There seem to be two types of people in this world – those that want to accomplish as much as possible and those that want to do as many things as possible.

Web design clients that want to do as many things as possible do their own site updates.  Clients that want to accomplish as much as possible let us do their updates so they can be more efficient doing what they are best at.

Now my heart lies with the ones that want to do it themselves – that is my natural instinct.  I like to know everything about everything and control my own destiny (a false feeling, in this case). My head of course lies with the ones who maximize their effectiveness by doing what they do best and letting us do what we do best, for they are the more successful and are far more likely to put themselves in a position to control their own destiny.

If a client wants to do their own updates we have a number of alternatives:

• Learn Dreamweaver (and maybe Photoshop)
• Learn Adobe Contribute
• Select a CMS option (e.g. WordPress, Joomla)
• Hang out until they realize that they don’t really want to do it themselves

Usually a site will degrade when a client has put themselves in charge of site maintenance. The rub being that although the mechanical process of an update is not that hard to teach or to  master, the skill and talent behind design, choosing colors, spacing, font size, alignment choice, etc., is often inherent in the individual.

That’s why it’s so easy to spot a site constructed with a downloaded template design – the perimeter of the web page looks decent (to varying degrees), but the interior looks horrible – a complete mismatch.  It would be like a fashion consultant choosing your suit (or dress), and then your 8 year old picking out your shirts and ties (or purse, earrings, shoes and belt – as the case may be).

For final proof – just start taking a closer look at all of the eNewsletters you get. These are often template based with the sender doing their own content – usually not a really pretty picture.

So decide – where is your time best spent – working on your business or working on your website.

What’s worse than overcharging for SEO – undercharging for SEO.

I just received an email blast from my phone service provider – AT&T.  It caught my eye because two of the three calls to action were for SEO. Now I don’t know about you, but it’s always a tough choice for me to decide between my cable provider and my phone company as to who gets my SEO business, so I decided to have a closer look at their offer.

I was actually a little surprised at the content after clicking on the links – although pretty basic, much of the infomation hit the mark reasonably well (see links below if you want to check them out).

Well, I got ready to shutter the windows and bring in my shingle – their Enhanced Marketer plan is $10 per month and their Premier Marketer plan comes in at a jaw-dropping $15 per month.  How can a guy compete with that!

What I object to here is that AT&T really isn’t interested in helping small businesses drive traffic through search.  They use search information as a lead-in to try to sell their more core services. However, in doing so, they imply that you’ll see search results for those kind of dollars – you won’t. You’ll just feel misled by yet another SEO firm.

A large part of our business over at Bastion Internet is Search Engine Optimization.  One of the biggest challenges we have is to estimate the amount of effort and resources it will take to successfully get a website found for the targeted phrases.  Of course, effort and resources are directly linked to price. So – quote too much and you risk never getting the business, quote too little and there becomes a high risk of failure – either for your client or your bottom line.

This market is way too mature and competitive for a low-priced magic bullet to work.

(here are the AT&T links if you’d like to view them)

• Quiz: SEO for small businesses (link here for the .pdf)
• Eight SEO mistakes and how to fix them (link here)
• Leads to a sales pitch for hosting and Internet marketing programs – here.

I was in the garage and needed to tell my teenager that his laundry needed to be transferred from the washer to the dryer.  He was upstairs at the time.  I decided the best way to communicate was a text message.  Was it the most efficient – no.  I could walk through one door and yell up the stairs.  However, it was very effective.  He pays attention to texts and they act as a stimulant for action.

I remember some years ago my job included getting in touch with IT people.  I could phone and leave voicemails and expect a return call in a day or two.  Or, I could send an email (pre-tons-of-spam-days), and expect an answer about 3 minutes after I hit the “send” button.  At that time IT people had started hating the phone (a typical telemarketer tool) and had discovered email. It took me way longer to type up the email then it would have to have a short conversation, however, the results of the email were way more effective.

