#1 Secret To Googling

Did you know that you can avoid sorting through thousands of pages of search results?

It’s easy and it's called:  Google Search Modifiers.

To find reports that are often meant to be hidden away, but Google still has found and indexed, simply add “filetype:pdf” to any search term. Looking for a Powerpoint presentation? Add “filetype:ppt” to any search term.

Example: Internet Marketing filetype:pdf

Basically, Google will return only pages that have PDFs or PowerPoint Presentations. Usually these files are easier to find rather than going through a bunch of commercial website pages. PDFs and PowerPoint Presentations are a great way to get a quick overview of a specific topic, and a way to discover great bullet points that you can rewrite and use in your copy! 

Bonus Secret: Even if you don’t own Microsoft PowerPoint software, you can download a free Windows PowerPoint viewer.


And for help finding definitions or synonyms, you can use the “define” query.

Example: Define: Internet Marketing 

The SEO Importance of KEYWORDS!!

When it comes to internet writing, blogging, marketing, etc., KEYWORDS are extremely important.

Keywords are basically the words in your copy that match what people are searching.  As you know, millions of searches are conducted each day on popular search engines by people all around the world.

Fortunately for you, most major search engines provide a way to glimpse into the web's query stream to discover the most popular search keywords or topics. These are just a few:

• Ask IQ: See top searches at Ask.
   
• Dogpile SearchSpy: Choose to see either a filtered or non-filtered sample of top, real-time search terms from this popular meta search service. Sister site MetaCrawler offers a similar MetaCrawler MetaSpy service.
   
• Google Trends: Allows you to tap into Google's database of searches, to determine what's popular. View the volume of queries over time, by city, regions, languages and so on. Compare multiple terms, as well. See our review: Google Trends: Peer Into Google's Database Of Searches.
   
• Google Zeitgeist: What people are searching for at Google and its associated specialty services in a variety of categories. There are versions for various countries, as well.
   
• Lycos 50: Long-standing service showing top searches at Lycos each week.
   
• Yahoo Buzz Index: Shows you what's hot and what's not in terms of search topics at Yahoo.

 
 It is important to actually search a couple of these sites before even starting a new blog post or whatever copy you are planning on doing.  That way you can ensure you are writing about something current and interesting in the minds of the majority of people.

DOING THIS COULD EVEN SUPPLY YOU WITH SOME INSPIRATION! YAY!

I also found this GREAT site http://www.seomoz.org which has some very helpful SEO resources you might want to check out as well. 

This particular page is actually telling you where the search engines are "crawling" or searching for keywords the most, which is basically where you want to focus your keyword attention on. 

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#on-page-keyword-specific-ranking-factors

Promoting Your Blog Through Social Media and Networking

Promoting yourself, your business or your blog on social networking can be extremely profitable if done right.

Before you can find your customers on a social networking site, you have to be involved in that social networking site. Which means establishing a page on Facebook, My Space, You Tube, Twitter etc.  Adding a photo so people get a sense of who you are. Just basically introducing yourself, your interest and your business.

For example, every time you write a new post, post the link on facebook.  This way it will come up on your friends' "news feed" and there is a very good chance someone will click on your blog from there! 

Now having "friends or followers"

• Let the networking site go through your email list and see who else that you know or have had communication with also has a page on the site. You can then decide if you want to link up with that person.

• Put an announcement on your website with your social network site information and ask people to join you.

• Join groups that have been established on the site that are relevant to your business interests.

Why you "Need" Friends: 

• Your email list will generate a list of people you already know that you can link up with.

• The site announcement gives people the opportunity to be part of your list.

• People who have joined a group have announced their interest in speaking with other people about the subject of the group.

• Use a search query that searches the interests people have identified in their profiles.

Give your social media creativity a try. It will help you build knowledge of your market and who is out there, it will give you closer connections with potential customers, and hopefully higher sales or hits as a reward for all of your hard work!

Promoting Your Blogs on Other Sites

A great way to promote your blog is to link to other sites and blogs.

For example, if you like to Do Things Yourself (DIY) there are a bunch of Crafty / DIY sites you can post your work and share it with others.  These sites also let you put a link to your blog or website up which will bring you referrals and will also bring you up in Search Engines.  (Two great DIY websites are http://www.craftbits.com  or http://thediyshowoff.blogspot.com )

However, it is important that you link to other sites with a better "traffic ranking" then you do.  This is just another confusing part about Search Engine Optimization.  Depending on how many hits your blog or site gets, the internet Gods give you a ranking.  A few sites you can use to check your ranking or other people's rankings is:

http://www.alexa.com/

http://www.quantcast.com/

http://www.prchecker.info/

These sites are great because they also provide keywords that are frequently used to search your sites, and other important statistics. 

Here's a secret:  Some of these sites also provide contact information for site owners which is great if you are looking to snail mail something out to a potential customer.

Promoting Your Blog in Blog Directories

A great way to promote your blog is by listing it on a bunch of different blog directories.  While some directories charge a small fee, there are many that are free.  Here are just a few free ones that I have listed mine on:

http://blogtoplist.com/

This is a blog directory that is sorted by the score each blog has received during the week. 100 unique visitors will generate the same amount of score as 1 unique vote. To get a vote your blog needs to send the vistior to them through the voting button and then the visitor needs to click on the button to vote for the blog. The tracking button tracks the blogs visitors and give the blog score without requiring the visitor to interfare. You can use both methods to get a good rank in the directory. The score is updated every 15 minutes and resets back to zero each monday. 

http://www.blogged.com/

Blogged is a place where you can get reactions to major news events. No more tired old newspapers! With Blogged, you can actually interact with other people.  You can start a profile and a network of friends and it is an opportunity to share your blog with like-minded individuals. 

http://www.bloghub.com/

Bloghub.com is an online directory and community where members from around the world gather and exchange ideas. It is free to add your site to their blog directory, and to search for blog templates, blog skins, create blog or chat on their online Blogger forum.

http://www.blogcatalog.com/  and http://www.globeofblogs.com/ are also very similar. For a list of the top 50 go to: http://www.avangate.com/articles/blog-directories-95.htm

http://www.blogpulse.com/  is a great site because BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs.  This is IMPORTANT because as a blogger you want to write about popular topics.  Popular topics are topics that people WANT to read about and therefore will WANT to read your blog =)

Whenever it comes to listing on a directory, most of them will ask or require a recipricol link.  Most will provide you with an html code that you can insert into your blog and a small little advertisement will be present.  To add the html code to your blog, just choose where you want your html text widget to go, add the code and save!  The recipricol link is actually a way for them to rank how well your blog is doing and the more people you refer to them, the more they will promote your blog on their site and refer to you.  It's a win win situation.

A Job That Allows You to Work From Home

As I mention in my About Me section, the reason I have decided to become a professional blogger is to have the option to Work from home. Perhaps the best reason to become a writer is that it allows you the option of working from home. Not having to drive to work daily or be set to a particular schedule, writers can plan their days as they please. Working from home has its many advantages as well as disadvantages but in my opinion the advantages of working from home as a writer far outweigh the disadvantages as long as you are the type of person that can motivate yourself. 

This also means you can Be your own boss!  Being your own boss is great as you will never have to worry about getting fired or upsetting someone besides yourself ahha. However, again there are advantages and disadvantages to this depending on how organized you are and your ability to budget your money.

If you are reading this and are interested in becoming a writer, you might want to consider starting up a blog.  I personally prefer blogger over wordpress because blogger is easier to design and customize the look of your blog.  Don't worry, it seems complicated at first but like anything practice makes perfect! I will use this blog to help you and provide tips on how to use blogger since I believe I was born to do this =)  Please feel free to post any questions you have about blogger on here!

But back to the making money from home part! Blogger makes it very easy to make money from home by offering Google Adsense.  This basically is a program that you sign up for and choose where they place Google Advertisements on your blog.  It's also called "Monetizing" your blog.  Ofcourse, with the more people going and reading your blog, the better your chances of making money.  However, don't get discouraged, its all about being persistent and writing writing writing.  The more content, the more chances Google will "crawl" over your blog and the better you will rank in the search engines. 

Tomorrow I will talk about ways to promote your blog for free and get more hits that way.  But for now it's time to go out and have some fun.  Good Night!!

What is Online Marketing and SEO?

Copywriting is the most important element for effective online marketing. With Search Engine Optimization in the picture and the need to be creative to catch people's attention, copywriting has now become both an art and a science that involves strategically writing words to promote a person, product, business, opinion, or idea.  You do this of course, with the intention of having the reader take action, like buying your product, commenting on your blog post, or changing their life decisions. 

SEO (search engine optimization) copywriting is the art of writing web page copy that is attractive to readers, but also ranks well for specific searching terms that people are using to find whatever you are writing about.  For example, if you were looking for a new restaurant to go to, you would probably go online and Google: “restaurants, providence RI” and then make your decision from the first couple of search results pages you get, right??  Do you ever search for something and look through all 2,385,000 results? Who has the time? Well the better your ranking the higher you will come up on the search engine's results pages. 

Well because of the overwhelming popularity of “googling it” search engines have now become more sophisticated, making good copy writing and SEO a crucial part of doing business. The great part about SEO is that the internet allows for already interested customers to find YOU.  Thus eliminating the need for smaller businesses to spend large amounts of money on advertising.  And saving money is a great thing!