The Sticking Point and the Visibility Factor…

When it comes to promoting your site, while what I am about to say is not necessarily practical, it is important. And hopefully, after I say this, there will be enough light bulbs going off in everyone’s heads to light New York (actually, I would be happy with one, single “A-MEN”)

It behooves you and your marketing endeavors to promote every single page you have out there that promotes your site.

-That means that if you are building links via commenting, that you should be promoting each and every page.

-That means that if you are doing the web 2.0 thing, you should be promoting each and ever page.

-That means that if you are using pages like hubpages, squidoo, weebly, wetpaint, ezinearticles, goarticles, knol, infobarrel or any of the thousands of properties that allow you to add a link pointing to your site, you should be promoting them.

You should stand on your stump and trumpet the funnels like you would trumpet your own sites.

If it is done through comment marketing, you should cite the sites as the next best thing since sliced cheese.

If it is a guest posting, you should rave about it like a maniac heretic raves about the second coming of Jesus…tomorrow…

You should encourage social interaction to those sites.

You should actively promote them.

The reason?

Simple. Common sense.

First of all, from an SEO standpoint the more visible you can make pages going to your site, the greater the chance of linking from other parties which will give that site valuable citations….which inadvertantly will give your site a boost.

From a straight up marketing sense, every chance you have to have eyeballs on your funnels makes for a chance (in some cases, a minuscule chance but a chance nonetheless) for a possible visit which could turn into a sale, a click or whatever it is you are trying to accomplish.

I understand why most don’t do it. Hell, I pick my spots when to promote something and when not to. But if I was smart, I would push every link that links to my site. This would include comments I made on other sites as well as my guest posts and even my social links.

We say we need targeted visitors. But the reality is the more eyes that you get on your property, the greater the chance of getting cited.

In a sense, promotion breeds more promotion…..

No-Follow/Do-Follow…Who Cares?

I have said this before but in the grand scheme of things, whether a link follows you or doesn’t follow doesn’t really matter. What matters is what kind of potential traffic you can leech from the link AND how the visitor coming through that link responds. Organic search advocates will say, well, it actually does matters since it helps your link acquisition and profile.

But, like I mentioned in Court’s Forum about a month back, if the link gives you visibility because it ranks in the search engines, what’s the difference? If throughout the course of a year, that one link brings in 100 extra visitors who are interested in your market from THAT page to YOUR site, who cares?

Alternatively, if the link exposes you to others within your niche (in a general sense) and in a sense “brands” your site in their minds, what’s the difference?

Citations breed more Citations….

The reality is that it is all about visibility…..

It doesn’t matter if your means to do this is organic search. It doesn’t matter if your means to do this is to inundate an article directory with hundreds of articles pointing to your site. It doesn’t matter if you are using web 2.0 properties, video, list exchanges, post exchanges, twitter, facebook or whatever.

If it makes you more visible to your market and brands you as an authority (or crazy cool) in your market, then you can sit back, pat yourself on the derrière and say to yourself, job well done. The money will follow…..

Promoting things that link to your links, your funnels, or your actually site just makes practical sense. It is kind of like having creating hundreds of virtual billboards across the net.

Promoting them, just gets more eyes on the billboards which could get more citations and even more eyeballs.

This isn’t for everyone though

Now what I am talking about here is 2nd party sites, not the sites that you create on your own. These are in some cases, (as in making comments) things you can do yourself, but ultimately what you want are the unsolicited links….those are the links that really funnel traffic.

Obviously, if your site is a 2 page site on how to make your facial scars go away with a product, then it doesn’t make much sense to promote this way.

Alternatively, if you site is something that you wouldn’t show to your best friend or your mama, then chances are good that you would do better with organic traffic (google doesn’t care about quality…they just care about backlinks).

But if you have a full fledged site that is general enough that a market could be interested in what you have to say (like the “go green” market or even the make money online market), then promoting pages and websites that link to you could capture a segment of the market that organic search quite frankly, won’t in most cases (to prove a point, when was the last time you googled “make money online or internet marketing?”…and no, doing keyword research doesn’t count…)

The X Factoid

The X factor, of course, is how crazy cool your site is.

It is how well you speak to your market.

It is whether you are viewed as just another blog like every other blog out there

It is how different you are than those around you.

It is about building a tribe of people who feel like they could sit at starbucks, have a cup of coffee and an actual worthwhile conversation with you.

This isn’t a new idea, by the way. Jack Humphries and all the social marketing cronies have been promoting like this all along. And while I don’t necessarily agree with everything that they say (twitter..for instance), the idea of inundating the web with links to your site for a general market, promoting those links to make them more visible thus giving you more chances to get visitors (what you do with them is up to you) and leveraging the potential traffic to build a list, make a sale or for the potential random citation does.

In the offline world, that would be called advertising….you know, like the crap you see on bus stop benches and in subway terminals, on billboards and in your junk mail.

….Dunno why us internet marketers don’t view it the same but whatever….

Now, I will always have my mini sites that will pimp out ways to get the girl, wart removal creams, fix your back problems and, by the way, I guarantee that with this proven system you can and will be able to blow up your bookie’s bank account (it my 5 star lock of the day).

I would also NOT show any of these sites to my mother either. In fact, I probably wouldn’t show off these sites to my friends (well, there is one who would get a kick out of my them…)

I DEFINITELY wouldn’t suggest most of the products I peddle to anyone off line….

The sites I am talking about are the larger, general market sites. The sites that I am proud of. The sites that my market would deem as a shining light to the community surrounding it. The sites that get links without me having to hunt them down….you get the point.

Now, maybe I am getting soft in my old age. Maybe I have found that I get more satisfaction out of building something REAL that means something to the market and isn’t simply a sales pitch for a shitty product that in all likelihood won’t work as advertised and is designed with heavy sales triggers to simply tug at the heartstrings of the consumer.

I do know this though. While the saying “if you build it, they will come” motto shouldn’t be anyone’s mantra other than the casual blogger who wants to daydream his way to success, if you build something actually worthwhile to your market and make it VISIBLE to those who would be interested in it, then it will be a raging success. The key is the visibility factor and the Connectivity of your message.

Selling to a market is not hard. It never has been. It is just about knowing what a market wants.

It is connecting with your market and being visible enough that your market even notices you in the first place. That is the sticking point.