Michael Campbell has released the latest issue of ‘Internet Marketing Secrets’ Newsletter. The featured article is titled “The secret to top search engine rankings”. [‘Internet Marketing Secrets’ Newsletter]


Michael Campbell has released the latest issue of:

‘Internet Marketing Secrets’ Newsletter

Issue #134 – January 10 2008

In this issue

1) Annual Survey – Tell Me What You Want!

2) The Secret to Top Search Engine Rankings

3) Why Having Too Many Links is Dangerous

4) How to Redesign with Eye Tracking in Mind

5) Which Marketing Gurus Can You Really Trust

6) Why Web2.0 Isn’t a Fad and Won’t Fade Away

7) Over 200 Hours of Study Leads to this Conclusion

All this and a lot more in this issue of IMS. Enjoy!

Internet Marketing & SEO News

Annual Survey – Reader’s Choice

It’s your favorite time of year. It’s the annual survey, where YOU get to choose the format for this newsletter and what goes in it.

Honestly my friends, the only reason I produce this newsletter is for you. To answer your questions and provide insight into the latest and greatest internet marketing strategies.

Now it’s your turn to tell me what you want. It’s a short survey with 10 simple questions, that will take you less than five minutes to answer.

There are three cash prizes… 200, 100 and 50 dollars, but you’ll need to complete the survey in order to win. The winners will be selected based on the quality of the info they provide in the survey.

Survey: http://www.cdzn.com/2008

Cast your vote and let your voice be heard. The future of this newsletter and what goes in it are in your hands.

(Contest closes on January 15 2008 at midnight PST. Maximum 250 entrants. Winners will be notified by email.)

The Secret to Top Search Engine Rankings

If you’re familiar with the story, “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Dr. Spencer Johnson, you already know that when change happens, you either adapt or perish. If your cheese supply dries up, you have to go looking for new cheese.

The gist of the story is; change happens and the cheese keeps moving. And like the little mice in the story, you must change and adapt, if you want to be keep ahead of the pack.

The search engines are a lot like the cheese. Google in particular – with over 55% of all search – have changed the way they spider and index content. The so called web 2.0 properties like social news and bookmarking sites, and any site containing RSS feeds are spidered quickly and often.

To those who say web2.0 is a fad or a buzzword, it’s time to stop the denial and get over it. Sometimes things change and they’re never the same again.

According to Dr. Spencer Johnston, “If you do not change, you can become extinct. Get out of your comfort zone and adapt to change sooner. Take control, rather than let things happen to you.”

According to Forrester Research, “Stop the denial. Get over it, get on with it, figure it out. Or end up in the dustbin of history.”

Once upon a time, it would take up to three months to get properly spidered and indexed. Now that time has been reduced to just a few hours. (Google’s real goal is to simultaneously spider of the web.)

Over the past months I have achieved great SEO results. But the question everyone seems to be asking is… “Will it stick?” Will the marketing tactics that I’ve been using of late, lead to lasting search engine results?

Well… the way that Google works, is to spider, then index, then sort. It’s weathering the sorting process that I was concerned about.

But here it is, nearly three months after my first round of marketing to the social sites, and I still own between three to six of the top 10 spots, for every single keyword phrase that I targeted.

Here’s the secret to top search engine rankings…

First I make a post to my blog. Second, I submit a little

snippet of the post to sites like Digg and Propeller. I then bookmark my snippet pages on sites like Delicious and Reddit. I then ping the bookmark RSS feeds using sites like Autopinger and Pingomatic.

What? You thought it had to be more complicated than that? It really isn’t. Using this simple process, my original blog post gets top search rankings that last. Very often,pages like my Propeller snippets and Reddit bookmarks are top ranked as well.

Of course you’ll come up with your own tricks and tips over time. (Like Reddit is nofollow until you get at least one other vote for your bookmark. Simply set up a second account – using a different browser – and vote for your bookmark to make the link normal.)

