David!

Congratulations, David! You’ll hear from each of us shortly. All of us involved with Project Jump Start wishes you the best of luck, and we hope that your online endeavors and your ideas and dreams turn into something big!

Stay tuned. We’ll be jumpstarting someone every month this year – on the 25th of each month. Will you be next month’s recipient?

© DazzlinDonna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Luckily for us, online advertising is generally a lot more affordable than offline advertising is. Still, it pays to be as frugal as we possibly can, so I wanted to give a few thoughts on making the most of our advertising budgets (no matter how meager they may be).

Of course, text ads are one of the first things that come to mind when discussing online advertising, and I’m not going to throw you any surprises here. Just as you would expect, I would recommend starting out with a Google Adwords account, and testing the waters with a small budget. I do recommend that you read as much as you can about the process however, so that you don’t accidentally shoot yourself in the foot and overspend (sometimes significantly) without even realizing it.

Next, spend some time creating some banner ads (or having them created if you aren’t graphically inclined). I recommend creating a minimum of 4 ad sizes, but 9 sizes is ideal. You can see all the standard IAB recommend ad unit sizes here, but my recommendations are as follows:

Four Sizes To Always Have Available

• 125×125
• 468×60
• 160×600
• 728×90

Five Additional Ad Sizes If Possible

• 120×240
• 120×600
• 300×250
• 180×250
• 336×250

Sites will very likely have ad spots available in one of the above sizes, so if you have ads already created and ready to go for any of those sizes, it will be easy to get your ad up and running quickly.

The next thing I would consider is having 2 or 3 variations of ads in each of those sizes. This will allow you to test each ad so that you know which works better. I recommend reading an interview that the Wildfire Marketing Group did, in which they explain when and how often to run the same ads versus testing different ads.

Once you have all of your ad banners created, your next task is finding available spots to place them. My favorite place to advertise is on blogs. Many blogs are set up to run 125×125 ad blocks, so if you have that size handy, it will be easy to arrange. You can either approach bloggers directly via email or Twitter, and arrange for an ad spot, or you can go through one of the many networks (such as buysellads.com) to find them. Most blogs will display ads for a month term at a fixed price (which is usually fairly low).

Finally, run your ads, run your tests, and track the results. Once you have some initial stats to look at, you can plan for the long term.

© DazzlinDonna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Then I changed my mind. Instead, I’m going to ask you this:

Do you even HAVE a “field” in which you might like to be considered an expert?

Before you can be an expert at something, you need to know what that something is. So the first step is to determine what field you’d like to be involved with. I especially want to emphasize the broad generic word “field”, rather than a narrow, specific title.

You see, the average person is perfectly capable of becoming an expert merely by engulfing themselves in the subject matter.

There are some limitations to this, however. For example, let’s say you decide to answer the above question too narrowly. You might say, for instance, that you want to be an expert saxophonist. There’s nothing wrong with having that as a goal, unless of course you have no musical talent whatsoever. Talent does play a part in our decision process. That doesn’t mean however, that you can’t extend the concept from a narrow one (saxophonist) to a broader one. What if you became the leading authority on the lives of the most talented saxophonists of all time? Or what if you were known as the expert in tracking the still unknown, but extremely talented saxophone artists of our time?

That’s the kind of thing I’d like to challenge you to think about. So many people have interests, but believe that they cannot pursue an education or a career within that interest, because their talents don’t extend far enough. I say baloney.

1. Consider the broad topics that interest you.
2. Determine your ability to become an expert of some part of that topic. Don’t limit yourself to the obvious aspects of the topic. Think as broadly as necessary – or as outside of the box as you can – to find a portion of the entire “field” in which you can contribute.
3. Once you’ve determined what your “field of expertise” will be, simply learn it.

Don’t run away screaming! Learning it is probably a lot less difficult than you imagine. The Internet gives each of us vast resources to pull from. You can get a free education from MIT, Berkeley, John Hopkins, Stanford, or any number of amazing universities around the world if you’d like. A formal atmosphere such a a university course may not be what’s needed at all, however. You may just need to immerse yourself in the many blogs, podcasts, videos, or articles that abound on the web. Whatever paths you take, if you spend an hour per day reading about the topic, you’ll be amazed at how much you learn. Once you’re sure that you really want to become the expert, then just immerse yourself in the topic. Participate in social networks or forums. Find mentors. Communicate with those who are involved. Become a part of the field.

Sure it will take some time. It won’t be instant. But think about this: Two years from now, you may wake up to see your name in an important journal or site that proclaims you to be the expert in the field of [you fill in the blank]. How cool would that be?

