May 2010 - Page 2 of 3 by Mark Murnahan

How To Avoid Going Broke in Business

Free advice? The Internet is full of it. You cannot swing a cat without hitting somebody willing to give you free business advice, marketing advice, tips, and ideas. So what is it all worth? I will answer that later, but first, want to share a story of my Monday with you.

I got a call from a good friend who is a top-level economist. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, and has an impressive job. He is a brilliant economist. We talked about solutions for a mutual friend’s locally-focused service industry company. While we spoke, he was in the car and driving through a strip mall with a huge grocery chain. He gave his opinion of how chilling it is that the once-thriving strip of over 30 businesses has only three businesses left. We talked about the huge challenges a business faces, and how scared companies are today.

What does it all mean, and should you be scared? Allow me to share some observations. First, should you be scared? Yes! Heck, I am scared for you. The numbers are against you, and if you don’t change with the tide and swim harder and faster, you will not make it … you will drown. Even the most brilliant business minds have had to make some big changes in the past couple years. Some will succeed, while many will give up. The worst change a business makes is that of just “riding it out” or taking a “wait and see” approach. In order to make it, it will take action … uncomfortable, scary, swift, and decisive action. If you are not sure I am on the mark with this, just watch this recent video!

Taking Action to Avoid Going Broke

Let us, just for a moment, stop allowing the blindness of false positivity to get in the way of logical thinking. I know, it feels like things will be better if we think positively and maybe if we ignore the downsides, economic conditions will improve. This is not a case of ignoring it and it will go away. Quite the opposite. If you ignore your business challenges, the business will go away … not the challenges. So what can you do to come out of this better than the rest, and even better than before? After all, that is what you hope for, right? Whether you are trying to catch up, trying to keep your lead, or trying to break records with success, doing more business tomorrow than you did yesterday is going to require some changes. It does not matter if you are ready for change or not, change is ready for you.

Only Wet Babies Like Change

Here is an example of fearing change that nearly cost many millions of dollars.

A few hours after visiting with my economist friend, another friend dropped by to pick up a modem from me. I have an Internet company. I have modems of all shapes and sizes. While we visited, I told him I am looking for a new sales representative. Actually, a presentation representative is what I am seeking, because I really hate boardrooms and ridiculous business politics. I am worn completely smooth each day with lies and excuses from companies who contact me, and I want to pay somebody who is willing to filter it out for me. Tom is a lobbyist, and I know he is well-networked and knows a lot of motivated people with good business experience. I told him I that am entirely worn out by answering the same questions each day, and hearing the same sob story from companies over and over. I decided that it simply is not good for me to face ignorance and indifference, and it sucks away a little bit of my soul every day.

He related my services to a bill he helped to pass that would cost the State of Kansas millions of dollars, but then return nine times that much by its passing. He told how frustrating it was to explain it to so many people who simply said “the state can’t afford it” because it was not in the budget. He understood how exasperating it was that the concern was the money, but that there would be far more money soon after the passing of the new legislation. The math was done … it added up, but legislators would still express fear of passing the law. Tom gets it! Tom has been in my shoes, and he understood why my fingers are tired from making that reaching for the throat to choke somebody gesture when somebody leaves their brain on the nightstand the day they call me.

I hear the same thing that Tom heard from legislators in my job every single day. People want to free up the money to spend on good marketing, but they cannot see beyond the check they write. They cannot see the vision. Sure, I can, because it is my job. I know the math, and I know that for each dollar out, there are dollars in. I know risk-management, and I know how to calculate expected returns. I know how much my clients benefit from what I do, but for new clients, it is as if it is just a big blur … it is something they cannot see.

I hear you, people … I get it … you are paralyzed with fear, but there is a point when you have to push the “go” button or go home without a job. Business will not cure itself.

What Makes Business Happen?

What makes business happen for you? It should be clear that if more people know your business, and understand the benefits of doing business with you, it helps your company. You know this, right?

