Believe me or not, a business can survive and thrive on the Internet without good search engine placement. That does not mean that a Webmaster should not strive to get good rankings in the search engines, but it does mean that a Webmaster should not throw his or her entire advertising budget towards search engine optimization (SEO).

The SEO guys are rolling in their Ferrari’s as you read this. I would have said that the SEO guys are rolling their graves, but they are not dead, yet.

There Can Be Only Ten
How many web pages will be listed on page one of the search results at Google? How about on Yahoo or MSN? That is right; there can be only ten web pages listed on page one of the search results.

According to the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org), there are currently 85 billion web pages on the Internet. But, if you have ever used the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, then you know as I know that they have not archived everything that is out there, so that 85-billion number is actually smaller than the real number of existing web pages.

With only ten listings on page one of the search results, there are going to be a lot of disappointed people in the world. They cannot all be on page one of the search results.

First Things First
Search engine optimization is an expensive undertaking, so it should never be taken lightly. I talk to people everyday who are building their first website for the very first time. These folks, bless their hearts, know just enough about Internet marketing to blow their savings on a website that may or may not deliver a profit to them.

There are steps that people should take when they start their website, and SEO is not one of those first steps.

Here is a checklist of steps that the new Webmaster should use in the development of his or her website:

Step One: Select the products or services that the website will sell.

Step Two: Determine if there is a market for what will be sold.

Step Three: Analyze the competition and determine the competition’s weaknesses. Competition is about building a better mousetrap or reaching customers that another might be under serving.

Step Four: Build the website to sell the chosen products or services. Sales conversion is the most important element in any successful business model.

Step Five: Run test advertising to figure out what will generate traffic to your website, and more importantly, to figure out what one needs to do in order to sell goods and services.

Testing And Tracking Advertising Results Is Essential
I sold advertising in my newsletter to a guy one time. He paid a nice fee to have his advertisement run in my newsletter, but he did not invest any money in writing or testing his ad first. The advertisement itself was written very badly.

I asked him if he would like to tweak his advertisement before I ran it in my newsletter. He said he did not care what the ad looked like. He just needed me to run his ad.

I offered to rewrite his ad for him to enhance his chances of getting traffic from my newsletter. He agreed and I did.

As the newsletters I subscribed to began rolling in the following week, I noticed his bad advertisement ran in dozens of those newsletters.

I asked him later about his results, and he said he had spent $10,000 running that advertisement and closed four sales at $25 each. He spent $10,000 to make $100. Needless to say, his website closed down just a couple months later.

The problem was clearly his ad, but his website may have contributed to his lack of sales conversion.

Starting Small Serves A Very Real Purpose
As we saw with the guy who spent ten grand to make $100, starting small would have been beneficial. It is all a matter of figuring out how to get traffic to one’s website and more importantly, how to convert traffic to sales.

One should start small with his or her advertising to find the ad formula that will actually deliver traffic to the website. Once the traffic is coming to the website, the webmaster needs to tweak his or her sales copy to make sure that the copy will close enough sales to justify the expense of a large advertising run.

SEO should be treated in the same way. By using Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC), a webmaster can get an idea as to which keyword phrases will actually generate traffic to a website, and with the right analytical software, the Webmaster can determine which keyword phrases generate clicks that will lead to a sale.

Google Analytics is a good program to help webmasters figure this out and it is free, but it has its shortcomings.

Popular paid programs include:

* OpenTracker.net
* KeyTrail.com
Another two-dozen web analytics applications are reviewed at Cumbrowski.com .

SEO campaigns should never be undertaken until one knows exactly which keywords will actually generate sales for a website. To do otherwise, one runs the risk of optimizing a website for keywords that will not help the website convert traffic to sales.

Advertising Lessons Learned

While testing your advertising and your PPC advertising, a few very important lessons can be learned.

First, you learn how to tap into the Law Of Attraction to bring people to your website.

You learn what keywords you should target, if you decide to optimize your website.

You learn how to track your successes and your failures with your website analytical software.

And finally, you learn to tweak your website for the purpose of increasing your sales conversion.

All are very important lessons, because each will contribute to how much money can be earned from a website.

Building Links Is Not About PageRank
If you remember, the title of this article is, “Internet Marketing Without Search Engines.” That should imply that this article is not about getting good rankings in Google. By extension, the title should also imply that what I am telling you has “nothing” to do with PageRank.

The fact is that every person using the Internet is clicking on links to take them from one website to another. Some links are in emails; others are in paid adverts on websites, or in informational web pages. Even social bookmarking websites have links to other web pages.

Building links to your website is about getting your sales message, with its accompanying link, in front of the people most likely to buy what you are selling, in a way that encourages your potential customer to click your link and visit your website.

Once you understand who your customers are and where you might be able to reach them, then you will know what steps you need to take to get your link within reach of their mouse.

