Thursday, February 3, 2011

Massive Growth at HostGator is Exciting to Watch

hostgatorIt’s always great to see awesome companies online succeed, especially ones that you have been working with for many years. The funny thing about online companies, is that they really don’t need to do “real world advertising”, since they can do it so cost effectively and well online. An extremely well known hosting company in the internet marketing space is HostGator, and not only do they host a great majority of affiliate related sites, but they also make affiliates a massive amount of money as well! Over $400,000 is paid out to Host Gator affiliates every month! How sick is that!?

Host Gator just sent out one of their monthly mailing and it had some pretty exciting highlights for the company, which saw explosive growth in 2010. Here are just a few of their company highlights.

HostGator in the News

In 2010, HostGator grew by over 2 MILLION domains! At the beginning of 2010, the company had 2.9 million domains, and are now at nearly 5 million domains. The company has also expanded to over 500 employees, along with 64 new reps to handle customer support. But even more fun and exciting is how HostGator is making a big name for themselves in the offline world… look out GoDaddy, here comes HostGator!

hostgator

The latest additions to the HostGator branding and marketing campaigns include billboards, a real NASCAR sponsorship and even being seen in an EA Sports UFC video game. Will we soon see a new celebrity sponsor for HostGator next? HostGator doesn’t just spend mad cash on ad campaigns… they’ve also donated $100,000 to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development Fund.

I’m glad to see HostGator doing so well. Not only do they host millions of web sites, but they have also made a ton of affiliates a TON of money over the years with their amazingly successful affiliate program, which is available through their in-house affiliate program and through Commission Junction.

HostGator Web Hosting Solutions – Save 20%

I have a few servers with HostGator and you should too! Web hosting plans start as low as $4.95 a month. Another excellent perk of hosting with HostGator is they have one click install software for many applications and programs like WordPress. If you are setting up a ton of mini sites or completely clueless when it comes to installing software, HostGator makes this extremely easy to setup. Use coupon code ZACJOHNSON to get your first month of only for only 1 penny!

Setup Your HostGator Account Now.

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7 Signs Your Blog is Bound to Fail

There are rules to everything if you truly want to succeed; blogging also is not exempted and there are several rules you should follow if you truly want to build a successful blog. Some people are not aware of these rules and some people see them as unimportant and this only leads their blogs to failure.

Bloggers make a lot of mistakes and there is nothing bad in making mistakes because mistakes are one of those things that make us human. However, there are also some very deadly mistakes we shouldn’t make as a blogger. This post will be talking about 7 signs that show that your blog is bound to fail.

1. Your Writing Sucks

Many people make a great mistake of thinking that what matters most when trying to build a successful blog is how they market their blog, but they’re so wrong. Quality content is the foundation of every successful blog and there is now how you can escape this. If you can’t write then you can’t succeed as a blogger.

I was once of the notion that marketing and promotion is all that matters when it comes to blogging; how wrong I was! I learned the hard way that content is what matters most when I wrote a guest post that sent me over 1000 visitors in one day and I was unable to retain at least 50 of those visitors.

2. You Believe Marketing is Unimportant

Another major mistake many bloggers make that end up costing them their blogging career is being of the notion that marketing is unimportant. It doesn’t matter how great or unique your content is, you need people to read it, you need people to spread the word about it and you need people to give you their opinion about it.

Your content is only the beginning and foundation of your blog, you need marketing to get to greater heights.

3. Inconsistency on Your Part as a Blogger

Being inconsistent is also a very deadly mistake most bloggers make. Your readers see you as a leader and they expect you to meet some standards, one of those standards is being consistent with the content you produce on your blog. You shouldn’t just write on your blog once in a month and then start writing everyday; if you want to be posting when you like, stick to it, and if you want to be posting 3 times a week make sure you also stick to it.

4. You Don’t Care About Your Design

Sure! It is content that matters (or at least I have heard that several times) but that also doesn’t make your design unimportant. A lot of bloggers make a very grievous mistake of thinking that all they need to do is put their best in their content and forget about the rest. Doing something like this might seem fine, naturally, but the outcome used to be more dangerous than expected.

Your content is really important but another thing of more importance is how you present your content. Your design makes your content more beautiful, attractive and presentable so you should make sure you give the best of your content.

5. Only Caring About the Ephemeral

Some bloggers also make a great mistake of only caring about the present and completely forgetting the future. As a blogger, your future is far more important than your present and a wise blogger will always make sure he is the one who determines his future.

