Monday, October 4, 2010

Google Updates and Other SEO News

Nothing ever stays the same very long on the Internet and that’s especially true when you’re dealing with Google. Now since that’s the primary search engine it’s also the one most people involved with search engine optimization need to concern themselves with so when the Head Googlers recently made the announcement they’d come out with a URL shortener, goo.gl, it raised a few preliminary red flags among people whose big concern is seo.

Google’s Matt Cutts has gone out of his way to put everyone at ease by pointing to things like the fact the shortener uses a method to redirect links that could be good for social media users and actually point to benefits for your website. If you’re anything like me your ears perk up when you hear any steps Google is taking to increase the efficiency of links because they are the bread-and-butter of any good search engine optimization campaign along with keywords.

Goo.gl could also play a part with the ranking algorithm the site uses and work its way into search results if the whole technique becomes popular. That’s the thing everyone who works with seo knows—its parameters are constantly changing and that means you need to keep on top of all these changes so you can supply rankings and traffic that provide your clients with what they need in the way of hits.

Some experts are predicting the results could be similar to Facebook’s Like button in that there will be some demographic information passed along when users are signed into their accounts.

Of course with the rise of social media people are beginning to wonder how seo will fare and although many pundits were first calling for the burial of search engine optimization with the rise of Facebook and Twitter, there now seems to be more of a conciliatory attitude with many professionals calling for a combined effort between the two.

Of course it stands to reason when you consider a good website that is search engine optimized is always the basis for any business and any of the social media campaigns you undergo will always point back to the same starting point. Through it all, there has never been any call for discarding good content or scrapping keywords and links.

In another bit of news, it’s now even predicted that mobile SEO platforms will become more important than the ones used on laptops or even PCs. Some of the people who know are even predicting a resurgence in things like pay per click advertising on the mobile web with the number of smart phones that are now in use.

Remember too that another report is stating Internet marketers are looking toward making link building their priority in the next twelve months and that means the need for well written content to couch these links will grow in the near future….again.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Blogging Tips from Pro Triathletes

This is a guest post by Mike CJ, co author of Beyond Blogging.

One of the businesses I consult with organizes triathlon events. Although my work is based around their blog and social media presence, I also enjoy getting stuck in as a general volunteer on the actual events.

The triathlon we run is called Ironman, and it consists of a 3.8km swim, followed by a 180km bike ride and finished off with a 42.2km marathon. Our triathlon is renowned as the world’s toughest, as athletes have to endure our searing heat and a mountainous bike course.

I’ve been lucky enough to get to know several world-class, professional competitors, and it was while talking to one of them that the similarity between what they do and what bloggers do dawned on me.

It’s the details that count

Steve was explaining to me that the difference between being a winner and an “also-ran” in triathlon is about improving a wide range of factors, bit by bit, over time.

He said the mistake most amateurs make is to focus on what he called “The big one”— the biggest challenge. In triathlons, that’s almost always the bike discipline, or the marathon. Amateurs tend to work hardest on those areas, believing that there is a lot to be gained from the two longest legs.

He told me that they’ll work and work on one area, and then lose all the time they’ve gained in those legs on other parts of the race.

As a pro, he told me the secret to his success was to focus on improving every single element of his race by a small amount every week. As well as the obvious key phases of the race, he also concentrates on small details:

the swim start, running into the sea and getting into a stroke fast
stripping his wetsuit off while running to the transition area
getting sun cream on quickly
leaving his bike shoes strapped to the pedals and doing them up while riding
changing his seat height for the final few miles to get his legs ready for the run
dismounting from the bike and racking it fast
putting his running shoes on while running
planning his fluid intake during the race.

These are just a few examples, but he told me that he seeks to improve the efficiency of each of those factors by several per cent every year. In real terms, he may make up only a few seconds on each, but when they’re all added together, he improves by minutes every single year.

How to blog like a pro triathlete

We bloggers love to focus on the big stuff—changing our themes, writing an epic series of posts, or perhaps creating a new ebook or course.

But actually, it’s all the little things that add up to improve our traffic, increase our conversion rate and really move our blogs forward over time. Lasting progress is achieved in many small ways:

revisiting old posts to add internal links and improve them
adding new follow-ups to keep our email lists engaged
testing placement of adverts or calls to action to improve response rates
taking the time to follow commenters back to their blogs
creating sneeze pages to help new readers find relevant stuff
adding links to relevant past posts when we write new ones.

None of these tasks are interesting, fun or sexy, but find me a successful blog and I’ll show you a blogger who does them. All the time.

