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Blog and Ping – A Search Engine Traffic Bonanza

March 18th, 2009

Everyone is talking about blogs these days as the magic money-making marketing tool. Some of the hype may actually be true, but I suggest you cut through most of what you read about blogs just long enough to understand why every business needs a blog.

Right now, that’s not to say this won’t change, search engines are in love with real blogs. By real blogs I mean blogs that are set-up and run by businesses that offer useful content on them. Like every successful marketing method there are people out there setting up fake blogs and dumping garbage, but keyword rich, content into them in order to trick the search engines into ranking the content highly. [Please resist the urge to add to this form of search engine spam as it may actually get you banned by a search engine.]

When you understand a little about how blog software works you get a better understanding about why search engines love blogs. Here are the top reasons that business blogs and search engines go hand in hand.

Lots of Pages

Each blog entry is shown in chronological order on a blog’s homepage but, each entry is in reality its own web page, with its own unique URL and title. So, an active blogger can create hundreds of keyword rich web pages in a matter of months.

Change Is Good

In order to claim your place at the blogging table you must commit to making posts often – 4 or 5 times a week perhaps. This commitment means that you are creating, updating, changing some portion of your site several times a week. The typical small business web site is lucky to receive an update several times a year. Search engines like change.

Wake Up Call

Because search engines love changing content, they are ever ready to visit a site when it is updated. One feature unique to blog software is something called a pinging. Basically, what you are doing is sending out a message to various blog directories to come and visit you site because it has been updated. Once a search engine has located your site, this is like a personal invitation to come back and get the new stuff. I use a site called Ping-O-Matic to send pings to multiple services. Some blog software can be configured to do this automatically.

RSS Directories

Blogs also have a built in distribution method known as RSS. This allows you to push your updated content out to people who subscribe through an RSS reader such as Bloglines or FeedDemon as well as Yahoo and MSN. This ability allows you to communicate directly with subscribers but it can also help get your main site noticed and indexed by the major search engines. Yahoo, for example, allows people (including you) to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed. On the day you create your blog, you can subscribe to it via a free MyYahoo account and Yahoo will visit and index your blog for free. It has no choice.

Linking Is Key

Part of the blogging culture is the predisposition to link to and from quality content that relates to the subject your are blogging about. In other words, bloggers like to link. Links from other high quality blogs will send traffic and get your blog and web site noticed.

So, your blog marketing strategy a little like this: Set-up a blog and start posting. Ping each time your make a new entry. Submit your blog to the major blog and RSS directories. Start looking for link partners. Repeat

In the last few weeks I set-up blogs for an attorney, a label manufacturer, and a remodeling contractor. In each case, the blogs were indexed and spidered by the major search engines within 48 hours. Traffic to the main web sites for these businesses (although a bit meager to start with) has already doubled or tripled. Traffic from each of the major search engines is now showing up for a large number of important search terms and phrases.

Who knows how long this blog traffic bonanza will last but at this moment a blog has never made more sense.

If you’re convinced that you need a blog but don’t want to hassle with setting it up and learning how to promote it properly, check out my basic blog coaching package. I do the work, you’re up and blogging and promoting your blog in a matter of days.

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant based in Kansas City, Mo. He writes frequently on real world small business marketing tactics and is the creator of “Duct Tape Marketing” a turn-key small business marketing system. Check out his blog at www.bloggingbusiness.com

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Posted in Blog Software | No Comments »

Differences between Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign

March 18th, 2009

Having worked for an Adobe Authorized Training Center for the last 10 years I often get asked from students what the difference is between Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Firstly, let me say that all three programs are in fact owned and developed by the same company, Adobe Systems, the World leader in Web development, graphic design and E-learning software. All three programs are also bundled together into Adobe’s Creative Suite, which is a great and affordable way to purchase this software.

I think part of the confusion, is that certain tasks can be done in more than one of these programs. For example you can find vector-drawing tools available inside Photoshop and InDesign, even though Illustrator is the predominant vector drawing program. The key to getting the most out of these three programs is to understand what their key functions are and how they can be used together.

Okay so lets look at each program separately. We’ll start with Adobe Photoshop, which is probably the best known out of the three. Photoshop is a professional image editing software primarily used for editing bitmap images and image manipulation. Bitmap images are images, which are defined by their pixel structure. In other words digital bitmaps can be broken down into millions of tiny pixels and each pixel has its own attributes. Bitmap images are sometimes also referred to as raster images. The most common type of bitmap image is a photographic image. Whether shot on film and scanned into the computer or whether digitally shot, photos are made up of millions of tiny pixels. So simply put Photoshop is a tool used to edit photographic images. It also has the ability to do lots of other things but the core function of Photoshop is to edit Photographic images. If you go down to your local newsagent and pick up any magazine, chances are very good that the images in that magazine would have been edited or altered using Photoshop. Sometimes the adjustments can be minor such as subtle lighting or sharpening adjustments, and other times they could be major like applying a filter or special effect. Photoshop is used for retouching – ever wonder why the models and movie stars never have any cellulite or a double chin – the answer is Photoshop. Often an image can comprise of a few different images with have been merged together to form a montage. This effect can also be created in Photoshop.

