By Karen Post, on September 30, 2011

I highly recommend this book, Get Rich Click, The Ultimate Guide to Making Money on the Internet by Marc Ostrofsky to every businessperson and entrepreneur.

There are gobs of great books available on Internet marketing and I’ve read many. But this one is worth adding to your library of valuable references and tools. Not only is the author, Marc Ostrofsky a real-life success story (he had made millions with the Internet) which for me gives the book extra credibility, it’s also organized in a way that makes it easy to understand, access the learning gems and apply to your business.

The book covers just about every aspect of the Internet and how anyone can profit from it. Some of the more interesting sections for me were on URLs, keywords, and new vendors to help get things done. In addition to the book content, Marc does a nice job of making updates available on his website via his blog.

This book took me a bit to get through, not because it’s long, but I found myself stopping to try things and look up examples that he cites that made the content not only hit my brain, but really stick to it and become my new walking knowledge that I’m now using with my businesses.

Just a couple of my top take-a-ways:

1) Having a key word in your URL is golden.
My brand name and URL are proof of this. Many of you know I earned the #1 spot on Google last year for the term “Branding Speaker”. I’m now convinced that in addition to my voluminous writing, the noun in my name www.brandingdiva.com has paid off too.

2) Buying smart URLs can add to your wealth just like buying a prime piece of real estate.
They can be low cost, high return investments. Since reading Get Rich Click I’ve purchased over 50 new URLs that I’m going to start monetizing with parking pages and landing pages.

If you need one comprehensive book that helps you understand and profit from the Internet this one should be considered. It gets a thumbs-up from me.

I’m looking forward to his next book too that will be called Word of Mouse.

By Karen Post, on August 23, 2011

Of all of the place I travel to, Manhattan, New York juices my brain like no other city. Got here on Sunday. Traveling with my Superstar Marketing Coordinator, Lauren, who’s been with me for over a year. So needless to say we are celebrating many things, learning a ton, meeting lots of interesting folks, doing business and contributing to the local economy.

The next few days while in NYC, we will cover everything from customer service ideas, new trends and hot spots to branding hits and misses and we will introduce you to some new friends and business experts. This trip includes a lot of hospitality content because I’m finishing up our new restaurant branding course set to launch in the next 60 days.

Specifics insight will include:

• How to brand to the Elite, even if you are not a 5 star luxury property like the Pierre Hotel
• How to brand-extend and not brand-dilute from Top Restaurateur Daniel Boulud
• Sampling trends and merchandising from hip, new Indian fare restaurant Junoon
• Video branding ideas from a super cool, online entrepreneurial TV by an insurance company
• What you can learn from a one scene Off-Broadway-production and apply to marketing
• Networking in NYC, it’s really such a small world
• Book Review on Army of Entrepreneurs by Jennifer Prosek
• Marketing and launching my new book Brand Turnaround with the McGraw-Hill team

Our journey started at the Tampa Airport. Which is one of the easiest and stress-free  places in the US. We flew Delta, which offers an early and direct flight that lands at 9:30. We were greeted by  “Felix” who owns K&G limo. He has been my driver for over 15 years. While there are many national limo services, I’m loyal to Felix and his company because for many reasons, he’s consistent; there are no surprises. I trust him and admire his hard work and family values. Felix has 7 children. 6 by his wife and one who they adopted after witnessing a less than healthy living situation over 30 years ago. Felix and I often talk marketing and branding when I’m in his car.

Since we came in on Sunday, I didn’t have a tight schedule of meetings, I invited Felix to have coffee with Lauren and me so we could take a look at what he was doing with his website and share some wisdom. Even though I only see Felix when I come to NYC, I consider him more than a transportation vendor, but a trusted friend. Felix makes everyone feel special,  like a celebrity. And he has no shortage of celebrity customers from Academy Award Winning actors and Grammy winning musicians.

Felix wanted to know what else he could do to attract even more business. His son who recently graduated from law school had set up his site. He did a nice job and K&G Limo was getting calls from their site and other online avenues.  We suggested a few added methods to increase his results, which can work with many business models.

7 Tips to drive more traffic to any website
1) Felix had a blog, but it was not connected to the site. We suggested connecting it for search engine optimization reasons and as a helpful content tool for his customers. We also suggested:

2) Adding more and often keyword research and optimization in his website and blog content. And tagging all images with these same high ranking key words.

