Here what Google has to say about the collaboration: http://bit.ly/afjWXO

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Google AdWords Editor

• Work offline and then update your campaigns efficiently and effectively.

Google AdWords Traffic Estimator

• Estimate the cost of keywords according to the word, budget, language and location.

Google Insights for Search

• Discover what keywords internet users are typing within categories, seasonality, location and time parameters.

Google Conversion Optimizer

• Handle advertising expenditures around particular conversion objectives

Keyword Research

Google AdWords Search-based Keyword Tool

• A list of keywords that is computed by analyzing the contents of your website and matched up with real Google search inquiries

SpyFu

• Displays what keywords similar competitors are bidding on

AdWords Wrapper

• Converts a keyword into one/all of Google’s match types

Google Wonder Wheel

• Displays word associations in a visual and interactive map

Keyword List Generator

• Generate lists of keyword using words and modifiers

Keyword Misspelling Generator

• Generate possible keyword or phrase misspellings to match common typing mistakes

Keyword Combiner

• A simple keyword generator that mixes from two or three word lists

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

• Combined keyword statistics from Google, Yahoo, Wordtracker, MSN  and Keyword Discovery

Link Building

Producing content

• If you produce content such as articles and blogs or leave comments somewhere, you can leave doors for your audience to link back to your website.

Yahoo! Site Explorer

• Check what other sites are linking to you, the number of your pages in Yahoo’s index, and the links of your competitors.

Page Inlink Analyzer

• Presents columns of indexed pages with the different inbound links to each particular page

pluginSEO Beta Linking Tools

• Displays the relevancy of keywords to your page and competition, promotion and structural code suggestions

HubSpot Website Grader

• Graded on factors such as inbound traffic and social media popularity to assess marketing effectiveness in different categories

Sheer SEO Backlinks Watchdog

• Manage and keep track of information about inbound links such as anchor text, page rank, date added, and detection of meta tags.

SoloSEO Link Building Tools

• A compilation of tools that helps keep track of the creation and deletion of inbound links

Link Valet

• Check the links and other sources objects on your page  to see if they work

Link Harvester

• Displays duplicate links from the same site and the domain name

Google Webmaster Tools

• Assistance in boosting visibility and checking indexing status

Majestic-SEO

• Trace link data  for any domain that include anchor text and backlinks

Xmarks Smarter Search

• Discover where popular pages are being bookmarked so you can target your content there

LinkAssistant  Rank Tracker

• Displays your site’s page rank automatically

Xinureturns

Displays your site ranking, whether you have syndication, how much of your content made it as social bookmark s, indexed pages and how many backlinks

Buzzstream Link Building

Helps you organize and maintain contact info and links

Nielsen NetRatings

Displays relevant information by demographic profiles from sites, measure content consumption and provides suggestions to your marketing approach

Market Sentinel

A set of tools that helps you monitor topics, benchmark your brand, and identify influential users

Who’s Talkin

Search and monitor topics across blogs, news, social networks, videos, images and forums

Analytics

Viralheat

Observe mentions on social networks and provides analytics to understand the data better

SEMRush

Discover the keywords that are driving traffic to your competitor’s sites and find out related terms you can use

Compete

Discover potential affiliates and keywords as well as view traffic and involvement for sites

Quantcast

It connects buyers and sells with ways to target, segment, and reaching audiences

Google Analytics

Track users from the previous source, find the conversion rate, and geographic location they are from

Social Media

SocialMention

• A cross platform collection of today’s most popular social media on the data that is relevant to you

Hootsuite

• Manage multiple social network accounts and contributors in different columns

CoTweet

• Manage multiple Twitter accounts and contributors by delegating specific tasks as they come and see notes next to the Twitter users

Monitter

• Displays real-time tweets for a group of keywords

Twazzup

• Displays all the mentions of your brand on Twitter

GeoChirp

• Find tweets based on keywords as well as location and then translate to your desired language

Google Alerts

• Get notified every time content is mentioned or uploaded that match defined keywords

Radian6

• Observe, measure and interact with the gathered mentions and contains built-in work-flow applications

BlogPulse

• Search and keep track of trends that are being discussed in the blogosphere

Addictomatic

• Displays of the mention of keywords from different media platforms such as Flickr, YouTube, and Digg

Bit.ly

• A link shortening tool that allows you to monitor the popularity by tallying the amount of clicks

Social Oomph

• Bring automation to Twitter by automatically sending replies and auto follow who add you

Blackhat

**We don’t recommend you to use these. These were included to inform you of the type of tools to avoid and the possibility of your competitors using them. The consequences are lower page ranks or even the removal of your site because they are seen as spamming techniques.

XRumer

• Improve search engine ranking by posting automatically on forums, blogs, and sites

SEnuke

• Multiple postings to different media, RSS aggregator and social bookmarking sites

SEO Elite

• Identify high page rankers on Google, mail multiple people at time, and check if they linked back

Scrapebox

• Artificially increase your page rang by pinging and automatically comment with predetermined messages

Department of Teaching and Learning’s Clinical Assistant Professor Dr. Josh Diem using Twitter in his lecture on advertising’s influence on children.

Stand in the back of any university lecture hall and look at what the students are browsing over. Most professors would be astonished that it isn’t the pythagorean theorem. More often than not, students are on Facebook, Twitter or chatting with their friends.  As social media marketers, and strong advocates for leveraging new tools, we saw an opportunity and challenge for professors to meet students in Twitter, the medium in which students had once used to better ignore their professors.

We took our social media communication skills to the classrooms of the University of Miami to help professors correspond with a large group of students without disrupting the lecture.

By using Twitter’s hashtags, professors set up a real-time message board for students to propose questions, talking points and arguments. Professors or Teaching Assistants (TAs) monitored responses and addressed those they felt appropriate.

“Twitter is meant to enhance communication, so we’re enhancing communication,” said Nick Santillo, 24, University of Miami alumnus and owner here at Voltier. “Even in staff meetings, training sessions, and the boardroom – Twitter is constructive when used this way.”

The study was inspired by this video created at the University of Texas, Dallas:

University of Miami Assistant Clinical Professor Dr. Josh Diem, Department of Teaching and Learning, uses mid-semester evaluations to see what his students think of his class. Using Twitter, he can get those updates daily.

“If people aren’t resistant to change,” said Dr. Diem. “[Twitter] offers a good tool to find out what needs to be changed.“

Tweets to the Staff

Just like the classroom, the likelihood of your employees absorbing everything in your staff meeting, training sessions, or even boardroom is pretty small. Not only will this enhance participation, employees will walk away with a makeshift outline of your meeting.

We wrote a how-to guide that’s going out to business owners and universities all over. “People always talk about all the useful benefits of Twitter,” said Santillo, who manages several client’s Twitter accounts, “but you never really see a practical use. This is just one we’ve found.”

Keep in mind: your Tweets are public. We don’t recommend trying to cram your competitive strategy into that 140 character box. You cannot interact in a hashtag conversation without having public Tweets, so be sure to uncheck Protect my Tweets in on the settings page.

E-Commerce is the selling of goods or services online, including via online stores, auction sites (like eBay), or online classifieds (like Craigslist). While eBay and online classified sites can be great places to sell products and grow an online business, for the purposes of this article, I will be discussing online e-commerce stores only.

2. Why E-commerce and why now?

In 2007 US online E-Commerce sales reached $175 Billion dollars. This number is expected to grow to $335 Billion dollars by 2012. (Neilson) Today, Business-to-Customer (B2C) projections are enjoying a double digit year over year growth. As the Internet becomes ever more ubiquitous, and more people become comfortable with the process of purchasing products and services online, the larger E-Commerce will become. The fact of the matter is that the new era of the Internet has opened up a window of opportunity that may never present itself again. Companies that are able to solidify their E-Commerce businesses online within the next few years will likely enjoy long-term popularity and success as a result of being early movers. Late-comers, however, will find it extremely difficult to break into already established and crowded niches.

