It’s official: Google uses page speed as a ranking factor

[Ed: This is a guest post]

Last Friday, Google announced that they started to use site speed as one of the 200 signals that influence the position of a website in the search results:

“As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. [...]

We’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

Will your website rankings drop?

Google’s Matt Cutts says that the change will affect only some websites:
[Read more]

Don’t be surprised if you aren’t making any money from your blog

My headline may be sacrilegious in Internet marketing (IM) but there’s plenty of real-world proof to backup that statement. The road to online riches is littered with many starving and/or broke bloggers.

For a long time, many IM gurus have taught their students that all they needed to do was put up a blog, add fresh content regularly to attract loads of traffic and voila, the blogger would be able to stuff cash into your bank accounts from AdSense ads. That business model is dead.

Don’t believe me? Probably one of the best examples of this blogging model is Daniel Lyons, a talented blogger and the creator of “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.”

He created a fake persona and posted 10 or 20 items a day without much success until The New York Times ran a story revealing his identity. On that day, more than 500,000 people hit his site, by far his biggest day and earned him about a hundred bucks.

Over the course of that entire month, in which 1.5 million people visited his site, he earned a whopping total of $1,039.81.

Today, Daniel has a very different take on making money from blogging as he recently wrote in Newsweek, “I learned the hard way: while blogs can do many wonderful things, making huge amounts of money isn’t one of them.”
[Read more]

How to Monetize and Profit from Social Media

Probably the biggest question most entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, and work-at-home people have about social media is how to make money from it. Everyone is aware of the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn to name some, but very few know how to convert that into more traffic, leads or sales. The thing is that people are spending thousands of hours in social media, but aren’t making thousands of dollars from it.

These days you can’t escape hearing about how wonderful and cheap social media is. That’s great – I use it regularly. As a businessperson, I’m always looking for the best possible return on my investment of time and money. Most people understand the key role of social media but don’t know how to monetize it. Unless you have a good handle on that, investing more in social media isn’t a wise long-term strategy.

I have something that might help. [Read more]

Link Building and Social Bookmarking – a Powerful 1-2 Punch for SEO

Link building plays a vital role in every organic SEO strategy. And as things stand today, off-page SEO tactics carry the bulk of the weight as compared to on-page optimization techniques of the past. Link building is the primary weapon used in outranking your competition in search engines.

However, not all backlinks or inbound links are created equal. Google and other major search engines no longer consider simple reciprocal links valuable. As a matter of fact, the relevance and quality can significantly affect your page rank. Hang around bad backlink neighborhoods and you could be penalized. Focusing on high-quality and relevant one-way links is the name of the game now.

Link building strategies

There are several methods for one-way link building, they are:

• Directory submissions
• Article marketing and syndication
• Forum posting
• Guest blogging
• Press releases
• Paid links (see my recommendation at the end)
• Social bookmarking

This post focuses on the powerful technique of social bookmarking for link building. [Read more]

How to Exclude Categories from Navigation in WordPress

Most premium themes have two sets of main navigation, 1) Pages and 2) Categories. Two questions that come up often are:

1. How do I exclude categories from the navigation?

2. How do I change order from the default alpha order?

I’ve found several ways of accomplishing both tasks. Choose the method that you find easiest to implement.

Excluding categories:

• Simple method – don’t post anything to a category that you want to exclude. This may not be always feasible, for example, let’s say you have a category called Featured Content to create a slideshow on your home page. You may want to list Featured Content as a category in your navigation. [Read more]

Why Email Open Rates are Unreliable

It is a well-known fact that email is a powerful weapon in every Internet marketer’s arsenal. However, it is also a fact that email open rates have been steadily declining over the past few years. Does that mean email marketing, as we know it, is dead?

Not exactly. Most marketing gurus will tell you to write clever, benefits-laden subject lines to boost your open rates. After all, you can’t expect to sell anything to your list if very few people are opening your emails. Getting people to open your emails is of course your first goal but this singular focus on measuring open rates may be partly to blame for the bad rap email marketing has been getting lately.

