Many people breeze through Google umpteen times a day without bothering to set their preferences — or even being aware that there are preferences to set. A recent Internet study asked users whether they would rather set Google preferences or get bathed in chocolate syrup. Sentiment was overwhelmingly against setting Google preferences. But I’m here to tell you that the five settings on the Preferences page enhance the Google experience far more than the effort required to adjust them.
To adjust Google preferences, click the Preferences link on the Google homepage or go here.
If you set your preferences and later return to the Preferences page by manually entering the preceding URL, your browser displays an unadjusted Preferences page (without your settings). That’s because your Preferences page has a distinct URL with your preferences built in to it. For example, after selecting English as Google’s default language for your visits, the URL appears like this: www.google.com/preferences?hl=en
How Google remembers your preferences
When you set preferences in Google, the site is customized for you every time you visit it, as long as you’re using the same computer through which you set the preferences. To provide this convenience, Google must place a cookie (a small information file) in your computer. The site and the cookie high-five each other whenever you visit Google, and then the site appears according to your settings. For this system to work, the reception of cookies must be turned on in your browser.
Some people are militantly anti-cookie, claiming that the data files represent an invasion of computer privacy. Indeed, some sites plant cookies that track your Internet movements and identify you to advertisers.
The truth is, Google’s cookie is fairly aggressive. It gets planted when you first visit the site, whether or not you visit the Preferences page.
Once planted, the Google cookie records your clicks in Google and builds a database of visitor behavior in its search results pages. For example, Google knows how often users click the first search result and to what extent they explore results lower on the page. Google uses this information to evaluate the effectiveness of its service and to improve it.
As to privacy, Google does indeed share aggregate information with advertisers and various third parties and even publicizes knowledge about how the service is used by its millions of visitors. The key word is aggregate. Google’s privacy policy states that individual information is never divulged except by proper legal procedure, such as a warrant or a subpoena, or by individual consent. The privacy policy is published on this page.
I have no problem with the Google cookie or with cookies in general. The convenience is helpful, and I don’t mind adding to the aggregate information. It’s rather comforting being a data droplet in Google’s information tsunami.
Your best bet for reaching the Preferences page after first setting your preferences (when you want to readjust them, for example) is to use the Preferences link on the home page.
A single basic process changes one preference or several. Just follow these steps:
1. Go to the Preferences page. As mentioned, just click the Preferences link on the home page or go directly to www.google.com/preferences.
2. Use the pull-down menus, check boxes, and radio buttons to make your adjustments.
3. Click the Save Preferences button.
4. In the confirmation window (which merely says “Your preferences have been saved” and is unnecessary), click the OK button.
How Google Preferences Work
KPI Business Process
Define Your Goals
The tactical goals for your project generally come down to a simple goal:
You want more ________. This may be leads for services, product sales, newsletter subscriptions, PDF downloads, views of a video, and so on.
Calculate Your KPIs
You need to establish the maximum amount you can pay for a customer and still be profitable.
An overview of the Key performance indicators (KPIs):
● Find the average order value (AOV). Divide the total revenue for the period by the number of orders to get the average value for an order. Some customers may buy a single item; other customers buy several items at different prices. Use these to find the average value of an order.
● Find the customer lifetime value (CLV). Multiply the AOV by the average customer’s number of annual purchases and length of customer lifetime (usually, several years) to get the CLV. This is how much the customer is worth to you in revenue.
● The question is then how much you’re willing to spend to acquire that customer (in other words, how much you invest to get a certain amount of revenue). In many companies, your finance team tells you that you must achieve a certain return in order to get the funding for your project. For example, for every dollar you spend, you should get four dollars in revenue. Use the PRR to calculate this.
● Find your close rate (CR), which is the number of leads you need to get customers. If you need 100 leads to get 20 customers, that is a 20% CR.
● Multiply the CPA by the CR to get the target CPL. This tells you how much you can spend to get a lead.
Domain and Hosting
One of the most important things you must do is choose a domain. It’s the name of your site so it has to be important. Something relatively short and that people can remember is vital. I’ve had the most success choosing a domain name which matches the niche my site will be about. For example, if I decided I wanted to make a website about cell phone chargers – I’d try and create a domain name which includes the main keywords external hard drives or something of the sort.
You don’t always have to do it this way, and you can still become the authority in your niche. I’ve seen it happen too many times and I’m sure you have too. But I’m going by my personal experiences.
