Link Exchange is Dead. Now What?

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Gal Baras

Let’s face it. Search engines are not interested in making SEO easy. By definition, SEO is a set of ways to manipulate search results, so why should the?

Google has always made it clear that the best way to promote a website is by focusing on human searchers, rather than on robots and crawlers. In several algorithm changes, it specifically targeted links that serve no purpose other than SEO and content that serves purpose other than SEO and advertising revenue.

So basically, traditional link exchange – you link to my site and I’ll link to yours – is dead. Gone. Buried. No more. You get it.

What now? How should an honest small business use the mighty Internet for some promotion, then? Without swapping links, what CAN we do?

The answer is … (drum roll) … fresh content.

Rather than having a static website, have a content management system (CMS). This is a piece of software that allows you to create and edit the content of your website through your web browser. There are many free ones out there, each with its own following, its own community and its own add-ons. Personally, I prefer WordPress.

Once you have a WordPress site, publishing new content is child play. You log in, click “Add New Post”, give it a title, type in some new and interesting information for your clients and prospects – special deals, industry changes, responses to news items and stories about happy clients – and hit “Publish”. When set up correctly, WordPress will do the rest for you: it will notify the search engines about the new post, update your company’s Facebook page, tweet to your followers and add to the authority and search ranking of your site.

Because Google didn’t just kill link exchange and reconsider page optimization, it also started to promote fresh content and view your entire site as one optimization unit. If you consistently post on a focused set of topics, your site WILL rise, maybe even to the top.

Another important factor is Google+. By many accounts, whatever is shared on Google+ and/or given a +1 is considered favorably by Google and gets a higher search ranking.

So now, SEO is as easy as 1-2-3:

Post fresh, relevant and interesting content that people will read and share
Engage your audience on Facebook (for consumers) or LinkedIn (for businesses) and share your content
Build your network on Google+ and display the +1 button prominently on your site

Of course, you may not have time for all this, but that’s OK. With the help of SEO professionals, you can find the most cost-effective and time-effective strategies and methods for your business and generate high impact content the works for your business.

Have a great day,
Gal

Everyone can do it (with expert help)

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Gal Baras

This is a guest post from my biggest and best client (she’s also my wife, but read it anyway). She told me, “You can’t tell people what it’s like not to know anything about online marketing, because you already know. I’ll write a post for you and you just publish it and show it to anyone who is non-technical like me”. So here goes. Enjoy.

As a blogger with tens of thousands of readers every month, I am often asked, “How did you do it?” usually with admiration for this success. I usually feel uncomfortable answering (my parents always told me to be modest), but I am going to stretch myself this time and answer everyone once and for all, without being shy about it.

Whether you know me from Family Matters, Be Happy in LIFE or The Motivational Speaker, you know how strongly I am into the “You can do it!” attitude. I am a life coach and an educator and ever since I started my first business at the age of 25, this has been my motto – I can do it! Everyone can!

I often use the quote “If you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right” as one of my life coaching favorites. I am in the business of happiness and my slogan is “Happiness is a choice!”

Even success on the Internet is a choice, isn’t it?

If you have a business and want to open it to the Internet, if you want to get more business online, if you want to have tens of thousands of readers or a stream of buyers, if you want to know how to be successful at Internet marketing, sit tight and enjoy the ride.

A free event for suckers

[I know the word "suckers" is strong, but it is not my choice. This is what people ultimately call themselves when they realize what has happened to them. I have heard it enough times to know]

The first time I came into the Internet world was when Gal and I did our life coaching course. While everyone was working on establishing a practice, Gal, who had been an IT manager, was focusing on our online presence. By the end of my course, we were the only people, out of about 50 coaches, who had a site and a business card to give potential clients. After a while, our roles became clearer – I was an educator with over 20 years of experience and knew nothing about computer technology and Internet, and Gal was an IT professional with over 20 years experience and knew a lot about it. So I did the offline work and Gal did the online work.

