EXPENSIVE MISTAKE MOVING MY BLOG - TECHNORATI.COM
In the last few months I've been heavily working on this site, shifting things around until I get comfortable with it. It's also called trying and testing things on the fly.

At the start of the process I put this blog on the main home page of the site. I hooked up all of the connects with technorati.com and many of the other blog services. www.technorati.com was pointed at www.express-marketing.com. A few weeks ago I shifted the blog over to www.express-marketing.com/blog.html.

YOU LOSE YOUR CREDITS IF YOU MOVE YOUR BLOG
The problem with that was I stopped getting credit for published articles or links back to the blog. All of the links back credits stay with the original page.

Now I am starting fresh again with my blogsite being at this location.
This is an expensive error as it cost me a few months of posting and backlinks etc. As I was trying different things, I'm not sure how I could have avoided this problem.

There are only theories on the best places to put your blog.

If possible, if you're going to set up a blog, make sure you put it in a spot from which it isn't going to move again.

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I LOVE INSPIRATIONAL STORIES
I was watching Rudy the other night. I was in the mood for an inspirational movie about a young fellow who beats the odds and fulfills his dreams. His story was later portrayed by Sean Astin in the movie "Rudy" in 1993.

See Rudy's official website

The imagery on the movie is pretty inspirational as they show young Rudy having a dream and then all of the activities he does to fulfill his dream. He has to change his mind set and the mindsets of people around him.

The parts on the movie where he is playing football against huge football players. He gets the stuffing knocked out of him over and over. He keeps getting back up for more punishment. His diligence is tremendously inspirational.

WEBSITE MARKETING IS LIKE RUDY'S ADVENTURE
In order to be successful in internet marketing you have to be like Rudy. Just coming back for more. Bloody and all.

The important thing that I enjoyed and was refreshed by was that, when people see that you're really serious about what you do and that you'll take the hits to achieve your goal, they'll get behind you and support you. Sometimes it takes a while for people to back you.

You just have to keep working at it. If you really believe in your goal, you just have to keep going for it.

Website marketing and internet advertising is not an easy task. If you don't market your site and products, nobody else will. You just have to keep getting out there and promoting yourself.

If you haven't seen the movie Rudy, look out for it at your local video store, or see it on TV. It's a worthwhile. movie to watch.

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Well it's that time again.
Getting out and visiting with the relatives. Leaving all this website marketing stuff behind for at least a few hours!!

I posted a new article for new articles writers here.
It's about writing articles, article submission and some of the problems new writers face when they're just starting.

All the best in this holiday season.

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Tim Berners-Lee started his blog on 2005-12-12. Tim Berners-Lee was the fellow who created the first internet browser which he called WorldWideWeb and later called his browser Nexus.

According to The WorldWideWeb browser

The first web browser - or browser-editor rather - was called WorldWideWeb as, after all, when it was written in 1990 it was the only way to see the web. Much later it was renamed Nexus in order to save confusion between the program and the abstract information space (which is now spelled World Wide Web with spaces).

This is a screen shot of the first browser.

You just gotta love this stuff.

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One thing I find, which is remarkably noticeable in these forums, is the lack of content relating to actual marketing. It's as if all the contributors believe the only way to rank at a search engine depends on some technical issues which need to be addressed. It's like, we'll do the SEO and then we'll have a look at your marketing!

Further

Awareness campaigns for new brands/sites, using niche marketing into verticals, especially for b2b sites works a treat. If you are a genuine marketer, there are dozens of methods of promoting a web site other than just sitting on your ass in the so called sandbox, waiting around for Google to do YOUR job.

Mike says market your product

There is so much talk about this search engine marketing technique and that website marketing idea.

I think it's important to market your product or service. If you work on behalf of clients, market their products and services. The people that spend the most time actively marketing are those who are going to survive.

While it's important to know how web pages work and website marketing/ programming works, it's more important to know marketing skills. I say this as I come from a marketing background first and then from SEO marketing second.

As I've mentioned over and over again people are going to buy from you if they know you, like you and trust you. You've got to know this from the depths of your sole. Fancy programming, blog spamming, cloaking etc is not going to magically get people to like you and trust you.

There are many more ways to advertise your website than just free google search engine results. I have to admit that prior to Google Update Jagger, all of my online marketing came from free search engine results. For the last several months, I've gone through the excruciating process of learning several new methods of internet marketing. No longer am I going to rely on free google search engine results!

I like to read these posts as they are entertaining. I like to read posts from real marketers because I know that they know how to market to people.

I like Mike Grehan's common sense comments in his blog.

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Recently I moved my blog page over to blog page from my home page.

The problem I was having was that my page was loading slowly. I did some tests with the load times and different components that I had loading.

As soon as I took the Technorati.com "blogs that link here link off"

the page loaded alot faster.

