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Is your website or blog really 2 sites?

August 5, 2011 By

This is important Need to Know information! Please read. There’s a very important setting for your website that may have a big impact on your search engine rankings or even for people to find you. It’s fairly easy to do and it’s overlooked by too many people.

What is it? It’s called a re-direct or canonical re-direct and it is really important to your website success.

Did I tell you it’s important? It’s important!

I got a call from a friend this morning who was panicked that his website was down. He had typed in his domain name without the prefix “WWW.” and got a GoDaddy (his web host) placeholder page. I got the same results.

But when I typed in his URL preceded by “WWW.” His website came up fine.

He was relieved.

But he has a major problem and here are 3 reasons why:example of canonization in Google Analytics

  1. Anyone typing in his website address would not get his page and he might lose a prospect or a customer.
  2. His website stats would have his Home page listed twice and give a disjointed view of his site visitors.
  3. Google might not give him full credit for visitors to his site and might even penalize his rankings.

I’m sure you understand the implications of #1.

As for #2, Google Analytics and other visitor tracking applications keep track of the index page of both your WWW and non-WWW web addresses.  It’s tidier and more correct to have, what is essentially the same page, reported together.  (See example to the right)

But the biggest implication is that, without the canonical re-direct, Google views your site as 2 sites and splits everything between them.  The WWW part of your URL is considered a sub-domain.  Google may also conclude that your site is duplicate content.  I could write about that all day, but suffice it to say, it’s not in your favor.  (Google “duplicate content penalty” to learn more.)

So, how do you fix this?

You can create a re-direct or a canonical re-direct so that the non-WWW version of your site forwards (aliases) to the WWW version.  Or vice-versa – it doesn’t matter.  You or your webmaster put a small snippet of code on your site does this easily.  I found a post, How to set up a 301 redirect, that explains how to do this and it’s done differently depending on how your webserver is set up.

If this all makes your head spin, “Dammit Jim, I’m a businessman, not a web developer!,” then show this to a web developer who can do it very quickly.

But DO IT! Your website success depends on it!

 

Filed Under: Need To Know, Search Engine Optimization, Web Metrics, Web/Tech

Word Camp Chicago Notes (Day 1)

August 4, 2011 By

Word Camp Chicago 2011Notes from Word Camp Chicago 2011. Blog tips, Blog Security, SEO, Plugins, Resources!

Word Camp Chicago was a 2-day event packed with great information resources and blogging tips.  Some very successful bloggers and developers attended and here are my major takeaways out of near 20 pages of notes.

15% of the World Wide Web runs on WordPress.

Web/Blog Security: Dre Armeda, taco lover and security guy,  had a great tip on FTP.  He suggests that you don’t store your FTP password in your FTP client – that you should submit it manually.  There are virus’ that look for website passwords.  If you access more than one website, this could be a major “Gotcha!”  He recommends that people use password apps for other applications and logins, such as 1Password, Keepass, Lastpass or Roboform.

Word Camp Notes Blog Tips Blog SecurityHe also shared a link to determine how many infections a potential web host has had in the last 30, 60 or 90 days. I’ll use Godaddy in this example: www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=godaddy.com You should replace “godaddy.com” with your web host domain. This information may help you find a secure web host or give you insights on your current provider.

You must update your WordPress themes and plugins! 70% of hacked sites were not updated.  Did you know that when a version goes from, say, 3.2 to 3.3 that the functionality has changed?  Minor revisons (3.2.1 to 3.2.2) indicate patches and those may affect security.  If you’re interested, you can view information to changes to plugins by clicking on the Changelog tab.

Another recommendation is to change the database table prefix from “WP_” to something else when you set up your blog.  You’ll find it in your wp-config.php file.

I did not know that you can limit (or specify) IP addresses that can access a blog’s login page.  That’s awesome!

Here’s something to bookmark: Enter a URL and the Sucuri SiteCheck scanner will check the site for malware, blacklisting status, and out-of-date software.

WordPress/Blog SEO: Mert Sahinoglu is a Chicago SEO and delivered great information on blog SEO. One point that he and others made at Word Camp was that inbound links seem to be waning as an SEO factor and “Likes” and sharing are becoming more important.  Mert says Google likes to see both.  I agree and think that links will always be a measure of popularity, but Likes and shares may be a little harder to manipulate and may get more emphasis in algorithms.

