To
attract these opportunities, is the key to success, and is a combination of
luck, hard work and common sense. Smart business managers expand on this luck
base in various ways. In the real world, contacting people and telling them
about your product, telephone solicitations, advertising, being in the phone
book are all ways to expand your luck base. Giving your customers free
information to induce word of mouth, being nice, having a good support area
are other ways of expanding a luck base to create opportunities for good luck
to happen to you. The ways of expanding your luck base is as diverse as the
number of different kinds of businesses. Good luck leads to creating a buying
customer or the formation of strategic alliances with others in your field.
Once you start forming strategic alliances with other web or business
entities, your business starts to become a presence. Once a true web presence,
you become one of the centers of attention or perhaps even THE center of
attention for your industry. The new opportunities this creates mean more
money.
The
key is: from the beginning, look for the opportunities that expand your
business. Plan on continuing through the life of your business to increase
your luck base and attract opportunities. Some of these opportunities will
turn into strategic alliances with others. These, over time, can become
strategic trusts, each helping the other, reach their goals through mutual
growth. As you grow, they grow and as they grow, you grow. In time every
successful business, whether web world or real world, consist of these
strategic alliances. You then become a presence or a force that people come
to, so they can grow with you. This is what all business is about.
Strategic
trusts are made up of energy, time, trust, communication and commitments
towards these opportunities. Over time, as one learns to work with one another
and you become dependant upon each other, the trust is born. Employees, other
websites and webmasters, software, product suppliers, cgi scripts, advertising
relationships, repair people, sales people, lawyers, accountants, customers,
competitors, bankers and basically every person or mechanism you become
involved with in your business becomes either a failed or successful strategic
alliance. Successful ones are those that pay off in profit or helping you to
reach your goals. The failed ones go away and gradually you collect the
successful ones with your business also becoming successful.
How
do you find successful opportunities? Whether you are a successful
businessperson or one just starting out, think what it might take to be
successful. In the beginning, in a real world business, if you have a
storefront or an office, you may have to go out and build opportunities. An
insurance salesperson that joins the Chamber, goes to church and is involved
in their community is building a luck base for opportunities that enable them
to sell insurance policies. They are building roads to their business. Thus,
potential customers will call and visit when they need insurance. It’s a
numbers game. The more people that know what the insurance salesperson does as
a profession, the more sales that will be produced by the sales team. These
roads could include 8 x 10 signs in the windows of other shops on your block.
Running newspaper ads, banner advertising, etc, are also roads that point to
your business.
It’s
the same for your website. Build roads and have signs that point to it and
keep building them. Never stop or your business will become stagnate. Then,
you must have content that makes your customers keep coming back. With roads
to your business, the visits will start immediately. Put enough signs up today
and you will get a few visitors tomorrow. The more signs you put out, the more
visitors you will get on any given day. If you have 100 signs out and you get
10 visitors a day, put out 200 signs and you will get 20 visitors a day.
What
are these roads and signs to your website? The answer has been before you the
entire time, links. The more links you have pointing toward your website, the
more traffic you have. A business without signs is a sign of no business. A
website without links pointing to them, is a dead website, period. I dare
anyone to show me a busy website that doesn’t have links of some kind
pointing to it.
Now
that you have visitors arriving on a daily basis, you want to make sure they
come back. You must have enough content or inventory that will make them come
back again and again. Or have what ever it takes that makes them say, “Hey,
I like this store. I’ll come back for sure. Let me remember this and it’s
location”. It’s the return visitors that make your business or website
grow. If 25% to 75% of your daily traffic is return visitors, add each days
new visitors to the return ones and now your website or business is starting
to take off. Giving your visitors content, information, knowledge and even
products is a great way to insure visitors come back again and again. You may
even decide to have your visitors provide the content. Chat and message boards
are a great way to add content to your site. I like the html ones that
actually make a html page for your site as the search engine robots like them
also. Matt Wright’s WWWBoard is a favorite of many. Since they have the
subject embedded in the Title and the page itself, they make great keyword
tuned pages for your website that the search engines will find and dispense a
lot of visitors to your business within 3 to 6 months.
Creating
a link page or link directory is a great way of providing new visitors,
opportunities, content for your return visitors and search engine traffic.
Properly organized, tightly themed link directory pages can send your website
thousands of visitors on a daily or weekly basis. These mini-search engines
become immensely popular and it’s location is saved in thousands of browser
favorites, especially if you have a way for your visitor to conveniently
search for information with a search script. Once a visitor finds a link
directory pertaining to a subject they are interested in, they return again
and again.
You
should require a reciprocal link to your site to be included, when webmasters
request to be included in your website’s link page or directory. Websites
want to be included and oftentimes you will get so busy adding websites that
you don’t have to market anymore in other ways.
