Twitter and Viral Marketing

This post is a 3-fer. Three for one.

I was wondering what to post today on this humble blog. Couldn't think of anything so I went to play on Twitter. (I do that a lot on Twitter - play. It's good for you!)

I saw Ricci Neer's retweet post ( initiated by seanclaes , an interesting writer/photographer) about The Naked Accountant. Took a look and was impressed. In this video we have an accountant (how mundane?) talking about how a good accountant can make your life simpler and more enjoyable.






Now that is marketing! You can bet I will think of The Naked Accountant when I need accounting help in the future.

So, we have two benefits to show: 1) the power of Twitter to help us through our day; 2) the power of a viral video on YouTube; 3) introduction to Sean Claes.

Ain't life grand?

Greg Cryns
The Mighty Mo Website Design and SEO Promotion
Nursing Programs Online
.

Introducing LETRON, fabulous singer

20 Ways To Make $100 A Day Online


I am the proud papa to my daughter, LETRON, who made her first music video last week.

aka, Liana Piper Cryns is an rising star singer in Los Angeles

LETRON"S website:
http://www.myspace.com/lianapiper

Missing Johnny Carson

20 Ways To Make $100 A Day Online

This video has nothing to do with buying or selling anything or about marketing.

It has a lot to do with enjoying life and humor. I miss Johnny.

Happy Sunday, 4/29/09

SEO is just one piece of the online success puzzle

If you build a good website, one which provides your visitors with information they want to read or see in video, chances are that in time you will gain respect from the search engines and your rank will rise. You may even get some top rankings for some key phrases.

I advise my clients to obtain good basic SEO advice from experienced professionals. I also encourage my clients to use the existing resources of smart people within their company to do much of the legwork and continue the SEO work done by your professional advisor. Read more in this fine Guest Post.

Finding Balance Between SEO and Non-SEO Traffic Generation
Copyright (c) 2009 Kurt D. Lynn
KLynn Inc
http://www.klynn.ca/

So much SEO.

You might think, from all the buzz about search engine
optimization - SEO - that it offers a cure for all the world's
business ills. Somehow, SEO has been propelled from the
backwaters of Internet geekdom into the forefront of modern
business marketing. For example, if Google's own search results
are any indication, the interest in SEO yields almost 50% of the
interest in general advertising. That level of interest seems way
out of proportion to the realities of business advertising.

So Why All The Hubbub?

The excitement seems to be around the notion that SEO means
"free advertising", that it means, if you do it right, millions
of people will be clicking through to your site willy-nilly
having found you on some search engine and then will immediately
do business with you. And behind all that excitement are
thousands of overnight SEO "experts" that, variously, all claim
to ... (pick one)

* Have SEO secrets that will help you get an unfair advantage
over the next guy;

* Guarantee you a first-page listing for an incredibly low
monthly rate;

* Provide hundreds of high page rank sites that will link to
your site;

* Give you 5/10/20 quick tips to immediately improve your
rankings;

* Tell you what Google/MSN/Yahoo doesn't want you to know about
SEO;

* Tell you that whatever SEO you're doing is all wrong; or

* Some other variant of the above.

To some extent, this notion of "free advertising" is not
altogether inaccurate. SEO can result in your site being found -
free of charge - and it can result in traffic to your site that
may, in fact, result in new business. But the reality of SEO is
not quite that simple.

SEO Is Far From "FREE".

SEO takes work... often, hard work. For those that aren't
familiar with what's involved in SEO, below is a list of some of
the typical activities that (as the CREST commercials used to
say) "when applied in a conscientious program of regular
professional care" will result in higher search engine rankings.

* Researching and selecting keywords that are truly relevant to
your desired audience;

* Researching competition for desired keywords;

* Researching and analyzing competitive websites;

* Re-writing and restructuring your website to address desired
keywords, to be more accessible by search engine "crawlers", to
appropriate label meta tags, headings, and inter-page links;

* Create a program to build links to your site from other sites
(directories, exchanged links,article marketing, etc.)

* Create a program to keep content on your site regularly
refreshed and synchronized with all the above.

* Regularly (daily or weekly) monitor all the search engines and
your competitors positions

SEO Is Not Easy.

Doesn't quite sound as easy as some people suggest does it?
That's because it's not. And it's all the more complicated
when you realize that every site on that first page, and on the
second and third, is trying to do the same thing - but against
you! You boost your rank above them. They go to work and boost
their site back above yours. And so on and so on... It's a war
and the SEO "experts" are the arms dealers.

Your Goals And Those Of The Search Engine May Be Different.

If you're going to pay good money for SEO, it may also be
worthwhile to keep in mind that search engines don't necessarily
have a goal of making you the most findable site on the web. The
bottom line for them is making sure that their users finds what
they are looking for. Satisfying that requirement may mean that
you don't and should not come up first. Google is the number one
search engine for a reason: Google users get results they want.
Those may not be the results you want.

