Internet Marketing Blog

I’ve learned much of my SEO and internet marketing knowledge through free information sources. I’ve found some great forums that give great online marketing information. Also, there are helpful members at these forums.

Blogs are also a great place to learn the trade of SEO. I love reading about SEO. SEO and internet marketing blogs keep me up to date with the latest SEO tips and news.

If you’re interested in the forums and blogs I like to visit, read my article at Ezine Articles. Thanks!

If you’re a webmaster, you’ve probably heard of Google’s universal search. Google issued a press release on May 16 telling the world they were going to add videos, images, news, maps, and books in their search engine results pages (SERPs). Thus, you will see many types of media on the SERPs instead of just text-based websites.

How can webmasters take advantage of these developments? How should our search marketing and optimization efforts change? Google gets about 60-70 percent of the search engine traffic, so it’s always a good idea to rank high on Google searches.

I think video will huge in the new search environment. It’s time to start using screencast software like Camtasia and Cam Studio. You may want to dust off your webcam. If you really want to make an impact, you can start shooting quality videos with a good video camera.

Also, not only will video starting ranking higher in the SERPs, traffic from web videos has been shown to convert well. If you’re selling affiliate products or have your own product, you can increase your conversion rate by using video. Even opt-ins and pay per lead offers will convert better with video.

Another search engine optimization (SEO) and traffic tactic that will become more effective is the press release. With news items moving up the SERPs, you’ll want to submit press releases that relate to your website and your industry.

Where should you submit your press release? PRWeb.com is one of the best online press release sites. They used to be free, but now they charge $80 for a press release without anchor text and $200 with anchor text. Also, there are free press release sites like PR-inside.com.

Another area to look into is images and pictures. In some niches and industries, the consumers are looking for images. For example, as I did my keyword research for my wedding site, I found that many keyword phrases included the word “pictures.” People are typing in phrases like “wedding flower pictures” and “wedding dress pictures.”

Also, the first results these image related searches are pictures. You will get a lot of traffic if you land one of your images on the front page of these searches. So, if you’re in a image-oriented niche, add more pictures to your website and see if that drives more traffic. And don’t forget to add keyword-rich alt tags to your images. This will help your images rank.

When it comes to monetizing strategies or techniques for websites, many people will just think about using adsense and affiliates. Adsense is popular because it easy to add to websites. Affiliates also easy to implement. And if you market well, you can make much more money with affiliates than adsense.

It’s always good though to think of other ways to make money with your website. You know the old saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Who knows, adsense could start charging a huge fee to join or your affiliate products could become unpopular. Here’s an easy way to monetize your website that many people don’t think about: create a paid web directory.

When people think of web directories, they might think about a stand alone site like dmoz.org. However, what stopping you from putting a directory subpage on your site?

One of the most famous web directories is actually on a subdomain. Can you think of it? You’ve probably visited it more than once.

The directory is dir.yahoo.com (Yahoo’s web directory).

Yahoo’s web directory charges $299 per year to have websites listed. In fact, many webmasters will get their first inbound link from this directory because it’s popular and high quality. A Yahoo web directory link is one of the best paid links to have. It helps you get better search engine rankings.

Anyways, back to your website. Obviously, your website is not as popular as Yahoo, but if you have a quality site with good content and some consistent traffic, you might be able to charge $10 or more a month.

Maintain Your Directory

To make it easier for you to maintain your web directory, use directory scripts (directory management software). Directory scripts keep your directory organized with categories. Also, it helps your potential customers by having a form where they can submit their websites. The form makes it easy for your customers to submit their sites. They don’t have to open their email account to contact you. Once a customer has submitted their site, you can have the scripts email you the customer’s information.

What about customer payments? That’s also automated by the directory scripts. The scripts make it easy for your customers to give you money. Simply add a paypal button on the submission form.

I would use paypal because it’s a well-known online payment service. Also, paypal allows non-paypal customers the ability to pay with a credit card and paypal is easy to integrate with most directory scripts. Just don’t forget other payment methods like check and money order for people who don’t like to pay with credit card.

Here’s a forum thread about free web directory scripts (talk.iwebtool.com/thread9648.html). This thread can help you get started on your search for a great directory script for your site.

Promote Your Directory

Don’t forget to promote your directory. Blog about it. Write a press release about it. Go on forums and post about it. Get multiple links pointing to it. Buy adwords clicks. Basically, you can use the same promotional methods you use for your website.

Also, put your directory in a place where internet users can find it. If you do this, you will attract more customers. Don’t hide it in a page that no one will visit. Put a link to your directory from your home page, preferably above the fold. More people will join your directory because they’ll get more exposure since it’s one click away from your front page.

