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By Duncan Wierman in Featured

Google AdWords, or any other kind of contextual advertising for that matter, is about one thing: getting a return on investment. Businesses of all types, from multinational corporations to sole proprietorships’ selling machine parts to real estate agents and investors love the traceability of AdWords and other pay per click advertising models – but it’s entirely possible to spend too much on your AdWords campaigns.

But the whole idea of AdWords is that you can have near total control over your advertising budget, isn’t it? Before we go any further here, I feel that I should mention that I am not knocking AdWords at all. People who end up wasting money on these campaigns aren’t doing so because of any flaw in this advertising model – they’re wasting money because the rest of their marketing strategy or even their entire online presence is ill conceived.

It’s not Google’s fault and in many cases, it’s not really these real estate investors or real estate agents fault either. It’s that they’re using a type of marketing strategy which is inherently poorly suited for the real estate business.

Should these people have known better? In some cases, yes – but there are plenty of newly minted investors trying to make their fortunes by investing in properties made affordable by the currently soft US housing market. These people, by and large aren’t experts on how to reach their target markets, let alone design or deploy an AdWords campaign. What you’re probably asking now is what exactly these people are doing wrong; and of course, how you can avoid making the same mistakes.

The biggest single mistake that real estate investors make when they establish a presence on the web is this: they’re thinking like the online snake oil peddlers, not real estate brokers. There is an enormous difference in how (for instance) someone promoting a dubious home based business does business online and how a reputable real estate investor does business online.

In a nutshell, that’s what it comes down to – but that’s not the whole story of course and it’s useful in this case to look at exactly what misguided real estate investors are doing, how they’re doing it and of course, how this approach results in an AdWords budget which is much larger than it needs to be without producing a solid return on investment. So without any further ado….

Landing pages

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: using landing pages only and real estate just don’t mix and making landing pages the central part of your online marketing means wasted money in your AdWords campaigns, just as sure as the sun will set in the West tomorrow.

Just what’s wrong with landing pages alone? Nothing, if you happen to enjoy wasting time and money.

But I’ve read that landing pages can produce results? OK, there’s a grain of truth here. It’s possible that you could see an inquiry or two at some point as a result of your landing pages – but of course, you’d be able to get the same or better results by standing in Times Square wearing a sandwich board advertising your real estate investment business.

Neither of these methods is really a great way to promote yourself if you’re in the real estate business, in case you were wondering. At least wearing a sandwich board in midtown Manhattan won’t mean budgeting for AdWords ads which don’t get clicks – and it’s a lot faster and cheaper to make this kind of advertisement than it is to build multiple landing pages.

Let’s get to the heart of the problem here. When people decide to build their online presence around landing pages, what they tend to do is to take a shotgun approach, desperately building landing pages for any and every keyword which they think will possibly lure in interested parties.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this other than being a massive waste of time, these same would-be online real estate investors then put a lot of effort and budget a significant amount of money on Google AdWords and other PPC advertising to drive traffic to these many different pages. This would still be fine if this approach actually tended to produce worthwhile results – but if you’ve tried this yourself, you’re probably already all too aware that it simply doesn’t work in 99.9% of cases and even less often in the real estate business.

It’s an approach to online business which is taken from the often less than reputable world of affiliate marketing; while I don’t mean to defame affiliate marketers, you have only to look at how many of these people adopt the same marketing model we’ve been looking at here – and how little return they see on their investment of time and money.

Now of course, some of you are probably thinking that AdWords ads don’t cost you anything unless someone clicks through and I won’t argue this point. However, the problem is that the money budgeted for multiple campaigns is tied up and could more than likely be used better elsewhere – and it adds an entirely unnecessary layer of complexity by requiring you to manage any number of campaigns at once rather than one.

That’s right – one. All you really need is one well designed, professional looking website and a blog in order to get exactly the same results as you will from having a site and who-knows-how-many landing pages. Your main website should be a traditional, largely static site whose purpose is to provide you with a professional business presence online (you know, like grown-ups).

Your blog can easily provide the same function as a dozen landing pages – and you’ll need just one PPC campaign with a budget and management needs which the average person can actually get their head around. You’ll also look more reputable, plain and simple. In an industry like real estate where your appearance is everything, why would you want to make yourself look cheap; or make running your business more difficult than it has to be?

