Internet Marketing Conferences and the Insider SEO Tricks

For the past few years I have dedicated my life to web design, a few core web applications for clients and internet marketing for those clients. And I must say wow, has the industry changed. It’s amazing to realize, and often sad to say, that basic web design has become a commodity. A commodity to the point where web templates, offshore labor and narrowing specialties has almost put every independent web designer out of business. The big companies don’t want you, the little guys rather buy a template. Which is why as of last year, I had to reinvent my business strategy. On top of that, strictly web design can get old.

But at least one thing is for sure, web marketing specialists will always will be needed. You can’t automate all this change, the new marketing methods that come about, nor can you automate human creativity.  People are trying, but thankfully I think it just leads to more creativity. With all my previous knowledge I have gained great marketing ideas over the past 15 years, but I am amazed out how far one can be left behind. If you don’t keep up, your internet marketing ideas and SEO skills will become outdated and mediocre rather quickly.

Which is why I have dedicated my last 6 months to revamping my knowledge for SEO, SEM and CPC management, and I have been enlightened. So many countless hours into research I have done, that I have decided to publish an internet marketing guidebook. It’s hot and its robust, take a gander on the main SEO Tools page. Anyway,  I love it this stuff, it brings me back to my roots, almost like my college career, from Engineering to Marketing. Amazing how things come full circle. My mom would be proud..

Anyway, just to let you in on a little secret, there are countless INTERNET Expos out there, every week. I should know, I have been to about 8 in the last 4 months. From SEO, CPC, internet marketing, e-metrics, search engine strategies, internet marketing tips and training, e-commerce, to analytics to conversions they’re out there.  All the internet expos were good, but honestly, the most gold nuggets are the ones from the one’s TEACHING internet marketing or many times a Super Affiliate marketer.

You know those guys, the ones that have the never ending marketing page, with tons of  verbiage and marketing terms that often take you into a tailspin from reading it all. Well, as much as I discounted those people, guess who’s making all the money without being a big executive in some outdated marketing agency?  Yep, those guys. Them guys. Yeah, they may seem impersonal, but guess what, you meet those guys at the conferences and they are great. They are smart, interesting, energetic and often very generous. Why? Because they figured out the future in internet marketing business’ models.

The in depth theories is something I will save for a later post, but the overall concept is developing trust, slowly but surely by giving away tid bits for free. Their sheer numbers of email messages come from people’s inability to act quickly and the need to develop trust from such an impersonal medium… the computer. You can always opt out, but you love those nuggets don’t you? You love those deep discounts they give over time right? See, they have figured out human psychology. Pretty wild it is, and I have only scratched the surface.

So if you want to learn from these guys, you can go to all the conferences or spend thousands on training, buy maybe you just want the meat of it, its all boiled down in our internet marketing Dynamic Eguides. Every month more and more data gets put into these great web-based, wireframe manuals. They’re fast, efficient and give you core concepts in a special, fluid hierarchical model. Knowledge from a Tree I like to call it.  The gold nuggets these guys give you is tremendous, and you can spend thousands go around to these conferences, or you can get the streamlined version from the Jump Starter. :0

Okay, enough self promotion, I know. But I am passionate about it. It doesn’t feel like selling to me. Either way, here are some of the conferences I have been to in the past few months and some of the ones you should go to too.

Super Affiliate Marketers

• StomperNet
• IMOG monthly meetings
• World Internet Summit
• Keith Wellman’s Conference
• IMOG quarterly Conference

More Corporate Based

• SMX West & East
• Affliliate Summit
• Search Engine Strategies
• e-metrics
• PPC Summit
• Social Media Conference

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.  I doubt you have the time, money or patience to go to all of these, but I do! I fly for free, and to me its one never ending puzzle, and my brain loves it! Plus the connections I receive are priceless. Until next time, please watch our video to see all about this “Living Eguide” training manual to internet marketing!

Take care.
Sean

Website Selling – Is your website built around Engaging your Visitors?

Sure your probably good at analyzing your website statistics, but have you streamlined, not added, anything about your website because of the results? Just last post we talked about statistics, so while we are on that thread, I found a good video that breaks down web metrics and how it fits into the sales process. Selling on the website is broken down to: One awareness, two traffic, three engaging visitors and four converting visitors. The video is by John Horn, the Directory of Professional Programs at Emory’s Lifelong Learning, so there is no sales pitch at the end. Whew. :0, so give it a whirl if you got time.

