How to generate income with your website, even in difficult times

I recently took a trip to Fry’s Electronics, which is like Disneyland for computer and technology fans. My eyes always glaze over upon arrival at the nearly 30,000 square foot store that is packed from top to bottom with technology and tools that I LOVE to have for my business and websites. In days gone by, I would wander the aisles picking up treats that I would take home and “taste” on. Sometimes they were expensive, sometimes they were affordable, but most of the time they were things that I Dear have but not necessarily things that necessary to have.

Although I instinctively know the difference between want Y need, but it had never been clearer to me than when the economy started to turn around and people became nervous about keeping their jobs, finding income (forget creating a savings account!), and spending money. I found myself faced with some tough decisions about where to focus my attention in dollar terms. What I once spent money on, now I had to figure out how to find low-cost or *free* alternatives.

Last week I received an email from a client that had me downright frustrated. My client is a wonderfully smart and hard-working girl who has been diligently building her business. With the economic downturn in the US, she is struggling because her customer base is drying up. As she read her email, she was on the verge of tears. All of her hard work and dedication would be lost if she practically closed her doors due to the economy and falling sales. Times are so tough that she can’t even afford to continue her current paid marketing efforts.

Does this ring a bell? Many of you are also entrepreneurs who might be facing similar concerns about your business. You might also be considering cutting back on things like advertising or small gifts for your customers to make ends meet. Worse yet, you could be closing the shop entirely.

During this difficult time, I started to go back to basics with my clients’ websites. Specifically, I have again recommended that sites be organically optimized for search engines. What is organic search engine optimization? SEO is an “on-site” marketing technique that was extremely popular before anyone had even heard of social media.

In the “early days” of the Internet (before blogs, podcasts, and social media), webby gurus focused most of their marketing effort on search engine optimization. We worked on creating a keyword list for your site that conveyed information to search engines about all the special products and services you offer. Search engines then use these keywords to determine how to present a site in the results list when a user performs a search. Your overall placement was determined by an algorithm that takes into account the keyword search that the user completes and your keywords and content. Specifically, you could influence where your site appears in the list based on where you placed your keywords (meta-tags) and also where you used them in your content. The best part is that, unlike Pay-Per-Click, you don’t pay to have your site appear in their results list.

However, with the invention of social media, I have seen a sharp drop in SEO: many marketing efforts have shifted towards “off-site” marketing techniques (blogs, podcasts, social media) to drive inbound traffic to users. websites.

Ideally, you would combine both methods to have a complete marketing system. If you are not already doing so, I want to encourage you to consider organic search engine optimization as an option to get your website seen in these trying times.

In case you need a little encouragement, here are a few reasons why organic search engine optimization is well worth the effort:

• You don’t pay a per-click “fee” to search engines for your site visitors, which means you can potentially have a higher ROI than pay-per-click search listings.
• When done correctly, it has an advantage over pay per click as PPC allows anyone to raise their bid for a search term you use and thus pass it up in the results list.
• The software makes it easier than ever to track your results and influence your search engine position.

If you’d like to learn how to get started with SEO Wordtracker has released a FREE step-by-step instruction toolkit (complete with videos, reports and guides) to help you learn organic search engine optimization which you can find at http:// /www.wordtracker.com/academy/free-keyword-tools-reports.