Free Programs and Fine Print

Yep! It happened again today. I was invited by a Skype friend to look into a free program. Their claim was that it was free to join and I would not have to pay anything to earn money. I’ve been around the internet long enough to not believe claims of overnight wealth and to distrust “free” joins but I indulged their request to click on the link anyway.

Non-English Landing Page

The first thing that I noticed was that the page was in German. I have a toolbar installed that allows me to instantly translate to English so this wasn’t a huge issue.

Analyzing the Offer

The first sentence on the landing page was a disclaimer:

This is no joke and no dream … You get paid money, because investors want to distribute funds.

If you have to begin by telling stressing the fact that your incredible program is really incredible and go on to suggest that investors want to give away their money, I’m immediately suspicious. Investors want to leverage their money by investing in things which will earn them money. At least that is what I’ve learned…

The landing page encouraged me to read the terms and conditions, although I would have done that anyway before filling in any forms. It’s called due diligence.

Free Isn’t Always Free

The second paragraph on the Terms and Conditions page said this:

Once you receive the gift, you have to pay into this program.

I didn’t need to read any further. Clearly, if payment is required to benefit from the program, it isn’t free.

I responded to my Skype pal by copying and pasting that text into our chat window. I added that I was a conscientious objector of cash gifting programs and that having to pay into it made it clear to mea that it wasn’t free. I thought that would be the end of it but they replied that I had misunderstood.

I re-copied and pasted the same text into our chat window and told them, in addition, that there was nothing ambiguous about the phrase: YOU have to pay into this program.

Denial of the Facts in Front of You

My Skype pal protested by saying that “no one had explained this” to them. I suggested that reading the fine print before joining anything, free or not, is a personal responsibility … and it is!

Are you entitled to a do-over if you sign a contract that binds you to a commitment you didn’t understand just because you expected it to be explained to you? If you are of legal age, the answer to that question is no.

I’ve worked in a business where contracts were necessary to proceed. I would spend no less than an hour going over the terms and conditions that my clients would be obligated to once they put pen to paper. I took pains to explain what their obligations were, as well as the authority they were granting to me as their agent. I never put paperwork in front of someone who might later claim diminished capacity because they had had a few drinks. I scheduled the meeting for another time and instructed them to hold off on the beers until after we were finished.

Not everyone will do this … especially if they are promoting a get-rich-quick-and-easy internet program.

Money for Nothing?

Call me old fashioned or jaded, but I’m not of the mindset that money will flow into your bank accounts without applying some effort.

When I was new to online marketing tactics, I got suckered into things. We all do. Once I abandoned the belief that the hype was more than it was and began to focus on things that I enjoyed doing anyway, which could earn income for me, my life has been simplified and I’m having a lot more fun too.

Many of the people whom I used to communicate with on a daily basis are still chasing the dream of instant wealth and fly-by-night programs. For them, and for those of you who pursue similar things, I wish you the best of luck and encourage you to return and post your results to my blog.

There are no Magic Wealth Pills. The recipe for business success is the same:

1. List the things that you are interested in doing
2. Analyze those things to determine if their might be a market for you to leverage
3. Construct a plan for pursuing that business
4. Devise a list of measurements you can use to validate your success
5. Determine the best approach for marketing and promotion
6. Follow your plan and monitor results
7. Know when to revise or abandon the plan and try the next thing on YOUR list

Incoming search terms:

• fineprint free blog

With all the outsourcing, is anything made in the USA anymore?

Enough with all this outsourcing talk!  This is the season where many of us are overtly shopping.  Economic circumstances may be forcing greater frugality but, as you are scanning shelves for stocking stuffers and gifts, take a moment to read the labels.  When I did this yesterday, none of the products on the shelf were made in the USA.

If you’re thinking globally about the events that led up to where things stand today in the USA economy, it cannot all be assigned to fiscal irresponsibility on the part of individuals and/or government.  Simply put, the root cause culprit is greed and any business who is outsourcing to overseas resources is contributing to the problem.

During my adult lifetime, from automobiles to toothpaste production, I’ve witnessed the discontent caused when corporate financial decisions were made to improve shareholder earnings.  Opposing forces clashed at annual meetings as the affluent passed through the picket lines of the affected employees.  But it didn’t stop or slow down the processes that have embraced offshore outsourcing and speeding the erosion of the financial foundation of the USA.  Since the early 70’s when this began, more and more US citizens have been put out of work and entire communities have been hobbled by the closing of manufacturing plants and businesses that once enabled them to thrive.

A trending online business is training that teaches internet entrepreneurs how to use offshore outsourcing for parts of their business.  While this may enhance one’s bottom line, these business owners seem to have lost sight of the larger picture.  By sending their business offshore, they are contributing to the problem that their training seeks to solve, in my humble opinion.

I’m not just ranting.  Over the years that I’ve been in the Online Marketing & Branding business, I’ve acquired new contracts with many USA business owners who have been burned by using offshore outsourcing tactics.  When those people seem to expect me to lower my rates based on their bad experience, I’ve had to remind them that whatever happened before they began working with me does not create an obligation on my part to make it better for them.

