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Below are the 18 most recent journal entries recorded in
djenyns' InsaneJournal:
| Friday, September 3rd, 2010 | |
| 4:58 pm | Social Media Platform There are examples of companies who have embraced the concept of social media. If you’re a small business, if you look at Vaynerchuck, he’s interesting because he is a family wine business. He took it from $4,000,000 to $50,000,000 primarily just using social media. Gary has spun off and now does his own Vayner media company where he actually consults on how to do these things. But he took it mainly from $4,000,000 to $50,000,000 using what was called Wine TV instead of just developing videos. He’s a great character and has a great sense of what wine should be, he’s not the usual boring wine expert. So he’ll get out there and eat dirt and show you why he ate dirt while he was growing up so he could develop his palate. Take a look at this SEO training. What’s most intriguing for Gary is that he understands what’s called the second layer of selling. The videos themselves don’t sell any wine. What sells is he goes on Twitter and sees people passing along the video or talking about the video and then he starts doing that second layer of selling which is rolling up your sleeves and doing a lot of hard work, but in the end it can really drive success. It drove him from $4,000,000 to $50,000,000 specifically. For me, I’ve developed videos that fortunately have taken off virally on YouTube, so the videos have over two million views. I learned this from these podcast interviews. That in itself doesn’t drive book sales but it helps drive book sales a second layer. I go into a tool like Twitter and Facebook and see the conversations happening around the video. I can reach out and say, look, I’m so excited you like the video, if you read the book, let me know. They might come back and say, I didn’t even know there was a book. I just bought it and I will let you know. So you can develop those relationships that way. It is important to know how to start with social media. The first thing I encourage people to do is, if they haven’t jumped in the water, the water’s nice, come on in and play and jump on in. The one thing to understand with social media is that you’re going to have failures. So it’s key, you don’t want to sink a ton of money in something, so it’s important to keep at a beta level and to keep this stuff light and quick. Instead of sitting in your meeting rooms like we traditionally did and try to vet through things until we think it is perfect, you might have three to five months of meetings, not years. I think for a thirty second television commercial generally it takes fourteen months from conception to actual shooting to get that thing out and get it perfect. That’s not the world we live in today. In my mind there are really four basic steps to social media success. It doesn’t guarantee success, it just helps you keep these constructs. Even if you’re what I call social media genius, by the end of the day, you should always revisit these things no matter how long you’ve been in this space to make sure you’re going back to the basics and the fundamentals. The four steps are listening to what’s being said about you, your company, your brand or product or service. The second is interacting. Once you’ve listened, then you can join that conversation. If you don’t listen and just join the conversation, it’s analogous to being that guy or girl in the room that goes into that housewarming party and sees four people talking and goes up and says, hey, what are you guys talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about, but why don’t we talk about what I want to talk about? Let’s talk about this. You don’t want to be that type of girl at that housewarming party. You don’t want to be that person in a social media room who does that. So the second step is really joining that conversation. The third step where a lot of people trip up, is actually reacting to that conversation. Reacting meaning are you adjusting your products and service based on what’s being said in those conversations? If ninety percent of people are saying, I really love this about your product or brand, then make sure you go back and talk to product development and say, let’s get this thing adjusted more. We need more of this, they love it. Conversely, if ninety percent say I don’t understand this, I hate this about your product and service, make sure you’re getting that vetted out and adjusted quickly. That’s where a lot of people trip up. They’re not quick enough to react to what’s being said. The fourth piece is really selling. If you do the first three, if you listen, interact and react properly then the fourth is almost going to happen on its own. You just need a soft push out the door for that one. |
| Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 | |
| 4:32 pm | What's So Great About Social Media The book Socialnomics which has recently been written has created quite a lot of buzz in the world of social media. Just like these public domain ebooks are spreading like wild fire. One of the big things in it is this idea that you’ll no longer search for products, they’ll find you. When I sat down to write the book Socialnomics, I wanted to look at what was the here and now which was back in ‘08 and ’09 but then also looking forward, what is it looking like a year, two or three years down the road? I got a lot of support from these podcast interviews. Part of the reason I was doing that, I was trying to shake companies, shake the CEOs. I felt like physically walking up to them and shaking them by the shoulder and saying, you’re not getting this, it is going to be huge and here’s why. The main reason is, it’s just like the news. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us. We don’t go down to the end of our driveway to pick up our newspaper anymore. People, our friends and peers push us information that we think would be relevant. So we rely on our friends to push us that information. So people get that now in terms of the news and magazines and whatnot but they didn’t get that four or five years ago. We’re in the same position now in terms of social media pieces, like I am at with the SEO guide. A couple of years from now, and we’re already starting to see this way faster than I ever thought was possible, is if I do a search today I get a bunch of results. If I use Google I get a bunch of paid sponsored results and I also get the organic search results in the middle. I’d actually written the book Socialnomics at the end of ’08, so even though it’s only been out for a little while now, relative to when I wrote it, it was very much forward thinking. I’m thinking about how quickly it’s got to this point. Before we actually see that integration into our search and our online experience, let us consider when that might happen. In ’08 when the book came out, I was sitting there saying, we’ve got to get to this thing because it’s printed. It’s funny because you have e readers. The beauty of e readers is that they can get it out like that. But still most people buy the hard copies, so I was going back to the publishers saying, this material moves so fast we’ve got to get this out the door. Fortunately I took a stab at some of the material and it came to light. We’re already starting to see some of the stuff in the form of there’s companies like Blippy that’s starting to track everything you’re doing with your credit card. It will send out tweets of what you’ve purchased. There are tools like Bazaarvoice which is a rating tool so that if you’re a company you can use Bazaarvoice as a rating tool to rate anything on your site. What Bazaarvoice already has, it’s connected to Facebook Connect so that it will pull in your friends if they’ve rated something. It will show you, this is a person in your Facebook network and they rated this product. So we’re really starting to see the early seeds of this starting to happen. When you think about Facebook Beacon, that was a product that Facebook rolled out and they rolled it out poorly because they opted everybody into it and that’s the product that was made famous by the kid who bought the engagement ring for his soon to be fiancée. Obviously she found out about it because it broadcasted on his Facebook account. So Facebook rolled it out poorly, but the thing to know is that they do have the technology that can do that. If you look at Facebook Beacon, if you look at Blippy, if you look at Bazaar it’s a beautiful thing for me to see that we’re starting to see that first step. These guys are the pioneers but we will see it progress rapidly in the next year to two years to where this material will be enabled.
