Marketing With Miles

3 Marketing Mistakes From My Past

Miles Baker — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:43:45 +0000

Aterrific way to get ahead in the game of Internet marketing and life in general is to learn from and avoid the mistakes that others make. I’ve certainly made more than 3 mistakes in the past but I thought I would share with you 3 major mistakes I’ve made that you can learn and benefit from. Take action today to avoid these major blunders and you’ll avoid the loss, frustration, and setbacks they’ve caused me.

Mistake #1 – Not backing up. One of the keys to keeping your online business intact and running without interruption is to have some kind of backup policy. There’s nothing worse than losing files, especially ones you cannot replace. Without a backup plan not only do you risk losing the hours and days of work you may have put into creating those files, but you will also lose time creating them again and/or trying to find them somewhere else. If you have a good backup plan, you won’t have these problems.

My current backup plan consists of an extra internal hard drive inside my PC that gets backed up to every night at 3am. I also backup to an external hard drive once a month that I keep in a fireproof safe. I have two hard drives in my computer that use something called RAID to simultaneously write everything to both of them, in case one of them fails everything is on the other drive. In addition to this I use Jungle Disk. I love Jungle Disk because it backs up everything offsite to RackSpace could hosting. It’s all encrypted with your own special password which means nobody can access your files but you. Jungle Disk also keeps several previous versions of every file you backup!

My backup plan is pretty extreme, however I’ve learned from not backing up how important it is, trust me, it’s a mistake you don’t want to make.

Mistake #2 – Not going to conferences. When I first started going to Internet marketing related conferences I couldn’t believe I waited so long. Sadly, it took me about 5 years of marketing online before I ever attended one. Once I attended one everything changed, and fast! Not only did a learn a ton, but the face to face connections I made were invaluable and continue to benefit me to this day. In fact, the more conferences I go to the more connections I make and the stronger my existing relationships become.

The first conference I went to I spent most the trip with marketing legend Joel Comm! A great connection that was, I learned a lot from him as well as another marketer Eric Holmlund. As a result I later got the opportunity to visit Joel’s office headquarters in Loveland, CO. Although I don’t currently work with Joel directly, that relationship is there and who knows what could still happen because of it! I did meet his chief idea innovator Dan Knickerson and I still do a little partnership with him to this day. None of this would have happened if I didn’t attend my first conference.

Subsequent conferences I’ve attended have introduced me and allowed me to form relationships with too many people to mention here. As a result I’ve done interviews, exchanged trade secrets, found business partnerships, started projects, formed strong bonds, and made some amazing friends with a ton of marketers in my industry. Enough can’t be said about the benefits of going to marketing conferences. One of my favorites is Affiliate Summit and if you can attend it you should.

Mistake #3 – Not mastering the art of saying “NO”. Saying “NO” is probably the hardest task to master but it’s absolutely crucial and imperative you master it if you want to reach your full potential. There are many different areas in which learning to say “NO” is necessary.

Opportunities – Turning down opportunities is just as important as taking them. If you can’t learn the art of saying no, you’ll soon find yourself overwhelmed with projects and tasks you most likely don’t want to do.
Leeches – People who email you wanting free help are basically saying they want to use your precious time for their advantage with nothing in return. Say “NO” to them. There’s nothing wrong with helping people and that’s why I write this blog, but as you get more successful or popular online you’ll find it impossible to help everyone that asks.
Favors – Again, you can’t do everyone a favor all the time, the busier and more successful you get, the less time you’ll have, you’ll just have to tell them “NO”.
Borrowers – Finding financial success comes with many advantages, but it also comes with some side effects. One of these is family and friends who want to borrow money from you. People who you know are incapable of paying you back. Trust me, tell them “NO” from the beginning and you’ll be MUCH better off.
Partners, Affiliates, Employees, & Outsources – Unfortunately some people will take advantage and walk all over you if you don’t set your limits and boundaries. Don’t ever be afraid to express yourself and tell these people “NO” if you need to. This doesn’t mean you have to be difficult, or say it without tact and grace, it just means you have to be firm. You set the rules of how you allow yourself to be treated in life and in business. Saying “NO” when appropriate will teach these people how you expect to be treated and what you will tolerate.

I hope you can learn from these mistakes and most importantly avoid them as much as possible. What are some of the mistakes you’ve made? Leave a comment and share.

The Marketing Edge with John Jonas

Miles Baker — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 03:24:22 +0000

The Marketing Edge is back! Yes, my infrequent, inconsistent, podcast is here again! Hopefully this time I will keep the momentum going, however I can’t make any promises. This issue of The Marketing Edge I think you’re really going to benefit from. In this series I interview John Jonas, a guy who’s really taking outsourcing for all it’s worth. John talks about how he’s able to run his entire business using workers in other countries while he plays golf, spends time with his kids, and works only a few hours a day! John is quickly becoming the king of outsourcing and currently operates ReplaceMyself.com where he teaches people to find, hire, and keep talent from overseas at extremely low costs.

