Online Marketing Success Blog - Internet Riches - e-Riches 2.0 by Scott Fox

6 Trends You Missed at BlogWorld in Los Angeles

Mobile marketing, Google+, smartphones, professional community managers, and "rich niches".

These are just a few of the trends I found at BlogWorld this year.

"6 Trends You Missed at BlogWorld" is an article about BlogWorld that Yahoo's Associated Content invited me to write. 

It was recently published detailing some of what I learned at Blog World & New Media Expo this year.

I hope these 6 trends are helpful to you, too.

What do you think of the points I make in the article?

Have you noticed similar trends in your own business?

Video Marketing for Your Business in 5 Easy Steps

Video blogging can help you attract more customers.

As I'm sure you've noticed, online video is exploding. Last year the average US viewer was watching more than 187 videos online per month, and that number is only increasing.

While it may sound too techie, "video blogging" just means posting short videos on your website instead of (or in addition to) the short text articles most bloggers post. 

You might be intimidated by the technical details of producing online video (or are just shy about appearing on camera), but video posts to your blog are easier than you think.

Watch this short video to learn how (click here if you can't see the video).

You'll learn my 5 quick steps to successful video blogging, plus see live demonstrations of the cameras I recommend.

Five Easy Steps for Easy Video Marketing Online

To get started in online video there are a lot of complicated strategies and equipment that you can use.

But instead here’s the plain and simple way I recommend that can get you started in online video quickly and inexpensively:

1. Camera: Almost any video camera today can plug into your PC to upload video to the web. Use your point and shoot digital camera, a hand held camcorder like the Flip or my personal preference, a web cam.  (Watch the video above for demonstrations of how easy these are to use.)

2. Setup: Prep some notes about what you want to say, and find a pleasant, quiet and well lit spot to use as a background for your video shoot.

3. Shoot: Turn on the camera and start talking. Be sure to save your new video when finished.

4. Upload your video to YouTube: This is the part where non-technical people get intimidated but it's really quite easy. An account at YouTube is fr

How to Build a Small Business Community Forum Online (Guest Post)

Building a community online can be a great business that’s also fun to run.

If you’d like some of my best tips for how to build an online community, check out this new article I wrote for my friends at the BizSugar blog.

Building Small Business Communities by Scott Fox

This guest post offers you my recommendations on:

• getting started strategies,
• the big mistakes to avoid,
• how to attract the attention (and participation) of potential customers, and
• the several ways you can make money, too.

Online communities are not a new concept but I believe that they are still an underappreciated lifestyle business opportunity for anyone reading this.

Thanks to Shawn and Anita at BizSugar for inviting this guest post from me.

I hope that it’s helpful to you.  Please leave a comment there at BizSugar if it is? 

p.s.You could win a Free Membership at Click Millionaires if you do!

Disclosure reminder

Hello - It's time to remind you again that Scott Fox, The Liminal Institute, Click Millionaires, and associated persons or businesses may have content, promotional, advertising, customer, consulting, or equity relationships with the entities discussed or recommended on this web site. Many of the links on our web sites and in associated materials contain affiliate advertising codes, for example.

While efforts have been made to identify the best suppliers/vendors in each of these areas, we assume no liability for your use of them. You should use your own independent judgment to evaluate their services and fit for your needs.

Please see the Legal & Disclosures section for more details.

Marks, graphics, and names are property of their respective owners, as appropriate.

Thanks for reading!

10 Fake Progress Time Sinks to Avoid in your E-Business - VIDEO

What's slowing the growth of your e-business?  I'll bet your #1 problem is YOU!

How to Stop Procrastinating: As a follow-up to my popular recent blog post about "Fake Progress", watch this short video to see me elaborate on the 10 "time sinks" that I'll bet are slowing you down, too.

Watch this one for a friendly kick in the pants!

[You can watch more Scott Fox business-building videos here.
Or subscribe to my YouTube Channel here.]

Do you recognize these bad habits in yourself? 

Which ones are you most guilty of?

 

5 Free SEO Website Design Tricks to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

Do you have to pay big money to search engine optimization (SEO) consultants to get your site ranked in the search engines? 

NO!  Here are 5 of my favorite no-cost web site design tricks that can help your web site attract more customers for FREE.

Note – none of these free SEO techniques require spending any money with SEO consultants!

1. Upgrade Your Domain Name – Search engines rank sites based on their relevance to the searcher’s queries. If your web site’s domain name does not include your most important keywords, it may be time to upgrade. Change your domain name to one that includes key search terms and you’ll see a rise in SEO rankings for those terms. (This only applies to new sites or sites without much established SEO history, so be careful.)