Pricing Your Directory

There’s two main ways to price your directory. You can charge a one-time lifetime fee. If you have a small, low-to-medium traffic site, this may help you get your first couple of sales. Webmasters love paying one time for lifetime links. As you may remember, Yahoo’s directory charges $299 a year. And one of the well-known text link brokers (text-link-ads.com) also charges monthly fees. By charging a one-time fee, you’ll be giving your potential customers an attractive bargain.

The other option in pricing is charging monthly. If you have a high quality, popular site, this pricing option can turn your website into a passive income generator. For example, just having 20 sites in your directory for $20 a month is a recurring $400 a month. Many website owners would love to have $400 a month from their website. And the $400 doesn’t include the adsense and affiliate revenues. How’s that for motivation to make your website better?

As your get more traffic and higher page rank, you can always raise the price. However, a good business practice is not to raise the price for those sites that were submitted under the lower price. For example, let’s say you have a one-time fee of $40. Ten sites pay the $40 to join your directory. After six months, you increase your traffic and page rank. Thus, you’re able to raise the fee to $100. I would not charge the first ten sites the $60 to meet the current price. This business practice will make your customers happy. In fact, I would put a written guarantee on your directory that you will not charge old customers extra if you do raise the price.

Raising The Quality Of Your Directory

Only accept quality sites in your directory. This makes your directory more useful, both for your website visitors and your customers. If someone submits a site that doesn’t have a lot of pages or has low quality content, don’t be afraid to reject it. You don’t want to make your directory look like any site can join. A couple bad sites is all it takes to bring down the credibility of your directory. Only accept quality sites. You’ll miss some sales in the short-term but you’ll reap the long-term benefits of building a high quality directory. By only accepting good sites, you’ll attract more good sites to join which will further raise the quality of your directory.

Finally, every approved site should be relevant to your industry or niche. If you have a blog about dogs, don’t accept sites about celebrity gossip. If your visitors come to your site looking for tech deals, don’t approve wedding sites!

Conclusion

If you’re looking to further monetize your site, give web directories a try. You may be surprised with their profit potential.

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This post was inspired by this blog post: How To Squeeze More Income Out Of Your Blog

With search engines giving more link authority to one way links, it’s important to have link building strategies that target those links. However, one way links are more difficult to acquire than reciprocal links.

With reciprocal links, you can offer a link and get a link back. What will you offer webmasters to acquire a one way link? Acquiring a one way link requires more creativity and effort.

Here’s two link building strategies that make it easier for you to get those important one way links.

Three way link exchange

This link building strategy takes much effort, but the payoff is great. Basically, start another site that’s related to the site where you want a one way link. This new site must be a quality site for the three way link exchange to work.

What should the new site be about? You can start a news site in your niche or industry. You can create a blog. You can start a site that’s a little more general in subject matter than the first site - or conversely, more specific in topic. For example, if your first site is about link building, your new site could be about SEO (a broader topic) or paid links (a narrower topic).

Once you’ve established your new site, simply email other webmasters offering them a link from your new site in exchange for a link to your first site. If your new site is a high quality site, you could obtain very strong backlinks to your first site from other high quality sites.

Links from related sites that are not direct competitors

Surprisingly, this is one of the least used link building strategies even though it is effective. There are sites in your industry or niche that do not compete directly with you. Write something useful for those sites. Then, contact the webmasters of those sites and point them to your content. If you’re content is high quality, you’ll probably get a couple one way links.

If the site doesn’t give you a one way link, you can offer to write an article for their site in exchange for a one way link.

Here’s two examples of this link building strategy.

Let’s say you have a entrepreneur blog. You can write about flipping houses as a way to make money. Then, you can notify mortgage or real estate sites about your article.

In the second example, imagine you have a basketball blog. You can write an article that ranks the top ten basketball teams of all time. Then, you can ask general sports sites to link to it.

One question you may be asking: “Where can I find these sites?” Search on Google with your industry’s search terms. Scan the first couple of search results pages. You should find some sites there that don’t directly compete with you.

If you want your website to rank well in the years to come, avoid these common link building mistakes.

Neglecting deep links

Deep links are links that point to your site but not your home page. In other words, these links point to your internal webpages.

What are the advantages of deep linking? First, you’ll have more search volume because more of your pages will rank. Second, you’ll increase the link authority and popularity of your whole site. Third, search bots will spider your site more efficiently. Fourth, whenever you create a new page, it will be indexed more quickly.

Focusing too much on reciprocal links

Search engines are giving more weight to one-way links because they look more natural. Instead of concentrating on link exchanges, use your time and energy to acquire one-way links.

