Archive for September, 2009

Free Press Release Secrets

September 25th, 2009

You’ve got a website, good product, and now you want some inbound links to your website, right? Easy. Check out this cool neat tool that I’ve been using for years.

http://www.free-press-release.com/ ==> Free Online Press Release Distribution Service

OK, lamens terms, write a press release or article, signup  (ITS FREE), submit your press release, select your cateogories and your done! This coulnd’t be any easier right?

In a few days; when Google Bot or any other search engines comes back to index your site, you’ll notice a spike in traffic; new links coming from blogs, news worthy websites, and other misc websites.

How do I check if this actually works?

Do quick Google keyword check – Type in “Title of article here” in Google and hit search. You should see all the websites that took your press release or articles in a matter of days after submission. It’s a great way to release your product or any news-worthy events to thousands and if not millions of websites on the internet.

Check it out, join the community and see what Free Press Release has to offer you!

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Posted in Marketing, Programming

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BROWSERCAM – Cross Browser Compatibility Testing Tools

September 22nd, 2009

So you have a website and your curious what it look’s like in other browsers but dont have more than 2 browsers to view it..right? 3 years ago I found this neat little tool called BrowserCAM- BrowserCAM allows you to screen-capture your website or any URL you might present to the system and view compatibility.

For example, you can define that you want the following criteria:

  • Internet Explorer 6
  • Windows Vista Home
  • 800 by 600 resolution

Within a few minutes, their script will run a virutal machine that goes to the website you provided with the specs you also provided. It will take a screen-shot of your website and post it back on your dashboard. Cool tool eh? All your trouble with cross-browser compatibility can be fixed with this neat little tool. They offer a free-trial before you buy, I’m signed up, so should you!

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CrazyEgg – Visualize your visitors with heatmap tracking

September 19th, 2009

CrazyEgg is a must-have on my list. It took me awhile to find a company that acutally sorted my data into visualizing clicks through heatmaps. CrazyEgg used to offer free trials to 5,000 visits per month, but this has changed now. It’s still well worth around $10 bucks a month to see where exactly your customers are clicking. Let’s give our users a quick breakdown!

What is CrazyEgg?

CrazyEgg provides a snippet of code (javascript of course)  in which you tag your website. Once your website has this code, any visitor that hits your website, clicks icons, buttons, graphics, CrazyEgg tracks. It generates a neat looking overlay of your website with heatmap’s and a ton of other information.

With CrazyEgg, you can re-create your website and re-do graphics, places of interest, menu’s, links and just about anyhting you can think of. It helps you visualize what is atrracting customers and what is not.

How much does it cost?

Ok im not here to sell you anything, but if you’re really interested, its around $10 bucks a month. Click here to visit their website.

Can I see a preview?

Of course..here you go!

CrazyEgg Snapshop CrazyEgg Snapshot

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Mail Chimp and Email Marketing

September 18th, 2009

So you’ve got a great list of let’s say 1,000 email addresses and you don’t know what to do. Mailchimp! Yes! Email marketing is one of the greatest things ever. Increase your revenue, send out customer newsletters, promotions and whatever you can think of. Just don’t be a spammer, I beg of you..

So what is Mail Chimp?

MailChimp is an Ecommerce Email Marketing System. Simply upload your customer lists, create an email in HTML or plain text (heck I dont know anyone who reads plain text anymore) and blast away. Your email gets sent out who anyone in your customer database (or you can segment even further, prospects, customers, partners..etc). Emails get sent out, you get statistics on who opened what email, your open rate, bounce rates and the best part, customer retention and ROI depending on what you do.  In a nutshell, it’s a free service (yea, free trials are good!) in which you can communicate to your prospects and buyers via email.

Here are some screenshot’s of some test emails (I don’t mind sharing, spread the knowledge)

Mail Chimp Dashboard

Mail Chimp Dashboard

How do I signup? Is it free?

  1. Signup here (be sure to select the free plan if you’d like to try, to lift limitations, you’ll have to purchase)

If you’re wondering why the URL has an AIF id, (affiliate ID) its because I added my affiliate ID on the link so you get an extra value added $30 bonus when you signup or become a customer. Its a refferal system. (I wont hide it !)

After you have signed up, you’ll receive your welcome email from Mail Chimp with all the details you need to know to get started. It’s fun, exiciting, and brings you to a whole new level of marketing.

So why Mail Chimp and not another provider?

Truth be told, Mail Chimp is one of the only companies that recently opened up one of their plans for a free offer, for life. Send up to 2,500 emails per month to a maximum list of 500 subscribers. Heck, thats enough for a small company to get started then upgrade their plan.

