InternetMarketingClub.org Presents 10 Golden Rules for Blogging

Join Marc Purtell and Michael Gustman from Ten Golden Rules to learn the "Ten Golden Rules for Blogging."

This presentation will explain the significant business opportunities for blogging and how to build your personal brand with a blog.

- The benefits of blogging
- How to blog
- Optimizing for Google and the search engines
- How to generate traffic to your blog
- What to blog about

This free webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 10, 2010 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register and for more information please visit: 10 Golden Rules for Blogging

Choosing Keywords for SEO

To run a successful search engine optimization campaign, an important step is choosing keywords for SEO to focus on. Simply trying to rank for a list of keywords you think are important is not always the best for your bottom line. You should be less focused on generating lots of traffic and more focused on generating revenue.

To develop your list of keywords to focus your efforts on, you want to consider a few things: how frequently are they searched, how competitive they are, and how well they convert for your business. Keyword research tools, such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and Google Suggest are useful in determining how frequently keyword phrases are searched and how competitive they are. While this information is valuable in deciding which keywords present the greatest opportunities for optimization (high search frequency, low competition), you also want to determine which keywords are likely to generate a lead or a sale.

If you run a pay per click campaign, you have a head start in identifying your best converting keywords (as long as you are tracking conversions). Go through your campaigns and see which phrases have the highest conversion rate. If they convert well from pay per click, there is a good chance that they will convert well in organic search. Choosing Keywords for SEO will improve your overall performance and search engine results.

Internet Marketing Tips from Team OceanSwell - Part VI

When you are using your autoresponder for a letter series and/or broadcast messages, one of the basic things that we all need to understand is how to inform, teach and motivate in an honest and professional manner. As they say, "PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING". If you don't believe what you're saying, people can sense it. There are a lot of liars in this business and the fastest way to ruin your subscriber list is to become one yourself. Never try to sell something to your readers that YOU don't believe in. That's the worst thing you could do.

So don't publish misleading ads in order to entice opt-in subscribers and don't make promises (in your ads or letters) that you can't keep. Speaking of ads, TrafficWave has many good templates and the newer video and Matrix-Buster pages are very good. I use Instant Splash Page Maker (not free), Instant Squeeze Page Generator (free) and there's a newer one out there that's also free - Instant Splash.

You're not going to get many subscribers unless you have good-looking, eye-catching ads that entice potential subscribers with a good REASON to opt-in. With the Team OceanSwell Ads, the reason for opting in is to learn about a service (i.e. the Team Rotator) that will help build a real affiliate income with TrafficWave's pay plan. That's information that a lot of people want! So, in order to build your list, your ads must offer something that people WANT - especially the kind of people that you are marketing to. Give the people what they want, be honest and informative and you will have a growing and loyal subscriber base.

There are essentially two reasons for having a large mailing list on your autoresponder:

1) To sell 'em stuff.

2) In the case of a program like Team OceanSwell, to inform, update, coach, etc.

In either situation, the TrafficWave autoresponder is a MUST. So if you haven't started yet, please begin building your list today. List-building (and all that goes with it) is really the central pillar of creating a long-term, satisfying online income. It's THAT important...

Facebook Page Marketing 101

I was recently developing a Facebook strategy for one of my new clients and figured it would be a great topic for this week’s post. Anybody can create a business or fan page for Facebook. What you do with the page is an entirely different story.

Where do you begin? You need to start off by asking three questions. What are your goals for the Facebook page? What is your strategy for achieving your goals? What tactics are you going to implement?

I’m going to use a fictional company (Acme Rockets) as my example. Acme Rockets wants to use its Facebook page to drive new people to www.acmerockets.com to purchase their rockets. They also want to use their page as a way to increase brand awareness.

The first things we need to look at are the goals.

• To triple their fan base in 12 months.
• To increase total new fans a month by 10% per month over the next 4 months.
• To increase interactions a month by 20% per month for 4 consecutive months.
• To increase likes per month by 20% per month for 4 consecutive months.

Now that we have goals set the next thing we need to do is develop a winning strategy.

