Good Website Design and Search Engine Optimization are not Mutually Exclusive

Website design is a process of function and aesthetics.  I’ve just completed a project where the desires of the graphic designer took precedence over search engine optimization and website performance.  I had only heard about these sorts of debates before and had never been involved in one.

The designer admitted they cared more about look and feel of the site than they did about its features and functions.  Ultimately being forced to defer to the graphic designer’s logic by putting a scroll box into a post, for the sake of aesthetics, enforced website design tactics that have not been popular since the late 1990’s.  Neither the project initiator nor the graphic designer seemed to care at all about search engine visibility, website performance, or the impact their design-based decisions were having upon the website design functionality or the user experience.  Regardless of my feelings about it, I did as I was instructed and delivered a site that has absolutely no SEO value, much to my chagrin.  I contributed my ideas and they were ignored.  What else was there for me to do? 

But, my position stands firm that graphic designer opinions should NEVER take precedence over website design performance, function, and search engine optimization.  I will augment this by saying that website design aesthetics and website functionality are not mutually exclusive goals.  With a little bit of understanding, beautiful graphic designs can be rendered to highly functional code that performs well and is also optimized for search engine visibility.

In my experience, graphics designers rarely have website design development or SEO skills.  I have the distinction of possessing wordpress website design, development and SEO skills, among other things, so this is not true of me.  My composite skill set is extremely rare, so I have been told.  Because it is important to my clients, I keep abreast of current online marketing tactics and website design and development trends so I can educate my customers and offer choices, should the need arise.  Of primary concern to me is overall website SEO and performance.  A properly designed website can garner organic traffic, especially if it uses the built-in features of a content management system like WordPress, and performance does not have to suffer if the developer knows what they are doing.

With the caveat that there are many people out there who know as much or more about this topic than me, I will share a little of what I know about these things in this post.   It is not all inclusive, for it would be impossible to encapsulate years of experience on such large subjects into a single post.

Why Should You Care about SEO?

A pretty website design pleases the eye, and aesthetics do matter, but your website SEO strategy can make the difference between a profitable website and a wasted expense.  If you are not doing your own development work, you have paid a professional website design developer real money in exchange for their time.  Viewing your website as a marketing asset should not be taken lightly.  With good planning, design, and a solid SEO strategy in mind from the onset, your website can become an extremely valuable tool that facilitates your business success.

Search Engine Optimization is not a huge mystery.  There are several sites with valuable and free content out there for people to study, if they are willing to invest the time and energy.  While each SEO “expert” seems to subscribe to their own philosophy, seach engine algorithms are based on math some factors are constants.

Generally speaking, there is on-page SEO and off-page SEO.  On-Page SEO is what you do with your website design and post content.  Off-Page SEO can be loosely defined as the linking strategies you employ to elevate your site’s authority on the internet.  Both are important, but the latter has very little to do with website design.

On Page SEO

Each page of your website is viewed individually by search engines.  Thus, it is possible for some of your pages to have a more elevated listing status in the search engines than others.  Content management systems, like WordPress, offer really cool SEO features like internal linking and frequent updates through RSS feeds and commenting features.  As a website design consultant, one of my functions is to help my clients choose rich keyword terms for categories.  While some Graphic Designers hold steadfastly to their belief that there still is a place for straight HTML websites, open source applications like WordPress, which is continually improving, make that belief all but obsolete.

Within a page, search engines are alerted by text styling tactics of using headings (H1 is best) or bold text to call attention to important content that contains the keywords you are pursuing.  Enabling WordPress plugins that permit you to specify relevant meta titles, descriptions, and post-specific keywords will assist with acquiring organic traffic and gaining better page listings and rankings.  Since I put up my first WordPress Website Design years ago, I’ve been using the All in One SEO plugin, although there are others out there.

Having a keyword rich domain name and page title goes miles toward a quick ranking.  Post titles and overall URL length matter.  The last time that I checked, search engines only read the first 256 characters of a URL.  This could have changed, so don’t quote me.  So, if you have a long domain name and a long page/post title, your effort in researching and placing keywords could be pointless.  WordPress setup defaults are not the best for creating links.  There are multiple opinions about what is the best way to customize the permalink structure.  In any case, finding ways to eliminate unimportant words and numbers from the link is the only way to go.

