Blue Oasis, Online Marketing Greenery

Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing or advertising used on the internet that connects several party that produce/sell/promote relevant products or services. Say for example, you visit website A. Website A presents a link / advertisement that introduce services or products in website B.

It’s using one website to drive traffic to another. This is the kind of online marketing which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. Search engines, email, and other marketing methods are the most popular ones compared to the low profile affiliate marketing. Yet undeniably, it still plays a significant role in marketing strategies.

When web surfers search on google, yahoo, msn, they create special permission for advertisers to actually ’sell’ them their products and services. It’s a Reverse Broadcast Network. The search engines took full advantage of this ‘reverse broadcast network’ and enable advertisers to market themselves through extremely-targeted advertising platform. Unlike the conventional advertising which is intrusive, search allow every business to sell their stuffs to people who need them at exact time when they need them.

so what are you waiting for? Start your way through search engine today! :)

So maybe you’ve just wrote yourself a good post in your blog and you feel like hook up with, linking it, or just simply notify those related post from other blogs about your newly written post. This is what you shouldn’t miss out doing.

Pingbacks, where the author request for notification when they link to their documents / articles / blog post. This can be done by embedding URL to the words in between your post. Say if i want to link to meshio.com’s article - Money or Time? I’d highlight any of the related words ..

and embed it with URL like this..

While Trackback, functions exactly like Pingback. The method of doing is different. In wordpress, there’s a Trackbacks option below the box where you write your post. Copy and paste the url inside the box. Like this..

Due to both Pingback and Trackback functions the same way, you don’t have to do the same thing twice. If you’ve already Pingback the URL inside your post, you shouldn’t Trackback the same URL again. Once you’re done, publish your post and it’ll look something like this at the comment section of the URL you tried linking it to.

I met Ken yesterday after having late lunch in Starbucks. We wanted to discuss about the project he’s about to hand over to me. I noticed he has bought a new laptop, DELL XPS M1530.

So i asked, ” What do you think about the laptop? Is it ok? ” He complained that when he bought a Dell laptop which costs him about RM 4,000 ++ is not doing well, the bottom part of the laptop is not flat but bulgy. He called up the customer service team and they sent a service man to help him solve the problem. The technical guy unscrewed the laptop but Ken hated when the stuff he newly bought is torn apart. So the guy immediately understand his need and bring back the laptop promising he’ll return him a new one.

Dell sent Ken a new laptop. Not only that, they’ve upgraded the laptop with more powerful processor, additional 1gb RAM, and a Blueray DVD-Rom with no extra cost. Ken was overwhelmed. He is so excited that he earned all the stuffs which will easily cost him RM 1,000++ if he had bought them through Dell in the first place. Then he was carried away excited about his extraordinary experience and new laptop and the performance of it and how he earned those stuffs for free and …..There you go, a happy customer. He was really mad about Dell sending him a faulty new laptop a few days ago. Now Dell has got themselve a good marketing person. If i were to ask him what laptop i should buy if i were to get a new one, the answer is obvious.

Dell doesn’t have to pay him salary to sell their laptops, they don’t have to give him incentive for the sales he made and i’m sure, Ken will do a good job promoting Dell’s laptop. At least, better than the average sales person that Dell has in their retail outlets.

One of the important way to build traffic is to create lots and lots of inbound links. It’s not just normal inbound links, it’s the inbound links from websites, forums, blogs, directory listings, award sites that is related to the content on your web.

This is what happened when daniel submitted our URL to tonnes of websites that’s related to design industry. Cool eh?

Having hard time going through search engines trying to locate your website ranking with a few specific keywords? Going through every page of the result is really really pain in the Ass. This tool will save your day.

One of the most spectacular tool for this job is a firefox plugin from
SEOBOOK.com. After installation, click on the words Rank Checker in the bottom of your Firefox browser to activate the tool.

Enter a URL and keyword combination and click the start button to check it’s rankings.

