Internet Marketing, unsurprisingly enough, is the
…marketing of products and services over the internet
according to Wikipedia. But while it’s a relatively new phenomenon by this definition, limited by the amount of time the internet has been in existance, in fact its roots go back a lot further than that. Internet marketing is really just an evolution of Mail Order / Direct Marketing, which has been around for well over a hundred years.
Image courtesy of Heart for Japan
Continue reading ‘Internet Marketing: is it for you?’
I remember being intrigued when I first heard Darren Rowse was planning on releasing a book, not because he was releasing a book, but because of the way he was releasing it. So many other bloggers / internet marketers would have slapped together an ebook, instructional dvd or subscription course, and in the process probably charged a heck of a lot more than the $20-odd this book goes for. To me, the fact that Darren chose traditional book format spells one thing: c-r-e-d-i-b-i-l-i-t-y.
OK, so the sub-title - Secrets for Blogging your way to a Six-figure Income - is a little cheesy, but I guess it’s perfectly in keeping with writing a “good” title for a blog post, so I’ll be generous and say it fits the style.
Continue reading ‘Book review: Problogger - Secrets for Blogging your way to a Six-figure Income’
You may have noticed I’ve been running a little competition lately, to win one of two £30 Google AdWords vouchers. Well, the closing date was supposed to be yesterday 20 September 2008, but I just noticed that I wrote 20 October 2008 by mistake!
Competition update
Also, no-one has entered the competition! Now, this may be partly because of me putting the wrong date on it, but also the post has not received all that much traffic, so perhaps not enough people have heard about it, and those that have have not been from the UK (unfortunately the vouchers can only be used in the UK or Ireland).
Anyway, for those reasons, I’ve decided to extend the closing date by another week until Saturday 27 September 2008 at 09:00 Central European Time. So please alert anyone you know who might benefit from a free AdWords voucher to get them started with pay per click advertising, and get them to enter!
Continue reading ‘AdWords competition update’
In the last 24 hours, I’ve had two seperate phishing emails, pointing to dummy banking sites, as they do. Both had set up shop, so to speak, by commandering someone else’s site and setting up their replica pages in a deeply nested sub-directory - exactly like the parasites they are! Presumably, the site owners did not even realise there was anything afoot.
This prompted me to wonder how the perpetrators had gained access, and how secure my own sites are. So I did a bit of research, specifically in the area of securing WordPress (although many of the principles apply to other kinds of site too)…
Continue reading ‘How secure is your site?’
Links back to your site (or backlinks as they are commonly called) are a critical determining factor for the amount of traffic you will receive. But not all links carry the same weight - some are definitely more valuable, and thus more desirable than others. As is often the case, the most valuable links are also often the most difficult to procure…but that doesn’t mean the lesser types do not have their part to play.
Continue reading ‘All backlinks are created equal…not!’
I’ve recently managed to get my grubby paws on a couple of Google AdWords vouchers which I’ve decided to give away to my readers. But I only have two, so I thought the fairest way of doing this is to make it into a competition; to enter all you have to do is:
- link to one of the posts on this blog from your site, and
- notify me via the contact form on my about me page
The closing date for entries is Saturday 20 October 2008 Saturday 27 September 2008 at 09:00 Central European Time, after which I’ll select the two best entries, notify the winners, and put up a post to announce who they are.
Continue reading ‘Competition: win a £30 AdWords voucher’
Blogging is at least as much about building your network of relationships as it is about producing great content. Of course quality content is a necessity - without it no amount of marketing will get you very far. But it’s not sufficient by itself, not when there are literally hundreds or thousands of other blogs competing for the same audience as you.
Image courtesy of pshutterbug
Now, one of the most common techniques for gaining exposure and building traffic is commenting on other blogs. Nothing new there - you’ve probably heard the same advice plenty of times already. But today I’d like to examine this in a little more detail, to maximise the benefits to you and your blog.
Continue reading ‘Strategic commenting’
Despite all best intentions, broken links are a fact of life on any website that’s been going for longer than a few months. Even if you rigorously follow the advice I gave a few days ago about redirecting urls, you can only control your own urls this way. But what about all those external pages you point to in your posts? If one of those sites closes down, or is less conscientious about maintaining the integrity of their site, broken links appear on your site!
Now, there is no shortage of link checkers on the internet, but for all you WordPress-ers, there’s an easier way - the broken link checker plugin. I recently installed and ran it on one of the sites I look after, and it came up with a list of more than 20 broken links - I had no idea!
Continue reading ‘Easiest way to manage broken links’
This morning I was checking out my stats in Google Analytics, and noticed that I’ve been getting a little traffic coming from StumbleUpon. Great stuff! But I wanted to know which article(s) were generating the buzz; unfortunately I had no idea how to find out. I tried the obvious: I tried searching StumbeUpon itself for my domain name, but that didn’t get me anywhere.
Now, I do happen to know how to find a specific page in Stumbleupon: simply navigate to http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/ and append the url of the page you’re looking for (thanks to Terence Chang for the tip). This can be quite a handy way of finding out who submitted your article, what they said about it, what category it was put in, etc. But still, the thought of repeating this for each of my posts to try and find which one(s) had been stumbled didn’t fill me with great excitement. So I decided to try to find the answer elsewhere.
Continue reading ‘Where’s the StumbleUpon buzz on your site?’
So you’ve started your blog for whatever reason. You may have been going for awhile, or only started recently. Either way, have you considered your exit strategy?
It may sound like a strange thing to think about if you’ve only just begun blogging; chances are you’re far more concerned about where your next hit is going to come from (for your site, I mean 
). But the fact is, most of us are not going to be blogging until the day we die, so what are the choices for a graceful exit?
Continue reading ‘What’s your blogging exit strategy?’
