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Death of a Marketing Legend – Billy Mays

June 28, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Today I had logged on to my Twitter page to put out some update just to get in contact with my followers, and I check the trending topics expecting to see nothing but Michael Jackson topics. To my absolute shock, my marketing idol Billy Mays was the topic of discussion, and his name was preceded by “RIP”. I took the news quite hard, Billy Mays is not only the host of the only TV show that I watch on television “Pitchmen”, but he is the reason I have this blog today.

I am a 20 year old college student that started an internet marketing company 2 years ago, which I now realize will become my future. I have no plans of working for some other company, I am loving the life of an entrepreneur and quite frankly I am doing well for myself. I realized a few days ago that the original source of my marketing interest was from Billy Mays.

When I was a kid I saw an Oxiclean commercial with the famous wow demo, and the next day when I went into bed bath and beyond with my mom I made her buy a small tub of it. We have never actually used it, and it is sitting under my sink, but we still bought it. Since that point I have been analyzing commercials and advertising ploys.

In short, Billy Mays is the main reason why I have become an internet marketer today. When I found out that discovery was launching “Pitchmen” I could not have been more excited, and I must say that I find the show fascinating. I fully intend to continue my marketing career for the foreseeable future, and I am devastated at the loss of my idol. Billy Mays products are a multi billion dollar industry, he could sell literally anything. I can only wish to eventually reach his level of success in the marketing world.

He was a hard working man that was always looking out for his family, and he will be missed. If there is something positive to come out of all of this, he died in the prime of his life and therefore he will always be remembered at his peak. My best wishes go out to his family.

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Hiring a Good Graphic Designer

June 5, 2009 By 4 Comments

I have done many things with internet marketing, but due to my stubborn nature I have only worked with 5-6 graphic designers before.  As my normal readers know, I am creating a product that will launch in late January called “Weekend Marketing”.  I haven’t gotten very far in writing the book yet because I have been focusing on scaling up the marketing campaign for it.  I intend to have all of the content finished by early November, but the actual marketing campaign has to start months in advance in order to sell well in the ClickBank marketplace.  This will be a household name by the time I am done, so you will hear all about it in the future.

The content may still be under construction, but the graphics for the site have been made.  I have the full template as well as affiliate resources created, which means that now all I need to do is fill in the sales page with the copy (that will be a 3 week project).  I got the idea for “Weekend Marketing” back in mid-May, and I have already decided on the name, received and paid for my graphics, found a proper web host, and began my marketing campaign.  I would say the project is well on its way.

Since I know you all want to skip through what I am saying to see the pretty pictures, here they are!  Weekend Marketing This is also the first official link to my website, so taking my own advice on getting indexed as soon as possible, I figure now is a good time for the spiders to have at it.  I would love some comments on the graphics, please tell me how they work in your browsers, how they catch the eye, etc.  I especially want input on the “Peel Away Ad” that I have added, because it took me 5 hours to make the simple script work (my web host apparently didn’t have my PHP scripts whitelisted).

Now less about me, more about the process.  The process of hiring a good graphic designer isn’t necessarily a quick or cheap process.  I have dealt with a handful of designers before, and while I have been “satisfied” with the work they did, I didn’t truly love it.  If you have a project you are truly committed to, you need to take your time with every aspect of it.  I went through and got quotes from the 5 biggest direct response graphic designers in the business and looked through every single example in their portfolios to make my choice.

I had a huge range in the quotes that I received, and I didn’t go with the cheapest or the most expensive of the quotes I got.  I was torn between three designers, as all had approximately the same level of skill, and two were within $50 of each other and the third was an extra $500.  I waited a day before responding to any emails to make sure that I had thought through the process as the graphics can make or break a product.  I decided that for my product I wanted a more subdued look while still catching the eye, and for this I ended up choosing Sean Lowery.

