Internet Marketing

Why Video Posts Can Generate More Traffic For Your Blog

by Melvin · May 5, 2012

This is a guest post by Amanda Green

Many bloggers have recently experimented with video use on their site. While there are many different challenges and considerations that one should keep in mind when making the transition to video, one benefit of the medium is abundantly clear: video, when incorporated correctly and on the right type of site, can almost guarantee a boost in traffic as a result of its use.

Why is this? Let’s take a look at some of the main reasons:

-Higher search result ranking. Several studies have shown that Google’s search results, in an effort to provide a broad range of search-friendly content, has a policy of strongly favoring video results over written ones. In fact, a piece in video form is almost fifty times more likely to organically make the front page than a similar piece composed of text. Video, then, can be an instrumental tool in bringing first-time visitors to your site.

-Differentiated content. Video naturally adds a diversity of content to a website. This can keep things interesting for both the blogger and for the loyal reader, but it can also have the effect of making the blog more appealing to more people in the first place. Some people are visually-inclined by nature and are likely to find a site with a good video mix to be highly appealing. Such diversification helps turn a greater percentage of first-time visitors into loyal returners.

-SEO benefits. Video further offers numerous SEO benefits that can translate into larger traffic volumes. For example, a blogger who effectively uses video tags, establishes video libraries, properly embeds streaming features into a site, and integrates with social media can boost his search result ranking and inbound traffic while lowering bounce rates. You may want to consult an SEO advisor for further link-building and integration assistance.

-More money. Finally, video posts can bring in more money for a website, which in turn can be used towards marketing approaches that generate exposure and traffic. The reason they procure more money is because advertisers have been flocking towards embedded video advertising in the past 1-2 years – and they are willing to pay high rates for the privilege. Bloggers who incorporate the medium correctly can consequently expect more money in their bank accounts and greater spending flexibility for their business credit card or credit card low APR.

These are the main ways that video blogging can help you boost traffic towards your site. While video is not appropriate for every topic or area of content, those bloggers that find a use for it can certainly reap substantial rewards as a result.

LeadsMarket Payday Loan Affiliate Program Review

by Melvin · May 1, 2012

This review is sponsored by LeadsMarket.

I usually shy away from reviewing or associating myself to any ‘payday loan’ related topics but when Leads Market approached me and showed me some press links and resources to their site, I decided that it wouldn’t be really bad to do a review for them considering they are an affiliate program and that I have been ‘sort of’ blogging into that space with this blog for quite some time.

Introducing LeadsMarket.com

Leads Market is a ‘new’ affiliate network that seems to be focusing more on payday loan offers. Their website, on first glimpse, suggests that they are a fully fledged affiliate network. They state in their homepage that they have other offers as well such as dating, mortgages, flowers, etc., however, some quick browsing would reveal that they seem to be more functioning as a payday loan affiliate program and nothing else at the moment.

Also if you go to their website, the title of their main page is ‘The Best Affiliate Internet Marketing Program’ which sounds like a bit vague to me since it seems to be there just to target a very broad keyword. The design of their entire website, while its clean and simple, looks somewhat generic to me. On the good side, it does present some good materials on their homepage and they also have an FAQ where you can read stuff to know more about them. Here’s a good look on their site:

Overall, the site looks somehow not complete yet, as they seem to be still working out on some other stuff at the moment. And that’s why they are primarily a payday loan affiliate program for now as I understand.

Benefits & Exclusivity

Just like every other affiliate network, they’re presenting some benefits and exclusivity in their affiliate network. One of those is getting direct exclusive offers from them. Leads Market runs offers that are ONLY available to them and nowhere else. As an affiliate, this is a good benefit since there would be less competition considering the specific offer you’re promoting is not that saturated yet.

Another benefit that they are promoting is the commissions. Leads Market claims that their affiliates get a ‘lion’s share of commission’. This is due to the fact that they are an advertiser themselves, not middle-man which most of the affiliate networks are. They also do what most networks do which is providing their top affiliates with payout bonuses per month.

Speaking of payouts, Leads Market has the standard NET 30 payout which means you’ll have to wait 30 more days from the end of the Calendar month. This is a bit long if you ask me however, you can structure a more flexible payout terms with them if you are one of their top affiliates. Payments are made via check, Direct deposit, PayPal, Payoneer and PayQuicker.

Lastly, just like other networks, they do provide top-notch support and good technology (e.g. tracking, creatives, etc.). Communication with your affiliate manager is very very important as every affiliate knows. The success of the affiliate somehow depends on the quality of the affiliate manager that he has. And with that, support plays a really really vital role for this. Hopefully LeadsMarket has experienced affiliate managers and dedicated support team to help you out on this.

