by Sasch Mayer
(Opinions are those of ArcLite, not my own)
Like most SEOs and agencies operating around the globe today, we at ArcLite SEO Solutions work tirelessly to copy the many “Eggspurts” we follow on Xitter and Linkedin, so we can compile an incoherent mix-mash of their wildly conflicting information, which we then shamelessly pass off as our own research and experience.
It is therefore our extreme pleasure to announce the launch of our new, 7,698 module Instructional Course on “How To DOMINATE SEO With SearchGPT,” a training program which took us literally months of blood, sweat, and beers to create, and which is most definitely not at all stolen from Wayne Barker, over on Linkedin.
This Super-Secret, World Famous SearchGPT SEO Technique can be yours for just
$9,999.99
Contact ArcLite Solutions today for a special, once-in-a-lifetime coupon code which entitles you to purchase two HTDSEOWSGPT™ Courses for the price of three.
YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS THIS DEAL!!!1!
Now that we’ve safely ditched the Attention Deficit Brigade and alienated the majority of copycat Search Engine Optimizers out there into abandoning this post in disgust¹, because it’s obviously nonsense and not worth stealing, let’s get to the real purpose of the article, since it’s something we’ve (Lyndon and myself) been meaning to discuss in-depth for quite a while now.
What follows is my own perspective on this topic. As time passes, Lyndon will no doubt add his own thoughts about the subject, which will in turn be followed by an in-depth brainstorming session between us and whatever willing victims “participants” we can rustle up at the time.
This, in turn, should eventually make the finished information package a fairly comprehensive resource for startups and small/medium online businesses, by the time we’re all done talking…
In effect, what we’re ultimately shooting for in this particular post is a detailed look at the fact that:
Gaining Traction Does Not Happen Overnight
And you won’t gain it by copying other people…
Starting or running an online business is not easy in this day and age of tougher economic times, and the smaller your venture is, the more difficult gaining any kind of traction becomes. This is even more true in view of the fact that Google blatantly favors large brands over small ones. That factor alone makes any startup have to fight a multi-front battle not only against its competitors, but against Google’s corporate cronyism.
Worse still, the sad truth is that few – if any – of the many self-proclaimed SEO and Online Business “Experts” out there will give you any usable in-depth advice or guidance about the steps, strategies, and promotional outlets required to drag your new venture out of startup obscurity and into the light of profitability, without first demanding payment for some sort of ebook, or webinar, or “secrets of e-business” Course, or some-such.
And even once you cross most of these experts’ palms with silver, much of their advice tends to be a stale, regurgitated version of what other acclaimed business startup experts advocated forty or fifty years ago… swiftly followed by the smug advice that you need to “Get a Blog!”
Unfortunately, however, the Eggspurts’ battlecry of “You need a Blawg!” is rarely followed by any practical or useful instruction of how to use “your blawg” or indeed what to “blawg” about in order to gain attention and customers.
So how do you – as a small business owner or startup founder – educate yourself about the many intricacies of publicity, marketing, and brand-building to the point where you start gaining marketplace traction and making an income?
The easy answer is: “Hire ArcLite Solutions to handle the heavy lifting for you.”
No, seriously… We do this a lot and we’re extremely competent at it.
Why Not Book a FREE 30 Minute Call?
But seriously, seriously… paying for endless numbers of “World-Famous, Super-Secret Technique to Rank #1 on Google and Become Fabulously Rich!” Courses or Webinars, all of which basically parrot the same old tired information, is not the best investment of either your time or money.
Remember: There are no shortcuts or magic bullets for gaining business traction, and too much effort can actually be worse than not enough.
With that in mind I’ll lay out some of the basics that need to be in place before you can even begin to think about trying to gain some traction in your marketplace or sector.
At this stage, your common or garden business advice or SEO Eggspurt will usually start his or her “Infomerciarticle” with some corporate platitude or other, so here goes:
“Start with the End in Sight!”
Gods how I HATE that hackneyed old cliche, not least because it takes the focus and attention right off the actual startup phase itself. What it does instead, is give most business owners and wannabe entrepreneurs visions of grandeur instead of making them prove to the world that their concept isn’t an abject turkey, unlike so many others which are launched on an unsuspecting public every day of every week.
