Charlie Cook's MArketing for Success Insider's Club

Search Engines

Top 2 Things You Should Know About SEO

By Nelson James   |   December 8th, 2009

Is SEO finally dead?

Many claim that SEO is dying – that the whole theory behind it will soon stop having any relevance. People have been making this claim for years, and some are making this claim even as I write this post.

The truth of the matter is » (Read More)


Recession-Proof Marketing Tips: Learn from Kellogg’s

By Dave Bascom   |   November 24th, 2009

When recessions hit, businesses naturally tighten their wallets. And more often than not, many businesses drastically cut their marketing departments.

Smart marketers, however, understand there is a great opportunity in times of recession – especially for those who crank up their marketing efforts. If you do it right, you can swoop in and grab up market share while your competitors are huddled in the corner in the fetal position. » (Read More)


10 Questions to Ask About SEO

By Nelson James   |   November 17th, 2009

When you choose a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company, you are putting your online reputation in its hands. An SEO company can make or break your online campaign, so finding the right one is vitally important.

But how do you know which company is right for you? How do you know if you can trust a company to help you build a respected online presence? Before you hand over the keys to just any SEO firm, ask the following questions: » (Read More)


How SEO Increases Traffic & Revenue

By Ash Buckles   |   November 10th, 2009

With more than 400 million searches performed online every day, SEO is SEO Tips & Strategiesbecoming increasingly important to businesses. If your site doesn’t come up on the first page of the search results, then you are missing out on thousands, if not millions, of potential customers.

So, how do you make sure your website gets to the top of search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing? » (Read More)


6 Tips For Making Your Website More SEO-Friendly

By Richard Kline   |   October 29th, 2009

If you’re looking for more qualified traffic to your site, here are some very simple ways to help ramp it up.  Before you spend a lot of money with a SEO firm, take some time to understand the basics of Search Engine Optimization and try these simple steps: » (Read More)


The Only SEO Resource I Recommend

By Charlie Cook   |   May 22nd, 2008

The number one question I hear from web site owners is, “How can I attract more people to my website?”

You want to know:

- What works to put your site on the first page of Google?
- How to play the search engine game without getting thrown out?
- How to stop wasting time on your search engine positioning and
finally start getting results so you can make money with your site?

If you’re frustrated I can understand it. There are a lot of ideas
floating around about what works with the search engines, which
ones should you use?

I’d be frustrated too. I know I was when I first started marketing
online. All that work to create a site and hardly any visitors or
sales.

So what’s an ambitious person who wants to grow their online
business supposed to do? I know you want to make your business more
profitable so I’m going to give you some options.

Here are three ways to handle this problem of improving your search
engine positioning
and making more money with your site. They are:

1. Copy What You See Everyone Else Doing.

Just do what your competitors are doing. Try every idea you can
find and see if they work for you. This process of testing takes a
big investment of time and money – but you could do it.

Given enough time you might stumble on what works. You just might
identify the formula for putting your site at the top of the search
engines. Of course you don’t know which ideas you read about or see
others using are worth copying but you might get lucky. Who knows -
you could get it right.

I have to ask you, is this the fastest way to reach your goals or
wouldn’t it make more sense to get expert advice, which leads me
to…

2. Hire An SEO Expert.

You could seek out and hire a top search engine expert to put
together your search engine optimization campaign, and you’d spend
$12,000 to $20,000 a year. Not to mention, the sorry truth is that
many SEO firms don’t get it right. Remember they only get paid for
working on your search engine positioning, not for results or
increasing your profits.

Even if you can find an expert and their strategy works, once
you’ve paid them to keep your site at the top you’ll need to pay
them again and again.

For a few people hiring an SEO expert to do your search engine
positioning can be the solution, but it’s the most expensive one
and only suited to already successful businesses that have the cash
to invest in it which is why I also suggest…

3. Discover the SEO Solution and Use It Again and Again.

Find out for yourself how to put your site at the top of the search
engines
. Recently I had the chance to interview Stephen Mahaney of
Planet Ocean and if you were on the call you heard that he knows
his stuff.

As I mentioned on the call, I discovered Stephen’s advice ten years
ago and it has helped me attract a flood of visitors each month.
month. Want to do the same >>

Ready to discover how to put your site at the top of the search
engines >>

I know you’re serious about building your online business so let me
ask you two questions:

How many people are there in your target market that could use your
products or services?

