How to Create Great Internet Videos Using a Web Presenter

When you want to take a more professional approach to making Internet videos, consider hiring a web presenter. Internet videos are a growing part of search engine rankings and customer retention. People like being able to view a video when visiting a website, especially if they are quality videos. Creating videos for your website is also an effective form of organic SEO. If proper meta titles are used in the placement of your video, it can help increase your search engine rankings. Since you want your video to be as professional as possible, a web presenter may a useful option.

Before you hire a web presenter, have your video planned out. This means that you should have the whole video scripted and laid out. Know what type of information you are trying to provide keep sentences short and to the point. When hiring a web presenter, find out if you can sample any of their previous work or have them read a few lines from your video. You should know how they sound before hiring them.

You don’t necessarily have to hire a web presenter, if you are comfortable recording your own voice. If you choose to do it yourself, then record your voice to hear how it actually sounds. You want the speech to sound conversational instead of sounding like you are giving a lecture. Imagine you are telling this information to a friend and keep relaxed.

Once your video is completed, it is time to use it to increase your search engine rankings. Post your video to YouTube so that you have an easy location to link to. Make sure you use keyword phrases that are relevant to your video when tagging it on YouTube or providing meta information for your video on your website. After your video is on YouTube or on your website, use social bookmarking to help promote it. Blog posting and posting to Facebook is another way to help get your video out there. Whether you hire a web presenter, or use your own voice, provide useful videos and use the same website SEO techniques you use for your website to promote your video.

Turn Visits Into Sales With Video: Introducing The Web Presenter

There are hundreds of ways to improve conversions — and every website converts differently. Years of A/B and multivariate testing by some of the biggest and baddest web design and website SEO groups in the world have unerringly revealed that (surprise!) nothing works well for everyone. Every industry and in fact every individual site has a set of conditions (background color, font color, font size, font family, background graphics, icons, arrangement of text, number of columns, etc. etc. ad nauseum) that works best for it, and those conditions even change over time.

But some things are true more often than others, and one of those nearly universal conditions is the presence of video. Video elements on a website make people pay more attention. It’s a combination of moving visuals, audial interaction, and the promise of information being doled out without any further effort on the surfer’s part, and it draws surfers in.

There are some kinds of videos that convert better than others — and that goes back to being something that works to varying degrees based on the type of website. But few websites should overlook the potential behind a specific kind of video called a web presenter. Web presenters are those pop-up people who smile, gesticulate, and talk to you from within the context of a webpage, outside of the confines of an obvious video box.

Web presenters can be used in a variety of different ways depending on your site and your audience. They can be set up to auto-play after a certain period of time, or they can require manual activation, or they can pop up and start explaining as the user interacts with some other element of the site. They can be set up to be in one place on the page, so as the user scrolls, the web presenter can roll under the fold, or they can follow the user as they scroll, so they’re always on screen.

However they’re set up, web presenters give the website an opportunity to present a human face to the world. They give your website an expression, a voice, and other human elements that websites normally lack — and by doing so, they engage your visitor’s empathy. Done right, that’s a conversion factory waiting to happen.

From Web Presenters to YouTube, Videos Are the Stars of the Internet

What are the three most visited sites on the Internet?

• * Google
• * Facebook
• * YouTube

What are the three most powerful forces in SEO?

• * Organic SEO
• * Social Marketing
• * Video SEO

Coincidence? Not at all. And because searches aren’t sexy and social marketing is incredibly faddish, video SEO is looking stronger than ever these days. The reasons why are pretty straightforward:

• * Videos are easy to keep watching
• * Videos communicate to people through multiple senses, making them more effective at creating emotions and memories.
• * Videos are easy to share through services like YouTube.

Whether you’re looking into creating a web presenter for your landing pages or you’re creating a series of YouTube videos to try to create some viral buzz about your business, the stars of your SEO campaign are your videos. Much like a movie star, videos can demand a lot of time and effort in order to get them working for you — but like a movie star, once you have some truly good videos working for you, you can leverage them to pump up your box office again and again.

