Freeman Cebu Business

Online marketing seminars

TRADE FORUM - Chris Malazarte - The Freeman

December 13, 2014 | 12:00am

Jump packed is what describes best the seminar that I did two days ago on online marketing. Worth noting in that seminar is the number of online marketers as well as search engine professionals present during the event. One question that caught me by surprise was if I ever had any experience or track record on the subject given the fact that my name is kind of unheard of in the radar or circle of online marketing practitioners. I cannot blame him for casting doubt on what I know since to begin with, I do not belong to any society of online marketing gurus, much less actively advertising my knowledge and skill on the subject since I am not also into getting paid to conduct seminars like what most of them do.

But to doubt one’s capacity over the subject, especially if it means to people who are already familiar with the topic, must not be taken lightly. People who listen to resource persons in a seminar are also wrangling to catch up for new ideas, knowledge and trends only because online marketing is a rapidly evolving affair. Secondly, online marketing is not just about what you know it’s about what you’ve done as a practitioner. People who are in the business will always be nosy when it comes to your credentials – the number of followers on your pages, the successful campaigns you did and other experiences that you have encountered.

For people who have followed this section, and for those who are curious about my knowledge chest in online marketing or the size of my footprint in Facebook marketing over the course of my practice as an online marketer for the last 12 years, I would like to say that I’ve done fairly a good job in what I do. Without sounding too “braggy“ (if such word exists), I probably am among the few who have personally owned and maintained many of the popular and biggest Facebook pages and groups (in the county). Some of you may have been a fan or member of these celebrity or regional pages and groups. Overall, the combined following in all of these pages that I maintain may be over 30 million. That’s fairly a good record for someone who gained that much following with nearly next-to-nothing investment in paid advertising. For me, the true test to a successful page on Facebook is by the quality of your content – which should draw your audience to your page, not surreptitious advertising.

Lest I be accused of advertising what I know, I would like to make it clear that my services as an online marketing resource had already long been concluded some five years ago and am therefore not for hire, nor open to do “seminars for a fee” in online or Facebook marketing. The seminars that I conduct are free of charge to a select people who are doing online marketing in property-related products or service.

So going back, I’m sure many of you have fallen into the trap of attending online marketing seminars that collect huge sums from participants like you and end up learning something that are recycled from the internet. It’s such a pity that many of those who advertise themselves as credible resources in online marketing can just easily say “me too” by just dropping a page they just manage than they personally started or owned.

In addition, many of these paid speakers in online marketing seminars especially on the subject of search engine optimization (SEO), more often than not gabble unfamiliar or technical terms like “alt tags”, “metatags”, “bots” and all to mesmerize their audience with their so-called digital prowess. Don’t you ever fall for this gibberish garbage. Technical compliance is just only 25 percent of the entire SEO campaign and you can even do this by looking it up in the internet. To win in the search engine page ranking war is mostly about content, the quality of these contents, and by the amount of time you spend in keeping them updated.