Unbeknownst to me, other outlets were talking about the increasing penetration of smart phones in Latin America.

According to Cellular News, there are over 500 million people in Latin America that have mobile phones. According to that same article, more than 91% of those phones use GSM and are on a 3G network.

There isn’t a hard breakdown of how many of those people are smart phone users, but that’s still a pretty big number of total users.

What I have been able to ascertain, is that a lot of the people that do have smart phones have either a RIM (Blackberry) device or a Windows Phone device. That’s according to this other article by Unwiredview.com.

Photo by: gabofr

According to that second article, Microsoft says that Windows Mobile, specifically version 6.5, is gaining share in Latin America and currently holds 26% of the smartphone market in Brazil and 24% of the market in Mexico.

Mexico and Brazil together account for about 250 million mobile phone users. I have not been able to find hard data on the breakdown of how many of those 250 million total subscribers are smart phone users either. It would be nice to know how many smart phone users there are, at least so we can put the Microsoft numbers into perspective.

Regardless, I feel that the total subscriber numbers, coupled with the availability of 3G data service and the increase in data bandwidth to Latin America that Global Crossing is installing, I see growth in the demand for social media, and other media rich products from Latin America.

I couldn’t agree more with this statement:

“The Latin American market is poised to sustain strong growth,” said John Legere, Global Crossing’s CEO. “The investments we are making are in response to the continued demand Global Crossing is experiencing across our global network for broadband services such as video over IP, social media and content delivery networks.”

Global Crossing, is a company that lays underwater data cables. Most data travels via underwater cables since satellites don’t quite have enough capacity and are still quite expensive.

Now, the question is, will all this growth in data requirements etc. be good for Latin American societies? Also, will the regional authoritarian governments put up firewalls to quell the free flow of information to and from their citizens?

What do you think?

Please contact us if you’d like information about our advertising and sponsorship rates.

Thank you!

Here are 3 things to do if you want to avoid looking like a spammer:

1. Avoid keyword stuffing. What does that mean? It means avoid putting too many of your keywords in your posts. You should also avoid having your key words close together. So, pay attention to the density of your target words to the rest of your text, shoot for 2-3% density and you should be OK.

   Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:
   

   Did you notice how many times the writer of that passage stuffs uses the words “marketing,” “online,” and “internet”?

2. Avoid talking and not saying anything. This is, I believe, an acquired skill. Most people, when they speak, they have a point to make. When talking to prospective clients or when blogging etc. make sure that you say something. Anything other than “sign up to get the 20 secrets to the best internet marketing widget known to man that they don’t want you to have.” Teasing someone in the text to entice your reader to take a next step is OK, but you have got to give me a real reason to take that next step.

   By the way, only scammers and spammers have “secrets” that “they” don’t want you to have.

3. Avoid being too religious. Let me explain, a lot of scammers and spammers will hide behind the guise of being pious. They believe that by acting and pretending to be pious that you will trust and believe them. Unless you know the person personally, be on guard any time any one tells you that they wanted to talk to you while they are “on their way to Bible study.” I feel strongly that someone’s piousness, or appearance thereof, should not be the reason that you do business with them.

Bonus: Pay attention to the comments on your blog or website. If you have a site where people can comment, such as a blog, or a squidoo lens or something along those lines, do yourself a favor and pay attention to what people are saying in the comments.

Here’s an example from the same site where I took the sample stuffing text from:

Looks like that site owner should’ve activated Akismet and enabled comment moderation.

• We go over what happened with the Biggest Losers and the Burn and Learn event
• What’s up next for Hope and Love 4 Kids, and what it has to do with chicken wings
• Other events that are coming up during the next month or so

This was a really fun interview, and I hope that y’all enjoy it.

For the most part, it appears that social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook and making some decent inroads into Latin America.

No, I do not have empirical data for you to use to verify my assertion, all I have is anecdotal data from seeing more and more people tweeting in Spanish and seeing more and more of my family members on Facebook.

I realize that this is not a representative sample, but I can tell you that on the surface, it appears that the people that are able to access the internet in Latin America are definitely getting on to Twitter and Facebook, I’d almost dare to say on a daily basis.

Why is it important that my family is on Facebook?

Because the majority of them had never been online before. They’d never bothered with blogging, with googling for anything, nor with buying anything online. The internet was viewed as something “the gringos” used and it was not something that they were interested in. Now, because of Facebook, most of my aunts, uncles and cousins, specially my cousins, are online and using Facebook on an almost daily basis.

I know that there are lots of other social media outlets out there. There’s something called Hi5 that keeps sending me notices that there are people on there that want to be my friends. There’s also q’oobole and quetal? and several other networks all vying for a piece of the social networking pie.

The big player making a move almost everywhere except for Brazil (where Orkut still reigns supreme), appears to be Facebook.

What does all this mean?

To me, it means that there is a huge opportunity in Latin America.

Recently, there was a social media conference in Mexico City called “SM Latam.” The conference looked to explore, teach and spread the word about social media and how to use it for creating connections and for increasing your business ROI.

I didn’t get a chance to go, and I only found out about the conference after the fact, but the fact the conference even happened makes me happy.

What didn’t make me happy was that a lot of the speeches, as far as I can tell including the keynote, appear to have been delivered in English. On the surface, it looks like the majority of the attendees to the SM Latam event were at least bilingual. This made me realize that most of the writing on websites that deal with social media is also written in English.

My question became: What about the rest of the people in Latin America that are not bilingual?

Lots of people that have small to medium sized businesses of their own that could benefit from using social media don’t speak English. Who’s reaching out to them?

