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Blog Carnival August 9, 2011

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011 at 4:24 am

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Welcome to the August 9, 2011 edition. Sorry that I’ve gotten behind with this.

Jack Lango presents Website Video Production Create Visual Content For Your Website posted at Got Business Cards, saying, “Creating quality video to promote your online business and website is vital today. There are several tools that will help in producing great online video.”

Melanie Slaugh presents 10 Internet Sites for Stay at Home Dads posted at Internet Service Providers.

Ted presents Good Customer Service Skills All Customer Facing Staff Need | Authority Articles posted at Authority Articles, saying, “Problem solving, responsiveness to concerns and a willingness to exert energy are important skills for all customer service personnel.”

Linda Bond presents 3 Most Common Affiliate Mistakes | Build Online Businesses Now posted at Build Online Businesses Now, saying, “Learn how to avoid affiliate marketing overload by avoiding these top 3 common mistakes.”

Mitesh Solanki presents Ten Myths About Internet Marketing posted at Internet Marketing Tactics.

malcolm presents The Importance Of Systems Thinking | NonTraditional Success posted at NonTraditional Success, saying, “Start using systems thinking to examine your systems and explore the implications that this kind of thinking can open up in your life.”

Jeff Bode presents Set Up A High Quality Website In 2 Hours Or Less posted at Marketing Online X, saying, “Find out how to set up an entire website quickly and have it looking great even if it’s a specialized website. Using this simple step by step process you’ll be faster than you were before at setting up great websites.”

Tips For Using Videos For Killer Conversion posted at Internet Home Business Opportunities, saying, “Video marketing the powerful tool for online business. People like to see visuals of the product they want to buy. Visual presentation will bring in more conversions.”

Spartak presents What is done only by 1 minute in internet posted at Assorium.

Serene Hitchcock presents Stop Struggling and Start Living! posted at earncasheveryday.

Less Known But Powerful Blog Traffic Generating Tips posted at Internet Home Business Opportunities, saying, “In the end the internet marketing success is shown in the traffic volume. A good website is of no use when there is no traffic. Know the powerful traffic generating tips to reap profits from your site.”

David presents Best HostGator Coupon Code July 2011 posted at Best HostGator Coupon Codes 2011.

Subhash Chand presents Customer Acquisition through Social Media posted at Emanuel Fernandes, saying, “Customer acquisition has always been an important aspect of a whole marketing strategy and this can be done more effectively and efficiently through various social media channels. These channels have really changed the way brands promote their products and services online.”

Tracy Miller presents 40 Revolutionary iPad Apps for Homeowners posted at Insurance Quotes Blog, saying, “Buying and owning a home can be an amazing experience, and a great investment to boot, but that doesn’t mean homeownership is always a walk in the park”

Juliet Jones presents 10 Most Disruptive Computer Viruses in Internet History posted at Business Insurance, saying, “A problem that predates the internet, the first virus was created 40 years ago, setting forth a problem that has grown with our dependence on computers.”

What is Local Search? posted at Local Bend, saying, “Local search is becoming an increasingly important way for businesses to market themselves on the internet.”

Brittney presents Streaming Video You Better Get to Know the VPAA posted at Information Law RSS Feed, saying, “If you operate a website that streams video, chances are you’re not familiar with the Video Privacy and Protection Act of 1988, 18 U.S.C. §2710 (VPPA). Recently there has been a series of lawsuits alleging violations of the VPPA involving how website operators store user programming history. Contact us with additional questions or to request an audit.”

Reactive Websites presents Ready, steady? GO! posted at Reactive Websites.

Melissa Delaney presents Warning: 10 Reasons You Could Get Hooked on WiMax Internet posted at Wireless Internet Reviews.

Elena Frederick presents 12 Step Program for Quitting FaceBook posted at Free Internet.

Kathy Nelson presents 10 Reasons People Hear News FIRST Now from Facebook posted at Broadband Service Providers.

Amanda Radcliffe presents 20 Stunning Homeland Security Infographics posted at Homeland Security Degree, saying, “One interesting way to explain certain aspects of homeland security is through the uses of graphics. Some of these are serious, while other illustrations can be parodies. But in their own ways, they offer an easier way to understand homeland security issues.”

Brian Rakowski presents Can MLM Lead System Pro Really Save Your Business? posted at Regenesis Health and Wellness | Brian Rakowski, saying, “Many of the top online network marketers are touting MLM Lead System Pro as the real solution to building a large organization using the internet, but will it really work for the average marketer?”

Charles Chua C K presents To Blog Is To Give and Receive posted at All About Living with Life.

DebB presents Create SEO Friendly URLS In WordPress posted at How To Build A Website Quick, saying, “Make your WordPress blog URLs more people and SEO friendly. It is simple!”

YFS Magazine presents Top 15 Tips to Boost Business on Facebook posted at YFS Magazine.

