Launch 2 info-products this month??

The NAMS event this weekend was just incredible. It was jam-packed with connections, opportunities, conversations and unique perspectives - all within a group of people from a wide variety of talents and skill levels. And to top it off with a nice plump cherry, I met with Paul Evans and Mark Thompson for a quick talk while I was still here in Atlanta…

You might recall that I met up with them several months ago as well. I’ve taken a serious interest in what they are doing, and how they are doing it. In case you weren’t aware, Paul Evans and Mark Thompson took over Nicheology which was originally managed by Ryan Deiss and Jimmy D Brown.

And what they are doing with it now is awesome!

Following this very intense and revealing weekend workshop, I am looking now more than ever to connect you with the right people and the right opportunities to help you meet your goals. To help you stop spinning your wheels and start making some serious progress with your online business.

That’s the reason that I wanted to let you in on what Paul & Mark are doing - which starts with a free live webinar on Tuesday at 8pm EST. I’ll give you a quick snippet from the copy to give you a taste of what its about:

What if you could have not one but TWO of your very own products launched by the end of February?

I know that sounds crazy.

Even crazier is that it will not cost you a penny to learn how to do it!

http://www.nicheology.com/cc360

Paul Evans is hosting a free webinar called “Cash Catalyst 360.”

Paul is known for…

• His unique ability to communicate and connect.
• The extreme value of his free content.
• His almost insane ability to create products at high velocity.

This is your chance to discover the secret behind Paul’s success.

AND, more importantly, the secret to YOUR success.

http://www.nicheology.com/cc360

Only 1000 seats are available. There is no doubt that each will be taken. And there is NO guarantee that this will ever be offered again.

I sat and talked to Paul and Mark in great detail today about the webinar, and about their methods and ideas behind creating info products. I asked them to send me the link and some details so that I could share it with you in time for you to register for the live webinar tomorrow (Tuesday) evening.

I do apologize for not writing a detailed recap of our conversation with you. Those of you that were here for the weekend already know that I’m exhausted and taking some time to wind down - I’m still in Atlanta even, with plans to be on the road towards home tomorrow. But I still wanted to get the word (and the link) out to you for this one. I highly recommend it.

It’s free. It’s GOOD. And I like Paul & Mark - and what they’re doing. At least sign up so you can access the replay even if you cant attend live:

http://www.nicheology.com/cc360

Best,

Video Update from the NAMS event

BIGLIST SEO Blog Reviews 0020209

Today’s BIGLIST update of search marketing blogs includes a smattering of agency blogs from the US and the UK as well as appearances from Poland and Singapore. Step right up and get your daily dose of SEO, social media and PPC with this collection of new entrants.

• The Woah Factor - Brad Shorr and  Jeanne Dininni write this insightful company blog (Whoast) about search engine marketing topics, especially SEO. 

• Latitude Group - This UK based search marketing agency blog posts the gamut of internet marketing topics including Affiliate, Email, PPC, SEO, Social Media and Analytics. Company news and case studies can be found as well.

• Sazbean Blog -  Sarah and Aaron Worsham post about a wide range of internet marketing topics including strategy, marketing, design, and technology in this well written blog that also includes a nice “Morning Edition” collection of links post.

• Social Media Top Tips - With their roots in search engine optimization, this corporate blog for London based Weboptimiser, emphasizes the use of social media within search marketing and general online marketing. 

• MaxRoy Blog - Need to know about search marketing in Central and Eastern Europe? This very new company blog from Poland offers a best effort at English to explain the importance of search marketing.

• Antidote - Smart Internet marketing advice from Singapore with Antidote.

• PPCPROZ Blog - Pay per click tutorials, tools and opinions from Dan and Elan Perach. 

Today is a very good day to get the BIGLIST badge for those who’ve earned it.

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BIGLIST SEO Blog Reviews 0020209 originally appeared on the Online Marketing Blog. © 2009. http://www.toprankblog.com

4 Tips For Clean Link Checking

It’s time for another SEO Basics post and this time getting more out of link building efforts is the topic. 

Link building continues to be an important part of marketing and optimizing web sites and web marketers can often get distracted by quantity goals rather than quality.  Link building efforts for search engine optimization purposes rely on clean links that can be crawled by search engine bots.  But what’s a “clean crawlable link”?  It’s one that is not blocked with Robots NoIndex meta tag, JavaScript redirect, blocked with robots.txt or a NoFollow tag.

There are hundreds of ways to attract and acquire links. If link requests, article submissions or other high labor, low impact tactics are used, then it’s important to make sure the links acquired are good for both users and search engines.

Here are a few things to check for:

1. To check the robots meta tag, look at the page source code. If there is no robots tag, that’s fine.

If there is a robots meta tag and it looks like this,
meta name = “robots” content = “index, follow”
that’s good - although it’s not really necessary on the part of the webmaster.

