Byte To Byte With Steve Johnsen

Myth: Posting on Facebook will help you rank at the top of search results. Not true. Although Facebook can be part of a valuable marketing strategy, you can post on Facebook a million times and still not have any impact on your website—or your business—getting found by new customers. Here's a question I got this week from one of the readers of my book: "Dear Steve: "I've been considering to hire a company for our website management and SEO that is basically relying on regular postings to our Facebook to improve SEO. They charge $300 initial set up and $99 every month for help with our postings. When I read your book it doesn't seem like you post to social media. Can you please explain how you improve SEO? It seems like that there is more than one way to increase traffic to our site….Also, how do I measure traffic to my site, and how do we measure whether we are successful or not? Please feel free to educate and enlighten me. Thank you." So, thank you to my reader for sending that. Those are all great que

When I'm coaching clients who are going through some type of adversity, the real breakthroughs come when they see that the adversity is a gift. Then we go way beyond simply assuring people that they're going to be okay. We can begin to create a masterpiece. We hear a lot about resilience. People talk about being okay in spite of circumstances. And we've all experienced the opposite, being hurt by something that happened to us, either physically or psychologically. But there's a third state of being that we all have access to that may benefit us even more. The scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about this third state of being in his book "Antifragile." He observed that there are things which are easily broken (fragile), and things which are not easily broken (resilient). He coined the word "antifragile" to describe things which are made stronger by volatility, stress and adversity. There are materials that illustrate this. Glass is robust up to a certain point, but then it shatters with the right amount of st

Myth: Good design isn't needed if you're already at the top of search engine results. Well, I would say that, actually, both are needed! Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and I want to talk about this idea that you don't need good web design if you're already showing up at the top of search engine results. The reality is that these are two separate things, and actually both are needed. Using your website to get you business, to get you new customers, is actually a two-step process. The first step is, you have to get found. When people go online to search for a service provider, you want them to find you. You want them to find your website. But once they click on that link and come to your website, then your website needs to connect with them emotionally and convince them to either pick up the phone and call you, or come into your store location, or fill out the contact form, or however it is that they get in touch with you to start doing business with you. And that is a function of design. Good web design makes an e

Myth: If you build it, they will come. Absolutely not true. When you launch a website, there are a lot of things that need to happen in order to get your website found by the people that need to connect with you. Hi, I'm Steve Johnsen, and I want to talk to you today about a common myth related to websites, and that is this idea that if you build it and launch it, they're going to come to you. Well, many, many business owners have discovered that this just isn't the case. Now, we all know that this is not true in the offline world, but somehow we imagine that it's going to be true in the online world, that all I need to do is get my website built and launched and then automatically I'm going to have people finding it and get customers from that website. Your website is just a collection of files that sits on a computer somewhere in the world. Once that website is launched, nobody knows that it exists, and it really takes a lot of work to get people to find your website. Expecting that you're going to launch a

Myth: SEO is simply pay-as-you-go. Not true! There's actually a huge difference between pay-per-click and SEO, or search engine optimization. Hi, this is Steve Johnsen and I'm going to talk about pay-per-click advertising and search engine marketing, as well as search engine optimization (or SEO), and how these can be done more effectively and how they can help you grow your business. One of the things that I hear sometimes is that SEO or search engine optimization is pay-as-you-go, which means that it's simply a matter of more dollars in resulting in more visitors to my website. The more dollars I put in, the more visitors I instantly get to my website. Well, that's just simply not true. And a lot of times people confuse what is called pay-per-click advertising with search engine optimization or SEO. Both are ways to get people to your website who are online searching for a service provider. But the two models work very, very differently. Pay-per-click is exactly what it sounds like; it means I am paying the

Myth: All web hosting is the same. Simply not true. There's a huge range of types and qualities of web hosting providers and in the impact that that web hosting has on your business. Hi, I'm Steve Johnsen and I'm going to talk to you today about web hosting. There is a myth out there that is very common, that all web hosting is the same. The fact is that there are all kinds of web hosting providers, and a wide range in the quality of their equipment, how that equipment is used, the types of data centers the hosting is in, and—what's most important and the bottom line—in the impact that web hosting can have on growing your business. Now, web hosting is one of those terms that kind of makes people's eyes glaze over, so I hope I don't get too geeky and technical on you here. But it's really important to understand what web hosting is. Your website is actually a collection of files sitting on a computer somewhere. Typically, it's a collection of text documents with some HTML and CSS code, as well as some document