Taking action is something we all need to do in life, not just in our internet marketing.
If we don’t keep moving, we become stagnant and (at best) stay still or (more likely) go backwards.
That can manifest itself in lots of different ways:
It’s easy to follow friends on Facebook and Twitter.
And it’s easy to sign up for lists and get emails in your inbox.
It’s less easy to ignore them once you’ve clicked the appropriate button.
You worry about whether your new friend (who you’ve probably never met) will be offended if you stop following them or unfriend them or unsubscribe from their mailing list.
Chances are, they’ll just chalk your unfollow up to “it happens”.
But if you don’t part company, you need to be careful.
I’ve mentioned SlideShare recently and got asked a couple of questions about it. Some of the answers involve turning yourself into a kind of Sherlock Holmes person but without spending hours deducing things.
The first question was selecting the category if there wasn’t an immediately obvious match.
My personal view is that most people don’t search by category – it’s on a lot of sites but I think that’s for historic reasons.
My guess is that most people searching on Ebay, YouTube, Amazon and near enough anywhere else use the search box.
OK, sometimes there’s a drill-down category selection offered and (annoyingly in my view) sites like Amazon don’t allow all searches to happen unless you’ve selected a category from the often almost identical ones offered. I guess that’s down to some programming issues that wouldn’t be cheap or easy to solve.
But with Amazon maybe 9 times out of 10, the item I’m looking for comes up anyway, so it’s not a problem unless I want to spend ages in research mode, reading reviews.
Which is a long way of saying that selecting a “good enough” category is plenty good enough.
Whilst I’m not privvy to the internal search engines of these sites, a good rule of thumb is that if there’s a box to be filled in, fill it in.
Computers are simple creatures like that.
The more boxes you’ve filled in, the more chances you have of showing up in the site’s own results and – since the info from the boxes is likely to be used on the page that gets created – you’ve given Google extra information as well.
I read something recently that said Amazon’s own search engine works that way – make sure every single box that you can add info to has info in it. I know Google’s “local” listings use the same principle. There’s probably a “percentage of boxes filled in” score that will be used as a tie breaker when the results are shown.
If you’re still not sure of the category, the next thing is to check your competitors – hence the Sherlock Holmes mode I mentioned in the title although in reality you’d be closer to his apprentice’s apprentice mode. Because it’s simple:
For instance, I just checked a few meditation presentations.
The first was from 2010 and had no category at all. The others were spread across several other categories including Health, Spiritual (meditation is often categorised there) and Self Improvement.
Which, for me, means I’d choose Self Improvement for the category as that’s where I think there’s a good fit. But others in the market could equally choose Spiritual or Health.
And since all those categories came up in the search results I personally wouldn’t take too much time worrying about getting it perfectly right because I’d show in the results regardless.
With SlideShare, the only categories I’d be really conscious of are the two in the main menu – Technology and Education. Every other category is under the “More Topics” option.
The same kind of logic would apply to any other site I’m adding content to: if there’s a category, select one that’s sensible enough.
The second was finding similar sites to get traction with.
That’s a case of using Google to help you.
If the presentation has a clickable link in it, you can do a search that starts with link: immediately followed by the URL of the page or site.
There may also be a link in the person’s profile – that can be quicker to get to rather than clicking through lots of slides before you find one.
This will probably show you a few links – by no means all as Google don’t like giving away that information but usually enough to get you going.
Sites like Ahrefs and Semrush will give you a handful more for free and that’s normally plenty to get you going if you run the same search on a few different domains. Explore the sites you find – chances are that you’ll pick up quite a few other places that will accept your content and give you a link in exchange for it.
Or if you want lots more data without the subscription fees, go to Fiverr and buy a gig. But, as usuall, beware of information overload. I think it’s almost always a case of “less is more” with data.
If there’s no obvious link – which seems to be the case quite often on SlideShare although I’ve never really worked out why you’d do that – then the user name is another thing to search for.
Most people use the same user name across multiple sites. That’s just human nature at work. And one of those should be a profile with a link.
Again, personally, I prefer the low hanging fruit. So if I can’t find a link in the profile or the presentation, I’d move on to the next. With 44,000 results for meditation currently on SlideShare it’s not like I’m stuck for choice.
As usual, the thing is to move quickly rather than getting bogged down.
If you hit a dead end, move on to the next lead. Of the 4 meditation articles I checked, 2 had links to the author’s website which is plenty to be going on with.
There’s almost never a single “correct” answer with internet marketing so whatever you choose will probably be OK.
I think it’s worth taking a look at what you’ve accomplished this week – in internet marketing and (if you think it’s appropriate) elsewhere in your life.
It’s probably worth doing this kind of exercise every week because it’s easy to drift if you decide to leave a longer gap and it’s more difficult to adjust if you’ve been going in the wrong direction (or simply doing nothing useful) for a longer period of time.
Sure, there will be weeks when life takes over.
That happens.
If you decided to make a new recipe for the first time, you’d find a recipe online (nowadays probably one with pictures and maybe even a video) and you’d follow it reasonably closely. Even if the chef demonstrating it was more casual about the precise weights and other quantities.
But, with internet marketing, a lot of people seem to think that doesn’t apply.
Which is daft.
Sure, over time, you can do like the chef does and play around with the ingredients in your internet marketing.
But – at least at first – it pays to be organised.
Keeping track of things falls into the often boring but still necessary category.
It’s essential if you’re directly paying for advertising – you need to know whether or not the clicks you’re buying are converting into something useful or if they’re just vanishing into thin air after they click.
The same goes for other places that are “free” but where you’re paying with your time.
Depending on the system you’re using, there may be some tracking either built in – EzineArticles tells you how many clicks have been made, that kind of thing – or it may be up to you to follow up with your own system.
As with any statistics, there’s scope for errors to creep in (human or machine) and there’s also scope for spending more time than you originally planned in what turns out to be analysis paralysis.
“Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…”
was the introduction to a radio show called Listen With Mother when I was young.
I remember listening after making sure I was sitting comfortably.
And most of the time that’s the state we’d like people to be in when they read our messages and watch our videos.
Of course, that radio show was in another era. No adverts because it was on the BBC (our public broadcaster) and at the time no incessant trailers for other possibly related programs, lasting almost as long as the commercial breaks.
Pricing is always an issue that people worry about. That applies to your own products and – as you’ll see a bit later – the products you promote.
And pricing is a minefield.
There’s no correct answer about the price you should charge for the products you create – in the offline world it’s just as chaotic.
For instance, I buy my mum’s groceries so I end up knowing more about some prices than I’d like to know. One of her favourites is instant porage oats with golden syrup and I can buy the box of sachets in my local supermarket for £2.58 or I can get the identical box in a local pound store for £1. That’s a two and a half times price difference for the exact same product bought in a different shop.
Translated to a $10 internet marketing product that would mean $25 in the right location.
I just answered a forum post about how to change the default of double opt-in to single opt-in on Get Response.
Even though I use its rival, Aweber.
The question was about using single opt-in for email lists rather than double opt-in and asked whether it was possible.
A quick search later and the answer was “yes”.
If you spend any time on forums or Facebook or Quora or any other question & answer style site, you’ll probably come across questions like that which could be answered by a quick Google search.
Over roughly the last two weeks I’ve been practising what I teach and being more consistent.
I’ve sent a reasonably long email to you (anything from 500 words to nearer 1,000) and I’ve turned it into a blog post.
Most of the time I’ve also turned it into slides and a video.
All that takes less than an hour a day, so it doesn’t fall into the super-human category.
But even in this short time, there’s been an interesting side effect:
Google is sending slightly more traffic to my website.
Nothing earth shattering – internet marketing is probably too niche for that to happen, especially since I’m aiming at long tail keywords rather than mass market ones – but noticeable.
Prior to doing this, any traffic at all from Google was a rare event (Bing is still “once in a blue moon” but that’s because Bing’s update process reflects Microsoft’s lack of enthusiasm for their own search engine) but now there’s a trickle.
Google are tight lipped about the search terms that are being used.
Maybe I could log in to webmaster tools and get a bit of information but that’s not something that worries me enough to investigate.
That comes back to priorities – the time spent looking at stats could be better spent creating more content so that’s what I choose to do.
If you’re not already creating regular new content for your website (even if it’s not new content daily) and keeping in touch with your list on a regular basis, I think it’s worth you making a commitment to do that.
Try it for the next 30 days.
If you’re keen, spend a bit of time making a full plan for your internet marketing.
But quite honestly the plan could be as simple as “I’m going to spend an hour a day creating new content for my website” and then keeping to that schedule.
That looks like a lot but only because I’ve broken it down into relatively small steps.
The first few times you do this, chances are you won’t get everything done in an hour (I don’t always manage either if that’s any consolation) but even if it only means you create a new piece of content and do all the associated other stuff every other day, that’s probably still better than you’re currently doing.
Internet marketing is a business just like any other – despite the sales letters, you can’t just do it once and then trek off to the beach to watch the money rolling in.
You wouldn’t set up a real world, bricks and mortar, business and then leave it unattended and the same goes for your internet marketing.
Do this consistently and in a few months you’ll have a website to be proud of. lots of content, a reasonable number of visitors, an associated YouTube and SlideShare channel, some followers on Twitter and elsewhere.
You’ll probably be making the occasional sale as well.
All with a do-able time commitment and the decision that “it’s going to happen this time”.