One great example of this mistake is focusing on getting more traffic than focusing on getting more subscribers. Your daily visitors can stop visiting your blog anytime or they can easily forget about your blog but your subscribers will always get your content no matter what and catering for them is the best way to secure your future.

6. You Take it Solo All the Time

Many bloggers also make this mistake without being aware of the future consequences. In the beginning, even God knew the importance of partnership and being together and that is why he created a woman to support man. You won’t go far doing everything on your own; you will need to launch a product, do one thing or the other which you can’t do all alone and utilizing the power of networking is a great way to get all these done without hassles.

7. You Are Too Selfish

Selfishness is a killer and it has crept into the lives of many bloggers unaware. If everything you think about when it comes to your blog is yourself you should know for sure that the funeral of your blog is around the corner. A wise man will put himself and other people around him into consideration before doing anything. Any decision you will make about your blog that will only benefit is very dangerous and you should make sure you rethink it to see if it is for the best; otherwise, drop it!

Over to You

The above signs are deadly signs of blog about to fail, if you’re a blogger make sure you spread the word about this post so that others can be aware of these mistakes. Also make sure you share this post on your favorite social bookmarking and networking sites.

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Do You Republish Other People’s Content? You’ll Want to Read This

Earlier this week Google’s “head of web spam”—Matt Cutts—posted on his blog that they’re implementing a change in their algorithm that impacts those that publish content from elsewhere on the Web.

The changes are all about ranking the original sources of content higher than those who scrape/republish/copy it. This has always been Google’s intent but increasingly some have been seeing scraped content ranking higher than original sources.

In Matt’s words:

“The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.”

This has a couple of implications for bloggers of different types.

For those who produce blogs with original content, it hopefully means not being out-ranked by other sites reproducing your content (with or without permission). As someone who finds his own content appearing on other sites many times a day (many times without credit of the source), for me this is a welcome change.

For those who do use scraping (or syndication) strategies, this news might stimulate a rethink in that approach. I know there are times and places for syndication (particularly if you do so with permission), but this serves as a reminder that in most cases if you’re looking to build a prominent and successful blog, you need to produce something that’s not only relevant and useful, but is also unique.

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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

How Does Personal Branding Fit in With Your Business?

Have you taken the time to sit down and decide what your business really is? Most people never really think about it on the level that I want to share with you today. Ask any business person, whether online or offline, and most will tell you their business is delivering information, or a product or a service. These are things you do in your business but your real business is you. You are your business. If people don’t like you or feel compelled to buy from you, then you really have no business. And it may be time to figure out why it is people aren’t buying from you. Maybe you have a great product, but if customers aren’t drawn to you for some reason, they will never know about your great product or service.
In many cases you need to sell yourself before you can sell your product or service. You do this by branding yourself. You also need to brand your business entity, but it’s just as important to brand yourself. I’ve ran across several marketers with personal brandings; the mostly sane marketer, the sweetie marketer, the sassy marketer (my own personal brand.) These are titles you remember and makes it easy to find in a search. You may not remember which product or service they offer, but if you can remember their personal brand, you can find their information real quick. You need a personal brand to sell yourself. If you can’t sell yourself, chances are you can’t sell a product or service either.
The second thing you should realize is that your business is a people business. It’s people who are looking for your information and become customers. If you’re not getting up-front and personal with your audience or target market, it’s likely they will find someone else who they can relate to on a personal level.
We all have days that we post to our blogs or websites and leave out our personality, but if you want to continually reach your audience you need to give them something to keep coming back for. Information is great and content is king, but customers are looking for a more personal experience these days. Many businesses, especially brick and mortar businesses, have forgotten about the personal experience with their customers.
I purchase a lot of information and content from online sources. I look for high quality materials but I also purchase from people who have marketed themselves with a great personality. I look at how they’ve branded themselves as much as I do at the quality of their product or service.
If you’ve left personal branding out of your business model, it may be time to go back to the drawing board and inject yourself into your business plans.
What have you learned about how personal branding affects your online business? Does it make a difference? Please share your thoughts and opinions.

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Niche Travel Blogging Demystified

This guest post is by Matthew Kepnes of Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site.

If you look at all the travel blogs out there, you’ll notice many common themes. People tend to write a blog that falls into an overarching category like cruises, backpacking, solo travel, or digital nomad travel. They don’t refine their offerings any further. What readers are left with is thousands of blogs about the same thing, and a crowded field where no one really dominates. There are no leaders, no experts, and the bloggers’ voices get lost in the crowd.

