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Archive for February, 2010

Goodbye Kitty is a hysterical site for all Hello Kitty haters. It has a multitude of products from t-shirts and sweatshirts, to totebags, aprons and cutting boards all depicting various forms of Hello Kitty’s demise. My favorites are Kitty Hit By a Car, Kitty Eaten, and Kitty Electrocuted. Great for a funny gift or a good laugh check it out www.goodbyekitty.net

If you would like to see your website or company featured on Free Shirt Friday click here

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This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

Goodbye Kitty

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If you’ve been doing email marketing for a while, you’ll eventually come across the ad swap. This is where you get together with another list owner and swap ads. You email his offer to your subscribers and he emails your offer to his subscribers. It’s a good way to leverage a mailing list and it’s free. The problem is finding reliable partners to swap ads with and setting it all up. How do you know the other party will mail your offer? Can you trust his list? What is his true subscriber count? These and other questions are what a new service call Safe-Swaps tries to solve.

What Is Safe-Swaps?

Safe-Swaps is the brainchild of Uncle Dimitry. The site is a place where other email list owners can swap ads with each other. Safe-Swaps automate most of the tedious works involved with ad swapping, like finding partners, setting up mailing dates, sending the ad copy, tracking the results, etc.

All members get a central calendar, where they can easily add swaps, track results and do everything they need to control the entire process. Safe-Swaps monitors everything for you – from the initial proposal to the actual mailing, and beyond. The system integrates seamlessly with Aweber and GetResponse, the Internet’s two most popular email marketing solutions.

Searching for Swap Partners

Safe-Swaps list their members in three groups – members with less than 2000 names, members with 2001 to 5,000 and members with more than 5,000 names. The list can show both verified and unverified lists. A verified list means Safe-Swaps has confirmed the list size. Verification is done by giving Safe-Swaps a temp login to your list provider so they can confirm the subscriber count.

Once you find someone you want to swap ads with, you just click the Book a swap link and it will bring up that member’s calendar with his booking schedule.

As you can see, Scott Case is all booked out until March 10th. If you want to swap ad with any members, simply click on an unbooked space in their calendar and it will pop up a proposal screen. If the other party agrees to the swap, Safe-Swaps does the rest. You can send swap proposals to any members and they can send proposals to you.

Membership in Safe-Swaps cost $24.95 a month. However, to encourage you to try out the service, the first month is only $1. If Safe-Swaps isn’t all you hope it would be, you can cancel your membership and they won’t bill you for next month. They won’t refund your dollar however.

If you’re an email marketer looking to leverage your list by doing some ad swaps with other email marketers, Safe-Swaps is worth checking out.

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As bloggers, we put a lot of effort into telling our readers how to do things.

We believe that if we can just give them enough informative content that they’ll subscribe to our blog and never leave. We try to become the best teacher we possibly can, instilling wisdom down into short, usable posts that our readers can put into action right away.

But what if that’s not what they really want?

What if they don’t want a teacher to tell them what to do?

What if all they’re looking for is a warm and understanding person who understands what they’re going through and is willing to love them, no matter what?

Someone like (you guessed it) Mr. Rogers.

Do you care how they feel?

Being a kid can be tough.

Everyone is always telling you to be quiet. No one wants to listen to what you think. Your parents make you go to bed, just when all of the fun is starting.

But not Mr. Rogers.

Fred Rogers made you feel like it was just you and him hanging out. He respected what you thought. He loved you, not because he had to (like your parents), but because he genuinely believed you were special.

After a while, you believed him. You felt special. You came back to the TV, day after day, just so you could feel that way again.

The best bloggers do that too. I read Copyblogger everyday for years before submitting this guest post, and it wasn’t just the information that kept me coming back. It was because, when I was done reading, it made me feel smarter, like I was one of the few people on the web who was truly in the know.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that’s a part of our job. Our job as bloggers isn’t just to inform our readers, but to make them feel special.

And yes, I realize it’s a little hokey, but I think Mr. Rogers can show us how. Listen to some of these quotes:

Lesson: For your audience to love you, first you have to love them. And they have to know it.

You know, I think everybody longs to be loved, and longs to know that he or she is lovable. And, consequently, the greatest thing that we can do is to help somebody know that they’re loved and capable of loving.