Mert Sahinoglu, WordPress ChicagoHe claims that Google gets to know you and will serve MSNBC to Democrats and Fox News to Republicans for some news-related searches.  (Kinda creepy)  He said that’s great for 95% of the people, but not so great if you’re doing research.  He like the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, in partfor it’s ability to generate sitemaps.  He recommends standard and mobile sitemaps. (Many people discussed the importance of sitemaps, including video sitemaps)

He shared some links to plugins and a list of blog directories:

  • Broken Link Checker will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found.
  • SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.
  • Yet Another Related Posts Plugin gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.
  • WP-Cache is an efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster and responsive.
  • Top Rank’s list of RSS/Blog Directories is an ever-growing list of places for you to list your blog for increased exposure.

Mert recommends using custom permalinks.

Google is working to develop links connecting page content to author, so savvy bloggers are using the “rel=author” tag to link to their author page and Google Profile.  If you haven’t set up your Google Profile, please do so now.  For more on this and information on easily adding the Profile button to your site, go here.  There are specific instructions for WordPress too.

Search engines cannot see Flash, CSS, Java script, share buttons, author links and links from page A to page B.  But they can see HTML text, alt-text and meta tags.  All of this affects your search rankings.

Blogrolls are problematic and leak link juice and kill Pagerank. If you want to interview someone, link to them from the post.  If you want a blogroll, put it on one page, not every page on your site.

Comments are great, but you should have visitors register to comment and continue to monitor their comments.  3rd party comments still count, such as Foursquare, Yelp, etc.

I’ll post my notes from Word Camp Chicago Day 2 later.  If you liked this post, I’d appreciate a comment, Stumble, DIGG, etc.  See sharing buttons below.

Thanks!

Photo credit: Kurt Scholle (See more Word Camp Chicago pictures)

 

Filed Under: Blogging, Conference Notes, Latest, Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Tips to Combat Comment Spam for WordPress

July 28, 2011 By
Regina Smola

-Guest post on How to Combat Blog Comment Spam by WordPress Security Expert Regina Smola at WPSecurityLock.com.   Is your blog secure? Ask Regina! -

Tips to Combat Comment Spam for WordPress

Comment spam is a problem for both website owners and the visitors reading them. They can be a nuisance to manage, but you must be vigilant in combating spam!

The ugly truth! Spam comments on your blog leave your readers with a bad impression of your site, discourages them from commenting, and they may never return. It demonstrates lack of care and laziness by the webmaster.

So what can you do to manage your comment spam?

Here’s some quick tips to reduce and filter comment spam:

1. GENERAL SETTINGS – Log-in to your WordPress Dashboard (wp-admin) and go to Settings> General. Make sure that Membership “Anyone can register” is unchecked. The last thing you want to do is allow your spammers to become a registered member of your site.

2. DISCUSSION SETTINGS – From the Dashboard, go to Settings > Discussion.

Other comment settings: Make sure “Comment author must fill out name and email” is checked. You definitely want to know who left the comment.

Before a comment appears: You should check “An administrator must always approve the comment.”. If you check “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” then it will auto approve their next comment, so use this with caution.

Comment Moderation: The text box for “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains… should have a 1 in it. You always want to moderate any comments with links in them. Below this box, you can also add some spam catcher words, names, urls, e-mail, and IPs.

Comment Blacklist: You can fill out the text box with the content, name, url, e-mail or IP you want to blacklist on your WordPress blog.

3.  SPAM FILTERING: Install, activate and configure an spam filtering plugin like Akismet or Defensio Anti-Spam.
By applying these simple tips, will help to reduce the amount of comment spam from appearing on your blog.

How to Combat Comment SpamSecurely yours,

Regina Smola
WordPress Security Expert
http://www.wpsecurityLock.com
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Filed Under: Blogging, Guest Posts, HOW TO:, Latest, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

How Often Should You Optimize Your Website for Search?

June 30, 2011 By

How often should I optimize my website for search engines?

I’ve come across this 3 times this week. Someone asked how often they should optimize a website for the keywords they want to be found for. Then my wife’s work was told by their web guy that their site only needed to be optimized twice a year. And now I hear a marketing acquaintance talk about a client who had some keyword research done for free and then asking her to update the meta tags on the website.  The free SEO guy says “Search Engine Optimization only needs to be done quarterly.”

