Can’t Keep Up With The Internet? February 23, 2009
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The Media Landscape is changing, and leading-edge companies are looking for those ready to adapt. What you’ve learned in school about media is all old, as “new media” dominates are landscape. With more and more companies looking for those with all those skills not taught in school, how will you acquire them all?
At the Digital Bus, we have created a new media driver’s license, that certifies that you’ll be able to learn all the cutting edge new media technologies in order to keep up in this new media marketing climate. You will then be able to separate yourself from your fellow colleagues, have the new media knowledge and experiences, that they will all be flustered over, confused as to how it all works.
Can’t you just imagine all the people looking up to you in your company for all the latest in SEO, PPC, and Social Media strategies that no one else knows about? No longer are you expandable, when you have the knowledge of a cutting edge course, not even taught in schools, that you can then use to get ahead of the curve.
Currently, due to large popularity, our course is closed, but follow us on our Facebook page, and we’ll keep you updated on all the latest news of this new media landscape. Be sure to follow us closely, who knows how fast our revolutionary new course will fill up. Get ahead, or get behind. The choice is yours.
Intro to SEO February 16, 2009
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SEO = Search Engine Optimization, and it is a very important tool for any website. When creating your website, it’s important to have it rank as high as possible in search engine rankings for organic traffic, rather than throw away $1000s in Pay Per Click Advertising.
The basics are having the proper meta-tags, having good headers and titles, making sure it’s all very relevant to your web surfer, etc.
I’m here to talk to you about wha I believe are the 2 most important aspects SEO.
1. Inbound links
2. Pagerank
1. In order for your blog or website to gain some publicity, it needs to be linked to, which means it needs some high quality links. There are many different ways to start generating quality back links to your site. The easiest of which is article marketing.
When you write articles and submit them to sites like ezinearticles, you can often put in your own links at the bottom telling people about your website. These sites get tons of traffic, and have very high pagerank, thus making your page rank that much higher in search engine rankings. Any inlinks are good, heck you could spam free classified ad sites, and this method would still work the same, although those would be of lesser quality. One search term I optimized was “How to write a catchy classified ad.” I simply created an article with that title and voila! I’m on the 1st page of google for that term. Nifty eh?
Social bookmarking sites are also a great way to get links. At sites like digg and delicious, people are browsing the net, and if they like it, they can bookmark it, or digg it, thus creating more inbound links as well. There’s even ways to put diggs in your blog, so they can digg your site, right on your site, if they like it. One of my favorite websites is squidoo, where you can create a lens, or hub so to speak, including a list of all your favorite sites. Google just loves these lenses, when they are done effectively, and can bring you to the 1st page of google within days, depending on the search term.
2. Page Rank
This isn’t as important however, there is a very important technique that I want to teach you that you can immediately apply to your website to increase your page rank dramatically, and instantly. When google looks for new sites through links, it follows on links, and gives every site equal weight, and when a page has more links to it within your website than other pages, it will give that more page more “significance” so to speak.
For example, if for the template on your site, you have a link that goes to your disclaimer, and terms of use, and it’s on every page, your site isn’t very well optimized because your disclaimer and TOS have a HIGHER Page Rank! Than even your home page, or important hubs.
That’s why this next technique is so important, and it’s called the no-follow rule.
Whenever you want a page on your website to not receive a high page rank on google, despite being linked to on every page, you simply embed on every link leading to the page the following code: rel=”nofollow”
This is essentially a way of telling google and other search engines not to follow that link, and thus, not index that page, thus keeping your pagerank on your website, EXACTLY where you want it to be.
And all that my friends – is just the tip of the iceberg, only an intro, ya know.
For some nice resources, you can go to the the digital bus’s SEO resources. There’s some good tips, and software there too for you all to check out. Let me know what you think, leave a comment so I know how I’m doing.
Adwords Advice January 31, 2009
Posted by bachelis in Internet Marketing, New Media Drivers License posts.Tags: Internet Marketing, Internet Marketing Tools
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There are many pitfalls to running an adwords campaign, and you want to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck. You want to be sure you are getting the right traffic, that are looking for exactly what your content has to offer. Here’s some tips on how to maximize your ads effectiveness.
