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Death of Del.icio.us Leaves Bitter Aftertaste for Yahoo!

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Del.icio.us fans worldwide are in shock today with the news that Yahoo has decided to terminate the site, along with Altavista, MyBlogLog, AllTheWeb, Yahoo! Bookmarks and Yahoo! Picks and Yahoo! Buzz.

News broke on TechCrunch this morning after a leaked slide from an internal Yahoo! product team meeting fell into the hands of Eric Marcoullier, who co-founded blog social network MyBlogLog. It has since been removed from YFrog, but the slide depicts three columns titled Sunset / Merge / Make Feature with Del.icio.us, Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, AllTheWeb, Yahoo! Picks and Yahoo! Buzz listed under the not so subtle *Sunset* column.

Marcoullier tweeted the slide from his account and then all hell broke loose, with Yahoo Product Manager Blake Irving even threatening to fire whomever leaked the slide.

Del.icio.us fans in particular have been very vocal about the news, voicing their opposition to Yahoo’s decision using Twitter hashtags such as #savedelicious and #delicious and even creating an online petition which can be *signed* by retweeting it.

The product terminations come the same week Yahoo! announced layoffs for 4 percent of its global staff.

Twelve Simple Ways to Generate More Blog Traffic

By Jessica Swanson in Featured

Imagine that you’ve taken the giant leap to start a blog to bring more brand awareness and exposure to your small business.

You’ve taken all the necessary steps to build your blog platform and now comes the day when you make your very first blog post. You spend hours crafting a post that is educational, inspirational and positions you as an expert in your field. You are as proud of this post as if it truly were your own flesh and blood. And, most of all you can’t wait to share it with the world.

So, you hit “publish” and wait for your readers to react to your nuggets of wisdom. However, the waiting is an endless ordeal.

Why aren’t you generating any comments? Why aren’t people emailing you thrilled that you have shared your expertise with them?

It’s called “lack of traffic” and if there’s no traffic to your blog, no one will ever see it.

So, how can you begin enticing readers to visit your blog? Here are twelve quick ways to generate a flow of non-stop blog traffic:

1. Create Great Content

Obviously, this goes without saying. But, your content needs to educate, entertain, inspire or offer a solution to your readers’ problems. You want to try to accomplish at least one of these tasks with every blog post.

SEO Trends – What 2011 Holds for Us? Part I

By Danielle Sage in Featured

With 2010 nearing an end, we are all looking ahead optimistically towards 2011. In the world of web technology, we have not witnessed any major upheaval this year. Being an ardent web surfer and a webmaster it’s all but natural for me to become curious about what the future holds for us in 2011. The most interesting area to look forward to is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) without which no website under the sun passes the fitness test. The SEO domain has received a tremendous boost from the growing popularity of social networking sites and various improvements in search technology. In this article and the following one, I will share with you some of the SEO trends that you can look forward to next year.

Social Media Optimization

Close on the heels of Search Engine Optimization, comes Social Media Optimization, the newest incarnation of SEO. I know that you are no longer surprised by this new term thanks to the tremendous popularity of social networking sites worldwide. Webmasters should not consider Social Media Optimization as a distraction from their normal SEO efforts; but this new activity should be deployed to boost a site’s SEO prospects. Social Media Optimization activities may include back links from individual social media sites, development of a credible profile on these sites, and targeting towards real time searching. The greater impact you can have on the social networking sites, the more your SEO prospects will improve in the coming year.

Website Speed and On-Page SEO Activities

There are some webmasters who rely on off-page optimization rather than on-page optimization. But in 2011, you should give equal, if not more, attention to on-page optimization. Most importantly, the site load time is going to be the litmus test. Google, in its effort to improve website performance, has decided to penalize those sites that have a longer load time. Also, improper use of Meta tags in website coding will have a negative effect on site rankings in the major search engines in the coming year.