Adobe Illustrator on the other hand is a vector-drawing program. Vector images are the other main type of digital image. Unlike bitmaps, vectors are made up of a series of lines and shapes, which are defined as mathematical formulae. Vectors are very good for creating images, which contain large sections of the same color. So for example a navigation button on your web site, your company logo, or any non-photographic image would be better off created as a vector. Illustrator is the World’s premiere vector drawing tool, so if you were tasked with creating any kind of ‘flat’ art, such as a corporate profile, including logos, sign work, letterheads etc, chances are you would use Adobe Illustrator. Adobe InDesign is the newest out of the three programs and is a page layout or publishing program. InDesign is used for putting together stuff like corporate brochures, documents, magazines, newsletters or advertisements. InDesign’s specialty is working with documents that contain a large amount of type or text. Often designers will use all three programs on the same project. For example we recently created some new course outlines so we used Illustrator to create our logo and a few other vector graphics, we used Photoshop to apply a special shadow effect to some bitmap images, and finally we imported all those elements from Illustrator and Photoshop into InDesign where we added the copy and defined the layout.

Quality graphic design can make or break any company’s image. Adobe Creative Suite which includes Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign plus a little training can give you the vital edge to succeeding in a very competitive world.

Billy Gee is the Director of Training for Training Connection. Providing outstanding instructor led training in Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign in the Chicago and Los Angeles metro areas.

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Guaranteed Traffic Or Guaranteed Rip-Off?

March 16th, 2009

Assuming that everything else is being done correctly, web traffic is probably the most critical element in the success or failure of a web site. Out of the many ways to get a lot of steady traffic, two are vigorously promoted—one is free and the other requires money.

On the free end, we have traffic exchanges where you can sign up and list your site and earn credits by surfing and clicking on other members’ links which converts into how many times your site will be displayed. Assuming you have all day every day to do that, I suppose that’s a fantastic idea, but I have found that to be the most time-consuming and boring exercise of all marketing strategies I have employed.

There are people who use these religiously and swear up-and-down by them—and they get great results—so they say. It’s an option and it won’t cost you any money (unless you opt for the paid upgrade which some of them have), but you had best be prepared to invest some time. Me, personally—I need to be maintaining my site and running my business—I do not have time to be clicking for ad credits.

The paid option involves services that will sell you web traffic in the form of hits, visitors, guaranteed visitors, or guaranteed signups. When you go to the sites of these services, you will find that they promise you the moon and the stars, but for the most part, seem to deliver only star dust. I have tried several of these companies and I have had dismal results—and that is the concensus of successful online marketers.

It seems that there are some, at least, that employ dirty little tricks once they get your money. Some of the underhanded ploys include sending you hits when you have paid for visitors, counting repeat visitors as new visitors, redirecting people to your site from expired domains who have no interest in what you are selling, showing a thumbnail image of your site rather than a full page view—and the list goes on.

For someone starting out, guaranteed traffic can be a godsend if you’re getting the real thing—but that’s the problem—you don’t always know. The immediate goal of someone starting out online is to get into profit as quickly as possible and this is best achieved with a steady volume of traffic because it all comes down to a numbers game—with x amount of traffic, you get x number of sales.

I am unaware of any unbiased reviews of the specific companies selling guaranteed traffic, so my best advice would be to pose the question in forums such as the Warrior Forum, and get other people’s experience. Article marketing and building back links are slow to take effect; of course, once they do, then you will start to get lots of free traffic from the search engines, but that doesn’t help you in the short-term. It takes a daily, steady flow of traffic to make an impact—if you can find the right service at the right price, it can get you where you need to be in a cost-effective and time-saving manner.

Michael W Crank is the owner of Marketing Concepts Plus. For quality resources to help you grow your online business, visit us at http://www.marketingconceptsplus.net Subscribe to our free newsletters for ongoing home business tips and news.

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Is YouTube The Geocities Of Online Video?

March 16th, 2009

In 1999, everyone wanted a Web site but few people knew how to code in HTML. The solution? Everyone created and hosted their Web site on Geocities. A huge Internet company ended up buying Geocities (Yahoo) and, over time, most good content creators left Geocities and built sites that they owned, operated and controlled.

