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SERPs Become Irrelevant
Google has been moving more and more toward individual search results. This means that website owners who watch their own search engine rank positions are not seeing what they think they are seeing.
Google tracks YOUR preferences. So if you Google your own website, then click on the link, you’ll rise in the search results – but ONLY on YOUR computer.
If you Google your search terms, and click on your competitor’s site, then you’ll drop in the rankings. But again, ONLY on your computer.
This means you CAN’T get an accurate ranking by searching. And it means that SERPs are becoming less relevant as a means of measuring your marketing and SEO efforts. Because the past browser history on that computer will skew the results, and make them almost meaningless.
We have clients that watch these results and obsess over them. If they drop a position, they’ll call in a panic and worry over what they did wrong. If they rise a point, they’ll clasp their hands in glee and celebrate for a week. And while I’m all for celebrating achievements, this is no longer anything worth celebrating – because it doesn’t MEAN anything anymore. It kind of never did – I mean, you can rank high and still not get traffic, get traffic and still not get sales, so it was measuring the wrong thing in the first place.
So we, as webmasters, now get to explain to our clients over and over, why rising and falling in the search results has no value in measuring anything. We get to tell them what we’ve always told them – SERPs are irrelevant, don’t watch search engine positions, watch TRAFFIC and SALES numbers. Because those are the only things that really matter anyway.
But there are people who just don’t get this. So we’ve come up with a solution for them…
We can tell them, “Just don’t ever click your competitor’s links in the search engine results, because that will push them up! Click your link instead!”
Of course, I’m joking – but with some clients, you just know that no matter how you explain it, they aren’t going to get it, so you really FEEL like telling them that, just to get them to take their obsession elsewhere.
The point? Measure sales. Search engine position is totally meaningless, and TRAFFIC is also a meaningless number without sales. Sales numbers are what tell you whether you’ve really got it right or not. And watch TRENDS, not just numbers. If your sales are rising, even slowly, then you’ve got something right, and you’ll eventually get where you want to be. If they’ve plateaued, or never even got started, then something needs to be tweaked. If they are declining, then something needs to be adjusted.
Measure what matters, and don’t obsess about things that are not essential to success.
Three Years of Blogging
I recently went through my blog to review and reprint some of my blog posts. I realized I’d been blogging for a little over three years. And I was a latecomer to the game.
I’ve learned some things as I’ve done it, and I’ve gone through phases with blogging. It has been a bit of an evolution, and it has changed some over time, due partly to factors particular to ME, and due to some factors inherent to online changes.
About five years ago, blogging spammers really started to saturate the blogging arena, changing what had been a fairly simple way to get attention, back into a harder one. This happens to every method for promotioning. It is the nature of the web. At that time, quickie marketers were still telling people two lies:
- “You just GOTTA blog”
- “It’s easy to get attention online from a blog.”
Neither one was ever true, then, or now (and they still get repeated regularly). Blogging is actually hard work – you have to do it consistently, and you have to produce stuff that people actually WANT to read – not everybody has the knack for that. And cheap sources for content just don’t do the trick, because all they produce is tired and overused stuff with no new information.
I came into the game fairly late – I didn’t blog for a long time, because I knew it didn’t fit my life or goals at the time. Eventually I decided to, because I had a purpose, and knew how I wanted to use it. So that is now my first rule for success with blogging – know what your purpose is with it, and what you hope to share and achieve with it.
At one time, I had four active blogs, but I found that posting to them took all my time, and worse, all my writing energy. I had nothing left for instructional writing, creating training materials, etc. It just sucked me dry! So I let three of them go – life had changed and they were less purposeful and necessary then anyway.
Social networking has also changed, making it easier to use a blog productively, by feeding it into other venues. Because of that, blogging is something I recommend for any business owner who can write. In fact, it has replaced article marketing for me, and I find it to be much more effective, and simpler to do and accomplish goals with. But I only recommend it once the groundwork is laid, and once a business owner feels the time is right to take it on.