My rates are my rates, and I’m worth every penny! 

For new entrepreneurial technical talent who are just starting out, using freelance sites to acquire new clients without incurring advertising expenses is a valid but temporary tactic.  I only could do it for about 3 months because devaluing my services was not good for my business … or my self-esteem.  When buyers who had invited me to bid pursued me and begged me to reconsider, I would sometimes calculate out their proposed hourly rate in an effort to inform them that what they were willing to pay was below minimum hourly wages in the USA.

Pretty simple project. Please bid reasonably.

These are words that you might find in a post on a freelancer site.  What are the parameters of a “reasonable” bid?

Budgets for gigs with statements like these normally range from $5 – $200 USD, and they assume they will win by outsourcing to an offshore developer.  When the low end of the proposed budget is $5 USD, the definition of “reasonable” is guaranteed to unreasonable for anyone who is trying to sustain a lifestyle in the USA.  Scanning through the requested deliverables, qualified AND experienced wordpress website design talent can see that the level of effort involved in meeting their expectations will consume no less than 20 hours of development and iteration time, including the iteration time that is part and parcel of the client not having a clear idea about what they want until they become aware of what they can have.

Much to my amusement, many such postings state they will only consider USA resources.  Either these buyers are lacking an understanding of what their outsourcing request entails or they don’t care to pay fairly.  I applaud wanting to control business operating costs but I can’t help wondering if they would ever consider a position that paid a maximum of $2 an hour?  And, with all due respect to anyone who has put something like this on a freelance posting, if someone is incapable of doing the work themselves in a few minutes time, how can they possibly characterize it as being simple?

More importantly and back to the point of my post:

When will those racing for wealth by using offshore outsourcing understand they are undermining themselves too?

Freelance outsourcing service values are only the latest in a long chain of progress that has cascading peripheral effects for us all.  As our country’s dependency on petroleum products shows no signs of lessening and the cost of a loaf of bread spirals upward, we all are feeling the pinch in our pocket books.  When manufacturing began moving offshore during the late 70’s, the source of our country’s expertise was described as being the service industry.  The train has left the station but which way is it heading?  After we’ve outsourced our services industry,  what will be left?

Incoming search terms:

• is anything made in the usa
• is there anything made in the usa anymore
• are there anything made in USA anymore
• is any thing made in the usa
• is anything made in the usa anymore
• is anything made in usa anymore
• is anything made in usa anymore?

Email Marketing and Your Business

Email marketing came of age after direct marketing practitioners realized that their methods of engaging customers with postal mail could be applied to the Internet.  For those who are unclear about what email marketing is, it is using email to promote offers and/or obtain new customers.  Reports have proven that this is the next best marketing technique after search marketing.

You can rent a list, purchase a list based on demographics for your niche, or set up an opt-in page to gather list members from your target market.  Even though it takes longer, building your own email marketin list from scratch is probably the safest and most reliable method to use.

No matter where you begin with your list building, a well-written email marketing message can gain a prospect’s trust by disclosing relevant information that helps them to make informed purchasing decisions.  Email marketing also has potential to enhance relationships with existing customers if you continue to provide valuable communications that facilitate repeat or referral business.

The major advantages of email marketing is that there are multiple ways to automate your scheduled or broadcasted communications and it is much more cost-efficient than postal mail.  In addition, your offers have potential to “go viral” because members of your lists can easily forward messages to friends and colleagues who they feel might be interested, which increases your opportunities to make sales and add new customers to your email marketing lists.

Within a relatively short period of time, a large audience can be identified and targeted.  Autoresponders, like Aweber, allow you to monitor the responsiveness of your list with email open statistics and click through rates on your embedded links.  They can also help you craft a message that won’t be filtered out by built-in spam catchers.

The sales ratios of your email marketing campaigns or inquiries from members of your list may lead you to new ideas for products and services.  Email enables you to engage your customers in dialogue that helps you to scope your new product development by inviting list members to take surveys or provide feedback on ideas that you are forming.  Talk about convenience!

How Much and How Often?

Loose statistics from direct marketing resources indicates that new customers may need to hear about an offer up to 10 times before making a purchasing decision.  Equally important is that your messages must be timed in such a way that your new list members don’t feel overwhelmed.  For example, I’ve enrolled in campaigns and opted out immediately after receiving multiple messages in quick succession or too many notes in a week.

In my opinion, more than one email marketing message a day is too many.  I’m also of the opinion that more than a couple (3 or more) email marketing messages a week is too much volume, particularly prior to conversion.  Setting up your campaigns to send email every 4th day, or so, keeps your offer on the prospect’s mind without seeming overly aggressive.  That is the whole idea, right?

If all of your all of your email marketing messages are pitching something, people will learn to ignore you.  Keep your email marketing messages relevant and brief.  Most folks are dealing with information overload when they peruse their email inbox so your subjects must stand out if you expect your email to get opened.  Using fantastic email marketing titles that compel people to open may work according to some people but it also can make you seem less trustworthy.    To earn and keep the confidence of your list members, stick to actual facts about your offer and try writing messages that DON’T require disclaimers in tiny print at the bottom of the note. 