© DazzlinDonna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

That’s the main concept behind a new site monetization service called Contenture, which is owned by the good folks of Clicky analytics. Essentially, Contenture is billing itself as a micropayment service that aggregates the income from all the users that pay for the service, and then distributes that money out to the websites that run its code. Here’s how they’ve described it:

Users pay a monthly fee into the Contenture pool, then we monitor what sites they go to, and automatically distribute each user’s money to those sites every month based on how often that user visited the site. This makes for a completely seamless experience, and we believe it’s one that will finally bring micropayments to the masses.

So why would a user pay for Contenture? That’s where the second feature of Contenture comes in – premium microservices. Contenture lets you offer exclusive features to paying Contenture members, such as removing ads, giving exclusive access to certain content (e.g. /archives/), giving priority access to new content, commenting privileges, and more.

I’m trying the service out myself, both as a site owner and as a paying user. If you aren’t a user, you’ll see a section to the right of this post called “Recommended” over in the sidebar that shows ads, with a green Support This Site ad included (which leads to Contenture). If you are a paying Contenture user, you won’t see those ads. That’s the only premium feature I’ve enabled at this point for this site, but I’m considering giving exclusive access to special content or some other privilege as well. Feel free to tell me what you’d like to get as a Contenture member when you visit this site, and I’ll consider doing that.

I love this concept, but of course, only time will tell whether or not it will actually fly. It’s cool that we, as users, can choose to pay one small fee in order to get special privileges at the sites we visit most (and are therefore appreciative of). But of course, those sites need to be participating in the program in order for us to receive those benefits. And from the publisher’s point of view, Contenture makes it easy to offer special privileges such as removing ads to their paying users, but in order for it to be profitable, there needs to be a large enough pool of users.

So both ends of the spectrum need to participate to make this service fly. Will it happen? I don’t know, but I appreciate the effort that Contenture is putting out, so I’m willing to be one of the first to sign up both as a publisher and a user. If you think this might be a good way for you to give your site users extra benefits and make some money as well, then you might want to check it out.

And if you want to support this site, feel free to either click on that green Support This Site ad or click here to follow the affiliate link to Contenture.

© DazzlinDonna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

We have many names. Some call us entrepreneurs. Some call us freelancers, or contractors, or consultants, or WAHMs and WAHDs, or sole proprietors … well, you get the idea. The fact is that no one has yet created a really good, standard definition that works well for all of us. The latest term is either microbusiness or microenterprise, and even it does not yet have a standard definition. Because the definition of who we are is so loose, it’s next to impossible to pull reliable stats about us, but here are a few items I’ve managed to uncover.

• The Census Bureau said a few years ago that about three quarters of all U.S. business firms have no payroll, with most being self-employed persons operating unincorporated businesses. I’d guess, that number is higher now.
• The AEO (Association of Enterprise Opportunities) estimates that there are “more than 24 million microenterprises in the U.S., representing 18% of all private employment and 87% of all businesses. One out of six U.S. private sector employees works for a microenterprise. Historically, microenterprises have been considered the backbone of the U.S. economy”, and that “in the United States, a microenterprise is usually defined as a business with five or fewer employees, small enough to require initial capital of $35,000 or less; the average microloan is about $7000″.
• A blog post at Business.gov agrees by starting out the post with this statement, “Nine out of every ten firms in the United States is a microbusiness – who knew?!”
• Small Business Trends predicts we’ll see a 4-6% more microbusinesses due to the current recession.

Although the most common definition of a microbusiness is 5 employees or less (some say 10, some say 20), like Lloyd Lemons, I tend to think of microbusinesses as even smaller than that. He defines a microbusiness as “a very small business; in fact, it’s the smallest of all businesses” … “often has no employees” … and is “often operated from the owner’s home”.

That’s me, and very likely you too. It appears that we make up somewhere between 70-90% of the entire workforce in the U.S. Even if we doubt the stats, and slash all the numbers listed above in half, we would still make up a huge portion of the workforce, and yet we tend to be overlooked quite often. We aren’t given access to the same benefits that others have, such as affordable health insurance for example. Nevertheless, we are strong contributors to the health and well-being of our entire economic structure, and we should be taken more seriously because of that.

I don’t have solutions for us, unfortunately. But I do have a few resources that may help us as we struggle to be noticed. Perhaps if we register with our local or state community groups, or join microbusiness-focused organizations, we can effect change that we cannot as individuals. Here are a few links to start. If you know of more, please add them in the comments.

