Right Place, Right Time

Top Searches for Handicap Accessibility:

Rising searches

Rising searches are searches that have grown significantly in popularity over a given time period when compared to a preceding time period. For example, if you're comparing searches for starbucks coffee during May 2006, the comparison would be April 2006.

For each rising search term, you’ll see a percentage of the term’s growth over a period of time. If you see Breakout instead of an actual percentage, it means that the search term experienced growth greater than 5000%.



CAPS builders, not enough search volume.

How to Grow Your Blog to 100,000 Visits a Month

by Neil Patel on December 2, 2013

I’ve done marketing for 20 of the top 100 blogs on the web, and I’ve created 3 blogs for my own businesses that achieved at least 100,000 visits a month.
With Quick Sprout, it took me 4 years and 9 months to hit 100,000 monthly visits:

With KISSmetrics, it took me 1 year and 10 months to hit over 100,000 monthly visits:

And with Crazy Egg, it took me 1 year and 6 months to hit 100,000 monthly visits:

As you can see from the graphs above, the amount of time it took me to hit the 100,000 mark decreased. I went from being able to achieve the goal in 4 years and 9 months to 1 year and 6 months.
Luck has nothing to do with this achievement. I actually have a formula, which works every time. And if I leveraged it again today, I bet I could achieve similar results in less than 12 months.
Here’s the formula I use to get blogs to 100,000 visits a month:

Quantity is king

With Quick Sprout, I noticed slight gains when posting 2 pieces of content a week instead of 1. KISSmetrics only started to see big traffic increases when I started to publish 5 pieces of content a week. But with KISSmetrics, we went from publishing 2 a week straight to 5 a week.
This is why KISSmetrics had a much faster growth rate than Quick Sprout. In addition to that, we recently started testing posting 6 pieces of content a week instead of 5.
When we posted 5 a week, we had 422,885 visits a month.

When we tested posting 6 articles a week, our traffic went up to 501,573 visits.

By posting an additional blog post each week, we were able to increase our blog traffic by 18.6%. My experience of working with 20 of the top 100 blogs showed that if we published 3 pieces of content each day (21 pieces a week), we could easily get our traffic to over a million visits a month over time.
When posting in high frequency, make sure you are still maintaining the quality of your content. Writing a lot of blog posts that are low in quality won’t help you see a big increase in traffic.

Infographics

The simplest way to increase your traffic is through infographics. This has worked well for blogs like Mashable, and it’s what caused a huge spike in traffic at KISSmetrics.
Within 2 years, we were able to generate 2,512,596 visitors and 41,142 backlinks from 3,741 unique domains from 47 infographics.
Just look at this screenshot of our traffic in August 2010:

And now look at our September 2010 traffic:

We went from 56,380 to 146,197 visits because of infographics. This strategy was so effective that we started to create an infographic each week to boost our overall traffic. Still, today, even if we don’t publish an infographic, old ones generate at least 50,000 visits for us each month.
If you want to copy this strategy, just follow the steps in this blog post. It will teach you everything you need to know about creating a popular infographic.

Write headlines for both people and search engines

The one thing that all three of my blogs have in common is that they all get a lot of search engine traffic. “Why?” you may ask. It’s because we write blog headlines that appeal to both people and search engines.

Just look at the Crazy Egg blog. Last month, we had 127,373 visits from search engines. All because we write headlines for both Google and people.
In the short run, you won’t notice much traffic from this strategy, but within 6 months, you’ll notice a nice increase in your search engine traffic. From that point, you’ll continue to see increases quarter over quarter.

Cover trending topics

Our biggest traffic days tended to be those when we covered major events within our niche.
For example, with Quick Sprout, when I covered Google updates like Panda and Penguin, I saw a surge of traffic. The same thing happened when Hummingbird was covered on KISSmetrics.
We also saw similar traffic trends when we blogged about Apple’s marketing around its events.
The beautiful part about these surges is that when they are over, your traffic is still a bit higher than it was before the spike.
If you are interested in covering trending topics, you can use Google Trends to see what is hot. Make sure you don’t write on just any topic. The content needs to be relevant to your niche. With a quick search on Google Trends, you should be able to get a good idea on what is increasing and what’s decreasing in search volume.

Write in a conversational tone

Have you noticed that I get over 176 comments per blog post on Quick Sprout? It’s because I write in a conversational tone.
Sure, you can use tricks like “top commenters” to try to boost your numbers, but by making your blog posts sound like a conversation, instead of an essay, you’ll invite more comments from people naturally.
You can create the same effect on your blog by:

• Using the words “you” and “I” within your content.
• Asking questions throughout your blog post.
• Making sure anyone can understand your content…In other words, write for a 5^th grader.
• Keeping your paragraphs short and to the point.

Comments are a great way to increase your readers’ loyalty. If people continually comment on your blog, it means they are reading your content, and they are more likely to share it via the social web.
Having multiple authors on your blog, instead of just one, decreases comments and engagement as your readers don’t have a chance to build a connection with you. Just look at the Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics blogs. We have multiple writers, and most of them don’t write in a conversational tone. As a result, those two blogs get far fewer comments than Quick Sprout’s blog does.
If you take my friend’s blog (he ripped my design…you can too if you want), you’ll see that he only gets 2,000 visits a month, and yet some of his posts have 13 comments. That’s because he writes in a conversational tone.
And if you are thinking about using Facebook comments to increase your engagement and social traffic, don’t. Every single popular blog I’ve worked with always receives more Google traffic than Facebook traffic. With Facebook comments, the comment text doesn’t get indexed by Google, which means you will get less search traffic.

Collect emails through offers and opt-ins

All the blogs I’ve created have a common trend… email is one of the biggest sources of traffic.
For the month of November, emails made up 18% of the traffic to Quick Sprout, 6% to KISSmetrics and 4% to Crazy Egg.
Those percentages may not seem high, but there are two good reasons for that:

1. All three blogs get a lot of traffic, so small percentages still add up when it comes to visitor count.
2. Except for Quick Sprout, the blogs do a terrible job of collecting emails. If KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg were optimized like Quick Sprout, the numbers would have drastically gone up.

If you want to collect more emails from your blog, follow step 2 in this blog post. It will teach you everything you need to know. Plus, you can just download the WP Lead Magnet plugin. Those are the tactics I use on Quick Sprout, and they work wonders.
Once you have an email list, you should blast it with your new blog post every time you publish it. Why? Because it will drive traffic, create more comments and, best of all, generate social shares. Email subscribers are 3.9 times more likely to share your content than your other blog visitors.

