We've written a few articles on how-to web marketing. With continual hyping of writting articles
and advertising in your local ad rags (magazines). Here's more of the same, however this time with pictures of examples!! Examples first, words of wisdom follows...
Fig 1. theinquirer.net front page!! Wow, it's the techie's version of having a feature run about you in the nytimes.
Fig 2. jobsinjapan.com front page!! Locally in Japan jobsinjapan.com has huge traffic.
Everyone is always asking, "how do I get our sites on the top of search engines." The answer is, your thinking the wrong way. Don't aim for the top,
just aim to be in the search results. Search result positioning is random with a few factors that help to get better positioning.
Search engines are not the holy grail of the web. Search engines are not target. Local businesses are target.
Most people find sites initially by search engines and then form habits of going regularly to a few web sites. So remember to advertise there. And don't be overly fixated on media web sites. These are free sites where people are just spending time. Popular high traffic businesses, people buy services from them. These people are more likely to buy services from you.
Banners build a brand. Often advertisements in ad rags (magazines) are little more than banners. The goal is get people to think about you when a topic comes up. Brand recognition means future sales.
On the web, banners and links are nice, but think articles. Go that extra step and ask others to do the same. Banners and links don't deliver a story, articles do. Be a good host and give us some entertainment.
Bad news works. Positive/Passionate people that only read editorials are rare. True business people who get excited about other local businesses advertisements are like discovering a new species and is a good reason for a celebration. For all the rest of you, that actually read propaganda...opps...news articles, you're addicted to negativity. If you fall into this category first step is break the cycle, it will change your life. With that said even positive/passionate and true business people realize that negativity sells. So complain about something and write about it. Instant traffic.
You link or write an article about another web site. The search engines then show that article in the search results. Not to their site, the article is on your site so you get the benefit.
Your friend links or writes an article about your site. Then their site shows in search results and your benefit is that they are talking about you.
Bigger is better. What is the measure of "bigger"? The shear quantity of text. That is why many low-image high textual web sites such as drudgereport.com or jobsinjapan.com get better positioning. It is also why companies with flash or graphic intensive sites get no business. Their sites look good but search engines can't read giberish.
Sites using .html / .htm only are high performers. Pages that use scripts such as .php, .asp, .cgi, .cfm, etc trip up search engines. Take a look at your local news web site notice that successful sites use only html.
Story Behind the Banner.
We had a spat with spamhaus.org a little while back. We were using a shared server at a server farm. The
server got blacklisted and so some domains email were being rejected by ISPs that use the spamhaus.org blacklist to filter SPAM. It was
the server farm's responsibility to get unblacklisted however they did nothing for two months, so we sent spamhaus.org an email.
spamhaus.org has an email address which is supposed to be used to get off the blacklist. Imagine our surprise, having sent an email to
spamhaus unblacklistme email address, when it was bounced back in our face. spamhaus.org was filtering the unblacklistme account. So basically
if your blacklisted then you can't resolve the issue without using a non-blacklisted account. A classic catch 22 situation. So we let
spamhaus.org have it. First we used a non-blacklisted email address and then CC'ed a seathing email to the server farm, spamhaus.org
and theinquirer.net. That got spamhaus's attention. Resolving the issue was simple the server farm removed the offending domains off
their server and then spamhaus.org verified that the domains were removed. This whole process took about two weeks. Mike Magee at
theinquirer.net seemed to have appreciated us sending in the information about our spat with spamhaus.org and we were graciously rewarded
with the WIJ banner being put into their banner rotation. Thanks Mike.
