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Effective Strategic Digital Marketing

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Spotting Marketing Crooks and Liars

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My clients are the best people on the planet! They are honest, trustworthy and loyal which are traits which make spotting marketing crooks and liars difficult.

See, people who are honest tend to view the world through that lens… the lens of honesty and integrity. Even the most “web savvy” are not immune to getting hooked by marketing crooks and liars. (Read the Itty Biz post 7 Home Business Lessons From StomperNet for an in depth explanation from a web savvy business owner who got “caught up” in the game.)

I OFTEN tell my clients that part of the “service” they pay for when they sign up with me is that they don’t have to get “burned” because I’m already heavily scarred from the 3rd degree burns I’ve suffered over the past 12+ years on the web.

After reading the post above, I got a message in my inbox the other day from a client who is toying with the idea of buying a “program” which will teach her the “secrets” to Google Adsense.  She sent me an email that goes like this:

My partner and I were just talking about the possibility of putting Google Adsense on our websites as guaranteed income. Just something we are thinking about. An example of this is on: [blog address that I’m not going to justify with a link]

This guy said that he has a guaranteed income of $15,000 thanks to Google Adsense.

Our question is-can this be done on the type of websites that we have? We are just wondering…

Thanks Kathy!!!

My reply:

Of COURSE you can add Google Adsense code to begin displaying ads on your blogs.

The way you make money with Google Adsense is when people come to your website and click on the ads displayed a.k.a… leave your site to go to another site.

The secret to making money with Google Adsense is traffic… lots and lots of traffic. It also helps to have really CRAPPY content because that way, visitors won’t find what they’re looking for on your site and will click on one of the ads displayed to find a site that does have the information they seek.

So I go to the site she sent me and there’s this guy who has his own typepad blog which is not “domain mapped”. The blog has an alexa ranking in the 1.2 million range. Adspy tells me he has 2 Google Adsense ads, both are running on this blog and he has them positioned in the navigation bar at the bottom. As anyone who makes money with Google Adsense will tell you… put your ads at the bottom of the page… that’s where the REAL money is made with Adsense. (Tongue is planted so firmly in cheek it hurts with that statement!)

However, because my dear, sweet, lovely clients would never lie to get clients, they assume that this guy is also a straight shooter as well.

Google Adsense can be a GREAT way to make money with very little effort from your blog, but it’s a numbers game pure and simple. From my experience with Google Adsense ads, I average about $1 for every 1000 visitors. Since the client who sent me that email gets about 2500 visitors to her blog every month, she can expect to make about $2.50 a month from displaying Google Adsense ads on her blog. Needless to say, that is far short of the promised $15,000 promised by this wannabe marketing guru!

In direct contrast to the idiot I refused to link to who promised guaranteed income of $15K, I’d like to introduce you to Courtney Tuttle. In his post, Smart Farmers Don’t Plant One Seed at a Time (and Neither Do Smart Internet Marketers)

As we’ve taught you more and more about sniping I’ve had a recurring fear for our readers. The fear is that you’ll do a little “case study” of your own, with one site, and after a few months you’ll get that number 1 spot on Google. It will be a big victory, because you’ll feel like you cracked the Google code, you’ve made it, arrived, etc…but then the site won’t make much. Maybe $3 to $5 per day.

Personally I think a $5 per day site is something to be excited about when it’s part of a portfolio of ten similar sites. But if you invest 6 months into getting that one site ranked, and then another month or two watching it get to $5 per day, you’re going to be mad.

Court’s the best… that other guy my client found is the worst.   Learning to tell the difference sometimes means getting burned but if you’ve got a blog, you can at least share your experience with others.  (Thanks Naomi!)

Google Adwords Phishing Email is TOP RATE

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Today in my in box there is a phishing email which is TRULY a work of art. It’s good and thank goodness the email box this landed in is not the one associated with my Adwords account or I might have been fooled. It’s THAT good! It appears to be a plain text email which reads:

Dear Advertiser,

We were unable to process your payment.
Your ads will be suspended soon unless we can process your payment.
To prevent your ads from being suspended, please update your payment information.

Please sign into your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login,
and update your payment information.

