Spiral Media - Search Engine Marketing Deconstructed

Reliable Web Hosting

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Adams-Spiral Media) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:34:00 -0400

If you are looking for reliable web hosting, I've got the solution for you. From my client work, I have long realized the importance of having a reliable and affordable web host that will work with you to help you understand the value in a hosting package and not just throw errant numbers and figures at you.

I've been using Lunar Pages as the host for all of my client's websites now for over 4 years and haven't had one issue with their service, features, or downtime. Now they've made their hosting service even more affordable by dropping hosting on both their 1 and 2 year annual plans to $4.95/month from $7.95 and $6.95 per month respectively.

That is only $118.80 for two years of reliable web hosting. That is amazing that a company can do all of that and still offer the most storage, the most bandwidth, the highest monthly data transfer amount and many other free and add-on features.

LunarPages by far is the leader in affordable web hosting and without a doubt is the answer I provide for all my clients web hosting needs.

Free domain for life
Free SSL certificate setup if the SSL is purchased through them
$775.00 in free stuff to add to your website to make it stronger
Free shopping cart software
Forums, blogs, ticket systems for customer support, etc.

It's all here at LunarPages, so check them out!

Fresh Content for your Site

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Adams-Spiral Media) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:19:00 -0400

Today I come to you with a great and helpful resource that can greatly enhance your ability to market your website to the search engines, but also get quality links back to your site. Here’s how it works…

The search engines love fresh content, more so, fresh relevant content, delivered to them regularly. Well, here is an easy and relatively pennies on the dollar way to deliver fresh content on your website regularly and also get links back to your site.

Niche Content delivers fresh written high quality articles for hundreds of topics at a great price. Go and grab the content and then use it to deliver fresh content onto your website in an article section, on a blog, on news pages, in a newsletter, or wherever else you can to get visitors back to your site.

The value is tremendous, not only are you serving up these great articles for the benefit of your site visitors and subscribers, but you are also serving up fresh, relevant content to the search engines,,,and they love fresh, relevant content. Make sure you sprinkle in some keywords before you post so the search engines know to rank your site for this content and these keywords.

In addition to the great content you will be serving up on your site, there is still another way to have these articles benefit your website. There are literally hundreds of quality article directories out there on the Internet looking to post high quality content rich articles. Rework your articles in order to make them unique and then post these with byline links back to your website. A great way to get relevant and high quality links back to your site.

Check out Niche Content and deliver an increase in the organic rankings for your website.

Got questions that need answers? Ask them in the comments and I’ll get back to you asap.

Affiliate Programs

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Adams-Spiral Media) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:38:00 -0400

Hello,

It has been a while since my last post and for that I apologize. I have been extremely busy working on projects for clients and moving into my new house this summer, which has not left me much time to invest in blogging.

Today I am back with my take on a new software I recently employed for a client. The software is for starting an affiliate program and it's called Post Affiliate Pro.

I researched quite a few different affiliate programs before I settled on Post Affiliate Pro. It has been a great product to work with and it comes highly recommended for its ease of use, setup and maintenance. Any successful affiliate program needs to have a few key elements involved to make it effective. The first is the ability to customize the appearance to mesh well with the rest of the site. Post Affiliate Pro has the ability to do that, but you need to know some html in order to be successful.

The next important facet is the ease of use by potential affiliates to sign up and monitor their commissions. Post Affiliate Pro excels in this area and makes it extremely easy and logical for any affiliate to be able to keep track of everything related to the program. The third logical facet of a successful affiliate program is the program's ability to attract and track the affiliates. Post Affiliate Pro does this extremely well and makes it easy to create banners for affiliates to grab. It assigns what are called hop or tracking links for each affiliate and the software does the rest.

I will expand my review as I get further into the program. This client has just signed on and therefore we are only in the early stages of development on this, but stay tuned as more details from my use arise, I will report them here.

Creating and Selling Digital Assets

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Adams-Spiral Media) — Mon, 19 May 2008 19:56:00 -0400

One of the fastest growing trends online today is the packaging of knowledge. Knowledge is valuable and many are investing their time in learning what it takes to create, package, and sell their "digital assets".