I think I’ve matured some as a writer from blogging also. I can better distinguish between “good enough” and “print perfect”. When I produce long term resources, they have to be “print perfect”. But blogging can be “good enough”. It can be done in a hurry, off the top of my head, and reviewed once for anything embarrassing before publishing. I don’t agonize over posts. I can change them later if I need to. It has helped me learn to write very fast, and to get it more accurate the first time through.
Blogging is hardest when life is hardest. When I’m buried in things that are too private to share, and when my thought processes are taken up by stresses and difficulties that I don’t quite know how to overcome yet. Then I feel like I am just wrung out and have nothing left.
I find that with some effort, I can actually produce one blog post per day. But it does take effort. Over the last three years, I’ve produced just over 250 posts. That’s roughly one every four days. Of course, that included spates of daily, and many times when I posted weekly, and sometimes when I was sunk in the mire and skipped weeks! It was kind of fun to read back over them and remember some of the discoveries, and some of the events surrounding the posts.
Three years, and counting. Somehow, that seems significant, even though I think that what I write is largely insignificant.
Points of Life Converge on FaceBook
My life seems to have a range of “phases”, and segments. At this time, there is family, church, and business. The way people see me in each of those roles can be widely different.
Family and church has always overlapped and blended well. Family and business have always had a little overlap, but not as much. And the way my business associates view me is probably quite different than how my grown kids see me.
I got on FaceBook largely for professional reasons. I use it primarily as a business tool. So my first associates there were those that I had known online in other capacities.
Then some of my family found me… ok. So now we have extended family and my business associates being exposed to one another. Hmmm. Some interesting dynamics there, especially since most of my extended family really has NO idea of what I really do, or that I even have a professional reputation.
Then some of my church friends found me. Ok again. But it makes for an interesting mix – again, most of them really don’t understand what we do in business, or how we do business. The parts of my life that have normally been separate are beginning to intersect on FaceBook in a way I had not anticipated.
Then highschool friends started finding me. Hmmm. Even more interesting. Highschool was a LONG time ago. I was a very different person then in many ways (though those who don’t know me will think not much has changed). Some people from highschool are not necessarily people I WANT to find or associate with. Now people I’d lost contact with are thrown in with people whom I associate with for other reasons.
I think this is the only place in my life where all of those different facets of relationships come together like that. It isn’t something that would happen through the normal course of life. And I’m not sure whether it is a good thing, or just a disconcerting thing.
For sure, it means that you can’t maintain more than one persona. You have to be more consistent in the person you present to the world. Being duplicitous is likely to backfire. I have always tried to just be myself in networking, so that comes easy. But I can see that for some people, this convergence could present some awkward intersections of parts of their lives which they might want to keep separate.
I don’t know that I have a conclusion about this, more of just an observation that something unexpected happened. Most of my networking venues are geared toward business, but FaceBook covers the spectrum. That means that all areas of your life and relationships may eventually intersect there. And for some people, it might present some interesting outcomes!
Google AdWords – Just Do the Math
A client asked this morning whether Google AdWords would be a reasonable option for her. I told her what we tell every client who asks this.
Do the math…
- What is your average profit per sale?
- How many TOTAL UNIQUE (new) visitors to your site per month?
- How many ORDERS from your site per month?
Use that info to come up with the average PROFIT PER VISITOR.
If that number is below $1-2.00, then Google AdWords is almost certainly a losing proposition. This means, for stores that sell small items, one or two at a time, it is almost always a bad idea.
With GA, you pay for EVERY visitor it delivers. You can’t get clicks for less than $.05 each, and the good ones usually cost near a dollar each (the price on clicks has steadily risen in the last few years). Highly competitive industries have higher costs per click – often several dollars each.
You pay whether they buy or not. And we’ve noticed lower conversion rates between GA and organic traffic (some users say otherwise, but this has been our experience).
GA is also like a faucet. Turn it on (pay), and the traffic comes. Turn it off, and it stops. No residual effect at all, no help to SEO, no other benefit. Tweaking it to get it to be effective (to bring buyers instead of browsers) is also tricky and time consuming. We generally do not recommend that a site owner use it if they do not have a few hundred dollars that they can invest in the experimentation process (and even an expert at GA has to experiment to find the right combination with each new site).