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| Monday, July 19th, 2010 | |
| 7:02 pm | The Good And Bad With Being A Market Leader  If you want to do anything in a market, you have to be a market leader. Much like Michel Fortin or Norman Hallett. Why? Do you have to be a market leader to be successful in a market? No, until someone who knows what you do and is also prepared to be a market leader comes into the marketplace. Then you’re messed up because they’ll take over from you. Why? It’s a fundamental law. As a general rule, people buy from people they know. If you’ve got a choice, same product, same service, same everything, and you know person A, you don’t know person B, who are you going to buy from? You buy from the person you know. It’s physics. We have to get out there and we’ve finally got out there and we’ve got the guts and the determination to put out content on a regular basis. Here’s this next fundamental. This is a really hard one to accept. No person on this planet ever has been 100% liked. Presidents, priests, ministers, and even SEO experts.This has huge ramifications. As soon as you stick your neck up, amazingly, in my case there are not only people who don’t like what I do, but they actually have the nerve to put those feelings in writing and criticize me. The first time I read a criticism of what I had done, completely unfairly in my opinion, it hurt, badly. I don’t think I did any other work that day. I was just raging about how this idiot could have possibly written this about me. There are some people who unbelievably do not like what you’re doing and your style will rub them the wrong way. This is important. Here’s why. Once I understood this, it enabled me to move on. Think about this for a second. It has to be a part of the human condition to ensure that someone is not ever 100% liked. Think of the horrific consequences if there was anybody in this world who was 100% revered. That person would have ultimate and horrific power. If there was somebody who existed that had no criticism whatever, as a society we wouldn’t exist past a couple of years. Think about it, Mother Theresa had critics, Gandhi had lots of critics. Name any popular person on the planet and they have critics. It comes with the territory. No one can be 100% liked. It’s part of the human condition. I think once people fundamentally realize this, it certainly helped me, realizing every time I put something out, at best, someone will disagree with me. You know what? This is something that Gary Halbert taught me. It’s great to be disagreed with. The worst thing you can do is put out stuff that everyone blandly accepts. You want people to either really agree with it or really hate it. That will generate action and energy. When everybody has antipathy for it, then you’re not going to motivate anybody to do anything. That’s why you have to take a view, take a position, you have to take a side. Market leadership is the real key. We all know through any sort of sales training and that sort of thing, people are crying out to be told what to do. They’re looking for a strong leader to show them what it is they should be doing, because they’re not sure. What are some of the qualities of a strong leader? A strong leader is someone who says what needs to be said when it needs to be said. He doesn’t care whether or not he’s loved or he’s hated, he says it because it needs to be said. That’s a real quality of a strong leader. Similarly, that idea of adding value, not only just saying things to create a stir, to polarize people, but also adding value to that community so that you’re seen as that content creator. I think that is a valuable insight for traders, businessmen and even Internet marketers. |
| Monday, July 12th, 2010 | |
| 10:07 pm | How To Do Market Research The Right Way When building a new website, it is important to know your conversions, and know if you’re getting x visitors, you’re going to make y sales which is worth z dollars. You can then factor that back and understand how much you can afford to pay for traffic and make a decent profit. It’s all the maths. It’s cool maths. It’s exciting maths. And when you know this, you are well on your way to becoming an SEO specialist yourself. I think once you do start to learn your numbers, and this comes down to understanding things like the lifetime value of a client, you can understand how much you can spend to acquire that client. Then the name of the game really becomes how many clients can I acquire that’s under the price that I’m going to get out of them in a lifetime. Then your marketing budget effectively becomes unlimited. Where I see a lot of people go wrong, especially with the market research, is once you start in on that, it’s very easy to just get caught up in the market research and then have trouble going through to implementation. By doing the market research, you’re sitting there and designing a trading system. You’re looking for that holy grail, that perfect system, or that perfect keyword. Sometimes you just need to do that research and then dive straight in. This is a huge issue, massive, for two reasons. One, it can be like educational crack cocaine; people get so addicted to designing the trading system, or doing the research and learning about something, getting all high on learning how to do something that they actually don’t end up doing, or they don’t put their trading system to the test. This is insane. The only reason we’re doing all of this, is because the information that you’re getting from Google itself is not gospel. It’s just like in trading, past results are no indicator of future events. They can give you guides and you can get good at analyzing them based on your judgment and history. At the end of the day, there is nothing like getting a blog up, targeting the phrase and seeing how it ranks, doing the work to get it ranked and then seeing the actual traffic coming through. That is the ultimate test. Everything we do inside the Thirty Day Challenge is all about getting you to that point, which is, is this market worth going to all that time and effort into? It kills me that people have this emotional bank account of how much effort they can put into something before they decide, forget this. I’m not going to do this. If you spend all this effort, you’ve got this bank account of effort and energy and if you spend all of that on knocking out the product, first of all just doing the research, you’re never going to get anything launched. Seth Godin in his latest book called Linchpin which is a ripper talks about himself wanting to be an idea shipper, not an idea maker. I love that. What a great phrase. Be an idea shipper. The distinction is this. Anybody can come up with an idea. We can brainstorm markets; we could go on for hours about different markets that we could get into and different things. Most people don’t ship. What I mean by shipping is, to deliver a product. Valuing Websites, a recent product I put together, is an example of a shipped idea. It’s a shipped product. Will it be a super success, will it be a moderated success, or just coast along? Not sure. One thing I do know, it won’t be a dud because we’ve done the research. For one of the best market research tools, read the Market Samurai review. All this market research and all this traffic testing and so on will never tell us how successful something will be, but it can help us avoid a huge amount of time and spending all of our currency in our emotional bank account by going after something that is a dud and is never going to work despite your best intentions. There is a huge correlation between the trading niche and the idea of the way people design trading systems. The fundamentals are the same. If I’ve got any distinction, if I‘ve been able to do anything with my time on the planet, it’s to realize that the fundamentals are absolutely incontrovertible, regardless of niche market or system. The fundamentals in finding a good trading system are identical to a good marketing system for a new website. They are identical for opening up a hairdressing salon. The tactics are different. The tools that you might have to use are different, but at the end of the day, it’s research, you need to get traffic, you need to figure out conversion and eventually you have to have a product. With a trading system, the best systems are all about helping you say no. When building a website, these are what you need to do. |
| Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 | |
| 9:58 pm | The Secrets Of Advanced SEO Techniques Let us consider something which I would call advanced SEO techniques. It’s something that I know a lot of serious players, internet marketing players are doing. That is leveraging their own network of sites. There’s a lot of debate about whether you need separate IPs and whether you need to mask the information because, again, the search engines find that if you’re linking between sites that you actually own, you’re going to get penalized. I’ve just known a lot of people are doing it and they’re having a lot of success with it. I think a lot of people can really get caught up putting their focus into the wrong area when they head down this track. You need to just see it for what it is and then apply a few basic things that I’ll talk about and you’re going to be much better off than if you do try and go off and do it. I have actually had experience with doing this type of thing myself. We were looking at putting some little clusters of sites on different unique class C IP addresses. We were registering the domain names in different people’s names so that way they weren’t all linked together. You need to make sure you’re avoiding things like putting the same AdSense account across all of them. In fact, especially for your feeder site, it’s better not to have any AdSense on there. It’s the same with Google Analytics. There are so many ways that Google can tie those networks together that you can constantly feel like you’re having to look over your shoulder. You should really be focused on building those pages, getting your good content out there, rather than spending your time focusing on, have I messed up here and have I cross linked something and then effectively that whole network is going to get taken down. I think it gets back to that idea that it’s all about building a good quality business that’s going to last, not necessarily going for black hat type techniques. There is a line as to what’s reasonable and what’s unreasonable. I don’t think Google would say having a few different websites is bad. People do that, people have multiple websites. The way that it is linking together, you see people talking about all the different wagon wheel linking structures. There are so many different ways that you can do it. I think you’re better off, once you start to build your own network, depending on the competitive niche, you might register three or five blogs on different domain names. Start building the content up on those, don’t stress too much about having them on different class C IP addresses. If you have a couple of hosting accounts, it can’t hurt to spread them out. Then just start to build good quality links into those websites and then be strategic in the way that you send the links over. Don’t use one of these plug ins where you drop in a keyword and every time it is mentioned on the page, it is going to link back to that specific page. You might send a few links here, a few links there. It’s also important to use web 2.0 properties and other websites to build your own network. So now when I think about building my own network, it’s not just about my own domain names. I’ll also go and set up a blog over at WordPress and also go set up a blog over at Blogger and use some of these other websites where we can leverage off the age of their domain name and the links it’s already getting and build a site there. Then we can use that to shoot back targeted links. I think the benefit of building your own network is the fact that you can so tightly target and be really specific on what links you’re sending to where. To get caught up in a lot of the other technqiues can get you off track, when really you just need to be focusing on let’s build a business. To summarize, the main thing is just to focus on three or five different additional sites and do good off page linking to those and then make sure that you don’t excessively cross link between each of your different websites in that network. Do these and pretty soon, you may be the next up and coming SEO expert. |
| Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 | |
| 9:31 pm | Choose Your "Money Phrases" Well |
| 9:10 pm | What Is Page Rank? The aim of the game when starting an online campaign is how many pages can I create rather than really sculpt these pages and have that page rank funneled. Leslie Rohde talks about when you create a page, you’re creating a page rank out of nothing. A brand new page with no links to it has some PR value in it, and it is between zero and one, but there is some value there. What you want to do is just all about the numbers of those pages to some degree.  But aside from that, the original idea really was that page rank was the probability that a random guy surfing the web would land on your web page. So if you had more content out there, it does makes sense if you link it well and you have external links to those pages, you have a higher probability of stumbling on the page if there are more pages out there. Obviously if there are more keywords out there you can potentially rank for as well. Once we start to create some of these pages and we’re testing it, we do a little bit of on page stuff and then start on our off page optimization campaign. The first challenge when you have some content is to get the thing indexed and build up some initial links to that content so that content gets discovered ideally with those keywords in the links linking to your web page. That makes a difference. So the first thing is using social book marking, RSS submission whether or not you do it manually. We use Traffic Bug. That is essentially to build that first set of links. Each of those links is relatively low value. At that stage of the process, it’s about getting indexed, getting relevant links for a bunch of low competition pages. Now that might be enough to see some good rankings based on those initial set of low ranking links that you’re building into your content. But that is certainly where I would start, because it’s so easy and it has become part of our publishing process and that’s why we’ve built it into our product Market Samurai. After you’ve published your blog, you just click a button and use the keyword and write some description about what your content’s about and you’ve got a couple of hundred links being built over time from social media work like book marks and site directories and RSS submissions. It’s quite low value but it’s enough to kick start the process. |
