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Today what we are talking about is the old Google slap. One day your site is ranked number one or at least on the first page for a Google term and then seemingly overnight, or within just a few days, you are ranked 1,001. You are like “what happened, what did I do wrong?” Don’t panic we’ll talk about some of the main reasons why Google may ban your search engine marketing campaign, and how you can correct it.

Google Won’t Tell You Why

We speak from experience on this topic because it has happened to us before. You hear about other people but when it happens to you it is a little more personal and far far less delightful. Anyways, assessing the problem; what the heck just happened, unfortunately you are SOL because Google is not going to tell you the exact cause. They are not going to tell you, “well you change this on that page and all of a sudden you are not really number one anymore however if you were to change it like that all of a sudden you would be number one again.” Easy huh? They are not going to tell you anything like that.

They do however have, and we did an article on this – if haven’t already be sure you read it, Google Webmasters tools. Be familiar with that, it is your way to know at least some stuff on how Google looks at your site. They have a form in there that you can submit to say “what’s up? I got nothing wrong I don’t think. Help me out, I am not violating any terms of use.” You may or may not get any response from them and if you do you will usually get something vague like “your site is violating their terms of use.”

So be sure to read all of that stuff before you submit the stuff and make sure you are not if violation of that stuff. Definitely read their Webmaster guidelines very closely. If you do get a response from the form they may tell you your homepage is in violation or something and it is really tough to know exactly what they mean and what exactly is in violation but do you very best, make sure you are following those guidelines to the letter – no exceptions.

Use Google Webmaster Tools

Use Webmaster tools to track your keyword rankings. They tell you what your keywords rank and show you nice pretty graphs, and sometimes they drop – not a good thing – but you want to keep watching it. You want to know what is going on the Google front and how they see your site. Keep in mind the change in page rank could be just a blimp, they could be just tweaking stuff and changing gears like one of those semis changing gears. And actually we have seen our page rank drop before it moved up two points so don’t overreact about page rank changes.

It is like public companies verses private companies. The latter can focus on strategic as much as possible and be patient. In our experience if you are penalized by Google it can take as much as a year to get back to it. Which begs the questions: are you in it just to make a quick buck? You started it today and you want it to be successful in 6 months or it isn’t worth it to you? Then maybe it is time to do something else, start another site, whatever. But if you are in it for the long hull, be in it for the long hull, be the best you can be at it.

Understand the Rules

It’s best for you to familiarize yourself with their’s rules before you even start building a blog. Google will often ban or penalize your website without even giving a warning, and it may take a lot of online business owners a while to even realize that they aren’t coming up on the search engine. Usually it’s when businesses notice a dramatic drop in their customer base that they start digging into it further, and realize that they are no longer coming up in search results.

No Black Hat

Don’t engage in black hat marketing tactics, no link triangles, no buying text links on other people sites. They will catch on to that stuff. Also, make sure that you have fresh content on your website regularly and just keep building your brand. That is what you got to do, keep building your brand and eventually Google will come back around.

We kind of go back to this every time when we talk about how to get Google and the search engines to notice you. They are spending billions of dollars to weed out the crap from the useful stuff. Every now and then when the change you may get flagged along with the crap even though your stuff’s not crap but if you keep building your brand and doing the right stuff and good stuff and more people link to you eventually they are figure out “not crap, let’s put them back in.” So, are you in it for the long run and do you really mean it? And if so you probably want to keep going with it. So what are you going to do, you have assessed it now you are going to track your results – you are gonna try to fix it.

CPC – Cost Per Click

Arguably the most popular way of advertising online, CPC (also known as cost per click) advertising is virtually every where. Chances are that you have performed a “cost per click” action and not even realized it.

CPC-based advertising is a method which allows businesses to pay only for the targeted leads that they receive. With this method, your advertisement would be displayed in the same way as a CPM (or cost per 1000 impressions), but there is a difference. With CPC, you are protected by only paying for each click that your advertised link receives. You will not have to pay for thousands of impressions that are uselessly displayed, as with CPM.

You can use banner advertising with CPM. With banner advertisements, your advertisement will display, and every time your banner is clicked by an end user, you will pay the specified cost for that banner ad. That advertisement will then run until you have reached your predetermined amount of clicks. This means that you may receive a lot more exposure than you would using other advertising methods, because the length of time your ad is visible on the internet is based solely on how many clicks it has received.

TIP: If you are interested in CPC, a great program to use is Google AdWords. AdWords will allow you to pick the keywords that you want to use and you will only have to pay for as many clicks as you can afford. Unlike a lot of other sites, you will not have to pay for a campaign since you can set an actual limit on the amount of money you have in your budget to spend on this type of advertising.

CPM – Cost Per Thousand Impressions

CPM, also known as “cost per thousand impressions” is a very effective way of improving your conversions by reaching potential customers on the web. Rather than paying “per click” with CPM you can purchase a set amount of impressions that your blog will have.

NOTE: An impression is a single instance of an advertisement appearing on your website or blog.

CPM tends to be a more cost effective way to advertise when compared to CPC, or “cost per click”. For example, if you chose CPC advertising, you would pay for each click that your advertisement receives. So let’s say that you are spending $1 for each click, meaning that ten clicks will cost you $10. In a CPM-based advertising campaign, you may pay only $3 for 1000 impressions. So if your advertisement receives a click through ratio of just 1% you would then be paying $3 for the same 10 clicks.

One thing to bear in mind when it comes to CPM is that text-based ads tend to receive a lot more attention than banner ads, which most internet users tend to completely ignore at this point. CPM-based advertising is also a great idea for any company that has popular and/or very expensive keywords.

CPL – Cost Per Lead

Cost per lead is one of the less common ways of making money through blogging and advertising, but it is still one that is used by a lot of bloggers. CPL is the calculation of the actual cost that is incurred in successfully acquiring a valid lead. Leads are typically generated in several different ways, which include the gathering of information.

Let’s say that a website visitor submits their email address after doing a survey or they register for an offer and provide their contact information and possibly their demographic information. This will then be counted as a “lead”.

NOTE: PPL, or pay per lead, is different from CPL. PPL refers to the actual model in acquiring a valid lead, while CPL is the actual cost that one will incur for successfully acquiring a valid lead.

CPL is a great option for the budget conscious blogger, especially during these trying economic times. With CPL advertising, you are able to generate guaranteed returns on your online advertising dollars.

TIP: CPL is also often referred to as “online lead generation”.

CPS – Cost Per Sale

What really draws other bloggers to cost per sale marketing is that this strategy is low-risk and high profit. It’s also a great way of reaching an unlimited amount of prospects over the web.

Cost per sale is a great new way of marketing which doesn’t involve risky and expensive methods of marketing such as print ads, television ads and direct mail campaigns. With cost per sale marketing, the company that is selling the product or the service will pay the publisher or the marketer only when a product or a service has been sold (the CPL model is also often referred to as “revenue share” or as an “affiliate relationship”). These models work best for customers that are not willing to take a risk or who have a very, very small marketing or advertising budget.

The one downside to this method of marketing is that, when compared to either CPC or CPL models, the cost that the vendor incurs can be quite a bit higher per conversion, and the contract terms that one must agree to are longer. Most CPS marketing models are best for e-commerce websites

Which Way is Best for Me to Make Money?

The type of advertising for you to use for your blog to generate revenue truly depends on two things: your budget, and how much you need to sell. Methods such a CPS are great for those with a low budget, but if you want a lot of exposure than CPC is probably your best bet.

How Is SEM Different From SEO?

Search engine marketing is not SEO, but SEO is a part of SEM. When you are optimizing your blog from Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL or any other search engine, you are hoping that somebody will see your site or blog in the search engine results page and click on the link. When they click the link, they are taken to your site. This is a very easy concept to understand because you probably do it yourself every day. But what if you wanted to pay for your site to be advertised on the search engines? Many bloggers use Adsense as a way to boost some of the income to their websites. These are ads placed on the sides of the search engine results. If you type something into Google right now you will see “Sponsored Ads” on the right side of the window. If you wanted to advertise your site on the search engine, you can set up and advertisement campaign to include your site as the link on the advertisement. This is called Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC).

PPC/CPC

Pay Per Click and Cost Per Click advertising is the same thing. The basic concept is that you will pay to have your blog or website advertised on the search engines via a keyword search. So let’s say that you run a web site that has to do with weight loss. You aren’t getting the traffic that you want so you decide to invest in a PPC or CPC advertising campaign. You go to the Adwords website and you set up your account. Then you start to choose the keywords that are applicable to your website. These could be “weight loss,” “weight loss strategies” and “weight loss programs.” Weight loss is a highly competitive niche so you are going to pay a lot per keyword. When you use this service you will have to pay a specified amount of money each time your advertisement is clicked on the ads page of the search engine.

PPC For Products

One of the best ways to sell a product through SEM is to have your link embedded in the advertisement and then have the link go to your blog. Your blog should have a review of the product to entice the reader and get them to buy it. We’ll use the weight loss model again. Let’s say that your website is selling a weight loss program. So you use a PPC campaign to advertise a weight loss model. When a reader clicks on your ad, they are directed to the review of the weight loss product on your blog. Sounds simple enough, right? Once the reader has read through the review, they decide that they want the program and they buy it through your site. Now you have used a PPC campaign to sell a product.

Is SEM Better Than SEO?

There are a lot of benefits to SEM, but there are also a lot of benefits to SEO. When you’re paying for a PPC advertising campaign, you are buying traffic to your site. So not only will you be bringing in targeted visitors, you are getting traffic to the site to help with your rankings. PPC can bring traffic to your site immediately where as SEO is going to take months or years to take effect. When you are looking for a fast way to get traffic and targeted visitors, SEM can be a solution. The problem is that you have to pay for it. With SEO, you simply optimize your site and wait for the traffic to come in. The bad thing about SEO is that it will take a long time for your to rise in the ranks unless you are releasing a much needed product or information to the public. SEM is fast and can be extremely cheap depending on your niche.

Tweets offer its users 140 characters of space, and they can be sent from a user’s computer or their cell phone. It’s a quick and easy way to communicate with people that you know as well as with people who you have yet to know, which means it is a great way to promote your blog or products to cyberspace. When you create a “tweet”, your message is then posted on a large bulletin blog in a cloud. This bulletin is called a “live stream”, and anyone can read it.

Sure, you can post links to your blog and to your landing pages with a short explanation of what it is, but let’s face it; every business owner is doing this. It becomes rather bland and boring to most, so they will simply ignore it on the live stream. So what can you do to get your share of attention from followers and non-followers alike?

One of the best ways to get attention in the Twittersphere is to create a bit of controversy.

A lot of celebrities use this method. They may engage in some sort of a “Tweet war” with another celebrity, calling them out or insulting them on their dress or behavior. These tweets undoubtedly are then published on entertainment and gossip sites.

Another example is that of Shama Kabani. Kabani is a well-respected social media consultant who has been on Twitter since the very beginning. She then decided to unfollow all of her followers in one swift and bold move.

Twitter Works

As mentioned above, Twitter is a tool that will allow you to type up anything you want in 140 characters or less. You can tell people:

- What you’re doing
- What’s on your mind
- Post a link to something that you find to be of some importance

From there, you will then get one of two different responses:

a) Someone will read your Tweet and learn more about you
b) Someone will read your Tweet and then either reply to it or “retweet” it to their followers

How to Gain Followers

There are a few different ways in which you can try to gain followers on Twitter. We will start with the first:

1. Follow People Organically

If you have never used Twitter before, you may be wanting to get some followers, and fast. This may actually be detrimental to your success as using Twitter as a controversy-inducing tool. Just begin by searching for people that you know ‘in real life’ and follow them. From there, you will gradually come across others who have your same interests and values. Follow them.

Remember: it’s all about the quality of your followers, and not the quantity. If you are going for quantity, then you will end up with a list of “bots” as followers who will be of absolutely no value to you or your business!

2. Follow People who Talk

As a new user to Twitter, you may just be writing out status updates or sending out links to things of interest. In turn, you probably are reading other peoples’ status updates and checking out their links as well. But once you get more comfortable, you may want to start having Tweeting conversations with others.

The best way to do this is to follow people who are already talking on Twitter. If you click on a person’s profile, check out their stream. If you see anyone with a lot of @replies, then you know that they like to talk on Twitter. Follow these people.

3. Keep Twitter Clean

As much as you may want to post tons of links and conversations on Twitter, you will want to keep it fairly uncluttered. Check into some of the many websites that are out there that will be able to tell you who is following you, and who is not following you in return. In a month or so, you can easily unfollow anyone who isn’t bothering to follow you.

TIP: Before you unfollow anyone, just send them a quick and easy @reply in response to one of their most recent tweets. If you don’t get a reply after a day or so, then go ahead and unfollow them.

When someone follows you, act fast. Check out their profile and their twitter stream, and quickly decide if there is any potential interest. If there is, follow them right away.

4. Go for Anyone with a Face Photo

Don’t bother following celebrities – they will be of no use to you. You want to be following real people with real faces on the web (this means that if someone has a picture of a cat or a flower on their profile, you should move right along). Check out their profile page and read through their little bio.

Using Controversy to your Advantage

Now it’s time to start tweeting about some controversial matter, something that will get people talking. You may have a particular opinion on a product or something that is in the media. If you do, post about it! Make sure that any tweets that you leave are not insulting or hateful, but write in such a way that your opinion is clearly shown. Now wait for someone to reply.

Once someone replies, make sure that you tweet a reply back right away in support of your side of the “argument”. Then, the other party will most likely reply back. Then another person may throw in their two cents. This creates a “tennis ball” effect. The more people that join in on the conversation, the more attention it will get, and the more people you will be seen by. This will help you gather more followers.

TIP: You will need to come up with a creative way to use the controversial topic to the advantage of your blog or product. Say, for example, you have a blog that is about natural sweeteners and you want to talk about how artificial sweeteners are bad for your health. You can post a tweet about how artificial sweeteners in “diet” products actually make people gain weight rather than lose weight.