You can use Pay Per Click ads through other venues also – FaceBook Ads are just one example. Each venue has particular rules to making it work successfully.
We have a few clients who use PPC successfully, but it is not profitable for most of our clients, because of the nature of their business and their product lines. If you do the math, that will pretty much tell you right off whether it is even worth considering or not. The right calculations can help you make an educated decision before you risk money you may not have to lose.
Your Compelling Conversation Isn’t
Nothing turns me off faster than inviting me to a “Compelling Conversation” or “Gripping Conversation”. The latest in a long line of “internet marketing” fads, this verbiage is currently making the rounds.
It is just a little too much like the bad internet marketing books I read years ago (when I was too dumb to know better), that spend the first three chapters telling me how great the rest of the book was, which were invariably followed by more chapters that absolutely failed to deliver on the promise.
Compelling and Gripping events happen spontaneously – a combination of individual response and great presentation. They happen DURING an event. They are described as such AFTER the event. To call it that BEFORE the event has even taken place is a misuse of the words, and smacks of an attempt to manipulate. Most intelligent people won’t be manipulated – which means that the people who respond may not be the intellectual upper crust. Not my idea of a great target market!
If it truly IS compelling, you don’t have to TELL me that it is. You make your title and your description compelling instead.
Telling someone how to feel, or describing emotions, is far less effective than inspiring them to FEEL the emotion. Don’t TELL me it is interesting… MAKE it interesting.
If you do, I might attend. If you call it Compelling, I won’t be there because I’ll be off doing things that really WERE compelling.
Twitter in the Middle
I hate Twitter. After years of hating it, I finally got an account. I still hate it.
So why do I use it? Because I can connect several things together using it and get extra exposure. But I don’t like using it as a primary communication means, I find it too clunky and awkward. It is also time sensitive – if you aren’t there when something goes past, you miss it. I can’t see staying glued to it all day just to see if something interesting goes past.
But… I do use it. I have Facebook and my blog connected to it. This means I can post in one of three places, and have it go to everything else, depending on what I want to accomplish.
Twitter reaches people that other methods don’t reach. It also interfaces with many other things. I’m able to use Twitter as more of an aggregator – a means of tying several things together. And I prefer to use it that way, rather than spending a lot of time with it.
The Twitter lingo typically leaves me feeling a bit nauseous, like I feel after having something too oily and sweet. So I don’t get into the whole environment of it. I doubt I ever will, it isn’t my style.
I much prefer the threaded style of FaceBook status and comments, as far as effective communication goes. Much easier to actually see and grasp an entire conversation.
I deplore time wasters. When I got the account, I determined that it had to be a tool, not a toy. I use all of my networking accounts that way – they are not playtoys. I don’t do the cutesy apps and games on FaceBook, and I don’t trawl Twitter all day. I use them as tools for my business. About half personal, half professional, because that is what seems to work best to promote a business and develop business relationships.
And I still despise it.
How Do I Get My Direct Sales Business to Work?
Ok… first of all, company websites almost NEVER do a good job of “selling” the product or the opportunity. If cannot tell within 5 seconds, from their site, what it even IS, then it isn’t going to work to persuade people to join or purchase. Generally, if all you are using to promote your direct sales business is the company website, you are losing every person who goes there without having a personal introduction from yourself. In fact, that is the only thing company websites are good for – to send someone to once they ALREADY want it. They aren’t good for anything else.
Search engines will never index your company site either – to them it is the company site, not yours, and yours is the same site. Many promotional sources won’t allow you to promote there either. Kinda hampers your ability to get the best free traffic.
So… My first advice is sound, even though I am a web designer.
Get a website of your own. You’ll have to research company policy on this, they’ll have requirements to meet, and they vary widely from company to company. If you work with a web designer, they need to know what those requirements are too, and they need to help you comply with them.
Use this website for the following purposes:
1. Introduce the BENEFITS, which should be two concise and meaningful statements, one about the product, one about the opportunity.
