The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Some people call it Internet noise, others call it information. There is always a lot of noise that occurs around the subject of Internet marketing. This last week we have seen stories related to Google and what the search giant has done to several major businesses for breaching Google policies. There has also been a lot of noise about Google’s changes to its algorithm designed to affect content farmers.

Do you ever stop and listen? Trying to operate a business and run a website can be hard work. Trying to keep up with all the changes that are going on in the online world can also be difficult. If you were to listen to all the noise, the chances are you would become confused and lost in what you should and shouldn’t be doing.

As a business, it’s often a good idea to appoint yourself a silent mentor or two. I say silent because these mentors don’t even know they are mentoring you – and in the true sense, they aren’t. Who should you choose and how should you approach things? First, find bloggers who are respected leaders in the field of SEO, social media marketing, and Internet marketing. Take the time to visit their sites on a daily basis, or simply subscribe to their content.

By following the regular posts, you can stay up to date with what is happening in those important areas. Over time, you will find that you are learning a lot about SEO, social media marketing, and Internet marketing, and that your current knowledge in these areas is up to date. If you apply processes that these respected experts discuss, then your website’s presence will improve – and with it your business. Don’t listen to the noise, find some clarity and listen to that instead.

Baiting, then pitching, is the act of promising one thing then delivering on something else, generally in the form of a hard sell (the pitch). I have nothing against baiting in general – that’s what marketing is often all about. However, you do need to deliver on what you promise – if you want to sell, you do it with subtlety. Internet marketing is one area where baiting then pitching is rife, and most users strongly detest the practice.

Email marketing and social media marketing are two of the major problem areas when it comes to baiting then pitching. As a customer, there’s nothing more annoying than receiving a newsletter that offers some advice on how to use a product if I click through to the website only to find that the advice is the sale of the latest version of that product. Yet it happens all the time, and business owners then wonder why their newsletter subscriptions are dropping off.

Social media marketing is no different. There are many instances where businesses have sent tweets or Facebook messages that makes an offer to attract visitors. Many of these offers do deliver – however, there are just as many that not only don’t deliver, they push the sell strategy.

Getting traffic to a website can be a difficult task. The last thing you should be doing is scaring them away again, especially if you are leaving a sour taste in their mouths. Failing to deliver is a business sin when it comes to Internet marketing. Deliver on your promises, and the subtle use of selling tactics will deliver results. Baiting your visitors then pitching to them is one of the fastest ways to scare off visitors.

One of the problems with Facebook Pages has been the lack of personal interaction. You could interact, but it was always as the administrator and this tended to depersonalize any relationships. Facebook Pages have gone through another mini-evolution, and one of the changes introduced is the ability to switch between your admin role and yourself.

No one wants to discuss anything with an admin.  Once you, or one of your staff members, start to interact using their real identity, conversations take on a degree of realism – suddenly there is a real person there.  Facebook have taken this facility a step further and now allow you to Like and post comments on other Facebook Pages. This will become an important feature for those businesses that have more than one Page, or who want to connect their visitors with services related to their business.

Included in the changes to Facebook Pages are a new layout and the random display of images. The latter is a negative in some ways given the creative use of images in the past.

For users looking to build a brand, and who wish to interact with their visitors, the ability to switch from admin to yourself is by far the biggest change – and for the positive.  By putting a face to comments on your Facebook Page, you are increasing your credibility while at the same time creating a human connection. Everyone knows that the admin is a human, but by using the term ‘admin ‘the perception is of someone unknown, someone not willing to show their face. You can now prove to the world that there is a real person interacting on your Facebook Page.

While most online businesses are stressing over SEO, social media marketing, and perhaps even pay per click campaigns, email marketing rolls along delivering a steady flow of targeted traffic. Email marketing suffers from an image problem in some sectors. First, it is viewed as being too hard. Secondly, it is viewed as being below the old-fashioned junk mail that still floods our snail mail boxes.

These are both misconceptions that need clarifying. Let’s take the second point first. Today’s email marketing campaigns are as much controlled by the receiver as it is the sender. If you run your email campaigns correctly, then the only email addresses you have are those who have opted in – and they always have the opportunity to opt out again whenever they want. As to junk mail, that depends on you. You can choose to send junk, or you can choose to send newsletters that receivers will read and find useful.

Is email marketing too hard? Hard is probably too strong a word. There are several services available that will handle the grunt work for you. That is, collecting and storing the email addresses. You just need to make a form available to your visitors, and they will do the rest.

