Internet Marketing in 10 Minutes

Today I took a minute to read through some well known industry blogs. I happened across a new post by Shoe Money today titled 3 Things before Launching a Website – TFS 20.

I think many of us know what kind of service we want to provide our website visitors; I also think we have an idea of how we are going to make money. How about the implementation of viral attributes on the website?

I’ve seen many good viral ideas and thought I’d take a minute to share some of them with my readers.

Wiki

This is certainly not a new trick that exists today. Allowing people to add or update content on your site is a great way to get fresh content on a regular basis. However, whatever you do, respect those who provide you with the content that runs your site and allow them to keep a link or two in the content so long as it is tasteful. Don’t do what Wikipedia did when they started hiding links from search engines.

Point System

One of the best uses of a viral website that I have seen within the real estate community is Active Rain. This site rewards its members by assigning point values to the actions that are doable within the network. Real Estate professionals earn points for up to three blog postings a day on their community and even points when they invite others to the network. People with a lot of points get a link higher up in the network. I believe that Active Rain is one of the main parties responsible for real estate blogging today thanks to their viral practices.

Profile Updating

How about adding a potential client’s information on your site if you are running an Internet directory?

Let’s say that you have an attorney directory that you just launched but have yet to receive any advertising inquiries. Instead of sitting back and waiting for someone to stumble upon your site, why not be a proactive marketer?

Go out and buy a list of attorney information nationwide. Populate your directory with these attorneys. Add a few blanks to that attorney’s information as if it was never given to you and then send an e-mail to each of them informing them that some of the data needs to be updated.

Anyways, just some thoughts on viral websites. Feel free to add to this list if you have other ideas that you’ve seen working well.

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I was looking through some of the more popular job websites to get an idea of what is available within my area and I came across an SEO job that brought up the content lifecycle.

This topic isn’t heavily mentioned in many forums, blogs or newsletters that I am aware of so I thought I’d address the four stages that were brought up on the job posting I read through.

• Creation

  This is the creation of unique content that should be appealing and maybe even keyword rich with some call to action prompts. Most search engine marketers will provide this content for you.

• Refresh

  Yes your content can become old! As a website owner you are obligated to make sure your website visitors are reading the most up to date information. Google and other search engines will give better rankings to sites that are constantly keeping their information up to date.

  In my experience I have seen many people develop the mentality of, “I’ll do this once and I’ll never have to do it again.”

• Archival

  I attended Search Engine Strategies in San Jose in August of last year. August 2008 is right around the corner and if I had written any content regarding last years conference then it should now be archived to make room for the fresh new content that is coming in the next couple of months.

  If you run a website that provides a calendar of events for your local area then it is probably a good idea to archive the old data to make room for the fresh data.

  There is always a reason to archive existing data. By not doing this you run the risk of looking old to search engines.

• Expiration

  Even archived information needs to expire from time to time. Let’s face it, talking about how great the graphics are on a Super Nintendo isn’t exactly accurate in 2007.

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Today I was looking through my Google reader and I came across a conversation happening over at search engine round table about search engine optimization shouldn’t come with a money back guarantee.

Over the years that I have been providing SEO services for my clients I’ve come across many people who wanted to pay me AFTER they see results. I’m fairly certain all of us at one point or another have ran into this problem but how should it be dealt with?

Here is a tip taken directly from my Customer Support experience when I was younger…

The correct answer isn’t: “No”, “Sorry” or “I can’t”.

When a potential client asks for this they are probably seriously considering hiring you and if you turn them down with the words you choose to use then you may have just blown a pretty decent opportunity.

Instead consider something like these starters:

• “What did you have in mind?”
• “Not a problem, here is what I’d be ok with…”
• I’m confident in my abilities to provide you with the Internet Marketing that you are looking for so what I’ll do, only because it is you, is…”

We don’t ever want to give a guarantee when it comes to our SEO efforts but at the same time we don’t want to tell our clients no. Make sure that when you are talking to a potential client that your answers are always yes. You don’t have to give in to their every demand, you can provide some kind of “fair trade” that would be appropriate for both parties.

My last thought on this is that most companies ask for a money-back guarantee because they’ve had pretty bad experiences with other SEO firms or individuals that have cost them thousands of dollars without positive results. Be real with your potential client and don’t over sale yourself to them.

• Uniqueness: 1.0
• Overall Rating: 1.0
• Usefulness: 1.0

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I was reading through a few blogs this morning and came across a post made by David Naylor regarding buying links. Two months ago Google’s Matt Cutts posted a blog about how to report paid links.

This article has brought up a lot of negative feedback from the SEO community and I have to ask myself, why?

Google has always told us through their webmaster guidelines, blogs, conventions, forums and other media outlets that they want to see natural linking and not linking that involves exchanges, bribery, and now financial gain.

“So if reciprocal linking is devalued and paid links are on their way to being devalued (if they aren’t already), then how does one get good quality links to their website?”

I can probably spend a few hours writing about this topic and give you a handful of idea’s but the easiest way to get links is to make sure your site has good content and is a true resource to the audience you are trying to reach.

A great example is David Naylor’s blog. His valuable input (resource) prompted me to write a post on my blog about the same topic that is already widely out there and I referenced two authorities in the industry to back up my post.

My $0.02

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