2. Talk about what YOU like about it, and why it makes sense to you.
3. Discuss comparisons of this program with other business programs.
4. Present relevant and current information which supports claims made by the company.
5. Introduce YOURSELF, and begin the relationship building process.
6. Your pages are all linked in with a “go get it” type button, which leads them to the company website, and tells them to use the signup button, or to view product listings (best if you take them right to where you want them to be, if you can). YOU do the pre-selling. Just let the company be there at the END of the process.
Once you have that, you can then feed ALL of your social networking traffic to that. Not only that, you can interlink a website WITH your social networking, operate a blog if you want (right in the website), and you WILL get additional marketing benefits from it IF you do it right.
You can build an entire marketing network if you have your own website, and the website sits as the hub of the wheel, with other things coming into it, and linking together.
Without it, your marketing efforts end up fragmented, and separate, and you chase yourself around trying to drive people here, or there, and not knowing where to send them, or how to initiate contact.
With it, you can focus on about FOUR basic marketing efforts, and they work together synergistically. Those four efforts are:
1. Regular Tweets, which are piped into your FaceBook Profile, or updates to your FaceBook Business Page, which are then piped to Twitter, and then to your FaceBook Profile. Social networking WORKS, when you do it professionally, and when you focus on relationships and not on advertising.
2. Regular Blog Posts, which are piped into Twitter, then into FaceBook, and which are posted automatically in the sidebar of your website. Blogging also works, when you focus on building relationships, giving value, and not on advertising.
3. Answering questions on Forums, or Linked In Answers, and just being a real person, helpful, etc. Your choice where you do this, do it where it works. It works when you are helpful and interesting, and kind.
4. Building Backlinks – good quality directory links, high quality swaps, and article marketing links. You choose which suits you best, we usually recommend doing these in a specific way to simplify it. Backlinks work when you learn what constitutes a quality backlink, and don’t try to take shortcuts that sabotage the effort.
You may optionally use a newsletter – a good website can have a newsletter manager built into the site, where you can send newsletters to any number of groups, and which allows a signup box on every page to politely invite people to sign up. You don’t need to bribe people or push them into signing up, when you do it right, an invitation works wonderfully. An opt-in list is NOT required for ANY successful business (in fact, more than 50% of successful business owners don’t even know what one is, and only about 2-3% of successful business owners actually USE one), but it is one that can work for people with the skills to operate one effectively.
It is not a FAST process. But it is very POWERFUL. Lay the foundation right, and your website becomes the center of where you do business, even though you don’t spend any more time there than anywhere else, the website becomes your virtual sales person.
There are rules and skills about making each of those things work – you have to do them right, but if you do, they gain power over time. If you do them wrong, you’ll beat against a wall and never make headway.
We’ve worked with hundreds of people in direct sales, MLM, network marketing, etc. This is the method that works to promote online with this kind of business. The ones who get this working are the ones who can eventually break out of the “I have to contact every prospect individually in order to make every sale”. If you want people to eventually come to YOU, you need to have some permanent, search engine indexable presences out there working for you.
If you can WRITE competently, you have a tremendous asset. If you use it creatively, and maybe differently than you have thought, you can bring people in to teach them, and they’ll learn to trust you. But you can’t always do it in the way you first think about doing it. If you can’t write well, then you will need to hire more services, and investigate methods of networking which depend upon it less.
It is actually HARDER in many ways to promote a direct sales business than it is to promote an independent business. But if you think of your business MORE as an independent business, and treat it more like one, you can be more successful. I don’t mean ignoring the company requirements, just that you need to WORK it like a business, and MARKET it like a business, and not expect that everything that the company hands you is all that you need. It never is.
Choose a reputable company, commit to it, and then invest in the necessary foundation for marketing. Do it right, and you’ll never regret it.
There Must Be a Pony
We’ve all heard the story. “With all this manure, there must be a pony in here somewhere!”
I think that a lot of people blog or write articles with the same mentality. Not particularly caring about quality, but believing that if they produce enough manure, that somehow it will materialize into a pony.
