3 Reasons Why Delicious Bookmarks Beat Digg Traffic Hands Down

Which is better, del.icio.us bookmark traffic or the stampede that comes with a big Digg?

Well, I was fortunate enough to have a post make both the top of the de.licio.us popular page and the front page of Digg yesterday with my (formerly) private collection of link baiting resources entitled How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide. Of course both events were awesome, especially since they tend to reinforce one another, as well as lead to links from other bloggers.

But if you had to choose one over the other, I think there’s no real question.

Bookmarks beat Diggs. Here are 3 reasons why:

1. Bookmarks are Enduring.

While it’s true that sometimes someone will bookmark a page simply to come back when they have more time, more often than not the Delicious user views your page as a resource that they might return to again and again. A Digg is simply a one-time vote that may or may not result in big one-time traffic. A Digg is short-term event, while a bookmark endures.

2. Bookmarks Show Commitment.

Related to the idea above, a Delicious user has made a commitment to your resource by adding it to their collection of links, most likely because it provides a benefit to them. Other Delicious users notice that commitment, and therefore your resource gains in credibility thanks to that bit of social proof, which often leads to more bookmarks. I believe this is one of the key reasons why a big day on Delicious translates into subscribers and return readers, while the same exposure on Digg often doesn’t.

3. Each Bookmark is a Targeted Link.

Here’s the real power of social bookmarks. Each bookmark you receive is a separate link on a separate web page. Moreover, those links are classified by tags which define their overall relevance, much like normal link anchor text does. Not only does this help you in the search engines, it makes Delicious itself a search engine. Tagging will no doubt play a big role in the evolution of web search, and Digg’s model misses the boat here.

Ignore Digg? Nope.

Overall, you should continue to strive for both bookmarks and Diggs, since they do have a bit of synergy between them. If your resource is compelling, Diggers will bookmark you too.

But it’s important to realize that flash in the pan web traffic means very little other than high server load if they never come back. Diggers aren’t much for clicking ads, and they often don’t stick around long enough to decide to subscribe.

Creating content with the bookmark in mind tends to make you concentrate more on delivering truly useful resources, rather than just pulling stunts to pull traffic. Getting the right type of traffic (rather than just tons of traffic) is one of the main keys to a successful blog.

So, aim for getting a bookmark, and you just might get Dugg too.

Why Professional Bloggers Should Choose Their Clients Carefully

There’s no doubt in my mind that blogging will be an important marketing communications profession going forward. When it comes to having a good presence in the social media universe, there are simply too many benefits for a business to ignore.

But most businesses will not have a clue how to actually create that effective presence. And that’s where the opportunities begin for you, the savvy business-minded blogger.

Having blogging skills that not only attract attention and traffic, but also translate into sales, is the key here. That’s why I advocate copywriting techniques as the ideal way to accomplish both with a blog.

Professional Business Blogging is a Business

Beyond those valuable skills you’ve been developing, you’re going to have to also market yourself to curious (but not yet convinced) business decision makers. And that’s where the typical freelance blogger will step into trouble.

Freelance writing communication professionals typically make three business errors that tend to hurt them in business:

1. They devalue their own work. If what you do creates sales, revenues and profits, then you are worth your weight in gold. But many people for various reasons don’t believe in themselves.
2. They take on lame projects that they not only don’t enjoy, but the work product itself does nothing to further the writer’s career.
3. They wait for work to find them, which puts them in the position of having to accept those lame projects just to create some income.

I’d like you to consider looking at professional business blogging in a different way. Why not view each business you work with as a partner, rather than a client?

Partnering for Profit

Let me share an example that I believe applies to the business blogging world as well.

When it comes to developing information products, I employ a joint venture model. I find a compelling demand that needs to be met, and then find a person with the right credentials to partner with and jointly develop the product with them, which I then sell online. If I do take on fee-based copywriting work, it’s because I see an opportunity to do bigger and better partner deals down the road, and I want to establish a relationship.

This same mentality can and should be applied to pro business blogging. Find someone who is doing exciting cool stuff offline, and approach them with your pitch to increase their revenues with a blog online.

Whether you seek a fee or a revenue share is up to you—it’s the mindset that’s important.

