Many Internet entrepreneurs think they’re doing everything they can to get the word out about their businesses. They allocate their marketing budgets to direct mail, e-mail, banner ads, print ads, co-registration, and pay-per-click (PPC). They spend much of their time, effort, and money on getting those channels to produce a positive ROI (return on investment). But they’re ignoring a major source of potential traffic… which means they are losing hordes of potential new customers. Big mistake.

I’m talking about organic search via search engine marketing and optimization (SEM/SEO).

Many marketers think focusing on organic search is "a waste of time." Some think there’s no way to monitor, measure, and monetize the results. But they’re either clueless or misinformed. For instance, according to a recent survey by Jupiter Research, 80 percent of Web users get information from organic search results. And measuring sources of traffic and visitors is easy with the free Web tool Google Analytics.

Search engines like diversity in relevant back links to your website. And one of the best ways to get lots of relevant back links – as I said in my article about the SONAR Method of Content Distribution – is with a synchronized distribution of your content to a variety of sources.

So in addition to having optimized website pages, having a variety of news aggregators, social networks, blogs, and directories linking to your site helps give you a heavier weight in organic listings. This helps build your organic market presence for little or no cost. And, let’s face it, low cost is a good thing.

Using organic search strategies helped increase traffic rank and visits to ETR’s sister publication, Total Health Breakthroughs, by 3,160 percent and 81.5 percent, respectively, in only three months. In that same time period, Total Health Breakthroughs had a 62.01 percent rate of converting that organic search traffic into subscribers. That’s about 16,000 organic names in three months at virtually no cost!

Now tell me… does that seem like a waste of time to you?

[Ed. Note: Wendy Montes de Oca is ETR's Vice President of Marketing & Business Development. For step-by-step instructions on starting your own Internet business, get ETR's Magic Button program. Click here to learn more.]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 5:30 am and is filed under Marketing/Internet, Wealthy .