Masterblaster Internet Masterminds of South FLA

PubCon Day 3

2011-11-12T21:23:00.000-05:00

Hi Guys, Day 3 was my best day for some reason. I meet some guys during classes and break outs and they gave me some great ideas. Also, I meet a guys who runs hotel website and when I meet him 5 years ago, he was fairly small. When I meet him at the show, he was surrounded by 10 guys. He now has 55 employees and grossed about 40 million, pretty impressive. His site is http://www.airporthotelguide.com/

Here are the notes from Day 3.

Link Juice

You need to find high quality links - Remember now is quality not quantity

Prospecting to find links

Find related industry

Try to find links that no one has

Great suggestion was to put your main key word in google. Then click search, then if you click on left side, more related search. You will get a list of related words. Remember you can look on page 1, 2, 3 for other sites to build relationships with.
Also on google

KW+Blogs
KW+Directory
KW+Twitter
KW+news
KW+retailer
KW+schools

You want to find Quality Sites - Related
You want to find sites that your competition does not link to.
Try not to use Forums and Directories for back links.
Quality Check the site you want to link to:

Page Rank or MozScore

Make this a science - Make spread sheet of the sites you are contacting

Prep for Email campaign

Do you best to find email to contact
Budget to get the business - pay them, gift cards, barter
Make email templates
1st email

Marketing director, webmaster
Check contact page, whois, form

Follow up email

Goal to talk on phone

make a relationship / rapport

Follow up
Negotiation for link placement
Remember your site is a resource
If you have the budget, you can pay$$ for advertising on a site.

If you offer to buy ad placement, you have chance also to meet them and build rapport with site owners. A chance to post your content.

Be direct, email them that you want to have the link from their site.
Link Buying is a No/No
Goal is Natural link approach

Scale
Natural
Wisely

How to use, Reviews, Posts

Competitive Intel

What kind of links are coming to your site, to your content, your blog?
Brute Force is dead - Don't buy links
Quality of Links - Less is more, Building relationship
Cloudlet tool - Not sure what this does
Give people a reason to share your material to others - You need to have good content!!
Build out your content with Wordpress
Try your best to build your content to go out virally - Youtube
Make sure you content deals with the Seasons, Spring, Summer, Christmas
Content has long life
Info graphic is big (read more)
Blogs, social promotion
Case Studies
Blogs that can write for you.

Link Attraction vs Link Building

Creating Interesting Content attracts links

Blogs
Ebooks
Podcast
Webcast
White paper
Enews
case studies
infographic
contest

Keep Hitting Singles and you will get noticed

Videos
interviews
free ebooks attracts
infographics
contest

Solid Blog Post Attracts Links

Use Google tools to find content ideas
Yahoo Answers is a good place to find content ideas
Build out list for content
Build your content on Longtail Key Words
Your titles are critical
You must promote your content

A top blog to look at Cup and Cashmere
Also, Beef Jerky Reviews

Does your blog show up in Mobile?

Creating Direct Ad Campaigns for you Site

Approach for Direct Ads

Your Readers could be possible advertisers

Cut out google ad Sense and do it on your own
Set Up Media Kit

Need help Go to ProBlogger

Cold Call is your best bet with prospecting
More information on a Media Kit

Tools

Site Review of DolphinWorld

Take Out Google Ad Sense ads the 250X250 - hurting my SEO
Simplify my footer links, one line, only the basics, About me, Privacy, Terms and Conditions, contact us
Make the Site more relevent
Ad some customer Quotes and Responses
More photos
my Secured Certificate is not working properly
My tabs did not work one of the browsers
All the panelist said I need to switch the site over to wordpress

One panalest said to use Thesis Themes Layover
Another panelist told me to get coder to make a hand coded template. She said it is safer and better because of Hacker are really attacting wordpress site. It is easy for hackers to get in.

She recommended a guy, named Thomas Vasquez, psd2wordpress.com

One panelist said to make sure to get a wordpress host to keep from being hacked and they update word press automatically. She recommended page.ly

Check out Zappos Footer
Build more trust

How to build compelling Contest for your website

Use Wild Fire to set up contest campaign

Easy to Use
Monitize
She recommended sweepstakes because it was easier. Give away $250 plus product. Not an IPAD, everyone is giving away Ipad.
Make sure you know the costs/benefits

Contest will help you know your customers
Make sure you are clear on the rules to enter

You can not make them facebook like you
You can say though, they need to facebook like you to win!

Help with Designs for your banners, 99designs
Use your existing customers to help evangelize your business - These contest will help.

Existing customers might get a bonus entry

Tool -- Shortstack to help build custom facebook pages to maximize the contest
Custom emails for the contest
You should have contest 1 X a month.
The bigger the offer the more buzz!! $500 up works.

Well that is it. I hope this helps you guys!!
God Bless,
John

Pubcon Day 2

2011-11-11T01:18:00.000-05:00

Today was a little harder to pick up information because I was really tired but hopefully this will make sense.

Matt Cutts from Google
SEO = Marketing
SEO - Coaching SEO is becoming more about human Nature.

Only Consistence is Change
Change is going to Benefit you
SEO 2010 big issue was hacked sites getting rid of them
SEO 2011 Getting rid of Low Quality Sites (panda update)
Communication with Google now is easier through webmaster tools. You can now ask google why you were booted.
Long Term Google

Mobile = Computer
Social / Twitter Facebook and Open Web
Local Search

Closer View - Better Page understanding
Google Bot will crawl facebook
Google looks for the content above the fold
If you have an ad above the fold this could be a problem
Search will become more personal
Google + Biz

Toyota Business Page with Google + Check it out

Communication and transparency for your software
Things to do

Webmaster tools

In webmaster tools sign up for email alerts
Fat Ping when you publish something new

Subscribe to

Q&A from Audience

Trust is big thing for Google
Now the search results is in SSL format. So when you go to google.com, it is https not http anymore. They did this for security reason but there was grumbling that some key word data is lost now.
Search is more personal
Download data from webmaster tools and use it.
Press releases and duplicate content - They know about it.
Is the author high quality - they look for that
Backlinks are quality not quantity

with the Panda update, they look at links and see which links are good and which are bad

Look at your top landing pages and see how they do on webmaster tools
Top queries - look at this
You will know you have a high quality site if you are willing to send your child to it.

Personal - Meet this guy VegasVIP.com -- Personal to look at site

Conversion Class

Plan where to Start
Implement Operation - Using a framework for the change
Improve interaction - what to change?
Follow a methodology

Trust
Visitor
Incentives
Fears and uncertainties
Buying

Do this for Homepage, all listing, detail pages, and send away
Urgency to act
Do your best to take the pain away from the guest.
Overture -- Tool
Instead of checking Title, buttons, and Graphics, you need to change the lay out around to see what gets the best results.

Hip Monk check out site for Travel

Mobile Search

95% of mobile search is done on google search
People want Immediacy and Location
53% on Mobile purchase
Touch to call from the screen
Ask what device - PC / Mobile

Feature phones
Smart phones

Make sure site is touch friendly

Tablets

These results are similar to PC

Firefox has a tool to see website on different phones/devices - Add on
Mobi Ready another tester
m.dot goes to feature phones
smart phones and tablets get same URL

Mobile Apps vs Web

The money is the question
Built in HTML5
Some apps to look at mint.com, find a place to stay
Design is law , Bad user experience and loose customer. No 2nd chance.
The consumer

the mobile phone is to help drive conversion
70% of mobile use is for research
A sale on mobile is usually within 1 hour.

The big sector on mobile.

Travel
Coupons
Mobile apps

Keep these simple
Deliver to the consumer

Mobile website

Streamline user experience
Optimize for all devices
test on all devices

Mobile Marketing

SMS/Texting
Email
QR Codes
Coupons
Mobile Apps

Google started Android just to be able to get data from mobile users.

Best of the Web

Site Redesign

Slide Share is where a lot of slides from the show will be

Preparation
Communication

Goals

Prioritze
1st, 2nd, 3rd

Analysis

Site performance
URL Structure
Navigation

Design for User and for Google Bot
Schema-Creator -- Tool

Info Gathering

Conversion by Key Word
Conversion by Country/Launguage
Top Converting Landing Pages
Low converting landing pages
Engagement Blogs / Posts
Underperforming content - Exiting, bounce rates
Revenue Generator - Key Words and Content
Goal Abandonment
Slow Page loads

Design

Keep a before and after for testing

Testing

So you can test new design
To test your site - Usertesting.com a great tool!!
conceptfeedback.com
Silverbackapp.com
Loop11
Speed of your site GTmetrix

Participation

Benchmarking
Google analytics annotation tool
raven tools event manager
detailed spreedsheet with roles

Launch

Engagement metrics

Tracking

Check for broken Links -

Tool Screamfrog.com

Process for Online Search and Social

People find out

Desires
Needs
Tasks

Process and framework

Seobook
Audience Demographic

Go to Fan Page
Yahoo Clues
Google insights

Page by Page mapping
Depth of Navigation
Categories and internal linking
Themed verticals

Silos - Keep like things together

URL directory structure - Page titles and keepwords

Understand your audience behavior

Group brainstorm
Ease the users pain

Content Creation

Make a plan

Making things Social

Twitter Loves Questions - Why? What? When?
Start asking questions
/Blog Post Title Length - shorter titles get more tweets
Link dex
Blog links to interesting events
Email is still great way for social

Inspire Trust

content
media
awards and certificates
association

Authors creditability

Authors Bios
Authors accomplishments

Authoritative site

Where your peers to go to
Where content is king
Syndication and guest posting

Getting More Links
Not sure where this came up but really cool tool for content -- Textbroker.com

To get links here are some unique ideas
Buy Websites and you can place your links on these web sites

Go to Flippa.com to buy sites

If you can, buy your competition sites
Do a key word search on your topic and look on page 2 and 3 make an offer to buy the site.

When buying a site and if the alexa score is not 300,000 or less, then don't buy.
page rank does not mean much

Forum for links
Site buy price. Look at how many back links the site has and offer $10 per back link.

Some person items

Look at my link directory and prune it
Get ride of bad links
Get ride of links that are not recipricating
Get ride of bad pages

Wow, Finish this day. Will do notes on day 3. I found day 3 was better than 2.
God Bless,
John

Pubcon Day 1

2011-11-10T22:08:00.000-05:00

Hey Guys,
I am Las Vegas at the Pubcon Show and I arrived late for the first class today. I flew in from MIA at 7am and arrived here in Vegas at 9:30am.

I did tons of writing but a lot of the notes won't make sense but do your best to pick out the best information.

Social Media Signals - arrive late for this one.

Make sure you get the Plus 1 button on your site. Have your employees and friends click it. It will help your rankings.
The Fundamentals are still strong for SEO - Link Building and Content Development for now.
Target groups in Facebook and work the groups.
For twitter -- Low followers = Less influence for the search engines
For Twitter - Stay away for 1:1 ratio = Following : followers
Low quality Like from facebook are "No Good"
Google Plus now has business profiles - Sign up fast!! Business names will go fast.

Advanced SEO

If you can, sign up for Google Places and Bing Local
Don't use the same Anchor Text for Key Words, mix it up.
Google is moving from Page Quality to Site Quality. So if you have pages that are not ranking or old pages, you need to put "no follow tags" on them. Those old pages can kill you !!
Size and Site as a whole now!

Total pages indexed
Total organic landing pages
Ratio of Total Pages Indexed to Total Deep Links

Look at Duplicate Content - Change or get rid of these pages

Use your Google webmaster Tools to help you with this

It is better to use "No Index" than "No Follow"
Human Engagement is big now - Facebook , Twitter, your site

Google bought Post Rank for a reason

Build Consistent engagement signals with in your content
Develop links from pages/domains with consistent engagement signals.
Backlink diversity anchor text strategy. Focus on a natural footprint.
Synonym and rotate different phrases.
Backlinks with partial matches, company name, generic phases.
Try Google Search bar and type in the words phase you want and see what the drop down shows from google and use those words for the back links.

Hot Topic and Trends

Get your Links in PDF. Google really like PDF for your ranking. Have the PDF on your site somewhere.
Tools to use

Make sure you take your low ranking or pages that you don't want index and use the no follow tag within the site. Check out how to install
Make sure to put your links in your Youtube Description and any Wiki Post. This will help.
You Tube - Are you tracking your youtube search Ranking?

Tool - Voot.net

Tim Ash Conversion Clinic

Continuity with your site

Make sure to put the Google Plus 1 and Face like Button on all confirmation pages

Try your best to Engage the viewer!
Simplify your site
Verify difficult operations on your site and fix.
The best kind of commitment from reader

Voluntary - Can not be cooerced
very Public
Small Steps and get bigger commitment later

Tool to know your customer and get them engaged BT Buckets --FREE
Make Sharing easy on your site, always look how to make it easier

. Facebook likes
Tweets
How can a guest write a review
Rating a product or service
Clicking through to another page

For me, Amtrak
Go wide and measure everything

# of Facebook Fans
Total # of social engagements
# of Likes

Humanized the experience

Huge growth in realistic and interactive websites
Video
Site to look at Net Nanny

Demonstrate social proof - We have over 10,000 fans

Pandora
It always too go have many because it tells there are a lot of people just like me.

Find a way to recycle your content
One column of your website has to be your trust column, how long in business, BBB

should be on the right side of your page

Tool to where people would go on on your site, Attention Wizard

Well this is Day 1, lot of information.
God Bless,
John

SiteTuner for to help with Conversion

Change Title Tag and Beware the Google Change

2011-11-02T22:43:00.000-04:00

I had changed my title tag in my main website, www.dolphinworld.org, and did not think I would suffer that much with Google. Boy was I wrong, I was #1 and #2 for my major key words and now I am #8 - #12 and the phones and emails have stopped.

dolphin swim
swim with dolphin
swim with the dolphin

Darn, it hurts but I know it will go up again, I have the faith. So the lesson is, be careful if you change your title tags and know your ranking may be affected.
God Bless,
John

Google Plus 1

2011-10-23T20:14:00.000-04:00

Hey Guys,

I went to an exciting Seminar and learned about Google's plus one and or you can call it google plus.

Its google attempt to get social and I think from this seminar they have found it. I know my friend Curtis is already involved with it but I have yet to sign up.

From this seminar, I kind of see the importance of social more and more. Social, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, there will be a tie in with your social activity and search and from this speaker, she said it is the goal of the search engines, google and bing, is to tie it all together.

Here are my notes

Bulleyes Marketing was the speaker

    Filling up your circle
        In google plus your goal is to fill up your social circles. You can split your circles from personal and business
    Export your linkin contact Gmail ACcount
        This is a way to import your contact from Linkin to the google plus account. I think you put it in tab delimited file and them import to google.
    Go to Google +
        Go to Google plus and sign up today!!
    Put your friends in the proper circles
        As I mention there will be circles to be in
    Drag Everyon to your circle
        once you have your contacts, you can drag you contact to proper category folder, personal / Business
    Drag one contact at a time to your folders
    They must add your back for them to see your updates
        In order to see your contact, the person you adding must add you too to google plus.
    Personalized Search Result
        Google is going to let you personalize your search results with the google plus. This is where google is going!!
        Look at the organic listing on google right now. You will see the +1 buttons on every listing. Google wants you to click the +1
    Social Search Intergration
    Dominate your time on the web
    Bringing everything together under google + like blogger , google docs
    Check out Ford - They have a googel + biz account - Right now you can not get a biz account
    google + is heavy in analytics
    Add the +1 Button to your page
    Click the +1 Button on the google search
    Go to Webmaster Tools to get a +1 button
    Tell People to +1 you
    Run a +1 campaign - Email and ask people to click it
    only 14% of sales from ads - 78% comes from trust / recommendations
    need for speed - Twitter is important
    Search on Twitter
    Google = twitter
        What this means, if you get your URL listed by someone tweeting about you, google looks for this.
    Bing = facebook
        What this means, Bing is looking for your friend on facebook. You can see this now on Bing, very cool.
    Linkin = Twitter
    there is power in social network
    more followers more power
    Search results will be different for each person
    Social Media
        Optimize Facebook update
        Optimize photos on Facebook and twitter
        Optimize youtube & flickr photos
        Optimize Blog Post
        optimize tweets - use hash tags-- I don't know how to use hash tag too well. If anyone has more information on this. I would like to know about it.

