Hasn’t happened yet, hence my confidence…

And one of the things that I’ve learned during this time is that consistency is massively important no matter what it is you’re doing on the net.

A couple of examples will explain why.

If you use Facebook or Twitter to market a product or service, the site users that you are promoting to must trust you. If you are not consistent, how can they?

Even if you are not promoting or marketing, your ‘followers’ need to trust and respect you. Again, if they do not, how can you expect them to believe a word you say?

So it’s been quite unnerving recently that so many marketers seem to be forgetting this.

For my sins, I am on almost every mailing list you can think of. This is not because I’m a masochist, or at least I don’t think so. But I do need to keep up with what is going on to make sure that today’s new product is not based on yesterday’s ideas and concepts.

And what I am seeing is information that is becoming less and less consistent (and therefore believable) by the day.

As an example, a few days ago, I received a video where a marketer I have actually worked for was pushing this great new ‘technique’ for making money using AdWords (a product that costs $49). Not a week later, I get another video for the same guy’s latest product which absolutely pans AdWords as the worst thing ever!

Total (almost moronic) inconsistency = complete lack of credibility from this point on…

It’s an object lesson in how not to ‘sell’ anything (a product, service or even yourself) on the net. What you post online is the only point of contact your readers have with you, hence, this is the ‘you’ that they know.

If you want to lose your credibility, changing your stance from ‘white’ to ‘black’ and back again is just about one of the quickest ways I know of doing so.

When credibility is important, you must be consistent, it’s as simple as that.

+++++++++++++++

What do you think?

Agree? Disagree? Think that I must be a masochist?

Let me know – I’d love to hear your thoughts…

I’ve had one of my periodical Twitter blasts where I follow a bunch of new people and many of them of course reciprocate.

So, here’s my question/query/beef.

I’ve got loads of people following me now who have lots of followers, they follow lots of people and yet they have posted a miniscule number of ‘Tweets’.

Can anyone tell me what the point of this is?

Twitter is a social networking site after all, so what is going on here?

What is the point of accumulating nearly 2k followers if you don’t want to communicate with them, pweeple (made up word…)?

Okay, I understand that everyone uses social sites in their own way.

But is it only me that thinks that folks like this are wasting their time and (more importantly), the time of others as well as site resources?

• Traffic generation;
• Keyword research;
• Affiliate marketing;
• Website copywriting;
• Creating membership sites;
• Using PLR materials;
• Setting up joint ventures;
• IM product creation;
• Making money from forums;
• Outsourcing guides;
• AdWords and AdSense;
• Money making with smaller PPC programs;
• SEO

And so on and so on…

Then there are the natural health related ones:

• Dealing with acne;
• Curing insomnia;
• How to stop snoring;
• Getting rid of toothache;
• Banishing warts naturally;
• Dealing with cold sores;
• Stopping hair loss naturally;
• Losing weight and preventing weight gain;
• Dealing with psoriasis;
• PMT;
• Natural treatment for cold sores etc.

Finally, there’s the stuff that fits into neither of the above classifications:

• Learning to sail a dinghy;
• Arranging weddings abroad;
• Bass fishing;
• How to play bridge;
• A guide for divorcing dads;
• IQ testing for kids;
• Debt control;
• Real estate;
• Growing bonsai;
• Playing soccer;
• Astral projection…

And so on and so forth.

But guess what?

I have never, ever been unable to finish a new project yet, even when the topic was something that I knew absolutely zip about in the beginning.

There’s been a few that were pretty darned difficult, but impossible?

Nope, not yet…

Understand that this is not a boast, in fact, far from it.

Instead, I’ve included this list to convince you that even if you think I can’t do it, I’m more than happy to go out of my way to prove you wrong…

In short, if you need a top quality ghostwriter at a very reasonable cost for any kind of project, I’m your man!

infoman[at]stevecowan[dot]com

And to say I’m amazed is the understatement of this or any other year …

In the four years (and a bit) of ghostwriting, I’ve created just short of 1000 e-books of 10,000 words or more! Plus, I’ve written thousands of articles and special reports as well! Then there’s a truckload of sales page content…

Now, there are two things that have left me a bit stunned about this to be honest.

First, it means that over the four years I’ve been a full time ghostwriter, I’ve written three e-books every four days (or thereabouts) plus a whole heap of other stuff!

I have no idea how that’s happened, but jeez, I must have been busy…

Secondly (and I’m always scared that I might be tempting fate by writing this), I’ve never had a complaint yet! Sure, I‘ve had people ask for additional info to be inserted or modifications but that comes with the job, and it’s never a problem.

But not one complete ‘that’s garbage, do it again’ yet (and like I say, I really hope I’m not tempting fate).

I guess that this all indicates that I know what I’m doing and that if you have an e-book project you want me to deal with, it will get done quickly and absolutely to your specifications.

Got a writing project you don’t have the time or the expertise for? Whatever it is, the facts indicate that I can do it, right?

Drop me a line to let me know at infoman[at]stevecowan[dot]com

2. Leave comments on other people’s blogs with a backlink to your site.

3. Answer people’s questions on www.answers.yahoo.com.

4. Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature.

5. Write a press release and submit it to www.PRWeb.com.

6. Advertise your website in the appropriate category on www.CraigsList.com.

7. Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a backlink to your site.

