I have been using Craigslist.org for many years to sell and buy many things (I never use Ebay or StubHub aymore). I have been successful in finding new employees for my companies and tenants for my rental properties. Needless to say I am a HUGE fan!

My admiration for CL grew even greater, a few weeks back when I was in a crunch. My family and another family were traveling to the Boston area to spend the weekend at the Life Is Good Festival (great time BTW) and around 9pm the night before we were informed that the third family that was suppose to join us had a family emergency and would not be able to go….immediately I thought how can I get these sold and not lose money before tomorrow at 11am since they were still selling tickets at the event. Fortunately the CL microchip that has been implanted in my brain (years ago) kicked in and said  “Post them on Craigslist”…..so by 11pm that evening sitting in our hotel room on my iPad I had the tickets posted slightly under the sales price.

By 8am the next morning my phone and my wife’s phone began to ring with calls and text messages of people wanting the tickets and even through Sunday people were still wanting to see if we had them available. We ended up selling them to the first person that called us.

I did not make money selling the tickets however, our losses were less by putting a simple free ad on Craigslist.org.

So before you do anything…..try Craigslist first, you might be surprised.

Dear CEO:

I want to thank you for the opportunity to reach out to you today, I know that you are busy…..so I will try and keep this brief.

Your web presence is poor, non-existent, incognito, losing you money and quite honestly….sucks! It lacks the true meaning behind having a website and that is to increase your profits, yes that is correct….increase your profits! Now you are asking how do I know this?? Well, it is quite simple…..your potential buyers (prospects) cannot find you, which means you do not exist in their eyes, which means they will never have the opportunity to buy from you, which means you are losing money.  Feel free to continue to spend your hundreds of thousands of dollars on trade shows, trade journals, print advertising, TV commercials, Radio Spots, direct mail and the many other traditional forms of marketing available. Meanwhile, realize that 90% of all buying research and decisions takes place through the internet.

I know what you are saying, we are doing SEO, SEM, Social Media and some other forms of Internet Marketing Services and I have to stand right up and tell you…..you are not! You might be dabbling in it, playing around with it, testing things, increasing traffic and perhaps feel that your outsource firm or internal efforts are maximizing your potential, when the truth is due to their uneducated, lack of knowledge….you are losing money. Your Internet Marketing campaign must be conversion and profit focused and most external and internal teams do not have the experience or knowledge to make that happen……so you keep losing money.

You see I have been through this with your marketing department, sales manager, IT department and various other executives within your company and they seem to have this fear that you will deny this need even though it is a MUST HAVE. I have strongly demanded that I cannot believe you would take this approach since this is such a missing link to your overall marketing strategy and one that cannot be ignored any longer. Perhaps, you should re-engage your marketing department and various other execs showing them your support of such an initiative.

See my job is to take your online presence to a whole new level that you cannot even comprehend and I know that sometimes there is not even a budget established. Not having a budget is truly not a good enough reason to lose an enormous amount of potential income especially for a strategy that is so precisely trackable. Go find out how many people viewed that TV Commercial you ran or saw the full page magazine ad you placed in that trade journal…..not gonna happen, is it?

Well I have taken up enough of your time today and I will follow this letter up with repeated phone calls and contact points until you see the error of your ways and want to start making a difference and increase your companies profits. After all, you would not want me to start reaching out to the owner and/or board of directors…now would you?

Make it a great day!

Sincerely,

Your Best Shot At Internet Immortality

As promised, here’s Part 2 of my SEO Content Writing series…check out part one here: SEO Content Writing Part 1.

SEO Content Is Under Appreciated…

Typically, most clients don’t understand just how much SEO content can help their rankings. It’s really all about the terms you want to rank for. SEO’d content helps you rank for more long tail terms. And typically, long tail keywords send more relevant traffic to your website. By relevant I mean people who need what you offer and are more likely to convert to leads, sales, etc.

We’ve seen time and time again how many long tail keywords a site can rank well for just by having the right keywords sprinkled throughout their content.

Of course, I’m in NO way saying that SEO’d content is all you need to rank. There are tons of other factors that go into getting your site ranked for various keywords…SEO content writing is just one aspect of it, but an important one when it comes to long tail rankings.

A Few More Tips For SEO Content

I did promise a few additional tips, didn’t I? To get the first few, go back and read my other post (it’s fairly quick and painless, I promise.)