Content marketing doesn’t have to be a hit-or-miss game

The most important element of a blog post is its headline. No matter how good your content is, if your headline sucks, very few people will read the post.
In most cases, content marketing is a hit or a miss: your content will be widely read or just ignored. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
You can use tools like Social Crawlytics to see what sort of content has done well on competing blogs. For example, if you had a marketing blog and you wanted to see what was hot on Quick Sprout, you would just type in www.quicksprout.com and see a table that looks something like this:

You can then sort the data by social site or by total count. In essence, it will show you all of the popular blog posts and their headlines. If you look at the top 5 posts, the advanced guide to seo, content marketing and growth hacking are 3 of them. That shows that if you create advanced guides and use similar to mine headlines for marketing-related topics, you too can get a lot of traffic.
In addition to finding topics and headlines that work, you can use formulas in this blog post to come up with attractive headlines. That post will teach you how to use opinions, create a sense of urgency or evoke curiosity within your headlines.

Build up your social media profiles

Another commonality among all three of the blogs I created is that they all get a lot of traffic from social media sites. In the last 30 days:

• KISSmetrics received 36,862 visits from social sites.
• Crazy Egg received 5,976 visits form social sites.
• Quick Sprout received 25,350 visits from social sites.

How are we able to achieve these results? It’s because we build up our social profiles. You can do it too if you follow this strategy:

• First, tackle the social media low hanging fruit through these 12 steps.
• Then, follow the steps and data in this infographic to maximize your Twitter traffic.
• Accept all of the friend requests on Facebook and then follow these steps to maximize your Facebook traffic.
• Lastly, make sure you are publishing your posts during peak hours so you get the most social engagement.

When building up your social profiles, you have to be patient. It typically takes 6 months to see consistent social media traffic to your blog.
In addition to focusing on major social media sites, consider leveraging smaller ones in your niche. For example Inbound and Growth Hackers are two social sites that focus on the marketing niche. In an average month, Inbound drives around 1,700, and Growth Hackers around 400, visits to my site. It may not seem like a lot, but it all adds up.

Partner up

Within a few months of launching the Crazy Egg blog, I was able to grow it to over 30,000 visits a month. Do you know how?
No, it wasn’t through SEO or even social media. It was through partnerships. The first partnership I went after was the Smashing Magazine Network. Because we were included in their RSS feed, we were able to get from them 22,181 visits a month.

The cost for this was $0. All we had to do was place a badge on our blog that stated we were in the Smashing Magazine network.
It’s not the only network on the web… before that, I was part of the 9rules network. There are a lot of blog networks out there. You just have to find the ones your space.
But don’t stop with blog networks. You can also share your content with other blogs in exchange for them driving traffic back to your blog. Business Insider has taken posts from Quick Sprout such as this one. I asked Business Insider to link back to my blog within the post, which they gladly did.
Popular blogs like Business Insider are looking for more content. If you provide it to them, they won’t have an issue linking back to your site and driving thousands of visits to you.
To get these partnerships, you have to continually reach out to popular blogs in your space. Most won’t accept your content or let you join their network, but for every 10 blogs you hit up, at least 1 will say, “yes.”

Conclusion

It may have taken me years to get Quick Sprout to 100,000 visits a month, but it shouldn’t take you that long. When I started Quick Sprout, social sites like Facebook and Twitter weren’t as popular as they are now.
You have more sites and partnerships you can leverage today than you ever had, and people are craving more good blog content than they ever did before.
Why not give it a shot? Follow the steps above, and you should hit 100,000 visits a month in no time.
So, what other tactics can you use to get to 100,000 visits a month?

What is a Marketing Funnel? | Why You Should Have A Marketing Funnel

by Rich Miller ·

Welcome Googler! If you find this page useful, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

What is a marketing funnel? That might be a foreign question to you if you are new to online marketing, but don’t lose heart I will explain it. A marketing funnel is one of the critical keys to building a successful business and your Freedom.  Read this entire article so that you can learn more about what is needed to get your marketing funnel up and running!

What is a Marketing Funnel?

For those of you who don’t know what a marketing funnel is, let’s get to it. Think about what a funnel really is. You might think of a tornado first, that takes you by storm, and you might think about things that get sucked in fast and either continue on or get spit out.
This is the same principle as a marketing funnel that you would use to build your business. There are normally a few steps in the Sales Funnel process simply because once you capture your targeted customer you want to accomplish some critical steps to get them through your funnel. Designing your own Marketing Funnel can be technically challenging, especially if you are new to marketing and don’t have the technical skills.

Designing A Marketing Funnel

In designing a good marketing funnel system there are many psychological factors that are considered when designing the process that your Lead will follow. Dialing in a good funnel that converts can be very time consuming and costly if you’re just learning the basics. Because of the time involved in learning, testing its usually best to use a system like MLSP that already has a marketing funnel that is already tested and ready to go.

Floating Through the Marketing Funnel

There are many phases of a funnel including the initial phase of discovery like. That could be a magazine ad, internet search or an online paid ad that attracted the lead to the first stage of your marketing funnel. Some refer to this as a trigger, but call it what you want, it got their attention!
If you did your job correctly, you have peaked the leads interest in your offer / product and you take them to your squeeze page where you deliver enough information so that your lead wants to know more, this is the most important step of the funnel as you now are capturing their contact information.  That Lead then gets added to a database that you own, most people use Aweber or GVO for that purpose.
Normally the next step in your marketing funnel is exposing your new Lead to your product or service.  This is what we call the exploration stage; or rather they are discovering what it is that you have to offer. Makes sense right?  This is the point that your lead can decide which path they wish to take, they may make the purchase at that time or not, but don’t worry it’s not over yet!

What Happens to The Leads In A Marketing Funnel?

Heres where the design of your funnel pays off, sometimes resulting in thousands of dollars of recurring sales. Many people get disappointed when they don’t initially convert a lead to sale, but thats ok!
A VERY important part of your marketing funnel is the follow up sequence that you have built into your sales funnel. This is where your emails start working for you on autopilot and build relationships with your subscribers. Sometimes it takes 10+ exposures to your offer before someone makes that buying decision.

As you can see there are a lot of moving part to a successful marketing funnel. I have built many marketing funnels, but to be honest with you I prefer to focus on getting traffic and let someone else do the heavy lifting for me. That’s why I have used the marketing funnels that have been designed and tested by some of the best internet marketers in MLSP.
 Take a test drive of the same powerful marketing tools I use and you can use to make a new life and a new business with new results? CLICK HERE and  get immediate access to the same Marketing Funnel System I use.
 Wishing You Great Success! 

