Find out what the Pretty Link Plugin can do for your Internet Marketing efforts.

This is just a fantastic plugin. One of the the really important things we need to know in our Internet Marketing efforts is what works and what doesn’t. The basic thing it does is to redirect from our custom URL to an external URL. Eg we might have a external URL http://secure.hosting.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/id=QWNERTY, which is our ugly affiliate link and it also tells the visitor aha he’s an affiliate. Pretty links now allow us to setup a custom URL http://yourdomain.com/hosting, cool isn’t it? So when someone clicks our custom link it redirect them via the external link to the relevant page and records their click in our database so we have a record of how many people clicked a certain link and we get some more info like what browser they were using their domain name etc. Pretty Links allows us to:

1. To have shorter URLs
   eg instead of http://yourdomain.com/yourcategory/article-name/ we can have http://yourdomain.com/rbt
   which is useful for Twitter or for promotions
2. Keep stats about clicks
3. Hides the external URLS and shows our custom URLs instead
4. We can group links to get combined stats for them
5. Market Samurai uses Pretty Links to integrate with WordPress
6. We can find out who we are sending traffic to and start talking to them to encourage them to send traffic to us

This plugin is so good that I’m now making it part of our Content Ready Website product. To find out what the Content Ready Website is all about hit this now.

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To be successful you will want to get into the blogging habit, which is “A POST A DAY”. Every working day without fail you need to make a post. Your aim of every post is that you use it together with a call to action to get people to read a sales page. So remember that your sales funnel is:

1. Write a post that attracts readers
2. Ask the visitor to read a sales page
3. Convince the visitor on your sales page to take the action you want them to take, eg to buy your widget.

You will also want to get into the habit of collecting relevant material for your posts. If you are like me you are reading all kinds mags online and off-line that are relevant to your target market. Whenever you come across something that interests you it’s also most likely that your blog readers will be interested. The trick is to gather this relevant information. Well since you now know the categories what you need to do is to create a manilla folder for each category and every time tou read something in a mag of interest rip it out and place in the relevant folder like wise create a folder for each category in your email client and copy relevant emails to it and of course have a folder per category in your documents folder on your PC. Not only is it painless to gather information but you ensure it’s relevant when you file it, because if it doesn’t fit into one of your categories then most likely it’s not relevant to your target market!

Think this is good, then find out more about our Content Ready Website here.

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Because I can’t help myself but have to have things structured I have decide to start a personal blog so I can move all “of topic” posts there. It just doesn’t sit well with me that I have put stuff here that isn’t relevant to my target market.

Talking about generating traffic it reminds me of a article on sitepoint a little while ago where the author was proudly reporting an additional 10,000 unique visitors because he had posted something about a celebrity. When I started this blog a few months ago we had a big sand storm and I posted photos about it and emailed the link to a bunch of friends and my BudgetHandles customers. My idea being that this was a sneaky way of introducing my new website to them and some might be interested in my offer. And yes I got heaps of feedback and was sent plenty of photos of the dust strom in various parts of Australia but no not one person even took notice of my other content. And during discussions with some of the people you commented on my photos I said “What did you think about my new site?”. And the reply in most cases? “What new site?”. So the moral of the story is that it is no use just getting traffic for traffic sake, it needs to be relevant traffic. As often less is more. We want less but relevant traffic.

Anyhow back to creating my personal blog. One very important part of setting up your own website is that you need to research what you website is about (website objective) who your target market is and what categories and tags you will be using. When you buy my Content Ready Website you receive a complete Research Guide and worksheet for this purpose. I always use a mindmap to identify the core issues that will be my categories and tags for any new website. I usually just draw this up on a piece of paper however whenever I need to present or communicate the outcome I create a Mindmap with Xmind such as the one below:

wolfs-z.com mindmap

If you are looking to use Xmind (opensource – free) or are looking for other resource then see all resource I recommend here.

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One thing I often get aksed is: “How will I manage to be able to add content that has never been published before every day?”

A very important part of having a blog is that you need to post daily (work days that is). However adding unique content is firstly not as difficult to do and seecondly not always required.

Really unique content

This is usually stuff that happens to you, so if it is about personal experiences then this can often be unique. Add names of those involved and you will ensure it is unique. And the most important content that by definition is always unique is your user generated content and information about your products and services. So every time you get a testimonial or answer a question you received from a customer there is a post! When talking about your products always be sure to be specific, eg use your product codes and other specifications because this will make your content unique and when people do a search using your specific product specifications guess what? You pop up!

