Many webmasters / online marketers make a common mistake when they begin doing business online. Often times, people do the processes necessary for their success - backwards. Rather than starting at the beginning and working forwards, they start at the end and work backwards. As a result, they waste more money and resources, often breaking the back of their business, well before they start to see any real success in their business.
In my years of helping online marketers promote their businesses, I have seen business models that seemed to have all of the elements necessary to ensure great success. And unfortunately, I have seen many of these perfect business models fail miserably, because their owners failed to honor their business with a realistic promotional plan.
Putting The Cart Before The Horse
When people begin to promote their new business, this is where most people begin to err.
Just recently, I spoke with an individual who started a business in a pretty competitive field. I don’t view heavy competition as being a bad thing. In fact, I find that there are often enough customers in any niche to support the additional competitors, especially when a new competitor answers a need not served by the current players.
The individual to whom I refer made his mistake by focusing 95% of his advertising budget on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), before he even knew what keywords would help him to be profitable in his business! He has so far blown $9,500 of his $10,000 to optimize his website for the search engines, and he still does not know what keywords will drive traffic to his website, leading to sales conversions for his website.
His “backwards” approach has left him with only $500 in his budget, with little hope for his future. He now emails me 4-5 times a week, always in a state of utter panic for the prospect of his future. All I can tell him is to be patient, since he has to learn how to “bootstrap” his way to success, now that he has no budget left to build strong and fast.
Test Your Copy First
Search Engine Optimization should “never” be a business’ first step in the promotion process. Although SEO can bring great rewards, it can also be very expensive to implement. Look at it this way. What good is search optimization if you have optimized for the wrong keywords?
The first step in the promotion of any business should be focused on attracting potential customers to one’s website.
The marketer needs to put human eyeballs on the website, so that they can test and tweak their sales copy for greater sales conversion.
Until a website has seen several hundred visitors, the sales copy should not be changed or tweaked. Sales copy should always be tested against a large statistical group of visitors, in order to ensure that the copy is given a fair and realistic test.
If the online marketer has a bit more money to start the process, often the best spent money will be to hire a professional copywriter to write the sales copy for the website. Professional copywriters have a skill, and that skill is to create the words that will drive people to buy what you are selling.
Test Traffic Is Important To The Process
Most Internet Marketing newbies are still focused on getting those first few hundred visitors to their websites.
At this point, there are systems like Link Referral and Traffic Swarm that can help the new business owner bring in a bit of traffic to their website. In a test with Link Referral, I am seeing 250 visitors per month. The neat thing about systems like these is that other members will review your website and offer good advice on how to improve your website, if necessary. Membership is free for both systems, with an option for paid upgrades.
The Law Of Attraction
While the traffic exchange systems mentioned above can send some traffic to your website, you are not going to get rich participating in those systems.
Once you have positioned your website to convert visitors to buyers, it is time to start attracting a larger number of visitors (potential customers) to your website.
There are a number of ways to do this, but two of the most effective are: Article Marketing and Pay-Per-Click Advertising.
Article Marketing
Mark Silver recently produced an exceptional home study course about writing articles that will help you be much more successful in your article marketing activities.
Just last week, a friend of mine told me that he has not promoted his website in over a year, yet he noticed that his website has a steady stream of traffic to it, from the three-dozen articles that he wrote and distributed in 2006 and 2007. He said that his ebook continues to produce new sales each and every month, and the only thing he can really attribute those continuing sales to is the articles that are available on the Internet that are promoting his website and ebook.
Article marketing, in and of itself, is a promotional tool that will allow a marketer to bring regular visitors to his or her website, and if the website does its job well, then the website will be able to convert those visitors to buyers. This is important, because all businesses need money coming into a website early, to ensure that the business can survive financially, until the long-term “recipe for profit” can be found and duplicated reliably.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a process where you bid on keywords in the major search engines, through Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, etc. You tell the search engine companies what words you desire to bid on and how much you are willing to pay for a visitor, and the highest bidders for that keyword phrase will be shown above and to the right of the free results in the search engine results pages.
