Get Noticed

I’ve been involved in sales and marketing for over twenty years – half my adult life. And sometimes I still get confused when I browse the Internet and visit websites searching for information, or to make a purchase. I’m absolutely amazed at how complicated some marketers make doing business online.

Let’s talk about searching for information for a moment. After all, most people go online not to buy anything, but rather to search for information to solve a problem they have. Knowing this is important, because if you understand that the Internet is driven by information and information seekers, as a marketer, you can kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.

1. You can provide information seekers with the information they’re looking for.

2. You can educate potential prospects and turn them into customers.

Educate Your Visitors First

If you visit my website, you won’t see any banners or advertising of any kind. Why? Because I built my site as a free marketing resource to educate my visitors. I’m not selling anything, so the only thing you’ll see on my site is free information… lots and lots of free information.

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Website Engagement Techniques: The Caricature Effect

Marketing is all about getting noticed, getting remembered, and motivating people to action. Whether it’s a website, display ad, or video, it must first grab people’s attention, it must stop the viewer from going onto the next website, turning the magazine page, or clicking the stop button. In order to accomplish that increasingly difficult task, you must understand the Caricature Effect.

The Caricature Effect

The Caricature Effect simply stated says that what we notice is variation from the norm. Caricature artists exaggerate reality because that is how we visually distinguish one person from another. Human beings are preprogrammed to look for patterns and variations in those patterns, it’s how we recognize who people are, and it is a basic survival mechanism that helps us recognize danger and distinguish friend from foe.

By distorting an individual’s prominent facial features the caricature artist mimics the human brain’s...

There's all sorts of quality content being shared on Facebook, unfortunately it can be difficult to get to this content. There's all sorts of useless updates from people, and finding a useful link can be a trying task. With LinkNotify, you can have all the links shared on your feed in one easy to browse location.

Just a few short years ago, it was a good bet that you would read articles like this one on your PC or laptop. Today, it’s just as likely that you are reading this article on a smartphone or tablet computer. So what’s changed, what happened? The mobile web happened, that’s what – and the Internet will never be the same. So, what’s the mobile web?

Loosely defined, the mobile web is a way of accessing the Internet via a wireless network, using a handheld mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet computer.

The Explosion Of The Mobile Web

The mobile web is growing at a phenomenal pace, and is forecast to overtake the desktop web in 2014. In other words, more users will access the Internet using a mobile phone rather than a PC for the first time.

Approximately 900 million people currently access the web with mobile phones, compared to 1.4 billion desktop Internet users. In 2014, mobile web users will outpace desktop users (approximately 1.7 billion mobile users to approximately...

On February 5th, 1956, a science fiction movie titled "Invasion of the Bódy Snatchers" was released in the US. The movie is about a small-town doctor who discovers that the population of his community is being systematically replaced by emotionless alien duplicates. Fast forward to today, and life is imitating art, with a real life version of Invasion of the Bódy Snatchers being played out. But it's not just happening in one small town. It's happening in cities and towns all across America. Only it's not bodies that are systematically being snatched, it's our individual right to privacy. 

Where's Waldo? "If you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day, the public movement of every citizen of the United States." Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer I just read a disturbing article on the BBC News website titled How Much Privacy Can Smartphone Owners Expect?...

It's been an extremely busy year for the good folks at Google, not only did they roll out the game-changing Panda Updates, but now they have increased the stakes by implementing Google Fresh. This recent algorithm update is based on the Caffeine architecture introduced by Google a year ago and supposedly makes Google's listings much fresher. On the Official Google Blog where this new Update was announced, Amit Singhal states: "We completed our Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows us to crawl and index the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we're making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness." 

However, in an update, Singhal explains...

It's something that you hear all the time - all of the SEO content in the world doesn't do you any good, unless your readers are really engaged in it. After all, people don't purchase products, sign up for email lists, or share links if they think that something is "just OK". If you're not publishing SEO content that really gets readers involved, you're missing out on countless link opportunities, traffic, and sales. So, how exactly do you create SEO content that's going to engage readers? 1. Don't Overlook the Importance of "You"  Your SEO articles, blog posts, and optimized sales pages are not formal research papers. The best way to get results out of them is to make each reader feel like you're speaking directly to them. Luckily, you can do that by focusing on one little word - "you". Writing in the third person (using "he", "she", or "they") is impersonal; writing in the second person (using "you") brings your SEO content to a personal level. Take a look at this sentence: "People have a hard...

The companies that make a real impact in the marketplace are not the ones that produce what people think they want, but rather the ones that produce what people will want but don't know it. The ability to know what people will want before they know it exists is not a result of intensive market research, focus groups, or telemarketing surveys. Knowing what people want is based on understanding the human condition: the motivating factors that move people from disinterest to action. Steve Jobs was unrelenting in this philosophy and it resulted in changing the computer, music, movie, and telecommunication industries and more significantly how people live, work, communicate, relax, and in some ways, think. 

'Make A Dent In The Universe' - Steve Jobs This is not an approach taught in business schools or self-help marketing courses designed for business neophytes. An entire industry of self-help consultants has exploded on the Internet, all designed to produce mediocrity, all based on rational analysis...

There's all sorts of relevant and fresh links being shared on Facebook. The problem is, there's a whole lot of clutter which can keep you from finding these links. Use LinkNotify, and you can have a list of links on your news feed presented without any additional content to get in the way.

How much time do you spend online? According to a time use survey compiled by ComScore Media Metric, the average American spends 33.9 hours on the Internet every week. Depending on age and other demographics, this number can double! And for those lucky individuals whose occupations rely primarily on computers: the Internet commands their lives and they aren't ever not connected. Computers have drastically changed the technological landscape. The Internet has facilitated efficiency in a number of offline processes. We use the web to communicate with our family, friends and business acquaintances in real-time chats. Books and other multimedia are available for online viewing and instant download. We can even shop for gifts online - often offered at a deeper discount than in brick-and-mortar stores! The Internet has revolutionized the way that we live, as we now spend one-sixth of our lives in the digital world.  Exhibit 1: 100 Most-Visited Websites by category, according to Google Ad Planner...

