Do you check your statistics to see if your web traffic has moved up since you checked it an hour ago? Do you ever feel just a tinge of obsession over your Google Analytics or Clicky statistics? Do you wait impatiently for the next update of your score on Alexa, Compete, or Quantcast? Do you get frustrated when your PostRank score is a day behind and you just have to know if they actually picked up on all of your hard work?

Stop it! Just stop it!

I know how easy it is to feel better when you go and see how (or if) people are interacting with your website or your social media profiles. It is actually very important information to know. Knowing your statistics, and understanding what they mean is extremely valuable for effective online marketing. The problem arises when it is taken to a level where productivity is lost.

The Internet has changed. Wait, scratch that … the world has changed, and the people of the world are fully engrossed in “The Information Age”. Maybe it is even beyond that, and perhaps we can now effectively call this “The Static Age” because of the massive level of static we must sort through to hear or be heard. Right now, today, there are likely 42 squillion people writing about your industry on a daily basis, and unless you are the reincarnation of Elvis Presley, you will have a hard time capturing their interest.

It is time to take a closer look at an important metric of your website traffic. Who is coming to visit, and will they return? Did you do something that knocked their socks off? Did you have something to say that totally blew them away enough to subscribe and come back? Allow me to explain why this matters, and what you can do about it.

Good Bloggers Know and Care About Readership Churn

The number of bloggers in 2010 has shot the moon. If you don’t believe me, that is fine. I should not need to prove this with numbers, because you surely already know it. You probably already saw another blog (or three) in the last 1 minute and 22 seconds. The blast of information is fast, furious, and growing like a flu pandemic. Some of it is great information, but most of it will interest you as much as a knitting class interests a race car driver.

Much of the massive blast of information simply does not apply to your life. Even if it is reliably useful information, I think we can agree that a lot of what we see on the Internet is filed away in the “time wasted” category and we will not be going back to read more.

So what about you? Will you find yourself filed away in the bottom of your readers’ Internet history? If you want to avoid this, you must get a couple things straight right now. In my short list, I will include that you must be useful, pay attention to your readers, give them a great reason to come back, and do not disappoint them when and if they do.

TweetMeme is huge, and bloggers know it. It is a wildly popular way to help people share the brilliant content that you have worked so hard to produce. You will find the TweetMeme button on any popular blogs. Another thing you will often see on blogs is a row of Sociable links. In case you are not familiar, Sociable is a WordPress plugin that makes it really easy to add social sharing links to a blog. I use both of these, and I like them. Kudos to Joost de Valk for creating Sociable and fav.or.it for creating TweetMeme.

Sociable is really cool, but the “Tweet This” button really left me with a need for more. By default, it did not shorten the URL, add a title, or include the “RT @murnahan” that I wanted. So, I thought it would be cool to add a TweetMeme button within my Sociable links rather than to have the extra bulk of both of them at the end of each of my articles. Including TweetMeme and Sociable together just made it look a bit nicer and it keeps all of those sharing links right there together in one place.

I made a follow-up call to a man about his marketing needs. He previously asked me to follow up, and so I did just that. Within about a minute of my call, he said “Well, this is a really busy time of year for us” and started with more excuse-crafting. I interrupted him to say “Hey Bill, I am not calling to waste your time” and quickly ended the call. What I really meant was that I was not calling to waste my time, and I think he got the point.

Bill is a man who knows very well why his company is bleeding money. He knows that he needs better marketing. That is why we have been talking. He expresses good intentions, but he always has an excuse. Is being busy a good reason to put off better marketing? Is money a good reason to put off better marketing? Is there really ever a good reason to put off something that will improve your business?

Let us consider where money comes from in most businesses. It comes from doing more business, and that means more customers. More customers comes from marketing. Is this really such a mystery?

“Procrastination Tax” is the Extra Cost of Waiting

People have been frustrated by taxes for centuries. They vote, they write their government leaders, and they even overthrow their government, but mostly they complain. They complain a lot! I hear people every day complain about the economy, and how everything is swirling down a big toilet bowl. I am not completely excluding myself. I don’t like it any more than the rest of you. The difference I make is that I realize one of the biggest “taxes” I pay is “procrastination tax”.

Many companies will face the question of whether to outsource SEO (search engine optimization) or to hire in-house SEO professionals to improve, manage, and monitor search engine optimization and other Internet marketing efforts. Of course, some companies will overlook the need for search engine optimization, branding, and online reputation management altogether, but don’t worry about them. They will not likely steal away any of your market share, so whichever of these options works best for your company, it is better than overlooking the question.

I have witnessed many arguments on each side of this topic, but most do not give fair and unbiased consideration to each viewpoint. I intend for this to be useful to companies seeking to hire SEO services, freelance and agency search engine optimizers, and in-house SEO who may not be getting what they are worth. My goal is to remain as objective as possible and to discuss something of a potential trend in the online marketing industry.

First Consideration: Who Needs SEO, and How Much?

