Charlie Cook's MArketing for Success Insider's Club

Search Engines

How Do I Get My Web Site Out There So People Find It?

By Charlie Cook   |   August 30, 2005

“I have very little control over my website. What is the best way, for my site, to get on search engines.” – Nancy Brown

If your web site was built with a third party template and is hosted on their site you may have little you can control about the actual site. This puts you at a serious disadvantage in terms of getting people to your site. You can’t make most of the changes you need to help the search engines find your site.

You can promote your site in a number of other ways including using:
– Pay-per-click ads to send traffic to your site
– Articles
– Online press releases
– Links from other sites.

My best recommendation is that you create your own web site, one you can write and set up so the search engines find it.
– Charlie Cook

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How Do You Know When To Change Your Small Business Marketing Strategy …

By Charlie Cook   |   August 14, 2005

Are you having the same problem with your marketing my Dad has with his favorite skiff? Read the article below to find out. And, yes the story about my Dad isn’t just funny, its true.

How Do You Know When To Change Your Marketing

When you put an ad in a magazine, send out a sales letter, or put up a web site, you want results. You want your prospects to contact you and to buy from you; you hope to get a flood of calls and sales.

If your marketing isn’t generating the results you want, then it’s time to change your marketing strategy! Don’t expect to improve your results using the same strategy.

Here’s an example. A search engine positioning firm I work with was having trouble generating leads. Yes, in spite of their superior ability to put their site at the top of the search engine listings and do the same for their clients, they were hardly converting any of their site visitors into leads and then clients. They were getting well over a thousand visitors a week to their site and generating at best a single inquiry per week.

Think about this for a minute. Most people assume that getting your web site to the top of the search engine listings will solve all their web marketing problems. The reality is that it doesn’t matter how many visitors you get to your web site (or how many sales letters you send or ads you place,) if you aren’t generating leads and converting them to sales.

Find out how to change your small business marketing so that your ads, your sales letters and your web site get a huge response. Use this link to discover a proven marketing strategy for generating a steady stream of sales.

The search engine positioning firm I was working with has many satisfied national clients, are highly skilled and great people to work with, but their marketing strategy was broken. Their website looked very similar to their competitors’ sites. In fact, with a lot of information about what they do and who they are, it read like a blend of the information found on websites of other firms who offer similar services.

Many small business owners look at their competitors’ marketing materials and cobble together the information for their own pieces based on what they see. The problem with this approach is that they are copying a strategy that isn’t working for someone else. Once they publish their materials, someone else copies the same stuff and tries to make it work. Know anyone who has done this?

Nine times out of ten, marketing materials put together in this way lead with the company name and then list services or features. I can guarantee that if you are using this approach to marketing your business, you’re not happy. This marketing strategy doesn’t work.

Discover a business marketing strategy that can help you attract more prospects, generate more leads, and increase your sales. Use this link to find out how to generate more leads and grow your business.
Is your marketing working? Ask yourself the following questions:
– How many leads did my web site generate relative to the number of visitors it gets?

– How many leads did my ad generate relative to the cost and number of people who saw it?

– How many leads did my sales letter generate relative to the number of letters I sent out?

Then ask yourself:
– Given the number of leads generated, how many did I convert into sales?

– What was the dollar volume of sales generated from each lead?

It’s not a matter of time, either. If your marketing materials aren’t pulling in clients within a few days, they’re not going to do any better if you keep running them for months.

This client had the same problem with his small businesss marketing strategy that my Dad has with his boat; he just couldn’t let go. After years of being dragged up and down a rocky beach, my Dad’s aluminum skiff has lost many of the rivets in the bottom.

Put it in the water and throttle up the outboard, and fine sprays of water push up through the small rivet holes as you pick up speed. Everyone in the boat gets an upside down shower. Wherever you’re going, you arrive damp.

Every year, the family tries to get Dad to replace his skiff, but he’s had it so long he can’t bring himself to part with it, even though its not doing the basic job of keeping water out.

Is your marketing like my Dad’s boat? You’ve used it for years but it’s not generating enough new business. If so, then it’s time for a change. It’s time to use a marketing strategy that puts you on top. Use this link to discover a proven and reliable system for attracting clients and increasing your sales.
– Charlie Cook

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To Succeed With Small Business Web Site Marketing – Think Big

By Charlie Cook   |   August 10, 2005

My current site, www.marketingforsuccess.com, has become one of the top sites on the web. How did this happen?

Each week for the last two years, I’ve written an article a week and more recently added a couple of blog entries. Page by page the site and the resources it provides has grown until it now is big in content.

Want your small business site to be big in profits. Start thinking big in terms of content. Add a page to your site each day and soon the search engines and your target market will be seeking you out.

– Charlie Cook – Helping you get a better response and more clients with your marketing

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A Secret Selling Opportunity I Bet Isn’t Found In Your Web Site Marketing

By Charlie Cook   |   July 27, 2005

Every web site has a “not found” page. This shows up when for a variety of reasons. You’ve deleted a page that someone is trying to link to, someone types in the wrong address, etc. Each time a visitor to your site sees this page its a dead end for them and you.