If the robots meta tag looks like this:

“robots” content = “noindex, nofollow” 

OR
“robots” content = “index, nofollow” 

that’s not good as far as links for SEO benefit.

2. To see if there is a JavaScript redirect of links from a desired page, put your cursor over the link and look at the url that appears in the status bar at the bottom of the browser. If it shows the correct link url, then in most cases, it’s ok.  

However, this can be faked within the JavaScript so if you can copy the displayed URL you may want to run the link through a tool like Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer which will show you if the link redirects, what type and where.

3. To see if robots.txt is blocking search engine spiders from crawling links on a page, then add the text “/robots.txt” to the end of the URL in question.

For example:
http://www.articleblast.com/robots.txt

Here you will see:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /editor/
Disallow: /help/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /mambots/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /installation/

What the “disallow” instruction does above is to tell search engine spiders not to crawl the designated directories. In the case of the article sharing site above, if any articles are located in one of these directories, then the links within those articles to client sites are no good for SEO benefit. However, readers can still click on the links and arrive at the indicated destination.

4. To see if there is a no follow tag, right click on the link URL using a browser like MSIE or Firefox and click on “Properties”. See if there is an attribute called:

rel = nofollow.
If that’s there, it’s no good for SEO.

If it’s not there at all or has another value besides “nofollow” then it’s probably ok.

You only have to do this once in most cases on any page of a particular site. The reason sites will do any of these 4 things is to hoard or “sculpt” their site’s PageRank. In the case of blogs, it’s to discourage comment spam.

Now here’s the rub: An exeperienced SEO professional will never do the above 4 steps manually. In almost all cases, they will either develop tools to automatically check for “clean links” or they won’t bother at all. It’s an important question to ask when working with a SEO consultant. Just because a client site’s inbound link count goes from 500 to 5,000 links doesn’t mean all of those links are created equal. In other words, quantity is nowhere near the complete measurement of a link building effort to improve search engine rankings.

Link building that is based on forms or submissions is very difficult to scale and the links are often nofollowed after it is discovered SEOs are populating the site with their content. Link building as a result of creating and promoting content worth linking to is high value, high impact and very scalable.  However, if it is important to check link sources to determine their value for SEO benefit you can use the 4 steps above, create your own script to check them automatically or work with a SEO company that has their own.

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4 Tips For Clean Link Checking originally appeared on the Online Marketing Blog. © 2009. http://www.toprankblog.com

5 More Ways to Improve CTR

In a previous post, I went through some ways you can use “strong” words in combination with strong call to action words to improve your PPC click through rate (CTR). Since that post, there have been some updates to the AdWords quality score algorithm and as such, CTR plays an ever important role. In fact, it is my opinion that incremental CTR increase is the most important part of any PPC marketing campaign as it is one of the few factors you can directly influence to increase your ad position and reduce your cost per click (CPC). Remember to always be A/B split testing your ads and never leave an adgroup with only a single ad.

Below, I outline five examples of ways you can increase your CTR without doing anything technical or magical. The ads are fabricated but the data is not. The ads are as close to the original as possible. Besides, you’re going to test the theory yourself anyway right?

1) Trademark Symbol/Registered Symbol.

While I have been using this method myself for years, Brad and Amber make some great points on this very topic. Not only can special symbols be used to increase your PPC CTR, but they can also be used to increase your organic SERP CTR. I could not agree with Ian Lurie more on his blog post predicting that organic CTR will matter a LOT in 2009.

2) Price In Headline

Adding the price in the headline is a great way to increase CTR. Be careful with this one though, if you’re not the cheapest, you’re CTR will suffer.

3) Seasonal Headlines.

Doesn’t matter if your product is not seasonal. If you sell blue widgets all year around, a headline like “Easter Widget Sale” will work great. There are so many different holidays, festivals and events that this can be used with. If you’re targeting locally, even better.

4) Trademark in Display URL Subdomain

While you can’t use most trademark terms in your ad copy, you can use them in your display URL.  Amber has a great post on why AdWords allows trademarks in the display URL here. Using the trademark in the display URL some argue confuses potential clickers into thinking that it is the “official” site of the trademark holder. Be careful with this one too… Google knows when a visitor clicks the back button on their browser!

5) The exact Keyword in the Headline.

An oldie, but a goodie. We all know that search engines BOLD your keywords when they match the search query. Having tightly knit adgroups will allow you to take advantage of this without having to use dynamic keyword insertion.

Remember, CTR for quality score reasons is only calculated on the exact match of the keyword and is only counted on the Google search network. This means that any increase in CTR from Dynamic Keyword Insertion does not improve your google quality score. CTR on Google search partners does not contribute to your quality score calculations.