Keyword research, utilizing systems like Word Tracker, or my favorite, NicheBot will enable you to brainstorm keywords and get a good idea of which keywords might be more profitable for your business.
By utilizing Google Analytics or Yahoo’s Panama Full Analytics (traffic analysis), an online marketer can follow a visitor from the search engine to the marketer’s sales page. Where this is important is it enables an online marketer to uncover the essential business knowledge of which “keywords” will bring people into a website and help convert those visitors into customers.
Essential SEO Knowledge
What one must keep in mind is that some keywords will deliver visitors who will never buy, while other keywords will deliver visitors who are extremely likely to buy. This one paragraph holds within it the secret to a successful SEO strategy. This is the essential knowledge that a marketer should have, before engaging in any Search Engine Optimization campaign.
Like I said previously in this article, “Although SEO can bring great rewards, it can also be very expensive to implement.”
If you are going to spend a lot of money to optimize your website for the search engines, doesn’t it make much more sense to target the keywords that will actually help you to earn back your investment?
The Backwards Thinking
The backwards thinking I referred to in the beginning of this article was the idea that many people put SEO in front of their keyword research, keyword tracking and keyword conversion statistics.
An industry I like to pick on is the travel industry. In order to rank well for the solitary keyword “travel” in the search engines will require an astronomical SEO budget. But most people seeking travel information are looking for something just a bit more specific, like: Disney vacations, Hawaii vacations, and European travel.
So long as a keyword has been proven to convert visitors and sales, then it makes sense to optimize for that keyword. But you will never truly know which keywords will convert visitors and sales, until you have invested some of your budget into pay-per-click advertising and traffic analysis.
Once the necessary “keyword” knowledge is in hand, then the marketer can make an investment into search engine optimization for those keywords that can actually make them money, and with good SEO deployment, the marketer can find that they can actually capture a lot of the search engine traffic for specific keywords through the search engines’ free listings.
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Bill Platt has offered article marketing services on the Internet since 2001 at http://www.thePhantomWriters.com - As an extension of his article marketing service, he has developed a process he refers to as Karma SEO. After two years of testing his Karma SEO philosophy, Bill has reached an understanding of how he can finally offer Pay-For-Performance SEO Services. Learn more at: http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com/seo-services/search-marketing.html
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Consider also his blogs: Marketing Tips blog, Article Marketing blog, and another he contributes to on occasion.
Tags: advertising, Article Marketing, online business, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, seo
On August 31st, 2008, we started building a new sales page for the release of our new service to help people get top rankings in Google. We officially launched that program on September 1st, 2008.
You might note that this post is dated September 5th, 2008. That means that our sales page has been live for just four days.
Now, it must be noted that as soon as we turned the web page on - live to the public - we started the process of implementing Karma SEO to promote this web page.
It took Google roughly 36 hours for Google to actually crawl and cache the web page. And within another 36 hours, our web page started breaking into Page One of Google’s results for many of our target keywords!
Without telling you are targeted keywords, I will show you how we rank for those target search terms.
It is always a challenge to do this, because if I tell you the exact keywords that we use, then our competitors could find this page and force us to compete more aggressively for the search phrases we are currently ranking well.
We made that mistake one time. We gave up one targeted search phrase with which we comfortably held the number one spot in Google for six years. We gave it up, in order to prove to people that we were actually targeting strongly competitive keywords, so that they would have a better appreciation of our ability to do this for others.
Within only two months, our competitors aggressively targeted the search term we exposed. As a result, we dropped to page two of Google’s search results. Since then, we have managed to aggressively pursue that search term again and elevate ourselves back to #5.
As you can probably imagine, that experience taught us never to expose our targeted keyword phrases in a public forum.
So, for this new page we built for our website, where we actually advertise our Karma SEO Service, we have reached Page One of Google’s search rankings on competitive keyword phrases in only 3 days (as of yesterday).
