So with this information, what will the spammers be trying to sell as their SEO service?

• 500 Twitter followers for just $5
• 500 Facebook Fans for just $5
• Automated content rehashing and sharing amongst social media profiles

These services will create generic profiles and you will be amongst a very spammy community. Google is intelligent enough to catch these people out and you run a high risk of being penalised severely. If or rather when you get penalised how do you get these followers to unfollow you? YOU CAN’T.

Obviously there will always be spam out there so if a spammy Twitter profile does follow you, there’s not much that you can do about it but if you are intentionally creating quality content the ratio of quality followers vs spam will be higher (high = quality followers). So you have nothing to worry about. I mention the ratio aspect of quality vs duplicate content in a reader’s question from a previous post. It’s a very similar scenario to what I state in the above-mentioned passage.

Enjoy!

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – The Future of SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Go where your audience are.

It’s not just about getting links that pass PR.  It’s about creating meaningful relationships.  If your potential audience hangs out on forums, then post to those forums.  Become a trusted member and advisor …..  This approach will serve you well for the future.  Google will be placing more and more emphasis on engagement metrics in order to determine rank.  Why?

The problem Google was created to solve – finding relevant information – is morphing into a problem of locating quality information.  There might be a lot of crawlable information on a given topic, so finding it isn’t an issue any more.  Finding the information people find most useful is the new challenge.

How people engage with your site is going to become increasingly important.  Look to establish meaningful relationships, wherever possible.

Here is an excellent analogy for start-up businesses, it is written by Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great.

“Now picture a huge, heavy flywheel. It’s a massive, metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle. It’s about 100 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick, and it weighs about 25 tons. That flywheel is your company. Your job is to get that flywheel to move as fast as possible, because momentum — mass times velocity — is what will generate superior economic results over time.

Right now, the flywheel is at a standstill. To get it moving, you make a tremendous effort. You push with all of your might, and finally, you get the flywheel to inch forward. After two or three days of sustained effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster. It takes a lot of work, but at last the flywheel makes a second rotation. You keep pushing steadily. It makes three turns, four turns, five, six. With each turn, it moves faster, and then — at some point, you can’t say exactly when — you break through. The momentum of the heavy wheel kicks in your favor. It spins faster and faster, with its own weight propelling it. You aren’t pushing any harder, but the flywheel is accelerating, its momentum building, its speed increasing.”
Jim Collins, Author, Good to Great

This analogy can be applied to the world of online marketing. Search engine optimisation and social media marketing dominate the discussions in the online marketing world of today. The fly wheel effect is in full motion within the internet industry and the message it carries can be applied to almost any business. However I feel that the people who can take the most out of this are bloggers. Often people begin blogging because they hear all the hype about web 2.0 and the millionaires it has made. They blog not necessarily because they enjoy their topic but rather because they think it will make them money and make them money instantly…

Here is a common scenario. Someone decides to create their own blog; they are now a blogger. The blogger begins adding content to their blog and traffic to their site increases. Naturally they get excited. They keep their blogs updated on a weekly basis for a few months, happy about the amount of traffic they are receiving and, no doubt, thinking about how easy this is. What they don’t see, however, is that initial surge and almost exponential rise in traffic that was noted when they began blogging. The rise in traffic has slowed. Now, because they aren’t 100% passionate about their blog (they are doing it purely to make money), they begin to lose interest just before Google and other search engines begin to take a liking to their site. Blogging is hard work and writing captivating content is difficult and time consuming but once you start catching the attention of readers, webmasters and bloggers will start linking back to you, driving even more traffic and link juice through your site. The flywheel, having overcome its inertia is now gaining speed and utilizing its own momentum. All that is required of the blogger now is to maintain it and monetise it.

How does one monetize a start up blog and/or website? Firstly, you need to understand your service. If you want to offer consulting services, I advise to offer your services for free in the beginning as you are still trying to make a name for yourself. I did this when I first started consulting in SEO, I offered to help a few website owners who I knew personally and by doing a good job I increased my self-confidence for my SEO services. You can do the same, once you have succeeded in your offered services you can begin charging your new clients and now you also have a few positive referrals when you start quoting on new work.

If you decide to offer a completely free service i.e. you put all your cards on the table and don’t withhold any information from your readership. By doing this you will need to rely on advertising, the classic Google model.
The pros and cons of advertising on a website:
Cons:
1) adverts link away from your blog
2) possibility of adverts not being related to your content
3) only 1% of traffic clicks on adverts, so a website needs substantial amount of traffic before you can actually start making money out of it. So make sure that you can estimate the amount of traffic your website will receive. If it’s a small geographical target and niche focused then it may not be a good idea to rely only on advertising.

Pros:
1) Source of income

The longer term way to earn money is to publish a book after you have developed a popular following, the problem with this idea is that it is definitely not short term so have an immediate plan to start generating income.

The message here is simple. A blog is hard work and requires patience, like any start up company it will require a strategy and an action plan. Without action you will not succeed.