I want to address one very important consideration right upfront, and that is the question of “who needs search engine optimization?” I do not want to carry on with this part too long, because it should be obvious, and otherwise you would probably not be reading this. There is scarcely a company in existence that will not benefit from proper search engine optimization and Internet marketing. The benefits are measurable, and the factual data proves the importance. A challenging part of the question is in how the SEO efforts you put forth will most greatly increase the bottom line of your company. You would probably not pay a sales representative more money than they return for the company, and SEO is not so different in this respect. You should expect more profit.

I am such a fan of this product that I want to tell you this right upfront: I have not been hired by Wibiya to market for them, and I do not have anything at stake here. My reason for blogging my review of Wibiya is nothing of the sort. It is just so cool that I was compelled to give my testimonial. Now, shouldn’t we all be so fortunate to have fans who feel like that?

Wibiya is kind of a funny name, and it may not just roll off the tongue the way Twitter, Facebook, or Squidoo does. All the same, I think this is a social media service you will see in use a lot more in the future.

Website Toolbars Are Not Created Equal

I have used toolbars on various websites before, and some were pretty cool. I have even scripted my own website toolbars from scratch and made them work really nicely with social sharing links, custom URL shortener, and all of the neat stuff you can pack into the little 50-80 pixel space you would expect from a toolbar. I am kind of geeky like that. I very often choose the hard way of programming, by doing it all myself from beginning to end. That way I get the exact result I am looking for, and not include all of the extra junk that most off-the-shelf programming code will include for meeting every possible scenario on every possible type of website. As you can see at the bottom of each page on my blog, I have chosen Wibiya on this website, and for some good reasons.

I woke up to another Monday today. Monday is the day I ask myself the question again, “Are you reaching the right people?” It goes a bit deeper when I start asking “Are you reaching them with the right message?” If I can answer both of these with the affirmative, the next step is to repeat it and try to be sure the message continues to reach the right people, with the right message, and at the right time. Getting the right time means doing it again and again until their time is right. At the top of my week, I realize that it all really begins with reaching the right people.

How To Reach the Right People … The Influencers!

I think for a lot of people trying to reach a market, the question of how to reach the right people totally confounds them. It is actually a bit tricky and it takes some serious thought. It gets easier with training, experience, and research, but it is always a challenging part of marketing. Good marketing often means reaching the buyer themselves, but the best marketing often means reaching the people who influence the buyer. It is called influence marketing. Knowing who is an influencer and who is a buyer is an important step to knowing the right message to deliver. Getting it wrong means wasting a lot of time and money.

Have you ever been in a conversation and somebody used an acronym that you did not recognize? You just kind of keep it there in your head for a moment and hope they say something that will clue you in on just what the heck they were talking about when they uttered that string of letters. Then, if you cannot figure it out, you may whip out your phone and google it while nonchalantly acting like you were checking an important message. I will offer up a new acronym for skilled Internet marketers that will be more memorable and better reflect the work we do. First, I would like to explain why I think the “SEO” acronym should be laid to rest.

Exactly what is “SEO” and why in the name of all things sensible do we still use this acronym? SEO can stand for either search engine optimization (the services) or search engine optimizer (the person), but it actually encompasses a much broader spectrum of Internet marketing services and technologies. It has morphed dramatically over the years, as marketers’ understanding and use of the Internet has changed, and as many greenhorn SEO came to flood the market. The use of “SEO” became popular enough that I suppose it sounded better to a lot of people than the term “Internet Marketer” or “Profit Engineer” and so instead of SEO being considered a sub-category of Internet marketing skills, it is often used to represent the whole of Internet marketing. It became more of a meme than an actual skill set, and due to saturation of its use, the real meaning has been muted and bastardized.

I have a request that you do not be a stooge, and that you do not treat SEO and Internet marketing professionals as stooges either.

During a phone call a moment ago, I was inspired to point something out about SEO (search engine optimization) and Internet marketing that is obvious to me, but clearly some people do not already understand. This is an extremely basic SEO lesson.

I make a point of asking people who contact me for Internet marketing a very simple question as follows: “How did you find me?” Of course I already know the answer, but so many people do not realize that we can track everything online.

When I think about the worst things in the whole world, I have this mental list of things like cruel people, wars, child abuse, murder, and all of that awful stuff. Ranking right up there is selling SEO and Internet marketing services. That is why I say that when I go to hell, they will probably strap me down to a flaming chair in front of a smoldering desk to answer a fire telephone and respond to burning questions about SEO services. Really, I have nightmares about this!

How Selling SEO is Like Hell on Earth

I said that Hell would have me selling SEO, but probably because it is the one thing I despise more than almost any other thing on Earth. I will explain this to you, but first, you must wonder how I can possibly love my job? I love my work as a search engine optimizer, probably more than what you would consider “natural”. If all jobs paid the same, I would have two jobs … SEO and racing cars. There are only a few things I love more than my work as SEO, and those are my family, racing cars, and riding motorcycles. So, it may seem strange that I hate to sell SEO, but I will tell you why.