• Increasing your interaction with fans. The interactions are going to show on your fan’s feeds. This is free exposure to people who do not know you. The more interactions you have on your page the more real-estate you own on your fan’s pages. I know this sounds simple but figuring out the types of interactions that will help you reach your goals is not so simple.

The goals are set and so is the strategy. The final step is the tactics we’re going to use.

• Make two to three posts a day.
• Link to articles relating to rockets.
• Interact with fans that make posts on your wall.
• Post pictures of rockets on your wall.
• Create a Coolest Rocket Photo contest. For example, to enter the contest you have to be a fan. The photo has to be tagged by you. The more comments your friends make the better chance you have at winning the contest.
• Create a custom FBML page promoting “becoming a fan”.
• Create a custom FBML page selling your latest rockets. Jay Berkowitz recently coined this type of selling as s-commerce and more and more companies are doing this through Facebook.

Facebook Insights is going to be your gift from God when it comes to figuring out what tactics work and do not work. It’s a great tool to measure user exposure, actions, and behavior relating to your Social Ads and Facebook Page. By understanding activity and performance, fans and ad respondents, and trends and comparisons, you are better equipped to improve your business on Facebook and elsewhere. For example, your fans might like certain types of photos better than others. We want to know which photos the fans liked and commented on the most - Insights will show you this. The same principles can be applied to articles as well.

So remember, you aren’t guaranteed results just because you created a Facebook page. You have to map out an effective plan that includes goals, strategy, and tactics. And remember to use Facebook Insights; the feedback it provides will help you develop better tactics to reach your Facebook page’s goals.

Part 2: Suffering From Blogger’s Block?

I thought it would be helpful to provide a post about some next steps for your blog writing journey. Before I do that though, check out Part 1 of this post; you will find this post is a beneficial supplement.

So you now have some blog ideas and a plan in place – but then you ask yourself – in what format do I put down all of my thoughts? Here are a couple of the best ways to format/structure your posts:

Lists. Creating your blog posts around a “list” format makes the information that much more digestible for the reader. You want to make sure you don’t lose your reader a few sentences into your post. Lists make it less overwhelming for the many on-the-go readers.

Segmented Paragraphs. Not every post you write is going to be short and sweet or able to be chopped up in a list format. A great way to write a longer post but still keep a reader’s attention is by putting each of the points you are illustrating under “headings”. Take a look at how this post has two separate thoughts broken up by preceding bold headings. The concept of this is that readers’ eyes will scan “headings” and skip to the section they are most interested in without abandoning your post altogether.

Think about some of your favorite posts and how they were formatted. What did you enjoy most about them? What about them enticed you to keep reading until the very end?

PPC Tip - Remove the Spaces

To any pay per click advertising veteran, it is well-known that bidding on misspellings of keywords is a good way to cut down on the cost per click of your campaigns. In competitive industries, however, your competitors are also aware and even commonly misspelled keywords can become very expensive to bid on.

A misspelling that is often overlooked, but common in virtually any industry is leaving out a space between words in a phrase.

People are busy. They type fast. Look at a document you recently wrote quickly. It's very likely that there is a space missing somewhere. The same holds true for your market.

Let's say for example you are in online marketing. Bidding on the phrase "online marketing" will cost you about $5.72/click while bidding on "onlinemarketing" will only cost about $2.26/click.

If you decide to bid on misspellings like these, you should set up an ad group specifically for that and not use keyword insertion in your ads. Using keyword insertion when bidding on misspellings will cause your ad copy to contain misspellings and look unprofessional.

InternetMarketingClub.org Presents 10 Golden Rules of Web Video Part 2

Jay Berkowitz, CEO of www.TenGoldenRules.com and Author of The Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing and Margie Schneider, Ten Golden Rules Vice-President will share Part 2 of "Ten Golden Rules of Web Video."

Part 2 of this presentation will cover:

- Optimizing for YouTube
- Best practices for conversion
- Testing and Measurement

This free webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register and for more information please visit: 10 Golden Rules of Web Video Part 2