People who won’t ever make it in EBiz
Literally every day, I get phone calls from people asking me about different “Get Rich Quick” schemes they find online. They call to describe them to me and ask me if they work. I just got off the phone with yet another guy who wanted to buy a pre-loaded, pre-built web site from some thieving jackass marketer who knows perfectly well it will never work.
The answer is NO, every time. There is no quick and easy solution to building a real business, either on the Internet or anywhere else. Never. Period. End of Sentence.
Every time I say NO, though…these people want to argue with me. They want to know if I’m sure that this one isn’t different. They keep telling me all the wonderful easy details over and over again, hoping I’ll change my mind. They WANT to believe that junk is real, because it looks so EASY!
So if they want it, and it looks so easy, why did they call me to ask about it in the first place?
BECAUSE THEY ALREADY KNOW IT’S JUNK. THEY’RE JUST HOPING THEY CAN FIND SOMEONE REPUTABLE TO TELL THEM IT’S NOT.
Sorry, I won’t do it.
There are no shortcuts. There are no cheap or easy ways out. There are no successful “pre-built” or “pre-loaded” web sites or businesses. You won’t learn everything you need to know on the search engines for free. You can’t outsource people to do your work for you, because if you hire people who do it right, it’ll cost you a fortune.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is a thief and a liar, and you can tell them I said so.
Most of the people who call me for the truth, then go away not liking the truth, will never make it in eBiz. They’ll still go buy all that endless crap from the ever-present Internet Marketing Clown Car and spend thousands of dollars and years of wasted time figuring out that I was telling them the truth in the first place, and they should have listened.
If you don’t want to be one of those poeple, you have to learn this stuff and do it yourself. That’s the only way anybody ever makes any real money in eCommerce.
Again, sorry…but that’s just the way the world is. We have to actually work for our money.
SO…do you want to know WHAT you have to learn to do yourself if you want to succeed? Here’s a handy list that you can tape to the wall near your computer or put in your business notebook.
Get Legal:
If you don’t have a legal business, you can’t work with real wholesalers, and you can’t collect money from your customers’ credit cards. There are lots of ways to get legal, and some are better than others.
Basic Ecommerce:
You need to know how all the puzzle pieces of Ecommerce fit together. An overview of how it all works lets you see the big picture, and that’s where you need to start.
Market Research:
You need to learn how to choose a product market with high demand, low competition, profitable margins, and price points that allow you to make money at a lower volume of sales while staying within the average price ticket in the current economy. Sound like fun? It’s not so hard when once you learn it!
Keyword Research:
Keywords are how people find our businesses online. Understanding how people are searching for the things you’re selling is critical to your Ebiz.
Product Sourcing:
From drop shipping to bulk buying, there’s a product sourcing progression your Ebiz needs to go through to become more and more profitable. Understanding that progression is the key to earning more and more money over time.
Site Hosting:
Understanding what site and store hosting is, how shopping carts integrate with stores, how sites are built and what kinds of site are the most effective makes a big difference in your business.
Site Design:
The most successful web sites lead their visitors through the pages visually, without too much text. There are visual patterns and subliminal messages that need to be sent to bring people from page to page, so they end up making the purchase.
Social Marketing:
This is one side of the coin when it comes to getting your site noticed in the most important place: The top of the natural search engine results in Google. There are several social marketing methods, and some of them are more important than others. No matter what, you need to know how to use them properly.
Search Engine Optimization:
Called SEO for short, this is the other side of the coin when it comes to getting to those top results in Google. Knowing exactly where and how to place keywords on your pages and in your Meta Tags makes all the difference when it comes to getting results.
Other Marketing Strategies:
From email marketing to viral marketing to paid advertising and more, there are other marketing strategies, some good and some bad, that you need to be aware of. You need to know which is which, and how to use the good ones.
Site Metrics:
Understanding how to tell what visitors are doing when they come to your site is as important as having a site in the first place. When you understand your visitors’ behaviors, you understand where change needs to be made to make your site more effective.
That’s just a basic overview of the major things you need to learn to run a real moneymaking business online.
If this is too much heat for you, please get out of the kitchen before you burn yourself to the tune of thousands of dollars and years of effort wasted on “quick and easy get rich quick schemes”.
On the other hand, if you can handle what it takes to be a REAL business owner, I’m always here to help you.
