Ask Yourself – What is the Internet for?

Easy answer… the Internet is for porn. Don’t believe me, check out this YouTube video. But in all seriousness, most people online use the medium for entertainment and free information. At the time of this blog post, Alexa and Quantcast listed the following websites as the top visited by users (excluding search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing)

• Facebook (social networking)
• YouTube (free videos)
• Wikipedia (online reference source)
• Blogger (free blogging application)
• Baidu (music search)
• MySpace (social networking)
• Twitter (social networking)
• Amazon (online retailer)
• WordPress (free blogging application)
• eBay (online auction side and retailer)
• Walmart (online and brick and mortar retailer)

Delving further down the list, one will find…

• The Huffington Post (news source)
• IGN (video game and entertainment hub)
• Examiner (news source)
• CNN (mews source)

The picture should be starting to clear – people spend most of their time looking for and sharing information, videos, and music. The rest of the time they spend buying stuff. Not a huge surprise in our free speaking consumerist society that hosts the entertainment hub of the world. You should also note that outside the retailers, people get to access all of these venues absolutely free! People love free stuff!

How Does Knowing The Dominance of Entertainment and Information Online Help My Business?

Well, unless your market fits into the free publication or entertainment sectors or you already sell your products through one of the major online retailers, it helps you very little, directly. But it does allow you to see how you might need to begin rethinking your marketing strategy to fit into these venues and indirectly get the Internet to work for you.

Your Macro Internet Marketing Plan Should Target…

Search Engines

Search engines serve as the gateway to all other websites. Getting anything significant you write or offer online into Google, Yahoo!, and Bing should be your number one priority. To do this, you will need to optimize your pages for search engine listings, find the best targeted keywords for your market, and weed out any initial competition. Fortunately, you can start your journey by reading “How to Find Your Best Keywords”.

Social Networks

A majority of people now spend their time online interacting on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and to an extent, YouTube. All of these sites offer ways for you to connect with potential clients and customers by participating or creating groups in your market, creating specific business pages for the interested to follow, and sending out informative and entertaining updates to your social connections. Before you jump into the social networking scene, please read some friendly advice on growing your connections and followers.

Free Information through Online Publications

Not everyone considers themselves to be a great writer, but you need some skills in this area. You plan to do business on the Internet after all, the INFORMATION super highway (allegedly invented by Al Gore), and most people use the medium to find tips, guides, advice, etc. Share some of your expertise, your skills, your knowledge, and later on hope that people will consider you reliable enough to someday give you a little money as well.

eMail

Do not forget, most people still use email to communicate with each other and it serves as an intermediary between social networks as well. Consider starting about a free newsletter or ezine people can subscribe to from your website or social network to receive ongoing updates and information from you. The ones that join and stay on the list will be more likely to pay for your services and products.

Think FREE!

Let freedom ring! Land of the free and home of the brave! You need to start realizing that once online, people want free stuff, otherwise they know where to go to pay for something (Amazon for instance!). Your job should be to gain credibility for your business, expand your visibility, and earn people’s trust. Once they know they can rely on you, they will be more willing to pay for your services and products. You need to soft sell, be indirect, and steer clear from spamming and marketing people’s eyeballs out. Online, people choose what to look at, what to read, what to listen to, and what to pay for. If you scare people, insult people, or market to them too hard, they will leave you in their cyber dust, or forever block you from the many online venues available.

Before you click away from my perceived insanity, remember that most of this journey will be free on your side too! Learn how to best setup your pages and keywords, to interact with people on social networks, and write a few informative pieces here and there, and internet marketing will not cost you more than time. If you do not possess the desire or hours to do it on your own, you can always find a trustworthy marketer out there to help you.

The Fork in the Road – Local or ?

Getting back to your business… you need to evaluate the online environment in your market before you really decide to gear up for internet marketing. The big question you need to ask yourself – where is your target audience? Do you offer your services and sell your products locally, say only in the Miami area? If so, your keywords and your groups need to reflect your geographic location. You need to seek out people living in your area and not waste time and money on everyone in the world.

However, if you can offer your services/products statewide, nationally, or even globally – if you can offer them to anyone who speaks English or any other language you can successfully communicate in – then you need to target a much broader audience. Before you write a single piece of copy or start doing any significant research, you must figure out whether your target audience lies on a local or bigger scale.

Does Your Business Have an Online Market?

If you use Google’s Keyword Tool with Adwords and my Keyword Guide mentioned above, you should be able to determine if people even search for your products or services. Based on the Monthly Search Volume, you may determine that you should not spend much effort on Internet marketing because a profitable online market does not exist, at least from a cost benefit standpoint. Be sure to completely exhaust your research efforts here though before you close the curtain. Remember that the future may be able to reap new rewards, so revisit your potential at another date. With an almost non-existent market, you may want to only focus on social networking to gain more visibility and at least give current customers and clients a place to go so you can upkeep your retention.

You might also discover that hundreds or thousands of other businesses already compete to gain the attention of your potential clients. You being the newcomer must fight your way closer to the top to be successful. This could signal creating a multiple year strategy to really build up your social networks, your inbound links, and your online presence before you can expect to gain any serious online sales.

Even if your online market appears ripe for the picking, you will need a solid one-year plan before you can realistically expect positive results.

No matter what, do not hesitate to establish some business presence online, even if that just means submitting your information to online Yellow Pages, Yahoo! Local, or City Search. Even if you just create a Facebook page or setup a single webpage with some basic information about your business and services. 74% of people search for businesses online and you want to be sure they can find yours.

Now ask yourself….

How many websites did you submit each individual article to?

You’ve probably fallen victim to the duplicate articles dilemma.

Rewind to a few years ago when “Internet marketing gurus” were pushing their viral marketing strategies and encouraging people to submit the same article to every known article directory they could get their hands on. Well, guess what? They were encouraging countless people to essentially spam the search engines with their writings and trick a system big on copyrights and original content. Everybody knows how huge a taboo spam is. Eventually, Google and the other guys caught on and implemented algorithms in their web crawlers to weed out and bury the duplicates.

And who can blame them? How reliable would users consider an engine that listed the same exact information in the top ten spots for a search, just on different websites? That’s like a library only offering different editions of the same book when someone was looking for research on a particular topic. What if someone turned in a paper with a works cited for 10 sources all essentially the same piece of information? Intelligent people would find a new library and the guy who wrote a paper would probably fail the assignment.

Google wants to bring value to their users and offer a service second-to-none, that’s how they climbed to the top in the first place. So, if you’re trapped in the habit of creating duplicate content, you should ask yourself the same question - are you creating any real value for people?

The Reality of Article Submission

Most of the article databases receive very little relative traffic to begin with and return a low residual effect. Their traffic rankings cannot compete with more prominent sites like universities and news sources, or high traffic directories and blogs. If you’ve spent several hours on a top notch article, why publish it on www.most-awesome-articles.com (not really a website) where it won’t get ranked, it won’t be found by the website users, and when other sites like WordPress, HubPages, Squidoo, and EzineArticles are around? If you wanted to include a guest piece in your magazine or paper, which source would you rely on… one from a prominent editor at CNN or a random letter received from spikeymikey@nowheremail.com?

Google thinks in a similar fashion on their end. Why list an article from www.most-awesome-articles.com when they already have a version from HubPages?

You might be thinking to yourself - what about Reuters? What about authorized syndication? It’s true that Google and the other engines allow some room for syndication from common news sources, but most of us do not operate in those circles or have access to that content to freely use, so why take the chance?  Probability dictates that Google will pick up one of your articles, but the rest will get lost in the engine and with them all the time spent submitting to dozens of useless directories.

Truth betold, no one can guess why Google keeps one version of web copy over another. It could be related to the age of the page (how long it’s been live online), the reliability of the source, the code to text ratio compared to the other versions… and sometimes, the engine will list more than one copy. It’s all guess work, but you can bet that more often than not, only one version will be viable.

The Solutions That Almost Saved You

But then there came in the works a hybrid solution to try and trick the engines again! Re-write the article so the web crawlers think it’s something new, so one can submit almost the same article to at least the top publication sites without needing to create something fresh. And so began the age of www.dupecop.com and similar services to check the percentage difference between docs.

Here too though, writers beware, Google’s web crawlers are more sophisticated than people give them credit for, and even an article that appears to be 50% different can be picked up as a dupe. To safeguard this technique, a service like QuoteFinder http://blogoscoped.com/quotefinder/ is recommended. Just change the sentences that show more than one online source in your new article.

The Best Solution for Duplicate Content… Doh!

I however, have an even better solution! Stop creating duplicate articles completely and start writing original and unique content that really offers value to your readers and hopefully potential clients. Nobody likes a fraud, a hack, or a two-timer – and that’s what you’ll look like if the smarter-than-you-think readers find out you’re duplicating content out there, or worse, simply rehashing someone else’s. Don’t destroy your potential credibility, visibility, and profitability because of laziness. Make each article you write count and make sure it’s one-of-a-kind.

The following benefits of article marketing can be yours…

• Increased page rankings (with inbound links)
• Increased webpage traffic
• Increased credibility
• Increased visibility
• Increased clients and customers
• Increased profits

But if you duplicate content all you’ll do is lose the above benefits plus…

• Waste time
• Waste money
• Become discouraged

What to do with your now unwasted time?

Search engines also like pages to stay fresh! Update your articles from time-to-time. Add in new information, take out parts now obsolete, add in some graphics, optimize the keywords, and keep editing until you get ranked on the first page for your targeted keywords. A well maintained and fully tweaked article can bring in more traffic and more business than 15 hurried and forgotten pieces any day!

So do continue with your article marketing, and do submit your awesome work so people can find it at EzineArticles, your blog, or other sites, but steer clear from tendencies to submit duplicates – in the end, you’re just committing internet marketing suicide. And like spam, we know how deadly that can be.

You can read more from the source over at Google and their warnings and guidleines about duplicate content.