Keen to get this site and its attendant services known to people in Perth, I have created a Twitter account specifically for it. It's been going about a year. I'm getting close to a thousand followers now, most of them in the city. 

To do this I've been using a tried and true method of building a network. And that is to follow people in your target demographic. Do this and a good proportion of them tend to follow you back. A good way to find these people is via the categorized lists that users make up. 

You can do this for any niche. It can be good if you are looking for people in your city, particularly early in in your Twitter journey. However, you have to be careful when using this method because you look at the lists marked, say, "Perth tweeps", "Perthians", etc, you'll find that a large proportion of them that are no longer active. So you should just check when their last tweet was before following them. 

In any case it is a strong reminder of just how many people do get into Twitter, go for a while, and certainly long enough to get on the radar of others. But they don't hang in there. (Perhaps some of those dormant accounts will start to stir again. They haven't been deleted after all. I'm sure the owners of many of them do intend to get around to it.)

Anyway, once you've found some good people in your target niche -- local or otherwise, if that's your focus -- you can find still more by looking at the ones they follow, and who follow them. But don't scroll down too far when doing this. You want to find the people who have joined these lists recently as opposed to a long time ago. These will be much more likely to be active for obvious reasons. 

Although a big part of your motivation for following these people is the hope that they will quickly follow you back, don't make it the only one. Try and find good people that seem interesting and engaging and have solid followings. This is because regardless of whether they're following you, if you do start having conversations with them, they'll be replying to you using your handle, which will be seen by a proportion of their followers. And they may well end up following you in the long run as a result of this interaction anyway.

After a while you will find that some people just won't follow back. So it's fine to unfollow them so you can follow others and keep building your network. But if you've done it this way you're not "churning and burning" which looks very spammy to Twitter. 

Speaking of which: When doing this I wouldn't follow more than twenty tweeps a day. And have a few days off from time to time. If you follow too aggressively you may end up being marked as a spammer by the site's internal algorithm and have to spend time in "Twitter Jail" (Twitmo). Needless to say you can do without that anxiety ... 

Now I know that making money is not primarily some arty, creative thing. You've got to be hard headed about it to some degree. Let's face it, if you don't have some product or service that people need enough to hand over their hard-earned money for, you'll just go bankrupt. So there's a lot to be said for being dispassionate when formulating business ideas. But there's a lot to be said for building a business around a passion, too!

After all, you're going to be putting a whole lot of time and energy into realizing your goal of creating your own income, and not being a slave to someone else. So you might as well enjoy what you do.

Apart from the pleasure that this activity gives you, your clients will pick it up as well -- particularly if your business involves a lot of human contact. It's just so much more fun dealing with people who are enthusiastic, and aren't just doing it for the money after all. If your customers sense this, odds are they'll recommend you to others too.

Now, if there's a huge and constant demand for that thing that you find so fulfilling, you're pretty much home and hosed. If there isn't it's obviously going to present some challenges. But I don't think these are insurmountable in most cases.

As long as you've got something that some people need and are willing to pay for, the challenge is to find where they are and advertise to them. Then you've basically got to get your advertising costs down low enough that you're making a profit -- even a small one. Then you rinse and repeat, refining it all the time. 

This is obviously a long process. That's why having a passion is so important. It will keep you going until you do find a way to make your venture profitable. If there's no passion, you'll give up pretty quickly. 

Here's an example from my own experience: As a result of promoting this very site and its attendant services, I've realized that there's a huge demand for people seeking help with computers. They need them fixed cheaply, and many have emotional issues with them and feel they need someone to patiently guide them through using them so that their fear goes away. I could easily make much better money than I am now if I choose to offer both, or either of these services. I won't, however, because I'm neither a geek nor a social worker!

My passion lies in blogging, drawing traffic via search engines, and social media usage. And I enjoy teaching people key concepts about these practices. This is a smaller, narrower market than the computer troubleshooting and instruction described above, but it's definitely out there. 

