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I got tired again of listening to music on my MP3 player and have instead started looking again for some internet marketing podcasts. There are lots out there and I have downloaded and kept a lot on my PC in case I wanted to go back and listen again when some infomration is more relevent to me.
The other podcasts that I have been listening to are the Marketing Experiments Web Clinics. The stuff from Marketing Experiments is amazingly good for learning about landing page optimization as well as making sure that your overall message is clear and effective. Sometimes I have trouble with the MP3s because I will be listening to someone describing pages that I can not actually see, the web clinics are actually recordings of webinars so I have no visual to refer to. These are the best that I have heard probably ever thought for understanding why my pages suck and how to make them sell better.
Firefox is a great browser when compared to Internet Explorer. I know, the geek in me likes Firefox but most people are just rolling their eyes and saying
“Who cares about a browser with not much market share? My buyers don’t use it anyway”
Well there are good reasons to use Firefox, especially as a web business person. I look at Firefox as my portal to the internet as well as a research and content cration tool. basically I use Firefox as a very strong tool to build my business.
Here are some great extensions that you can use with Firefox to extend the ability that a browser can give you for internet marketing. Read the rest of this entry »
The best way to build your traffic cheap and fast is buy posting in forums and making blog comments on blogs. There are two problems with blog comments for most people and these problems are actually an opportunity for you to be a commenting machine while at the same time getting ideas for new blog content yourself.
There are a few reasons to do blog commenting and the main ones are backlinks to your own sites (some nofollow blogs will not help but that is ok), getting blog owners know about you, and finally to have readers of blogs see you and get exposure to your site by clicking your website link on your name in the comments.
Finding posts to comment on
First problem is that most people doing internet marketing go to the classics, Problogger, Shoemoney, John Chow and others but these are crap blogs for getting traffic to your niche site unless you are in the internet marketing niche. If you are in any other niche then you have to hang with the thought leaders and then become a thought leader.
Do some searches, if you are interested in Organic Gardening then start looking for gardening blogs, environmental blogs, blogs about organic farming and of course your own niche or organic gardening. This is going to keep you on the pulse of your niche and also reading these blogs will give you lots of ideas to get new posts of your own out.
Do you have a Google account? You should as this is how you get access to a Google tool called Google Reader. Google Reader is an RSS reader and when you are using an RSS reader all you need to do is to copy the link location for any site and simply add the subscription to Google Reader and then you will get updates every time that this other blog makes a post. Add all of the blogs that you have found for your niche, and although you may be struggling a bit with Google Reader you will get the hang of it in a matter of hours if not minutes and have a nice easy way to access 100s of blogs if you want to all at one website.
Commenting tips
OK, this is the second problem, writing blog comments that will be read in the shortest amount of time. Now you have found lots of posts in your niche to do blog comments on so go ahead. The nice thing about blog comments is that once you have made one the site will remember your info for the next time that you comment. There is such a short supply of comments to smaller blogs that as you make a couple of comments the blog author is going to notice you and link back to your posts.
Anyway the blog comments themselves should be a couple of sentences long and should add to what the post is about. If you are leaving longer blog comments then try to write down the gist of your comment so that you can create a post out of your blog comment for your own site. (I just copy my comment into notepad for later viewing). The worst thing that you can do is leave lots of blog comments saying “I agree” or “You are right”, these comments add nothing to the conversation and will not be supported by the author and are not insightful enough for anyone to click your link to see your site.
How much commenting to do
I think that devoting 15 minutes or a half hour a day to blog commenting is great. I know that Yaro Starak says that as he was starting he would at the end of the day just leave comments as much as he could but I think that it is great to do this before you are tired. Get the blog comments in, get some ideas for future blog content, and move on to the rest of your work for the day.
One of the things that we really see a lot of is that if you are looking for any products that are Internet Marketing related there are no bad reviews.
Is every internet marketing product that good? If you look at some products they will bash everything else in the market as rehashed crap and you even hear about rehashed crap in the internet marketing forums. I have read a lot of these ebooks and tried a lot of the software and all of the software I have tried seems pretty good and a lot of the ebooks are pretty good to excellent but of course some really are rehashed crap.