How I Find Top Outsourcers on RentACoder

Miles Baker — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:31:28 +0000

Over the years I have been extensively on the buyer side working with RentACoder, an online labor marketplace, to outsource all sorts of technical projects.

RentACoder boasts “the world’s largest number of completed software projects and is currently made up of 112,923 buyers and 242,331 coders.”

With so many coders to choose from, finding the best coder to complete your project can be tough. It can even be frustrating when it feels like you are spending more time finding the right person to do the job and outline them with instructions than it would probably take to do the work yourself.

If you want to save time, find the highest rated coders who have completed similar projects as yours. So to only work with the best coders, follow some of these tips:

Creating your project

Create a new bid request for your project and start your bid as a “Private Auction.”
Tip: By creating a private bid as opposed to public, you will be able to choose the best coders you want to work on your project.
Invite top quality coders to bid your project using the instructions below.

Recruiting quality coders with similar project experience

From the RentACoder homepage, click on the link in the rop right under “Newest Bid Requests” to browse all open bid requests.
Using some of your project description’s keywords (e.g. HTML template), search past bids for projects similar of the one you want to create by using the “Bid Request Search” in the top right.
The search will show a list of related projects based on your keyword search. Click on a similar project as the one you would like to have completed.
Tip: Results are filtered by date, so you may have to browse back a few pages to find completed projects.
Read the project’s details under Brief Summary. If the project is a similar match to yours, view the buyer’s history by clicking their username next to“Posted By” to find the coder who completed te project.
From the user’s profile page, view their “Work History” and browse for the related project you found. After locating the project in the “Rated For” column, you are able to see the coder who completed it under “Rated By.”
Now that you have found the coder that completed the job, click on the coder’s username to view their profile page and history. Browse down to the project title you found and you can view any rating or feedback given to the coder.
TIP: Finding a positive rating and/or feedback will let you know this coder was able to complete the job successfully.
If you are interested in the coder, invite the coder to bid your project from their page by clicking on “Control Panel” and “Invite ______ to bid on one of my existing projects.”

Alternate way of finding the best coders

From the Rent A Coder homepage, click on the link in the rop right under “New Bid Requests” to browse all open bid requests.
The 10 highest ranked top coders are listed on right side, but to see all the coders by ranking click “See all coder by ranking.”
From this page, you can browse users page for project history and look at their skills
You will want to start at top and work down to the lower rated coders.

Assessing a coder credentials, ability, and ethics

Ratings are often the top indicator for assessing a coder’s ability.

The number of ratings shows how active coders are in RAC, and also give you a more accurate indication of their coder rating.

Looking at the coder’s past bid amounts under work history will give you a good idea as to how large of projects the coder is experienced with.

If they coder leaves you a comment and or bid, respond with a question or comment of your own and time their response. If there is a long delay, which may be a good sign as to how responsive they will be during the project.

Wordpress SEO & Optimization Strategies with Notes

Miles Baker — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 07:37:45 +0000

I‘ve been using Wordpress for SEO for several years now. I fully agree that it’s the cheapest (free) and easiest way to start a content based website that’s search engine optimized to a great degree out of the box. However, there’s still a lot of awesome ways to enhance it for SEO. This video by Joost de Valk is fantastic for anyone who is going to use Wordpress and wants to show up in Google. In fact, it’s one of the most comprehensive guides to what plugins you should use and how you should be creating your Wordpress blog. I watched the video, then had my assistant watch it so he could learn all about these plugins and tips. I had my assistant take notes, get links to all the plugins mentioned and decided to share my notes with you, so here you go…

Joost de Valk

Website: www.Yoast.com
Company: www.Orangevalley.nl

Wordpress Overview

It’s the cheapest, best option for CMS
It’s also the ultimate tool for affiliates

Optimizing Wordpress – Plugins

HeadSpace2 plugin

Function: Optimizes blog header/title and “more” link.
Blogs need well optimized titles, descriptions
HeadSpace allows alteration of the More tag on posts
Tip: Seach engines don’t like “More” link because they want link to have keywords what post is about.
To use, will have to edit Header.php file in theme
Want post title to be first thing in title because by default, WP makes Blog name first few words of header.
POST TITLE is more important than BLOG TITLE

Redirection plugin

Function: Tracks 404 errors and redirects to proper pages.

Yarpp

Function: Shows related posts to blog
Lets readers navigate site more
Also better for search engines because they can crawl site through related posts

SEO Friendly Images

Function: Places post title into image alt and title tags if they are empty

Clean Slugs (Sign up for his newsletter to get this plugin.)