Making A Star
So what makes a video a star? More than anything else, it has to be relevant to it’s audience — not to your business. Think back to the best advertising campaigns in your memory, and ask yourself: how many of them are actually about the business or the product itself? What do grown men yelling “wazzzap!?” at each other over the phone have to do with Budweiser? What do Vikings have to do with CapitalOne? What does freshness have to do with Mentos?

The answer is that, when you go video marketing, you don’t want to be explaining your product or service — save that for an introductory video on your website, or for your web presenter. Instead, what you want to do is evoke an emotion that you want the audience to associate with your product or service. CapitalOne wants you to think of butt-kickery. Mentos want you think of coolness. Budweiser wants you think of hanging out with your buds.

Figure out what your want people to think of when they think of your product, and make that feeling the center of your video — then build your superstar and turn it loose on the world.

Web Presenters: The Little Guy On Your Website

A web presenter is a pretty simple concept: an image of a human being, outside of any obvious frame, pops up on a layer ‘above’ your website, and starts talking to the surfer. You mouse-over the speaker, and a few buttons pop up that allow you to control it like a normal video, including volume, a timeline bar, and an ‘off’ button. If you do nothing, the speaker keeps right on going, telling you about the site.

Why would you ever do anything so annoying to your visitors? Well, actually, if you do it properly, the benefits far outweigh the annoyance. It’s a single-second mouseover and then one click to banish the web presenter forever, so very few people are going to up and leave your site because of it. And those people that are on the fence about your site have a good chance to decide to stick around when they learn that they can get the information they want without scrolling or reading.

And that’s really what a web presenter is all about — pulling in the people that aren’t sure about your site. Remember, it takes the average surfer less than two seconds to decide whether they’re going to pay attention to your site or skim right past it. A web presenter that kicks in during that window and starts their speech with a good hook can almost make that decision for them.

Especially if you’re driving traffic that requires you to pay for every visitor — like using Google Adwords, for example — your PPC management team can tell you about the importance of tools like a web presenter for maximizing the profits from your pay-per-click campaigns.

The particularly clever can even arrange their site so that the web presenter appears to interact with it, pointing at certain links and buttons as they describe the benefits of your product or service. That kind of polish goes a long way with web surfers, who have almost universally seen every kind of cheap, hackneyed sales job in their surfing — having a few details that speak to your level of attention to detail implies volumes about how you’ll treat them as customers.

Web presenters aren’t just little guys on your website — they’re a huge tool for maximizing your website’s profits. That is what you’re here for, right?

Profit-Optimizing Your Website: SEO for Visitors, Video for Conversions

There’s a lot of talk online about monetizing your website. But monetization isn’t the point — it’s one part of the goal, but it’s not the whole thing. For those of you who don’t recognize the term, ‘monetization’ simply means ‘adding one or more elements to your website that produce money when visitors interact with them.’ The most basic form of monetization is Google Adwords or other context-sensitive text ads. The most complex form is probably along the lines of “being eBay”. But no matter what your form of monetization is, it’s useless if you don’t have two other things going for you.

The first is traffic. No matter what your website, SEO is the best answer for getting long-term, targeted traffic that’s ready to buy. An established SEO firm that has a reputation for great keyword research is your best bet, for no other reason than that targeting the right keywords will determine 50% of how successful your SEO efforts are. No other part of the SEO process is as mission-critical as excellently chosen keywords.

That’s because targeting the wrong keywords can make you go wrong in 3 different ways. You can target keywords that have so much competition that you won’t ever achieve a first page placement on the SERPs. You can target keywords that are easy to dominate, but have so little traffic that no one will notice that you dominated them. And you can target keywords that are low-competition, high-traffic, but happen to be used mostly by people looking for free stuff and not willing to pay anything (a startlingly high percentage of surfers.)

The second problem is no conversions. In other words, you could be getting traffic that is ready to buy, but something about your page fails to capture that urge and turn it into a sale. That’s where on-page video comes in. Offer your visitors a web presenter to tell them all about the benefits of your product or service. Or a flash video banner that goes over, in short, your company’s mission and how you’ve implemented it.

Regardless of exactly how you do it, it’s proven that videos lead to people sticking around, and people who stick around are more likely to buy. Attach the video and the SEO to a clever, monetized site — THAT’s the goal.

YouTube Is Still Growing – Does Your Website SEO Company Do Video?

