Adventures in Internet Marketing

Posts Tagged ‘Internet Marketing’

OK, it’s official. I’m a huge nerd.

Trying to pretend that I’m even slightly cool is no longer an option.

I was surfing through the blogosphere (which sounds cool, but isn’t really), looking at some of the top 100 internet marketing blogs out there. Incidentally, if you want to check out the IM blog charts (you know you want to) then visit Winning The Web’s Top IM Blogs.

On one of the blogs – owned by IM expert Matt Cutts – I found this little gem. Actually, Matt’s site is full of little gems. Come to think of it, that’s probably why he’s an expert…

Anyway, Matt’s a bit of a genius when it comes to search engine optimisation. In this video he shares TONS of great information which I know will help your understanding of SEO. So, here it is, in its entirety. It’s a long video – a whole hour, in fact – but it’s time well spent.

Enjoy it and let me know what you think below.

If you read my blog last week, you’ll see that I chatted a bit about the new plugin I discovered thanks to my friend Wayne Lambert. The plugin is called Pretty Links and helps you to cloak links using your own domain name. Very cool.

Well, I have an update for you…

I was writing some articles recently for Ezine and other similar directories and realised that they wouldn’t accept these cloaked links, even though I’d made them pretty. Incidentally, when I say pretty, I don’t mean that I’ve covered them in flowers and patterns. I just mean that they now have look like this:

mydomainname.com/pretty-link

instead of like this:

bit.ly/random-collection-of-letters

So, although the plugin is awesome for blog and e-mail postings, it doesn’t work for article links. However, what does work very well is using domain names to cloak the links. Basically, you buy a domain name, then set it up to forward to your affiliate link. Whenever anyone clicks on it, it takes them straight to the affiliate promotion.

Now you may be thinking: ‘Yeah, but isn’t it more expensive to buy a domain name every time you want to cloak an affiliate link?’

Yes, of course it is, but there’s a very good ‘up side’ to doing it this way.

Read the rest of this entry »

Having spoken to a friend of mine who runs a local business, I wanted to share with you a method of getting to the top of Google fast.

What’s even better is that this is not the usual SEO or backlinking strategy. It’s a simple tool that businesses miss out on and therefore miss out on lots of lovely traffic.

The tool is part of the Google suite of tools. It’s called Google Places and it enables you to feature at the top of the search results as part of the geographical results (also known as ‘Local Business results’). This is the tool that used to be called Google Business Center and it works like a dream.

I added several clients to this and immediately got them as the first thing people see when they arrive at their search results.

This video is a quick tutorial on how to get listed and use it to dominate your local business listings for free!

If you own a website, you need to watch this short video. It’s pure content, it’s free and it can really help your site rank well in all the big search engines.

I was chatting to a friend of mine last night (yes, even Internet Marketing nerds like me have friends). He’s an editor for the online directory that Google uses to determine which sites are ‘authority sites’. A good guy to know, right?

Anyway, I realised that a lot of people who own websites don’t know about this directory or how vital it can be in helping you to become an authority site. So I thought I’d make a video Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note to let you know that, thanks to The Warrior Forum (http://bit.ly/WarriorForum), I’ve been asked to write for a new, up-and-coming internet marketing magazine. It’s called Conquer Internet Marketing (CIM) and is already available as a download.

http://conquerinternetmarketing.com/

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Having been in internet marketing a little over 6 months now, I’ve been taking stock of where I’ve got to and learning as much as I can from the experience.

I wanted to share one particular thing with you that struck me as important. I even came up with a little name for it: ‘Magpie Syndrome’.

You see, put simply, this is the tendency that we all have (including the internet ‘gurus’) of wanting the next shiny book/course/piece of software that promises to improve our business. Of course, assuming they’re good products, then the chances are good that they will improve our business… Until we see the next shiny object and forget about the first one…

Here’s the problem: We’re all looking for ways to make money online and we want it sooner rather than later. As a result, if we’re convinced that a product will help us accomplish that, then we’ll want to buy it to get that ‘secret formula’. Marketers capitalise on this to sell you their product. However, every marketer is doing this, and so we can easily become blinded by the new information and not actually do anything with it.

Having studied many of the marketers who are wildly successful, I’ve realised that their approach is somewhat different. Read the rest of this entry »