Category Archives: Marketing

C’mon, get your PPC campaign right.

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I’ve had discussions with dozens of different people about their PPC campaigns, and almost everyone tells me that it “just doesn’t work”. That’s because you’re doing it wrong, not because it’s a bad place to advertise. PPC is valuable – probably more so than any other form of advertising you could do. Why? Because you can track it.

I’m not talking to those of you out there that have PPC down to a science. You don’t need to read this. This is for the casual business owner, who thought it’d be a good idea to advertise on Google or Facebook. Five figures later, you have a sour taste in your mouth and you don’t think it worked. The problem wasn’t the ads. It was how you managed them.

If you’re new to PPC, you might get some value out of this as well, so read on.

There are three things you absolutely need to do in order to be successful at PPC:

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How to Build and Drive Website Traffic

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Probably the single biggest question about building websites I get is how to drive traffic. I’m not saying it’s the most important part, but it’s definitely key. Content is king, sure, but if you don’t have traffic, you could be pouring your heart out to a wall. Really what every website wants is quality, converting, long-lasting traffic in high volumes.

There are essentially four ways to drive to your website, which are: search engines, direct traffic, referral links, and your ‘list’. I’m going to teach you how each of those things work on an intermediate level and what their value is compared to the others. I’ll be covering some of the more detailed finer points of these traffic sources in the future. This is basically a primer for what is to come.

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Affiliate Summit East 2010

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I went to Affiliate Summit West 2009 and loved it, so it was time to go again. I scored a pass from John Chow, but quickly realized I had an extra, so I ended up giving it to a buddy of mine who doesn’t even own a computer. I was apprehensive, but I knew everyone was nice and would accept him even though he’s a techno-turtle.

Friday

As many of you know, I live in Vermont, so the Hilton in NYC is about a 5.5 hour drive. I left with Charles from Perfectly Grand because I convinced him to go and check out this “affiliate thing”. We left Vermont around 2PM and ended up reaching New York City around 7:30.

Saturday

The Audience Conference was amazing. The small feel of the whole thing made it really easy to approach the big kids in the industry and start a conversation. Talking with people like Jason Calacanis or Chris Brogan was really great. It’s an awesome feeling when Jason can pick me out of a group and ask what I do. Brogan did a great speech. I think he was funnier than some of the comedians. Great job Chris. We all really owe Loren Feldman a standing ovation.

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Facebook Reveals Suggested Interests and Why You Should Care

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On Facebook, you can see what pages your friends view now, but they have taken it one step further.  Now you can view the pages that people of a similar demographic like.  It will be interesting to see how users figure out how to game this system to get massive coverage.  If you’re involved at all with Internet Marketing, this should be on your radar.

They have an algorithm for figuring out the relevancy of the suggestions, not unlike how other demographic and interest comparison sites work, like: Pandora, Netflix, or Digg.  I think a great addition to the like system would be a rating system, for two reasons.  Your interests could be weighted, and the relevancy and quality of a page based on user input can be used in the algorithm.

For now, suggestions can’t be sponsored, but I can see that as a future revenue stream for them if this takes off.  They will also only show pages that are receiving high levels of engagement from its users.  This seems a lot like the Twitter suggested user list, but that could just be me.  They had trouble, and I suspect Facebook will face some of the same problems as this goes live.

What do you think about the new feature?

Be lazy naming your next info product.

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If you need help naming your next info product, check this out:

www.infoproductnamer.com

Basically it’s to help you be lazy.  You can create your next info product name easily.  If you don’t even know what you want your info product to be, it can help you with that too.  It comes preloaded with many different niches for you to try out, or you can enter your own.  All of this value completely free!

The product is currently in beta and accepting feature requests.

What do you think about it?