I know this because I have slowly been building an income offering these lessons. I'm not saving anything but I am getting by, just. And I can see what I need to do in future both short and long term. There's no reason I can't increase my income by about a third in the next six months. If I manage to do that I'll be laughing. 

Having a passion is also particularly important to the online aspects of promotion. That enjoyment of and keen interest in what you do is what will supply you with so much unique content that you can put in blog posts and be found by people who might ultimately buy your services. You can share it on social media, too, thereby building substantial authority on those sites. 

Teaching the social media and SEO lessons has been a real eye opener. I've come to learn about the numerous and entrenched misconceptions many people in business have about website promotion. I'm also getting a handle on what their priorities are.

Something that intrigues me is that quite a few website owners don't make drawing traffic a priority. I think this is because they assume that it will just start to flood in automatically. 

But even when they realize that hardly anyone is looking at their sites, they often don't resolve to do something about it. I know this because of calls I receive from people who've seen my ads for traffic building lessons. Even though that's where they got my number, they're not really interested in getting more quality clicks. They often want to know if I can do other, usually very specific tech-related things for them! 

I scratch my head sometimes wondering why they think like that, particularly when they're spending maybe fifty bucks a month on web hosting, as some do -- not to mention the hundreds, if not thousands they originally paid a gun web designer to make their site look just how they wanted. 

I think it's because they don't have a clear goal in mind. They've gotten online because everyone's doing it. It's the conventional wisdom that a website is just something you should have if you're in business these days. And now everyone's using social media so they feel the need to do that too. They see having an online presence as a requirement. But they don't truly realize the potential power of it.

But really you need to get online not just because everyone's doing it. You should do so because it can be such an effective way of getting known by more people in your target demographic. You can build trust that way too. This can be a huge boost to sales, and all for very little money if you tackle it right. 

Anyone who gets calls that come as a result of Google searches knows this. People really trust the search giant. They convert into sales at a high rate. Social media leads are also good quality, although of course the process by which they come is not nearly as direct as it is with search.  

Basically, you've just got nothing without traffic. It doesn't matter how beautiful your website looks and how proud you are of it when you look at it. You've got to use it! And to use it, you have to get people to look at it -- and not just any old people. They have to be in the right demographic.

Achieving this is no mean feat. It's certainly not impossible. But it's going to take some thought, tweaking and persistence. Odds are it's going to be a much bigger challenge than you thought it would be. And it's going to take a while. So you should really get into it right from the get go and keep the pressure on until it starts to bear fruit. 

Do that and your website will be a profitable investment. But if you just let it sit there in the background and never take advantage of it, it could end up being money down the drain. While that waste may just be a trickle, after a year or two it could add up to a depressingly large amount of cash.

Among several others, there's one widely held misconception about optimizing your website for search engines that I think is particularly damaging. It has two main elements: That SEO is primarily a technical task. And it's "set and forget" so you only have to do it once.

The theory goes that you have to do it right, however, and that's an involved process requiring super-expert knowledge. If you manage to do this, or have it done for you, you'll rocket to the top of the search engines and stay there, reaping rewards for many months if not years to come.

Pretty much this entire scenario is tosh. It's not set and forget for a start. It's much more of an ongoing process. And that's primarily a human (as opposed to technical) one. And while it's definitely worth knowing what you're hoping to rank for and structuring your site accordingly to make this as clear as possible to Google, this will usually only get you a little way. 

Yet this unrealistic belief persists for some reason, and many web hosting companies exploit it. For example, you often see ads for web hosting packages that feature the claim: "Website comes optimized for search engines!" 

But what does that mean, exactly? Optimized for which keywords? And to what extent? 

It's clearly meant to make you think that you won't have to do anything yourself, that you're going to get Google traffic immediately or pretty soon thereafter. People believe this claim and that's why they're happy to hand over their money, sometimes a helluva lot of it. 

