Wizard of Ads Clay Campbell

What are people saying about you?

If you go to a restaurant for the first time where the food, service, and atmosphere are more or less worth your $40 bill, you probably won’t tell anyone about it.

If the food is so-so, the service lousy and when you complain to the manager she shrugs and says, “It’s hard to get good help and we are 3 people short tonight,” statistics show you’ll complain to 11 other people who will tell about 5 others as if it happened to them.

If on the other hand, your experience was fabulous, with great food, uncommon service and an inviting atmosphere, over the next 2-3 days you’ll tell 6 others who will tell 4 others.

It makes NO difference if you sell a product or a service. How customers feel about you will make or break you. How do you find out? Ask them. Some will lie, but if you ask sincerely and convince them that you really want to know; most will be honest with you. Be ready – the truth may make you uncomfortable.

Submit Your site to Directories.

Why submit site to directories?

Do I need to I need to submit my website to directories to rank higher in the search engines?

Some people absolutely believe you need to, some other people say it's a waste of time and money.
The truth lies in the middle. If you have a website and you want more visitors it makes sense that more people will see your listing on the first page than on the fourth page. Good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not doing one main thing, but doing a whole lot of small things right, including submitting to directories.

That's right. Submitting to directories is just another part of SEO.

In some cases submissions are enough for ranking well in the search engines, this is especially true in the case of niche websites, but in most cases it's necessary to add other techniques such as link exchange, link buying, submission to paid directories, among many others.

Many small business owners that have a website want to know… Can you rank well in search engines without submitting to directories?
Yes, in some cases.

You may choose other ways to get good positions in the search engine rankings. For example you can create content networks; those focus on niche markets and build several websites around one chosen topic, then interlink these websites in order to improve rankings. Others focus on blogging, they get known in their fields for what they write, other people place links to them and there they go moving up toward the top pages in the search engines. Michele Miller’s blog is what an excellent blog looks like.

SEO is basically about getting your site to rank the top of the search engines for your chosen keywords. The more inbound links you have the better, but there's another detail: the higher the quality and relevancy of those links the better too.

Let's say you have a website about cars, then you should go an get links from various sites if possible some that deal with the car world, but of course a single link from bmwusa.com will be worth tens, hundreds or even thousands of links from small websites. Generally it's a balance: getting many medium quality general links, getting medium quality related links, and every now and then also getting high quality related authoritative links.

Directories are a way of getting medium quality links for a reasonable ROI (return on investment).

Let's say you submit your site to 500 directories, and lets say you pay $70 for this. If your site were accepted by 80% of directories then you would have gotten 400 links at around $0.17 each. Even getting approved by 50% of directories would be a good deal: $0.28 a link.
Does Google use the directories?
Google, Yahoo! and many other search engines send software over the Internet, called "spiders" or "robots". Spiders visit millions of websites, among them; directories, their mission is to index websites in Google's databases.

Spiders "read" the text in links and then index your site according to what they find. That's why titles (the links pointing to your site from directories) should contain keywords related to your site's content, this way spiders can "understand" what your site's about.

Let's use www.kentuckyopry.com for instance.

1 - Spider visits directory (or any other site with a link to your site).
2 - Spider reads link pointing to kentuckyopry.com that says "Kentucky Lake Music Show".
3 - Spider index your site in Google database.
3 - A person in Chicago wanting to come to Kentucky Lake for vacation goes to google.com and types "Kentucky Lake music show" or "music show in Kentucky", and if you’ve done all the other “little things” right, your site will be among top ten search results; probably in the top three.

Directories are edited by human beings not by spiders; so, Google likes them because listed websites have a "human vote", directories help organize the World Wide Web.
What you're going to accomplish in submitting to directories depends on many factors. In other words it depends on you doing a whole bunch of other little SEO things correctly besides directory submission.
You should read Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? if (SEO) ranking higher in the search engines, is important to you.

More Later
Clay

Absence of Trust

When you trust someone you believe they’re telling you the truth, you go the extra mile for them, you have a good feeling when their name is mentioned.
In a good marriage there is complete trust. In a well-run business there is trust too. The customer feels that the business owner (or company) will be fair with them. They feel like if there’s a problem the business owner will fix it. If there is anything wrong your trustworthy friend (the business owner) will make it right.
What would cause an absence of trust?
Acting like or indicating in some way that you (the customer) are not important. I told the owner of one of my favorite restaurants, “You know, the thing I like about coming here is that your staff makes my wife and I feel like we’re really special customers and that we are important.”

You would not be able to take care of all the business that would come your way if each and every person who ever walks in the door of your business felt they were treated really important when they left. Probably hundreds of thousands of customers have left one place of business and went to another that sold the same products or service because they felt like were treated as if they were unimportant. It causes an absence of trust.

Saying unflattering, negative things about your competitors. People don’t like it. My Dad used to say, “Boy, if ain’t got nothin’ good to say about somebody, it’s best to keep your mouth shut.” Does it make a politician look good, or entice you to vote for them, when they say their opponent is a liar, an idiot, a cheat, they are not patriotic and none of their ideas are any good? Does it make the pastor of a Baptist church look good to run down a list of things the Charismatic folks or the Methodists aren’t doing right? Saying negative things of ones competitors really ticks me off. It creates an absence of trust.

What else creates an absence of trust?
Here’s my list that may cause consumers not to trust a business:
1. Lying. Even a very tiny small lie. Or, not telling all the truth.
2. Not following through & following up
3. Not being polite
4. Using assumptive closes: (you did want to take that home with you today, didn’t you?)
5. Using alternate closes:(Did you like the navy suit or would you prefer to get the gray one instead)
6. Doing any kind of bait and switch.
7. Saying there will never be a better deal than this or saying this sale price will never be repeated
8. A business that has a going out of business sale 4 months in a row.
9. If a business has over promised and under delivered.
10. We’re selling these cars below what we paid for them. (Yeh, right)
11. Making it seem like the company is more interested in making money than my needs.
12. When a business does not honor a guarantee
13. When the consumer feels that the salesperson doesn’t know their product well enough to explain it adequately.
14. Bad language or dirty jokes.
15. Dirty restrooms
16. Pushy salespeople
17. Websites with no phone number
18. (And this really ticks me off) When you’re the only person standing in line in, and the person behind the counter looks out and says, “May I help someone?

A person will do business with someone they like and trust 99% of the time.
Is your business gaining trust with customers or are you inadvertently causing an absence of trust?
More later,
Clay