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9 Reasons Why Zappos is So Successful

by EricHammer on March 20, 2012

zappos 9 Reasons Why Zappos is So Successful
One of the great success stories of the past few years, Zappos is on everyone’s radar as a great company, both as far as being a great company to work for and as far as being a great success story. Here is a true rags to riches story of a company which started in a nondescript apartment and went on to become a multimillion dollar empire.

Zappos didn’t have fancy backers throwing millions of dollar at them when they started (in contrast to other dot com companies of the time — pets.com for example spent something like $100 million before they went bust.) They just knew how to act like decent people and they profited handsomely from this fact. Here are nine lessons you can learn from Zappos:

 

What is Zappos Anyway?

Let’s start by discussing just what Zappos is anyway. The company started out selling nothing but shoes. They eventually expanded and moved into selling clothing and other items in much the same way that Amazon.com started out as just an online bookstore and eventually started expanding until they became the all in one online supermarket we see today. Zappos hasn’t strayed quite that far from its roots, but it has definitely widened its focus somewhat to deal with things like apparel.

Actually, the name Zappos was chosen specifically to allow the company to expand beyond the shoe market. They started with a domain name called shoesite.com, but decided that they needed something more generic which would allow them to expand and so they created a word based on the Spanish for shoes (Zapatos) which is today a household name.

The Zappos Difference

The thing that has made Zappos so wildly popular and such a massive success story might be summed up in what we could probably call the “Zappos difference.” The company is known for doing things in a way which puts people before profits. They have consistently been ranked as one of the best places to work in America and customers consistently rank them as being one of their favorite companies.

A Philosophy of Treating Customers Like Human Beings

I’ve said many times on these pages that simply treating your customers like human beings who actually have opinions and are not just annoying people who have to be fobbed off on a voice mail system is the best policy and Zappos proves my point. Zappos is one of the few companies left in the United States where you don’t have to worry about navigating through a maze of different menu options before you sit for half an hour waiting on hold.
Of course, even if you don’t have the staff or money to do what Zappos does, simply treating people like human beings and offering to get someone on the phone for them to talk to when they need someone will go a long way. Don’t forget that in a world where people expect useless layers of voice mail and half hour waits to speak to someone, simply answering the phone or dropping the wait time will make you stand out.

Taking the Time to Do Things the Right Way

While many companies have in house training programs for their new hires, Zappos takes this to a whole new extreme — they spend a couple of months training people. And no, they don’t train them in the skills they’ll need for the job. That comes later. First, they need to get trained in the culture of Zappos.

That’s right — the culture of Zappos. I know it sounds a tad cultish, but rest assured, if it is a cult, it’s a benign one. In essence, the training in Zappos culture talks about putting the customer first and making sure that they are happy. This again is one of the keys to the Zappos success story — that they really do take the time to do things right — even the customer service.

Treating Employees Right

There’s a reason people love working at Zappos and it’s got nothing to do with the cheery attitude that seems to pervade throughout the company. No, it has everything to do with the fact that Zappos recognizes that their employees are people too. They try to be open and fun about how things are done and they allow people to explore their passions, even going so far as to encourage people to learn more during company time.

This philosophy has served the company well as it has continued to thrive and to grow. Why? It’s simple really — when you genuninely feel good about being a part of something, you make it your business to do your very best. However, when you are stressed and constantly being pushed around, you tend to retreat inside of yourself and decide that you simply cannot be bothered.

Talking

Yes, I know — it sounds so utterly and completely obvious to say it, but it’s true. One of the key points which has made Zappos into the powerhouse that it is today is communication. By taking the time to communicate properly (it’s actually one of their “core” values), they cut down significantly on friction in the workplace and are able to keep people happy.

And remember — a happy employee is much more likely to give his or her all for the company than an unhappy employee who is only biding her time until the economy improves and she can find a job somewhere else (anywhere else).

Making Do

As I said, the Zappos concept started in a fairly humble way and that philosophy has served the company well throughout its history. Zappos employees are encouraged to “do more with less.”

Now while this may sound like a recipe for disaster, when this philosophy gets combined with the other policies at this giant retailer, it creates a truly amazing experience for all those involved, allowing you to have employees who are truly committed both to working for the company and to helping the company to save money.

Being Adventurous

Great companies are built on the backs of even greater ideas. That’s why companies like Google and Facebook work so hard to attract the best and brightest — because they know that ultimately, this is what is going to allow them to succeed in the world.

