Yahoo Search is Dead!
Last week Yahoo! began transitioning certain back-end functions for its Search product over to Microsoft’s search platform. The transition is now complete. If you follow the world of SEO closely, welcome to a two-horse race.
Yahoo! Web, Image, and Video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now being powered by the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada (English) and more markets will follow shortly. Yahoo! is advising that webmasters continue to provide site information to Yahoo! using Site Explorer until the full global transition is complete (not expected until 2012).
All actions performed on Site Explorer that webmasters perform including site and Web page submissions, feed submission deleting and un-deleting URL, adding dynamic URLs and undoing dynamic URLs will be shared with Bing. Site Explorer will still exist after the transition and will ultimately provide analysis of the traffic that sites receive from search originating on Yahoo! and its partner sites. Yahoo! is working to finalize a revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come.
Yahoo! stood firm with its promise to “continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike.”
And now for an important counter quote from Lawrence Garfield (Danny Devito) in the 1991 film Other People’s Money:
Amen. And amen. And amen. You have to forgive me. I’m not familiar with the local custom. Where I come from, you always say ‘Amen’ after you hear a prayer. Because that’s what you just heard – a prayer. Where I come from, that particular prayer is called ‘The Prayer for the Dead.
Today’s Math Lesson – Irrational Numbers
I’ve been talking about the emergence of this next gold rush now for well over a week. My friend brought it to my attention in an email about 10 days ago. I’ve been into the Internet since 1988. I’ve been an avid Internet marketer since about 1992. My gosh how things have changed! Moore’s Law doesn’t even come close to applying here. It appears to me that since about 2003 we have been taking quantum leaps every six months or so.
I reported two days ago that after the first 24 hours my friend had banked just over $200,000 from the sale of his instructional course on exactly how to take advantage of this booming mobile device market. I thought that sales would taper off after the initial launch. That has typically been the marketing model for internet launches over the past decade. But today my friend emailed me again to express his elation. Three full days into his 15-day campaign he has over 5,000 customers and has banked nearly $900,000!
If there was ever any doubt as to the strength of this market, that question should now be answered. Who doesn’t want to take advantage of the biggest marketing pool in world history? This is bigger than Google, bigger than any corporation and is intensely indicative of the powerful entrepreneurial spirit that is alive and well today. My friends, you are witnessing the changing of the guard. You are witnessing the birth of the most robust market shift ever.
Remember when we were kids and we said to each other, “What if we could get everyone in the world to give us a dollar! We’d never have to work again!” Well, those days are now here. Everyone in the work now CAN give you a dollar. But I will guarantee that you will definitely not want to stop working. You will be having way too much fun.
Is there a downside to this? Yes, I suppose there is. I think it is too easy to do. If things are too easy, then too many people may end up getting in. That bothers me a bit. I realize that might sound selfish, but when you put your life into building these kinds of businesses, it just doesn’t seem right. At the same time, many people are lazy and unfocussed. History shows that nearly 98% of those who buy these kinds of programs actually never even finish the course. This one might be different since the learning curve is much less than the Internet side of things. I guess we’ll see over time. I expect that this gold rush will may at least 1000 millionaires by the end of 2011.
It will be very interesting to see who is in that exclusive group and who isn’t. Will one of my readers be there? I sure hope so! There is nothing I would like more than to correspond with someone who read my material and went on to become a millionaire.
New Market Revs Up
A few days ago I started talking about the newly emerging market for high volume impact. We know the internet has just over 1.1 billion users. Well, this new market is over five times the size of the Internet market and users are more motivated to buy! This is the hottest market, buy far, that the planet has ever seen.
Did you buy share in Google in 1998? Did you buy shares in Microsoft when Paul Allen and Bill Gates were running around in jeans marketing their “Traff-o-meter?” Neither did I. But in the years since, I vowed to never again miss an opportunity of this magnitude.
To really understand the potential here, you have to look at the big picture. Some time ago, Google purchased Friendfeed for who knows how many millions of dollars. There’s no revenue stream coming from Friendfeed. It’s a free application. What could Google possibly get out of Friendfeed? What they get is demographics on what you are doing. They know what websites you visit. They know how many times you visit a website and they know what you were looking for when you found that website. What Google gets is demographics on a population’s surfing habits.
