Email marketing is the most powerful tool you have! So, you need to improve the chances of converting with the people that do want to buy your stuff.
Yesterday, I advocated the idea that you should always use a sitemap on your blog to be sure that all your permalink pages are indexed. But what is a sitemap and why is it so important?
A sitemap gives search spiders information about your website. It tells the bots what pages are on your site, when they were last changed and when it’s likely that they’ll change again. Search bots love information that updates frequently, and it’s part of the reason why spiders love blogs. If you’re blogging consistently, and using keywords associated with your niche you’ll find yourself in the results pages pretty easily, providing you’re not competing for terms that are uber competitive.
Sitemaps also give spiders information about pages that they might not discover otherwise, which is great, and sitemaps allow you to prioritize your pages, if you want to do that.
The bottom line is that they just provide more information and make it easier for spiders to crawl your site. The easier you make it the more likely it is that they’ll discover everything that you want them to. If you’re using flash, or Ajax for example, having a sitemap is mandatory. Otherwise, you might lose the opportunity of having your page crawled at all because spiders find information in those formats hard to parse.
Having a sitemap doesn’t totally guarantee that your page will be indexed, it just increases the likelihood.
Sitemaps are easy to create, whether for a blog (get Google XML Sitemaps plugin) or a website. Just go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ where you can set priorities, and the dates/rates of change for your website. Then, take the file and upload it to your root directory via FTP. It’s really simple.
To make this more powerful, you should have a Google Webmaster account. It’s free to set up, and when you do, you give it the URL of your sitemap and you’re all set. XML-Sitemaps.com will index up to 500 pages for you for free. It’s a great deal. Totally take advantage of it.
I can tell you what the wrong choice in terms of SEO is and that’s keeping the “http://yourblogdomain.com/?postnumber” that is the WordPress default. It doesn’t tell folks or search spiders anything about the post, except what number the post is.
Your SEO-friendly permalink will include your keyword rich title as well as the post number, and it should look like this:
/%post_id%/%postname%/
You can add the category (/%post_id%/%category%/%postname%/) in addition to or instead of the post ID #, but you should only do that if your categories are set up as your main keywords. A “General” category, for example, won’t help at all.
To change your permalink from your WordPress dashboard, you simply go to Settings, then Permalink.
You’ll see them right at the top of the page. Click on “Custom Setting,” and either fill in what you want or copy and paste the above.
However, this is something that should be considered when you start your blog. Do NOT alter your permalink structure if your blog is old or you’ll lose all SEO goodness that you have built up for ALL of your previous posts.
If your blog is new and you don’t have too many posts, change it now. It will be well worth the effort and help your SEO efforts.
To assure that your permalinks will be crawled and indexed, you should also have an XML Sitemap in place. You can get the XML Sitemaps plugin at http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins.
Remember a long time ago, I told you about a product that I created with Tellman, called Spider Language? Well, we’ve been working on it and tweaking it and making things all come together. It’s been a long five months as we went back and forth with the format and the set up and whatever…
We tried it a few weeks ago with a smaller list, and things have been going well, so we launched it to the whole list this weekend! I can’t tell you how excited I am that so many folks decided to take us up on the trial. (You can see what’s happening at http://SpiderLanguage.com)
I want to teach everyone that SEO isn’t as hard as they think. Oh sure, there are some very technical aspects that you can get into that are difficult to learn, but if you’re a webmaster and not a professional SEO that spends 24/7 on optimizing for the search engines, you really need the basics and you need them presented to you in a way that’s easy to grasp and retain. I think we’ve done that.
The course is presented in weekly installments with a video or two to back up the written learning. There are checklists that you can use to just fly through this stuff when you’re ready to pursue a task. And there’s homework. You need to learn this stuff with a hands-on mentality. I never learn something entirely until I do it myself, so I think that’s a very important component.
The other thing I want to teach folks is that SEO should permeate every single activity you do online–blogging, articles, press releases, videos, even Twitter… everything!
And so we’ll be talking about each of those areas, too, as the weeks roll on.
I’m really excited about this, and hope that everyone who signs up will be, too. SEO is something I totally love, and I don’t want folks to fear it because it’s too hard to learn. Come with me… I’ll make it easy for you, and you’ll be amazed at how you can really put this to work and get some of that free, targeted traffic that people are always talking about. Isn’t that what you really want? I’ll show you how it’s done.