Function: Removes stop words from URL slugs
A slug is the part of the URL that identifies the post
Clean Slugs plugin automatically removes stop words like “to” and “the” from the slug before it saves the post.
Result: You get cleaner, shorter slugs

RSS Footer

Function: Adds text to bottom of post linking back to original post.
When blog get scraped and reposted, RSS Footer will automatically insert backlink and source of original blog.
Result: You get more backlinks and traffic back to your site.
Best for ranking on blog search engines because of amount of links.

Optimizing Wordpress – Site Structure

Switch Blog Title and Post Title

WordPress puts the blog title into the header on your theme and makes the blog title the H1 always. However the blog title HAS NO USE of being an H1 anywhere else except on YOUR HOMEPAGE. Reason is you don’t want your other pages to rank for your blog name/brand, you want them to rank for your post title.

Categories in WordPress

Add description to categories that tell people what is in each category.

Breadcrumbs (Plug-In)

This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme.
Breadcrumb paths add to site structure by letting users navigate back.
Users like it, search engines like it even more because it tells them how your site is structured internally.

Optimizing Wordpress – SEO

Internal Linking

It is important to get internal linking right be back-referencing posts, etc…

Robots Meta (Plug-In)

Can be used to exclude pages from the search engine index.
Reason is user could land on archive page from 2006, when it would be better for them to land on category page.
Can also add “no-follow” values to pages you don’t want search engines to crawl, such as login page, disclaimer, etc.

WP Page Numbers (Plug-In)

Give numbers to all pages on blog instead of letting WP order newest and oldest. Otherwise, posts get buried.

Promoting Your Blog

Social Networks

Find the people you are looking for to read your blog and go to their community and join the conversation there. (e.g. Twitter)
Use those social networks to promote your blog.
Don’t beg with bad content. Make sure content is quality.

Guest Posts

Do a guest post on a bigger blog on a topic you are able to post on to promote your blog.

Audience: Visitors/Subscribers

Turn Visitors into Subscribers.

If visitors only go to site once, it really only helps your CPM rate.
Give them multiple options to subscribe (e.g. RSS, email) Note: Method should depends on audience’s technical level and what they use!

Offer subscription options with posts

Remind people that they should be subscribing to your blog.
Ensures your readership grows.

Life cycle of a site user:

Visitor – first time to site
Subscriber – becomes a regular user
Fan – starts telling others about your site.
THIS IS WHERE YOU WANT THEM TO BE!

Comments/User Interaction

Ask users for comments: e.g. “What’s your opinion?” and get conversation going.
Respond to users if time allows.
If comment is good, add to blog and attribute.
Make yourself easy to contact.
Enable or install subscriptions to comments.
Stop spam and remove it immediately.
Keep it simple to comment.

Maintaining Your Blog

Housekeeping

Make sure you have quality hosting once audience grows.
All blog additions should benefit your READERS, not YOU. Users go to your site for content, not your sidebar.

Bonus Tips

Change WordPress Search Option

WP Search is a problem because results appear in chronological order rather than relevance.
Will have to install plugins and edit theme to make this change.
Can also use a Google Custom Search Engine.

Shrink Queries to Database

For references to items such as style sheets, make them static to speed up page loads.

Install Safe Updates

Be sure to install safe plug-ins.
If not careful, you could be kicked out of Google for SPAM.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Stay updated on future posts by subscribing to my RSS Feed.

Reach Out and Touch Someone

Miles Baker — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 06:43:38 +0000

When I first started marketing online I knew no one personally that was doing what I wanted to do. Even after a few years of Internet marketing I had only a few acquaintances or friends online. Keep in mind, this was long before MySpace, Twitter, or the whole social atmosphere which is on the web now. Yes, it was just me and my computer, pretty lonely

One day after sending out an email to a list of mine with my phone number in it one of the readers called me. This was probably the 2nd or 3rd person I ever talked to over the phone who I’d met online. His name was Rob Boirun and we talked and eventually became good friends and we did some projects together. We shared a lot of information and I learned a lot from him.

Some time after that I finally started to reach out beyond my cozy little home-based bubble. I would actually pick up the phone and call people, introduce myself, and get to know them. I even put my phone number right on this website, it’s still there if you look now. The connections I began to make were incredible and have led to many partnerships, opportunities, and has led me to make me hundreds of thousands of dollars.

One day I ran across an Internet marketer who I saw lived in the same town as me! His name was Eric Holmlund and I reached out and called him. Then, I took a big step. I actually left my bubble! We went and had lunch. While at lunch Joel Comm called him on his cell phone! I didn’t realize he even knew Joel Comm.

Later that year the three of us attended an Internet marketing conference. (Very far from my bubble.) If you’ve never attended a marketing conference you definitely must. I got to hang out with Joel and Eric the entire weekend and they introduced me to tons of other people. I felt like I knew everyone in the industry after only a weekend!

Sometime after that, about a year and a half ago through some turn of events I cannot remember Amit Mehta reached out and called me. We became great friends and eventually started a Mastermind group together. This group completely changed my business and has brought me some of the greatest friends I have.

As you can see, just a small act of reaching out can begin to unwind a huge turn of events that can literally change your business and your life!

Today I know TONS of people that do what I do, and it seems the more connections I make the larger my income grows, the larger my business gets, the more opportunities come across my path, and the faster my knowledge increases.

As I look back, one of the mistakes I wouldn’t repeat is waiting so long to start connecting and reaching out to other Internet marketers. Even if you’re a beginner you’d be surprised at just how friendly people really are and how much direction and advice they’ll be willing to give you. So go ahead, reach out and touch someone today. Don’t wait and don’t be afraid.

Does “nofollow” really equal “nofollow”?

Miles Baker — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:11:18 +0000

Several times in the last few months I have run into the following scenario… I see a website that is ranking higher than me for a certain search term. When I analyze their backlinks I find they only have a few decent backlinks, and many backlinks from Yahoo Answers. These links are always in the answers to the question that was asked on Yahoo Answers, and the links always include the “nofollow” tag. Yahoo Answers includes the “nofollow” tag on all outoing links in their questions and answers.

According to Google no PR is passed when the “nofollow” tag is used.

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

We don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web.

In a Google blog post they also say this…

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.

Could there be exceptions? If you’re Google and your goal is to provide the most relevant results, then you know that Yahoo Answers is going to be a quality source of reputable links. The same goes for Wikipedia, a human edited and highly credible (for the most part) set of links related to a certain topic.

It wouldn’t be hard at all for Google to make an exception in their algorithm to count “nofollow” tags from certain authority sites. In fact, when it comes to Yahoo Answers they could even count only the links in the winning answers. This would definitely increase their search results relevancy as those winning answers would usually be very high quality sites that are related to the question.

So I set out to see what other information there was about this topic and I found I wasn’t the only one that seems to think there is some incongruity when it comes to what Google says and what they do when it comes to nofollow links.

Wikipedia had an interesting bit…

Google states that their engine takes “nofollow” literally and does not “follow” the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google’s index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page).

I also found this very interesting blog post where someone also notices a conflict between what Google says about “nofollow” and what it they really do.

Only testing will tell if my suspicion about Yahoo Answers and the “nofollow” tag is true. Until then I’m never going to assume what anyone tells me is the truth without putting rational thought and experience through my own testing into it. Especially when it comes to SEO.

What do you think? Is this theory off the mark or have you experienced inconsistency with the nofollow tag also?

Marketing on Wire

Miles Baker — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:15:56 +0000

Ijust watched an extraordinary film called Man on Wire. If you haven’t seen it you really should. It’s about a man that walks across a tightrope between the two World Trade Center towers! It’s a movie about passion, dreams, and pushing life to the edge.

Not many of us are as big a risk taker as Philippe Petit, the man who performed the feat. However, we can still implement the lessons he shares in the movie in our own lives and marketing. You see, so many times I talk with people that are too afraid to take even the smallest risks online. They’re practically paralyzed in their marketing efforts because they’re afraid of what Google might do to their rankings, that their landing pages might get slapped, or they may risk losing sales. However, it’s the people that push the envelope a little further and aren’t afraid to take larger risks that end up with the larger rewards.

Frank McKinney calls this risk taking “exercising your risk threshold muscle”. If you don’t know of Frank, he builds some of the world’s finest and most opulent mansions ever built all on spec! Meaning he doesn’t have a buyer when he builds them. Talk about risk!

Sometimes it’s easy to get stuck in a comfortable rut, and it’s definitely easier to take bigger risks if you have nothing to lose. Yet, if you really want to push things, to really see what’s possible with your marketing and your business you have to be willing to walk the wire to some degree.

What risks could you take in your business that could really pay off for you? Are you holding off spending more money on getting help or purchasing more content for your website? Have you been holding back on implementing some split-testing because you’re afraid you might lose sales?

Whatever your personal risks are ask yourself, what would happen if I took these risks and succeed? You can’t find out if you don’t take the risk.

How I Use TweetDeck for Twitter

Miles Baker — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 07:38:34 +0000

How To Find Local Friends and Business Partners on Twitter

Miles Baker — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:09:25 +0000

The Marketing Edge with Jon Benson

Miles Baker — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:11:26 +0000

Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Jon Benson, a ClickBank top seller, fitness expert, and extremely successful Internet marketer. Jon is the author of several ebooks including Fit Over 40 and 7 Minute Muscle. In my interview with Jon he shares his story, what’s made him successful, and some great tips and info. Have a listen and feel free to share your thoughts and comments below.