Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Backlink Experiments / Update 1/27/2015

I realize that I haven't been contributing very much to this blog as of late, so I decided that I would get this last post out tonight and bring everyone up to speed with the things I am currently working on. The gardening blog is doing well. I am currently in the process of writing some KILLER content that I can use to get backlinks.


Backlinking is a real challenge that can really occupy a large amount of your time. The process I am using right now, is to ask fellow bloggers in my niche a specific question, then I am compiling a "giant" list of answers, and everyone gets credit that participated (in form of a link) and then they will hopefully link back to me. I have scored a couple of high DA / PA links this way, right off of blogger in fact. I also scored some Wordpress.com links which are always high DA as well.

I want to let you in on a secret about backlinks that a lot of people fail to tell you. When you get a link from a site, or if you even payed for someone to run a program and generate a lot of links for you, you have to really pay attention to what you are doing. Just because they linked to your site, doesn't mean that you are necessarily going to see any benefit (or any determent either). You need to be sure when you are checking your backlinks that:
  1. Your link is indeed "dofollow"
  2. That there aren't TONS of other links on the page.
  3. That your backlink, is indexed by Google. 
That last part is very important.  That's the part they fail to tell you, especially if you are paying for links on a place like Fiverr.  You can get 40,000 links for around 10 dollars, but they are all garbage links, and 99% of them wont index, and the ones that do get index will actually hurt you.

Google Webmaster Tools Shows 12,041 Inbo by Frederick Md Publicity, on Flickr
Photo Credit:

Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License   by  Frederick Md Publicity 

If you do choose Fiverr, you need to look for people that do pyramid building, and manual .edu and .gov sites.  They are going to give you the best results and have the best chance of getting indexed.

Another service I am using to get backlinks is through social media bookmarking.  There is a service called SocialADR that will submit your bookmarks to over 25 social media sites at once. It is really powerful because each time you submit something, it gets posted by a different user, so the bookmarks are going up all over the world in a very natural way. I currently pay for the 20.00 a month program which gives me enough credits and bookmarks to handle my small amount of websites. You may wish to purchase more if you have more sites, or if you have clients. I spoke with the customer service at SocialADR today, and they told me that the sites take about 1 month to get indexed. They said that they "ping" each url once a day, and they also use an automated indexing too. I don't know what the success rate is, but I will let you know in about a month when I can see if I either got backlinks that are dofollow from high PA and DA social bookmarking sites, or if it was a failure. I think for 20 bucks it was worth a shot to try for the backlinks. The actual traffic you receive from the bookmarks is really small.

Monday, January 19, 2015

One on One Mentoring via Skype

Regular Price: $40 per 30 mins...1 on 1 Skype mentor call.


voicesmicro@gmail.com
(352) 519-4855

Now that I have officially graduated into "professional" status by actually hiring a real life employee (not a virtual assistant, a real person), I'm here to give you a special offer that's running for a limited time only. I am just starting up this marketing company, and even though I have a couple of clients already, I thought what a great time this would be to run a "mentor" campaign, for 1 on 1 Skype calls. They will last 30 minutes, and the charge will be the rock bottom price of 40 dollars. I figure this way, people can put a small amount of trust in me for 40 bucks and not really risk losing the farm, and I can then offer them a great value by coaching them on whatever topics they want to learn about. It's a win-win for everyone involved. I get a little bit of help starting out my marketing business, and my guests get a little bit of help working towards their dreams! Sounds like a great idea to me.

Mentor Skype Call 40 Dollars 30 Minutes
Photo Credit: Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License   by  Dana Lookadoo - Yo! Yo! SEO 
Here are some of the topics we can cover (this is not an all inclusive list you can ask me whatever you want, internet marketing related or not!) It's your money, and I will do my absolute best to put together an informative package of information for you.

