Website Design

SMO is not about getting a number one ranking on the search engines but more about building a site worth talking about. The end goal is not only getting traffic from forums, blogs, Digg and other Social Media places but building a name for yourself as well.To give you and idea of how this works, I’ll explain a little about how to make money using forums.

1. Have your heart in the right place. Post on forums to help people and not to promote your own business. The business will come but don’t look for it.

2. Everyone knows more about something then you do. Try and learn something from everyone you meet. Don’t put anyone done, they could be a potential client.

3. Always try and improve your website. You should not be making self promotional post on forums, you’ve got one shot to make the sell and that’s through your website. Always try and improve your design, text, logo and images as well as the way your site operates.

If your going to make money on forums your website needs to be the best, there is a lot of competition.

4. Debates are good but never let them get personal.

5. Bad information, I think a lot of people post bad information just to get people posting on a topic they started. I would never do this, it not only makes you look bad but also causes people to become confused about the topic being talked about.

At the end of the day you end up with links pointing to your site from forums, blogs and other websites talking about something you’ve said or done.

This helps your website rank in the search engines not because of link exchanges or submitting your site to directories but because you were out helping someone.

When your website does rank it’s the best it can be, you’ve been improving it everyday to help sell your product or service, while your competition has been submitting there site to directories and doing link exchanges.

You’ve also been making money from day one instead of worrying about the search engines and were you rank.

People need to forget about the search engines and start learning how to make money online.

There is a thread over at WPW where a member claimed to be getting thousands of visitors a day with a brand new site in only a couple days with only a couple hours of work.

He also claimed to be getting swamped by all the people wanting to advertise on the site but was unwilling to give a whole lot of information about how he did it or show a site to back up his claims.

The thread went into about 8 pages of people wanting to see proof and got way off topic, I tried to bring it back on topic because I wanted to better understand how he did it but the other members wouldn’t allow it.

So I decided to take my test else where, now one of the moderators wants to say I’m trying to steal the thread.

How sad is it that people feel that if you don’t want to fight and want to test the results others make claims about that you’re the one doing wrong.

Rule number one, never give anyone a break, it always comes back to bite you on the ass. I’ve done many sites for free or for very little money and it always seems those are the people that want the most out of you.

Once you start your obligated at that point, the same as if they were a paying customer because if you don’t get it right, you not only have the wasted time and an upset customer but they can talk bad about you and cost you even more business.

We are in the process of building our last website for another web design company. For the last 3 years we have been building websites for other web design companies from around the world. I’ve decided it’s not worth the time and effort to continue doing.

All the reasons we are stopping.

1. We do the work and get the design perfect so another web design company can show the client and say look what we did for you.

2. I don’t have the time to do other people’s design work.

3. Most web design companies can only send us a couple designs a month, they can’t keep one person busy.

4. The other design company gets to put our design in their portfolio and show it off as something they themselves did.

5. A lot of companies will pick the design apart asking us to make 15 or 20 different design changes, then they will show it to the customer who will ask for another 20 or so changes a lot of which would have been ok if the web design company had shown the client before asking us to make the changes.

We will continue to build website for our customers but will no longer build websites for other design companies.

I’m finished ranting now.

I do a lot of reading on SEO forums and it seems that a lot of the so called expert Search Engine Optimizer’s don’t even make their living online.

Most of them either work for someone else or do a lot of off line marketing along with their online marketing. I’m constantly getting spam emails and phone calls from these so called experts. I have to wonder, if SEO is so good then why are they resorting to phone calls and spam emails?

I live in a third would country (Colombia South America) and not have the option of doing things off line, I have to figure out what works and make it work for me. I think it’s sad that all these other people that are unable to make a living online are trying to get me to pay them to do for me what they can’t do for themseleves.