Here’s a video I made for Overcome Everything About Getting Traffic to your blog:
OK… Time for a Pat smackdown, people.
You know, I’m sick and tired of people asking me obvious questions. I mean, sure, “getting” this whole Internet marketing biz is hard when you get started. Trying to figure it all out is daunting and overwhelming, especially if you go off chasing after every pretty new thing that comes down the block.
STOP!
Do you think that I buy every product out there? Hell no. I bought one yesterday, tried it, liked it, and wrote to you about it here. But I don’t buy anything unless I know it will help me to move my business forward. And you should be the same way. Otherwise, your credit cards will be maxed out and you’ll be crying because it will take you seventeen years to pay them off.
But here’s the thing…
If you do buy something, USE it! READ it! Don’t join a club and then ask obvious questions about what’s inside it. This happens all the time with The ListBuilding Club and with Blogging4Boomers. People have legitimate questions, of course, but the ANSWERS are right there in front of their noses. Yet, they have never taken the time to go through the material in the course.
Guess what, people?
You won’t make it.
Why?
Because you don’t know how to find the answers you need. Nobody is going to hold your hand through this and show you every little thing you need to know. They just aren’t going to do it for you. If you want to be successful, you have to do some looking and learning on YOUR OWN.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love doing Q&A. I do it twice a month for Overcome Everything and twice a month for my own business, and I love the calls. But I also get lots of emails. I must have answered at least 1,000 questions already this year and it’s only January. That’s awesome! I love helping people and I love to see them make progress and money. It’s a thrill to be able to help when folks just need something extra, and they often do.
But please… If you already have the answer–right in front of your nose, take some initiative and go find it! Otherwise, you’ll be frustrated and angry and you’ll never make it.
Part of this business that’s really important is that you have to learn where to find the answers. If you can do that, you’ll never be daunted. You’ll always know where to turn, and you’ll find success.
Don’t expect success to be handed to you because it won’t happen. Sorry. That’s just the deal.
I just got done watching the video for PPC Web Spy, and downloaded the free version immediately. You can get it here:
http://easyseotricks.com/ppc-obv
It’s a Firefox plugin that allows you to see the keywords for any AdWords advertiser. You can also have extra keywords suggested, and it’s totally awesome. I went through the whole video, expecting to pay. I mean, Brad Callen is the SEO Elite guy, right? It’s a great tool and I’ve used it a lot.
But I get to the end of the video, wondering how much it was, and it’s FREE!
You really should watch this video: http://easyseotricks.com/ppc-obv
Then, you get inside, and of course, there’s an OTO (one-time offer for the newest marketers). So, I’m thinking, hmm… how can this be better?
How would you like your Clickbank, Amazon, or PayDotCom IDs showing up whenever your referrals search for something and ultimately buy the product? I thought that was pretty sweet, so now, Joel Comm made some money from sending me to the site. You go, Joel. 
Go download the free version and see how awesome it is, or at least watch the video. Rocks!
People are always asking me about my books, and since I have to come up with a video for the Overcome Everything channel each week, I decided to show folks my prior life. I did a lot of bleeding from the soul for these. You’d think that an accomplished author would be wealthy and famous…
Not
So, I came online to help sell these books, and now, look at me. Raving SEO, Internet marketing afficionado, and making more money than I ever have in my life. If I can come from an academic background (more or less, I was a banker for 20 years before writing) and be successful at this Internet marketing biz, you can, too.
‘Course, I wouldn’t have done it without Tellman. He was my mentor, which made all the difference. The cool thing is that you can have Tellman as your mentor, too. Just go over and Join The ListBuilding Club. It will set you straight down the path to IM success… I kid you not.
Anyway, check out this video and let me know what you think…
Do you love all things Web 2.0 like I do?
Well…
Do you love video?
I have a great place for you: Seesmic.com
You can go there and post really short videos and get to know people on the site. They respond to your posts by making return video comments and such, and it’s a whole lot of fun. Kind of like the old bulletin board days, but with moving pictures, rather than text entries. It rocks!
You will need a webcam, though. The Flip Video just doesn’t seem to work with Seesmic. They don’t accept the .avi format that Flip Vid uses, so you have to convert your video to .flv or .mp4. I tried that and it still didn’t work for me, but oh well… I’m not a video genius. If anyone can help with that, it would rock. Flip Vid is far superior to what I’m using.
I have this crappy web cam that I got free with something I bought. It’s really old and makes fuzzy pictures, but nobody cares. Everyone is there having fun and communicating with the rest of the world.
Check it out: http://seesmic.com
It’s a blast!
I just got some pretty interesting stats from Royal.Pingdom.com. They say they used various sources around the Web to come up with these numbers and did some fancy-schmancy calculations of their own. So, not sure how totally accurate they are, but let’s take a look:
How many people have email accounts?
1.3 BILLION
How many emails are sent per day?
210 BILLION Wonder how many of them are spam emails? I must get 2-300 a day.
Ah… read on. 70% of them are spam. I guess the CAN-SPAM Act of 2004 isn’t exactly kicking ass. I often wondered how the U.S. could enforce it when a lot of the spam comes from other countries. I totally hate spam and wish there was a better way to deal with it.
53.8 TRILLION spam emails were sent out in 2008! What a frickin’ waste of good bandwidth!
186,727,854 websites were online at the end of December. That’s sites, NOT pages. Imagine how many pages there are. Those Google spiders move like the wind.
There were 77.5 million .com domains in existence at the end of 2008. Lots of people in business or want to be in business, eh? I bought my name.com a long time ago, like in 1999.
When you add in .net and .org, you’ve got 174 million domains!
Worldwide Internet users? 1,463,632,361 That’s worldwide
There are 133 Million blogs and were 329 million blog posts in 2008.
How about this one? The average number of minutes in an online video? 3.1 minutes.
Internet Explorer is still the winning browser, though I don’t understand why. Probably people in the non-business or non-dev Internet — you know, just your average Internet user. Not insane Internet people like us — have never even heard of Firefox. Shame. They totally don’t know what they’re missing.
And…
There were 1 million computer viruses
Hope you weren’t the recipient of one of them.
And that about sums it up. If you want to read the whole article and the full list of stats, go to: http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/01/22/internet-2008-in-numbers/ and check it out.
I think stats are interesting. If you’re an online marketer, they should be interesting to you, as well. When you plan your marketing around a statistic, when you take some of the important ones into consideration, you’ll no doubt find that using this intelligence to target your campaigns is much better than hit or miss marketing, eh? I get stats in my Inbox every day from eMarketerDaily.com.
OK, OK, so I’m a math geek. I minored in Calculus in college. I like numbers a lot.
But numbers DO tell.
One question that I’m often asked by my customers is, “How do I find stuff to post to my blog?”
Seems really tough to some folks. I get that. I really do.
I have always had a love/hate relationship with writing. I’m a professional writer, so the words just flow out of my fingers, more or less, but even for me, it’s sometimes hard coming up with what to write on my own. In fact, I rarely use my own brain to come up with topics, in case you haven’t noticed.
At the end of my work day for Overcome Everything, it’s time for blogging, which I try to do Monday through Friday. Sometimes, that doesn’t happen. This week, I spent most of my life on the telephone between the re-launch of The ListBuilding Club and the “Listathon” which we did Wednesday and Thursday. Ahhhh!!! It’s so much fun, but at the end of a day like those, you’re just exhausted.
So, I don’t rely on my own brain, which is very tired by the end of one of THOSE days.
First, I go into my email. I get newsletters from Site Pro News, Media Post and several other sites about search and Internet marketing, plus Jack Humphrey’s Friday Traffic Report. I can usually find something interesting in one of those that will give me an idea for blogging. I read articles on the SEO sites and such, too, so it’s easy to bounce off one piece or another.
Or, I can go to You Tube and find a video to post, or I post a video of my own.
I can go into my member calls from Blogging4Boomers and select a bit of audio to publish.
It’s totally easy for me to find stuff to blog, and it can be easy for you, too. Learn something you didn’t know before. Catch up on the news in your niche. Make a video or find one on one of the video sites, or interview someone — an expert — and post that interview to your blog.
There are so many ways to blog, it really boggles the mind.
Great article today over at SEOMoz blog by randfish, the site’s CEO and co-founder, entitled: Do the Little Things in SEO Make a Big Difference?
In the post, randfish muses that the little details that all SEOs know are often overlooked because of site devs not really wanting to do the work. Hmm…
I hear that.
