Hey Guys I have been offline for a little while, and have recently decided to come back to online marketing, and boy things have changed. Whilst getting back into things I have realised that search engine optimization and depending on the the big search engines for traffic and sales are gonna be a thing of the past for me. Here is where I am going to be concentrating my marketing efforts on going forward and I thought I would share with you guys. Use Social Media Forget about Google - these days it's all about social media. When I am searching for a product or service I turn to Facebook or Twitter, and I am willing to bet most of your potential customers are too. I not only use Facebook to look for them but I can use it to check out their credibility and look for reviews. Social Media is also a great word of mouth tool. If you provide a good service or product for someone on Facebook then chances are they will share your page to all of their friends on Facebook potentially creating even more business for you. Another great thing about Facebook is their paid advertising tools. There have been many times I have been scrolling down my newsfeed and have come accross a new product that I haven't seen before and clicked on the advert out of curiosity. 3 of my favourite social media platforms for business are: Facebook Twitter Instagram Guest Blog Posting Another way to get eyeballs on your website quicker than relying on search engines is with guest blogging. When looking for a website to guest post on - forget about going for the one with the highest page rank or Google ranking. Choose one that has the highest amount of traffic, and user interactivity. The best way to determine this is by looking at the comment section and the amount of shares to social media each blog post has (sometimes this is displayed at the top or bottom of posts). I don't even worry about whether the link to my website is going to be "Do Follow" or not. The more people that are reading and interacting on the blog you are guest posting on the more people are likely to click through to your website, and be interested in what you are offering. Use Marketplaces If you are selling a product or service - don't wait for customers to find you - go out and find them. The best way to do this is to find out where they are already purchasing from and sell there. Think about it - if you have a small, new website how are you gonna compete with the giants like Amazon or EBay? You can't!. Well, if you can't beat them join them. Use these marketplaces to get your brand and products known, and in front of customers that are already waiting to purchase. The best marketplaces to sell on are: EBay Amazon Gumtree (UK users) Facebook (also has many buy/sell/trade marketplaces. Go Viral If you want a lot of traffic or customers quickly then you might want to think of a way you can make yourself go viral. I used to sell a lot of websites on Flippa - and recently I decided to check out their marketplace as I hadn't visited for a while. Whilst looking at the "starter websites for sale" I saw the same mish mash of clone webistes selling for under $100 - then something caught my eye. A website less than a month old with no search engine traffic had sold for $85,000. What did this website have the the other starter websites hadn't? It had a unique idea and had gone viral in the space of one week resulting in $20,000 in sales, and 2.5 million visits. It just goes to show that all it takes to go viral is one great idea. Something unique, funny or even a little contoversial. Something that people want to share with the friends and collegues over and over again, and you could be in that same position. Wait....... I'm not saying completely forget about Google and SEO. All I am saying is if that is all you are concentrating on then you could be waiting a long time to earn yourself any money, and after all that is what we are all trying to do.
Guest blog posting can be tricky. Guest blog posting for SEO has never been OK with the big G, so one has to be very careful how much guest blog posting he/she does. Between Panda and Penguin they can now figure out if it's done for wrong reasons.
Yes, it can be tricky for SEO purposes. However, the point of my post was to forget about Google and search engine optimization. Guest post purely for the direct visitors from that blog.
SEO has for the last few years been ran by a lot of people who want to trick you into ranking for terms which wont see you get traffic. Problem is that a good SEO person requires a year or more to rank for decent terms and generally only larger business' can afford the kind of resources it requires. There is a huge amount of Adwords fraud going on right now and to be honest I'm thinking about stopping my ads. Right now I get more than half the spend back each month due to click fraud.
Yes, 100% agree. Of course, what I have posted above is just my opinion and what I plan on spending my time on. If I do see an opportunity to get a few good backlinks along the way then I'm gonna grab them. But, I'm not going to be relying on Google to provide me with the traffic I want.