Are you one of those people, like me, that writes a post then changes it 10 times immediately afterwards? Perhaps not. Nevertheless, it is important from an SEO standpoint to choose how you want things to look from the search engine and post with this in mind. Here’s a few tips:
1. Pick a catchy title that will stand out in a crowd of search results. Even if you make it to the first page, if you don’t have a title that elicits interest, nobody will click.
2. Write your title after your post. Perhaps you’re less rabit brained than I tend to be, but many times I’ve sat down to write on a topic and it rabbit-trails into something else. My original title is not really well suited any longer, and needs to be changed. Save yourself the hassle, write the post, then write a title. Students: You don’t write a summary before you write the paper do you? (Don’t answer that).
3. Use a plugin like the All in One SEO pack for Wordpress. It plugs in seamlessly and allows you, right in your post editor, to add meta tags, a meta title, and a 160 character description that will be seen by the search engines. In the description field, try using a portion of one of your more interesting sentences and end with an ellipsis (…) to lead their attention on, into your blog. Having just read the first part of the sentence (if it is interesting), people will naturally want that thought to be completed in their brain, so they’ll click to see what it says.
This is your chance to customize what your search engine entry looks like! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen search results and the “title” is simply a bad list of keywords, and the “description” is basically more of the same. I typically shy away from these results, and go for the ones that look more professional, the ones that are actually coherent! It doesn’t take much effort to stand out sometimes, but it is well worth the few seconds you’ll spend doing it right.
I was over at AskHowie.com and found a clip where he was talking about finding the correct triggers for your product. He gave an example of selling a weight loss product for kids. What are the triggers that would prompt a concerned parent to search for such a product? It could have been a doctor’s visit, a comment from another parent, a comment from the kid themself, or any number of other things.
By understanding the different events that would trigger a motivated buyer to start searching for your product, you can market to them much better. A “triggered” searcher is one who emotionally is ready to buy, right now. All you need to do is get your product in front of them and clinch the deal with some compelling copy that plays on that trigger.
Take the weight loss example again; if you identified a common trigger being a doctor’s visit, and you created an ad that was titled or included “Fed Up With Doctor’s Visits?” or something of the like; your searcher is more likely to identify with that ad because of their recent experience. Immediately they feel a connection with your ad because you’ve identified with their experience. They get the impression you understand what they’re going through.
Taking this beyond the ad, if you can exploit these triggers in the sales letter itself you can take this to a much higher level. Suppose a concerned parent got to your site by searching for “weight loss for kids,” and when they get there, they immediately see a leading statement related to doctor’s visits. Do you think they’re more likely to at least read the whole sales letter?
If you can get inside your target market’s minds, you will have a far higher success rate than simply taking the “if we market it they will come” approach.
PS: today I randomly discovered that 138 people per day search for the keyword phrase “excuses for being absent from work” and there are no Adwords campaigns running! I wonder if there’s potential here for a work from home product… then again perhaps its a bomb? Let me know if you try it out…
In my ongoing quest to achieve SEO for this blog I’ve started looking at the number of inbound links I have. The more inbound links you have, especially one way links, the better your ranking on the search engines. That’s the theory anyways. Ideally, you want inbound links from sites/pages with high PR as well.
This inbound links tool shows all the inbound links to your site registered by the Big Three: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Punch in your site and try it out. When you click on the button it will bring you to the SEOChat website where your results will be displayed.
Alternatively, you can have a look at the Google Webmaster Tools for your site, or go to alltheweb.com and punch in link:www.yoursitename.com to see the results.
What is affiliate marketing, and why is it worth doing?
Simply put, affiliate marketing is a way of sharing revenue between a company and its affiliate based on performance measures. The affiliate is not employed by the company, but there is an agreement in place that allows them to promote the company’s products and to get rewarded for that in a specific way. Affiliate marketing is huge on the internet. The benefits are many, as we will see.