BROAD VS PHRASE VS EXACT KEYWORDS
when entering keywords in to your list, there 3 different ways google can read them. For example, let’s use the keyword, stuffed animals. you can enter it in as either
stuffed animals
“stuffed animals” OR
[stuffed animals]
When you just use stuffed animals, as your keyword term, that is known as a broad match. Your ad will show whenever the terms stuffed, and animals, show in the search query. If someone searched stuffed jungle animals, or stuffed chicken and other animals, your ad would show, simply because both terms are in the search.
With “stuffed animals”, the entire phrase “stuffed animals” would have to show in the search query, in order. This means that your ad would not show with the term stuffed lobster animals, however, it would show with lobster stuffed animals, as long as the phrase appears within the search term, your ad will show, even in something like, crazy big long jungle stuffed animals, but NOT in crazy big long jungle animals stuffed, because the phrase “stuffed animals” wasn’t in it.
and Last [stuffed animals] means that only when stuffed animals is searched, will your ad show. This is good if you want your ad to be shown only in VERY SPECIFIC circumstances. If there is anything else in the search terms, your ad will NOT SHOW. If a user searches stuffed animals, your ad will show ONLY when that term is searched EXACTLY, hence it’s category.
DYNAMIC KEYWORDS
Another great tip to increase the effectiveness of your keywords is to insert your keywords in to your ad dynamically. Rather than create 100s of different ads targeting each of your different keywords, you can edit your ad so that the searched keyword term will appear each time.
For example, if you want to advertise CDs, and you want people to buy CDs, rather than change the words in your ad to say buy “particular” CD, and to change the particular for every ad, you can insert the keywords in to the ad with the following simple technique.
You just enter {keyword: default} in to your ad, and whatever is searched will appear in your ad, and if the search query makes it go over the limit in terms of its length, it will show the default keyword instead. Let’s say your keyword list was buy Nickelback CDs, buy Backstreet Boys CDs, buy Spice Girls CDs, and buy Akon CDs. Rather than make a seperate ad for each, your title could simply be {keyword: buy their CDs}, and it will automatically show the search query in the ad.
There’s one more bit of customization involved in doing this. depending on how you type {keyword} it will display your ad title differently. If you type KeyWord, it will capitalize the first letter of each word. If you type Keyword, it will capitalize only the first word, and if you just type keyword, it will leave it lower-case.
In Advertising it’s always best to capitalize as often as you can without looking unprofessional. Anything to get your ad to be captured by your consumers eyes, is good. Even if that capitalization results in only a 5% increase in clicks, that 5% can mean thousands to your company in terms of sale over time, hence why you want to optimize everything as much and as often as you can.
Affiliate Marketing & Social Networking. Combine? January 25, 2009
Posted by bachelis in Internet Marketing, New Media Drivers License posts.Tags: Internet Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0
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Of course! Whenever one is promoting any kind of product or service as an affiliate, all possible revenue streams must be explored, social networks included. 
The best part about social networks though is that, of course, it is all FREE, which is all the more better to the marketer ONLY if he/she knows how to position him/her self within the social networking community.
I recently read an article titled “Generating Free Leads through Social Networking,” by Jan Shimano. Unfortunately, it did not have very much to say about how to market through these networks, other than to describe what networks should be used, which of course the big 3: Myspace, Twitter, and Facebook.
However, despite a lack on instruction, it did have a couple nuggets of wisdom. It talked about a NEW site that’s looking to get pretty big in the Network Marketing Industry, and that is betternetworker.com which happens to be by Mike Dilliard (google him, a legend of MLMs and Network Marketing).
The most important thing about marketing in social networks, he said, was that you can’t just pitch like you would in an advertisement. People in MLMs are the craziest pitchers of our time, which is why at betternetworker, you aren’t allowed to do that, but you must provide great content and information instead, as opposed to just HYPE.
In order to be sucessful, you must develop a relationship, and have interactions with your friends and followers. Only AFTER you’ve built a following of people, interested in who you are, what you are like, etc. Only THEN can you let them know about an affiliate opportunity of yours, but only CASUALLY, because remember, you aren’t SELLING your friends, you’re letting them know about something you thought was cool.
