Make Money Online

Know what you want…

Seems simple right? In my experience, dealing with hundreds of clients over the last 12 years, very few can actually quantify what they want.

Some tell me they want marketing help (far too vague), but when I ask about success metrics, they almost invariably cite traffic as their primary success measure. Now, not to discount traffic, but that’s not what pays the bills is it?

ROI shouldn’t be calculated on traffic*, but by counting other other measures. If your aim is engagement, count comments, reviews, buzz. If your aim is sales, count overall revenue increases, direct conversions, increase of average sales…

In an SEM campaign in particular, knowing what you want is vital, because every click costs you. Your campaigns should be highly segmented, helping you know where each dime goes, how each ad performs, how each keyword you’re buying contributes to the goals you’ve set.

Search Engine Guide has an excellent post up today about segmenting your keywords:

There are four distinct keyword segments each representing a different phase of the searcher’s buying cycle. After going through the process above you should be left with one or more groups of keyword that can be optimized into a page or several pages. The next step is to take each group and segment them even further based on those keyword segments.

Once you know what you want, you can do A/B testing to determine where your money’s going and whether or not your plan is working.  Know what you want and you have a heck of a lot better chance at getting it.

*there are a few, rare exceptions to this rule

Social Bookmarking

See more here:
Online Marketing Goals

Trendspotting Market Research came out with a report about predictions for social media trends in 2010. I found it interesting that the predictions were in 140 characters, Twitter style. It definitely makes it easy to read. From this report, the major trends predictions in 2010 were suggested as mobile, location, transparency, measurement, ROI and privacy.

Some of my favorite predictions included:

• “Mobile becomes a social media lifeline.”
• “Companies get serious about social media, elevating their focus to social business.”
• “By the end of the year we’ll have a new interface for status updates that looks nothing like a microblog.”
• “Search will get more social: real time content in results, information from social network friends to results, using collective information from other web users.”
• “Social media in 2010 will cease being the shiny new object and instead, become part of the everyday lexicon on business.”
• “We’re going to see an explosion of things that use location.”

Are you ready for 2010? Do you have any trend predictions of your own regarding social media?

Read the rest of the report below:

Read more here:
2010 Trend Predictions in Social Media

A regular workout routine is recommended for a healthy lifestyle. Though, sometimes we forget that working out is not only for the body but also for the mind. Have you flexed your brain lately?

When we blog, we don’t usually think of what is happening in the background but blogging affects us in many different ways. Beyond producing helpful content and connecting with great people, it is believed that blogging helps improve our cognitive learning skills. As we challenge ourselves with these interactions our brains are “flexing” and becoming stronger. Taking it a step further, the more involved we are with reading and responding to comments, the further our writing evolves and improves. Engaging through blogging also facilitates an environment in which we are able to expand our opinions and open our minds on different topics. As a result, many times we are exposed to a perspective we may never have thought of.

So let’s continue to produce great content and connect with others while getting that ever so important workout!

Read more:
Blogging: A Workout for the Brain

According to a breaking story on Mashable, today brings big news from LinkedIn, which finally invited developers to contribute to its social media platform. The new LinkedIn Developer Platform is expected to spur the onslaught of new apps you can use with LinkedIn – much like those available for Facebook and Twitter. In fact, you can expect integration with TweetDeck as early as this week, according to the article.

What does this mean for Internet Marketing?

We’ll have to wait and see, but for those of you that currently leverage social media to network and market your business, it appears you will have even more options. Of course, instead of Roller Coaster Kingdom, Farmville, Mafia Wars and the other time-suckers you can find on Facebook, I hope we can expect more useful business oriented applications.

For starters, I’d like to see a way to sync all my friends (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) so I could group (segment) them more efficiently, and communicate (market) to them from one application, with the ability to choose my platform (medium)…

What types of apps would you like to see for LinkedIn?

Excerpted from:
What Type of Apps Do You Want for LinkedIn?

With 2009 almost coming to an end, we tend to reflect on the past year to remember all those memorable moments. Taking that a step further, The Webby Awards has just released what it considers being the 10 most influential moments of the past decade.

Here’s a look at the top 10 moments:

• Craigslist expands beyond San Francisco (2000)
• Google AdWords launches (2000)
• Wikipedia launches (2001)
• Napster shuts down (2001)
• Google’s IPO (2004)
• Online video revolution (2006)
• Facebook opens up, Twitter takes off (2006)
• The iPhone debuts (2007)
• U.S. presidential campaign (2008)
• Iranian election protests (2009)

With technology continuously evolving, let’s see where the next decade brings us in advances.

See original here:
The Webby Awards Announces the Past Decade’s Top 10 Internet Moments

You may or may not yet have experienced the new retweet feature of Twitter, but the service has confirmed it is in the process of rolling out the feature to everyone. This feature and its attributes are progressively surfacing. Some interesting functions include:

• It can be turned off on a per-user basis
• The retweet area will have three tabbed sections: retweets by others, retweets by you and your tweets, retweeted
• You can still use the “RT” style for retweeting
• There will be a retweet timeline shown just below the individual tweets (perhaps a cleaner look)

The mechanics of the features were first explained by @Biz in a post entitled, Project Retweet: Phase One. Of course, all features have their pros and cons and will take some getting used to. Some additional information can be found at TechCrunch.

Original post:
The Reinvented Retweet

In the past eleven years, Google has been pushing out product after product, many of which collect personal information from the users. There are now so many products that many of us use, that it is hard to keep track of what you have registered for and where to find it. Once you are using Gmail, Reader, Calendar, Picassa, and a plethora of other Google interfaces, monitoring your security settings can become a very tedious task. Now, however, there is help.

