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Scambusters – Email SEO Solicitations
We can help you get more traffic! Your website is not ranking as high as it should for your top keywords. Free Marketing Assessment for your website. Marketing suggestion for insertnamehere.com.
If you are in business online, you’ve seen emails like this. Some of them may cause you to think they actually LOOKED at your site, and actually WANT to help you.
They don’t.
WITHOUT EXCEPTION, every single email you receive offering Search Engine Optimization or Marketing services is a SCAM. They aren’t all the same KIND of scam, but they are all scams. And no, there isn’t EVER an exception to this.
If you reply, one of several things may happen:
1. They just want your website access, so they can set up a phishing site inside it without you knowing. This is the kind of scam that doesn’t even pretend legitimacy.
2. They may just run an automated SEO Analysis on your site, and give you the results. Problem here is that computers CANNOT THINK, so ANY kind of automated SEO Analysis is completely bogus. That’s right. Meaningless. All that oh-so-scientific “keyword density”, and “frequency of h1 tags” garbage is just that… garbage. REAL SEO requires a thinking brain behind it, and only a real person can do it.
3. They may actually perform a service. Badly. NONE of them do a good job. NONE OF THEM. They typically do one of about four things:
They may do quick and dirty black hat SEO. Black hat refers to the stuff that every search engine forbids. And which will penalize your site eventually, if not immediately. They may completely trash your text, and replace all your good descriptions with stupid keyword strings. It always fails, for search engines and people – so you lose search engine traffic, and your site looks trashy to those who visit.
They may set up a scraping blog to pick up and redirect traffic for your top keywords. This is, again, completely ineffective, and will get you penalized. This kind of blog is ignored by search engines and people, both. You lose, and you pay for the privilege.
They may engage in “article marketing” for you. This one is VERY dangerous, and again, completely ineffective. Scammers like this are the reason our company no longer recommends article marketing as a viable marketing method – the article databases are so polluted with badly written unoriginal and downright shady articles, that even good articles don’t work for marketing anymore. Only one or two article sites even rank with the search engines, all the rest are ignored, and these companies who offer the service will tell you they are submitting to 50, 500, or even 1000 article databases. It is all meaningless, since none of them will get you any traffic anyway. It can be dangerous because they do not check facts when writing articles for your company – in the worst example of this, a medical company paid for this, and the writers wrote articles that opened them up for medical liability lawsuites, using statements like “this surgery has no risk”, and “results are guaranteed”.
They may spam blogs, forums, and social networking sites for you. Typically, they promise a certain number of submissions. They will then load everything into their automated system, press “go”, and walk away. Your spam (yes, it is YOUR spam) will be submitted to all those websites that have any kind of ability to do so – whether or not the topic is related. A few do look for related topics, but they do so strictly by keyword matching through a computerized system, so it is highly inaccurate, and often ludicrous. One or two actually hand-submit – but they aren’t any better at it than the computers, and the results are no better. At any rate, any site owner who owns a site which it WOULD be worthwhile to have your link on, will promptly remove your link, and report YOU for link spamming. Any sites it actually stays on are sites that are ignored by search engines anyway, and which people never visit either.
What they SAY they will do, and what they do, are completely mismatched. ANY company that emails YOU to solicit business, is breaking the law. Any company that emails you, offering to get your website in the top ranks, is fraudulent, and does NOT know their business. After all, if they could get a website to the top, why do they need to send you email spam to get business? They’d be getting all the business they wanted directly from the search engines themselves!
Just remember the rule – NO email offering SEO services (or anything else) is EVER legit. EVER. No matter how enticing it sounds, dump it where it belongs – in the virtual latrine.
Good SEO companies offer services you can monitor, and take the time to get to know your business, your goals, and what makes your company unique, before they dive into any work for you – including any kind of assessment. They’ll consider what your customers want to see, and then optimize THAT to attract search engine traffic. They’ll recommend or carry out marketing methods which work for YOU, and which reach your specific target market in meaningful ways. They won’t automate ANYTHING that requires a personal touch.
