Websites & Internet marketing

Myth: SEO Is Simply Pay-As-You-Go

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Myth: SEO is simply pay-as-you-go.

Not true! There’s actually a huge difference between pay-per-click and SEO, or search engine optimization.

Hi, this is Steve Johnsen and I’m going to talk about pay-per-click advertising and search engine marketing, as well as search engine optimization (or SEO), and how these can be done more effectively and how they can help you grow your business.

One of the things that I hear sometimes is that SEO or search engine optimization is pay-as-you-go, which means that it’s simply a matter of more dollars in resulting in more visitors to my website. The more dollars I put in, the more visitors I instantly get to my website.

Well, that’s just simply not true. And a lot of times people confuse what is called pay-per-click advertising with search engine optimization or SEO. Both are ways to get people to your website who are online searching for a service provider. But the two models work very, very differently.

Pay-per-click is exactly what it sounds like; it means I am paying the search engine to have somebody click on the link that leads to my website. In that kind of model, it is true in a sense that the more dollars I pay for clicks, the more people I’m going to get to my website. With a pay-per-click model like Google AdWords?that’s a very common example of a pay-per-click type of advertising?the more money I pay, the more people I’m going to get as a kind of a general rule. And as soon as I stop paying, I’m going to stop getting people to my website.

Search engine optimization works very, very differently. Search engine optimization means doing a whole lot of technical things (which I’m not going to get into) to make the search engines think that your website is the best result for people who are online searching for a service provider. Therefore, when somebody goes in and searches for the kind of business that you provide, the search engine is going to display you as the best link. You’re not paying to be put in that position?at least not directly. You’re not paying the search engine to be put in that position, but rather you’ve done a whole lot of work to make the search engine consider you as the best result for certain people.

Now with SEO, you’re not going to see an immediate result. It usually takes time to do the work to get your website to the place where it is seen as one of the best options by the search engine. But once you get there, it’s very easy to maintain that position if you keep doing the work. You can stay ahead of the competition at a much lower overall cost than with the pay-per-click campaign.

Now the funny thing is, even with a pay-per-click campaign?although it is a model where if I pay more, I get more traffic?most of the pay-per-click advertisers give quality scores to the campaigns and the ads and the web pages, which means that there can be as much as an 800% difference on Google AdWords with the amount of traffic you’re getting for your campaign with the exact same budget, depending on how well it’s done.

So, one person may be running a Google AdWords campaign spending $3,000 a month and getting half of the visitors that somebody else is getting on a budget of $1,000 a month, because the one who’s investing $1,000 a month is doing it right, and doing it really, really well, with high quality scores, whereas the person who’s spending $3,000 a month is just throwing money at the wall and it’s not getting nearly as much result.

Every day, there are hundreds of people online searching for you and the service you provide, and I want them to find you. So this is not a simple pay-as-you-go model, but rather it’s a matter of figuring out what is the best strategy, short-term and long-term, for your business?whether to use a pay-per-click search-engine-marketing campaign, or to use search engine optimization campaign, or both?and to do them in such a way that you get the maximum result for your investment, to make your website effective as your number 1 employee.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Myth: SEO Is Simply Pay-As-You-Go

Steve Johnsen is a marketing strategist, a business coach, and the Founder of Cloud Mountain Marketing. He is also the author of the Amazon #1 best-seller, 5 Easy Steps to Make Your Website Your #1 Employee.

Myth: All Web Hosting Is the Same

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Myth: All web hosting is the same.

Simply not true. There’s a huge range of types and qualities of web hosting providers and in the impact that that web hosting has on your business.

Hi, I’m Steve Johnsen and I’m going to talk to you today about web hosting. There is a myth out there that is very common, that all web hosting is the same.

The fact is that there are all kinds of web hosting providers, and a wide range in the quality of their equipment, how that equipment is used, the types of data centers the hosting is in, and–what’s most important and the bottom line–in the impact that web hosting can have on growing your business.

Now, web hosting is one of those terms that kind of makes people’s eyes glaze over, so I hope I don’t get too geeky and technical on you here. But it’s really important to understand what web hosting is. Your website is actually a collection of files sitting on a computer somewhere. Typically, it’s a collection of text documents with some HTML and CSS code, as well as some documents containing software code, along with some pictures and maybe some videos. And if there’s software, the computer it’s on needs to have the ability to run that software. But either way, your website lives on a computer somewhere. It’s a collection of files on a computer.

That computer may be a good computer, or it may be a really old, really slow computer. It may be on a computer with ten websites on it, or it may be on a computer with ten thousand websites. Now, you know on your own personal computer, if you get too many windows or documents open, your computer can really slow down.

Well, if you think about it, if you have a computer that has ten thousand websites running?which, by the way, is a very common scenario with cheap web hosts?that computer is going to be very slow. Not only that, it could be an older computer with not so much horsepower and not so much memory. And not only that, that computer could be stuck off in a corner, far away from the Internet backbone, which means that the person who wants to access your website has to go through a whole bunch of connections to get there.

The end result is that you can have a website that’s on a slow computer that’s running even slower because of the ten thousand other websites running on the same machine that’s far away from the Internet backbone. And that experience for your customer visiting your website can be less than ideal.

Your pages may load slowly. Occasionally those computers with ten thousand websites on them can be targets for hackers, and you can get some malware or some sources of spam (or worse) on the computer that’s hosting your website.

