Have you ever click a link on Twitter to an article that sounded promising and then, the first thing you see on the landing page are adds ? Of course that bellow those adds is the article but I for one am not interested anymore. From all the places where you could’ve placed your adds – on a sidebar, at the end of the article, in the middle of the article – you choose to do it at the beginning.

And not only that : the add is so big I have to scroll down to see the article. You thought that choosing the biggest format from Google Adsense or any other affiliate link will what ? Get you thousands of dollars ? Make you the first one that thought of that ? I really do get it why people are doing it.

In most of the cases I don’t even bother to read the article. Why ? Well, for several reasons but here are two of them. One, if you, as the article’s writer, consider that those adds are more important than your article then why should I waste any of my time to read it ? Two, I’m thinking that you’re just one of those people that the only thing they do on their website is pitching and selling : so why waste time – I wanted to read an article not buy something or click some adds.

I admit that this way of dealing with this kind of websites might also lead to skipping some great articles. Eh, this is life : easy come, easy go : there will be other articles and for sure better ones.

So, next time you spend a few hours researching and writing a new article try and place more value on it. After all, you’ve put some effort into it so you might start appreciating your work

These days everyone has a blog : it’s free or dirty cheap and it’s a place where you can publish whatever you want. There are no restrictions : you don’t need a publisher anymore. You don’t have to wait for someone else to approve what you write. Just like Nike, you could say : just do it.

But the question that pops in my head is : could this be true ? I can publish whatever I want ?

The answer is not that simple as you may think. Yes, you can write what you want, when you want and publish it the way you wanted. But … would you want to do it like this ? Having no responsibility on what you post is like filling a library with all the nonsense and then when someone wants a really good book he or she would have to search trough millions of small papers in order to find it.

If let’s say you post all the things you can think of … just like that : all the nonsense and small things that really don’t interest nobody. When you will want to be serious and start blogging for real and maybe build a business, how many people do you think would be interested in what you have to say ? They’ll do a short Google search and see all the stupid things you said over the years. How do you think you will convince them that you are a changed person that now has something to say ?

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Big brands invest big money in advertising, marketing, SEO, website building, website content development in order to be present on as many media channels as possible. They are spending big money to get as many clients as possible. The fact that the budgets of these giants are so big it doesn’t mean that this is the only way to do it. What the web offers today is the possibility to stay in your home, with your slippers on and conduct a profitable business.

The new-social-web gives each and every one of us the possibility to start our own business: all you need is a blog, a product to sell and determination. The main difference between you and the big companies is your passion and your enthusiasm for your business. Big brands lost that quality when they became big. When they hired hundreds of people and many of them don’t even know why that company was founded. Their voice is not personal anymore : it doesn’t talk to persons, it talks to masses.

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This article is a response to few e-mails I got recently requesting some SEO services. It seems that the economical crisis makes people think a little bit different. Now, business owners think that they have to move or act quickly or else they lose. Most of them didn’t had a website, didn’t invest in marketing or web marketing and often responded to my e-mails with words like “who needs the Internet : I have so many clients I can’t keep up”. Now that the wheels are turning and they have less and less clients they are desperately seeking for alternative solutions: and one of them is the Internet.

Let’s go back to those e-mails I’m receiving :
“I want to be in top 3 on Google. Could you please check my website ?”. Usually it’s about new websites with only ten pages of poor content that have titles like “about us” or “contact us” or “our products” kind of thing. After I send them a quick response explaining what they have to do if they want clients from their website they usually back off. Why ? Because they had different expectations from this interesting thing called SEO. They thought that I will came with my magic wand, perform some technical tricks and that’s it.
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The quality of your content is basically the foundation on which you build “the number of eyes watching you”. And, when it comes to Twitter the quality of your tweets will dictate the number of followers that are actually following you. This is the power of Twitter : having followers that are really interested in what you have to say. It’s not about the number, although this can influence the results of a tweet : it’s about quality.

The thing that you have to pursue is transforming your followers into friends. It’s not easy but by interacting with as many as you can, as often as you can, will start to make it happen. Why do you need friends and not followers ? Well, basically because friends care for you and speak nice of you. Tweeting to friends has more chances to go viral then tweeting to strangers. I see articles about how to create a viral tweet : it doesn’t matter how hard you will try. If no one is used to interact with you on Twitter then it’s more likely your tweet won’t go viral.

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Trust is a powerful element. It can determine if someone buys or not from you. On the web this simple word has a greater importance. Why ? In real life you can enter a supermarket without having to trust into the seller in order to buy. But when it comes to an on-line business trust seems to have a great importance.

I think it’s because of the non-human contact. We don’t see a familiar face and we don’t know who it is behind the web-page. But we need a good reason to buy. If you hear about two new e-commerce websites, one from Amazon and the other from a company you never heard of. From who you will buy ? Even if the price is higher at Amazon you’ll buy from them because you want to be sure you receive the product. So a website owner has to put a great amount of work into building a good reputation : basically build trust. Because when people trust what you say, they are more likely to buy from you.

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After a break in my blog writing that I used it to rethink my ideas and what to communicate through this website I decided it’s time I should restart writing. The main difference between what will come and the articles that are on my blog right now will be a different way to look at things. You see, my articles, up until now, were very focused on the technical side of optimizing your website and finding the proper keywords and stuff like that. What my articles will try to present from now on it’s a less-technical-side of promoting your website and more a human-natural-way-of-getting-yourself-noticed-on-the-web.

The fact that you can receive traffic and exposure without being top five in Google is now real : social websites gives us the ability to expose ourselves and our businesses and our lives. There are many markets in which you really can’t be top 5 because of the authority website. I really believe that just by using the free power of these social media channels you can promote anything : you just need to find a suitable audience for your product or service. A very intuitive way to classify social networks was presented by Dragos Roua in an article of his.

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