Phew, another busy day. I’ve been working on my presentation for our next Melpies Workshop tomorrow. It’s going to be big. We will be focusing on traffic and I will be revealing some sneaky tips and tactics that I have been learning about from a top affiliate Internet Marketer. He only makes rare appearances on the speaking circuit and tries to avoid the pitchfests. Learning with him is like riding a bike effortlessly – not like the previous course I did which was like Internet Marketing on training wheels!
We are expecting a slightly smaller crowd tomorrow as a few of our regulars are away. Unfortunately, I can’t promise to deliver all the content to those that don’t come. Last time we have away a PDF of the presentation. This time we are rewarding commitment.
Speaking of commitment, we went out to dinner with some fellow Internet marketers on Wednesday night and met up with this really switched on young guy named Ricky J. His enthusiasm was infectious – to be honest he blew me away. Turns out he is a friend of Steven Essa – Voted Best Speaker at the Perth WIS in February this year.
His focus and dedication to succeed at Internet marketing was clearly evident. He then proceeded to advise us that he lived in Albury and had driven 4 hours just to make it to dinner, then he was driving back home. Now that’s a BIG effort.
Through a simple chance meeting (all we did was put ourselves out and go to dinner) this guy has motivated us and renewed my enthusiasm.
We learnt a valuable thing – sometimes you just need to make the effort and things can happen. It’s not all about the Internet!!
Read more on Traffic Tactics and Motivation…
Filed under Driving Traffic by on Mar 13th, 2010. Comment. 
At our last Melpies Meeting on Sunday 7th February, we covered of keyword research. Keyword research is one of the most critical pieces of the puzzle in achieving success online. In fact, research is the foundation of any marketing program. Do this wrong, and you will struggle to get the right traffic and traffic that converts.
Some tips covered at the meeting included:
- How many sponsored ads are displayed – are there buyers in the market? If so this is a good sign as it means your market is commercially viable.
- Consider the competition – if there are millions of search results it is going to take a very long time to rank very highly in google. Ideally you want less than 30,000 search results.
- Think laterally and use related keywords
- Use long-tail keywords that are 3 or more words long- these are more targeted
- Be relevant. Put yourself in the mindset of the buyer. Consider what would you type into Google if you were looking to buy something. For example, if you were looking for advice on how to save money to go on a holiday, you wouldn’t be searching for the term “cheap weekends away” – a buyer typing in this term is most likely going to be looking for locations where they can have a cheap weekend away.
- Use buying terms – words such as cure, stop, fix all suggest that the searcher is looking for a solution to a problem. You can bet if this is the case, they are more likely to be in a buying mind-state.
Keyword research is a simple process but it is amazing how many people get it wrong. We did a couple of case studies of some websites and found that many had some fundamental flaws. Some of the keywords used were too broad, the headings did not match the keywords. The PPC ad campaign for the website was also not specific to buyer needs and used different search terms to the rest of the website.
The process of finding the right keywords is relatively simple. It can be done manually by looking within various Google tools or it can be more automated by using a Micro Niche Software program. The good thing with software, is that you don’t have to go looking in various places to do your research. Your searches are automatically saved so you can refer back to them at a later time. If you would like to find out more about Finding Niche Keywords, then check out these free videos of the software in action by clicking on the above link.
Filed under Keyword Research, Market Research by on Feb 15th, 2010. 2 Comments.
While working this website and planning our next meeting, Ray mentioned that we really needed a form on this website so we could get members to register their attendance. The concern was that attendences at our meeting have been rapidly growing and the seating capacity at our venue is limited to 24. Despite my very limited knowledge on creating forms I said “no problem.” I then googled event registration form and I found the plug-in I needed to and promptly installed it.
It took a little bit of time to get the hang of it but essentially I’ve done it. The plug-in I found was called Event Registration. Its a nifty little tool and it is also free. The plug-in is quite good and could be great to use if you were holding an event that you wanted people to register to. It even integrates with PayPal so if you wanted to charge for your event you could. This could be especially useful for any niches you might be interested in promoting. The good news is that the plug-in also has the flexibility to allow you to register people for free. This was great news for me as since the venue at our next two meetings does not cost anything.
The only tricky thing was working out how to display the registration form. In any case I had to create a new page, find the html code for the form and then paste it into the html tab of the page I had just created. Once this was done, my form was ready to go.
The only downside to the plugin is:
- You need to register your name, address and phone number. There does not seem to be any way of changing this within the plug-in.
- It does not integrate with your autoresponder account
- The email comes directly from my web-hosting account so it is not the email address I normally use. It looks weird and a little like spam as it displays my hostaccountname@box441.bluehost.com. I have not found a way to customise the email address.
The plug-in therefore is limited in some respects. Now I can see that if you were holding an event that you suddenly had to cancel or there was a change of venue this would be useful. However, if you were holding an event like we are doing this could be a right royal pain. Some people may not want to give out their personal details – they might just want to attend. For our purposes, I just want to register Melpies members to our meeting as the room only holds 24 people. Given we had about 14 or 15 people at our last meeting and the numbers have been rapidly growing we needed to know how many people were coming.
So apologies in advance for those who register – I really don’t want your address and contact details but the plugin itself makes it compulsory to put the details in. The good news however is that we have a registration form.
This is just another reason why I am so in love with WordPress. There are so many plug-ins that I really can’t see why anyone would need to spend any money on having a website built for them. There is just about a plug-in for everything imaginable.
Filed under Wordpress by on Jan 9th, 2010. Comment.
Recently I stumbled across a video featuring Matt Cutts from Google speaking at a WordPress event. So I devoted 45 minutes of my time to watch the video. It was well worth it.
The good news is that Google loves WordPress. Matt outlined that there were surprisingly only a few things one needs to do to search engine optimize WordPress. He recommended five plugins that he thought were essential for WordPress. Scarily I only use two of them. The plugins are:
- Akismet
- Cookies for Comments
- Enforce www.preference
- Feedburner Feedsmith
- WP Super Cache
I should qualify that the plugins he outlined above did not include some other plugins that I also consider essential – such as the All-in-One SEO plugin. However, it depends on your point of view. I noticed Matt uses the Thesis theme – a theme that I use on all but one of my websites (this one!). Thesis is already jam-packed with SEO features so using All-In-One SEO is probably less relevant.
The video is quick and fast paced. You need to pause it a few times to fully understand it and sometimes there are bits about Google Tools that he glosses over that I understand but can’t find in Google Tools. Typical though – I don’t really find many of the Google Tools very intuitive to use. In any case, some of the tools he recommended were:
- Webmaster console at google.com/webmasters
- Google Analytics
- Feedburner – its very quick but he gives a quick tip on the best way to use this
- Google Website Optimizer
- Adsense (some tips on how to use within your site)
It is well worth the watch. Depending on your level of experience some things might go over your head but I wouldn’t worry too much – the video is engaging and the fast pace means you will be moving from one thing to another pretty quickly.
Note: I should point out that the link on this post to the Thesis theme that both Matt Cutts and I use is an affiliate link. If you click on the link and purchase the Thesis theme, I will obtain a commission from the sale. I don’t recommend this product lighheartedly – I use this myself and and only recommend products that I believe are worthy of recommending.
Filed under Driving Traffic by on Dec 29th, 2009. Comment.