| Monday, June 28th, 2010 | |
| 1:07 pm | Why Video Marketing Is Important To Jim Fleck I now run a TV show where I can sell my own products, which costs $1,000,000 a week to run. You’ve got to have a pretty serious operation to make television in that form work. But what lessons we can learn here is, and I’ve been on the internet since before we could really sell things, so I can remember it being extremely slow. If you tried to use video SEO it was just ridiculous, it just didn’t work. I even remember the first company that came out, they were called Crushed Media. They could make things work, what we would consider now, excruciatingly slow, but when they were done with it, it seemed like it was a revelation. We couldn’t believe how much faster the videos slowly skipped for us. But now we can stream video the same as television. Television is such a powerful medium, that we don’t put almost any page up of any kind anymore without video. If you were to go to my support site, there’s a video of me explaining things to the people. You know we have so many different products that sometimes people get a charge on their credit card, I’ve done this, you look down, and I don’t remember what that is, so we list our website on the credit card. They can go there and there is me talking, saying, ‘Hi, this is Jim Fleck I’m glad you stopped by my site here. I just wanted to let you know, in case you need some help with a product or registering for a seminar, just open up a ticket over here and send us an email and someone will be on it right away. If you’re not sure what your charges on your credit card are, it was probably real estate related. If you’ve been looking around, you might have purchased,’ and I name a couple of products. ‘If you simply don’t remember, just open a ticket here and tell the person your name and give your email address and tell them your question and they will tell you exactly what your credit card charge was for.’ Things like that. We use video everywhere. Thank you pages, thank you for buying. ‘I want to let you know we really value you actually using some of your hard earned money or your hard earned time with our company. Because of that, I know you’re really excited about your purchase and we’ve got a product that we normally sell for $197, but now because I know you are interested right now and want to make a change in your life and I’m so excited that you’ve just joined our company, I’m going to make you a special offer. I want to put it in front of you right now. This $197 product all included in your order is $49. Just click on it right now and it is my way of saying thanks for joining the family, blah, blah, blah.’ That’s a thank you page. Normally people would just let the merchant account or the authorized.net or Infusion or whatever just go to a thank you page. I use those two examples because those are areas where people wouldn’t even think to use video. We do most of our selling using video optimization now. I don’t write almost any long form sales letters. When I started in ’97 I took a forty page mail order letter and put it online continuously, one page, they didn’t even click through. So we learned tricks about creating html tables where you’ve got your first table up there and it showed your first bit of your text and the rest was still loading down below. I think video is a must and I think for beginning marketers it’s easier. There are some things that have changed. I know people would argue with me, but what I’m finding, from empirical evidence selling people information on how to make money is, they’re not responding to much of the hype anymore. I want to temper myself there because I’m an old marketer and I’m used to direct response copy, I’m used to crazy headlines of all kinds. I still use crazy headlines to get people’s attention but my sales letters are very much just like language I would use in everyday speech. It took me many years and anybody who has studied any SEO writing or copywriting has been taught to pretend you’re writing to one person. Try to picture your person and I can do that now. I’ve met so many of them through seminars, I can picture one of them and I write to one person because I know only one person is going to be opening my email at a time. It’s extremely hard to do for people. It’s so hard to do. You just have to rewrite and rewrite. |
| Saturday, June 26th, 2010 | |
| 4:37 pm | Eugene Ware Explains What Analysis Paralysis Is When starting an online campaign, it is most important to first do some SEO keyword research. This will include looking at the commercial value of the keyword you are considering. Two good examples of this are the tattoo market and the dream analysis market, both of which have quite a lot of searches, dream analysis even more so. There are quite a lot of searches there, yet commercial value on that particular keyword is low. Most people are looking for free dream analysis, and they’re not really going to buy anything. You might do your research, tick off traffic and tick off low competition and say, ok, here’s a keyword I can go after. Then when you actually come to the market and try to monetize that, you’re not really going to have anything. I think a lot of people get scared away from markets that have competition, and if anything, I think Jeff Johnson talks about this, you want to go after markets with competition because it shows there is money there. All you have to do that is just do a little bit better. We do a lot testing at Market Samurai with the traffic component (read the Market Samurai review if you are new to it). Relatively recently, Google started providing some sort of insight into how much a particular keyword’s getting. Through some of the testing I’ve done, I’m seeing massive discrepancies. For example, you can have number one position ranking for a keyword and not even get one tenth or even much less than that, click throughs on that particular keyword. I think ultimately that’s the thing about testing, you take it with a grain of salt and you do look to multiple sources. Just like with share trading, you don’t buy something just based on one signal, you look for multiple signals to be saying the right thing before you take action on something. Most people get so tied up with analysis paralysis, and particularly with the product they provide, they can just get so obsessed about it all although it’s good that testing does provide some discipline and some rigor to what can be a very risky business if you don’t know what you’re doing. I like to do an AdWords campaign first and actually confirm the data. I know that the AdWords data should be a percentage of what the full number of searches is and AdWords will tell you the number of impressions that your ad got as well. So if you’re looking for confirmation, you could spend a little bit of money to get that insurance that the traffic is behind a particular keyword. I certainly do the AdWords, throw it to a site and test the commercial value and the conversion and the traffic before I invest heavily going into that market. So one of the first stages, both pay per click and SEO, is obviously to do some keyword research. With SEO obviously you can take those keywords and load them into your pay per click and start to do your monitoring of