Email Marketing Can Have a Dark Side

Some companies collect email addresses of people illegally and send irrelevant mails to them, which can be very annoying.  To get past spam filters, these messages will often have many lines of irrelevant text below the offer with “safe” words in them.

Some hackers intentionally design an email that looks like an advertisement but, when the ads are clicked, malicious software is downloaded that creates headaches for an unsuspecting or naive end user.  I will never understand why smart people, like hackers must be, use their creativity and talent to wreak havoc on people!  Even though your email marketing message is not malicious, you need to understand that everyone with a computer and email has heard one or more horror story and this will affect the success of your campaigns … especially if you have purchased or rented a  list.

In my previous post, I discussed the highlights of the CAN-SPAM act of 2003.  Caution is recommended for any list you choose to join but this does not keep you from receiving unsolicited email marketing, just as postal regulations do not restrict sending demographic based mail to your home.

Since the CAN-SPAM act only applies to US businesses, it is legal to initiate an email marketing campaign from a purchased or rented list as long as a physical address and a functional opt-out is included in the message, and email marketers are allowed up to 10 days following the request to remove people, the CAN-SPAM act seems to protects marketers more than consumers.  Sadly, my single voice isn’t loud enough to get these laws changed anytime soon and corporate entities with much more influence than me are working hard to loosen SPAM regulations, not tighten them.

Most email clients and webmail systems have spam filtering capabilities that can help to keep your inbox clean but those algorithms aren’t perfect.  How many times have you found a legitimate messages in your spam folder?  How many legitimate messages have you accidentally deleted?

Email Marketing is Only ONE Marketing Channel

As the saying goes, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.  This is especially true for marketing and advertising expenses.  Email marketing is a great tool for building your business out there but you should also be testing other marketing methods and you should always be tracking the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Go forth and prosper, and make sure you use this marketing method wisely.

Incoming search terms:

• email acquisition costs
• 2012 viral customer acquisition cost
• email acquisition list cost

Are You Email Marketing or Spamming?

Email marketing is a proven method of developing a relationship with your customers and, if that relationship is properly developed and nurtured, a way to generate affiliate cash flow when you need it.  All that is well and good, but when your opt-out doesn’t result in being opted out, email marketing campaigns can result in driving business away.

One of the inboxes that I own began receiving email from Elizabeth Jackson.  Since I used to know an Elizabeth Jackson, I was enthused to see her name.  It was disappointing to find an advertisement for Work At Home jobs when I opened the email.

I used the option to unsubscribe, more than a dozen times during the past 3 months, and I continued to get email from Elizabeth Jackson from different email addresses.  Each time, I opted out again.  Further research today helped me deduce that Elizabeth Jackson is a fictitious name used to “protect the affiliates” who are promoting a certain CPA campaign offered by Clickbooth, to get income.  Clickbooth advertises themselves as the “exclusive CPA Network” who is ranked #1 by Website Magazine.

Ok, that is all legal but my question today is, who is protecting me, or others who didn’t invite these CPA email offers?

SPAM and the Consumer

Prior to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, I was forced to close a business email account that was being overwhelmed by no less than 50+ messages an hour in a language I couldn’t even read!  Things have gotten better, for sure, but it is possible to be in compliance of that act and still be doing nothing other than irritating customers or prospects.  Case in Point:  Elizabeth Jackson.

Here are some CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 cliff notes:

1. It is an opt-out law and, for most purposes, permission of the e-mail recipient is not required.  If a recipient wants to unsubscribe or opt-out, however, you’d better stop sending e-mails you are at risk of being subject to severe civil and criminal penalties.
2. Fraudulent or deceptive subjects, headers, return addresses, etc., are prohibited.
3. Sending sexually explicit email without clear markings is a criminal act.
4. Email marketers must have a functional opt-out system that is easy for consumers to use and is operational for at least 30-days following each mailing.
5. Email messages should include a physical address of the company in the email.
6. Spammers AND those who procure their services are culpable and both can be prosecuted.
7. Personal emails, and perhaps non-profit emails, are not addressed by the act.  It applies to all US businesses who are sending commercial email of a transactional nature.

SPAM and the Business Owner

Looking over the guidelines again, a smile came to my face.  I do feel that some of the earnings claims in subject lines from a few of the internet marketing lists that I’ve joined are nothing other than deceptive, in spite of their disclaimers.  This is especially true when the click through leads to a product or service that was not developed by the sender.  But I am a perpetual student of marketing methods and completely understand that this is how affiliate programs work. 

Email marketing is a good business strategy, especially for affiliate marketers.  At Flippa, sites with lists are worth more than other sites at the time of sale.  Thus, whether your motivation in launching a site is to build a Niche Empire or develop a site to later sell for profit, building an email marketing list is very important!