Duncan Wierman is an Ex Software company CEO turned Real Estate Investor and Marketer. Discover how you can use creative online marketing methods to do more deals online. For more details on how to set up an automated internet marketing system, please visit Duncan Wierman’s website and get is free 14 day e-course. http://www.DuncanWierman.com

By Enzo F. Cesario in Featured

businessThe point of a brand is to create an instantaneous association in people’s minds. The Nike ‘swoosh’ brings to mind footwear, athleticism, and Michael Jordan. The Toyota ‘bull’ logo evokes images of compact cars, foreign business competition, and new ways of doing things. The name Budweiser reminds us of everything from the actual beer to those clever talking frogs, and the ‘wassup!’ advertisements.

These are cases of successful, memorable branding. Michael Jordan is retired from professional sports, the frogs haven’t been on television in years, and wassup has almost faded from day to day use in the American pop culture vocabulary. However, every one of these elements remains identifiable, and mentioning them to most people will get the typical, ‘oh yeah!’ response to memories of clever marketing, cementing the image of the brand in the viewers’ minds.

By Riley West in Featured

An affiliate marketer has to have certain things. I consider it very important to have a web page where you can put your offers and content.

Then you can just get down to driving traffic to your site, making sales, and earning money.

Still, the beginning affiliate marketer and perhaps even some intermediates, would like it to be low priced and more straightforward than the typical setup.

Take as an example the mass of web pages called Squidoo.

It’s really just another website except for it’s size and variety of content. It’s VERY well known at Google.

By the end of 2009 there were nearly a million individual pages on this huge website and those pages are called “lenses” by the “Squids.”

Here are 5 good reasons to use Squidoo as an affiliate marketer.

The first reason is your cost for the hosting space. It’s zero.

The second reason is the cost of registering a domain name. It’s zero too!

Squidoo loks good because it’s practically effortless, AND it’s very low cost, especially when compared to the typical cost of hosting and domain at about $100 to $130 per year.

That doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t if your site is making money or if you just have plenty of it. But for affiliates who are just starting and a lot of intermediates too, it’s just perfect.

The third reason, and one of big importance to affiliates, is that it is relatively easy to get indexed by Google for your lens. Really it’s a web page. But Google seems to like them.

If you pick your domain name with a keyword relevant to your sites content, that you can easily rank for, and you put it at the beginning of your domain name, you will be on your way to good rankings.

Doing a good job optimizing your page (lens) for your relevant keyword, is the best way to get your site to come up on the search results page in Google. And Page One of Google for almost ANY keyword will result in some good traffic.

The fourth reason to use Squidoo is that there is on site help. There is lots of assistance.

This would have really helped me when I was getting started because it seemed like, for me, everything new wasn’t just new…it seemed wierd…alien even. I didn’t “get it.”

Squdoo helps you in a dozen ways and you can see for yourself by just going there and looking around.

In addition, there is a forum where you can go and ask questions and get answers. And maybe later you will even answer some questions.

The fifth reason to use these pages (lenses) is because they work!

By work I mean that you can make them look like a great web page. You can also set them up to get a good bit of traffic. And you can sell directly from them.

If you’d like a landing page, this is it!

And that’s not all. You will learn a lot!

Many of the stumbling blocks a typical newcomer or even intermediate affiliate marketer will run into are completely eliminated by this alternative. The first reason that comes to mind is the FREE domain name and hosting.

Go there, join up and start your first lens. Start fooling around with it. Learn how to do a few of the things you need to get a halfway decent site up. There’ll be plenty of help if you get stuck.

In a couple to three weeks you could have an affiliate site up, indexed, and getting traffic, and making sales.

Watch out because IF you do this, the next thing that will happen is that you will get a sale. A sale that didn’t cost you anything but your time and effort.

Only now you’ll know how to repeat it and increase your income.

For a couple of years now, Riley West has been putting out the idea of Simplified Affiliate Marketing, and he intends to continue. The formula is Webpage + Offer + Traffic = Sales. See this explained at Targeted Traffic , and, while you are there, don’t miss out on the sure-fire, simplified affiliate marketing plan at One Week Marketing.

By David Jackson in Featured

Cutting Rank: Improper Domain Name Redirects

Cutting Rank: Improper Domain Name Redirects

Let’s face it, compiling a list of this type is always subjective. Trying to figure out what to include and what to leave off can have you second-guessing yourself, more than a few times.

But in the end, being only human, you do the best you can, and let the readers judge for themselves. Anyway, I present to you my listing of “The 10 Biggest SEO Myths Exposed.”

