A new year is almost upon us and with it, resolutions and change. If you are a marketer that has survived Panda’s bear hug and are wondering what’s next, then this article may be right up your alley.  Given the latest search trends, what worked last year (and the year before that and so on) is most likely not going to work this year, especially if you are solely an SEO who does niche marketing.

So what’s in and what’s out?  These are all my opinions.  Consider them or disagree with them at your own peril.

What’s out-

• Owning Volumes of niche websites- 3 years ago, I owned 800+ domains.  This year, it is down to 46.  The idea of  owning domains sounds right.  The idea that the more website properties you have out there, the more money you will make sounds right too.  But the reality is that once you factor in maintenance, it is a time drain.  And when you realize that 800 domains computes to less than 100 profitable domains, you totally understand that it isn’t worth it over the long haul.
• Link dumping for ranking-  The only thing that link services do is drain your pocketbook.  And as Google search integrates social elements into search (as well as personalized search) and diminishes the returns for exact anchored keyword links, the only ones using it will be the ones who don’t know how to market in the first place and have likely never made anything online.
• Mindless Automation-  Scraping & Spinning aren’t going away but they will likely be far less effective in the future (see above).  Automation is supposed to make you more efficient.  But when the ROI for that article marketing campaign you are running that delivers content to places no one sees, well, let’s just say what’s the use of automating something that doesn’t really do much in the first place?

What’s in-

• Fewer more focused Web Sites.  All those eggs in just a few baskets will pay off more in the long run and allow you to run your websites efficiently.
• Efficiency concerning link equity-  Links should be high quality.  They should get you traffic.  They should be directed at your market.  OR they should point to something relevant.
• Networking for links -Given the state of SEO and the fact that where you rank increasingly depends on who you know, networking seems to be the better and more efficient choice.  Guest posting on websites that already have an audience (even though broad and seemingly untargeted), getting in the ears of others who have active and influential voices in your market, becoming an active part in one of the various communities within your niche and building a brand around people, not search.  Welcome to 2012.

LeoDimilo.com

2011 has been what I would consider a landmark year for me in terms of personal growth and perspective both in marketing and business.  I have completely extracted all black hat SEO strategies from my marketing and gone legit.  I no longer use back link services but instead have link building campaign strategies that deal with finding vertical markets and networking with people in the markets that actually matter (“true link building”)

And I have started to see the real benefits of social marketing and branding a business.  The long term effects are what matter here.

Strangely, I made these moves after working with clients and having to figure out creative ways to market their business.  Working with other people’s websites kind of allows you to see things because you aren’t that close to the business. That’s what I figure at least.

The Bad….

So things haven’t been totally rosy in my life.  I have had a couple things happen that were not so good.  For instance:

• Lost my main adsense account- I hardly ever used adsense for anything other than revenue sharing websites.  2 months ago, I got that “we have disabled your adsense account” letter.  I appealed.  And lost.  The result?  $36,000 a year wiped out virtually overnight.  It wasn’t my only revenue stream but geesh, it hurt.  All that starbucks money.  Gone.
• Panda killed a start-up I was working on-  I had a model.  Had an executive summary.  Had investors lined up willing to invest $500k in start up money.  Then panda rolled out and killed one of the main components of the model.    Projected returns had to be adjusted.  And then the investors started to back away.  It was back to the drawing board after nearly 6 months of meetings and work.  The good news was that I am better connected now.  The bad news is that it didn’t happen.  As the saying goes-……horseshoes and hand grenades.

The Good

• I expanded the consulting leg of my business-  For those of you who don’t know, I do local consulting in my area for online marketing.  I have been doing it for 5 years now and it has been sporadic to say the least.  This year, I gained more clients the old fashioned way; through referrals.
• I started a website design brokering side business-  This was local as well and geared towards the artist community with a push from several non-profits in the area.  Without going too deeply into the model, I am only the “face” of the business.  I have designers do the dirty work.  The designers get the 80% of the upfront money.  I make money from re-curring payments as a host.  I did it because I wanted to reconnect with my musician peers.
• I started networking with other SEO professionals- 3 years ago, I did SEO but didn’t really know anyone.  Fast forward to today and I have fostered some good relationships with online marketing professionals like myself.   This year has been a great year for networking with others in the marketing world for me.  Along the way, I have made friends with what I would consider some heavy hitters in the SEO world.   Now, I am not having coffee with Rand Fishkin or Frank Kern yet, but I have expanded my network with (and learned from) others within my profession.  And suddenly, my wife doesn’t have to hear my SEO rants.