Finding Hosting
I can’t stress the importance of having a reliable host. See it this way, how are you going to eat, if there is no food? How are you going to make money, if your sites are down constantly? A reliable host is definitely a very important aspect when it comes to making money online. If one of my sites go down I lose anywhere from $20-$50 that day. It adds up quickly.
Once you’ve gotten a domain, you need to find a reliable host. Niche blogging can become an addiction after awhile so find a company that let you host unlimited sites.
Deep Linking
Deep links are links to internal pages of your website. Most people will aggressively build links only to their homepage … but this is definitely not the most natural looking linking profile.
Instead, I would recommend you split you inbound links between your home page and your internal pages. You should still have about 50% or so of the links point to the homepage, but spread the other links out across your other pages.
Natural Inbound Linking
This has a couple of benefits.
• This will result in your site getting deeply spidered which in turn will cause the search engines to find and index more pages faster.
• You will also start to notice that your internal pages will begin to rank better for their target keywords.
• I believe if you do this on newly launched sites you can keep yourself out of the “Google sandbox.”
Non Natural Linking from single IP address
Every website is assigned to an IP address. An IP address can also be thought of as the equivalent of a street address or a phone number for a computer or other network device on the Internet.
Just as each street address and phone number uniquely identifies a building or telephone, an IP address can uniquely identify a specific server or a website.
Here is an example IP Address:
123.456.789.000
A Block: 123
B Block: 456
C Block: 789
D Block: 000
When building your links you want to ensure you get links from a variety of IP sources, this will ensure you have the most natural looking backlink portfolio.
This may sound like a simple tip, but getting site wide links from a high PR website is not a good idea for this reason. You may get 1,000’s of links, but they are all from the same IP and will in short order hurt your rankings instead of improve them. This of course is mostly in Google, MSN may still give you some love.
Link Building Velocity
One of the things that I learned from reading the Google Patent is that Google pays attention to the speed at which you aquire your links.
This is why it is highly recommended that you build your links slowly and at a consistent velocity, or speed. The reason to do this is because a site that is naturally popular will consistently gain new links just from people wanting to share what they have found.
In order to duplicate this, we must resist what can be a very strong urge to acquire as many links as we can as fast as we can. I have personally found that building 10-20 quality links per day is a good number in the beginning. Then I eventually ramp this up as time goes by.
You may be asking yourself “How in the world do you build 10-20 links consistently?” “How do you find the time, and the energy, to do that everyday for all of your sites?”
Well, the short answer is: Blogs
What makes blogs so darn great is that search engines absolutely love them, and for good reason: They contain fresh content!
SO HOW DOES THIS HELP YOU?
Well, the short answer is blogs have a neat little feature called Trackbacks.
What Exactly is a Trackback?
Trackbacks were designed to enable webmasters to notify other webmasters that there is another web page with relevant information.
Getting Links Using Trackbacks
Getting Links Using Trackbacks
The beauty of the trackback system is that all of this linking can happen without human interaction, which increases the chance of getting the desired nother thing that is great about Trackbacks is that they use a standardized protocol across all blogging platforms.
Hopefully by now, you are beginning to see that Trackbacks can be an excellent way to build up your backlinks! Ifso, keep reading to discover what ifferentiates Trackbacks from Blog Comments, plus how you can exploit Trackbacks for maximum profit.
Trackbacks vs Comments
You may be thinking that a Trackback simply sounds like a comment added to a blog post. Well, not exactly.
Comments are there for people to speak their mind about a blog post’s content. But a Trackback on the other hand is designed to indicate there is more about this topic to be read on another website.
The fact is that a large percentage of bloggers are totally unaware of the trackback system installed on their website, and don’t fully understand how it works. And because of this most of the spam protection mechanisms have been focused on comments not trackbacks.
The links you can get from posting comments to a blog have a high probability of not passing any of its value. Trackbacks on the other hand still hold extreme value.
Why You Should Join Twitter
When you visit Twitter, you’ll soon see that it’s all about staying in touch. But this isn’t the kind of website that gives you free rein to say whatever you want and spend as long as you like on every post you make. Twitter is all about brevity. It’s all about giving people the basics without bogging them down with the ‘too much information’ syndrome.
140 CHARACTERS OR LESS
That’s it—that’s all you’ve got to play with on Twitter each time you want to get in touch with your followers and tell people what’s going on with your business and your life.
To put that into some kind of context, the title of an eBay auction can’t be longer than 55 characters so you’ve got less than three times that amount to make an impression on people.
You’ll soon find yourself becoming very adept at using the English language to get in touch in the shortest way possible.
So why do you need to join?
It seems like the whole world belongs to two groups—those who are thinking of joining Twitter, and those who already have. If you are in the first group you’ll want to know what all the fuss is about, so here are some reasons.
Quick and easy
We’re not just talking about how easy it is to actually join here; it’s all about the updates. We know how long—or short—a tweet can be, and that’s exactly what makes the site so accessible.
If you have got your own blog you’ll know what I mean.Blogs are a great way to get in touch with people and build a following over the course of time, but if you don’t write posts of a reasonable length you tend to feel like you’re shortchanging your readers. You almost get to the stage where you’d be better off not posting at all than posting a short message.
Twitter takes all that worry away instantly. You are limited by their 140 characters or less rule, so it’s super speedy to jump on and write a quick sentence to tell people what the latest development is in your business or on your website.
In fact, you’ll probably have to restrain yourself to keep from posting too often!
Getting connected
Twitter makes it easy to put yourself and your business in front of the kind of people you want to get in touch with. Every time you send a fresh tweet it will appear in the public timeline, which is basically a scrolling record of every single tweet sent out by all the members of Twitter all over the world.
There are plenty of other ways to get people to notice your presence on Twitter too, and good news is that the website gives you all the tools you need to draw attention to your profile.
But there are other ways to start using Twitter. You don’t just have to tell people what you are doing; people are also using the site to ask questions, ask for advice and even network with other like minded people with the intention of forming a
business relationship later on.
Are you starting to see that there is a hell of a lot of potential wrapped up in those 140 characters?
Staying in touch
Twitter isn’t just about letting people know what you are about and what you’re up to; it’s also about finding other like minded people and following them too.
Staying in touch couldn’t be easier as you can follow those Twitterers you are interested in and receive updates as and when they post a new update. Once you have found someone you like, all you need to do is hit the Follow button and wait for
updates as and when they post them.
Of course, the more people you can get to follow you the better. This book will help you to write the best updates you can and reach out to exactly the kind of people who will be interested in you and your business.
Raising your profile
If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to get your name out there and spread the word about what you’re doing, Twitter certainly fills that need. You can pick any username you like—as long as someone else hasn’t already taken in—so think about
using your business name if you are mainly going to use the site to promote your business.
It all helps to raise your profile and means that more and more people will find out about you.
Instant updates
While a conventional blog is a great tool for attracting readers and potential customers, those blog posts can get pushed to the bottom of your list of things to do.
Twitter isn’t like that. You only have to write 140 characters after all, and sometimes you won’t even need that many to tell people what’s going on right now.
You also stand a chance of getting more followers to a well maintained and thought out stream of tweets than you will to your regular blog—precisely because it’s short and sweet.
People don’t always have the time to keep reading a blog (even a very good one) so you can give people the choice of whether they want to read more or just stick with your tweets for now. Did I mention you can use URLs in your tweets if you want
to? Now there’s a thought . . .
A great marketing tool
This benefit should be obvious by now. It might take you a while to get the hang of how to put Twitter to good use for boosting your business, but this book will get you much closer than you would if you made the journey on your own.
An important point to note here is that you can customize your own personal Twitter page to include your own business colors and photo—so it’s super easy to upload your business logo and create a background that instantly identifies you and your business and makes you stand out from the crowd.
Get Found Online
Get Found Online: Search Engines
Consumers most frequently go to the search engines to research and purchase products and services. Is your website getting found by consumers looking for you?
Organic Search is Best
There are two kinds of search results: paid results and organic (or natural) results.
Paid results are those listings that require a fee for the search engines to list their link for particular keywords. The most widely used form of paid listing is Pay Per Click (PPC), where you pay each time someone clicks on the link in your advertisement.
The price increases with the competitiveness of the keyword.
Organic results are gathered by search engines’ web crawlers and ranked according
to relevance to search terms. This relevance is calculated by criteria such as extent of keyword match and number of links into that website. Ranking in the organic search results is better because not only is it FREE, but research shows that people click on the organic results 75% of the time and paid results only 25% of the time.
How Does Google Decide?