SEOBOOK.com offers a variety of tips and tutorials to improve your rankings, traffic, and profits. Check it out!

Internet marketing or better known as online marketing, is a activity, services or products that perform marketing on the world wide web. Typically, internet marketing is an effort of promoting services or organization with the goal of increasing sales, popularity, brand awareness, and boosting profits.

The internet marketing has unique advantage like distributing information and media updates at a very low cost across to global audiences. The interactive nature of Internet marketing, both in terms of instant response and in eliciting response, are unique qualities of the medium.

There are several ways of internet marketing methods and strategies, namely, Search Engine Marketing ( SEM ) which can be broken into Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) and Pay-Per-Click ( PPC ), display advertising, text-based advertising, bahavioral marketing, software-based ads, email marketing, newsletter marketing, Customer Relationship Management ( CRM ) Marketing, affiliate marketing, web press releases, interactive advertising, online reputation management ( ORM ), online market research, and also Social Media Marketing Methods such as blog marketing, and viral marketing.

To better optimize and analyze how your website is doing, this is one of the website you must visit. Goingup.com offers first class web site analytics and SEO tools for your website. One of the toll you may want to try is the SEO optimizer.

First, key in your web URL. Then key in the keyword you wish to optimize with and lastly choose search engine.

You will basically get a report as shown below, tips and tricks, suggestions and warnings what to do and what not.

It’s a must-try tool for your SEO work. Visit www.goingup.com for more.

The first U: Useful

Before there was LonelyGirl and before there was NumaNuma, the web was a tool. The money and time that’s gone into it has paid off because people become more intelligent and productive when they find what they’re looking for.

Guess what? The search engines know if your page is lousy. They know if it’s some sort of dead end trap. They know if people see it and then flee, and they know if it’s actually helpful. How? Because they track how often people hit the ‘back’ button. Because they track how many other sites are linking to you. Because they have thousands (literallythousands) of well-paid people looking out for every trick and scam in the book.

Most people online are trying to solve a problem. They want to know something or find something or buy something. They want to meet someone or learn something. A useful lens solves their problem. It gives them a sense of meaning, helps them understand what’s what.

It’s not just Squidoo, of course. Blogs do a great job of solving problems. Consider this great post from Joel Spolsky about Finding Great Developers.

Or take a look at these two lenses. They seem pretty different, but they both get tons of traffic:
http://www.squidoo.com/turkishhaircut
http://www.squidoo.com/HollywoodDolls

The reason they show up in search is simple: They solve a problem. They solve a problem without ego, without distraction and with authority and confidence. And they solve it better than any other page.

That last part is critical. No one cares if your lens is good. They care if it’s great. Irresistible. The one and only best spot online. Not in your opinion of course, but in their opinion.

Here are three more great lenses. http://weirdest.babynames.ever.com , http://www.squidoo.com/make-lemonade, and http://www.squidoo.com/laptopbag. Notice that if you were looking for information on any of these topics, you’d be delighted to find one of these lenses. Same as great blogs, like boingboing.

I’m actually uncomfortable writing this section, because it feels a lot like say, “if you want to succeed, work hard.” It goes against the grain of the rock-star, shortcut, I’m-in-a-hurry-here’s-some-cash American way. Sorry, but every shortcut I find isn’t really a shortcut.

In fact, it takes more time and effort to game the system than it does to just build something useful.

The second U: Updated

Search engines and blogs are now obsessed with recency. The theory is simple: the web moves fast, faster than any medium ever. So recently updated pages are worth more than old pages, all other things being equal. Sure, there are still classic pages like this: http://www.venganza.org/, but in general, updated, fresh pages beat old ones.

This sounds so simple. It’s actually pretty tricky to do.

If, for example, you have 20 or 40 Squidoo lenses, going to each one and updating it regularly can be quite a chore. You need to do it, no doubt about it, but you also need some help. That’s why user-generated content is such a tremendous asset. If you build a page that attracts other contributors, your content stays fresh.

