SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the art of getting high rankings on Google and other search engines. Some strategies are very complicated and labor intensive, but some are relatively easy to implement.

Why bother with SEO? Quite simply if you have a business or nonprofit website, it will do you no good at all if no one visits your site.

But that is not enough. These visitors need to be people who are likely to do business with you. You want people who want and need what you have to offer.

In other words, you need more than just web traffic, you need targeted web traffic.

Fortunately, these people self-identify themselves by the searches they make on Google, Bing and other search engines. If your site appears on the first page of the results they receive, you will get a high number of visitors who want and need what you sell.

This is the first of seven SEO strategies you can use to get higher rankings.

The first strategy is called "Slave Sites." It is based on the principle that the domain name your site has can be one of the most important ways to get high search engine rankings.

For example: If someone is searching for a Samsung PN50C450 50-Inch 720p Plasma HDTV television, the search engines will most likely rank a site named SamsungPN50C45050Inch720pPlasmaHDTV.com, higher than a site named, joeselectronics.com.

The reason is that the domain name itself contains the keyword or search term the person typed into the search engine as a query.

Here's another example: Let’s say your company already has a website but you want to target a keyword for a particular product. For example, your company rents equipment and the name of your company is "Acme Equipment Rental." The URL for your website, of course, is, www.acmeequipmentrental.com.

Your most popular products are forklifts and you want to get higher search engine rankings when people search for "forklifts." But your URL (domain name) is not optimized for forklifts, it is only optimized for "equipment rentials."

Here’s a solution: Buy a domain name like www.forkliftrentalscleveland.com (assuming your business is in Cleveland). Now when someone searches for “forklift rentals in Cleveland, Ohio,” they are much more likely to find your new website.

You could also create slave sites called www.electicgeneratorscleveland.com to target electric generators, or www.scaffoldingrentalcleveland.com to target scaffolding.

Using slave sites, you can target every keyword you need.

But how do you get people from this new site over to your main site?

Make your new site a one-page mini site with some content about renting forklifts, but cut the information off mid paragraph with a link that says “See More.” The link of course will take visitors to the appropriate section of your main site so people can continue reading.

You can create these one-page slave sites for every type of keyword you wish to target, just be sure to link them to the sections of your main site that deals with the topic of these keywords.

You can also create slave sites for specific products, including the model numbers, as I did in the example above about the HD TV. Believe me, when someone searches for a product by its model number, they already have their credit card out and are ready to buy.

These are people who have already done their homework and are in the final stages of their buying cycle.

Using slave sites enables you to funnel traffic from a large variety of specific keywords, product categories and even individual products to your main site, no matter what domain name your site now has.

The next strategy will also be an easy to implement way to get better search engine rankings to get more, targeted, traffic to your website.
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Wisdom from "Social Media Marketing Superstars" - Part One

Even though internet marketing is barely more than a decade and a half old, the game is changing for online marketers. Gradually the importance of search engine optimization is giving ground to social media optimization.

In other words, playing in Google's sandbox is not as important as playing in Facebook's playground.

But one thing that has not changed is the importance of creating and posting quality content on the web. Good content is just as important to social media as it is to search engines. With each year that goes by, the world will more and more belong to those who put a lot of (valuable) content on the web.

People frequently ask me how Twitter, for example, can make much of an impact since you are limited to 140 characters. The answer is not much unless your tweets include links to your blog, your website, your videos, your photos, your slide shows, your podcasts or other content you may create and upload to the web.

Content is still king, even as the "game" shifts away from search engines to social media.

• Content can solve problems for your ideal clients,
  
• Good content establishes trust and credibility with them,
  
• Good content entertains them, educate them,
  
• or it can help them become better, more-informed, consumers of whatever it is that you sell (which is no small achievement, since it helps them distinguish between your products and your competitors' products on factors other than mere price differences).