How to Become a Rich and Famous Professional Blogger

The way to become successful as a marketer is to be a successful marketer. In other words, what you sell is just as important as how you sell it.

If you take on blogging projects from any poor soul who happens by, who you know doesn’t have a chance of succeeding, why do it? Just for the quick money?

That’s incredibly short-sighted. You want to associate yourself with winning companies that have killer products and services, and a great story just waiting to be told with a blog that you produce.

That’s how you raise your profile as a pro business blogger. That’s how to have people banging down your door to get you on their team. And that’s how to make a lot of money in this type of business.

So, choose your clients carefully, and always be proactive. Only take on projects that you are genuinely excited about, and you’ll never feel like you’re working.

And if your choices are on the money, you’ll be in the money.

The End of Adsense?

The results are in, and they ain’t pretty.

Market research firm Outsell released a report Wednesday that shows what many already knew — that click fraud in contextual pay per click advertising is a big problem. The report reveals that 14.6 percent of all clicks are bogus, and that 27 percent of advertisers reduced or stopped spending on click-based advertising.

That type of reaction is to be expected, and it’s reflected in Scott Karp’s post asking What Will Replace Pay-Per-Click Advertising? However, closer inspection shows that the majority of the fraud comes from third-party publisher sites, not in the actual search engines themselves, and that vindicates a pay per click model that actually works.

As I indicated in my recent pay per click advertising post, smart search engine marketers don’t bother with contextual advertising on third-party sites. Even without fraud it’s just not a good return on investment.

I’m not saying there is no fraud in the search engine result pages (SERPS) themselves, but it’s easy for Google to detect and discount that, and the motivation is lower. It’s a whole different story on independently-owned sites where a profit motive is present, thanks to AdSense.

AdSense has been a cash cow for Google for one simple reason — it caters to the “money for nothing” mentality that pervades the world of Internet publishing and marketing. You don’t have to sell anything or even add value to the Web… you just need that click.

So, once you have a program that rewards publishers for producing content and pages that effectively encourage people to leave as soon as possible, can we really be surprised that organized click fraud is the natural result? Did we think the millions of splogs and junk web pages littered with AdSense ads would be as bad as it got?

Nope. That’s not how this end game works, and I’m fairly sure Google had to be aware of this inevitable result.

However, pay per click advertising in search engines is still effective, and if the knee-jerk reaction from some advertisers is to abandon all PPC, better for the rest of us. Just understand that you can opt out of having your ads displayed on third party sites and still enjoy the ROI of search engine marketing.

But there is a definite shift afoot, and even Google’s smartly getting into it.

Affiliate marketing is making a strong comeback.

For many (such as myself), it never left. Unfortunately, the emphasis placed on AdSense, especially in the blogging world, has left many newcomers to Internet marketing completely in the dark about affiliate marketing techniques that work. And those techniques generally do not involve banner ads inserted in the spot where your AdSense used to be.

The fact is, you can make money with your blog (and other types of sites) if you’re willing to put some work into it, and invest a bit in learning smart strategies. Just don’t invest in any “make money with AdSense” programs at this point!

How NOT to Sell RSS

I see these lists all the time, and they never cease to amaze me.

Steve Rubel offers us a post entitled “35 Ways You Can Use RSS Today.”

Here’s a few samples:

Get hotel deals from Marriott
Learn a new word every day using RSS
Track the latest sales with Dealcatcher

Subscribe to the Target circular
Subscribe to movie reviews

Go ahead and check out all 35 if you’d like.

Now, tell me — couldn’t you rewrite that headline to read:

“35 Ways People Used Email in 1998 (And Still Do Today)”

I mean, come on. Just as an obvious example, people have been learning a new word via email for forever. And heck, even I published an aggregated movie review ezine back in the 90s!

Worse, every single one of the 35 listed by Rubel can be done with email today. It’s not like opt-in content delivery originated with RSS feeds.

Here’s the point.

Recently released studies re-affirm that people love getting content by email, and don’t get why they should switch to RSS. Of course when you ask the question “Do you want to aggregate RSS feeds?” and get a negative response, it’s as if you had asked “Do you want to access Web pages with HTTP?” in 1995 (good one, Scott!).

