Tuesday, December 20, 2005

I'm Still Pumped Up!

In the coming weeks, I've got a host of really powerful internet marketing advice and information to share with you.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent all weekend at the Internet Marketing Center's "Bootcamp" in London. It was an incredible two days. My adrenelin started flowing on Saturday morning, and I still haven't come off the ceiling!

I thought that I was "experienced" in many internet marketing techniques, but during the weekend, I came away with 30 pages of notes and 51 action points for me to implement (I've done four of them!). In future posts in "Marketing Sparks", I'm going to be telling you about some of the ideas I came away with - and I'm going to let you know about my experiments with them.

Amongst other things, I'll be covering:

Technology:
Blogs
- how you can use them to get high search engine rankings and drive traff'ic to your site (I've had a blog for 2 - 3 years and done little with it - that's going to change)
RSS - what it is, why it's easy to use, and why it's so powerful for marketers (I've dabbled with it, but not really seen its power until now)
Podcasting - again, what it is, why you should start using it and again, how it's simple to implement (I'm going to make my first "Podcast" in the next 2 days)

Marketing:
Copywriting
- what needs to go on your sales page - and where it should go (I'm going to be making major changes to my sales pages in the coming weeks)
Email - methods of ensuring your emails are delivered.. and read (I use some of them, others were new to me)
Affiliate marketing - if you've joined my affiliate scheme, you're going to see even more help from me in the future!
Search engine marketing - how to use Pay-Per-Click effectively and how to boost traff'ic from the "organic" search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc). Again, I found that this old dog can still learn new tricks. I'll describe them, and tell you how successful I've been

So, there's going to be some hot stuff in future posts in "Marketing Sparks", kicking 2006 off to a great start! And no, despite the source of a lot of this info, I won't be angling the material towards affiliate links to the Internet Marketing Center!

Friday, December 02, 2005

Building Content-Filled Websites - Update

After using ContentDesk for six weeks, I decided it just wasn't for me. The online software was a little clunky, I found it difficult to find enough articles for the niche site I'm building, and the user support was not ideal.

But what I have come across is a lovely bit of free software called "Orwell". It doesn't automate the site building very much, but it enables you legally to trawl article directories.

The trouble with the "scraper" type of software is that article directories are increasingly banning automated interrogation of their websites. And Google is getting wise to websites built of "scraped" content, and is rooting them out.

I came across "Orwell" through a fascinating report about this change in Google's policies, and you can only download "Orwell" from this report. I asked the author of the report is I could make it available for public distribution, and he said "yes".

So, if you want to experiment with "Orwell" for rapidly gathering a lot of tightly focused articles, download the report from here. It's in PDF format.

Inside the report, there's a link to the download website and (important!), the PDF also includes the software's unlock code.

With "Orwell", I managed to find about 80 articles on "cold calling" and "sales prospecting". With ContentDesk, I only managed half a dozen or so.