One morn­ing, you go into your mail­box and dis­cover there’s an enve­lope wait­ing for you from an unknown source. You bring the pack­age into your liv­ing room, tear open the enve­lope, pull out what’s inside, put on your read­ing glasses, unfold the let­ter, and begin to read the contents.

After com­plet­ing all of these steps, you then quickly glance at the let­ter to decide if the let­ter is worth reading.

If not, you throw it in the garbage.

But if the enve­lope looks like junk mail, there’s copy on the enve­lope and it screams “hype,” or the printed address label just says “dear occu­pant” as the addressee, chances are you won’t even think about open­ing it and you’ll just throw it away.

How­ever, let’s say the enve­lope works, curios­ity takes over, and the let­ter does get opened at this point. Once unfolded, though, if it looks like some kind of sales pitch at first glance, not even a sin­gle word will likely be read. So into the round file it goes!

Your web­site is the enve­lope. What does it say about you?

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One of my favorite shows on TV of late is Shark Tank.

The show cen­ters on aspir­ing, brave, and some­times down­right idi­otic inven­tors and entre­pre­neurs who pitch their ideas in front of a group of mer­ci­less, seem­ingly heart­less mul­ti­mil­lion­aires, beg­ging for invest­ment capital.

Some of the advice that come from these “sharks” are pretty obvi­ous and com­mon­sen­si­cal, espe­cially to peo­ple who’s been in busi­ness for as long as I have.

But a lot of it is bril­liant. Bril­liant, but also brazen, unabashed, and bru­tally hon­est. It’s not for the faint of heart. If you don’t like see­ing peo­ple, along with their hopes, dreams, and busi­ness ideas being shred to pieces on TV, then this show is cer­tainly not for you.

The more I watch that show, the more I learn. It’s not just a fas­ci­nat­ing pro­gram, it’s a million-​​dollar edu­ca­tion in just one hour a week. And for free to boot. If you ever get a chance to watch that show, do it. You’re going to learn so much. It’s an amaz­ing show.

If an idea or busi­ness is dumb, dead, or down­right dread­ful, they will say it. Often, in no uncer­tain terms. They have to. After all, their money is on the line.

But then again, so should it be with you.

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Is the Inter­net mar­ket­ing indus­try implod­ing? I think it is. But if not, it sure seems like it. In fact, it seems to be a sign of the times.

For exam­ple, we see it with the FTC crack­ing down on mis­lead­ing adver­tis­ers, Visa and Mas­ter­Card clos­ing down mer­chant accounts for forced con­ti­nu­ity billings, and Google per­ma­nently ban­ning adver­tis­ers for rea­sons still unclear but some­how related to the lat­est crackdown.

Harsh? Per­haps. But we can’t say we didn’t see it coming.

Remem­ber, it was about three years ago — wow, has it been three years already? — when my wife, Sylvie Fortin, put out her scathing report, called “Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Sins.”

It was highly con­tro­ver­sial at the time because peo­ple didn’t expect it. How­ever, since then many mar­keters, blog­gers, jour­nal­ists, dis­grun­tled clients, unpaid affil­i­ates, even social media experts have joined in the cho­rus. Some, qui­etly. Oth­ers, not so quietly.

For instance, copy­writer Ryan Healy ruf­fled a few feath­ers recently by post­ing a scathing report, enti­tled “Inter­net Mar­ket­ing on Life Sup­port,” in which he sin­gled out a few mar­keters for their ques­tion­able, uneth­i­cal, or allegedly ille­gal practices.

One com­menter praised Ryan for his will­ing­ness to name names, and by the same token crit­i­cized my wife for not doing so in her Sins report. In fact, since it was pub­lished, we received a lot of flak for not nam­ing names. I cer­tainly under­stand their cynicism.

So I’m tak­ing this oppor­tu­nity to elab­o­rate on why we chose not to name names.

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Last year, a bunch of copy­writ­ers who also blog — like yours truly — shot the breeze on the Nuts and Blog­bolts talk radio show.

It was an inter­est­ing and at times spir­ited discussion.

