Internet Marketing ladder: one step closer to the top

photo: Josh McMillan

Getting there, one step at a time. Finally got my refund today, and a friend said he wanted to take over the Internet Scam site - so I'll now be free to simply concentrate on streamlining and publishing what I know about Internet marketing.

One interesting point which has come to light just over the last 24 hours is that most of promotion is link-building. And while this is still a great majority of what you have to do in Internet Marketing, it gives us structure to what has to be done.

My take on this is going to fill about a dozen sites on the same host, with a dozen books, a dozen email courses, and a dozen CD's/DVD's filled with videos (as well as online).

If you've been following this blog intently, you may have noticed some data going up and then coming down again. I'll be able to explain this more thoroughly in these books, since now I've lived through and refined what can happen to a person when they make certain promotional steps. And more of what needs to be done to ensure these are properly effective.

This, of course, isn't the last of this - since the Internet itself is evolving and so are the lessons we learn daily as we go.

One of the more interesting mentors I've been working to catch up with recently is Charles Heflin. He's from a ThemeZoom SEO background, so is thoroughly engaged with real-world studies on what is effective site-building. As well, he is very active in the social media scene and can tell you exactly how to build an effective social network that really brings home the bacon.

While I've got a desk full of notes on this area, I'll start sorting and weeding these through tomorrow. Don't know if these will result in posts or not - since some of it is so esoteric to be nearly gobbledegook until it's all sorted through and aligned.

As well, I have to research the keywords and competition for 12 different sites in order to present them in a fashion that will be effective and useful.

One immediate spin-off is that I'll be able to do a sort of "Chicken Soup" transmorgrification, making it possible for this data to be used by all sorts of niches from small organic farmers to Fortune 500 companies, from WAHM's to Boomers - and everyone inbetween. If my heart were in it, I could spend the rest of my life just marketing this to all the various niches which need to be on the Internet to expand their own product offerings.

My work in this is to actually just perfect the marketing channel itself, so that I can move into a much tougher set of niches to crack - personal improvement.

And there are some trees beyond that section of forest as well.

I imagine that I'll be adding to this area as I find more about what happens after - particularly in building a subscription site. (Internet marketing has plenty of velvet rope areas already, so I won't bother in this one - too much inane competition. I've got bigger fish which create far more impressive changes for this planet than simply making tons of money.)

But I wanted to keep you up to date.

And if you haven't, subscribe to this blog as it will be an outlier promotion line for this new baker's dozen of products coming out. You won't want to miss this insight as I dissect the basics and show how simple it is for anyone to do this - and why most people don't...

More Genius Social Media Insight from Charles Heflin

(Well, after the third try, I'm having to import from a text file to quote from a blog - Blogger doesn't like the copy/paste from Chrome.)

Here's real genius on how to deal with the flux of data from the Internet:

How do you create a social media marketing campaign?

Here’s how I do it…

1. Publish a new blog post.
   
2. Syndicate the post to 2 or 3 social news sites with large market share (many eyeballs).
   
3. Increase the visibility of the syndications by garnering comments, votes and shares on each network where I syndicate my blog post. (I use a tool called Synnd for this function)
   

As content gains votes and comments it becomes more visible to a larger and larger audience.

It matches a post I did today on genius, Free Will and the Universe as a data aggregator.

The point is the punchline to this old joke:

"Q: How to you get down from an elephant?

"A: You don't, you get down from a goose?"

Social media is designed to network, not produce results. Marketing has ROI as it's base, since you are working to gain return on your investments. Social media isn't remunerative in it's base - you add value to your commercial offerings by including the community your business is supporting. Warts, in-laws and all.

(and no, the quote function on Blogger is currently broken. Sheesh.)

Auto blogs don't work - but twitter does

I've been working with various "pipes" situations, rigging aggregators and whatnot in order to acquire and utilize data. 

A few notes on this:

Google Alerts piped to Blogger eventually get shut down. Usually the Google Alerts just disappears. Once I got a notice that Blogger thought one of my blogs was a "spam blog" and so I shut it down myself.   Apparently content that is only built through Google Alerts can be considered a "spam blog" but one which has human-edited content originally isn't.