The first thing you learn about starting a business on the Internet is that everyone can do it. I remember the first seminar I attended. You may have had the same experience yourself. It is a free event that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales in one day. The food, the venue and the free gifts are nothing compared to how many suckers come to those events for the promise of sitting on the beach in a swimsuit with a laptop, sipping cool drinks and watching the dollars appearing on the screen every day and every hour.

The suckers’ slogans

Gal and I went to our first event as life coaches. It was an awesome weekend. It was a great seminar and I learned a lot. For 2 days, they promised the world “Be your own boss! Work 3 hours a day! Money will be coming out of your ears!” and … “Everyone can do it!”

I have to say I almost believed them. I wanted to believe them with all my heart, but because our life coaching course had promised exactly the same thing, I had the suspicion there was a pattern there. Luckily for us, it was not a test of our trust. We just did not have $10,000 to buy the product on offer. We were shocked that our fellow coaches spent so much money just weeks after they had spent thousands of dollars on the life coaching course.

If you have ever heard these slogans about trying to build a business on the Internet, be warned, someone is convinced you are a sucker and might be taking you for a ride.

Seminars that teach you online business have a system to convince you that everyone can do it. They show a woman who could hardly type and has a family to support in order to attract parents who want to make some quick cash and say she did it within 3 months in her spare time, in-between doing her daytime job, taking the kids from one activity to another, doing housework and oh, I almost forgot, a huge debt she was trying to pay. Or, they show you a group of teens without any capital who came up with a brilliant idea that became a hit overnight. Those events are like a magic show – you know there is a trick, but it is done so beautifully that you just accept it. You buy into the illusion.

What kills me every time is hearing the presenter say, “I’m a successful person and I’m here to teach you how to make money effortlessly, have lots of time off and have all the luxury you want”. I especially hate the word “effortlessly”. The harder life is for you, the louder you hear how effortlessly it can be done.

I always have the same question to those speakers – “If your system can make you a millionaire overnight, why would you spend your time sleeping away from your wife and kids, sleep in a different hotel every night for 200 days in a year to convince us, suckers, to buy your product? Why aren’t you on the beach next to some amazingly blue water working an hour each day and drinking tequila? Isn’t it because you are too busy running workshops?”

I never ask it out loud, because I know the answer. I have 30,000 readers a month because I understood that not everyone can do it. I certainly could not!

Overnight success

I swear to you I have tried. I spent hours studying the same course with Gal. The Internet marketing guru said to us, “You need $90 to buy a website and hosting and an hour a day. Everyone can do it.” I sat 4 and sometimes 5 hours a day, watching videos, reading, summarizing and trying to implement, but pretty quickly, I realized that our Internet marketing guru’s “overnight success” had taken about 8 years and the reason he was successful was that he sold Internet marketing products to aspiring Internet marketers. It was a closed market – people who were making money by convincing others they could make money using their own products. They even have affiliates that sell to the same people. It is like a feeding frenzy. There was so much dishonesty there (MLM, or “direct marketing”, is the same).

My product was a coaching service. I did not want to tell my client they could make a fortune from my coaching, because it was just not true. Every time I watched Gal programming something, I freaked out. I wanted a business, not a course in HTML, PHP, CSS or any other strange acronym. I wanted to work with my clients, do my workshops and sell my books, not to sit in front of the computer all day long.

So many readers come to my site because I decided to give up trying to prove that everyone can do it by doing it myself. Instead, I focus on what I do best and allow the Internet marketer in the family to do what he does so well. Coaching and doing Internet marketing are two different skills and focusing on one leaves much less time for the other.

All my life coaching buddies wanted a website and spent months learning something that Gal did in 2 weeks. In the meantime, they neglected their life coaching practice and got nowhere in both areas.

The reason I feel uncomfortable when people ask, “How did you do it?” is because I did not do it, at least not on my own. Someone had to take my parenting advice, my books and my coaching services and publish them so that many people would actually get to see them.

My message to you is that the online world is big and keeps expanding. Yes, at some stage every business will have a site, even if only for presence. If you want a business online, if you want buyers online, if you want a website even just as an online brochure with your contact details, stick to what you do best and let those who know Internet marketing do the rest for you.

