Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

February
12

reCAPTCHA – Protect Your Website from Spammers

Spammers always seem to find ways to achieve their goals :-)

You know the problem, you login to the control panel of your blog and you are met with dozens or hundreds of Spam posts. I hate that.

For example, this blog is “dofollow” … meaning, the links that are posted count in Google’s algorithm. So, if someone makes a good comment, they get rewarded. It is a win-win. But that also attracts the Spammers who see this as an “opportunity” to spread their crappy offers and sites.

For the most part, the Spammers use “bots” to automate the process and can do thousands of posts an hour. For you, to personal monitor those posts and clean them out could take a big part of your day, and that isn’t productive. What are your options? You don’t want to shut down comments, as that would limit the conversation. What makes blogs great is the conversation back and forth.

There is a solution. CAPTCHA.

CAPTCHA determines whether the visitor is a human or machine and the acronym stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Seriously, that’s what it means. Almost as good as TWAIN (Technology Without An Interesting Name). The “word” is presented in a format that is slightly distorted so a human can read it but a machine can’t.

But there are a lot of different CAPTCHA programs out there…which one is the best?

According to Adam O’Donnell, director of emerging technologies at anti-spam firm Cloudmark, says,

“Google already has the best computer-vision techniques. The way ReCAPTCHA works, this means that Google will only be presenting CAPTCHA words that are very difficult for a bot to defeat,” O’Donnell explained.

“By pushing up that boundary, it will make CAPTCHA technology much better.”

What does reCAPTCHA look like? Check it out:

captcha

captcha

The best part is not only does Google own the technology, but Google offers it free! I highly recommend you can take advantage of it. Unlike other CAPTCHAs, it can’t be broken by third-party apps to allow the Spammers to automate their garbage posts.

How it works:

• Sign-up for a reCAPTCHA key to get the code implemented on your website on the reCAPTCHA Administration Portal.
• Remember your reCAPTCHA key is valid only for the domain you sign-up with. If you need to have this option on your multiple domains then you need to generate different keys for each. Or you can sign-up with a Global Option.

Want to see it in action? Just go to the Comments section and you will see it. In order to post a Comment on this Blog, you have to go through reCAPTCHA. Now, will that block all Spam? No. But it will block the automated bots, which is 98% of the Spam posts out there.

Install reCAPTCHA on your site today. It’s free of cost and secure. You can also customize the look of reCAPTCHA on your website.

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Posted in Blogging, Webmaster | 15 Comments »

April
24

“The Marketing Ambush”

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When you hear the word “ambush” what comes to mind? Warfare? Exactly. You don’t think of business but that is exactly what can happen to you if you are lazy and you become predictable in the market.

Want Proof?

BMW "Checkmate" to Audi's "Your Move BMW"

This is a picture of a billboard in Southern California. You can tell it is California due to the sunny sky and one visible cloud. :-) To the left of the picture is a billboard which Audi posted, promoting their new car. Their tag line? A smug, “Your move BMW.”

How did BMW respond?

A full-on ambush.

They purchased the billboard space right next to the Audi ad and posted an ad for their new car with “Checkmate.” And this happened just DAYS following the Audi billboard. Audi cannot respond to “Checkmate” … that’s game over.

Stick a fork in Audi. They are done.

Taking on a competitor can seem like a good idea, but you must be prepared for the consequences. And being stung by a competitor can have severely damaging effects. Let me illustrate both topics and how you can both protect your business and aggressively go after your competitors.

Who is the enemy? Not your competitor, but predictability.

Let’s first discuss the issue Audi found themselves in. They went aggressively after a bigger, stronger competitor, who, rightfully so, came back and crushed them. Before going after a bigger competitor, make sure you have the ammo you need to defend yourself when they retaliate. Actually look for ways your competitor can come back at you. Write these down in your business journal and decide if your plan of attack is worth the return fire.

Now, let’s discuss how to protect yourself from getting attacked in the first place.

If you recall, during the Revolutionary War, both sides would just stand there and fire out in the open. “Taking cover” was looked at as “unmanly” and “poor sportsmanship.” Hey, I look at “lead poisoning” as unmanly too! Guerrilla fighting tactics are common place today. It is simple really. You ASSUME that when you are on patrol your enemy is watching your every move and you never go back to your base the same way twice.

The same is true with sports. John Madden, who recently retired from broadcasting, coached the Oakland Raiders for ten years. During his coaching days, the Raiders played Denver 18 times without suffering a loss. EIGHTEEN TIMES. What was the reason? “Simple really,” recalled Madden, “they would run the same three plays in certain key situations, so we practiced to exploit those plays. We kept thinking they would catch on and change things, but they didn’t.”

Are you as predictable?

This goes right in line with what I learned a decade ago from Mark Joyner. Predictability breeds death. Here is the summary of Joyner’s example:

Let’s say you sell furniture and you advertise in the Sunday newspaper without fail and you run the same ad, which is, if they come into your showroom on Monday with the ad, they get 10% off. It’s worked well and you’re just too lazy to test anything else out.

Your competitor takes advantage of your predictability and Sunday morning comes. You have the same routine, of course, and you read the paper with your morning coffee. The first thing you look at is your ad, but this time, your heart sinks. Directly across from your ad is a huge ad from your main competitor, “All Furniture 20% off. Sunday and Monday only.”

You brush it off, after all, you are closed on Sunday, it won’t be bad as you have plenty of loyal customers. But then Monday comes and your showroom is a Ghost Town. You begin to panic, so you have a new ad created. You decide that even though it will kill your margins, you need to move some furniture for cash flow, so you offer a 25% savings, beating your competitor’s 20% offer.

Not so fast.

Your competitor has your number. He knows you are lazy due to how you have been running your campaign. He also knows you don’t have much creativity and he correctly predicts your next move, which was to reduce your prices even further. Sunday comes. As you sit down with your morning coffee, you open the paper to see your ad of 25% off next to your competitor’s ad of only 20%, but instead, your heart sinks further than before.

“You Can Pay Lower Prices for LOWER QUALITY furniture, or for Just a Few Dollars More, You Can Invest in Furniture That Will Last You a Lifetime – Guaranteed.”

Monday morning when your store opens, the only foot traffic you get is from your employees. Not one customer. Game over.

Customers aren’t stupid. When they see the same message over and over, they will eventually tune it out. But more importantly, the same message can be easily exploited by a competitor.

I can hear you now … “But what about your “Lather, Rinse, Repeat” method Jerry? Where you find what works and do it over and over and over again?” Sorry if you misunderstood. That concept does NOT include a marketing message, headline, or ad. Those must always change as buying habits change, prospects change and demand changes. For example, if I find that advertising in Google AdWords is effective, I will continue to use Google AdWords until it stops working, but that doesn’t mean I just stick with the same ads and never change them. That would be stupid.

Remember: “Whatever can be tested, can be improved.”

If you are predictable, your competitor has a better opportunity to not just ambush you, but kill you. Look around, it is happening all around you. Rainmakers are those who avoid being ambushed and look for ways to properly attack their competitors in order to gain market share ethically. Want to learn more? Attend the SEO Rainmaker workshop in Nashville, TN June 25-26.

Posted in Blogging, Webmaster | 26 Comments »

March
8

David Bullock Uncovers Obama Strategy

David Bullock is on stage right now showcasing how Obama used Social Media to land the presidency. Cool stuff.

When it comes to content, David pushes that just because you have the idea, and even register the domain name, unless you actually take your product and make it, package it, and move it, your idea means nothing. He even suggests giving away your product for free to get it out in front of your market. While many recommend doing this, I don’t. Giving away something for free just attracts the wrong people.

You know the famous phrase:

“The customer is always right.”

That’s wrong – and always has been. Let me explain. Take a moment and think about your customers. There are some you have right now that you wished you didn’t have. Why? Because there are RIGHT customers and there are WRONG customers.

What is an example of a wrong customer? See the email I received below a few days ago based on one of my eBooks I included in Jason Katzenback’s PPC Course as a bonus:

From: REMOVED
Date: March 6, 2009 10:09:24 PM EST
To:
Subject: Fr.ee? E book offer
Jerry,

You offered a FR.EE* E-book thru REMOVED in exchange for my opt-in name and email address. Now you want even more information on you sale page. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. I understand the game, but you are wanting to much for too little.

I don’t object to list building or even trying to up sell me, but I do have a problem with you not giving me access to the PDF without further information. I am not making a purchase…It was offered for FR.EE and you already have my permission to send emails thru the double opt-in.

Either send me the e book as a PDF attachment to your reply email in exchange for my double opt-in which you received, or I will be forced to consider making a nuisance of myself thru the Better Business Bureau, REMOVED forum and any other forums and blogs I come across until I get
what you offered.

I will be awaiting your reply with attachment.

Regards,

REMOVED

That is the wrong customer. I use 1AutomationWiz to power my autoresponders and the digital delivery of my products. It is a simple process.

1) Enter your name and email address (adds to autoresponder)
2) Verify identify through double opt-in (to block spoof/spam signups)
3) Receive autoresponder with link “purchase” digital product
4) Shopping Cart displays with “$0.00″ as purchase price
5) Enter Information and Digital Product is delivered

Sure you are entering your name and email address twice. So what. The process takes four minutes or less, and the product is free.

The Bottom Line: The RIGHT Customer is Always Right and the WRONG Customer is Always Wrong.

I was talking to Leslie Rohde here at StomperNet and he mentioned that there is a marketer online who provides zero information for free. Even if it was for a dollar, as long as they have paid, those are the only customers he will communicate with. Does that limit is reach? Absolutely. Does he avoid the idiotness from the above example? Absolutely.

I even had ridiculous complaints over the email delivery of my CPA Mindcrime course – which was free. Here’s where I am now. I still believe in giving free content … it is a great way to get your message out. But if you have something really hot, you might be tempted to “move the free line” and give them that info for free. Hold back. Limit what you give for free. Use teasers to funnel your prospects to fully understand the value you will be adding to their business or their lives and use POINTS of DIFFERENCE to solidify your offer and then close the sale.

I’ll be writing more on this in the coming weeks as I do testing in various markets. Oh, and, of course, I’ll be releasing the results to the members of my SEO Revolution. :-)

Posted in Blogging | 11 Comments »

September
15

“Just Write Good Content…”

This is one of the biggest lies in Internet Marketing. Yeah, that’s right, lies.

You see, just writing content isn’t enough…you have to actually MARKET the content. What a concept, huh? Unfortunately what has happened in the IM space is “rockstars” like Matt Cutts from Google, who has great intentions in the market, but his suggestions are taken literally.

The result?

Content is written, really good content, and it is posted on the site or blog…and the owner then sits on their hands and just waits for links to just “appear” to the page and they start rolling around on a big pile of money.

That isn’t reality.

You see, old fashioned “grass roots marketing” is needed in order to get your message out when you sell a product, and there is no difference with content.

Content is your product. Market it effectively and be as aggressive as you need to be to get the results you want.

Next week I’ll cover some of my favorite techniques to market my content.

Posted in Blogging, SEM/SEO, Webmaster | No Comments »

August
8

What is a Trackback?

You’ve probably actually heard of a trackback before, especially if you are quite familiar with the blogging world. An actual trackback is when you have linked to another blogger’s blog post that will then automatically link onto your blog.

Now this seems a little too easy to get a large number of links does it not? Yes, actually trackback caused a large amount of problems before making many blogs look like spam. Many people then of course started putting on the onto their blogs so no one could have trackback links.

Trackbacks have actually become a very handy SEO tool if you are careful with them. You want to try linking onto blog posts that have the same topic that consists with your blog posts making it that readers can get further information on the topic. Take the extra time also to let the readers be aware as to why you’ve placed the trackback link and what caught your eye with the blog post you’ve placed it under or you may get caught for spam.

You will be shocked to know that just about all blogging software does offer this feature except Google very popular Blogger. This is another great way for Google to minimize the amount of spam on their search engine results, but of course people have found a way to bypass it.

If you really do want to increase the amount of links on your blog then by all means try out the trackback option, but be careful when doing so. If you just randomly choose blog posts that have no relevancy to your blog then you will quickly be caught for spamming, which no one wants.

Posted in Blogging | No Comments »

August
1

What is a Ping?!?!

Many people are quite aware of what as RSS feed is, but haven’t heard of what pings are. This is a new way to allow your readers to know that your blogs has recently been updated. Wouldn’t that be perfect to get your subscriber’s coming back every time you put new content in? The ping has been designed to send an electronic message between servers that will actually notify sites that new content has been added onto your blogs.

Now what exactly is this going to do? The ping will not actually send a message to each of your subscribers, but it will actually inform the site or directory the blogs is under that they may want to consider re-indexing the blogs because new content has been added. This will not only pull in your subscribers, but it can bring in even more traffic because it is consistently updating the blogs directory for new content.

Currently many of the blogging sites that are available have this ping feature such as Technorati. Usually the blogging software has the ability to be set up that it will automatically ping various blogs directories to inform of the update, but not all have it available so you may want to consider looking into:

http://www.pingomatic.com

This site will then make it that the ping is sent out every time you update your blogs.

As you can see with the use of the ping option you cannot only get your blogs site navigate by search engine spiders more often, but you can bring in a larger amount of traffic into your blogs page.

Posted in Blogging | No Comments »

February
17

Sherman Hu on Blogging Strategies

I’ve had a lot of members ask regarding the best methods of Blogging … so I went right to the source, Sherman Hu. I’ve known Sherman for just over a year now. I met Sherman through StomperNet as we’re both members of the faculty.