While everybody is out there vying for your customers, you must market your company better than ever. That does not mean having a blog, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account. It means understanding how to use the tools. It means having a better plan and understanding that execution of the plan must be done better than the competition. It means that marketing is not a commodity, and that Pepsi beat out those other cola companies because they had better execution of a better plan. Luck only spreads so far, and after the luck is gone, it is going to take marketing talent and marketing creativity.

Marketing Made Cheap

There are a lot of cheap marketing offerings out there. I was curious about some of them, so I decided to dip my hook in the water and see what fish would bite on a small worm. I wanted to see how people really think. I took a call from one of those squillions I normally weed out who asks for prices instead of wanting to know what he is buying. I asked all the important questions. I took a little time for discovery, and found that I could take his competition to the wood shed and bare-assed whip them like an angry stepfather.

I took it on the chin and wrote up an eight page plan for his stated budget of $2,500 (yeah, I laughed, too). It was a full-featured proposal including much research, custom blog creation, search engine optimization, social media marketing, five Murnahan-written and circulated blog posts, and web hosting for a year. The expected return was many tens of times the investment. I mean, this guy would have been set on a path paved with Murnahan-engraved gold bricks, and just because I wanted to make an example of somebody.

I received an email from this company owner a couple days later and it read as follows:

I hate to admit this, but I can’t afford your services. At least not in the immediate future. I really like your ideas and respect your abundant knowledge.

I’m respectfully declining your services.

Sharing My Findings About Cheap Marketing

I could write for days about things I have learned about people hoping to get something for nothing. It is not new, and a lot of people really think of marketing as all the same … that it is a commodity. It is easy to overlook or ignore the research details, planning, execution, talent, experience, reach, and other assets in a good marketer’s toolbox. In this case, I decided to share my example of delving into the cheap marketing arena with some people. I asked a small sample of people who know my work fairly well how much they thought my absolute floor is for taking on a new project. The answers averaged around $80,000, with none answering below $25,000 as what they thought the absolute lowest project that I would or should take on as a marketing consultant. Well, what I should do and actually do are two different things. I will take on small jobs if I like the people and I like the product. I liked the guy with a $2,500 budget that I wrote an extensive plan for. Do you think he made a good business decision? I don’t benefit by lying to you, so here is the truth. In this case, a measurably better decision would have been to pay the marketing guy before the light bill or the mortgage.

Good marketing is really hard to find, and sometimes hard to produce the upfront cost, but the bottom line is that if the marketing is performed well, it will make you more money. Good marketing is an investment, and not a cost. If you find a good marketer, you must never forget that fact.

About that earlier question of what all that free business and marketing advice is worth, the answer is as different as the people offering the advice. My advice and the next guy’s advice are not equal, and marketing is not a commodity.

Facebook Privacy Fears Are Absurd!

I know, I just slapped a lot of Facebook’s 400,000,000+ users with an insult. The real insult is how many “Chicken Little” minds there are out there crying “The sky is falling!” You are a “grown up” right? You can take responsibility for things you say and do, right?

I have read about the biggest fear-mongering pitches ever surrounding Facebook’s privacy settings. I see people moaning about how all their privacy has been taken away and they feel all exposed. They whine about the fact that they actually have to take responsibility for the stupid things they don’t want the rest of the world to see. For me, that has simply been obvious. I mean, I keep my wallet in my pocket instead of leaving it on a counter at the airport. I have routers and virus protection to keep my data safe from prying eyes. If I don’t want somebody to have something, I just don’t give it to them.

Free Facebook Privacy Guide

Didn’t anybody ever read the privacy information published by Facebook in “A guide to privacy on Facebook: Understand and control how you share information” or was that too much work? The service is free, but people still want to complain that it has some rules and guidelines.

If you are afraid of things like somebody tagging you in a photo on Facebook, how do you feel about blogs, email, or even fax for that matter? Is it the service’s fault for transferring the information? That seems kind of absurd to me, considering that transferring that information is exactly why people use Facebook. If people will just take a little time from their selfish Facebooking life to set how they want their information to be handled, maybe they can move on and complain about something else.