YouTube is the third most visited site on the Internet (behind Google’s english page and Facebook). Every minute of every day, an average of 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube — that’s 8 years of content per day. It takes less than three days for the number of videos watched to exceed the number of people on Earth. Every second of every day, more than 8 tweets containing links to videos on YouTube go out to hundreds of followers.

If you’re not convinced that you deserve a part of that action, you should probably just quit trying to market to the online crowd right now. If you’re wondering how you can stand out in a venue with such a massive noise-to-signal ratio, you don’t need to worry — that’s what your website’s SEO company is for.

If you put together a high-quality video — something engaging, interesting, quirky, and powerful — your SEO company darn well ought to be able to start getting it some attention. If they’re really good, they can help you get your videos put together in the first place. Many modern SEO companies keep close relationships with scriptwriters, video editors, voice actors, and full actors because they do things like web presenters to improve bounce rates and conversions — it’s a small jump from there to making YouTube videos to spread the word.

Not only do YouTube videos have an easier time going viral than any other form of media, but even if they don’t, you still get plenty of benefits from video:

• Persistence: A video on YouTube is forever; it will keep getting clicks basically forever.
• Relevance: Because you control a significant portion of the text displayed adjacent to your video, you can create your own relevance, making the backlink even stronger.
• Authority: You think YouTube isn’t an authority site? Don’t kid yourself — even Google isn’t silly enough to discard the opinion of the third-most-visited website in the world.

In short, if you’re not doing video, talk to your SEO company — and if they don’t do video, get a new one.

Web Presenters and Video Marketing: Not The Same Thing

As a business owner you may be running a lot of ads to gather more customers. That is business 101 at work, and while it may have worked in the past, it’s not as effective as it used to be. Today’s generation has learned how to block out advertising and separate it from real content. You have to learn how to get past that so that you can talk to your visitors and offer them quality, while at the same time guiding them towards a sale.

A web presenter is a video with a human talking that sends a direct message to the visitor. With the current tune-in and turn-off mentality of the Internet generation these days, you need a tool that will get your visitor’s attention and keep it. Web presenters have effectively done this job on many sites as long as the message is well presented.

The person talking on the video looks right into the eyes of the visitor to pass on a message. The person viewing the video feels like someone is talking directly to him and will often become engaged in what is being said. The quality of the message needs to be great to hold onto the viewer’s attention, but if this is done, you may just have a new customer on your hands.

One of these videos added to your website can turn it from a stale static site into something interesting and exciting. Your visitors will stay on your site longer and this will help your organic SEO. Google does keep track of how long people are staying on your site. If Google sees that your visitors remain on the site long enough to see the presentation and then perhaps click for more information on another one of your pages, it will be noted.

More and more web masters are using videos as a presenter to help with natural SEO and to increase sales. It is not a form of video marketing, however, since the presentation remains on your site. Video marketing involves making videos that are sent out to other sites for backlinks and to increase traffic.

Web presentations have nothing to do with video marketing. They are both separate marketing tactics that have each been proven to be effective in their own areas.

Web Presenters and Targeted Email Marketing: Two Killer Conversion-Boosters

With all of the talk about SEO and the proper way to do it these days, less attention is being put on customer conversions. While SEO is important to get your site ranking, it won’t do you any good unless you can convert all of the extra visitors into customers. Conversions are just as important as SEO and need to be addressed in order to see increased sales.

There are two killer methods you can use to increase your revenues right now. The first is a web presenter. This is a video that you can put on your site that has an actor talking right to your visitors. You decide what you want the actor to say and the message you want to get across.

The reason why this video is so effective is there is a real person talking to the visitor at your site. It grabs the attention of a potential customer right away, and if the message is effective enough, the person will watch this video through to the end and then take action on your site. They may buy something or opt in to be a part of your email list.

Building up a list of emails is another vital strategy that any business needs to employ. Once you have a list of people that are interested in what you have to offer, you can send them emails promoting products and offering sound advice. Targeted email marketing is the best way to reach people that are interested in what you have to offer. This is how millionaires have been made and local businesses have thrived. If you haven’t yet added an auto responder to your website to collect emails from your visitors, you’re simply leaving money on the table.