Zappos encourages this kind of adventurous creativity in its employees too. This has allowed them to constantly stay ahead of the curve and to actually get into various niches before they grow cold or even to create new ones.

Encouraging the same kind of spirit of adventure within your own employees is critical if you want to move beyond your own little box and get into the world of making real money online (or offline for that matter).

Humility

Being humble isn’t something you usually see encouraged in a large and successful company. However, it is one of the core values at Zappos and it really does help them to keep things in perspective. By being humble and realizing that they probably cannot control everything that happens to them (and that a good bit of luck has been thrown into the mix as well), the people at Zappos are able to weather most storms.

The idea basically revolves around realizing that you really are only as good as your next big success story and that you don’t necessarily have all the answers. When you start to think that way, communication begins to occur and people start to listen and actually get themselves involved in the business doing whatever needs to be done to make the company successful.

Be Flexible

Okay, for our final lesson from the folks at Zappos, I’m not looking at what the company says they do. I’m looking at what the company actually did. I’m reminded of an interview I heard once with MJ Demarco, who created an online limousine service and eventually sold it for something on the order of $10,000,000.

He said that the market will show you where your business needs to go and he was 100% correct about that — your customers will show you where to go with your business and if you are flexible enough to adapt, you can make it too.

Zappos, as I said earlier, started out as purely shoe oriented store. However, they quickly expanded their line of offerings and they did it fairly early in the cycle. This allowed them to beyond the core that they started with that much more quickly.

However, even if they hadn’t planned for the future and had been stuck with the less catchy sounding ShoeSite.com, by simply being flexible enough to make the changes that needed to be made when they need to be made, Zappos was able to become the powerhouse success story they are today.

Tagged as: business success, customer service, make money online, zappos

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The Compulsive Writer’s Guide to Selling Using The Right Words

by EricHammer on March 15, 2012

block The Compulsive Writers Guide to Selling Using The Right Words

When it comes right down to it, your job is that of a salesperson. Regardless of whether you make your living selling other people guides to how they can make it big or you make your money by selling websites or selling furniture online, you are still a salesperson. Therefore, it’s important to keep in mind that your ultimate job is to use words to sell stuff to people.

Words are Everywhere

Now before you go and tell me that your business doesn’t rely on words (because you use spun content or you use videos or something else), let me be clear: you’ll always be relying on words to make your point and sell stuff to your customers. Even when you do videos, you still need to speak to people on the videos (and or set up slide shows).

Getting Started

My first suggestion is to whip out your smart phone and download a little free app called Evernote. The nice thing about Evernote is that it lets you store ideas of all kinds wherever you happen to be. This means that if you’re out in the middle of a forest with your family on a camping trip and you get a cool idea, you can simply enter it into Evernote for retrieval later on. Of course, they also have desktop apps and they support all the major smart phone and tablet platforms so that they can be as universal as possible.

Why Taking Notes Matters

The fact is that great writers are idea people. As a professional writer, I spend a great deal of time reading and ideas come to me all the time for cool things I could write about for my customers so that I can get them to make purchases from me. If you have a way to constantly take down ideas as they occur to you, then you are that much more likely to be able to make use those ideas and make sales.

Quit Worrying about Titles

You know the guy who is always talking about how he wants to write “The Great American Novel?” This is the same guy who will have a really cool title to offer you for the book. They haven’t written a word yet, but they’ve obsessed over the title to the point where they’ve changed it about a million times.

A real writer knows that titles are secondary. The important thing is the idea. You can always come up with a title later on. In fact, many writers actually write up entire novels without first picking a title for the book. They figure that the book will pick the title for them. Now here’s a little secret for you: the same rule applies to making money online with your writing!

Really — Keywords are Secondary

First, come up with a cool idea for a products or service that you can sell. Get the ideas down on how you want to sell it. Heck, write up your content for the thing before you ever worry about picking out keywords. Then and only then should you do the research to find the keywords that you need in order to make your project into the success story you know it could be.

Why Keywords Come Second

There are two reasons for this — first and foremost, your writing will sound much more natural and flowing (and thus be more likely to sell) if you just write it without fussing about keywords all day long. Second and more importantly, you’ll often find that your keywords naturally work their way into your writing as you create the content. If they don’t, you can always go back and add the keywords in later.

Finding Ideas

This is the million dollar question for many people — they can’t think of a single blessed thing to say about whatever it is that they want to sell to you. They figure that everything has already been said and there is simply nothing original to talk about. This is of course ridiculous.