Sound familiar? It should. Three years ago, it was hard to host your videos online. Flash players were rudimentary, content management systems were built on popsicle sticks and video streaming costs were high. As a result, everyone uploaded and hosted their video content on YouTube. YouTube’s traffic grew and they too were bought by a big Internet company.

Today, no major media company makes significant money syndicating their content to YouTube and no viable economic model has emerged that properly compensates long form, scripted content creators for their development costs. Consequently, nearly all media companies are creating video destinations and/or building syndicated video offerings that they own, operate and control. Early data suggests that this strategy is proving effective, as broadcast audience networks, content sites and syndication offerings are beginning to scale both in users and in revenue.

This shift in investment towards new and branded, owned and operated video sites is resulting in a shift in video consumption and the flow of media dollars. Users are demonstrating a willingness to find premium content on content owners’ sites and content owners are aggregating the bulk of video media dollars in the market today. For the first time, YouTube is beginning to look a lot more like a hosting site than the preeminent television aggregator it once was.

So, is YouTube the next Geocities? The analogy is probably not a perfect fit. YouTube is far more powerful than Geocities was in its prime, and the Google machine is far more efficient than Yahoo ever was. That said, this new YouTube dynamic presents big opportunities.

Owned and operated online video properties will have the same challenges that other online media properties have had — most notably infrastructure, content management, ad serving and advertising. This increased portfolio of challenges, coupled with the increasing fragmentation of the market, means that companies solving real customer problems can build big businesses.

And, as with other media segments online, fragmentation means there will likely be multiple winners.

Sacerdoti is the CEO and founder of BrightRoll, a branded video advertising network. Under Sacerdoti’s direction, BrightRoll has grown into a premier video advertising network, having served billions of ads on behalf of the world’s leading agencies and their clients and executed campaigns on more than two-thirds of the top 100 online media properties in the U.S.

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Posted in Video Sharing | No Comments »

Performance Based SEO – Experience the Power of Top Rankings for Internet Search Results

March 16th, 2009

As a successful business owner, you plan to grow your business whether the economy is flourishing or floundering. You assess your costs and risks, making sure your company stays in line with the goals you have set. You use innovative means to improve your product or service, realizing that your customer’s satisfaction translates to more customers and, therefore, more business.

Yet, it has become increasingly more important that you market online as well as other means to increase customers and sales. The internet is an extremely useful tool for small businesses, but you must make sure your site can be found by the search engines and potential customers. This often requires help from a search engine optimization company; costing money you don’t have. The answer is choosing a company that offers a performance based seo program.

As the perfect vehicle to help you meet your goals, performance based seo can help you:

  1. Take control of your finances. In today’s uncertain economic climate, money management can make or break a business. Marketing and paid advertising pose real challenges to a company’s bottom line. With performance based seo, your business will not be paying for something with no guarantee of return on investment. You pay only after you see your website getting top listings on the first page of a search. The pressure is off as the risk is transferred to the seo company. Market changes will be reflected through ongoing search engine optimization, always keeping your company up-to-date and search-engine friendly, resulting in enhanced profitability.
  2. Experience top rankings on search results. Search engines have become the phone books and business directories of the modern world. People look for and find the services, products, and companies they need online. Studies have revealed that the first 5 listings on a search are getting the great majority of visits from these online “shoppers.” Clearly, top ranking means more traffic to your website. Performance based seo is the tool that will help you attain that top ranking. Your website will be optimized to become more visible and to be ranked higher than that of your competition.
  3. Attract customers who are looking for what you have to offer. Performance based seo gives your business greater visibility, thereby attracting qualified traffic to your website. In general, “shoppers” trust the high-ranking results listed in the search to be relevant to what they are looking for. New leads (the result of higher rankings) mean more customers, which translate to more sales. Regardless of the state of the economy, people will always need the products and services that others have to offer. Performance based seo ensures that people searching for your product will find your website.

Performance based seo will enhance the effectiveness of your business. By increasing your profitability and growing your customer base you can better secure your company’s continued success.

Lisa Hosman works with PageViews Interactive, an Arizona SEO company. PageViews offer innovative programs like performance based search engine marketing to help companies get ahead of their competition on internet search results pages. PageViews B2B SEO keeps a company’s sales pipeline filled with qualified internet buyers. To learn more, please visit http://www.pageviews.com

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Websites That Get Clients – the basics

March 13th, 2009

Despite what many website designers would have us believe, the websites that actually get clients aren’t necessarily the ones that look like glossy brochures. Sure, it’s important to have a good-looking website to engage the initial interest of your visitors. But ultimately, they’re not going to roll over, panting at the gorgeousness of your website imagery, and gasp ‘Coach me, coach me!’ are they? Let’s face it.

