How to Get Found Online Part 2 - Why Go Beyond Search?

So you probably already know that I’ve been out of pocket due to my on-going illness. The tide is shifting, though, and I’m having a bunch of really good days. I’m gonna continue this series now, though it may not be a daily update.

Before I was interrupted, we were talking about how small businesses can get found online - particularly small businesses that aren’t internet marketing sites. Too often, the techniques being touted by various experts are taken out of the true context, which makes people feel like they don’t work at all. Not so. They just need to be adjusted to work for business owners who are expanding their existing offline businesses to online properties.

We’re of course told that if you want people to find you, you’ll have to rank well in the search engines. (And I’ll tackle the whole host of misconceptions about what it means to rank well in the search engines, in another post at the end of this series.)

Further, it’s explained to us when we’re new online, that if we can’t get ranked, then we should buy our rankings. What isn’t explained is 1- what if we can’t afford it, and 2- what else is out there behind search.

Well. Here’s what I know, which is at the center of the theories I teach at my main site about web traffic, and elsewhere around the web.

Yes, search is an excellent place to get leads. Yes, there are ways to maintain good listings even after search engines periodically change the way they rank sites. Yes, you can keep good rankings for years. And that comes from making sure that in each thing you do to promote your site online, you keep search considerations in mind.

But.

Search isn’t all there is to getting visitors. And some of the ways you can get more traffic can still bring you visitors from search as well.

Let’s take article marketing. For newbies, that’s when you write an article about a topic that is related to your site, and submit it to editors and other publishers to republish in their ezines and sites, and sometimes even offline. In the basic version of article marketing, it can also help you build links, which can help take more people to your site. One thing few people talk about is that sometimes, if you can’t get your site to rank for a given group of keywords, you can get your article posted on sites that will easily rank.

Of course, you’ll have to write one heck of an article to get the people who find it to then also click your link and visit your site, however, 10% of 5000 visitors a day is a fair sight better than zero percent, is it not?

So there’s one reason to go beyond search.

Another is that people don’t always look to search engines to find things, immediately or first. And sometimes they can find you in other places Before they start looking. We’ll take that in the case of social media in the next article.