When you get to know people that well, you can begin to predict behaviour. And THAT is worth billions of dollars to marketers. So when we learned earlier this year that the mobile device market is now over 5 billion strong, you just had to know that this was somehow going to turn into something great. Google went out and recently purchased AdMob, a CPA network for mobile devices. Why would Google buy a CPA network if there was no money in it? Exactly! They wouldn’t.
Once again, my strongest advice is to get in on this wave. I believe that we will have two or three years before the mobile market peaks. In that time, you – yes you there in your underwear reading this article – have a chance to build an empire. You can get started for next to nothing. You can get clicks for as low as 1 cent! And your market is 5.1 billion strong, and they are looking for you!
What I really like about the way this is developing is that you can even do this without a website, or the knowledge it takes to build one. Mobile text ads are delivered in a highly targeted, contextually aware marketplace. This new model is laser beam marketing!
In the next six months, I expect there will be dozens of books out to sell you on the idea and the methods I’m talking about here. What I want to do is give my readers the “leg up” on the competition. Find out about this new wave and be the first into it this time.
The Death of Websites
Over the past few days we have talked a lot about the next gold rush. By now, anyone reading my material knows my prediction for mobile devices. With 5 times the traffic of the Internet, mobile devices are going to be the next major boom for all of us in this business.
One of the reasons that mobile is going to be so attractive is that for the first time ever, it engages women. Demographics has long indicated that the Internet is primarily a male dominated platform. That’s not to say that women don’t participate or do well, but they just don’t dominate the way the men have done so far. With mobile devices, the tide may be turned.
It is going to be a bit of a learning curve for men who are the first to catch on to new marketing system. They won’t be used to marketing to women. So, newbies and women, take note. If you start now, you may have an advantage over even the most sophisticated guru. Entrenched marketing habits can be difficult to purge.
We are going to see the rise of mobile ad marketing to both women and men. One of the reasons for this is that the demographics are more readily available. Unless they quickly change privacy laws, mobile ad marketers will be able to target right down to the neighborhood. This is going to be a good thing for your local bricks and mortar businesses too as they try to capitalize on the massive traffic streams now available to them.
While all this is going on, you are going to see a slight shift away from Internet marketing. The same people on the net will also own mobile devices, and since mobile device advertising is actually easier, a lot of the effort will swing that way. At the same time, whenever there is movement, there is opportunity. The smart marketers will look for market opportunities by keep an even closer eye on the keyword tools.
My advice is to develop a “trap line” to farm your niche ideas. I have a dozen places I go to dig up trends. I research the keywords and cross-tabulate the results. By doing this you will stay current on niche trending. When you see your spot, you will be ready to take action.
And all of this will happen without the use of traditional website design tools. No longer will we need high end html design tools and 4″ thick books to teach us all about cascading style sheets. It will all be done with one simple WordPress template. The one I use is capable of creating landing pages, squeeze pages, blog sites, member pages, contact pages and much more. There is no longer much need to know html or CSS design. As these tools refine, its going to be “drag and drop” or “click and design”.
The real value will come from your creativity and your ability to manage your trend spotting. Just be ware that the Internet will go through a slow-down for the next little while as everyone tries to figure out how to capitalize on the new mobile market.
The REAL Cost Of Getting Started
You can read thousands of blog and never get a straight answer to the one burning question. What is it going to cost me to get started in this business? Of course, we are talking about Internet marketing. I don’t think I’ve ever run into anyone who would be right up front with you. They all appear to want to build up the hype, only to leave you somewhat disappointed afterward. Allow me to smash the mold!
Let me preface by saying “yes” it is easy to do, but “no” most people don’t find it easy. The real question should be why is that so many people fail? Why do they find it so hard to get started? The real answer is that no guru has ever lead them completely through the jungle. Some will charge you $7 for a pdf about the existence of a jungle. Another will charge you $17 to read about is trip to the edge of that jungle. Still another will charge you $47 to read about his overnight stay in the jungle. The odd geek will charge you $97 for a soon-to-be obsolete copy of their little program that describes the scenery along the way to the jungle. The big guru, living on the beach in California, and driving his fancy sports car, will sell you a $497 program to explain the psychology of getting people to buy the stuff the other guys tried to sell you. And of course, the heavy-weights will log in with their monster programs that charge you $1,997 to summarize everyone else’s work and give you cute little “mind maps” about how to find the road to freedom by outsourcing.