Regardless, people simply don’t like change. And when you tout RSS on the basis that it does the exact same thing as email when it comes to content delivery, you’ll get nothing more than a shrug and a blank look.

The way to sell RSS is to tell people why it’s better than email.

Or, as Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog correctly commented, RSS “beats email all to heck.” Now, we just need to tell people why.

And I agree that we’ve got to stop calling it RSS. It’s just not going to fly with the masses.

I’m warming up to “content feed” myself. What do you think?

Please feel free to offer any brilliant feed branding ideas in the comments.

5 Steps to PPC Ads That Work

Compared with the ineffective crapshoot that is traditional advertising, there’s no better way to get targeted traffic than through pay-for-performance keyword advertising in search engines. If you’re not clear on what pay per click ads are, those are the sponsored links that show up when you perform a web search in Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

While more targeted than offline advertising or banner ads, it’s certainly possible to throw away a lot of cash with pay per click. The way to do that is to fail to think strategically about where you send people who click on your ads.

The goal of pay per click advertising is to get in front of searchers who are looking specifically for what you have to offer. This takes careful keyword research, strategic bidding, and compelling ad copy just to get the click.

The problem is, that’s where most people stop.

They make the mistake of sending that targeted traffic to the home page of their website or blog. Even worse, they make no attempt to establish a relationship with those that don’t buy, so as to boost conversion rates for every dollar spent.

So, if you’re selling products or services, it makes sense to make sales and build your fan club at the same time. Here’s how to boost your conversion rates from any pay per click campaign while also boosting your subscriber numbers.

1. The first thing to do is build a ultra-specific page to send the search traffic to, called a landing page. Depending on the variety of key words you are bidding on, you may even build several landing pages that each narrowly address the specific needs of that searcher.
2. When I say “searchers,” I mean searchers. Do not participate in contextual advertising programs on publisher sites. I think we’ve all seen enough AdSense spam to understand part of the reasoning here. But even on reputable sites, contextual advertising brings too many “curiosity clicks” that kill your return on investment. You want people who are actively looking for what you are offering. You can choose to opt-out of non-search traffic with both Google and Yahoo.
3. The landing page does not sell your product or service. This is key. You instead offer a quality free resource –- a mini-course, ebook, teleseminar, or other type of tutorial that is directly related to what you are ultimately selling. By teaching people about the subject matter of your product or service, you are actually engaging in a highly effective form of selling, all while establishing a relationship.
4. Whatever your free offer, it must be delivered by an email or RSS autoresponder that allows you to stay in contact with the prospect.
5. You should explicitly inform your prospects that in addition to the free resource you are offering, they will also be receiving your email newsletter / blog updates. Make sure you make this part of your offer as enticing as possible. You’re delivering valuable, relevant content on a regular basis, right?

And there you have it. You’ll likely make some sales right away, but your real profits will come from the people who warm up to your offer thanks to the ongoing value you provide with your blog content.

This technique is by no means new. But it’s shocking how many people still don’t use it, as they waste good money sending targeted traffic to a home page that is not laser-focused, and also fail to offer true value to the searcher that results in a relationship.

You don’t propose marriage before you get a first date. And you likewise shouldn’t expect people to just automatically jump at the chance to give you money upon arriving at your home page.

Of course, each of the five steps above could use some elaboration, and I’ll be offering tips in the future that can help boost landing page conversions even for those who have been using this method for years. Also, the key word research and bidding process in Google AdWords (the largest pay per click program) is a topic in itself that requires mastery to be effective.

Effective Advertising That Builds Your Fan Club

It’s ironic, isn’t it?

Bootstrapping, tech-savvy entrepreneurs use blogs as ultra-low-cost tools for free promotion in lieu of an advertising budget, often with great success.

Meanwhile, existing businesses are carefully looking into this “whole blogging thing” trying to determine if it’s a worthwhile return on investment that supplements their current marketing.

If only — like chocolate and peanut butter —we could get these two groups together, eh?

A smart blogging strategy can hugely boost the fortunes of an established small business, and even allow for the elimination of many traditional advertising methods.

