Once you've decided on a niche to target, you then need to determine the level of competition within that niche. No matter how good the SEO, if your competitors offer a better service, you're unlikely to see the payoff for all your hard work getting high rankings.

S.W.O.T

A SWOT analysis can help you determine how your site compares to those already in the niche.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. You perform this analysis on your own site, and those of your competitors.

SEO SWOT Method:

• Query the serps for the keywords you want to rank for
• Pick out the top few sites in your niche. The top sites will usually appear under a mix of keyword terms relating to your niche
• Determine the strengths and weaknesses of the competition
• Determine the strengths and weaknesses of your own site

This exercise need not take long. Whilst you can can go into incredible detail with a swot analysis, the key points are to identify what you are good at, and what the competition is good at. You're not looking at the SEO elements, you're looking at the service or product offering. If your site is informational, then look at the quality and quantity of information they offer.

Are there areas where you are better than the competition? If you can't find an area where you are better than the competition, either refine the niche you're targeting, choose another niche, or figure out a way to be *markedly* better than the other guys. Out-ranking them won't really help in the long run, because searchers seldom stop at the first site they find. They compare sites against each other.

This is why you don't necessarily need to outrank a site that offers a poorer service than you do, early in your campaign. You simply need to position against it. For example, your TITLE tag could be worded to show how your offer is better than theirs.

By going through this exercise, you'll also get a good feel for opportunities, and the level of competitive threat.

Barriers To Entry Are Your Friend

On the web, there are few barriers to entry. Anyone can start a website and copy your idea.

However, not everyone can start a Google. Or an Amazon. Or a Facebook. Those companies have barriers to entry in their markets, mostly to do with the scale of operations. It is very expensive to do what they do, and they're also entrenched as long-time crowd favorites. This barrier to entry plays to their advantage, and make s it very difficult to unseat them. Also, being the biggest, they also tend to grab the lion-share of revenue in their space.

Try to look for barriers to entry than are you can get over, but others can't. Is there something that will make it difficult for new entrants to follow you? Can you spend more money, or partner with someone to make your offer difficult top emulate? Can you leverage your personal reputation?

If so, you stand a good chance of fending off competitive threats from latecomers.

Beware Of Well Resourced Competitors

Can your competitors outspend you? Do they have more people working for them? Do they have waves of writers producing content and spreading the word?

It is difficult, although not impossible, to compete with such sites. You can work smarter. You can be more efficient. But your task will be harder than if your competitors have a similar level of resources to you.

In SEO terms, check out Mike Grehan's "Filthy Linking Rich" (PDF) for reasons why the rich get richer, especially in terms of SEO.

Perceptual Mapping

Perceptual mapping is a graphical technique that attempts to visually display the perceptions of potential customers. Typically the position of a product, product line, brand, or company is displayed relative to their competition.

Perceptual maps are very useful for finding unserved markets.

The Wikipedia example is a good one:

Cars that are positioned close to each other are seen as similar on the relevant dimensions by the consumer. For example consumers see Buick, Chrysler, and Oldsmobile as similar. They are close competitors and form a competitive grouping. A company considering the introduction of a new model will look for an area on the map free from competitors. Some perceptual maps use different size circles to indicate the sales volume or market share of the various competing products.

Do likewise for your niche, and look for areas of clear space. That's where the opportunity lies

Honesty Tax

The anonymous nature of the web acts as a tax on anyone who is an honest merchant. Sales are driven by perceived value, and many marketers spend 90%+ of their time & effort on front end marketing and optimizing their sales channels, while providing little to no substance to anyone who buys from them. By the time those customers get to people like us, they are already more distrusting, cynical, and jaded due to having been scammed - in many cases multiple times.

To someone new to a field, scams often look more legitimate than the real thing. Just ask anyone who has spent their share of the 100's of millions of dollars on acai diet reverse billing fraud promoted through fake blogs advertised on the Google content network.