The key to driving and converting traffic is not efficiency – it’s effectiveness.  I’m not saying to do everything without regard for a streamlined, volume oriented approach.  I am saying make sure your eye is on results and not activity. Additionally, you’ll continually have to update your communication approach in order to separate yourself from the “noise of the day” – a category to which as a parent I’m often classified.

We’ve all experienced it.  We find a new piece of software, a new website, or now – a new “app” that we just love.  It’s simple, innovative, and easy to use.  It does exactly what we want – no more, no less.

Then there is the inevitable upgrade or update.  To our surprise we realize that our great piece of software has actually become even better.  It does extra stuff that we like and is still pretty simple  – nice job, developer! Inevitably though, the cycle repeats itself until that bloated feeling takes over.

Google’s two most successful products are Search and Gmail.  Both continue to have more and more features heaped upon them including yesterday’s announcement of Google Instant (likely to be the 2010 equivalent of New Coke).  Now this is good for many of us and great for some of us, but for the Users originally attracted to simplicity – it’s bad.  Google may soon find it’s user base starting to drop (although the overall amount of use may rise as power users typically exploit the new advantages new features provide).

So why does it happen. A number of factors come into play that eventually turn our beloved piece of software (or website, webapp, phone app, etc.) into bloatware:

• Competition: A competitor comes in and the battle of the checklists begins. You’ve seen the advertisements with a list of features and check marks next to each one for one product and only a few check marks for the competitor.
• Growth: Companies need to grow or die.  One way to grow is to get your existing users to upgrade. To do this, upgrades need to be available.
• Squeaky Wheel Customers: A subset of customers keep asking for more – they eventually become the power users
• Human Nature: The developers just want to keep developing

Is bloatware all bad – no.  While it can be bad for many users who liked the less complicated versions, for power users the additional features can be great. In fact, Google has a ton of ways to refine your search that most people still do not know about.

From a Search advertising perspective, there are definite opportunities:

• finding the new products that return us to simpler times.
• finding ways to exploit the “bloatware”. As things become more complex the competitive riffraff are weeded out or don’t look beyond the obvious choices.

Finally, the cycle of bloatware often leads to another marketing favorite – is there a “Google Lite” in our future (for a preview check out www.google.com/palm).

It’s hard to keep a good idea down!  So we’ve breathed new life into Drive It – Convert It!

The Drive It – Convert It! blog was originally hosted at www.bastioninternet.com/blog, and produced a popular podcast series throughout 2006.  We’ve did migrate the podcasts over (they still get lots of downloads), but left the rest.

Drive It – Convert It! will be a place that allows the staff at Bastion Internet to get a little more opinionated and speculative about the way we see the world.  Bastion Internet is where we get the job done, but www.DriveItConvertIt.com is where we talk about how the job gets done; what is fun, frustrating, fascinating, and more about the technology and sociology that we face on a day to day basis.

So stay tuned!  You’ll be happy you did!

(Note: This podcast was originally published 1n 2006 under another domain name – bastioninternet.com/blog.  In 2010, the blog was later migrated to this site.  Some links may be outdated or there may be issues with RSS feeds)

Local search tactics offer a huge opportunity whether you are local or not.

Suggested Tags: seo, sem, web design, website design, search engine optimization, internet marketing, web marketing, local search, web promotion

Show summary:

Local search defined.
The numbers are all pointing to more and more local searches being done online by Internet users.

A 10 step plan to get started with driving more traffic to your web site through optimizing for local search.

Download and Subscription Links:
Download the Podcast
Subscribe to Drive It – Convert It!
Join our Email list to be informed about future podcasts

Links to resources mentioned in this podcast:

• comScore’s Local Search press release
• Google – add your local listing
• Yahoo – add your local listing
• MSN – add your local listing
• infoUSA – add/verify your information
• Yellowpages.com advertising
• Verizonâ€s Superpages.com advertising
• Local.com – vertical search engine
• TrueLocal.com – vertical search engine

Hi and welcome to Drive It – Convert It!, for October 6th, 2006. This is episode #12: Getting Started with Local Search

They say that all politics is local. Is that the same for search – listen and find out.

