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.

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.

With Facebook, one can network with all their friends, or fans.  Join groups with similar interests and discuss.  One great feature I like is the ability to change your status.  With a status change, one can easily send out a quick advertisement of whatever it is they like.  With pages of great material for your business, you can keep people updated with everything going on with your company, that is if you want it public.

Personally, as a conductor/pianist/Internet Marketer, I use Facebook to connect with friends mostly, however, I am building other connections as well.  I made many friends at conducting workshops I have attended, and hope to keep in touch with them with the use of this tool as well.  Everyone always gets their first conducting gig, not by getting hired, but by substituting in for someone they know.  Perhaps they may need me, for a gig they can’t do, then I’ll have it made.  You can friend me too, just click here

LinkedIn, I’m not so familiar with, but it’s a professional networking site.  As a pianist/conductor, most of my field, is usually further behind, if not last, when it comes to the Internet learning curve, so I doubt that I will soon see my favorite conductors and other professionals anytime soon, but once I start getting in to the workplace myself, I can build connections and bring them on board.  Then, when I apply for new jobs, I can just send people to my LinkedIn profile, and they can see everyone I’ve worked with him, and all the AMAZING THINGS they think of me, with their recommendations all in one place.

Last but not least is Twitter.  I recently signed up for an account, and was a little skeptical, until I followed some of my Internet Marketing Idles, and I was AMAZED!  The whole idea is that people that you value, will follow YOU!  I am no Internet Marketing or SEO guru, but after following Andy Jenkins, the CEO of Stompernet, he now follows ME!  To think that I can instantly communicate with these super busy people, simply with the power of tweets amazes me.  Plus, I decided to follow legendary copywriter Joe Sugarman, and now he follows me too.  I can communicate with these amazing people now!  That’s what it’s all about.  Now if your organization has this too, people can instantly communicate with you also, and FOLLOW what you’re doing.

Talk about keeping your fans up to date with everything that’s going on in your organization.  Yay!

NOTE:  Be sure to follow me on Twitter

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.

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.

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!

Google Calendar

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.

2. Site Explorer

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!

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.

Here is the class website

New Media Drivers License