Call me at 888-8ChrisM with any question, but keep an open mind, and I’ll be glad to talk to you about how a real business is built and run.
Most people “Point-Shoot” with their EBiz. Do you?
In my long (18 years +) experience with making money online, and with well over a decade of experience in teaching others how to make money online, this is something I see most often when I look at someone’s online business. Almost everyone I’ve ever talked to who had problems making money online was “Point-Shooting” with that business.
Check out the Video…
The Top 5 EBiz Killer Mistakes new EBiz Owners make
During the Holidays, I sent out a series of 5 emails explaining the Top 5 Worst Mistakes that EBiz Owners make online.
Bad time to send emails…only 15% of the people on my lists opened them! To many festivities, I guess!
So I decided to put together a video describing the very worst mistake that most eBiz owners make, and put it out on my Blog. This mistake nearly ALWAYS kills a business before it even gets off the ground.
Check out the video below. If this describes YOUR web site, this is why you’re not showing up in the search engines, and you need to do something about it quick!
Automatic Product Feeds: Good or Bad?
When you have a web site that sells products online, sometimes you come across Automatic Product Feeds from wholesalers. This means that your wholesaler can send an automatically loaded file to your web site that fills in all the products, descriptions, prices, quantity available and so forth. These feeds are updated on a regular basis so that you don’t have to manually add products, manage prices and descriptions, etc.
For lots of people, this looks like the Holy Grail of ease in product management.
BUT, there are a couple of mistakes people make when using a feed like this that lead to serious problems.
THE FIRST PROBLEM is that people tend to take the ENTIRE product feed and put it on their web site. That often means hundreds or even thousands of products on a singe site. It almost always means that lots of products on that site will be unrelated to each other. For example, a large wholesaler with a product feed might carry everything from sporting goods to jewelry to clocks to baby buggies.
That’s really bad. Why?
Because a web site that has more than one specific product line on it is next to impossible to get ranked in Google (the most important search engine) or any other search engine.
Search engines look for web sites that tell one story about one thing. If you’re going to sell baby buggies, you need to sell ONLY baby buggies on your site. If you’re going to sell sporting goods, pick ONE type of sporting goods product (hunting knives, for example) and sell only that. If you mix products that a search engine sees as unrelated to each other, you have far too wide a mix of keywords for a search engine to rank you well for any ONE set of keywords, and nobody will ever find your site. If nobody finds your site, no sales.
THE SECOND PROBLEM is that when you get a product feed, you get descriptions of the products along with the feed. That seems like a good thing, but for your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) it’s actually a bad thing. Manufacturer and wholesalers’ descriptions of products are almost always short and factual. For good SEO, and for good sales conversion, your product descriptions need to be personalized. They need to be very descriptive, contain the right SEO Keywords for that product and page, and give people a warm fuzzy that matches the overall look and personality of your site.
When you simply take the descriptions directly from the wholesaler and don’t re-write them to do all those things, you lose a very important part of your SEO, and a very important part of your sales conversion (turning visitors into buyers).
If you use an automatic product feed and you DO re-write your descriptions to be both more SEO friendly and conversion friendly, you run the risk that the next time the feed updates your site, all your changes can be lost and those descriptions can be replaced with the original ones.
So, if you are going to use an automatic product feed, make sure you do two things:
1. Choose carefully from the product feed! Be sure that you can pick and choose which products the wholesaler feeds your site (which is available in almost all feeds). Choose only the products in one carefully argeted and researched niche, and build your business around that niche.
2. Always change your product descriptions as mentioned above. Always be sure you can control the product feed to the point where it doesn’t overwrite your changed descriptions when it updates. In some cases you can do this, in some cases you can’t. In EVERY case, you NEED to, so make sure that you talk to the wholesaler first and confirm that your descriptions don’t get overwritten when the feed updates.
An automatic product feed can be a great timesaver, but if used the wrong way it can kill your business.
Live Chat - should you use it on your site?
Should you use a Live Chat on your web site?
Well, the people who sell those programs certainly think you should. They talk about how important it is to be right there on the spot to talk to your customers, answer their questions, invite them into a chat to help sell your products, and so on.
So should you do that? Yes? No?
The answer is a resounding “Maybe”.
