Internet Marketing, Make Money Online

Hotel Managers Don't Get It

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:06:05 +0000

Having recently done a two month vacation, I can tell anyone who listens that the quality of staff in hotels, restaurants and other hospitality providers differs a lot, so much in fact you'd wonder if some of them have any training at all.

Countries like Spain are particularly poor in service standards, and my memeory of travelling around the US a few years ago wasn't much different in many places, and it occurs to me that hospitality isn't just waiting tables, but even if it was, a smile, professional conduct, and taking a small interest in the person who ultimately pays your wage shouldn't be too hard achieve.

Do a quick search for training providers and you find websites like hospitality management schools, so really there is no excuse for anyone who wants to progress in the industry, take a look at the Batchelors and Masters degree programs.

Yet, I'd be willing to bet the majority of people I encounter probably never undertake a degree program, and they expect me to spend my hard earned money in their establishments? I'm sure you agree with me, if you go on holiday or visit a local restaurant it would be nice to think the manager understands the basic principles of hospitality and will insist on certain minimum standards from their staff.

How often do you feel this actually happens? I do understand that most small hotels and restaurants are probably managed by their owners, and maybe money is tight, but a hospitality degree will actually help increase bottom line turnover, so is an investment in their future, and if the business doesn't succeed at least the owner would have a qualification that would get them work elsewhere.

Even amongst large chains, you often find the manager is simply a person who ws able to gt funding to buy their franchise, then they're given in-house training to run their business. Some in-house training programs have excellent reputations, but the majority of these organizations seem to don't seem to look for degree educated managers.

The result is an industry with hugely varying standards of service, and where things like star ratings become meaningless because the management don't have the skills to maintain the rating. It would be nice if hospitality providers would understand they make their money from keeping people happy, and staff need to be educated to do that effectively.

Internal vs External Backlinks

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 16:00:54 +0000

This is a great debate, and one that gets a lot of discussion in webmaster forums like digital point or netbuilders, and most people seem to come down on the side of one or the other. Essentially the debate is between on page SEO vs off page SEO.

A lot of MFA promoters tell you to create a small 3-5 page site, through some articles up on ezinearticles, add your Adsense code and wait, and in the past this system could be considered very successful, actually it might still be effective if you fly under the radar, but the bigger your site becomes, and the more traffic you get, the more you start to compete with established sites that do a lot more for their ranking.

I'm not going to sit on the fence, I'm going to tell you to do both, and I'm going to tell you why. You can do an experiment to prove how well this works if you have three new websites in the same niche and on different host accounts. Start a blog on each one, and give each blog maybe 5 posts of similar length, all targeting the same keywords.

To make the experiment even easier, forget about registering domain names, just grab a free blog from Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, and Blog.com, they all give you a subdomain so each blog would be competing fairly, instead of having a mix of top level domains, subdomains, and subfolders.

Then on one of the blog only interlink between posts using keyword rich anchor text, on the second blog don't interlink between posts instead only write articles for ezinearticles, and on the third blog do both interlinking and ezinearticles. Now ping the major RSS readers for each blog and sit back and watch your stats to see which one gets more traffic.

I'd be willing to bet that 90% of the time the two blogs with the ezinearticles will get traffic faster than the blog with only interlinking, but wait a little longer. Soon you'll see the blog with only interlinking will catch up with the blog that only has ezinearticles backlinks, but the blog with both will stay ahead of both of them and after 3 months will have several times more traffic than the other two.

OK, so that isn't an example, I'm not stupid enough to disclose my test blogs, that would ruin the test and I'd have to start again, but I can tell you that I used the results of this test to promote a client who has a website here in Spain and her little B&B that was previously only on page 4 of Google shot up to the #1 position in 2 months.

I did that by interlinking all of her content pages using her main keywords, plus wrote 3-4 ezinearticles for each page on her site, and then just sat back and watched. Of course real SEO never stops, and I'll need to keep adding backlinks and if she wants to target extra keywords she will need more content, but her reservations have increased, her booking ratio is above 50%, and she's very happy. Try this with your own sites, you'll see it works.

