Seasoned Marketer

Have you ever published a post in WordPress and then viewed the post only to find there was a typo or some other problem?  I’ve done this all too many times.  Not a problem, right?  Just go in and edit the post and hit “Update”.  Problem solved, eh?  Well, not exactly. And for several reasons.

The most significant reason to make sure your blog post is accurate before hitting publish is that the search engines instantly pick up your content via your RSS Feed.  The search engines then quickly index your first publish.  Even if you go back and update your post (which obviously you should do), your feed still doesn’t update the search engine results.  The damage has already been done.  And things like Google will publish your typos and errors for the world to see.

That’s why it’s so important to thoroughly read your post from top to bottom BEFORE you hit the publish button in WordPress.  Maybe even re-read it twice.  Before publishing, I’d preview it to make sure it was formatted and typed the way you want it to be BEFORE hitting the publish button for the first time.

Also if you have a readership, then they’ll all get to see the mistake.  And trying to change that in WordPress is NOT easy.  I tried several things, republished the feed, deleted the post entirely and re-entered it (a really bad idea), I actually had to go into the MySQL Database and manually delete the post (but by then the damage was already done.).  Hopefully people will be understanding, but it’s just not all professional.

In the past, I’ve been guilty of creating a post and haphazardly hitting the Publish button and then just correcting it later.  But recently I wrote a post that contained a significant typo that changed the entire context of the blog post.  And even though I updated it, Google and my feed readers had already indexed the old post and it was just plain embarrassing.

I certainly don’t consider myself a great writer, but to put out content that isn’t even what I intended due to a typo is easily correctable before you ever publish.  And those errors really shouldn’t ever happen if one is careful enough.

In short, take the time to proof read your blog post BEFORE hitting the Publish button, even if you are in a hurry.  And don’t just rely on the spell-checker (which is what I tend to do).

Re-reading your post is easy to do and just makes sense, in particular because the software isn’t all that forgiving.

I read this article on Yahoo today, it was one of the headlines / featured stories for the day and it was about a book written about Gandhi with implications that he might be bi-sexual.  Oooh – scandalous right?  According to the article, the book got good reviews, but some European press went a step further and speculated as to what the author was suggesting.

The marketing thing is that it makes for good headlines and gets attention.  And that’s the whole point of launch marketing.  I can only imagine how many people will now buy that book because of the hype.  And whoever the book’s publisher is or their PR firm, they did their job, if it was planned.  And even if it was all an accident (highly doubtful), then as long as the author is sincere, it doesn’t even seem to matter.  Of course, the author is saying that’s not even in the book and is moving away from that angle, which only seems to spin off a side story.

That right there is the entire process of press releases and launch marketing in a nutshell.  Modeling that process and being able to replicate that process would be worth pondering.

Beyond that however, the amazing thing is the habits and patterns that people fall into for even figuring out what news is.  What is your home page set to?  What’s the agenda for that company?  What news do you follow?  What articles do you read?  Do you do that daily?  Habitually?  Why?

Search engines, new sites, news papers, they all have a bias.  And their job is to shape and distort things to their liking.  They are deliberately showing you what they want to.  Either what they think you want to see or what they think will get the most responses / clicks.  That’s their job.

I’d imagine our job as a consumer and creator of that information is to be eternally vigilant in terms of your self and perception of the world.  In one regard, the Internet has been a wonderful creation.  And in yet another regard, it seems to have further fractured people and community away from consensual reality.

As a society in an informational age, we’ve become quite addicted to that information.  I refer it to as living in ‘informational trances’.  That’s why pattern interrupts are so effective as a headline attention getting mechanism.  And it doesn’t even matter if Gandhi preferred men too.  Just the mere suggestion is enough to get attention these days.

Hi – Spring has sprung here and the weather is finally getting warmer after a colder and snowier winter than usual and you’ve reached the Seasoned Marketer.  My name is Robert and I have been doing online marketing for about 9 years now or about 36 seasons which ever comes first.  And in that time I have learned quite a bit about marketing on the internet ranging anywhere from getting traffic to your site to increasing conversions for ecommerce sites and every where in between.  I’ve also made a number of sites that have generated a significant amount of money over the years.

