5 Laws of Online Success
Over the years I’ve watched a lot of online businesses come and go, and I’ve worked with innumerable businesses to help them grow their presence online. I’ve learned that there are 5 secrets to marketing success online and these successes rival any secret SEO technique or “killer” traffic trick.
Consistency of presence: First, you need to be online, all the time. Maybe not you personally, but you need to create a web presence and maintain it. You can’t walk away from it for a week and then come back to it, you can’t turn it on and leave the room. You need to working on it, analyzing it, tweaking it.
Consistency of message: Second, you need to have a single message that you tell people over and over and over. If you’re a “graphic designer” on this site and a “Photoshop designer” on that site and a “freelance graphic artist” on another site, you’ll lose out. Write a short bio and use that same bio everywhere.
Consistency of delivery: Third, you need to deliver your products or services with consistent quality. While this isn’t a direct marketing action, it is an indirect action because inconsistent quality can result in bad PR about your business. And unfortunately, bad PR can appear in results for your name.
Ubiquity: Fourth, you need to be everywhere. Okay, maybe not absolutely everywhere (because I just said that you can’t do that in my last blog). But you do need to find a number of channels and use them. For example, make sure you’re posting content that includes web articles, blogs, forum postings, Twitter, etc.
Selectivity: Fifth, even though you need to be ubiquitous, you also need to be selective. You can’t truly be everywhere. So in your effort to be in a lot of places, you need to choose those places carefully. For example, if you’re going to distribute web articles, distribute articles at an article distribution site that is reputable and offers a high quality editorial service.
These 5 laws are the trustworthy fundamentals that, in my experience, are the steps to online marketing success.
photo credit: steakpinball
Freelancing is my life. It's what I know, it's what I'm good at, and I can't imagine doing anything else. You can call me "Freddie the Freelancer"… because I'd prefer not to use my real name for reasons that I'll tell you about in a moment.
2 Comments
I agree with all these in principle, but think that consistency of message is very different to repeating the same words over and over again. Using your example, placing a profile highlighting Photoshop skills might be perfect on one site, where making ‘graphic artist’ the theme might be more advantageous on another. I agree that one phrase shouldn’t preclude the use of others, but the emphasis can and perhaps should change from site to site.
And if a particular site allows links within the body of the profile, then it makes sense to use different job titles as keywords to direct traffic (and search engines) to a relevant page or section of your own website – again demonstrating the merit of a catch-all approach.
Besides which, variety doesn’t hurt, and if you create slightly different profiles for different sites it’s possible to track which descriptions net you more enquiries.
Thanks Anthony for posting your thoughts on this. I especially like your suggestion about having subtle changes in profiles in order to track activity.