Good writers try to write good quality every time. They understand that you write four or five articles, or maybe a dozen or two, for every one that someone else proclaims as “good”. Good article marketers and bloggers also realize that the really popular articles can’t always be predicted. So you write the best that is in you, try to make it good quality every time, and know that if you do that, you greatly enhance the odds that one of them will pay you back.
There are many “SEO” companies, a good many that are located in countries where English is not the native language, that produce “marketing articles” in something akin to an article mill. What boggles my mind is that anyone will actually PAY for these articles, but they do. And the writers are a plague on every article directory out there, the reason why you have a harder time submitting GOOD stuff.
The average article produced by them ranges from downright awful, to technically accurate and correct, but entirely colorless. Either one is purely a waste of time, money, and effort – and in some instances, we’ve even seen such companies create legal liability issues for their clients, because they wrote things that the FTC would consider to be misleading or dangerous statements. These articles do no good at all, search engines don’t really bother to COUNT most articles that are not linked outside the article directory itself.
A large number of business owners also crank out article after article, little caring about the quality, on the belief that if they wrote it, it MUST be good. They never check to see if their articles are linked, or even indexed in the search engines.
Article marketing works when it does, because people LIKE what is written. So the primary goal of a good article marketer is to create stuff that people WANT to read. Stuff that they enjoy, and then want to SHARE. Because the real power is in the sharing, not in the posting to the article directory.
In fact, posting articles to an article directory is a COMPLETE waste of time if they do not get picked up and linked, or reprinted. Seriously.
Blogging has similar requirements. Blogging works when people READ the blog. There are a gazillion blogs out there filled with nothing of value. If yours is just another of those, then people will forget it so fast that you’d get more mileage out of getting arrested and making the news. There is no distinction in owning a bad blog. 95% of blog posts are not read by more than one person – the person who wrote it. If you want others to read what you write, they’ve gotta LIKE it enough to take time out of their busy day to see what you have to say today.
An amazing number of people will pay for writing services though, without ever checking to see if the writing is even good! They think that somehow if they fertilize the web with enough manure, that something good will grow of it? There’s already enough manure on the web, and people universally ignore it. If people ignore it, search engines do too.
Quality, and enjoyability are the factors that make an article worth writing.
The Parable of the Donkey
A traveler bought a donkey to haul his belongings. He had a long way to go, and could not carry all of his belongings himself. He chose a fine, strong donkey, from a breeder who was known for breeding sturdy pack animals.
The man loaded his belongings onto the donkey, and set out upon his journey. After a number of days, he reached a city. He entered the marketplace, and there he saw many merchants, selling all sorts of wares. One merchant caught his eye. He sold hats, for donkeys. The traveler thought the hat so interesting he just had to have it. He bought it and put it upon his donkey. It covered the donkey’s ears, and made it harder for the donkey to hear, but the man liked the hat so much, he hardly considered it. He did wonder why his donkey was less responsive to his commands, but blamed it on the animal.
He traveled on. In the next city, his attention was taken by a merchant selling leg decorations for donkeys. This he had to have! He quickly bought a set of four and fastened them onto the donkey. He thought they looked very fetching. His donkey adopted a funny walk to keep from bashing the leggings into each other, and the man found himself criticizing the donkey for being awkward.
In the next city on his route, he discovered a decorative pack saddle. It was far heavier than the plain one he had been using, and it did not accommodate the burden as easily. But he liked it so well, he strapped it to his donkey, and loaded his goods onto the pack saddle. The load was somewhat unbalanced, and some items had to be tied to the side with ropes, where they dangled and beat upon the donkey’s legs. At the end of the day, some goods were damaged, and the man was angry with the donkey.
A city later, he found a full body blanket for his donkey. It was meant for night use, but he liked it so well that he unloaded the donkey, put the blanket on, and reloaded the animal. During the hot day, the poor beast overheated, and had to rest more frequently than usual. The man cursed his donkey for being slow and lazy.