So in this blog, we’ll be covering interesting things about internet marketing and it’s related components.

There is a lot to talk about and we’d recommend you subscribe to this feed by adding the feed to your RSS Reader.  If time allows, I might even add a newsletter, but I’ll be honest, I am extremely busy these days and adding a newsletter will be a luxury if I can get to it.

Feel free to leave meaningful comments or questions and I’ll see if I can give you a worthwhile answer.

Thanks and enjoy this site!

Robert Sigler

At the end of each year or at the beginning of the new year, it’s a good idea to sit down and take a couple hours or even a couple days and map out what you want to accomplish for the new year. 

What’s worked well and what didn’t work from last year?  In this case, we are going to focus on your website and internet marketing endeavors.  So here’s a few things to keep in mind that might help your business do even better online for 2011:

1. Review your end of year Analytics data.  Assuming you are using something like Google Analytics to collect data about things like keywords, traffic, content, bounce rates, etc. (and if you are aren’t then that’s your first priority for the new year). Change the time frame on your Analytics data to look at the entire last year.  And look for peaks and dips.  Checkout your bounce rate.  Which pages were the most visited?  Which sites sent you the most traffic?  When was your best month?

   Reviewing your data can give you ideas on how to improve areas / pages on your site that need work so you’ll be better prepared for 2011.

2. Re-assess the goals for your website and business.  Depending on your overall success of your site last year, you might have to make some changes or improve some things. Setting goals, like I want to add 25 more pages by the spring can help you stay on track.  And then take a moment and really be honest and assess which areas need work in your business.  And then make those a priority. 

   Come up with an action plan and specific steps you can take to make your business online better.   

3. Get better organized for 2011 – One of the biggest changes I did in 2010 was I got better organized.  I started using Microsoft’s OneNote and it’s been unbelievably helpful. Another tool is an online calendar program (like Google Calendar) that you can use to help you create time frames for projects and reminders about certain products. 

   How well is your email inbox setup?  Do you need more specific folders?  Or maybe even less folders? Take a moment to look at your email processes.  Do you spend too much time being interrupted by email when your working?  If so, change it.  

4. Improve your connections with your customers – How’s your newsletter doing?  Do you even have a newsletter?  Are you gathering potential customers email addresses?  Is there a way you can do that better?How’s your facebook and twitter pages?  Do you even have a business page for facebook?  Did having a twitter account even help your business or was it another distraction?

   How often are keeping in touch with your former customers?  Often times they are your best customers for new products and / or word of mouth marketing.

   If you’re not doing email marketing or any form of social marketing or you’re not giving it enough attention, then make a plan to do more of that.  The web seems to be heading more and more into the social world. 

5. Take a look at your internet marketing methods for the last year.  Were you using PPC? Do you have a mobile marketing campaign?  Are you tracking your positioning for keywords in the search engines?  Are there other areas that you can expand to, like video marketing?  If you have a brick and mortar, are you on Google Maps?

The key to long term success is learning from the past by creating honest assessments of where you are right now and by measuring your progress.  Then using those to help create a strategic plan for accomplishing the major goals for your business moving forward.   

There is so much information out there, that’s it’s easy to get side tracked.  But taking the time to create a overall plan of what you want to do over the next year and then taking action to achieve those goals can truly help.  And the more specific you can get with your action steps, the better.

Good luck in the new year!

Ever since WordPress has included that ‘automatic upgrade’ option (which I really like, btw), some web hosts like Godaddy sometimes don’t handle those updates too well.  How do I know?  Cause I have several sites with godaddy and have gotten the “this site is undergoing maintenance error all too frequently with my sites.  It kinda makes me feel a bit nervous pressing that automatic upgrade.

However, recovering from that error is actually a simple thing to fix.  You have to use a program like Filezilla (free FTP program), login into your account via FTP and remove the maintenance file.  That will get your site back up and running.  But it won’t upgrade your site to the latest version, it’s more of a revert back to something that at least works.  However, wordpress has a frequent number of ‘security’ issues and updates.

So my solution?  I use bluehost for many of my sites and have never had a problem when pressing the automtic update button in my blogs on bluehost.  So you could switch web hosting providers.  I use a variety of them for various sites.

I have noticed that if you manually installed your blog via FTP, then the updates usually worked.  But if you used the auto installer that Godaddy has, then it seems hit or miss with each WordPress security upgrade.

But if you want to stick with Godaddy, then the best way to update your blog is to login to your Godaddy web hosting account (not your blog).  But your main Godaddy account.  And then click on webhosting and launch the control panel.  From there goto the applications.  And there should be an update option.  Just follow the directions and update your WordPress blog from within the Godaddy applications section.

And lastly, I would make sure that your username wasn’t admin.  That seems to be a target for ‘hackers’.  Try using a real first name instead.  Hope this helps and good luck.

I just opened a brand new course I have been working on for several months now, called Make Money Online Rules.  And inside this course I teach 11 different ways to Make Money Online.  I have used these same techniques to build sites that have made me a lot of money over the years, including a site that has made several million in sales.

I also included an entire training section on how to build a website.  I even included a custom template that people can use and get started pretty easily.  And there is no extra software required to make your site, we are using free software that anyone can use to get started online. 

 This course is great for learning how to make extra money online or even to build an entire web business from.  It’s ideal for beginners wanting to make some extra cash to anyone who is serious about building a home based business.  This course is not some 30 page ebook on some ways to make money, but rather it’s a comprehensive online course completet with step by step training videos.

Inside this course we cover the essentials of internet marketing and getting started with your own website.  You can literally take this course and within 24 hours be online and start utilizing these money making techniques.  I have been been making money online for 8 years now and continue to do so today.  I have built many sites that have made money over the years and in this course I show people how to do it.

So effective April 30, 2010, Yahoo will no longer be running their publisher network.  This was a network, much like Google Adsense, where people could sign up and place ads on their site and make money anytime anyone clicked on one of those ads.

Instead they have decided to recommend people sign up for Chitika.  Which is another network very much similar.  You place ads on your site, you get paid when visitors click on those ads. 

I have been going with Google Adsense primarily these days.  AND as of March 31, 2010 have made more money from Adsense than I have made in the last 5 or 6 years.  Apparently with Chitika, you can also run concurrent Adsense ads as well.

I tried the Yahoo Publisher network, but didn’t have time to really test the results between Google and Yahoo.  And now I just have to go through and get rid of Yahoo altogether off my sites.

Just thought you might want an update on this in case you were thinking of joining or had sites with Yahoo ads on there..

A conversion is simply a goal you want to achieve with your site.  A conversion can be a sale or successfully generating a lead via an email sign-up.  And by using an analytics program like Google Analytics, you can easily keep track of your conversions.

It is so critically important to track your conversions, especially if you are buying ads (either PPC or CPM).  And even if you don’t have sales conversions, you should be tracking your email / newsletter sign-up conversions.  Ideally, you should be tracking both.  And it’s so easy not to, or to forget to add the tracking code to your web pages.

By tracking your conversions, you know which keywords are performing for you and which ones are just a waste of money.  Now keep in mind, even if you have an ecommerce site, not everyone is going to buy from you on first visit.  In fact, MOST people will not buy from you on the first visit no matter how good your site is.

So it is highly unlikely you’ll have a 100% conversion rate.  And actually it’ll be more like a 0.05% to 5% conversion rates.  So if most people aren’t going to buy from you on first visit, then you’ll need to at least entice them to sign up for your newsletter (offer incentives like discounts, great info, reviews, etc. to boost newsletter sign-ups).  This process will allow you to hopefully build trust and establish a relationship with your new visitor and ideally they’ll become a customer.

But if you aren’t tracking this stuff (Google Analytics even gives you the code – all you have to do is copy and paste it into your site), then you won’t know what’s making your site successful.

And here’s a key and the real gold nugget in this article is what to do once you’ve collected a few months of conversion data.  Let’s say you are buying ads via PPC.  And you’ve been somewhat successful and you’ve been tracking your conversions.  The next step is to setup a brand new campaign and take ONLY those keywords that convert and increase your budget and run your PPC with that campaign only.

Doing just that should help you increase sales, not to mention help with branding and building your newsletter list.