Drive It – Convert It! is the podcast where Small and Medium Sized businesses learn the marketing strategies and tactics behind Driving More Traffic to their website and Converting that Traffic into qualified leads and sales.

Drive it, convert it.

Iâ€m John Boulter. Iâ€m the president of Bastion Internet. Podcasts, show notes, and transcripts can be found at BastionInternet.com/podcast. Thatâ€s B A S T I O N internet.com/podcast. Email your comments and questions to [email protected].

Welcome to the first installment of the Getting Started series. The plan for the Getting Started series is to give you a simple five to ten step plan which will get you started in a variety of traffic driving strategies. Weâ€ll focus on the less traveled strategies, those beyond normal SEO and PPC – Pay Per Click. Our first Getting Started installment – Local Search.

Local search – itâ€s very hot news in the search marketing industry right now. Last week in Colorado, Search Engine Strategies had a conference dedicated to only local search. I wasnâ€t able to attend but I did heard is was very well received. comScore, the data gathering folks, just published some stats on local search. There was some very interesting news there which weâ€ll go over. And if youâ€re following the actions of the maajor search engines, you can see theyâ€re ramping up their local search offerings.

But the hottest news came yesterday when I needed a Firewire cable. I quickly found the number to my local Target store. Local search in action, in vivid color.

Itâ€s always a kick to me when my wife is climbing up on a stool to get the yellow pages to contact some local business. As sheâ€s blowing the dust off the phone book my son gives her a printout of whatever information she needed. In the time it had taken her to get that big old book off the shelf in the closet, he had the information in hand.

Now I think sheâ€s just faking him out when she starts heading for the closet to get the book. She just wants him to do the work.

During the next 20 or so minutes, Iâ€m going to be mentioning a lot of links. Donâ€t worry about writing them down. Just visit the show notes – theyâ€ll all be the Bastion Internet website.

Local search – what is it; why is it important; and how do you get started. Iâ€m going to talk about that and give you a 10 step “getting started†plan.

What is local search. To me local search means physical contact. If you have something to offer that can be enhanced by a physical meeting then you are involved in local search. If your target audience will want to get together with you at some point in the process, and theyâ€re searching for your type of offering, that is local search.

Why is it important. Itâ€s important because people are doing it. Theyâ€re searching online for local products and services. Right now – as we speak.

There are some fresh stats just out from a comScore Networks study. comScore provides consumer behavior insight to companies. They just completed a study on local search on the Internet. This past July, 2006, 109 million people in the United States did a local search on a search engine. That was 63% of the US internet users. Local search is up 43 percent year over year.

Now for the really exciting number – 47 percent of local searchers followed through with a visit to a business theyâ€d found while searching.

Hereâ€s the number that surprised me the most – Yahoo and Google were neck in neck with local search market share – Google had 29.8 percent of the market, Yahoo had 29.2 percent of the market. To me thatâ€s pretty significant for a couple of reasons.

First it means that Google has a lot less proportional influence in this category then they seem to in overall search.
Second, it means that the 2 market leaders comprise about 60% of the market, a lot less then in more general search where itâ€s probably closer to 75% of the market. Thereâ€s also a lot more players making up the next 30 or so percentage points. Check out the link to the press release to get more info on that. So – we know what it is. We know how important it is. Now – how do we do it. Where do we focus.

Hereâ€s the 10 step program to get you started:

1. Add your website to the major search engines†local search areas.
2. Update your infoUSA profile
3. GeoTarget your Pay Per Click program
4. Place tester ads on traditional yellow page style websites
5. Place tester ads on vertical search engines
6. Optimize your website coding
7. Optimize your website content
8. Create new website content
9. Add a map to your site
10. Get geographic centric links

Letâ€s look at those in more detail

1 ) Add your website to the major search engines†local search areas.
Just before the show, I typed in the phrase “furniture store in los angelesâ€. The top result in Google, Yahoo, and MSN (aka Windows Live) were all the search engines own local search sites. Try it.

