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Whitehat, Grayhat And Blackhat
The whole purpose of Internet marketing is to sell people stuff or get them to do stuff that pays you. That’s it. There are three basic approaches. If this bothers anyone, I don’t mean to be offensive. I am simply stating categories as I see them. I will be using them as I go along. SEO White Hat: Sell the best stuff you know, believe in it, and follow the rules. SEO Gray Hat: Do White Hat stuff, but throw in some bullshit and if, perchance, you sell some crap, take the money and run. SEO Black Hat: Get as much money for as little as you can. Favor quantity crap over quality value. We can go outside this scheme altogether and sell freelancing services, but that’s employee mentality. My focus here is on entrepreneurship and getting rich. If you get real broke, sell some writing or coding or flip some hamburgers to get by until you make it. I didn’t bother studying techniques for any of that. Another division of online promotion is useful: Spam: There are many names for this, shotgun approach, throw a lot of mud on the wall and see what sticks, etc. The crux of this approach is to automate quantity and not care so much about profiling. Targeting: There are colorful labels for this, too: laser targeting, finding schools of hungry fish, niche marketing, etc. The most important aspect of this approach is profiling a customer base through different kinds of studies. White Hatters target. Black Hatters spam. Gray Hatters do both. Market and Product There aren’t too many aspects to worry about here: 1. Find a lucrative market and product, 2. Make a place to sell it and advertise, and 3. Sell it and get paid. To identify a lucrative market, you have to see what folks want to buy, find something similar and offer it to them. Or you can be a stubborn fool and try to get them to buy some crap they don’t want. Stay broke, I don’t care. This is one of the most important decisions of the process and you should make it consciously, even if you think you don’t need to. If you can be passionate about your market and product, all the better. But Don’t-Give-A-Crap marketing (when disciplined) will always outsell Fool-In-Love-With-His-Dream marketing. No exceptions. If you can’t have both, take the first. Make some money. Then you can at least become a sucker and pay for it. People pay the most when you solve a problem. So search for phrases on Google like “no solution” and “need help” and so forth. Forums are good, so add the word “forum.” See what comes up. Find the ones that come up most often. Do some reading. Then see if you can find or make a product that solves their problem. This will define your niche and product at the same time. (Niche means small specialized market.) Also, you could look into desperate people (people with eminent money disasters, especially home foreclosures, spouses with fear of being cheated on, insecure people who cannot get dates, those with severe diseases, fat people, etc.). This is really predatory if you do not provide value, but if you do and you over-deliver, you will make good money and provide them a service they sorely want and need. Not everyone is suited to this category, though, and you could end up a nervous wreck who is unable to sleep at nights from guilt and empathy. Check whether you have more of an inner moral compass or a callous where that should be. The best stuff is digital because there’s no overhead, but you know what you know. So if your product is physical and there is shipping, deal with it. Then look on Amazon, eBay and other places that provide product sales statistics. See how the products sell for this problem and niche. There are all kinds of techniques for checking this, so look for them in the literature. The only important part is to be sure you are looking at closed sales statistics and not simply product searches or offers. On keywords, you’ve got to do the donkeywork. Keep in mind that when a person types in a keyword on Google or a search engine, he is looking for something. You need to get him to look at your stuff and not someone else’s stuff. Do what it takes. It’s easy to lose sight of this when you start studying it because of all the math. There are a gazillion books on keyword strategies, but you can actually get the basics for free by searching Google. Product names make the best keywords. Next come 3-5 word phrases called long-tailed phrases. The worst keywords are general terms like “make money” and the worst of the worst are ones nobody is looking for. You type them in and nothing comes up except “sorry.” Once again, make sure people who search for your keywords are people who buy stuff (do Amazon, eBay, etc., again if you need to). “Freeware,” for instance, is a terrible keyword. So are “cheapskate” and “free ebooks.” Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com |
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