3. E-Commerce vs Affiliate Marketing

When it comes to selling goods or services online, the two most common models are affiliate marketing and E-Commerce. Affiliate marketing is the selling of goods or services on behalf of another company for which you are paid a commission. E-Commerce is the selling of goods or services directly from a website that is maintained by you (you already own the product, or purchase it from a distributor). Affiliate marketing can be tempting for those who are not interested in working through the initial logistical steps required to acquire products, set up an online store, and manage customers, but affiliate marketing provides far less of a return.

Bottom Line: It pays to ‘do-it-yourself.’ Affiliates who sell other companies’ products can expect to make anywhere from 5-20% of the cost of the good or service sold through a click-through or referral style tactic. E-Commerce, by comparison, yields much higher profits with product markup usually upwards of 100% of the wholesale price of the good or service sold. There are some niches that have markups of 300-400% on their products or services. Many retailers or affiliates assume that the process of setting up and running an E-Commerce property is difficult, but this perception inaccurate. There are currently many new, easy to use technologies and services that make starting and running an E-Commerce business possible even for those with little or no experience with websites, E-Commerce, or marketing. The following steps will walk you through the process of setting up and launching an E-Commerce business in a do-it-yourself style guide.

Starting The Business

1. Choosing a Niche

The single most important choice you must make when deciding to begin an E-Commerce business is the niche that you are going to be working in, and the products that you are going to be selling. The following hints contain some criteria you should consider in making your decision.

A. Where to Start

With millions of potential products you can sell, it might seem a bit overwhelming. Fortunately, there is an excellent resource to explore all your options, and it is a source that is probably already familiar to you. The source is eBay! eBay is the largest auction site online and does huge volumes of goods transactions in every conceivable niche. eBay has done an incredible job of segmenting each market, and they have tools within their site to help users evaluate the popularity of each niche. If you start in the Categories section, you will get a feel for the scope of information available to you. After you have selected a niche from the category list, you can take a look at a “completed listing” and see how many products have been sold in that niche recently. My advice would be to find several that seem interesting and then evaluate them based on the criteria listed below.

B. Traffic Potential

If you are going to sell products online for money, you have to first make sure there are enough people out there willing to purchase your products. The best way to figure out if there is a market for your niche, and the easiest, is by finding out how many people are looking for the products you will be selling. You can find this by looking at the monthly search volume (total number of searches done) for ten or so of the most common keywords (usually products) in that niche. An excellent tool for analyzing those keywords is something that Google provides and you can access here. If the combined total number of monthly searches from the top ten or so most common keywords in one niche is less than 50,000, you are probably better off choosing a more popular niche.

C. Number of products

The more products that exist within the niche, the more unique opportunities there will be to attract customers looking specifically for those products. Congruently, the more products that exist within the niche, the more traffic you will be able to get from “long-tail keywords.” Long-Tail keywords are more specific, less general search phrases that aren’t searched particularly often individually, but exist in large quantities. For example the keyword “1995 used Chevy Blazer” would be considered “long-tail”, whereas the keyword “used car” would be considered short-tail. 80% of the searches done in any niche are of the “long-tail” variety. The more individual products within the niche, the more long-tail keywords will be used to find the products you are selling. **While it is good to be in a niche with a large number of products, and a strong “long-tail”, be careful of overextending yourself. Stick to one niche; don’t try to sell absolutely everything.

D. Would I enjoy this niche?

Starting and running an E-Commerce business requires considerable initial effort and sustained work over the long term in order to be successful. It is important that you have a passion, or at the very least, some interest in the niche you are going to be selecting. There is a high likelihood that part of your marketing and promotions will mean writing about topics within the niche, so don’t pick something you are uncomfortable talking about, or something that bores you.

E. Is the niche prohibitively competitive?

A common mistake of many E-Commerce start ups is failing to evaluate the current state of competition within a niche. Electronics, clothing, shoes, flowers, and sporting goods are probably poor choices for niches because they are already saturated and dominated by well known brands. If you can name two or more online retailers in the niche you are looking to enter, it is probably a good idea to look into a different niche. Make a list of the top ten current E-Commerce sites within the niche you are evaluating. You can do this by searching for common keywords within this niche and making note of the top ranking sites in Google’s search results. Evaluate each site on aesthetics, usability, features, the niche’s unique selling proposition, product selection, and prices. Another good idea would be to take a look at how difficult it might be to rank well in Google and other search engines for some of the most competitive keywords within the niche you are considering. SEOmoz.org has an excellent tool for evaluating how competitive a keyword is, which you can access here.

F. Online vs. Offline (buying trends within the niche)

You should consider how the products you are looking to sell are currently purchased. Are they available locally? Can your customer buy this item from their local Target or Wal-Mart? Is the product the sort of thing people don’t mind waiting 4-5 days to receive? The ideal product is something people would prefer to buy online, or something that is inconvenient or hard to find offline. Taboo products or unique, ‘throwback’, or closeout inventories often make great niche E-Commerce products, with the bulk of their sales occurring online. These markets do well for a few reasons, but the main reasons are E-Commerce sales are discreet and they offer more variety. Additionally, I would caution against products that people like to ‘try on’, or examine in person before purchasing (like Jewelry.) Selling Clothing or Jewelry online can be quite difficult and wrought with frustrating return situations.

G. Product Profit Margins

Selling a product that has very slim profit margins won’t leave you much room to advertise or market your site. It is important for you to consider both the cost and the profit margins of the types of products you will be selling. The higher the profit margin, the more leeway you will have to spend money on advertising and marketing strategies and still maintain profitability. Look at the wholesale prices of the products in that niche and compare them to the average prices of the top E-Commerce sites currently selling the same products to find out the average profit margins.

2. Acquiring a Product Source

A. Dropshipping vs Stocking Inventory

Once you have decided on a niche, you will now have to find a supplier for the products you are going to sell. There are two main ways to accomplish this: For those with enough start-up capital, you could simply by the products you will be selling on your site wholesale from a wholesaler or distributor. Depending on the niche you are in this could be a large initial investment. This option also means that you will be responsible for managing your inventory, packing and shipping the products to your customers, and dealing with returns or exchanges. Another option is to find a wholesaler or distributor that will drop ship products for you, which allows start-ups and small businesses to maintain the site and the marketing, and not be bogged down by customer issues. The second option also allows for a faster shipping time in most cases. If you find a company that will drop ship for you, you will only purchase products from them when a customer orders that product, and the dropshipper is responsible for packing and shipping, returns, and some customer service. Most dropshippers charge a fee of $3-$5 per order for these services, a fee that can be easily passed on to your customer.

1. Stocking Inventory Considerations

If you choose to purchase your inventory here are a few things to consider:

A. What is the shelf life of these products? (Do they spoil, go out of style, wear out, become obsolete, etc.)

B. What are the minimum orders? (Do I have to buy giant case lots, or can I purchase just what I need?)

C. What is the cost of housing these products? (Will you need to rent warehouse space?)

D. Who will do the packing, shipping, customer service, and returns?

2. Dropshipping Considerations

If you choose to use a dropshipper here are a few things to consider:

A. How reliable is the dropshipper? (Do they have good customer service and track record?)

B. What are their fill rates? (The percentage of orders that are filled 100% correctly and in full.)

C. Do they provide a product feed, which contains data and images of their products? (Can you get an automatically updated list of available, discontinued, and out of stock products?)

D. How do they handle returns, exchanges, and customer complaints?

E. What is their dropship service fee? (Does this make it difficult to price your products competitively?)

F. Do they have a minimum order amount? (This can present a problem if they have a $100 per order minimum, but you are only selling $25 per day on your site)

B. Finding Dropshippers

The following are some great places to look for wholesalers, distributors, and dropshippers.

1. Alibaba – Is a very large directory of business-to-business (B2B) suppliers, distributors, and manufacturers. Many of the companies you will find on here will also drop-ship.