Let me share with you stories from two of my favorite authors — Tom Clancy and John Grisham. You’ve probably heard of both of these men as they happen to be two of the most famous and successful fiction writers in the world. But did you know that both of them came by the ideas for their first novels by following the suggestions above?

John Grisham

john grisham 01 The Compulsive Writers Guide to Selling Using The Right Words

I said above that great writers are always learning things and always taking down ideas for new things and new stories. Grisham found his inspiration by sitting around in a court room (he is a lawyer). He was watching the trial of a man who was accused of molesting a child and it occurred to him as he watched the trial to ask, “how would I feel if that was my daughter he’d done that to?” The result was Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill.

Tom Clancy

ttom The Compulsive Writers Guide to Selling Using The Right Words

Clancy offers us an even better insight into the mind of the professional writer. He was reading his morning paper one day and he saw an item about a submarine having gotten stranded off the coast near his home. This got him to wondering what would happen if a Soviet submarine found itself stranded off the coast of the United States and what kind of reactions would occur in this country. The result of course was The Hunt for Red October.

But I Don’t Want to Write a Novel. I Want to Sell Stuff Online

I know what many of you are thinking to yourselves — you don’t care about writing the Great American Novel. All you want to do is sell stuff online. The thing is, the same principles apply — constantly spend your time looking at the world around you and you’ll find that ideas for catchy slogans come up all the time.

Don’t believe me? Just watch the very first episode of Mad Men. The client was about to walk out the door because the ad agency couldn’t come up with a slogan which was legally acceptable. So what did the guy do? He asked him to describe the process of making the tobacco. “It’s toasted” was the result of this thought exercise. The result was that they took something commonplace and turned it into something extraordinary (i.e. an ad slogan).

The Practical Stuff

Okay, enough of the theory. Let’s get down to brass tacks as they say. Let’s talk about taking those ideas and turning them into something useful. We’ll assume you’ve been diligently taking note of interesting things that you see all around you and that you are now ready to start turning those ideas into money making words. There are two basic ways to do this and they both revolve around one simple concept.

You Will Get All You Want In Life

This is a famous quote from Zig Ziglar — you’ll get all you want in life if you help enough other people to get what they want. And it’s very true. Turning your list of ideas into products and words is merely a matter of placing yourself into the shoes of your potential clients. When you do this, you can instantly start coming up with ways to make money off of them.

The Pain Vs. the Want

Here’s another cool idea I found by looking around at the Warrior Forum (and yes, I know, they’re under scrutiny these days and they do need to clean up their act, but for those who are smart enough to read between the hype, there is still lots of great information there).

The idea goes that there are two basic reasons that people buy things — because they are trying to relieve some kind of pain (i.e. physical pain, emotional pain or even the pain of worrying about how they’re going to pay for the things they need to pay for) or because they are trying to fulfill a desire.

Making Money from Misery

Of the two, the pain is often much more immediate and that’s why so many sales pitches ask questions from people about whatever problems they may be experiencing (i.e. do you have trouble finding enough traffic for your website? Do you need cash now? etc. etc.). Now while I’m no big fan of making money from other people’s pain (hey, I have a moral compass), I do feel like it’s a great idea to help people in trouble and if you happen to manage to make a few bucks in the process, well so much the better.

The Right Message

This then shows you the right way to use words to make money. Be generous. Give away real, useful advice to people. Don’t just be coy and say that you have this wonderful idea to solve their problems. Offer some real and useful information. When you do, you’ll find that you are able to make more money because people feel that you are now trustworthy (they’ll say if he gives all this for free, then what must he be charging for?).

The Bottom Line

By constantly watching out for new ideas and by being the sort of person who researches those ideas obsessively (remember what I wrote above — just the idea is not going to be enough. You want to offer real value and then offer even more value in what you have to sell), you can make money. And worrying about keywords should be the last thing you do, not the first thing. If you have great ideas, they’ll sell themselves.

Tagged as: compulsive writing, make money online, sales, top copywriting, writers block, writing

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A HUGE List of 60 Extremely Motivational Business Quotes

by EricHammer on March 14, 2012

 inspiration A HUGE List of 60 Extremely Motivational Business Quotes Running an online business as most of us do is all about being a jack of all trades. It means being able to get yourself going in the morning and being able to yourself motivated even when you feel like you simply have no motivation or energy left to get the job done.