Additionally - since search engine optimization is still important to any online marketing campaign - content can be optimized with the appropriate keywords to help people find you and all your wonderful solutions online.

Which leads me to a brilliant piece written by my friend Anne Handley of Marketing Profs. I found this in a book called, Success Secrets of Social Media Marketing Superstars.

This book is a collective effort compiled by Mitch Meyerson. It includes chapters written by Anne, Gary Vaynerchuk, Brian Clark, Shama Kabani, Julie Perry, Mike Stelzner and many others. In other words, the superstars.

Anne's chapter is called, "Creating Content People Care About: The Cornerstone of Social Media."

Now let me start by saying that Anne Handley is a genius. She really "gets" the how, why and what about creating marketing content for the web.

Anne, points out that today's customers have changed. They are no longer easily swayed by bombarding them with advertising. Instead they seek out information before making a buying decision. They Google various brands and they ask their friends on Facebook what their experiences with various brands have been.

Think of how you behave when you take off your marketing hat and put on your customer hat.

No doubt you are far more proactive when you are shopping for a new car or even looking for medical care. Possibly you also read reviews and ratings by actual customers of these products on Amazon, Angies List, Yelp or Foursquare. Why then, do you expect your own customers to behave differently when they are buying your products?

So how do you create content that can attract these changing customers? Anne gives us a list of 11 Rules of Compelling Content, with several examples and short case studies. I won't re-list them all here, but I will higlight a few of her insights for you:

• "Compelling content is vendor-agnostic." In other words, your content is not about you, your company, your products or your brands. It puts the spotlight on what the customer wants to learn and becomes a publisher of information that meets these needs.
  
  Nothing will turn off your customers/readers faster than lot of self-serving commentary. Keep your brand mentions to a minimum. This is a medium from which people value objectivity, not salesmanship.
  
  
• Build trust by become a resource. Nothing builds trust faster and more reliably than educating customers. Anne uses Rubbermaid as an example. Their blog "does not focus on injected molded plastics but on space-saving and organizing, as well as on the consumers interested in, and the industry build up around these issues. Consider these recent posts: 'How to Sell Clothing at a Yard Sale,' and 'Save Money Packing Your Lunch.'"
  
  
• Compelling content allows for interaction or dialog. Create content that serves a specific community and allow them a voice.
  
  
• Great content does not create barriers. Anne gives an example of a General Mills "community" site Psst General Mills. Instead of finding a community, she found barriers in the form of pages of qualifying questions designed to compile their database.
  
  
• Compelling content starts a conversation.
  Build in ways for readers to share you information with their friends (or fans, followers or blog readers). Don't force them to sign in order to link to your content, but encourage them to share with easy to use widgets.

What kinds of content appeal to you as a customer or potential customer? How have your decisions been impacted by commercial information that educated you and offered solutions to specific problems? And how did you feel toward the brand that took the time and effort to educate you more without an over-powering sales message?

You definitely want to check out the book, Success Secrets of Social Media Marketing Superstars. It is full of a lot of useful ideas from some of the best minds in the field of social media marketing.

For those of you who have already read this book, what were your favorite insights? I plan to write an occasional series of articles based on the chapters and lessons in Social Media Marketing Superstars, so I will greatly appreciate your feedback.

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A number of people have asked me to repeat my workshop on "57 Strategies to Attract More Visitors to Your Website" and so I have scheduled a small workshop for April 22. The workshop will be at the BB&T Bank on 1201 Church Street, Colleyville, TX 76034, from 1pm to 4pm.

The workshop will be informative and hands on, teaching you how to get a lot more of visitors to your site, and how to target the right kind of visitors. You will learn 57 unique and effective strategies to boost the traffic you get to your site.

Includes Traffic Strategies Workbook
Plus, at the end of this workshop, you will leave with a completed traffic workbook to help you build a dominant online presence with your site. This workbook will be your game plan, filled with actionable steps you can take to position your site at the top of your niche or field.