Stupid is as stupid does.

And this guy can’t update the site himself?  There is something drastically wrong here!

Let me correct this flawed information and show you how to benefit from it. Obviously the people suggesting that SEO needs to be done only twice a year or once every 3 months have no real-world experience in Internet Marketing.  That people are listening to these Bozos (and paying them) is really troubling, but you’ll benefit by doing things the right way while your competitors sit around for 3-6 months waiting for results.  And when that doesn’t work, they’ll revise (or usually not) and wait another eternity for the Search Engine Gods to smile down on them.

Stupid is as stupid does. (Sorry, I already said that)

First, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is techniques, policies and tactics used to refine a website to attract visitors who search for information in Google, Yahoo, Bing and hundreds of other search engines.  What works best on one search engine doesn’t work as well on others, and that means for individual keywords!  You can have a top 10 listing on Google and be in position #70 on Bing for one keyword and have the exact opposite results for another keyword.

Second, there are at least 2 dozen places to optimize a webpage for Search.  In reality, only 5 or 6 are useful to address and it takes experience to integrate all of those together, not only SEO, but so that the content reads well.  So for the guy who did the free keyword research mentioned above and asked the marketing specialist to update the meta keywords, he is ignoring writing effective headlines, placing proper keywords in page content, cross-linking pages on the site, optimizing images for search…the list goes on.  It takes time to revise, wait for the Googlebot to visit, assess the results and revise again.

Stupid is as stupid does. (Sorry!)

Third, one of the most important elements of optimizing a website for search is to build incoming links to the website.  We could discuss this for days, but here are some major points:

  1. The number of inbound links can be important for increased rankings, but the quality of the sites the links come from is more important.  The best links come from “authority sites” that are related to the subject.  For example, a link from a news site, association or chamber of commerce site is much more valuable than a link from “Betty’s Blog” or something equally unrelated.  Sites with higher traffic levels are preferable to sites with little or no traffic.
  2. Building links to a website is a long, time consuming project, especially for websites in competitive niches.  It doesn’t happen overnight and for successful websites, it’s a marketing tactic that never really ends.
  3. And while there are services out there that will sell you inbound links for insanely low prices, most of them are known to Google and others, who devalue those links, if not ban your site altogether!
  4. Search engines spider different sites with different frequency, often based on how often the site content changes.  CNN and other news sites are crawled by search engines constantly and new articles begin showing up in search indexes almost immediately.  They crawl smaller sites less frequently so you want to update your site on a regular basis to encourage more visits from more search spiders.

So for the guy who told my wife’s work that SEO only needs to be done twice a year, he’s completely ignoring one of the most important elements to optimizing a website for search.

Stupid is as…oh nevermind!

One other point is that search engines rarely give you the highest ranking they think your site or page deserves because they want to see how it evolves, how people interact with it and how many other sites link to it over time.  Good SEOs refine their tactics, wait for the search engine spiders to visit, assess the results and revise accordingly. It’s not a one-shot deal.  And despite our best efforts, sometimes search rankings can be frustrating.  I had some success with an eye doctor client site.  We achieved most of our objectives in the first couple of months, but we just couldn’t get rankings for the term “optometrist” and their local GEO’s (location geographical references).  It took a couple of months of trial and error, but we finally got them page one rankings for all combinations of GEOs and “optometrist.”  That’s because we worked on it every month for several months!

I’m not saying that SEO is a slam-dunk.  It’s like a box of chocolates.  You never know what you’re going to get. But you can improve your odds! And you must optimize your site on an on-going basis!

I believe that clients of the two guys mentioned above have websites that are not optimized for all the keywords they should be, are not ranking well for many of the ones they’ve tried optimizing for and aren’t getting much in the way of website traffic, all because of their sporadic approach to website optimization.

I hope you understand what all this means.  If you do it will improve your results, save you money paying Bozo to optimize your website and give you a major advantage over your competition!

There is much more to this!  Please call or email if you’d like to know more.  Toll free: 877 Web-Asylum

Would you like a chocolate?

 

 

Filed Under: Case Studies, Competitive Advantage, Latest, Search Engine Optimization

A Fine Example of Social Media

June 8, 2011 By

Social Media has been around for centuries. It’s not just limited to Web 2.0 technologies. In fact, here’s a recent example of Social Media that doesn’t have anything to do with the Internet.