The problem is that technorati won't track your site if you don't have their code on your blog. It's good to have technorati loaded on your blog as it gets you more traffic.

So, I moved the blog page away from the home page and have all the blog toys and goodies on this page. My apologies if the page loads alittle slower than it should. I just hope that technorati adds some new servers soon.

The problem of success... technorati has done such a good job, but now they are too successful and it's bottlenecking all over.

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Brett Tabke is one of the best in SEO that I know of. His www.webmasterworld.com is one of the highest traffic seo forums on the net, if not the largest.

It seems that just for fun, he has put his blog in the Robots.txt file on his site.. It's amazing that people actually read Brett Tabke's robots.txt file.

It's an enviable position to have that much power and traffic. Currently WebMasterWorld has 292,000 pages listed in the google search results.

I like this comment from Brett Tabke with regards to being completely white hat, or being a little 'black hat' -

Does that mean we will be pure-as-the-driven-snow? No way - our job
is to generate traffic at a reasonable to low universal risk. That means getting listed - getting ranked - getting traffic - is only the
first step. *ANY* SEO policy MUST focus on ROI as well as
traffic acquisition. If your seo practices poison your ROI, then
what is the point? You can only trick your visitors for a certain
amount of time.

So... even one of the most respected names in the industry is in the business of "-getting listed - getting ranked - getting traffic no matter what he has to do. Brett Tabke also admits the fact that many blackhat techniques are going to go by the wayside, especially with google.

I find that encouraging. The whole idea is to get people to get on your site and stay on your site. The only way to do that long term is to give them value, value, value.

The hard earned luxury that Brett has is that he has enough traffic to try all sorts of things with his loyal visitors.

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Website development and SEO are like going to the Gym and doing heavy weight lifting...

It's extremely difficult, exhausting, frustrating, etc while you're doing it.
Afterwards, you feel great for having done the work out.

I've had this quote in my mind alot lately.

Also.. google just updated their backlinks, pagerank etc. It's a new , fresh google update.

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Monty's quote of the Day:
There is a new linker born... every second!
(This is SEO motivational talk to help us when we feel we're getting low on people linking to us.)

After my email blunder, I contacted each person who complained, all two of them.

I spoke at length with Rod Beckwith over the phone and told him that I wanted to introduce myself as I was selling his products on my site. As with the affiliate game, he had no idea who I was. The email blunder and phone call started a good relationship.

Rod Beckwith indicated that he's got alot of new products that he is going to introduce in 2006, so I'll be looking forward to seeing them.

The whole point of the internet or any business is to create good relationships with people. I thought I would turn my error around for the good and it worked.

Aside from that... i've been beefing up my pages on this site and putting more value into them.

rod beckwith email problem website development

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Well... when you eat, sleep, and breathe something sometimes you make dumb errors. I thought I would share mine with you.

As I was working through one of the techniques suggested in one of the ebooks I'm reading about developing your newsletter, it suggested that I send out emails , as in a reply sort of thing, to all of the people who have emailed me , in my 'inbox'.

So I thought, that's cool... it's not spammy... these are people who have sent me emails asking for something or replying to something, it's fair game.

What I forgot about is that all of my email addresses from my websites are funneled through one account. There was no way for me to tell from which websites these people were contacting me from. OUCH... this is embarrassing.

Being that I work in advertising in different industries with different websites promoting really different things, some people don't know my different identities.

I got a crank email from Rod Beckwith of Mr Joint Venture fame, whom I some software from. He sends out spamarrest emails to those who are trying to contact him. My auto emailer sent out an email to his spam arrest account and he thought I was a spammer. Geez... I feel stupid.

I got another angry email from a fellow who made a purchase from me from a different website, and wouldn't have a clue about this marketing site. He was happy with the service from the other website, but he didn't know who was sending him this "marketing" type email.

The lessons from today... Much unlike myself, please put in at least 3-5 minutes of planning with something before doing a campaign like this. It was pretty dumb, and I cancelled all subsequent "automatic" emails to people that send me email.

I always look at these types of things as a learning experience. I'm sure I'm going to do a few more idiotic things like this, however, sometimes you've got to do them in order to learn not to do them.

I am going to make sure that everybody I email from now on is actually from the website that they contacted me from. What a marketing concept. Market to targeted people. Don't market to people who signed up for something on a different website as they won't have a clue who you are.

I thought I would share this BONE HEAD mistake publicly so as to help people not do the same thing.

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I've been programming for the last few months steady, to build up this website. I thought I would take a break today and practice some of the techniques I've learned.

I won a copy of RoboForm over at WebMasterRadio the other day and by using it, found a product that I really like. Traditionally I have made it a point to memorize every last password that I use at every last website I log in to. I log into alot of websites each day.