Quality vs Perceived Quality

In terms of sales, the quality of the product or service is typically nowhere near as important as how much mindshare you have. That last sentence sorta reveals one of the major weaknesses of most non-salespeople. You can't just focus on having the best product and think that will be enough. You have to use push marketing until you build enough momentum that it starts becoming a force of its own. And it needs to be periodically refreshed through advertising, public interaction, and viral marketing.

This is where advertising, building trust, website credibility, and cumulative advantage play a big roll in making a business ubiquitous so the perceived risk of being a customer is much lower.

Word of mouth marketing is great, but you have to encourage it, and promote it.

Scaling a Website

The good news is you do not need a lot of employees to look large, so long as you are good at structuring your customer interactions. Through the above strategies (and being super-efficient), our site (which has 2.5 employees and has its highest value portions locked up as member's only content) gets more traffic than competing businesses with 20 employees and some of the largest public forum websites (with 10x as many pages in Google & no barrier to entry).

The Alexa blog recently referenced the success of our site's current model:

seobook.com gets more traffic than seochat.com and seomoz.org. But how do they do it? Loyalty. Despite getting less traffic from search engines, and despite having fewer links than seomoz, and despite scaring away potential customers with aggressive marketing [editorial note: the quoted article was published while we were testing a pop up that we are no longer testing], seobook is doing quite well. They are converting visitors to customers, and turning those customers into regular visitors.

The take-away lesson is that good SEO is important, but it can't compete with a loyal and engaged user-base. Seobook.com is a perfect case in point.

Building Loyalty

Such loyalty does not come easy though. This quote represents the barrier you have to overcome if you want to build a lasting online community that matters:

In effect, this guy who has twenty thousand friends is completely alone in the real world.
...
In this age of great digital connectedness, we increasingly find ourselves clinging to illusions of intimacy, adrift in a sea of anonymity, surrounded by the great faceless, nameless masses from which no commonality can be extracted.

What barriers are preventing people from getting the most out of your community? What can you do to make your interactions more life-like? How open should your community be? What pieces should you focus on building most aggressively? How can you make it grow larger without damaging the quality of the community? How many customers can you have before you need to hire more people? Who should you hire? What should they work on? Where can you add value to your customer's experience? How can you leverage your knowledge most efficiently?

Ubiquity

Growing a community is a quite tricky process because every type of marketing causes expected and unexpected consequences. Our ebook, when priced at $79, was coupled with a brand that was seen far and wide. The price-point was so low that it was an impulse purchase that reached virtually every piece of the market - entrepreneurs, small businesses, b2b, retailers, Fortune 500's, hedge funds, etc. Direct interaction with 10,000+ customers made us quite good at knowing what questions are commonly asked, and how to answer them accurately and efficiently. The most common questions got worked into the content.

Death of Ubiquity

The growing complexity of search (particularly the subjective nature of Google hand edits), the general low perceived value of ebooks (largely destroyed by scammers), and Google teaching people to steal our ebook (via suggested "torrent" searches) killed our old business model. Luckily we saw those market changes coming, and shifted our business model in time to more than double our revenues while focusing on higher quality customers.

The minute a profitable business model appears on the web, many forces work to commoditize and disintermediate it. The only ways to stop that are to build a platform that other people build on, or to build deeper relationships with customers.

One of the most important points of Seth's Tribes is that to build a community you have to have outsiders.

Growing a Community

Growth of a community beyond a certain point gets tricky though. Any membership site has some level of decay rate and some level of growth. If you push into markets where you don't fit well then you (temporarily) increase your revenues while lowering your lifetime customer value, lowering average customer quality, polluting your community with people that do not fit, and increasing your maintenance cost of advertising to less receptive markets and supporting transient short-term members.

Rather than trying to get more members, it often makes sense to increase what you get from current members, and look for ways to increase the value delivered to members to increase member stay time.

Price as a Filter

Even though our training program has a similar price-point as the ebook did, it is perceived as being far more expensive because it is recurring. That increases the perceived risk to some of the potential customers who are less committed to learning SEO. This higher perceived cost shaped our community to filter out some of the worst pieces of the market (like the people who buy lots of internet marketing junk on Clickbank and reverse charge most of it) and attract many high quality customers (many of our members have 20x more the business experience and know-how than I do). But it makes it harder for the brand the site to be as relevant to as wide of a group as the old business model was.