How much do you care about your readers? I mean, really care?

Mr. Rogers didn’t just talk to children on television. He also visited them in person. On a regular basis, he would go out into public and ask kids about themselves. He would bend down and look little boys and girls straight in the eyes, so they knew he was fully focused on them. Then they poured their hearts out to him right on the spot.

No, he wasn’t compensated for that time, and neither are we. Most popular bloggers spend inordinate amounts of time reading every comment, responding to every email, and watching what people say on Twitter. None of this has any direct effect on traffic, but what it does is build goodwill. One at a time, your subscribers find out that you really care, and it transforms them from readers into raving fans.

Lesson: Before you can be a leader, first you have to be a neighbor.

Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.

Mr. Rogers didn’t pretend to be better than the children who watched his show. He didn’t point out how young and ignorant they were. He didn’t appoint himself as an expert and command them to listen.

Instead, he decided to be their neighbor: someone just like them, who knew what they were going through, and was ready to help in any way he could, not because they were defenseless children, but because that’s what good neighbors do.

The same is true for bloggers. If you really want your audience to listen to you, you need to take the time to tell them your story, pointing out the ways you’re similar to them and inspiring them through your example.

Lesson: Create an environment where it’s okay to be imperfect.

I like you just the way you are.

Most kids are terrified, not just of getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar or their parents finding a bad grade on their report card, but of the possibility that they’ll do something so bad that their family will stop loving them. They believe that love is only for “good” children, and they worry that they don’t deserve it.

This quote was Mr. Rogers’ gentle way of correcting (and comforting) them. Over and over again, he would tell them that, “I like you just the way you are,” not just because it sounded good, but because it was what they needed to hear. They needed to know that love wasn’t conditional, and that they were safe enough around him to make mistakes and learn how to improve.

I believe it’s important for us to create the same environment for our readers. You may not realize it, but lots of your readers are probably intimidated by you, believing that they can never be as good as you are, and they’re afraid to reach out to you for help.

It’s important to remind them that you like them just the way they are. Maybe you don’t have to tell them as often as Mr. Rogers, but take a moment every few weeks to mention how impressed you are with the creative ways they’ve implemented your suggestions and how are honored you are to have them as readers.

It’s a small thing, but it matters.

Lesson: Keep what works, throw out what doesn’t, but always know what and why.

Propel, propel, propel your craft softly down liquid solution. Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, existence is simply illusion.

Every day, Mr. Rogers honed his craft, paying attention to even the smallest of details.

One time, he asked a fellow actor to say “the dog is going back home” instead of “the dog is going back to his owner.” He didn’t like the word owner because it was too possessive for the children viewers.

He also stuck with what worked. “Won’t you be my neighbor?” wasn’t just the theme song for the show; it was a way to set the tone at the beginning of every episode, getting children ready to listen. And so he repeated it, show after show for years.

It’s our responsibility as bloggers to hone our craft in the same way. You should experiment, not just with headlines or post ideas, but with new openings, new closes, new pictures, and even new words. It’s how you improve.

And at the same time, take a lesson from Fred Rogers and don’t be afraid to repeat what works.

Lesson: Seize your opportunity

When will your opportunity be?

Every day that you communicate from the heart, you have a chance to change the world.

Back in 1969, Nixon proposed cuts to PBS, leading the Senate to hold a hearing that would decide the future of the station. And who do you think appeared before them and melted their hearts with words?

Mr. Rogers.

He wasn’t the CEO. He wasn’t a Washington insider. He wasn’t even well-known to the committee. Yet he showed up, spoke from the heart, and transformed some of the toughest, most hardened politicians in the country into raving fans.

It was the opportunity to create change that many of us dream of, and he seized it. But here’s the real question:

When will your opportunity be?

Watch this video, and think about it. Because when it comes, we’ll be counting on you.

About the Author: Karl Staib writes about building stronger relationships and being happy at work: Work Happy Now! If you enjoyed this article, you may like to subscribe to his feed, follow him on Twitter, or read one of his most popular articles: How to Write a Career List.

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This guest post is written by David Siteman Garland, the founder/host of The Rise To The Top. The Rise To The Top is the #1 non-boring resource for building your business smarter, faster, cheaper, which features a daily Web show for entrepreneurs.

