Chris Meistre

If you run a website there must’ve been times that you wonder how to find out who is actually “talking” about or linking to your website.  Most people already know this, but I’m writing about it for those that might not know it.

Getting people to linking to your website helps with your search engine rankings, and specifically Google’s PageRank.  If you want to monitor your Google Page rank check out GoogleRank.co.za.  That website helps you with your PageRank.  The better your PageRank the better Google thinks you are… simple.

Now let’s look at how you can find out what websites are linking to you.

Google – http://www.google.com

Simply type in link:www.website.co.za replacing the www.website.co.za with your actual website.  This will give you a list of all the websites Google has in it’s index that contains a link to your website.

Yahoo – http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search

Here you’ll just type in your url such as http://www.website.co.za and hit Explore URL.  Once the search results are shown, click on the Inbound Links button.

You can also use this url http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.website.co.za&fr=sfp&bwm=i and just replace the www.website.co.za with your actualy website address.

Ask – http://www.ask.com

With Ask you can type in link to:http://www.website.co.za to show you all the websites in Ask’s index that links to you

AllTheWebsite – http://www.alltheweb.com

Type in link:http://www.website.co.za just like you would with Google

AltaVista – http://www.altavista.com

And AltaVista is also the same as Google, link:http://www.website.co.za

Is this too much work?

If you’d like to make use of a free Inbound Linking Tool, check out the one we created at CM Computer Services.

I attended a seminar / product marketing event of a supplier that we’d like to work with recently.  Their products seemed awesome, but the guy that came down from Gauteng to host the whole show was a bit funny.  And not funny as in haha, but funny as in weird.

You expect people that come to do a presentation about their products to have a certain way of talking to people and stay away from border-line jokes.  The jokes we heard were racists, sexist, rude and at some points bordering on filthy.  Perhaps I’m just too critical, but I expected a better performance from him especially when he introduced himself as the marketing director and owner (I might be wrong) of the company.

I’m not someone that is put off by dirty jokes or when people joke about religion, race or anything else for that matter, but when it comes to business you expect a certain type of tact when speaking to the attendees. I also felt that some other people might have felt a bit uneasy about it.  Thank goodness there were no non-whites to hear the stuff being said.

His mannerisms were also quite abrasive.  Perhaps I’m just more pedantic lately towards things, but just from the presentation I attended I will forever have the image in my head of him whenever I think about their products.  It’s quite off putting.

I’m sure if I feel like this, there must be a few other people that experience the same feeling when they’re at a seminar or presentation.  So whenever you have someone promote your product, get someone that will verbally and visually represent the way you want your product to be remembered.

We all have them in our lives….. you know who I mean.  That person that is the first to point out something wrong when you say something that isn’t accurate, the person that comes up with 10 excuses to not do something or the person that keeps on complaining about life and how hard it is.

All of us have a positive and a negative side to our lives.  That is what makes us human and balanced.  The good and the bad.  Yin and yang. A problem arises though when we tend to dwell on one of the sides for too long a time.  It starts to engulf us and that is what we become.  You can either be too negative or believe it or not, too positive.  I’d much rather be too positive though, but it annoys people more

How do you point out the negative people in your life?

Think to yourself who of your friends or family have said or done any of these things just once too often in the last couple of weeks.

1. You come up with a suggestion of something to do and you tell them about it.  Within 5 minutes of you telling them your plan you are given 10 reasons why whatever you want to do won’t work.  There is a need for people like this in your life, but it does get depressing if they can immediately give you 10 reasons why something cannot happen and not even 1 reason why it might be a good idea.  Take the idea to another person and you’re given 10 reasons why it’s a good idea and 1 reason why it’s a bad idea….
2. You’re happy to be alive and want to share it with the person.  Within 5 minutes of being in their company your energy is just drained away by their attitude.  It might not really be directed at you, but it still drains you.  Don’t confuse this with someone that needs to lean on you every now and then, because that is what friends and family are there for.  I’m talking about that friend that wants to lean on you at least 4 times a week.
3. According to them the world is always against them and everything bad always happens to them.  Or they just have “nothing”.  This is not to be confused with someone that actually has nothing, opposed to your friend or family member that has a car, a house, a job, food on the table and spare money to spend on other arbitrary stuff.
4. People feel uneasy around them and do whatever they can do rather not be in their company.  You’ll find that if a room of 20 people is filled with laughter and joy, it only takes one person to come in to spoil the mood with their negativity.
5. That person that always thinks the worse will happen, and live in fear because of it.  Worrying for instance that going out to the shop someone might run you over in the street doesn’t make sense if you consider that thousands of people are killed in their homes every month.
6. Those people that complain that they have too much work to do and then when there’s less work to be done they complain there is too little work to be done.

What can you do?

Do your utmost not to let them drag you down.  It’s very difficult because it does drain a lot of your energy.  If you feel that being in the company of such people is not worth your effort, rather just avoid them and get on with your life.  Don’t whine with them or talk about “tough times”, rather keep a positive outlook on things and tell them about it.