Take, for example, this argument on Scott Adams’ blog about religion: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/the-atheist-who.html. The framework gets built once, but the ongoing debate inside of the page keeps it fresh and worth returning to. At the extreme, a site like Digg is changing all day, every day, always staying fresh even though the organizers of the site aren’t writing the content.

Many blogs allow people to leave comments. Squidoo will soon expand on this by allowing moderated discussions (we call them Duels) as well by using a Digg-like feature we call Plexo. Plexo allows your visitors to vote links up or down. So, for example, you could build a page about the top ten candidates for president and let your visitors vote their sites up or down all day long. Even if I saw the page last week, I might want to come back this week to see how my favorite candidate is doing.

The third U: Unique

I saved the most important one for last. In the haystack of the web, there’s not a lot of room for me too. If you build a page and use almost no effort, rely on defaults, write as little as you can, find no original links and copy and paste text from Amazon, don’t be at all surprised if you don’t get any traffic. In a world of millions of choices, you don’t deserve any traffic, do you?

The most successful Squidoo lenses, like the most successful blogs and the best stores, are all filled with unique stuff. Remarkable stuff, even. Stuff worth talking about. Links you can’t find anywhere else. Collections of information that actually make a point. Hand-built organization that teaches. Copy that’s worth reading.

“Oh, boy,” you think, “this is a lot of work.” It is, and that’s great news.

It’s great news because it means that for the foreseeable future, the secret of getting tons of organic web traffic has NOTHING TO DO with who you know or how much money you have. It revolves around a simple truth: great pages get more traffic.

One thing that makes a page unique is that it’s the best in the world on that topic. It is uniquely able to save time, solve problems, expose shortcuts and save money for the user. Or at least entertain her.

Most blogs are boring. Most Squidoo lenses are a little thin, to put it gently. Most corporate websites are selfish, cookie-cutter exercises in committee thinking that no sane person would choose as the best in the world. The more shortcuts you take, the longer it takes to get to where you’re going, at least online.

The Hall of Fame

Have you ever visited boingboing.net? It’s one of the five most popular blogs in the world, and no wonder. It’s amazing. Mark Fraunfelder and his colleagues kill themselves every single day. They create remarkable content, stuff that people can’t help but talking about. They deserve every piece of traffic they get.

Here’s a fairly long lens, but Ronni, the creator, has shown up on a regular basis and improved it. Just a few minutes a day, sure, but it adds up. As a result, it rules the search engines, because if you’ve got a problem that this page can solve (starlings!), you’ll be happy you ended up here.

Or consider this single page post about the new Amazon Kindle. Out of more than a million pages in a search on “Kindle terms of service”, this page makes the top three. Why? It doesn’t follow any of the obvious tactics. Instead, it’s merely updated and unique. It has a point of view. It’s worth talking about.

A lens doesn’t have to take a year to create, and it doesn’t have to be very long, either. Here, for example, is a lens on the best cookies ever. It probably took a few hours to build, but once it’s done, it’s done.

I could probably go on for pages and pages but I guess you get the idea. Find the top pages on most topics and you’ll probably discover that those pages are pretty good. Some of them are astoundingly good.

You have the chance to use your blog or your store or Squidoo to build useful, updated, unique pages that people can’t help but talk about. Once you do that, it seems, traffic follows.

Next steps

Google is on a mission to build a better web. That’s why they encouraged blogs, why they hunt down spam pages (even those with Adsense on them) and why they seek out pages that are unique, updated and useful.

I’m thrilled when I see a great Squidoo page, because it means our platform is working, that people are using it not to game the system or make a few bucks, but to contribute something precious to the conversation. You’re building pages that teach or soothe or inspire… stuff that’s in short supply. So thanks.

If you’re convinced, go visit http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/dashboard and update your lenses. Add a discussion or one of our new duel modules. Write a few paragraphs about what you wished you’d known before you know what you know now. Add unique collections of links, or annotate the ones you’ve got. Insert plexo lists so your users can vote. The short version: build a page other people want to see.

