I got inspired to write this from the article on Wordtracker’s site: Stop the Slaughter of Innocent Copy! For those of you who are somehow not familiar with how wonderful Wordtracker can be for any kind of online marketing, go try the free trial now! And if you really want to go at it, try it for a day or a week. You’ll be amazed at what you can dig up with it.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of using your keyword phrases too much in your copy. If you read on webmaster forums, it isn’t at all unusual to see people arguing about what percentage of the text should be a particular keyphrase. You’ll also see people saying it doesn’t really matter all that much.

There certainly is an advantage to having your targeted phrases on the page you are trying to attract traffic to. There’s no doubt about that. It’s one of the factors that can attract search engines.

Unfortunately, the abuse of keywords rapidly drives customers away. Read the rest of this entry »

Or at least it is more friendly to women than when it started out. Just take a look at this article over on Grokdotcom on the Feminization of the Web.

They make some really good points. Just think about the things that are recommended to market your websites. Join forums. Be helpful. Be a part of the community. All very much things more classically associated with women.

As they say, it’s more a right brain thing than a female thing, but it’s still pretty nice that the web is so much nicer for women to use than it was originally.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing

I wrote last week about challenging myself to comment on blogs every Tuesday. Last week I did 24 comments total. Did better this week. I set a goal of a minimum of 10 comments each relevant to 3 of my blogs, plus at least 10 more relevant to other blogs.

The random factor allowed me to cope with the fact that when you go through blogs on a given topic, sometimes you will find something that better matches a blog other than the one you are thinking about.

I think I’ll stick with this formula. I managed 40 comments, a very nice mixture, but some good emphasis on the blogs I wanted to emphasize this week. I think it went well overall. Took hours, but hopefully quite worthwhile.

Technorati Tags: blog comments, commenting, tuesday challenge, blog marketing

Well, I suppose not just affiliate marketing. You could use this just about anywhere.

There’s a new site called BubblePLY. It basically takes care of that little problem with advertising being very hard to put into videos. Better yet, it’s free.

You just take a video and tell them where it’s hosted. Then you decide where to put the ads. They give you the code to add it to your site.

I’m sure you would want to be careful about how you do this. Think carefully about the videos you add your own ads to. While YouTube and similar sites try to keep up with copyright issues, I can certainly see people getting upset with you for adding your own ads to videos they created. Doubly so if you try it with anything taken from a commercial source.

On the other hand, if you make videos for your own site, you can add links to things you want to sell. There’s a lot of potential I can see there.

Technorati Tags: bubbleply, video ads, youtube, online videos

Text messaging is really popular right now. You may or may not text people yourself, but it’s quite a popular trend and may be quite useful for advertising.

I’m sure you’ve seen text message voting on shows such as “American Idol”. Text message advertising works somewhat similarly. You choose your keyword and use it in your advertising. The Mobile Marketing company, Mobitivity, recieves the text message and automatically sends your ad back as a text message.

They’re fast about this. You can set up a campaign with them in minutes.

There are plenty of possibilities for this. You could hold voting, certainly one of the better known options. You could have people text to enter a contest or drawing. You could make special offers. You’re limited only by what you can say in a short text message and your own creativity.

It can really pay to take advantage of the newer marketing options. There’s often much less competition and people can be more curious about wht you’re offering.

1. Memes! Yep, trying things like Thursday 13 and other memes on my blogs to see what impact they have.

2. Blog carnivals. I’m checking them out twice a week to figure out which ones I have posts to submit. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m really determined to keep doing better on my marketing activities. The next thing I’m going to try is remembering to submit posts to blog carnivals regularly

I’m assigning myself two days to check on these things, so that hopefully I have enough time to check topics and submit by the various due dates. I’m giving Wednesday and Saturday submissions a shot.

I went to Blog Carnival to find potentially relevant ones. There’s a huge list there. Not all are active, though, or at least aren’t maintained on that site.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with blog carnivals, don’t worry. It wasn’t that long ago that I hadn’t heard of them either. But now I’m determined to take advantage and see what they can do for my sites.

You submit a post from your blog that is relevant to the carnival. Many have topics for each carnival, but others have just a standard single topic or range of topics that they accept. Some are picky about which posts they accept while others will post just about anything. Read the rest of this entry »

This is something I hope to work on every Tuesday, or at least whichever days my inlaws take the kids. It involves some pretty intense work, and I know I’ll need the peace and quiet to pull it off to maximum effect.

I’ll be experimenting to figure out exactly how much work to do on this. It’s a marketing challenge for me.

Every Tuesday, I want to find at least 10 blogs to make comments on relative to sites of mine. I’m challenging myself on a per site basis; that is, 10 relevant comments per blog I’m working on each week. I think I’ll start it out as targeting 2 blogs, so 20 comment goal this week.

No junk comments. I need to have something to say.

How will I do this? There are a variety of sources out there. Technorati can be good. I also use the Comment Hut software in the free version, which finds WordPress blogs. Read the rest of this entry »