So instead of starting by thinking about ending it all, start with a solid understanding of your profession and your market sector. Follow that with a sturdy proof of concept of your invention, product, or service, and then proceed to carry out some market research and profit & loss studies. Simply put, you need to see if anyone even wants what you’re offering, and if you can offer it at a price your audience can afford and is willing to pay, while you’re still able to make bank.
Then, once you’ve done all that, make the necessary adjustments to your business offering, because there will be a bunch of those. I’ve not yet known a single new business or product concept that’s survived market research or P&L unscathed.
Assuming you’re still in business following this ordeal², you’ll need to make a plan of action to not only break into your market sector and claw market-share from your competitors, but to create enough brand awareness to get your audience talking about you. And this plan had better include a way to pay your bills and put food on the table for 18 to 24 months while you’re in your inception phase. It also needs to include contingency planning against the inevitability of stuff breaking, contractors/suppliers letting you down, and jealous competitors trying to wreck your reputation as fast as you can build it.
I won’t get into detail of all the above within the scope of this particular article, although we will without doubt cover those facets in future. I mention them here because they are realities, and because I’ve walked that walk in the three years following my spectacular parting of ways with my last employer, back in 1999.
Those first three years were tough… and if I can help some folks to avoid a few of the pitfalls I fell into back then, I’ve actually achieved something.
For the moment, however, lets focus on:
Gaining Traction Does Not Happen Overnight
Is there an echo in here?
If I had a Dollar for every time I’ve seen a new business owner or entrepreneur throw their heart and soul into trying to build some kind of audience traction without having solid foundations to start on, for months or years before finally throwing in the towel… then those Dollars would be worth considerably less than they were this time last year.
But I digress…
Ultimately, taking a “Heart & Soul” approach and throwing every waking moment at your startup for months on end will only ever lead to one single place: BURNOUT
As they say in England: “Good things come to those who wait.³”
To wit, building a market presence and gaining traction takes a considerable amount of time in the best of – er… – times, so there’s no point in getting impatient about it. Hence the need for having a startup plan that includes an eighteen month supply of food, rent, and utility money as well as some kind of coherent ongoing promotional structure.
The thing to bear in mind is that when it comes to establishing a presence in your market, patience, persistence, and purpose⁴ are far more important than any other factor, apart from making a solid plan of action and having a workable long-term strategy (that’s somewhat flexible) to follow… but I repeat myself.
That patience, persistence, and purpose, however, will pay MASSIVE dividends in time.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of pacing yourself, when it comes to getting your new venture established in the marketplace, especially if you’re a solo operator or working with a small team on a shoestring… because I also walked that walk back in 1999, and I learned the BURNOUT lesson firsthand and painfully.
In fact, my own journey to establish a brand and a reputation provides an excellent overview of a bunch of brand/reputation-building approaches that actually work… as well as several hundred that really, REALLY don’t.
But let’s focus on what works, shall we?
First Up: Get a Professional Handle
If you check my Linkedin profile, you’ll see that I’m “The Disaster Recovery Guy.”
That moniker was pinned on me by a large international sex-toy retailer client of mine back in 2013, after I lifted a Manual Link Action that was costing him about $500k in revenue per month.
He ended up referring a number of his friends to me, all of whom said something like “You’re ‘The Disaster Recovery Guy’ right?” when they called me, and that label has stuck with me for over a decade now.
If you manage to get yourself a catchy professional sobriquet, it can do wonders for your referral business, as that “Handle” becomes synonymous with your name and brand.
Next Up: Your Brand
Before I started “Armament Solutions” in 2019, and then later “ArcLite Solutions” – together with Lyndon – earlier this year, I was operating as Sasch.co. That started in 2011, by which point I’d made a name for myself as “Sasch” in the SEO Disaster Recovery sphere due to my long-term association with Google and having serviced some massive contracts, so it made sense to shutter my original IceGiant brand, which focused on web and graphic design, and rebrand myself inline with my newly established profession as an SEO Troubleshooter.
