Category Archives: Internet Marketing

WordPress Theme – Premium vs Free Tough Choice

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Every wordpress blog needs a theme. Depending on the purpose the at theme needs to meet specific requirements. The tough choice is to go either for a free template or a premium theme, but why is it a tough  one?

There is plenty to choose from if you want just to decorate your website and you don’t have to pay for a theme. If you just want to post your content without doing anything to it then any theme will do.

But if you want your message to get across faster or if you want it to be found in the search engine results then you have to be more careful with your theme choice.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is necessary for search engines to classify your content and properly display it. Things like page titles, tags, categories, even comments play a vital role in placing your website in the right place in search results.

Good wordpress theme takes care of those this part of SEO using code within, this code strategic information in places where it can be easily accessed by search engine spiders or robots. Many modern themes have that part integrated, but it’s not obvious just by looking at the theme from the outside.

Premium wordpress themes include many aspects of SEO from basic to highly refined , also optimizing content like images or videos on site. In this case you pay for a peace of mind knowing that your content will be found and placed where you want it.

The problem with some premium wordpress themes can be that excessive usage of code can slow the website down very much. You don’t want a slow website, the reason is that Google considers speed as an important ranking factor. If you page takes more than 10 second to load it can become a problem.

Many of the best premium wordpress themes take care of this with clever coding, these are the ones worth investing in, but in many cases those fast themes may not be the prettiest.

So the choice is yours in the end but for me functionality and  speed is always a top priority. Over the years I’ve used or experienced every type of wordpress theme, I just like to play and change things around. I have also bought many but still haven’t found that ultimate one that would become the last theme I’ll ever need.

There is many that come close, but there’s always something missing and I love good looking websites but the web is not fast enough yet for nice and functional in the same theme.

Social Media – Where To Start Your Social Marketing

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Social MediaYou’ve probably figured out by now that the whole social media buzz is the wave of the future for many years to come. It you don’t yet include this type of interaction int your marketing strategy you leave a lot on the table for other marketers.

Social Media is another means of communication with your audience and potential customers, giving that many of these resources are still unrestricted for marketers there is just an amazing opportunity to take advantage of.

Why do you need social media?

  • contact audience from many various sources using various social services,
  • easy branding opportunity,
  • easy way to find targeted audience which keeps on growing,
  • easy way to connect them to your marketing strategy,
  • multi-platform marketing, from short text to videos, podcasts etc,
  • user interaction works both ways,
  • this type of online presence is highly regarded by search engines,

Where to start with social media?

Facebook – so far the largest online community, gathering international users from all over the world, Facebook account is a must have for an business to serve as a platform for continuous updates and  short company introduction. Of course there is many businesses that rely solely on Facebook as the only means of contact with customers. I never recommend this approach, use as many various platforms as you can to brand your business.

Twitter – also vital platform, it’s good for quick to the point marketing, but can be very successful as many followers can form a social proof other people need to start listening to you. It takes a skillful approach to correctly use Twitter for best effect but there is a massive potential for finding people with various problems that are waiting to be solved. Use Twitter’s search to enter keywords and find people who need a particular service – very convenient.

Google Plus Social Network – this one grows the fastest of any in recent months. Google waited too long to perfect their platform but they sort of force people to create an account so there will be massive numbers of people who joined. If you have any type of business online you jus HAVE TO HAVE the Goggle Plus Account for it, very important.

LinkedIn – this one is little less used by marketers as it has an association to professionals only. Wrong! This platform is as good as any other top ones, and for certain types of marketing it is massively more productive. If you market to professionals this is better than anything else. The true power of this network is in the networking, hings like groups, forums etc are places to market your brand.

YouTube – owned by Google, amazing way to brand the business and present visual aspects of your business or use messages that work on many senses. Creating a simple video and posting to YouTube is super easy, used with correct titles and tags this often work better than a website to get your message across, and you don’t even have to use your own face.

These are top recommendations of Social Media to start with. Use as many of these as you can and you will see the massive difference in effects of your marketing efforts.

OnlyWire – 50 Top Social Bookmarking Services Under One Button

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OnlyWire

OnlyWire is one of the first Social Bookmarking submission services on the market. They were quick to recognize the potential of multi-network submissions necessary to promote the content and build backlinks.

As social media presence is considered a necessity for every serious business, any tool that automates social backlinks creation is welcomed, plus it gives a massive traffic boost.

How does OnlyWire work?

It works in two ways. One is to allow you to bookmark your content very quickly across many services ( you decide which ones) at the same time. Simply fill out basic information like a link, description, title, tags and click submit.

The software then automatically logs in to social accounts you’ve created and posts the information you just filled in. Occasionally you need to solve a captcha to proceed.

The most time consuming thing about using OnlyWire is creating those social account as you need to go to your chosen social bookmarking sites and create accounts. With 50 or so services it can take a good part of the day to do that, but this can be easily outsourced using services like JustaFive.

Why does OnlyWire work?

The reason this is a good strategy is that Google searches through social bookmarking services for fresh content and to recognize current trends. this is one of their ways to provide searchers with up to date information on given subject.

