Join myself and Brian Carroll (author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale) for a LIVE (free) teleconference this Thursday, May 15th at 3pm Pacific.

Brian is a lead generation guru and, well, you know me :).

The Cool Part…

Brian and I will be taking your questions LIVE (yes we have a moderated operator).

AND, I plan on asking Brian some tough questions about lead generation.

You won’t want to miss this…

BTW, once we get 1000 signups, I will be taking the registration link down, so if it doesn’t work, you know why…

DID YOU MISS THE CALL??:  Click here to listen to the recording.

If you're new here, be sure to signup for my newsletter and join 20,000 others. Thanks for visiting!

If you market your business, you need to check out this video.

It shows how to generate mass interest in your business.

• Prospects literally line up, ready to purchase after experiencing this.

• Following the strategy, businesses are becoming the thought leaders of their industries.

• Once set in motion, the strategy keeps generating quality leads literally for years.

Watch the video now.

(more…)

Do you find it hard to engage with prospects or customers? If so, keep reading…

I was recently on the phone with Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies.

I explained a project I am working on and she said, with great excitement, “You MUST read this article I wrote.”

What follows is perhaps one of the best lessons on why we fail to engage.

It is simply a letter from a customer.

(more…)

I am looking to collect a repository of ads that leverage white papers in any capacity.

These can be online or print ads.

I am also looking for well-done landing pages specifically related to white papers.

Would you please respond to this post with links the ad or landing page.

If you see something on a site and you want to send me a screen capture or image, please send it to mike at writingwhitepapers dot com.

Thanks in advance!

Marketing information is sales gold.  However, often a disconnect exists between sales and marketing.

For example, if someone reads a white paper, especially a big prospect, how does sales know this event has occurred.

Cisco has recently implemented a very interesting program. According to the January edition of Target Marketing magazine, “at Cisco, a dramatic shift is underway within the organization as it ventures into the a new world of web strategy, challenging its traditional tactics.”

Cisco introduced a marketing to sales linkage program. Here’s what they are doing: (more…)

If you have pondered the value of search marketing but have not yet jumped in, keep reading.

This Thursday, search advertising guru Andrew Goodman is teaching an exclusive teleclass called Navigating the Search Advertising Frontier (How to Outsmart the Competition).

Andrew is a world-leading authority on this topic and popular book author.

Here is a little taste of Andrew:

Be sure to join Andrew and I this Thursday by clicking here.

My life was the classic story of a struggling small company trying to make ends meet. Then I met a man who literally transformed my business.

More on him in a second…

As many of you know, I am a writer by trade. About 5 years ago, my business was hurting and I really needed some quality leads-and quickly!

I was ready to place an expensive ad in a trade magazine. But some sage advice from a peer stopped me cold. The advice was, “You should consider search engine advertising.”

To say I was skeptical is an understatement. After a little research, I happened upon Andrew Goodman–the man who would help me achieve success.

I devoured his materials and began my own search engine marketing campaign.

I was shocked to see four leads come in the first day. There were 40 by Friday, no joke! At the end of the first year, I had more than 4000 leads.

All these opportunities came through Google search advertising.

Today, tens of thousands of leads have resulted from the lessons I learned from Andrew. And, I was able to land clients such as Microsoft, HP and FedEx!

Are you wondering how I did it? Do you want to know what Andrew taught me?

I recently asked Andrew if he would consider breaking from his speaking circuit to share some of his secrets with you.

He said yes!

And now it is my distinct pleasure to be joined by pay-per-click guru Andrew Goodman for a special teleclass entitled Navigating the Search Advertising Frontier (How to Outsmart the Competition).

Andrew is one of the world’s foremost authorities on pay-per-click advertising. Together we will examine how search marketing and white papers can transform any business.

This class is sure to sell out.

Click here to reserve your seat.

This is the second article in a series that discusses on-site optimization tactics. Today we talk about the importance of the meta tags.

Meta Title

The meta title is the most important tag on the page. You can see what your competitors are using as their title tag by looking at the blue bar at the top of your browser when you visit their website.

Google uses the meta title as the clickable part of the search results. This is why you need to optimize your title tag not only for the search engines, but for the searcher too.

The meta title should be shorter than 100 characters and include your main keyword as early in the text as possible. Some web sites include the company name as the first word in the meta title: I generally advise against that and suggest to add the company name at the end of the title tag, if they really want to have it there.