Off Page SEO

This is, in a nutshell, your linking strategy.  Over the years that I’ve been involved with website delivery, I’ve seen hundreds of offers for SEO automation tools that claim they can drive floods of traffic to your site by exploiting loopholes in search engine algorithms.  I’ve never taken that bait.  As for other tools that offer SEO link building assistance that is white hat, I’m skeptical that these products have delivered the results promised but I do confess to not having tried more than a handful of them.  In my humble opinion, high quality external links are earned through the time-consuming work of posting articles, providing high-quality responses in active forums, and building an online reputation for your site’s authority by offering sincere and relevant blog comments or appearing as a guest blogger on a high ranking site.

Freelancers offer SEO services of link building through article creation, blog commenting and forum posts.  I cannot compete with offshore service provider pricing so this is not a service that I offer.  I educate my customers on link building tactics and sometimes refer work out to colleagues.  There are article spinning tools that allow you to write one good article and spin it multiple ways so you can have unique content up on multiple sites.  As for automating blog comments, I don’t approve spam comments on my sites so why should I expect anyone else to do so?    Forums may seem like old news but there are some very busy forums with high authority on which I’ve been actively pursuing links back to a few of my sites.  Just ensure that you become active in a forum that is related to the main topic of your site if you choose this tactic for link building.

Website Design Performance Notes

If you are using images on your site, upload and reference them with keyword rich names.  Embedding keywords as alt text for your images is a important too because search engines can read it.  More and more frequently, websites are being found through image searches.  Although it makes a site or post more interesting, excessive use of images is discouraged because each call for that image results in another http request which can inhibit performance.

Pages that are designed entirely in flash are … well, flashy.  I truly admire the skills that flash programmers have honed but I have never recommended flash introductions when text and images will deliver the same message.  Opinions may vary but mine is that flash intros and pages are not good for SEO.  Additionally, flash is a client-side application that relies on the technology configuration of the viewer’s computer.  Most non-technical people are not as fastidious about PC maintenance and technology upgrades as I may be and no website design expert can write code to overcome that.  Hire the flash developer, by all means, but keep in mind that your multi-thousand dollar investment for flash programming may be lost on a portion of your potential audience who is frustrated by the fact that they see nothing on the page or it is taking too long to load.

When moving a site from HTML to a content management system, I frequently hear my clients say that the site seems slower.  That’s true.  It is, by comparison.  This has to do with PHP and database access speeds.  Website design architecture and code that works as optimally as possible is my responsibility, so I’m not abdicating entirely.  Recently, when this protest kept coming up, I set up the same site on two other hosting services so they could compare site performance.  It was a proverbial “no brainer” decision.  Their hosting service was the stumbling block.  Both A2 Hosting and JustHost eclipsed Network Solutions for page loads and video performance.

The use of CSS sprites improve website design performance because only one image is referenced.  I do not advocate for the use of image-based menus, however, because their use removes text from the pages and eliminates dynamic addition of navigation links.  This is best explained by example.  One of the features of WordPress is that it automatically adds new category links to menus without having to alter site code.  This translates to ease of use for my customers, once they’ve gotten a handle on the difference between pages, posts and categories.  With the exception of the site that I was recently asked to develop, all of my site navigation code has been pure CSS, clean and simple.  After working with a beautiful theme that used one image for all of its iconography and backgrounds, my custom theme designs will be making much more use of CSS sprites.

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Brand Revitalization

The importance of creating a brand that sticks in the minds of your target market is obvious to people in stable businesses.  When the market paradigm shifts or a part of a product line is discontinued, it has potential to kill the brand.  Campaigns to create and obtain market share for a new brand can be very expensive so leveraging the investment you’ve already made in your branding strategy  by implementing a brand revitalization strategy is economical and important, especially these days.

When Volkswagen introduced themselves in the USA in 1949, only 2 vehicles sold.  By the end of 1955, the manufacturer had firmly established their presence in the United States. I’m not sure if it was the marketing experts or the public who created the “slug a bug” attachment to the vehicle but I certainly remember playing the game with my sister in the back seat of our family car.  I also remember my mother complaining about the odd appearance of the VW Beetle.