Mike CJ is a full time blogger and writer who lives in the idyllic Canary Islands. He’s co author of Beyond Blogging and you can find out more about him at Mike’s Life.

Friday, October 1, 2010

Why Getting Attention Won’t Make You Rich

image of woman in Renaissance costume

Be remarkable. Be the purple cow. Get yourself noticed. Just be your own beautiful and unique snowflake self, and your allotment of raving fans will come find you and buy everything you make.

Ever heard that advice?

It’s a social media truism that as long as you’re authentic, you can’t go wrong. Fame, fortune, and the latest Apple products will all be yours.

Let’s face it — authenticity can be a great way to draw a crowd. Especially if you have an over-the-top personality. And because we live in the age of attention scarcity, many people think that getting attention is the hard part.

If only I could get noticed. If only I could get someone to read my stuff.

But attention isn’t actually the rarest commodity in the 21st century.

Trust is.

It’s true that the first letter in every sales formula is “A”

All marketing has to start with attention.

If you can’t attract attention in the first place, nothing else you do has a chance to work. This is why headlines matter more than anything else you do.

And that’s been the case as long as selling has existed. If you’ve ever been to a Renaissance Faire, think about the way the food vendors let you know what they’ve got to offer.

When the pretty girl in the tight bodice shouts Hot Turkey Legs! and Cold Beer Here!, those are headlines. They attract your attention and let you know the most important details of the offer.

But you need to remember that the work of the headline is not only to attract attention.

The true job of the headline is to get the first line of your copy (whether it’s a blog post, email message, sales letter, video, or podcast) read, watched, or listened to.

In other words, if you gaze happily at the pretty girl but you never approach her for a beer, the headline (and the bodice) have failed.

Copywriting formulas have more than one letter

(If the whole idea of copywriting formulas is new to you, you can find 15 of them here.)

Conversion is the copywriting term for all the stuff that happens between that initial “A” and the sale.

You craft an offer that people will actually want to buy.
You build trust.
You answer questions and counter objections.
You describe appealing benefits to spark interest and fan it into desire.
You make it easy for the prospect to see herself as a customer.
You increase desire with appealing bonuses.
You deliver a clear, compelling call to action.
You build in urgency elements to get the prospect to act today.
You state your call to action again.

Being a jerk is bad for business

Lots of us will reward a jerk with attention. But not many will reward a jerk with business.

Jerks can’t be depended on. They play head games. They don’t respect their audience. They amuse themselves at the expense of other people.

Prospects are already fearful enough. If your prospects don’t trust you, they’re not likely to spend any money with you.

You don’t have to be a wimp

You’ll notice that some very successful businesspeople have strong, tough personas.

They may well make themselves unlikeable to most of the population. That’s ok – they’re filtering out the customers who aren’t right for their business.

The message they send to their right customers, though, is always that they can be trusted. That they’ll tell the truth, even when it’s not pretty. That they’re consistent, whether you like them or not.

The dad from Sh*t My Dad Says would make a good marketer. Let’s face it, if you bought a car from that guy, you know that you’d have a completely accurate picture of what was good and bad about the car. He may be offensive at times, but he’s trustworthy.

(At least, the real dad and not the one who will be played by William Shatner.)

The dad from “Family Guy” would make a lousy marketer. He’s capricious, he goes for the cheap laugh every time, and he has no integrity. There are no customers gullible enough to buy a car from that guy. You may find him hilarious, but no sane person would find him trustworthy.

It takes more than being remarkable

Hey, I’m a big fan of remarkable. I built a blog and a lovely business around it.

But “remarkable” doesn’t mean “remarkably annoying,” “remarkably mean,” or “remarkably useless.”

You have my permission to swear on your blog, to fearlessly embrace controversy, or just to make yourself a likeable jackass.

But never, ever do it at the expense of the trust of your readers.

There is no effective copywriting formula that leads directly from getting Attention to creating a Scandal to making a Sale.

That’s just a formula for making an A-S-S of yourself.

Interview: Michael Dunlop

Michael Dunlop is a 21 year old internet marketer who is most well known for his large income blogs such as IncomeDiary and Retireat21, together receiving millions of visitors and have been featured in newspapers, magazines and books around the world. Find out how he did it and, more importantly, how you can do it too!

Tell us a little background info about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you? How long have you been working in this industry?
I grew up in a small village called East Preston on the south coast of England and currently live in Southampton. I am 21 years old, but have been working online since around 15.

What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
Honestly, I really couldn’t decide what I’m most proud of because I have very high standards, but to give you a cut down list of a few things I have done:

* Had millions of people visit my sites
* Featured in books, magazines and newspapers around the world
* Asked by MTV to be in a new show they are working on.
* Being young and financially independent is probably the most important one.