Local Business Promotion using ecademy and InterNations

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 10:38:39 +0000

In a previous local SEO article I talked about using Facebook and Twitter to promote a local business, here in Spain I've found them to be very effective for driving search engine rankings, though not always effective for connecting with genuine customers, often you'll connect more with other business owners.

Connecting with other business owners is a great concept, you never know when one of them will become a referral or a customer, but with respect the Twitter and Facebook, a lot of their users are there to be entertained, so how do you connect with more business minded contacts?

The answer is still in social networking, using ecademy and InterNations, but the services are different, and I should point out if you are promoting an MFA or non-business website these sites may not be appropriate. But my local clients in Spain get a lot of mileage from them for business networking. For pure SEO, another option is to create a profile on Brown Book.

Let me tell you a bit about the clients I have in Spain, some are owners of small hotels, others are real estate agents, but I also support translators, holiday home management, restaurants, and people who own shops. All of them are finding the current economic crisis is hurting their bottom line, and they all want to connect with customers to build relationships.

Of course any smart business person will know that clients can come from knocks on the door, website referrals, advertising, but the best business always comes from personal connections who know your business and pre-sell your service or product to their friends.

This is where ecademy and InterNations are so valuable - both are professional networking sites, the first is for business people all around the world, the second is for people who are expatriates and have global connections. Do you see why these networks could be so valuable?

Small shops dealing purely with local customers might not get much advantage from membership, but in Spain most of my clients are somehow involved in the tourism industry or they deal with property owners and investors, most of whom are not local.

In bigger cities or regions where business networking is an important part of doing business the story is different and a lot of success follows from joining ecademy. Similarly, people involved in tourism get a lot of value from InterNations because statistically expatriates travel more, and they talk about travel more.

I want to quickly talk about the difference between travel websites like TripAdvisor, GoGecko etc, and ecademy or InterNations. The difference is the level of professionalism and the quality of referrals your business can attract, and in many cases the volume of referrals you can get.

Back to Work

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 13:38:57 +0000

I'm BACK!!!

Yes, it's true, it really is me, I'm back and ready to get back to work again. The last couple of months have been crazy, me, my backpack, a small tent, and nothing else, no laptop, no phone, just me and nature touring Spain on foot. What a blast, but it's time to get back to work again.

The funny thing about taking a couple of months off is the amount of spam messages filling your email box, or the number of comments you need to clear from blogs and websites. It took me all day to get back to a state that I can start working again, but hey, I enjoyed my walk so that's the main thing.

Being back in front of my laptop after a couple of months is interesting, it's amazing to see which websites have performed, which are just sitting there costing me money, and which domains I don't really care about any more.

Actually I recommend taking a couple of months away from your websites every couple of years, because only by doing nothing to a site do you appreciate which sites are attracting organic traffic growth, and which really depend on SEO for their income.

So a few of the sites were deleted this morning, I'd rather focus all my energy on sites that have a baseline of organic growth, then all I need to do is build on that, instead of starting from scratch with link building.

Aside from that I've also decided I really need to see more of Spain, this really is a beautiful country. Sorry no photos of my trip, I made a decision at the beginning of the walk to leave my camera behind, otherwise a holiday would seem too much like work since I also own several travel websites.

Thanks everyone who sent messages, I'll reply to them all later today, Carl

Using Twitter and Facebook to Promote your Local Business

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 10:01:19 +0000

Living in Spain and not speaking the language fluently means I have to be self employed because my regular paying job (sales management) isn't available to me, but traveling and being an Internet Marketer is very compatible. Consequently, a lot of people ask me to consult with them on improving their local business search results.

I always recommend starting with the basics, and that includes Twitter, and Facebook, both of which are amongst the best ranking websites on the net, and if you use them wisely mean your local business could dominate the top 5 or 6 results in the search pages for your main keyword. If you've read my previous article on using Twitter to promote your business you'll find this article fills in a few of the gaps not mentioned in the first.