Social Media Marketing is all about getting your fans to share and promote your product or content.  Think of it kind of like having email subscribers, or an email list in real time.  You’re able to stay in touch with your customers at a very low cost.  Your motto should be “the more subscribers, the better.”

Using Facebook

The first one, Facebook, it started out as just a little website for college friends to connect, but we all know it has gotten much, much, much bigger than that. Then they rolled out something called pages where you can actually set up a page for your business. The reason that we recommend that you do not set up a personal Facebook page for your blog or business is because you can only have like 5,000 friends if you do that. Pages allow you to have unlimited amounts of followers so set up a page for your blog.  We will get into how to use those tools a little later in another video.

Twitter Magic

Twitter, less bells and whistles, is limited to 140 characters of text, and even more real time. Think of it this way, A lot of people say “should I be on Facebook? Should I be on Twitter?”  It’s a no brainer, yes, because some people like Twitter, some people like Facebook. Guess what, do you not like the Facebook folks? Do you like the Twitter folks? You like both of them and you want them to like you, you got to be in both places. You are going to have to post more often on Twitter if you want to build a following because there is a lot more noise going on.

You can make short announcements about new products and special offers on Twitter.  Use the Twitter search tool or tools like “Twiends” to locate people with interests or a business similar to yours, and follow them.  Chances are they will follow you too, and if you make your tweets engaging and beneficial to the public, they will retweet your tweets.  This again means that you and your blog will get more and more traffic, which of course means that you may be seeing an increase in ad or affiliate revenue very soon.

New Kid on the Block: Google +

A new player in the game is Google +, they came out in about the summer of 2011. There was a lot of excitement and a lot of hype in a typical Google fashion.  They came out in beta and rolled to the general public.  The interest is there again, but the jury is still out if they can catch up with Facebook, so pay attention to that one. You want to create an account on there but don’t put all your eggs there just yet. It will be interesting to see where it goes now that anyone can create an account there.

Social Media Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

There are quite a few differences between social media marketing and traditional marketing. Traditional marketing would be television and print ads, for example, which simply advertise your business or product and may give a brief description of what you or it is all about. Social media marketing, on the other hand, should always give your customers something of value and be personable. If you have nothing of value to offer, then they won’t waste their time talking to you about it.

You need to also have a real human voice when you interact on any social media platform. If you sound too sales-pitchy and are only promoting your product, then people are going to unfriend, unfollow and completely remove you from any social media lists. Interact with people just as you would online. You can use smiley emoticons and even some internet jargon, such as “LOL” and “TTYL”. Keep it casual – just make sure that you don’t keep it too casual. Be courteous, polite, and always reply to anyone who comments or asks questions either about you or your business.

Putting it All Together

If you’re new to social media, you may be wondering where to start. The best way to do this is to start with a blog. A blog gives you a good opportunity to introduce not only your company and the products that you sell, but it also gives you a chance to introduce yourself to the online world. Your blog is just as much about you as it is about your business, so it’s important that you keep your blog personable. Once you have written abut yourself and your business, start writing up blogs that are related to your products and business. Start posting things about yourself and your every day life that people may find entertaining (pets and children are a great place to start). Showcase your products on your blog, while also sharing things and news clips that you find funny. This will give readers the clear message that not your blog isn’t only for promotional purposes; it also shows who you are as well.

Once you’ve got your blog going, you can then open it up to all of the other social media outlets out there. You can open up your very own Facebook profile page, and then open up a “group” page for your blog as well. Encourage friends and family to join the group. Once they join, it will show up in the newsfeeds of their other friend and family who may not be on your “friends” list, thus increasing your exposure. Keep your Facebook group page updated regularly with your blog posts, and always provide a link back to your blog.

There are a lot of different ways that you can approach social media, and depending on your business, you may want to start off with Facebook or Twitter. The important thing is to make sure that you link up all of your social media accounts so that they direct customers back to your blog or website where they can find out even more information about your company.

You may be thinking, “But isn’t my Twitter account enough?” No. With Facebook being more popular than Google as well as the number one ranked site in several countries, you need to take advantage of the 400 million users that are on the site. We will start with how to create the page itself to how to find more fans so you can promote, promote, promote!

Step 1: Creating a Facebook Page

If you don’t have an account yet, then get one. It’s quick and easy to create. Once you have your very own account, you can then find the “Ads and Pages” link on the sidebar of your Profile.

NOTE: A lot of users have found that this link seems to be mysteriously missing, but you can still access the “Ads and Pages” link from this URL: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php .

Step 2: Select your Page Type

It has fortunately offered a load of different pages types that you can choose from. Most bloggers will probably want to choose the “Brand, Products or Organization” option, and then scroll down to the very bottom of the drop down available to find “website”. From there, you will be able to give your website a new name. It’s always best to go with the name of your website so that users can quickly and easily associate it with your site.

After you are finished setting up the site, make sure that you tick the box that will authorize you as the representative for your own blog. Then all you have to do is click “Create Official Page”.

Step 3: Customizing your Page

So it may look a bit empty at first. You can easily start fixing it up to make your page more exciting. For an image, make sure that you add either your website’s logo, or a picture of yourself. Using a picture of yourself will make the page more personal, but if you want to brand your site more than brand yourself, use the logo.

You will also need to add a short little blurb about your blog. Make it short yet descriptive so that users will know exactly what they’ll be in for when they visit your blog.

Step 4: Using the FMBL App

Congrats! You should now have a fairly well set up Facebook page that is almost ready for fans. You will find that in the sidebar an “Edit” tab. Click this tab, and then scroll to the bottom of the page to find more applications. Click on “Browse More” and then choose the “Static FMBL” app.

TIP: You may need to conduct your own search for this application. You can easily do this by typing “Static FBML by Facebook” in the application search box.

Once you have obtained the app, then all you have to do at this point is click on the “Add to my Page” link at the upper left hand side. You may receive a popup too; make sure you select on the popup that you would like to add this app.

Step 5: Setting up the FBML Application

Once you have added the FBML application to your Facebook page, make sure that you go back to your page. Once there, click on the “edit” tab and then scroll right on down until you find the “FBML Static” app. Click on the “Application Settings” and then swap the default settings so that you have removed the ‘box’ and then added the ‘Tab’. This will enable you to create a new tabbed page as your Facebook landing page.

Step 6: Adding the Coding for your Facebook Landing Page

You can now start to fully customize your landing page. You may first want to change the box title. An easy box title you may want to have is “Welcome”, simply because this is the very first page that any visitor is going to see. You can then insert the code that you want to display. The coding can be as advanced or as basic as you see fit. You can start with having it be just one image that will redirect visitors to your blog or to an offer that you are making online.

Step 7: Set Up your Landing Page

Click back over to the edit screen again. Find the “Wall settings” and then click on the “Edit” link. This will expand the box. From the second drop down menu you will now be able to find your brand new landing page by the name that you gave it (in this case, it would be “Welcome”). You can then change some permission settings, such as whether or not you will allow visitors to write on your wall, post links, post photos or post videos.

TIP: You may want to disallow anyone from posting links or photos or videos to external sources. This is your page, after all, so the focus should be on your blog and not on whatever the visitors are posting.

Step 8: Promoting your Facebook Page

The best and easiest way to start promoting your page is to “like” your page and become a fan. This way it will be automatically added to all of your friends’ feeds, and you will definitely have a few fans by the end of the day.

Once you have done this, it’s time to hunt down some new fans. You will want to post about your new page on Facebook to bring awareness to it. You will want to add the link to your Twitter account. You can also find apps online that will help you find Facebook members who you can add as a “Friend” who may have an interest in your blog!

Getting Your Feed

Depending on the hosting account or the URL to your website, your feed URL can vary. For the most part, your feed URL is going to be http://yourwebsite.com/feed. If you are using Feedburner, the program will burn your feed to look like http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourdomain. “ Feedburner is a great way to get stats on your feed once you have submitted them to different RSS directories. Once you have your feed, you can add a “Subscribe” button to your website. This is a good way to get your readers to subscribe to your blog. Once they subscribe, they will get an email notification telling them when the blog has been updated with new content.

RSS Submission

Really Simple Syndication submission is a good way to bring traffic to your blog or website. Basically, you are submitting your feed to RSS directories much like how you submitted your website to a website directory. When the Google bots crawl the directory they will find your feed link, which is essentially your website link. This is another way to get a backlink to your website. However, there are other advantages to submitting your feeds to directories. Other websites will come to these directories looking to add a feed to their pages. RSS feeds give websites a way to fill the ends of their pages with related content. For instance, if you have a dating website and you subscript to a feed from another dating website that is ranked better, the Google bot will associated your dating website with the higher value site. This also helps with your rankings.

RSS Software

There are a lot of software packages on the market that are designed to submit your feeds automatically to thousands of directories. Can these software packages be helpful? Of course. Should you be weary of them? Yes. Here’s the problem with submission software. Just like most submission software packages, they are working on a bulk level. When you are looking at RSS submission, you want to submit your feeds to related websites. The last thing that you want to is to have your dating site feed attached to a cooking site. These software packages will blast away without finding your niche. Your feed could be on home improvement directories, health directories or even gaming directories. When you are submitting your feeds to directories, you need to have a directory that is related to your niche. Stay away from RSS software and put in the work yourself.

Finding RSS Directories

Finding an RSS directory to submit your links to is not very difficult. A simple Google search can bring you thousands of directories in your niche. When you are submitting your feeds to different directories, it’s best to run a PR check on the directory before you submit your link. A PR rating of at least a 4 or 5 is best when using their service. Some directories will have a link exchange program. Shy away from link exchanges or any directory that will charge you for inclusion to their website. You should never have to pay for a backlink or a submission of your feeds. If you find that the directory requires a link exchange, remember that you will be losing ad space on your page if you participate.

RSS feeds can lead to a lot of traffic to your site. If you’re looking to get a boost in the rankings, use your feeds as a way to syndicate your content across the web. Your website or blog should have a “Subscribe” button that you can implement into the page. The best way to get subscribers is to keep your content updated frequently. When your readers see that you post new content to your site every week, they will want to be in the loop.

However Apple stands out, and makes some really, really awesome products by following some very important but, simple principles. Here’s how you can apply these principles to your products.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Simplicity

Ok, Simplicity. Albert Einstein said make things as simple as possible but no simpler. It can be a tricky line but here’s the thing with Apple products, there always so easy to use. You can just figure it out. Now, if you’re a Windows user and you’re use to all the complex stuff, then you switch over to Apple and it can be a little confusing, but once you start thinking about, hmmmm, how would I actually do this there very simple and intuitive to use. The user ability of your product or service, whatever it is, is critical. Critical!

Delight

Now delight people should be delighted by your thing. They should look at it and go, “oh my god that’s really awesome. That’s way cool!” Like most people are when they look at an ipad or an Iphone and most of these Apple devices, if you actually use it and not just own it. “All I use is Windows -Apples suck.” That’s not really an informed perspective. When you use it and you actually try and give it a shot; you’re going to be like whoa that’s kind of amazing. This is pretty cool. Even the packaging is cool. When you buy stuff from Apple, like the iphone, it comes in like this Neiman Marcus quality box.

But what really contributes to that, you want to pay attention to all those details because that’s what Apple does. Pay attention to every single little detail and anticipate what the customer actually wants. Not just; I want this feature in there. What does the customer want – and pursue that excellence look follow all those details; all to be the best because everything matters. People notice. Don’t release a product that’s mostly finished because you know what there going to be mostly, “Aaaaa that’s kind of buggy dude.” That’s not the perception that you want people to have on your product.

Elimination

The next one is elimination. We’re talking about getting rid of the fluff. Get rid of the crap. Look at your product or service very closely and say, ok what don’t I really need? What am I doing that’s just fluff, that’s just filler? And get rid of all of it, ok? You got to be brutally honest with yourself. That’s crucial. Just get rid of anything that doesn’t work.

Suspense

Suspense. It’s one thing that Apple does fantastically well that other brands seem to fail at. Does anyone know or even care about what HP is bringing out next? Didn’t think so. But everyone is always speculating how this year’s iPhone is going to differ from the last model, or what changes may come with the new iPad.

Apple has a great way of keeping any information about their products a complete secret. Keeping the specs of their new products a secret helps build up the anticipation and excitement for its release. People these days are just dying to have the newest and greatest thing, and not knowing what’s coming up next drives them crazy.

The brand is also quite good at building up suspense by creating a sense of scarcity. There’s not enough new iPhones for everyone all at once, meaning that only a select few will be able to have the brand new phone the very same day it’s released. Everyone else will have to wait a week, a month, or maybe even longer for their own – at which point Apple is already creating suspense over another new product that’s coming out.

This suspense is also what draws a crowd to those electronic stores and has people camping overnight, just so that they can have a chance of being one of the first coveted few to have the newest “it” product. Crowds and line ups imply that what ever is being sold must be good; otherwise why would so many people be waiting for it?

Clever

Apple has some of the most memorable and clever marketing campaigns out there. Where they really excel is creating advertisements where they compare themselves to the competition. For example, Apple has created a whole line of ads in which it points out the difference between a MAC computer and a PC. The ads are incredibly simple in appearance and in their message, but because they are so simple, a viewer is able to immediately understand what’s going on. Thanks to such advertisements, almost anyone can tell you just why a PC is very different from a MAC computer.

MAC isn’t afraid to use actors in their campaigns either, but they have never used big, flashy actors. Justin Long is currently the “pro MAC” guy in a lot of the ads where they compare MAC computes to a PC. The “pro PC” actor is John Hodgman, an even less notable actor. Using actors that aren’t easily recognized or very established in the acting world can arguably present less of a bias towards the actor, and therefore the product. So let’s say Charlie Sheen was the “pro MAC” guy. Given recent events, a lot of people have a whole lot of different opinions on the guy, so a bias has already been formed there when it comes to him. Justin Long, however, isn’t a huge actor (though is still recognizable) and hasn’t been in any scandals or anything else. Also, he looks like a normal, average guy. It adds to the appeal.