Thank you for advertising with Google AdWords. We look forward to
providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Best Regards,

The Google AdWords Team

————————————————————————————-
This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
——————————————————————————————

I’ve removed the link from the text above because while the link SAYS it’s going one place, it’s really going another. This is a common phishing trick.  Just because the text DISPLAYED says a link is going one place, doesn’t necessarily mean that the link is ACTUALLY going there.

Often, in lower quality phishing attempts, the actual URL is an IP address.  However, in this case the actual destination is VERY similar to the stated one.  Even if you LOOK at the coding, it’s not obvious that this is a phishing email. Everything looks legit even in the url except for this tiny little addition of a jumble of 9 characters embedded within the legitimate code.

At first glance, the displayed URL is ALMOST exactly the same as the URL where this link will take you.  In this case, close is the difference between giving your credit card information to a legitimate site and turning over your credit card information to a thief.

I didn’t follow the link, but I’m sure that it looks EXACTLY like the login page for your google account… because these crooks are smooth criminals!

As a general rule, don’t EVER click on a link inside an email… EVER!  If paypal, google or anyone else who has access to your money and/or passwords wants to get in touch with you… go to their website DIRECTLY!

Don’t EVER follow a link embedded in an email.

Go to http://www. [insert domain name here] . com and sign in there.

If the URL is long, then copy the words from your email and paste the DISPLAYED URL into your browser’s address bar.  In this case, doing that it takes you to the REAL Google site instead of the phishing site.

Web Promotion Advice

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Sometimes, when you’re trying to promote your website (be it a blog or a traditional website) it can feel like you’re in a tiny row boat being tossed about on a roaring sea. It’s easy to feel lost in the sea that is the internet. Website promotion via the web is a “natural” but to really stir things up, create a website promotion strategy that includes OFF LINE promotion tactics.

Website Promotion Advice

Web Promotion Tool #1: Off line or hard copy newsletters

Darren Rowse of Problogger.net recommends allowing offline publications to print your content. In Darren’s case, he gave permission for a newsletter to translate and reprint an article he had written. As a result, he got 50 new sign ups for his photography website.

Web Promotion Tool #2: The Postal Service

ScribeFire suggests using snail mail as a website promotion tactic in the post Offline Blog Promotion Techniques:

Go Postal – this morning I got to my PO Box to find that inside it was a rather large parcel. Inside was two things – a book and a T-shirt. I didn’t know the name of the person who sent them to me but on the accompanying business card and note was the name and URL of a blog which I will check out later today.

A popular blog gets hundreds, sometimes thousands, of emails each day. Most of the time it’s people seeking the opportunity to be showcased on the popular blog. Its a great website promotion strategy to partner with a popular blog to promote your own website, however you need a way to stand out from the crowd. Taking the time to send a card via snail mail can be the difference between making contact and getting marked as spam. Including a T-shirt, a book or another promotional piece in the mailing is even better!

Web Promotion Tool #3: Traditional Media

Way back in the late 1990’s, if you listened to AM radio, you would have heard ads for the largest bookstore in the universe. These wacky radio ads featured such silliness as trying to rent warehouse space on Mars because no where on earth was big enough to house all the books offered for sale by this emerging online bookseller. You’ll probably recognize the name of the online merchant that ran those ads: Amazon.com.

Traditional media has been slammed of late because it’s a “spray and pray” approach to marketing. In most cases you’re reaching tens of thousands of people who are NOT prospective customers. However, if you can create a compelling and captivating message, you’ll find that traditional media can be even very effective at driving traffic to your website.

When people find your site via a radio, television, newspaper or magazine ad, this is known as a DIRECT REQUEST. According to the WWW Observer, this is what is known as Low Bounce Rate Traffic and is exactly the type of traffic you should be striving to create.

Web Promotion Tool #4: Social Networking Media

BlogGrrl in her post A Very Long List of Ways to Get Blog Traffic lists 13 different social networking sites plus another 36 tips on ways you can introduce your website to new people.

Web Promotion Tool #5: Commenting on Blogs

This one usually makes my skin crawl when I read someone who advises people that they don’t need a blog, they can just comment on other people’s blogs and get all the benefits of blogging without the time and expense of maintaining your own blog.

Commenting on blogs is NOT a substitute for having your own blog, but it can be a great way to promote your website.  The key here is to find the right blogs to comment on.  Rather than go over that, University Kid has a post on the subject Make Money Online By Blog Commenting.

When making a comment, make sure you give it the care and consideration you would take if that information were appearing on your website.  A blog comment can act like a banner ad for your website so watch what you post!

These 5 Web Promotion Tools are just a few website promotion tactics.  What ones have you used to promote your website?

Domain Names, Keywords and Blogging

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Recently, I took a look at the log files for a blogging client. To be honest, I expected the worst. She had only posted 15 blog posts to her blog over the past three months. Not only was she not posting regularly, but none of the posts were tagged nor were they created with her ideal keywords in mind. I braced for the worst.

Imagine my surprise when things weren’t dismal on the traffic front at all. When she then reported how many newsletter subscribers, I was floored. She was getting a 25% sign up rate for her newsletter via her blog with VERY little blogging effort.

When I began looking at the keywords that people were using to find her blog, well it was then that I saw the key to her success. Her domain name and blog name both contained a vital keyword, essential to her business model.

The right domain name, a domain name that contains a keyword which people are using to find the very solutions this client is offering… is making up for a HUGE blogging misstep on her part (not posting regularly to your blog is a HUGE blog mistake many beginning bloggers make).

Which brings us to two essential tools you need to have in your arsenal before you launch your blog.

Blog Keywords:

First, you need a better than the average bear way to find the keywords that are really worth the time and effort of optimizing your blog. Wordze is well worth the investment on this front.

For example, there’s a 4-word keyword phrase which is well worth optimizing for today. (Things change from day to day when it comes to keywords, which is yet another reason to make the investment in a paid tool rather than wait for the trickle down to occur into the free tools.)

On the free keyword front, the Google Keyword tool shows you that the keywords on the singular and the plural of this keyword combo both have a competition level equal to the searches performed. (Meanwhile the incredibly similar 3 word keyword phrase has an average search volume with very high advertiser competition.)

What the Google tool doesn’t show is that there is a lack of competition on the singular version of the 4-word keyword phrase. Wordze does. Oh, did I mention the .net extension of this exact keyword phrase was available for registration? This keyword has had a 94% growth over the past 30 days.

In other words, Wordze is WELL worth the money… especially if you’re getting ready to launch a blog.

Once you have your keywords, it’s time to pick up a domain name.

Blog Domain Names

My blog client got lucky. She was insanely lucky in the fact that she chose a keyword combination that people were already using to find her services. She also picked a keyword competition without a lot of competition.

I wish I had that kind of luck, but I don’t. I have to use Wordze and then plug in those results into the Domain Twist domain name finder tool.

This tool allows you to plug in two essential keywords and find interesting (and available) domain name combinations.

The right domain name, one that contains essential keywords, can act like rocket fuel for launching your blog.  I can only imagine how much further she could be if she had been creating her titles with those essential keywords in mind.

Blogs as a Means of Building Trust through Communication

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BLogs are a great communication tool which is why they’re GREAT marketing tools for the business involved in making intangible sales.  Trust is a huge issue when you’re selling “nothing but air”… which is all you’re selling when you’re selling your knowledge and services.

However, in order to establish a rapport with your target audience, you must first demonstrate that you are indeed qualified to speak on the subject.  Which brings to mind a joke that recently appeared on Comedy Central.com:

A guy was seated next to a 13-year-old girl on an airplane. Being bored, he turned to the girl and said, “Let’s talk. I’ve heard that flights go quicker if you strike up a conversation with your fellow passenger.”

The girl, who was reading a book, closed it slowly and said to the guy, “What would you like to talk about?”

Oh, I don’t know,” said the guy. “How about nuclear power?”

“OK,” she said. “That could be an interesting topic. But let me ask you a question first. A horse, a cow and a deer all eat the same stuff… grass. Yet a deer excretes little pellets, while a cow turns out a flat patty, and a horse produces clumps of dried grass. Why do you suppose that is?”

The guy thought about it and said, “Hmmm, I have no idea.”

To which the girl replied, “Do you really feel qualified to discuss nuclear power when you don’t know shit?”

Your blog readers are asking the same question…. what basics do you need to demonstrate your understanding of before you engage in the real conversation with prospective clients or customers?

One thing about blogging… it’s hard to hide what you do and don’t know over the course of hundreds of blog posts.    Blogging is great when you’re open to engaging in the Art of Transparency.  However, if you don’t know shit… then blogging can be a real pain.