Google and the other search engines rank websites in search engine results pages according to relevance to the search terms. This relevance is calculated by looking at both on-page factors such as the content on your site and off-page factors in the form of inbound links to your website. Off-page factors are the biggest influencers in your website’s ranking in search engine results.
How To
STEP 1: Find Keywords
Search Volume – Given two different keyword phrases, optimize for the one with the larger number of searches.
Relevance – Choose keywords that your target market is using to describe and search for your products and services.
Difficulty or Competition – Consider your chances for ranking on the first page of Google for that keyword phrase. Look at the sites ranked in those first 10 slots,
their authority and relevance to search terms, and gage if you will be able to overtake them to secure a spot on that first page.
STEP 2: On-Page SEO
Place keywords in the page title, URL, headings, and page text.
Optimize your page description for maximum click-through-rate when your site ranks in Google searches.
Place keywords in other “invisible” places on your site, including meta-keyword tags and alt-text on images.
STEP 3: Off-Page SEO
Build more inbound links from other sites into yours. Each link serves as a recommendation or a reference to tell the search engines that your site is a quality site.
Build more links within context, i.e. those with valuable keywords in the link anchor text (the text that is hyperlinked to your site). Link anchor text provides context for the search engines to understand what your site is about.
Build more links from trusted websites. Just as references from well-respected friends and experts offer more value, so do links from trusted and well-respected websites.
Link-building tips:
• Submit your website to directories like the Yahoo Directory and Business.com
• Communicate with others in your industry through blogs and other social media
• Create compelling tools (such as an interesting calculator) and content
STEP 4: Measure & Analyze
Track number of inbound links, keyword rank over time and compared to competition.
Measure real business results: number of visitors, leads, and customers from SEO.
Internet Marketing
The Internet has profoundly transformed the way people learn about and shop for products. Ten years ago, companies reached their consumers through trade shows, print advertising, and other traditional marketing methods. Today, consumers start their shopping experience by looking on the Internet, in the search engines, the blogosphere, and social media sites. In order to remain competitive, businesses’ websites need to be found online by the consumers already searching for the products and services that you sell. Businesses must get found online by the consumers searching for their products and services in the:
- Search Engines
- Blogosphere
- Social Media
Outbound vs. Inbound Marketing
The Internet has changed the dynamics of the business world. For the past decades, marketers have used “outbound” marketing techniques such as trade shows and print advertising, where marketers push out a message far and wide hoping that it resonates with a few individuals.
These outbound marketing methods are becoming less and less effective for two reasons:
People are getting better at blocking out interruption-based marketing messages.
The average person is inundated with thousands of outbound marketing interruptions per day and is figuring out more creative ways to block them out, including caller ID, spam filtering, and on-demand TV and radio.
The Internet presents quick and easy ways for consumers to learn and shop.
Instead of flying to a trade show across the country, for example, a consumer can go the Internet to research and purchase products or services.
Today, consumers are going to the Internet to start their purchasing process. In order to remain competitive, businesses need to utilize “inbound” marketing techniques to “get found” by the consumers searching for their products and services online.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is a gradual process of testing, measuring, and refining. Once you have optimized your Web site, it can take weeks to months before you start to see an increase in your site’s rankings for the keyword phrases you targeted.
Do not expect a top ranking in Google overnight or even within a few months. Achieving high rankings can take as long as 3 to 6 months. Once your rankings kick in from search engine optimization, it can be extremely rewarding, so it is worth the up front initial investment to do it now and do it right. If you need more immediate results, consider a paid search campaign (pay per click) while you wait for your search engine optimization results to grow.
Finally, search engines algorithms are constantly evolving. As a result, search engine optimization specialists must keep up-to-date on the latest developments in the field and modify their Web site and search engine optimization strategies accordingly.
Some tactics to avoid
Don’t concentrate all your efforts and budget into only one tactic
Becoming prominent online requires a balanced approach. Tactics like optimizing your Web site for popular keywords, sending optimized press releases, and even investing in the pay-per-click advertising packages will have some positive effect when used individually, but are most effective when combined. Remember to vary your tactics and evaluate them periodically to see if changes are needed.
Do not advertise what you cannot deliver
Using keywords on your site that don’t apply to your products or services may generate more traffic, but you generally won’t be able to make a sale from someone who expected to see something that you don’t offer. Your customers may feel deceived, which can lead to poor reviews and merchant rankings. If the deception appears to be intentional, search engines can penalize you by reducing your ranking or blocking your site entirely.
Do not attempt to deceive the search engines
Search engines don’t like sites that are flooded with keywords, use “hidden” text that is the same color as the background, or that automatically re-route traffic from a well-optimized page to another page. The more sophisticated engines can detect practices like these and block offending sites automatically, while other such offenses are often detected during a manual review of a site.
Black Hat Hosting
For Black Hat SEO, you need to choose the right hosting for your needs. There are special functions that need to be accessible on your server in order for your scripts and content generators to work.
Not only that but if you dip your toes into the darker side of things, it’s a good idea to be with a host that has a certain degree of tolerance for your activities. Happily a lot of outfits fit the bill and it’s always easy to find more.
There are 2 main types of hosting to be considered for different usages.
Paid Hosting
Paid hosting is to be used when you need full flexibility of your host. Different options offer different possibilities. If you need to run resource intensive scripts, you might consider getting VPS hosting or a Dedicated server.
Here are the criteria that should be considered “must haves” for black hat needs:
- Wildcard subdomains
- CHMOD 777
- Fantastico
- Cron Jobs
- PHP fopen function
Shared hosting is the least expensive and least flexible option. On the other hand, it has its benefits too because it’s inexpensive and offers you a certain degree of protection against snooping search engine spies.
For example, if you have thousands of sites on a dedicated box and Google is able to identify that they are all auto-generated and all hosted on the same server, you will be looking at a mass ban and that will hurt. You can get away with this for a long time but shared hosting eliminates the problem in large part because your precious little sites are independently hosted.
Another advantage is that you can have more unique IPs. This is very useful when building site networks and or blog farms.
The important thing for now is to know that you can reinforce your site’s power by linking to them from your own sites but the link power will be greatly discounted if the sites are on the same hosting account and IP block. That’s why several smaller accounts can actually give you can advantage since you have variable completely unique link juice to bestow upon your targets.
VPS Hosting
VPS hosting refers to Virtual Private Server. In essence, you get a part of a server dedicated to you. That means that whatever server resources you pay for are guaranteed to be available to you when you need them.
Mass pinging, site growing and link distribution can all be resource intensive and VPS hosting becomes a good idea to run your scripts on once you reach a certain level. The two things to watch out for are the higher price tag (generally between 25 and 50 dollars per month) and also the chance of getting a mass ban from the search engines since your sites are the only ones on the server.
Most VPS providers will set you up with at least two unique C block IPs, with the possibility of buying more as you see fit for only a couple of dollars a piece.
Dedicated Hosting
Also known as dedicated server. This type of hosting allows you to rent an entire server for your needs. This provides the most resources and highest flexibility. It also requires some basic knowledge of servers and the costs can be quite prohibitive until you start earning interesting money.
This is ideally what you should aspire to. When you find yourself building 100s or even thousands of sites per day, you’ll find it extremely tiresome to buy and fill shared hosting accounts that will only support 50 domains a piece.
The same holds true for resource intensive scripts that are run from your server. If you are growing 5000 sites, generating content for them, pinging them and generating trackbacks, you need the power of dedicated hosting on your side.
Of course you should start at the level that represents your investment capabilities and the size of your operation.
Video Marketing
The A to Z of using short promotional videos as the spearhead of a wider but basic (manageable) Social Media Marketing Campaign.
Is your sales funnel in place?
Are you clear what the purpose/goal of the campaign is?
Have you got the whole campaign planned?
How many videos will there be in the series or is it a one off promotion?
Setting Up a Basic Campaign
There are thousands of sites that you can target for your marketing campaigns. Select a few to start with and concentrate on them - add more later.
Any plan worth its salt has to be manageable.
The value of your own hosted blog
Quality content will attract comments and start conversations with your readership.
You can present all your content be it text, images or videos in one place to pass your traffic onto your offers.
In a short time you can create the essential element of "trust". The one ingredient that will dictate the success or failure of your Internet business.
Thoughts on Social Media Profiles
Be very careful how you present yourself on social networks. Before you start, visit as many sites as possible and look to see how other marketers are presenting themselves. There are basically three strategies:
1. Your main profile
Use your own name for your main area of expertise
Use your best content
Keep active - update frequently with text, audio or videos
Use comments, forums etc to boost exposure
2. Subprofiles
Noms de plumes
Perfectly legitimate way to make friends/contacts in other important areas of your strategies. Authors have used this method for ever.