conversion and that sort of thing and tweak things. Once I’ve done the research, I consider how many keywords to pick out and where to start. I try to pick a small subset of keywords that are tightly semantically grouped with each other that meet certain traffic competition and commerciality filters that I put on them. So I basically say, I’m looking for keywords that have a decent amount of traffic, so it’s going to be worth my time, with a decent amount of commercial value. Obviously it’s going to be the way my competition threshold is, based on what my SEO asset base is in terms of my other sites and my ability to get links. So I like to think of this cluster of keywords as essentially becoming categories. If it is a blog on my site, I typically have somewhere between six to twelve major keywords or something behind my site. But there’s definitely some semantic clustering of those keywords. They’re related to each other. That is really one of the cool things behind the Google keyword tool and Google Website Ranking. They’re actually giving you semantically relevant keywords and that’s really important. |
| Thursday, June 24th, 2010 | |
| 4:49 pm | Ed Dale On The Tools For Market Research We have recently launched a little product, Valuing Websites, and created some content that we put on a blog. The content we were putting on the site was both articles and videos. We did the classic Ezine Articles with key phrases and we’ve seeded those out. Now in fact I’m pretty sure we haven’t done this, but the next obvious step would be to take our demo intro video, put that on YouTube and tag it up correctly.This is video marketing. If we talk about things that are really working brilliantly now, and getting really big bang for your buck, it’s getting traffic from video. That’s really working well. I know our number one source of traffic for Thirty Day Challenge is literally YouTube. For new visitors, YouTube is our number one source of traffic. People don’t realize, unless they’ve been hanging around the internet marketing industry, that YouTube is the second biggest search engine. When you do your Google video search, you can have six, seven, eight positions within that Google search for that phrase. Obviously some videos and some keyword phrases people aren’t going to be searching for videos based on those topics. Again this comes back to measure twice, cut once. Do your market research and make sure you’re using Market Samurai or some tool. It takes two seconds. You type in the main phrase that you’re targeting and add the word video. See what Market Samurai spits back at you. What are people typing? Are they looking for videos? Are there any words and phrases that have a relation? Is there any traffic to speak of? We use video submission services, either Traffic Geyser or TubeMogul. What makes me cry, if people had done the work in market research or keyword research, is they’d know what to call the video. They’d know how to tag it properly for maximum effect. Videos are like any other piece of content, and yet people haven’t treated them like any other piece of content. Any links that go back to that video are back links. Of course now we start to stretch into the off page factors of SEO which is what it gets to be all about. After you’ve launched your content, there’s nothing more you can do in terms of on page factors, that’s it, you’re done. Anything you change has to happen over a long period of time. Then the focus switches to the off page factors and getting back links. Of course back links to those videos are so powerful. And no one is doing it. We’ve been experimenting with this for the last six months or so and it is literally shooting fish in a barrel at the moment. This is an arbitrage situation, there is no question about it. If you’re reading this, it’s something you need to look at because the average YouTube video would have less than five back links. If you want to test this out, it’s very simple. You just type any phrase into Google, you’ll see the videos come up in the universal search, usually they’ll be in position five or six, sometimes even higher. Just grab the url of that, go to Yahoo and type link: and then the url and have a look at how many back links there are. Or alternatively, if you want to be a super ninja and use Market Samurai, Market Samurai makes it even easier for you. You can just go and analyze that site and you’ll see how many back links there are. You’ll see where they’re coming from, what PR they are and all those sorts of things. The videos are getting just great traffic. They really are. If you don't believe me, check out this Market Samurai review. There are a couple of things with the videos that we’re finding. Firstly, it’s important, once you’ve done your keyword research, name the video your keyword. So it will be keyword.move; before you upload, you upload it to YouTube. We find that helps. Then using different services, as far as getting those back links, and at the moment there is this arbitrage opportunity. I think this opportunity will be here for a long time, even when you drill down into niches like knitting. It’s going to take so long before it filters through. It’s still an easy opportunity in internet marketing. So that obviously will happen. You can use things like AMA or Portal Feeder or any things like that where they allow you to post out using their blog network. A lot of them are now allowing you to embed the video. We’re finding that embedding the video is just as good as getting a link back to the video. That’s a sign that it is a popular video. |
| Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 | |
| 9:31 pm | Why You Should Consider Front End Marketing The purpose of the front end marketing is to acquire new customers, it’s not to maximize profits and it’s also not to make a sale. Think of it as advanced SEO knowledge. Its purpose is to bring in new customers, that’s it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s for profit, for break even or for a loss. The purpose is to just get a new customer. The purpose of the back end marketing is to maximize the lifetime value of the customer to your business.  There is a common mistake people make in internet marketing and affiliate marketing. You get customers who spend more money, you give them greater and greater value and additional offers and that’s what happens. But people really look at it wrong. Front end get new customers, back end more offers, generate more money. It’s really deeper than that and that’s where most companies place their priority on creating new products and offers. I fell into this, you’re thinking what else can I create, what else can I do, what other services and products? But the problem there is, that’s not really how the biggest and most successful companies operate. I didn’t always know this. You have to be careful who you mimic and who you model yourself on. The most successful ones, they understand what we just talked about. The long term growth and security of your business, your online business comes from front end customer acquisition. So what you’ve got to do here is, you’ve got to know what it’s going to cost you to get a customer. That is your cost per acquisition. There are things that go into that but mostly it’s just, right, what am I spending to get that person on my list? Then there is the lifetime value. You’ve got to add up everything someone spends with you. It’s pretty easy to do that. You just take all your sales for a certain period of time, divide it by how many customers you have and alright, that is what each customer is spending. What most people can’t do is, if I say what is your business currently paying to acquire a customer? I’m paying $110. Most people can’t even begin to tell you. I also can tell you that it’s $130 from TV, but it’s lower from AdWords and it’s lower from direct mail which averages us out to $110. The lifetime value of our customer is $450. So I put them on my list for $110, and over the next couple of years they spend $450. I make $300 and some dollars. So every person I put on, I’m making $300. So I want to put on as many as possible. And for the back end, the profits come from different areas. So a simple way to think about the metrics we just talked about, is the cost per acquisition tells you how well you’re doing on the front end and your lifetime customer value is a measure of how well you’re doing the back end offers. The question is, which side of the business can you put on auto pilot, the front end or the back end? So you want to think about a couple of things. Which sale is the harder to make, the front end or the back end? The front end. Which end faces more competition? The front end as well. Which end required constant innovation? A lot of people think it is the back end but it is the front end if you’re going to keep ahead of the competition and you’re going to keep making the sale and keeping the cost down. Which one has the higher conversion rate? That is going to be the back end. Which end are you going to make bigger profits on? That is going to be the back end. But many people say, alright bigger profits, higher conversion rates, I shouldn’t put that on auto pilot, that is where the real money is. People will say, let’s put the front end on auto pilot. That’s wrong. You want to put the back end on auto pilot. I know I can get $350 or $400 per customer. Then if you’ve got a home study course, you’ve got a service of some kind, you’ve got a restaurant, and you know you’re going to make x amount of dollars when people come there. If someone comes to my restaurant, this doesn’t have to be internet marketing, and I know they’re going to eat there for the next three years and spend $200, I just need to get more people in. So you get your back end established as quickly as possible and then you a majority of your resources on as many front end activities as possible. If you need an online business plan, this is a good place to start. |
| Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 | |
| 8:44 pm | David Jenyns On His SEO Journey Although I am an entrepreneur and my core business is stock trading and trading systems, I have moved into the internet marketing realm and learned to master SEO as well. When I finished school, I actually took out a loan and instead of going to university, I went and did one of those week end share trading courses, where in a crash course, you learn how to trade the stock market in a week end and on Monday hopefully you’ll make a million dollars. That was the plan. That was at least the way they sold it. I signed up for that and went through the course and did a little bit of trading. It was sort of late in the internet boom, early 2000, just as everything was still running up before the big tech crash. I made a little bit of money there, but I started to realize that to make money, especially in the stock market, you do need a trading float. You need a little bit of capital and here I was already $5,000 in the hole. A friend and I who I met at this particular course, identified a need for a stock market education product to do with some software, stock market software. People were using this software, but didn’t fully understand how to get the most out of it. We put together a home study course on that. It was really successful from the early days, except when I got it online, I realized it’s all well and good to put your website up there, but a website isn’t worth the domain name it’s hosted on, unless you’re getting traffic to it. I got interested in a little bit of classic direct mail stuff, Jay Abrahams, Dan Kennedy that sort of thing. I learned a little bit about the classic sales letter writing, long form sales letter writing. That branched over – I’ve always been interested in technology and gadgets and things like that. The internet was springing up. I got interested in internet marketing, how do you market on the web. That evolved. I started again with the long form sales letters online and then I started to say, how can I get more traffic to the websites? That’s what led into a pretty in depth study as far as the SEO was concerned. In the early days, there wasn’t a lot of material out there that you could find out about on page and off page optimization. It was a little more trial and error. When you think just how much information there is now, in such a short period of time, how much it has grown, it is amazing. It almost feels as if it happened overnight. In one way it can be bad because there is so much information, you don’t know where to start. There are still a lot of different myths and misnomers out there, about what is good SEO and how do you get a website ranked and that sort of thing. At least now, if you find one or two people to follow and watch what it is they do, and do your own testing, it’s a lot easier than when I first started out, that’s for sure. So I started up my trading system and as a by product, I became interested in internet marketing. I learned to write the traditional long sales letter of which we’ve all seen many. Then I became interested in learning how to drive targeted traffic to those sales letters and as a result I started to explore SEO in more depth. I think one of the first programs I really started getting interested in, there’s a guy called Ken Evoy who is behind a program called SiteSell. His first book Make Your Site Sell was one of the first ones that I read. It was all about the art of the pre sale and putting really good content out there, almost having SEO happen naturally. When you do put good content out there, SEO does happen naturally. People link to it and that sort of thing. What we try and do now is use our SEO techniques to jumpstart and get us up to a point where we reach that critical mass and then hopefully the natural SEO starts to take over. |
| Friday, June 18th, 2010 | |
| 11:56 am | Initial Steps To Driving Traffic  When you’re first starting a new website people are often interested to find out the sort of steps you’d take to drive traffic. They want to know where to start and what is the process that you go through. What SEO techniques to use, and so on. It’s sort of a mixed question. I could talk about people having online assets so online assets being products and content and links, the number of people on your prospect list, your customer list and your partners. The answer to the question really depends on taking a look at your own asset base, wherever you are at and looking at what’s most appropriate for you. For me if I was to start today, I’ve got a very large data base, so my first action would be to email my database about that and drive a lot of traffic that way and then go on to talk to some of our partners promoters. That’s talking from me personally where our business is today. Saying that, over fourteen, fifteen months ago, the current company I’ve got, Market Samurai, didn’t exist. I had one or two things on my asset list which was, I knew lots of influential people in the marketing world and so from that perspective, my first port of call was to try to do something with them that would be of interest to them that they would promote to their list and then of course be able to build my list up as a result of that. That’s me personally as a company. From the perspective of someone starting out with essentially nothing, no large leveragable relationships or no list or those kinds of things, I’d think of going either the simple SEO route or the AdWords route to start generating traffic and therefore start building a list. That is definitely where I would start looking at things. It is important to look to what you’ve got, or what assets, leveraging off those, and work off where you’re already strong. Then look to build a list. Let’s say you were starting out or even consulting with someone, working oput where to start would be purely based on your asset base. If you don’t know what you’re doing in AdWords, you’re going to be very poor very quickly. It’s going to get eaten up very quickly, you’re going to waste a lot of money learning to play the game unless you know what you’re doing. So I wouldn’t necessarily suggest starting by doing the AdWords thing without having a very strong training or strategy behind doing that, without buying some good course teaching you how to do it. Saying that, though, I think there is no faster way for someone to test the market, even if they’re losing money, than via AdWords. So if you’re looking at getting your toe in the water, and I’m a big believer in testing the market, then AdWords is fantastic whether you’re starting out or not starting out and you’ve got some online assets behind you. AdWords is a very quick way to put your toe in the water. Saying that now, with some of the SEO methodologies around today, it’s very easy, if you know what you’re doing, to actually dominate a keyword very quickly in a matter of days to weeks depending on the strength of the competition around the keyword. So it really depends on what your time horizon is to actually get a result. So if I wanted to know in a couple of days, I’d probably go the AdWords route. If I was happy to play around for a couple of weeks and wait for the results to come in, then throw up a site to SEO some keywords to get some traffic to test the commerciality of that traffic is something I would take a look at doing. You can also learn new white hat SEO techniques to help you out. Either of these ways would be a great place to start out with your online campaign. |
| Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 | |
| 9:53 pm | The Importance Of Satellite Sites
When you begin working with a client to build a website, you know what your objectives are, and you’re going for the lowest hanging fruit first because you’re looking at hidden resources and existing resources on where to tackle first. Once you start working on those, you need to fire as many arrows as you can. |
| Saturday, June 12th, 2010 | |
| 9:10 pm | Why You Should Build Links
Building links is such an important aspect when you build a website. You can go out there and get 10,000 pr1 or pr 0 sites but then you go ahead and just get one link from Microsoft or Entrepreneur and if that link is going to stay, the benefit is, it only takes you one of those links to get all of the same benefit you may have got from all of those other links. |
| Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 | |
| 12:39 pm | Mistakes In Online Business When people first get started in online marketing, or even if they’ve been online a little while, there are several common mistakes they make. The biggest thing is chasing shiny objects. People get so focused on trying to learn too many new technologies or trying to see what everybody else is doing, or they get excited about one product and they hear about one that is even more interesting that someone is having more success with. They start chasing that money. Those are the worse things they can do. Not paying attention to the numbers, not doing your research ahead of time before you launch a product or service is another common error. Make sure there is actually a market for whatever you have. Understand that people may or may not want it. I’m working with a client right now who I’ve told on numerous occasions her product is probably not the right product for the market. But they did no research ahead of time, literally said, well this was given to me by the universe, so it must need to sell. Well the reality of it is, whether you want to be that far out and say it was given to you by the universe, or you just have this great idea that you fall in love with and you’re going to make it happen, you can push it as hard as you want, and I’m a big believer in if you believe in something and absolutely hustling to make it happen. But at some point if it’s not working and you’ve done everything that you possibly can, you have to ask, does the market exist? Ideally you would ask does the market exist ahead of time, before you invest a lot of time and money in trying to sell something that people may or may not want. So not knowing there is a market ahead of time is a mistake. Not developing a powerful persona that people can connect with and believe in. Not being relevant and transparent, believing people won’t find out the truth online. It takes moments, if not less, to find out anything they want to know about you now. People take too long to initiate and engage. They believe it is too hard, so they’ll start out with one thing, and they’ll say, I’m just going to blog. I’m only going to do that until I’m successful. You won’t just be successful using one media outlet. It’s like saying, I’m going to build my whole business around a radio ad in a particular town. It’s just not going to happen. You have to reach out and go further. A huge mistake I see people make all the time is being under funded. While it appears that internet marketing is very inexpensive to get into and it is, it’s not free, regardless of what people will tell you. One of the fastest ways to do research for example is to use Google AdWords to drive traffic to a site or to a product to see if people are really interested in it. And if they are, that gives you a sense of whether or not it will work. Almost all the beginning businesses when I start them or when I have clients do it, we start driving traffic with Google AdWords because it is the fastest most cost effective way of getting traffic that is interested in what you’re talking about to your site. You’ve got to have enough money to be able to last the ups and the downs, do the testing and to go from there. Another big mistake people make is they spend too much money on technology. This person I was just talking about earlier, whose product may not be a good fit for the market, spent $60,000 to create a website that could have been created using an outsourced tool to Romania or China or India. They probably could have had it created for a couple of thousand dollars. They invested $60,000 in it and that was all of their money. Now there is no money to promote it further or do other things that need to be done. It was sort of the idea of, if you build it, they will come. I’m here to tell you there are way too many fields on the internet to be building it and hoping they will come. You’ve got to have a systematic process for doing it. That’s my final thing that I see people doing wrong, is that they don’t have a plan for how they’re going to run their business. They don’t actually create a business plan, they don’t create a marketing plan. They don’t sit down and say, these are who my clients are and this is how I’m going to reach them tactically day by day, these are the things I’m going to do. Without that sort of focus, that fearsome focus, you’re not going to have success. To learn more, you can consult an SEO specialist. |
| Monday, June 7th, 2010 | |
| 2:42 pm | Strengthening Your Online Presence When someone is starting to create a business online, it is important to first build a strong persona. Start with that persona, create the information and be ruthlessly consistent about it. When I have a new client who’s doing this, this is what I tell them. In order to create a strong and compelling persona online whom people will come to trust, you will need to submit to a program. For the next ninety days, you have to write a blog post every day. For the next ninety days, you have to create at least two videos a week. For the next ninety days you have to create at least one audio a week. For the next ninety days you have to tweet at least ten times a day with something that is interesting and compelling. For the next ninety days you have to ask at least two powerful questions that people might have that would lead them to ask more questions about your product on LinkedIn. Learn too, the difference between Google vs. Facebook. When we start with that process, that seems very overwhelming to a lot of people. They say, oh, I can’t create content at that level. Well, if you can’t, you need to back up and regroup and decide what it’s going to take to do that, or maybe you’re in the wrong business. The reality of it is, what most people feel when they say, oh, that’s too much information, I don’t know if I can do it, is they’re not prepared for it. So step number one, even preemptive to starting that strategy obviously is to sit down and say, ok, I need to create blogs over the next ninety days, I need to create twenty-four videos. This is also called social media marketing So what are twenty-four topics, questions, concerns, interesting things people might have about my product or service that I can talk about, that I could create videos about? When you break it down into those simple topics, I can talk about these twenty-four things, I can have an audio around these twelve things, I can write blog posts on these ninety things, you’ve suddenly got something that’s very interesting. What I’ll let them do in the last twenty days of that is, they don’t have to write blog posts that they’ve necessarily created themselves, they can respond to other people’s blog posts. They can begin introducing other ideas into their blog. Initially we want them to do that and there’s a very specific reason and focus for that. What we’re trying to do is dominate the keywords in a category. All of the blog posts that we’re writing, we’ve done our keyword research ahead of time, so that we know these are the keywords, these are the key phrases people are searching for in order to find our product or service. Those keywords or key phrases are going to end up in the headline of the blog post and they’re going to end up in the blog post body, so that we have more and more relevant, valuable links back from the search engines. That is one of the most overlooked things that people do, but that’s the real reason for having such an aggressive SEO strategy. Once that first ninety days is up, you’re going to let up a little, but for the next year or for the balance of nine months, you’re still going to post at least three times a week on your blog. You’re going to be doing video at least once a week, you’re going to be doing audio at least a couple of times a month, you’re going to be tweeting every day, Facebooking, all those things that are required in order for you to dominate the search and to dominate the top of mind awareness in the category you’re trying to create. To learn more, visit www.melbourneseoservices.com. |
| Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 | |
| 11:06 pm | What About SEO Services In Melbourne? In terms of Internet marketing and advertising so much can be gained from SEO,so it should be considered an important part of any Internet marketing plan. Failing to maximize your site for search engines may end up in a huge loss regarding no cost advertising that's efficiently obtained from ranks in addition to search engines. Some degree of SEO is needed by Internet marketing, that is why a reading of this article is a must ,which will tell you what SEO is and why it is necessary. SEO optimization's a strategy where a site's made to obtain favorable search engine ranks from prominent engines. This may be attained using several various methods and ultimate SEO strategies in combination with several various methods for completion of a well considered SEO promotion. Should you be tuning your website for search engines, you need to understand factors such as keyword density, prominence, META tags, headings and inbound links. Keyword density is one of the most common SEO plans that SEO specialists use and necessarily involves using the concerned keywords which are often in the contents of a website to show the relevance of those keywords with that of the website. Search engines are likely to reward websites with optimal keyword densities with better search engine rankings in an effort to provide Internet users with the most related websites for particular search expressions. So this is very important. Dominant keywords must additionally be thought of including how close the keyword's are placed to the site's introduction. The common errors with this way is thinking the ideal chance for including keywords is in the 1st line of viewable words on the page. This isn't correct since search engines crawl site code in contrast with the viewable site data. What this means is that one can incorporate relevant keywords a long time prior to setting down actual visible website content, which could include title codes and META tags. Business owners that use the keyword in the code rather than keywords on their website have an advantage. It is very important for those who are interested in SEO to use inbound links. It is an other area of interest if you plan to be an SEO expert. Inbound links are valuable links that are found on other websites,they can lead traffic to your website. Why are these links so crucial? Primarily because many prominent websites put a value on inbound links, which are the equivalent of one website advertising for, or suggesting, another website. When you want to obtain inbound links, however, you should do so from other websites that rank well with search engines. Many of these search engines take into account the rank of a primary website in determining the value of inbound links. We will explain why you need optimization of your website in the first place. And now we briefly explain the main concept of SEO. SEO is really vital since the majority of web users really value search engine results and probably exclusively inspect rank sites when seeking a particular keyword. To get more information information on Melbourne SEO services make sure to visit the link above. |
