Internet Marketing Smarts.com

Google has a universal search engine now. Basically what this means is depending on the search you conduct you’ll find websites, videos, news articles and images all mixed in the search results. Prior to this they separated the results by type. Universal search makes for a better experience for the users. But more importantly means it’s more ways for you to rank. We’ll focus on images for now.

Most people know the value of performing search engine optimization on a web page. Some people have wised up and gone beyond text and even started creating keyword optimized videos to help their rankings. But not many people are optimizing their images which is your golden opportunity.

Now I’ll be honest the images don’t come up a lot in the regular search results. But some do and the fact is more than ever people are using the image search feature on Google to find pictures related to searches. And no it’s not just naughty pictures, you pervert. There are a lot of people doing searches for products that they want to buy or are thinking about buying. When they do a search they often click on the image results like you do for a regular search. And guess what? Google often just links directly to the page that the image is on! What that translates into, is more targeted traffic to your website. It’s highly targeted because if someone is searching for a specific product image, it’s probably because they are in the latter stages of research and are ready to buy.

The Advantages of Ranking Using Images

1. Additional traffic you would have never received.
2. Less competition. Most website owners aren’t thinking about optimizing their images. They’re barely thinking about optimizing their pages. So that means you won’t have to worry about fighting them off like you do with PPC or even regular search engine optimization.
3. It’s easier to rank high in image searches than it is for regular web page searches.  Because it’s under the radar you can easily optimize tons of images.

How To Optimize Images That Rank Well

Step 1: Be descriptive and name your images using the keywords they represent. If you have an image of a Sprint Palm Treo 700p. Then don’t name the image cellphone. Name it exactly what it is. The more keywords that really describe the image, the better chances of coming up in Google’s image search results at the top and possibly the regular search results as well. If you really want to take it up a notch you may want to do some keyword research using Word Tracker’s free tool.

Step 2.  Get a Google Webmaster account. Don’t worry it’s free.

Step 3. Submit A Sitemap.

Step 4. Verify you own the site.

Step 5. Enable the Image search feature.

The last step is very important. This will help Google easily find your images which should help them rank faster than having Google hunting them down on the worldwide web.

If you follow these steps you can take advantage of a back door way of getting more traffic to your site. It won’t be a lot but every little bit counts especially when it is highly targeted traffic of people in the right mind set ready to buy! By the way if you think I’m full of crap about this (and I’m highly offended that you might feel that way.) check out where Google admits to this.

Don’t say I never gave you anything! Cheers.

Your article or blog post headline is like the cover of a book. People judge your whole article based on it. Sure your article may reveal the secret of life or how to become a millionaire instantly. But if your article title reads like an obituary then people will never actually read what you’ve written. You literally have several seconds to get their attention.

Your Supermarket Can Write Headlines For You!

So how do you write headlines that will pull your users in? Don’t! Just steal them from the best copywriters in the world! We’ve all been in the supermarket standing on line behind that lady that seems to be buying groceries as if she’s preparing for armageddon. It drives me crazy.

So I tend to occupy myself with the magazines and books that have been strategically placed around the counter. I would love to think that the magazines are placed in that location to help violent people like myself from busting slow customers in the head. But the real reason is that the space near the counter is one of the most valuable in the whole store because consumers are captive. They have no choice but to sit there and wait as other people get checked out by that annoyed teenage cashier.

The owners of these magazines are aware of this so they spend huge amounts of money hiring the best copywriters in the world to grab your attention in
seconds. How do I know it works? Because I don’t know anyone that has ever been to a supermarket that hasn’t picked up a magazine near the counter. I
would argue 90% of us do it.

It’s no coincidence. Those magazines whether it’s about women issues or Michael Jackson’s baby momma drama will pull you in. Most of the time in my regular life I would ignore those stories but on the check out line I get sucked in because I have nothing better to do. But I would also argue the real reason is because the headlines put you in a trance where you want to pick up the magazine to read. That’s just basic good copy writing. So let’s talk about how you can have the same effect.

5 Easy Steps To Create Winning Headlines Like The Pro’s

Step 1. Visit Magazine.com

Step 2. Select the magazines geared towards women like Cosmo or O.

Step 3. Click on the Magazine covers to enlarge them.

Step 4. Note which headlines immediately made you want to know more.

Step 5. Steal the headline and change it to fit your own topic.

