A Midwest Journal

One of the more interesting situations happened to me. I’m actually reversing what I know about SEO to actually hide a site from the Search Engines in order to make it much harder to find.

Of course, this is dead easy.

The reason I’m doing this is to simply have the time to get all this stuff on SEO and online marketing out of my head, down on a blog-site and  ready for othere  to use. It’s another step away from all that scamming reporting I’ve been doing lately – and several steps closer to simply being able to follow my own bliss of comics.

With this recent work, I’m finding it’s great to simply write and publish without having to constantly worry about search engines penalizing you for too much content too fast.

This new site is the Online Sunshine Plan – but you can only find it by direct link. But I keep it out of the search engines to keep it private.

And I’ll be so happy when that’s done. Or closer to my native happiness, anyway.

Practically, this is a nice test of whether search engines are even needed with all this social media around. And whether that site shows up on Google even though they don’t index it.

Great experiment. Visit if you like. You’ll find some neat stuff there, especially how to create a membership area without all the major hype most of them have…

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Oh: almost forgot (again…)

Happy Birthday to meeeee.

Another rainy day on the farm – perfect for sorting through all sorts of things. For me, it’s getting back to all this stuff I’ve accumulated on Internet Marketing.

I’m just now getting through Charles Heflin’s SEO2020.com, where he has a great deal of courses in all shapes and conditions. But they mostly follow what he has been uncovering for years. Some changes you can tell. And other stuff he’s not gotten around to yet – if ever. But the basics are there.

Internet Marketing Pyramid

Now, there is a bit of a pyramid to all this SEO stuff. And I’m sure this is controversial, but I’m looking at it from the broad view. This is looking backwards to see where I’ve gotten the data that works and who came up with that stuff first.

Top tier is Charles’ Heflin and his ThemeZoom buddies. Follow him, get a Google Alert going on him – this way you can keep up with stuff.

Somewhere between top and second tier is the 30 Day Challenge guys. When you hold a webinar series and 50,000 people attend, you have to be doing something right. If you did 30DC and then studied Heflin’s stuff – this would be a simple approach which would really set you up to succeed. Ed Dale doesn’t particularly cover Heflin’s stuff, but he gets you set up very well on using the Internet and making money doing it. Another subscription you should sign up for (it’s free.)

2nd tier is Michael Campbell and his buddy Dr. Andy Williams. Both of these guys have been around as long and deal with making income from Affiliate sales, much as Heflin does. But while some of their stuff is original early on, and that they have their own tangential approach to things, they have a sizable Heflin/ThemeZoom influence. And I follow Campbell and Williams through their email newsletters – though I’d probably be better off with RSS feeds.

3rd tier is Jack Humphrey’s and his associates. I don’t really like anything that is ego-based. When someone says it’s “based on so-and-so’s success”, I tend to be skeptical. And Humphrey’s stuff is that way. It’s all about Jack. The other point is that while I’ve done his 16-step program with Sam Clark (twice), I found it haphazardly organized and presented. After that 16-day program, you are supposed to sign up for his (formerly known as) Authority Site Center and do his 60-day program. But you can find that pdf file online in various places – and it’s no better organized. It’s really a blind shopping list of things to do, not “here’s what to do and why it’s in this sequence and how come”.

After all, I’m a farmer, engineer, and philosopher – so things that work are appreciated and when you study them to find out why they work, you appreciate them even more. When someone obfuscates (hides) the reasons things work (or don’t really know) then you suspect either 1) they got their secrets from someone else, or 2) their “secret stuff” doesn’t work or is a gimmick.

Jack also has the scene of reinventing himself every few years. First it was ContentDesk (the idea that Content is King, which is still true) and this was in the heady days of Article Marketing. Then it was Authority Site Center, based on the idea that authority sites get better search engine positions and so more traffic (also true). Now it’s BlogCentral or something – all based on local search (the current rising star). So I’ve reluctantly started following him, as he keeps coming across my trail with data I’m trying to find. He’s just changing too much for me – seems inconsistent. Nice guy, though. I’m just not into personality cults for my data. So you don’t see any link to him or his cronies.

4th tier and below – all these knuckle heads with their semi-rabid followers who buy up everything they put out. My clue to these guys was in a survey Sam Clark did at the beginning of his 16-step program – where 80% of those who had signed up had bought some major services or packages about Internet Marketing in the last year, and were intending to buy more. The worst scenes I’ve ever had to deal with were Internet Marketers marketing Internet Marketing to Internet Marketers. Like the settlers circling their own wagons endlessly with no Indians even attacking. (Are we there, yet?)