The real trick to getting top rankings, is to target a phrase in the middle of the long tail, with 100K or less competing pages. And then, the most important thing of all, the title of the original blog post and the titles of your snippets, must contain your search phrase. So have fun with it and don’t get too bogged down in traditional organic SEO methods, using one website and competing for just a couple of keywords. (You can still do it, just don’t obsess over it.) Add a blog to your site,sprinkle in a little social marketing, and each post can be a potential top 10 listing.

Remember that search engines are like the cheese. They keep moving and changing the way they operate. Few SEO gurus understand this. They’re still stuck back in 2005 with the Google Sandbox, link building campaigns and PageRank.

Web2.0 is not a fad, or a buzzword. Web 2.0 was coined in 2005 by Tim O’Reilly, so if your instructors and gurus are calling it a fad or a buzzword, think of it this way…they’re only three years behind the curve. That’s some pretty moldy cheese 😉

Call it what you want. It hasn’t been this easy to get top rankings since 1998. And the sooner you add these strategies into your marketing mix, the sooner you’ll be getting top search engine rankings.

Amazon Has Buckets of Storage for You

All sorts of large and small companies continue to migrate to Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), as an affordable way to host large media files. A few benefits of the service are secure backups, reliable video streaming, unlimited storage, and access to your data from anywhere in the world.

All you need is an Amazon Web Services account. Go here to set one up, if you don’t have one:

Click: https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/registration/index.html

The only trouble is, Amazon provides the affordable storage, but not the software to access it. Thankfully there are many companies creating control panels and widgets to access the Amazon Web Services. You can find a partial list of the software here:

Click: http://solutions.amazonwebservices.com/connect/index.jspa

Then look for the link that says Amazon Simple Storage Service to find gems like, Bucket Explorer and Data Bucket Pro. They’ll help you take full advantage of Amazon’s storage service.

But if you’re really on a budget, look for an upgrade from your favorite FTP software provider. Mine just added an S3 module, so I can access my Amazon storage using a familiar interface.

All that said, I’ll continue to store my podcasts on Libsyn.com, as I’ve been very happy with their service. They provide me with a blog and RSS feed, to get my podcast submitted to the iTunes directory. It also pings the popular podcast feeds to let them know I’ve created a new show.

And since iTunes has grown into my third largest traffic source, bringing in more visitors than Yahoo! and MSN combined, I certainly don’t want to fix what ain’t broke. 😉 But for all my bulky video storage and backups, it looks like Amazon’s S3 might be the way to go.

Google Video Sitemaps

This tip came to me via Ken McCarthy. It was just a quick note where Ken said, “A colleague sent this to me. Looks like it might be important. It appears to be comprehensive info about Google, video and SEO.”

Click: http://www.marcliron.com/google-video-sitemaps.html

It turns out that it is VERY important. According to Google, “When you submit a Video Sitemap to Google, we will make the included video URLs searchable on Google Video. In addition, your video may also appear in other Google search products.”

Click over to the page and read the complete story by Marc Liron, a Microsoft MVP. You’ll find out how Google Video Sitemaps can make it easier for users to find your videos.

How to Redesign with Eye Tracking in Mind

Here’s a real meaty post from Seth Godin’s blog. It’s a summary of all the lessons learned, from the various eye tracking studies. For example, did you know that text ads are the most effective, or that bullet lists hold reader attention, while large blocks of text are avoided?

Although eye tracking doesn’t tell us why individuals do what they do, these studies do tell us the habits of the majority. So if you want to redesign your website to please the masses, tape this list to your monitor, and take a good hard look at your site, before you start your next layout.

Eye Tracking Rules from Seth Godin’s blog: Click:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/11/eye-tracking-ru.html

Internet Marketing And SEO FAQs

Using the Nofollow Attribute to Cut Down on Links (Why Too Many Links Can be Dangerous)

Question: I’ve spent a lot of time doing SEO on my site… or at least I think I’m performing SEO… LOL :-). I’ve been able to rank on the first page for a few keywords. So I’m doing some things right, with keywords in title, meta, description, and by placing keywords throughout the pages.

But now I’m worried that I have too many links. How do I reduce the amount links? How do I nofollow them? And how to aim that link juice? Can you show an example?

Answer: Yes, I agree. You have too many links. I counted 108 of them. They are in your archives, categories, sidebars, ads… even to your SEO company and website designer. Unless you have some contractual obligation to those dudes, nofollow those suckers.

(Tip: Google says you should never have more than 100 links on a page, or you risk being labeled a link farm.)

Right now you have what’s called a “ball” linking structure. Every page links to every other page. It’s not very effective at conserving and spreading the link juice (PageRank, link reputation and link popularity). What you want is more of a pyramid structure.

(To understand the concept behind the linking structures and nofollow idea, read Revenge of the Mininet and Dynamic Linking… both are available from my downloads page. The diagrams are solid, but ignore the fancy Javascript and just use the simple nofollow attribute instead.)

Mininets: http://www.internetmarketingsecrets.com/downloads

In a nutshell, nofollow links allow people to click the links, but search engines don’t crawl them. They are ignored. Simply add the rel=”nofollow” tag *anywhere* inside the anchor text for the link.

To see if you’ve done it correctly, I suggest getting a plugin for Firefox called SearchStatus. You can set it to highlight all the nofollow links, so they are easy to see, on any site that you visit. It also shows PageRank, Alexa traffic rankings, backlinks, link counts and a whole lot more.

SearchStatus: http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus

In my typical affiliate marketing sites, all the links leaving the home page are nofollow, except the one leading to the sitemap. The sitemap has normal links to everything, except the home page. Then on the internal pages, everything is nofollow except the link back to the home page. It creates a feedback loop, concentrating all the link love back to the home page.

You should be getting a lot of traffic from your internal pages. For example, over on your cooking site, you are #10 on Google for basic polenta. And the page shows only three incoming links. If you can get a few more deep links to this internal page, you’d climb even higher in the rankings.

You could write a little article on making polenta. Tell a story around it’s origins and how it evolved. Foodies are very interested in this sort of thing. I’m sure that after every cooking show which mentions polenta, there are a flood of new searches.

When you post the article on the directories or Web2.0 sites, deep link to your polenta page. Be sure to monetize it with rice cookers, fancy pans and other high end goods. (I’d skip the AdSense pennies and go after affiliate program revenue instead.)

Go sign up for Nichebot right away. Do a quick lookup of any keyword, before you start making a page.

Nichebot: http://www.cdzn.com/nbt

For example, within 10 seconds I found that the phrase “easy polenta recipes” gets 25 daily searches, but there’s only five competing pages… that’s the kind of title tags you should be going after.

Will the Web2.0 Fad Fade Away

Question: On the subject of using Web2.0 for SEO. Are you *really* telling me that Google is throwing out its Pagerank system, in favor of the latest items from Newsvine, Digg etc, which appear at #1 in the search results? I wonder if they’ve got a built-in “fade time” and disappear after a week?

Answer: Er… I’m not saying that Google is throwing out it’s PageRank algo. You can still put up a site, announce it to directories, get some incoming links and wait three months to show up in the rankings for a couple of keywords. What I’m saying is “change happens” and they’ve “moved the cheese.”

Certainly there will be cheese doing it the old way. But if you want a lot of new cheese and you want it really fast… post to your blog, announce on the social news sites, then bookmark those posts, and ping the RSS feeds.

The way that Google works, is crawl, index and sort. It’s weathering the sorting process over the “long term” that remains to be seen.

12 weeks have passed, but when I search Google for one of my first keyword phrases, I hold down six out of the top 10 spots. Same deal for a six week old one, I still have the #1, #2, #6 and #9 spots.

Even if they do not stand the test of time, it’s easy enough to make another blog post and run through the 20 minutes of web 2.0 promotion, to snag several top 10 spots all over again. The cheese keeps moving and so do we… if we want to find it and enjoy it.

Which Marketing Gurus Can You Really Trust

Question: I was thinking of getting the “brand name course” from “brand name guru.” Do you think it’s a good idea?