Don’t worry so much about the search engines. If you embrace the three U’s, they’ll embrace you. And if you see Mark Knopfler, tell him I said hi.

Seth Godin is the founder of Squidoo.com, a popular site that makes it easy for anyone to build a page about a topic they care about. He blogs at sethgodin.typepad.com. If you type Seth into Google, you’ll see what he means. You can find a list of Seth’s books right here.

Three U’s and the Haystack

After you build a page on Squidoo (or a blog, or anywhere else on the web, for that matter) there’s an almost irrestible urge to panic. Panic, because you’ve put in all this work and then you feel sort of powerless. “No one is looking at my page!”

It’s human nature. We want to be noticed, we want our effort to pay off and we hate to fail.

So, the question: How do I get more traffic? It’s not just you. EVERYONE wants to know the answer to this question. They want to know how to get more traffic to their blog, their corporate website, their Squidoo lens. More.

There are plenty of tactics about how to get more traffic to your pages online. Dozens of blog posts and great advice, easy to find. WARNING: None of these tactics work without the three U’s that are covered in this book.

The three U’s? Yes, it’s simple:
Useful
Updated
Unique

The reason you don’t have enough traffic is pretty obvious but still hard for most people to embrace. The web is a haystack, the biggest haystack the world has ever known. The reason that Yahoo and Google are so important is that they help us find what we want in the stack.

And your lens or blog or page or store is just a tiny little needle.

Of course you don’t show up first in Google. I’d be stunned if you did. With a million matches on a typical term, the odds of showing up first are, ready for this… a million to one.

That means that the search engines can be really picky. Sure, there are ways to trick them (for a while) but pretty soon, the average stuff just ends up somewhere in the middle. If you can settle for this, you should, because the alternative requires some effort. This is a really short ebook about three requirements to avoid the middle, three ways to stand out, three ways to make all those other tactics actually work for you.

You can skip these three and spend all your time and your money trying to beat the system. Or, you can embrace the system and put it to work for you. It’s worked for me so far, and I’ve managed to rank highly for dozens of terms for my blog and my Squidoo lenses.

If you spend any time at Google, what you’ll discover is that the people there are universally committed to making the web better. I can’t remember ever talking to anyone at Google (or Yahoo for that matter) who said, “hey, that’s a pretty lousy page, but we make a lot of money on it.”

Superstition

What people do:

When we see a system we don’t understand, we make up stories. Humans used to think that space was filled with ether, that supernatural beings rode chariots through the sky to make the sun rise and that stomach ulcers were caused by pastrami sandwiches. We saw phenomena that we didn’t understand and made up stories around them.

There’s a lot of stories about search. Certain kinds of content, we hear, gets you banned. Other kinds of link structures always work. There are gnomes at Yahoo with a blacklist. Certain political parties are favored… the list goes on and on. We find a few data points to support a theory and suddenly it becomes a religion. We follow habits slavishly, all hoping to please the search gods.

It turns out that it’s a lot simpler than that. The search engines have been really up front about what they seek and what they link to. I thought I’d give my best shot at explaining it.

A few words about Squidoo

If you’re already a Squidoo lensmaster, feel free to skip this little section. If, on the other hand, you found this ebook some other way, a quick explanation:

Squidoo is a platform that lets anyone build a page about anything. Online. For free. In just a few minutes.

Just to be difficult, we call the pages “lenses.” A lens is your viewpoint on a topic. There are lenses on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the best way to get a dragontattoo and a wide ranging page about digital photography. In fact, there are about 300,000 lenses on just about every topic imaginable. Each hand-built by an individual, like you, for free.

Lenses focus attention, drive clicks and even earn royalties. None of that happens, though, if people don’t notice your lens. Hence this ebook… a way to build pages that get noticed and clicked on. It works for blogs and commercial sites too, of course, but I’ll be using Squidoo lenses as my examples. (Hey, it’s my company and my ebook, so there you go.)

- to be continue -