A lot has happened over the weekend, and I have three cool things to share.
One of my favorite SEO folks is Jerry West. He’s so creative and smart, and I love to read his blog. If you’re not a subscriber and are interested in SEO, it’s a MUST, right?
Next, have you been watching Andy Jenkins’ Video Boss videos? Aw come on, people! If you haven’t, you’re brain dead. LOL.
Seriously, Andy is a genius with video. No wonder, he’s a pro that worked on TV and film in a former life and won awards for it. So, he’s back to show us how to use video in our marketing, and let me tell you… these videos aren’t salesy. We’re not even sure what his offer is yet, but let me tell you… if this is the free stuff? Imagine. continue reading »
Woot! If you’ve been hesitant about using Google Analytics or if you’re used to using this incredibly powerful tracking tool… I have a surprise for you. I didn’t create it, and actually found it in this great article by Mark Thompson over at SearchNewz, entitled “Plugins And Hacks For Google Analytics”
It helps you to set up your Analytics tracking on your pages, even if your site spans multiple domains.
It gives you a roadmap to link tragging.
It shows you how to add filters.
It helps you to set goals so that you can track every part of your sales funnel.
You can track 404 errors with their trick
And there are links to some “Seriously Nerdy Ninja Tricks”
Pretty cool. If you’re interested in improving your marketing and your SEO, this could be a huge help, even if you think you have Analytics really covered.
Are you a stats junkie? Well… I don’t have time to be much of one, but I do enjoy looking a good batch of stats and seeing progress, don’t you? Google Analytics has been very cool to me and it’s getting cooler.
There’s now an “Intelligence” segment to your reporting. It will alert you if something out of the ordinary happens at your website. For example, if you have an outrageous number of new visitors one day or if people stay on the page longer than normal, you’ll get an alert. Significant if you’re tracking a new form of traffic or if you want to see how an ad swap did for you, for example. Not earth shattering, but kind of neat.
But a better improvement is the fact that you can now add a whole bunch of new goals to your marketing funnel. You can now add 20 goals as opposed to the old 4, which told you some stuff, but well… twenty can tell you a whole LOT! As long as you have Analytics code on every page, it’s a pretty good indicator of how successful your marketing is overall. continue reading »
The gist of the post is that you have to clearly state on your page what you want your customers to do. The author quotes Seth Godin, who says you want people to do one of five things:
Click to go to another page on your site
Buy something
Register for something
Click on/view advertising
Pass your message on to a friend
You need to focus on one of those things, and not worry about the others. A sales page, for example, has the purpose of getting someone to BUY something. A squeeze page asks someone to REGISTER for something. So, be aware of what you’re trying to do.
SEO is important, no doubt in my mind, but when it comes to sacrificing usability, it’s pretty worthless. I mean, why bother ranking for a sales page that doesn’t convert, right? Make your purpose clear.
I encourage you to read the rest of that article. SEOBook.com always has some pretty great stuff, and their keyword discovery tool is awesome! If you’re not using it give it a try.
If you’ve been into this online marketing world of ours for a while, you probably understand the difference between “white hat” techniques as opposed to “black hat” SEO. If not, let me explain a bit.
White hat techniques are tried and true. They’re about doing everything “naturally”—adding great content to your site and others; creating links back from article directories, human edited directories, and social media sites; optimizing your pages with great titles and descriptions, and so on. All of these methods will accumulate and get you great rankings in the search engines… over time.
Black hat techniques are more immediate. They’re things you can do right now that will make your search engine rankings soar, and they absolutely do work… until you get caught. Then, your pages could be banned from the search engines entirely, if the things you’re doing are enough to really piss the powers off. Then, when these activites stop working, the black hatters just devise some new scheme that they put all their efforts into until the search engines catch on and the whole cycle begins again.
Is black hat bad? I mean morally wrong? Well… it’s kind of a grey area, but probably not. Search engines aren’t people. But here’s where the grey comes in… Black hatters make it bad for search engine users because all that they might see on a search results page is one website. So, in a way, I guess it’s not a good thing, right? I mean, it seems pretty unethical to me.
But that’s not why I advise against it. I wouldn’t waste my time with black hat stuff. If you plan to be in business online for a long time, why tarnish your reputation with the search engines? I mean, they really do matter to you as a businessperson. You want them to send you targeted, free traffic forever, right?
So, why waste time doing stuff that will not only get you into trouble, but be worthless eventually? I’d rather put my efforts into the tried and true—stuff that will last forever. My road to the pot of gold might be longer, but it won’t turn to mud under my feet.
Ever have one of THOSE days? Well… I did today. Nothing seemed to have been done right… out of my hands… just a victim of getting others to do things for you and not following up. Who’s court is the ball in ultimately? Mine, of course.
Or, how about those days when you don’t see any sales, no optins, nothing working no matter how hard you try! I get that. Been there…
I have a friend who’s vlog will totally pick you up and set you on the straight road again. Energy and how to channel it is important. But that’s only one aspect of her vlog that I know you’ll enjoy…
OK, so I’m the project manager for The ListBuilding Club and totally love, love, love it. And why wouldn’t I? I’ve helped create it, have maintained it, and work on it 100% of my time for Overcome Everything. I’m prejudiced. But we have hundreds of people, if not thousands who would agree with me.