I very rarely give out free advertising to business partners, but he truly did an excellent job with this project.  We had about 20 emails back and forth and multiple redesigns as I know exactly what I am looking for.  I couldn’t have asked for any more, I love the design, the affiliate resources, and he delivered on every little detail and more.  If you want to have a big product, you will need big graphics.  If you plan to make an opt-in page, ClickBank product, blog, etc. make sure to get a quote with Sean, he will work until your are satisfied.  The key to success when hiring a designer is to have an image in your head and hold true to the basic design, but allow the expert to make it into something that will sell.

Feel free to check out Sean’s website here: Minisite Graphics and make sure to leave me some comments on the images.  You guys are my first wave of testing!

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Switching from BlueHost to HostGator

May 27, 2009 By 2 Comments

I am not quite sure when I will switch over this blog, but my current plan for my websites is to migrate them all to a new HostGator account that I am opening later today.  As some of you may have seen in my post about a week ago I am going to be launching a ClickBank product and with this comes a need for a more expandable web hosting plan.  I fully intend to get 30,000+ unique visitors each month, and with this comes quite a bit of bandwidth requirements which a regular shared hosting account cannot support.

For now I will just be buying the “baby” plan because it more than fits my current usage needs, and at quite a good rate as well.  I am going to buy it for 3 years because their sales department told me that when I upgrade to a dedicated server the money in my account will rollover anyway, so I might as well get the hosting cheap until I hit that point.  There are two basic reasons why I am switching to HostGator, the first is that they provide a much faster shared hosting plan than BlueHost currently does in terms of webpage load speeds, and the second is that it is a scalable operation.  Once I use up too much resources for a shared account, I can simply upgrade to a dedicated server with no interruptions and continue on as if I was still on a hosting plan except with a much faster loading speed ;-) .

Normally I put a lot of time and effort into cutting my costs to a minimum, and since I have already paid for the next 6 months of BlueHost I would normally wait until it has expired.  This time around, I figure that I am making good money from my sites and a couple hundred dollars is really just a drop in the bucket, the only real loss would be about $30-40 and since there is currently a 20% off all initial orders coupon floating around I will be saving more than that by buying it ahead of time. I have called their sales department 3 times to see if I could skim out a better deal but this is as low as they are going, at least all of their support is U.S. based.

This will be my first time transferring my sites around to another webhost which doesn’t seem like a complicated process, if I have problems I’ll make a post begging for you guys to help me out ;)   This also works as a great motivator for me, if I want to get to the point where I literally need to own my own server to run my sites, then I would clearly be raking in quite a bit of cash.

Feel free to copy me, this HostGator link + the coupon “Spring” will get you 20% off your first order.  If I have any problems I’ll post them up :)

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Spending a Little Time Upfront

December 23, 2008 By 6 Comments

One of the horrible habits I have established since early on in my marketing career is that I quickly move from one project to the next, and left by the waist side is typically design.

I have begun a new project in which I will review a large amount of “digital products” such as those sold via ClickBank. Since I intend to go through hundreds of different products, I might as well make my time count in the long run by optimizing my site upfront. Even the slightest error I am going through and correcting, whether it be a slight malformation in URL’s or one of the many Joomla! plugins that I have installed. So far my first experience with Joomla has been very positive, while it is somewhat self explanatory once you add in a bunch of components then your .htaccess file as well as many PHP files become incompatible so it takes patience.

Thankfully I have jumped over most of the hurdles, and I consider the design portion to be almost complete (I am still searching for a better template for the site), but all the behind the scenes work for optimizing load times and intrasite linking for SEO has been done.

I am looking forward to see how this works out, as I will essentially be targeting a list of 3000 long tail keywords I have spent the past days researching.

Once again I am sorry that I don’t post as often as I should, I am working full time on top of marketing during the Winter break from school so it kills the majority of my free time. If you would like to check out my site conceptually at least (since it has no content), it is http://www.productscamreviews.com

Happy Holidays everyone!!

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23 Link Building and Traffic Driving Tactics for Blogs

September 22, 2008 By 20 Comments

I am constantly seeing posts on various webmaster and marketing forums asking how to drive traffic or gain backlinks for a blog.  I find it funny since blogging in my opinion opens so many different doors that would otherwise be closed.  The social media, blogging community, marketing community, and many more are willing to be return visitors to your blog if you do it correctly.  This blog has only a couple posts so far, starting less than a week ago, yet I have already gotten around 1500 backlinks and well over 1k unique visitors.  It isn’t that hard, simply write good content and then find people that are interested in what you have to say and you’ll be on your way to blogging success.