Things I learned in 2011…

• The 80/20 rule is real.  Recognize what is working.  Cut out what’s not.  That’s business 101 and although many people will agree with it, few actually implement it.  This year, I implemented it.
• Design and SEO go hand in hand-  What was once a tentative affair between website designers and SEO’s is now a partnership.  Why?  Because suddenly what people think matters in terms of where you rank, both in organic seo and personalized search.
• You will make far more money with brand than with SEO- The reason?  Social Proof.  And considering the fact that search is merging (and continues to do so) with social metrics, branding is going to continue to be my buzz word.  And the funny thing is branding actually boosts rankings.  Weird.
• Helping People is way cooler than making a pile of cash-  Being in the make money online niche, it is easy to think only of yourself.  But strangely enough, my best month didn’t come with a huge check in the mail;  it came from working with a band that couldn’t afford my services.  I did it pro bono and got the warm fuzzies that lasted over a month.  Now that may not pay the bills but for the first time in nearly 5 years, I felt like my life had balance and I was thinking of more than ledger entries for my business.  Ironically, I made more money this year (despite the adsense mishap.)

Looking Forward to 2012

There are a few things I intend to do with my marketing this year.

• Consolidate and become even more efficient-  Cut the clutter even more.  Save time.  Save money.  Enjoy life more.  It’s warm and fuzzy….and zen.
• Work more on this website-  I have played with the idea in the past of making a wave in the marketing niche with this website.  But I have never done anything because this has always been a personal outlet for me rather than a monetary cause.   Because of that, I have never really taken branding this website to any level beyond a couple twitter posts and talking to a few mid level bloggers.  2012 may be the year to make that push.
• Expand my network.-  Most don’t understand that networking is a very important component to succeeding in anything in life.  A lot of search marketers seem to think that all it boils down to is keywords and back links.   I have found that affecting people is much more efficient in business than blatantly trying to affect search results.
• Learn more about mobile usability and SEO-  Mobile search is one of those things that I really don’t know much about.  The world is changing though.  We have gone from being chained to our desks to actually having a life (or the potential of one anyways).
• Expand my consulting business to the point where I actually have employees.  Right now, everything is outsourced as necessary.  But a secretary would be nice, even if it is just part time.

Personal Goals for 2012

• Spend more time with friends and family.  Working is a drag.  Working too much is not good for the soul.  2012 will mark the year where I chisel down my work week further to 4 days a week and spend that extra day doing crafts and watching movies with my 4 year old.
• Learn one new thing a week that has nothing to do with marketing-  It can be anything.  A new recipe;  How to build a chicken coop;  How to rebuild the sistine chapel using only toothpicks.  But the key isn’t that I am learning something new but that I am moving my frame of mind from work related things to non-work stuff.
• Read one new book (fiction) a month.
• Get more involved with volunteer work.

LeoDimilo.com

The most common SEO tutorials deal with things like on page optimization, creating back links (or buying them, or “leasing” them through a back link service), keyword research, etc. ect. ; essentially all those things that are easy to teach and practical to employ.

To be perfectly honest, I could teach someone who doesn’t know SEO basics (the technical stuff) in roughly a day.

And people who want to learn about SEO love them because they basically say the same thing-

You can do it all yourself without any help from the outside world.

Now, I am not going to say that going the route of the loner won’t work for you.  What I will say is that it won’t work for most because they lack the resources necessary for lift off.  Doing it all yourself without the help of others is damn near impossible for larger markets.

So, how do these bigger, more established websites do it?  How did they get to where they are today?

The one thing that most SEO’s don’t talk about that is every bit as important (for most) as Title tags and back links is networking with other people who you can help (and who can help you) in your market.

Why is it so important?

Because it makes getting links so much easier.  Think about it.  You have a home improvement blog.  You start networking with other home improvement blogs who have an audience.  You guest post on their blogs.  Someone likes your article who retweets your post, whom in turn is followed by someone who retweets it again, until it falls into the laps of the this old house (a pbs show), who retweets it to their base or (better yet) casually mentions your article in a post.

