Monthly Archive: July 2009

Jul
31
2009

Local Business owners aren’t yet Educated on Internet Marketing for a Small Local Business

July 31, 2009

Today we’re launching a fairly extensive campaign for my Internet Marketing Agency. Apparently we’re in a recession, but the agency would never know.

June 2009 we had a record month, and thus far in July we’re set to break another record. The funny thing is that June and July are hands down, the worst business to business months on the calender. Not to mention we’re apparently at the bottom, the worst, of the global recession of 2009, the worst recession in 80 years.

So why is an Internet Marketing agency that caters to small local businesses doing so well? Timing is a key factor. This is the time because the local business is being transformed, despite the negative factors. I’m excited and terrified as to what is about to come in September of this year. What happens when the economy does turn around? It’s a good thing I’ve built a business that is highly scalable.

I share this with you because I want to talk about our largest marketing campaign we’re launching. It’s costing us peanuts and I want to show you the objective.

Most people just don’t get it!

Yesterday I had a prospect from Toronto tell me we’re 4 times the price of a competitor and that my competitor promised #1 results in 4 weeks. Good for you Mr. Customer, spend money on your business in times of recession is good, just make sure you are cheap and buy the lowest cost provider. We’re all the same. I’m just immoral and decided to charge more so I can enjoy 4x times the profit. I’m also not as good as your competitor, because I can’t garantee you #1 spot.

WHAT?!

Selling Internet Marketing to a Local Business owner is tough and easy at the same time. They really don’t know know better. The Internet is scary, unknown, different, uncomfortable and simply unchartered territory. Some will take opinion at face value. The next challenging aspect is that there is no magic formula. Us Internet Marketers can make stuff up.

The point is here it’s up to us in the know, those who are properly educated, to properly educate our buyers. Those who follow me know that I’m as white hat as it comes. We don’t chase the Google algorithm. We are simply marketers. This is confusing to many, many potential buyers.

Here’s what do to sell SEO

We invest significant time and effort into each prospect. We take the time to show the business owner that there is in fact business on the Internet, using a trusted source, Google. We show them their competitors and provide basic education on key points that our prospect need to know, in order to properly manage their campaign.

See, they know they need to invest this money. The questions now is, with who.

See, if I could garantee you 100% return on investment in one week, why wouldn’t you invest every single penny your owned? Why would you invest only $10? The point is….

Smart Business Owners buy on VALUE, not PRICE — period.

People don’t buy a product or service, they buy a state and a state is an anticipated feeling received from that product or service. Perceived value. Therefore, demonstrate value!!!

This is what we do with our website assessment.

Take a peak and check out our opt-in page.

This process is fantastic for us. We provide great value to the prospect through education and solid research, enabling them to better decide their next step. Our goal is to close 33% of our assessments.

1/3 goes to the competition
1/3 decides now is not the right time
1/3 buy

We achieve a higher closing rate

We have had months where our closing rate is as high as 58%. Most of those who don’t buy don’t end up buying for over a year, and I’m sure several of those ended up buying from us or will buy from us. At that point, it’s about strengthening the relationship, that’s a whole different post.

2 comments

Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/local-business-owners-arent-yet-educated-on-internet-marketing-for-a-small-local-business/

Jul
22
2009

Malicious iframe attack

by Administrator

July 22, 2009

This is not a post related to Internet Marketing. I felt this post was necessary since we’ve seen this a few times recently. A search on Google for [malicious iframe attack] brings up 38,000 results. Please take the 2 minutes to check your site and below we describe the steps to identify the problem and steps to correct the problem. I would like thank Meena Rao, my senior project manager, for compiling the report below.

Recently, a number of websites were attacked by malicious code. Several reputable and legitimate sites have been compromised by this attack.

The attack is done in 2 steps. The first step in the attack is for an intruder to gain access to the FTP login credentials (username and password) for a site. This is easy to do for sites for which FTP passwords can be easily guessed, something like “site123” and easy to decipher. The FTP login is then used to get into the site and append malicious code to the index files on the site. Any file that has the name “index” as part of its name will be attacked. The code that is appended is contained in an <iframe> tag.

The first step that you, as a website owner, need to take is to immediately change the FTP password for the site and make it very strong by using a combination of numbers, upper case and lower case letters, and special characters and make it at least 8 characters long.

Some other points to remember are, never send FTP username and password via email or Instant Messaging. If you have to do it, make sure you send it in some encrypted form, or send it in 2 separate emails. Also, talk to your web host and make sure that they have installed the necessary security fixes to improve internal security and prevent further attacks.

iframe-attack

http://www.brookscourier.com and http://www.easterncourier.net were among the sites affected by this hacking program. In the screenshot above, you can see that Google has put a warning message for the site that reads “This site may harm your computer”.