1. Search Engine Optimization will put you on the first page of Google.

This is without question the biggest SEO myth floating around the Internet today. Here’s the truth: SEO is a tool – nothing more. And any tool is only as good as the person using it. That’s why some people have success with SEO, and others don’t.

By Ivana Katz in Featured

Having worked with a large number of small business owners, one common mistake I see over and over again is the obscene amounts of money they throw away on advertising. Many of them believe the more money they spend, the more business it will bring.

WRONG!!! WRONG!!! WRONG!!!

The main reason traditional marketing doesn’t work is the small business owner doesn’t really know much about marketing, and relies on the salesman of the marketing media to tell them what they need. The problem is they use the “trust me” method which is: “Give me your money, I’ll run your ad and trust me; the leads/money will come rolling in”. But they seldom do.

So what’s a new entrepreneur to do?

It’s simple!!! Write articles.

Writing articles is an excellent way for you to get free publicity. Getting an article published is free and some publications even pay for your contributions. The publicity you receive by having your article published in a newspaper, magazine or website can be worth thousands of dollars in equivalent advertising space. Well written articles yield better results than advertisements and earn you respect from customers, who see you as an expert in your field.

So what exactly is an article???

An article is a short piece of information that aims to educate and inform people about something, which they may be interested in. They are usually between 500 and 3,500 words long and guess what……. you are reading one right now. That’s right, I have written this article because of my passion to share the idea that expensive advertising is probably not the best way to market yourself and get more business.

By writing and distributing these articles you are sharing information, which displays your expertise and gains you trust and credibility. No amount of advertising can gain you either trust or credibility. So let’s look at this concept of writing and distributing articles as a form of free publicity. The best articles are ‘tips’ or expert pieces. People are looking for guidance and will purchase from experts who show them how to solve their problems.

Structuring Your Article

Your article should include the following elements:

(a) The Headline

This should be attention grabbing and use power words and phrases, such as “How to …” “10 Ways that …”, “Do you want to …?”

(b) Lead Paragraph

The first couple of sentences tell your readers why they should read the whole article. Show them the benefits they will gain, or the pain that they will avoid, by reading the article.

(c) Body Copy

This is where you inform the reader how to do something that will enrich their business or personal lives. Use short sentences and provide step-by-step directions that they can easily follow.

(d) Conclusion

At the end you want to summarise the topics you’ve covered and briefly review the main points. Since you have helped your readers they will most likely want to know more. This is your chance to make your sell by making them an offer with a ‘call to action’ such as ‘mention this article and receive a 10% discount off orders placed before June 30th.”.

(e) Resource Box

A resource box provides the reader with information on your company and includes the following information:

  • Your name
  • Company name
  • Contact information
  • Website details
  • How to order your product, etc

Journalist, marketer and public relations specialist Madisen Harper has three top tips for clients writing their own articles:

  1. What are the questions you hear most often from customers? Write an article to address these queries. Remember to provide valuable information; articles that sound like one big ad for your company rarely get published.
  2. Write with the ‘st’ factor in mind. Tell readers about the latest, greatest, first, most, newest, quickest, best etc. Publications want fresh, new information, so where possible show them the ‘st’ factor with the ‘latest technique’, ‘newest technology’ or ’10 best solutions for…’.
  3. Edit, edit and edit again. As a professional writer, Belinda constantly re-writes and re-works her words. Ask someone to read your article and they’ll often spot errors you miss because they’re reading from a new perspective. If you want to double-check that your sentences make sense – read your article, sentence-by-sentence, from the bottom up. You’ll be amazed what you pick up when you’re not caught up in the flow of the story.

Topics to Target

There are thousands of problems people need solved, so the number of solution-focused topics is endless. If you’re stuck, here are some ideas to get you started.:

Florist
Flower Care Tips, Choosing Anniversary Flowers, Best Way To Buy Your Wedding Flowers, Choosing Centrepiece Flowers For Your Dinner Party, How to Press Fresh Flowers, How to Pick Perfect Flowers According to Occasions, etc.

Baby Related Products/Services
How To Settle Your Baby, Baby Shower Themes & Games, How to Baby Proof Your Home, Baby Sleep Routine, Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep All Night, Age Appropriate Toys, Gifts for 1/2/3/4 Year Olds, 20 Fun Silly Games to Play, etc.

Accountant
Tips For Getting The Best Home Loan, 10 Tips For Financing Your Business, Tips To Save You Money, Choosing Accounting Software, Bookkeeping Basics, How To Save Money On Bookkeeping, Setting Up Budgets, etc.