Affiliate Marketing Resources

Recommended Resources Below is a list of some of the various ad networks, online services, and software tools that I personally use and recommend. I made this resource section on my blog to share these valuable resources with you, as well as to help lessen the amount of e-mails I get requesting to know who designed my logo or what specific tools and services I use for this and that. I do use other resources from the ones listed below, but these are my favourite and the ones that I can highly recommend. This page is fairly long, so below are the topics in case you are looking for a specific type of source: Affiliate Networks Ad Networks Affiliate Marketing Tools & Services Paid Traffic Sources Blogging Tools Graphic Design Programming Outsourcing Websites SEO Tools E-mail List Management Web Hosting Domain Registrars Buying & Selling Domains and Websites Social Media Tools & Services [Last revised and updated: May 24th, 2013] Affiliate Networks (CPA) PeerFly – I’ve been working with PeerFly since they launched and can’t recommend them enough. They are an awesome affiliate network that has a fantastic custom-made backend, the highest payouts anywhere (guaranteed), and great customer support. Read this post to see photos and a video from when I met up with them in person in Florida. AmpedMedia – AmpedMedia is another good solid affiliate network that I use. They have never failed to send me a Christmas card every year, hand-signed by their entire staff. Read this post to see photos and a video from when I met up with them in person in Florida. Neverblue – Neverblue is an established network in the industry, being in business since 2004 (a long time for an affiliate network). They are a very solid network with a great custom backend, good payouts, and a nice balanced selection of offers. Neverblue is definitely a network you want to add to your "portfolio". Ad Networks (CPC/CPM) Casale Media – I have been using Casale Media for over 5 years, since 2006. They pay out 70%, have a good advertiser base, a great control panel, and a referral program which pays out for life. Tribal Fusion – Tribal Fusion is a fantastic ad network for high volume sites due to the high quality publishers they attract. By requiring their publishers to have high quality, large traffic sites, they are able to attract big brand advertisers and in turn offer very high payouts. However, you will need to have a minimum of 500,000 unique visitors a month in order to be accepted. I’d highly recommend them if you can get accepted into them. Affiliate Marketing Tools & Services CPVLab – If I could only choose ONE affiliate marketing program or service to use, it’d be CPVLab, no question. I simply cannot recommend this tracking software enough. It is not free, and costs a one-time fee of $297, but it is worth every damn penny! In fact, it could be priced at $2,977 and still be worth every damn penny. I now use CPVLab on all of my campaigns and it has saved me countless hours of analysis, as well as helped me make a lot of money. The main features that make CPVLab stand out from other tracking platforms is its blazing speed, extremely clean and easy-to-use interface and design, and built-in features such as landing and offer split-testing. Honestly, if you’re doing affiliate marketing (or any type of traffic analysis), you need to get CPVLab now. You’re welcome. Prosper202 – Prosper202 is a 100% free self-hosted tracking software that you install and set up on your server. Prosper202 is well known in the affiliate marketing world as it was really the first tracking platform developed specifically for the affiliate marketing community. Talk to any super affiliate, and chances are they are either using Prosper202 now, or have in the past. It is simply the best free affiliate tracking platform out there, hands down. GeoEdge – GeoEdge is a proxy service that allows you to surf the web as if you were coming from another country (it currently offers 80+ countries plus 25 major US cities). It works with Flash, videos, rich media – basically everything. In addition to being extremely useful for affiliate marketers (no more "This offer is not available in your location" landing pages), it is also an extremely useful service to view country-specific ads. I use their browser add-on nearly everyday when working on my campaigns. For me, it is a must-have tool as an affiliate marketer who promotes international offers. It is also essential for me since I am a Canadian and many offers are US-only and will geo-redirect based on my IP. GeoEdge is also perfect for mobile advertisers as it has a mobile emulator tool. StackThatMoney – StackThatMoney is a private affiliate marketing forum that costs a monthly subscription fee of $99/month. While not free, it is worth every penny and will pay for itself many times over. For example, last week, I was browsing the forums when I discovered a small network I never heard about before. The first campaign I ran with the network was profitable right off the bat with no optimization or targeting. It’s little gems like these that easily justify the subscription fee. Whether you’re a newcomer struggling to find your first profitable campaign, or an experienced affiliate marketer who is making 6-figures a month, StackThatMoney will have something for you. If you’re serious about affiliate marketing, I highly recommend joining. IMGrind – A lot of people ask me how to get started in affiliate marketing and learn the industry. Well, here’s a great resource for that. IMGrind is a paid, private training forum for affiliate marketers. It is run by super affiliates Ralph "Ruck" Ruckman and Ryan Gray, two guys who are extremely well known in the industry. While Ryan and Ruck are active on the forum and will definitely help you out, the real beauty of the forum is that it consists of hundreds of other experienced affiliates and super affiliates. As a result, you are learning a hell of a lot more; it is not just 2 guys you are learning from, it is hundreds of successful affiliates. Some of the biggest guys in the industry are members there, and it is up to you how you decide to interact. You could be a "fly on the wall" and just sit back and read all the valuable information, or you could be an active member and participate and engage in discussion and ask questions. If you really want to learn, you’ll do both. For a more information, be sure to check out my review. CrazyCTR – CrazyCTR is a paid service that allows you to instantly make countless variations of your ad images so that you can focus on actually split-testing the ads instead of spending all of your time creating the images manually. Be sure to check out the review I wrote about them which includes a 17-minute screencast video. Also, enter the coupon code: TYLERCRUZ to receive 20% off your subscription price for LIFE. SocialAdNinja – If you use Facebook as a traffic source for affiliate marketing, then you should definitely look into trying SocialAdNinja. SocialAdNinja is a Facebook ad spy service that gathers and harvests ads from Facebook and allows you to browse and search through nearly half a million (and growing) ads. Basically, it allows you to spy on your competition and copy their ads and/or ideas. Check out the review I wrote about them which includes a very detailed 33-minute screencast video. In addition, use the promo code: TYLERCRUZ when signing up to get 15% off your monthly subscription for life. Paid Traffic Sources Google AdWords – AdWords has been extremely heavy handed on affiliate advertisers over the past few years – so much so, that most affiliates will scoff upon the sheer mention of their name. And while seemingly random bannings do still happen, as long as you’re not promoting anything super shady, you should be okay. AdWords is great because you can target people who you know are interested in your ad because they are proactively searching for it. The content network is also a fantastic source, as Google has amassed a huge publisher base over the years, allowing for seemingly endless traffic. Facebook – A lot of people have turned away from Facebook over the past couple of years, because just like Google AdWords, competition quickly grew and made it rather expensive to use. But if you stick with it and can get the hang of it, Facebook offers some of the best targeting out there, and a never-ending supply of traffic that you can scale upwards forever. Blogging Tools WordPress – I use the free blogging software WordPress for my blog. WordPress is great because it’s a free open-source software which is heavily supported by developers offering free plugins. WordPress releases new versions with new features and improvements regularly, and is theme-based meaning you can easily customize your own theme or download one of the thousands of free themes available. There are also countless plugins available to extend functionality as well. Windows Live Writer – I actually don’t use WordPress to write, edit, or publish my blog posts. Instead, I use the free blogging editor software Windows Live Writer (made by Microsoft). I always find formatting posts within WordPress to be a real pain which is why I started using WLW. In addition, WLW has a plethora of features and tools including: built-in image cropping and watermarking, spell-checking, auto-linking, word count, and tabs for easy view switching. WLW also works with a number of different blogging platforms including WordPress, Blogger, Live Journal, and TypePad to name a few. Graphic Design SOSFactory – Sergio from SOSFactory is the talent behind my mascot, and has done a number of variations of them for me now. Without hyperbole, I can confidently say that Sergio is a world-class artist, especially when it comes to mascots. He charges around $600 per logo, and while that may sound expensive, it’s really not. In fact, it’s quite cheap considering the sheer quality of it. In addition, Sergio will provide you with the PSD and any other sources (such as fonts) used in high resolution so that you can print offline material such as business cards, posters, or T-Shirts with your mascot. He also guarantees his work – he’ll provide you with early sketches and revisions along the way to make sure you’re happy with the way it’s taking shape. If not, he’ll do it until you are. In addition to mascots and logos, Sergio also does traditional print, web, and stationery design. Just check out his portfolio to see his awesome work for yourself. Tell Sergio that Tyler sent you and he’ll take care of you. Webdesignbe – Formerly 4Design.tv, Webdesignbe.com is one of those hidden resource gems that isn’t widely marketed and linked everywhere but rather spread through word of mouth. In fact, that is how I found out about them – through a friend. I hire them for all my graphic work now. Webdesignbe is a small but great design company from Belgium run by husband and wife. Check out their portfolio to see examples of their work. They do pretty much anything graphic-related including: website design, banners, logos, business cards, etc. They offer very unique and creative design, a fast turnaround, free revisions, are very affordable considering their quality, and give the source files (PSDs, fonts, etc.). I highly recommend them. Tell Nathalie that Tyler says “Hi” :-) Programming Interberry – Interberry is a programming company that I have regularly hired since finding them several years ago. They have done all my programming work since, including Movie-Vault.com, PublisherChallenge, and several other sites and projects. Being a perfectionist and having a lot of experience with developing websites and outsourcing, I can be very demanding. Interberry impresses me in that they never complain or hesitate to do anything I request. That’s saying a lot because I often send 3-4 e-mails per day with lists of new things to add or other changes, and they won’t complain at all, they’d just get it done. You can contact them via their website at Interberry.com, e-mail them at info@interberry.com, phone them at +1-888-367-1110 (during 9:30 am to 6:30 pm Indian Standard Time), or if you’re like me you’ll want to talk to them via Skype chat. Add cheb.iberry to your Skype contacts for that. For more information, you can read some of my past posts on Interberry at: The Programmers Behind PublisherChallenge, My Christmas Gift to You: Interberry, and 2 More Reasons Why You Should Hire Interberry. Be sure to tell Interberry that I sent you, and they’ll treat you extra nice :-) Outsourcing Websites Elance – Elance.com is the most established and leading authority for outsourcing work online. I’ve personally used them since 2004 to find programmers for my various projects (before finding Interberry). Elance has 2 million providers, allowing you to you hire professionals in almost any field relating to business including: programming, design, writing, admin support, accounting, marketing, and even legal services. Freelancer – Freelancer is similar to Elance, only its providers seem to offer cheaper prices. They also have over 7 million freelancers in their system, and have grown at a tremendous pace the past few years, and seem to have now overtaken Elance as the largest outsourcing work site. It’s partly the higher number of freelancers on Freelancer that tends to drive the bids down. For smaller, simpler, projects, I tend to use Freelancer over Elance. oDesk – oDesk tends to have a lot more European providers compared to Elance and Freelancer, which have mostly Indian providers. oDesk also tends to have higher bids from their providers as well. However, I really like how oDesk presents their providers, clearly displaying their hourly rate, description, portfolio, and past projects and rating. oDesk also has a test feature, in which providers can take certain tests in their field so you can get an idea as to their level of skill in that particular field. Overall, oDesk has a much higher quality of providers than other freelance sites, in my opinion, but they’re also far more expensive. SEO Tools RankPay – RankPay is a very unique SEO firm in that they have a business model in which they only charge based on the results they provide. Basically, the higher you rank, the more you pay. The prices are per keyword and will vary depending on the keyword and your website. The are also tiered, so the higher you rank, the more you will pay. What’s nice though is that you only have to pay once you are ranked in the top 30 – you won’t have to pay a cent if you’re ranked #31, for example. I worked out a special deal with them, and so if you decide to sign up with them, be sure to use TYLERCRUZ as the promo code when you register, as it will give you an instant $50 credit applied to your account. RankTracker – I absolutely love RankTracker and highly recommend it. It tracks the rankings of your keywords and provides graphs, charts, and reports on their progress. There is no program that is as accurate and has as many features as RankTracker. It will search virtually any search engine, and provide accurate rankings up to the 1,000th result. You can watch an early screencast review I made for more details, or look at some screenshots of the results from any of my past SEO Case Study posts. I highly recommend RankTracker for anyone wanting to keep track of their keyword rankings. E-mail List Management AWeber – AWeber is an e-mail list management service that allows you to collect e-mail addresses from your visitors. Ask any top internet marketer the one thing they regret, and they’ll likely tell you that it’s not building an e-mail list sooner. Starting at only $19/month, it’s pretty affordable. AWeber is very popular because they are an extremely “whitehat” company. They are very strict in how their users conduct their e-mail lists such as all e-mail list subscriptions having to be confirmed and opted-in, and having a zero-tolerance policy for using their services for spamming of any kind. This strictness is actually a very good thing as it establishes themselves as a respected company and are therefore often safelisted (as opposed to blacklisted!) on many ISP’s and servers. AWeber also offers a horde of features, such as awesome tracking, great analytics, and the ability to collect e-mail addresses by providing something to the user, such as a download to your e-book, for example (ever wonder why so many internet marketers pitch their free e-book?). If used correctly, AWeber will easily pay for itself and then some. Popup Domination – Popup Domination is a web script that overlays a lightbox sign-up form over your website in order to encourage visitors to sign up to your mailing list. While the concept is simple, the fact is that it works. In fact, most of the top internet marketers are using it, such as John Chow, Zac Johnson, Shoemoney, etc. They’re using it not to annoy their readers, but because it works. You can check out a short case study I did with adding Popup Domination on my blog. Basically, I increased my subscription rate by 1,033%. It works. Popup