Live Chat on your site can certainly be a useful tool, but it has it’s drawbacks. The biggest drawback is that it ties you to your site a lot more than you’d probably like to be there. We all go into ECommerce for a little more freedom, right? I can tell you from painful experience that sitting in front of your computer practically 24/7 is not freedom!
Okay, say the Live Chat guys, you don’t have to sit there 24/7! You can close your Live Chat and leave a message saying you’re not there right now, “please leave a message”. But how does that come across to your customer?
The internet is supposed to be a 24/7 operation. While people realize that most stores are not staffed by live people 24/7 in the physical world or online, it’s still something that you really don’t need to remind your customers of. The feeling when shopping online is that you can get pretty much anything anytime. It’s kind of a magical shopping experience where everything is always open for business.
That’s a psychological effect I don’t think we should be messing with. Showing a Closed Live Chat window gives people a feeling, no matter how subtle, that your store is empty; devoid of life, the lights are on but nobody’s home…that kind of thing. No matter how subtle that effect is on different people, it’s there, and it’s not good.
So overall, I don’t like Live Chat all that much because you simply can’t staff it all the time, and when you aren’t there, it could slow sales down considerably. Will that make up for the supposed increase in sales when you ARE there?
Well, let’s think about that too. The fact is that most well-designed sites should not need Live Chat. A well-designed site will move people quickly and efficiently to the product(s) they want and make the sale without human intervention. In fact, that’s the way shoppers want it. Online shoppers move quickly. They don’t like things that slow them down, like needing to talk to someone on the phone or in Live Chat because the site itself doesn’t explain it’s products properly or is hard to navigate to what the shopper wants.
So design your site well, and you won’t have to worry about having a Live Chat that you can’t (and really don’t want to!) staff all the time. You also won’t have to worry about disappointing your customers and giving them a negative vibe about your biz when your customers see a closed Live Chat.
Okay, let’s talk about the flip side of the coin now. There ARE some sites that could benefit from Live Chat. Thinking back on the times I’ve actully engaged in a Live Chat when shopping for something, the only times I can remember doing it was when I was buying something complicated that needed futher explanation, or I was buying some software program that I didn’t get the License Key to.
Wait…that could have been solved by better site design and operation on the part of the seller! So, we’re back to square one.
Look, I’m not saying that Live Chat is a horrifying mistake or something that should never be used. I’m just saying that I don’t believe it should be needed by most web sites, and I don’t believe most site owners want to staff it as much as they should, and I DO believe that when it’s NOT staffed, that’s a bad thing.
So in my opinion, worry less about Live Chat and more about increasing your sales by working on your site design and marketing. Let people shop in your store in the wee hours while you sleep, without letting them know you’re asleep! That’s kinda the point, isn’t it?
Can Your EBiz Be Sued for Trademark Violations?
Can your eBiz be sued for Trademark violations?
Yes it can, if you violate a Trademark, whether you realize you’re in violation or not.
This issue has caught my attention for two reasons this week. (1) I just heard about a home-based business owner who’s being sued over a Trademark violation, and (2) One of my Private Forum Members was thinking about registering a domain name that could be considered in violation of a Trademark. Luckily, that person asked about it in the Private Forum, and it was pointed out before anything bad could happen.
Lots of home-based EBiz owners either don’t think that they’ll ever be caught up in something like this, or don’t understand what to be careful of. It’s something that’s important to keep in mind. It does happen. Like I said, I know of a case in court right now where a home-based eBiz Owner violated a company Trademark, and is likely spending a fortune right now trying to defend himself in court. Whether he did it on purpose or not, well, that’s for the jury to decide at this point.
The particulars of that case don’t really matter. The important thing is that you understand the basics of Trademarks and steer your business clear of violating them.
So, here are the things you’ll want to keep in mind. There are two very common ways to violate Trademarks. Inappropriate domain names, and counterfeit products.
1. Inappropriate domain names:
Registering a domain name for your web site is easy. Go to one of the countless hosting sites that register domains, pick one, pay a few bucks and you’re on your way.
If you pick the wrong one, though, you could be on your way to court.
Let’s say you’re going to sell Wilson tennis racquets online, and it seems like a really good idea to you to register the domain name WilsonTennisRacquetsOnline.com. That’s actually a very bad idea, because the company that makes Wilson tennis racquets undoubtedly has the name Wilson Trademarked in relation to their products. That domain name would be in violation of their Trademark.
