We decided to do a SEO Services Review on HitsCheap.com after stumbling across their site on the web. Their site advertised some pretty impressive numbers and the traffic was unbelievably cheap. Just like the name of the site. So we broke out the credit card for a review.

For this review we signed up and bought the $16.99 for 25000 hits service. The image here comes from the HitsCheap.com console.

So you can see here that after sixty days we only reached 11146 of the 25000 hits we paid for. (we masked our URL for privacy reasons) but you can also see that we were in the traffic category. We were supposed to get a lot of exposure.

I must admit I was expecting to have the hits blown through in a day or two. 60 days and under half was not what I expected.  I didn’t see a single note on their site that said, “results could take many months.”

At the corporate level or for any large client, 25000 hits is probably enough to do some testing.  It’s regular practice to test first and then pursue the option if the test results are good. That’s why I went small. It turns out to be a good thing this was a just a test.

Here’s why. That 11146 hits doesn’t translate into actual traffic. Here is what I mean.

From this report you can see that the 11146 doesn’t even come close to generating real visits. We received 76 visits in the 60 day period.  That means the traffic basically trickled in. Not quite 11146

But here is the Reality-

At first glance it seems like this is a real steaming pile of you know what.  Nope- In fact these resuls have some high points.

1. We actually got traffic. That’s huge from this sort of thing. I have paid for dozens of “directory Submission” sites that do nothing. I have even given my personal email address to see if I’d get the mother load of spam your supposed to get. Like clock work Nada. So, HitsCheap.com scores a major plus here just by actually delivering some visits.
2. Time on site. Now I wouldn’t bank on this just yet, but if I had bought say 1 million hits from them (which might have given me 3040 visits so far) and the time on site stayed around 3 minutes, that would be phenomenal for this project. So, another plus. Visitors might actually be staying.
3. Next- from the report above, New Visits. That’s another double bonus for me. That means 25% actually came back. For this particular project that is monumental. Again, we’d have to see the same result with a large sample size before we’d go all in. But Another Plus +
4. Pages per visit is also fantastic. People actually looked around just a bit. Another bonus+
5. Now this may not be good enough for everyone, but this is calculating out to to be .12 per visit if the traffic trend continues. Now Stumble Upon can deliver single page views for a nickle. I am averaging 3.57 views per visit so to me its better than stumble upon per visit, but I’ll be grayer by the time the traffic equals out.

So, in reality HitsCheap.com delivers. Just very very slowly.  Here is my advice when it comes to cheap traffic like this. Do the math before diving right in. Cheaphits.com is out performing stumble upon paid traffic if you have a site where you want people looking around a bit. If your trying to land visitors on a pitch page with a buy it now button, Stumble Upon might be a better alternative and a lower cost.

Another strategy I would look at with these types of sites is multiple buys. Instead of buying a million from one, do 4 250,000  buys. This way you can run 4 at once, This will help with the traffic lag if other sites deliver at the same rate.

Last, you probably want to consider the issues of brand management before using a service like this. My next post will discuss brand management issues that you want to consider as your brand grows. Cheap traffic like this can get really expensive if it triggers a PR issue.

HitsCheap.com gets  8  out of  10

Recently I was asked this question: How Often Should I Post To My Blog? I figured a lot of people might be asking the same question. Especially when it comes to SEO.

I would have to say there are probably 3 rules I follow when it comes to frequency of posting.  Overall though it really comes down to your business.

First here are my 3 rules or best practices I generally follow regardless of the business.

Rule one is basically this. “Always be posting“. By always I mean twice a week if you have something to share, and at least 1 once a week if you don’t.  I didn’t use this advice for this blog, but I should have. If I had I’d have almost 24 posts already. Not to mention the number of news feed subscribers would probably have increased instead of decreased since I started.  My reasons for always posting revolve around relevancy. If your not keeping your blog relevant than it will just waste away. Another important factor is Robot Crawling. Google visits sites that change often, and avoids the ones that don’t change.  So keep the posts up. Hard Work is at the core of SEO.

For a business that is always changing, there is nothing wrong with posting more often. You should post as often as your business does. Nothing wrong with getting the word out on a new idea or product.

Rule Two. When ever possible post on a schedule. This is important when you have subscribers. Imagine how happy people might be if they new every Friday, if they came to your blog, they could sit back with a cup of coffee and watch a short product review video, or learn something new. It works. So, post on a schedule.

Rule Three. Keep it real. By real I mean make it a real worth while post. No one wants to head on over to your blog to find 250 quick words that were really meaningless. I promise you this, if you try that often with your business, you’ll be blogging about going out of business in no time.

Although not a rule, it can be a best practice to write a few posts and just keep them as drafts. This way when the tap runs dry, you can finish up a draft or two and still give your readers something fresh. That will keep you “Always Posting” even when you have a vacation or crisis that takes you away from the blog.

