feed hat blog

There’s an old saying … You’ll never make the shot you don’t take. It’s in that spirit I’m announcing that, starting today, I’ll be experimenting with some new advertising here in the form of sponsored posts. I’m doing things with a different approach, so hopefully you’ll give me the opportunity to explain the program in more detail.

Disclosure: First off, I will disclose all sponsored posts at the top and bottom of the posts. I’m not trying to sneak anything past you.

Paid Links: I’m not tempting the Google gods so all links will be nofollowed and pass through an advertising redirect that is blocked for search spiders. Overkill, sure, but that’s the playground we’re all in.

Vetting: I’m going to look into previewing the destination site/service/product beforehand. If something doesn’t look right and I can’t resolve it with the advertiser, you’ll never see it here.

Low Volume: I’m limiting the number of sponsored posts to a maximum of two per month.

If you’re an advertiser, this presents some interesting opportunities for you:

Custom Content: I’d like to give you a really one-of-a-kind, unique opportunity to communicate with the people you want to reach as your potential customers. We can use a number of interesting avenues like interviews, in depth product reviews, videos, tutorials, and so on. I’d like to offer the ability to do something you can’t do anywhere else. If you want to run your own copy, that’s an option too.

Visibility: In addition to getting your content in front of all of the RSS subscribers (15K at the time of this post), your ad will be placed in the top left corner of this website for the duration of your campaign. See the diagram below for an example. You will have that spot exclusively during the time your ad runs. More detailed traffic stats available upon request.

Open Scheduling: You can schedule your ad to run whenever you want (provided that someone else hasn’t reserved that time period). You can choose a two week run time or four week run time.

Long Term Content: It’s my intention to keep your post available in the archives of this blog for as long as it’s on the web. If for some reason I am legally or morally compelled to remove your ad, or some irreversible technical issue comes up, it will be dealt with on a case by case basis, but it’s my intention to keep your post up. Additionally, if there aren’t any new scheduled ads, I’ll sometimes mix old ads in rotation.

Hopefully I’ve hit the high points, but I’ll add info here as questions come up. Want to find out how you can get involved in this opportunity? Stop by the contact form. Think this is the worst idea ever? Go ahead over to the contact form and let me know.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Sponsored Posts Experiment

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Sponsored Posts Experiment

I originally wrote the following article a couple of years ago for publication at Website Magazine. It presents one way of thinking about the evolution of search and search engines, and I thought it might be a good idea to share it here as well. I’ve added a few very minor updates to the [...]

Original post:
What Personalization Means to Search

Does the PicApp name sound familiar? It should! It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote my first review on the service for free licensed photographs.

In case you didn’t catch it the first time around, PicApp is a website where you can search for all sorts of premium licensed photos. The kicker is that you can freely embed any of these pictures, which come from sources like Getty Images and Jupiter Images, on your website or blog without any concern for copyright infringement. It’s all free for you to use.

Well, the team at PicApp decided to order a second review for their service, this time highlighting a slightly different set of features. You can think of the first review as an introduction and this second one as a more specific chapter in a book.

The SEO Benefits of PicApp

As you know, search engine optimization can play a major role in the success of your website or blog. You want to rank well in the search engines for your target keywords and keyword phrases, but how can using images from PicApp help?

Sifting through the official PicApp blog, you can read a post on exactly this topic. More specifically, the PicApp team says that using their images can be like using “a real SEO steroid.”

That’s because each of the images that you embed from PicApp come preloaded with “in-depth and professional metadata and captions.” As you know, having an SEO-friendly file name, along with good “alt” and “title” text can go a long way in helping Google understand exactly which keywords it should associate with your image.

Even if you’re not a site that is particularly focused on images, you have to recognize that over 10% of searches online are being conducted for images. The Google Image Search utility is used extensively by just about everyone. If you can rank there and someone clicks on the embedded image of John Mayer, guess whose site shows up in the lower frame? Yup, that could be yours.

Should the site visitor find that your website or blog provides more useful information or other related photos, they just might stick around or even bookmark your page. The higher quality images from PicApp will certainly help in that respect too.

Can you achieve similar results with your own photos? Of course you can, but you will need to spend the time to create your own high-quality pictures (or hire a photographer) and you’ll need to write your own in-depth metadata to accompany them (or hire a writer). Even then, you probably would not be able to get your own shots of Barack Obama and Taylor Swift… but PicApp can provide thousands of those for you.

