Self Employed Success

A quick reminder for those of you in NJ and PA: the Mid-Atlantic chapter of the National Speaker Association is hosting a full-day intensive on Internet Marketing on January 10 (Saturday). It’s near the Philadelphia airport.

I’ll be speaking on two topics related to driving traffic to your site: Search Engine Optimization and Paid Online Advertising (focusing on Google Adwords).

I hope to see you there!

Wow, you are going to kill me, but I have to say it:

It doesn’t matter how good your website is, if people don’t come back often. Your website gets them interested; your ongoing relationship with them gets them to buy.

The real key to e-commerce is building a mailing list of people who are interested in the topics you write, speak and teach about. On a good day, you might get 10 percent of your website visitors to buy. But what about the other 90 percent? Are you just going to ignore them and their needs?

The internet is a distracting place and a visitor may only come to your website once. A mailing list member can be told about new articles, new offerings and new resources on your site each month, thereby increasing your traffic and your sales.

I’m not talking about creating huge lists of people who will remove themselves as soon as they get your freebie. What’s the point in that? I’m talking about a sustainable list of people who like the products and services you offer, who have an ongoing relationship with you, and are likely to purchase from you again and again.

I can think of 20 or 30 different things you can do to grow your mailing list. Let’s look at the 10 techniques I like to use.

A few weeks ago, we were discussing whether submitting your articles to article banks is seen as duplicate content, and whether the search engines would penalize your site and/or specific website pages based on this information.

According to Google’s webmaster site:

“Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to block the version on their sites with robots.txt. ”

So it seems that Google DOES see syndicated articles on article banks as duplicate content. While they may not penalize your own site for this, putting your article in the article banks probably won’t increase your SEO rankings either. In addition, the search engine may show, in their search results, your article on the article bank’s site instead of on your own site.

On the plus side, having your article show up in the search results often can lead prospective customers back to your site. I’m not abandoning my plans to syndicate my articles, but I will be creating two versions of the same article to avoid the duplicate content problem: a long one to put on my own site, and a short one to put on the article banks and on my blog. Taking the extra 15 minutes to shorten an article seems like a worthwile investment of my time.

Small business owners often ask me which internet marketing techniques work best. The answer is, “it depends on your audience.” Knowing your target audience and testing to see which techniques they respond to should be your #1 priority in your internet marketing plan.

With that said, MarketingSherpa did a survey recently with these results:

BEST internet marketing results:

• 49% of survey respondents said “paid search ads”
• 47% said their own in-house mailing list
• 45% said search engine optimization (SEO)

WORST results:

• 56% said rented mailing lists gave them the WORST results
• 45% said pop-ups and pop-unders

MarketingSherpa.com is a wealth of information, especially surveys and studies. Here are some good reports. If you sign up for their mailing list, you get most of their reports and articles for free (if you access them within a week of the email broadcast; after that, there is a fee):

• MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Presentation: Top Email Marketing Opportunities for 2007
• MarketingSherpa Search Marketing Presentation 2006: PowerPoints, MP3 and Transcript