Official Google Blog: Help and learn from others as you browse the web: Google Sidewiki

Official Google Blog: Help and learn from others as you browse the web: Google Sidewiki

Congradulations Google, with Sidewiki in one swipe you have made every webmaster block the Google Toolbar and hit you with defamation and libel lawsuits.

It was fun while it lasted.

Squidoo Banned on Netscape.com

More proof that when something is too good, it won't be too good for long.

This is perhaps a direct result of the Google Slap Squidoo has taken recently, but I was genuinely surprised to see it's domain banned as a reputable news source for Netscape.com, a high ranking PR site. The last time I tried Digg it went through ok, but I'm wondering if they'll banned Squidoo as well, if they haven't already.

This is certainly not good news for Squidoo. Coming back form the Google Slap was already difficult. If a lot of their main outside sources of traffic their members use to create an income with their Lenses are shutdown, they'll go elsewhere. while Squidoo has worked to get rid of spam on their ownsites, they should also be looking at their main sources of traffic in an effort to mend bridges between them. Netscape may be just the beginning.

Infomation Product Overload

Maybe it's that I've been in this business awhile, but the sheer volume of info products available for internet marketing is staggering--and unneccessary.

Email marketing, RSS, Blog and Ping, eBay, affiliate marketing, Adsense... and every little marketing niche inside the internet marketing field probably has no less than 50 products telling you THIS way is what's working and what you should do.

I'm sure they're all very informative, and if you're totally new to this you'll get some value out of it. Most of the time I see these surplus of products offered as bonuses for another info product. I own some, of course, though I got the vast majority of IM material for free by looking and discovering the right places.

Now, I'm not the world's great internet marketer or affiliate marketer, but I can tell you that you DON'T need all the extra filler and redundant e-books to make it in this business. What you will find is that there are laws and principles that never change in your approach. These guides simply adjust them to their marketing niche.

As you can tell, I sell an info product from this site, and it does exactly that. The basic outline. I don't need 50 ebooks on Email Marketing and 20 ebooks on Adsense, to tell me where to attack or what market to get into, that stuff is basic.

If you must by something to get your feet wet in Internet Marketing look for a thorough guide that tells you where to go next and what to do to drive people to your site. John Reese's Traffic Secrets is an amazing tool for this, well worth the money if you can find a copy still available. I'd obviously recommend my own product too, but the point is, marketing niches are the small stuff in a bigger picture of the learning curve all new marketers need to learn before they start making or seeing real money.

AuctionAds vs Adsense

After the Google Slap hit tons of websites that were utilizing their services to drive targeted traffic people started looking for a new or better way to make the income they were making before. The blow Adwords took alone knocked a huge, but unknown, number of people using the service away. Who knows how many of those used Adwords as their main source of income...

On the other side of the coin is Adsense. Clicks now only seem to give you a few cents here or there. Earning a dollar costs a lot more visitors than it used to. Adsense has had upstarts come up and fade away to try to take their place as the internet's primary source of contextual advertising revenue.

However, one with a slightly new twist is making it's rounds. Can this be enough to save it? Time will tell, but I think it holds promise.

It's called AuctionAds and it utilizes eBay's Auction feeds and affiliate program to provide targeted ads for your visitors. They are NOT contextual, which will mean adjusting each one per page, but that should make you go a bit out of your way to make sure it's targeted. A difference from Adsense, and Adsense-like companies, is that each displayed ad has a picture to go along with it. Pictures have always improved CTR, so this can't be a bad thing to add.

An interesting difference is that AuctionAds is a Pay-Per-Action type of service and not Pay-Per-Click. When someone clicks through, they have to do something AFTER that for you to get paid. This area is probably well known to all who read this, but rewards extremely targeted pages since the prospect will already be, or will get to be, in a buying mood, after clicking through.

Obviously, test this against your Adsense pages and see which brings in more money. If you're already making lots of money from Adsense you may never look twice at this new service. I think this can be more profitable than Adsense for a lot of people, who DON'T have cash cow type Adsense sites already.

As always. Test. Test. Test.