What are my benefits?

  • Manage and grow your mailing list
  • Great for start-up companies with limited budget
  • Get into the inbox instead of SPAM/JUNK folders
  • Design beautiful inline emails
  • Track your email campaigns

Mail Chimp is great, if they weren’t, I dont think the companies below would signup

  • FireFox
  • Fujitsu
  • Magneto
  • Intel
  • Canon
  • Staples and much more…

OK enough about Mail Chimp, if you are interested (highly recommended), signup here.

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DomainTools – Introducing Whois.sc records

September 17th, 2009

DomainTools.com is great place to check the status of your domain along with some network tools that can help webmasters; such as, nameserver information, SEO Score, Meta tag descriptions, Alexa Rankings.

Let’ts run through a quick tutorial…

  1. Open your browser and go to www.domaintools.com
  2. Under the first whois lookup form, type in your domain. ie; “WebMasterpunk.com” (typing www is not needed)
  3. Select search
  4. You will not be presented with a long page of descriptive data about your domain and your webhost

Some of the cool features I like about DomainTools.com Whois Record Lookup is that is provides you a quick snapshot of what your website is about, who you are hosted with, quick SEO score, any wiki articles about your site.

Now let’s do a breakdown of the detailed sections.

Site Profile

Site profile captures data from your website .html .php or .asp pages. Grabs the title from your code and lookups the numbero f unique wording descriptions on your website. It’s a cool tool that will also tell you if you are missing any alt tags (which are very important for Google Indexing).

Registration Record

This data provides you where your domain was registered and or purchases. Gives you a quick breakdown of the company, register status and your nameservers.  A great tool for webmasters and webhosts.

Server Data

This portion of the page describes information about your nameservers. It simply does an IP address lookup and display information about your host’s network, where the server is located, what datacenter and much more.

DomainTools Exclusive

Since DomainTools.com is a free service, heck, their going to try to upsell you, right? Yep. This section of the website provides even more detailed information about your nameserver, registrant and how many domains the server or registrant owns. In order to lookup this information, you will need a membership to this website. (Boohoo!) Yea…I know you don’t like paying for stuff, neither do I. It’s a nifty tool, well worth it becuase you can see the history of what that website looked like a few days, weeks, months, and years ago! Kinda like a web history page.

Whois Record

When purchasing a domain, you are asked to enter in your data for your domain. Data such as your first name, last name, who this domain belongs do, who the admin or webmaster of this domain is. This data is displayed here and is publicly available to anyone in the world; unless, you purchase Privacy…in which your domain Whois Record is masked by a corporate address from a company that monitors your privacy and blocks your personal information. Privacy is recommend only to users who would like their information blocked from publich access and or business/personals who have personal websites and would not like to share their name and details.

Easy eh? This is a great site if you ever want to figure out where your compeition is hosting, what company they are using, where they registered their domain or heck to see who owns the domain. Goodluck, be safe!

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Posted in Webmaster

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Step 1- Understanding Marketing

September 16th, 2009

To market your audience, you must understand what marketing is. If you cannot explain the definition of marketing in more than 4 variants, you do not understand the concept.

Heres a quick overview

  1. Marketing consists of strategies used to indentify needs and wants. In lamens term, you have something that the customer needs; market to them.
  2. Promoting and exchanging information about your product/service in a variety of channels.
  3. Strategy of allocating resources (time and money) in order to achieve your objectives.
  4. Creating customers, keep customers (customer rentention), and satisfy customers.

Very well. When marketing a product or service, you will need to understand the core ethics of marketing aka “Marketing Etiquette”. You don’t just blast out an email to a 1,000,000 prospect list and expect money. No. You have to build your brand, create the want, answer the need. You need to pitch these to your customers. If you are selling shoes or you are a shoe e-tailer, don’t just send emails and expect thousands of dollars in return. You need to slowy define your product and bring it to their attention. Again, you have to create the need for it and answer the want(you’ll hear me say this alot, it’s very important to understand this concept or you will fail).

A quick example would be to start off with a newsletter, grab there interest in a certain topic. In a week, send them an email about a new shoe that you have in stock..how it has shock absorbers..or protects your heels from some type of problem. Now that you have your list of potential prospects who are interested in your shoes, send them updates (be sure not to spam them as there are many US CANSPAM laws you’ll need to abide, read more here). 2nd week, send them a promotional email offering a coupon for 20% off (can be any amount). You have just created the want, and now you are offering the need. The need is the heel problem, the want is your promotional coupon which gives them an incentive to purchase. Simple right? Imagine the number of possibilities to create wants and needs. Its an endless road of opportunities.