When I talk to people that are relatively new to Internet marketing, I’m astounded that they don’t see the value of building a list. Your list is the most important asset of your entire business! Without a list, you don’t make money, it’s just that simple.
Oh sure, there are some folks that have cracked the AdWords code, who know how to make AdWords pay off, but I guarantee that they’re also building a list around that activity. If they’re smart enough to conquer AdWords, they’re smart enough to know that the list will help them to make even more money, and not only that, but it will cost them far less cash. Emails are free, whereas we all know that AdWords is definitely not.
There are all kinds of ways to build a list, too. Obviously, you can put up a squeeze page and drive traffic to that. You can have an opt-in box on your blog. You can start a free site of some kind and pick up a huge list that way, or you can even buy a list through co-registration. But there are plenty of other ways to build a list, and if you aren’t doing it… good luck.
I spent the first couple of years online thinking that a list didn’t matter. I wasn’t making any money, either. It wasn’t until I connected with Tellman that he smacked me upside the head (virtually, of course), and said… “Start NOW!” And so, I did. And I have to say that my list means more to me than all the tea in England. Really. And my life is very different from what it was three years ago, too. It’s all because of my list.
Your LIST is your bread & butter. If you’re not building it… Start TODAY!
And if you need help with that, if you’re not sure how to begin… there’s always the ListBuilding Club. I assure you, it’s worth every single penny. Yes, I”m prejudiced, but I also know that you can’t find better training anywhere. We have thousands of satisfied customers, and I know that because they send us wonderful testimonials every single day. It’s really great to be part of that.
And it’s great for members because every single one of us at Overcome Everything cares. That’s our edge. We’re not just in it for the money. We want every single person that comes to us for help to succeed in a BIG way, and many have.
If you’re drowning out there and feel like you’re overwhelmed and don’t know where to start… Click Here and STOP the frustration. We really can help. And when your list is growing and you start making regular, steady money from it every day… you’ll “get” it, and be totally glad you did.
I’m always looking for interesting sites, and sometimes when I join here or there, I’m asked for a logo.
Well… I don’t have one.
At least I didn’t, until Now!
What d’ya think? It goes with the whole SEO theme, right? It’s colorful and fun, and oh yeah… it was free to make.
I stumbled on a stie called “Logo Creator” at http://creatr.cc/creatr/
You can choose from 5 different preset designs, add your own colors and styles, and voila! You’re logofied.
But… Maybe you’ll like this one better:
It’s got my blog colors, and a little “wheelie” thingy that indicates a techy feel.
I made this one at SimWebSol Logo Generator and you can find it at http://www.simwebsol.com/ImageTool/Default.aspx
So, now I have too many logos…. What to do?
I’d love your opinion.
Vote!
Tell me which logo I should use, and I’ll give you access to the first lesson of Spider Language. You’ll love it so much that I’m betting you’ll want to stick around.
So, let me hear your comments, even if you only want to say that they both suck. 
When I went over to Google Reader to check on my feeds today, I had no idea that I was about to BUY a plugin, but I did. My friend, Brian Terry from ListHero, had shared a cool post from Michel Fortin’s blog about all the plugins Michel uses. He has a TON of them, and frankly, I’m impressed that his blog still loads so quickly. But anyway…
One of the plugins caught my eye.
It’s called “Action Comments,” and it asks people who comment on your blog if they’d like to also join your list. A checkbox shows up under the comment form and is automatically checked for them, if you want it to be, or it can be open. It’s pretty sweet, and so for $17 I bought it.
It’s easy to install with WordPress 2.7.1 because after you download the .zip file, you just ask the blog to install it for you. Then, you fill in your autoresponder code, and voila! You’re done.
If you want to check it out… Click Here to Get All the Details About Action Comments. After you buy it, there’s even a video that shows you how to install it and use it. Even the newest newbie on the planet can do it.
Are you building a good following at Twitter? I am. I love hanging out there. Don’t post a TON like some folks, but I manage to get a blog post and a link or two in a day and love #followfriday. Total fun stuff.
But if you’re building a list at Twitter to market to the people on your list, well… you can, but for how long? I mean, Twitter is awesome, and though I’m hoping it will be around a long, long time, I’ve been on the Internet a long, long time, and…
Stuff that was HUGE way back then, like Usenet (bulletin board type spaces that are more like today’s forums) or IRC (Internet Relay Chat, like today’s chatrooms except you can get to them from the Word Wide Web), for example are so used to was now.
An email list is permanent, at least until your subscribers decide that they don’t want to be on your list anymore. But their loyalty will stand the test of time.
Twitter may be a passing fancy, and if you spend a lot of time trying to build an enormous following without building your email list at the same time, well… I don’t think you’re looking very far into the future.
Remember how everything was so MySpace a couple of years ago? Or, how about when Yahoo was the premiere search vehicle? Alta Vista doesn’t even exist anymore, and we used to think it was pretty great until Google came along. And so…
It’s the Internet. Prepare for it. Get the people who are enjoying your Tweets today onto your email list. That’s the only way you’ll be able to keep them as your customers for a long time to come.
Just sayin’…
Do you love social media as much as I do? I mean, you have to know I enjoy Twitter. I write about it often enough. But I also love Ning, where I have set up various sites, HubPages, and MyBlogLog, just to name a few. Why do I love them? Primarily because to me, they’re the FUN part of the Web. The friend making, and content adding and finding out what people like instead of just what search bots find interesting is really important to me, and I love it.
You may love it, too. Or, you may be one of those Luddite types who see social media as a waste of time. I got that comment about Twitter once. The person who commented on one of my status updates about Twitter said that it was nothing more than a time waster.
Duh.
I agree that playing around with social media CAN be a time sink, but not if you’re doing it properly.
Everyone who wants to be noticed online needs to remember something very, very important… it’s ALL about the keywords. The more you use keywords associated with your niche, whether that niche be ROI- or personal-centric, the more people will find you online. It’s just that simple.
Go to a keyword discovery tool like SEOBook or WordTracker and do some frickin’ research, dammit! People usually skip this step and don’t even realize how vitally important to online success using the right keywords in everything you do is. They think it’s boring. Or, they think it’s hard. But it’s not! And worst, they may think they don’t have to do it at all. That’s really dopey thinking.
If you don’t use the right keywords in everything you do, you’re destined to be just another 1 of the 8 gazillion pages online and NOBODY will ever find you. You’re a cyber-ghost. POOF!
So, find the keywords that apply to your niche and use them in every social site you use. Eventually, the search engines will put it all together and say, hey! This guy is a writer or hey! This gal is a super-smart SEO or whatever…
Otherwise, get out the sheet… You’re just another grain of sand in the Sahara.
Have you ever had a great idea for a website, but just couldn’t find a great domain? I have. When I opened Blogging4Boomers, well… every freakin’ domain with “blog” in the universe has been taken. Even Tellman couldn’t help me to come up with something awesome and he’s like the most creative person I’ve ever known. We even got Jodi into it and nothing. She’s just as creative as Tellman, but even with all that incredible brain power behind me, it was really hard.
One of our ListBuilding 411 customers asked about buying domains today for a very special project that he’s doing, and I had to tell him to buy a bunch of domains. Coming up with those could be really hard, and as I thought about it, I realized that there had to be some sites online that would help do the job.
What happened?
In messing around with these, I actually found a domain I wanted and bought it. Be looking for WeirdNewsWeblog.com in the near future. I’ve always wanted to do a blog like that because that’s my specialty. When I was writing, I was always coming up with these obscure facts that nobody much knew and loved to use them for the WOW! factor in writing. I want people to go, “Wow! That’s an interesting tidbit.” So, this will be a lot of fun for me.
But back to these sites that will make domain naming a bit easier for you:
This site will allow you to choose terms from column “A” and terms from column “B.” Then, the site mashes the words together in their various forms. You select the domain potentials you like and it sends you to Dotster.com to check the availability. Kind of kicky.
Here, you put in a bunch of words germane to your niche. I tried horses, bridles, tack, and it came back with horsebridles.com. Not bad! Then, it sends you right to GoDaddy to buy it. Sweet! Hmm… a great way to be a GoDaddy affiliate. Hope they are.
This is where I picked up my new domain just testing the site out. VERY cool. You put in a word and it comes back with a pile of expired domains. Many of them already have backlinks. This is great because you could find a cool domain with a bunch of backlinks and have SEO traction before you even set up the site. Woo-hoo!
Anyway, those are some sites where you can create domains you might not think of on your own. Have fun… Just don’t buy too many!