The result is a free link (unsolicited) from a trusted site but more importantly, the link widens your audience, & distills trust from real people who are interested in your market.

With a wider audience, you have a greater chance of getting more links (once again, unsolicited) and have a channel that you could pursue in terms of building a relationship from.  It opens doors to places that most websites would not have an opportunity to really explore.

Yeah, to a point it is social and search marketers hate to think that social has any place in SEO.

But make no bones about it.  When you start to dive into social clusters, you start to see the same patterns.  Those at the top talk with each other and about each other often.  They network ideas with each other.  They promote each other.  And they share their audience.  As a result, they stay at the top, in most cases both socially and organically.

Is it easy?

Of course not.  It is never easy to talk to new people who don’t know you.  It isn’t easy to convince someone that you truly know what you are talking about.  Building back links for SEO purposes rather than an audience is way easier because you aren’t dealing with anyone with an actual opinion.  You are just trying to game the system.

But the rewards are so much bigger.  You want a larger audience (even if most don’t buy) because those that have the resources to spread your brand may spread it far and wide.  That means mentions, likes and yes, even links.

And that is the one SEO strategy that separates the mediocre from the great;  Networking to build relationships and potential links.

LeoDimilo.com

Most successful businesses (online or off) are constantly trying to figure out ways to get the most out of what they are doing or using.  Usually, this involves systems, although most of us don’t think in those kind of micro-managed terms.  In this article, I am going to go over some strategies to building (or rebuilding) what you already are doing to help you save time or money…or both.

How to Build the Perfect Marketing System

Systems start off as kind of junky and bloated.  Most marketers will take the system out of the box and just continue to use it as-is, without a thought of what the system itself is costing them in terms of time and money.  Most dismiss it as just part of journey.

A marketing system for a business can be broken down into a series of processes.  Sometimes there are systems within systems.  The key is to identify the processes, locate the resource hogs within the processes and either refine them, delegate them or eliminate them.

In doint so, you learn how to scoot point A (the starting point) closer to point Z (the finish) and do so efficiently.  You shave time by cutting out things that either don’t matter or don’t matter enough for it to make much of a difference.  Sometimes you can refine it to the point where you are literally shaving hours from your work.

If it takes a business 4 minutes to do something and they do it 20 times a day, then they will have “lost” 800 minutes (or 13 hours).  If that same business can cut that time by 2 minutes then they will have saved over 6 hours of work.

Additionally, some systems can be used over and over again, lowering the cost significantly.  An example of this would be doing keyword research.  You may start with a system of manually investigating keywords via adwords external and then using spreadsheets to build a keyword strategy but ultimately it may end with you integrating Ubot software (or some other type of software) in which you plug in a keyword and it automatically pulls only the keywords based on a certain set of criteria and then spitting them out in a customized excel sheet.

Of course, the cost of automation in this example is learning how to make bots but if you spend hours a week doing keyword research, the cost (both in price and training) may be worth it to create a more efficient system.

The above example would be an example of honing the system to save time.

Systems and the Range of Motion Test

Back when I used to play guitar professionally, I learned that the best way to do fast solos was to make it so my fingers stayed as close to the fret board as possible.  I could pick faster if my hands didn’t move too far away from the strings.  What I learned was limiting my range of motion increased my speed and efficiency as a guitarist.

The same thing applies to building marketing systems.  If your range of motion is long (how long it takes to get from point A to point B), then the system will be slow and inefficient.  Shorten the range of motion between tasks and the system suddenly becomes more efficient.

For example, if you are a niche marketer who bounces from market to market based on opportunity, then every time you have to spend researching a new market creates a longer range of motion.  It becomes an inefficient use of time because researching content (especially content that is foreign to you) takes time.  Constantly researching new content becomes the elephant in the room; your niche system based on opportunity may work but it is inefficient because content research is a resource hog.

On a side note, this is primarily why I have always advised to stick with one large market and segment niches within the markets you know; what you may be missing in terms of opportunity is counteracted by a more efficient process.

Your Processes and the Time Trap.