For some bloggers, that’s fine. They simply blog because they like blogging. They want to interact with others and have no intention of ever making their blog into a business. If they make three hundred dollars selling an ad, they’re probably ecstatic; if they never make any money, they’re probably not fussed.

Yet there are a lot of bloggers out there who do want to make money. Some of them want to make a living, and most would just love for their blog to pay for their travels. In a sea of sameness, though, it’s hard to get the traction you need to become an expert, distinguish yourself, and gain traffic. And as we all know, it’s only then that you can make money from your blog.

The worst mistake

A few weeks ago, a travel blogger I read said that we travel bloggers should look to companies like Lonely Planet and be like them. “Copy the big companies,” he said.

I think this is the worst mistake you can make. You can’t be Lonely Planet, Boots n All, Orbitz, or the like. These companies have decades of experience and money that you don’t have, as well as huge budgets that allow them to stay ahead of the game.

Moreover, there’s no way you’ll be able to get ahead of their brands. Google didn’t wake up saying they want to be Microsoft. They said, “we want to be a new tech company.” That’s what you should aim for. You should aim to be something new. Don’t follow. Lead.

Leading a niche

To be a leader, you need to be niche. That word is thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean?

In simple terms, being niche means that you focus on a narrow topic. For the purpose of this article, I am going to talk a lot about backpacking as a niche. If you look at most travel blogs, you’ll notice that they all focus on backpacking or long-term travel. It seems to be a trend. How do you make yourself different when everyone is writing about the same thing?

Recently, I gave some advice to another travel blogger. He had just come back from a long-term trip to Central and South America, and he wanted to make his website bigger and earn some money from it, so what did he do? He followed the conventional line of thinking and turned his site into a general backpacking blog, and in the process he made his blog just the same as all the other blogs out there. They offered the same tips, advice, and stories that everyone on the Internet does.

I asked him, “How many sites do you see about backpacking in Central and South America?” That made him stop and think. He couldn’t think of any blogs that covered these regions, and he had just spent two years living, learning, and traveling that region of the world.

I told him that he is an expert on that area, and I asked him why he’s trying to cover the whole world. “Cover the area you know about!” I said. “When people ask other travelers where they look for information on a specific region, you want your name to come up first. Be the backpacking site for your area of expertise.”

Your niche matters

One of the greatest things the Internet has done is that it has made all niches marketable. With millions of people on the ‘net at any second of the day, even the smallest hobby or niche has an audience. You may think you are the only one with a passion for photos of horses doing stupid things, but with the Internet, you’ll find that you aren’t. You can bring all sorts of people together with your niche site.

The same is true in travel. No niche is too small. There are blogs covering RV travel, consumer issues, cruises, seniors’ cruises, gay cruises, gay seniors’ cruises, backpacking, long term travel, couples travel, and Asia travel—you can always find interested followers within your area of expertise.

Look at the “top travel blogs.” Out of the top 20 blogs, the majority deal with backpacking, independent travel, or families. Everyone is talking about the same thing.

When you looked at the numbers of those sites, did you notice something? There are a few with really high numbers, but the most are simply in the same area. They are talking about the same general topic, and thus they all share the same traffic.

Now take a look at the site Travel Fish. This is a destination-based site. It’s not really a blog, but it focuses on one thing: Southeast Asia. What kind of traffic does it get? It has an Alexa rank of 33,000 and a Compete rank of 144,000, which averages 88,500. That puts the site at #5 on the list of blogs.

Why does being niche help?

By going super-niche, your blog gains a single purpose. Everything you do focuses around one central theme. It helps focus your content, your marketing, and your audience. Don’t be everything to everyone. Be the best at one thing to some people. You want people to reference your name when people ask where they need to go for help. Travelfish’s single-minded nature allows that site to be the expert, and dominate one field. The owner doesn’t compete with anyone. People compete with him.

There are many travel websites out there. If you don’t go niche, you won’t be able to create a name for yourself. If you really want to make a stellar travel blog, monetize it, and be successful, you must pick one small genre of travel or location in the world, and be the expert on that. Otherwise, you’ll never break out of the crowd.

Matthew Kepnes has been traveling around the world for the past four years. He runs the award winning budget travel site, Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site and has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian UK, AOL’s Wallet Pop, and Yahoo! Finance. He currently writes for AOL Travel and The Huffington Post For more information, you can visit his Facebook page or sign up for his

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Tuesday, February 1, 2011

How to Capture Your Reader’s Attention

image of a peacock

“OH MY GOD! Your hair is on fire!”

Well, that’s probably not true. I only said it to get your attention.

