Marketing Pilgrim

By Chelsea Blacker

You know you work in search when you:

1. have more logins than you do pairs of socks.

2. friended Danny Sullivan before you met him.

3. don’t think you’re a Cuttlet.

4. typically have at least 3 different browsers open simultaneously.

5. have considered dating a college student/education professional to get links.

6. grocery shop and think “my average CPC is higher than that apple/steak/wine bottle.”

7. get really excited when your map overlay is light green in a 3rd world country.

8. look for house numbers 404 and 300 with the same enthusiasm as house 69.

9. receive grammatically incorrect emails form India offering to write you copy.

10. cannot convince your friends you do more than surf the web all day.

11. were disappointed to learn SEO by the Sea is in Virginia.

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By Chris Tynski

For anyone who’s joined and had success in the Internet Marketing world, there are likely a great number of things you have learned over the years that allow you to be successful today.

This list is compiled from my own experience with Internet marketing,  it consists of the top 5 lessons I’ve learned in 3 areas of Internet Marketing that I believe are essential to success.

These areas include:

Mentality/Frame of Mind

Business Direction

and Marketing Technique.

Mentality:

1. Fake it till you make it.

When you start out with Internet Marketing, you WILL be overwhelmed.   The breadth and depth of this field is staggering, and it’s changing every day.  Don’t let this deter you. Trust that you will eventually “get it” , it will come together, and you will begin to see the big picture soon enough.

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By Frankie Fredericks

“There is only now.”  Eckhart Tolle

A common problem for those who have already optimized their website, and have created a wide array of content across social media outlets and networks is how to fight the traffic stagnation that comes after the initial launch of your comprehensive search engine optimization and online marketing campaign.  The key to fighting this is as true in traditional marketing as it is in search engine optimization and management.  This key is relevancy.

Whether you are selling a product or service, promoting a mission, campaigning for a politician, or just pushing for internet PR, you must cater to the impeding change of focus from static content of websites to fresh content available on blogs and social networks.  Such things as Twitter Trends and blog search engine WhosTalkin.com.  In short, your content must be relevant to now, as in THIS MOMENT.

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By Paige Filler

Let me preface this post by saying: If you don’t take the time to read you will miss out on the massive prizes below. Really. And it’s easy to win, no skills required.

Read on…

An Experiment in Social Web

It is starting to feel like the 60s again with everyone ‘experimenting’ (on the web). So, I figure the time has come for a little experiment of my own…(I’m Paige by the way).

Enabler SEO

So, what is “Enabler SEO”? Well, it is a term I made up especially for you (I am sure it has many other names), but nonetheless it’s a principle, so you are welcome to call it what you want. Here is how it goes:

The biggest successes on the web all enable people to do something. Simple.

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By Justin Briggs

SEO: time-intensive, ever changing, and highly misunderstood. Creating a website design that is appealing, while also search engine friendly, is one of the hardest parts about SEO web design.

If you’re a designer, are your designs really search friendly?

A lot of misconceptions about SEO still exist in the web design community and many designers, who have at least some knowledge, are often acting with outdated information. Once a designer understands the value of SEO, there is still the concern of how to keep a design attractive, while also being search friendly.

Designers love beautiful websites and SEOs love optimized content and code, but neither should fool themselves, because these days, both matter. In that spirit, I’ve put together a list of 9 SEO tips that help keep your stunning website optimized for search engines. Instead of focusing on SEO design basics, I’ll be covering some design-focused SEO tips, to show how SEO and beautiful design elements can co-exist.

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By Asif Anwar

Article Theme Versioning, was chosen as the name for this strategy. Because, you make many unique articles by making version of a specific theme of an article. So, each version contain the same theme. With Article Theme Versioning, you can create hundreds of articles from just one seed article. It involves manual versioning, word spinning, and sentence shuffling. The problem with spinning softwares is that you have to stay on their mercy for quality. But, in Article Theme Versioning with MS Excel you have the total control of your contents.

Why do you need Article Theme Versioning?

• Content was the King, but recently unique contents are the new King.
• Google now uses a duplicate content filter, which filters out your website if you have duplicate contents. Soon the other search engines will follow the same strategy to wipe out Plagiarism.

