Think of the first thing you heard about “marketing a website” on the web. 99% of the time, the first words someone hears are “search engine marketing.” Or some semblance of the phrase.
And from that moment on, the hammering of misinformation never stops. They make him believe that his business will die a terrible death without search engines. They make you believe that only the people who can guide you through the search engine optimization minefield are the SEO “experts”.
You are also told over and over again that the only way to market online is through search engines. Over time, you’re conditioned to focus most, if not all, of your efforts on tricking search engines into liking your site above all your competitors for search terms where “there can only be one.”
Well, here’s a wake-up call: The vast majority of small businesses will never have the resources, time, or knowledge to turn an idea into a profitable online business that is focused on search engines alone.
Just look at the flood of information out there on Google and how to rank well with them. People are selecting their ranking patent application right now to try and come up with a website promotion strategy based on what Google reveals in their application about their ranking system.
Is this information valuable to a small business that wants to sell its products to an entire market rather than just the part of that market that uses one of the big search engines?
It is in extreme moderation, yes. In a well-balanced marketing campaign that focuses on many ways to attract targeted traffic, search engine marketing has its place. You do what you can and move on to all the other ways out there to promote your business.
However, many people fall victim to the glitz and glitter of search engine riches offered to them by SEO companies and people selling search engine how-to manuals.
It doesn’t take long before a new business gets caught up in a game where the only winners are geeks and deep pockets.
If you don’t fall into any of those categories, your business is doomed from the start if you jump off the porch to play with those big dogs.
“But I hired a ‘big dog’ SEO company to make my business stand out and compete with the geeks in my niche.”
More power to you. In reality, unfortunately, she probably just hired a teenager from India with an Internet connection at her parents’ house. Most small businesses starting out can’t come close to affording a major SEO firm. They charge corporate-level premiums to gain access to their services.
By comparison, everyone else in the SEO world is practically working out of their garage.
Scared yet? It doesn’t have to be so long as to distribute your marketing to the non-search engine traffic you should be getting.
Writing articles and distributing them to your market is a direct traffic strategy that has nothing to do with search engines. Except search engines also find your site through those links. But you should only do it for DIRECT TRAFFIC from readers on other sites and take increased search engine traffic as icing on the cake.
You see, as people spam search engines, they need to adjust how they rank sites to compensate. This means that many good sites are affected when Google changes the way it ranks sites.
You could have gone completely up and down and fell for the engines because they made a new rule that everyone who registers their domains for just one year is a possible spammer. There goes your legitimate site. I hope you haven’t thought of search engine traffic as your ONLY source of traffic.
Can you see how dangerous it is to get stung by the search engine bug? YES, you can propel your business overnight from a no-profit dead zone to a top-ranked glamorous profit machine.
Of course it’s possible. Not likely.
People who are turning their small online businesses into success stories are doing one thing across the board: running a multi-faceted marketing campaign that includes search engine along with a good mix of other types of non-search engine marketing. search, such as reciprocal and non-reciprocal links. tactics too numerous to mention here.
If you want long-term success online, you must be willing to look past all the sleeze merchants selling you dreams of riches through search engine marketing.
Search engines care about one thing: their own skins. You need to care more about your skin than anything else and use a disciplined and well-planned marketing strategy that puts search engines in their place. Not at the epicenter of your marketing campaign, but another tool in your toolbox for driving targeted traffic.
Do this and you will escape the fate of thousands of startups this year who will realize too late that they pinned their hopes on the wrong marketing strategy as their profit engine.
Copyright 2005 Jack Humphrey