The material begins with basic keyword research strategies, introducing you to many innovative ways to find keywords that you can easily dominate.

Here's what else you will learn:

• Learn how to use tools like Search Engine Optimization, pay-per-click advertising, Twitter and email marketing to drive buyers to your site.
  
• Get front-page placement on Google, Yahoo, AOL, Bing, and over 100 other search engines - for searchers in your targeted zip codes.
  
• People who look for your business online are proven to be much more likely to buy than any other type of prospect.
  
• Studies show that 63% of your potential customers go online to gather information before physically visiting a brick and mortar business.
  
• Geo-targeting technology: For most businesses, it serves no purpose to appear outside specific geographic areas. Geo-targeting software allows your site to be found by local customers in zip codes of your choosing.

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I've been reading about Google's new URL shortener, goo.gl with a lot of interest. As anyone who uses Twitter knows, it is just about mandatory to shorten long URLS into smaller ones in order to fit your message withing the 140 character limit.

I've been using bit.ly as my shortener of choice until now. It works very well, plus it is integrated into my Tweetdeck so the whole process happens automatically for me.

The drawback with shortened URLs has always been that Google and other search engines do not follow a shortened link back to the site it points to. In other words, sending out a shortened link does not contribute to an SEO link building strategy.

The more links you have pointing back to a website, the better it will rank when someone does a search for the keywords used in your website.

Hence my interest in Google's new shortening tool.

While I have not been able to find anything written about whether Google's spiders will follow Google's own shortened links, I have to assume it will. When Google adds on new services and offers new tools, they have always in the past contributed to its goal of delivering better search engine results.

So I will be using Google's new shortener with my own Twitter activities, if for no other reason than to add to SEO link building.

The only drawback I see with Google's new shortener is that it presently requires that you use Firefox as your browser. I switched to Google's own browser, Google Chrome, some months ago. It strikes me as odd that this new tool is not yet available on Google's own browser.

For more information about the new shortener, read this article by Muthu Muthusrinivasan, Ben D'Angelo and Devin Mullins,

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Leaving pay-per-click advertising out of the equation for now, is Search Engine Optimization(SEO) still the only game in town for businesses and non-profits seeking targeted traffic to their websites?

In other words, is it still necessary for a business to work so hard and so long to get to the top of Google’s search engine results in order to get a decent flow of targeted traffic to its site?

The problems with SEO are daunting. First there is the difficult task of finding relevant keywords that get respectable numbers of search engine queries each month, yet at the same time are not so competitive that you are fighting hoards of other businesses trying to dominate those same search results.

Next there is the matter of optimizing your site. If your site is already in existence, this may entail rewriting all of your content to sprinkle the right number of keywords throughout. And even that may not matter because your site is probably at a big disadvantage if it does not have your favored keyword within its URL or title. (Example: your URL might be http://yourkeyword.com and your site’s title might be “YOUR KEYWORD BLOG”). Given that, it probably wouldn’t be feasible to go back and start your site all over again.

Then there is the problem that even if you have your site internally optimized around a given set of keywords, it still must have numerous links from other sites pointing to it. Unless your targeted keywords have very, very little competition, you must have a lot of external links to establish its relevancy.

And if all that were not enough, just making it to the top of the Google mountain is no assurance that you will stay on top. Search engine optimization is a game of king of the hill. One day you may be on page one, and the next you may find yourself on page twelve - for no apparent reason.

But I believe social media gives you a new set of tools to get traffic.

First, as I wrote about in an article about Kansas attorney Grant Griffiths, Blogging to Dominate Keywords and Google, blogging (a social media tool in its own right) can sometimes be the best way to dominate search engine results. But it takes a lot of time and work to get there.

But if your blog is a platform upon which to create content, report on useful information, and link to other good content, you can use a variety of other social media tools to give it much more exposure than it might otherwise receive.