Domination is designed to work with all the major mailing list services, such as AWeber (see above), and offers a number of customizable features such as being able to set it so that the lightbox doesn’t appear until after the visitor has made a certain number of pageviews on your site. Web Hosting HostGator – I’ve stated in several interviews now that the best business decision I made in 2009 was switching to HostGator. They have amazing hosting packages which will suit 99% of you, from basic web hosting starting at $3.96 a month to powerful dedicated servers. HostGator has a spotless reputation online and is an Inc. 5000 company. Their customer support is beyond outstanding – what I especially like is their 24/7 live chat support (with literally over a hundred agents ready to help you instantly). They even do free site transfers for you, if you’re switching from another provider. I am a complete fanboy when it comes to HostGator and simply cannot recommend them highly enough. Use the coupon code TYLERCRUZ25 when signing up to receive a full 25% off your initial order (it’s therefore recommended to prepay a year in advance to take advantage of the discount). LiquidWeb – I mention above that HostGator will work for 99% of you. After all, I use HostGator myself. But I also use LiquidWeb. In the Spring of 2011, I bought a website that was receiving mad traffic and utilizing a lot of server resources. My dedicated server at HostGator wouldn’t be able to handle it properly, at least not with any growth, which is saying a lot because the Pro Dedicated Server at HostGator is pretty damn powerful. And so I purchased a new dedicated at LiquidWeb. LiquidWeb specializes in dedicated servers and can offer custom packages much bigger than HostGator’s largest available server. For example, my server with them is a 16x core! LiquidWeb has great customer support with 24/7 live chat support and a wide selection of server customizable and upgrade options available. I therefore recommend LiquidWeb for those 1% of you who need something REALLY powerful. Domain Registrars GoDaddy – GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain name registrar, and most professional domainers (those who buy and sell domains for a living) use GoDaddy. GoDaddy has awesome customer support. To give you an idea of just how great their support is: on two separate occasions I accidentally registered domains with an accidental typo. Both times I contacted support and they kindly refunded my money within minutes and wished me a good day. They have great prices, especially if you become a member of the Domain Discount Club (very useful if you have a lot of domains), and allow for easy and instant domain transfers (which is why most domainers use GoDaddy). They have one downside though. Their site is extremely ad heavy and you will be bombarded with offer after offer as you use their site, but once you get used to them you quickly learn to ignore them. NameCheap – While I mainly use GoDaddy, I also use NameCheap since it’s also a very popular registrar and many domainers use it an alternative. NameCheap is nice because their site is much cleaner than GoDaddy’s, and they don’t try to hard-sell you on their products and services like GoDaddy does. Their prices are awesome, as their name suggests, and probably their best perk is that all the domains come with free WhoisGuard protection. I wouldn’t recommend them if you plan on flipping domains, though. They are rather bitter when you transfer a domain away from them to another registrar… waiting until the last possible second according to the ICANN rules (the end of the 5th working day) to approve the transfer. Buying & Selling Domains + Websites Flippa – Flippa is hands-down the best place to buy and sell established websites. You can find websites there from as low as $50 to as high as $1,000,000+. I have been using Flippa for many years (it used to be Sitepoint Marketplace before becoming its own site), both buying and selling sites on it, and can highly recommend it. Be sure to watch a video of a webinar I did with e John Chow, Zac Johnson, and Matt Mickiewicz (the co-founder of Flippa) in which I was a panellist. My presentation begins around the 24-minute mark. There are invaluable tips for buying and selling sites there. DNForum – I’ve been a member of DNForum since early 2004. DNForum is an absolute massive domain name forum in which you can discuss anything pertaining to domain names. But its main purpose is for members to post their domains for sale, where potential buyers can then contact them. In order to gain access to some of the buying and selling sections, you’ll need to upgrade your membership on the site. Fortunately, there are lifetime options available, and I recommend getting the lifetime Platinum membership (that’s what I have). If you do a lot of domain buying and selling, this one-time cost will pay for itself quickly. NamePros – NamePros is just like DNForum, only it’s completely free. Whenever I post my domains for sale or am looking for some domains to buy, I always use both DNForum and NamePros. In fact, you’ll find many posts duplicated on both sites from other people doing the same thing. Sedo – Sedo is a large domain marketplace. However, unlike DNForum and NamePros, Sedo takes a commission (10%) for every domain you sell. It does not cost anything to list your domain(s) for sale, however. Sedo is most beneficial for sellers of premium domain names who are looking to get a high price tag. It is therefore not so great for buyers, as the prices for most of the domains listed on Sedo tend to be quite inflated. BuyDomains – BuyDomains is another domain marketplace, only they tend to focus on higher-quality domains when compared to Sedo. What I like about BuyDomains is that if you have a higher budget, you can find some pretty nice domains for fair prices. It is therefore not-so-good to list your domain for sale there, but as a buyer it’s pretty nice. If you’re willing to spend $1,500 – $20,000+ for a domain, I’d recommend taking a look at BuyDomains first to see if they have anything that suits your needs. Social Media Tools & Services Twiends – Twiends is a service that allows Twitter users to list themselves in which is essentially a giant Twitter directory. The secret is to purchase seeds instead of using their free service. I personally grew my number of followers from 1,000 to over 60,000+ by using them. Be sure to read my very detailed review and case study of Twiends, as well as my follow-up post: How I Gained 25,000 Real Twitter Followers. FeedBurner – FeedBurner is an RSS feed management provider owned and operated by Google. By creating an account (free) and adding your RSS feed(s), you can gain access to a large number of features such as keeping track of how many people are subscribed to your feed(s), offering e-mail delivery whenever you make a new post, and most importantly – having a centralized source for your RSS feed. If you switch domains, for example, you won’t need to rebuild your RSS followers from scratch again. FeedBurner is a must-have for any blogger or anyone with an RSS feed. Tube Toolbox – Tube Toolbox is an absolute awesome software program that dramatically boosts your YouTube friends, followers, and video views. The best part is that as long as you use the software tool properly, that these are highly-targeted users who are genuinely interested in being your friend and subscribing to your channel. You can see an early case study I published in my post: How I Gained 5,000 Friends and 260 Subscribers on YouTube in 1 Month. I purchased the lifetime account and would recommend you do so as well, as it’s a one-time fee. As long as you own it for 13 months, you’ll save $10 a month each month thereafter. SocialCrocodile – SocialCrocodile is a service in which you can pay to boost your social media metrics. They currently offer packages for: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube/Vimeo/MetaCafe, LinkedIn, Google +1, and are working on adding some new sources such as RSS. Their packages are very affordable. For example, you can get 10,000 Twitter followers for $93 or 5,000 Facebook fans for $98. They also deliver results fast. I received 5,000 Facebook fans and 2,000 Twitter followers in 5 days. I worked out a special deal with them: if you use the coupon code: tylercruz when placing your order, they will issue you back a 10% refund after you pay (this is a makeshift deal which is why you don’t receive the discount until after you pay).