A Noteworthy Endorsement from Blogger

In my first review, I noted how PicApp got an official endorsement from the WordPress.com community and how there was a plug-in to work with self-hosted WordPress.org installations. PicApp plays friendly with other platforms too, but it got a noteworthy endorsement from the Blogger.com crew too.

Going through the official help documents for Blogger, you’ll find one entry that discusses using images from the web. In addition to a paragraph on “stealing” bandwidth, it also talks about copyrighted materials.

In it, Google says that “if you’re unsure whether or not an image is copyrighted, it’s best not to risk it. However, there are places that make it easier for you to find images you’re allowed to use.” The first place listed is PicApp. It’s a full two slots above the Flickr Creative Commons search. That’s a big achievement!

I don’t think I’m supposed to say anything just yet, but I hear that PicApp will have another major announcement to make early next year. Stay tuned for that.

CLICK HERE FOR FREE LICENSED PREMIUM PHOTOS FROM PICAPP

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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Another Look at Free Images from PicApp

Content may very well be king, but the king will be without a kingdom if no one can find him in the first place. You can have the best online business or the most interesting blog on the Internet, but you need people to find you in the first place.

New site visitors can come from a variety of sources, but search engines typically represent a fairly large proportion. If you’re struggling with search engine optimization and you need a utility to guide your ventures, this review just might be up your alley. Internet Business Promoter promises a top-ten ranking in Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Yes, it’s a promise.

Comprehensive SEO Tools in a Box

Known as IBP or iBusinessPromoter for short, Internet Business Promoter is meant to be a comprehensive website promotion software tool that tackles search engine optimization a number of different ways. It is only by looking at all of these different aspects that you can achieve high search engine rankings for your website.

As with any other goal in life, you need to approach this search engine optimization tool with a specific goal in mind. You can’t just say that you want to “rank in Google.” You need to choose your target keyword or keyword phrase. That’s the first step with IBP.

For example, it would valuable for me to rank for the term “freelance writer” for my website. John targets “make money online” as his primary keyword phrase. After choosing your target keyword phrase, you can then dive into the various tools that IBP has to offer.

Approaching from All Directions

Internet Business Promoter takes a multi-faceted approach to search engine optimization. In the screenshot above, you see a series of six images across the top. These are used to access the different sections and the different items on your to-do list.

These include keywords, optimization, links, submission, rankings and tools. In order to use the keywords tool, you’ll need a Google AdWords account. For the links, the tool will analyze all of your inbound links and the submission tool will submit your site to a number of international search engines.

Generating a Report, Using the Tools

One of the first things that you’ll want to do with this SEO tool is to generate a report. This breaks down the current performance of your website in terms of search engine optimization.

In the extensive report, you get information about the sites that are currently ranked in the top ten for your target keyword, as well as how you are doing in the same areas. These describe keyword density, links from social networks, server speed, keyword use in IMG ALT attributes, number of trailing slashes in URL, readability of web page, and more.

Reading through this report, you can see how you stack up against the competition and you will also be provided with suggestions on how you can improve on all of these areas. Add them to your task list.

In addition to all the manual things that you can use to improve the SEO of your website, as well as the search engine submission utility and more at the top of the page, you can also access a myriad of other useful tools through IBP. These let you check for valid HTML markup, any broken links, and more.

How Much Does It Cost?

If you’re looking for something that will magically propel your site into the top ten rankings in your favorite search engine, you’ll need to look elsewhere. Internet Business Promoter won’t do all of the grunt work for you, but it can point in the different directions you can take to improve your search engine optimization, showing the opportunities you have for improvement.

The sheer robustness of this tool can be very daunting for SEO novices, so be prepared to put in some time to understand what it’s saying and what you can do about it. That said, the user manual offers good guidance and you’ll be moving up the rankings in no time.

In terms of pricing, there are two versions for sale. The Standard Edition is $249.95 and the Business Edition is $499.95. If you still don’t rank in the top ten after following the suggestions offered by the tool, IBP will offer you a 100% refund. That’s their guarantee.

CLICK HERE TO BUY IBUSINESS PROMOTER

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How to Get a Top Ten Ranking in Google

In the past few months all of the search engines, but especially Google have released or started supporting new ways of fixing site architecture issues. However IMHO these are band-aid solutions for bad site architecture, and not something you should rely on … at all.