And the smart entrepreneur who gets a start with inexpensive online promotion would be well advised to reinvest initial revenue into high ROI methods that spur rapid growth.

The key to effective online advertising is to make an offer and establish a relationship at the same time. You may be surprised to learn that some products are created and some services performed just to break even on the cost of subscriber acquisition.

Why? Because the money’s in the list.

Or in other words, a subscriber relationship is way more important than a one-off sale.

My next two posts will be a quick primer on a couple of ways that you can benefit by focusing on both subscriber acquisition and sales. First, we’ll take a look at pay per click advertising that works, followed by a subscriber acquisition technique called co-registration that you may not be familiar with.

How to Get 53% More Readers for Every Blog Post You Write

You know from the 80/20 Rule of Headlines that the best way to get your writing read is to improve your headline. It can be a bitter pill to swallow when you realize that most people, even among those who subscribe to your blog, are not reading every post, but it’s not just you — it happens to us all.

So what was it about the headline of this post that got you to read this far?

Well, it’s not only that the headline makes a promise to deliver unique and useful information to my audience of bloggers. It’s also the way that it makes that promise.

The headline is very specific.

While certainly not the only method for writing good blog post titles, just about any headline can be made better by being as specific as you possibly can. Specificity increases credibility because specific details are simply more believable than broad assertions. Plus, a specific headline conveys more valuable information to a potential reader, which acts to draw them magnetically into the content.

Here are a few examples of ultra-specific headlines:

• How I Made $19,931.42 Last Month With Google AdSense
• In This Free 10 Chapter, 123 Page Ebook You’ll Learn…
• Eleven Secret Techniques That Make Bloggers Money
• Lose 36 Pounds in Only 7 Weeks
• How to Shave 5 Strokes Off Your Golf Score in 3 Days

Of course, the single most important rule of ultra-specific headlines is that you need to be able to back up your assertions. And as I’ve done before, I break the rule in order to make the point (which is the true joy of writing a copywriting blog).

While I’m positive that being more specific in your post titles will increase the number of people who read your post, I have no earthly idea what the actual percentage will be for you. There are way too many variables involved.

So I really should have said:

How to Get More Readers for Every Blog Post Your Write

But that’s simply not as good a headline

RSS & CB Radio

Imagine if ATT had decided to send all of its telephone subscribers a free CB radio back in the 1970s, just to make sure the company was at the forefront of an exciting new communications technology that was sweeping the nation. Mass adoption of trucker tech by the general population would have been a silly thing for a monopoly to gamble on, right?

Seth Godin today looks back at the CB radio craze of the 70s, and specifically how people at the time mistook a niche fascination for a larger trend. The post concludes with Seth asking whether RSS feeds are akin to a true killer-app like email, or destined to join GeoCities in the discarded technology dustbin.

With any new technology, you can waste money and your all-too-important time chasing a fad while thinking it’s an enduring trend.

At first blush, it might seem like Seth isn’t sure what he thinks about the future of RSS. But if you follow the link he places in his closing question, you’ll see he’s invested quite a bit of his own valuable time in an “Understanding RSS” lens on Squidoo.

As the Godfather of Permission Email Marketing®, Seth knows RSS is not a passing fad or a niche obsession. Anyone who has spent time in the email publishing arena knows that people love to get content that matters to them delivered by email.

What they don’t like is spam, viruses, phishing and filters that nuke desired content. Email has become too important to personal communication for that junk, which means many people no longer want to give out an email address to content publishers.

You know, content publishers like you, who realize how important subscribers are.

The fact is, RSS and CB radio are at completely different points along the technology adoption spectrum, because the concept of sending and receiving opt-in Internet content has already been hugely embraced thanks to email. Since RSS fixes the unintended nasty consequences of email publishing, it too will be hugely embraced.

Which brings us back to silly things that monopolies don’t do.

The way Microsoft has invested in RSS speaks volumes. Feed reading capabilities are integrated throughout Internet Explorer 7, the new version of Outlook, and the Windows Vista operating system itself. Microsoft knows RSS is the future of content delivery, and they’ve made the appropriate big investment.

So… Can I get a big 10-4 on the importance of RSS to your businesses, good buddies?