Reply To: Do you tap into a "steady stream" of traffic?
First, I have to say that I think this is largely what Sean is thinking and working on, but I have had my personal “I got it” moment and how it applies to what I am doing and maybe what you are doing. Give credit where it is due.
To become the platform for everything on your topic will take a lot of work, but if you have been working for years then, how much work have you done already on things that never worked or are not working now?
How much work will you do in the next years? If you don’t give up you will do plenty of work to keep up with the changing winds of the internet.
You might as well work on something that works and no one can take away from you.
You know, I might just teach a course on this.
What would it take to “Become Your Own Google?”
First, you would have to be a one stop location for everything in your topic.
Jay Abraham teaches the strategy of preeminence, your goal is to become the preeminent source for everything in your topic. For years in industry I had to buy IBM computers because they were the preeminent choice in the market. IBM clones were cheaper and often had the same hardware, but we all know you are going to have a problem with a computer sometime and when it happened I knew my superiors would say, “Why didn’t you buy IBM?”
I stuck with the preeminent brand. My superiors were sold on it. Magazines were playing the role of Google in those days saying “Clones are as good as IBM, look at these brands” but IBM in those days overpowered the noise in the market that said, just as good.
Talk about leverage, I saw an IBM ad that said, “When cheap computers say they are just as good as another brand, it is always IBM that they claim to be as good as. IBM, the standard everyone tries to attain…” They turned around the good as claims to their advantage. Marketing Judo.
You want people to say, “Why didn’t you go to Norma.com?” (more likely what don’t you try Norma.com) or whatever your website is, when they do you will have something. If you want it make it a goal.
Here is how things work now, people search for answers and information, Google (or any search engine) ranks the sites that somehow correlates with the search terms. You are probably in there, but it could be page 33 or 58 based on a machine you will never see and how it ranks you based on a program you will never understand and how it decided to rank you and perhaps the worst part is, if you figure out enough to win today, the same approach won’t work tomorrow or next week or sometime soon and you don’t know when it won’t work, just that it won’t. When the account you make your living on goes dry, that could be your first clue things changed. “Oh, we can’t pay the house payment this month, I guess Google changed something again!”
You are also ran. Not first place, not second place or even third, but also ran, but be truthful, how many pages of search results do you go through? I seldom get past the first and the third page doesn’t exist as far as I am concerned. Sad, but true. When I started I remember bragging that I made it to page five, but honestly page five doesn’t exist in your prospect’s world.
If you aren’t a big company with a big budget you aren’t going to make it to number one and if you somehow through clean living and blood, sweat and tears do make it to number one, any fad or cat video can knock you off, off number one, off the first page, off anything people will see.
I worked and worked and created content, answered questions, wrote kindle books, even was on a few guest blogs and became number one on Google for my search terms and someone that put those search terms on a tee shirt and made top heavy women jogging wearing the tee shirt videos knocked me off and when I started falling I never made it back up.
I had worked hard at driving traffic, but not on getting people to stick, to belong, to invite others, to participate. So when the traffic dried up, it got lonely.
I had a financial website and was knocked off number one search results for my terms and my domain name actually had those terms in the domain name by women jogging in a tee shirt.
It was like people not finding Ford.com when looking for Fords. Want information on Fords? Well here are some nice cat videos and one of the cats is named Ford, one is named Focus and another one is big, fat and fluffy, we call him F-150.
A domain name that was made up of search terms was beat out on those terms by women jogging in tee shirts. I began to wonder if I was the only sane person in the world.
Back to the traffic process. So they return this list of search results and you might be seen on it and you might not and they click one and go back to the search results, they click another and go back to the results and they click another and somewhere in there they may find something that interests them and go through the content there. I call it circular search engine traffic. They keep circling back to the search engine.
(took a break and checked, I am back to number five, I think making a page and posting on facebook did it, but five isn’t number one and the guy with the tee shirts is nowhere to be found, so don’t consider that a permanent strategy, you can tell I am still smarting and a bit touchy over the tee shirt incident)
Here is what you want, they search for something, see your website and you capture them, they are trapped in your huge, plenty of answers, plenty of content, plenty of resources, they can interact and participate, interesting looking website, with contests, balloons, hot dogs and a band and Taco Tuesdays and you take them away from Google. They don’t go back.
You also seed (or breadcrumb if you prefer) your website through forums, blogs, Ezine, youtube, facebook, instagram, twitter, the whole gambit of places you can post and someone see it on the internet, maybe even for some people post on craigslist.
I call it Google Judo. You use their strength to take the traffic away from them.
You work with their process and you punch holes in it by becoming your own search engine.
Someone, somehow winds up on your website, well people are lazy. If you have a way to search the zillion articles, videos, free content and stories on your website that connect with what they are interested in, why go back to Google, just search on your site, it is standing out right there in front of them. You could give them a hint, just say, “Search for everything _____ here!” and you fill in the blank with your topic.
Come to think of it, if they came through google or bing or yahoo or startpage or duck duck go, they are in search mode. If you don’t offer them something that aligns with that mode, it is like you have a sign on your website that says, “GO BACK TO GOOGLE!”
You have got to spell it out for them “Welcome to the platform for everything ______”
Oh, it says they are the platform for everything __________, I guess they must be the platform for everything ________.
Now, what about this group? We could cross promote. You could have “Be Your Own Google” and also have “We Are Our Own Google” and the we would be us!
I actually think that is a direction Sean is working on. We need to find his address and send him pizza so he doesn’t have to slow down to eat….
Best,
Scott Hogue CChH
Scott Hogue CChH
Follow me in the "Use What You Learn Challenge" as I create a website using what I learn from Sean that is a Platform for my niche:
http://www.threestepstowealth.com
The thread on this group that explains it:
http://preneurpal.com/forums/topic/own-the-game-and-win-it/#post-1747