Google Alerts piped through an imaginary friend on Friendfeed to Twitter is a success - as well as mixing it in with other news RSS feeds. I've got an imaginary "http://twitter.com/joethunk" which was developed simply to give me news feeds and an alert which is all the "how to's, learn to's, and ways to" which show up on the web. This has over 466 followers as of today. I imagine if I put a babe as an icon, it would get even more. Just the way life works. But its right now the content which is valuable to people.

Using Alerts to pipe to Friendfeed and then using that RSS back to a blog (probably a WordPress plugin) would be the next approach. A direct Google Alerts to Blogger using a mail-to approach leaves the header in, so is easily worked out. When those alerts go through Friendfeed, that header disappears. Posting it on a Wordpress blog would be a workable auto-blog. While Google could lower it's rankings, it couldn't stop it as it does with Blogger.

Now, if you could do that with a video feed, you'd be really popular, depending on how you themed it...

All for now, a couple more posts to do elsewhere. 

Oh - remote blogs do work, you just have to watch your subdomain names and not directly "take over" trademarks.  Research shows that adding "blows" or "sucks" after a tradename is legal.

Marketing Insight: Watch your trademarks and linklove mojo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkadog/

(If you go to that link, you'll find the entire story of how this trademark dog, Nipper, came into being.)

If you read up on Robert Kiyosaki's books and lectures, he infrequently tells of creating a line of "surfer wallets" made up of nylon - and building a factory in Hawaii to get them made, only to see his product be undercut by foreign manufacturers with knock-offs. Lost the factory as he couldn't compete in price. He hadn't trademarked his products and so could actually have blocked those imports into this country if he had.

Lesson here: make sure you trademark along with your keyword strategies.

The advantage of trademarks is that they don't expire, like copyrights or patents. You can keep renewing them indefinitely - which, for Burrough's Tarzan, was a nice little inheritance for his descendants.

- - - -

I remember someone got a lot of traffic during the last presidential election with isobamamuslim.com and had a simple one-word site: "No". But that person went further and also grabbed the variation, isobamamuslin.com - and the answer was: "No. Muslin is a fabric."

If the guy were really smart, he would have set up t-shirts with just his domain name on the front and the answer on the back. And link to Cafepress where people could buy his product.

Monetize, always.

So watch your defenses closely. Most big (and smart) corporations will actually tie up all the domain variations of their brand names. And if they are really smart, they'll hire someone to build some static mini sites which link to their main site.

When you are working to develop your linklove mojo, you build it by sharing.

But you have to think entirely outside the box regularly - or hire people that do. And if you do have a person like this, give them rein and don't just load them up with work to solve. Let them try things out - give them a small budget to try experiments, plus a percentage of those profits to expand their experiment-budget when they are successful. That will fine-tune their genius. And your profits will grow exponentially.

The point in "Marketing Warfare" is never to take on the competition directly, but take them on by developing a very narrow front - one torpedo in the right spot may not sink a ship, but it can stop it dead in the water while you keep steaming right along and get to that port ahead of them to sell your product.

A final point. Competitions are never won by going head-to-head. The more creative person wins. Period. Don't buy how you were trained in school, with equally-matched teams on two sides in different-colored uniforms. Doesn't work that way. Ask Microsoft. Or Apple.

SEO Marketing Mix: Never thought I'd have so much fun complaining

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnjoh/

Yes, I love to stop telemarkers' Internet scams - and the way to do this is by complaining.

Visit my links to complain about scammers at http://stop-telemarketers.midwestjournalpress.com

- - - -

//Sponsor//

For more information, I've been writing a book about Internet Scams - and a free online/email course. Come visit - let me know what you think...

Service and Exchange: Some social media sites just don't get it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/voght/

Got into a couple of new social sites today and they basically sucked.

Reason? They were pristine Ivory towers. Also known as silos. You couldn't link other sites in or import even tiny parts of your lifestream - and no one could get a link from you to check out. Everything was internal.

Much like the students above - a very inward facing group with their own little set of agreements which no one else makes much sense of.

The problem is that the group doesn't contribute outward and so will eventually wither and die off. Groups need to both service and exchange, internally and externally in order to survive and expand.

