In this issue:
1. The Last of The Four-Part Blogging Course. (See below.)
2. Import Export Seminar in Panama -- coming soon! This is an event that I'm putting on with the folks at International Living (Agora) -- I just got the itinerary for this 4-day conference (June 11-14) and it is going to be really excellent! Those of you interested in selling physical products and importing can see details about the conference here:
http://www.internationalliving.com/events/06/i_e_workshop.html
This is the most comprehensive importing seminar I've ever heard of and I don't think it is sold out (yet) so there is still time to register. Check out the seminar web site at the link above.
3. Interns Wanted -- again! Summer is almost here, and so I'm putting the word out -- come to Atlanta and learn internet marketing firsthand. Work side-by-side with our e-commerce team that sells more than $1 million a month online. (Last summer we had three interns, and two of them work here full-time now.)
Whether you want a full-time career opportunity (we're up to 50 people now and still growing) or you just want a great summer job, send an email to bradf at bradfallon dot com with Internship in the subject line if you want to apply. (Or forward this to someone you know who wants to learn as much as possible about internet marketing.)
4. Product Launches.
I don't know about you, but I've been enjoying watching the bar get raised on "How to launch an info product." First, Jon Reese sells a million dollars in one day with Traffic Secrets. Now everyone else is launching products with better and better marketing. Kind of like a four minute mile, it's still not easy to do, but it makes it seem a lot easier to do 5 or 6.
The latest one is Sterling Valentine. Have you seen his JV formula thing yet? This is the guy's very first info product ever, and darned if he isn't going to sell $100,000 on the very first day. Everyone in the world will be promoting it, and if you haven't seen the emails and deals leading up to the launch next Tuesday you should get on the list and check it out: http://www.bradfallon.com/jv
If you're in the info product business, you know that the JV partners are really what it's all about. And Sterling put together all the teachings from all the top internet marketers -- specically about how to do joint ventures -- in one place. Very cool idea.
Start up to $100k in a few months. Yep, the internet still rocks.
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Week 4 of 4 -- Blogging for Business (By the way, the eight week telecourse I did with Dave Taylor, 19 books in bookstores and bigtime blogger (intuitive.com, askdavetaylor.com) is going to be ready soon. There's over 10 hours of content on CD plus class notes and transcripts -- and Anne Holland from Marketing Sherpa, and Joe Vitale from everywhere did great bonus lectures. Stay tuned.
This week we're going to wrap up the blogging course by talking about what makes a blog tick - the words. The content. The copy.
Whatever you want to call the end result, blogs are fueled by the written word. People don't initially come to your blog to buy products (though you hope they will eventually!) or to look at pretty pictures. Customers visit your blog to read what you write. They want to know more about your industry or your product line, or maybe they just want to know what you think!
So if we're blogging at least 2-3 times a week . . . what exactly are we blogging about? Where are you supposed to find enough content to fill all that up?
One of the best ways to find something to talk about in this new media, is to use the OLD media...newspapers and magazines. If you're stuck for something to write about, a great blogging "trick" is to go out, read the newspapers and magazines, excerpt a chunk of the article you want to talk about. Then stick a paragraph or two before and after the excerpt and voila! You've got yourself a brand new blog post! (Of course remember to cite or give credit to material you quote.)
Another great way to bust "blogger's block" is to quote someone who's posted on a message board or forum. A lot of times you can get great ideas or blog seeds by simply keeping an eye out for posts you find compelling or thought-provoking. Email the author of the post and ask them if they mind being quoted on your blog. Nine times out of 10 they will be flattered. You get ideas for your blog content, they get flattery -- a win-win!
You can also republish entire articles and essays you find online. Again, it's important that you get permission to do so first, but once you have it, you simply tack on a preamble that says "My friend Todd just wrote a great article on X and he's kindly given me permission to republish it here!" Then post the whole article. Don't forget to link back to the original author's site.
Another great way to get content for your blog is to hire someone to write it for you! There are plenty of outsourcing sites out there where you can find competent, trustworthy and affordable writers-for-hire. (If it makes sense for you financially, you can even do what I did, and hire an in-house writer.)
To find outsourced writers try craigslist.com first.
And if you don't have a myspace account yet, get one. You can run ads on there for free in multiple categories and you'll automatically get internet savvy applicants. Plus, you can see everything about them (often, way too much) before you ever interview them!
