has 13+ years experience in web development, ecommerce, and internet marketing. He has been actively involved in the internet marketing efforts of more then 100 websites in some of the most competitive industries online. John comes up with truly off the wall ideas, and has pioneered some completely unique marketing methods and campaigns. John is active in every single aspect of the work we do: link sourcing, website analytics, conversion optimization, PPC management, CMS, CRM, database management, hosting solutions, site optimization, social media, local search, content marketing. He is our conductor and idea man, and has a reputation of being a brutally honest straight shooter. He has been in the trenches directly and understands what motivates a site owner. His driven personality works to the client's benefit as his passion fuels his desire for your success. His aggressive approach is motivating, his intuition for internet marketing is fine tuned, and his knack for link building is unparalleled. He has been published in books, numerous international trade magazines, featured in the Wall Street Journal, sat on boards of trade associations, and has been a spokesperson for Fortune 100 corporations including MSN, Microsoft, EBay and Amazon at several internet marketing industry events. John is addicted to Peets coffee, loves travel and golf, and is a workaholic except on Sunday during Steelers games.
Profitability with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising comes down to how well you have chosen your keywords.
Choose too generic a term and you will lose your shirt – and fast. Choose too specific a term and you’ll miss out on traffic your competitors will get.
For example, let’s say you offer a travel guides for sale online – here are some possible keywords with associated monthly traffic counts and top bid as of the time this article was written: (more…)
Whatever your home-based internet business is, you must have people visit your website. The best way for this to happen is to have a high search engine ranking. This takes time, skill, and money.
For those of us that have limited budgets and can’t afford sponsored links, full page ads, or speedy URL insertions, there is an alternative — The Pay Per Click (or PPC).
The Pay Per Click is geared towards business owners who have outgrown free classifieds, but are still not turning enough profit to advertise in the aforementioned way. (more…)
Not too long ago the search engines depended heavily on meta tags and keyword density to determine the positions or rankings of web sites. Google is the first search engine to shift its primary focus to link popularity when ranking web sites. Some other major search engines are doing the same. It is therefore very important to focus on link < popularity (in addition to meta tags and keywords) if you want to get a better placement on the search engines and drive more traffic to your site.
The search engines regard a web site as very valuable if there are several links pointing to it. The rationale is that an informative and useful site will attract the interests of several web site owners. These owners will link to this site as a benefit to their viewers and to increase the “content” value of their sites. (more…)
Search Engine Optimization
Many small businesses simply do not have the resources to hire a search engine optimization (SEO) company to promote their web site. There are countless resources online for do-it-yourself (DIY) optimizers where professional SEO’s offer general recommendations and advice. This article is my opportunity to offer more of my SEO experience in the form of a 10-minute optimization process.
This process will be effective for any page designed in HTML with at least 1 paragraph of html text but for the purposes of this article, I will concentrate on the all- important home page. (more…)
Email is a unique opportunity when you’re marketing. It’s like being a business owner and having the customer standing right in front of you, a captive audience. Treat this person as the target market and make your signature block, your sig, work for you.
It’s part of branding. Everything about you, and everything that comes from you, is consistent and bears your stamp.
If you’re in a professional service, such as coaching, add a quotation that reveals something of who you are and what your philosophy is. Use it with, or instead of, a tagline. (more…)
Search Engine Friendly Pages
Your web site may look beautiful to your eyes, but what about to the “eyes” of a search engine? If you can understand how a search engine “sees” your site, than you can design the site or make the necessary changes so that your site will get a higher ranking in search results.
The first thing to consider is that search engines do not see pictures or other graphics. If you have rendered some very important text (loaded with keywords) as an image, a beautiful multi-colored gif for example, the search engine will not index these keywords. There are some wizard-oriented web creation tools that may automatically change your text into a gif or jpg image. It may look like text to you, but not to a search engine. Thus, you have to weigh the relative importance of good images against the need to give the search engine some- thing to chew on, some “spider food”. Usually a balance has to be struck. At one extreme are pages that contain only images. For example if you have an entry page with a beautiful image of the ocean and a beautiful sunset with one word saying Enter. It may be dramatic looking, but it is not very interesting for a search engine. Similarly sites that are only Flash images, don’t give anything for the search engine’s “spider” (robotic gather- ing tool) to gobble up and put into the index. If you want to use Flash, consider making a hybrid page, one that has some elements, such as informative text (rendered in HTML) and a section in Flash. Keep this in mind and make sure that your important concepts and keywords do appear on your pages in a text format. (more…)
Google Search Engine Optimization
Google is by far the most popular search engine available today for both ordinary surfers and webmasters.
Surfers like it because of the highly relevant results it gives, and the speed it gives them at. This is due to its complex text matching algorithm and of course the PagerankT system that this engine uses. More on the PagerankT system later.
Google is popular with webmasters and Internet Marketing companies due to the highly workable ranking system it uses. (more…)
When you are looking for something on the Internet, what do you usually do? You go to a search engine. Where do those results come from and how do you put your website up there too?
The mother of all marketing tools online is the search engine. There are many to choose from and there is no reason not to be listed in as many as you possibly can. However, there are only a few which garner more than 80% (between them) of the Internet’s searching traffic. These are usually referred to as the “Top Ten Search Engines.” They are, in no particular order: Yahoo!, AltaVista, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, AOL, Excite, LookSmart, Google, and the Open Directory. (more…)
1. Build a solid business foundation. Design a business plan, marketing plan, ideal client profile, and a site map for your web site.
2. Be consistent. Brand your company.
3. Make your website trustable. This article will show you 10 ways. www.coachmaria.com/trustableweb.html
4. Create policies the build trust: customer service, code of ethics and newsletter privacy policy.
5. If you have pages on your site that you update monthly (like an articles page or recommended links page) say so on the page. (more…)
You have a web site ready for action. Your product catalog, order tracking, credit card payment system, and fulfillment process are all in place. Now all you need is traffic! Many web entrepreneurs have learned that the magic nut to crack is attraction: get a steady flow of customers who explore your site and eventually purchase goods. The overhead costs of most web businesses are minimal relative to brick and mortar stores. However, the variable marketing costs can over shadow sales revenues by orders of magnitudes. Unfortunately, unlike the saying in the movie Field of Dreams, ?If you build it, they will not come!? Luckily, the industry has learned this lesson; some the hard way, and others in spite of the losers. Dot-coms are clearly not the darlings of the capital markets any longer; however, there is still money to be made! If you plan to start a web business or already have one but are not sure how to increase traffic and make money at the same time, you should consider a science-driven approach.
How to Lose $500 in 12 Hours
One weekend, my business partner and I created an affiliate commerce site. The site comprised a list of links to other online retailers. People go to our site, pick a link to a jewelry store for example, buy something, and in turn we receive a commission from the sale. The process of creating the site, signing up the affiliate agreements, and turning it on was a cinch. The cost was virtually nothing. We, being new to this whole web business concept, thought we had an incredibly smart marketing idea: pay to have our site come up in an ad box on a major search engine (Google) every time someone searched on the word ?gifts?. The word gifts is searched for 49,000 times per day! We figured we would have a good flow of visitors and the money would start rolling in. For certain, we would at least break even. We sunk $500 in one day and let it rip. Here’s what happened: (more…)
