“If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains that money, you should focus on inbound marketing.”
Guy Kawasaki

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers. This is also referred to as permission marketing or relationship marketing.

Outbound marketing, in contrast, focuses on building brand awareness through advertising and press releases. It is the more traditional form of marketing – an older paradigm. It is also called interruption marketing.

Carl’s task, in working with you, is to show you how to use inbound marketing effectively to get high visitor traffic with an affordable web site.

To quote Robert Allen(1), too often people develop a product and then look for a target audience. Allen says you need to reverse this – find a hungry target audience and then feed it. So the real question here is how to identify this hungry target audience and “create this feeding frenzy.” Your first goal, then, is to find the hungry fish.

I like marketing expert Jeff Paul’s definition of marketing:

“Marketing is setting up automatic, repeatable systems that create the environment where people want to buy from you instead of you having to sell them.”

Need help? Contact Carl.

1 Allen, Robert G. Multiple streams of Internet Income: How Ordinary People Make Extraordinary Money Online (John Wiley & Sons, New York) 2001

We’ve been working with one of our websites and have seen the traffic increased 350% since the beginning of the year and now by mid-May is showing about a 450% increase on many days. How did we do it? It’s a lot of work, but if you are interested in seeing this for your web site please contact us. That’s our business!

1. Sell to the need of your customer. Actually, you sell to the “want” of the customer. What the customer wants and what he or she needs are two different things. Suppose you sell health products. For example, HGH is a hormone that enables the rebuilding of cells and restores youth. Normally you don’t take HGH, but rather a precursor that forces the body to release the HGH that the body has already made. If the product is XXX, you are not selling XXX. That may be what the customer needs, but the customer doesn’t know that. Also, you are not selling an HGH precursor. What you are selling is youth. Target that with your keywords and content.
2. Go for the niche market. Do your keyword analysis, use long keyword phrases, and target a niche in your market. Use multiple web sites and blogs if necessary to target multiple niches.
3. Drive from content. Lead from ideas and information. In the old paradigm, this would look like you are giving the store away. In the new paradigm you are establishing yourself as an authority and drawing people from your authority. To win, you have to lead from authority and encourage networking in terms of that.
4. Be interactive. Keep your blogs open for dialog. Interact on the social networks like Facebook and Linkedin. Join groups on the networks and contribute to them. Force interaction with controversy and novel ideas. Be creative. Comment on blogs that relate to your issues. Don’t interact to sell, interact to drive comment and synergy. Give people multiple ways to reach you. Be sure to follow up on contacts.
5. Use lots of links. Link from the social networks to your site and blogs.

It use to be that Google did a “Google Dance” once a month indexing everything and if you were lucky you held on to your position or climbed up some. The less fortunates saw their site head for the back forty or disappear entirely. One of the famous ones was the Florida Dance that happened before a recent Christmas, dropping a lot of commercial sites the never-never land and getting these online businesses upset going into the Christmas shopping season.

The Dances are gone now. Google uses a different strategy. There are billions of pages, and the indexing challenge for returning the good sites to a searcher was too big for “the old way”.

Google now tries to return only pages with good ranking that are relevant to the search. These are indexed every month or less – some indexed every day. The main page of this site was indexed less than a week ago. The more important your page, the more often Google will index it. Sites considered less relevant are banished to the supplemental index. These are only returned to the searcher if Google can’t find much matching the site. These pages are indexed much, much less frequently if at all. If one of these pages is returned in a search, it is marked supplemental. Here is an example from our business site:

Comments on: Not getting a good Google position?
http://www.netadventures.biz/wordpress/2005/07/19/not-getting-a-good-google-position/ Building Web Sites that work.. Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:32:58 +0000 …
www.netadventures.biz/wordpress/2005/07/19/not-getting-a-good-google-position/feed/ – 1k – Supplemental Result – Cached – Similar pages
Don’t worry if some of your pages get into the supplemental index. We have thousands of pages in our site and a good number in the supplemental index. We just make sure the important pages aren’t there. Our book shows you how to get your pages out of the supplemental index.

To see if you have pages there, search your site on:

site:www.netadventures.biz *** -yuiopjkl

where the domain specified is your own. Use the three asterisks and any nonsense string with a minus sign in front of it. Avoid any special characters in the string. This is an undocumented feature, so don’t trust it too much.

PS – yes, we know there are some bad links in this site. We are working on that.

One very important blog – if you haven’t found it – is Matt Cutt’s blog. Matt works at Google and has become the primary interface between Google and the SEO community. This is as close as you are going to get to the inside scoop on how Google works. You can find his blog at:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/.

Check it out – search by topic or scan the archives.

A good recent posting is available at:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/infrastructure-status-january-2007/

This describes some of where Google is going in 2007. It’s a little big of technical stuff here, but those supplemental results he mentions are the listings Googe returns when it can’t find enough information on a search in its main database. These are labeled as such in the return from a search. Obviously, that isn’t a good place for your site to be listed. If you are there, it generally means you have a weak image to the search engine (too few links to your site?) or you are doing borderline spamming of the search engines. Matt says it basically means you have low PageRank.

Yahoo has changed its bidding system (paid advertising) to compete more effectively with Google. You can find more details of this at:
http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2007/01/08/the-new-bidding-system/

For the second time, we’ve had a client having problems with their email through Comcast. Comcast is blocking their email when using another host, even though they aren’t spamming. Contacting Comcast about it doesn’t do anything. Comcast is on our blacklist of hosts that support spammers at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.pdf

They are also on our short list of the most serious offenders. This list is at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/badhosts.htm

We use Comcast broadband services at the moment, but do not use their email because of these serious problems. We had our Comcast address deleted from our email program when we saw strong evidence that they had sold our address and we started getting spam on the Comcast address. Since we never used the address, the only way anyone could have gotten it was from Comcast.

Our advice to our clients: Don’t use the Comcast POP server for your email, and don’t use a Comcast email address on any other hosting system for people to contact you. You could very well never get that email from a potential client from Comcast blocking. And Comcast won’t tell you what they are doing. Nor can you recover damages.

Google Adwords has changed things a bit for their ads going into the holidays. Bid price has become more important for positioining your pages and the quality of the landing page less so. This, I presume, is to enhance Google’s profit during December. This means you may have to increaee your bid to maintain the same CTR during the month.

If you have a web site targeted for the coming holiday sales, here are a few tips for your site:

1. It’s a little late for optimizing a new site for the organic (free) engines for the holidays. If you have an existing site, target your title, description, and page contents to one to three keyword phrases that are used frequently in searching the engines and have a minimum of competition. Second, get as many links into your site as possible. Our seo book has many tips on these strategies and others.

2. Using paid advertising gets you positioned well in minutes (Google’s Adwords) or in a week (Yahoo). Our seo book now has a lengthy chapter on using these PPC strategies to get them working for you quickly.

Order the book today and get your site going today!

Thinking of using Google Adwords? A new and updated version of our SEO book is now available at:
http://www.the-seobook.com.

The book is now 256 pages, and the PPC chapter is now expanded with more information for using Google Adwords for successful selling. Why not order it today? If you are thinking of selling something online during the holiday season and you are using a new web site, you’ll need Google Adwords to get the word out by then. Google will have trouble optimizing a new site for any quality ranking by the holidays unless you are using Adwords.