Traveling on, the man found a merchant selling shoes for his donkey. Not the typical iron shoes, but full covering, lace up shoes. He thought them so clever that he immediately put them on his donkey and happily paid a high price for them. The donkey could no longer feel the earth beneath it’s feet. It stumbled and plodded instead of stepping lightly. The man found he needed to hit his donkey to keep him moving fast enough.
The man was angry that his donkey was no longer the sturdy and sure animal he had bought. It frustrated him. He beat the animal to make it go faster, and to punish it when it stumbled, and hollered and cursed it when it did not obey his commands.
Finally, he could take it no longer. Arriving in a small desert town, he determined to sell his donkey for what he could get, and purchase a new one. In a hurry, and frustrated with his animal, he sold it and only removed his original traveling packs, leaving the animal to the new owner with all the trappings in place, and set off with his new donkey (a quick and responsive beast), with his eye out for new accessories to bestow on this new and “better” animal.
The new owner of his old donkey patiently removed the blanket, the pack saddle, the hat, the shoes and leggings, and rubbed down the tired animal. He fed it a good meal and rested it for several days. Then he placed a plain and simple pack saddle on it, loaded it with a sizeable burden, and marveled at the strength and sure-footedness of this donkey that had been described as a weak and clumsy thing. He set out on the road, soon passing the first traveler, who was making his way with his new donkey, slower and slower, as he again loaded it with unnecessary trappings.
It seems so clear when it is choices someone else is making regarding a donkey. But when it is our own website, and we think the next new gadget is “really cool”, we have a harder time making wise choices.
The rule is simple… If it does not help achieve the primary goal, don’t do it.
If you want your website to SELL, then don’t put things on that get in the way of that. Otherwise, your website will be less responsive, slower, and will stumble and fail to perform effectively.
If You Don’t Actually Know Me, I Don’t Want to Be Your Fan
The whole FaceBook Fan page thing has me really wearied. I get fan invites from everybody and their dog. Most of them don’t know me. Not really. If they have never bothered to make any kind of personal contact, why in the world do I want to be their fan?
Lately though, if you allow a Friend connection with anyone you do not personally know, the first thing you get from them is a fan invite.
I think that the whole fan page thing is sort of run wild. When fan pages were not so well known, you had a chance that people might want to subscribe. But now, since everyone has one, the competition and lameness factor has risen to such a fever pitch that it is now far more difficult to create an effective one that actually serves a purpose, or to get it noticed.
Now let me assure my clients that I don’t mind when they send me an invite. After all, I KNOW them, and I have a vested interest in their business. But I don’t subscribe to all of those either – some cover topics I am not highly interested in.
And I don’t mind when my real friends send an invite either. I KNOW them, and they KNOW me. There is a relationship there.
But I’m selective about which pages I subscribe to. There is only so much time in the day, only so much room for STUFF in my life. If I subscribe to a page, it has to MEAN something to me. If I don’t, it isn’t an insult. I don’t like lime green, I dislike jazz music, I’m death on get rich quick scams or anything that even comes close. Lots of other personal quirks… I choose based on my likes and dislikes.
Right up there with Fan pages, are Causes. I don’t do FaceBook Causes. They are pretty much a useless gesture. A bunch of people sitting around commenting on a problem, but nobody really doing anything other than joining. It doesn’t change a thing. If I want to change the world, I am going to get busy doing something effective, not just gathering a group of people to notice that there is a problem. And then I’m selective about what I take on also – there’s only so much of me to go around.
I don’t live my life on FaceBook. I don’t play games there, and I don’t expect life to revolve around it. I live out here, and drop in for newsbites once or twice a day, and drop a little info of my own. Beyond that, it isn’t even real.
Most fan and cause notices I receive are deleted without further investigation. If I do not recognize a name behind it, it doesn’t even show on my radar. I don’t think I’m unusual in that… at least in final outcome.
Maybe a lot of people DO subscribe without really paying attention to what they are doing. Those people aren’t valuable contacts. They subscribe with the same degree of attention they pay to your announcements.