Slowly it dawns on them that their expectations are not being met. But by then it's too late, they've bought the product. They realize that rather than being at the end of the process, they're actually at the beginning.

If you're one of these people and you want to achieve the optimization you thought you were already getting, but didn't, you'll have to do a whole bunch of things yourself. 

Basically, you have to choose what keywords you're trying to get found for and build pages around them. Then you've got to build some links, as well as drawing relevant, voluntary one way links to your site (still a hugely powerful factor). You want to get some social sharing of your pages as well. When these factors are operating cumulatively -- among many others such as load time, age of domain, bounce rate -- and Google is getting some "good vibes" from your website, the hits will start to come. Only at that stage can it truly be said that your website is "optimized for search engines". 

Because there's a widely held view that online marketing is primarily a technical process that requires detailed, expert knowledge, many people in business believe that they should hire an SEO company to do all the work that will result in that high quality organic Google, Bing and Yahoo traffic coming to their site.

In many cases doing it this way is by far the best option. But for a lot of businesses (small, locally oriented ones in particular) outsourcing this task may well end up being a waste of money. If you take a different approach, get a handle on the key concepts yourself and apply them consistently you may well end up ranking for some relevant keywords before too long and make a few sales as a result. Reach that stage and you'll really start to get into it and own the process. Then there'll be no stopping you!

You don't outsource decisions regarding offline advertising, after all. That's because you want to choose what you're doing, try different approaches and monitor the responses you get so you can improve on them. So why hand the challenge over to someone else when it comes to a big chunk of your online promotion?

Sure, an SEO company can save you time. And it may get you some good results. But ultimately the process is fractured in the vast majority of cases. They do their thing and you do yours. The two operations are not meshed -- at least not in an ongoing way. 

And usually, unlike you, they don't truly care about the site that they're optimizing. Sure, they may be skilled, have professional pride and the very best of intentions. But they don't have the strong connection to the site that you have. After all, your website is your business on the web. And you and your staff are your business. It's the knowledge, skill and professional conduct of these people that Google is really trying to get a handle on so it can rank your pages accordingly. 

Let's say that you are a local dog breeder, for example. You decide to outsource your site building and SEO to a company. They are flat out with numerous projects and decide to target an obvious keyword phrase, say, "dog breeders Perth". They build a main page around that, along with a contact and about page. They write the copy, build links and finally get you on page one for that search. That brings you some good traffic and you are getting calls and sales so you're happy, and you never look further into the whole process.

However, if you'd done it yourself, you might have taken a different route that was ultimately more profitable. For example, since you have several different breeds, as well as the main page targeting "dog breeders Perth" you build a page for each of your breeds. So you have separate ones targeting "poodles Perth", "daschunds Perth", "pekinese Perth", etc. 

Say your main page doesn't rank very highly, but these individual pages do consistently well with say, five out of seven of them in the top three results of each search term. Because of the specificity of these searches, the traffic is excellent quality, and it adds up to more than getting on page one for that main, obvious search. It was easier to get to this level and you actually get more conversions as a result. 

Now, it all depends on the SEO company you hire. Some may have seen this possibility. But some would not. They don't know your business well enough. So they don't think of it (or maybe they do but decide it's more profitable to go with the simple obvious approach). But because you know your business (hell, you are your business) you do think of it. And because you care about the site you are willing to put the time into building these pages. 

And that's my point. If you can get into SEO enough to own the process, you can then make adjustments that will improve its effect. If you just think "Oh it's all too complex and difficult" and consequently outsource it to someone else then you may well be missing out on a whole lot of benefits.

These days there seem to be many people saying that blogging has had its day as a means of online promotion; that its been taken over by social networks. Well, I don't think this is true at all. Blogging is still a powerful tool for anyone who wants to get his or her message out, whether they're in business or not. (And it is a social medium in itself. Actually, I think that communities forming around blogs were the original social networks.)

