Search Engine Marketing Spot

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Yesterday I was playing around with MSN and some of the new features the site has to offer with the results page. The screen shot above is from a video search I did for the term sports cars. Instead of just showing an image from the video, go ahead and put your mouse over the thumbnail and the video will begin to play for you. This way you have the option to preview the video first before enlarging the view and having to load the next page.

My daughter had fun searching for her favorite TV show and cartoon characters, it was easy for her to navigate through and watch what she wanted to without clicking on to many things and getting lost. I personally like the new style that have implemented into the results pages for not only the video, but the images as well. You have the option to check the feedback on the picture and also add it to your scratchpad if you like. Is this the new sign of MSN coming back to life, I highly doubt it, but they sure are going to try to catch up to Yahoo and Google.

For those of you just now crawling out of your cave to hear about Webmaster Radio, then now is as good as time as any then. Webmaster radio is headed up by Daron Babin, his wife Brandy and associates which over the years has brought us a great online radio station. There new website was released and the look and feel is so much better in my opinion. To go with the new layout, they have now included paid membership for only $28.73/month. Kind of a strange figure to charge each month, but hey whatever works for them to help pay the bills. In the past everything on the site was free, including the ability to download a lot of the previously recorded shows. By adding this monthly fee, it allows them to expand and offer better services as well as pay there hosts for the shows. In the past all the live shows that were done, the host or hosts were never paid because the funds were not there.

You can see the show line up here, as well as participate in the chatroom or join there online community. I have listened to webmaster radio for almost a year now and have learned a lot in this short amount of time. I was sadden to see the old website go for I did have a small (very small) hand with that site. Ok so all I did was help make a little flash button for Daron a while back, no big deal. I must say though I think the new website has a much cleaner and professional look to it then the dark purple and black from before. I also encourage anyone who has never tuned into some of the programs to check out there lineup and catch some of the live shows. Now on a different note with that monthly fee, when will see an affiliate program any time soon Daron?

Visit Webmaster Radio today or download there desktop application.

Today a client who uses 1and1 hosting called in complaining that they could not send any email to a Hotmail account and wanted to know why. I confirmed there outgoing mail server with them, had them send me test messages to other accounts, (not MSN or Hotmail) and there mail was delivered fine. So I had them forward over the returned mail and it said the following:

SMTP error from remote server after MAIL command:
host mx3.hotmail.com[65.54.245.72]:
550 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. A block has been placed against your IP address because we have received complaints concerning mail coming from that IP address. We recommend enrolling in our Junk E-Mail Reporting Program (JMRP), a free program intended to help senders remove unwanted recipients from their e-mail lists. For enrollment instructions, please refer to:
http://postmaster.live.com/Services.aspx#JMRPP. For additional information about Microsoft’s technical guidelines, please refer to:
http://postmaster.live.com/Guidelines.aspx

At first I thought well there IP address on there network is being blocked by hotmai, for security reasons I will not list that information here. I went to spamhaus and did not see there network IP on the list, then I remember though that MSN/Hotmail does not use spamhaus to block out IP addresses. They have there own “in house” spam filter system that they use. So my next thing was to check and see what other websites are on the same IP as my clients, a simple check at MyIPneighbors.com will do just fine. There were only two other websites that is on the same shared IP, so I was now going to call 1and1 and see about moving my clients website to another shared server so they would receive a different IP address. I figured moving it to a different server and changing the IP of the domain name would do the trick, boy was I wrong.

1and1 makes you use there mail servers to send and receive your email, so by default you have to use smtp.1and1.com as your outgoing mail server. Most of the time hosting companies allow you to use mail.yourdomain.com or smtp.yourdomain.com as the mail server. This was not the case, so moving the domain to another server/IP would not solve the problem. After speaking with a manger there, I was told that mail server is blocked completely by MSN/Hotmail and at this time the only way to send mail to those people was to use the mail server of your ISP. I was speechless for a moment, this big of a hosting company has there entire network blocked by MSN…WOW! They have known about this issue for several weeks and I was told they are working with MSN to get this problem resolved. There was no time frame giving for when the problem might be resolved, I just hope soon.