SideNote: Unless you’re the smartest or luckiest online business owner or entrepreneur on Earth, you’ll be switching and/or upgrading brands/names during the course of your career. At that point, brand-continuity becomes an important factor. I did not yet know about this fact when I switched from IceGiant to Sasch, but I’ve made full use of it in subsequent ventures, which I’ll outline below.
To be fair, switching to the mononym brand was made fairly simple by the fact that I have an usual name. Were I named something like Frank, George, or Bob, a unique personal rebrand would have required far more creativity.
Then again, that’s why most of us establish actual companies to build unique brands around.
Which is why a catchy, memorable brand name is a vital component for gaining business traction, both online and offline. If your brand is easy to remember, getting referral business will be far simpler than if you choose to call your company something mundane or – worse – something ultra-trendy which is both impossible to spell and pronounce.
Ask me about being approached for help by an outfit called SülPh33d, sometime… 🤦
It’s also worth mentioning Lyndon’s approach to personal brand building at this stage, because over the course of more than a decade and a half he’s managed to do something most professionals and business advisors consider to be utterly impossible:
He’s built a “Completely Anonymous Personal Brand.”
Starting off as “The Autocrat” back around 2008, he then became “Darth Autocrat,” and “Lyndon NA,” on Twitter/X, he managed to accumulate 14k+ followers and become a household name in the SEO sector without ever revealing his real face or real name, in well over a decade and a half of doing business.
How did he achieve this? He did it by being better than the vast majority of his competitors, and by freely giving out information which most other SEOs and Business Consultants charge good money for. As time passed, this got more and more people to follow him, including a great many “SEO Thought Leaders,” some of whom continue to profit from his free advice to this very day…
Isn’t that right, Lyndon?
Anyways, let’s move right along, shall we?
Up Last But Not Least: Your Logo/Emblem
If you check out https://sasch.co, you’ll see exactly where the Armament and ArcLite “A” comes from. It is that “A” which is responsible for transferring brand recognition from my personal “Sasch” brand to our new brands. So when you’re considering logo designs, try to factor in some kind of unique element or badge, which can be applied to subsequent or sibling brands. This alone will make achieving brand-recognition in the marketplace considerably easier.
Again, like your “Handle” and your “Brand Name,” your logo/emblem need to be instantly recognizable, as well as memorable. There are no hard and fast rules here other than these two, and over the years I’ve seen some really oddball logos/names become runaway success brands, so there’s plenty of room for creativity… unless you decided to call your company SülPh33d.
Your logo doesn’t even have to be particularly original, just unique and memorable enough to be instantly recognizable.
With that said, we’re getting ready for ArcLite Solutions’ latest product launch, a new soft drink aimed at an extremely tight niche audience:
See how that works?
You’ll remember that brand until the day you die.
The fact that Coca Cola would sue us into oblivion if we were to actually try and launch this stuff, does not stop it from being a killer example of a memorable brand and logo. However, if you’re taking a derivative approach, be sure you don’t leave yourself open to a copyright lawsuit.
So there you have it: The Trinity of Building an Actual Brand.
“Sasch,” that “A,” and “The Disaster Recovery Guy,” have become part of a continuously evolving brand and set of brands for the past decade, and it’s worked exceedingly well.
And if we can do it, you most certainly can…
We were led to believe you’d talk about actually building some marketplace traction…?
I was just getting to that part.
However, you needed to realize that you must have a solid foundation to actually try and start gaining traction on, because something like “Bob Smith – Swimming Pool Cleaner” isn’t going to cut it if you’re trying to create a brand buzz and stand out from your competitors.
One particular approach I’ve found to be exceedingly effective for gaining attention and visitors, over the years, is the following:
I’ll write an extremely detailed guide about a chosen topic, on my own site. For instance, I might write a guide about “Gaining Traction for Your Business.”
In that piece I’ll go into plenty enough depth to show that I REALLY know what I’m talking about, that I have “walked the walk” and that I’m giving my readers a solid starting-point to begin gaining traction for their own businesses, without actually providing an easy “How to…” blueprint any SEO or Business Consultant copycat can just follow⁵.
