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Internet Marketing - 2/5 - SEO & Social Media Marketing

SEO & Social Media Bonuses?

I received an email from a fellow asking me why I am “not including bonuses with the purchase” of my book. If you are not familiar with the “IM crowd” (hard core Internet marketing types) you may not know why he asked this question.

free bonus SEO & Social Media Bonuses?The people who sell Internet marketing products to other people who sell Internet marketing products online have a tradition of including tons of bonuses with their product pitches.  In other words…Buy my $77 program and I’ll throw-in $3,647 worth of free bonuses…or something along those lines.

bonus bonus SEO & Social Media Bonuses?It is funny, but the whole concept of bonuses never really clicked with me from the first time I saw them being hyped in the mid 90′s. Do real people buy a product solely based on the bonuses included?  By that, I mean “real” people, not the IM crowd that will jump at anything that promises them a shortcut to fame and fortune.

Maybe I spent too must time in the off-line business world or maybe I’m just too cynical, but I’ve always been of the mind that if a product has value, and is priced in a way that supports the perceived value of the product, an intelligent decision is made regarding the purchase.

Wait! By George I think I’ve got it…that’s the problem…and the answer.

99.9% of the crap being peddled isn’t worth the electrons wasted to produce it. Artificially increasing the perceived value of the purchase is the purpose of the bonuses. In other words, if this over-hyped crap holds no intrinsic value, but you can be enticed to buy it if I throw in $50,000 worth of more crap. The sheer quantity of crap has got to make you believe that this must be some valuable crap!

Imagine the challenges the IM crowd would have if their market were “real people” (meaning people who do business offline) who were expecting to buy a real product.  Hmmmmm, a product would need to stand on its own merits, and not rely on the fluff of a sales letter…and merely adding a bunch of bonuses probably wouldn’t sell one extra unit.

Personally, I don’t use bonuses.  Maybe it’s because I sell my services to brick & mortar businesses that judge my service by results obtained – not hyped-up promises. Wait, I lied, I do offer a bonus. I offer a free lifetime subscription to my newsletter, but that’s not really a bonus because anyone can sign up for free anyhow.

buy seo social media marketing guide SEO & Social Media Bonuses?Funny, I’ve only had 1 sales refund since last August, and you can’t really count it. The buyer was an IM type looking for the shortcut to instant riches and when he discovered my plan involved work, he asked for a refund.

If you want to learn how to make your website work as hard as you do, and attract targeted ready-to-buy customers, get my book.

Sorry, no other bonuses included!

Let me know your thoughts on this, leave your comments below.  Thanks!

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End of the World May 21st. or will the Mayans be right?

The End Of The World As We Know it?

endofworld End of the World May 21st. or will the Mayans be right?If you are reading this post it means that a California preacher (Rev. Harold Camping) who predicted that the “Rapture” would occur on May 21, 2011 got it wrong. Frankly, I admit that I’m pleased his calculations were off because everybody knows that the Mayan calendar calls for the end of the world to happen December 21, 2012.

However, if you talk to scientists that know about this stuff, they tell us that the world only has about a billion years left before the sun boils off the oceans and reduces the earth to an uninhabitable cinder (source Fox News).  If I had my druthers, I’d rather that the scientists were right and the ancient Mayan calendar is as accurate as yesterday’s TEOTWAWKI prophesy.

Hey, I am not making light of such things, like every being with the capacity to think, contemplating the end of existence is a sobering experience. I just don’t think (hope) it will happen because a well-meaning fellow in California or some self-appointed soothsayer chose a particular date thousands of years ago.

The end of the world for Internet marketing?

With the hard-core Internet marketing community, the end of the world occurs every time that Google updates their algorithm and destroys websites whose primary objective was to scam the search engines.  Such algorithm changes occur as a result of Google’s scientists refining their calculations with the intent of delivering the best results for a particular search query.

Optimizing a website for your vital search terms has never been more critical. The content you include on your site has always been important, but the degree of importance has increased algorithmically. In other words, quality unique content is of the utmost significance and has never been as critical as it is today.

The Google spider (bot or robot) is constantly searching for the BEST information to display in search results.  If you sell ‘Blue Widgets’ and your website offers the best, most complete and unique information about blue widgets, your chances of appearing on page one results for that term increase with every algorithm update.

If content is so important, why the need for SEO?

Imagine that you could call Google on the phone and talk to their head search scientist and explain in detail why your site should rank above all others.  In essence, SEO gets Google’s attention.  It makes your site stand out from the field because it permits the spider to take note of many of the algorithm components on which it judges your site. The better your content and greater your SEO score, the higher you will rank for your particular search term(s).

buy seo social media marketing guide End of the World May 21st. or will the Mayans be right?Search engine optimization is ‘right now’ insurance, it is the icing on the cake, the high gloss polish on a new car. SEO is the finishing touch that turns a ‘me too’ website into an authority site.  It is the difference between page one and page two, page three or page three hundred.