RoboForm automatically and securely remembers my log in passwords and usernames, autofills the login forms and then hits the submit button for me. Before, I would cringe at having to go to a website because I had to 'manually' remember the login codes. Now I just have select the site I want to log in to and RoboForm does the rest. I was impressed with the software at this point!

Then I learned that RoboForm fills in all types of online forms.
(I didn't get it when I first visited RoboForm's website.)

Being a web-a-holic, I have considered myself pretty diligent at
logging into forms and posting at blogs, forums etc. Example, I like to post at alot of blogs. I usually have to enter in my name, email address and website EACH TIME.. RoboForm has a feature that automatically fills this information in for me every time. And as all blogs/ forms are different, RoboForm has a system that allows me to train it to look for words and phrases of the respective input boxes.

I was so excited, I couldn't sleep last night, thinking about all of the ways I could use this new tool! I've often thought about how to program this type of tool, but I just don't have the time nor inclination at this point. RoboForm is going to help me communicate, better, stronger and faster with all of the blogs, forums, directories i like to visit each day. Check it out for yourself...RoboForm Webpage

Aweber.com - Autoresponder Email is another product that I am starting to like. I am currently building a collection of valuable articles and information that I want to share with my subscriber base on a regular basis. All I have to do is enter these articles into my aweber account, make sure they're formatted properly, and then submit them.... These website marketing articles will be automatically forwarded to my subscribers .

While autoresponder technology is not new by any means, I'm starting to learn the value of it, and I do like aweber. Aweber
has been reliable to work with and gives me more tools and reporting than I initially needed. (They've even come out with an RSS email tool feed).

The reason I'm just now starting to use aweber's email autoresponder is that up until a few months ago, all of my websites were pretty well ranked with google. With google update jagger, my sites have lost the positioning that I enjoyed for years. I am now learning and exercising the "OTHER" internet marketing methods.

Aweber even has a 30 day free trial .. Aweber's website

New Website Marketing Articles Area

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I just added website marketing article directory

We're starting to collect website marketing articles that we feel will be good value for our readers.

These are written by authors who are knowledgeable in the field of website marketing.

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I came across this interview with Barry Schwartz - Rusty Brick of SERoundtable fame.
interview with rustybrick barry schwartz

I've met Barry at some of the webmasterworld conferences. He is very good and diligent at taking notes and keeping records of things.
That's why his blog is so well respected.

website map product categories

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I'm finally starting to get control with how I'm showing products on this site.

The following links are for marketers products which we are selling on this site. The linking is a much better format and was a bit of a learning curve to get it right.

Just to let you know... we DO sell products on this site. The products below are from some of the more popular authors and creators around.

Jeff Alderson
Jimmy D Brown
Michael Rasmussen
Chris Carpenter
Rosalind Gardner
Michael Rasmussen
The Rich Jerk

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Trying to market product when you're just starting out with internet marketing is a little frustrating. I've been going through this myself, lately. I've taken on the task of programming my websites as I want to get a closer control of how they're laid out and created.

The problem I'm having is, being a guy, I can only concentrate on one thing at a time!! Therefore, marketing takes a back seat when I'm learning a new programming skill.

Sound familiar?

The best thing to keep in mind when you're just first starting is that you've got give yourself some time. I've been relearning how php, mysql and html works together for about three months. The first month was spent just relearning the logic of the programming code. At that point I wasn't even thinking about keyword placement etc in my documents. Search engine optimisation wasn't even coming into play.

After the third month, I am now starting to memorize some of the programming language which is allowing me to be fluent in programming.

This weekend, I was looking at google to see how my pages were ranked. Much to my shock and horror, my pages weren't doing well. I then looked for the reasons and immediately noticed that I had completely missed some fundamental components of search engine optimisation on my pages.

Prior to programming these pages, I wrote them out manually. My pages have usually done well in the search engines and I spend a great deal of time making all pages search engine friendly.

As I'm getting a little more fluent in programming, I thought it might be a good time to look at the other aspects of page development. I can finally concentrate on other issues.

The point is... even though I consider myself somewhat of a veteran web page builder, I overlooked many of the fundamental principles of webpage development when I was learning a new skill. If you're starting off in website marketing, you're going to be flooded with a huge learning curve for the first several months.

Give yourself lots of time to learn everything.

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I've been developing this site lately, and have made extensive changes on an ongoing basis.

Lately I've noticed my site was loading a lot slower than I would like. I did some checking and ran into the W3C Markup Validation Service

This site analyzes your website's html code and looks for broken tags and invalid code of any sort.

I noticed that I had 18 code errors on my home page. These weren't big errors, however the browser still has to translate them and try to correct for them. That takes time...

Last night I went and corrected all 18 errors and Voila! my page started to load faster. I was surprised and thought I should pass that along to the readers.