What you really need to know

Hopefully, I’ll be able to tell you this by the end of these studies. I got into studying marketing after I wrote a bunch of books which just sat there. Now I had already been trained as a graphic artist, so had a thorough grounding in what that corporation thought was marketing. Of course, they had built this up with their own clientele and through the days before and after desktop publishing appeared. And mixed in with this was their own way to build a sales silo to extract maximal income from clients they had lured there. All top-down and inbred.

Getting out onto the Internet was a relief, but was a bit like Tom Hank’s castaway character – lots of ocean all around after you get off that island. And the “experts” out there are really little more than sharks most of the time. Essentially, they all want you to buy into their plan somehow, someway. They all want a piece of you. And they’ll keep circling until they get it…

The funny thing is that when you try to use most of their methods, the vast bulk of the fish just swim right away from your hook. So you have to learn how to fish completely different than what you are being told or shown. Most all of the data which is and has been being used is dated by the time you get around to using it.

My approach is to then find the underlying explanations for those method which will consistently work. Marketing is based on the principles of finding or creating a market for goods or services you can provide – to clients/customers/consumers who really need that set of goods or services and are willing to exchange something with you in order to acquire (or use for a limited time) those goods or services. That also includes giving advice to people on how to use or acquire your own goods or services.

The bottom of the shopping cart

This is what you need to get first – how the whole system works – the basics. This is the durable goods which will stand up and hold their shape no matter what you put on top.

At this layer, you are getting in your basics of

• what your passion is,
• what your business model consists of,
• what niche fits those two,
• market research for that niche,
• getting a product that niche wants,
• setting up a way to sell and deliver the product(s) those niche clients want.

It’s really that simple. But you can see there are a lot of steps to it.

Shopping cart Fluff filler and the top items

You then, and only then, can start your promotion. You’re still marketing, but now you know who you are trying to reach and how, with what – and for how much.

What you next need is to let people know you exist and why they really need that better mouse trap. Mouse traps need to be promoted, or the world can never find a beaten path to get to your door.

And here is where social media comes in, as well as conventional marketing. PPC is another leg to this stool. And to begin with, you’ll need to rank on search engines – but we’ll need to do some SEO at the outset in order to build a site they can come to and buy from. And search engines are the be-all and end-all. They are just another stepping stone (albeit a big one.)

Series shopping beyond dropping

Update: This data is now available a book – Online Sunshine Plan.

And all this is simply an explanation of what I’ve found that others use – a review of sorts – plus all sorts of little knick-knacks and PLR sets so you can get inspired and start cranking out your own site.

The idea of this is to create a basic site and then set up ways various niches can find and use this stuff for themselves. Internet Marketing for Farmers, Internet Marketing for Boomers, Internet Marketing for Newbies. Lots of versions of this with the same idea – helping people who don’t have a clue how to get set up and operating in no time at all (or it should seem like that.)

It’s not a course in “how to make money online” or “get rich through online marketing” – it’s a course in how to figure everything out for yourself so you can get on with your life and what you really want to do.

That’s one of the hard lessons I had to learn over the last year – if you are only trying to learn how to “make money”, you’ll surround yourself with people who want to “make money” off of your hard work. You really want to help people improve their lives. And that is why you have to put a price on stuff so they can buy it – because they wouldn’t think it was valuable enough to put to use in their lives otherwise.

-o0o-

OK – list complete (at least the broad strokes – I’m sure I’ll find something on the dessert aisle…)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ashevillein/

Somebody ought to give these guys a clue: put a sock in it so the rest of us don’t have to listen to your hysterical death moans.

While on the Internet the other day (my chief form of both livelihood and information), I was visiting right-of-center Real Clear Politics – who I adopted during the last three years of campaigning because they were the only ones who averaged all the polls.

I was astonished to find, after Tax Day, how many disparate and desperate opinion (not factual) pieces their were about what had happened. It went from twisted support to knife-twisted-in-back denial. Even commentary on commentary where Keith Obermann had used reportedly sexual innuendo to describe it.

Who cares? No, really – WHO CARES?!?

There is a reason that the NY Times is estimating a 30%+ loss in advertising revenue for the next year. There is a reason for the “Big City” newspapers going under at a record pace. There is a reason that people who watch the Network news are fewer and fewer by double-digit percentages. There was even a rumor that one of the two people who watch MSNBC and CNBC (they take turns) – actually fell asleep…

Relevance.

The mainstream media can’t get used to the fact that it’s dying. A very slow and painful death (at least for the rest of us.)

It’s not that people don’t care. They don’t care for the slant, the diatribes, the couched phrases, the unabashed support of certain liberal senators.