How did you come to learn about this industry? Why did you choose this career? When did you first realize the full potential in blogging and affiliate marketing? When did you first “hit the big time?”
I was 14 at the time and I was at school competing in a competition called the Young Enterprise and I had to build a site for my business were I was selling brand new mobile phones and digital cameras. My dad connected me with someone who knew how to use Dreamweaver and I really just took it from there. I chose to do this as a career because I knew I had to be an entrepreneur anyway because I lacked any qualifications from school and wasn’t prepared to be paid $5 a hour to work for someone else. The internet just makes it so easy as an entrepreneur to start and see a return so that's why. I first saw the potential when I connected the dots between finding a problem and creating a solution, that’s where the money is. I created IncomeDiary and the very first month the blog earned $5000 and since then it has just gone through the roof and I never looked back.

What do you think it takes to be successful as a blogger and affiliate?
I think the most important thing for me was to think big, sure you need to provide value and do all these other things but if I didn’t think big, I wouldn’t be BIG. GO BIG, or GO HOME.

What have been your biggest failures and frustrations?
I wouldn’t really say I had failures, definitely a lot of set backs and things not working out as well as you had first thought. I think failure and success go hand in hand, any success I have had, there has always been some failures involved, that’s how we find out what works and what doesn’t.

What is the single toughest problem you've had to face, and how did you get through it?
Spelling, like I mentioned at the beginning, I failed most things at school as I was very dyslexic, I was one of those people who read a page in a book, it took me so long that I had forgot what was the page was even about. If you look at anything I wrote 2 years ago on Retireat21 and look at my writing now, you wouldn’t believe it was the same person, It has improved greatly just because I do it every day, however I still get a few dicks who like to mention I have grammar issues, at least that’s my only issue. My teachers wouldn’t believe that I now write for a living.

Which methods of promotion do you favor?
As I’m a blogger/affiliate marketer - I have found by providing great valuable content on my blog, I have been able to bring long term great traffic to my site with no effort at all, it simply comes. People are always look for amazing content, that’s ho we learn.

How have you made those promotion methods successful?
I connect all my affiliate promotions with a HOW TO. So for example, anything I’m writing about, it has to involve them using a product of some sort that they have to buy. So for example, how to get more followers on Twitter, I show them how I do it with TweetAdder and so it’s educational and a promotion at the same time.

What have you been up to recently? What projects are you working on?
Recently just launched a Clickbank product called Popup Domination, I’m getting 100’s of new subscribers daily so it felt only write that I put the tool I’m using to do it into a WordPress Plugin so people could duplicate my success. I’m always working on my main site called IncomeDiary - there is always something I can be doing to improve it and up my game so that I stand out as the BEST.

What problems have you had with those new projects?
Rushing it although I do think this is why it was successful. So many people plan to do something and they plan it out but they never get much further, I just powered through and got my team working constantly on it so that it was done ASAP. As we rushed it, we didn’t have many affiliates on board and so only myself and a couple other friends brought in the majority of the sales although I believe it will sell every day for years because it solves a HUGE problem and easily.

What are your greatest strengths?
Quick thinking and getting what I want.

One thing I have found in life and business is that if you want something, just ask for it. Jon asked me for this interview, he got it. Jon asked for my plugin to review it, he got it. I asked Jon for a review a while back and although I can afford full price, I might as well ask for 2 for the price of one, nothing stopping me and I got it. You can get a lot more out of life and business if you just ASK!

What are your greatest weaknesses?
Consistency, work ethic and short fuse at times.

You take your eye of the game for one minute and you will start to lose momentum, traffic and sales.

What motivates you?
Lifestyle.

What is the best advice you’ve been given and try to apply to your life?
Entrepreneurship is about living a few years of your life like most won’t, so you can live the rest of your life like most can’t.

Who has impacted you most in your career, and how?
So many people have impacted my business, perhaps my Dad (barrydunlop.com) would be at the top of list.

What kinds of people do you have difficulties working with? Any good stories?
Slow thinkers, honestly, I think 10x quicker then the typical person and I expect everyone to keep up and if you don’t, I have very little time for you. However, I have learnt to slow down and be more considerate

Anyone who thinks they are better then me when they aren’t - sure there’s a few people I work with that I really clever and I look up to, however sometimes I come across people who just think they are. They usually have a little overnight success and think they are really clever when really they know nothing and when I make suggestions they throw it in my face, I have little time for these people. I’m always learning, never think you're too great to learn.