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By Richard Kirk

People browsing your website via mobile devices are an ever-increasing segment of total website visitors. The proliferation of smartphones and increases in mobile browsing are key trends for 2009, with smartphone shipments worldwide set to grow by 23% this year, (despite a 9.1% decline in the mobile handset market). This not just a western phenomenon; in developing nations the cost of a computer makes a web-enabled mobile device even more attractive. With many companies looking to expand into new markets during the recession, this is an interesting point to note. Importantly, as mobile web use grows, the personal experiences of users are more likely than ever to be shared both online and in ‘the real world’.

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By Al Scillitani

You can excel in all marketing channels individually, yet never achieve overall optimal marketing health. Right now you are only feeding each marketing channel breads and grains, but they all need their fruits and vegetables too. Take your next online promotion to the next level.

I see a lot of articles on improving paid search, SEO, email, or social media, but not many on how these channels must all work together to improve overall conversions of a promotion. Everyone needs to understand that online promotions should work in sync with each other, not independently. By aligning all your promotional efforts in all channels, you are increasing your chances of marketing success. When I write “all,” I mean all: social media, email, paid search, affiliates, and any other channels you are using. Imagine increasing your conversion rates by .5 percent to two percent, or possibly more, in each marketing channel.

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By Marta Turek

What is SEO?

“Suppose it’s got something to do with when doing a search, getting the most and best hits back, i.e. no crap.”

“A practise that improves performance and relevance of result sets for search engines. Never heard of it as a service.”

“No understanding at all…is it something that makes Google work better?”

“My guess is that you pay for a good position on the search engine.”

That is how 4 of 33 respondents in a closed study defined SEO. This very basic study was conducted among tertiary qualified professionals to provide a snapshot of the ‘general public’s ‘ understanding of search engine optimization. All respondents were asked not to perform any research prior to answering the questions.

Interestingly, quite a few people (30%) considered SEO to be a practice performed by the search engines themselves, such as changing the algorithm to improve performance and deliver more relevant results.

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By Chinmoy Kanjilal

Readers, SEO has always been a field of tough competition and deep interest amongst the netizen, especially webmasters. Today, I will let you in to my biggest SEO secrets related to Technology blogs. One top secret of SEO is the content. And I always prefer it in a compiled manner, point-wise. So here is Chinmoy’s SEO Guide to success.

• Choosing a good domain (Applicable if you do not have a domain yet)
  

• your domain will reflect your website content and your niche. Keep it relevant.
• Check over at www.domaintools.com for availability of your desired domain. Also look at the typo-domains. If they are huge in number with good ranks ,opt out. Chose a different domain.
• If your domain is available, check for competition in your niche with similar domain names.

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By Anthony Verre

If You’re Not An 800 lb Gorilla, You’re Guerrilla

It’s no big secret: PPC is competitive. And any advantage you can get is always an edge. The hardest part is finding the edge you can leverage effectively, efficiently, and strike a resonating blow. It sounds like war because it is. Pay-Per-Click generals need to find and exploit the weaknesses of competition.

Small businesses face a number of challenges in the PPC battleground, chief among them being that they have small-ish/smaller budgets than their larger counterparts. Meaning, for highly competitive and general keywords within your vertical, it’s difficult to compete. As such, brute force click-bids are impossible leverage because your competition will effectively price you out. Therefore, small businesses must leverage the one strength that a majority of them possess: small guerrilla marketing.

Exploiting the Competitor’s Strategy: Research

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By Peter Zale

The New Environment

The growth of blogs, Wikis, sites like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Huddle and others point to the increasing use of the Web as an environment for users to communicate and collaborate with one another in the facilitation of work, play and self-expression. This has caused a profound shift of consumers from diffuse and passive to active community members whose immediate and worldwide communicative ability exerts powerful influence over the perception of brands.

This new reality means that a brand or company that gives real user value will not only be popular for the value it gives but also will promote its brand across the Web. The dynamic that has changed the most is the existence of interactivity. Formerly advertising messages were of course one sided. Now, with the ability of a person to respond or interact with the message, or the medium of the message, a whole new dynamic sprouts. From this, we can fashion what I will call Zale’s Rule (unless someone else has already come up with it): The effectiveness of the message delivered in a medium increases in direct proportion to the utility the medium (not the message) gives the user.

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