Let’s use an example that everyone is familiar with: Amazon.com. Now you might ask, why would a company as huge and successful as Amazon need or want an affiliate marketing program? Why would they want to share their revenue? Well plain and simple, it saves them a lot of work. Amazon has setup an arrangement whereby nearly anyone can sign up as an affiliate to promote their products. The affiliate is then given tools and specially coded hyperlinks which they use to promote products for sale on Amazon’s website. They drive traffic to Amazon.com, which hopefully converts into sales. If the affiliate refers someone who actually buys something, then Amazon will give the affiliate a set percentage of that sale.
What’s in it for them?
The benefit to Amazon is that they get a veritable army of affiliates promoting their products in all sorts of ways all over the internet. They end up with very good marketing coverage this way. You have to remember that in order to get advertising and links plastered all over the internet, in every nook and cranny, Amazon would have to spend a ton of money. Either they would outsource this lucrative contract to some large firm, or they would hire a whole bunch of advertising experts in-house. Instead, they are able to contract with affiliates who go out and advertise all over the place, and - here’s the best part - Amazon only pays when a sale is generated! Amazon can then go and confidently plan around the fact that their affiliate related marketing will cost them 4% of sales, or whatever the number is. None of this pay $100 million and I’m sure we’ll get some good coverage! They only pay for advertising that generates cold hard cash!
What’s in it for you?
So, sounds like a great deal for Amazon right? But is the affiliate marketer getting a bad deal? Not at all. So what makes this a good deal for the affiliate? Well there are a lot of people out there with websites, resources, and expertise to successfully market products; however they don’t have any products of their own! The affiliate arrangement puts a product in the hands of the marketers, without them having to deal with inventory, handle transactions, tech support, returns, suppliers, importing, shipping etc. The barriers to entry are negligible for an affiliate marketer, compared to the owner of the web store.
Marketers also benefit from having the guaranteed terms of a contract. They know exactly what they need to achieve to get a paycheck of X dollars. Affiliate marketers then create websites, pay-per-click ads, email campaigns, banner ads, social marketing campaigns and all kinds of other things in order to drive highly targeted traffic to Amazon.
Most affiliate programs have a sliding incentive scale of some sort. For instance, for the first $1000 of sales an affiliate refers within a given period, they might get 4%. For the next $1000 they might get 5%. In this way companies are able to reward for performance and the best affiliates will be even more motivated to continue on their promotion.
Affiliate marketing can work for nearly any kind of product out there on the internet right now. Think of it as a referral fee. Some of the products I promote don’t even involve sales; the client doesn’t actually purchase anything. In these cases the company pays for “leads,” that is, qualified people who fill out an application form. So all I need to do is get people to fill out the form, and I get paid! They don’t even have to spend a cent! Good deal for me right?
If you have a website, affiliate marketing is a great place to get your feet wet making money on the internet. Find an affiliate program for a product that is complementary to the interests of your site’s visitors, and promote it on your site. If you’re feeling more aggressive and you find a good product to promote, try paying for advertising on the internet! You’d be surprised how easy it can be to get going!
Inserting a YouTube video into Wordpress 2.5 is really, really simple, and here’s how:
Five Simple Steps to Adding a YouTube Video in Wordpress 2.5
1. Go to the YouTube page you want to use,
2. Find the text box on the right side with the code in it to embed the clip.
3. Copy that whole line of code.
4. Go into your blog post editor, switch to html view, and paste the embed code in where you want it to appear in the post.
5. Publish the post, and you’re done!
If you want to play with the positioning or other aspects of the clip, feel free to go back to Visual view and do so. The updated editor won’t screw up your code.
This is a little clip I took of my puppy, Fraser, howling along with me while I played my guitar. I know, it’s completely irrelevant to internet marketing but hey - this is my blog! Anyways, he’s done many more “duets” since this clip was taken, and one day perhaps I’ll post more. Cheers.
I posted on March 20th that I would start tracking my traffic on this blog, as a means of measuring my success at driving free traffic here. Anyways, here are the stats - either for the month of March or as of today, April 3. Please note that I only got Analytics happening around this time, and I didn’t do any promotion prior to this.
Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 6,181,254 (up from 13,952,743!)
Google PR: 0
Technorati Authority: 0
RSS Subscribers: 0
The Golden Rule
March 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 143 (last month I had 1!)
