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.

What does this mean? At any given second, millions of prospective clients/customers could literally be a couple of clicks away from learning about your company’s products or services!

In fact, in the United States alone, over 14 billion searches were conducted in July of 2008. That’s over five thousand web searches per second – and you have to remember that Americans are only a small fraction of individuals who are ready to spend money online.

Thanks to the Internet, there has literally never been a stronger time to conduct business.

However, marketing and advertising your organization wisely is essential.

Without the expertise of a reputable Internet Marketing Consultant on your side, your potential clientele have little to no chance of knowing that your company exists.

Allow me the privilege of becoming your Internet Marketing and Advertising Consultant. I have years of Internet Marketing and SEO experience helping companies like yours use the Internet to build portfolios, brand businesses and increase profit margins.

I offer a comprehensive group of highly competitive Internet Marketing and Advertising services including:
Free Website Analysis– Are you wondering how you can market your business online the right way for an affordable price?  I offer a complete website analysis to all of my new clients – free of charge.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Is your site languishing at the bottom of a search result? Never again! SEO helps you build your Internet presence and ensures that more people are getting to your site every single day.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising – Do you know the secret behind creating an exceptional PPC ad strategy and campaign? With me, you don’t have to. With an ad designing and copywriting background, I have the experience to create PPC campaigns that are cost-efficient and profitable for your business.

Link Building Services – Want to move up in the major search engine rankings? By using systematic backlinking and link building techniques you can easily increase your company’s reach one hundred fold. My link building services get your name out. Fast.

Viral Marketing – Do you want to be part of the “buzz”?  As a viral marketing specialist, I will work my hardest to ensure your company’s name becomes part of your target market’s lexicon.

SEO Copywriting – Is your web copy written to maximize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website?  If not, I will transform your web content into SEO ready, revenue-generating pieces of text.

Blogging – Blogs are becoming increasingly popular, however it requires know-how to ensure that yours will be bookmarked and visited regularly by potential customers. As a Content Expert, I hire professional bloggers that will do the writing for you. With SEO rich content, your blog will generate the interest you deserve.

Online Reputation Management – Do you really know what’s being said about your company? I’ll find out “the word on the street” and use that information to help build positive buzz on your organization’s behalf.

Online Public Relations – The Internet is a powerful place.  That’s why you need a strong public relations consultant who understands how to get your company noticed amid the competition. I have a background in public relations. I’ll use my training to obtain prime placement for your public relations materials.

Web Analytics – Never wonder whether or not your marketing is working. When you partner with me, you’ll receive web analytics reports regularly. These reports contain valuable statistics to give you a better understanding of your client base and help you target new customers more efficiently.

Custom Packages – Have a project you’d like to complete but don’t have the expertise to do it in-house?  Call me and I’ll provide a quote for customized services.

Interested?

Allow me to put together a customized Internet Marketing/SEO proposal for your company. Please contact me today!

brett |at| brettprince.net

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!

1) Want to know what Facebook users have joined because of you? Go here.

2) Would you like to see a list of everyone that you have invited to join Facebook but who haven’t accepted your invitation yet? Go here.

3) If you’re interested to know who in your circle of friends has brought the highest number of people to Facebook so far, you can go to facebook.com/impact.

With the Facebook Invites history page you can send email reminders to people who have yet to join the website just in case your previously sent invites somehow went unnoticed or if they happened to land in their junk folder.

This is definitely a useful tool as part of your social media marketing campaign if you’re a business sending out invites to existing/potential clients.

To do this, you go into your Twitter account settings, type in the username you’d like to change your account to and if it’s not taken, you hit the save button.

What happens when you change your Twitter username?

Twitter does a good job when it comes to the username transition. Changing your ID won’t affect your follower count, you’ll continue to be on Twitter lists, your old tweets and direct messages will remain intact and everything will continue to work just as it did before.

What’s the problem then?

Let’s say that your original Twitter ID was @seoking and you decided to change it to @seoqueen. Twitter automatically shifts your followers and friends to your new ID (@seoqueen) however search engines will have indexed your old ID (@seoking) for quite awhile.

So what does this mean?

If people are searching for your Twitter account on Google, there’s a chance they’ll come across your old profile page that no longer exists, returning a 404 error since you’ve changed your alias. Bad if you’re a business and your customers are looking to connect. So, in order to redirect your customers, potential friends, whoever, when you change your Twitter ID it’s a good idea to reserve the old one before anyone else has a chance to claim it.

Changing Twitter Handles the Right Way

Step 1: Go to your Twitter account settings and change the username from seoking to seoqueen.

Step 2: Log out of Twitter and create another account immediately (you can use the same email).

Step 3: Use seoking as the handle for your new Twitter account and set your profile URL to twitter.com/seoking. In your profile description, you can say something like – “this account has moved, please follow @seoqueen.” You can even post a tweet with your new account saying the same message.

Now if people happen to find your old Twitter page via search engines or links on other web sites, they’ll still be able to find and follow you on your new profile.

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.

For those of you who have multiple Twitter accounts, you’ve probably noticed that you’re unable to use the same email address with other accounts. If you try it, Twitter will shoot out the “Email has already been taken” error. A pain, I know.

But don’t fret, there’s an easy solution! If you’re using a Gmail or Google Apps email address then you’re in luck!

With Gmail you can add a dot (.) anywhere in the username end of the email and all emails sent to the dotted email will still end up in your Gmail inbox. For example, if I had brett@gmail.com, any email sent to br.ett@gmail.com or br.e.tt@gmail.com would still find its way to my inbox, as Gmail ignores periods in the username.

I think you know where I’m going with this, but I’ll continue on to be thorough.

Twitter considers brett@gmail.com and br.ett@gmail.com to be two separate email addresses even though they both direct email to the same Gmail inbox.

If you don’t want to use this method (for whatever reason), a second email is created automatically when you register for a Gmail account, one that uses the googlemail.com domain.

So if you have two accounts on Twitter, you can use the Gmail email with one and the googlemail email with another.

Have fun!

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.