Be sure you keep the names of other companies and their specific product names (for example, the word “iPod”) OUT of your domain names. Doing anything else is asking for trouble.
(Legal disclaimer: “Wilson” and “iPod” are the intellectual property of their respective Trademark holders and are used here simply as examples). See what I mean? You have to be careful!
If you want to find out if any of the major words in a domain name you’re thinking about registering is Trademarked, go to http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/index.jsp and click the “Search Marks” button. That’ll tell you whether you need to steer clear of the word(s) you’re considering.
2. Counterfeit products:
There are a LOT of counterfeit products coming out of places like China these days. Products that look like name-brand merchandise, and even have the actual name brands ON them. If they are not made by the company that owns the trademark, they are counterfeit, and you should NOT sell them. I know that lots of people think that if they can get cheap knock-offs at a low price they can make a lot of money on them.
Well, maybe they will. I hope so, because they’ll need a lot of money for legal defense when the Trademark owners catch up to them.
Remember that it’s very difficult if not impossible for these Trademark owners in the US to sue the counterfeit manufacturers in China, so they do the next best thing; they go after the people they can get to in the US. That means you, and you don’t want to be in that situation.
So,
(a) Please be careful when registering domain names to sell name brand products
(b) Never use another company’s name or Trademarked words in your domain name
(c) NEVER sell counterfeit goods.
You can make plenty of money online without having to worry about getting sued over Trademark violations!
Your EBiz: 5 Do’s and Dont’s for 2011
Well, here it is…another New Year! This is the time of year when people get the most fired up about doing new things in their lives and making the changes they’ve always dreamed about for their futures.
So, with that in mind, here’s my list of 5 Do’s and Dont’s for your EBiz in 2011.
1. DON’T: Ask how much money you can make, and how quickly.
DO: Realize that a business, whether online or offline, is not a race to the cash. It’s a slow, steady progression to bigger and better things every day.
I get people asking me all the time how fast they can get to making a certain amount of money per week, month or year. They all have a money goal in mind, and most want it to happen yesterday. They all want to do everything all at once, make a pile of money right now, and then sit back and spend it. It doesn’t work that way, but nobody wants to hear that.
Think of business like breathing. If you breathe really, really fast for a while, can you then stop breathing for the rest of your life? Well, you could, but the rest of your life wouldn’t be very long. It isn’t about how fast you do things. It’s about doing the right things consistently over time and letting the reward come from that consistency. If you do that, the rewards last for a long, long time.
It’s okay to have a financial goal in mind. In fact, it helps you work toward that goal. But, the faster you try to race toward that goal, the more mistakes you’re going to make. The more mistakes you make, the further away that goal gets, and the longer it’s going to take to get there.
This is not a race. Don’t treat it like one. Virtually all of the people I’ve seen really succeed online take the time to move slowly and methodically toward their goals.
To paraphrase a truly great quote from JFK: “Ask not what your EBiz can do for you. Ask what you can do for your EBiz!”
2. DON’T: Expect to hire people to do your day to day EBiz work for you right from the start.
DO: Make sure you learn every job in your EBiz before you turn it over to someone else.
I come across people every day who want to know who they can hire to design their site, write their blog posts, pick their products, do their marketing, handle their customer service, and every other EBiz function under the sun.
These people will never own a successful online business, unless they put together a couple of million dollars and buy one that’s fully staffed with employees and already making serious revenue. That’s because one of the most critical parts of owning a business (and I can tell you this from 35 years of experience!) is learning and really understanding everything about that business. Without that knowledge and understanding, you have no experience to base critical everyday decisions on. If you can’t make the critical decisions properly, you lose. Period.
People who learn and understand are people who make money. People who whine about not wanting to learn and do the hard stuff themselves had better show up to work at the day job on time every day, because they’re going to need that day job.
3. DON’T: Make your EBiz more complicated just because you know how to.
DO: Build your EBiz on existing platforms that already work well.
When I was much younger, I spent years working for my father’s construction company. I can build a house literally from the ground up. Framing, walls, trim, drywall, electrical, plumbing, roofing…you name it, I know how to do it. So, when I’m looking for a new house, should I go buy all the materials and build it myself? Of course not. I’m either going to hire a construction company to build one, or buy an existing house that I like. Otherwise it’ll take me way too long to build the whole thing myself, and I won’t have time to do anything else.
