RIP Woolworths

Woolworths finally closes today

Woolworths, that British high street retail institution we all loved has closed down 200 of its stores today, and the rest will probably follow soon unless they find a buyer - 27,000 jobs are potentially to go and they are apparently £300 million in the red. We never knew just what your purpose was, and never expected a coherent shopping experience, but you were ours nonetheless.

My aunty started a high flying career in our local Woolworths in Brighouse going from punky Saturday girl to supervisor, to promotion to promotion to being headhunted repeatedly and on to some of the most prestigious jobs with British Aerospace and others so this is for her:

Xray Spex - Warrior in Woolworths

WOW Gold Competition

This is it, the opportunity for WOW Gold afficionados everywhere to get a legitimate comment posted. The funniest, or most original comments only will get through approval. Please no comments about how you've made millions out of selling WOW Gold even if you have, and any claims that you are commenting from your Gold mansion on a tropical island surrounded by sun-kissed semi-naked women, men or sheep could be greeted by an IP Lookup which places you in Scunthorpe, Detroit, Bosnia, Adelaide or where ever. Will there be tumbleweed blowing through this WOW Gold competition post, or will I get a deluge of witty one-liners from sharp WOW Gold afficionados? Closing date 31/01/2009.

Or if you've nothing interesting to say about WOW gold, just watch this clip from the South Park WOW episode - It may be the end of the World of Warcraft as we know it.

Two weeks in and the only conclusion is that you WOW Gold marketers just don't listen:

Happy SEO

I'm very happy, nay even smug, right now. I just updated FireFox and for the first time ever, it didn't delete all my SEO plugins, SEO for Firedox, SearchStatus, Google Toolbar, StumbleUpon toolbar etc etc. To top it all I think I just penetrated a multi-million quid industry extensively on Google.co.uk in less than 24hrs with nothing more than onpage optimisation - fingers crossed, touch wood e.t.c. and bring on the commission. A happy end to the day methinks

social media sites that don't exist but should

New social bookmarking and networking sites are popping up every day and, as if there aren't enough of them around already, here are some not quite so serious suggestions for some new ones. This is the dark side of social bookmarking, social networking and news submission websites and gives me the opportunity for some really bad puns. Well it is nearly Christmas.

So here is the definitive 26 social bookmarking sites that don't exist but should:

1. Splutter - viral social bookmarking - pass on germs of wisdom every time you post a Sneeze




2. Sh*tter - whereas Twitter is social networking on your mobile phone this is social networking while sat on the toilet




3. FumbleUpon - post stories from web sites you found while trying to type in the dark



4. GrumbleUpon - post stories from and vote down web sites that you find irksome



5. MumbleUpon - a social bookmarking site for people who are really understated and sotto voce about how good their story content is



6. Flatter - social bookmarking site that let's you say gratuitously nice things about web sites that no one is interested in



7. Wimpy This - vote for web sites you like by giving them a burger



8. Pimpy This - vote for web sites by blinging them up large



9. WindianPad - submit web sites that provide cures for flatulence (sort of like a panty pad but for your bottom)



10. EverSmote - share and bookmark web sites that God doesn't like



11. SkidMarks - vote for web sites you like by giving them a pair of dirty undies



12. Humptags - vote for web sites you like by shagging their leg



13. Rumptags - vote for web sites you like by shaking your bottom at them



14. Redeye - share your holiday photos with people who've been avoiding you for the past 15 years



15. Stalker - a cross between Facebook and Twitter but more honest



16. Fixx - social bookmarking site that lets you vote for yourself ad infinitum



17. Rigg - see above



18. Smug - a social networking site where you can boast about your pointless online
    achievements



19. FoeFeed - regularly update all the people you don't like on how much better your life is than theirs



20. ObamaBin - whether you are a jubilant democrat or a disapointed republican, this is where your deluge of tedius posts should go, all of them!




