We all know the potential that kindness, honesty, and generosity have online – they’re welcomed and rewarded! So why is it that “conversations” are getting heavy with sales pitching and self promotion? Not only is this turning off consumers, but it’s making Internet marketing look bad and undoubtedly makes it much more challenging for businesses to convert contacts into sales.

But don’t panic, you just need to set yourself apart with a few key Internet marketing strategies, and in return you’ll be able to transform your social media communities into profitable business. What’s even better is that these activities heavily increase ROI online and refrain from that unwanted sales pitchy trash that everyone hates.

Here are five rules you should follow to successfully convert online contacts into sales.

1. Be generous: Share your expertise and knowledge online. No one is out to get you, shift your thinking and think as if people are out to do business with you. If you’re generous with your expertise and knowledge, people can connect with you much more quickly and will want to do business with you (because you’ve already given them a taste of what you have to offer.)

2. Don’t look desperate: There’s a huge difference between desperation and sincerity. You really need to want to build a relationship to get business, you can’t just approach them with the mindset of getting another deal, or with the reasoning that closing the deal is what you’re supposed to do. Consumers are smart, they can tell the difference, especially when it comes to handing over their money.

3. Create a communication plan: Once you start engaging with people you need to ensure that you have a consistent, ongoing plan to stay connected with them. There’s a variety of ways to do this directly, the best is to get their e-mail or get them to join your Facebook page and send them informative updates, tips, and resources. You want to create and build actual value, not perceived value. People will be much more responsive if you take this approach.

4. Build your social proof: Having recommendations and testimonials on your main site or blog goes a long way. By having social proof you’re essentially proving to your potential clientele that you’re worth doing business with and you don’t have to say a thing. Another good place to post some testimonials is a site such as LinkedIn.

5. Just be yourself: Don’t try to be someone else to try to impress potential clients, leads or business. Consumers want to feel as though they’re going to do business with someone real, not someone who’s insincere.

Above all, diversify! Don’t talk yourself out of reaching out to new industries, groups, or people. The Internet is bursting with millions of potential contacts, so do whatever you can to engage them with sincerity and leave out the sales pitching. After all, that person you invited or accepted your request could be your next big customer. You never know.

Google has never shared the exact percentage of revenue that it pays out to AdSense publishers, but one can figure out the number fairly easily by using Google’s earnings report that is released at the end of the quarter.

The “Google Network Revenues” section of the report represents the total revenue generated through the AdSense program, and the “Traffic Acquisition Costs” section shows the total paid amount to Google’s AdSense publishers. You can calculate the approximate revenue share amount by dividing TAC with the total AdSense revenue.

Here’s a brief chart that compares the two numbers for the 2009 year. The revenue percentage that Google shares with AdSense publishers has decreased from 75% in the first quarter to 72% in the fourth quarter of 2009.

This isn’t the greatest news, but it’s meant to inform people of what’s going on with the AdSense program rather than scare people off. If you want to earn big through advertising placements on your site there’s a variety of options similar to AdSense, but you may want to consider approaching an advertiser directly.

If you have decent site traffic and targeted content, it’s fairly straight forward to approach targeted, niche advertisers. Rather than going through a service that a company like Google offers, these advertisers would buy ad space on your site directly. Ultimately, you win in two different ways: you get a targeted, high quality advertiser on your site and you increase the potential of earning more than you would through a system like AdSense.

For those who run sites in the tech/web niches, http://buysellads.com can be a very effective 3rd party solution for a few different reasons: you don’t have to deal with any CPM tracking or customer service, and you don’t have to do any sort of extra work to get advertisers to place ads on your site – Buy Sell Ads does all of that work for you. The downside is that they take a percentage of earnings, but if your site is related to a fairly popular niche, there’s a lot of advertising potential and you can potentially charge a few hundred per ad slot on your site.

So as you can see, this AdSense news isn’t the end of the world and the system isn’t simply going to die overnight. Will it change? Sure, but everything in Internet marketing does! You just need to adapt and leverage what you can.

Check out this post, it may give you a few ideas on how to attract potential advertisers to your site.

Good luck!

Once the migration is complete, all previous posts and blog links will continue to work and visitors will be redirected to the new site.

Why move to WordPress.org?

So, like the majority of users, you began writing your first blog on WordPress.com because the service was free, it wasn’t necessary to have any technical skills to get started, there were plenty of themes, plug-ins and widgets to help you customize your blog quickly and easily.

Then, as your blog gained traffic and popularity, you discovered certain limitation. For example, you couldn’t monetize your site traffic because WordPress disallows the use of Google Adsense and other advertising methods on their sites. There are literally thousands of wonderful and optimized WordPress themes, but with your free blog your choices were limited. WordPress.com also doesn’t allow JavaScript so you were unable to use advanced tracking software such as Google Analytics.

Apart from Google advertisements and themes, another reason why you may want to move from WordPress.com to a personal web domain is branding.

Step 1: Get a domain name and rent some server space

Prior to moving your blog from WordPress.com to your own domain, you need to have your own web domain and server space where you’ll be hosting that blog.

As you may already know, you can buy web domains at fairly reasonable pricing from websites such as GoDaddy.com or Network Solutions, however I recommend that you look into Google apps, which costs $10 per year per domain. By doing so, you get all the regular Google goodies (Gmail, Google Docs, etc.) however the best part is that your registration details will be kept private – people will be unable to see your address or phone number in your whois domain record.

There are a lot of different web hosting services that you can potential use for hosting your WordPress blog, a few are Rackspace, BlueHost, KnowHosting, DreamHost, and Media Temple. BrettPrince.net is hosted at BlueHost.com and I haven’t run into trouble.

Step 2: Transfer posts from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

Now that you’ve gotten started and have a basic infrastructure in place, we can now setup a WordPress blog. Essentially every web hosting company offers a 1-click install of WordPress, so this should be fairly straight forward, however you have to be sure you install WordPress in a sub-directory.

Once you’ve done that, head over to the admin dashboard at your old WordPress.com blog, select Tools -> Export, then save the XML file somewhere on your computer. Next, go to your new website’s WordPress admin panel, select Tools -> Import and then choose WordPress. Choose the file you just downloaded. On the next page, select the authors, and check the box and say “Import Attachments.”

Now everything from your old WordPress.com blog will be imported automatically to your new blog, including images and other attachments.

Step 3: Redirect visitors and search engines to your new blog

Although your new blog is a copy of your WordPress.com site visitors and search engine spiders will still hit your old site since they don’t know anything about the new one. We want to avoid this problem, so we will implement a method to redirect traffic from your old site to your new one.

This isn’t difficult, trust me. First, visit your domain registrar (the company that you registered your domain with), login, then change your domain’s DNS settings to point to WordPress.com servers.

Important: You need to take note of the existing name server address, you’ll be needing them later on.

Once you’ve noted the existing information, you can now edit the name servers and change them to ns1, ns2, and ns3 with the .wordpress.com extension after each (ns1.wordpress.com). The domain registrar may prompt you to confirm the change.

From your free WordPress.com blog’s dashboard, select Upgrades -> Domains. Type in the new domain URL, and select “Add Domain to blog.” Then select “Map Domain” when you’re asked to confirm the address addition. Keep in mind that you can’t have www in the URLs and be sure to leave out the trailing slash.

If you chose to do domain mapping, keep in mind that it’s a premium service and will run you $10 per year. Payment is flexible, though – you can pay with a credit card or PayPal.

After you’ve completed this, you need to set your personal domain (site.com) as the primary URL for the WordPress.com blog. Head over to the WordPress.com admin panel, navigate to Upgrades and select Domains. Select the checkbox for your main that you added above and select Updated Primary Domain.

Step 4: Reverse the DNS Nameserver changes

Now it’s time to change your domain’s DNS back to the originals that we changed earlier. Once you’ve entered them, save and wait for awhile so that the web domain (site.com) and the old WordPress.com blog (site.wordpress.com) will redirect you to the new site.

That’s it!

All your search engine traffic, RSS readers, incoming links and everything will now be redirected to your new site. However, if you want to keep your WordPress.com address redirecting* to your new site, you’ll have to renew the domain mapping upgrade from WordPress.com every year.

Best of luck!

[*] WordPress.com uses a 302 redirect with domain mapping, meaning that it’s a “temporary redirect” and search engine spiders will continue to index your old site in addition to the new one.

The reality today is that you can easily run advertisements on TV for your website/business for the cost of dining out! Pretty amazing sounding, isn’t it? Sure, the ads may not air during expensive prime-time shows, but you’re still reaching that TV audience, even if you have a limited budget.

Welcome to Google TV Ads!

This is a very straightforward process and anyone with an Internet connected computer can immediately setup and run a TV ad campaign in minutes.

