I’ll be honest, “Dominate The Internet” isn’t very specific. Heck, it’s not specific at all. Yet I’m using it as the catch phrase for this entire website. No, I’m not hopped up on cold medicine, there is a certain method to my madness. Crazy? Perhaps. Sober? Definitely.

There is a method to my madness.

We live in an electronic world. I’d say at least 110% of the U.S. population spends a decent amount of time online every day. And in Europe that number probably rises to 110.06%. So many people in one space. Talk about a captive audience. If you want to say, sell or show something, the Internet is the place to do it.

In the “real world” you can reach only as far as your voice carries, which isn’t very far, even for someone like me who talks pretty loud. You can expand this reach by taking advantage of  traditional media, like print, radio and television, but that’s pretty spendy, and most marketing firms don’t give discounts for loud voices (tell that to the guys who narrate TV furniture commercials).

But it’s different on the Internet. Here you can just as easily bump elbows with someone living halfway across the world as you could your next door neighbor. With so many people booting up their favorite Internet browser every day (with SearchEngineViking.com loaded up as the home page… right?), the online world has become a condensed meeting place for just about everything, even stuff that most people would have thought were strictly “real world” just a few years ago.

For Instance:

Hanging Out With Friends. Social media like Facebook, Twitter and, back in the day, MySpace, made it easier for buddies, friends and stalkers to keep track of each others’ lives, often at the expense of random public embarrassment.

Hooking Up For Romantic Dates. Every day I see a new advertisement for a match making website that takes the “picking up” process out of dating. Just enter your personal information and the software does the rest. If you’re lucky, you’ll find the man or woman of your dreams. At the very least you’ll meet up with some college kids who filled out a profile as a joke.

Reading The Newspaper. I haven’t read a physical newspaper in four years, and I’m a former newspaper reporter. My guess is most people aren’t reading them either, that’s why they keep going out of business.

And those are just a few examples.

My main point is (I did have a point in all of this, I promise), is the we spend so much time on the Internet that a person/business/organization would be silly to not focus a majority of their efforts in that direction.

If you want to sell something, forget brick and mortar stores. They’re too expensive. Sell you stuff online. You’ll have a huge potential customer base and a smaller overhead cost. Win-win if you ask me.

If you want to say something, would you rather stand on a soapbox and yell at the top of your lungs or say it in a venue with potentially kajillions of listeners? If I have a point to make about Istanbul, it doesn’t matter how hard I yell from the Pacific Northwest, the Turks aren’t going to hear me. Unless they’ve tapped my phone. Those sneaky, sneaky buggers.

So if you’re really looking to dominate anything, you must do so on the Internet.

(Image by aulasvirtuales)

Greetings, and welcome to the very first installment of SearchEngineViking.com. If you’ve stumbled across this page, you’re probably asking yourself:

“How in the heck did I end up here?”

That’s an excellent question, if I do say so myself. It’s well worded, articulate and straight to the point. It speaks volumes about you as a person. Well done, old chap. Such a wonderful question deserves a wonderful answer, right? I’ll try my best…

You ended up here for any number of reasons. Allow me to elaborate:

1. You Found This Page In The Search Engines. Somehow Google, Yahoo, MSN or one of the smaller search engines decided to index this page into its listings. And for whatever reason, the term you were searching for is somehow associated with this page. It’s my guess you were looking for “Super Sexy Dude” or “Great Looking Guy” or even “Lame Boring Guy Who Tries Pumping Himself Up Through Web Copy.”

2. You Followed A Link From Another Website Or Blog. Webmasters and bloggers love spreading “link love” to the sites and pages they enjoy. So it’s entirely possible that someone linked directly to this page, probably with the anchor text “Check Out This Lame Guy.”

3. You Read One Of My Guest Posts And Clicked On The Link. I love writing random stuff, and as a result of that I frequently write guest posts on other people’s blogs. The topics are fairly diverse, ranging from “A Smart Ass Guide To Personal Finance” to “A Smart Ass Guide To Make You Dog Stop Chewing Your Cellular Phones.” When I write guest posts, the person who owns the blog usually includes a link to this site, perhaps even this page.

4. You Clicked On A Link To This Page From Within This Site. You could have done this in several ways, but that’s not really important. The fact is you were cruising around and ended up here. Well done. I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far.

5. You Are One Of The First Visitors To SearchEngineViking.com. Considering this is the very first post, it will stay up on the front page until I write enough new posts to push it into the netherworld of the Archives. There’s a solid chance that somehow you’ve stumbled in here during this blog’s infancy, and are actually reading this while it’s fresh.

6. You Bookmarked This Page. You, my friend, are very weird.

7. You Are My Mom. Hi Mom.

See, there are plenty of ways you could have gotten here. But chances are you left before reaching this point, since the average web surfer spends about .001 seconds scanning a page before deciding if he or she will stay, and since this blog is about as graphically pleasing as a spilled can of tomato soup, nothing caught your attention. So in that sense you aren’t even reading this, which means I’m writing for no real reason.

But for those of you who stuck around, thanks! I’m both pleased that you’ve enjoyed the contents of this Introduction post but saddened by your apparent lack of anything better to do. Not to say there isn’t a lot of great stuff on my other pages, but this one is pretty thin. So if you were hoping for a surprise ending, sorry to disappoint you…

“Surprise!” There you go.

p.s. Writing in future tense is harder than I thought – I mean, will be harder than I thought.