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Google Analytics: Baby-step tutorial

September 16th, 2009

Google Analytics is one of the most important aspects of Marketing. Understanding where your traffic is coming from, understanding your audience and site analytics. Google offers free Analytics services, called “Google Analytics“. Best part, its absolutely FREE.

Note: Google may or may not share your data, please read the Terms of Service before accepting to signup for Google Analytics. This website itself is fully powered by Google Analytics and nothing else. I love it! Have nothing to hide!

First..Let’s have you create a Google Analytics account.

  1. If you don’t already have  a Google account (such as Gmail or anything related), then please signup. http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html
    Note:     If you have a Google Adwords or Adsense account, you can enable Analytics within your account settings.
  2. Once you have signed up, you will be presented with a dashboard.
  3. Select  ”+Add a new account” (click here to view screenshot) to create a new profile for your website so you can begin tracking.
  4. Fill out the “New account signup” form.
  5. Enter the URL of your website you would like to track. ie., “yourdomain.com” (without quotes of course)
  6. Account name will be what you would like to see under your dashboard ie., “WebmasterPunk.com”
  7. Fill out the general contact information (bah humbug, I know..)
  8. Accept the Terms of Service.
  9. Now you will be presented with two snippets of JavaScript Code. Copy this code; it will enable Google Analytics to pickup the statistics for your website and present them into the dashboard. Make sure you are copying the “New Tracking Code (ga.js)“
  10. Select Finish, you are now done with the first part.

Ok, that was easy..right? Now that we have successfully signed you up with Google Analytics, the next step is to insert the code into your website.

  1. Open up your “index” page, whether its an .asp .php .html page, it doesnt matter.
    Note:     If you are running an include for your header and footer, be sure to put this into your footer before the </body> tag.
  2. Locate your closing </body> tag, paste the code there before the </body> tag.
  3. Save your page, publish and you are now done.

The most important thing is to have the code before the closing </body> tag so that when your page loads, it does not hang up on the .js code if any browser misreads it. I always tell users to put it by the footer if you are using an include. Woudn’t you rather have the page load quickly without any rendering issues than to have your snippet of code? YEP!

Ok, now login back to your Google Analytics dashboard. (hope you didn’t forget where this is already..sheez, hang in there, were almost done.)

  1. After you have logged back into your Google Analytics dashboard, you should be presented with a few statistics.
  2. Select “Edit” on the last column under “Actions”
  3. You should now see your profile information (feel free to edit per your own settings and fill in the easy blanks)
  4. You should have a yellow warning icon and a question mark with the words “Check Status”
  5. Click the “Check Status” link.
  6. It should say Google was able to retreive data from your website and/or is collecting data.
  7. If for any reason you are not retreiving data or it is not verified, you probably pasted the code in an awkward location. Double check your code and make sure again its before the closing </body> tag.

Your complete, every 24-hours, Google parses yoru website data. Your data is not REAL TIME.. It takes anywhere from 16-24 hours for Google to sync your data from the previous day, so you’re always 1 day behind.

Now you have complete analytics on your website; including geomapping, traffic sources, conversions (if e-commerce store) and plenty more goodies that Google offers you for FREE!

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Posted in Marketing, Programming, Webmaster

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Welcome to the world of Marketing.

September 15th, 2009

First..I’d like to take a few minutes and introduce myself so our users can have a brief understanding of my history and where this content is coming from. Yes, guaranteed, you will not learn or find most of this online, some of it just comes from what I have learned from my experience of being both a Webmaster and Internet Marketer.  I’m an entrepreneur, webmaster, and a marketing guru. Kinda like “The cat in the hat.” No, I’m not a Mr.-Know-It-All”… with a few tricks up my sleeve, I think we’ll establish that some of my methods are proven to increase your Marketing efforts and techniques to master the Web.

I’ll be running you through crash courses through many levels of Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, the wonderful world of Google (and it’s tools). You’ll also be learning how to create your own website in just a matter of minutes. Stick around, grab a cup of JOE, and if I could say “Don’t touch the remote”, I would…

Stay tuned as I will update my entries weekly and sometimes daily. I’ll be adding content to this website to continue to expand your knowledge of the web. Sounds easy? Fasten your seat belts, you’re about to take a roller coaster ride through the web, hope your one tough cookie!

Sincerely,

Webmaster Punk
Webmaster/Marketing Guru

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