There are a lot of things that you can take from Apple when it comes to thinking about and creating your information products. From the product itself to the marketing campaign to how they even design the layout of their Apple stores, they keep their customers engaged and wanting more. They do a great job of making everything seem incredibly easy: from the simplistic product designs to the spacious store layouts, the brand seems to keep its promise of delivering exactly what we want, and in just enough time so that we don’t forget the brand, and yet we don’t get tired of it either.

CPC – Cost Per Click

Arguably the most popular way of advertising online, CPC (also known as cost per click) advertising is virtually every where. Chances are that you have performed a “cost per click” action and not even realized it.

CPC-based advertising is a method which allows businesses to pay only for the targeted leads that they receive. With this method, your advertisement would be displayed in the same way as a CPM (or cost per 1000 impressions), but there is a difference. With CPC, you are protected by only paying for each click that your advertised link receives. You will not have to pay for thousands of impressions that are uselessly displayed, as with CPM.

You can use banner advertising with CPM. With banner advertisements, your advertisement will display, and every time your banner is clicked by an end user, you will pay the specified cost for that banner ad. That advertisement will then run until you have reached your predetermined amount of clicks. This means that you may receive a lot more exposure than you would using other advertising methods, because the length of time your ad is visible on the internet is based solely on how many clicks it has received.

TIP: If you are interested in CPC, a great program to use is Google AdWords. AdWords will allow you to pick the keywords that you want to use and you will only have to pay for as many clicks as you can afford. Unlike a lot of other sites, you will not have to pay for a campaign since you can set an actual limit on the amount of money you have in your budget to spend on this type of advertising.

CPM – Cost Per Thousand Impressions

CPM, also known as “cost per thousand impressions” is a very effective way of improving your conversions by reaching potential customers on the web. Rather than paying “per click” with CPM you can purchase a set amount of impressions that your blog will have.

NOTE: An impression is a single instance of an advertisement appearing on your website or blog.

CPM tends to be a more cost effective way to advertise when compared to CPC, or “cost per click”. For example, if you chose CPC advertising, you would pay for each click that your advertisement receives. So let’s say that you are spending $1 for each click, meaning that ten clicks will cost you $10. In a CPM-based advertising campaign, you may pay only $3 for 1000 impressions. So if your advertisement receives a click through ratio of just 1% you would then be paying $3 for the same 10 clicks.

One thing to bear in mind when it comes to CPM is that text-based ads tend to receive a lot more attention than banner ads, which most internet users tend to completely ignore at this point. CPM-based advertising is also a great idea for any company that has popular and/or very expensive keywords.

CPL – Cost Per Lead

Cost per lead is one of the less common ways of making money through blogging and advertising, but it is still one that is used by a lot of bloggers. CPL is the calculation of the actual cost that is incurred in successfully acquiring a valid lead. Leads are typically generated in several different ways, which include the gathering of information.

Let’s say that a website visitor submits their email address after doing a survey or they register for an offer and provide their contact information and possibly their demographic information. This will then be counted as a “lead”.

NOTE: PPL, or pay per lead, is different from CPL. PPL refers to the actual model in acquiring a valid lead, while CPL is the actual cost that one will incur for successfully acquiring a valid lead.

CPL is a great option for the budget conscious blogger, especially during these trying economic times. With CPL advertising, you are able to generate guaranteed returns on your online advertising dollars.

TIP: CPL is also often referred to as “online lead generation”.

CPS – Cost Per Sale

What really draws other bloggers to cost per sale marketing is that this strategy is low-risk and high profit. It’s also a great way of reaching an unlimited amount of prospects over the web.

Cost per sale is a great new way of marketing which doesn’t involve risky and expensive methods of marketing such as print ads, television ads and direct mail campaigns. With cost per sale marketing, the company that is selling the product or the service will pay the publisher or the marketer only when a product or a service has been sold (the CPL model is also often referred to as “revenue share” or as an “affiliate relationship”). These models work best for customers that are not willing to take a risk or who have a very, very small marketing or advertising budget.

The one downside to this method of marketing is that, when compared to either CPC or CPL models, the cost that the vendor incurs can be quite a bit higher per conversion, and the contract terms that one must agree to are longer. Most CPS marketing models are best for e-commerce websites

Which Way is Best for Me to Make Money?

The type of advertising for you to use for your blog to generate revenue truly depends on two things: your budget, and how much you need to sell. Methods such a CPS are great for those with a low budget, but if you want a lot of exposure than CPC is probably your best bet.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Been doing it already but haven’t been getting a good response? Then you’re doing it wrong. “Tweeting” is a whole lot different than writing out a well thought out piece that you post to your blog. You have 140 characters or less to get out a quick message to the world, a message that you are praying will not only be clear and get the point across, but that you are also hoping will get retweeted across the “Twitt-o-verse”.

Here are some of the best tips that you may or may not already be using that will help promote your blog on Twitter better than ever before.

1.Create Your Profile

This one is obvious, but so many people don’t even bother doing it. You create a Twitter account, then you fill out the profile. Populate it, put as much information as possible so that your followers will know who you are. This means putting your URL in there so that people can follow the link back to your site. Upload a picture. It can be your happy face, or your logo, whatever. Just let people know that you’re open for business. Don’t look generic though.

2. Don’t Spam Your Followers

Sometimes less is more. You want to be a good curator. You want to post stuff that actually matters. It doesn’t necessarily mean just post once per day, but use your judgment. It’s like speaking. You don’t want to babble.

3. Separation of Business and Personal Tweets

Now we understand that your Twitter profile needs a personality. You’re welcome to stick to that personality, but if you’re a business, you want to separate your personal feed from your business feed. Your friends don’t care about all of your business stuff. Vice versa, your business followers might not care about all of your personal rants.

There can be exceptions. For example if you’re a brand like Martha Stewart, or Dan and Jennifer, your personal like of cross into your business, because your personal musing is your business. But unless you’re your own brand, keep them separate. Just have two accounts, one for each desired purpose.

4. Add Value

This is really important and gets back to the basics. Provide good useful stuff. Add comments, analysis, quips on current events, or things that’re currently going on. Or include deals and coupons that will be useful to your followers. Add your own take, but remember to be positive, no whining or bitchin!

The only exception is if your niche is negative, for example, “Something Stupid That My Dad Says,” where it’s actually entertaining. Otherwise stay upbeat, and put a lid on any negativity.

5. Watch your Tweet’s Character Length

Having 140 characters may seem small, but in order to be an effective tweeter, you have to keep it even shorter than that. Why? Because if you want to get retweeted (which you definitely do), a follower would have to then edit your post in order to edit it. If your posts are hard to edit, do you really think a follower will bother to do it?

People are lazy. If you want to be retweeted, then you have to make it as easy as possible to have this happen. The best and most surefire way to leave enough space in your tweet so that you will be retweeted is to make your comment 125 characters or less (and remember, spaces count as characters too). That way anyone can easily retweet your message with a simple click of a mouse.

6. Make Them an Offer they Can’t Refuse

Now what you have to avoid having happen is having your Tweet come across as sounding like, “Hey! Hey you! You need this, so uhh… click here!” That’s going to get you nowhere. But if you have unraveled some secret mystery, or discovered something that [insert name of hot new celebrity] is doing that has not yet been revealed to the public, then that will get you responses.

Making actual offers is great, too. Free vacations are always a winner, but most of us bloggers don’t really have that sort of a giveaway on hand. Offer things that you have noticed on the web that may be related to your niche. Say, for example, you know of a great deal online for 16GB memory sticks. Write up a quick blog post about it that gives your readers the scoop on this great deal. Then write up an enticing tweet about it and provide a link back to your blog post about it. Your blog post can then have the link to the offer itself, but people had to go through your blog to get to it.

7. Leave 2-5 Posts a Day

Leaving a post a day for your blog isn’t going to get you anywhere. People are getting a constant feed of new tweets every single minute, so you want to make sure that you actually get seen every once in a while. The ideal amount of messages to post in a day is 2 to 5 different posts. They don’t all have to be related to your business or niche, but they should mostly, if not all, take people back to a page on your blog that may have a funny video, a photo that’s gone viral, or information about something that is of interest (universally funny things or political blunders are generally well accepted).

8. Take Advantage of Twitter Apps

You do NOT have to stay sitting at your computer all day. You can use a number of different Twitter apps that are out there to make your job all the more easy. There are tools out there that will actively seek out followers and people to follow for you. There are tools out there that you can pre-program to actually post tweets for you, even if you aren’t at your computer. There are tools out there that will allow you to control and maintain a number of your social media sites all at once and on one screen. Don’t waste a lot of time tinkering around on social media sites like Twitter. Get the apps to do it for you.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. This technology has been around for a while, but most users do not use it to its full potential. Millions of web users that span the globe use this technology to keep track of their favorite websites (or blog posts)

In order to optimize your RSS feed, you will first have to do a few things to ensure that your followers are actually watching what you are doing.

Publish the Full RSS Feed

Why should you publish the full RSS feed? Because users won’t have to click it to read it. If you only offer a partial RSS feed, that would require followers to then click on the link and read through it. Most people don’t have the patience to do this, especially as they undoubtedly have other RSS feeds to check out themselves.

Publishing the full feed will not only help keep your current subscribers, but you can easily gain 50 to 100 subscribers in one month (or even more, depending on your current subscribers list).

Use Programs to help Share your Posts

Programs such as FeedFlare will help your subscribers share your posts to the social network of their choice. When you use a program like FeedFlare, your feed will then place bookmarking and social sharing links on the footer of your RSS post. From there, you can choose what sorts of services you want to display, such as Twitter or Facebook.

Optimize your Feed Title and Description

If you find that your description or title isn’t as SEO friendly as you thought, you can then use other programs to try and change the metatags for your feed. These can be changed in the Title/Description Burner.

TIP: You can also use programs such as Google Analytics and Google Keyword Tool to help you come up with appropriate tags and SEO data that you can use for your RSS feed. The tools are not only free, but they’re easy to use too.

Cross Post your Articles

Cross posting your articles will get you a whole lot more traffic than you ever thought imaginable. Programs such as BuzzBoost will allow you to republish the burned feed’s content as HTML. From there, you can set it up and then place the code snippet that has been generated in another website which you may already manage.

Always include an Email Signature

A small HTML snippet will help draw a lot of attention to your website. You can include the email signature in your emails, or you can place it anywhere on your website. If you use a tool, such as Headline Animator, you can create quality and professional looking signatures that will show as an animated banner which will then cycle through all of your recent posts.

Always Offer Email Subscriptions on your Feed

A great way to keep subscribers and to hold interest is to offer an email subscription on your feed. Once you set this up, the Feedburner will then automatically send out regular and pre-planned emails to your subscribers when ever you have posted any new content.

A lot of bloggers may already be doing this, but are they doing it successfully? A bland, boring looking email isn’t going to get a whole lot of attention. The smart way to do it is to add your logo and customize the confirmation email. Take a look at the delivery options and set them in a smart way. One of these ways would be to set the delivery time to when your readers tend to be the most active on your blog.

TIP: To find when your readers are most active on your blog, you can track the user activity easily with a free tool such as Google Analytics

Provide a Creative Commons License

Want other bloggers to be able to republish your blog posts? Not a problem. The legal way to go about doing this is to provide anyone who will republish your posts a “Creative Commons” license.

Most users do not actually bother contacting you and will just use your content without even asking. But this too can be used in such a way that you benefit…

How to Benefit from those who Steal your Content

The best way to go about benefiting from those who rip off your content is to add a link to your original content somewhere in your RSS feed. This will help clear up any confusion which Google may have as to which copy of the article is the original, and which is the “stolen” copy. When the search engine sees the link in your feed, it will immediately recognize you as the original blogger and differentiate you from the “splogger” (those who enjoy republishing your stuff without asking).

For blogging, all you have to do is open up your blog dashboard. From there, go to your “Settings” and click on “Side Feed”. In the “Post Feed Footer”, add the code:

<hr />
<a href=”http://www.myblog.com”>My Blog Name</a>
If you are on WordPress, you can open the functions.php file and then add the following code:

function embed_rss($content) {
if(is_feed()) $content .= “<p><a href=’”. get_permalink() .”‘>’” . get_the_title() .”</a></p>”;return $content;}
add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘embed_rss’);

Once you add this, a link will be added to your main blog at the bottom of every article that is published in your feed.

Brag about your FSS Feed Count

You can easily use FeedCount to generate a graphic that will display to all of your subscribers just what your subscriber count is.

Notify Different Feed Reading Services of your Articles

You can easily use different programs available on the web to help notify different feed reading services that you have posted a brand new article to your blog.

TIP: If you already have Twitter (which you probably do) you can easily use HootSuite, TwitterFeed, or even your own Twitter app to post any fresh content you may have.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. Great Content

I swear we keep saying this, great content rules. Make stuff that people want to read, which is the same stuff that people actually want to link to and people will read it and link to it. I mean it’s really what it gets back to other blogger’s will naturally link to it. They don’t just say, “ I wrote this link it to me. Alright really great stuff.” People will be like, “oh look someones writing really great stuff lets link to them.” I mean it really does work that way. Keep it fresh and publish consistently though.

2. Consistency

Consistency. That’s a big thing, ok? You gotta, you can’t just post once every three months, ok? Build relationships, ok? That just never goes away in business. Network, network, network. Ok. Reach out to other bloggers, other web site owners, even PR and news. OK, use contact, emails, forums, twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and if you have to…get on the phone, ok? There are still people that like to get on the phone these days. You know, comment on other peoples stuff. Be useful, ok? Don’t just blah, blah, spam everybody but provide useful feedback, useful comments, engaging…

Dan: I’m engaged

Jennifer:You want to be someone that people want to be partnered with.

3. Write Guest Posts

Absolutely! And another one and this is a good one, write guest posts, blogs always need more content; online magazines always need more fresh content. So what do you do, you solve their problem. Offer to write fresh content for them and they’ll publish it and you should get the link back, you should get the link back, plus you’ll get exposure to their audience. Great one way.

