The reasons why I should win:

Currently we are a group of affiliate marketers, seo dudes and programmers have a company kicking ass down here in sunny Orlando. We are no chumps to web marketing and have been at it for years.

We are at the tipping point for our company where we are almost there to being smooth sailing, but there are still some things that we are unaware of.

We are attending ASW11 where one of my partners, Greg Rollett, is speaking and actually overlapping your speech on Sunday. I am attending a private coaching session all day Saturday and paid a good chunk of change to do so. We live and breathe this stuff, but still are not big time ballers like yourself.

That is of course why I would love to get a platinum pass, because there are some really interesting panels that I would like to see. Some of the main ones are:

1. Banking On Infomercials

2. Mobile Marketing -97% Response Rate

3. Using Datafeeds to Monetize Sites – I really want to see this one because I spoke on this at Affiliate Unsummit in Orlando and there is a lot of stuff I don’t really know.

4. Mobile Affiliate Site Strategies

5. And of course – A Beginner’s Course on Blog Monetization

The 2 nights hotel accommodation’s would totally kick ass because currently we are staying a mile or two off the strip and would rather not have to take the drive.

The $500 airfare means I could probably cancel my flight with Southwest and not have to be herded like cattle and served shitty peanuts, I could actually fly business class on some other airline. We have a 6 hour flight so that would be sooooo appreciated.

Hell yeah I can handle the pressure of $2,000 on one hand of blackjack. I have my handy dandy card reading book and I have been watching 21 the movie over and over. I’m ready to totally lose that 2k and then go wallo and drink myself silly because of it.

I of course want to roll with you at Affiliate Summit, I mean every year you’re in all the pics, you always seem to have gorgeous girls hanging off your arms, you’re rolling with the top dogs being the top dog yourself. Who knows, you may just slip and tell me all kinds of good shit that I can use when I get back to Orlando. You might even spill the one tip that can set us over the edge (not only that but I ask a ton of questions and being able to ask you directly, would be extremely helpful).

On top of that, you could probably introduce me to the right people in the industry and I can then nurture those relationships once I get back home, time spent with you is the best part of this whole contest. I can buy tickets, airfare, piss money away….but I can’t buy my way into chilling with the” in crowd” that can open the door to knowledge, but I know you can show me the door. That is worth more than money to me.

A PASS TO THE PLAYBOY MANSION – Hell yeah I want to go to that. Honestly how many people can say that they have done that. I will be updating my facebook wall constantly, building the massive amounts of jealousy in every dude that is a friend of mine. I will be telling my grandkids about that….just the part of attending.

So I actually won!!!!

Ending 1 I attend all of the sessions each day soaking in all the knowledge like Lawnmower Man (that shitty movie from the nineties), I then have that one part that really sticks out in the several days that takes our business from 5 figures a month to 7 figures a month. I then proceed to buy an island and running gambling sites and a bank where all the affiliates can hide their money from Uncle Sam.

Ending 2 I take that $2k and lay it down and go double or nothing 10 times over and win!!! I buy everyone that is attending affiliate summit a free drink. Then I go back to playing quarter slots and hanging with old ladies smoking Misty 100’s, I lose all my quarters and later can’t play flip cup.

Ending 3 I roll with Shoemoney at Affiliate Summit, I hire someone just to walk behind us with a boom box playing Superfly on repeat as we stroll through the meat market. When we walk into a banquet hall I have my hired dove releaser guy – release a dozen doves as we walk in….one of the doves shits in Dennis Yu’s eye.

Ending 4 I roll with you to the Playboy Mansion, Heff sees my sheer brilliant way I can tell if a women is hot or not, we start our own show called “the boys next door”, which is basically me and a group of friends that get a condo down the street and a bunch of telescopes. We film ourselves watching the “girls next door” with Xzibit. That show ends up sucking really bad too, but we don’t get pregnant.

There it is Shoemoney – See you in Vegas. I really hope you chose me, we will have a really good time.