Conclusion

I don’t have any first hand experience with Leads Market myself since I just recently signed up, and therefore I cannot really make any personal recommendations myself on whether they’re worth it or not. As I mentioned, they are relatively new in the space and do not seem to be that popular yet. A quick search for Leads Market will not even yield that much results yet for them.

While I may not be recommending them yet, I would highly highly suggest you to at least check them out, and perhaps signup and see if the offers are enticing enough for you to stay. Payday loans are usually high paying offers which are not that hard to promote considering that its mostly cost per lead and that the consumer just need to input some stuff and meet some minimal requirements in order for them to qualify as a lead. However, payday loans are also a bit regulated and there used to be and still there are lots of shady offers existing in the vertical. That would be a pretty good challenge for Leads Market to take in this regard since they are primarily a payday loan affiliate program.

So that’s it, feel free to check LeadsMarket.com and if you already have experience with them, feel free to comment below.

Maximizing Search Traffic For Old Blog Posts

by Melvin · Apr 15, 2012

If there’s a type of blog entry that is potentially getting traffic from search right now, its undoubtedly your old blog entries. As we all know, search engine traffic takes time. No one really writes or puts out something, and then expects search engines to start sending traffic to that content as soon as its published. That’s why its really more long term and that I always tell people to just do the basic search stuff, but not get too obsessed with it. In short, do other online marketing stuff as well and don’t really on Google.

In this blog entry I would just like to share some ~~rambling~~ stuff regarding search engine traffic here in this blog. As you all know, I haven’t been blogging actively for quite a while now and in fact I’m not that much into the game anymore. So understandably, the traffic that this site is getting is considerably lower than ever. And because of that, its easier for me to spot the increased search traffic that I started getting.

While the traffic increase for the past 18 months is not massive, its very evident that I started getting more traffic from search and that comes with me not posting that much during the period of increase. And the traffic is still consistent as of this writing. More search traffic when not posting too much, amazing? No.

The truth is even if I am posting consistently, I would still get the same (or more) amount of search traffic because the content that are getting the hits from search are old blog entries.

Now I’m not really a search guy. I wrote before about writing for search engines but I don’t mostly work with doing SEO stuff. I love putting out content and engaging but I’m not a search guy. However, the reason I started getting more search traffic is quite a bit surprising.

About 3 years ago I wrote a cheesy post about the best birthday gift for the girl that I love (or more accurately I have a crush with). That was college days so please understand that I was dealing with puppy loves and whatnot. :p. Now, I noticed that I started getting like 10-20 hits a day regarding keywords related to that blog entry. I was obviously surprised because the article was not written in a way that one would expect it would get traffic.

So when I got convinced that I had to do something to get better traffic, I studied the Analytics and Webmaster Central data even more. And then I edited the said blog entry to try to ‘massage’ it more and eventually get better rankings. I’m not really able to follow it closely because of work but for the past 2 months, I realized that I’m now getting 30-50 hits from search from keywords that are related to that blog entry. It was fascinating because I never really expected it to get traffic from search at all. Also, its on the first page of Google right now when you search for ‘best birthday gifts for girls’ which I thought was amazing.

And now there are some other keywords that I never intended to rank for that are ranking well and are getting me some traffic.

Moral Lesson

So what’s the moral lesson of this blog post? The lesson is to never underestimate traffic from search engines. But another is that when you feel like you are starting to get some, don’t be afraid to make modifications to that specific blog post. You have all the data to look at from Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Central and it reveals almost everything to help you. Do some tweaks and those little tweaks can definitely help.

My stance on not getting too caught up with doing SEO is still the same and I don’t still consider myself as a guy doing search engine optimization primarily but it definitely gives me some things to experiment for now. And getting search traffic and maximizing it is something that I know will be useful in the long run.

How about you? What’s your no.1 tip in maximizing search traffic?

Does Directory Submission Still Work? Get Links Pro Review

by Melvin · Dec 10, 2011

Directory submission used to be one of the more popular link building techniques that people used to boost their search rankings. Back then, doing submissions was a must. However these days, many SEO experts seem to conclude that doing submissions isn’t worth it anymore. But is it really the case?

Well to help us answer that, let’s review Get Links Pro first, a company that does manual directory submissions and also other link building methods.

Get Links Pro Review

As mentioned above, Get Links Pro provides manual directory submissions and other link building services like blog comments, do-follow profile links, article submissions, local citations and etc.