Getting attention is the most important part of online marketing. No matter how brilliant your ideas are, you can’t even offer them to your prospect unless you’ve made her look in your direction first.

You have to get your prospect’s attention before you can turn her into a reader, let her know how wonderful you are, or sell her something.

Do I have your attention yet?

Good. Now I’ll show you how to get someone else’s.

Your reader can’t pay attention to everything

The brain is funny like that — in order to understand, the brain has to focus on specific information.

Attention helps us screen out the irrelevant and choose which information will enter, and stay, in our awareness. Our attention decides what to “pay attention to,” because human focus is limited, and we just can’t give our attention to everything.

Your reader’s minds are very selective. So we have to give them a reason to pay attention to our content instead of everything else out there they could be listening to.

There are many obstacles in the path to gaining your reader’s attention

Even if you have the best product, service, or information on the planet, it’s still difficult to get people to give you the time of day. Here are some common obstacles to getting your prospect’s attention:

  • The relentless proliferation of available products, services, and information
  • Increased and increasingly better competition
  • The multiplying methods of distribution
  • Buyer sophistication
  • Information overload
  • The desire for instant gratification

These are all roadblocks you face in the attention-getting game, so you’ve really got to be good at showing readers why their limited attention should be directed to you.

Try these attention-grabbing strategies

  • Help them see what you see. You might be focusing on yourself when creating messages about your business, thinking that everyone sees things the way you do. But they don’t. People won’t “hear” you, or pay attention, until they perceive what you perceive. So you’ve got to make your position crystal clear — help them to see what you see, using storytelling, description, personal experiences, case histories, and anything that will put the prospect in the right position to understand your message.
  • Make it personal. When you make your writing personal, you make it important. Personally interesting or perceptually meaningful information can grab attention, bring clarity, and help it slip right into your prospective client’s awareness. You don’t have to do a lot of explaining to tell someone his house (or his hair) is on fire — because it’s so personal to him. You immediately get attention.
  • Use emotion. Emotion is a great way to bring clarity to your business messages while making them personal. Emotion also comes with the triple bonus of adding clarity, giving clients a reason to talk about you and your business, and triggering the circuits in the brain that activate behavior and decisions — emotion is much better at that than logic is. Emotional messages get attention.
  • Don’t take chances with attention

    You only have a few seconds to capture someone’s attention, so don’t take chances with clever, cute, or insider language or visuals, which are often lost on people. Don’t use inside jokes or industry terms, either, unless appropriate for narrow niche marketing. These tactics only tend to confuse audiences, if only for a few seconds, which is all it takes to lose them — and a confused mind does not pay attention.

    Follow up with a strong second

    Once you’ve managed to capture your reader’s attention, don’t waste it. Getting your reader’s attention is like the first strike of a One-Two punch — if you don’t land the second part, you’re not going to knock them out (and I mean KO in the good way).

    Make sure your second punch, the actual information or message for which you grabbed her attention in the first place, is worthwhile.

    If it’s valuable, you’ve paved the way for easy entry into her attention with future conversation.

    If it isn’t, it’ll be that much more difficult to capture her attention the next time, as your prospect’s brain has already filed your information under “not worth our attention.”

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10 David Ogilvy Quotes that Could Revolutionize Your Blogging

__ShSCuaESlVk_TODWUMK3g8I_AAAAAAAAAec_wUrCCc_jc3I_s400_david-ogilvy.jpgThis week, I’ve been reading The King of Madison Avenue—an interesting biography of ad man David Ogilvy (aff).

I’ve always been fascinated with Ogilvy and see a lot in what he’s done as relevant to bloggers. So here’s some of his more famous quotes, with a few thoughts on how they relate to our medium.

1. “The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife.”

How appropriate—both for internet marketers (who are often known for tactics that treat those they target as morons) and bloggers (who can at times talk down to readers).

The idea of treating your reader as someone who you value, as someone incredibly special to you, will take bloggers a long way.

Another Ogilvy quote that relates: “Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.

2. “The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.”

I’ve been pondering this one a lot over the last 24 hours and it’s true—some of my best blog posts and projects have emerged out of light-hearted tweets or comments in conversations to friends.

31 Days to Build a Better Blog came about as I laughed with a friend about how bloggers needed a daily devotion (similar to what I grew up with as a good Christian boy reading Every day with Jesus) to keep their blogs on track.

7 Digital Camera Predators and How to Keep them at Bay started as a friend and I joked about things that conspired to kill our cameras.