CAN-SPAM Loopholes

An apparent loophole in the CAN-SPAM Act, which is always exploited by senders of unsolicited email, allows email marketers have up to 10-days to complete an unsubscribe request.  Although those business owners are adhering to the letter of the law, I find it absurd.  All the autoresponders that I have ever used or recommended facilitate immediate removal from a list.

Pick Up The Phone!

In my desperation to stop getting three more months of unsolicited email from Elizabeth Jackson, whom I now know is a fake person, I was prepared to send a snail mail letter but I dug deep enough to find a phone number to call.  I did allude to the CAN-SPAM act during my call, which may have inspired them to be more attentive, but that remains to be seen.  Regardless, it was comforting to actually speak with someone who listened to my concerns and gathered up the email addresses that I wanted to eradicate from their lists.

The phone seems to have gone out of fashion but the truth remains that consumers sometimes need a phone number to call.  Business owners might conclude that including a phone number on your primary sales page footers or within the terms and conditions page at your site is a good idea for owners of affiliate programs.  After all, the program owner is equally exposed to the fines and penalties outlined in the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, and they are legally obligated to manage the affiliates who are issuing email marketing messages on their behalf.

Incoming search terms:

• spam
• spam photos
• affiliate programs cpa that allows email marketing
• spam images
• Spam :)
• cpa email marketing spam
• immagini spam
• images of spam
• SPAM!!
• [get] email marketing cpa

Panning for Gold

While having fun with the grandkids the other day, we visited a place nearby that specializes in educating people about the California Gold Rush by providing an experiential tour of a mine on their property.  What does this have to do with Web Marketing and Branding, you might ask?  Read on….

The California Gold Rush created a lot of wealth.  So has the internet.  Not unlike internet properties, 49ers staked claims on mines, hoping the vein was rich.  The conditions were difficult, picking their way back into the mines and chiseling through rock by hand.  There were certain things that they looked for that provided direction about pursuit of a path.  The same is true of internet businesses.  It all relies on choosing the right “real estate” to begin with and doing the work necessary to extract the value of that space.

As the kids panned for gold in the trough that the owners of the ranch had set up, they each had different reactions.  One child in the group complained immediately, saying it was too hard, and sulked for a while.  Another “struck gold” right away, shouted out about their good fortune and continued to shriek every time they thought they had found another nugget.  The remainder of the group quietly found nuggets, washed them off and set them aside, and proceeded to look for more.

Where is the Online Mother Lode?

If you are not new to online business, you know exactly what a niche is and how important it is too.  If you are new, this is a term you need to understand.  I can’t tell you what is a profitable niche in a blog post but I can tell you there is a lot of material out there regarding choosing a niche.

In summary, a niche is an area of interest for consumers.  I will always recommend that people begin a business that is in line with their personal passions or hobbies.  While your passions may align with a profitable niche, it is equally possible that your highest area of interest is NOT what other people are looking for.  This should not dissuade you entirely but it will make penetration of that niche more work.  Equally possible is that a niche that you know people are looking for is also a niche that is saturated.  Specializing that niche may allow you to find a “vein” to follow to create online income.

There are free tools to use to explore possibilities but, as expected, digging for gold by hand requires a little more effort and time.  The external Google keyword research tool is a great place to start.  It may seem like a good idea to choose the niches with the most search volume.  Within reason, it is.  You need to be aware that searches with a lot of volume also have a lot of competition.  A good rule of thumb is to choose phrases that have monthly global search volumes between 1,000 and 15,000.

Once you think you’ve found a niche to exploit, continue your due diligence.  Use Google again to find out how many pages are there for you to compete with.  Take the term that appeals to you, place it in a Google search box in quotes, and submit your search.  This will return the number of pages with each word in your phrase in any order.  If you submit the search without the term in quotes, it will turn up the count for all the pages that have all of the words in your phrase anywhere on that page, whether together in a string or not.

From a reasonableness perspective, it is best to choose niches that have less than 100,000 competing pages online, so long as the supporting search volume is there.  This is a guideline only.  Persistence will get your pages elevated in search engine listings for more saturated niches.

For the expense, a great niche research tool is cleverly named Micro Niche Finder.  This tool allows you to analyze the strength of competition and computes the number of back links, which is a measure of how many links you will need to build to your site to allow it to rise above other listings for that term.

If you don’t want to learn at this level or purchase tools that would make it easier for you to conduct your own research, you can opt to work with someone who has knowledge of how to research a niche and choose good keyword phrases.  Use the convenient contact form to initiate a conversation with me.

What Tools Can You Use to Launch your Campaign?

It is hard to be in an online business without a website.  If the great keyword phrase you’ve found is an available domain name, grab it quick because you will need a website somewhere online to promote your niche.  With all of its built-in features and since my specialty is WordPress Website Design, it is the best software that I can recommend for your business website.

While you can start a free site using wordpress software at Wordress.com, my position has always been that it is far better to retain ownership of your content.  Besides, theme choices and add on open source software is limited at WordPress.com.  These limitations can impede your progress.