This is not only a bad experience for your users; the search engines don’t like those kinds of situations either. So your site is probably not going to rank nearly as well on one of those cheap web hosts. And I’ve seen many occasions where this got someone’s website banned from Google.

It’s also possible to host your website on a really fast, new computer, in a good data center that’s close to the Internet backbone, on a machine that has only a few websites on it (with a lot of resources dedicated to your site). In that situation, your site is going to perform a lot better. The search engines are going to like it a lot better. More people are going to be finding you in online search. More people are going to be liking your website when they do find you. And even though it’s very hard to measure and nobody’s going to tell you they hired you because you have a good web host, this usually results in your getting more business.

The difference in investment between a quality web host and a cheap web host can be significant, but when you compare it to the opportunity cost of how much business you could lose on a cheap web host versus how much more business you could gain on a high quality web host, to me it’s an investment that is well, well worth it. In fact, there is no way I would ever want to put any of my websites on anything but a high quality web host.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Myth: All Web Hosting Is the Same

How to respond to negative reviews online

by Steve Johnsen Leave a Comment

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Q: Steve, What’s the best way for a small business owner to respond to negative reviews online? And to eliminate them from search results?

A: There are several things you can do to manage your online reputation.

It’s important to keep your emotions in check when this happens. Rarely does someone post a negative review that seems reasonable. And, it also doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person. Sometimes people just have a bad day and you’re the trigger for them to vent.

Smart business owners also realize that negative feedback can be a tremendous opportunity to learn and improve your service. It’s also an opportunity (possibly) to win that person back and make them a customer for life if they feel you’ve made an effort to resolve their issues.

To that end, here are some best practices.

1) Regularly monitor review sites to see what people are saying.

2) Do your best to respond to the person leaving the negative review.

If you are checking regularly and you see a negative review, very often you can figure out who the customer is who has an issue. Call them up and ask how you can resolve the problem to their satisfaction.

Some sites do allow the business owner to respond to negative reviews right on the web page. Be sure to claim your profile as the business owner. You may even be able to get an email notification if someone leaves an online review. Best practices for responding on the website:

If you can respond, it is best not to dispute what a negative reviewer has posted.
Instead, you might want to post a comment inviting that person to contact you. E.g., “Sam, that sounds very frustrating and we’re sorry that you had a negative experience. Could you please call us at xxx-xxx-xxxx so that we can help you resolve this issue?”
You can also post a comment thanking someone for an especially positive review, if you want.

3) In order for negative reviews to not hurt your business, you want to do your best to encourage a large number of positive reviews.

Whenever someone expresses appreciation for your service, invite them to leave a review.
Feel free to share the URLs for review sites on your website or in your email signature.

It can be valuable to use a professional service provider to help with online reputation management. Part of the MoxyBoost Local SEO service from Cloud Mountain Marketing includes reputation management tools to monitor online reviews and encourage positive reviews.

How to get back 4 hours every day

by Steve Johnsen Leave a Comment

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You don’t need a website in order to build your business. In fact, I have a good friend who grew a very successful business using traditional networking and prospecting activities to generate his leads. The catch is, even after 20 years in the business, he’s still spending 4 hours every single day on prospecting activities to generate leads.

As a business owner, your time is worth a lot. If your target salary is $250,000 per year, and you’re spending 4 hours per day to generate sales leads, that means you’re investing $2,600 worth of your time per week, or $10,400 per month, in order to generate those leads.

What if investing $1,500 per month in your website could give you just as many highly qualified sales leads? Would that be more cost-effective?

When your website performs as your #1 employee, it gives you back many hours every day. With a steady stream of pre-qualified leads coming in from your site, you will spend far less time making cold calls, contacting people through LinkedIn, asking past clients for referrals and going to networking events.

How might you leverage your time if you weren’t prospecting? With your experience, your brilliance and your creativity, aren’t you worth far more working on your business than making cold calls? What might you do if you had more time to spend with your family? Imagine 4 extra hours. Every Single Day.

To your success!

Getting prospects to your website

by Steve Johnsen Leave a Comment

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The best time to think about how you’ll get people to your site is before it’s ever built.

What strategies will you use to bring people to your site? For some types of businesses, social media may be effective. For others, social media may not work that well. Personal service businesses may drive traffic to their site through an effective content marketing strategy, or through offline activities like speaking engagements and networking. For most businesses, some level of search engine optimization will be necessary to maximize the website’s earning potential.

Understanding your target client and their shopping habits will go a long way toward determining how to best “market” your website.

A simple formula…

by Steve Johnsen Leave a Comment

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The only reason for having a business website is to make your business money. But how do you do that? I have a really simple formula for you:

Traffic + Conversions = Customers

In this equation, traffic does not mean the number of “hits” on your website. That can be a pretty useless statistic. Rather, it refers to the number of people who are your ideal potential clients who are visiting your website to check you out.

Conversion refers to a website that really speaks to your ideal prospect and makes them want to connects with you.

It’s that simple. I can assure you that when you take care of these two items, the website will make you money. When you really break it down, the only reason that a business website might not be making money is that (a) the right people (the ideal prospects) are not finding the site, or (b) once they’re there, the site does not speak to them in a way that makes them want to connect with you. Or it could be both.

To your success!