More Filters

Our price-point and the stuff we write about on the blog likely makes many people think that we aim for high end experienced web professionals who have a lot of SEO experience. While that perception keeps our forum levels above the level of quality anywhere else on the web, it also causes us to miss 90%+ of the market.

The approach of simply having hands down the best customers, the best customer service, and delivering the highest level of value (which causes people to stay subscribed for a long time) was the best approach to take when running this site as a 2.5 person business, because churn is expensive when you do marketing, public relations, advertising, quality assurance, content creation, customer support, and customer interaction (all while keeping up with changes in the market). We still want to keep our core customers, but might try expanding.

Appealing to More Beginners

You are not your own customer. I am not my own customer. Designing for yourself gives you a good chance of creating something of value, but most of the buying market for how to information are people new to the field.

Put another way, beginners are the largest market segment, and everyone was a beginner at one point in time.

This is precisely why email list internet marketers make so much money. There is always a new, desperate, and gullible crop to feed off of - an Eternal September. And until they get burned a few times and hardened by the market (and/or go bankrupt) they convert at rates well above what other market segments convert at. Greed makes it easy to make poor financial decisions, especially when matched against seasoned marketers and promises of automated wealth generation.

If we are to expand, we will likely need to reach some of the market that thought our site was too advanced for them. Our offers won't be as hyped as the email guys, but we do have a lot of channels we could use much more effectively. Our training program is certainly easy enough for most beginners to get it, but we need to make our marketing reflect that. My wife used to do offline tech sales stuff, and she is going to help try to do some of the online stuff for this site too. Given that she is up for helping out, I think we can grow the site again...there are lots of things we could make better (like re-doing the intro video, making more video content, and building a few more tools) that I had not got around to because the community was about as big as it made sense to be without more labor.

Websites and tools can be great for both beginners and experts. We just have to figure out how to better reach both market segments without alienating the other. :)

There was an article on TechCrunch entitled "Jump Into The Stream"

In short, the article is about how the internet appears to be going through its next big shift. It is moving towards becoming a stream of immediate information. The web is being organized by "nowness"

This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter, encompassing not just periodic news and musings but constant communication, status updates, instantly shared thoughts, photos, and videos.

I thought the article gives us a compelling way to think about this shift:

First and foremost what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages. In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration - yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. It’s dynamic, it doesn’t live very well within a page and still very much evolving. A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.

But isn't this just social media marketing? We've known about that for a long time now. Yes. But the concept of "nowness" and immediacy give us a great way to make sense of it, and a better understanding of how to make it work for us.

One of the criticisms we often hear about search engines is that a lot of the information is dated. Google has tried to address this problem by focusing on sources such as Wikipedia, that have a community of updaters, or pointing you towards news content, if your search is time dependent, or allowing you to sort by date. Search is also rather anonymous, as opposed to personal.

The appeal of Facebook/Twitter is that they provide an immediacy of information. There is a constant flow, updated often. They also provide this information in the context of a trusted filter i.e. your friend network. That's a big shift in how information will be accessed, especially as more and more people come to view the web from this perspective.

If the web is indeed a place, it is starting to look less like a library, and more like a river.

What Does This All Mean For The SEO?

It means SEOs will need to think more about what traffic is, where it comes from, and how to hook it.

Look at where people are spending their time. Increasingly, it isn't on web pages or sites. It's within a trusted channel that provides a flow of information. So a site owner needs to think about how to direct these streams towards a site, and make sure people hang around long enough to buy what the site owner is selling before they move on.

Obviously, search engines aren't going to disappear. Nor are people going to stop publishing web pages. Nor are they going to stop visiting web pages. But what are the characteristics of social media activity, and how does it differ from search visitor activity?

I think the main characteristics of this channel are immediacy, the fleeting visit, trust, relevancy, and remarkable-ness.