I hope this helps you get more involved with Google Plus. If you guys can help me out, go to my www.dolphinworld.org and go to the right column and click the facebook like and / or +1 button. Thanks!!
God Bless,
John
swim with dolphins cancun

Conversion for your Webpage

2011-08-30T15:54:00.000-04:00

Hi Guys,

I hope this helps you guys. If you have traffic, start working on conversion. Use google optimizer to test. Its very easy to install and use.

Don’t touch page unless you are measuring it. You might might make it worse.
Make 1 change at a time. Measure. Then make the next change.
Headline <<< Add it or Change it
Video or Images <<< Add it or Change it
Text <<< Add it or change it
Color of Links? Maybe << Test
Call to Action Words - Call to Action Buttons <<< Test
Banner Ad Placement
Sweet Spots of the Page
Look at the page and see if you clear away the clutter. Keep focus where you want visitor to go.
Look at software, ClickTail
Might want to go to Conversion Conference by Tim Ash << This is where the big boys go. Top of the Line
Getting Reviews of your programs from Real People. Like facebook like button or any reviews similar like Amazon Reviews.

Getting a professional Review, someone with high creditability, writing about your product and saying they like it.

Heat Maps - There is software to see where people are clicking on your site.

BlogWorld Expo << To see what bloggers are doing

Don’t make changes on a site unless you have plan.
Make a back up of the original page and you can always go back if you make a mistake.
Don’t have rotate images on the page you want to convert. The rotating image making a person hesitate to purchase. NO GOOD.
To get ideas where to test, whichtestwon.com
Work on Pages not Websites
No Distractions on your page or site
A/B Test may not be enough, multi variant test is much better
Never Stop Testing
Another tool to use, crazyegg.com Heat Map tool. No Free but may be worth it.
Tim Ash’s Youtube Video Landing Page Secrets a must watch

God Bless,
John

Tweet Deck and New Information

2011-06-07T17:08:00.000-04:00

Hey Gang,

I have been working hard on conversion with http://www.dolphinworld.org and it seemed to work. This spring was really good for me and hoping it continues this summer.

I have installed Tweetdeck and really enjoying, especially if you are following that are giving good information. You can kind of stay on the cutting edge. I see why people are digging twitter. Without Tweetdeck, its really boring and not that exciting. If any of you guys are using Tweetdeck and have comments on using, I would love to hear from you.

This information are from Tweets I received this week.
Must haves for your computer.

Skype – If you have not yet used Skype, you have to do so immediately. This amazing communication device allows you to video conference, collaborate and share all sorts of information with people anywhere in the world.
SnagIt – I love this Skype add-on because it makes image sharing so easy. This screen capture software allows you to add captions and collaborate on visuals.
Pamela – This Skype add-on has been downloaded more than four million times. It’s a voice recorder and much more as it allows you to create a personalized message, record messages and remind you of birthdays.
Google Calendar – Get and stay organized with this fine tool from Google. You won’t miss an appointment or forget a deadline and you can access the information from any computer.
Google Documents – This software allows you to access and share documents no matter where you are. All you require is an Internet connection and a computer (any computer).
RoboForm – I’d lost numerous important passwords, usernames and other forms of important information before I found RoboForm. That no longer occurs with this software as I’m not able to recall important information in an instant.
Carbonite – If I lost all of my contacts, projects, financial accounts and other such information on my hard drive, I’d be in big trouble. That can’t happen with Carbonite as it regularly backups all of my important information on a secure server.
PageLeap – Do you hate losing track of those webpages that are most important to your business? That will no longer happen with PageLeap as it displays those pages on one screen, making them instantly accessible.

To read the rest of this article, go to: < Read More >

The one program I added to this list, that has made my life so much easier is ClipMate. Its a must have !!!

Does anyone out there have carbonite? I want to check into that some more.

I hope you guys are doing well.
God Bless,
John
Swimming with Dolphins Grand Cayman

Video Lesson Part 2

2011-02-16T08:32:00.001-05:00

Hi Guys,

Here are few notes from last night class.

James, was mentioning about placing bids on Elance and how to spend money. He said you could spend anywhere from $200 and up for a video. With everything together, you could spend as much $1000. James has been using a guy from elance, Rick, his handle is rglasby if you want to ask him to bid on your work.

James, uses Istock photos for his Still Motion Videos. He only uses the 2 credit images and it works. He does not use Istock video images, too expensive.

One thing I discovered from the last time I made a video edit on elance, I used this service one of the video editors turned me on to. https://www.wetransfer.com/ Its really great for transferring large files for FREE.

To find video and music at reasonable cost, http://audiojungle.net/
John Hawaiian, showed me another place to get music loops for free,

http://www.flashkit.com/loops/

James usually spends about $40 for still photos and about $40 for music and sound effects. He kept stressing how important the sound quality for you video is important.

You need to

Also, James Stressed to Organize your sales message. 5 tips to organize your message.

Have an "Awareness" of your customer needs. You should write them down.
Identify the "thing" that satisfy their needs
Identify the Source of the Thing that fulfills their needs or desires - ie like " Amazon"
Is the Price acceptable for the customer
Give them a reason to Act Now!!

If you incorporate these sales points into your video, you will see conversions rates go way up

Here is sample Bid to elance editor from James. You may wan to use this outline.

Hi, it's James Martell here.

Thank you for bidding on my project.

I am looking for a video editor to take my video footage and edit it down into a 6-8 minute video.
The video will include a narration by my wife Arlene and I.

The video footage captured at the ShareASale Think Tank 2010 held at the Ritz-Carlton in San Fransisco, California. I would like the completed video to be of the same style as from the past two years. It will also include our siteseeing tour and mini-holiday in San Fransisco.

I would like the video to have the same opening, closing, sub-titles, etc. I would like it to be as close to the same format as possible.

ShareASale Think Tank 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kcs9-fRGJtQ

ShareASale Think Tank 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JV2LY64E74

I am hoping to have the same four quadrants that show up on the screen. Same style of font, etc.

The Video
- mini-DV format
- approximately 40 minutes in length
- it is pretty much shot in the sequence of the story
- it consists typically of short 5-10 second clips
- you will receive the video footage from me by courier
- the music to be supplied by you
- the narration (mp3) will be supplied by me
- I will simply the intro and outro text
- I will provide the text for the lower thirds (and titling)

Work Flow
- you edit the video to fit the narration
- I will request any minor adjustments by time code
- you make the edits
- I will give you the text for the lower thirds (and titling) by time code
- you add the intro, outro and music

Overall it should be a simple project. I am hoping to have it wrapped up within 7-days of awarding the project.

If you have any questions please send me a PMB... but please don't use my PMB area to pitch me. I look forward to seeing your bid. ~ James

I hope all this helps.
God Bless,
John
Swimming with Dolphins Grand Cayman

Video Editing and More

2011-02-08T22:27:00.000-05:00

Hi Gang,

A new series by James Martell which is worth writing about, Video Creation...

Youtube Traffic is huge
Helps lead to Google Traffic
Video helps your opt in for emails.
Helps Clarify your product
You can make article reviews and products easier
Sales increase on your website with video

What is your Top Priority with the Video? Conversion rate or other?
3 Types of Videos

Video Footage - All video production
Motion Graphics - where you have still photos and make a video with the stills Great place to get images http://www.istockphoto.com/
Screen Capture video - Instructional videos http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/

What can be done with Video

Product Reviews
Presentations
Tutorials
Demonstrations
Courses ( might give away to increase sales)
Questions and Answers sessions
How to Guide ... How to build something
PSA announcement
Interview
Events

Key to a great video is the Audio!!

Plan your video

Objective
presentation
script
Narration
Recording
Images
Video
Footage
Editing

Editor that some people use http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/

Remember to

Stated Goals
Scope of Work
Type of Video
Organize work Flow
Video outline
Look at James Example, google Doc1 Another one google doc2

James uses this service for audio http://www.accuconference.com/

Tips to remember for a good video

Plan your Video Shoot >> have some outline what you want to accomplish
Shoot in sequence >> easier to edit
Less is more
Type of Shoots >> Establish the Shot ( Far ) >> Mid Shot (getting closer) >> Close Up Shot ( right there)
Go Freehand but try to be steady
Avoid the Zoom
Short Shots >> easier to edit >> 10 seconds at the most
Keep it simple

Website to keep in mind
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8821177360537153504#

I hope this helps you guys!!
God Bless,
John
swimming with the dolphins tortola

Wonder Wheel and Google Analytics Video and More

2011-01-21T11:07:00.000-05:00

Hey Guys,

Here is some information for you.

Learn about the google Wonder Wheel, a new tool if you don't know about it.

Information about Google Analytic, I think this was great.

Also, you might want to check out these link for Creating compelling Headlines. I really like this.
http://socialmediaworkbook.com/wp-content/uploads/102-headline-formulas.pdf

I guess thats it for now. Hows everyone doing out there. Make a blog post.
God Bless,
John Mac
swimming with the dolphins playa del carmen

AFFCON Affiliate conference notes Miami Dec 9 - 10

2010-12-14T14:03:00.000-05:00

Hi Gang,

Here are some notes from the AFFCON Affiliate show last week. I really liked this show. It was smaller and got to talk to many people. The speakers were really good too. The best part is that affiliate get to go to the show for FREE.

Thursday's Notes:
The Key Note speaker - Steve Denton from Pepperjam
That affiliate marketers are the ones that are changing the way shopping is done on the internet. Some examples, PriceGrabber.com, About.com, Daily Candy, Pronto.

Check out iguiders.com - This site will help you with your shopping experience. This site is geared to help you think through the process. A funnel sort of thing.

Click Rates for niche sites 9% CTR for holidays and 5% CTR for non holidays

40% more sales from Nov - Dec. June you need to start planning for Christmas. FREE shipping is huge for conversion.

Mobile Marketing

91% over 13 years old have cell phones
97% Text messages help brand
95% text messages are opned
Cell phones are 20% of the search traffic by 2012

Paid Search
Google Instant - Help you discover the long tail key words
Yahoo and Bing don't have instant yet
Facebook is the biggest display network
Facebook you can go through your limit quickly
Facebook is great place for niche sites and display adds.

Try Google Wonder wheel for related key words. To get some help on this, go to this blog.

You can make your Key Word List using the Google Wonderwheel function.

Top Adword points

Not utilizing negative keywords enough. Don't show your compitition
Poor Ad Word group orgainization
Sending traffic to homepage
understanding quality score
Always test / evaluate
Not using the content network properly
set and measure goals
Getting an adwords education - Ad Words Learning center

Facebook / Linked in
500 million users a day
Images are very important in the ad
Budget and Scheduling - Start small and work your way up
Very targeted if you want.
Facebook Lite << Check out
Facebook Landing Pages >> I am not 100% sure where this

Google URL Builder << Check out

Linked in Ad - Very Targeted. You can get your ad in front of CEO, Ad exect

You would use google URL builder to use to build targeted ads with Adsense or Linked in.

Twitter Ads are coming soon.

Web Design

Create Phone numbers for specific landing pages to track calls.
Put an active life style logo - Get people engaged
Logo is important
***City First for Key Words. Miami Swim with Dolphins vs Swim with Dolphin Miami
Seomoz ****; Check out site
Make sure you back up Wordpress
Webpagetest.org *** Look at this
*** Need to change out the Goolge Search code has changed
Make sure your copy write up to date.
Make sure your 404 pages are correct.

Landing Pages
Trust - Help with Conversions
4 pillars of Trust
1. Appearance - Professionalism, Sparseness and neatness, Organization and Clarity
2. Assurance - Trust Marks, Forms of Payments, delivery, is data secure
3. Authority - The company we keep - Put down other company we are associated with. Better business bureau, so forth.
Tools to test, Site Tuner.com
Attention wizard.com
4. Consensus of Peers - Similar to Panora.com, Facebook.
Pull facebook into your site, facebook open social
Check out See Why.com, Code Baby.com,

Friday, December 10
Using the Industry for Good
Building a story for good. Make sure to tell your story
Leverage on the 3 elements
1. Education
2. Capital
3. Hope

Good Return Model, this company Soap for Hope has done this. 100% of profits to fight poverty. They get a return after 1 year of the profit loan. They are a for profit business. Very interesting!! Check it out.

To impliment
1. What am I passionate about?
2. Find a Business, non-profit?
3. Integrate this non-profit into your business
Don't fudge, be transparent

Daily Work + Giving = Leverage

1. Advisors, you might need to find help when implementing this
2. Believe and have hope to be successful in this

Google Analytic

*EPC - Earning per click
*CTR - Click through rate
*Average Order Value
*Conversion Rate - Most important metric - Good conversion rate is 2 - 3 %
*Reversal Rate (what gets returned) - Important

Web Strategies Blog

Social Media Metrics ** A must read book

Tools to use:

Google Alerts for your products
Feedburner Stats
Page View Comments, Retweets, Page Rank
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Insights
Google Trends ** Very cool, check out
Inbound Links
Tweetreach ** the teacher really like this
Google URL shorter tool

What to do with your Google Analytic

Need to load the New Script immediately - You can get the new code and replace the old code
Campaign Source
Goals
Visitors on your sites
Trend Segments, which browser they come in from, screen resolutions (pc vs handheld), above the fold, speed connections, traffic sources, search engine
Filter make sure to use to figure out the segments.
On Click Tracking Code for Affiliates

If you went to the conference too, please post your notes here and pass it on to other affiliate friends.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Years to you all!!
God Bless,
John
Hawaii Oahu Swimming with the Dolphins

James Martell Q&A

2010-11-19T00:06:00.000-05:00

Hey Gang,

I thought I would share my notes from tonights Q&A with James.

He primarily talked about Pubcon which is a huge SEO conference in Las Vegas. They always have the latest on SEO.

Well here goes,....
They talked a lot about Scrape Box, Which is Google Long Tail Key word collector. You need to check it out.

Manage Flitter - Managing your twitter account

Co Tweet - Managing your social accounts, facebook, twitter, about conversions.

Content for Social
* More you talk about yourself the less people will follow you.
* More people follow Positive messages
* Personalize your talk
* Tweet click rates and facebook increase on weekend
* Share cool information
* People want to be first with information
* people are always looking for news and humor
* people love to be part of the crowd
* retweet other people's comments
* Tweet your blog posts
* Try to build an audience

Matt Cutts from Google talked and this where google is focusing on.
1. Local Search
2. Mobile
3. Social

Google did say when you comment on a blog post, you will get credit from google. Good for PR.
Google is looking for twitter retweets with your website in it.

Video SEO
Make a video that does not stink!!

Buzz at the show, These sites
Four Square.com to advertise your area
Facebook places
Gowalla.com
Google Buzz

Local Search drives more business

The guy that runs Pubcon spoke and told the audience, this year, he stopped paying about $70,000 in google ad sense (he did this for the last few years) and went totally social, twitter, facebook, and blog, and sales were up 30 % from last year. Go Social!!!

I hope you enjoy this guys, remember, write a response in this post and google will give you a back link. DO IT!!
Have a great weekend!
God Bless,
John Mac
Swimming with the dolphins Tortola

November 4th Update

2010-11-04T22:45:00.000-04:00

Hey Guys,

I have not written in a long while but here a few things you might find of interest.