Web presenters get the attention of your visitors and help to lead them towards making a purchase or signing up for your list. When you have a presenter and a targeted list of emails, you will definitely see an increase in your profits as long as your web presentation is done properly and the emails sent out are written with good copy.

Flash, Videos, and Web Presenters: Powerful Visuals That Capture and Convert

You’ve seen the equation before: t*c*p=$ — traffic times conversion rate times price equals gross profit. Website SEO companies used to focus entirely on the ‘t’ in that equation, leaving the rest to the webmaster to figure out. But as the economy tanked in 2008, many major SEO companies realized they had to take the next step in keeping their clients profitable if they wanted to remain above water themselves. The result: they started working hard on the ‘c’ part, too: conversions.

We’ve been studying conversions for a few years now, and we’ve come to one overwhelming conclusion: among everything that you can do to help your conversions, adding visuals to your website is the top item. Whether you’re adding beautiful flash banners, videos of real people talking in real terms about your product or service, or even a web presenter to capture surfers’ interest and attention, it’s all about the visuals.

Flash Banners are so common these days that coming across a professional website without one is almost a shock to your senses. Some websites’ banners are so big that it’s a challenge to tell that there’s any content on the site without scrolling down a little first — that can be a mistake. But no banner at all is a much, much worse mistake to make.

Videos provide the surfer with a sense of connectivity — they can see and hear ‘you’ or, depending on how you do things, your satisfied customers. That gives them a better feel for who you are as a person, which is why many business owners hire actors to play them. Not everyone can be a movie star, after all. Regardless of it’s authenticity, videos are great for connecting to your customers.

Web Presenters are a little-used but powerful variation on the video theme. They’re little pop-up people that proceed to talk and gesticulate like people on a video, but ‘outside the box’. They can give an even better sense of connection than the videos, primarily because they’re “opt-out” — surfers have to take action to NOT see them, unlike videos which generally must be activated in order to be watched.

It doesn’t matter kind of visuals you decide to run with — as long as you have SOMETHING to catch your surfer’s attention and help your conversion rate. Your bottom line will thank you!

Ultimate Conversions: Targeted Email Marketing From The Outside In

Targeted Email Marketing (TEM) is NOT typically part of the services offered by a website SEO company. That’s because it’s not actually SEO — there is nothing about TEM that will get your website ranked any higher for anything anywhere.

What TEM is, however, is a way of improving the effectiveness of any SEO you’ve already done. That’s because of a simple calculation:

Traffic * Conversion Rate = Sales

What that means is that if you have 200 visitors, and you convert 3% of them, you’ve just made 6 sales. You can improve your number of sales by getting more traffic, or you can do it by improving your conversion rate. SEO is designed to get you more traffic — but at some point, you’ll make more money by improving your conversion rate than you will by adding another 4 or 5 visitors per day.

So, Targeted Email Marketing. Have you ever seen a website that offers you something for free, but asks you to put in your name and Email address in order to get it? That’s TEM in action. If you’ve ever done this, you know that the next step is to receive an Email that says “hey, is it cool that you continue to receive Email from this website?”, and you have to say “yes” in order to get the free thing.

What you’ve just done is confirm via Email that any further Emails the webmaster of that site sends you aren’t spam and you accept his right to send them to you. From his perspective, he now has a ‘hook’ in you. He can send you an Email whenever he has a new sale, a new product, or even just because he wants to impress you with how knowledgeable and competent he is in his field.

As you can imagine, it’s a killer way to turn visitors into buyers, because you can remind them of your product and your offer every week…forever! You can keep trying different angles until you find one that sticks. Every time you throw an Email out to your TEM list, you get a bunch of them back on your website for another chance at that 3% conversion rate.

That’s the kind of tool that SEO companies typically overlook because they’re focused on traffic, but if you find an SEO company that offers TEM as a service, you know you’ve got someone who is focused on improving your profits from every possible angle — a great find.

Social Bookmarking Is a Sucker’s Game — Isn’t It?