 

 

Lately, Volkswagen has been weaving this childhood game into their brand revitalization campaign.  The inference of the new spin, however, is that the vehicle is moving so quickly that the onlooker who has been “slugged” didn’t see it.  This is brilliant!

A brand can be established using imagery, colors, sounds or words.  Most times, it is a combination of some or all of these things. If a brand becomes “stale” or the marketing message has gotten muddied by exterior influences, like competition or economic constraints, it may become necessary to pursue brand revitalization to elevate awareness and increase market share.  Clever tactics for brand revitalization  or stabilization are not accidents.

Whether your business is small or large, there are a series of rules that must be followed steps that must be followed to accomplish the task of brand revitalization.

Refocus

This step begins by evaluating the market that you are pursuing and redefining the purpose and goals of the company and the brand.  Every member of the organization must aspire that message in their work and the communication from the company to the market must consistently reiterate the new goals.

Your message should succinctly state that purpose and be easy for consumers to remember.  Consider the branding strategy that AT&T is currently using for their wireless campaigns.  They want consumers to know that, using their technology, anything is possible.  This is a good message.  It conveys freedom and choice, something that is dear to all our hearts.

Relevance

Since the promise of a brand is what leads to consumer interest and loyalty, it must clearly and accurately convey what consumers can expect to experience every time they choose your product or service and how that is different from the competition.

As a business owner or executive, you must decide where you want to be and how you will get there.  You must understand the criteria your market uses to make purchasing choices in your niche.   You must also have an awareness about why people are choosing your competition’s products or services over yours. If you’ve lost market share due to global factors, your task is to repurpose the brand so you can keep your product or service viable.

Reinvent

This is where action comes into play.  The active components of any market are people, product, price, place and promotion.

Revitalizing a brand must begin with the people INSIDE your organization.  Every member of the company must feel committed to the new branding strategy if you hope to influence future success.

Products and services are tangible evidence of the brand promise.  Reinventing a brand image involves innovation of your products and renovation of services that support it.  This requires investment of resources and  and the talent of your organization.

Consider the variances you have witnessed with everyday use products like skin care, laundry detergent, or toothpaste.  With the rise of economical concerns, laundry products began to promote the fact that you could wash more clothes with less detergent.  Personal care products,like toothpaste, introduced and now promote their ability to make your teeth whiter.  Neutrogena has recently introduced a brand revitalization campaign that reminds women that they trusted the product as teenagers and should continue to use it to keep their skin looking young.  This is very clever…

Pricing is part of this phase of brand revitalization.  If there is a way to re-package your product or service offerings in a way to grab more market share, you will have expanded your revenue stream without having to develop new products.  McDonald’s implemented this strategy with their Dollar Menu items.

Inclusive in this phase of brand revitalization is the promotion aspect.  Your brand’s “face” is its place.  Whether the product resides on a store shelf or online, each time it is found, it must be easily recognized.  Packaging, colors, images, and sounds are all part of what makes your brand image memorable.  Promoting and maintaining the non-verbal aspects of your brand image are important, especially in a global environment where language differs.

Results

It isn’t an obsession, exactly, but measuring results is a topic that you’ll find me referencing consistently.  The entire point of change is to realize progress and, if you are not measuring the results of your brand revitalization campaign, you have no way to see if your efforts are enhancing your bottom line.

If your organization has staff, ensure that they are engaged in the results orientation efforts.  Stress the importance of bringing the brand to life for your market, especially if your employees are “on the front lines” and dealing with your customers individually.

Rebuild Trust

Expanded access to information has heightened consumer awareness, and there are many reasons for them to feel distrustful.  Your brand must acknowledge the social imperatives that drive consumers during their purchase decisions.  Speak to their concerns about ecological matters, privacy concerns, or false claims.  Re-establish their confidence by engaging in local activities and events that are not profit oriented and by being open and honest about all of your business affairs.

Realize Globally

Distill your brand revitalization strategy to a single document that is capable of expanding globally.  Make this resource readily available to your staff and your customers, along with the desired goals of your brand revitalization strategies.  If you have a brick and mortars presence, clientele will see that you are walking your talk by the experience they have as they are interacting with you professionally.