If you want to listen to James latest podcast
Affiliate Buzz #172 – 7 Tips for Turning Your Passion Into Profits with Affiliate Programs

Info for you.
Top 20 WordPress Plugins

If you would like to go to the Affliliate Summit in Las Vegas, there is a contest for FREE Gold Pass.
< About Contest > This is from Shawn Collins who is in charge of the conference.

Quick Tips
1. Adding Photo Captions are huge. Most people don't read the content but skim and they read the photo captions!
2. Know your demographics. A cool website to help quantcast.com. Check it out. Type in a website and you will see the demographics. Check out

Have you seen my latest Hotel review? Pier House Key West , Check out the video we did. How do you like it?

I hope all you guys and gals are doing well. Post a response on the blog if you can.
God Bless,
John Mac
swimming with the dolphins

SFIMA Meeting and More

2010-09-09T22:52:00.000-04:00

Hi Guys,

Its been a long time since I have posted anything but today, I went to the SFIMA meeting and James Martell's Q&A, so I have few things to blog about.

SFIMA meeting
This might be a home run for me, I will see. One of the making guys I was talking to mentioned that he and his company uses this service, http://www.usertesting.com/ and it very reasonable. You will get invaluable feedback. Check it out.

The main subject tonight was Email marketing. Two office depot women talked.
Get back to basics. They still get tons of business from email.

Reinvent your company to your customers
Open Rates
Target your emails
Asses your email
Personalize your message

What you are trying to achieve? Loyalty and Retention >> office depot goals
Html vs Text email? You must have text for Mobile devices. So text is a must.

Office Depot uses http://www.cheetahmail.com/corp/

They both speakers use and read daily the http://www.retailemailblog.com/

From James Martells Q&A tonight
Share A Sale Think tank, http://www.shareasalethinktank.com/About.aspx If you get accepted, all your expenses paid for except flight.

One of James Students: http://all-things-aviation.com/featured/original-aviator-sunglasses/ he is ranking really well for this key word, Randolf Aviation Sunglasses. He has done a nice job with the site.

These blogs list other blogs that have Do Follow in their comments sections. Great for Back Links.
http://www.feverishthoughts.com/do-follow-bloggers/
http://dmmbg.com/d-list-2.html/comment-page-1

James really loves this service for Comments on your blog. http://comluv.com/

Anyone want to hear the recap of the Affiliate Summit East,
http://jamesmartell.com/affiliate-buzz/a-recap-of-affiliate-summit-east-2010-in-new-york-city/

Hey guys, please make sure you comment this blog. You can put your back link in the comment. It will let me know that you read this and it will great to hear from you through the blog. Use it!

Keep on Going and God Bless,
Johnny Mac
swimming with the dolphin grand cayman

Latest Affiliate Class

2010-07-18T21:03:00.000-04:00

Hi Guys,

I thought I would put some of this information on the Blog from James Martell's last class.

1. Two of his students wrote an ebook about making money with Amazon < Check it out > I am going to get it and see what it says. I will post if it is worth it.
2. James Free Video on Improving conversion for 1400 Key Words. < Check it out >
3. James Free Video of creating content inexpensively. < Check it out >
4. Paid Word Press Themes templates Socrates WP Theme & Yukon theme. The Socrates is for Affiliate people. It looks cool.
5. Jame's wife Arlene has created a site and has a new control panel look. James really likes this navigation.

http://www.epilepsymoms.com/control-panel.html

I hope this helps someone.
God Bless and Love,

John

Site Critique

2010-07-05T11:38:00.000-04:00

Hi All,

Here is Site Critique from James Martell. Simple Italian Website

Also, another cool site the 100 Greatest Headlines ever written. You might want to use of these.

God Bless,
John
Swimming with the Dolphins Grand Cayman

New Ideas from James Martell

2010-07-01T23:18:00.000-04:00

Hi Guys,

I just got through with my live James Martell Class.

Some interesting stuff....

Clickbank.com may be an interesting affiliate network to check out.
To build content, go to Youtube and put your key word you are searching. Take Youtube video and write a story about it. Take the video code and add to your content. Geat way to get interest and easy content.
Buzzom.com it Tweeter and Facebook posting management tool.
James has a tweeter account for each of his niches. The buzzom tool helps him manage all the accounts.
James using two part headline for Articles. Example Uses Key Word then the Title to attract. Like >> Managing Credit - What you Don't know Can Hurt You ( Video) - the key word was Managing Credit
One of the guys mention this guy for Google Adword classes Perry Marshall
A website to buy and sell website Flippa.com. When James sold his formula Revenue per day X 1 1/2 years.
Matt Cutts from Google Video about Page Ranking
A Free Affiliate Conference that coming to Florida next year.

One of our internet mastermind members is moving, Alex. He was a great addition and I wish him well on his move to California. May God Bless him and his family on this new journey!!
Alex, you will be missed in South Florida. Hey gang, we now have a place to stay in Cali, yeah!!
John
swimming with the dolphins Grand Cayman

Super Mega Optimal SEO

2010-06-21T13:57:00.001-04:00

Hi All,

Here are some suggestions for Back Links to your site. Click the links to see the site. If any of you use any of these sites for back links, please put a comment on your successes.

1. Public Relations

2. Classified Ads

3. Video

4. Content Development

5. Getting Social

6. Directories

Using Word Press Template

2010-06-17T12:14:00.000-04:00

Hey Gang,

I just thought I would share a few notes about my new website, Florida Vacation Travel Guide.

The process was a little longer than I thought. My original thoughts were going to build a site from scratch but finally came to my senses and built a site with Wordpress.

I used a template that my friend and webmaster, Carlo, from CWP internet. He helped me install, teach, and modify the template. Allen, from Cruzan concepts did the header image and graphics. It was a great team effort and it came together. The site took me about 8 weeks to get up and running.

If you have any feedback, I would love to hear from you.
God Bless,
John Mac

Summit Driving ROI with Search and Social

2010-05-14T21:27:00.002-04:00

Hi All,

Long time, I have not written in a long time. I was at a seminar about a Search and Social from SFIMA.

I was writing by a wild man and my notes are not the best but here it goes.

Mitch Joel talked about Social Sites....

Banner advertising is going down, not many clicks. This past year, the clicks on Banner Ads have gone down to 2% from the total of 1.8 billion user online.
Why is normal advertising going down because of social site and customer reviews. People are trusting people not advertising.
Information is everything. He talked about yelp.

You need to start really value your relationships.
More Grandparents than High School students on Facebook
Facebook is so popular because the user can share, socialize, collaborate, and most of all create.
81% of online holiday shoppers read online customers reviews.
Reviews = Trust. Let your customer talk on website about your products. Be transparent to the world.
Make sure you know who you want to put your meesage in front of. Be part of Groups that you want to be in front of. Facebook groups...
50% of youtube audience is over 34
Canadians watch over 15 hours a month of Youtube videos. Pretty amazing, considering the average video is 4 minutes.
Google said that 20% search is NEW each day. So new key words groups are created everyday.
You don't control your homepage, Google does.
Now, you need to get in front of your customer versus where you were looking for customers to find you.

Facebook ads are very targeted audience.

We are not marketers anymore, now we are publishers.
1. Accept the change
2. Build and share
3. Move towards open and sharing
4. Its attitudal versus generational
5. Do something now? Be sure you know why?

Your stories should be one to many - Social
Give Value up Front and be Simple

Ten Golden Rules - Jay Berkowitz
To see the outline go to http://presentations.tengoldenrules.com/ He has some great outline and very smart guy.
* He sadi to get your Facebook Vanity User Name, Twitter Name, Linkin Name. It is going to be hot commodity.
* the Facebook Like it button is going hot. Look for the Like it Widget to add to your site.
*Location Networking 4 Square
* My personal use - Pay per Post to make money to blog
*Youtube is great product sale person
* PR Web to promote your video
* Create a community >> Jay created one http://www.internetmarketingclub.org/
ning.com is low cost community network
*Google is looking for "Recency" and site speed.
*Wine Library TV is has become huge hit on youtube

***************************************************************************
For John
Gorilla Marketing Idea - Make Bookmarks and put in books and magazines to promote your website. For example, travel website, but the book mark in travel books and magazine in a bookstore.
Travel Blog to check out http://amateurtraveler.com/
****************************************************************************
Next Speaker

Facebook is visited more than google
Get a strategy - Need a plan to drive revenue - lead generation
Make engaging and sharable content. Is your content good enough to share?
Offer exclusive content
Listen to your user. Listen to what they want. Are people talking on your page? Do they have complaints or praise? Get Feedback. Ask Questions?
Focus on Groups.
Buy Buy is doing a good job communicating and reacing the right audience.
Fan retention
Engage your fans in conversation

Next Speaker
The theory of facebook's Likeability
Engagement = Media X commitment
Facebook has started Likeability. what is it? Is about personalization.
How it works - Photos, Albums, Accessable
Look at Facebook Plug ins
Predictions
1. Personalization will be mainstream
2. Graph Based Commerce - Facebook shopping site
3. Geo and Mobile - Location is big and new facebook feature
4. Insight mining is going to be huge
5. Facebook ads will be everywhere. Big shift in advertising
Embrace Likeability or Else
1. Accept that notion of privacy and identity is going to change
2. Empowers consumers
3. Better analytics and measures

Next Speaker
Before going Social
Set Goals
Get a Strategy
Start campaign
Tactic >> Social >> Facebook
Build your brand

Build content First with Youtube, Photobucket, Blogs >>> Then build facebook, linkin, Twitter >>> Invite Existing Customer to Engage >>> Marketing Intergration (email, mailers, advertising)

Talked about Youtube
Video >>> Make a PreRoll and Make a Post Roll for the videos I make.
He said to use Corel Pro X3
He uses a Flip Camera

A Guide to SEO

2010-02-09T14:54:00.001-05:00

Hey Guys,

Here is another class I saw at the Affiliate Summit. It was young guy, Joshua, and owns FullSpeedSEO.com and really liked what he said. Check it out.

How Do I Increas My Ranking

Analyzing Your Niche
Dominating the Niche
Tracking your Progress

Who Do I need to Optimized for?
Unless you have compelling evidence not to optimize for Google, its best to do what they like to see, and let the other catch on.
Searches

Google 66%
Yahoo 16.2%
Bing 8.8%
Aol 3%
the rest 7%

Picking a Domain Name
If you have not bought a domain name, Use Google Keyword tool to try to find highly search versions of your main keyword. Use the Global Search and Use EXACT match.

If you already have a domain name that you are not willing to change, that's alright. Domain name is only 1 of about 200 ranking factors. Remember sites like, ebay, Aazon, and Zappos all rank for keywords not in their domain.

Don't makeyournametoolong.com

A wellplaced dash is fine, like expert-changes.com but avoid-lots-and-lots-of-dashes.com

If you are geographically centric business, it much easier to rank Houstonfloorpolishers.com than floorpolishers.com

Is your website optimized? (boring)

Main Keyword in title tag
H1 . H2 Tags
Meta Description tag

Do you have a site map?
Keywords in the first 250 words of text.
Pro tip: A CMS (content management system) like wordpress will do almost all of this for you. Wordpress has been known to follow google advice closely. <<<<<

Optimizing Wordpress
Google Sitemap Generator
All in One SEO pack << talk about this before
Popular Posts (for last x days)
Lose the Default theme
Woo Themes ($20 / month)
Page.ly - managed wordpress hosting with premium themes ($15/month), upgraded, patched, and backed up.

Page Optimization

Use Google Keywords tool for additional terms you might want to rank for. Use the broad match option.
Use in the Google KeyWord Tool the ~operator before you google queries for related ters. le ~dog, ~collars
make sure you page loads fast, consult google webmaster tools
Increase time on page via "related posts" or Additional Products at the end of pages

Off Page Optimization
It is better to have 1 really popular website than 30 "zero" page rank sites.
To become a Authority Site: Relevant Links and Authoritative links coming to your site.
Don't be freaked out about page rank. Its a macro metric. Its better to be "0" PR with lots of visitors.
Focus on building a profile of high quality one way links
Trust your list ranking, not y our page rank.

Where Do I Get Links?
Guest Posting
Social Bookmarking (Digg, Stumbleupon)
Various Profiles (youtube, slashdot,etc)
Twitter aggregators
facebook fan pages
Sites you make (mini nets)
Link Bait >> this is any media that gets people excited, in any capacity, about the content of that media, and inspires them to link back to it so their discourse on the subject is relevant.
Examples >> Contests, Viral Videos, Creative Web Applications (mobile apps), be evocative
From Matt Cutts "Link baiting sounds like a bad thing, but expecially if its interesting information or fun, it doesn't have to have negative connotations. I hereby claim that content can be both white-hat and still be wonderful "bait" for links."

Link baiting is the reason your website needs a blog.
This is reason you should probably have mini net made about your niche.

Link Building
Blog Comments
CommuntLuv - Dofollow plugin for WP
Look for "footprints" if you find something
Social Media
Submit Great Content. Diggers are snobs, rightfully so.
Your twitter followers will want to blog/link great content, give it to them! Don't mislead them with your profile though. I personally hate lots of off topic tweets.
When all else fails.. look where your competition gets their links. Yahoo.com site: theirDomain.com
Sitesnatcher <<<

SEO Tools
Rank Checker - Free from SEOBook
SEO information on SERPS >> great for assessing competition in a niche
DoNotFollow Fire Fox Plugin
CODA Development Software

Thats it for what it is worth. Also, Alex, reported to me you could not post on these blog post and I fixed it. Please post and put your website in the post. As we read, one way links will help and this blog is a tool to help you!!

God bless,
John
Swimming with the Dolphins in Miami

Affiliate Direct Links from Email

2010-02-06T13:45:00.000-05:00

Hi Guys,

You may not know this but I thought I would share this with you. I had created an email where I put the affiliates link directly from the email to the affiliate company, Viator. It was part of my strategy to earn more money. I was wondering way, I only got about 10 sales all last year. We send out 1000s of emails a month. So I was expecting so much more.

When I went to Las Vegas and I talked to the manager of Viator. She told me that in the Viator agreement, I could NOT email direct links to viator. She told me its in their agreement statement with me, but I never read it. I wasted a whole year without any sales from them. So came back and I started to create Activity landing pages for each location so the customer would have to go there first and then click to Viator. Well, I created, Things to Do in Dominican Republic page and it worked. I got my first sale this week. Believe me I was very excited.

But when I was in Vegas I asked the manager of Expedia if it was OK to direct link from emails and she said it was OK.

Just thought I would share this with you because I lost a lot of sales ( i think) because of this mistake.

God Bless,
John
PS Curtis copeland told us at the meeting, to upload photos 960 pixel

Masterblaster Monthly Meeting

2010-02-05T08:09:00.001-05:00

We had a good turn out last night, John - Neyrot Photography, Me - Swim with the Dolphins Miami, Rich - Fish Oil Direct, and Curtis - Copeland Photography.

We had a good time talking and eating for a little while, My wife Shakira, from Remax Fort Lauderdale, gave us some good eats and then we moved to the office to discuss the internet and business.

Some points:

John Neyrot.
He showed us his new website, http://neyrotproductions.com/ This is his first website he is building from Dreamweaver. The learning curve was hard for him because he was a MS frontpage user for years and now switching to dreamweaver. Its taken him about 2 weeks of reading and watching videos and now he is getting the hang of using dreamweaver. What do you think of his site? This site is to promote him better and for his salesperson to sell him better.

Also, John showed us a big written and photo spread in Moves Magazine. I looked online for the article but its not there yet. It was a great spread about 10 pages.

John Mac
Asked for some help in Wordpress. Curtis and the guys gave feed back on uploading photos to wordpress. Wow, I have been doing it the hard way a long time.
We also talked about the plug ins for Wordpress. The one everyone needs is Askismet for spam. I showed the Flickr plug in and we discussed about flickr. Flickr is social / photo sharing site and we were discussing the pros and cons of the putting the photos there. We agreed that putting a watermark on your photo was worth it.