Last week, Google launched Google Dashboard, a user interface that provides a simple and useful summary of all the products you are signed up for. When signed in to your Dashboard, you are presented a list of all your Google products and direct links to your personal settings for each. Now is a good time to brush the dust off of some of those Google products you haven’t used in a while by logging into your Dashboard. For help understanding Google Dashboard, watch this video.

Credit:
Manage Your Google Products

Brian R. Walton, who led online marketing for brands such as Sandals Resorts, Beaches Resorts, Walt Disney World Resorts & Disneyland Resort, will be hosting a free webinar to discuss the following topics:

- Identify where the consumer is in the Vacation Planning Cycle
- How to use the right online marketing tactics and message based on which phase of VPC
- Consideration/Information Gathering
- Itinerary Planning
- Experience
- Return Visits

The event will take place on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register please visit: Online Marketing for the Hospitality Industry

Go here to read the rest:
InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Online Marketing for the Hospitality Industry

Most SEO experts will tell you that “Content is King.” And it’s true… Both search engines and people visit Web sites for the content. Unlike a search engine, however, users are looking for content to help them solve a problem or complete a task.

When you provide your visitors with the information they need, in a format they can easily digest, you’ll discover your conversion rate improves, along with your bottom line.

Unfortunately, people don’t really read on the Web – they skim. And if your content does not convince them to take the next step – whether it’s to buy an item, download a file, or click through to the next page – within a few seconds, they’ll quickly move on to one of your competitors.

Help your users (and your site’s performance) by feeding them the information they need, in a format they can easily digest. In other words, make it as READABLE as possible.

10 Tips for Improving Web site Readability

1. – Make it easy for users to find what they need by providing accurate, descriptive headings.
2. Avoid “word clutter” – Be concise. Don’t use two words, when one will suffice.
3. Keep paragraphs short – Long blocks of copy intimidate users. Keep blocks of text short – about 2 to 3 sentences.
4. Use lists – Aid comprehension by presenting information in a numbered or bulleted list.
5. Separate thoughts – This helps users find the information they need quickly. Limit the copy to one theme per page, and one thought per paragraph/section.
6. Leverage illustrations – Used wisely, images can convey your message quickly. Support your copy with visuals – just don’t overdo it, or oyu will create a distraction.
7. Utilize white space – Organize your page layout. Does it look neat and clean? Keep your design simple, and your copy will be easier to digest
8. Check your facts – Readers want up-to-date, reliable and accurate information, If your information is bad, it won’t natter how easy it is to read!

For more tips on how to improve the readability of your Web site, check out Letting Go of Words by Janice Redish.

More:
10 Ways to Improve Web site Readability

Jay Berkowitz will be hosting a free webinar to discuss the following topics:

- How to get a virtual sales force selling for you
- Selecting the right solution
- Recruiting affiliates
- Best practices for program management
- How to stay current on new programs and technologies
- Payment strategies

The event will take place on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST and to register please visit: Ten Golden Rules of Affiliate Marketing Webinar

See original here:
InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Ten Golden Rules of Affiliate Marketing Webinar

You may have seen a plusbox below some AdWords ads that displays several products right on the Google results page. This is because Google has been giving certain advertisers a chance to participate in their beta test of combining AdWords ads with Google base to display product feeds directly below ads.

If you want to be a part of the test, however, you are out of luck because the test is coming to an end. Google will now be assessing feedback from the advertisers that participated. Look out for availability of this feature in the near future.

More:
Product Plusbox Beta Test Commencing

TenGoldenRules.com VP, Margie Schneider will be hosting another InternetMarketingClub.org Webinar focusing on creative PPC strategies. The event will take place on Wed, Oct 28, 2009 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM EDT and to register, please visit; PPC Strategies Webinar.

Read more here:
InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Webinar On PPC Strategies

Jay Berkowitz will be hosting a free webinar along with Warren Whitlock, Gail Goodwin and @Iconic88 to discuss the best ways of doing business and building your personal brand on Twitter. The event will take place on Wed, Oct 21, 2009 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM EDT and to register, please visit; The Rock Stars of Twitter Webinar.

Read more:
InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Rockstars Of Twitter Webinar

Building backlinks (links from other websites) to your website is a common tactic in most search engine optimization campaigns. Knowing how many backlinks your website has and monitoring the growth is an important aspect of assessing the success of your linkbuilding campaign. If you don’t know how to determine the number of backlinks your website has, here is a simple command to give you an idea.

In Yahoo search, use the following query:
linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com -site:www.yourdomain.com

Of course you will substitute “yourdomain” with your actual domain name. For example, if you wanted to know how many webpages link to the www.tengoldenrules.com website, the Yahoo query would look like this:

linkdomain:www.tengoldenrules.com -site:www.tengoldenrules.com

This will provide you a good estimate of how many backlinks your website has.

Excerpt from:
How Many Backlinks Does Your Website Have?

It is a long standing debate on whether or not to bid on phrases in pay per click that your website already ranks for organically. One school of thought would ask why someone would pay for clicks on a search engine results page in which their website is already ranking for organically. There are actually several answers to that question, one being that it gives a website the opportunity to use different messaging variations.

Various messaging may be attractive to some people but not others. The messaging/offer included in your organic search listing may attract clicks from some users, but not others. Additionally, you do not have complete control over the messaging that is displayed in your organic listing. Adding a paid listing with a different message or a specific offer can appeal to an additional cross-section of searchers. You also have much more control over what is displayed in a pay per click listing than what is displayed in an organic listing.

Go here to read the rest:
Test Different Messaging on a Single Search Engine Results Page