Growing Business not Spinning Wheels

Posted by Susan Brown on September 10, 2013

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Thinking about building a business from scratch or have a business that desperately needs attention, but having a hard time getting started? Getting your act together does not have to be this big, overwhelming process. Taking the tiniest, most simple-looking steps could be just what you need to get into gear and jump start your business.
The following are ten practical steps to building a business or starting a new project that anyone can do. With a little willpower you’ll be able to achieve goals you may have never thought possible.
Skeptical?
Go through the steps below, and give it a try. You may be surprised by the difference a systematic approach can make.
Recognize what you are ultimately trying to accomplish and why. The very first step is clearly mapping out your goals. Merely having a rough idea of where you are heading is not enough. Write down exactly what you want to accomplish, and more importantly, why you want to accomplish it. I personally am a very visual person, and I’ve found that mind mapping is really helpful in this process. I use FreeMind, which you can download for free here.
Make sure your business goals are manageable. If your goals are too broad or the bar is being set too high, then you will be much more likely to get overwhelmed or burnt out. The trick is knowing how to break down your goals into manageable steps or focus areas. For example, if one of your goals is to learn how to successfully promote your business via social media, you’ll need to break this down into small steps such as:

• Step 1: Getting a basic understanding what each of the major social networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest) will allow you to do.
• Step 2: Determining which platforms attract your target audience
• Step 3: Picking ONE social network platform and then….
• Step 4: Learning about how your target audience uses the network
• Step 5: Learning how to optimize your profile
• Step 6: Learning how to optimize posts for targeted reach and exposure

…You get the point? Each step becomes a goal in and of itself that requires sufficient mastery.
Pick a starting point… and start immediately. Let me begin by saying that the actual starting point in and of itself is NOT so important. I know that may seem counter-intuitive, but in practice it’s not. It is much more important to just commit yourself to one area and get going since the biggest hump for most people is taking those first steps. Even if these steps are small and far from perfect, you’ve already put yourself on the road to growth and development merely by starting, and that is no small thing. You also want that start to happen right away, as in TODAY! Pick a very small thing that you can do right now, and just do it.

I couldn’t resist

Keeping yourself accountable. Defining your goals and finding a starting point may not be enough to keep you motivated over the long run. For this reason, you should create additional, “outside” motivators. Depending on your personality, there are several things that you could do. You could make a monetary investment into the business (for example, registering a domain or buying a piece of equipment that you know you’re going to need). You could also get others involved: you could join a support group, find a mentor, or even call on a friend or family member to help keep you accountable to your goals.
Don’t consult too many resources. Another reason why people tend to put off building a business or taking their current business to the next level is that they are overwhelmed by the shear amount of information available, and depending on the topic, a lot of it may be contradictory or unclear. There is just way too much noise: too many “experts,” too many resources, and too much data for a person to possibly go through. You’ll have much to gain by just picking one or two sources to follow and consult. Look to learn from those who have mastered their skills enough that they can teach it to you in a way that you can receive it.
Make sure you have what you need. Before you get started you need to be certain that all the resources you need to accomplish your goals are in place. This includes things like equipment, materials, supplies, and even qualified workers.
Make a commitment to your goals. This may sound simple, but it’s one of the most common pitfalls people have when trying to build their businesses. It’s not just that you need clear goals and the resources to fulfill them, but you have to actively commit yourself to using these resources for the process. This means setting aside the necessary time, attention, and money and doing so consistently.
Don’t move on till you’ve achieved sufficient mastery. Following on the heels of the point above, don’t run after content for content’s sake. Seek to master the gaps in what you already know in a given area. Once you’ve reached a sufficient level of mastery, you can then move on to something else. Again, this is about focus. If you are constantly scattering your attention and resources, you simply won’t get so far.
Work with your natural rhythm and learning style. When are you most productive? What is your ideal learning style? How long can you focus on the given task? Knowing this information and acting on it can make the whole process go much quicker. It will help you to maximize your efforts. To help you find out this information about yourself, you could take a look at the site Qualified Mind. It allows you to conduct experiments on yourself to determine your peak mental performance. To find out your learning style, there are many free online tests you can take. Here is a sampling of some good ones:

• http://homeworktips.about.com/od/homeworkhelp/a/lstyleqz.htm
• http://www.learning-styles-online.com/inventory/
• http://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-learning-styles-quiz
• http://www.acceleratedlearning.com/method/test_flash.html
• http://sunburst.usd.edu/~bwjames/tut/learning-style/stylest.html
• http://www.vark-learn.com/english/page.asp?p=questionnaire

Record your progress, test, and get feedback. Building a business from scratch is not a static process. If you really want results, then you need to be testing, reporting, and generating feedback along the way. Obviously, the kinds of reporting and testing will vary depending on what you are trying to accomplish, but it may include things like: A/B testing, looking at site analytics, and other performance tests and reports- all in the name of keeping tabs on your progress. This will help you to stay on course so that you can pursue the activities and strategies that are really working and be alerted to the things that aren’t.
In closing, building a business is a process like anything else. If you know how to approach this process properly, you can avoid a whole lot of wasted time and other resources and end up accomplishing much more than you may have thought possible.

The 10 Things You Should Do On LinkedIn Each And Every Week

The 10 Things You Should Do On LinkedIn Each And Every Week

8 Tips to Create a Killer Gamification Strategy

8 Tips to Create a Killer Gamification Strategy

Optimize Your Website Content with Calls to Action: Tips for Small Businesses

By Mike Murray published September 1, 2013

Many small businesses have a long way to go when it comes to providing the calls to action that are essential for driving conversions from their content marketing efforts.
For example, I regularly find websites that lack easy-to-find phone numbers; or they fail to display offers targeted at engaging prospects who may leave after a few seconds without picking up the phone or sharing their names and email addresses.
To document the issues I’ve come across, I randomly selected 200 U.S.-based small businesses from the ReferenceUSA database (including companies with fewer than 100 employees in such industries as construction, manufacturing, and professional services), and compiled my findings into the Small Business B2B Call to Action Study.
The study, presented by Small Business Trends, also includes a small business B2B call-to-action checklist, which details more than 30 conversion topics that small businesses should review and implement when optimizing their website content.
Here are some of the key observations on how small businesses are failing to benefit from calls to action:

• 96 percent don’t feature any industry how-to guide or white papers on their home pages.
• 70 percent don’t reference any notable calls to action on their home pages (other than a phone number and a “contact us” option in the navigation).
• 72 percent don’t have any calls to action on their interior pages.
• 82 percent don’t reference their social media profiles (text or images).
• 27 percent don’t include a phone number on their home pages.
• 70 percent of websites with a phone number don’t display it in a prominent place.
• 68 percent don’t include an email address on their home pages.
• 38 percent of websites with an email address bury it on the home page (often in the footer).