Leadership Required

Creativity is essential, but  the new brand vision and positive momentum is a result of committed leaders who are capable of providing clear direction and maintaining priorities.  The brand message must be consistent, whether you are interacting with the board room,  investors, employees, or consumers.  Trust your instincts, by all means, but remember that you ARE the personification of the brand you seek to revitalize.

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SEO and Watching Paint Dry

We joke about watching paint dry when time seems to move too slowly but, believe it or not, this is an actual role for which people are paid.  Duties include touching the painted item to ensure that it is dry.  What does this have to do with businss and online income?  Read on…

Many people put up pretty websites and expect immediate results.  Very few people get what they desire, unless they have found a particular niche that is in demand and has not already been exploited or they have a well established and responsive list.

As a website consultant, I’ve always recommended beginning with the end in mind.  During initial meetings with any new client, I always inquire about their keywords and SEO strategy.  Of all the hundreds of sites that I’ve built, only one customer actually had a plan in place.  Statistically, those who did not embrace the idea that they needed to identify niche keywords and strategically pursue them experienced less than optimal results.

Once you’ve determined your SEO and linking strategy, you must set about the task of doing the work necessary to accomplish it.  This entails tactics that will build relevance based on keywords through on-site and off-site content.

Perhaps the best known method for getting links to your website is writing articles, adding a link to your signature in a forum, or commenting on blogs.  But, how do you know which sites have importance from Google’s point of view?  Michelle MacPherson recently released a free tool for monitoring top internet properties for your content and links.  I don’t know if it is still available but I’ve used it and it is very helpful.  The caveat is that each site has different rules so make sure you read the fine print when you register and begin to use them.

Lately, there has been a resurgence in using videos to promote your business or opportunity.  This isn’t big news.  Video marketing has been a great way to give voice to your brand for years and new video distribution channels are popping up every day.  Your videos need to go viral, for them to really provide benefit, and if you don’t use good keywords when posting the video, it is just “out there” waiting to be found.  Alternatively, and as I mentioned earlier, you can deploy it to your dedicated and responsive list.

Differentiating yourself online may be the biggest challenge you face.  Most of what I observe is a lot of emulation.  That isn’t a bad idea.  Heck!  It worked for me when I wanted to learn to sing like Joni Mitchell.    Still, emulating what everyone else is doing only makes you like everyone else.  Your market will choose to buy the offer, if it is something they want or need, and they will buy it from a link that appears in early in their search results.  Thus, if you have no SEO strategy, whether or not you’ve done your niche research homework, there will be a lot of people ahead of you in the pile.

Assuming that you’ve are now convinced that learning SEO and keyword research is important to your business success … online or offline … what can you do?  Well, you can begin by learning more about SEO and keyword research from an expert.  Dan Thies has availed a great ebook entitled Fast Start SEO which you can download at this link.  Dan Thies also offers a free membership where people aspiring to learn more, or those who are active in the arena already, can interact and swap ideas.  You can choose to outsource the task to someone who knows what they are doing, if you feel you have more important things to do,  but I imagine it will be hard to sift the wheat from the chaff  when interviewing potential outsourcing partners without any knowledge so learning something about how SEO is done is still advisable.

Building an online brand requires patience, dedication and belief.  Once you have your keywords and SEO strategy in place, all that remains to be done is to implement it.  However, waiting for the benefits you seek can be difficult if you are impatient.  Not much different than watching paint dry, I suppose.  But, if you’ve done your homework and selected a good niche and linking strategy, your results will come.

Tools help.  I use a product called Micro Niche Finder that is easy to understand and provides a lot of data very quickly.  If you don’t want to buy a product, you can also use Google’s free keyword research tool.

If you’d like to know how I can help you, please don’t hesitate to ask.  You can complete the contact form at www.VirtuallyMarj.com and I will certainly respond.  I’d love to learn more about your business and, if it feels right to us both, help you build your online brand!

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Anyone Can Install WordPress … Right?

If you are using WordPress as a basis for your business website, you’ll expose yourself as a newbie, possibly open yourself to online security risks, and lose potential SEO benefits the software provides if you don’t take time to learn how it works. While it is true that installing WordPress is simple, setting it up correctly contributes to your website’s success, which also has an impact on your business success.