Traffic
THREE ways! Your Link Directory is providing traffic from your reciprocal
links, return traffic from it’s content and traffic from the search engines
because of the individually keyword-tuned directory pages.
Reciprocal
links do help your placement in search engine listings but the important thing
is the link pointing to your website, not what it does for your website in
search engine marketing. Too much emphasis is placed on search engine
marketing and until webmasters understand this, they will never be truly
successful. I always hear marketing experts talk about how link popularity
improves your listing in the search engines. That’s a simple side effect but
the important result is the qualified traffic you get from the link itself.
Search engines are just one of a thousand different ways to get traffic. If
you rely solely on them then you might as well be just relying on a listing in
the WHITE PAGES Telephone Book in your real-world business. I’m not cutting
the search engine form of marketing, I just think it narrows a webmasters
thinking to just that. I have three very successful and profitable websites
and if I just relied on the search engines, I would be making 4 cents for
every dollar I currently make. Remember that a listing on a search engine is a
link to your site that you cannot control. I call it passive marketing,
waiting for visitors to come and leaving that decision in someone else’s
hands, hoping for them to send you a trickle of traffic.
Go
out and put links to your site throughout the Internet. Don’t think too
small by just considering normal hyper-links. Links can be anything as long as
a user can reach your site through it. Reciprocal links, advertising, the
printed page, search engines, word of mouth, people talking about you on the
forums and message boards, banners, affiliate programs, writing articles
giving yourself credit, referral scripts etc. All of these add up and are
roads back to your website. No one of these will make you successful. If you
rely on just one, you won’t have much traffic. Each one will bring you a
little traffic and closer to your goals.
OK,
so what happens now? You have the roads or signs pointing to your shop or
website, content to make them return again and again, traffic from the search
engines which everyone always wanted. Is this what it’s all about. Not even
close, it’s just started :-) The opportunities of your Link Directory has
become a strategic trust. One you can always rely on to continue driving you
traffic AND opportunities. This is your motivation to continue. Roads to your
site are what open these opportunities. You have to be able to see these as
opportunities as opportunities, which is hard to do without common sense
After
a few days, weeks or months, these strategic opportunities will come along.
Someone is going to email you with a great idea, a partnership or something
that will benefit both of you. The basic strategic alliance is the reciprocal
link partnership. You’ll try it and if it works and both parties are
benefiting, then you have another strategic alliance and after time a
strategic trust when you learn to trust each other. It’s not just reciprocal
links, as the more diverse kinds of trusts you have, the closer to your
website’s goals you will become. You are now partners and as you grow so do
they and vice versa.
What
is a web presence? It’s all of the above and more. Visitors are flowing to
you and opportunities are happening. It explodes somewhere along the way and
you become noticed by the powerful people in your field. Now everyone wants to
be involved with you and your website. You can’t stop it now, even if you
wanted to. Instead of a steady logarithmic growth it becomes explosive
geometric growth.
In
the beginning, all new websites are like opening real-world businesses in the
worst business location in the world. No one knows your website is even there.
What do you do first? You get a telephone so you can get listed in the phone
book. After applying and waiting a few months, your listing appears in the
white pages. You expect visitors to call but they don’t. That’s because
you relied on a passive listing in the phone book. A business won’t make it
from such a small amount of traffic. You don’t spend all your time trying to
increase your visitors from the phone book listing so why do it with the
search engines. Do some active marketing and go out and get your visitors.
Search engines are nothing more than phone listings in the phone book.
Aha
you say, let’s get a yellow page ad or in web terms, lets start paying for
our click-thrus from the search engines. Notice the analogy between the phone
books and the search engines. Cyber-robotics.com is in the top three listings
for every keyword phrase we could think of, pertaining to reciprocal link
marketing. It accounts for 4% of our sales. Scary isn’t it? We own all the
keywords and phrases we want, on 75% of the search engine queries on the net,
and we only get a handful of visitors and sales from them. It does pay for
itself and makes us a little money. If there is one lesson to learn about the
search engines, it’s quit thinking so much about the search engines and get
out there and market yourself and your website.
The
key to being successful on the net is creating a web presence. Creating your
own luck and making those opportunities happen is how you become a web
presence.
One
of our first Zeus Internet Marketing Robot users once said:
“Well,
my friend...all these encounters would NOT have been possible if it were NOT
for Zeus!!!! I've left out many
‘untold stories’ which happened on account of me dispatching the
notification letter…Again, without Zeus...or something like Zeus...the
generation of this kind of ‘activity’, ‘connection’, ‘interface’,
etc., WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE!!!!!! I'm
telling you this as and aside from the generation of
‘traffic/links'...there's REALLY ‘things that happen’ which are FAR more
important as a result of using Zeus. "
Link
Long and Prosper!
David Notestine
Creator of the Zeus
Internet Marketing Robot
You
are Here: 
Web Presence
