Devour The Web

Those of you who aren’t ready to wade into the Blog pool are taking your time for several reasons, according to my informal interviews with people before and after they blog. Others start blogging and then abandon their projects too soon, unaware of the benefits.

Whatever your reason, you should get started now - or get back to blogging as the case may be. Here’s some motivating enlightenment that you may find surprising.

Reason # 1 that you aren’t blogging - You don’t realize how huge the benefits are, and how much they may outweigh any monetary or time costs involved.

I think number one may partly the fault of people like me, who have a foot in the marketing arena, and don’t explain the idea in detail.

We tend to tell you how great blogging is, but we don’t tell you why, or better yet, show you. Or we tell you how to get the best results with your blog, but don’t tell you where to start. Let’s talk about some of the basic facts.

Sponsored Links

Yes folks, there is a way of making absolutely certain-sure that you have developed a winning product.

Do you want to know how to do this? You do?

Well, it’s quite simple: You allow the punters to tell you whether or not they want your product.

I am being deadly serious here when I tell you that the only certain way to be sure is to test your product in a suitable, email broadcast, newspaper ad or direct mail campaign.

The punters will pretty soon tell you whether or not they want to buy or not. Either you will get lots of orders, or you will just about break-even, or you will hardly get any orders at all. You just wont know until you test!

Now, do you want to know the single most powerful piece of information in the product development and/or direct marketing business? This information is worth more than everything I have previously told you, put together.

It is this: Believe the punters - not yourself.

Here’s how you breed blog stalkers!

This is about the easiest Wordpress plugin I’ve ever installed and configured.  It rewards your top commentators by keeping a tally in your sidebar with links to their sites.  I’ve been getting a lot of comments from a wide array of readers, but not much action in repeat commenting for each individual.

Chances are you are seeing the same thing.

Comments still have to be approved, so don’t get ideas.

Here is the plugin download.

Tags: plugin review, show top commentators, wordpress plugins

Found some good link building posts today:

Notice how much emphasis is being placed on organization when it comes to link building these days. One reason for that is it is more complicated than ever to run a good link building campaign. In other words, there is far more opportunity now than ever before to get quality linkage from thousands of sites in many niches.

The number of social sites alone is mind boggling. So having a plan is crucial. Knowing where to go to get good links aside from posting comments on blogs takes research and some good tools.

Recommended Reading

Tags: link building

Are you running ads and marketing with tag lines that send people to your website? Then you’re missing the point of internet marketing and losing out on your best money making opportunity.

First a little history. The guys who started internet marketing were all either successful direct marketers or people who learned from successful direct marketers. Direct marketing is marketing through the mail, catalogs, infomercials, etc.

Ask any direct marketer or any internet marketer who has gotten REAL results what the most important part of marketing is. They will ALL tell you it’s the list, the list, the list. In internet marketing this means YOUR opt-in e-mail list for your ezine or newsletter.

The larger your list grows, the more targeted customers you have to market to for the rest of your life. If you’re not building a list then you’re wasting your time trying to market on the internet. The BIG PICTURE is more than one sale to one customer.

The ONLY purpose of an EFFECTIVE (money making) website is to capture e-mail addresses of targeted people who are interested in what you are selling. Why? Because most first time visitors to a site DO NOT BUY. Because you want customers for life, not customers for one sale and then bye-bye.

The road through Middle Earth is long and windy, and now it’s been mapped by Google. For its “Lord of the Rings Online” game, developer and publisher Turbine, Inc. licensed the Google Maps API to map out world of “Lord of the Rings.” And like all things Google, it’s in beta! “We will keep it in beta as long as we’re adding features,” said Jim Drewry, director of marketing at Turbine. The map and wiki Turbine offers to its users is part of a retention-based marketing strategy.

When Turbine called Google to ask about licensing the map API to create a map for Middle Earth, Google was a little taken aback. When you use the API Google “almost assumes you will be mapping the earth. When it’s not the earth, things get interesting,” said Drewry. Turbine created the map with hundreds of thousands of map tiles stitched together. It’s hosted by Turbine, and trafficked through Akamai.

