Is There A Future In SEO? My Answer Is Yes…
Posted on May 8, 2008
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | Leave a Comment
Yesterday evening, I was reading a blog called ShoeMoney, some of you may have heard of it, some probably not. Apparently he did an interview about SEO and the future of the industry. In his interview he was quick to voice his opinion about SEO and how it has no future. I couldn’t disagree more! Anyone who thinks that SEO is slowly fading into the past is completely out of their mind and this is why…
Evolution of The Search Engines
Yes the search engines (especially Google) will change and evolve into something new on a continual basis. Google has changed so many things over the last few years that make it harder for black hat SEO techniques to be effective. It also put some limitation on real SEO’s and how they help their clients rank. Did we cry? Did we all throw up our hands in defeat? NO! We evolve with it and make it work again. No mater how much Google changes over the coming years, good SEO’s will adapt and continue to dominate the search engine rankings.
The Power of Link Building
Building links is always going to help a website rank. The voting system is here to stay regardless of what anybody says. It is truly the only fair way to asses how much authority a website has regarding a particular keyword(s). If you want to dominate the search engine rankings now and for years to come, you need to be building massive amounts of links to your site.
Meta Tags
Don’t see meta tags going anywhere anytime soon… These little babies are essential for telling Google exactly what your website is about. As soon as Google starts picking up links to your website, they will then go to your site and take a deeper look at things. It is then that they will asses exactly what you do and why you are there. They will categorize your site with a certain topic or keyword and you will start showing up in the search engines.
I could probably go on and on about my reasoning for this, but I’m too busy to do so. It is quite sad that one individual thinks that SEO is on its way out, because it’s just not happening. Best of luck to Mr. ShoeMoney in his endeavors.
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Internet Marketing Mix
Posted on April 30, 2008
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Pay Per Click | 3 Comments
I am frequently asked why it is important to have a sound internet marketing mix. Well, because it’s important to diversify the traffic that is coming to your website. Don’t get me wrong, it is vital that you segment the market that you want to target, but you don’t want all of your traffic coming from just one source, hell, you don’t even want it coming from two or three sources. I learned in a Principles of Finance class about diversifying your portfolio to reduce the amount of risk you take when investing. It is the exact same with internet marketing and generating quality leads online. The more solid your marketing mix is, the better chance that you will get a higher quality traffic, with just a few losers here and there.
In order to diversify your internet marketing mix, you need to take a step back and look at the whole picture and what you want to accomplish. Some methods of internet marketing don’t work for certain businesses or industries. You need to pick the perfect blend to maximize your return on your investment. There are so many different forms of internet marketing that you can consider and choose from. Of course, there is the monster, Google AdWords, Yahoo and MSN ads, affiliate marketing, co registration, pop ups and pop unders, email marketing, display advertising, and the list can go on and on.
Each of these methods of internet marketing has its advantages and disadvantages and that is why it is so important to have a balance among the methods. You may have an affiliate campaign that completely thrives and a co registration campaign that suffers. When you take how much you spent on each campaign and average it out among all conversions, your damage will be greatly reduced than if you just chose to do co registration and ended up getting hammered.
I can think of two really good examples that have happened to me over the last year. Just recently, a client of ours asked us to perform an email campaign for them. Being that we aren’t skilled in that area or have a list to blast to, we outsourced to a company called Prospects Influential. We were pressed for time and had to meet a deadline and took their offers and theirs only. In the end, we lost about $2,000 of our own money (since we did not charge the client) because we had one conversion off the entire campaign. If we would have allocated that $2,000 through a few different types of internet marketing, our losses would have been reduced greatly.
The second example is a positive one. We were doing some co registration for a client recently and placed their offer on ten different registration paths. Three of those paths suffered greatly with conversion under 2%. The rest of the paths converted at over 12% allowing the client to have a greater average conversion. Yeah it still sucked that they put money into three sites that didn’t convert, but the success with the other seven paths far outweighed the losses on the three.
I hope that you can clearly see how powerful a planned and executed internet marketing mix can be for your company. It is vital to your success if you want to make it big in your industry.