3-30-3 Rule of Online User Behavior

By Jamie Lee in Featured

* More than 1 Trillion unique URLS online

* 3-30-3 Rule of User Online Behavior

* 3 Seconds before pressing the “Back” button

* 30 Seconds to evaluate your landing page

* 3 Minutes to decide to make a particular action

With over 1 trillion unique URLs and 122 million domain names online, the internet has become a very crowded place.

An effective sales funnel design is instrumental to maximizing conversion. According to Joel, an Internet Strategy Consultant from Conversion Hub (a Singapore based usability and conversion optimization consultancy), an average web visitor would give you a mere 3 seconds before deciding to press the “Back” button of his browser. If you succeed in capturing his attention, you gain an additional 30 seconds where he will evaluate your value proposition. Finally, you will have an additional 3 minutes to persuade him to perform a particular action.

This is also known as the 3-30-3 rule.

What Is A Sales Funnel?

You should have a specific goal that acts as a funnel to drive all incoming traffic into your goal. The sales funnel begins by capturing the attention of prospects. Some prospects are convinced to become buyers of the product or adopters of the action your website is persuading. The sales funnel continues to nurture the best customers, filtering out mismatches and refining the specific target customer, offering them more specialized products and services, often at higher prices. By the end of the process the funnel has identified the highly-responsive customers who have heeded your message.

Give your visitors exactly what they came to find and you will be edging them along the sales funnel. This includes an eye-catching design to draw your target audience’s directly to the sales funnel, a clear marketing message communicating a strong and clear value proposition, and one or more clear, concise actions to take.

Measurement And Analysis

An integral step of developing a sales funnel design is measurement and analysis. Such action will tell you many things that will help you develop an effective sales funnel, such as which marketing activities are bringing in the right visitors, where visitors are losing interest and leaving your site, which chains of presentations and related visitor actions are producing your sales and so forth. Conducting measurement and analysis allows you to drop ineffective marketing activities and messages, determine which marketing activities are bringing the right people to your site, where they are dropping out of your sales pathway and in what percentages. All these means you can squeeze out more results of your marketing investments. An effective sales funnel is supposed to be designed to filter out the misses at each layer, so in that sense, attrition at a certain percentage rate along the way is both expected and good. This means that your funnel is focusing on the target audience you are expecting action from – the customers that have found a reason to stay on your site for that extra 3 minutes.

Developing your sales funnel or improving on it could be as simple as the creation of a new top banner or homepage restructuring to give your visitors a sense of purpose and the development of a conversion driven goal page.

If your strategies and messages are all over the place, find out how you can coordinate and synchronize your efforts with an effective sales funnel design. With 87% of visitors giving you a very unforgiving 3 seconds to make that first impression, and only 30 further seconds to evaluate what you have to offer, a successful sales funnel design could essentially be what makes or breaks your website.

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Jamie Lee is a Consultant in Singapore’s leading Search Engine Marketing
Firm – Conversion Hub. She also actively contributes to forums on topics related to PPC Advertising and social media marketing. www.conversion-hub.com

Is Split Testing Really All That Important for Online Business Success?

By Michelle Jayes in Featured

Split testing has always been an important part of any successful online marketing campaign, but is it really necessary? It has been said that if you can improve a part of your sales funnel to increase your sales then it is worth doing. Is it really that important that you should utilize the amount of resources it requires to split test?

If this is the case when do you decide that you have done enough testing?

Let’s take a closer look at the need to split test on your squeeze page, website or any other aspect of your online business.

First, you must understand that the purpose here is not to say that here is no value at all in split testing; but rather that it is only useful up to a certain point, and then continued testing begins to give diminishing returns and becomes more of a waste of time. What is important here is deciding when that point has been reached.

With that foundation now established, let’s take a look at the issue and work out the cost of testing in general. If, for example, you are testing your title or attention grabber, and you have one in red and another in green, you will need to drive traffic to your page where half of your visitors will see the red and the other half will see green. After a few thousand or however many you decide on, you will then need to gather your information and analyze it.