Just update regularly
3. Throwaways
For quick promotions of, for example, affiliate products on the Blog and Social Network platforms.
Example Promotion - Prepare:
Title
Banner ad for the product
One post - 500 words
One or two anchor text links to a squidoo lens or xanga page
Once the promo is finished - forget and just bank the commission cheques
How To Leverage Your Campaign Using The Social Media Networks
- Video Sharing Sites
- Social Bookmarking Sites
- Blog and RSS Directories
- Social Networking Sites
Photo Sharing Sites
Podcast and Videocast Directories
Strategic Tips
Find where your potential customers are
Spend some time in the Forums and Groups
Put your content in front of them
Leave comments
Be original, controversial and humorous to raise your profile
Think - KEYWORDS - TAGS - ANCHOR TEXT LINKS
Get as much quality content on as many platforms as possible
Use submission software to increase distribution and save time
10 Sites You Should Visit
1. ePrompter
ePrompter will check up to 16 of your password protected email accounts automatically as well as reply to, compose and even forward messages. Depending how many accounts you have, and how often you check them, this little tool could easily save you hours a day.
2. Vista Print
A lot of people already know about this site, but it's certainly worth mentioning again, just in case. I don't know how they can afford to do it, but Vista Print will give you 250 free, color business cards.
3. Click Tracker
This web site offers a free link and click tracking services, and even the pro version is ridiculously cheap. I especially like the fact that their software allows you to have your own domain in tracking URLs instead of the link tracker's URL.
4. PageSucker.com
This product will "suck" an entire webpage on to your hard drive so you can read it off-line. It's great for people who use dial-up connections, and best of all it's totally free.
5. RefDesk.com
This site will help you find anything from people, to your local weather, to just about any other random fact that you could find the answer to anywhere else. Check it out if you need to do some product research.
6. FILExt
How many times have you downloaded something only to have your computer tell you that it didn't recognize the file type? You then try to open it using the "Open As" feature, but even you don't know what the file extension stands for. That's where a site like FILExt comes in hand. FILExt has just about every software extension listed so you can easily do a search on your "mystery file".
7. MailWasher
Block spam for ever.
8. Ezine Ad Auction
Ezine advertising is one of the cheapest and quickest ways to get the word out about a product or service. This site allows you to bid for ultra-cheap ad rates in a wide assortment of newsletters.
9. Site Viewer
Sites created for one browser type can very often look horrible when viewed through other browsers. This site allows you to avoid such embarrassment by "viewing your own site as your visitors do." I'd make it a point of testing out your website using this tool before launching any new sites.
10. WebAssist
Give your ecommerce site PayPal functionality without having to touch a line of code. PayPal is one of the most popular payment processors online so by including them as a method of payment could very well increase your sales in and of itself.
Go viral with Twitter ReTweets
Retweet or RT is when someone takes your Twitter message and tweets that same message to all followers in their own Twitter network. Getting readers to retweet your content allows the power of your network to take over and spread your message in the Twittersphere.
In other words: viral marketing.
Word of mouth or viral marketing is when your content is spread from person to person. Retweeting is the most powerful factor in something going viral on Twitter. It helps spread your message from one community to the next and has the ability to spread messages much faster than any other viral marketing tool.
It is free advertising and bloggers and business owners should do anything they can to encourage readers to retweet their content. Following steps can be taken to get more readers to tweet your content.
Announce your latest content
Always make sure to announce your latest content in a tweet, as that will make it easy for someone to “retweet” your message to their own network.
Make it easy for your readers to share
Remind your readers about Twitter on your site and make it easy for them to share your content on Twitter. You can use retweet plugin like TwitThis for this or you can create a simple link yourself. Use the following HTML link on your sitet:
http://twitter.com/home?status=
Put your tweet text after the equals sign. Remember to replace each space with “%20″.
When a reader clicks on this link, it will forward him/her to the Twitter home page
with the “What are you doing?” text box pre-filled with your message.
Start a Twitter competition
Two top-bloggers Shoemoney and John Chow have recently started Twitter competitions, where in order to enter a chance to win some prizes, you must retweet a message they have chosen. Looking at my own Twitter stream and searching the Twittersphere, it seems to be a very efficient way to spread your message and your link.