 Blogging Software

  • Tumblr 
  • Blogger (Blog Spot)
  • Weebly
  • WordPress 
  • Plugins
  • SEO
  • Traffic  
Of those softwares, I obviously have the most experience with WordPress.  We can discuss the installation and actually go over your install to make sure it is set up exactly how it should be to put you in the best possible position to get good rankings in Google, and crush the traffic. You will benefit from my experience here, because you can begin to rank decently for keywords that you pick in 4-12 weeks, instead of 12 months which it would probably take you on your own with no guidance (that's not an exaggeration, it will take you many months, if you actually rank at all). 

Content / Social Media Cycle
Photo Credit: Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License   by  toprankonlinemarketing 

Content Marketing

All about content marketing from how to write content for different situations, to how to mass produce content to put all over the place.  I will share with you all the tips and tricks I have developed over the past two years.  Again, this information is invaluable and will save your TONS of time.

Social Media Marketing

All the major social media channels.  I will tell you which ones to set up, and how to get them to have a following within a matter of weeks.  You can start this and see results very quickly and once you get into it, it actually becomes really fun.

SEO

I will give you my one trick to get SEO done in a matter of seconds.  You follow these guidelines and every single post or page you make will be fully optimized to be in the best position to get a high ranking in Google.  That will take us to the next spot, that I get hundreds of questions on per month:

SEO Backlinks by india7network, on Flickr
Photo Credit: Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License   by  india7network 

BackLinking

OMG HOW DO YOU DO IT!?!?! CAN I PAY FOR LINKS?!?!? What do I need to do?  ... Just calm yourself, I Will teach you young grasshopper.  It is a vital element of ranking well in Google now-a-days, but I have some tips and tricks that can get you moving up in the ranks quickly, and get the ball rolling to move over to the "hard link farming" that is required when you run a blog.  Some mentors will misinform you and just say "if you write really fantastic content, people will link to it naturally and you wont have to worry about it" and that is a golden rule that is very true... however the problem that will inevitably present itself is, when you are first starting out, and only 3 people a day are visiting your site, how the heck are you supposed to go viral with a blockbuster piece of content? 

I will show you how, this one ties into SEO and the Social Media Marketing, but it all works together and once again there is a "formula" or a system that you have to follow and if you can stay disciplined you can make this as painless as possible.

I can also talk with you about PPC and Facebook Ads.  I am very close to being AdWords Certified, which will get me that much closer to being a "Google Partner"..  Here's a little secret about me, that you probably didn't know, but when I was a child, I wanted more than anything to work for Google.   This is my big chance, and it's going to be the best possible situation ever!

Ebay Explained 2006 (KLCC) by liewcf, on Flickr
Photo Credit: Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License   by  liewcf 

eBay

I was a top rated seller for years, I have had several eBay accounts and I have sold just about anything you can imagine on eBay.  You wanna eBay? I am your man, I know a TON about it, and I can give you a million little tips and tricks that are going to save you time, and more importantly MONEY. I can also give you tricks that will slingshot you into top rated seller status.  When it comes to eBay I should raise my price because this discounted offer is going to kill me with how much great information I plan to give away!

Non Computer Related Stuffs

I can even mentor you on non-computer related stuff.  How am I able to set up a marketing business? Run my Spring eBay store for plants/fertilizers.  Manage 3 of my own websites as well as 3 more for clients right now, and maintain a 4.0 average in college?  

I know a secret.  This secret has been around for thousands of years, but it was protected by the elite and they didn't want anyone to know what this secret was.  They wanted it for themselves and now the cat is out of the bag.  I know it, and I would LOVE to share it with you. 

 It will change your life, as it changed mine.  There is nothing in this world I can't do, and you can be exactly the same.  If nothing else, this little bit of information I will give you in the call is definitely worth 40 dollars.  Go ahead and roll the dice, this is the kind of thing that will make the rest of your days on planet earth wonderful.  I thank God (or whomever you worship) every day for this wonderful miracle of life.  If you aren't religious, or don't follow God, it doesn't matter, you can still use this secret, it's that powerful.


CALL TO ACTION!  


The fact that you are interested in getting a mentor, speaks loudly about the things you want to accomplish.  Take that 40 dollars, and let it ride on me, I promise I wont let you down.  We can get your dream machine running nice and steady.  You can do it....(and I can help!)  Just shoot me an email at voicesmicro@gmail.com ( you have to cut and paste it) or call me at (352)519-4855 and we will set up a time and get you going.  This discounted rate is only good through the weekend, so book your time now before it is too late and the price goes up! (this is a 40 dollar value, 75% off at 40 dollars for thirty minutes!)

Friday, January 16, 2015

The Most Twitter Followers In The World! - Free Social Media Marketing

How do we achieve the most twitter followers in the world!?!? Well we probably don't but I can give you some insights into how to build a huge twitter following, and not only will it be huge, it can be highly relevant and very free!

First and foremost I want to stress that "free" & "internet marketing" do not always go hand in hand. While there are a lot of things that you can do in internet marketing for free, it's not always the best way to go about a particular task.  I understand what being bootstrapped is, and when I first started this journey a few years ago, I did everything I could to find as many free options as possible.

The Most Twitter Followers in The World
Photo Credit:
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License   by  Slava Murava Kiss 

I am going to share with you my experience with Twitter, because this is actually one of the internet marketing social media strategies that can absolutely increase your exposure exponentially, and what's even more important, is that this is one of the rare marketing opportunities that is actually free.

There is software that exists for twitter that will allow you to do different things.  Some of them automatically reply to people that follow you.  Others will automatically follow people that follow you, and there are also programs that will tell you all the people you follow, that don't follow you.  All these things are useful, but most of them require that you pay a subscription fee.  In my marketing company there are programs that we do pay for, however for the interest of staying free, I am only going to talk about using Twitter directly with no extra programs, so that you can accomplish these goals 100% free.



The Most Twitter Followers In The World - Step By Step

The first thing you need to do is set up an account with twitter.   Make sure that your nickname and your information all follows the website that you are going to promote.  We recommend having one twitter account for every website you plan to promote.  This will allow you to brand the twitter account to match the website, and will allow you to directly contact twitter followers with the intention of providing outstanding customer service in return for value.

Twitter is all about the relationships that you build.  I am going to give you a few steps here to get the ball rolling:

The Most Twitter Followers In The World, Twitter Logos
Photo Credit:
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License   by  Rosaura Ochoa 

  1. Create a branded twitter account to promote one and only one website.
  2. Search for people, brands and companies that are directly related to your niche (for example if you are in the marketing / building a Wordpress niche, you could go to @patflynn because he is a dominant player in that market).
  3. Click on his/her/their followers.  Starting at the very top of the list (which will be the most recent to follow him/her), start following all the people down the list.  The great thing about twitter is that you don't have to know someone to follow them.  These people are already pre-screened to want information about niche marketing.  
  4. Be sure to greet and open a dialogue with all the people that start following you back.
  5. Tweet at regular intervals throughout the day, providing links to your site, links to relevant sites in your niche, and you can also use famous quotes.  This will establish credibility and give your users value.
Remember that your goal with twitter is to find profitable customers.  So by going to a person in your niche that is an authority, and following the most recent followers of that person, you are picking people to follow that you already know are interested in your niche.  As you follow these people, there will be people that follow you back by default.  Remember to greet everyone that follows you back.

Don't start the conversation with an immediate sales pitch for your website.  Your first message should include 0 links. That is just silly, and spammy at best.  Remember that these are real people, and even though they are potential customers, you want to establish a friendship with these people first.

The Most Twitter Followers in the World, Twitter Bird High Resolution
Photo Credit: 
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License   by  Paul Snelling 

Your first goal is 100 followers.  You don't want them to be just blind followers, you want 100 people that you have had discussions with.  You have used these 100 people to establish credibility and also to obtain value from them in the form of defining what their wants are.  This information is priceless.

Once you have 100 followers, continue to follow people by finding them on relevant accounts to your niche.  Sometimes you have to think outside of the box a little bit to determine where to follow.  I have a client that sells high end items for dogs.  These items are by no means a staple, and are strictly discretionary to the consumer.  The majority of the clients are in the upper income brackets in the United States.

