Stop Promoting Your Home Page!
If you know me then you know I’ve been in this business a long time. Not that all those years amount to a hill of beans if a person doesn’t change with the landscape of marketing online. I discussed this three years ago on one of my other sites that dealt specifically with gaining website traffic. I surmised that many of the old time marketers would be looking for alternate income streams if they didn’t get their social marketing in order and fast.
For the first 8 years that we marketed online it was pretty simple really. Create a product, invite affiliates to promote our product and sell a bunch of copies using an auto-delivery method. This often equated to tens of thousands of dollars overnight even for the small time marketer. (I’m not kidding. On a little project of my own with a big name as a co-author we rolled over $10,000 by morning. Back in that day John Reese sold a million worth of product in the first 24 hours.)
What many of the big names then did was (a) take a long vacation, (b) take a sabbatical, and/or (c) pursue other interests – until more money was required.
Today life isn’t that easy. The web is massive. People don’t trust marketing ads. Everyone knows now to look for an affiliate link and by-pass it. The recession slowed down the buying frenzy. I could go on and on reporting on the changes – large and small – the first of which you should understand right now: Google isn’t driving the web anymore when people want to purchase information, shippable products, or online services.
Nope.
Today’s business has to be everywhere the people are – Facebook, Twitter, and so on – as well as Google. A lot more work for the marketer right?
Well, yes. But also, no.
I’m going to suggest that once you’ve created your social marketing strategy, that you learn how to romance the Web 2.0 properties a little first and as a direct result you’ll win over Google and the other search engines in the process. (Hint: Today, Google would rather ‘discover’ your content than be told. Rather like a child that way.)
Don’t believe me? Take 15 minutes looking through some of the top results for competitive keywords in Google…
Who ‘owns’ the results today? The Web 2.0 properties that’s who!
Does that mean you can’t compete in those niches? Au contraire!
Your involvement on those same sites can get you the top results and as the people come, they will also find a direct link to your business site, proposal or product, newsletter or whatever else you want to call attention to.
Well that’s a bit of work isn’t it? Not only are you now expected to build your business website but you’re also expected to be active in social networking and have content on Web 2.0 properties! Not to mention you have a business to run! Who’s got the time for all of this?
Here’s the ‘easy’ answer…
The Do Nots: Stop promoting your home page. Slow your efforts at tweaking keyword metas for search engine optimization. Give up the back-linking game. Don’t ping your pages. In fact, throw out nearly all your old ways of working and promoting in the past.
The Dos: Post excellent, keyword-rich content. Delete your massive ping list (you know you were only doing that for Google’s sake anyway). Take a (keyword-rich of course) snippet of your content and post it to your social network pages and/or Web 2.0 properties. Bookmark your new content with (keyword-rich) tags. Let Google do the rest. Repeat again starting with posting new excellent, keyword-rich content.
Who This is For: This strategy works best for those who are running one to three websites only. Marketers who are managing (should I say juggling) multiple websites in as many markets need to automate or delegate (see below). Of course I’ll always take automation from a good service over delegation because outsourcing bills add up pretty quickly but you likely have your own ideas on how you want to run your business. The automation service I’ve been using since the original beta is here – and I’ve enjoyed top ranks for very competitive keywords as a result.
The link above is my link for the service – if you become a member please understand that this is a super robust service only intended for ‘players’ – full training is provided. You have to want to get and keep top placement in the search engines to make it worth your while and I will also suggest that you don’t over-do your automation. The service has more tools and more traffic and rank methods than you’ll ever need. You don’t need to use them all to see results. In fact in my earlier test I only did about 25% of the work suggested to gain my top positions and haven’t had a slip in Google since. Not to mention the increase in traffic as direct result of social and Web 2.0 marketing.
What better way can there be to suggest your products or services in just about every niche imaginable then on a website where thousands of people converge by the hour just to window shop and read reviews?
I started using StumbleUpon over 3 years ago and it still sends me oodles of traffic to the niche focus websites. You just need to be careful here (or you’ll get lost on the site exploring all the other bookmarked and content areas).