Facebook Privacy Beyond Facebook

If you are concerned about what somebody will see, keep it off the Internet. Did you forget that anything on Facebook or any other website can be copied and pasted, printed, or otherwise reproduced without your authority? Who are you going to blame for that? Will you blame the copier company?

I entered a couple of comments on a blog post about Facebook privacy on Mashable.com a moment ago. I will share some of what I said here, and I invite you to go and see the context of my comments as well.

My Comments:

“Facebook is not the whole Internet. What if they take the photo and email it and post it on their blog? Would you like Facebook to control that, too? What if the Internet didn’t exist at all? Couldn’t people still be embarrassed by a bad photo? Marilyn Monroe was, and she didn’t use Facebook.”

“That is the business they are in, but that does not make Facebook, Google, Twitter, or any other site responsible for our indiscretions, or for our privacy. I do not want my documents read when I take out the trash, so I shred them. I do my part to protect my privacy. My privacy is my responsibility. What others do to reduce my privacy by posting a photo or writing something about me is often beyond my control. That does not make me stay indoors. I just know that if I pick my nose while I am in public, those in my direct contact may not be the only public who see it. The fact that there is a venue to share it does not mean the venue should be blamed. It is like blaming the phone company for somebody sending a fax about you. The person doing the faxing is at fault, and not the phone company or the fax manufacturer.”

My point here is this: If you want to blame Facebook instead of yourself, it is like blaming your Internet service provider because you got a virus but did not protect yourself with up-to-date antivirus software. Take responsibility to know the services you use online. If you are not willing to take the time to know the rules of a service, and to keep up to date with those rules, don’t use the service. Nobody is breaking your arm to use Facebook.

Let’s be grown-ups and stop blaming everybody but ourselves for our personal responsibilities. Go set your Facebook privacy however it makes you feel comfortable, or delete your Facebook account like many fear-mongering technophobic users are suggesting.

Defending Facebook

Facebook is a corporation that makes decisions based on their interests. That is the way a corporation is supposed to work. Sure, you can whine that they should ask your opinion, but it seems apparent that they have a pretty good feel for what people want. Maybe you think a company with such a big omelet can do it without breaking a few eggs, but I don’t see anybody else attracting 400,000,000 people across the world for their great plan.

It seems to me that with a user-base larger than all but three countries in the world, they are doing just fine without you in their boardroom.

7 SEO Guarantees: Yes, Guaranteed SEO Can Be Legitimate!

The search engine optimization (SEO) industry has attracted a lot of bad search engine optimizers. For a good SEO, there is a lot of money involved. Wherever there is a lot of money, there is usually a lot of fraud, too. It can be really hard for the average person to know the difference between good seo and bad seo.

I know it is not only me who gets the offers in my email each day offering guaranteed top ten results at Google. I manage a lot of websites, and nearly each of them will receive offers for guaranteed SEO results. I even get these offers for sites that I intentionally exclude from search engine indexing, which makes it pretty clear these guys don’t know much about targeting their market … they just have an email address. They claim to guarantee top ten results, but top ten for what search? I guess that would be pretty easy for keyword phrases like “unicorn hunting expedition”, but what about the stuff that really pays off? What about the things that create more business for the client, and not just a buck for the SEO?

SEO Guarantees Should Be Objective

A guarantee without an objective measurement, that is reasonably guaranteed to be achievable, and is guaranteed to be of value, is no guarantee at all. However, that is the type of guarantee people get suckered into all the time with SEO. It is a good reminder that it is really easy for people without integrity to make false claims. It is a constant challenge for me to try and understand why people so often believe lies more than they believe the truth about Internet marketing. They only see the bold print with great claims, but their eyes glaze over when it comes to the fine print or when common sense is necessary. You know, like the common sense that kicks in and tells you “it sounds too good to be true.”

