Down In The Trenches – Internet Marketing

Hey gang,

Have you heard of the Gdrive yet?

Read this short article and let me know your thoughts.

Although the prospect of having access to your info from anywhere is appealing to me, I’m not sure I’m quite ready to give anyone full control of my hard drive.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,482761,00.html

Ya think this one has MicroSoft shaking in their boots a bit?

Scot

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Hey Gang,

I’ve noticed a trend here in recent weeks on interest in Auto-Blogging.

I’d like to share with you a little known FREE, script I have been testing out over the past few weeks and have fallen in love with.

This has to be the easiest install ever, you simply upload the file into your WP Plugins folder and that’s it.

The script was designed by a Medical Doctor in India by the name of Satheesh and is called YAAB, (Yet Another Autoblogger):

http://www.psypo.com/2008/12/yet-another-autoblogger-for-wordpress-is-out.html

Comparing to other autoblogger plugins, YAAB has/can

1. Convert each rss item to separate blog entries (MODE : DUPLICATE)

2. Create an automatic blogging carnival in your blog using rss feeds. Summaries of entries from different blogs will be published in to single posts. (MODE: CARNIVAL)

3. You can post blog using SMS. Detailed tutorials will be published soon. (MODE: SMS BLOGGING)

4. You can run a automatic youtube clone website by automatically embedding youtube videos in your posts. (MODE : YOUTUBE CLONING)

5. Built in cron jobs. No need to use external or servers cron jobs. (many servers do not allow cron jobs)

6. No need of curl extension in server.

7. No need to install external rss classes like simplepie. Yaab uses magpie that is built in with wordpress.

8. Interactive interface where you will never get confused.

9. Update alert at plugin dashboard.

10. Free and GPLv3

This script is extremely versatile and easy to use.

If you have WP blogs sitting around collecting digital dust, give this little gem a whirl, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Enjoy!

Scot

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OK, this may go against everything you ever read about building links to your websites, but here goes…

No-follow links are every bit as important as links that don’t have no-follow tags, and everyone is ignoring them. You don’t get the added traffic from no-follow links, but Google counts them just the same as do-follow links when grading your incoming links.

A link is a link, is a link, the only difference is the power or authority of the page it comes from.

Now that we have that out of the way, here is the easiest system you will ever find to build backlinks to any page you want.

First of all, you’ll need to sign up for Google Alerts, don’t worry, it’s free and you can do so right here:

http://www.google.com/alerts

Next, enter the search term you are looking to rank for, toggle the Type box to Blogs and set the how often to whatever suits your needs and enter an email address you check often.

Then, as the alerts begin to come in, simply visit the blogs and add comments. Keep in mind, these cannot be drive-by comments, make them insightful and on point with the topic at hand. Also make sure and use the keyword you are targeting as anchor text in your posts if at all possible.

Anchor text is the actual text in the link, the blue part of the content that you click to be taken to other sites/pages. If you are adding links to a site about motorcycles, make sure your anchor text matches your title tag on the page the link points to.

This part is crucial!

Then build additional pages on your site using other related keywords and rinse and repeat what I explained above.

It really is as simple as that.

Depending on the topic you are targeting, you can add dozens of links a day and before you know it, you are going to be on the first page of Google.

Here are a couple sites that you can use in addition to what I explained above using the same techniques, these sites however give you blogs that use DoFollow tags

http://www.dofollowblogs.com

http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver/

http://www.stephanmiller.com/the-ultimate-dofollow-blog-list/

http://followlist.com/

This should keep you busy for a while

Good luck with this, let me know how you make out.

Enjoy!

Scot

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Hey Gang,

As I logged into Google today to do some comparison shopping for car insurance since my oldest son is about to get his drivers license, I noticed something peculiar about Google’s listings.

If you look to the right of the title lines of each listing, you’ll see an up arrow and an X.

When you hover over the up arrow it says “Promote”.

When you hover over the X is says “Remove”.

I don’t know about you, but this really worries me.

What’s to stop someone from opening a sweat shop in some third world country, give out a ton of proxy IP’s and systematically remove all the competition from the markets they want rankings in?

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Scot

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One of the toughest areas to understand, for the new Internet Marketer, is finding a niche and profiting from it. There are the challenges of competition, saturation, “freebie seekers” vs. buyers, seasonal trends, customer profiles, prices to charge, etc. Even the matter of what day of the week to make an offer is different from market to market.

Market research begins with finding a ready pool of buyers. It’s relatively easy to attract people to a source of information, if it’s free. Driving hungry buyers, with wads of cash to spend right now, to an offer they “don’t refuse” is a skill that takes knowledge and practice. It all starts with locating active buyers. Never make the mistake of trying to sell something that people don’t want. Go to where people are already spending money and help them spend some more.

