Maybe that’s you? Maybe, when you’ve been to a seminar you are absolutely full of good intentions but actually putting these things into action becomes a chore and you just never get round to it. Well, don’t worry, that happens to most people because when you learn something new it seems like it’s an absolute doddle when a so-called ‘expert’ stands up and tells you, but reality can be a lot different.

New skills take time to learn but most of us really want quick answers, unfortunately we end up never getting any answers because instead of spending the time to get to know the subject, we try to short-cut and end up simply failing. It’s a bad place to be in and you can be forgiven for thinking that this new stuff you’ve been taught just doesn’t work.

Well, we had a plan.

We’ve created a small document that you can easily read in about ten minutes that explains exactly how to go and get some links that will increase your rankings over time. Depending on how easy or difficult your products and keywords are will determine how long it takes, but if you follow the instructions exactly, your rankings will change.

At first we just sent this out to all our seminar attendees, but we’re now making it available to everyone – just sign up below and we’ll send a copy on to you.

“Turn Your Website into a Sales and Marketing Machine”

We have decided this month that we will be donating half the money from the tickets to Barnardos. They are an awesome charity (in our opinion), running 415 projects across the UK.

Whatever the issue from drug misuse to disability; youth crime to mental health; sexual abuse to domestic violence; poverty to homelessness; Barnardo’s believes we can bring out the best in every child.

So we thought, as a business, let’s get more exposure and money to them so they can do more of what they do best.

We hope to see you at the event if you can make it.

BOOK HERE… http://www.eventelephant.com/onlinemarketingevent

But the general gist of it is that a business thought it would a hoot to send a donkey up in the air to advertise their beach. What it actually did was terrify locals and get interest from the police, who themselves had words for the general ‘no-brain’ crowd.

Anyway, go enjoy the link, it’s almost funny.

For those of you that have never heard of Social Proof before, here’s an example.

We’ve all seen the cards placed in hotel bathrooms about the environmental benefits of reusing your towels. Research showed that about 40% of guests reused their towels at least once. When they changed the message on the cards to “The majority of guests who stay in our hotel reuse their towels”. An additional 26% of guests reused towels in response to the revised message.

That’s a very simple example, but show that social proof is a powerful influence. When people see that others like them are doing it, there’s powerful influence for them to do it too.

The reason I tell you all this, is that you really should be getting client testimonials on your website.

If you do a great job for people, which I know you do, then get your clients and customers to tell your audience about it.

It’s even better if you can do it by video. Here’s one of our customers talking of his experience:

This has caused some queuing outside the O2 shops across the UK. Apple seem to be quite clever in the way they use scarcity to build their brand and there’s some kind of assumption that it must be amazing because it’s hard to get hold of one.

Doesn’t really work on me, I just carried on walking past the queue.

Then imagine my amazement when I saw a full size Dalek talking to the kids in the street while threatening to ‘exterminate’ them.

Great! Some company was combating the Apple hype with a marketing ploy of their own.

My only question was ‘what the heck are they selling?’. Surely it’s something related to Dr Who.

No…. it was a pet shop. Yes, a pet shop.

For some reason, one of the owners had got their hands on a full size Dalek and thought that this was a great opportunity to tell people about the two for one offer they have on dog toys and cat food.

Wrong.

As I walked briskly away to McDonalds, these two questions came to mind:

1. Do companies really know who their target audiences are?

2. If they do know who the target audience is, then do they know how to find them?

We’ll be answering these two fundamental questions at our next Workshop in August.

If you’re in the Birmingham area on the 11th August, we’d love to see you there.

Well it appears not as he is now giving away his next album free in the Mirror on Saturday.

But why do this? Why simply give away what surely took a long time to make? Is giving stuff away for free really the way to make a lot of money?

Well it certainly appears so. After the giveaway in 2007 he went on to sell out the O2 Arena for 21 nights and as concerts is where the money is, he made an awful lot of money. Best of all, he keeps a lot of it too, in contrast to albums where he only sees a fraction.