Get Links Pro’s services start at $8 for 50 Social Bookmarks package and go up to $200 for 2000 Directory Submission package. They also provide a monthly type of directory package which costs a walking $25 for 250 monthly directory submissions. The owner told me that this monthly package was more popular than the other ones.

Overall, most of the categories are pretty flexible in which it allows you to choose from a small package up to a big package.

Aside from this, they also provide a combination of all of their services and this falls into their link building services. For this, they combined 5 different types of methods which help ensure diversity in link building profile. For example their ‘fantastic package’ provides 100 directory submissions, 50 article submissions, 15 profile links and 5 dofollow comments at an affordable price of $39. The higher end of these combinations is called the ‘Incredible Package’ which costs $1,455.

If you decide to go this route, I would suggest picking what’s suitable for you for the immediate moment. They have 9 different combinations for the link building service that you can choose from so if you’re just a small startup then obviously the cheaper one could work well for you. This is also ideal since links are coming from multiple sources which mean it’s much more diversified and less spammy.

Here is a screenshot of some of their link building packages:

Get Links Pro Website

If you arrive at Get Links Pro website, you can see that it’s a pretty simple and neat site. The navigation is good although it could be a bit confusing at the start. For example, you would initially think that they only do manual directory submissions since it’s the primary description on their site. Also, I think some packages could be named better like a ‘fantastic package’ for instance could be named as a ‘beginner package’ or anything that describes it better.

Another thing worth-noting is that most of their category-specific packages are not done efficiently (in my opinion). You will have to scan through a long generic pack of text before you can see the pricing and the content of the package. I definitely think that the pricing and packages should be the first thing seen when someone goes in there. The text can then come below that (like their link building services page. 😉 ). Lastly, I don’t think people would want to read a long text so it probably wouldn’t harm if they decrease the text, and get straight to the point.

Support and Other Miscelllaneous Stuff

As far as support, I think they’re just doing it fine as they have 5 “I’m online” live chats. Yes 5 different live chats. Seriously I’ve never seen any service or website that lists 5 different live chats that you could talk to so as long as these chats are for real, then I think it’s a big plus on their part.

Aside from that, I think everything is fine on their end. They have lots of pages (FAQ’s, About, Affiliates, etc.) so if you really want to know them more and the services that they provide, you can definitely spend some time reading about them first. Lastly, I think the URL structure on some of the pages is quite funny as it seems to be ‘rerouting’ some pages to a temporary link or something. A good example would be clicking on their logo (i.e. has some index.php?’parameters’ instead of just the main index url).

Conclusion

So is it still worth spending money on manual submissions? Specifically companies like Get Links Pro? My personal opinion is that directory submissions are still useful and if done correctly, it can still create a diversified link profile that can rank you well for certain key terms. In fact, I know some people that rely on this alone in getting their niche sites up in the search engines. But again, submissions must be done correctly and I don’t think there’s anything better than manual submissions like what Get Links Pro does.

So if you want to get ranked and you don’t have time to do it yourself, check out Get Links Pro. I’m sure there would be a package there that would suit your needs.

Competitive Local Searching. GeoEdge Review

by Melvin · Oct 18, 2011

This is a paid review. If you’re interested in having your product/website reviewed, kindly see our packages here.

Update: In this review, GeoEdge was compared to an outdated version of GeoSurf. The version of GeoSurf that I reviewed was version 3.0 which is now an outdated version according to them.

Viewing websites in different geographic locations has many uses. An “obvious” use is for us, online marketers who are doing research for the market that we’re targeting. Another use is for SEO’s running optimization campaigns for their clients or even for themselves. Also, we have those affiliate marketers that use pay-per-click on search engines. They want to know how their ad is performing and if it shows often. Lastly, we have these other group of people who are monitoring their brand throughout different locations and seeing if their campaigns are being ran as planned. Actually, surfing websites locally has almost unlimited uses.

The use of tools that will do all of this is starting to become a necessity. Sure, we have all those ‘free’ web proxies that are available ever since but how do we know they’re not infecting our system with all those malwares and viruses? How do we know they’re really reliable? Perhaps the reason why they’re free is because they’re not really delivering the goods.

Last month I talked about GeoSurf and how it differs from the rest by instead providing a toolbar for doing local searches. For this month, I’ll be reviewing a somehow similar service called GeoEdge.

What is GeoEdge?

GeoEdge, as a whole, is a company that specializes in creating technologies in the field of online media and specifically geo-location (targeting). Their global visibility solution is obviously the GeoEdge Pro product which I’m about to review.