The best place for the novice to begin (and the expert to expand) is people who are desperate. Here’s an example: if you have a wretchedly painful toothache for long enough, even a phobia about dentists won’t stop you from finding one and getting help. You certainly won’t mind paying a premium for an immediate appointment and quick relief. Now, consider all the painful, embarrassing, obsessive, nagging problems that people have, from physical challenges to greed for money, from lonely hearts to acne scars.

If you can find an affiliate program for a product or service that caters to such a buyer, or you can create one yourself, you have the makings of a niche market that will pay top dollar for your solution. Remember, these people are either hurting or greedy and have a powerful emotional drive to spend NOW. There is one rule you need to follow with this type of market – deliver the goods. In fact, make a point of overdelivering on your promises to them. You’ll create a customer that will happily send more customers your way, via word of mouth advertising or your own affiliate program for your product or service.

Beyond desperate buyers, there are the folks with money to burn and a need for the best. Some of the most profitable online businesses serve rich individuals (and companies with big budgets) with exclusive products and services. One pair of designer sunglasses can retail for thousands of dollars. One corporate account for holiday gift giving can net you enough money to buy as many pairs of designer sunglasses as you could possibly want. Consider the luxury market when investigating niches. The amount of money spent in these niches is disproportionately large, when compared to the total amount of money spent online.

Finally,  there’s your personal passion. If you love fishing, needlework, dogs, rock climbing, post cards or any of the hobbies and interests that appeal to other people, there’s a way to “monetize” that hobby for fun and profit. You can create an Authority site, a monthly membership site, deliver products and services in your niche or simply blog about it and put up advertising that appeals to your readers. By exploring the Internet for others who share your passion (and are making a buck doing it), you can begin to develop an idea that could become an excellent source of income for you.

The bottom line in Market Research is locating a market of buyers FIRST. Don’t put the cart before the horse, here. You may have what you think is the greatest idea since the invention of round, wheel-like thingies, but will sadly discover that no one wants to buy one from you. Find the river of money first and bring a bucket.

Scot

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One of my members posted a link to a cool customized Google SE that specializes in finding blogs and forum sites that allow you to include a backlink to your sites.

I have not played around with it a lot yet, but the few tests searches I did, I found some great results.

Use this for useful, informative posts, not spam, and you should be able to build yourself a very nice chunk of backlinks in no time.

DoFollow Blogs & Forums Search

Enjoy!

Scot

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You may already know that RSS stands for Remote Site Syndication, but what does that mean to you and more importantly, how can you use RSS to help you make more money?

Simply put, RSS feeds are written in a computer language called XML, a special mark up language much like HTML. This means that they have mechanisms included that identify structures in a document. The structures define the content and how that content will be displayed within that document. RSS is what makes big news websites possible: RSS files are used to create a data feed which will deliver headlines, links or virtually any other piece of information to a channel viewer application, commonly called a news reader.

These readers are subscribed to certain RSS feed URL’s and constantly monitor them over the Internet, alerting the user when ever any new information has been added to the feed. So, how can you use this to your advantage as an internet marketer?

Here are the most popular ways to integrate RSS feeds into your marketing effort:

You can use RSS to supplement any email marketing you are currently doing, take advantage of RSS feeds to drive traffic to your blog or sales site or create your own RSS feeds so your messages and information show up on thousands of websites, blogs and desktops online.

Although many marketing gurus will claim that email marketing isn’t dead, with the advent of increasing spam complaints and filters coupled with the threat of viruses originating from an email, more and more people are leery of even opening your email. So even if you have a large email list, the likelihood of your emails being opened is becoming increasingly slim.

With RSS, your messages won’t ever get filtered and they will have a much higher chance of actually being read vs. email. Your marketing results can only be better when people actually read your message. You can even incorporate autoresponders in conjunction with RSS.

Including RSS feeds on your content site or blog allows you to add fully dynamic theme-related content to your web pages making your site or blog very popular with the search engines. The constantly updated content is exactly what the search engines crave and helps increase your search engine ranking, driving more traffic to your page.

Probably the best way to use RSS to help your online marketing efforts is to create your own RSS feed. This way your information will be published on any website that is using the RSS feed you are supplying that information to. There’s even automated software to submit your RSS feeds to the various directories that supply the feeds to marketers using them on their websites as described above.

RSS is still a relatively unknown method of driving traffic to websites, but is becoming more popular every day. As an internet marketer, this is a great opportunity to take advantage of this new technology before the rest of the online community jumps on the bandwagon.

Scot

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