I want to share seven legitimate SEO guarantees that are based on objective third party measurements that are very achievable by any SEO worth the water their body is made of. These are guarantees that actually have meaning, because they are measurable and not subject to individual interpretation, and they place specific responsibility on the SEO.

SEO Guarantee Number One: Website SEO Readiness

Measuring website readiness for SEO can be performed in many ways. It seems that a lot of non-SEO people do not realize how objective this can be. There are a lot of very specific deal-breakers that can preclude a website from high search ranking, and they can be measured very objectively. I will give you just a couple of examples.

Website Grader by HubSpot: HubSpot is a company that provides tools to help companies measure and improve their website and social media reach. As a side note, it is actually kind of funny that if you search Google for HubSpot SEO or HubSpot social media, or a bunch of other terms related to their services, you can find my thorn in their side. I have given HubSpot a hard time in the past, but they really do have some good products to measure a website’s preparedness for SEO.

Website Grader analyzes a website based on preparedness for SEO mixed with its traffic level. A legitimate SEO guarantee based on a set ranking on Website Grader is something achievable to the SEO, because it will provide details of what to improve, and it is objective data from a third party. If the SEO guarantees a HubSpot Website Grader score of 98 within 60 days, it is something that is both measurable and readily achievable to even an average SEO. Try it for yourself and see where your site ranks. If you want to improve it to 98+ within 60 days, your SEO should be able to make a legitimate guarantee. This particular site is presently ranked at 99.7, and it did not require any rocket surgery. Click the badge to see a sample report for my blog.

Google Webmaster Tools: I have previously pointed out that Google wants to index your website. Providing relevant listings for searches has everything to do with how Google makes money. They provide a lot of help for making websites more search engine ready, because it helps them meet their business objectives.

Google Webmaster Tools provides objective information to help website owners measure and maintain the SEO preparedness of their website. This provides a measurement that any SEO should be able to guarantee, legitimately. I will include a couple screenshots to show SEO standards that any SEO should be able to achieve, maintain, and guarantee.

The appropriate SEO guarantee in the instance of Google Webmaster Tools is clear and very simple to track. It is also very achievable to any SEO that has been in the business more than three weeks.

SEO Guarantee Number Two: Traffic Measurement

There are a lot of ways to measure website traffic. There are many different value metrics such as number of unique visitors, time on page, bounce rate, traffic sources (keywords, referring websites, etcetera), new vs. returning website visitors, and more. If a guarantee is to count, it must be well defined and based on historical data compared to new data.

A legitimate guarantee that the SEO can make in traffic measurement could include ongoing work in specific increments until certain goals have been met. For example, if the goal was to increase search traffic by 300 percent and keep the time on page above four minutes, the SEO will provide (and log) no less than ten hours per week in services until that goal is reached. That would be a reasonable guarantee. If the SEO wants to get to work on other projects, he or she will probably work pretty hard to be sure the goal is met without delay.

SEO Guarantee Number Three: Alexa, Quantcast, Etc.

Ranking at Alexa, Quantcast, Nielsen, and etcetera is another form of traffic measurement that is more important to websites focused on selling advertising than their own products or services. These rankings have often been contentious, and many people will argue their validity due to possibilities for falsified or fraudulent results. However, it is hard to argue that the SEO has not done a good job if a website’s ranking in two or more of these services has made significant improvements, especially if they each produce results that are in agreement.

If the SEO chooses to guarantee increases in these rankings, it can be beneficial to measure more than one of them simultaneously. A guarantee of ranking in the top “X” sites on each of these services could mean the SEO will provide the amount of increase at a specific cost and continually log efforts until the goals are reached. If the SEO priced it too low, their guarantee is to keep providing work, and proof of that work, until your objective is reached. An incentive to the SEO for higher than promised results is often an additional guarantee of another sort. It guarantees the SEO will be excited to work on your project.