One place we found people to follow, were people that followed "Doggy Day Care / Spa" business. We knew if the person had enough discretionary income to send their dog to one of these expensive day cares, that they had more than enough money to buy my client's high end product.

That worked like a charm, and while we didn't generate a huge amount of followers, the followers that we did generate were highly targeted.

Don't be afraid to mention your competition and even share some of their information.  By doing this, you will show your followers that you want them to have great information, regardless of where it comes from, and that you are an "authority" in the niche, because you always have the best articles and quotes for reading.

Twitter Hastag Information
Photo Credit: 
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License   by  Skley 

#HASHTAGS

Hash tags are so important that they get their own sub-heading.  When you type a tweet, you can insert a hash tag into the tweet that will allow anyone who is searching that hash tag to see your tweet. For example #internetmarketing is a popular hash tag that gets searched for all the time.  You can use this to your advantage and get your tweets out in front of more people that don't necessarily follow you yet.  This feature is what makes twitter so incredibly powerful.  While Facebook does have hash tags, no one really uses them or searches for them.  Let me give you an example of what some of the hash tags will be for this post when I promote it.

The Most Twitter Followers In The World - Work At Home Men #internetmarketing #twitter #free #followers

I do a search for each of those hash tags before I decide to use it, just to make sure that people are actually searching for that term. You want to use tags that are currently being used, and are relevant to your niche.

TinyUrl.Com

You are going to want to use tinyurl.com to make the URL of the page you are trying to promote shorter.  This is especially helpful with particularly long URL's that would greatly limit the amount of characters you have left in your tweet.  One of the things that makes twitter so effective, is that you only get a limited amount of characters that you can use, so you have to be short and sweet.



I hope this gives you a head start with twitter.  I really regret not having started using twitter years ago.  It's amazing how much you can jump start your social media campaigns with it. 

Interested in seeing the twitter account for this website?  I started this twitter account less than one month ago, You can follow me on twitter @workathomemen to receive updates about this website, updates about my competitors websites that offer truly valuable information, and famous (and not so famous) quotes that you can live your day by! I admit that I have not been pushing this account as hard as I could, but I can tell you that it is now responsible for half of my traffic.  It currently equals the amount of organic search traffic that this site generates, so if that's not proof that you can crush it with twitter, I don't know what is!



Wednesday, January 14, 2015

The Top 9 Reasons Blogs are a Stupid Idea

We all can relate to that familiar feeling...the one where you think your blog is doing well and you are contemplating just quitting your job and diving head first into the world of blogging full time. We dream of vacations and working from a beach somewhere in the Carribean but let's take a moment here to go over the list of reasons why you shouldn't quit your job just yet.  Don't worry you can thank me later when you are enjoying your free time off instead of working on a pipedream that is nothing but smoke in mirrors.

9 Reasons Blogs are a Stupid Idea
9 Reasons Blogs are a Stupid Idea (Vacation? Ha yea right!)
Photos By:
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License   by  faungg's photo 

#9 Your Blog Stinks 

Well I hate to put it to you that way, but the truth is your blog probably stinks. You may have some pages indexed in Google, and heck you may even have some #1 spots for a series of well-thought out keywords, but the real truth of the matter is that you don't have a fraction of the traffic you would need to get a serious payday going. So let's read on and see what other reasons there are to be very careful about quitting your day job.

 #8 You Can't Afford to Lose the Money

You can't afford to lose the money that your job provides you in order to  work on your blog full time.  It's hard to admit this.  If you don't have a large safety net of money saved up to support yourself for 6-12 months while your blog gets rolling, you could find yourself out on the street with no where to hang your hat.  Girlfriends and wives will be understanding and even excited to a point, but once they realize that your adSense account has made exactly $0.03 over the past month, they will change their song on you rapidly. Girlfriends and wives will become x-girlfriends and x-wives so fast that you head will spin right off your shoulders if you aren't careful.

