The Greg Parsons Project

The Top 3 Principles of Marketing

• KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
• BUILD YOUR NETWORK
• ADVERTISE EFFICIENTLY

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
For any business to be successful, you must know who your audience is and what their specific needs may be prior to beginning your marketing efforts. Narrow down your key audience and focus on those products and/or services that will capture their attention. This is a good head start for any business strategy. Starting out too broad or starting with a niche that is highly competitive are frequent reasons that small businesses fail. Find your niche and exploit it! And furthermore, don’t try to sell your audience something that they are not interested in. You will come across as being a pushy salesman and you will lose credibility and trust with your audience immediately.

BUILD YOUR NETWORK
In order to build your network, begin with current contacts and expand upon those. Network with old friends and colleagues and build relationships through those with others. There are several ways to do this: attend local and national events, host an event yourself, and utilize internet web sites to build your current network such as facebook.com, myspace.com, etc. These sites are usually free to join and very helpful in building a network of contacts.

ADVERTISE EFFICIENTLY
Advertising is a key factor for any business. Without appropriate advertising, you are limiting your business potential. Depending on what type of business you have, you may want to advertise in local or national newspapers and magazines to target all audiences or travel to local areas and pass out flyers, business cards, etc. for more local prospects. Billboards are another option, but can be quite costly. Another, more economical avenue would be the internet to market your business. There are free web sites such as craigslist.org, backpage.com, local classified websites, etc. that can be a very effective tool. Whatever you choose, know what you want to advertise to get the most bank for your buck!

I thought I’d take a minute to just clarify something that recently I’ve been seeing a lot more talk about, and it’s absolutely false. I’ve been doing a lot more link building campaigns for people lately, which in and of itself is fine. The problem arises when those that have hired us as an SEO company begin to question the means in which we do our SEO. Let me explain:

Client A hires us for a link building campaign and requests weekly reports. This is fine - we give daily reports if you want them, so no big deal there. Once the reports start rolling in, the client begins questioning the links which we are getting for them. “Why don’t we have any .edu or .gov links?”, they ask. So I answer - “Because I have not found any relevant pages on .edu or .gov domains that I can get links to you from.” Ok, problem averted - for now. The next week comes, and so does the same question. “When are we going to get some .edu and .gov links?”, they ask. So I begin to wonder if there’s a pattern forming here. I went on to explain to our client, as I’ll explain to everyone here right now: It is a myth that .gov and .edu links give you a bigger SEO boost than any other domain out there. This started some time back, many years ago, and while it may have been partially true in the old days of SEO - I see absolutely no benefit from it in today’s SEO world. Don’t believe me? Let me quote Matt Cutts:

“This is a common misconception–you don’t get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. Hah John, I beat you to it! If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you’re not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn’t have any PageRank.”

The one thing to keep in mind here though, is the fact that .edu and .gov sites tend to not ever be involved in any “bad neighborhoods” and therefore you have less chance of getting involved in a bad linking scheme if you DO get links from .edu and .gov sites. These sites also tend to be considered authority sites in their niches and the domains are more than likely fairly old, all factors which help rankings. However, don’t think that just because you get a link from a .edu or a .gov that you’re getting something extra for the extension that you wouldn’t get from a .com, or even .info for that matter.

Don’t get me wrong here, I am not downing my client in any way for questioning the means in which we are getting them links. I expect that our clients will have many questions and concerns - after all, they hired us because they did not know how to do proper SEO themselves. We are here to help them and guide them every step of the way. This is just an example of how bad information permeates the Internet on a daily basis.

Fact of the matter is, this is just a common SEO myth that you should not pay any attention to!

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about social media sites as an alternative to “good SEO” because of the fluctuations that everyone is seeing in Google, and I’d like to touch base briefly on the 2 main social media sites and their effect to your business and relation to your company’s mantra.

First of all, if you’re going to worry about your business sinking every time Google has a blip, changes an algorithm, mixes up the SERPs, etc. then you may want to think about getting into a different business.  That’s a harsh truth, but one I feel that a lot of people need to hear.  These days, PageRank is constantly changing, SERPs are constantly changing, and you really need to stay on top of your game to make sure you aren’t doing ANYTHING even remotely close to black hat.  If you do, chances are you’ll have a short lived top ranking followed by a penalty that may outlive you and your kids.  Yes, they are that harsh.  So, that being said, back on-topic here.

As an alternative to good search engine traffic, I’ve been hearing a lot of people talking about the benefits of the social media sites, namely Digg and StumbleUpon.  These are indeed great sites, and they do offer something to the web community as a whole.  Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not downing these sites one bit.  I’d like to touch base on people’s perceptions of them though, and how they may affect the bottom line of your company.

My first suggestion is this: don’t rely on social media as a driver of consistent, quality traffic to your site.  As a general rule of thumb, traffic from social media sites are of very low quality, and are extremely inconsistent.  Even if you write a phenomenal article and somehow make it to the front page of Digg, the traffic you get, while very significant, will also be very short lived and the targeting of that traffic is extremely poor compared to targeted, optimized search traffic.  Sure, the traffic statistics on your site look impressive and you think you did something great (and you may have, don’t get me wrong), but chances are all you did was get a boatload of people to your site in a short period of time — and hopefully your servers could handle all of the traffic — who will probably never come back.  If you’re lucky, you got some bookmarkers or subscribers to your feed who will check back again later because they liked your style of writing.  But I’d almost bet you got little to no sales if you look at conversion ratios.

The moral of this short story is this, and it’s very simple.  In the time you took writing that “perfect” article to submit to Digg in hopes of hitting the front page, you could just be continuing to look at the BIG picture and working towards the long term of building links, creating solid, optimized content for your site, and hoping that Google notices you sometime soon.  Trust me, in the end, it will pay off and your work will be rewarded.

Short cuts get you nowhere, but certainly do give you the false illusion that you’ve done something great.  Take the long, proven path to success instead of the short cut.