To help you with that, here are a whole bunch of motivational quotes from famous business people to keep your spirits up when things look at their bleakest. They appear in no particular order:

1.       The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.  The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency – Bill Gates

2.       Let’s be honest.  There’s not a business anywhere that is without problems.  Business is complicated and imperfect.  Every business everywhere is staffed with imperfect human beings and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect human beings – Bob Parsons

3.       The NBA is never just a business.  It’s always business.  It’s always personal.  All good businesses are personal.  The best businesses are very personal – Mark Cuban

4.       You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough – Joseph E. Levine

5.       Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity – Charles Dickens

6.       I don’t pay good wages because I have a lot of money; I have a lot of money because I pay good wages – Robert Bosch

7.       For all of its faults, it gives most hardworking people a chance to improve themselves economically, even as the deck is stacked in favor of the privileged few.  Here are the choices most of us face in such a system:  Get bitter or get busy – Bill O’ Reilly

8.       You’re most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning – Bill Gates

9.       It’s through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we’ve always mapped our path at Dell. There’s always an opportunity to make a difference. – Michael Dell

10.   If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours. – Ray Kroc

11.   Winners take time to relish their work, knowing that scaling the mountain is what makes the view from the top so exhilarating. – Deniss Waitley

12.   Management is nothing more than motivating other people. – Lee Iacocca

13.   Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. – Dwight D. Eisenhower

14.   The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.– Peter Drucker

15.   Conflict is inevitable in a team … in fact, to achieve synergistic solutions, a variety of ideas and approaches are needed. These are the ingredients for conflict.—Susan Gerke, IBM, Leadership Development

16.   Teamplayer: One who unites others toward a shared destiny through sharing information and ideas, empowering others and developing trust. –Dennis Kinlaw

17.   Teamwork is the quintessential contradiction of a society grounded in individual achievement.– Marvin Weisbord

18.   Team members who feel threatened but who are not aware of it become rigid — and that stops teamwork. –Will Schutz

19.   I was just pursuing what I enjoyed doing. I mean, I was pursuing my passion.— Pierre Omidyar, eBay

20.   You can chase whatever keywords and phrases you like, but at the end of the day it’s all about those conversions.—Matt Webb, SEO Honolulu

21.   If we wanted to sell ad banners, we could call DoubleClick and be profitable today … But we can be more successful in the long run if we grow our user base…—Sergey Brin, Google

22.   My rule of thumb is build a site for a user not a spider.—Dave Naylor

23.   Over the past six years I’ve had many difficulties. But I never lost my passion.—Robin Li, Baidu

24.   People used to think that the web was somehow different from offline, that anyone could just slap up a web page and get results overnight. There might have been a few that got lucky somehow, but it’s not like that. You have to build a real business online, and then it’s hard work, it’s making something good. It’s like any business; you can’t just open up a store somewhere and expect to get business. It’s all marketing, and it’s really come full circle now, with people trying to understand that you have to market your web site online and offline and any way that you can. - Jill Whalen

25.   SEO isn’t an entitlement program. It’s an ongoing investment that must be resourced properly. It’s not a one-hit, one-phrase paradigm. It’s not built on quick wins for trophy phrases. There are hard costs and soft costs associated with building a successful SEO strategy that deserve proper budget allocations. – P.J. Fusco, The ClickZ Network

26.   We’re just going to concentrate on what we’ve always done, which is to create the best possible online directory, adding content and other features along the way when it makes sense.—Jerry Yang, Yahoo! Inc.

27.   In the absence of communication among your customers, advertising rules.— Don Peppers

28.   Search is about figuring out what people are looking for when they enter keywords into their favorite search engine. Social media is what people are actually saying to each other; they’re telling us what they’re looking for. We, as marketers, should be able to fit it all together pretty nicely.” – Norm Elrod

29.   If content is king, then conversion is queen.— John Munsell,

30.   I like thinking big. If you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.—Donald Trump

31.   If you go into what I call a bubble boom, every bubble bursts.–Margaret Thatcher

32.   Life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it.– Dennis P. Kimbro

33.   Winners lose much more often than losers. So if you keep losing but you’re still trying, keep it up! You’re right on track.– Matthew Keith Groves

34.   The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision. – Helen Keller

35.   The real opportunity for success lies within the person and not in the job.– Zig Ziglar

36.   If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.– Napoleon Hill

37.   Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.– Ray Kroc

38.   Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence. – Vince Lombardi