First of all, he will be paid for the album (although I doubt the papers will tell us how much) and he’ll get 2.5 million copies of his album out there into the public and although many will simply bin them (or pass them on to kids in the family) this will ensure at least some old fans, people who have never heard of him and new fans alike will get to hear his music. This amount of sales would normally make it a multi-platinum album but obviously, they won’t be recognised in the charts however he’ll probably reach more people anyway.

Then there’s his concerts. I don’t believe he’s announced any yet for 2010 – but he has a habit of doing things differently. Give it a month or two and you can bet he’ll announce something to make the most of the publicity.

So is there anything we humble marketers can learn from the king of publicity? Of course there is, and we’ve been doing it for years.

We do SEO, but we also tell you how to do SEO using our free ebook (get it here: DIY SEO), and when we visit potential clients looking for SEO we often see that the book is sat on their desk in printed form.

Free stuff sells. It’s simple – if you want to make money, give stuff away and people will buy it from you. Prince gives his music away and yet people still want to see him in concert. If you have skill that’s unique then consider telling people about it.

So many of us think that in order to make money from our idea and skill that we need to hide it from the public, but this just isn’t true. Get it out there, tell people about it and show people how it’s done.

Here are some ideas:

• Are you a telemarketer? – Explain to people exactly how you cold-call. Tell them who you target and give examples of your work. Put this information in an ebook or videos.
• Web expert? – Give away some free websites for people to use themselves. No strings attached – just give them away. All you need is your copyright on the bottom – blam – lots of free advertising.
• Salesman? – Give away your tips and techniques in a manual and show people how to be the best salesman in the world. People will want you to train them, even though you’ve shown them what to do for free.

The power of free has worked for years and its all around us. Did you pay for the web browser you’re using to view this page? Are Microsoft and Mozilla bankrupt because they gave away this stuff for free?

Of course not.

Free is good, free is easy and most of all, free makes money.

This was the joke banded around yesterday after the terrible decision of disallowing England’s second goal even though it was a foot over the line. There was uproar for about 20 minutes, until German scored their third and fourth goal to finish England off.

After 90 minutes, when all was said and done, it was the poor performance people we’re talking about. Not the fact that the goal line technology should be upgraded and they should allow the referee to watch replays.

No amount of technology would have helped England win.

This brings me (get ready for the shoehorn) into something we’ve been thinking about the last few months:

Technology is Useless…

.. if you’re overall business performance let’s you down.

As you know we deliver SEO services for our clients.

It works well and they get more traffic to their websites and subsequently receive more leads and potential business. People searching for what they do find

their site over their competitors. At that point, we’ve done our job well.

But I want to be real with you for a moment and I have to confess…

SEO is Useless…

.. if you’re overall business performance let’s you down.

There, I said it.

Let’s face the truth, not everyone can turn prospects into clients every time.

Also, what about ‘if’ they become a client? Does everyone keep their clients for life or do they often wonder off 6 months down the line and start working with another company.

Do they give you referrals?

Maybe there’s an even more fundamental question. Do you REALLY know who you want to be doing business in the first place?

Do you know what type of client gives you the best return when you invest your time chasing after them?

Now is the time!

Now you haven’t got any more England matches to watch, it may be a good time to take a fresh look at your overall strategy.

I imagine you’re on this blog because you want to know more about marketing yourself online. Which is great. But if you want more than that, we have organised a special one off event on August the 11th 2010 in Birmingham.

We’ve teamed up with a top business coach to deliver this workshop aimed at business owners, marketeers and really anyone that wants to grow their business.

Places are limited and demand will be high!

Chris Green

P.S Even if you’ve been to one of our seminars before, you’ll get a TON of value from this.

Sheesh.

When the iPhone first came out, I was there eager to get my hands on the thing – they really were a turning point in mobile phones and they provided a stunning amount of functionality, but as with everything in live, things move on and the relentless pace of progress in the smart-phone market means there are now better handsets about.