It’s often the crazy little ideas that we have that first make us laugh that do best. If they get some kind of reaction in us (even one that makes us giggle at how silly they are), they’re likely to also get a reaction from others.

3. “Don’t bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.”

Think big! While there’s also something to be said for having realistic expectations about what you can achieve with a blog, there’s nothing wrong with having big dreams and aiming to make them a reality.

It can be a bit of a balancing act, but if you aim a little higher you might just find yourself achieving things with your blog that you might not have thought possible.

4. “I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive.”

If there’s one quote in this selection that most rings true for me it is this one. The posts that I’ve written that have emerged out of real experience, pain, excitement, heartache, and life are the ones that time and time again hit the mark with readers.

Tell stories, share your successes and failures, be yourself, and let your own personal voice come out. You’ll find readers respond in a personal way, too.

5. “I don’t know the rules of grammar… If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.”

This might get up the noses of those of you who are a little more particular about grammar (and I do thank you for your continued daily emails pointing out my mistakes), but I think there’s something powerful about this.

Write your blog posts in the way that you’d actually speak to them if they were in the chair opposite you. Use language that communicates most clearly with them—even when it might not be the Queen’s English.

Of course there comes a point where grammar and spelling errors can and do get in the way of communicating clearly with readers. Don’t be lazy—the point is to know your readers and communicate in a way that’s relevant to them.

6. “Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.”

I’m not sure I agree 100% with this as I do know bloggers who make good livings from writing about things that they have no real interest in or passion for. However, most successful blogs (and by that I mean more than profit, and am looking at blogs that connect with readers and help build a blogger’s reputation) are written by people who have something genuine to say about a topic they believe in.

While it’s possible to create a profitable blog on something you have no interest or belief in (by gaming the search engines for example), those kinds of blogs are never going to create a connection with readers or do much to raise your profile in an industry.

Conversely, bloggers who create blogs that come from genuine interest and passion for topics create connections with readers that have flow-on effects that lead to all kinds of wonderful opportunities.

7. “If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don’t let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else’s advertising.”

There’s nothing more heartbreaking for a new blogger when you see your content being scraped onto another blog or your intellectual property being used by others without credit.

I still get upset by this from time to time, however there’s one thing that I’ve noticed despite hundreds of sites each day republishing my work without permission and/or credit. Nobody actually seems to read those blogs.

The key to successful blogging is unique and useful information. People who simply regurgitate what you write, or even repost it word for word, either eventually give up (because nobody reads it) or get caught out (and stop in disgrace).

While there are times when I’ve chased down others who blatantly steal my stuff without credit (there is a line) I find it much more beneficial to spend my time creating more great content than policing how people use what I’ve already produced.

Focus the bulk of your time upon producing and being the best you can be. This will have more positive impact upon your business than the negative tasks of stopping spammers and thieves stealing your old ideas.

8. “First, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround yourself with partners who are better than you are. Third, leave them to go get on with it.”

This one might be a little more appropriate for advanced bloggers who’ve established themselves and are looking to take things to the next level.

There does come a time in most businesses where a solo entrepreneur needs to think about how to expand and grow beyond their own capacity to give their business personal attention.

There are only so many hours in the day. Expanding your team and/or partnering with others is one option to consider. If you do it, look for people whose skills complement and exceed yours, then get out of their way.

9. “Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”

David was big on testing, and his effectiveness as a communicator improved dramatically as a result.

It’s amazing what you learn when you test different elements on a blog: simple tweaks of headlines, changes in calls to action, different placements of ads, tracking how design changes improve conversion of your objectives … the list could go on.

Great bloggers don’t just write content—they watch to see how people interact with it (and their blog) and use what they learn to improve their future efforts.

10. “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar. “

The headline or title of your blog post is the most effective way to get people to read the rest of your post. If you don’t understand—and more importantly, implement—this principle, you’re going to miss out on a lot of readers.

Headlines draw people in, whether they see them in search results, on Twitter, in RSS feeds, or on your blog itself.

Ogilvy is famous for his advice on this: the purpose of your headline is to get people to read your first line. The purpose of your opening line is to get people to read the next one. So invest time and energy into your titles (and opening lines).

Here’s a related quote: “The headline is the ‘ticket on the meat.’ Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising.”

What’s your favorite Ogilvy quote?

There are a lot more David Ogilvy quotes. Do you have a personal favorite?

Here’s one more that I personally don’t live by, but which I know for a fact a couple of other well-known and quite successful bloggers live by.

“Many people—and I think I am one of them—are more productive when they’ve had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I’m far better able to write.”

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