photo credit: nickwheelerozVideo Marketing & Product Shots For Your Blog

Once in a while on a Sunday, like today, I will review my RSS feeds to the fullest. That is, I spend a few hours weeding through the RSS feeds I subscribe to. I found an RSS through Flickr?from a guy named Nick Wheeleroz. His image is above. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this guys photos over the web. He’s really good and even more prolific in his sharing of how he set’s up photography shots, product demo shots and I believe even a few video marketing ideas.

Step 1: Follow the images in several of Nick’s photo sets. You can see the equipment he uses, positioning, and lighting bulbs all the way down to the power strip. I share this because it’s important to know how to do this right, and how to do this on a budget. Nick does it right.

Step 2:Make sure your room has plenty of natural light. You may not need the lamp, lighting backs, and other stuff to make it work.

Step 3:Shop and read blogs that do this professionally. You can see I am not sharing any real technical details. I use natural light but started to realize that most of my photos are from creative commons and flickr.

One of my favorite places to get free one-way links is through high quality paid and non-paid directories. Depending on your subject matter, you can expect anywhere between 230-1400 visitors a month from a quality directory.

Today, as of June 17, 2009, I recommend the first couple free directories:

–> DMOZ.org – this contains one of the oldest directories on the web. It’s also highly rated by Google. Once you are accepted into the directory, which can take 3-4 weeks, you should see your pages being indexed more frequently by Google. I’ve monitored this on my sites.

–> Joeant.com – great and favorite for link getting that will raise your PR a whole basis point.

–> Botw.org – not much to say here but to know that .org back links count almost as much as .com, .net, .edu and others. In fact, it may at times have much more impact overall.

How I doubled My Traffic With This Simple Technique:

- Sign up with a repuatable host like Godaddy.com and BUY an already existing domain. Or you can use sedo.com, domainnames.com and any domain name service that has auctions. In matter of two days, you can be driving targeted traffic to your site.

Internet Marketing Swipe File Landing Page - Image Credit: Singlesnet.com?

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Swipe File Image # 1: Singlesnet.com Online Dating Landing Page From PPC Ad?

Although I contemplated using this image because of the nakedness… This is one of the most ripped off landing pages for dating sites.

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Internet Marketing Image A

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Swipe File Image # 2: This Ad was seen in late October 2006 & December 2006.

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Swipe File Image # 3: The Ubiquitous Yellow Sticky Note That is Usually A Pop-Up

I don’t usually spend much time hovering over my swipe files. But on this Memorial Day weekend, I spent some time looking at some of the most basic yet very ripped off in the internet marketing community. I know… I could say it’s the landing page of Eben Pagan, “Double Your Dating”, but I never used it. I used these and seen several other marketers use them with tremendous success.?

Take these and use them as you please…

We average selling $678/month in profit. That’s after Amazon.com seller fees (7% plus fulfillment fees) so if we sell a product at $20 we are usually left with around $14. Not bad if you are doing good volume.

Here are some helpful links to review and see if you have anything worth getting started on. ?A quick word to the wise, there are a monthly fee of $40 plus you will need an UPC or ISBN number. UPC aren’t too bad but you have to put Amazon’s code on everything. If it’s digital, different rules.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=1161232

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=1161238

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=1161306

At the beginning, it’s all roses…but in the end it’s a tough pill to swallow. Just recently, I’ve experienced some traumatic ups and downs with the new version of Wordpress. Currently I am running WP 2.7.1 and love it. But hate it, too. The hates are more hiccups in programming and pages missing versus it be a functionality issue. Most of my time is spent writing posts and updating other blogs other than my own mikewanner.com.

Last year I hired a company called Unique Blog Designs. I loved every aspect of the engagement of having Nate and his team create my blog. But I learned a few things along the way. Here are three short ones (In the future I will post a 37 ways to eliminate the frustration with new blog designs) so you don’t make the same mistakes I did.

1. Redesign

The theme that I?ve been using to this point is a custom one from Unique Blog Designs?has been fantastic. In fact the way it is set up is probably one of the reasons search traffic has grown relatively quickly for the blog. But be careful, as all the design work if not properly programmed can be a nightmare as I am experiencing right now.

The redesign will include a custom logo (branding), a distinct look (differentiating it from other blog), more prominent subscription options (designed to grab attention and connect with new readers), a variety of tools to integrate it more with Twitter and Facebook.

2. Option For Video And Best Posts

One of the challenges of blogs once they have more than 100 or so posts in their archives is that it gets difficult for readers to find the best and most helpful content for their needs. If found out that TwiTip does an amazing job of creating what Darren calls sneeze pages?that will be linked to prominently that will target new readers specifically. I’ve seen Darren do this a lot in his other blogs, but amazingly see the loyalty it can bring with new readers, especially ones from sites like Twitter.

3. Pay As You Go Subscription Models

As mentioned above – there are a lot of other ways to make a blog sticky and convert readers. I haven’t formally tried a monthly subscription program or newletter, but know several that have 1000’s of readers who appreciate the content and up-to-date information to help grow a steady readership base, as well as improved ways to bring in loads more traffic. These three methods might be relevant for your blog – but so might some of the others covered in?how to make a blog sticky?post.

Can you imagine the transition Google goes through on a day-to-day basis? I mean living in the world of coding for Google or the team responsible for keeping their algorithm fresh. I can’t imagine and I don’t spend anytime thinking about it. But what I do think about is how much of an idea’s success is pinned on the “fresh factor” versus a sustainable idea that’s just so good it doesn’t need advertising, promotion or any substantial changes to it’s core value proposition.

If you said to Google today, we need to change the way our algorithm works… because we aren’t where we want to be. Brand new concepts, ideas and bridging the now from where we want to be sometimes becomes a whole new business without purposefully trying to make that happen.

For example, I think the Page Rank toolbar is the epitome of ?”stinky old socks”. Yep, nothing new there. Right, I mean when was the last time you saw any freshness with the Google toolbar and the way we as marketers find out page rank, backlinks, cached pages, or basic information about a site page or content.

I use a few different tools to find out the fresh factor or freshness of a site, page, content piece. When you start a PPC campaign, for instance, you would look at how is advertising for your main keywords you think are money makers, organize these into a spreadsheet by highest to lowest CPC, the Ad variations, the variations in ad text, URL, landing page and use of characters like tm or copyright. Then, using an analytics tool like Keyword Spy or SpyFu or Market Samurai to pinpoint your entry into competing on a keyword. How does this relate to freshness… easy.

• Fresh content is always rewarded by Google (this is in their editorial guides) and by your user base for the purposes of education.
• The auction of keywords is a revolving door in terms of price elasticity and search behavior. Do you think a person in the research phase for wanting to by say a car would use the same keywords as someone who wants to buy within two days?

When you bury yourself in the?minutiae of figuring out Google Page Rank for their algorithm for that matter, it’s a loosing game. All Google wants is fresh, relevant, newly thought of, better created, highly anticipatory solutions that searchers can get on the first try. It’s true, you get penalized by Google for not being fresh. So the next time you are out searching, building your campaigns, building content or trying to figure out Google, just remember being fresh is what works today and will work well into the future.