Think about the first thing you heard about “marketing a website” on the web. 99% of the time, the first words someone hears are “search engine marketing.” Or something like the phrase.
And from that moment on, the hammering of misinformation never abates. You are led to believe that your business will die a terrible death without search engines. You are led to believe that only the people who can guide you through the search engine optimization minefield are SEO “experts.”
You are also told over and over again that the only way to market PERIOD online is through search engines. Over time, you are conditioned to focus most, if not all, of your efforts on tricking search engines into liking your site above all your competitors in search terms where “there can only be one”.
Well, here’s a wake-up call: The vast majority of small business startups will never have the resources, time, or knowledge to turn an idea into a profitable online business that focuses only on search engines.
Just look at the flood of information on Google and how to rank well with them. People are selecting their ranking patent application right now to test a website promotion strategy based on what Google reveals in their application about their ranking system.
Is this information valuable to a small business that wants to sell its products to an entire market rather than just the part of that market that one of the big search engines uses?
It is in extreme moderation, yes. In a well-balanced marketing campaign that focuses on many ways to attract targeted traffic, search engine marketing has its place. It does what it can and passes all the other ways out there to promote your business.
Yet many people are falling victim to the glitter and shine of search engine riches that SEO companies and people who sell search engine how-to manuals lend them.
It’s not long before a new business is caught up in a game where the only winners are geeks and deep pockets.
If you don’t fall into either of those categories, your business is doomed from the start if you jump off the porch to play with those big dogs.
“But I hired a ‘big dog’ SEO company to make my business stand out and compete with the geeks in my niche.”
More power to you. Actually, unfortunately, you probably just hired a teenager from India with an internet connection at his parents’ house. Most small business startups can’t come close to paying a major SEO firm. They charge premiums at the corporate level in order to access their services.
By comparison, everyone else in the SEO world is practically working from their garage.
Scared yet? It doesn’t have to be as long as you’re spreading your marketing around the non-search engine traffic you should be getting.
Writing articles and distributing them to your market is a direct traffic strategy that has nothing to do with search engines. Except search engines find your site through those links too. But you should do it solely for DIRECT TRAFFIC from readers of other sites and take the boost from search engine traffic as just icing on the cake.
You see, as people spam search engines, they need to adjust the way they rank sites to compensate. This means that many good sites are affected when Google changes the way it ranks sites.
You could have done everything completely top to bottom and let the engines drop it because they established a new rule that everyone who registers their domains for only one year is a potential spammer. There goes your legitimate site. Hope you weren’t planning search engine traffic for your ONLY traffic source.
Can you see how dangerous it is to get stung by the search engine bug? YES, you can boost your business overnight from a nonprofit dead zone to a glamorous top-ranked profit machine.
Of course it’s possible. It is not probable.
People who are turning their small online businesses into success stories are doing one thing across the board – running a multi-faceted marketing campaign that includes search engines along with a good mix of other types of non-engine marketing. search, such as reciprocal and non-reciprocal links. tactics too numerous to mention here.
If you want long-term success online, you have to be willing to look past all the fancy merchants who sell you your dreams of riches through search engine marketing.
Search engines care about one thing: their own skins. You should care more about your skin than anything else and use a well-planned, disciplined marketing strategy that puts search engines in their place. Not at the epicenter of your marketing campaign, but just another tool in your toolbox to drive targeted traffic.
Do this and you will escape the fate of thousands of startups this year who will realize too late that they pinned their hopes on the wrong marketing strategy as a profit engine.
Copyright 2005 Jack Humphrey