You actual marketing emails are up to you. They can be very simple and very plain emails inviting your recipients to come back to your website, perhaps offering discounts or special offers. You can also make your newsletters quite professional by hiring a specialist in this field.

Email marketing is neither hard nor junk mail. A recent report has highlighted how successful promotional emails are in relation to search and social media marketing. If you haven’t tried before, I suggest you do a little research.

Here’s a question for you to consider. If you were in an industry that was closely related to real estate, where would you concentrate your internet marketing campaigns? Which search engine would you focus on? It’s not a trick question, but it is a question that relates to how closely you watch the changes in search engine activity.

A little while ago Google announced that it was dropping out of real estate search. Their excuse was that the Google API was being dropped from use so real estate agents would no longer be able to list properties. Back in July, Zillow and Yahoo! announced a special partnership that would see Zillow real estate listings automatically available through Yahoo!s real estate search. This now makes Yahoo! the biggest single real estate listing site online.

If you are in an industry closely related to real estate – for example, mortgages, insurance, title searches, home inspections, appraisals, and so on – then it would make sense to concentrate some of your paid search efforts on Yahoo!. Time will tell if Yahoo! Real Estate becomes the most used real estate search portal online, but with so many listings, there is a good chance it will.

That’s real estate. The point I make here is that current information, especially news related to search engines and social media sites, is vital if you are to be effective online. You do need to filter your information admittedly. I mean, if you are in no way connected with real estate, then you would say ‘so what’ to much of what I have written. However, tomorrow, it may just be your niche that’s affected – are you going to be on top of the story and ready to take advantage?  Your internet marketing efforts are only as good as the information you base them on.

Late last week Bill Hartzer wrote a post that discussed what he calls social validation and it’s importance to SEO. His rationale is that if content gets mentioned on social sites, for example, re-tweeted on Twitter or ‘liked’ on Facebook, then search engines will sit up and take more notice of that content. To quote from the post:

….the search engines (Bing and Google) are looking for social validation. They see your new URL and index it, but will rank it higher in the search results if they can find some reason to: and one of those reasons includes social validation.

There is little doubt that search engines are taking more notice of what is happening through social media. While this is important, it is also important to understand the wider implications of successfully promoting your content through social media.  The more often your content is referred to through social media, the more likely it is to be referred to in other areas such as blogs and web pages.   The result is an increase in the number of inbound links.

So this then begs a question – do pages that perform well after receiving a lot of mentions in social media do so because of that interaction, or is it because of the sudden increase in mentions throughout the web, the sudden increase in links? Many people would argue both, and they are probably right.

What is important to note is that creating content that is well written and well received will rise to the top of search results quite quickly, if those factors all come together. What is more important is to find ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ who are themselves well respected, especially by the search engines. Other users will follow their recommendations, meaning more traffic, more inbound links, and perhaps a few extra brownie points from the search engines. The lesson is simple – build credibility in your content by have those respected acknowledge it’s value.

If you were to lift a website from ten years ago and dump it into today’s internet world, it wouldn’t cut it. Business websites of today can be complicated beasts, or at least, they may seem that way. However, a closer inspection will reveal that their anatomy is actually quite simple.

Today’s business website needs to address several factors. Get the design and mix right, and your website will be the least of your worries. So what factors does a modern website need?

Optimized for search – it goes without saying that search is still the number one source of traffic for most websites – this includes both organic, paid, and local search.

Optimized for social – optimizing for social involves a few simple modifications to a standard website. Social buttons are the first factor to consider. Allowing comments or user feedback should also be considered.

Optimized for the user - uncluttered pages, clear call-to-action triggers, easy to follow navigation, and the ability to communicate with you, the business owner, are all important user functions.

Optimized for the Internet – today’s websites need to be slick, fast, easy to follow, and fairly straightforward. Shopping baskets and checkouts need to be smooth processes that are not complicated by over form filling or confusing processes. Today’s website needs to be streamlined in the way it processes users and their data.

Optimized for information – what is the Internet all about? Information and communication. We have communication covered so all that is left is information, and for a website, that boils down to content. Relevant, unique, up-to-date, easy to read, and of value to users – content is what drives websites and its content that attracts visitors.

Does that sound too simplistic? Perhaps you are trying to over complicate what should be a straight out process. The hardest task in building a website to satisfy everything on that list is the seamless integration of each component. If your web design team can get that right, you website is ready to do business.