In 2009 some of the big advances we’ve had the major search engines announce support for are things like the “rel=canonical” tag which allows you to tell a search engine this content at this URL may exist in more than one place, but you should credit it to one URL. Another new item is the ability to tell the search engines to ignore certain URL parameters. So if you’re using tracking parameters, session ID’s or other items you can now tell the search engines to ignore them entirely. There are many people who are happy to have these new tools, as it allows them to fix “issues” they have had for years. However I think these tools are crutches for lazy and incompetent programmers and developers, and should be avoided like the plague … and I’ll tell you why …

In the dawn of the public internet there where dozens of search engines that webmasters and publishers had to deal with, combine this with a lack of standards and the online publishing community had a lot of growing pains. When the dot-com bubble burst and the market consolidated we where really left with four big search engines. As Google pursued it’s relentless market domination, under the guise of a garage start-up bathed in the light of primary colored lava lamps, they stole the thunder of everyone else (coincidentally of course) and, established themselves as the ruling organization and defacto standards setting body, the rest of the world be dammed.

This is bad, as sloppy publishers and slip shod developers, now use google’s band-aid solutions, instead of developing websites and applications that don’t introduce problems that don’t need to exist in the first place. Case and point look at this URL from Forbes Magazine:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/20/live-well-cities-lifestyle-real-estate-hermes-paris-london-new-york.html?feed=rss_news

Notice the [feed=rss_news] part at the end, that enables Forbes to track where visitors came from, in this case RSS, most likely a feed reader. But now there’s the problem of that same content existing at two URL’s, remove the feed parameter and it still works:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/20/live-well-cities-lifestyle-real-estate-hermes-paris-london-new-york.html

Not to worry we can use the “rel=canonical” to point to the URL without the parameter, we can also use webmaster tools to tell it to ignore the “feed” parameter and we’re good to go right … wrong junior that’s two band-aids you needed to use instead of solving the problem properly. What you should have done is issue a 301 redirect at the server level to the correct URL, and not rely on the client or bot to figure things out. Need that parameter for tracking drop it in a cookie.

Why does this matter … as publishers we want to foster and build an environment that’s friendly for more than one search engine. Here’s an experiment, go try and append a meaningless imaginary parameter or two to a URL and submit it to a social site like Digg or Stumbleupon and see what happens. The simple fact is they aren’t sophisticated enough to parse it out as tracking parameter. Lots of other social sites are trying to gain access to your content as well, and by using substandard architecture you aren’t helping yourself. Your story will get votes in two places, decreasing its ability to go “go hot” or “popular” as its votes are spread over two URL’s.

While social search may be in it’s infancy, and may never overtake traditional search, the easier you make your content to crawl and understand for everyone and not just google, the better off you’ll be in the long run. Get out of the habit of relying on the crawling and indexing band-aids of search engines for your survival, learn to write clean code that makes you self reliant for your long term lively hood and success.

Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Bad Architecture and Band-Aid Solutions

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Bad Architecture and Band-Aid Solutions

A blogger’s greatest asset is his or her credibility. It is a blog’s credibility which results in readers and eventually regular subscribers. There are millions of blogs out there and unless you can brand yourself as an authority in your niche, your blog will never live up to its full potential.

So, how does one go about building credibility?

It is a long process that requires a great deal of time and effort. You need to be able to show what you know and demonstrate why others should listen. However, it is more than just great content that you need. To build credibility, you need a platform on which you can demonstrate your expertise to the masses. The practice of guest posting in the blogosphere gives aspiring bloggers this platform.

For those of you who don’t know, the practice of guest posting is when one makes a post on another blog. No blogger alone can provide expertise on every subject matter so they recruit guest posters to provide new perspectives and insights. This is a guest post on John Chow. In exchange for writing the post, the author gets a byline with a short bio and a link back to his/her website.

Guest posting is by far the easiest way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche. It is a free marketing tactic which associates yourself with well-respected individuals in your niche, instantly building credibility. It also gives you the platform you need to share what you have to offer. An insightful guest post, backed up with well developed posts on your own blog is one of the most effective ways to find new readers.

To illustrate my point, lets look at my personal case study. I started AMBeat.com as a blog about entrepreneurship and business opportunities a little more than a month ago. For this blog, I have exclusively been promoting it through the use of guest posts. I have written posts on various blogs in this niche including ProBlogger, Shoemoney, JohnChow, and others. These posts have driven hundreds of targeted visitors to my website. However, more than just raw traffic that resulted from these posts, it is important to analyze visitor engagement with the blog. I saw that these visitors were spending more time on my site and browsing more pages. Within days of the first few guest posts going live, the average visit length increased from less than 20 seconds to over two minutes a day. Page views per visit increased from one to about three and bounce rate decreased to about 42%, significantly less than those of my competitors. (Statistics from Alexa and Statcounter)

Guest posting results in visitors who interact with the site; reading multiple articles, commenting, subscribing, and most importantly coming back for future posts. This tactic will never drive as many visitors as a popular article on Digg or StumbleUpon will, but it will drive targeted traffic that will help in building an initial reader base.

