Question the marketing theory you were taught by SEO
I’ve recently become too busy to write for this site much because several of my other sites have taken off recently, and when you suddenly get busy running popular sites, it’s a bit difficult to find time to update your less popular sites.
But there’s one thing you should know, and that is the reason my sites have taken off: I exorcised internet marketing theory from my brain and went back to offline advertising basics. Here’s what I learned.
Consider how various types of offline businesses - from sole proprietors like doctors to international corporations - have promoted themselves successfully for decades:
- Doctors refer patients to specialists who handle different stuff, not to other doctors who do exactly what they do (competitors). It would be absurd for one podiatrist to send business to another podiatrist.
- Businesses buy ads from any place their desired customers are likely to be watching/reading/listening.
- Businesses buy ads from places that are good to associate with their brand image.
- Businesses create other brands and small companies within their corporate structure, and they all promote each other. Sometimes they do precisely the same sort of business (two women’s clothing boutiques, for example), but more often they cover a spectrum (one corp might have a woman’s clothing boutique, a man’s, a children’s, and a bath & body chain).
Now, consider the various things we’re being advised to do as internet marketers, because a lot of SEO proponents convinced us optimizing for search engines was all there was to internet marketing:
SEO (in general) taught us to link to our competitors instead of to people who attract our desired audience but don’t provide them what we want to provide them. SEO convinced people early on that networking our blogs together in a logical fashion that appealed to visitors was something Google would punish you for just on principle. And SEO is partly responsible for destroying text link advertising, a perfectly ethical (when done ethically) practice that pre-dates Google’s existence, and might still exist if SEO hadn’t convinced everyone text links were for building pagerank, not attracting visitors.
See the absurdity? Internet marketing has never separated itself from “search engine optimization.” SEO is about scoring with search engines (mainly Google) and, I really think in most cases, making money off AdSense. Internet marketing should be about “how to make your site big.” How to make your various sites into a business. But it’s not, and now we have a handicap: even if we change our practices, there are a lot of people who won’t play ball with us unless we follow SEO rules, which they think equate to “good marketing.”
SEO proponents who make money on AdSense have done this for the purpose of promoting and protect their own interests, not yours. If AdSense is the best way to make money because it’s all Google will allow without penalty, so much the better for them: they’ve already got that market cornered. Now, I’ve tried to make it clear I’m not saying “all SEO people/advice = evil” but I feel the need to state that just in case. When you can optimize your site for Google without doing something that runs counter to the goal of getting more visitors who translate into more dollars, that’s a good thing. A few SEO experts (like Aaron Wall) are damn smart people who don’t encourage you to think SEO is all you need. And those SEO proponents who did mislead us certainly didn’t force us to stupidly abandon such common sense basic marketing practices as not sending business to a competitor. That’s a no-brainer, folks, and we were stupid to miss it.
So now people are complaining that big sites won’t link to them - “I’m a small widget maker who linked to a big widget maker, and they didn’t link back!” - and I’m thinking hallelujah! Finally, someone is being logical. The net is growing up and acting like a business.
Of the offline business models I listed, there are three most of us can immediately make use of: networking with complementary sites rather than competitors, improving our brands through affiliation with complementary sites, and building sites to send traffic to other sites (the last two are essentially the same practice, just with different goals). Advertising is… well, it certainly can work and I’m not discouraging anyone from using it, but it’s very unpredictable as yet, so you can’t expect to get a consistent rate of return from one ad to the next. What we’re absolutely in a position to do right now is:
- Stop linking to/seeking links from people who do exactly what you do. Think about what sort of other topics would interest your desired readers, and advertise/sell ads to sites featuring those topics. Aim for your audience, not for your topic.
- Build networks. I see no evidence that Google will punish you from building perfectly sensible networks. Build sites that complement your other sites, and link ‘em. Make friends with complementary sites and set up links between them, too. If Google does go insane and ban all those sites, I swear you will still end up with more traffic from the network than you were ever going to get from Google*. Just make sure the sites are all of the same quality and none of them will tarnish your “brand” in your desired audience’s eyes. (I’ve lost tons of Google traffic a couple of times temporarily due to such things as changing a domain name - every time I end up gaining traffic because it pushes me to seek traffic through other means, which is always much easier and more effective than trying to guess what Google wants.)
- Remember what print magazines and newspapers learned eons ago: if the copy (content) is too good, no one looks at the ads. Don’t expect to sell a lot of adspace on your most brilliant site: great content can make big money, too, but not necessarily by selling ad space for the purpose of converting to dollars. You may need to seek advertisers who want to enhance their brand by affiliating with your brilliant site instead.
- Don’t always measure your advertising ROI by how many converting visitors you got. Sometimes branding is more valuable in the long run. And it works the other way around, too: don’t buy advertising with a great ROI if it’s with a site that could damage your brand.
I have a lot more to learn. I’m hardly an expert on offline marketing. It’s something I’ve studied a bit, and a lot of it is obvious if you just observe TV commercials and print ads and billboards and ask yourself, “Why did they pick that?” And find out which companies are related to which others and so on. The patterns emerge, and we can learn from them.
This change in my approach is the single biggest event I’ve experienced since I started internet marketing in 2004. It’s revolutionized everything for me. Expect to hear more about it.
