Thanks to Jim Connolly’s twittering I came across this very interesting article on his blog today. It’s about honesty and trust on-line. What do you think?

I was researching today for some up to date content on email marketing when it occurred to me to check what are the latest books on the subject.

Having done that it then occurred to me that it might be helpful to my blog readers to see some of what I found, so here first is a collection from Amazon.com, and then for the benefit of UK-based readers there’s a similar listing from Amazon.co.uk.

To those who have been around in the Internet marketing field for some time the name Marlon Sanders means long experience, solid advice, demonstrable success, and business longevity to mention just a few of the positive words that come to mind.

Marlon is no fly-by-night self-proclaimed guru.  He’s a genuine guru of the gurus.  As one guru ranking site recently wrote: “Marlon Sanders should need no introduction, he’s one of the pioneers of marketing online.”

All of this make this post especially important because it’s to let you know that you can benefit from the accumulated marketing wisdom of this outstanding business performer … and you can do so for free!  He has put together a great volume of his writings from past years into a single place, a large ebook that really is worth reading.

This is not one of your typical free ebooks full of  badly written half-baked nonsense.  This is the real thing from a real expert.

Make sure you download “The Best Of Marlon Sanders” for FREE today and incorporate its advice into your Internet marketing programmes for 2009.

On many blogs you have to fight your way through a barrage of adverts to find any content, but today I want to point my readers to one on which there is no advertising at all.

Now I must make it clear that I have no objection to blog advertising. It would be rather hypocritical of me to say I was, given that this blog, like many of my others, quite unashamedly carries banners and advertorial content. No, it’s not an aversion to advertising but simply a question of what is appropriate to a specific blog with a specific purpose.

Jim Connolly lives just a few miles from me in the middle of England. We have never met in the flesh but often do so through Twitter and “Jim’s Marketing Blog”.

If you’re into blogging I suggest that you take a look at his article “No advertising or sponsors!“ and then ask yourself whether your present blog advertising strategy is the best for you. It will all depend on what you’re trying to achieve through your blog – but come to think of it, have you ever defined that clearly to yourself? If you don’t know precisely what you’re trying to achieve, how can you possibly know whether you’ve got the best advertising (or no-advertising) strategy?

One aspect of Internet marketing that I really enjoy is researching and writing articles. Sometimes they’re for one my sites or blogs. Other times they’re for placing on the various article directories that I use (and shortly I’ll be launching my own as part of the Admastery.biz suite of services.

However, much as I enjoy it I simply don’t have the time to write all the articles I need. So where can I get them? PLR (Private Label Rights) material almost always needs serious rewriting unless it comes from one of the more expensive services. Much cheap outsourced writing comes from people with English as a second or third language and can be a false economy. So where can we turn?

There’s now a new article writing service, and judging by the people behind it I can’t help believing that it’s going to be good. They’ve recruited writers with English as their native language and capable of researching and writing coherent prose. What’s more they don’t charge a fortune as they’re mostly doing this as a part-time occupation in retirement or semi-retirement.

It’s a brilliant idea, and I’m going to try it out. If I can get a set of five totally unique, well-researched and well-written 350-word articles on a topic of my specification for $30, as is claimed, then I’ll be over the moon.

I joined up today at Articlez.com and you might want to take a look also.

- David Murray -

I spotted on Darren Rowse’s “ProBlogger” today an item about the Huffington Post’s new book about blogging: The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging.

It reminded me of an incident a few years ago when I bought one of Arianna Huffington’s books, so I entered a comment on Darren’s blog which I thought might be interesting as a humourous aside here as well (although it wasn’t very funny at the time until it was over!).

This is what I wrote:

“I wonder whether this latest Huffington book will be as “explosive” as one I bought a few years ago. I was speaking at a conference in Los Angeles, and Arianna was one of the other speakers (a much more celebrated one than myself, I should add).  Anyway, after listening to her I was moved to buy her latest book.

“The trouble started at the airport, en route home to the UK, when I was stopped for having something suspicious in my bag.  I have to admit feeling more than a little worried; it was only a year or so after 9/11. Eventually after biting my nails to the core (figuratively speaking!) for about fifteen minutes they extracted Arianna’s book. The new lacquer coating on the paperback cover apparently was giving off an odour which the bomb detectors had picked up.

“On getting back home to the UK I wrote encouraging her to keep on writing “explosively”, but preferably stuff that can pass through an airport without my having to worry about possibly arriving in Guantanamo Bay rather than good old England.

“I’m looking forward to this latest output.”

This morning I was looking at Google’s “Insights for Search” site when I came across something very surprising.

Google give an example of their ability to display the popularity of search terms in a time series, comparing countries .  They used the word “soccer” to illustrate this and showed Brazil, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom.  There were some interesting results, including the fact that the UK was showing a far lower popularity for this search term – nigh on impossible, I thought.

Why?  And then it struck me.  Even Google had got it badly wrong (depending on what they were thinking to show, but assuming they were advising on how to research popular terms).

Hardly anyone in the UK would ever search Google for “soccer”.  It’s a word that’s scarcely ever used except by visiting Americans.  Without knowing the translation into Portuguese, Italian and German I suspect the same would be true there also.  The game is “FOOTBALL” virtually everywhere in the world except the USA, where they’ve co-opted the word for their own local game.

The lesson – Don’t assume just because a keyword has a particular meaning, or is commonly used, in your own country that it has the same meaning in the wider world.