]]> http://brettburky.com/shoemoney-entry-for-asw11/feed/ 1 http://brettburky.com/5-tips-to-getting-more-feedback-on-your-posts/ http://brettburky.com/5-tips-to-getting-more-feedback-on-your-posts/#comments Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:37:58 +0000 brett http://brettburky.com/?p=403 As the owner of a blog or website, you may find yourself with less feedback on your posts than you would like. There are various ways of encouraging feedback, but one of the most effective methods is to nurture a sense of community and dialogue. If you neglect this, readers may not feel the need to provide feedback. By making them aware that their feedback is valued, you can greatly increase your chances of receive more. Here are some tips to getting more feedback on your posts. Ask Questions This is one of the most direct ways of getting your readers to leave feedback and can also be very effective. Consider ending your posts with open questions, and inviting readers to comment and discuss the questions. This directly invites your readers to participate in a discussion and provide feedback on your post. You might even include a question early in your post, letting readers think about it as they read the post. By the time they finish, they may very well have something to say about the topic at hand, and therefore will be more likely to comment. Interact with Your Readers While it can be somewhat impractical on larger-scale blogs and websites, directly interacting with your readers lets them know that their feedback is noticed and appreciated. While you cannot easily answer every question your readers have, participating in your readers’ discussions can help foster a sense of community. Readers are much more likely to leave feedback if they know that you read it, and are especially encouraged to do so if they know you actively respond to readers’ concerns and questions. Reward Your Readers Like interacting with your readers, rewarding those who provide quality feedback can be an effective way to encourage even more. There are several ways of doing this. You may consider displaying your sites top commentators, directly rewarding those who contribute the most feedback to your site. You can even implement a comment rating system, allowing your users to rate the value of each others’ post, further enhancing a sense of community. One of the best ways to reward those who provide particularly valuable feedback is to feature them in a future blog post. If readers see one of their questions of concerns addressed in its own post, they are more likely continue contributing. Allow Readers to Rate Your Posts Some readers may not have the time or feel comfortable enough to directly comment on your post, but allowing them to easily rate the post provides a quick and easy way to get more feedback. You might consider letting your readers rate your post on a scale of one to five stars at the end of the post, displaying the average overall rating. While this form of feedback is less specific than comments, it can allow more readers to more easily respond to your content. Create Targeted Posts This is one of the simplest and most effective ways to encourage participation. Create posts based on what you think your readers are interested in. Examine previous posts to determine what topics seem to get the most feedback to gauge the interests of your readers. Make your content writing provocative enough for readers to respond, but not to the point that you will alienate them. If this is something that you struggle with, consider hiring professionals in the SEO that specialize in and offer high quality article writing services. Keep in mind the goal of your website, but target your post directly toward your readers to make it more engaging, and therefore encourage more feedback.

Well honestly I am not a big fan of it, because you have to keep up with trends and adapt to the changes to keep up with the real competition.  But then again this is an advantage to SEO’s as well.  I mean, as long as you keep up with what is going on, your competition will probably sit on their fingers and not do anything new.

So basically what that translates to is NOW IS YOUR CHANCE TO OUT RANK THEM.

How do you do this?  The first thing you will want to do is to start to have people or you, do searches for your website and start to see what is showing up first.  People will start to find new searches taht they may have never have thought of until now.  This is where you will have to capitalize.

Focus on plurals and single ways of saying the same thing.  Or …ing…if that makes any sense. If there are ways to say the same thing or put stuff into different ways make sure you are looking into this.

But what you will want to do is take all of the variations that you find and then put them into the handy dandy keyword tool.  Find out what has the best search is for that search variation and make the changes to your website.  What will happen is you will start to show up first in the searches when people are using the instant search.  The good thing about this is that others will not take the time to figure this out and will be left in the dark while you reap all the rewards.  MUHA HA HA!!!

The strategies that i talk about are for SEO only.  It can really have adverse affects on Paid Search.  And they haven’t even come out with how this will affect your impressions..which affect quality score…which affect your CPC.  Until they tell how this will work be careful.  Best bet is to make different adgroups with plural and singular on exacts. It  will help you to determine what Google is showing in the searches without doing the work for yourself.

Please get in the conversation and let me know what I am doing wrong, or tell me how well I am doing or just tell me about what you ate for lunch….get in the conversation below.

Basically I played camera man and was having a good time with it.  Granted some of the images are a little blurry and I apologize, I do marketing online, camera work is rather new for me.  But hey I try.  Let me know what you think of the images and if you would like any of them in particular.  I would be more than happy to send the raw images.

Looking forward to seeing you all again in the near future.