And they won’t ever solicit your business via an email that you did not ask for.
Government Doesn’t Protect Our Food
This is actually a rather involved topic, so I’m gonna have to see if I can be concise, and coherent enough to get a few points across, without covering the entire spectrum… Hmmm…
First off, we have a myth in society that if the government did not protect our food, that we’d all be slain in a matter of days by foodborne illness, harmful chemicals, or deadly plants or substances masquerading as food.
This is purely a myth. In fact, the truth is precisely the opposite.
The government SUPPORTS, and actually MANDATES that our food be polluted with harmful chemicals, it PAYS growers to ENSURE that your food is contaminated with superbugs, and it approves for human consumption, chemicals and substances which are provably deadly. Yes, all of these statements are substantiated, and completely unexaggerated.
The myth that food is a dangerous thing without government involvement is a lie which has been perpetuated BY the government.
Here’s an example: On every box of eggs, there is a notice that you need to keep eggs refrigerated. And government legislation requires that eggs be refrigerated from the time they are gathered, until the time of sale.
While this is a great boon to refrigeration suppliers, it is completely unnecessary. Eggs have a natural protective coating. If the eggs remain UNWASHED, they will keep for two months or more at room temperature. After they are boiled in the shell, they’ll keep for about 4 days. The eggshell is a marvelous natural protective container, which is much better than any manmade device at keeping eggs fresh.
Now, it IS true that eggs, once broken, or cooked out of the shell, will pick up contamination, as will any other food. They DO require refrigeration at that point.
But up until the mid-1900s, fresh eggs were kept on the counter, boiled eggs were carried in pockets as travel food, and the human race not only survived, it thrived.
About the same time our government started requiring refrigeration for eggs, it also started requiring producers to WASH all eggs intended for sale in the US. It is actually illegal to do so in some other countries, because of how important that protective layer is on the outside of the eggshell, in reducing food contamination. But because our government seeks to encourage factory farming and mass production, it determined that in order to keep the playing field level for larger companies (which cannot survive without government intervention), they would intentionally ALLOW a contamination issue to survive – then not only to ALLOW it, but to REQUIRE it.
YOU think that eggs require immediate and continuous refrigeration because our government has told you so. But they lied. They created a problem, then insist that you take action to keep that problem under control – only you can’t. You will still have more contamination issues from your refrigerated eggs than you would have from unrefrigerated eggs that had been unwashed.
Another myth is drinking water. A whole nation of people now think that if the government did not mandate safe drinking water, and require chlorination, that we’d all die of cholera. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Polluted drinking water is caused by careless handling of wastes, and by overcrowding in population centers, NOT by failure to chlorinate. And drinking water in the Middle Ages (when it was completely unregulated) was actually SAFER than it is today. People lived more spread out, without the huge densely populated cities of today. They drank from wells, rivers, springs, streams, and ponds, and nature is a wonderful cleaner of water. The bacteria they did ingest was typically of low concentration, and merely served to strengthen their immune systems. In fact, today, chlorination itself causes far more harm than contamination by pathogens ever did.
Chlorine is a poison, and when consumed daily in glass after glass of water, it slowly kills you. It is a prime causative factor in all forms of Irritable Bowel Disease, and causes auto-immune disease over time as wells. Long term consumption of small amounts of chlorine contributes to heart disease, diabetes, persistent obesity, chronic fatigue, cancer, asthma, and many other conditions which are on the rise.
Our government not only disseminates false information about our risks, it mandates and supports harmful actions in many other ways, besides just chlorine in your water.
Commercial baked goods are REQUIRED to be treated with preservatives. Preservatives are just like chlorine – poisons, which slowly destroy the human body, one cell at a time. They contribute to the same long term disease processes. The irony here is that the preservatives do NOT reduce foodborne illness. They merely extend the shelf-life so bread can be shipped across the US and stay on store shelves longer before it develops HARMLESS mold, that looks unsightly, does not taste good, but which poses no health risk.