3) Adding social bugs like tweet this, like this and pass this on, to his blog, so it’s easy for visitors to share and earn links back to his site.

4) Add a site map, search spiders love site maps.

5) Offer a helpful safety travel tip sheet that visitors can download when coming to NYC. This will not only earn points from the site visitors, customers and prospects,  it can help Felix grow his opt-in list. Plus, he can tweet and share on Facebook too.

6) Set up a Youtube account that hosts a welcome video or again, helpful travel tips videos. This will not only earn points from the site visitors, customers and prospects,  it will help his search ranking, because Youtube is owned by Google.

7) With their permission, add testimonials from customers to the site, and if they are interesting,  then blog about them and use them for content on social media platforms too.

Till next time, Brand on!

By Karen Post, on February 18, 2011

I think about this a lot. In fact not a day goes by that I don’t ponder this subject.

Oddpodz has experienced a 70% increase in readership. Our SEO report card score is over 96 out of 100. We post content daily. And believe it’s smart, worthy stuff.

I have set high standards for the blogs’ success. I want traffic 10 times what we are getting. I want to generate more revs from Google ads and  from affiliate partners and I want to sell more our products.

What is the magic move to make this a reality?

A killer best selling book?

More inbound links?

A big publicity hit?

Social media swarm of 10,000 friends?

Pay per click?

Advertising?

More content posting?

Befriending other popular bloggers?

Comment luv?

I will keep you posted.

Need some ideas on social media or SEO. Check out our ebooks. Want more small business and entrepreneurial insight read our other business blog. Interested in restaurant marketing visit our latest initiative.

By Karen Post, on January 5, 2011

My wish list for the Branding Diva is fairly simple: make my projected profit numbers, live a high standard life, beat most of my opponents in tennis, have fun, stay healthy and earn the #1 organic search result on Google. The first five I mastered and was not surprised. The last one (a pleasant surprise) happened this last quarter.

I earned the #1 spot in Google results under Branding Speaker.

So how did I do that?
I did not invest any money with an SEO specialist or ranking company.
I did not call Google and beg.
I did not do the search result dance around a bonfire.

Here’s what I did.
The 10 steps that got me the #1 listing on Google for Branding Speaker.

1. I did my own keyword research.
2. I added as many of these keywords into my web copy as I could.
3. I updated my meta tags.
4. I secured my URL for more than three years.
5. I tagged all my images with ALT tags.
6. I wrote relevant keyword content and posted it everywhere, creating links back to my site.
7. I set up and tagged all of my videos on YouTube which is owned by Google.
8. I repurposed every piece of content I ever wrote and posted it everywhere.
9. I set up all of my social media that link to my site.
10. I set up RSS feeds on my site.

If it worked for me, it can work for you. Good luck!

For more on how to get search results, view: Making history in Saudi and 5 lessons from the experience.

By Karen Post, on November 16, 2010

Want return visitors, got to provide fresh stuff. I’m guilty. Been busy working on content and other things and failed to see the mold growing on my site that hadn’t changed much since the relaunch in early 2010. Wow how time flies when you are having so much fun!

This week I’ve been in the learning cave. I joined Marketing Profs, bought the PRO membership, which offers a heck of deal for $300. You get tons of awesome learning from webinars to premium content. I tuned in this week to the seven deadly sins of landing pages. Presented by Tim Ash, a guru in website conversion. It was well worth the entire annual fee. I learned so much about what matters if you are looking for action on your website. In addition to the seven sins which you don’t want to commit, I learned about a very cool free tool that Tim’s company offers. It’s called Attentionwizard.com. It’s basically a heatmap of your site and it’s FREE. This is way worth checking out. Just send them a jpeg of your landing page and they show you where the eyeballs are going. And what I learned about our site was the focus was not directed to our desired call to action.

That’s going to change. I just sent a bunch of tweaks to my web designer, so you you get some fresh stuff and no stale website from Oddpodz. Infact, after the webinar, I’ve decided to freshen our homepage look monthly, like a hot fashion boutique that moves around merchandise often.