The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag may not affect your page's ranking in the search engines, but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO and social media marketing campaigns. What Is the Meta Description Tag? It's a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the section of a web page. It is usually placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag (if you use one), although the order is not important. The proper syntax for this HTML tag is:  

If you're using a content management system (CMS), look for a field to fill out that's called Meta Description, or possibly just "Description." Many years ago, the information contained in a Meta description could slightly help a page rank highly for the words that were contained within it. Today, neither Google, Bing, nor Yahoo! use it as a ranking signal. In other words, whether you use your important keyword phrases in your Meta description tag or not, the position of your page in the search engine...

Google Place Search (formerly known as Google Places) rules local search. Just try it. Go to Google and type in "Personal Injury Attorney Your City." The first seven listings in the "natural search listings" are all Google Places pages. Since 20% of searches are local and the majority of their over $30 billion in revenue comes from small businesses, Google has decided to go hard after local small business advertising. They started by creating 50 million Google Places pages using aggregated data from online directories and the Yellow Pages. These pages are mobile optimized and attached to Google Maps. 

Only about 8% of local businesses have actually claimed their Google Place Search page. Even less have fully optimized their pages. However, this is changing fast. Local businesses are getting hip to the importance of Google Places pages. If you have a local business, the first place potential customers will start to find you is on your Google Places page from their smart phone. You want to make sure...

With so much misinformation about SEO having been dispensed over the years, it's hard to know what's true and isn't true - making it all the more difficult to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff, as it were. Concerned about the potential harm misinformation about SEO can ultimately cause, I decided to compile an alphabetical listing of the most popular and persistent SEO myths, to either debunk or confirm their factuality. 1. Adwords Since the arrival of Google Adwords, there has been an ongoing debate over whether or not running an Adwords campaign can improve search engine rankings. Ultimately, only Google knows the answer to that question for sure. However, to my knowledge, there is no credible evidence to support the notion that Adwords can improve your search engine ranking. If there were indeed concrete evidence to the contrary, it stands to reason, everybody would just start an Adwords campaign to boost their rankings. 

2. Anchor Text Although it can be other colors, anchor text is typically the blue, hyperlinked text you see on a web page - the words that you click onto take you to another page. For example:...

The most up-to-date and relevant information can generally be found the quickest on social networks. The problem is this content is difficult to relay onto an actual website. With SocialDitto, you can embed tweets directly on your site, allowing for it to be crawled and noticed. 

Consider this scenario: You know you're supposed to get on Twitter to somehow promote your website. So you start randomly tweeting out links to a product or service page on your website. But who is going to care? Sure, you could do some Twitter searches and find people who are asking their own Twitter followers about a product or service that you may happen to provide. And yes, you could reply to them with a link to your information, but overall, is that really a good, scalable social media marketing strategy? No, it's not. For one thing, they don't know you. 

It's likely that they may even consider your helpful tweets to be spam. They weren't asking you for a recommendation, they were asking their online friends. Why would they trust some random person who seems to only be on Twitter to promote their products and services? And their thoughts will be confirmed when they review the rest of your tweets and see that most of them are similarly self-promotional in nature. Sound familiar? If so, you're...

If you've ever wondered what information a search engine spider is grabbing when it lists your site on a result page, use this Site Spider Viewer. It provides various indicators, along with stats important to optimizing a website.

OK, so you've decided that getting some web video on your website and social media profiles is a great idea to make you more appealing to prospects and put your SEO (search engine optimization) on HGH. You realize that video marketing is a key part of your overall search engine marketing and social media strategy. Bully for you! Now onto the tech stuff. Video formats can be mind-boggling and vary depending on the equipment the video was shot with, the type of computer you use, and the final destination where you want to host and serve up your on-demand video as part of your video marketing plan. So which is best for you? 

Lorraine Grula provides these tips from her years of experience as a top shelf video photographer and producer in ReelSEO. Web Video Guidelines Depending on whether you are doing research to get started with web video or if you are making use of existing equipment and software,...

If you're browsing the web, there are generally all sorts of things you want to do when coming upon a certain website. You might want to share it with a friend, translate it, or easily find a related topic. Using the Google Toolbar, you can enjoy these features and more provided by Google, directly on your browser.

Time makes a mockery of most predictions. Once derided as the tools and hobbies of hopeless shut-ins and intellectual ivory tower sorts, social media sites such as PayPal, Facebook and LinkedIn have become the home of an entirely new, powerhouse economy. Where hundreds of years of war and diplomacy have failed, social media marketing has succeeded in bringing people around the globe together in the pursuit of common interests and open markets. Social media marketing is the home of successful brand promotion and finding the right mix of tools to take advantage of it has become the defining issue of the modern brand. 

When people refer to SMM tools, they are discussing a host of applications and programs that allow real-time and long-term feedback on the performance of their social networks. This kind of information goes beyond the purely mechanistic approach of SEO and website performance, moving into the realm of genuine social engineering. Social media tools can track the number of times a brand is...

The recent Facebook changes are game changing. For most this is scary; for us (and hopefully for you, too) it's exciting! Facebook has managed to make our everyday activities even more social and has created a way for us to share our lives via a virtual scrapbook. This tool lets you feature all your old and new Facebook memories with integrated ways to express yourself through different "lifestyle apps." Luckily for you, we read every article, and we watched the entire 1-hour, 40-minute f8 presentation, so we are here to condense the information for you as much as possible. Here are the Facebook changes you should know about: 

Only a few things are really going away; it's the experience and interface that are changing. Here are the latest and greatest new features of Facebook: The Facebook Timeline -- "The story of your life" The Timeline is the central change in the Facebook revamp. It is your new Facebook profile, completely reorganized with a different way to display your profile picture...

Do you want to know how your website compares to the big players in your industry? Do you want to learn how to compéte with these sites? This month, SEO analysis provider SEOprofiler.com has published a list of the websites with the most backlinks in November 2011. Comparing the backlinks of these websites with your backlinks can help you to improve the position of your website. The necessary three steps are explained below. Backlinks are the cornerstone of successful search engine optimization. The more high quality backlinks a web page has, the higher it will rank in the search results of Google, Yahoo and Bing. 

