Can Direct Mail Principles be Applied to Web Properties?

Friday, February 17th, 2012 at 2:11 am

This is a question that has been bothering me for a long time. Some of the best in the whole online thing came from the direct marketing world or were schooled by legends of direct marketing (I am talking about you Frank Kern and your teacher – Dan Kennedy).

Unlike them my career started doing seo for small businesses … for free, to hone my skills. I though that online marketing is be all end all and the offline marketing will day if not today tomorrow for sure.

It turned out that I was wrong – offline marketing/direct marketing is still going strong (even Google uses direct mail to promote its Adwords program).

What happened was that I started to realize that in order to be a successful marketer I needed to learn the principles of direct marketing. And here I am again starting from square 1.

A few days ago I built a website for a chiropractor in Park Ridge IL. This time instead of setting up a website with multiple pages I have only one, so called squeeze page.

Upon lending on the site visitors have only two choices – to enter their name and email address to get the free report “How to Find the Best Chiropractor in Park Ridge IL” or leave the page.

The website has been live for a few days but I can’t get Google to index it (is it just me or Google has been lazy lately when it comes to indexing new websites?).

I expect it to happen in the next 24 hours or so. I am curious to whether it will hit the front page of Google for Park Ridge Chiropractor and Park Ridge IL Chiropractor or not.

If you want to keep an eye on this live case study as it develops – visit www.parkridgechiropractor.net and bookmark it (so you can see when it will be indexed and ranked on page one in Google).

Update 02/17/12 – The website was indexed by Google about 15 hours after I wrote the post (just as I thought). However it took a week for it to be indexed from the moment I put it up online.

As far as the search ranking goes – it is on page 2 (position 6). I am curious what the rankings would be in the days to come.