Talk to any portfolio, hedge fund, or wealth manager about an intelligent investment strategy, or one that maximizes return while minimizing downside risk, and they’ll all say the same thing – DIVERSIFY.
Diversifying your portfolio effectively means spreading your wealth across multiple securities to protect against negative market conditions, or a potential drastic reduction in your portfolio’s Return on Investment (ROI).
Consider a portfolio 100% invested in an American oil pipeline company, and how that stock would react to news that Barack Obama had put a plan in place to have the country running on 25% solar power by the year 2025. The pipeline company’s stock would likely tumble, and naturally, so would your investment.
Now consider a portfolio that still invests in that same pipeline company, but also has money in Chinese solar panel producers, and undeveloped land in Western Florida (the Sunshine State) that, all of a sudden, is an attractive site for the development of a solar farm. Although the presidential address will still have a negative effect on the pipeline company’s stock, 2 things will now occur differently: 1) Only a small portion of your investment is now exposed to this market event, and 2) your other 2 investments are likely to react positively, and maybe even make you more money than you lost from your pipeline investment, making your ROI positive.
So what does all this financial mumbo jumbo have to do with online marketing? Well, the principles are the same. How you rank on Google is more a consequence of the online content that your company produces and markets – we’ll call it your online ROI. The content you create – those are the individual investments that make up your online marketing portfolio. And finally, how you manage each of those streams of content is what Google’s search engine algorithm is really analyzing in determining where you rank.
To put it simply, what Google’s algorithm is looking for, is authentication that you exist in the real world, that people like what products or services you have to offer, and that all these little ‘certificates of authenticity’ are coming from different places on the internet.
Here are a few ways that the Spark team plays nice with search engines:
Social Media Management: These people are your biggest fans. Love them early, love them often, and they will love you back! This is also a great way to generate leads. Active engagers on your social platforms are passionate, and will help you rise to the top if they like what you do.
Email Newsletters: Offer discounts, incentives, share new information, and show up in their inbox rather than them having to find you. Just make sure you AVOID spamming, and follow the new CASL.
Original Content Creation: Start a blog! You’re clearly an expert in your field, if you’ve been able to turn what you love into a business. Tell us what you do, how you do it, and what makes the way you do it awesome!
Paid Search: You pay when they click, so if you target your ads right, you’re only spending money on qualified leads.
Local Citations: Google loves to see you mention your company name and address all over the web. The more transparent and frequent you are with your info, the higher you rank.
Each of these tools has the potential to create enough of a response on its own, but doesn’t that proposition seem risky? We’re talking about your business here! Diversifying, by combining several of these methods together allows you to reap the rewards of effective online marketing, while minimizing the impact of the individual tools that may not work for you.
