Steinar Knutsen» marketing

Why podcasting is such a valuable marketing channel

Steinar — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:02:37 +0000

Podcasting is a wonderful marketing channel that is widely misunderstood. I love the fact that for free you can basically have your message heard by potentially tens and even hundreds of millions of people.

I think most people shy away from podcasting because they don’t understand the potential reach. The tools are not as well understood as blogging, so that is probably another reason that it’s not as widely used by marketers.

Listen or Download

This podcast episode was recorded on my iPhone and automatically uploaded to this website and iTunes using the Mobile Podcaster plugin. For more information visit http://www.mobilepodcaster.com

How to Podcast with Garageband and Publish on iTunes

Steinar — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:02:39 +0000

In this course, I show you exactly how to record your podcast in Garageband, export your episodes as MP3′s and publish your podcast to WordPress and iTunes. This is great because listeners may now listen to your podcast on your WordPress blog and subscribe to your podcast on iTunes.

The lectures are recorded with professional video screen capture software, so it feels like you’re sitting right next to me. Customers have responded very well to this over the years.

First, you’ll learn how to use Garageband to make your recordings. I’ll show you how to edit your file, apply various equilizer settings, and trim your recording. Then we’ll add a musical introduction to the recording and save it as an MP3. Next you’ll learn how to install WordPress, setup WordPress for podcasting, upload your podcast and submit it to iTunes so others may enjoy!

How to Podcast with Garageband and Publish on iTunes

First Impressions of Apple iBooks Author

Steinar — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 01:16:29 +0000

Apple launched iBooks Author this week and it’s pretty amazing. Basically, it’s free software that allows you to create media-rich, interactive ebooks. It’s available for download on the Mac App Store.

Typically, this has been a pretty difficult task, but iBooks Author is so simple because it plays nice with Pages, Keynote and several other forms of media available on your Mac.

I spent a couple hours working in iBook Author and after importing some existing content from Pages, I had an ebook ready to publish rather easily and quickly.

What do you think about iBooks Author? Let me know when your book is online!

GoToWebinar: #12 Essential Online Marketing Tool for 2012

Steinar — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:50:48 +0000

What is GoToWebinar?

Reach your target audience quickly and affordably. Use the GoToWebinar self-service interface to plan, present, record and analyze unlimited Webinars with up to 1,000 attendees each – all for one flat fee. Create and host your own professional Webinars from day one – no experience required

Reach hundreds of people – right from your PC or Mac®
Save with built-in VoIP and phone conferencing at no extra charge
Includes GoToMeeting® for smaller meetings

Key Features

Download an audience list ranked by interest level to focus follow-up efforts on your hottest prospects, lowering your overall cost per lead.
Present online to anyone, anywhere, reducing your costs by decreasing travel and customer acquisition expenses.
GoToWebinar flat fee pricing structure lets you conduct unlimited Webinars without raising your costs – achieving faster and higher ROI.

Try it FREE for 30 Days!

Why do I need GoToWebinar?

GoToWebinar® features make it simple for you to set up, conduct and analyze Webinars yourself – no need to pay for additional event-management services. Increase your audience size while reducing your overall presentation costs with easy-to-use GoToWebinar. Make presentations in real time to hundreds of customers, prospects and employees — wherever they are. Plus, GoToWebinar comes with GoToMeeting, for smaller, more collaborative online meetings.

Download the complete list of 12 Essential Online Marketing Tools for 2012!

Grasshopper: #11 Essential Online Marketing Tool for 2012

Steinar — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 19:34:55 +0000

What is Grasshopper?

The Grasshopper virtual phone system helps entrepreneurs sound more professional and stay connected from anywhere. Features include toll free and local numbers, custom greetings, multiple extensions for employees, call forwarding to any phone anywhere in the world, voicemail to email and more!

Get a Toll Free or Local Number With Multiple Extensions – Add department & employee extensions easily.
Get Voicemails and Faxes via Email – No more calling in to check messages. Just open the attachment.
Know Who’s Calling Before Accepting the Call – Hear the caller’s phone number or name, the choice is yours.
Read Voicemails – A transcription of voicemail is included with emails.

Key Features

Toll free or local number – local or national presence
Unlimited extensions – for departments & employees
Call forwarding - work from anywhere
Voicemails via email – play online or on cell phone
Manage online or by phone – no hardware to purchase
No Long Term Contracts

Get Started Today!

Why do I need Grasshopper?Unlike a traditional phone system, Grasshopper is managed all online and in the cloud – there’s no hardware to purchase and no software to install. It’s really so easy to setup a new phone number or extension and expand your company’s footprint. Plus, since it’s month-to-month with no long term contracts, it’s also a popular solution for short-term marketing campaigns or temporary contact requirements.

Download the complete list of 12 Essential Online Marketing Tools for 2012!

2011 YouTube Video Traffic Review

Steinar — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 00:13:45 +0000

As many of your know I like to shoot a lot of video. In fact, I published 61 videos on Youtube in 2011 – you can see them here on my YouTube channel. I have several other YouTube channels too, but I’m not going to refer to those in this post.

I like video as a communications channel for several reasons:

sometimes it’s better to illustrate a point show & tell style
shooting video or screencasts are so easy it’s almost irresistible for me
search engines love video (Google owns YouTube)
video keeps the reader’s attention longer than text
video is mobile friendly

Of course, if you’re not comfortable putting your face in front of the camera, the prospect of doing video isn’t really going to sounds very apealling. It won’t be terribly fun and your viewers will probably sense your lack of confidence or enthusiasm.

A good remedy is to record a quick video every day for 30 days and keep them private – this helps you find your voice, learn the tools & process and gain some confidence. Also, spend some time on YouTube watching others. Explore their styles and consider what might work best for you.

My video stats from 2011

Here’s a snapshot of my YouTube channel performance in 2011. Overall, I’m pretty pleased, but there are areas for improvement.

Performance – # of views at 33,441 is OK. This represents a 10% increase over last year and really could have been a lot higher. My most popular videos had to do with iPads and Podcasting, so those seem like a popular subjects to build on. I’m in the process of building a podcasting app and service for podcasting on the iPad so this is a no brainer.

I’m pretty happy to see 57 new subscribers; this gives me some sense of value. Unfortunately, it’s less than the net number of new subscribers in 2010 of 90, but I think I know the answer.

You see, in 2010 I did a series of videos on podcasting from your Mac using Screenflow. I worked really hard on them and people took note. I’ve gotten tons of comments and the reaction has been nothing but positive.

In 2011, I published a similar series on Facebook Pages for Business, but recorded the videos with Screenr in more of a rapid fire mode. Because Screenr videos are limited to 5 minutes and do not provide any editing capabilities they weren’t nearly as impressive as the 10 minute, finely tuned videos from 2010. Don’t get me wrong – the content was great, but the presentation was not as memorable and thus fewer people subscribed to my Channel.

YouTube Activity Impact on Website Traffic

I often preach that video is critical to driving traffic an retaining visitors once they reach your site. Let’s take a look at how this unfolded in 2011.

This first snapshot shows that I received 311 visits, with 1.95 pages per visit, average time of 1:50 and bounce rate of 63.3%. All of these metrics perform better than my entire site on average.

I also see 75% new visits, which is 12% less than my site on average, but this is OK because it tells me that I have loyal viewers on YouTube.

Key Takeaways for 2012

I’m going to keep publishing video in 2012. It drives great traffic and pages on my site that have videos embedded have better visitor stats than average. I also really enjoy producing and publishing video and feel like it’s going to continue to develop as the preferred media for online communication.

This year, I’m also going to use Screenflow more strategically as my main video production tool. The quality of output is just so much better than any other screen capture process I’ve used. Sure, it takes a bit longer to use Screenflow vs Screenr, Jing or Quicktime, but it’s time well spent.

How’s video working for you and your business? Do you get much traffic from YouTube? What are you doing to leverage video in 2012?

My New Video Introduction for New Site Media

Steinar — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 19:38:02 +0000

I do a lot of video – some for this blog and some for my company at New Site Media. I’ve tried a variety of video introductions using some of the preconfigured transitions in iMovie but thought it was time to get a little creative and make my own from scratch. I considered using Fiverr for a minute, but knew I could create my own in about 30 minutes.

To create my intro I used a combination of Photoshop, Keynote and iMovie.

First, I separated the elements of my logo in Photoshop. Specifically, I created a standalone image of the red box portion of my logo.

Next, I recreated the text portion of my logo in Keynote and imported the red box as an image. I also created the black line as a separate image in Keynote. When I was finished, I had four distinct elements.

Using the Build Inspector in Keynote I created a series of Build-in effects for the four components.

“New Site” is set to Move In
The line is set to Pop
“Media” is set to Typewriter
Red Box is set to Anvil

Each Build element is set at 1 second intervals to automatically transition through the series to complete the entire build.

Next, I recorded the presentation in Keynote using the builds, and exported the presentation as a Quicktime Movie including the recorded transitions.

Then started a new project in iMovie and dragged the .mov file into the new project. I added a couple sounds and that’s it!

Now I have a unique video intro I can use on all my future videos.

What do you think? Let me know if you need help doing something similar.

OptimizePress: #10 Essential Online Marketing Tool for 2012

Steinar — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 16:44:13 +0000

What is OptimizePress?

Many of the world’s top Internet Marketers, Experts, Speakers and Coaches use OptimizePress to build their sales pages, launch funnels, membership sites or squeeze pages. It’s simply the easiest way to create an online sales funnel fast. It’s packed with customization options and built-in graphics that would take hours or days to replicate.

OptimizePress Theme – Utilize the power of this theme on as many of your OWN domains as you want, and start creating amazing pages in minutes!
Complete Page Building Solution – Now you no longer need to mess around with HTML, CSS, just use OptimizePress to build all your sales pages, squeeze pages, launch pages, bonus pages and more …
Unique Shortcode Sales Letter Building System – No longer do you have to worry about paying designers to clean up your sales letters – simply use our own super-powerful shortcode system to add in all the elements you want on your pages, just point and click!

Key Features

Build High Converting Squeeze Pages with over 10 tested and proven designs for your squeeze pages or landing pages to increase your optin rate and build your list fast
Create Powerful Product Launches with a custom launch sequence inside OptimizePress and use our advanced features to increase your visitor response.
Build Sales Letters, Bonus Pages, One-Time Offer Pages based on proven & tested designs, so you can give your pages a boost before you even start writing your sales copy!

Get Started Today!

Why do I need OptimizePress?

OptimizePress has been designed to make everything super easy. This includes integrating with your chosen autoresponder, which can usually be a real pain. Simply copy and paste the main form code your autoresponder provider gives you into OptimizePress, and our system will do the rest, including integrating the form with our custom styled input boxes and your optin button!

Download the complete list of 12 Essential Online Marketing Tools for 2012!

LinkedIn is Top Social Media Channel for B2B Marketers

Steinar — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 01:27:30 +0000

LinkedIn is the smallest and oldest of the big 5 social media platforms, yet is surprisingly the preferred social media marketing channel among B2B marketers according to a recent study by Safefrog Marketing Greoup.

Survey respondents often cite LinkedIn as the top social media site for B2B marketers, but others put Facebook and Twitter above the business-minded social network. According to Sagefrog Marketing Group, in summer 2011, 58% of US B2B marketers that used social media used LinkedIn, compared to 50% for Facebook and 43% for Twitter.

via More B2B Marketers Embrace Social Media Efforts – eMarketer

LinkedIn is great for B2B Marketers for several reasons:

1) LinkedIn is based on your profession, business resume, so folks on LinkedIn are is a business frame of mind. Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, are more personal in nature.

2) LinkedIn puts business in the forefront with robust business profile pages. Businesses can upload their logo and fill out a robust description of their product or service. Employees can link their individual LinkedIn profiles to the corporate profile, providing a great system to network B2B relationships.

3) LinkedIn Groups offer a great environment to share ideas and resources among your peers, customers, prospects and other parties that either currently do business with you or would like to engage in some level of business related discussion.

This is just three reasons, but the list goes on. Are you using LinkedIn as a marketing channel for your business? What’s working for you?

DropBox: #9 Essential Online Marketing Tool for 2012

Steinar — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:22:13 +0000

What is Dropbox?

Dropbox allows you to easily store and share files online in either a private or public setting. Dropbox works hard to make sure that all your files are the same no matter where you’re working from. This means that you can start working on a computer at school or the office, and finish from your home computer.

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere.
Invite your friends, family and teammates to any folder in your Dropbox, and it’ll be as if you saved that folder straight to their computers.
Dropbox is like a time machine that lets you undo mistakes and even undelete files you accidentally trash!

Key Features

2GB of Dropbox for free, with subscriptions up to 100GB available.
Your files are always available from the secure Dropbox website.
Dropbox works with Windows, Max, Linux, iPad, iPhone, Android and Blackberry.
Works even when offline. You always have your files, whether or not you have a connection.
Send people links to specific files in your Dropbox rather than emailing huge files back and forth.

Get Started Today!

Why do I need Dropbox?

People around the world rely on Dropbox to help them design buildings, compose music, run businesses, write books and even coordinate disaster relief. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a teacher, a photographer or an astronomer, an artist or an activist, Dropbox simplifies your life. Dropbox also makes it super easy to share with others, whether you’re a student or professional, parent or grandparent. Even if you accidentally spill a latte on your laptop, have no fear! You can relax knowing that Dropbox always has you covered, and none of your stuff will ever be lost.

Download the complete list of 12 Essential Online Marketing Tools for 2012!

Commenting on Blogs for Knowledge, Brand Building and Market Leadership

Steinar — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 18:54:22 +0000

Commenting on other blogs is a fantastic strategy for building your brand online. So few people leave comments these days that you can easily differentiate yourself with this simple tactic. Not only does commenting get your name out there, it also gives you a chance to learn something new and connect with other thought leaders within your industry.

In my daily routine, I scan all of the blogs that I subscribe to in Google Reader. My goal is to choose three blog posts that I find interesting and leave my comment. I find that this gives me exposure to readers on that website, and often drives traffic back my website.

Do you comment on blogs on a regular basis? I’d love to hear your feedback.

Listen or Download

MindNode: #8 Essential Online Marketing Tool for 2012

Steinar — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:45:37 +0000

What is MindNode?

MindNode Pro and MindNode are elegant and simple-to-use mind mapping applications for the Macintosh that help to 1) visually collect, classify and structure ideas and 2) organize, study and solve problems.

Available for Mac, iPad, & iPhone
Visually Appealing Mind Maps. There is no need to spend hours playing with the visual attributes to create an appealing mind map. The default values are suitable for most uses.

Key Features

Constrain node width and resize nodes. Automatically constrain the width of a node and to resize the node directly on the canvas.
Node Well. New nodes are created by simply dragging them out of the node wells. There is no need to access the toolbar or the application menu.
Multiple Mind Maps. The ability to create multiple mind maps on one canvas makes MindNode Pro an ideal tool for brainstorming sessions.

Why do I need MinNode?

Get Started Today!

Mind maps can be used for many different tasks – including to-do lists, brainstorming, holiday planning, research, writing, project management – and in many different environments – school, meetings, workspace. Personally, I like to use mind maps to outline blog posts and podcast episodes among other tasks. MindNode Pro includes the same features as the free MindNode version, and adds several new features that help improve your productivity.

Download the complete list of 12 Essential Online Marketing Tools for 2012!

Skitch Image Capture: #7 Essential Online Marketing Tool for 2012

Steinar — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:25:33 +0000

What is Skitch?