You may need to buy advertising at that location. You might be able to write an article to give to them, in exchange for a link to your website. You might be able to participate in the website’s forums and leave a breadcrumb trail of links for your potential clients to find. You can even create social bookmarks that will point to your website or to a page that points to your website.

The goal of linking is to give your potential customers more ways for them to find your website.

An Ironic Twist To This Tale
Although this article is about thriving on the Internet without relying on search engines, any person who undertakes linking for the sake of attracting customers will find their websites climbing in the search engine results, due to all of those links on targeted and relevant websites pointing to their own website.

Imagine that — a link that will attract and deliver potential customers to a website AND influence how well a website might rank in the search engines.

By Bill Platt
Bill Platt has been writing reprint articles for the promotion of his websites since 1999, and now he has written an ebook to share what he has learned. His book is called, “Article Marketing For Traffic, Sales and Profit“. Included in the book are many examples and the Five Essential Elements Of Creating A Successful Article. To learn more about Bill’s business, visit thePhantomWriters.com .

Last year saw the arrival of online social media. If you operate a website or blog, you would be well advised to realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffic.

You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new forms of interaction on more and more sites and they will have an expectation of the same from your site too.

If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus for the next few months should be on the social aspects of your site.

Social media uses technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting, tagging, etc. and offers social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features.

The central theme of these sites is user generated content used for sharing amongst other users. The social aspects of these sites allow users to setup social communities, invite friends and share common interests.

You don’t have to change your site immediately to take advantage of these new technologies. Introduce small changes incrementally and you will be well on your way to measure up to your visitors’ new expectations.

Step 1. Declare who you are to the online community. People should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people don’t like to deal with people they don’t know. Create an About Me page to list your achievements, skills and aspirations.

Step 2. Create a MySpace page and link your biography in the Profile of your MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop your online social network in MySpace. Invite a few of your new friends to write blog articles at your site about your products or services.

Step 3. Install a free blog and start publishing at least one article in your blog every week. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. This is done by providing an action button for each article in your site. The action button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking site.

Step 4. Provide an action button for direct posting of blog articles to Digg. Digg is a popular news ranking site. A well dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to you.

Step 5. Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products and services. Don’t delete negative comments because they provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker is a forum search engine.

Step 6. If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate your products. This will help you in inventory management because you may want to discontinue low rated products.

Step 7. Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your content. Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for more information if the teasers interest them.

Step 8. Publish all your feeds at Feedburner. Feedburner provides media distribution and audience engagement services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network for your feeds. If you have quality content, you will be able to monetize your content using their services.

Step 9. Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube and Google video. Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site with your site URL. Post these videos using catchy titles, teaser descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them easy to discover.

Step 10. Provide embedded links to your remotely hosted videos on your site. This will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos reside on the video sharing sites rather than on your own site’s server.

Step 11. As well as videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr and SmugMug to share pictures related to content on your site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques discussed earlier for social video sites.

Step 12. Provide a “Send to Friend” feature for all the products and services you offer. This feature is a link that sends the article, product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.

Social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and brings a profound change to web surfers’ experiences. Now is the right time to implement features that will make your site Social-Media-Friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize popular social media sites, you will see a massive increase in traffic to your site.

By Dave Foster
Dave Foster owns and operates the “Solo Profits” blog and podcast, guiding individual entrepreneurs and home-based business owners to online success using audio, video and multimedia techniques. Dave also explores the virgin territory of multimedia psychology and how to present your message effectively through these new communications channels. Want to discover more? Go To ==>> SoloProfits.com

Isn’t online marketing by definition, expensive? Not necessarily. Online businesses are coming to the realization that in an organic environment like the Internet, organic marketing is required; paying for traditional or static marketing only gets you so far before it becomes ineffective. The consumer now controls your marketing.

What is Wrong With the Old Methods?
Old marketing methods are failing because users are beginning to wise up (Rise Up) against the old brute force advertising that tries to win users over through sheer volume, using abrasive web-page banners, unrelated Adwords displayed on the page, or repeated newsletters (most being restricted by anti-spam laws).

The old methods no longer work effectively for two key reasons. One is the fact that they are a “flash in the pan”, directing users to websites only so long as you continue to pay for the campaign, the second reason is consumers are now at the stage where they either ignore them or go out of their way to block them (with plug-in based browser or email filtering).

Let’s quickly run through some of the “traditional” ways to market on the web, and their failings.

