Steve Mills – Online Marketing

One of the most important parts to your SEO campaign for your websites should be the building of backlinks. Finding quality backlinks has always been a tedious task, sifting through search results, finding blogs and forums and social media sites with relative content to your niche.

Recently though I have been automating the process and using the power of google to send me backlink opportunities to my inbox everyday for free. I have set up a program using Google Alerts to keep track of all of my topics on the web, and tell me when new content is available that I can backlink.

I have so far found it an excellent way to keep up to date with what people are saying about my own domain, as well as keeping track of the different market niches that I have sites in.

AN EXAMPLE
An example is that if you have a site on “yoga advice” then you would create a Google Alert for these keywords. Google will then send you an email when a new link or content related to this is published on the internet.

It’s a fantastic way to be informed about your area, BUT it is also a great way to find potential linking partners to set up backlinks with.  With Google Alerts you will easily get 10 – 30 links per day, depending on how popular your niche is.

BLOG LINKING STRATEGY

I have found that an even better way to find blogs that allow you to leave a comment is to setup a google alert specifically for blogs and set the alert to search for “yoga” “leave a comment”. This will send a list of all blogs in your niche that you can leave a comment straight to your inbox. You can set the alerts to be sent to you daily, weekly or as they happen (as google indexes the page).

There are a few considerations to take into account when commenting on blogs as a back linking strategy. The first is the search relevance of the site that you are linking to. I recommend installing the SEOQuake plug-in as it provides information on Alexa Ranking, Google Pagerank and Number of Backlinks to a site, plus heaps of other relevant information for you to decide if it is in your best interest to backlink to a site. This great SEO plug-in can be attached to your browser and will give you helpful SEO information on the link or links you’re viewing.

Use the SEOQuake plug-in in conjunction with Google to sort through the results and find the ones with the highest PR, traffic and backlinks. The more knowledge you have the easier and more effective your link building will become.

Keep in mind that finding quality backlinks is one of the most tedious jobs in being a webmaster. It can take a long time, and a good deal of patience. By using this google alerts system you are taking a lot of the legwork out the equation, which will allow you to focus on backlink creation more consistently. Persistence pays off in this area, and soon your site will get noticed and start to rank higher.

One of the key concepts to learn if you want to successfully run a sustainable online business is the idea of lifetime customer value. I define LCV as how much the customer is worth over the lifetime of your relationship with your business.

HUNTERS & FARMERS

Some businesses can be seen as hunters, and some as farmers. The hunters are focused on a single sale, and will do everything the can to get a customer perform one specific action, buy their product. Once purchased, they don’t perform any specific actions to get that customer to purchase from them again. They are not interested in having to provide long term value or in retaining the customer.

Farmers however understand the importance of building long term relationships with clients. They want to nurture and grow relationships with their customers so that they can continue to provide more products and services with ever increasing value to them. The cost of retaining your existing customers if often far less then the cost of acquiring new “cold” ones via advertising and other marketing methods.

LCV is all about keeping customers as YOUR customers, stopping them being tempted to look at competing products, and when they do look elsewhere they retain a loyalty to your brand that makes them come back, based on the relationship that you have developed with them.

Real farmer businesses realise the LCV as so important that they will give their first sale away almost for free in order to get that customer into their sales funnel. I will leave the concept of sales funnels to another time, but in short a sales funnel is a range of different products that you can provide a customer after the initial purchase. In general, these products are a) more expensive and b) more closely tailored to the qualified customers needs. So by giving away the first sale profits to those that promote their business (affiliates, retailers) the very top of the sales funnel acquires a lot of customers that you can then promote other products too.

A REAL WORLD EXAMPLE

A real world example to consider would be the sale of inkjet printers. You can go and buy one from your local office supply mega warehouse for $100, which at the time seems to be a bargain. You use the printer for a few months, printing off photos, documents and CD labels, and all of this goes well until one day a flashing icon tells you that the ink has run out.
It is only when you go back to the store and look at the price of the ink cartridges that you realise that it is going to cost you $120 to refill the ink for your $100 printer.
The printer company now has extended your LCV with them by giving away the printers for near cost price, and now make all of their costs back on the ink.

While this example does not really do the sales funnel model justice (it only has one tier to the funnel, which is buy more ink), it does show you how lucrative it can be to develop a business model with LCV as a key factor.
WHY IT IS IMPORTANT

When you understand lifetime customer value the importance of mailing lists, social networking and making sure that everything you produce has real value to it becomes apparent.

This is why membership sites, online courses and mentoring are such great opportunities online. You are constantly in front of the customer, providing real value and a service which they would rather get from you then anyone else.

There are lot of terms and specific theory around Lifetime Customer Value such as churn rate, retention rate, retention cost, discount rate and a lot more which I will cover in some detail over the coming weeks.