Aziz Char-Waller Epic fail: (Link building and online marketing)

Today I had more proof that outsourcing digital marketing is just not the route to go down at all.

I received an email from a company asking me to remove their links from my site, I was somewhat bemused and a little disappointed, after all I run a business directory and article marketing website for the UK market and one for the Thailand market where I live. A link from my site is very much sought after, and is great for search engine ranking. So I began to find out why:

 After nearly 9 years of online marketing experience, I know one thing; that Google will (well they are not perfect by a long shot) try to give the searcher what they asked for and provide them with a website that gives information and less sales so that they don’t return to the search engine page and look again, throwing off their pay per click revenue.

With that in mind I started my web directories with a clear goal, give content and lots of it. The Unique selling point of the business directories is the article marketing, I have over the last eighteen months managed to glean the writing services of some of the best authors in the world to write articles for us, and I am happy to say with great results as they get a lot of shares on social media and it has brought my bounce rate down to 30% according to Alexa,

which means they are staying on my sites a lot longer than the average website!

I then did my research into why would a company ask to have their links removed from a business directory? Their listing, which is categorised to highlight them in a category perfect for them, this was a T-shirt company so they were under Shopping/clothing/T shirts category! Then my research started to make sense; upon closer inspection in my UK business directory site the owner of the page had a really obtuse name and he had a few other listings as well, but then the fact that the T Shirt company was based in Leigh near Wigan UK and one of their tags was Liechtenstein?? Well it didn’t take me long to lead me back to our culprit: the Char-Waller of Bombay again!

God bless this poor guy, he’s learned SEO and he knows how to manipulate keywords, he is God’s gift to the Google robot, but knows very little about the geography of North West UK, and even less about T shirts or the  UK people that buy them!

In this instance it seems poor old Aziz Char Waller has added their business to lots of websites online and has added what scant information he knew about the businesses he was assigned by the call centre manager. Poor old Aziz is doing SEO in the morning and then selling utilities over the phone to Kent households in the afternoon all from his hot desk in downtown Calcutta! (See my Indian Geography is on a par with Aziz’s UK geography!)

Let’s not shoot the messenger here, let’s go for the big fish; I.E. The UK Company that is so busy that they have no time or any inclination to learn about a massive and vital process in their business which is online marketing and social media, and has outsourced it to India for a few rupees. Job done, let’s go the pub!

If you are prepared to leave vital information about your business in the hands of others then you will have to do a lot of cleaning up to do later. In fact they will have had to contact almost everyone Aziz has added their business to, so as to correct information about their business.

Here’s another prime example of where leaving it to someone else could go spectacularly wrong:

When I am training business how to get more leads from online marketing, yes I know, that’s quite patronizing, like saying I am teaching a baby to drink milk, but really the vast majority are doing it all wrong, they don’t really know why they have a website, someone told them they must have one, er, why?

Recently I visited a company as they had a huge challenge. When I got to their office they told me they seemed to have lost their business domain! Yes lost it! And can I get it back for them? “Well sure” I said, “First thing is: Let’s log in to your domains account” Their answer: lots of blank faces!

“That’s just it Alan our old web designer bought the domain for us and has all the passwords and well he’s sadly passed and his wife is too distraught to continue the business and he always did it all for us.”

The upshot of this story is they lost their main business domain to someone else who is now cyber sitting on it waiting for what they call ‘an appropriate offer’.

Buy your domains yourself with your own credit or debit-card; most of the top domains hosting companies accept PayPal too. It will take approximately 5 minutes to purchase a domain, and you get a receipt too! Any web designer does not need your passwords, they can come to you, you open the account and they can do what they need to do!

 Be warned: He who buys the domain owns the domain, unless they have passed the domains to you by you setting up a domain hosting account!

It’s so easy to give in to the sales spiel of a company offering cheaper alternative to do your internet marketing for you, when you should be learning about this aspect of your business so you have complete control by doing what essentially is housekeeping for your business, keeping your brand and online real estate close to your chest, like your baby and nurturing it so you know and ‘feel’ your business. When you let someone else in, and you give them a free reign, well that’s when the proverbial baby pulls the contents out of the fridge all over the floor!

To learn all I know about online marketing and social media in Thailand contact Netmedia