Twitter
Twitter is great for connecting with people in your local area, and can also be good for SEO if you can keep your tweets short enough that you can also publish your full URL in your tweet.

The way I use Twitter is that I create a profile that has a very basic about us type of info but I include my main keyword in the profile, and also the website link, then I find all of my peers in the industry, with local websites this means anyone in your town, and anyone internationally who tweets about the same stuff that you do. The reason I follow everyone in my home town is that you just never know when one of them might become a customer.

After creating the profile and following local tweeters and international peers I wait for them to follow me back. Some people advise you to only follow people who return follow, but I think that is really stupid and frankly those idiots aren't real Internet Marketers.

The reality is that if I follow you and you sometimes mention something that I could help you with then I win, if you don't follow me back it isn't a problem, because when you check tweets to you you'll see my tweet, and if I've helped you it is likely you'll start to follow me. Moral of the story, don't try to game Twitter to increase followers, if you have a local business you'd prefer followers who have an interest in your product.

Now the tweeting begins, and for most business people the concept of tweeting seems like a waste of time, but here's the magic of tweeting, it lets a local business have an opinion about your home town, lets you be part of your community, and the effort is minimal. Here's an example, your local business sells widgets, most people will use Twitter to simply blast special offers etc, but let's say the local basketball team has an important game coming up, why not also get behind them with a "Go Sharks! [Business Name] is right behind you, bring it home tonight!"

See how short and sweet that is, and I tell you what it puts you right in there with all your local tweeters who will see you tweeting something they would also tweet. Stuff like that is free advertising because other tweeters will retweet that, or reply to you with their own rah rah, see where this is going? And how super easy it is to use Twitter to really get involved in your community for free, and best of all for minimal effort.

so how many tweets a day should you aim for if you're a local business? Personally I'd aim for one per day, but you need to split the content up a bit for the different audiences you have. Out of 10 tweets I'd probably mention things happening in the business maybe 5 times, from special offers, to sponsorships, members only offers or parties etc. Try to keep the actual tweet to the minimum, and use the rest of the space to link to your webpage with more info. Google loves URLs in tweets, and this will definitely help with your SEO.

Facebook
Facebook is similar to Twitter, but works in a completely different way and has the potential to drive even more business your way because the notes you create can be longer, and you can attach photos or video. In addition, Facebook fan pages often rank very well in Google, so don't be afraid to create a fan page.

I always advise my clients to create a fan page instead of a group, they give a lot more options for configuring the page, and fanpages are public, meaning the search engines will find them, and you get statistics on how many of your fans are interacting with the page.

Once you've created your fanpage, you really need to complete the profile but don't just copy and paste from your website, remember the fanpage will be indexed by the search engines so you don't want duplicate content. Make sure you add your contact details etc, and then also create some photo albums with your products or events that your business is involved in. If you also have short videos you've made upload these as well. It might seem like you're recreating your website on Facebook, but many of the people who use Facebook will never visit your website anyway, and if they still connect with you it doesn't really matter.

The wall in your fanpage is the most important part of the entire page, everything you publish there will also appear on the wall of anyone who is a fan, so make sure you never spam, you never use bad language, and you never write about irrelevant topics. Specifically, your fans are fans because you are a local business for their town, or they feel a connection with your business, so don't abuse this.

I always recommend to clients that they publish to their wall at least 2 or 3 times per week. You can publish more often, but unless you have something good to say it isn't worth it, and 2-3 times per week is great for your SEO activities as well.

New Coupon Code from doteasy

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 19:31:47 +0000

Regular readers will have seen a previous article I wrote about doteasy, a company that provides free web hosting and domain registration services, and I had an email from them (because I am a customer) advising me of their new coupon code for a free hosting for a year with the purchase of a domain.

OK, now before you rush in to tell me who your favorite host company is, let me tell you about the doteasy offer. US$7.95 for a .com/.net/.org domain, and 12 months hosting for 100mb of storage and 1Gb of transfer, and you can host multiple domains if you want.