People don’t care who is the anchor for the evening news or what sex they are – they don’t watch it anyway. (Except for the reviewers and those employed by NBC, CBS, and ABC. But these are the mourners, not the rest of the passer-bys outside the cemetery on the sidewalk.)

People do care about what is going on and what is really happening. And they know that there is more than two sides to every story – and that anyone who thinks they are some sort of expert officiator is full of more manure than any herd out there. (And they are thinking about taxing farmers for cow gas – what about newscaster and politician gas?!?)

While the mainstream media is dying off, why are local papers (and local banks for that matter) doing just fine and even – gasp – expanding in this economy?

Relevance.

What’s on the local newspaper front page? What happened locally that day. What’s on page 3 or page 5? National and World News. Oh, there is a blurb which runs at the bottom if something important is happening. But covering the election – it’s how the local voter turnout went.

Some used to say that there were bubbles on each coast (probably connected by a very long tube) where all the “really important” stuff happened. And we in the middle were lucky enough just to capture bits and pieces and overviews of it – that we should feel honored that there were three news agencies who would digest it all and present it in half-hour segments each night at dinner.

Let’s get something straight. They’re nuts.

I watch TV for the weather and get my news from the Internet. And this means that I try to avoid the National News, since they don’t carry local weather. My family likes to catch the sports as well. But that’s it.

And our TV has to be propped up when any “Network News” is on, because they are so slanted, the TV would fall off the stand if it weren’t supported.

Impartial? Look, my dogs are impartial – as long as I feed them something they can eat and they have a dry spot to lie in. My cows are impartial – as long as they have plenty of pasture or hay and water (and I keep the dogs from chasing them). Try treating a “news person” that way.

But is that a fair comparison? Well, how do the news people treat me? “This political party is horrible; that political party is saving the day.” The government did this nonsense thing today, but when the business do the same nonsense thing yesterday, they covered it as some horrible sin against humanity. Some politicians and candidates are held up on pedestals, some others are held up to thinly veiled scorn.

Do I need real facts that I can judge for myself? Yes. Do I need to put up with noise and pandering and slanted diatribes couched as “fair, impartial journalism”? Hell, no.

So around this house the TV goes off except for the morning and evening weather. We get the local “big city” paper on Sunday. I have one favorite comic strip, my brother-in-law likes the want ads, my mother likes the opinion section and the recipes (only one of which soothes the stomach – guess which…)

What’s entertainment? Nothing on TV. What’s the commercials for their “hot, new shows” — people dying, getting killed, being investigated after being killed, investigations into killings that happened years ago, specials on people who are trying to save the planet (which is being killed….) And so on. Ad nauseum.

Or there are “reality shows”. Nope. People on remote islands and deserts doing stupid antics and trying to act like the TV cameras aren’t there. Do you see any camera in a trailer park seeing people raise their kids while they hold down two jobs and their grandmother makes sure the kids’ homework gets done? Nope. We see millionaire bachelors fooling around with 20 or more women and deciding to “marry” one of them. Yeah, that’s real. Or game shows where 20 or so girls with amplified bosoms and barely dressed holding briefcases so a bald guy can tease a person into saying and doing really stupid things to “win” something in those empty cases. That’s real high-brow.

How about comedy. Go ahead – find some. Most of the half-decent comedy reruns used to fill afternoon slots and now has been replaced by “Judge Jerky” and “Judge Korky” and ‘Law & Order” reruns from five years ago.

OK, there is one show we watch when we can get it – a game show where the host is actually polite and funny at times and people do nothing but win money if they can guess the words right. Nobody dies, no one gets investigated, no one’s in prison. No sex, no violence, nobody dies (some of the jokes fall flat, but that’s no crime…)

Sure, there’s plenty of all that on the Internet as well, you could say. But there is also a lot of everything else as well – tons more. And the choice itself is relevance.

And yes, we used to watch Fox News and the Discovery Channel and even CSPAN – until some boobs decided to take it off the big dish – and we tried the small dish for awhile and got tired of paying for 20-30 channels of stuff we didn’t want for the 2 or 3 we did.

It’s cheaper to just watch what we want – local news and local weather – then turn it off the rest of the time.

Why, oh why do I have to listen and watch what some cock-eyed TV or newspaper executive – someone who has probably never had to change his own flat tire, or grow his own vegetables, or raise chickens for the eggs and stew them when they got too old – much less rescue a healthy calf that was born in an unseasonal blizzard, and raising them to a good weight only to sell them off at auction a year later.

