There’s no standard metric for how to set prices on net advertising space, so how do you decide how much to ask when you start selling your own ad space? There are a couple of ways to go about it that at least make sense and can be explained to clients clearly. However, they won’t ...

The most effective overall form of marketing is word of mouth. You can’t buy it. You can’t really control it. Sometimes, irritatingly, some minor aspect of something you’re building gets all the buzz while the whole point of your project gets missed. But this is your best indication of what your market is looking for. ...

Not only can you get free advertising for your sites, but the ways you can go about it are virtually unlimited. Pretty much any deal you can imagine whereby someone might be persuaded to give you a free link, free banner ad, or free offline advertising will work. It’s usually just a matter of finding ...

I was reading this piece by Holly Buchanan on creating personas when I realized this is a huge stumbling block for me. First, if you’re not familiar with the concept of personas: marketers try to imagine the sort of person who would buy their products. Then they write copy and come up with campaigns that ...

You already have an idea how it works offline: people buy advertising space to show off their shops, products or ideas. They pick locations for their ads based on where they think their target customers are likely to see them. They choose the media – TV, newspaper, magazine, billboards, fliers – according to how they ...

In order to increase your website traffic and boost your pagerank, you need to get quality inbound links pointing to your site. Buying those links is against Google’s rules. Just waiting and hoping for someone to link to you is too passive a strategy – especially given how stingy some people have gotten with handing ...

Marketing is about lies, right? It’s about convincing people your cheaply made crap (that you copied from some poor schmo) is worth tons more than it’s really worth, so they’ll buy it and make you rich. We all see these stories every day. We all buy some of the crap, at least until we learn ...

Conventional marketing research – polls, surveys and number crunches about what’s sold in the past and how and where it sold and to whom and by whom – can tell you what, among all the stuff that’s already out there, people are likely to buy again. It can’t really tell you much about that product ...

This is worth bookmarking: The 500 Dollar Per Month Comment Thread Mark threw open a discussion where people making over $500/month profit on websites could advise people making less than that. If you’re making less, you’re welcome to discuss your strategy and get feedback, or just ask questions. There are a lot of ideas and ...

Are Friends More Influential Than “Influencers”? Grokdotcom analyzes a recent study revealing that people trust the recommendations of friends and family over bloggers and social networkers they see online. The opening line of the article is just right: “This may not come as a shock…” Indeed. There’s value in networking online, but I think you ...

I’ve been reading up on Digg all afternoon.  By the end, I’d collected a bookmark list of articles on it.  Have fun with them! How to Drive Traffic to your website with Digg How To: Get a SEO Blog to Digg’s Front Page – The 6 C’s DiggBait 101: 8 Ways to Help You Get ...

I got a letter from eBay recently. They’re recommending their affiliates with CJ not change their links until later in the year, at which point eBay and CJ will have come up with some solution that allows HTML links to stay. As jmschmitt points out: What does this say about eBay’s view of the LMI? ...

So it’s not just me? I’m new to AdWords, and my first campaign was somewhere between dismal failure and “well, there went a few dollars I’ll never get back”. I figured it was just a factor of me not knowing what I was doing. Which is true. But apparently, my ignorance may not be the ...

Here’s a little trick I just found and am testing out. Instead of trying to write an ideal headline on all of your AdWords Ads, just give ‘em what they searched for, using this syntax: {KeyWord:Default Headline} This causes the ad headline to read as their search term – as long as their exact search ...

You’ve got a new site. You need to build traffic, and that means you need inbound links from other sites. You notice there are more sites promising site links than you can count, and quickly get the feeling they’re not all of the same quality. Good catch.  Read info vilesilencer: the SEO friendly free directory ...