The big take-aways from the MarketingProfs webinar by Tim Ash were:

1) Make  sure your call to action is clear and pops out!

2) Don’t have too many choices for your readers, it wears them down

3) Don’t ask them for too much info, it’s not needed and you will loose em fast.

4) Watch the amount of text you dish out, too much will give you a headache.

5) Don’t make a promise you can’t keep

6) Watch the visual distractions that blur your message

7) Always include evidence of credibility, media coverage, partners other kudos

It didn’t stop there. I’ve also enrolled in the Clay Collins Pre-launch Formula mentor program, which also totally rocks. It’s a three month class that focuses on how to build and launch digital products. It covers product development, list building, video marketing, conversion, SEO and so much more. The content is great, but the bonus is how he delivers and organizes it with video modules, downloadable PDFs and a weekly call in session with other students for an incredibly low price of $1500 and change that you can pay out in three months. I can’t share everything in this blog, cause that just would not be right. But here’s two of top take-aways and I’ve not even finished the class.

• Did you know that blogs generally only convert 5% to opt-ins.
• And landing pages can deliver up to 50% in opt-ins. This is where your focus should be.
• Asking for too much info in your opt-in form will loose your sign ups faster than the hotels and guest with bedbugs.
• And while SEO is great, however, it’s not the life raft unless you are already sailing in some pretty big winds.
• Joint venture partners are sweeter than honey. In the program you learn how to find them and attract them.
• If you use WordPress you can set up many pings in the backend that will help spread your content while you are sleeping.

With in the next couple weeks, you’ll see some changes to our site and I will report back on how they impacted our list building, product sales and traffic.

Stay tuned.

By Karen Post, on October 13, 2010

Internal linking is the most practical way to increase page views and traffic to a website. Many SEO experts believe that external linking from other websites is more effective than internal, but it’s quite the contrary. Visitors tend to stay longer on websites that use internal linking, rather than those that do not, because internal linking makes the site more user-friendly. They also make navigation more simplistic while clicking links on the website. Adding internal links throughout a site allows more control over pages and content. These links are monitored by ‘search crawlers’ that improve search engine ranking which, in turn, makes the website easier to find. Be sure to use the checklist below for your internal linking strategies.

1. Link all of your keywords
2. Link text from new posts to older posts
3. Write up bi-monthly or monthly summaries of your most popular posts, linking back to them
4. Write a series of posts that link to each other
5. Link to other related posts throughout your site
6. If you have an FAQ page or a sitemap, link to other pages in your siteNeed more ideas on improving your search results, check out our SEO Ta-Do list.

By Karen Post, on August 27, 2010

“Do not panic. This is not the revolution. But you should pay attention and find your Place on Facebook. Your business or place may not be in Facebook Places, and that means someone else can define you in this giant network of mobile users.

Facebook’s making a play for geo-location dominance. It’s not revolutionary because others are already here. But Facebook has a large and growing audience, and that means more people will start using this and you need to think about how that affects your social profile as a business, an event or a movement.

If you depend heavily on social outreach, then get to know Facebook Places, “Facebook blog: Who, What, When, and Now…Where”.

As you may know, when social networks integrate geo-location, we get social navigation. Games and check-ins through apps by Gowalla and Foursquare allow mobile and smart device users to announce their location with quips or to search for friends, deals at restaurants and collect cute stamps in their profile.

Whether this is a business or a feature is debatable.

What is not debatable is that Facebook just launched a geo-location enhancement that immediately has an audience of 100 million users, according to Facebook on Feb. 10, “Facebook Mobile: 100 Million and Growing,” .

Find whether your place is on Facebook Places.

If it’s there, check the accuracy and completeness of the listing.

If it’s not there, make an entry immediately. Any user can create an entry on Facebook Places, and it starts with adding a name and a description of the Place. So if you’re business is a restaurant, imagine someone adding your Place but getting the name wrong or not giving your menu a good review.

In all likelihood, you’ve been paying close attention to how your location appears in the current geo-location social apps. If you fit this category, then Place is just one more check on your social marketing list.

If you are just waking up to this, then go directly to Facebook Places. Check your Places profile. Make it accurate. Take care of your profile in the other apps later. You can no longer ignore social navigation. This is not the revolution, but this is your time to join mobile marketing.”