Answer: I get this question in one form or another, almost every single day. I’ll tell you a little secret.

I was listening to a podcast the other day. It was an interview with a ghostwriter. She has written dozens of PDFs and How To Guides for several “big name” marketers. It sounded like a who’s who of the online marketing world.

What’s scary, is that she admitted “not fully understanding” what she was writing about. The marketers – who didn’t know any better – slapped their names on the finished work and sold it to the masses. No wonder there’s so much confusion out there!

So the next time you’re tempted to buy something, realize that the guru “who wrote it” may not have had any part in the project, other than to glue their label on it. It’s very possible that the person who wrote the ebook has only 5-10% more knowledge than you do.

The first thing I suggest you do, is to ask yourself a couple of questions. Do you trust the person that’s trying to sell you the course? Do they have a solid reputation? Do they use the product themselves. Are they a member of the private site? If the answer to all the above is yes, then it may be a good course.

But first email the proprietor and see if you get an answer back. Ask them point blank if they wrote the material, or if it was done by a ghostwriter. If they hem or haw, hide from you, or don’t give you an honest answer straight away, don’t buy it.

And finally, the most important question. Can you apply this course immediately to your existing business model? If not, resist the temptation to buy it. It’s just new and shiny and full of promises for a glimmering moment. Just shake it off and maintain your focus.

Every time you switch business models you lose momentum. If you stop applying power to your goal and keep trying for “quick hits” you’ll never build a successful, sustainable business model.

So look deep in your heart and ask yourself, can this new thing add to your existing momentum – not start it – but propel you further on your chosen path. If yes, then invest in the course, private site, software, to add more thrust, so you can escape the gravity of mediocrity and achieve the stratosphere of excellence where only the best can survive.

Featured Article

Over 200 Hours of Study Leads to this One Conclusion (What is my fate, my fortune, my future, my destiny?)

In his recent book, “The Dip” Seth Godin explains that anything worth doing will have a “Dip” associated with it. Essentially the dip is the long lag phase, between starting something, and becoming the best in the world at it.

In the beginning we are full of energy and enthusiasm. We have beginners luck and all seems to be going well.

Then comes the dip. The long hard process of becoming the best at what we choose to do.

Seth says, “The marketers who get rewarded are the ones who don’t quit. They hunker down through the Dip and galvanize and insulate and perfect their product while others keep looking for yet another quick hit.”

“Your commitment to the market needs to be unquestioned. It’s much cheaper and easier to build your foundation in one one market than to flit from one to another until you find quick success.”

“Decide once and for all, whether you’re in a market or not. And if you are, get though that dip.”

In Jim Collin’s, “Good to Great” he tells us of the Hedgehog concept. To do one thing really well, instead of jumping from one strategy to the next.

Jim tells us to draw three intersecting circles. One represents “passion.” Two is “best at.” And the third is the economic model or “revenue.” Everything you do, must coincide where these three circles intersect.

You must be passionate about your topic. You must be capable of being best in the world at it. And you have to be able to monetize it.

Make all business decisions based on the intersecting three circles. Only accept new technology and adapt your strategies if they are in agreement with the center of the circles and they add to your momentum.

Earl Nightingale’s “The Strangest Secret” tells us, “You become what you think about all day long.” In “Lead the Field” he tells us that true wealth comes from the service of others and that your attitude determines your success.

Earl tells us that our brains are like an empty fields, tilled and ready to be planted. The dirt doesn’t care if you plant weeds or a crop, both will grow with equal vigor.

Just like the dirt, your brain doesn’t care if you watch reruns, or if you feed it with wisdom. It’s up to you! You are the only one that can make a conscious decision to invest your time learning, rather than spending your time watching TV.

In Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret” we learn about the law of attraction. That we get what we think about, and attract what we want, so long as we do it with an attitude of gratitude. Our spirits have infinite power and we can will positive changes into our lives.

In Jeffrey Gitomer’s “Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude” he tells us that positive attitude is the key to all success. Jeffrey says that, “If you become best for yourself first, you can easily be your best and do your best for others. Achieve attitude for yourself, and the rest of the most important people in your life will benefit forever.”

