Q&A; - Sounds Great, What's Wrong With It?

I've told you all the good things, but you may also like to know...

What's wrong with Stompernet?

So I'll tell you, at least from my perspective.

1. Some of the SEO content on the "brain transplant" is a little bit basic. Mostly the link building stuff, where they're talking about reciprocal links a bit more than I would. To provide some balance, Leslie Rohde is recording a link building class inside the portal, and I've given them my own advanced Link Building Clinic videos. It's still important for people to understand reciprocal linking, even if it's not a big part of their long term strategy.
   
   
2. Leslie and I found an error in one of the workbooks. It says that using keywords in the title attribute of images and links will help with rankings. As far as Leslie and I can tell, none of the search engines indexes this attribute any more. We've posted our findings in the portal, so nobody has to waste their time with this. I mention this for the sake of complete disclosure.
   
   
3. Leslie and I are like Darth Vader and Yoda. He thinks I don't understand the power of the dark side. He refers to his aggressive SEO methods as "more advanced" than my brand of natural optimization, when it's obvious to me that he just needs to see the light of natural SEO. But hey, it's great to talk with someone who has discovered all of the same advanced techniques that I have, who actually understands PageRank, Latent Semantic Indexing, etc. Now if he'd just put down that light saber and listen to reason...
   
   
4. There is almost too much information. Andy Jenkins has described the initial 15-DVD box set as "drinking from a fire hose," and it's very accurate. All of the new faculty agree, and we are working overtime to collect everything into a more traditional "academic" arrangement, with courses on different topics, for different levels of expertise. It's a good problem to have, and it's why we have so many top-flight instructors.
   
   
5. You actually have to do the work. This isn't a "system" where you push a button and money falls out of the sky. Stompernet won't research a market, build an online store, write your grand opening press release, get you into the right directories, distribute your articles to get links (actually it sort of does), manage your PPC campaigns, run multivariate tests to increase your conversion rate, etc. But, it will teach you how to do all of these things yourself.
   

That last bit is the most important thing. You can outsource a lot of things, but one of the core principles we Stompers live by is that you should never outsource expertise.

That doesn't mean you would never hire someone to help with your online marketing... but it does mean that you need to develop real expertise inside of your own business. Even though I am an absolute wizard with Adwords, I've still hired other people to manage campaigns. It's easy to train them, if you already know yourself.

Anyway, the launch is tomorrow.

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