Inbound Links
Another metric I’m going to start tracking is inbound links. I’ll assume that I had 0 at the beginning of March, and as I didn’t measure this at the end of March I’ll assume I had about 30 on March 31. I recently started a new tactic which is going to greatly increase my inbound links (Apr 4 - Yahoo:113, Google:0, MSN:0) which I’ll post about soon. I’m using the link popularity tool at SEOChat.com.
By far the greatest part of my visitors (approx 110) came from one comment I made on Digg one day where I also included the link to my blog. I actually made $1.22 on Adsense that day (from this site). So a few more days like that and I’ll have recovered my costs on the domain anyways. LOL. Good thing I’ve got other things to rely on!
The rest of the visitors mostly came from other sites where I’ve been posting comments, getting involved in the community. This is a slow way of developing traffic, but hopefully it will prove to be higher quality, in terms of finding people that will come and read more than one post, hopefully find something of value here and leave a comment or something.
I’m going to start tracking my progress in ranking for certain terms. This site happens to be #5 on Google for “Jonathan Boettcher” which by most measures is a completely useless term at the moment, so I’ve decided to pick “Affiliate Marketing Tips” as my target phrase for April. I don’t rank at all on any of the engines for this phrase so we’ll see how quickly I can get registered. Initially I thought of “internet marketing” but this is too broad a keyword and there is too much competition for that. Mind you, there will be good competition for this keyword as well, however it is a bit more “niche” so we’ll give that a shot. In addition, I’m planning on putting up some more resources directed towards affiliate marketing in particular.
In other news, last night I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, which went well, and I am excited about some of the new features that are available. Apparently you can get a live traffic chart on your admin panel now. Then all I have to do is get some more traffic!
I quit my 8-5 job pushing paper at the end of January ‘08. Since then I’ve had my nose down, trying to grow my online business. Today I decided work could wait. I went over to a friend’s place for breakfast, then we took my canoe out and explored nearby Ruskin Lake for the better part of the afternoon. The weather was perfect, no one else was out there, there was tons of wildlife all over the place, and in general I had a great time. It was good exercise and mentally relaxing.
That is the benefit of working from home.
In the summer I read a book called the 4-Hr Work Week, by Timothy Ferriss. I highly recommend it. That book and the ideas it presents started an intense period of introspection that ultimately prompted me to quit my job. It also helped that my affiliate campaign was taking off like a rocket during the fall. Here are some of the questions that I pondered prior to pulling the plug on my boss. Think hard about them; they’re not the gimme’s you think they might be.
Do you live to work or work to live? If you work to live, are you working as efficiently as possible? If not, why not work more efficiently (therefore less hours) so as to “live” more?
Are there non-economic benefits to work? Are you getting these at your current job? Do they outweigh the economic inefficiencies created by working a 9-5? Excluding the paycheck, why do you go to work? Again excluding the paycheck, what is your dream job?
When you meet someone on the street, and they ask you about yourself, what do you tell them? Is your job the defining element in your life? If so, is that your desire?
What is the worst possible outcome from quitting your job and starting your own business? Write it down, visualize it in exquisite detail. Make a YouTube video about it. Then think of ways you could regain your current lifestyle from that position. The worst (assuming it doesn’t include death or dismemberment!) might not be as bad as you think!
These and others are questions that lead to change. Change occurs when you become dissatisfied with the status quo, and start looking for alternatives. Believe me, there are alternatives to the 9-5 out there.
Back to my first paragraph: one of the biggest reasons I started my own business was for freedom of schedule. The ability to work from anywhere, anytime I wanted was tremendously appealing. Now I am free to work those hours in the day when I know I am most productive, and when I’m not being productive (there’s usually not a lot that will remedy that) I can just leave work and go canoeing, or do something else! This leads to much higher job/life satisfaction.
I’ll be posting more on this topic in the coming months, especially as I get things sorted out for myself. If you’ve got a similar story I’d love to hear it.
, by Timothy Ferriss. I highly recommend it. That book and the ideas it presents started an intense period of introspection that ultimately prompted me to quit my job. It also helped that my affiliate campaign was taking off like a rocket during the fall. Here are some of the questions that I pondered prior to pulling the plug on my boss. Think hard about them; they’re not the gimme’s you think they might be.