2. Doba.com – Dropshipper

Simplest Business Model

Works Seamlessly With eBay

Excellent Training Materials

Guarantees the Best Drop Ship Price

Sells Name Brand Products

3. Salehoo.com 75,000 Members; 8,000

Unmatched Customer Support

Connect Directly to Suppliers

Access to Instant Imports

Supportive Community

Recognized by BBB

4. Worldwidebrands.com 8.1 Million Products

Top-Notch Video Training

Recognized As Best In the Wholesaling Industry

No Risk Of Scam Suppliers

Tested For Legitimacy

Over 9,000 Suppliers

Approved By eBay

5. Blackhatworld Forums – Dropship Wholesale Hookups – Forum in a Tech world setting

Wholesale/Dropshipper List via BHW

3. Buying a Domain Name

Once you have decided on a niche and figured out what you are going to sell, it’s time to select an appropriate domain name where your E-Commerce site will be located. The following tips contain some criteria that your domain choice should match with:

A. It should be as short as possible. Shorter domains are seen by users as having more authority and are generally easier to remember, and spell.

B. Your domain name should make it obvious to your potential customer what type of products you are selling. Unless you have huge start-up capital to build and launch an actual brand, stick with a domain/business name that reflects your product offering. Including the type of product you sell in your domain name can also help your site rank in the search engines for those keywords. For instance, if you are starting a Dog Clothing E-Commerce site, pick a name like “www.doggyclothing.com” instead of “www.bowwowscloset.com.”

C. Make the .com extension your main domain. If it is a commercial site, your visitors expect it to be .com domain, the .com domain extension is among the most trusted by searchers and search engines alike. You should purchase the .org, .net, .info, and .biz of your site as well, but your main domain should always be the .com domain.

D. Avoid hyphens and numbers, they seem ’spammy’ and unprofessional.

E. Make sure the domain is easy to spell. Spelling something intentionally incorrectly just to have a .com name will come back to bite you in the butt when your customers get to your competitors because they spelled it right.

F. Make sure the name that you choose for your domain name is not similar to other company’s names and that it is not protected by copyright.

G. Some great places to research domains:

1. Bustaname.com – allows you to create lists of possible domains based on keywords you choose.

2. Instantdomainsearch.com – Quick domain availability search – also gives you a discount coupon for godaddy.com

3. Buy an Expired Domain – Domains that are recently expired could potentially still exist in Google’s index which means they already have authority (of some kind) and have some power to rank well in the search engines. If you can, try to find a good expired domain that makes sense for your niche, this will be your best bet.

4. Developing your site

A. Choosing a Platform

If you have no experience with web development, you will probably need someone to create your E-Commerce site for you. The good news is that in recent years many new and powerful platforms have been created that work well as E-Commerce solutions. The following are my top picks and some notable considerations for each:

1. OsCommerce – Free – Open Source – Huge active community that regularly develops free add-ons – Tons of options for customization, skinning, and templating.

2. ZenCart – Free – Open Source – User friendly – Easy Installation.

3.VirtueMart – Free – Open Source – Ajax Product Overview – Joomla Integration.

4. Magento – Free or Enterprise(Pay) – Full Featured and Very Professional – Excellent product views – One page checkout.

5. CubeCart – Free and Pay versions – Template Driven – Full Featured – Very easy to set up.

6. X-Cart – Costs $229.00 – $500 – Very full featured – Good back-end control – Compatible with many payment systems.

B. SEO considerations

When it comes to On-Page Search Engine Optimizations best practices for E-Commerce sites, there are many considerations to be made. For those of you who are not experts, or don’t have the patience to spend the time optimizing the site for the search engines yourselves, your best bet is to go with a shopping cart platform that has integrated proper SEO technique into their systems. Be sure to look into this before choosing your platform. Below is a checklist of SEO items that should be adhered to at a minimum.

1. Title, Heading, and Meta optimization

Each page should have individual Titles, Headings, and Meta Descriptions that match with the content on that page. This is especially important for individual product pages. You will run into major issues if all of your product pages use the same titles, headings, and Meta info.

2. URL Rewriting

Your URLS should contain appropriate keywords and should reflect your menu hierarchies. For example if you sell 1998 Ford Windshields your URL should look something like www.yoursite.com/cars/ford/1998-windshields.html or something similar.

3. Avoid duplicate content at all costs

Make sure that you don’t have the same content on multiple pages; this can cause serious indexing problems and drastically reduce the amount of long-tail organic traffic you get from the search engines. Additionally, make sure that the product descriptions you are using are 100% unique across the Internet. A lot of times drop ship companies will give you product descriptions, if they have been provided to you, they have been provided to others. Even if it is a huge hassle, REWRITE your product descriptions so you can make sure they are UNIQUE.

I cannot overstate how important this is.

C. Unique selling proposition

Success within a niche relies on a combination of factors, but one of the most important factors is your site’s ability to stand out from the crowd. Even in niches that are not very competitive, it is likely that there are already dozens, if not hundreds of E-Commerce sites already in business. Ninety percent of these will be mediocre cookie cutter E-Commerce stores with very little in the way of uniqueness. Becoming a top E-Commerce site within your niche will be much easier if you can add value to your site beyond what the other sites in your niche offer. A few things I would recommend are:

1. Product reviews. (Outsource this if you have to, having third party reviews can boost your site’s credibility, and help you convert visitors into sales.)

2. Stellar search functionality. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing a site probably has what you are looking for, but being unable to find it. Give your customers a superior search experience and you’ve done your job.

3. Product Sorting. Many E-Commerce sites have some product sorting features, but few do it well enough. Give your customers a way to sort by price, name, rating, and any other metric that you think would be helpful for your product.

4. Blog Entries. Give a voice to your E-Commerce site by writing and regularly maintaining a blog that is located on your E-Commerce site. This blog will serve a dual purpose (Link Building) which I’ll discuss later on, and keyword placement.

5. Marketing Your Site

A. Manual Link Building

Manual link building should be a long term consistent task recognized as an important tactic in growing your E-Commerce store. It can often be difficult to build links to a commercial web property like an E-Commerce site, so it is important to be smart about how you acquire your links. The following are strategies that have worked well in my experience:

1. Blogger Outreach

Requesting links from bloggers in who maintain blogs in your niche. Often times they will give you a link upon request, but you may have to give them an incentive to link to you. Some bloggers will want a link in return; others may be swayed by an offer to write a guest post for their blog. Just remember, flattery goes a long way! If you’re having trouble getting bloggers to give you that link, offering monetary incentives, while frowned upon, certainly does work.

2. Directories

With thousands of directories out there, it’s very easy to find and drop your link for some easy link building. Directories won’t give you a huge boost in rankings, but it is still worth it to get into the major ones (Yahoo’s directory and a select few paid directories) and higher pagerank directories within your niche. Also try to get your site included in a directory that showcases sites built on whichever E-Commerce platform you choose. Getting into the oscommerce directory can net several dozen visits per week, and provides a good link value to help improve your rankings.

3. Article Marketing

One major difficulty when link building for E-Commerce sites is getting links to deep pages, particularly deep product pages. One great solution for this is to build links to those products through article marketing. There are many sites online that allow submissions of well written articles and how-to guides (ehow.com, Ezinearticles.com to name a couple). By writing articles about specific products or types of products, you can build links to deep pages to help fill out your sites overall link profile. Make sure that you take every opportunity to link back to pages on your site within the body of the articles you submit. Make sure you vary the anchor text and keep it natural – don’t force it to fit because you want it to. Keep it relevant and interesting, and you will get longevity out of the article.

B. Content Generation and Viral Marketing

Generating links to an E-Commerce site can be a difficult process, because other sites rarely have an incentive to link to a commercial web property. Editorially given links rely on having content considered worthy of linking to. Here are a few ways to accomplish this:

1. Blogging

By creating a blog, you can give your E-Commerce site a location for content that other sites will want to link to. It is important to make sure your blog is located on your domain; that way, any links built back to your blog will help the ranking of your site on a whole. There are several good blogging platforms that will accomplish this, including Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad, among others. For this type of blog I recommend WordPress, it is a full featured blogging platform with a large development community. WordPress has thousands of add-ons, templates, and tools that make it easy to customize and maintain. Wordpress can also be easily optimized for on-page SEO factors, which is why it is the best choice in my opinion.

The goal of the blog is to give you a place for content that will hopefully stimulate others to link. Creating such content is easier said than done, but there are a few tips worth mentioning:

A. The goal is links, not traffic, but LINKS.

As you conceptualize and write a blog post, ask yourself “Would I share this with people?”, if the answer is no, start again come up with something compelling enough to share.