The coupon code is 1003BPM, and you'll be buying US$7.95 domain registration, that link is not an affiliate link, it just has the coupon code in it so go ahead and click it.

Now, why this is such a good deal, and why I mention it, is that I'm a niche keyword marketer, and let me tell you getting hosting at this kind of price for small 4-5 page websites that earn you AdSense or affiliate income doesn't happen very often. In my own case I'll make that US$7.95 in a couple of hours or less, but I get 12 months for the site and that is pure profit.

Most internet marketers will tell you they use multiple host companies and I'm no different, and I recommend doteasy often because for niche sites their pricing cannot be beaten, and many of the small business owners I advise only have very small websites, but they still want a presence online, and if I can show them how to use the free website creator instead of doing the website for them, then we both win becuase my job is SEO, not webdesign.

I know you can get hosting from other companies for around seven bucks a month with a lot more disk space and traffic allowance, but just compare the annual price against $7.95; literally doteasy is 11 times cheaper than the other majors.

And the thing is that niche sites don't even have very many pictures, pretty much all of mine are less than 100kb for the entire site with a dozen pages, a few images, javascript library and css, so 100mb of disk space is plenty, and anyone who tells you you need unlimited disk space, unlimited domains, and unlimited transfer is basically recommending a host that oversells; doteasy don't, all of my sites perform really well and respond fast, and I make a good income from not spending more than a few dollars per year.

Quickly Change an English Word into Spanish

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 08:04:00 +0000

Here's something a little different for my website visitors who wonder when am I going to add more about learning Spanish, after all I do live in Spain and I do have a few articles about the language, but sometimes I get distracted with other topics like SEO.

Well, today I got an email from Marcus Santamaria whose list I subscribe to about instantly adding a bunch of words to your Spanish vocabulary to help you understand and speak more confidently, and all you need to do is change one letter in many English words to instantly convert it to Spanish.

Here's how it works, any word that ends in TION in English can become CION in Spanish, so information => informacion, collection => collecicon, solution => solucion, vacation => vacacion etc. Actually Marcus has translated a Beatles song into Spanish to show how easy it is to get to grips with Spanish;

You say you want a revolution
You tell me that it's evolution
But when you talk about destruction
You say you got a real solution
You ask me for a contribution
You say you'll change the constitution
You tell me it's the institution

Then in Spanish;

Dices que quieres una revolucion
Me dices que es evolucion
Pero cuando hablas de la destruccion
Dices que tienes una solucion verdadera
Me pides una contribucion
Dices que cambiaras la constitucion
Me dices que es la institucion

Actually there are 325 words that can be converted this way, and you can get the entire list from Marcus' blog post Easy Spanish

Auto news and spy shots are how I relax

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:50:33 +0000

Anyone who is a regular reader of this blog will know I'm quite passionate about cars, it all started when I was a boy, I had a scrap book of newspaper clippings from the auto section with all my favourite cars, I actually wanted to build a collection of photos of every car ever built, and luckily the auto section of newspapers in those days used to cover the auto industry including car shows.

These days I don't bother with newspapers because I get all my motoring news from the web, and websites these days usually offer video and podcasts, aside from written articles about car repair or the latest model.

Actually I enjoy watching videos of cars, especially production model spycams, or race spec custom builds, I think it's only natural, guys like cars and we like to see what designers are testing on the roads even if we never get to drive these autos ourselves. I subscribe to Motorward's RSS feed, and a bunch of other lesser known auto sites, simply because I can't be bothered using search engines to find the latest car news.

Motorward seems to be written by a bunch of people who are real enthusiasts even if their English isn't spectacular, you get the feeling people in Germany track what Audi, VW, BMW, Mercedes are doing then quickly write up a piece without getting it proofread, but the news is up to date, and I guess that's probably the most important thing.