Are you ready to puke yet? Maybe you’ve been there and met one of these guys or bought his program. That may be why today you are still looking and hoping to find the answer you know will get you there. You might be thinking that continuity programs might do it. I hate to pop your bubble, but they are devised by lazy people who just want a perpetual income from keeping you excited.
The real cost of getting started is “integrity”. It’s a currency that appears to be in short supply from what I can see. So I’m going to tell you today that there are a dozen or more paths you can take to reach your goal of earning a full time living online. What you need first is counselling about the pros and cons of each of those paths. That is something that can’t be bought or sold – ethically at least. You need to find the guru you trust and ask the questions. You need to understand that coaching people is tough. And the class size cannot be large. It can’t be done by continuity programs.
There needs to be a one-on-one connection through phones or by Skype. It is like financial planning. Your position in life, in your community, in your family and in your relationships will affect your choices. You need to know this stuff up front.
In reality, your actual software costs will be quite low. You need an auto-responder account and the ability to type. Typing is the only thing I learned in high school that was of any use. Everything else was fluff and filler. If I had my Macbook Pro and the ability to type a little earlier, I would have been finished with high school by age 14. But I digress.
At one time you needed a html design suite. Those days are gone. Now you can do it with a great little WordPress theme that I use. It totally rocks. If you are lucky enough to find a good guru to help you, you may be able to piggy back on his auto-responder to get started. A good auto-responder costs about $53 per month. But for as little as about $200 and another $200 seed money for CPM, CPA or PPC, you are in. But this will work only if you get the right advice and get constant assistance until you are making $1000 or more every two weeks. At that point, you should be able to take the training wheels off.
That’s the reals scoop on getting started in the Internet business.
Earning An Income Online Has Never Been Easier Than Today
I have been marketing on the Internet for about 15 years. I never did quit my day job because for one thing, Internet marketing is easy and can be done in a few evening hours and on weekends. It is my hobby and I love it. At the same time, the income growth in the past few years makes it increasingly difficult to keep the day job. I suppose that at some point I will be losing money working a 9 to 5. Until then, I’m having a great time.
Life comes down to a series of choices. Choose the wrong foods often enough and you will be fat. Choose the wrong lifestyle and you might not live long. Choose to join the herd by watching TV every night, and you will never earn a living online. Perhaps if there was 36 hours in day we could pull it off, but there isn’t, so that’s that.
When you are motivated and energized by the excitement of earning online, it is very easy to get to bed on time and to get up early. I can’t wait to hit the home office at 5:30 am to log onto Clickbank or other payment gateway to see what I made. And at lunch today I was reading Glenn Reynold’s book “An Army of Davids”. Early in the book he says, “there will be more empowerment for individuals willing to take advantage of the tools that become available.” You should read that again! It underscores everything I’ve always said about this business. If you have average skills and a desire to learn, then you can take charge of your destiny. If you are coachable, that’s even better. An Army of Davids is about how society is moving increasingly toward smaller and smaller niche markets. Its about how an army of small guys can move global economic policy. There is no more powerful force on this planet that people like you and me with a burning desire to succeed.
Today there are more and better success-getting tools than at any time in history. All you have to do is recognize opportunity, then take a half dozen baby steps. I remember scanning my first Clickbank cheque for $8.36! I was so excited. But as you hone your skills and zero in on what works, the single digits soon become double digits, then triple digits – and on it goes. I remember my first $500 day. I told my family that if I can do one, I can do two. And if I can do two $500 days, why can’t I just string a bunch of them together? What’s stopping me? What is holding me – or anyone – back?
You are limited only by what goes on in your head. It’s called baggage and you need to drop those bags right now because your future needs you to travel light! If you’re on the edge, you need to take action now and get in. The new mobile marketing opportunities are tuned exactly for you. Find a mentor you trust and start asking questions. If he’s good, he will help you. No one got to the top without help and most of them are only too pleased to return the favors. That is how life works.
Why Newbies Fail
So lets say you have decided to become an Internet marketer. You have researched your niche market and decided that there is room in there for you. You have tested your keyword list on the big search engines and found sufficient traffic to warrant you taking a run at it. You have also nailed down your product and have guarantees of a good supply.