Skitch is Mac desktop and Android mobile image editing tool that lets you grab, annotate, edit and share your screenshots and images fast. Skitch revolutionizes basic image editing tasks, delivering a quick and easy tool that offers most image editing features you’ll use day to day.

Screenshots are easy: Skitch makes grabbing a screenshot a mouse click or keyboard command away. Crosshairs Snap, Fullscreen Snap or a Frame Snap made easy
Image indexing: every image you edit in Skitch is saved within the program so you can easily browse through anything you’ve previously created.
Upload to your own site: using Skitch, you can also directly upload any picture to any web server via FTP.

Key Features

Image resizing: Open an image or drag one directly into Skitch.
Image cropping: drag any point of the image in the direction you want for a quick crop.
Text or drawings: type, use your mouse or even a graphics tablet to quickly add anything to an image.
Webcam shot: if you’ve got a webcam, you can use Skitch to take shots with it.
Share on Twitter: any image hosted on Skitch is a shortcut away from a Twitter post.

Get Started Today!

Why do I need Skitch?
Besides being completely free, it’s the range of features Skitch offers quickly and simply. It’s not a Photoshop replacement (I still use Photoshop on occasion) nor does it pretend to be. What Skitch offers is 95% of every image editing function I use on a daily basis without the bloat of Photoshop so image handling is that much quicker.

Download the complete list of 12 Essential Online Marketing Tools for 2012!

Catalyst Theme for WordPress: #6 Essential Online Marketing Tool for 2012

Steinar — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:00:52 +0000

What is the Catalyst Theme?

Catalyst isn’t your typical WordPress Theme. It’s not just a cookie-cutter template to slap on the face of your site. Catalyst is more of a design platform. It gives you the flexibility to create a site that’s unique. With over 800 custom options at your fingertips, what you can create with Catalyst is only limited by imagination.

Search Engine Optimization – Catalyst is built from the ground up with SEO in mind, so that your site has a fighting chance to rank among competing sites on search engines.
Ideal for Developers & Non-Developers – A beautiful user dashboard makes Catalyst stand out from the crowd with over 800 custom options. Great for both the seasoned WordPress developer and novice alike.
Unlimited Custom Layouts – Unlike the majority of WordPress Themes and Frameworks, Catalyst has unlimited custom layout development capabilities.

Key Features

Unlimited Custom Layouts, Widgets & Hook Boxes Provide Amazing Flexibility
The Dynamik Child Theme Provides Over 800 No-Coding Design Options
Create Your Own Custom Child Themes With A Single Mouse Click
A Custom CSS Building Tool That Writes Custom Code For You!
The Most Comprehensive Font Control Offered In A WordPress Theme!

Get Started Today!

Why do I need the Catalyst theme?
Catalyst makes WordPress website design easy! No need to purchase a new theme every time you want to change the look and feel of your site – just create a new child theme in Catalyst and let your imagination go wild!

Download the complete list of 12 Essential Online Marketing Tools for 2012!

WishList Member: #5 Essential Online Marketing Tool for 2012

Steinar — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:35:28 +0000

What is Wishlist Member?
Trusted by over 31,102 online communities and membership sites worldwide, WishList Member is a powerful, yet easy to use membership solution that can turn any WordPress blog into a full-blown membership site.

Integrates With Your WordPress Site – Whether you’re building a new site or integrating with an existing WordPress site, installing WishList Member is a breeze.
Multi-Level Access – Give your members access to multiple levels within your membership. For example, create a central download location with access granted to members of all levels.
Control Viewed Content – Just click the “Hide” button to protect exclusive content for members of a particular level. Create “modular” memberships and hide content from other levels.

Key Features

Just unzip and upload the plugin, and within minutes you’ll have your own membership site up and running.
Unlimited Membership Levels
Protected, members-only content, integrated payments, member management, and so much more!
Seamlessly integrates with the most popular shopping cart systems.
Graduate your members from one level to the next for sequential content delivery

Get Started Today!

Why do I need Wishlist Member?
WishList Member makes the process of building a membership site as easy as possible, so you can start creating a powerful online community of your own right away. No other system makes it so simple to sign up new members and deliver content behind a series of flexible membership levels. Charge for access if you wish or create an open membership. It’s up to you and WishList Member makes it easy!

Download the complete list of 12 Essential Online Marketing Tools for 2012!

Hootsuite: #4 Essential Online Marketing Tool for 2012

Steinar — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 18:41:51 +0000

What is Hootsuite?

Hootsuite is the leading social media dashboard to manage and measure your social networks. Hootsuite is an online application – no software to install!

Save your time and your sanity. Monitor and post to multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter using the HootSuite dashboard.
Show off your social media success. Create custom reports from over 30 individual report modules to share with clients and colleagues. Track brand sentiment, follower growth, plus incorporate Facebook Insights and Google analytics all without leaving the dashboard.
HootSuite’s Pro and Enterprise plans allow you to have multiple contributors to your social profiles without sharing passwords. Assign messages for follow-up and track responses.

Key Features

Manage multiple social profiles
Schedule messages and tweets
Track brand mentions
Analyze social media traffic
Mobile apps for those on the go
Direct feed from you blog to Twitter
Upload images and links
Popular browser extensions

Why do I need Hootsuite?
HootSuite helps organizations use the social web to launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow audience, and distribute targeted messages across multiple channels.

Using HootSuite’s unique social media dashboard, teams can collaboratively schedule updates to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, WordPress and other social networks via web, desktop or mobile platforms plus track campaign results and industry trends to rapidly adjust tactics.

Download the complete list of 12 Essential Online Marketing Tools for 2012!

Bluehost: #3 Essential Online Marketing Tool for 2012

Steinar — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:28:59 +0000

What is Bluehost?

From the business owner to the individual who desires full functionality on a small budget, Bluehost provides your complete web hosting solution.

BlueHost has WordPress hosting built in. Their one-click installs with SimpleScripts make it super fast to spin up test sites or new blogs quickly.
Bluehost has been providing quality web hosting solutions since 1996 and provides a consistent experience for your website without all the ups and downs normally associated with every other shared hosting provider.
$6.95/month is a killer deal. Sure you can save a couple of bucks if you hunt around, but is it worth it? Trust me, I’ve tried and it’s NOT.

Key Features

UNLIMITED Disk Storage
UNLIMITED Domain Hosting
Free Domain Name
Secure Email Support
UNLIMITED GB of Site Transfer
Add-on Domains, Subdomains and Parked Domains
cPanel Account Control Panel
FTP Access
Web File Manager
Secure Shell (SSH) Access
Spam Assasin Protection
MySQL Databases
PHP 5 and more!

Reserve your domain!

Why do I need Bluehost?
Bluehost technology is really what sets them apart from other companies. They have their own datacenter, their build their own servers, they have their own nationwide fiber network, they build their own custom linux kernel. In short, because they handle every aspect of your hosting you can feel confident that if there is a problem that you won’t have to deal with 5 different companies to get your problem solved.

Download the complete list of 12 Essential Online Marketing Tools for 2012!

Aweber: #2 Essential Online Marketing Tool for 2012

Steinar — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 01:13:28 +0000

Aweber is my #2 essential online marketing tool for 2012. I’ve been using this service since 2007 and absolutely love it to this day.

What is Aweber?

Aweber offers industry leading, affordable opt-in email marketing that enables you to boost your website’s traffic and convert more sales.

Industry-Leading Deliverability: Get your emails to the inbox, not junk folders, with deliverability rates exceeding 99 percent.
Email Newsletters and Autoresponders: You set the date and time you want your newsletter to be sent, and they’ll get it delivered. Autoresponders will be automatically delivered at the intervals you specify.
Analytics: Find out who is (and isn’t) opening, clicking, downloading and buying from your emails. You can use this information to improve future sends, create new targeted groups of subscribers and find ways to improve your results.

Key Features

Collect, manage and segment your subscribers across multiple lists.
Use email autoresponders to deliver a sequence of messages automatically.
Over 150 ready-to-use, customizable HTML email templates and forms
12+ years experience delivering email marketing campaigns help you reach the inbox.
RSS to email tool turns your latest blog post in an email newsletter.

Why do I need Aweber?
For the highest ROI, AWeber provides the tools to create, manage, analyze and optimize your email marketing. If you don’t have a full team of copywriters, designers and developers, AWeber makes it easy to do it yourself. We also make it easy for agencies and freelancers to use our service, so whichever route you take, you’re covered.

Download the complete list of 12 Essential Online Marketing Tools for 2012!

Market Samurai: #1 Essential Online Marketing Tool for 2012

Steinar — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:08:20 +0000

What is Market Samurai?

Market Samurai is software for your Mac or PC that streamlines all critical search engine marketing tasks, puts complete market intelligence at your finger-tips, takes away uncertainty, and gives you focus, direction and confidence in your internet marketing.

It slashes time wasted on tasks that don’t directly create results – allowing you to put your focus into the areas where you will receive the best returns for your unique online business;
It tells you exactly what you need to do next – by using decision-making data that is specific to your unique market – meaning you don’t get lost, confused or sidetracked – and every ounce of energy is effective;
AND it helps you complete critical internet marketing tasks faster, more easily and, efficiently, and achieve better results than ever before

Key Features

Find out how to uncover “gold-nugget” keywords – each of these keywords can send hundreds, even thousands of free visitors to your site each day.
Stop attracting time-wasting tire-kickers to your web-site, and target the keywords in your market that real buyers are using right now.
Discover exactly how to beat the competition, and get front-page rankings in Google for high-traffic keywords in weeks or days – not months or years.

Download Your Free Copy!

Why do I need Market Samurai?
Every web-site needs traffic if it’s going to succeed – and the most reliable, consistent, profitable, high-volume source of traffic comes from search engines. All it takes is getting 4 SIMPLE things right! – the 4 Golden Rules … but 99% of sites get these 4 things wrong (without even realizing it at the time). As a result, the odds of success are stacked against them, making good profits (not even big profits) becomes a massive struggle and, as a result, 99% of sites fail!

Download the complete list of 12 Essential Online Marketing Tools for 2012!

12 Essential Online Marketing Tools for 2012

Steinar — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:04:01 +0000

The list of products and services chosen for this year’s list are products that I use on a regular basis. Some of them are free and others are paid services. In my experience, the combination of these products provides a platform to execute online marketing campaigns more efficiently & effectively.

… thus, I am sharing them with you!

Listen as I explain this year’s lineup …

Listen or Download

This year’s list covers a broad range of leading products and services, including keyword research, email newsletter management, file storage, website hosting, contact management, image capture, video capture, mind mapping, social media, WordPress custom themes, online lead generation, membership site management and webinar hosting.

After 15 years of marketing online, it is clear to me that there is more than one way to get things accomplished. In the early days, I relied heavily on free tools and my own programming & marketing skills to make things happen. In almost every case, there is an alternative route, tool, application or service that is equally capable of getting the job done. Trust me, I’ve tried a lot of tools over the years!

How to get started with affiliate marketing for passive income

Steinar — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 02:17:17 +0000

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make passive income online. Essentially this is the process of selling other company’s products for a commission on the sale. For example, you might sell a $50 product and get 6% or $3.00. With a good amount of traffic though your affiliate link, this could multiply into a decent amount of income.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online. Today we’ll discuss Linkshare and how you can get started.

Listen or Download

I started exploring affiliate marketing in 2005 after blogging about the Olympics since 2001. I had a steading flow of traffic to my sites and wanted to monetize them somehow. I tried Adsense but that didn’t seem too promising.

I did some research and discovered a few leading affiliate programs: Linkshare, ShareaSale and Commission Junction. These sites basically serve as the middleman between you and the merchant.

Basic Steps to Get Started with an Affiliate Marketing Site

Before you get started with affiliate marketing, you need a website. The fastest way to do this is get hosting at Bluehost and do an auto install of WordPress. There are tons of great free themes or for a more sophisticated set of customization options check out the Catalyst WordPress Theme.
Once you’ve registered your website, visit the affiliate program sites (Linkshare, etc) and sign up for an account. There you’ll find dozens of categories and 1,000 of merchants with millions of products you can promote on your website. It’s easy to search and find the right products that match your niche.
Once you find a a few good merchants, apply to become an affiliate for their program. Some programs will approve your application immediately, while it may take a day or two for others to let you in or reject you based on a number of potential reasons.
Upon approval, you’ll have access to a plethora of links for each merchant. You’ll see text links, banner links, individual product links and some customizable links. Most affiliate programs also have a feed that you can subscribe to or download so that you no longer have to manually login to see what’s new. It’s really pretty amazing how quickly you can start grabbing HTML code for these links and build out your new website.
Put the links on your site and once someone purchases something a record of the transaction will appear in your affiliate program account. Depending on the program you’ve chosen, you can expect to get a check for your commissions within 30-60 after your total reaches a set minimum. Payouts usually come in the form of check, direct deposit or PayPal.

Have you tried affiliate marketing? What’s worked for you?

New Visitors Start Here

Steinar — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 05:11:47 +0000

Hello and welcome to the Online Marketing Studio blog. My name is Steinar Knutsen and I am a full-time Internet Marketing & Technology Consultant. I’ve been blogging since 2001 and use this blog as a platform to test new ideas and share with you what works.

If this is your first time to my blog, you will want to read this page carefully as it will help you to learn about Internet Marketing in a way that makes it much easier to comprehend – plus it will help you to understand which parts of my site to check out first so that your time is best put to use.

First a little background: For new people new to Internet Marketing, the reason our business can be extremely overwhelming is because of:

The broad range of strategies available to position your business online.
The sheer number of tactics needed to successful execute a given online marketing strategy.
The overwhelming nature of managing multiple social media profiles and communities.
The complete lack of any comprehensive set of industry standards for training.

Who is the Online Marketing Studio blog for?

This blog is for business owners and marketing managers faced with the task of creating an online presence for your company. Maybe you’ve read something in the news about the popularity of blogging and social media, but have found it frustrating to nail down specifically what to do next, how it all ties together and what works best.

My blog will show you specifically how to:

Research and find profitable keywords (this is by far the single largest cause of failure for most online marketers)
Build websites and landing pages the correct way
Get your site ranked in the Search Engines
Convert visitors, Generate Leads and Increase your Return on Investment

What you can expect from me:

I tell it like it is. I have nothing to hide and I have no problem sharing my best strategies and tactics. Online marketing is a fast paced industry so it’s my job to stay on top of the latest developments.
I’m always online so if you leave a comment or reach out to me on Twitter, you can be fairly confident that I’ll reply within minutes.
I like to try new things and share my experience along the way. I take the risk and you benefit.
I like to mix up my content with text, audio and video. I think you’ll find it more interesting and quite frankly I find it’s a lot more fun.

Here are Some “Must Read” Posts to Get You Started

How to Contact Me

Definitions and Terminology

Blog – Originally call a weblog, a blog is a form of website that allows you to update content on a regular basis, much like you would a daily diary. Most blog platforms, such as Blogger, WordPress and Posterous are free and provide a user friendly interface to update content online without any additional software to install or knowledge of HTML. Blogging is a great way to keep your site fresh, inform visitors of new information and signal to search engines that your site is current and relevant.

WordPress – This blogging platform has evolved into one of the most popular content management systems. WordPress.com is an online free version where anyone can setup a free account and start blogging within a few minutes. WordPress.org provides a version of WordPress that you can download and install on your own server. In both cases, WordPress offers a simple admin interface, a great collection of free themes and a robust set of plugins to add functionality to your new site. For a more custom site, you can also purchase flexible WordPress theme frameworks that take WordPress to a whole new level.

