This post is for all you newbie online marketers! Because I have such a fondness of helping people new to online marketing get up-and-going and pointed in the right direction, I thought the subject of today’s post would be a good one, and should be addressed! I hope my words are taken as a helpful warning, and that you will learn a simple, but valuable tip that you might not have thought about doing.

Do You Know Who You’re Buying From?

This post is prompted by an offer I received in my inbox this morning. A free eBook that was guaranteed to be chock full of “SEO secrets” and “killer tactics” that would propel anyone’s website  to the top of Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. And that “1000’s of hits” would start coming into your site and you could do all this for free.

You think I didn’t want to get that free eBook to check it out? I sure DID download it (still waking up a bit and had a little time available this morning to review it) … and EGADS!

Sigh … just what I anticipated. This was a piece of junk! The SEO optimization that was discussed in this so-called “killer SEO secrets” eBook was so bad, that I can’t say anything good about it, except that there was other non-SEO information in it that wasn’t too off the mark.

Of course, sprinkled all throughout the eBook were hyperlinks to the writer’s super-duper $80.00 SEO product’s sales page. That’s OK … I have no problem with a free eBook having other promotional information in it. That is a very ethical and accepted marketing tactic.

But, what makes me sick, is what the information told you to do to supposedly search engine optimize your website to achieve thousands of hits each day! Even the most basic of optimization best practices were wrong! But how would a trusting newbie online marketer know?? And herein lies the vulnerability people like this guy take advantage of!

How about a few examples of what got me ticked off as I read?

• No mention of the need to do keyword research to see what people looking for your product or services are actually using as search queries. It instructed you to sit down and make a list of terms you thought people would type in.
• No mention of the length parameters that are a best practice for the Title tag and Description Meta tag.
• Completely horrible ERRONEOUS information given as how to properly write the Title tag. As a matter of fact, this author encouraged you to add your top keywords at the end of the title, separated by commas!
• And the list of wrong, wrong terrible “how-tos” goes on and on ad nauseam…

“So”, I Said To Myself … “Just Who Is This Guy, And What Can I Find Online About Him?”

Here’s the tip I want to give all of you. Unfortunately, not everyone selling a “great killer super-duper this is all you will ever need” SEO product (or whatever else kind of online marketing product) is 100% trustworthy. I mean, if you or I are brand new to learning something, and we’ve no one to personally recommend a worthwhile product or service to spend our hard earned money on …. we are somewhat gullible and might find ourselves being taken advantage of … HYPED ,SCAMMED or whatever term you wish to use.

Perform A Search On The Person’s Name & the Product’s Name!!!

I suggest you first type in the person’s name, surrounded by quotations marks - remember quotation marks around your search term returns much more specific results. Such as “Joe Smith”.

Boy, when I entered this guy’s name into Google, you know what? This is the honest-to-goodness truth!! There were nothing but listings of articles that were calling this guy, his eBook AND his SEO product exactly what I thought it all was … worthless AND full of information that was wrong! One title read: “(Name Here) Sucks!” (sorry, but that is the word that was used!). Now … other organic listings went on with comments such as “he is a total rip-off artist; his $80.00 SEO program is nothing but a scam”. You get the idea.

I didn’t even bother to Google the product - why waste my time? I certainly needed no more confirmation of my suspicions!

Moral Of This Post …

Please  always check out the person/group/product/services you are thinking of purchasing! I know of nothing that will catapult your brand new online marketing website into instant top rankings with instant hoards of visitor traffic!

Yes, there are things that can certainly help cut your learning curve. Yes, there are products and software that can be a huge asset to getting your website pointed in the right direction.

I’m just saying … buyer beware of so-called expert SEO guru’s and the like. Investigate. Do a quick FREE search engine background check first!

How about a shamless plug for my free SEO eBook that does provide ethical “best practice” suggestions to help you properly optimize your website. And guess what? I’m not plugging any product in it! I wrote it to help newbies (or those of you who are still wondering why your website’s are lost in the rankings.)  Get a copy today: The SEO Edge.

Though it might seem to be a very obvious way to promote your budding online business, sometimes things like this just don’t register with a new internet marketer. I found this to be the case with one of my clients recently.

He is all excited that he’s finally got a really nice, SEO’d website up and running. Some of his targeted keyword phrases have even shot right up into the top-ten Google rankings, so both he and I were very pleased.

But then I received an email asking “so when do I expect people to start placing orders?”   It was a bit hard for me to not laugh too hard when I read this. I think most of you reading this post know that you have to work at promoting your website, right? We can’t just sit back and wait for the stampede of customers to overtake our site just becasue we have great organic search engine rankings!

I love my newbie-to-online-marketing clients! Bless their hearts. Really. They keep me atuned to the fact that much of what I have learned over the years is not as commonplace knowledge as I may think. And their questions (such as the “where’s the customers?”) remind me I need to go over the most basic of traffic generation how-tos when their new website is uploaded and turned over to them.

One Easy Way To Help Drive Traffic To Your Site Is Via A Forum

It’s important to promote your website in every way possible.  Another popular way you’ll see this being referred to is driving traffic  to your site. A free, simple and basically pretty easy way to do this, is to find a forum (or two or three) that:

• is in a niche that attracts people who would be interested in the services or products you are promoting on your site;
• is a forum where you believe you can truly get involved in answering people’s questions, and really provide good informational answers - don’t post for posting’s sake and say things like “I think that is true, too” or “I agree” - always provide helpful answers; and
• allows you to place a sig (signature) line on each post you make and allows COMMERCIAL oriented links to be included in the sig line.