Filed Under: Latest, Social Media

How to Set Up a Social Media Listening Station

June 7, 2011 By
Hot to set up a social media listening station

Actual Social Media Community Managers at an Actual Social Media Listening Station

How to Set Up a Social Media Listening Station

One of the social media tactics that most people aren’t aware of, but many people love is to set up a social media listening station. It’s part of the social media training at CertifiedSocialMedia.com.  By listening to your market, customers, prospects, competitors and your competitor’s customers and prospects, you’ll learn who is looking for your product or service (and what they think of it), what they think of your competitor’s product or service and identify people who know neither you or your competitor, which gives you a competitive advantage.

If you or your company were getting trashed online, you’d want to know about it, right?  I’m amazed at how many people don’t want to know; either they’re afraid of the situation or don’t care what their customers think.  Their competitors stand to benefit from this, both directly from the unsatisfied customer as well as anyone in their network who is listening.

This isn’t new, by the way.  New technologies like Twitter, Yelp, blogs, etc are just new ways to spread word-of-mouth marketing, just as people have done, mostly in-person, for hundreds of years.  Today’s social media, however, DOES amplify the bad things people are saying about you!

Or, amplify the Good things people are saying!

Businesses that go online and respond to criticism public, can actually help your reputation.  People respond positively when you take an incident of criticism via the social web and deal with it!

Dodging the social media bullet because you’re afraid of negativity shoots yourself in the foot.

Which gives you an advantage over your competitors, who aren’t as media savvy.

Social Media Mission Control

Gatorade Social Media Mission Control

Hotel Social Media Marketing

By starting with a listening station, newcomers to social media can also learn how to become a social media marketer.  For my clients in the hospitality industry, I recommend that they begin monitoring other flagged properties, who can be helpful when they begin talking on social media.  They may also identify brand loyalists who would consider staying at their properties if they were aware.  For instance a Hilton hotel in Chicago might benefit from Twitter conversations people are having with Hilton properties in Orlando or Seattle.  A suburban Chicago hotel might snag travelers who normally stay in the city.  (Play nice!)

Or the Hilton can hijack room nights from the Westin. (Take the gloves off!)

Whether you’re a hotel, manufacturer, optometrist or restaurant, the techniques of setting up a listening station are the same.  Here’s how.

Social Media Marketing Training

1) Find people to follow and engage on Twitter by looking for people who fit your target persona profile.  For a local business, you may want to target people who live in your town or surrounding communities.  Sites like WeFollow or LocaFollow allow you to search for Twitter accounts by location.  Our friends working in hotels might search for similar properties by searching on “Hilton” or “Westin.”

2) Follow your competitors and their customers and prospects.  (Even vendors) It’s easy to click on their Follows or Followers and scan their lists for people of interest.  Consider using Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to set up columns by interest or objective.  For our Hilton marketing team, they might create a column of other Hilton Twitter accounts, a column of customers and a column of their direct competitors and their followers.  There are powerful ways to engage each of these segments!

3) Set up Google Alerts for mention of you, your competitor(s) or market. You can specify the types of media to monitor and how often to deliver it to an email account.  Bonus Points: In addition to setting up alerts for mentions of your business or competitor’s business names, set them up for your business and competitor’s names PLUS the word “sucks.” Super Bonus Points: Have the “Sucks” alerts get delivered to your mobile phone.  You’ll want to jump on those quickly! :-)

4) Similar to Google Alerts, Social Mention allows you to set up free alerts focusing on the social web.

5) Addictomatic allows you to set up a webpage that resembles a Control Panel. (Your boss will think you’re awesome!)  Track the latest buzz on any topic or look at their categories of what’s trending for ideas of things to Tweet, post on your Fan Page or blog about!

Social media is the ultimate canary in the coal mine about what’s broken in your business.  Are you worried about negative feedback on social media? Do you hang up the phone when somebody calls to complain?  Wouldn’t you like to be in contact with dis-satisfied customers of your competitors?  Set up a social media listening station and get networking!

 

Filed Under: Hotel/Tourism Marketing, Latest, Social Media

Glossary of Internet Terms

May 31, 2011 By

Internet Marketing Definitions and Glossary of Internet Terms (Added to Web Asylum Internet Glossary May 2011)

Glossary of Internet TermsThe following Internet terms have been added to my Glossary of Internet Marketing Terms at WebAsylum.com in the past month.

