Become Part of an Ebook – Free Link

Part of online business is online marketing. Ebooks are a great way to get your name out there. You can create your own ebook or become part of others as you add something substantial to their content.

Creating your own ebook is one way you can become well known as an expert in a subject.

Over at AimforAwesome.com I started an ebook about “What is the Point of Life?” Why that topic? Good question. I was increasingly aware that over the past 2-3 years that post was getting more traffic than any other on the entire site. It doesn’t get crazy amounts of traffic – there aren’t that many people searching on the topic, but there’s obviously a lot of interest in it. I don’t think my post was particularly well-written, and I think there was a lot more to talk about.

Hence the ebook, “What is the Point of Life?“.

If you want to be part of it – you can add your idea about what the point of life is by writing me at AimforAwesome@@@gmail…com and follow this post to send me your idea.

Contributors to the ebook will receive a credit with name, site (personal or business), email, phone – whatever info you want – and a free copy of the ebook, “What is the Point of Life?“.

Getting Inbound Links

Inbound links are very important for Google, and presumably every other search engine on the planet… though to be honest, I’ve focused solely on Google for about the last 4 years. If I’m well represented in Google I seem to do just fine in Yahoo, and now Bing.

I’ve been experimenting with creating articles at EzineArticles.com for the last couple of months and am possibly seeing good results already. If I can believe their stats, they’re sending me some decent clicks over to my site(s) where I’ve linked to.

Apparently Google likes the site because it’s well moderated. Junk articles don’t (usually) get through, though I’ve seen some horribly written articles the majority are decent enough quality.

What is Ezine Articles? You write articles laced with keywords about whatever topic your website or page on your website is about. You can link back to your own site twice from the “Author box” in the last paragraph. Free inbound links… for the price of writing an article. I like the idea, though at first I balked at why in the world I would write quality content for another website.

Google trusts this site to the tune of a PageRank 6. They have thousands of articles and authors – some of which ONLY write there and do very well.

If my recent gains in pagerank numbers are signs of the success of this inbound links technique, I’m all for it and will be writing another 20-50 articles there this year.

Anyone had good success with it yet?

Here’s my feed which will give you some of the articles I’ve written there. You can click one and go see the full article and how I’ve setup my links back to my own sites.

I’ll let you know more as I nail down whether or not this technique is responsible for my recent gains…

Here’s my feed:

Real Time Search – A Game Changer

Microsoft’s Bing and Google just reached separate deals with Twitter for rights to index the Twitter data as it occurs… in real-time.

This is a game changer on a couple of levels.

1. People are going to tweet just to get into Google’s search engine results pages (SERP’s). It’s a game changer for companies that are looking to get into the Google and Bing search results pages. I don’t see the results in Bing yet, though some have said they are showing up for them. Google has yet to integrate Tweets into their results – but it will be interesting to see how they go about it.

Tweeting might have just become important to me again, depending on what the results show, and whether they are prominently placed. Links in Twitter will probably pick up some sort of value in Google’s eyes based on the number of times the link gets passed around – retweeted.

2. Less and less space is being used for organic search results in Google especially. Some companies are going to get pushed down, out of the sweet spot. SEO is becoming ridiculously hard to max out because there are no longer 5 or 10 slots that matter. There are just a couple.

I think small businesses – 1-10 employees are being hammered. It’s becoming more difficult to break into any online business that relies on the search engines. Companies must have budgets to hire people to do videos, images, and now tweets.

I think Google is favoring big business. Big business rules online, just as it did offline. It can’t be any other way, right?

If the Twitter results are really prominent displayed in Google results, whole businesses will develop to take advantage of this chance to get high placement in Google’s SERP’s. Heck, I might jump into that space if the getting looks good.

Will they rank the Twitter data higher than YouTube videos? Higher than image results?

Interesting to see what comes of this – the game is always changing!

Internet Marketing’s A-List, the “Good Guys”

I used to not follow any internet marketers online – I didn’t need to, or thought I didn’t. Up until about 2004 I studied everything on my own and had immense hands-on experience with different companies around the USA I worked for as an internet marketing consultant. I was pretty cozy with what I knew versus what everyone else knew.

Then I started to see people talking about things that were more specialized, more in-depth than what I was doing. I realized – I’m not on top of the game and the only way to get back to the top and keep up with everything is to follow what some others are doing too. As areas of expertise get more specialized – in internet marketing or whatever your business are happens to be, you’ll need to start learning on a daily basis from everyone else that’s into what you’re into or you’ll quickly be left behind.

I don’t want to be left behind so I set about trying to figure out – who are the internet marketers that are making sense, and who are the ones I trust enough to listen to?

It’s a very tough question. It’s sometimes hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, the meat from the muck.

The following group of people are those that I either trust or am starting to trust. Their message is usually solid and they have good hands-on experience. They are selling things – no doubt, they couldn’t exist without marketing something – but, they’re also helping people get started.

Jonathan Volk – You know, when someone says they are Christian on their business site it gives you the idea almost immediately that you can trust the person. Sure there are posers, Jonathan doesn’t seem to be one. No, I’m not Christian, but I understand that most of those that are adhere to some basic fraudless practices… they have a certain morality that probably jives with mine. Jonathan has some great PPC ideas and shares a lot of them freely on his site. He seems to be a very genuine person out to help others succeed.

Shoemoney – Jeremy is often times all about the hype, but over the last couple years seems to be moderating it and is coming across more like someone at the top willing to help those that are trying desperately to get there. His knowledge of PPC is probably unmatched. He frequently “gives away the game” and provides great information for free. His current major promotion is Shoemoney Tools and his free 12 week internet marketing course which you really should sign up for – it’s free and, though basic – might be just what you need to get started.