39.   People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily. – Zig Ziglar

40.   If not us, who? If not now, when? – John F. Kennedy

41.   Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are. – Dale Carnegie

42.   The elevator to success is out of order. You’ll have to use the stairs… one step at a time. – Joe Girard

43.   Some men see things as they are and say why – I dream things that never were and say why not.             –George Bernard Shaw

44.   A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him.           –Sidney Greenberg

45.   I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. – Bill Cosby

46.   The man who has confidence in himself gains the confidence of others. – Hasidic Proverb

47.   Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. – Peter F. Drucker

48.   Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.– Steve Jobs

49.   You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.—Wayne Gretzky

50.   I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.[…] It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. –Steve Jobs

51.   I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.– Pablo Picasso

52.   Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

53.   Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things. – Robert Brault

54.   Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.– Albert Einstein

55.   By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.– Benjamin Franklin

56.   Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.—Thomas Edison

57.   Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. – Confucius

58.   Here’s to the next step in our lives – The American Pie boys

59.   The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. — Winston Churchill

60.   The only way to have a friend is to be one. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

And remember folks, what all these inspirational business quotes are saying to you: The only one responsible for your success is you. Here’s to making it great!

Tagged as: building a business, make money online, motivational quotes

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20 Important FREE Tools to Increase Your Website’s Exposure

by EricHammer on March 11, 2012

tools 20 Important FREE Tools to Increase Your Website’s ExposureIn the business of Internet marketing and SEO, your ultimate goal is always going to be to increase traffic to your website so that you can improve the odds of actually getting people to click your link and buy your products. The trouble of course is that in a hyper information saturated world, increasing your website’s exposure is becoming increasingly difficult.

The follow is a smattering of different tools which will help you tremendously in building exposure for your site. Some are specific to WordPress (i.e. plugins for WordPress) and others can be used regardless of the kind of site you are running:

Google Search Stories

I came across this little gem a while back, but this is the first time I’m sharing it here with our readers. Google Search Stories is one of those sites which at first looks like it could just be a great way to waste time but which ultimately could prove highly effective in getting your site noticed.

In essence, Search Stories creates a kind of video where you simply use various keywords to tell a story. It runs the keywords through Google Search and shows the results. So why is this valuable? Two reasons – first and foremost, it’s a super easy way to make a cool looking video which can point to your website. Second, if your search video is chosen as one of the best, it will get profiled on the Google website. You can see an example of a Google Search Stories video on my personal finance channel here.

Staples Facebook Push

Speaking of videos, I ran across this one just recently. It’s really a contest where you can describe your business in 30 seconds or less on a video and then compete for a chance to win a $50,000 campaign from Staples. However, beyond this, I see a value here just for getting exposure for your website. In essence, all the videos are made available and can be voted on. In theory, the most popular one wins.

However, even if you are not the most popular, just getting there with a funny video (entering is free) could gain you some great exposure.

CommentLuv

One of my most popular posts here at the QuantumSEOLabs blog is about whether or not CommentLuv is useful. For those who are not familiar, CommentLuv is a plugin for WordPress which will allow your visitors to leave do follow comments on your blog. It also allows you to have a rolling list of the comments on the front page.

Now while this can definitely increase the number of people who will leave comments (along with the number of spammers – I suggest combing it with a captcha), being part of the CommentLuv network also means being able to find other sites which are CommentLuv enabled and getting your comments onto those sites as well.

The Warrior Forum

I know – regular readers are scratching their heads and saying to themselves, huh? Warrior Forum is great for learning about internet marketing and SEO. But getting exposure for my website? Yep – you see the Warrior Forum has always allowed you to put a link in your signature to your website. It is also an extremely popular website with tens of thousands of active members. This means that a link in your signature will be noticed, especially if you do something related to SEO or Internet Marketing.

By the way, if you want even more exposure, consider buying a graphic signature on the Warrior Forum. Yes, it costs money (and I know this list is supposed to be free tools), but the fact is that it’s well worth your while since it makes you stand out more from the crowd.

WP Testimonials Plugin

Here’s another really useful plugin for WordPress. It simply allows you to get testimonials left on your blog or website. Now while it doesn’t directly improve your exposure since the testimonials remain on your blog rather than getting spread around, it does help because people who leave testimonials are more likely to tell their friends about you.