The same applies to any business service and even to family and parenting services, such as accounting, public relations, gardening, construction and architecture. In the same way you would not reinvent a smart phone and prefer to buy one that has been developed by experts, using expert services can produce better results (perhaps more expensive upfront, but cheaper over time) and allow you to concentrate on what you do well and enjoy doing.

You just have to let go of the illusion.

Life is much better this way.

Happy days,
Ronit

My Site Has a PR5!

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Gal Baras

C H E C K T H I S O U T !

I was showing someone this site as an example and quickly checked my Google PageRank (PR). It was 5!

In the past, whenever someone offered me SEO services, the first thing I did was check the PR of their site, their keyword density and so on to get an impression of what they have been able to do for themselves. More often than not, the site looks good, but has a PR3 or lower. That, of course, made me wonder what potential clients might think of my own site, if they discovered its PR.

I worry no more, for my site is in with the best of them.

Life is good,
Gal

P.S. If you ever want a PR5 for your site…

Market Leadership

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Gal Baras

I often hear people talk about “market leadership”, wanting to be “the market leader” or even to “dominate my marketplace”. Many business and marketing seminars hype their audiences up with these and similar terms.

But these concepts cause the opposite type of think to what actually brings success.

You see, in order to succeed in business, online or offline, we must let the market lead us, rather than trying to lead the market. There is one of us or maybe even 50 of us in the business, but the marketplace, particularly online, is endless. There’s no way we could lead it anywhere.

What we need to do is pay attention to where the market is headed and position ourselves there as a good supplier that delivers products and services to the heart of what the market wants and needs. In other words, we need to follow our clients’ lead.

Who needs to dominate and endless market anyways?

One of the best sayings I’ve every heard about online marketing was this:

Instead of dragging your message across the land to your audience, why not just drop it into the river?

Basically, what this says is that instead of focusing on what you have to offer, packaging it beautifully, putting up signs about it, calling out to anyone who will listen to tell them about it and putting up a great website to sell it, you’d be better off finding out what people need and tailoring the perfect product or service for that. They will then ignore the packaging, come up with messages of their own, spread the word to all their friends and sell your product or service for you.

Where your website is concerned, by the way, if you create it so it looks beautiful to you and your product or service is featured brightly and with hyped up statements, you may very well sell nothing. On the other hand, if you take the time to study you clients first and build a site that they will like, a site that uses their language, pictures of people like them and their favorite way of using a site, they will carry you again to online sales and online profits.

So trust in the market and let your clients lead you to success.

You can use online services like www.reputation.com to help keep your PR in check. It’s always good to be aware of how the market may respond to any decisions you make.

You don’t know what you know

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Gal Baras

For the past few months, I’ve been facilitating a Small Business Online workshop. Small Business Online is an Australian government initiative to help small business owners create web presence for their business and get business online.

The material is excellent and provide a solid foundation for working with online marketing specialists and web developers. For people who are in IT and want to build their own site (or one for their wife’s business), the course provided many opportunities to gain perspective from experienced consultants and even have their specific sites reviewed.

The main messages of the workshops were:

Small business owners can’t focus on too many things. Therefore, they should do what they do best and engage professionals. So we gave the participants some great advice on how to select and get the best out of their Internet professionals
Small business owners are typically action-oriented and want to do things, but getting business from the Internet requires setting business goals, developing strategies and measuring results. So we tied every technical decision area back to business objectives
Small business owners are familiar with every little aspect of their own business, but they are often blind to the bigger picture. For example, they may know their clients on a personal level, but they have no idea how the people who don’t buy from them think, so they can’t attract them. So we showed them ways to find out “where the wind is blowing”
Small business owners often apply offline, local thinking to their online venture and can’t see the true potential of the global web.

In the last session, Phil Hoffman (the program organizer) and I were talking (again) about why the participants should hire professional Internet consultants to help them and at some stage, I said, “You don’t know what you don’t know”. That’s because professionals keep their knowledge up to date and small business operators have no hope in Hell of doing that while running a business, so they are very likely to miss important stuff.