Content Management System – In the old days, a website consisted of static content in HTML. Today’s modern platform consists of PHP based, dynamically generated pages that speak to a database on content. A content management system, such as WordPress, connects the PHP, CSS and database together to present your website to visitors. It makes it easy for you to add new content and edit content over time, rather than messing with HTML pages. Moreover, a content management system provides the tools to better organize your content and run sophisticated code and queries to manipulate your content.

Niche Website – Just like your business operates within a specific target market, a niche website is designed to laser focus in on one specific topic and target a particular set of visitors. For example, a general website might be about “tires”, whereas a niche site is about “Italian race car tires”. Niche sites are useful as landing pages for paid advertising campaigns or in markets that have a large variety of products and services and it’s important to speak to a specific audience. The idea is that if you can speak more directly to your readers, your content has greater value and has potentially a better conversion rate.

Domain Name – This is your web address, such as www.steinarknutsen.com

Plugins – most content management systems and blogging platforms offer a series of plugins or widgets that add functionality to your blog. Typical plugins include a search form, recent posts, a list of posts and pages, a calendar and a open text box for you to add custom HTML or javascript. WordPress has 1,000′s of plugins, many of which you see on this very site in the sidebars and throughout the content. Without plugins, your blog would mostly consist of text and images with some basic navigation.

On-Page Optimization – This includes all the things you can do on your website to increase the likelihood that search engines will index your content and display your website in search engine results. This may include title tags, keyword tags, alt tags, description tags, header tags, content based keywords, internal links, page titles, keyword rich url’s and more.

Off-Page Optimization – This includes all the things you can do off your website to increase the likelihood that search engines will index your content and display your website in search engine results. This may include back links from other websites, submitting your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, sharing your RSS feed on other blog directories, submitting links to your content on link sharing sites like Reddit or StumbleUpon. This list goes on.

RSS – In layman’s terms, Really Simple Syndication is a standard format for sharing content online. Most blogs have an RSS feed built-in, e.g., http://www.steinarknutsen.com/feed. For publishers, RSS feeds help other online platforms and your readers, subscribe to your content using an RSS reader, such as Google Reader. RSS Feeds are important because they signal to these other platforms that you have published new content. If you have blog, your should submit your RSS feed to Google Webmaster Tools.

How to Find and Add Local Google Plus Users to your Circles and Grow your Social Network

Steinar — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:38:26 +0000

Searching for and adding local Google Plus users to your Circles can be a time consuming process, but I’ve come up with a solution to make it easier.

I’ll use my “Cville” circle for local Charlottesville Google Plus users as an example.

1. Share your local Google Plus Circle with your followers.

Go to Circles and click on the local Google Plus circle you want to share. Then click on “Share this Circle” in the upper right hand corner. Share it publicly or within a given circle of followers. Now everyone will be able to see your Circle and they may follow these people if they choose.

2. Publish a new Post on Google Plus asking your followers to share their local Circle.

Say something like this: “Please share your local Google Plus Circle with us. I would like to find new local people to follow and by sharing your Circle we can all get the most out of Google Plus on a local level. Go to Circle, click on the Circle you want to share and then click on ‘Share this Circle’”.

Hopefully, some people will now start to share their local Google Plus circles, like some of my friends, Jim Duncan, Daniel Rothamel, & Kari Rippetoe,

3. Add their Circle to your Circle or create a new one

When someone else shares their local Circle and you see it in a new Google Plus post, click on the “Add Circle” option in the middle of the image within their post. A popup will appear. If you want to create a new Circle from their Circle, spell out a unique name in the blank box and click “Create a new Circle”.

If you wan to add these people to an existing circle, spell out the same name of your exising Circle in the blank box and the option below will magically change to “Add to xyz Circle” (xyz meaning the name of the Google Circle you already have setup.)

Go through this process enough times and your Circles will grow pretty quickly.

Cool huh? Tell me how this goes.

Differentiate Yourself And Your Business For Online Market Leadership

Steinar — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 02:09:05 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot about online market leadership lately and what businesses can do to differentiate themselves online. You see, it’s so crowded on Twitter and Facebook and blogs these days that it’s tough sometimes to stand out from the crowd.

How do I differentiate myself and my business?

Personally, it’s all about pushing the limits and adding real value on a regular basis for my clients and friends online. That means shooting video, podcasting, blogging and commenting on other popular blogs within my niche.

Commenting on other blogs is a great community building activity that has significantly decreased over the years. With the proliferation of Twitter and Facebook buttons, most people just share content rather than actually reading it and getting involved in the conversation. Their loss … my gain. You should do the same.

My challenge to you is to think about what you can do to differentiate your business from the pack. How can you add value? How can you stand apart as a trusted source?

I’d love to hear your ideas. Come up with something you can do this week, this month or next year. Your market is waiting for you to take charge.

Talk soon.

Worksheet: Define Your Target Market

Steinar — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 01:22:46 +0000

As a business owner or marketing manager, defining your target market is one of the first things we know we should do, but is often forgotten or remains stagnant over the years. The problem with this is that as your business grows and your customers change, you risk losing focus on those who need you most.

Once a year, usually in the Fall, I like to review my year-to-date performance and outline my strategy for the next year. Part of that process includes a look at my target market. It helps me gain clarity of who my audience is, whom I wish to reach and what my ideal customer looks like. It’s not easy and sometimes it can be a tough pill to swallow but it’s a critical step toward evolving your business.

I find it’s easier to start with customers’ needs first and then get into the demographics. It seems like if you start with demographics you fall into the trap that “everyone is my customer,” which we know is just not true. Starting with their needs will quickly weed out adjacent and other irrelevant segments that would most likely not be a very good fit for your business.

Here is a simple Target Market Worksheet to consider.

Download a PDF version of this Target Market Worksheet

What are my customers’ needs?
Who are my customers?
1. Age
2. Gender
3. Economic Level
4. Lifestyle
5. Buying Habits
Where are my customers located?
1. Where do they live?
2. Where do they shop?
Projected size of market?
How does my business meet their needs?
What is unique about my business?

Of course, you will want to customize this series of questions to meet your needs, including any industry specific criteria typically considered relevant to customer segmentation. That being said, don’t feel constrained to industry standard segmentation schemes. Ask your market what’s important to them and completely redefine your target market if needed. Get specific, find your niche and get excited about the idea of speaking to them in a more meaningful way.

What do you think? Is defining your target market a worthwhile exercise or just a waste of time?

Mind Map: Elements of a good blog post

Steinar — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 01:13:33 +0000

A little mind map brainstorming on my iPhone about elements of a good blog post. What would you change or add?

Social Media: You Can’t Be Everywhere, Nor Should You

Steinar — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 23:51:17 +0000

As marketers, many of us strive to “be everywhere” on the Internet. It seems like a reasonable goal given the capabilities of tools like TweetDeck, Ping.fm and others that allow us to continuously share information across multiple social media platforms at once.

Or maybe, you’re spending hours shooting video, blogging and podcasting because you almost feel obligated … only to find out your market is really getting trustworthy information from one of your competitors on some other industry-specific, niche social media site.

You can’t be everywhere, nor should you. Many entrepreneurs are excited about technology and they overextend themselves because they want to be part of the latest trend. The key is to only be where your customers, prospects and those who influence them engage.

via Brian Solis on Five Common Social Media Mistakes and How to Avoid Them | Blog | Daily Dose | Entrepreneur.com.

Personally, I do tend to be everywhere because I’m in the business of social media and online marketing. It’s my duty to have an in-depth understanding of an excessive number of platforms. It’s part of the value I bring to clients.

For most business owners and marketing managers, however, it may make more sense to focus on one or two networks.

I think the reason most entrepreneurs, and larger companies for that matter, fall into the trap of “be everywhere” is that they have yet to clearly define their niche target market. It’s almost easier to believe that “everyone is a potential customer” than focus on a specific segment.

Unfortunately, the process of marketing to everyone is actually more like marketing to no one. It’s very difficult to sell your product or service without specifically talking to a potential buyer’s wants and needs.

I recommend you get laser focussed on your niche and find the 1 or 2 of the most trusted social media platform for that audience. Then communicate directly to those people using words and information that let’s them know you’re speaking to them.

What do you think? Is being everywhere a reasonable strategy or does it make more sense to hand-pick online platforms for more effective, targeted communication?

7 Free Goal Setting Templates and Worksheets to Download

Steinar — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 21:18:33 +0000

If you’re looking for a great goal setting template or worksheet to download, you should find the following resources helpful. For me, goal setting is an important process to help clarify both short-term and long-term objectives. Without goals we can easily fall into reactionary mode, whereby we fail to evaluate opportunities relative to our overall desired course.

In my experience, writing down my goals often helps me achieve them faster and better than expected. It allows me to consistently focus on what’s most important for me and my business. This is not selfish – in fact, it’s better for your customers and those around you as well.

Here are some goal setting templates and worksheets you might find helpful:

1. Setting SMART Goals for your Marketing Strategy

Setting SMART goals is a proven approach to achieving success more quickly. As 2010 winds down, this is the perfect opportunity to examine your goals for 2011 and apply the SMART mnemonic or acronym to increase the likelihood your goals are met. Includes goal setting templates for Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers.

2. Goal Setting Worksheet and Weekly Planner Template

This Goal Setting Worksheet will help you organize your goals, to dos, and/or projects to help you make the biggest impact in your life or career. This Weekly Planner Template (inspired from the teachings of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) will help you organize the most important things to do in each “role” you play in your life. Combined with the Goal Setting Worksheet, you can easily identify those things that will have the biggest impact.

3. Goal Setting Worksheet and Template

There are many free goal setting worksheets and templates available on the web. Even though there are slight variations in individual worksheets, they all serve the same purpose. Get this goal setting worksheet kit and take a step towards a clear sense of direction in your life.

4.Goal Setting Forms

If Goal Setting Forms is what you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right spot. In all likely hood, you are one of the vast majority of people who never learned to either consciously or unconsciously set goals. Now you have come to understand that goal setting is central to success in any part of life and you want in on the action. Good news! We have provided some goal setting forms for you right here! How convenient! How useful.

5. Setting Goals

14 templates for how to set goals, goal worksheets, setting goals, goal lesson plans and more.

6. Free Goal Setting Templates

Studies have shown that people that write their goal along with a written action plan have a 51% chance to achieve it. Compared to those that do not write their goals, they have a 43% chance of achievement.

7. Printable SMART Goal Setting Templates

SMART goal setting templates, such as those below, remind of you of what you want, why you want it and how to get it. Print and use this free template to accelerate your progress towards what you want and waste less time on the way.

Which template(s) did you find most helpful?

30DTC – Why are WordPress Tags Important?

Steinar — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 07:11:35 +0000

WordPress tags can sometimes be a real mystery, but they are very important.

User Navigation

1. WordPress tags help your readers navigate your content.

I like to compare them to the Index in the back of a book. These are all the specific, individual words that you as a reader are seeking, that may not be as obvious in the Table of Contents (categories).

If readers find one post interesting, they’re likely to find other posts that share a similar tag interesting as well.

Search Engine Traffic

2. WordPress tags can drive significant traffic to your website. When you use a tag in a post, WordPress creates an addition page. For example, this post has the tag “wordpress tags”, so WordPress automatically creates a page for … WordPress Tags.

Since the new page has your exact keywords in the URL, search engines have a better chance of understanding what that new page is about. Thus, they get indexed well and drive traffic when people search for that phrase on Google, etc.

Here’s a great example.

I recently wrote a blog post about Google Plus Pages and used the tag “google-plus-multiple-admins” because I knew that the lack of multiple administrator support was an issue and people would be searching for some clarification.

As you can see from the chart below, this drove a handful of new visitors to my site over the past few days.

Yes, there was traffic to that post from other channels, but the tags did contribute in their own, unique way.

I hope this helps. Do you use tags? Why or why not?

Social Media Expands with Launch of Google Plus Pages for Business

Steinar — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:23:25 +0000

After much anticipation, Google Plus Pages launched this week. It’s another significant step for Google as they attempt to steal market share from leading social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. To setup your Google Plus Page, visit http://plus.google.com/pages/create.

Here’s a quick quote from their official blog post announcing Google Plus Pages …

In life we connect with all kinds of people, places and things. There’s friends and family, of course, but there’s also the sports teams we root for, the coffee shops we’re loyal to, and the TV shows we can’t stop watching (to name a few).

So far Google+ has focused on connecting people with other people. But we want to make sure you can build relationships with all the things you care about—from local businesses to global brands—so today we’re rolling out Google+ Pages worldwide.

via Official Google Blog.

A couple thoughts on Google Plus Pages given my limited experience:

This is Google so we should take care to understand that content you share on Google Plus has a higher likelihood of showing up on Google search results. If you’ve searched on Google lately, maybe you’ve noticed just how much content is surfacing from Google Plus. This trend will only continue.
As of december 19th, Google+ Pages may now have up to 50 admins. The capability to rolling out across all Pages, so you may or may not see this functionality yet. To add an admin, login to Google+, switch to your Page login, then click on Managers under the little gear in the upper right hand corner.
As a Page, you cannot add people to your Circles. Individuals must add your business first and then you may reciprocate. This makes sense, since we don’t want to get bombarded by companies promoting their Page. Google Plus offers a nice set of recommendation to help you promote you Page instead. I’m sure this will all change, especially the likely capability of businesses to befriend each other, much like Facebook Pages.

What do you think? Does Google Plus Pages have legs?

Do you have a Google Plus Page? If so, please leave a link in the comments.

How to Add the WordPress “Press This” Bookmarklet Link to Your Browser Toolbar

Steinar — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:45:11 +0000

I’m blogging a lot more during the 30 Day Traffic Challenge and it reminded me of this great tool that is pretty well hidden in the WordPress Admin: WordPress Press This bookmarklet. This bookmarklet is a useful link you can add to your browser’s toolbar or bookmarks to increase your efficiency.

The idea behind the Press This bookmarklet is that as you browse the web, you might come across something you want to share in a new blog post. Rather than cutting and pasting the content and appropriate resource links, you can use Press This to simply highlight the text and click the Press This link. This will save you a bunch of time and make the process of sharing other people’s content much simpler.

The Press This bookmarklet can be found in the “Available Tools” section of your WordPress admin. This is simply called Tools in older versions of WordPress.

To begin, click and drag the Press This button to your browser’s toolbar. Obviously, you must have your browser’s options set to show a toolbar of links or bookmarks. This varies depending on your browser and operating system. If you’re having trouble clicking and dragging, you can also right-click or CTRL-click on a Mac to “add link to Bookmarks” or “save link to Favorites”.

Once you install Press This in you toolbar it’s time to start using it. For example, let’s say I want to quote a recent article I found on SEO and reference the author with a link back to the original article. Simply highlight the text in the article you want to quote and click the Press This link in you browser.

Now you get a popup window where you can edit your post and add your own color commentary. You can also save the post as a draft which is a great way to fill up your pipeline with new post ideas. One drawback of the Press This window is that you cannot schedule a post for later, but I can live with that.

Typically I like to add my comments at the beginning of my new post just before the quoted text and put the quote in blockquotes. This seems to give the best appearance and provide proper separation for the reader between my comments and the 3rd party content. Of course, this will depend on how your WordPress theme is formatted to display blockquotes.

Here’s an example of a Press This post on my site.

Pretty cool huh?

30DTC – Driving Targeted Web Traffic with Long-Tail Keyword Research

Steinar — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:06:47 +0000

It’s day five of the 30 Day traffic challenge and a couple days ago I set out to optimize for the keyword phrase of targeted web traffic. I’m happy to report that some of the traffic to my website is indeed for this keyword search phrase.