Hairdresser
Hair Care and Treatment, Hair Loss Prevention, Hair Drying Mistakes, Celebrity Hair Styles, What Hairstyle to Choose For Your Lifestyle, New Hair Trends, etc.

Restaurant
How To Make Restaurant Quality Coffee At Home, 10 Ways to Attract New Customers to Your Restaurant, Restaurant Décor Ideas, 5 Secret Recipes, 7 Publicity Tips for Restaurants, Choosing Restaurant Equipment, Making Healthy Food Choices when Dining In a Restaurant, etc.

Customer Service
How To Stay in Touch With Your Customers, How To Build Good Client Relationship, 7 Tips For Creating Customer Loyalty, Common Customer Service Mistakes, How To Get Back Lost Clients, Looking After Your Customer Service Staff, etc.

If writing an article seems too daunting, you can hire a ghostwriter to do this for you – generally at a very reasonable price.

Once your article is written you will need to submit it to various publications on-line and in printed publications. For a listing of Australian printed publications, including the editor’s details, you may wish to buy “The Australian Writer’s Marketplace”, available from most bookshops.

If you don’t have a lot of time to submit your articles manually, you may wish to consider using article submission services by companies such as: Submit Your Article or The Phantom Writers.

For a small fee they will submit your article to thousands of on-line publications, also known as ezines.

Remember, article writing is far more powerful than any advertising you will do. It will prove to your customers you know your business and best of all, it won’t cost you a cent! So don’t be afraid to try it … what have you got to lose?

Ivana Katz of Websites 4 Small Business makes it easy for you to get your business on the internet. If you’re looking for a professional and affordable website designer, visit http://www.web4business.com.au and download a free website plan.

By Julie Ann Ross in Featured

Web-2.0Social media optimization (SMO) is an essential ingredient within your SEO campaigns. Years ago, social networking sites were little more than an oddity. Today, several of them have received enormous ranking authority from the top search engines. If you are not leveraging them to increase your exposure and communicate with your niche audience, your search engine positions are vulnerable to your competitors. In this article, we’ll describe the influence that social media optimization is currently having on search marketing. We’ll also give you the rules of engagement for executing an effective SMO campaign. We’ll explain what SEO social media is, and the advantage of hiring an experienced SEO consultant to spearhead your social media optimization efforts.

By Donna Gunter in Featured

One of the most difficult aspects of being an independent service professional is being seen as credible and as a viable expert in your industry. Until recently, that process often took years and required an investment of much blood, sweat and tears. Ultimately, it wasn’t until you paid your dues that anyone of influence in your industry would pay any attention to you or be interested in speaking with you. Thus, any hope you had of creating a strategic alliance or joint venture would fall on deaf ears because your potential VIP had no idea of your existence.

However, with the advent of Internet marketing, that time process has been greatly accelerated. You can now become a person of influence in your industry and become known to other industry VIPs in a matter of months, rather than years. Here are 7 strategies that will help you build successful relationships with your industry VIPs:

  1. Become the instant guru. One quick way to do this is by recording an audio. You determine your target market and the top 3 problems that plague your target market. Then, create an outline detailing solutions to those top 3 problems, and record an audio of yourself speaking about those problems and your proffered solutions. Create an audio CD and CD cover and have the CD duplicated. Offer your CD as a client attraction device on your web site and blog.
  2. Create your strategic alliance list. Write down your ideal list of strategic alliances or product launch joint venture (JV) partners. If you’re just starting out, you might want to begin with a second- or third-tier list (i.e. those who are not as well-known as the industry gurus but have some standing in their own right).
  3. Use Web 2.0. Use social networking on Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter and follow/friend the members of your list. Interact with them often, commenting on their status updates, videos, etc. Retweet useful information to your followers that they send out to their followers and friends. Go to their blog posts and comment on those, as well.
  4. Become a customer. Buy a product from your person of influence. Review the product on your blog or in an article and submit the review through your social networks. If you purchase a physical product, take a photo of yourself holding the product and send the photo to your VIP or send the VIP a card containing your photo and some word of praise about the product.
  5. Attend live events. Many industry VIPs attend a number of live events each year. Because you’re now following these industry VIPs via social networking, they will tell you what events they plan to attend. Attending these same events and meeting these people in person helps them remember you, especially if you take a photo of yourself with that person and send it to them or post it to your social networking profiles. Many times you can buy your VIP a drink or take them to dinner and have a 1:1 conversation with them. Remember, if you don’t ask, you’ll never know!
  6. Become an affiliate. If you love your VIPs products, become an affiliate and promote those products to your list. If you can genuinely talk about how this product has helped you, you’ll be of service to your list members and attract the attention of your VIP, as well.
  7. Stay in touch regularly. Set up a direct mail “stay in touch” campaign. Rather than using email or social networking exclusively, I think the most effective strategy at this stage is to send a direct mail card or postcard, as those get more attention as they are used far less often these days.