The key to effective networking is relationships. You can’t build relationships unless you get to know people. A fan invite is an assumption of an existing relationship – smart people just don’t respond unless the relationship is already there. And if you KEEP sending them (I get them from some people several times a week, even though I consistently ignore them), you just annoy people. Annoying people you want to reach is NOT a good idea!
Spend less time broadcasting, and more time making meaningful contact. It will get you further.
I don’t have time to waste on CraigsList
I hear friends of mine recommend CraigsList to get business by advertising there. Frankly, I don’t have the time to waste. I’ve had several experiences with it, none of them good. The problems were enough that I find the entire venue to be a collosal waste of time.
First, I posted a business ad – nothing but spam came back from it.
Next, I posted several separate ads, for similar things, but distinctly different. In Canada, they were all allowed to remain active. In the US, all but one were flagged as duplicates, even though they were not. I got some spam from the ads, but nothing else.
I recently posted ads for three different laptops – Three different brands and model numbers, three sets of specs. One was allowed to stay, the other two were flagged as duplicates. An HP Pavilion laptop for $500 was flagged as being a duplicate of a Dell Inspiron for $300, and apparently so was the Dell Inspiron (different model number) for $200. No terms of use were violated in any way.
Oh, but before the items were flagged, I did have time to receive a total of six scam emails – CLEARLY scam emails, regarding the postings.
I don’t have time to wrestle with a careless company that can’t even determine when something is genuinely a duplicate post and when it is not. And I don’t have time for the spam.
One of my biggest gripes about it is that you can ONLY do local. Ummm…. Local for me is 300 people. My business is national. There is no way you can effectively use CraigsList if you have a national business. Let’s see… Pick one city in the US to advertise to. Just one. And you can’t advertise to another with anything remotely similar for another 30 days.
Who has time for that?
As a rule, I don’t usually post ads that expire in 30 days. I just don’t have time. Online ads are rarely effective anyway, and classifieds are some of the least effective.
And even if your ad DOES last for 30 days, nobody looks at it after the first three days. It takes time to write a good ad, time to get in there and post it, and then people see it for three days. Hardly worth the bother.
If you are in a small town, marketing nationally, or if you are selling something that people are not fighting over due to high popularity, CraigsList isn’t going to be an effective venue.
I never liked the idea of being thrown in with the prostitutes anyway.
UPDATE: I got half a dozen more responses from the remaining listing – all of them scams. Sloppy writing, incorrect English, and requests for a lot of information from me and promise of a cashier’s check if I ship it – not one mention of asking for more details, request for photo, or anything a real buyer would do. Classic for scams.
I am not an inexperienced seller – I have sold dozens of computer items on eBay and have an excellent feedback rating there. We bought and refurbished, then resold laptops for several years, so I know how to do so successfully. A complete lack of legitimate responses, and being flooded with scam responses is not typical for other venues where I have sold such items.
The Ethics of Education and Promotion
If you have an educational site, is it ethical to promote items on the site that you profit from, or is that a compromise of your informational integrity?
I have a business educational site. The purpose of the site is to promote scam awareness, educate people about what helps them really earn, and how to spot a good program or a bad one, the advantages of independent business endeavors, etc.
I have two clients that offer multi-level distributorship programs. There is no charge for either one. Both are ethical and have a good chance of returning a profit if someone works them.
I’ve toyed with the idea of joining both just for signups and sponsorships. One of them would require that I purchase items at least for my own use. They are items I am likely to use anyway. The other would not require purchases, and would allow me to function purely as a recruiter.
One consideration is TIME. Do I want to invest the time to really make them work. Since I have outlets that would allow me to plug in information to existing channels, I think it could work without undue effort.
The major consideration though, is ethics. Is it ethical for me to promote specific programs and profit for them on a site that purports to be unbiased?
The thing I’ve learned is that this is what people WANT. When they come to a “build a business” site, they want to be told, “Here are some honest choices.”
But I still wrestle with it. Still unsure of whether it lowers my credibility and makes me just another “work at home” site that exists to promote a program instead of to benefit the end user.
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