Here is what I asked Sherman:

  1. What is your choice of blogging software?
  2. In your opinion, what are the most important features for blogs?
  3. Can the average person conduct an upgrade for WordPress without losing their entire blog, ie. accidentally overwriting the files on the server?
  4. Besides having the XML subscribe button posted, what are the other ways to get a blog noticed? What are your “must have” subscribe chicklets?
  5. What are some great marketing tips on getting a new blog in front of the right audience?
  6. What are your favorite resources for blogging information?
  7. Which blog directories are best to submit to? Are there good country specific blog directories? Or is it best to just concentrate on US-based blog directories if your blog is outside of the US?
  8. Does blog and ping still work? What is the best method of getting Google back to your site? (I did a test and found that if you blog at least three times a week and don’t go more than three days of no postings, Google will come back at least a week to reindex the blog. If you blog everyday, Google comes everyday. Your thoughts?)
  9. If a site like Feedburner distributes my content to all the other blog sites, do I really need to submit the content to all the blog directories?
  10. What is the “Sherman Method” to obtaining “greatness in blogging”?

You can listen to his answer via Sherman’s Blogging Podcast or if you are a member of the SEO Revolution, I will be posting a summary of his answers and my commentary.

Posted in Blogging | No Comments »

September
16

Google Launches Blog Search

No “size matters” jokes here, just straight to the info. On Monday, Tim Mayer announced in Yahoo’s blog that they have increased their index – and not just a little, by a lot. Yahoo! now claims to have 19 billion documents in their index, which is up from a “meager” 6 billion that had last week. Compare this to Google’s 8 billion. Now, before you get all impressed with the work that Yahoo! has put in to make them the “most comprehensive search engine” available, know that one of the worst and stupidest bots out there is Slurp (Inktomi).

A quick history lesson: Back in 2000, as Yahoo! was having their search results (along with HotBot and others) served by Inktomi, Yahoo! saw a great opportunity and put in an offer to by Inktomi for $1.3 billion. The execs at Inktomi wanted more despite the recent “dot bomb” crashes of the spring of 2000. So, what did Yahoo! do? They dumped Ink and went with Google to serve their results. Inktomi was unfazed about it in the media, but behind the scenes they were scrambling. They went through numerous layoffs, cutbacks and such (i.e. Slurp was NOT updated, upgraded, etc.), and then two and a half years later, Yahoo! puts in a bid, much lower than their original, to buy Inktomi whcih is accepted. Through this time, Inktomi was not touched, it was the same bot, despite the upgrades in technology and code.

To continue, Yahoo! sits on Inktomi for about a year, does nothing with their new bot they have bought and then launches Yahoo! Search. Have they upgraded Inktomi since then? No. So, what I have done recently is build sites with very basic and routine CMS (Content Management Systems) that are not complex, but did some redirects and served dynamic content. The results? MSNBot and GoogleBot spidered the pages without a hitch. Slurp? It was caught in many spider “traps” which didn’t serve session IDs and were very basic. In looking at MarketLeap, Yahoo! would have 2-4 times the number of pages indexed. Now, even though there were no session IDs, it was clear that Slurp was confused by the dynamic content and it would index the same page multiple times thinking it was a different page.

It is clear that the new huge index of Yahoo! is filled with at least 30% of duplicate content pages.

Yahoo! Hand-Editing SERPs
We were alerted to a good thread in the Webmaster World forums regarding if Yahoo! was indeed, hand-editing the SERPs. In our testing, we do screen captures of the SERPs, so we can verify, not just the SERPs, but also the paid listings, the layout, structure, etc. It is what sets us apart, I believe, we have an extensive library of screenshots to refer to. Now, when I read this thread, I couldn’t see the value in Yahoo! spending the time in hand-editing certain keyword phrases, but in looking through the logs, this is exactly what is happening. Google is kicking the teeth of Yahoo!, repeatedly. With Slurp not being updated, and their index bloated because of it, Yahoo! is spending money left and right as if it is trying to solve its problems by throwing money at it, which we all know doesn’t work.

If Microsoft can get its act together, which they seem to be doing, they should pass Yahoo! in market share by year’s end and it should be just a two engine race for dominance between MSN and Google. Unless Yahoo! makes changes, cleans up Slurp and actually have an algorithm that is fine without hand-edits, they are headed in the same direction as HotBot and Infoseek. Once a great and widely used search engine, now in the junk heap.

I can’t believe I am going to say this: Based on our testing results, it is our recommendation that you cease in optimizing for Yahoo! and concentrate soley on Google and MSN. You read that correctly. Too many issues with the logs and the testing results to allow for any more time spent on Yahoo! as a primary provider of qualified traffic. Yahoo! is not in good shape. Concentrate instead on using PPC in Yahoo! instead of the organic listings. If a Yahoo! directory listing comes up for renewal, let it expire, unless you are getting 3,000 or more referals from it per year. It just isn’t worth it anymore. Yahoo! Search may be dying.

Posted in Blogging, Google | No Comments »