Erica Morgan presents 10 Technology Secrets Kids Keep from their Parents posted at Internet Providers.

Stacey Rogers presents Minimalist Internet: 10 Ways to Make Dial-Up Work for You posted at Dial Up Internet.

Melanie Slaugh presents 7 Laws Impacting our Online Privacy posted at Internet Service Providers.

Christine Kane presents 10 Reasons Terrorists Stay Off the Internet posted at Internet Service Providers.

Kathy Nelson presents Top 10 iOS Apps for Social Media Addicts posted at Broadband Service Providers.

Gloria Nilson presents 10 Reasons to Immediately Leave a Website posted at Dial Up.

Brittney presents Seven reminders from the FTC for CAN-SPAM Act Compliance posted at Information Law RSS Feed, saying, “The FTC has put together this handy video outlining seven simple things to remember about complying with the CAN-SPAM Act.”

Charles Chua C K presents 10 Effective Ways to Create a Positive First Impression of your Blog posted at All About Living with Life.

Stella Anokam presents Outsourcing: Strategy To Grow An Online Business Income Fast posted at Free Internet Marketing Tips Simplified |Start Your Own Online Business.

Coleen Torres presents 10 Traditional Newspapers that Successfully Moved Online posted at phonetvinternet.com.

Phil Byrne presents Using Google Alerts For Market Research | Coffee Kicks posted at Coffee Kicks – SEO, Link Building.

Matt Barrington presents Using Video to Promote Your Business Steps to a Great Marketing Video posted at The YouTube View Blog.

Michael Donelly presents “Decorate” your business with the art of delegation. posted at www.anotherway.org, saying, “Read this if: you want to be a successful manager or grow your one-man business into something bigger. Gain: The more you delegate the more time you have for other tasks. Cost: Loss of direct control over tasks.”

Tash Hughes presents Discussing automating social media updates posted at Word Constructions.

Tash Hughes presents Choose links carefully posted at Word Constructions, saying, “Sharing links and information is a great way to build community and show generosity, but be careful what links you choose…”

Juliet Jones presents 10 Old Brands That Managed to Stay Modern posted at Business Insurance, saying, “You might have more in common with your great-grandparents than that receding hairline or cleft chin; some of your favorite brands might have been used by your predecessors, even as early as the Civil War.”

Brittney presents Reputation Management: Dealing with negative online postings posted at Information Law RSS Feed, saying, “Pepper Law Group is one of very few law firms qualified to employ BOTH the legal and technological tools above to help control your positive online reputation. Learn more, or schedule a consultation with one of our lawyers to confidentially discuss your situation in detail.”

kronik seo presents Building Back-links for Targeted Web site Traffic posted at Internet Marketing – Web design, saying, “Building back-links can help get your website indexed faster by search engines as well as increase traffic to your website by improving its rank on search results. Search engines use a number of factors to calculate a website’s rank. Relevancy of content and back-links are the most important factors.”

Steve presents The Basic Points to Keep in Mind When Advertising Your Website posted at ISMagazine.com, saying, “There are an estimated 312 million websites on the web today and this number is forever growing. So how can you make sure yours is different?”

Amber presents 3 Habits of the Effective People posted at Captured Technology, saying, “One person can achieve a lot by himself, but this cannot be compared to the things that more people can achieve if they work together and trust each other completely.”

Anna Farmery presents Show 344 – How Our Eyes View Web Pages posted at The Engaging Brand.

Mitchell presents Finding Dedicated Servers on a Budget posted at VistaPrint – 250 Free Business Cards, saying, “Having a website that is highly available, within budget and not located on a server with bad neighbors is one of the best way to get traffic from the search engines.”

Mitchell presents Things to Avoid when Getting Dedicated Server Hosting posted at VistaPrint – 250 Free Business Cards, saying, “Selecting a dedicated server company that allows for more than one domain on a server will provide the needed flexibility to expand in the future.”

Paul Piotrowski presents Starting an Ecommerce Website in 2011 posted at Paulymath.com.

BWL presents How Do Bloggers Make Money? posted at Blogging Your Passion, saying, “This post takes a look at some of the various ways that bloggers can make money from their blogs…”

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of internet marketing muscle using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

A Simple Formula for Keyword Research

Thursday, November 11th, 2010 at 12:38 pm

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Keyword research ought to be one of the first things you do when setting up an online business. Heck, it's one of the first things you should do when setting up any business nowadays. Even if you don't have a website of your own, your business should be online (think Google Places, Yelp, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, to name just a few).

Even if none of the above matters to you, keyword research still matters because you want to mould your marketing message and all marketing materials with the keywords that will pre-sell your products and services.

Having said that, once many folks convince themselves that they need to do KW research, they ultimately fail by either doing it wrong or waiting for the perfect set of keywords.

