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 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.

Oh hum.

Now. It’s kinda the done thing for people in our industry (web marketing etc.) to put a list of websites they are doing SEO for and then show the keywords they’re working on for them. We love ourselves you see. But we don’t do that. We’ve never done that and I really couldn’t explain why we hadn’t done that until today when Chris (the chinny one) sent a link to a site that was doing that and it made me think – “Us SEO lot really are very stupid sometimes”.

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..yes.

Well, if you are clever and actually use it for what it is and engage with your customers. If you’re the sort that thinks all this Internet malarky is for other people then you won’t, but maybe we should all sit up and listen when a name, a big name announces they’ve made a bit of cash from the social networking site of the moment…

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A number of times now I’ve met people who tell me that they’re really proud of their ‘number five’ position for a really competitive search term. A couple of months ago it happened and the guy was quite smug. I took a look at his site and thought “there’s no way that bag of crap is number five…”

I was right. When I ran my magic ranking tool it found hum down at number 67, quite a difference.

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Over the past month I’ve been taking part in the Hub Challenge where a bunch of us are trying to write a crazy amount of articles in a month. I’m up to 36 now and as it’s sometimes late at night when I write them, I do try to spice them up a bit with a ‘different’ title.

Didn’t think anything of it; thought it might add a bit of humour to the proceedings to. One of them was ‘The mailto: command, a great way to harvest email addresses”.

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If ever there was a social networking tool that divided opinion, it’s Twitter. The views on it are almost polarised between “It’s a waste of valuable time and money” to “it’s the best thing to happen to the Internet since email”.

Well, neither of those statements can explain the real worth of the network to businesses, but maybe this news will make it all clear.

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Email is everywhere now and it’s use is as common as drinking tea for most of us, however this ease of use means we are often very hasty to fire something off that we really shouldn’t. One moment of madness can result in someone being upset or even worse, a big headline and news reports for everyone to see.

As Damian McBride discovered to his downfall, you really shouldn’t try to use email to bring down the opposition because you might be the one looking for work.

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In a previous post I spoke about the hideous use of hidden text within a page to promote certain keywords. I also mentioned that these were techniques being used by rival SEO companies. Not only is it really bad to be using these techniques in the first place (not just bad, stupid) it’s also unnecessary.

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I promise, my earlier post was written before I read about this! I don’t plan these things y’know, I just let them happen and today we’ve seen that Toys ‘R’ Us (I tried to find a backwards ‘R’ but couldn’t), has splashed out a whopping $5Million on the domain ‘Toys.com’.

Still think you shouldn’t be on the Internet?

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