seo – Leverage the message

What is a destination? It’s the place you want to be. Perhaps it’s a vacation resort. Maybe it’s your parent’s place during the holidays. When it comes to business, a destination is where people in a particular niche want to hang out.

When you think about the niche that your business operates in, where do the people like to hang out? Where do they like to be? That’s a destination, and that’s where YOU want to be.

Now you might want to be there as a fan of the niche, but you REALLY want to be there as one of the experts. I don’t know how big your contact list is, but if you’re looking for a LOT of people to get in front of, your list won’t compare to the list of all the people who are dropping by the destination to see and hear about exactly the solutions you have.

Find or build a destination for your niche and then be a very visible player in it. Leverage all the people that others bring to the same group. That’s a smart, effective and very inexpensive way to market.

When you have a new video for people to watch, where are you sending your traffic? Right now, most of us are sending it to YouTube or to FaceBook so that millions of people “might” watch it. Why?? You are actually driving people away from you.

No one knows for sure exactly what formula Google uses to rank websites, but traffic is definitely one of the larger data points they use. When you put a new video or post on a social site, and then tell your list to go watch it there, you are generating a lot of traffic. Who benefits? FaceBook and YouTube!

Instead of posting the videos or posts on a social site, try this instead: Create a blog post or page on your own website and then create posts on the social sites to drive traffic to you. You can even add a short excerpt from your blog or video to entice people. The goal is to get traffic to your site, which then gets Google to rank you higher.

There’s another benefit to driving traffic to your website instead of away from it. Once people are on your site, a good percentage of them will take a look around to see what else you have. You may end up picking up sales or clients because people came looking at one thing and found something they liked even better.

You might even bump up the size of your email list if you provide a gift.

Take some time to rethink your traffic strategy. Think about what you’ll do to make your site “sticky”, which means that you’ve created something that keeps people on your site. By driving more traffic and having objectives in mind for what to do when they arrive will have an amazing impact on your business.