That's it for this week. Keep an eye your inbox for the next edition and as always . . .
Keep on Stomping!
Talk soon,
Brad Fallon
www.bradfallon.com
Don't worry, Part IV of the blogging e-course is still coming soon. But I wanted to call your attention to a couple cool things that came across the radar today.
- Rethinking Online Conversion Rates
For those of you interested in selling online, Marketing Sherpa had a great case study about online conversion today based on experience and advice of JC Penney.com -- they sold $1 Billion online last year so you may want to hear what they have to say :-)
Warning: It might make you rethink how you've been thinking about conversion. (second post at bradfallon.com)
- Big Seminar Wrap Up
If you missed Armand Morin's Big Seminar in Atlanta this weekend, you missed a lot. It's one of the really great events. I connected with some old friends and met a ton of great marketers I didn't know before.
Stu McClaren who was there is going to do a free teleseminar and pass along all his notes and and what got out of this event. (first post at bradfallon.com).
(Great idea, Stu!)
I don't know any successful online marketer that doesn't think that one of the KEYS to online success is to go to these live events and hang out (mostly outside the official 'sessions') with other people doing the same thing.
Thing about how much volume your business does this year -- and how much you want it to do next year. Now figure out what percentage of your gross revenues you want to spend on your education and don't be afraid to step it up in '06.
E-commerce is just getting started and now is the best time ever to get great at Traffic and Conversion.
But most of us just don't invest in ourselves enough.
Or we're too busy working IN our business that we can't step back and work ON our business.
Perfect example -- one of my buddies is Mike Filsaime, one of the biggest internet marketing teachers of the last year who came out of obscurity to be a top ranked speaker at all the biggest events. He does extremely well online and his Butterfly Marketing system is one of the most successful programs this year.
We met at John Childers boot camp that we both bought at the Big Seminar last year. Yes, the $5,000 seemed like a lot at the time, but if you're willing to apply what you learned, like Mike was, it's a drop in the bucket.
(I'm just glad I met him before he was famous and he still talks to me! :-)
As a direct result of attending that event, and from the relationships he's made at others like it, Mike has gone from zero to hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales in a matter of months.
If you really want to take your business to the next level, there's nothing like getting on a plane and going to a live event with a bunch of other like-minded business owners and entrepreneurs.
Stay tuned -- I'll be letting you know where I'll be this year and I hope we can hang out. The best marketing ideas occur somewhere between two and three beers in the pubs after the conferrence events! :-)
Hint: Andy Jenkins and I have something amazing planned that's going to blow away the entire internet marketing community. I just got him a plane ticket -- he's flying down to my office in Atlanta next week for two days with my entire creative department, and the countdown will begin . . .
Talk soon,
Brad Fallon
www.bradfallon.com
3012 Adriatic Court
Norcross, GA 30071
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In this week's issue:
1. Testing for fun and profit -- get some recognition!
2. Part Three of our Four-Part Blogging Course
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Hey Gang,
The last two weeks has been very busy -- we increased our office size by a third, hired a bunch of new people, and I had meetings in Miami and Phoenix.
It was also our very first month ever with over $1 million in sales -- yay! (Gotta work hard now before the twins come in July! :-)
The next few months are going to be great for those of you who like to go to live conferences and events. There are a bunch of good ones coming up -- some I'm speaking at and some I'm attending, like the Marketing Sherpa email marketing conference in Chicago in April http://www.sherpastore.com/Email-Summit.html.
I'll be teaching at the China trip in April and the Ken McCarthy's System Seminar in May. And I'm doing a very private two day workshop in my office in Atlanta the first or second weekend in June.
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If I had to pick out two main things that all website owners should constantly be improving, it would be:
(1) Traffic
(2) Conversion
Let's say you spend all your time working on getting good rankings in the search engines, running your pay-per-click campaigns, getting links, and other things to bring more traffic to your site. Those are all great ideas . . . but if you aren't trying to increase your conversion, you are missing out on some easy money.
In fact, doubling your conversion can be far easier than doubling your traffic! Increasing your conversion can be as simple as changing your headline, or trying a new image.
We are always trying new things on MyWeddingFavors.com, because even an increase of a fraction of 1% can mean huge increases in profits.
Think about what an increase in conversion would mean to your website. Let's say you are converting at 0.5%. If you test even just a few new things, raising up to a 1% conversion rate is definitely doable. That may not seem like a lot, but think about it. Just by testing, you've just doubled your income!
And what's the best part about working on your conversion rate?
It's free!
It costs nothing but time to swap out an image or a new headline. Yes, there is software out there that you can buy, or services you can subscribe to that will do the testing and tracking for you. But if you're just starting out or have a tight budget, you can track it yourself.
What I want to know is this . . . how many of you are constantly testing new things to help increase your conversion?
New headlines, different images, moving something up or down, adding a security icon, different text, etc. What have you tried, what worked, what didn't?
So how about this . . . do you want to get some free publicity and a link to your site from the home page of bradfallon.com?
Then send me your thoughts on different things you've tried and the results you got. Email me at testing@bradfallon.com with any data you want to share. Include some screenshots and stats of what you tried and the results you achieved because of it. I'll take a couple of the best examples and post the case studies on my blog next week.
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Welcome to Part Three of our Blogging Course. In this edition, we're going to talk about how to amp up your blog's search rankings - and how to monetize your blog!
After all, what's the point of writing a blog if no one can ever find it and if it doesn't improve your bottom line, right?
Let's talk first about SEO.
The same basic SEO rules apply just as much in the blogosphere as they do on other websites. Bare minimum, you should always:
Use good keyword-rich title tags.
Use 'h1', 'h2' and so on for section headers.
Pay particular attention to how others link to you.
This third point is very important. As you know by now, how someone links to you is almost as crucial as getting them to link to you at all. A link that displays the phrase 'Wedding Favors' is far more relevant and rank-enriching for my wedding favors site, then say, 'Click here!' Why? Because no one is searching for 'Click here!' but plenty of people are searching for 'wedding favors.' And Google puts far more weight
So if someone wants to link to your blog, see if they would mind making the link display a worthwhile keyword phrase to you. (They may not want to, but then again - they may. Never hurts to ask, and it definitely could help.)
There are other SEO 'tricks' that can help improve your search engine ranking. Like breaking your blogs up into two parts. The key here is to write a teaser entry, and then - and here's the smart part - use the 'to read more, click here' link as an opportunity to reiterate the title of your blog article. You get twice the keyword action by repeating the title.
While you're at it, you want to try to get a keyword or two into the actual name of your blog, if you can.
But blogging in general is so SEO-friendly, anyway, for many reasons. They constantly are adding fresh content, they're easy for engines to crawl, they're easy to get linked (if you are writing good stuff, that is) and they're easy to maintain a slow, steady growth pattern.
Make your Blog make Money
The more I teach, and learn, about blogs the more I realize what a super-hero of a tool they are. They can not only boost traffic and sales and your relationship with your customers - but they can make money in and of themselves!
In order to do this, you have to make some choices. There are people who don't like the idea of trying to get visitors to their blog only to send them away via Adsense Ads.
But then there are those who like the idea of the extra money. And when you hear of people making thousands of dollars a week with Adsense, can you blame them?
In the business blogging telecourse I did with Dave Taylor, there were a TON of good ideas for monetizing a blog. Now that the course is done we are going to be offering it on CD pretty soon -- stay tuned.
Pay Per Click
Google's AdSense program is one of the most popular PPC program. You can really customize what your Adsense ads look like, choosing between text or graphical and you can even place up to three ad 'units' on your blog. But I'm pretty adamant in my advice of NOT using Adsense's default color scheme. By making your ad look more like the rest of your site, readers are that much less likely to skip over it, and actually click on it!
Textual Links Alone
Some sites will pay a lot of money to get plugged in with high PR sites. There's a service called AdZaar which matches these companies with your site. If you have a site that's PR6 or higher, you can make some nice $ from this service.
Text-Link-Ads.com does the same thing, but I've personally not used this service. I usually sell my own links with no middleman.
And finally, there are the two A's of monetizing your blog. Affiliates and Ads in RSS Fees. By now, you probably have a good idea of what an affiliate is and how affiliate programs work. If affiliate programs are interesting to you -- Commission Junction is one of the best places to start -- or you can go straight to some of the smaller networks -- including all of my own affiliate programs at www.smartmarketingaffiliates.com.
And did you know you can now drop AdSense ads into your RSS feed of your weblog? It's called 'AdSense for Feeds'. There's another service called Pheedo, which shows some very nice statistics in your reports. I can't personally vouch for putting ads in RSS feeds, but you can check it out.
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That's it for this week. Keep an eye your inbox for the next edition (and last part of the blogging e-course) and as always . . .
Keep on Stomping!
Brad Fallon
Chief Stomper
www.BradFallon.com
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In this week's issue:
1. Video for e-commerce?
2. Part Two of our Four-Part Blogging Course
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Hi all,
I'm back with another installment in the four-part blogging course we started in the last newsletter. Have begun blogging yet? I hope you're having as much fun with it as I am. Blogging is much more than a trend, it's a great way to increase your site ranking while you establish a trustworthy rapport with your customers.
This month I was quoted in The Economist magazine and a small local newspaper -- both from reporters calling me from the blog. Whatever your business, it's time to step up the blogging efforts . . . so on with Part II of our e-course.
But first I want to show you the new video site we did for My Wedding Favors.
It seems like everyone interested in internet marketing is talking about video right now -- and I wanted to show you what we're doing with video to complement e-commerce and the sale of physical products.
Check out www.myweddingfavors.tv -- we shot the video for this streaming video site a few weeks ago and just launched it today. Visit bradfallon.com to leave a comment and tell me what you think! Later on, I'll be talking about how we did it, sharing the results, etc.
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The Second in a Four-Part Course on Blogging
Last week we armed you with basic blogging terminology. By now you should know your trackbacks from your comment spam and how an RSS feed has absolutely nothing to do with dinner. ;)
So I thought now we'd move past blogging definitions and onto tools. There's an abundance of blogging tools out there, but I've narrowed it down to a few which really help you manage and build your place in the 'blogosphere.'
Google
There's even a Google Blogsearch
Google News
Technorati
Digg
MSN Search
Ice Rocket
Next edition . . . SEO for your blog.
That's it for this week. Keep an eye your inbox for the next edition and as always . . .
Keep on Stomping!
Brad Fallon
www.BradFallon.com
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In this week's issue:
1. Part I of our Four-Part Blogging Course
2. MyWeddingFavors.com & Google or 'A Ranking Rollercoaster'
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Thursday March 9, 2006
Hey Gang,
It's been a while! If you've been reading my blog, you know that things are ramping up in an amazing, busy way at our company, including MyWeddingFavors.com. So forgive the delay between newsletters. (And if this is your first Stomper Update, hello! You joined up at a really exciting time.)
The Stomper Update is back this week -- with a vengeance. This edition has some really great stuff, starting with . . . .
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---> The First in a Four-Part Course on Blogging
It's really fun . . . it seems like everyone's doing it . . . even the 'traditional' marketers are jumping in the game . . . it's blogging for business!
One of the best ways to attain excellent search results while establishing a better rapport with your customers is to launch a blog. Starting a blog is easier than you think – and the rewards are endless. So I thought I'd give a few pointers over the next few newsletters on how to get your blog up and running and, most important, working for you.
To start out with, I want to make sure you're familiar with the basic blogging terminology. With the way the blogosphere changes daily, it's good to make sure we're all working with up-to-date definitions:
1. Blog -- Don't make the mistake of considering a blog to be simply an online diary. While it can be that, it can be a whole lot more. A blog is a content management tool as well as a place to build communities, learning and discussion.
2. Blogroll -- You know when you go to someone's blog and see a list of links to 'Blogs I like?' That’s a blogroll. Basically it's list of other blogs that particular blogger likes to read or just link to, for other business purposes. If you're on one, it means you're getting a link from every page on that very Google-friendly site.
3. Captchas -- Those bothersome but necessary graphics that look like warped words or numerals which you are prompted to type into a field underneath it. 'Captchas' prove that you are a human being actually reading (and commenting) on a blog. And not some spambot.
4. Comment Spam -- Comment spam is when comments are left on a blog that are essentially worthless, and just a means for people to post incoming links to their sites. Comment spam can be hand typed by spammers but more often than not, it's left by the aforementioned – and dreaded - spambots.
4.5 Comment Spammer -- One who propogates comment spam. For these people, capital punishment is appropriate. :-)
5. Pings -- When a blog is updated, it can be set to automatically 'ping' various sites, such as Yahoo and Technorati, which lets them know the blog has been updated.
6. RSS Feeds -- Readers of a blog often subscribe to an RSS feed (RSS is an acronym for 'Rich Site Summary' or 'Really Simple Syndication,' depending on who you ask.) Then, whenever the blog is updated, that reader can read the blog posts in an RSS reader without having to go the blog itself.
7. Trackbacks & Trackback Spam -- Whenever someone links to your blog, you get a link from whatever site is linking TO your blog. That incoming link from someone else's site is called a 'trackback.' Unfortunately, like most things that involve incoming links, trackbacks are susceptible to spam. Trackback Spam is when someone says they posted an article mentioning your blog and give you a link to it, but when you click on it – surprise! – it’s actually a link to some irrelevant, shady site.
Next edition . . . what are the best blogging tools for beginning and advanced business blogging?
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---> MyWeddingFavors.com & Google or 'A Ranking Rollercoaster'
As you can imagine, I'm constantly getting questions
about MyWeddingFavors.com and how it went from #1 in
Google, to completely gone, to partially back, and finally back to #1.
I love all the people who have emailed me to help, 'Hey Brad, did you
know your site's off Google?'
'Really, naaaahhhh hadn't noticed.' Right.
Anyway, this is one of the busiest times of the year, and
we've been slammed with orders, so I haven't had the time
to sit down and write a long explanation. Until now, that is.
Since last summer, we've had to triple our warehouse
size, and we've gone from a staff of a dozen or so, to
around 50 (and growing).
That's right -- even when we were dropped from Google, we
continued to have record months, because Google traffic
is only a fraction of where the traffic comes from.
Which drives home an important lesson - the need to
diversify.
You can't rely solely on being on the first page of
Google, or you could be in trouble if your rankings
drop.
There are plenty of ways to do this, and over the next
few months, I'll share some of the things you can do to
get more traffic outside of the search engines.
As for Google and SEO in general, we've learned a
number of things.
The search engines are always evolving, so rankings can
come and go, and certain things will lose their
effectiveness. But if you follow the basic principles
of SEO, like we taught in Stomping the Search Engines, you
will do well over time.
So anyway, what happened to MyWeddingFavors?
Several months ago, MWF dropped out of Google
completely. For a while, it wasn't even being cached.
If you did a search for site:myweddingfavors.com, you
would have only seen some of the links, with no
description. A few days later, not even the links
showed up.
What was the problem?
Well there are a couple things that we think caused the
problem, both relating to the same thing . . . .
Duplicate content.
First of all, since we also run a wholesale wedding
favors company, when other sites carry our products,
they almost always use the stock description.
That means there are dozens of wedding favor sites that
have the same products with the same descriptions.
We think Google, for whatever reason, decided that it
was only going to cache and rank the products on one
site. And that site was not us ;)
Also, shortly after that, we found a file on our domain
called 'upload.html'. What is upload.html, you ask?
We wondered the same thing!
When we did a search for site:myweddingfavors.com,
that was the only page that was coming up.
Turns out, it was a file that was created by a Yahoo Store
programmer working on our site -- for a project when we
exported all of our data once several months prior, and
somehow Google found that page.
Upload.html was a file that had the information,
including titles and product descriptions for EVERY
product on our site -- all on one single (very large)
web page.
Google may have seen that page and thought, 'Hey look,
they have all of the product descriptions here in one
place . . . Let's just use this instead, that way we don't
have to cache all those other product pages that are
just saying the same thing.'
So we removed the upload.html file and redid a good
amount of our product descriptions.
A couple weeks after that, we started to get our pages
back into the cache, and some of our rankings started
to re-appear.
It took a while for our rankings to all show back up,
but now we are back at #1 across all of the
datacenters.
I even sent an email to Google, and sure enough,
3-4 days later, our site reappeared at the top with
a special 'tracking URL' that was certainly placed
there by Google for some reason.
Later, the tracking URL disappeared and my site was
showing up #1 in all the datacenters whenever 12, 16
or 19 million results were displayed for the keyword
'wedding favors.'
It was also showing up #1 in Google's Big Daddy datacenters.
(For a discussion of Big Daddy, see:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bigdaddy/)
But whenever only 5 million results were displayed, it was
nowhere to be found.
I sent another email to Google, and sure enough, 3-4 days
later it was back to #1 in all the search results, this time
with no tracking code.
To wrap up, here are some lessons we learned from this
experience:
- If you are using the manufacturer's descriptions for
products on your site, modify them or re-write them so
they aren't identical.
- If you use duplicate content, for example for product
descriptions, try to have a good chunk of non-duplicate
content on all your pages as well. (You can tell if Google
is recognizing your content as non-duplicate if a site:
search for all your pages displays both titles AND
descriptions for all of your pages.
And to those people that have asked if we have been
using 'black hat' techniques - the answer is no.
In my opinion, black hat sites tend to do worse -- over
time. Good content sites tend to do better over time.
So rather than fighting an uphill battle, I like to keep
building sites that you get to keep, year after year.
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That's it for this week. Keep an eye your inbox and Part II
of the Business Blogging course, and as always --
Keep on Stomping!
Best,
Brad Fallon
www.BradFallon.com
Hey Stompers,
Long time no talk. There's so much cool stuff happening on the internet these days that I can barely read my own email, let alone all the RSS feeds I try to keep up with.
Are you using del.icio.us yet? Very cool -- see below. (Warning: Stay away from the 'popular' section or you might not get anything else done for two days.)
Today I was trying to explain to someone the time value of money as it relates to spamming the search engines. For those of us interested in traffic, this is worth thinking about.
(Story continued online, here... If you want to read a great short story about how easy it is to get sustainable traffic, click here to continue:
Until next time,
Keep on Stomping!
Brad Fallon
Chief Stomper
Hey Hey,
I meant to tell you when I emailed about the 'QVC Online' website that
Brad Callen of SEO Elite has big news today for all of us trying to get more
QUALITY backlinks to our web sites -- which of course is critical for higher
rankings.
I added this post to my blog, and you can already see all the comments from
those who agree Link Metro is great, but the new AUTOMATED version is very cool.
Brad Callen has gotten to be a good friend of mine and he is really an expert on
link building and link analysis. Brad is the creator of a search engine optimization
program (SEO Elite) that Andy and I use to optimize all of our websites. But that's
not what I want to tell you about. It's this:
http://www.bradfallon.com/linkmetro
Brad told me that he just released a brand new program that will completely
automate your entire link building process. He said he has to actually keep an eye
on how many links he gets daily, because he could easily get over 100 links in one
day!
I took a look at it and have to admit, it looks really cool. You have complete
control over how fast or slow you want to get links, but I won't go into all of
the features in this email. I will tell you that I have employees doing nothing but
link exchanges all day long over at LinkMetro, and know for a fact that this system
works well.
You can also read the comments from people using the automated and
non-automated version. (Automation and time saving is key!)
Now, not many people know about this program...yet.
So I strongly urge you to take a look and get a jump start on your competition
while you have the chance. I know you'll like what you see.
http://www.bradfallon.com/linkmetro
Until next time,
Keep on Stomping!
Brad Fallon
www.bradfallon.com
Normally I wouldn't send another Stomper Update for at least three months. (Just
kidding, but who has the time and sit down and write newsletters anymore?)
Seriously, I wanted to show you a really, really cool web site that many people
haven't seen yet. If you are at all interested in interactive marketing you really must
check out this new video ecommerce site. It's like QVC, but on the internet.
Very cool. (And the little kids' and baby Halloween costumes are great.)
(continued online at http://www.bradfallon.com )
If the link doesn't work, just go to http://www.bradfallon.com/2005/10/discuss-ecommerce-tv-is-here.html
And don't forget to post a comment with your thoughts, too!
Brad Fallon
Wow, less than a month since the last Stomper Update. (I know, I know ... hard to believe.)
But I didn't want you to be behind on one of the coolest online marketing ideas I've seen in awhile.
Sometimes, it's better to be there small, than not be there at all.
(Huh?)
I'm talking about pixel ads.
(Does that help?)
If you haven't heard about pixel ads yet, not to worry. Soon, they may be everywhere.
Pixel ads may be the next big thing in internet advertising.
...Click here to read the rest online (and check out the facelift, so to speak, on my blog!)
http://www.bradfallon.com
Thanks,
Brad Fallon
Chief Stomper