How-To: Build Real Internet Equity

From Pavement to Pixels

Websites, blogs, Wikis, Social Profiles develop equity similarly to commercial real estate. Successful commercial real estate development follows a formula: First, you purchase some commercially zoned land, preferably on a busy street, in a bustling part of town. You develop the land by laying a foundation, erecting store fronts and putting down asphalt for parking. Shortly thereafter, your new development attracts some long term tenants, like a 7-Eleven or an In-n-out, who bring in significant consumer traffic and transform your land into valuable commercial property.

In addition, maybe you put up a billboard over the busy street and collect some advertising revenue. Over time the land under your store fronts builds real estate equity. You can leverage this equity to buy more land, on a busy street, in another bustling part of town.

Internet properties, like blogs, can develop equity also. You purchase a domain name, preferably one that clearly describes the intentions of your blog. Next, You develop your blog with content like blog posts, images, or video. With each published blog post you announce your presence to the world by pinging blog search engines. Shortly, the search engines will send over spiders that will index your site and add your blog posts to search engine listings. Over time the domain name associated with your blog builds reputation, with readers and search engines, as your blog posts move up the organic search listings.

Building Internet Equity

You’re building equity now because your new web property is attracting natural web traffic in addition to gaining rank, reputation, and trust with the search engines. You can leverage Internet equity in a myriad of ways: collect some ad revenue by putting up banners, promote other web properties you own through the use of back-links from your blog posts, Communicate your ideas and goals to your readers, or describe and discuss your newest products and services. The opportunities are endless. Just like with real estate the sooner you get in and the longer you are around the more equity you build.

Temporary Solutions to Permanent Problems

I view purchasing banner ads, pop-up ads, or paid search listings the same way I view renting space on a billboard or leasing a storefront in a busy commercial development. It’s a temporary solution to a long term challenge. You don’t need the billboard or the storefront; you need the land under them. You can do anything you want with that land if you own it; and you can leverage the equity later to create more opportunities.

You shouldn’t focus on banner ads, pop-ups, sponsored blog posts, or paid search listings. Paid for blog posts can look contrived; banner ads and pop-ups aren’t effective anymore because people ignore them. Paid search listings are effective but they are expensive and people don’t trust them like they trust organic results. The value lies in the web property that hosts the banner ad, or the pop-up, or the paid search listing.

Organic Search Engine Placement is Internet Equity

What is real internet equity and why is it valuable? There are several forms of equity but the type we focus on here, at Adtorrent is organic search engine placement. More specifically, if your blog is number one in a Google search result you’re going to receive a whole lot of targeted traffic.

You can leverage this traffic, the same way you leverage real estate equity, to create opportunities.

People trust Google’s natural search results; if your blog posts rank well in the natural results people are going to visit your site with some amount of inherit trust. Over time trust nutures the reputation you build with your readers and the search engines. Your blog’s pagerank increases and you move up the orgainc search results. You’ve gained equity because now there is value, built up in this website, where before there was little or none.

In Google We Trust

The key here is trust. Increasingly, your online reputation precedes you, like it always has in the offline world. Its easy to trust somebody with a sparkling reputation. Google shows a great deal of trust in websites that make up their top 10 or 20 organic search results. Googles’ livelihood depends on the quality of their first few search result listings. So it makes sense that only websites with a great reputation top the organic results. We trust Google because they are excellent at what they do. The websites that rank highly in Google maintain a great reputation because Google trusts them - and we trust Google.

There are two ways to build your reputation online: You broadcast your voice throughout the Internet on your blog, with your tweets, or on your facebook page. If you remain transparent and provide the thoughtful information your peers are looking for then you can depend on word-of-mouth build your reputation. Or, you consistently rank highly in organic search listings. Think of moving up the natural search results like building a friendship with the Google. Friendships are predicated on trust and honesty. As you maintain this trust over time your reputation grows. New blogs start off with a small amount of trust with Search Engines - they like to give everyone a chance. You can capitalize on this goodwill.

SEO Zen

A blogging initiative should be the focus of every complete marketing effort. At Adtorrent achieving the number one spot in the Google natural search engines remains our goal for each blog we produce. Blogs are perfectly suited to maintain top search engine placement for several reasons. Their simplistic, stripped down design makes them easy to crawl and index by search engine spider bots.

Blogs are full of links. You can tell the search engines to revisit and re-index after each new post, update, or comment. Most importantly - and this is where Adtorrent specializes - blogs are full of content. We produce fresh, insightful content; and this appeals to the core mission of Search Engines which is to provide recent, relevant, and reliable information to the web searchers who want it - when they want it.