Photos from the NAMS event in Atlanta

Brainstorming during our break-out workshop group on Saturday. An awesome group, committed to making a profit & fleshing out action plans!

David Perdew crowns me the ‘Queen of Affiliate Marketing’

Friday afternoon session at NAMS, which stands for Niche Affiliate Marketing System workshop: www.nicheaffiliatemarketingsystems.com

Willie Crawford & Nancy Wilhite. A lot of networking all weekend long…

All photos courtesy of @PaulYoung. See his NAMS Workshop set on Flickr.

We’re having a blast here in Atlanta! I have more photos to come, some very cool things to share with you from the weekend, and a video update from Saturday. Stay tuned

Best,

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The Copyblogger Files - Interview with Brian Clark

 After being a fan of Copyblogger and other projects, Brian Clark was kind enough to do a panel on SEO I was moderating at BlogWorld. Then I ran into him again recently at Affiliate Summit thinking each time what a great thing it would be for our readers to do an interview with him for Online Marketing Blog. 

Brian is a fantastic writer and marketer, recovering attorney and someone that over 50,000 people have decided to subscribe to at copyblogger.com - one of the most popular blogs on the internet.  Brian has a lot of what people want: knowledge, talent and success.  Read on to tap into some of that Copyblogger goodness.

How did you go from being a lawyer to an internet entrepreneur?

Easy… I hated practicing law and I was fascinated by the Internet. The transition was extreme I suppose, but I always had a thing for writing, so I started creating online content over a decade ago. Now it’s just part of me.  

How much does SEO play into your blog marketing efforts with copyblogger.com and the other sites you work with?

Well, it’s absolutely vital and yet absolute optimization never happens too soon for us. I’m a firm believer in building trusted authority sites, and sometimes that means foregoing the best keyword optimization in order to attract more links and subscribers. Once you have that trust (with people and Google) it’s easy to dive in and optimize certain pages or sections of a site.

What are the most common mistakes you see people make that get in the way of blogs or web sites from having better search visibility?

I think it goes back to my last answer… Obsessing over the perfect keywords in your title before you have any readers or any links is backwards these days. Google wants to rank trusted brands highly, and creating a brand goes way beyond keyword research and placement. 

How important is genuinely good writing to having a successful blog?

It depends both on the audience and the author. In some areas being a great writer will put you ahead of the pack. In others, people are more interested in what you have to share with them, warts and all. But how you say things will always matter, whether you’re considered a “great writer” or not. That’s where copywriting skills come in.

Do you see links and buzz worthy content as a cart before the horse situation? ie, in order to get those links, you need to have something worth linking to.

The content and the value has to be there first. People think this is about “gaming” or whatever. Some people think having any strategy at all is “gaming,” and that’s fine for them. To me, it’s about solid value and solid strategy… both are necessary to achieve online marketing goals. 

If you were limited to 2 or 3 things blog owners should always do to optimize and promote their blogs, what would they be? ie, what are 2 or 3 of your best blog optimization/marketing tips?

Well, it’s been said over and over, but I can’t say anything new. It’s about a unique voice, unique value, and working to make a connection with the audience. It’s not easy, but those who truly work at it will succeed.

What are some of your most effective tactics for writing blog post headlines?

It boils down to making a relevant and compelling promise… one that your target reader can’t refuse–and then fulfilling that promise with your content. If you’ll forgive a link, I’ve written a ton about headlines. 

What do you think are the most important success measurements for a corporate blog, a content blog, a personal blog? (RSS Subscribers, web traffic, repeat web traffic, advertising rev, consulting)

It really depends on your revenue model, but frankly, my answer remains the same regardless–subscribers. It can be email (and in most niches, it still should be) or RSS, but getting people to “raise their hand” and pay attention to you on a regular basis is golden.

What resources can you recommend for keeping current with blogging, monetization and internet marketing?

Well, for starters, you. Also, a lot of really great stuff is being shared on Twitter these days if you follow relevant folks. And I suppose we manage a decent tip or two over at Copyblogger.

Here’s the best advice I can give on this… learn from everyone. Study marketers you hate as well as marketers you agree with. Don’t close your mind to anything and you’ll come out with a more well-rounded toolbox of tactics and strategies for online marketing. 

 Thanks Brian!

Check out Brian on the web at: Copyblogger, Teaching Sells, DIY Themes and on Twitter

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The Copyblogger Files - Interview with Brian Clark originally appeared on the Online Marketing Blog. © 2009. http://www.toprankblog.com

What do you use to create a website?

I’m curious what you use to create a website.

I would really love to hear from people of ALL skill levels.

Do you use web design software, did you learn HTML, buy a “create a website” program, use the web page editor your host provides? Share specifics with us in the comment section below.

Thanks!

Search Engine Optimization