What are some of your long-term goals? How much is enough? If money was no object, what would you be doing?
Grow a new business I’m starting to earning 7 figures monthly and selling for a 9 figure deal in a few years to come. Money doesn’t mean to much to me, sure I would like to have enough to live very comfortably, but selling a company for hundreds of millions would just be for my own personal benefit, knowing that I could do it. Money is like points for me, it’s just a way to see how well I’m doing.

What is your greatest achievement outside of work? What are some of your unfulfilled dreams?
Considering I’m young, there’s so much I plan to do still, the first two things being, buy a house and a old mustang which I believe will be soon anyway. As for achievements... killing 1732 zombie on COD5 Nazi Zombies. To be honest, that question is just to hard to answer. Things have just begun for me.

Do you have a Twitter account or Facebook “Like” page?
twitter.com/michaeldunlop

facebook.com/IncomeDiary

Help LogoMyWay Take Home the $25,000 First Place Prize

It’s really tough to create a new web site and break into a niche where there are already big and successful sites. When my friend Joe Daley said he was going to create LogoMyWay.com, a marketplace for graphic designers, I thought the idea was great, but knew he would have a lot of trouble competing with other big sites in this market like 99Designs. That was over a year ago, and now LogoMyWay is killing it, and also one of my favorite sites for having logo design work done.

Joe is currently in second place for a Kodak Home Office Prosper Contest and the first place winner takes home a $25,000 prize. Joe has a great story and a killer site, so he deserves to win the contest, so I’d surely help him in his efforts to win this contest, and would like for you to do the same. Here’s how you can help, and possibly win a free t-shirt in the process!

Step 1 – Vote for Joe Daley
(Visit page, click vote, then confirm email)

Step 2 – Leave a Comment on this Post Stating you Voted.

Ten winners will randomly be selected from comments made on this blog post to receive a free t-shirt from this blog. Winners will be contacted and posted on October 10th. Good luck to both you and Joe!

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Scribe 3.0 Launched Today

One of the popular premium plugins that I know many ProBlogger readers use is Scribe. This plugin (for WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal) is designed to help your posts rank well in search engines—without compromising the quality of your posts.

Developed by the team at CopyBlogger, Scribe has gone through a number of updates that have added new features and functionality.

Today it has been updated to version 3.0, and it now covers pretty much all of the fundamentals of SEO—not just some of them.

Search engine-optimized posts—without compromised readability

The great thing about previous versions (and the new one) is that Scribe doesn’t just create search engine-optimized content: it works with your own content, written for your readers. It works to optimize your unique posts.

This leaves you with compelling and useful content that has been optimized for search engines, rather than search engine-optimized content that doesn’t really help anyone.

In the update, we now have:

an integrated keyword research tool (meaning you no longer have to use a separate tool)
a new link-building tool.

These features help you get a little more strategic about your relationship building with other bloggers, and cross-linking your content within your own blog.

Get full details on what Scribe is about here and view a video demo here.

Try it free

Scribe is a great tool with many features, but in the end you’ll only really understand it once you try it for yourself. The good thing about Scribe is that while it’s a premium/paid plugin, you can try it free by signing up and then, if you decide it’s not for you, canceling your subscription within the first 30 days and asking for a refund (something they honor every time).

They also have a great limited-time ‘STEPUP’ promotion going on. This lets you increase the number of monthly content evaluations you can access. Details of the offer are on this page.

Win a Set of New Business Cards from Print Runner

After a conference or networking session, your business card is what you are represented as. What does your business card say about you?

Everyone could use a new set of business card, or even a completely new business card design? BloggingTips.com has partnered with PrintRunner.com to run a promotion for someone to win a set of new business cards for their blog, web site, business or whatever they like.

It’s amazingly simple to enter! All you need to do is leave a comment on why you’d like to win the contest and TWO WINNERS will be selected and contacted on October 7th. This is a quick contest, so make sure you enter now.

Here’s a bit more on the business cards available through this promotions.

Specifications of business cards:

Premium 14 pt. card stock
Durable, water resistant UV-coating
Choice of glossy or matte coating
Full color, black & white, or blank back available
Available on 100% recycled paper

And of course, the fun contest terms and legal info.

Official Rules

No purchase necessary
Open to legal residents of U.S. online
Must be 18 years of age or older and not an employee or relative of an employee of PrintRunner LLC
One entry per person
Void where prohibited and subject to federal, state and local laws

If you are in the market for a new set of business cards, be sure to check out PrintRunner.com and their coupons page for promotion and discounted items. Even if you already have your own business cards, PrintRunner also specializes in notepad printing, brochure printing, catalog printing and more. I usually refresh my business card designs every few years, so why not see what you can do for a fresh new look!

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