Do It Big. Get Noticed.

Whatever you do in business, do it big! There’s no other arena in which those words are truer than the internet. It’s a competitive world wide web, and you do have to find your niche. But once you find that niche, do it just a little bit different than everybody else. Do it big. People don’t often think in those terms. So if you are able to put yourself in that mindset, then you’ll be ahead of the pack.

You can struggle all you want trying to get your website to the top of the search engines, but by the time you get there, the rules for getting there will have changed. You can spend countless hours trading links with other websites, but you’ll find that many of those will soon ditch their domain. You may consider any number of online strategies for getting your website noticed, but the bottom line is somebody on the other end always wants to get paid.

This is when the idea of “do it big” comes into play. Let me explain. I recently discovered a website owned by a woman from the UK. Her product was original art. Specifically, cartoon-like pencil sketches. Her intention was to put her work on shirts, stationary, and greeting cards and to sell it through her website. The problem was she couldn’t get her site noticed. She had no visitors.

How many times have you lamented over the lack of visitors to your site? I have, and I do. It doesn’t matter how many visitors a site receives. It never seems to be enough. We are insatiable. But you can struggle with online strategies, or you can do something big offline. Here’s what I suggested to the woman from the UK.

Start a campaign. Call it the “loan a shirt” campaign or something of that nature. The idea would be to take a shirt featuring the artwork, and send it around the world. How? She or somebody else would wear it for a day and then pass it on to another person who would do the same. This would continue for any duration of time. But the goal would be to send the shirt around the world, and each person who wore the shirt for a day could log on to the site if they choose and fill out a quick location form so the shirt may be tracked.

It’s such a simple, low-cost idea, but it’s a creative way to expose a website as the address would be listed right there on the shirt. And people who wore the shirt for a day would get to see and sample the product first hand. It could even be an event for charity, and an effective press release would be the only invitation the media would need to get involved.

But what if somebody decided not to pass the shirt on? What if somebody stole it? What if the shirt got lost? What if “this”, and what if “that”?

Hey, what if it worked? What did it cost? Nothing. It only required a little creative thinking. A person could do anything they wanted with the idea in order to eliminate every negative “what if”.

The point I’m trying to make is we don’t often think of doing something big offline to promote ourselves online. And it doesn’t have to be costly. It doesn’t have to even follow what we believe to be the traditional rules of advertising. Just think big, do it big, and get noticed. After all, isn’t that the goal? Or is the goal just to advertise?

Where to Get Links?

Where to Get Links

• Create content or ideas that important people can identify with and would likely link to.

• Directories may link to sites you submit.

• You can exchange links with similar websites. If you can afford to, It is better to create legitimate business partnerships and friendships rather than just to trade links with whoever is willing.

• Writing articles about your topic and placing them on other websites can give you inbound links via the article signature. If you submit articles to other sites, you may want to create unique content just for the article submission sites, or have a longer or different version of the article on your site so that you are not fighting against duplicate content issues when others syndicate your articles.

• Writing press releases can give you inbound links.

• You can participate in forums that provide signature links. If you participate in communities and leave relevant, useful comments, then eventually people may want to link to you if they start to like you.

• Buy links or rent advertising space.

• Donate to charities for links.

• People interested in your site may eventually link to you without you asking. Generally, this is where SEO battles are either won or lost in competitive markets.

Generally, the easier and cheaper the link is to get, the less a search engine will want to trust it. Getting other people to want to talk about you or your business (and link to you) is the golden egg of SEO.

Search engines want to count legitimate editorial citations. They would prefer not to count other types of links as votes. Some engines, such as Google, have advanced algorithms to find and discount many artificial links.