This weekend I got to attend the Asheville festival Belle Cheere and not only was the festival an awesome time to log off and get away from the world, but it was also a great time to rethink about this whole marketing world that we all live in.

Be it a Green Peace Advocate, Street Musician, or even a Balloon Artist, everyone at Belle Chere was doing their best to make sure that the minute of your attention that they had, they were doing their best with.

So think about it…as a marketer that first minute, what are you doing with your customers attention?  Of course you should always be selling but what are you doing to make your product more recognizable than the other guy. At Belle Chere, I watched a 12-year old balloon artist hitting on girls and making parents laugh and at 12 years old I bet he knows more about business than you do.

Before anybody walked up to him, this balloon artist had already surrounded his corner with balloon animals and made it apparent who he was and what he sold.  Plus he didn’t wait for anyone’s attention, he talked to people who walked by him and constantly asked people if they wanted a balloon animal.  If someone said yes, he didn’t stop there, he entertained the crowd with jokes and tricks.  OH YEAH AND REMEMBER…HE WAS 12!

This kid had you before you even had his product.  You knew what he did, but his unique selling point of a 12-year old who built balloon animals was something you could not pass up.  He was a salesmen of the best kind. He wouldn’t stop once he had your money, he continued talking to you and made sure that you had the best time possible with him. Hoping to garner more attention and more friends, was his game and something that you’re probably not doing with your audience.

This kid was not the only one. People dressed up in funny clothes, told funny jokes, anything to get your attention. These people all knew that one minute could make or break a sale. So again, I ask you what are you doing with those first few minutes…to make sure that you have your customer’s attention.

I have a confession to make, I consider myself a sports fan and yet,  I don’t follow baseball.  I can’t name you more than four players on any team not named the Red Sox or Yankees, and I can’t tell you when the last time I watched the game.

I don’t follow baseball not because I don’t like the sport.  I don’t follow it because the ’03 – ’08 Steroid era left a bad taste in my mouth.  For every Craig Biggio there are hundreds of Barry Bonds’, Roger Clemens’, and Mike Piazzas’, guys that I just don’t trust…nor do I think I ever will.

The funny thing is, I don’t blame baseball players.  When the league’s best players are “juicing” in the locker room next to you, what can you do?  What’s sad is the same thing is happening to SEO now.

For everyone who claims to be a white hat SEO and says that they’re going by Google’s rules, there are 20 link schemes and link buyers out there.  It’s getting hard to rank a website any more, without committing some form of black hat SEO.  But if your competitors are doing it, should you?  That’s a real hard question, you have to ask yourself as an SEO expert and something that I’ve been asking myself lately.

If we called the last decade of baseball the Steroid ERA, I wonder what we will call the last ten years of SEO?