Curtis mentioned about Disqus (a social blogging tool he uses). I looked at the site but I really don't understand yet. Hopefully Curtis can explain more in future about his site.

We also talked about setting up a Gravatar for your blog. That is something I would like to do. A Brand for my image. Maybe Curtis can talk about this more too.

Curtis
Discussed about his struggle from switching from his website to a wordpress and buying a template. We all encouraged him to move forward with wordpress.

I think that is it. If you guys can add anything, please do.
God Bless you all and see you in two weeks.
John

Affiliate Summit - Monetize Blogs for Affiliate Marketing

2010-01-21T12:34:00.001-05:00

Hi guys,
We had a panel to speak on monetize your blog.

Ben Spark - Does a photo blog - Tim Jones - Murray Newlands
Some of the basics of blogging - all the panelist use Wordpress - This is the leader
Make sure you set up Permalink Settings on Word press. This is where By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links. A number of tags are available, and here are some examples to get you started.
Word press has plugs in you should use.

All in One SEO
Google XML Site Maps
Broken Link Checker
Best Posts Summary
Word Press Stats
WP Super Cache
WP-DB Back up
Askismet << a must for spam
WP Contact Form III
E-Mail Respond
Disqus
Tantannoodles Photo Updates from Flicker
Tweet this << Automatically send out tweet posts

There are so many plug ins for word press
Guest Posting is a big thing in the Blog world. This where you post on someone else's blog your material and you get the back link to your site. If you get this, this could be huge for your google ranking.
Try to find at least 10 blogs and have all 10 blogs try to link to each other
Try to Link to Deep pages within the blog
To Monetize your Blog, you can

Affiliate Networks - Pepperjam, CJ, Linkshare, Share A Sale
Intext Solutions - Skimlinks, VigLinks, Kontera
Widgets - Chitika
Pay Per Post
CPA Networks - Azoogle,
CPM Banners - Ad Brite, ValueClick
Product Feeds into Site - Add Plug in Pop Shops << A lot of people are doing this

Just for me >> Pop shop Data Feed for a regular site

Other programs for Making Money >>

Click Bank >> Which sells digital Books and Products - Very High pay out

How to Plan and Grow

The Tighter the Niche the Better
Build the Community
Valuable Content
Build for the Long Term - Remember, its your readers site. Let them build it
Consist value for the reader
Movement to Video - You build a lot of trust with Video

Building the Blog

Recommend to get customizable Template

Paid - Unique Blog Designs
Paid - It seems a lot of people are using this service >> Thesis

Example of Blogger that had success

Tricia Meyers - She was a lawyer, now full time as a mommy blogger. twitter >>@sunshinetricia, tricia@sunshinerewards.com, blog>> www.tricia.me
When she finds a hot topic, she gets the key word, domain, server, and wordpress development within a few hours
She showed her Twight Blog
This blog is all about selling stuff
Banners

Look for Merchants from Affiliate Networks
Hot top Banners 125 X 125
Customize 120 X 600 works well

Static Banners
Auto Update Banners

She does a lot of product reviews
She uses the Pop Shops - plug in for word press >> for product feeds
She really like Ebay affiliate because you can almost find anything there. She suggested to sign up with Ebay directly because you can get better widget and tools.
Also with Ebay, you get paid for every new member that signs up
She uses a PHP Plug In from Ebay that automatically pulls in products to page - the latest aution items - 5 items
She uses Widgets from Amazon - Also uses the Share A Sale Widgets
Other ways she is making money

Video from Share A Sale
Golden Can >> Coupon Data Feed
CPA Network Ads
Uses www.coupons.com

This is the area I was most impressed with. Everyone is Blogging. The show focused a lot of attention toward this group of people. I plan to be one too!!
God Bless,
John
Dolphin Blog

Tricia responded to email I sent to her and I want to put her answer in my blog post.

Here are the answers to your questions:

1. You mentioned that you got your wordpress free templates from a program / company called thesis. I searched and searched and could not find anything on this. Can you help me where to find these free templates? It’s actually not a free theme. If you want a free one that is decent, you might want to check out Cutlines (it’s what I have on the Twilight site). The one that I mainly use is DIY Themes Thesis. http://diythemes.com/ I paid the $164 to be able to use it on as many sites as I want as long as I stay a developer.

2. When you said at the mentor session, you can turn around and build a blog in 1 hour I was really impressed. I just want to make sure the steps you do are....

Topic >> Find Key Words to Build >> Get Domain >> Buy Server >> Find Wordpress Template >> Build Site and Content >> Promote Sight To launch the site in an hour, I have a couple of cheats. One is that I already have my server. And the Thesis theme. So I just 1) find my topic, 2) buy the domain, 3) install WP on the domain along with my “set” of plugins that always use, 4) customize the keywords and the colors/logo. The first couple of times it definitely took me longer because I had to learn which plugins I wanted to use and how to customize Thesis. Now it’s just second nature. I also then link to it from my main blog so that Google will find it within 24 hours.

Tricia Meyer

MeyerTech, LLC

www.twitter.com/sunshinetricia

www.tricia.me

www.sunshinerewards.com

Affiliate Summit - Building Communities and Self Promotion

2010-01-21T12:31:00.000-05:00

Hey Gang,

As I am really week in this area, this class was a good reminder of how building communities are really important. The Speaker Site - Help a Reporter

Listen to your cusotmer - Best way is with Facebook and Twitter
Follow on twitter - See what people are saying
Listen before Tweeting
Ask your customers how they would like to get your information
Tell about yourself
Free Pizza to get people to talk to you
Your job is to get others to talk about you and your products
When using Twitter >> Make sure you only tweet useful information. Website to see, your website to see
Your goal is to get people to retweet your tweet (informational post)
Is your information valuable and relevant
Don't use the word " I " in your post. Use more " You " in the post.
Your goal is to get at least 50% or more of your tweets retweeted
Your customers will drive your content = Money
In the future - Search is going to be the recommendations of others. Are people recommending you and/or your product?
Raving Fan is a book that talks more about this subject. You should read it.
Relate to your customers - Facebook / Twitter on a regular basis
How do people remember you - Tony Bennet stood up for the women
Go to your computer and follow your twitter
On twitter, make sure you have followers than you following
Have your friend and Employees Tweet. Have them tweet about you.
# Tags are about the same group on Twitter

Well, I can not delay anymore and need to get involved with Facebook and Twitter. I hope I can manage it but other do, so why can't I.
God Bless,
John
Find more Florida Adventure Travel Here!!

Affiliate Summit - Get Motivated

2010-01-21T12:27:00.000-05:00

Hi Gang,

They did have a motivational speaker and I though would add his notes.
Individual Success:

Get over yourself - Don't be so self centered
Avoid Self Sabotage
Always Move Forward
Fail your way to success
Doubt kills success - A good Success website - Chris Brogan
Just do it
Get productive or perish

Distractions kill
Tips on removing distractions

Shut down time - No phones, No Twitter
Reward yourself when you get accomplish task - nice lunch
Go to the library for quite

Be remarkable

Misplace jealousy
Tell the Truth
No overnight success
What have you done?
Hang around successful people

What is your signature product
Doers get what they want and everyone else gets what they get
Are you a loser or a failure? Loser is bad , Failure is Good = means you are willing to fail and try
Fail Hard, Fail First, and Move on
Negativity Kills - Remove negative people across the board from your life

Then he started to talk about the web and being successful there.
Web Success:

Why people go online:

Solve Something
Get Entertained

Your job is take about the consumers "Pain"
Simple wins always on the web - Look at Google

Easy site
Problem Solve

Branding

Do you sell what you think you sell? A product or Feeling - Swim with dolphins or do I sell adventure or happiness or smiling
Website to help your business be more efficient - 37 Signals

No one reads anymore, everyone scans a website.
A good book to read " Don't make me think - Steve Krug "
What are your customers thinking
Your customers have short attention span
How does your website stand out
People want bargains

Are you giving some sort of discount?

He showed a company called CrossFitCleveland.com and they are a fitness company and they promote by all these means.

Email Marketing - Constant Contact
Meet Up
Flickr
Facebook
Plugged In Cleveland
You Tube
My Space
Crossfit
Linkedin
Twitter

Its always great to get motivated because I needed this talk because I spent a lot of time in prayer the days before whether I can make any money doing this affiliate stuff. But I feel God gave me peace and I ready to start again. This talk confirmed it.
God Bless,
John
Ready to Swim with the Dolphins in Miami

Affiliate Summit - Website Reviews

2010-01-21T12:25:00.000-05:00

Hey Gang,

I went to a few classes on Website review. It was a lot information and I am sure of all the lingo, but here the notes in this area. Maybe it will help you. They had a panel of speaker and they dissected many websites in front of the audience. Here are the points I was able to get from these sessions.

Too much CSS code
404 code need to be the correct error redirect
Loading too long - should load on regular DSL 30 seconds or less
Use Yahoo Site Explorer to check accurate back links << Cool tool
Use Google Webmaster tools. You can check speed load time here
the use of No Follow tags on your site. They talked about this a lot. I really don't totally understand. I know you put this code around links that you don't want google to follow. I am not totally sure what links you would not want google to follow. Also, I don't know what this code looks like. Does anyone?
They talked about 301 redirects and doing this correctly
Be carefull not to have to many out bound links on a page. Using "No follow" tags
Be careful about your webmaster, if you have one, imbedding outbound links without your knowledge
Recommended to use Click Path to see which Key Words are converting
Meta Descriptions are #1 things to keep up with
To find all your pages that are being index on google >> Site:Your URL
Talked about whether you need to put your price on your site or not. A / B test results
Recommended to use SEOMOZ for Seo Tool. It has FREE and Paid Tools
Use Fire Fox Web Developer Tool bar plug ins - No sure which one
Make sure that you are using your tags correctly

I hope this make sense to you.
God Bless
John
Looking for great Florida Vacation

Affiliate Summit - Day 1 Mentor Class

2010-01-17T23:44:00.000-05:00

Hi All,

Shakira and I are in Las Vegas at the affiliate summit. We are learning a lot and I am going to post the notes as they come in.

Mentor Program
During the this session, we had a change to talk to member that officially called mentors that can help newer affiliates.

I focused toward two people who I thought could help me.

One women focused on the social side and I going to make notes about my discussion with her.
* With Facebook, you need to create a business fan page.
* Once you create the fan page, you can find a Badge code from Facebook where you get code to put on other sites to get people to sign up as a fan.
* The key to make Facebook and Twitter you need to automate where you can.
* When you blog post, the RSS get posted on Facebook automatically.
* Twitter - socialoomph.com This helps you schedule your tweets automatically
* twitterfeed.com Where your blog post goes automatically
* Tweetdeck.com TweetDeck is your personal browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook and more. This will show you tweets and group in the right tweets grouping.
* When sending a tweet message, @name this message goes to the person tweet account and is public. d before the tweet name is direct. # name is before staying within the same group.
* TubeMogul is a free service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed. TubeMogul tracks rich, standardized analytics far beyond "views," including per-second audience dropoff, audience geography and much more.

Well we are off to the Share-A-sale under the star party. Will have more post soon.
God Bless,
John

Start of 2010 Meeting Notes

2010-01-07T23:27:00.004-05:00

Hi All,

Well, here we are and ready for a great new year. Tonight we discussed a few things.

1. Rich was explaining about his websites and how he building his business through network marketing companies vs. affiliate companies. He explained to me why he likes the networking side of his business.

Here are two examples of network marketing site he has:
http://www.fishoildirect.com/
http://usapetstoday.com/

The big thing is that he is in control of his customers.
He gets to see his order.
He gets to see which product the customer order.
He makes residual income from all his customers.
Commission can be really high, especially on the first sale.

What you get with Affiliate companies.

You do get to sell products you want to sell, your hobby or passion.
You do get a 60 day cookie on the customer computer if they do buy again from that company.

I am going to the affiliate summit in Las Vegas next week with Shakira. Shakira is getting introduced to the affiliate buinsess and we are going to see if we get blessed with some great ideas and companies to work with. Lets see if Shakira gets excited about the business too.

Rich and I talked about a game plan when I go to the conference.

I need to find companies that are willing to send to me a customer receipts to I can see my sales.
I need to find a company that is willing to share with me what there top affiliate websites are doing, blogging, website set up.
I need to find a company that is willing to share with me what are the top 10 products are selling through affiliates.

Lastly, we viewed a video from Allen Victor, one of our internet mastermind member, has done a great FLASH commercial for his natural soap buinsess. Check it out. Here are a couple of notes that Allen told me. He used a voice over service, Voicetalentnow.com. The voice service did a great job and it was reasonably priced. The only challenge with the voice over, they only give you so much time so that changed the amount of time he made the video. I still think it came out great. Check it out.

We have decided for the next Skype meeting, January 21, we are going to do a Video Skype meeting. So I need to get a video cam. If you plan to join us, please get a video cam.

God Bless and see you guys soon.
John
Swimming with the Dolphin Tortola

Meeting Notes

2009-12-11T00:16:00.000-05:00

Hi Guys,
We had a strong turn out for the last meeting for 2010.
John Neyrot
Alex
Rich
John Mac

We talked a lot about face book and the uses.

We talked about Google Wave and the uses of it. We all agreed this would be very useful oneday.

Alex had some good suggestions about using MeetUp.com >> Search local groups of similar interest.

One step for communicating to all social sites with Ping.FM

Alex talked about his mentor, Jase Sanders and his facebook postings.
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to you all !!!
See you in 2010.
God Bless,
John

Speaking with Carolyn Tang from ShareASale

2009-12-10T23:51:00.001-05:00

Shakira and I are going to the Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas in Mid January 2010. Today I spoke with Carolyn Tang of Share A Sale to get a better feel of the market and understanding the their affiliate network.

We talked about the basics and she gave me some great ideas.

DataFeeds which is where you download all the products in one big Excel spreadsheet.
Webmerge is a software to merge CSV iles or Database files into a Html template. There is a free trial and then it cost $99

Carolyn recommended using this....
Using Afftrack with ShareASale
You can use the afftrack= portion of your link code to include affiliate defined tracking strings. Enter your tracking variable immediately after the afftrack= portion of your link code. This tracking variable will be echoed back to you in the Activity Details Report (http://www.shareasale.com/a-accountactivity.cfm). The tracking string must be alphanumeric, and can not contain any spaces or special characters. There is a 255 character limit. If you are using the "Shortest Code Available", Email Links or Product Links, you may need to add the afftrack= wording to your link code. A sample link would look like this:
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=70&U=XXXX&M=47
Where the XXXX is replaced with your Affiliate ID number.
You can add the afftrack= parameter to this code along with your tracking string. The tracking string must be alphanumeric, and can not contain any spaces or special characters. If your tracking string is "123ABC", then your new link would look like this:
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=70&U=XXXX&M=47&afftrack=123ABC
The afftrack= parameter may already be in your link - be sure to use the existing one and not to add an additional one.

For the Affiliate Summit, she recommended that I bring...

*Color copies of my website and to show merchants.

*Bring Plenty of business cards.

*Go to the Sharaasale party on Sunday to make contact.

Going to the Affiliate Summit and sign up for the Mentor program..

Carolyn recommended that I look into the RIU Affiliate program

Thank you for your time today, Carolyn!!!
God Bless,
John
Swim with the Dolphins in Tortola

Google Wave

2009-12-10T13:22:00.000-05:00

Hi All,

Google Wave is coming. You should watch this youtube video to get an outline of what is going to happen.

If you want to sign up for Wave, go here

Watch Video

Also, if you want to buy a manual to understand and use better click here

I am not sure how we can use the wave but maybe a way to carry on the meeting virtually this way.
God Bless,
John

Building a Successful Affiliate Website

2009-11-20T23:07:00.003-05:00

Here is the chronological order of the success of Shopping-Bargains.com.

