Exec

That Confusing Internet “Stuff” Is Just Advertising

No matter how hard I try to use plain English, all this website-Internet-social media-Google “stuff” is just plain confusing to a lot of business owners and salespeople. Their eyes glaze over when I talk about ranking well in Google or converting site traffic to email subscribers.

Confused people don’t buy – which might explain why about half of all small business owners still don’t have websites – and why most of those who DO have sites aren’t happy with theirs.

So let me frame Internet marketing in another way – friends, it’s just another way to advertise your business.

Wikipedia defines advertising as “… is a form of communication used to persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services.”

When you print business cards or run an ad in Doormail or Columbia Marketplace magazine or buy space in the Yellow Pages or do TV commercials, you’re advertising. Your website is advertising too – and it’s an important way to advertise, since most people look online today to find products and services.

You don’t have to understand how the printing process works to use print media effectively. You don’t need to know how to determine the best radio stations and time slots for your commercials. There are experts to help you with that – you find someone you trust, who DOES understand how all that works, and they’ll help you make the right decisions to make the most of your ad dollars for that particular medium.

That’s how it works with websites and Internet “stuff” too – you find an expert you can trust, who DOES understand how it works, and let them advise you on how to use your advertising budget, online. It’s okay if you don’t understand websites and the Internet and the search engines and Facebook, as long as you work with someone who does. It’s just advertising, and you do it all the time.

Wonder of the Web Map

Have you noticed that communities large and small are getting connected online? The Web is so vast — often too big for most to grasp or use fully. And yet, online resources or simple mobile webpages with key information are quite localized and even warm to use.

Matter of Scale

Every community or area on earth, such as Eastern Connecticut, is now an expandable point of interest on the different landscape of the Internet. Each place determines how much it will represent itself online, and, how much its citizens use the Web for local organization.

We on earth who are connected to this global network, especially those of us using the mobile Web, have become accustomed to a wider sense of scale, a new sense of geography than our ancestors.

This will be disorienting — this new scale — for anybody, although some like the youth take to it more easily. GPS and social networks actually help people adjust, it could be argued.

In any case, if a person just adopts one online tool, such as a reference website, to use in daily life then they step closer to comprehending the new relationship between earth and its online map.

Great Local Detail

Basically, now that many of us (and soon, most or all of us) are able to access the Web on a daily basis, if not in real time on a phone or tablet, we have a lot more information at our disposal. Each person must choose and organize their online life.

Many people go overboard when starting to use the Web's many tools and points of entertainment. The biggest thing to remember is that one platform contains pretty much every kind content made by people under the sun, from just about all parts of the world — and the content from official or corporate sources should be considered as well.

If it seems overwhelming to you that you can at the same time look up information about Eastern Connecticut and play games at reputable Tablet casinos, and at other times get an online degree — all from the same device and Web connection. Try to get to grips with how useful the Web can be even for your local community-focused life, and stay focused amidst plenty to distract you at times.

Is There a Gnome On Your Toadstool? (Importance of Research)

Research Avoids Problems One of my mentors online, Ben Hunt, was talking about the importance of research, and I love the way he phrased it: “… research the marketplace to check there’s room, and there isn’t another gnome on your toadstool.”

Your particular “toadstool” could be many things. It could be your profession (realtor, web designer, plumber). It could be your differentiator (price or selection.) It could be your location, or your store hours, or your guarantee, or your training.

The point is that if there’s already a gnome (or two or three hundred) perched on your particular “toadstool”, it’s going to be difficult for you to claim it as your own.

Research is how you avoid this problem. If you’re in the mortgage business, and 3 million “gnomes” are already trying to rank for the keywords, “mortgage yourcity/yourstate”, maybe you should try to rank for “home loan” or “mortgage consultant” instead.

If you’re a printer, and most of your competitors have gnomes positioned on the “low price” toadstool, maybe you should position yourself on the “fast shipping” one.

A few “gnomes” are seldom problematic, but a lot of online marketers run into problems because they don’t do preliminary research on their online competition. Don’t let that happen to you!

SEO or SEM: Free or Pay-For Site Rankings

Making your site more visible in the search engines – getting it to rank high on the first page of the results for a given keyword (search term) – is a goal of most of the website owners I talk to. That’s because 90% of searchers never go past the 1st page of the search engine results.

A few fortunate website owners are savvy enough, and persistent enough, to get their site to rank without any help.

For the rest of us, hiring someone to help with SEO or SEM assumes greater importance. I’ll describe briefly, the pros/cons of each.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. “Optimizing” your site’s content and structure to make it more appealing (relevant) to Google and the other search engines is one way to get it to rank.

The other key to SEO is backlinks – getting other sites to link back to yours, so that the search engines see your site as a popular resource for those given terms. Sites that rank well this way show up in the natural or organic results – in the main body of the page. You do NOT pay Google or any other search engine for these rankings.

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. THESE are what you pay for – such as the Sponsored Ads on the top and right side of the search results pages. Through programs such as Google Adwords, you create small ads and pay every time someone clicks on the ad. (That’s why they’re called pay-per-click or PPC ads.) The more you pay, the higher on the page your ad shows, generally speaking. Some really popular, competitive keywords can cost more than $50 per click!

The advantage of SEO is that it’s cumulative, usually long-term – as you improve your site and get more and more backlinks, your site’s rank steadily improves. And once you get it to rank, it’s easier to get it to STAY there. Also, the vast majority of web surfers click on the natural/organic results – NOT the ads – because we don’t trust advertising. But it can take a while for SEO efforts to get results.

The advantage of PPC is that it is immediate – you can place an ad and have it show up the same day. It’s also a good way to test pages and offers – you can use an ad to direct traffic to something new and analyze how people respond. But when you stop paying – your site disappears. That’s the huge disadvantage – there is no cumulative benefit.

For most of my clients, I recommend PPC only until we get the rankings we want through SEO. After that, PPC is only for occasional testing, or perhaps when a new product is introduced.

Paying Google Comment Left Me Speechless

Speechless after Google Comment This comment left me speechless. Twice. (And that doesn’t happen often.)

A local business owner told me yesterday that he didn’t WANT his website to be #1 on Google’s search engine results page (SERP).

I was speechless for a few seconds… I’d never heard anyone say THAT before. I couldn’t imagine why he wouldn’t want that prime visibility – after all, the website at the very top gets more clicks than any other listing. That’s usually the goal!

So I asked why not, and he said:

“Because prospects will think I’m too expensive if I can afford to pay Google to be #1.”

I was speechless again. And asked him to tell more.

To make a long conversation short, evidently he – and he says, a lot of other business owners – think that you somehow PAY GOOGLE for high rankings. (By the way, this gentleman was very clear that he wasn’t talking about the Sponsored Ads – which you DO pay for – that appear at the top or right sides of the search results page.)

FOLKS – This IS is flat-out WRONG. You don’t pay Google anything at ALL for any ranking. Let me say that again in another way. You DO NOT have to pay Google (or Yahoo or Bing) anything at all to get found at the top of the search engine results when people look for your product or service online.

Those rankings are determined by RELEVANCE. Google’s job is to give people what they’re looking for. If they (their search algorithm) thinks a particular page on YOUR SITE is the best, most relevant match for what that person typed in, that page will rank #1.

That’s it.

Now convincing Google that YOUR site is the most relevant one – which is called SEO (or search engine optimization) – is something you might well hire someone like me to do for you. But you do not pay Google itself, nor does a SEO expert pay Google directly.

Got it?