Online Marketing From Home

A couple of weeks ago I posted a very positive review of Kevin Riley’s new step-by-step blueprint for creating video commercials, called Recipe For Shooting And Distributing Sales-Pulling Video Commercials.

You see, I really believe that videos can be a very powerful marketing tool, especially when they go viral. Today I came across an excellent case study of just how powerful and profitable videos can be…

The following video, made by Len Foley, called “The World’s First Bionic Burger” has already been viewed close to 1 million times!

According to Len Foley the video is still being viewed between 1,000 and 10,000 times every single day! You would have noticed in the video that he is promoting his website called TheBestDayEver.com – A membership site that currently has about 1,000 members paying $29.95 per month. That is about $30,000 per month!

Although not all of the members joined his site thanks to the “Bionic Burger” video, the video earns him about $11,400 per month in passive, residual income. Not bad when you consider that it did not even cost him $82 to produce the video…

Many people will argue that the conversion rate (views that result into sales) of viral videos are very low, and they are right. However, it is an excellent way of gaining publicity at hardly any cost. Just imagine how much money you would have to spend on Google Adwords to get 1 million clicks!

Now for the best part…

Len Foley and his partners produced an ebook called “Viral Video Secrets” that is currently selling for $47 on ViralVideoSecrets.com. However, you can get this 86 page ebook for free by visiting http://www.viralvideosecrets.com/free/ (Not an affiliate link)

Trust you have enjoyed this case study! If you enjoyed this post and see the benefits of using videos I highly recommend you get your hands on a copy of Kevin Riley’s Recipe For Shooting And Distributing Sales-Pulling Video Commercials (334 pages and nearly 500 screenshots!). You will not be sorry!

To YOUR Online Marketing Success!

Francois du Toit  

First of all, sorry for the blunt title ‘HITS – How Idiots Track Searches’…

I received an email this week from one of my list members about the meaning of ‘hits’ and thought it’s a good idea to post my reply to him on my blog as well.

Many new webmasters are misled into believing that Hits = Visitors. They think that 10,000 hits mean their website will get 10,000 visitors.

It is true that when a web page opens it is considered as a hit. However, if you have three graphics on that page, each of those will be counted as a hit as well. The reason is that each one has to be downloaded separately from the server to be seen. In other words, in this case 1 Click = 4 Hits!

This is one of the main reasons why ‘hit counters’ are so ineffective although I have noticed that a lot of webmasters are still using them.

Based on the above, the number of hits your site receives every day is irrelevant, hence my title ‘HITS – How Idiots Track Searches’. What is important is the number of VISITORS you get!  

I use Google Analytics on my sites. First of all, it is free and secondly, it provides me with some great statistics, such as:

- Number of Visits
- Unique Visitors
- Page Views
- Pages per Visit
- % New Visits
- Average Time on Site
- Traffic Sources

Let’s quickly have a look at the significance of some of these statistics:

Number of Visits, Unique Visitors and % New Visits

Although the ‘number of visits’ is important, remember that one visitor may visit your site several times a month. You need to know how many ‘unique visitors’ you are getting.

A high percentage of ‘new visits’ is not necessarily good… It may be an indication that most visitors never return to your site. This may be normal if you have a sales site and they have bought your product. However, if you have a content rich site it may indicate a problem… Your site may not be sticky enough (no reason for people to return).

In order to get a clear idea of what is happening you have to monitor and compare your statistics on a monthly basis.

Page Views and Pages per Visit

This is obviously not important if you have a one page sales website. However, if you have a 100 page content website it is very important.

Although it is not realistic to expect a visitor to visit all 100 pages you have reason to be concerned if the average visitor only visits 1.2 pages! (For example, when you get 120 page views and 100 visits).

There may be several reasons for this, including:

- Your internal links are not properly displayed.

People do not have the time to search for links! Make sure your links are properly displayed. In addition, include links to other pages in the body of your content.

- Your site content is too wide or not targeted enough.

Assume your site is about pets. This is too wide. You may get a visitor that is looking for information on getting a dog as a pet. However, it is unlikely this visitor will visit other pages on your site about cats, birds, etc.

It is a very common mistake made by new webmasters to go too wide…

Average Time On Site

It is a well known fact that you only have a couple of seconds to grab the attention of a visitor.

If the average visitor only stays 10 seconds on your page you have a problem! It can be an indication that he or she did not find what they were looking for. It can also be a case of your page loading too slowly (too many graphics, etc.). Hey, it is even possible that your page layout is in such a mess or your site is so ugly that nobody likes it!