Short Term and Long Term.

In the short run, there may be some serious benefits from
investing in SEO to boost your search engine rankings. In the
long run, however, there's probably not much you can do beyond a
certain point. Frankly, if you have a finite budget, altering the
basic nature of your site and trying to boost how valuable your
site is to others (as represented by links to your site) can only
be taken so far. After a point, the perfect market
characteristics of the search engine will prevail.

Balance SEO With Other Forms Of Traffic Generation.

What this means is: yes, do make sure you do the essential SEO
necessary to optimize your rankings in search engines. But do it
in the context of an overall marketing program. Definitely use
SEO to ensure that you get a fair and accurate appraisal by
search engines. But also invest in other non-SEO lead-generation
methods to bring traffic to your site and business to your table.

Above all, measure the results of your SEO and non-SEO activities
carefully and frequently. When SEO reaches the point of
diminishing returns, cut the rate in which you invest in it and
boost your reliance on non-SEO marketing to reach your goals. In
the long run, traditional non-SEO marketing may just be the most
reliable and consistent way to boost traffic to your site.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Kurt D. Lynn has been a founder, cofounder, or senior executive
of half a dozen enterprises in both the U.S. and Canada.
Currently Kurt provides consulting and communication services
focused on the needs of emerging and growing businesses. His
consulting firm, KLynn Inc, offers an assortment of proven
services for the development of sound marketing strategies,
tactics, and project execution. His communication services,
while more diverse, are focused on optimizing sales and
marketing effectiveness: http://www.klynn.ca/


I add that social networking may be an important aspect of your online success. Article marketing could be another. Blogging yet another. There is much more you can do on your own to improve your targeted visitor count. Keep that in mind. You need targeted visitors, not plain vanilla visitors who leave as fast as the arrive to your website.

Greg Cryns
The Mighty Mo Website Design and SEO Promotion
.

The Power of Google: case study

20 Ways To Make $100 A Day Online

A month ago I received a very disconcerting email from Google.

I was told that someone had hacked into one of my websites and placed some malicious code on one or more of the pages of a profitable website I own. Google told me it would suspend the site from its directory for "at least 30 days."




I use the Firefox browser that somehow determines that there is a bad code problem with any web page I surf to. Before I made the change I went to my site and sure enough a warning box appeared on my browser window exclaiming that I could get into the site at my own peril.

The folks at Google were very understanding. They said it was understood that I was probably not to blame and I was advised to go through my site, page by page, to find and delete any suspicious code. I did this and I did find something on the main page. I wish I had examined the code more closely but I was so anxious to get rid of that warning box that I just erased that code snippet and uploaded the page to my server.

I did not contact Google. Maybe I should have, but I had a lot going on. I planned on contacting the company but I dropped the ball because I was very busy. Also, I was getting some traffic from Yahoo, MSN and a few other places.

Two days ago I noticed that this site was showing increased activity when I checked my Adsense report. I went to Google to find out if any pages had been re-indexed. (You can do this by typing in "site:(your site name)" into the Google search engine.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw that all the pages were re-indexed by Google. This leads me to the real reason I am writing this post, the power of Google.

Below is a graphic showing the number of unique visitors I had this month (4/09) from 4/6 through today 4/15. My site was re-indexed early on 4/12. The visitor count was 26 on 4/11 and 107 on 4/12. Keep in mind that this is a well established website, with decent PR. So, Google not only put it back on the Internet map, it brought it back with everything intact including my high placements for key words.

When Google came back into the picture for this website, I started getting more than six times the number of visitors I was getting with the other sources. This is the number I was getting before the site was removed from Google's index.

My sincere thanks to Google for keeping its word and for its great customer service team.















Greg Cryns
Wahm Search Engine
.

Keyword Questions: google

I found this nice tool over at John Alexander's Wordtracker. It is called Keyword Questions.




You put a search word in and Keyword Questions spits out what it found in the search engines recently.

For example, I entered "google" and here are the top 30 results:

1	how does google maps work	269
2	how often is google earth updated	222
3	who invented google	187
4	how do you google someone's name	172
5	how do you google someone	112
6	who owns google	110
7	who created google	100
8	what happened to google	97
9	how do i google a person's name	93
10	how do i clear previous google searches	88
11	why is google not working	88
12	what is google finances	86
13	who started google	85
14	how many web pages is google currently searching	72
15	who founded google	61
16	how do i sign up for google mail	49
17	why is it called google	48
18	what happened to google today	44
19	how do i google myself	42
20	when did google become a company	42
21	what is google reader	41
22	how do you google yourself	38
23	how to google someone	34
24	how do i delete items from my google search bar	33
25	how do i google a person	32
26	how to google for people information	32
27	how do i google someone	32
28	how can i find my google stats	31
29	when did google stock go public	29
30	how to google a person	28

How does one google a person?