Getting links from generic sites instead of relevant sites

Generic sites include article directories, site directories, and word cloud sites. There are a select few directories that have gained the search engines’ trust like ezinearticles.com and dmoz.com. However, most article directories and site directories are not worth your time and effort.

Word cloud sites are especially risky. Search engines can easily devalue those links because word cloud sites are manipulative, spammy, and easy to detect. You might rank well with word cloud sites in the short-term, but search engines’ algorithms are getting better. Don’t count on word cloud sites as a long-term link building strategy.

Get links from relevant sites. What’s a relevant site? It’s a site that relates to your site. If you have a site about a hit TV show, you should be getting links from entertainment sites instead of sports sites. Getting links from relevant sites helps the search engines figure out what your site is all about. This leads to higher ranking on keywords related to your niche.

Going after links from non-authority sites instead of authority sites

Too many webmasters are going after links from sites with low traffic, low page rank, and low quality. Remember one link from a popular, high-quality site is better than 100 links from mediocre sites.

Using irrelevant anchor text

I see this all the time. Using relevant anchor text is one of the most important SEO strategies yet many people forget to do it.

In the course of link building, you’ll have a chance to give the anchor text. You might pay for a link, do a link exchange, or write the resource box to an article submitted to a directory. In these instances, always use relevant keywords for your anchor text.

For example, I own the site, heroesinfo.com. If I do a link exchange, my link partner might ask me for the anchor text, site description, and site url.

The following anchor text would not be optimal, because the search term “heroes info” has a low search volume.

Heroes Info
Heroes Info has the latest Heroes news, spoilers, pictures, and video.
http://heroesinfo.com

Instead, I would give him the following information, because “NBC heroes” and “heroes news” have higher search volume than “heroes info.”

NBC Heroes News
Heroes Info has the latest Heroes news, spoilers, pictures, and video.
http://heroesinfo.com

Here’s another example. I write an article for ezinearticles.com. What should I put in my resource box?

I could try this…

Visit my heroes news site at http://heroesinfo.com.

… or I can be resourceful and write this instead.

Visit my NBC Heroes news site (heroesinfo.com).

Building site wide links instead of content-based links

Site wide links like blogrolls on the sidebar or footer are losing their link authority. Search engines are putting more weight on content-based links, because they look more natural.

Refusing to linkbait regularly

A lot of people may disagree with me on this. I believe linkbaiting gives you the best ROI (return of investment) for your link building efforts. One successful linkbait can give you hundreds of links, many of them being high quality.

Here’s a couple linkbaiting tips to help you get started:

* Be creative. Do something different.

* Fill in a gap. Find an undeveloped area in your niche and write about it.

* Do some in-depth research. Publish something longer than your normal 250-400 word blog post.

* Make a list. The longer, the better - everyone loves getting 101 tips.

* Write something people can debate about. For example, if you have a basketball site, rank the top ten players and then ask your readers to agree or disagree.

Killer Niche Marketing left me with mixed feelings. I found some great tips on topics like choosing a domain name and on-page seo. However, other parts of the report were either inaccurate or not very useful.

Let’s start with the positives.

Killer Niche Marketing’s main point is avoiding over optimizing your web page. Pawel, the author, states that Google knows a lot about your website. A lot more than many of us think. And Google usually penalizes websites that overseo. You’ve got to go under Google’s radar to rank well.

His advice on finding a niche is very good. He shows that it’s not enough to find a niche with low page results. He gives you two great keyword tips to further evaluate a niche.

His advice on choosing a domain name might surprise you. It sure surprised me. However, he gives strong evidence from the SERPs (search engine results pages) that supports his advice.

His on-page seo tips are the best part of the report. I’m glad he spent a good chunk of the report being specific with his on-page seo recommendations. He talks about html header and title tags, keywords in the meta tags, keyword density, and linking infrastructure. His tip on linking infrastructure is excellent. Also, he points to four wordpress plugins that make your wordpress blog more search engine friendly. Good stuff.

He has some good backlink strategies. He tells us how to make our backlinks look more natural to Google. I learned a lot from his reciprocal linking tactics. My favorite backlink tip is how to obtain one-way links from highly relevant pages using three-way link exchanges.

Ok, on to the negatives.

His content building section seems very basic.

His linkbait section is lacking. He defines linkbait as useful tools or controversial content. However, many linkbaits are well-written, relevant content like how-to articles, resource lists, or insightful commentary. He never talked about those kinds of linkbait.

His tips on publishing duplicate content contained one of his web pages that supposedly ranks on the first page of the SERPs. However, when I tried the search, the web page was not on the first page.