Entrepreneurs fall into the time trap because they don’t value their time in the same way that they would if they were working for someone else.  So, if a process costs you 4 hours every time you do it, and your time is worth $30 per hour, if you can find someone to do it for less than $120 then you could actually eliminate that process altogether from your work stream.

Our days are nothing more than a series of processes inside systems.

I think it is important to realize that nearly everything we do, in work or life, is  system based whether we are conscientiously acknowledging it or not.  The best managers figure out what processes are essential and which aren’t.

If you have a problem with time management, then a poorly developed system can literally take the wind out of your sails and make you feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day.

Are you that person?

Every Process adds a cost to the system.

There is a cost, whether time or money, to everything you do for your business.  A homeowner may fix their faulty toilet for “free” without accounting for the cost of learning how to do it and actually fixing it but it may “cost” them more if their time is worth more than the minutes or hours they spent learning how to do it.

So keyword research is a system that involves a series of processes.  So is content development.  As is website design.  And so on and so forth. And all of them have costs attached to them.

The overall system may be designed to rank your website and make you money but getting there is nothing more than a series of processes strung together.

Where to Start?  Prepare.  Delegate. Eliminate.

How do you start honing a system?  There are 3 ways to do it.

1. Prepare
2. Delegate.
3. Eliminate.

Preparation.

The preparation phase starts with getting a clearer understanding of the processes within the system. The more micro you go within the processes, the clearer idea you have of what processes you may be able to delegate or eliminate.

The preparation phase also has to do with the daily mundane tasks.  If you use a lot of excel spreadsheets for keyword research or competitive analysis, then setting up the folders for easy access ahead of time will help cut down the load during actual work time.

Preparation also involves understanding the costs of doing things in relation to how much your time is worth.  A better understanding of this will help you understand what you may want to delegate or cut, process wise.

Find the biggest resource hogs within the system.

Finally preparation involves knowing what processes are the biggest resource hogs.  For instance, writing content is a resource hog that eats up literally hours a day for many.  Part of the preparation phase should be to identify parts within the system that can be trimmed or cut from your work day.

Delegating.

So you know your resource hogs within your system.  Now you have a choice.  Delegate them or eliminate them entirely.

My biggest rule for delegation involves costs- time and money.  If something costs you a large chunk of your day and it’s necessary but can be outsourced cheaper than you value your time, then that’s a consideration.

For instance, if you are trying to develop content for a new website and you need 15 articles on a subject that you are going to have to research and learn (a process), and it takes you 1 hour per article plus 3 hours of research totaling 18 hours and find a writer willing to write for you at $10 an article, then it may be better to delegate this out if you value your time at more than $8.33 an hour.

If you can’t afford it, then the better option (and one I have suggested frequently) is to commit to one single market for all your content writing (so to lower the cost of research content development time over the long haul).

Eliminate.

Finally, there are some processes within a system that can be eliminated entirely.  A real life example of this would be making a drink.  In my former life, I was a bartender.  I knew that the finest vodkas were tasteless.  If someone ordered a fuzzy navel, (which consists of vodka, peach schnapps and orange juice), I knew that I could eliminate the vodka from the equation and no one would know.  If I was in a pinch, I knew that I could eliminate the vodka from the drink and it would essentially taste the same.

In almost all systems, there are clunky processes that chew up time that can ultimately be eliminated.

Summary Points

• Deconstruct the system to reveal the processes.
• Identify resource/ time hogs to find parts that can be made more efficient.
• Assign a dollar amount to your time value to determine outsourcing strategies.
• Eliminate processes that don’t affect the overall outcome.

LeoDimilo.com

What causes one website to rise above while most go nowhere?

You and A-list blogger write an almost identical piece on how to get traffic.  Yours is by far, a better written piece.  Both are unique and “new”.

Your post gets mentioned on twitter a handful of times by people that aren’t very popular.  As a result, you get 10 comments, 5 of which are your responses to the commentators.

The A-list blogger post gets a far different response.  His post is liked and tweeted dozens of times and makes the rounds across the blogosphere.  The post gets 50+ comments, none of which he even makes a casual appearance on.

What gives?  Why is it that your blog is more informative overall than his yet it seems like everything he does gets all the respect?