4. Directory Links

Directory links are a great way to help spread the word about your website or blog in a good way. The more directories that your site can be found on, the more that search engines will trust your site.

While it may sound easy to go ahead and submit your site to a directory, bear in mind that there are literally tens of thousands of different web directories out there – and not all web directories are equal. Some of them are poor in quality and not SEO friendly – which means that they won’t help your site in search rankings in the least. You want to make sure that the directories you are submitting your site to will actually be able to pass your web link down the line.

The best way to submit your site to a directory is to try and use a niche directory submission. Niche directories are those which are created with one specific topic in mind. Niche directories will only accept sites that they say are related to that particular niche, which is why Google places a lot more importance on backlinks that come from any sort of relevant site or sites anyways, so this will help you a lot when it comes to search engine rankings.

Submitting your site to a directory one by one is incredibly boring and time consuming, so you may want to look into hiring on a directory submission service provider. These providers already have a whole list of directories that they know will help improve your site’s rankings in search engines, and they also understand the nature of each and every directory they are submitting your site to. They know how to get your site approved so you don’t have to spend countless hours fiddling with this or that, and they typically quite affordable.

5 Social Media

Social media are all the rage these days and they are continue to grow. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, even MySpace… the list goes on and on. You can build some really important links just by having a placement on each of these social media sites (yes, even MySpace is still a bit relevant, so don’t count it out entirely).

Social media is great since they offer a lot of different ways to have people promote your content FOR you. People can retweet, “like”, “share”, “+1” and just plain old copy and paste a link to your website right on their social media accounts if they find the link that you have put on your very own social media site at all valuable or useful. If you have a blog (which you should, and we’ll discuss that in a second), then you should try to have it on the very same domain as your company’s website. Social media is all about keeping it real and keeping it human, so having a blog, which is far more human than just a website advertising products, is a must-have.

Conclusion

Link building plays an incredibly important role for any website or blog that wants to actually have a presence on any search engine. Unfortunately, link building has gotten a bit of a bad rap lately, mostly because people have used and abused it for a while now. One of the worst types of link building that everyone should avoid is the Blackhat SEO (aka completely unethical) link building techniques. This type of technique attempts to manipulate any search engine’s rankings through things such as hidden text, paid links, cloaking, and link farms.

There are a number of reasons why you want to build links to your site. For one, it will help improve your site’s authority in a number of search engines, like Google and Bing. Having a strong network of links backing you up tells search engines that you are trustworthy and aren’t a site full of useless garbage. Link building will also help draw attention to your site’s important keywords, which in turn will help improve your ranking in search engines. Lastly, having a strong network of links will make your site all the better known on other larger websites. This will, of course, help increase the referral traffic to your site, and it won’t even cost you a dime!

Publication

When you publish your article on a directory you are providing it to the world free of charge. Because of this, anybody can republish your content. If the article is republished on a site that isn’t even ranked, your backlink within the article can actually hurt your ranking. Furthermore, some article directories don’t even have a PR ranking of 2 and this can give you a bad backlink to your website also. Run a PR check of the directories that you are publishing your articles to before you submit your piece. If you are going to use article marketing, you need to be savvy. Publish your articles on a directory that has a PR ranking of at least 5.

Duplicated Content

Duplicated content is a big no-no to Google. By now, you should know this. In the early days of the Internet, you could publish the same article on thousands of websites and have a great rank. Now, duplicated content can even lead to your website being banned. The problem with duplicated content is the fact that even phrases used within the article could be seen as duplication. Never mind actually cutting and copying the full version of an article, using the same keywords over and over again can be seen as duplicated content. If you are worried about getting your website banned by the search engines, never write an article on the same topic using the same keywords.

Anchor Text

So you have a bunch of different articles and you want to use the same anchor text for your backlink. Don’t even think about it! Anchor text is seen the same as copy and keywords. If your anchor text is “sliced bread” and it’s attached to your backlink, Google will recognize this and negatively affect your website ranking. Mix up your anchor text if you’re going to use article marketing to get your website some backlinks. One of the best ways to get backlinks is through blog comments and forum posts relevant to your site. Search the web for good posts related to your niche and post your link on their comments section to start getting some authority for your site.

Can Article Marketing Still Be Effective?

Article marketing can still be effective, but not exactly for Google rankings. There are a lot of people that keep article directories as bookmarks in their browsers. Article directories allow people to find a wealth of information very quickly. Is there a lot of junk on article directories? Yes. Does this mean that you will not be able to get a lot of readers from them? No. Article directories should be treated as another resource. Depending on the information and the quality of your content, you can still gain a lot from them. The thing about article directories is that they give people a great way to find you. This is much different than trying to gain backlinks and rank in the search engines. Article directories should be used to bring readers to your blog so they can subscribe to your RSS feeds. Other tactics can be used to rank in the search engines.

The Bottom Line

Article marketing was a trend that brought in a lot of traffic, but as all trends come to an end, it is officially dead. This doesn’t mean that you won’t benefit from article this. It just means that you need to weigh the time and effort of marketing your site through articles over building your ranks in the search engines. Article marketing is not nearly as effective as writing original content or using forums to market your site. If your primary means of getting your site ranked was through article marketing, you’ve probably already experienced a drop in your rank. Rebuild your ranking through other means to stay in good standing with Google.

Pay per click, what is it? For those who don’t know, ok, you know when you go to Google or your favorite search engine, you search for something and then you see these little boxes at the top and another one down the right hand side? Those are paid ads, ok? Those aren’t the best results, but those are paid ads ok? That is what pay per click is, people pay money, then when you click on that they get billed. It pays the bills the search engine so the search engine can keep finding stuff for you.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ok, so who are the major players of pay per click? Well, you have the big 800lb gorilla; Google Adwords. That’s Google’s big cash cow, pay per click. Ah, you can also promote additional, in addition to search results you can also promote videos on YouTube, in a way through adwords as well; which is kind of cool. Now, there is also Microsoft AdCenter which now manages Yahoo and Bing together. And, also Facebook ads. It’s more for targeting by demographics, but that’s also an option. So, there’s alot of options out there, but here’s the key; you got to manage your pay per click campaign. If you’re not careful you can literally loose your shirt. Everybody thinks, I got to be number 1! Ok you got to be number one well you may be paying $5 a click to be number one.

When we first started in business we have this memory, or nightmare if you want to call it, of our $6,000 pay per click, ok. You don’t have to be number one, you do want to be in the first few results, but you’d be amazed at the cost difference between position one and position five. And you also, when you have a pay per click campaign going you always want to be split testing you ads to see which one gets the best click through. You can call it A-B Split Testing, or whatever, but you always want to meet the control. If you have at least two ads running and you’re always trying to get a better click through every time. Absolutely! Set the daily budget! Set the daily budget definitely!

Definitely set the daily budget and track your visitors. See what they’re doing. Are those visitors converting like you hope they will? Absolutely! Because it’s driving traffic but that’s a cost. You want to drive traffic that you know converts. Well, you can have an ad that gets a really great click through but people don’t buy or you can have an ad that gets a little bit less click through but everybody converts, so you just go to…Testing! Test! Test! Test!

So where do you send that paid traffic? Do you just send them to your homepage? No! You want to send them to a targeting landing page. And, basically you want to see which ad you’ve written and you want people to click on that ad, but the landing page to get to has to jive with the ad they clicked on because, if you make a proposition in their ad that their interested in and they click on it they are not going to buy if you send them to your homepage. It’s just a wasted click and a waste of money. So, always send them to a targeting landing page. And get them to make an action; like join your email list, buy and item, whatever. Test all the way to the end.

For Publishers: Google Adsense

Never heard of Google Adsense? Then this is where your money making venture begins. Google has their “Adsense” program which really allows other website owners and bloggers a chance to make some extra cash after they sign up for the program. How it works is that Google allows for a third party to place Google adverts on “their” Google websites (which would include your blog), and Google is then paid by that advertiser. Google’s Adsense program allows you the ability to also make a portion of the cash that they earn from those advertisements, since the ads that they are being paid for are being placed on your blog or website.

With the “per click pay” or “pay per click” program, you’ll make a pre-defined amount of cash when someone clicks on those ads. This form of advertising works like this:

1) Person finds your blog
2) Person sees advertisement on your blog
3) Person clicks on the advertisement
4) You and Google make money, and client is happy that you directed a new potential customer to their site.

Before you can benefit from any of this, you will need to create a Google Adsense account. It’s free and easy to do. All you need to do is go to the Google Adsense site and then provide your personal details, such as your name and address. From there, you can then start defining what types of advertisements you want on your site.

Different Types of Advertisements

Google Adsense offers some different options when it comes to the types of ads that you want on your site. You can choose from:

- Text only ads
- Image only ads
- Text and image ads

You can also change the size and color of the advertisements so that you can make the advertisement look as if it belongs and is a part of your blog. If an advertisement looks like it’s out of place on your blog, it will be glaringly obvious and it will hardly get any clicks, which means you’ll be getting hardly any cash. The more the advertisement blends into your blog, the more likely people will click on it.

Still difficult to choose? Generally text ads go over well with blogs that are related to business, careers, politics, science, self help and more educational topics. Image ads are better for “sexier” and more glamorous niches, like music, movie and TV, fashion, celebrity news, sports, fitness and gaming. If you want a blend of both text and image ads, consider these if your blog niche is in cars, pets, technology, or the food and drink industry.

Facebook is the number one social media site on the Internet. It has a population that is larger than hundreds of countries on this planet, with members coming from every corner of the earth. Just being a member means that you are potentially exposing yourself or your business to millions upon millions of people – and all with little to no effort. Though a lot of bloggers don’t realize this, Facebook offers a number of tools to promote your blog. Let’s start with the most basic of them all:

Change your Profile

What’s the purpose behind your Facebook profile? Is it to connect with friends and family? Is it to showcase pictures of your wild night out last Saturday? Or do you want it to be associated with you, a professional blogger who is an expert in your niche? You have to really consider how seriously you want to be taken, starting with how your profile is set up. People will be looking at everything about you, from what you “like” to what you are a “fan” of to the different pictures you have taken of yourself. Say, for instance, you have a blog about putting a stop to animal cruelty. A picture of you eating a steak probably isn’t the best thing to have on Facebook.

If you do want to have your profile about your personal life, then strongly consider having two separate accounts – one for “you”, and one for the professional blogger.

Seek out Friends

Don’t wait for people to find you; you’ve got to go out there and find them! The search tool  is pretty thorough, allowing you to search for people not only by name, but also by company, school, networks, email address, and more.

And don’t think that you need to know a person before you send out a friend request. You can send a friend request to absolutely anybody on Facebook. What’s the worst that can happen? They can decline your request or ignore it. But what happens more often than not is that they do accept your friend request (many people have a strong urge to have a high “friend” tally) and you then have a brand new addition to your Facebook blog network.

You can also try to seek out people who may be interested in your niche by checking out people on your friends’ friend’s lists or through group and fan page lists.

Create your own Group or Fan Page

One of the best tools for it is the Facebook Page. We’re not talking about just creating an account and friend everyone. People won’t follow you just for that. Instead they want to get updates from your blog. In fact, the first fans of your Facebook page might just be your own friends. Have them click on the “like” button. That way when you post something, they’ll be able to see it on their feed.
When you do create a Facebook page for your blog, make sure that you also upload your blog’s content onto it. When people comment or reply, make sure that you also reply and keep the conversation going. It  is an online community, so in order for that community to survive, everyone has to keep on talking and participating. If you post and never reply, you’ll find that people will quickly lose interest in your Facebook page and your blog.

One big difference between a fan page and a personal page is that the former can have an unlimited number of follows, while your personal page is limited to 5000. Obviously, you hope that your business will bigger than that at some point.
So how to you get people to like you page. Well put the “like” button on your post. It’s a matter of engaging the Facebook audience on your site, and have them eventually subscribing to your Facebook page as well.

Comment

You know how a lot of blogs have comments by default. Well the problem with that is you get a lot of spams. Facebook solves that problem by offering a plugin that requires actually Facebook accounts. So it means only authenticated users can post on your blog. Additionally when someone post comments about your article, it shows up on their wall and feeds that’s visible by their friends. So it creates a viral environment that promotes your blog.

Like Box/Facepile

It’s a box that you can embed into your website to show the number of people who likes it. Someone can click on the Like button, and become a follower as well. There’s also Facepile which shows the pictures of users that like your blog.

Hook Up with your Other Social Media

Every social media site can work with the other social media sites in some way. If you create a Facebook page, for example, you can include this link in a number of your Twitter entries. Link your blog’s RSS feed right up to Facebook to create up-to-the-minute status updates. While you’re at it, link up your Twitter feed and if you have a SlideShare account, add that to Facebook too. Keep on connecting different social media to other social media that you have to create a web, or network, of sites that are all promoting your blog and what it’s about.

Remember to Be Human

Whether your blog is written solely about daily observations, or whether it is more business-minded, you still have to be human. Facebook is less professional and more casual in nature (unlike some other business-related social media sites, such as LinkedIn). People aren’t on Facebook to be bombarded with promotions and business-only material. If that’s all you’re giving people, then they will be de-friending you soon enough. Make sure you do a fair mix of both personal stuff and promotional material. As long as the personal material isn’t too personal, your customers will appreciate it. Funny observations, pictures, quotes, and videos are all great to share. Talking about what your dog, cat, child, or friend did – as long as it’s appropriate and, preferably, universally funny – will give your Facebook page a fun, personal edge.

So these are some of our favorite tips & tools tools. Tell us about which ones that you like the most.

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Get a Celebrity Endorsement

Now one of those is getting a celebrity to mention you on Twitter, whether a real life movie star or just someone really popular on the network. For example, Ashton Kutcher has 7.6 million followers. If he mentions your site, it’s like hitting the lottery. Everyone is going to know who you are and what you like. It can be exceptionally difficult, and may take a lot of luck, but it could be worth it to reach out to them. It’s something to try.

