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Sometimes I just have to walk away from my desk and find a nice quiet spot where I can beat my head against the wall and not be disturbed.

Those times usually come immediately after a phone call or a visit from someone we built a website for ... usually over 12 months ago ... who wants to complain bitterly that their website isn't working for them, When asked what they mean by "not working for them" they usually base their opinion on the fact that it's not on the first page of any of Google's search results.

I then ask them why they think that their website deserves such a good ranking and have they done anything to promote their website since we built it and I always get the same old answer. No, they've done nothing to promote their website and it should be on page one of the search results because it's their site ... it's relevant ... it deserves a page one listing and Google would give it to them if we hadn't done something wrong.

What that something might be is never quite defined but we must have done something wrong and it is definitely our fault and we better damn well fix it.

Yes, in this day and age people still believe that Google is their friend and that they are somehow entitled to a page 1 ranking for their website. They might only have three links pointing to their site and they may have never had their site updated since the day it went live but it still deserves to be on page one and it's our fault that it isn't.

And then when I ask them what they're doing to promote their website off-line I get either a dumb look if it's a face to face meeting or a deathly silence if they've called me. Have they added their web address to their company vehicles and their private vehicles? Have they added their web address to their letterheads, quote forms, business cards and every other bit of advertising they might do? Of course not.

Now you wouldn't be like that would you? You haven't wandered into and adult online industry with the belief that it's all just one big free ride have you? You do understand that you're not going to build just one site and then be able to sit back and watch the money roll in don't you?

If you have come in with that belief then I have some very sad news for you. Here you can make money ... lots of money ... but you are going to have to work your ass off for it.

Funnels
As you may have noticed from some of my columns recently, I've been looking at the Indie publishing scene where people, writers, authors, write a book and publish it for Kindle readers.

In many ways that part of the publishing industry is a lot like adult online. Many people try their hand at it thinking that they'll write a best seller with their first book while those who want to make serious money understand that success involves lots of hard work and writing lots of books. But there is one thing that the successful guys over there do that I don't see us doing here.

Here the idea seems to be to get them off our sites and over to the sponsor as quickly as possible. We don't want to be burning our bandwidth on a bunch of free loaders so we never seem to use what the successful Indie publishers refer to as funnels.

Those guys write a series of three or four books ... each running into the tens of thousands of words and each one following on from the last one. Once they have the series under way they publish the first two books and then publish the rest of the series as quickly as possible after that.

They offer the first book for free and at the end they have a strong call to action that encourages people to buy the second book. In the back of the second book they have another call to action that encourages people to either buy the third book or buy the "boxed" set of all four books. The first book was free, the second, third and fourth books all come at a cost while the boxed set is available at a price that makes it more attractive than buying each book individually.

That's the funnel that leads people down from the free book to where they are spending more to find out what happens next. Now would the funnel concept work here? Maybe it would and maybe with a whole lot of adaptation it could work a heck of a lot better than our single free sites and galleries work.

It might be something worth thinking about.