The Web Woman

Seth Godin wrote a great post today about the role “luck” plays in the success of a business.

Around here we have our own definition of “luck”:

Luck is where preparedness meets opportunity.

If you have gone to the trouble to read, research, practice, rehearse, or “work” on anything.  If you have put in hours of sweat and focus into a project.  If you have gone out and networked your little heart out.  If you have invested your time, heart, effort and hard-earned cash into your project.  If you have done any of these things and more, you are more likely to be “lucky”.

I am constantly amazed at the number of naive innocents out there who still think they can set up a website and be rolling in dough in under 90 days by putting in only a few hours a week.  If it were that easy everyone would be doing it.  Oh…whoops, everyone is doing it!  Unfortunately, very few are making any money.

I can’t tell you the number of clients who have come to me deep in debt, struggling to make ends meet and need to make a living wage on the internet by next week to save their bacon and keep the wolf from the door.  Too bad, so sad…it simply doesn’t work that way. Success on the internet is achieved the same way success anywhere is achieved, you have to pay for it.

You pay for internet marketing success by doing all the right things.  You work on creating blogs, podcasts, forums, communities to create real relationships with your readers, listeners, tribes.  You publish articles related to your “long tail” niche.  You participate in discussions all over the net about your passions.  You go out of your way to help other people who can use your help.  You create a position of strength by joining with others with a similar passion for your cause.  You share credit and relationships with others in your field.  Creating a website isn’t even a first step.

Actually, you can make major inroads on the internet without ever owning a classic website.  I know people making serious money by having a series of “lenses” on Squidoo and simply linking to affiliate sites. But like anything else it takes work.

I think it was Edison who said, “Most people don’t recognize Opportunity when it comes knocking because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

Nothing is free and everyone is as lucky as they deserve to be.

Listen as The Web Woman interviews Julia Johnston ( left) and Ariel McNichol ( right) the ladies that put the GO in Mego.com. Mego is a tool or widget used on the internet to build your own profile and then post that profile to many websites. What if you have created your profile and need to update it but don’t want to go back to each site where you posted it? Simply revisit Mego.com, change your profile, all your posted profiles will automatically be updated. Please click here to listen to the entire interview.

For the last many years I have taught a select group the little known tips and tricks of marketing on the web. This little group is know as the Cookie Cutter group and has been meeting for a long time. Though not all of our meetings were recorded, most were.

Every week for a long time I have gathered this little group together to teach them the intricacies of marketing on the web.

To date there are over 70 classes, some recent, some archived on many different web marketing topics such as: social bookmarking, lensing, blogging, podcasting, article writing, press releases, etc.

I never much promoted the class. I have enjoyed our little group. However, the other day, when speaking about it to an associate, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was being selfish to keep this to myself.

So, O.K., here it is. You are cordially invited to attend the Cookie Cutter Class. No, it isn’t about cookies, at least not the kind you can eat. What it is about is tried and true marketing techniques that help people find you on the internet. The name came from a simple concept: If you make a good cookie cutter you can make a perfect cookie, or a dozen perfect cookies, or a million dozen perfect cookies.

Using honest, tested and perfected marketing concepts, you can promote anything in a step by step manner and use those principles over and over again. So come join us:

Every Saturday morning 10 am pacific time

Call in line: 218 486 1300 Bridge number: 830423

Oh, and I don’t charge for the class or any of the archived classes which are podcasted at:

http://www.thecookiecuttergroup.com

Hope this is helpful and I look forward to meeting you in a future class.

Everyone has their favorite tools. The use of tools is a higher function, one of the main things that indicates intelligent life. On the internet your choice of tools often makes the difference in your internet experience and that of your market.

I use several tools that make a difference for me. I use a laptop instead of a desktop computer as I travel a lot and I need my business to travel with me. I also own an air-card to allow me internet access pretty much anywhere.

I have all three main browsers loaded to my computer, but my browser of choice is Firefox, because of the flexibility and pluginedness (yeah, I know it isn’t a word). I could have chosen many different blogging tools, but I chose Wordpress for much the same reason. It gives me flexibility and by using the self-hosted version I have complete control over my content.

I use Squidoo as a marketing tool in addition to my blog. Thanks to the brilliant interface the Squidoo folks have put together there and the amazing SEO that happens as a result, I get serious traction for ideas and concepts I want to explore and have a tool that allows me to show myself as an expert on any particular topic I feel passionate about.

I use Dreamweaver as my html editor and Photo Impact Pro as my graphics editor. I prefer Pinnacle products for editing video, but I also use Ulead from time to time. I use Total Recorder and Sound Forge for audio editing and CamStudio for creating tutorials.

I have a number of tools I use for SEO projects, which I will be covering in more detail in my newest Squidoo lens. http://www.squidoo.com/keywordstosuccess

Learning tools: I have a few favorite mentors, Seth Godin at the top of the list. I totally recommend his latest brilliant marketing book, Meatball Sundae, as well as my three favorite classic Seth Godin books, Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Idea Virus and Purple Cow (actually, there are a lot more…Seth doesn’t know how to write a bad book). I am currently reading Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch, all about marketing that sticks. I also spend at least 3 hours a day doing research to keep up with marketing trends, marketing tools and resources and what folks are doing out there. The best way to learn the web is to be part of the web.

What are your tools?  I would love to hear about what you are using to market on the internet.  You will see many future posts about specific tools.