We’re talking business here, right? I do acknowledge that there are many extremely successful bloggers who established blogs on free sites, like Blogger, before WordPress came of age. These days, sites like that are most useful in your SEO linking strategy and should NOT be the base for your primary website. This is also true of WordPress.com, another free blogging platform.

For starters, free blogging sites offer limited theme and plugin options. The most important for you to understand about them, however, is that they own your content and can arbitrarily take your website down at any time. While “free” may sound good to you, building SEO for a website is actual time spent, whether you outsource the work or not. Why in the world would you choose to invest that much energy on a domain and content that you do not have complete control over? It boggles my mind…

Although WordPress is a one-click installation on most hosting accounts, choosing a good theme, customizing it, knowing how to configure the software correctly, and selecting the right plugins are not one-click solutions. Knowing what to look for is not intuitive if you don’t understand how WordPress works.

So here you are. You have a great business idea and you know you need a website to make it happen.  Everyone is saying that WordPress is what you should use too. You’ve found a lot of helpful and free articles on the internet explaining how to install and set it up so why would you want to hire someone to do this for you?

Based on stories I’ve heard from my clients and some of the projects that I’ve been asked to finish, I can think of several reasons. Primarily, they come under the heading of insufficient technical skills or a lack of understanding about how computers and database applications work. If you don’t understand the underlying technologies of your WordPress software, you can get into trouble which can affect your business plans.

Other things that make it easy to spot a newbie include:

Lack of Focus
Have you ever visited a site with frequent and unrelated posts designed to bring in affiliate sales? Offering too many different things or choosing too broad a niche can make your website invisible. Up-front keyword research, to isolate low competition keywords with adequate search volumes, is essential to your website’s success, whether your products are affiliate offerings or your own content, like an eBook.

Having Too Many Pages
While every place you go on the internet is considered a web page, WordPress uses the term pages differently. When I wind up at a site where the majority of the content is pages, I know that the site was created by an inexperienced WordPress user. The beauty of WordPress is that it notifies search engines automatically when post content is updated.

Default Installation Content on the Site
Another dead giveaway is seeing the default installation content, like the blogroll or the standard meta login. Worse yet is spotting the “Hello World” post or the default about page on the site.

Categories
Visiting a WordPress site with nothing categorized is a tell-tale sign of a newbie blog. So far as I’m concerned, no content should exist in the “uncategorized” category.

Cross-Browser Inconsistencies
Although I’ve been tempted, I’ve never published a site with a “best viewed in …” message on it. Without inflaming the debate about which browser is better, and taking the high road, assume that you should not enforce the use of one browser over another. Over the past several years, I have learned that not all themes are created equal and solid CSS skills, as well as knowing what to look for in the theme, are necessary to resolve browser incompatibility.

After a free consultation, people often say that they can put up their own sites. After weeks of trying, some have come back to retain my WordPress website development services.

Our blogs are intended to present us as professionals. The best advice that I can offer to you is that, if you are not technically adept, hire a professional who can deliver the website you want and help you learn what you need to know so you can build your online reputation and add value to your bottom line.

Matt Mullenweg: Entrepreneur with a Vision

WordPress was awarded the 2009 Open Source CMS Award last month. Not only is this a great honor for the software, it validates a decision I made to specialize with this CMS years ago and all of the recommendations that I’ve made to website clients for the past several years. WordPress is a powerful CMS and, with the improvements introduced during the past year and this award, it is crystal clear that the software has stepped up to the plate for consideration as the basis for any website project.

Many of you who know me understand my deep appreciation for WordPress. I began using the software as a blogger in late 2004 when I set up my first self-hosted blog. Since that time, my interest in blogging has become a way of life for me.  My WordPress development skills have been a good source of income for me and I love being a self-employed entrepreneur.

In fact, entrepreneurship is a frequent topic on my blog. An important attribute of being an entrepreneur is having a willingness to take measured risks but crucial to entrepreneurial survival, regardless of one’s niche, is resilience. Ideas bloom, excitement builds, partnerships are formed, and there are many ups and downs along the way.