SEO Guarantee Number Four: Increased Incoming Links

Incoming links pointing to your website is the most desirable and effective way to achieve higher search engine rankings. Because of its importance, it is also one of the most abused areas of SEO. The most common scams I see are from crooked SEO selling useless links. Many SEO will promise you a squillion new incoming links to your website, but what they do not tell you is they are largely links from domains that are penalized by all major search engines for being “link farms” and can actually do more harm than good. It is why this kind of search engine optimizer will generally have their own website penalized and cannot produce a single example of a website where they have created a large number of useful incoming links.

If any SEO guarantees to produce “X” number of incoming links, you should see it as a big red flag. On the other hand, if they guarantee a given MozRank increase based on high quality links, it had better come with some pretty serious content production. That means producing the kind of website content that will attract people to share your article in social media, reference it in their blog, or submit it to Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and others. Any SEO promising links simply by adding your web address to blog comments, forum posts, and link farms is likely to hurt your business in other ways, too. If you want to know how to create incoming links, read this article titled “SEO Backlinks: Why Most SEO Fail at Link Building“.

Links are not created equally, and some are not only worthless but even harmful. Any SEO guarantee including link building should be based on measurements of link value and not just link volume. A reputable measure of link value may be found using SEOmoz Linkscape or Open Site Explorer (example report). Of course, there is also Google PageRank, but a good SEO knows that PageRank is not a good measurement tool, and it is old and unreliable data.

A reasonable guarantee for the SEO to offer is to produce and promote useful content on your website and continue until it reaches your set goal. This is another example of an SEO guarantee that places responsibility on the SEO to work for their money.

SEO Guarantee Number Five: Increased Search Phrases

The number of unique search phrases that bring you traffic can be a useful measure of overall performance. I do not mean measuring the number of search phrases where you appear in results, but rather the number of search phrases that actually brought visitors to your website. It can indicate that your site is being more thoroughly indexed, and that its overall search engine health is improving. If your site was visited as a result of only 500 unique search terms in one month but then visited as a result of 5,000 search terms the next month and 10,000 the following month, it is a pretty good indicator that things are going well.

This is a very measurable metric that has meaning, but for the purpose of a solid guarantee, it should be measured alongside the number of unique visitors to your website. You know, for the skeptic to be sure the SEO is not running a script to falsify the results.

A good SEO guarantee based on the increase in search phrases could be something such as additional increments of services being logged by the SEO until “X” percent increase in unique search phrases and “Y” percent associated increase in unique visitors.

SEO Guarantee Number Six: Solid Marketing Plan

This is a preemptive guarantee that is a hard one for a lot of people to really grasp as a truly measurable guarantee … but it is! Many people will look at SEO as a commodity that is produced the same by every search engine optimizer, and is just a set of basic tasks we perform the same for each client. This is not how it actually works, but it is why I receive many visitors searching for SEO hourly rates (google it for yourself).

I recently wrote about the relationship of marketing cost vs. marketing value, and the truth is that if you want all the pieces to fit just right, you should plan to make a sizable investment. This is because a good SEO will be making a sizable investment of time and knowledge to help you achieve your business objectives. As you can perhaps see here and throughout my blog, there are a lot of tasks to perform in reaching good search engine results. The specific work of my industry is not the same for any two companies, which is why a properly outlined plan can be the greatest SEO guarantee of all.

The lack of a solid marketing plan is a guarantee to fail. If the SEO provides a well-formed contract outlining the discovery process, proposed execution of tasks, and reporting of outcomes, it is likely the best guarantee that you will get what you pay for. When it is carefully planned out, high quality SEO can become the greatest asset to a company, topping the chart for online success tools. It can take a company to a whole new level and send their profitability and market share through the roof.

SEO Guarantee Number Seven: Inaction Guarantee

Number seven is the SEO guarantee grandfather of them all. I guarantee that there are a lot of websites returned in a search for what you offer. If you do not take action to optimize your position, or you lack the proper actions, you will miss a lot of potential business. That is a guarantee worth betting on. If the SEO has a strong track record and will make specific guarantees like the ones suggested here, you will risk a lot more lost money by inaction than if the SEO took your money and split for a country without extradition.