These findings are somewhat surprising, given that commercial websites have been around for
about 20 years — ample time to have begun to put best practices in place.
You can get excellent tips by reading Mark Sherbin’s CMI post, Are Your Calls to Action Missing These Proven Formulas? Among other ideas, he offers three steps based on conversion experts’ experience:

Step 1: Write copy that gets specific, touts benefits, and uses keywords

Actionable, specific language is the most important part of writing your call-to-action copy. For example, a specific call to action might mention the number of pages in an eBook or the length of a webinar.

Step 2: Design contrasting buttons and shallow navigation

Call to action buttons and banners should stand out through contrasting colors — but which colors you use may be less important than you think.
“Someone once told me, ‘I’ve never not clicked a call to action because it was deep purple instead of bright blue,’” Katherine Griwert of Brafton explains in the article. “Content marketers should consider other design priorities, like using brand-appropriate colors or creating a recognizable custom icon to pair with your CTAs.”

Step 3: Weigh your call to actions and prioritize them

Assuming your “Buy Now” command is your most important isn’t always correct. Your highest priority call to action should be paired with the content, depending on where your prospect is in the sales process.
For example, if your visitor reads an introductory blog post, chances are they are unfamiliar with your brand and not quite ready to buy. The call to action should point them toward more advanced content — instead of the contact page or shopping cart.
You can also get great pointers from Brian Massey in his article, Landing Page Basics: Making Your Content Marketing Convert.
In my small business call to action study, I found that typically nothing stands out on the websites. Even the “Contact Us” statement is often just another navigation option among many page elements (a different color or larger font would help call attention).

Things to know to Make Money Online

Posted by Andrew on August 30, 2013 | Reply

While there are wonderful opportunities to generate wealth online, people continue to face problems achieving this. These problems are often attributed to information overload, unscrupulous gurus, and complicated technology.

Agreed, those are some of the symptoms, but they’re not the disease. These symptoms don’t just affect new marketers. I have seen people who’ve been at this online marketing game for a long time, and who do very well, but they suffer from these limitations. They have found something that works and they make money by scaling what works. But they are missing the concepts that could elevate them to the next level.

What are those concepts?

I know your mind instinctively may have gone to the various make money online tactics you would have seen in some book. There are plenty of books out there, and few offer real strategic principles, but even fewer offer things that can propel you to the top.
Most of them just do the job of motivating you enough to get you to leave your boss and becoming a business owner.
Being your own boss can be wonderful, but that can be a good thing only if your online business proves to be better than your boss. If not, you’ll end up with a feeling that your boss wasn’t that bad after all.

Concepts For A Successful Online Business

As you probably guess from the title, there are five concepts you must be aware of, in order to build a really successful online business.
* A product offering immense value
* Communication of that value through your site
* Visitors already looking for your product
* Leverage
* Focus
The first three are something many successful marketers focus on to make money online:

#1 – A Product Offering Immense Value

The core of our vision-based strategy is “cross-selling”— the process of offering customers the products and services they need, when they need them, to help them succeed financially. The more we give our customers what they need, the more we know about them. The more we know about their financial needs, the easier it is for us to work together for them to bring us more of their business. The more business they do with us, the better value they receive and the more loyal they become. The longer they stay with us, the more opportunities we have to satisfy even more of their financial needs. That’s the mutual benefit of cross-sell. ~ Wells Fargo
Although the above is a beautifully written bank strategy, it makes perfect sense in the marketing community.
This is the easiest, as long as you understand the definition of value from the perspective of your potential customers.
Not you.
It really doesn’t matter how “cool” you think a product on creating widgets is, if you try to sell them to people who don’t know anything about widgets or why they need to create them.
Remember – if your product solves the problem of 100% of the people, and 0% of the people care about it, it’s of no use to them and it just won’t sell.

Value is defined as what people “want.”

Not what they need.

Not what you think they need.

Not what you think they should have.

Not what you think will make them happy.
Yes, there is another line of thought that says “make them want” your product, and to a certain extent this is possible. But it is time-taking and may as easily backfire if you don’t do it right, with unhappy customers “crying over spilt milk.” They will wonder why they bought your product in the first place. You don’t want that.
What do they want?
How powerful is their want?
The more powerful their want, the better your product will sell, and the happier people who buy from you are.
Your job is to fulfill that want in the best way possible. Making sure it offers value is the surest way to make money online.

#2 – Communicate That Value Through Your Site

Create a site that shows them what’s in it for them. Communicate the benefits. Don’t mistake features for benefits. You can take a look at the articles on our website that talk about this.
Here’s a definition: Benefits exist in the head as well as in the heart, and everything else is a feature.
Create an excellent sales page that shows things people perceive as benefits. Things that make them feel better. Everything else is fluff.
Your site should have great content that revolves around the goal of communicating to your visitors that you have what they’re looking for.

#3 – Visitors Already Looking For Your Product

When you’ve convinced people that you can satisfy their longings (the deeper, the better) — then people will not only fall in love with and buy your products, they will become unstoppable evangelists as well. ~ Demian Farnworth via copyblogger.com

This is the kind of traffic you need. This is the traffic you’re trying to find. This is the magic wand that opens up locked doors to a treasure not many can get their hands on.
This is where most marketers go wrong. “Any traffic is good traffic” is something they believe in and end up unsuccessful.
Irrespective to what your product is, it’s important to create a plan to find and attract people who already want your project. Make sure what you spend in getting them to your site is less than what you’re going to profit from selling your product.
This is easily done if you have created a product that has a huge demand, and you’ve already identified the sources you’re going to be driving traffic from.
Watch your “visitor value.” You need to see the income generated on an average, for every person visiting your website. You must see which traffic source is sending people who buy from you. Use analytics and do the math to ensure you make money online.

#4 – Leverage

The ability to share a message with a few and have it reach the many has never been so available. As marketers we have to start thinking about exponential reach. ~ Jolina Pettice via toprankblog.com.
This is a simple concept. This involves getting better results from a specific effort than what you would normally get.
For example, if you write an article and submit it to different ezines. If people like it, you will get decent traffic from it. That’s a good thing.
But how can you make it better?
* Create a small report and offer a small article. Tell readers to visitor your website for the report and tell them to go there. Offer it as a bonus for subscribing to your list.
* Include a link to your product in your article and give it to your affiliates to use on their sites or mailing lists.
These are just a couple of examples. You can do it several ways.
Whatever you create, think of ways how you can use it in different ways to get more for your effort.