Make the decision

Being positive is all about setting your mind to it.  I’m by no stretch of anyone’s imagination always a positive person, but I try my best.  For most of the time I have the ability to look at whatever life wants to throw at me and see the positive side to it.  Some things in life I just cannot see a positive side to though.  Things like rape, murder, child abuse, animal abuse and other things I just cannot imagine people doing.

There are hundreds and thousands of books you can read about being a better person or looking at life in a different way.  None of them will help if you don’t decide that you want to be a positive person.

Find out how other people are living, or visit a charity close to your home to see how bad people can really have it.  That will make you appreciate what you have.  No matter how bad it’s going in your life, someone somewhere has got a lot more problems than you.  When we watched Long Way Down and Long Way Round a few days ago, it was wonderful to see how even when cities and villages are clearly living in poverty, they still go out of their way to be friendly and give what little they have to other people, even if they were strangers.  Surely if someone that has NOTHING is able to be positive, I am sure you can find it somewhere in your mind to be positive.

Be happy negative people want to be around you

An article I read a while back gave a nice flip side to this story about negative people.  Everything in this world is about opposites attracting.  That is why you have such funny relationships between people.  Naturally a negative person will be attracted to a positive person, and for some perverse reason positive people will be attracted to negative people.  So if you find yourself surrounded by negative people, give yourself a pat on the back.  You are either a very positive person and people want to feed off it, or you’re just a sucker for punishment…. choose better friends.

Remember

Don’t be too critical of negative people, because remember, deep down we all are negative.  At least at one point in your life you too will feel down and that everything around you is just against you, but it too will pass…. hopefully.

In the recent few weeks I’ve been able to spend a bit more time on a couple of websites I’m trying to get going.  Most of them are just experiments to see how much traffic I can drive to them using various techniques.

One thing has become very clear, Google is not your only friend when you run an online business.  Don’t get me wrong, Google, as everyone knows, is the most awesome utility available on the Internet at the moment.  Even if it were just for the speed and accuracy alone.

More and more you read about how to make your website do well in Google’s search ranks or how to gear your website towards getting higher ranks in Google.  And although this is a very critical part there are a few other important things people aren’t taking into consideration.

Whenever you hear about investment, there will also be the one paragraph telling you not to invest all your eggs in one basket.  The reason for this is obvious, if something happens to the basket, you’re screwed.  So why gear your whole online business towards satisfying Google and not thinking about the other ways to drive traffic to your website?

It only takes a few minutes of speaking to a few online business owners and you’ll soon learn that getting good results from Google’s search ranks and maintaining it can be hard, if not impossible, work.  Getting good results just means to get your website on the first page of Google’s search results when someone searches for something relating to your website or product.  In my opinion this is the best way to get traffic, because you’re not directly paying for it.  Indirectly though, you have probably paid for it by employing a SEO guru or putting in the effort yourself.  The reason for me saying I think it’s the best way, is that if you do the correct keyword research you will be able to find keywords people are looking for that doesn’t have a lot of competition.  If you get that right, you’ll get free traffic to your website.

Apart from that you can also pay Google to place your advert next to relevant search results.  You end up paying per click that takes visitors to your website.  This is another excellent way of getting people to your website without waiting for and spending time on getting your website higher up in Google’s ranks.

The last thing (although it’s actually the first thing you should do) people tell you about gearing your website to making Google like it is to write articles in a way that Google will pick up on your keywords.  Now, this is actually relevant whether or not you’re going to want to please Google, because most decent search engines should work similar.

So there are 3 easy steps to get Google to send website visitors to you!

Now let’s look at what can happen.

What if Google decides one day that the ad that you’re displaying and paying for on it’s search engine pages are no longer “suitable”?

You’ve built your whole business around using Google Adwords to get visitors to your website, and it’s been going well.  You’re making R20,000 a month and it’s growing day after day.  Without notice Google decides the product you are selling isn’t suitable to be advertised on their website and they stop it.  Instantly the tap of visitors to your website is turned off and your sales stops dead immediately.

You’re only using Adwords to get to your website, so that means you’re screwed because no one else is finding your website.

What if your high ranking website suddenly drops to page 100 in it’s search pages?

You’ve spend R10,000 to get a SEO guru to get your website on the front page when they search for keywords relating to your product.  This drives visitors to your website which in turn leads to sales.  You have your SEO guru do maintenance to make sure you are kept on the front page.  Every so often Google decides to either change the way they’re ranking you, or they find something on your website that makes it more irrelevant with regards to your product and you start dropping on the ranks.

Instead of getting 1,000 visitors a day, it drops to 10 visitors a day because you’re no longer on page 1 but page 100.  Your SEO guru cannot fix it because he only concentrated on getting you ranked high in Google.  It will take weeks if not months to try and fix this.

Surely that cannot happen!