I’ve worked with people who operate on an assumption that a site hosted at WordPress.com will get more traffic.  WordPress.com is a high-traffic site but you must build interest in your page in order to have traffic.  Why do all of that SEO work on a site if you don’t own it?  Seems silly to me…

There are many free themes out there for you to use and, if you find a theme that is close to what you want, you don’t need any special technical skills to put up your own website.  Personally, I recommend taking a look at Studio Press themes.

Remember that owning a website does require you to know something about HTML.  Last year, Holly Powell and I conducted a couple of online webinars to teach people the nuances of choosing domain names, registering them, activating them on your chosen host, installing wordpress, and other things you might want to know to use the software.  I will be updating the training for the latest version of WordPress soon but you can follow this link for access to the 2009 Live Blog Training at no cost.  If you sign up for the newsletter there, you will find out more about new training modules as they become available. 

What Kind of Miner are You?

Let’s get back to the kids who were panning for gold.  Maybe you’ve already found your Mother Lode niche and are living your dream life.  But, if you haven’t, what kind of miner will you be when you locate your niche and the first online payment arrives?  Will you shout out your success for all to hear or will you use the knowledge you gained to find that niche to locate and develop another?

Happy mining!

Incoming search terms:

• gold panning set up for kids
• gold panning trough for kids
• how to pan for gold plr
• operate gold panning business
• panning for gold amusment
• panning for gold web design

Good Website Design and Search Engine Optimization are not Mutually Exclusive

Website design is a process of function and aesthetics.  I’ve just completed a project where the desires of the graphic designer took precedence over search engine optimization and website performance.  I had only heard about these sorts of debates before and had never been involved in one.

The designer admitted they cared more about look and feel of the site than they did about its features and functions.  Ultimately being forced to defer to the graphic designer’s logic by putting a scroll box into a post, for the sake of aesthetics, enforced website design tactics that have not been popular since the late 1990’s.  Neither the project initiator nor the graphic designer seemed to care at all about search engine visibility, website performance, or the impact their design-based decisions were having upon the website design functionality or the user experience.  Regardless of my feelings about it, I did as I was instructed and delivered a site that has absolutely no SEO value, much to my chagrin.  I contributed my ideas and they were ignored.  What else was there for me to do? 

But, my position stands firm that graphic designer opinions should NEVER take precedence over website design performance, function, and search engine optimization.  I will augment this by saying that website design aesthetics and website functionality are not mutually exclusive goals.  With a little bit of understanding, beautiful graphic designs can be rendered to highly functional code that performs well and is also optimized for search engine visibility.

In my experience, graphics designers rarely have website design development or SEO skills.  I have the distinction of possessing wordpress website design, development and SEO skills, among other things, so this is not true of me.  My composite skill set is extremely rare, so I have been told.  Because it is important to my clients, I keep abreast of current online marketing tactics and website design and development trends so I can educate my customers and offer choices, should the need arise.  Of primary concern to me is overall website SEO and performance.  A properly designed website can garner organic traffic, especially if it uses the built-in features of a content management system like WordPress, and performance does not have to suffer if the developer knows what they are doing.

With the caveat that there are many people out there who know as much or more about this topic than me, I will share a little of what I know about these things in this post.   It is not all inclusive, for it would be impossible to encapsulate years of experience on such large subjects into a single post.

Why Should You Care about SEO?

A pretty website design pleases the eye, and aesthetics do matter, but your website SEO strategy can make the difference between a profitable website and a wasted expense.  If you are not doing your own development work, you have paid a professional website design developer real money in exchange for their time.  Viewing your website as a marketing asset should not be taken lightly.  With good planning, design, and a solid SEO strategy in mind from the onset, your website can become an extremely valuable tool that facilitates your business success.

Search Engine Optimization is not a huge mystery.  There are several sites with valuable and free content out there for people to study, if they are willing to invest the time and energy.  While each SEO “expert” seems to subscribe to their own philosophy, seach engine algorithms are based on math some factors are constants.

Generally speaking, there is on-page SEO and off-page SEO.  On-Page SEO is what you do with your website design and post content.  Off-Page SEO can be loosely defined as the linking strategies you employ to elevate your site’s authority on the internet.  Both are important, but the latter has very little to do with website design.

On Page SEO

Each page of your website is viewed individually by search engines.  Thus, it is possible for some of your pages to have a more elevated listing status in the search engines than others.  Content management systems, like WordPress, offer really cool SEO features like internal linking and frequent updates through RSS feeds and commenting features.  As a website design consultant, one of my functions is to help my clients choose rich keyword terms for categories.  While some Graphic Designers hold steadfastly to their belief that there still is a place for straight HTML websites, open source applications like WordPress, which is continually improving, make that belief all but obsolete.

Within a page, search engines are alerted by text styling tactics of using headings (H1 is best) or bold text to call attention to important content that contains the keywords you are pursuing.  Enabling WordPress plugins that permit you to specify relevant meta titles, descriptions, and post-specific keywords will assist with acquiring organic traffic and gaining better page listings and rankings.  Since I put up my first WordPress Website Design years ago, I’ve been using the All in One SEO plugin, although there are others out there.