After analyzing the information and lets say the green worked better than the red, does this mean that green is the best. Absolutely not! All it means is that it is better than red, and now you will need to test it against blue – and then pink – and then black and on and on.

Once you have settled on the right color for this exercise lets say green you will then need to test the text of your title and you will test A against B, but as with the colors you will need to test multiple times with various titles.

The point is that at some stage along the way you will find that all this testing is costing you more than it is benefiting you or your online business. Of course you have the choice of testing everything you desire both on and off your website, squeeze page or anything else you plan on testing, but when do you draw the line and decide that it is time to stop.

There are many online marketers who will tell you that you should always be testing, but if that is so, when do you actually begin to benefit from all this information that you have been gathering so diligently?

Now lets look at the costs that all of this has incurred up to this point. The number of hours, days or even weeks that you have put into this task will have cost you a lot of time, and time is money. Even if you have done all the labor yourself how much have you lost in income opportunities because you have been too busy crunching numbers and doing nothing else.

All the time you have spent on making changes to your website and the decisions on what you are going to test and how you are going to test it, might well be an acceptable expense, but the thing that many online markers seem to overlook, is that while all of this is going on you are losing customers, simply because people are not converting as well while you are busy testing.

This is not to say that split testing has no purpose at all in the greater scheme of things. The important point here is not to get carried away by it all. Just because you can test everything does not mean that you should, all you need to do for the good of your online business is to set a conversion goal before you begin testing and as soon as you achieve your goal, get on with your next project.

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For more help with your legitimate online businesses Michelle Jayes invites you to visit her online income opportunities website www.online-income-business.com and get some great internet marketing e-books for FREE at www.online-income-business.com/FreeEBooks.html.

50 Powerful Call to Action Phrases

By Jessica Swanson in Featured

Are your prospects doing what you’d like them to be doing? Are they ordering your ebooks, opting into your website or clicking on your links?

If not, you’re missing out on one of the top-secret weapons that copywriters have used for years to get their prospects to act accordingly.

So, what do master copy-writers do to move prospects to action? They ask them to act.

That’s right. You simply need to ask your prospects to do what you want them to do. It really is that straightforward.

But, most landing pages, sales pages and emails don’t utilize this bizarrely simple technique (which is also why most ad-copy performs so poorly).

According to usability expert Jared Spool www.uie.com/about/consultantss, when visitors find powerful action words on a landing page, they are successful at completing their task 72% of the time; if the action word isn’t on the page, they are only successful 6% of the time.

Obviously, it’s in your best interest to ask your prospects what you want them do, how to do it, and that you want them to do it immediately.

Here is a list of 50 powerful “call to action” phrases that you can use in your future ad-copy:

1) Click here.

2) Click here to find out all the details.

3) Download now.

4) Immediate download.

5) Reply today.

6) Try it free.

7) Start your free trial now.

Sign up for your free trial immediately.

9) Your free trial is just a click away.

10) Join now.

11) Start now.

12) Talk to an expert.

13) I invite you to…

14) I urge you to act at once.

15) I can’t wait to hear from you.

16) We’d like to hear from you.

17) Just hit Reply and we’ll email you the details.

18) Sign up online at ____.com

19) Learn more about us at ______.com

20) Order now, while there’s still time.

21) Place your order now, while everything is still in front of you.

22) In a hurry? Call 555-1212.

23) For even faster service, call 555-1212.

24) To place your order, call us toll-free at ____________.

25) Just reach for your phone.

26) Mail your order today!

27) Send in your application today!

28) We’re waiting for your call.

29) I urge you to send for our free brochure.

30) Send for our free catalog.

31) Mail this convenient coupon today!

32) For more details call 555-1212.

33) Please don’t hesitate to call us.

34) Why not give us a call to find out all the details?

35) Call us this week to schedule an appointment.

36) It’s important that you respond promptly.

37) Offer expires March 1st.

38) For a short time only.

39) Order now and receive a free gift.

40) See it in action.

41) Get it now!

42) Request your FREE quote today.