Association for Enterprise Opportunity – The Association for Enterprise Opportunity (AEO) is the national leadership organization and the voice of microenterprise development. By providing cutting edge training, knowledge sharing, Federal and State public policy and advocacy, and communications, AEO empowers a community of nearly 500 member organizations to be uniquely effective in serving the needs of microentrepreneurs who do not have access to traditional sources of business education or capital.

SBA Small Business Association Micro-loan Program

Business.gov Loans and Grants Tool

Finally, our government is more open than ever before. Let them know who you are, what you do, and how you believe you are being overlooked (assuming you do, of course). Go to the White House’s official contact page to let your voice be heard. Or contact House Small Business Committee Chairwoman Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) or Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship Chairwoman Mary Landrieu (D-LA). Let them know that our collective group needs to be considered when decisions affecting business and the economy are made.

Individually, our voices whisper; Together, our voices thunder.

© DazzlinDonna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Jeff Stern!

Congratulations, Jeff! You’ll hear from each of us shortly. All of us involved with Project Jump Start wishes you the best of luck, and we hope that your online endeavors and your ideas and dreams turn into something big!

Stay tuned. We’ll be jumpstarting someone every month this year – on the 25th of each month. Will you be next month’s recipient?

© DazzlinDonna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Transcript:

[Two Places You Might Not Have Thought To Brand Yourself]

Hi my name is Dave Dugdale and I wanted to thank Donna for letting me do another guest post.

I have been doing lots of videos lately so I thought instead of writing this post I would create a video.

I am going to run through two places that you might not have thought to brand yourself on your site.

To help yourself standout from whatever niche you in you really need to use every chance you get to help people remember your name and what you look like.

I try to place my picture just about everywhere I can on my sites, like on my SolarDave site even though I know it is the right thing to do I am still amazed when I go to solar conferences or other events when people walk up to me and say, “Hey are you SolarDave?”

Contact Form Page

So the first place to increase your branding is on your contact form page. On my contact form I ask them what my first name is, which is pretty obvious since the site is called SolarDave. This also helps me weed out emails that make it through this first filter because when I get an email from someone and they do not use my first name and I have it plastered all over my site, I pretty much know that it is going to be spam.

RSS Reader

If you are like me I read blogs from my RSS reader and hardly ever go to the site (like Donna’s site for instance). I use a plug-in on my blog called RSS Footer from a guy I can never pronounce correctly – that works great.

What you do is not only include your name and a link your site but include your photo (or logo if you are not branding just yourself but your company.) This also helps when people scrape your feed, so your brand follows you even on the scraped sites.

Well that’s it, I hope you enjoy these two tips and have a great day!

Thanks!

© DazzlinDonna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

One of the most crucial activities when crafting a marketing and branding plan is to get a logo for your company. A well-designed custom logo communicates a message to the public, conveying what your business is all about. Although Google’s logo is well-known and well-designed, Google often changes its logo for holidays and anniversaries. By portraying a more dynamic feel, their special occasion logos are able to actually “speak” to the public on these occasions.

Case Study: Google Doodle

According to Google:

At Google, we like to reflect the ever-changing world of our users through the logo designs on our homepage. These ‘doodles’ celebrate different people, events or special dates and are designed by our original Doodler, 30-year-old Dennis Hwang. (from Doodle 4 Google)

If we look at the history of Google, the first ever dynamic Google logo (they call it Doodle) was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin themselves. It was designed for the Burning Man festival in the summer of 1999. They created the Doodle in case their site crashed, and to explain why their phones weren’t being answered. The logo would convey the message to users that they had gone to the festival.

Later, they hired a graphic designer named Dennis Hwang, who has now become the official doodle maker of Google. He draws the designs by hand first and then computer graphs them. Dennis has designed nearly 150 Doodles to date. Presently, Google designs Doodles for many events and places them on their website for a limited period of time.

The most recent Doodle was displayed on May 10, 2009 to give tribute to Mother’s Day. The logo was predominantly pink in color, with a flower vase replacing the letter “L”.

Google’s use of Doodles that change for each event is a branding tactic that reflects Google’s image as a more advanced and up-to-date company, and also shows their affection for the events. This not only catches the eyes of their users, but also helps Google position its brand dynamically.

You can also use this tactic to brand your company with a dynamic logo on your website for each event. A good idea is to develop an event calendar so you can plan to have your logo designed before each event arrives. Then let your logo designer know what special message you want your logo to convey for that occasion. Upload it for the designated time period, and let your logo speak!