There’s been a lot of changes to the social bookmarking game in the past few years. Even as far back as Google’s addition of the nofollow tag, social bookmarking pages have been declared ‘dead’ over and over again by various SEO gurus. Yet somehow, it keeps coming back like a zombie in a B-grade horror movie. The fact is that social bookmarking might not be the utterly amazing backlink that it was when Digg and del.ici.ous first invented the term, but they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

The reasons why are several, but the big ones are very big.

Control
A social bookmark gives you control over two things that are very important: the context around your link (what many organic SEO experts like to call “Latent Semantic Indexing” or “LSI”), and the actual anchor text of the link itself. Every time you get a link to your site, Google looks at the anchor text and the LSI to determine how relevant the linking page is to your website, and modified the link’s strength based on the relevance. That makes controllable links much stronger than uncontrollable ones.

Persistence
There’s nothing like investing a few thousand dollars in a massive and complex link building campaign and then discovering six months later than half of the sites you linked from have either disappeared or at least eliminated your links. That’s a lot of money and time down the drain. Mercifully, social bookmarking sites don’t do that. They are persistent, which means every well-controlled link you build on a social bookmarking site is here to stay.

Panda
Yes, I said Panda. Panda is the latest Google toy, and it’s designed to make sites more ‘user-friendly’. One of the things that the Goog decided when they built Panda was that social bookmarking buttons are totally cool to have featured prominently on a website (as opposed to, say, AdWords blocks or banner ads.) That means that, as the Web adapts to the latest twist Google has for us, social bookmarking is only going to get more and more used, which means social bookmarks will get more authority. What more do you need to know?

Who Else Should Be Looking Into Custom Blog Creation?

Custom blog creation is the name of a service that SEO companies have been selling to small businesses for years. It’s a very dependable way to improve a website’s rankings for particular keywords, which is exactly why it’s used — but it’s also relatively easy and inexpensive, which is why it’s marketed as a regular component of small business SEO.

A customized blog allows you to have content pages (which attract surfers) that then link back to your main site with controllable context and controllable anchor text. That, in turn, makes the site more likely to rank for the keywords that you use as anchor text. Thus, blogs serve as both an SEO tool and as part of your sales funnel — exactly the kind of multipurpose power that small businesses need in their tools. But there are other entities who should be looking into custom blog creation as well.

Individuals
If you’re a freelancer looking to make a name for yourself, one of the biggest steps you can take on the road to stable success is to build yourself a website. People who want to learn about you — to decide whether to hire you — are going to Google you; that’s just a fact of life. You can let them find your Facebook page with your drunken college pictures, or you can present them a professional face.

Having a blog attached to that professional face is a great way to show your potential employers that you know your game. Write about what you do, about your challenges and your victories, and about the details of whatever skill you apply on a regular basis. As before, not only do you get to show off, but you can optimize your website for killer keywords at the same time.

Public Entities
It’s one thing to be in business, but the public sector is another area entirely. One thing that both groups seem to consistently need, however, is more attention. If you happen to be a hospital director, a college principal, or the head of any other public institution, you might not be aware of just how easy it is to focus the right eyes on your Web presence: all you need is a blog. Everything said above applies just as well to an .edu or an .org than it does to a .com — don’t hesitate!

When and Why To Put All You’ve Got into Article Writing and Submission

There is ample evidence for anyone out there looking that article writing and submission is a killer SEO tactic. The reasons are pretty simple: content is king, control is key, and article directories are heavyweights.

Content is King
Google loves content. If you write an article that talks intelligently about facts that aren’t already discussed to death elsewhere on the Internet, Google will love you. You’ll rank well for quite a few keywords, and people will see your words. Put a decent call to action at the bottom with a link to your site, and you’re likely to get quite a few clickthroughs.

Control is Key
When you create a backlink to your site, Google uses it to decide what your site is about. Having a backlink to a site about golf from a site about pit bulls confuses Google. When you write an article, you control the context of your backlink perfectly, giving Google a strong signal about what your site is about. Strong signals mean better ranking.

Article Directories are Heavyweights
Article directories are classic examples of what Google called “authority sites” — their pages are considered pretty trustworthy. What that means is that every link you get from a respected article directory gives your site a lot of ‘juice’.