Use this statistic to make improvements and test the results of these improvements.   

Traffic Sources

I have a problem understanding why so many webmasters do not track their traffic…

I want to know how many visitors I get from Google and what keywords they use to find my site. I want to know how many visitors I get from posting on forums and blogs. I want to know how many visitors I get from doing social bookmarking and what sites give me the best results, etc.

Two more things that I want to mention…

Setting up Goals

It is very easy and quick to set up ‘goals’ using Google Analytics.

For example, if I have a sales page and a download page (that can only be reached after payment has been made), I can set it up that every time someone reaches my download page it is recorded as a ‘goal’. It gives me very valuable information on how well my sales page is converting.

For more info visit Goals and Funnels

Block your own traffic by setting up a filter

Once your site starts getting thousands of visitors every month or even every day your own visits really become irrelevant from a statistical point of view.

However, your own visits can be a problem when you have a brand new site that is only being visited 10 times a day, and 5 of those visits are you!  

I recommend that you use the ‘Filter Manager’ function in Google Analytics to block traffic from your own IP address from being shown in your statistics. It will only take you a minute to set it up.

For more info visit Filters

The next time you hear someone saying how many hits he or she gets every day I trust you will remember this short post about hits - How Idiots Track Searches. Sorry again for the rude title. If you can find a better word that starts with an ‘I’ to replace ‘Idiots’ please let me know. :) 

To YOUR Online Marketing Success!

Francois du Toit

Before I get to my review of Kevin Riley’s latest ‘recipe’, called “Recipe For Shooting And Distributing Sales-Pulling Video Commercials” I have a confession to make…

I really suck at making videos! Have you ever seen one of my videos? No? Well, count yourself lucky!

Hey, it is not like I have never tried… It is just that I really dislike reinventing the wheel by teaching myself through trial and error, and, I have never come across a really good resource on how to create profitable videos.

Yes, there are many short little reports on the market about creating online videos. In fact, I even have the Private Label Rights to many of these. Have you ever seen me promote them? No, I won’t even give them to you for free!

Fact of the matter is that I have no doubt in my mind that I can significantly boost my sales and increase my mailing list by using video. There are many things that I am not an expert in and that I am not interested in becoming an expert in either. I either don’t really need to know it or I can easily outsource it.

Video is an exception! Here’s why…

The most important thing you need to significantly increase your online income is targeted traffic! Let’s be honest, the worst sales copy on the net, that gets a lot of traffic, will always make you more money than the best sales copy on the net that gets no traffic.

Pretty logical!   

Now there are many ways of getting targeted traffic. Some are free (bum marketing, posting on forums, etc.) while others can be quite expensive (PPC advertising, ezine advertising, etc.). As a general rule of thumb you will always get more traffic by paying for it. There are a couple of exceptions and video is an exception.

Video is very inexpensive. You may have some initial costs shooting a video but once it is done it is done. A powerful video can send a stampede of targeted traffic to any one of your sites at virtually no cost.  

How would you like to get an extra 1,000 or even 100,000 visitors per month? What impact would this have on your income? How many new prospects would you be able to add to your mailing list?

However, it is not that simple! You cannot simply just add any video to YouTube and expect to retire by next week. You need a sales-pulling video!   

Well, time for my review of “Recipe For Shooting And Distributing Sales-Pulling Video Commercials” by Kevin Riley…

“Recipe For Shooting And Distributing Sales-Pulling Video Commercials” is not really a recipe… It is a cookbook! In fact, it consists out of three books totaling over 300 pages (334 pages to be exact) and nearly 500 screenshots!

It is the most comprehensive package I have ever come across on how to profit from video commercials.

I would normally review any new product by listing the things I liked as well as the things I didn’t like… Well, there is nothing I didn’t like from “Recipe For Shooting And Distributing Sales-Pulling Video Commercials.”

Part 1 gives a step-by-step and fully illustrated blueprint of how to create a video that will attract targeted traffic, pre-sell to them and then send them to your site with credit card in hand.

Every step is laid out in great detail with simple, and easy to understand, instructions.

Part 2 (Two Books) gives you a step-by-step strategy on how your video(s) can rank very well in the search engines. In fact, even dominate the search results.

In addition, it explains how to get your video up on the most important video sites on the internet (not only YouTube!) and how to promote your video using the power of Web 2.0.

Being brand new on the market, Kevin Riley is selling “Recipe For Shooting And Distributing Sales-Pulling Video Commercials” at a special price, for now anyway…

I highly recommend it!

Click here for more information.

To Your Online Marketing Success!

Francois du Toit

Buying links to artificially boost PageRank has become quite common in recent years, despite obvious disapproval from Google.

During the last Google PageRank update (October / November) many sites got severely penalized by Google for buying or selling links that pass PageRank. (Several of these sites took a big hit, such as dropping from a PR 6 to a PR 3)

Although many webmasters have reported that the drop in PageRank has not adversely affected their rankings in Google (organic traffic), the long-term impact is not yet evident…

Note: I recently posted an article here titled The Truth About The NoFollow Attribute where I explain the significance of Google PageRank as well as the NoFollow attribute. Suggest you refer to this article for a better understanding of what is meant by “PageRank” and “NoFollow”, if you are not familiar with these terms.

Paid Links and Link Schemes
  
Google is very clear about the fact that paid links that pass PageRank is in violation of their webmaster guidelines and can have a negative impact on your site’s ranking in their search results.

“Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating”

“Some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results”

Google specifically includes “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank” as an example of a link scheme.

Source: Google – Link Schemes

In fact, Google even goes as far as encouraging people to report any site that is buying or selling links that pass PageRank.

Source: Google – Why should I report paid links to Google?

What about paid advertising links?

This is what Google has to say about paid advertising links:

QUOTE

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

UNQUOTE

Source: Google – Why should I report paid links to Google?

When may it be worth it to buy links that pass PageRank?

In principle, it is not worth it if you are serious about search engine optimization. The fact that many webmasters have gotten away with it for a long time does not mean the risk of being discovered by Google is low.

Google is continuously working on improving their already advanced algorithm and trying to outsmart them for short-term gain is not very smart. I guess the question should be: “Do you feel lucky?”

I can only think of one case scenario where you may not care about the potential negative impact of buying links that pass PageRank, namely if you have no interest in how well your site ranks in Google.

Some webmasters could not care less about Google and PageRank. They are mainly interested in buying links on high traffic sites in order to get traffic. They do not rely on organic traffic. This is often the case when a webmaster is using a squeeze page, simply to build his list or subscriber base.

On the other hand, if you are serious about building a website or blog that will rank well in the search engines then I would strongly advise you against paying for links that pass PageRank. 

All the best,
Francois du Toit

The NoFollow attribute or NoFollow “tag”, as it is often referred to, has led to many heated debates amongst webmasters since it was first introduced by Google.

Although the debate on whether the NoFollow attribute should have been introduced, or should be used by webmasters, will probably never end, there are many misconceptions about it. I trust this post will clarify many of these misconceptions.

Let’s start at the beginning… What is the NoFollow attribute? Why did Google introduce it? Why do I need to know about it?      

What is the NoFollow attribute?

The NoFollow attribute is a bit of code that looks like this: rel=”nofollow”. It is not part of the visible content on a website or blog. It is used by webmasters to inform search engines, such as Google, how they should treat hyperlinks.

Example of a hyperlink not using the rel=”nofollow” attribute:
<a href=”http://www.website.com/”>My Website</a>

Example of a hyperlink using the rel=”nofollow” attribute:
<a href=”http://www.website.com/” rel=”nofollow”>My Website</a>

In both above mentioned examples the phrase My Website (Anchor Text) will look identical and will be a clickable hyperlink. However, by using the NoFollow attribute in the second example Google will not give the link any credit.

To quote Google: “When Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results”.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

The best way to establish whether a website or blog is using the NoFollow attribute is to follow the following easy steps:
Step 1: Open the site in your browser
Step 2: Right click
Step 3: Left click on “View Source”
Step 4: Left click on “Find”
Step 5: Type in: nofollow

Should the site be using the rel=”nofollow” attribute it will be displayed.

Why did Google introduce it?

The simple answer is to combat comment spam. For example, to discourage comments like “For cheap Viagra click here” to be posted on blogs.

Before the NoFollow attribute was introduced comments could be posted on blogs, resulting in the poster getting a hyperlink (backlink) to his site as well as some traffic (site visitors) from people clicking on the hyperlink.

Backlinks from sites that use the NoFollow attribute are basically worthless.       

Google felt that if blogs were to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute that fewer spam comments would be posted just to get backlinks.

The main arguments against using the NoFollow attribute are:

1. If Mr. A makes a good comment on the blog of Mr. B (adds fresh content to the blog) surely he should be entitled to get some “link juice” from the blog for his efforts. If he does not get any “link juice” will he still take the time to post good comments in the hope that it will result in some traffic to his own site?  