Let me explain; the open rate metric is unreliable because it relies solely on a piece of code that requests a tiny, transparent image from the web server. So when a reader opens the email, the image is downloaded, and an “open” is recorded for that specific email. This is the only way all email marketing systems know how to track and measure open rates. So, what’s wrong with that? [Read more]

Video Killed the Content King

The headline is my clever attempt at spoofing the classic 1979 hit song “Video Killed the Radio Star” by a British band called The Buggles. The song celebrates the golden days of radio, describing a singer whose career is cut short by television. The song topped the music chart in several countries.

It was the first music video shown on MTV at 00:01 on August 1, 1981, the day the cable station was launched in the U.S. I found the video on YouTube, so here it is for those not old enough to remember and/or for those who just want a trip down memory lane. Enjoy! [Read more]

When to Seek Marketing Help from an Internet Marketing Coach

The Internet is bursting at the seams with all kinds of do-it-yourself marketing advice and help. That’s good and bad if you need marketing coaching for your online business.

While you have plenty of choices for free information, it takes an incredible amount of your time to sift through all that information and separate facts from hype.

First, you have to find the right answers to your specific marketing problem. Next comes the implementation, which can present its own set of new problems and then comes the waiting to see the results.

Often, things don’t work out the way you had planned and you are back to square one – seeking the right marketing advice. All you want to do is get up and running quickly so you can make money.

If you are feeling like you’re spinning your wheels, then may be it’s time to look for an Internet marketing coach to mentor you. The problem is that most marketing gurus charge you an arm and a leg for their services.

The good news is that you can invest in online marketing coaching one step at a time. Let me explain that concept in more details. [Read more]

How to Use Powerful Psychological Triggers in Your Sales Letter

Words have a significant influence on how we react to things. Let’s drill down a little deeper and look at some powerful psychological triggers or “hot buttons” that you can use to persuade your visitors to take action.

These techniques are known as psychological triggers because they trigger certain actions or thoughts in us subconsciously. These could be words, images or sounds. People use them all the time – not just in sales letters, but also in everyday life.

1. Power of association:
Association is a trigger where the person using it wants his/her audience to associate a certain emotion or  thought when using their product.

For example, a print ad or a TV commercial that shows a good-looking woman or a successful man driving a luxury car. Automatically you associate beauty and success with that image. It triggers a desire in you to want to own that same car for you to look as good or be as successful as the model. [Read more]

Online Coaching can be Lucrative Business

Making money by coaching others to solve their problems is big business. Just do a Google search for “online coaching” and you’ll find 590,000 results. There are all kinds of coaches out there, online executive coaching, online life coach, health coach online and the list goes on. There are lots of people earning a good living online by selling their coaching services, me included (see 1on1 coaching).

Who is a coach?

A coach is someone who takes his/her knowledge, experience and expertise in a particular field and teaches others to be successful in their own fields. It is not necessary for your clients to be in the same field as you, for example a leadership coach can help business owners in a variety of industries to be successful in their respective businesses. Or you could be an expert in business-to-business (B2B) copywriting and coach general copywriters to become successful specialists in B2B copywriting.

There are even coaches for coaches. A more experienced coach can teach new coaches how to master their own coaching skills. They are like mentors who are always there for you to answer questions and guide you when you are at a loss. There is very good money to be made in doing just that. [Read more]

Mr. & Mrs. Internet Marking, Meet Web Copywriting

If you are just starting out in Internet marketing or are struggling to promote your online business, it may time for you get familiar with web copywriting. Writing for an online audience is different from general copywriting or copy for the print media.

A picture may be worth a thousand words but it is the power of your words that will persuade your online audience to take action. The primary goal of web copywriting then is to promote your business or your expertise if you are a coach or a consultant.

Sure, you can outsource copywriting or buy Private Label Rights (PLR) articles for online content. However, you must understand the true cost of those options. Do you really want to risk the reputation and credibility of your business by depending completely on others? Their primary motivation is to sell your their services or PLR products and not grow your business.

Now that you understand why web copywriting is so important to marketing your online business, let’s get very familiar with it. [Read more]

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