First, you upload your video to your Google Adwords account, select your daily budget (your budget per day for the TV commercial), next you pick the time of day you’d prefer your ad to air, and lastly you choose a list of networks (or specific TV shows) that you would like to broadcast your ad on.

So what sort of results can you expect? Here’s an example.

Using a $1,300 budget and selections, your ad could be aired 50+ times on multiple cable networks and viewed by 1-1.5+ million people.

If you have a well designed ad you can expect 1,000+ people to visit your site (provided  the URL is in the ad) so you’re essentially paying $1 per visitor (CPC), which is very reasonable!

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, this is a new and very exciting platform you can take advantage of to find new customers for your small business using  a limited advertising budget. Think about it, this can be used to drastically enhance your new media/Internet marketing campaign on a new medium without the need for a 3rd party. Unfortunately, the service is only available to advertisers located in the US and currently only US based cable networks may be targeted.

But the future is bright!

I think a lot of people have preconceived notions that they’re required to do things a certain way. Whether it’s blogging, social media marketing, building backlinks, whatever, and you know what? They might not really know why they’re doing it, they’re doing it because someone told them to, they’re repeating it.

Are people doing these things because they work, or is there some weird perception that they have to? How many people are experimenting and testing new backlinking practices, as opposed to sticking to what traditionally works?

Who’s innovating?

Shift your thinking forward, will these methods be relevant 5 years from now, or will there be newer, more effective ways to market your website? Technology is constantly changing; you need to think forward to stay ahead of everyone else, you need to be competitive. You need a unique Internet marketing strategy. Because once a method is leaked, it generally becomes obsolete, or the variables that were once involved will have changed.

Too many people are giving advice to others based on nothing; they haven’t successfully applied the methods, so why should you accept something as fact without verifying it over a period of time?

Imagine if you stopped building backlinks and focused on unique content. Do-follow backlinks today might be no-follow tomorrow (profile links).

Imagine if you stopped social media marketing and started developing products.

Imagine taking focus away from your other websites and moved toward a single focus, one to market yourself.

If you can create something great, it will sell.

A blog is great for promotion, but what are you trying to sell? How are you making money? People get caught up with driving traffic to their blog, but why? Is the traffic targeted? Are you even selling anything of value? Sales pages only go so far, most products are garbage – if you want to create something big, you need to brand yourself.

If you work on branding and creating quality, it won’t matter what happens to Internet marketing and new media in the future. People will trust you and recognize you for what you’ve done and what you can do for them.

There’s always an alternate way to succeed, you just have to find it.

Here’s Google’s take on SEO in 5 years:

The AdSense system is straight forward, think of eBay. You (the website owner) sell ad space and buyers (in this example, advertisers) are competing with one another to grab that space. With more buyers joining the auction process the bid amount will increase, therefore benefitting the seller (you).

How can you increase your website’s visibility on the Google Ad Network?

Many advertisers use tools such as DoubleClick Ad Planner to determine which websites they should target on the Google Ad Network, therefore you must make sure that your website is visible and/or can be discovered in tools such as this.

Ad Planner is a very informative report, it’s like a marketing brochure that you can hand out to an undefined number of potential clients daily via Google, and therefore it should always have updated information.

Through Ad Planner, advertisers can view the different types of ads that are accepted on the site, traffic details (pulled from Google Analytics), as well as various topics that are covered by the site (categories) and additional information that can help them easily decide whether or not they should consider using the site in their campaigns.

In this video, Adsense team member Vijay Vachani walks you through the required steps so that you can quickly and easily add your website to Google Ad Planner.

Step 1. If you haven’t added your website to Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll need to do that. You can sign-in to Webmaster Tools by using your Google account, then simply adding your website URL.

Step 2. Once you have verified your site, head over to the Publisher Center of Google Ad Planner and add the site to your Ad Planner profile. If you have recently added your site to Webmaster Tools, it’s possible that it will not immediately show in Ad Planner.

Step 3. Lastly, find the “Edit Site Info” link to add an informative site description as well as relevant site categories. Google automatically presents approximated data of your site’s traffic to advertisers, however you are able to give them a much more informative and accurate picture by permitting Ad Planner to pull data from your Google Analytics account.

In addition to the creation of your own Ad Planner Profile, it’s also important to consider a few simple techniques to attract advertisers:

• Always allow text and image ads to be displayed on your site.
• Create specific “channels” (areas on your site) so that advertisers can choose specific ad placements.
• Be sure to always place your primary ad unit above the fold.