I was prepared with an agenda before I started the show, but it was not in any way scripted. I spent a few hours writing a clear series of pointers a few days prior to the event, so it definitely kept me from going off topic too much. This was a good and bad thing for me. A script would have been less entertaining, but a list of topics that I had to adlib at some times seemed as if I were unprepared.

Here are my tips to making a good podcast:

• Be confident. There would have been no way for me to accomplish this without really knowing the information I was about to discuss. Run each topic through your head a couple of times and make sure you’re prepared.
• Be “in the moment”. You absolutely have to create a distraction free workplace. Turn off your cell phone, IM, e-mail, and close the door.
• Be comfortable. Sit in a cozy chair, have good posture, and speak in a relaxing, resonant voice. This will keep your tone pleasurable to listen to.
• Be hydrated. Bring a bottle or two of water-not soda, coffee, or tea. This will ensure your voice sounds the same throughout the entire broadcast.

Here are a few bonus tips I’ve learned:

• Use a good sound editor, like Logic or Pro Tools.
• Use a powered condenser microphone and an audio interface. This will keep your voice sounding crisp, clean, and professional. Adjust the EQ or apply digital filters until you’re satisfied with your sound.
• Use a “pop” filter to prevent unwanted vocal sounds from showing up in your recording. These sounds include “pa”, “ta”, “da”, and many others that sound as if you are tapping the microphone.
• Breathe properly through your mouth. Never, ever, ever breathe through your nose. The proper way to breathe is immediately before you start talking. This should be a very quick sounding breath.
• Don’t record everything at once. Just like when you record music, you record the verse, then you record the chorus, then you record the bridge, etc. Podcasting can be the same way. Record topic one, pause, record topic two, pause, and so on. Edit as you see fit.

I hope these tips are able to provide a good source for you to get started with your own podcast and I look forward to sharing insightful Internet Marketing advice with you!

Website Evaluation iPhone Application

I am heavy in the development process for my latest endeavor: The iPhone App Store! I have created an amazing tool that anybody can use to get a detailed report of their website’s health. Here are some of the features were have included in our internal beta:

• Domain Info
  • Page Loading Time
  • Whois Info
  • Googlebot Last Access
  • MSNbot Last Access
  • Technorati Last Update
• Ranking
  • Full URL PageRank
  • Google PageRank (domain without www)
  • Google PageRank (domain with www)
  • Alexa Traffic Rank
  • Quantcast Rank
  • Compete Rank
  • Technorati (Blog) Rank
• Search Engine Positioning
  • Keywords
  • Google SERP Position
  • Yahoo SERP Position
  • MSN SERP Position
• Internet Directories
  • DMOZ
  • Google
  • Yahoo
  • Wikipedia
  • Archive.org
• Linking
  • Backlinks
    • Google
    • Yahoo
    • AllTheWeb
    • Altavista
    • .GOV
    • .EDU
  • Outbound Links
  • Internal Links
• Indexed Pages
  • Number of Indexed Pages On
    • Google
    • Yahoo
    • MSN
• Landing Pages Information
  • Title
  • Description
  • Keywords

I will keep you all in the loop on further developments. I can’t wait to show these screenshots!

Weekly Podcast

I am starting a weekly podcast that can be downloaded on iTunes beginning March 9th, 2009. Our first topic will be on Google Insurance and I’m really stoked about having the opportunity to help businesses on a regular basis master their online presence.

Monthly Video Subscription via YouTube

My goal is to provide monthly website evaluations on YouTube. I believe this will be a great opportunity for company’s to get a grasp about things they are doing right, things they are doing wrong, and things they could be doing better.

Twitter Updates

On a side note, do you have a Twitter account yet? If not, sign up today and become a follower to get the scoop on more exciting marketing news.

I was performing keyword research yesterday evening-which I always do on Sundays, I find that it’s a neutral day to work-and while doing so, I found an outstanding method to expand your keyword inventory: spy on your competition’s Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. I’ve used this method in the past for isolated situations, but I’ve never used it as part of my methodology for finding profitable niches-until now.

If you think about it, your competition would not be bidding $5-$10 per click on specific keywords if they did not see a return on investment. These words should be at the top of your list for writing content and expanding your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and PPC campaigns. Targeting these keywords first is a smart idea because they have been proven by industry competitors to be profitable.