I hope that answers the question. I’ll be following my own rules more often, and besides its good for SEO.

If you have written your first article and are talking about your product it is time to spread the word a little bit to do a little market testing. With social bookmarking you can disseminate your information into popular user groups.  You can then observe those groups and their interactions with your article or product information. You can read the comments, track votes and even track the links in your article with services like bit.ly. (that’s coming up soon as we begin reviewing SEO services out there so stay tuned.) It’s almost a submit an watch what happens approach. If your article ends on on the front page of a site or if it’s widely accepted, you’ll know you’ve got a winner. This is one way you can get some data.

In fact each and every article you write could be submitted to many groups or different groups. Just beware of spamming social bookmarking groups or submitting into the wrong one. Many tools exist to speed up the process, but like all other parts of SEO there are no short cuts.

Here is a little more information about social bookmarking in a more general sense and how it can help you with SEO.  When it comes to increasing your search engine ranking and traffic to your website, social bookmarking is one of the best methods of doing so. It is easy to do and costs virtually no money, yet can greatly expand your audience and visibility on the web. With so many websites flooding the internet today, it can be quite difficult to find a way for your own page to move up the search engine ranks and get viewed by the numerous people surfing the web. However, making use of the right kinds of marketing tactics will deliver great results without a lot of time, money, or wasted effort.

Social bookmarking is done by using various established websites to link back to your web page.  These linking websites and services allow people to share information and pages quickly and easily among their groups of friends. Instead of needing to copy and paste or send a file of something that they came across online, they can simply link to it. From here, this bookmark can be seen by lots of different people without needing to contact each person individually.  The whole process is very simple to do, costs nothing, and has a lot of potential for increasing the popularity of your website.

The way that social bookmarking works is by making your website more appealing to the various search engines that are available. As most everyone uses some sort of search engine, such as Google or Yahoo on a daily, if not hourly, basis, it stands to reason that increasing our visibility in this sort of a venue will greatly boost the amount of people that discover and visit our web page.  After all, how can someone find out about your site if it does not show up until page 10 of a list of search results?  The sad truth is that people rarely look beyond the first few results.  Therefore, it is important to get your page listed as high as possible.

Your better ranking is achieved through this method because the more links to your site, the more credible your web page becomes in the eyes of a search engine. However, it also boosts your ranking and visibility in an indirect method as well.  By having these referrals to your page on a social bookmarking site, more people have the opportunity to stumble upon your web page.  In doing so, more and more people can visit your site, which increases your number of hits and, thus, your search engine position as well.

That was a brief run through of the SEO benefits to bookmarking your articles.

Here are a couple of Social Bookmarking Sites as suggestions.

• Digg.com
  
• KarmaLynx.com
  
• Delicious.com
• StumbleUpon.com

When it comes to good grass roots internet marketing there are no magic bullets. Much of real SEO is not smoke and mirrors or magic tricks but simple execution of a few basic processes that are formed around a particular marketing strategy. Over time if the strategy is successful authority is established. Learning how to write or create content in an SEO friendly manner will help you become more authoritative. Here some quick tips on how to write an SEO friendly article.

First, What is an SEO friendly article?

Well it will be much easier to start by telling you what it is not. It is not an article that is stuffed with so many keywords and links that people give up on reading it.  Nor is it an article that was written in English, translated to French, then Italian, and back to English. (if that hits home because you got duped, or duped someone into one of those $499 training courses, that’s for you!) It’s also not a copy of some other authors article with a new title and a few extra words thrown in to cover it up. That’s still blatant plagiarism.

What it is, what it is.

An SEO friendly article is a well thought out, honestly original piece of editorial content that is somewhat focused around your marketing strategy. For example, if you were in the Jelly Bean business an article that discussed how to make a perfectly black black licorice jellybean might be relevant to the business. Including the word Jelly Bean a couple of times would be perfectly natural. Adding it to every sentence does not make for a quality article. If the article made a pitch about why your jelly beans are the best, that’s ok , you probably should add that in,  just don’t hammer it to death.

The point is for the piece to be truly natural. Most of the time the mere fact that your article exists is better than if it didn’t at all but there is another more important reason to stay natural. It’s the marketability of the content. That’s what your really after with SEO friendly content. If its a winner the editorial will help to accelerate any successful SEO strategy. If it’s engaging and relevant you might get “buy in” from others. They will link to it, tell other people about it who might tweet about it, maybe even throw it on their Facebook wall.  Hell, the entire high school mob might pick it up run with it. That never happens when you publish a pile of garbage and on top of that almost every human being has the ability to see right through it.

Tips to get you started.