Social media marketing is an off-site SEO component.  It reinforces your message and created new pathways to your core website. Bringing all this together is the purpose of my book, the SEO & Social Media Marketing Guide.

Some people have been prophesying the demise of SEO for years, yet with every new algorithm update the need for SEO (done right) has increased exponentially. If you follow the “End of the SEO World” crowd and you are proven wrong, it really could be the end of your business.  The best and cheapest insurance is to get your copy of the SEO & Social Media Marketing Guide…and rest easy.

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SEO | Social Media | Small Biz. Options

Small Business Online Marketing Decisions

As it relates to optimizing a website for search and adopting social media, the challenge facing all businesses are the questions pertaining to the time, personnel and financial resources that can be committed to these efforts.

  • Can any of this be accomplished in-house?
    • Can we invest the time?
    • Do we have the skills necessary?
    • Will this effort detract from our other business responsibilities?
  • Can we afford to outsource this?
    • Who can we trust?
    • How do we find a knowledgeable, trustworthy company?
    • How do we know which questions to ask?
    • How do we measure and judge success?
  • What level of involvement is necessary?
  • What is the least we can do to have an effect?

This infographic illustrates the options

seo social networking infographic SEO | Social Media | Small Biz. Options

Do Nothing

  • Let the status quo alone

Do Something

  • Create your public profile on Google
  • Claim local Search Engine listing pages such as:
    • Google Places
    • Bing Local
    • Yahoo Local

Do More

  • Do all of the above, and…
  • Research your critical keyword phrases that pertain to your business
  • Optimize website for search focusing on critical keywords
  • Social bookmark all major pages in website
  • Launch a blog
  • Submit website and blog to major directories and industry sites
  • Get a Facebook Page
  • Open a Twitter account
  • Create a YouTube Channel
    • Create videos for YouTube & optimize for SEO

Do Everything

  • Do all of the above, and…
  • Post weekly to the blog, craft keyword-rich anchor text links to internal website pages
  • Update Twitter & Facebook mentioning  every blog post
  • Automate Twitter (Tweets, Direct Messages and Friend acquisition)
  • Post daily (or 2-3 times per week) to Facebook
  • Acquire strong content related links
    • Focus on high-profile local links
    • Seek out industry related links
  • Claim listings in community sites like MerchantCircle, SmartGuy, etc.
  • Create additional videos and distribute via TubeMogul for multiple links
  • …and scores of other traffic-generating tactics that you will discover in the “SEO & Social Media Marketing Guide“.

Get this book – and get your website found!

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Facebook Internet Coup d’état?

Google is big, rich and global…
and Facebook is stealing their traffic.

If Facebook were to continue its meteoric takeover of Internet activity, some questions need to be asked as they relate to a company’s online advertising, marketing focus and resource allocation. First, consider these mind-numbing Facebook facts:

  • Facebook users approaching 600 million.
  • 50% of all users logon to Facebook every day.
  • Average users have 130 friends.
  • 1 in 4 pageviews in the USA is on Facebook.
  • 10,000 new websites integrate with Facebook every day.
  • If Facebook were a country, it would be the fifth-largest country in the world, after China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia.
  • In the United States, 54.7% of people ages 13 to 17 have a Facebook account.
  • There are more than 800,000 developers building applications for Facebook.
  • People are now using Facebook as if it were a search engine looking for personal recommendations.

In other words, if you have a Facebook page, why do you need a conventional website?

  • If the ‘Like’ button is becoming the new ‘Link’, why spend resources locating content-related links?
  • Why buy Google’s expensive Pay-Per-Click ads if Facebook’s are cheaper and possibly more targeted?
  • Why pay hosting fees for a website if your Facebook page(s) are free?

What if Facebook’s ultimate plan is an Internet coup d’état?  Think about it, if Facebook owns the eyeballs of most of the traffic on the Internet, could it not be argued that resources outside of Facebook are redundant and unnecessary?

I remember when we all trusted Google with their catchy corporate slogan “Do no evil”. However, individuals and even countries are now re-evaluating the trust they have in this global behemoth that tracks every click and even anticipates our next move.

Facebook, like Google tracks every word we type and uses our words, friends, links, likes and traffic patterns to deliver targeted advertising to us. Do we really want any company (or government entity) knowing that much about us?

cuffs Facebook Internet Coup détat?What if Facebook was successful in capturing the hearts, minds and eyeballs of most of the Internet traffic?  Would we still need Google or Bing?  Would we still need a website?  I don’t know about you, but I’ve learned enough from Google to know that I want to be the one to determine my company’s destiny and not place my public presence within the confines of any other company. i.e. the Facebook page.

Having raised all these questions, I’m offering no answers. Like you, I don’t know if Facebook’s ultimate plan is for world domination, or they just want to grow a profitable business that creates opportunities for members.  I have no crystal ball, but I have learned that blind trust should never be given freely, trust must be earned and that trusting relationship must be monitored.

Idle ramblings…stay tuned!

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