Dear KC Readers,

Today is the last day of March. This month marks the 3rd anniversary in the journey of KickstartCommerce.com.

The last 3 years have been amazing, to say the least. There have been ups and downs, big losses but even bigger wins.

My confidence as a writer has been boosted while my writing has grown leaps and bounds. I’m not perfect and there is still room for improvement.

This has been and will continue to be journey. I made some changes over the last 3 months that have drastically put the blog on a different course than when I first started.

I want to share with you and others in hopes that this story inspires each of you to maximize your potential towards achieving excellence and greatness in what you’re called to do in life.

Just some quick thoughts I wanted to share with you today.  I’m nearing the end of my vacation, so you can look forward to having a regular daily domain auctions list starting tomorrow (if I didn’t already post one today).

But quickly, I wanted to give and share some insight with you about a recent experience I had just before going on vacation.

I was researching the various domain auctions to prepare for the coming days list when I noticed a domain that looked quite familiar.

As I usually do when a domain catches my eye, I added the 7 character .com domain to my watch list, and continued my search and review for more expiring domains.

For whatever reason, this one domain kept coming to the forefront of my thoughts.  I wasn’t sure why I kept thinking about it or what connection I had to it, if any, until I strolled into the laundry room.

Okay, this content is quite long… So, grab a cup of coffee and get ready for your mind to be blown with simple concepts to grow your business while reducing its marketing spend. 😉  

Are you ready?  Let’s get started…

I know the entire story about rising advertising costs as I’m sure your wallet has felt the impact too! No matter if you’re a local, regional, national or global business, search marketing is quite competitive and expensive.

Why is search marketing so expensive?

Let’s think about this and walk through the spend. The masses are blindly paying for pay-per-click advertising with YellowPages, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Yelp, Yodle, and other 3rd-party advertisers.

Then there are companies, and this may include your company too, paying substantial fees on a monthly basis for search engine optimization.

That’s just online marketing spend. We’ve not mentioned offline advertising such as billboards, radio ads, door hangers, classifieds, newspapers, magazines and television ads.

There are so many businesses competing to be at the most visible spot of the hottest and most visited media known in the world. The sheer number of companies competing is growing daily due to new businesses launching throughout the world.

And time is of the essence as no business can afford to wait for months and years to grow their business.

To answer the original question of why search marketing is so expensive, I have businesses look at one thing: their domain name.

I’m often questioned about what steps and process to take to rank website content in a search-safe manner.

Most of the time, the question is based around how long should it take for a page or website content to rank in search results.

Often times it’s about how many times a keyword or keyword phrase should be used (i.e., keyword density). While other times it’s about how many internal and external links a page should contain.

Well today, I’m sharing 6 valuable questions to ask when creating epic website content.

We’re kicking of this year with a bang, releasing a MUST-READ ebook topic: Local SEO Marketing.

Yes, there’s an abyss of local SEO marketing content covering a vast number of options for small businesses to locally market services and products.

The list is long, including marketing and advertising options such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Yodle, CitySearch, MerchantCircle, Door-to-Door hangers, and many more…

But I’m not covering those topics in this book. I’m sharing and showing you another less traveled road that only a few are dare to travel.

That’s right, I’ve worked quite hard over the last year researching and experimenting with a variety of techniques and strategies to command local market share for a range of businesses.

And I wrote an ebook to share with you and the world about what I learned in my quest to understand local SEO marketing for myself and others.

In short, getting more revenue and customers in a local market can be quite the challenge for the every day small business and it’s owner (that’s you and me too!).

After all, I’ve been there with my own businesses, and executing local SEO marketing is not an easy nut to crack.  Why, you ask?

As 2015 comes to an end, it’s been quite a year for Kickstart Commerce pertaining to SEO and Domaining.

The 2015 recap…

I’ve help quite a few customers determine that SEO MUST be aligned to the needs of their business as well as their overall marketing strategy.

I’ve successfully taught, coached and consulted quite a customers on what it means to always be continuously content marketing with an education slant and not selling.

I’ve also fired a few customers who only wanted to focus on buying reviews, buying links, or create content based solely on keyword focus in an attempt to sell and not educate.

Although I’m working with less clients, my stress levels are down, yet my overall value proposition has increased right along with profitability.

Where we’re headed in 2016…

I’m looking forward to 2016 and focusing less on SEO and more on domaining. I’ll still accept new SEO relationships with customers, but I’ll be more intentional with who I am called to serve and how to serve their business in the most effective manner long term.

That said, with my new found time in serving less customers, you’ll notice that there will be quite more posts about domaining in 2016. You may have already noticed with daily domain auction posts being made within the last week or so.

Nevertheless, the domain industry overall is growing at quite a rapid pace. Namescon, a growing domaining conference, is right around the corner is expecting nearly 1500 domain investors (aka domainers) to attend.

With the domain industry growing, I’m devoting more time to educating brands not only about SEO and content marketing, but adding to my repertoire the value-add services of educating customers about domain investing at a personal level for themselves as well as a professional level for their business.

With the new domain extensions becoming more relevant over the next couple of years, the time is right for me to transition with the vast market growth of the domain industry itself.

As we enter 2016, I want to leave you with my top 10 predictions for where I see both SEO and Domaining headed. At the end of 2016, we’ll see how spot on I was or was not. That said, here are my 2016 predictions…

Only a few days remain in this year, closing in fast to being only hours.

There is a lot to do before year-end as we prepare for a new year.

And as I do every year, I take a moment to perform 11 MUST-DO SEO actions on my website.  Some of the 11 SEO actions I perform consistently throughout the year.

However, even if I lose track of time during the year, I make sure that the SEO actions we’ll soon discuss are completed at the end of each year without fail.

There’s always chatter about the coming year and what SEO this or that will impact a website and its overall search rankings.

I’m not discounting those articles and predictions.  In fact, I have my own 2016 SEO predictions to be published soon enough.

Stick around, and you’ll see.  But I digress.

There are more than 11 SEO actions to perform on any given website at any point in time.  Some of the actions I’ll soon discuss are reactive, while most are going to be preventative.

The preventative steps will aim to help you successfully and safely manage your website’s growing content while keeping it search-friendly and safe.

I’m sharing with you actions that I find and see substantial benefits to performing at the end of each year for my website.

I hope you receive the same benefits, if not more, that I have from performing the following 11 SEO actions.