43) Free Shipping.

44) Money Back Guarantee.

45) Best value.

46) Limited availability.

47) Expires at midnight tonight.

48) Act quickly.

49) Reserve your spot now.

50) Sign up now, while you still can.

So, there you have it. A list of fifty powerful “call to action” phrases to use in all of your future ad-copy. The results will astound you.

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Jessica Swanson has helped thousands of small business owners, all over the world, implement low-cost, high-impact DIY marketing campaigns. Known for her energy, passion and “get-it-done” attitude, Jessica takes complicated marketing concepts, turns them upside-down, and makes them incredibly simple and outrageously straightforward. To download your FREE Shoestring Marketing Kit, visit:
www.ShoestringMarketingKit.com

Planning Your Website – Essential Prep

By Paula Wynne in Featured

Before you dive off in your quest to find a website, you need to think about planning, researching and brainstorming your idea.

As you plan your shiny new website, you will understand the need to explore every avenue of your online business so that you are fully prepared. The work you do now will be reinforced along the way.

Naming Your Site

By now you’ll have an idea for your website; Your ideas may have been stewing away in your brain for many years or it may have only popped in for a visit recently and something made you pounce on it.

Before we go into planning your site, one of the first things to consider is the name. Many entrepreneurs have realized the viral effect naming can have on a business. When you go through the process of brainstorming a name, you will come up with all sorts of concoctions.

Domain Names

The most important thing about domain names is: firstly you MUST own it and secondly, find a name that you can use for viral and optimization purposes as well. My book has a lengthy section on how to find a successful domain name. It also explains the difference between a bog standard name and a descriptive, keyword-rich domain name. And it gives you a run down on international versus country domains. Pop over to Amazon if you can’t wait to find out more!

iMindMap

A cool tool to brainstorm is mind mapping. Buzan’s iMindMap brainy piece of software hosts a range of features designed to make you more productive and creative in the way you think.

Mindmapping is like a giant Octopus with colorful tentacles, images and icons that allow you to add notes and links to a range of files.

When brainstorming chapters for my book, I drew up an iMindMap to generate new ideas quickly and effectively and to store them in an organized way. This screenshot illustrates how it can help you to plan and record spontaneous bursts of inspiration, as well as to explore promotions for your future website.

Score Goals

If you haven’t already done so, you will need to set goals and objectives. This way you can establish the exact aim of the site or your potential business. You may have grand plans to sell this brilliant idea of yours for a cash bomb with an exit strategy after a number of years. You might want to manage a small and cozy family business over a long period. Maybe you need to run your online business while working a day job or alongside another business.

Whatever it is you want to do, you need to aspire to something in order to achieve it. Recognition of your aspirations and actually visualizing it, will lead to achievement and result in success.

Niche

Dictionary.com describes a ‘niche’ as “a place or position suitable or appropriate for a person or thing and having specific appeal.”

It’s really important to find your niche and now is the time to research it.

For example: you may be a photographer, so what’s niche about that? Well, maybe you specialize in underwater photography or newly born babies. If you’re a commercial photographer your niche may be shooting scenes such as factory equipment, food or rock concerts.

My Partner and I set up a niche job board (screenshot) that is dedicated to flexible jobs working from home. Take a peek at Remote Employment to see how we found a niche appeal to s specific audience.

Above all, you should only ‘niche’ it up if you love your chosen web concept and you know a lot about it. Don’t settle with a topic you’re unsure about just because you think it will make money. Do what you love the most, where your passion will ride waves and your energy will be unstoppable.

Testing The Market

Research is vital for any project, especially for a full throttle online business. There is a multitude of sites out there so you need to know exactly what you are getting into before you rush ahead, spending money on a fancy website, only to find there are several hundred already doing the same thing. Flip through Create A Successful Website to find a quick test on how to test the market and you’ll find a list of research examples along with loads more content.

Prepping up and setting objectives at this stage will pay off later on. Brainstorm all possible avenues of research so you get all the ‘must do’ tasks out of the way because we are now heading into some pretty exciting stuff.