B. Resources for coming up with ideas:

1. Digg search: http://digg.com/search (organize by most diggs based on keyword)

2. Reddit search: http://www.reddit.com/search (organize by top based on keyword)

3. Delicious search: http://delicious.com/search (look for most saved based on keyword)

4. Stumbleupon search: http://www.stumbleupon.com/

5. Google groups: http://groups.google.com (look for popular topics within keyword relevant groups)

C. Evaluating Virility Potential:

1. Will the reader understand the content quickly and easily?

2. Does the initial impression of the blog post illicit further desire to understand the topic?

3. Does the reader have an incentive or desire to spread the content by sharing?

4. Will it enhance their reputation, income, friendships, status, or peace of mind?

5. Is the effort required to spread the content less than the benefits recieved from spreading it?

If you can answer yes to most or all of these questions, you have yourself a viral topic. Basically that means a worthy subject to put on your blog so that people will want to read about it, and share it with others.

D. Content that builds links has a hook to it. The following are the most common hooks:

News Hooks — Breaking a hot news story on your site will almost guarantee a large amount of traffic and keen interest from the social news communities. However, news hooks are not the most linkable. Once the story becomes old news, it’s no longer a valuable resource to link to.

Contrary Hooks — Playing devil’s advocate is a good way to get attention, traffic, and links. Contrary content must be created with great caution, however. Unpopular opinions can cause damage in the form of down votes on social sites and unsubscribes from your content.

Resource Hooks — Creating a great resource of links, tutorials, information, and more are some of the best ways to attract a large amount of links. The great thing about resources is they rarely go stale. You can always go back and update them, when the content changes or the information is dated.

Humor Hooks — Next to news, funny and offbeat content is one of the most popular to share. The advantage humorous articles have over news articles are their great longevity. What was funny yesterday is usually funny today.

Ego Hooks — Appealing to prominent community members’ egos will entice them to help promote the content with their honorable mention. This can be done in the form of interviews, spotlights and lists. Ego-based content has a high success rate of obtaining links from those people featured in your content, as well as their entire personal and professional networks.

Attack — This hook relies on pissing people off, so if your goal is to build a brand, this is method is not for you. If your goal is simply to build links, than it can be one of the most effective methods. Creating controversy can be one of the best motivators for building links. By inciting anger, outrage, or frustration, your message can be spread far and wide, just be careful, this can also result in unwanted attacks or slander lawsuits.

Whatever the Hook, it is necessary for you to think about the direction that content will take you, and to think about where you would promote that content once it is written and live on your site.

2. Quizzes and Widgets

Interactive content can be extremely effective at building links. Quizzes and widgets allow users to interact by answering questions about a certain topic for comparison to an average of the answers for those questions. By appealing to a visitors desire for introspection, and by giving those visitors easy ways to share the results, we have seen tremendous successes with our own Viral Quizzes and Widgets.

3. Videos

Expanding into rich media such as videos can be an excellent way to make your E-Commerce site more unique and more memorable. It can also be a great way to open yourself up to new areas of visibility online, and create more vectors for linking to improve your sites rankings. Video content can be centered around several different things including but not limited to the following:

A. Product Reviews

Doing video product reviews are great for a few reasons. First, they give shoppers on your site a better experience, and more information to help them in their buying decision. This added value makes your E-Commerce site stand out. Product reviews that are hosted on YouTube have the added benefit of ranking pretty well in the search engines, so if you own a golfing supply store, and do a product review of the latest TaylorMade Driver, you probably have a pretty good chance of having your video rank for the products name!

B. Tutorials

How-to videos are another excellent option. They provide added value for your visitors, while also giving you an opportunity to drive traffic from YouTube or Google video searches. There are also many niche “how-to” video sites that allow submissions of video content. Syndicating your videos can be a great way to build links and gain additional referral traffic to your site. Check out TubeMogul.com, a video syndication site that lets you upload one video to dozens of video sites like dailymotion.com, Howcast, Metacafe, and many others simply and easily.

C. General Video Blogging

If you don’t want to do tutorials or product reviews, creating a more general video blog can be a great way to attract more links and visitors. Select topics related to your niche, and try to structure them to be interesting in the same way your blog entries are interesting. They should contain a hook just as your blog posts would.

6. Pay Per Click Marketing

Pay Per Click marketing can be an excellent way for new stores to begin making sales and developing a brand almost immediately. Being profitable with PPC in E-Commerce can be difficult, but it can certainly be done quite successfully. The following are some pro-tips:

A. Organize your campaigns by Product Type —> Sub Product Type. A key to achieving good ROI with PPC is to segment your campaigns so that you can serve relevant ads and landing pages to those who are searching for the keywords you are bidding on. Providing clear organization with proper ad and landing page targeting you will be guaranteed high PPC quality scores with Google and optimum campaign performance.

B. Do extensive keyword research. You are looking for keywords that get a good number of searches, but are still not very competitive. One of the best tools for researching and evaluating keywords is provided by Google. The Google Keyword Tool gives suggestions on potential keywords. It also gives estimated monthly search volumes, and a rough guide to how competitive the keyword is. The Google search based keyword tool also provides good keyword information.

C. Don’t go CRAZY with keywords. Starting with small groups of keywords is preferable to giant lists of every imaginable longtail keyword. Start with 20-30 keywords per adgroup and add more as you build a strong account.

D. Do some Math: Calculate how much money you can spend on each campaign according to your conversion rates and profit margins. If you’re campaign on “Blue Widgets” has an average profit margin of $30 per sale (excluding advertising spend), and your conversion rate is 2%, then your average cost per click has to be less than $0.60 in order to make anything on the sale. You should know what this number is for each of your campaigns. This can be accomplished with Google Analytics quite easily as I will discuss in the next section.

E. Avoid hyper-competitive keywords. Focus on finding more focused “long-tail” product specific keywords for much higher conversion rates and ROI.

F. Take hints from your competitors. Use tools like Spyfu.com or others to figure out what keywords your direct competitors are bidding on and adjust accordingly.

G. Create multiple ads and do ad testing almost constantly. Try adding coupon codes to your ads, it worked wonders for us!

H. Bid on your competitors brand names and manufacturers names. Unless they have submitted an exclusion request, you are allowed to bid on your competitors names or even URL’s. Many people will type in the URL they are looking for into a Google search instead of the address bar. By bidding on these terms, you can pick up a large amount of very targeted, cheap traffic when searchers click on your ad instead of going to your competitors site.

7. Tracking and Conversion Optimization

A. In-Depth Analytics

Utilizing professional analytics tools like Google analytics to better understand your visitors is extremely important to having a successful E-Commerce business. Even if you are not doing PPC marketing, you should be aware of the keywords and referring sites that are driving the most traffic to your site. A few key metrics that should be understood and examined in order to optimize your sites conversion rates include:

1. Total Traffic: How much traffic is your site getting daily?  How does this break down between Direct, Organic (from the search engines), and Referral traffic from other sites.

2. What is the average number of pages per visit? By increasing the average number of pages per visit you are getting, you will also increase your sales.

3. What is your sites bounce rate? Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave after looking at only a single page. High bounce rates indicate a lack of interest or an inconsistency in what the visitor wanted to find, and what they actually found on your site.

4. What are your conversion rates, broken down by product category, and sales channel? You should use your analytics to understand how Organic, Direct, PPC, and Referral traffic is converting to sales. Knowing this information is the only way to make informed decisions about where to best spend your money.

B. Heat Mapping

The second piece to proper tracking and conversion optimization lies in understanding how your customers interact with your site. Your analytics data may let you know where you might have a problem that needs fixing, but you need to know how to fix this in order to progress. Tools such as CrazyEgg allow you to see more specifically potential problem areas in your site, including places that customers find confusing, frustrating, or simply unappealing. CrazyEgg, and other similar offerings allow you to see where on the page users click, giving you an opportunity to change styling and layout that can create big improvements in site interaction, length of stay, and ultimately in conversions(sales).