But then I thought about something else – “You don’t know what you DO know”. That’s because whenever I look at a client’s business with my Internet Vision, I see potential products they could sell worldwide, ways to engage their market and incentives they could use to inspire action and they just go, “Wow! I could never think of THAT”.

And that’s the point, folks. You don’t know what you don’t know, but you also don’t know what you DO know that somebody else may want to pay you for. After years of doing something, you think it’s easy, but it’s not easy for everyone.

Brokers in any market add value to their clients by being able to find and match products and services. It may not seem like much, but to a client in dire need who can’t find what he needs, the value is incredible.

Great web developers, graphic designers, copy writers and online marketing specialists add value to their clients by making their sites more robust, faster, more appealing, more compelling and generating more profits than the clients could do on their own. In most cases, the cost is incurred ONCE and the benefits are ONGOING.

If you live in Queensland, I invite you to register on the Small Business Online site (click the banner below) and plan to attend the upcoming webinars. I’ll be there too.

Talk to you soon,
Gal

What will compel you to buy?

Posted on August 12, 2010 by Gal Baras

This is a question that was posted on LinkedIn:

Will you make a purchase from a stand-alone Landing Page that you’re visiting for the first time?
To elaborate, lets take a sample scenario. You’re surfing around, looking for some particular service vendor (products are much easier to sell online, I believe). You click on a sponsored result, and come to a page – a stand-alone landing page that lists their package offerings, with a call-to-action to buy. Lets assume that the page is of decent quality, and you are kind of inclining towards these guys.
Signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form – a typical visitor would probably do that. But would you actually spend money and buy something from this page? What would impress you enough to go “wow” and immediately start subscribing to their services?

Here is my answer.

Personally, I look for the feeling of safety when I buy, which is made up of several components:

The identity of the seller must be clear, preferably verifiable, and there must be a way to communicate with him/her offline
There must be conditions under which I can get my money back and a clear method of doing that. If a third party is involved (like Clickbank or PayPal), that’s even better, because I will feel protected
It must be absolutely clear what I am buying through the content, the images, any videos, testimonials and so on. For some things, the only thing that will make me buy is a demo, but screen captures come pretty close in most cases
The testimonials must appear to be from real people, who have gotten actual value out of the product/service and who describe their personal experience in sufficient detail to inspire my trust. Any website link and the testimonial is disqualified as biased. People who have just finished a workshop have not done anything with their new knowledge, so they are heavily discounted. Real, personal, raw life experience = trust
The way things are laid out and the style/tone of the text give me a feeling. If the writer is confident, I will buy. If the writer tries to sell too hard, I will not buy. Good things are easy to sell, because their value is readily apparent. If the seller is not convinced he/she can sell without an effort, there must be something wrong with their offer
I HATE pop-ups. If anything pops up, that’s the end for me

Although the question was about standalone sales pages, my answer is just as relevant for anything you do online. Tricks don’t work! At least, they don’t work for long. Search engines, social networking engines and website visitors are quick to learn and will always find out the frauds.

The more real value you provide, the easier it will be to present it. Your feelings about your product, your service, your company and yourself as a person shine through your website pages and you can’t fake them.

As a life coach, I believe deeply that the world is our reflection and that by working on our inner peace will give us better results than trying to manipulate anybody or anything else. It’s the same when trying to sell something online. Love your product with all your heart. Truly feel you would buy it yourself and the sales will follow.

This is why I am an ethical Internet marketer.

Happy online business,
Gal

The Truth Will Set You Free

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Gal Baras

This is one of the reasons I love doing business on the Internet. In Cyberspace, you can be yourself and there will always be enough people who will think you’re pretty cool and, if you’re selling something, will buy from you and say “Thank you”.

Most of my clients have an offline marketing mindset when they venture online for the first time. Offline marketing is all about branding and creating an image for your company, or so they think, because they’ve seen all those TV ads for “big money” companies.

By Internet marketing is very different.

