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Help Me Help You With the New Weekly Poll
By Todd | March 9, 2009
The primary reasons for this blog, and the Long Tail Treasure course, is to help you not only make more money, but to successfully grow a sustainable business that will provide security for your long term future. The new weekly poll that you see on the right sidebar will help me help you do just that.
It only takes a minute to answer the poll and your effort will come back to you in multiples. Helping me understand your marketing business, what your struggles are and where you need the most help ultimately helps me understand how to best help you. (how many more times can a person say “help” in one paragraph)
So here’s the plan. Each week I’ll be collecting the stats and changing up the questions. I’ll use the feedback to help plan out some of my future lessons and blog posts.
Having said that, please don’t assume each poll question is a direct indication of what’s to come. It’s to give me a better picture of what’s needed and the content I ultimately create may address more than one issue or poll question. Another way to put it … there may not be a one-to-one correspondence between the poll questions and what I produce next, but it will certainly guide what I produce for you.
Normally I prefer to simply ask for email regarding what you need, but the Long Tail Treasure membership is in the many thousands and it would take weeks to poor through the email responses. I’d have to change this to a quarterly poll and even then I’d spend all my time reading email rather than producing solutions for you guys. That would suck for all of us!
So please participate in the poll, it will be very much appreciated.
Lastly, please provide suggestions for future polls by adding them to the comment field below. Got a burning curiosity about how others are doing with some technique? is it appropriate for a poll? Add a comment below!
cheers,
Todd
Topics: Long Tail Treasure Course, Long Tail Treasure Updates | 26 Comments »
Wordpress Tags and SEO; Doing it Right
By Todd | March 5, 2009
Using Wordpress tags for SEO seems to cause a lot of confusion. Most people incorrectly treat them as nothing more than another keyword list like you might find in an adwords campaign or something you might place in your META tags part fo your header, but that’s not the way to think of it at all when working with Wordpress.
Furthermore the issue of duplicate content is often sited as a reason not to use Wordpress tags in your blog but this is based on an incorrect assumption that using tags will always create duplicate content issues.
If you think of tags in the right way and approach your use of tags on your wordpress blog correctly they can be a huge help with SEO and this great post from affiliate-minder.com will go a long way in setting you straight.
http://affiliate-minder.com/wordpresstutorials/wordpress-tags-uses-and-abuses/
enjoy 
Topics: SEO, blogging | No Comments »
Free Adwords Digger Kicks A$$
By Todd | February 26, 2009
The past few weeks I’ve been running an Adwords campaign and making some OK money, but these past few days the free Adwords Digger has really expanded my profit margin and it only took about 10 minutes.
Not being a big PPC guy I consider myself a newbie with Adwords compared to some of my colleagues so when I cover my costs and make a bit of money I’m usually pretty happy. I think of it as free list building.
Well I’ve decided to dive in and really learn Adwords for this new campaign I started a few weeks ago. Then a few days ago I came across the free Adwords Digger from the Kahuna guys. I’m a Traffic Kahuna member and consider it to be one of the best marketing expenses anyone can make so I knew their free Adwords Digger tool would be pretty high quality so I grabbed a copy.
Here’s the low down … if you use Adwords or are even considering it then you should grab this tool. In fact even if you don’t ever plan to use Adwords this tool could make you think twice after you watch the video on their site. It’s currently free and I think it may stay that way forever but who knows.
It’s a very simply tool that takes your keywords and the returns all the top websites with Adwords placements that will trigger based on your keywords, then it does an Alexa search and grabs the Alexa ranking for the site so you can see which sites have traffic and where to do Adwords placements.
The great thing about it is that it’s fast, free and can save you a bunch of money by helping you figure out where to get the most bang for your adwords buck.
In the past 2 days I’ve managed to increase my profit margin significantly mostly because I’m paying less and getting more traffic from the placements Adwords Digger helped me find.
Go checkout the video on their website and you’ll get what I’m talking about, then grab your free copy and get busy … you’ll be glad you did.
Topics: Adwords PPC, Productivity | No Comments »
Funniest Blogging Screw Ups
By Todd | January 23, 2009
We all screw up sometimes and more often than not we want to keep it to ourselves because we all want to look like pros but the reality is we all screw up and sometimes it’s just too funny to keep to ourselves.
It all began innocently back in May of 2007 when I decided to take the leap and move my blog from blogger.com my own hosted wordpress blog. Unfortunately the tools available to help with this migration simply didn’t work. After searching for solutions I discovered many people had the same problems and it was a generally known thing that migrating from blogger to wordpress just plain sucked. (note to self … just use wordpress from the start)
So anyway, the exporting and importing functionality wasn’t working for the post comments I just said to hell with it and I hired someone to manually cut and past the blog post comments over to the new blog for me. Of course I instructed my outsourcer to ensure that the urls that were entered for the user were also correctly copied over so the commenter would continue to get the backlink credit they deserved.
Well the job got done and the new blog was born and all was well in the world. I was happy. Things moved along nicely for a number of months.
Then about 8 weeks ago I decided to make a few changes to my blog and add support for gravitars, those little pictures you see beside people’s comments (get yours at www.gravitar.com). Cool I now had gravitars and I was on my way to building a better blog and community … until a buddy pointed out that my picture was showing up on a dozen or so different commenter’s names!
It turns out that way back when the outsourcer moved the comments over, although they moved the correct website urls, they didn’t think the emails mattered because they weren’t used for anything so they put my email as a default for all the email fields for the comments.
If you don’t know about gravitars the important thing here is that the gravitar pulls an image that you specified when you created your gravitar at gravitar.com based on your email address. This is how when you leave your email on other sites comments your image then shows up in the comments.
Well adding the gravitar feature immediately pulled my image for a whole pile of comments with different user names! I freaked out because it looked like I just populated my own comments and made up different names. What a great way to kill your credibility!
Anyway, it wasn’t clear to me at first what was going on until I noticed all the comments in question were posted before my big migration many months before. So after another couple hours of painstaking manual work to fix the problem all was resolved but I was embarrassed as hell.
The issues was brief, it got resolved, and maybe a handful of people might have caught it … or maybe not, but in the end my panic far exceeded the reality of the situation.
The moral of the story is that everyone makes mistakes and sometime they can look bad and sometimes they are really bad, but almost all the time it seems much worse than it really is.
So when you screw up just roll with it and move on. It’s probably not as bad as you think it is.
What’s YOUR funniest blog screw up?
Come on, don’t be shy. Tell me what your funniest blog screw up was in the comments below. I promise it will feel good!
Topics: blogging | 10 Comments »
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