C. Better Conversions Through a Personalized Experience

One of the major differences between online and offline commerce is the personalized service you can get in a brick and mortar store if you need help. Most E-Commerce sites do a very poor job at addressing customer concerns while they are on the site. There are several ways to give your customers that personalized experience and superior customer service.

1. Livechat – Having a live person available to answer questions can be an excellent way to convert visitor to buyers. Liveperson is an excellent paid solution and Crafty Syntax provides a decent open source version.

2. 800 number – Having an 800 number adds authority and legitimacy to your site.

3. Extensive FAQ – Try to answer any potential questions a customer might have. A few important ones to address that could mean a lost customer if not answered included: “what will appear on my credit card statement?”; “will my item be shipped in discreet packaging?”; “What is your return policy?” etc.

8. Email Marketing and Social Networking

While the majority of your sales will likely come from first time customers, repeat business is essential to the success of any online store. Email marketing and integrating social networking can be an excellent way to keep in touch with your customers and encourage repeat business.

A. Email

1. Collect email addresses from all customers. Email address should be a mandatory field for all purchases. This email will be used to contact customers about their orders, but can also be used later on to solicit new business, to tell them about deals, or to introduce them to new products. Make sure you give them the option to refuse further communication though.

2. Use an email service like IContact.com to send email blasts. Sending the emails yourself will result in poor results. IContact.com and other email marketing providers have white-list agreements with many ISP’s, meaning more of your emails will get through and less will be sent to your customers spam folders. IContact also provide tracking features which can help you track your email campaigns efficacy.

B. Social Networking

Integrating Twitter and Facebook into your site and email blasts can be a great way to reach new customers and develop brand loyalty with your current customers. With each email blast, be sure to include links to your Facebook group page and your twitter account. Incentivize your customers into being your friend on Facebook, or following you on Twitter by offering bonuses through these channels. Exclusive coupons or deals work great.

9. Affiliate Programs

An excellent way to increase both your sales and your organic search engine rankings is by starting an affiliate program for your ecommerce store. Affiliates act as your sales people, spreading the word about your ecommerce store online. Not only will you gain more sales through the traffic they drive to your site, but their marketing efforts will increase the number of links pointing back at your site which can significantly improve your organic search engine rankings. By utilizing an affiliate program you can also get your site included in many reputable affiliate directories, which can provide additional benefit.

A. Affiliate Software

1. idevdirect.com – iDevAffiliate offers inexpensive software that is highly compatible with most shopping cart systems. There is a small initial fee but no monthly recurring fees.

2. Post Affiliate Pro – Post Affiliate Pro is an award-winning software program designed to empower or establish your affiliate program. Post Affiliate Pro is easy-to-use, and easy to set up to manage your own affiliate program. Cost varies depending on features, but is one of the more expensive options.

3. Affiliatewiz – Is a decent solution for tracking your affiliates online. Similar to idevaffiliate, but with a few different features and a bit more expensive.

4. Direct Track -Direct Track is powerful software that is used by many including CPA Networks, Affiliate Networks, etc. Infact. DirectTrack currently powers more affiliate programs and affiliate networks than any other technology in the world. DirectTrack is an intuitive, turn-key ASP platform that can easily be private labeled and tailored

5. Affiliate Trail – Another low cost, highly featured affiliate software solution.

B. Affiliate Directories to Join

One of the best ways to attract new affiliates (and also build links) is to add your new affiliate program to affiliate directories. There are hundreds of such directories out there. Here are a few good ones:

affiliatescout.com

affiliatesdirectory.com

affiliateseeking.com

associateprograms.com

jamaffiliates.com

10. User Generated Content

Writing your own content or having it outsourced consumes both time and resources. It is, however a very valuable piece of marketing your site and building links. An excellent way to increase the amount of quality content is to ask the visitors and fans of your site to contribute to its content. This works particularly well for niche sites, where readers are well invested in the topic, and likely knowledgeable and eager to contribute. Although you will find some altruistic people who will write for you free of charge, having some incentive to contribute is usually necessary.

Incentivizing UGC: Incentivizing people who come to your site to write for you can be done in many ways. If your site is heavily trafficked and receives a lot of visitors, the visibility will likely be enough to entice others to write for you. If you’re just starting or have a small readership or low traffic, it might be necessary to incentivize writers monetarily or by offering them products from your E-Commerce store in exchange for their services.

Examples: There are many sites that have utilized user generated content well. One excellent example is Youmoz.org/UGC. Youmoz is an excellent SEO and Internet Marketing site with a very high reader base. They allow submissions for content from anyone, and when approved post the content in their user generated content section. They post many of these articles written by users per week, and they have seen increases in their rankings as a result of the success of articles written by their viewers.

Wordpress MU: Wordpress Multi User is a great way to provide a way for your visitors to have their own blogs that are hosted on your domain. Check it out.

11. A Few Notes on Outsourcing

Outsourcing can provide a huge competitive advantage if you can learn to do it properly. There are huge numbers of qualified cheap workers available to help with almost any aspect of your E-Commerce business. The following are some resources for finding these workers.

MTURK: Excellent for menial and repetitive tasks. Mturk is a service of Amazon.com and there are many qualified workers who can do a wide variety of tasks. As I discussed earlier, having a 100% unique site is very important in avoiding duplicate content issues that can hurt your E-Commerce stores rankings. Mturk can be a great resource to have people re-write content, especially product descriptions so that they are unique from the product descriptions being used elsewhere online (a lot of times generic product descriptions are supplied by dropshippers or manufacturers and most E-Commerce stores don’t go to the trouble of rewriting them.)

ODesk: Odesk.com is a website that allows for the hiring and monitoring of outsourced workers. You can hire workers here with almost any skill from around the world. Odesk is unique in a few regards. First is that you will find more workers from foreign countries than on other freelancing sites. Workers are generally cheaper because of the foreign workers. While they are not the best for more advanced writing jobs because many are not native English speakers, it is easy to find programmers, link builders, low level content writers, and other basic tasks. In order to get the most out of workers here it is essential to provide very detailed instructions about the tasks you assign and the deliverables you expect. Odesk does a great job of helping you monitor your workers by providing keystroke counting, screenshots of what they are doing, and even the ability to monitor them to see if they are at their desks.

Guru/Elance/Scriptlance/Rent-a-coder Etc: These sites are for hiring freelancers, most of whom are native English speakers and are from first world countries. You can outsource almost any task on these sites from design to writing to programming to illustration to marketing. Expect to pay freelancers a bit more on these sites than Odesk, but they will produce higher quality work more autonomously.

Conclusion

While starting and running an E-commerce business can require more upfront work than some other methods of making money online, it provides significant benefits. By creating a sustainable and profitable E-commerce store that ranks well in the search engines and gets significant organic search traffic, you will have also created a very valuable web property that can be sold for many times its yearly profit.

1. Affiliate Marketing

What: Many people in Internet Marketing today began their journey with AM (affiliate marketing). AM is basically selling other companies products or services and getting paid a commission to do so. Affiliate Marketing is growing Very quickly,  affiliate payouts top more than 6.5 Billion annually.

Tips: Pick an unsaturated niche. Try to find products within that niche that are not being sold heavily by others. Better yet, try to work out an exclusive relationship with a new company to be their only/first affiliate.

Resources: Find things to promote:  CJ.com, Clickbank.com, Linkshare.com

Experts: JohnChow.com, Shoemoney.com, Affiliatetip.com

2. PPC Arbitrage

What: Pay Per Click Arbitrage was a technique used successfully by many internet marketers 3-5 years ago to make literally millions of dollars. The concept is to exploit the price difference between Adwords and Adsense, or other PPC services. Basically finding keywords that cost very little to deliver large amounts of traffic to landing pages or sites built to encourage visitors to click on Adsense ads. When the profits from visitors clicking on Adsense ads exceeded the price paid to Google’s Adwords program, you’ve built a successful arbitrage campaign. Google and other PPC companies have cracked down hard on this sort of thing, but PPC arbitrage still exists in some forms online.