2. Focus Your Keywords and Use them in Titles - Use free keyword tools like Google’s Traffic Estimator to determine the most popular words and phrases that customers use to search for your key products. Pick a specific version of that keyword phrase to use repeatedly in the titles of your blog posts and pages, especially on the product detail pages.

Being specific and focused in this keyword deployment will help drive your site’s search engine rankings up for that key phrase more effectively than if you try to use multiple versions and synonyms of your keywords. So use the words “hot dog” as much as you can in the titles and on the pages that sell your hot dog products.  And don’t confuse the search engines (and human customers) by also including on that page mentions of other your products like bratwursts, sausages, hamburgers, too.

3. Ditch Your Old Slogan – Replace your “corporate speak” slogan from the 1990s with a modern, keyword-driven one instead. No one knows what “Reaching for Excellence” means anyway. And they certainly aren’t searching on that phrase when looking for your web site that sells hot dogs.

Try something specific that both humans and search engines will appreciate more like “The Most Award-winning and Tasty Hot Dogs in Omaha”. Post that keyword-rich phrase in text (not graphics) at the top of your web site pages and it will help boost your SEO.

4. Use Keywords in File Names – Both web designers and developers like things “efficient” and “clean.” This often means that designers name their images and developers name their web pages with short, secret code-like names.

Instead, you want images of your hot dogs titled with names like “tastyhotdog.jpg”. Similarly, your web site’s pages should have names like “tasty-hot-dogs-and-catering.html” instead of “h4rrjxb.html”. The repeated use of keywords in both of these not so obvious types of file names will provide Google, Bing, and Yahoo additional clues about how to categorize your web site and where to rank it higher.

5. Anchor Text - When other sites link back to yours, ask them to include your keywords in the text that they link. For example, a link to your site XYZ.com is good, but much better from a search engine’s point of view is a link that says “XYZ.com Hot Dogs” if you are a hot dog merchant.

In all these cases the more keywords your site has on the page, the higher the search engines will rank your site for those keywords. Pick your keywords wisely and you can attract tons of free traffic from search engine users searching for info on those topics.

 What tips are working best for your web site?

What did I miss?

[For more free SEO strategies, check out the "SEO" category on my blog at ScottFox.com here.  And, if you would like my help in improving your web site, learn about my personalized site design review service here.]

Stop Fooling Yourself – 10 “Fake Progress” Time Sinks to Avoid

There are lots of activities you can do to fool yourself into thinking you’re making progress toward success.

But if you are looking to make money online, most of these activities are a waste of time, or at least premature if you are starting a new business.

10 “Fake Progress” Time Sinks to Avoid
Here are 10 “Time Sink” activities that I recommend entrepreneurs avoid:

1. Buying things, especially training courses and ebooks you won't use
2. Researching online, especially if that includes lots of worrying about the competition
3. Reading books, especially from people who have not achieved themselves
4. Writing business plans or marketing plans
5. Designing, redesigning, and overdesigning your web site
6. Incorporating, trademark, copyright and administrative paperwork
7. Designing, redesigning, and overdesigning your logo
8. Buying domain names
9. Facebooking and Tweeting to “build a following” with only vague plans for monetization
10. Building products or services that only work at scale instead of starting with small scale, real sales today

Why should you avoid these Time Sinks?
Because they are “fake progress.” They make you feel like you’re moving forward but they’re actually draining away your most precious asset: your time and attention!

All of these activities can be important and necessary steps for success eventually, but not today.

Make it Happen!
You need to finish that keyword research and pick your niche, get the first draft of your new web site finished, polish up that PDF and turn it into an ebook you can sell through Clickbank, or publish your first blog post or newsletter. 

The importance of taking action is true in almost any work situation but especially if you work in a startup or are a solopreneur.

My advice: Get on with it!
End your "analysis paralysis" and stop being such a "tweak freak"!  You will learn more in the first week of actually running your business than in months of planning to run it.

How about you?
What kind of “fake progress” most distracts from your momentum?

How You Can Get Your SEO Black Belt for only $75

You know that search engine optimization is important because it can help attract free traffic to your web site.

But you have questions about SEO because you’ve been confused by conflicting information. You might even be intimidated by SEO because “SEO consultants” have made it sound so complicated.

If this sounds like you, I think you have been getting the SEO “runaround”.

Unfortunately today there is a whole industry of people who make a living from making SEO more difficult (and expensive) than it actually is!

There are many basic steps to SEO that you can do yourself for FREE. These are not difficult but they are just techie enough that “consultants” try to make them seem like black magic that you could never figure out yourself.

It's my belief that smaller, niche-focused companies cannot afford to do relentless and expensive SEO. They should set up their sites correctly, get lots of inbound links, and then move on to more general marketing instead.

My $75 SEO "Black Belt" Budget for You

Instead of spending thousands of dollars, I recommend this much cheaper plan. It doesn’t include all the bells & whistles that SEO consultants will claim you need, but these are the techniques that I have used to make ScottFox.com and other web sites #1 on Google for their niches.

1. Read the many free posts about SEO on my blog at http://www.scottfox.com/seo/ Cost: FREE

2. Listen to the free SEO expert interview podcast you can download from ScottFox.com. Cost: FREE

3. Read Chapter 20 of my first book, Internet Riches. That chapter is called “No Budget Marketing Secrets” and outlines the basics of SEO. Cost: $14.96 on Amazon.com (for the whole book!)

4. Read my Special Report “Free SEO in Plain English” which you can download from http://scottfoxshop.com right now. This is the best-selling Special Report in my Scott Fox Shop. Its 70+ pages explain search engine optimization in plain English, non-techie terms. You can use it to easily improve your site's SEO yourself to save thousands of dollars in SEO fees, too. Cost: $49 (on sale!)

5. Spend the remaining $11 on a beverage or two of your choice to enjoy while you learn how to optimize your site!

These inexpensive steps will teach you enough about SEO to greatly upgrade your own site and also enough to intimidate SEO consultants who try to BS you.

And when you’ve finished these simple and cheap SEO strategies, come back here to ScottFox.com and ask more questions for free to get your “SEO BlackBelt”!

Am I right to be so critical of SEO Consultants? 
How have you found success in SEO?  Please share your comments below!

Disclosure Reminder

The FTC would like us to remind you that Scott Fox, The Liminal Institute, Click Millionaires, and associated persons or businesses may have content, promotional, advertising, customer, consulting, or equity relationships with the entities discussed or recommended on this web site. Many of the links on our web sites and in associated materials contain affiliate advertising codes, for example.

While efforts have been made to identify the best suppliers/vendors in each of these areas, we assume no liability for your use of them. You should use your own independent judgment to evaluate their services and fit for your needs.

Please see the Legal & Disclosures section for more details.

Marks, graphics, and names are property of their respective owners, as appropriate.

How much Keyword Research is Too Much?

Do you get overwhelmed by keyword research?  All the gurus say it's critical for online marketers and entrepreneurs to make more money online, but how do you know when to stop ? 

Members of my Click Millionaires coaching forum have been asking me for advice on keyword research because it causes many of them to suffer from "analysis paralysis".

So, here's a critical question I'll answer for the success of your e-business: How much keyword research is too much?

Yes, keyword research can be confusing, with the search engine optimization (SEO) goals often conflicting with good copywriting. 

But here's the real deal:

Most keyword research advice is written by and for people who are running a pay-per-click-driven marketing campaigns for a third party product/service.

In other words, these online marketers are selling products in which they may have little interest in personally and no personal expertise or connections in that industry.

Most of these folks use keyword research to find niches where they can spend $1 on PPC ads to create $1+ in revenues. It's a very quantitative approach to business which has made a lot of people a lot of money.

BUT, this strategy does not account well for your own expertise, enthusiasm, connections in your industry, for free social media marketing techniques, that some industries and products offer much smaller/larger markets or much lower/higher profit margins, AND your resulting ability to differentiate your e-business web site through all of these tactics instead of primarily by clever keyword selection.

Put another way, these folks are counting on keyword research as their primary (if not their only) differentiation strategy. I think you can do better!

When Keyword Research Matters Most
If you are planning on PPC as your primary marketing vehicle, then the details and results of your keyword research are critical. This is because that approach (if used by itself) relies on very small differentials and arbitrages to uncover profitable keywords. (ie., those keywords you can buy ads for cheaply and with limited competition to attract profitable customers).

However, if you are going to build a business based on good content, your own passion, sharing your enthusiasm through email, social networking, blogging, Twitter, podcasts, video, or article marketing, etc. (all the techniques detailed in my book e-Riches 2.0), then the keyword research is only a starting point for you.

So, I recommend that you use keyword research to:

a) validate that whatever your niche interest is really is shared by other people online,

b) determine what the keyword variations, phrases, and synonyms are that best apply to your niche product/service/market to attract the most fr.ee traffic via SEO, and,

c) optimize your site to reflect those keyword phrases.

Then, move on.

Don't let endless keyword research be the obstacle to you starting your new e-business.