So the question is When and Why to put your effort into writing articles (as opposed to building backlinks by doing some other form of website SEO)? The answer isn’t what you might think. The thing about article writing and distribution is that it takes a lot of time and effort per article. Articles should be high on your priority list if and when your ‘SEO basics’ are already taken care of. Before you get heavy into articles, make sure you’ve got a natural link profile consisting of:

• • Social bookmarks
  • Forum posts
  • Blog posts
  • Blog comments
  • Web 2.0 properties
  • Directory entries
  • RSS aggregations
  • Link exchanges
  • and Videos

Once your backlink structure has the low-effort, high-rankings-impact backlinks above built, then and only then should you invest significant money into getting articles written and submitted Getting there might take a month or three, but the effect of good articles backed up by a solid link profile is pure gold.

First Page Placement Doesn’t Mean Automatic Success

There’s a lot of emphasis put on first page placement by SEO companies. Like many industries, they have a strong motivation to sell you on the idea that they can solve all of your problems. In the Web Wide World, “all your problems” seem to spring from a single source: not enough traffic.

So long as X% of visitors convert into sales, then more traffic equals more money. It seems pretty simple. If only it really were. But it’s easily possible — in the case of someone unfamiliar with the basics of marketing, even downright probable — that you can get a site listed on the first page of a decent keyword and get nothing for it.

There are a few ways that can happen. The first is if you go the ‘sponsored placement’ route. That is, pay-per-click (or PPC) marketing. With PPC, every time a surfer clicks on your advertisement, you pay a few cents. They end up on your page. But if they don’t buy anything from your page, you lose those few cents. Over hundreds of clicks per day, that can add up pretty fast.

That’s why, if you’re going to go the PPC route, it makes sense to hire a PPC management team that knows their stuff. They can keep costs down and traffic high at the same time — something that’s virtually impossible for a webmaster working alone.

Another way that you can waste a valuable first page placement is by having a page that simply doesn’t convert well. If you manage to do enough organic SEO to get real regular search traffic to your site on a regular basis (virtually the only functional alternative to PPC), you still need them to buy stuff.

There are a lot of ways to encourage them to convert. Learning sales language and call-to-action prompts are good. Belcher buttons (look up) are virtually mandatory. Using a gimmick like a web presenter or a focus video can work well in the right fields. Regardless of how you do it, you have to pay attention to conversions as well as traffic. Only then will your first page placement really mean what the marketers want you to believe it will.

Go Local! Internet Marketing for Brick and Mortar Businesses

Local internet marketing isn’t a new phenomenon if you’re familiar with online marketing in general — but if you’re a brick and mortar business just starting to build your online presence, you might be curious what the hoopla is about. There’s a lot of people out there talking in a lot of very excited voices about online marketing; this is the straight scoop.

“Reach audiences worldwide! Have an online storefront open 24/7/265!”
You’ll hear this one a lot. The truth couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, a website could potentially get hits from Pak Gwak Kai or Orniok, but the fact is that Google knows where you live. Google isn’t going to show your trading-card store to someone searching for rookie Chesbro if that person is searching from Latvia. They’re going to show that guy a store in Latvia. Google isn’t dumb.

On the other hand, if you deliberately include your location in all of your marketing strategies — what we call local internet marketing — you’ll end up showing up high on the results pages whenever anyone searches for “trading cards in Los Angeles”. SEO gets a lot easier when you keep it local.

“All you need to make money is a website and some traffic! It just runs itself!”
Yeah. That’s kind of like saying all you need to run the United States is an Oval Office and the title of President. It’s easy to say, but actually getting those things isn’t terribly easy. I mean, putting up a website is pretty easy, but then you also have to have a website that people will buy stuff from. That’s harder.

Also, getting traffic to come to that site isn’t all that easy, either. The best way to go about it is to get your site ranked on various relevant Google searches, but that means paying for someone to optimize your site for those keywords. Because local keywords are much lower competition than broad keywords, they’re much quicker and much cheaper to rank for — making local internet marketing a much smarter option.

What It Mean to Be Affordable? SEO and Cashflow Economics

Let’s just get one thing clear: the economy ain’t recovering. It’s not a matter of time, it doesn’t matter who’s in office — the economy isn’t going to recover for decades. That means that every single entrepreneur who tries to get started online is looking for the same thing: affordable SEO.