Which Websites Do Have the Most Backlinks? The published backlink statistics are grouped by country and the top 10 websites in the USA come as no surprise: Facebook and Twitter lead the group, followed by Wordpress, YouTube, Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Digg, Amazon and Flickr. All of these websites are major players in their category and it's no wonder that many websites link...

So, social media marketing is about the conversation, not the pitch. People are starting to get that. This is a good step, but what does it mean in practical terms? Having conversations with people is nice, but the goal of a brand is ultimately to get people interested in spending their time or money on the brand, after all. What does having this conversation accomplish, and just how does a brand use that conversation to get the critical conversion from conversation to customers? The Key Thing: Customer Investment  Just about everybody's familiar with the smart and trendy Mac commercials. They've been seen, redone, spun off and parodied just about to death, and will stand as icons of excellent advertising. But think about it - when was the last time you saw one of these commercials on TV? How often do they actually come up anymore? The fact is, Mac's most consistent and open advocates are its users. People with an Apple notebook can't wait to tell their friends about it, take it around in public and talk...

Learning to turn your website visitors into buyers is a skill that every internet marketer should acquire. Do you have a website or a blog you are promoting? Are you satisfied with the behavior of the people who visit your website? Do they come and disappear without accomplishing the desired actions you expect them to perform such as filling in a form, buying a product or signing up for the program you promote? How much time do they spend when they visit your site? If your responses to the above questions are in line with your expectations, then you are probably one of the lucky few website owners or marketers with the skill and ability to turn your website visitors into buyers. But if you still find hardships in this, like many other marketers, it's high time you tested the following tips for improvement. 

How do you then turn your website visitors into buyers? Before going into the details, bear in mind that your success in making a sale online will largely depend on your ability to create a reason...

Finding effective and sustainable methods of building links to your website can prove challenging. However, with some effort or investment on your part, it is possible to enjoy an boost in direct traffic as well as a boost to your link profile and search engine rankings through an ongoing link building strategy. There are tried and tested techniques that have been used for years that help build links in volume, as well as techniques that aim to build a smaller number of links but of much higher value - the perfect combination for a natural looking and effective search engine link profile. 

1 - Directory Submissions Directory submissions should be considered a staple part of your link building campaign. While directory links provide less value than they did several years ago, they do still provide benefit. What's more, while there is a finite number of directories online the number is massive and you can submít to one or two hundred directoríes a month for at least the first year or so of your link...

If you're still evaluating the merits of putting a Facebook Share button on your site, it's time to get off the fence. And make sure you come down on the right side. Oh, and while you're at it, you might as well just start tearing the whole fence down. Right this minute there are more than 5 billion people who are using mobile devices. There are 2 billion, at any time, communicating on the Internet. And Facebook alone has a membership of more than 750 million users. No man is an island, and no blog can survive without connections. 

Sometime within the next few days Facebook is going to introduce Frictionless Sharing. Maybe it's already happened in your neck of the woods. If not, fear not. It's on the way. But the big question isn't when. The big question is, will you be ready? Frictionless sharing is going to be powerful. When a visitor comes to your blog or website, if they've enabled access, Facebook will automatically post your content on that user's wall. No more clicking the Like button. No more copying and pasting links. He visits your site and it shows up on his wall....

The size of your website is a good barometer of how well it will perform for people when it loads. The larger your page, the longer it will take, which leads to people leaving. With this Webpage Size Checker, you can find out the size of the site's source code.

Is your website bringing in at least five new inquiries per day? If not, you need to look at its functionality. Your website acts as a "storefront." You should put as much thought and care into your website as you would to the display in your store's window. Your website needs to attract customers and keep them coming back for more. The following should give you a place to start and a guideline of what a good website should have and what it should do: 1. Where Do Your Eyes Go First?

You only have a few seconds to catch a visitor's attention. That means you need to make sure that you capture their interest immediately. You need a headline that stops them thinking whatever they're thinking, and think instead: "hey, this looks interesting! I need to read this." 2. Do You Know Right Away What This Website is About? Don't have any distractions from the message you are trying to get across. If you start talking about how great your company is instead of what the visitor is interested in, you lose...

Like millions of other website owners, I use Google Analytics to analyze my website stats. And while I actually like GA a lot, it isn't perfect. My biggest pet-peeve with the software is the fact it doesn't provide real-time results. It has a lag time of at least an hour or two before you can view most of your data, and a full 24-hour lag time on full data reporting. With all the brilliant engineers Google employs, that particular flaw hasn't ever made any logical sense to me. That negative aspect of GA has been bugging the heck out of me for years. Well, finally, that's all about to change and fast. 

How fast? By the time you read this article or shortly thereafter, GA will be providing real-time analytics. All I have to say is, it's about time! Google Analytics Announces Real-Time Reporting On September 29th, John Jersin of the Google Analytics team announced: "Today we're very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new...

When I teach my SEO classes, I begin by telling the students all the things that SEO isn't. I've always felt that it was important because they're often expecting to hear some secret formula for SEO success. And why wouldn't they, with all the myths and outright wrong/bad information that constantly swirls through the SEOsphere? When I finish telling them that everything they thought was SEO really isn't, they stare at me with their mouths hanging open. So I tell them what SEO actually is: Making your website the best it can be for the search engines and your site visitors. Unfortunately, that doesn't do much to alter their blank stares. After all, it's an incredibly open-ended definition of SEO. Still, it's the only one that truly encompasses what good SEO is all about, as well as why you need to do it. While my method of SEO has always been based...

Most SEO tools can only conduct a single function at a time, which leaves you running around to find what you need. With the SEO Workers Analysis Tool, the functions of the different tools are combined into one. Along with the combined functionality, it's free and user-friendly.

The lifeblood of your site in search engines is highly determined by who's linking to you, and how many inbound links you have. This Free Backlink Checker will help you track how many links you have, and who's linking to you. 