I should add the disclaimer that whilst I've fiddled with auto repair in the past, I actually don't like repairing cars, I always thought it was better to take my car to the workshop and hang around talking to the mechanic while they did what needed to be done, but I do still like reading about auto repair because you never know when it will come in handy.

However the most appealing reason for subscribing to auto news sites is to see the latest car spy shots, for me it doesn't matter if they'r eAmerican cars, German or other European cars, or Japanese cars, I like to see the next model without all the finishing touches; speculating over a cold beer with friends if the new model will be better or worse than other brands makes for a great evening.

Of course I'm always right and they're always wrong, but they can't help it, I just know more about cars than them, and even if they don't agree with me I'll be proved right or they'll forget and it won't matter.

My Advice, chase lower paying AdSense ads

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:38:21 +0000

Anyone who wants to make money online knows that one of the easiest programs that pays is Google's AdSense, a pay per click program that website owners can sign up for. Advertisers bid cents or more for each click that brings traffic to their websites, the aim being to convert the site visitor into a buyer. Smaller niche websites often perform better than larger websites because they are more targeted to a particular keyword, and that attracts specialist advertisers who may pay more.

I'm not going to tell you how to sign up for AdSense, nor am I going to tell you how advertisers determine the rate they're willing to pay. You and I are make money online people and we only care about getting money from people clicking the ads Google puts on our websites.

There aren't any AdSense ads on this site, so I can't tell you to look at the ads, but you probably have ads on your own site so take a look at them in relation to the content on your page. Chances are the ads are somewhat similar, something Google calls being relevant.
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Adding Pages to your Blogspot Niche Website

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:33:47 +0000

A lot of people laugh when I tell them that Blogspot is a fantastic platform for hosting your niche websites, they tell me you don't really own the website, that Blogspot isn't as functional as Wordpress, or that Blogger doesn't look appealing.

I disagree, for me Blogspot (or Blogger if you call it that) is a great platform, and it's just got better with the addition of pages, which I think are still in beta.

In the past if you wanted to give the illusion of pages on your Blogspot blot you'd create a new blog post then backdate it so it was so far back in your blog timeline that very few people would find it. The new beta pages alows you to create a page just like in Wordpress, and then select where in the template you want the menu displayed.

Currently Blogspot offers menu placement under the header or in the sidebar, and you can choose to enable a link back to the homepage as well. I have to say I'm impressed with this, it is several years late, but a lot of small business people start with Blogspot for their company website, and a lot of newbie bloggers do too.

What this means now is that it's possible for niche website creators to use Blogspot more effectively by putting their about, contact, and privacy policy into a page, and leave the articles for the blog posts, thus splitting things up just the way you like.

Whether you use AdSense or affiliate programs, Google's Blogspot is a great hosting platform because it's fast and reliable, and you can add your own domain to the site if you want. Sure you can't sell a Blogspot account, but you can sell the domain if you've bought one for your Blogspot, and if the site is a niche site, then you can also sell the content.

All in all, I think pages has given Blogspot a new lease of life and I think this quiet revolution is going to transform Blogspot, and make it impossible for people to continue to ignore the service.

Crafting Anchor Text for your Website

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:11:35 +0000

I've talked in another article about the importance of anchor text in backlinks, actually looking at that article from early 2008 I'm feeling a little awkward even admitting I wrote it, but in the world of SEO a lot of things change, and so have I.

Yup, in two years I've gone from mega SEO fanboy, to really not caring a heck of a lot, let me tell you why. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is more about common sense than anything, and you can optimize the crap out of your pages, but in the end if the other site has more backlinks than you, they're going to beat you in the SERPs.

Sure there are other factors at play like authority, age etc, but in the cold hard light of reality, he who has more and better backlinks wins. This is why it is so important to get those backlinks, and why it is so important to make sure they are phrased in a way that appeals to search engines - coincidentally, this also helps human readers so it's a win/win for everyone. We call that crafting your anchor text.
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Spinning Articles for Even More Exposure

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 10:06:17 +0000

One of the things I do in Spain is provide consulting services to people here who want to know how to promote their websites, too many people who own websites are also computer illiterate, it isn't their fault, but it means they have a lot of catching up to do.