They say that loose lips sink ships; at least, they did back in WWII. Those words still ring true today, except the ships are businesses. It’s the loose lips that haven’t changed. Internet marketing covers a wide range of activities including search and social. It’s amazing how one loose word in the wrong place can come back to bite you down the track.

Badmouthing someone, either while engaged in a social media conversation, via a blog’s comments, or even privately through e-mail, never actually gets you anywhere, no matter how angry they have made you. Being able to control your emotions and respond courteously yet with authority with help you to maintain (if not build) your reputation while still allowing you to promote your product or service.

Humans are a fickle lot. We read a comment and we instantly take it personally. Often, it’s not true. If a comment is true, you need to be able to depersonalize it, and to put it into perspective. Why has that person made that comment? Rather than responding with angry outbursts yourself, remain professional.

Internet marketing is all about promoting your business, your products, and your brand. Reputation management is all about protecting your business, product, or brand. Between the two, there is no room at all for personal feelings, in particular, personal grudges. If someone bad mouths you, your business, product, or brand, take it as a potential marketing or reputation-building opportunity.

Loose lips will sink businesses. Leave your emotions at home and put on a professional face that is ready to handle everything that the online world is prepared to throw at you.

There has always been a sad truth about marketers – they care little for ROI. This has always been the realm of managers, particularly finance managers. Their mantra is always – ‘how much will it cost and what sort of return will we get’? When it comes to marketers, they are always interested in how far and how well they have delivered their message.

Is there a meeting place? There should be. There is one startling fact that business managers and marketers should always have at the back of their minds – it is easier to sell to existing customers than it is to acquire new customers. So my question to you is simple – what are you doing with your existing customers?

For many businesses, a customer comes to their website, buys, and disappears, often never to be seen again. Online marketing has one special difference to offline marketing, a website is not in your face everyday. Offline, your store front is there. People walk past it everyday. A website is different. If your customer has not bookmarked your website, and can’t quite remember the URL, they will visit whichever website catches their eye the next time they want to purchase.

So I ask again. What are you doing with your existing customers? Are you capturing their email addresses for email marketing? Are you inviting them to follow you on any of the social media sites? If you are not maintaining contact with your existing customers, then perhaps your internet marketing strategy needs a review. Existing customers can be pure gold so if ROI is important to you, make sure you get the maximum return from every one of them.

SEO is not Internet marketing. In fact, SEO is just one link in what is an ever growing chain of Internet marketing options. There are some online businesses that are quite profitable, yet they have not done any ounce of search engine optimization, they have the other links to be profitable. So what are those other ‘links’ in the chain? Here are a handful of marketing options that should keep you occupied for a while.

Pay-per-click advertising. There are many businesses that prefer the targeted traffic that comes from PPC advertising. It can be easy to measure your ROI, and you have complete control of your spending.

Social Media Marketing. There are some niches that are more suited to social media marketing than others. Some businesses can survive by attracting customers through social media rather than search.

Email Marketing. Newsletters have long been a popular channel for marketers. Email marketing has proven to be highly successful for some online businesses, particularly those that are catalog-based.

Offline Marketing. Large corporations still use traditional offline marketing strategies. Online businesses are now finding that some of these channels are well suited for promoting their online businesses.

Blogs. Blogs are certainly not dead. In fact, blogs are becoming a favorite place for many that are researching products and brands before making decisions on where to spend their money. Blogs are also an excellent way for your online business to connect with the social side of the web.

Businesses, both online and offline, that can harness all of those links in the Internet marketing chain are going from strength to strength. That doesn’t mean you need to utilize all of them, but if you can determine which of those options are best suited to your niche, you can focus your attention on building your presence and building your business – to success.

Do you understand your website’s traffic metrics? Most websites have particular days of the week, and even hours of the day, when they are at their busiest. A quick look at your website’s stats will tell you which days of the week (and which hours of the day) are most popular. The question is, can you modify your marketing to either take advantage of traffic peaks, or better yet, to drive traffic during the quieter times?

Offline businesses have been doing it for centuries. Making special offers available early in the week when customer traffic is low. Some businesses have even been accused of raising prices during peak periods – gas for our cars is a good example. What about your website – can you do the same?

Many businesses care only about right now. You need to understand your target market first. If you are selling products that are aimed at moms, then you will see a distinct peak at certain times of the day, depending of course on your product. Tweeting a super special at other times of the day may increase your traffic marginally, but if moms just aren’t available then, that special offer will be lost. More importantly, you may upset some customers since they weren’t physically able to take up your offer.