After some talk about con­tent and copy (or should I say, writ­ing con­tent ver­sus writ­ing copy), the show’s host, Mike San­sone, asked each pan­elist if we would indi­vid­u­ally respond on our blogs to this question:

“Writ­ing for the vis­i­tor is more impor­tant than writ­ing for the search engines. Can both be met with­out sac­ri­fic­ing quality?”

Ryan Healy posted his answer on the sub­ject. Good answer. I agree with him, because he makes some great points. But I also dis­agree as I think there are ways around it.

So I guess my answer is both “yes” and “no.” Here’s why.

First off, I’m not a search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) expert by any stretch. How­ever, I do know enough about SEO to know that it’s pri­mar­ily based on three major factors:

Code, links, and content.

Let’s take a look at each one…

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The new year is around the cor­ner. It’s a time for res­o­lu­tions. A time for change. And some­times, those changes need to be drastic.

On Decem­ber 16, 2009, while we con­duct our reg­u­lar weekly webi­nar for our Suc­cess Chef stu­dents, we will be mak­ing a major announce­ment about rad­i­cal changes we’re mak­ing to our cur­rent busi­ness model…

… Changes that not only affect our stu­dents but also might affect the Inter­net mar­ket­ing train­ing indus­try as a whole.

So we’re open­ing up this live class to the pub­lic for the first time. For this one time, we’re invit­ing every­one who wants to join us on this webi­nar, and not just our pay­ing students.

These changes might sur­prise you. Or shock you. They even might make some peo­ple mad. But they must be made. And together with Sylvie Fortin, author of the con­tro­ver­sial Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Sins, we will be announc­ing those changes on that spe­cial webinar.

The rea­son is sim­ple — but it’s not what you think. We’re not sell­ing any­thing new. This is not a typ­i­cal pro­mo­tional or sales pitch webi­nar. It’s a spe­cial announce­ment, one we’ve been itch­ing to make for a very long time. All I can say is, “It’s about time!”

We recorded this very brief video and wrote this open let­ter to explain.

I remem­ber 10 years ago.

In the wake of rumored pro­pos­als to reg­u­late the web, in 1999 the CRTC, com­pa­ra­ble to America’s FCC, offi­cially declared that the Inter­net is not a broad­cast medium.

Now, that rul­ing was sig­nif­i­cant for many reasons.

Tech­ni­cally, the Inter­net is a medium. But the gov­ern­ment based its deci­sion on the fact that the web is inter­ac­tive with its audi­ence — unlike other uni­di­rec­tional, one-​​way broad­cast media such as the TV or radio. As a result, reg­u­la­tors con­cluded the Inter­net could there­fore police itself.

(The “Net Neu­tral­ity” debate of late is a per­fect exam­ple that it is different.)

Nev­er­the­less, my point here is not a polit­i­cal one but a marketing-​​related one.

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Organic traf­fic is a fan­tas­tic source of vis­i­tors that’s often ignored by many marketers.

Search engines change all the time and many of them now charge for the priv­i­lege of includ­ing your web­site. So, peo­ple often ask me how to gen­er­ate traf­fic, beyond the search engines and with lit­tle to no cost.

Let me be can­did by say­ing that I am not a search engine expert, nor do I play one on TV. But there are two meth­ods that I’ve used con­sis­tently to attract thou­sands of qual­i­fied hits to my web­site at vir­tu­ally no cost and with very lit­tle effort.

Granted, everyone’s dif­fer­ent. And these tech­niques may not be appro­pri­ate for every­one. How­ever, let me share what works for me and what I do, along with a few tips.

My biggest organic traf­fic gen­er­a­tor is con­tent marketing.

Namely, there are two categories:

1. Post­ing con­tent on social net­works, includ­ing blogs, blog com­ments, forums, social net­work­ing sites, dis­cus­sion lists, and of course, my own blog;
2. Con­tribut­ing con­tent, such as writ­ing arti­cles or reports, and sub­mit­ting them to ezines, mag­a­zines, direc­to­ries, and guest con­tri­bu­tions on other people’s blogs.

Now, let’s take a closer look, shall we?

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