Anytime you see yourself questioning the “Status Quo” of marketing and how-to information on marketing, consider this: Marketing, internet marketing, blogging, twittering, facebooking, MySpacing, LinkedIn’ing, and everything in between are simple ways for you to generate responses to your message. Most of the time, the leaders in a particular industry or niche, have a mindset that the best marketing dollars are spent where the highest possible return can be met, yet with the lowest risk or smallest amount of effort. In other words, you follow where the big guys go and MOST of the time you’ll see results?

Small Business Online Marketing ROI – Small Business Trends

Here’s a lesson I am learning right now for Rungtong & Co. website. We set a mildly basic marketing plan together that assumes we can go negative (more on that in a future article) or spend x amount of money to acquire a new customer. The chart to the left shows areas on the internet and offline that can be potential lead generation or getting customers through video, audio, text, pictures, chats, and simple bookmarking and sharing.

If you were to raise your hand right now and tell me what you think the best marketing medium for achieving the highest ROI, what would it be I bet, with all the $4.00 I have in my pocket as of writing this blog post, you would choose something that has been written a lot about in the media. Let’s assume you choose a combination of twitter, YouTube and Digg.

What made you believe these are the right or BEST ways to find customers?

Creating an Error 404 Page

While you work hard to make sure that every link actually goes to a specific web page on your site, there is always a chance that a link clicked will slam dunk and become a famous 404 ERROR PAGE NOT FOUND.

All is not lost. If your visitors encounter an error, why not be a helpful WordPress site administrator and present them

with a message more useful than “NOT FOUND”.

This lesson will teach you how to edit your “error” and “page not found” messages so they are more helpful to your visitors. We’ll also show how to ensure your web server displays your helpful custom messages. Finally, we’ll go over how to create a custom error page consistent with your Theme’s style.

Image Credit: Julius Armen, Internet Marketer, Marketing Guy, The Man

Without sounding like I love the mac guy, this is your proto-marketer today. Or design guy who looks the part. How does this have anything to do with internet marketing, marketing, conversions or business in general? I think picture of someone who is the face of ?one of the most popular commercials ever, in the entire world and ever created, seems to be a normal, down to earth person in the commercials.

In the not too distant future, I bet we see less P-Diddy’s and more Mac guys. Forget the Bentley, what’s the new eco-no-footprint-tin-can small suv or mini-mac car. I also bet Mac comes out with design for a car. Already talks, but it shows you the true genius of Mac people and it’s culture.

In a recent Inc. article, Jim Collins explains the simplicity around the best businesses on the planet have one thing in common: they ferociously focus on ONE thing at a time. That’s paraphrased, but he’s right. All the most successful individuals I know are locked in to what they do. Just recently I asked a marketing buddy of mine to help me on project, and he had the best answer I’ve ever heard (or excuse – depending how you look at it): He said, “Mike how does this fit into your overall goal of better coversions, more money, and saved time”. I couldn’t answer it… I didn’t know.

He sent me a spreadsheet that he built or had someone build for him. I’ll add that in an upcoming post. It bascially shows every minute/hour of his day broken down by tiers of importance. First tier shows all must-do, absolutely critcal. It wasn’t check e-mail, it was 12 prospecting calls before 9:00am PST, 1 appointment, 1 free report distributed, one-way link to an article, one submission to an article directory, video submit through TubeMogul, and to take a pee. Yep, all before 9. He does this in two ways:

?

NO EMAIL IS OPEN. IT’S TURNED OFF OR CLOSE.

THE PHONE GOES DIRECTLY TO A MESSAGE THAT HE WILL CHECK MESSAGES AFTER 1PM

HE OPENS ONLY ONE WINDOW/BROWSER AND NO OTHER APPLICATIONS

I know this sounds silly. But he’s a multi-millionaire. No debt, huge assets and the most solid guy I know.

Just this week I will begin to do this. Today I turned off the e-mail and focused on calling. Got more done by just doing that and not getting distracted. Maybe Facebook, Twitter and everything else is a HUGE distraction. We’ll see in the end.

Yahoo Directory - Should You Pay $299?

ALERT: PR +1 to 8/10 (Apr. 08), Yahoo! loses 600,000 backlinks but PageRank bumps up one point? That just doesn’t add up. (Apr 08). Started in 1994. No refund. Even though it is still going through a redirect server, I am seeing PageRank pass through. Referral traffic is a trickle. This is one directory that provides “TrustRank” with Google. This is a must submit for your site.

Update: Added 300,000 backlinks in Jan. ‘08. If your listing is accepted into the Directory, there will be a $299 recurring annual fee in subsequent years.

This came from a recent StomperNet article that I ran into. Not exactly something you want to avoid.?

I submitted Rungtong.com to over 123 different directories and it hasn’t seen any increase in traffic. The only one that seems to work that was free was DMOZ and just simply going and posting comments on sites. Although the No Follow rule doesn’t pass you page rank, nor does Google give you a solid backlink or credit, it does trickle small amounts of traffic that, if your site is well tested from copy, images, and coversion structure, you should with all purposes see more money.

The others

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.

My social media Guru site -?Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion.com

• The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation — New York Magazine
  A loooong story on the Attention Crash for people short on time.
• One Tweet Over the Line – Room for Debate Blog – NYTimes.com
  • The top 12 trends of the video game industry ? VentureBeat
  • MediaShift . Kicking Ink: The Struggles of a Print Newspaper Unsubscriber | PBS

As my wife and I walked into the St. Joesph hospital, we were greated by three people: security, nurse and someone donating their personal time at 12:10pm at night. What I noticed, other than my wife ready to deliver our first baby, was the subtle lures the hospitals use today to try and entice visitors to engage with their hospital. The most notiable, the “Upcoming Webinar” sign I have here that was shown in the second door you passed through right before you will deliver your baby.

Here are three tips to figure out how to leverage what you experience from other people’s experience in your business or life:

Tip 1: This came from our night nurse who was so intuitive to what we were experiencing that, as a result, we were able to intuitively ask her questions that made sense even though we had no idea where it come from. Does that make sense? I’ve been up for 36 hours so it may not. She had a little journal with notes that showed over 121 common questions she has received from new parents right before labor starts. The nurse could of easily just given us a copy. Instead, she went through the most favorable questions asked by new parents. Not ones that have three kids, brand spaken new. ?She basically unconsiencly or knew this ahead of time where to put the questions and how to bring them up at the right time so it cuts the amount of prodding she has to do.

Tip 2: Never leave the room (this could be a conference call, e-mail, voicemail, anything really) without being absolutely clear what is going to happen next. The nurse quizzed us in a fun way that made us temporarily forget why we were there. The lesson I got was a little bit of misdirection every once in a while is good.

Tip 3: Don’t panic when you don’t know the answer. I could visibly see the reaction of some of the nurses who were less experienced that didn’t know how to answer a question they didn’t know the answer to. The focus was on figuring out how to answer it so she or he didn’t look dumb. Rather, what we learned from nurse one was take the focus on the generic question and put focus on questions that help her to be understood.

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.