This goes to show that this issue can be harmful and needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

1 comment

Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/malicious-iframe-attack/

Jul
01
2009

Follow the < nofollow >. Evidence that nofollows can hurt your SEO (Marketing) efforts

by Administrator

July 1, 2009

I have been saying this for well over a year now that the entire <nofollow> strategy in SEO is bogus. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

Some History of Google’s NOFOLLOW HTML Attribute

Let’s go back in time. Way back in history, in the dark ages of 2005, Matt Cutts from Google introduced new HTML code called the <nofollow> HTML tag. This HTML tag was introduced to add to the HTML code of a webpage in front of a link. The goal was to tell complying search engines to NOT index the link and in turn, do not follow that link.

It wasn’t long before SEOers discovered how this could benefit them in rankings. It was determined, for example, that if a link had a nofollow attribute attached to it, the page’s value (aka link juice) was passed to only links that did not posses the nofollow attribute. In other words, outbound links with the nofollow tag passed zero page rank.

This gave us control of page rank on our own sites!

This meant we, SEOers, had control of the internal ranking juice on the sites’ we controlled. We could manipulate page rank from one page to another, in turn increasing our rankings simply by controlling and understanding how to properly use the nofollow attribute.

This was widely argued as white hat. I argued otherwise. The nofollow HTML attribute was NOT designed for this, and this made zero sense from a user’s marketability standpoint. SEOer’s continued to push and created strategies like the 3rd tier push (pushing page rank from 3rd tier pages to 2nd tier pages) and link schemes that truely did help.

Here’s the problem.

Since Google is always looking to enhance the value of the visitor, then why would nofollow help the user?

Used properly, for example adding a nofollow to a terms and conditions page, make sense. We would not want to rank or market our internal T&C’s. They have no value to market. Companies do not promote or market their contracts to prospects. They market their marketing material, their business cards, brochures, etc.
When using nofollow to manipulate page rank, you’re in turn manipulating the search engines, removing the democratic value of the Internet and in turn, decreasing visitor value.

So, I’ve always asked the question, when is Google going to update their algorithm to stop this false manipulation and restore democracy in the link building scheme.

Most teach us to avoid NOFOLLOW sites

I’ve been taught to look at sites that will not use the nofollow for a link to my site, including directories, blogs, forum, social sites, article and video sites. I’ve argued, while with no proof yet, that the search engines must give some sort of validity to a link, or a reference to a site. Sure, the value changes depending on the nofollow, anchor text, site’s authority, trust, etc. But I still argue that that there is still exposure and transparency. Regardless of the webmaster’s desires.

It’s like handing out a business card to one person and a brochure to another. Both are references to your business, but the business card doesn’t depict a clear picture of what you do, your brochure is much more detailed. We still hand out card though and hand them out more willingly than a brochure. This is the same as links.

I don’t and now I have proof

blog-crop1

Here’s the link (with follow!) http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/06/26/jackson.presley.blog/index.html

The world of local SEO is moving towards links and citations, along with theme and geographical sites.

I found an article on CNN that proves this theory, at least in theory. This is not hard evidence, however based on my philosophy that Internet Marketing can always be directly related to old skool marketing, this makes complete sense.

See, in this article from CNN to a blog of Lisa Marie Presley, CNN knows the immense value of a link from their site to another. They do not want to provide SEO value to this blog. They do not want to promote this blog. They do not want to help this blog monetize itself, if there was a monetization strategy in place. They do however, want to mention the reference cited from the blog.

Therefore they added a reference. Not a link. The link is not spiderable. In theory with the nofollow tag, they merely needed to add a nofollow to the link, however because of the alleged theory, even that would add some SEO value. So they didn’t even make it a link. Not only that, cause under my theory, this is still a citation, a reference, if not a link. Therefore, they used a URL shortner (www.bit.ly) and removed the link. So now it’s just unrecongnizable text. The search engine can not follow a link nor does the search engine know the originating domain. The value to the CNN reader is still there, by copying and pasting the link. A search engine won’t copy and paste text to determine if its a link.

So there you have it. The value of the democratic Internet is restored.

Ask yourself this question

If you are adding value to the democratic Internet by posting valuable information on theme related blogs, and these blogs use nofollow, why would a search engine give value to your competitor in their index if they only posted on follow blogs and not yours, even if you 5x times the valuable posts?

I believe that websites that have used this strategy in the past and use nofollow today to manipulate page rank, will have created a clear footprint of manipulation and it’s pretty obvious. I believe that the search engines will soon penalize these sites that have clear objectives to manipulate the SE’s. I recommend to never look at sites code and use the nofollow as a determining factor to acquire a link. Don’t consider it at all, only use it for pages on your site that make no sense from a marketing standpoint. I believe the SE’s will soon work all this out and you’ll be much further ahead of the other SEO’s who chase the algorithm.