According to the world population clock, there are 6,860,146,847 people in the world today. Let’s say that only 10% of them have Internet access. That’s 686,014,685 potential customers.

Can you ever hope to service them all? Nope.

Could you keep in touch with all of them, even if you have a large team? Not likely.

Is it possible that out of these people, 1 in 1,000 will love what you offer and want to buy it? Yep.

That leaves us a nice group of 686,014 people. For a small operator, even that’s a big undertaking and it’s probably best if they don’t all take out their wallet or sign up on the same day.

So why not be yourself? Why pretend and work so hard to create a false image? After all, once people actually come to your business, they will quickly find out what you are really like and, if it’s not as advertised, they might just go away.

The main purpose of having a website is to have yourself represented online 24×7 and for as many prospects as possible to find out more about you, learn to trust you, buy from you and then tell all your friends about how wonderful you are, so that they too come and visit your website, except they will jump straight to the buying step.

This is why I always tell my clients to find ways of being present on their website – through the text style, through the images, through audio strips and video clips – so that website visitors will quickly discover who you really are and get excited from your personality. Attracting lots of traffic with promises you can’t fulfill is pointless. Attracting a continuous stream of visitors who will feel at home with you, buy and refer others is very much to the point and will create an endless online business for you.

So be yourself online, because you’re worth it!

Gal

AdWords Performance – I Win!

Posted on June 11, 2010 by Gal Baras

This is the story of how I beat a Google AdWords Certified Partner at their own game – getting clicks to a website quicker and for less money.

I’m great with SEO, so most of my sites do well over time without advertising, but I use Google AdWords to launch sites, boost their performance and run time-sensitive promotions.

Recently, I was so busy I decided to engage another company to take care of my AdWords campaigns. I figured someone who solely does this for a living has to be better than me too. If they were good enough, they could justify paying for their services.

So I called a Google AdWords Certified company, which I’m not going to name, so let’s called them AW. They said they would audit my own campaign, make some generic suggestions and if I wanted, they were happy to take it over for me.

When I received their report, it was indeed generic. The recommendations came straight from Google’s standard documentation and seemed to ignore what was happening specifically in my campaign, but I thought that was all they had promised, so never mind.

I rang them and agreed they would run my campaign for 1 month, then stop and call me for a detailed phone review. They said I would have to double my budget for the campaign for best performance and pay them $150 for their services. Since this campaign had to do with a parenting workshop, for which each ticket was priced at $250, I figured I would do well anyway, so I agreed.

When I saw the AW-proposed keywords, I wondered why they were all singular. “Google doesn’t care about this”, they said, “It matches singular terms to plural queries. That’s not a problem”.

“OK”, I said, “You’re the experts”.

After a few days, I wondered if I could monitor their progress, so I asked to link the new campaign to my Google Analytics account. What I saw in the following days was my ads appearing at the top of search pages for their chosen keywords, but very few clicks each day. My budget wasn’t being spent, but my business wasn’t getting any traffic either. My confidence did not improve by seeing a single plural term outperforming every other (singular) keyword phrase by a mile.

A month passed and I heard nothing. I waited a few more days and then inquired about the campaign. It was still going, so I asked to stop and have that detailed review they promised.

… and all I got was this lousy Excel spreadsheet (not even a T-shirt). The sheet didn’t even have a column for the one thing I wanted: conversions – people who bought tickets for the parenting workshop. The number of clicks was oh, so small, no wonder there were no conversions.

“Bugger!” I thought, “I’m going back to doing my own thing”.

To show you what happened in detail, here is a comparison of my first campaign, the AW campaign and my new campaign and you can judge for yourself:

Campaign	Days	Impressions	Imp/day	Clicks	Clk/day	$	$/click
Before AW	56	14,763	263.6	279	4.98	299.28	1.07
AW	37	2,150	58.11	57	1.54	75.84	1.33
After AW	10	3,005	300.5	54	5.4	55.56	1.03

Basically, if you gave AW $100 today and told them to run a parenting workshop campaign for you, they would take 49 days to deliver 75 visitors to your site. I would deliver 97 visitors to your site in just 18 days.