#7 You Don't Have a Product

This is a huge factor that people often overlook when starting a blog. There comes a point where you will realize that you have no products! Some people do monetize their sites strictly with PPC-advertising or by placing banners for specific businesses, but most of your real income will come from a product that you have created.  If the whole purpose of your website is to gather email addresses, that's fantastic, because it will offer you a highly targeted list of people to sell your products to. However gaining that list is only half of the battle. Once you have the list you need to open up the doors and use that list to sell a product you have created. That's where the real money is.

#6 You Aren't a "Jack of all Trades"

If blogging, hosting a podcast, running an e-commerce website, or walking your dog all at the same time doesn't sound appealing to you then you should be aware that getting started in this business requires you to put up with all the job requirements  that exist for you to even come close to having success with this business model. It's going to involve you doing so many different things at the same time, that you are going to really want to throw in the towel at any given moment.  This is not a passive job, though certain internet guru's would like you to believe it is.



#5 You Don't Want to Work REALLY , REALLY hard. 

Imagine, if you will, a place where you work yourself from sun up to sun down, and usually way past that as well, late into the night, burning the midnight oil. You have to be prepared for some really long working days and nights where you will feel like you have accomplished absolutely nothing and you will wonder on a regular basis if all this hard work is going to pay off.  Just because one set of circumstances paid off for someone else, don't mean that they didn't spend thousands of hours working on something they would like you to believe they did in 10 minutes.


Pat Flynn Amy Porterfield Wes Schaeffer by The Sales Whisperer, on Flickr
Photos By:
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License   by  The Sales Whisperer 
 

#4 Passive Income and Pat Flynn Are Real

If you think Pat Flynn and his blogs are real life success stories, that you are perfectly capable of obtaining, prepare to be ridiculously disappointed when you finally find out that more than half of the information on Pat Flynn has up on his website is outdated. Many of those strategies and tips simply don't work anymore. Next, you are going to put together an exact match domain name, get penalized, then you will try to back link a bunch of 2.0 sites, and get penalized yet again, and then when you are morally crushed and emotionally bankrupt you reach out to Pat for help, he's going to pull a "Cake - Never There" on you....

#3 You Aren't Prepared to Wait up to Three Months

Just to see where you initially stand.  It's called the Google Sandbox, and since NO ONE seems to explain this part in any of the online help with "niche marketing" or "WordPress" starter sites I will attempt to explain this phenomenon myself. Google will take up to 3 months just to index your site. No one cares about your site, especially Google. If you do get lucky and your site gets crawled, your site, you will then be shocked at where you land in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Position) for a specific keyword.  No one is going to tell you that you have to work constantly if you plan to maintain that rank. All this "set it and forget it" nonsense is exactly that, nonsense.

#2 You are Impatient

Your going to have to wait a long while to get into the Google results, if you make it there at all.  The worst thing about it is that your site is going to be sand-boxed and delayed for several weeks to months, so when you do see your site move up, your going to have a heck of a time trying to isolate which actions made you climb the ranks. It doesn't tell you what actions benefited you and which ones didn't so you are left playing a reactionary "guessing" game.


#1 You are Flat Broke

and you are trying to promote and market your site completely by yourself using free tools. - This is a major no-no and the odds of you hitting all the things you need to get your site to #1 in Google just isn't a realistic goal for someone who is just starting out in this business.  You want to know the absolute fail-safe way to get to #1 in record time?  I will tell you...it's very simple.

Create an adWords account, you fund it, and you pay a little money to get some clicks, and viola, you are on the first page of Google. Stop worrying about organic search results, and worry about creating a real landing page that will convert when people that are specifically selected to come to your site. You don't need organic search results. You need a page that you can convert users to sales and you will stop giving yourself the biggest headache / heartache known to man.


For more information read my blog here at the blogspot, or you can check out fertilizernumbers.net or the one and only dog biscuit blog,  or contact me via email at voicesmicro@gmail.com.  Put something catchy in the subject line, and let's get something started!