Here is the link to the photos

This question is not answered really easy.  There are different people and sometimes they tend to congregate to different platforms.  So to answer the question really easily – be good at both.  Yeah we know it sucks you have to keep up with two different platforms.  But it really isn’t that hard when you use a third party application like Hoot Suite or some other option.

Making sure you are there when your prospects are there, is a good way to do the one thing that social media is made for – developing conversations.  If you learn nothing else about social media or don’t use for any other reason, use to engage and have conversations with your network.

Facebook is better for getting to really know people you are doing business with.  You can learn about their colleges (good for networking and bringing up their team in meetings), you are able to establish repertoire with them and that is what this is good for.

Linkedin is good for building your credibility.  You want to play peacock here and flaunt your feathers.  Show off and tell us how much of a bad-ass you are.  You know like you did when you lied on your resume.  Yeah same thing here.

I’m not even going to go into Twitter.  You have to pick your battle, find the prospects or people you want to talk to, find out where they are and then develop a plan (not stalk them….online it is called a strategy) and then get out there and talk to them.

Which is best for business?  Both are best in their own ways.  Use each to their advantages.  They are just tools.  You wouldn’t use a hammer to do a rakes job.  Same here, know their strengths and then utilize them.

The point is that people will find more blogs that are relevant if they search blog directories.

Do you search blog directories when looking for information? The sad truth is that not many people do.  At least not the average question answerer..?  Not sure if that is really a word or not.

The way I see it is that people use these services when they want to keep up with information in their field or area of interest, but to get an answer it is a no. Blogrolls are still cool and you can get decent traffic if you are in a popular blogs blogroll.  That is still totally worth effort, but those blogs that get added to blogrolls are in a different boat all together.  These are friends of one blog and being included because either the blog is relevant to the topic or a friend of the blog owner. Blog directories involve really no friendship.  I could submit this blog if I wanted to, but I haven’t.  Because I have before and not seen the type of traffic that you are wanting to get.

So what are blog directories good for?

Getting the search engines to take notice of your sites.  Use it as a way to herd those blind cats….search bots.  Blog directories will help you get noticed, by bots but not really by humans.  So think of it like this.  It is a one time thing you do, or have a plugin to do it for you.  No need to spend hours at these sites. I may be wrong but from what I have learned this seems to be the best answer to this.  If you have a different opinion I would love to hear it.  Let me hear your opinion in the comments.

All of those questions need to be answered.  You have to give value and your site better look nice too.  Because once you get them to your site you want to keep them there for a reason.

A good way to get traffic is by commenting on blogs in your industry with comments that are not just random useless crap.  Give to the conversation and while others are reading that blog, they may click on your name and go to your blog.

Do this by using tools like Comment Sniper to get the first spot on a post for comments.  People usually read the first couple comments and then move on.  So if you can get in there first it will be good for the visitors and the blog owner because they will see that you actually care about what they are saying. Then once you build a relationship of trust they may ask you to guest post on their blog.  Once you do that you are going to get a couple eyeballs looking at you and coming to see what you have to say.

Granted once you get them to your site, try to get them on a list of some sort.  Yeah I know this blog doesn’t really try to do that very well.  Well I do this for my pleasure and not for a business reason.  But all aside building a list of followers through an email list is the surest way to get people talking about what you have said.

Hope that helps a bit, if you have further questions please leave it in the comments.

First things you will want to do is make sure that you have all of your analytics setup correctly.  By this I mean making sure first that it is installed and then making sure that you are setting up proper goals and funnels.  If you have an eCommerce site, assigning a value to your goal can be easy since you know what it is that you are making each time that you make a sale.  If on the other hand you are not offering a product for sale.  It would be wise to assign a customer value to each person that visits your site and converts to your goal.  If you know the lifetime value of your customer this can be a simple task.

If you don’t then you will need to assign a value so that you know if what you are doing is working.  Best bet is to bust out your ole math skills and use the mean averages calculation.  You know

# of people /#of conversions.  Then take that answer and multiple it by the price of your item.  This will give you an idea of what one customer coming to your site has the potential of bringing to your bottomline.

Step 2

Once you have all of this figure out it is a good idea to start tweaking some things.  Using tools such as a Google Website Optimizer.  Start with testing little things and measure the difference.

What is a good number of visitors to make sure you are seeing differences in your results?

