Thanks to a tweet on Twitter I’ve just come across this excellent blog post from Darren Rowse at ProBlogger on three stages for shaping your own brand. Short and punchy. Yes, “punchy” in the sense that it hits you between the eyes and forces you to think, “Am I doing this? Or just pretending to?” – How to Shape Your Blog’s Brand.

This afternoon I was setting up and re-setting some of my social networking sites, updating and expanding my LinkedIn profile, and connecting some of the sites together. When I came to Squidoo I found that it was now possible to check how many of my Facebook friends had set up their own Squidoo lenses.

Now I don’t have a very large Facebook following (only around 268, of whom 152 appear to be active) but I was extremely surprised to discover that, even though the majority of these good people are engaged in what can broadly be called the Internet marketing field, only 39 of them have Squidoo lenses.

Within the 39 there is, of course, quite a variety. One has more than sixty Squidoo lenses, and has made these a major plank of his marketing programme. Others have far fewer, or only one.

If you do not yet have (free!!!) Squidoo lenses as a strand in your marketing strategy I would strongly recommend it.

Or maybe you haven’t come across Squidoo.  If not, take a look at this lens which I produced on a subject far removed from Internet marketing last year – William Wilberforce.  Then imagine what you could do with a Squidoo lens on a theme of your marketing activities.  Whereas my Wilberforce lens was non-commercial apart from promoting a few books available at Amazon,  my lens on The English Lake District is unashamedly commercial in that it links to my travel and tourism sites for that part of the UK.

What’s stopping you using this immensely powerful service (which has a Google pagerank of 8 and Alexa rating 504)?

Here is an excellent post on “Better Business Blogging“.  It recommends some very useful plugins under five categories:

1. Facilitating content sharing
2. Search engine optimisation
3. Onsite functions
4. Back Office
5. Comments

By the way, I don’t have any business relationship with the owner of that blog.  This is a genuine recommendation of a page that I believe many of my readers here should find useful.

- David -

I’m not myself a great enthusiast for PPC, preferring free advertising to paid.  I subscribe to very few ad services.  Yes, I do pay monthly to a small handful of credit-based safelists but for the most part these were set up under special deals for cheap subs or even a free or cheap “lifetime” membership.  I learned a long time ago that a less than careful accumulation of monthly subscriptions can quickly leak away one’s PayPal balance.

However, I’m not going to deny that some people have made a lot of money out of both their own and affiliate products and services through promoting them by PPC services such as Google Adwords.  And as someone who likes to watch his Adsense balance building up it would be rather inconsistent of me to deride those sturdy Adwords customers who, at the end of the day, are the people who pay me for showing their ads.

Having said that I do believe that it is necessary to take some care over launching into Adwords campaigns.  PPC can look deceptively simple, but if you don’t know what you’re doing you can pour a lot of money down a big hole.  So today I was pleased to see that Kenneth Koh has put a new article on his blog dealing with this important theme of Pay Per Click Marketing.

(If you’re interested in more comprehensive PPC training take a look at this from Perry Marshall).

Yaro Starak from Brisbane, Australia is an exceptionally successful blogger and his recently launched training course has now attracted more than 800 members. He earns enough from his blogging to have recently spent many months travelling around the world while constantly earning through daily blogging from wherever he happened to be at the time.

For some time he has had a free training course but recently, in collaboration with Gideon Shalwick, he launched “Become A Blogger Premium“. However, on February 6th the doors to this course will close.  Take a look at it now, and if you’re an aspiring blogger don’t miss this remarkable opportunity.  It won’t be there for long.

Hello,

Knowing that you’re probably very busy I won’t take much of your time. but I do want to tell you about a new, free keyword research tool that Brad Callen has just released.

It’s called “PPC Web Spy“, and it allows you to browse Google and view the Adwords keywords of ANY Adwords advertiser!  Basically, it’s a small file that gets installed into your Firefox web browser.

When you do a Google search, the software automatically places a “view keywords” button below every single Adwords advertiser.  When you click this “view keywords” button a neat popup window appears that not only shows you the keywords that any Adwords advertiser is bidding on, but it also shows you a LOT of other information, like how much they’re paying per click and so on.

I’ve been testing it out on some of my most-used keywords. It’s quite amazing and should be a powerful addition to the toolkit of many of our members here, even if you don’t advertise with Adwords but just want to use it to find good keywords and phrases.

Anyway, here is the link where you can download the keyword research software, and it doesn’t cost anything.

I hope you’re having a great day and that this will make it even better.

- David Murray -
AdMastery.biz

P.S. Once again, here’s the link where you can get the free keyword tool.

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 -