Define: 301 Redirects
A method of alerting website visitors and search engines that a page is no longer a part of a website. The 301 redirect automatically redirects the website visitor or search engine crawler to a new page, usually one with similar information.

Define: Cross Sell
Cross selling can be defined in different ways, depending on the situation. The best example, however, is to try and persuade a prospect to buy something else when they’ve rejected another product or service or if their sought after product or service is unavailable. Other definitions include activities that could be described as upselling.

Define: Dynamic URLs
Page URLs that are generated using a database as opposed to straight HTML or similar language. They’re usually easy to spot because they contain a “?” and often a mishmash of letters and/or numbers and symbols. Dynamic URLs can also be problematic for search because the page is created on the fly, usually based on a series of questions or queries.

Define: Elevator Pitch
A brief (30 seconds or less) description of your business, product or service. So-called because it’s all you could say during a chance meeting in an elevator, it’s useful as a quick introduction in many business scenarios. Your elevator pitch should be rehearsed and include benefits and your USP.

Define: Exact Match
A type of keyword matching where the search query exactly matches the advertising, whereby “deluxe widgets” would only match for that exact term and not “deluxe blue widgets.” Exact match is often specified in pay-per-click advertising but can be used in organic search.  See also “phrase match.”

Define: Google Sandbox
When Google puts a website on probation, it is referred to as being in the Google Sandbox and is usually a de-listing of a site for “not playing nice” or incorporating black hat SEO tactics. Sometimes the ranking drops by 30 positions, sometimes more. It’s nearly impossible to contact Google about being in the Sandbox and It is thought that sites are put into the Sandbox for 3 months or as long as the offense remains, whichever is longer.

Define: Lifetime Value of a Customer
The amount of revenue or profit (gross or net) of an individual customer or group of customers. Knowing this metric helps decisions on marketing tactics and other aspects of business. Can be useful to look at individual customers, certain groups of customers or total customers. LVC can be affected by upsells and cross sells.

Define: Phrase Match
Used in Pay-Per-Click advertising, Phrase Match allows for ads to match search queries when the keyword or keyphrase is used verbatim, but allows for leading or trailing words in the queries. (EG :When “down comforters” is the advertising keyword, but would match a query of “satin down comforters” or “down comforters store in Chicago.”)

Define: Pillar Post
A blog post designed to attract inbound links from other sites for the benefit of search engines OR to attract significant attention that results in more brand awareness or to get visitors to click on affiliate links, opt-in to email lists or buy something. Pillar content is significant and special.

Define: Page Authority
Authority rankings for websites and webpages are based on a variety of factors that could be compared to some kind of ‘respect index.’ This ranking changes from website to website and even from page to page on a site. The authority of sites linking to a site or page is part of the complex equations search engines use to determine rank for specific keywords.

Define: Site Authority (aka Domain Authority)
Search engines rate websites and webpages for ‘authority” based on a variety of factors that may include how much traffic the sites gets, how many inbound links it receives and from where, whether the TLD is .com, .org, .net or something else. The authority of sites linking to a site or page is then used in the algorithms that determine rank for specific keywords.

Define: Sitemap
Sitemaps help users and search engines find content on a website. HTML sitemaps are usually links on a site to a directory tree of a websie. Search engines most often use XML sitemaps, which is code behind the page and not visible to to visitors, but search engines sometimes use HTML sitemaps, especially if the site is missing an XML sitemap.

Define: SOHO
Small Office / Home Office

Define: Up Sells
As part of the sales process, when a salesperson or website tries to sell a more expensive product or service or additional product(s) or service(s). Many sales experts think that the best time to sell an additional item is right after a completed sale. See Cross Sell.

Define: USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
Unique Selling Proposition or Unique Selling Point is used in advertising or sales presentations to differentiate the value of one’s goods and services over a competitor’s.

Define: WAHM
Work At Home Moms

 

Filed Under: Latest, Things I Learned While...... Tagged With: , ,

Why Optimizing for Bing is So Important

May 25, 2011 By
Optimizing for Bing Tips

Rey Villar

How To Optimize Your Website For Bing and Why

I attended an Online Marketing Meetup hosted by the affable Rey Villar, an expert on SEO. The topic was why Bing is important to people who market online and there are some important aspects of Bing for you to know and some differences with the other major players, Google and Bing’s partner, Yahoo!. I’ve included 5 tips for optimizing your website using Bing near the bottom of this post and a great tip on using the power of Meetup.com to build great links into your site.

Pros:

  1. Bing and Yahoo! now account for 25-30% of all searches and growing. That’s significant!
  2. Bing has attractive consumer demographics and is probably better for consumers than B2B, so if you market B2C, you need to be on Bing.
  3. Can rank fairly well with links with lower authority.  The Google needs site authority for competitive queries.
  4. Bing appears to have a bias in favor of Travel, Hospitality and Entertainment niches.

Cons:

  1. Is not as good as The G at deep crawls of a website or handling dynamic URLs.
  2. Not as useful at recognizing natural citations.
  3. Bing does not reward newer domains as much as Yahoo! and especially Google. However newer sites can rank fast.
  4. Has difficulties with 301 redirects.

How to Optimize for Bing:

  1. Use Bing Webmaster Tools (not just Google Webmaster Tools).
  2. Claim your listings on Microsoft Small Business Portal, which is similar to Google Places.
  3. Anchor text is a big factor for Bing.  Google appears to be emphasizing it less.
  4. Use both XML and HTML sitemaps on the site.
  5. Robot.txt files should include Bing.

Rey shared some additional information and recommended tools that he likes best for SEO.  I could tell you more, but then he’d have to kill me!  So I suggest you sign up for Successful Online Marketing!  Upcoming topics include:

  • Email Marketing in a Social Media World (6/28)
  • Boosting Sales and Lead Gen with Google Optimizer (7/26)
  • Using Video to Increase Rankings and Conversions (8/23)
  • Monetizing Your Website: 7 Ways to Make Your Site Earn More Revenue (9/20)
  • Essential Social Media Marketing: 10 Social Media Tools Every Site Needs (10/25)

As a followup to my recent post, “Why I Attend Meetups and Why You Should Too,” let me add this; building inbound links from sites with high domain and page authority can benefit search rankings significantly.  Rey says that SEOmoz tools show Meetup.com with a domain authority of 89/100 and the Online Marketing group’s page with 63/100 page authority.  You can benefit from these strong links by making sure that your Meetup profiles have links to your sites.  These links are do-follow and you can use keyword-rich anchor text.  The more Meetup groups you join, the more profiles you can create!

Comment discussion also generate links to your sites!

Got a question or a favorite search optimization tip?  Please share!

 

Filed Under: Conference Notes, HOW TO:, Latest, Search Engine Optimization

Are You a Small Business Owner or an Entrepreneur?

May 12, 2011 By
Dan Kennedy

Dan Kennedy

I’m reading Dan Kennedy’s book, “No B.S. Business Success in the New Economy.” He talks about the difference between small business owners and entrepreneurs. I understand the difference between the corporate world and entrepreneurs, mid-sized businesses and the SOHO market or WAHMs.  But I’m interested in his take on the differences between business owners and entrepreneurs.  There is more of a difference than I had considered and that affects your approach if you are one or the other or you’re marketing to them.  Kennedy says,

“The terms “business owner” and “entrepreneur” are commonly used as interchangeable synonyms, but they are different people. A business owner can become an entrepreneur. But they are different people.“

The difference, he says is:  “Ordinary business owners think in terms of growing sales and businesses, while the entrepreneur thinks in terms of creating value.”

He says the New Economy’s demands favor the entrepreneur more than the business owner.  Customers of the New Economy are in control and they know it and they want to be catered to.  Kennedy says, “The New Economy mandates a much more willing and creative approach to constant change and evolution and recurring reinvention in order to keep a business very specifically and currently relevant to the customers able and willing to support it.”

So, are you a business owner or and entrepreneur?  Kennedy lists 4 Distinctions:

  1. The true entrepreneur is not married to a specific business.  Business owners have narrowly defined limits.  Entrepreneurs are more expansive
  2. Entrepreneurs, first and foremost, make their money with innovative ideas.  They are creators or builders much more than managers.
  3. Usually, entrepreneurs are in many businesses, not one, even when it looks like one.
  4. Entrepreneurs develop equity differently.  Business owners are focused on buildings, real estate, inventory, etc.  Entrepreneurs believe the most valuable asset is the customer.

