Passion Must Fuel Market Strategy

I just finished reading an interesting post by Aaron Wall of SEO Book. I hesitate to share the link as I have a secret desire to keep his brain and knowledge all to myself...unfortunately several thousands have already tapped him and he's now giving his freshest content/knowledge away for free via his blog. So at some point it becomes fruitless to think I'm being sneaky by keeping is name away from you. After all, if you were really into SEO or search marketing you would already know his name.

I suggest reading the article entitled Links Based Economy? No. Passion Based Economy? Yes. if you aren't familiar with it as it will give you some good background.

The main point I want to focus on is the need for new internet content to be passionate. There is something I hear implicitly, that I am not hearing explicitly as much as I think I should when I study web marketing. I believe this concept plays a key role in understanding how to market a site well. (Before I say this I need to point out that I am by many people's standards an SEO/web marketing novice, although I'm quickly becoming a junkie and want to flex my thinking a bit.)

To market a site well - don't play games, be true to what makes marketing a great field of study.

Be creative, be thoughtful, be genuine and real, operate ethically and work hard to understand what you have to offer people that is of real value and think creatively in how the message can be presented. BE PASSIONATE about what you are doing and working on. If you are, then without too much effort that passion can spill into how you work to communicate your message and will greatly help you bring the targeted, interested, traffic that you want.

As you work on the different aspects of online marketing, remember that Google and other search engines are attempting to match people with the most accurate information for their searches. Tricks, games, and everything that goes with them are continually being rooted out by these companies and won't give you long term, sustainable traffic. Be genuine in what you do, work hard to promote as you would normally and watch what happens. If you have something of value and know your market as you should the traffic, rankings, etc., will all come.

About 8 months ago someone asked me to write about why I enjoyed the SEO/web marketing concept as much as I did, when I often have a BIG problem with how the field of marketing is being run. Here's what I came up with:

"...good SEO represents a pure form of marketing to me as well. Instead of being as simple as paying for a billboard in an appropriate location to throw an ad on, you have to work at crafting several parts of your business into a cohesive effort that will bring you as much traffic and visibility online as possible. Because Google is now the major search engine, SEO is often focused on achieving high google rankings for certain keywords. The “pure” part is evidenced because Google is attempting to deliver exactly what a user is searching for...therefore tricks, games, lies etc. are all filtered out (or pushed lower) and the sites that are creating genuinely solid contributions in whatever their field (shoe sales, personal blog, etc.) will be picked IF they have an excellent SEO strategy to get them noticed.
The marketing here is to Google’s algorithm, not to an individual. This distinction creates a very interesting and unique challenge for businesses’ as the goal is not to market themselves to the end consumer, but to the machine with no emotions, thoughts, feelings, stupidity, etc, to play upon. Strange...but in some ways it strikes me as a purest form of marketing with some fascinating challenges that force a business to really learn who their customer is, and then apply the knowledge to create a truly valuable product for the customer. The business must be good, the value proposition must be good, and the SEO strategy must be good in order to gain success and web dominance."