Then I find a highly relevant trade magazine or topical website and I offer to write a comprehensive guide on “Gaining Traction for Your Business” for them. I make this guide plenty good enough to provide a detailed insight into my topic, but significantly shorter and less detailed than the one on my own site… I then end it with “If you want to learn more, check out my detailed guide, over at ArcLite Solutions.” which links to my own site.
To be clear, I AM NOT doing this for SEO; I am doing this to actually build an audience to ArcLite, and to raise brand awareness… which is why I need to pick a highly credible online magazine or topic site for its relevance and audience, instead of just scatter-gunning “Muh Guest Poasts” all over the place in an effort to build sh*tty backlinks, and which is why I needed to offer potential readers something on the ArcLite site which they’re not getting unless they click to visit us.
Again, it takes effort and structure, but done right this tactic will pay huge dividends in time, in both visitor numbers, as well as backlinks which are genuinely valuable.
Which brings me to the final aspect of this overview: TIME
If I had a Dollar for ever startup owner or entrepreneur who… Oh! Wait! I’ve done this one already.
Fun-Fact: In the Age of the Soundbyte, most normies have the attention-span of a goldfish and the retention of a sieve. These are two massively important factors to remember as you embark on your journey towards gaining traction for your business and your website’s content.
Remember: Your publicity campaign WILL TAKE MORE TIME than you’ve planned.
It’s no use running any kind of awareness or buzz-generating campaign for a month or two and then giving up. By that point most people are still completely unaware of your company’s existence⁷.
Instead, you need to plan your attack vectors at least six months out, with any content or advertising operation that’s designed to achieve market penetration and consumer awareness. Only by taking a slow and steady approach will you penetrate the average user’s shield of ad-blindness, and pause their attention-deficit scrolling.
Speaking from experience, the average social media user needs to see your brand and headline whoosh past his or her face at least a couple of dozen times, over the course of a two to three month span, before they’ll have enough awareness to slow down and maybe read your intro paragraph. or watch your video’s first thirty seconds… provided you have something which actually interests them.
So plan your attention-getting campaigns accordingly and don’t disheartened if Google or Facebook haven’t offered to buy you out after two months, because they’re impressed by your roaring success in attracting clients and making money.
And lastly, lastly… If you follow my example above, about writing or producing guides for your site/business, and then publishing promotional introductions elsewhere: Serialize Them
In the time it took to write this piece I’ve mapped out a sequential six part (maybe eight) series of startup/small business instruction articles, of which this is likely #4. The whole series will take around two months to create and publish, and ArcLite will also produce videos to accompany each one, so we can get some useful information onto our Youtube Channel.
By the time this is done I’ll have mapped out another series entirely, and the whole process will start off again for another couple of months.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
And gods only know what Mad Scientist stuff Lyndon will have produced for us in that time.
That’s all I have for the moment, but as I said above: This is a work in progress which will eventually end up as a comprehensive – and free – guide for startup business owners and wannabe entrepreneurs, once Lyndon and I hash it out and rope other competent professionals into contributing to the information pool.
So stay tuned, because there’s plenty more of this coming to ArcLite Solutions…
¹ FunFact: If I say “I hate all those damn IP-stealing vultures in the SEO market sector!” and you go “HEY! THAT’S ME! HOW DARE YOU?!” then that says a lot more about you than it does about me.
² and not at the nearest bar getting wasted on Pabst Blue Ribbon while lamenting how you threw that coffee at your old boss before running from the office cackling maniacally, because chances are it’s too late to ask for your job back at this point.
³ Unfortunately most Brits seem to think this means that if you sit around on your hands while doing nothing at all for long enough, you will eventually get some traction for your business.
⁴ as well as Quality and Consistency, but I didn’t want to ruin my alliteration…
⁵ Ultimately I want my readers to go “F*ck⁶ me. This is a lot of hassle. Sasch really knows what he’s talking about, so I’ll hire him to do it.”
You REALLY Should Consider Booking a FREE 30 Minute Call To Discuss This
⁶ Yes, I did just drop an F-Bomb on an actual company website. You’ll remember me for that too.
⁷ Unless you manage to pull off a publicity stunt on the scale of Marvin Heemeyer, in which case EVERYONE will know your name instantly.