The exciting part of being connected to the internet marketing network is the opportunity to meet and share experiences with the industry superstars. Over the last weekend, I had the pleasure to meet Simon Leung – an internet marketing whiz-kid and an ex-Google employee who built a million dollar empire within the first year of his business.


  Known in the internet marketing circles as the Google Insider, he is one of   ’The’ Google Adwords gurus going around and is today a widely sought after   consultant, author, speaker, coach and a mentor. Following are excerpts from   my interaction with Simon.

  One of the gems that I picked from him was this – Google is Google’s   biggest fan. And it would help your cause if you can give them a bit of   ego-massaging. Would you mind doing so if the reward is a higher ranking   on the greatest marketing machine on planet earth? I guess not.

So how to do it? Simple. Make sure that Google is amply covered on your website.

- Have blogs on blogger.com. If you have a self-hosted blog, have links to your blogger account
- Link pictures on your site to Picasa
- Put videos from YouTube
- Show Buzz widgets/icons
- Get iGoogle and Knol represented on your site

In short keep your content Google-rich and have plenty of backlinks to your site from those sources.

Search engines and especially Google likes navigational links which adds to the user experience. Follow a consistent structure with templates which has a good number of navigational links which is intuitive and easy enough for the visitors. And those links should be linking to pages within your site and outside. Also, if you’re having outbound links, make it point to do that within specific posts and articles instead of having them on the template and getting repeated on all pages as this lower your ranking on Google.

Google loves content and they love constantly changing content. You should keep the Google spider busy that it finds something new on each of its hop to your site. The caveat is that the content needs to pass the originality test. Google’s algorithms for checking plagiarism and duplicate content are so powerful and ever evolving that there is no fixed formula to get around it. So instead of trying to beat Google at their game, the better and easier option is to have fresh and original content.

Personalize your brand – This is something which struck an immediate cord with me since I’ve been someone who always believed that the most prospective strategy in your internet marketing career is to build your own brand because people buy into people more than anything else. Some of the quick and easy ways of implementing this are,

- Promote your site before anything else.
Eg: You.com/Facebook & You.com/Twitter instead of Facebook.com/You & Twitter.com/You
- Association with industry leaders and experts which helps to build your credibility

Lastly Simon acknowledged that the apprehension of Adwords being an expensive medium is due to the fact that the vast majority of the Ad campaigns are not maximized for results on Adwords. This stems from a lot of misconceptions and misplaced notions that people have about the tool. The Adwords guru’s suggestions were easy – Keep it simple, laser target the audience, keep the promise on your Ad and constantly monitor and optimize.

The interaction was very casual and he seemed a very chilled out guy. And interestingly, he said that one of the reasons of him quitting Google was their shift from a relaxed, laid-back environment to a formal, uptight setup of a corporate giant and that’s not the in-thing with internet marketers. I couldn’t agree with him more.

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