This amazing interview with Matt Mullenweg, the father of WordPress, really gives a lot of great insights into a smart way to start and grow a company. Other participants in this show are Jason Calacanis and Joel Spolsky. All are visionaries and well respected in the internet arena. The interview is nearly 2 hours long but it is well worth your time to listen, at the very least. I must caution you that Jason uses some colorful language while telling some of his stories.

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Laughter and My Story Marketing?

Listening to the Prairie Home Companion program today, I experienced a bit of home sickness. The program aired from the Minnesota State Fair. As Garrison Keillor spoke of fall, apples, harvest moons, and the fair, all the sights, sounds, and smells from my home state and that event rushed to my senses. These are all pleasant memories. You can take the girl out of Minnesota but you can’t take Minnesota out of the girl, I guess.

Garrison Keillor is a delightful story teller. He may even be remembered with the likes of Mark Twain, eventually. His stories have a way of creating empathy for his predicaments and the laughter that bubbles up when imagining his scenarios is totally spontaneous and impossible to suppress.

How does this relate to Online Marketing? We’ve all heard of “My Story Marketing” by now. This is a method used to evoke empathy, build excitement and gain sales as a result. I’ve sure read some long-winded sales letters in my day. None of them were happy stories, like Garrison Keillor’s witty tales, and most were so tedious and predictable that I didn’t even finish reading them, let alone feel compelled to press the buy button.

In fact, the recipe for “My Story Marketing” is to begin with a problem that you have faced in order to grab people’s attention. After doing this, you can explain what you’ve done to effect a change and how your life is now. Supposedly, this will inspire your visitors to buy your product or join your business. Having never tried it myself, there is no way to know how effective it really is but there are enough proponents of the tactic that it is worth evaluating.

In my former career as a Realtor®, I learned that there were two ways to write compelling advertisements. One was to use a headline that evoked fear.  The other type of headline permitted people to imagine or dream.

Statistically, most of my guests came to an open house because they saw the sign while they were in the neighborhood or were neighbors who were merely curious to see the inside of the house but, in my experiments with print advertising, I found that using the positive headline drew more people in, if they came as a result of seeing the ad. If “My Story Marketing” is effective, it would be interesting to see the split test results, assuming they tried a page with a positive and happy story too.

So let’s apply my real estate marketing experiment to Internet Marketing. When we have internet real estate, we use many different methods to bring our websites to the attention of surfers. In a way, some of our website traffic is similar to people driving by an open house sign and deciding to stop in along their way. How are they affected by their visit?

Generally, you have less than a minute to entice someone to stay at your site and have a look around so the look and feel of your site is your curb appeal. This includes color, font, image, and layout choices. If your page is too slow to load, uses garish colors, or has too many blinking ads, visitors will abandon it quickly. But that is aesthetics and one person’s “ugly” is another person’s “beautiful” so you’ll need to experiment with things to see what works best in your niche.  More importantly, look and feel is not what helps you to get income from your website.

For several reasons, the most important part of your page is your content. The area above the fold (i.e., seen without the need to scroll down) is critical real estate so you need to use it wisely. Do you want to frighten your visitors into reading on and possibly taking action or would you rather build a relationship with them established through interest, truth, value, and trust? From my viewpoint, the latter goes miles further than the former.

I’m advocating that Internet Marketers start creating “My Story Marketing” stories that are entertaining. We all need more joy in our lives, don’t we? Enlightenment or laughter must be equally compelling and writing about things like that certainly is much more fun for the author too. Current studies indicate that leveraging humor can lead to a potentially big payoff. Social scientists have long documented that people who are perceived as being witty, clever and funny are destined for popularity and greater success in their work and relationships.

If you actually have had a difficult problem and your business or product has resolved it, by all means write the traditional “My Story Marketing” story. I caution you to be honest in the results you claim, however. Credibility is very easy to lose and nearly impossible to recover.

Occam’s razor and internet marketing

The other night, while watching a movie entitled “Contact”, the dialogue referenced a principle called Occam’s Razor. Call me crazed, but I’m always pondering the aspects of internet marketing that I hear people complain about most frequently. When I considered Occam’s Razor, I suddenly realized that this principle covers most of those complaints quite handily.