Having a keyword rich domain name and page title goes miles toward a quick ranking.  Post titles and overall URL length matter.  The last time that I checked, search engines only read the first 256 characters of a URL.  This could have changed, so don’t quote me.  So, if you have a long domain name and a long page/post title, your effort in researching and placing keywords could be pointless.  WordPress setup defaults are not the best for creating links.  There are multiple opinions about what is the best way to customize the permalink structure.  In any case, finding ways to eliminate unimportant words and numbers from the link is the only way to go.

Off Page SEO

This is, in a nutshell, your linking strategy.  Over the years that I’ve been involved with website delivery, I’ve seen hundreds of offers for SEO automation tools that claim they can drive floods of traffic to your site by exploiting loopholes in search engine algorithms.  I’ve never taken that bait.  As for other tools that offer SEO link building assistance that is white hat, I’m skeptical that these products have delivered the results promised but I do confess to not having tried more than a handful of them.  In my humble opinion, high quality external links are earned through the time-consuming work of posting articles, providing high-quality responses in active forums, and building an online reputation for your site’s authority by offering sincere and relevant blog comments or appearing as a guest blogger on a high ranking site.

Freelancers offer SEO services of link building through article creation, blog commenting and forum posts.  I cannot compete with offshore service provider pricing so this is not a service that I offer.  I educate my customers on link building tactics and sometimes refer work out to colleagues.  There are article spinning tools that allow you to write one good article and spin it multiple ways so you can have unique content up on multiple sites.  As for automating blog comments, I don’t approve spam comments on my sites so why should I expect anyone else to do so?    Forums may seem like old news but there are some very busy forums with high authority on which I’ve been actively pursuing links back to a few of my sites.  Just ensure that you become active in a forum that is related to the main topic of your site if you choose this tactic for link building.

Website Design Performance Notes

If you are using images on your site, upload and reference them with keyword rich names.  Embedding keywords as alt text for your images is a important too because search engines can read it.  More and more frequently, websites are being found through image searches.  Although it makes a site or post more interesting, excessive use of images is discouraged because each call for that image results in another http request which can inhibit performance.

Pages that are designed entirely in flash are … well, flashy.  I truly admire the skills that flash programmers have honed but I have never recommended flash introductions when text and images will deliver the same message.  Opinions may vary but mine is that flash intros and pages are not good for SEO.  Additionally, flash is a client-side application that relies on the technology configuration of the viewer’s computer.  Most non-technical people are not as fastidious about PC maintenance and technology upgrades as I may be and no website design expert can write code to overcome that.  Hire the flash developer, by all means, but keep in mind that your multi-thousand dollar investment for flash programming may be lost on a portion of your potential audience who is frustrated by the fact that they see nothing on the page or it is taking too long to load.

When moving a site from HTML to a content management system, I frequently hear my clients say that the site seems slower.  That’s true.  It is, by comparison.  This has to do with PHP and database access speeds.  Website design architecture and code that works as optimally as possible is my responsibility, so I’m not abdicating entirely.  Recently, when this protest kept coming up, I set up the same site on two other hosting services so they could compare site performance.  It was a proverbial “no brainer” decision.  Their hosting service was the stumbling block.  Both A2 Hosting and JustHost eclipsed Network Solutions for page loads and video performance.

The use of CSS sprites improve website design performance because only one image is referenced.  I do not advocate for the use of image-based menus, however, because their use removes text from the pages and eliminates dynamic addition of navigation links.  This is best explained by example.  One of the features of WordPress is that it automatically adds new category links to menus without having to alter site code.  This translates to ease of use for my customers, once they’ve gotten a handle on the difference between pages, posts and categories.  With the exception of the site that I was recently asked to develop, all of my site navigation code has been pure CSS, clean and simple.  After working with a beautiful theme that used one image for all of its iconography and backgrounds, my custom theme designs will be making much more use of CSS sprites.

Incoming search terms:

• multiple income for website designer and seo

Zoom in on Zettabytes

Most of us don’t think twice about what is involved in maintaining the platforms the Social Networking and Social Bookmarking potpourri of sites that we use each day in our online businesses.  These days, the focus is mostly on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.  Other useful sites are LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Flickr, MySpace, and Last.fm … to name a few.  Then there are he multiple free email accounts we have.

When it comes to our home computing environments, we unconsciously manage disk space every day.  If we have self-hosted blogs, we look for and choose hosting vendors who permit us to have unlimited storage for our websites.  Yet, we take the storage of our Tweets and posts for granted.

Every piece of content must be stored somewhere.  In the early days of email, I was part of a group who studied email etiquette with interest.  We discussed computing capacity issues, like storage, too.  A friend of mine, who worked for EMC, wrote a fascinating white paper about the exponential growth of data storage.  Her predictions have been exceeded by mounds and mounds and mounds of data.  None of us foresaw the advent of micro-blogging in 1985, let alone text messaging on a cell phone! 

