As a web junkie and I’m pretty impressed with Kevin’s fresh approach to politics who has also been using other online social sites like MySpace. I spoke about being remarkable to differentiate yourself from others in the same arena and Kevin has hit the nail on the head really being different and making headlines leaving other traditional politicians in the dust by using online to support offline which is really important in reinforcing your brand.

Building your online business is just the same! Do what everyone else does and you’ll soon find yourself as just one of the crowd. Take a look at a few web sites and it’s really just the same boring sales pitch with a different company name and logo at the top.

Be Creative and Dare to be Different. You never know where it might take you.

These questions are fine and are part and parcel of the work flow process however it is in my opinion, more important for the service provider to ask about their business and what they do and how they do it, who they are, what they stand for, how are they different from their competitors, why should someone pick them over the competition etc.  As a web designer, developer and search engine marketeer all these questions need to be answered by the client so we as service providers can get a hollistic view of their business.  If a service provider doesn’t understand your business how can they possibly create a successful marketing campaign?

Are you asking the right questions?

When I started, I remember checking my web stats and nobody could find me and they probably didn’t care either as I was a small time startup and my site didn’t have any online value yet. As I learnt about the web and learnt alot from others both in the web design & search I started to understand what makes you popular on the web. Aaron Wall often talks about being linkworthy and how social interaction on the web is a great way to become popular amonst others in the community. Seth Godin also talks about people talking about you and how this applys to every business in his best selling list of books and why being remarkable is important as part of your overall business strategy.

These days my web rankings are getting better and better with first page results becoming more and more common as I slowly climb the search engine rank ladder and over the competition. What I have noticed is that more web masters are noticing me now more than ever before and I am getting more link requests than ever. Isn’t it funny that people only want to know you when your popular!

Dan shows how to target and expand your keyword phrases from broader more general terms to the longer and more profitable longtail searches using Aaron Walls Free Keyword Generator Tool. Dan say’s using this methodology generally provides approx 10 – 20% more traffic to your site.

Dan has recently finished up with his search training programs to a new venture with a number of highly experienced SEO experts. I was fortunate to learn from Dan on one of his courses and gain some valuable insight into the world of search and wish Dan all the best in his new venture.

The more I become involved in the social network of the web the more my eyes are open to the importance of being involved in forums, networking and creating an image where people want to talk about you or your business. Ask any business where they generate the majority of their sales and your find that referals from friends, existing clients and employees will make up the vast majority of leads. Social networking is an integral part of generating business opportunities and the internet provides excellent leverage that allows you to have reach beyond convential marketing methods.

Too often it’s just to easy to follow what the crowd is doing. Have a look at most websites and you’ll find the same boring text about the business and what they do but very rarely to you find compelling content calling for action.

Seth Godin the author of a number of best selling books was interviewed by Aaron Wall author of SEO Book earlier this year which gives an excellent insight into how we should be thinking outside the square by being innovative and remarkable and how this all relates to the web.

Unfortunately I’m going to have to burst your bubble because that just isn’t the case. Websites just don’t instantly convert traffic into sales even if you are throwing thousands of dollars into advertising and traffic generation techniques.

So what’s the answer then? Well firstly you need to measure your current websites performance with some online tracking tools. This will then provide a benchmark for you to measure gains or losses against. Then you need to try variations or split testing in your landing pages, like changing the heading, images, page copy, call to actions etc, then test it using metrics from your tracking tools. From monitoring variations in your landing pages,  you should then be able to see which variations are providing better conversions rates, therefore increasing your bottom line and return on investment.

You can get a number of software packages to help you gather the statistics of your split testing or if your using Google’s Adwords to drive traffic to your site, you could apply for Google’s Website Optimizer which is currently in Beta testing.
One final note is that this all takes time, monitoring, tweaking and tracking so have some patience and be dilegent in your tracking.

I didn’t get to read the whole site but it looked well worth the investigation as he has documented every thing he was doing along the way.