Even if you can deliver your service anywhere in the country, if someone wants to deal with a local company – you want to show up.

Now in Google, you can have many local addresses, – but they are going to ask you to confirm each one by sending you a confirmation code via snail mail to that address.

Iâ€ve got the links to Yahoo, Google and MSNâ€s local submission URLs in the show notes. It does time them time to get listed, so start this going today.

2) Update your infoUSA profile
infoUSA is a large database and list management firm. When you get telemarketed, thereâ€s a good chance the telemarketer bought their list from infoUSA. Oh well, theyâ€ve probably got your information anyway, so go onto their site and make sure itâ€s the right information. infoUSA feeds a lot of directories and smaller search engines so you do want to be there.

3) Target Your Pay Per Click programs
If you arenâ€t already doing this, geographically target some portion of your pay per click campaign. Even if you market in the entire country, if you can do something extra in some locations – because you have physical presence there – target those locations. You can do this in one of two ways – either bid regionally – a feature within the various pay per click engines, or include geographic keywords as part of your search phrase – like furniture store in Boston.

If you choose to use the PPC feature, Google and Microsoft seem to be doing a better job at this than Yahooâ€s search marketing. However, Yahooâ€s new Panama release may change that. I did see a demo of their upcoming software but canâ€t remember if in enhanced the geotargeting functionality.

I usually prefer to add the specific keywords to my phrases, but others definitely prefer using the search engines own geographic filters. With services like AOL and other anonymizers the IP address of the searcher does not always match their geography. And I think Users are getting more used to using geographic terms in their searches. If I had to choose one, I think that using the actual keywords is the way to go.

4) Place tester ads on a traditional yellow page style websites
Go to yellowpages.com or Verizonâ€s Superpages.com, check out their ad prices and place some test ads.

One thing I really need to mention and that is definitely the subject of a future Drive It – Convert It episode is that of Analytics. You do need to know where your traffic and conversions are coming from. The more sources of traffic you have, the more important it is to be able to analyze the success or lack of success of each one. This is a little easier when youâ€ve got limited sources of traffic drivers. As you diversify, analytics is a key.

5) Place tester ads on vertical search engines
There are a number of search engines that are catering to Local search. Iâ€m not sure whether theyâ€ll having staying power versus the big engines.

I do think itâ€s worthplacing some test ads on a few of these sites. Two that I would start with are local.com and truelocal.com

6) Optimize your website coding
This gets back to showing up in the general engines but for the geographic long tail.

Revisit your page titles, metatags, h1 headings and see if you canâ€t plug some geographic terms in there. Often it will just add to your ability to be found for these geographic qualifiers without diminishing your ranking for the more generic terms youâ€re currently focused on. If you need more information on how to do on-page coding – re-listen to podcast # 4.

7 ) Optimize your website content
Take a look at your current content. Do you mention nearby cities, suburbs, neighborhoods, counties. Usually you can add a short paragraph that is very conversational in nature

“whether your planting lawns in Southlake, landscaping in Colleyville, or gardening in West Plano our Dallas based warehouse can handle your fertilizer needs†you get the idea.

Make sure your physical addresses are listed on your contact page. Consider putting your main address as part of your footer. Add your phone number to the header. If youâ€re solely doing business locally, that should be a must anyway.

8 ) Create new website content
Create pages for 2 or 3 key geographic terms – letâ€s say youâ€re San Francisco Bay area based – so Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose. Dedicate a page to talk about each of these cities. List the attractions, the weather, the business climate the

Now take your top 2 or 3 regular search phrase targets and integrate them into the city pages.

Itâ€s probably going to look a little strange, so be creative. Make up a new section for your site. Call it doing business in the Bay Area. Tell why your employees like the surrounding cities. Talk about the history of your area of business within the cities. Just make sure you have some good internal links near the top of the page which will transfer Users to the business end of your site. The idea is to rank with the search engines for these pages and then quickly have those users move on to the converting areas of your website.