Traffic is essential to anyone who owns a website and/or blog. Without traffic we have no customers or sales. Unfortunately traffic does not just come to us, we have to work at it and we have to be consistent and persistent. Sales conversion rates normally average less than 5%. What this means is that only 5% of the people who visit your site will become a paid customer. So, to grow your sales, you need to boost your traffic and/or your conversion rates. Below are twelve things you can do right now to start increasing your traffic to get those sales. 

1. Launch an Article Marketing Campaign - Writing articles is not as hard as you might think and it can do wonders for your traffic! Write about something you know and just pretend you are telling a friend all about it. There is no need to use big, fancy words because people just want basic, straightforward information. Submit your articles to some of the more prominent article directories such as Ezine Articles. 2. Guest Posting and/or Commenting...

In this day and age, technology is constantly evolving. Everyday we are inundated with new features, new interfaces and improved designs that can sometimes make our head spin. Facebook is not exempt from this either and has undergone a lot of major transformations over the past several years. Just recently, Facebook has made some major modifications to its features, and whether you're a fan or not, they are here to stay. Combined News Feed Layout One feature that Facebook has changed is its news feed layout. Before, you had two feeds: your "Top News" and "Most Recent News," depending on its relevance to your interests. Also, if you only checked Facebook occasionally, you wouldn't see anything about activities that happened a week ago. Now, the most interesting stories will always be displayed at the top and you won't have to worry about missing anything important. 

Additionally, prior to this change, you had to scroll down quite a bit just to see what people posted the day before. If your business...

Coming up with keywords for a website comes down to a long list of factors, one of them is discovering how much competition is out there for particular keywords. With this Keyword Ranking Difficulty Check, you can discover how many websites are in Google's index for a keyword.

Social Networking has taken the world of business by storm. Properly used, it can establish you as an expert in your field, keep you in-touch with customers, sell your products, and market your business or organization. It is an around-the-clock marketing machine that doesn't ever sleeps. In our seminars, we are asked how to get started using it. While that is a simple question, it requires detailed understanding of the company, knowledge of business goals, and much more information as well. So, to provide people with meaningful assistance we developed these steps. Be advised that they do not provide answers, but lead you to asking the right questions. 

Why? Pertinent questions that apply to your business and situation only are invaluable. And those questions, my friend, are far more valuable to you than their answers. There are people, books, consultants, aplenty to give you answers, but if you don't answer the right questions, where are you? By developing the high quality questions that apply to...

By now, most site owners realize the importance and value of SEO in the development and growth of their site. A properly optimized site is going to rank better in the search engines, see more targéted traffic being directed over, have a higher conversion rate and much more. However, SEO is incredibly long term and nothing can rush time. It takes time for a site to build a good trust factor with the search engines and until that happens, most of your off-site SEO efforts are going to produce minimal results. If you recently launched your site and are already looking into SEO, here are 5 things you should focus your time and energy on.  Learn the Basics of SEO for Yourself There is no shortage of blogs, whitepapers, articles, reports, e-books, webinars, videos and more that can teach you the basics of SEO. It is imperative that you as the site owner arm yourself with as much SEO knowledge as possible during the first year of your site's life. The more you know about SEO, the less likely you are to be conned...

With the advent of the Internet and the worldwide dominance and prominence of Google, Facebook and Twitter, one could reasonably assume the whole world revolves around the Internet. It doesn't. There's a great big offline universe out there with nearly 6 billion people in it that was here long before the Internet. And if you don't have an offline marketing strategy to reach those billions of people, and complement your online marketing strategy, you're missing out on a significant amount of traffic and income. Following are 19 affordable and effective offline advertising methods that generate traffic to your website:  1. Bookmarks Everybody has books in their home - some more than others. But I think that you'll agree, just about everybody owns books. And what better way to get your marketing message in front of readers, than with a bookmark with your company name and website address printed on it? And distribution couldn't be more easy! Simply get a bunch of bookmarks printed up and hand them out to everybody you meet. You can purchase bookmarks imprinted with your company name from MG Creations....

Web videos have many purposes: they display, present, inform, educate, enlighten, and entertain; they also persuade, motivate, and sell. Marketing videos can serve any one of these purposes, or they can serve all of them. What is important is the audience remembers the message and the company that delivers it. Without penetrating the audience's consciousness and making an indelible impression, the resources invested are wasted. Of course the lasting impression you impart must serve your branding and sales objectives. Creating effective marketing videos entails a lot of creative skills in order to take a self-serving business message and make it not just palatable but memorable. To begin, you need a concept, script, performers, and technical expertise in video, editing, and sound design; as well as the psychological insight to understand, and the creative ability to manipulate, emotional reactions while emphasizing key points. Knowing how to implement those kinds of subliminal mnemonic memory triggers is...

Finding a complete analysis tool that doesn't cost anything is a tough task. Free SEO Tool is a site which provides a long list of features you'd find in single tools. You can test your site's speed, keywords, links, and more.

The homepage of your website is often the landing page and is critical to the success of your online business. When people land on this page, you have just a few seconds to capture their interest. This page will be a giant factor in your conversion rate which is the ratio of visitors that respond to your goal action. This goal action can be subscribing to your newsletter, signing up for your ecourse, ordering your products, etc. Your homepage needs to contain certain elements to be successful in raising your conversion rate. Read the list carefully and check to see if your homepage meets all of the following criteria. 1. Color - The color you choose for your website can have a big effect on your visitors. The type of site you have should be a factor in the colors you choose. There are essentially two types of colors - cool and warm. Browns, blues and greens are cool colors and can make you feel relaxed, calm and assured. These colors are good for sites pertaining to medicine, relaxation and other sites that have reassuring answers to your problems....

When dealing with SEO, there are a long list of terms which you must know in order to be successful. This SEO Dictionary provides a long list of keywords and definitions, from algorithm through XML Feed.