Creating the same meta title for all your pages is very tempting, I know, but that would kill your SEO efforts. Take the time to create a unique title tag for every page of your website. This is a great opportunity to target different keywords with different pages on your web site.

Finally, since your title tag will have to compete with others in the search results, you want it to stand out as much as possible. To do that, you can capitalize the first letter of every word in your title tag and include a benefit too, to encourage the searcher to click on.

Meta Description

The meta description is less important than the meta title, but some search engines use it as the descriptive text of the search result and Google looks at it to decide your ranking.

This tag should expand on what the title tag is saying. Don’t just copy the title tag in here: it can actually hurt your rankings. Instead, use one or two sentences to describe the content of the page. The meta description tag is a great opportunity for using your main keyword together with some synonyms too.

Avoid using the same meta description across all your pages: that will hurt your rankings.

Meta Keywords

Many websites still include a meta keywords tag in their pages.

Search engines used to look at this tag too, which contained a list of keywords the webmaster wanted to rank for. Unfortunately people started abusing it and nowadays you get no additional boost for using it in your pages.

Coming Up

My next article will close this series on on-page optimization. If you have any doubts and what was covered today, please leave a comment below and I’ll try to clarify my points.

About the author: If you are interested in video tutorials and articles that can teach how to increase your web site traffic and build a list of targeted prospects for your business, you are going to like what Vittorio Bosio is saying on his blog: www.TechSavvyMarketer.com.

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

 Loading …

Have you mastered the lucrative craft of writing white papers?

WhitePaperSource (I am their executive editor), has put together a really excellent program called “The Annual Pass Membership.”

With the Annual Pass, you get priority access to ten live classes that will be taught in 2008.

The classes focus on writing and marketing white papers and can be attended from the comfort of your home or office.

Some of the topics include pay-per-click advertising, white paper layout, writing compelling titles, how to price your writing services, performing expert interviews, time management for writers and white paper PR.

These classes provide live access to industry guru’s such as Andrew Goodman, Roger Parker, David Meerman Scott, Michel Fortin and Steve Slaunwhite.

What’s great is that the classes are less than $15 each!

Be sure to check this out by clicking here.

As we saw in a previous article, SEO consists of two main activities: on-site and off-site optimization. Today I am starting an article series that will give you tips and tricks on how to do on-site optimization, which is the easiest and least time consuming of the two.

Domain Name

If you don’t have a domain name yet, pick one that contains your main keyword.

The ideal would be to have a domain like “mainkeyword.com”, but it is going to be very hard to find it available nowadays. You can try with “yourmainkeyword.com” or “mainkeyword4you.com”, though.

People tend to trust (and remember) .com domains better. If you really can’t find the right fit in a .com, you can still go with a .net, if you want.

Having your main keyword in your domain name will help you because:

1. websites with the main keyword in their domain name tend to perform better
2. the keyword will be shown in bold in the search results, thus making your listing stand out
3. since it is important to have your keyword in the anchor text (clickable text) of the links pointing to your website, a keyword-rich domain will help you even in those cases where people link to you with your domain as the link anchor text.

Do you already have a domain name? Even if it doesn’t contain your main keyword, you can still benefit from it. Google tends to like older domains, because it feels those are “real businesses”, that are there to stay. It is not uncommon to see remarkable ranking improvements with just some on-site optimization, in these cases. Just follow the tips I am about to give you.

Navigation

The technology you use for your website navigation has an impact on how many pages the search engine will index. Search engines can only follow standard html links.

If your website navigation is based on a flash animation, the search engines won’t be able to spider your pages. The same holds true for Javascript.

Page Names

It doesn’t matter the technology you use to create your pages. Google will index .htm, .asp, .php, .aspx pages and many other formats (including word documents and pdf files, for example).

The way you name your pages, though, can have an influence on your rankings. Having keywords in your page names can help you from an SEO perspective.

Instead of “yourwebsite.com/page.php?id=bluewidgets”, use something like “yourwebsite.com/blue-widgets.php”. Separate the words in the page name with a dash, so that Google knows where every word starts and ends.

More To Come

The list of on-page optimization tricks is not over. Wait for my next article to find out more. If you have any questions or comments on what you just read, please leave a comment below.

About the author: If you are interested in video tutorials and articles that can teach how to increase your web site traffic and build a list of targeted prospects for your business, you are going to like what Vittorio Bosio is saying on his blog: www.TechSavvyMarketer.com.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading …