An often dismissed way of advertising online is by using a Safelist. It’s named that because you have to agree not to report the flood of emails you get as spam… So the emails
you’re agreeing to use is therefore “Safe” from spam accusations, no matter how many come in each day. I normally get a few hundred emails daily just from the three accounts I mention below… Way more than I or anyone else is planning to read through.
Safelist’s major problem, which everyone agrees is substantial, is that no one really reads these emails. Conversion rates (people actually clicking a link in one of the emails) are down in the toilet around 0.0001%.
So why do we still use these things? Sheer bulk. If you can write (or borrow) a catchy headline that could get your email opened by someone who just skims headlines alone, then even new free members can send out their solo ad to a massive enough list to get some form of response. It’s very much like having your own list, although it would be the equivalent of having a list that people didn’t have to opt-in to, because so few will read it.
Like Traffic Bars and Exchanges, this tactic excels in the IM2IM niche because everyone else who subscribes to a safelist is an Internet Marketer too. The three biggest & best Safelists I’ve found for general use are:
They are more responsive than most large lists, and also let you build credits by clicking on links inside certain emails. However, if you really want to get serious about this and investigate Safelists in depth, check out Traffic Hoopla’s directory of safelists.
Since so many people are afraid of the tech curve involved with safelists, I took the liberty of making a very detailed film to show you just how to set up and use safelists effectively, while keeping it all free:
How to Advertise for Free with SafelistsSearch Engine Optimization is big business. The number of companies out there providing SEO services is quite staggering, and it’s growing every day. Does that mean it’s too difficult to do all by yourself?
Not at all. It’s very involved, and it will take a little time and ongoing effort, but it’s not rocket science, and you can even do everything you need to organically Rank #1 in all major search engines by yourself, all for free.
When I opened my SEO Services business in 2004 I only had experience working with my own websites before that point, and I learned VERY quickly one last, very important thing about SEO… It’s personal.
If you pay a big company to optimize your website for you, as opposed to you learning how and doing the optimization yourself, then you’ll never be able to rank as highly. Another company cannot have the very discreet knowledge of your businesses’ keywords and market that you had to learn the hard way.
You can’t just write some keywords down on a list and give it to them, either. You have to be the one continually choosing your website’s keywords and putting them in your site where you see fit. Any other method will either make your site be someone else’s work, not matching your industry, or simply ineffective. (Usually all three.)
The good news is that you taking on the role of SEOer of your own site means that you won’t have to pay a penny for SEO services at all. As my ratings suggest, it’s not a very quick way to bring in traffic, but scoring very highly for your keywords in the Google, Yahoo!, and MSN search engine ranking pages (SERPs) is an incredibly effective way of bringing in traffic. Possibly the best of all ways, because it is the highest possible quality, and if you can dominate enough keywords for your niche, the highest possible quantity as well!
On- site Search Engine Optimization breaks down into 5 categories.We won’t be including link building in with these five, but it is a very important ongoing method you must follow up with... There are many entries throughout this Encyclopedia on that subject.
People who don’t understand SEO just aren’t aware that it’s all about the Keywords. Choose the right ones, and all of the ones, for your niche, and then use them everywhere you can on your site. That’s really all there is to SEO, but there are infinite variations to the process. Let’s hit the major areas by category.
Choosing the Right keywords to target your intended audience with is more than vital, it’s the whole ball game. The best way to do this is by using a large-scale keyword generation software & services such as Wordtracker or Keyword Elite.
However, if you take the time to do it right, you can find all the same keywords yourself, albeit more slowly, by using an excellent free web-based tool offered by Digital Point Solutions, simply called the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. It actually queries both Yahoo’s (Overture) data as well as Google’s AdWords keyword data, for each and every keyword search you run. Better yet, it let’s you drill down to be as specific as you want.
The only thing this doesn’t tell you is how much people are willing to pay for each term in PPC engines like AdWords and Y!SM. This is valuable data I suggest you use for in-depth campaigns, especially for AdSense Publishers, however at this point it’s not necessary. SEOing your website is strictly the art of choosing the MOST RELEVANT keywords to your desired audience. All else needs to be forgotten at this stage.
Build up as big a list as possible, keeping all keywords on your list relevant. I suggest using a spreadsheet like MS-Excel to store them, so you can sort them by demand as well.
The way you get lots of people to your site is by choosing the highest-demand keywords on that list and using them in your site often. After you’ve built your whole list, sort by demand, and use those with the biggest numbers the most across your website.
It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but you can easily see the pattern here. For those perfectionists out there, I’ve perfected the process instructions on my old SEO website:
http://www.internetoptimization.net/keyword_services.htmlThis term refers to the number of times you use your keywords throughout a page or a site. If you had a 200 word page that you’re trying to optimize for the word “peanut butter,” but only said this phrase once throughout the whole page, you’re not letting Googlebot and it’s spider pals know what you’re talking about at all…
Alternatively, if 50 of those 200 words (25%) are the keywords themselves, then you’re really going to be spamming the search engines, as Googlebot will see right through what you’re trying to do and penalize you for it. Even worse, people reading such copy would think that you’re not even a native speaker of your language, and leave the page immediately!
The best course of action would be to aim between 0.5% and 5% of the content on a page. Any more would sound artificial; any less would be too vague. The trick is to never let it influence your copy’s effectiveness.
This doesn’t take into account the other places you can put your keywords, such as the name of the page, the title, in HTML comment tags, as names for the photos it links to, and of course in the Meta Tags in your HTML code. They’re all wide-open for you to shove your keywords into as well, and SE Spiders like Googlebot read them too.
The most important place on a web page to put your keywords, beside the Title on the page, is in your page’s META tags. In your html page codes’ heading section, they look like this:
<meta name="description" content="A description of your website here."> <meta name="keywords" content="Your five, best keyword, phrases here, separated, by commas">
<meta name="author" content="Your name here">
<meta http-equiv="title" content="Page title repeated here"> <meta name="copyright" content="Your copyright info here">
A major mistake most web authors do is to make their META tag block once, and then just post the same block on every page of their site. Each page on your site should be targeted individually, and contain the keywords from the meta tags in the body copy as well.
To put it another way, your page on Peanut Butter Cookies must have that keyword phrase on it, in the Meta Tag as well as the content, and not the same 5 keywords on your main Peanut Butter web site home page… Remember, Google and the other big SEs judge each page one by one for for their results, not whole websites.
The Flow of a website in SEO terms refers to the order in which a Search Engine Spider like Googlebot will read a site and even page while indexing. (In sales websites, there is another “Flow” process, which is totally separate from this one.)
To optimize your website for the search engines, you have to try to read the website code in the same order that a spider does, not just how it appears to humans. There are many variables to this, including instructions for the spiders in your Robots.txt file, inside the META “Index” tag, the order of which your links appear on a web page, the order of all links in your sitemap file, and even the order that the content occurs within the html code. Collectively, we call all of these “Spider guiders.”
What this mini-science comes down to is the fact that you must show the search engines exactly what you want to be highly ranked for, and hide as much else as possible from them. The most important tool in this arsenal is a Sitemap file…
Both Google and Yahoo! let you write a “map” of your website and submit it to them, so their spiders will know in advance exactly what to go index and how often. This has nothing to do with your website’s “Sitemap” page, those are for a human being’s eyes, although technically those make it a little easier on the spiders as well.
Google’s spider map is commonly a file named “sitemap.xml” that must be placed on the main web directory of your server host. Google demands that it be written in the XML language, which looks a lot like HTML except for a few other commands. Don’t worry, you won’t have to write a single line of code for this. There’s an excellent free tool coming up in a minute to write these for you.
Once you’ve got your file written, you’ve got to tell Google that it’s there, so you can get Googlebot to come out and spider your website as soon as possible. Without doing this, you have no control at all when your website will be first indexed.
Where do you do this? Simply log into your Google account, (the same account for Gmail, Analytics, AdWords, AdSense, or any other of Google’s services) and click on “My Account,” then “Webmaster Tools.” From that page you’ll be able to add websites and watch their progress.
Yahoo!’s Sitemap is different. It’s just a Text file (.TXT) that is nothing but a list of URLs on your domain. If you list an URL there, it will index that page. If not, it won’t. I love the simplicity of their method. They call it a “Feed” however, and you have to submit that too.
Simply go to the main page of Yahoo.com, click at the bottom where it says “Suggest a Site.” Choose the top option of “Suggest a Site for free,” and the page will then take you to an account login screen if you’re not already logged in. Do so, and then the next screen will be a website URL suggestion form. The account “Feed” it is looking for is the Urllist.txt file that you have to make. It can be added there at the end of the URL to your website in their form, and Yahoo! will start spidering your site immediately as well.