Both the above examples are real life examples of what has happened to myself or people I know.  The dropping in search rankings has happened to me over and over again without any explanation.  In fact, 80% of the times I never even changed any of the content on the website.  It’s a classical case of having all your eggs in one basket.

I’m using Google as an example here, but without going into much detail, it can happen whenever you focus on just one source of getting visitors to your website.

I won’t argue that using Google is probably the best way to get traffic to your website, but what will happen if Google starts disliking you?  Do you really want to be caught with your pants around your ankles?

What can you do?

Here are just a few things you can do to get more diversified ways of getting traffic to your website.  It’s the same as having 1 or 1,000 clients.  If you have 1 client and he drops you, you are done.  But if you have a 1,000 clients and even 100 decide to drop you, you simply concentrate on the 900 others.

In trying to keep this an article about getting alternative traffic to your website, I’ll try and stay on topic and not go into too much detail about each method.

1.  Write articles

I’ve written before on using articles to drive traffic to your website.  Writing articles to drive traffic to your website works great for very little effort.  I had a website that was ranking 3rd of Google’s front page for a specific keyword I was targeting.  Luckily I wasn’t content with this and I carried on putting in other efforts for driving traffic to it as well.  2 weeks later I dropped to around 167th position for that keyword.  No content changed on my side and I still don’t know what happened.  Around that time my one article that I promoted with Article Marketer was approved at Ezinearticles.  I lost the 1,200 visitors a day from Google, but gained 1,100 visitors a day from my one article.  That article now resides at position 7 in Google’s search ranks.  So even though Google dropped me, I’m still getting traffic from them because I didn’t stop when I saw I had good rankings with Google.  I’m waiting for another article to get approved to see how much more traffic that will drive to me.

2.  Make use of other search engines

Even though Google is _THE_ search engine on the Internet, a lot of people are still using other search engines like Yahoo and Bing.  Yahoo also has a pay per click advertising feature that you can make use of.  So use it, and don’t just rely on Google’s Adwords.  Also monitor your rankings in those search engines.  Watching stats on one website I’ve put up, I found that people searching with Yahoo searched for a specific spelling of a keyword that brought them to my website, whereas with Google not a lot of people were searching for that particular spelling.

3.  Use forums and other social media

With Twitter and Facebook, along with all the others, being so popular it would be stupid not to make use of that to advertise your website.  Facebook for instance has also got a pay per click advertising feature.  Make use of it.  Monitor your progress and decide which advertising source you’ll spend more time and money on, but make use of them all in some way or form.  Twitter allows you to keep people updated about your website and keep in touch with potential clients.

There are community websites and forums out there on practically any topic you can think of.  Join one that is in line with your product and talk to people about your product.  See if you can’t strike up a deal with the forum owners to advertise you product.

4.  Get people to market your product

Setup an affiliate program for your product and get other people to market your product for you.  If someone is your affiliate, they go out and promote your product on their websites or newsletters, and you pay them a percentage of anything that they sell.  You can join places like Offerforge and Clickbank that already have thousands of affiliates just waiting for new products to start marketing.  Use it!

5.  Printed media

Printed or offline media is long from dead.  It might be worth it investigating a cheaper option for advertising to your offline market.

Are you going to do it?

There I’ve given you 5 simple ways to spread out your online advertising risk a bit more.  There are lots more that you can do, and I’m sure sitting there you already have a list.  It’s now up to you to safe your ass and implement them.  Even if you don’t do all of them, try at least.  Do something, monitor it’s progress, rinse and repeat.

We had time to kill while waiting for my bakkie to get washed, so we walked around the Moffet on Main Shopping centre on Friday.  As we had about 2-3 hours to kill we literally had to go into each shop because the centre is actually so small and there are very few shops.

One of the shops we went into is House & Home.  While browsing around I went to have a look at all the TV sets they’ve got on display.  The first ones we saw are the Samsung LCD and Plasma ranges.  They were playing some sort of Samsung promotional DVD on them and the quality on the sets looked amazing.  Just down the aisle they had the LG series of TV sets.  Same types, LCD and Plasma.

I noticed that the quality of the LG TV sets were quite bad compared to the Samsung TVs.  There were way more LG TVs there, and after having had a look at all of them I just couldn’t understand why the quality of the video playing on them is so bad.  Then I clicked.  They were busy playing what looked like a home made video, probably off a VHS cassette.  It was a House & Home promotional video they were playing.  The quality of the video was extremely bad though and didn’t do the LG TV sets justice at all.  While on the Samsung TVs, the quality looked awesome because of the better quality movie playing on there.

So, on first glance it looked like the Samsung TVs were way better than the LG TVs, but it ended up being some idiot that decided to put a crappy looking promotional video on the LG TVs.  How stupid is that?  You’d think they would play the best quality video they can on all of them so that you can judge which TV is really suited for your needs.

If I were the LG rep that went into House & Home and saw this, I’d be very upset.