Knowing your traffic highs and lows and knowing your target market’s online habits are important metrics that you may be able to use to better target your marketing. If you use pay-per-click advertising, then you can ensure your ads are only running when your customers are online.

When it comes to blog traffic, publishing blogs shortly before your traffic peak ensures your readers are receiving the very latest. Publish after your traffic peak and regular readers are seeing your content 20-24 hours after publication – that is not ideal if you are looking to start conversations. On topical matters, you could be seen to be publishing stale news.

Understand your traffic metrics and use them to help boost your internet marketing programs.

If there is one complaint that is often heard regarding social media marketing it is the lack of analytics and the inability for business to measure return on investment. This perception is not really true – you can measure the success or failure of a social media marketing campaign. I would go further and suggest that you can measure and compare different campaigns to determine which is the more effective.

The hardest part of any form of measurement is the collection of data. This is not as hard as it may seem. Your first step is to determine what data is important. You can measure any of the following social media outcomes to determine success or failure.

Social media views – You are able to measure how many people have viewed your page on Facebook, and how many times your video has been viewed in most of the video sites. You can also measure how many people are reading your blog.

Subscribers, followers and fans – You can measure the growth in subscriber numbers for your blog or newsletter, Twitter followers, and Facebook fans.

Social media sharing – How many times are your Tweets retweeted, your pages liked, or your blog pages Stumbled? Sharing is reported to be a factor used by search engines to determine authority.

Traffic – Your own web analytics should be able to tell you how much traffic is flowing from social media websites to your pages. This will tell you if your social media marketing campaign is being effective.

Conversions – The ultimate statistic is being able to measure how many conversions you are achieving that can be directly attributed to your social media marketing activity. Using tracking codes on your links can help you to measure this.

Return on investment does not have to be a monetary return. If you decide you need to achieve a certain number of subscribers to make newsletter marketing viable, then the success of any social media campaign will be measured by the final number of subscribers achieved. The monetary return will come at a later date and will depend on how many sales can be attributed to your newsletter.

What is important is that you can measure various components of a social media marketing campaign.

Are you chasing the impossible? When it comes to search engine optimization, many website owners are. They spend a lot of time, effort, and money chasing that number one ranking in the search results. Smart SEO is all about assessing your position and comparing it to your competition, then acting on what you can realistically achieve – the probables rather than chasing the improbables.

The number one ranking in search results is not a fixed rank. If you have Google’s Webmaster Tools tracking your website, you will find that your search rankings change, and frequently too. Search results now also take into account factors that are beyond the reach of search engine optimization – these factors include a user’s history. This means that, in some searches you are actually number one – or number twenty-one. You have no control.

If your analysis of your current positions suggests it would be hard work, time consuming, and perhaps costly to chase a higher search rank, then it’s time to change your strategy. You need to work on other factors such as your meta description, your landing pages, and perhaps even your social media marketing.

Your meta description may help you stand out from the crowd and so draw more clicks – even though you are only number two or three in the search results. Spending time on developing a good landing page may see you convert a higher rate of visitors – which would you prefer, more visitors or more sales? Social media marketing, of course, uses another channel to attract visitors.

Don’t chase the improbables – it can be a frustrating experience. Take a realistic approach and tackle what is achievable in the current environment. You’ll save time, money, and your sanity.

Despite popular opinion, search engine marketing is not purely about paid search. Rather, it is marketing through the search engines using both paid and organic search. One of the difficulties with organic search is determining your return on investment (ROI). That doesn’t mean it should be ignored.

Where businesses need to focus, especially new businesses, is on the balance between investing in paid and organic search. It is easy to determine the ROI when it comes to paid search. For this reason, you can target hundreds, sometimes thousands, of keywords. This, together with targeting features, means you can advertise your business to a much wider market.

Organic search can be slow. However, that can work in a new business’s favor. While paid search brings in the bulk of a website’s traffic, organic search can slowly build in the background, especially if you only target a precise set of keywords. As your organic traffic grows, you can start to diversify your keyword list; in the meantime, paid search is still delivering traffic. The overall effect is a slow but steady growth in the business.

A mistake that many new businesses make is to throw 70% or more of their marketing budget at organic search and leave the crumbs for paid search, social media marketing, and perhaps other forms of advertising such as banners. Often, the balance should be reversed with paid search receiving the bulk of your marketing budget while organic search is left to slowly develop.

Every niche is different, of course, and some niches respond well to social media marketing rather than search. A little research and a lot of testing is the best approach. With search engine marketing, achieving a good balance between your paid and organic efforts can result in a profitable business from day one – and a business that will continue to grow over time.

