SEO and Social Media Marketing Blog
by Mark Murnahan, a Web GuyAre you tired of SEO and social media marketing "snake oil"? Find out how to recognize the difference in good SEO vs. bad SEO and how to reach your target market.
Are You a Participant in Your Business, or Just a Witness?
Filed Under: Business in General, Internet, Internet marketing, marketing, Podcast, SEO Blogging, SEO Factors, Website Development Issues.
I blame the Internet. Attack this all you like, but I blame the Internet and its many over-hyped success stories for allowing people to let down their guard and take a “witness” approach to their marketing. We all know that the Internet is a hugely important tool to businesses, but the lack of understanding how and why the Internet is valuable to a company has led a lot of people to throwing their hands in the air and giving up participation in their marketing. It is a knee-jerk reaction people make because all that information about Internet marketing is beyond the comfortable things they understand.
What makes this worse is that as so many people give up trying to be participants in their marketing efforts they give up on even knowing the right questions to ask or directions to take. It is as if they just throw all their fate to Google and a few other websites, and hope they get the right results.
A Non-Participant Seldom Gets Exceptional Results
I received a message a couple days ago that bothered me. It bothered me enough to write this, but it was a message that I see every day from small business people. I want to share it with you, but first, I want to say that this is a good example of why small businesses remain small.
SEO and Social Media: Picking Chicken Poop from Toothpaste
Filed Under: Internet, Internet marketing, marketing, SEO Factors, SEO Tools, social media, social networking.
I have heard many arguments about separating SEO and social media by trying to decypher which is more valuable. Here are a few questions that marketers use for producing arguments:
- Which is more important … SEO or social media?
- Which discipline provides the higher return on investment?
- How do you calculate the ROI of social media?
- SEO? Isn’t that some sort of fairy dust?
- How do you separate chicken poop from toothpaste?
OK, that last one was my own personal interpretation, but seriously … how can people get this so mixed up that they stand in their corner spewing their respective knowledge without coming together in the center and having a big group hug?
SEO For Hire: The Worst Job for an Honest Person
Filed Under: Business in General, Internet, Internet marketing, marketing, SEO Blogging, social media.
I have been in the business of SEO (search engine optimization) for over a decade, and it has provided me a very handsome living in that time. I fell in love with the SEO field with the excitement of having nearly anything I ever really wanted listed at the top of search engines reach the top, and remain there. I still do that, today … every day.
In the time I have been in the industry, I have accumulated so many stories of winning that it is no wonder it feels like a bad drug habit. Through the 2000’s, SEO was the basis of my means to sell millions of dollars in Internet access and web hosting services to Internet service providers. I rocked that market and earned squillions. SEO was really fun, indeed!
Adding to all the fun and games, I have enjoyed things like a relatively small client crediting me for increasing their new home sales by over $82 million in the first year they were my client. That is like an intravenous drug to me, and hearing how many jobs it created for that somewhat small organization means that I have done something meaningful.
How SEO and Social Media Are Like Sex Drugs and Nigerian Scams
Filed Under: Facebook, Internet, Internet marketing, LinkedIn, marketing, Podcast, social media, social networking, Twitter.
The majority of the world’s population do not need sex drugs. Likewise, the majority of the world’s population do not need SEO and social media marketing. If you try to convince a spammer of this, their ears turn off. They just don’t get it, because they know that one in “X” squillion people who receive their message will respond.
It is easy to compare the propagation of false and misleading information about SEO and social media marketing to the false and misleading spam of sex drugs and Nigerian banking scams. It is also easy to compare the changes of social media’s growing spam to the way email turned spammy. A huge problem I see is that social media propagates the spam of social media. When SEO and social media is flooded with deception, it devalues the industry and creates much skepticism of these useful services.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Etc.: All Those Friends and Now What?
Filed Under: blogging, Facebook, Internet, LinkedIn, marketing, Podcast, social media, social networking, Twitter.
Making friends is fun. Some of them just touch us for a moment, and some of them last a lifetime. Social media has changed a lot of our communications, and sometimes for the better. Usually it is for the better, but not always.
Over the past decade and a half or so, I have acquired a lot of contacts online. I try to keep a closeness with them, and I still enjoy the friendship of many old friends from the once-popular AOL and Yahoo! social networks. In fact, one in particular stands out. We met ten years ago and became close as members of a Yahoo! chat group that got together every Friday night. We were married eight and a half years ago, built multiple successful companies together, and have three darling children now. A sad and frightening thought that occurs to me is whether with today’s astonishing level of social media static and frenzy to reach so many people, whether she would have even heard me.
You can find a lot of useful information about SEO and social media marketing in my blog archive. If you do not find what you are looking for, let me know and maybe I will write about it.
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