Yaro Starak – from entrepreneurs-journey.com. Yaro is an Aussie that comes across as having a sincere desire to help others succeed and is enjoying some level of success himself in recent years. I listen to what he says and take it as gospel truth. I can’t see Yaro lying to save his life.

Frank Kern – I’m still not sure about Frank. His laid back attitude is either 100% genuine… or not. He has some phenomenal information he lets go for free, and his programs are priced about 4x as much as I’d ever want to pay (Mass Control), but he’s enjoying some outrageous success from his programs. If you have the $, Frank is one guy you want to follow.

Gary Vaynerchuck – is a motivational speaker that has some good points of view and lets them be known. He’s frequently hired to present at conferences and such. You can tell Gary is coming from the heart and isn’t going to screw you around. Gary has enjoyed immense success as a branding expert for his family’s wine business – but is also knowledgeable in many other areas and is an avid social media marketer-enthusiast. He’s a workaholic and to me, seems very genuine.

Darren Rowse – I look at Darren as the grandaddy of blogging. He says all the right things and is never controversial at all – which, leads me to believe you can trust the guy though he’s not giving you all sides to himself – he’s giving the world what it needs – amazing articles – hundreds upon hundreds of them filled with solid information that isn’t questionable. The guy is a blogging machine and I trust whatever he says.

Vern Lovic – I’m somewhat of a mix of all these internet marketers. For many years I’ve not shared online what I do for a living – internet marketing. I was blogging at Aim for Awesome and 15 other sites but had nothing online about internet marketing.  Recently I started this site, Inc. Answers because I wasn’t finding anyone online that was presenting SEO – SEM – IM the way I think it should be presented.

I have a decade of experience with web development, SEO, and internet marketing topics of all sorts.  I’m a deep generalist, meaning – I know something about nearly everything online – but, I’m not totally geared toward any one area or technique for making money online. I prefer to know a moderate amount about everything – not everything about 1 small topic. I do make an exception for SEO and do my best to stay current with everything going on there. It’s a fascinating area for me and where my heart is really at.

Though I’m not Christian I have a strong inner-morality that urges me to do the right thing. I don’t attempt to sell by hype. I present what I know and tell you the benefits of using it – and hope you come around to trying it. I don’t have any ultra-expensive programs I’m marketing. I prefer to target people that are just starting out and that need to know the big picture about internet marketing – and how they can actually get started with some small success that might build into something great later. The fees I charge for my online training courses are reasonable and affordable to most people. Many of my courses are completely free.

I offer a realistic view of online success. In most cases it will take a year of effort as a general minimum if you’re starting from scratch. Or, it will take a lot of cash to have a website built for you and optimized for search engines and other traffic building systems so you can start a meaningful income from your online projects. That’s the reality of it. If you think you can do it in a week or a month – give it a try. Other internet marketers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars off people that think there’s a short-cut and that will pay for it – just in case it works.

Most of the time it doesn’t work. Stick to the advice and suggestions of this group of internet marketing experts mentioned above. Work your tail off and you’ll probably find some success.

Everyone can do this – it is not DNA engineering… it’s a+b+c !

Good luck and much success!

(photo credit: Flickr.com user, AdamSelwood)

New Video Advertising Idea

Video viewing has exploded and is only getting bigger. My own videos at YouTube have had about 1.5 million views and are currently doing between 5-10,000 views per day on average.

I was thinking about that today and I came up with an idea for myself that might also fit your situation as well.

If you have a lot of successful videos at YouTube or even just a couple and you want to make money from them, and you can’t get into the YouTube partner program where you’ll get paid for viewers of your videos that click on the ad… this might be for you.

Well, wait a minute… even if you are part of YouTube’s partner program and you’re showing Adsense ads you might be able to do this in addition to that. I need to check that.

What I might do is…

Create a small ad on my site that says, “Want 1.5 million views of your 300×250 (or larger) ad?”

I can sell a spot on all of my videos, to a company that wants to be seen. The clicks on the video will not go anywhere – meaning, I’m not an advertiser on YouTube and so I can’t setup a link that would take people to the company’s site that is advertising with me – but, the ad can be a razor sharp image that plays after the title in my YouTube video, and just before the content starts. I can also add a couple frames into the videos if I want, to increase the number of impressions a video viewer will see.

I could even put 2-4 short(1-2 seconds) static 300×250 ads in a row – maybe with words on them that create a sentence… like first board shows: “Do you need…”

The second board might say, “to crank…”

And the third, “up your website TRAFFIC?”

Then the 4th board might show a SEO specialist’s website and contact info – if she were advertising on my site.

You get the idea…

There are videos that show over a million times on YouTube… if you had one and could promise a company a million views – what would that be worth?

What if you ran a 4 slide series like I gave as an example? What would that be worth I wonder…?

How many ads could you run on one 2 minute video? One company at the beginning and one at the end?

I wonder what the partner program’s policy is on this – I must look it up – I’ll update this post as I figure it out.

One cool thing to note is that using your videos in the YouTube partner program does not preclude you using them somewhere else. This is from YouTube’s site:

Non-Exclusive Agreement – YouTube doesn’t restrict where you can upload and distribute your videos so you can monetize it via YouTube and still use it elsewhere.

Nice… right?

If you try this – be sure to let us know, and how much you’re charging per 1,000 views.

Best of Luck!

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