Factory farming is supported by the government, while safer small farming is actively persecuted. Government subsidies are only available to large farms, not small ones (which they were originally designed to help). Large scale factory farms COULD NOT financially sustain themselves without government subsidies and without regulation enforcement entities being willing to ignore compliance requirements for larger farms (many regulations are in fact written to EXEMPT larger farms from food safety laws – the very farms that cause the problems are the ones exempt from them). They can ONLY exist because of dishonesty and funneling of taxpayer dollars into the corporate farm coffers. And yet, virtually ALL serious food contamination issues stem directly from factory farms.
The conditions which cause the development of superbugs, or which cause mass-contaminations in serious enough concentrations to actually make people sick, only occur in large scale operations, with the attendant supply chains.
Hence, our government is CAUSING the very safety problems they are claiming a NEED to prevent. Their increasing regulations in the name of “food safety” have served consistently to protect large farmers, chemical corporations, and to persecute and harm both small farmers, and consumers. Every time. It has invariably done the opposite of what was promised when the legislation was proposed. And it was designed to. If there were no more serious issue of foodborne illness, there would be no more capacity to use this issue for political gain, and that is all it has been used for.
Foodborne illness was simply NOT a serious problem prior to the 20th century. It became an issue precisely when the government became involved in promoting mechanized farming.
Mechanized farm equipment is expensive. In order to make a mechanized farm profitable, the farm must be many times larger than a man and animal powered farm. Thus, mechnization of a farm creates a large scale factory farm, where things get seriously out of balance.
Don’t believe me? Most people scoff at the idea that horse farming can be profitable, yet we have living proof that it is more profitable than factory farming, AND without government subsidies. The Amish are probably the most visible example – they have horse farmed for centuries, and still do. The average Amish farm is 80 acres. This is the maximum amount that a family can manage successfully. Most Amish farmers make a good living from their acreage. No, they do not have Television, or cars, or other expenses which we consider “necessary”, but they do have financial security, nice homes, are well fed, and their communities thrive.
Many other small farmers have returned to horse farming, and are profiting more from their farms now than they did with a tractor.
It is not only POSSIBLE to profit more from a small farm, it is MORE LIKELY that a small farmer will profit without intensive mechanization.
In contrast, the average factory farm is thousands of acres of land, and the debt load is crushing. They typically have literally a million or more dollars worth of un-paid for equipment being used on the farm – and it may not be paid off before it reaches the end of its useful life. Profits per acre are very low as well, because mechanized farms produce less per acre than horse farms, and sell wholesale through costly distribution chains.
To scale it down further, a farm that is managed by hand – without either horses or tractors – is statistically even more productive per acre, with even higher profits per acre than horse farming (up to 20 times more productive than a factory farm, and up to 10 times more productive than a horse farm). Generally, only 2-5 acres can be managed this way, but it is enough land to provide a comfortable single income within a family.
These smaller farms do not market through supply chains (the supply chain – from farm to store shelf – is responsible for 90% of the store shelf price), they market direct to the customer, and therefore can earn a higher amount for their labor than larger farms are able to do. If you can sell your eggs for $3 a dozen on the farm, you can earn far more by your labor than a factory farmer who has to sell his eggs for $.30 per dozen to a packing house.
Small farms also typically run livestock and crops side by side, providing a synergistic environment that more closely mimicks nature, and which reduces the costs of outside purchases for both fertilizer and feed. This more natural way of farming is advantageous to the farmer, the crops and livestock, to the land, and to the community, and it has a powerful effect on reduction of harmful pathogens due to the increase in helpful microbes in the more natural environment.
Small farms do not develop superbugs – they typically use far less antibiotics, and their stock runs in lower concentrations, which reduces incidents of widespread contamination. Since superbugs and high concentrations of contaminants do not develop, cross contamination to vegetables and fruits is not a problem.
