Devour The Web

I don’t think there’s a more scorned form of literature than the romance novel. “Bodice rippers,” “trashy books” or “that Harlequin crap” are some of the more charitable terms I’ve heard. It was probably pure perversity that led me to try to write one. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be, and I didn’t expect to learn as much as I did.

The four romance novels I published taught me more about writing than anything else I’ve ever done. And when I began to write marketing materials, and later blogs, I realized that the key to writing romances is also the key to any kind of persuasive writing.

No, contrary to popular opinion, it’s not the sex that gets the reader to turn those pages.

It’s the pain.

People who don’t read romances think they’re about some dumb Fabio type who rides a white horse and rescues a woman even dumber than he is.

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Four Fabulous SEO Tools
 by: BJ Novack

So, you’ve just built a website, or had it built by someone, and you want to kick it into high gear with the search engines. How?

Use these four kickass tools and they’ll tell you exactly how to do just that.

Silktide Sitescore (www.silktide.com/tools/sitescore) offers a fairly comprehensive website critique, which will tell you what you’re doing right . . . and what you’re not doing so well. This rather comprehensive mini report tells you of what’s good and bad in your design, in the accessibility of your website, and in how google sees your site based on your site content. As of right now I’m an 8.9 and climbing, how about you?

Faganfinder Url Info (www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/) is the best way to not only find out how you’re doing getting linkbacks, but can also be used to find out information on your competition so you can see what you’re up against and, if they’re doing better than you, how they’re doing it.

This in from Hitwise: Twitter, a social network/micro-blog, has seen traffic climb 60 percent over the past month.

Hitwise puts Twitter’s size into perspective. Even with all its growth and buzz, Twitter’s still tiny. Hitwise stats show Twitter is No. 439 among all social networks and forums, and No. 4309 among all categories of Web sites.

Still, Twitter’s potential impact on brands should not be overlooked as Pete Blackshaw points out in his ClickZ column, “Customer Service Meets ‘Lord of the Twitters‘ “.

The steps to gaining exclusive rights

You will need to give valid reasons to the manufacturer as to "why" you should have exclusive rights to his product for your specific niche markets. Don’t be in fear of this requirement, believing you must be a fortune 500 company or at least doing millions of dollars per year in sales to be deserving of it. Nothing could be further from the truth. You may be a new Internet marketer with no real sales track record, but you have valid reasons why you believe you can do a good job for him.

In this case suggest a performance agreement. After 6 months your agreement specifies you are to have sold a specific number of units and after one year another number, and so on. If you meet these sales quotas, you keep your exclusivity. This way both you and the manufacturer are not locked into a long-term unproductive relationship. But if you perform, you are protected for your work performed, retaining you exclusive marketing rights.

Search engine optimization can take a long time to show results. The Google sandbox alone can delay optimization results by 6 to 8 months. So, what can you do to get traffic while you wait? Pay-per-click ["PPC"] campaigns fill the time gap. This article discusses the basics of PPC advertising.

What Is A PPC?

A PPC search engine allows you to bid for placement in search results. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and most others bolster their organic search results with sponsor advertisements. If you search on Google, links in blue across the top and the little ads down the right side of the search results are PPC listings. In one form or another, similar listings appear on every major search engine.

How Does It Work?

When you use a PPC, you will bid for placement in the search results under particular keywords. Instead of optimizing your site to appear high in the listings, you simple pay for the position. While this may sound great, keep in mind you are paying for the listing and have to watch the return on investment closely.

…people post videos all over the web about you.

Here’s a video I found on Revver from Dave Nielson about Friday Traffic Report and Social Power Linking. Thanks Dave for taking the time!

I had to re-post this one. Raimi rocks even if he hates the Authority Black Book.

And finally, the creepier ones like below. I don’t know who did this. It’s not my voice. It links straight to the proper URL. It’s my words from something I wrote, I guess. Sounds familiar anyway. I’m locking the door tonight.

Tags: videos about jack humphrey

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Except when they are. Planned Parenthood nails the sex ed instructor shtick with a new video site at TakeCareDownThere.org. It’s funny and filthy stuff, just the way teenagers like it. Bonus points for use of “blow-jays.”

Rockstar Games released the fourth installation in its Grand Theft Auto franchise today, an d the game’s soft porn Web ads are popping up in some odd places. See exhibit above. Two ClickZ reporters spotted this one on the Times home page just now, suggesting its not targeted on behavior.

PageRank (PR) is Google’s way of measuring the quality and relative "importance" of your website to searchers. It’s purpose is to give web surfers an idea of the importance of a website

PageRank is measured on a scale of 0 to 10. Your PageRank depends on the amount of web pages that link to yours, and the PR’s of each of those pages.

It can take up to three months for a new website to be assigned a PageRank ? depending on when Google decides to do the Google Update, where all websites’ PR’s are reviewed.

A thousand links from pages with low PageRanks can eventually achieve as high a PR as that from a few web pages with high PR’s. Some website owners research the value of a potential link partner’s PR before deciding whether or not to link with them.

It’s true that a web page with a high PageRank can pass on a high PR to you, but this can be offset if the page has too many links on it, because the PR is distributed proportionally to all the web pages it links to.

A page with a low PR may be worth linking to

Affiliate marketing isn’t that tough… if you’ve got attention and trust.

You can gain attention and trust through your relationship with people who agree to receive content from you. And you can gain attention from people via search engines because Google trusts your content.

Ideally, you want both.

Of course, there are ways to make money with affiliate marketing that don’t involve content at all. You can use search marketing to send traffic to pre-sell landing pages, and sometimes even directly to the merchant offer (see Affiliate Project X for those strategies).

Different strokes for different folks… but I like to build online assets. Building a subscriber list is a valuable asset, because you can market to these folks over the long-term with multiple offers if you preserve the relationship. Likewise, a site well-positioned for valuable keywords in search engines is an asset that can bring targeted traffic and revenue for years.

Let’s take a look at three affiliate marketing strategies that build assets and sustainable businesses. The first focuses on list building, the next on link building, and the last on both.