I decided to finally start my Twitter account back up and also my Linkedin profile as well.

Catch me on either at:

http://twitter.com/#!/eliquid

http://www.linkedin.com/in/smallbusinessinternetmarketing

I had an interesting conversation the other day with the CMO of a local company over lunch and they were raving to me about a new online marketing company they picked up to handle their web advertising.

Since I know just about everyone in the local Internet marketing space ( this is what happens when you pioneer a service in your hometown for well over a decade ), I inquired about the company they picked up and to my surprise, their name didn’t ring any bells with me. As I dug deeper into the conversation, what alarmed me was that this “new company” might actually be some kind of fly by night service about to pull the wool over my potential client.

I asked questions about this company:

1. What kind of clients do they handle now?

2. What kind of budgets do they handle for those clients?

3. Did they provide you references?

4. How qualified do you think they are to actually handle your account?

The CMO didn’t have what I would call “great” answers to those questions and a little more background checking should have been in order to find out more. It never ceases to amaze me how companies can jump head first into a partnership without doing their due diligence just because they got a “hot tip” or because someone at their office knows someone who knows someone.

What happens when you partner with someone that you barely know anything about and you want to grow past their limitations? Are you going to let them “learn” or educate themselves on your dime when that hurdle comes up? Wouldn’t you rather partner up with someone that not only has years of direct experience, but routinely handles clients that have million dollar budgets in the field you need help in?

The CMO was looking for help with Facebook advertising, something I have been doing since Facebook first opened their doors with their self serve system. If I were him, I would much rather take advice and get help from someone who can prove what they do with million dollar budgets and can help me scale my success, then hire someone that barely has a couple hundred dollars in unproven experience.

Small sample of a few of my Facebook Adverting accounts:

Account #1

Account #2

Account #3

Have you ever wondered why your site or marketing campaign is bringing you lots of targeted traffic, but you’re just not able to turn that traffic into the extra revenue you are seeking?

One thing I have noticed about Louisville web design companies is that many of them know how to initially set up a website for their clients but lack the foresight in helping their clients with their future online marketing campaigns. No, I am not talking about helping them with PPC or their Facebook page, but with their actual website and how their website can dramatically increase their conversions, revenue, and lead-generation goals.

I have been helping several companies with their local Louisville SEO projects, and almost all of them have asked me the same question, “How can I drive more leads/revenue into my site?” A lot of them simply think they can just drive more traffic to their site and that will fix their problem. While this sounds logical at first, the better method would be optimizing your site first and then driving more traffic to it once the site is optimized. Think of it like this, you wouldn’t crank up your air conditioning in your house when it’s hot outside while your windows are wide open, would you?

The hard part is, many of these same clients had a website built for them that they are not able to edit. Either their web design company has them “locked” into a system that is not user-friendly, or they simply have a system that is so grossly complex that if you make one change you have to edit several files and spend lots of time to make that one simple change.

I was working with one Louisville ecommerce company that was receiving hundreds of targeted visitors for their products every day. They were only converting maybe .30% (yes, only .30) of their customers. I devised a plan to help them convert more of their customers with ideas such as:

1. Capturing their email before the sale/before they left the site (to be used in a Louisville email marketing campaign.)

2. Install a live chat system to help customers that were on the site find the product they need.

3. Add in upsells and cross sells to the checkout funnel.

4. Change up the “calls to action” on their buy-now buttons and quote cart system.

5. Offering different payment options for those that would rather pay with Paypal or Google Checkout.

I had determined that these changes would result in my clients’ conversions being raised to a full six percent, which would result in a change of over 1,270,000 dollars in revenue per year for them. The problem? The web design company made it to where their site was almost uneditable. Making these changes would have resulted in hours and hours of programming because the clients’ code was not commented, locked down to a proprietary system, and encoded with source code encryption. Not only that, the web design company wanted to charge 300 dollars an hour to make these changes and had projected these changes (that only they could make) would take three months to implement.

Optimizing your site will provide you the largest gain in ROI that you will ever see, but if you do not include a knowledgeable online marketer in your site-planning projections, you will only end up hurting yourself and your business later down the road when it is time to ramp up your marketing campaigns.

I have had many clients in my time, and not all of them have been 110% “happy” with their previous Louisville SEO/Internet marketer.

Some of these unhappy clients just had unrealistic expectations no matter what anyone told them (i.e. wanting to rank for an ultra-competitive term in less than 10 days for less than the price of a nice dinner and a movie). Others just didn’t give their SEO campaign enough time to “set in” and work, and some clients just cannot be pleased.

If you are paying for SEO and not getting the results you want, here are some thoughts on why you might not be…

You are not listening to your SEO consultant:
Lots of times you are being told what we can and cannot do and in what time frame. You, however, insist on it being sooner, better, and easier than what we are telling you. If you know so much more than us (who you are paying), then why not take a crack at it yourself? We as consultants are up against not only all your competitors trying to rank for the same niche, but lots of times your competitors have more than one active SEO consultant, a longer history at being ranked higher than you, and just an outright better website than you. Also, we are trying to convince Google to change THEIR logic to favor your site over another site, all the while constantly tweaking and changing the standards we need to learn and follow at the drop of a dime.

You are not willing to work/help:
I get it. You hired a consultant to do this work and rank you higher. You do not want to do this or do not know how to do what you hired us for. That’s fine, but when we ask you for things we cannot do (maybe things like, changing your site navigation, adding more content, changing the URLs, etc.), we really need you to comply. I have one client I have worked with off and on for years and EVERY single time I ask them to make a change to their site, their answer is always, “Can’t”. You really limit what kind of results I can get you if you have a site that is not editable.