The major benefit of blogging is that it's a great way to establish your authority. By persistently adding informative, useful content related to your niche you can prove beyond any doubt to anyone reading it that you really know what you're talking about; that you're an expert in your field.

This is a good thing in itself, of course. But It's extremely useful if you're in business. It will garner respect and trust from people who you may end up forming partnerships with. And your authority will build confidence in your products and services, thereby increasing the odds that people will buy them. 

Then there's blogging's power as a traffic generator. Firstly, it increase the odds that your website, and thereby your business, will be found by people using search engines. 

Remember that Google ranks pages separately. And every blog post is another page. So every time you write one you have another chance of ranking for a query (usually a "long tail" search that is highly specific and often contains several words). 

It's kind of like fishing for readers. You think about where they might be biting, and you cast your blog line over there. Sometimes you get bites, sometimes not. But if you keep at it you will slowly but surely build traffic.

Say that after several months of blogging you have dozens of posts up there. Of those, you end up with 15 blog posts being found in long tail searches twice a week on average. So that's another 30 hits a week that keep on clicking over.

Now some of those people are sure to click through to the sales pages of your site. Perhaps only a few of these visits result in sales. Maybe none of them do directly. Still, that's an extra thirty people who have found you who wouldn't have otherwise. That has to be a good thing for your business. 

As well as the search engine clicks blogging generates all that extra, relevant and unique content under your domain looks good to Google in a general sense. Now, as with so many things related to the search giant it's hard to know just how much influence blog posts have on the rankings of other pages. But they do seem to help, particularly if you link back to them from the blog post. (Interlinking within your own website has long been known to help with website SEO.) 

Also, a blog supplies a pounding pulse. You're saying to Google: "Look, my website is alive and kicking. See, I'm constantly adding stuff!" Now if you are competing with someone who's been beating you for various keyword searches but hasn't updated their site for ages this could be just the factor to lift you above them in some results.

Blogging also supplies you with other earning possibilities. You can put affiliate products on your site, for example. You can also rewrite your content and create an ebook out of it, and sell it off the blog itself. (If you are to do this, you should condense and improve it so that it's distinct from the blog itself, of course. That way you won't be charging for something that your readers can already get for free.)

Another reason to blog is that it keeps giving you something new to share on social networks. Sure, you can engage with your followings in a different way, conversing with them and sharing stuff written by others. But it's way more impressive to them if it's your stuff your sharing.

Finally, regular blogging is invaluable if you intend to write for a big media outlet. It might help you get the gig in the first place, and the fact that you've been cranking out heaps of quality content means that you'll be well prepared to do so for someone else. 

If there's one central characteristic of social media that people new to it should get their heads around it's this: It is two way. It's a conversation, not a lecture. Your aim should be to use it to develop many friendly, brief but nonetheless meaningful online relationships with others who share your interests. 

That's pretty obvious. It's called social for a reason, after all ... 

But it's clear that many people -- often those in business --- don't quite comprehend this. They tend to think it's a variation on the concept of a mailing list. The believe you get a whole bunch of followers who are interested in what you're selling. And you just keep pumping out offers until eventually some of them purchase something from you. 

I think this is why so many people fall into the trap of buying followers and likes, which is a total waste of money.

It's also completely understandable that it would be this way. If you're trying to make your business profitable you have to have a hard-headed approach. You think very much in terms of raw numbers, demographics, leads, and percentages that convert into sales, etc. 

So seeing a promotional method as much more of a human, interactive, even emotional process is a big ask. But if you can make that shift you will immediately start making progress with social media. And it will be a whole lot more enjoyable, not a chore at all (unless you hate interacting with people, as some do, no doubt).

Still, progress can be very slow even if you are doing it right. If you are in business of course you want to get some sales, and soon. And there's no guarantee that this will happen in a time frame that you consider acceptable.

This can cause deep frustration, even for those who are quite adept at social media use and who are enjoying the process on one level. I think more than a few business people decide that while it's right for some people, the ROI is just not high enough for them. So they give it away or hire someone else to do it.