In EBiz, I see this happening most often with people who know something about web programming. It seems like everyone who can write a few lines of code wants to create the entire web site, including the shopping cart, shipping and taxation functions, etc., from scratch.
This is a very bad idea. There are already some very good online store platforms out there that come complete and ready to go. (I’m talking about something like Yahoo Store, for example…not those ridiculous “biz in a box” pieces of junk). You have to learn a lot about a lot of different things when you run a business. If you spend all your time trying to program something that already exists, you won’t have time for all the other things you need to do.
4. DON’T: Ask which EBiz tools are the easiest and fastest to learn.
DO: Ask which EBiz tools are the most effective for your business, no matter what the learning curve.
Business isn’t simple or easy. It requires time, dedication and a committment to learning. I see people all the time who are looking to do things the fastest and easiest way possible. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just either misguided or lazy. Those people are fooling themselves and wasting their time. Looking for the fastest and easiest way, instead of the most effective way, is simply the fastest and easiest way to the point of failure.
5. DON’T: Try to re-invent the wheel. The existing design rolls downhill just fine.
DO: Learn, practice and master the basics of online business first.
Start where eveyone else starts, only dedicate yourself to really understanding every phase of your business as you build. If you feel the burning desire to get fancy and build some massive online concept site, wait until you understand how business really works before you roll your wheel off that particular cliff. Chances are that understanding will save you from a long fall.
Every once in a while I come across someone who wants my help to build something extremely complicated. Examples: (1) A web site that sells a different product every day, (2) A web site where the customers themselves can also list items for sale, and pay a commission to the site owner, (3) Web sites that sell everything to everybody, and (4) Dozens of other complicated schemes.
People who go off on these complex tangents seem to think that sites like eBay, Amazon, Shop.com and many other big concepts were started in somebody’s garage and went on to make fortunes. They weren’t. These complex ideas required years of combined businesss experience from many people and millions of dollars in capitalization for development, programming and marketing.
Stick to and learn the basics. The basics are complicated enough, and if you don’t get those figured out, you don’t have a chance at the complex!
SO, there are 5 Do’s and Dont’s for your EBiz for 2011. There’s a lot more to understand, but these 5 are important. Please keep them in mind!
Have a great and prosperous 2011!
Your EBiz: Should You Have An Accountant?
Should you have a local accountant to talk to about your EBiz?
This is a question that comes up in my EBiz Workshops all the time. EBiz owners want to know if they should be working with an accountant when it comes to money questions related to their businesses, or if they should just wing it based on info they find online.
I’ve been in business for decades, and I can tell you that my businesses DO use an accountant for specific tax and financial questions. Accountants are not exactly cheap, but they’re not as pricey as the laywers that you might need to get yourself out of trouble if you DON’T use one for those questions.
However: keep in mind that accountants are not the best people to rely on for decisions that affect the DIRECTION of your business. If you want to know what forms to file and when, great. Ask an accountant. If you want to know whether or not you should partner with a certain company, or go down one business path or the other, DON’T.
We had this discussion in my Private Forum recently. Accountants will always give you the SAFE answer. They’ll always err very much on the side of caution. Answers to business issues are never black and white. They are always written in shades of gray. As a business owner, YOU need to make decisions regarding which directions to go in business. You need to be willing and able to take risks…that’s what being an Entrepreneur is all about.
An accountant will virtually never advise any kind of risk. They need to protect their CPA license at all costs, so any advice they ever give you will be extremely conservative.
Again, for specific tax and financial questions, yes. An accountant that you can talk to once in a while is a good idea.
When you’re trying to make decisions that will affect the course of your business, you can CONSULT with one on the NUMBERS, but don’t let your accountant’s conservative approach back you down from taking the occasional risk that IS Entrepreneurship.
Good Blog, Bad Blog…What’s the Difference?
Blogs are free, easy to get, and easy to use.
They’re also really easy to use badly, and most people do use them badly.
Why? Because most people don’t really understand what Blogging and Social Marketing are all about. You need to understand that before you can write effective blog posts that will help your business make money.