So:

• Encourage user registration on your site to help lock people in
• Offer time-limited membership deals
• Offer forums, tools, multiple content formats, and other interactive elements that mimic the appealing aspects of social media
• Be unique, memorable and remarkable so people talk about you to their friends
• Go niche. Me-too and generalist is unremarkable
• When going broad, leverage existing networks to facilitate faster growth
• Focus on establishing trust

The Twitter/Facebook/Social Media streams are like the rest of the web in that most of it is junk. So how do people filter the noise and focus on the good bits? Trust is one aspect.

Do people say "Hey, look at this great secured loans site?". They don't. We'll, not unless they're pimping for said secured loans site. The stream is not going to favor the mee-too approach, either. It's going to favor the remarkable approach. Do people on social media sites point out the mundane?

So re-read Seth Godin, and think about "being remarkable", and how to apply it to your strategy.

Incidentally, when asked about Twitter today, Larry Page had this to say:

I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime

Google aren't asleep on this issue.

Do aggressive marketing practices repel you?

Or make you more likely to buy?

Is it a cultural thing? For example, does hard sell work in some cultures, but not others?

Dear Friend......

;)

Personally, when I experience the hard-sell, I immediately become suspicious that the product is worthless. After all, shouldn't the product or service, if useful, pretty much sell itself?

Having said that, I have, on occasion, bought from people using the hard sell. Curiosity sometimes gets the better of us all :)

The fact that aggressive sales strategies are used so often tends to indicate such approaches do work. Let's take a look at some of these tactics, and if you can think of more examples, please add them in the comments. Also, if you've had success using such tactics yourself, please share your experiences.

The Time Sensitive Offer

A time sensitive offer, as the name suggests, is an offer that has a specific time limit.

Typically, the more time people have to think about something, especially impulse buyers, the less likely they are to take action. So the time sensitive offer will always create a sense of urgency - combined with jeopardy. People feel they might miss out if they don't act immediately. Like many hard sell tactics, it is based on fear. In this case - the fear of missing out.

Typical examples:

• Limited places available: "Only ten places left!"
• Limited stock available: "STOCK CLEARANCE!! WE ONLY HAVE A FEW OF THESE LEFT!! GET IN QUICK BEFORE THEY SELL OUT!"
• Deadlines: "This offer will end at midnight, tonight! After then, we close the program" (Of course, they re-open it again at regular intervals)

Some people use PHP or Javascript date includes to put today's date in the content, and the offer expires tonight. Of course, the same thing happens tomorrow, and every day for the next year. Others go so far as popping up a clock that counts down your 5 minutes before the special pricing offer expires.

Creating Hype

The hype level of the hard sell is usually off the scale compared to most legitimate business offers.

I recall an offer last year where the hype level for a vaguely SEO-related service was getting quite ridiculous. Like many other people, I was getting bombarded with emails at every step of the sales process.

They were going to launch in a few weeks. They were just about to launch. They launched. They had launched, but there was still time to sign up!

The aim is to create an event.

The advertiser also needs to make some fairly outrageous claims. Trouble is, when everyone is making outrageous claims, then s/he needs to make even bigger ones in order to get noticed.

It sometimes helps if you print a lot of zeros on an over-sized check to really ram the point home.

How do you avoid getting sucked in?

Hard work was intoxicating.

But sitting in the ‘counting house’ counting money was frankly even more appealing. I frankly don’t know how much money and time I spent before I got wise. Or should I say wiser.

The moment of wisdom came when I started recognising the red flags.

• I started avoiding anything ‘instant.’
• I started avoiding anything that offered ‘tsunamis of customers’
• I started avoiding anything that had fancy cars, surfboards, planes, jets, boats.
• I started avoid anything with graphics of cheque books and bank balances.

Secret Or Unfair Advantage

Everyone loves to know something the next guy does not. Or gain an advantage. Anything that creates a shortcut to effort. And creating an air of mystery or invitation to a select club is very enticing.

Of course, if the secret or unfair advantage was significant, you've really got to wonder why anyone would sell it for $89.95 to faceless unknowns.