Wikipedia describes Occam’s Razor in this way:

“The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory.”

Now, let’s test this principle against some complaints I’ve heard recently, for the sake of making my point.

Complaint #1 seems to be; “I don’t have time for fill-in-the-blank.”

Let’s assume that all of us have about one third of our day to spend on business building activities, which leaves 8 hours for working, if one has a job, and 8 hours for sleeping. If you are inspired to create an online income with a product or business opportunity, you must break down the tasks related to your vision that need to be completed so you can do this into manageable chunks and prioritize them to reach your goal.

Consider your time to be like a household budget. There is only so much time that you have to spend. Sometimes, we begin by tracking how we are currently spending our finite resources. This study can reveal unnecessary “expenses” and provide insights as to how to stretch our constrained resources.

It doesn’t matter if the study is about money or time; the principle that leads to correct action is the same. If you are spending your “free time” on things that do not further your financial goals, you need to make better choices about how much of your time you are investing on those things.

If you honestly evaluate your time, I’m sure you will find that the only thing standing between you and success is yourself.

Complaint #2 seems to be; “This is a scam.”

I’m sure many of you have heard the quote, “There is a sucker born every minute.” As an aside, you may be interested in the history of this quote according to History Buff’s website. For all intent and purpose, the story told here perfectly describes some of what I’ve witnessed with some internet marketing opportunities.

Having learned quite a bit about internet marketing, SEO, and keyword research, I am better armed for checking out any online offer. The first thing that I always do is to find out how many people are offering the same thing to find out if the market is saturated. This can be done quite easily using Google. If this passes my scrutiny, I will invest time in evaluating how I might better monetize the same offer.

Applying the principles of Occam’s Razor, however, the simplest truth is that there are no scams and it is up to us, as consumers, to perform due diligence on any business opportunity, product offering, or other proposal that we choose to accept and pay money for. I’m not necessarily an advocate who claims you must work hard to earn money but hype marketing messages that suggest vast earnings with NO involvement or personal effort always fail the sniff test for me. On the other hand, some free things that claimed to be helpful have really been free and also provided significant benefit.

Complaint #3 seems to be; “I can’t stay focused!”

We are bombarded daily by Skype and Email offers so it is very hard to not get distracted. Although a little rambleitis can be fun and lead us to exciting new ideas we hadn’t previously imagined, it is up to us to ensure that the business opportunities that we choose to join dovetail with our personal or business passions and interests.

Do you have Internet Marketing Attention Deficit Disorder? Are you crazily pursing everything that comes to your attention with the hopes that one of them will be the one that finally works? If you are involved with a dozen different business opportunities that have nothing to do with each other, creating a scenario where you cannot leverage either time or content, how in the world do you expect to maintain focus?

I recommend that you ask yourself these questions about every new idea that is presented:

1) Does the business model make sense?
2) Does this opportunity agree with my needs, passions or interests?
3) Will it be possible to leverage content or knowledge from anything else I’m involved in so I can economize on my time spent building the business?

Complaint #4, my personal favorite, is; “I can’t seem to get anything done!”

Here is where we really can rely on the principle of Occam’s Razor! If we are not getting anything done, there can only be one of two causes:

1) What we think we need to do isn’t important enough to do
2) We aren’t doing what we must to finish it.

The bottom line is, the decision to succeed is ours to make everyday.

Speaking of not getting anything done, I must get back to my work. Thanks for stopping by!

Doodle for Google Contest!

We all use Google everyday to look for information. Every now and then, there is a new link on the main Google page which catches my eye. If you haven’t done so yet, follow the Doodle for Google Contest link. The theme of this year’s contest is “What I Wish for the World.” The drawings which I previewed are all absolutely delightful but the originations of the young people who created them are what I found most compelling.

Here’s a YouTube video with some animated Google Doodles which is promoting the contest.

Every internet marketer has access to the entire world to promote their businesses. Not everyone is guaranteed visitors to their website daily, however. We all know that Google has this sort of leverage. To see a huge company like that use their advantage in such a selfless way warmed my heart.