Even though the iPhone 4 has only just been released, it’s still behind some of the previous releases from HTC and Samsung but Apple have something else going for them and that is ‘image’. Their brand is a force to behold and people desire these products like they do jewellery. Jobs has created an amazing aura around everything he produces and it wouldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t so arrogant about it.

It’s as though he’s become a cult leader dictating what we can and can’t do with these products we buy off him. For example, Flash is a no-no, even though most other devices use it absolutely fine and without a problem. We also have to use his own programming tools if we want to distribute apps on his devices. The decision to do this was quite obviously a swipe at Adobe but the fall-out has been incredible, causing many companies to lose hundreds of thousands of pounds in development cash.

And now he releases his ultimate phone but you have to change the way you make calls. Brilliant.

I’m glad I’m out of it.

I suddenly realised that our love of the England team is pretty much related to our love of SEO. Bear with me, it’s not as odd as it sounds…

All through the World cup we have been greeted at every match by the sound of the vuvuzela ringing around the stadium as the fans cheered on their teams with gusto. Even those teams that weren’t expected to do well were greeted with a good blast because it didn’t matter – their fans were behind them.

However, as England failed to play any convincing football in the first two matches, what we got in the UK were lots of people moaning about the noise, inventions to cancel the noise out and complaints to ITV and the BBC. We certainly weren’t going to put up with that racket if our team were coming home!

And we also laid into the team. Oh boy, did we lay into the team. They were old, they were slow, they were paid too much and the manager was a bunch of things that I daren’t repeat here ‘cos my mom reads this stuff.

As I watched in the pub last night, the build up to the match was pretty much a somber affair with the odd mumble about how bad the tournament had been and what a bunch of losers England were. They had no chance of winning, no chance of getting through to the next round, they were written off.

Then Defoe scored a goal that looked like it was going straight through the goalie. The place exploded and out came a vuvuzela. They’re OK to blow now, we’re winning.

So how does this relate in any way to SEO, y’know, the stuff I normally waffle on about? Well it comes down to the expectations of the results.

We expect England to win convincingly, especially in a group that easy. We expect them to trounce everyone they meet (especially or except Germany, depending on your point of view) but they vary rarely do. What England do is they have a slow build up and when they win, we love them and when they don’t, we hate them. It really is love and hate, two polar views that I’m sure no other team is subjected to. Except maybe the French this year – their campaign was laugh-a-minute.

And it’s much the same with SEO. SEO is a long slog and many people expect there to be results in the first few weeks. At an SEO training course we ran a month or so ago, someone actually mentioned this fact. They said “It’s an awful lot of work to see no results”. They’re right, but the results are building and eventually, they will have an effect.

We often work with companies for a couple of years on their campaign because it can seriously take that long for the big results to come in. It takes this long because you’re competing with so many other companies who are probably doing the same sort of work. They’re ‘doing SEO’ too and unfortunately there’s no ’switch’.

Until our customer gets top ten, we are a bit like a defeated England team. Nobody really likes to spend money on something that doesn’t get instant results, but sometimes you’ve just got to live with the pain. Eventually, like England, your site will rise in the rankings and at that time you can break out the vuvuzela and blow it triumphantly, but if you give up on it early, you’ll always think it was a waste of time and worse, you’ll never see the results.

There, that’s as good as it gets. Not my fault, you can blame the fact they opened the pub at 3pm and put the match on.

I had put off subscribing for a few months because I thought to myself “HOLD ON, all this information is available on the internet”.

However, each time I go into the newsagents, I pick it up and read it. There is still something really relaxing and inspiring about the printed word. Maybe it’s the tactile nature, maybe it’s because you can just take the magazine anywhere… I don’t know, I just know that people love to read magazines.

So this got me thinking. We’ve been meaning to create a small magazine aimed at business owners and marketing people to help them make more sense of marketing online and SEO. People generally don’t have a load of spare time in business, so this will be something they can have on their desks so they can try refer to when planning how to make more of an impact on the Internet.

We’re going to launch this next month. But I have a problem and …

I need your help!

What do we call it?

How do we name a magazine that is helping people build their online brand and build their business?

Please add your comments below and you can win a mention… or maybe something better.