How to Succeed in a World With Over 1 Billion Websites

Back in the day

Back in the 1990s when I began doing business online I could put up a website and if I could get the website found I could bank on making money from it. I had some of the first health insurance websites there were up back then. Websites were a novelty. They were new.

Search engines were coming into being. As we moved into the early 2000s then having a website and in particular a website that could do business online if ranked well on the search engines was a winning lottery ticket.

I was lucky.

I was very lucky to have been in front of the trends and have my websites up early on. Back then I had to say over and over again on the site what the site was about as that increased rank. The really lucky thing was by being in front of the trends. My websites were top of the search engines for Florida health insurance and international travel and health insurance across all the search engines.

This was not due to any brilliance of mine. It was being on the internet and thinking having websites would be a good idea and doing it. The doing part is important. By doing this early on I was number 1 because for some time there was no number 2.

There is nothing like being Number 1.

What I found out was being number 1 or at least in the top few back then really mattered. It was better to be at the top of many than to be all alone.

As the search engines were working themselves out on how to make sense of the information coming online being high up meant getting more traffic than other sites and so that alone kept my websites at the top. It was catch 22 in reverse. Having traffic meant you were popular, being at the top meant you had traffic so I stayed up there until the end of 2010 to early 2011.

Back then if you had a website you could count on making money.

Up until that time I could watch my sites generate business. The real peak was the mid 2000s as the economy affected my business as well. It balanced out for awhile as economy pushed things down while internet growth pushed things up.

That was the old days. For professionals and small to medium sized businesses traffic was king and queen. You could count on traffic, leads and prospects to become paying customers and clients.

Hello. Then there was social media..

Social media came into being. Social media happened. This was something new, something novel. As with all new things there are the stages of finding its place. We were moving forward towards the virtual world online more reflecting and modeling our world, our cultures, our relationships, our business relationships and our social ways of interacting.

The more powerful technology becomes the more it looks like life without technology. That might not seem to make sense but think of it this way. Let's look at artificial intelligence. Hummingbird on Google is a step into artificial intelligence in that it is looking to determine the meaning of the sentence or question. That is a huge step beyond searches based on key words only. For those that can remember Pac Man, compare that to the video game Grand Theft Auto.

There is consistency in this.

If we want to find a consistent path online, the path is towards the virtual world more reflecting the real on nonvirtual world. If you want to know where we are going online then look at how people and businesses interacted decades or more ago prior to our virtual world.

Even though technology advances at ever increasing speeds our brains still work as they have for hundreds of thousands of years. Technology is a tool and it is coming closer to us not us to it. The companies and entrepreneurs that bring us what we use online like LinkedIn, Apple, Microsoft, Google and more know this. The interface between us and our technology is looking more and more like life before technology.

Business before the internet.

What did business look like before the internet? One way, not the only way, but one way was that it was personal. My father told me when he needed a loan from the bank he would go to the bank meet with a bank officer that he had known for many years. They would talk and because they knew each other and the bank officer knew my father kept his word would give him the loan. There was no such thing as credit scores. People were not their credit score but their reputation and that people knew who you were mattered. That matters today too.

Back to the present time.

Now, let's come into the present time. Soon, very soon we will have 1 billion websites. Websites are not new and not novel. Unlike when I started online, today having a website even well ranked on Google and having traffic is no guarantee of having paying clients and customers. This is especially true for professionals and small to medium sized businesses.

Large corporations have the money to advertise and brand recognition to do business from their websites. Compare this to big stores and businesses of the past. The problem is that many professionals and small business owners are trying to compete on that playing field rather than playing where they can win.

There is some really good news.

The good news is that with the increasing power of technology we as professionals and small business owners can very successfully do business with each other. We can change our focus from traffic, leads, prospects and Google page rank to building business relationships right here on LinkedIn. Our business relationships start here and then can very quickly be direct offline as they have been throughout history. This is very good news for us and only getting better for those that understand it and act on it.

The principles that have governed business relationships for thousands of years still apply. Letting your work speak for you and having and doing quality work is one of the best things for your business. It has always been important to know who people are and why they should choose you to do business with you.

How do people see you online?

One of the most important things for people is identifying who is qualified and who is an authority in their field and marketplace. Today we often do that by Googling their name or looking at their LinkedIn profile. If someone Googles you or looks at your profile would they want to connect with you based on that?

The good news is that you don't have to win the traffic, lead or prospect battle. You do want to be a professional that others want to do business and that is not about the traffic it is about making solid business relationships. That for me is personal. I would rather have one great business relationship that is good for all parties than 10,000 hits or views with no real business being done. Of course having 10,000 real business relationships would be good too.

Let's connect on LinkedIn John K Arnold
The possibilities are limitless.

John K Arnold is a 30+ year insurance professional working both domestically and internationally. Now creating authority marketing campaigns for qualified insurance agents, agencies, employee benefit companies and other professionals, entrepreneurs and small to medium sized businesses.