Recent research by IDC revealed that our digital universe grew by 62% during the last year alone.  The stunning amount of storage online at the time of the study was 800,000 petabytes, a measure better described at this link.  In short, it is one million gigabytes.  By the end of 2010, it is predicted that there will be 1.2 zettabytes online.  A zettabyte, incidentally, is roughly half a million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States.  Whew!  And I’m worrying about a few gigabytes around here. 

Computers and the internet have made our lives easier, much more public and availed methods to get income online for some of us too.  Pages upon pages of material sifted and listed, categorized and presented for our reading pleasure with a few keystrokes and a button click.  Since our content is cached and stored online indefinitely, one begins to wonder if our content will outlive our grandchildren.  Who can say?

Facebook Taking Heat Over Privacy Policy Changes

Social networking is a great way to connect with prospects and friends.  Over the past few months, there have been a lot of internet marketers advising that Facebook is a better advertising spot than Google.  When you must advertise, it is good to have choices where your ads will be targeted but has Facebook gone too far to serve up data for their advertisers?  It would appear so, if the US Federal Government has gotten involved.

In a nutshell, here is what has changed.  Previously, Facebook flushed personal information from their cache each 24-hours.  The privacy policy revision states that it will be held infinitely and that advertisers may use it for targeted promotions.  Many internet marketers have picked up on this nuance and developed products for sale to help people get more bang for their advertising buck.

Although Facebook users have the privilege of opting out, the user interface is confusing and most folks don’t know where to look for the opt-out.  Heck, finding your public profile link can be an absolute chore!  I do understand the genesis of Facebook as being sort of an online yearbook for a university.  This may explain the unwieldiness of it  but it doesn’t forgive the fact that we should be able to easily locate all news and important links by visiting out own profiles.  In other words, the obligation to track changes to the privacy policy of any social networking site is not the user’s.

Many Facebook users won’t care one way or the other.  Still, there are those among us who don’t enjoy unsolicited advertisements.  I’m sure one.  When I logged into my account today, I found a dozen ads that were geo-targeted to my location.  Local shops, product providers, service providers, Realtors and bars.  I’d rather not be bombarded like that.  I looked for a method of opting out and I just couldn’t find it! 

Facebook is not wrong to sell advertising space.  Their on-screen real estate is valuable and they must fund the site support.  All things being equal, Facebook ads are less expensive than Google Adwords.

The fact remains that nothing replaces good SEO with a solid keyword strategy.  In my online branding business, I never advocate that my clients use paid advertising.  I will provide some consulting services to help them learn the SEO ropes.  It isn’t a big secret or anything.  Most of the information someone needs to learn SEO is available online for free.  With interest, the ability to read, and the willingness to monitor results and experiment, perseverance will take your site where you’d like it to be.

Long Sales Letter or Long-Winded Video?

Perhaps I am the exception but it perturbs me that the long and predictable sales letter page is being replaced by an optin form leading to a long-winded video which has no details about its length and takes way too long to arrive at a point.

This trend reminds me of a desert character that I met recently on an outing.  Although the dialogue was entertaining, this person spent an hour telling my friend and I what he was going to tell us AFTER he told us why he was going to tell us what he was going to tell us.  Of course, we were free to leave at anytime but he seemed to have a need to tell his story, and I wanted to give him a chance.  In the end, it was a circular and one-sided discussion and he never really told us anything.  :D

But it was interesting to behold…

Time is a non-renewable resource

How we spend our time each day is one of our more important decisions.  An email or link sent through Skype sometimes elevates my interest .  When the destination turns out to be a video landing page that provides no text to scan, the journey is predictable.  Someone is going to try to sell me something.

While it is entirely possible that what they have to sell is something that I want or need, what is the benefit of biding my time through more than 30 minutes of self-aggrandizing dialogue, waiting to hear the price and being forced to endure so much “ but wait … there’s more” yammering?

deep discount or inventory liquidation?

People don’t like to be convinced of something’s worth.  Idle curiosity led me to computing the discount of the bonus items for the most recent Video Sales Letter so I could report it to you.  The add-ons for this particular Video Sales Letter offer were “conservatively” valued at $38,731.  Yet, this internet marketer was willing to “give” them to me for $1,997.  That’s nice, but is it believable? 

If you are quick with a calculator, you’ve already determined that this is a 94.8% discount.  I’m fairly certain that opting into this offer would have led multiple upsells and an offer to have a trial membership with on-going fees of $97 a month, or more.  I’ve seen it before.

But here is my point:  Liquidation sales are not a new idea.   In fact, Russell Brunson just had one and he didn’t pretend it was anything other than it was.  I truly admired that.

ambiguity, logic and the law of averages

During the dialogue, the marketer informed us that his secrets had only been released to a handful of people who had proven to him, during 8 months of trialing his methods, that what he had found was not a fluke.

What is a handful to an internet marketing millionaire with a huge list?  If the handful of people privy to the software and techniques have an 8-month head start, is there a prayer that these “hand selected niches” can be still penetrated and leveraged?