Ah, your email list: precious gold for inbound marketers, especially if you are looking to continually bring current clients (and hopefully future clients), customers and fans to your website.

Let’s assume you are taking advantage of all the great inbound marketing tactics (If not, what are you waiting for?!). Your website is a hub of amazing content. You are making connections and bringing in visitors from Facebook and Twitter. Your SEO strategy is top notch. Your blog is booming (or sizzling…or waiting to sizzle). That is all fantastic, but how do you turn traffic into subscribers that you have permission to stay in contact with?

There is often only a slight difference between someone entering their email address to subscribe and someone clicking away from your site, never to come back. In this video, you’ll learn 5 keys to boost your subscriber base and create a killer list to boost your business.

Photo Credit: Justin See

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I always thought it’d be fun to take a belly dancing class.  Who knew I’ve been missing out on an opportunity to learn a little something about personal branding?

In our top inbound marketing article of the week, author Lisa Barone talks about what she’s learned from her belly dancing instructor about how to create a thriving personal brand that’s based not on ego but rather on your favorite version of yourself.

1. What Belly Dancing Taught Me about Personal Branding

Author: Lisa Barone on Copyblogger

Lisa’s article uses her belly dancing instructor as example of why you should and how you can create a personal brand that garners attention as opposed to hate. 

Lisa offers step-by-step advice for creating a successful personal brand, expanding on the following lessons:

1. Claim your niche
2. Create your character
3. Treat people like humans
4. Make your brand accessible 

Marketing Takeaway: Be careful when creating your personal brand. It could distinguish you from a brand people love and a brand people hate

2. How to Deal With Negative Feedback in Social Media

Author: Josh Catone of Mashable

One of the most common excuses from businesses unwilling to engage in social media is their fear of negative feedback.  Social media is a conversation, and although conversation isn’t always positive, this shouldn’t mean you should shy away.  After all, if we’ve said it once we’ve said it a thousand times: People will talk about you whether or not you’re involved.

To help you deal with negative comments in social media, Mashable defines a helpful two step process which involves identifying the type of feedback, then deciding on the best reaction.   

Marketing Takeaway: Not all negative feedback should elicit the same response. Evaluate criticism first to determine the best course of action.

3. Top Ten Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Small Business Blog Using Twitter

Author: Mark Hayward on Problogger

While Mark admits that “learning how to master Twitter can seem a little bit like wrestling a hungry alligator,” he also reveals that through trial and error, he’s learned quite a bit about how to use Twitter to drive traffic to his blog. 

Mark’s 10 tips consist of his best advice for generating targeted traffic to your content, including the importance of a complete bio and a branded background, the significance of building a following and expanding your reach, as well as being sincere and developing collaborative relationships, etc. 

Marketing Takeaway: Effectively using Twitter for business benefits is a science that takes time and skill. 

4. 5 Landing Pages Tips To Boost Your Conversion Rate

Author: Christopher Wallace of Search Engine Land

Christopher’s article addresses a common problem he sees many B2B marketers experience: the inability to convert site visitors into leads.  His proposed solution is to control the experience a potential customer has when they reach your site by focusing on optimizing your landing pages.

His top 5 landing page tips?

1. Simplify your content
2. Shorten your lead forms
3. Use your analytics to drive decisions
4. Keep the conversion path in mind when using images
5. Leverage landing pages for extended user engagement  

Marketing Takeaway: Instead of wasting time trying to get more people to click on your site in search engines, focus your efforts on ways to better convert the traffic you’re already getting.

5. 7 Steps to Powerful Online Seminars

Author: John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing

Online seminars are increasingly replacing in-person meetings in the marketing world, as they’re more cost-effective and often have the ability to attract more attendees. 

Thinking of holding an online seminar? John encourages you to consider his 7 steps to make it a success, which include getting sponsored, educating (not selling), picking your platform, causing interaction, creating a backchannel, providing bonus content and promoting the archive.

Marketing Takeaway: Online seminars can be a profitable and cost-effective alternative to live events. 

Photo by David Yu 

 

Video: How to Use Social Media to Manage Your Company Brand Online

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There’s a trend of editors in the SEO world uptight about linking out.