No, most of these guys grew up in some suburb and then moved into a condo or apartment where they don’t even have a yard – working in another high-rise across town (so to speak) where they listened to other people in suits who spoke from “on high” about what advertisers thought people wanted to hear on those magic boxes in their living rooms.

And the “down their nose” attitude toward the rest of the country is infectious and spreads like the plague up and down the halls of those palatial boardrooms and studios.

Does anybody really care that Keith Obermann pouted until he got a door with a window in it for his new office? Hell, no.

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Here’s a reality show I’d like to see: get all those newscasters and TV personalities and line them up in front of a series of “pre-owned” cars. No, get some real used ones. You know, the ones where nobody cares to wax them any more because it would point out the rust spots worse.

Make sure they are dressed up in their usual suits and blouses and whatnot. Give them all a wireless mic so they think they know what they are doing. Then tell them it’s a contest and they have to change that flat tire on the car behind them, get it started and drive it to the filling station 5 miles away. Good luck.

I’m often talking out loud to my Senator or the President or one of these news anchors as I’m on the third day of fixing a section of fence the rain took out last fall and the wind dropped a couple of trees on during the winter. Do any of these guys look like they could even start a chain-saw, much less run one for a few hours? How about splicing barbed-wire? Know how to herd cattle just on your lonesome and two half-trained dogs without spooking them or losing any calves? Do they know what to do with a steer who’s got bloated up from eating too much wet clover in the spring?

I’ll swap them for their job almost any day – for awhile, anyway. I could do what they do with no problem. Write some stories and read them off in front of a robot camera. Nothing to it. Really. But it would be harder on me, because I know they wouldn’t take care of my herd and I’d be way behind when I got back because they wouldn’t know how to get the equipment ready for this season’s planting.

AND – they’d get all the good food, while I would have to make do with a bunch of stuff shipped in from thousands of miles away and was about as fresh as the bottom of my boots. (Would smell nicer, though…)

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Yes, I’m the same Dr. Robert C. Worstell who has a PhD and 7 other degrees. So don’t get all snooty with me. I’ve written, edited, and published around 4 dozen books and keep up with (more or less) another two dozen blogs – that I personally post to, not some scriptwriter down a long hall somewhere. I’ve given speeches, podcasts, videos – been there, done that.

But I also know how to drive a dual-axle 10-speed transmission, a John Deere tractor with a couple less (and two of those are reverse) – and which cover crops will bring back soil fertility in a worn-out flood plain.

And I know better than to take a tour bus into the middle of a corn field in Iowa in order to “get a story” about a combine and corn harvest, only to get stuck in soft ground (not even mud.)

Oh, come on. Same folks who got a corn picker and a combine mixed up last year (“reporting” some tragic accident from the year before). Heard the same story all day, about 5 or 6 times – somewhere in there it was corrected, at least by dinner. This was on national news – not the local channel. They’d have more sense.

- – - -

Do I know about big cities? Sure – I lived in L.A. for over 20 years. Right downtown Hollywood – not in those suburbs. So I’ve seen the crime, and the pimps, and ho’s, and “bruthah’s”, and the rich and famous as well. Porn peddled on the street corners and dirt almost everywhere (except when there is a premiere where they sweep it up and hose it down and put some red carpets over it.) The bums are back the next day, just as soon as the crews take down the velvet ropes.

Which do I prefer? Guess. Where did I make more money? Guess. Does money buy happiness or accurate news reporting? Don’t even have to flip a coin on that one.

So these news guys and gals should take a hint or two:

1. Get a real job, get a real life.
2. Go do something nice for someone for a change. Quit talking everything and everyone down because your ’spozed to’.
3. Get a real yard and plant a real garden. Raise some tomatoes and lettuce, maybe some sweet corn.
4. Meanwhile, put a sock in it and j-u-s-t – s-h-u-t – u-p, would you?

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/golf_pictures/)

More small business marketing insight. Got this great list from my autoresponder service, GetResponse. Great service, great product, great advice. Perfect for your own marketing mix…

I’ve categorized them (and commented) in order to make them more useful – aligning to an Online Millionaire Plan.