All of this means that with small farms (the kind the government wants to put out of business), not only are the initial risks lower, but the customer and producer are close together, and very little time passes between production and consumption. That alone is responsible for a 1000 fold reduction in foodborne pathogens. Bugs simply do not have time to develop. With industrial ag, crops and food often spend many weeks in the distribution chain, or on store shelves, often exposed to moisture, in conditions which allows a small contamination to become a massive one.
Many of the regulations which our government declares to be necessary are NOT supported by governments in other countries (putting the lie to their claim that “science” is the basis for the regulations). In fact, in France, for example, washing eggs is forbidden. They recognize that more harm than good comes from washing eggs, yet our government requires this dangerous procedure.
There are many other examples – pasteurization of milk, which kills all beneficial bacteria which would normally help in keeping harmful bacteria in check, while all sales of raw milk are becoming criminalized because the government has declared raw milk to be “dangerous” (more foodborne illness occurs yearly from contamination of pasteurized milk than does from raw milk, because once pasteurized milk becomes contaminated (and it always does, just a matter of time), there is nothing to slow down the growth of the harmful pathogens – which is why raw milk left on the counter gives you good tasting and healthy buttermilk, but pasteurized milk left on the counter gives you nasty vile stuff that will make you sick if it stays out for too long). Organic farming requirements which make true organic farming disqualified for the label are the brainchild of our government under the guise of “protecting” us. Another law involves requirements for “grading” eggs, which merely measure size, yolk age, and shell quality and which have NOTHING to do with food safety, yet which our government routinely labels as a safety issue – all it does is increase the price of your eggs, hinder farmers, and keep the egg graders employed in a useless trade. And many more illogical, stupid, and harmful regulations.
Government regulations and enforcement do not keep our food safe. In fact, they CAUSE foodborne illness and food related disease, and then use the resulting chaos as an excuse to burden the industry with more regulation, which invariably lets the offenders ride, while punishing the farms which were not the cause of the issue in the first place.
And lest we mistake this for capitalism run amok, it is not. This is NOT capitalism. If it were, the government would not be involved at all. True capitalism lets the buyer learn for themselves, instead of expecting the government to protect them. This is socialism creeping in – preferring one industry over another, handing out money taken from one source to benefit another. Redistribution of money to benefit favored classes of industry. That is not capitalism.
Hence, government regulation of our food is making the situation WORSE, not better.
We would be much better off with no regulation of the food industry at all, because what we do have is either ineffective, or counterproductive.
Skills, Artistry, and Competition
I share almost everything I know concerning successful website and business operations. I even share that knowledge with my competition when they ask. I sometimes volunteer to share trade secrets with my competition. I often publish articles or instructional pages with specialized instruction which most people in our situation would not share without charging for it.
We not only sell website services, we also sell webmaster training instruction. So why in the world would I GIVE away what I’m selling? Wouldn’t that undermine my profits and train my competition for free?
That has to be one of the biggest myths of paranoia in the business world. It is perpetuated by people of limited imagination, who think that the only way to do business is the same way everyone else is doing business. When you are competing with a gazillion other businesses and have not truly differentiated your business with a good dose of the best elements in your personality, and when you have failed to truly connect with your customers or clients, then yeah, it is a bad idea to be too free with your competition.
But when you are not just one of the numbers, but something unique, and when your business is as much YOU as it is standards of excellence, and ESPECIALLY when you’ve diverged from the other lemmings in your particular professional arena to develop NEW and BETTER standards, or more effective policies and procedures that give you an edge and make your clients feel the difference, then you can share your expertise freely, and you’ll have little to fear from your competition.
Why is that?
Skills are just skills. If you learned them, then anyone else can. There is no issue of competition there. If you don’t kindly help someone when they ask, and they are trying to learn the same skills you already learned, then they’ll just go learn them somewhere else anyway. So there is no real profit or benefit in NOT sharing them.
There IS a benefit in sharing them. You establish yourself as THE go-to expert. Many of those you help will soon be approaching you with subcontracting proposals, or referring clients or customers to you when they cannot meet their needs themselves. Plus you get a reputation as a REALLY NICE, and HIGHLY QUALIFIED person. Yes, your competition will in fact help you gain that reputation, and to uphold it. They will quote YOU instead of other experts in the industry.