You may have heard this term before: Analysis Paralysis.

You get so caught up in the data, go on tangents, analyze using multiple tools, all of which give you conflicting information.

Below is a link to a pdf I picked up from a friend in the industry, written by two pretty smart guys. In it, they show you how they do keyword research. It's a simple formula. You should check it out. You may find that it's perfectly suited to you and your situation.

KW-Research

Create Small Reports Using PLR

Friday, August 6th, 2010 at 12:07 pm

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I wanted to talk to you today about a simple business you can start part-time, doing some of the things you're already doing.

Online business is all about leverage. Sure, creativity matters; those who can produce most efficiently with their own style or flair thrown in are better off than those who can't.

But let's face it: We don't all have the gift of product creation or of writing quality articles or ebooks.

However, you can certainly start a thriving online business selling small reports using Private Label Rights material.

Here's what you do:

Enter a market that has hungry buyers already. No need to create demand where it doesn't exist already. Do your keyword research. Use the usual tools to find relevant keywords. I'll be putting together a keyword tutorial of some sort in the near future.
At first, concentrate on "long-tail keywords" – they are generally 3 words or longer. For example, if your market is "weight loss" (highly-competitive and you really have little chance getting any search traffic from that term, as you'll wind up on Google page number "nonehundred"), target in all your writing and posting a term like "weight loss tips" or "weight loss plans" or "weight loss and exercise." Make sense? You'll have a much better chance of ranking for those terms AND potential customers are more likely to search using those terms when they're looking for a solution.
Now, purchase some PLR material on weight loss. Make sure it's PLR (read the license terms to ensure that you can a) modify the material however you want and b) you can claim authorship).
Make the material yours. Target the 4 or 5 keywords/phrases you found in Step 2.
Title the book using one of those keywords/phrases. Pick the one that you think will resonate best with your audience.
Let people know about your product. Offer review copies to folks on the relevant forums (for our example, pick a weight loss forum). Run an "introductory special" for the first x buyers. Whatever.

The idea at first is not to earn a lot of money but rather to become a known quantity in your chosen niche. Add people to your email marketing list. As you create more products, make offers to your list. You'll find that people who liked your stuff last month will like what you write this month.

Test. Try selling your next book for $7. The books, by the way, don't have to be lengthy. They can be anywhere between 7 and 30 pages. I suggest 7-15 pages because this length matches what an average reader/consumer has the patience for reading in full

Next product, sell it for $10. Think in series – working backwards from a full-fledged course or "real book," chunk out the chapters in a way that each chapter is a small report. Sell the "chapters" as you write them. At the end, bundle it all up and put it in book form, video, audio, or membership.

The key idea here is to leverage what's already available, use it, re-use it, and re-purpose it.

For example, I will use the content of this email as "stock" (as in making soup) for a blog post (heck, I might even copy it word for word), a short report, and then part of a bigger product.

As I suggest here, you're doing this but with an easier method: Your PLR material has already been written for you! You just have to modify it a bit.

Good sources of PLR material:

If you want to learn a bit more about how to use PLR material to build a thriving online business, check out Easy Private Label Rights Profits. It's something I picked up from none other than Jimmy Brown and it's easily worth 100x what you pay for it here ($9.95). It's really a no-brainer.

Tools: My Blog Log

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 7:13 am

Comments (3)

In an online business, more information is usually better than not enough. Unless, that is, you get all tangled up in the details. Which is easy, because with tools like Google Analytics, there is SO MUCH information and there seems not to be much in the way of easy-to-follow documentation on how to use the tool.

MyBlogLog (an unusual name, for sure) is different. Essentially, you can see 3 things that are very important. It's a tool I use every day.

The 3 things are:

How visitors got to your site
What they looked at when they got to your site
Whether or not they clicked something on your site

To me, it's critically important to find out where a user came from. Most of my traffic comes from search engines, most specifically Google. The cool thing about MBL is that it shows you the exact URL a visitor came from, which means you get to see the search term(s) that a visitor used to get to your site.

This is extremely valuable information.

You can do a lot with just this simple information. For example, you can build a page incorporating that exact search phrase. Then, you can link that new page to the page the viewer visited (link both ways). You can also tweak the original page to target that key phrase. Now, you have 2 potential pages that are reachable by that search phrase.

You now also know what potential customers are looking for. Why not write a short report (that's an affiliate link to an awesome report on how to write short reports that sell) that addresses this most obvious need?

MBL also has a neat social networking aspect to it. Your visitors can join your "community" and you can send public and private messages. You can use this small subset of your readers (face it, not everyone will sign up to join your community) as a test bed for offers, as a way to find out what your readers really want, or a host of other things. The potential is limitless.

You can also connect with your readers by adding them to your contacts. You can quickly amass hundreds of contacts, and you know what? Because all of your sites are posted on your profile page, your contacts see them all and — more importantly — they visit!

