The Debt Dance

Imagine, if you will, that you have just started a business in Tokyo, New York, or Mexico City, (three of the largest cities in the world).

Your business occupies a ten by ten foot space down a dark alley. The alley is only four feet wide. There are no other doors in this alley.

You are excited about your business–let’s say you make extraordinary hats and costumes. Your hats and costumes have received high praise from your friends and family. You know everyone will buy them.

You wait.

You discover that you do have a small sandwich board at the opening of the alley. You stare at the blank slate…

Now you know what it is like to create a website-a wonderful, glorious website-and the reality of its invisibility. This is not Field of Dreams. James Earl Jones is not going to take you to the ballgame to see the secret message that will solve everything. There will be no whisper in your ear “If you build it they will come.”

You must, if you are to survive, understand at least on a basic level, the pieces of the Search Engine Optimization and Marketing puzzle. In my humble opinion, after launching and operating five websites, that SEO and marketing are the toughest aspect of online business.  And yet it is the most critical to getting your business up and rolling. Whether you stay up and running will be determined by many things, including the quality of your products, your customer service, your trustworthiness, and your prices.

Aarron Walter in his excellent book  Buidling Findable Websites writes that not only do we need to be concerned about people finding our websites but also finding what they wanted within your website, sticking around on the site for a while having a good time, and being compelling enough come back!

So what is SEO? Technically it is making your website as attractive as possible to the search engines, hence the name Search Engine Optimation or SEO.

What do the SEO monsters (like Google and Yahoo) want? Content, content, content. Good content. New content. Frequently changed content that is a logical match with your business name, your tagline*, and your keywords.

In other words if your business is “Joe’s Best Barbeque,” your tagline is “Ponies having sex” and your articles are on “dating tips for men over fifty,” the search engines (or their robots) will take a bite of that and puke!

We all know websites that do a good job with this but probably don’t notice it because it flows so naturally and easily. You land on a page that gives you exactly what you were looking for and you can click on a few extra pages and find relevant, interesting, frequently updated information.

A key to having people find you is the selection of placement of keywords–the constant buzz of the web. A good free tool to find keywords is through Google’s adwords program You will probably have to register to access it but it is free. In the case of our camera parts business I found that when I searched “camera repair” the top keywords were:

1.camera repair at 2300 searches per month

2. digital camera repair at 1500 searches per month

3. Canon camera repair at 1200 searches per month

If you decide to choose these keywords make certain you link them to the landing page about these services (you’re able to list the page’s URL when you enter them,) and make sure you use the phrase, exactly, in the content of your landing page.

The monsters (like Google and Yahoo) also want aged websites. For new companies/websites this can be very frustrating.

You can build a golden website and still get beat out over and over again in the organic listings. We have this situation with our cat gift site, TwoPennyCat.com where we have significant competition. The top ranking cat sites (in the organic listings–the ones on the left/middle side of the page) do not have videos (we do), do not have articles (we do), do not have social media (we do.) But…they’ve been around forever.

We will eventually overcome this limitation by adding more and more good content, frequently changing the content, and building a large inbound link category.

Speaking of inbound links, how do you get the “good” websites to link to you?  Inbound linking will count for about 75% of your standing with Google, so it is critical. There are lots of ways to be successful, and as you research SEO on an ongoing basis, you will find more “tricks of the trade.” Here are some of my favorites.

1. Link to them and send them a brief email  telling them you like their information, feel it would be beneficial to your viewers, so you have put them on your link list (or blog list.)

2. Comment on forums, articles, and blogs. Don’t just go in and make a commercial for yourself. Have something to say! If you can offer a nugget or two of good information, in a friendly, non-pushy way, you will forge relationships with those readers and the blog or site owner.

3. Write guest posts/articles and ask others to write guest posts/articles for you. Using our camera guy again, perhaps he could write an article on how to trouble shoot camera problems for a photography website.

4. Write ezine articles. I write on ezine Articles.com on a variety of topics. Again, this is a valuable and free avenue for you to establish expertise. Always offer an incentive to your ezine readers to visit your site. Using our camera parts business as an example you could give away an ebook on how to buy broken cameras, fix them, and re-sell them. (Feeding hamburgers to hungry people–lots of people would love to make extra money.)

5. Make your site super fun. Offer jokes, videos, anecdotes, horoscopes, outrageous surveys, contests, etc. This will cause people to forward your bit of interest to their friends (this is called viral marketing) and it will keep them coming back.

6. Provide a tool that other sites see as valuable for their constituents. For example, I have a link on this site that takes people to a “get out of debt snowball calculator.” If you can provide reference information, perhaps a comparison of products, a ranking of services, etc., other sites would see this as valuable and would link to you.

7. Help others–people getting started in the business and charities. Charities will often list your business as a sponsor or donor–more free publicity. Ask your viewers to donate a dollar to the cause and really help a worthy cause in these tough times. Everyone wins.

Beyond SEO there are several methods of “revealing” your website and one powerful mechanism is Viral Marketing. In its simplest terms viral marketing is something that spreads, usually by some “word of mouth” means. As I was writing this I wasn’t sure I could explain it very well so I searched for “what is viral marketing” and I landed on Seth’s Blog which is an extremely helpful place to land. (Seth’s Blog is one of the highest ranked blogs on Technorati so it’s wonderful to study if you are even thinking about setting up a blog.) Seth has a downloadable PDF document that is free on viral marketing. Here is just a bit of what he wrote:

“The critical element of viral marketing is this: it’s built in. ..The more people used the camera on their cell phones, the more the idea spread, the more people wanted a camera.”

Viral marketing, in my simple mind, is kind of like a fascinating secret that you share with someone, they tell two people, who each tell four people, and so on.

The kicker is, and this is what I think Seth is referring to, is that the information passed along has to be of some intrinsic value. It has to be funny, it has to be shocking, it has to be a cure for a common problem, etc.  And in some way it must make the viewer want your product, service, etc. If you put a video on YouTube that is just an out and out advertisement nothing will happen. But if you put something out there that people will want to see and tell their friends and family about then you have succeded.

The last item we will tackle with this very lengthy blog is advertising. Adwords is probably the most common method of advertising. I, for one, detest Adwords. There is no rhyme or reason to how it works. It is all a secret within the sacred walls of Google and, in my opinion, you have to develop a degree in Adword science to make the damn thing work.

But…they are truly about the only game in town.

There are other means but the majority of the population do not use them.

The key to adwords is finding the right combination of words that will place your ad in the top listings (on the right hand side of the search page) and finding the right bid price to get you up there in the rankings. Just like the other keyword issues you need to remember two things about your adwords ad:

1.Study the top listings and see what words they are using,

2 Make certain these relevant words are in the content and keywords of your specific landing page. (So if our camera repair guy is writing an ad and uses the phrase “digital camera parts” he must make sure this is one of his site’s keywords and that he places his landing page URL on that ad–mycamerarepair.com/digitalcameras.)

SEO and Marketing are like the field of medicine. You must study it, find sites about it, perhaps hire a consultand, buy books on it…because it changes and it is complex. All of the SEO gurus will tell you that it is a process of trial and error. This is especially true of Adwords. (Try reading the success stories on Adwords and perhaps this will give you some good insight.)

Best of luck to you. I would love to hear comments on this one!!

NOW HERE’S A VIDEO FROM ME TO YOU:

Fast Tube by Casper

Check out Juan’s blog @ JuanMann.com

THANKS JUAN. AWESOME.

COMMENTS GRATEFULLY WELCOMED.