But what is affordable SEO? Affordable means a lot of things to a lot of different people. If you’ve got a J.O.B., affordable means it’s within your monthly budget. If you’re rich, affordable means it’s purchasable. If you’re an entrepreneur, however, affordable means it fits within your cashflow.

That’s because an entrepreneur has to deal with invoices — both incoming and outgoing –that are much less reliable than a paycheck. Sometimes, all of an entrepreneur’s money comes in at once; sometimes, it trickles in bit by bit every day. The question for an entrepreneur isn’t whether something is affordable overall; it’s whether the payment can be spread over a long enough time that there’s never a cashflow issue generated when the payment comes due.

In that way, most forms of organic SEO are still affordable to most entrepreneurs. Sure, there are always SEO companies who want you to pay three large on the first of every month to get their ultra-platinum superservice, but they’re dying if not dead. Real SEO companies have options.

Of course, you still need to have a bit of an idea what your cashflow needs will be — but the beauty of SEO is that it’s cumulative. From a cashflow perspective, that means you can get a little bit done when you have a little money, or if you catch a lucky break, you can buy a better service for a month or two. SEO isn’t a startup cost, that must be paid all at once — it’s not even like a bill that has to be paid every month.

What SEO is is a marketing expense — and any business guru will tell you what when money is tight, the best place to put your money is in advertising. How else are you supposed to start bringing money in? Especially online, SEO is the key to traffic which is the key to sales.

In the end, then, SEO is affordable when it doesn’t ruin your cashflow, and that’s the only consideration, because every ‘unit’ of SEO you purchase promises future income. The ‘right’ move, then, is to buy what you can afford when you can afford it, consistently.

Google’s Games: Is Organic SEO Still Viable?

I just heard the worst words an SEO guy could ever hope to hear: a client told me on the phone that “organic SEO just isn’t working anymore.” He was talking, as you might have guessed from the title, about Panda.

If you’ve never heard of Panda, here’s the story. A Google software engineer named SomethingLongAndIndian Panda came up with a learning algorithm that keys off of the “user-friendliness” of a webpage. The Goog did a bunch of research into what pisses users off about websites, and turned it into a bunch of “do-nots”, taught the Panda algorithm about them, and then let Panda inform the Google main algorithm about website rankings.

The end result? If your webpage isn’t easy to use — and that means easy on the eyes, not just easy to find the “buy now” button — it won’t rank well, period. There are a few things that Panda takes a look at that aren’t on the traditional list of website SEO rules:

Readability
In other words, is your content interrupted by crap? Adwords, banners, even poorly-located navigation bars are considered ‘no-go’ by Panda. If you want an example of a website that reoptimized to Panda’s standards, go look at any article on EZineArticles.com. There’s an author pic, an unobtrusive info panel with social buttons, and that’s it until after all of the content. All of the crap that the reader might consider unimportant comes at the bottom.

Fat Content
It used to be that a 200 word article was adequate for SEO purposes — not anymore. Panda hates thin content. You’d better have at least 400-600 words on a webpage if you expect Panda to consider it quality enough to get a decent ranking, straight up.

Broad Quality
Panda also knows your sister. Or rather, your webpage’s sister. While Panda gives a quality score to every page, it also gives a quality score to an entire site, and the two modify each other. So if you have one Panda-perfect page on an otherwise horrible site, you can’t expect it to rank. Quality has to be across all pages.

In the end, I told that client of mine that he had no idea what he was talking about. The truth of the matter is this: Panda isn’t a whole new set of rules — all of the old rules are still there, and they still work. We just have a few more points to take into consideration, that’s all.

PPC Management And The Power of Sponsored Placement

Pay per click marketing is an incredibly powerful tool under a limited set of circumstances — you need to have a decent starting budget, a site that converts like gangbusters, and a strong PPC management team on your side. Basically, if you’re a starting webmaster and you’re canny enough to be utilizing conversion tools like targeted Email marketing, quality Flash banners, a Web Presenter, and the like, you’re probably in the right place to make the most of PPC advertising.