The answer is value and it is a far more complicated web to unravel than most would imagine.

To put this into a real world context, back when I was in my 20′s, touring the country playing in a rock band, I used to hear band members complain that our music was way better than the music played on the radio so therefore, if given the chance, we should do at least as well as them.

The problem was that we never got that chance.  Those on top continued to be promoted and continued to build an audience while we spent nights sleeping in the van and relying on the handouts of strangers to exist.

We could very well have been as good or even better than what most heard on the radio.  The problem wasn’t about talent or how good we were though.

It wasn’t about value.

In fact, we may have been the most valuable rock band you had never heard of.

Deciphering the Value Conundrum- People.  The Lost Equation.

You have heard it all before.  Some jerk tells you that in order to succeed online you need to create something of value for the visitor.  It’s the field of dreams philosophy.  Build something worthwhile and eventually someone will notice and propel you to the ranks of success.

But I think that value doesn’t apply to the actual content as much as it applies to how someone perceives you.

Let me explain.

The reason why A-List Marketer does better isn’t necessarily a case of better content.  It’s a contextual thing between how the audience perceives them and even more importantly, what the audience’s motives are for doing things in the first place.

For example:

• They want the a-lister to notice them and think that by promoting them, they will (not likely).
• They want the a-lister’s audience to notice them because they think by writing a smarty pants comment on the website, they will be able to leech some of your visitors.
• They notice that the marketer has a gazillion RSS readers and think if that many people are readers, they MUST have something smart to say.
• They notice a gazillion comments and automatically assume that the popularity of the page must mean something (although it may not- see points 1 and 2).
• Someone they respect re-tweets the page, which automatically boosts the credibility.
• By associating with a popular marketer, they think that it makes them smarter/better/more likely to succeed.

It is marketing 101.  What’s in it for me?  And that relationship between perceived value and what the audience is going to get out of doing whatever it is they are willing to do is all tied into it.

All of these value triggers in place makes it very difficult to perceive otherwise.  In effect, it may or may not be that it is so valuable but that the perceived value from the “herd”, whether this is with an alterior motive or not, is set before they even start diving into the content itself.

As a result, they get tweeted more (ie. more exposure to new customers), they get liked more (ie. more exposure to new customers), which in turn exposes the new people to their content which ultimately elicits a greater chance of credibility in the eyes of the new visitor.

It snowballs.  And the rich get richer.  And those at the bottom are most likely to continue to stay at the bottom….

And that is the biggest hurdle that most businesses have to deal with online.  Gathering enough value triggers in place to boost content credibility before that new visitor reads the first line.

In a nutshell, those value triggers will boost a lot of assumptions about the content.

Now there are exceptions to the rule here.  And this is in no way diminishing the effort that it took the A-lister to get there.

But make no bones about it…..

Delivering great content is only an itty-bitty part of building anything successful online.  It is actually the easy part.

LeoDimilo.com

A couple years ago, you could rank well fairly quickly by simply slamming a keyword phrase in anchor text and distribute through various channels throughout the web.  These days, doing this will most likely result in a penalty.  Rather than simply look at this and try to adjust by fluctuating anchor text using stems, I would like to offer my theory as to why this doesn’t work as well anymore.

Equally important-  I want to stress the fact that I am in no way saying that you need to go out and open a twitter account if you are an SEO.  This isn’t a discussion debating whether social platforms significantly boost rankings;  I am merely highlighting my theory as to why what worked so well 2 years ago, doesn’t work now.

Social elements such as twitter weren’t significant drivers in search rankings despite the fact that a “good” and “relevant” page would likely be driven by them.  Most people who used these social websites also used URL shorteners, which ultimately meant that in order to determine what the page was about, they would have to visit it.

As social media started to drive more and more links to pages, the search engines had to adjust their algorithms to not penalize the link popularity of pages that are driven through social media platforms.

SEO’s clung to anchor text (myself included) as the way to drive relevancy points home to help search define what the page was about.  But a natural link profile would now include retweets and likes as well, right?….given the “new” web experience, that is.

So, a “bad” link profile would now have little to no social elements attached to it, despite the fact that your competitors were getting mentioned in a social context.  And because their link profile was a series of links that were shortened by a url shortener,  if search was to stay as it was, they wouldn’t be considered as relevant as say, someone like me, who placed all my work on exact match links.