To get started with guest posting, make a list of reputable blogs in your niche, large and small. Once you have made your list start contacting bloggers with ideas for posts you think would be a good fit for their blogs. Your messages will not always be replied, but of you e-mail enough bloggers, some guest posting opportunities will come. I recommend starting with smaller blogs in your niche and working your way up. The most authoritative blogs in any niche will be the most selective and showing past guest posting experience is a good way to get one foot in the door.

When pitching a blog, make sure to take the time to search through the archives to ensure no similar posts have previously been published. Analyze the writing style so that you can craft your post in a similar manner. Encourage discussion through the use of comments and make sure to interact with any responses on your post.

Guest posting is an art that requires patience and persistence. Large amounts of traffic may not come immediately; however with time targeted quality guest posts can result in regular readers and a vibrant active blog community.

This post was written by Aditya Mahesh, founder of AMBeat.com, a complete resource for entrepreneurs complete with advice articles, start-up profiles, interviews, news analysis, and more.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

See the original post here:
The Secret to Building Blog Credibility: The Practice of Guest Posting

Getting Personal with Your Prospects

When’s the last time a billboard, or a magazine ad, or a radio spot made you feel like a business was talking to you directly? If you’re anything like me, probably never. So-called “mass” media can reach large numbers of people, but its great limitation is its inability to engage those people on a 1-on-1 basis.

One of the main reasons that email marketing outperforms mass media is that with email, you *can* speak to people on a 1-to-1 basis. You can engage them, build a relationship with them. You can make people feel like you’re talking only to them.

Personalization Helps Make It Possible

Inserting someone’s name into an email message is such a simple step, but over and over I see studies that link it to increased response rates. Of course, personalization doesn’t stop at a name. You can merge many pieces of information into your messages. For example, Aweber personalization allows you to insert and personalize with the following tags:

• Name: {!name_fix}
• Email address: {!email}
• The date they signed up: {!signdate dayname}, {!signdate long}
• Today’s date: {!date abb+0}
• Or a future date, say a week from today: {!date abb+7}
• Approximate Geographic Location: {!geog_city} {!geog_region}
• Any other information you collect from subscribers

If this post was sent out as an email, all the above information would be filled in with your name, email, etc. For more personalization choices, check out AWeber’s knowledge base article.

“With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.”

Yes, that is a line from the Spider Man movies, but more importantly, it’s quite applicable to what we’re talking about today. Remember: your subscribers aren’t dumb. Personalization is powerful, but it’s nothing new to most of them, and even before email, they received personalized direct mail.

Mix up how/where/what you personalize in your emails to get the best response. Don’t personalize just because you can do so – excessive personalization is transparent and blunt.

Right… So How Can I Creatively Personalize My Emails?

A few things to try:

• Limited Time Offers: use a date variable in a follow up email to specify when a sale or offer expires. That way, regardless of when your subscriber gets your email, a sense of urgency accompanies it.
• Build anticipation: tell people when they’ll next hear from you using day/date variables (I’ve done this in a couple of these Test Drive emails).
• Use geographic targeting to isolate and email people in a certain part of the country/world — make offers to your {!geog_city} area subscribers.
• (Didn’t realize you could segment based on where your subscribers are located? Not only can you do that, you can access geographic reporting *and* even map out your subscribers’ location. For example:

  

  Pretty cool, no?)

These are just some of the ways you can personalize your messages to increase your subscribers’ response. As you go, you’ll undoubtedly discover all sorts of new ways to use email personalization to your advantage.

Don’t Delay Any Longer

If you’ve been getting just 100 people per day to your site, that’s over *2000* potential sales/readers that you may have lost to inaction. And 100 more each day. There’s nothing funny about that. Every website visitor is an opportunity. Don’t let yours go to waste. Remember, it’s only take $1 to set up an Aweber account.

What’s Next?

So far, I’ve focused on turning your website visitors into prospects and customers. But what about people who aren’t even coming to your website but are still interested in what you have to offer? Tomorrow, I’ll show you some simple ways to measure the success of your email campaign.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

Read more:
How To Set Up The Most Effective Email Follow Up System – Part 5

Do You Miss This High-Profit Market Segment

Most of us don’t have the luxury of meeting and selling all of our potential customers in person. So, we use other tools to acquire new customers, like Paid Advertising (Web, Print, TV, radio), Referral Programs, Direct Mail, Website/Search Engine Optimization, Outbound and Inbound Sales Teams.