I’m my own site dev and rarely pay attention to this stuff on my own websites because I just don’t have the time. I’m so busy working on stuff for other people that if I were to choose one “little” thing to do, it would be to get my primary keyword to the front of my title.
Works for many of the SEOs commenting, too. That’s huge! If you wrap an <h1> tag around that, well… total SEO blessings be to ye.
Easy to do, huh? I mean, you can just select the text and ping the <h1> in most HTML editors.
But <h2>s and <h3>s… Well… great if you want to use them, and maybe, just maybe they will give you an edge, but I’m thinking I don’t have time for those. And I probably won’t bother with bolds, worry about content to code ratio, or ever put a hyphen in a URL in place of the underscore. I’d never buy a domain with a hyphen or an underscore in it to begin with.
Yet, I will do some pretty down and dirty keyword research, and I will make those keyword phrases the title of my page, and I will come up with a kick-ass description.
Those three things alone are pretty powerful. So, what’s the moral of the story?
If you’re going to be a too-busy SEO like me, you won’t worry about all the details, but… there are just SOME details that you can’t do without.
Wow! Have we finally made it to the Big Leagues? Well… maybe the minors, anyway, which is pretty cool.
Houston Baptist University is offering a new course: Internet Marketing and SEO.
Yep.
Being taught by two “Noted Website Marketing Executives,” whom I’ve not heard of, but hey. Brian Edmonson says I have my head… you don’t want to know. Trust me on that.
Anyway, they’re teaching, “… internet marketing skills, Search Engine Optimization, including domain name considerations, hosting strategies, keyword research, HTML tagging, header utilization, URL extensions, content development and website submission to search engines. Additionally, this course provides a review of Google tools such as iGoogle accounts, AdWords, Analytics, AdSense, and Webmaster Tools,” according to an article at MSNBC.com (“Internet Marketing SEO Course Offered at Houston Baptist University, ” Jan. 20, 2009)
Interesting. Wonder if they have any other degrees or they’ve just made a ton of money online. And I’m wondering if they are truly SEOs. I mean, any SEO worth his/her salt knows that submissions to search engines are a waste of time. Spiders find sites anyway. Duh.
But I’m just pleased that people are finally taking us seriously, I guess.
I had a comment today on my last Ferrari post that we were all scammer and spammers, basically, and I think that’s the attitude that mainstream Internet users have of us. We’re the dark side of the Internet force.
I applaud Houston Baptist for taking this business to heart, and hope that the trend grows. In time, I see more business done online than off. I mean, retail probably will still exist, but I think that Internet business is going to be predominant.
But that’s me. My husband says that people won’t buy cars online, and I say, “They’re already doing it.”
Are you using video successfully? Have you even started to include video in your traffic routines? Here’s the thing: People want it! The demand for video is rising, and according to eMarketer.com, by 2012, which is only 3 short years away, 88% of all Internet users will be 
watching video, and 80.9% of us will be using it in our marketing campaigns. That’s huge!
So, what do you put in a video?
If you’re in a niche, you’re obviously an expert in that niche. You know things that other people don’ t know. So, give them an interesting factoid about your niche, or teach them something they need to know.
The trick is to make the video interesting. If you don’t, no one will watch it. To make it interesting, it shouldn’t just be you on the camera droning away about something. A great blog is http://DearTellman.com where you can watch Tellman answer questions. Notice how he does it. He’s animated; he’s on fire! Plus, he gives stuff away, everyone adds comments and video comments, and it’s really cool.
If you just suck at making videos, pay someone else to do it for you. Just be sure that you’re getting your URL into every frame. Make a watermark or a callout and be sure that people are seeing information about how to get to your website.
Keep the video short, too. You know that most of us have environmental ADD, right? I mean, anyone under about 40 grew up with Sesame Street. They gave things in short bursts to keep kids attention.
Well, Internet viewers are kind of like those Sesame Street kids, who are all grown up now. If you don’t give them something quick and clean, you won’t keep their attention. Videos should be 5 minutes, which is ideal, but probably less than 10 minutes. If you have a very long story to tell, think about chunking the information down in a series of videos, rather than making one long one.
Get a Flip Vid, too, as I’ve mentioned before. They totally rock. I can’t wait to take mine to JVAlert next month! You’ll be getting some cool stuff from there, for sure!
