SEO and Offline Marketing

Since yesterday was Saturday I had a little more time to read about SEO and try to apply some of these ideas to my site.

What I tried yesterday was to send an email out to many of my friends to encourage them to comment on my blog or pass it along to friends they think might find it interesting. It's hard for me to measure how many are passing my site along but I can see that about 1 in 10 has actually visited the site (due to a particular URL I included in my email to them). I'm really uncomfortable with solicitation so this is the kind of marketing I will very (very) rarely do.

I wanted to offer a little bit of advice to anyone who is thinking of trying this: I would suggest that you personalize the emailing to each friend you contact. I realize that this will take more time but I can't help but feel my email sent to all my friends at once yesterday is having much, much worse results than I expected.

Yes, I do need to give this some more time but looking back, I really could have personalized it to each of my friends. For the ones who are busy I could have kept things short and sweet, for the friends who love to know how I'm doing with my site I could have been more detailed, and so on.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure my email came off as spammy. Good news: I only contacted a subset of my friends and the remaining I'll definitely be making more personal attempts with. This is also good since I'll be able to directly compare the two approaches.