Link Building and Viral Marketing
Ryan gives a twist on link building offering readers a different approach to link building. His advice? Write one quality article and submit it to an article directory. Which is different from most advice where quality doesn’t count.
Viral Marketing Terminology
Matthew Peters over at PandemicBlog gave a excellent article separating the vocabulary of Social Media marketing. Filled with sharp graphics, this post will explain the words behind the buzz marketing.
Link Building? Try Facebook
Facebook isn’t for fun, social connections. Now facebook can build links to your blog, or website. Now, introducing the Facebook Backlinks App.
Marketing Advice at 105 mph
Karen Post, a columnist at Fast Company, gives some advice about changing a new business venture. She offers a few tips and some well-worn clichés. The cheese advice includes “hire only specialists” and “stay connected and communicate honestly with your brand evangelists,” but in her defense she rescues herself with some bite-size advice, “Work from a Business Requirements Document (BRD) first.”
Promoting Affiliate Products
Derek Gehl, a frequent writer for Entrepreneur Magazine, points to focus as the success-factor when running an affiliate business. Here he attempts to answer a question a reader submitted, how do I write copy to attract visitors and buyers? His advice includes focus, focus, and yes of course, focus.
“Focus on your individual product pages, not on your main homepage, focus on one specific problem that each of those individual products solves, and focus your pay-per-click and search marketing efforts so that every ad and article you write addresses that one specific problem and takes visitors straight to the landing page for the product that solves that problem.”
Turning Browsers Into Buyers: How to improve conversion rates.
With only 3% of on-line customers buying, according to a survey by Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation, converting all traffic can boost profit tremendously. Dan Briody, does two case studies on how companies are improving conversion ratios.
Stamps.com, based on Broidy’s case study, found success by, explaining what they did, move the logo closer to viewers’ eyes, clarify the offer, make action calls clear, and find the perfect image.
While, Jigsaw Health saw success by keeping viewers on the page, thinking small (shorter headlines), simplifying the buying process, removing clutter, and creating urgency.
Keyword Sniping - Finding And Choosing Profitable Niches
Keyword sniping precludes an extremely focused effort on a single keyword, says Curt. Then goes on to give her readers some creative keyword exercises to find profitable keywords — to snip. Then an exercise to evaluate competition and advertisements, from her view, “most people really struggle to come up with new ideas for keywords.”
Measuring the Success of Your Blog
In a new column at Dosh Dosh, he gives a simple answer saying, success happens “when you meet or exceed the goals you have set for your blog.” But, his favorite measure of success is income — pure cash. In his mind, “Income by itself denotes ability” suggesting that it takes ability to build traffic and ability to convert that traffic.
Time for Reality
Darren Rowse, the creator of Problogger, gives his thoughts about the reality of earning an income through blogging. After a Wall Street Journal article revealed his earnings, Rowse tells the real story. Rowse looks at the work behind creating an extremely profitable blog, noting that a blog “takes a concerted long term effort,” a blog “takes luck,” and a blog “takes a lot of work.”
While Some Marketing Advice Flies off the Cliff
The Brilliant Way To Find A Niche Market! was a guest post on Carl Ocab by Franck Silvestre, but it wasn’t by any standards brilliant grammar or advice. His famous-Mr-Ed advice included, “Find a hungry market of people who are going whatever your promote” because apparently people who are going whatever your promote are called “desperate buyers.”
Shoe Money Leads in Market Share
In 2007, Shoe Money becomes the market leader, with 28%, in the market of publishers for on-line business owners. John Chow, slightly behind Shoe Money, grabbed 21% of the market. Based on our research, the on-line business information market reached 391,629 in monthly demand at the end of 2007, up from 65,791 monthly demand in the beginning of 2007 — an increase of 1,240.19%.
This report does not consider large commercially owned websites such as inc.com or entrepreneur.com. Although Inc. and Entrepreneur magazine indeed cover topics for starting an online business, these magazines have hundreds of other topics not relevant to starting or running an on-line business, thus their numbers would’ve distorted the report. (See the Breakdown of the Market)
Despite its saturation, the publishing market for on-line marketers had tremendous growth in 2007. From our estimates, 1,240.19% increase in overall visitors was seen in this market. By tracking the visitors, we can be relatively certain that this growth represents an overall increase in information demand within the on-line business market. It seems more people are becoming increasingly interested in starting or growing an on-line business.
As consumer’s taste demand evermore specialized information, eager entrepreneurs create multiple brands focused on publishing for on-line business owners. This trend, from early 2004 to now, has resulted in an increasingly fragmented market. With this fragmentation, it’s becoming ever more difficult to estimate the exact size of the whole market and the individual market shares.
With the cost of entry and the ever-lower sunk costs, the publishing market for on-line entrepreneurs will, most likely, continue to grow and become increasingly fragmented, unless the current publishers create exclusive arrangements with revenue sources. If exclusive agreements were made this would significantly increase the barriers to entry, thus discouraging competition entering the market.
However, as one firm begins to gain market share, customers will face strong incentives to switch to the leading firm, creating an upward cycle of growth — perhaps giving the leading firm market dominance. If this trend were seen, the cost of entry would be an expensive battle against an established brand.
From the Experts
John Chow attributes his success to his wife, while Darren Rowse, Courtney Tuttle, Joel Comm, and Carlo Cab did not return media requests.
With a link to a picture of his largest Google Adsense check, Jeremy Schoemaker e-mails, “Many people talk about making money online but few quantify it.”
Adam Doolittle contributed to this report.