I’ve decided to try to reach out to those people, either on this site or on a new site. I’m already bilingual, so all I need to do is learn how to say certain words and express certain concepts in Spanish.

From monitoring the #smlatam feed on twitter, I was able to figure out how to say some social media terms in Spanish. From the feed, I was able to ascertain that:

• Social media in Spanish is “social media”
• Fan page in Spanish is “fan page”
• Web analytics in Spanish is “web analytics”

So, moving forward, expect to see more content in Spanish on this site, and also in the podcast. I may actually end up launching a completely separate podcast en español, but we’ll see about that.

I am a big believer in article marketing. If you’re looking to generate traffic to your website, writing articles and then posting those articles on various sites is the cheapest and quickest way to get visitors to your website.
There are a lot of nuances when it comes to article marketing. For example, 90% of the success of your article depends on the title. If your article doesn’t have a good title, people won’t open it and read it. Yes, you should provide good content in your article body, but that won’t matter if no one wants to read your article because the title sucks.

The next most important part of an article, is the resource box. It’s the signature box at the bottom of the article. That’s where you invite people to come to your website and get a free something or another. The quality of the article and the relevance of the free something or another will help with getting people to your website, but more important than that, is that the resource box should flow out of the body of the article.

So, where do you go post your articles?

There are many, many, many websites out there that allow you to post your articles for free. There are also a lot of services that purport to automatically submit your articles for you. My experience with automated tools is that your mileage will vary. Some of the automated tools are good, but expensive and if you have money to burn for an article submitter service, just buy PPC ads instead and save yourself the time and hassle or writing articles, but I digress.

While doing some research for this post, I found a website that uses a proprietary tool that ranks the effectiveness of article marketing sites. I don’t know anything about the formula they use, so I can’t vouch as to how precise or accurate it is, but I do like that they have a list of over 450 article directories. They even recreate the list every month.

http://www.masonworld.com/masonworld-article-directory-rank/

Here are the top 20 article directories from the above site for the month of January 2010.

Notably absent from the list is Associated Content, I’m not sure why they didn’t make the cut, but I like posting my articles on AC because they split their adsense revenue with their authors. I like to say that every little bit of revenue helps.

By “good and successful” I mean that they pay their bills by performing SEO work full time, with legitimate clients and that you can see have a high profile within the community. Admittedly, by my own definition, I am not a good SEOer. If I had to peg my level, I would say that I am adequate to perhaps an advanced student of the art.

What are the traits?

• They never miss an opportunity for a keyword rich backlink I’ve noticed on certain pages for the upcoming SEO conferences that some experts have keyword rich backlinks, and others don’t. At first, I thought it was something to do with the organizer not allowing the links, but why allow some people to get a back link and not others? See the speakers page for the Search Exchange conference for a sample.
• They always link to themselves “above the fold”. The term “above the fold” is an old newspaper reference. Basically, if you picture a newspaper of yore, for sale in those boxes on the street, the good news would go “above the fold” where people would see it and want to buy the paper to get the rest of the story. On a web page, it refers to top part of the page, before you have to scroll down to see the rest of it.
• They always use the same keywords. They’re not listed as a “marketing consultant” at one site, as an “online marketer” on another site and as an “online specialist” on yet another. Even though all of those terms are related, they’re not the same keyword. The good practitioners always use the same keywords to link to themselves.
• They tend to be public speakers. I’m not saying that they have to always keynote at Blogworld, or something like that. What I am saying, is that good SEOers tend to speak publicly about their craft. Either in local, regional or national conferences you should be able to find an instance of your SEOer teaching or speaking at an event.
• They don’t promise page 1 rankings. It’s one of the biggest flags when you’re dealing with someone that isn’t good. A good SEOer will tell you that they can improve you rankings or they can optimize your rankings but they won’t promise or guarantee a page 1 ranking, or any kind of a page ranking for that matter.
• They own at least 1 domain. I’m sure after this post goes live I’ll get several emails from “SEO experts” promising me a page 1 ranking “in the Google.” All of those emails will come from a gmail or yahoo email account. It’s my belief that good SEO practitioners own at least 1 domain for their business and know how to use it for their business related emails.

That’s my little list of things that could help you figure out if your SEO consultant sucks or not. I’m not saying that if someone passes all the above criteria they don’t suck. They may still suck and do things that will get your site banned from the search engines or worse, these are just some quick guidelines to help you sort the wheat from the chaff so to speak. There are exceptions to the rule, but for the most part, these guidelines should treat you right.

Photo Credit:

Looks like Asok will be around for awhile since that other guy wasn’t quick enough to pick up on the gist of the conversation.

Although this is not a fitness and weight loss blog, I felt that the story of how Pete lost 185 lb in 9 mo, 5 years ago, and has kept it off holds a valuable lesson for all of us that we can apply both in business and in our personal lives.

Here are some of the highlights from the interview

• The delicious formula for weight loss success: master your mind, manage your mouth, multiply your muscles
• How to deal with trigger foods
• The different types of training that you can perform
• How to get to the point where you hold yourself accountable for your own success
• The difference between wisdom and knowledge
• What’s the secret sauce that makes The Biggest Loser so successful at helping the contestants lose weight
• How to deal with Food addiction

And much, much more.

This is probably one of the most content packed podcasts that you will ever listen to. I’m not hyping, Pete gives us all actionable ideas that you can go out and implement today.

More info about Pete Thomas is at his website: winningman.com

For more information about the Burn and Learn event in Kyle, call 512-350-9177 or visit the Burn and Learn website at: workoutlikealoser.com

The Burn and Learn is a chance for you to try out many different workout styles. Go to Workout Like A Loser for more information about the burn and learn.

Click play below to listen.