Much confusion experienced by online newbies as well as traditional business owners- is a struggle with one of the three agendas on the Website Success Stool.

Extensive surveying confirms this to be true.

Their questions always reflect weaknesses in one or more of the legs.

It is helpful for you to know your personal strengths when entering into the Theme Zoom process.

By having a clear understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, you will know which part of the Theme Zoom software will require more explanation and focus.

Strong Technical Leg Agenda:

web developer, webmaster, IT person, SEO person, geek

If someone is a web developer, they are often weak in direct response marketing. (Direct Response Leg)

If they are good at technical SEO, they often struggle with how to find well-written content to represent their website. (Educational Leg)

Strong Direct Response Leg Agenda:

marketer, list builder, affiliate, super affiliate, sales person

If they are direct response marketers, they are often crippled when it comes to organic search engine optimization (SEO), which is the technical leg.

Strong Educational Leg Agenda:

writer, teacher, instructor, professor, SME (subject matter expert), guru

If they are strong writers and educators they are often weak in both the technical leg and the direct response marketing leg. They usually do not have a problem coming up with excellent quality content.

The educational leg of the agenda refers to the well-written and interesting content carefully prepared by a subject matter expert or research writer regarding a topic or theme. This material is generally well edit and prepared for consumption by the masses.

In its simplest form, the confusion has to do with how to best integrate the PPC as well as the SEO agenda:




Let’s define some of these terms.

Direct Response Agenda = Pay Per Click

For example, pay per click marketing (PPC) is primarily a “Direct Response” agenda.

Direct response marketing should be tightly  focused on creating laser targeted ads and split testing them to see which keywords and offers will appeal to your prospects and make them DO something. Hopefully what they are doing is buying something from you . . . and in record time.


Educational Agenda = Well written and informational content for suspicious prospects.

The educational agenda on the other hand is not always about “getting” instant direct sales responses. It is about “giving” not so much about “getting” in the sense of instant gratification. Educating customers is more about giving information away and building your credibility over varying amounts of time. The response may be instant (direct) or over time (indirect.)

The name of the game in organic search is to provide well written free educational content to increase visitor trust and reduce the confidence gap early on in the buying cycle.

This is one of the main things that PPC gurus and technology centric entrepreneurs often forget.

The internet is an “information-on-demand” technology that has widened the confidence gap between offline buyers and online sellers.

Please review the following presentation before you build your website.

Do not neglect the educational agenda, or you will have an unbalanced business platform:

The Overly Educated Shopper    (Articulate Presentation)


Technical Agenda = Natural Search Engine Rankings

Natural (Organic) search engine ranking, on the other hand, is part of the “Technical Agenda”.

The “technical” leg of the stool focuses on how to engineer high rankings for your website pages as well as your most profitable keywords.

You still need written content to work with the technical agenda, but you do not necessarily focus on the “quality” or the “purpose” of the content used.

For example, I'm sure you have accidentally arrived on websites that contain gibberish and nonsense instead of useful content. This experience is an example of web content created by technically dominant geeks who have nothing of real value to offer the market. Make no mistake about it, this sort of content spam website will become obsolete during Web 3.0 which is also known as the Semantic Web.

Imagine if only one department in your company was focused on PPC while the other was focused on natural rankings- yet they never talked to each other. In this case, your “business success stool” would collapse (or remain unbalanced) because you would be giving too much power to one leg while neglecting other equally important legs.

I see this lack of communication between agendas happen all the time.

Art Crowley, the author of Theme Zoom's Gateway to Multi Channel Marketing Course (coming January 10, 2008) has pointed out that when you discover that the marketing department and the sales department are on a different floor of the company building, you are pretty much guaranteed a serious lack of communication that will have to be during your consulting process.

This leads us into a discussion of pay per click addiction.