I’m not sure why I even look at Google PageRank anymore… I know it’s full of crap most of the time and really means nothing when it comes to search rankings.

But, I can’t help but see that big ol’ green bar in my Google Toolbar (I know, I shouldn’t have that toolbar… I’ll probably be taking it down shortly … everytime I go to a website.

So, this morning my real estate blog had a new post on it (that drove a ton of traffic to a webinar I put on last night) and I hopped on over there to check it out again.  Anyhow, I was almost blinded by the Google PageRank bar stretching across my toolbar.

My normal pagerank for that real estate investing website is 3 (for the past month or so anyway)… and I haven’t been able to break it past that (I haven’t really put in much of an effort though either).  Well… what do I see when I head over there today?

A PageRank 6!

I refreshed the page several times and cleared my cache just to see if it would change… it didn’t… it’s still a 6 (for the time being anyway).

So, right now I’m strutting around with a PageRank of 6 (it’ll probably be back down tomorrow).

This Sounds Cool… But It’s Frustrating As Heck…

While it sounds all cool and all to have a pagerank of 6 (even if it is temporary)… it’s really not.  Pagerank means nothing at all… at least I haven’t found a huge use for it other than when I sell advertising some people still ask “what is the PR of the site?”.

Pagerank is kind of like a fancy bra on a car.

Two cars might have the same fancy little sporty looking bra… like this Ferarri…

Or… this Kia…

The fact they both have bras that look similar doesn’t make a difference at all how the car performs.

The Ferarri is always going to kill the Kia.

PageRank Doesn’t Equal Performance…

If you’re deep into the SEO and internet marketing world you SHOULD realize that PageRank has little (or nothing) to do with actual performance in the search engines.  Actually, I’m not really sure what it does to tell you the truth.

Two pagerank 3’s can perform very differently in search results.

For instance, I have a ton of pages (internal pages within sites) that are pagerank 0 that outrank pages for targeted keyword phrase with pageranks of 3 and above.

Why?

Google sees my pages as more relevant to the search term.

Don’t Focus On PageRank… Focus On…

Don’t focus on PageRank.  While it’s cool to see your website out “PageRanking” your competitors… it doesn’t mean a thing because Google doesn’t pay you money based on how big your green bar is.

You’re paid when people find you in the search results… and search results are governed by how relevant Google sees your site to the specific search term.  Thats is.

So, shoot for continued improvement on relevancy of your website and pages within the website to the specific search terms you are going after.

If you’re going after the Green Remote Control Car market… make a blog post or entire page (or entire website would be even better) dedicated to ONLY Green Remote Control Cars.

Be more relevant than the next guy.

If you run a content based website (which is what I’m focusing more and more on w/ my sites)… and your topic is more broad than “green remote control cars” (or whatever your topic is)… make specific sections or specific articles optimized for your moneymaking terms.

I have a real estate site that gives out free information on real estate investing.  But, I also have a ton of very targeted pages and articles on VERY SPECIFIC products and markets. Then, I optimize each of these sections and articles with internal link building and social media.

Guess What??

I rank very very well for extremely targeted search terms (with low PageRank pages) over sites like Amazon.com, Bizrate.com, Business.com, and others with huge PageRank for the competing pages.

I’m just a bit more relevant than they are (in my title, my content, my incoming links, my media within the pages, etc.).

Shoot for relevancy… not high PageRank.

Buy the car because it performs and looks awesome… not because it has a cool looking bra on the front of it.

Capisch?

For those of you who market affiliate products online… and have had any type of success… you know how awesome it is to hit those milestones you set for yourself.

• First you hope to make just that first dollar...

• Next you look for making just $100 a day…

• Then you hope that someday you’ll actually start to make real money and make $1,000 in a day…

• Then that $1,000 hour is the next goal…

I can tell you from first hand experience… setting and hitting your goals for affiliate marketing is a great feeling… even if you’re only making enough to pay your cell phone bill every month.

Here’s How I Have Hit My Affiliate Marketing Goals…

I didn’t even know what the heck affiliate marketing was until a little over a year ago.  Ya, I knew people made a crap load of money doing it… but I didn’t know where to start.

Anyhow, fast forward to today (a little over a year later) and I’m starting to make it look like I know what I’m doing a little bit (I’m definitely not big time… but things are heading in the right direction).

Here’s my affiliate marketing timeline:

• Made my first dollar using Adsense on my real estate investing tips website:I think it took me weeks and weeks to make that first dollar… but I made it and got my first Google Adsense check about 4 months later (ya… it took me that long to build up to $100).
• Saw that Adsense wasn’t going to make me rich (at least the way I was using it) so I started to look into affiliate products in mid ‘07:I made my first affiliate sale of Mark Joyners Simpleology in the summer of ‘07.  Simpleology was something that I was personally using and really felt it was worthy of sharing with other people.  The commission from each sale is $24.95.
• I noticed Simpleology starting to make a few bucks a month (like $75-$100) so I knew there were other products out there I could share with my readers at The REI Brain:Rather than making just $25 a sale… I wanted to make more per sale so I started searching for higher dollar products that I felt were great products at a great value.  So, I joined a few affiliate programs that had great products and began to send out emails to my email list… and write blog posts on the subjects.  A really cool thing that I soon found out was that people are willing to send you their product for free just so you can review it… even products that are selling for more than $1,000… free.  Pretty cool huh?  Anyhow, I made my first “higher dollar” commission in the fall of ‘07… it was a $148 commission on a $297 at home study course.That was my first $100 day (and I didn’t have another for several months).
• In early 2008 I just knew there was more out there to be had… and that making $100 in a day was only the tip of the iceberg:So, I started looking for new niches and products for my websites that I could try to rank really well in the search engines… and create recurring revenue.  I actually stumbled on a niche from an email I received from one of my readers at The REI Brain.com.  Long story short, I began reviewing property management software and started to hit $100 days more consistently… and even hit my first $500 weekend (profit… not revenues) in the spring of 2008.   Pretty cool I thought.  Work maybe 2-3 hours a week on these projects and turn that into the low 4 figures a month.
• Now, come up to a month or two ago when things really started to get consistent:Sales were coming daily, adsense earnings were well over $100 a month (really, I know that’s not a whole lot), and I had began to do CPA (cost per action) affiliate programs with Hydra Networks (and some others), promote more than 50 affiliate products, drive traffic with PPC (pay per click), use social media a lot more, and write content almost daily.In March of ‘08 I hit my first $2,000 month for profits from affiliate products.