Just don’t let it be a sand trap, where it’s “end all, be all.” Some people’s sole mission in life might be to be on Oprah (when she was still on the air), but guess what, it might be a possibility, but don’t put all of your eggs in it. Instead focus on your overall goal, but be flexible on how to get there.

Build Relationships with Other Bloggers

A better way is to reach out to other experts in your niche. Follow them on Twitter. Retweet their posts and content. Eventually you’ll begin to develop relationships with these people, especially if your tweets add value and increase their visibility. They’re going to start to notice you. It may take a little while, but it will happen.

Every niche only has a few really successful people, like five. You want to be among them. Be one of the few that is there to stay.

Make Sure You are Retweeted, Too

It’s great for you to follow people on Twitter and retweet their postings, but you undoubtedly want to the favor returned as well. Though most bloggers support each other and will retweet your tweets if you retweet theirs, there may be some who don’t seem to follow that courteous practice. You will also have people other than bloggers on your Twitter following you, and it’s incredibly valuable if they will retweet your messages.

Though there’s nothing saying that you can’t ask for people to retweet your messages, for a lot of users that comes off as a bit too desperate for most. You really have to get creative, stand out, and offer something of value for other people to bother retweeting what you have written.

Let’s assume that you have your niche picked out as being men and women who are trying to conceive, or may be having difficulty conceiving. Products that your business may sell are pregnancy tests. Here’s an example of a fairly bad tweet that has very little guarantee of being retweeted:

“Wide variety of pregnancy tests available. Click here to check out our selection.”

No offense, but who cares? Someone can go to their local pharmacy or grocery store and find a wide variety of pregnancy tests. But if you have something unique to offer, or something of significance, then you’ll get attention and get retweeted. A good example would be:

High sensitivity pregnancy tests. 99.9% accurate! 10 for $3 with free shipping while quantities last!!! Click here to place your order.

So which Twitter message would you be more likely to click on and retweet for your friends to benefit from? Chances are it’s the second one and definitely not the first. Provide a link to your blog, and you have yourself not only a new customer, but you’re giving people what they need, making the transaction mutually beneficial.

Keep the Conversation Going

If all you’re doing with your Twitter account is posting message after message promoting either your company or your service/product, then you’re going to ultimately fail. Twitter is a social media community. A community requires all people that are part of the community to participate in some way. Having a self promoting one-sided conversation with other Twitter followers will get you unfollowed as fast as you were followed, so when people leave comments or even ask questions, make sure you follow up.

Everything that you post on your account doesn’t have to be purely business related either. Funny (yet tasteful) videos and pictures are great, so are less or non-topical news articles that you find interesting.

Seek Out Followers

Don’t be a lazy tweeter and wait for people to come to you; go to them! You can easily use Twitter’s search tool to find other tweeters and other bloggers who have the same interest as you, or who is a professional in a niche that is the same as yours, or related to yours. As in the example above, if your business is about selling pregnancy tests, why not follow people who offer products for newborn babies? Not only are you expanding your network, but you may get some awesome ideas for blog entries that you can write in the future (or you can ask for the blogger to be a guest blogger!).

Other Tweeting Tips

Tweet consistently. If you only do it a few times, or sporadically, guess what, you’re not going to build the momentum to attract followers to a sizable audience. Do it at least 3 to 5 times a day every day. Be interesting. You can tweet about your blog posts, but also mix it up with other content around the web.

Offer cool, sexy, awesome info. Be the guy where people say “hey I want to hear what he has to say.” Include a link in your blog in your Twitter profile so that people can visit it. In your tweets, include something that’s more relevant on your site. The links will also help with your site’s SEO efforts.

Also remember to ask specific questions to get a dialog going. So to follow our own advice, leave a comment and let us know, how do you use Twitter to promote your blog?

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Offer a Freebie

Give them something for their email addresses. People are handing something valuable over, and they want something in return. Some examples might include a free reports, or how to videos, or providing the answer to their problems. It’s even better if you can put the material in an e-course, which you break them into parts, and send a lesson every week. This gets them to expect emails from you and actually open them, and finally click on the links in the body. Basically you’re training them on a new habit. Make it smooth and natural, and your list will grow and multiply like bunnies.

Make sure you’re offering something relevant. Don’t simply ask people to sign up for your newsletters. People aren’t that interested in simply hearing about updates of your website. It has to be something useful and make an immediate impact to their lives.

Make it Visible

The signup form should be above the fold in your readers’ faces without them having to scroll down and look for it. If they don’t see it, they obviously not going to sign up. It’s location, location, location. Your site is like a real estate. You need to position your signup form in a visible area. This won’t hurt your readership because If you have good content, people will scroll down for it.

Include a Privacy Policy

You should have a comprehensive and thorough privacy policy. This protects both you and anyone who signs up for your emails. If you aren’t sure how to write up a privacy policy, you can visit a number of websites that will either give you tips on how to do so, or there are sites that will generate it for you for free. www.the-dma-com is a popular site which you can use (though you will have to sign up as a member), or you can search for a number of other resources online.

Once you have created your privacy policy, make sure that you post up links to the policy all over your website. Most websites will provide a link at the very bottom of every page. Make sure that this link is also included on the page which will be used to collect your customer’s information.
Use a Popup

Here’s one that’s a bit controversial. We thought long and hard before using it. Put up a popup for new visitors who’ve been there for over 30 seconds. Give them an option to sign up and stay in touch. Make sure the offer is there for them to download the free report or watch that cool video. It can be a bit aggressive, so make sure you do it for first time visitors only. You don’t want to show this every time people revisit your site, otherwise they might annoyed, and stop coming.
It really works. So far it has the best opt in rate of all the methods that we tried. Now aweber, also who we use to manage our email list, makes it so easy to create & customize forms. We’ve tried a lot of companies and think this is the best one. If you’re not using Aweber, go BlogSuccessJournal.com/Aweber to try it one month for only $1!

Self-Installed Software:

In the remote case that you want to host your own list, you can install software directly onto your website that will both help you with list creation, and list management. It’s incredibly easy to send messages out to customers with this type of mailing list manager, and it’s easy to maintain the data.

If you think that you will be having a fairly large list, then you will want to make sure that whatever software you choose will be able to handle a large amount of data. You don’t want to have to be switching over to another list manager due to size limitations (this will cause you a huge headache), nor do you want to lose data. Continue to back up your information regularly to avoid this.

Another consideration you will have to make when it comes to your mailing list is to see if your web hosting service requires that your customers have to do what is called “double opting in” to your mailing list. What this means is that any customer you have will need to reply to an email that is generated by your list manager program prior to them being added to your mailing list. The purpose: to ensure that customers are not being signed onto lists that they don’t want to be on. It’s a form of SPAM protection that many web hosting companies perform now which can make it more difficult for you to build your mailing list.

Landing Page

Another great way to get people to sign up for your newsletter is to create a professional landing page for your website or blog. If you have some web design background, this should be a simple step for you. If not, there are programs available out there that will help you build a fantastic, professional looking page, or you can splurge a bit and hire on a professional web designer.

Once you have people on your mailing list, you want to make sure that you keep them engaged so that they will stay on that list. Have a regular ezine or newsletter go out, and make sure that you’re providing quality material. It doesn’t have to be a long newsletter, but having maybe 2-3 news articles and/or a video and images that are related to your site and what it’s about will keep them coming back and trusting you as a source of valuable information.

So what tips do you have to grow your email list?

With the recent unleashing of Google+ things are about to get a lot more competitive, too. It was easy to see the value in belonging to so many different sites, but with Google+ tying everything together that most web users area already using, competition is definitely heating up. For instance, you can expect to see RSS feeds that are of interest to you pulled right into your Google+ account.

But, wait a second! Whatever happened to RSS feeds as one of the best ways to market your blog? It used to be that readers demanded access to a feed on every single site and every single blogger was talking about how to set yours up. Well think of RSS feeds sort of like Netflix: everyone is using it, but we’re so used to it that we’ve stopped talking about it.

RSS Feeds 101

So, what if you’re not using RSS feeds or focusing on them properly in your blog? What can you do to get started or to do things better? First of all, don’t use the built in feeds that are provided with your content management system.

They can’t be tracked properly and won’t give you the opportunity to claim the clout that you deserve. It’s more important for you to use a tool like Feed Burner, where you can easily track the number of subscribers. This will give you the ability to properly push to your RSS feed.

How Do You Get People to Sign Up?

One of the best things to do with your RSS feed is use it as a way to promote content early. If you are frequently ahead of schedule with your blog posts, you can push things to your RSS feed before they go live on your site. As people see these posts and interact with them, you can make last minute changes to improve your content.

You can also offer them a free report or e-book. There are many articles out there to teach you how to quickly put together a killer e-book or report, so if you aren’t experienced with this you should go look it up right away. Offering the e-book to those who sign up to your RSS feed is a great enticement that should help increase your numbers drastically.

Making Money with Your RSS Feed

You can also use your feed as a way to improve your ability to sell products. For instance, if you are selling click bank products, you can release special posts just to your feed community discussing these products. You can make your community feel special by telling them that they are the only ones you are sharing this information with.

There are also many programs that will enable you to advertise in your feed. The good news is that this feed is generally separate from your main content, meaning you can experiment with different advertisers without violating any of your agreements. Be extra cautious to check the fine print, though.

What RSS Feeds Can’t Do

RSS feeds are only good for getting those who are already interested in your content to continue following you. The RSS feed alone can’t bring you more users. It wasn’t designed this way.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. This means that it allows people to integrate your content into their routine. Whether it is a single person bringing it into their RSS reader of choice or another publisher taking your content and publishing it on their site, that’s what it does.

Having an RSS feed won’t bring you more viewers. It’s not like Twitter or Facebook where people interested can share your content or let others know that they like it. It just doesn’t work that way.

But if you already have a group of people coming to your site on a regular basis, then it may provide you an additional alternative to keep people in the group. If you notice you have a large amount of people who come to your site every month, but they don’t regularly join your community, then this might be a part of the solution.

Reconciling your Blog and your RSS Feed

One of the things most people will have trouble with is making sure that they have a good idea of how many people exist on their blog independently from their RSS feed. This can be very difficult to keep track of. The important thing is to go back and check your historical data.

If you could see before your RSS feed that you had, let’s say 100 new visitors per day, and that each month your total number of visitors was increasing by about 30, this would show you how quickly your blog is increasing: one new regular visitor per day.

If you started an RSS feed and saw that you were gaining about 2 new subscribers per day, this would give you some information to work with. Reconciling these numbers is pretty much impossible, though. The best that can happen is getting a rough idea of how many people join the RSS feed but don’t return to the site.

Using survey tools you can publish a survey on your RSS feed and publish another on your site. Ask people to vote as to whether they subscribe to one, the other, or both. Then you can actually reconcile these numbers.

Regardless of your choice to use an RSS feed or to ignore it entirely, you should consider it a viable means to capture audience attention. Many people are still using RSS feeds as a way to keep themselves focused on content without having to visit websites on a regular basis, and that’s what counts.

Yeah, right. You quickly learned that there was a lot more to getting visitors to your site than just creating good content. You have to promote your site and get people to notice it.

Certainly you have since learned about SEO and are now on the hunt to find some SEO services that can help you boost your rankings in the search engines for the terms you want. But if you are going to benefit from intentional SEO, you need to be aware of the services that you have to avoid.

This article highlights five SEO services that might actually hurt your ranking in the search engines or even get you taken off completely. Avoid these tips at your own peril.

Link Building Services

There are several services that provide you with the ability to write small blog posts and have them distributed to other sites. These are known as link building services, and there are many popular services available.

While they can be effective if done correctly, the problem is that many providers are very savvy, and leave patterns that the search engines quickly recognize which sites are a part of the network. Any links coming to your site from these sources will not provide you the boost that you are looking for, and may even harm your rankings.

If you are thinking about signing up for one of these services because of the easy backlinks you can generate, you should ask some detailed questions how they will operate before proceeding. Here’re some questions to ask. What anchor text would they use? The answer should be a wide variety relevant to your topic. What type of content? Uniquely written at least 500 words.

Blog Comment Services (and Automated Software)

You have heard before that one of the best ways to promote your blog is to participate on others. You know this is true, but who has time to comment on all of those blogs to get some extra readers? Eventually, you will find out about blog commenting services.

Run. Far. Away.

You want to avoid these services because often they will include spammy body copy with a link back to your site. Most of the time, the comment will get noticed as spam and be refused from the site. And then your domain may even be penalized for being so heavily associated with spam.

Finally many blogging platforms have plugins that automatically insert “nofollow” HTML tags to links in the comment section. This means searches engines would not assign any weight to these links in their ranking consideration. So it defeats the purpose all together.

One caveat is if you use a reputable Social Media service company who will actively build relationships on your behalf with other blogger. That might be worthwhile in the long run because other bloggers might then voluntarily add the link of your website to their blogs.

.EDU and .ORG Backlink Services

There are websites and products that promise to boost your ranking in the search engines by providing you with links from .edu and .org domains. What they do is take advantage of forum software loopholes. These are considered blackhat techniques and are frowned upon by the search engines.

The company providing this services will merely create a profile on a forum with a link to your website. It’s totally worthless, though, because the search engines almost always ignore these links.

Article Spinning Services

Article spinning is one of those things that sounds great in concept, but just doesn’t ever hit the mark. Imagine if you could rewrite every word in this sentence using an equal synonym. You would have a completely original article that wouldn’t need to be rewritten!

Think again! The reality is that these articles come off sounding more like something written by an intoxicated foreigner than anything you or I would ever write. These articles are detected by the search engines and usually flagged.

The site receiving the link is often going to get some kind of penalty. It’s in your best interest to pay decent writers fair wages to create unique and engaging content if you’re going to go this route.

