By Les January 4, 2018

FIRST PHASE THINKING:

Internet Marketing Conventional Wisdom Tells Us that to have a successful commercial website you need two things, traffic and conversions. If you don’t have the traffic you won’t have the conversions. If you don’t have the conversions your website might as well be a glorified business card as it isn’t building your bottom line. Now what if I said, “Not in 2018”.

‘ON SITE’ Optimization:

First, understand that ‘Google’ as a search engine is largely responsible for directing traffic ‘on’ to your web site if it deems the content high enough quality.  Therefore you want your web site tailored so that the Google Search Engine [through its search algorithm] views it an authority site in your business category. In other words you want your website Search Engine Optimized [SEO]. SEO in 2018 is still your best long term marketing investment. Optimizing your website makes it a tangible asset that can always suck in traffic from the search engines for years and years to come. IF your site provides good value and is relevant. This value in terms of real traffic and conversions can only increase overtime as you continue to provide current information that visitors look for.

‘OFF SITE’ Optimization:

Second, understand that when other Websites link to you this provides third party validation. This Social Proof in turn rates your website higher in the search engines rankings. This results in more traffic to your site. So building content OFFSITE is a valid long term internet marketing strategy. In addition to your one website there are easily 200+ places where you can place relevant content.  These other website properties will direct traffic through links to your main website. This is called OFFSITE OPTIMIZATION.

FREE TRAFFIC:

Both ONSITE & OFFSITE Optimization works with the ‘Search Engines’ that index your content. They send traffic to your site directly for its content or indirecty through your published content elsewhere on the net. This may be viewed as “FREE TRAFFIC”. The only problem is that it is not free. It takes time and effort to build enough quality content to stand above the crowd. Realize there are millions of sites competing for what used to be the top ten spots of an internet search. Only then you begin to understand what you have to do to achieve those coveted top rankings. This is one reason SEO has fallen out of favour. Not because its not valid as a long term strategy but because it takes a such a sustained effort to achieve results. And in a ‘we want it now’ society few are willing to implement what it takes for long term internet marketing success. However if you strategically do a little more than your competition you will get those coveted spots. To optimize your web presence here in is a sample report of what we do for our clients combining both ONSITE and OFFSITE SEO.

PAID TRAFFIC:

Now if you want immediate ‘TRAFFIC NOW’ to your website, use a paid traffic strategy. One Option is PPC. PPC or ‘Pay Per Click’ works by placing a bid for the right to have your website show up in the top results of a search engine search. Knowing what specific key word phrase your customers are likely to use in an internet search, you competively bid on those terms. For example, “Toyoto Dealers, Abbotsford”.

PPC’ is an effective way to get immediate results but here’s the drawback – as long as you continue to pay a third party for access to their data. Google by far the dominant search engine, offers ‘Adwords’ as a bidding platform for those key word terms. But as the dominant player they are in a position to ask what ever the market can bear. Yahoo’s Bing is a distant secondary player and there are other search engines with even lessor market share.

COMPARE FREE TRAFFIC WITH PAID TRAFFIC:

Think of PPC Ads as a SHORT TERM investment with immediate high returns if done correctly. Think of On-SITE and OFF-SITE Properties as a LONG TERM investment with slow returns but ever increasing yields over time.

PPC is not something you want to do as an amateur, as the competition is fierce and the learning curve is expensive. That is unless you are prepared to do test every aspect of your campaign against an alternative until you get that elusive positive ROI combination. Once that is achieved, it literally means for every X dollars in, you get X plus dollars out. That is the beauty of PPC, once you get the winning combination you can do this 24/7. This allows you to cycle and progressively scale up your efforts, that is, until things change and they will. Its the nature of the beast – once the competition finds out whats working.

Mobile Dramatically Changes The Internet Marketing Landscape forever

Now that mobile devices are approaching 80% of all internet use, paid advertising has become much more competitive and thus much more expensive. The reason is that when desktop computers dominated, Google placed ads on the top and to the side of the free search results. Now with increasing mobile phone use, there is no room to view side ads on a small viewing area. Google wanting to ensure a good user experience has thus eliminated the side ads. And since there is only room for 3 spots on the mobile phone screen, this leaves only 3 paid ad positions for everyone to bid on. Thus you have more companies bidding for less space driving your PPC ad costs through the roof.