Then I hit a big affiliate marketing goal of mine…

For quite a while I’ve had a goal to make $1,000 in affiliate profits in 1 day.  Ya, sounds like it’s pretty tough… and for some reason I had been making it actually a lot harder than it really was.

Yesterday (8/13) I finally hit my first $1,000 day (actually, I almost hit that in just 1 hour… and did hit it in just 2 hours yesterday morning) in affiliate profits.

Actually… let me rephrase…

I hit my first $1,596.70 day in affiliate PROFITS.  Not in sales… in affiliate profits (and it cost me absolutely ZERO in advertising costs… all through SEO, social media, and my blog readership).

Since it’s all the craze nowadays to post screenshots (even though a ton of them are fake and photoshopped)… above is a quick screenshot of the 1shoppingcart affiliate reporting area for this particular affiliate account that I promoted yesterday… which is where most of my sales came from.

Once again, I know… this is peanuts compared to what a lot of other affiliates are making online right now… but this kind of income can really add up and change someones lifestyle.

What would an instant $1,596.70 in 1 day (that you didn’t otherwise have) do for you?  It would be pretty cool huh?  And this $1,596.70 is for one day… it doesn’t include the profits from the rest of the month.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t make this much everyday… this was because of a small launch that was going on that I promoted to my real estate blog and real estate investing newsletter readers… and some sales from other affiliate products that day.  But, I’m confident that things will be at that level pretty soon once I systematize my online business a bit better… and get into the swing of things with my new VA (virtual assistant).

The “secret” to making thousands a day online…

I know, that heading sounds pretty hypey… doesn’t it?  It sounds like some late night infomercial trying to pitch you a $39.97 product that is tied to a $97 a month “forced continuity” product.

Well… this advice is free and is something that it has taken me over a year to figure out (and I’m still trying to figure it out).

1. There is no “secret” to making money online... follow a simple formula, systematize it, and don’t give up.
2. Be real, honest, informative, and provide a huge amount of value to your prospects… that’s the ONLY WAY you’ll make it online.  If you look at everything in the “how will I benefit” mindset… you’ll lose out on a lot of money and opportunities.  Take the “how can I benefit my customer/prospect/reader more today”… “what true value can I provide my prospect today?”.  I can promise you that your results will be 1000x times better when you take the focus off of how you’ll make money… but rather on how you can help your prospect benefit.
3. Find something that you enjoy to do and build something around that first… This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but start by focusing on a topic you are passionate about and really enjoy.  You’ll be able to stick with it longer.  I chose real estate investing because I am a real estate investor and love it… then I figured out how to provide a huge amount of value to my readers and separate myself from the competition.
4. Success won’t happen overnight… maybe not even in 6 months or a year…  If you want to build something really worthwhile it won’t happen overnight.  It took me over a year before my first website started to produce an income that a person can live off of (but, I’m pouring a lot of the profits back into the site and hiring Virtual Assistants to take the load off of me).  I’m not saying that you can’t build something more quickly… actually you should be able to if you become educated and take action a bit more quickly than I did… but too many people think it’ll happen quickly… then they give up too easily and never see their true potential.Find a niche, committ to it for at least 6 months… and spend at least 2 hours on your business EVERYDAY for the 6 months.  (I only spend about 2 hours a week now… but starting out it was a ton of work because I didn’t know the shortcuts I know now).
5. Network with people and DON’T be afraid to invest... Networking is huge.  95% of my current successes came after I went to Rich Schefren’s (yep, that’s an affiliate link event in Orlando earlier this year.  I got to know some really cool people… many of them who are way more successful than I am… and have stayed in contact with them to this day.  Huge… huge… huge.Also, up until March of this year I was almost afraid to really invest in myself.  The only education I bought up until March was a $50 ebook from an unnamed “guru” (which turned out to be a pile of crap).  I probably feel the same way you do… but I felt that if I bought anything I would be one of those guys who is an info product junkie and never takes action… I didn’t want to be that guy.So, I put in some hard work… won a trip to Orlando to go to Rich’s event in March (I still had to pony up about $700 for airfare and hotel… so it wasn’t free by any means)… and invested in myself and changed my outlook on my business.  After that event I’ve slowly started to outsource a lot more things that I was banging my head against the wall to complete myself… and the money started to come in a lot more frequently (in bigger amounts).

What are your online goals?

So, that’s my “cliffnotes” story of my affiliate marketing venture over the last year.

I hit my first $1,000 day (actually over $1,500… and did most of it in just under 2 hours)… am systematizing my business more… and can’t wait to see what happens the rest of this year and into 2009.

Whether you’re a newbie online still working to make that first $10… or you’re already making thousands a month… what are your next goals for your online business?

I’d love to hear them and help ya out if I can in any way.

Chat soon,

- Trevor

This is nothing new… you’ve heard it said a billion times… “the money is in the list“.

I can say that you can make a good bit of money without a list (a site of mine makes almost $2k a month with a list of just over 100 subscribers)… but an email list (or mailing list also!) is another asset that you can leverage big time to create more revenues and repeat customers/visitors to your site.

Like I mentioned, you don’t NEED a list to be successful… but a list makes it a whole lot easier to be successful and keep your readers and customers coming back time and time again.

Before you go out and throw up your Aweber or Getresponse (or whoever else) autoresponder code… read this article to get a few pointers on how to increase opt ins just a bit. FYI… I have both Aweber and Getresponse accounts and like them both… really Aweber is probably the one I’d tell people to use… but Getresponse does the job too.

Throwing Up An Opt In Box On Your Site

First of all, if you aren’t collecting email subscribers to a newsletter on your site (no matter what kind of site you have), you should start doing it today.  Even if you throw up a crappy opt in box and get 1 subscriber a week (as I did when I first got started)… that’s better than nothing!