Created by Mike Allen

1995 Graduated College with Master Degree
1996 Made first online purchase
1997 -99 Learned about powerful coupon code ** Google is born ** Search engines are not very effective
1999 Shopping-Bargains.com is born ** Used free hosting ** Quickly moved shared hosting ** Joined two affiliates amazon.com and netgrocer ** joined 2 networks bfree and linkshare
Learned in 1999 ** Meet the customers needs ** Quality webhosting is vital ** Affiliate marketing exist ** Content management is a lot of work ** Affiliate income is not automatic ** This hobby had potential ** Start setting goals
2000 - 2003 ** Joined Commission Junction ** Share A Sale ** Performic (bought by google) ** Added more retailers and content ** Moved to table layout and upgraded ** Aquired shoppingbargains.com (without dash) ** Trademark easier with dash (- ) in URL ** added first part time person ( this person did data entry only )
Main Lesson 2000 - 03 ** Affiliate marketing works ** Merchant communication is great ** Manually updating content is painful (35,000 products - redesign site) ** Search engines become really big now ** search more accurate ** online advertising is very effective too ** This not hobby anymore and becomes a business ** need help ** become a LLC business ** Building the BRAND and investment in the company is vital
2003 - 04 ** The big migration ** Dynamic content ** Database driven ** Dedicated server is acquired ** Build database in Cold Fusion ( looking back I wish I did it in PHP instead) ** Standardize Layouts ** Navigation ** Read Quit my day job - Jeremy Palmer ** Started to interact with the affiliate industry ** Use Abestweb.com for resource ** Involve more with affiliate managers (building relationships)
Main lesson learned 03 - 04 ** running a business is expensive ** I must focus on content, not developement ** Quality sites are trusted more ** web layout + usability really matter ** Read the book "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug ** Affiliate income fluctuates widely ** Search engines don't like change
2005 - present ** More industry involvement ** Advisory boards / service ** won several awards ** Blogging ** Added more retailers ** Created newsletter >> Like mail chimp for segmented list and not expensive ** Social Media - Blogging, RSS feeds, Facebook, Twitter, Some use of Video ** Tools to use - for me to coupon.com - popshops.com (all the affiliates in one spot) - google custom search (With Google Custom Search, you can harness the power of Google to create a customized search experience for your own website.) ** Business enhancements - hired more part time people ** New revenue stream - slotting (where you put perferred products on your site and get paid for it) - google ad sense, chitika
2005 trends noticed ** Buiness cycles and trends produce big impacts ** Search Engines algorythmes change and it effects bottom line ** Media mentions and Social can be huge ** the ecomony impacts conversions ** Legal issues arise the bigger you get ** Infrigment and typo must be addressed ** content must be protected ** more tools - open office, aff meter , affbook.com, ** go to trade shows - affiliate summit, search engine strategy, pubcon
Suggestions to think about ** Find a problem to Solve ** Offer creative solutions ** think long term ** build your own brand ** Invest in education ** Expect to fail
To see the whole PDF hand out < go to >

Thank you Mike... facebook/com/mike.shoppingbargains or twitter.com/mta1
God Bless,
John
swimming with the dolphins bahamas

ShareASale - SFIMA - Other Speaker

2009-11-20T21:03:00.004-05:00

More notes from a few speakers today.

Carolyn Tang - Share A Sale an affiliate network
This network is one of the hottest in the industry - everyone is raving about its integrity, honesty, and payments.

Big affiliate site that work within their network, FatWallet.com >> Tim Storm ( started 5 years ago and has 80 employees)

Stats to keep up on:
Raw Data

Impressions
Clicks
Number of Orders
Sales$$

Derived Data

Conversion Rate
EPC >> Earning per click
Returns

Jay Berkowitz 10 Golden Rules
The types of Affiliate that are out there.
SEO >> Natural and Paid
Email >> Building List
High Traffic Websites
Shopping / Bargins / Coupon
Information products pages
Lead Generation pages

You might want to see this video from Tony Robbins
In this interview I meet with two very successful students, Frank Kern and John Reese. Both of them are self-made multi millionaires who made their fortunes by selling products on the Internet. What’s particularly interesting about both of them is that neither had any “real” education. Neither one finished college and they both went from being broke to becoming wealthy.

Andy Rodriguez Consulting
I thought of Johnny Hawaiian contacting this guy. If he reads this, you might want to follow through with him.

He said a supper affiliate is someone who earns at least $10,000 a month commission.
He helps companies both with finding Affiliate Networks or Growing the Affiliate business
Tools her recomended
Wordtracker >> with word tracker you can see the cost for 1 year
Syntryx >> Find affiliates for any products

andy@andyrodriguez.com

Sites to look at:
Affiliate Tips Blog by Shawn Collins
ABestWeb is the world's largest affiliate marketing forum with 60,000 members and over 943,000 posts
Affiliate Summit conference
Geekcast - pod cast about affiliate marketing
Quit your day Job
Shoemoney.com >> Not my favorite but they showed at the show where they have a photo of this guy with a check from google adsense for $132,000 for a month check. Pretty impressive. Look at the check.
zacjohnson.com - Super affiliate blog
ReveNews Blog - Discussion of Online Advertising, CPA, SEO, Affiliate and Next Generation Marketing

More to write about>>
God Bless,
John
dolphin swims miami

Trust Agents - Affiliate Marketing SFIMA

2009-11-20T20:20:00.004-05:00

Hi Everyone,
Wow, I went to inspiring Internet class today about affiliate marketing, which was up my alley.

The first speaker was Juliene Smith who wrote the NY times best seller Trust Agents
His books and speak was about building channels and talking to many people
Blogs > Facebook > Twitter

Building a strong Channel of People can last forever
Controlling your future means controlling your channel platform > your network
Emailing will help communicate to your channel of people
Building tribes is critical
Social Capital > facilitate the exchange of the groups
You need to be part of every conversation
Create websites that are visible and indexable
Make sure you have the inside language with your group >> connection with your group >> Buzz words that ever talks about within your group
Your offering >> Differentiate from the Crowd
Pattern Breaking >> Be a human artist >> so your crowd can remember you
Understanding leverage >> Social Capital = Financial Capital >> Keep the friction friction low
You need to be the lead dog of your group. When you are the lead dog, you have less competition >> Similar to network marketing pyramid - You at the top and the rest of your group below you.
Habit of fear won't let you take risk to be the lead dog.

Chris Brogan Blog advises businesses, organizations, and individuals on how to use social media and social networks to build relationships

Book to Read:

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant (Hardcover)
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (Hardcover)

2 Website for me to look startcooking and startcooking blog

More notes to come.
God Bless,
John
swimming with the dolphins in Miami

Your offering >> Differentiate from the Crowd

Email Service Providers

2009-11-14T10:50:00.004-05:00

Here is another story I have read about Email Service Providers (ESP) and how to use them properly. Some Companies to Look at Aweber, Listtrack, iContact, Exact Target, and Mail Chimp.

Proper Selection Process of an ESP
Real Basic....

Handling Authentication
Quality Control Features
Third Party Intergration
Foster an environment of Permission based marketing - Double Opted In emails
Do they have Metrics to Track, opt out subscribers, spam complaints
The ability to quickly create individual emails and campaigns
To preview and test content and run spam checks
Schedule delivery of Emails or Campaigns
Set Up Autoresponders

Also, look for advanced feature ...

Segmentation - the ability to create small email groups
Subscribers Level of activity or interaction - Sending to the real buyers
Abandonment - How to get those that leave your email list to come back and buy again
Coupling emails with social media

Some ESP have autmatic RSS feeds into their email programs. I know Aweber offer this.

Some Industry with High Inbox acceptance

Books, Music, and Movies 95%
Food and Beverage 87%
Sports / Outdoor 87%
Misc Retail 82%
Gifts and Collectables 78%

3 Basic Elements of Every Email

Personalization
Branding
Call to Action

Sender OK has a plug in for Outlook, Gmail, Live and Yahoo, where you add a social network into the header panel of messages

Success Story:
Dreamfields Pasta built a marketing database of excess of 280,000 brand advocates in the san of 24 months. << Check out this site

Something to think about. I have used Aweber for many years but would like to check out the other ESP to see what they offer and cost. Also, I am trying Mail Chimp for my civic association because they offer 500 email users for FREE for life. It will work great for the civic association.

God Bless,
John
Today is the perfect day to go swimming with the dolphins !!

Meeting Notes Nov 5 09

2009-11-05T21:06:00.006-05:00

Rich and I listen to James Martells Affiliate Buzz.

They talked to internet manager to Lazy Environmentalist.

He talked about the following:
To fix his site, he looked page by page
He needed to figure out with the Key Words what the customer really wanted
Then he need to figure out what key words the search engine wanted.
Fix the headlines
Added H1 tags
Took off options - Goal one product - 1 sale
With optimization, increase google adsense by 600%
Know your analytics - use google - Always test
Biggest Tip >> Keep Moving and don't stop

Rich talked about a Key Work optimization program, Web CEO.

Rich want to talk about Benefits of Fish Oil and how these keys where optimized. He used the Web CEO tool to help.

Rich also show us his new directory which is geared toward the following keys word, compare dog food.

Rich made this Squeeze page, for Land in Belize, check it out.

Rich asked about Flip Video. here are the specs
UltraHD™, 120 minutes

The Flip UltraHD camcorder combines Flip Video's signature shoot-and-share simplicity with the power of vivid, vibrant HD video. With 120 minutes of record time, you'll never miss another minute again. And because of UltraHD's pocket-sized portability, you'll truly be able to capture HD video anytime, anywhere.

Tips to Better Google Analytics

2009-11-05T12:39:00.007-05:00

Here is another article review I doing from Website Magazine.

I recently was using Google Analytic recently to update my swimming with the dolphins site. There is tons of information and I am glad for this article and I hope to implement some of the ideas.

The Basics

Make sure to tag all your pages with Google Anaylitcs code
Google has created Conversion University - This is a free Tutorial from google with video - A must
Check for proper installation of the google analytic - Sites to help. EpikOne, Firebug, or WASP

Setting Up Goals

what do you want your customers to do: Subscribe to mailing list, become a lead, buy your product.
Finding out where your customers are falling out of your website.
Not having goals will cost you money.
Here is good article about setting up goals. Zen Cart Optimation Blog

E Commerce and Lead Gen-Tracking

The most common misstep is the failure to filter out internal Traffic.
On your anaylitics home page, on the bottom right is link called "filter manager". Here you can exclude internal traffic, as well from any other domain you don't want to track, like your competitors.
Also, you might want to filter out repeat visitors.
Filtering out unqualified visitors will help you get a handle on exactly how well you are converting qualified visitors.
Google analitics also allows segmentation and tracking of results from adwords campaigns.

The Bottom Line: Take Action
The purpose of the Web Analytics is to turn the information into something you can optimize on your website.

Getting Started

Look at your top entry and exit pages and optimize those with a 40% percent plus exit rate.
Look at your top referring keywords and optimize landing pages for terms with a 40% percent plus exit rate.
Look at your goal conversion funnels, and start optimizing

Another Resource : Grok Dot.com
Enjoy Optimizing!!
God Bless,
John
swimming with the dolphins Waikiki

BING is becoming a Fast Growing Search Engine

2009-11-05T12:25:00.003-05:00

Just read a news brief about BING, the newer search engine from Microsoft.

What the article said....

1. Bing is the fastert growing search engine, according to Nielsen. BING's search market share in August rose 22.1 percent to 10.7 percent of all sarches, up from 9 percent in July.
2. Google still remains the big boy, with 65% share of all searches.
3. But Google only rose 2.6% in July, AOL 1.8%, Ask.com 2.9% - All have grown but not as much as Bing.
4. The only Search that fell was Yahoo, 4.2% fall.

Bing introduction to the Visual Search feature has been a hit. bing.com/visualsearch/ You need to check it out. From Bings research, more people click at an image then text.

Read this story Bing Cashback: 6 Reasons to get started now
Hope this help.
God Bless,
John
swimming with the dolphins in Miami

Video Marketing

2009-10-22T14:38:00.002-04:00

I went to the FDMA luncheon about Video Marketing

The speaker was Jessica Kizorek

She very interesting and got some answers.

Video Turns in Buyers

There is opportunity there with Video, only 2% user are involved with Video. You need to decide is the medium for you.

Video can be a big competitive advantage for a website.

Online Consumption of video has grown and will continue to grow.

Video is the new language for the internet. Send your message quickly and to the point.

Websites that use Video. Increase sales by 72%

Why does this increase sales?
Absorbed with the Video
Increase Engagement time with the website
Deepen Connection
Build Trust - Creditability
Learn the best by video

Question asked about Load time. WEBMASTER: If you have the website build with the html first and then have the video load afterwards.

Sending Email with Video, you would send a email to have person look at your video. With the wording, HURRY SEE MY VIDEO >>> Then have them land on a video page.

Videos are great to have testimonial from Customer. This could be huge.

Here is a great example of website that uses. < Client Attraction Squeezepage > < Client Attraction Blog > < Client Attraction Ad Page >

Squeeze page is a new term I have not heard about. You can see what it is from Client Attraction. It where you get to advertise and have the viewer give you their email or some information.

Video is great for....

Testimonial
Video Email
Invitation
Instructional
Reviews
How to
Video Blogs and commentary

Before you post your video, make sure you have someone you trust view your video. Get feedback. Putting up a bad video can be really bad for your business.

If your video is BAD, you make your product BAD and not able to sell.

She used an apple laptop and really liked it for Video. She mentioned about Photo Booth. Defination

When making a Video some points....

Look into the camera. Make sure your eyes are looking at the camera. Don't be trying to read lines but know the lines.
Lighting needs to be good.
Audio - It needs to be clear.

Video can....
Increase Sales by 72%
Increase Engagement by 22%
Increase Conversion Rate by 40%
2X - 3X Increase purchases

She talked briefly about the cameras. She was using the ipod video camera and uploaded to her blog right away. Very impressive.
She Mentioned about Flip Video with High Definition is very good.

She said that putting Youtube video on your main page is not the best thing. Gives bad image. She said have a Youtube Channel is very good but you should have Branded Player for your website. < Definition of Branded Web Video Player >

WEBMASTER out there: Do any of you out there have code or solutions for a branded player?

When I talk to her about this, she said once you load the player up on your server, then it easy to upload video to your server.

Length of Video...
45 Second is the best, no longer than 2 minute 30 seconds.

Mentioned was YouTube Insights anaylitical tool. You want to know your visitors of your video.

Tube Mogul is another way track video

Copy Doodle - Not sure where this fits in but have this website.

Overall it was a good presentation. Thanks Jessica.

God Bless,
John
swim with the dolphins Miami

301 Redirects

2009-08-21T08:53:00.002-04:00

301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection.
It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option.

The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently".

Below are a Couple of methods to implement URL Redirection:

IIS Redirect

In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL".
Enter the redirection page Check "The exact url entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource"
Click on 'Apply'

ColdFusion Redirect

<.cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<.cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.new-url.com">

PHP Redirect

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url.com/"
%>

ASP .NET Redirect

<script runat="server">
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.new-url.com");
}
</script>

JSP (Java) Redirect

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%>

CGI PERL Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect("http://www.new-url.com/");

Ruby on Rails Redirect

def old_action
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to http://www.new-url.com/
end

Redirect Old domain to New domain (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

In addition to the redirect it is suggested that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Redirect to www (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name.
Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Source: http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

Word Press Website thats Making Money

2009-08-13T22:14:00.002-04:00

Hi Guys,

We had a our weekly skype meeting, John N, Andres P, Rich M and Me were there. There was good accountablility with the group.