It is also not helpful when I have goals and tasks that are waiting on things for you to complete, but it takes you three to four months to complete them.

You wanted to be cheap:
Trying to cut corners when it comes to paying is always a bad tactic. If I give you multiple options for different packages that I can offer you and you pick the lowest one (which means I give your site less attention/time than if you picked a higher-end package), then you need to expect lower results. Sure, we talked about getting you to X position on Google and getting you X amount of leads, but when I give you the price for those results and the time frame involved and you balk and say you cannot afford that amount and decide to choose the package that is 50 percent less, then you should expect 50% less work from me every month. This also means that since I am working less hours for you per motnh, it will take longer to get the results we originally talked about. When I also present to you that we should purchase some paid links from other sites and you flat out reject the idea, then expect the results you wanted to take longer as well.

When I then see you on Facebook going to Disney World for two weeks, then buying a second million dollar vacation home, and have five new IT hires in your office when I come in to meet with you, I really have a hard time believing your excuse for “being a small company” that cannot afford the original price I gave you.

You forgot what my role was:
I am here to bring you traffic. Unless I agree to personally redesign your site or help you code a new ecommerce cart by hand, do not ask me to do that. If I do agree to help you with those tasks, realize that I will charge you for the new work and that the new work is also taking away time from me getting traffic to your site.

Also, you cannot expect your online marketer to “generate more sales” for you. We are here to get you more traffic and more leads. How you handle that traffic and those leads is entirely up to you. I brought the traffic to you; I filled up your lead cart, but I cannot make your customers love your product and spend three times more money on your product than what your competitor charges just to buy from you. I cannot RUN your business for you, and I cannot make your customers love everything about you. If you need that type of help, then I want to be a 50-percent partner and we can talk shop then.

Just because I got you number one in Google and raised your traffic eightfold, doesn’t mean the people actually like your products or that your business model is financially sound.

You just didn’t give it enough time:
Too many times, you expect results way too soon. Your competitors are trying to maintain the positions they are in, and many of them are trying to outrank you anyways. Google is also constantly changing their methods and ranking factors ( averaging 2x a day ). It is going to take time to correctly rank your site and also help you KEEP that position.

Also, every keyword and every niche is different. What it takes to rank first page for “blue widgets” is totally different than what it takes to rank for “red widgets”. None of us know what it takes off the bat. It takes research, testing, and data to find out what it is going to take to rank you for your keyword.

Finally, you got the result you wanted, and then didn’t want to maintain it:
Yep, I got you there when you wanted and where you wanted, and you thought to yourself, “Great! Thanks for the help, and I will call you if I need anything else,” and ended our relationship. That’s cool, I understand that once you got ranked you thought it was magically just going to stay there forever. I guess you didn’t listen to me when I told you that after you get ranked, you will need help to maintain that ranking so that when Google changes their algo or when your competitors get pissed and hire two or three SEOs to get their rankings back, you do not slip back to the third page of results again.

Your competitors are going to hire help to get their results back, and once you drop off, you are going to want to call me again to get you back to the first page. This time the work will be 10 times harder because I will have an uphill climb trying to now catch up to your competitors that have active SEOs working on their campaigns and building links like mad. Thanks for that!

Conclusion:
Next time you are not getting the results you are wanting from your Internet marketing consultant, think about what problems YOU are causing that are affecting your marketing efforts instead of thinking that your SEO consultant is at fault.

I am going to forewarn you, some of the things I mention could be against AdSense guidelines. Their rules change all the time, and you should always consult with them before following the advice of others.

I make a pretty good amount from AdSense each month. I set up my first true AdSense site sometime in 2005 and have enjoyed the passive income it brings me each month. I have now set up a ton of sites that use AdSense for income.

Here are some of the things I have learned since that time:

1. You must always experiment with your ads and content. I know that doesn’t sound “passive”, but once you get this down in your first couple of months, you can just leave it “as is” and collect checks.

2. Do blend your ads with your content. I try to always have a test where my content matches the same css (as close as possible) as my AdSense ads. I use the same font, same size, make the text color the same, the background color the same, etc. I even match the title of the AdSense ad to the color of my text links I am using on the site. You should still change it up and test it out to make sure your surfers are clicking as much as they can.

3. If you’re using black text on your site, try changing it to a lighter color like #333333 instead, also change your ad text to this color. The lighter color will almost always make your title of your ad unit stand out and “pop” more, making it more appealing to click.

4. I used to place my ad units right under the H1 and above the content, but since AdSense frowns on this, I now float left my ad units within my content. My content now wraps around the ad unit. Float left seems to work better than float right.

5. I almost always use 336×280 ad units. You should play with those and 300×250. Those have always worked out the best for me.

6. Only use one ad unit, regardless of what anyone tells you. Matter of fact, just test it out yourself and see where you make more money. What I have found is, the more ad units you put on your page, the more customers have to click. However, they could be clicking on the lower-paying ads in those other ad units. When you display one ad unit, you display the top-paying three to four advertisers.

7. Test out a 300×250 image unit ad next to a 300×250 text unit ad. You cannot place a normal image next to an AdSense ad unit, but you can set two AdSense ad units next to each other. Just make one image only and the other text only—same effect.

8. On the larger 336×280 test ad units, the URL of the ad sits next to the title of the ad. Both are underlinked. Try making these both the same color. The effect is, a same-color, lengthy, underlined piece of text that draws the user’s eye to it.

Hope this helps. I might post more on this later next week.