To help understand the concept, let’s look at “social marketing” in the physical world first. Let’s say, just for example, that you’re an insurance salesperson. You’ve been invited to a wedding reception. You know a few people there, but you’ve never met most of them, which is how wedding receptions usually are.
It’s a social situation with lots of people, though, and for any professional that’s an opportunity to pick up sales and new clients.
So, as an insurance salesperson always looking for new business, do you systematically corner every single person at that reception, shove a business card in their faces, and tell them they should buy some insurance from you?
Of course not! You’d find yourself thrown out on your ear before the cake was even cut!
Why? Because it’s the wrong approach to the situation. A wedding reception is a social gathering; it’s not a place to force your business on other people. It’s simply not socially acceptable, and it ticks people off. Here’s a tip that you should write down on a sticky-note and paste to the side of your computer screen:
Socializing online is the same as socializing in person.
If you can always remember that Social Marketing is the same as socializing with people in person, you’ll always do the right thing in Social Marketing. I teach this in my Personal EBiz Workshops all the time.
So how COULD you drum up some new clients for your insurance business at that wedding reception? The same way real salespeople have been doing it forever. You walk around, socialize, introduce yourself to people. While you’re talking to people, you casually ask what THEY do for a living.
Say you’re talking to someone, you ask him what business he’s in, and he says “I’m in construction”. You ask him for his business card, and then you could say, “Hey, I actually insure a lot of contractors. Tell you what; here’s my card. Let’s talk sometime”. Then you LEAVE IT at that.
You’ve just placed a fishing line in the Social waters. You have to wait to see if your proscpective client will bite.
The point is that the people at that wedding reception are not in “buying mode”. They’re NOT shopping. They’re not out looking to buy anything. They’re socializing. So, you have to approach them socially and plant the seed of an idea that you have something they want, but you can’t actively sell to them at that reception, because that’s not why they’re there.
The same is true in Social Marketing. When you’re using Social Marketing, you’re putting INFORMATION out there. When people are looking up information online, they are generally NOT SHOPPING. When they’re not shopping, they’re not receptive to outright sales pitches. So, you place your sales pitch in the form of giving them information that plants the idea that you have something they may want to buy.
Blogging is part of Social Marketing. So, let’s take a look at a GOOD blog post, and a BAD blog post.
BAD BLOG POST:
Making Fresh Bread for the Holidays
The Holidays are here, and you should think about making fresh bread for your Holiday parties and gatherings. The Breadmaster 8000 Breadmaker is the best breadmaker on the market, and we have them in stock this season. Our prices are low, we guarantee Holiday delivery, and we always do our very best to take are of our customers at JoesBreadmakerEmporium.com.
Click Here to Order today! Time is running out!
Okay, that’s not just a bad blog post…from a Social Marketing perspective, it’s horrifying. Someone who comes across a Blog post like that is most likely searching for info on HOW to make fresh bread (note the title of the post!). The title is misleading and makes them think you’re going to talk about how to make fresh bread. When they see that post and quickly realize it’s nothing more than a sales pitch for a breadmaking machine, they’ll leave your blog faster than a rabbit on a date, and they’ll leave unhappy. Bad Social Marketing.
GOOD BLOG POST:
Making Fresh Bread for the Holidays
Fresh bread baking in the oven has always been one of my fondest Holiday memories. My Mother used to make a cinnamon raisin bread that seemed to flavor every nook and cranny of the house!
When we’d all sit around the tree opening presents on Christmas morning, she would always have a plate of thick, warm, melt-in-your-mouth slices of her cinnamon raisin bread sitting on the dining room table, all ready to be lathered with butter and gobbled down. I’ll bet you can already taste how good this is going to be, so here’s the recipe!
This is a Holiday tradition that I’ve continued with my kids, and I’m sure they’ll continue with theirs, although I have found a way to make a huge improvement. (Shh! Don’t tell my Mom!) Instead of laboring over a mixing bowl and kneading dough in the kitchen ’til all hours, I use a Zojirushi Breadmaker. Takes all of the work out of it, and leaves all the delicious fun.
Have a great Holiday, and enjoy that cinnamon bread!
