Why Using Cheap and Free Services Are A Waste Of Time


For the first time ever we started a PPC campaign for our web design service this week. I was a bit surprised when I took a look at my competition and found that all of them were build-your-own-site sites or template sites.

I was sitting here wondering rather this was the way to go. I heard one of the guys talking on the phone to a lady, that had just purchased a do it yourself site. She was needing help with the design. The simple and easy to set up site did not seem so simple. But that was not what caught my attention.

The guy she was talking to was not a salesman nor was he trying to sell her a job. But he did point out all the flows in the program to her.

1. She was using a subdomain name. This means she did not own the website. She could very well get links to the site and get it going good only to find herself out the door. And the competition owning her site.

2. She is limited by the program. When we design a website for a customer there are no limits. If the customer wants a small header, large header no navigation there are no limits placed on that customer.

I saw one website that bragged about having over 900 designs to choose from. Chances are there are only a couple nice looking designs. And the chances are even better that you are not the only one using that design.

There is no other place in the world that offers the ability to get some many customers for so little money. But if you try and save every penny possible then you will never make it online. Your website is an extension of you and the design has to convert your traffic.

have started running ads this week with Microsoft’s adCenter.

We are still setting up everything so I have very little to comment on there. Although the fact that I can use their tools to find out the age and sex of the person doing the searches makes it very nice for designing landing pages.

Here is what I have been looking into.

How is the launch of the new windows affecting MSN, Google and Yahoo.

As luck would have it, it did not take long to find this article. My feeling is that Google may have a hard time holding on to number one as more and more people buy computers with Vista set as the default search engine. As the graphs in the article show it would appear that Live is gaining while Google is dropping.

People using Google are normally web savvy webmasters and are not very good potential clients while MSN search has always converted better. Evey thing I have read so far online about Microsoft’s adCenter says the conversion rate is a little better than Google.

I would rather go with less clicks and a higher conversion rate myself but only time will tell.

It might be time to start ranking sites for MSN.

I have just now created a new section on GeeksOnSteroids about website designs the plan is to create this section of the site and hope it alone can do around $50,000.00 per month worth of business.

It is not easy task.

The idea is to customize each page for each keyword. Another words if I find that more girls click on a page than men then I will customize that page for girls. And of course if it is more men then I will customize the page for men.

While I am doing this I will also be writing text for each of my 10,000 keywords. Now that might seem like a rather large number to some people but the idea is that the more pages I have the more traffic I can bring into the site. While I am writing the text I will also start getting links to this section of my website and running ads with MSN’s new Microsoft adCenter.

I guess I better get back to work on adding more text to the site.

I have been playing around a little with Microsoft’s new adCenter.

It has some information that is worth knowing. I can find out the geographic location, gender, age, lifestyle and time of day people search for any keyword I enter.

This allows me to build pages and aim them at the type of people that will be landing on those pages. Helping me to convert more of my traffic.

I like this a lot better than Google’s AdWords and the conversion should be better, since MSN gets less webmasters and more real people.

I am going to give it a try and see what type of traffic it can send me.

I’m not saying that there is no need for on page optimization because it is important but I’m saying that it want get you traffic. It is important that you use SEO friendly url’s and it is good to use title tags, meta tags, alt tags, H1 tags, URL structure, internal linking, Content, site maps and the site is be usable.

But none of these things will get traffic to your site and are easy enough to add to a site. There is no reason to hire an outside firm to do what your web designer or CMS (content management system) can do at little or no charge. People hire an on site SEO firm thinking that they are going to see traffic to their site and many times this is not the case. The increase that can be seen with an on site SEO firm is very little in most cases and none at all in others.

Your return on investment would be better seen using PPC or going with a marketing firm that will work on getting links and traffic to the site as well as taking care of on site SEO needs. If I had a choice of hiring someone to handle SMO vs SEO, I would go with the SMO.

SMO (Social Media Optimization) will get both links and traffic to your site while on site SEO will not get either to your site.

I woke up this morning and had gotten an email from John asking me to take a look at a post over in another forum, that I’m a member of. The thread is talking about search engine optimization being dead and while I believe it is dead and will get into that in just a moment I want to address a point John made in the thread about using W3C.

W3C does not have anything to do with SEO and validating your site is not going to help you get traffic. You chances are better showing up at the Indy 500 with a 3 hp go kart than to make a living with traffic you get from validating your site.

Now on to the death of SEO.

I think SEO has been dying for a long time but the personalization is not what is killing it. About the only people that know what personalization is, is the SEO’s. The average Joe is going to go to Google and type in what they are searching for and that will be that. They do not spend enough time online to worry about personalizing their search results. I spend about 15 hours a day online and have not personalized mine, until about 5 minutes ago just to see what all the fuse is about. I do not see this becoming something that is used very much.

But I do believe SEO is dead

1.I’ve seen more than my fair share of people that are asking questions about SEO one day and the next day they have started an SEO business.

It has to be one of if not the easiest business to start. All you need is a website and to spend an hour on a couple forums and you have enough information to fake it tell you make it.

2.The guy that has just started his SEO business feels that he can charge $100.00 a month and get 100 customers and live happily ever after. This is not the case, in most cases SEO is a full time job and to get one site to rank can take you 60 hours a week for the next 8 months.

3.Most people want to promise the ranking for 10 keywords but to get the traffic needed to run an online business you need more in the range of 10,000.

4.The average Joe does not have the dedication to run his own business much less spend the needed time on your site to make it rank and get the traffic needed to run a real business.

5. The average customer is not going to wait for more than about 3 months without seeing the needed results before wanting out of the game.

6.The client agrees on getting so many keywords ranked in the top ten but when he finds those keywords do not bring in enough traffic to sustain his/her site they become upset and want more for the same price.

7.There are no guarantees, no matter how much you know or how many sites you have ranked in the past there are no guarantees that you will be able to rank the next one.

8.Doing it correctly means trying to rank the client for enough keywords that it will have an impact on his/her business. In most cases this means thousands of keywords. After making a list of the keywords you now need to build thousands of pages of unique text. After that you need to optimize those pages and start link building for each page.

I no longer do SEO, but have done it on and off in the past and have worked with customers who make in excess of $100,000.00 per month. I’ve also seen more than my fair share of so called SEO’s asking for help in finding clients and a lot of them do cold calling.

If the SEO’s are able to make you so much money than why do so many of them go to forums and cold calling to get clients.
Because their services do not work for themselves, yet they want to sell the services that they already can not make work to you.

Most of the SEO’s that have figured out how to make it work only do consulting or sell ebooks. They know it is both a pain in the ass and a huge responsibility to take on a client. By selling an ebook or only telling the client what to do they place a spacer between themselves and the responsibility.

I guess what I’m saying is that SEO is dead because

1.Most SEO’s do not know how to rank a site
2.The SEO does not charge enough money for the service and is unable to complete the task
3.The SEO is only trying to rank the site for a couple keywords

In most cases once a customer gets burned by a service he goes looking for other ways to make money and is no longer willing to spend more money for the SEO service.