Blog Marketing Academy

One of the things that we all want with our email list is high open rates. We want to know that when we send out an email that the highest percentage of our list as possible will actually open it. Now, one of the things to keep in mind is that systems like Aweber use what is called a tracking image to actually track whether the email has been opened. However, a lot of email web services such as Gmail block images by default. So, by its very nature, tracking of opens is sort of inaccurate … [Read more...]

If you haven't heard, Google recently announced this Disavow tool inside the Webmaster Tools system and it basically allows you to make it so that Google does not count incoming links to your site from certain places. The idea is that when low quality links are affecting your rankings, you have the ability to get on there and say "okay, I want you to ignore those links". So, basically what happens here - if you look at the overall picture - Google is making it so that it's now … [Read more...]

I want to make a little bit of a commentary about bloggers who are using list posts constantly. Now, in blogging circles, it's often thought that list posts are the thing to do. Because they get shared, people like to read them, they like to get in and out, they like to get their quick advice and they're like... BAM! It's awesome, share it on Facebook, something like that. And they’re off to the races. But the whole idea is that you get all these bloggers who want to write big, long list … [Read more...]

The question I want to ask today is, "Do you have to spend money before you make it?" So, it's a simple question and I think it's one that we need to address because a lot of people spend a lot of time in a constant hunt for free things. And, even though people will recommend solutions that are good, they will usually not sign up for them because it costs money. The idea here is that, if you're not making any money - you don't want to spend it. I can definitely understand the desire to do … [Read more...]

Sometimes it's good to think outside the box and question some of the assumptions that we make. This especially goes in the world of blogging and online marketing. There are a lot of things out there that everybody does and the thing is… if everybody does it maybe you need to go a different direction. In this particular case I'm talking about opt-in forms and where you actually place opt-in forms on your blog. Now, there are typically several places on a blog where you're going to see an … [Read more...]

Lately, I've been looking for a good CRM for my business. Now, first of all, what is a CRM? CRM basically stand for Customer Relationship Manager. Essentially, I look at it as a glorified customer database. Now, a true blue enterprise level CRM does a lot of things, many of which I'm not interested in. You can track leads and opportunities and all these salesy thing. And, if I were a traditional salesman I'd care about things like that. I pretty much just want a good solid customer … [Read more...]

Google has a long checkered past of buying services that some people like and then later killing them off. It looks to me that might be getting ready to happen to FeedBurner. Now, this is going to affect a lot of bloggers because a lot of podcasters use FeedBurner. It's a basis of a lot of RSS feeds and... whether that was a smart move or not remains to be seen because everything seems to be pointing to the fact that Google is going to be killing off FeedBurner. It is more just a matter of … [Read more...]

In the last post I talked about what success actually mean for a blogger and there are basically two camps there: Being famous How much money they're actually making The Hard Truth Now, when it comes to true success, here is a REALLY hard truth that sucks in a way but, it is what it is. Most bloggers make “squat”. They really don’t make very much money at all. They're making zero and they're spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to make more than zero. And those … [Read more...]

I want to talk about a little bit about what success actually means for a blogger. Now, this is an item that can generate some debate and, in fact, what brought it to mind for me was actually a question that Deborah Ng (she's the community director for the New Media Expo) actually brought up on her personal Facebook profile. And she started off by basically saying that, I've been thinking a lot about some successful bloggers I know lately. They have big names but the income they bring in … [Read more...]