At the webmasterworld conference in New Orleans, I heard talk that the search engines might penalize sites for having code mistakes in pages, ie... sloppily written pages. I can see why now. If a google spider is slowed down while trying to parse through your page which is full of errors, they might hesitate before coming back. This makes sense.

So... take a moment and validate your html code.

The best part about this is it's FREE!

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I've been trying to understand, so as to write about it, why internet marketing is so frustrating for people.

You hear about product reviews where people say this product works, or that product doesn't work. I've figured out why some product DON'T work.

As with all small businesses, online and offline, the initial setup stages are filled with many mini failures. You keep trying different things until you figure out what works.

There are three variables which you have to consider when looking at why your hard work fails:

1. Your level of experience - company maturity - in the market place, and how much credibility your company has in the market place.
   
2. Product maturity - which is how saturated your product is in the market place, how well do people know about the product and its benefits.
   
3. Industry maturity - how many competitors there are - how saturated is the market place with product, Overall experience of the market place.

It's a good idea to think about where you are in your market place. example... if you're a new inexperienced company working in a mature saturated market place, it may take you longer to succeed than if you were an experienced company in a new market place.

There are challenges and hurdles no matter what level you 're starting at in developing your business.

THE 80/20 RULE.
When starting a business there is no road map for success for sale at the local store.

When I look back at some of the businesses I've developed, there were many times when I spent weeks on a project that was later scrapped. I've done that several times over my career. I've spent time on developing things that at the time were a good idea. Later, I realized they weren't valuable and scrapped them.

YOU MAY HAVE TO SCRAP SOME OF YOUR WORK
Is it possible that in order to be successful you may have to scrap 80% of the things you build and keep the 20% of things that work? That's what I'm starting to think. R&D like everything else is a numbers game. Especially on the internet. you have to keep trying and monitoring different things until you find what works for you, your company, and your industry.

If you can become comfortable with knowing that you may have to scrap 80% of what you build, you will have an easier time of developing your business.

It is important to keep in mind that monitoring the success and failure of what you build is very important. The whole thing is to know when to scrap things and when to keep them.

The 80/20 rule of marketing and developing your website is a good one to remember.

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This post is one of the more honest analysis I've seen about creating spamlike scraper sites.

He's saying that a life expectancy of a scraper site is 3 months. Your expected revenue is $xx.xx for that time period.

Black hat spammers are often frowned upon. It is my strong opinion that if they could, the largest ad agencies on Madison avenue would be doing the same thing offline if they could.

Advertising is all about creativity. Black Hat spammers are some of the most creative people I know.

The only thing I don't agree with, is black hat spammers scraping white hat sites and getting the white hat sites banned. That's unethical.

---

Email Marketing Products

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I saw this on Oilman's blog.

I did a little more research and found this on CNN
CNN -Reporting MicroSoft, AOL or Google $20 Billion Dollar Deal?

NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - Investors looking for something that will move Time Warner's intractable stock price, stuck between $16 and $19 a share for two years, should expect to be disappointed -- again.

All fall there has been talk about its AOL unit doing a huge deal with either Microsoft or Google that would value AOL at at least $20 billion -- triple what analysts value it at now. But it's not going to happen. A deal with one of the two will get done and will likely be announced within two weeks. But it will be radically scaled back and likely won't move AOL's valuation needle on Wall Street at all.

Google already works with AOL with content

Currently, Google supplies search and search related advertising to AOL as a subcontractor. AOL gets about $300 million a year from that arrangement; Google gets about $100 million. AOL wants an even bigger take and more importantly, to get more of its content into Google's search index. Because of AOL's years as a subscription-only service, most of its pages are still hard for search engines to find -- even now that most of the content is free.

It's interesting when the big guys are battling. It's also scary. Every time these giants get larger, they also get more control of the net. It makes it more challenging for the mom and pop internet businesses to make a go of it.

I guess we'll see as this mystery deal unfolds

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Internet marketing with PPC just got even more difficult.

Google Adwords - Quality Score

I've been working pretty heavily with Adwords in the last few days getting brushed up on it.

With this Quality score they're even putting an algorithm on pay per click ads. This is much different than the old days where you bid on a term and you got placed at the rank you bid at.

I spoke with a client rep at google yesterday and she was briefly explaining Adwords Quality Score. The way she explained it, you may get a better rank than a higher bidder if your keyword, adgroup ad and your landing page are better quality than a higher bidder.

That puts the onus on every body to go and rework their ads if they were just throwing in tons of keywords and crappy ads.

It's a continuous tweeking process.

One the one side, it's good that google is giving the customer better results. On the other side, it's creating a great deal of work for the thousands of advertisers.

One thing you have to say for google is that they continuously innovating and improving!

Links of people who sell Software and ebooks
Links of people who sell Software and ebooks
Links of people who sell Software and ebooks

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