Make it quality, as always. And, make the pages different. Donâ€t just do a search and replace on the city name and leave the rest of the content unchanged. Duplicate content is likely to get ignored. If the technique works for you, itâ€ll be worth your time to expand it. Branch out to more cities, neighborhood, states, whatever makes sense in your geography.

9 ) Add a map to your site
Make sure youâ€ve got a map on your site with an Alt tag describing it. Add some directions. Tell how to get to your location from neighboring cities. Sound like good content to me.

10 ) Get geographic centric links
Finally, go get some links. Two tactics here – first, make sure the linking anchor text contains the geographic keyword qualifier. This applies especially to links from more generic directories or traditional website sources for you. Second, try to get links from directories or sites that cater to your geography. We often talk about links from good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods and same-industry neighborhoods. Now go get some links from your actual neighborhood.

There are a lot of directories trying to cater to a particular region, search them out and youâ€ll probably find you can get some cost effective links. Hopefully, the links themselves will drive traffic to you, but the link juice you get that ups your search engine rankings can often be a big kicker.

There we go – done! It should take you less than 60 days to work your way through those 10 steps. Youâ€ll probably be through half of them in just a few weeks.

So like politics is all search local – nah – but a lot of it is – so take advantage!

That wraps up Getting Started with Local Search. But whether youâ€re local or national, it seems you canâ€t turn around without bumping into another Drive Traffic animal – Social Search. So join us for our next installment in the series – Getting Started with Social Search.

So if you havenâ€t yet subscribed, you wonâ€t want to miss out. You can follow the subscription links on our site. Or, if you use iTunes, do a search for drive it convert it and pick us up there. Iâ€m John Boulter, for Bastion Internetâ€s Drive It – Convert It! podcast.

If you just donâ€t like the whole RSS thing, fill out the email form on the site, Iâ€ve got the link in the show notes and all the podcast pages. Weâ€ll get you added to our double-secret probation opt-in email distribution list.

As always I welcome you to visit us at bastioninternet.com or Email us at [email protected]. Weâ€ll get back to you.
And for gosh sakes – link to me – because you can never be to thin, too rich or have too many quality inbound links.

(Note: This podcast was originally published 1n 2006 under another domain name – bastioninternet.com/blog.  In 2010, the blog was later migrated to this site.  Some links may be outdated or there may be issues with RSS feeds)

Don’t put all your eggs in one web marketing strategy. The key to short and long term success is diversity.

Suggested Tags: seo, sem, web design, website design, web site conversion, online sales, ecommerce, internet marketing, web marketing, trust, credibility, web promotion

Show summary: SES San Jose – A little about the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose

Diversification – Be careful about jumping too soon AND jumping too late. Longevity is one more reason to diversify now, though. Think your safe with SEO or Pay Per Click – think again.

Upcoming podcasts – Switching back to the Drive side of Drive It – Convert It! Look for the new Getting Started series to help get you started with new Internet Marketing vehicles and for those that want some extra tips on doing it effectively.

Download the Podcast here
Subscribe to Drive It – Convert It! here

Read a full transcript here …

Hi and welcome to Drive It – Convert It!, for August 29th, 2006. This is episode #11: Internet Marketing Diversity

Drive It – Convert It! is the podcast where Small and Medium Sized businesses learn the marketing strategies and tactics behind Driving More Traffic to their website and Converting that Traffic into qualified leads and sales.

Drive it, convert it.

Well it’s been over a month sine the last Drive It – Convert It! podcast. Thanks for sticking with me. It’s been a busy summer. I went on vacation. They tried to catch up. Then I went to a conference. Then tried to catch up. I little more vacationing, and I’m still trying to catch up. But the podcast gods were calling my name and promising retribution if I didn’t get things going again.

Actually, I have been dying to get podcasting again. There’s a ton going on. I’m fresh from the latest Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose and clients are keeping us on our toes here at Bastion Internet. We’re pushing some limits and exploring into new territory.