Even though I’m basically an optimist, this sort of talk makes me skeptical.  I learned in the racquetball court that timing and position are everything in life.  In other words, creating the money-making idea or being part of the cadre of founders is the place to be if you really want to be if you want to cash in on something.

If you are invited through a mass mailing, you are not in that group.  Applying their techniques to your current tactics has potential to improve your sales but please stick with your own niches.  Those “hand selected” niches are highly likely to be saturated.

Passionate Pursuits

My viewpoint is that wealth will follow the pursuit of something that you already are interested in and will enjoy working with every day.  Using that base formula, your marketing, whether or not it is a Video Sales Letter, will genuinely convey your enthusiasm and have greater potential to become viral.  Your time spent researching the niche is time that you would be spending anyway because it is interesting to you.  Your targeted list is easy to acquire and grow because you are interacting with people naturally already, through Twitter, Facebook,LinkedIn and your blog.

Identify those things that you truly enjoy and focus on what you like to do anyway and don’t invest yourself in the outcome.  It will come to you without a struggle if you maintain focus and don’t allow yourself to become distracted by the noise around you and frivilos get rich quick schemes.

Incoming search terms:

• sales letter vs sales video
• video letter versus sales letter conversion

PLR WordPress Websites … Turn Key or Not?

PLR Websites are a tool used by internet marketers as a way to get your site online quickly, complete with content.  If you’ve ever worked with them in the past and have an interest in learning the underlying technologies that make a website work, the instructions and a little time are more than adequate.

Everyone working on the internet must be aware of the rising popularity of WordPress.   If you aren’t, feel free to contact me to learn more about how you can leverage this amazing software for your websites, beyond the traditional blog.

Under the Covers

WordPress Websites require knowledge of more than simple HTML to set up correctly.  WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) that uses databases for content storage and PHP scripts to access that content for presentation on a website.  Learning how things all work together can be a rewarding journey if you like knowing how things work.  If you have limited experience with technology and become impatient when things don’t go as expected, your project can be less than fun.

The whole idea of PLR is that you can purchase content, slightly modify it, and put it up as your own.  This permits the ability to begin creating a web presence with a minimum of effort and can also save on expense of hiring someone who can adequately translate your vision into a functional website for a product or service launch.  If your goal is to monetize a site quickly and you lack the base technical skills you need to read into the instructions,  you are likely to be confounded by a PLR WordPress Website purchase.

PLR products will give you all of the information that you need about installation, usage and reselling privileges.  There are some generalized guidelines but PLR products do have differences so reading the license for your new software is advisable.

WordPress Database and Security Matters

A simple WordPress installation creates 11 tables, at this time.  WordPress requires that certain things are set up in order for the software to operate correctly.  These specialized data are stored in various tables within the site database.  The list of items includes a site URL and blog URL, if it is different.

While reviewing the installation script for a recent project, I saw that the PLR Product had altered the standard WordPress Installation script, apparently in an effort to bypass the need to make these changes in the database.  All things being equal, uploading the database export to the destination database on my client’s servers was easy.  As I analyzed the data that was stored in the tables, however, I realized that the instructions lacked very important information for truly owning the site and its data.

Another observation that I made about the setup script was that it didn’t follow secure WordPress Website installation practices that have been recommended for more than two years.  As we are all painfully aware, website security is critical … especially if it is a source of income for you.

A new user of WordPress, who may have been misled into believing it is a one-click install would not have known what to look for, let alone how to change it.

WordPress Setup

No one that I know puts up  a website, WordPress or otherwise, just for the sake of having a website alone.  At least I hope not!    The whole idea of having a website is that you want traffic to your site so you can share some specialized knowledge, build authority in a niche or campaign about products and services that you might be offering.  Once again, knowing what settings affect the visibility of your new WordPress website are the key.

The PLR software package that needed to be installed did not have the privacy settings nor ping list optimized for broad access to the new site.  Indeed, the website was up as predicted but nothing in the installation instructions addressed these critical and necessary changes so it could be found through organic searches and paid advertising campaigns.

The Virtually Marj Service team uses standardized procedure for optimizing settings, as well as a standard list of plugins for analyzing and improving traffic to the site.  This is our “secret sauce” so I won’t be laying all of that out for you here but if you’d like to know more about that, you can contact me.

To PLR or Not to PLR, that is the question

PLR Products are a great way to jumpstart your business and website and it is wonderful that people take the time to create them.  As with all business decisions, choosing the “right tool for the job” is an important step along the way.  As for PLR WordPress Websites, they are not recommended for people who do not have the underlying skills to read into the instructions or who don’t have staff to make them work properly as a business building tool

Incoming search terms:

• plr websites
• allintext top commentators powered by wordpress
• wordpress plr website
• wordpress plr ebooks
• wordpress plr ebook
• wordpress plr
• turnkey plr web site
• turnkey plr blogs
• plr website wordpress
• plr Web Design WordPress

Next Page »