8. Start a blog and submit it to the 100’s of free blog directories.

9. Manually submit your website to the major search engines.

10. Optimize each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase.

11. Add a link in your email signature to your website. It’s a free and easy way to get a little more traffic.

12. Make a custom 404 error page for your website redirecting people to your home page.

13. Use PPC search engine advertising.

14. Add a “bookmark this site” link to your webpages.

15. Have a tell-a-friend form on your site.

16. Send articles to ezine publishers that includes a link to your website.

17. Hold a crazy contest and make it go viral.

18. Give away a freebie (ebook, report, e-course) to keep people coming back to your site.

19. Add an RSS feed to your blog.

20. Submit your site to any related niche directories on the net.

21. Post information about any content you publish to social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon etc.

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -”you must be logged in” -”comment posting closed” -”comment closed” “<your keyword term>”

Do this and Google returns all of the .edu university and college blogs to which you can submit your comments to generate a link. It is probably a good idea to ping his/her blog after your comment is added to the post to make certain it gets picked up too.

Of course, you must ensure that the links are followable before posting a helpful and thoughtful comment. Install either the Google toolbar or the excellent (and free) Search Status Firefox add-on to simplify this latter task.

More specifically, were you aware that links from .edu and .gov site seem to have more importance attached to them than links from ‘ordinary’ .com, .net and .org sites.

As with most things to do with Google, then only people who really know how true this notion s are the Google folks themselves, but there is certainly a logic to the idea.

After all, it is possible to manipulate links from ordinary domain names, but far harder to do so with links from educational and government establishments, and you would naturally assume that those links should carry more weight too.

But, how do you find sites like these, .edu and .gov domain sites that are willing to link to sites in your niche?  Here’s how…
Run a standard Yahoo! search using your main niche keyword.

This will produce the top ten sites in your niche, so you then take the first domain name and type it into Yahoo! in exactly this format:

‘linkdomain:competingsite.com inurl:.edu’

And, hey presto, you’ll have a list of .edu sites that are carrying links to your competitor.

Now all you need to do is follow up and request a link for your own site from the same .edu establishment. Alternatively, check the site to see whether you are able to ‘register’, in which case you can probably create the link yourself from within your profile.

And of course, exactly the same works with .gov sites as well, so give it a shot and let me know how you get on by leaving a comment.

That’s right, you can do whatever you want with this baby. Put your own name on it and claim it as your own work, break up up inro articles or specila reports, basically, whatever you like.

But you’ll need to be quick…click this link now

In the first part of ‘what happens in an economic depression’, I tried to suggest that in these extremely difficult times, many people are going to start trying to earn a living from the internet, primarily because there is less work and therefore less money flying around.

Hence, the first question that people who are thinking of earning a living online are going to ask is, ‘how do I do so?’. The simple answer is, by blogging.

Traditionally, if you want to generate an income from a blog, you would do so in one of two different ways.

Either you would feature paid advertising on your site (generally using Google AdSense) or by promoting someone else’s products as an affiliate.

However, I would suggest that neither of these solutions is going to be effective or profitable in the future, for several reasons.

Firstly, there is less money available to the businesses who were previously spending lots of money with Google, and it therefore stands to reason that there are going to be less companies advertising with the ‘big G’ in the future. Furthermore, one of the big bugbears of anyone who has ever used AdSense is that Google has steadfastly refused to tell you how much you will get paid for featuring their advertising on the site, or indeed, what percentage of the money they are paid ends up in your bank account.

Am I wrong in thinking that the percentage is likely to come down when Google see less and less people advertising? And when that happens, will you be any the wiser?

I believe that the answer to these questions is ‘yes’ and ‘no’, in this order.

Thus, if you are going to feature advertising on your blog as a way of making money, you really need to look at other advertising companies apart from Google, companies who offer paid advertising that is an awful lot more transparent than AdSense.

But, why depend on advertising in the first place? After all, by doing so, you are relying on other people (Google et al) to place advertising materials on your website, and then you are relying on your visitors to click on those ads. Granted, that is the very basis of PPC advertising, but it is a fact that the average net user is becoming increasingly ‘ad blind’. AdSense is almost everywhere nowadays, even featuring on the websites of the quality broadsheet newspapers so the average net user is nowadays bombarded with online advertising. Thus, they are becoming increasingly adept at ignoring it.

Then, you have the affiliate product option.

In this situation, you find a product or service created by an individual or company which you promote in exchange for a commission. The problem here is that the product or service you are promoting does not belong to you and you did not create it, so you have no guarantee of the quality of the product unless you buy it yourself.

As 99.9% of affiliate marketers don’t do so (if you bought every product you are thinking of promoting, you would probably spend more money than you generate from sales), there could plenty of refund requests, and again, you are relying on other people for the success of your business.

Add this to the fact that you only ever going to earn a percentage of the overall customer spend as your commission, and you again have to ask is this the best way of earning money online?

As far as I can see, neither of these traditional solutions is going to be the answer for how to make money through your own blog site in the future.

So, is there a better option?

The answer is, of course there is.

More on this next time…

]]> http://stevecowan.com/what-happens-in-an-economic-depression-%e2%80%93-part-2/feed/ 0 http://stevecowan.com/what-happens-in-an-economic-depression-%e2%80%93-part-2/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/stevecowan/FxPk/~3/5PvpTQ7exyU/ http://stevecowan.com/the-incredible-effectiveness-of-social-marketing/#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2009 08:18:39 +0000 admin http://stevecowan.com/the-incredible-effectiveness-of-social-marketing/2009/02/ Social marketing has evolved into a VERY influential type medium whose effects are felt both on and off the internet today. From our recent presidential election, to the public opinion of the Californ…