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
(thephantomwriters.com/linkreferral)
and Traffic Swarm(thephantomwriters.com/trafficswarm)
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
(thephantomwriters.com/heartofarticlemarketing).
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.
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.
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: www.LinksAndTraffic.com/seo-services/search-barketing.html.