I listen to mentor, James Martell tonight and it was the best one in his series.

It was a study of his, Dan, who has a successful Review website.

His site name is Piano-Keyboard-Reviews.com
This site start in 2006
He is boot camp member of James Martell.
This site has had 4 evolutions, static >> drupel >> dreamweaver >> now wordpress
He really wanted to get in the social aspect and went for the wordpress theme. If you check out the theme. It is awesome, really cool.
He talked about the transition from the static site to the dreamweaver site. He had a lot of concerns about loosing page ranking and google key word ranks.
During the transitions he used 301 redirect. I could not totally understand this because he said he static site was www.piano-keyboard-review and the wordpress was piano-keyboard-reviews without the www.
He has built a lot trust with his customers.
He is selling tones of Keyboards and is usinng on 1 affiliate to the sell keyboards from.

Questions asked him.
1. What was the biggest challenge starting in affiliate biz. A. Believing I could make money. Once I made my first check, it gave me confidence to continue.
2. How hard it was getting into the top 10 of google. A. Not very hard if you write good content and use the keyword desity rule from James.
3. What has helped you grow. A. I listen to my clients and change my website what they want.
4. What make you different from the compeition. A. I have a passion for music and keyboards.

I was really impressed with this guys website and selling ability. He is selling more this summer then he did during his christmas season in 08.

God Bless,
John
swimming with the dolphins in Florida

General Meeting Master Blaster

2009-08-06T21:20:00.003-04:00

Hi Guys,

Rich is talking about http://www.esyndicat.com/

Rich bought unlimited directories and sharing his success because his link is on everypage. He has over 2000 directory listing.

Curtis told John H about http://www.smugmug.com/ and http://www.zenfolio.com/ to monitize his website.

John Neyrot is going to sign up for a gmail account and then sign up for Google Ad Sense.

John Mac showed his template for http://dolphinplaces.com/default.shtml

John Neyrot is going to work with DreamWeaver.

Anyone have suggestions, please make some comments.
Have a great week!!
God Bless,
John
Swimming with the Dolphins Oahu Hawaii

Skype Meeting 7-23-09

2009-07-23T20:00:00.004-04:00

Hi Guys,

We talked on the Skype. Here are some links:

Facebook and Using it for $$$
http://www.socialmediamoneysystem.com/member.html

John Neyrot is trying to find a voting tool. We talked about using Frontpage Extension.

Rich asked "What is it do your really want to do with your business?"

John Mac said that Linked in may be a good tool for John N for looking for a Marketing type person to help him grow and sell.

John N latest promotion for boby paintint http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK9FBhUuUUo

Rich suggested to John N to start up a paypal account and start selling products. To see Rich's products, go to: http://www.usadogstoday.com/dog_food_samples.html Then go to Life's Abundance Weight Loss Dog Food section, you will see the paypal link. Its simple.

Thats all 1 hour of talking.
God Bless,
John Mac
swim with the dolphins in Miami

Linked In Seminar

2009-07-10T08:47:00.006-04:00

Hi All,

I went to the SFIMA meeting last night and it was a good meeting because the main speaker was talking about Linkedin, which on the Social Media scale is hardly talked about.

I sat with Mike Monahan, he is the Internet Marketing manager for a cruise ship portal site, called Cruise One. He mentioned a blog that was really successful, call foursuitcases.com, it about a family that is traveling the world. They are a member of CruiseOne and he said they have a huge following on the blog. You might want to check it out, pretty cool.

LinkedIn Meeting Notes:

A place to find people and place to be found.

Not a substitute for meeting people face to face. Building Relationships!!!

There are 10 Application for Linked in. I never knew.

Linkedin has grown, from 18 million user in 07 to 44 million in 08

The average income of a user in linked is $110,000

This biggest nugget I got from this speaker is this....
All Social Media you should have a strategy before starting, don't go into it blind.
His strategy is
Part A - Pressence on the Social Site.
1. Strategy >> 2. Brand >> 3. Profile
Part B - Participation
4. Execution >> 5. Connections 6. Key - Coordinate this social site with your other marketing efforts

Brand questions to ask yourself

My company (or you) is known for_______?
3 Adjectives to describe you or your company?
Describe your expertise.

Profile
Profession Discription of yourself in profile - Make you and your brand very descriptive.
7 Elements of linkedin profile >> It important to get this completed properly. If you don't you wont be ranked on Linked in.

What makes your profile complete?

Your current position
Two past positions
Your education
Your profile summary
A profile photo
Your specialties >> Add Key Words here to get ranked better!!
At least three recommendations

To increase Participation
Join Groups
Send out Invitations >> Don't spam
What are you working on Now Section >> kind of like twitter -- Don't over use

Before growing your connections with others, make sure your profile is 100%

You can grow your connections quickly by importing your email list into Linked in

Final

Spend 10 - 15 minutes a day on Linked in
Define strategy
Be clear on what your expertise is
Proffessional description
Value Links
Power of Summery

Speaker Website - LinktoProsper.com

Last thing - One guy told me from the last meeting about twitter, a guest ask what is the next thing to come along we should watch for. The speak said Google Wave Check it out.

God Bless You All !!!
Johnny Mac
Swimming with the Dolphins Miami

Feed Front Magazine Review

2009-06-29T00:07:00.003-04:00

Hi Guys,

I was reading FeedFront the Affilate Summit magazine they sent out and I wanted to highlight a few points they made in the magazine.

1. Things I wish I knew 10 years ago - Article 1

Don't Skip on the Basics Like Web Hosting, Web Design, domain names, and third party solutions like Aweber for emails and Membersgate for membership sites.
Time to Work Hard is NOW
Solving People's problems = Making Money

2. Google Site Map Protocol May need Riches Help with this

3. Four Great Tools for Twitter
Search Twitter.com
Twitscoop
Monitter
Tweetdeck

I think that is it.
God Bless,
John

Photo Gallery Software / Blogs

2009-06-18T16:40:00.002-04:00

Hi All,

Just thought I would share these free downloads for Photo Gallery Software for your server.

They all look cool and a great source of building content very easily. I know the social aspect of flicker is really good but building your own content is great for you SEO. Tough call.

Anyway, if any of you guys check out these products, I would love to hear from you which one you think would work well and easy?
God Bless,
John

FreeDictionary.com - MasterBlaster Meeting June 4 Meeting

2009-06-07T20:11:00.004-04:00

Hi All,

Here is are some note from our meeting on June 4th. It was really cool and different. We had a chance to interview Steve Boymel the owner of FreeDictionary.com. We did this on Skype.

Always loved the computer, since he was little. A programer at heart.
Work during the dot com period and build a business with venture capital dollars and the business crashed during the bust.
Went back to school and for a MBA degree after the failed business.
Graduated with a MBA with a computer Technology degree. During his MBA as a class project started freedictionary.com 2004.
His theory is to build an Asset. His website is an asset. Like real estate and wants to build for the long haul. He builds his site with White Hat intention. ( Which means he stays google compliant)
He will never use venture capital dollars again. He uses only his own and partner's money to build the business.
He believes heavily is to go to big web SEO related conferences. He goes to at least 7 a year. The big one he goes to WebMasterWorld in Las Vegas. Pubcom This show is in November every year.
He makes a lots of money from Advertising from his website.
He is involved with Web 3.0 now, more than web 2.0
He follows and listen to Matt Cutts a lot from google.
He mention about this 1 man show, who owns plentyoffish.com and makes a lot a money. He said this guy works about 1 - 2 hours a day and is very focus on this site.
He now has about 15 part time programers. He has a partner and makes a great living from this website now.
He mentioned a great tidbit. Since he started, he has listen to his users all the time and has built the site from their suggestions. It has paid off. The way he has gotten feedback with a feedback link. I need to do this right away. All he has is Feedback link at different places on the website. Left sidebar and bottom footer.
You need to check out freedictionary.com pagerank, wow an 8. That is amazing!!!

We plan to try to record others who we interview and try to have a podcast for the next time. Rich Mattheisz was going to send me a link to record from the computer. Alex mentioned about Gold Wave Audio. If any other suggestion for recording, please let me know.
God bless,
John
Swim with the Dolphins Key Largo

Pod Casting for Success

2009-06-03T12:55:00.004-04:00

Hi All,

I was listening to a podcast on the success of Podcasting.

Here are the tips it gave:
1. Finding your guest to interview. You find these type of guest from your customers or local associations.
2. Schedule your interview. Find someone to interview for your type of business.
3. Research on the Topic - Outline. Ask for a Bio from your guest.
4. Come up with a List of Questions for you and send to your guest for them to prepare.
5. Find a place that is quit for the interview. Don't worry about Mistakes.
6. Find a phone to use for recording. This podcast said to use landline to landline for best quality and record. But I did some research and I think Skpe to Skpe would be the best quality due to the fact that you can digitize the recording and edit it. < Read More on this Part 1 >. < More Part 2>
7. Be at Ease - Prepare 30 minutes before interview. Be Alert. Have quite. Make the call. Read the intro and Bio of Guest. Start the interview. Thank the guest at the end of the interview.
8. Edit Podcast. Click and Read #6. This part sounds a little tricky to me.
9. Publish the Podcast to Podcast Directories for exposure. < A Good directory list to check out>
10. Email all your customer that you have publish a new podcast. Get the word out there.

Has anyone done a podcast? Anyone have anything to share on it? Everything seems easy to me except the part of recording the podcast and editing the podcast. It seems if someone had that experience the rest would be simple. It would be nice to record our next meeting.
God Bless,
John
swim with the dolphins miami

Great Article - Content Creator? Then Forget Analytics. Use Digg.

2009-05-22T10:18:00.003-04:00

Here is a great article about finding content and relevant data using Digg. Good info about how to use Digg to search for relevant key words, content and links rather than raw data from Google.

Here is the link:

http://www.talentzoo.com/news.php?articleID=2118

Here is the story:

"Who can figure out Google Analytics? I can’t. The data is fascinating and it certainly makes one’s curiosity complacent. But how do civilians use this information -- some of which clearly has nothing to do with you or what you are creating?

How then, does one leverage website analytical data into a marketing strategy that will drive people to a blog or other conventional website?

For now, let’s forget Google Analytics. Use Digg instead. Digg distinctly determines the value of content and its relevance. It is a valuable marketing tool for pinpointing what -- and how -- to create targeted, well written content. Content that could leverage existing -- and popular -- web information and push visitors to your site with strategic use of expected and accepted tags and keywords.

Suppose you are a fitness and weight loss writer and you need a relevant and “hot” topic within your beat / scope. Search Digg “Lifestyle > Health.” What are the topics people have Dugg the most? Easily evaluate what is relevant to you, your audience and how you can determine what topic is worth writing about, i.e.: will get you the hits slash exposure you are obviously seeking.

Now, the magic

There is a valuable and free service for journalist looking for sources. Peter Shankman’s “Help a Reporter Out” or “HARO.” I was fortunate to find Peter after reading Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Work Week and doing some further research. The queries from reporters and the quality of responses are considerably better. As Peter said in his book, “under promise and over deliver.” HARO does. I use it for my own motivation column on Examiner.com.

Leverage all of this with Twitter; absolutely certain to always request responses sent to Twitter in Twitter format (@stefanpinto). You gain credibility on Twitter by doing this and you will immensely increase your followers, not to mention the quality of followers.

Now, these services are merely tools. Results are not typical and vary depending on how much effort, dedication, time and perseverance you put into it. If you are good at what you do, it doesn’t matter what service you use, the cream always rises to the top.

Go on, be clever"

Have a great day!

Curtis Copeland - Professional Photographer South Florida

Social Media Conference at FDMA

2009-05-21T17:37:00.003-04:00

Hi Guys,

It was a good FDMA Good conference today, but a little bit of information over load. I am going to do my best to put down my notes here and hopefully will be useful to you. I wrote my tail off, there were so much information it was hard for me to keep.

As I walked in there was about 1/2 hour of networking and talked to interesting guy about the business and he suggest a few things to me.

To expand my presence on the internet I might want to be an affiliate and look for affiliate software to accomplish this: Need to do a google search for the software.
He said to change content, even just a sentence. Google loves this and the spider will come back often to check your page. I need to change my index page at least 1X a month.

First Speaker: Understanding Social Media, Social Networking, and Social Marketing presented by Peter Leshaw

Social Profiles

Blogsport, Wordpress, twitter
Youtube, Flickr - Make sure to tag your videos and photos properly
Digg (where to write a comment about an article and add a vote about it. It helps the article get noticed), Delicious (saves your books on their website)
Facebook, Linkedin

Peter mention about Location based Social Networking. He uses with his iphone when he travels to find people on facebook who are near where he is. Like he is in Miami and he is able to communicate with the local people using the GPS portion of the iphone.

Buzz about Blogs

Search Engine Favor site that are frequently updated like blogs
Blogs are easy to format and use
Blogs allow comments
RSS

Using Reader to Read RSS - Yahoo and Google have readers

What Peter does when writing a post:

50% Writes about the key word he is trying to convey
25% about the product he is trying to sell
25% about buy the product
Does not use more than 250 words

Social Profiles
When setting up your social profile....

Brand your profile, is about you or your company. Try to keep it the same.
Customize your profile
Describe yourself - your chance to be on soapbox, interests, other thing
Provide images, videos, links, etc
Share your content with others

Reputation Management

Tracking social profiles for mention on you or your company. Use google alerts for this.
Look for positive and negative reviews and prepare what to say. See case where Domino Pizza. What do you say or do. Guys video Tape theme. Very Negative

Some Tools for Twitter
Tweet Beep, Blog Pulse, search.twitter.com, back tweets ( I tried to look at these and its greek to me - Maybe someone can try and explain)

Some other tools for Social Media
UserName Check ( Very cool ), Ice Rocket,

Off subject, but he mentions - A tool he used Poll Daddy (Free Polling on Site),

Peter Leshaw : An Internet Marketer's Blog

2nd Speaker: Who has the time for Twitter by Jeff Yaniga: Pitney Bowes

What is Twitter

Twitter is One Way Mirror
Twitter is like being at a networking event - handing out cards on steroids
You are looking for good partners - not everyone out there
You speak your mind - your own soap box within 140 characters
A place to sell your stuff
Everything is searchable on twitter

Navigation Twitter

Sign Up today if you haven't
One Line Bio of yourself - important
Your URL/ Signup Name important choice
Location
Create a back ground or Custom Background - Need to ask Johnnie Hawaiian how he did his background

Follow Others on Twitter - and Why do you follow others

You need to look other sites to see what kind of comments they are making.
You can unfollow anyone - You will know if someone is spammer and you can unfollow them
If you follow someone, the more you follow will get people to follow you.

He used this term, "ReTweet" a lot and I am not exactly sure what that means. ( Can anyone explain)

You can put any URL in a Tweet message. You may need to shorten a URL and you can use, tinyurl.com - It will shorten any URL to 25 characters.

Within your twitter dashboard, you can have many Twitter Account. So you can have 1 personal and another for your business, all under the same dashboard.

Direct - Company uses twitter as a public relation tool. For example, if you were at Starbucks and sent a tweet saying, "I am at starbuck" and starbuck and send a tweet back.
Indirect - Employees Post as Individual

Be prepared for good and bad tweets about you (especially companies)

Example of growth - Starbucks had 30, 270 followers Jan 09, today has 181, 776 followers.