• If you don’t have a newsletter yet, start one. People always want to learn more about their topic of interest. GetResponse is a great web-based email marketing software for publishing newsletters and hosting your mailing lists.
• Add a subscription form to every page of your website.
• Make it quick and easy for your visitors to sign up. A first name and email address is all you need initially.
• Be sure to state your privacy policy in your subscription box. Or add a link to a separate privacy policy page right next to your subscription form.
• Be clear, persuasive and honest as to what your subscribers will receive and why your visitor will gain by subscribing.
• Tell them how often they can expect to receive your newsletter or other emails. Do not inundate them.
• Link to a sample issue before they sign up, so they have an example of what you provide your subscribers.
• Archive your past newsletters and make them available on your website. (Bonus: This also produces additional organic search traffic!)
• Don’t be afraid to link to other websites or recommend other good newsletters. Your subscribers will love it and the recommended sites / newsletters may even return the favor and recommend your newsletter!
• Joint venture with other newsletter publishers and mention each other’s publications.
• Create an ebook and offer it free as an incentive to subscribe.
• Create an informative PDF report on your business topic. Only a few pages of useful content are needed for a report.
• Start with your immediate contact list and generate buzz to draw visitors to your site and subscribers to your newsletter.
• Offer a product discount for purchasers who subscribe to your newsletter.
• Give away useful software or web-based tools to subscribers. If you’re not a programmer, hire one through RentACoder or Elance
• Conduct a webinar (a web-based seminar) for which your visitors must register. On the registration form, get permission to send them future mailings.
• Mention your newsletter during your webinar and provide a subscription link. This will give those who haven’t opted-in an additional chance to do so.
• Ask your subscribers to tell their friends about your newsletter.
• Add a link or button on your website and newsletter taking them to a “Tell-A-Friend” form, where they can invite 3-5 of their friends.
• Allow others to reprint your newsletter as long as the content and links aren’t modified and your bio box is intact.
• Add a “Subscribe” button, or a link to the subscription page, in every issue. Then, if your newsletter gets forwarded, the new recipient can sign up.
• Optimize your website for search engine rankings. If you think SEO means “search engine optimism” instead of “search engine optimization”, check out SEObook.com by Aaron Wall.
• If your newsletter or campaign is newsworth, submit a publicity release at services such as PRWeb or BusinessWire. You might get a surge of new subscribers, as well as a number of inbound links.
• Make your email marketing campaign “newsy”. Run a controversial survey and turn the results into a story. Then let the world know about it and get free exposure.
• Include Opt-In information on Customer Satisfaction Surveys. Ask permission to communicate valuable info via email newsletters and promotions.
• Create a squeeze page designed solely to capture new subscribers.
• Find hundreds or even thousands of relevant keywords with services like Wordtracker, and then promote your squeeze page using PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, such as Google Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, MSN adCenter, and more.
• Track the effectiveness of your advertising and test changes with services like HyperTracker. Keep the best – scrap the rest. Always keep testing.
• Spice up your squeeze page with a pre-recorded audio message to tell your visitors why they should subscribe. Record it yourself or write a script and hire a voice talent to do it.
• Add video to your squeeze page. Not only can you speak to your prospective subscribers, but even point where the subscription form is located on your webpage!
• Incorporate social proof through testimonials on your squeeze page (written, audio, or even video!)
• Remind double opt-in subscribers to watch their email for your confirmation link and ask them to be sure to click it to confirm.
• Start a free blog with WordPress or Blogger. It’s another way to communicate with your visitors and nicely complements your email marketing and list building.
• Add your newsletter subscription form to every page of your blog.
• Research similar websites and newsletters with Google Blog Search or Technorati. Post relevant, helpful comments with a trackback to your blog or squeeze page.
• Keep your blog readers notified of new posts when they sign up for updates. This has a 3-prong benefit: build your email list, maintain relationships with your readers, and get more traffic to your blog.
• Use a responsible co-registration list-building service like GetSubscribers
• Perform a cross-registration campaign with other newsletter owners by adding a link/banner to the other newsletter on the confirmation page. Subscribers won’t see it until after they’ve joined your list.
• Advertise in ezines and other newsletters. Use a directory like Ezine-Dir to find newsletters reaching your target audience.
• Submit your newsletter to ezine and newsletter directories.
• Promote your newsletter / promotional emails in industry directories and websites.
• Sponsor other people’s contests and get exposure for your newsletter. Give away freebies that don’t cost you money.
• Submit articles to Article Directories like GoArticles, SubmitYourArticle or EzineArticles. Include a bio box at the bottom with a link to your website or the email address to be added instantly (if you are using an autoresponder).
• Visit discussion boards, forums, Yahoo! Answers and similar sites to provide helpful answers, while including a link to your newsletter subscription page in your sigfile.
• Add your newsletter sign-up link to your email signature.
• Promote sign-ups in Confirmation and Transaction emails.
• Include an opt-in link on customers’ credit card receipts.
• Add an opt-in message to Warranty and Product Registration Cards.
• Use sign-up message on all Invoices.
• Network at trade shows and conventions. When exchanging business cards, ask permission to send them your newsletter / report. If they say “no”, write an “X” on the back of their card. Otherwise, add them to your list.
• Hand out sign-up forms promoting your newsletter when speaking to groups or at seminars.
• Include newsletter subscriptions in Trade Show Lead Generation form. Ask booth visitors for permission to send your monthly newsletter to them. (see 50 above)
• Make it easy for your audience to subscribe by including a link to your newsletter subscription page on the footer of your PowerPoint or webinar presentations.
• Look for ways to collect email addresses if you are a brick & mortar business.
• Display opt-in forms at the Cash Register to receive weekly discounts, etc.
• Advertise email promotions on Product Shipping Boxes, Packing Slips and Direct Mail Cards, with links to your site.
• Offer customers a VIP or loyalty program for signing up for your list.
• Request employees use an email signature such as “Subscribe to the Company X Email Newsletter”.
• Call Center and Sales Employees can ask customers and prospects if they’d like to receive newsletters or promotional emails and get their information by phone.
• Encourage email subscriptions by printing on Direct Mail, Catalogs, and all Print Ads.
• If you have a physical mailing list from your offline business, send a postcard to your customers, offering a special for opting-in to your email newsletter.
• Study each offline advertising piece with the thought of integrating a list building component into it.
• Collect email address at each point of contact with customers and prospects.
• Get more traffic to your website. Even if your opt-in percentage doesn’t change, this will automatically result in more subscribers.