With all the talk about social media marketing being the new king of traffic delivery, you would think it was the only method. In the cold hard light of day, most businesses still rely on search traffic, and they will for years to come. Social media marketing and search engine optimization complement each other, they certainly don’t work against each other.

There is an easy way to look as this issue – why chase only half the traffic when you can gain traffic from both channels?  The number of people using search engines to find information is still growing, even if it is only slowly. More importantly, when you look at the volume of search undertaken each day, if you were to receive .001% of that traffic, it would most likely crash your servers – that’s a lot of traffic and a lot of search queries being run.

So, why is SEO still important? Search engines are still supplying traffic for free. The only cost to you is the time effort that you or a consultant put into optimizing your pages to rank as highly as possible in those search results. Do it well and your web site will receive significant traffic from the search results.

In many cases, SEO serves one further purpose, a purpose that many don’t consider. A good SEO program will ensure that your web site is put together in a very slick, tidy and well-managed fashion. Whether your traffic is coming from the search engines or social media, that tidy and slick web site will gain instant approval from visitors. Without the housekeeping that SEO demands, web sites would run out of control, will start to look untidy, and will most likely frustrate users who can’t find what they are looking for.

Search engine optimization helps your web pages to rank highly in search results. It also helps you to stay in control of your web site. Both are important if you want to be successful.

It is interesting to read some advice columns when it comes to social media marketing. Their first piece of advice often runs along the lines of creating a great profile, developing landing pages that will convert traffic, and general tips on how to interact with others. That advice is good advice – however, a successful social media campaign starts well before any of that.

While planning is crucial to the success of any business campaign, what is equally important in social media marketing is having very clearly defined objectives – and the smaller those objectives are, the easier it is to plan and the easier they are to plan. These objectives could be as simple as being able to interact with five new followers each day – in fact, your objective may be to collect five new followers each day.

Once you have a clearly defined set of objectives, you can then plan how you intend to achieve them.  Those plans of course will then include details such as putting together a profile, landing page, or even the design of pages such as your Twitter profile or a Facebook Fan Page – if you intend on having them.

In most cases, the general approach has been to create a profile, and to then accumulate as many followers as possible, irrespective of the quality of those followers. Once a business has accumulated a good number of followers, the question has been, ‘okay, now what do I do with them’. In other words, the planning starts well after the event. In the majority of cases, that approach is doomed to fail, often due to the poor quality of the followers.

By planning, you will know why people are following you, and if you know the why, the how in marketing becomes so much easier. Do your planning from the start, not down the track – that’s the most effective way to start a social media marketing campaign.

Big business turned to IT decades ago. They had the money to buy huge mainframes and to pay for the dedicated staff to manage them. What those mainframes could do in an hour often took dozens of workers to do in several hours. Small business has toyed with IT, some with a great deal of success, others with not so much success. It seems that small businesses are once again looking at IT as a means to cut operating costs. It’s interesting to note that Internet marketing is one of those driving forces.

According to SmallBusinessNewz:

nearly 36% of small businesses are investing in improved email marketing campaigns, 28% are looking at Google Adwords and 21% are looking at Facebook advertising.

They also report that 30% of small businesses are investing in “virtualization, business intelligence and collaboration“.  Business intelligence (or competitive intelligence) has been a primary motivator for many medium to large businesses where dedicated staff research competitors across the broad spectrum of the Internet – especially social media.

One of the driving forces into the future will be the introduction of smarter software that will deliver better analytics of social media activity. We are already seeing better analytics coming out of Facebook, other social media sites will not be far behind. One of the best indicators of how successful Internet Marketing is becoming is the fact that traditional marketing sources, print, television, and radio, are now crying poor and bemoaning drops in sales, viewers, and listeners.

Today, you can create a highly successful video ad for far less than the cost of a television ad. Where television charges tens of thousands of dollars for some 30 second ad spots, you can publish and promote a video of any length, almost for free, across the Internet. You may not get the same audience, but when you can produce 20 or 30 videos for the same cost as one television ad – savings are fairly obvious.

We are only touching the surface when it comes to cost cutting. Cloud computing is yet to make a huge impact yet the potential for savings could be huge for small businesses. Internet marketing is just one dimension, but its success will drive ventures into more cost cutting activities using IT and the Internet. The ride is going to be interesting.

When it comes to marketing, every option is fair game. Facebook has become a popular social media marketing option for many businesses. Twitter, on the other hand, has not proven to be as successful for many businesses. With only 8% of US population using Twitter, there isn’t a huge market to begin with, especially if many of those users are also using Facebook. So has Twitter been overrated by many in the marketing world?

