A Winning Strategy For Creating Backlinks

This video has concise information about creating back links to your site. From the Excellent training program The Challenge.

How We are Driven as Humans. A Better Economic Model

How to Find Competitors’ Keywords For Your SEO & PPC

Technique 2: Buy The Data From A Keyword Monitoring Service, such as Spyfu

Spyfu has 2 tools that answer the limits of the analysis we ran of our competitors’ website.

1 – Spyfu Domain History tells you what keywords a competitor bought over the past year, and for how long. By seeing the keywords they’ve bought for the longest time, you can see what keywords are most valuable.

2 -Ad History shows you all the competitors who have been bidding on a keyword in PPC auctions for the past year, and for how long they’ve been bidding.

Ad History shows you their ad text, too. By seeing the patterns in competitors ads, especially over time, you can see how to pitch the people searching.

I also like Spyfu for other reasons. Spyfu helps find keyword patterns or categories I hadn’t discovered during my own keyword research. It seems years are often used with car model names, when people want to get car insurance.

Spyfu also tells you the competitors’ ad ranking in the search results. The higher the ad’s position, the more that traffic is important to them. A good indicator of value…

Spyfu value-maximization tip Look at trends in position over time. If you see a competitor gradually raising their ad’s position, chances are that the keyword is proving better than expected. And if they’re dropping, it’s probably a poor keyword!

Article Quote courtesy of Gabriel Goldenberg at seoroi.com

I like SpyFu myself and use it extensively. They allow free use, albeit a tad limited. Even the free service is quite valuable.

 

Your Value Is in Deciding What's Important, Not Answering Email

People get out of balance when they see their value as being able to respond quickly. If I see myself as a machine for answering email, then my work life would never stop because my email never stops. If instead I see my value as separating the important from the unimportant and making good decisions on the important, then I can go home at a reasonable hour, spend time with my family, ignore my email and phone messages all weekend long, and make sure that when I return to work, I am in the right mood to make the good decisions.

See the whole thing at LifeHacker 

Keeping up with life is no easy task. Especially if you have an online business of some kind. The job of an owner is not doing all the mundane stuff, it is making wise decisions. You cannot make those decisions if you are consumed by what you created to set yourself free.

I personally offload as much of the work as I can to a computer. It's not smart, but it is good at sorting emails.

Connect with people in your niche

Get connected. This video covers a few ways how to connect with your own niche.

The Real Pros: creativity is messy

http://www.pixelatedimage.com/blog/2010/06/go-to-the-writers/

Interestingly most creative disciplines have a similar process. There’s a time and place at the beginning of creation, to be messy and to create really horrific stuff. Painters sketch. Musicians write lousy first drafts on napkins, their angst and heartbreak leaving puddles of tears on the bar. And we photographers, no less artists – potentially – than the others, seem to feel we need to hit the shutter, create something great, and move on. Bollocks.

Creation is almost always messy. Because we are messy. If your plan is to from Point A (no photograph) to Point B (iconic photograph which will define my career and on which I will retire fabulously wealthy) then you’re in for a shock. If there is such a transition at all, it’s from Point A to Point Z. And in between are the sh*tty first drafts, the sketch images.

Small Business Advertising Idea 5 Proven Strategies

Small Business Advertising Idea 5 Proven Strategies

September 10th, 2010 Filed under: advertising idea — Marketing Ideas Author

If you are looking for a small business advertising idea, using the internet makes a lot of sense. The majority of potential customers use the web to find products and services in your city or county.

Word of mouth and paper advertisements are becoming less relevant by the day. Here are some tactics to get your product or service out to the internet community. These are merely starting points. Utilize search engines and your imagination to brainstorm more strategies.

1. Start a blog.

There are some excellent free sites like Blogger.com to market your small business. Use the same relevant keywords in the URL, title, and scattered through the text so that the search engines can determine what your blog is about.

2. Communicate with your local Chamber of Commerce.

You can visit their website, call them, and email pertinent information about the products or services you sell. Give very specific information about what it is that you offer.

3. Use search engines to find organizations that are relevant to your business in your city or area.

Get in contact with these people and offer something free or a discount for a first time customer. Remember to test out the things that are working. Ask new customers where they heard about your small business. You could also offer different promotions to different organizations and observe what is returned to you.

4. Search out other community organizations.

Nearly every group has a website these days. Use your imagination to expand your advertising. As a start, you could look for: Little League sponsorship, veteran organizations, churches, and lodges. Use the above tactic of give and get. Offer something extra to them in exchange for marketing your small business.

5. Set up an email campaign.

Collect emails from willing customers. You could suggest that they email 10 of their friends who may benefit from your small business. Send out a newsletter containing useful tips, strategies, or advice pertaining to your company. This will show that you are a subject matter expert in your field and customers may send this information to more people.

The key to all of these strategies is networking. The most successful small business advertising idea is to offer useful information and not make a sales pitch. Consumers are looking for helpful information and products. They must get the feeling that anything you claim is truthful. If you offer this, your reputation will begin to grow rapidly.

For a small business advertising idea to show you how to gain importance in the eyes of your customers, click here.

via everydaymarketingideas.com

Found an interesting article I thought you would enjoy. I use #1 and #5 myself.

A successful Viral marketing strategy. 13 million views

http://money.cnn.com/video/news/2010/07/19/n_old_spice.cnnmoney/

Old spice used an interesting marketing strategy using primarily social media. It is possible to use this same strategy yourself.

Strategic Internet Marketing with You-Tube

Take a look at Strategic Internet Marketing wit You-Tube, This is a quick how-to on Video marketing and why it works so well.

Google reader - keeping up with business

The Challenge, the standard of Free online marketing training

Combating Overwhelm

Data overload, often referred to as overwhelm is one of the most challenging part of learning online marketing. There is just too much going on in any niche at any time to keep track of.

The important thing is, You are allowed to miss stuff. Actually you can miss most everything and still be effective in your niche. Go ahead and try it. This realization is the first step towards the goal of overcoming overwhelm. 

Next is use a few tools to help with this. For data acquisition i personally use google reader, that way I don't need to go looking for what has changed. It comes to me. I use Google Reader to sign up for a number of RSS feeds from various places that interest like blogs and news sites. Then sort them into folders. Each folder should be something like "Imperative" , "not so important", "only read if you need a break" and so on. And remember just because something new pops up as unread, does not mean you need to read it. Usually when I look at what is available in Google reader, I just skim the titles and only read what seems interesting. When I'm done, I just click the button to clear everything.

Next is do a little bit every day. If you set aside 30 minutes a day to keep up with stuff, and when the time is up delete the rest, you will be surprised what you will get done after a week. Don't get impatient, Just because you don't see any progress, does not mean you have not made any. If you follow these simple steps you will help you mind relax and deal with the day. Its already tough enough as it is.

The Magnificent Symphony in Marketing

the Mini-net made easy

Not long ago, creating a network of backlinks (also called a mini-net) was hard work! I mean the to the level of work only a team of 10 to 20 full-time employees could accomplish with any deal of effectiveness. If an individual just starting out in marketing wanted to compete with that, it would take no less than 3 hours for every post created.

What is a backlink? it is a web link pointing to any given website like for example yours. A search engine like Google roams the web looking for who is linking to your site. For every link to your site, Google counts that as a vote of importance from that site to your site. More votes, the more Google sees you as important. As you are important, you appear better in Google's search results. Resulting is better traffic for you. Its far more complex than that, but that is the basic idea.

watch the video about how you can create your own mini-net 

for the specific steps check out The Challenge 2010

Get access to my Free MLM Training to get more awesome information from all the best marketers!