….despite the fact that socially their page is more popular….

…despite the fact that their page resonates with more people….

That’s a conundrum that the Search Engines had to fix.

Hence, suddenly anchor text took a backseat to the url shortener.  Over time, the algorithms figured out that from an SEO standpoint, exact match anchor text may be relevant but it didn’t give as many indicators for link popularity as say, a page that had been retweeted 100′s of times across various platforms.

Does that mean that exact anchor text doesn’t matter anymore?  Nope.

Does that mean you need to become social?  Nope.

But it does mean that social media with their url shorteners have made exact match anchor text less important than it was 2 years ago….that is, if my theory is correct.

LeoDimilo.com

What if I told you that you could make more money with fewer prospects by maximizing the profit potential of the traffic you are currently getting?

A visitor online is not a lead nor are they a customer.  They are a prospect.  If they further engage you through signing up for more information, they become a lead.  If they buy something, they become a customer.  The reason why I am spelling out the obvious is because there are a large segment of internet marketers who don’t focus on leads or customers (in the classic sense anyway) and instead focus on raw traffic volume to deliver prospects to merchants as affiliates.

For these types of affiliate marketers, what you end up doing is playing the numbers game.

In this article, I am going to go over several concepts including lifetime customer value and how, if you are relying on one and done sales, you could be working too hard.

One and done customers will make a business sweat it out from month to month.

Why would it matter what a visitor is worth on average to your website?  There are a couple answers to this question-

1. To know how much you can spend on advertising (if you are advertising).
2. To maximize profit potential from those who buy from you.

Let me give an example to illustrate this:

You have a website that converts product X at 2%.  Each product carries a $20 profit margin to it.  

By running the numbers, you know that each visitor is worth .40/visit (40/100).  

This is for a one time sale, which is fairly common for small affiliate based businesses online.  So, if you know that your one-and-done customer is worth .40, in order to make 100k a year, you would need 250,000 visitors a year.

To make it worse, at .40 a visitor, you have little wriggle room for an advertising budget.

I am about to show you the magic if you can get returning customers and how this affects the cost of each prospect.

Returning Customer Magic.

Let’s pretend you are getting 3,000 visitors a month, and your product is converting at 2% for a $20 profit margin.  Those who became customers were added to your mailing list.

Over the course of 6 months, you acquire 360 new customers and make $7,200.

Your new customers get your offers via emails and over time, you see that the Average Lifetime Value of the customer is worth $120 to your business’ bottom line.

$100 X 360= $36,000

In a year’s time, you have made 720 new customers who’s lifetime value is worth $100 per customer + $20 for the initial sale or $86,400.

So let’s revisit the how much a prospect is worth question…..

• If you know that your product converts at 2%…..
• And you have factored in that each new customer is worth $120 over the lifetime of your relationship….
• Then suddenly each new visitor is worth $2.40….

Rather than 250,000 visitors to make $100k, you only need roughly 42k visitors;  a far cry from the original estimate, right?

Now this may seem trivial but as an online business, every new customer you get is going to be battle.  When you consider the fact that only 2 out of 100 will ever do business with you and when you consider the costs of advertising your business, returning customers mean a lot more to you than the 100′s that get away.

Less Visitors- More Money

In the example above, the difference is almost $58,000 with 200,000+ fewer prospects needed.

In fact, the hardest part is actually getting them to buy from you in the first place.

Now you may be wondering why this would matter to affiliate marketers who sell other people’s products.  First of all, the merchants who work with affiliates understand that that 1st sale is very difficult and are willing to pay the price of gaining a new customer if it means that they will potentially get a returning customer.  That, in and of itself, should be enough for those doing affiliate marketing to take a step back and muse over.

But the bigger deal is this-  If you can increase the lifetime customer value, you can use the revenue created to scale up rather than simply be content with a piece of the pie that is smallish.

LeoDimilo.com

I personally use two different wordpress themes for myself and for web design clients- Catalyst and Headway.  This is a review of the latest version of Headway otherwise known as Headway 3.0.  To be perfectly clear here, Headway just came out of beta and this is a look into the 1st generation of this theme (they have had 1 update at the time of this writing.