Like I said before, I win!

[Disclaimer: I am NOT a certified AdWords partner, but I'm happy to help with your AdWords campaign on a consulting basis or by managing it for you. Contact me for more]

Get Your Site Listed

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Gal Baras

How long does it take to get your site listed?

One of my clients recently found out that, with my help, it can take as little as 6 hours!

I met this young man at a networking function and he told me his website had been launched 4 months before, yet there was no trace of it in Google Search results. In fact, if anyone typed the full site URL into the Google Search box, Google would tell them it didn’t know about the site.

When you try to offer your products or services to people and you tell them you have a website, one of the first things they do to check you out is search for your website. This man had given business cards, sent out emails and used various other ways to let people know about his site and he was embarrassed it was not indexed by Google.

“Leave it to me”, I said to him, “I’m going to do some thing real quick and your site should get picked up by the crawlers a lot faster than it would otherwise”.

I didn’t want to commit to a timeframe, because nobody controls ol’ Googlebot, but I had a good feeling about it.

So I went back home and spent about an hour creating some inbound links to my client’s website. No big deal, right? But by putting those links in places frequented by Googlebot, including social media sites, some magic soon took place.

After 24 hours, I searched for my client’s site and saw 6 results listed. “Not bad”, I thought, “Not bad at all”.

When I rang him to let him know, he said, “Are you kidding? I got up and checked first thing in the morning and already saw 3 results then. This is such a relief, man! Thanks”.

But actually, one of these search results had been labeled “18 hours ago”, which means it was picked up only about 6 hours after I did my work.

At the time of posting, there are 23 search results for my client’s site, including some PDFs.

Is you site not getting listed? Contact me

Portfolio

Here are some sites I have created and/or promoted online, each with its own story. I built them with Internet marketing in mind. As you will see, the results are impressive and have made significant impact on the respective businesses.

Plastic2go – plastic pallets, crates and bulk containers

Within 6 months of launching this website, inquiries for plastic pallets, crates and bulk containers were strong and steady. While I initially used paid ads to attract targeted traffic, I gradually cut back until I turned off the AdWords campaign completely. Plastic2go – plastic pallets, crates and bulk containers now receives only free search traffic and site referrals, being #1 or #2 in Google Search for every one of its keyword phrases. Even the images from Plastic2go feature highly on Google Image Search for the relevant searches, which means more free traffic.

Despite being a country-specific website, Plastic2go receives inquiries from outside Australia, simply due to its outstanding search performance.

Be Happy in LIFE – life coaching

This website has been redone 3 times based on its results and feedback from visitors who became clients. The Internet marketing includes a combination of paid ads, search engine optimization and blog referrals. As of the time of writing, it is one of the highest ranking websites for the very competitive phrases “life coach” and “life coaching” on Google Search against well-funded coaching schools.

Over the past 2 years, Be Happy in LIFE – life coaching has been pulling in a regular stream of life coaching, parenting classes, relationship coaching and kids assessment inquiries, building a list of prospects and sustaining this small coaching practice.

Family Matters – parenting blog

This website has received a steadily increasing flow of visitors who come to read the daily parenting posts, subscribe and participate in discussions. Based on WordPress, Family Matters makes posting content easy, allowing for more than one author to contribute and for many people to post comments every day.

This Internet marketing of this blog involves only my time and skill, yet gets thousands of visits per month, advertising requests and loads of syndication opportunities and drives traffic to other related websites. It receives its traffic from search engines, social networks and other websites and continues to do better all the time.

Family Matters – parenting blog appears on the first page of Google Search for the term “family matters” against the government and a movie and in the first position for searches like “positive thoughts for kids”, “positive thoughts for children” and “positive parenting quotes”.

As you can see, these sites are doing extremely well for their owners and operating on a very small budget. The ways in which I promote each website depends on the nature and target market of the site itself, but they are all very well optimized to be found easily, read and navigated easily and perform well for their business.

Would you like similar results for your own business?

Get business online Today

Get Business Online

Connecting YOU to your market

Tag Archives: success