So how would this effect any marketing you are doing with a website. Well for starters if you use 1and1 hosting for any of your websites, you will not be able to email to MSN/Hotmail. There could be other domains, but currently I am still trying to figure out who else is blocked. If you run an auto responder, using 1and1 could put a dent in your marketing efforts due to the fact your auto response will not get delivered. If you run a forum, any passwords, confirmation letters, etc. will not be delivered to a MSN/Hotmail account. Who will stay at the forum if they cannot receive any emails from you in regards to changing there password or even worse when they sign up they never hear back from you. I am in no way saying not to use them as your hosting company, I just wanted to bring this to everyone’s attention that they are currently experiencing problems getting mail delivered to MSN/Hotmail. If you know of other web hosting companies that have a similar problem please post them here so all are aware of it.

So you have always wanted to try Yahoo search marketing, but never wanted to spend more money on advertising that you think would not work for you. Are you stuck on Google like glue to paper? Well here is your chance to try out Yahoo’s search network for free. I am not sure how long this offer will be around for, but you can try it out now if you like. If you have tried Yahoo out before in the past without success, then here is your chance to try again without it costing you anything. More so a way to have Yahoo try and get Google customers, but $199 free is a great way to start.

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/choose.php?o=US1893

Tuesday’s Spot On tip of the week is about you and your marketing strategies. Read the title a few times, then write down or type your answer for later on. Everyone wants to know the secret of how to make a living with internet marketing and what easy steps to take in getting them started. They read a few websites or see a success story and want to emulate that person since they saw how much money that person made in that short amount of time. Why do you want to be like someone else? Why try and duplicate what has already been done?

What I notice a lot of is people trying to be is the next affiliate marketing superstar. The thing with being a successful affiliate marketer is not about copying people and what they have done in the past. It is about being ahead of the game, thinking of what market to target next with the best product/service you can pitch to them. Thing is people, that person did not make all that money that fast. They spent hours and hours testing out there marketing strategies to see what works best for them in whatever niche they are trying to promote. Successful marketers can spend those hours and see zero results from it, instead of giving up or just trying to copy someone else they move forward to there next idea. You see these ideas are one of the driving forces behind what makes a person succeed or fail. If you are just trying to use other people’s ideas then you will not get that far. At first you might see some success and see that light at the end of the tunnel, but I bet you will end up falling flat on your face and that light will fade. The reason why most will fail is due to the fact of wanting to be like everyone else you read about, you end up being one of a million, because there are probably a million other people out there trying to succeed by copying and emulating what they have read. When you read a “new trick” or “new technique” do you really think it is new? Boy I sure hope not, those tricks and techniques had been tested over and over again until perfection. Then used to the fullest by that individual or at times group of people to profit the most money. Only then might you see and read about what they did to achieve that success of making money. Problem is that technique had been used previously by a select few, now the rest of the world can try it to. How long do you think it will still work well?

I want you to try and see the big picture, being successful with internet marketing is not about copying what others have done. It is about laying your own ground work for your success and future. You need to realize and understand that coming up with new ideas is all around you. What products do you see around in your every day life that you could target to a specific audience? What new websites are out that you can market on, what new marketing techniques can you use on these websites to increase your success. You need to be able to think for yourself, you need to be that one in a million and push yourself to succeed. I believe anyone can succeed if they have the will power and motivation to do so. Now I ask you to go back to the answer you had wrote down or typed up before and post it here. Being one in a million can happen, you just need to believe in yourself and set your goals in the right direction. That direction is your own road to success, there is no need to be like anyone else and follow there road, you now need to start building your own.

Would you like us to know who you are? Well here is your chance to let the marketing community know by being put On The Spot. Every Monday I have tried to have a new person to feature, which has been slow as of late if you could not tell. There is no charge, and I am not asking for anything in return.  I have tried this in the past and it did not take off the way I had thought it would, probably due in part to not enough traffic coming directly to this site.  I am asking for your help on what I think is a great idea, let your readers know about what I am trying to do for the community and have them take up on it. This is my way of giving back to the community that has helped me out over the years.

So if you want some free publicity and be put On The Spot then send me:

• Full Name
• Nickname (if you have one)
• Picture/Logo/Avatar (if you have one)
• Website address (include anchor text you would like used)
• Give me a writeup that talks about yourself, what you do in the world of online marketing, how you got started and anything else you would like to include about yourself that would be interesting for the readers.