Social Proof Of Value

Social proof involves making the assumption that other people are better informed that you. People like to go where other people have gone, as it feels less risky that way, unless they all happen to be buying tickets for the Titanic, of course.

Social proof takes the form of case studies, personal recommendations, and, as often happens on the internet, shilling. Ever tried to look for a review of a product that has been sold hard? Chances are the only reviews of the new $2,000 course that ***will change the world forever*** you'll find are from affiliates.

Example (combined with time sensitive offer): Server Issue: "Our server crashed (yeah, right) due to the number of responses. We're so sorry to all those who missed out! So we've extended the offer for one more day!"

Some merchants warm up an email list by giving away prizes in exchange for testimonials as you get closer to the launch date. They even let you know that the more outlandish the testimonial is the greater the chance of being featured and winning a prize. Such false endorsements are meant to fool the rest of the list into thinking they are missing out on a once in a lifetime opportunity. And anyone who contacts them during the sales pitch gets a special link ***only for them*** to place their order the night before the general public.

Any Idiot Can do it, Fast, Easy, & Nearly Automatically

A friend recently got this via email, which captures the essence of the 'anyone can do it' pitch.

We gave you solid PROOF. Proof of how 37 people walked in our office on a Monday morning in May with:

• NO product
• NO website
• NO technical experience

And they ALL walked out Friday at 4 p.m. with their very own Internet business. Amazing, isn't it?

Now, listen to this very carefully:

If you are remotely interested in attracting more wealth into your life at a faster speed, our elite Internet marketing team can transform your life forever. It sounds clichéd, but it's true.

In some cases during the sales process you will see testimonials from teenagers, senior citizens, AND people with severe disabilities. They are showcased and exploited to remind you that if they can do it then surely you can too.

My friend also had a call with one such group about their 'mentorship program' where it was a tiered list of interviews that were made to look like qualification interviews, but were actually more like boiler room sales sessions, where certain people's times were limited and they just happened to open up right now if you have $5,000 of space on your credit card.

One group asked Aaron banal SEO questions via email one month, and was then selling a how to SEO course less than a month later. They went from completely ignorant to masters in record time. So long as they sell to desperate, inexperienced, and/or stupid people it is a strategy that works. For that target market they only need to be confident and know slightly more than your prospective customer to pry a few dollars out of their wallet.

Cross Selling

Cross selling involves selling an additional product or service to an existing customer.

This is not just a method used to hard sell, it's a highly efficient way to market. It is cheapest to market to those whom you already have built up a relationship.

Intimacy & Relationship Building

Guerrilla Marketing is an approach to marketing that has become very popular on the internet, mostly to get over the barrier of anonymity.

One aspect central to Guerrilla marketing is the importance of building up a personal relationship, so the sales pitch will often be personality driven. It involves telling personal stories about familiar situations and problems that have been overcome. It is the polar opposite of the anonymous, depersonalized copy of the sales brochure.

Some "business opportunity" merchants create fake "application forms" which accept everyone with a credit card and a pulse.

Hard Selling is Not All Bad

There are many potential bad customers who take take take and have no intent of doing any real work. Get rich quick ponzi schemers offer a more compelling offer to them than you or I ever would, and so they filter them out of the marketplace *

I was getting better clients thanks to the get-rich-quick merchants.

They were weeding out the people who simply wanted it easy. They were weeding out those who got impatient because they tried something for 10 minutes and weren't getting results.

They were weeding out all those for whom hard work is like a disease.

* If your price-point is one of the lowest in your market and you do not charge recurring fees and the get rich quick folks enter your market then you will likely need to increase your prices and/or change your business model to filter out that bottom tier of customer and restore your faith in humanity. Even having 1 in 10 customer interactions be unpleasant can become unbearable.

Many hard sell techniques cross over into softer-sell conventional marketing and sales. We recently added a pop up to this site offering a free SEO course via email, and it did increase our conversion rates. The proof of any marketing technique can be found in the bottom line: did it make more money than other techniques?

I'd be interested to hear your experiences. Do you use these techniques? Have you bought from people using these techniques?