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Head over to Aweber or Getresponse (they are the most widely used by Internet Marketers) and sign up for an account.  Once you’re in there, follow their directions to create an opt in box that captures just the Firstname and Email address (or just email… I’ll discuss later).
2. Take the code that they give you and, if you’re using Wordpress, go to the “Design” tab, then click “widgets”, and insert a “text box” in the right sidebar.  Paste your code into there and save it.

That’s the easiest and quickest way to get an opt in box up and running.  It might not be the prettiest… but it’s done and you are now at least ready to start collecting opt in subscribers.

I’m not going to go too much more into any technical details of how to do it… I’m going to cover other things based on a quick change that I made to one of my websites.

Making Your Opt In Box Appealing… and Boosting Conversions

As you might know, I finally got done launching the new design for a real estate investing website that I run (I am a real estate investor also… this site is actually what got me started in internet marketing).  I like Wordpress so that’s what the entire site is built from.

Anyhow, in the previous version I had an opt in box that looked like this:

This isn’t a bad form… but it didn’t produce a very good opt in rate.  You’ll notice that I give many benefits of what people will get by opting into my newsletter… had that “nice” red arrow drawing the eye over to the form… but it just didn’t produce the results I was wanting.

I’d love to tell you the conversion rate on this form, but I really have no clue (I know, a cardinal sin in internet marketing).

Then, we relaunched the new site design and updated the opt in box with a few elements that have shown a huge increase in opt ins (like… more than 500%!!).

The New Opt In Box – And Results

Instead of the same tired looking opt in box on every page of our site, I decided to mix it up a bit and vary the placement/look of the opt in box in different places in the site.

Here’s the new opt in box on our home page:

The home page opt in box is placed in the middle of the home page right at the bottom of the fold (I wanted it above the fold but it just didn’t work out that way… I’ll have to do some tweaking to the set up of the page.

Here’s the new opt in box on our article pages:

This opt in box is placed in the TOP of the right sidebar of all of our article pages.  It is of course ABOVE THE FOLD and really stands out to the eye.

Here’s the new opt in box on our blog home page:

Okay, for the blog I wanted the opt in box to be ABOVE THE FOLD also and be right in the middle of the page so people had to look right over it to see the articles below.  It’s right next to the “popular articles” section and is very prominently placed in the structured of the blog.

The Elements Of An Effective News Letter Opt In Box To Increase Conversions

There are a ton of elements that go into an opt in box that can make it convert more effectively.  I’m not a guru in opt in box creation (I actually made these ones myself… I’m not the greatest graphic or coding guy at all).

Here are a few elements I integrated that I think are leading to the 500% increase in opt in rate almost overnight.

• It grabs the eye much better - This opt in box has the nice medium thickness RED BORDER, the big red arrow, and the nice “eye candy” to draw the eye over.  If you don’t draw the eye over to the box the chances people will voluntarily navigate over there go down.  Think about those annoying inflatable things they have on car lots or in front of cell phone stores that move and draw your attention.  Same thing… first you need to get the attention… then give them something they want.
• Eye candy - Eye candy is the stuff that makes the opt in box look cool and professional.  I used the image of the software box and free report (to show that the things they are getting are real… and of higher value) as well as the big red arrows to jazz up the box and make the offer present as a higher value to the prospect.
• Give Them Something Specific – In the past I’ve tried to just get people to opt into my newsletters by telling them benefits they’ll get and things they’ll learn.  For me, that just didn’t work all that well.  What works well is by giving people something specific (the software and ebook downloads free) in exchange for their email address.  Imagine going into a restaurant and reading a menu that said “you’ll be satisfied, it’ll taste good, our price is good, and you’ll walk out happy”… but didn’t give you specifics on the food that you’ll actually get?  That would be weird huh?  How likely would you be to actually make an order?  Probably not too likely.  People like specifics, and like to know what they’re getting (exactly) before they make a move.

  So, give people a free report, an audio download, a piece of software, etc. that is of REAL VALUE and that could be sold on it’s own if you weren’t giving it away.

• Use Our Preprogrammed Colors – I’m not all that sold on my choice for the use of the red submit button.  But, with this button… I have it programmed to turn green when someone hovers over the top of the button (head over to the site to check it out in action).  With our society the color green means go… and people are more apt to gravitate toward taking a specific action when they are given “permission” to go with the green color.

  I’m going to test out using a different color as the default color (other than red) to see if it makes a difference… but I’ve seen in other tests that the color red w/ a green color change upon hover works well.  We’ll see after I get done testing.

• Make It As Easy As Possible For Them – It’s been a debate recently among internet marketers whether or not it is better to collect firstname and email… or just email.  Technically, all we really need is their email address to send to them; however, the firstname helps us to personalize the message to them… which is pretty darn effective as well.   But, I put in just the email so it would be as easy as possible for people to submit.  They only have to enter one thing and click submit… and don’t need to fret over giving their real name… or making up some fake name (like a lot of people do).

  Some people argue that the firstname is necessary… I disagree.  While the firstname is good to have, you can write very personal emails to people that give your personality that don’t include their name.  Think about it… when you’re writing to your close friends, do you start the email with their name?  I don’t.  Also, having their firstname can backfire sometimes… like when people put in a fake name… their last name… their firstname in all capitols, etc.

  What’s worse, writing an email full of your personality and not including their name?  Or writing an email that starts with, “Hey VERIONICA,” or “Hey asdfatl,”?  I’d venture to say that I’d rather put no name at all than blow my cover and SHOW THEM that this message isn’t personal at all.

Revamp Your Opt In Box Today

Okay, that kind of gives you a good idea of what you can implement in your own opt in boxes today to squeeze some more subscribers into your list.  Sometimes the smallest changes can be huge (like my 500% increase in opt ins)… sometimes it may be small.  But, changes might only take an hour to do and will feed extra customers into your funnel every day of the week forever.

If you need any help getting your opt in box up to snuff… let me know and I’d be glad to give you a few pointers.  I’m not accepting any new clients until the end of August because of my workload on my own projects and the clients I already have… but if you have a project you want me to look at quickly let me know.

Chat soon!

While I was doing a bit of research and trying to analyze why some sites are ranking high for very competitive search terms…

… I ran across a site that is currently ranking #1 in Goolge for the search term "Cheap Viagra " .

While digging through some of their inbound links I quickly found that a very popular tech website is actually helping them rank #1 because the link spammers pushing this site up to the top slipped a link into one of the Techcrunch web pages.

The Techcrunch post dates back to the summer of 2006… and this link spam was made in early 2007 and blatantly includes 2 links back to their website. (the bottom comment).

(t looks like comments are closed on that post now (as far as I can tell)… but I wonder why Techcrunch hasn’t taken it down yet.  It’s probably that they get so many comments on posts they might not manually moderate comments anymore… but instead use spam filters to do the bulk of the work (this is just a guess though… )

Anyhow, this is a good lesson to put the term "viagra" in your Askimet spam filter.

So… technically… without knowing it … Techcrunch has helped this site get to the top of a huge money term and I’m sure rake in thousands of sales each and every day (Clarification… Techcrunch isn’t raking in thousands from this, the Viagra site owner is).

Just to be clear, I don’t write this post to implicate Techcrunch on anything or insinuate that they even know about this comment on their site… I’m positive they probably don’t have a clue the comment is even on their site.  It just goes to show that ANY website can let spam comments slip through… and we all need to be sure to monitor the comments we approve to keep our company image and professionalism intact.  You never know if a comment like this could turn off prospect reading your website… and cost you real dollars.

Is blog commenting still working for SEO?

Yep… sure is…

Just ask the comment spammers behind the "Cheap Viagra" Google leaders.  Pretty much every inbound link I found going to their site is from comment spam… but not in a way that is blatant URL stuffed generic spam that we all see in our Askimet spam folders everyday.

It seems that a lot of the comments left on blogs from this URL do somewhat reference the post and/or the blog writers name… so they aren’t overtly spammy.  So, I guess you can call this spamming with a personal touch .

Seems to work (but I wouldn’t be able to tell you from first hand experience .

Social media is kind of a confusing term for most businesses today… let alone knowing how the heck to use it to benefit their online presence and profits.

So, I thought I’d give you a quick tutorial on one way to use social media websites like digg.com , fark.com , de.licio.us , twitter.com , etc… to drive traffic to your website very quickly… and build multiple search engine rankings in the shortest amount of time possible.

Who Should Use This Social Media Optimization Strategy?

Well… everyone. Everyone who wants more traffic , more quickly , more often , and for less money and effort . Is that you? If not, I’m going to have to ask you to push the back button on your browser and head over to your favorite news site and not come back here again ( , seriously ).

All kidding aside, every business who has a website should institute this simple Social Media optimization strategy (or one like it) for your important and high quality content.

What Is Social Media and Why Does It Help Your Website?

In simple terms, a Social Media website is a place where a community of people come to share things on the internet, network and connect with others, and find things that are related to their likes and interests.

Sounds simple huh? Well… it is.

Social Media can help your website and business in many ways including:

• Direct people to your website and content
• Build links back to your site for search engine optimization purposes
• Monitoring the discussion in your market… and about your business and products
• Engaging in the conversation with your market… and building a stronger relationship with them
• Networking to find new business joint ventures, partners, etc.

But, in this tutorial I’m just going to cover the part of building links back to your website and content (SEO) and driving traffic to your website quickly and easily.

Social Media Optimization for SEO and Driving Quick Traffic

In simple terms, what we’re going to do here is in 4 simple steps:

1. Create high quality content worth telling people about
2. Go to social media websites and let them know about your content, what it’s about, and create a good and compelling headline that piques peoples curiosity about your content
3. Integrate multiple social media websites together (news and RSS feed aggregators, bookmarking services, and video/podcast posting websites) in a way that best builds a web of links back to your content
4. Rinse and repeat for new content

Really, traffic can come from a few different places by using a strategy like this.

First , you get traffic from people clicking through to view your content (article, video, picture, etc.)

Second , you get traffic from search engines because the actual "bookmarks" or "submissions" on the social media website often show up great in search results (and very fast!) when you title it with the keywords and phrases that your target market is likely to search.

Third , many people who have websites and blogs read these social media websites every day looking for things to write about. If they see something worth passing along to their readers, they’ll write about your article and usually link back to your website… driving traffic to your site and building high quality links.

Okay, here we go…

Step 1: Create High Quality Content Worth Telling People About

This step is pretty self-explanatory… but not as simple as it sounds. The internet today is packed with more information than the world ever dreamed of just 20 years ago. This means that there are more competing places for your target markets attention.  Jeff Widman calls this type of content "wall-able "… meaning we should strive to create content that people would want to print off and hang on their wall because it is so profound, entertaining, valuable, etc.

In order to grab their attention… and keep it… you need to create high quality, high trust, content that is different than the other millions of web pages with similar content.

Whether it be separating yourself by being:

• Humorous
• More relevant
• More detailed
• More honest
• More cutting edge
• More timely
• and on and on…

You need to separate yourself from the pack in some way so your target market stands up and notices what you have to say… and cares about what you have to say. You can be mediocre and get noticed at first… but mediocrity does not last for the long haul and is way more expensive than just spending the extra time and effort to concentrate on getting only high quality stuff out there.

Here are some great resources to check out to help you learn how to create memorable content that will get you noticed:

• Do You Have Remarkable Featured Content?
• A Three Step Approach To Strategic Content Development
• How to Create Remarkable Content When There’s Nothing New Under the Sun

Just remember, when creating content… ask yourself the question, "Why would someone care about this?". If you have a good and solid answer for why someone truly would care about your content… excellent… post it and market the heck out of it. If not, keep writing.

Writing A Compelling Yet Relevant SEO Enhanced Title:

Part of creating great content is to create a great title (or "headline") for your content. Great compelling headlines will likely be read more through the social media websites because people will be compelled to click on them more.

Also, the title of the article, post, video, etc. should contain the keywords and phrases your target audience is likely to type into search engines.

FOR EXAMPLE:

You just wrote content packed article on the in’s and out’s of writing a kick @ss elevator speech.

You want to make sure the title of the article reflects what the article is about, is compelling, and has the keyword phrases that people are actually typing in search engines when looking for the solution your article helps them solve.

So, head over to: (and bookmark this site for future reference)

• http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com (free keyword searcher)

Once you’re there type in "elevator speech" and see what types of searches people are ACTUALLY typing into the search engines.

In there you find…

These phrases are the actual phrases that people are typing in to search engines to get information on "elevator speeches". The numbers to the left of the phrases is the estimate of "daily" searches for that specific search phrase. Keyword Tracker doesn’t include Google in these estimates, which accounts for 2/3 of all searches on the net… so if you multiply the number on the left by 3… that’ll give you a decent idea of the search volume (still, this is just good for an overall look at phrases and volume… not 100% accurate).

In this search you see that the most searches are the phrases:

• "elevator speech"
• "elevator speech realtor example" (this shows that you might want to write an article specifically about elevator speeches for realtors)
• "elevator speech examples"
• another is "how to write an elevator speech"

So, now sit down with this new found knowledge and try to integrate one of these phrases (ideally one with more searches) into your content title.

For instance, if your article is on how to write an elevator speech… but you also include 7 examples of great elevator speeches… you might write something like:

"7 Elevator Speech Examples From Millionaire Entrepreneurs and How To Write One Yourself "

or

"How To Write An Elevator Speech That Actually Loses You Money "

Ya, I admit… the first one is a bit long… but you get the picture. With the second title, I used the reverse psychology principle. People will want to read the article simply to make sure their elevator speech isn’t one of the one’s that "lose money".

Notice how I integrated the "elevator speech examples" phrase and added some elements that will hopefully pique the interest of the reader.

Anyhow, that is a quick primer course on writing headlines for SEO and to make them compelling for readers to click on. For more info on writing headlines and content head over to copyblogger … he usually has some pretty darn good content over there on writing online copy.

Step 2: Let Social Media Websites Know About Your Content

The first time you do this step it will take you a bit of time… mostly because you need to go and set up free accounts at each site before you can post content. After your free accounts are all set up (usually takes no more than 5 minutes to set up free accounts on each site), you can really automate the posting process pretty easily.

There are a lot of places to find great social media websites that you can post your content to… and I’m not going to make a full list of social media sites (there are hundreds… maybe thousands), but we’ll just use a solid base of 20-50 social media sites to get the word out.

Various Social Media Websites:

• Digg.com
• stumbleupon.com
• de.licio.us
• propeller.com
• reddit.com
• slashdot.com

And a ton of others that I use.

Rather than redoing the work that other people have already done… here are a couple links that have great lists of social media websites that are great for driving traffic and building great links and buzz for your website.

• Dosh Dosh’s List of 48 Social Media Sites (great list)
• Tropical SEO’s List (good list as well… he’s got some that I hadn’t heard of)

At first, pick 20-30 social media sites (just go w/ the first 30 Dosh Dosh lists or the ones that socialmarker.com has)… and use them for your first batch of social media optimization. I like starting off small so you don’t get overwhelmed by the process and give up because it seems like too much work.

How To Get The Word Out:

There are a bunch of different ways to get your content onto these social media websites. One approach is to do each submission one at a time, which is good just so you learn the process… but takes way too much time if you do it every time.

I prefer to use services that help speed up the "bookmarking" and "submission" process like:

Socialmarker.com -

Socialmarker.com is a "semi-automatic" social media posting service that lets you post your content to about 50 of the top social media websites in probably about 25% of the time it would take you to go to each website individually. I use it a lot of the time because it’s easy and is free.

Onlywire.com -

Onlywire.com is pretty much the same as socialmarker… but with a few different bookmarking sites… and about half of the choices. Really, they both do the same thing (socialmarker supports more sites though) so check them both out and use the one (or use both) that you like the best.

Really, it doesn’t matter how you end up submitting your content to these social media websites… it just matters that it is done… and done correctly. If I were you, I’d start off doing it yourself the first couple times so you can then train someone else to do it in your company… or hire a Virtual Assistant to do it for you (which is what I do).

Submitting Your Content:

Head over to Socialmarker.com and fill in the box in the upper right hand corner of the page with your:

• Content title (optimized for SEO as I wrote above and compelling)
• The link to the content
• Text explaining the content in a compelling way. You are looking to persuade people to click on your article.
• Tags. Basically, type terms that are related to your content. So, if you’re writing on elevator speeches you might use, "elevator speech, how to write, marketing, personal branding" etc.

From there, of course click "submit" and the social marker site will take you to each social media website to submit your content. The first time through you’ll have to set up accounts at each site… so it may take a little while… but after that it shouldn’t take longer than 15-20 minutes to submit to more than 40 social media websites.

Advanced Social Bookmarking:

I won’t go into depth on this because this is a whole other article… but when you really get into social bookmarking your content… you’ll want to create multiple accounts at each social media website.

The reason for this is to of course provide more links to your content … but also to spread the submissions out across multiple accounts so it isn’t obvious that you are only submitting your own content… which social media sites tend to not like. Newsvine.com actually is pretty strict on this and my first time through I got my account canceled in just 3 weeks because I only submitted my OWN content.

And, it is important to bookmark content other than your own periodically to make it look like you aren’t only on their site to submit your content.

In addition, multiple accounts lets you leverage all of the accounts together to form a big web of links between your content and your websites… resulting in better search rankings (that’s the idea anyway).

But, don’t worry about these techniques yet except for the one about being sure to bookmark other articles other than your own periodically to throw off the social media sites from "thinking" that you are only bookmarking your own content.

The Aftermath (RESULTS):

After you bookmark your content with the targeted title, you should begin to see traffic coming in within 24 hours.

How much traffic?

Well… that depends on the quality of your content and how compelling your title was written.

Also, by submitting your content to the social media sites… the search engines (especially Google) will follow the links back to your website and index your content almost immediately. I’ve had my content show up in Google within 2 hours before… which is huge.

Here is a screen shot of the results of one article (with a video I created) after I optimized the article and video in social media. This was taken just 2 days after I did the submissions. This is the first page of a search for the name of a pretty popular product. The first two results are #1: the manufacturer of the product and #2 Amazon.com. After that, I take up 7 or the 8 remaining spots with either my website or social media pointing back to my content.

I didn’t post that screenshot to brag… just to illustrate the point that social media optimization really works when done correctly.

Step 3: Build The "Web" Of Links That All Lead Back To Your Company

The whole aim of social media optimization is to lead people back to you and your company in some way, shape, or form.

Really, I don’t care how people get back to my website… I just care that they do .

The best way to ensure you attract the most visitors back to your website is to cast the largest "web" out on the net.

You can do this by integrating social media and other internet marketing techniques together to get your content out to as many places as possible.

Here are some methods to build your "web":

• Social Media Marketing (as described in this article)
• RSS Feed Syndication
• Video Marketing / Content Producing
• Podcasts
• Press Releases and Articles (I won’t cover these here)

And on and on. Once again, this is a whole other article… so I’ll go over it briefly.

RSS Feed Syndication:

An rss feed is simply a way that people can easily read the content from your website without actually going to your website.  For example, you can "subscribe" to a feed and read the articles in your Google Feedreader or other feed reading service.  Yahoo news (and most other give news aggregation sites) use RSS feeds to gather the news and put it on their own website for their visitors to see.

The first step is to head over to www.feedburner.com and set up a free account.  Once you have your account up and running "burn a feed" (video instructions here ) for your website/blog, etc… and you’re done.

Now, whenever you write an article, your RSS feed is automatically updated.  Now, you can use this "new feed" provided by Feedburner to submit your feed to website and blog directories like Technorati.com , Yahoo News, and www.pingomatic.com which will get your content out to multiple websites automatically every time you write new content.

Pretty slick huh?  There is more to RSS feeds than this… but this gives you a good idea where to start and why to use RSS feed syndication.

Video Marketing / Content Creation:

Another pillar of your "web" should be video.  Video is a very effective way to drive people back to your website, teach online, provide great value, and generate more traffic.

Film a video of you talking about how your target market can solve a particular solution (that you help them solve)… or do a powerpoint presentation with your voice over… title your videos using the tips I mentioned earlier… place your website URL in the video to drive people back to your site… and submit the video to multiple video sharing sites like Youtube.com , Revver.com , Viddler.com , and others.

This is essentially the same concept as the social media marketing … but you are now creating video as your content and submitting the video to video sharing websites.

The same thing goes with submitting the videos…

You can do them one at a time yourself… or use websites like the ones below to "automatically" submit your videos in 5% of the time.

• Tubemogul.com – Free video submission service.  I use this one quite a bit and it works great… but it doesn’t support a lot of the video sharing website I like to use.  Great for free though.
• Trafficgeyser – Membership based automatic video submitting service that supports many more video sharing sites than Tubemogul.  The plans run between $50 and $97 / month and have a ton more features in addition to just submitting your videos.  I’m pretty sure they still have the $1 30 day trial .  I used to be a member but now I go with Tubemogul quite a bit and my Virtual Assistants who do the video posting for me using my systems.

Either way, I suggest you either hire out the video submitting or use one of the automatic posting services above.

That screenshot you saw earlier where I dominated many of the top 10 spots in google for the product name… most of those results came from these video sites.

Podcasts :

I haven’t gotten into podcasts a whole lot… but I do know that they work great for getting out your message and converting people into clients.

Since I’m not an expert on using Podcasts… I’ll point you over to Paul Colligan who is one of the top business podcasting experts in the world.

Bottom line… podcasts are just another way to get your word out and grab more attention.

———-

Whew!

I know this article was a tad bit long… but I wanted to go into as much detail as possible on the overall social media optimization process that I use to easily generate:

• More traffic to my own (and my clients) websites
• Traffic more quickly
• More links to my websites
• Better search engine rankings

Really, the process sounds somewhat daunting at first… but once you go through the process the first time you’ll see how easy it is.

The really important part of making this work for your business is systematizing the whole social media optimization process so it is as hands off for YOU as possible.  Have a secretary or intern in your office take over the system… outsource it to a Virtual Assistant… hire a consultant (like myself) to take it totally off of your hands… etc.

Your job is to focus on creating quality content and serving your customers better… this social media optimization process simply helps you get the word out on the internet much more quickly, efficiently, and cheaply.

Any Question On The Value Of This System?

I know a social media marketing plan like this one is very valuable to my business and the businesses of my clients.  However, many small and medium sized businesses fail to see the value… until they see the targeted traffic coming in as a result.

Social media marketing / optimization works in all markets .  From ecommerce sites like Amazon.com… all the way to mainly offline businesses like attorneys, insurance salesmen, consultants, etc.

Develop a social media marketing and optimization plan (use mine to start) and get going!  You can have more targeted traffic later this afternoon if you want!

——

Social Media Marketing combined with traditional direct response Internet Marketing strategies and SEO are truly a killer combination for driving more traffic and converting it better.  If you’d like to hire Trevor Mauch to help you get the most out of your small or medium sized business website for the highest ROI possible … contact him to schedule a consultation today .

**UPDATE**

I am currently booked out for the next 60 days with project based and retainer clients.  I do have 2 projects scheduled to be completed soon… so email me so I can place you in my consultation cue and get your project moving asap.  I look forward to doubling your online ROI today!

In all reality… the internet is still a pretty new marketing channel (less than 15 years old) and most small businesses haven’t quite mastered (or even tried) the art of marketing their business on the internet.

I hear it all of the time from small business owners (businesses from $250k to $5 million) that they don’t know "how to market a business on the internet ". The answer I give time and time again is that marketing your small business on the internet is NO DIFFERENT than marketing your business offline… you are just using the same marketing techniques on a new medium.

After successfully taking over the internet marketing (in other words, direct response marketing on the internet) strategies for many small businesses I’ve come to realize that really there are just a few simple steps that all small businesses need to take to get the most bang for their buck on the internet.

And yes, ALL small businesses can benefit from the right internet marketing and brand building strategy if done correctly… which I’m about to show you how. This article is the first of 3 articles in this series where I will walk you through the process of getting more traffic to your website and converting the traffic better into customers.

