SEO can be a pretty expensive thing to do if you have a new site you want to promote and so many people take the easy option of doing nothing. However, doing nothing usually end up with nothing happening.

The next best thing is to do it yourself and we’ve been around long enough to see the problems with that. If you don’t investigate SEO properly, you’ve got a real chance of ending up doing things that could do more harm than good. You’ll end up stuffing your page with keywords, filling up your meta tags and doing lots of totally useless actions that get you absolutely nowhere.

What you really need is a bit of training from a company that knows what it’s on about. That’s where we come in!

Our new SEO Training Course is designed for the total beginner to get them up and running quickly. What’s more, if you approach Business Links they will help you to pay for the whole lot. You can get three days of quality training for less than the price of one day. Gotta be a bargain, yes?

Give us a call and we’ll be able to help you to get the funding and get trained. Unless you’re not bothered about your search ranking in which case even fifty quid is wasted…(!)

It surprises me the number of people who seem to think that the Internet is the way to millions in this crazy world. So many approach me and say “I’ll just throw up a website then sell it for millions” without actually wondering if their idea is worth a bean in the first place. Let alone working out whether they will actually be able to sell anything.

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Headsup – things are changing in the online world. Thousands upon thousands of new websites are created every day and a lot of these are by companies new to the online world. And unfortunately they site there at the bottom of the search results, never to be seen.

But over the next few years we are likely to see a boom in a new type of service – the search engine optimiser. This new type of service will actually help some companies make thousands of pounds online – fancy having a go?

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Driving around Wolverhampton the other day I was struck by something made me go back and take a picture. No, there wasn’t a naked woman prancing around by Waitrose, there was an online company, nay, an online giant advertising on boards.

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My little girl gets a little stressed at the length of her hair, it doesn’t grow as quickly as her friend’s hair and she’s desperate to put pigtails in.

So you can imagine her intrigue when, as my wife was trimming the edges, she was told that ‘your hair will grow quicker if you trim it’…

I could see her mind working overtime.

Then on Saturday night as we were just relaxing in front of the telly, she sheepishly came to join us with one of her hats on. We found out quick that the hat was a cover for the atrocity of a  haircut she’d just attempted upstairs hair by herself.

While I thought it was quite amusing, my wife was already on the phone to the hairdressers for an emergency haircut. Which of course cost a lot more than a normal trim would.

So what’s the lesson? Well, apart from keeping scissors well out of reach of children.

Make sure you have the WHOLE picture!!

My girl believes everything my wife tells her. And she should. However, she’d only got part of the picture regarding her hair growing.

The same problem exists in business, especially when people talk about their online marketing. We hear…

“My brother is building our website…”

“My website should have the product name at least 7 times on the page…”

“SEO is easy…”

“All I need to is put the right details on each page and we shall be top of Google…”

People are destroying their chances of getting more business by limiting themselves to what they know or they’ve skim read.

And… (getting to my point) that’s why we hold our Online Marketing seminars each month. The next one is on the morning of the 19th January in Birmingham. Can you make it?

>> BOOK NOW, (WHILE PLACES LAST) <<.

Hopefully see you there.

Here’s a thing. Every year I say “I don’t do them resolutions” because I know full well I’m never going to keep to them. I know that if I say “no more McDonald’s for me” I’ll be tucking into a Big Mac before the week’s done.

In fact, when returning from Gatwick last night, I was sat thinking to myself that very “no more fast food” rule and then realised I was starving and before you know it I’m tucking into a double cheeseburger and finishing off my son’s chicken nuggets and fries.

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Or maybe just ‘SEO Explained’?

I love a competition when I think I’ve got a chance of proving a point or winning something, so when a forum discussion kicked off about the best way to optimise web pages, I had to wade in.

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Now this doesn’t happen to me, but i’ve noticed that good looking men and women cause quite a reaction when they walk into a room. Like it or not and basic as it seems, attractive people ‘attract’.

On a slightly (only slightly) deeper level people are attracted to people like them. Could be similar tastes, characteristics, hobbies whatever…

Guess what… this very simple truth works with your marketing too.

Most successful businesses are aware of the power of attraction marketing to generate sales and increase their long term client base.

If this is so simple, why do so many companies get it wrong?

Well, most businesses get it the wrong way around. Through lack of a proper plan, they decide to pursue new clients. A bit like the guys you see in the pub that hassle the pretty women after they’ve had a load of beers.

Even when no-one responds to their letters, emails or phone calls; they carry on regardless blaming the recession for the lack of sales.

Here’s an example of a better way…

We are obviously a web development and SEO company. People find our blog and newsletter reasonably funny, informative and useful. So that could be described as ‘attractive‘. Many people have downloaded our free guide to SEO, which in many cases has helped people generate more sales for free.

SEO is a market full of scamsters. By being open, honest and giving away solid free information, we set ourselves apart. People then link to our site and tell others about downloading our material and joining our newsletter.

When we send out details about SEO seminars we host, people respond well and we fill them because people trust us.

So, without spending anything on ANY traditional forms of advertising, there’s tonnes of people who know all about Calloway Green and our ability to help companies rank high on Google and produce great sales results.

THEN whenever someone who follows us decides they want to embark on a full blown SEO campaign, hopefully they come to us.

Now, does this take more time and effort? Yes.

Does it work better than banging out crappy flyers and emails in a shotgun approach, hoping someone will use your product or service? Yes.

So think about your strategy to become more attractive to your potential customers. Remember, people don’t like to be sold to, but they do like to buy. As I found out today when my wife came home with a new pair of shoes!

As people still wonder whether Twitter is really ‘all that’ and if it really does have much power, the past two weeks have proven that if you get on the wrong side of it, you’ll be taken down in flames…

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As Andy said in his last post, our SEO Birmingham event was a great success. We had a real mix of people from one man bands to Directors of multinational businesses.

We realised that although people are all at a different stages in their online marketing. Some had created their own sites, some had invested a lot on an agency to create them a slick corporate site. BUT… the biggest issue people had was not getting enough traffic.

Without traffic you can’t tell whether your site is working or not…

Without traffic you have no idea how to enhance your site…

Without traffic you can’t build a list of people that you can turn into clients…

THE LIST GOES ON!!

We believe that a website for vanity purposes is a waste of time and money, you must get people there. Not just any people either, you need motivated buyers in your market coming to you first.

At the seminar Andy showed us a load of ways to get the right people onto your site and how to keep them coming back. We’ll be doing the same again on the 25th November 09.

Come and join us.