Frank Reed on Marketing Pilgrim had a few interesting things to say about Twitter following their release of the Top 10 Trends on Twitter 2010. I have to agree the list is quite uninspiring. But then, on second thought, it is a list of what inspired Twitter users in 2010. This then leads to that question as to whether or not Twitter has become overrated as a marketing channel.

The flip side is, when it comes to social media marketing, perhaps we as marketers have lost the plot. Are we trying to force a square peg into a round hole? Twitter has always been primarily the online version of a mobile text message. A short and sweet commentary on what interests users right now. As a marketing channel, it is great to see what is trending right now. As a communication channel, it certainly has its limitations.

Frank Reed observed:

Twitter is getting pretty full if itself when it has the stones to call these results “most meaningful”.

I tend to disagree with him here.  To Twitter users, it is probably a list of what is ‘most meaningful’ in their lives. Just because it doesn’t fit into our marketing picture is really irrelevant since Twitter’s primary goal was never to be a marketing channel. As marketers, our role is to take what is topical today, and to try and use it to our advantage.

The only way you can change that list is to inspire others with your message so that it becomes one of the hot trending topics. But then, that is what every marketer aims for. Twitter is highly successful in some niches, not because it follows trends, but because it offers something of value to those who are interested in that niche.

Is Twitter overrated? Possibly! Have we lost the plot? To some degree, yes!  But then, has the marketing world really got a firm handle on how to use Twitter? Probably not! What are your thoughts?

Oh – and for the record, the top 10 Twitter topics for 2010?

1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. FIFA World Cup
3. Inception
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
7. Google Android
8. Justin Bieber
9. Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows
10. Pulpo Paul

Writing content can be a difficult job, particularly if you are trying to achieve a certain result. One of the mainstays of online marketing is baiting content so that it draws the reader onto your site, or further into your site.  The philosophy is quite simple: write content that is informative while not quite answering the user’s question.

In fact, it goes a little further than that. Onsite (and with email marketing), you close off almost all other forms of escape leaving the user little option apart from following the doors you have opened, or closing the page altogether. If your content is well written, the user will travel the path you have mapped, without even realizing it.

Off site, for example, article marketing or social media marketing, you don’t have the option of closing doors. This means your content must be good enough that it blinds the reader to anything else – until they reach the all-important link back to your website. Creating a constant steam of content that achieves this goal is quite an art form in itself.  If you can achieve it, then you will find that conversion from this material can be quite high.

Writers that can produce top quality material are in high demand. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t produce this material yourself. You can, with a little thought. The key is to write content that does answer the user’s question, then to edit it so that the full answer is missing but can be found by following a train of thought – and that is the link deeper into your website.

If you do bait your content, be sure there is an answer at the end of the line, and don’t make that line too long. If you do, your visitors will leave and never return. Provide some satisfaction, and your visitors will feel good about the experience and return for more. Baiting content has been a marketing ploy used for decades off line – it works just as well for internet marketing too.

Can you build an online business without the help of free traffic from search engines? In simple terms, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” In fact, most online businesses are built without the help of search engine traffic – at least, the free organic traffic that comes from search results. The reason, it often takes months before a website’s pages start to appear on the front page of search results.

If that’s the case, can you continue to run a business successfully without traffic from organic search results? Again, the answer has to be yes – if you’re prepared to work at it. There are many businesses surviving on pay per click marketing including pay per click from minor search engines where ‘quality scores’ are not an issue.

The biggest move in non-search marketing is social media marketing, particularly sites such as YouTube and Facebook. They say that YouTube is the second largest search engine online. That may be so, but it does take time and effort, and sometimes money, to put together videos that are of an acceptable quality. Even then, there is no guarantee that viewers will actually visit your website.

Facebook is another story. Being the most trafficked site on the Internet, it is quickly becoming one of the major target areas for business. Add Facebook’s own advertising program and the opportunities are there to succeed without search. If you can steadily build an email marketing list from your social traffic, so much the better.

There is, however, a certain irony in building a business without the reliance of search. Over time, your pages will rank (unless you block them). You will start to get a trickle of traffic from search engines and it will have an impact on your business, even if it’s just a small impact. If that’s the case, then why not incorporate some of the basic tenets of search engine optimization. It doesn’t take a lot of extra effort, and the benefits down the track could be significant. Can you succeed without search? Many businesses already think they do – notice I said “think!”