Eventually we can speculate that all results of a Google search will soon be all paid ads with free search results moving to page 2, or 3 or 4. Like it or not it appears that if you want visibility for your website you will only have two choices. Either pay for it directly with Paid ads [PPC] or be prepared to constantly feed quality content all over the web [Use Onsite and Offsite SEO]. All this in the hope it will attract visitors to your money site. This adequately sums up conventional FIRST PHASE internet marketing thinking but what if there was a better way?

SECOND PHASE THINKING:

Fortunately we can offer you a much more effective alternative for your paid internet marketing. Big Business bypasses all the issues we mere internet mortals have to deal with. They simply plug directly into the data generated by internet traffic from social media and all the sites you and I visit. In other words they can directly market to you simply by using the data collected on you as you browse the net. They then target you based on your interests, your age, where you live and what sites you frequent … In fact they don’t even have to have a website or social media presence to market to you. They simply place an ad where ever you happen to be on the internet with a compelling offer that you cannot refuse. For example, 75% off that item you were always hedging on buying but felt too pricey. You might say Santa’s got a list and he knows if you have been naughty or nice and will present accordingly.

Big Data:

In other words Big Business is plugged into ‘Big Data’ – the Second Phase of INTERNET MARKETING. The minimum entry into this playpen of commerce starts with an ad spend around $100,000 per month which is out of the reach of most small to medium businesses, that is until now.

You can think of the First Phase of INTERNET MARKETING as the Art of Creating and Directing Traffic to Good Content on all your website properties for the Purpose of Conversions. The objective there in is to make it as easy as it can be, for prospective clients to find you. This first phase internet strategy requires that all your web properties be properly optimized with good content ON SITE on your website and OFFSITE where ever you have a presence on the net. This presence includes social media, what is known as web2.0 properties [that is a presence on high traffic public sites such as blogger.com] and business directories. See Brand Optimization  All this is a very effective overall strategy but Big Business are approaching the traffic generated by all these sites in a totally different way.

A Different Way Of Thinking

Instead of getting or enticing prospective clients to find you – WHAT IF you simply find them where ever they are on the net? Employing Second Phase Thinking: Imagine a restaurant sending a tempting lunch offer at 11am to the mobile phones of all office workers within a 5 mile radius. Or imagine a local real estate office offering, all current ‘executive home’ buyers to cover their moving expenses. Well, we are offering access to a system that allows you that type of ‘Pin-Point’ marketing. Don’t waste ads by presenting them to non-buyers and get higher conversions.  Its cheaper than any other type of paid traffic. You pay wholesale not retail rates. An even bigger plus: You don’t have to invest the years of effort and the money, it takes to build traffic and create a list using First Phase Internet Marketing Thinking [Pay Per Click or Onsite or Offsite SEO].

Access Potential Customers Directly without Going Through A Third Party

“My Business Builders is uniquely positioned to give your company a system to reach your ideal prospects at will without requiring an ad spend over $100,000 per month. We are part of a cooperative using a proprietary system that allows us to accommodate smaller business spends when interfacing with ‘Big Data’. Through it we interface with 295 Display Ad Exchanges, Google’s ‘Double Click being only one of them. These networks collectively pool data on all traffic on the net making it a prospectors gold mine. Tap into this data and the benefits are multi-fold:

1) It allows us to research and target the demographic and geographic traits that specifically define our clients’ customers;

2) Rather than be limited to one display ad network such as Google with 20-25% market reach we expand that to 95% coverage of what’s available in any geographic area;

3) We bid on ad placements by all 295 networks directly paying wholesale costs without paying retail through a third party like Google. We thus are in a position to pass on significant savings on your ad spend;

4) Plugging into big data means you have direct market access to potential clients in virtually all of the various social networks such as Linkedin and Facebook.

P.S. Since Microsoft acquired Linkedin, all of Linkedin’s database is now part of ‘Big Data’. Now you should know that plugging in a B to B Linkedin Network is approximately 2x our normal wholesale ad cost. This is still a good deal as B to B purchases are typically 10 to 100x B to C and are thus more valuable. Even so our system still out performs PPC at roughly half the cost right across the board although some niches work better than others.

What we are offering here changes the game board dramatically for small and medium sized business. If you wish to know more contact us here