A few other things to keep in mind when writing content for SEO:

• Use your main keywords in your <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags…and even <h4> if you got ‘em. Google sees this as a headings, and will usually see them first – they hold a bit more emphasis then body text.
• Bold the use of your keywords once or twice through out your copy.
• Include keywords in the file names and alt tags of any images.
• ABOVE ALL: make sure your content is genuinely useful and relevant information – that’s really what Google is looking for!

Cool SEO Content Tools & Resources

When I first started writing optimized content for clients, I used a very cool tool from SEOmoz called Term Target, that would basically give you a letter grade on how well you optimized your content for a chosen keyword. You basically put in the url of your content, enter the keyword you were targeting, and hit the button to run.

Within seconds you get a “grade” and suggestions on how to improve your grade. Once you’ve run this enough times, you basically memorize what your pages should include to get a good grade, but it’s an awesome tool if your still learning the ropes.

As a newbie in the world of web copy (for both SEO and sales/marketing stuff) I lived and breathed CopyBlogger.com. They’ve got a couple great posts about SEO copywriting that really helped me grasp the concept to begin with. While there are other blogs that may have more comprehensive info on the subject, CopyBlogger will always be near and dear to my heart!

Every now and then I’ll get myself into a new situation. Occasionally in new situations, the way things turn out line up pretty well with what you expected. More often than not, there are – shall we say – some minor differences between what I imagined and what is reality. Sometimes that’s positive, sometimes not.

Marriage, fatherhood, and moving overseas are three great examples of huge differences between expectations and reality. I’m about to add another item to my list:

Internet Marketing.

Being a member of the ProspectMX team is my first jaunt into the internet marketing world. I come from a consulting / coaching / training background with a healthy dose of retail. Now that I’ve been in the internet marketing world for a few months, I have developed some keen observations on what internet marketing actually entails vs. what I originally assumed it would be.

Seeing as how many of our clients are sticking their feet into the waters of internet marketing for the first time, I believe my observations can be very beneficial for anyone questioning what this industry is all about and how it fits into their marketing objectives.

I was looking for a quickly changing, fast moving environment when my job hunt led me to ProspectMX. Slow growth and stability? Bah! Not for me. Well, I certainly found what I was looking for. It seems that things are changing all the time in this industry. Even aside from all the other issues that are part of the changing landscape in this industry, working with Google (and their game playing) keeps things interesting.

Naturally I expected a bit of a techie flavor when I started. This is internet marketing, after all. But I certainly underestimated the amount of geekiness required to excel in this field. There really is a high amount of technical expertise required to do internet marketing well.

I underestimated the level to which you are able to track the results of your marketing efforts. Many have heard the famous quote that is attributed to a variety of people:

“Half of my marketing works. I just don’t know which half.”

One of the beauties of internet marketing is the ability to easily track results. In fact, there is the danger of having too much data. The biggest challenge for tracking results with internet marketing is not the lack of data readily available… it’s paring down the massive amounts of data and identifying the key pieces that are relevant for a business.

This item is not specific to internet marketing, but it’s an important part of what I’ve noticed moving into this new company and industry. I was (and still am!) surprised by the skill and knowledge level of my teammates in their specific areas of expertise. It’s enjoyable to learn new things from people who are intelligent and competent.

One of the things that attracted me to marketing, in general, is the opportunity to be creative and forward looking. But I assumed that creativity would be less important in internet marketing. After all, how much original thinking is required to help a client’s website rank higher in the search engine results?

As it turns out, a lot. We’re always kicking around ideas for doing different things or doing things in a different way.

Lastly, I underestimated how much I would enjoy not having to dress up each day.

I have had several conversations with clients and most recently a very good friend of mine about why they are not using Google Mail for everything. My good friend still has an AOL account that he has had since the time it took 7 days to connect….crazy! I have explained to him and have shown him the greatness of emailing, archiving, SPAM ELIMINATING, scheduling, chatting, document and spreadsheet creating/sharing, customizing and organizing found when you have a Gmail account. He/They simply say I have had my email address for years and I tell them there are tons of ways around that after a few weeks with Gmail, you will kick yourself for not making the switch sooner.

Now this is not a “Plug” for Google or maybe it is…..however, I would love to hear more excuses of why you would use a very limited system for email when there is such an amazing product available. Please tell me what you are thinking?!

I can see if you are concerned about Google going out of business before your existing provider