If you tweet about each and every new piece you put on your blog, you will attract visitors to that new article. See Hard Evidence That Twitter Brings Me Traffic (Part 1) and (Part 2).

Or if you create YouTube videos, post tagged photos on Flikr.com, bookmark your posts on Digg.com or Stumbleupon.com, you not only attract one-time visitors, you also expose your blog to people who may become fans or evangelists, who then spread the word for you.

It is the creation of true evangelists that gives social networking its true power. At its heart, social media marketing is really all about letting the market do your marketing for you.

Let’s take the social bookmarking sites I mentioned earlier. Social bookmarking is nothing more than a democratization of the web. Users “vote” for the best articles and content based on whether they found the information useful.

This is something no search engine can do with their algorithms and spiders.

Bookmarking sites give greater authority to those web pages that have been voted on by many people, who base their votes on the how they perceive the page’s quality rather than its keyword density.

Digg.com and Stumbleupon.com are useless if you just bookmark your own content and no one else follows suit. But if hundreds of people like what you have posted and “Digg” or “Stumble” these pages, your content gains authority and thereby increases its visibility on the web.

The same is true with Twitter. Twitter is the “NFL” of social media, which means “Not For Long” if you simply send out spam-like tweets telling how great your product is. If you do this, your followers will block you fast and you will find yourself with no audience at all. But if you build conversations, create a community and provide quality content that solves readers’ problems, you will reap the benefits much faster than any SEO campaign could ever produce.

One thing that astonishes me about Twitter, for example, is how fast I am adding new followers. Although my numbers are still very modest when compared to others, I find that the number of new followers grows every single day.

This means I am adding to my “social capital,” and like all other forms of capital, this is a valuable business asset. It also means that going forward, my efforts will be focused on increasing this social capital, and thereby extending my reach among other social networkers.

Search Engine Optimization rewards sites that have a certain number of repetitive keywords, social media rewards sites that provide quality content.

So which is the better course of action: Search Engine Optimization or Social Media Marketing?

Personally, I think social networking puts the control into my hands. I no longer have to write with both human readers and Google algorithms in mind. My job is simply to create quality content and build a social community that appreciates my content. If I do that, the traffic will take care of itself.

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Yesterday I wrote a case study about Grant Griffiths, a Kansas family law attorney who totally dominated his targeted keywords on Google within two years of starting his blog.

Grant's blog, Kansas Family Lawyer, put him on the first page of 12 out of 13 keywords that I looked up. Obviously as they say on those weight loss commercials, these results may are not typical of all bloggers, but it does show the potential of blogging to promote your business.

Based on this case study, here are some lessons you can apply to dominate your keywords:

• Put your main keyword in your blog's title;
  
• Put this same main keyword in your url or website address (ie http://yourmainkeyword.com);
  
• Write articles on a regular basis (don't know if Grant Griffiths wrote every single day, but he posted often);
  
• The titles of his articles always contained keywords;
  
• Within these articles repeated the same keywords in the article title about 4 times out of every 100 words;
  
• Post helpful (non spammy) comments on other related blogs. Whenever appropriate, include a link to a pertinate article within your own blog.
  
• Use anchor text within these links. "Anchor text" refers to those blue, clickable links that do not just mention the website address but instead have a keyword. Look back to the first paragraph of this article at the blue "case study about Grant Griffiths" as an example.
  
• You can create anchor text links with a small bit of html code. I have written a tutoriol on creating anchor text at: Anchor Text Tutorial
  
• Also create internal anchor text links from one of your articles to another just as this article contains a link back to my previous article.
  

These are all basic search engine optimization techniques, but as Grant Griffiths example demonstrates, they are extremely effective.

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One of the things I want to do in this blog is to pass along some of the most outstanding online marketing ideas I am able to find. One very important idea is to use blogging as a marketing tool.

Case in point: Back in December 2006 I wrote about Grant Griffiths, a Kansas Family Lawyer, who had stopped all of his traditional advertising because his marketing efforts using his blog was bringing in all the business he needed.