What do you think? Are you a business owner or an entrepreneur?  What can you learn from the other?

I will report on the important challenges and opportunities of the New Economy that he identifies in an upcoming review.  Have you read this book or any other Dan Kennedy books?  Please leave a comment!

Filed Under: Latest Tagged With: ,

Why I Attend Meetups and Why You Should Too

May 10, 2011 By
Jason Rubacky Affiliate Summit Meetup Chicago

Jason Rubacky

If you haven’t attended a Meetup, you’re missing an opportunity to learn some things that are important to your career or business, network with like-minded people and have some fun! Meetup.com is where you begin and you can look for a Meetup based on location and/or interest. Many Meetups are free and some have a modest fee to cover food or beverages.  Play around with Meetup.com, you may find some interesting opportunities!

I belong to several Internet Marketing or Web Development Meetup groups. I recently attended 2 Meetups that are part of the Affiliate Summit Conference, one in Chicago where I live and one in Orlando where I was on business.  (Note: Affiliate Summit is moving to Facebook Groups from Meetup)

At the Chicago Affiliate Summit Meetup, I was talking with Jason Rubacky, the Affiliate Development Manager from Shareasale, who told me that he could rank in the Top 10 for any image, usually in the Top 3, within a week or 10 days. That’s powerful stuff! His technique is not that much different than anything an SEO with a little experience doesn’t already know, but what is intriguing is the WHY it works so well for Jason. He thinks many of the leaders in image search rankings are by people who don’t really optimize well – they just sort of lucked into a high ranking.

Affiliate Summit Meetup Chicago #meetmeaffsumI believe it!  And that presents an opportunity for you!

Jason shares his optimizing images technique on the Shareasale Blog, but the highlights are to use an exact match strategy for the “File name,’ “Title,” “Alt Text,” and “Description” of the image.

At the Orlando Meetup, Missy Ward, Michael Nunez and Brett Burky  all made made great presentations.  Missy (@MissyWard) presented “Monetizing Your Blog Using Affiliate Marketing.”

Missy Ward #meetmeaffsum

Missy Ward

Tip #1: Video – Including using TubeMogul for easy distribution and tracking for top social media and video sharing sites.  Also, how to use Google Adwords Video Ads

Tip #2: Email – Use Feedburner email subscription on your blog – it’s free.  Use AWeber (aff link) for subscriber opt-in and sending weekly automated newsletters using a template

Tip #3: Photos – Use plugins to rotate images on your blog

Tip #4: Twitter & Facebook – Build relationships by being relevant and genuine.  Make sure you’re transparent and offer full disclosure.  Use automation plugins and consider Facebook advertising.

Tip #5: Podcasting – Missy recommends that you syndicate podcasts to iTunes and AudiblePodcast.com

Michael Nunez from AffiliateManager.com continued with: Automated Commissionable Links.  Michael introduced his Bouncelinks.com program and using it on blogs, forums and social networks. I was impressed and want to investigate it some more!

Affiliate Summit Picture #meetmeaffsumBrett Burky (@BrettBurky) presented on Leveraging OPA. What if you could legally steal traffic from successful websites? You can do this with making frequent comments on blogs & forums, using trackbacks, guest posting and participating in social media, including Twitter, Fan Pages and LinkedIn Groups.  He shared some of the tools he uses to stay on top: Google Readers, Comment Sniper, Google Alerts and Hootsuite.

So, between the two Meetups, I probably invested 3-4 hours of my time.  What I’ve shared with you in this post is only a small portion of what I learned, not to mention the value of the relationships I’ve made.  Participating in Meetups is an efficient way to learn and network and that all helps build your ROI!

Affiliate Summit Orlando MeetupOne other point: I was talking about Meetups yesterday with someone who had looked at them and dismissed them.  Upon further review, she learned that the organizer of a local Meetup she might be interested in is also the Executive Director of an association she’s interested in!  Talk about multiple opportunities to connect!

Click for more Kurt Scholle photos on Flickr of the Chicago & Orlando Meetups

It was just announced that Affiliate Summit Meetups are moving to Facebook Events.  You can look for Meetups in your area, but to attend one of the dozens of Affiliate Summit Meetups Meetings, you need to find them on Facebook.

#meetmeaffsum

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