The thing about pay per click is that there is very little middle ground. Few people break even on Google Adwords or it’s various competitors. They either have a PPC management team that knows how to pick the right bids and (more importantly) the right keywords, or they don’t — and the difference is like investing with Warren Buffett versus investing in lottery tickets. Because there are a lot of losers in that equation, PPC has gotten a bad rap in recent years, but think for a second about what it does.

You set up an ad, and you attach it to a keyword. Anytime someone searches for that keyword, your ad appears on the first page, right next to the first organic results. If they click that ad, you pay a few cents or a few bucks if it’s a popular keyword. If they don’t, you pay nothing.

That’s pretty much the definition of targeted traffic, and if you do a decent job of choosing your keywords — making sure that you’re not paying in the dollars for traffic of the tire-kicking variety rather than the purchasing variety — you can assure a pretty good conversion rate from it.

There’s not many other tools out there that can get your website in front of that many people who are sure to be interested in your site — and all of them will make you pay per exposure, not per person who actually visits your site. That’s a lot of impact from a single tool — which makes it very worth it to accept the risks, especially if you can find some talented PPC management to mitigate those risks for you.

5 Reasons Targeted Email Marketing Makes Good Money

Targeted Email marketing might seem like it’s outside of the range of a typical organic SEO company — after all, it’s not SEO. There’s nothing about Email marketing that makes you rank higher for a keyword, or improves the amount or quality of traffic to your website. What it does do, however, is make phat money. Here’s why.

Targeted Email Marketing lures customers in. They give you their Email address in exchange for something — usually relevant information. From the moment they do that, you have their permission to Email them, which means you can remind them that you exist and that they have a problem you can solve.

Targeted Email Marketing establishes your expertise. A good Email marketer knows that if they hit the customer with a call-to-action right away, they’ll bail. That’s why they spend a few to several emails just plying them with information. Not only does it give them a sense of security, but it convinces them that you know your stuff.

Targeted Email Marketing hits them where it hurts. People don’t sign up for emailing lists because it’s fun — they do it because they have a problem that needs solving. By continuously but softly needling that need, you bring it to prominence in their lives. That way, when you hit the call-to-action button, they’re ready.

Targeted Email Marketing brings them back over and over again. As soon as someone has purchased your product, they get added to a special, second Emailing list for “proven customers”. What that means to you is that they’ve proven they’re willing to give you money — and in all likelihood, they’ll be wiling to do it again if you hit them up with another call to action.

Targeted Email Marketing doesn’t ever end. Unless you irritate someone enough that they unsubscribe from your list — or you run out of Emails to send them — people will stay on your list for years. You never know what will hit their button and make them get out their wallets, but with this tool, you’ll never stop giving them good reasons.

Targeted Email marketing is amazing, and if you’re not using it, you need to talk to your organic SEO company about it today.

Leveraging The Incredible Power of Article Writing and Distribution

Of all of the services that most typical affordable SEO companies offer these days, few have the potential of a talented article writing and distribution crew. Such a group of people — a combination of researchers, writers, submission experts, and sometimes spinners or other specialists — can turn the slow but powerful process of SEO into something that can generate traffic and sales from day one.

A well written article is almost perfect SEO entity. It offers control over the anchor text, control over the link’s environment in terms of latent semantic indexing, an authoritative page (the article directory) on an established site, and of course it links to exactly where you want it to link to. That’s not insignificant in any way, and yet the effort required to write a really good article scares many people away. That’s too bad, because if all they’re considering is the SEO factor, they’re missing out on a large part of the power of article writing and distribution.

Part of the story comes from the potential of a given article to rank higher than your page on the search engines. Google “article writing and distribution”, for example, and you’ll find that several entries on the first page are blogs that point at other pages — the pages that are actually trying to rank for that particular keyword. That’s only one example, of course, there are literally millions of keywords for which an EzineArticle or some other directory page or blog is sourcing traffic to its linked page.

Another aspect of the power of article writing is in the strength of building a personal brand. One of the things that Internet customers are very ready to do is distrust. In order to overcome the basic assumption that you’re a marketer rather than someone who really knows about Betta fish, you have to display that knowledge. Getting a few dozen articles written about the little fishies and getting your name attached to them on some very public sites goes a long way toward giving yourself an air of credibility.