A friend in the industry who guest blogs recently told me that he was told by his editor he couldn’t promise links to contributors who participated in guest interviews. Others have been seeing the same, and writers I work with have seen their editors take forever about updating bios [with the attendant links] …

WTF?

The big three engines encourage you to link out to quality sites and resources.

(From Matt Cutts, on the death of nofollow PageRank sculpting:

“Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?
A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.”)

(Found via SEO 2.0’s “Matt Cutts [admits] linking out [is] a ranking factor.“)

Google’s Librarian Newsletter featured an editor of the Librarian’s Internet Index – one of the highest quality and most exclusive directories around, today the ipl two – telling readers that linking out to good places is a positive signal.

Here’s a really simple question:

If you trust your writers enough to publish their articles, why don’t you trust them enough to publish their links as is?

Baseless Fear

In my opinion, there are a lot of editors and sites who are scared silly – especially in SEO and more generally in internet marketing – of offering links, and of offering links with quality anchor text.

They’re scared because they think this will mark their sites as bad or spammy. They’re scared because they’re thinking of search engines first and humans second.

When you link out with generous anchor text, you’re doing your readers a favour, too. They know what the subject of the page they get to is going to be. And those that click through will accordingly bounce less.

Imagine if Google sold AdWords and said you can only use brand-awareness copy, even on generic keywords. So you’re advertising car loans but you can only write copy like, “Visit ABC Lending Co. In business since 1905. A financial co you can trust.”

a) The CTR would be lower.
b) If the underlying page is actually about car loans (or SEO services etc.), then you’re creating a disconnect between your ad and the landing page. People expect to find out about ABC Lending and instead get a car loan application form.

On CTR: Sending visitors out to other sites is akin to scoring karma points. You always get more than you give, so creating a high CTR is a good thing – don’t worry about visitors leaving your site. They’ll be back.

To wit, if your name is Ann Smarty, and your profession is SEO consultant, which of ‘Ann Smarty’ and ‘SEO consultant’ would make more sense for me to use as anchor text when I link to your SEO consulting page?

If you’re Ontolo and your business is link building, doesn’t using link building as anchor text make sense?

If you do a group interview, shouldn’t you link to the interviewees’ sites to thank them? If they’re good enough to be cited, how can they not be good enough to be linked to?

And then SEOs will whine about newspapers not linking out. Geeez…

Gab Goldenberg wrote this on behalf of the Ireland search engine optimisation company, Red Fly Marketing. Their various divisions also play in the general fields of digital marketing and search-conscious web design.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

Hey! Editors! Leave Them Links Alone!

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I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month. Without them, there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.

CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

BOTW.org – Get a premier listing in the Internet’s oldest directory.

KnowEm – Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites, read an Interview with Michael Streko.

Interested in seeing your message here? There are banner and RSS advertising options available. Find out more information. Be sure to check out our new Sponsored post option.

Here’s a list of some other programs and products I reccomend

Thesis Theme for WordPress – Hands down the best theme on the market right now, read my Thesis Theme for WordPress Review.

Scribe SEO – Improve your blog posts with this easy to use built in tool, read my Scribe SEO Review.

TigerTech – Great Web Hosting service at a great price, read my Tiger Tech Review.
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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

Thanks to This Month’s Sponsors – February 2010

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Relevant, Consistently Updated Content + Flawless Technical Functionality & User Experience = Perfect Blog Launch

What’s missing from the equation above? You guessed it: blog promotion.

Creating a glitch-free blog with informative content means next to nothing without attracting readers.

Start promoting your blog today with these five effective tips:

1. Involve influential industry bloggers.

By linking to popular blogs, you can gain the attention of both the influential blogger and his or her readers.

But your blog won’t be the only one to benefit. You’ll be giving the other blog a little link juice – and be paying them a compliment at the same time.

Try out a few of these ideas for leveraging other blogs:

• Create a post around an interesting concept published by an influential blogger: Be sure to attribute the information to the blogger and link to his or her post. And don’t forget to offer additional unique insight to make the post your own.
• Interview an influential blogger and turn it into a Q&A post: That blogger is sure to link to your post, and his or her readers are likely to visit your blog as a result. Side benefit: Including the insight of a thought leader will help position you as a thought leader as well.
• Create a list of influential blogs: Include popular blogs from your industry, and include a link, short description and even a screenshot. Online Marketing Blog has successfully done this with its BIGLIST of online marketing blogs. Publish a blog post each week highlighting one or two new blogs to promote the list and acquire another link to the list.