You have established fulfillment options and shipping charges related to getting your product to market and you still believe there is room for you. You might have even tested your product and received public testimony that supports the assertions you make about the quality of the product. Next you went out and registered a keyword-rich domain name and then secured reasonably priced hosting for your website.
After that you either built the website yourself, or you outsourced it to a trusted 3rd party developer. Now you are almost ready to launch. You gather the necessary graphics and plan out your page. You find that in your market there are perhaps 4 or 5 other competitors. You put up the ad copy for your product and then begin to seed the mine with your social bookmarking efforts. You have a list of 6 powerful sites that you use to ensure your site gets backlinks quickly. And you work diligently every day to make sure your site begins its ascent to the top.
After a couple of months you notice that you are beginning to appear on page 2 of your biggest search engine and on occasion you even make it to page 1. Suddenly you find that you not only start making some sales, but also you become a target for the other marketers. They post nasty stuff about you and they lie about your product and about you. At this point you are at the most critical fork in the road that you might ever imagine. How to react to this will make you, or toss you on the scrap heap with the rest of them.
I recently did some research on water ionizers and found the perfect example of this. There were 5 companies. I liked company number 1 and number 3. Company 3 had a great price because they didn’t have to support a 50% MLM payload. Company 3 just pays their affiliates a nominal fee for selling their product. I was heavily leaning toward company 3. When I went to their website, though, I was shocked.
The site was unprofessional and full of critical attacks and vitriol about company 1. It was as if written by a 20-year old male who hadn’t yet gotten control of his testosterone. The site said more about the state of mind of the owner than it did about the product. Why are we here? We are here to sell products.
Rule #1 – never even mention another company’s product. Take the high road always and simply expound the virtues of your great product. Ignore everything anyone says about you. You have the freedom to “not respond”. And in that non-response you will demonstrate your maturity and worthiness as a businessman.
I have seen so many newbies fail at this stage. Take a good look at your material and make sure your site is all about your product and not some fight you think you should be having with your competitors.
Mobile Device Marketing
It’s been two days since I first wrote about the newly emerging market for mobile devices. By now many of you know that mobile marketing represents 5 times the traffic volume of the Internet. The numbers are simply staggering. With 1.1 billion users world-wide, most people were quite happy to market to this audience. It is still a hot market and it just keeps getting hotter. If we stopped there and shut out the lights, everyone would go home happy. But wait….theres more!
Not only have we surpassed the number for Internet users, but we have done it by more than five times over! And the icing on the cake, is that of this group of 5.1 billion users, there is a significant number who are ADHD! These folks can’t wait for anything. You see them texting in their cars while driving, texting in theatres, texting on the bus, texting as they walk through the malls and pretty much glued to their mobile devices all of the time! If you can get their attention, you can get their sale. And let’s put aside, for now, the ethical issue as to whether it is fair to market to these people or not. The fact is they are mature adults and they can make their own decisions.
I recently connected with a fellow who published a course on mobile marketing. Since we are right at ground zero on this trend, I decided to buy the course and have a look at the material. It went on sale this morning at 8 am Pacific time. Within an hour, my friend had pulled in over $200,000 in sales. So if there is anyone left out there who thinks that people are not interested in making money online, then you should think again. These sales are only from people who want to learn how to make sales online. The market is phenomenal. I expect that by the time the dust settles on this one, my friend will have sold over 3,000 copies of his program.
I think that by months end we will have two clear marketing avenues to pursue. One will be the 1.1 billion person Internet market, and the other will be the 5.1 billion person mobile device market. Each market will require different marketing tools and strategy. The mobile device platform might be the easiest one to get started in since it requires the least amount of work and the fewest software resources.
Anyway you look at it, the future is golden for those of us in this business! Maybe we should be thinking about developing a marketing University?
SEO Bootcamp – 301 Redirects
Last week we talked a bit about search engine optimization and how the big search engines keep tightening their algorithms. Like anything else in this world, the more competition there is in a market, the tougher it gets to not just get to the top, but also to stay on top. Today I’d like to discuss an important “back end” aspect of managing your websites and their links.
For the purposes of this discussion, I use my own custom URL shortener that allows me to tweak all aspects of my redirects so that I can decide whether to keep page authority, or pass it on. You can accomplish the same thing if you are familiar with your host server and have access to the backend. You can use the tools in that back end to manage redirects.
I believe there is a lot of out-of-date information about redirect types and about they affect on SEO generally. I’m going to attempt to clear that up a bit here.