Best wishes for your website!

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Paula Wynne is the bestselling author of ‘Create A Successful Website‘. She offers practical workshops to help you succeed in your online business. Read more at www.paulawynne

5 Ways to Enhance Your LinkedIn Company Profile

By Adam Aloi in Featured

As consumers continue to flock to social media websites, marketers recognize the importance of attracting and retaining those users. One of the challenges facing companies today is how to enhance their LinkedIn company profiles.

LinkedIn has grown from a startup company to over 33 million members in the United States and over 80 million registered users worldwide. The recent economic downturn has also boosted the amount of individuals and companies that have turned to LinkedIn for networking opportunities. LinkedIn company profiles now provide a wide variety of tools to help your organization improve business networking opportunities.

Here are a few tools and tips on how to get started:

Build a Business Profile

Setting up a business profile is relatively easy, you start by setting up your personal profile.

Why social media is like exercise – Guest Blog by David Meerman Scott

By Debralee in Featured

The second most common question I get at my talks is: “How do you find the time to do all this social media stuff?” People want to know how to find time to blog, tweet, produce videos, and create valuable online content.

(BTW – the number one question I get during Q&A is: “What is the ROI of social media?” But that’s another story.

I’ve found that: “Finding the time to participate in social media” is just like exercise – you need to make it an important part of your life. If it is important to you, you don’t even think about it anymore. It just is.

You have a choice.

You can choose to exercise regularly in order to stay fit. The only effective way is when exercise becomes part of your routine. Some people like fitness clubs. Others enjoy running outdoors or dance or kickboxing. But in all cases, success comes from making it an important part of your life and routine.

I enjoy 45 minutes on an elliptical trainer every morning that I’m home. Sometimes the hotel I’m staying at has a machine and I jump on that too. Been at it for more than a decade.

I get up early, around 4:00 most mornings, and do my training in the family room while watching recordings of the late-night television shows from the evening before. I don’t even think about “finding the time” because it is a very important part of my life.

Same with participating in social networks and creating online content – it becomes part of your life.

In my case, I do about 100 blog posts a year and maybe 30 videos. I comment on thousands of blogs. Most years I write a free ebook. And I’m on forums, chat rooms, Twitter, and Facebook.

Many people are surprised when I say that I probably spend about six hours a week on social media – about the same amount of time I spend exercising. I don’t even think about it. It’s important, so I do it. And I can’t really say how I “fit it in”. It’s mainly in micro-bursts of one or five minutes throughout the day.

I recommend that you don’t even try to “find the time to create content and participate in social media.” You’ll fail. Just like “finding the time to exercise” leads to failure and wasted money on health club memberships.

Instead, make exercise and social media important parts of your life.

Bonus idea

If you still cannot fit exercise and social media into your life, cut out television completely. You will be amazed at how much time you free up.

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About the Author: David Meerman Scott, author of the blog WebInNow, is a marketing strategist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, seminar leader, and the author of the hit new book World Wide Rave. His previous book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, was a number-one bestseller and is being published in twenty-two languages. He is a recovering VP of marketing for two publicly traded technology companies and was also Asia marketing director for Knight-Ridder, at the time one of the world’s largest newspaper and electronic information companies. David has lived and worked in New York, Tokyo, Boston, and Hong Kong and has presented at industry conferences and events in more than forty countries.

Image: Shutterstock / Zurijeta

3 CAN-SPAM Gotcha’s That Every Email Marketer Should Avoid

By Chip Cooper in Featured

Experienced email marketers often operate under the misconception that the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply to most routine business communications. With CAN-SPAM Act fines of up to $16,000 per violation, this misconception could add up to a big number.

That’s why email marketers should avoid 3 gotcha’s that are CAN-SPAM traps for the unwary.

The CAN-SPAM Act

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM) promised to provide remedies against annoying and unsolicited bulk email known as “spam”. Typical of legislation that starts out with limited objectives, CAN SPAM reaches much further than regulating unsolicited, bulk email – and that’s where the
gotcha’s come into play.