If you could tap, say 5% of your total target market, how many
sales would that be each month?

If you’re like most businesses there are thousands if not tens of
thousands of people who want and need what you deliver, but most
aren’t buying from you – yet.

Think about it. You have an ENORMOUS potential to profit online. If
you could just get even a small percentage of all these potential
customers and clients to your web site – you’d be making more than
you ever imagined.

Ready to discover the truth about the search engines and the simple
steps to take? Get answers >>

Which solution the right one for you? Let’s review.

1. Copying your competitors – you could but it rarely works.
2. Hiring an expert for top dollars – if you can find one you trust
it’s still expensive and comes with no guarantees.
3. Finding out what works yourself and using these successful SEO
strategies over and over to make more money.

Whatever you decide, it’s up to you to take action today to be more
successful. If you don’t who will?

To your success,

Charlie

P.S. If you sign up with Stephen in the next few days, you not only
get the comprehensive and easy to understand book, ‘The UnFair
Advantage Book on Winning The Search Engine Wars’, you’ll get a
free 6 months subscription to his all important updates so you can
stay abreast of the latest changes and what to do about them. Get
the details here >>

P.S. 2 Stephen guarantees your satisfaction. He calls it his ‘dog
ate it’ guarantee because he doesn’t care why you want a refund. If
you want one, just tell him the dog ate it! …even if it’s the
last day of your 6 month subscription!

Get ‘The UnFair Advantage Book on Winning The Search Engine Wars’
to see your profits soar >>

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Why 97% of Website Marketing Doesn’t Work…

By Charlie Cook   |   October 23rd, 2007

Most web sites don’t successfully generate more than a small trickle of sales. Is yours one of them?

Let me guess. You have a web site and it may be attracting visitors, but it’s only generating a couple of sales each week, if any. Is the volume of traffic the problem?

It’s true that you need visitors in order to convert them to buyers, but even getting thousands of visitors a day won’t guarantee a single sale. So you turn to your web designer for the answer to the problem. Your web designer should know what to do, right?

No!

Marcia called me from Chicago. Thanks to some top search engine positioning, her web design firm’s site gets around four thousand visitors a day. Wow! Even I’m impressed by that number. With that kind of traffic, Marcia’s firm should be generating between two and four hundred leads a day and have more business than they can handle.

When I asked Marcia what their conversion rate was – how many leads they generated from their site – she told me that it was only one lead per month. That’s only one lead out of 120,000 visitors.

Ouch! With all the interested prospects that stop by their site but never contact them, Marcia’s firm is losing millions of dollars of potential business a year, and their site was built by some great web designers.

Want results from your site? Find out how to get visitors to your site – and – how to convert them to buyers. Use this link >>

Building a website is like building a house. Given enough time and lumber, you could throw up some kind of structure that you might call a house even without any blueprints. Of course, the plumbing might not work and the kitchen might end up on the third floor.

But you wouldn’t hire a builder to put up your new home without a plan. You’re smarter than that. The first thing you’d do is find an architect to draft a plan for your house. Once you’d worked out a plan that you liked, you’d find a builder to turn your plan into reality.

Did you ask your web designer to build your site without first giving them a marketing plan and the marketing copy they needed to create a winning site? Whoops, you and 97% of web site owners did the same thing and got the same results.

Web designers build sites, but they don’t create your web marketing strategy or the master plan to start with. And without a master marketing plan to get prospect’s to contact you and to convert them to buyers, no matter how much you spend on your site, it won’t sell your products and services.

It’s not your web designer’s job to map your online selling plan, they just build sites. If you told your home contractor you wanted an all black granite kitchen, they’d build it whether it was a good idea or not.

Web designers and carpenters get paid to create what the owners want. And if you don’t know how your site should be structured to generate sales, don’t count on your web designer to tell you what to do.

If you want a web site that generates leads and converts them to buyers, you’ll need to give your web designer the compelling marketing copy and the marketing strategy and plan for your site to follow.

With a web site marketing and sales strategy in hand, your web designer can do their job and help you build a web site that sells. Without it you’ll waste your money.

Want to build a web site that sells, or fix yours so it converts visitors to buyers? Use this link to get the details >>

Charlie
Small Business Marketing That Gets Results

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Does SEO Still Work to Improve Your Web Marketing?