I could waste a lot of time showing them how to create squidoo or hubpages, teach them how to blog, encourage them to join forums, but the reality is that none of these promote their business website fast enough. Article submission on the other hand is easy, effective, and a heck of a lot faster.

Article submission can still be time consuming if you write every article from scratch, and of course submitting the article also takes time. Now multiply that by however many article sites you want to join, and the workload becomes unmanageable.

Consequently I spin articles and then use an automatic article submitter, and I gotta tell you this works a treat. In a couple of hours I can write one completely new article, spin it using rewritten phrases, sentences, paragraphs and even synonym swapping, then submit the article to over 100 article directories. That is a huge return on my time investment.

Some of you reading this post will say, "Ah, but spinning never reads well", and I'd say you're doing it wrong!
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Blogs to increase backlinks and traffic

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:41:04 +0000

A recent article I wrote was about backlinks, specifically crafting great anchor text, but now I want to take the entire process forward another step and talk about blog links that work for me.

I love when people comment on my sites, the more comments I get the more I feel like I'm connecting with people and sharing something worthwhile. If you blog on any subject it's good to get comments and boost your ego. Of course I never get as many comments as the a-list bloggers, but I'm not chasing huge traffic like they are so it's understandable.

The second reason I love comments is that they actually increase the amount of content on my page, every person who comments and leaves a paragraph or two gets approved, and their comment increases my page length by another couple of paragraphs. This is why I also try to answer every good comment with a couple of paragraphs myself.

It doesn't take very long to get a 1000 word article converted into a 2500 word page when you include 10 comments, and it doesn't matter if half the comments are yours, why? Because it's more content. The only thing you should try to do is keep your comments on topic.
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Twitter and Promoting your Website

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Sun, 31 May 2009 11:22:21 +0000

I've been playing with Twitter to promote a couple of my websites, with varying success, but I think I see huge potential from tweeting that most website owners could probably take advantage of.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that restricts the number of characters per message to 140, this allows them to piggy back off mobile phone SMS services as well, and after the initial shock of only writing 140 characters most users soon become quite adept at using the service.

For my own experiments I used Twitter for two sites, one of which is a business site all about Spain, and the other a blog with entertainment stuff on it, not news, just videos, gossip, pictures that sort of thing. I found that each required a different approach on Twitter if I was going to increase traffic to the website.

The entertainment blog only needed me to follow as many people as I could, thousands if possible, and wait for them to follow me back. Then I'd post regular updates with links to the blog for the latest videos etc. This Twitter account worked really well, and referred a lot of traffic to the blog, and increased blog feed subscriber numbers. The potential for doing this is almost unlimited when you consider the number of people who Tweet.

The business website was completely different, it isn't as simple as just following and tweeting, I think a smarter, more thoughtful approach is preferable. To begin with I simply tweeted about the website, linking to my Spain pages, and followed all the other twitterers I could find who tweeted about Spain or learning Spanish.

But that doesn't work, following everyone else in your industry doesn't actually help drive traffic to your site. It might help with exposure amongst peers, but what are you more interested in, reaching your peers, or reaching your customers?

This is probably one of the biggest failings for business tweeting. How do you let a potential customer or at least someone who is interested in your product know that you tweet? I use both of Twitter's search engines, the topic search and also the name search, but to really make the most of Twitter I make sure I reply to conversations that have even the smallest connection to my topic.

Of course if you're a business and decide to tweet, be sure to make sure you tweet or message helpful advice or comments. Nobody likes a spammer and you'll get blocked pretty quickly.

Tweeting for many business owners seems like a waste of time, but I've noticed an increase in traffic to my website, not just from referrals, but also from search engines. I'm not sure why, but it seems like my own website has improved it's SERP since I started tweeting, and I wonder if the nofollow on a Twitter profile page is being ignored by Google?