I was thinking about Mr. Griffiths because I was explaining to an other professional why blogging was such a great way to market just about any business. So today I did a number of Google searches to see where his blog is ranked by the world’s most popular search engine. Here are the results:

Grant Griffiths dominates almost every keyword or search term I could think of related to "Kansas Family Law." The only term I looked up that listed his blog on the second page was “Kansas Child Visitation.”

All the other searches I did had him on Google’s first page. The results listed below are all for Google’s non-paid listings. (In other words, the paid ads Google sells may be higher, but Mr. Griffiths’ blog outranks all the others on the "organic," or earned, search results.)

• Kansas Family Law, #2 on page one
  
• Kansas Family Lawyer, #1 on on page onepage one
  
• Kansas Family Attorney, #1 on page one
  
• Kansas Divorce Law, #6 on page one
  
• Kansas Child Custody Law, #1 on page one
  
• Kansas Child Custody Lawyer, #2 on page one
  
• Kansas Divorce Lawyer, #2 on page one
  
• Kansas Divorce Attorney, #2 on page one
  
• Kansas Divorce Mediation, #4 on page one
  
• Kansas Divorce Mediator, #6 on page one
  
• Kansas Fathers Rights, #1 on page one
  
• Kansas Dads rights, #5 on page one

Think about it. Almost anyone who searches for information about Kansas family law or Kansas family lawyers is going to find Mr. Griffiths’ site. And when they get to this site, they will find a wealth of information on the topic.

Do you think he has to convince people that he knows what he is talking about when they have read a site like his? Do you think he gets to be choosy about which clients he wants to work with? (or do you think he has to settle for the lowest paying, most disagreeable clients because he is desperate for business?)

And my personal favorite, how many clients do you think try to "negotiate" his fee down to rock bottom?

Now also take a look at the length or complexity of his articles. For the most part they are surprisingly short or easy to write.

Some are fairly long, but there is a fair amount of short articles in there as well. Many of his articles simply cite and comment on information he gleans from other sources. Some of his articles are list articles (such as ten ways to cooperatively seek the best interests of your child).

What I am getting at here is that Mr.Griffiths has achieved marketing success with blogging by simply communicating information to his readers on their level. He updates his blog regularly and he uses important keywords that he knows will correspond to the search queries his prospective clients will use when they go into Google.

And he did all this in a relatively short period of time. I wrote my original article in Deccember 2006 and he started his blog sometime in 2005 (I'm not sure exactly when in 2005). That means he started dominating the Google rankings in at least 24 months.

Something else. Griffiths has aparently taken a sabatical because his blog has not been updated since late 2007. Nevertheless, that blog still dominates all those keywords even without additional writing on his part.

How can you or your firm imitate what he is doing? Simply create a blog and update it regularly. Use the keywords the customers you are targeting will also use when they use search engines in both the titles of your articles and repeated in the bodies of the articles themselves.

Within a few months, you should see your site climbing the search engine ranks for the keywords you are focusing on.

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It is no secret that one of the most effective ways to optimize a website is to include your targeted keyword in your site's domain name.

For example, if one of your business' targeted keywords is "accounting software," you may want to have www.accountingsoftwaresolutions.com as your domain (by the way, I just checked and this URL has expired so you could grab it now if you are quick enough).

Unfortunately, most of us do not have the luxury of re-naming our websites just to target one keyword, no matter how valuable that specific keyword may be. Most businesses either already have a website or they must target many keywords.

But to continue the accounting software example, if I were in this business I would still be very interested in grabbing such a domain name because there has to be a lot of people who log into Google and type in "accounting software" as their query.

The solution, is to set up mini-sites, or as a recent article on Dosh Dosh calls them, "Mini-Funnel" Websites. These Mini Funnel sites are actually "slave sites" that exist to answer a single, specific question or keyword and direct search engine traffic to a master site.