#5 – Focus (To Make Money Online)

But the landscape evolves faster than ever. In the field of marketing, the lines will continue to blur. The tools and tactics we rely on will continue to change. The need to focus on the customer will not. ~ Barry Feldman via copyblogger.com

I don’t need to explain this to you. We’ve discussed this many times.
Anyway, I’ll say it again – Focus means desperately wanting something, so every action of yours should answer the question: Am I moving closer to what I want faster than other methods?”
Focus is what separates the successful marketers from the “almost” successful people.

10 Ways to Write Content That Ranks High on Google

BY Kristin Piombino | FROM PR Daily| July 25, 2013|

6 Comments |

196

1K

Image credit: mindtouch.com

Since its arrival on the online scene, search engine optimization (SEO) has put writers in a difficult position. Do you write for people or the search engine algorithms?
Thankfully, we no longer have to choose. According to an infographic from ContentVerve.com, Google actually prefers natural-sounding content--as do, obviously, your readers. Besides, what's the point of landing a high Google rank if your content won't turn people into customers?
The graphic goes on to explain 10 ways you can ensure your content will land a top spot in Google's search results. Here are a few of them:
1. Forget about keyword density. Google will pick up on keywords, but there's no evidence that cramming them in will help your rank.

Hntent. Most of the content that makes it to the first page of Google has more than 2,000 words. Long articles also tend to see more shares than shorter ones.

3. Answer customer questions. If a prospective customer has questions about your product or service, he will probably type it into Google. Write content that answers those questions, and he will visit your site. Plus, if your answers are better than those of your competitors, you may land a new customer.
4. Get more social media shares. The more shares your content gets, the more relevant and popular it will seem to Google.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/227491#ixzz2aXEwZo1h

SEO Google optimization Course

y Len Smith

Let me show you how to make your website into a money magnet by learning the basics of search engine optimization.
Yes, I'm a freelancer working from home, yet I really do get more than 1,000 visitors every day - day in, day out. That's auditable.
And it's not the mythical ‘hits’ that some people boast about. These are real live humans.
Around a third of a million a year! That's why I now have to farm work out.
IF YOU ARE A WEB DESIGNER, APPLICATION DEVELOPER, FREELANCER, THIS COULDN'T BE MORE APPROPRIATE. YOU ARE SELLING TO EXACTLY THE SAME AUDIENCE I SELL TO.
And I did all the search engine optimization myself. I don’t pretend to be an SEO
guru. In fact, I hate technology but I realized some time ago that your
rankings in Google searches are too valuable to entrust to others. And
there's no need to spend a fortune with SEO companies when you can achieve
astounding results yourself without any technical expertise. After all, no-one
knows your business like you do, and no one can be as highly motivated.
In this search engine optimization training course, there's no sales hype. I just lift the kimono and show you exactly what I did to my own site – and
you can do exactly the same to your site – just ‘copy and paste’. And, yes, it does take into account the latest changes that Google has made to its ranking algorithm.
A jargon-free zone
We start very gently, taking a bite at a time. In the entire course there are just
six hard-core jargon words (I couldn’t avoid those). These are search engine optimization basics, so they are easy to understand. The rest is pure layman’s
language. Each video introduces a new concept and is followed by a downloadable
pdf, so you have a hard copy and can add notes of your own.
Fireside chats
This is not a sterile ‘off the shelf, take it or leave it’ course. In my other
course ‘How to Become a Copywriter’, I introduced the idea of fireside chats.
When students raise a query that would be useful to others, I add a video
‘chat’ covering the topic. That way, the course always stays up to date and,
over time, really tunes into student needs, rather than what I may think those
needs are.
Oh – and I am very accessible. Any queries, or anything not clear, just email me.
I am here to help.

This has got to be the definitive course on SEO - exactly what entrepreneurs and startups have been crying out for
If you have seen me on TV's The Secret Millionaire, you will know I built my own startup from scratch to make it into a multi-million dollar business around the globe. You will also know that I dedicate a lot of my time helping entrepreneurs and startup businesses to get off the ground.
I have known Len for a number of years and he has given SEO workshops on my behalf for lots of new businesses. Always ecstatically received. Those workshops became the basis of this course.
I can personally recommend it. Invest now and grab that competitive advantage.
Dawn Gibbins, MBE, MBA, philanthropist, entrepreneur
Dawn's accolades include Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year, voted the most influential person in UK manufacturing and an MBE for services to industry.
She has also been made a ‘Pioneer to the Life of our Nation’ by Her Majesty The Queen in 2004 and recently been titled ‘Legend of Industry’ .

How People Read on the Web

How People Read on the Web

Meme Man

How to Harness the Power of Internet Memes for Your Business (Infographic)

BY Kathleen Davis | Yesterday|

funnycatwallpapers.com

Grumpy Cat, Bah Humbug

Grumpy Cat has a movie deal, the "I Can Has Cheezburger" franchise is worth millions, and Big Bird became the star of the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Internet memes have the power to capture the fleeting attention of millions, so finding a way to tap into that power to market your business could give you a huge boost.
But what goes into creating a viral hit? The environment, the topic and the timing all have to be right, says Damon Brown, entrepreneur and co-author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Memes (Alpha, 2010). Brown studies pop culture and the power of memes.
"There isn't an exact formula to go viral. You do the best that you can and see how it goes," he says.
Related: Grumpy Cat and the Thriving Cat Meme Marketplace
While you can't predict what will become the next Grumpy Cat, there are a few things that entrepreneurs can do to tap into the power of memes to promote their business or product:
1. Pay attention to pop culture. 
If you want to understand "the modern zeitgeist" and what people are thinking, you have to follow pop culture, Brown says. "Memes are little pockets of pop culture that show what we are thinking at that moment," he says. "How can you create a meme or be part of a meme if you don't know what the modern thinking is?"
2. Work quickly.
When you find something in the news or in pop culture that is appropriate for your business, timing is everything. For example, within hours of the Mars Rover landing last August Oreo released an ad showing a cookie with what looked like tracks from the Mars Rover it the orange-colored cream.

3. Be prepared.
It's not about seeing what's trending right now and trying to create something around it, Brown says. Rather, he advises to be proactive and look for elements of your product or business that are meme-worthy. Brown says you should ask yourself, "Is there a meme in here? Is there something that can carry on?"
For example if you make all-natural soap, Brown says, and Youtube video of a baby eating soap goes viral, use that opportunity to latch on to the video's success.
Related: What You Can Learn About Social Media from Big Bird
The infographic below from Seattle-based online backup service, Mozy, breaks down different types of memes and the elements of a viral hit, as well as the history of how memes started.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226955#ixzz2W0bKMwXG