One of these groups had a good idea - to get people in to write reviews. Only problem was - they were essentially whoring. The people writing the reviews got really nothing out of it. These guys wanted to attract people who needed reviews of stuff. So it's a cute, but dead, idea. It's not social except within that tiny group of people who want to write reviews in 800 characters or more. If you could only live in Twitter and couldn't post your blogs or import your Friend Feed - or even have tinyurl links to share. Boring. Boring and whoring.

Probably only Facebook and FriendFeed really get this. (Google's social attempts are also probably on the mark all except they were started by a company, not a bunch of like-minded individuals and then popularly adopted.)

"Social" has gone beyond simply getting along with people around you. Now it's finding and building your own niche of like-minded people. And you are going to have several niches. Great for marketing, since more and different products can be offered and exchanged easily.

Nothing like the Internet for setting things on their ear, eh?

Article Marketing - Dusting off an old stand-by

http://www.flickr.com/photos/avlxyz/

Just like meeting an old friend again - or picking up an old baseball mitt and ball, remembering the days of sunshine-sprinkled catch and impromptu games with the ball going wild and no one playing that position...

Picked up Article marketing more or less as a way to force myself past the death of one old machine (two hard-drives gone) and another one on the mend (actually, I have to get out the manual to mend it, still.)

As well, I needed to translate some great over-long blog posts into tight prose needed for articles, podcasts, and videos. So writing articles seemed the best way to try it out.

I found that I'd not submitted any articles since last fall. And nothing really significant in any volume for well over a year. But I'd been busy with research and it was a perfect time to try out these new tools I'd assembled (yes, I know, men and their tools...)

So I took advantage of this opportunity to cobble everything together and blog all about it for you.

There's a lot to cover about article marketing, so much that it's filled a single volume out of the Online Millionaire set of books (anybody have a better name for that subject, please let me know...) Today we are simply going to cover a simple recipe for producing non-duplicative articles and submitting them to multiple directories.

What's non-duplicative?

Non-duplicative articles isn't writing the same one over and over and over. How tedious and boring, that would be. It's taking your original article (short essay) and working out how to make it say the same thing with different words for every article directory you want to submit it to - well, at least those which show up on the top Google standings.

Some authors (namely Michael Campbell of "Striking it Niche" and "Nothing but 'Net" fame) found that the Google penalties for duplicative content fell out if around 40% of an article was changed out. Articles didn't have to be entirely fresh (which gives hope for all those PLR article collections which are clogging your hard-drives right now.)

That being said, how do we write an article?

Same as always - get an inspiration and hammer it out before it passes. You can write this on anything. More recently, I've been excited by the use of Google Docs, which is based on OpenOffice. This way, as long as you have an internet connection, you have all your documents all neatly (or not) organized and available.

But at some point, you are going to have to convert this to pure, straight text. Here's where I recommend NoteTab (http://www.notetab.com). And I say to get the free version, and look around for pre-5.0 version. (Because I use their feature to strip out HTML tags, which disappeared from the free version after 4.95 or thereabouts.) But you can use Note Pad in Windows or any other straight text editor. You want something which will take the straight text out of copied data and paste it into some other application without the formatting included. A filter, nothing more or less. (And it helps if that application will count words for you - something we'll find useful in meeting various article directory word limits.)

This article writing also assumes that you've already done your research and picked out your niche, found it's profitable keywords and still were inspired enough to crank out some copy.

Take a second and look at Top 50 Article Directories by Traffic, PageRank. This is a regularly updated list which gives you an idea of the huge amount of article directories and which ones have clawed their way up to the top by providing far more relevance and service. You can see right now, that even if you wanted to just post at each of these, you are going to have to be very creative for a long period of time in order to come up with original articles for each of them.

Save your fingers - let a spreadsheet do your creating.

There is a broad subject of article spinners, which are programs that simply replace various words with synonyms and so "spin" a new article out of old cloth. Problem is, they look and smell like old cloth that's been patched several times too many. They don't have the same quality as actually human-edited. Like someone put the article through a foreign language translator and then back. Awful, unreadable stuff. Means people aren't going to read down to your resource block and click on your links there.