Sometimes SEOs and site owners encounter the problem of their sites suddenly going down in the search engine results pages for no particular reason, it seems. When this happens, it is often hard to figure out why your rankings nosedived. So, let's consider possible reasons for and solutions to the problem. I arranged them by relevance, starting with the most common ones. 1. Your Site Got Penalized for Using Black-Hat SEO Techniques Google has Webmaster Guidelines by which all SEOs and webmasters must abide. If Google finds out (or your site gets reported) that you are not playing by the rules, your rankings may drop substantially, or your site may get removed from Google's index altogether. 

As stated in Google Webmaster Guidelines, one must not "participate in link schemes" (buying/selling links is basically meant here), create "doorway pages", or use "hidden text" on a site. These are considered...

People long have loved to find new and innovative uses for the most innocuous technologies and advances. In the late 19th century, "moving pictures" were a nickel-arcade novelty. Today films such as Avatar are made on budgets comparable to military-grade hardware investments. Alexander Graham Bell's telephone could barely call from one room to another; now the average iPhone has more uses and computing power than all the computers used in World War II combined. This trend is repeating itself with the rise of social media network marketing practices. What started as socialization programs only slightly more complex than the average e-mail client has grown into one of the newest and most promising marketing niches in the entire world. Taking advantage of this means familiarizing oneself with a few surprisingly simple concepts that have unusually far-reaching implications. In particular, marketers are finding that the "Like" and "Share" features on Facebook have become the newest and best tool in the marketing...

When generating a list of keywords for a website, it's vital to do your homework to research competitors and discover related keywords. iSpionage is a tool which provides PPC data, related keywords, and a list of SEO competitors. 

If you want better search engine results (and more clicks, and more business), and you haven't paid attention to "Google Places," you need to do so right away. Why You Need to Claim Your Spot on Google Places * Google has stated that one out of five searches on Google is related to location. That translates to 2.6 billion "local" searches a month, and that number is increasing 50% per year. (Yes, that's "Billion"-with a "B.") 

* If you're a family law or divorce attorney in Irvine, CA for example, you want to show up when someone does a Google search for "divorce attorney orange county," or some variant of that - which happened over 56,000 times last month. Maybe your niche or location can't boast that kind of volume, but when you get your Places page set up and positioned correctly, it can still have a dramatic effect. * A good Google Places listíng can provide a valuable bump in your search engine ranking and in your ability to reach and interact with prospects and customers. You can even post...

Social networking has grown steadily in scope and importance over the last decade, and over the past few years, Facebook's position as the top dog of social networking services has been solid and unquestioned. Enter Google+. Google's attempts to step into the realm of social networking have been plentiful and almost undeniable failures, but Google+ is undoubtedly their strongest showing yet, and has the best chance of success. It is growing steadily in popularity, but how well does it work and what sets it apart from its competitors? Read on. Social Networking, Google Style Google has a long, tumultuous, and mostly unknown and ignored history with social networking. The following is a rundown of their previous attempts. 

Orkut: As far as I am aware, this is Google's earliest and (until now) most successful attempt at a social networking platform. It didn't ever gained much popularity in the United States, but it is huge in Brazil to this day, and it also has a following in India and other various...

When looking for SEO tools, generally, you have to go to different places to complete various singular tasks. With the SEO Workers Analysis Tool, the functions of the different tools are combined into one. Along with the combined functionality, it's free and user-friendly. 

First, let's look at how crawler-based search engines work (both Google and Yahoo fall in this category). Each search engine has its own automated program called a "web spider" or "web crawler" that crawls the web. The main purpose of the spider is to crawl web pages, read and collect the content, and follow the links (both internal and external). The spider then deposits the information collected into the search engine’s database called the index.

When searchers enter a query in the search box of a search engine, the search engine’s job is to find the most relevant results to the query by matching the search query to the information in its index.

What makes or breaks a search engine is how well it answers your question when you perform a search. That’s based on what’s called the search engine algorithm which is basically a bunch of factors that the search engine uses to say “hey is this page RELEVANT or NOT?”. The higher your page ranks for these factors (yes some factors are more important than...

One of the unfortunate side effects of social networking is dealing with Internet trolls. These anonymous consumers seem to exist just to spite you. They love stirring up trouble, attacking your brand and lambasting your company on every forum, blog and social network they can find. Maybe they are a former customer with an axe to grind. Maybe they're just looking to pick a fight. Whatever the reason, almost every company is going to have to handle a troll at some point. Here are 5 ways to help you better manage the social networking trolls: 1. Establish Ground Rules You want to make sure that the troll doesn't make your company end up looking like the bad guy. Before trolls become an issue, establish a set of ground rules for commenting on your social profiles. Let you audience know what kind of behavior will and will not be allowed. If a troll posts something offensive or abusive on your Facebook wall and you decide to delete it, let your network know that it's because you won't tolerate that kind of belligerent...

Need a way to quickly view all aspects of a website? Quarkbase is a unique and simple tool for obtaining valuable information.

Just enter in your URL and you will see a full report on all kinds of key information including tags, traffic, competitors, pagerank, social popularity and much more. So go ahead and use this tool to your advantage! 

How does your site stack up to your competitors? You may want to use the Page Comparison Tool to compare your web page to competing pages to find keywords.

This tool compares page titles, meta information, and common phrases occurring on different pages. 

Knowing what percentage of keywords appear on your site is crucial to SEO success. The Keyword Density Checker is a simple tool that allows you to check your keyword density.

Just enter a url and and a report will be generated showing you how many keywords are on your site and a list, in order by how many times they appear. 

Broken links are bad, it's no secret. All they'll do is drive your visitors away and cause your search ranking to plummit. Why not stay up to date with your links by using the Valid Link Checker tool.

The tool is quite simple, you input a URL and wait a few minutes. When it's done running links with a green box are good, while links with a pink box require some investigation on your part. Sound easy enough?

Google has many great tools to help your SEO and search efforts. With Website Optimizer, you can test to see if those efforts are paying off. With this tool, you can test your landing pages, headlines, and other aspects of your website. Also, it will show you what changes got you the most conversions, all in an easy to use interface.

Start testing your website now with Google Website Optimizer.

