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Social Media Marketing Tactics 2010

January 20, 2010 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

Here is a good way to start to think of marketing online.  If you have seen anything in marketing strategy over the past 18 months, you have probably seen something similar to this showing all the ways you can promote your online business website or blog.  It starts with having a good foundation with your site or blog.  By the way, if you just have a “website” and not a blog, you are being left behind everyday.  The search engines are looking for “fresh” content and if your site is not providing it, you are missing out.

Anyway, look at the structure of marketing in this video and see if you can implement some of it or start to think along these lines when it comes to online marketing.  There isn’t a niche out there that blogs and social media marketing cannot conquer.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: 2010, Blogging, social media marketing

Top 10 Steps To A Super Effective Blog Post

November 15, 2009 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

When you’re writing a post to your blog, you won’t make it easy and fun for your readers to take a look. A post with a list of items is very easy for your readers to read, scan, and enjoy. There’s been some hugely popular list posts about online business and Internet marketing in the past. Let’s go through the steps.

1. Decide on the number of items in the list.
First you have to figure out how many items you going to post in your list. Yeah keep in mind that you don’t want to have the list of 100 items or 200 items because it just makes your reader take less value from each item listed. Instead have a short list. Anywhere from five to 25 should do the trick.

2. Make each item in the list flowed together.
Keep your items in your list in the general same structure and about the same topic. This may seem like common knowledge that there are tons of blogs out there that missed the step up.

3. Start a think about what you know and what your readers want to know.
If you’re an expert in a certain area, you typically get a lot of questions from people inquiring about your expertise. This should give you some great ammunition for your blog post as you think about what people usually ask along what lines they asked the question.

4. Order your list
make sure that you put the items in order to make the most sense. This means start from the very basic, and move to more advanced. This will help work your reader into the subject and help them build their knowledge as they go.

5. If you have a really long list break it into sections.
There’s nothing worse than trying to find the golden nuggets in a list of 50 items. Either bring some of the main points together and include them in one item, or get rid of any items that you don’t need.

6. Think about making your list a series.
It’s advantageous to give your readers or followers your information in small, easy to remember chunks. If you do it this way, you will get to put your face in front of your prospects are readers more often, and they will typically appreciate your knowledge even more because they can digest each section at their own rate.

7. Consistency in your writing
Make sure the structure of each item in your list is easy to read and structured in a way that is easy on the eyes. Think of bullet points, or highlighted sections of each point.

8. Always number your items
Trying to find the main points of someone’s list that are not numbered, it can be a pain. Make sure you make it easy for your readers to understand your blog post and pull out the main points that they want to take from the information.

9. Invite your readers to give their input
Your list is never to be perfect and your readers can be a valuable resource for you. Make sure that you give them the ability to comment on your post and add their own spin of what they think you may have missed on. Or they might just want to add what has worked for them in the past.

10. Make sure you have a great title
Just like any marketing out there your title is going to sell the reader on reading your blog post. If you have a crappy title, no one is even going to take a look.

What did I miss? Comment Below.

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Top 10 Steps To A Super Effective Blog Post
Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: Blogging, blogs

FTC Starts The Internet Marketing Crackdown

November 15, 2009 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

On December 1st, 2009 the new marketing on the internet regulations to into effect.  Yet another government interference in our daily lives.  Don’t get me wrong, I am glad that we can clean up some of the false marketing and lies out there, but it is just sad that the government is involved.  It isn’t the regulation that scares me, but once they get in it can be a slippery slope.

Since we have to work with the rules, let’s talk about some of the specifics and how they will effect your business.

The FTC has really stressed some the regulation on bloggers and what you say on your blog.  But where do you put your disclosures on your affiliations etc.
Read FTC Responds to Blogger Fears: “That $11,000 Fine Is Not True” .  The summary is
“Disclosures can be made in different ways, whether you make it outside of the text but in proximity to blog, or incorporate it into the blog discussion itself–those are the issues that bloggers will have discretion about.”

The FTC said that “We just want to bring some transparency to the process.”  Which is good in some ways as long as they don’t overstep their boundaries.

We will have to see how and when they start to crackdown on internet marketing blog, sales pages, squeeze pages, and more in the coming months.

FTC Starts The Internet Marketing Crackdown
Filed Under: BenJanke.com Breaking News Tagged With: Blogging, ftc, internet marketing

Maximizing your Blog

November 4, 2009 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

Becoming a top blogger is a topic that has a lot of experts, information and advice, but has very little real strategy. With the huge army of self-proclaimed blogging experts out there, it can be difficult to know who to trust, what path to take, and how to effectively market your blog to turn it into a popular and profitable online enterprise.  You need to know whats the meaning of blogging.

You need to maximize your audience and personal exposure to become a top blogger. While it’s possible by doing interviews and blogging for other people the best way to build a massive subscriber list. As with many types of business, the conventional advice and method isn’t always the most profitable, and a small amount of research into alternate routes to a massive subscriber count can yield great success further down the line. These 3 tips are designed for two things: to greatly increase your subscribers and keep them with you long term. Long-term appeal always wins out in the blogging world, and those subscriptions are the most valuable and lucrative of all.

Tip #1 – Find your optimum update times, and stick to them ruthlessly.
This is a tip from Tim Ferriss, one of the most popular and successful bloggers on the internet. With over 50,000 Twitter followers, Tim is a powerhouse in the internet marketing world, and is renowned for his highly time-optimised strategies and blogging advice. One of his best strategies is experimenting with several posting times and using the times that get the most subcribers. This process is as simple as micro-testing 12 different blog posts to determine which hour of the day is best for subscription increases.

Tip #2 Give people a reason to subscribe.
This one is a simple psychological exercise more than it is a blog optimization. Would you join a club that had no benefits? No, of course not. But you’d definitely join one that allowed you to access exclusive offers, content and resources that nobody else could access. You need to put yourself in this mindset when you design resources for your subscribers. Offer something exclusive and valuable for your subscribers and they’ll reciprocate your generosity by subscribing and sharing your blog with friends.

Tip #3 – Partner with other bloggers to create cross-subscriber traffic.
This one is a slightly more advanced strategy that requires a larger time commitment to blogging. Once you’ve built a decent audience, build relationships with other bloggers. Once you’ve built a friendly relationship, send them a quick email offering to guest blog for them, and in exchange offer them the same opportunity on your blog. You’ll be surprised at how many bloggers will eagerly accept the offer. This strategy brings multiple benefits — you increase your subscription count, expose your blog to a new audience, and build valuable back links to your blog page. All for free, and all because you understood blogging strategy.

To learn more about blogging, check out the free Bloggers Starter Kit. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at http://cbpirate.com/main/greg311/man.

Filed Under: BenJanke.com Contributors Tagged With: advice making money blogging, Blogging, increasing bloggers, making money blogging, maximizing you blog

3 Steps To Optimize Blog Post

October 22, 2009 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

For many blog owners, they fail to capitalize on search engine traffic because they do not understand how important SEO optimizing their blog is. This is one reason you’ll see so many bloggers fail to earn money online.

It doesn’t take a SEO guru to optimize your blog. It can be done in three simple steps. By doing these three steps all the time, you can increase visitors which may make the difference in a blog that makes the owner virtually no income or a blog that is an instrument for additional income.

Follow the advice below to optimize every post you upload and take advantage of free traffic from search engines.

To begin with, you should make sure your blog post addresses are SEO friendly. With free blogs like Blogger, this is automatically done for you. If you’re a WordPress user, then you’ll need to set your url structure so that the code produces search engine optimized url’s when you create a post.

All you have to do in WordPress is to click on the Permalinks tab, and click the radio button along side the Custom field. Then you’ll put a percentage sign followed by the words Postname. {Immediately after the words postname, Now} add another percentage sign. Now all your blog post will have search engine optimized addresses.

The best tip to optimizing your blog is to put your main keyword in the Title. If you’re blogging about earn money easy, then make these keywords the Title of your blog. What you don’t want to do is put unrelated keywords in your Title. If your name is John and you have a blog named Johns Dog Blog, then you’ll rank higher than if you name it something totally unrelated.

Your next step is to put your keywords in the Post’s title. If you’re targeting blog readers to read your post about online auctions to to make extra money, then put the keywords in the post title. Forget about using non relevant titles like How I Make Money With Auctions. Doing this prevents the search engine bots from figuring out what your post is about and prevents search engine users from finding your blog post. If you’re blog is monetized with Adsense, this tip will increase traffic while showing the highest paying ads for an increase in the pay per click you receive.

Implementing these 3 simple tips will be letting the Search Engines understand what your post is about. By making it easy easy for the search engines to determine what your post is about, the search engines will rank your post higher than a non-optimized blog.

Building links to each of your optimized post is the last step in dominating the search engine rankings with your blog post. Ahh, but link building is a whole nother article that has to be saved for later. But you need to learn how to optimize your blog before tackling link building.

Filed Under: BenJanke.com Contributors Tagged With: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, blogs, internet marketing, Make money, make money blogging, Make Money Online, Search Engine Optimization, search engine rankings, seo

Building your businesses via blogging.