What exactly are "digital assets"? The term is defined at Wikipedia as "any form of content and/or media that has been formatted into a binary source which include the right to use it." This can be in the form of textual works, images, video, and other multimedia. Leveraging the power of knowledge and packaging it for sale is a great way to provide information inexpensively to others and to harness the power of your online resources.

One of the most popular "digital assets" is the e-book. The ebook is a simpler way to deliver relevant information over the web and a great alternative to traditional printed publications. To get started with creating an ebook, you need writing software. Yes Microsoft Word and WordPad can be used, but for those who wish to be guided a little there is a great number of software solutions available online.

The one I use and think highly of is e-Book Starter. This program will guide you through the ebook creation process step by step and deliver a great finished product, complete with security codes and restrictions to protect your work.

Ebook Starter will enable anyone to create a professional looking ebook with absolutely no design experience. You can use the six step publishing wizard or simply create ebooks using easy to follow 'Help' files.

But, that's not all. eBook Starter provides users with a wide variety of professionally designed ebook templates that will give their ebooks the look and feel of a real book, notebook, manual or report.

If you are serious about expanding the potential to make money online, then the packaging of your knowledge into "digital assets" is the key. Once created, your ebook needs to be marketed just like any other product and you must have the ability to sell the ebook online.

There are two great e-commerce products available that will allow you to inexpensively sell your ebooks online. You can check them out for yourselves and see that within 10 minutes, you too can have the ability to sell via the web. It's just that easy.

To learn more visit ShareIt.com or KickStartCart.com today!!

You can easily harness the power of the resources available online to start generating income from your knowledge. Get writing and look for our ebook on Harnessing The Power of Social Media, coming soon!!!

Advice from the Media Mavens at Bisson Barcelona: Blog Gadgets/Widgets#links#links

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Adams-Spiral Media) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:51:00 -0400

Advice from the Media Mavens at Bisson Barcelona: Blog Gadgets/Widgets

Blogging Clinic in April

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Adams-Spiral Media) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:36:00 -0400

Starting on April 8, Bisson Barcelona will be offering hands-on instructional clinics for creating a blog and RSS feed.

Ben Adams online promotion and search marketing expert and owner of Spiral Media, will be teaching these clinics. Participants will leave with a completed blog and RSS feed!

Each clinic will run from 6:30pm - 8:30pm and will be held in the computer lab, room 253 at Barrington Middle School, 20 Haley Drive, Barrington, NH. Each clinic islimited to 24 participants.

Act fast! Because we expect this to be a guaranteed sell out with a waiting list, we are offering you an incentive as a way of saying Thank You!

Sign up for one clinic and receive $25 off, sign up for two clinics and receive $40 off. In addition, if you sign up a friend, they will receive the same discount. This is a savings of over $500 from having a professional set up your blog and RSS feed for you. Attendees who register for two or more clinics will receive a 512 mg USB 2.0 Flashdrive that will include additional information and resources for understanding blog promotion (a $50 value).

**Participation in a blog and RSS feed clinic is essential if you plan to attend the How to Make Money with Your Blog<http://www.bissonbarcelona.com/clinics/may08-blogging.htm> clinic in May.**

For more information, click here…><http://www.bissonbarcelona.com/clinics/april08-blogging.htm>

For questions, or to register and receive your discount, call 603 664-5776 or respond to this email.

Hope to see you in April!

Search Engine Marketing Specialties

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Adams-Spiral Media) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:29:00 -0400

There are many areas of importance to an up and coming search engine marketer to make yourself more marketable to clients or an agency. We all know that on page search engine optimization is a starting point for many newbies in the industry, but this area is flooded with those who feel that their skills and techniques are far superior. Therefore I feel this is an area to add to your skillset, but not focus your energy on becoming the best. There are many other disciplines within the online marketing and promotion realm that can provide you a better chance of succeeding in this career path.

Below are a few areas of study that would be a huge opportunity for anyone who wants to stand out from the crowd to learn more about.

1. Analytics - Still one of the most important aspects of any web site to justify ad spend or online marketing resource allocation. The backbone of any online campaign and any website that truly knows how to convert customers. Good ones to learn are Site Catalyst from Omniture, Web Side Story's Hitbox, Google Analytics, ClickTracks, or WebTrends.

2. Social Media Marketing - With all the new types of social media sites available and their overwhelming popularity with younger generations this online avenue will continue to grow for marketing experts who want to find new and creative ways to reach this target market for years to come. Some of the sites to check out are MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, etc.

3. Widgets & RSS Feeds - This on demand technology brings content to the user and is constantly evolving in scope and popularity. Imagine the possibilities if you have the ability to develop a widget that a business can use to help bring content to their user base and to their desktops. Integrating these widgets with the RSS technology strengthens both the delivery method and the ease of use.

4. Blogs - Obviously well known for their marketing and promotion abilities, these personal journals are and online masterpiece of technology allowing everyone to create a space for themselves online for little or no cost.

5. Microsites - These small version websites are chalk full of dynamic content and work well to deliver a special piece of the online marketing and exposure puzzle for many larger companies that utilize the technology and marketing ability of them daily. There is a lot to learn for up and comers to help sites maximize their online presence using these microsites.

6. Social Tagging - One of the most fascinating new online technologies is social tagging. Sites like Digg and Del.icio.us allow the Internet to be compiled into one location that is different for all of us and yet allows each individual to share within the community setting. Brilliant, and a geat marketing weapon for your own content.

7. Of course there are many more...Community forums, CMS sites, peer-to-peer sharing, photo capture sites, online affiliate program development, e-mail campaigns, sponsored campaign management, etc.

Strengthen your knowledge in any of these areas, and reap the rewards as the online scene continues to take over how companies market their products and services to an ever changing world and a rapdily evolving and technologically savvy consumer base.

Google's Subscribed Links

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Adams-Spiral Media) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:38:00 -0500

Google has a new tool that they have launched called Subscribed Links. I've just recently placed the button onto a clients website and don't know the results. We'll have to wait and see.

How does it work? Well, you simply create search results specific to your product or service, industry or expertise and place keywords related to the ads for Google to help rank your search result ad of sorts.

You place a button that looks like the button above and when a visitor to your site clicks on the button they will be taken to a Google page where they can subscribe to your search results. Henceforth, each time they search for any keyword you have labeled in your Google subscribed links, your search results pop up at the top of their results page.

Those are the basics. There are many advanced elements to it including images and dynamic content that you can catalog with the results and that might make the difference in many industries.

Sounds great in theory if you can get your visitors to subscribe, but that is where the jury is still out. How easy will it be to get subscribers? I guess it is easy in some industries where you can generate dramatic results with images and feed results thru and RSS, but for others it might produce no results.

I invite everyone to test out the new tool and comment on it here to allow others some insight on your experiences, hits and misses, likes and dislikes.

Welcome!

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Adams-Spiral Media) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:26:00 -0500

Search Engine Marketing Deconstructed brings you closer to the here and now, myths and truths and heresy of the search marketing industry. A checks and balances of sorts from someone who has been in the industry mixing it up for years and plans to be here for many more.

A little bout me....I have been marketing websites for about 7 years now and developing them for more than 10. I can't say I've seen everything there is in these two constantly evolving disciplines, but I can say that I seen a lot of what is wrong in the industry and why so many clients don't have a good respect for what hard working seo'ers do.

The industry has been saturated by hacks of all types and this has led to the stigma that some of us run up against on a consistent basis that search engine marketing has no value and that those within are crooks.

Has anyone come up against this? I'd love to hear from you....Share your story here so we can work together to deconstruct these errors in classification and right the wrongs of the many who have saturated this industry and tainted it for the few.

This is not a rant, but rather the humble beginnings to a larger project where we will seek out ways to strengthen our position within the framework of the industry and educate the people looking to hire and work with reputable firms to generate quality results and consistentency in our work.