He talked about Hash Tags a lot. I am having a hard time understand, but here is great description of what it is. < Hash Tags >

Monitor your reputation on Twitter
Search the web - Google alerts

Read your Tweet Feeds daily

3rd Speaker: Marketing Fusion
New Way of Business

Two Way Dialog with Customers now
Now it is conversational vs Broadcasting a message
Goal - Create a longterm value and loyalty
Sell by Servicing

Matrix Fusion
Holistic (Parts of the Business)- web - Social Media

Loader the Business Message the more consumers turn off

What Customers Want

Control Frequency of your business message
Surprise and Delight your customers
Listen to your customers and Respond
You will get deeper trust over time

Email is the center of communication with all the technologies

Mobile
Social Media
Online Connector
Push / Pull messages - Twitter

Email is the link
The inbox has morphed as the center

Computer
Social Media
Mobile

Not Wider but Deeper with Customer

Mine Customer
Upsell
Use analysis as way to earn creditbilty
Cross Sell

Tool she talked about - What people are talk about you on Social Network - Radian6

Find out what social items your customers are using, facebook, twitter and start promoting your social networks to them. Ask them, in surveys or emails.

4th Speaker: Facebook

Why be on it: Growing 100 million user and growing
If you are using your name as a brand, your facebook page may show up really high google.

5 Keys for Success

Have a Strategy - Listen to others
Use Personals
Select Friends carefully
Be Active Regularly
Always add value to your site
Be consistant, authentic, and congruent

Daily Activity

Update Status
Big Clients
Update your profile
Feedback
News feed - read them
comment on photos
watch conversation
video comments
90% accept friends
acknowledge birthdays ( a really good idea - create birthday gift page on your website for your friend to go to - )

Key elements of Good Profile
1. Have a Picture of yourself
2. Real Name
3. Profile description important
4. Unique landing page
5. Right click your name to address for your facebook URL of yours
6. Change your tabs to ones you need to use >> Add Friend Feed Tab
7. Add Videos
8. Add Links
9. Add Application to your site

Making a New Friends
1. Don't take any friends without a face
2. Put your Facebook or Twitter URL on your email signature
3. Put a Face Badge on you site or blog - Wordpress has a widget

Profile Page Vs Fan Page

Once you get 5000 friends you can get a fan page
Build your personal brand
Fan Page can be a Biz Page

Page Vs Groups

Pages and Group has a discussion group
Page let Application in and not groups
Page has stats, not groups

Here is important Ratio with Facebook and Twitter
-If you have Large amount of Friends:
7 content messages vs 1 self promotion
-Small amount of Friends
15 content messages vs 1 self promotion

I hope this notes are use ful for you guys !!!
God Bless,
John
Swim with the Dolphins in Miami

How Twitter and Facebook Now Compete with Google

2009-05-20T16:40:00.003-04:00

A great article about how Social newtorks are now becoming a resource for information rather than Google. Here is the article from Mark Cuban .

"Last year I wrote a blog post entitled “If the news is important it will find me”. The point was that we all live in so many social networks, that someone will send us an update if something in the world happens that we would be interested in. Back then I was guessing. A year later I have data.

For the 1st time ever, more people are finding my blog from Twitter and Facebook referrals than via Google. The total number of people coming to my blog is increasing. The percentage of people who find it via Google is declining. Significantly.

Thats huge. Why ? Because of the behavior implications for users, and because of the business implications for Twitter, Facebook and Google.

What if I decide to follow someone on twitter or facebook who is a guru on the types of cars Im interested in buying ? Could I not just query them and get a response and referral to a site that gives me the information Im looking for ? ie,

Anyone know a great source for information on Ford f150 trucks ? Need to buy one

@mcuban follow the @greatdealsotrucksguy

Anyone else like this guy

@mcuban I used it. Great source.

@greatdealsontrucksguy – any suggestions on where to get a used ford f150 in Dallas ? @mcuban – Try this site. xyz.com They know their stuff. Or the response could be. @mcuban whats your price point ? Or it could just be a generic response. In either event, my actions are going to be influenced. I followed this “person” for a reason. In this case

The best example of this is #follow fridays on Twitter. Where users recommend people to follow. Users being influenced by users. A far different experience than the Google search experience. Its also where Twitters anonymity will benefit it as users are able to interact with privacy. Something you really cant do on FB. On FB if you have a friend who knows about trucks. You just email them with a question. Maybe you put it out there to your network. But chances are that network is limited in numbers. Those limits are not in place for twitter.

From a business perspective, Im sure Im not alone in getting more referrals from Twitter than Google Search. Thats money in the bank for Twitter and FB for commercial accounts. There is no reason why a big or small company, say Charmim selling toilet paper, cant set up a twitter account and do whatever marketing they can to build the largest number of followers possible. From there, Twitter could charge them on a cost per referral click originating from their followers. As long as they cost per click is lower than competing options, why wouldn’t they do it ?

Things change. We are seeing a change in our referral logs right now. That could translate into systemic change in user behavior and business opportunity""

this brings up a whole new paradigm for us internet marketers. How do we become the "go-to" resource for potential clients when we are not connected to them via a Social Network? This could be an all night discussion!

Shall we chat about it?
Thoughts to ponder,

Curtis Copeland Professional Photographer for South Florida and Internationally

Using Tweeter

2009-05-14T23:48:00.002-04:00

Hi Guys,

Here is an article from Curtis about Tweeter.

<Click Here to Read>

Who would like to tweeter with me? I want to try it but I am not sure how it works and would feel safe (poor word) to learn how to use it better if we tweet between each other.

I am hoping all of us will agree to sign up and try it with each other. What do you say? Please reply and tell me who will sign up.
God Bless,
John

Directory Listing

2009-05-14T13:40:00.002-04:00

Hi All,

Rich gave me this list of directory website that have page rank and get source of helping your back links for your websites.

It will take you a while to plug in the information into the submission form but it will be worth it if you have time.

Directories
http://business.epagini.com/
http://directory.classifieds1000.com/
http://directory.seoexecutive.com/
http://www.777WEBLINK.COM
http://www.9dir.com
http://www.a1weblink.com
http://www.a2zwebindex.com/
http://www.achx.com/
http://www.addurl-links.com
http://www.addyourwebpage.net
http://www.a-livedirectory.com
http://www.allurls.info/
http://www.anaximanderdirectory.com
http://www.aokdirectory.com/
http://www.AWESOMEDIR.COM
http://www.az-links.info
http://www.backlinkdirectory.info
http://www.bestdots.info/
http://www.best-buy-deal.com
http://www.best-net-sites.com/
http://www.blfree.com
http://www.BrightDirectory.com/
http://www.businessespana.com/
http://www.canlinks.net/
http://www.concensus.org/
http://www.crazyleafdesign.com/webdirectory/
http://www.creativeagency.eu/
http://www.dir365.org/
http://www.directdirectory.co.uk/
http://www.directory.pkdesign.sk/
http://www.directoryglobe.com/
http://www.directorylover.com/
http://www.DIRECTORYWONDER.COM
http://www.dirsubmission.net/
http://www.DIRWORLD.NET
http://www.DREAMDIRECTORY.NET
http://www.duslerdunyasi.com/
http://www.duwf.com/
http://www.EASYWEBDIR.COM
http://www.e-centrex-directory.com/
http://www.environmentpage.com/
http://www.esgsite.com/
http://www.esiq.org/
http://www.etkal.com/
http://www.everythingreduced.net/
http://www.ewebindex.com
http://www.ezinfo.org/
http://www.fat64.net/
http://www.finest4.com/
http://www.freeonlinedirectory.info/
http://www.freewebsitedirectory.com/
http://www.geeez.com/
http://www.gi8.net/
http://www.gilas.net
http://www.goldlinks.org/
http://www.graydirectory.com
http://www.hitshappening.com/
http://www.host-it-planet.com/phpLD/
http://www.huckepack.org/
http://www.iadvertising.biz
http://www.jayde.com/
http://www.jtob.com/
http://www.kingoftheweb.net/directory/
http://www.landlost.com/
http://www.linkcentre.com/
http://www.linkecho.com
http://www.linkitseo.com
http://www.linkpark.org/
http://www.LINKSGAIN.NET
http://www.LINKS-HUB.COM
http://www.LINKS-HUB.COM
http://www.linksider.com/
http://www.linksubmitdir.com/
http://www.listingtop.com
http://www.listmyniche.com/
http://www.webmixture.com/
http://www.marvistastreet.com/
http://www.mydirectlinks.info
http://www.mydirectorylink.com/
http://www.mydirectorylive.com/
http://www.nameproz.com
http://www.neonlinks.com/
http://www.newfreedirectory.com.ar/
http://www.nonar.com/
http://www.NotoriousDirectory.com/
http://www.omega55.com
http://www.one-sublime-directory.com/
http://www.ONLINEWEBLINK.NET
http://www.parsonsdomains.com/
http://www.pegasusdirectory.com/
http://www.pickedlinks.com/
http://www.plentylinks.com/
http://www.publimix.net
http://www.publimix.net/
http://www.pukt.com/
http://www.quidirectory.com
http://www.qos-team.com/
http://www.rankbl.com
http://www.roundshot.us/
http://www.sahodesign.com/
http://www.samsdirectory.com/
http://www.searchforresults.com
http://www.searchsight.com/Directory.htm
http://www.segta.net/
http://www.seo-friendly-pr.com/
http://www.seo-friendly-rank.com/
http://www.seo-friendly-ranking.com/
http://www.seo-optimization-friendly.com/
http://www.seorange.com
http://www.seowebindex.com/
http://www.SEOWEBLINK.NET
http://www.shapel.org
http://www.sitepassage.com/
http://www.sizzlingdirectory.com/
http://www.somuch.com/
http://www.surfcell.co.uk/
http://www.tcpls.net/
http://www.TEXT-LINK-DIR.COM
http://www.thalesdirectory.com/
http://www.theseoking.com/
http://www.tiptopdirectory.com/
http://www.topseodir.info/
http://www.trumpdir.com/
http://www.ubdaily.com
http://www.ucdirectorylinks.com
http://www.ucdirectorylinks.com
http://www.ukdirectory.com.ar
http://www.urlblend.com/
http://www.urlfusion.com/
http://www.vccllc.com/
http://www.viesearch.com/
http://www.viseox.net/
http://www.wannaberichtoowebdirectory.info/
http://www.webmixture.com/
http://www.webnetclick.com/
http://www.WEBWORLDLINK.COM
http://www.welldonedirectory.com/
http://www.whatclicks.com/
http://www.wikidweb.com/
http://www.wlinker.com
http://www.yesdirectory.net/
http://www.yvir.com/
http://www.zbestlinks.com/

You will need to copy and paste the links to view the sites.

Rich can you comment here and put the website here of the directory submission service you used? Rich used this service for some great success and you may want to consider doing it too.

God Bless,
John
Swim with the Dolphins Miami

Affiliate Website Pit Falls

2009-05-11T21:45:00.004-04:00

Hi Guys,

As I have mentioned, I have been following James Martell, an affiliate guru. I have signed up for his affiliate newsletter and this is some points, 5 points, about making positive and income producing website.

1. Give Creditability to your site. Put your face on the website. Stand out and build trust with your face on your website. Brand yourself as the expert.
http://www.epilepsymoms.com/
and
http://www.kitcarconnection.com/

You will see Jame's face and his wife's face on both sites. He recommend to put your face on the top right hand corner and every page.

2. Ad your Name to Blog Posts. Articles you Write, - Full Name. Get people know you are a real resource. Just like a book, people buy the author. Everyone knows Steven King and will buy his books. You do the same.

3. Add your photo to your blog and articles you write- Adds creditability
Photo size 80X80 or 50X50
See example http://epilepsymoms.com/blog

4. When writing blogs or articles or stories - Add personality - Read stories about your reality. Stay away from boring facts and add some real personality.

5. Adding Audio to your website with your voice to your website.
You will see an example: http://www.epilepsymoms.com/ He said it doesn't matter whether you have the voice on or off. Your choice.

Your goal is to have your visitors believe in you. Stay away from Vanilla website where it looks and feels like all the other. If the customer doesn't believe in you, they won't buy from you.
God Bless,
John
Swim with the Dolphins Man

Developer Tools Web Sites

2009-05-11T17:46:00.003-04:00

Hi All,

Alex sent me a link to a cool developer tool website from Yahoo.

It has some neat tools that some of you maybe looking for < Web Tools >

Thanks Alex.

Any of you guys out there have other sites to add to this? Post a comment if you do.
God Bless,
John

Meeting Notes May 7

2009-05-08T00:27:00.003-04:00

Hi All,

Attendance: John Mac, Rich R, Alex, and (new) Miguel,

1.Miguel mention that he went to a seminar and where they were showing a place to make a website in 15 minutes or less. The Software is called cyberspaceinabox.com This software cost about $4,000

The programs pulls in feeds from all different sources and makes a webpage. It pulls feeds from ebay, amazon, blogs and other sources.

To see an example of a site, go tommybahamahats.com

2. Alex talked about Widgets and pulling feeds with it.

3. Alex talked about MasterTemplates.com. Where you can find FREE templates that have a way of pulling feeds. This is the poor man way of cyberspaceinabox.com, more time and work.

4. Think about a master plan for group site out there. We need to come up with a mission and then make a website to make some money. We all need to come up with mission for a group website.

5. Next meeting we are going to talk owner of thefreedictionary.com
This site has reached over 1 billion visitors in 5 years
Some questions to ask:
How is he making money?
Where is he getting content?
How did he build the form, from scratch or from software?
Where is his vision for his site.

John need to get Alex his skpe address and phone # for the meeting.

6. One of the best email management programs out there: aweber.com If you have a website, you need to have this.

7. Rich created a new logo: http://super-food-nutrition.com/ He did it on his own. He did a great job. Rich maybe you can comment on which program you used, you weren't sure.

8. Rich created a new site: http://food-based-nutrition.com/

9. We discussed Xhtml and great resource for this subject and many web related go to: About.com To learn the basic about Xhtml Click Here. Alex has signed up for other internet related subject with about and like the emails he is receiveing from them, good information.

10. We had a demo of the iphone vs blackberry. The iphone was very impressive especially with all the features. You can't beat it.

11. John needs to fix his reservation pages. Rich gave great suggestions.
1. Work on the Miami registration page. ( if you want to see it now, it will change)
2. lighten color or white within box
3. Only have 1 activity date
3a. Can we find a calendar date box ?
4. Take out where they are staying box ( move to below)
5. Modify additional info box - take out q1, q2, q3, q7. Modify 4,5,6 - make like MS form
6. Make a separate form for the Transportation service.

Welcome Miguel. It was great to have a new person involved!!!

I think that is it.
God Bless,
John

Chitika Premium for Publishers

2009-05-05T22:36:00.004-04:00

Hi All,

I have heard and read some more about this source of making income with your content website. It called Chitika and it compatible with Google Ad Sense. If you want to check it out, go to:

Read More Chitika for Publisher

Here is the video from the site:

You might want to watch it and it could work for some of us.
God Bless,
John

HTML to XHTML

2009-04-26T19:05:00.003-04:00

Hi All,

This might be of more interest for the webmasters of our group. I still don't understand this totally and trying to figure what I need to do with my few websites. Rich M., one of our faithful members, has talked to us about XHTML and how he is designing all his new websites to meet the XHTML standards.

I have installed the newest version of wordpress and word press is stressing how their code is XHTML compliant. Also, I am listening to an affiliate marketing seminar and the moderator is saying how important it is to make sure your websites are XHTML compliant.

Here is link from WordPress about XHTML about the subject.

I am hoping my webmaster friends can tell me what I need to do with the website I have and h0w to move it into the XHTML compliant websites.

There is website that can show if your site is compliant - XHTML tool

I understand basic html but I am confused with the code changes in XHTML. Hopefully we discussed this some more and help us all. If you can add to this subject, please add some comments.
God Bless,
John

Blogging - Carving Out a Plan for Profit

2009-04-22T22:43:00.003-04:00

Hi Guys,

I received the latest issue of Website Magazine and the cover story was about Blogging, so I am going to highlight some of the major points of the article.

To start a good blog, go and see what your competition is doing blogging wise.
Go to Compete.com and put your competitor websites in there and see who is getting the most traffic. Try to find 10 competitors.
When going to your competition blogs, see which topics are getting the most comments for other viewers. - This will give you some ideas on what readers are interested in hearing about.
Earning Money with your blog - Google Adsense, Value Click, Tribal Fusion
Email subscriptions offer an excellent way to send targeted offers. Consider an email signup box in a prominent position on your page. Feedburner (now owned by google) has a free email collection service.
If you feel your content is strong, consider exclusive content and paid subscriptions. The Word Press has a membership plugin and require payment to see all or some content on the blog.
You need to incorporate Video to your blog
To help get advertiser creditability - Make sure you tell about how many facebook, myspace friends you have, or twitter followers, or digg friends you have.
Earning money - You can also use affiliate links
Another way to Earn Money - You can be a paid for content provider. You will need to let your readers know you are being paid for posting your content. To be an advertiser writer go to ReviewMe and PayPerPost
Earning Money with supportive services - Blurb.com gives publishers a free downlowad to take content directly from your blog and lay in out into a book format for publishing. Also Lulu.com is another publishing option.
As you write your post - MAKE sure you make note of important topics or those that are just scratching the surface of a greater issues.
Basic SEO for blogging - Create sitemaps and submitting them to the search engines, key word optimization, linking strategies.
Blog Networks - Technorati and MyBlogLog, and facebook's Networkedblogs
Good idea to get involved with social sharing, Digg.com, Mixx.com and Bookmarking sites like Delicious.com. While these sites can be beneficial but take a lot time, stay focused.
Blogs have evolved from online diaries to essential business tools. Use your blog to inform readers, extend your brand and make new contacts. But at all times and through ever step of the way use your blog to profit.

They noted in the article about DailyCoyote.net, a highly successful award winning blog.
Some points she made in the article.

When Dooce.com link to her, the blog boomed
She blog post regularly every day at the same time. Her readers count on it and expect it
The best source of income is the subscribtions to daily photos, calendar prints and the book deal
She spends about 25 hours a week on the blog
She uses twitter help grow

I hope this helps you guys. I really feel blogging could be the tool to help grow anyone's business.
God Bless,
John

Skpe Meeting Night

2009-04-16T21:36:00.004-04:00

Hi All,

Attending:
John Mac
Rich M
John N

Look at this site: http://www.addthis.com/tour

I think I will using this link and try it on my DolphinWorld.org site.

We are going to have a great speaker at May 7th meeting from Alex. Dictionary.com will talk with us.

I have installed this program http://www.ccleaner.com/ on my computer its free and it cleans all temp files very easily.

Rich is busy with his websites, adding more banners and graphics. John N is going to Jamaica and will start using Tweeter tonight. He wants to tweet his trip to Jamaica.

Anyone have anything to add to the notes?
God Bless,
John

Windows Key Board Short Cuts

2009-04-16T21:17:00.002-04:00

Hi All,

Here are some Windows Key Board short cuts. They will cut increase your speed doing work with your PC. You Apples user don't need to worry about this.

I hope this helpful. Does anyone out there have any shortcuts that is not on this list that you want to share?
God Bless,
John

Windows system key combinations

F1: Help
CTRL+ESC: Open Start menu
ALT+TAB: Switch between open programs
ALT+F4: Quit program
SHIFT+DELETE: Delete item permanently

Windows program key combinations

CTRL+C: Copy
CTRL+X: Cut
CTRL+V: Paste
CTRL+Z: Undo
CTRL+B: Bold
CTRL+U: Underline
CTRL+I: Italic

Mouse click/keyboard modifier combinations for shell objects

SHIFT+right click: Displays a shortcut menu containing alternative commands
SHIFT+double click: Runs the alternate default command (the second item on the menu)
ALT+double click: Displays properties
SHIFT+DELETE: Deletes an item immediately without placing it in the Recycle Bin

General keyboard-only commands

F1: Starts Windows Help
F10: Activates menu bar options
SHIFT+F10 Opens a shortcut menu for the selected item (this is the same as right-clicking an object
CTRL+ESC: Opens the Start menu (use the ARROW keys to select an item)
CTRL+ESC or ESC: Selects the Start button (press TAB to select the taskbar, or press SHIFT+F10 for a context menu)
ALT+DOWN ARROW: Opens a drop-down list box
ALT+TAB: Switch to another running program (hold down the ALT key and then press the TAB key to view the task-switching window)
SHIFT: Press and hold down the SHIFT key while you insert a CD-ROM to bypass the automatic-run feature
ALT+SPACE: Displays the main window's System menu (from the System menu, you can restore, move, resize, minimize, maximize, or close the window)
ALT+- (ALT+hyphen): Displays the Multiple Document Interface (MDI) child window's System menu (from the MDI child window's System menu, you can restore, move, resize, minimize, maximize, or close the child window)
CTRL+TAB: Switch to the next child window of a Multiple Document Interface (MDI) program
ALT+underlined letter in menu: Opens the menu
ALT+F4: Closes the current window
CTRL+F4: Closes the current Multiple Document Interface (MDI) window
ALT+F6: Switch between multiple windows in the same program (for example, when the Notepad Find dialog box is displayed, ALT+F6 switches between the Find dialog box and the main Notepad window)

Shell objects and general folder/Windows Explorer shortcuts

For a selected object:

F2: Rename object
F3: Find all files
CTRL+X: Cut
CTRL+C: Copy
CTRL+V: Paste
SHIFT+DELETE: Delete selection immediately, without moving the item to the Recycle Bin
ALT+ENTER: Open the properties for the selected object

To copy a file

Press and hold down the CTRL key while you drag the file to another folder.

To create a shortcut

Press and hold down CTRL+SHIFT while you drag a file to the desktop or a folder.

General folder/shortcut control

F4: Selects the Go To A Different Folder box and moves down the entries in the box (if the toolbar is active in Windows Explorer)
F5: Refreshes the current window.
F6: Moves among panes in Windows Explorer
CTRL+G: Opens the Go To Folder tool (in Windows 95 Windows Explorer only)
CTRL+Z: Undo the last command
CTRL+A: Select all the items in the current window
BACKSPACE: Switch to the parent folder
SHIFT+click+Close button: For folders, close the current folder plus all parent folders

Windows Explorer tree control

Numeric Keypad *: Expands everything under the current selection
Numeric Keypad +: Expands the current selection
Numeric Keypad -: Collapses the current selection.
RIGHT ARROW: Expands the current selection if it is not expanded, otherwise goes to the first child
LEFT ARROW: Collapses the current selection if it is expanded, otherwise goes to the parent

Properties control

CTRL+TAB/CTRL+SHIFT+TAB: Move through the property tabs

Accessibility shortcuts

Press SHIFT five times: Toggles StickyKeys on and off
Press down and hold the right SHIFT key for eight seconds: Toggles FilterKeys on and off
Press down and hold the NUM LOCK key for five seconds: Toggles ToggleKeys on and off
Left ALT+left SHIFT+NUM LOCK: Toggles MouseKeys on and off
Left ALT+left SHIFT+PRINT SCREEN: Toggles high contrast on and off

Microsoft Natural Keyboard keys

Windows Logo: Start menu
Windows Logo+R: Run dialog box
Windows Logo+M: Minimize all
SHIFT+Windows Logo+M: Undo minimize all
Windows Logo+F1: Help
Windows Logo+E: Windows Explorer
Windows Logo+F: Find files or folders
Windows Logo+D: Minimizes all open windows and displays the desktop
CTRL+Windows Logo+F: Find computer
CTRL+Windows Logo+TAB: Moves focus from Start, to the Quick Launch toolbar, to the system tray (use RIGHT ARROW or LEFT ARROW to move focus to items on the Quick Launch toolbar and the system tray)
Windows Logo+TAB: Cycle through taskbar buttons
Windows Logo+Break: System Properties dialog box
Application key: Displays a shortcut menu for the selected item

Microsoft Natural Keyboard with IntelliType software installed

Windows Logo+L: Log off Windows
Windows Logo+P: Starts Print Manager
Windows Logo+C: Opens Control Panel
Windows Logo+V: Starts Clipboard
Windows Logo+K: Opens Keyboard Properties dialog box
Windows Logo+I: Opens Mouse Properties dialog box
Windows Logo+A: Starts Accessibility Options (if installed)
Windows Logo+SPACEBAR: Displays the list of Microsoft IntelliType shortcut keys
Windows Logo+S: Toggles CAPS LOCK on and off

Dialog box keyboard commands

TAB: Move to the next control in the dialog box
SHIFT+TAB: Move to the previous control in the dialog box
SPACEBAR: If the current control is a button, this clicks the button. If the current control is a check box, this toggles the check box. If the current control is an option, this selects the option.
ENTER: Equivalent to clicking the selected button (the button with the outline)
ESC: Equivalent to clicking the Cancel button
ALT+underlined letter in dialog box item: Move to the corresponding item

APPLIES TO

Windows Server 2008 Datacenter
Windows Server 2008 Enterprise
Windows Server 2008 Standard
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition (32-bit x86)
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise x64 Edition
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition (32-bit x86)
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition for Itanium-based Systems
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard x64 Edition
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition (32-bit x86)
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition
Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition
Microsoft Windows 98 Standard Edition
Microsoft Windows 95
Windows Vista Business
Windows Vista Enterprise
Windows Vista Home Basic
Windows Vista Home Premium
Windows Vista Starter
Windows Vista Ultimate
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Microsoft Windows XP Starter Edition
Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition

Successful Website

2009-04-03T11:42:00.003-04:00

Hi All,

Alex's friend has this very success website.

Free Dictionary.com Check it out for ideas.

Alex said his friend will speak with us when we meet again.

God Bless,
John

Note from General Meeting - April 2 2009

2009-04-02T22:28:00.004-04:00

Hi Guys,

Who was here:
John M
Rich M

Some things we talked about:

1. Looked at Rich's banners and did a blog post on it. Please add some feed back for Rich.

2. Talked about Zeus and latest updates. If you don't know about Zeus, it is a link exchange program. I used to use it a lot and Rich still use it more than. It definitely helps with back links. Go to: Zeus Program

Rich needs to fix his submission pages for the links - interior pages were not work. John needs to fix TropicalAdventure.com links pages.

3. We talked about the webmaster tools from Google. We looked at my back links for www.dolphinworld.org - I had over 2,000 back links. Its a great tools to use.
( Check out tutorial of tool)

4. We talked about the graphics that Allen created for me to use on myspace. Rich liked that idea and may use it for some his pet sites. To see dolphin myspace graphics

5. The next Skype meeting we are going to start the Google Adword professional Series. Next Skype meeting April 16.

Anyone seen anything new about Business, Internet, Affiliate Marketing, please post on this blog.

Don't forget to add your website on this blog, get a free back link !!!

I think that is it.
God Bless,
John

Website Advertising Banners for Rich

2009-04-02T20:37:00.002-04:00

Hi All,

We need your opinion of what banners you like.

Rich is has made a bunch of new banners from Photoshop CS3.

Please go to:
http://www.best-whole-food-nutrition.com/testbanners.htm

Please rate the 3 468 width X 60 ( retangle) and the other 3 150 width X 400 ( almost like a square).

Just comment in the blog to make it more helpful for Rich and deciding what would make people click the ad.

God Bless,
John

My thoughts on IE 8

2009-04-01T14:01:00.006-04:00

Gentlemen,

Firstly I'd like to say 'well done' with the blog. I think it's a great idea and hopfully will help us all. My only qualm is with the name, seems like John forgot to include Brasil in the title. Oh well!

I think I was the first (if not only) one of us to install IE 8. I'm pretty sure I was the first one to uninstall it as well. John asked me to provide a little feedback, so here goes:

The installation was painless and everything went according to plan. Visually, for the user, there is little difference in the appearance of the browser itself. The biggest change is that is seems to render pages like the other browsers (Chrome, Opera and Firefox). Hopefully this will alleviate, if not end, the nightmare of having to create separate style sheets for IE. There is a cute little button to the right of the address bar that allows IE 8 to diaplay a page as if it were an older version of IE - this is interesting for designers and programmers.

IE 8 is still in beta and so is not being widely used yet, but we should be prepared to make our pages readable in all versions. The easiest way to do this (so far) is to force the new browser to view the page as if it were the old browser. This is accomplished by adding a single line of code to the header of each page:
<meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7"> .
This code forces the browser to use the rendering engine of IE7.

So far the reviews of the new browser has been mostly positive, but there have also been a few detractors (if you have MS then you won't like IE8 - no matter how good it is).

Here are a few links to more infomation:
WIKI PAGE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8
Official Page: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Internet-explorer/default.aspx
Microsoft Developer Network Page about how the new browser works with CSS:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531205(vs.85).aspx (very good - recemmended!!!)

If you're wondering why I uninstalled it so quickly...
I has to do with an online banking program that I use that didn't work with the new browser version. I couldn't figure out how to run versions 7 and 8 at the same time so I ended up uninstalling 8 so that I could access my bank account again. As soon as my bank creates a program that is compatible with IE 8, I plan to upgrade again. I liked the new browser very much.

FYI I'm running Windows Vista Home Basic on an Intel Core 2 Duo at 3 Ghz with 4 GB of memory.

That's all for me for this week. I won't be able to attend the meeting this week as I will be traveling.

Have a great Meeting!!!

Note from Skype Meeting - March 26

2009-03-26T23:10:00.002-04:00

Internet Mastermind

Rich M

John Mac

John N

Talking about adding his banner to site and using the masking with photoshop.

Part of the masking is part of layers to create an animation
You can stack 8000 layers with photo shop
Rich is having a hard time with started the masking process
Rich is showing his banners http://www.best-whole-food-nutrition.com/testbanners.htm
Masking is the process of touch a part of the image and pull it out the world LIVE in the image. Would put Purple on Live. And put in the Word LIVE with each letter L – I – V – E . Each letter could pop in.
Rich talked about Gradient mask where the photos fade out slightly. Look at Richs vegetables banner on top to see an example. Should be a 20% gradient mask.
Once you learn one adobe program, it will help learn other programs

Rich is talking with John Hawaiian about Photoshop 3.

How do you take out the word LIVE out of photo.
John N need show this live. We will work on this the next time.

Rich start working with Dream weaver

Look at http://super-food-nutrition.com/nuriche_live.html

Look at his menu on the side and click on the menu and see the drop down menus
He created it with a CSS file
This page is new website compliant and make the website look better on all web browsers

Curtis Article about Twitter

http://raven-seo-tools.com:80/blog/366/step-by-step-howto-guide-for-marketing-on-twitter

Curtis Copeland and showing his life on twitter and facebook. He love to talk to people.
Rich is not going invest time here
John H is going to twitt. He knows he get more business.
We talked about increasing his personal photographery business.

We will have internetmaster Blog. We will start a blog tonight

Masterblaster Internet mastermind blog

John Mac Blog Changes http://dolphinworld.net/wordpress/

The right column needs some help

Fix the blue area where where the google search engine box. The blue area expanes out too far on big monitor.
Take out Retail item, dolphin Store, Toys and books
Replace with a google banner only 160 X 600

New Internet Explorer 8

Be prepared for its arrival – Maybe Carlo can write something in the blog about this.

We talked about starting some sort of Educational component:1. We agreed to start the google adword professional classes and getting certified

2. http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/index.html

3. Look at this page and be prepared for the next Skype meeting

We meet again next – LIVE at my house – Thursday April 2

Welcome to the Internet Mastermind Blog

2009-03-26T23:05:00.003-04:00

Hi Guys,

Well, lets see if this helps us in any way. I need your internet or business stories added to this blog. Also, if you have some sort of internet challenge, post it here for discussion.

Make sure you categorized your post correctly, otherwise, it will be difficult to find. Put your name or nick name in the category, so your post will associated with your name.

I am praying for success for everyone in the group!!!
God Bless,
John
Palm 1