Anything Labeled Black Hat or Gray Hat

In the world of computers, black hats are worn by the bad guys, and white hats are worn by the good guys. Since everyone knows there are shades of gray, there are also gray hats. Knowing what kind of search engine techniques the service you are looking at is important.

You want to make sure to avoid anything that is black hat or gray hat. These are tricks that take advantage of current loopholes in the way the search engines work. And this often means that you are going to eventually suffer a penalty when you are found out.

You can also always ask the company providing the service whether or not what they are doing is considered gray hat SEO. If it is, then that means they are mixing some shades of acceptable behavior with some shades of unacceptable behavior. You need to avoid this at all costs.

If you have spent any amount of time building up your blog and are trying to give it a boost so that you can have more readers, you might be better off taking advantage of a Facebook ad campaign, or a Google Adwords campaign. To use these black hat techniques will not help you get serious, long-term readers to your site. You might boost your search engine rankings just a little bit, but in the long term you are going to pay dearly.

Avoid the services listed in this article at all costs if you want to protect your existing rankings with the search engines. The number one thing to remember is that you should always be creating content that is for people, not for search engines. Do this and you will succeed!

Try Different Networks

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different networks out there. You can easily search for many advertising vendors who want to buy ad space on the web. This is a great opportunity for you, as it gives you the chance to try out several different networks on your site and see which one works best.

While there are all kinds of different networks out there, they can be broken down into four categories – pay per click, par per action, pay per view, and ad space.

Pay per click advertising is just what it sounds like – if someone clicks on an ad on your site, you get a small percentage of that revenue. Pay per action means you get a percentage of revenue when someone does something such as purchase an item from the ad or give their contact information to the vendor. Pay per view ads pay you based on the number of times an ad displays on your site. Finally, you can just sell space for a monthly fee on your site as well.

You can try all of these different kinds and see what works best for you.

Make Sure the Ads Are Relevant

Try to find ones that are relevant to your site as well, and test different ones to see which ones get the most clicks or actions from your site. These networks allow you access to these types of analytics so that you can see exactly how many clicks and/or sales you are getting through each advertisement.

Some networks, such as Google AdSense, will choose what ads they display for you based on the content of your site. However, you should still review the ads and make sure they are appropriate for your site.

Try Different Ad Placements

Sometimes, the placement on your site can be a big factor in your success. Try putting it on the left hand side of your site, instead of the right, or at the top instead of the bottom. Track what kind of click through rate your ads get when you move them.

Try Different Ad Sizes

They might be too small or too large. Resize them as well to see if a different size gets the attention of readers a little better. While you might think that bigger is always better, this might not be the case, and you will not really know until you have done some testing.

Graphic or Text?

Many ad networks give you the option of having either graphic banner ads or text ads. While many blog owners gravitate toward image-based ads because they believe they will be more likely to catch someone’s eye, do not rule out text ads! Sometimes they may actually do better depending on the content of your sites and the content of the advertisement.

Different Templates

It seems that different website templates seem to have an effect on the amount of people who will click on your ads. Try different web design templates on your site in order to see if any particular one leads to more advertising clicks.

Pop Ups

If you really want to get your readers’ attention, you can try pop up ads and see if they have any effectiveness. However, keep in mind that pop ups are often seen as annoyances to your readers and might keep them from coming back to your site. They may be worth a try, however, while you are testing to see what seems to work the best for your blog.

Banner Rotation

One great way to see what ads do the best is banner rotation. With a banner rotator, you can have different banner ads show up in the same spot on your site at different times. This way, you could test the effectiveness of say, five different banner ads, by having a different one rotate in each time someone comes to the site for a few days. These sites

Switch Things Up

Mix up the design of your site from time to time to see if that helps with ad effectiveness, and even move them around that seem to be doing well if they have lost a certain amount of their effectiveness.

Many of us develop ad blindness where we tend to start to ignore the ads that we see on sites we visit. Mixing up the design of the site or the placement of your ads might get your customers to look around a little more closely when they see that things have changed a bit! This is just a good practice anyway, as mixing things up on your site just keeps things fresh and will probably keep their eyes on your site longer and keep them coming back more often.

While it can be tedious to try to tweak you site and get a better click through rate on the different advertisements that you put up, taking the time to test and improve can end up bringing you in a significant amount of extra income without even having to get more traffic coming to your site. While it is not as simple as pushing a button, using the tips above should help you get your ad revenue up without having to do a significant amount of work!

Humor

People love to share funny stuff, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of sites out there that are dedicated to just funny videos that people post on YouTube and other sites.

However, doing humor can be tricky. Make sure that you are careful not to be offensive in your post and let other people look at it before you post it to see if they think it is funny. Ask them for their honest opinion. If you are sure it really is funny and creative, put it out there! Hopefully you will have the next viral videos on your hands!

Excellent Information

If you do not want to try to be funny, you can instead go for excellent information about the topic of your blog or something related. Find a topic that people ask you a lot of questions about or that you always had questions about and provide a really good explanation to your viewers about that topic. Use good visual aids to help them understand it even better.

Make sure, of course that the explanation you give is clear and accurate. If it is really helpful, people will likely share it with friends and colleagues, which is exactly how many viral videos get started.

High Quality

Make sure it is high quality as well. Keep the camera still and shut off anything that will cause you a lot of noise while you are trying to record the video. Turn things like the television and radio off and make sure no one is going to be walking in and out of the room while you are trying to record.

In essence, your video does not have to be high definition quality. It just needs to be easily watchable by viewers and something that does not include distractions for you or them.

Keyword Research

These days, a lot of videos are showing up in the search engine results. You might be surprised how much traffic you can get to a video if you take the time to do some keyword research before you post your video up on sites such as YouTube.

Obviously, the search engines do not notice keywords within the video; however, they can pick up on keywords in your video’s title and description. If you can find some good related search terms, include them in your title, description, and tags.

Video Distribution

When people think online video, the first name that usually comes to mind for them is YouTube. However, there are hundreds of other sites out there that get a large amount of views. You might be surprised how many views sites such as Vimeo and Dailymotion get on a daily basis.

Therefore, make sure you do not limit yourself to posting on just one site. Post on several sites if you can to get your production the maximum exposure it can get. You can even embed the video on your blog and any other sites you might have access to in order to get it even more views.

Encourage Sharing

Make sure that you ask people who watch to share it with others. Just a little “please share this” request can add a huge boost to the percentage of people who will view it elsewhere or share with others.

To do this, add the request in the description field. You can also mention it in the video or in a little message down at the bottom while it is running. Of course, as mentioned above, it should be something of good quality and worth sharing, as people will probably not share something they did not like themselves!

Social Networks

Facebook and Twitter along with other social networking and social bookmarking sites are great places to get it more exposure. In fact, many if not most of the viral videos out there got their biggest boost from social sharing on these sites.

If you do not have a presence on these sites already, you should go ahead and start getting involved and adding content and friends. If you do have a profile, make sure you add the video to your Facebook profile or page and add the link to the video to your Twitter page.

Make sure the title on these status updates is catchy, as you are vying for the attention of people bombarded with all kinds of information on these social networks.

You can also add the link to your video to social bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit and others.

Link Back

Of course, all of this would be for nothing if you do not tell people where to go after the it is done! Make sure you link back to your blog in the description field. Give them a compelling reason to go back to your blog in the description as well. You can also put together a slide or something within, preferably toward the end, letting viewers know where to go when is over.

If you will try these few simple tips, you will give your videos a much higher chance of going viral and will hopefully see a flood of traffic to your site because of them! Happy recording!

What is a Pay-Per-Click Advertisement?

As the one advertising the product or service, you choose which words you want to be displayed in order to receive as many hits as possible, along with the most you will pay Google per click. When someone does a Google search, these advertisements (called “creatives” in Google lingo) triggered by the word or words they have typed in the search bar appear on the right side of the screen, and occasionally above the results of the search. Statistical analysis reveals that a search result may return anywhere from no ads up to twelve ads.

Whenever someone clicks on your advertisement during a search, you (the advertiser) agree to pay Google a fee for this service. Search engines such as Google will have advertisers bid on a certain keyword phrases which directly pertain to their product market.

The more you bid, the more likely it will appear high up on the page. Merchants who implement the Google Adwords system in their marketing campaign will then have their ad shown whenever a keyword is used which matches the merchant’s keyword list they selected and submitted to Google’s adsense program. Those “sponsored” advertisements you see when performing a search is the result of an advertiser using the pay-per-click system.

How is the Ordering of Ads Determined?

Ordering of the ads on a webpage depends on the amount of the bid placed by an advertiser and the “quality score” of all the advertisements that pop up during a search. Google determines this quality score by taking into consideration the significance of the advertiser’s keyword phrase and text, the “historical” click-through rates (which relates to how many times the ad itself has been clicked) and whether the advertiser has an account in good standing. In addition, Google utilizes this quality score to establish the minimum bid for an advertiser’s keyword phrase.

Minimum bids are determined by the quality of the advertiser’s web page. Although Google has published guidelines regarding how they decide whether a blog is legitimate, the actual method they use to determine adequacy of keyword phrases is kept a secret and Google has been known to modify these parameters without giving specific reasons.

Features of Adwords

Frequency capping prevents ads from appearing over and over again to the same user who may be performing many searches on a specific topic. An advertiser can tell Google Adwords what they want that limit to be in regards to every day, week or month. Bombarding a consumer with the same advertisement each time they do a search for pet supplies, for example, can be irritating to a potential customer who may begin to think that this ad may not be trustworthy.

IP address exclusion allows advertisers to tell the adwords program which IP addresses they want to be excluded from their advertising operation. This is useful because it prevents unwanted clicks from occurring and can keep the advertiser’s payments to adwords to a minimum. In addition, IP address exclusions permits advertisers to only target those IP addresses considered to be potential customers of their product or service.

Adwords Can Help Sell Your Product

Using Google Adwords program has helped many businesses sell millions of dollars worth of merchandise and is proving to be an extremely popular method in promoting products and services. It takes less than an hour to set up your account with Google and begin implementing the system. Once you have registered with the program you will then be instructed to create your advertisement, choose your keyword phrase or phrases by referencing the Google keyword tool, and telling Google how much you would like to spend each day, along with how much you want to pay each time someone clicks your ad.

If you do not have a blog but work for a business, you can still use adwords by becoming an affiliate marketer and registering as a member of an affiliate program. Whenever someone clicks on the ad you create and orders something from the blog, you will automatically collect a commission from the sale.

This is where demographics and targeting a specific audience who will be more inclined to click your ad and make a purchase becomes vital to the success of your business. For example, consumers who live in rural areas of the country will not be interested in appliances which make apartment living more comfortable, but they will be interested in home repair products.

Depending on the merchandise you sell and the keyword phrases selected, you can make a lot of money easily and quickly. for example, if you choose to pay Google $1 every time someone clicks your ad, but can make two or three sales at $50 apiece per 50 clicks, you will have made a profit, or what is known as a significant “return on investment”. This transactions can potentially be completed several times a day or over a hundred times a day.

Entrepreneurs love the Adwords program because of its applicability and user-friendly interface. Anyone can initiate their own business using Adwords and, depending on how well a business is run, become a successful merchant. In addition to the features of Adwords, this program indirectly allows you to check whether the product you want to market stands a chance in today’s highly competitive market. If you run your advertisement for several weeks but get few hits, this may suggest that the product represents an unstable niche and that you may need to forget about this product and try selling something else.

Don’t be discouraged if you can’t manage to get your advertisement placed on Google’s first page (or even second!). Competition for this space is incredibly fierce and you will probably not experience a surge of profits in the beginning. However, by studying how to optimize Adwords and learning how to use the various methods available which can drive loads of traffic to your blog (blogging, SEO writing), you can find yourself in the position of becoming a successful internet entrepreneur.

But what if Facebook just not your cup of tea, or what if you have maxed out your brand’s or website’s effectiveness on Facebook? There are plenty of other social networks out there that you can utilize to draw more folks to your brand or website. Below is a list of four of these types of sites that you can use.

Microblogging Sites

Microblogging sites are social networks that are just what they sound like – you tell the world what you want to say in very small pieces. Twitter is of course the main example of such a site. You make a statement or a comment in 160 characters or less, and the people on Twitter who “follow” you will be able to see it. You can also reply to other people on Twitter and have a conversation with them.

Twitter is great for businesses, as it is expected that companies and websites, while they should offer helpful information, will be largely self-promotional with their information given out on the social network. So, your site or business can use about as many shameless plug as you want on Twitter, as long as you do not get too overbearing!

There are other microblogging sites besides Twitter, but it is really the 800 pound gorilla of the microblogging world. If you have not used it before, it is very simple to get signed up and started right away. You can start sharing links to your new blog posts or other helpful information and following people who might be interested in your niche right away.

Blogs

Blog sites, such as wordpress.com, tumblr.com, and others, make great social networks for companies and websites to join. These sites are simply blogs hosted at different websites that you can use to update information about your website, about your company, etc. You can even get creative with it and highlight different staff members, customers, etc.!

With one of these blogs, make sure you have it linked to your main site so that people can find it. Also, ask questions of readers and customers and encourage conversation. The more comments you get, the better!

Another tip for blogs – make sure you update them regularly with good content and have a way for people to sign up for notifications about updates. This way, your followers can come back knowing there will be new quality content on your site regularly. Make sure that your content is helpful and something that people can really use

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites are a great way for internet users to share their favorite content on the web. A few popular social bookmarking sites include Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, and Del.icio.us. It works essentially just like a regular bookmark in your browser, except it is public, and other people can “vote” on your submission. The great links that get shared and voted on by the most people go on to end up on the first page of the social bookmarking site, and can actually end up getting a lot of traffic!

These social networks really require that you submit some exceptional content to get noticed and voted up by the users of the sites, but they can be very powerful. Not only can you submit and vote on different websites, you can even “friend” people like you can on Facebook. If you add to your list of followers on these sites, you may see some traffic from the people who follow you, as they will be notified when you upload new content.