I recommend Googling your most relevant keyword. From that, generate a list of the top 100 keywords from each advertiser on Google AdWords. Do this over a five day period to cancel out advertisers who aren’t relevant and are short term. After a week, you should have over 500 words, their average CPC, and their maximum CPC. Narrow those keywords down to the top 250 words with the highest maximum CPC and remove the keywords that haven’t yielded a significant amount of daily traffic.

This isn’t to say you should throw out traditional keyword research. Services like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker should definitely be used in conjunction with this method. The most important thing is to organize these keywords into as many groups as possible and sort them by the highest amount of searches. These groups should give you ideas for writing targeted content. The individual keywords should suggest terms that need be included within each article.

If spying on your competition is something that interests you, there are plenty of tools on that market that use the Google AdWords API to display this information. A few of these tools include: SpyFu, PPC Web Spy, and Keyword Spy. I personally subscribe to PPC Web Spy and have been very happy with the functionality and ease of use. Having the right tools will save you hours of extra work and make the mind-numbing job much more enjoyable.

** Just a clarification, when I use the phrase “spy on your competition”, it is not intended for unethical behavior. The tools I use only provide publically available information. **

How does PageRank work?

PageRank is the science behind where you rank in the search results. The higher your PR, the higher up in the results for a specific keyword. The lower your PR, the lower in the results. A PR is achieved by the following four factors:

• The total amount of recommendations you have (in other words, the number of relevant back links). Note: these back links must be related to your website and be relevant.
• The amount of links from high PR websites has a much bigger impact than links from low PR websites.
• Your PR is diluted by the amount of external links on your own website. In other words, if you are linking to a bunch of other websites, you are lowering your score.
• and finally, websites that have been around longer have a much bigger impact or your PR than websites that have only been around for a short period of time. It is sometimes better to have a back link from a lower PR that is aged, than a higher PR who is new to the web.

If you would like to estimate your PageRank, you can do so by using the following method. Look up the PageRank for each of your back links. Then, calculate the total point value using the table below:

PR1 = 8 points

PR2 = 64 points

PR3 = 512 points

PR4 = 4096 points

PR5 = 32768 points

PR6 = 262144 points

PR7 = 2097152 points

PR8 = 16777216 points

PR9 = 134217728 points

PR10 = 1073741824 points

Next, take your total point value and enter it into the formula below where C(A) represents the total number of back links:

PR(pts) * 0.85 / C(A) = PR points transferred through one link

Here are a few things to consider when PR-building:

• If you are able to, start off with an older domain name. If you can purchase a website that’s been around for a while, you will rank faster.
• Extend your domain name registration for 10 years. If you know you’re going to be around for a while, let Google know.
• Add rel=”nofollow” to your anchor tag to prevent GoogleBot from following links and pages that dilute your PR.

If you would like to begin link building, check out the table below:

As you can see, it takes much more effort to achieve a higher PR simply by adding back links. It is far easier to build your PageRank if you can get the attention of high PR websites.

We have a tool in our resources section so you can see the amount of back links and how Google currently ranks your website. Click here for the PR tool.

So you can see my sarcasm when I chuckle at those who constantly login to their profiles making updates throughout the day-giving up-to-the-minute statements of their activities, commenting on photos, and installing profile applications that further invade their privacy. But make no mistake; this is marketplace that should be tapped into. It is a great opportunity to keep up with marketing trends and find new relevant leads.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a network every business should be involved in. It is an excellent way to associate connections, find people you’ve worked for in the past, collect valid testimonials, and analyze the size and capabilities of competing companies. It also features groups so you can collaborate with others in your field. You can also recruit new employees based on the profiles of its members.

Here are a few tips to make the most of LinkedIn:

• Require all of your employees to have an updated-well written-resume. Try not to think of the negative impact of an employee possibly leaving if they are found by a recruiter. Most likely, they keep an updated resume anyways.
• Require employees to solicit testimonials/recommendations from past employers or clients. This adds confidence to your to other companies that choose to work with you.
• Require each member of your staff to make their profile public and allow it to accept any incoming connection request.
• Create a company profile page and require all employees to be added as a “current employee”. This will link each profile to your corporate LinkedIn page.
• Be sure your web address is included on your company page and on the pages of each member of your staff. This is likely to increase your website’s PageRank.
• Integrate your company’s blog into your staff’s profiles using Bloglink or WordPress.
• Integrate feeds using the “Company Buzz” application.
• Get creative. Create groups and associations and invite people to join. This is about building a network.

Facebook

Facebook is another system every business should use to expand their network. Not only can you see personalities of people within your network, you can use that data across the entire website to advertise products and services based on their profile data. Another benefit to using this service is the size of its user base. It is very likely that 8/10 people you know already have profiles.

