ONLINE MARKETING

2010-08-03T09:45:00.000-07:00

Internet Marketing and Leveraging the Power of Syndication

By Jeffrey L. Smith

Considering most ranking battles are won as a result of content wars, the power of content syndication is a powerful equalizer for search engine optimization, conversion and exposure. The tactical advantage of a company that strategically publishes keyword rich / critical content to reach a broader audience has a distinct advantage to a less visible competitor who may be relying on a smaller footprint or narrower array of phrases and channels for exposure.

Which would you rather have, one website touting your message or hundreds of websites syndicating your content through a ripple of synchronized promotion? Just like you can lead a horse to water and not make them drink, not all traffic converts, unless the medium for exposure matches their impulse to purchase, their mood or can create the tension needed to fuel conversion (filling out a form, purchasing a product, taking action, etc.).

Many of the best kept SEO secrets revolve around the simple premise of reach and syndication. Considering gravity, impact and reach are all metrics which correspond to (a) which medium or mediums are in play (b) how authoritative the initial splash is and (c) how the ripple of syndication builds authority through citation to the original source.

Just as each keyword has a tipping point, every website needs a certain amount of saturation from related posts, pages or links to cross the tipping point and reach a ranking plateau. This directly corresponds to two unique principles that search algorithms pay particular attention to (1) query deserves freshness and (2) citation and link velocity.

The spike in traffic or citation that spreads through search engines is algorithmically programmed to assess the signal to noise ratios of citation and determine if the signal is genuine or automated. For example, when a breaking new story erupts, it can appear very similar to a mass scale of automation and the trust of the various sources is what often determines what gravity the page or post is given.

The Digg effect for example - when a page got to the first page of Digg has proven that the power of leveraging collective ripples can not only create a deluge of server-taxing traffic, but the aftermath that results is often accompanied by the page that was the fulcrum in the spotlight becoming buoyant and ranking in the top 10 search engine result pages as a result of the mass citation.

Just as the word "wedding" with its 720 million competing pages was easily conquered when a wedding video where the participants started with a normal looking wedding and then all began dancing in choreographed routines (unbeknownst to the groom and bride).

The point to take away from this is (1) attention equates to buoyancy in search engines and (2) viral success can result in superior search engine positioning. The video still ranks to this day for the keyword wedding and if properly leveraged could represent a massive opportunity for monetization (even though it was intended as a joke). If leveraged properly, they could all laugh all the wat to the bank.

Syndication is what allows viral content to reach millions of potential consumers who in turn pass it on to others to consume and enjoy. While SEO is a broad connotation for all things related to search and search engine positioning, thinking outside the box and applying traffic generation strategies for conversion do not exceed it scope.

The takeaway from this one example represents the underlying premise of (1) assessing popular marketing or social media channels for your target demographic and (2) not trying to recreate the wheel to drive traffic to your website as much as finding a relevant traffic source and then funneling it to your offer.
Content is the medium for online consumption and through positioning your content (videos, landing pages, RSS feeds and articles) through prominent sites which have the ability to immediate gain traction and catapult your message in front of millions of potential readers.

By using this type of online promotion, you can scale your message to massive proportions by using multiple sites as the apex of your syndication and internet marketing strategy.

Jeffrey L. Smith is the Founder of SEO Design Solutions an SEO Company based in Chicago, IL for more information about their SEO services follow the links provided.

2010-03-01T09:13:00.000-08:00

Craigslist Business - How to Get Your Business Started Online

As the job market continues to look bleak the entrepreneurs are coming out in droves to help those who are losing a job or those looking for a way to supplement their current position. What these entrepreneurs are showing us is how to make our own money on our own terms. So if there is money to be made on the internet how can a person start a Craigslist business? If you're a savvy shopper and a bit handy, you can make a business on Craigslist. First you must have an item or service to sell. If you want to invest you simply find a product that you can get at no cost or limited expense, fix it up, and re-sell it through another local venue. This technique takes practice but is well worth it if you can easily fix something torn or slightly worn to look newer and serviceable. There is a free or give away section on Craigslist that should be checked daily in the early morning to obtain the best deals. One trick that many people have learned is to call the cell phone number of the person offering the item and arrange a time for pick-up. Once the item is picked, you do a little work, and list it for sale.

You can market your business through your community, on forums and using classifieds. All of these are free services offered through Craigslist with a few simple rules; no spamming or repeated ads. Simply set up a free account, place your ad in the appropriate group then add in your text. Make certain that the text is catchy, truthful, reasonably priced, and regional. The best received ads are those that are to the point and contacting the owner is easy. A quick transaction makes for a quicker profit. One entrepreneurial minded person I know straight out of college took one hundred dollars as an investment and turned it into a thousand in less than eight days. If you can spend a couple of hours in the morning surfing for the best bargains you can get great results as well. As ads run from newest to older, you will want to update your ad frequently, possibly twice a day if the item hasn't sold or the response is weak. In order to update your ad you will need to delete the older post and write a new one. One thing that Craigslister's will catch quickly is a duplicated ad. Craigslist business, is a great way to make fast and effective cash online.

If you don't like to buy, sell, or trade items to make a profit then you may be more interested in the 'telecommute' section on the site. This is a list of jobs that are available in your area offering different work from home opportunities. Another way to work a business on the Craigslist site is to offer your own business as a merchant. Start an online store and sell your products first on Craigslist and then direct potential customers to your ecommerce site which will in turn build repeat customers for you. The hardest part about posting on Craigslist is having your ads get flagged off or ghosted from too many postings. Most successful Craigslist advertisers use multiple phone verified accounts so they can post several ads a day without worrying about their accounts being banned or their ads being killed. If you have access to a lot of phone numbers then you can verify multiple accounts yourself. For the rest of you I would suggest buying some Craigslist Accounts. It will definitely help you to be more profitable if you can post multiple ads.

Marketing the Law Firm - Internet Potential and Opportunities

Although lawyers have been part of our society since the days of old, marketing the law firm, a necessity in garnering business for attorneys these days, has not been seen as a necessity to practicing law until recent. Traditionally, firms have never been aggressive in marketing strategies and campaigns. However, in today's economy where there is a surplus of lawyers coming out of universities every year, the competition is becoming stiffer than ever, and marketing has now become a necessity. Most firms have awoken to the fact that a successful business must have an online presence. With so much saturation in the field, acquiring a strong online presence for your firm is essential for beating out other competitors. So if you were assigned the responsibility of marketing a law firm online, how would you go about it? While marketing the law firm, you need to harness several advantages of the online platform. These include the following things. Online marketing of law firms require very minimal expenditure as compared to traditional marketing strategies like press advertisements. Online marketing for legal services requires minimal manpower unlike traditional means where a lot more manpower is needed to carry out their marketing strategies.

When marketing the law firm online, you have a real time response rate. You receive a request from a client or potential client immediately when he or she sends it and you can respond to it just as fast. The lawyers can easily delegate manning and updating of the website to supporting staff members and they will be left with adequate time to deal with daily business engagements. After marketing the law firm on the World Wide Web, you have reached a global market that has no limitations geographically unlike advertising on local press. Forget the yellow pages and their squeezed ads. In most cases, the fact that a hundred lawyers will be featured on the same publication means that most of these off-line marketing and advertising solutions just cost much and produce little. These methods are the past. Society today is one that is tied to the internet, and as such, businesses must adapt. The potential of marketing the law firm online has advantages such as access to paid search providers who have pay per click packages that offer lawyers the perfect Internet marketing and advertising solutions. It also has online portals and directories can be exploited to gain popularity for your site by enhancing your firm's internet visibility once you are listed. The exposure in a legal internet portal or directory is incomparable to any other marketing and or advertising medium available offline. Finally it has the potential of marketing the law firm to have the most dominant presence in the online world, potentially getting you clients from all over the nation. Internet marketing is not limited geographically, and as such, it is the most effective means of reaching as many people as possible. Internet marketing can help you to get clientele and you won't have to spend up to the last buck in your pocket. Instead of spending money on Search Engine Marketing, which is unsuccessful try Attorney Video Marketing. Every lawyer has seen 100% action with Marketing the Law Firm.

2010-02-17T07:26:00.000-08:00

Jobs Working Online at Home - Legit Online Jobs to Earn Money

At any one time, there are over 1,000,000,000 (one billion) users surfing the internet. With such astonishing quantities, it would definitely be a good idea to tack in on some of the cash. Making money online is simple, but not easy. Boredom will be a huge factor for in your online success, it is so easy to get tired of repeating the same old thing multiple times. If working online at home was a package being sold on eBay, the description would look like this:

Simple, casual work from the computer.
Money pouring into your online account.
Extra income and cash from promotions and the snowball effect.
Cash being generated on "autopilot" while you sleep.

Okay, Internet Marketing might be all those things, but that is only if you succeed. This might be the description of the package, but inside your are really going to find:

Spending countless hours staring at a computer screen.
Being unable to drive any traffic to your website (if you have one).
Working for a simple online job, spending countless hours without seeing any results.

Not to discourage you, but over 90% of attempted Internet Marketers fail. Nevertheless, you can be one of those 10% who succeed. By following the right guides, researching the right topics, and preforming the right tasks, your chances amply increase that you will hit the bulls-eye and be rewarded with profits. This article will allow you to see your options. First, I will assume that by you are looking for a simple online job, without a website or blog of your own. There are tons of uncomplicated, plain jobs for you to look at:

Take customer surveys. Customer satisfaction is becoming more and more important for every business, online and off. Organizations are asking regular citizens like you for their valued opinion. If you are interested in online surveys, I might recommend surveyclub.com.
Read emails. Okay, this may sound easy, but do not be easily beguiled. You will not get paid as much as you might hope, and you will be expected to spread these emails to your friends. If you are interested in email marketing, I might recommend getpaid5times.com.
Click on ads. You can get paid a lot....or not so much for clicking on ads. You will probably generate a total of about $0.01 for every ad you click on. However, a system I have found called bux.to has a rather interesting system. It offers your $0.01 for each ad you click on, and every ad your referrals click on. If another person sign up to the system through your link, they become your referral.

These jobs are very time consuming, and the pay is not always constant. If you are more interested in starting your own type of business, follow these next steps. I recommend choosing to start your own business because there is a lot more room for improvement than with a simple job. Furthermore, succeeding with your own Internet Marketing business will cause a huge snowball effect, and money will roll in faster than ever.
You do not necessarily need any Internet Marketing tools to get started online. All you need is your knowledge, access to the internet, and a keyboard. Without further delay, let's get started.
Affiliating
Affiliating is a method to create income that almost every beginner uses. Why? Because it's simple, and free to start. Affiliates are people who sell products that are not their own. There are several online affiliate programs, but the best affiliate program is Clickbank. Follow these steps to get started with Clickbank:

Go to clickbank.com and sign up for a free account.
Make a few hoplinks for various products you wish to sell.
Make a website and fill it with content. That means important information, tips, and solutions.
Add your hoplinks at the end of content segments.
Drive traffic to your website with Article Marketing. Article Marketing means writing free articles for online directories with a link back to your website at the end of each article.

Bonus Income: Sign up for a free AdSense account at google.com/adsense/. Make simple image and text ads to put on your website for extra income. Other online methods you may want to try:

Setup your own online auction business. You can sign up for a free eBay account and sell your used or created merchandise.
Service selling. You can make a website for your particular service and advertise offline.
Make a webmaster business. If you specialize in HTML, you may want to consider making a website creation service.

Grab a Free Affiliating Course and learn the legendary PREselling method that top affiliates are using. 100% Free, meant for all experience levels! Check It Out!

2010-02-06T10:44:00.000-08:00

SEO and PPC - Generating Leads With These Internet Marketing Strategies

Good websites are created to do one simple thing, and that is to capture leads. More times than not websites do not have enough traffic to drive leads to it. Successful internet marketers have discovered the secret to driving traffic to a good lead capturing website. The secret lies in utilizing PPC and SEO to their fullest potential. Even though pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) marketing are strikingly different, they both offer similar results.
Advantages of PPC -
Users can now get instantaneous results using paid advertising, thanks to the top search engines on the internet. PPC is also known as pay-per-click because it is basically paid advertising. No other form of internet advertising offers faster results for online marketers. A PPC campaign can be up and running literally within a few minutes. This form of advertising allows the marketer to know exactly which keywords yield the best results based on the number of clicks that an ad receives. Once set up the ads are distributed all throughout the web ready to entice visitors to the destination website.

PPC marketing is just as much an art as it is a science. Successful online marketers spend a great deal of time learning the technical/science of proper keyword selection for their PPC campaigns. Tools such as freekeywords.wordtracker.com and adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal supply the information for lead generating keywords. Once this science of attracting potential leads has been established, the next step is to get these clicks to convert into actual leads. This is where the art of the message in the PPC ad begins to shine. In order for the PPC ad to lure potential customers, it must elicit some sort of desire in its compelling message. For example, Perry Marshall is noted for creating desire in his ads by saying the following. "Nobody who bought a drill actually wanted a drill. They wanted a hole. Therefore if one wants to sell drills, they should advertise information about making holes - NOT INFORMATION ABOUT DRILLS."
Advantages of SEO -
Top search engines like Yahoo and Google are friendly to internet marketers that are patient enough to learn SEO. Search engine optimization is a little bit trickier than PPC but once mastered can product longer lasting results. As with PPC, SEO also generates traffic based on a single word, combination of words or word phrases. SEO rankings depend on two main criteria: (1) keywords and (2) competition for those keywords. Experience has shown that the first search term (i.e. meta tag) to get optimized is often times the first listing (non paid advertisement) on the search engine results page. It is also apparent that seniority plays a large role in the search result outcomes. At least that is how Google favors certain search terms.
PPC or SEO -
No one can say which is better; however, the lead generating results from PPC have proven to be faster than SEO. Another advantage to PPC is that it can help a website get optimized by providing back links to it (thus enhancing its SEO capability). On the other hand, SEO costs the online marketer nothing but time and "know how" to get high first page rankings. And SEO remains on the page for as long as the search engine will allow it to be there.
More Tactics -

If you would like to learn how to generate an unlimited supply of your own MLM leads then find your way back to the original article at www.AmysMLMFortune.com. There you will find marketing tools like PPC and SEO to help build your home based business online. You can also get your own copy of my internet marketing newsletter which will grant you access to resources used by dozens of online MLM savvy entrepreneurs. I'm a successful internet marketing and attraction marketing coach. I enjoy teaching others how to use web 2.0 and social media to succeed in their opportunity at http://www.AmysMLMFortune.com.

2010-01-25T03:13:00.000-08:00

Your Internet Marketing Campaign - Ideas That Are Hot

PR 101, when you're coming out with a press release to announce the launch of a website in your internet marketing campaign, you tie it to something that is already newsworthy and that is the way you get attention to your press releases. As I'm seeing it now, to build a new website, the first thing is, see what resources we've got, make sure we optimize on page and clean up what we can. Then we look through our own networks for JVs and look for what's easy and also leveraging off other sites that are in line and maybe complementary for what we are doing. When you're working for a client, the first thing you're doing is going through all this brainstorming and mapping out a strategy and writing down, here is what we're going to do next. Actually there is some easy low hanging fruit to go after.

It's hidden resources in your internet marketing campaign. Very often you sit down with someone and they say, we've been buying this type of advertising, we've been doing a newsletter to our clients, whatever their general list of things is. Most of the time the biggest mistake people make is, they rely on only one or two channels of marketing. So they've been doing direct mail for a long time and they haven't really leveraged the internet. Or they are on the internet but they've never done a postcard marketing campaign. There are things called hidden resources and that is where I will ask them, who their relatives are or who are the people they know? Where have they spoken before? They've spoken somewhere at a trade show last year but they didn't videotape it. They didn't even audio record it. The next thing in the hidden resources is their customers. Very often they don't use testimonials effectively, they don't have a capture method for testimonials.

The next thing we do in your internet marketing campaign is, look at the hidden resources where they already have processes in place. Say they install curtains in people's homes. They do house calls and they measure the windows and they install curtains. But they don't take a flip cam with them or train their installation people to have the person stand in front of the newly installed curtains and say, I just had Bob's Curtains in my house and they took off their shoes at the door, they cleaned up all the wood and plaster shavings before they left. Not only that, I have a beautiful set of curtains and it was a great price. You capture the testimonial in the moment. They've already got somebody on site, they've got a happy customer, and maybe they send around somebody after who does an inspection but that person at the inspection doesn't ask one more question. Would you mind calling this special 1800 number and leaving a testimonial or better yet just have something in their hand, a voice recorder and record a testimonial. Give them $20 off to show your gratitude.

So that is just adding one more step to existing processes. We have the existing resources, we've got reviewing the sites, also the possibility of JVs and also some of those hidden resources. I know there is a little bit of overlap there with a few of those different areas, like the existing resources and also your hidden resources as well. When you're working with a client it essentially brings us full circle back to the objective.
First we set the objective in your internet marketing campaign. We want to get twenty more leads a month for a company, let's say. That is their objective. Next is the strategy. The strategy is the high level big picture. We want to get twenty leads but we want to do it with pre qualified people who already have money in their pocket, have a preconceived notion of their pain and respect value. The strategy is to target those prospects. The tactics are then the things, well what do those people read? So I'm going to go in this newspaper, I'm going to go in that magazine, I'm going to get quoted in that magazine, I'm going to go on this website. So that's tactical. Set the objective, look to the resources and your website is bound to become more popular.

Have You Learned The Fundamental SEO Techniques To Get Your Site Ranked?
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"Attraction Marketing" - The Modern Guerilla Tactic

First of all, I want you to know that I'm not a superstar. In fact, I'm just a regular guy who managed to finally found my way out from the bottom of the pits doing MLM, after teaming up with the right leaders and really figured it all out. I want to help those of you who are stuck in the same position as I was before. I want to show you a way to run your home business effectively, so that you won't be wasting your efforts and eventually failing and angry at the Network Marketing industry. So, the first golden nugget that you need to take away from this article is:
"It is not WHAT you sell, it is HOW you sell it". And I teach something called "Attraction Marketing" to all my team members. You see, you want people to come to you. You don't want to be chasing other people. And once you understand this concept, you will be able to build your company on autopilot, WITHOUT chasing friends and family, making cold calls, buying leads and using other traditional methods of marketing.
If you are still using these old school methods, it is very likely that you will become one the 97% of network marketers who fail in this business. Why? Because these methods are difficult to implement, have little reach and most people don't like doing them anyway. Also, these old school methods teach you to pitch anyone and everyone you know and meet. But if you are pitching it to everyone on the street, how can you expect to reach a qualified and interested audience? Remember, its quality not quantity! But what if you could have both? The major problem that we as network marketers face today, is that people have become immune to information and sales pitches. Think about all the spam and junk mail you receive on a daily basis. Or the solicitations that you get on the phone or at your home. People just switch off!

So with this iron wall of defense up, how are you suppose to get someone to join your business opportunity? The only way that you can successfully sell to someone is when they trust you and find value in what you have to say and want more of what you offer. You must be able to offer value and expertise people want. Because quality prospects don't join a business based on products or a compensation plan, they join because they have found a leader that has equal or greater value than themselves who they can learn and emulate success from. So what you need is some basic marketing education, a little bit of trial and error, and a sound marketing plan that includes paid advertisements and free/low cost web 2.0 strategies, and you are on your way to play with the big boys. If you don't have a system of marketing your business on the internet, which is absolutely essential in this business if you want to have any type of success, then make sure you get one now!

Anthony Tan, Internet Marketer & MLM Global Specialist If you want to learn more about a fully customizable lead generation system on the internet that allows you to integrate your own opportunity on the back end while generating over 14 streams of upfront income through a cleverly constructed funded proposal system, then visit my site here: http://www.mlmsponsormore.com.