If Google finds a large number of links on bookmarking sites pointing to any particular subject that means this topic is important for people and it’s a fresh trend.

Certain bookmarking services can be a trusted resource from human perspective and users of services like Digg often search for news on given topic right there. If your social post on Digg gets to Digg’s front page, the shear volume of traffic created by Digg users can easily block a server of any site.

This also comes from viral aspect of social bookmarking. If people find something interesting they will pass it on, so your single submission has a potential of returning thousands of backlinks.

There are various versions of OnlyWire service, starting with free ending with enterprise for massive number of submissions going to millions.

I have been using this back when it was all free and have upgraded to free version. This is one of the tools where you can see the difference right away. It’s easy to test, simply publish two similar posts and for one of them use OnlyWire to bookmark.

Many times you will see the staggering difference, but the absolutely best way to use it is to do this for every single post you create and every bit of content. You can also submit other websites that contain your backlinks.

Onlywire Submitter

OnlyWire Plugin

OnlyWire created a plugin for WordPress that automatically bookmarks every post you create. you can also choose to show OnlyWire button on that post so people also can bookmark that same post to their favorite services. This creates a social interaction with you website’s content, a factor that Google strongly considers in evaluating a web page.

SEO tips on using OnlyWire service

- Don’t put all your eggs into one basket, meaning if you have many websites don’t use the same OnlyWire account for all of them, this may look suspicious for search engines.
- Switch between accounts when submitting, don’t always post to all bookmarking accounts at the same time.
- This should NOT be your ONLY strategy for backlinks, you have to create some other types of incoming links.
- Captcha solver is a must for high number of submissions, in the end adding up all the time, it will save you a few nice days of your life.

Other OnlyWire tools

You can also submit your pages using Browser Bookmarklet, basically any webpage you see in your browser can be quickly submitted. Interesting thing also is the ability to submit RSS Feeds to OnlyWire services, a feature many people will appreciate.

Conclusion

Social bookmarks are the only type of links you can create with this service, but overall this is a massive time saver and one of the best tools in terms of impact for the money and time spent.

You should expect a great traffic boost because OnlyWire uses only top social networks.

I’ve been using it for years and before I discovered OnlyWire the only way was to submit to every bookmarking site manually – a huge headache that was.
Not anymore.

Stupid PageRank and Alexa Rank, I hate this nonsense!

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I have a website that is basically a domain only pulling videos from youtube. Google ranked it at PR3 a few months after I set it up and I’ve never built a single link to it.

On top of that, it is a .info domain!

The only thing I’ve done is to pay for the domain for 5 years in advance  – if that’s enough to give it a PR3 then I will do it more often. Stupid ranking system.

On the other hand I buy expired domains with high PR and Google always swamps it no matter what I do. Try to figure out a machine….! useless…

Alexa is even more stupid, their ranks depend on people using Alexa toolbar, this way only young demographics affect ranking and I can see this clearly on my sites.

Sites with high traffic but related to old people’s topics have poor alexa rank regardless of traffic. On the other hand, stuff like games have a nice rank even with poor traffic. Freakin’ nonsense.

There are sites on top of Alexa’s ranks only because they’re used by internet marketers, nobody else, and all marketers have one or the other way of checking alexa ranking in their browser.

I also have websites with no traffic whatsoever with nice rank based only on my daily check on those sites. Useless!!!

… Just thought you might like to know …

http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
http://www.alexa.com/

Is Really Creating Value That Important in Internet Marketing?

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Many if not the most of us people making money online get stuck in the mindset of making money as a main goal. This seems to be a short term solution. If you want to get to the next level you need to change the way you look at your online business.

Selling is not straightforward anymore, people will not buy from you just because you have a product. If someone else offers the same thing in more attractive way then you have just lost a customer.

Typical ‘chasing a dollar’ mindset will not take you far these days. Instead change it to ‘create a value’ mindset and if you start to really care about your customer you will notice that your money becomes a byproduct of you creating the value.

The even more important thing is that you will create a relationship with your customer and if you don’t know yet it is far cheaper to sell to the people who bought from you before than converting a new customer.

This is the reason why businesses who keep this relationship are future-proof. This is as long as they don’t screw their image and authority, which can be done easily too. Internet has this viral nature and even one unhappy customer can spoil company’s image.

On the other end a satisfied customer can elevate your business if he lets the world know. And you can help them to do that by creating opportunities to comment, leave testimonials, tell his friends etc.

Then if you follow up giving them something extra, thus making sure they are still happy, you will virtually guarantee that they’ll stay with you for a long term.

One of the simplest things to do is to help them use your product, give them more ideas, tutorials. Here comes the importance of internet cross-media usage. You can help your customer via ebook, video, website, mobile phone app, you name it.

But before you do anything, first figure out who exactly your perfect customer is, what’s his age, education level, intelligence, body…things like that. Then place yourself in their shoes and go through your sales process.

Think what they think and keep in mind how they will use the product, what help may they eventually need? Have you created value associated with your product or service?

Make sure you do and you won’t have to worry about money anymore, money will take care of itself.

Also make sure you have the best internet marketing tools for the job.