OK, so lets say that you are doing a lot of reviews of products. do you only review good products? Do you only say good things about products that you review (not quite the same thing at all). Why not do a bit of bait and switch with product reviews.
Start writing reviews about popular products that are crap. The products are usually popular on hype alone but still all you will see is products reviews that glow about whatever the book is about, so be honest and write a review saying how you really feel about the product.
When you write a negative review you it gives you the opportunity to highlight a better product, your honesty will give you more credibility in the eyes of your readers. The other thing that doing a negative review will do is give your blog or review site a lot more range of emotion. No one really wants to read glowing review after review and keep coming back for more.
I am on Joel Comm’s email list and most of the emails that I receive are raving about one or another product, and these emails come every day. All of the positive reviews that you see do not mean much when you do not see that the person writing reviews hates anything.
Well the first day of the year has come and my plan of action should start to really take shape starting today. I have outlined a few strategies but more importantly is the daily habits that I may have known about last year but did not actually do. Here are the daily work plans.
Plan every day - As we all know it is very easy to get on the computer, find an interesting thread on Digital Point and then surf from there for an hour and a half connecting the dots in some not very useful process. Instaed I will start the day with a plan of action that I will finish before I start any surfing at all. And I will think of it as work so that I do not get a chance to distract myself or do a half ass job of it.
Blog Posting - With my journal full of stuff to blog about I will be writing to three blogs initially daily whether with sales pitches or just content.
Forum Posting - In each of my niches this will be my way of keeping up with new idea, niche research and backlinks all at the same time.
Blog Commenting - Same as the Forums, all about knowledge, new niche ideas and getting new people to see who I am so that they can surf their way to one of my site.
Niche research - After going through all of the above steps I will have written down a bunch of ideas for little sub niches. I will start doing keyword research and see if there is anything new that I can apply my niche process to.
I have processes written all over the place but often I do not get a chance to implement them because I am busy getting lost in the surfing of knowledge. There is a whole industry behind internet marketing that seems to teach that you don’t ever know enough . Great culture to sell ebooks in but bad for having people implement what they already know.
What if you just made the assumption that you knew enough and just built into niches all of the stuff that you need to do. This is what I have tried to do more and more over the last year and then I find another ebook that takes me on another tangent which is away from the actions that will build my business.
This will be one many articles about Wordpress when it comes to internet marketing. Wordpress although it is a blogging platform is in reality a great way to easily add content to the internet that can not be beat for ease of use, simplicity, SEO and power for driving traffic through Web 2.0One of the most powerful aspects of Wordpress is the use of plugins to add automation to the process of posting and publicizing your content on the internet. Internet marketers use a different subset of plugins than other bloggers do and for good reason. Here are my favorites and why.
An internet marketing journal is a great way to keep track of ideas that oyu have for your internet marketing business.
When I become overwhelmed with ideas and plans and even just blog posts ideas I will dump them all into a big list. At one point last year got myself a new Mead Five Star ringed notebook and started writing down all of the things that I had to get done in my internet marketing business as well as some of the processes that I was just starting to get into place.
After a couple of days of writing down ideas as they fell out of my brain I had a list of about 50 site, SEO and mass marketing ideas and another list of 50 or so blog post ideas.
When I look back now at this list I can see that I implemented about half of each of the lists and the other half were just crap. I think that this is a great method so I want to just get down a list of what is important in these lists. Read the rest of this entry »
I know that one of the keys to success is knowledge and I have over the years gone to a lot of forums and either stayed with them or left them. These are the ones that I have stuck with for now. I hope that you find them as useful and helpful as I do.
The key to working in a forum or messageboard is to see what people are talking about, see the quality of the answers that are coming across and take note of these people with all of the knowledge and then when you have a question try to tag a situation and some info of your own to the question so that other people will learn from your question and be in a better position to answer as well.
And for god sakes do not push products at all hard on an internet marketing messageboard. We all get pitched enough and on a messageboard everyone is even more sensitive to this then in non internet marketing spots.