Google, the internet giant based in California, has had a strangle hold on much of the online market for the past decade. Most would struggle to find a single person in the Western World who is not yet familiar with the Google Search Engine. In fact the search engine is so popular that the phrase 'Google it' has been adopted by many Gen-Yers. In addition to their massive presence in the search marketplace, Google also commands a large percentage of the online advertising industry, generating revenues in the region of US$35 billion per annum.  Facebook, a relatively new comer to the internet, and center of popular film The Social Network, is quickly closing on Google's market. Currently Facebook ranks as the 2nd most visited website online globally and holds over 750 million member accounts. Facebook is beginning to threaten Google's market dominance in online advertising due to the huge volume of data that the social network holds about its members. While Google's advertising model focuses around what people...

Google is talking about bringing back its Realtime Search feature. It’s been missing since last month because Google and Twitter couldn’t agree on terms to extend their partnership which gave Google access to the firehose – the source of all tweets in realtime – a crucial factor of what’s going on “right now”. When Google’s deal with Twitter expired, Google said the following in a statement, as reported by Search Engine Land:

Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2. While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google.

Unfortunately, this isn’t always as helpful (though it certainly can be from time to time) outside...

Many small businesses fail today without the process or discipline to succeed. When all the excuse-making is said and done, do you have the will and the skill to survive and thrive? A few weeks ago I watched the culmination of 4 years worth of work that started at the ripe old age of six. Huh? As impossible as it seems, 4th graders can set a goal, focus on it (kind of), and progressively realize it one step at a time. I'm talking about my son Jack, who just achieved a black belt in Karate. This was a big deal to all the kids and adults in his class, reminding me of achieving my Eagle Scout as a teenager, and this dad was beaming!  These guys were unbelievable, and on the grueling 6 hour day of final testing and ultimate celebration, it was great to see not only Jack but everybody in the class crackle with a precision you wouldn't think possible. So how's this apply to you as a business owner? Here are 5 Lessons in Black Belt Mastery for your business. Progressive, Manageable Goals Do you know how...

Load and send? Batch and blast? Those direct marketing concepts are ancient history in the modern email environment. Today’s email marketers must navigate their way through a complicated landscape of shifting customer expectations, challenging new technologies, evolving government regulations and other issues old-school direct marketers never had to face. Manage your sender reputation Don’t get on an ISP’s bad side by sending too many emails too often or by generating a high number of spam complaints. ISPs will block your emails, shunt them to oblivion in the bulk folder and won’t bother to tell you what you did wrong. Here are some valuable tips for managing your sender reputation: • Honor unsubscribe requests within the ten-day window dictated by CAN-SPAM laws.  • Stay off blacklists by monitoring, resolving and learning from spam complaints. If you’re delivering relevant content in formats that recipients want, you’ll minimize those complaints.  • Use a double opt-in process and unique IP address. ...

Just like everything else pertaining to your website, sometimes your keyword list needs to be cleaned up a bit. With the Keyword List Cleaner & Number Stripper you'll be able to clean up all your keywords and sort them in an order which will have the greatest potential value for you.

There are plenty of SEO companies and consultants on the Internet that can help you out and plenty of free forums and guides that will give you the basics. Even if you do decide to use the skills and expertise of an SEO firm, it is still important that you at least know the basics of SEO so that you can also work with the company to make the results even better. There are loads of things that you need to be doing within an SEO campaign, but there are also some things that you REALLY must avoid and we take a look at some of these below with our top ten things to avoid when running an SEO campaign.

Waiting Too Long - One of the biggest mistakes most people make is waiting too long to even begin an SEO campaign. If you have a website you should be running some kind of SEO, no matter how young the site is because a good campaign can help to get a higher ranking in the early days. Targeting Competitive Keywords - If you sell houses then the chances of you getting to the top of Google for the keyword "houses"...

Load and send? Batch and blast? Those direct marketing concepts are ancient history in the modern email environment. Today’s email marketers must navigate their way through a complicated landscape of shifting customer expectations, challenging new technologies, evolving government regulations and other issues old-school direct marketers never had to face.

Permission is not optional

When you send unsolicited email, you hurt your brand, your campaign and your sender reputation. Don’t use “stealth” methods to collect email addresses such as pre-checked boxes on site registration forms. Use a proper, two-stage opt-in process that requires confirmation before the address goes into your database. Ask subscribers who have been on your list for more than 12 months if they want to continue receiving your email and retain all the permission data on each subscriber.

The Internet might be global in nature, but if your business is local, it makes no sense to concentrate on global reach, when your customers live in your city, or even in your neighborhood. For local businesses getting a global reach is a waste of resources. Instead, you should concentrate on the local community. You might be asking how you can do it, when the Web is global and Google doesn't classify sites according to their location. Here is how you can go local with SEO:

1 Use your location in your keywords.

The first trick is to use your location in your keywords. For example, if you are in London and you sell car insurance, your most important keyphrase should be “car insurance London” because this keyphrase contains your business and your location and will drive people who are looking for car insurance in London in particular.

2 Use your location in metatags

Metatags matter for search engines and you shouldn't miss to include your location, together with your other keywords in...

Some Funny SEO Comics.

For more Funny SEO Comics, visit webconfs.com

An important part of keeping and getting more traffic to your website is keeping tabs on your backlinks. The Link popularity tool from LinkVendor will give you a complete site analysis showing you all of your backlinks, indexed sites, PageRank from Google and more. Use this tool and see what you can learn about your site.

The wise choice of the right keywords you will optimize for is the first and crucial step to a successful SEO campaign. If you fail on this very first step, the road ahead is very bumpy and most likely you will only waste your (or your client's) money and time. There are many ways to determine which keywords to optimize for and usually the final list of them is made after a careful analysis of what the online population is searching for, which keywords have your competitors chosen and above all - which are the keywords that you feel describe your site best. All of this is great and certainly this is the way to go but if you want to increase your chances of success, additional research is never too much, especially when its results will save you the shots in the dark.



Dreaming High - Shooting the Top-Notch Keywords?