They get searchers because these mini sites are set up to grab one keyword and then re-direct these visitors to another site that may target many other –related- keywords.

Maki (the author of the Dosh Dosh article) uses an interesting example a site called, Is Barack Obama a Muslim, which the Obama team set up during their campaign. This site was a one-page site that has the word "NO" printed in big black letters against a stark white background. Visitors who clicked the word "NO" were directed to an article on www.barackobama.com that addressed smear email campaigns.

The article, How ‘Mini-Funnel’ Websites Can Help You Increase Traffic, Generate Leads and Build Exposure, also points out an interesting twist. The Obama team also set up companion mini-funnel sites that offered different phrases and even allowed for misspellings by searchers.

For example, the site Is Barack Obama Muslim, which leaves out the word "a," produced even better results than the previous example:

"This particular one ranks the highest on both Yahoo and Google for the ‘is barack obama muslim‘ phrase, taking the no. 1 spot and even outranking Obama’s own official website. This appears to be the most established version of the three; Yahoo site explorer shows that it has 10,762 incoming links."

There was even a version of the site that uses the word "muslin" instead of "Muslim," to accommodate people who may misspell the word when they type in their search engine query.

The lesson here is that mini sites, which target single keywords, can drive massive traffic to your main website. Look for search terms related to your business and set up one-page sites that answer the visitor's question and then provide a link for more information to your main site.

This will allow you to benefit from traffic coming in from many, many different search terms.

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The following article is a reprint of an article I recently posted on my other blog, Dynamic Copywriting. I thought it was relevant to this blog because it shows mistakes I made when I frist started blogging. I think my readers on this site will find it helpful because I learned a lot of lessons along the way that I wanted to pass along.

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Finding and using the right keywords is an absolute essential to success on the internet. In fact, I am hard pressed to think of any other aspect of web marketing that is more important.

Which brings me to the purpose of this article. In one respect, I am slightly hesitant to post it because it chronicles my own mistakes when I began writing this blog (dynamic copywriting) several years ago. So in that respect, this article is a bit of a cautionary tale.

On the other hand, it is also instructional because it gives me a chance to explain what I learned from my mistakes and the things I know now about using keywords in web marketing.

When I started this blog back in 2006, I began with the primary goal of attracting more copywriting clients. I considered myself a generalist and was willing to take on any and all copywriting assignments.

In my naivity I thought I knew all I need to know about using keywords. My one and only keyword at the time was "Freelance Copywriter." Every post I wrote for this blog began with the title "Freelance Copywriter Secrets ___" and I also sought ways to insert the phrase several times in each article.

So as a result, I was tremendously excited when a few months later I found myself on the third page of Google when one did a search for "freelance copywriter."

I assumed that I was well on the way to conquering the search engine mountain and I just knew that it was only a matter of time before I was at the very top of Big G.

Well some of you can no doubt guess the rest. I never did make it to the front page of Google for my one and only keyword because there is so much competition for that phrase.

I knew nothing (at the time) about long tail keywords. I didn't know why all websites should target several related keywords instead of just one.

But I have learned. I learned that long tail keywords (ie search terms that are four or more words long) are easier to conquer than short, highly competitive keywords.

I have learned that the person who does a search for a phrase like "business case study writer in Texas" is much more focused than the person who types in one or two words. I have also learned that such a person who makes that highly focused a search is probably hundreds of times more likely to do business with the companies he or she finds than the person searching with a vague, general keyword.

Moreover, Google is more likely to start moving your site up the rankings on your primary keyword when it sees that your site is optimized for other, but related, keywords.

And then there was my external linking strategy. I worked hard to write articles and comments on other blogs that linked backed to my site. But I made the following two mistakes with my inbound links:

1. I created links that either targeted my name or the name of this website ("dynamic copywriting"), and
   
2. I seldom linked to any place on this site except the home page.

(By the way, I am a little shocked that I am really admitting all this. lol I hope I don't lose future business by explaining what a dolt I was. But then, explaining how not to do something is often far more instructional than just telling how.)