Begin your campaign today to increase your visibility in your industry by connecting with industry VIPs. You’ll soon discover how quickly your business will grow when you’re in touch with those in the know!

Internet Marketing Automation Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals create prosperous online businesses that make more profit in less time. Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to increase your visibility and get found online by claiming your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, at ==> http://www.TurbochargeYourOnlineMarketing.com

By Enzo F. Cesario in Featured

Blogs-&-PodcastsBlogging can be a deeply satisfying, intensely personal experience. Generally simple to use, blogs allow the household mom, the serial author, the political activist and the high school poet to publish and archive their best efforts and satisfy the creative muse in all of them. Whereas, in the past, publishing was a privilege for the elite few, it is now open to anyone with the time and the means to access a computer.

But if no one is reading the blogs, they can become a disheartening and frustrating experience. A lack of audience can even cost a blogger money – there are numerous blogs on the web that are intended to be significant sources of personal income, between advertising programs and personal product sales. A key step in getting a blog read, therefore, is the use of a specialized web directory known as the blog directory.

By Trey Pennewell in Featured

googleIn August, Google announced the upcoming roll out of the Google Caffeine infrastructure. Google was quick to point out that they would not launch the new infrastructure until after the Christmas holiday shopping season — giving many online retail stores confidence for the upcoming Christmas shopping season.

In the August announcement, Google described Caffeine this way:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences…”

By Cory Threlfall in Featured

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that was originally launched in March of 2006 and has since grown into a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices. Twitter enables users to stay in touch and share information with each other in real time. Users can use a maximum of 140 characters per message or “tweet” as they are called. You can tweet as little or as often as you want, as long as each individual tweet does not exceed 140 characters.

Once you have joined Twitter, you can use their search tool to find specific people, companies, and their tweets. Hashtags are an effective method of allowing users to sort topics into useful categories to revisit later. Hashtags are a community-driven convention for users to provide add additional context and other relevant info to their tweets. The basic structure of a hashtag is simple: it’s the pound sign (#) followed by an acronym or word.

Twitter didn’t itself create hashtags; they were borrowed from IRCs (i.e. Internet Relay Channels such as chat rooms). Rather, the Twitter community adopted them as a means of creating “groupings” on the service without having to alter the basic service itself.

The Twitter community uses a hashtag in front of frequently used terms in order to categorize them for searches and filtering. So, when talking about an iPod for example, people might also reference “#Apple.” If you’re looking for company specific news that’s happened recently or what’s being said about a company’s product, the hashtags can be very helpful.

Using hashtags to search Twitter for specific information is now even easier since the company purchased the search engine Summize in July of 2008. Twitter can now track hashtags itself at search.twitter.com. The engine tracks keywords too, which makes hashtags not quite as necessary for trend tracking as they were in the past. Nonetheless, they still possess unique advantages. For example, you know that anyone tagging their tweet with one of these acronyms means for it to get categorized within that topic. It also serves as a visual indicator to others following their Twitter stream that they’re tweeting about a particular subject.

One of the potential disadvantages of hashtags is their very popularity. Hashtags are so prevalent on Twitter these days that it can be hard to keep track of them all as well as what they mean. However, there is a resource available that can assist with this as well. Tagalus is a service that acts like a dictionary for hashtags. Tagalus enables users vote on definitions for tags if there’s more than one version. The definition with the most votes will be the one that defines the tag. If you invent any new tags or just want to help build the resource, you can send a tweet to @tagalus to suggest a meaning for a tag. The format for doing so is as follows:

@tagalus define mynewtag as a new tag that describes everything about me

You can also use Tagalus to provide you with a meaning for an already existing tag. The format for this is @tagalus define ____ (fill in the tag that you want the definition for).

Cory Threlfall is the Editor and Publisher of a online web development publication called… The Web Development Central BLOG, where you’ll receive via the Web, Mobile or RSS syndication Expert Articles, Video’s, Product Reviews, HOT Tips, Resources and More on how to Promote and Build your business(es) online. Visit ==> Web Development

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