• Paid Campaigns - (These only work while active) Paid campaigns may lure people to your site, but they are regularly not your target market and after arriving they promptly leave (High “bounce” rate).
• Banner Ads - People hate banner ads. Most of the ads on the Internet are loathed because they aren’t relevant. Seeing a banner for a better insurance rate when on a gaming site is a massive disconnect for the audience and a significant portion of banner ads are plain abrasive to users. Filling one third of your page with banner ads will not increase the likelihood anyone will care.
• Adwords - Adwords (PPC, Pay Per Click) have the same problem as banner ads, though to a lesser extent. Adwords work by displaying “sponsored results,” in search engine results. Adword results are separated from normal search results so not many people select them and the unknown quality in the user’s eye causes distrust (how do I know that a sponsored result is better than an organic result). Competition is fierce, with prices spiraling upwards, and returns staying constant. For more information see our article about Google marketing pitfalls. 
• Newsletters - One word: Spam. Because of the spam epidemic, users are becoming ever more wary signing up to receive mail from any online source. Legislation and the ever increasing ability of spam filters mean a continually shrinking audience (Restricting the ability to send newsletters, and filtering them before they reach your audience).

The “Old World” marketing relied on one or two large marketing sources to drive traffic with big budgets and marketing firms. You have to get people to create the “news” then you pay other people to distribute the “news”, so you are pulling people into your “store” to show them what you have (whether they want it or not).

New Methods for Marketing
These days having others create and distribute your content for you is in vogue, this can mean syndicating your articles for other users to repost, paying users to review or rate your services, guiding users directly on forums or having users sign up to receive exclusive information. In every case, the handiwork of distribution is left to others.

Lets quickly run through some of the new “Web 2.0″ ways to market on the web, and the reason you should try them:

• Blogs - Blogs are a goldmine to both the reader and the writer. Blogging is less time consuming and considerably cheaper than traditional marketing. Blogs give you the ability to convey your personal thoughts on happenings in your industry and your personal and corporate life, letting you really connect with your audience. Another positive is the viral marketing component where you are referenced through various social media websites, search engines and other blogs, increasing both your credibility and searchability, making it easier for consumers to find and trust you.
• Forums - Forums give you an insight into what people are talking about, letting you get directly into the heads of potential customers. An easy way to find an appropriate forum is by asking existing customers what forums they frequent. Join in conversations, threads, contribute to the community and become a trusted member, then you can give your professional advice and mention what you do for a living. You should approach this as a way to get insight into what people are talking about, with the side-effect of possibly generating leads. If you approach this as direct marketing, the community will quickly tell and either ban you, or develop a healthy disdain of you.
• Articles - Articles are a great way to show you are connected to the issues in your industry and the wider world around you. You can either submit your articles through a syndication service, or post it on your blog; even better is a combination of the two: Choose a topic you enjoy talking about and write an article (like this one!) with your personal opinion or some helpful advice. If it is well-written and educates readers, you will already have an edge on your competition.

The theme of the new marketing methods is tailoring your content to the audience. The intent is to create something readers want to read. Marketing is not about trickery or insincerity, it’s about communicating your ideas with honesty and authenticity. If it is worthwhile to your users, then they will happily talk about the content and spread it around. You have to communicate authentically with your customers and it simply doesn’t happen using “traditional” online marketing.

A word of caution: if you try any of the above methods but approach them traditionally (as a direct marketing channel) then not only will you annoy a great number of users, you will also damage your company image. Again I stress the above point, make the content something people want to read, not just marketing material.

Old Marketing Methods That are now Approached Differently
Benjamin Franklin said insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This is increasingly true for some of the more traditional forms of online marketing. It’s not so much what people are doing, but more a case of how they are being done.

Let’s take a look at how we should be approaching some of the old marketing methods today.

• Press Releases - Before we start, I’m sorry to tell you, but unless you are in the 5% of the market that people pay attention to, no-one reads your press releases - at least no potential customers do. A high percentage of companies marketing on the web use traditional methods of delivery, either in print or on a section of their website. Consider changing your press release to positively present your company then send it through a syndication service for papers and online news sources to pick up and republish.
• Search Engines - Previously you had to specifically tailor your site to search engine specifications to ensure you had a high pagerank and were located at the top of search results. To put it simply, the important factor was how your site was presented to the user. These days although page display has an impact, it is far more important to have the right content on the site. Search engines now care more about content. Structure your pages logically and efficiently with appropriate content for each page, and be sure to link to those pages wherever possible, especially if you are engaging in blog or forum marketing.
• Mailing Lists and Newsletters - With new anti-spam laws coming into effect, coupled with users increasingly annoyed at anything email based, mailing lists and newsletters are becoming far less effective. Ensure all the users on your mailing lists and newsletters have agreed to receive them. You don’t need to re-ask permission from your existing list, but be sure to let users op-out, and put an optional op-in form link in your communications.

Old-world communication can still be effective, but you need to ensure it is not your only approach.

The Conclusion?
Reevaluation is the key to a healthy online presence. You need to be constantly measuring and reevaluating your marketing methods to ensure you are not wasting money, and can take advantage of effective new methods.

By Sam Law and Julian Stone
Sam Law and Julian Stone - Project, Task & Time Management specialists for: ProWorkFlow, ProActiveSoftware & Julian101.com