If you want the details of my vacation – send me an email. From here on in, this podcast is all about driving traffic to your website and converting it once it’s there.

We’ll start by reviewing the summer Search Engine Strategies conference. That’s going to lead me into what’s hot, what are the trends in Internet Marketing. From there, the main event – I want to talk about the importance of diversity within your online marketing plan and how we’re going to get you starting down that path. Finally, with diversity in mind, I’ll give you a forecast of the upcoming podcast series.

Search Engine Strategies: I attended the summer Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. For those of you that are familiar with Search Engine Strategies you know how much information gets thrown at you over a 4 day period. For those of you who aren’t familiar with these conferences – I’ll give you the rundown.

Search Engine Strategies, also know as SES is put on by Incisive Media. It’s chaired by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch fame. It runs over a four day period and follows a pretty typical trade show slash conference type of format. There’s 5 hour to hour and a half sessions running at any given time and thatâ€s done 4 times a day. So over the course of the conference there’s well over 70 different sessions. The sessions break down into different focuses – you’ve got ones more targeted toward beginners, ones targeted at advanced users. You’ve got a SEO track, an Advertising track, vertical tracks like shopping search and local search, you’ve got a B to B focus. It’s really got something for everybody.

The sessions are a little bit teaching, a little bit opinion, lots of Q and A. Most sessions have 3 or 4 panelists that are subject matter experts, and a moderator. Each panelist gives a 10-15 minute presentation offering their slant on the subject and then it gets opened up for questions.

Based on how people put up their hands when the moderators ask, it seems like about 60% of the attendees are in-house employees at various companies outside of the Search industry and about 40% are from Internet marketing firms of one description or another. My numbers could be way off, though, I’ve never seen anything published on that.

There’s also a exhibition floor where there’s a good100 or so exhibitors ranging from SEO companies to dot.coms to analytics software firms.

Anyway, I don’t want to make this a commercial. Go to SearchEngineStrategies.com Go to SearchEngineStrategies.com for more info if you’d like.

One of the things I look for when I go to these conferences is trends.
Where things seem to be heading. In marketing if youâ€re always following other companies†leads, youâ€ll likely always be following others – stands to reason – huh. So if you can get out in front of the trends, you stand a better chance of success.

One of the most highly attended sessions was on Social Search. I think it was highly popular because itâ€s pretty new. Weâ€re all trying to figure out how we want to play. How many resources do you put into something without having a good idea of the payoff.

Now itâ€s always a little dangerous because new stuff is alluring. If youâ€re like me, you work so much with standard SEO and Search Engine Advertising that it can start to seem a little mundane at times. So when something new comes along, you want to jump all over it. And then you step back and look at the statistics and see what an overwhelming amount of traffic is still generated by those two 500 pound gorillas – Optimization and Pay Per click

So it can be dangerous to go after the new, alluring marketing vehicles – I call them market vehicles one, because they drive traffic, two, because they are often self contained. Anyway, back to the danger of pursuing the new, mysterious strategies. But, it can be more dangerous not to pursue them. If you donâ€t diversify, and that even includes doing things that are new to you and not necessarily new to everyone else, you will absolutely suffer from that decision.

Letâ€s run through some scenarios. You think SEO is the place to be. Well it can be until you get banned or shoved down in the rankings by an algorithm change or a spurt of competition. Have you noticed that Froogle and Googleâ€s local results have started showing up high in the rankings of search engine results pages. Howâ€s youâ€re Froogle ranking. Are those Froogle results knocking you down in the rankings an inch or two.

If you rely on leads just from the natural search results, what happens when those results suddenly dry up. A lot of companies have been thrown into a panic for just that reason. Now a lot of times you can go way down in rankings and itâ€s just a temporary thing. You bounce back up after a week or two. But if thatâ€s where all youâ€re business is coming from and itâ€s now gone, youâ€re under a ton of pressure to do something. You canâ€t just sit there and do nothing – which is often the right thing to do. So youâ€re sort of forced to take action just so it looks like youâ€re trying to do something. If you had some other traffic driving vehicles in place, the pressureâ€s off a little. You can wait it out a bit to see whatâ€s real and whatâ€s not in a rankings bump or shuffle.

