How to Get Your Website Published In a Book (and My Story)
As internet marketers, we often look for ways to get the attention of A-list bloggers so that we can attract traffic and links to our websites. Sometimes, it can be a good idea to get the attention of people online, but not in a way that gets you on their website, but in their next book.
I wouldn’t share something I haven’t experienced, one of my first websites is in a book called “DJing for Dummies” which is part of the popular Dummies series that I’m sure you’ve all heard of. This wasn’t by chance; I had to work for it.
9 Comments / 
June 19th, 2008 / 
Marketing
Get Your Internet Marketing Fix…Offline
I wrote this post on the plane four weeks ago, I was at a time where I had no access to the internet and hadn’t printed anything Internet Marketing related off my computer and I was ready for a 12 hour flight to Thailand…Oops.
I did manage to get my Internet Marketing ‘fix’ though, and if you are subscribed to hundreds of feeds which you read daily like I am then you will understand its quite a change not to hear the latest news from Search Engine Land or a fascinating blog post from Seomoz and the countless other blogs I don’t have time to mention. If you remember a few months ago I received Search Marketing Standard through the post, well…I finally had time to read it.
I have wrote about this in the past but only after a brief review (flicking through the pages) but now ive read the first two issues cover to cover and I have to say it was a throughouly enjoying read. There were some things I really liked about Search Marketing Standard:
- Industry – This is the ONLY print publication relating to Search and Search Marketing so every single piece of information in there I was interested in, could relate too and enjoyed. Something you won’t find in a magazine with no real focus on a specific part of a specific industry.
- Information – You buy magazines or print publications for the information they have in them, so if it’s no good you don’t buy it again. Thankfully for me and the creators of SMS (Search marketing Standard) the content covered included a varied range and even a handy conference guide which is something you could only really appreciated from a print publication and not from a blog.
- Style – The magazine certainly doesn’t look as new as it is, and with (I assume) limited funding Im really impressed with the quality of the product and how you ‘feel’ like you really got your moneys worth.
As with everything there are some downsides or some nitty gritty complaints from those who are just trying to give some constructive criticism so if Andrey and the guys are reading heres what I would like to see change:
- Less Ads or More Content – I know ads are what keep things like this going, but so should the money people spend on the publications aswell. To my knowledge there was a large ratio of ads to content and something I would like to see get less and less (or more content) to strike a balance between the pages I can read and enjoy.
- More Community Involvement – This might seem strange because I heard of Search Marketing Standard by their editor posting on a forum I frequent. I emailed 2 different people from Search Marketing Standard and not once did I get a reply about possibly giving them suggestions or writing a guest article, yet they managed to register to our forums and post.
Search Marketing standard was a great read and it certainly helped me get my Internet Marketing fix for a short time at least.
This is the one I bought at Heathrow airport, slightly put off by the ~£6 price tag I was intrigued to see what it was all about after hearing some good reports online. Needless to say I wasn’t disappointed with over 100 pages of fantastic content.
The articles that really caught my eye included an interview with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Basically he was plugging his new open source search engine (wikia). Following on from that I was surprisingly interested in the Designers Face-off where a team of top design companies are asked too create a design for a certain type of website however they want, and they are all reviewed at the end, something Im sure that could be interesting each month.
Finally I was also impressed to see quite a few articles on Search and SEO, I guess I shouldn’t be really as they are forming to become a huge part of the internet, I would say net magazine is far more for webmasters then it is for general web users, or even those who work on the web. I was shocked but pleasantly surprised to see my ‘e-friend’ Andrew Girdwoods face at the top of an interview relating to Search, something I didn’t expect to see so congrats to him.
Round-Up
Although Ive only named two sources in terms of Getting my Internet Marketing Fix offline, its because those are the only two sources I used so why write about anything else. Im also hoping that its not too long for you to be away from a computer, if you run out of things to read maybe start writing a few blog posts like I did ;).
3 Comments / August 4th, 2007 / Marketing
Top Internet Marketing Blog Posts…Ever
Don’t you just love finding a really authoritative blog on a certain subject you are interested in and just checking out all the popular posts to see what you can find? Well how about a list of the most popular Internet Marketing related Blog posts…ever?
Disclaimer: I thought I would write this first to remove confusion. The list includes topics on All Subjects and areas of Internet Marketing from my personal favourites, posts that have had huge traffic or a lot of user interaction.
12 Comments / July 31st, 2007 / Marketing
How You can Earn $600 with 10 Minutes Work
Before you think Im not going to give you a real answer to this terribly good headline (if I say so myself) I want to let you know that I would never write something unless I meant it, was passionate about it or was going to follow through with an answer, my loss is your gain.
The opportunity to make around $600 dollars over the next year has only arisen in the last 48 hours and so far theres nobody on the bandwagon so theres plenty of ways to make the cash. You may remember a while ago I wrote a post on ‘How to Make Money with CherryTap‘ yet sadly only 2 people followed my advice, one was me and I started making more than $50 a month and one was a friend who is now cashing in on the success of yet another re-branding.
LostCherry >> CherryTap >> Fubar
Do any of those sound familiar? Well they are all a social network with over a million members, all looking for layouts and graphics etc but theres only one problem, nobody apart from myself and a friend seemed to want to offer them and with the constant rebranding (LostCherry was CherryTap and now Fubar) it was hard to keep up.
So how can you make $600 over the next 12 months?
Setup a layouts site, theres so many free myspace turnkey sites for free that you can upload to a domain you will have no problem getting one setup. OK so maybe 10 minutes was a slight exaggeration but its really only 10 minutes work. Download the code, upload to a domain and maybe add a blog to get some unique content.
The real reason this will work well is because there is no search engine competition but there is secret search volume. The search volume is secret because is far too early for any keyword tools to pick up on the volumes, just having the keywords in your title tag is going to get you ranking in the top 10.
As I believe in complete transparency I own the site CherryTapper, I have made $50+ a month for a couple of months and thats with only Yahoo & MSN rankings, no traffic love from Google. That traffic is going to die down a lot now as the site is rebranding, maybe with 30 minutes work you can take over all the SERP’s and really push the earning capacity of those keywords. Think affiliates, adsense, list-building pages…anything you want, theres some good teen traffic coming your way.
Good luck and let me know how you get on!
7 Comments / July 30th, 2007 / Marketing
How to Turn Your Blog Around in 4 Weeks
Why four weeks, why a blog? Because its best to see things happen in a case study. I have 4 weeks left before I make the biggest change of my life and want to give myself a challenge to completely turn this blog around. Having a big change coming up means I have far too much spare time again and am going to dedicate it to blogging and helping others which is something I love doing! So what changes am I going to do and what changes could you do to turn your blog around in just 4 weeks?
Post More Often
Ill be the first admit I have been lazy, but Ive done so much learning and developing myself as a person and as a business-man this last year ive neglected doing the things I really love, as stated that is helping others and having fun while doing it. If your blog needs to be turned around in 4 weeks then you too either need to post more often or post better content.
Post Better Content
Having spent the last 3 days, literally glued to CopyBlogger you realise not only can you learn so much from something if you really focus on it but you can also actually enjoy doing so aswell and really take what you have learnt and use it. I now think my titles are a lot more interesting then I have to make sure the opening of my posts either draw the reader in futher or emerse them in the content by asking a question. See how I did that? If you are posting good content on a regular basis you are on your way to success
Use Feedburner
Mostly for the way that you can see if you really are turning your blog around. I class turning a blog around as really improving on what you have, substantially increasing your traffic and getting more feed subscribers. Checking on your number of feed subscribers is something feedburner can help you do but it is up to you to increase them. Ive also added the Comment, Email and Digg buttons using Feedburner Feedflare to the bottom of my RSS Feed posts
Subscribe to Your Own Feed
No its not sad, its to check for performance, to see how things appear and make sure your not turning people away who do actually subscribe to your feed. Little did I know recently I had an audio plugin that removed all spacing, imaging and links from my posts which really upset me and I hate to think how annoyed it made the readers. Check on your own feed to make sure things are formatted correctly and its also good to see if a post you make is something you would normally read from your feed reader if it hadnt have been yours.
Be Involved in the Community
Im a big fan of Sphinn from Search Engine Land as it gives me a community I can really interact with although Im worried it will get taken over majorly by the current big bloggers in the industry. Get commenting on blogs and leaving your views on blog posts if you are reading them already. If you want success with Social Media get involved in the community, dont just try to use / abuse it. I use Sphinn because I love the content and leave comments on things I think are great. Its possibly getting my brand out there and making my own posts easier to hit the front page even if the traffic will be minimal it will be targetted.
To Summarise…
If you want to turn your blog around in any time scale, never mind 4 weeks then you have to really want to turn it around, you have to enjoy blogging and you have to be a benefit to your readers. Im hoping posts like this help others to increase their blog and I like writing it as its sort of giving me tips on how I can improve my blog at the same time. If you are a benefit to others and love what you are doing, you are going to have success, its as simple as that.
Current Stats to Improve on:
- 53 Feed Subscribers
- 89k Alexa
- 247 Posts
- 220 Comments
2 Comments / July 29th, 2007 / Marketing