© DazzlinDonna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Intelligently Crafting Content

I could start off this article by saying that to succeed with SEO, you should create high-quality content, but if I did that, you would immediately think, “same old ‘content is king’ blah, blah, blah”, and you’d probably not read any further. So instead, let’s just start off by stipulating that creating great content is a given. So often, however, no one really goes beyond the phrase “good content” to discuss how to create that content, and just as importantly, how to plan it out, and effectively create a flow throughout the site.

Analyzing Your Text Content from a Graphic Point of View

“You can’t see the forest for the trees” is an old saying that holds much truth when we are trying to analyze our own content. You’ve looked at your own content so much you probably no longer see it the way your visitors do (or the way search engines will). Sometimes I find it useful to look at the words on my site in a completely different way. By viewing your content differently than you’ve ever done before, you open up the possibility of seeing the individual trees within your content forest again. Here’s a little exercise I like to use now and then.

Link Bartering

Link bartering is NOT the act of trading links (reciprocal linking), but is the act of trading services, which usually results in acquiring nice links and recommendations.

Creating Subliminal Connections Between Your Site and Hot Trends

What if you could associate your site, your niche, or your product with a hot new trend? What if the search results showed your site for that popular new gizmo or movie? What if I told you that you can create a subliminal connection between your site and any hot new gadget/movie/song/toy/etc. no matter what niche your site or product is in? And what if you stood a good chance of ranking well for that hot trend?

The Swirling Vortex of Social Networking

Social networking is increasingly becoming a vital aspect of our search marketing efforts. The connections we form amongst our online social communities can provide ever-expanding avenues of awareness of our sites, brand recognition, and ultimately buzz and link-love.

Sadly, however, there is a dark side to social networking. This dark side is one that we’d rather not talk about because we are afraid we might see it within ourselves. What could possibly be so scary? I call it the swirling vortex of social networking.

Using the Science of Social Proof in SEO

I’ve written about Robert Cialdini in the past and how his six persuasion principles can be used in search marketing. Briefly, the six principles are Liking, Reciprocity, Social Proof, Consistency, Authority, and Scarcity. All six are worth spending some serious study time with, but today I want to focus on just one – Social Proof.

Tracking Site Page Importance Via Crawl Cache Dates

A discussion centered around the realization that Google cache dates were the new PageRank and that crawl frequency is an excellent indicator of the importance of a page, which leads to an explanation in how to track this metric.

How To Create No-Fail Hot Content

Would you like your site content to rank well? Would you like your content to draw links like nails to a magnet? There is one strategy you can use to make sure the content you create is almost guaranteed to be a hit – and in the process it gathers backlinks and ranks well. This strategy isn’t some secret ninja tactic that would get your site banned if the search engines found out about it either. In fact, it’s a tactic that the search engines would be happy to recommend to all site owners.
And while the actual creation of the content may take some time and effort, the concept is extremely simple. So what is this awesome strategy?

Blueprint of a Successful SEO Campaign

The surest way to successfully construct a building is to follow a blueprint. A blueprint contains detailed plans and designs that enables skilled personnel to build the structure just from the blueprint. In the same way, a detailed set of plans is the surest way to build a successful search marketing campaign. And just like construction blueprints, while each SEO blueprint may be unique, each will also contain similar details to ensure success. What details should a search marketing blueprint contain?

SEO – Vital Inclusion to the Overall Marketing Mix

Companies are beginning to embrace SEO as a legitimate means of marketing, but they often throw a paltry amount of marketing dollars towards it, or they allocate most or all of the search budget to PPC only. That is a mistake, even for companies that don’t sell products or services online. Let’s take a look at some interesting statistics that will help show how important it is for companies to concentrate significant resources towards ranking well in the search engines’ organic rankings, which are the natural listings returned on the left side of the search results page.

When A Good Idea Goes Wrong – SEO Oopsies

If you search the Internet, you can find at least a few dozen lists that outline the common mistakes a newbie SEO might make. Just to make sure I don’t leave out the obligatory list, I’ll present it below. After that, however, I’ll detail what really happens when a beginner starts to see results from his or her first search marketing experiments.

How To: Evaluating Competition for New Site Niches

Think you have a great idea for a new website? One thing I always consider when I come up with the next idea is: How hard will it be to compete? The competition level will determine if I have the timepower and manpower to make the effort worthwhile for me. If the competition is so tough that it would require a massive amount of time, energy, personnel, or money, then I may decide that it’s just not worth pursuing. If it’s still worth pursuing, even with a huge amount of competition to face, then at least I know what an uphill battle it will be – and I can prepare for it accordingly.

The Plight of the Social Media Eskimo

A tale of an Eskimo receiving all the wrong kinds of gifts, and how she influenced the buyers into sending perfect ones instead – and how that translates into you controlling the social media attention your articles receive.