Do I regret buying Killer Niche Marketing? No, because Pawel has some tremendous tips (especially about on-page seo) that are easily worth seven bucks. Plus, it’s hard to argue against someone who ranks on the first page for the keywords “affiliate marketing.” That’s a big accomplishment. However, just watch out for the mediocre parts of the report.

Learn more about Killer Niche Marketing

Yesterday I didn’t meet my goal of writing 2000 words. I had writer’s block. I was getting distracted.

I sensed that my problem was not having a writing plan. So, I wondered, what would it look like to plan out my content creation. Here’s the quick tip I thought of.

I got a piece of paper, brainstormed different kinds of articles and blog posts, and wrote them down.

Here’s my preliminary list.

* Rewrite PLR article
* Review
* Recommendation
* Link out (Link blurb)
* Linkbait (Basically, something super creative)
* “Life cache” (tie a niche topic with a life event)
* Rewrite forum post
* Quick research post (pick a topic, find three articles/blog posts, combine them)
* Big research post (just like quick research post, but more research)
* List

Now, how does this help me write more words?

Well, before I write, I scan this list to give me a framework for my writing. Based on my recent blog reading and life experience, I choose the most relevant format and go for it.

Because of this list, I don’t have to rack my brains every time I post an entry. For me, this list of writing formats helps me focus on the niches, topics, and ideas. Instead of focusing out how to say something, I focus on actually saying something.

Tell me what you think. How do you add unique content to your websites? What other writing formats have I missed?

I believe the foundation of a good internet marketing is lots of good useful and unique content. Sure, you can try to make money through “quick” techniques like black hat seo or PPC arbitrage.

But for a business that will grow and succeed for the long term, you need to find a way to produce a lot of content.

SET A DAILY CONTENT GOAL

One of things I recently did was set word count goals.

I recently put a document on my desktop called “Daily Word Count (2000 words daily)”.

Every day I’ll keep track of all the words I write on that document. My goal is to write 2000 words daily. This should motivate me write more consistently.

Also, I should be more efficient and focused with content creation since I have a goal to focus on.

Being more focused is great because being an internet marketer can be get distracting. At least for me, it’s easy to get away from producing content to randomly surfing the net (digg, blogs, etc.).

How do you consistently produce content?

If you’re anything like me, you spend way to much time designing your wordpress blogs. The problem is I’m not that good of a designer and I don’t have money to spend for one.

One of the most important things to design is the adsense areas. Where will you put the adsense blocks?

Thankfully, I ran across these 16 Adsense Optimized Wordpress Themes on doshdosh.com.

How can these themes help you build your adsense empire?

Maki from doshdosh.com explains.

A key element that is central to all Adsense Ready themes is their focus on integrating contextual ads around content. As you will notice, the ads and link units are carefully placed above, beside and below each individual post to maximize exposure and their click through potential.

Also, Maki talks about how using these wordpress themes can save you a lot of time especially if you have a lot of niche websites.

I plan on using them on web sites that I plan to sell. I’m gonna make a bunch of mini-sites quickly and then try to sell them. If I can’t sell them right away, at least they’ll be optimized to make adsense income.

Just because you’re an internet marketer doesn’t mean you have to have no personality. While many internet marketers are too sensational and dramatic, other internet marketers are just too boring. They have no passion in their marketing. Just browse through the “internet marketing” category of ezinearticles.com. Boring.

What can you do avoid being a boring internet marketer?

Write in a conversational tone.

You’re writing to people who want to make money on the internet. The internet is pretty casual. Google, Youtube, Myspace, and web 2.0. These all reek with informality.

You’re writing for people that want to work in their pajamas. So, ditch the big words and write like you speak.

Be different.

Many people will say that internet marketing is a very saturated field. A lot of marketers are trying to sell the same stuff. There’s over 33 million sites on Google for the keyword “internet marketing.”

You need a way to distinguish yourself from the crowd. With tons of competition, you need to make sure your building a unique brand.

So, ask yourself.

What am I doing different from every other internet marketer?
What makes my business unique?

I was reminded of the power of unique branding when I surfed onto this site, doshdosh.com. The bloggers writing was good but what earned him a spot on my RSS reader was how he branded himself.

He’s got anime on his internet marketing web site! I don’t even watch anime, but I sense that this guy would keep things fun.

Making money online is serious business, but don’t forget to have fun. Doshdosh.com reminds me that I decided to become an internet marketer because it was enjoyable. It’s those little quirks like anime pictures that remind me about the joys of being an online entrepreneur.

So, what will you do to brand yourself?