So you think youâ€re safe by driving leads through search engine advertising – pay per clicks. Hey, you pay, your ads show up, people click, you get customers. Well along comes Google and their quality score. Now itâ€s just not a matter of price bids. Click through rates and the relevance of landing pages are affecting the rank of your sponsored ad. Plus with all the Tivoâ€ing going on, just how much more competition is flowing in from companies looking for better places to spend their advertising dollar then television. How does that affect the cost per click.

Hereâ€s something to think about. Do you know what two of the highest downloaded Firefox extensions are – a script blocker and an ad blocker. Do you think that might have an affect on your Google and Yahoo pay per click business. History has definitively shown us that people like to block ads. Donâ€t think Google and Yahooâ€s ads are immune to that. Getting a little sick of seeing AdSense on sites – yeah, me too. Whereâ€s that Firefox extension. Maybe once Iâ€ve turned it on itâ€ll block the ads on the Search Engine Results Pages, too.

I think youâ€re getting my point.

So if you havenâ€t already started getting systems in place to diversify efficiently, you need to.

Another trend – longevity. Longevity goes hand in hand with trust. If youâ€ve been around awhile people tend to trust you a little more. Heard of the Google sandbox. There are pretty good indicators that length of time youâ€ve been doing something means something in this web site marketing world of ours. Itâ€s pretty hard to go out a get a new link thatâ€s 2 years old. You would have had to have done that two years ago.

So the key to longevity is to get started now. It a few years youâ€ll have it. Meanwhile, why not drive some traffic and have some fun while were at it.

I believe it was John Lennon said that 90% of success was just showing up. Iâ€m not sure that I totally agree with the exact percentage, but the principle does apply. Youâ€ve got to get in the game if you want to score and if you want to win. Most people sit on the couch and are content to watch.

So, how do we all get into the game.
Well, Drive It – Convert It! is shifting back to the “drive it†side. Over the next several podcasts Iâ€m going to talk about getting into different games – weâ€ll call it the Getting Started series.

What do I want you to get started with – to diversify into. Lots of things.

We are going to talk social search and social networking. We are going to talk about podcasting. Blogging – yeah itâ€s been out awhile but youâ€re still not doing it, are you.Weâ€ll revisit Vertical search engines like shopping search and local search. Pushed out any press releases lately, how about Ezines or newsletters.

Iâ€m calling it the Getting Started series but donâ€t let that fool you. Iâ€ll be lacing it with something for everyone whether youâ€re a beginner or an old hand at it.

I canâ€t wait for the podcast on Social Search and Social Networking. I am excited about it and dreading it all at the same time. Iâ€m 42 years old, do I really need a My Space account. Do I really need to Digg stuff. Is it a goldmine or a big waste of time.

We usually avoid what we fear or what we donâ€t understand. I know a lot of SEOs that hate getting links because they donâ€t want to have to actually communicate with another person. A lot of us have a fear of speaking – not looking forward to that first podcast – are you? Donâ€t understand all the tech stuff surrounding Shopping Search – donâ€t worry itâ€s probably just a fad anyway.

Letâ€s face down some of those fears, that apprehension together. Letâ€s go back and revisit some of those online marketing vehicles that we took a look at a few years ago and turned our noses up at – darn shopping engines. Letâ€s get diversified. A little secret – itâ€s mostly just about repurposing content.

So if you havenâ€t yet subscribed, you wonâ€t want to miss out. You can follow the subscription links on our site. Or, if you use iTunes, do a search for drive it convert it and pick us up there. Iâ€m John Boulter, for Bastion Internetâ€s Drive It – Convert It! podcast.

Visit us at bastioninternet.com or Email us at [email protected]. Iâ€ll get back to you. See you then.