And that’s a WHOLE different ball game.
Do we need another Calendar? Yes! January 25, 2009
Posted by bachelis in New Media Drivers License posts.Tags: Google Tool
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When I first discovered google Calendars, I was a bit skeptical. I was already very well acquainted with iCal on my mac, and liked using that very much, however, there is one aspect of google calendars that makes it sooooo worthwhile. And those are the following things.
1. It’s PUBLIC!
2. You can download OTHER calendars!
Whenever I use a calendar of any kind on my computer, it only exists ON MY COMPUTER. The great benefit of google’s calendar is that I can make the entire thing PUBLIC, so that ANYONE can see exactly what I’m doing, at any given moment.
At first, that may seem like privacy has disappeared, however, I think it helps relationships.
Rather than have to go back and forth to see when someone is free for a meeting, you can just leave the open times you have available, in your public google calendar, and voila, a time is picked and ready, and no longer are you stuck trying to figure it out, since all the information is RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU.
In addition! There are many PUBLIC calendars out there
So Venues, and other event centers can list ALL their events, for people to IMPORT in to their OWN calendars.
I manually typed in all of Wharton Center’s events in to my calendar
With this, it would have been SOOO much faster.
Try it out!
Internet Marketing Tools January 17, 2009
Posted by bachelis in Internet Marketing.Tags: Internet Marketing, Internet Marketing Tools, Keyword Tool, Site Explorer
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Millions have been made in Affiliate marketing every single day. Sometimes it’s on pay-per-clicks, sometimes it’s just on organic search. No matter what your promoting, or how you promote it, you will need to drive traffic to your site. Here are a couple cool tools that can help you in finding worthy products and keywords to promote, as well as to see if your site is ranking better in google searches.
1. Keyword Tool
This tool allows you to check how often any keywords are searched. In looking for a million dollar business to promote, you want to make sure it gets a lot of traffic. It will be hard to be a millionaire if you’re promoting products that get searched only a few dozen times every week. On the other hand, if you’re trying to advertise on keywords that are heavily competed for, you’re probably gonna end up with a very low ROI, if not negative.
This tool allows you to see how optimized and popular your website is coming. This tool uses yahoo’s database do determine all the links to site. A great way of increasing your SEO is in creating good & solid backlinks. This tool allows you to see what they all are, as well as the backlinks of any of your competitors.
3. SEO Toolbar
This I don’t know so much about, but, you can see SEO statistics of all the results in google searches when it’s turned on. Talk about powerful!
New Media Driver’s License. January 17, 2009
Posted by bachelis in New Media Drivers License posts.Tags: Internet Marketing, New Media Drivers License, Social Media, Web 2.0
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The idea for this blog came from a new advertising course I am taking at Michigan State. It’s called the New Media Driver’s License. The basic idea is that by the end of the course, I will be qualified as a New Media Driver. Essentially, I’ll be able to use Facebook, Myspace, google, and many other Websites as tools to market businesses, as I drive them, driving traffic to the websites and opportunities that I am marketing.
The teacher of the course is Derek Mehraban, who also happens to be an MSU alumni, which is very cool. His facebook page can be found here, and our course website can be found here.
According to the syllabus, our course covers the following topics.
google, PPC, Social Media, SEO, and Presentations.
social media
This should be quite exciting. As part of the course, I HAVE to post on this blog, so if I don’t keep this up to date for all of you out there, my grade WILL suffer. Call it an extra incentive if you will, lol.
This course should be very exciting. I have been doing much research on the Internet lately, by various products, but most people think that whatever ebooks you find must be scams. It’s nice to finally have an Internet course that is legit. Now I can finally put an Internet Advertising thing on my resume. I can’t put “Auto-pilot Profits,” or “Google Snatch,” or “Day Job Killer”, on it.
Welcome! January 10, 2009
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This is my blog as part of my New Media Driver’s License Course. It’s an advertising course at Michigan State University. I will continue to update this with topics that interest me over the course of the semester, as well as continue to keep it updated after. This should be fun.
Here is the class website