Get to work with "real" marketing by engaging your potential customers through all the marketing techniques mentioned above. Building your customer base by providing value to your audience is how you will differentiate your e-business, not just by differences in keyword search demand or SEO.

What do you think?  Has keyword research bogged down your business?  What's your advice?

Deliverability: The #1 (but most overlooked) Email Marketing Success Metric

Most email marketers focus on tweaking visual and copywriting elements to improve performance of email marketing campaigns.  But those elements are only part of the story for successful email marketing...

While your email's images, copy, and subject line are important to attracting customer click-through, there’s another factor that overshadows them all: deliverability.

Deliverability is a measure of how many of your emails actually make it to their intended destination.

Most marketers gloss over deliverability because it's more fun to focus on crafting pretty images and enticing product messages.  But it’s been reported that more than 20% of emails never even reach the email inboxes of your intended recipients.

Your precious noozles may be held up by spam filters at the ISP or network levels, misdirected due to technical glitches, or caught in local firewalls. Even more are mis-filed into Junk or Spam folders in the user’s email software program.

You Need to Use a Professional Email Delivery Service
So don't try to manage your email publishing efforts yourself.  You should use an email delivery service that prioritizes deliverability of those messages.

Your next email marketing campaign is much more likely to succeed in reaching the inboxes of your targeted customers IF:

• You use an email sender that has strong relationships with the top Internet service providers to ensure deliverability,
• You encourage your recipients to “whitelist” your sending email address, and
• You avoid using spam triggers in your emails (these are words and formatting that make your emails look like spam to the firewall and filter software employed by most ISPs).

My Email Service Recommendations
Enhancing deliverability is the #1 reason that I use professional email delivery services to send my ScottFox.com noozles.

In publishing my noozles, I have successfully used Constant Contact, Feedblitz, and Aweber enough to recommend (and become an affiliate for) all three. Today Aweber is my #1 choice because it offers the most affordable combination of strong deliverability, good reporting, and includes industry-leading autoresponders, too.

What do you think? Is this helpful?  Who do you use to get your emails delivered?

 

My Easy 10 Question Free Business Plan Template

Last week in my new Click Millionaires Forum, a member named Tony asked me for a free business plan template recommendation.

My response? Most entrepreneurs spend way too much time on writing business plans. I’d rather see your creative energy invested in product development or marketing, things that will directly lead you to more revenue.

So I sat down and thought about all the business plans that I’ve written and seen over the years. I think that they all boil down to a few basic questions that apply to any startup business.

My Free Business Plan Template for You
Here are my Top Ten questions I think are most important for you to answer when starting a new business. You can use these to focus your thinking and to impress potential partners or investors (like your spouse!).

This basic business plan template doesn’t cover everything, but if you can answer these questions solidly, you are on your way. (Conversely, if you spend much time beyond answering these fundamental questions, your business planning process may be too much.)

Scott Fox’s Top Ten Business Plan Template Questions

1. Who is your target customer? Be specific.
2. How does your product or service solve a problem for them?
3. Will your solution to the problem be unique and valuable enough that these customers will pay you a good price for it?
4. How can you reach this target audience cost-effectively?
5. Will satisfied customers naturally tell others? If so, how can you encourage them to do so?
6. How much time and money can you afford to invest in this new business before you need to stop? (Set a time and money cut-off.)
7. What will it cost you to get started? Why? How can the Internet reduce those costs?
8. If you make conservative assumptions about the number of people who buy, and how much it costs you in both time and money to sell to them, can you make enough money to achieve your goals?
9. How can you differentiate yourself from the competition?
10. What are the 3 key assumptions you are making that are required for you to succeed? Are they reasonable and probable? If not, what could you do to change them?

Bonus Question: How can you systematize your new business so it takes proportionally less of your time as it grows but makes as much or more money? (Creating a business that will grow without you can lead to a true Click Millionaire lifestyle!)

[Note: These questions are for a solopreneur considering starting a new venture. If you are planning a larger venture or looking to raise money from investors, you’ll need to be a lot more thorough, especially with financial analysis.]

An Easy, Instant Business Plan!
If you can write just a couple of solid paragraphs answering each of these questions, you will be well on your way to creating a respectable business plan, as well as clarifying your own strategy.

Don’t fall victim to “analysis paralysis” by over-indulging in business planning. I recommend emphasizing “doing” over “planning”. It pays the bills much better!

What did I miss? Please let me know in the Comments below if this business plan outline is helpful to you?

If you would like more details and follow-up conversation about my simplified approach to writing business plans, please join us in the Click Millionaires Forum!