So no need to be paranoid about sharing skills. Be nice, and helpful, and it will help you more than it harms you.
Beyond skills, a wildly successful business also requires something totally unique and beyond the norm. For us, it was development of a totally new and separate standard for small businesses, as differentiated from corporate businesses, because the website needs were totally different, but this was almost never acknowledged by web professionals as a group, and when they did, they merely scaled down the same old corporate standards, which in fact, did NOT scale down effectively. This is the thing that makes you a BETTER option than your competition.
So, with the first thing, that unique thing that you developed and created, those individual methods for operations that separate your success potentials from your competition. The stuff of which trade secrets are made. The same question arises as for skills. Won’t sharing them hurt you and get you more competition?
Not really. In fact, the same thing is true. YOU are the one who developed it. That makes you the undisputed expert. You’ll get MORE people who will cooperate with you, make referrals, and improve your reputation than you will those people who would cause harm to your business by what you share.
Everyone thinks that sharing that kind of information will backfire and someone will steal their concept and set themselves up in direct competition, claim the fame for it, and sink the originator of the idea.
That is actually EXTREMELY rare. Pretty much the ONLY time it happens is when someone has a good IDEA, but no ability to actually do anything with it! If you are already successful based on some unique changes you’ve made to your business, then you are not in that category.
In our years in business, there have been people who tried to immitate us, or even to steal our systems and pass them off as their own. So why am I still recommending sharing openly?
Because the people who are the type to try to steal something rather than build their own, invariably lack the self-discipline and determination to actually turn what they stole into anything effective. They think they can steal it, slap up a quickie website (they’ll NEVER take the time to build a good one), and that the money will pour in without any effort on their part. They are completely blind to the fact that even if you have a great product or service, it takes a LOT of work, patience, repetition of boring tasks, and time, to actually earn anything from it. They make a hasty slapdash effort, and never even climb out of complete obscurity. No one else EVER knows that they have what they stole, because the very characteristics that caused them to steal it will ensure that they never make a profit from it.
You might also feel that putting it out there in print will just mean that other people can read all about it and never have to pay you for it, especially if you are selling training on the topic. Again, there is no need to fear that it will decrease your profits, quite the contrary.
A body of toothsome information validates your expertise. It helps people realize that you know things they don’t, and that they CAN’T find elsewhere. If you hide all the really juicy bits, then they have no reason to feel that you know anything that every other of your competitors does not know.
When you write about just a bit more – and actually start sharing those secrets, then people really understand the depth of your expertise and how different you are from all the rest. Oh, a few will read that, and feel it is all they need. But the hungry ones – the ones you REALLY want as students, they’ll want it straight from the teacher. They’ll realize that they can learn it much better from an organized training program than they can from digging through a website to get it bit by bit, or having to assemble it and sift the quality from multiple websites. It will increase your client base, not decrease it. And it will increase your reputation, not undermine it.
So, again, you really have nothing to lose, and a great deal to gain, by freely sharing information, including your own specialized knowledge, even in referenceable ways.
The last element that makes your business successful is your personality, or your artistry. This is the part that no one else CAN immitate. It is all you, and comes from something within you that you cannot teach to anyone else, nor can they successfully copy it. They’ll inject their own personality into it, and even if they INTEND to become “you”, they’ll persist in being themselves, and they’ll appeal to a completely different clientele than you do. So no need to fear that – you are each an artist, with your own style, and customers like what they like, and having more or less competition isn’t going to make some personality types want to work with YOU any more or less. It is beneficial to have good associates to refer problem clients to – a client who just cannot work well with your style may do well with the style of one of your competitors, and by referring out, you get out of potentially difficult situations and still come out looking good.