Take a look at Headway 3.0 Right Now- Click Here

Grids….Manage….Design

There are 3 main design elements to headway 3.0.  The grid, managing your wrappers and the actual design.  The developers of Headway did this so that you can completely customize your website, from easily managing the wrapper to customizing how you want the different elements of the page to look (wanna change the placement of your header?  No problem.  Want vertical navigation? No problem.

Want a navigation panel that spans half way across the page and meets the content?  No problem.

Headway allows you to do virtually anything within reason from a design perspective.

The Grid- The first part of setting up your Website.

Below is an illustration of a site redesign for this website.  As you can see, I have my header to the left with the navigation over a custom block (which incidentally is going to be a photo slider).

 Headway 3.0 Issues.

This isn’t to say that Headway doesn’t get some lumps.  For one thing, the grid system can feel kind of clunky.  In some cases, when I have gone to re-edit a page, I have found the content blocks to be in a different position.

Secondly, the template system is kind of confusing and you can’t edit the names to reflect each specific template.

Thirdly, the price for this theme isn’t exactly cheap. Then again, you get what you pay for, right?

Those 3 things aside, I have been slowly warming up to Headway 3.0.  And as the theme developers start to iron out the bugs, the theme should become the most advanced and easy to use premium wordpress theme out there.

But that is all in the future for now.

Take a look at Headway 3.0 right now.

LeoDimilo.com

The guys over at Catalyst have discounted their WordPress Theme (you can see the image below for what they are offering).  For those who don’t know what it is, it is a premium wordpress theme that allows you to literally change anything on your website.  It is one of two premium themes that I personally use for not only my websites but the websites that I create for clients.

If you have never heard of Catalyst before, you can check out my review for it here.

Or you can go directly to their website here.

LeoDimilo.com

SEO’s claim getting ranked in the search engines is better than building a brand and marketing your business.  SEO’s claim that it can be passive income, that it is the most targeted type of traffic and that it all boils down to finding non-competitive keyword pockets within a niche and exploiting it by building backlinks to the website.

From there, it is simply a matter of shuffling the search visitor toward whatever it is you want to shuttle them off to.

Usually, (but not always), you exchange high conversion rates for volume.  A 1-5% CTR is common so in order to make real money from a $40 product in which you get half the commission, you need to get 2000+ search visitors a month to view your offer and click through.

• They have to be extremely targeted.
• Most traffic is one & done.
• Most rely on search traffic for their visitors.
• It scales according to adding additional SEO optimized pages to the website.

With List marketing, it is different.

There are several things that make list marketing different.  For one thing, most list marketers hardly bother with search marketing, at least in the overt sense, because usually lists are more general in nature.

Secondly, the immediate purchase is nice but unnecessary because the list marketing actively engages their leads long after they have visited the website.

Finally, with list marketing, you are crafting offers that the lead usually doesn’t even know they may need.  In other words, they may not necessarily know they need that new book on how to cook gluten free pasta but if they are on your celiac cookbook list, then they may be interested in it.  And depending on how you are presenting yourself and the offer, they may take the risk of buying it based on built up trust between your brand and themselves.

That person may never have thought they needed that book and most likely would never even have thought of searching for it, but because of that trust between your brand and your lead, they may take you up on your offer.

So, with list marketing….

• Doesn’t need to be highly targeted but can be general in nature within the market.
• Usually isn’t dependent on immediate sales but focuses on future sales.
• Scales by adding more leads to your list.

Ultimately, it is about PEOPLE.

I think for a lot of search marketers, they tend to forget that ultimately marketing (whether search or otherwise) is all about creating connections between your brand and your market.  As a result, many search marketers spend an inordinate amount of time creating the connections in search but forget to build the right environment when they are actually getting traffic to their pages.

Now, I am not going to say which is better because it isn’t a case of better, per say.  It is all a case of what you want to do with your business and what is easier for you in terms of scaling your business.  Personally, I prefer list building although I play around (and know) SEO.

I think that people are the real source of income and I believe that developing lasting relationships with people is the best and easiest way to get ahead.

That’s not to say that ranking organically is a bad thing though. In terms of scaling a business, there is nothing quite like free traffic to your website.

LeoDimilo.com