Warning: Not all forums allow a commercial link or even mention of even anything remotely close to “please visit my site for more information” with a simple mention of the site to visit.   You’ll get booted off and banned if you disregard a forum’s rules.

This non-commercial posting is a situation I come up against more often than not with a website I have that is in a hobbyist niche. It seems that the best forums I could post in do not allow any commercial advertising nor mentions of one’s website. Again … make sure to read the terms and conditions about posting before you even bother to register an account.

And as I said, make sure that if you are utilziing forums as a free advertising vehicle, do make sure to become a valuable member of the forum community. Now this doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to be asnwering people’s questions (or even asking a few of your own - doesn’t hurt to ask questions and this does allow for a conversation to get stated, of course) a number of times each day, unless you want to … but dropping by a few times a week to see if there is the opportunity for you to answer a question, or add a nice comment is the way to best go about this marketing method.

There are so many free ways we can promote our online business, and taking advantage of using forums to get our name out in front of a large community of possible prospects is one great way.

So, back to my client’s question … my reply to him was “ah, now you are going to learn about the concept of ‘driving traffic to your site’. Listen up and I’ll teach you …”

• PRIDE • HARD WORK • SERVICE •

To all the hard working, determined people of the United States of America.
This is a day that is mandated for you to rest!
God Bless!

More often than not, I must coach new clients to help them get their website content whipped into shape. This just happened with my client “Sue”. Though “Sue” is a pretty good writer I could see many areas where, with a few tweaks and improvements, she’d do a much better job at “talking to” and really relating to the visitors that will land on her website.

In many instances, I found her content rather stiff and boring. It didn’t get me too excited about her really great products. Since I so often see this mistake in my client’s website content, I thought I’d touch upon it in today’s post.

Project Your Speaking Style Into Your Written Words!

If you were standing face-to-face with a customer, you would certainly know how to talk to them; how to explain the benefits of your products or services; why, you’d even be able to answer any objections or concerns they’d raise, right? Sure you would.

Well, since the content on our sites is really our only way to communicate to a potential client … do you understand how to effectively translate the spoken words (your conversation) into great written words? Is your content written in very much of the same tone and demeanor as it would be if you were actually speaking face-to-face with the person? I highly suggest that it should be.

You know, I often am complimented on the way I write. Whether on my hobbyist websites, business websites, or right here on my blog, I tend to use the same tone and attitude with the written words that I would be using if we were chatting. I do my darndest to impart “Claudia” into all aspects of my written words.

I receive compliments because there is genuineness to what I write. I’m not stiff in the way I say things. Think about this … don’t you find it easier to read content where the person writing it seems to be letting the words flow from their mouths, rather than stiffly from their “heads”?

Loosen Up & Keep It Real

I just want to remind you today to loosen up a bit when you write content. Try to pretend you are in the room with your visitor, having a friendly conversation.

As example, if you knew me personally, you’d probably say that I use lots of hand gestures, facial expressions and voice inflections when I communicate. We’d call that “demonstrative”. I don’t think anyone would accuse me of being “dry”. But that’s OK, that’s me. 

Thusly, I use a lot of punctuation and italics and such that perhaps you don’t normally see in other people’s online content. But I do this for a reason … I’m trying to get my verbal style of speaking and communicating across to the person reading my posts or articles.

Remember … I did tell you my readers really like my style.  So for me, my approach works.

And along with this, I try very hard to type it out as close as I can to the way I’d be verbalizing it. Yes, this often can be hard, and yes it may take those of you heeding this advice some extra time, but I guarantee if you try the “natural” type approach to your writing, you will get the hang of it in not too much time.

“Sue” caught on quickly, and when she sent me back her tweaked content, it was dramatically improved. I was able to tell her that now she sounded like she was writing in a style and language that I knew her prospective customers would truly relate to!

So, as I said in the beginning of this post … as much as it makes sense and is possible … write it just like you’d say it !

I recently wrote in another post about how I noticed that some top ranking keywords, that have been quite stable for a long time, suddenly were ranking horribly. I could only deduce that a brief 36-hour glitch that affected the website in question, The-Artistic-Garden.com had caused it.

I also said that I wasn’t going to frantically start to tweak content, or change Meta tags or anything at that time. It is better in situations like this, to take a deep breath, sit back for a bit and see if things get back to normal.

Well … guess what? My Google rankings did settle right back to where they’ve always been in about 24-hours after I wrote that post! Those important keywords are now right back up where they belong.

What you can learn from this is, is that all of us  can have rankings flip-flop and dance around at times. It is something you can’t be totally immune to. I now know that my first hunch about what was causing the sudden drop was correct.

See? There was absolutely NO need to tweak or change anything! Think of all the wasted time, and possibly harm I might have caused to my ranking positions, had I started to try and figure out what to change to get those web pages of content back up in the top-ten.

Now … had I seen after two weeks or so that the keyword phrases in question were still suffering, then and only then would I have slowly and methodically looked at all the angles of what might have caused it before I started making changes to the web page content and tags.

How’s your website’s ranking positions? How long have you been online, yet still aren’t seeing a nice flow of targeted traffic to your site?

Did you know I gladly offer a Complimentary 30-minute Consultation? I’d be happy to take a quick-look overview of your site and give you my professional opinion of what might be causing you problems. I look forward to assisting you!