Now, I’m not recommending that you give away your product, or that you give away, for example, your website content or other intellectual or material assets. THOSE, they have to get on their own. I would not give away my templates, systems, site structures, custom software, or other items that I typically charge for. I don’t print my curriculum online. But I share most of the secrets in it, here a little, there a little. That sharing goes on working for me night and day, convincing people to invest in our expertise.
There is no need to be paranoid of your competition. Make friends of them instead, cooperate with them, and build a professional network that benefits all of you. There is far more to gain by being open and helpful than there is to lose.
This is true of your customers as well – be willing to educate them into being informed customers so they know how to make good choices. If they are do it yourselfers, be helpful, and answer short questions (there comes a point where you can’t answer time consuming ones, but up to that point, be helpful and generous). You don’t have to give away any hands-on work – but answer emails kindly and generously. It pretty much always comes back to your benefit.
I’ve answered questions for total strangers countless times. Some I never hear from again. Others come to me later for services when their circumstances change – sometimes they come to me many years later. They remember me because I helped them when no one else would. Often, it comes back to me by way of a referral. Someone calls, again, often many years later, and says that they were referred by someone I helped, who could not say enough good about me. They validate my expertise, my integrity, and assure the prospect that I won’t charge them unreasonably.
You can’t buy that kind of advertising.
Once you rid yourself of the resentment of your competition, and open up to cooperation, you start an amazing synergy that helps all of you be just a bit better than you could be on your own.
And there isn’t ANY reason to be paranoid about THAT!
Our company is now offering Cottage Industry Consulting, to help businesses identify and encourage artistry in their own business.
Content Marketing
About three or four years ago, online networking changed. We used to be involved in several forums and lists, where we were able to contribute to lengthy conversations, give advice, help people with website problems, and generally make ourselves look like the knowledgeable experts we are. That interaction and relationship development yielded a steady stream of clients, already pre-sold on our services. They knew we were good, and we were the people they wanted to hire, before we even knew they wanted to hire us.
Then FaceBook and Twitter took over. The popularity of instant and short interaction superceded the appeal of lengthy conversations. Now, networking is almost impossible online, because everybody wants interaction condensed into 144 character blurbs. The emphasis of social has trumped business interactions, and the ability to network through these venues for purposes of gaining pre-sold clients is weak in comparison to the old forum formats. It is fickle, capricious, impatient, and since it has the attention span of an immature gnat, using it with any degree of effectiveness (and it may not be a lot), is completely EXHAUSTING, because you have to keep finding “new” and “fresh” ways to get in front of people and get them to notice you among the SEA of other people screaming for their 2 seconds of attention. Oh, there are people who will hotly disagree with that assessment, but they are pretty much ALL people who are selling something related to marketing with FaceBook or Twitter.
Truthfully, this change threw us for a loop. We didn’t realize it right away though, because we still had lots of momentum going from the previous venues, even though they had dried up. We were also doing a lot of local networking through teaching classes, giving presentations, and attending luncheons and after-hours events.
It became baldly apparent after we moved and those local opportunities were gone, that we had to reassess, and figure out what was still working.
About that time, I decided to consolidate some of my domains. I mean, 86 active websites is a bit much to manage when your life is getting busier for other reasons. So I started letting some of them go. That had more of an impact on our business than any other single change we had ever made. Customers and clients simply dried up.
The reason is Content Marketing. I had many websites that were instructional sites on various topics related to our business. I blogged, and I wrote extensively. All of those sites were interlinked with our main websites, and all of them brought us several clients per year.
Now, you must understand, I am NOT talking about quickly content scraping sites, nor am I talking about sites where you post the same overused articles everyone else is posting, or where you rewrite badly written PLR articles (ok, so they are ALWAYS accurate, ALWAYS grammatically correct, but COMPLETELY unoriginal, and lacking in inspiration or creativity). I am also NOT talking about “Article Marketing”, where you paste your articles into article sites that the search engines now completely ignore.
No, what I am talking about is 100% hand-written, unique, creative, personable, helpful, and informative information, which you put into sites that YOU own.
You, saying what no one else is saying. Writing about answers to the questions your customers keep asking. Writing about your expertise, about things your customers need to know that they might not think to ask. Having fun with it, being yourself.