SEO Meta Tags: Oh, You Must Be Another SEO Expert!

I was on the phone with a new prospective client just yesterday and he brought up the use of meta tags. I immediately felt like a time machine had just sucked me back to the 1990s when search engines gave attention to the meta keywords tag. The topic of the meta keywords tag comes up once in a while, and each time I think to myself “somebody really suckered you bigtime, buddy.”

I find it really hard to comprehend how some people imagine that something simple like meta tags will make a real difference in their website ranking in search engines. It is as if they think they have really out-smarted all the technicians over at Google, Yahoo, Bing, and etcetera, with this cool trick called a meta keyword tag.

As long as there are people who ask “do meta tags help with SEO” there will be plenty of people to con them out of their money.

Why can’t the meta keywords myth just die? There was a day when a good SEO could outsmart a search engine with tricky little tactics like this, but how can somebody in 2010 really think that there is such a simple way to outrank billions of other pages vying for search engine rankings? Do these people really think they were the first on the scene and they have uncovered the golden key to the Internet? Come on … anybody smart enough to tie their shoe should be able to reason this out with just one little “duh, I guess this kind of makes sense” moment of reality-checking.

I still hear people talk about meta keywords from time to time, and more often than I like. I guess maybe it is just some people’s way of trying to sound like an expert. Maybe they will sound like they did their homework if they can start a discussion of meta tags when they call the SEO. Seriously, is that what people think my job is as a search engine optimizer … to strike up some good keywords and feed them into the back door of Google? That is either totally absurd, or so brilliant that I want to choke myself for being so dumb I didn’t think of this sooner. Perhaps all I really needed to do all this time was add some meta tags to my websites. Gosh, I have wasted so many years of my life creating useful and amazing website content that people link to and share with others. I should be punished for being so slow to catch on to this one simple fix that could have made me the king of Internet search. I guess maybe all of the SEO lessons that I have authored over the past decade and a half are useless.

OK, enough of the sarcasm … I had my fun. The fact is that although you will still see sites using the meta keywords tag, it is as my grandpappy would say: “about as useful as teets on a boar hog.” For those of you big city folks, that means boobs on a boy pig. They don’t feed the piglets, and meta keywords will not feed you, either.

Google’s Matt Cutts on Meta Keywords

There has been so much speculation of the usefulness of meta keywords that if we were sitting in a bar, I would curse like an angry sailor to make my point. My wife says that makes me sound less intelligent, and since we are not having beers together, I will just give you good solid references. Here is what Matt Cutts from Google has to say on the topic of meta keywords. In his words, “we don’t use that information in our ranking, even the least little bit.”

Here is another interesting article that I found from Search Engine Land about meta keywords.

When Meta Keywords Mattered

There was a time when the keywords meta tag mattered to search engines. It was designed to help search engines understand the overall emphasis of the page. That was a great idea to make the Internet easier for search engines to index all of the Web’s content. A few search engines even chose to use the information, but that only lasted just a short time before people started trying to attract searches for Brittany Spears and Madonna to their completely unrelated website about treating bedsores. It never really worked all that great, because above all, search engines have always read the visible text of websites, and the links pointing to the website. By the way, invisible text (text that is the same color as the page background) is also a huge mistake that a few idiots still think is a good idea, but that is another blog post.

If you really think that something so easy as a meta keywords tag is going to drive traffic to your website, ask yourself how logical that really sounds. If some slick talking SEO somewhere convinced you that meta keywords will help, take your money to the grocery store now, before that slick talker takes all your money and leaves you hungry.

Which Meta Tags Matter?