Can you see the difference? In the second blog post, I’m not selling, I’m socializing! I’m sharing fond memories of Holidays past, I’m passing along an old family recipe, I’m wishing the reader a great Holiday season, and oh yeah, BY THE WAY…I happen to mention that making bread is SO much easier with a Zojirushi Breadmaker! I’m linking those words to a page on my site that actually sells that breadmaker (well, not really, because I don’t have a site like that, but you get the idea).
Earlier in the post, I’m also providing a link that would lead to a recipe that would be on my site for that cinnamon raisin bread. A recipe that could be used in the breadmaking machine.
So there’s the difference between a good blog post, and a bad one. A good blog post is social, and the writer understands that the reader is looking for information, not shopping for something. So, the writer of a good blog post places ideas and suggestions in the mind of the reader, and leads the reader through links in the blog to the opportunity to buy something.
Every time you write a blog post in order to try to improve your site’s sales, imagine you’re in a social situation that has nothing to do with shopping, and just talk to your reader. Your blog will be much more effective, and your EBiz will appreciate it!
Why ‘Instant SEO’ Doesn’t Work
You probably see them almost every day. The constant emails harping at you to buy the latest and greatest SEO (Search Engine Optimization) product. They claim your web site will hit the top of the Google search pages in no time, and you’ll have so many visitors to your site that you won’t know what to do with all the money you’re making.
Guess what? Sometimes, it works. Yes, you read it right. Sometimes, when the programs come from well-known search engine optimizers, they WILL get you to the top of the search engines pretty quickly, and you will start to see some increased sales.
But, there’s a catch. (Sheesh, isn’t there always?)
The catch is this: These “instant SEO” programs only work for a very short time, and then your web site disappears again and leaves you wondering what happened.
Never fear, though…those same people will be after you soon for another couple of hundred bucks for another easy or instant program just like the first one. That one might work too. For a short time. Then you disappear again, and the jiffy-SEO guys are at you again for more money for yet another quick fix.
These guys know that’s going to happen, and they’re going to keep trying to get you to pay for quick fix after quick fix after quick fix. All the while, you spend all your time building all these quick fixes into your site and then removing them when they quit working. Your site bounces up and down in the search engines like an insane yo-yo until Google just gets fed up with you and drops you from their search index altogether.
Why do these quick fixes only work for a short time? Because they’re based on the quick-fix SEO guys finding loopholes in Google’s algorithm. (Google’s algorithm is a mathematical formula that acts like the Editor of a newspaper, deciding what gets printed and what doesn’t, and whether it’s on the first page or the last).
So these guys find loopholes in Google’s algorithm, and fool Google with them. Guess what? Google does NOT like to be fooled.
The guys at Google buy these quick-fix programs too, then they change their algorithm so that the loopholes close, and the quick fixes don’t work anymore.
Google changes their algorithm in response to these things and other issues more than FOUR HUNDRED TIME A YEAR.
But of course, the quick-fix SEO guys already have the next three loopholes figured out, so they just send you an email or call you and tell you to buy the next one. They make money, you work your fingers to the bone and get dizzy yo-yo-ing up and down in Google, and on it goes.
Don’t fall for this crap. Real SEO is a process. Google owns 85% of the search engine market for a good reason…they have a very good algorithm, capable of giving their users the info they’re looking for instantly. All Google really wants is honest info about your web site.
If you focus your site on a single subject (or product line), do your keyword research to find out how people are searching for what you do, and then simply work the process, you’ll find yourself ranking well the right way, and your site won’t disappear from Google every time some joker is getting ready to sell you another piece of junk.
Think of Google as a newspaper:
1. A newspaper sends out reporters to gather stories. Google sends out little programs called Spiders to do the same thing online.
2. The reporters turns their stories in to the newspaper Editor. The Spiders turn their stories (the content of your web site) in to Google’s algorithm.
3. The newspaper Editor decides whether the reporter’s story is current, compelling, relevant to what people want, contains all the pertinent facts, is understandably written, and is focused tightly on the subject at hand. Google’s algorithm determines whether the content of your web site is current, compelling, relevant to what people want, contains all the pertinent facts, is understandably written, and is focused tightly on the subject at hand.
Treat every page of your web site like it’s simply a different paragraph in the same story, and you’re well on your way to real Search Engine Optimization.
Yes, there’s a lot to learn about SEO in order to do it right, and what I’ve described above is only the beginning. However, the very first thing to learn is that quick fixes are a waste of time and money.