October 20, 2009 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

Can a business still use a blog in a meaningful way, or have the new social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, superseded this tool? Several years ago, many companies abandoned their static, flat websites that lectured customers with facts that could have been straight out of their Annual Reports, and began including blogs. There they announced their latest products and received customer input in return, and discovered that blogs were a valuable public relations tool.

It’s well known in the business blogosphere that Dell Computers led the way, being one of the first companies to make such a change. Even as successful a business as Dell was, a barrier still existed between the company and its customers, many of whom had frustrating complaints that weren’t being addressed. When the company set up to receive blog entries, the turnaround in its relationship with customers was remarkable. General Motors, too, had a similar experience.

So consider what a simple yet profitable impact blogging can have on your business before taking the plunge into expensive marketing training like Maverick Money Makers. Start up a simple blog first.

While some customers still prefer regular email newsletters with the latest business news, others are eager to unclog their inboxes and check a company blog instead. A business can reach people in all of these ways, each serving different needs. One advantage of using the blog, however, will be that the posted information won’t vanish off the bottom of the page as quickly as Twitter updates. Nor will the responses from customers.

Businesses do need to be cautious about raising customers’ expectations, however. While an almost one-on-one relationship might be possible between a small business and its customers, larger companies may not be able to respond to all queries or complaints, and this could damage its reputation if it’s not careful.

But another use for blogging, and one that businesses might not even consider at first, is for internal communication. Even though employees can keep in touch via email, meetings or conference calls, an internal blog can focus on one department or a single project, providing a central place for a team to receive regular updates or make an informal record of their progress. This will keep these employees up to date without their own email inbox piling up to an unmanageable level.

Blogs are the elder sibling in the social networking world, and are still better at providing information and feedback in a more permanent form. Once blogging software made it possible for a business and its customers to interact in this way, the lines of communication opened widely. The company can provide up-to-date information about products and services, and customers can respond, thus both sides of the relationship benefit.

Filed Under: BenJanke.com Contributors Tagged With: blog marketing, Blogging, marketing, starting a blog

Buidling My Own Website Is Fun

October 12, 2009 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

Create blog website was nothing new for me. You see, I have been involved in the Internet since long time ago. Today, you can keep touch with friends via webpage and putting up post. Blogging is a small task after all. For better or for worse, I was creating my own webpage before I could write a decent sentence. And, none of my own websites were particularly technologically sophisticated – something that got me into trouble.

When I decided on creating my own business website to make money at home online, I thought there would be nothing to it. In theory, I knew it would be more complicated than creating my own website had been in the past. Most of my sites are simple and straight forward. Sure, people could post responses to some of my blogs and vote in online polls, but that was about it. It is easy and does not require any technical background to begin with. Based on this, I thought I could create a business website without any problem. Well, how difficult can it be? It turn out that the process is very difficult! Well, making my own website for my business was one of the stupidest things that I have ever tried to do.

At first, it seemed easy. I decided that I would start off with the things I knew and then learn the things I didn’t know how to do as I got to them. I knew the fundamental such as design layout, how to make some good content, and how to organize menus. Then I tried to do fancy things and it starts to collapse.  The lesson lernt here is that you must be prepared and stick to the basic.  Getting fancy about things may turn out to be not so good an idea.

Grab some Great Internet Business Ideas

Filed Under: BenJanke.com Contributors Tagged With: Blogging, ecommerce, internet, internet income, internet marketing, internet website, online business, online job, online profit, website, wordpress

Create A Blog Now And Join In The Online World

October 12, 2009 By Ben Janke Leave a Comment

It was a few years ago that I first decided to create a blog to learn how to how to make money from home using websites. Back then, I use the blog mainly to keep up with friends. After all, in our this generation of internet, you practically have to have a blog if you want to have any chance of keeping in touch with anyone. The fast pace of the way information moves has make letters and phone calls quickly becoming more inefficient. Even e-mails are starting to go that way – at least from the perspective of keeping up with you friends.

Creating a blog has many advantages over these other forms of traditional communication. One of the biggest ones is that if you have some news to announce, you can give it to everyone at once. The blog once created, enable you to not repeat the same thing over and over again to people.  Everyone can read it themselve at their own time.

People have online identity for various reasons.Right now, the most popular reason for any to go online is social networking.But, there are some focus on very specific reason.This can be due to the reasons that some people like niche topic.Such blogs could be talking about politics,entertainment,music etc. 

Even there is nothing to write about, you can still have a post on your blog just to keep the community warm.  This can help you to be on par with what is going on in the world.Be a blogger yourself and that is the best way.You can communicate with other bloggers and exchange information this way.  You can also learn how to make money on blogging with internet marketing affiliate program

Filed Under: BenJanke.com Contributors Tagged With: blog, blogger, Blogging, internet business, internet income, internet marketing, online business, wordpress