There are a couple meta tags that actually matter, so don’t just assume that all meta tags are totally useless. The meta description tag is quite important, and is often used to display a description of the page in search engines (unless there is more relevant on-page content to display). The “robots meta tag” will direct search engines to follow links on the page or not, and whether to index the page or not. This is also why we have a “robots.txt” file. The “Content-Type” meta tag tells computers the character encoding of the page. Yes, there is useful meta data in a web page, just as with any other computer file.

While I wonder why the keywords meta tag myths still circulate, I think it must just be because people want to sound smarter than they really are about the SEO industry. If you can make it sound like some really advanced programming skill is involved, it must be more important. I mean (in a booming voice) “meta keywords tag” sure does sound “techie” and important, right? So why do they even exist if they are not used by search engines? I think it is simply because of habits and lingering myths that most of the meta keywords tags on the Internet still exist. After all, there are still some meta keywords right here on my blog. I guess mostly because I have been too lazy to remove them and they don’t actually hurt anything. However, if you look at the source code on this page, you will not see a keywords meta tag, but I assure you it will still rank really nicely in search engine results.

If you still just must decorate the behind-the-scenes head section of your website, here is a meta tag generator that I wrote sometime back in 2001 or earlier. I do not know an exact date off hand, but I was able to find it in the Internet archive at archive.org from Jan 2002 (hilarious archived version). Maybe you will find it to be a cool tool, but just don’t count on those meta keywords to feed your family.

Imitation Marketing Means Imitating Marketing Failure

Trend, fad, popular, meme, hot, new, fashionable … word it however you like. Everybody wants that piece of whatever it is that works in marketing today. Companies and individuals frantically try to be on the leading edge of a wave that promises to be the “next big thing” that will bring them success. They hear how well it worked for this company or that company, and then make carefully calculated efforts to imitate that success. Perhaps they always heard it is best to imitate success, but on the flip-side of that coin is the far more likely outcome of imitating failure. I call it “imitation marketing” when people strive to imitate success, and it comes with a good side and a bad side.

Anybody who has used popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and the rest, has surely watched the imitation that happens every day. Somebody tweets, facebooks, or blogs about something “hot” and all of the sudden every other blogger scurries to their keyboard to blog about the same thing. If you catch on with things that are “hot” in a market, you have a greater chance of catching your 15 minutes of fame that was promised. Let’s face it, a lot of what we see each day on the internet is just the same thing, regurgitated with an alternate slant, and worded slightly different. If you look at any industry, you can see all the competitors mocking each other while only a few really stand out. Is that imitation really going to produce the results they are seeking? The odds are against it. There is a near infinitely greater chance of wasting time, energy, and money!

The Imitation Marketing Monster Eats Its Young

In this Internet age of vast information and lightening fast social media reach, we have collectively created a monster of sorts. What many people do not understand is that it is a monster that eats its young and as the cycle goes on, it eats itself.

Along with economic insecurity over the past couple years, it has become easy for people to believe they can save money by handling their own marketing. The Internet is the obvious place for this to happen, because it is easy. Anybody can put their name out there on the Internet and cross their fingers. The craze for do-it-yourself marketing on the Internet has created “marketers” out of about every living being that has a pulse, and a mouse to click with. Standing out from the crowd will take something unique, and not just “imitation marketing”. If you are up to the task, I am here to try and help you with my experience.

Whether you like this or not, you are right there in the thick of it. There is no other reason for you to read my blog than to try and know a better way to market what you offer and to become more profitable. Face it, you are here because you want more money, and you think you may pick up a tip to make that happen faster and cheaper than your competition. It is either that, or you have it in the back of your mind that you may pick up the phone and hire me to produce and implement a plan for your marketing … but that is only a tiny fraction of the people reading this. I am here to try and help you in either case, because it is what I do. I want to see you be successful.

Pay attention as I give you a surfing analogy: The waves of popular methods of Internet marketing exposure come a lot faster than ever before. By the time you see the wave, your window of opportunity to surf it to the beach has already closed. The riders of that wave were on it way out at sea, and it is moving far too fast to jump on now. If you want to surf in today’s marketing ocean, you are better off making some waves of your own.