I'm reading a book called "In Search Of The Obvious". It makes many references to another book, written in 1916, called "Obvious Adams". The book outlines the simple truth of marketing, which is that the best marketing solutions should be evident. They should be obvious. They should be simple.

1916?

But isn't that the deep, distant past? This is the internet age. Everything is different now. We're living in a complicated age, surely!

Not really.

It's not different now because while circumstances change, the human condition remains the same. And those who don't learn the lessons of history are destined to repeat it. Looking at what happened in Vietnam will tell you what will happen in Iraq. There is plenty of advice that stands the test of time, and I think this truth is a great one.

A search for any marketing strategy should be a search for the obvious.

Five Tests Of Obviousness

The book outlines five tests to see if an idea, a strategy, or a solution is obvious.

The Problem, When Solved, Will Be Simple

If an idea is clever, ingenious, or complicated, it's not obvious.

History is full of of simple solutions to complex problems. A search engine, although complex in execution, is a simple solution to a complex problem. You type a topic you're interested in, and the search engine shows you where to find information on that topic. E-mail lets you send messages to other people instantly. A mobile phone lets you call people from anywhere.

Anyone can understand these solutions.

Does It Fit With Human Nature

Will it be accepted by a wide range of people when you tell it to them?

Will your mother understand it? Will you friends? Will the guy behind the counter at the shop? Do you feel comfortable explaining your idea to these people? These people are a cross section of human nature. They will be indicative of the wider community in which your idea will exist.

Because these people won't understand industry conventions and technical jargon, in order to explain it, you'd need to strip your idea down to the basic features and benefits. Does it still work?

Put It On Paper

Write your idea down on paper.

Write it as if you were explaining it to a child. Can you do so in three sentences? When you find the right words to describe your idea, it will sound simple. If it sounds complicated, it's probably not a great idea.

Does It Explode In People's Minds

Do people say "now why didn't we think of that before"?

You've probably had that experience yourself. It's the head-slapping moment. From that moment on, the matter appears settled.

No further talk seems necessary.

Is The Time Right?

Many ideas and plans are obvious, but occur at the wrong time. Ask yourself if the time for this idea has passed? Or is it some way off in the future?

For example, given the existence of Twitter, would you start a blog that pointed out interesting things on the internet? The time for a blog pointing out interesting things on the internet has clearly passed.

Does this all sound too simple for the complicated internet?

A lot of people start with simple ideas and deliberately make them complex. By making ideas complex, they make themselves sound clever. They use complicated charts and diagrams. They use big sounding, empty phrases. Some people certainly buy into that approach. By buying into it, it makes them appear clever, too.

But is that what people really want?

Do you buy goods and services that confuse you?

Isn't the real aim to be self-evident?

Apply These Ideas To The SEO Pitch

So why is SEO so difficult to get across to people? Why aren't there hordes of people knocking down your door to sign up? Do people's eyes glaze over when you tell them what you do?

I think that happens because the language is wrong. SEO hasn't been boiled down to the simple idea.

I recall watching a video a few years back where Jill Whalen addressed a marketing conference of non-SEOs. She was talking about SEO, but I'm not sure the audience were responding all that well, mostly because it was new concept for them.

However, when Jill got to the end of her speech, where she talked about a local dentist who had been about to go broke because he had a lack of patients, and after Jill did her work, she said "and instead of going broke, he had to hire more staff!".

At that point, you could see the the audience just light up. The MC noted it, too, and commented on it. The language resonated. At that point, the idea became simple and obvious.

SEO is really about growing business.

Everyone could relate to that, where they couldn't relate to rankings, links, and keywords or any of the other process elements SEOs often talk about. A lot of SEO pitches, particularly to customers who are new to SEO, focus too much on the "how". However, the "how" is not evident. Rankings, links, keywords...none of that is simple.

The evident thing is that more customers arrive on the site and buy, or sign up for, something.

So, when pitching SEO, try to focus a lot less on the "how", and a lot more on the "why". Structure your offering around improving the customers business. If you can't do that, there is no point doing SEO. SEO, in itself, is not evident.

The business building benefits of SEO certainly are.