On one of my sites that includes a directory of newsletters I discovered I had a Not Found page that was showing a lot, over 11,000 times a month. What could I do?

I added a sign up link for my free marketing newsletter on the Not Found page and now have a steady stream of new sign-ups for my newsletter coming from my not found page. Click here to see it. For many more ideas on ways to generate additional leads and sales from your web site, Click here – Charlie Cook

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How to Select the Best Keywords for the Search Engines

By Charlie Cook   |   July 25, 2005

Now there is an alternative to using Overture’s keyword suggestion tool.

Keyword Discovery provides you with a list of the most frequent uses of the various uses of your keywords. – Charlie Cook

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What’s the Most Common Search Engine Marketing Mistake?

By Charlie Cook   |   March 28, 2005

“How can I help the search engines find my site and avoid common search engine marketing mistakes? – Adam Brock

1. Start by creating a list of keyword phrases and the variations you think people will use in searching for your products and services.

2. Use the Overture keyword suggestion tool to organize these according to the frequency people actually search for them.

3. Use the keywords in this list when you write your web page copy and articles you distribute online.

Learn exactly how to write and code your web site to help the search engines give it a top ranking. – Charlie Cook

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Who Does Your Search Engine Positioning?

By Charlie Cook   |   March 9, 2005

“You must have someone really good doing your search engine positioning. I see your site appearing in the top 10-20 spots for lots of keywords on Google. Who does it for you?” – Kristie T.

It is true my site enjoys top 20 positioning for a lot of keyword phrases related to marketing. Phrases such as free marketing plans, marketing message, marketing blog, web site marketing plans, marketing coach, business marketing tools, etc.

This is a result of a simple system I developed that is you can learn with my internet marketing manual “Creating Web Sites that Sell and I’ve applied to my site myself. Of course the first step is having highly relevant content, that’s what the search engines are looking for. The second step is knowing what the search engines are looking for, that’s what you’ll find explained in Creating Web Sites that Sell. – Charlie Cook

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Why Isn’t My Web Site Coming Up in the Search Engines?

By Charlie Cook   |   February 28, 2005

“Can you tell me why my website isn’t coming up in the Google Search engine?” – Michelle Brown

The search engines, including Google, look for certain key elements on your web page when they spider it. If those pieces of information aren’t present or don’t include the proper text they won’t know how to categorize your site or will prioritize it incorrectly. How and where you use your keywords on your page is critcial to the success of your web site marketing.

Just because your site is relevant doesn’t mean Google will find it or put it at the top of the search findings. To help Google you need to use your keywords in specific places and with a certain number of times. Getting your site listed at the top of the seach engine can happen by accident but usually it requires very carefully planning your pages to ensure they help the search engines find them. I’ve detailed what you need to improve your internet marketing and put your site at the top of the search engines in Creating Web Sites that Sell. This comprehensive manual explains how to structure and write your web site to improve your website marketing plan and sell more with your web site. I also work one-on-one to provde select clients with web site marketing advice. – Charlie Cook

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How Can I Find Which Keywords People Use?

By Charlie Cook   |   February 16, 2005

“Where can I reverse look up the words people are using when they are looking for your products?” – Buck Buckingham

I use the Keyword Suggestion tool at Overture to get a rough idea of how many people have searched for a set of keywords in the last month and related keywords. Once you’ve identified the keywords people use in looking for your products or services you may want to use them in your elevator speech.- Charlie Cook

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My Biggest Search Engine Positioning Mistake

By Charlie Cook   |   February 8, 2005

It is in the past so I can admit it. I made a huge search engine positioning mistake that was a drag on my site traffic and it took me forever to figure it out. As the author of one of the first books on search engine positioning it was a little embarassing to say the least. Here’s the mistake I made and how to avoid it.

Originally my marketing site could be found at www.charliecook.net. This site benefited from some top search engine placements in Google and other popular search engines thanks to applying the few simple guidelines I detail in Creating Web Sites That Sell . Traffic from Google was growing steadily, that was until I made the following mistake.

About ten months ago I rebuilt my site and moved the content to the current location at www.marketingforsuccess.com Thanks to my strategy of using articles to attract prospects and my huge distribution list of online and offline editors who publish my articles, my website traffic continued to grow, but I noticed I couldn’t find my site in Google. Yikes, what was going on. Preiously I’d been in the top 10-30 spots for every one of my keywords.

During the last six months I’ve worked closely with a search engine postioning firm to try and fix this situation and get listed in Google again. After trying a variety of tactics which worked to boost my listings in every other search engine, we tried removing all the original pages from my www.charliecook.net site. I had left them up under the assumption that since they were originally well placed they’d continue to draw traffic which would be automatically forwarded to my new site. Big mistake!

It turns out that Google didn’t like having similar content pages on both my sites, even though the first had a permanent redirect on it to my current site. About a week ago I removed all the pages from my initial site, resubmitted it and my current site to Google. This week my site is back in the top 10-30 positions in Google for most of my keywords.

Lesson learned. If you create a second site for your content with a new url, after a month or so, delete the original and just have the domain forward to your new domain. Want to learn how to avoid more web marketing mistakes, check out Creating Web Sites That Sell – Charlie Cook

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