My internet passion started back in 2003. A little eBook set me on the road, it was Google Cash by Chris Carpenter. I set up a few campaigns in a relatively competition free Australia and started making money directly promoting affiliate programs.
Having had some great initial success, I got a little disappointed as I watched new entrant after new entrant come into the market, copying my campaigns and forcing the cost of pay per click (PPC) advertising up. This combined with Google’s enhancements (which did make their search engine work better, just not for affiliates) made the time involved in managing a Google Cash style business, to be way in excess what the diminishing returns would compensate.
So I changed tack. I’d pretty much learned all I could with pay per click advertising anyway. At this juncture I started building and optimising websites. I spent thousands working out the most successful and enduring methods of search engine optimisation (SEO) and applied all the techniques to my own businesses. I still own about half a dozen successful websites. Only one promotes my own product, a tourism service I set up a couple of years ago. All the others sell products in affiliate programs or advertising space.
As my skill grew, so did my reputation. The result of this was a continual stream of business owners who, having heard of my expertise, wanted to hire me to sort out their web presence. These business owners all had two things in common. They all saw the potential the internet had for their business and they all had been taken advantage of by unscrupulous internet operators who took their money yet added no value. So I took them on and applied the same strategies to their websites that I applied to my own. Much to their delight, their websites now create business for them.
These clients of mine all had a pretty negative view of the internet industry when they came to me. Unfortunately they’d all been ripped off by one operator or another. That’s the problem with our industry though, its unregulated and we are all, by and large, self taught. There is no standard of quality, this lets the poorly skilled earn while their clients suffer.
Every week I see how these charlatans work. They prey on the assumption that their clients are ignorant. Despite the fact they know so little themselves, they assume their clients know less and therefore can be baffled with a few technical phrases and a pretty graph.
My tourism service is a great example. Its a tiny little operation on Australia’s Gold Coast, we hire surfboards to tourists. Do a search on “Gold Coast Surfboard Hire” or the less specific “Surfboard Hire”, I’m pretty easy to find. My business is Gold Coast Surfboards. As you can see in the search results, its a well optimised website for the relevant terms to the business.
So I have a website which is supporting a business perfectly. Its optimised in the search engine for the search phrases which are popular and relevant to the service. Despite this, so called internet “professionals” contact me every week trying to sell me their SEO services.
I’ve worked out exactly what they do. They find my website and recognise it as a small business. They’ll do a few Google searches and see that I really am well optimised, so then they set about finding some search phrases that I am not optimised for. In their belief they know more than me, they then try to scare me into buying their optimisation services for the less relevant search phrases. Phrases such as “surf accessories” and “holiday rentals”.
Using my two examples above, if I had have used these “gurus”, my website would be optimised for 1 specific search phrase which is unrelated to my core business “Surf Board Accessories” and 1 broad phrase that will attract lots of people, most of which are looking to rent a car or a hotel room. Thes people probably aren’t even going to the Gold Coast. I’m sure the gurus would have taken my money regardless.
If you are a small business owner and get approached by an internet marketer who is going to “turbo boost” your business by getting it up to the top of Google, look carefully at the words they are suggesting they will do this for. There are lots of phrases which anyone can get to #1 as there is no competition for them. This is because no-one uses them to search. So before you sign up an internet marketer, try and get a good understanding of what your clients search for on Google when they are looking for your product.
If on the other hand you are not being hassled by these salesmen, yet understand the potential the internet has for your business but don’t know where to start, I recommend you start asking around your circle of friends. Try and find an operator that someone will recommend first hand. Just make it clear to them though you are looking for an internet marketer, not a designer. There are plenty of students or graphic artists out there who will be happy to take your cash and build you a masterpiece. It will be such a pity no-one will be able to find it.
If you are an internet professional reading this article, its time for all of us to smarten up. We need to look after the industry and we can only do this by being ethical in the manner in which we operate. So please, stop going out trying to extract a pound of flesh, go out to add value to your clients. Once you are adding value, the new clients will come, following your reputation. Continue operating as you are though and soon no-one will talk to internet professionals anywhere.
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