During a recent tour of websites put up by professional speakers - I was shocked at how truly bad they are.

It appears that the vast knowledge of what works online is being ignored. Only Speakers Bureaus have uglier websites than speakers.

Most have riduculously bad brochure sites - using concepts put forth based on vanity and what looks "pretty" in the opinion of people totally ignorant of Internet marketing success factors.

No wonder speakers report only making money when they are on the road speaking.

These websites are so dreadfully bad  in every area from search engine optimization, lack of stickiness, lack of interesting content, mean that no one ever goes to these sites unless prompted by an offline invitation.

Nearly all these sites competely ignore the number one rule of web marketing CAPTURE EMAILS!

No one comes back to your site - ever. Especially when there are actually good sites to go to.

Regardless of how much money you spend making a website look pretty - it is worthless to the Internet and to you if you can't make it make money.

Rick Butts - Internet Marketing Consultant

This blog was founded on the need to address the villianous practice of some speaker bureaus - of running Google Adwords ads for professional speakers - by name - and routing that traffic to their bureau pages.

This means that when someone sees a speaker at an event and goes to find them on the web - they will be drawn to the bureau instead of to the speaker's web site. Who can argue that any bureau has the right to do this?

Michelle Lemmons International Speakers Bureau has been one of the most consistent offenders - even going as far as being written up in Forbes for this practice by skanking leads from searches for famous authors, politicians and business leaders.

This video was produced in July 2007.