Here is my favorites list:
A kind of Web 2.0 of tops stories. I just poke around here once a day to see what is coming up marktd: latest marketing news
Syndk8.net is a Blackhat community that you can learn from but at the same time some of the people are not at all tolerant of people with stupid questions, this makes it quite entertaining. Syndik8
Warrior Forum. Where they talk about making money. This is the second best place on the net for money making info. Also the Special Offers, refered to as WSO in the board are great content and have great sales copy to learn from. The Warrior Forum - Main Warrior Discussion
I have not been hanging out at Webmaster World Much lately but if you want to know what is going on with Google this is a great place and the people are amongst the most knowledgeable on the internet. WebmasterWorld News and Discussion for the Web Professional
This is the most edgy board for internet marketing info. I have learned more here in the last year than anywhere else and people do not tend to push products, instead they will mock ebooks and anything that is not very effective.
Revenue source is a great forum that i discovered a few weeks ago that has mounds of info and I have only scratched the surface. I was intrigued with all of the clickbank questions and answers that people had so I guess i will be moving this up my list as one of my real favorites soon enough Affiliate Marketing & SEO Forums
I visit these sites once or twice a day and probably spend about 60 to 90 minutes total on them per day so I find I learn a lot. Also if I am looking for something in particular quite often Google will point me to one of these with the answer.
The only problem with every forum is that reading makes you feel like you are doing and in real life there is no substitute for learning from the actual doing of building sites and sales pages and learning from your own mistakes and tweaks.
Have you ever heard of PLR Private label rights products? Usually when you hear about these it is on one of the big Internet Marketing boards like Warrior forum of Digital Point and it usually seems like a great deal. You get to buy some books or a series of a 1000 articles or something that you can reuse for whatever you want.
First thing you should ask yourself when you see these PLR articles for instance is why are they so cheap? Often when you are buying a lot of articles you will find that they have been listed in Google on tons of sites and so they are useless content. If you want a lot of content on your sites you want stuff that no one has seen yet so that you can rank high in Google or submit the articles to ezine articles to bring you traffic.
The only PLR that I like to buy is articles in my niche that i am working in that are a bit more expensive, lets say 2-5 bucks an article. If you are going to pay this much then you are going to more than likely get an unused article that you can rank with. Ask the seller for some sample text and then do a google search for that text in quotes “this is the text” and see if any results come up. Read the rest of this entry »
Creating your own content can be a challenge if you publish your own online newsletter or eZine.
However, regardless of any topic you are publishing on, types of contents can be generally divided into four categories, namely factual content, short tips, mini stories and case studies.
Other than writing your own content, you can get your own unique content the quick and easy way by organizing an interview with an expert or leader in the topic.
Very often, this can be done for free and since the interviewee is writing out most of the content, there is nothing else for you to do other than giving the interviewee something valuable in exchange (maybe a meal!).
Now if you have money to spare, you can hire a ghostwriter to write your content for you without taking any credit. Recommended professional marketplaces where you can seek ghostwriters include http://www.elance.com/ and http://www.rentacoder.com/.
Another little known and underused method in getting your own content is via public domains. If you are not familiar with the term “public domain”, “public domain” simply means anything that is NOT protected under US copyright law.
This includes ALL works published before 1923 and, under certain conditions, works published up to 1978. And in this case, we are referring “works†to written materials such as reports, articles and books.
Republishing and repackaging public domain information can help you save time and effort from creating new ideas and content as they are readily available. On top of that, you do not have to pay royalties or copyright fees on that work.
If you fancy the idea of publishing content without any writing on your part, this method is for you.
I use 1 and 1 Internet. Some people will always complain about their support but they have been great to me and very cheap for all of my hosting.
Autoresponder Service
Get Response, When I was looking between AWeber and Get Response I continually saw reviews saying that Get Response got better deliverabilty rates then AWeber and they are a bit cheaper as well
Knowledge Stuff
SEO Book is $79 but the wstuff that Aaron Wall has in there is pure gold. I could not put it down when I first read it.
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