Well it appears that real people using the web are finally getting a stronger say than webmasters tricking search engines into sending visitors their way.
A little over two weeks ago, on October 16, Google posted this article on the Webmaster Central Blog:
“A new tool to disavow links”
The article tells webmasters how they can ‘disavow’ those pesky telltale links they can’t seem to shake that inform Google’s “spiders” (programs that “crawl” a website and report back to Google whether you’ve been naughty or nice) that your web site has been hanging out with shady characters.
Tsk, tsk…
If your business has been reliant on SEO for leads, you may be all too aware of and smarting from recent “Google Slaps”, in the search giant’s quest to “clean up the wild, wild west” of the old internet days.
Whether you rely on search or not, what all this means, ironically is that good ol’ trust based advertising, marketing and leadership wins the day. But you have to be smart about it…
You can’t be like everybody else. You need to be different, in a good way.
So, what really sets your business apart? That gives unmistakable reason to your prospect to do business with you over every alternative out there? It might be product or service, or it might be in relationship with prospects and customers.
Let’s not underestimate the power of relationship. But it could also be in your sales process. A superior marketing system in terms of complexity and effectiveness may be enough to outmaneuver inevitable knockoffs.
Example: “Gold by the Inch”, a business opportunity for people interested in additional income they could earn over weekends, had one of the longest running and extremely profitable TV infomercials, something like eight years if I recall correctly.
According to Dan Kennedy who consulted on the campaign, there were plenty of would-be knock-offs which often kill a business deriving leads from an infomercial, but what kept them running was a complex multi-step multi-media campaign behind the scenes that competitors wouldn’t or couldn’t overcome.
Are you relying on a single hit selling system? One media? One step, then done and on to the next?
Or do you have a well designed set of steps in a variety of media over time that allows your prospect to feel like she is buying rather than being sold something?
And one of those media could be a simple old–fashioned phone call. In person.
After all, people generally prefer to buy from people. Especially those they are familiar with.