Its about an hour long, but about 15 minutes in, it really breaks down these four categories. After years of creating websites, I guarantee many entrepreneurs are like me, creating awareness and “buying” traffic is the easy part. Its creating the critical mass of traffic worthy of your time to Engage that customer, that is the hard part. Engaging is the act of moving them toward buying, by doing things such as answering their questions via live chat or creating more calls to action on the site. A few visitors an hour probably isn’t worth your time unless its a pricey product, because most of them WILL NOT want to chat. And bugging them too early, will send them running faster then they got there. Think about all those crazy popups that occur as soon as you “walk in their” store, UGHH! Come on are they serious?? I hate that.

One of the bottom lines that the video advocates is remembering that typically HALF of your visitors view just one page! So keep that in mind when building your website. This fact probably started the Web 2.0 trend  of now keeping it simple, one quick diagram and a selling point on the front page, showing what NEED or DESIRE you fulfill within 5 seconds. Yes, content gives you traffic, but too much content, also will confuse the reader and prevent them from making a decision. So I would recommend a startegy cornered around “hiding” a lot of that extraneous content that is not required in deeper areas.

In other words, move Majority of links to the bottom of the page in a series of vertical rows, or something distinguishingly differnt from the top menu. Many Web 2.0 sites use this structure, while keeping 3 or 4 key links at the top, often creating a very desireable clean and uncluttered look.

All those extra or non-critical pages are helpful and should be created, but often hard to obfuscate without making them hard to find. Those link banks are often good for all those content pages you use to capture eyeballs from Search Engines. If you create those portal pages on your own or use our JumpWriter auto page builder to build them, keep in mind that you MUST tie in those SE “content pages” to your original website using outlinks. In other words, links to many of these pages must come from the original site, not just the reverse where “content pages”  ONLY link TO the main site. That can be considered a “doorway page” and can give you Search Engine demerits.

Happy Engaging!

A few visitors an hour probably isn’t worth your time unless its a pricey product, because many of them WILL NOT want to chat.

Live Website Statistics and Tracking on Steriods

Blvdstats.com has a nice new spin on statistical tracking. I am no expert on website statistics, but I think these guys have a winner when it comes to deep website statistics and REAL-TIME analytics while successfully linking it to existing marketing campaigns.  Every time I get a webstats program, it seems like I have to spend forever on the millions of pages before getting what I really want out of it.

So many stats programs put things in huge lists and nice bar charts, but sometimes its just hard to find your bottom line from those programs. That’s where the their main viewing dashboard does a great job by giving you 6 key statistics at your fingertips. From the top 5 most important stats, conversions and referrers, the dashboard shows your top 10 vistors immediately. Hit the “In Depth” link and it goes to work cranking out detailed data. The key here is taking typical stats and matching them to conversions, so you know where your time and money are best spent. It makes it very easy to see what campaign sparked a referering website by using icons in the column to flag particular campaings.

Another feature I have never seen is RSS stats, it shows you the number of subscribers from RSS feeds and some more statistics.  They have Digg tracking too a huge plus.

Of course they have all the typical stats like foot traffic by the hour, how people left your site, and the main keywords used to find your site. But sometimes we don’t want to wait until after midnight to see our DAYS statistics. Plus once you review website statistics, who has time to figure out which marketing campaign they came from? Yes there are products out there that do it, but I bet blvdstats.com’s price comes out lower than the competition. Enough said.

Please let me know if there are similar products out there, haven’t been shopping for this stuff in a while.

Hello world and SEM Business Launch

I love these Hello World scripts and 1st to try terms. Okay, its official, I am saying Hello World I am here. Well, I have been here for 38 years, but I have finally put my thoughts into the mix with a blog. After 15 years of web development and SEM at my firm Weblogix, I have realized what is missing in the SEO industry. I would like to call it, Broad Scope SEM, for those of us who don’t have time to get our hands dirty every minute of our day with endless tweets, diggs, and HTML tweaks. This will be for you, the SEM Generalist, and not so much for the SEO Specialist.

This is my shot at clarifying what seems to be so nebulous out there for internet marketer beginners. IF your a SEO specialist, you will find this boring, or will realize these ideas are tools are great for helping your clients understand the big picture. SEM is confusing, its about time someone put a framework to it for do-it-yourself SEO people and SEM managers, who are need a bigger picture and a few impactful SEO tools.  Now’s the time to take a gander, please see the Broad Scope SEM brainchild, The JumpStarter.