1. Pick a Worthy Title- Your title should be catchy and related to your goal. (that means include some targeted keywords)
2. Write the way people talk- This is very important to get buy in. Very rarely is a frigid, technical article passed around. Never write the way things are written in a text book. It’s hard to master, but you gotta do it!
3. Include a keyword or two- Pick some keywords and phrases related to your goal. Remember you don’t get a point each time use it so keep it natural. You should  underline , italic or bold it if it’s important or necessary to the paragraph or sentence (see jelly bean above)
4. Spice it up! – add charts, videos, and images to go with your quality content
5. Give Credit Where Credit is Due – don’t forget to list your sources or provide author information when you quote someone else.
6. Give and Take – Use anchor text in a couple of links as a road map. Anchor text that reads SEO Services and links to a seo services site is perfect where anchor text that reads Jelly Bean and then links to an Ice Cream website is probably not proper. (It may help the ice cream site rank in the search engines for Jelly Bean, but users will be pissed if there aren’t any jelly beans to be had. ) Don’t be afraid to link to something useful that drives the point home. For example if your talking about an IRS form in detail. link to it.
7. Add Some Technical Stuff-
   1. if you can use an <h1> do it. Just make sure its the only one on the page. It never hurts.
   2. If you spiced it up,  make sure you include  alt tags that are relevant. (calling an image of a person a “Cell Phone Accessory” is not ok)
   3. Add an improvise to anything on the list to fit your strategy.

That’s the long and the short of it. Now you can write a Search Engine Optimization friendly article the right way.

Now is the time to start talking about your product! We built a blog so we could have a place that we could do that. Even if your not ready to deliver your product or show it to people, the sooner you can get the word out the better.

Do it now. Even if your website is in shambles and your supply chain is held together with promises, IOU’s and duck- tape; get the word out!

A lot of people expend a lot of energy keeping things private before they put the word out. It’s certainly a good idea to keep some aspects of your business private, but all to often people try to keep all things secret. I have done it. I thought people would steal my idea. Little did I know, my idea wasn’t worth stealing. I found that after going all in. It’s a tough balance but  when it comes to internet marketing, get the word ASAP.

Common thinking would say cross all your TEES and dot your EYES before you launch so you don’t come off like a low budget operation. That may hold true other places but on the web the “IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME MENTALITY” never holds true. In fact everyday what seem like lesser web businesses out perform the glamorous ones. Usually a portion of its success can be attributed to adoption by the masses early in on a particular niche.

Here is why you should break from common thinking and start talking about your product now.

1. Find out if you have a winner. Nothing will be more depressing for you if you set up an awesome product and it flops. All the energy, all the money, all the time, most of which you never get back. The internet is filled with what I like to call High School mobs. Just like twenty years ago,  if the in-crowd said something was in style, it was! If they laughed, you knew you were out of style.

Much of the internet works the same way. There are tons of truly amazing products out there, but the ones that aren’t adopted fail and the ones that are accepted make someone rich. Talking about your product early will let you know if your product is being adopted and by who. When the high school mob laughed some students found a new group to band together with like the Drama Club or the Debate Club. If you knew that early a subtle change could get your product adopted much earlier.

So, I am talking about traction. If you get no traction or some traction with a group you didn’t expect you’ll have a feeling or an indicator if your product is a winner or a loser. You may even pull the plug and save yourself a hefty pile of cash.

2. Get out the kinks. We have heard about Murphys Law. When you go out there and market your product almost always you run into a few problems. IF you get the word out now, you can eliminate a lot of them. People will ask questions and help you build your business around their needs.

Just imagine if you were selling ice cream, took your first order for 2 gallons of ice cream and never figured out before hand what will happen with your shipments if they are delivered to a building in Manhattan where the door man doesn’t accept perishables? What then. Well maybe you include some information on your website to let users know how to get your product. A lot of the simple kinks can be ironed out before you ever initiate your full blown marketing effort.

3. Address what the people want before they have to tell you. When you get the word out most commonly friends, family, and peers, will be the ones “tasting your ice cream.” So, since they will not be a true test of the market they should not be considered an example of a high school mob. However they can still be used so you can address common concerns before your product goes out the door.

For example, you already know that no one wants melted ice cream delivered. So, your going to make sure it gets their cold. But also, people may have a concern that it would arrive too deeply frozen to be enjoyed right out of the box. So address these concerns now rather than later.

If you go to market and then start addressing peoples concerns you will find that people will be unlikely to adopt your product or service early and may even talk negatively about it.

Another benefit is when you address the concerns of those close by, they will feel good and might even get a second opinion from one of their peers. That can then be the mustard seeds of good data to come. So get the word out now and start addressing concerns.
Those are just a few quick reasons that are at the top of my list. Use the blog that we created and start posting content about your product or service.