Here are a few tips to make the most of Facebook:

• Go to Pages and create a company presence. This can be found in the advertising section at the bottom on the screen. Creating a page is free.
• Include your company’s logo, biography, hours of operation, and contact information within the page.
• Be sure your web address is included on your company page and on the pages of each member of your staff. This is likely to increase your website’s PageRank.
• Have each member of your staff become a “fan” of your company. This will link their profile to your company page.
• Write OpenSocial applications to make it more interactive.
• Consider adding applications that get more data from friends in your network. You would be surprised how birthdays, favorite movies, books, and places they’ve visited can greatly help your relationships.
• If you sell a product or service in a niche market, consider paying for advertising to benefit from their highly targeted and relevant sales tool.

Twitter

Just like Facebook, Twitter was one of those services I swore I’d never use-until one day I tried it and got hooked. It allows you to make status updates throughout the day. Your connections are called “followers” and they are able to see your status and make replies. While this sounds like an impractical and ridiculous activity, I have found so much useful advice and tools here that I would have never found elsewhere.

Here are a few tips to make the most of Twitter:

• Create a Twitter profile with your company name, logo, and web address
• Create a custom theme that matches the colors and brand you use in your marketing materials.
• Install the Twitter app on Facebook and other Social Networking sites to keep your status in sync everywhere.
• Don’t go crazy with the Twitter updates, but try to Tweet at least twice per day to stay relevant.
• Only tweet about professional topics. Nobody needs to know that you’re doing the dishes.
• Invite friends and clients to use Twitter so they can become followers.
• Install Twitterific on your company and iPhone to make these updates easier.

Google Insurance is a series of methologies geared to protecting your business from frustrated customers, nasty competition, and slander via blogs, forums, and other venues that can be used to negatively impact your company’s image. It is important to perform a series of best practices to prevent a bad situation from happening. This can easily be done through regular SEO maintenance.

Consider the following doomsday scenario: You have a profitable business, several employees, large accounts, and a fairly high retention rate. While most of your customers are very satisfied, you have one client who is difficult. This client verbally abuses you, is never satisfied, and spends every waking moment making doing business with them as miserable as possible. You make a decision that it is time to let this particular client go and cut your losses.

The client decides to get revenge and writes a negative rant about you in their blog. A bad situation gets worse when Google crawls the blog, which has a better PageRank, and their blog entry ranks higher than your website. Suddenly, when your company is Googled, that blog entry ranks higher for all of your targeted keywords–including your company name.

New business comes to a complete halt and current clients decide to take their business somewhere else. You consider suing the blogger for slander, but you realize that there is no use. You have no choice but to restructure under a different name and start over.

Although you may not hear about it often, this situation happens every day to companies who fail to take the proper precautions to ensure their website is optimized for the search engines. Proper SEO could have prevented this bad situation from becoming a corporation killer.

Here is a list of things every company should be doing:

• Make sure your PageRank is not “0″. That PageRank is reserved for websites that are new and have not been ranked yet. Sometimes, a “0″ ranking is a result of being delisted from Google because of blackhat SEO.
• Check to see who is linking to you and who you are linking to. Use “link:www.yourdomain.com” in the search query to see what your backlinks are. You should have backlinks with high PageRanks, this will ensure that your PageRank is high and your website is healthy.
• Consider hiring an Internet Marketing firm to manage all aspects of your website’s health.

SEO is not just a method of bringing traffic to our website, it is also a safety mechanism. It is important to understand that in this economy, many companies are getting nastier and many are investing in Internet Marketing firms to enlarge the gap between them and their competition.

Let’s say that you have a national commercial that is airing in 50 different states (or regions) and you wan to maximize the effectiveness of your advertising. If you knew that there were states that were sucking your profit high and dry and you could do something about it, would you? Of course you would! But how can do effectively analyze the statistics from a television or radio ad?

I’ve seen this technique a few times and it has been proven to be extremely effective. What advertisers are doing is really clever! They’re registering several different domain names and airing different commercials for each region with a special domain name. So if you were trying to advertise Jamorama via a commercial, you could tell your viewers to visit 123PlayGuitar.com in Virginia, 456Playguitar.com in California, and so on. I’ve seen advertisers who have hundreds of domain names to sell their products and maximize their advertising dollars.

