I started my first online business back when OJ Simpson was on trial the first time around. In the time since then I have dabbled in just about every form of direct marketing I could get my hands on. This included telemarketing, email marketing, direct mail, and eventually SEO. Never made it huge but have always been able to work full time from home and support my family comfortably.

Almost every SEO agent you speak to these days will do their level best to convince you of their ability to be able to fool Google and the other search engines into pushing your site to the top of the search result pages.
You won’t hear anything of the sort from me anymore though.

Sure there was a time not too long ago when I felt the best way to generate revenue for a client was to use black hat methods to fool the search engine algorithms into giving our clients better rankings.

The problem with that philosophy was and still remains to be two fold. First focusing only on generating increases in ranks totally ignores the conversion process that has to take place in order for a website to generate income. Second by focusing only on improving rankings via black hat methods client’ sites are far more open to penalties, algorithmic drops and all other kinds of nasty crawly things that will keep you up at night.

Now we focus more on boosting our clients’ revenue by dramatically improving their conversion mechanisms and processes.

Once the conversions are in place we start grafting in sources of targeted traffic from the search engines, PPC, social media sites, YouTube and anywhere else prospects are hanging out online these days.

Engineering real profit from a website or web properties takes a lot of hard work and painstaking attention to detail.

It’s work I enjoy and very often get to perform in my pajamas. 😉