Keep in mind, some of these steps seem kind of in-depth and cumbersome… but in reality… when you dig into it and create systems to support each step… it’s much easier than it looks.

Step #1: Figure Out What You Want Out Of Your Web Presence… and Why

The first step small businesses (or any business for that matter) need to take before you dump too much money into your website and internet marketing strategy is to figure out what the heck you really want your website to do for you.

Websites can serve all kinds of functions including:

• To act as a simple business card (not recommended)
• To actually make the sale of your product to your customer (also called e-commerce) – Think Amazon.com here
• To generate leads for your business
• To act as a brochure for your business/product
• To be the communication channel between you and your customer

… and on and on. You get the idea. Different businesses have different needs for a website… but ALL businesses SHOULD have a website of some sort.

Retail Businesses -

If you are a retail business and want to extend your sales funnel to include online sales… you’ll of course need to center your website and internet marketing strategy around getting people to your site to purchase products right then and there. This includes having a shopping cart and ecommerce platform to take orders, show your products, etc.

Your goal is to make direct sales online and every aspect of your website should be geared toward educating prospects on the benefits they’ll receive from your products and converting them into buyers both now and later.

Service Businesses -

If you have a service business such as a consulting practice, professional practice (dentist, attorney, insurance, doctor, CPA, etc.), hard service (carpet cleaner, maid, plumber, etc.), or any other type of service business… you really need to have your website and internet marketing strategy focus on educating your target market on the benefits they’ll receive from your services… and converting them to take an action such as calling you, giving you their contact info/email address, requesting a white paper, etc.

Your goal is to gain new clients and your website should be geared toward educating prospects on the benefits your service will provide them and converting them into somehow giving you their information or making a direct contact with you.

Too many small businesses throw up a website that is a glorified business card and expect people to just start calling. Odds are, you won’t get any calls no matter how nice your site looks or how much you paid the web designer to build it. Figure out what you want your site to do for your business and make sure your site follows through with that goal.

Really get down to the core of what your business does and think of how you want your website to fit into your overall marketing strategy. Your website should be an extension of your offline marketing efforts… not in addition to.

Step #2: Create and Optimize Your Website and Integrate It With Your Offline Marketing

All websites are NOT created equal… and are often 180 degrees from what you would expect.

The most visually appealing website in the world that cost $9,000 for a graphic artist to create may result in ZERO sales (which is what happened with one of my clients)… while an "ugly" website that has the right focus and sales copy might be a profit machine. Your goal is to get a good balance of visual appeal and great salesmanship.

Create Your Website -

A website doesn’t need to be elaborate or filled with great graphics… it just needs to get your message across in a way that converts the site visitor to take the desired action.

If you want to tackle the website yourself there are some simple programs that will enable you to make a great website like:

• Microsoft Frontpage (not my favorite, but it’s the easiest to use)
• Adobe Dreamweaver (expensive, not all that easy to learn, but very very powerful… I use it for some projects)
• Wordpress (what I use for this site. Free, great templates available, easy to use once you get the design finished, difficult to make design changes if you don’t know php)

There are more but those three are my favorite. I prefer Wordpress and use it for most of my own websites and my clients websites because it is so flexible, search engine friendly, and has a great community of developers who do great work.

Or, you can hire out the web work to a web design firm who knows how to create a search engine optimized website (WARNING: most will tell you they do… but really have no clue).

Whichever way you go, you can expect between $500 and $7,000 for a decent website. Finding great web guys is very difficult… so if you need a web designer shoot me an email and I can refer you to great companies I have worked with in the past (FYI, I’m not a web designer… I’m a marketer).

Optimize Your Website -

SEO

Part of the process of creating your website is optimizing it for the search engines and for better conversion. I won’t go into depth too much in this article about how to optimize your website for the search engines (I could write a whole book on just that topic) but I’ll go over the very basics.

1. Determine which search phrases your target market likely types into the search engines and create content around those phrases
2. Edit your "title tags" so they include the target phrase for that page. i.e. – If you are a personal injury attorney in San Diego… the title tag for your home page might be something like "San diego injury attorney" or for the page on brain injuries it could be something like "San diego brain injury attorney". Those are just quick examples… but you get the idea.
3. Include information, links (internal and external), headings, etc. that are related to your business and phrases that your market is likely to type into search engines.
4. Gather links from related websites that point back to your website. The best way to do this is to just create valuable, usable, and great content that people will want to link to anyway.

Really, there’s so much more to SEO… but that’s enough to get you started. If you don’t want to mess with doing the SEO yourself, shoot me an email and I’d be glad to do a free review of your website (as time permits).

In basic terms, create great content that will truly help your target market solve whatever problems you will help them solve. If the content is valuable, people will link to it and search engines will see that and reward you with better search rankings.

Conversion

As far as optimizing your website for conversion , it’s pretty simple (simple sounding… sometimes a bit more difficult in practice).

Make sure your website guides the prospect along in the "sales" process in a logical flow to compel them to do what you want them to do. If you are a retail business, Amazon.com has the conversion thing down. Study their website and their sales process to see what is working great (study everything about it… it converts at something like 12% which is crazy).

If you are in a service business, make it easy for people find the information they are looking for ("how to" information is great), create benefit oriented copy, have "calls to action" that request the reader to take a specific action, and gather leads. That’s pretty simplified but gives you a great idea of what your website should do.

Integrate Your Website and Internet Marketing With Your Offline Strategy -

Too often small businesses think that the internet is an "addition" to their offline marketing… when in actuality it should be treated as an extension of your offline marketing strategy.

Be sure to align your offline and online marketing message so your prospect finds a congruent message across all mediums and is guided along in the sales process seamlessly from offline to online and vice versa.

Here are some ways to integrate your website with your offiline marketing strategy:

• At the least, place your website on your business cards … preferably place a call to action on your business cards such as, "Download Your Free 60 Minute Audio ‘7 Costly Mistakes To Avoid When Planning Your Next Vacation’ at www.yourtravelsitehere.com". This drives offline people online and further qualifies them as an interested prospect.
• Include your website on all marketing materials (a printed book, banners, brochures, letterhead, yellow page ads, handouts at networking meetings, etc.)
• Ask offline customers to go online to take a survey in exchange for something of value
• Create contests, giveaways, etc. that require people to go to your website to participate
• Sign customers and prospects up for a free newsletter which gives them great information, discounts, etc.