Community involvement is not a new business idea. Engaging our prospects or existing customers through being present in a non-threatening way is a great method to get to know these people as people. Initiating a contest can permit you to attract targeted traffic to your site and it can be a lot of fun for you and your staff too. You are only limited by your imagination.

As internet marketers, we often overlook things that are not trendy. Leaving our desks to actually interact with our local community is something we rarely do. This could be due to the fact that we have an “online” business but I don’t think we should use that as an excuse. Getting involved with our regional and local communities can only stand to facilitate meetings with other like-minded entrepreneurs and expand our circle of influence.

If you haven’t done so already, cast your vote at Doodle for Google Contest. If you are inspired, try to think up a way to use this great promotional tool in your business too.

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Are You Swarming Upstream?

As a person involved with internet marketing, I hear about new programs every day of the week. Always, there is the first wave of notification via Skype broadcasting tools for immediate attention. Next are the emails from affiliate marketers or internet marketers whose lists I have opted into. I’ve mentioned before that my initial reaction to these sorts of offers is to Google the opportunity name and see what is out there to read, as well as analyze how many people have jumped on it already. I have no statistical analysis to offer but it is crystal clear that there is a huge group of people involved by the time any information reaches my inbox.

Recently, a colleague of mine explained a mindset of success that included being part of the group who created the hype surrounding new business launches and moving forward quickly, from new business opportunity to new business opportunity as part of an entourage as a means of creating wealth. The first metaphor that came to mind was killer bees. Then I started wondering: How Many People are Swarming Upstream?

I’d like to explain the entire thought process of my associate. By their explanation, the people who made the most money in any business opportunity were those who got in early, attracted the first round of initiates and moved on quickly to the next launch to promote it. I knew folks who joined a program early made the most money but it had not occurred to me that they moved in swarms. I confess to having a visceral reaction. Following it through, I could only imagine a lifestyle of promotion mania and capitalistic avarice.

I’m a retired hippy, for goodness sakes! My generation shunned materialism!

I acknowledge that the success or failure of any business venture rests with the person who decides to join it. However, I firmly believe that those who are swarming and hyping the business venture must assume some responsibility for its ultimate longevity and success. If the founders are swarming forward to the next thing as soon as they’ve made their millions, are they creating wealth or havoc?

Sadly, the mindless pursuit of money and distance from the masses who join these programs seem to make some top guns calloused. Like a salmon swimming upstream, a new marketer who is caught up in the hype can become nothing more than a tasty snack for the bear that waits upstream.

The Size of Spokane

This post is not about business or marketing in any sense other than we have to pursue our passions to live our life dreams. Sometimes, we are so caught up in our material pursuits, we do not take the time to pause and consider what we may be missing by choosing to not be aware of what is beautiful in our midst.

This poem arrived in an email subscription from The Writer’s Almanac years ago. I have never forgotten how this profound poem affected me when I first read it and have since shared it with many of my friends and colleagues.

 
The Size of Spokane 
The baby isn’t cute.
In fact he’s a homely little pale and headlong stumbler.
Still, he’s one of us-the human beings stuck on flight 295 (Chicago to Spokane);
and when he passes my seat twice at full tilt this then that direction,
I look down from Lethal Weapon 3 to see just why.
He’s running back and forth across a sunblazed circle on the carpet-something brilliant,
fallen from a porthole.
So! it’s light amazing him, it’s only light,
despite some three and one half hundred people, propped in rows for him to wonder at;
it’s light he can’t get over, light he can’t investigate enough, however many zones he runs across it, flickering himself.
The umpteenth time I see him coming,
I’ve had just about enough;
but then he notices me noticing and stops-one fat hand on my armrest-to inspect the oddities of me.
****
Some people cannot hear.
Some people cannot walk.
But everyone was sunstruck once, and set adrift.
Have we forgotten how astonishing this is?
so practiced all our senses we cannot imagine them?
foreseen instead of seeing all the all there is?
Each spectral port, each human eye is shot through with a hole,
and everything we know goes in there, where it feeds a blaze.
In a flash the baby’s old;
Mel Gibson’s hundredth comeback seems less clever;
all his chases and embraces narrow down, while we fly on (in our plain radiance of vehicle)
toward what cannot stay small forever.
 

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