Your View on other peoples Content

Blogging is a lot about taken content that is already out there but reviewing, restructuring and rephrasing it to your situation. For example I blog a lot about stuff to do with WordPress lets say how to remove certain pages from your page widget. Now if you search the web you will see others have blogged about this as well. Howver I do it in my style and once you got used to that style you will find it a quick way of absorbing ne information and applying it and I provide this information within the context of my blog which in turns provides a valuable resource on how to market your website on the Internet.

So that’s really it the combination of unique content together with content from others that is applied to your situation or target maket is really what blogging is all about.

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One important issue of any website is that people can get in touch with you. By the way have you realised that the larger the company the more difficult it is to get in contact with them?

Anyhow for us as internet maketers it is very important that people interact with us! Hence why we allow comments against post and always have a contact us page for people to contact us if they wish.

After some research I have chosen two plugins for this purpose:

• For the Contact Us page – Fast and Secure Contact Form
  This is a superb form you can place on any page within minutes and even includes CAPTCHA code – see example of Contact Us page here
• For all other forms one might require – MM Forms
  useful for any other information you might need to gather. A much more complex solution however it allows to create awesome forms. You will require to know at least HTML basic to use MM forms

To see all tools and resources I recommend click here

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I can not believe what I discovered today. This reminds my of James Schramko’s saying: “It’s all BS until you test!”.

I did a broken link test on my site today and for all pages I get a result that the link could not be checked because of an exclusion in robots.txt. This is a major disaster because this means that none of my resources and pages are being indexed and therefor not found via any search engine.

After a bit of research I found out why this is, there is a privacy setting in WordPress that allows you to block search engine spiders from crawling your site. Now there might be reasons that for certain sites this is a good idea however why the WordPress guys have set the default to blocking spiders is beyond me. Or at the very least a warning should appear on your site to ensure you are made aware of this fact. I assume their idea was that you should only open your blog once you have added content.

Anyhow here is how to fix it:

logon to wp-admin > settings > privacy and you’ll see to options for blog privacy:

Follow this to find out about testing tools including for link checking

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Dungog Chamber of Commerce Awards Night 2009

We used to use a slide show as the “back drop” when people are arriving. This year I decided to use animoto to have something a bit more spunky.

What I did was to upload all the slides and the sound track “Taking Care of Business” and you can see the result for yourself below:

To find out more about animoto follow this link

To see a list of all tools and resources we use and recommend click here

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Getting audio to play directly from your post or page is really easy, just follow these steps:

1. Upload audio file .mp3
   Create a folder (directory) in your website’s root folder (public_html) called audio
   upload the .mp3 file to above folder
2. Install plugin WPAudio
3. Insert player into content
   Add a new post or page and switch to HTML mode and
   place this code anywhere you want the player to play your audio:
   {wpaudio url=”http://your-domain.com/audio/your-audio-file-name.mp3″ text=”text to click to play your file”}
   Just replace the “{}” above with “[]” and WordPress will see it as an embedded plugin and will display your player.

MPAudio is the easiest plugin to use and most importantly it doesn’t require flash!

For an example of how it looks and works see my post here that contains a interview with Chris Garrett

To find out more about this plugin and many other resources click here to see our resources page

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Interview participants

Topics covered in this interview

• Membership site advice from the trenches
• must have membership software
• wordpress plugins for membership sites
• pricing strategies
• the “bikini concept” and how to use it
• and much more

Click Here To See What Chris Garrett Is Using For His Membership Sites

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After some feedback and discussions I have re-visited my previous post:
Do you know the 15 aspects of your web presence (website) that you must address to be successful?
to structure it in categories that make it easier to decide which category you want to DIY or outsource.
The aspects of your Internet Marketing IM) Strategy are:

1. Market Research (what “burning” problem are you resolving, what keywords will people use to find you, what products or services will you sell)
2. Website (domain name and hosting, WordPress or Joomla, site appearance and how will customers buy and pay eg payment gateway, shopping cart etc.)
3. Content and sales strategy (posts and pages that need to contain text, audio and video and user generated content such as FAQs, testimonials, blog comments etc)
4. Build you customer list and keep in touch (name capture, auto responder, newsletter and adding value to every communication)
5. Monetise your website (sales pages, affiliate sales, paid consulting, paid forums or member only content,)
6. Get Traffic (SEO, PPC, social media, feeds, forums, affiliates, book marking, ping, mirror, directories and ezines)
7. Testing, a saying of James Schramko is: “Unless you test it’s all BS!” (website analytics, conversion rates, onsite visitor behaviour, landing pages, PPC ads and keywords, split testing of different calls to action etc.)

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