After conducting a closed test of its new online ad exchange, Right Media and DoubleClick Exchange competitor Traffiq opened its marketplace to all buyers and sellers this week. The company’s aim is to give media buyers a great deal of transparency into all media that’s on sale, including competing bid information, a graphical view of the ad position that’s on the block, and historical pricing data for individual publishers.

I spent some time playing with the Traffiq search tool to query various media listings, and while the system is fairly buggy (it’s still in beta), it does provide an accurate and sizable set of available inventory based on a geographic, demographic or category-based query.

For instance, a search for healthcare-specific media reaching women aged 34 to 50 in North America turned up available inventory on LifeScript.com, eDiets.com and Medhelp.org/Childcare/maternal. Along with it were some placements of questionable relevance, for instance on Timeout.com, but these were few. Overall, the inventory was fairly premium… mostly above the fold and homepage placements. Where they weren’t on the homepage, the inventory seemed pretty targeted, as with the Medhelp impression block. Yael Yekutiel, Traffiq’s director of marketing and public relations, said the company is an appealing place for high-quality inventory since it lets publishers segment their audiences, which then generates higher marketer value and CPMs, creating a virtuous cycle of transparency.

5 Methods For Self-SEO. If You Have The Time.
 by: Conrad Sear

So you want to Search Engine Optimize (SEO) your website.

Well despite what you may hear it’s easy & fun.

The caveat is time. In such a “fast food” “I want it now” mode, the web gives us just that. So why does SEO take TIME? The answer is the millions of others out there fighting for the top spots has created a niche industry by the search engines. They want to thwart the unethical scammers out there. So, we have to follow their requirements so that millions can see my website. Sure you can pay to be in the very first position. But that costs money. Capitalism at is finest.

The early days are long gone. Laws are in place now. Laws made by Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

So the simple advice is, know the laws. Ignorance will not get your site seen by anyone but you.

Follow the slow steady path & you’ll be richer for it.

5 sure methods:

1. Your reading it now. ARTICLES! Write articles about your field of interest. Relate it to your website. Set these articles across the internet. Content is KING.

Yahoo says it’s already collected more ad dollars from presidential campaigns this early on in the ‘08 election than altogether in any other election season. That’s according to Richard Kosinski, Yahoo VP of Political Advertising, who told this week’s “Presidential Campaigning” panel at IAB’s MIXX conference, “We’ve seen more revenue now than we have in any election.”

Still, he lamented the fact that, by his estimates, political campaigns are putting just 1 percent of their ad budgets on the Web. Indeed, they’re using all the free social media platforms out there — from Facebook to YouTube to Flickr — to get messages out online.

“If you look at it from a paid side we have a lot of work to do,” he added.

Readers following ClickZ’s unique data-driven coverage of the presidential campaigns may note the fact that Nielsen/NetRatings AdRelevance hasn’t picked up on any ads for presidential campaigns running on Yahoo. Stay tuned to this site for evidence that the candidates are buying on Yahoo.

Female-focused publishers are really good at co-opting each other’s ideas. It wasn’t long after Glam Media became the first notable smaller publisher to represent an extended network of sites that iVillage began doing the same. And this week, with the acquisition of “social shopping” site ShopStyle, Sugar Publishing has obtained new e-commerce and product discovery capabilities of the sort both iVillage and Glam offer.

In a video interview with AllThingsDigital’s Kara Shwisher, publisher Brian Sugar describes the structure and strategy of the business, which has been renamed Sugar Inc. Along the way he takes a bunch of subtle and not-so-subtle swipes at rivals Gawker Media and Glam.

“Snarky’s just sort of a trendy thing that eventually goes away,” he tells Swisher, dissing Gawker without mentioning it by name (though Swisher had earlier referred to him as the “sweet Nick Denton”). “People magazine has a style we like. We model after them.”

And in a blatant attack on Glam Media, Sugar tells Swisher he “really hates” sites that roll up comScore data from an extended ad network to “say they’re bigger than they really are.” Call it artificial sweetener.