Tips: Learn ALL the rules. Most PPC networks have done their best to completely eliminate arbitrage, this technique has real potential still, but requires TONS of research to figure out ways to make it still work. As always, niche is everything, pick obscure topics. The biggest tip here is really just to understand that arbitrage can be done with nearly anything, so look for new opportunities. For example, Twitter Arbitrage is a potentially huge new market. Read this.

Resources: The Basics

3. Website Flipping

What: You’ve heard of house flipping, the process of buying a “diamond in the rough” house, fixing it up, and reselling for a profit. A similar concept can be applied very successfully to web properties. In a down economy, there are TONS of websites being sold for pennies on the dollar. The trick to being successful with it is being able to pick up on the ones that have the most potential.

Tips: Find sites that are aged (at least a few years), have decent link profiles (thousands of links), and that have poor site-side SEO and design. This applies doubly for e-commerce properties, by remedying duplicate content issue, indexing problems, link structure problems, conversion roadblocks etc, you can double, triple, even quadruple profitability. Once you’ve increased profitability, either keep it, or resell at a large profit.

Resources: Flippa site marketplace,Websitebroker.com, Guide

4. E-Commerce and Dropshipping

What: E-commerce websites are among the most profitable online, and can be a great long-term investment. Having an E-commerce site that sells dropshipped products (products shipped from a third party distributor) gives you the ability to offer products without having to purchase them upfront, or store them. Using this strategy, overhead is almost completely eliminated, and the focus can be put on site optimization and marketing.

Tips: Niche is everything in E-commerce. Don’t bother with clothing, shoes, electronics, these niches are saturated. Focus on under-served niches. semi-taboo/strange products can be especially lucrative.

Resources:GetElastic.com , Forum

5. Domaining

What: One of the oldest and most lucrative ways to make money online. Domaining is the process of buying and selling domain names. Early domainers made millions of dollars in very short periods of time by being the first to buy domains that later were in very high demand. The domaining landscape is different today, but still can be very profitable for those that know what they are doing.

Tips: Be creative, forecasting trends, memes, rising celebs, can all be great ways to snap up domains that will be worth money in the short term. Also look for opportunities to buy undervalued domain names in a down economy. There are some great deals to be had these days. Domain names are a shrinking commodity, there is still money to be made here.

Resources: Namepros Forum, DN Forum, Pickydomains.com

6. Create and Sell Info Products

What: One of the best ways to make a sustainable income online is to sell your own products. If you aren’t interested in e-commerce or dropshipping, and writing and research are your forte, then creating and selling informational products like e-books might be your ticket to Internet Cash. E-books and other info products can be created for almost any conceivable problem, from “How to regrow hair”, to “How to get an ex back”, to “How to put on 10lbs of muscle in 30 days.” Info products can then be sold directly by you, or by utilizing affiliates through services like Clickbank.com.

Tips: Niche info products are key, look for under-served communities looking for resources that aren’t being provided for them. Be comprehensive with your info products and offer real value, mediocre e-books will fail.

Resources: More Info

7. Offline and Local Affiliate Marketing

What:Affiliate products and services don’t have to be promoted only through online channels, many affiliate marketers have found success driving traffic and getting sales by marketing online products through offline means. This can include fliers, business cards, or other grassroots efforts. Think for instance placing flyers for online weight loss affiliate programs on cars at local gyms.

Another offline/online affiliate marketing method is to approach local businesses with creating a custom affiliate program. Car dealerships, limo services, lawyers, clubs, restaurants, contractors, mechanics.. TONS of local businesses would be willing to pay for customers you send to them. Depending on how competitive local terms are, it might be quite simple to rank for such terms with little online marketing efforts.

Tips: When selling affiliate products offline, be creative and be targeted. Don’t waste your time by passing out 500 fliers to random people, pick a niche and corresponding demographic in places where they congregate. When looking to set up offline affiliate programs, go after high ticket items, the more a conversion is worth to the company, the more they will pay you.

Resources: Example, Forum

8. Produce Viral Videos

What: Viral content, especially videos can generate huge numbers of viewers and a few video networks are willing to pay content producers by the views. There are several sites that will pay you based on the number of views you generate. Youtube does this through their application/invite only partner program, and Revver.com does it for all users.

Tips: If you’re looking to make big bucks with this method, it’s unlikely. Youtube and Revver.com pay a pittance for the traffic, but it can be a great way to monetize your videos at least a little bit for some extra cash.  The big money in viral videos comes from producing them for clients. If you can prove success with your own projects, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get work doing freelance viral video creation.

Resources: Interesting Example, Guide

***Not-Recommended***
Greyhat and Blackhat Money Makers

9. E-Whoring

What: E-whoring is the technique of using social networking sites to lure/trick users into signing up for things like dating sites or porn sites. With the explosion of Myspace, Facebook, and other social networking portals, E-whoring became very popular and very successful. The technique generally involves creating fake profiles that funnel profile viewers to landing pages or other forms of monetization (usually other dating sites or porn sites that pay per signup).

Tips: There has been a lot of saturation in this monetization method, but for creative folks out there, the market is still wide open. It’s best to think of E-whoring as a study in social engineering. Getting eyeballs isn’t a problem, its convincing them you are legit, and walking them through to completing a sale or signup that is the tricky part. Again, niche communities are easier to be profitable in than mainstream ones. Make sure the affiliate programs you use are liberal with what they allow, as some would ban you for this method.

Resources: More Info, Forum

10. Outsourcing Arbitrage

What: In the past 5 years or so many freelance work sites have cropped up with workers from all over the globe. By posting jobs on these sites, workers bid on your work, often times for VERY affordable prices. With so many different freelance sites, workers, and work available, this is a wide open market for a technique called outsourcing arbitrage. This type of arbitrage, similar to PPC arbitrage, takes advantage of price discrepancies. The goal with outsourcing arbitrage is to win contracts for work, and then re-outsource the work for that contract at a lower pay rate than what you are getting. This can be done with almost any type of work from content writing, to programing, to marketing.

Tips:Those making the most money doing outsourcing arbitrage are the ones who have spent the time to build good relationships with those they re-outsource work to. Finding a competent writer, programmer, or graphic artist for a rock bottom rate can be time consuming (Thailand and Singapore are great places to start your search.)

Resources:elance.com, rentacoder.com, scriptlance.com, crowdspring.com, 99designs.com, odesk.com, guru.com, freelancswitch.com, getafreelancer.com

11. Cookie Stuffing (**Will Likely Become Illegal)

What: Affiliate sales are almost always tracked via cookies. Cookie stuffing is the practice of covertly placing an affiliate cookie on a visitors computer without their knowledge with the intention of getting credit for any sales placed by that visitor. An example would be using a highly trafficked page and cookie stuffing all the visitors with your amazon.com affiliate cookie. Each visitor who then went on to later purchase from amazon.com would look like they had been referred by you, giving you a commission on whatever they purchased. While not yet illegal (but certainly not right, and possibly criminal), cookie stuffing is rampant.

Tips:Nearly all affiliate programs explicitly prohibit cookie stuffing in their Terms of Service. If you are caught doing it, it’s likely you will be kicked out of the affiliate program. Small private affiliate companies are worse at detecting fraud than large ones.

Resources:More Info

12. AutoBlog Empires

What: Autoblogging is a technique where you automate blog creation and content generation in an effort to earn money through adsense or similar monotization methods.  Successful autobloggers own “empires” of thousands of blogs that target a wide swath of niches and keywords.

Tips:If you plan on trying this, do so on a completely different server than any whitehat sites you own. Being banned from Google is a risk autobloggers must accept.
Resources:
Autoblogs == $$$
(12 pages of threaded discussion. Some really basic information on the working of autoblogs)

Ultimate Collection of Autoblog Plugins
(Almost every WP plugin has been discussed in concise details in this thread)

How To Replicate Techchuck AutoBlog
(Techchuck.com – one of the decent example of autoblogging. Learn how you can make the same kind of autoblog.

Auto Blogs on CRACKS
(A thourough guide and the first guide you should read, on building autoblogs. Really cool.)

Another Blogs on HomeMade Crack
(A really descriptive guide on a method based on autoblogs. Hats off the OP. Filled with really nice discussions on Autoblogging and Money.)

Step By Step Autoblog Setup
(Building autoblogs can never be easier than this. A totally spoon feeding, spoiling post)
Living the Dream with AutoBlogs
(Success story and guide)
Bluehatseo.com guide
(Success story and guide)

In the field of search marketing, there are a ton of different areas where skill proficiency is a must.  If you are new to the arena, back from a hiatus or just need something to help you focus on one area at a time, I have something for you.  I use a short and simple equation that organizes all of the search marketing tasks into different groups.

Here she is:

Research + SEO + Link Building = High Search Rankings

Seems like a elementary equation to represent such complex tasks and systems but I assure you, it will help when you need a frame of reference or you get lost in the weeds.  As always, the better you become in each area of the equation the better results you’ll achieve.

Part One: Research

The most overlooked area of search marketing is in my opinion, the planning and research necessary to the success of any website online.  You should be engaging in keyword research, niche analysis and competitive analysis before you construct your plan of attack or develop any target keyword spreadsheets.

• Analyze keyword difficulty
• Analyze the competitors that currently rank for the keywords you want
• Compile a comprehensive keyword list with at least a metric for keyword difficulty
• Develop your SEO plan of action

Part Two: Search Engine Optimization

Of course, before you decide how the website will be optimized, you’ve got to have a firm grasp on which keywords are going to give you the biggest bang for your buck. Obviously, you should scoop up the keywords that are easiest and put in solid consistent effort in improving your rankings for more difficult long term keyword goals.

Before you build your first link, write your first blog post, submit to digg.com or tell a friend about your website, you must:

• Create unique page titles
• Create unique meta data/information
• Create unique urls using mod-rewrite or something similar
• Fix any canonicalization issues
• Check site-wide architecture and make sure the infrastructure is in tact with no server error pages
• Make sure unique content is on every page
• Don’t ever serve two pages with the same content

If you can’t master the aforementioned tasks, don’t tell anybody until you can.

Part Three: Link Building

So, you want to get your website fully indexed by the search engines and you know you’ve got to get some juicy inbound links to it.  Sorry guys, ultimately, if you suck at link building, you’re going to have an impossible time getting the rankings you/your client is looking for. If you’re giving it a shot anyway, here are a few popular ways to accomplish this task!

• Manual Link Building (slow): this usually consists of contacting website owners and convincing them to put a link on their website that links to yours.  This is totally cool for the more popular websites whose link would benefit your rankings greatly but don’t just go contacting any old Joe with a PR1 blogger blog for a link.

• Blog Writing (slow/medium): One of the best ways to build links to your domain is to create an active blog that offers content to an eventual community of users.  The topics can usually be directly or tangentially related to your company/product.  The con here is that creating a successful blog takes time, creativity and patience which a lot of us don’ t have.  If you can weather the storm, the pro of keeping a successful blog severly outweighs the con with thousands of visitors per day becoming the “talkers” for your company often linking your site to others and spreading offline word of mouth as well.

• Social Media Marketing (fast): If you engage in social media marketing correctly, this can turn into a link-building powerhouse for you.  By far, the most difficult part of this process is creating link-worthy content and refining your promotional skills, two activities that even “web 2.0” experts struggle with.

There are many more link-building examples that could work for you, check out some examples over at SEO BOOK.

Remember when optimizing your website and campaigns, you’ll want to make sure you’re using analytics data to make decisions about which tactics work and which ones do not.  The power of the search marketing equation should get stronger and stronger over time.

Note: this is by no means the end to the work done in search marketing, but it does illustrate in a quasi-mathematical way, what areas you must focus on for success with your website.

-Nicholas Santillo

Universal Social Media Lessons

1. The playing field is level: This is true in the fact that the internet is a place where anyone can publish content.   If anyone can publish, anyone can create a successful internet meme or campaign.  Can anyone create the ideas behind the campaigns with a high success rate?  This is less than likely and where the amateurs of social social media get left in the dust.   Social media experts and web 2.0 agencies are in fact, held responsible for creating content that fits the culture of a specific community. The goal is to create content that marries the brand with what the community finds valuable.  This takes constant involvement in those communities and trend research to be able to use those communities to your advantage, time after time.

2. Social Media Submissions Cost $0
The actual cost of submitting content to a social community such as reddit.com, digg.com, stumble-upon, etc.. is indeed $0.  Perhaps the only cost associated with social media marketing is the cost of content development and production.  Its possible that your brand is a PR dream however, in most cases its not, within this gap there are many web 2.0/social media firms around to help you properly utilize social media for your business.

3. Be Genuine/Write Original Content
Writing original content is the backbone of everything on the internet. You should never inflate, lie or copy others work and claim it as your own. There are many negative SEO implications for copying content that comes from somewhere else and not to mention ethical problems associated with it too. The internet is for producing and reading original, interesting (and sometimes not so interesting) content. No posers allowed.

4. Lose Control
For those bigger corporations, losing control is probably the scariest thing one could say to you but for social media, you really have no choice. With the proper planning and campaign strategy, you can lose control positively. There will always be opposition to your brand but as long as the positive comments and sharing outweigh the negative, the word of mouth alone will go a long way.  Word of mouth alone can make or break your brand, product or even business so using social media wisely key for any business.

If you were on Facebook last January, you no doubt saw, or even participated in a meme that swept across the social networking site like wild fire. The meme was basically a survey with rules as follows.

“Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If i tagged you, its because I want to know more about you. “

This simple concept became one of the most viral memes ever on Facebook, with very direct impacts on their traffic and user participation. Compete.com data shows that nearly 4 times the more people visited the “notes” section (the section utilized for the 25 things meme) on Facebook in January than the previous. This reached a high of 20million in January vs 4 million in October 2008. In addition to this, Facebook itself saw 15% overall growth in January, with 60% more profiles created in January than December. You can see the increases in general traffic, and the notes section reflected in the graph below. The meme eventually became so popular, it garnered mention in the mainstream news. Thanks to readwriteweb for the image and analysis.

Notable Features of the Viral

1. Specific rules for sharing: The rules mandate sharing with at least 25 other individuals. This is a HUGE reason why this particular meme took off and became so viral. By requiring tagging of others, this meme accelerated exponentially.

2. Appeal to vanity: Telling others about yourself appeals to vanity, given an excuse such as a meme that “everyone is doing” give people a chance to talk about themselves that they normally wouldn’t be able to discuss. This helped to make each participant in the viral meme feel a sense of ownership in it, adding to their desire to share.

3. Appeal to learning inside scoops: The nature of the viral was to share information other people didn’t know. This made the meme interesting to both participants and readers. This meant that even those who did not write a “25 things” p0st themselves, still acted as spreaders for the meme in that they talked about it with others both on and offline.

2. FakeBait – The Viral Lie

In May 2008, marketer Lyndon Antcliff, wrote a sensationalized and fictional article for his client money.co.uk. titled “13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers”. The story became popular on digg and was then picked up by mainstream news sources including News.com.au, The Daily Telegraph, and Fox News. The fake news bait resulted in over 2,200 links for his client. Even more exposure came when Lyndon exposed the article as a fake, gaining hundreds of links from reputable marketing blogs across the internet.

If looked at in terms of viral success, this was no-doubt a blockbuster, however there is more to consider here than simply the number of links that were built. This case should be seen as a both an interesting example, and a warning to those who might consider a similar viral strategy. Using a lie can result in a good deal of negative press, so one must be understanding of that risk, and asses negative publicity as part of the equation.

Notable Features of the Viral

1. Lies can make great Virals: The caveat to this is that they can damage a brand and its credibility. There are however instances where this might not matter, or strategies for dissociating the brand from the lie.

2. Sensational outrageous stories coming from legitimate sources result in viral success. The weirder or more bizarre, the better.

3. Viral success isn’t your only goal, if its a detriment to the brand, forget it.

3. Mappos – Viral Mashups

Mappos is a real-time google maps mashup that shows people buying shoes from the Zappos.com website in real time. As each customer buys a pair of shoes, that shoe pops up to the location corresponding to the buyers IP address. You can then click on the shoe and buy it! There is also additional functionality for voting for shoes you like, which gives users additional incentive to participate. While this particular example has yet to be a viral blockbuster, I felt it was worthy of mention for several reasons:

Notable Features of the Viral

1. Good viral content allows viewers to relate to a product in an interesting way (even when its something mundane like shoes) . This sort of mashup illustrates the sort of thinking that result in viral content that spreads the word not only about the content itself, but about the business/brand as well.