One main point first is that the focus should always be on the content before worrying about how you market it, get links to it, etc.  If your content sucks, nobody will care about what you have to say, what you are promoting, or what you do in the future.  The better your content, the less leg work you have to put in yourself in getting visitors.

Ways to build links and drive traffic to your blog:

  1. Create link bait, people love “Top 10″ lists, quirky fact and cultural phenomenon, breaking industry news, etc.  Good content is also good link bait!
  2. Use social media such as Twitter, MyBlogLog, Facebook, etc. to your advantage.  Do not abuse the system, just use it as it is designed while marketing yourself.
  3. Relevant link exchanges with sites within your niche, especially blogroll trades for bloggers as it is seen on every page.
  4. Comment on DoFollow blogs *cough*  You won’t have to look far!  If you use your imagination, you might find a PR 7 blog that is very lightly moderated fully dofollow and millions of visits a month, I’ll tell you the answer in 43 days.  Type in “dofollow blog search engine” in Google and you will find quite a few nice tools.
  5. Submit your blog to blog directories and blog aggregating websites such as Technorati (Remember to favorite this post!) ;)
  6. Submit your blog to good old fashion link directories (yes, they do still work for links, and no, they don’t work as well as 5 years ago).
  7. Use social bookmarking websites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Sphinn, etc. to bring in big traffic and decent backlinks as many bloggers frequent these sites in search of content to link to.
  8. Link to other websites!  You would be surprised how many people check who is linking to them, and might give them a favorable mention later on.  I have found random people linking to me in my Yahoo Site Explorer backlinks before that I have decided to link to for the hell of it.
  9. Create articles and submit them to article directories such as Ezine Articles, Article Dashboard, iSnare, etc.
  10. Yahoo! Answers, this is a great way to get some visitors to your site as long as you don’t overtly spam them, the links are nofollow but a steady traffic flow is good for the health of any site.
  11. Start a contest and post it on popular forums and contest websites, this is a great way to get some interested visitors.  Make them work for it a little with comment contests, traffic contests, something creative.
  12. Create a WordPress theme and distribute it for free, if this doesn’t work pay somebody else to get a Sponser link stuck in the footer.
  13. Create a WordPress plugin that makes life easier for everyone (akismet anyone?).
  14. Find “Top Commentator” enabled blogs that will give you sitewide links for quality comments, and decent traffic from my experience.  ShoeMoney has this enabled, but this doesn’t mean you should go spam up his blog.
  15. Be a guest blogger on another blog, many people will be willing to allow other authors to share new insights in exchange for a couple links back to your site.
  16. Create a press release and distribute it to various PR sites, only do this if you have something that is actually news worthy but if played right it will work great.
  17. Keep your blog up to date!  By having an up to date blog it will make people far more likely to link to your site, and Google will love you for it.
  18. Create a Squidoo lens to build links and generate traffic (and hopefully earn some cash along the way).
  19. Use forums to boost your “expert” status while gaining quite a few backlinks, there are countless dofollow forums out there.
  20. Be creative, piss off a major industry expert such as ShoeMoney or John Chow to get them riled up, or sue a major corporation.
  21. Get your readers to participate in your site’s expansion, encourage them to use social media and to tell friends and family.  If your content is good enough, this will happen automatically!
  22. Create a good freebie such as an ebook to generate traffic, it will bring in people and if you do it right it will make them stick too.
  23. Flattery will get you everywhere, if you butter up some webmasters they will give you a link.  It never hurts to try….and no it won’t work with me :)

And now you are well on your way towards building links and gaining huge traffic for your blog.  Be creative, don’t be annoying and don’t go down to the level of spamming and you will be in a great position.  It is all about building long term visitors, traffic, links, and getting the word out.

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, SEO Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,