After you have made a long and detailed list of all the lucrative keywords that are searched by tens of thousands a day, do not hurry yet. It is great that you have chosen popular keywords but it would be even greater if you have chosen keywords for which top positioning is achievable with reasonable effort. If you have many competitors for the keywords you have chosen, chances are, no matter how hard you try, that you will hardly be able to overtake them and place your site amongst the top ten results. And as every SEO knows, if you can't be on the first page (or on the second and in the worst case on the third one) of the organic search results, you'd better think again if the potential gain from optimization for those particular words is worth the effort. It is true that sometimes even sites that are after the first 50 results get decent traffic from search engines but it is certain that you can't count on that. And even if you somehow manage to get to the top, do you have any idea what it will take to keep the good results?

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Load and send? Batch and blast? Those direct marketing concepts are ancient history in the modern email environment. Today’s email marketers must navigate their way through a complicated landscape of shifting customer expectations, challenging new technologies, evolving government regulations and other issues old-school direct marketers never had to face. Define your email value proposition (EVP) Without a clear value proposition, your email won’t hit your recipient’s “internal Inbox” – the barometer in the mind of each recipient that tells them whether your email message is worth their time. Give your subscribers clear reasons to open your email messages every time by establishing and sticking to your own EVP. An EVP should:

Be unique to your company and tie back to your company’s business and/or marketing objectives. Clearly define the value your email message brings to subscribers. Define your EVP much like you would a positioning statement and make sure that it concentrates on how it will directly benefit your subscribers. Use your EVP as a measure when you review your content, creative, frequency and segmentation strategies....

Do you know your hostname? How about your IP address? Sure, that's pretty basic information, but it's good information to have. With this tool you'll get that and more!

With "Your Browser Details" you'll get information on: your IP address and hostname, your browser details (User-Agent, Cookies Enabled, Java Enabled , JavaScript Status, Screen Width & Height, CPU class/type, Screen Colour Depth, Window Width & Height) and browser headers.

I'd like to share with you 5 key methods you must be using on a very regular basis in your internet marketing activity to ensure worthwhile traffic generation to your website. Now again when I say worthwhile we mean is 'targeted' traffic.

Now I make no apology about always banging on about this but it stands to reason you 'must' get visitors to your site that have an interest, a need for the information and solutions you're offering to their problems - otherwise you're simply wasting your time, so think about - target, target and more targeting. OK let's get into the exact Top 5 Steps we use all the time to get traffic to our sites�

1.Viral Marketing

Viral marketing means spreading your company's message through word of mouth, the oldest type of marketing ever, now word of mouth now means email, text, twitter, facebook and yes you've guessed it actual word of mouth.. It's just a matter of producing something interesting, fun or entertaining, and putting it out there for people to enjoy. If they like it, they'll pass it on to their friends and it will create a buzz. Your name is attached to it somewhere so that people can find out more by visiting your site. Press releases can achieve this and videos on You Tube are a great way of self-promotion. Also article marketing is viral marketing as well, which I cover below.

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Did you know the only businesses that make monéy on the Internet are those on the first page of Google? Oh, you already knew that? So you're not the least bit surprised by my statement? What's that you say? You've been hearing for years how important it is to be on the first page of Google? I see. So my statement just reinforces what you knew all along. It's a BIG lie! The Google First Page Lie That's right, it's a big lie! You Do Not Have To Be On The First Page Of Google To Make Móney On The Internet! I repeat... You Do Not Have To Be On The First Page Of Google To Make Móney On The Internet! I'll explain why in a moment. But first...a little history lesson in marketing. Marketing lies didn't just start with search engine rankings. Long before the advent of the Internet, businesses were climbing all over themselves trying to get the best ad placement in other types of major media: The Major Media    * Newspapers    * Magazines    * Direct Mail    * Yellow Pages    * Radio    * Television   ...

Since the start of Bing, it has become one of the top search engines to get your site listed on. They have created a set of webmaster tools to help you get top rankings. Use this tool to view your crawl activity, research keywords, traffic stats, control what the crawler sees, and much more. Start a webmaster tool account with Bing today and use their tools to increase your website rankings!

Load and send? Batch and blast? Those direct marketing concepts are ancient history in the modern email environment. Today’s email marketers must navigate their way through a complicated landscape of shifting customer expectations, challenging new technologies, evolving government regulations and other issues old-school direct marketers never had to face.



Check your email mechanics



Don’t forget to check your email mechanics on a regular basis. Some of the best campaigns fail because simple items like response links, the unsubscribe process, co-registration or images fail. It takes time, but each email execution is valuable. Don’t frustrate your subscribers or waste your money by sending out and email that doesn’t have its most basic items working. One of the best and simplest methods for making sure that the mechanics of each and every email campaign are optimised is to create and consistently utilise an email development and deployment checklist.

 

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Load and send? Batch and blast? Those direct marketing concepts are ancient history in the modern email environment. Today’s email marketers must navigate their way through a complicated landscape of shifting customer expectations, challenging new technologies, evolving government regulations and other issues old-school direct marketers never had to face. 

 

Design for the Inbox

 

Poor design and improper formatting frustrate users. If they can’t easily navigate your email or find the information they want at a glance, your messages will fall flat. Your email has to stand out in a crowded Inbox. Here are some tips for designing for the inbox and optimizing deliverability:

·         Be sure to test sample messages to see what performs.

·         Put your company name in the “from” line for fast recognition.

·         Add a “grabber” subject line – 50 characters or less.

·         Use teaser text and HTML colours and layout rather than an image so readers...

Thinking of keywords can be quite difficult. How are you suppose to know what people are searching for... right? Well, you're in luck, as the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool can provide some much needed assistance to this mundane task.

Just type in a term and pick a geographic market (the U.S. is the default option). Then the tool will try to tell you how many searches are performed for it and some related terms on a daily basis. Those numbers might not be completely accurate, but should at least act as a helpful estimate.

Small business social media starts with making the decision to be part of the conversation. Not as easy or cut and dried a decision as one may think. What are the factors involved in this process? The pros and cons?

