Scheduled for launch in May(see the news update post) here’s the first sneak peek at the special case for Traffic Secrets 2.0.

The first version of this best-selling course shocked the Internet Marketing industry when it was released on August 17, 2004 and sold over $1,000,000 worth in less than 18 hours. It became known in the industry as the first “Million Dollar Day” by an infoproduct entrepreneur and the course went on to become one of the most popular “must have” training courses ever published.

After listening to what our customers really wanted, we designed a custom case for this course that will hold all of the components. No more ‘loose’ disc cases that can get lost. No more packaging you open with ’stuff’ that just flies everywhere. Now it can all stay in one nice container that can go on a bookshelf for easy reference.

The 2.0 version of the course is ALL NEW and contains 12 special interactive CD-Roms (our brand new learning platform; super cool stuff!) that will set a new standard for the industry and how people consume infoproducts. This new interactive learning platform was designed to help our customers consume the information faster so they can immediately put strategies into action and start seeing results right away.

The course also includes a Training Manual, Workbook, Blueprints, and some other goodies I can’t reveal just yet.

Stay tuned to the blog for more info.

YouTube has just added some new features and a new layout.

Look at the “Statistics & Info” tab under a video.

This tab will show you any ‘awards’ that video has won but more importantly will show you REFERRING SITES and how many clicks those incoming links have sent to the video.

* It currently appears to only show the top 5 referring sites.

EDIT: These stats have been available before but many marketers chose to ‘hide’ them. (Read on.)

This is extremely VALUABLE marketing information.

Now you can look at any of your competitor’s videos and see ‘where’ most of their traffic is coming from!

This is a great way to find new JV partners or content publishers in your market that would be ideal to send traffic to YOUR videos.

Users can apparently hide this information but YouTube displays it by default with the new layout. (For now.)

So GO NOW and do some valuable research into your competitors’ videos before they HIDE this referral data.

UPDATE: I meant to emphasize that it looks like ALL of these stats have been turned on by DEFAULT. A lot of this info was already there although the layout has changed. In the past this information did not appear to be turned on all videos by default — not sure if this is an error by YouTube that will be corrected soon.

Squidoo, in the past several months, has turned into a very popular free service for generating traffic. Setting up a Squidoo lens was an easy way to rank high for certain targeted keywords. Then a lens owner could just funnel that traffic (via links) to any web site they wanted.

And it worked great…

But that free ride seems to be coming to an end.

This happens to almost any tactic that starts working well online. It gets abused and then it goes away.

TechCrunch just made a great post about how Google is cracking down on Squidoo’s spam.

eBay recently launched a new classifieds site to go head-to-head with Craigslist. The new site is called Kijiji.

CORRECTION: The site has been around for awhile but the USA version is new.

This new site could turn out to be yet another great way to drive traffic to web sites that can find a way to creatively do it — i.e. within the rules without abusing the site.

Many have been able to drive a lot of leads and traffic from Craigslist but it’s often done by breaking their rules — which I don’t recommend.

Kijiji, like Craigslist, allows users to find or post listings based on location. So you’ll find listing sections for all the major cities in the USA.

Check it out and see if you can’t find some creative ways to generate some free leads for your business.

I recently posted about search engine optimization for blogs and asked my readers to chime in on the subject.

As expected, there were many contradictory answers and suggestions — and it’s no surprise since no one really knows exactly how Google’s algorithm works. And Google likes it that way.

But there were some incredibly valuable suggestions that were posted. You definitely should take a moment and read all the comments that were posted for that entry.

And as promised, anyone that submitted a solid tip earned a link of their choice on this blog.

Here are the contributors that I selected and their brand-spanking-new links…

Read the rest of this entry »

I need some help regarding SEO and blog structure. So I’m calling all SEO geeks that have any knowledge of what I’m about to ask. I know there are super genius SEO people out there that can give their two cents on this…

* Anyone that offers some solid tips I will make a follow-up post and give you the link of your choice to say “thanks.”

(And I’m sure the info will be of tremendous help to my blog readers.)

But before I proceed I want to clarify that I know a lot about SEO. I wouldn’t say I’m an “expert” as I don’t feel I have mastered it, that’s probably because it changes so much, but I’ve pulled in millions of visitors during the past year or so from organic results — my point is, I’m no newbie, yet I’m willing to admit I don’t know it all.

I have some issues I am interested in knowing answers for (related to optimizing blogs for SEO) and so I thought I’d create a post to “put it out there”…

WARNING: This is a very new blog and to be honest I haven’t yet had a chance to do everything I have planned to spice it up. So before I get beat up over it I know that I need to have my post titles listed before the blog name and some other obvious changes. I just haven’t yet had the time to do it (it’s coming very soon).

Hehe. It reminds me of Andy Beard not too long ago teasing me for not having permalinks setup on my old blog (that I posted to like once every 8 years). It’s just one of many things I knew I needed to do but kept finding ways to not do the work.

A big “thanks” to Aaron Putnam who contacted me to let me know there were some things I should do to improve the blog — he didn’t know I had all that stuff in the works but had been too lazy to add it yet. Aaron has a great pre-launch checklist for WordPress blogs that has some great tips for things you should do if using WP for your blog.

My Questions For The SEO Super Geeks

1. Permalink Post Structure - are there any test results (because I’ve read some conflicting opinions — and see my own confusing data) that indicate it’s better to be using a /name-of-the-post/ (directory) structure instead of a /name-of-the-post.html structure?

2. Permalink Post Structure Directory ‘Depth’ - same question regarding www.domain.com/name-of-the-post/(or .html) VS. www.domain.com/archives/some/other/folders/name-of-the-post/(or. html) ? i.e. is anyone seeing a real difference in archiving their posts in a several directory deep hierarchy compared to one closer to the root level.   [EDIT] The reason I mention this is because I have some data (non-blog pages, but many pages in a large series) that actually ranked better for the deeper path.  I had a pretty sophisticated sitemap for those pages and I’m wondering now if some of that linking structure (i.e. PR passing) is why; because I know the consensus is “closer to root ranks higher.”  So I was just curious to the data others have with blogs. 

3. Tags: Hype Or Reality? - I’m talking about putting a tag cloud after each post and filling it with keywords related to that post; then linking those keywords to a url like domain.com/tag/name-of-tag and having it go to the permalink for the post. So all the tags are just links to the same post. I have done a little bit of testing on some other sites trying to use a similar structure and wasn’t really seeing much from it. But maybe I wasn’t using enough tags and/or too many… or maybe there’s some other ’secret’ to it. I see a lot of tag usage now but I have yet to personally see much results from my testing. Maybe Andy Beard wants to chime in on this since I notice he’s using them for his posts?

4. PageRank ‘Aiming’ - this is getting a bit more advanced… does anyone have any experience with using a blog structure to no-follow certain links within the blog while ‘aiming’ all that PR on that page to a certain tag or special permalink for a specific post? Okay, that’s a bit geeky, I know. But some of this has worked for me in the past (not on blogs but web sites) and I am just curious if anyone happens to have figured out a pretty cool structure to do it with their blog — and might even be doing it to aim more PR to certain posts (i.e. ones that contain targeted keywords) compared to other posts that aren’t as much as a priority - yet still using SEO fundamentals so ALL the posts are getting indexed nicely.

Have Any Thoughts?

Please post your comments. Any solid tips will be included in the follow-up post with a link of your choice. I will email you personally concerning the link so don’t post it in the comments please.

Thanks!

After doing a little digging, i.e. trying a bunch of crazy searches, I’ve been able to discover some additional stuff about Google’s upcoming Universal Search format…

You should be able to do a Google search for “Paris Hilton” and see some of Universal Search in action.  If you get the same results page I got here’s what you’ll see at the very top…

As you can see in the above screenshot they have some News results listed first — including a photo pulled from one of the articles.

But if you look farther down on the results page (about where the 10th listing would be) you should see this…

Here we can see how they’ve integrated a Video listing on the first page of results.  And you can click that “Watch video” link and actually watch the video imbedded within those results.  Pretty cool.

This leads me to believe that all the relevant Video and Image results won’t just be stacked at the very top of the results page.  It looks as if they will be scattered throughout the listings, hopefully, based on relevancy.

While this doesn’t take away the fact that optimizing video files will become a more important part of the SEO landscape it does look as if the regular listings might not be hurt as bad as first thought.

Google just announced that they will be releasing a major update to their algorithm and to the format of how their results are displayed.

Their new results page is called “Universal Search” and it will combine results for Video, Images, News, and the rest of the Web.

This is a MAJOR change that will have a massive impact on the world of SEO. 

It will also have a big impact on the traffic some were getting from search results.

For example, a site that used to rank #7 for a specific keyword phrase will probably now receive traffic as if it were ranked #12 or #13 — because the Video, Images, and News listings will push the web site listings farther down on the page.

We will now most likely see a lot of new SEO strategies that target Video, Images, and News.

I think Video-optimization will see the most activity since News will be too hard for marketers to game the system.  Images will seem like the easiest target but I’m sure Google already has some tricks up their sleeve to keep people from gaming the system there as well.

I believe Video is where we will see the most activity — and it will probably be a combination of user ratings and other factors that determine which videos get displayed; not just a matter of video tags.

Here’s a great detailed write-up about these changes from Search Engine Land.

Here’s more on this important story from Search Newz.  And here’s an article from CNN.com.

 

   I’ve received amazing feedback about The Rebirth Of Internet Marketing report.  We’re heading towards *500* comments on that one blog post. 

Others have written about the report on their own blogs or in articles to their ezine lists.

I would say that 95% of the comments and feedback have been positive but there has been some criticism.  Which I certainly welcome.

Several people have raised some interesting points about different sections of the report and in my next few blog posts I want to address them…

“I disagree about the Internet getting more competitive and becoming a harder place to make money.  As more people start using the Internet around the world there will be more opportunity to sell things to those people.”

Of the people that had some criticism about the report this was by far the #1 reaction and disagreement.

Some even claimed I was preaching “Doom & Gloom” merely as a marketing tactic to promote Income.com as the solution to a false fear that I was making up.  (Now that made me laugh!)

I stated in the report that it is going to become increasingly difficult to make money online because the competition is growing by the second.  Generating an income from the Internet is the ultimate business and more people are figuring this out everyday.

ANYONE can start an online business without much capital or technical experience — so the low barrier to entry is going to grow competition at an extremely fast rate.

So let’s examine the argument of as more people start using the Internet there will be more people to sell to…

Read the rest of this entry »

According to Alexa (which most realize isn’t 100% accurate) Income.com was recently ranked the 629th most visited site after releasing this blog.

I think that’s pretty cool. Especially considering the fact that this blog (and the Rebirth report) were not some “affiliate marketing” promotion where tons of affiliates drove traffic to the site.

The initial traffic was generated by me contacting my customers and subscribers and then more additional traffic was created by people all over the Internet talking about and linking to the report!

Maybe I do know a thing or two about driving traffic to a web site.

Read the rest of this entry »