Suddenly, everyone is on the Social Networking bandwagon. 

My local Small Business Administration is offering classes on the importance of participating in Social Networking sites, blogging, eArticle posting, etc.  The overall name for this activity is Web 2.0.  Tons of SBA offices and marketing experts across the US are offering lessons and ebooks for purchase.

Social networking on the internet is worthless.   I think Google and the other search engines will soon agree.

Most of the social networking posts are now coming from people who are not business-savvy. The posts look more and more like the pages from a teenager's diary talking about her after-school job as in "I helped a client and her granny today" or "Don't miss this weekend's high school football team game."  Just take a look at a few hundred ActiveRain posts to see what I am talking about.

Important aside - Posting on AR to interact and help and industry colleagues is extremely helpful to our businesses and careers because they help us expand our professional knowledge.  That is a different topic from this post.

Most social networking posters have been making matters worse for those of us wanting to market our services on the internet.  The posters are adding sound and video to home-made monologues with head-shot movies of them talking. Boring at best. I think these types of blogs, MySpace posts, etc, will become so full of useless rhetoric that their importance in SEO and internet marketing will quickly fade and no one will pay any attention to them, not even the Google bots.

Forget Google Analytics.  Most small business owners with websites are told to use Google Analytics and other tools to help drive traffic to their websites.

To this I say Phooey.

You can get 5,000 hits (visitors) a week to your website simply by adding some pics of Pamela Anderson.  This will not get you notary work.  What you really want is to get 30-40 hits a week that result in 28+ phone calls wanting appointments.  (By the way, I get more calls than 28/week because my website is not the only place I post information about mynotary services.)

The solution is to make certain the home page of your notary website has all the keywords your prospective clients will use when searching for a notary in your coverage area. Plus give them links to websites with forms that most of your clients need which are hard to find on internet searches.

Check out my website to see what I am talking about.  You are welcome to paraphrase and adapt the text on my website for your coverage area.

btw - I have a psych degree from an ivy league college so I know what I am blogging about.

LauraV   www.ProfessionalNotary.com