So where do you get your Sitemap.xml and Urllist.txt files made? There are hundreds of places online that offer the service of writing these files for you. Until recently, all the free versions were very limited, only allowing 50 to100 links on your site, or not allowing certain time variables. Lately there’s been an addition that has no such limits, making all the rest of these obsolete:
http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.aspClick on the ‘webmaster tool’ box on this page and it will open up a Java application. (Yes, you need free Sun Java installed first.) Play with this app until you feel like you’ve included everything on your site that you want Google and Yahoo! to see, and hidden away everything else. It can then output the sitemap.xml and urllist.txt files for you, all for free.
Upload those to the main folder of your server host and tell Big G and Y! where they are as fast as you can.All the rest of SEOing your website has to do with link building, but there are some other details that can help as well. I also recommend a great program called WebCEO that helps automate all of this work from one suite of tools, and they even have a free version as well. It even gives you reports of work left to do and campaign effectiveness.
Digg, Technorati, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Fark, Furl, even Netscape. Web 2.0’s largest trend has created over 1,000 of this new breed of “Tagged News sites.” On them we mere humans share our online bookmarks with each other, and on the latest incarnations, we vote them up and down against each others to point out which ones are the most interesting or useful.
These tools are great, and their power is staggering at times… But all they do is essentially just use humans to duplicate Google’s work to the same end! Why would we go through such trouble? Because computer algorithms still just don’t “know” their resources the way humans do. Having another person select a website and “tag” it as relevant to your keyword is much more intuitive for us to find resources with. It has its problems too, mainly when combining keywords, but overall it’s becoming an extremely popular way for people to find other websites.
This of course means that you, too, need to be Tagging your website in many Social Bookmarking tools for others to find.Essentially the way these things work is that you set up an account with each of the ones you want to use and “Tag” any website or blog entry instead of bookmarking it the traditional way. Those tags could be kept just for personal use (Who in their right mind would want to do that…?) but as a default they are shared on that bookmarking website for others who search for the term you tagged it with.
With most Social Bookmarking tools, such as Del.icio.us, (we call this group the “Taggers”) the websites that have been tagged the most for a certain keyword come up the highest on the list when that keyword is searched. It’s actually a very simple & elegant system.
The newer breed of SB tools, such as Digg.com, uses an additional Voting capacity for people simply viewing the index page to vote up or down any news items they want to. (Naturally, these are referred to as the “Voters.”)
From a marketing standpoint, however, this can all be chaotic! First of all there are simply too many of these sites… Submitting to Google and Yahoo! is one thing, but could you imagine opening an account in all 1000 of these things and hitting the “tag” button for all of them? How about providing a review in each of them?
Second, people still go to google.com to search unless you make it easier for them to search a Tag elsewhere. It’s still not quite worth our time.Finally, the problem it has with multiple keywords (Search engines handle keyword phrases as a single query… Bookmarking sites handle each word as a query and add them together) leaves a lot up to interpretation. The end result is that you need to be supplying even MORE keywords to a bookmarking site than you would to a search engine.
One thing you’ve got working for you is that you really don’t need to submit to them all. (Whew!) Once you choose some good keywords for your article (Remember, we use bookmarking tools per article or blog posting, not per whole website) you simply need to post it in the best bookmarking tool sites for your niche topic.
For example, in the Internet Marketing world, the best one is PlugIM (www.plugim.com) which will only accept internet marketing-related posts. That isn’t to say that I should be submitting my articles to Digg.com too, because Digg has a marketing subsection… But I’d never submit it to a social bookmarking site like Newsvine, for instance, because they are only interested in the most newsworthy news stories, like what President Bush is doing to make a fool of himself this week.
So, once you start exploring the SB tools for your niche market, you’ll quickly learn the best ones for you and use the same ones over and over again forever.Surely, you ask, someone has tried to automate the process… Perhaps another submission software?
But of course! You didn’t think I’d forget to tell you the shortcut on this one, did you?
Well you’re in luck, because there are THREE shortcuts for Social Bookmark Marketing, and two of them are free!
The first is not a submitter at all, but it helps webmasters (and of course blog owners) get their content submitted by others much easier. It’s called the Socializer, and it’s basically just a page that is updated for you with all of the most well-known SB tools on it. It even passes the title and URL information through for you… But it’s not something you can use to do mass submissions with yourself.
The second tool is quite frankly awesome for a free product. I can think of no reason everyone shouldn’t be using this tool daily. (Even those who pay for the third tool!) It is a service called OnlyWire that keeps your account information and passes your submission to NINETEEN different SB tools with one single submission. That’s 19 links to your site or blog for every time you use it, all for free. (Quite possibly the best free marketing tool online!)
OnlyWire’s only downfall is that it doesn’t appear to work with Voter sites, discluding Digg, Reddit, and many of my favorites… But it does have a few big names on it such as Del.icio.us. Perhaps in the future they’ll find a way to add a lot more sites and then shoehorn the Voters in too.
Also, keep an eye on OnlyWire in the future; I expect great things from it. Think of the power it would have if it manages to talk all social bookmarking tools into cooperating… I guess only time will tell.
So how about for the really aggressive Social Bookmark submitters out there? You didn’t think I’d leave you out, did you? Web2Submitter was designed just for you. In very much the same fashion that you use Article Submitter and Directory submitter, Web2Submitter lets you submit your posting to all of the Social Bookmark tools out there as automated as can be. For the small price you have to pay for it, this is easily one of the few tools out there that has a cost to performance ratio in the top 1% of anything you can do online!
There is a great film walking you through the whole usage of Web2Submitter on that page, so go check it out if for no other reason than just to learn what a wellexecuted Social Bookmarking Marketing campaign looks like.
Quite seriously, just using this tool for an hour on one blog posting can result in
Quite seriously, just using this tool for an hour on one blog posting can result in 5 day increase of traffic that you couldn’t afford to pay for otherwise… Even if you took out a new mortgage on your house!
So in summation, Social Bookmarking is quite possibly the very best thing you can be doing to market your website online. Certainly there will be exceptions, and it works much better for Blogs that have frequent postings than it could for a static website. Even still, it’s a free source of traffic that has been known on many occasions to send blog & website owners even more traffic than Google ever could on its’ best day… So the bottom line is that Social Bookmarking should be one of the top sources, if not the primary source of traffic you use for your free advertising campaign.
Any Internet Marketers not Squidooing right now simply haven’t tried it yet! This exciting Web 2.0 application is truly a Business Marketer’s dream come true. You can think of it as MySpace, but for serious professionals. It’s a lot like being given editorship of your own topic at About.com, but with even more functionality!
A lens is a web page on their domain that “brings into focus” your niche topic in a new and dynamic way. It’s a place for you to show off everything you know about your topic, as dynamically as possible.
Started in the Fall of 2005, within one year flat Squidoo had already gotten itself into the top 1000 sites according to Alexa, and it’s been pretty steady ever since, slowly growing. (It’s #601 today, still steadily growing.)
I believe a lot more Internet Marketers would use this service if they only knew about it. I’ve even witnessed many Squidoo pages pop up in the #1 spot at Google for that lensmasters’ keywords!
They’ve now got about 180,000+ lenses, although considerably fewer members… A few people have cranked out many lenses on all of their favorite topics, so there’s no reason you can crank out one for each of your business ventures or marketing ideas.
To attempt to get your lens featured, simply use good Tags on your page, and then email their review team once it’s done and they’ll consider making it the “lens of the day.” These get some serious traffic, but of course they won’t select a lens that appears to be blatant advertising or boring.
One other great feature to note is they share all advertising revenue with you for advertising on your page! Some people are making lenses to use as Virtual Real Estate style publishing sites… Theoretically, you could make a few hundred great lenses and live comfortably off the income forever. Many are trying to do just that.
For our purposes, however, the benefit of using lenses for marketing our other websites is clearly the main reason to get involved. The branding you create and the nearly automatic stream of traffic will be well worth the time.
And did I mention that they are a cinch to put together? You could literally start and finish one in 10 minutes. Of course, the more work you put into them the better they’ll perform, just like everything else in life.
So how do you get involved with Squidoo the fastest? Here’s a free download from Bob the Teacher called “How do you do, Squidoo?” that will show you all the best ways to use Squidoo for marketing. It’s a very valuable resource if you’re even thinking about creating a lens, and it’s totally free with no opt-in required.
Joel Comm once let Bob the Teacher tweak his brand new Squidoo lens with no page rank and within two days it went from around #168,000 (dead last at the time) all the way up inside the top 100 in all categories! Bob’s personally had the #1 ranked Lens himself, and has also taught many “LensMasters” to achieve that great honor too… The man knows his lenses. And you should too if you could use some free, quality advertising.