Well with a lot of what we do, we try to make sure that we have at least 100 new visitors that have been to the site to see if what we are doing is making any sort of difference.  Ideally you would like to get 1000 visitors.  It is all a matter of how much traffic your website is currently getting.

Once you see the results of your testing, measure and then adjust if needs be.  If you do adjust, keep it and then switch one more thing that is minor and see if you get better results.  Then again and again and again.  Till your conversion rates get to a level that you are happy with.  Which is actually never.  So this is an ever going project.

Make monthly goals of what you want to switch and try and have it ready to go for the time when you have measured the current results.  This is not hard if you just take one day and knock out all the changes at once.

What changes are you talking about?

Changes such as color of “buy button”, the size, the text inside – Buy Now or Claim Yours Here or Add To Cart, etc. Then you will want to test things like where to put that button – left side, right side, up or down.  Ideally from our testing I will tell you that having the buy button right below the price is the best place and making it Orange.  I don’t know why Orange but it works.

Then you will want test Titles, different descriptions and shipping costs.  A good thing to do is really try to understand who your typical buyer is, if you have this data try to analyze it and adjust your content to reflect what that person would want to read .  You talk different to teenagers than you talk to baby-boomers. So understanding your audience is probably one of the most important things that you can do to get a better conversion rate.

There are many more things that you can do to better optimize for better conversions and I will confess I’m not the master of it.  But if you would like to look at someone who is, then check what Site Tuners has to say.  These guys whole deal is doing just this.

Being Granular

This is where a lot of companies get it right from the start. They try to send a potential buyer or client to the main page of their website. This is a big no no. The process sounds really hard to have a landing page for every keyword in your online campaign. That sounds like a lot of work. But the best thing to do is make sure first that you are using a CMS. The reason is because you can have a lot of general content that is the same and then change some of the main details to really focus on that keyword. What I mean by this is making sure the Title tag is unique to that keyword, the H1 is unique to that keyword and believe it or not the meta description and meta keywords. Matt Cutts recently came out and announced that they haven’t been using Meta data in their algorithm for a while now to rank sites in the search engines. That is fine for regular SEO but not for PPC. You want to include as much information about that keyword that you can. Better to be safe than sorry.

Be Specific on What You Want

Don’t try to send someone to a page that has a bunch of different offers to choose from. You want to have one goal per page and one goal only. Make sure that you only try to offer a sign up for a newsletter or try to sell one product. You want to work this lead into a funnel and if you give them many options it will not work out the way you plan.

Credibility Is Key

If you were featured on Oprah or something make sure that is above the fold for sure. This is extremely important. You don’t want to leave out a way to build trust if it is possible. Always make sure that it is above the fold usually in the top righthand corner if possible. If you don’t have something that credible to display have a link out to a association that you are apart of this helps for Google and for potential buyers. They like this. You can also have testimonials listed here. Put them in the sidebar where it can be seen all the way down the page

Include Privacy Policy and Terms of Condition

Google wants to know what you are going to do with their clients information. And yes Google searchers are Google’s clients. At least this is the way they think of it so make sure that you are laying out in detail how you intend to use their information.

Have a professional looking page

If you are trying to get someone to give you their money you need to make them feel comfortable. You can do this by making a site that looks like it wasn’t designed by a teenager. Video helps a lot if this is a possible option for your company.

1. Keep your titles short and catchy.  The title is the most important part of your video marketing.  I tend to think of it just like I think of adwords.  Upload the same video with multiple titles and see which one is getting the best click through.  Do around 3 titles and let it run for a month to see what happens.

2. Make sure you are using tags that describe what your video is about.  Don’t go crazy here, keep it to about 10 tags at most.

3. Make sure that your main keywords are in the title of the video.  Try to make it the first word if you can.

4. Promote the video through the social media platforms that you have at your disposal.  So try to tweet it and put it on your facebook page.

5. Include at the end of the video to – comment and get involved.  A lot of people just watch the video and then leave.  Tell them what they need to do.  The more the comments are there, the better chance you will have of ranking higher because your video is being talked about, remember it is not about “Content being King”, it is about “Conversation being King”.

6. Put it on your website as well. A lot of people forget about this easy task but it will help in your rankings.

7. Make sure the thumbnail is of something that will draw in the eyes.

Once you do all this you will just have to sit back and wait.  But this will get you started on the right track.