MyBlogLog is a fantastic way to accomplish multiple things with one tool: It's a social networking tool, it's a stats package (albeit not fully-fleshed out in the free version, which is the version I use because a) I'm cheap and b) it's all I need for now), and it's a great way to find like-minded individuals who write some incredible blogs.

I encourage you to check it out.

By the way, I get nothing out of recommending MyBlogLog, other than you might happen across my profile and connect with me. There is no financial incentive.

Building an Online Business Empire, Part 1 of 10 — Choosing a Business Method

Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 1:36 pm

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In Part 0, we laid the foundation for building an online business empire; basically, we talked about what we’re going to talk about. Now, onto the “real work.”

The first thing you have to decide on is “What is my business going to be?”

Some things to consider:

What am I good at?
Do I have any special talents?
What do I like to do?
Can I learn what I don’t know already?
Can I work without a boss?
Can I really work from home, in my pajamas? I mean, really work hard?
Is there enough material in me to make my own products?
Do I have industry connections that will ease my transition into whatever market I wish to enter?
Can I get help?
How much in liquid assets can I avail myself of? Meaning, how long can I go without making any money before I have to get a “real job?”
Do I have the support of my spouse or significant other?

Many of these “issues” can be alleviated simply by starting out “part time.” Keep your day job and build your business every other waking, non-family hour.

Let’s get to the real meat of this, then. What type of business should I start? There are a few excellent choices to start with.

Sell other people’s products. Known as “affiliate marketing,” this is one of the easiest businesses to get into. And it can be very lucrative. Many affiliate programs pay 50, 75, or even 100 percent commissions (they hope to sell the buyer on “back-end” products after you sell them the first product). It’s not hard to imagine how selling a $100 product with a 75 percent commission can add up! Sell 3 a day, $225! Or, over $6000 a month. All of these sales, too, by the way, are done fairly passively, meaning you don’t have to call anybody or continually sell. Once you set up a sales process, you’re on auto-pilot?
Create your own products. You have specialized knowledge that other people don’t have yet they seek it. You might be the parent of a “special needs” child, or you may have run the marketing operation of a small advertising agency. You might know how to train animals or have a special talent for baking cakes. Explore your experiences over the course of your lifetime and you’ll come up with dozens of product ideas for which you can create your own products. Then, you can build your own affiliate army and have other people sell your wares.
This one is a hybrid of the two above, of sorts. Private Label Rights (PLR) materials are materials that you get (either free or you pay for them), modify to suit your tastes and – more importantly — the tastes of your potential customers, and sell. In effect, you’re selling other people’s products (as in affiliate marketing), but you’re changing them up (sort of like creating your own product), but after the initial outlay of labor and/or money, you keep all of the profits. I have a really good course on starting and running your own PLR business called Internet Millions.
On the flipside of buying or acquiring PLR materials, why not create them? You sell your PLR to people who need well-written material. You don’t have to worry much about marketing, setting up niche websites, the sales process, and the like. You sell to the dozens of very good PLR membership sites that exist; they’re always looking for good material (and trust me, there is a lot more crap writing out there than good).
Membership sites. This is where you serve up content but for a price. It’s a great business model IF you have a lot of content because you receive regular monthly payments, rather than a one-time payment for a product you sell. However, I think a membership site is something you work into your business plan after you’ve established a profitable business.
There’s always eBay and Amazon. If you have physical products like books, gadgets, or other “hard goods,” these two sites are ripe for building a business.
Advertising. There are a lot of notable blogs that make a considerable 5 or even 6 figure monthly income based on serving up ads on your own site for other people. Google’s AdSense is the big player on campus, but there are others, most notably yahoo and Microsoft.

Of course, you can (and I encourage you to) marry more than one of these methods into your business plan. I would suggest that you start with no more than 2, however. My choices would be PLR and/or affiliate marketing PLUS AdSense. I would spend very little time on AdSense, and my thinking goes like this. AdSense will serve your visitors with ads that could actually help them, but they can also hinder your sales. For example, let’s say you’re promoting (“affiliate marketing”) a product that promises to solve a particular snoring problem. On your website, you write a post or page that talks about the negative health effects of snoring and you conclude with a link to the product you’re promoting (or “pre-selling”).

If you have an AdSense ad on that page, it is very likely that the ad will be about snoring and how to stop it (in fact, this is exactly how the ads are supposed to work — they aren’t called “contextual” for nothing). So instead of leading your reader to the sales page of the product you want to sell, you have sent them to a competitor.

Not good. Use sparingly. I suggest you place contextual ads only on pages your are not selling from. Seriously.

So there you have it — a few very good methods to get your online business empire going. Next up, in Part 2, we’ll brainstorm ideas, keywords, site concepts, and other things.