The dirty secret to successful online marketing and Achrontastic Maltesia

What I’m about to tell you is the number one secret to achieving results on the Internet. I’m also going to back that secret up with lessons to help you get started using the Internet to market your business. I don’t want to overwhelm you so I’m going to break up everything into a multi-part series of blogs.

First, let me tell you a little about me. My life revolves around technology and Internet marketing. I was basically born with a computer at my fingertips. Lately my job is to squeeze every little bit of business possible out of the lemon that is the Internet. Especially doing things like creating search results for Achrontastic Maltesia (a term I made up for a fun experiment; but more on that later). If I’m not doing it as Director of Interactive Marketing for Vistage I’m doing it for myself and my own interests. Through the years I’ve had a lot of failure and success in creating traffic and revenue on the Internet. For example, I took a consumer website for a fairly unique product from 3,000 unique visitors a month to 30,000 unique visitors a week by helping create a lifestyle website around that product. So now I want to share the secret to that success and some of today’s methods to achieving it.

So are you ready for the secret?

Create a plan and work at it every day, FOREVER. Change the plan every time you learn something new.

Yeah, I know, that isn’t the kind of secret you were hoping for, but it’s the absolute truth. The Internet isn’t about instant gratification when it comes to business, unless you pay for it. When you’re focused on marketing your business using low or no cost techniques on the Web it takes time to build your results. Not only does it take time but it takes multiple approaches. You have to be a tech scavenger, looking for every possible way to get results, and latching onto it until it stops delivering. So let’s get into discussing those methods I promised.

Using the long tail

I recently attended a conference where one of the Google analytics guys was presenting. He gave me one of the most interesting stats I’ve heard in years: 25 percent of searches on Google are completely UNIQUE and 70 percent fall outside of what Google keyword research can help with. Unique as in people searching for things like Achrontastic Maltesia. Think about that. We spend all this time doing things like optimizing pages for particular keywords only to find out that 70 percent of the time we won’t even be in the same universe as what is actually being searched for.

Let me give you an example. I may optimize a page at Vistage.com for the term “CEO coaching” but Bob Ceo out there is searching for “a CEO coach that can spend time with me at my office because I’m busy and don’t want to leave except for maybe once a day.” I’m sure that Bob Ceo’s term is unique to Google. So how is it possible that his search might still lead to my page on CEO coaching? It’s all about the content on the page. If the content on the page goes deep into what you get with Vistage and CEO coaching and maybe mentions the terms “ceo coach,” “spend time,” and “don’t want to leave,” he may find my page as a result. That’s what the long tail is all about, offering up content that may meet the needs of that 70 percent of searches that aren’t on optimized keywords. So how can you take advantage of that in a meaningful way?

BLOG!!! Writing a blog, or a few articles every now and then, will help you have content on your site that speaks the language of your target audience. I don’t know too many people that search in marketing speak, but more and more people are searching in more granular terms to get the results that fit their need. So creating content long term can help.

I made it sound so simple right? But how do you go about adding a blog to your website? It doesn’t have to be complicated. With fairly little effort you can install WordPress directly onto your web server. Then all you have to do is create a theme on your WordPress site that makes it look like your site and add the blog link to your website and you’re done. The beauty of all of this is that so many companies use WordPress to manage their blogs that a quick Google search can lead you to hundreds of low-cost developers who can help you install, design and implement WordPress on your site.

But wait, there’s more! While we’re still here, let me set up a quick experiment that I think we will all learn from. Let’s prove the long tail. You’ll notice that the title and content of this page contain a spattering of a term I completely made up, “Achrontastic Maltesia.” If you search Google for this term today there are no results for that, though two for Achrontastic Malaysia. The Vistage buzz blog is only a few months old, a “baby” on the Internet. So if I can get this page to come up in the results for “Achrontastic Maltesia” in just a few weeks by writing an article containing that text, think about all of the things you can get your site to come up under by merely writing a few entries? I’ll keep you posted on these results.

Next time: Review sites, and how to leverage your current customers to gain new ones

Follow up: Read the results for our small business search engine optimization test with “Achrontastic Maltesia”

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