Jim Morris posted on NicheBot blog, “Do not buy another product until you read this.” Jim tells us, “Take what product, service or software you currently have that is proven in the marketplace and develop a skill with it. Master it.”

“And then… only once you have developed and mastered the skill of focusing and using whatever product, service or software you’ve purchased, should you go on to purchase another product.”

Which inspired me to leave the following comment on his blog…

“Becoming successful means quitting. You must have the courage to quit everything that you’re mediocre at doing, to focus on your core competencies, until you are the best in the world at what you choose to do.”

“If you persevere beyond where the reasonable person would quit, due to lack of talent, lack of commitment, or weakness of spirit, you will be rewarded by achieving expert status. And once you’re there, you can never stop learning or growing, for your competition is just one click away.”

“So take this advice and focus on what needs to be done, not just in the future, but what needs to be done tomorrow. Before you stop work for the day, write down five things that you absolutely must achieve tomorrow. Then number them in the order of their importance.”

“When tomorrow comes, focus on your list. If distractions come, ask yourself, if you can apply this news immediately to your business model, will it save you time, or generate more revenue in your niche, right now today? If not, dismiss it quickly, file it away, and get back to focusing on your tasks.”

“And finally, don’t forget to reward yourself for every achievement along the way. At the end of the day, look at the list, of what you’ve achieved and realize, your goal will come one successful achievement at a time.”

In Ecclesiastes, Solomon wrote, “Then I realized that it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given him – for this is his lot.”

“Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work – this is a gift of God. He seldom reflects on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart.”

I’ve invested over 200 hours in the past couple of months, reading, listening and learning the wisdom of others. All this has lead me to one conclusion which I’ll share with you now.

You must step out of your comfort zone. You must endure the short term pain of change, rather than dying a slow death of mediocrity and inevitably becoming obsolete. You must adapt, learn, grow and change, rather than endure the familiar dull numbing pain, that’s eating away at the very days you have left on this planet.

Think of the three Good to Great circles. What are you passionate about? What can you be the best at, and truly enjoy doing while making a comfortable living at it?

Realize that there will be a dip. That it will take time and perseverance to get through it. The bigger the dip, the bigger the reward on the other side. Just remember that everything you do, will be infused with the energy and attitude with which you do it.

Your positive attitude is critical to success. You must practice and work on it every single day of your life, if you want to attract the kind of success, spouse and wealth that you want. You must be joyous and love what you do, to stay occupied with gladness of heart.

Do not reflect on the days of your life, for the past only had one job… to get you where you are now. You have the ability to reprogram your life, your work, your meaning in life, starting today, right now.

There’s a blank slate starting tomorrow. What will you write on it? Where will you go. What will you do? It’s your future. And it’s entirely up to you!

….

That’s it for this issue my friend. Thank you for reading. We’ll chat again soon. Until then, here’s wishing you all the best for online success.

Michael Campbell

P.S.

Don’t forget to fill out the survey and tell me what you want from the newsletter this year. You could win a cash prize for your efforts! Not only that, it’s your chance to ask questions and get the answers, that will help you overcome obstacles and achieve success.

Take the Survey: http://www.cdzn.com/2008

P.P.S.

Did you like this newsletter? Why not forward it to your friends, coworkers, classmates and anyone else that you think might enjoy it. Thank you for your continued support.

IMS Blog ==> http://homepage.mac.com/dmcorp/index.html

Legal stuff…

Copyright 2006 Dynamic Media Corporation. All rights reserved world wide. All trademarks and servicemarks are property of their respective owners.

The information contained in this newsletter is the opinion of the author based on his personal observations and years of experience. Neither the author or publisher assume any liability whatsoever for the use of or inability to use any or all of the information contained in this publication. Use this information at your own risk.

Privacy Policy: I never sell, rent, trade or lend any information about my subscribers to anyone, for any reason, whatsoever. I assure you that your privacy is respected and well protected.

Michael Campbell

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