Worked this weekend while working at my day job. (Just my style, multi-tasking at Internet Marketing and web design while pushing boxes around a warehouse, taking hundred-pound-plus boxes onto a 3×4 pallet at 30 feet – the lighter ones can be 80 feet up…)

The latest incarnation of an online marketing plan takes all the elements of an Online Marketing Plan, but now looks backward from the SEO tactics of Michael Campbell and Dr. Andy Williams.

Your base is to work out how to get these mini-webs/mini-nets into play with all the other venues of attracting viewers and getting sales leads/subscribers.

Mini-webs/Mini-nets are a sort of Google food. One that this search engine likes. Properly constructed, it both feeds the current need for keyword-centric searches and the nascent use of LSI/theme-based content (which is only going to continue to evolve).

Since over 80% of most web-site traffic is from search engines (your mileage may vary), we not only give our attention to external links, but also then build a nice little link-controlled web/net which flows pagerank upwards to key pages – thus increasing their value to the search engines (particularly Google, the 800-pound gorilla sitting stage-left).

This mini-web/net isn’t just bait, it actually feeds the basic algorithms which Google uses, at least the current evolution. Now it is food because it is based on the three needs of the Internet which the users defined long ago: Information, Choice, and Timeliness. These join together at the hip to form the subject known as Content.

You are constantly building more content, which continues to feed the search engines and give you more page rank. You are building, on a timely basis, a huge site. And it’s built on human standards – which the search engines are set for. (They long ago started getting hip to the spammers and hijackers, who utilize the capacities of computer-generated speed to flood the search engines with some sort of short-cut they recently discovered. Then the search engines respond with bans, de-listing, and other counter-tactics.

The secret is to be human.

Humans only do things at a regular pace. They can only code so fast. They like and dislike various things. And know when content is useful or not.

Google has even started employing people who use their search engine to find web sites and rate them. Those which don’t fit the bill are penalized. Over-optimized pages can lose page rank and even get banned.

So design and build like humans do. Means you use articles that make sense and are written to be understood. While you can use emphasis now and then, you use pronouns when they are called for and not just use your keyword over and over and over. You don’t plop down 300 pages all at once.

Articles show up ok, since they have to be (for the most part) human reviewed and moderated. Since they have duplicate content filters, this tends to weed (and penalize) the whole article directory field. [Ezinearticles.com tends to rise above this, but they are unique in their ability to rise above the common...]

Again, you have to work through the attempts to “hack” this system. You want to produce great, fresh content that is useful to users. And produce this only on a human scale. Of course, corporations are forgiven, as they often will launch a vast amount of re-designed and added pages at a single whack. But we aren’t talking corporate, we are talking individual.

Now we are just the simple people, individuals. And the work we do is for our own progress, our own financial gain. And of course, to get this gain by being of service to others…

And so we work on an individual basis – at that individual speed – which should be just fine for our needs. The thing is to pace yourself and so get all your needs covered. How this is done? Simply get one mini-web per product line up and running every week. And your articles and a Squidoo page posted, as well as any blog mentions you’d like.

Lots of work to do.