That’s pretty much it. It’s really that simple. Sometimes just reading the headlines will give you topic ideas for your own industry. So now you have no reason
to create crappy headlines. The steps I’ve laid out can be followed by anyone in any industry. You just need to be a little creative but not much since the
copywriters did all the hard work for you. By the way,  if there is still any doubt that the titles are effective, just watch what you and others do at the check out
line next time you do your groceries. 

My final tip, please ignore the temptation of smacking the bejesus out of the person in front of you on the check out line. Instead be productive and read those
magazine titles and stories, it may lead to greater readership and money for your site or blog!

The Internet is like the wild wild west, in that it’s expanding exponentionally but without all the busting caps and bodies dropping. Some of the sites that will emerge are doomed to fail while others will grow to be the next youtube.com or myspace.com Too often as marketers we learn about the next big site when its’ already been saturated or abused by our competition. So you end up playing catch up which is not a fun game!

The early bird gets the worm is a key concept in marketing. Imagine if you knew about youtube.com way before your competitors ever heard of it. Depending on how savvy you are, you may have already seen Youtube’s potential and would’ve jumped in head first with videos of your own. By the time your competition realized what was going on you were already way ahead of the pack.

I know what you’re thinking. "Yes that would’ve been nice but that opportunity has long passed. So why are you rubbing it in my face?" Not so fast grasshopper. There are many more opportunities like youtube and myspace that are popping up all around you. But you need to know where to look. I’m going to reveal one resource that is going to give your marketing efforts a huge advantage.

The resource in question is KillerStartUps.com. This site list new Internet businesses popping up on the web. You’ll be very amazed with some of the new concepts and products people are coming up with. One way to take advantage of KillerStartUps.com is to do market research. You might stumble upon a website that has a great concept. One, You can take their concept, improve on it and launch another website to compete against the original. Or you can discover a product or service that you can easily copy and incorporate in your current business. Either way, this could make you a very wealthy person.

Okay, But where’s are the back links?
I know you’re thinking to yourself, "I thought this article was about back links? Get to it already!" Aren’t we the impatient reader? Well here’s how KillerStartUps.com can be used for back links. We all know that social media and web 2.0 websites are all the rage. Everyone wants to become the next facebook so a lot of folks are doing what I described above. They’re looking at existing website models, making changes to them and then launching them as new and improved. Well that’s great for us because many social media and web 2.0 websites thrive on interaction and user content. So if there are new web sites that allow users to create their own content such as text, video, pictures, etc. That’s a perfect opportunity for you to come in and add your own content which should have back links to your site. If you’re lucky because many of these sites are brand new, they won’t be using the dreaded no follow tags because they haven’t experienced tons of spam yet. So they will give you some link juice with the search engines in addition to direct traffic.

By the time your competition finds out about these new upcoming sites, your presence is already established in terms of links and content. Furthermore you’ve probably made a few sales, newsletter subscriptions and have already moved on to the next start up. The process can literally be repeated over and over again every day.

You can even assign someone to do this research for you. The sky’s the limit. Now look, I’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t something that can be used by everyone. Honestly you need to have a trained eye to see the marketing opportunity of a given website. You have to be able to find an angle. If you’re not really good at this, then you should continue as you have been and just play catch up. But for those of you who are like the mobsters that saw a golden opportunity in the middle of the dessert (Las Vegas) then you can definitely utilise KillerStartUps.com to catapult your business or website to the next level.

Everyone says that content is king. But I feel like no one really gets into what that means. If I write about how my wife takes up all the bed covers now that she’s pregnant. Is that an example of content being king? I went to a search engine conference in 2007 and some folks from Google were present. A question about search engine optimization and content was asked and the Google rep said the following. "Don’t worry about search engine optimization (seo). Just write good content!"  What the f! What kind of answer is that? We all had to chuckle because Google was being as elusive as secret government agent.

Well screw that. I’m going to let the cat out the bag. I have 3 steps that have helped me secure top rankings in Google for various long tailed and regular keywords. Chances are you’ve heard some of these but I’m going to put some twists to them. So be patient.

Step 1:  Write good content first!
Huh? Didn’t I just make fun of the Google guy for saying that? Yes I did. But he is right, you should write really good content first. You should actually know about whatever you’re writing about. Otherwise people will know that you’re just babbling on and will leave your site. (more…)