For those who don’t mind spending a few dollars, I ran across a similar plugin on the Warrior Forum which is supposed to actually allow you to get your testimonials indexed separately by Google using “rich snippets.” I bought a copy myself but haven’t had the time to test it yet all I know is what it says on the page. On the other hand, it’s relatively inexpensive so it certainly can’t hurt to look…

Feed Yes

Everyone should have an RSS feed available for their website. However, if you’re not running a WordPress based site (WordPress creates one automatically for you), then you may not have an RSS feed for your website. Feed Yes is one of those sites that solves the problem for you and does the whole job for free.

There are other tools out there that do this as well, but Feed Yes is free and it is really simple to use (just enter your URL and you’re basically done). The one downside? They will index every link on your page and you then have to manually weed out the pages that shouldn’t be included in a feed (for example, your legal disclaimer doesn’t need to go in).

FeedBurner

Speaking of RSS feeds, FeedBurner is a free service from Google which will allow you to create a better looking feed off of your own feed. Even better, it provides you with additional backlinks. Oh and did I mention that you can link your Adsense account to Feedburner, meaning that you can actually make money from your RSS feed by having relevant ads included in it automatically? It probably won’t make you rich, but it will help out quite a little bit.

Ping.FM

This was another wildly popular post here at Quantum SEO Labs. Ping.FM is a wonderful little tool which will allow you to syndicate your posts and tweets to dozens of different social media sites. You do need to sign up individually for each site (or you can go to Fiverr and find someone to do the job for you), but once you do, there is no charge for using Ping.FM. It’s a really nice system which does wonderful things for you.

HootSuite

Okay, so I’m splitting these two here. Really I use HootSuite in combination with Ping.FM, but the two can be used separately as well. Like Ping.FM, HootSuite allows you to syndicate your stuff to dozens of different websites, including a number of Web 2.0 properties. The thing I love about HootSuite though is that it also allows you to schedule, something which Ping.FM doesn’t do. Now here’s the kicker – you can also sent stuff from HootSuite to Ping.FM, allowing you to schedule everything and get the best of both worlds.

Social Monkee

Yet another way to syndicate to lots of different social networks and bookmarking sites all at one time, Social Monkee is notable for two reasons. First, I find that the sites they offer differ from those of Ping.FM meaning that you can get a broader reach. More importantly than that though, they also support spintax. This is useful if you want each link to count for as much as possible.

What that means is that you can put in something like {this site | that site} is a {really great| super} {resource| source of knowledge} about {internet marketing | SEO}.  This creates a number of different and unique permutations of your comment, all of which should make sense when mashed together. This then gets read by Google as unique content as opposed to syndicated content.

Note that syndicated links –i.e. links where your stuff is syndicated but identical to what you have on your site do help, but unique content links can help even more (which is why people use spinners, though most do a really bad job unless you manually set up spintax).

All In One SEO Pack

Sure it’s an oldy but it’s still a goody. This is another WordPress plugin which will help you to ensure that you have meta tags and other things which are required for your on page SEO. Why does this matter? Well, SEO consists of two parts – creating off page SEO (i.e. backlinks) and creating on page SEO (meaning that your content is easy for sites like Google to index).

Another alternative which does something similar is Platinum SEO Pack. Yasir and I both use Platinum SEO Pack on our sites, but All In One SEO Pack is more popular. Just pick one or the other. They pretty much do the same things though Platinum SEO Pack has one or two extra bells and whistles which advanced users may find exciting.

 

Google SiteMap Generator

Love them or hate them, the Big G is definitely one of the most important parts of getting exposure for your website and you ignore them at your own risk. Now if you want to make sure that your site gets smoothly indexed and noticed by Google, then you do want to make use of their free SiteMap Generator. This thing will create an XML sitemap which resides on your server and which helps Google and other search engines to better index your website.

Sociable

Another WordPress plugin which is vitally important if you are determined to get people to notice your blog or website, Sociable adds in buttons for dozens of social networks, allowing your visitors to click them and automatically add your site to their social networks. This is the ultimate thing when it comes to getting your sites exposure because word of mouth from people who are truly enthusiastic is by far the best kind of exposure.

Twiends

I have mixed feelings about Twiends. In theory, it is a very useful tool for getting exposure for your website or blog because it allows you to add new followers to your Twitter feed (you are posting to Twitter when you put up new stuff on your site, right?) or likes to your Facebook page.

I say in theory, because in my experience it ends up being used by people who want to send out lots of spam tweets and finding real followers can be a challenge. However, there are those who swear by it, so it’s worth checking out.