But you can get it all done if you work out a logical sequence. Working from an existing product (or an affiliate’s):

0. Given that you’ve already researched your keywords,
1. Create a mini-web which utilizes these, and links to your product’s sales page. Go ahead and post this. (Time – a few hours of one day, once you get used to the sequence.)
2. Post a press release about this. Do up a podcast giving your breakthrough on this – have someone interview you if you can.
3. Post to your blog, linking in the podcast. Supposing we are promoting our latest book, make this a book review. Link into all pages of your latest mini-web.
4. Create a Squidoo lens out of the book review. Link to your blog, product sales page, and every mini-web page.
5. Write about five articles or so – link to the landing page, your main web site, and of course to an opt-in page to get their address (with a suitable bribe). Get these all posted, one at a time, to each of the five main article directories. Then the next, then the next, etc. Don’t post all five to one directory at once – looks like you’re spamming.
6. Do up a media release so you can line up and get radio interviews. (Book authors are usual suspects at this – being an expert on what you just wrote and everything.)
7. Set up your own affiliate sales (thank you page, download link, etc.) and modify your mini-web for this. Also update your master affiliate page, if you have one.
8. Option: do up a full set of MP3’s and offer this as a kit – through your mini-web (update) and also through your affiliates (update).
9. Option: create an online course (autoresponder delivered) and update your mini-web and affiliate pages/links.

Then you are able to cross connect these different product-types, particularly if you have a page to link in your MP3’s and online course to your book itself. You would have a MP3 series for each book, as well as an online course for each book. So a person could be interested in MP3’s, books, or online courses – and so flip to different types of this product instead of only accessing through your one book page. This also gives you some very interesting options for pagerank building.

Anyway, that’s the long and short of it. Of course you social book mark everything as you go. And you could comment market instead of article marketing, if you wanted.

The thing is to give you options, plus a way to get maximal marketing going on. I use a book in this, as I write books – and am way behind, now, in marketing them. But at least now I know how.

As I have three product lines of books, I can then spend one day each on just marketing them. I’d take another day to send broadcasts to each of these different lists and as well the last day (of my five-day workweek) working on new products. Once I get these up and running, making money hand-over-fist, I can then simply quit my (weekend) day job and have more time for all this (or just some time for myself…).

But you can see how to do it, now, can’t you. Somewhere, you have to fit in time to keep abreast of things – but as we get faster at page/site building and posting, there will be more time to do that type of thing. As I said, you and I probably have a great deal of catch-up to do, just getting our existing web-sites optimized properly.

By adding a mini-web every week, you build a mini-net in short order – about 50 mini-webs a year. And so you then add a great deal of pagerank to everything – which gives you more people finding you on the search engines.

Tomorrow, I hope to tell you something about climbing the search engine rankigns via keywords which these above guru’s don’t explain too well, but you can use for yourself….

Providing great service and making money at it. That’s the bottom line.

This is done by finding where there is great demand and little supply. So we are looking for regular searches in an area and few pages coming up – as well, these pages aren’t all that optimized and so you can create a better page and move up above the current rankings. You move up these standings by providing better service and higher-quality information.

An important thing to note is that you are working to get a page up in the standings, not particularly a site. Both sites and pages have pagerank, and these are not the same. You want your mini-web to push a single page up in ranking, so that it shows up higher in the general standings for that niche search term.

The next point, which is the whole reasoning behind an Online Millionaire Plan, is to do this with a small budget and only an Internet connection to start with. So when people are telling you to subscribe to article services, keyword finding services, niche finding services – tell them to go jump in the lake (at least to start off with). I’m sure these services they recommend are more than just affilate sales for them – they have to work or they wouldn’t stay in business. But the point is to work from what you can afford to invest in the business and run it as a business.

For instance, if you get the Massive Keyword List Builder from iBiz.com, you have all the tools in one package to get started. If you then go to checkrankings.com, you can then query overture and their database for the top 100 variations on your keyword theme. Cross-check those out in either MKLB or Adwords Traffic Estimator, and you’ll see if you have a hot niche or not.

Working back from your product is probably best done by posting your work to a standalone web page, with no or few links – it can be as long as the whole chapter or whole text if you want. Then use one of the many, many “keyword optimization” tools that exist (all these really do for the most part is to count how many times different words and word combinations show up) to get your keywords. Save these to a file and then check these in MKLB or Adwords Traffic Estimator to find out what you’re using for keywords and which of these are popular. Look for single words at this point, as you want a few base keywords you can use to help people find your article and find use for your article.

You’ll then find niches which will work for your mini-web, so that you can rank high in these smaller areas – using variations all based on the same niche keyword phrase. That’s where checkrankings.com comes in.

Build your mini-web according to what Michael Campbell has laid out.

Then you article, comment, Squidoo market it to get inbound links – and don’t forget to social bookmark everything as you do it.

