I haven’t blogged in a while.
It’s a good thing.
Things have been busy. We launched IMBroadcast.com, our own SEO tool, and threw a great conference last week.
Usually I just blog when I get an idea, or get pissed about something. I don’t like to force it, because it is easy to spot posts that are contrived.
And so again today I feel the yearn to write.
Why?
Because most of you haven’t figured out your job yet.
Most of you don’t understand what it is you do.
You have been sipping the Kool-Aid, and lost focus on what it is your job entails.
I don’t care what your business card says;
SEO,
Social Media Expert,
Online Analyst,
Guru of Interweb Google Machine Voodoo.
In the end you are a marketer.
For those of you who have obviously forgotten the definition of marketer:
marketer
n : someone who promotes or exchanges goods or services for money
Your job is to make money.
Whether you work for yourself, handle client work, or create affiliate sites, in the end the goal is the same. Convert traffic to coin.
Too many of you have lost focus on this.
You have become obsessed with statistics that lie on the periphery of importance;
PageRank,
Link Counts,
Rankings,
Twitter followers,
Blog subscribers.
None of it matters if you aren’t making money.
Many of you have created your own dot com bubbles in 2008, with accomplishments based on nothing more than hot air. You have lost focus on the end result.
What good are 1,000,000 uniques a day for an ecommerce site that has a 0% conversion rate due to cart abandonment?
What good is a top 5 ranking for a term that yields 5 unique visitors a day, and converts at a clip below 1%?
What good is a “PR of 5″ if everyone you are competing with is destroying you in the SERPs with less toolbar PageRank?
What good are 4,000 Twitter followers if you aren’t mobilizing and utilizing them?
I am the last person in this industry you will ever here claim that if you don’t make x dollars you are a failure, anyone that knows me, knows I am not a materialistic person.
But in the end I do know what my job is.
I am an Internet Marketer.
And by definition I make money on the Internet.
Period.
The rest is fluff.
So do yourself a favor today, and do something I myself have to do from time to time, take a long look at the concepts that you have been focusing importance on in the last few months, and take out your needle and burst your own bubble.
Then get back to work.
(On request from Chris Winfield, an audio representation of my post.)
Great, back-to-reality post Dave! I was disappointed I didn’t make ScarySEO, but hoping to be there next year!
Good writeup. You’re right, most people do lose sight of their most important bottom lines.
the definition of marketer is right, I always tell my clients ” you did not hired me to do SEO for your Website, you hired to make your Website generates $$$$$$”.
You’re right, many people focused on the technical aspects of internet marketing and forget about the business.
“…Snap back to reality, Oh there goes gravity…” sorry couldn’t help it that’s what ran through my head =)
The issue doesn’t boil down to whether you want to be a “technician” or a “marketer.”
No matter what, you are going to be a marketer, because if your client comes to you and asks, “Well how come I am not making any sales,” you can’t just shrug your shoulders and say “I dunno.”
If you are making your own money on the web it becomes even clearer, you can’t feed your family with any numbers that don’t have dollar signs in front of them.
A lot of SEOs get pissed when I write posts like this. They say that their only job is to do what the client asks. Well to me your job should be to help your client make more educated decisions. Either that or face the loss of clients as people find out you offer very little in terms of ROI.
As search continue to become for data based, the SEO is going to have to become more and more focused on concepts like CTR, conversion, and usability. I know most SEO thought leaders will say true SEO has all of these concepts intertwined, but tell that to the “technician” who is only concerned about SERP placement, and little else.
Many social media folks are among the worst abusers of their role. They sell and provide fluff. Social media is very much a channel that can lead to conversion, but you have to design your campaigns around that concept. Every action should be proceeded by the question “How can this make us money?”
This is what I keep telling people too. The absolute first thing you have to do in SEO is determine what your goals are, and then break them down into really simple terms. If I hear a client say they want to rank #1 for a particular search term, that’s great, but I dig deeper to find out why. Is it a feel-good, show-off issue with no monetary goals? Are they building brand awareness? More often than not, I find out that what they’re really interested in is more sales, but they simply have no idea that 50 other factors affect that, other than #1 ranking. It’s easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day stuff, but it is crucial to understand the intent behind the clients’ stated goals and stay focused on that.
Nice touch Big Dave ;)
Well said Dave, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a show called Dragons Den but there’s five rich guys sitting on a panel, people pitch business ideas to them and if they’re good, the panel gives them money.
It’s like speed dating for VC but … most of the time, they tell people to get out of the studio because the idea has no means of making money. I feel that way sometimes as a Web Technology Specialist (pretty fancy title eh?) , I make people money on the web … that’s it.