It’s not for every business, not for every person. But for those that market through door-to-door sales we just got in an interesting take on the subject. You’ll find the new article complete with a daily schedule and mini marketing plan in our small business marketing ideas guide. Or you could just click on the link.

Back in the Stone Age when I was a kid, we had television and radio.  That’s all we had.  Imagine (or remember?) a world pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, pre-cell phones…  It was a very peaceful time. LOL  The messaging that we’re bombarded with almost constantly has created a noise in the marketplace that we tend to shut out or ignore.  If we’re shutting it out, you can imagine that your prospects and customers are doing the same.  A broadcast message from a source like television or radio is an obsolete and ineffective method for communicating with your audience more than ever.

If you’re a brick & mortar business, that argument might seem counter-intuitive.  After all, you run one ad and can reach thousands or millions, right?  You might be broadcasting to thousands or millions, but I can guarantee you’re not reaching them.  Advertisers love to use metrics like the size of their audience to entice you into thinking you are actually connecting with those prospects.  We see this in broadcast media as well as other sources like newspapers and the Yellow Pages.  Recent headlines this past year about all the failing newspapers worldwide should cause you to re-consider that advertising model; clearly, many other small businesses and Fortune 500 companies before you have realized their marketing dollars are not being well spent in traditional media and have pulled out, leaving those newspapers filing bankruptcy.  Even at the local level, we have seen Yellow Page advertising reps dropping their rates to a fraction of previous years just to retain any kind of business from their clients who are leaving in droves.  It’s not just a tough economy that is driving those ad costs down; it is the vacancy of savvy business owners who have realized their advertising and marketing budget is better spent elsewhere.

Is this merely a shift in ad revenues, or part of something bigger and much more fundamental?  Consider the process of a Google search (or Yahoo, Bing or your favorite search engine) for a moment.  What is taking place there is an inbound process.  A potential client needs information, searches for it, and then clicks on the website to deliver on that.  They’re not responding to anything but their own drive and self-perceived need.  They are driving the request for contact.  That’s fundamentally different from an ad on a radio or television that’s causing someone to pick up the phone or visit a showroom.

Advertising by definition is an outbound process, a process which has become so crowded and noisy that rarely are those ads being heard.  It’s a process that’s fundamentally flawed; the only way you know if your ad is successful is if you sell more widgets.  You will go through a fiscal quarter of ad spend before you know if your ad is working.  Does that make sense on any level?  Especially in today’s marketplace, where marketing campaigns can spread virally to millions practically overnight, you can’t afford to wait three months (or more) to find out if you’re connecting with your audience.  Advertising starts with a product and then tries to find the buyer, when really your process needs to be finding the hungry audience and crafting your product or service per their needs.

New Marketing (as I like to call it) is fundamentally an inbound process.  You contemplate your customer.  You create products or services that meet their needs and you create an opportunity for them to find those products when they perceive the need.  Part of your success will be in crafting the product or service, and partly in your ability to control the perception of “need.”  Perceived need in the traditional advertising model occurred by bombarding the prospect with repeated messages until they perceived a need for the product; now that those messages are being ignored, your messages need to become more interactive.  Your product or service must adapt as you receive feedback from your customers and prospects.

There are a lot of web designers out there, and a lot of firms advertising the “best web design” available.  We are of the school of thought that an effective web design is one that brings traffic to your website and revenue to your business.  For that reason, you won’t see us recommending Flash, you won’t see us recommending HTML templates, and you won’t see us recommending a design without SEO.

For a web design to be effective, you must have SEO.  A thumbnail explanation of SEO is that the site speaks to the search engines in their language.  It is optimized for the search engines.  Why is that so crucial?  Because the number of pages on the Internet is increasing at an exponential rate, and the competition for page 1 in Google, Yahoo or Bing will grow in intensity.  It will be more & more difficult to rank on page one.  In the more competitive niches, it is already impossible to rank on page one without good SEO; that will become the case for every niche in the very near future.

Good SEO can mean many different things; in terms of SEO web design, “good SEO” means on-page factors.  Yes, you will also need to market your site to insure top placement in the search engines; on-age SEO factors are not enough in most cases (unless you are in an extremely tiny, non-competitive niche or hyper-niche) to insure top placement in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The two go hand in hand.

The old school way of doing things was to create a website and then go hire a separate SEO expert to optimize it, oftentimes completely changing what the designer did because it was actually harmful for your search engine rankings.

Before you hire a web designer find out what their experience is with SEO and make sure that they can build SEO into the design of the site.

My usual bottom line is the bottom line; if we’re doing something that isn’t helping our business, then we shouldn’t be doing it.  This is sort of a digression from the way I live my life, in that if I’m doing something that isn’t helping my walk with God, then I shouldn’t be doing it.  But let’s not digress…

There are many reasons for a website.

Perhaps you want to use it as a reference; maybe you’re a local event planner and you promote in-person at events, gatherings, etc., and do direct mailings to businesses and private parties interested in your services.  You need a place to refer those prospects for more information, pictures of your work, pricing, etc.  And a phone number.  You don’t need e-commerce, you don’t need a 5,000 page website pulling in content from the world about “event planning.”  Your focus is your backyard and frontyard, and how your community impacts you — and vice versa.  A simple website will do, along with a linking campaign to insure top search engine placement for your local keywords.

Perhaps you are a local giftshop who is tired of netting five cents on the dollar with high rent, payroll expenses, taxes, etc., and you want to expand your market beyond your local borders.  You WILL want to increase the size of your website.  In this case, I recommend narrowing your niche if you’re going to expand your reach.  You can’t punch the side of a barn.  Focus, focus.  Do some research on your keywords to see about your competition on a national level, and that will inform you as to how many links you’ll need to create to compete successfully.  Page count is a factor; hundreds if not thousands of pages related to affiliate products, products you are actively selling, and information about those products, is recommended.  Do NOT post fake reviews on products you have never seen or used.  It’s not only unethical, but lame!

You should consider yourself lucky to do what you do for a living, assuming it is anything other than Internet Marketing.  Being an honest internet marketer is like working as an undercover cop in a gang.  You see a lot of ugly going down and you do your best to right the wrongs, hold the line and live to fight tomorrow.

The perception is that marketers are like politicians or novelists; we are professional liars.  I can understand how that came to be.  Some of the business owners I work with decry the lack of honesty in marketing, then want me to push the truth in marketing their brand.  I really don’t do that.  I don’t bend the truth to make a buck.  You either have a legitimate product/service or you don’t.

Consider actually making a better product. Not only will your list of benefit be what you want them to be, but your product really will market itself.