This is not by accident. I used the phrase in a number of blog posts. I used it in some PDFs I uploaded to my website and to third-party websites and I used it been some comments that I left on some other blog posts.

I used it in a YouTube video and a couple quick podcast episodes at AudioBoo. At this point I hope you are thinking about some of the keyword phrases that you could be optimizing for on your website.

Search engine optimization is as much science as it is art. We don’t know the algorithms used by Google or Bing but simply guessing what the right keywords are is going to lead to failure and ultimately confuse the search engines.

On the flip side, if you use market research to understand the appropriate keywords you can drive targeted web traffic. I recommend Market Samurai as a great tool for understanding what the appropriate keywords are. In my case, I spend about 60 minutes to research some potentially promising keywords. I am by no means finished, but feel like I’m heading in the right direction.

What is your search engine optimization keyword research strategy?

Create a Website in Minutes with a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

Steinar — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:30:47 +0000

You want to create a website? WordPress is one of the leading blogging platforms available. Most people interested in blogging stumble across WordPress.com at some point and maybe register their own free blog. The lack of control over WordPress themes may be frustrating and you want to create a website that reflects your brand.

WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

http://wordpress.org/

Ultimately, if you’re serious about blogging you are ready to install WordPress on your own server and create a website that offers more flexibility and control. It’s time to launch a self-hosted blog from WordPress.org.

A few benefits of a self-hosted WordPress blog are:

WordPress itself is still free (though you’ll need to purchase a domain & hosting package to install WordPress)
Full access to & control over all the files that support WordPress
Full access to & control over the MySQL database that manages your WordPress content
Ability to add any theme & customize WordPress themes as needed
Ability to add & customize unlimited WordPress plugins

On the surface these reasons alone should be enough to convince you that self-hosted WordPress is the way to go over the long run. There are other more technical, privacy and security related reasons as well, but we’ll leave that for another day.

How to Install WordPress and Create a Website from your New Blog

Step 1: WordPress Blog Domain Registration

First thing you’ll need to do is register you domain name or URL. This is the web address where your new WordPress blog will live. I recommend Bluehost to register your domain. Specifically, because they offer great products, support and uptime. Furthermore, their Control Panel is very intuitive vs. other registrars and you’ll thank me later for this!

Step2: WordPress Hosting

A website host provides server space for you to store all your WordPress blog files.

This includes the php and css files that drive WordPress plus the MySQL database and other applications required to actually make WordPress operate.

Again, I recommend Bluehost for WordPress hosting because the service and products are top of the line for the price. When you register, sign up for a 2-year hosting package and you’ll get tons of extra products that other hosting companies try to charge extra for such as email account and extra storage space.

Step 3: WordPress Self-Hosted Application Files

Next you need to install WordPress. The simplest way to do this is to use the self-install scripts that come with Bluehost. From your control panel just click on the WordPress Icon in the SimpleScripts section and follow the step-by-step instructions. It’s really pretty straightforward.

Step 4: WordPress Themes

WordPress themes give you a more custom look and feel to your blog. It could be something fancy or maybe you prefer something more minimalist. In any case there are 1,000 of themes to choose from – both free and premium.

My favorite theme right now for someone who has limited programming skills but wants a theme that is dynamic and easy to customize is the Catalyst WordPress Theme Framework. It is, in my opinion, the best theme available for WordPress today.

Otherwise there are plenty of WordPress themes available to choose from for free directly within the WordPress Admin section in the Appearance > Themes tab.

So, that’s it really – this is initial requirements to create a website with WordPress. The process to install WordPress first time is a bit daunting but you’ll make it. If you get stuck or feel unsure call the folks at Bluehost and they’ll walk you through it.

Free Report – Build an Effective Online Distribution Strategy

Steinar — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:22:14 +0000

So much of what we do online these days is managing the flow of information.

We have tons of content coming at us everyday from social media, blogs, news, video and other online sources with little chance to filter the content let alone really consume everything in a meaningful way. On the flip side, some of us are in the business of publishing content and we sometimes question and even struggle to understand the best methods of distribution and consumption for our readers.

The attached report is my 2 cents on the subject of using RSS feeds as an effective means for managing the flow. I recommend setting up a blog as your central distribution center and using Google Reader as your gathering place and filter.

Enjoy!

Build an Effective Online Distribution Strategy

30DTC – Using Mind Maps to Brainstorm Ideas and Map Out a Plan of Attack

Steinar — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:13:33 +0000

It is day three of my 30 Day Traffic Challenge and today I am working on creating a mind map of all of the potential channels and opportunities to drive targeted web traffic to my website. I’m using a great tool on my iPad, iPhone and Mac called MindNode Pro, which is available at www.mindnode.com. Another great free mind mapping application I’ve used in the past is FreeMind.

Mind mapping is a great way to brainstorm ideas graphically rather than writing down your ideas in a list. In particular, they allow you to get ideas out onto the table in a free-form fashion and then re-order or categorize your ideas in a more meaningful way. With MindNode, I can export my map as an image, pdf or text based outline among other formats.

You can see from the initial mind map that I’ve created there are numerous ways to drive traffic to your website. I’ve categorized my mind map into strategies, tools, measurement, and search engine optimization, plus a special category around stuff beyond increasing traffic, such as conversion and monetization. This is by no means complete but it gives me a starting point with which to move forward implementing my traffic getting strategy.

Here’s the same mind map exported as an html file … pretty cool, huh?

Increase Web Traffic

Beyond Traffic

Long term strategy
Business objectives
Converting visitors
Monetization

Measuring Traffic

Google Analytics
Quantcast
Alexa
Compete

Strategies

On my site

Blogging

Keyword rich posts
Controversial content that challenges common belief
Covering current events
Top ten lists

Subscriptions

Blog feed subscriptions
Newsletters
Auto responder series

Creating a simple tool or widget as a downloadable

WordPress plugin
Ebook
Excel templates
Simple workbook with forms to complete

Multimedia formats

Podcasting
Images
Video

On other sites

Press Releases
Paid traffic

PPC
Advertising
Affiliate Marketing

Social media

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Participating in Forums
Commenting on blog posts

Offline promotion

Tools

Market Samurai
Blogging editorial calendar
Google Reader
Subscription Services

Aweber
Mailchimp
Constant Contact
IContact

Search engine optimization

Keyword research
On-page

Leveraging what I already see working with current visitors

Off-page

Inbound links

Once my mind map is fairly complete, I will prioritize the action items and fill out my blogging editorial calendar. It is much easier this way to stay on track and feel like I have a plan of attack moving forward.

Mind maps are also great for outlining a table of contents for an eBook, white paper, or any writing assignment in general.

Do you use mind maps? How? Why? What tools do you like?

30DTC – Tracking Website Visitors in Real Time and Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts

Steinar — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 04:10:29 +0000

As part of my 30 Day Traffic Challenge, I’ll be spending a lot of time in Google Analytics. It’s nice actually, because it is giving me the chance to update a bunch of settings, really dig into some of data and get some hands-on experience with the new tools.

Tonight I stumbled across Google Analytics Real Time Reporting, which turns out was recently launched. Here’s a snapshot of the activity on my site right now. Three visitors – stunning, I know.

I have used real time tracking tools before, namely Woopra. For me, it never really made sense to watch a small handful of people on my site in real-time. I do have at least one client, however, who has upwards of 200 people on her site at any given time and in that case it’s fun to watch the traffic pass through.

Speaking of Woopra, I just found this relatively recent article that outlines 8 Free Tools for Live Website Tracking. Check it out if this is something that you want to explore further.

Tracking website traffic with Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts

What probably makes most sense for the passive Analytics user is the Intelligence Alerts dashboard. It essentially provides you with a visually intuitive snapshot of the top 10 major changes in traffic behavior on your website.

For example, as you see in the screenshot below, my site saw a 98% increase in Pageviews and a 242% increase in Average Time on Site on Oct. 15th.

If I click on the details link to the right, I can see possible factors that influenced the shift and add annotations for future reference.

While these alerts are useful, I’ve found the Google Analytics Custom Email Alerts to be the best in terms of notifying me of any major traffic changes. If you click on the Settings Cog icon off to the right in your Analytics Dashboard you’ll find a place to setup custom alerts.

Here’s a screenshot from a new alert I just setup tonight to alert me when unique visitor traffic spikes by 25% vs. the previous day’s traffic.

Normally, I would recommend weekly or monthly based alerts, but given my short timeframe for the 30 Day Traffic Challenge, a daily window makes sense.

We’ll spend more time in Analytics later, since it is my main platform to measure traffic and define success this month. Any specific questions about Analytics you would like answered? My friend, Pierre DuBois, is an Analytics expert at Zimana and could likely help answer any questions we throw at him.

30DTC – Using Market Samurai to Identify Keyword Phrases and Drive Targeted Web Traffic

Steinar — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 20:01:14 +0000

It’s still day two of my 30 Day Traffic Challenge and it’s time to use Market Samurai to do a little keyword research. The goal is to identify long tail keyword phrases and increase targeted web traffic to my site.

I used Market Samurai for about 30 minutes this afternoon to identify at least one promising keyword phrase: targeted web traffic. I’ll revisit Market Samurai again later to explore other keyword phrases but let’s take a look at the initial process of keyword analysis and selection.

In this screenshot you see my initial keyword search for the phrase “website traffic strategies”. I narrowed the initial related keyword phrase result set to exclude non-relevant word and longer phrases and then move forward with my analysis.

What I discovered, as shown in the next screenshot is that the phrase “website traffic strategies” has relatively low traffic. The results tell me that this phrase only gets 4 clicks per day for the website in the #1 position Google search result set. I’m looking for a keyword phrase that gets at least 80 clicks per day in the #1 position so this won’t do.

I notice, however, that “increase web traffic” gets 374 clicks per day and has a PBR (phrase-to-broad match) score of 24%. That means that 24% of the searches for that phrase are exactly “increase web traffic” and 374 clicks are made each day on Google in the first position for that phrase. That seems a bit more attractive, right?

Unfortunately, I see an SEOC score of 666,000 which means that over a half million other webpages are already competing for the same phrase. I could deal with that, but generally that’s not good. I want a phrase that has less than 100,000 competing pages . . . but I like the traffic number.

Given the good traffic statistics for “increase web traffic” I run a similar keyword research report . . . this time for “increase traffic”. I narrow my result to keywords that have at least 80 clicks per day, a PBR score of at least 15% and no more than 100,000 competing webpages.

Based on the screenshot below, I discover that “targeted web traffic” is a good candidate.

“Targeted web traffic” gets 112 clicks in the first position on Google, has a PBR score of 36% and only 64,100 completing webpages. This is a pretty good keyword phrase to target and I’ll go with this one for now.

How will I use keywords to drive targeted web traffic to my site?

I’ll use this new phrase in a number of ways to drive traffic to my site. Basically, I’m telling the search engines and, ultimately, my readers, what my content is about. No trickery here. Learning how to drive targeted web traffic is exactly what the 30 Day Traffic Challenge is all about. I don’t want random traffic – I want targeted traffic. You should want the same. Make sense?

I’ll use my new keywords throughout my blog in meta-tags, titles, descriptions, keywords, categories, post tags, image tags, anchor text and more.
Off-site, I’ll use these keywords to find relevant 3rd party blogs and content with which to comment and use as inspiration for my own blog posts.
Understanding my keywords will also allow me to speak more directly to my audience, since I more clearly understand what they want.

Again, understanding how keywords work and what people are searching for online is critical if you want to attract a target audience through natural search optimization.

Guessing or choosing keywords based on intuition can really waste everyone’s time and effort. Don’t do it.

That’s it for now. I know this was a bit more technical in nature, but I hope you learned a little. I know I did!

I’ll share some more Market Samurai goodness later with a deep dive into competition and outranking other websites for my keywords. This is gonna be fun, right?

30DTC – Commenting on Other Blogs to Drive Traffic to My Website

Steinar — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:50:18 +0000

It’s day two of my 30 Day Traffic Challenge and today I am going to embark on one of my favorite tactics for driving traffic which is commenting on other blogs. Commenting on other blogs has several implications for driving traffic.First, commenting on other blog posts get you involved in the conversation. It allows people to see who you are and click through to your website if you leave a link.

Listen or Download

Second, if enabled, your link on someone else’s blog post can be indexed by Google. By default most blogs use a no-follow rule which means that your link will not be indexed; however, with the help of Market Samurai I can find blogs that have this option set up to allow search engines to index my link. This creates a backlink to my website, which is one of the leading variables to determine how my site ranks on search engine results.

Third, leaving comments on other peopl’s blog posts forces me to keep on top of the latest trends, strategies and tactics others are using within my niche. In my case, I’m going to comment on blog posts that have to do with driving traffic to your website. I not only get to learn about what others are doing, but I get to use this information as inspiration for some of my upcoming blog posts.

For me, commenting on at least three blog posts per day is a reasonable frequency and pace that I can maintain over the course of 30 days. There is a ton of information on the Internet about driving traffic to your website so I feel like there will be no shortage of blog posts to find and comment on. This may or may not be the case for you depending on your niche.

A best practice when commenting on other people’s blog posts is to add insightful information to the original blog post. There’s nothing worse than leaving a boring comment with a link to your website. This adds no value and can ultimately hurt your search engine optimization. It can also hurt your reputation.

On the other hand, leaving an insightful comment that adds value to the conversation will draw additional comments and can help build your reputation overtime. You may even find some new people to follow online and build mutually beneficial relationships.

That’s it for now. I have some comments to leave. Do you regularly leave comments on other blogs? Why or why not?

Sent from my iPhone 4S

Current Website Unique Visitors and 30 Day Traffic Challenge Goal

Steinar — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 04:24:24 +0000

The intention of this post is to establish the unique visitor traffic baseline for my 30 Day Traffic Challenge. Since this is about traffic, I turned to Google Analytics to see if I could easily determine an appropriate timeframe with which to compare my future performance.

It would be easy to use a monthly average based on the prior 12 months or year-to-date traffic, but since my traffic has steadily increased over that time, I didn’t feel that would really provide an accurate read on the situation.

In the following chart you can see I was able to identify 3 plateaus since the beginning of the year. In the Jan-Feb timeframe my traffic sat around 1,600 unique visitors per month. In the March to Jun period traffic hovered around 2,000 and from July thru October, it has increased to approximately 2,900 unique visitors per month. Given the sizable differences, I think it makes most sense to establish the baseline on the last 4 month period.

Next I focussed on the exact period in question. Google Analytics tells me I had 11,700 unique visitors during the last 4 months from July 1 – October 31st. Divided by 4, this is equivalent to 2,925 unique visitors per month.

So . . . 2,925 unique visitors per month is my baseline and 8,875 unique visitors is my goal for November!

Kinda scary if you think about it. A much safer metric to target would have been pageviews, since it’s relatively easier to get more page views from exiting traffic than to drive more unique traffic in general. But, I think targeting unique visitors is worth the fight — I need some new eyes on my content!

Again, some quick math concludes this is about 293 visitors per day. Sweet! We can do this!

———————–

Now that we’ve got that covered, let talk about some things I need to do right away.

Ping.fm

First, I just revisited my kick-off post for the 30 Day Traffic Challenge and “pinged it” with Ping.fm. This is a great tool, because it allows you to send a link to a number of popular social media and other bookmarking sites at once. For example, my Ping.fm account is set up to notify 16 social media sites, including my Twitter account and Facebook Page. This is a huge timesaver and has great search engine optimization implications.

There’s some debate over the use of tools such as Ping.fm to send the same post to multiple sites at once. My argument is that everyone has their preference for where they consume content. Some of my readers are on Twitter and others are on Facebook. There is some overlap but by and large, they are separate. Even if some of my followers are connected with me on multiple platforms, chances are that they have chosen one platform to spend a majority of their time on and therefore are probably not going to see my post more than once.

In terms of SEO, it’s clear that social media content is playing an increasing role in how content surfaces on the front page of major search engines. In my experience, it seems like roughly 40% of the search results I get on Google these days are related to one of my social media account relationships. I only see this trend continuing and therefore think it’s important to feed these platforms with links back to my website. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

Meta Tag Keywords and Descriptions

Meta tag keywords and descriptions are still an important element of driving traffic to your site. Keywords in and of themselves are critical to any sep campaign. Long-tail keywords in particular are the keywords that users enter into search engines to find your content.

For most of us, long-tail keywords probably manifest themselves in the form of 1) our personal or brand name 2) a unique phrase we may use frequently throughout out website and blog posts and 3) a keyword phrase we’ve specifically researched and optimized our content around. All three are valid and can drive good traffic. Check your Google Analytics for more information.

One area I really need to work on is taking an extra minute to define my blog post meta tags and description. For the last 12 months or so I’ve just let my WordPress theme take care of this for me. Unfortunately, when I look at the source code of my pages, I’m not happy with the resulting meta tags, so I’m going to do this manually throughout the course of my challenge to really get a handle on this important detail.

Fortunately, the Thesis Theme I’m using for this blog has a great setup of post option boxes where I can set the meta tags.

I’ll explain this in more detail later, but I’m going to use a tool called Market Samurai to analyze my long-tail keyword choices and selection.

Any thoughts on meta tag keywords and descriptions?

3 Reasons to Share Facebook Content on Twitter

Steinar — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 20:35:27 +0000

Sharing content across multiple social media platforms is a common practice to help get your message out and communicate with your audience where they are most likely to see your content. A good example is sharing Facebook content on Twitter. Most businesses have an account on both platforms and have considered either linking the two up or posting to both networks simultaneously.

Some argue that this practice may be considered spam or at least annoying for users to some degree. So why would you want to do it then?

If you do not have a blog, Facebook may in some cases serve as a platform to share information in more detail than Twitter. In this case, when you post new content to Facebook, you want to share that information on Twitter for others to read. You really don’t have much of a choice.
If you share a lot of pictures, Twitter really isn’t the best platform. Facebook on the other hand provides a great set of tools to upload pictures, organize them into albums and write meaningful descriptions. Once this is done it makes perfect sense to send out a notification on Twitter.
Facebook is really great for managing events and allowing people to RSVP. It’s also more conducive to sharing details prior to and pictures after the event. If you want to increase participation, it’s probably wise to promote the event registration link on Twitter to potentially increase your audience.

So there are 3 specific examples of when it would seem appropriate to share Facebook content on Twitter. Unfortunately, it seems the default it either share nothing or share everything.

One thing to consider –most mobile phones (even Smart Phones) have trouble with Facebook links that show up on Twitter. They usually send folks to facebook.com rather that open the Facebook mobile application. In some cases, your followers may never actually find your content. It’s extremely frustrating, so think about your end users and ask them what they think.

Do you share Facebook content on Twitter? Why?

My first post with Siri

Steinar — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 05:25:34 +0000

So last week about the iPhone 4S and it is really helping me in terms of my ability to streamline my social media process. For example I am writing this blog post by talking to my phone. I am e-mailing this blog post using Siri and the email capabilities built into the iPhone.

Sent from my iPhone 4S

How to Customize Your SEO Options in the Catalyst WordPress Theme Framework

Steinar — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 03:15:24 +0000

Catalyst is a wonderful WordPress Theme that allows you to customize your blog with over 800 built-in options. In my opinion, it’s the best WordPress Theme on the market today.

Customizing your blog’s search engine optimization options is pretty straightforward in the SEO section of the Catalyst Core Options.

Steps to Customize Your SEO Options in Catalyst:

The title tag is used by search engines and also displays in the banner across most the top when viewing your site in modern browsers. By default your should append the site name and description to the Title Tag. If you can include keywords in these two variables to increase likelihood of being found when people search on Google, etc. A drop down let’s you choose the order in which these display and you also have the option choose a unique tag separator. I would go with the default options if you’re not sure what to choose.
H1 tags are arguably one of the most important elements in terms of content being read by search engines. It’s like the title of a book – it defines the first thing people and search engines see when they index your site. Catalyst give you the option to wrap either the Title or Description in H1 tags. Using the tagline might be more effective if the tagline is keyword rich and includes a better description of what your site is about. If your title is strong and explains your content well, choose that instead. You also have the option to manually assign H1 tag placement.
By default, search engines will attempt to index all the pages on your site. If you are a prolific blogger or a heavy user of tags and categories, your main content can get buried by all the dynamically generated pages that tags and categories create. Generally speaking you should only have a handful of categories, so indexing these pages is fine. By selecting “NoIndex” you are signaling the search engines to avoid indexing certain sections of your site. By default, Cataylst sets Archive, Tag and Author pages to NoIndex. For most site owners this makes sense and should be left alone.
Nofollow Comment Author Links tells search engines not to index links that you, as the author, post in your comments. By and large links in your comments will be to third party content and should not be indexed.
As search engines index your site, they also take snapshot of individual pages and cache them for future use. You have the choice to NoArchive certain sections in Catalyst though I recommend you leave this set at the default which allows for caching.
Homepage SEO Options first give you the opportunity to indicate your site’s Homepage Meta Description. These descriptions used to play a major role in SEO, but play a somewhat less important rolls these days given the rise of importance in other on-page and off-page factors.
Nonetheless, it’s important to provide a description. One practical application is that the description you provide here is often what appears below your heading in search engine results. The the second line of text that people see when searching for your site. Make it catchy with a clear explanation of what your site is about and why someone should visit. Include keywords or long-tail keyword phrases if possible without keyword stuffing.
Homepage Meta Tags should contests of several long-tail keywords. These are phrases that someone might search to find your site. Personally, I like to use Market Samurai to help identify the most valuable keywords phrases. Picking the wrong keywords can be a waste of time, so choose wisely.
This section gives you same choices for selecting how search engine robots will index, follow and archive your homepage.This would tell Yahoo!, Live & Google that the page in question should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL www.seomoz.org/blog and that all of the link & content metrics the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL. For an in-depth article on this subject visit http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021646.html.

If you’re not familiar with Catalyst, I highly recommend you check it out today!

Setting SMART Goals for your 2012 Internet Marketing Strategy

Steinar — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 05:37:51 +0000

Internet Marketing continues to serve as a powerful channel for communicating with your market. Social media, geo-location services and mobile devices extend the opportunity to reach your audience in a new and different way and add value to the discussion happening online.

Spending time now to develop your internet marketing strategy for next year will provide you with the appropriate baseline, timeline and milestones to ensure effective execution. Part of that process is establishing goals with which to measure your success.

Setting SMART goals is a proven approach to achieving success more quickly. As the year winds down, this is the perfect opportunity to examine your goals for 2011 and apply the SMART mnemonic or acronym to increase the likelihood your goals are met.

SMART stands for:

S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Attainable
R – Realistic
T – Timely

Free Template Downloads:

Specific

You want to clearly define your goals to articulate specifically what you are trying to achieve. The question is what, how and why are you striving toward this goal?

What are you going to do? Use action words, such as create, sell, manage, or grow, etc. to bring a sense of energy to your goals.
Why are you doing this? What is the ultimate outcome? Why is this important and what impact will this have on you, your business, or your customers?
How are you going to do this? What are the sub-goals or action steps that will enable you to achieve your goal

The more specific you are, the greater your ability to identify success when it occurs. For example, “I will write and publish 21 blog posts (250-400 words) about skydiving equipment by March 1, 2010.“ In this example I used action words “write and publish”, specified the number, length, and topic of the blog posts and put a date on it. As we’ll discuss next, this goal is also measurable, attainable, realistic and timely.

Measurable

If you cannot measure your goals then you cannot manage your progress. Furthermore, it is far more difficult to achieve your objectives if a) you do not measure your progress or b) you do not measure the appropriate metrics. In some cases a progress chart, table or simple checklist might help.

For example, you might be trying to improve visitor conversion rates. Using a web statistics tool, such as Google Analytics, can help track vital statistics but make sure you understand and pick the right metric that defines success. You can get 1,000 visitors a day, but if no one buys, that metric is meaningless. Don’t get caught up trying to move the wrong target.

Attainable

Is your goal possible? Is it limited by your resources or require more time to achieve? I encourage you to set stretch goals for yourself to push your limits, but keep them within reach. The benefit is that you’ll see real progress toward success. The risk is that you do not achieve your goals and lose momentum or hope.

For example, you may have just launched a new blog and you want 20% of your visitors to sign up for your newsletter out of the gate. While this is a realistic rate that you could eventually achieve, it is unlikely to happen right away. A more attainable goal would be to grow your newsletter list by 5% each month.

Realistic

Is your goal realistic? You might want 5,000 newsletter subscribers, which is attainable, but is it realistic to achieve this goal by within 2 weeks? Maybe not. Be honest with yourself and your business when setting goals by keeping them realistic or you risk disappointment.

Timely

When is the deadline to achieve your goal? Next week, 3 months, by year end? Setting a specific date will help you identify your tactical sub-goals and action steps to achieve your goal within a given deadline. Map out these deadlines or milestones on a calendar. Plan rewards for yourself when you cross each line.

A common mistake is to generalize about timing. For example, avoid using descriptions such as “this year, next quarter, in the next two weeks.” Without a specific date, these deadlines will slip away.

In my experience, SMART goals help you reach your objectives more quickly with a defined path for success. I recommend writing them down and revisiting them frequently to check progress and adapt to changing circumstances. In most cases, you will over-achieve — either beating a deadline or delivering something of greater value.

What’s your experience setting goals for the new year? Do you use the SMART mnemonic?

Search and Email Still Powerful Channels for Online Marketing

Steinar — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:28:43 +0000

Most of the hype over the past few years has been focussed on social media, and rightly so. In many cases, social media is a preferred communication channel over other forms on online marketing, but the fact remains that search and email are still among the most popular online activities and should still be considered valuable components of the marketing mix.

Search and email remain the two online activities that are nearly universal among adult internet users, as 92% of online adults use search engines to find information on the Web, and a similar number (92%) use email …

… Today, roughly six in ten online adults engage in each of these activities on a typical day; in 2002, 49% of online adults used email each day, while just 29% used a search engine daily.

via Search and Email Still the Most Popular Online Activities – Pew Research Center.

There are a several tactics to leverage search and email activity to drive eyeballs to your website. Here are a few ideas:

Implement a Search Engine Optimization strategy on your website. This doesn’t have to be rocket science, but understanding the basics of SEO and doing a little bit everyday can drive a significant spike in traffic.
Write content on your website that answers your potential customers’ most pressing questions. What are the top 7 questions people always ask you and what are the top7 questions they should be asking you. Write helpful blog posts that address those questions and you’ll attract a growing audience.
Use a newsletter subscription service such as Aweber so that readers can subscribe to your blog via email. The fact is, most folks don’t really understand how to subscribe to your RSS feed and email is just more convenient.
Leverage the direct messaging capabilities of social media sites to send email to your followers. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube all provide you with this functionality to communicate privately, 1:1 via email.

What do you think? Are search and email still powerful marketing tools?

Why it may be time to purge your Twitter account

Steinar — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 04:14:02 +0000

What is your following strategy on Twitter?

It’s kind of a funny question but if you’ve been on Twitter for any length of time this question has crossed your mind. Most people start out on Twitter by following friends or colleagues that they already know and soon they branch out to people within their geographic region.

The next logical step is to consider people within your niche. Maybe you’re a realtor? Or maybe you’re a doctor? Maybe you start to connect with people who share similar interests by identifying individuals based on their job description or certain characteristics within their Twitter bio.

Beyond that you might run across people that have tweeted interesting posts and therefore you follow them as well. Or maybe you follow someone based on a “Follow Friday” recommendation. And then there are random people that you run across on Twitter that you find interesting and you start to follow them too.

Lately I’ve taken a more aggressive approach to following people on Twitter. I’ve used the search functionality within Twitter to identify people that I might find interesting whether they are in my niche or in adjacent industries. I’ve even used some software to automate the process. Don’t hate me for that – it’s my job to test this stuff out.

At the end the day I was following nearly 1500 people. It has simply become overwhelming and has ultimately decreased the value in terms of my experience interacting with people on Twitter on a daily basis. I just couldn’t find the meaningful discussions through all the noise.

Maybe you’ve heard the common assumption that we really can’t follow more than 150 people and still maintain meaningful relationships on social media platforms. I think that is for the most part pretty true.

And so today I am embarking on a kind of purging of my Twitter account. I am unfollowing people by the masses. People that don’t interact with me or people that I find do not add much value to the conversation. It’s not that big of a deal – we’re only talking about roughly 1,350 people, not tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

I think that when this process is complete I’ll have a much more solid set of people that I follow that I find interesting, not only locally but also within my niche.

I think it’s good every now and then to analyze the people that you are talking with online and consider the quality of conversations you’re having on a daily basis.

If you find that your experience on Twitter and other social media platforms is waning, I encourage you to do the same.

Many before me have taken the same stance and discovered that the overall quality of their daily social media experience has improved. In fact, you’ll probably develop deeper relationships with the people you do follow and find a stronger voice within your market.

What are your thoughts?

BTW, I “wrote” this post using the Dragon Dictation iPhone App. I highly recommend it if you prefer to talk rather than type.

Social Networking Site Usage Among Adults on the Rise

Steinar — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:34:53 +0000

I often hear the excuse from reluctant business owners that “our customers don’t use social media.” I often come back with a series of statistics, such as the following that suggest otherwise.

Fully 65% of adult internet users now say they use a social networking site like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn, up from 61% one year ago. This marks the first time in Pew Internet surveys that 50% of all adults use social networking sites.

The frequency of social networking site usage among young adult internet users under age 30 was stable over the last year – 61% of online Americans in that age cohort now use social networking sites on a typical day, compared with 60% one year ago. However, among the Boomer-aged segment of internet users ages 50-64, social networking site usage on a typical day grew a significant 60% (from 20% to 32%).

via 65% of online adults use social networking sites | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

First, I’ll admit it’s kinda funny that MySpace is listed here. Sure they have new ownership now but I don’t see them as a driving force. Nonetheless, they still have a few hundred million users, so it’s only fair to include MySpace in the mix.

Here are my thoughts on the numbers above:

65% is probably conservative. When I ask groups of people I often see numbers in the 75%-80% percent range. I think there’s a big population of people that don’t even realize their on a social media site when browsing the web. For example, it could be fairly simple to confuse a Ning niche site with a regular blog or standard forum for that matter … even if you’re visiting the site everyday.
Stability of social media usage among the younger audience is expected. This demographic was the first to arrive on the scene, has kicked the tires and is now settled in on their 1-2 favorite social media sites for a while. They’ll shift to different platforms overtime, but I don’t see them abandoning social media anytime soon.
60% usage growth within the 50-64 age group makes sense for several reasons. One, this group was late to the party, so they’re just now getting up to speed. Two, they’ve been convinced by their children and other relatives that there is value in connecting with family members on social media platforms. And three, they’ve actually been on social media platforms all along and they’re just now ready to admit it.

So, if you’re a business owner and still contemplating the value of social media to connect with your market, I urge you to consider this study and many others like it that illustrate the shift toward all this social.

What do you think? What can we learn from these trends and how does it impact marketing your business online?

How to Increase Your WordPress Site Speed

Steinar — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 17:23:15 +0000

We’ve heard for a while now that Google considers site speed as key factor in their search rankings. In other words, they look favorably upon sites that load faster and thus give them preferential treatment in search rankings when someone is searching on Google.

Site speed can also dramatically effect visitor experience. If your site is slow to load, visitors may be more likely to bounce or leave the site prematurely. You all know the feeling when you visit a site and it takes for ever for content to show up. You don’t want to be that site! You want your site to deliver content quickly, especially with the increased use of mobile web browsing.

There are several actions you can take to speed up your site. Let’s cover a few of the basics to get you started.

Measure your site’s speed

Google is nice enough to provide an entire set of tools to help speed up your site, including a handy Chrome speed monitoring extension for Developer Tools and an online Google Speed Test tool.

The report from this test explains potential issues effecting your site’s speed and categorizing them into high, medium and low priority. Obviously, it’s in your best interest to address the high priority issues first and work your way down the list. In my case, I had site caching disabled which raised a “high priority” flag.

I also ran a second site speed test at WebPageTest.org. The feedback from test results are similar in nature to those generated by Google’s online tool with one major advantage: WebPageTest let’s you compare site speed before and after improvements. My original test tracked my site’s Page Load Time at nearly 9.5 seconds, which is dreadful. After a few tweaks I managed to reduce page speed to 5.8 and eventually to 5.4 seconds. I’m not done yet!

WebPageTest.org also gives you a score on a scale of 0-100 and allows you to bookmark your results so that you can come back any time to run additional tests. Maybe you could compare your site to a competitor or another site that you think loads quickly?

Cache your WordPress site to increase page speed

I recommend you install a WordPress caching plugin, such as WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. These services basically ”generate static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog, so that they load faster. After an html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.”

There are a ton of settings within both of these plugins, but the good news is that they are pretty self-explanatory with plenty of documentation to help you set things up right.

Once activated, you’ll notice a difference in site speed right away. Note that because you’re now caching your site, when you make changes to your site, they may not appear when you refresh your browser. To overcome this, either turn off the caching while updating your site or clear your browser’s cache file. It’s no big deal, but it can be confusing the first time you experience this.

Minify and Optimize your CSS

If you have a complex WordPress theme and multiple plugins, your site will slow down unless you properly optimize your javascript and css. You can do this manually, Wp-Minify is a great plugin that handles it for you.

There are only a few setting for this plugin and the default settings should do just fine. If you run into any problems, you may choose to exclude certain JavaScript or CSS files.

You can see in this screenshot that my page speed decreased by another full second after activating WP-Minify! Sweet!

Optimize your WordPress Database

If you’ve had your site up for any length of time, it’s likely that your MySql database is cluttered with extra content that is negatively impacting your site’s speed. Fortunately, there’s a great WordPress plugin to help clean up the mess.

WP-Optimize is a WordPress 2.9++ database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn’t require PhpMyAdmin to optimize your database tables. It allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue, un-approved comments within few clicks.

via WordPress › WP-Optimize « WordPress Plugins.

Was this helpful? Let me know if your site speed improves!

Companies Still Struggle with Social Media Return on Investment (ROI)

Steinar — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 02:37:25 +0000

It’s amazing to hear that with all the hype over the past couple years that a large number of companies have yet to measure social media return on investment.

Over half of executives in the food and drink industries do not measure the return on investment ROI they get from their use of social media, according to a just-food and just-drinks survey.

More than 54% of industry professionals said they did not monitor the ROI that their companies make on social media networks. A further 18% “did not know” if the business in which they worked measured the returns.

via Food and Beverage Industry Failing to Grasp Social Media Potential – PR Newswire – sacbee.com.

I understand that, like most marketing strategies, measuring results can be difficult. Much like many forms of advertising, it’s not always clear how customers come to finally do business with your company. Was it an ad they saw? Was it a combination of market touch points that built trust and credibility over time. Was there a specific tipping point from a particular campaign that drove the sale?

At the bare minimum, it’s critical that companies outline the metrics that define success when measuring social media ROI. Return may include awareness, familiarity, sales, leads, referrals, customer satisfaction and more. At the end of the day, investment boils down to time and money.

What metrics are important for your business? How can social media help move the needle? Start with the end in mind and craft a social media strategy to help drive results toward these goals. Don’t overcomplicate things by feeling obligated to track every single source of customer acquisition. Analyze a significantly significant sample and draw intelligent conclusions.

Test a variety of social media tactics and track results closely to create a winning plan over time. Measure these results against one another and against traditional forms of marketing. Maybe social media isn’t worth the investment. Maybe the lifetime value of customers is higher through direct mail or cold calling. If you don’t measure, you’ll never know.

Social media is not a fad, so please don’t use that as an excuse not to measure. Dedicate some time to map out your goals, identify your target market, identify the right tools to use and a process that minimizes strain on the organization.

One final thought – don’t expect immediate results. Social media takes time. You can definitely experience short-term, incremental success, but it’s important to consider the big picture and set expectations accordingly.

Any questions? Good luck!

Google Plus Text Formatting with Bold/Italic/Strikethrough

Steinar — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 21:10:42 +0000

Those of you using Google+ might see some folks posting updates that include text formatting. How does that work? Well, Google Plus has a hidden feature that lets you markup text with bold, italic and strikethrough.

You can see it in action in one of my recent Google+ posts.

Here’s how it works …

Bold Text in Google Plus: If you want to write bold text then you would start your text with star ‘*’and end with’*’ for example *Bold Text* will appear Bold Text.

Italic Text in Google Plus: If you want to write Italic text then you would start your text with underscore ‘_’ and end with ‘_’ for example _Italic Text_ will appear as Italic.

Strikethrough Text in Google Plus: If you want to write Strikethrough text then you would start your text with minus sign ‘-’ and end with ‘-’ for example -Strikethrough Text- will appear as Strikethrough Text.

Bold with Italic Text in Google Plus: In this case you would be start your text with star together with underscore ‘*_’ and end with ‘_*’ for example *_Bold with Italic Text_* will appear as Bold with Italic Text.

via Bold/Italic/Strikethrogh Text in Google Plus | Google+ Text Formatting.

Setup an RSS Feed for Your Google Plus Account

Steinar — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 14:59:43 +0000

If you’re like me, you like to use RSS feeds to aggregate and distribute content. Strangely enough, Google Plus does offer an RSS feed by default.

There is a simple solution from PlusFeed that takes less than a minute to setup.

First, visit your Google Plus profile and copy your account ID from your browser’s address bar.

Next, visit http://plusfeed.appspot.com/ and add your Google Plus ID to the end of the URL. This will generate your Google Plus RSS feed. From there, you can add your feed to Google Reader, connect it to FriendFeed, or a plethora of other options to track and distribute your content.

Enjoy!

3 Tools to Record, Publish and Share Screen Capture Video

Steinar — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 02:28:46 +0000

I’ve often said that it’s good for bloggers to mix up their content with a variety of different forms of media. Rather than just text, you might spice things up with images, video, or audio. The benefit for your reader is that they’re not always seeing the same form of media and therefore your site is more interesting and more appealing to a broader range of readers.

Video can sometimes be a bit intimidating if you’re not comfortable putting your face on the camera. Video recording yourself is not always appropriate as well if you’re trying to demonstrate a product or show someone how to do something online. In those cases, it can sometimes make more sense to do a screen capture video. Here I’m going to discuss three alternative ways to record a screen capture video so that you can share something with your readers.

3 Tools for Screen Capture Video

1. Screenr.com

The first option is to use a great free online video capture service called screenr. You can visit the website screenr.com and joinby using your Twitter ID as your login username and password. From their screenr gives you the option to record a new video.

By simply clicking on the record now button you will be presented with a resizable window that you can basically position to fit the area of your computer screen that you want to record. You can either record something that you see on your browser or something that you see within an application such as PowerPoint or Keynote that you want to record.

Then you simply press the record button and start recording. You have 5 min. to record your video and you can just use the built-in microphone with your laptop or your computer to do the audio. Screenr records all of your mouse movements and does not require any editing. In fact there is no editing capability within screenr .

The benefit of using Screenr is that you can record videos very quickly on the fly and save them to YouTube. You can also download your videos for further editing if you choose and then republish them on any platform that you wish. I like to use screenr on occasion in those situations where I just need to record something quickly and get it out there without doing any editing.

2. Screenflow for Mac

A second option that I use quite frequently is Screenflow for Mac. Screenflow is a $99 product that gives you full control over the screen capture and audio recording requirements for recording anything that you see on your desktop. The beauty of Screenflow is the post recording editing capabilities.

In my opinion Screenflow provides the best end-user experience in terms of the way screen capture is presented because it allows you to zoom in on the mouse and record any keystrokes that you perform while recording the video. You can also add text titles and other zoom in zoom out effects to give it a very professional look and feel.

You can also add additional videos on top of one another so that you can combine multiple videos into one final product and create the best possible screen capture to get across your point. Screenflow is highly recommended by professionals and you see it quite often on some of the best tutorial websites across the web.

3. Quicktime

The third option for those of you that have a Mac is QuickTime. The latest version of QuickTime that comes with Lion OS X allows you to record video from your screen or any application on your computer and again allows you to determine the width and height of the recording capture size.

Quicktime is really a great solution if you just need a basic screen capture video. There is no built-in editing capability but if you’d like to export your video to iMovie the sky is the limit. The latest version of Quicktime also provide you with the ability to export to YouTube and Facebook among many other options. This is great if you want to use social media as a platform to distribute your videos online.

As I mentioned earlier screen capture is a great way to put video on your blog or on your website without actually shooting video of you talking or some other subject using a video camera. It’s a great way to illustrate a point or post a tutorial on your website and teach other people how to do something.

I’ve gotten tremendous traffic to my website with screen capture videos and I highly recommend them to any blogger looking to add a little variety to their blog.

Do you ever recorder and publish screen capture video on your website? What tools do you use?

A few cool finger swipe features in OSX Lion

Steinar — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 06:01:34 +0000

Apple released OSX Lion for the Mac this week. Here are a few of the cool new finger swipe features that should help improve user experience and efficiency.

OSX Lion iCal Navigation with 2-Finger Swipe

OSX Lion introduced a new version of iCal which allows you to navigate through days, weeks, months and years by simply using a 2-finger swipe to the left and right. This was particularly interesting to me since I was hoping we could get this feature on the iPad. It may be a sign of good things to come!

Browser swipe navigation with OSX Lion for the Mac

With OSX Lion you can navigate through your browser history simply by swiping two fingers left and right. No longer necessary to click the forward and back buttons. Very cool!

Switching desktops and apps with OSX Lion Mission Control

OSX Lion for Apple allows you to easily swipe between desktops and apps with a 3- finger swipe.

Top 5 Facebook User Activities on an Average Day

Steinar — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 19:19:59 +0000

A recent white paper from the Pew Research Center illustrates that Users Liking another users’s content is the most common behavior on Facebook. Here’s a detailed breakdown . . .

On Facebook on an average day:

15% of Facebook users update their own status.
22% comment on another’s post or status.
20% comment on another user’s photos.
26% “Like” another user’s content.
10% send another user a private message

This is pretty important data if you’re in the Facebook marketing game.

For starters, you might conclude that Facebook users generally prefer to be on the recieving end. Liking is a single click activity and it’s the most common behavior. Next time your boss asks why so few people comment on your Facebook Page, show him this data.

The second takeway is common sense really . . .

those who post content on Facebook stand out
those who post the best content get more Likes
those who post more of the best content, get the most Likes

What’s your Facebook marketing strategy? Is your Facebook Page getting the attention it deserves? What can you change to leverage this user behavior data and differentiate your business?

Are women more likely to Like you on Facebook?

Steinar — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 17:49:04 +0000

A recent white paper from the Pew Research Center suggests that women Like Facebook content more often than men.

The dichotomy between the two groups is clear …

Though I have my theories, I’m not a human behavior specialist nor will I attempt to explain why this is the case. As a marketer, however, I will embrace this data and use it to better leverage Facebook as a marketing tool. No sense spinning your wheels, right?

If you are marketing on Facebook you should think about a few things based on this data:

20% of women “like” content on Facebook several times a day compare to only 9% of men. Think about that. The more relevant your content is to women, the greater chance you have to get Likes for this group.
In general, the more content you put out, the more opportunities there are for people to Like. Of course, there are limits . . . what are those limits? Depends on your market really. Some folks can only handle one post per day, while others expect ten. Play around with this a bit and push the limits. See what works – you might be surprised.
In some cases, getting men to Like your content on Facebook may be a serious challenge, since 28% of men indicate they never click the Like button. Could a better strategy include targeting women to indirectly get your message across to men? This will obviously depend greatly on your market and how different forms of influence determine decision making among your users.

What do you think? Is this data relevant to your Facebook marketing strategy? Will you do something different as a result?

Age distribution by social networking site platform

Steinar — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 17:13:05 +0000

A recent white paper from the Pew Research Center illustrates the subtle differences in age distribution by social networking site platform, including MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other.

Here are a few takeaways:

Not terribly surprised that MySpace is mostly comprised of younger users, given the timing of MySpace’s popularity prior to the broader explosion of social media.
I think most businesses that are considering marketing on Facebook would be surprised to see that 25% of users are 50+ and 18-22 only make up 16% of the userbase
LinkedIn numbers seem right, given that the target market is mostly made up of middle aged working folks.
50+ crowd only accounts for 17% of users on Twitter. As the youngest social media site in this group, I imagine we’ll see rapid growth for this age group in the next 12 months.

What does this data mean? Well it means something different, depending on who you are and why you’re using social media.

As an individual user looking to connect with other people, hopefully this will help you figure out where people in the same age range hang out online. If you’re using social media for business as part of your marketing mix, this data should provide some valuable insight as well to help position your brand and marketing message.

What do you think? Is this data helpful? What other demographic variables are important to consider?

Age distribution across social networking sites growing fastest among older users

Steinar — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 16:49:13 +0000

A recent white paper from the Pew Research Center suggests that the fastest growing segment of users across social networking sites is in the 50+ range.

I find this most interesting for businesses that sell to an older crowd and are pondering the addition of social media to their marketing mix. Small business owners I meet often seem reluctant to embrace social media because they do not believe their target market uses popular platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

The data support the fact that, indeed, an older population of users is online; demographic searches I often run for clients also suggest that more people within your niche are online that you might suspect.

What do you think? Should businesses care about this shift and will it influence their social media strategy?

How to leverage Foursquare to engage local consumers and grow your business

Steinar — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 18:29:54 +0000

Foursquare is a web and mobile application that let’s users virtually “check-in” to your location and share their experience with friends within their social network.

Unlike Twitter, where people mostly talk about what they’re up to, Foursquare uses GPS to geo-tag an individual’s location. For example, if I visit Starbucks I can use the Foursquare iPhone app to “check-in”. When I do this, all my Foursquare friends and Twitter followers get an update or notification. That is, roughly 1500 people now see that I’m at Starbucks. While I’m there I can also add a comment, attach a photo or leave a tip for others that check-in later.

Why do I use Foursquare as a consumer? I check-in on Foursquare for a few reasons. First, I want to share places I love with my friends. I love the lunch menu at West Main Restaurant in Charlottesville, so every time I go there I take a picture of my meal and check-in. I also check-in to places because maybe it’s someplace new and I want to make other people aware of this store or location. Finally, I check-in on Foursquare because I want rewards. If I check-in enough I’ll become what’s called the Mayor. In some restaurants and retail establishment, the Mayor is given special discounts, free parking or other perks. That’s where you come in.

Businesses need to get a grasp on Foursquare to leverage the fact that there are millions of users checking in all the time. In Charlottesville alone there are likely 1,000 people actively using Foursquare on a regular basis. Most of us share our check-ins on Twitter and Facebook. What does this mean for your business? Well, if your business has some special incentive you could offer those who check-in or earn Mayor status, your brand can get a serious number of impressions across the social landscape rather quickly.

If you own a business, go to foursquare.com, register as a user and claim your location. Set up a special for all the Foursquare users out there and make it a good one. I don’t want 10% off – I want something really special.

Is your business using Foursquare? How’s that going? If not, why?

Video: how to connect with and engage other businesses on Facebook with your Facebook Page

Steinar — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 20:56:21 +0000

In the following two videos I show you how to connect with and engage other businesses on Facebook with your Facebook Page. This is a powerful strategy to build b2b relationships and build brand awareness through other brands.

How to share photos on your Facebook Page Wall

Steinar — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 22:46:49 +0000

Now that you have a Facebook Page and your business is ready to start sharing content with your fans, I recommend you consider pictures, photos, and other graphics in your status updates. These items are filtered with greater preference by Facebook on your fans’ news feed. In other words, they are given priority over text updates and links so your fans have a better chance of seeing them.

To share a photo on your Facebok Page Wall, click on the “Photo” in the Share section and either upload a single photo, snap a picture with your webcam or upload a series of photos into an album. Provide a meaningful description in either case, including a description for each individual photo in an album. You can also tag people or other Facebook Pages in your photos to begin sharing immediately.

In some cases a photograph might not make sense and you would like to share something from your desktop or website. Two great tools I recommend for this type of image screen capture are Skitch for the Mac or SnagIt for Windows. Both applications allow you to take a screenshot of a portion of your screen, save that image to your computer, which you may then share on Facebook. Very cool!

How are you creatively sharing photos and other images on your Facebook Page?

How to post status updates to your Facebook Page

Steinar — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 18:21:38 +0000

You have a Facebook Page for your business and now it’s time to post a status update. It’s seems rather straightforward but there are some strategies to make the most from this important process. For most people status updates are at the heart of communicating on Facebook so you want to understand how to do it well.

First, I recommend you post original thought in your updates. Don’t just regurgitate someone else’s words. Add something new to the conversation. For example, if you’re linking to a news article, add a question for your readers to consider and potentially answer. This is a great way to bring out the human side of your brand and encourage engagement.

Second, when posting a link, Facebook will automatically pull the Title and Description meta data from the target content. By clicking on these items, you can customize them for better impact and understanding. Occasionally, the meta data Facebook pulls in is complete garbage so this feature can be a real lifesaver.

Finally, take the time to explore the customization options available in your post targeting. You can select to whom the post is visible based on geography and gender. If it makes sense, target your posts to these audiences – the extra effort could have tremendous benefit.

What tactics have you found successful when posting to your Facebook Page?

How to login and use Facebook as a Page

Steinar — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 01:14:15 +0000

Using Facebook as a Page is a powerful alternative to the traditional login, in that it allows you to comment and post on other business Pages as a Page, rather than as an individual.

To switch to Page mode, simply click on Account in the upper right hand corner and choose “Use Facebook as a Page.” A popup screen will appear; find the Page your want to switch to (probably only one choice in the list); select Switch and you’re off and running. You can also do this by going to your Page and selecting “Use Facebook as ” on the right hand side.

To switch back to yourself on Facebook, select “Switch back to …” from the dropdown menu under Account in the upper righthand corner. Good luck and enjoy!

11 Examples of Jingles and Introductions from Leading Marketing Podcasts in iTunes

Steinar — Tue, 17 May 2011 19:19:12 +0000

I’m working on an introduction for my new podcast and threw together a few examples from some of the leading marketing podcasts on iTunes.

UPDATE: Here’s my new intro.

Some of these are better than others, but at the end of the day they provided me with some useful inspiration for my own podcast.

Enjoy!

These intros aren’t that difficult to create. You could easily create your own in Garageband with some simple sound bites mixed with some of the built in musical effects.

You could also use a sight such as fiverr.com. There are dozens of voice specialists that will create a killer podcast intro for only $5. Well worth $20 to get 4 versions put together, right?

Are you podcasting? How’s that going?

Social Media for Business and Sporting Events Marketing

Steinar — Thu, 12 May 2011 03:34:37 +0000

In this video, I join Jim Harshaw of Riot Sports Marketing to discuss the impact that social media is having on event marketing, specifically within sports. Much of these lessons also translate well to business events.

Some key points to highlight:

Twitter allows people to engage in a live event in real-time. This is especially powerful at large events and beneficial to those that may not actually be at the event but would like to stay up-to-date.
Social media allows fans or customers to connect with your organization and connect with each other. This reinforces their relationship with your brand, adding a new level of credibility, trust and loyalty. Don’t underestimate the power of making your followers feel like they are part of something special.
Social media is a great channel to promote your organization in a niche that may not otherwise get much airtime. For example, lacrosse gets relatively low coverage in the news, but with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube I have new opportunities to connect with the sport and other fans within my area. Very powerful stuff!
There are several ways to leverage Facebook during events to engage your fans, including videos and photos or play-by-play updates. If you don’t have resources on staff to post this content, recruit a fan or customer to pitch in – they’ll most likely feel honored to help out.
There are several ways to grow your Facebook Page fanbase. Some quick strategies include a) import a CSV contact list, 2) include your Facebook URL in your email signature, 3) use your Facebook URL in any print or offline marketing literature and 4) target users with Facebook Ads.

How are you using social media to engage your market? What works within your industry?

3 Reasons to Consider Video Marketing for Your Business

Steinar — Tue, 10 May 2011 16:43:43 +0000

In this video, I join Jim Harshaw of Riot Sports Marketing to discuss 3 reasons why businesses should consider using video marketing as a powerful marketing channel to communicate with their market online.

Three main reasons are:

YouTube is the #2 search engine on the Internet. More than ever, people are relying on video to learn about companies and consume content in general.
The availability of inexpensive, high quality video camera equipment makes it so easy to produce and publish content. You can use a webcam, a portable video camera such as the Kodak Zi8, a traditional camcorder such as the Canon HG20 or some of the new DSLR cameras which allow you to produce stunning HD video with depth of field.
Since Google owns YouTube, video is a great method to rank higher in search engines. With a keyword rich title and description, YouTube videos can drive significant traffic to your site from people searching on Google.

Getting started with YouTube is easy. Just head over to YouTube.com, sign up for your free account, and start uploading videos. If you’re nervous, just keep your videos private until you feel more comfortable in front of the camera.

What are you doing to leverage video as a powerful channel to communicate with your market?

Blog Monetization Strategy: Downloadable Products (Charlottesville Blogville Conference)

Steinar — Fri, 06 May 2011 21:32:21 +0000

Last week I spoke at the Blogville Conference in Charlottesville on the subject of Monetization. This is a short except from that presentation specifically discussing potential of driving income with the use of downloadable products.

Description: Digital and information products that may be purchased online, such as software, e-books, photos, music, plugins, podcasts, and videos.
Benefits: Immediate delivery, higher profit margins, no inventory, completely automated, ability to update or change products on demand.
Tools & Resources: Word or Pages, Audacity or Garageband, Camtasia or Screenflow, e-junkie, 1shoppingcart, lulu, Amazon, Blurb, PayPal
Implementation: Use a shopping cart service to provide simple execution. Test various price points. Offer free version with up-sell. Consider 1-time purchase vs. subscription.
Reality Check: Creating downloadable products is one of the easiest methods of product creation and usually costs nothing (except time). Challenge yourself to create one this week!

Blog Monetization Strategy: Affiliate Marketing (Charlottesville Blogville Conference)

Steinar — Thu, 05 May 2011 21:26:05 +0000

Description: Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards you (their affiliate) for each purchase or action brought about by the your marketing of their products.
Benefits: Earnings potential using targeted ads that require little or no customization and drive revenue 24/7.
Tools & Resources: Amazon Associates, Google Affiliate Network, Google Adsense, ClickBank, LinkShare, Commission Junction, ProBlogger.net, Entrepreneurs-Journey.com
Implementation: Be true to your niche audience or tribe; provide value – ads should be something you feel good about or use yourself; more is not necessarily better; provide your own personal review for best results; measure results and weed out low performers.
Reality Check: Earnings potential may be limited in local markets

Podcasting 101: Tips To Create Your Own Podcast

Steinar — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 14:41:15 +0000

This is the first in a series of podcast episodes I’m doing with Mike Bisceglia from Cvillepodcast.com to help educate businesses on the realities and benefits of podcasting.

As you know, podcasting is a great channel to leverage the 100 million+ Apple devices out there not to mention the millions of other devices capable of subscribing and listening to your show.

In this episode we lay the groundwork with some basic tips and essential tools you can use to create your own podcast! Want to have your own show? We’ll discuss options to do-it-yourself or work with Mike in the radio production studio for a professional recording, editing and publishing experience.

Feel free to contact me or email Mike Bisceglia at cvillepodcast@gmail.com for more information!

Listen or Download

P.S. – It took some real guts to include this picture of me wearing that awful headset

P.S.S. – You can subscribe to my blog’s podcast via iTunes here

Monetizing your Blog with Affiliate Marketing

Steinar — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:23:52 +0000

In preparation for my speaking gig at the Blogville Conference in Charlottesville next week on the subject Monetizing Your Blog I thought I would share some thoughts on affiliate marketing.

If you have a blog and would like to make more money with it, affiliate marketing can be a great complement to your blogging efforts. I don’ really recommend this as a long term monetization strategy, but it definitely works if you’re pationate about promoting other people’s products.

I don’t personally use (much) affiliate marketing on this site and when I do I make it clear. I do however have a number of other sites that are 100% affiliate driven and deliver some nice income on the side. They require very little attention and basically run on autopilot.

Here’s a quick breakdown on the basics of affiliate marketing:

Description: Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards you (their affiliate) for each purchase or action brought about by the your marketing of their products.
Benefits: Earning potential using targeted ads that require little or no customization and drive revenue 24/7.
Tools & Resources: Amazon Associates, Google Affiliate Network, Google Adsense, ClickBank, LinkShare, Commission Junction, ProBlogger.net, Entrepreurs-Journey.com
Reality Check: Earning potential may be limited in local markets

Here is a checklist of ideas to help you skillfully incorporate affiliate marketing into your blog.

Think about the subject of your blog and your typical blog reader. What types of products would they be interested in? What products do you like and would like to recommend to your readers?
If you have space for promotional graphics and advertising in your blog layout, use it. If you happen to have unsold ad space, never leave a blank “Your Ad Here” space. Instead, use that space for an affiliate graphic. Having blank ad space gives your potential advertisers the image that your blog may not be worth advertising on.
Write posts on topics that lend themselves to linking to the products you want to recommend. For example, if you’re going to be promoting wedding dresses, write a post about choosing the perfect wedding dress, making it a natural fit for your affiliate link.
Write a product review. Your loyal readers value your opinion, give them full details about the product and your honest thoughts…and then insert your affiliate link.
Include a “My Favorites” section in your blog sidebar and link to the product. Instead of a traditional blogroll, why not include affiliate links to some of your favorite products.
If you have a mailing list sign up for your blog, be sure to promote a product on the thank you page and in your follow-up emails.
Publish the articles, special reports and other content provided by the affiliate program on your blog.
Write follow-up posts. Just because you posted on a topic once, doesn’t mean you can’t follow up with more information. You can also post review updates, more ideas for using the products and more.

Two of my favorite affiliate marketing networks are Commission Junction and LinkShare. I’ve used them both extensively on some of my other blogs and made some good money in the process. You can expect somewhere between 5-15% commission on sales through these networks and in my experience you can double that if you build a relationship and negotiate some special terms with the affiliate manager.

Have you tried affiliate marketing on your blog? Was it successful and/or what other monetization options to you find more financially rewarding?

How to Attract Customers to Your Storefront with Foursquare

Steinar — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 20:12:53 +0000

Foursquare is one of the leading geo-location check-in mobile applications available to the millions of smart phone users around the world. It basically allows people to indicate they are at or nearby a given location based on GPS enabled services bundled with their phone. If you think this sounds silly, consider the fact that Foursquare is adding 35,000 new users each day as of April 2011.

For example, let’s say I stop in at a local coffee shop. When I open Foursquare on my iPhone, it recognizes that I’m nearby and with the click of a button I can “Check-In.” If I have “friends” or connections I’ve established on Foursquare then they all see see my check-in as well. I may also choose to broadcast my check-in on Twitter and Facebook and include a comment or picture as well.

At this point, I’ve shared my location, the name of the retailer and potentially some other color commentary to my friends. Simple enough.

Retailer Venue Setup on Foursquare

The retailer, on the other hand, has just benefited from free publicity. If I have 1200 friends between Twitter and Facebook, that’s 1200 people that have just seen their brand name. Maybe I mentioned how good the coffee was or how delightful the service was. Again, more free publicity.

Most retailers have a listing on Foursquare whether they know it or not. By simply creating an account, they can login, claim their location and update their profile with additional information to help spread the word and best represent their brand on Foursquare. It only takes a few minutes and can make a world of difference. For example, you can add detailed address information, product categories, and add tips and links to content you choose.

Setting up Foursquare Specials

Retailers and other businesses that use Foursquare have the ability to leverage Foursquare by offering Specials – incentives to Foursquare users that perform certain check-in behavior in order to earn rewards. There are four types of Specials a business can offer on Foursquare:

Friends Special -
You can set a minimum number of foursquare friends a user needs to check-in with to unlock a Special. That special is only redeemed when that pre-set number of friends check-in together. The goal is to get groups of friends coming to your venue.

Swarm Special -
You can set a minmum number of foursquare users that need to check-in within a 3-hour window in order to unlock this Special. It can only be unlocked once per day per venue, and is great to incentivize large groups to visit your business!

Flash Special -
This Special gets its name from “Flash Sale”. You set the number of Specials that you want to unlock per day, then after that its first-come, first-serve. When it reaches the unlock limit, there are no more Specials for the day. This is great for special limitied quanity sales.

Newbie Special -
This type of Special unlocks on a user’s first time visitng your venue. This is the most direct way to drive new traffic to your venue.

Check-in Special -
These are our classic Specials. They unlock on every check-in, or on whatever conditions you apply. This is great for rewarding users on their routine check-ins.

Mayor Special -
This Special is swarded to the Mayor fo your venue. The foursquare Mayor is the most frequent visitor over the last 60 days. This is a great way to reward your best customer and encouraging competition for the prize.

Loyalty Special -
There are a few ways to use a loyalty Special. You can reward a user every X times they visit, you can reward them for coming in X times in total, or you can reward them for being loyal within a certain period: for X visits over Y days.

The Newbie, Check-in, and Mayor specials seem to be most popular, I guess becuase they require the least amount of effort on behalf of both the customer and retailer. The other types of specials require longer-term participation and/or multiple users, so they maybe the next logical step.

What’s most suprising is how few retailers actually setup Specials. In Charlottesville, for example, there are roughly 15 specials throughout the entire city at any given time. Also, for those that have Specials, they haven’t changed … ever! Some retailers have had the same specials for nearly a year. Personally, I think they would benefit from some variety, especially, given the new types of specials available.

Fast Start with Foursquare

If you’re a retailer, first visit Foursquare and find your venue by searching on the homepage. If it’s listed you can “Claim this Venue” and make the necesary adjustments. If your venue does not already exist on foursquare, you can create a new venue by scrolling to the bottom of the search results (bottom of page) and clicking “Add a new venue to foursquare.”