These things can get expensive fast. But as business owners, we do them so we can acquire customers and make more sales, even if our margins are lower than we’d like because the costs we incur to get a new sale are so high.

Wouldn’t You Prefer to Keep Your Revenues?

What if you could increase your sales without surrendering so much of your profits to these pricey acquisition tactics? I’m willing to bet you can. See, there’s a group of people you may not be marketing actively to now, who already know about your company, like what you have to offer and are more likely than anyone else to buy from you. To get at who they are, let’s take a look at how you’re making sales now.

A Typical Pattern For Online Sales

Let’s take a second to lay out your potential sales path:

1. Prospect hears about your company (through advertising, direct mail or one of the other tools we listed above)
2. Prospect comes to your website and while there, signs up to your email campaign.
3. You follow up by email (and possibly other methods) with prospect until s/he is ready to purchase
4. Prospect returns to your website and makes a purchase

Now, depending on whether you want people to purchase right on your website, or call you, or come into your physical store, your path may vary, but I think we can safely say that this is about what you envision happening with your own potential customers. Am I right? But what happens after that person buys from you?

What Happened To Step #5?

Sadly, for many businesses there is no step #5 in the above sales path. They attract a prospect, market to him/her, make a sale and move on to the next prospect. They don’t market to their own existing customers. At all. This is the definition of a wasted opportunity. Your existing customers already:

• Know You and Your Company
• Are Interested in What You Have to Offer
• Trust You Enough to Make a Purchase

So why not continue to market to them? They’re much more likely to purchase from you in the future than a new prospect is.

What Can You Send Customers After The Sale?

A few ideas for email content to send your customers:

1. Product Training/Support Resources
2. Highlight Lesser-Known or Advanced Features/Uses
3. Solicit Feedback/Testimonials
4. Showcase Other Satisfied Customers and How They Use Your Product/Service

You can do this all while discussing related products or encouraging repeat purchases. If you sell a subscription based service, doing these things can cause your customers to stay subscribed for longer periods of time, increasing your revenue per customer. Don’t let your customer relationships wither and die after just one sale. Use an email marketing service like AWeber to make more sales and boost your profit-per-customer.

What’s Next?

Tomorrow, I’ll show you some creative ways to personalize your email messages. See you then.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

Continued here:
How To Set Up The Most Effective Email Follow Up System – Part 4

Here’s my roundup of the best search/marketing posts I found and read during August. If you’re new to this blog, this is a monthly feature that began way back in 2007. You can find earlier “Best Of”s for each month in the archives: 2008 Best Posts and 2007 Best Posts. I never include my own posts in these end-of-month recaps.

Local Search

• Ash Nallawalla/Net Magellan: SEO ranking of US IYPs across 274 cities
• Andrew Shotland/Local SEO Guide: IYP SEO Rankings Report 2009
• Bill Slawski/SEO by the Sea: Opinion Summaries in Google Maps Reviews

Small Business

• Miriam Ellis/SEO Igloo: Time Or Money – Why Small Businesses Need One, The Other Or Both

SEO

• Virginia Nussey/Bruce Clay Inc.: SEO Hierarchy of Needs
• Rae Hoffman/Outspoken Media: 2003 Called; They’d like their URL structure back
• Linda Bustos/Get Elastic: Holiday SEO: Using Amazon Bestsellers for Keyword Research
• Aaron Wall/SEOBook: Source Code Validation > Common Sense
• Rand Fishkin/SEOmoz: Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization

PPC

• Brad Geddes/bgTheory: Q&A Should You Bid on Your Competitor’s Name or use Their Name in Ad Copy?

Link Building

• Dave Snyder/SEJ: Link Building Evaluation Guide

Social Media

• Mack Collier/Viral Garden: Are we too worried with finding the ROI of social media?
• Patrick Winfield/10e20: 4 Ways to Optimize Your Twitter Background
• Lisa Barone/SmallBizTrends: Most Common Social Media Mistakes
• Lisa Barone/SmallBizTrends: Getting The Most Out Of YouTube

Blogs & Blogging

• John Lee/Bakedwheat Web: Discover 11 Blog Topics That Will Get Every Small Business Owner Writing Today
• Jonathan Morrow/Copyblogger: Don’t Do These 12 Things
  When Writing Headlines

Online Marketing/General

• Duncan Morris/SEOmoz: 10 Things You Must Check When You Re-launch Your Website

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

August ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts

Related posts:

1. June ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts
2. April ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts
3. July ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts

Excerpt from:
August ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts