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…(!)

So, why is it that the Internet is portrayed in such a way? Personally I believe it’s something to so with the way Internet businesses have been portrayed in the media. We see lots of news about multi-million pound business being formed in entrepreneur’s bedrooms and scribbled on a bit of paper before being snapped up by venture capitalists.

The truth is, it’s actually the hardest place to make money – because everyone is trying it.

It’s so cheap and easy to create a website now that everyone is at it. Just do a search for ‘free web site’ or ‘free blog’ and you’ll find thousands of places to set up your own little bit of web real estate. It really doesn’t matter that they’re rubbish, look terrible and have absolutely no value at all, they’re still cluttering up the Internet and therefore getting in the way of your superb site making any money.

So we have to look elsewhere to promote some of our newest websites and this is where the traditional off-site activity comes in. See my post of Google – if it’s good enough for them, surely it’s good enough for you?

Well yes, it is. The thing is, people do different things and look for their supply of goods and services in different ways. Also, some are just terrified of the Internet and so want to make sure that any company they buy off also has a shop or office that they can pop over to and scream at someone if something goes wrong? This probably explains why we are so happy to stand in the queue at Argos rather than do all our shopping on line.

Let’s face it, if the Internet was that good there would be no shops left at all, and there are. So why?

Humans are generally social creatures and unfortunately, for all the postulating of the online gaming fraternity, the Internet is a generally individual, solitary experience. We are alone when we’re shopping online for most of the time and this goes against our nature – so we still crave that little bit of social interaction.

This is why the shop will always be here. It’s here to stay, believe me, the Internet will not  take over completely because it’s just not human and if we all agree with this, we need to admit that we can’t just confine our advertising to online means, we need to step into the real world every now and then.

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?

Search Engine Optimisation isn’t actually that difficult. When you consider that it’s mainly about analysing sites, making suggestions and then creating lots of content then you may soon get to realise that you could do it. Seriously, you could.

And if you can do it, you can do it for other companies. I won’t bore you with it here, because I’ve written an article elsewhere that explains it in far more details. Check it out here :SEO Training

Suffice to say, if you’re serious about it then we can help you. Our SEO training packages are aimed at getting you to the top of the tree in as little time as possible. If I can do it, you can do it.

Google? Advertising at the side of the road?

This tells me that even Google realises that we don’t all stare at computer screens all day. Some of us have lives and drive around so we need to have our advertising pumped into our heads at other times too.

But, without being flippant, it’s quite important. So many people believe that they can just start up a website, do some ‘SEO stuff’ and then blam – be top of the shop and they completely miss the point. When you’re selling your products online you are also trying to appeal off-line. If you have a product that you wrap up and sell, you’re actually sending it to real people. People who read and drive and look at advertising hoardings.

If Google do it, then there must be something to it. As I explain elsewhere, there’s more than one way to advertise your business.

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.

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.

I’m guessing you’ve probably got similar ideas about setting some goals for the year and with a bit of luck, one of those goals will be something to do with marketing. I bet you’ll be wanting to increase your search engine results so you can sell more stuff.

I also bet you haven’t got a clue where to start and so rather than do something, you do nothing. You probably read a ton of books, go to a bunch of seminars and still do absolutely nothing because you think that you need to do this, do that, analyse the other and do a whole host of other things before you could possibly knuckle down to do some actual work.

Here’s the rub: if you keep doing that, you’ll be in exactly the same situation next year as you are this year.

But let’s look at it this way. I spend my time analysing search engine positions and I’ve found that most competition has less than 300 links going to their site. That is, when a company comes to me and says “can you optimise for this keyword”, I check and find that the number one slot is held by a website with around 300 links or less.

Therefore, with a decent enough website with plenty of content we can get it to number one by getting more than 300 links.

Or, to put it another way, by spending about 30 minutes a day researching, finding and then posting just one link I could beat him by this time next year.

Just one link a day. That’s all. Then I could be getting all his customers.

Now, many people think “a year??!!! I want it before then!” but these people said the same thing last year and spent months trying to find a quick answer, instead of just doing it.

We’ll be giving away many more techniques in the coming months and we have a superb SEO training plan nearly ready to go. So, if you want to make some money – better start now!

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.

If you’ve followed us for any number of months, you’ll know that we advocate the building of links as a great way (if not the way) of gaining authority and getting good ranking. But there are those that would say content is enough. Now, I’m not brave enough to say that link building is the be-all and end-all and content does indeed play a part, but a great question came out of this – which is best?

So, in a similar vein to Harry Hill’s TV Burp, we’re trying it out with an experiment to see which method can make the most difference. A couple of us are creating lots of back links, and the content guys are, well, not.

Let’s see what happens!

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!

If you’ve been on the moon for the last few years and you haven’t heard of Twitter, I’ll just enlighten you. It’s a platform that allows you to type in a 140 character message that will then get seen by all your ‘followers’. The more ‘followers’ you have, the more people will see it and the more influence you have. Easy.

Really, that’s it. It’s a way of sending messages to people who want to read what you say. The interface is a small text box where you type what you want to say. When you type it, people will read it and you can move along and get on with your day.

That little box has turned out to be pretty darn powerful.

Two weeks ago, a law firm called Carter-Ruck whacked a super-injunction on the Guardian to stop it running a story that would be extremely damaging to their client, Trafigura. It appears that Trafigura had been dumping toxic waste off the Ivory Coast and they didn’t want this little, errm, problem, being leaked.

However, questions were being asked in parliament and the Guardian was going to report this so out comes the super-injunction. Now, I had to read up on this, but a super-injunction is a way of not only stopping the reporting of an event but also stopping the reporting of the stopping of the reporting of the event.

According to the injunction, the Guardian couldn’t even say that they had been stopped from reporting on the issue.

Private Eye decide it was going to run it anyway because this was an obvious affront to freedom of speech and so a war broke out. The indignation this caused actually went stellar on Twitter with the result that the service was brought to its knees.

Eventually, Carter-Ruck yielded and the injunction was lifted as their only other option was to sue everyone who had tweeted about it. That’s a lot of lawsuits and they realised it couldn’t happen and that they were in fact causing more harm than good.

Chalk one up for Twitter, then. Result for democracy.

OK, so now its quiet for a bit until the death of Stephen Gately, the outwardly gay member of Boyzone who died after a night out.

There’s the general outpouring of grief and a consensus in the press that Gately was a lovely chap who really didn’t deserve to die so young. Who does?

So then the Daily Mail, that paragon of virtuous reporting prints an article by Jan Moir. I’d never heard of Jan Moir and I’m sure many people hadn’t, but she produced an article that even by the Mail’s pretty low standards indulges in such a level of barrel scraping, conjecture and outward homophobia that you could hear the Internet gasp.

This hit the news shops on Friday morning. By Friday afternoon the Press Complaints Commission had received more complaints about that one article than it had received in the last five years. By the end of the weekend there had been over 22 thousand complaints.

This was the outraged many deciding that ‘enough is enough’ and eventually the PCC had to do something, so they’ve asked the Mail to comment.

Not much, but it’s a start.

Of course the obvious Daily Mail apologists have spouted the usual “she’s only saying what we’re thinking” – to which the level headed amongst us would simply say “please stop talking to me you hateful creature”. There are also those that think that this was an ‘orchestrated’ campaign against Jan Moir, a particularly dumb claim but an obvious one if you know nothing about social media.

Free speech means people like Jan Moir can say what they want to say and the Daily Mail has every right to publish it. Twitter and social media in general makes sure that bigoted, racist, homophobic or just generally nasty comment doesn’t go without being challenged. This is democracy, this is the ultimate free speech.

But what does this say about business? It hasn’t happened yet, but what if someone decided to trash Pepsi? Or Coke? What if somebody found out something about a big, national brand that up until now had been hidden behind another super-injunction?

Twitter is big and its getting bigger. Twitter means you can’t simply get away with things any more and slap an injunction to stop people saying things. You’re fighting against millions of people  world-wide, people who wield real power.

You’d better learn about Twitter pretty darn soon, before it learns about you.

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.