I do not want to discourage you, and if I do, I will make it up to you with some encouragement. I am going to tell you what you are up against in your marketing, in order that you can prepare for the challenge.

Meeting the Creative Marketing Challenge

I just have to share a piece of reality in order to emphasize my point. Most of my readers are still swimming along in the vast open water and trying to stay afloat by imitating success. What they seldom realize is that by doing so they carry a higher risk of failure than hiring it out to experienced people like myself who do this all day long … for decades. They will soak up every bit of useful knowledge the vast Internet has to offer, and then try to create something more inspired and genius than all of the trained marketers who have facts, figures, creativity, and experience on their side.

Just as a simple example, consider how creative you are feeling today. Do you have it in you to write three, four, or five blog articles and marketing copy to promote your brand … or even one article? Do you have it in you to be sure what you produce is in front of hundreds of thousands of people … or even a thousand people? The right people? Can you write three books in three months (and actually have them sell) … or even one book? Can you write something and be assured that it will be listed within the top five results for the keywords you targeted less than ten minutes after you publish it … top 2,000 results? Do you have these things on your side? Well, I do, and there are others out there like me. That is what you are up against. When you get busy with your marketing, be aware that a lot of us make it a full time job, and some of us are damn good at what we do. To get ahead, you will have to be damn better.

The rampant drive for do-it-yourself marketing is one of those crazes that, like all other fads, has seen its time and is a wave that already crashed on the beach. It was a great idea, but when you are one of millions of people attempting to be the loudest, smartest, and overall best at what you do, your voice is squelched by the static. So, is there a fix? Yes! This is where I make it up to you if I discouraged you.

Stop Seeking Marketing Waves and Start Making your Own

Stop doing what they are doing. Stop trying to play follow the leader. Do something genius. If you spend your time making more waves and less time trying to catch one that is over your head, you have a lot better chance of surfing all the way to the beach. It may be easy to look at successful marketing and say “I can do that, too” but the odds are overwhelmingly against you. We trained and experienced marketers stacked the cards a long time ago as we earned our battle scars. We have been there, and we have done that. There are a lot of guys like me who spent 100 hours per week for years of our lives studying, practicing, learning, and tapping into every resource available to crush the competition of our clients. There is simply no way to beat us at our own game, so instead, you must create your own rules. Make your own waves. If you want to do it yourself, do not even try to do what everybody else is doing. You do not have the same resources as the competition, so don’t try to market as if you do. Take a serious inventory of your strategy and what resources you have at your disposal to implement that strategy. Stop trying to figure out how to do what the others are doing and get serious about what makes you different and better.

Tips for Overcoming Imitation Marketing

Try sitting in a quiet and dark room for an hour and think about what makes you different. Bring a voice recorder to take notes. Repeat this as often as you can. Read more books, blogs, and do everything you can to exercise your brain. The more you use it the more creative you will become. Read my blog. It really has a lot of great brain food to boost up your creativity. Start blogging! Read these really good reasons to blog and also read about how blogging improves intelligence. Seriously … go do it and stop trying to make excuses. This is for your benefit, after all. This is intended to help you increase your marketing talent.

Get really serious about what you are doing and stop letting yourself become comfortable. If you are going up against professional marketers, you are going to have to get serious with your marketing creativity, and it just doesn’t come naturally … it takes a lot of hard work. I get paid to make my clients successful, and if you want a piece of any market I am in, you had better brew another pot of coffee and plan to stay up all night.

Go sit in that quiet place and think really hard about how you are going to do something that nobody else is doing, and start figuring out how to make some waves. If you are not up to it, you should start getting settled with the lackluster results of “imitation marketing”, and be ready to take some heavy risks of failure. My hope for you is that you will try harder than ever, and take some of my tips. Otherwise, hire me to do the work for you and go get some rest … this marketing stuff is exhausting!