Another great benefit of these sites is search engine optimization. When you submit a link from your site on one these social networks, you are actually helping your SEO by building a high quality link back to your site! So you get the social networking and the SEO benefit all in one shot.

Video Sites

Finally, our last (but not least) set of social networks is video sites. Video continues to grow in popularity and in numbers online. People are even watching video on their mobile devices and tablets these days as the internet and processing speeds on them get faster and faster. Video now seems to be incorporated into almost every site that you visit, and it is said that YouTube is now is #2 search engine after Google. In other words, people are using YouTube to find answers to questions just like they would any other search engine.

With YouTube and other video sites, you can add “subscribers” to your video channel, which are similar to friends on Facebook. This is a great feature for businesses, especially ones that plan to upload videos regularly. Subscribers to your channel will receive a notification when you upload a new video, so you can get regular eyes on your offers or websites just by uploading good videos regularly. Outside of YouTube , you can try out Vimeo, Dailymotion, and a host of other video sharing sites out there to get more exposure for your video content.

While you will need some expertise if you want to create your own videos, it has never been easier to create and upload videos to these social networks. If you do not want to create them yourself, you can easily find someone online who will create them for you for a small fee.

While Facebook may be the largest player, by far, in the sphere of social networks, as you can see, there are plenty of other options when it comes to growing your follower base online. If you focus even on one of the four above, you are very likely to see some increases in traffic to your website, which will hopefully turn into an increase in sales for your website or business!

The Evolution of The Phone

It was not that many years ago that cell phones were a rarity. Do you remember the big car phones everybody had for while? We have definitely come a long way since those days!

As cell phones became more popular, they also started to get smaller. We were able to keep them in our pockets after a while, and the battery life kept getting better. The signals and the networks continued to grow to the point that we expected our phones to work virtually anywhere.

Once cell phone networks began to get more sophisticated, they started rolling out new features. The first, and still ever so popular, was of, course, text messaging. Many of us now use our phones to send text messages just as much as, if not more than, we use them to actually call someone.

Then, as the phones became even more like computers, they began to get more and more features, such as the mobile web. Initially, the mobile web was pretty slow and did not display the full internet, only different content that was set up on specific networks designed to work only for certain cell phone companies.

Finally, fast forward to today. Cell phones are basically smaller versions of computers, and the internet is almost as (if not more) accessible on our phones as it is on our computers. Smartphone apps give us access to many of our favorite sites, games, etc., without even having to go on the web. One of the last things people do with their smartphones is actually talk on it!

Now that we spend so much time on our phones (even if we are not actually talking on them), the opportunity for websites and businesses to market on this platform continues to grow, and will likely continue to become more and more important.

Using The Mobile Web

Many smartphone users now turn to their phones before their computers when it comes time to look up something on the internet. This means that those companies and brands that have a strong mobile presence will be more likely to get the business of these users, as these companies will get the most eyes on their offers.

As more and more people continue to use the mobile web on their phones, and as a generation of people conditioned to mobile web use reach the age where they have income to spend, being in front of these people when they are on the mobile web will become more and more important.

Many companies are trying to make sure they have a mobile marketing presence by making sure they have a mobile version of their sites. They have a mobile version in order to attract visitors from this phone.

This will be much more important as mobile web use increases. Every website owner should really make sure they have a mobile optimized site, because it does appear very certain that more and more people will be using their phones to access the web.

The Growth Of Mobile Apps

Smartphones are not the only opportunity for mobile marketing. Almost every type of smartphone – iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc., has a seemingly unlimited number of apps, or applications, designed just for that particular operating system. Many users turn to these apps before they actually even use the mobile web.

Why is this important for your business or website? Imagine if a competing business or website has an app on the major phone platforms, and you do not. If potential customers can easily get that app, who do you think they will purchase from first?

It is actually getting much easier to develop these apps these days, so if you have the resources, hiring someone to build an app for you may be a great idea!

Other Mobile Devices

Tablet computing is now starting to change the mobile marketing game as well. With the advent of the iPad and Android tablets, people are now moving away from computers even more.

A few years ago, people would have taken their laptops out with them to do schoolwork or work on their latest project at the coffee shop. Now, people take their tablets with them instead.

Again, you can see the power of this platform for mobile marketing. If this is where your potential customers are, you will want to be there, too! Typically, if you have a mobile optimized website, it will work on a tablet as well. Also, most smartphone apps will work on tablets as well.

Text Message Marketing

These days, many marketing emails get discarded or ignored by potential customers. Text messages, however, get read almost 100% of the time. These days, there are a number of text messaging platforms that businesses can use to reach out to their customers.

Customers have to opt in to these programs, so companies usually have to offer some kind of incentives to get sign ups for text messages, and people do not want to be bombarded by messages, but the well placed tweet with an announcement or a discount can definitely drive traffic to your business!

In conclusion, mobile marketing is an ever growing market that will continue to be more and more crucial for companies to gain and keep their market share.  As more traditional forms of advertising go out of favor and have smaller returns on investment, companies and websites that make the move to a strong mobile marketing presence will likely see a stronger return and market share than their competitors who choose to keep with the status quo in their marketing methods.

Do A Search For Similar Blogs

Before you can build a relationship with any bloggers in your niche, you need to find them! This is usually a fairly simple project. Just head over to your preferred search engine and type in “blog” plus the name of your niche. This will usually give you plenty of results and more bloggers that you may even be able to contact.

Personally, I would start by contacting the ones that come up first in your online search, as they probably have the largest audience. Make a list of these blogs somewhere so you can refer back to it later as you are contacting bloggers. This way you do not have to redo this search over and over again.

Get Active On Social Networks

Do not just look in the search engines for good bloggers in your niche, however. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks are great places to find these folks. Do a search on these networks for your niche and see who comes up and who seems to be active. Try to add them as a friend or subscribe to their channels or updates on these sites. Also, try to strike up a conversation with them on these websites as well, as this is a great way and an appropriate place to start that type of conversation.

Participate In Forums

Web forums can be a great place to meet and interact with bloggers in your niche. If you do not know of any, I bet they are out there! You can find them by doing the same kind of search as I mentioned above when looking for blogs, but this time just do a search for “forums” followed by your niche.

Once you find a few, sign up for them and become an active participant. You are bound to find a few folks in your niche if you get involved, and then you will probably really get to know a few of them well as you actively participate in discussion on these forums.

Comment On Their Blogs

Once you do find a few good bloggers in your niche, start reading their posts regularly and become a regular poster on their site. Make sure that your comments are well thought out and more than just something along the lines of, “Great post.” Be imaginative with your comments and make them interesting and worthy of reading.

You might not try to go for a link back to your site in these first comments, at least not yet. You do not want the blogger to be put off by you or to feel as if you are only there to get a backlink to your website. Just leave the links out of it at first and post with your name only. Maybe later you can use a link once they know who are you and you have established a positive relationship.

Share Their Posts

When you have found a few good bloggers in your niche, share their posts on your site or on social networks or elsewhere. This should get you some good rep with the blogger with whom you are trying to establish a relationship. Make sure they know you shared somehow, maybe by leaving a comment on the post you shared about it. They will be more likely to check you out or maybe even share your content as well.

Contacting Bloggers

Once you have done some commenting on blogs, social networks, and forums, you should have a few names of bloggers in your niche that you would like to contact. In this case, just hit them up! It does not hurt to send them a private message on a forum or social network or an email to see if you can establish some kind of relationship.

Do not be too pushy, however, and always send a personalized message. Most people know when they receive a canned response, as they get them all the time. If they do not respond, move on to the next person on your list. You are bound to get some positive responses in there!

Offer To Guest Post

Once you have gotten a positive response and have started building that relationship, offer to write a guest post on their blog sometime. This is done all the time in internet marketing, and it can really drive some serious traffic to your site if you write a good post and offer a good reason for readers to check out your site.

Many bloggers will be happy to oblige your guest post request, as it can give them a break from writing. However, it does help to have a post ready for them to read, or maybe a sample of your work, so they know that the content you send their way will be high quality.

Offer A Link Back

In addition, offer to link back to their site on yours. This is just a nice gesture, and you do not necessarily need to ask them to reciprocate. Many times they will do so just because you took the time to link to them. If nothing else, you will have gotten their attention! They will at least probably take notice of you if you do so!

If you follow these simple steps, you can bet that you will build some great relationships with bloggers in your niche, and in turn will have a great group of people who can support you and who can help provide you with more exposure for your blog as well.

Here are a few simple ways to make a connection with a guru you admire who can help get you a significant amount of exposure to your blog.

Follow Them

First, of course, you need to be following on Twitter any guru who you want to connect with. Seek them out and make sure you follow them and pay attention to what they are sharing on Twitter. They cannot know you if they have never seen you!

Retweet Their Tweets

You should definitely make sure you re-tweet the things that he or she shares on Twitter. Do not share everything, as that might get a bit weird! However, do re-tweet the things that they want to have shared – maybe a link to their new blog post or something that they want to share publicly. Doing this may well garner some goodwill and attention from them as you try to connect with them.

Reply To Their Tweets

When the guru you want to connect with on Twitter shares something that you could reply to, send them an @ reply. Converse with them about what they shared. They may not always be able to respond, but you may well get their attention if you do it enough! Keep in mind with this, however, that he or she may get a whole bunch of replies when they tweet something, so they may not always be able to respond to you if you reply to their tweets, so do not get upset if your reply goes unanswered.

Send Them A Direct Message

If you want to make a personal connection, you can also them the guru a direct message on Twitter. Send them a brief introduction and an invitation to connect. Keep in mind with this as well, that they may receive many direct messages, and direct messages are often automated messages, so some people ignore them entirely. Therefore, you might not get a response this way, either, but it is just another way to get your name in front of them.

Follow Them on Other Social Media Sites

Check to see if they have a Facebook page, a LinkedIn account, etc., and follow them there as well. Try to interact with them on these sites, too, as this is another way, outside of Twitter, to get the guru’s attention and to get your name in front of them once again.

Comment on Their Blog

If they have a blog that they post on regularly, make sure you leave a post there that is helpful. Join in the conversation by adding value to it in the comments. Do not however, try to solicit their help in their blog by being overly self-promotional in their blog comments. This is generally frowned upon by website owner and bloggers.

Go To Live Events

Will the guru you want to connect with be speaking in your area, make sure you attend! I actually got to do this recently and had the opportunity to meet in person with someone considered a guru, and whom I admire, greatly before and after a meeting he held in my city. It was a great chance to chat, and now he knows who I am if I ever contact him.

Send Them Information

Let them know about when you are posting something new or something exciting on your blog, especially if they are in that person’s area of expertise or experience. They might just see fit to share it with all of their followers!

Seek Out More Than One Guru

You may not hit it off with the first guru you get in touch with. Keep in mind that they probably get flooded with information and invitations, so you may or may not hear from them in the long run after trying. So, hedge your bets! Try to contact several different gurus. By doing so, you significantly increase the chance that someone will get back with you and will share your profile or your information with others.

What you will find is that there are only 5-7 big players in any niche and you want to be one of them. The best way to get there is by following the other 5!

Do Not Be Annoying (That’s Just Creepy)

While following all of the above ideas can get your name in front of any gurus who you want to connect with, keep in mind that you do not want to annoy them with too many messages or invitations to connect via twitter or anywhere else.

Think about how you would feel if someone sent you several messages daily. This is probably not a good plan! Keep the interval to once every few days at most on your attempts to connect, and if your attempts are ignored after a long time of trying, it may be best to move on so that you do not alienate the guru entirely. You never want to push too hard and alienate someone who could be a great partner in the future.

Once Connected, Continue To Give

Once you have connected with a guru and they have sent out information, make sure you thank them publicly on Twitter and elsewhere, and make sure you continue to keep that relationship with them. After all, you do owe them some gratitude for their assistance.

Conclusion

If you will work to connect with gurus on Twitter by using the steps mentioned above, then give them good information that they could share with their followers and constituents, you might just find that one of these days, you are the guru that everyone is trying to get in touch with for assistance! By the way, if that day comes, make sure you take the time to remember the little guy and help them out as well if you can.

This article assumes that you already know the basics of setting up your Facebook ad campaign and moves into some of the advanced methods for generating traffic.

Choose Your Demographic Appropriately

One of the mistakes a lot of people make when setting up a Facebook ad campaign is to choose the wrong demographic. You need to know who your target reader is. So how do you find out what these people are interested in?

By using Facebook! If you start with one thing that you know a reader of your blog is going to be interested in, you can start clicking around Facebook, finding people that like those things and going to see more of their likes. This won’t be easy and will take some time and effort.

Not everyone has everything available for public review. So you will need to find the lists that are public. Take this information and put it into a spreadsheet.

Collect as much of it as you can, and then cross reference each list. Make a new list of all of the things they have in common. That will help you ensure that you are focusing on the right demographics for advertising on Facebook.

Write A Great Title

It’s important to pick a title that is going to draw people into your ad. You don’t want to simply tell them what you are offering. They won’t pay attention. Write the headline of your ad in a way that leads the reader to believe that there is something important that they need to find, which they will.

But avoid the clichés, such as “One secret to…” as people already know this is a trick. You want to come up with more interesting headlines that are specifically tied to the type of content that you are going to be offering the reader.

Go back to the list of interests you collected and see what sort of inspiration you find there. Drawing people into your blog using a good teaser is easy.

Use Pictures To Get Their Attention

Did you ever see those pictures that don’t seem to be related to the Facebook ad in any way? Those are pictures that are there simply to attract people’s attention. You can use any number of different types of pictures, but you should aim for one of a few different kinds: sexy, shocking, funny.

Those three will get the most attention and also keep the reader focused long enough to read your text. If you have a good title, the whole ad will start to come together, and you will be pulling readers into your blog before you know it.

You can find pictures at a number of different places. There are many stock image sites on the Internet and the Wikimedia commons has plenty that are totally free for you to use.

Just always check the terms of use before you commit to using any specific image for your Facebook ads.

Writing The Body Of The Ad

This is an important step. You need to bring out some sense of urgency here. You can do this if you are offering something as a prize or gift.