Next, think about potential Specials you can run. Maybe run two to begin – one that’s easy for folks to achieve with a single check-in and another that requires some more work. Make it something truly fantastic, something they’ll want to share with all their friends on Twitter and Facebook.

What do you think of Foursquare? Do you find it useful as a consumer? Has your business seen much success using Foursquare to drive business?

Product Creation Strategies to Monetize Your Blog

Steinar — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 18:50:51 +0000

I’m speaking next week at the Blogville Conference in Charlottesville on the subject of Blog Monetization and thought I would share some thoughts on product creation.

Creating your own product is one of the best ways to monetize your blog. A lot of bloggers resort to affiliate linking or pay-per-click advertising to generate income but soon discover that, without significant traffic, those methods result in very little income.

Creating your own product today is easier than ever. You can create audio products, video products, and even books that people can purchase directly from your website.

Podcasting is very popular and a terrific method for recording your voice and making it available to an audience that can subscribe to your podcast through PayPal.

Creating an ebook is another very simple method of converting your blog into a product that people can purchase via electronic download. For example, you can take three blog posts, combine them into one document, and save that as a PDF with some simple editing and upload this to your website for someone to purchase.

Including a simple PayPal button allows them to buy your e-book for a nominal fee – whether it’s $7, $17, or $27, depending on the content.

Video is also very simple to execute. Most computers today come with a webcam or you can purchase a handheld digital video recorder for less than $200 that produces outstanding quality. Think about your niche and what they want to know and what you can share with them. Sit down in front of your video camera and talk to your audience. Or share some slides from a powerpoint presentation. Upload that video to YouTube and make it unlisted so that people can’t find it unless you specifically direct them to the URL.

Again, use PayPal as a method for people to purchase the video or a series of videos and provide them with a link to the video upon receipt of payment.

If you are having trouble coming up with ideas for products to create, you have several options. The first and most obvious option is to ask your audience what they want. If you already have a blog or a twitter account or a Facebook page, this is a great channel to survey your customers.

A second approach is to go on to Amazon.com, research some of the leading magazines within your niche and review the table of contents for inspiration on articles or other content that you can create and package into a product.

Third, look at your competition – what are they selling? What’s been successful? Don’t copy these ideas, exactly, but use them as inspiration for your own product.

It’s been suggested that some of the best products are multimedia in nature. That is, you combine audio, text, and video into one package to provide a robust product offering for your customers to purchase. Obviously, the more content you pack into your product, the more you can charge, but do recognize that this will take longer to compile.

What are thoughts about product creation for blog monetization – have you considered creating your own product? What makes sense for you and what’s holding you back? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Check it out – new Facebook Page Tabs are basically mini websites

Steinar — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 21:14:05 +0000

Facebook continues to be top of mind for businesses and customizing Facebook Pages to best position your brand in the leading social media network is critical.

Here’s an example of what’s possible with Facebook Pages. Doesn’t look like your traditional Facebook Page now does it?

I built this from scratch and can do the same for your business. We can include logo, links, images, video, google maps, sign up forms and more.

Contact me if you’re interested.

Video: We made the news this morning …

Steinar — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:24:35 +0000

Fun news piece this morning on NBC 29 in Charlottesville featuring a number of iPad enthusiasts and developers, including Brian Williford and Steinar Knutsen of Story Born.

5 Tips for a Better Facebook Page

Steinar — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 05:37:57 +0000

By now most of you who own a business or are in charge of marketing for your company have set up a Facebook Page. If you haven’t, please go to Facebook.com/pages and get started right away.

As you know Facebook is the number one website on the Internet and it’s critical for your company to have an established presence on Facebook and take advantage of the popularity of Facebook to connect with your market via social media.

If you’re struggling to customize your Facebook page and interact with fans, here are some simple steps to set up a professional Facebook page that best represents your brand.

1. Your logo can have maximum dimensions of 600 pixels tall by 200 pixels wide. Some companies use this space to create a custom JPEG or PNG image that includes additional information other than just their logo.

2. I find it’s best to post content to your Facebook page every day. This may seem like overkill at first but honestly don’t you have something to say about your business on a regular basis? The fact of the matter is that most people are following so many companies and individuals on Facebook that your message can easily get lost in the shuffle so don’t feel like you’re overwhelming your audience with too much information.

3. The recent updates to Facebook allow you to include a number of pictures at the top of your Facebook page. In fact you can include five pictures and I recommend you carefully pick these pictures to best illustrate your brand image and draw attention to your page. Some companies in fact have used this new feature as a way to better display their brand and present a more creative approach to the layout of their Facebook page.

4. If you have more than 25 fans I highly recommend that you create a custom username or custom URL for your Facebook page. Once you have 25 fans go to Facebook.com/username to register your custom URL. Please note that this custom URL can never be changed. The advantage of creating a custom URL is that you can use it in other forms of traditional marketing such as print advertising, radio advertising and television advertising to draw fans to your page. The worst thing you can do is say “find us on Facebook” and leave it up to the individual to find your page.

5. One last tip is to create content that invites users to interact with you on Facebook. Post a poll or ask a question. In fact, I recommend that you finish every post with a question. Studies suggest that people will leave comments more often if you pose a question rather than simply stating some facts or linking to another article off of Facebook. Did you also know that video and images get priority in terms of how they are distributed to your fans individual Facebook feeds?

I hope these tips help as you and your company explore the opportunities to leverage Facebook as a powerful channel to market your business online. Please contact me if you have any questions or would like help setting up your Facebook page.

P.S. — This blog post was written as a transcription from Dragon Dictation on my iPad 2. It’s just one tool I use to help increase my efficiency when it comes to marketing my business online. Plus, I can’t type that fast What tools are you using to increase efficiency and effectiveness in your online marketing?

18 Inbound Marketing Tactics to Drive Website Traffic and Search Engine Rank

Steinar — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 14:10:12 +0000

The number one question I get from website owners is “How can I drive more traffic to my site and rank higher in search engines?” This diagram from SEOmoz illustrates the pleathora of options and complexity involved in accomplishing this.

My guess is you’re actively executing on a handful of these tactics. I recommend you install Google Analytics and track their performance. Which channels are driving the most traffic, backlinks and ideal customers to your site? What new channels can you leverage to expand your footprint?

Podcasting Equipment and Tools

Steinar — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 21:05:57 +0000

In this video we’ll discuss podcasting equipment and tools, including microphones, headphones, devices and software to record, edit, publish and promote your podcast. What’s most exciting is the variety of tools that are available – you can go simple with just a smart phone and publish without editing or high-end with professional sound equipment and edit as much as you want.

Podcasting Equipment and Tools:

Microphone
- Built-in
- USB External
- Phone
- Stand-alone recorder (Zoom)
Headphones
Recording Device
- Mac, PC, Phone, Tablet
Software

What podcasting equipment and tools are you using these days?

What is Podcasting and Why Is It Important for Your Business

Steinar — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 21:05:48 +0000

In this video I discuss what podcasting is and why it’s important for your business. With the proliferation of mobile devices and the ease with which you can create and publish audio, podcasting is a great channel to promote your business and connect with your market.

What is Podcasting?

Portable on Demand Broadcasting
Netcasting
Regularly schedule content delivery
Audio / Video / Pdf’s
No min or max time requirements
iTunes and/or iPod not required

Why Podcasting is Important for Your Business

Mobile device proliferation
Differentiate your business
Add variety to your blog
Say more with less effort
Discuss topics at length
Interview others
Broaden market reach
Audio may be “easier” than video

Have you tried podcasting? How’s that going for your business?

An Inspirational Story of Entrepreneurship: SEOmoz

Steinar — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 04:37:35 +0000

SEOmoz has been for some time one of the most popular go-to sources of SEO related information. Here’s a great story of their early beginnings and rise to superstardom.

The Story of Moz: 1981-2011

View more presentations from randfish

I’m particularly impressed with their ability to 1) listen to their customers 2) build products that customers want and 3) position, package and price their products in a meaningful way. My favorite chart is that in which the price continues to increase as the number of subscribers increases as well.

Thoughts on Podcasting

Steinar — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:47:01 +0000

Podcasting is a fantastic channel to engage your market and reach a new audience. This morning I led a discussion on this topic with the SheBlogs group in Charlottesville.

The main takeaway is that there are several different approaches to podcasting either from the web, your Mac or PC, your phone and even the web.

This audio was recorded using the VR+ recording app available on iTunes for $1.99 and I am writing this text using the WordPress iPhone app. No longer are we tied to the expensive tools that once served as a barrier to effective podcasting.

Listen or Download

What are your thoughts on podcasting? Have you considered it in your marketing mix?

Video: How to Use Facebook as a Page

Steinar — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 15:10:12 +0000

The ability to use Facebook as a Page is a relatively new and exciting feature. The benefit is that companies can connect with other companies and members of their community or niche as a company rather than as an individual.

Try Facebook Sponsored Stories instead of traditional Facebook Ads

Steinar — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:16:58 +0000

By now, you have probably heard about, seen, or tried Facebook Ads. Just login to Facebook – they’re the stuff on the right side of the screen. If you’re trying to market something on Facebook, Facebook Ads are a great and very popular means with which to get your brand in front of millions of potential customers and fans.

Over the years, Facebook Ads setup options have remained relatively the same. That’s changed with the introduction of Facebook “Sponsored Stories.” Basically, this option gives you the ability to “Sponsor” a recent Facebook post on your target market’s feed, as a targeted story along the right sidebar.

I’ve found the best results by targeting friends of my Page’s fans. So if John Smith is a fan, my Story or Post shows up on his personal friend’s Facebook page. The hook is that below the Story it says “John Smith like this” and there a handy Like button included. This takes advantage of the social connections on Facebook rather than just serving up anonymous Ads. Plus, as you ad new posts to you Facebook Page, the Sponsored Stories change, so the Ads really never look the same.

In my recent experience, Sponsored Stories cost the same as traditional Ads and results are 100% better. For example, I ran a test yesterday to 40,000 people. The traditional ad got zero clicks, while the Sponsored Stories got 66 clicks – 100% of which where “Social” in nature.

To set up Facebook Ad, head over to facebook.com/ads or just click below and click Create an Ad. Enjoy!

New Facebook Comments in WordPress

Steinar — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 01:45:19 +0000

Facebook just released an exciting new set of code to embed Facebook Comments in your website.

You’ll need a Facebook Application ID, so first setup your app at the Facebook Developers Center.

Then, head over to the Facebook Comments Social Plugin Page to get the code for your Comments.

Here it is in action. (Hint: Leave a Comment!)

Facebook Fans Are Not Interested In Interacting With Your Company

Steinar — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 02:27:25 +0000

It’s hard to dispute the conclusions you might draw from this chart that suggests Facebook Fans are really most interested in getting free stuff from the brands they follow on Facebook.

I guess it’s not that surprising, but what did catch my eye is the fact that “interaction” came in last place.

via 4 charts that show how social media drives sales relationships.

What do you think? Why do you “Like” certain brands on Facebook?

Measuring Social Media Return on Investment

Steinar — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 18:46:45 +0000

Here’s a basic equation for measuring social media return on investment …

And here’s an example of measuring social media ROI in a typical situation …

The question with any ROI is “Is this a good ROI?” The challenge is to compare your social media ROI versus other forms of marketing. For example, how do your social media tactics compare to more traditional marketing channels such as tv, radio, print and direct mail? Calculate the ROI on each of these and do the comparison.

2011 Snapshot of Facebook Users in Charlottesville

Steinar — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 18:46:25 +0000

I recently taught a class at PVCC on Social Media ROI. Here’s a slide that illustrates a few segments of Facebook Users that call Charlottesville home.

Obsessed with Facebook: Some Stats to Consider

Steinar — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:44:59 +0000

Here are some handy stats from Online Schools if you’re interested in the obsession with Facebook. Some of these numbers have been floating around for the past few months, so it’s nice to have them all in one place.

One interesting find is that Photo Uploads and Comments rank among the most frequent activities on Facebook. I’m sure there a strong correlation between the two. In my experience, businesses that post pictures to their Facebook Page get more comments.

How to get the right picture to show up in Facebook when you post a link

Steinar — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 16:09:58 +0000

When posting links to Facebook from your blog or website it can sometimes be frustrating that the wrong pictures get displayed next to your link. This is partially because Facebook has an old version of your site cached in their que and is pulling older pictures.

There’s a great tool called Facebook URL Linter that helps fix this problem.

1. First, post your new content to your website, including any pictures you want included in the Facebook link. If you’re blogging, this may be a picture in your new blog post.

2. Visit Facebook Linter at http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint and enter your URL. Again, if you’re blogging, be sure to enter the specific URL for that post.

3. Facebook URL Linter will spin its wheels for a few seconds and a new version of your site will be indexed in their cache.

4. Post an update to your Facebook Wall and the new picture thumbnail should be available to choose from!

Enjoy!

How to add a simple PayPal Buy Now button to your website

Steinar — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 18:25:19 +0000

PayPal payment buttons are an easy way to accept payments online for products and services. If you have something to sell online, installing these buttons is rather easy once you have an account.

1. Login to PayPal and visit Merchant Services

2. Click on the Buy Now Button icon

3. Fill in the appropriate details, including item name, item ID, and price. You may also have a series of options you can load into a convenient drop-down box.

4. Click Create Button, if you wish to simply install the standard button or continue to Steps 2 and 3 if you wish to further customize.

5. PayPal will now provide you with some HTML that you can paste into the body of your website. If you’re using WordPress, you could post this into a blog post (use the HTML view) or in the sidebar if you want it to show up on every page throughout your site.

Happy Selling!

Episode 6 – Blogging for Business: Using WordPress as Your Blogging Platform

Steinar — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 19:19:53 +0000

In this episode I discuss choosing a blogging platform and hosting package. I really focus on WordPress in particular but there are several options, including Blogger, Moveable Type, TypePad, or Tumblr to name a few.

I prefer WordPress because it’s free, it has a great community of users and developers that help provide support and it’s rather simple to use. You can either use WordPress at WordPress.com or download a version at WordPress.org.

I recommend you download WordPress from WordPress.org and install it on your own server. To do this you’ll need a hosting package from a domain hosting service, such as Bluehost. This approach gives you the greatest control and flexibility over the long run.

Adding new posts to your WordPress blog is simple. Just login to your admin panel and add a “New Post” much like you would write an email. Enter the subject and body of the Post and hit “Publish.” If you need to expand the functionality of the blog, there are a number of great plugins available in the WordPress Plugins directory.

Video: Episode 5 Blogging for Business – Content Creation

Steinar — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 23:47:50 +0000

In my last video we talked about blogging search engine optimization and today let’s spend a few minutes thinking about creating content.

Setting SMART Goals for your 2011 Internet Marketing Strategy

Steinar — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 21:00:16 +0000

Setting SMART goals is a proven approach to achieving success more quickly. As 2010 winds down, this is the perfect opportunity to examine your goals for 2011 and apply the SMART mnemonic or acronym to increase the likelihood your goals are met.

SMART stands for:

S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Attainable
R – Realistic
T – Timely

Free Template Downloads:

Specific

You want to clearly define your goals to articulate specifically what you are trying to achieve. The question is what, how and why are you striving toward this goal?

What are you going to do? Use action words, such as create, sell, manage, or grow, etc. to bring a sense of energy to your goals.
Why are you doing this? What is the ultimate outcome? Why is this important and what impact will this have on you, your business, or your customers?
How are you going to do this? What are the sub-goals or action steps that will enable you to achieve your goal

Measurable

Attainable

Realistic

Timely

What’s your experience setting goals for the new year? Do you use the SMART mnemonic?