GeoEdge (the PRO version) allows you to view up to over 100 locations (which is more than what GeoSurf offers) and you can do that by installing their toolbar on your browser. As of the moment, there’s a toolbar for Firefox and Chrome (beta). After installing, you are now ready to use GeoEdge.

Aside from GeoEdge Pro, they also have other tools that you can associate with it. One is GeoEdge search and the other one is GeoEdge Analytics. The first one is basically just a package that’s more suited for search optimizers and marketers. The second one is more targeted to Ad networks and Media Buyers. Let’s have a look on what’s inside.

Inside GeoEdge

GeoEdge gave me a free trial wherein I was able to explore in many different countries. My experience with the toolbar is mostly good and I would say its pretty accurate. A quick test that I conducted is browsing Google.com on several locations and GeoEdge never failed in delivering me to right Google page based on the location that I selected.

The toolbar is sleek and I like that its organized by continents. You don’t need to scroll down to a list of gazillion countries. Instead, they’ve grouped them accordingly so if I want to select ‘Argentina’ as my location, I can simply just go to Latin America and then select Argentina.

Aside from this, there’s also a mobile emulation feature wherein you can see the look of a page on a specific mobile handset. I cannot speak on its accuracy since I only own an Android phone so I don’t really know if the page looks the same in Symbian or iOS.

Since GeoEdge is a browser add-on, they need to keep up with endless updates from the browser it is supporting. I think they’ve done a good job of that since the version that I tried seemed to work with three different Firefox versions without having any problems at all.

I was also using an internet connection through a USB when I tested GeoEdge and it just worked fine (GeoSurf didn’t work well with a USB dongle btw.) As an aside, there are some other Firefox plugins (like Foursquarefox) that don’t work well with USB dongles so kudos to the creators of GeoEdge for that.

As far as the connection speed, not sure if its normal but when you change to some other locations, the page loads slower. I know that the servers are located on different places that might have been far from my location so that’s probably the reason why it happens.

I would say all in all that I like GeoEdge. The toolbar idea is superb and I like how they have the details organized in the toolbar. Aside from that there’s this ‘Snap-it’ thing that looks real unique. What this does is build a consolidated view of pages and ads from several geographical location. The view will be based on your selection of locations. I haven’t tried this extensively but a quick look on Snap-it would lead you to their bigger product called GeoEdge Analytics which I will not be discussing anymore.

For a good demo, you can also visit the GeoEdge demo page to see how it works.

Plans and Pricing

GeoEdge has interesting packages as compared to GeoSurf. They actually have a free version called GeoEdge Search where you can access up to 8 locations but you can only use these locations on search engine ranking page. That means you cannot really use it to a specific URL but rather to search results only. Its very limited in that sense but still I know lots of people can benefit from this. And hey its for FREE.

As for the pro package, the cheapest one starts at $59/month where you can view up to 3 locations and have a search limit of 200mb. Here’s a screenshot of their entire packages:

They have this unique package which is the custom one wherein you can choose your own combinations and build it your own way. The price for this obviously depends on that certain combinations that you want.

Lastly, every package has a free trial option so within that specified period you can cancel when you feel its not worth it.

Conclusion

GeoEdge is actually almost identical with GeoSurf. They both make use of toolbar and they’re pretty expensive if you’re gonna use them and you’re not really making any money. However, if you are in the industry wherein tracking locally is always a task, then this is definitely a must have. If you are working on a large company, you can also suggest to use this tool. In short, tools like this is not for everyone.

Overall, I find GeoEdge just fine. I’m a web guy that has gotten used to using proxies from websites and having the privilege to use a tool like this, I would say its almost always refreshing. Maybe they can roll out more features that would further more set them apart from the competition but right now its already solid. Also, finishing that Google Chrome toolbar would help a lot since lots of users are using Chrome these days.

How about you? Do you think GeoEdge can help you do your local searches more competitive?

Why a Blog is your Best Marketing Asset

by Melvin · Oct 10, 2011

I have been blogging for about 4 years now and it still never ceases to amaze me how a blog can be utilized as a powerful marketing asset for whatever you’re doing. For example, this blog alone has helped me do a ton of things just because I write here. It has that leverage that gives you a pretty good advantage over your other competitors in your market. Aside from that it allows you to do direct response marketing better than ever since you’re hardly pitching them anything but rather just giving out good content.

Anyway there’s a huge contest over at SEM-GROUP in w/c I am currently participating right now. My writing entry to that contest is entitled Your Best Internet Marketing Asset – Your Blog. It’s a detailed blog post about what I said above. It also tackles how blogging alone covers all of the other components that you probably already need in order to succeed in marketing your business online. Again you can help me win the contest by reading my contest entry.