2. Promote your blog via social media.

If your organization already has a solid presence on Twitter, Facebook or other social media channel, leverage your followers or fans to promote your new blog.

For example, when a new post goes live, create a short tweet with a link back to the post – and provide the link on your Facebook fan page.

A few tips to keep in mind:

• Whenever possible (we know how quickly 140 characters can be used up!), include the blog name in tweets and other social media messages.
• Auto-feed new posts to your social media accounts with tools like FeedBurner. But if you choose this option, make sure your headlines are as compelling as possible for social media.
• Maximize promotional efforts by asking employees to add the blog URL to their signatures and personal social media accounts. Employees can also re-tweet posts that they find interesting.

3. Create “link-bait” posts and “sticky” headlines.

Creating compelling headlines or posts that resonate with social web users is another way to garner attention for your new blog.

Try some of these ideas:

• Write counter-intuitive posts – i.e, “The 10 Worst Online Marketing Ideas” or “The 5 Quickest Ways to Get Caught in the Spam Filter.”
• Incorporate celebrities into posts (if appropriate for your industry) – i.e., “Top 10 Celebrity Tweets of the Week”
• Leverage the sticky headline formula, “number + adjective + sticky message” – i.e., Lee’s recent post, “10 Must Read Tips to Start a Small Business Blog” (see image below)

4. Promote the blog on your corporate website.

It’s important to gain some valuable real estate on the homepage of your corporate site – particularly in the early stages of getting a new blog up and running. Create a button with a link to the blog to appear on the homepage, or at the least provide a link to the blog in the nav. The Otter Group does a good job of promoting its blog on the homepage of its corporate website (see image below).

In addition to the homepage, ensure the blog is included in the upper and right-hand nav on all website pages. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to find your blog.

5. Promote the blog offline.

For all of the online channels available to promote your blog, there are just as many offline channels to leverage. Don’t limit yourself to the online world. Instead:

• Add your blog URL to business cards.
• Promote your blog at industry events.
• Get print publications to pick up blog posts.
• Use word of mouth to let customers and business partners know of the new blog.
• Include the blog URL in the boilerplate of press releases (and in online releases, too).

Of course, these five tips are just a few of many ways to promote and market business blogs. Whatever promotional efforts you choose, look for tactics that will help you reach business goals whether they are increasing awareness, garnering buzz in the media or driving additional website traffic.

What tactics have you used to promote your blog?

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Posted by great scott!

This week, we’ve got a couple of newcomers to Whiteboard Studios! Our very own Jen Lopez and Danny Dover (whom you should know well thanks to Jen’s Meet the Mozzers post) are pinch-hitting for our globe-trotting CEO. Let’s all give them a big welcome.

We did a PRO Site Review Webinar last week and noticed a few SEO issues that are all-too-common. So, in this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Jen and Danny will walk you through five common areas where people often make mistakes, and explain quick fixes that can help you improve, including bot blocking, courting the Linkerati, identifying problems using Top Pages, analyzing conversion rate, and addressing canonicalization.

Here are the charts Danny referenced in the video:

     
                                                                                       Courtesy of WebsiteOptimization.com

Also, if you’d like to learn more about tracking first-touch attribution in your analytics, Whiteboard Friday alumnus, Will Critchlow, wrote about it here.

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The Shoemoney System will be reopening its doors this Tuesday March 2nd at 3pm EST. The last time Shoe opened his system, he limited enrollment to 500 students and sold it out in only 20 hours. One of the reasons for limiting enrollment was to make sure the server infrastructure could handle the load. All bugs has been worked out and the Shoemoney System is ready to take in another group on Tuesday.

I thought it would be cool to give you a sneak peek inside the Shoemoney System. The following video gives you a quick walk though of the Shoemoney System. It’s what you’ll see when you enroll in the System on Tuesday.

Jeremy has re-arranged the course material so that you get to make your first $100 before the first 30 days are over and your first $500 before 60 days are up, and your first $1,000 by the time you’ve been on board for 90 days. It’s all about results. Put your name on the early notification list to ensure your spot this Tuesday.

The Shoemoney System Early Notification List

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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