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The Basics Of Affiliate Marketing
Posted on April 28, 2008
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments
I’ve been an affiliate marketer for about four years now. Affiliate marketing is an excellent business to get into, if you can find your particular niche. Most individuals who get into affiliate marketing have a certain product or service that they are going to market online. If they have a blue print of what they need to do and where they need to go to be successful, they will make a killing!
To start out in affiliate marketing, you need to come up with an idea of what you want to promote. Home security, identity theft products, any type of training course, web hosting services, dating services, car loans, payday loans, online video rental services, or magazines. They list can honestly go on and on all day long.
Once you establish a niche that you want to promote, you need to figure out how you are going to promote them. You either need a blog, website, or store front. You need some way for visitors to access these offers from the internet and from some form of website that you own. If you want to start slow and cheap, you can sign up for a free blogger account and promote offers that way. If you are going to be a diehard in affiliate marketing and hopefully sell your affiliate website(s) someday, you need to own rights to it. I use Host Monster for all of my websites. They hosting fees are very affordable, they have an easy to use control panel, and their customer service is to die for.
After you make your decision about whether to buy a domain or go with the free blog from blogger, you need to come up with a unique URL and name for your site. Try to have your niche keywords in the URL to help with the branding of your site. Next you need a solid design for your site. It needs to look professional but exciting. You also need good solid content explaining what your site is about so that the search engines will be able to tell what your site is about and categorize you properly.
Next, you will need to find the actual affiliate product to promote. There are hundreds of affiliate networks online today in which you can sign up for a free account and pull offers to put on your site. Partnering with a good affiliate network is vital to affiliate marketing. With a good partner and account manager to help you, you will have a much higher chance of success! Some of the networks that I personally work with are CPA Storm, Commission Junction, Filinet, and the Panthera Network.
Once you have your site all spiffed up and your affiliate offers loaded onto your site. You are ready to start driving traffic to your website. You can do this two ways,
- Organic search traffic and search engine optimization
- Your own internet marketing efforts (AdWords, Hub Pages, etc.)
I recommend that Craigslist is always an excellent place to start to get free traffic!
Affiliate marketing is fun, it is flexible, and allows you to do other things you love while it works for you in the background. I would suggest affiliate marketing to anyone interested in making money from the internet.
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What Is Positioning? Most Internet Marketers Have No Clue…
Posted on April 25, 2008
Filed Under Internet Marketing | Leave a Comment
If you are an internet marketer, with very little off line marketing or advertising background, you probably don’t know what positioning means. Positioning is where your product or service lies in the mind of the consumer. If your consumer doesn’t know about your product or service, you have about a 100% chance that they aren’t going to buy your product. For instance, I have been obsessing over Mario Kart Wii for the last two months. It finally comes out on Sunday and I will be at the front doors of F.Y.E. at 10 am Sunday morning to pick up my copy. Mario Kart Wii is positioned in my mind as something that I cannot live without, sad as that may seem 
On the other hand, my brother, who is a Wii fanatic as well will not be there to get the game. He said he will get it when it becomes more readily available. So there, two examples of how a product is positioned in two different individuals minds.
I first learned about positioning in a principles of marketing class at Utah Valley University. As I sat in class and thought about positioning in the marketing world, I wondered what ways you can position a product through internet marketing. The same principles apply whether you market online or off line so it shouldn’t be that difficult, right? I currently use these techniques for my own projects and for our clients to help position ourselves in the mind of our consumers.
- Have a strong internet marketing mix (I will go into marketing mix more in depth in another post). Mix things up and have your product or service coming at your customer from all angles and directions. The rule of thumb is, if a customer hears or sees your product or service at least three times from three different sources, they are probably going to at least look into it and possibly buy it.
- Promote your product or service through a press release. Nothing sounds more official and legitimate than a press release.
- Product or service reviews, this is HUGE and is called social proof. Contact blog owners, website owners, forum owners in your particular niche and ask them if they would mind trying or testing your product for free and write a nice review about it on their website. You would either deliver the product or service electronically or through the mail. When doing this, make sure that the particular website or blog has enough traffic to create a good amount of awareness or you will be wasting your and the owners time.