2. Surely the owner of the blog can decide to pre-moderate all comments first before they appear live on the site and, even if he does not pre-moderate them, he can still delete all inappropriate and spam comments.

3. It has not had the desired effect of reducing comment spam.

4. Blogs, such as Wordpress blogs can combat spam by using selected plug-ins that can help identify and prevent comment spam.

Note: The NoFollow attribute is set as default on all new Wordpress blogs but can be removed by the blog owner.  

In my opinion, the main reason why Google introduced the rel=”nofollow” attribute was not really to help sites combat comment spam but to prevent the manipulation of Google’s algorithm.    
 
This is a bold statement. In order to understand its significance we have to understand the importance that hyperlinks play in Google’s algorithm, and we have to understand the significance of PageRank (Google Trade Mark).

According to Google, the heart of their software is PageRank - “A system for ranking web pages”. In the eyes of Google a link from page A to page B is a “vote” by page A for page B. The more “votes” a page gets the more important that page becomes.    
http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

Note: Relevancy plays a big role. For example, a link from page A (pornographic site) to page B (desert recipes site) is not relevant and will largely be discounted.

Google makes no secret about the fact that “webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34432&hl=en
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349&ctx=related 

The number of relevant links from high-quality sites determine the PageRank of a web page (on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being the lowest and 10 the highest). All else being equal, web pages with a high PageRank will rank higher in the search engines for a specific keyword or key phrase than web pages with a low PageRank.

Note: Google does not rank sites only based on PageRank. There are many other factors they take into consideration. However, the fact remains that PageRank is an important factor.

When blogs started increasing in popularity Google realized they had a serious problem on their hands. Many people would spend hours every day just posting little comments on relevant and high-quality blogs to get one-way hyperlinks back to their own sites, thereby increasing the importance of their own sites as well as their search engine rankings. 

If Google left this unattended it would make a mockery of their PageRank system. They realized that many webmasters did not pre-moderate or moderate comments, often due to the fact that some blogs have hundreds of blog entries and many webmasters simply do not have the time to review all comments.

Based on the above, it can be argued that Google did themselves a favor by introducing the NoFollow attribute and that combating comment spam to help webmasters was of secondary concern. After all, the rel=”nofollow” link does not prevent spam comments from being posted and it does not prevent the hyperlinks from being clickable, sending traffic to the spammer’s website or blog.

Are there any advantages for webmasters to use the NoFollow attribute?

Absolutely!

1. It does limit content spam

Many spammers specifically look for blogs that do not use the NoFollow attribute and will not post comments on blogs that do. It is hard to estimate by how much spam comments have been reduced thanks to the NoFollow attribute.

I still see a lot of comment spam on blogs that do use the rel=”nofollow” attribute, presumably posted by people that have not checked whether or not the blog is using this attribute or by people that don’t care and simply post comments in the hope that it will generate some traffic to their website or blog.

I have seen some webmasters complain that using the NoFollow attribute has had a negative impact on people posting comments… Well, I would rather have fewer comments posted on my blog than many stupid comments from people that are only after backlinks, have nothing really to contribute and will probably never visit my blog again after posting!

2. It is important who you are linking to!    

As previously mentioned, a link from page A to page B is seen by Google as a “vote” by page A for page B. You cannot control the sites linking to your site but you can control the links from your site to other sites.

Google is very clear that webmasters should take care who they link to. According to Google: “Avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected by those links”.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Checking out hundreds of posts and links to make sure they are not links to “bad neighborhoods” is practically just about impossible and a waste of time. 

By not using the rel=”nofollow” attribute you run a huge risk that at least some of the links on your site may point to “bad neighborhoods” and that Google may rightly penalize your site.

By using the NoFollow attribute you are basically saying to Google “I did not post this link, someone else did. The fact that this link is on my site should not be seen as a “vote” from my site to the other site.

People that post on blogs only to get backlinks will obviously be disappointed by the rel=”nofollow” attribute. What some webmasters do not realize is that even if a site does not use the NoFollow attribute, and is relevant to your own site, that if the site has a lot of hyperlinks the value of a hyperlink to your own site is very much watered down… Anyway, maybe this will be a good topic for a future blog entry.   

Thanks for reading this very long blog entry on the NoFollow attribute. I trust you have not had too much trouble staying awake. Looking forward to reading your comments!