The “quick and dirty” on redirects is this. When I talk about redirects here, I am specifically referring to them in terms of what the search engine robots would see, and not so much how the ordinary surfer would see them. It is important to distinguish between the two. Basically, you should use 301 redirects when sending traffic to your site and want to keep page rank and authority on your site. You should use 302 or 307 redirects when sending traffic away from your site, but still want to keep the page rank and authority.
The search engine robots are often referred to as “bots” or “user-agents”. When a user-agent visits your shortened URL, it is sent to another web page – or destination page. When a user or search engine robot visits the link, they end up at a different web page through this redirect. You use this format when you have many pages and you have build strong page ranking for your site, but do not want to lose your authority, just because you moved the page to another of your sites.
Page rank is one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked by the big search engines. Each page on every site on the planet is assigned a page rank – usually on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest rank. When you redirect, you pass page rand from one page to another through a link in the page.
The page rank of any particular page is essentially based upon the quantity of inbound links to that page, as well as the actual page rank of the page providing the link. This is the reason that so many marketers try to get mentioned on .edu and .gov sites. Those domains always carrie very high page rank, so when your link in spotted by the bots on any of those domains, you get a big boost in rank and authority.
So what exactly is a 301 redirect, and why should I care? A 301 redirect tells the bots and user-agents that your page has been moved permanently. It says that all that counts is the destination link. The destination link is the new home of this page. It tells the bots and user-agents to bypass the old link in future and go directly to the destination page. And it is these results that will show in the search results and not your old and outdated link.
When you use 301 redirects, you are redirecting to pages on your own sites. This way you pass authority and rank from the site where the link is published, to your own sites, and thus improve your site’s search engine positioning. It almost goes without saying that you should put the keywords you want to rank higher for in the anchor “Click Me” text when you publish the link. Also, use 301 redirects if you are getting “404 not found” requests on your site to invalid pages. This way, you are redirecting those pages to the best page on your site that will let you not only regain lost traffic, but also let the search engines know that your site is a quality site.
Mobile Marketing Is White Hot
Earlier today I wrote part three of a series of articles designed to discuss the changing face of Internet marketing. When I finished part 3, I had no intention of writing another article before day’s end. However, after relaxing this evening with a couple of good movies, I decided to take one last compulsive check of my sites and posts. I use a special little program that was developed by a friend of mine to monitor the activity on my links. The program is a bit like these URL shorteners. It allows me to tag a descriptive name to the end of any link in my range of domains and have that link automatically register the visit before continuing on to the destination URL.
This is a very useful tool when doing PPC or CPA marketing. It keeps your campaigns clear in your head as to which one are producing and which ones are not. But when I when onto that application tonight for one last check, I had to do a double take. I launched a campaign today on a little known search engine to gage the interest in mobile device marketing. I launched the campaign at 4 pm Pacific time. When I just checked moments ago (11:40 pm Pacific Time), the traffic on that link was up a whopping 4,400%!
I have never seen a link take off so fast. And it is not like the link is highly advertised. The mobile market is the very leading edge of the coming gold rush. There has been very little discussion about it on the boards and forums. I bid only 2 to 4 cents per click, yet the site is getting hammered! The only reason I write this is to illustrate the importance of staying current with leading edge trends in Internet Marketing. I might have missed this one if it were not for a friend of mine sending me a short video he had done on the subject.
It also illustrates how quickly we can react to market changes. In less than 24 hours, I went from having no active interest in the mobile market to having three sites and a PPC campaign dedicated to it. This is the speed you need to develop in order to rock your Internet empire as well. All you really need to do is gather a few tools and have at lease one domain you can use. From there you need to learn how to be organized and how to conduct efficient market research. I say that only because I’ve seen many gurus advise all kinds of market research that usually involve you once again buying their $97 wiz-bang keyword-SEO tool so that you can know where the bones are buried.
I use one paid tool and three free tools and my research is done in 20 minutes. I use one premium WordPress theme that is so versatile it’s like having a dozen premium themes. I use about a dozen excellent plugins and that is about it. It helps a bit that I do my own graphics, but if someone has no skill or connections in this area, it is not a show stopper. I know some great places to find royalty-free graphics.
In the next article, I am going to attempt to drill down a bit more into this mobile device marketing concept.