There are a ton of ways to integrate your online presence with your offline presence… but virtually all businesses should at least include their website on your offline marketing materials in some way shape or form. The more you can get people to engage in your marketing message the more apt they are to use you for solutions to their problem.

The Business Card Syndrome -

Most small businesses still have what I like to call the "business card syndrome ". This is where small businesses fall in the trap of putting up a website that is just a glorified business card. You know what I mean… the site tells about you and what you do, has your contact info, and that’s about it. A glorified business card.

We all get so used to handing out business cards to hopefully evoke an action from a prospect (the action is to get them to call me back). So, many people think that doing the same thing with their website will be a good idea.

WRONG.

Your website should act as a salesman that never sleeps and should educate your prospect, show your credibility, provide value to them before they ever buy, help them to realize their problem, and compel them to contact you for the solution. A simple business card approach just leaves too many potential customers on the table and does not provide your company with a very good ROI.

Large corporate companies with many representatives are famous for the business card syndrome . They provide their reps with their own "website" which amounts to little more than a business card… and most reps think this is the only "website" they need.

Your small business website should educate your target market on solutions to their problems… the solutions that you can help them achieve.

(This is Part 1 in a 3 Part Series Called "Marketing Your Small Business On The Internet – 6 Easy Steps". Subscribe to my RSS feed to be notified when Parts 2 and 3 are posted)

——————

Up Next:

Part 2:

• Step #3: Research Your Market and Create A Content Plan That Gives HUGE Value
• Step #4 : Create Solid Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Strategies and Implement Them Faithfully

Part 3:

• Step #5 : Get Consistently and Persistently Active In The Conversation With Your Target Market… and Become The Expert
• Step #6: Continue To Look For New Opportunities To Reach Your Target Market

Man, I was checking the stats for one of my own websites as a routine that I have every Monday… and I saw something pretty damn crazy on there that I wanted to share.

One of the sites I run is a real estate investing website that focuses on helping new and struggling investors begin investing the RIGHT WAY. As you probably know, I’m a very part time real estate investor and invest in multi-unit real estate. So, I pass on what I know and help my readers sift through the crap that is on the net and find the truly actionable, truthful, honest, unbiased, and up to date information and resources that will help them succeed… not just line the pockets of gurus.

(sorry… I’ll get off my soapbox for a sec

Anyhow, back to the SEO story…

Okay, I was checking out my stats today and was expecting to see the main search terms referring traffic to be a ton of long-tail terms that I optimize my site and each post for. Hey, that’s what I’ve been focusing on because the generic search term “real estate investing” is one of the more competitive search terms out there… truthfully… I really think it would be a waste of my time to concentrate a ton on ranking high for that search term.

Well…

I come to find that over the past week or so I have been pulling a bunch of traffic from the search term “real estate investing” from Google.

So, like any curious internet entrepreneur would do… I headed over to Google to see what I was ranked for that term.

I couldn’t believe my eyes!

Here’s a screen shot of the actual Google search. (my site is www.thereibrain.com)

The term “real estate investing” is a huge search term w/ over 30 million competing pages and has been dominated by Creonline and REIclub for probably the past 5 years at least. Those two sites have been around since the late 90’s and early 00’s… so Google likes that they’ve been around for a while.

But…

My site just passed the 1.5 year mark a little while back (might be closer to 2 years… don’t remember) and has been doing very well in a ton of long-tail search terms that I have optimized the content for.

How the Sites Been Doing Recently…

The past 6 months The REI Brain has been growing pretty damn well. Traffic has almost doubled every month since January and I attribute that to my highly targeted articles… and the use of social media as of late.

But… up until I noticed my #3 ranking in Google for real estate investing… I haven’t touched higher than the 3rd page for that same search term.

I don’t keep up on the Google algorythim changes a whole lot… I feel that if you put out a ton of awesome content… give the readers awesome value for their time… that other bloggers and websites will link to your site because of the content… and Google will love it for that reason.

Google’s whole aim is to provide the user (one doing the search) with the best quality experience.

This includes:

• The most relevant and timely organic search results
• The most relevant and useful ads
• The results that Google feels will help the reader best answer their question

When you concentrate on #1, providing awesome and timely content… then #2 optimizing it for the search engines… you’ll win.

How did I get this high ranking in such a competitive search term?

Well… to tell you the truth… I can start naming off the ninja techniques I’ve been doing recently…

… or I could tell you the truth and say, “I really don’t know why… maybe a new Google algo”.

All kidding aside, there are some reasons that Google would even consider my site as a top 10 site for real estate investing.

Here are my thoughts…

1. Truly, my site is an awesome resource and is updated on a consistent basis. It sets out to truly help people rather than to make me a ton of money. Google likes that sort of thing.
2. Lately, I‘ve been writing some posts that have been getting linked to a lot on the blog… which would trickle down to the root domain (the root domain is the highly ranked page). Good content = incoming links = Google salivating over your content.
3. I optimized my internal link structure in January using some cool wordpress plugins like the alinks plugin
4. I started using social media big time in January to get the word out about the site.  People gravitate toward genuine content… and social media makes it easy for people to reward good work.  (I’ll write a post later on about how to do this…)

I want to give this a few weeks or a month or two to season on Google.  If it’s around next month at this time… I’ll feel confident that I should continue doing what I’ve been doing to get the word out about my content.

Just an FYI… this is all 100% white hat stuff.  No tricks… just giving awesome content… using simple on page optimization… using social media… and implementing some great internal linking (which I still have a ton I need to do) to make the entire site a bit more sticky and to get people and search engines to do deeper in to the site.

Easy as that.  Give people what they want… be of value, not a spammer w/ a motive… and the search results will find you.

I’ll keep you updated on the status of this ranking and let you know exactly what I’ve done (both on page and off) to get my websites (and my clients websites) where they are.