That kind of writing is like candy to the search engines. They LIKE original stuff. And it is great for capturing less common search terms, which make up the BULK of organic traffic searches. That random, unpredictable, completely spontaneous happenstance that occurs from people just being people, rather than people trying to game the computers into abnormal results. You just create good stuff, and then sit on the sidelines and scrape up the leftovers – which, in the world of the web, are an AWFUL LOT of good quality customers and clients.
This kind of marketing provides a wide range of benefits:
1. About 1% of the search terms used in any given industry are responsible for about 10% of the traffic. And EVERYBODY is going after that SAME 10%! There are a gazillion other terms, which you don’t even have to PLAN for, but which occur naturally in well-written content, which are responsible for the other 90%. They are like seagulls, all fighting over a whale carcass, so thick that most of them can’t even get a nibble, when the whole beach is strewn with fish, which are being ignored as everyone fights over the whale. Forget the whale. Clean up on the fish and it is easy pickin’s in comparison!
2. The clients and customers you get are the ones you WANT. They are ones that looked at the most popular options and DID NOT WANT THAT. So if you are offering something really special, you don’t want people who don’t care about how special it is. They won’t be happy customers. You want the ones who KNOW they want something better, and content writing appeals to them. They’ll dig a little deeper, find you, and be glad they did.
3. The customer is pre-sold. They KNOW you know your business. So you spend less time persuading them of your value, and you are able to get right to closing the deal.
4. You don’t even have to come UP in the first ten pages of the search engines for your main website, and you don’t have to pay for costly ongoing SEO (a single SEO review and optimization, with a short training session is sufficient). If you have other sites referring traffic to it, or other sites helping with the sales process, your main website can have relatively low traffic, and low search engine placement, and you can still clean up. We once had an “SEO expert” criticize our site, and ask us how we got any customers. I told him how I did it, and he flatly told me that there was no way I could make money unless I was showing up on the top positions for the top keywords on my site. He was wrong. Well written content is naturally optimized for the less common search terms, and when you get enough content, it sits there working for you regardless of your position for top keywords.
5. The longer you do it, the more power it has. Search engines like new and fresh content, but they also like old and stable content, as long as it is unique and good quality. So when you write good stuff, and keep adding to it, the power of your writing just grows and grows. Each article is a drop in the bucket, and adds to the existing power. It does this even if each article gets relatively little traffic.
6. When you have content writing as a cornerstone of your marketing, you can feed it automatically into Twitter or FaceBook, via RSS, and increase the exposure. Write once, and automatically cover multiple areas of contact.
Without that, you end up having to find ways to be clever and witty and to market in little sound bytes, instead of being able to be a complete person.
7. A single exposure is sufficient to convert a customer. With most types of marketing, it takes seven or more exposures to a marketing message or individual before someone decides to act. With content marketing, this dynamic changes. Because the exposure is more detailed and more comfortable (they do it on their terms), and because they looked for an answer and YOU provided the one that helped them “get” it. A single article that helps someone understand, or teaches them something they value, or makes them laugh, or which echoes their own feelings on a subject, can do more to persuade in a single encounter than multiple exposures to other types of advertising.
Many things about the nature of the web have changed in the last several years. The nature and expectations of the average web user have changed. But Content Marketing has not changed. Write good stuff. Post it to your own website or blog. Set up more than one, organized by interest, and interlink them. In about a year, it will start to pay off, and it only gets better from there.
Content is still King, and a nice informative or humorous article with an ah-ha moment still has more power to bring in paying customers than any other method of marketing that is not face-to-face.
Gardening doesn't have to be that hard! No matter where you live, no matter how difficult your circumstances, you CAN grow a successful garden.
Life from the Garden: Grow Your Own Food Anywhere Practical and low cost options for container gardening, sprouting, small yards, edible landscaping, winter gardening, shady yards, and help for people who are getting started too late. Plenty of tips to simplify, save on work and expense.
