Recently, I presented my new magnum opus: The Content Rich Online Marketing Summit. Reviewing all the important online marketing strategies and tactics, the Summit is an action packed, 2 hour seminar that focuses on results. My goal with these events is to distill it down to the most important teachings and give everyone that came a ton of substance – no fluff – minimal storytelling and lots of step-by-step instructions.  I don’t know about you, but so many of the seminars I attend are either a total sales pitch or a bunch of stories stitched together by “get rich quick talking heads.” I’m a busy guy, I don’t want “feel good” anecdotes – I want information!

The inaugural 105 min event (outlined below) was attended by small business people from all over San Diego County and is now available for purchase for only $29.95. It’s action packed and covers the entire spectrum of online marketing and from the feedback we’ve received, attendees got A LOT out of the meeting.  The goal?  To take it to as many places as we can, spreading the good news of online marketing strategy everywhere we go… Everything for the Beginner.  Ideas for the Experts.  Check out these clips from some of my recent events!

Here’s how we break it down at Content Rich “Live” (as it’s also called):

I. Elements of Strategy

• Keyword Research
• Competitive Research
• Content
• Improving Usability – Design
• Social Media
• RSS/Social Bookmarking
• Blogging
• Link Building
• Sub Strategies based on type of business
• Local Companies
• E-Commerce and other web businesses

II. Tactics Continue reading →

Popularity: 3%

Other Ways to Link Bait

Contests

Another thing you can do to build link‐friendly content is to run a contest or sweepstakes on your blog (or your Twitter or Facebook page). It doesn’t have to be expensive – you could give away your services, actually. For me, being an online copywriter and marketing consultant, I could give away 10 pages of free content. I haven’t done that yet, but I could. It would probably go off very well. What could you give away? Once you decide, promote it and blog about it like crazy…on every social media channel at your disposal!

Interviews

Finally, to build some high quality link bait or “link friendly” content, you could interview prominent people in your industry. How about that for an idea? You know that these people you interview will link to you, right? Absolutely they will. Most of the prominent people out there in any field appreciate the added exposure. Play off that and get some great traffic as a result! Try this on your YouTube channel next week… Continue reading →

Popularity: 3%

by Jon Wuebben

II.  Types of Social Media Content

So if social media is any online media that allows users to interact with one another, there are probably many different types of social media right? Yes, that’s right. Here is a list of the unique forms of social media and which sites are the most important.

Social networking – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn,

Social networking sites allow users to add friends, send messages and share content on either the “one-to-many” or “many-to-many” format. Typically, people on social networking sites get together in communities of like-minded interest. More on Twitter in a bit…

Social bookmarking – StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious

Social bookmarking applications allow users to share their favorite online content with one another while by creating online bookmarks. The bookmarks are on a web site so other people can then see your bookmarks and ideally be exposed to something that they wouldn’t otherwise encounter. Some social bookmarking sites, like StumbleUpon and Digg, use a voting system that allows users to indicate what bookmarks they found interesting. Continue reading →

Popularity: 4%

There are millions of small, well-run, mom and pop businesses all over America. They come to work every day, provide a great service and help drive the engine of the economy. Many say that they are the ones that will help get us out of the mess we are in. And whether it’s Joe the plumber, Margie’s Pet Grooming, Bob’s Barber Shop, your local florist or even a larger business that may not necessarily be in retail – they are out there, every day, interfacing with people in their community, working hard.

In addition, there are thousands of older manufacturers and other companies that have been doing things the same way for a long time. Maybe a little stodgy, but making lots of money. These are the companies we are talking about.

Most of them are customer service pros and are very good at what they do – they have to be, it’s typically super competitive for them. There may be 10 salons in a city, for example, all going after the same people. Continue reading →

Popularity: 47%

If content is “king”, then linked content is the empire. Writing words for your site – even if it’s the best prose ever constructed – -easy to scan, benefits-rich, with the perfect call to action…can only get you so far. As someone who has written copy for over 200 websites in the past few years, I’ve seen it all: poor design, great design; bad content, great content; poor attempts at conversion, and conversion machines; non-linked content and yes, link friendly content.

Lets face it; this recession is tough for everyone. We are all searching for strategies we can use to not only survive – but thrive, despite the economy. At the end of the day, you have to do a lot of things right in order to have your content found on the web and to convert visitors, as I discuss in my book, Content Rich: Writing your Way to Wealth on the Web. But of all the things I mentioned there, link friendly content, or content that naturally attracts links, is the most important – by far. How do we know? Because Google tells us it is… Continue reading →

Popularity: 18%

Every single one of us in the online marketing space is here for a reason. Whether you are talking about Andy Beal, Aaron Wall, Heather Lloyd Martin, Lee Odden, Jill Whalen, Danny Sullivan or any of the other 100 or so web marketing leaders out there, we all have a strong desire to help other companies become more efficient and sell more products and services. Of course, all of us are passionate about the web, love to know what makes consumers buy and enjoy building online communities. But each of us also has a treasure chest of resources that we have gathered over the past few years that have lessoned the learning curve and help us help others every single day.

So, for the first time ever, I put together a list of my personal favorite online marketing tools and resources for you to take a look at. In total, this is a very large, very comprehensive and very good list. Continue reading →

Popularity: 100%

Some of you out there may have heard of something called link baiting. But, what is it? The term Linkbait is used to describe viral, linkable content designed to attract thousands of links and is recognized as one of the most effective ways to build links – and relevance for a site. So link baiting is really building link-friendly content. It’s just another name for it – or more accurately, a subset of it.

The traditional way of getting links circa 2004 and before involved contacting other relevant websites, emailing the webmasters and asking for a link. You’d contact people you know – vendors, partners, customers, suppliers and “reciprocate” links. You would carefully explain in your email that linking to you would be worthwhile for their visitors and beneficial to them as well…and you’d spend hundreds of hours doing it.

Why didn’t someone in the know just explain to them that all they had to do was write solid content and the links would come? Of course, you have to promote it too, but perhaps they were looking for the easy way out. Ironically, the easier way is to write high quality, very popular, link friendly content. Continue reading →

Popularity: 48%