PR.Com

PR.Com offers both free and paid services so you need to check with them to find out more specifics about what’s available for free and what’s not available for free. However, in brief, they offer you two ways to gain exposure for your website. First, they have a business directory which you can join for free (not terribly valuable, but it certainly can’t hurt).

However, what I find much more interesting that they also offer free press release distribution, meaning that you can get your news release into more hands and maybe even get the mainstream press to do a story about you.

Google News

Speaking of press releases, getting into Google News can be pure gold for your website because it can gain you lots of exposure. Plus, it’s completely free. The catch? You need to be publishing plenty of newsworthy content and you need to have more than one person writing the content on your site (it is after all a news aggregator).

Google Places

Another Google property which is a useful tool for gaining exposure, specifically for local businesses is Google Places. You can put up a profile there and when people do location specific searches (i.e. barber, New York, New York), your site will show up in the Google Places listing.

Submit Free

Another nice little service which has both paid and free versions is Submit Free. It will simply automate the process of submitting your site to popular search engines. To be honest though, if you get yourself indexed by Google and Bing, you’ll have done 95% of what this thing could do for you. The paid option, to submit to 300 search engines is probably a waste of money because most of the smaller guys either get highly specialized searches which are not relevant for you or they will index you anyway if you’re in Google.

Bulk Ping

Ultimately, getting exposure for your website is all about getting your website noticed by the big search engines. Bulk Ping will let you automatically tell the sites about your newest blog post or page (different from submission above) by using an old feature of the web called pinging.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Finally, I’ll assume most readers of this blog have already heard of the Google Webmaster Tools, which can help you to increase your site’s exposure. Bing Webmaster Tools offers similar services, but tailored to Bing instead of Google (remember that Yahoo also gets their search results from Bing these days, so it’s useful to do this).

Tagged as: make money online, seo, traffic, website exposure

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Could You Use Kickstarter to Help Build Your Business?

by EricHammer on February 20, 2012

kickstarter Could You Use Kickstarter to Help Build Your Business?One of the more interesting websites on the Internet has to be Kickstarter. This website is designed to allow you to build up a business idea by giving people a piece of the action (after a fashion – I’ll explain more in a moment). The idea is kind of like crowd sourcing for your venture capital, though your “investors” typically won’t get part ownership of your company.

Why This Could Work for Web Entrepreneurs

Let’s start by discussing you as a web entrepreneur. You have an idea for a business that you want to put on the web and you think it’s a really good one. Well, you need several things to make it successful. First and foremost, you need a great website which will attract people and get them excited about whatever product you want to sell them.

Second, you need a good SEO campaign which will allow you to get your website out there. Third and possibly most difficult, you may need some cash to make your project happen. Whether it’s for creating a software program you have an idea for or it’s for selling a physical product, testing and development does take time; and money. That’s where Kickstarter comes in.

What Kickstarter Does

In essence, Kickstarter is a place to share your idea for a new product or invention and get funding for it. Depending on the particulars of your situation, you may offer a freebie in exchange for helping out with funding (for example, if you were building a new kind of software program for viewing online TV, you may offer “investors” on Kickstarter a free copy when it’s done). You can also have tiered offering, including offering part ownership for those who have deep pockets to fund your business with large chunks of money.

How It Works

Basically, in order to get money on Kickstarter, you have to have an idea for a product which will attract people. Simply wanting to make a website is not enough. There must be an actual product being offered at the end of the road. You would then create a pitch for your product which describes what the product is and what you would offer to people. Browse through other Kickstarter projects to get some ideas for what you can provide.

Getting Funded

The fact is that getting funded at Kickstarter can be a challenge. That’s because they do not allow partial funding of any projects. If you want to get your project funded, then you must get all of your funding. That means that theoretically if you asked for $40,000 in funding and you only reach $39,897, you would not be able to get that $39,897.

After the funding period is over (you must specify how long you want to allow for funding to happen) you either get the money sent to you (if you reached your goal) or the money is returned to the “investors.” Note as well that there is a fee that Kickstarter takes off the top as well as a fee that Amazon takes for processing the payments.

Bottom Line

Kickstarter can be quite useful to internet entrepreneurs, however you need to have a clear plan for your business, a clear product you’ll be providing and clear ideas about how much you need to fund your project.

 

Tagged as: internet marketing, kickstarter, make money online, startup, venture capital

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