The whole question of ROI for social media activity is a big one. And the need for answers to it has spawned a whole new industry of analytics tools and consultants. So the vagueness about just how much time you need to spend on it to make it worthwhile may be gone before too long. 

In the meantime I think the best approach is a comparatively free-wheeling one that isn't fixated on results. Basically, get in there and find those good people. Help them with your knowledge and learn from them. Be helpful and friendly. It will help you progress in the long term, even if you can't quite see how. 

Apart from their recommendations in the form of shares, links etc, some of them are sure to buy from you. You're just doing things in reverse. Rather than customers getting to know you after buying something you're selling (then returning because you've established a cordial relationships) you're establishing the relationship first.

I have been struggling a bit to find the right kind of market for my lessons. The main thing I want to do is quickly help people get some benefit out of online marketing methods such as SEO and social media by explaining key concepts and showing them how they work using examples from my own websites and accounts. Keen to disabuse them of their misconceptions I point out the most common pitfalls so they can avoid those and focus on the best practices.

"It's all about computers"

But what I've found is that those misconceptions are amazingly pervasive and stubborn. One of the big ones is this idea that social media and SEO are about computers; that they are primarily technical processes. So you need to be a bit of a geek to use and benefit from them. But in reality they are both much more about human behaviour. 

Many of the calls I get are from people asking me to teach them technical things, or do technical tasks for them. When I explain that's not what I do they don't quite understand. They just can't get their heads around it.

It's a strange situation to be in because in one sense these are exactly the people I'm trying to reach (so that I can disabuse them of their misconceptions, which could end up saving them a lot of time and money) but they don't want to buy what I'm selling. They want something else. So it's a "Catch 22". 

The best way to describe it is this: I want to teach them what they need to know. They don't know they need to know it, however. They only know what they want to know. And often this aim is based on a misconception.

"Build it and they will come"

As well as this idea that online marketing is all technical, geeky stuff, there are other, related misconceptions. For example, some people think that the moment they publish a website, people will start visiting it in their hundreds. This is the "build it and they will come" fallacy.

Here's an example: A woman called me asking how to get the look of her Weebly website just right and was frustrated by the customization process. 

After a few minutes talking on the phone I realized that she wasn't actually publishing the changes she was making to it. So I said she should do that first. She told me that she didn't want to press publish because she didn't want people to see it while it was under construction. I politely explained that unless she already had some PPC advertising program in place (which she hadn't) no one would see her site. In fact it would take months of work before anyone other than herself and her friends would even know it existed. 

"It's all too complicated and time consuming to do myself"

There's another firmly entrenched but equally inaccurate belief on the opposite extreme: People think that drawing targeted traffic to their website is going to take amazing expertise and countless hours of work by hordes of bespectacled web ninjas .

Yes, it take some time. And you have to comprehend a few central concepts and keep applying them. But if you make some good decisions and chip away at it, it's not that big a job. For example, there's no reason you can't have an engaged Twitter network of over a thousand targeted followers within a few months if you put ten minutes a day on average into it. 

Similarly, if you've done some keyword selection and built clear, unique and relevant pages, you could well be getting a few search engine hits a week within a couple of months. Now that sounds like next to nothing. But considering how much people trust Google that modest sum can still bring in sales. And you can build on this success from then on. (This is particularly true when it comes to local businesses. This is because it's still quite easy to rank for many local terms.)

If people do have this particular misconception and they're running a business their most likely conclusion is: "I'm too busy to do this myself. I'll just pay someone to do it." That's fine but the problem with that approach is that you may just be throwing money down the drain, and lots of it.

My attitude is: Get your head around the key concepts. Learn what things you can do to move forward, however slowly. Keep chipping away at them and you'll really start to get into it. If you get to that stage you'll almost certainly do a better job than some company that is simultaneously promoting hundreds of websites including yours.