Keyword Phrase #1 - two words - #3 in Google of 22 million results
Keyword Phrase #2 - four words - #3 in Google of 56,000 results
Keyword Phrase #3 - four words - #3 in Google of 57,000 results
Keyword Phrase #4 - four words - #6 in Google of 83,000 results
Keyword Phrase #5 - two words - #3 in Google of 28,000 results
Keyword Phrase #6 - three words - #9 in Google of 373,000 results
Keyword Phrase #7 - five words - #3 in Google of 457,000 results
Keyword Phrase #8 - three words - #3 in Google of 511,000 results
Keyword Phrase #9 - three words - #1 in Google of 725,000 results
Keyword Phrase #10 - two words - #3 in Google of 2 million results
This is a decent range of keywords with good rankings, after only three days playing the field. But this is a new program. The question most people will have is whether we can maintain those high rankings for these specific search terms after 30 days, 60 days, or one year.
We already know the answer to that question, and in 30 days, 60 days, and one year, you will know too.
On June 10th, 2008, we entered the most recent SEO Contest for the search phrase “blackhat fish“. We had gone up against more than 200,000 pages aimed at qualifying as winners in that contest. At the close of the 30-day contest, challenging some of the greatest minds in SEO, we finished the contest 25 days after we started in the #11 spot of Google’s search results for the target search term. Three days after the contest had ended, we reached #5 and continued to bounce between #3 and #5 for the next 60 days.
But, on a check just now, our web page was in the #1 for both “blackhat fish” and “black hat fish“. Of course, it was my intention to target both the two-word and three-word version of the search phrase. I tried to think ahead as to how people would “remember” the target search term and type it into Google for checking. I figured most would remember the proper “blackhat fish”, but others might remember it as “black hat fish”, so I made sure we ranked for both.
So here we are, 90 days out from the start of our attempt to rank for the challenged keyword phrase “blackhat fish”, and we are firmly sitting in the #1 spot in Google. Therefore, I am confident that in 90 days time, we will retain the high rankings we have already achieved for the afore referenced search terms, or perhaps even improve upon what we have already accomplished.
One year from now, we will still own “blackhat fish” and the unnamed keywords that we are now on Page One of Google for. I know this, without any hesitation, because I own #1 on lots of search terms, and some of those #1’s, I have held firmly for years.
We can do the same for you, if you order our Karma SEO Service. While our service may not be for everyone, it is a service that many will be able to appreciate and use.
It is like I say on our sales page…
We don’t have to pay Google for traffic…
They give it to US for FREE!
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My name is Bill Platt, and I am the creator of the Karma SEO Concept and the owner of the Karma SEO Service, housed on my other website, LinksAndTraffic.com.
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Tags: black hat fish, blackhat fish, free listings, google rankings, google seo, google traffic, proven search engine optimization, proven seo, seo contest, top google rankings
Karma SEO is a search engine marketing strategy that is offered at on our other website, LinksAndTraffic.com.
In essence, Karma SEO is a principle based on the concept of Karma, which is defined as “what comes around, goes around”.
People have always said that the point of Link Building is to build Link Popularity to the web pages on ones’ website. But, unless you are buying links, Link Popularity is hard to predict or replicate.
When one uses a Link Building Method such as Article Marketing, all articles on placed on new web pages, which because they are new web pages, they have no Link Popularity and no Google PageRank.
For several years, we have known that the best way to ensure that our websites gain the Link Popularity that we desire, then we need to ensure that the web pages linking to our web pages gain their own Link Popularity and PageRank. On this realization, we started a campaign to make sure that most every page that links to our web pages will gain its own Link Popularity for the sake of the search engines.
Many people find this an undesirable approach, because it means that they are spending some of their limited marketing budget to build Link Popularity for their online friends.
But the beauty in this concept is that when you are helping your friends, you are helping yourself. By taking pro-active measures to ensure that your friends have Link Popularity, you are ensuring that they will have more Link Popularity to share with you.
We have been using this technique for our own websites for several years. And as of September 2, 2008, we now offer the same service to our customers, under a Pay-For-Performance SEO Service that enables our customers to pay us according to how successful we are at getting our customers ranked in the Google Search Results. Learn more about our Karma SEO Pay-For-Performance Service here.
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Bill Platt - Stillwater, Oklahoma
Tags: Article Marketing, karma search engine optimization, karma seo, link building, search marketing, search rankings