Pros:

* Potential to raise website page rank * Potential to find new customers or clients * Potential to make new business connections * Potential to reach current customer base with new products or services * Potential to get customers talking about me or my company * Potential to find out what you are not offering to your customers that they want * Potential to have your PR department consisting of your customers * Potential to get great reviews from happy customers * Potential to feel important because you have 15 followers! (Joking)

Cons:

* Time consuming * Energy consuming * Resource consuming * Costly * Don't know what to say * Don't know where to start * Don't have any customers or clients to help you get started

The current trend in search engines...

Globally, spam accounts for between 70% and 95% of all mail received by ISPs. The cost to filter it is a significant expense for service providers, as well as consumers, who pay for downloading spam if it gets through filters. Opting out of unwanted SMSes also costs consumers, as there is a network charge.

The PPI Bill should cut down on spam as it sets down strict parameters around how information can be collected, and used. The law specifically refers to direct marketing through fax, SMS, automatic calling machines and electronic mail.

If companies do not comply with the law, and have been issued with an enforcement notice, they can be fined or face a year behind bars. In addition, end-users can institute a civil claim for damages.

The PPI Bill is expected to be enacted towards the end of this year, although the date is not yet certain. It is currently making its way through Parliament.

Having some data about your site is crucial. With that in mind, give Alexa a go and it will provide important information about your traffic trends for free.

It's really quite simple, you just enter a URL and you'll get back related keywords, traffic stats and various other information on your site.

Offering a webinar is a great way to build your brand, introduce yourself to prospective clients and establish yourself or your company as an industry authority. Whether you want to give a free or paid webinar is up to you, but the true value of a webinar begins long before the actual session starts and can carry you along well after it is done. You can leverage your webinar for your SEO and turn a one-time event into a long-term marketing effort with extended life and use.

Every once in a while, you'll hear a horror story about a site owner who attempted to optimize his site for one thing, and then found that it indeed ranked high. just not for the term they wanted. Make sure that's not you with the Keyword Density & Prominence tool.

Users just need to supply the tool with a URL, then it'll return a seven-plus page report on optimized words and phrases, page elements, tag clouds, links, and Google positions. Which is valuable - but free - data.

Have you ever wondered which keywords your competitors are using to rank high in the search engines? This is important because if you are focusing your efforts on the wrong keywords, your website will not rank on the first 3 pages of search results (which are the most important pages).

Niche Watch is a free online tool that helps you see the competitors for your niche keywords. This tool will help you gain a better placement in search engines by helping you compete with your competitors' keywords.

There is also a Firefox web browser add-on you can add here if you like.

Dealing with concerns related to search engine marketing can be difficult, but when it comes to gathering stats, it doesn't get much easier than having them surface while you surf. And the SEMToolBar provides just that service.

This toolbar shows up at the top of an open browser window, and the official description explains, "Transformed search engine results pages (SERPs) display keyword demographics and statistics at the top, and the results are numbered and annotated with useful data and links (such as PageRank, backlinks count, pages indexed, last cached date, a cached text link and more)."

Every business, large or small, local or virtual, needs a website. You already know you need a nice looking site with content that is free of typographical and grammatical errors. What you may not know is that in order to create credibility and build relationships with potential and current customers you need the following:

Do you have content on your website but not sure exactly what keywords would work well?

If you are having trouble coming up with keywords for your website try textaliser.net to give you ideas. All you have to do is paste in content from as many pages as you want, or just type in your web address and get detailed analysis on keywords, keyword density and link analysis. This simple tool from textaliser.net can help you focus your content on the right keywords.

When you're starting off in SEO there's a lot of conflicting information about what to do and what not to do. There's a constant battle between White Hat and Black Hat and which is more effective.

It's pretty easy to get frustrated at how long it actually takes to achieve a decent ranking. This can lead to taking the wrong advice. I learned by trial and error the SEO mistakes listed below.

Here are some rules to follow if you DO NOT want your site to rank in search engines.

Social Media Marketing is the act of using social media (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) in order to promote a business.

Many companies will want to start their own social media marketing campaign and create a Facebook page or Twitter account. The problem with is they don't have a clue on how to run a successful social media marketing campaign. Here, I have listed 10 of the most basic rules when it comes to social media marketing. Follow these rules in order to have successful accounts with Facebook, Twitter, etc.

So if you're selling the most features, lower prices, better service, and best staff in the business, you're communicating the wrong message. Your audience isn't stupid; no one promotes the idea that they have no service and sell cheap crap that doesn't work. No one really cares that you Tweet, Facebook, Google, or text message your day away. What people want to know is what are you going to do to move them up the Maslowian ladder. Every successful brand, product, or company is based on a big idea. What's yours?

The key to successful marketing is finding your Emotional Value Proposition. It's how you humanise the outdated notion of a sales-value proposition that no self-respecting marketing expert gives a hoot about.

So if technique is merely the how, what's the why, the why anyone should care? Ask yourself, and be honest, what's your big idea?

Brand Stories are how companies use psychological persuasion to transform viewers into loyal customers (brand evangelists) by changing attitudes, preferences, and preconceptions. Brand stories allow the audience to vicariously transform themselves by providing a look at what could be.

Research that asks people what they want is useless, how can they know if they want something if it hasn't been put on the market yet. Marketing is about defining your audience's need not reacting to what your competitor has already established. By definition that kind of approach will leave you as an also-ran, not ever a market leader.

Market leaders are proactive not reactive. Asking everybody's opinion on what and how to sell is weak and ineffectual and is not only reactive, it's downright regressive. Your customers can't tell you what they don't know, that's why they rely on you.

Marketing requires you to take the long-view; it's an approach that requires a company to stake out a position and build a personality that customers can rely on to be consistent and ethical both in offering and in execution. Marketing is about building a legend, an iconic brand that explains who you are, what you do, and why anyone should care. Marketing is about psychological persuasion in order to improve your audience's businesses or personal lives. Marketing is about transformation, it communicates a brand story that acts as a metaphor that defines your identity, which in turn helps customers define and express themselves.