There is no limit really on what you can say, just I ask that you do not write a book. This only applies to online marketers, so no viagra, insurance, vacation specials and other non marketing topics will be accepted.

Email this to “sub” :@: semspot.com

 

So I will admit this quiz was probably easy for most of you reading this. For any of you who did not know most of these logos, then this was a success in showing you the simple power alone of a logo. When people see your logo, they do not just see colors and a design. They see the symbol for your name, your website, your company even. That goes a long way in any industry. These logos here are a symbol of the search marketing industry and blogging world. On the internet name recognition is great, but I feel logo recognition is greater. When someone sees a full name on a website, they might not know who that person is. If they see a logo or avatar they can relate to the website and the persons first name in most cases. They tell themselves, “oh yea I read that website” or “I have been to that site before, I remember that logo”. They might not remember your name at first, but I bet that logo or avatar stands out to them. Let’s get to the answers now and find out who all these logo’s belong to.

1. Andy Beard – When we see that big A anywhere, this is the man behind it. Andy has a niche marketing blog where he also talks about search engines, social media marketing and affiliate marketing.
   
2. Michael Gray - A.K.A Graywolf. Michael is a vocal figure in the search engine industry, giving great opinions on various marketing information. He runs Graywolf’s SEO Blog.
3. Aaron Chronister - A.K.A. TheMadHat
4. Jaan Kanellis - A.K.A. Incrediblehelp, this green faced avatar can be seen moderating WebPro World and is always there to help out no matter what the question is. He also runs a search marketing blog.
5. Barry Schwartz - Barry runs SEO Roundtable, Rustybrick.com, writes for Search Engine Land, Cartoon Barry, ok so the list goes on and on with barry but he is a vocal figure when it comes to covering search engine news.
6. Ralph Tegtmeier - A.K.A. Fantomaster. Ralph covers the world of blackhat seo and marketing like a blanket. His site not only talks about it, he offers products and services related to it as well. Great information from the “dark side”.
7. Jeremy Schoemaker - A.K.A. Shoemoney. The man who took the world of ring tones and helped put it on the map as far as online marketing goes. It was his adsense check that struck it big with the affiliate marketing world and since then everyone has tried to be like him.
8. Todd malicoat - A.K.A. Stuntdubl. Todd is known throughout the search engine marketing community, and continues to speak regularly at conferences on search marketing and optimization.
9. Sebastian - This one was a dead give away, this logo was what I was referring to in my post. Sorry Sebastian I do not know your last name, so no I didn’t get a perfect score either. Sebastian is a regular over at Sphinn and has made quite a name for himself there with the great stories and feedback in the world of online marketing.
10. Kevin Muldoon - Kevin is the owner of Blogging Tips where you can find great resources from there dozen or so writers on blogging, content writing, search marketing and more.

So there are your answers. How did you score on this quiz? You got them all correct? Well then how long did it take you to answer all 10?

Now you have some insight on who these people are and what they do for the industry.

Your logo is more then a bunch of pixel’s on a computer screen, it is the branding symbol that the internet knows you by. When you see certain logo’s and even avatars, I bet you know the person before reading one word. A few weeks back I was watching The Little Mermaid with my daughter, first thing that came to mind was not the little red crab character with the accent, it was actually sebastian over at Sebastian’s Pamphlets. Yesterday Sebastian wrote an article on getting the perfect logo for your blog. It was a great article that talked about the power a good logo can have. Think if it like a business card, you throw 50 business cards down on a table, you will want your’s to stand out from the rest. The same rings true for your logo, you want your logo to stand out from the rest so people will remember it. I have put together a quick quiz to see if you know these 10 logos from the SEM industry. These logo’s are used in almost everything these people do, branding that logo to there name for eternity. So give this quiz a try and see if you can answer all 10 of these by putting the persons name and blog with there logo. Don’t try and look them up, that takes away from the point of this post. I will have the answers for you tomorrow.

I know you should practice what you preach, so in my defense I do not have a great logo. I have tried myself to create one in the recent weeks and I can not come up with one I like. Biggest problem is I am not the greatest at graphic arts, so I will have to get one done soon because my little blue circle just isn’t doing it for me.