Greg Cryns

Customer service: selling is not a bad word!

Twitter may or may not be all that it's cracked up to be, but I've made plenty of friends and discoveries during the past few months of highly active Twitter participation.

For instance, @RobbDrury responded to me by directing me to a customer service video. I almost did not click the link thinking it was just another sales pitch. I am glad I did finally click that link because I think we need to think of customer service no matter what level we achieve in a company.

In fact, I will say that the most successful companies these days are those that understand that everyone in the company needs to be an evangelist for that company. Achievable? Probably not, but we can hope that a large percentage of our fellow employees will be evangelists. Why? Because if the company succeeds, I succeed. If you say that making money to put food on your table is not your idea of success, well, then you are lying. That may not define "success" but then we are discussing nuances of a word.

Back to Twitter, I ask people if they want to exchange "business cards" through Twitter. See, I think everyone on Twitter is in business even if they are not selling things. But we all are at least selling ourselves in one way or another. We need to get away from the idea that "selling" is a bad word.

Watch this video sent Robb Drury to see what I mean.

photo by jennifer könig

Greg Cryns

Court rules trademarked keywords cannot be used by third parties in Adwords

In a reversal of the smaller court decision in Rescuecom v. Google for Google, the appellate court ruled in favor of Rescuecom.

This decision, though regional, will have national impact on the use of Google Adwords.

The ruling prohibits the use of trademarked keywords even in ad titles as well as in the ad text in the landing page.

The intent of the law is to prevent confusion by consumers. Read a good summary of this important case at Search Engine Land.

Greg Cryns
The Mighty Mo Website Design and Promotion
.

Colbert interviews Twitter's Biz Stone

This is very funny, even if you like Twitter. ;)

Greg Cryns
The Mighty Mo Website Design and Promotion

.

Twitter maintenance message

Did you every see this Twitter note before? I saw it today at about 2PM Pacific time.



















Greg Cryns

100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and Phrases in English

There are lots of mispronounced words. This listing is both educational and fun. Do you spot any of your own mispronounced words here?

100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and Phrases in English

Greg Cryns
Wahm Search Engine
The Mighty Mo Website Design and Promotion
.

Copywriting: 100 Most Often Misspelled Words in English

Everyone makes spelling errors. But in a world where you are judged by your first impression, you certainly want to show off your intelligence.

Read through the list of misspelled words in English. See if this helps.

100 Most Often Mispelled Misspelled Words in English

Greg Cryns
The Mighty Mo Website Design and Promotion
Wahm Search Engine - affordable advertising
.

Google cache- what is it?

When you do a Google search for just about anything, you will see the word "cached" on the bottom line of the search result (SERP).





What does this mean?

Googleguide.com (not associate with Google) explains it this way: "Google takes a snapshot of each page it examines and caches (stores) that version as a back-up. The cached version is what Google uses to judge if a page is a good match for your query."

Google saves the cached page with the date saved at the top of the browser window. So, if the result is not what you were looking for the page may have been changed since the day Google cached it. You can see what the page looked like when Google cached it.

You can also use the Way Back Machine to see what a page looked like before Google started caching the pages. I will always appreciate the Way Back Machine because more than once I've deleted important pages on my websites. They could only be recovered there.

So, if you were thinking that the Google cache was a bad place like Purgatory or the infamous Google sandbox, so rest easier.

In fact, it has been suggested that the cached date of the page may be more important than the vaunted "Page Rank" of that page. Think about it. If you see a recent date on the cache page it means that Google spent the time to visit it recently. This impliesmore trust in the site and page. [I did some checking with my own sites and I see that most were cached during the past week whether I changed those pages or any other pages in the site or not. So, I do not think this idea is valid.]

Greg Cryns
The Mighty Mo website design and promotion
.

12 Seconds offers value to social networkers

Have you discovered 12 Seconds yet?

12 Seconds is a fast rising social network featuring very short videos (12 second max length) from anyone who wants to post one (within reason with the usual caveats).



The most important aspect of 12 Seconds to me is how easy it is to put a video on my website or blog. Uploading to YouTube can be a drag.

Other uses may be simply to put a message out to the social networks, send a link to grandpa, research topics and keywords.

Just for grins and giggles check out The Girls of 12 Seconds .

Here is an example of how one fellow uses 12 Seconds to promote his newsletter:

Welcoming You to my Twitter page on 12seconds.tv

Here is Cate Sevilla showing her business card

Business Cards! on 12seconds.tv

Dave Saunders talks about his Webinar

Just finished tonight's webinar on 12seconds.tv

The uses for 12 Seconds are as big as your imagination.