This next batch is a series of posts I’ve done for SEO Chicks. Keep in mind that the SEO Chicks blog is a sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes just plain goofy look at the search world, so if some of these posts seem a little “less than professional”, that would be why.

Behavioral Based Ads Bad for Publishers and Scary for Users

Google just announced that it would start providing interest-based Adsense ads. I have a bit of experience with being a publisher that serves ad based on past user behavior and interests. That experience isn’t a very good one. If you are in the mood, follow along as I tell you my little tale of how behavior-based ads can be bad for everyone. (*names changed to protect the guilty and the innocent)

Dr. Phil Would Tell You That Stubborness Won’t Get You Higher Rankings

(A semi-fictional tale)

Despite the many changes, some folks just refuse to let go of the things they long to hold onto. Let’s consider the case of someone I like to call “Mr. Stubborn”.

If Google Is Unable to Remember Its Own Rules

Google, really, you just can’t expect everyone in the universe who owns a web site to follow your rules. You’ve just proven that by not following your own rules.

Finding SEO Inspiration

To be successful with your SEO campaign, you need to see beyond the simplistic ABC’s of search – looking past the typical optimization rules to get inspired. Find inspiration outside of the (chiclet) box, and you’ll likely find ways to improve both rankings and conversions!

Lets Call This Hypocrite Day Shall We?

There’s nothing new about this post. It’s been said before. But for those who still confuse ethics with believing whatever line of bull the search engines might be throwing out for their own betterment, I wanted to just put out a little reminder on this fine April day.

Link Building Ideas for the Link Building-Challenged

Since link building is about as fun as ripping off your own toenails with pliers, I thought it might be useful to spark some creative ideas into the heads of poor, depressed link builders. You know who you are. So without further ado, or maybe with lots of further ado, it depends on my mood …

The Evolution of a Newbie SEO

All the stages a noob goes through while learning SEO

SEO Conferences: Good Deal or No Deal?

I love SEO Conferences, but there’s a good possibility I’ll never attend another one. Why? Well, for one thing, after I tick off all the conference hosts today with this post, the SEO bouncers might block me from entering. But in reality, I may never go to another conference because the prices are just too freaking high. (please bear with me on this long rant, because really, you’ve GOT to read it all�seriously)

The Long Cold Wintery Days of SEO

The long, cold wintery days hold the same lures for SEOs. Trapped inside, bundled in warm, fuzzy pajamas or long-johns, the SEO prepares to strut his stuff. The goal: to seduce a bot into believing he holds the key to its spider-heart. Unfortunately, his mastery of the SEO process can be broken down into the same three primary stages as the lover.

Also, since most of these are SEO related, I thought I’d throw in a few posts that I wrote on my old SEO Scoop blog that might interest anyone interested in the above…

The 5 Goals of a Search Optimized Page

“How do I get my site to rank well?”. Start with understanding these 5 goals of a search optimized page, and then expand your knowledge with the resources compiled in the Beginner and Comprehensive Guides to SEO, Link Building, PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Blogging post.

Beginner and Comprehensive Guides to SEO, Link Building, PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Blogging

A quick roundup of ebooks and guides, both free and paid, that would be useful for anyone wanting organized how-to info to study on SEO, affiliate marketing, etc.

SEO for WordPress

The HTML version of a presentation I did at WordCamp Birmingham in 2008 which was all about, well, SEO for WordPress.

Finally, you might want to check out some of the back issues of Personal Branding Magazine to read my articles that focus on combining personal branding with SEO, along with fantastic articles from lots of other writers as well. Hope some of those are useful to some of you.

© DazzlinDonna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Some ideas from SEP’s blog post include cleaning up your subject categories, finding and repairing broken links, remove widgets and plugins that are outdated, and update your copyright notice.

The one thing I suggest we all do is take an objective look at our sites, and de-uglify them as much as possible.

What? De-uglify is not a word? Sure it is! Well, it is now anyway.

If you’ve added lots of widgets and such that ended up turning your pristine site into a mishmash of ugliness, be bold, be daring, and rip 90% of those uglifying widgets right out of there!

If you’ve used a layout or color scheme that looks like it was created in 1995 for a geocities site, consider updating it to a new, fresh layout with colors that don’t cause people to run screaming, “my eyes, my eyes!”.

Cleaning up your site accomplishes a lot of things in one go. It helps keep visitors on your site. It creates a better user experience which will likely lead to better conversions, more traffic, links, buzz, etc.

So let’s all participate tomorrow in Blog and Site Spring Cleaning Day. Who’s with me???!!!

© DazzlinDonna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh