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Do you Write Outlines for Your Blog Posts?

2009-11-10T02:21:00.000-08:00

Do you plan your posts or do you just write them free flow as they come?

This is a question that one of our members at ProBlogger.com (Mark Dykeman) started off a conversation with in the last week.

Mark talked in the thread about how he does both (sometimes he uses bullet points for his main points and then writes on each point while other times it just comes) – but I thought it’d be an interesting question to open up to everyone.

What’s your approach?

My own approach is mixed and sometimes starts with one approach and ends up as the other but in general the way I work depends upon the type of post:

Pillar Content – in most cases if I’m setting out to write what I refer to as ‘pillar content’ (or a big post that is on a central theme of my blog) I generally like to have some kind of plan before I start. Like Mark I’ll usually start out with a list of points that I want to cover that I’ve brainstormed (and perhaps a quick note or two on each). Then I work systematically through the points one by one and write a paragraph or two on each.

Other Posts – other posts that are not quite as structure in their form tend to be written in a more freely written way. For example if news breaks on something relevant to my niche I will generally bounce off a press release or another blogger with a few of my own thoughts. If the post is like this one and is more of a ‘reader question’ type posts I again will usually write it without a formal outline.

I should say that often my posts are a bit of both. Sometimes I’ll be halfway through writing a free flow/non outline post and I’ll suddenly be hit with inspiration for about 5 other things that I’ll want to say in the post. I generally stop writing at this point and capture the points that I want to cover and in doing so write a bit of an outline for the rest of the post before coming back to where I was.

Other times I might be writing a post that I’ve got an outline for and the post will evolve in a direction that makes a lot of the points I’ve outlined irrelevant and I’ll scrap them (or at least put them aside for a future post).

What about you?

Are you someone who plans posts in detail? Or do you write best when you’re writing in a more freely flowing style?

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/11/09/do-you-write-outlines-for-your-blog-posts/

Cutting Rank: How an Improper Domain Name Redirect Can Forfeit Your Top Rankings

2009-11-09T02:59:00.000-08:00

Can my site rank better with a keyword-rich domain name? Sure.

Can my site rank better without a keyword in the domain name at all? Absolutely.

I get questions (or assumptions) like this regularly. Actually, there are many other things going on behind the scenes that impact rank, and the domain name is rarely a significant factor.

Let's say your website has been out there for 6 months or more and you assume, for whatever reason, that you can get a higher search engine ranking if you were using a keyword in your domain name instead of the one you have. In addition to your company web domain, maindomain.com, you rush to purchase keyword1.com, keyword2.com and keyword3.com.

From Google's perspective, there is both a good way and a detrimental way to assign these additional domain names to your site. This can cause a much greater problem in terms of organic ranking if you get it wrong in terms of duplicate content and trust. Have you ever heard of duplicate content? Which domain name does Google have more history and trust with, your current domain name or one you just bought?

Common methods webmasters use to point multiple domain names to your web server include:

• Domain Mirroring/Masking
• Domain Cloaking
• Domain Alias/URL Alias
• Domain Redirecting

Domain mirroring/masking is sometimes called a pointer domain. It looks like it is the domain name when it is used in a browser, but it is simply a mask overlaying the real domain name and its content. When someone types in www.domain.com, it's really forwarding to domain.blogspot.com without the address changing in the address bar. The user continues to see www.domain.com in the address bar, although the site and its contents are really from domain.blogspot.com.

Domain cloaking uses an iframe or embedded frameset to display the content of another site.

Domain redirecting (also called URL redirecting) requires all traffic that is sent through the new domain name to be redirected to the main domain name. This can also be a domain redirected to a subdirectory of the main domain, or multiple domains redirected to a complex URL. This is different from domain mirroring/masking and domain cloaking because, when a user types in www.domain.com, they end up on www.maindomain.com and the address changes appropriately in the address bar.

But, let's back up a second and look at the issues you must consider before making this decision.

1. To limit confusion, it's better to change the brand (or company) name to better reflect the keyword-rich domain name. This could be as simple as recreating the company logo, but you might consult your customer base first.

2. The technical procedure of redirecting domain names must be done so that the search engines do not get confused about what you are trying to do. Otherwise, you risk tripping a duplicate content filter, which would force Google to accept only one domain with that content (explained below). But the biggest risk is setting off an alarm at Google that you are trying to trick them to get a better rank.

Just for fun, let's say you've gone through the trouble of changing the company name to reflect your new keyword-rich domain. Now it's time to get technical.

If you use any method other than domain redirecting, you are going to be disappointed with your search rank. Domain mirroring, masking, cloaking and aliases confuse search engines because they see the same content under a different domain name. Google then selects one of the domain names to display that content and leaves the others out of the search results. Google chooses for you - since you are not aware of how to manage your duplicate content issues - and no one knows which domain name Google will choose. You could be saying "bye-bye" to all the hard-earned link juice pointed at your main domain name.

The more serious issue with domain mirroring/masking is the probability that Google suspects you are trying to manipulate search rank by suddenly using keywords in additional domain names. The result is either loss of whatever good ranking you did have or your site is banned from Google altogether. Ouch!

This is precisely what happened with a client. Despite my warnings, but thinking they might change the company name eventually, they bought additional keyword-rich domain names and had the webmaster point them at their server (using domain masking). Within a couple weeks Google dropped their domain ranking across the board, but did not ban them.

Of course they came to me with their issue. I gently reminded them about how this should have been done, redirected the domain names properly (using a 301 redirect) and asked them to consult me next time they're considering a marketing or technical decision regarding the website. It took about 6 weeks - a long and painful 6 weeks - for Google to restore their good rank again.

When a company acquires additional domain names, they should be permanently redirected to the main domain name - the one, central location on the web for all of the company's or brand's content.

Redirecting a domain name should be handled differently depending on the type of server hosting your site (Apache or Windows), how much control you have over that server (hosted on a shared or dedicated server) and the purpose of the redirected domain name.

About The Author
Tom Shivers is an SEO consultant and president of Capture Commerce, Inc. - a professional SEO company focused on tailored Internet marketing.

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Blogging is Rocket Science

2009-11-08T08:43:00.001-08:00

Today’s post is by Kevin Sanders of Strong and Fit.

Do you ever have those moments when seemingly random, unrelated thoughts kind of merge together in your mind? This happened to me a couple of weeks ago.

I remembered a documentary I watched on the space shuttle years ago. Something was said about the percentage of fuel it burns within the first two minutes of liftoff. It stuck in my mind and I tried to find the information on Google. No luck. Then I remembered that one of my family members (Dale Hutchens, Ph.D.) works with NASA. He is a chemical engineer who was directly involved with developing the shuttle’s solid rockets. He gave me a quick estimate:

For launch, the solids provide the vast, vast majority the total LAUNCH thrust. The solids burn out in 2 minutes and 12 seconds, if memory serves. Each solid holds 1.1 million pounds of propellant. Therefore, in the first minute, you probably burn something more than 50% of the solids, or 41-ish % of the total fuel. A more certain number is that in 2 minutes and 12 seconds you have burned all the solids (2.2 million pounds) and close to 380,000 pounds (out of 1.6 million pounds) of the liquid, for a total of 67% of the total fuel.

The space shuttle burns most of its fuel within the first two minutes of flight! The science geek in me thinks this really cool.

What does this have to do with blogging? Stay with me.

I began thinking about some things I’ve learned on this blog. A few weeks ago Darren said problogger.net is kind of in maintenance mode (my paraphrase). In other words, it doesn’t require the same amount of work it used to. John Chow said something very similar in his video seminar—he now works about two hours a day.

But both bloggers spent a lot more time and energy getting things started.

In some ways, blogging is like the space shuttle—a great deal of effort is required to get it “off the ground.”

Think about some of the steps a typical blogger would take during the first six months of creating a new blog:

Choosing a topic (big one).
Choosing a platform and design.
Choosing a name/domain.
Writing/creating a hundred posts (assuming an average of four posts a week).
Registering with digg, stumbleupon, twitter, etc.
Participating in forums.
Leaving comments/backlinks on other blogs.
Writing guest posts for other bloggers.
Registering with directories (such as blogcatalog).
Spreading the word on social networks (facebook, etc).
Developing a core of followers.
Setting up a newsletter.
Printing business cards with your blog address.
Telling your friends about your new blog.
Finding appropriate affiliate programs.

These are just a few steps that come to mind. When you think about the cumulative effort, it’s a lot of work.

Maybe this is one reason some blogs never make it very far—some bloggers just don’t realize the initial effort that’s required on the “front end.” Or maybe they don’t realize things will get easier (or at least more productive) over time as their blog gains momentum.

As I’ve mentioned before (both here and on the forum), it took about six or seven months for me to see significant traffic on Strong and Fit, my fitness blog. It still requires effort, but I’m now seeing more results with less work (in terms of traffic and income).

OK, I’ll admit it—blogging isn’t really rocket science. But we sure can learn from it.

The Paint By Numbers Guide To Artful Blogging

2009-11-07T09:05:00.002-08:00

A Guest Post by Greg Hayes from Live Fit Blog.

Do you subscribe to the idea that blogging is an art form? I do.

Britannica Online defines art as “The use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others.”

If you’re a blogger, then by definition, you most certainly engage in the following activities during the creation of content:

Creative Writing
Web Page Design (Aesthetics)
Idea Development (Novelty)
Social Media (Shared Experiences)

When we start our blog, we read the A-list bloggers, and they repeat the mantra of blogging, “CON-tent, CON-tent, CON-tent!” Yet, its so easy to get caught up in the allure of unique visitors, page views, and keyword content. All the background noise distracts us from the core of what we do, which is, in reality, a form of art.

Creative Writing

Like all other forms of art, the gift of creative writing is enhanced through practice and study. Research into the habits of many successful authors shows that most are well-read people. Reading the work of others shapes your own creative writing skills. Being well read keeps ideas flowing, and prompts you to expand your skills.

In the online realm, read the works of Copyblogger, Write to Done, and Men With Pens. These are places to hone your writing skills. There are others as well. Seek them out.They are masters at the craft of writing, and just like any student, studying will hone your skills.

Web Page Design

The artistry of blog design can take many forms. For instance, what experience do you hope to provide for your readers. If you look at Zen Habits, you’ll find a very clean design, with a strong focus on core content. Leo Babauta’s page design clearly adheres to the theme of his content, which is minimalistic in nature.

By contrast, John Chow’s site is geared toward the process of making money online. Readers should expect to find more advertisements and promotional materials. This is consistent with the experience John Chow is attempting to create for his readers.

These are just two examples. The point here is to choose a blog design that is consistent with the experience you want to create for your reader. Within those constraints, the options are endless.

Idea Development

The odds of choosing a truly novel niche are slim. There are very few subjects around the net that haven’t been covered in some detail. But, the same holds true for painting. Paintings of women are a dime a dozen. But there is only one Mona Lisa.

The process of creating a work of art demands novelty. No matter how crowded your niche, the experience you provide for your readers is what will differentiate you from the crowd. So, whatever you do, DON’T try to copy the success of others. Instead, study the success of other artists. Learn from them. Then apply what you learn in your own unique way to provide something new and fresh for your audience.

Social Media

Works of art are meant to be shared with others. What value would the works of Van Gogh or da Vinci bring to the world if they were secreted away, never to be seen again? The same holds true for your blog. Get out there and socialize with others in the online community. Take advantage of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and all the others to share your work with the world. Revel in both the praise and critique of your works. It’s all part of the process.

Blogging is a unique art form. It blends aspects of creative design, writing, technical development, graphic media, and other skills to create something new and unique for readers around the world. It provides a novel, open platform for sharing new ideas. Take advantage and push the form to its limits. This is the essence of artistry.

About the author: Greg Hayes writes Live Fit Blog, a blog with tips about living a balanced lifestyle, fitness, what it means to be a father, friend, husband, and much more.

Six Ways To Make More Money As An Affiliate

2009-11-07T09:05:00.001-08:00

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that affiliate marketing is the easiest way to make money online. You don’t have to create a product or develop a service, you don’t need huge amounts of focused traffic the way you do with AdSense, (I started using AdSense a year ago and just recently passed the $100 minimum payout), and you don’t need to do a ton of advertising or SEO to make it work.

All you really need is an audience to whom you can refer products and services.

Of course, the above statement is true in the same way it’s true that you only need food, water, and shelter to live. It’s technically accurate — but personally, I’d like to have Netflix and a few Twix bars, too.

I made around $20,000 in my first six months from affiliate marketing, and the following are a six tips I’ve found that will take you from bare bones to a legit affiliate income.

1. Establish trust

Technically, you can make a few bucks here and there even by tossing out links to people who don’t know and/or like you. I think of these as “cookie toss” sales, because most affiliate setups dictate that each time a person clicks on an affiliate link, that affiliate’s cookie (which identifies the customer as “belonging” to that affiliate) overwrites any previous cookies on the customer’s computer. If you’re on Twitter during a launch and toss out a bunch of affiliate links for the product that everyone is promoting, there’s a chance that your link will be the last link someone uses before buying. You didn’t really refer the sale; you lucked into it.

A far better way to go is to actually have some credibility with your readers, audience, and peers. If you have a blog, work on building bulletproof trust with your readers. If you’re on Twitter, tweet with some integrity, and be a real person rather than a selling drone. If your people like and respect you, they will believe you when you say a product or service is worth buying.

2. Promote only products you honestly believe in

Don’t be a shill. Once you start promoting as an affiliate, you’ll quickly discover how many things are out there to promote. If you hop on every one, your people will turn away because they’re always being sold to. Worse, they won’t believe that your recommendations have any merit because you’ll recommend anything. There are plenty of good things out there, so be a true “raving fan” of a product you like rather than a hawker.

3. Don’t promise the moon (i.e. tell the truth)

No product or service is perfect, so don’t pretend it is. There is a strong tendency (especially in online marketing) to oversell. Everybody’s course will triple your income in two days; every program is guaranteed to whiten your teeth and wax your new Ferrari while filling your hot tub with supermodels. People are smarter than to believe the BS, so don’t feed it to them. (And as a bonus, if you tell the truth, you’ll sleep better at night.)

If you want to go really nuts with this principle, you can take the contrarian’s approach like I did when I promoted a course by pointing out its foibles and the fact that you may well totally fail online. (By the way, I ended up being the top-selling affiliate for that course.)

5. Disclose your affiliate relationships

This really isn’t a bonus item anymore, actually. The Federal Trade Commission is now saying that bloggers must disclose that they will make money if people buy through their affiliate links.

The good news is that disclosure can be a good thing if you’ve established trust already. Loyal readers won’t care that you’ll benefit if they believe that your praise of the product is honest, or if they were planning to buy anyway.

6. Offer bonuses

This is a great one. Recently, I offered to give my $297 Zero to Business program to anyone who used my affiliate links to buy Copyblogger’s Teaching Sells course, which I honestly think is spectacular. Because my course added almost $300 in value to their purchase, customers loved it. And because the commission for Teaching Sells exceeded the price of Z2B, I loved it.

I think the biggest, simplest key to affiliate marketing is honesty and integrity. If you lie, yes, you may make sales — but those people who were lied to will never buy through you again. If on the other hand you build relationships and tell the truth, affiliate marketing results in a natural synergy. You refer people to good products that they will enjoy and benefit from. When they buy, you benefit, too. And when they benefit, they come back to thank you from the referral. In all likelihood, they’ll trust your future recommendations in the future — and then everyone benefits again.

Hey, it beats a plain old “food, shelter, and water” existence, right?

——–

Johnny B. Truant writes about online business, turkeys, and occasionally SpongeBob SquarePants’ pet snail at JohnnyBTruant.com. He invites cool folks to join his laid-back Jam Sessions call series and to connect with him on Twitter @johnnybtruant.

Windows 7 Release

2009-11-06T03:05:00.001-08:00

November 05, 2009

Experian Hitwise’s resident gadget, expert Client Intelligence Analyst Richard Seymour, takes a look at the online reaction to the Microsoft’s Windows 7 launch last week.

Using the Experian Hitwise Hot Consumer Electronics List, we saw that during the week ending 24th October - launch week for Microsoft’s new flagship operating system - 28% of all software searches were for Microsoft Windows 7 terms, overtaking the categories perennial leader Apple iTunes. A week later (w/e 31/10/09) and after the hype had settled, searches for Windows 7 still topped those of iTunes though the gap had closed. Microsoft’s product accounted for 21% of software searches, compared with 17% for Apple’s music software.

The top Windows 7 search terms for the week ending 24th October 2009 were:

1. ‘windows 7’
2. ‘windows 7 download’
3. ‘windows 7 review’
4. ‘windows 7 upgrade’
5. ‘windows 7 release date’

The increase in searches for Windows 7 resulted in a 28% increase in searches for software as a whole, making software more searched for than video games for the first time. The chart below shows this increase in software searches compared to searches over the previous 12 months, with the Christmas shopping season the only point in the last year where searches were above Windows 7 launch time. Not surprisingly, the Microsoft Windows official site received most traffic (10%) from our software portfolio for the week ending 24/10/09.

The Windows 7 launch also stimulated searches for computers, as the chart below illustrates. Searches for laptops, desktop computers and general computer terms all increased during the week ending 24th October - especially laptops, with new terms including ‘windows 7 laptops’, ‘windows 7 laptop’, ‘laptops with windows 7’, ‘laptop windows 7’, and ‘netbook windows 7’. Dell EMEA received most traffic (9.5%) from the laptop search terms, and the computer manufacturer also benefited from the new software release. Dell’s Windows Upgrade program resulted in with the appearance of new search terms such as ‘dell windows 7’, and ‘dell windows 7 free upgrade’.

Looking at the latest data we can see that this increase in searches has been maintained, it wasn’t just a one-week blip during the fanfare of the launch. This data is included in our recent Experian Hitwise Webinar: The Online Consumer Landscape in the run up to Christmas which you can view here for free

Real-Time Search - 5 Reasons Why

2009-11-06T02:38:00.000-08:00

If you don't understand why the Real Time Web is huge, you will soon.

Thanks to micro-blogging sites like Twitter, a constant stream of human-posted content has infiltrated the Web. This growing infiltration has created a bottoms up approach to content creation that via the progressive support of rapidly developing applications has and will continue to empower every individual to co-create what is deemed as "important" on the Web. The Real Time Web serves as both the database that informs us of what is happening right "Now" and the human touch to the content that will compete with the traditional algorithms for what is deemed as "valuable" content to us all.

Its challenges lie in the filtration and mass integration of both the content and the act of sharing to the Real Time Web. There remain major aspects of the Web that have not yet integrated "searching" and "sharing" of the Real Time Web, including traditional search. But as filtration and integration progress the Web will take the form of a living breathing database.

Here are 5 reasons why Real Time Search will help the Real Time movement change the Web and your experience forever.

1. The "Now" Factor

We saw it with Michael Jackson's passing. We saw it with the Iran Protests and we see it more and more everyday -- the Real Time web provides us with what is happening right "Now" and with vivid detail from around the globe. "We" is driving the "Now" factor.

2. We Become Co-Creators

The Real-Time web offers us the ability to become co-creators in not only content but also in what is deemed important. Why? Because we decide what is worth sharing, discussing and having opinions on. This behavior serves as a natural selection of valuable content. Certainly the current web allows for creation of content, but what is deemed as important/valuable is mostly left up to a few individuals, organizations and a bunch of robots. The Real-Time web, once fully integrated, will change that.

3. Humans vs Machines

Have you ever clicked on blue links that lead you to a piece of content dating back to a year ago? Search results lose relevancy each day due to the amount of new content hitting the internet. Spiders, web crawlers and engines decide what content is relevant via algorithms and those results can be manipulated via intelligently structured content (SEO). Real-time search enables users to receive information via conversations and people instead of machines. Take a look at your web results today. Would you rather receive cold content determined by algorithms or what the crowd and people value as good and bad?

4. Facebook Factor

With over 300 million users creating and wrapping themselves around content, once Facebook opens up its search API to the web what do you think will happen? Better yet do you think there is value in being able to search a database of 300 million users' opinions and experiences? Searching Facebook may be the factor that tips the overall experience of the web into one that is very different than today. Facebook may be the tipping point to where bottoms up (sharing & contributing) will go head to head with tops down (crawling & optimizing).

5. A New Breed of Search Engines

If there existed a search engine that was capable of aggregating and rendering results based on what was shared, peoples opinions and conversations, would you be interested in that search engine? If you knew that there were 6 conversations that provided a fantastic account of a design firm you were considering would that be more valuable to you than the top 3 links on your current search engine results? Would you have more value for SEO based search results or human conversation driven results? How about both? Real-Time search, once developed, will render a new breed of search engines that will capture this new value the New Web has to offer.

At the moment, Real Time Search is only in its infancy, as is the Real Time web. Twitter and the like are simply representations of a big movement that will continue to occur with the creation of more similar services, more adoption of those services and more integration of those services.

What is clear is that our daily use of the Real Time Web's driving platforms -- Twitter, Facebook and the like -- is unprecedented. The Internet is no longer simply just a disconnected 3rd party container of tops down aggregation, "We" is now part of its determination. And, search as we know it will soon change to accommodate, thereby delivering a completely different experience of the Web.

About The Author
Ben Behrouzi has over 12 years in building and managing startups, building management teams, developing core technology infrastructure and leading product design and architecture. http://www.leapfish.com

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Video SEO - A Neglected Path To Higher Search Rankings

2009-11-06T02:35:00.000-08:00

Video SEO is an underutilized search engine marketing strategy. Even as videos continue to gain significant traction in the search engines' natural listings, most companies either ignore them, or remain completely unaware of their potency. That oversight represents a valuable edge your company can use to leapfrog your competitors in the organic rankings.

The strategy blends traditional search optimization tactics with a relatively new platform. With the rise of YouTube, Revver, Blip, and similar video sites, consumption patterns have driven the search engines to provide these sites with greater ranking authority. As long as your primary objective is clearly established, a video SEO campaign can have a dramatic effect on your exposure in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

In this article, we'll explain why you should integrate video SEO into your current search marketing strategy. We will also provide a few ingredients that will help you avoid potential pitfalls along the way. Last, you will learn what to look out for when choosing a video SEO company that can drive traffic and conversions.

How Video SEO Improves Your Search Exposure

Before Google released their Universal Search platform in May 2007, their natural listings were dominated by text-based pages. Videos were rare in the top spots. Universal Search changed the way Google displayed their primary index. Google, Yahoo, and Bing now include entries from their respective video search platforms. What's more, popular video-sharing sites have been given higher ranking authority and increased link weight (we'll describe this latter point in a moment).

Video SEO gives you greater exposure in the search engines through two levers. First, it caters to the algorithm used for Universal Search. By allowing syndication of your videos to authoritative video-sharing sites, you will enjoy more exposure through their increased ranking authority. In effect, those sites will rank higher, drawing more people to your videos.

Second, videos that are placed on your site (as opposed to syndicating them) attract links - both directly and indirectly. As your videos gain popularity, direct links will naturally build, pointing to the pages on your site that host the videos. Indirect links will point from other sites whose owners have embedded your videos. As a result, your inbound link profile will continue to grow and strengthen, lifting your site higher within the search engines' organic listings.

3 SEO Video Tips To Capture Higher Search Positions

Your video SEO campaign can only be effective if you recognize the limitations of the search engines. First, their algorithms cannot read lips. In order to rank for your target keywords, they must be available to the search engines' spiders in text form. If you're placing videos on your site, optimize your titles and surrounding text, and include an edited transcript of the video. If you're syndicating them, optimize your external titles and tags.

Second, focus on inbound links. An effective video SEO campaign relies on contextually related links pointing from a wide breadth of sites. Videos that spark a groundswell of attention - whether through entertainment, information, or controversy - can achieve this easily.

Third, integrate a social media sharing component. You want viewers to share your videos with their friends on Facebook. You want them to "Tweet" about your videos on Twitter. You want them to bookmark your videos on StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicious. These social media sites can form the backbone of your video SEO campaign, driving waves of inbound links to your site.

Key Factors In Choosing A Video SEO Company

Traditional search optimization is a mature strategy. SEO specialists have honed their craft for more than a decade. By contrast, video SEO is still an evolving science. Even though it leverages the core tenets of a traditional SEO campaign, the rise of social media and video-sharing sites have infused video SEO with enormous complexity. Hiring a video SEO company removes the need to keep up with the roiling landscape. The key is using the right criteria to identify a proficient firm.

A professional video SEO company should have an established track record that shows a keen grasp of the search engines' organic algorithms. That track record should also demonstrate an ability to evolve as the algorithms change. Many search optimization experts were completely unprepared for the debut of Universal Search. By extension, so too, were their clients.

Leveraging Video SEO For More Traffic And Higher Conversions

A carefully executed video SEO campaign can sharply improve your exposure within the search engine's natural listings. When implemented as a component of a multi-pronged search engine marketing campaign, it can drive more targeted traffíc to your site. Targeted traffíc translates into higher conversions. If you are not yet utilizing video SEO for your site, your current organic rankings may be more vulnerable than you realize.

About The Author
With 20 years in marketing, advertising and 10 years in internet marketing, Rostin Reagor Smith has refined the SEM SEO Expert Formula. Hundreds of internet marketing case studies have combined to build the formula that drives search engine ranking through Social Media Optimization, Online Reputation Management, Social Marketing and web 2.0 communities and resources. www.rostinreagorsmith.com

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14 Types of Stories You Can Tell On Your Blog

2009-11-06T02:30:00.000-08:00

Today we’ll look at 14 types of stories that you might like to try on your blog.

14 Types of stories can you tell on your blog

Personal Discovery Stories – tell how you discovered a lesson. These stories show your readers how similar you are to them and also might give some practical advice on how they might learn from your experience.
Stories as Analogies and Illustrations – tell a story that on the surface has nothing to do with your topic but which illustrates a principle that is relevant.
Success Stories – tell how you achieved something. These stories can be inspirational and motivating for your readers.
Failure Stories – I find that these stories are incredibly powerful – particularly if you are able to show some lessons learnt through a failure.
Tell Someone Else’s Story – sharing the journey of someone else and how/what they learned can be effective
How I did it Stories – these practical stories can be effective because they talk your readers through a process in a relatable way
Biographies – pick a key person in your niche and tell your readers that person’s story – pulling out useful parts that can be applied and used to enhance your readers lives.
Autobiographies – tell your own story from start to finish. I’ve done this a couple of times (example) and find readers really respond well to it. It can also be something to link to from your About Page for further reading.
Picture Stories – using images or video can be another great way of communicating a story because it engages the senses in a way that text can’t (similarly – audio posts/podcasts can do this too).
Case Studies – quite often pulling apart someone else’s experience in a case study can be a powerful way to connect with readers. Similarly you can use your own story, or the story of a project, brand or company that you had something to do with can be useful.
Fiction – if well written a made up and imaginative story can be a good way to lead into a post. You’ll probably want to come clean about the fact that it’s not true though :-)
Reader Stories – ask your readers to tell you their stories/experiences on a topic. You might kick things off with a short one of your own but then quickly hand it over to others to share.
Collective Stories – sometimes telling the story of a group of people, industry, niche etc can be very powerful. This might be presented as a ‘history of….’ your niche/industry which chronicles key developments over time. These pieces can almost become reference material for others in your industry.
Imagine If…. Stories – another type of story that I’ve seen used well on occasion is one where you get your reader to imagine a hypothetical scenario that they are in. Here’s an example of this where I told a story in the 2nd person (with YOU the reader as the main character). These posts can be particularly useful for getting readers to FEEL something or to help them to understand that the problem that you’re writing about is one that is personal for them.

I’m sure there are plenty of other types of stories to tell. Feel free to suggest your own in comments below. I’d also love to see examples of where you’ve tried some of these story telling techniques (and others) as part of your blogging and to hear your stories of how they went!

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/11/05/12-types-of-stories-you-can-tell-on-your-blog/

Canadian Banks Brand Association

2009-11-05T02:27:00.001-08:00

November 04, 2009

Internet search data can be an excellent input to understand what consumers associate with a brand name. Looking at the words that consumers include with a brand name in a search query provides insight into the products, services and attributes consumers associate wtih that brand. The data, updated weekly is far more timely and cost effective than the traditional phone surveys to measure brand association.

Today, I want to follow up on a post from last week to show what Canadians associate with the brand names of the big banks. The following table shows the top 10 branded search terms for the Big 5 banks in the twelve weeks to October 3, 2009.

It is not surprising that most consumers are searching first for online banking for all of the banks. We tend to use search engines to navigate the web and banking is no exception. There are a few other things of note, however:

- Bank of Montreal's Mastercard appears at #8 among search terms for Bank of Montreal, while credit card searches don't appear among most other bank search terms. Notice also the brand for their Mastercard product, "mosaic mastercard".
- CIBC's credit card, Visa, is also among its top 10 brand searches, again at #8.
- TD Canada Trust's search terms reveal the continued strength of the TD brand, with "td" at #2 while "canada trust" appears at #10.
- Looking beyond the top 10 terms, I found searches for TD Canada Trust Insurance offering, "rbc visa" and "desjardins visa".

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather-hopkins/2009/11/canadian_banks_brand_associati_1.html

Why Stories are an Effective Communication Tool for Your Blog

2009-11-05T02:26:00.000-08:00

As I write this it is the first Tuesday morning of a new month and I’m sitting in a local coffee shop going through my ‘start of the month routine‘.

It involves a large lattè (everything else hinges on this) and some delving into my blogs metrics to see how they’ve been performing.

While I do keep track of the traffic stats of my blogs each day I like to set aside an hour or two at the start of each month to go a little deeper and do some more analysis of trends on my blogs – I find that when I do this I notice things that I can build on to continue momentum on my blogs.

This morning as I was looking at the type of posts that had done well in the last few weeks on my blogs I noticed an interesting trend – many of them were ‘story‘ type posts.

The Power of Being Personal on Your Blog – the hottest post on ProBlogger last week – a post where I tell the story of being jumped on/hugged by a reader who I’d never met before.
The #1 Reason My Blogging Grew Into a Business – the hottest post on ProBlogger in the last month - the story of my wife giving me a 6 month deadline to get my blogging to a full time level – or go get a ‘real job’.

Both posts got a lot of traffic, were linked to by numerous other blogs and were re-tweeted more than normal.

I’ve always known how powerful ‘story posts‘ can be on a blog but I decided to dig a little further to see whether this continued deeper than just the last month.

What I discovered was that story posts have been among the most popular posts on this blog over the last 5 years time and time again. They’re not the only type of post that does well (there are a few other types of posts that do well – we might explore these in a later post) but they certainly have performed very well for me.

Here’s a few more examples of popular story posts:

The Day 250,000 People Showed Up at My Blog – a case study that recorded my experience of a successful post.
9 First Step Goals for New Bloggers – a post introduced very quickly with the analogy of my son’s first steps (and a picture of him).
Learn from My Mistake – Don’t Leave Money on the Table – a story of where I failed – shared as a warning to others.
Becoming a ProBlogger – a Story in Many Parts – my full story of going full time as a blogger – a mini biography.
Lessons from an Umbrella Salesman – not a personal story but an analogy type post from my early days of blogging.
Another Day in the Life of a ProBlogger – a post from a few years back which outlined a typical day of mine.

I could go on…. and on! Each month that I looked back on through my blog here at ProBlogger a story type post featured in the top 2 or three posts.

Why are Stories Effective?

A lot could be said about the reasons why stories tend to do well on blogs but here’s a few reasons that I’ve seen in my own experience:

Stories engage the imagination of readers
Stories go beyond facts and theories
Stories reveal something about yourself as a blogger (they’re personal)
Stories trigger emotions and the senses
Stories are conversational - they stimulate others to react and tell their stories
Stories provide hooks for readers to latch onto in your blogging (they’re relatable)
Stories grab and hold the attention of readers
Stories are memorable – while people don’t always latch onto facts and figures – a good story can be remembered for years
Stories illustrate your points in ways that can be much more convincing (and convicting) than other types of information

The key with stories on blogs is making them tie into the rest of your blog – ie make them relevant and ensure that they have some point to them that is useful to your readers on some level. While telling the story of how your dog dug up your vegetable patch might interest you, the readers of your blog about (insert your blogs topic here) may not be quite as fascinated – unless you use the story to illustrate something about your topic.

Now that we’ve looked as some of the reasons stories are effective on blogs – tomorrow I want to extend the idea of story telling with a 2nd post that explores some of the ‘types’ of stories that you might like to use on your blog.

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/11/04/why-stories-are-an-effective-communication-tool-for-your-blog/

The REAL Death of Email Marketing

2009-11-04T00:54:00.000-08:00

For many online marketers, conversions rates are a mere fraction of what they use to be. At the same time, there are a few marketers that I've chatted with who have experienced no significant drop in conversions. These are all marketers who have built incredible subscriber loyalty over the years.

For many online marketers, the biggest problem is email deliverability. Their email is simply not getting through. Email is being filtered so heavily today that often less than 20% of a large ezine mailing gets delivered.

There are things you can do to improve your email deliverability, such as run it through a spam checker prior to sending it out. Top mailing list management systems, such as ProfitAutomation.com, have built in systems that allow you to grade an email against the Spam Assassin database prior to sending it. If your email scores higher than a 2, I personally would revise it to lower the score.

I've talked to friends over a year ago, who often confided in me that they sometimes sent out emails and got absolutely NO response. They wondered if anyone even got the emails or read them.

Many savvy marketers also realized that a business totally dependent upon email was not a very solid business. They realized that what they really needed was a database that contained not only names and email addresses, but physical mailing addresses. That way, if something dramatic ever did happen in the world of email, they could just shift their marketing to direct maíl, and still be in business. This is one of the reasons that you started seeing some online marketers offering loss leaders on CD or DVD. It gave them the perfect tool (excuse) to build out their databases. They knew that email could someday go the way of fax broadcasts.

Some of my in-the-know friends have also shared with me that many ISP's now monitor things such as email delivery rates, bounce rates, and open rates. They use readily available data, and if a given ISP or third party list host had a dismal record, they may block ALL email from that source.

That's pretty scary. I was also told that a few well-known list management providers were having emails coming off their servers BLOCKED, or "black holed."

If ISPs are tapping into databases that reveal which mail servers send out a lot of mail that has very low open rates, for example, and blocking email from those servers, that does very well spell the slow death of some email marketers... unless they move their list to other platforms.

Ok, so I just painted a pretty dismal picture for some marketers.

When I was in the military, my bosses always told me that they wanted the truth from me. They insisted that I not "sugar-coat" the facts. However, they also told me not to bring them problems, without also bringing them viable solutions.

Solutions to the email deliverability issue are out there. For example, paid "sender verification" is one that is often suggested.

One that I've looked at many times over the years is some type of direct-to-desktop solution. That's one where your subscribers install tools that allow your communications to tap into technologies not even dependent upon email.

The objection always brought up when discussing direct-to- desktop applications, is that there's only so much desktop real-estate, so a person can only subscribe to so many of these independent channels.

Another solution that I like very much is building your list on a hosted platform, so that communications take place within the system.

A good example of this can be seen on the social networking site Sokule, pronounced "so cool." The Sokule community is built on a platform that looks and feels a lot like Twitter, except that it's built for marketers, so you are encouraged to market on the platform. In fact, there are several built-in features that allow members to monetize their community membership.

While members of many social networking communities tend to de-emphasize getting lots of followers, Sokule is different. Sokule seems to encourage you to get as many followers (called "trackers") as you can in two ways:

1) They have a quasi-currency, called "sokens" that you can provide to other members to reward them for following you. You earn these sokens, and then you provide them to community members as a reward for following you. In a way, you can buy followers.

2) They allow upgraded members to direct message ALL of their followers a maximum of once every three days. That means that in a very real way, when you build a following on Sokule, you ARE building a list.

When you set up your Sokule account, you enter three of your areas of interest. This allows others to search the database for members with like interests, whom they can then track (follow). In theory, this means that when you send out a direct message, your message should be going to people interested in the same topic.

Just as with an email list, you need to respect your trackers on Sokule, and provide genuine value to the relationship.

To check out Sokule, visit my profile page at: Sokule.com/postit/williec There you can see how you can personalize your profile and monetize it. The links that you'll notice on the left side of the page are to five of my pet websites. There are also links on the left side of the page that promote Clickbank products. Those links are coded with MY Clickbank ID.

My old military bosses would be proud of me today. Yes, I came bearing bad news. Email marketíng as it once was is dying an agonizing death. However, I also did as my old bosses taught me and presented you with a viable, proven solution.

In future articles, I'll share with you some more solutions to "the email problem." For now, check out Sokule. Sign up for a free account and take it for a test drive. It's quicker to do that at:" Sokule.com/williec . The key to survival in business, just as it was for me in the military is to be aware of, and adapt to, changing circumstances. That's something you're now ready to do.

About The Author
Willie Crawford has been marketing online for 13 years, and used article marketing most of that time (writing over 1500 articles). His favorite tools for automatically distributing his articles, videos, podcasts, and press releases is the automated submission site: EasyPushButtonTraffic.com

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How to Register Your Domain Name

2009-11-04T00:52:00.000-08:00

Registering domain names is not as complicated as you might think. Your web design is completed, everything is set up and you are ready to go.

The best thing to do is to find a registrar that is an official Internet registering service and use this to register the name. Often web hosting sites will offer registration of your domain name. However, there is some confusion among some of the sites when it comes to ownership of the domain name so the best idea is to register it yourself.

Where to Go

Your domain name can be anything that you can think of that describes your site. As long as it is not already taken by someone else, you will be the owner of the name when you register it.

Find out if your choice is available by visiting http://www.whois.org and search the name you have chosen. Whois is a database that displays information for those searching for domain names. If someone does a search for the one you have chosen, after you register it, this is where the information comes from to show the name is already taken.

For instance, you may do web design for people who do not know how to do their own. The name of your site will be the URL that is entered when people search for a web design service to help them set up their own web site.
So the name you choose needs to reflect the service you provide so that it will be easier to find. Because there are millions of domain names this may prove a little difficult. But if you do a search for keywords that describe your site you should be able to come up with the right combination.

Once you have chosen the name you will use and made sure that it is available, visit some of the Internet registrars and find the one you want to use. What the registrar basically does is resells domain names.

The prices vary among the different ones but typically start at around $5.00 for a one year registration. They can go as high as $50 so finding the one that offers the best price can take some investigative work.

When you are ready to register the name, you will be required to provide either a PayPal account or a credit card to pay for it. This is not optional. Most all providers require this method of payment. On the plus side by paying using this method you can immediately have access to the name.

How Long Can You Keep the Domain Name?

You may also register the name for a longer period than one year but this is the minimum time. The domain name may be registered at some registrars for up to 10 years. This is a good idea if you are worried about forgetting to re-register. If you have a very popular name and want to ensure that it remains yours, registering it for as long as possible will keep anyone else from purchasing it.

When you find the registrar that you want to use, they will ask for your contact information. This is the information that will show in the Whois database when someone searches this domain name.

The contact information should have a correct email address as well as other information because this is where re-registering information as well as anything else that concerns your name will be sent.

If someone should want to purchase your web design name for their site, they can contact you to make an offer. Some domain names have sold for a lot of money if they are very popular.

The Importance of the Domain Name

The web hosting site that you are using when you choose your domain name may not always be the site that you use. If you change to another site you can take your name and this will allow you to keep your regular customers as well as visitors. The name will be typed in the same as before and they will be taken to your new site.

If you have a web hosting site already, you will need to get their name servers. There are normally primary and secondary ones. This is necessary for pointing your domain name to the website you have set up. Often this information is in the frequently asked questions section under the domain name category. Email the host if you cannot find them.

By following the instructions at the web hosting site you choose, this is not difficult. The main thing you want to remember is to re-register your domain name at the end of the period of time you have chosen. This will ensure that your name remains with you which is essential to finding your website and keeping your business going.

About the Author: Marcus Fei Lim - Pace Work Technologies is a web hosting company and a domain register offering free domain name, dedicated server, virtual private server, semi-dedicated server, website builder, php scripts, 30 days money back guaranteed and 24/7 customer and technical support.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Predictions

2009-11-04T00:51:00.001-08:00

November 02, 2009

Holiday projections are out and many are predicting a gloomy holiday season for retailers. The NRF forecasts a 1% decline growth in total retail sales for the 2009 holiday season, totaling $437.6 billion. The online channel is poised to fare somewhat better, with Forrester Research projecting an increase of 8% to $44.7 billion. The official shopping season usually gets underway during the Thanksgiving holiday with heavy promotional activity taking place around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However this year, fearful of weak sales, retailers are already starting to release Black Friday promotions and discounts. What else can we expect to see as the holiday season gets going? To delve into potential trends, we pulled together data from across Experian Marketing Services to predict what may happen around Black Friday this year.

Search will continue to play a strong role for Black Friday

Shoppers have been starting their searches for Black Friday sales earlier and earlier each year, with queries beginning in August, when speculation begins about which products may have the biggest discounts during the kickoff to the holiday season. In 2006, the searches took place over a 9 week period leading up to Thanksgiving & Black Friday, growing to 14 weeks in 2007, and 16 weeks in 2008. The number of variations including the term ‘black friday’ have increased significantly as well, increasing 41% year-over-year to reach 7,822 different combinations for the week ending Nov. 29, 2008. The number of websites receiving traffic from the search term ‘Black friday’ during the four weeks leading up to and including the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday increased to from 416 in 2007 to 473 in 2008 – an increase of 14%.

Every year, more consumers flock to Black Friday websites looking for information about sales & promotions both online and off. In 2008, visits to a custom category of 12 Black Friday websites grew over the previous holiday season overall – with a 21% increase in visits to this category during the week of Thanksgiving. During that peak week, 53% of the traffic was driven by search referrals.

Source: Experian Hitwise

Overall email volumes will be higher, but will increase at a lower or equal rate

The volume of email sent by Experian CheetahMail on Black Friday increased 64% from 2007 to 2008 and 40% on Cyber Monday from 2007 to 2008. Analysis of the most current email data suggests an expected 30 percent increase in volume on Black Friday and Cyber Monday as compared to 2008, particularly if sales are low towards the end of November. In that case, there is a large chance that marketers will react by increasing volume to an even higher capacity. Mentions of Black Friday and Cyber Monday are also expected to be more prevalent in email campaigns earlier in the year.

Source: Experian CheetahMail

Expect consumers to start shopping online early

With Thanksgiving falling late again in 2009, consumers are expected to start shopping online a few weeks prior to the official start of the shopping season – Black Friday. In 2007, online purchases peaked during the week ending Monday, November 26 (Cyber Monday) when fully a quarter of all adults bought something online. Online purchases remained high for several weeks after Thanksgiving before falling to 17% the week of Christmas. In comparison, when Thanksgiving fell a bit later in the month last year, online purchase activity occurred earlier – several weeks prior to Black Friday. In fact, between the weeks ending November 3 and November 10, the share of adults who made an online purchase more than doubled – increasing from 11% to 23%.

Source: Experian Simmons

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-dougherty/2009/11/black_friday_and_cyber_monday_1.html

UK Halloween and fancy dress costume searches increasing

2009-11-03T00:57:00.000-08:00

November 02, 2009

Judging by the amount of merchandise for sale in the shops, it feels like Halloween becomes more popular every year in the UK. And Hitwise search data seems to bear this out: the chart below illustrates the breadth of searches for the term ‘halloween’ (which measures the number of different ways that people search for a topic).

Last week (w/e 31 October 2009) we monitored at astonishing 49 distinct search terms containing the word ‘halloween’, and the top 10 were: ‘halloween 2009’, ‘halloween’, ‘halloween costumes’, ‘halloween games’, ‘halloween costume ideas’, ‘halloween jokes’, ‘halloween recipes’, ‘halloween fancy dress’, ‘haunted village pluckley halloween cancelled’, ‘halloween ideas’. The fastest moving Halloween-related search term last week was ‘pumpkin designs for halloween’, and we also tracked 10,786 distinct terms containing the word ‘pumpkin’. After carving related queries, the most popular of these related to recipes, with ‘pumpkin soup’, ‘pumpkin soup recipe’, ‘pumpkin pie’ and ‘pumpkin pie recipes’ all making the top 10.

As you can tell from the list of terms above, fancy dress costumes play a key role in Halloween-related search behaviour. Last week the US put out some data about the most popular fancy dress costume searches, with ‘michael jackson costume’ and ‘balloon boy halloween costume’ topping the list. In the UK the most popular specific costume searches were for ‘vampire costume’ and ‘joker costume’, but more popular were searches for broad types of costume, with cheap, plus size and adult all appearing as popular key words.

We built a custom category of the top 15 online fancy dress retailers in the UK, and its traffic is charted below. While it’s no surprise to see visits increasing significantly in the run up to Halloween, it’s interesting to note that traffic peaks the week before Halloween (i.e. w/e October 24th rather than 31st). This also happened last year – presumably people are ordering their costumes in advance in order ensure deliver in time for parties and trick-or-treat outings.

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2009/11/uk_halloween_and_fancy_dress_costume_searches_increasing.html

PR People Getting Pushier with Bloggers Since the Recession

2009-11-03T00:56:00.000-08:00

A guest post by Krizia from Eat Smart Age Smart

I’ve been blogging since June 2007 when I launched my beauty site . In April 2009, I launched a healthy eating site with the encouragement of my Internet coach Yaro Starak and in the last few months I’ve noticed a shift in the way I deal with publicists.

When I first started blogging, I actually went out and bought beauty products to review them on the site.

During a conference, an exhibitor told me that in my position (promoting skincare and make-up brands on the Internet at no cost to the manufacturer), I should never have to pay for products and I should be getting them for free by contacting the companies.

I didn’t need to hear that twice. On the following Monday morning, I started calling and emailing skincare and make-up companies to get review samples.

I crafted an introduction letter with the most important points about my blog and the reason why I was asking for samples.

In very little time, I started received samples and before I knew it, I became inundated with products from the U.S., Canada and as far away as the U.K.

It got so bad, that the guys at my pick-up area (I rent a UPS address) started complaining about the number of parcels (I’ve received several thousand dollars worth of samples) I was receiving and they were threatening to seriously increase my yearly fee. Luckily I received a few samples I could share with them and they quickly forgot about the idea of increasing my fees.

The samples were taking over my home and I couldn’t give them to friends and reviewers fast enough. In order to keep up with the flood of samples, I started running contests on the blog in order to give away products to 1) clear my home 2) put my readers to work so they could write reviews that I could post on the blog 3) secure some sponsorship dollars from beauty companies to keep up with these contests.

In 2007 and 2008, publicists (who I dealt with to get these samples) would email me to let me know they would gladly send me the samples I requested and asked that I email them once the post was up on the blog.

In many cases, publicists liked the concept of the product review so much that they would recommend my site to their marketing departments for paid reviews or other paid advertisement opportunities that were incredibly lucrative to me.

I still remember that in 2008, I got a really incredible contract via my ad service company (I have a company that takes care of selling ads on my blog) with a large pharmaceutical company to write six posts for them to try educating readers on the benefits of their product. The deal was to net me $8,000 for those six articles and the only thing I had to do was to get the copy reviewed by the pharmaceutical company to ensure that I wasn’t using any medical words in the wrong way.

This was an exciting point in my blogging career since that type of contract is far more lucrative than running site ads or Google AdSense ads.

Everything came to a stop in October 2008. As the stock markets were tumbling, panic was setting in, real estate prices were falling, companies were laying off workers and hard copy magazines were folding, I received an email from my media company informing me that the pharmaceutical company was ceasing the campaign I had started and that they had to cut back on the fees I was supposed to get (I only got $1,600 in the end for three features).

It was a devastating moment for me, but I thought things would get back to normal soon. I don’t think at that time that I understood how things were going to change.

Life as a blogger since the recession and my relationship with publicists

It took me some time to realize that things where changing; but because I was so busy working, I had not noticed the signs of change.

It’s only spending 90 minutes in one day answering emails from publicists that it hit me.

>>> Here’s what I was observing:

1) I was getting at least two to three times the number of pitches to review products. I was spending a lot of time emailing back publicists asking them to send basic essentials like photos, a press releases and price information. Some of these emails from publicists contained only a few short lines “we love your blog, will you feature our product, here’s a link.”… that’s not much to work with.

2) I was getting more requests from non-bloggers looking for link exchanges. These requests were coming from companies that had sites which sold beauty and hair care products on the Internet. They wanted me to add them to the front page of my blog, while they would give me a link on their blog on a page that was almost impossible to find and not visible from the homepage. This happened a lot and it floored me that these companies didn’t get that I didn’t want to give them free publicity while my site was buried somewhere on their site.

3) I was no longer receiving ANY offers for sponsorship opportunities on my site.

4) The few requests for free samples that I had sent were returned to me with a long string of questions:

“How long have you been blogging?”
“What’s your PR rank?”
“Are you on Twitter?”
“Are you on Facebook?”
“How many unique users?”
“How many page views?”
“How fast can you get our review on your site?”
“Have you won any awards in the past?”
“Send us links to past reviews you’ve written.”
“What angle will you take with this feature?”
“I need all your company details before we release any samples to you.”
“Will you promote this on social media networks?”
“Are you going to shot a YouTube video like you did for other brands?”
“You said the review would be up last week, WHERE IS IT?” … etc.

As you can see, I’ve started dealing with really demanding publicists and in some cases rude and impatient publicists. I was never asked so many questions in the past when I requested samples.

>>> Samples are being denied or scaled back:

I’ve contacted companies that in the past had sent me boxes and boxes of samples (and I do mean full-size products) and when I contacted them recently, they would say “sorry, we’re not sending any samples right now, but if you want we can provide you with information for you to write a review on your site”. Well, it’s hard to be excited about a product you’ve not tried.

In some cases, companies were sending those ridiculously small samples you get at your department store and it’s still unclear to me how they expect me to write a review when I can only test the product for two days (we usually test products for two-to-three weeks before writing a review.

Here’s a photo of products I received the same week for review:

As you can see one company sent me the smallest possible size while the other company sent me full size products.

Maybe it had to do with the niche?

The interesting thing is that I launched a new blog on healthy eating and healthy lifestyles in April 2009 (www.EatSmartAgeSmart.com) and my relationship with publicists is vastly different from one niche to another. The blog tackles healthy eating, but I also focus on fitness. The fitness publicists have not been really easy to deal with during this recession.

One company (which manufactures supplements) that contacted me to send products for review also wanted to know how much it would cost to sponsor spots on my site. They actually wanted to pay to have banners on my site and not only receive a free review!

I remember that when I sent them the finished post I wrote for them, the publicist sent an email thanking me for getting their company circulating in the social media networks. They were thrilled and I was thrilled.

In contrast, I’ve contacted a number of fitness companies who have said “NO, we don’t send samples to bloggers. We only deal with major media. If you want to test the product, you’ll have to buy it”.

In the cases where a fitness company was willing to send me samples, I’d be subject to daily or weekly emails asking: “When will our review be up?” to “The client is getting nervous and impatient, WHERE IS THE REVIEW?” to “I saw the review and there are things that you wrote that are wrong.” to “We don’t like ‘this word’ you need to change it in the review NOW”.

Most fitness reviews have been received with a string of negativity, while my healthy eating reviews are usually quite well received and the publicists or owners of companies jump for joy at the idea that I’m helping get the word out.

So how am I dealing with publicists since the recession?

In the case of negative backlash, I’ve decided to ignore those publicists and not let them affect me or affect my work. I usually won’t work with that publicist anymore.
When I get praised for a review, I quickly email the publicist and company back and thank them and I’ll usually get my traffic assistant to take that link to more social media networks.
I’ve created an auto-reply that delivers an email with a link that takes publicist straight away to a PDF they can download that gives them all the requirements we need to write a post. If we don’t get all those elements, I will pass on the review and will not chase after publicists. This also has helped cut back on the number of follow-up emails I send publicists.
I’ve set clear expectations in that PDF and do make it clear that a review will take eight weeks before it’s featured on the site. And that once the review is up, I will send them a link.
I’ve said ‘no’ many times to publicists who had a burning deadline to meet if I couldn’t make it fit in my publishing calendar and if that would be adding to my stress level.
When I contact a company for samples, if I feel that getting samples is hard work and I’m being asked loads of questions and am given tons of excuses why they don’t release samples to smaller media outlets, I’ll usually walk away and find another product to review or another topic for my blog post.

I’m not the only one finding it hard dealing with publicists these days

I’ve spoken to other beauty bloggers and editors of magazines (who were not bloggers) and they’ve also found that more and more publicists are being quite pushy, demanding and sometimes rude.

They also feel things are quite different since the recession and they’ve found themselves having to put their foot down and ask the publicist to no longer contact them on a daily or weekly basis and tell them that once the review is ready, they will be contacted.

My theory is simple: Publicists and companies now know that bloggers have a lot of weight on the Web and with the recession hitting advertising budgets really hard, publicists are turning to bloggers to get the word out about their products and also as quick way to getting into social media networks without having to spend any money.

Manufacturers realize that buying a full page ad in a magazine that would costs several hundreds of thousands of dollars will affect their profits if they aren’t able to calculate the rate of return on investment, while hiring a PR firm to get a few samples (that costs very little to the company) out to thousands of bloggers and demanding quick turn around on the features is much cheaper.

They get their new launches to circulate all over the Internet and thousands of bloggers telling their readers to go out and buy the product, and they don’t even have to write a cheque to the bloggers.

This situation could be quite specific to lifestyle bloggers, but I’d love to know if other bloggers also feel more pressured when dealing with publicists since the beginning of the recession.

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/11/02/pr-people-getting-pushier-with-bloggers-since-the-recession/

How Many Links Does It Take to Get to

2009-11-02T02:21:00.000-08:00

Everyday it seems, people are asking me about the optimum number of inbound links they need to acquire for their website in order to rank well in Google.

My answer is going to seem a little flip, but it is the honest, best answer.

Answer: You need more inbound links - of equal or higher quality - than what your competitors have.

Albert Einstein argued that any mathematical formula that required pages of calculations did not contain within it "the mind of God".

So when Albert Einstein developed E=mc2, then Einstein had fulfilled the promise of a simple formula that could encompass the brilliance of God.

When people wonder how many inbound links they need to acquire to rank in the Top 4 of Google's search results or even the Top 10 of Google's SERPs, they are generally hoping that someone will be able to give them a numeric answer, so that they know whether they can afford to undertake the process or not.

I understand the WHY of the question, but there is no canned answer that will work for everyone. Remember, your competitor may be asking the same question and undertaking the same processes as you are, trying to accomplish the same goal.

You can't truly begin to understand the answer to this question, until you have taken the time to do an Inbound Link Comparison Analysis of all of your competitors in the Top 10 spots of Google's SERPs.

• You need to look at the Top 10 listings in Google for a particular keyword.

• You need to do backlink checks for all ten URLs in Google's search listings, and you need to check those numbers across a variety of sources, including Google, Yahoo and any other tool you can find to do a check. (Google and Yahoo both tend to understate the actual link counts. While Yahoo will show you more than what Google does, they also show a number of "no consequence" links in their results.)

• You need to look at the quality of a few of the pages that provide links to the URLs in the search results.

This is not an easy process to undertake. I have done it before, but the best you can hope for is a "snapshot" of what is out there, and therefore, what you need to accomplish.

Note: If Wikipedia turns up in your search query, few people with small budgets will ever be able to dislodge Wikipedia in the search results. What they make up for in a small number of inbound links, they more than make up for with links from dozens or hundreds of PR4, PR5 and PR6 pages. Wikipedia is the king of Internal Linking, and they use that to a great degree to rank extraordinarily high in Google's search listings.

Your analysis should seek to uncover how many links a page has to it.

As a general rule of thumb, Google will show you less than 1% of the existing number of links for a web page. Yahoo will sometimes show closer to 5% of the existing number of links for a web page, but they will not show you the highest quality of those links.

So, as you strive to gain a "snapshot" picture of the playing field, you want to take Google's Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 100. Then you want to take Yahoo's Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 20, then cut the number in half to acknowledge the number of worthless crap links they have in their database. Once you have achieved these two numbers, then I tend to call the truth "somewhere in the middle".

With your "somewhere in the middle" number in hand, you then need to look at the quality of links to a few of those search listings, to get an idea of whether those links exist on higher quality pages or simply junk pages.

If those links are on junk pages, then the goal could be achieved by just working the numbers. But if there are a lot of high PageRank pages in the mix, then whatever number is in your hand, should be multiplied, perhaps 100-fold, to overcome the quality of pages that link to your competitors.

If you get the idea that my simple formula leads to a complicated answer, then you are right.

All of the numbers that I have included in my sample formula are based on rough speculation, as the "snapshot" offers you your best hope of understanding the challenge in front of you.

While the number of inbound links may be relatively easy to determine, the link quality is a factor that is really hard to pin down.

• If you determine that you only need 300 inbound links to rank with the big boys, you may be right.

• Your 300 inbound links number should also be quantified against the number of links that Google will count worthy, so you may need 1200 links to get 300 links that Google will deem worthy. This calculation depends more on the "quality of your content", rather than the "quantity of your content".

• When all is said and done and your 300 Google-worthy links have not yet put you on page one, then you know that the quality of the links pointing at your competitors is greater than the quality of the links pointing to you.

If you were hoping for an easy answer, I am sorry that I could not help you with that.

But with this explanation of the challenge, you may be better prepared to answer the big question, the question that is really on your mind:

Are my hopes of achieving good rankings in Google within my reach?

I tend to throw "worry" to the wind and just start working. I don't worry if I can afford to do it or not. I simply start doing, and I know that in one month, one year or five, I will have built enough value in my website that my competitors are going to be the ones who are trying to figure out if they can unseat me!

About The Author
Bill Platt has provided SEO services since 2004. In 2009, he transformed his SEO service, into one that helps people defeat negative search results in Google. By improving the rank of positive website reviews in the search results, negative search listings begin to disappear from the public eye. If you would like to learn more about how Bill's Reputation Management SEO service can help your business, visit: 911reputation.com. Bill has also owned thePhantomWriters.com since 2001.

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How to Write a Blog Post That’s Stickier than Velcro

2009-11-01T06:21:00.002-08:00

Do you have a really good idea which you want to go viral? Is there a behavior you’re trying to modify in your blog readers, such as encouraging them to save, eat healthy, or start an exercise program? Are you looking for ways to persuade readers to purchase an affiliate product you’re promoting? If your answer is “yes” to any of these, then you need to make your writing stickier. In this post I’m going to share with you six principles which you can begin to apply right away to make your articles as sticky as urban myths, Aesop’s fables, the “Don’t mess with Texas” slogan, and JFK’s “man on the moon” speech.

In the bestseller “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die”, the Heath brothers, Chip and Dan, explain that sticky ideas–ideas that spread, that are remembered, and that people act upon–have six traits in common. Sticky ideas are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and they’re told as stories (the authors use the acronym “SUCCESs”, with the last s omitted). Here’s an explanation of each of these principles:

Keep It Simple: It’s the Economy, Stupid

In order to make your message sticky, it has to be simple. This means that it has to convey a single, core idea that is meaningful and easy to understand. You need to make sure that your core idea stands out clearly from the very beginning, instead of being buried under an avalanche of facts, details, and abstractions. Keep in mind that simplifying your message doesn’t mean that you dumb it down; it means that you strip an idea to its most critical essence.

In addition, you need to prioritize. Psychology research shows that choice can hinder decision making. In one experiment cited by the Heath brothers, researchers took a group of college students who were planning to spend their evening studying and offered them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend a lecture by an author they admired. Almost 80% decided to skip the study session and attend the lecture instead.

However, when a second “fun” choice was added—watching a foreign film that was getting great reviews-only 60% opted for one of the “fun” choices and 40% chose to study. That is, when students had to choose between two “fun” options, more students chose to study as compared to the scenario in which they only had one “fun” option.

When you have several good ideas about a topic it’s difficult to pick the single most valuable idea and make it as sticky as possible, but that’s what works. Successful trial lawyers know that if they argue ten points, even if they’re all good, when jurors get back to the jury room they won’t remember any of them. James Carville summarized the most critical issue of the 1992 U.S. presidential election when he said: “It’s the economy, stupid”. Narrowing the issues to that one sentence stuck with voters and helped Clinton get elected.

Another way to keep it simple is by using analogies so that you can capitalize on what your readers already know. Think about the following movie pitch: Speed is “Die Hard on a bus”. How can you compare your idea to something your audience is already familiar with to help create hooks so that they will remember your idea more easily? Analogies allow you to say a lot with a little.

Make it Unexpected: Lose Weight by Eating Fast Food

With all of the information that’s available, one of the biggest hurdles you’ll have to face is capturing your readers’ attention. You can get their attention by taking an unexpected approach. Then, you hold their interest by making them curious. Behavioral economists argue that when we have a gap in our knowledge, we strive to resolve it. We’ve all stayed up late at night reading to discover who did it in a murder novel, or watching a movie to see how the conflict is resolved. Make your readers curious from the very beginning of your article by raising questions they don’t know the answer to, and then gradually filling in the gaps as they read along.

As an example of doing something unexpected, Chip and Dan refer to City Year. City Year is a nonprofit organization which offers 17 to 24-year-olds the opportunity to engage in 10 months of full-time community service. Here’s a slogan that they use: “We envision a world in which, one day, the most common question asked of a 17-year-old in this country will be, ‘Where are you going to do your year of national service?’” That’s a powerful, unexpected view of what the world could be like, and it gets people’s attention.

Another message that was unexpected was the one used in the Subway Guy marketing campaign. Jared was a college student who weighed about 430 pounds; he created a “subway diet” for himself and started walking every day to his local Subway Restaurant to have a subway for lunch and one for dinner. With this diet, Jared lost over 240 pounds. Subway came across Jared’s story and they turned it into a marketing campaign which was incredibly successful and which increased their sales dramatically. People were captivated by Jared’s story, in part, because of the unexpectedness of someone losing weight by eating fast food.

Make it Concrete: What Do 37 Grams of Fat Look Like?

In order to make sure that an idea can be grasped and remembered later, you have to make it concrete. If you describe something in a way that allows your readers to see, touch, or imagine it in their mind’s eye, the chances are much better that you’ll communicate successfully with them.

In 1961 U.S. President John F. Kennedy announced the following: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth”. This was a concrete vision: it was very clear about what it required—get a man on the moon and bring him back safely–and when it would happen. It captured the imagination of the American people for almost a decade.

The Heath brothers explain that Kennedy’s speech would have had much less impact if he had said something abstract like the following: “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” What does that even mean? Make sure that you make your ideas tangible, instead of delivering them in abstract, difficult to understand terms.

Here’s a second example offered by the Heath brothers of how to be concrete: A health organization was trying to convey to the movie-going public how incredibly unhealthy movie popcorn popped in coconut oil was. A typical bag of popcorn contained 37grams of saturated fat, nearly double the recommended daily allowance. But movie-goers weren’t interested in statistics. The health organization had to find a way to turn the abstract “37 grams of fat” into something concrete which would get the public to stop eating the harmful popcorn.

So what did they do? They called a press conference and laid out all of the following in front of the television cameras: a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings. Then they explained that a bag of popcorn had more fat than all of those meals, combined. If you think this was tangible enough to get the public to demand that movie theatres stop popping their popcorn in coconut oil, it was.

Make it Credible: The Surgeon General says . . .

If a message doesn’t seem credible it will be discounted, even if it’s perfectly true. Credibility can be achieved through status–such as citing a study conducted by a Nobel Prize winner–through prior performance, through the use of convincing detail, or through the appropriate use of statistics. When you use statistics, contextualize them in terms that are more everyday and human. A good example of making statistics more accessible is “The World of 100”, which presents different data about the world population in terms of a village of 100 people.

In addition, you can encourage your audience to test out your ideas for themselves. Chip and Dan explain that in the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics on the economy. Instead, he encouraged voters to test the effectiveness of the Carter presidency for themselves by telling them: “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.”

Appeal to People’s Emotions: Make Them Care

Information makes people think, but emotion makes them act. You’ve probably heard of urban myths such as “the kidney-heist”and the Halloween candy tamperingstory. How do stories such as these spread across the country—and even the world–despite a lack of evidence? Why are they remembered and believed by millions? These stories are sticky. And one of the reasons that they’re so sticky is because they evoke emotion: in the case of urban myths, they evoke fear.

The authors of “Made to Stick” explain that in order for people to take action—donate money to your cause, buy your product, modify their behavior, and so on—they have to care about your message. You appeal to people’s emotions to get them to care. There are many different emotions you can tap into, such as a person’s “group identity”. When the Texas Department of Transportation was looking for ways to reduce litter on the Texas roadways, they discovered that most of the litter was being caused by truck drivers.

What was the best way get these truck drivers—characterized as “Bubba”—to stop littering? Applying threats and fines? Telling them about the impact they were having on the environment? What they did was much more effective: Bubbas love Texas, and the Texas Department of Transportation appealed to this pride. They cast Dallas Cowboys and Houston Astros in testosterone-soaked ads telling drivers: “Don’t mess with Texas”. With an emotional appeal to identity, the campaign managed to reduce litter on Texas highways 72% between 1986 and 1990.

Tell Stories – A Well-Told Story Jump-Starts Action

Research shows that when people swap stories they’re not just entertaining each other; they’re providing mental training. In “Made to Stick” the authors explain that when firefighters swap stories after every fire they’re helping each other create a rich archive of situations which they might encounter during a fire and the appropriate responses to these.

When we hear a story, we create a simulation of what’s happening in our minds. By providing a story in which the protagonist is in a predicament that is similar to our audience’s situation, we allow our readers to apply the story to their own situation.

In addition, Chip and Dan explain that a story is also important because it provides the context missing from abstract prose. Aesop’s fables—such as “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”–teach their morals through stories. By telling the story of a bored shepherd boy who entertained himself by crying out “wolf” on repeated occasions and watching the villagers rush to his aid, and who was subsequently ignored by all when a wolf really did appear, Aesop shows his readers how liars lose all credibility and aren’t believed even when they’re telling the truth. Telling this story is much more effective than simply saying to people: “Don’t lie”.

As a further example of how to use stories in your blog posts, the best way to promote an affiliate product is to use it yourself. Then share a true story with your readers of how the product helped you to solve a problem that they might be having as well. Invite them to try it on for size and see for themselves.

Conclusion

To summarize, you can write sticky blog posts that get your readers to take action by making your ideas simple, unexpected, concrete, credentialed, and emotional, and by presenting them as stories. You don’t need to apply all six traits to have a sticky idea, but it’s safe to say that the more of them that you’re able to work into your writing, the stickier your idea will be.

Don’t just read this blog post and store it away as interesting, new-found knowledge: take the six principles presented by the Heath brothers and begin crafting your stickiest blog post yet. Incidentally, I tried applying most of the “sticky principles” to this blog post. How did I do?

Written by Marelisa Fábrega. Marelisa blogs about creativity, productivity, and simplifying your life over at Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online. Marelisa is the author of the ebook “How to Be More Creative – A Handbook for Alchemists”.

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/11/01/how-to-write-a-blog-post-that%E2%80%99s-stickier-than-velcro/

How I Use Email Newsletters to Drive Traffic and Make Money

2009-11-01T06:21:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I shared 6 reasons that I find email newsletters to be a more effective way of driving traffic to and making money from blogs than RSS.

Today I want to show you exactly how I do it.

Firstly a word about technology – I use Aweber to deliver my emails (I talk about why here). However you can use pretty much any email newsletter service for the process I outline below as long as it allows you to set up an auto-responder or sequence of emails.

I should also say that the process I’m about to share has evolved over time. It started out very very simple and has slowly developed with time – in fact it continues to develop as I learn more and by no means is where I want to take it…. yet.

Lets start with a visual on how my process looks (click to enlarge) before I explain the elements:

Reader Subscribes

Because email newsletters are such an important part of my site I put a lot of emphasis upon getting this conversion moment with those who come to my site. There are a variety of places around the blog where I attempt to get readers to sign up – some are more subtle than others. Some are anything but subtle including a popup signup box that readers see 20-30 seconds after they arrive on the blog.

The pop-up is set to only show once per visitor (unless they’re blocking cookies) and while it is intrusive and I was very hesitant about adding it – it’s incredibly effective at getting readers to signup.

I switched to using this Pop-Up signup technique just on a year ago and at the time wrote up how it took me from getting 40 confirmed signups a day to 350 over night here. Since that time subscriber numbers have continued to climb – I now get around 500 new confirmed subscribers a day. This adds up to around 180,000 a year which is exciting growth. It does annoy a handful of readers (I get an email or two per month) but for the payoff it’s something I’ve decided to continue with.

Welcome Email

When someone signs up and then confirms their subscription by clicking a link in an email they’re then sent (double opt in is required by law) the new subscriber is immediately sent a welcome email. This email is all about making them feel good about subscribing and giving them a quick introduction to the site.

I’m presuming that most people who sign up for the newsletter are new to the site so it’s a great opportunity to introduce myself, show them around and help get their expectations right about the site.

This welcome email has a site logo, my picture, some links to key parts of the site like the forum, some suggested reading for catching up on key posts in our archives (I send them to a few ‘sneeze pages‘ that send them deep within the archives and get them viewing multiple pages) and shares what the subscriber will receive in the coming weeks in terms of future emails.

The email also asks people to add the email address that emails are sent from to their white list/contact list to help ensure emails are delivered.

It’s written in a personal and friendly style and seems to connect as I get a lot of replies to this email from new subscribers thanking me for the personal welcome.

Weekly Updates

As you’ll see from the chart above – weekly updates are what readers get the most. They’re largely updates on what has happened on the blog/forums in the past week.

You can see one of my more recent ones here (although it loses some of the formatting in the web version) where you can see that these emails have a bit of a structure. I usually have the following sections in these weekly updates:

Welcome: usually just a sentence that intros the week. If there’s something important I’ll often highlight it here. Sometimes I’ll also do a quick update on something cool that happened on the site during the week (record day of traffic, milestone in terms of subscribers, a mention in the press – this kind of update seems to build morale/momentum among readers)
Quick Links: here I share the weekly assignment, any discussion oriented posts/polls, any competition announcements and occasionally a ‘featured post’ that I want to especially push traffic to etc
Tips Tutorials and Techniques: new blog posts of a more general nature
Recommended Resource: in this case it’s an affiliate promotion (a great product) but occasionally I swap this section to be a ‘message from our sponsors’ and have it as a sold ad position.
Post Production Tips: updates from this section/category of the blog
New Gear, Tips and Reviews: again, updates from this section of the blog
Hot Forum Threads: a bit of a summary of key threads happening in the forum
Reader Images: Being a photography site visuals are important and the images get clicked on a lot. They also give readers some incentive to post images in the forums as they could get featured in this newsletter that goes out to over 200,000 people..

I do mix things up a bit. Some weeks I’ll run a little promotion of our Twitter of Facebook accounts, other weeks I might throw in some older posts form the archives that people may not have seen and sometimes I’ll run a promotion encouraging readers to forward the email onto a friend. Really anything can go in these emails as long as they’re on topic and useful

The main goals of these weekly updates are to:

Drive traffic to the site
Build Community, reinforce brand with readers
Make money through the promotions

Readers love these newsletters because while they’re largely links to the site the links are all content rich and useful resources. I title these emails ‘Photography Tips for Your Weekend’ and that’s how many of our readers use them – as a spring board into their weekend with their cameras.

Note: these emails are manually put together. They take me an hour or two a week to do. There are tools that will send out automated update emails (Aweber has one) but I prefer to do it manually to ensure that the emails are tailored for maximum impact and usefulness.

Themed Updates

I’ve written about this concept once before here on ProBlogger in a post titled How 24 Hours of Work Will Send Millions of Readers to My Blog.

The idea really came about when I realised that the majority of my blogs thousands of pages of content was going largely unseen by new readers to my blog. While I would occasionally link back to key posts most of my archives don’t get a lot of traffic.

These ‘themed updates’ are all about sending readers back to old but useful content around a single theme. Here’s how they work.

I use the ‘auto responder’ or ‘followup’ feature of Aweber to set up these emails. This means that they go out at pre-determined intervals to readers a certain number of days after their last scheduled email.

The first email in the sequence is the ‘welcome email’ that I mentioned above. 8 Days after that email goes out the subscriber receives the first ‘themed’ email. The topic is ‘portraits’ and is a newsletter that contains a short intro to the topic and then some links back to some of our most useful portrait photography tips. It also has a few recommendations of good books on portraiture (with affiliate links).

30 days after this portraits email they get another themed email (remember they’re getting weekly updates in between). This email is about ‘exposure’ (pictured right – click to enlarge) and contains links to some of our best posts on subjects like Aperture, Shutter Speed etc. It also contains a couple of recommendations to good books on the topic (with affiliate links to Amazon).

30 days later they get an email on composition (same format as above with links to archive posts and books). 30 days later they get another themed email.

The main goals of these weekly updates are to:

Drive traffic to the site – particularly older posts
Make money through the affiliate links – while they’re not big ticket items they do convert

These emails do take some time to set up but once they’re set up they become automated and go out every day without me ever having to think about them. With 500 people signing up for my newsletter every day I know that 500 people are getting each of these emails on a daily basis. I have 6 of these emails set up in a sequence at present and add more to the list every now and again so I know 3000 people in total get them each day of the week – forever.

Promotions

This is the most recent addition to my sequence of emails and I’m still perfecting their use but the signs are very promising already.

I use the auto-responder sequence mentioned above to deliver these (they’re going to go out every month or two) and the content of these emails is to highlight a resource or product that I recommend to readers.

The products are affiliate products that I take a commission from any sale of. We disclose that relationship in the email and get a lot of positive feedback on the disclosure from readers.

The key with these promotional emails is to choose products that you genuinely recommend. The reason for this is that at any point subscribers can leave your list – if you push too hard or recommend dodgy products they can leave (with a bade taste in their mouth).

It can be hard to find quality products – I’ve found there to be a lot of junky products in my niche for example – but when I recently found a product that I believed in (123 digital imaging) I knew I had my first product to add to the sequence.

I only sent this first promotion email 17 days ago so it’s yet to go out to everyone on the list but it’s generated 500 or so sales and will continue to sell as long as the product is on the market as it goes to another 500 people every day. In many ways it’s become a nice little passive income with a few sales every day being generated.

When we release our first ebook in the coming weeks it will also be added to the sequence of emails in a similar way.

The main goals of these weekly updates are to:

Make money through the affiliate links – the money these earn starts with a bang when you send it out to the bulk of your list on the first day but after that it becomes a steady trickle. The cool thing about it is that once you have a few of these set up in your sequence you can be having a number of affiliate promotions paying off each day.

Summing Up

All in all I find that the above mix of emails that we send out to our list gets very positive results. I work hard to keep them a ‘win/win’ for both our readers to get useful and relevant information but for me/the site to generate income. So far I think I’ve got the balance right – I regularly get emails from readers saying thanks for the newsletter and if I’m even an hour or two late sending it get people emailing to ask where it is. On a revenue front it’s increasingly profitable – between the sales of products and the ad revenue increases from the increased traffic it certainly has become a central part of my income stream to have this email list.

With the cycle as it is readers do occasionally get 2 emails in a week – however it’s never more than that and on most weeks it is just the one weekly email. I make it clear when they signup that it’s at least weekly to get this expectation right as I don’t want them feeling duped into signing up.

I also use Aweber’s scheduling feature for the auto responder emails which allows you to specify what days of the week they can go out. I schedule the sequenced emails (the themed and promotional ones) so that they never go out on a Thursday or Friday (the same day as the weekly ones).

Lastly I generally focus my efforts with this list on HTML emails. Aweber does give you the ability to send out a text email as well for those subscribers whose email system doesn’t allow HTML. For the text version I usually just send out a short email that links to a HTML version of the email. I did use to send out a full plain text email for these people but found that when I switched to a shorter email linking to the HTML version that most readers clicked through and appreciated seeing the images (this might be particular to my niche).

So that’s how I’ve set up my email newsletters on DPS. It takes a fair bit of work to get some of it set up but as I mentioned in yesterdays post – the pay off has been great and continues to grow as we recruit new subscribers to the list.

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/10/31/how-i-use-email-newsletter-to-drive-traffic-and-make-money/

What retail categories are Gen Ys searching for online?

2009-10-31T03:20:00.001-07:00

October 30, 2009

In my last post I looked at search terms by 18-24 year old Australian users, and indicated how they were more likely to search for bricks and mortar brands than online players; with an overall tendency to search by brands compared to products.

As expected, some of the retail categories that these brand and product search terms fell into conformed to some gender stereotypes. For example, ‘Apparel’ related terms attracted the highest percentage of search traffic by 18-24 year old female users (25%), while ‘Electronics’ terms were heavily represented by 18-24 year old male users (28%).

· 18-24 year old females, compared to males, were more likely to search in these retail categories: Apparel, Grocery, House and Garden, Ticketing, Sports (e.g. ‘Nike’), Rewards, Books, Health and Beauty, Mall (e.g. ‘Chadstone shopping centre’), Comparison Shopping (e.g. ‘Shopbot’), Toys, Video and Discount (e.g. ‘Best and Less’).

· 18-24 year old males, compared to females, were more likely to search for brands and products in Electronics, Department Stores, Music, Classifieds, Auctions, Automotive, Mobile, Games, Computers, Hardware, Household, Stationery and Notebooks.

·Apparel brands searched on by 18-24 year old females included, ‘forever new’, ‘supre’, ‘valley girl’, ‘dotti’ and ‘sportsgirl’. Product terms included, ‘engagement rings’, ‘sunglasses’ and ‘dresses’.

· Electronics brands searched on by 18-24 year old males included, ‘apple’, ‘jb hifi’, ‘hp’ and ‘dell’. Product terms included, ‘iphone’, ‘nokia n97’, ‘laptops’, ‘mac’ and ‘tomtom’. Brand names on notebooks included, ‘dell laptops’, ‘toshiba laptops’, ‘hp laptops’ and ‘sony vaio’.

Greater price-sensitivity by female shoppers

It was also interesting to observe that 18-24 year old females had a stronger tendency than males to search on terms related to Comparison Shopping, Rewards and Discount categories. This means that retailers should ensure they are well-represented on comparison shopping websites and reward schemes for products targeted at females.

Retailers can use search behaviour on retail categories to help prioritise which products they market to different age and gender groups across all of their marketing activities. Keyword lists can also be fine-tuned by delving further into the search tail by each segment.

This post and the previous one are based on Experian Hitwise Custom data. To find out more, email csm@hitwise.com.

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/sandra-hanchard/2009/10/what_retail_categories_are_gen.html

6 Reasons Why You Need to Consider Email as a Communication Strategy on Your Blog

2009-10-30T06:32:00.000-07:00

Email is back!

Earlier in the week I mentioned that one of the emerging themes in the monetization sessions at Blog World Expo was the idea of membership sites as a way to make an income from a blog.

The other theme that emerged in a number of the sessions was that many bloggers were placing increased attention on the medium of email as a way to communicate with readers.

Email is back!

Actually email never really went away – but it’s back on the radar of many bloggers after a swing over the last few years away from it in favour of other mediums such as RSS.

RSS feeds are far from being dead as a way to communicate with readers but while some saw the advances in feeds and feed readers as an email killer many entrepreneurial bloggers are now realising that perhaps they should not have given up on email.

I shared on at least one of the panels that I was on at BWE how email on my photography blog is much more effective than RSS on a number of fronts:

1. The Numbers Speak for Themselves

On DPS I currently have a total of 340,784 subscribers. 223,081 of these subscribe via email – 117,703 of them subscribe via RSS. That’s a 2:1(ish) ratio. While this ratio will vary from site to site considerably (depending upon the niche) I’d guess that on most blogs it’d be similar – the exception possibly being sites with a more techy/social media focus.

2. Email Drives Great Traffic

The days I send out Newsletters are the biggest days of traffic on the site. I shared this graphic a few months ago but here’s the traffic to the blog area of my site on newsletter days (it’s pretty obvious which days the newsletters went out):

RSS certainly does drive traffic – however it is less – probably because most people read the content in their feed reader.

3. Email subscribers are monetizing better than other subscribers with onsite advertising

One of the interesting things that also happens on newsletter days is that the rate that people seem to click on ads also seems to go up slightly. This was a surprise to me when I first saw it because I would have thought that subscribers who visit the blog each week would become blind to the ads but the CTR (click through rate) on my AdSense ads goes up on newsletter days. Here’s a quick screen grab of total AdSense revenue on the DPS blog – again you can see the rises for newsletter days.

4. Email Also Monetizes Better with other Income Streams

Not only does AdSense income increase on newsletter days but I’m finding that other monetization strategies also work well in the newsletter. Three come to mind:

Affiliate promotions have worked really well in newsletter for me. I’ve tested this a number of times by posting a blog post about a product I’m promoting and sending an email about the product. In every instance that I’ve tested it the newsletter wins hands down. The best performing affiliate promotions actually work best where you do a blog post AND an email promotion – but without the email component I find I’m definitely leaving money on the table every time.
Product Launches - if you have your own product to launch I find that in a similar way to how affiliate promotions work best in emails – so too does selling your own stuff. Again – posting both on your blog and via email (and in other places like twitter) can help increase sales further but email is crucial in driving sales.
Direct Ad Sales – lastly the few times that I’ve sold ads in my newsletter to direct advertisers I’ve had very good feedback from the advertisers. We ran a big promotion both on our blog and in our newsletter earlier in the year for a big computer brand and the feedback we got was that the campaign was most effective on newsletter day from clicks from within the email.

5. Email is Personal and Builds Community

There is something about a regular email newsletter that just seems to make people feel more connected to you. I find it hard to put my finger why but there’s something about receiving a good email that just seems more powerful than reading a good blog post via an RSS feed. It just seems a little more personal, more special.

Perhaps it is because RSS is generally read in an RSS feed reader where there are hundreds of competing posts to be read or perhaps it is because an email is delivered into an inbox filled with more personal communications or perhaps it is because when someone signs up for an email they have to give you something personal – their address – whereas with RSS they don’t have to reveal anything about themselves.

I’m not sure WHY it is the case – but every week I get people emailing me to thank me for the emails I send them. I’ve never had anyone thank me for my RSS feed….

The newsletters I send do more than drive traffic and make money – they seem to make people feel as though they belong. To get an email someone has to sign up – they become a member of sorts and this is reflected in the emails that they send me that talk about ‘our site’.

6. Email is more Accessible

I only really started to experiment with email because someone in my family asked me how they could get updates from my photography blog. When I told them about RSS they stared back at me with a blank face. I added an email option and they immediately subscribed.

If you only offer RSS as a way to access your site’s information you’re excluding my family member and probably a lot of other people too.

For this reason I advise giving people a variety of ways to get updates whether it be RSS, daily emails, weekly emails, Twitter updates…. whatever is relevant for your audience.

Don’t Forget about RSS

I don’t want this post to be seen as writing off RSS. It’s an amazing technology and is still really important to my own sites. It too drives traffic, makes money, reinforces brand etc – all I guess I’m arguing is that bloggers take a 2nd look at email.

My personal approach is to have multiple points of connection with readers which reinforces what I’m doing on my sites and maximise the impression that I’m able to make upon them.

How I Use Email

Tomorrow I want to continue this focus upon email to talk about how I use email newsletters to achieve some of the above things. While you can set up tools to just automatically send out emails at predefined intervals to those that subscribe to your blog you can actually take it to the next level and set up a system that is much much more effective.

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/10/30/6-reasons-why-you-need-to-consider-email-is-a-communication-strategy-on-your-blog/

Top Ten Ways to Use Twitter for Marketing

2009-10-30T02:15:00.000-07:00

Twitter is a micro-blogging site that asks you a basic question, "What are you doing?" It allows anyone with an account to write up to 140 characters in a text field as a means to update, comment, promote or communicate to others who are "following" you. When people follow you, they see what you've recently contributed when they login. They see your "tweets", which are the messages you leave.

And of course you can follow others who tweet about the things that interest you. As an Internet marketer you may want to follow other Internet marketers, for example.

Like anything, and this is especially true of working with social media, the more you give, the more you get. In other words, the more often you tweet the more activity you'll generate. Some suggest that you tweet a few times a day, every day. Not every tweet needs to be profound. But they should all be useful.

It's important that you don't abuse Twitter for marketing and promoting your products, services or affiliate links. Most of your tweets ought to be about offering your followers useful and valuable information. Only once in a while should you try to use Twitter to promote something. Otherwise you'll be perceived as a spammer, and no one wants that tag.

Imagine if you had a large number of people following your tweets? Some people have tens of thousands following them. If you had something to promote and you had a large following, you could quickly and efficiently alert a lot of people of your promo. It acts sort of like a mass emailíng blast to your house email list, but it's a heck of a lot easier and faster. This is the power of Twitter.

One thing that I've noticed with Twitter is that it can seem overwhelming at times. The sheer information on Twitter, the 'how-to's', tutorials and all the other ubiquitous advice on how to use and take advantage of it can seem hard to understand and implement. So here's an easy-to-understand list of the top ten ways in which you can use Twitter to market yourself, your business and your website.

The Top 10 Ways To Use Twitter for Marketing:

1. Use it to promote new pieces of content you or your company create to drive traffic to your site. From online articles to blog posts or from videos to webinars, each time you add something to the Web that is of value, tweet about it and include a link. (Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short.)

2. Use it for learning new marketing ideas, strategies and techniques. If you follow the right people, and you have to be picky about who you follow, you'll get pointed to a good amount of useful tutorials, videos, e-zines and other things that teach you about marketing.

3. Use it to get new customers. Use Twitter's search to find people who may be interested in your product or service. There are many ingenious ways to search for people on Twitter. For example, if you sell red widgets you could go to http://search.twitter.com and find people who have tweeted specifically looking for red widgets. To do this, type the following into the search box: red widgets?

• You'll notice a lot of the results will be of others selling red widgets. These ones will all obviously have links in them to direct people to the site they're selling red widgets on. To weed these people/tweets out, use the negative sign like this: -http red widgets?

• Since every link has 'http' in it, using the negative sign in front of it will cause your search results to not include any tweets with links in them.

4. Use it to build your email list. Use Twitter's search to find people who may be interested in the monthly newsletter you send out to your house email list. Invite these people to join.

5. Utilize Twitter plugins or add-ons such as TweetMyBlog or The Twitter Updater, which both automatically make tweets of every new blog post you publish. Also check out TwitThis. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the Web page and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their followers on Twitter. Finally, look at TweetLater, a service that allows you to write lots of tweets at once and then schedule them to go out over time.

6. Use it to build buzz about an upcoming product or website launch.

7. Use it to better brand yourself or your business. Remember, when someone wants to learn more about you or your company, they are increasingly using sites like Twitter for research. You could easily use Twitter to establish yourself as an authority in your field.

8. Use it to update followers on breaking news regarding your company. If your company is mentioned in a new article, tweet about it and include a link to the article. Or if you're at a conference or trade show, you could tweet what you're doing and invite people to visit you in person.

9. Use it for business networking, master-mind groups (see Napoleon Hill), and getting yourself seen by high-profile people in your industry.

10. Use it as an instant messaging system to keep you and your team on the same page during projects. This is especially useful for those who work with teams spread out in different cities or countries.

You should note that this top 10 list is not in order of importance or in any particular order. I suggest that you give Twitter a try if you haven't already. See if you can apply a few of these techniques and tactics to help you take advantage of Twitter as a marketing tool.

And one more important thing to remember is that there is no silver bullet in marketing. You should always be trying and implementing numerous tactics when marketing your business. Don't only rely on Twitter or any other one thing. Instead, use Twitter (or any other Web 2.0 site) as simply one more tool in your entire social media and marketing toolbox.

About The Author
Jason OConnor is a Web consultant. He writes for The Net Gazette, a Web marketing newsletter, and owns Oak Web Works, LLC, a Web design and marketing company.

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Twitter Revisited - in More than 140 Characters

2009-10-30T02:14:00.001-07:00

October 29, 2009

A quick update from my Twitter post from last month. I had the pleasure of speaking at two excellent conferences this week, iMedia Breakthrough and Digital Media West. During the Q&A of my talk at Digital Media, I was asked about my views of Twitter's staying power versus competition from Facebook.

I think this charts sums up the competitive threat that Twitter may pose to Facebook's astounding 6% of all U.S. Internet visits (read: no threat).

Facebook's dominance minimizes the detail and recent decline in visits to Twitter's domain. This chart gives a clearer picture of Twitter's decline over the last few months. As I noted in last months entry, this chart only portrays web visits to Twitter versus application traffic.

At iMedia Breakthrough, Jeff Rosenblum from Questus referenced a Harvard Business School Study finding that the median number of tweets per twitter user over the life of their twitter account is 1!

I Believe this figure confirms our original hypothesis of Twitter-stall due to a drop in new users. As Facebook continues to grow, its user-base across Mosaic types shows that its user-base is becoming ubiquitous. Twitter by contrast was showing greater coverage amongst types earlier in its growth phase. Since Twitter's decline in July, the number of over-indexing has narrowed significantly, indicating that early growth may have been the result of significant trail behavior leading up to this summer.

That being said, I still plan to tweet this entry.

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2009/10/twitter_revisited_in_more_than.html

Search Engine Marketing: A Perfect Blend Of Social Media, SEO and SEM PR

2009-10-30T02:11:00.000-07:00

Search engine marketing (SEM) has evolved to become the most reliable strategy for reaching your target audience and driving conversions on the internet. It compels your market to visit your website; it boosts your company's exposure within your space; it positions your product as the solution to their problems. As a result, your sales go up. Your revenue and profit swell. Your ROI rises. And your business enjoys stronger branding and customer loyalty in the process.

Many of your competitors are already using SEM in an attempt to capture a larger portion of your market. There hasn't ever been a better time to protect and expand your territory. This article will explain why search engine marketing should be a critical piece of your online marketing strategy. You'll discover the value of hiring an SEM expert versus forging a path yourself. We'll also describe how SEM PR and SEM social media tactics converge with SEO and PPC to produce a groundswell of momentum.

Why Search Engine Marketing Is Critical

Search engine marketing blends SEO, pay-per-click advertising, and social media strategies to give your company a higher level of visibility within the search engines' listings. However, visibility without sales defeats the purpose. And therein lies the true value of SEM.

Your marketing efforts must generate conversions in order to justify the investment. Conversions might include a prospect buying your product, signing up for your newsletter, or becoming your affiliate. It might include subscribing to a continuity program that generates monthly revenue. Search engine marketing not only allows your company to approach your audience, but it engages the conversation that is already occurring in their mind. It compels action, which lifts your conversion rate.

Is Hiring A Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Expert Necessary?

Every tactic that is leveraged within a comprehensive search engine marketing deployment can be learned. The problem is, doing so is incredibly time-consuming. The algorithms that govern the search engine's organic rankings change constantly. The major PPC platforms endure a seemingly endless string of upheavals. Social media sites are still in their infancy; as they mature, so too, will the tactics required to leverage them. Developing proficiency in each area of search engine marketing takes an enormous amount of time.

An SEM expert will design a search engine optimization campaign that pushes your website to the top rankings for your chosen keywords. They can also launch a pay-per-click, PPC, advertising campaign that further improves your exposure. Social media marketing tactics can be integrated to dovetail with the rest of your search engine marketing deployment. Even though you could launch these strategies yourself, do you have the time to learn and apply them?

SEM PR: Melding Search Engine Marketing With Public Relations

SEM PR has its roots in search engine optimization. Years ago, online public relations was managed largely through the creation and distribution of online press releases. This is still effective today. These press releases gain traction in the search engines' organic listings. That builds your company's brand while helping to push negative publicity off the first page of results.

Today, online public relations has been incorporated within a broader search engine marketing context that includes PPC, SEO and online reputation management (ORM). For example, a press release can be distributed online in order to gain traction within the natural listings. Then, a PPC campaign can be launched to direct your audience to the press release on your website. Links can be placed throughout the page to other positive coverage. The more points of exposure, the less likely negative press will penetrate the top rankings in the search engines. This is a core element of ORM and by extension, search engine marketing.

Leveraging SEM Social Media Optimization For A Competitive Edge

Social media sites began to enjoy ranking authority in the major search engines a few years ago. That authority has only increased over time, making social media an important cog in search engine marketing. This is the reason SEM social media optimization has become critical for companies that need to reach niche markets.

By establishing a presence on the top social media sites, a search engine marketing agency can develop multiple entry points in the organic listings. That increases your audience's exposure. It also prevents bad press from infiltrating the top listings for your keywords. These advantages converge to deliver a competitive edge for your company.

The Value Of Hiring A Professional SEO Marketing Consultant

Time is the most valuable commodity of all. Once it expires, it cannot be retrieved. This is why a growing number of companies - including your competitors - are opting to hire a professional SEO marketing consultant. They realize that search engine marketing strategies are complex. The learning curve is steep. What's more, deploying PPC, SMO and SEO tactics poorly can do more harm than good. Precision in execution is critical.

If you have already mastered each of the strategies that make up search engine marketing, and have a refined the systems through which to deploy them, you may not need an SEM expert. Otherwise, you might be fighting an uphill struggle. Consider contacting a search engine marketing specialist today.

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How I Diversify My Site and Income

2009-10-30T02:08:00.000-07:00

In this post I want to present some visuals on how I’ve expanded one of my blogs and diversified its income streams.

How do I expand my blog?
How do I move beyond the basics of making money with AdSense on my blog?

I’m asked these two questions a lot and in this post I want to share, with some visuals, how I do it on one of my own sites.

While at Blog World Expo last week I was asked to present to a small private group on how I make money blogging. As part of the presentation I put together some basic graphics that attempted to visualize how Digital Photography School works. With the permission of the clients I presented to I’d like to share them here.

Lets start with a basic rundown of what the site is made up of – or at least where I’m interacting with readers both on and off the site:

The site started as a simple blog. In time I added a forum and a newsletter. The forum added a more communal element to the site while the newsletter both gave a secondary connecting point with readers, drives significant traffic across to both the blog and forum but also opens up other ways to market to readers. In more recent times I’ve started using social media by creating a Twitter account and Facebook page.

In this next visual I highlight four of the main tasks that I focus my energies on with DPS. While there are other things that one must do to keep a site going, these are the main things I focus my time upon at present.

Creating Compelling Content – this is the foundation of the site and particularly in the early days of DPS was what I spent most time doing. Ultimately it is about creating useful content that solves problems and meets needs for people.
Build Community – getting a reader to your blog is hard so it makes a lot of sense to work hard on keeping the readers you have and doing whatever you can to keep them visiting again and again. One of the main ways to do this is to give them a sense of ‘belonging’.
Monetize – a site with great content and community is fantastic – but unless you can monetize it in some way it isn’t sustainable. As a result a percentage of my time and resources goes towards making money from the site.
Marketing – to make money from a website you need people to read it and to have people reading it you need to step outside of your own site and market yourself in some way. Great content and community is not enough. I’d include SEO in this category as it’s largely about driving traffic.

There are obviously other tasks that a blogger needs to work on (such as design, maintenance etc) but broadly speaking these are the four things I’m working on each day in some way or another.

Lets see how the two graphics above interact with one another. Below is a visual of the four areas of the site and the four ‘tasks’ that I do – it shows WHERE I’m doing each of the ‘tasks’ on the site.

OK – so I’m doing everything everywhere.

The reason I include this graphic is that I hear people talking about how certain types of media are only suited to some goals.

For example I heard one presenter at BWE talk about how social media is just for marketing or community building – however I think it can be used for monetization also. An example of this was when I launched the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook. I did launches for the ebook both here on the ProBlogger blog and also on Twitter – Twitter generated over twice as many sales as the blog.

While social media may not be as effective for everyone when it comes to monetization there are certainly ways to do it. The same goes with other mediums.

I won’t go through how each of the four areas achieve each of the four goals or tasks but the take home lesson here is that if you have a variety of goals for your site that there can be multiple ways to meet them.

Lets move onto monetization. The next visual highlights the four main ways that I make money off DPS (or at least the four ways it will make money shortly).

Ad Networks – in some circles these are looked down on as an inferior way to make money but on DPS they work. Running AdSense and Chitika in particular have been very profitable for me on DPS. Sure you share the revenue with the network but when you’re unable to fill your inventory with directly sold ads they can still work out for you. You should be looking to expand your focus and diversify but don’t write it off altogether – keep testing the options to see what converts on your site.
Direct Ad Sales – the obvious advantage of selling your own ads to an advertiser is that you’re not splitting profits with Google or some other ad network. The downside is that it can take time to find advertiser and negotiate with them to really get the return that you could get. This can get a little easier when you’ve got significant traffic but depending upon your niche and where the economy is at it can also be difficult – particularly to attract the bigger brand advertisers unless you have relationships with them or are well positioned in the advertising sales game.
Affiliate Marketing – this is something that I didn’t focus upon a whole lot on DPS except for using Amazon’s Associate program. However lately there have been a few quality photography products launched that have opened up opportunities on this front.
Products – this is the ’soon to be’ element of the monetization mix on DPS as I have two ebooks in development – one to be released in the coming weeks. I’m still yet to see how well products will work on the site but there’s significant potential if we can convince readers that paying for some content is worth doing (I’m sure I’ll write more about this in the coming weeks).

You’ll notice that there are other monetization streams that are not mentioned and that I don’t do at DPS – such as text link advertising, paid reviews etc.

Here’s one last graphic that overlays the monetization streams with the areas of the site.

Once again you’ll see that each of the areas of the site are involved in at least two of the monetization streams – although not all. Some of the exceptions are simply that I’ve not had time to try them but some I’m not sure will ever happen (either because I doubt that they’ll work or because they can’t – such as Ad Networks in Social media).

Again – the reason I include this graphic is that opportunities do exist to diversify income streams between mediums. For example newsletters are a great place to monetize. While you can’t run AdSense in a newsletter you can sell an ad to an advertiser. You can also use a newsletter to do affiliate marketing (in fact I find it works better in newsletters than anywhere else on my site).

I hope the visuals above are a little food for thought and make sense without the context of the rest of the presentation.

A few Take Home Lessons:

Let me try to pull together a few of the main take home lessons that I’ve been learning:

Know your goals – having identified that main tasks that I want to be involved in has given me a structure and helped me develop strategies to take my site forward.
Expand and Diversify – Adding different areas/mediums to your blog can help to make your site multi-dimensional and opens up new ways to achieve your goals. It is also good in turbulent economic times to have a site with a variety of different areas but also income streams.
Don’t Ignore AdSense – ad networks have their pros and cons. If you write them off completely you could be leaving money on the table. The key is to have an open mind, test what works best and revisit your decisions over time as different monetization streams will suit your site differently at different stages of its life cycle.
Don’t get lazy and rely upon AdSense – many bloggers get lazy and rely upon the same old way that their site has always made money to continue to do so. Keep testing, hustle to find new advertisers, test different affiliate products to promote, watch what your competitors are monetizing with and consider launching your own product.

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/10/29/how-i-diversify-my-site-and-income/