- Gather testimonials about your products and services and put them on your website. This is also known as social proof. If others support it, your potential customers will consider trying it, therefore it is positioned in their mind.
In internet marketing, positioning is something that is vital to your success. You need to know what it is and how to do it. Put yourself in the consumers shoes and figure out why they would want to purchase what you have to offer. Once you know that, then work on ways to inform them and create awareness. Create social proof so that they know others are loving your stuff and at that point you should have them hooked.
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Internet Marketing Channels of Distribution
Posted on April 23, 2008
Filed Under Internet Marketing | Leave a Comment
When I ran out the door of my home this morning, I looked down at the shirt I was wearing. Of course, it is a Famous Stars and Straps shirt (my favorite brand). I went driving to clear my head and try to develop some new ideas for blog posts and ways to better my internet marketing skills. I got to thinking more and more about the shirt I was wearing and about something I learned in my Strategic Marketing class at Utah Valley University.
I first started wearing Famous Stars and Straps in 2001, just shortly after Blink 182 released their fourth cd. For those of you who don’t know, I’ll bet that’s all of you, Famous Stars and Straps is owned by Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker. At the time, Famous was distributing their clothing through an exclusive channel, their website. When I received my first shipment from them it had a flex fit hat and a shirt with their flagship logo proudly displayed on the front of it. I thought I was something else! They only person in the state of Utah rocking the coolest brand out there.
Let’s jump to three months later. I was walking down the University Mall in Orem, UT on afternoon with a friend. As we walked by the local Hot Topic, my jaw just about dropped. There was the same shirt that I had ordered just a few months back. I was saddened by the fact that I would not only be the only one who knew what Famous was, but I would no longer be the only one wearing it either. At that point in time Famous had moved to a selective distribution channel, where not everyone was carrying it, but a few retailers were.
Let’s jump to one year later. It’s now late in the year of 2002 and I was visiting a Gen-X factory clothing store in Provo, UT (don’t ask me why I was there, it’s quite ghetto) and to my dismay I saw a complete wall of Famous Stars and Straps clothing, hats, and belt buckles. Disgusted, I immediately left the store. How could Famous do this to me? They were moving toward an intensive distribution channel where everyone and their dog is carrying their clothing line. I wouldn’t be surprised if on day, Wal Mart is carrying it.
I feel as though Travis Barker and Famous have somewhat sold out on me and every other fan of their clothing. Fortunately, they only allow some of their designs to be sold in stores. If you want to get the really cool stuff, you have to go online.
Now to get to the reasoning behind this flashback and novel about a clothing line… Is it better in the internet marketing world, when paying for actual marketing like affiliate, co registration, email, and display, to be exclusive, selective, or intensive in the distribution channel you choose? To be completely honest, I’m not sure! I believe that they both have their pros and cons, but If I were to do it for myself, I would probably go exclusive.
My reasoning behind this choice is as follows,
- Being exclusive with one company to market my products will give me greater leverage when working directly with them in my campaign. I will have greater leverage in price and which of their publishers actually run my offers.
- Going exclusive does not get you as much attention all over the internet, but gets you better attention all over the internet. I cannot stand more than anything, when I go from site to site and see the exact same ads displaying. It makes me even less likely to click on them since everybody else already does.
- It allows you to become better friends and build a relationship with the account manager running your campaign. In the past, when working for a market research company, we worked with probably 15 different internet marketing companies. It was so hard having a strong relationship with each of them, especially since they knew they weren’t exclusive. I still worked hard to have good relationships with them and for that I believe that our campaigns thrived. If we were exclusive, I believe that a strong relationship with that one individuals, could have let to the same results or better than we were experiencing with all 15.
No matter what channel you select, you need to work hard to make things work for your advantage. Obviously, each channel works in the internet marketing realm and in the world today. Nike doesn’t rule the world today in shoe sales by having exclusive relationships with retailers. Even Wal Mart carries their shoes. Just do what works best for you and your company and you will be happy with the results.
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