By Charlie Cook   |   October 16th, 2007

“I’ve been told by my webmaster that SEO is a waste of time and I shouldn’t bother. Is he right? Does search engine optimization still work?”

- Phil from Austin TX

It’s a question I’ve been asked more than once. I’ve also had clients tell me that they’ve hired search engine firms to help them with their search engine optimization but after spending thousands of dollars and waiting for months, seen no appreciable change in traffic to their sites.

- Is it a worth spending the time and money to make your site search engine friendly?

- Will it make a difference in the number of people who visit your site?

- Or would you be better off spending your money on pay-per-click advertising? Should you bother with any of it?

Absolutely. Search engine optimization, that is, helping the search engines put your site at the top of their listings, is the single most effective way to build your business.

Put your site in the top ten listings or the top few spots for the keywords your prospects use to find your products and services, and you can make a lot more money. Of course once you have lots of traffic you’ll need to know how to convert it into sales.

Want to know the secrets to getting all the business you can handle? Find your web marketing answers >>

Sugar For Your Site?
If you want a quick energy boost, you might grab a candy bar. You get a surge of energy, but when the sugar has burned through your body an hour or so later, you feel tired.

To build the stamina to get through the day feeling great, you eat a balanced snack of protein with some carbohydrates that will keep you going and build muscle.

Pay-per-click advertising is like sugar. It provides almost instantaneous results, but it’s short-lived, and to reenergize your web site marketing you need to buy more and more. Each time you spend money on advertising you get a handful of visitors, but to keep them coming in you need to spend again.

Search engine optimization or helping the search engines give your site a top ranking is a better balanced diet. It’s harder to put to use, but it has longer-term benefits. For example, each time you get another relevant site to link to yours, you help your search engine ranking for months, if not years to come.

Where should you spend your time and money to attract more buyers with your web site marketing? Use this link >>

Where to Spend Your Promotional Dollars to Start?

If you’ve allocated a thousand dollars a month to promoting your web site, I recommend that you spend half of that on optimizing your site and half on pay-per-click advertising. Site optimization can take months, in the meantime, use pay-per-click advertising to bring in prospects.

When to Shift Your Promotional Spend to SEO?

After the first 6 to 12 months, shift your efforts and your resources to concentrate on your search engine marketing efforts. I spend less than 10% of my promotional dollars on pay-per-click advertising and use it primarily to test sales headlines or book titles. I spend 90% of my web-marketing budget on making my site even more search engine-friendly and keeping it at the top of the search engine listings.

Yes, SEO still works! When people find your site in the top 10 or even top 20 listings on Google, they’re much more likely to buy from you, link to your site and want to joint venture with you.

What should you know about SEO?

Before you hire an SEO firm or ask your webmaster to take over your online promotional efforts, find out what it is you should be paying them to do. Many SEO tasks could easily be done by a real or virtual assistant.

And don’t assume your webmaster is an SEO expert, either. Only a few are. Web work is very specialized. Web programmers and web designers should know the basics of SEO to do their work well, but rarely are they SEO experts.

Step 1 – Understand the core SEO strategy that will put your site at the top of the search engines.

Step 2 – Give your webmaster and assistants a clear map of SEO tasks to do every month to help you generate more traffic, more leads and more sales.

Step 3 – Make sure your web site converts all the traffic you’re getting into leads and sales.

Want the details? Use this link to get the bonus special report on search engine placement. Start here to improve your web marketing >>

- Charlie Cook
Advanced Web Marketing Ideas
Work

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Where to Submit Your Web Site…

By Charlie Cook   |   June 20th, 2007

What’s the secret to being found online? Start by submitting your site to every search engine and directory you can. To make it easy for you I’ve included a short list of the most important places to submit your site or you can use SEOCompany’s comprehensive and somewhat overwhelming lists of search engines.

- Charlie Cook
Web Marketing Ideas You Can Profit From

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What Do You Need to Know About Creating Links to Your Web Site?

By Charlie Cook   |   September 18th, 2005

Here’s a blog to check out on the top 4 things you need to know about getting links to your site by William Royal. Read it at http://www.royallmedia.blogspot.com/ – Charlie Cook, The Small Business Marketing Response Expert
.

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