Online Marketing Advice For You - Blog

Name Calling

I was just reading the post The Technology Diet and am shocked at the nastiness used by Lena West. I agree that using your domain email on marketing material is really important. What I don't agree with is calling people cheap and lazy because they don't. In most cases those who don't use their domain names on their marketing materials aren't doing it because they don't know that they should be doing it. They need to be educated about this not insulted.

What I find ironic is that Lena has a Paypal Payment button on her site to pay for her course she is offering. Don't get me wrong I have used Paypal for years and just recently upgraded myself to a shopping cart. However many people consider Paypal cheap and those of us who use it Cheap and Lazy.

Lena's Technology Diet course looks really interesting. I wonder how many people she may have turned away from taking it though by insulting them. More than likely those people she called Cheap and Lazy are probably the ones who could have benefited the most from her course.

My Advice: Don't insult your potential clients!

Amazon Gift Certificates

There's some great news for Amazon Affiliates. This holidays season we will finally be earning a commission on Amazon Gift Certificates! It's about time too! I often wondered why Gift Certificates didn't count. Affiliates will earn 6% on all Gift Certificate purchases. One down side is that Gift Certificates sales don't count toward tier items to help and increase your referral fee rates.

Difference Between Junk Mail and Spam

I'm sure I'm like most people and can not stand getting so much spam email. Going through my email today I must have recieved about 50 spam emails. They aren't even trying to selling something. Don't get me wrong I don't care for junk email where somebody is trying to sell me something but I have had it with spam.

The spam I have been getting makes no sense and is just a bunch of words together. It's clearly just somebody with way too much time on their hands trying to clog up the internet.

Like this right here:

I love unicorns and LigersDo you have a favorite Iron Chef?
This busy beauty is just getting started, and if things go right, she'll leap past the car show circuit and jump straight into TVUeo Style tie rod ends allow dual adjustments of up to 20mm of toe setting and correction, as well as the ability to adjust the steering angle by 20mm

What is this supposed to mean?  It's just plain spam using up my resources!

Podcasting is Hot!

I will admit that I know very little about the stock market but I know that when specific people are doing certain things it's time to get in on certain stock. A lot of the same can be said about Internet marketing. When certain experts are talking about certain online marketing techniques it means something is up and it's time to begin using that technique.

This past week I noticed that certain online marketing gurus are talking about podcasting. This leads me to believe that now is the time to get into podcasting or improve your existing podcast.

This coming week The Blog Squad is hosting a free call about Podcasting over at Conversations with Experts.  It's called How to Use a Podcast to Fill Your Sales Funnel, Increase Profits & Attract New Clients.

Next Week Andy Wibbels is hosting a free call about podcasting too. The end of the month he is also beginning Podcasting BootCamp which I just enrolled in.

I think it's time to get in on Podcasting!

I Need to Blog More

Well I just looked at my stats and very few people are reading this blog. This is actually a good thing since I haven't been very good at keeping up with this blog. I know that it's best to blog at least 3 times per week. I tell this to my clients. I guess it's time to start practicing what I preach!

Social Bookmarking with TypePad

For the past couple of weeks I have been seeing TypePad Blogs with social bookmarking links in each post. I suspected that the bloggers hadn't added each link manually. I thought about asking a couple of bloggers how they got the links there but never got around to it. Then yesterday I stumbled across the answer while reading How to Build a Better Blog.

Denise Wakeman made a great video about how to add FeedFlare to your TypePad Blog!

I have learned a couple of things since adding the social bookmarking FeedFlare. First of all it's not instant. After adding a new post you need to wait between 5 and 10 minutes for the links to show up in your post. It took me a bit to figure this out and at first I thought that I had to republish my blog each time I added a post. But I don't need to do that...I just need to have a little patience.

I'm still trying to figure out the deal with republishing the blog in order for the links to show up on old posts. I just added the Feedflare to one of my blogs and didn't republish it yet. The links are showing up on all the posts on the main page of the blog but not on all of the pages or posts. It's only been about 30 minutes since I added it. It will be interesting to see if all the post will eventually have the links or if I really do need to republish.

New Windows in Typepad

I have been using Typepad for Blogging for over a year and a half now. I really like Typepad and find is very user-friendly. I recommend it to many people including members of Online Marketing for ADD Professionals. However,there was just one little thing that annoyed me about Typepad blogs!

I didn't like the fact that that my links couldn't open into new windows. I was so excited to learn that Typepad added the optional feature of allowing links open in new windows. The way I understood it -is that only links which aren't part of your blog's domain would open up into a new window!

Of course then I installed it on several of my blogs and tried it. I was really aggravated when every single link I clicked on opened up into a new window. That's even worse then none of them opening into a new window. I don't want 15 new windows opening while somebody is trying to navigate through my blog!!

What is wrong with Typepad? Did they not test this out before releasing it???

Is this for real?

I have received about 50 copies of the following email the past week. This has got to be the worst sales pitch I have ever seen. Lesson 1 if you are going to claim to be an Internet marketing expert YOU NEED TO HAVE A WEBSITE!!!!

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Just Underline the Links

One thing that has been annoying me lately is when people write up sales pages and underline important information. If this was a hard copy, something on paper, it would makes sense to underline. However when it's a web page it can be confusing. For the past decade or so, underlined text has been associated with a link. So when I and other people see something underlined we expect to click on it and be taken somewhere else.

There are plenty of other things people can do to make the important info stand out. Use a different color! Bold the text! Use Italics! Better yet use a combination of all three.

But please, please only underline your links!

Put a Newsletter sign up box on your site.

I have a lot of Pet Peeves when it comes to internet marketing. One of my biggest ones is people who don't have an actual ezine / newsletter sign up boxes on their sites. It's not that they don't have a newsletter or ezine on their site. They do but to sign up they want you to send them an email. I just saw this on a newly designed web site of somebody who is very well know in her profession.

I'm sure this person spent good money to have her site redesigned too. What kind of web site developer puts an email link on his or her client's site for a newsletter sign up? In a my opinion not a very good one at all.

If you are putting up a new site or having your site redesigned make sure you use a sign up box on your site for your newsletter. All of the good Newsletter programs out there like Aweber will provide you with a simple code to add to your site.