“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.” True. But you can surely increase your chances if that horse is thirsty in the first place!

You want your website visitors to be thirsty, too. Getting lots of traffic isn’t the point; you need traffic that is potentially interested in what you have to offer, and hence willing to subscribe. In online marketing, building a responsive list is how you are going to make money. It’s also the most time-intensive task, but extra effort spent on this step will also pay off handsomely. Read the rest of this post »

MarketingSherpa published a wonderful list of seven free (and one paid) search engine optimization tools, most of them user-friendly and valuable for the solo entrepreneur as well as small businesses! I love this list not just because it’s a great collection of tools, but because of the ideas they share for HOW to use the tools, too. For instance I’ve had SEOQuake for months and didn’t know you could use it to sort your search results!

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A question I often ask my target market is, “what’s your biggest challenge with building your business online?” And one answer I get frequently is this:

How do I make my website earn money?

If you’ve got a business online, then it’s likely you have some sort of web presence. Perhaps it’s a one-page ’sign up for my list’ kind of site, or a full-blown brochure site with a menu of choices, or maybe your site is in the form of a blog. Regardless of what kind of site (or sites) you have, if they’re not doing what you want them to - and since we’re in business, ultimately that means making some sort of a profit - then it’s time to make some changes.

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MarketingSherpa recently asked its members for stories about significant marketing lessons learned in 2007. The results aren’t available yet, but I thought I’d share my own response with you.

The Power of Metrics
One of my goals at the beginning of the year was to increase Solo-E traffic, and thus subscribers. I’d noticed that many of my colleagues were focusing on search engine traffic; so, assuming this would also be a good strategy for me, I spent months learning and applying SEO tactics. The results were pretty successful — traffic increased 80% over a 6-month period. Read the rest of this post »

Just launched within the last 48 hours by John Reese, internet marketing expert, this handy little tool is like a cross between automated blog link exchange and Google AdWords — except it’s free!

Instead of just your name or the title of your blog — these other blogs will carry actual titles of specific posts on your blog. IMHO, much more enticing and likely to get clicks than a list of names that makes up the typical blogroll.

It’s free and to sign up, and you get to specify a category for your blog so you only get posts related to your blog topics. Plus, you can filter certain words and even specific blogs that you don’t want shown on your site.

It’s a viral kind of thing so sign up early! BlogRush

One of the most popular, inexpensive ways to market your business online in recent years is article marketing: writing quality articles and submitting them to dozens of article directories, where they (hopefully!) get picked up and published in relevant ezines and websites. This, of course results in potentially hundreds of copies of essentially the same content — your article — on various web pages across the Internet.

So — is this the dreaded “duplicate content” that Google and other search engines will penalize in their rankings? I’ve heard a lot of chatter this week that this is indeed the case, and so article marketing will start losing it’s effectiveness — or will it? The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth, by white hat search engine optimization expert Jill Whalen, offers a clear explanation of what is, and isn’t, considered duplicate content. If you have any doubts about the future of article marketing, this post may put them to rest.

You may have seen those internet marketing “programs” that specialize in helping folks develop “niche web sites”. The premise is to search out keywords and keyword combinations that get a lot of hits, but don’t have many websites serving that niche. Viola’, you’ve found a lucrative niche.

This approach makes me cringe.

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