Sunday, November 21, 2010

Online Marketing for Dummies

When you're a blogger and you spend time on Twitter and facebook and other social networking sites, you're sometimes amazed by how bad some people and companies are at this whole social media thing. Most bloggers  have gotten at least a handful of emails from people with blogs or websites trying to solicit a link exchange with your blog. Usually they claim that they've read your blog and really like it, and then further insist that their site is about a related topic, even if your blog is about cooking and their website sells bicycles or promotes travel to a random city that you've never visited.

When I get these types of emails I always wonder why these people and businesses never learn.  Does this strategy really work? I understand trying to boost your site's traffic for free, but I feel like if this is your strategy, it's worth bringing in some professionals to handle your SEO services. In the long run it'll be better for your business and site's reputation and save you a lot of time in sending out emails to bloggers who are just going to ignore them at best or mock them publicly at worst.  The same goes for other types of email solicitations - I've gotten emails from companies asking my to promote products and/or services on my blog.  Some of the offers are well-targeted and make sense, and some...really, really don't.  Sometimes professional list management can be worth it.

Of course, it's hard to blame small companies and websites for getting this wrong when even huge corporations have been known to fail at it.  For example, I'm sure there were quite a few times in the past year when Nestle wished they had some professional Online Marketing help. It does seem like more and more businesses are starting to get a clue when it comes to social media, so hopefully we'll see fewer and fewer of these bad pitches as time goes by. And in the meantime, there's always public mocking to fall back on.

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