As everyone and their brothers jump online and get familiar with the ease of putting down their credit card for online commerce, it's obvious that historical marketing methods of direct mail, media, and telemarketers just won't be enough to buy you small business success. Small Business now sees mind-numbing changes. If you want your business, product or service to be found, you'd better be Marketing for Search Engines (SEM) and familiar with today's Social Media Impact on Business. Web-based tools and tactics have altered the playing field and generated new rules for information handling and commerce. Software as a service or SAAS is meaning that everything from Aunt Zelda's cleaning services to your kid's baseball training program is now online as part of the, you guessed it--CLOUD. Your business needs needs more visibility in the cloud than a goose headed for a 747 turbine, and marketing for search engines is the primary tactic of getting noticed.
THE 4 C's OF S.E.M.
As my VBlog guest Ira Wolfe summed it all up, here are the 4 Top Guidelines you need to know about successful Marketing for Search Engines (search engine marketing, SEM):
CONTENT
If your website is your printed brochure and you like it that way, please click off of this page now! You cannot have any success online driving traffic to your site from search engines without Content. Gobs of Content! Oodles. Insane amounts of words, pics, video, musicwhatever floats your boat. By insane amounts, recognize that there are millions of websites out there with, sit down, 1000s of pages of content!
Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo look at content as a measuring stick of how relevant your business is in the world. There are a ton of strategies, and unless you have unlimmited resources, you just can't do all of them. Article writing, for my blog and similar versions for dozens of other's blogs and article sites, is a favorite strategy of mine. If you're paying attention you just learned one way to get written content for your site. Syndicate it. This is great for those who fear content creation, don't have time for it, or simply lack the confidence that anything they have to say is worth broadcasting. There are millions of bloggers and poor man's authors out there dying for you to publish their material on your site for the simple favor of a return link or three to their websites or blogs.
Don't like to write? That's OK. Know what a ghost blogger is, Mr. big-time CEO? And in today's full-color world, Google rewards Pictures, properly tagged, even more. Even better is Video. People, if you've been to my VBlog and seen me interviewing subject matter experts, it's not because I think I have a career in film making or replacing Larry King. I want to get great information to my readers and video works fantastic, but it also boosts my search engine rankings in a major way. Boo-Yah!
CONNECTION
It ain't a once and done world. Any good marketer knows that it may take a while for someone to warm up to your content, so you need to have plenty of it and keep refreshing ita lot! Your goal is not to have them look on your site or blog once, but to bookmark it, subscribe to your RSS feed, and basically give you permission to market to them again and again. This content repetition in all its forms is what wins people over. Once they subscribe, you're now beyond idle chit chat and into the hand-holding phase of the relationship. Keep going and you just might get to second base, where they like you enough to want to talk to you.
CONVERSATION
Ahhh! Now we're getting comfortable. If you subscribe to or read any blog posts, you know that 99.9% of them have a box to encourage you to have a take and don't suck about it. You also see all those tiny little squares on websites, all over the place (just check mine-get your dead cat out again), asking you to follow them on Facebook, re-Tweet them, subscribe, Stumble Upon, or otherwise talk to the site, rate the blog, or product, or pictureget it! This is just marketing recognition of the importance of dialogue and chatter in today's world. Exploiting this correctly is the main way Social Media Helps Small Business. Everyone is a critic, yes, and torque-off the wrong, angry blogger or hacker at your own risk, but most ordinary humans have real lives without the time to spend it on wrecking yours with vitriolic bile in cyberspace. Create a conversation with your customers, and soon you'll have them creating positive, happy, fluffy conversations about your business Do this right and go viral and you're a celebrity in your own little business niche, and that ain't chump change, friends.
CONSISTENCY
This is the most important C of the Big 4 for marketing for search engines. Every day, millions of pages of content get loaded onto the Internet and indexed by Google, Yahoo and the boys. Besides that, the guidelines and algorithms used by the big boy search engines regarding relevance are always changing. What that means to you is, if you are trying to get any search engine traffic at all to do enough business for you to buy a Happy Meal, you need to be engaging in this stuff weekly. Monthly? Cute. Once per quarter? Google does not suffer fools easily. The Internet is a what have you done for me lately world. On top of the world today, living in a refrigerator box tomorrow.
Don't let me be misunderstood (note to self, try to develop some lyrics around that), you need to consistently market to the search engine universe to succeed at the game. Having said that, if your content is wholesome, good stuff, the huge benefit of the online world is that your stuff never dies! I heard a guy on a YouTube video say, "Google never forgets." I have articles from 10 years ago that are ranked in the top 3 of certain undisclosed keywords to this day! It can be a beautiful thing. The problem is, you never know what is going to last. It's simple really. You never know what the rest of the planet is doing now that may be more germaine to business than the wisdom you shared last week. The best you can do is keep going. Every now and then you'll hit a grand slam, but more games are won with singles, walks and hit by pitches. Go get your bat and stroll up to the plate.
Now learn a ton of Article Marketing Tips and Techniques
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