I hope this post doesn't come across as a rant , its intended to be helpful and refocus some of our members. Declaration here - I KNOW BARELY ANYTHING ABOUT SEO. Don't get me wrong , i am not knocking SEO and i am sure it has its place within the marketers arsenal but please please remember that all business revolves around people. I follow someone on Twitter and boom instant spam DM - Im not going to sign up to anything just because you send me a link people. Someones twitter feet is automated and full of the same repeated posts day in and day out .... guess what You just lost a follower. I go to a post on a blog and its just written for a computer to try and fool google, the style is horrible , the content makes no sense and the ENGAGEMENT is next to nothing. People are what makes you money.People are the ones that need help and their problems solved.Last time i checked Google was doing pretty well haha. So let me try and teach you a little of what i do.There is no magic sauce , so special button basically i interact. If someone tweets me i respond - ALWAYS If someone messages me on a forum unless its a straight pitch i respond ALWAYS. When i write on my blog i allow comments and guess what i respond ALWAYS. You may be behind the computer but you are still human. People want to work with people they like , trust and respect. Imagine what would happen if you wrote a genuine post for PEOPLE . you readers really enjoyed it and gained value from it and they started to share it.Well firstly it starts to gain traction for you but secondly it actually have more validation because someone else shared it to their friends. In effect they recommended you. That has far more weight than coming first in a search engine.It may not gain you as much traffic but i prefer quality not quantity. Anyone else have any questions or comments or thoughts , i would love to hear them. And remember this isn't an ANTI SEO post , its just trying to make people see that SEO isnt everything Peter
Hello Peter, Yes, you are right! When we do business, we do not chose the business, we chose the people sometimes. The trust and the respect is the most important thing in the business I believe.
I think there's some brilliant advice here. Marketing through online interactions can really only work if it's clear that it's one person talking to another person, there's so much robot spam out there today that if people smell that something's automated they'll turn off! Iseult
You're absolutely right, Palmfanatic. My best clients are those that I know personally through real established contact.
You're completely right, but the people that do the things you describe aren't concerned about running a legitimate business so much as hustling the most cash with the least possible effort. Turning away 99 customers is fine for them as long as they snag 1 out of 100. Running a legit business with elbow grease put into it would make more money, but it would also take way more time and overhead. They're fine with smaller returns with much less effort and time investment. That and a lot of people doing this are ESL speakers in developing countries who can't produce quality content in English, don't have the front money to pay somebody to do it, and are just desperately throwing everything they have access to at the wall in the hopes that some sort of passive income stream will stick for them.