But for many blogs this just might not work. So what are you going to do to instill a sense of urgency in your potential reader? Think about offering something that they might be interested in reading or watching.

Offer that to them in the body copy and then tell them that it is free for a limited time.

For instance, if you are writing a blog about video games and you know that most of your potential readers are interested in a specific game, then you could put together an ad that uses the following body copy: “Get a free guide to dominate GAME X. It’s free for now, but retails at $35. Limited offer!”

If this doesn’t get you a lot of clicks to your site, then you did your research incorrectly and should go back to that step. You are probably targeting the wrong group.

Putting It All Together And Split Testing

The most important element of this entire process is the initial demographic research. If you get that wrong, the Facebook ads won’t get the right attention and draw traffic into your site. But assuming that you got the right stuff in the research step, how are you going to make sure that you get the best possible click-through rate?

Well, that’s easy! Use split testing. But how do you do it?

You have three elements in your ad that you can mix and match. The first is the picture, the second is the headline, and the third is the body copy. You can’t possibly know how any one of those is impacting the success of the ad, but you can verify the power of a specific combination.

Come up with at least three different pictures, three different headlines and three different body copies. They don’t need to all make sense when you mix and match them. You just need to be able to come up with nine distinct Facebook ads.

Run each one of these Facebook ads with an identical budget and then use the Facebook system to track their effectiveness. You will quickly learn which one works the best.

With this combination of Facebook ads, you can also cross reference and determine which picture is drawing the best attention. You can do the same for each headline and body copy. Just make sure that you are keeping good track of conversion rates.

When you finish with the first set ads, you can do another round, focusing on the elements that work the best. With these tips you can draw tons of traffic to your blog using the Facebook advertising platform.

Email Marketing Software

For any good marketing campaign, you are going to need an email marketing service like Aweber. Companies like Aweber allow you to collect and store and manage customer email addresses in their database, automatically respond to newly signed up customers, schedule newsletters in advance, and track the results of all of your campaigns.

How To Get Email Subscribers

You cannot have much of an email marketing system without subscribers! Before you get rolling, you’ll need to think about what you are going to do to get them to sign up to your list.

Will you give them some kind of freebie for signing up?
Will you offer a drawing for some kind of giveaway?
How about an eCourse – teach them something over email?

You don’t necessarily have to give something away for them to sign up. If your site is interesting enough, they may sign up without a freebie of some kind. However, it sure doesn’t hurt to have an incentive!

Make Your Subscriber Form Prominent On Your Website

You will also need to have the form for them to sign up for updates somewhere on your site, preferably somewhere prominent so that once they have read something interesting, they are willing to sign up to get updates and have the opportunity to do right in front of them.

Most email marketing software companies make this fairly simple. With their code, you can put the form wherever you fancy on your site such as the sidebar or in the header. Once you put the code in place, all the subscribers have to do is enter the required information, and they will start getting updates!

Set Up Your Follow Up Emails

It is smart to go ahead and have a few messages in place before you even have subscribers. That way they begin to receive updates from you almost immediately without you having to race to get some content out to them.

Email marketing companies like Aweber allow you to send previously written messages to subscribers either immediately or at a later scheduled time.

Use Catchy Email Titles

How many emails do you skip over in a day? For me, I skip a lot. If you do not want to fall into that group with your subscribers, then make sure you use catchy titles for your messages. Do not make them misleading, just make them something that you would want to click on if you saw the headline.

Rather than “Joe’s Newletter – Issue #1″, try something like “5 Ways to Make Money With Your Email List” – which one would you rather read?

Be creative here and have some fun with the titles. People will be more likely to open your message if your title is something that stands out from the rest of the junk in their inbox.

Don’t Overdo It

Be careful not to email your customers too much. What constitutes “too much” is a bit different for every group, but just put yourself in their shoes. How many times would you want to get a newsletter or eCourse? There are some email newsletters that I look forward to receiving every day. There are others that I get a couple of times per week, and if they came every day, I would probably start to ignore them after a while or just unsubscribe if it got too intrusive. You can also test and see how many readers open your messages at different intervals. Once you’re list starts to grow, you can even ask them what they prefer!

Don’t Underdo It

Don’t let your subscribers forget about you, either. You want to have your name and/or product in front of them regularly so that it stays in the front of their minds. You do not want them to see your email and wonder who you are and why they are receiving it. Again, each group and industry may be different in this respect, so some testing is probably in order to see what works the best, but I generally recommend contacting your list at least once per week.

Don’t Just Sell, Sell, Sell

If your readers know that all they are going to hear from you is a sales pitch, they will probably start to unsubscribe or just ignore you altogether. Make sure that much of what you send is useful, helpful information so that your customers or readers look forward to hearing what you have to say. That way when you do have something to offer, they’ll be much more receptive to buying…

Remember – they are aware that you are going to be selling something to them, even if it is just an invitation to come back and visit your site. They signed up, so they do not mind a new sales pitch. Just make sure that’s not all you’re doing.

Email Split Testing

Many email marketing software services allow you to “split test” your messages. In other words, you can send one version of an email to a part of your list, and another version to the others. Then you could track exactly how many opens and clicks each message receives. This is a great way to see what titles and content work the best in getting your audience to respond. You could also use this to test the duration between emails that we discussed in the sections above.

If you will follow these steps, you will likely see a good response to your email marketing campaign along with more traffic and sales!

Try Aweber for yourself for just $1 and you’ll find out why they’re the only email marketing software or service we trust with our own email list. (They also have a REALLY good knowledge base and newsletter to help you make your campaign successful once you sign up)

Click here to view the embedded video.

As of the writing of this article, Facebook has surpassed 500 million registered users and that number continues to climb steadily. With that much power and potential, it is a wonder that more blog owners haven’t caught on to this form of marketing. Yet they will and if you wait, you will be fighting an uphill climb.

Perhaps one of the best assets going for Facebook is that you can post updates, links, and directly insert videos from YouTube onto your page. This makes getting your message out as simple as possible. As a result, when you build your network of ‘friends,’ they see your updates in real time.

How to Build a Network of Facebook  ‘Friends’

Different social networking sites have different names for the people within your social network. With Facebook, these are called ‘friends.’ Of course, this changes when you set up a  page, in which case you don’t have friends, but rather ‘fans,’ which means that your potential customers will need to ‘like’ your page. How each of these work is similar, but Facebook does not allow direct selling through your personal pages.

So, if you are building your Facebook presence for your business, then you want to build the business page. It’s as simple as that. The key to success with any network is building it with as many people as possible.

While it can be difficult to get people to ‘like’ your Facebook page if they don’t know who you are, you can make the process a bit smoother when you provide quality content that they would find interesting. There’s a balance between being too forward and not posting enough.

Provide the Right Type and Amount of Content

No one wants spam; spam is that awful junk mail that you receive in the inbox of your email account. When it comes to Facebook, spam is basically when someone posts thirty different updates about the same topic. For example, if you wanted to share information about how to start a blog or web hosting, as it pertains to your blog, don’t publish the same post a dozen times a day.

Young businessmen and those desperate for sales or traffic to their sites tend to do this. What happens is that when you follow this practice, the people who ‘like’ your page will see all of those posts from you, cluttering up their main page, and won’t be able to sift through all the junk just to see what their friends have posted. When that happens, they tend to remove or block you.

If you get blocked, then nothing you post will be seen by that user and you’ve basically removed them from your network. Also, when a blog owner takes three months to post their next update, the people who are fans or like the business on Facebook will forget about it. There is a balance that needs to be established when posting updates for your website pages.

The content also needs to be relevant. If you sell shoes, you don’t need to be posting about the latest political scandal in Washington. In fact, if you value your blog, don’t engage in political discussions at all, unless of course your business is in politics.

While personal networks of true friends on Facebook may have no problem sharing the latest stomach bug that they’ve contracted, your personal stuff doesn’t belong on your business page. It’s important to remember that you are a professional when it comes to this environment. If you don’t act professional, it will show and you will lose interest from your potential customers.

Interaction Is The Key

When you want to use Facebook to get more traffic and sales, interaction is the key word. You need to interact with the people who have taken the time to ‘like’ your business on Facebook. Whenever one of your followers posts something about your business, whether it’s a question or a comment, engage them. Answer the question or comment on their concern.

Do not dismiss these people. Customers today have more choices than ever before when it comes to where they will spend their money. They want to feel some connection to the other blog owners with whom they interact.

This doesn’t mean that you will have to write long tomes in response to every inquiry or comment. A quick line to acknowledge what they’ve written will do the trick. Just that one line will mean a world of difference to your potential customers.

Of course, you may find people posting inappropriate comments on your page. These don’t need to be acknowledged and should be removed as quickly as possible. If you feel that others might have seen the post, you can make a quick comment about the rudeness of others and leave it at that.

Don’t Oversell

As mentioned, it can be tempting to oversell your products and your business. Resist the temptation. As a blog owner, you want as many people to know about your blog, and even if you have a hundred products, it doesn’t mean you should post a hundred comments about them every day.

Limit yourself to five posts per day, at the most. One to two is ideal and will give the people who are following you just enough information to keep your blog in the front of their mind. Sharing information is also key.

Analyze Comments

Look at the comments that you receive. Do they tend to be positive or negative? When you begin to focus on these comments, you’ll be able to fine-tune your message about your blog, making it even stronger.

Also be on the lookout for people trying to poach customers away from you. Users will add links to their business and your customers might not realize that they’re being redirected away from you. Maintain control of your page every day.

Be Selfless

When it comes to success through Facebook, selflessness goes a long way. If you have some friends or fans on Facebook who are trying to spread the word about a good cause, share it for them. This will pay dividends.

Using Facebook to get more traffic and sales is simple when you follow these basic tenets and use common sense.

Audio and video have become popular among a number of Internet marketers because they are easy and inexpensive to make. Yet article marketing is still the force that drives search engines. That’s because articles contain content that the search engines can actively find, log, and rank.

Whatever kind of products or services you are marketing, using articles is one of the most effective ways to generate interest and build one of the most important foundations of any relationship: trust. When a consumer trusts a business, they are much more inclined to purchase from them. A well-written article, full of valuable content, will build trust, and it will generate leads.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Step 1: Writing The Article

Writing an article requires a specific purpose. For those that will be published on the web, there are two kinds. The first is keyword-stuffed and the second is content driven articles.

Keyword-stuffed articles were once the driving force of all content on the web. These articles, more commonly referred to as ‘fluff,’ were created with the sole purpose of a achieving the highest ranking within search engines. Content wasn’t very important; it was all about ranking and driving traffic to a specific website or page.

Content rich articles are the driving force of Internet marketing today because search engines have changed the way they rank web pages. Also, as more people are using the Internet to find products and services, they are demanding more information. Content driven articles are, for the most part, well-written, have useful and action-able information within them, and answer a specific question.

When you set out to write an article to promote a product or service, focus on one or two main ideas that relate to the product or service. It could be about the uses for the item or how it can help people. Stay on topic and don’t inject too many opinions.

Step 2: Watch Your Article Length!

The length of the article is important. In fact, gauging how long an article should be is a balancing act. On one end of the spectrum, short articles or overly long ones will be penalized or ignored by the search engines, and you have to contend with the attention span of your readers.

If the article takes too long to get to the point, then the reader is likely to stop move on. Getting your article into the hands (or in front of) readers is a challenge and you don’t want to waste those opportunities because of length. The best articles have a word count between 400 and 1,000 words.

Step 3: Creating Links And Backlinks

Every effective article for marketing purposes will have back links that lead the reader to the main page or sales page. Inserting these links is a delicate balancing act if you use article submission sites such as Squidoo.com or EzineArticles.com, for instance. These submission sites do not permit direct selling and only allow links to informative pages, not to sales pages.

In most of these article submission sites, you will have a resource box that is used for giving information about you, the author. It is here where you can give a brief overview of you and your blog. If you’ve written a quality article, your readers will want to know more about you.

Step 4: Make Sure You Offer Useful, Actionable Advice

The best articles use strong opening lines. In the first sentence of any article, a question that the reader has must be addressed. This narrows the focus of the article and lets the reader know that they have found the right content to read.

Once you have set the tone of the article, the main body is where you offer instruction, advice, opinions, or other pertinent information. If the writing moves off on a tangent or becomes cluttered, then there is an opportunity for the reader to stop reading. Common sense information may be useful only if it is designed to set the stage for something greater, or as an example.

Many writers fail with their blog posts because they use them as a long sales pitch, making promises that are never delivered. The writer must conduct enough research in order to compose a targeted and specific article rich with useful, actionable information and advice. Anything short of that and it becomes nothing more than fluff.

Step 5: Publishing On The Web

Articles that are never found by the search engines are about as useful as one sitting on your home computer. Marketing is about getting content in front of the public. Article submission sites, such as those mentioned, are one of the most powerful tools that businesses can use.

Most of these article submission sites offer free services, but you have to wait longer for approval. Paid services offer faster turnaround times as well as some other benefits, such as increased exposure to the search engines, advanced keyword strategies, and assistance creating better content. If you are serious about marketing and prefer top quality results, paying for memberships to article submission sites will offer a greater return on your investment of time and other resources.

You can also publish on blogs and if you know how to start a blog, then you are already in great shape. The main focus here is to get as much exposure as you can to the search engines. That will, in turn, give you the most exposure to potential clients.

Step 6: Using The Right Keywords

Not only does the author need to concentrate on content, but he also needs to incorporate keywords or keyword phrases appropriately so that the major search engines can rank it appropriately. Keywords are the driving force of search engines and the way they rank websites. Keyword phrases refine any search and when you have content rich articles and a keyword density between 2-3%, then your article marketing campaign will be a powerful tool for your business.

When you’re ready to break into the world of article marketing, knowing the ins and outs is the first step. The entire process takes time to master, from web hosting to blogging, writing the articles, and fine-tuning them to target your ideal consumer. The more you market with articles, the more exposure you will receive.