The way most people think of SEO is the same way they do about finding money in the gutter.  We have all done it, we are walking down the street we look down and find a wadded up dollar that probably fell out of a prostitutes bra the night before and we are then soooo excited we can’t even think straight.  None of us would ever try to base our business model on finding money in the gutter.  But that is what many companies do with SEO.  They get a few sales from organic search and they are so excited that they got sales “without spending anything” on marketing and advertising they immediately hire a bunch of people and spend a bunch of money to “find money” again.  Let me first say this.  Every week I get a few people emailing me asking if I do SEO.  Then I will take them down a line of questioning to find out if they should do SEO.  You see I have had over 100 clients over the years and although most of them were young companies in only one of those did SEO play a significant role in their business.  Guess what % of their marketing budget was dedicated to SEO? 0.00% They were an old company and a leader in a niche industry so every month no matter what google changed in the Algorithm they would get about 500,000 visits from organic search.  Once I started working with them we doubled sales in 8 weeks.  Want to know how?  Paid Search (PPC) we bought some clicks from google.  The traffic was very targeted and converted really well.  Add to that it was easy and instantaneous and I would suggest most companies should start with Paid Search every time.  Once cash flow is good and you can afford the long term investment of SEO then do it.

As you know I have a love affair with infographics…well it’s not really a love affair because I am pretty sure these infographics don’t even care if I exists and so really I am more of a creepy infographic stalker, but I digress.  This is a great graphic on PPC vs SEO (put together by an SEO)

I have wanted to create a custom URL shortener using Bit.ly for a long time and I just figured out how.

Step 1. Buy a Short URL

If you haven’t used domain.nr before it is the perfect place to find snooty, geeky domains that guys with trendy glasses who spend too much time sipping espresso will LOVE.  Names like Flickr, del.icio.us and buzz.io

Step 2. Set an A Record or CNAME record to point your tiny url to bit.ly

doing this is a little bit different on each web host but usually very simple.  bit.ly will give you the CNAME and A records to use. If you are doing a subdomain like I did (i.buzz.io) you MUST use the CNAME.

One tip: lower your TTL value so when bit.ly checks for it it will see it quickly

Step 3. Add it to your bit.ly account

Log into bit.ly and go to account>settings and you should see something like this:

That’s it – you should be ready to go.  Now when you add a link to twitter you can be as cool as the New York Times or other bigshots. This is a great tool for branding or any type of viral marketing.