Marketing

Only if it intends to grow.

Evolution Media: My company's logo.
It is safe to say that most dog groomers have neither time nor inclination to blog. Same goes for real estate brokers, cardiologists, plumbers or just about any type of small business person. Someone who spends 70 hours a week (or more) running a business probably does not want to be bothered with blogging. What, exactly, would be the point in blogging, after all? It's not like anyone gets paid for it (world-renowned blogsters like Yours Truly aside), and time spent blogging is time spent away from the core business, right?

Can it be this easy?

The other day I was talking to this guy who develops iPhone apps on a contract basis. He is a coder. Apparently, big companies are paying big money for custom applications. Apparently, this guy is doing pretty well. It got me thinking: Why would a big company not outsource this work? Why pay a local NYC code slinger big bucks to do it?

I'm about to give away a good portion of the store, so read carefully

I help small to medium-sized businesses come up on "money" searches. When prospecting, I can show many examples of businesses that I have helped, a couple of which I helped push to the top on some fairly competitive key phrases. Not to brag or anything...

Before getting to the main point, let's muse on backlinking, shall we?

OK, so it's official: Inbound links are important, maybe not as important as quality content, but important nonetheless.

Video marketing on the Internet is a widely untapped and vastly misunderstood resource. Notice that I use the word "untapped." It's not as if it's not being done on a broad scale; it's just not being done effectively.

Let me clear up a few points by doing a little FAQ on the subject.

What is video marketing?

Using video distributed via Internet to reach your market and tell a compelling story about your brand, product or service -- that is the short definition.

How does it differ from other forms of marketing?

For the first time, U.S. businesses will spend more of their ad dollars in digital/new media than in newspapers and magazines.

I'm only surprised that it took this long. Who pays any attention to ads in newspapers or magazines these days? What's more, who buys that way?

Back in the day, people actually used to pick up the phone and order items they saw advertised in magazines. Or they would send away for something because of an ad they saw in the newspaper. Do people still do that?

I'm going to share a link-building strategy (not specific tactics) that has worked exceedingly well for me when it comes to driving traffic to a website. This will not work for everyone because, frankly, few can produce content of high enough quality to make this strategy feasible.

(If you think you're tough enough to hang with this, you need to keep reading.)

It's here! The ultimate splog

If you want to know how to splog, check out my new splog, dedicated to getting people to buy stuff.

If you're seriously looking for advice on how to build a blog for profit, here it is in three simple steps:

1. The first thing you need to be able to do to splog successfully is find excellent products to promote. Cruddy products don't sell, and even when they do sell they generate lots of troublesome refund requests.
Go full-nerd and read on...

Includes free spreadsheet with all formulas and charts!

Plug in your own numbers and watch the magic.

If you read part one of my little exposition on PPC vs. SEO ROI, you should have noticed that the numbers were simple and unrealistic. Indeed, for illustrative purposes, those numbers produced a 100 percent return on PPC investment which is absurd.

Since I already had the spreadsheet with most of the formulas, I decided to tweak the assumptions a little bit to see how things might play out more realistically. The view from 30,000 feet on that is here.

SEO or PPC: Quality matters

I recently heard a marketing professional say that his firm didn't focus on SEO since search engines only delivered about 5 percent of their traffic, and it made me wonder how long that person will keep their job. This was a young, tech-savvy marketer who was really into social media and spending gobs of money on PPC advertising. Don't get me wrong: Used properly, those tools can be great drivers of traffic, but they're not necessarily the best drivers of profit.

"Think about this," I said, "You're putting nothing into SEO, and it's driving five percent of your traffic." What I didn't say was, "Have you looked at the conversion ratios from SEO as opposed to other traffic sources? I would be willing to bet you have not." No need to be adversarial.

Even if search engines are not your biggest source of traffic, they are probably your best source of traffic.