Enter Chris Smith (http://profitswithchris.com) and his article-rewriter. (Free download from link.) He tackled the problem of editing articles head-on and came up with an elegant solution. He got a spreadsheet to use some simple math formulas and generate new versions of your original article. You simply separate the article into short paragraphs or sentences and then create two more versions of each of these. The random math function he's built in takes your three versions of that article and then recombines them by their paragraphs into different formats. He figures you get well over 200 different versions of each original and it's two additionals.

But are they at least 40% different?

Lets go to Dupe-Free Pro - another free download, ad-supported. This great tool has two panels left and right where you plug in your original article on one side and your newly re-written article on the other. Hit the Compare button and you'll quickly see by what percentage the new version is identical to the original. If you come up with more than 60% or so, just go back to your article re-writer and generate a new one.

This is where your NoteTab (plain text) editor comes in. Copy/paste from article rewriter into NoteTab, then copy/paste from there into DupeFree Pro. Otherwise, you can wind up with some messy looking stuff, since there's some formatting on the spreadsheet you don't really want.

But you now have the capability to generate new versions at will. Far more than you need.

Go to eZineArticles and enter your first one. Means you have to sign up.

Now take the next on the list and post your newly re-written version. Make sure you change the headline and the summary blurb. Otherwise, it's just copy/paste. (You still have it in your NoteTab editor.)

Next article directory, generate a new re-written article, change the headline and blurb slightly - and so on, etc.

Who, me - cheat?

Isn't this cheating? Well, did you actually write each article yourself? Are they different enough that Google isn't going to penalize you or the article directory for duplicative content? Then what's the problem?

Ok, then, there's still more. How about the thousand or so remaining article directories out there?

Here's my tip. Give the top of the heap your best shot, always. Most of these are completely uniquely coded and have to be hand-entered, which takes time. But an interesting point is that the lower rankings mostly run on the same basic script.

Save your time, submit to the multitudes semi-automatically.

There is another body of data called article submitters. These automate the production. Essentially they work because there are only a handful of scripts which people use to create article directories. The largest majority of these are based on Article Dashboard's free script.

In my searches and trials, I found one Article Submitter which did the trick and was worth paying for (less than $50. Simply because they re-coded an existing codebase (yes, there are tons of article submitters out there just with this name) and have continually updated their product. You want to buy support, not headaches and expire-ware. This one is from SubmitSuite.com. And yes, they have additional products.

What this does is take a single article and post in on around 1000 directories if you want.

I say it's semi-automatic, as it is trying to act like a human would and every now and then hangs when a website isn't delivered right on time. And some websites simply go "4 legs up" every now and then. So keep it open on your desktop (or another monitor or computer) so you can debug it from time to time.

Wait - isn't this just duplicate stuff again?

Why do we want to post duplicative content after all that work? Is it, like Clinton, just because we can? No.

My argument is this:

Look at the Bell Curve and the Long Tail. The bulk of your traffic is going to come from a few sources. Practically, the top 5-10-15 article directories are the only ones which will routinely send you traffic - if you routinely post to them. The rest of the article directories have very nichefied traffic and loyal readers who go there first for data. Just the way it is.

You are only going to get drips and drops of traffic from these niche sites. Posting by hand isn't efficient to do 500 or so article directories at a go. In practice, because these directories are so niche-oriented, I actually only get about 150 or so posted from any single article. Cat-article directories don't want the same articles as Real Estate article directories. And their clients don't search through other directories for their specialty articles, either.

But if I'm a cat fancier article writer, I'd post my original articles on the Big Box article directories and also a copy on any cat-niche article directories as well. Cover all your bases.

Article Submitter from Submit Suite allows you to help the niche directories build up their services while you also have set up your main supply of paying traffic through the top article directories. (If you want more on this subject, check out my work over a year ago on article directories and article submitters.)

- - - -

All that great work deserved an update - and so there you have it.

The advantage of posting articles is that it gives you back links and potential traffic for years to come. Like blogs, you have to maintain a constant supply of content, as the new articles are featured and older articles archived. Human nature, again. (Otherwise, used bookstores would always be the first place we look.)

But again, this is really the point of creating once and publishing many, many times. Your job as content creator is to be first in all these various venues with your brilliant ideas to share.

Articles are another vital venue to get those potential viewers who want this particular type of data delivered in that particular content-type. And it's our good fortune to be able to satisy their needs.

Good Hunting, then.