Both of those are really bad linking stratagies. First, I would have had much more success embedding my keywords into these links, so that a person would see, for example, a clickable blue link that said "website copywriting" that would have brought him or her to this site.

That would have told Google that my site had something to do with "website copywriting." Over time, if I had furthered this technique using other longer tail keywords related to website copywriting, I would have alerted Google that this site was relevant to many different keywords.

Google is after all a computer program that searches all over the web to find sites that pertain to various topics. But links that merely target a person's name or the title of the website tell Google very little of what the site is about. Only keywords will do this job.

Secondly, Google quickly dismisses inbound links that are only pointed to the main page of a website. These links should point to specific articles within the site that are related to the inbound keyword. And those articles should likewise be optimized for that same keyword by including the keyword in the title and in several places throughout the text.

This tells Google that the site has depth and covers a variety of related topics in detail. That demonstrates to Google that such a site is an "authority site" on its subject matter.

All this is to say that I had to learn search engine optimization in part by trial and error. And I am still learning.

Of course I have been working hard to get this site better optimized, but it takes a lot to turn the Titanic around. The task has been complicated by the fact that I am no longer a generalist, but am more focused on writing web content and search engine optimization.

The lesson here for other website owners is to pay careful attention to the keywords that relate to your business. Both internal and external keyword strategies are essential to getting high rankings by Google.

I hope you find this helpful as you build and develop your own sites. I suspect I am not the only website owner that has had to learn from mistakes, but I would be interested to hear comments on what lessons you have learned about search engine optimization.

NOT USING NON-SPAM EMAIL MARKETING FOR YOUR BUSINESS YET? Learn why email marketing is the easiest, most effective and most affordable way to get new clients. Download my free ebook and receive tips, ideas and case studies to help you get more new customers at http://www.trafficwave.net/lcp/chbrown/emailmarketing/6604.
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COPYRIGHT © 2009, Charles Brown
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As I start this new blog, the question arises, "why start a new blog?"

The task ahead is daunting, I have been writing my Dynamic Copywriting blog since 2006 and have written over 200 articles online, so the idea of starting all over isn't something I want to take on lightly.

But there are several reasons. First is that over time Dynamic Copywriting has become unfocused. I started with one business model of just being a copywriter for any and every type of work that came my way.

But my business model has changed. I have found that most of my work (and interests) have shifted to helping clients get better results online. In the course of my copywriting I find myself doing at least as much sharing things like:

• How to get more targeted traffic to a website,
  
• How to get higher rankings on Google and other search engines,
  
• How to convert more of those visitors into customers,
  
• "Permission Marketing" strategies to build an email list of opt-in subscribers and cultivate a loyal customer base,
  
• Social networking ideas to use tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Digg and MySpace to build a powerful online presence,
  
• How to use the internet to become a recognized autority in one's field,
  
• How to use the power of business blogging to as a marketing tool,
  
• How to create inbound links that point to your site,and
  
• How to create online publicity and the differences between traditional PR techniques and new online PR strategies.
  

And finally, I have come to realize that potential clients tend to put more of a premium on my knowledge than they do my writing. To many, a writer is just a skilled laborer and it has been a constant battle to overcome resistence to what I consider reasonable fees for my work.

And yet these same people will pay more for my knowledge and consulting skills. So why should I fight it?

I would love to hear your feedback. Any comments or suggestions you can give me will be very appreciated.

NOT USING NON-SPAM EMAIL MARKETING FOR YOUR BUSINESS YET? Learn why email marketing is the easiest, most effective and most affordable way to get new clients. Download my free ebook and receive tips, ideas and case studies to help you get more new customers at http://www.trafficwave.net/lcp/chbrown/emailmarketing/6604.

COPYRIGHT © 2009, Charles Brown
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