New Technology To Kill Old Marketing Methods?

I think at this stage Web 2.0 sites are not going to fade away. Evolve into something better, but not fade away. The age of video, and audio, is now upon us to keep up with the Joneses.

Those that command traffic will still be able to rake in the sales, as that's at the heart of this industry. What has changed is the tools and technology needed to drive that same traffic to the same website.

Squidoo, YouTube, MySpace, FreeIQ and so on are all embracing this coming change. I think the day of the long form sales letter is over, or going to be over very soon. People have shorter attention spans. Video and audio are better at capturing and keeping that attention for much longer.

This is a change marketers will have to adjust and adapt to. Professional sites now may look ameteurish in the next year or so. Granted, all a sales page needs to do is sell, and I've seen some ugly sales pages that work. Web 2.0 is an attempt to expand and grow on the written word that holds the internet together.

Take advantage of what's out there. Traffic is at a very easy point right now, even if you are not taking advantage of all the technology of the coming Web 2.0 era.

Some Words About Website Traffic

There's got to be 1,001 ways to get traffic to a website. I'm sure there's more. So, my question is; Are you one of the people who just can't send traffic somewhere? It's optimized, monetized, SEO-ed, and all those other techinical terms to mean it's easy for people to find it, but noone is coming?

A quick rundown of ways to get people to your sites are:

Message Board Signatures: People surprisingly click on them. Who knew?

Articles: Like this one. At the bottom is one of the things I've done where you can learn mroe about this stuff. People click on that too. Sometimes they buy. Who knew?

Pay-Per-Click: You can pay for it. That can get expensive. It's got to be learned, but FREE is so much more on the budget...

Borrow it: You can trade traffic with other websites in your same market or niche. Trade links. Depending on the site it'll be a trickle or a waterfall that comes in.

Search Engine Results. The "natural" free traffic that comes in when someone sees your site at the top of search results. This one takes times to learn, but the fundamentals all make sense.

Redirect it. Perhaps you already have a place that gets good traffic. You may not know how it's doing it, but you can direct them off somewhere else you own to monetize them. Add a link here or there in good places to make them go where you want them to go.

The thing with getting website traffic is there is no, one, single, magical fix. You leaves crumbs and links to pull from anywhere and everywhere you can. At the same time you get looks reciprocal or one-way links with highly important and popular sites in the search engines.

It will come. It always does if you do it right.

This rant-worthy article about traffic comes from the author of Chimp Change. An ebook will well learned and hard learned information to get you back on track so you know where to go next in your internet marketing efforts.

Marketing Using Forums

Forums are a big part of the internet today. People register to join then post messages in a bulletin board type website that other registered users can respond to. AS communities they quickly become tight-knit with heirarchies, regular posters, people who simply read and not post, to people passing through posting once and then never again. They often have strict rules that are enforced by their moderators that vary from forum to forum. The "No advertising" and no "spam" rules are typically the stricted of the rules regularly enforced.

So, if you plan to market your website on a forum, how do you work with and inside those rules? "Spam" can vay from person to person and is usually enforced by the moderator-on-duty's discretion. In this sense, learning the community is very powerful so you know where the lines are even if you intend to post a blatant ad. The most effective way through the rules is something called a Signature. A signature is your own customized area that appears under every post you do. Signatures sometimes have their own rules, but simply linking your site in there with a catchy headline will drive traffic to your site.

It's recommended NOT to post sales letter type posts on message boards since they have the possibility of getting your account banned from the forum on the spot. Noone likes their forum used as a big advertising and commercial holding place. They want contributions and people who really want to discuss the topic at hand. If you come out wanting to sell something you run the very real risk of being ousted by the administrators. Hang out there for awhile, get to know some of the forum's regular posters, THEN take a shot at trying to advertise to them. Do it subtely and not obviously. Blatand advertising on a message board is a cardinal sin that has got many ambitious internet marketers banned on sight. Make sure you approach and do it right.

Credit: The Cash Monkey
Chimp Change; Author of an internet marketing guide for beginners. Instant download. $79