Then find another section of that same work, or another work, and create another mini-web to link together with the other mini-web to form a mini-net. If you plan out this mini-net properly it will give you a nice pagerank and a great service to the viewers that find you. And that will keep you high in the rankings as you keep adding pages every day and week – all filled with great user-friendly service.

The rest of your week is really just sending out a broadcast to your list(s) of another useful piece of data and a useful product you’ve found for them. Plus finding or building new products for your loyal subscribers.

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Some strategies:

You want a single link which you can push in all your articles, comments, and incoming links you create. There can and should be more than one, but this one page is where you get the bulk of your traffic – it should get people to subscribe to your list first and foremost.

It will also have a link to your site directory – where all of your page rank is collected and distributed for your mini-net.

Your mini-net pages are themselves all set-up to collect page rank and redistribute it just the way you want it. They each have articles related to the product sales page they link to (yours or an affiliates). But they really are frugal with outgoing links. So whatever page rank they get is properly and exactly passed on.

By collecting and allocating your page rank, you can have particular pages rise high in the standings and so get traffic from search engines.

Meanwhile, you are collecting email addresses so you can then ply them with useful data and offers.

Note I don’t mention paid advertising anywhere in the above. Keep your expenses down and automate everything you can, saving your time for creative work. And your creative work then really seeks to help people find more harmony, more success in their own lives.

As you social bookmark, use offline marketing, and build your list – you’ll then start getting traffic beyond search engine traffic.

And that is the point – because you don’t want to depend on search engines, just use them to start the party rolling…

The problem (and fortune) of being set in the Midwest is that you are miles from everything and so a lot of things (like decent bandwidth) are very expensive. On top of this, most rural areas are “economically disadvantaged” – meaning that since it costs less to live out here, companies pay less to the people who live here.

But to get your stuff marketed, you either have to pay someone to do it, or get rich and famous enough that people will do it for you for a piece of your action.

You can see the catch here – you have to make it first before people come knocking at your door to do it for you…

I’ve been studying along about marketing, since I’ve published many books on Lulu – but the sales haven’t taken off (because no one knows they’re there). So this lead to modern (cheap) marketing techniques as part of my research.

I just posted a couple of books on Autoresponders. You may be saying “Auto – What?” Yet if you do know about these marvelous inventions, you probably are saying – “Well, I hope they’re good ones.”

You see, the plain and simple way marketing is shifting on the Internet is away from being bombarded with inane and ridiculous expensive advertising promoting some new aftershave, car, insurance company, or law firm. Even banner ads and various multimedia, bandwidth-hogging video clips are disappearing – as soon as people find out how to block them.

What is replacing these is known as “permission marketing” or “opt-in marketing”. For these, you get people to sign up for a free service which then softly sells that person the benefits of your solution to their problem. You are treating your customer like you would like to be treated – and you have her permission to do so!

But that is just the beginning of the subject.

You don’t have time to send and answer every potential customer to your site about how they feel and how would they like some more information about your product, and so on.

An autoresponder (actually called a sequential autoresponder) will do this for you – on a semi-automatic basis. This means you can set it up once, tweak it a few times, and then concentrate on working up some more products to sell. Your friend, the autoresponder script, will work around the clock, on any schedule, to ensure that you get your messages out to people who want to hear from you about what you are specifically selling.

You can spend your free time writing more books, being interviewed by the press, or simply counting and re-investing all the money you are getting.

Now, personally, I’m still at work writing a book on this subject. But I had the brainstorm to publish some of the references I’ve run across which have really been created just for you – to help you improve your marketing and save your time.

So I rounded up four of the best whose authors would allow me to make them available for you.

The value of these books individually far outweighs the price I’m offering them at. The first book alone is valued by the authors at more than $980! Yet, they told me not to sell them too cheap, either. You can read about it in their books – which are republished in:

Autoresponder Magic & Million Dollar Emails

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Autoresponder Secrets Exposed! and the TrafficJam Formula.

You may have noticed that this is a seeming far cry from the usual self-help classics which I have been publishing lately. However, as many people have observed, writing philosophy doesn’t pay that well – unless you make it pay well.

That is where marketing comes in. Lulu does a great job of making publishing easy. And it’s cheap because they don’t invest in your design or marketing. But unless you get into marketing, you won’t make much money doing what you love.

The reason I’m writing a book on this is so that I can learn how to do this. And books like those above are the reason I can figure out how to market cheaply and efficiently.

Check them out. And don’t forget that you can take the download formats and offer them on your own site – and get people to pay you for re-selling them!

Luck to us all…