It is, in fact, incredibly rare for website visitors to convert into coaching clients right there on the virtual spot. Actually… what potential new clients who visit your website want is to get a feel for whether you and your services are a fit with what they’re looking for. If they’re interested enough, the next thing they want to do is to enter into a relatively anonymous relationship with you. They want to find out more without having to pick up the phone and talk.

It’s all about information capture

This is why you MUST ask visitors to your website for their name and email contact details. Because once you start to collect contact details, you have a chance to be in touch with your potential new clients – people who have expressed an interest in what you have to offer – and you can start building that relationship with them.

If you don’t offer them a way to be in contact with you without having to sign up for coaching with you there and then, they will most probably surf on by and you’ll never even know they were there, let alone that they were interested. Now that’s the kind of opportunity it would be foolish to pass up on, don’t you think?

The value of a mailing list

By collecting contact details, you’re in the process of building your mailing list. And a mailing list is the best way to cultivate new clients online. Of course, you do have to mail out to your mailing list to build and maintain that relationship with them. And some will take longer to convert into clients than others. Some never will. But it’s easily the most effective way to get clients from your website.

As your mailing list grows, so does its worth. I’ve heard various estimates put on the value of each email address on your list, but the most frequently quoted is £1 per contact. Not that I’d advise you ever to put your mailing list up for sale… if you don’t have a decent privacy statement next to the sign-up box on your website (a ‘we will never pass your details to third parties’ message), your sign-up numbers will drop anyway.

The true financial value of your list, though, is in potential it contains to convert interested enquirers into real-life, fee-paying clients. As your list grows, so does the number of future new clients it holds. It’s a numbers game. The more names you have on your list, the more clients they will convert into. Although don’t forget that to be valuable your list must contain the contact details of genuinely interested parties.

No more hit and miss

What makes a website effective (or not) can so often seem a mystery. Use your website to capture visitor information and build a mailing list, though, and you have something considerably less mysterious on your hands. In fact you have a financially valuable asset that will carry your business success into the future.

“How to Set Up Your Coaching Website AND Get Clients From It” is a FREE 20-page bulletin by Mary McNeil. Click here to grab your copy now!

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Must-See Online TV: Kutiman’s Mother of All Mashups

March 13th, 2009

After seeing mention of it on TechCrunch and Mashable, thought I’d check out this Kutiman guy’s new album/video: the one in which every clip and every sample came off of YouTube. It’s aptly called “ThruYou” and the Web site on which the seven-track production can be found sports an interface that looks like the YouTube home page — if it had been left under a bus and run over a few times. Recognizable, but a faded version of the actual product.

But this whatever-it-is is anything but. The world music/funk “ThruYou” is a ton of fun, and sometimes, even, haunting (there’s a word that’s never been used in a Social Media Insider column before). But it’s also mind-blowing just because it exists; it would have been unimaginable a few years back that so many people would share little audio and video bits of themselves with the rest of the world. The clips that appear in the videos — and off of which the audio is based — range from an elderly woman playing a church organ to a young French guy smoking a joint.

A few years back, it also would have been unimaginable that someone could make art out of all these audio and video bits, working at home, as Kutiman apparently did.

A project like “ThruYou” should make us crucially aware of one fact: the line between professional and amateur content is getting more and more squiggly. What do you call an album created by a professional musician out of amateur content? The first song is called “The Mother of All Funk Chords” (quoting someone who appears on what looks like an instructional video for guitar) — but the project is certainly the Mother of All Mashups.

Now, because I always wonder about these things, I wonder how Kutiman will make money out of this. Unlike one of his albums, it’s not on Amazon or iTunes… yet. And maybe, due to intellectual property concerns, it can’t be, unless all of the YouTube “stars” his project uncovered sign off on it, and, probably, if they’re smart, ask for some revenue. That would be a logistical nightmare. By my count, ThruYou uses upwards of 150 YouTube clips. However, with all the buzz this project seems to be getting, it’s quite possible the music will become popular on a broader scale. I hope Kutiman is ready to go wherever this takes him.

But enough of my lame attempt at a business angle. I suppose I focused on this because, despite our little community’s obsession with iPhone apps and social media ad models, sometimes it’s worth pointing to one of those things that sums up how social media is creating the zeitgeist. This is one of those things.

Catharine P. Taylor has been covering digital media and advertising for almost 15 years. She currently writes daily about advertising on her blog, Adverganza.com. You can reach her via email at cathyptaylor@gmail.com, follow her on Twitter at cpealet, or friend her on Facebook at Catharine P. Taylor.

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Posted in Social Network Service | No Comments »

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