LotusJump Review: Do-It-Yourself Online Marketing Service

LotusJump is a web-based software system that helps you improve your ability to get found online and in the search engines.

It is an automated system that:

• points you to a wide variety of activities that you can do yourself to increase the number of places your business will be found online;
• organizes those activities with a convenient online to-do list so you can structure your work;
• provides automated reports to measure your progress.

How It Works

LotusJump searches through thousands of online venues to identify opportunities where you can get a listing for your website; pick up editorially-earned backlinks; get blog and media coverage; network and/or share content on social media sites; and develop online PR and buzz for your brand.

If you’re thinking of cheap software that automatically submits your website to hundreds of useless, spam-filled directories — ditch that idea right now.  This is not that kind of system.

Rather, to use LotusJump effectively will require much more of your creativity and smarts.  You WILL have to be hands on.  But the results will be many times more useful than “directory submission” software.

LotusJump identifies the places where you may be able to get listings or press/blog coverage,  submit an article to be published, create an online profile page, etc.  It’s up to YOU to actually go visit those locales, understand the requirements, and follow through.  It’s for this reason that LotusJump creates the online to-do list — because you’re going “to do” these activities.

To get started, you choose the keywords that are important to your business.  Then LotusJump presents a long list of visibility opportunities tailored for those keywords.  This will save you many hours of time that you would otherwise have to spend searching for relevant places where you can develop online buzz, or publish an article, or create an online listing, or develop backlinks.

The following three steps illustrate LotusJump’s process:

One of the best features about LotusJump is that it’s more than just a basic task list. Each task comes with detailed instructions that explain what that task is and how to do it. In these next two screenshots, you’ll see what I mean.

First, in this screenshot (click it to open larger image) you see a partial list of the activities that have been returned for the keyword “small business.”

The list page is easy to scan.  You can click on the “X” to delete anything that looks like it doesn’t fit or that you do not want to do.  You can “pin” any items to your to-do list that you definitely decided to tackle (notice the orange push-pin).

But what if you’re not sure what the task involves?  Then in that case you click on the item.  It takes you to a detail page that explains more.  From there you can make a better judgment as to whether this is a task you actually want to take on.

Pros and Cons

LotusJump offers many benefits, but here are two major ones I want to highlight:

• LotusJump shows you how and where to build relevant links that point to your website. This is the hardest part of SEO, in my opinion. Seeking out quality linkbuilding opportunities out there is really hard work, and this service does it for you.
• It organizes all of your tasks into a familiar email-like inbox format. Each of these tasks comes with the necessary instructions to help you improve your visibility, rankings and traffic.

With all of its great benefits, there are two small limitations:

• It doesn’t yet help you solve your on-site optimization. It assumes that you have successfully completed all of your own on-site work to make your website pages as search-engine friendly as possible – things like title tags, which again are the easier part of SEO.  According to LotusJump execs, this is likely to get solved in a future release.
• Some of the tasks may not be relevant to you. For example, if you’re targeting a broad keyword like “apple,” you might get tasks for Apple iPods, or apple pies.  This problem can be addressed by either modifying your keywords or deleting the irrelevant task.

Again, these are small hurdles, and probably won’t slow down your efforts to get found online.

Who Should Use It

LotusJump is great for small business owners who lack:

1) time or expertise to do SEO research and link-building from scratch, or

2) resources to pay an outside SEO firm or individual expert on contract.

This is a do-it-yourself service primarily aimed at the SEO beginner/intermediate (which probably includes most small business owners).

Conclusion

Could you do some of this yourself without using a service like LotusJump? Absolutely. Would it be as easy, painless, and inexpensive? No.

According to Andrew Pincock, CEO, there are some very accomplished search agencies and business owners doing their own SEO who have signed on to use LotusJump, and that speaks volumes about how useful and effective it is. Even if you have a technology person or team on your payroll, you could use this affordable service to organize all the link-building and buzz-building tasks and make that person or team more efficient.

With LotusJump you get an affordable “research assistant” that is constantly searching and filtering online resources for you (and giving you instructions on how to complete them).

In summary, LotusJump is for the business owner who wants to improve their online presence, but doesn’t know where to start, and can’t afford to outsource. If you have some time, initiative and a desire to improve your website rankings and your brand’s online visibility, then take a look at LotusJump.

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