Be active on Twitter
Spend time on Twitter. The more active you are and the more followers you have, the more exposure your tweets will get and there will be a higher chance that someone will retweet your content.
Build relationships
You will never go wrong by talking to your target audience, other bloggers, and other power users on Twitter. By building relationships with people interested in your subject, you stand a better chance of getting your messages retweeted.
Write quality content
When someone retweets your tweet or your content it shows a high degree of content approval. Your tweet and your content was of such great quality and was so valuable to the person, that they decided to share it with their own Twitter network.
You must have useful, original and quality content. It is impossible to attract people to read your articles, if your articles are not useful. The same way, it is hard to get anyone to spread your link and retweet your message, if they do not enjoy and find your content valuable.
How do I track my retweets?
Simple! Use Twitter Search and search for the URL you have tweeted in your original tweet. This will show you all the retweets that used the same URL. Look at the number of followers for each person that has retweeted your link to get the number of the total exposure.
27 Self-Promotion Tips
Overcoming Self-Promotion Obstacles and Retuning Your Brain
1. If you have negative associations to sales and marketing, get busy curing yourself of “antimarketing-itis.”
2. Create new associations to self-promotion if the old ones don’t work for you.
3. Your brain is your greatest asset, so use it to adjust and fine-tune the way you think about and approach self-promotion.
Laying the Foundation and Offering Value
4. Realize that your music is a special gift that should be shared with the world.
5. Be driven by a burning desire to reach as many people as possible with your musical gift.
6. You have musical integrity because you are spreading the word about something you’ve created yourself that touches people and enriches their lives.
7. Self-promotion starts and ends with YOU. No one else understands your music and passion
more.
Understanding the ArtistArtist-Fan Relationship / Focusing on Fans
8. The artist-fan relationship is a two-way transaction. You get recognition, satisfaction and money. They get a valuable physical and emotional payoff.
9. You must understand how your music positively affects your fans – or what’s in it for them.
10. Focus on the benefit your music offers fans, not the category of music you play.
11. Avoid “middleman-atosis.” Focus on getting and keeping fans – not on the media, the industry, record labels, retail stores, distributors, etc.
12. Every morning, ask yourself: “What can I do today to connect with more fans?”
Reaching and Attracting Fans
13. Motivate fans to identify themselves and give you permission to show them more.
14. Create a brand identity by clearly communicating who you are, what you do and the unique
way you do it.
15. Use the VFW Hall Principle: Find at least one fan out of every thousand people.
16. Know who you are as a musician.
17. Be able to clearly describe your music in asfew words as possible.
18. Know who your fans are - based on the benefit you offer them.
19. Determine the best avenues to reach people most likely to become your fans.
Using Additional Fan-Building Tactics
20. You don’t have to be a household name to be successful.
21. Understand that fame and fortune are merely byproducts of being a good self-promoter consistently over the long haul.
22. Be consistent with your identity and selfpromotion message. Changing them too often will
confuse people.
23. Obliterate the “local” and “starving artist” mentality.
24. Cross-promote with other artists and combine your marketing impact.
25. Use testimonials and guarantees to help firsttime buyers give your music a try.
26. Exploit talk shows and position yourself as an expert related to your musical niche.
27. Do something every day to promote yourself and connect with fans.
E-Zine Directories
MySpace Marketing
Myspace is the most visited site on the internet. This gives its member profiles a very powerful tool. The first place you must post your links is on your own profile. I use the “About Me” box to talk about my products a little, but focus on
talking about you. The SEO benefit won’t change if you become a spammer.
You can use their search function to find others that deal with your niche and comment on their profiles. Make sure that the member profile you’re posting on allows html, or you’ll look like an idiot.
Myspace groups are a great place to post your links, as well. Respond to posts related to what you know, with good information and you’ll get traffic from it too.
There are many other social networks, but my favorite is Stumbleupon. Following the same tactics above will work great for Stumbleupon. Your profile page can contain links to your website. There are groups as well. Stumbleupon lets you drive targeted traffic to your websites by submitting them to a category and allowing other “Stumblers” to wander through to your page.
MyBlogLog is becoming one of the most used blogging tools online. Most major internet marketers are using it on their blog. Their widget actually shows pictures of who has been reading your blog. Again, this site consists of the same
types of interaction as Myspace. There are communities and your own profile page. This gives you the ability to gain great exposure for your blog.