It’s not a traffic-getting contest actually but rather just a writing contest. However, its one of those rarely lengthy blog entries that I usually do and I think you can benefit greatly from that.

——————————————————————————————————————————————–

Contest Media Partner

$500 Sponsors

RankPop.com Affordable SEO

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Daniel McGonagle Link Building

SEO-Peace.com Professional link building SEO Company

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Hesham Zebida Thesis Skins

$100 Sponsors

Scott Bradley Simple Weight Loss Tips For Entrepreneurs

Milan Matchev Health Directory

Jacob Share JobMob Job Search Tips

Ileane Smith Blogging Tips

Search Engine Marketing Group

John Britsios www.SEOWorkers.com

Magento Developer

Doc Sheldon’s Clinic Critical Thinking for the Discerning SEO

$50 Sponsors

Vertical Measures Internet Marketing Services

Whitney Michael Segura Greenhouses for Sale

Butch Segura Wholesale Greenhouses by EarthCare

Whitney “WeedyP” Segura Internet Marketing Blog by Whitney Segura

Ernest Segura Greenhouse Supplies @ OurCrazyDeals.com

Raxa Design Houston Internet marketing

Ana Hoffman – Traffic Generation Cafe Web Traffic

James Brown James Brown

Anwar Barake Wholesale Herbal Incense

Understand Technology with TechFume

The Tech Blog TechnoZeast

Wilderness Aware Rafting Colorado White Water Rafting

Sales Nexus online CRM

SEO Prize Sponsors

David Harry A full years membership at SEO Dojo, a value of $250.SEO Training Dojo

Lifetime membership to: My Blog Guest. MyBlogGuest.com is the free guest post exchange community where users meet to exchange guest posts and network.

Link-Assistant.Com SEO PowerSuite Enterprise (max. functionality license) SEO tools

SEMrush.com – the best tool to spy on your competitors ($210 value) www.semrush.com

3 month Pro subscription to Raven Internet Marketing Tools ($297 value) Raven Internet Marketing Tools

A Guide on Doing Blog Marketing

by Melvin · Sep 19, 2011

It’s been a while since I created a guide on blog marketing/driving traffic to a blog and obviously the need to update the material has occurred to me. Especially with the fact that I got lots of feedback based on the old one that I created and those feedback that I received were really good.

Now if you haven’t been reading my blog since last year, then the book that I’m referring to is the one entitled ‘Blog Marketing for Fame’. This free guide generally received positive feedback from most of my readers and I was happy with how it turned out. There were a couple of good suggestions that I put into work with regards to the new one.

So there I upgraded the guide and it has been rebranded as …

‘Blog Marketing Guide’

Aside from the old one having a long flimsy name, another reason for the renaming of the book is the fact that there’s really no guide on blog marketing in general available. And perhaps, ‘Blog Marketing Guide‘ as a name is pretty good and something easy to remember. It may not really be the perfect name for now but its something that’s good to start with.

The book just like most of my guides are free if you subscribe to my newsletter which is totally a no-brainer if you ask me. :p. The book has 5 general sections on how and where you can get traffic plus a detailed explanation/elaboration of the different things that I do that has worked extremely well for myself and hopefully can also work for you.

But the book isn’t really just the cool stuff here as the newsletter is the one that I would say I’m pretty proud of. Over the past few years I haven’t really had gotten a huge amount of people on my list. I have a couple of hundreds to be honest but I’m very proud to say that the community in my newsletter is a tightly-knit interactive group. Lastly, I usually put out lots of great advice and tips that I normally don’t publish here. And hey there were a couple of times that I even gave free goodies there. 🙂

Why Blog Marketing?

Pretty simple. Just like in my old post about most bloggers failing at marketing, the reason I created this thing is to be able to help out lots of bloggers on how they can market their blogs competitively.

Not much has really changed. Most bloggers aren’t still good at marketing their stuff and its pretty understandable. When I was getting started I looked at blogging as just writing and I believe this is how most bloggers trying to carve their niche look at blogging as well. Obviously its the wrong way to look at it.

We, bloggers have to be somehow in the middle of ‘writers’ and internet marketers (salesmen). We need to write out our usual selves while being good enough to promote it and get enough people in our community. But we don’t need to sound like those marketers right? Nor do we need to push out one product after the other just to get affiliate sales. In short, we don’t want any part of being salesy yet we want to know how to market.

Hopefully that’s what the Blog Marketing Guide brings to the table.

So that’s my reason. Again, your feedback is highly appreciated and feel free to get this guide across the blogosphere.