Another way to use this method is to have a different advertisement on each network. If Lifetime isn’t producing very good results, perhaps you should spend more money on ESPN instead. One company who does this is CrazyFox.org, who have a number of different domain names to test the effectiveness of lead generation: 296crazyfox.com, 45crazyfox.com, 199crazyfox.com, 86crazyfox.com, etc.

Why is this method so effective (and why is it necessary)? The first rule in business is to get rid of your bad customers. These are the ones that are costing you more in advertising to bring in than the profits that are returned from them. They if people in Hawaii don’t buy your product, simply don’t advertise to them. Sometimes loosing an entire market of bad customers can take your business to new heights!

• iso
• cheat
• free
• p2p
• serial
• key
• warez
• crack
• hack
• password
• cracked
• keygen
• torrent

All of the above keywords relate to illegal ways of obtaining a digital product, and I know through my research that promoting to these people are a complete waste of money because they are most likely not interested in buying the product. The benefit to using negative keywords is that you increase your Click-Through Rate (CTR) and you lower your Cost Per Click (CPC) because you are removing visitors that are not relevant to your business. If you were to simply qualify your visitors, your CTR would be decreased, so you actually end up saving money instantly.

You also want to use negative keywords when bidding on phrases that can have other meanings. For example, if you’re bidding on “houses”, you may want to remove some of the following:

• doll (for doll houses)
• half way (for half way houses)
• dog (for dog houses)

Does this make sense? Look at how much money you could save if you removed your ad from searches that didn’t relate to your business.

If you promote a bad quality website on Google AdWords, it is very likely that you will get penalized by Google by automatically lowering your Quality Score. This means that just throwing up a review site with a few affiliate links will not pass Google’s quality standards. It may have worked in 2002, but this is not the case in 2008. If you’re trying to build this kind of website, you need to have as much quality content as possible. Now why does Google penalize you for this? They do not want people to click on your ad and immediately leave your website–which can likely happen when you don’t give them a reason to stay.

This is how Google has been able to dominate all of it’s competition over the years. Yahoo and MSN are at least two years behind Google. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last week, you probably have heard that Microsoft is trying to acquire Yahoo so they can be competitive with “the G word”. They are hoping that their combined traffic can create a competitive search engine alternative to Google. Going back to landing pages, Google was able to completely grab market share overnight , and this is how they did it: they started implementing quality standards into their algorithm. Unless your website has quality content, whether it’s a website promoted through SEO or PPC, you’re not going to easily grab any kind of ranking with their service. Google AdWords, in order to stay a step ahead of it’s competition, must force strict standards on the companies that advertise with them.

It is also important to remember that Google AdWords crawls your website once and it’s not disclosed how often they will “re-crawl” your website. This means that if you don’t have quality content and you’re penalized, it might be months before you can recover. If you are “Google Slapped”, as we call it, you need to call Google’s Customer Support and ask them to re-crawl your website once it’s been corrected.

Another benefit to building a website with quality content is that it will give you free traffic, because Google will also send more organic search results to your website. So, instead of building a one page website with to throw AdWords dollars toward, build a quality website that people want to visit! That is the formula to getting quality traffic.

You see, Google is not trying to punish you, rather, they are trying to make the most money off of you as possible–which, in turn, makes you a lot of money. They want to people to click on your ads. They really do! If your ad is not being clicked on, they’re loosing money from other businesses who have ads that people want to click on. So, Google automatically places the best performing ads on the first page of Google’s results and penalizes those ads that don’t perform by increasing their Cost Per Click (CPC).

So, how do you increase your CTR? Believe it or not, it’s really easy. All you have to do is test your ads.

• First make sure that you bid on Exact, Phrase, and Broad versions of each keyword.
• Organize your keywords into AdGroups. Like I said before, it’s a really good idea to create a separate AdGroup for each keyword and put different variations of those keywords into each group.
• Bid on Negative keywords. This will increase your CTR by not showing your ad for keywords that don’t perform.
• Put each keyword into your ad body as much as possible. Make sure it’s in the headline, the body, and the display URL.
• Split test your ads. Remove ads that don’t perform and replace them with ads that do perform.

Most people I talk to about Google AdWords share stories of failure. They simply don’t understand how people can afford to pay $1.00-10.00/click and stay in business. The truth is that although the minimum CPC may be expensive, having a very good CTR will lower your CPC dramatically. I know people who bid on keywords that are $10/click, and they pay only 50 cents because they have such a high QualityScore. In reality, you can build a more successful AdWords campaign than a Fortune 500 company who spends millions by only spending a few thousand. If you know what you’re doing, the possibilities are endless.