Before we get to the gotcha’s, let’s review CAN-SPAM’s 5 basic rules as supplemented by amendments enacted in 2008:

* header information (identifiers such as To, From, IP Address): must not be materially false or materially misleading;

* subject line: must not mislead the recipient about a material fact regarding the email’s contents or subject matter;

* return email address: must contain a functioning email address that the recipient can use to request no further messages;

* requests to unsubscribe: if a recipient requests unsubscribe from receiving additional emails, emails matching the unsubscribe request must be honored within 10 days with a mechanism that is available from a single web page and that operates with a single click; and

* contents: the email must (i) clearly and conspicuously identify that it is an ad, (ii) provide clear and conspicuous notice the recipient may unsubscribe for additional emails, and (iii) contain a valid postal address for the sender (may include a valid post office or private mailbox address).

In addition to supplementing the 5 basic rules, CAN-SPAM’s 2008 amendments added an additional rule regarding email newsletters and other emails that have multiple advertisers, contributors, or senders. Under the new “designated sender” rule, multiple contributors to the email may designate as single sender who must be designated in the From line, and who will be responsible for CAN-SPAM compliance.

“Commercial” emails are required to comply with all 5 of the basic rules, plus the “designated sender” rule. “Transactional or relationship message” emails are required to comply only with the header information requirement and the “designated sender” rule.

Gotcha 1 – CAN-SPAM Applies Only to Bulk Email, Right?

Not true.

Although much of the publicity surrounding the passage of CAN-SPAM focused on regulation of unsolicited, bulk email, there is no minimum number of emails for CAN-SPAM to apply; CAN-SPAM applies to even a single email.

So, if a single email relates to the business of an individual or entity, it’s a “commercial” email and CAN-SPAM applies, and the email is subject to all 5 of the basic rules, plus the “designated sender” rule.

Gotcha 2 – CAN-SPAM Only Applies to Unsolicited Email, Right?

Not true.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) made it clear that CAN-SPAM may apply to emails that are solicited. The FTC stated in regulations issued in 2008 that the FTC would view email newsletters that were subscribed to (or solicited by) a person to fall within the definition of a
“transactional or relationship message” if the newsletter consists exclusively of informational content or combines informational and commercial content.

So, even if the email newsletter is solicited by the recipient, CAN-SPAM applies; however, as discussed above, as a “transactional” email, the sender is required to comply only with the header information requirement and the “designated sender” rule.

Gotcha 3 – Regular “Business-to Business” Emails are Not Covered by CAN-SPAM, Right?

Not true.

The FTC made it clear in 2008 that emails sent in connection with what most businesses view as “business-to-business” relationship emails may also be regulated as “commercial” emails under CAN-SPAM. For example, the FTC noted that “business-to-business relationship” emails could include mortgage lenders sending emails to brokers with the latest interest rate information or equipment leasing businesses sending emails to equipment vendors regarding rate sheets.

The FTC expressly rejected a request by business leaders to add a “business-to-business relationship message” category to the “transactional or relationship message” category discussed above. This means that “business-to-business relationship” emails are subject to all 5 of the basic
rules, plus the “designated sender” rule.

So, even though this determination by the FTC regarding “business-to-business relationship” emails flies in the face of reason and common business practices, it’s the law according to the FTC.

Conclusion

With CAN-SPAM, as with many statutes, there are unintended consequences that sometimes lead to surprising results. Nevertheless, strict compliance with the rules involving the 3 gotcha’s is required in order to avoid liability under CAN-SPAM.

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Leading Internet attorney Chip Cooper has automated the process of drafting DigiContracts.com Website Legal Forms – www.digicontracts.com – for website legal compliance. Use his free online tool — Website Documents Determinator — to determine which documents your website really needs for website legal compliance. Discover how quick, easy, and cost-effective it is to draft your website legal forms at DigiContracts.com.

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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