2. Good viral content can convey additional value of a product. This particular case demonstrates popularity. Only a popular site like Zappos could make an application like this, because only Zappos has the traffic and customers to make it work.

4. Blendtec

Blendtec is a company that makes high powered blenders. They are responsible for the “Will it Blend?” series of viral videos that began in 2006 and continue today. The premise of the virals is to take everyday objects and see what happens when you put them in a Blendtec blender. Things they have blended include: a rake handle, marbles, an Iphone 3G, Glowsticks, Cubic Zirconium, Hockey Pucks, Golf Balls, and many other items.

As of June 21, 2009, the Blendtec series of videos had collected a total of 83,238,033 views (an average of 967,884 views per video) on YouTube. The viral videos became so popular, Tom Dickson, the companies founder and star of the videos, found his way onto television several times including a feature on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. In 2007, Blendtec announced that their viral marketing campaigns with the “Will it Blend?” series had improved sales numbers by a staggering 500%.

Notable Features of the Viral

1. The viral succeeded in being interesting, and at the same time demonstrating value of the product. If you’re goal is to build brand awareness through a viral, it is necessary to make sure you’re viral marketing idea somehow conveys the benefits of your product. Blendtec does this spectacularly by showing the durability and strength of their product in a very interesting, and viral way.

2. Packaging is important to legitimacy. If you watch the “Will it Blend?” series, you will notice the care that went into the videos, the professional quality, the set, and the overall production value. This is an important element. In many cases the presentation is almost as important as the content. Presenting something professional and pleasing to the eye encourages sharing, and adds value and legitimacy to both the product and the viral content.

5. AVirginsPlea.com

I wanted to mention this particular viral because its really a combination of three that have already been mentioned (Savetoby.com and Ex-Girlfriend Revenge, Viral Hoax). The site was set up with the premise that if 5 million visitors came to AVirginsPlea.com in 30 days, a girl had agreed to sleep with the sites owner. That back story included the fib that the author was a virgin whose fiancee cheated on him six months before their wedding, ruining the next three years of his dating life.

The hoax took off and Matthew Gamble, the creator of the site, did more than 20 interviews with news programs before finally being exposed as a fraud. The viral had no monetary goal, and was not used for the viral promotion of a product or service, but is still interesting as a concept for virility.

Notable Features of the Viral

Matthew Gamble commented that the idea “worked too well”. In my opinion, this is because it included several elements that had proved successful before. These include:

1. Telling an outrageous story that people find share-worthy.

2. Giving readers a scenario they can empathize with.

3. Giving readers an incentive to share (in this case sex, but also altruism)

4. Definitive goals to reach (5 Million Visitors)

5. A Time Limit (30 Days)

]]> http://voltier.com/2009/12/5-more-unique-viral-blockbusters-we-can-learn-from/feed/ 8 http://voltier.com/2009/12/e-culture-hubs-places-all-internet-marketers-should-understand/ http://voltier.com/2009/12/e-culture-hubs-places-all-internet-marketers-should-understand/#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:26:54 +0000 admin http://voltier.com/?p=442 The Cool Kids

Sometimes I like to think about the Internet as one big high school. A high school that has every imaginable clique or type of group, from the nerds, to jocks, to stoners, to cheer leaders, to political enthusiasts, to goths… Each of these groups comes with a certain amount of social pull, a level of ability to sway general perceptions and spread ideas. In a real high school, the group of students with the most influence are usually known as “the cool kids.”

Online, the cool kids are not the jocks or the cheerleaders the, they are actually the geeks, nerds, and techies.  They are the people who live and breath the Internet, who contribute to the creation and spread of content, ideas, and culture.

If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwells book “The Tipping Point” these Internet “Cool Kids” are considered CONNECTORS.  Individuals with large social networks, motivation for sharing amongst each other, and producers of content. Gladwell states in his book that

“The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.”

I call them the “cool kids” , Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz called them “Linkerati.”  They are bloggers, forum posters, web news writers, content creators, viral connectors, and journalist, but most of all, simply VERY active participants.

For the cool kids, the 80/20 Principle applies. 80 percent of the work (spreading of ideas online) is done by 20 percent of the participants (the cool kids).

Where the Cool Kids Hang Out

So where does this 20%, these “cool kids”, the “Connectors”, hang out?  Well,  everywhere, but there are several “Hubs” where they all come to compare notes. It’s in these hubs where the real magic happens, where the power of the “Cool Kids” is shown.  It is where Internet Culture is dictated, it is where memes are born, and learning to influence it is the holy grail of all those looking to spread viral content and gain notoriety. The following are the places you should know and understand  as a good Internet Marketer.

1. Social News Sites

Reddit

Reddit is a social news site where users submit content (articles, images, videos, comments, etc.) and the submissions are ranked by popularity based on the total number of votes given to the content. The largest demographic on reddit are males between the ages of 18-35. Topics redditors care about include: atheism, marijuana legalization, science/technology, programming, net neutrality, Jon Stewart, gay rights, and hating Glenn Beck.

Digg

Digg is similar to reddit but somewhat more popular. It’s demographics are similar to reddit but tend to be more moderate and more focused on gaming/news/and pop culture. There are what are called “power users” on digg who have high success rates with promoting content to the front page of the site where it is seen by millions.

2. Forums

Something Awful Forum

Something awful is a very large paid forum. Members have developed a unique community with its own specific subculture. In many ways it is similar to 4chan in that it’s main visitors are young males with raunchy/gross out type senses of humor. Many memes have originated there including “all your base are belong to us” and goatse.ce.

IGN Forum

IGN forum is the companion forum to IGN.com, one of the largest gaming sites on the Internet with over 6 million unique visitors per month. The demographics of the forum are similar to the site itself, mostly young males. Content on the forums is similar to what you will find at 4chan or Something Awful consisting of picture posts, offbeat news, contests, pop culture, geek culture, gaming talk, hot chicks talk, and obscure Internet references/memes.

3. Chan’s

4chan

4chan.com is the web’s most popular image board. It was created in 2003 by a 15 year old from NYC who called himself “moot”. Before starting 4chan, moot was an avid somethingawful forum member. The boards started as primarily a place to discuss anime and manga, but has since become a hub of Internet culture that has been responsible for starting and spreading TONS of viral content and spawning dozens of memes.

4chans’s most popular board is /b/ which allows “random” content to posted. 4chan is 100% anonymous, which has led to a sense of anarchy among members, an anything goes attitude and sensibility. The /b/ section is now a wasteland of bizarre content full of nudity, shock content, memes, and “funny content”. The humor of /b/’s many users, who refer to themselves as “/b/tards” is often incomprehensible to newcomers and outsiders, and is characterized by intricate inside jokes and black comedy.

4chan, and the /b/ board in particular are responsible for the following virals/memes: Rickrolling, Chocolate Rain, Chuck Norris Love, the words “Lulz, epic fail/win, zomg” and many others, ffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuu, Over 9,000, Peanut Butter Jelly Time, an hero, pedobear, Lolcats (this meme spawned icanhascheeseburger.com, which sees more than 1,000,000 unique visitors per month. It was sold recently for $2,000,000) and dozens of others.

Conclusions

Understanding each of these communities can help you gain at least a top level understanding of popular Internet subculture among those most responsible for influencing others online. The communities mentioned, in addition to several others listed below, are an underground driving force in what is and what will be popular online. Their effects are seen across the Internet, and by understanding the trends starting in these communities, you can often find great opportunity to use these trends to your advantage, to piggyback your own viral content on a growing meme.

Additional Places You Should Understand/Know About:

1. Fark.com

2. YTMND.com

3. Facebook/Myspace/Twitter (You should already be intimately familiar with these)

4. Gaiaonline.com

5. Bodybuilding.com

6. Ebaumsworld.com

Please feel free to comment on additional places you feel are hubs of Internet Culture.