 

One of the biggest problems for any forum moderator is having to deal with spam posts made by either users or a piece of automated software. These posts are normally short and have links inserted in them to a variety of different websites depending on what the person is trying to advertise for. Forums get these types of messages everyday, so the moderators are always having to delete them. So lets say you have 100 people spamming your forum on a daily basis with there links. That means the moderators will only have to delete 100 posts a day. What if the moderators had to watch there PM (private message) system on the forum now as well? The use of instant message marketing (can call it spam I guess) has been around for over 10 years. In the mid 90’s there were programs created that would harvest screen names of AOL users from chat rooms and eventually profiles once that was implemented. It would take those screen names and send them all an instant message with a link or asking for a reply back. Take that same concept and apply it to today’s marketing world. Forums are visited by millions of people everyday for almost any type of market. Well sad to say I have come across a piece of software that will spam your forum automatically. Luckily however the program is poorly designed and the creator has been making a bad name for him/herself already over at BlackHatWorld.

This program creates an account, spiders the forum and collects all the usernames it can find and tries to send each person a PM. In theory this sounds great for the person running the program, and bad for the forum moderators. However there are a few things wrong that makes this program useless. Most forums have a time limit on the amount of PM’s you can send through it, when trying to send more then the allowed limit you either get a warning message or an account ban. Luckily forums also have an outbox that can get full, so after sending so many PM’s the user has to go in and delete these as well. The program is suppose to do this for you, but that does not work either. So people who bought the software are left in the dark now with no updates, no support and no responses to there questions or problems.

 

People ask all the time about black hat marketing, well the theory behind this program is a perfect example of black hat marketing technique. It could work if done the right way; however I do not condone spamming any forum. The moderators spend a lot of time keeping there forums spam free and most do not get paid either. This blog though is meant to teach people on techniques weather white or black hat.

 

How this could work:

• Have the program create multiple user accounts on the same forum

• Have it be able to store a list of email addresses in it to use when signing up so it rotates through them for different user names.

• Have it check the email accounts and look for verification links to go to.

• Have the program use proxies so your IP will not get banned by any forum.

• When sending out messages, have the program use multiple threads (connections) and log into various forums so it can get around the 1 minute timer allowed to send each PM. If you have accounts made on 500 forums you could just have it rotate through them all making sure not to hit the same forum in under a minute.

• Have it actually delete the sent message in the forum outbox.

Black hat style marketing is all around you, most just over look it and never think of the “What If’s”. A lot of places do not talk about these types of marketing strategies because they would not be used for any real client. They do exist however and I will try and show you some other examples in the future.

 

 

Do you want more RSS subscribers? I am sure you do and are always looking for great ways to increase your subscription numbers. Neil Patel is a guest bloger this week for Shoemoney and has written a post How To Get More RSS Subscribers Through Feedburner. He goes over some of the basic methods in the post and then as a bonus tip through somewhat of a curveball. Here is the bonus tip that Neil mentioned.

I know some of the above stuff was a bit basic so here’s a bonus tip: If you want to increase your RSS subscribers I would find all the top bloggers that aren’t using FeedBurner and register their FeedBurner URL under your account. Once you setup the feed with their content you’ll notice that after a while it will start gaining subscribers and usually after it gets to roughly 100 or so you can email FeedBurner and request them to redirect the subscribers to your blog feed. Granted, the content will be different but people are lazy and most won’t unsubscribe.

Now he is in no way saying to go out and do this, he simply just stated the facts as is to let people know it could be done. I’ll bet all the top blogs on technorati either already have a feedburner account or by now someone has created them. This advice would work though because there are people out there who will not see what has happened and continue to read your feeds. Thing is though, if you do not write good content or your content is not related really to what they thought they were subscribing to then you will lose that person. This comes with the territory of trying to essentially hijack subscribers from other blogs, your subscription rate will go up, but over time that number will go back down because those people will unsubscribe. Now if you have good content and are consistent then your subscription numbers would hopefully go up. Implementing this hijacking method would raise your numbers higher in a shorter amount of time, but as I said before I bet those hijacked subscribers will unsubscribe in due time. If you got enough hijacked subscribers this could still increase your earnings for your blog since it is more traffic.