Photo by Chad Arizona

Greg Cryns
The Mighty Mo Web Design and Website Promotions
.

Sales Letters: How long is too long?

Guest post

Hey! Why the Long Sales Pages?
Copyright (c) 2007-2009 Mark Silver
Heart Of Business
http://www.heartofbusiness.com/


So, you get one of those emails from someone whose business you
kinda like. And it's got some enticing little message in it- so
you click to take a look at the offer.

And suddenly you find yourself in highlighter land. Broad streaks
of yellow, lots of exclamation points, and pages and pages of
words making all kinds of claims and promises. And when you
scroll allllllll the way down to the bottom, there isn't even a
price. You need to click on an 'order now' button before they
even tell you the price.

Steaming, you swear by all that is holy that you will never, ever
subject your customers to that kind of nonsense.

So when you go to sell your own offer, say for instance a
seminar, you write up a simple, clear paragraph or two about it,
add few bullet points, and an understated offer. And hardly
anyone responds. Oy!

Do you have to be hyper-hypey to get customers?

Let's get clear: these sales pages are there to do one thing...
and it's not selling. Nope, they aren't selling. So, what are
those pages doing?

Those pages are holding a conversation with the reader. What
conversation? The same conversation you would hold if you were
trying to fill a seminar, and someone who was interested called
you to ask about it.

I've had plenty of those conversations, and I bet you have, too.
How long are you on the phone? Twenty minutes? Thirty minutes? An
hour?

Time flies when you're connecting heart-to-heart.

Have you ever read Shakespeare?

Remember studying plays in grade school? Your middle school Arts
and Literature teacher Mr. Snyder tells you, "Read through page
61 of Romeo and Juliet for Monday." And the class groans- 61
pages by Monday!

Yup, 61 pages. The first half of the book.

How long is 61 pages?

I believe it takes about two or three hours to play out Romeo and
Juliet on the stage. The Folger Shakespeare Library edition is
245 pages, but every other page has historical notes. So we'll
just count half. 122 pages.

Let's be generous, and say 122 pages in three hours. 40 pages an
hour. 20 pages in thirty minutes.

How long was your sales page again? Three paragraphs and five
bullet points? Well, you've just had the equivalent of a
45-second conversation with your reader.

"Uh, yeah, I've got 45-seconds to tell you about the seminar,
and then I gotta go."

Not very generous or helpful to your caller, eh?

You can still put away the yellow highlighters.

No, you don't have to write pages and pages of fluff, full of
hype and yellow highlighters. But, you have to give me, your
potential customer, more than 45 seconds.

How much more? Here are a few pointers:

Keys to Writing Your Offer

* Find the questions.

In the Opening the Moneyflow class, one of my clients took thirty
seconds to describe an upcoming seminar- and then the other class
members let loose. Question after question after concern after
concern. Many of which my client hadn't considered before.

Describe your offer, in less than a minute, to people in your
target market, and then ask for any and all questions that come
up, no matter how oddball. The answers to all of those questions
need to be woven into your offer description.

* Make the concrete very clear.

There are logistical facts about your offer- price, what's
included, location, time, quantity, materials, etc, etc. Put all
of those in a box that is very easy to find and read. And put
them at the bottom.

Because the written format is static, it's hard to present the
information in one way that everyone is going to like. If you put
the information at the top, it's like putting a big price
sticker over something, so they can't even see what it is. You
have to peel back the price before you even know what you're
looking at- that's not really fair to either party.

If the information is in the middle- it can be hard to find. So
put it at the end- easily accessible, right out in the open, but
not in the way.

* Start with empathy.

Before you get into describing your offer, and the benefits, use
a paragraph or so at the beginning to create empathy for the
problem that your offer solves. For instance, if you help people
who have chronic pain, spend a few sentences describing what
it's like to live with chronic pain, so your readers feel seen
and understood.

Then they'll have more space to hear what you want to tell them
about it.

These are just a few pieces that can help your offers connect
more strongly to your readers. Find successful sales pages from
people you respect, and print them out. Study them carefully. See
if you can find 10 or 20 things that you notice about those
pages.

And give it a shot yourself. Don't be afraid to wander into
having a longer page, knowing that the people who really need
what you are offering WANT the information, and may read it
word-for-word several times.

The best to you and your business,

Mark Silver

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Silver is the author of Unveiling the Heart of Your
Business: How Money, Marketing and Sales can Deepen Your
Heart, Heal the World, and Still Add to Your Bottom Line.
He has helped hundreds of small business owners around
the globe succeed in business without losing their
hearts. Get three free chapters of the book online:
http://www.heartofbusiness.com

Greg Cryns
Website Design and SEO - The Mighty Mo
.