The site starts at the beginning with picking a niche, getting a domain name, setting up a blog and so on. I mean, it’s step-by-step video training that anyone can follow. It just rocks and we’re constantly working on what we have to offer to make it better and better. We really care that people love it and are able to use what they learn and take it to the bank.
But that’s not why I’m writing here.
I’m writing to tell you about our affiliate program. It’s awesome! I mean, where else can you get $20 – $29 a month from every customer you refer and pays for his or her membership? That keeps on coming! It’s an awesome site to promote, and something you can be proud to represent.
Sell 50 memberships to the LBC and then, you can apply to be an affiliate for our high-end coaching programs that bring in MUCH bigger commissions. Show us you know your stuff and you stand to make a great deal of cash!
But here’s a cool thing:
Even if you’re new to this whole affiliate marketing environment, we’re there to help you. Every Friday, we’re putting on training teleseminars that will teach you what you need to know to promote and make money with our system. You’ll love it!
So, sign up now and be part of the team. We’re waiting to help you make the cash you need to get by in these tough times.
Oh wait???? What’s that? I mean, really. If you’re a good affiliate marketer, there is no recession. It’s awesome!
The other day, I was over at SmartPageRank.com checking on this blog because I heard that Google had updated PR rankings again, and was curious. I had recovered from the paid links drop to PR0 back up to PR3 again, and was hoping maybe I could see a PR4 (where the blog was before the nasty debacle). I really shouldn’t care, and I’ll tell you why in a minute. But… I was totally surprised when…
I saw a PR0 again! Wow! That really pissed me off. And sure enough… days later, the PR0 appeared in my Search Status (see yesterday’s post) toolbar again.
I’m sorry but I won’t stop selling links. So, there, Google! My links have been there a long time, and so, people are obviously finding value in having them there. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to take that away from them. They were loyal to me before Google decided to penalize people for having paid links, and I seriously doubt that those links continue because the folks who are buying them wants to get some link juice. They didn’t leave me when I was a PR0. They just get clicks on the links or they wouldn’t keep paying for them, right? I mean, if Google took my PR away before…
I’m guessing that’s why they did it again.
So be it.
Does it hurt me? Well, if I was trying for some reciprocal linking, I’d say yes. But I’m still ranking #2, right under Matt Cutts (the Google spokesperson), for “seo canonical” for my post on canonical linking. And I’m ranking #3 for “WordPress marketing,” and #5 for “twitter nofollow,” and various other terms on page 1 that are pretty competitive. My page rank, though now bupkiss, hasn’t hurt me at all.
I was on the phone with Brad Fallon one time, when Tellman wanted me to find out why a site I’d been working on for a few months still had no page rank, and he told me that page rank means nothing. We all still worry over it and think about it, but the proof is in the pudding, people! PR means zip, zilch, zero.
What matters is where you land in the results.
So, I’ll keep selling links. It’s a matter of principle.
Here’s a video I hope you enjoy. We posted it to YouTube a while back, but I’m telling you… if you’re marketing online and you’re NOT writing articles, you totally need to start, and here’s why…
Have you been to Google lately? (Who hasn’t, right?) Everyone seems to be talking about the new search item they call the “Wonder Wheel.” It puts me in mind of a couple of tools online. One is Personal Brain, which is mind-mapping software, and the other is Visual Thesaurus that will help you to brainstorm keywords or really just find synonyms if you’re a writer. Pretty neat, both have limited free versions that are worth checking out.
But what does Wonder Wheel do? It helps you to expand your horizons. When you do any search in Google, you’ll see a link above the horizontal paid ads, just under the Google search box, on the left-hand side of the screen that says “Show Options.” When you click on that, a right-hand sidebar opens.
You’ll notice that you can choose videos search, forum posts, or reviews. You can also decide how old you want the listings to be.
But the links at the bottom are the ones you want to pay closest attention to. The first link is for related searches, but the second is for the Google Wonder Wheel, which when clicked, opens just to the right beside the search results. You’ll see that circling the center search (what you typed into the search box,) are related terms.
For example, if you search for “search engine optimization,” you’ll see terms like “search engine submission,” “meta tags,” “search engine optimization pricing,” and so on for other terms related to SEO. When you click on “search engine optimization for dummies,” another wheel opens that’s linked to the original wheel, and you get new stuff to think about, like “google universal search,” “major search engines,” and “xml sitemaps.”
Pretty sweet. This can help you develop a pretty broad keyword base for any niche that you’re pursuing. That’s great for SEOs and Internet marketers, but it’s great for just plain searchers because it helps them to really get where they want to go. For example, if you click on XML Sitemaps, it takes you to places where you can learn what they are and to generators that will prepare them for you.
Anyway, it’s a cool new tool and you should check it out. It can be very valuable for your business or help you to search a whole lot smarter.
OK, so I’m the project manager for 