Just spent a pleasurable evening putting up my first serious Squidoo lens about the hows and whys and whatfors of keywords. I actually dreamed this lens last night and figured unless I made a start on it before I went to bed I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

So take a look. It is an ongoing effort and you will see it bloom as it goes along. It’s current rank (all of 10 minutes old) is #500,107 overall. The goal here (yes this is another case study) is to see how high I can get it, how fast I can get it there and whether or not it makes a difference in my Web Woman blog statistics. My current Alexa ranking is 1,482,248 and I am averaging 454 hits a day on the site.

I will be doing a number of things in addition to the lens, but here is where I start to actually promote The Web Woman. I have promoted so many things over the years, but now I am spotlighting myself. Whoda thunk?

I have decided that the current template is not meeting my needs. I think it is kind like moving into a new home. For the first little while the furniture gets moved around a lot until you find a configuration that really flows. Sometimes you just want to re-decorate.

In this case, as I have been working on this and reading lots of other people’s blogs, I get a much clearer picture of what I really want my blog to look like and more importantly how I want it to function. So back to the drawing board. Stay tuned and watch me change my spots!

This is the beginning of a series of blogs/podcasts about monetizing your blogging and podcasting efforts. I will be using this blog as a case study as well as involving my Cookie Cutter Group friends as well. What we will be doing is a real time study of various monetizing resources.

Things we will be tracking are:

Cost (if any)
Ease of use
Visitor feedback
Changes in statistics (traffic flow)
New subscribers
Actual checks

Using my own site as a test site makes a lot of sense. As we go along, I would love visitor feedback and potentially any dealings you have had with each of these methods and what success or lack of it you have experienced.

So keep watching this blog. We will be adding new plugins which will give us new features. As I add each new thing, I will do a write up to explain where I got it, how I installed it and why I decided to try it, as well as how well it worked. So stay tuned, Web Woman fans. The best is yet to come…

My Saturday Cookie Cutter class is about lensing today.

Lensing is a Seth Godin product (yeah, him again) I was fortunate to be in on the original closed beta on this one and saw right away that this new project of his was headed for greatness.

A lens is a focused look at a particular topic (you can read that “niche” if you’d like) that brings together links, pictures, blogs, text and many other types of content in amazing ways. Lenses are far less stodgy than wikis as they reflect the personality and intent of the lens builder.

Lensing is also free, yes, no cost, gratis, zipideedoday. In other words, you don’t have to pay someone to lens. No hosting costs, no bandwidth costs, no design costs… Actually, Squidoo pays you to lens! Yepper, leave it to Seth to make this thing over the top.

On top of that, we find that lenses often come up higher in the search engines than the websites they represent! Search engines love ‘em!

Not only that, but you can sell your stuff via your lens. No self-righteous, anti-profit, marketing -free zone, is Squidoo, not at all. On the contrary, they encourage you to sell your stuff or anybody else’s stuff right there in front of God and everybody.

Having said that, I recommend you take a look at a tutorial we did awhile back.

Squidoo Tips and Tricks

You can listen to today’s class by clicking here.

Building a lens is simple. Promoting it is flat enjoyable and the benefits can be huge. Try it, you’ll like it.

You also might like to check out the free lens tutorial I found:

 

 A Lensing Resource Guide [70:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

John Jonas’ blog recently talked about the new google rules and how to deal with them. These new rules particularly affect affiliate marketers who usually use domain forwarding techniques to shorten or mask long cumbersome affiliate urls.

“If you’re using Google Adwords, you’ve probably already seen or heard about the change that’s coming on April 1, 2008:

Warning Important Change to URL Policy Enforcement
Starting in April, display URLs for new ads will be required to match their destination / landing page URLs, without exception. Please adjust your URLs accordingly when creating new ads.”

He then goes on to outline a number of strategies for dealing with these new rules. I highly recommend the article. I really enjoy his blog. BTW, there is a podcast associated with the blog you might want to listen to as well.

That said…he addresses various strategies including so-called “Black Hat” strategies for dealing with these issues. Black hat strategies basically come down to figuring out ways to “trick” the search engines into doing what you want you to do.

You should know that Google pretty much always figures out black hat tactics. After all they are discussed openly in blogs and sites all over the internet. When they do figure it out, everyone using them ends up severely penalized and then they have to figure out a whole new way to scam and spam the search engines.

It still comes down to honesty being the best policy, folks. Do a really good job in what you do, Use all honest SEO techniques available to you. Participate in the internet community (discussion groups, wikis, lenses, forums, social communities, etc.). Create awesome content and use the techniques we teach on The Cookie Cutter Group calls. This will give you success. Not overnight and not without effort, but definitely long-term, trackable, bankable success.

In the long run Black Hats work longer and harder, because they are constantly having to find new fixes for the messes they get themselves into. Not worth it, IMHO.

“Your account is past due”, “Payment has been awarded”, “Long time no see” and so forth. And what do find when you open these emails? Another ad for enlarging body parts, buying drugs that you don’t need or a scam to extort money.

When are people going to learn that tricking people into seeing an email that doesn’t apply to the subject line or a person’s interest is basically wasting time (theirs and yours) and bandwidth?

But even if the subject line is blatant…and I won’t print any of those here, it still comes down to the same thing. Why be tricky in your marketing?

Seth’s Godin’s recent post, “The Dark Side” says in part:

“I’m amazed every single day at the lengths some people will go to in order to run scams online. It’s so much more work to create a spam site or a deceptive come on, so much more work to deal with the angry customers and be hiding from them…”

How much better and actually easier in the long run it is to find out what people want and figure out how to give it to them? Who knows? Maybe these people don’t lose any sleep.

Honesty truly is the best policy, because when all is said and done, it just works.