21. RecycleBin - let yourself believe that your post is being read, voted up and commented upon by thousands of interested readers, but really we deleted it five seconds after you submitted it. You should have read our submission guidelines now shouldn't you?



22. PlugIMP - bookmark your favorite rubber fetish web sites



23. Batter - social networking for chip shop owners



24. Hixx - bookmark your favorite redneck, hillbilly, chav or bogan web sites



25. Flutter - social networking for bookmakers



26. Bleat - get them to follow you just like sheep - baaaa!

Or just think of a word and put some dots in the middle of it:



in.fect.io.us

poi.ntl.es

Or, a few literary social bookmarking sites for bookish sorts:


BookmarkOrange - give their web site a smack over the Gulliver


BigendianPad - for afficionados of Jonathan Swift

Ideas for more social bookmarking sites? Let me know.

10 ways to grow your business and beat the credit crunch

How to expand your business in a harsh economic climate

To undertake any one of these ways to make your business recession proof could really be as simple as adding a new page to your website and marketing it. With so little to lose and so much to gain, this has to be the perfect strategy for growing your business during harsh economic times. Do this agressively and you can beat the credit crunch and stick two fingers up at recession.

1. Use geo-targetted webpages to capture business in new geographical areas. You can either expand around the margins of your current coverage, adding more local towns and cities that you provision. Or, you could even market further afield - the way to do this is to find people in those areas that offer the same services as yourself and ask for cut every time you pass work on to them. Before long you could grow from a local to a national company by adopting this strategy.




2. add new products and services to your portfolio.




3. target new demographics, expanding your appeal to different age groups, genders, income groups, cultures or ethnicities or industries, or even bigger or smaller businesses than your usual target market.



4. product cross placement. Highlight relationships between your products and services and the ways in which they might complement on another and let your website upsell for you.




5. re-package existing advertising for your products and services. Extend your appeal by displaying what you offer in different ways in different places.




6. harness the skills available to you to offer new services



7. Identify synergies with your competitors and strike deals to pass business between you.



8. find new sales channels. There are ever increasing numbers of free places online to showcase your products or services and with a little research you can identify some of these social shopping websites and multiply the visibility of your goods online to well targetted potential customers.



9. sell advertising from your website. You can do this either on a business to business basis or look at advertising schemes such as Google Adsense or an affiliate marketing package. In hard times you will welcome the additional revenue stream.




10. jump on the eco bandwagon. Tell people what your business is doing to help the environment and let them know about any eco-friendly aspects of your products and services. You can also introduce eco-friendly cost saving working practices to help lower your overheads into the bargain.

Today's free installment from our forthcoming Internet Marketing ebook is from the section 'Monetising your web content'. When released, this Internet Marketing handbook will be given away free for the first 30 days. If you would like to pre-order a free copy of the e-book now, email us as seo@foursquareinnovations.co.uk

Monetising your web content

In this section we cut straight to the chase, and cover some means of making money online. You will find this particularly useful, if you are not selling your own products or services on the Internet but are looking for some opportunities to make some extra cash from home or from a home business. You will find that these sources of online cash can be exploited more effectively if you read beyond this section and get to grips with the task of promoting your website.

You should be aware that get rich quick Internet schemes generally don’t work, and that time and effort is involved in making money on the Internet. Any online article or advert promising you a 6 figure income, or untold riches from the Internet is most probably a scam. However, if you are willing to put the work in, and the research in, your income will increase as you go along and you can make good money and a worthwhile residual income when offset against the amount of time that you need to put in. Think in terms of revenue streams – something you put work into now could still be making you money 6 months, a year or even five years down the line.

Making Money with Adsense

Probably the most common way to turn a website into cash is to serve up Google Adsense adverts on your website or blog. Adsense provides smart ads which will usually match fairly closely the theme of your website.

Adsense these days is getting rather sophisticated, and as well as the conventional Adsense ads for content, you can also use Adsense advertising with RSS feeds, mobile content and YouTube, as well as making money out of putting a Google search box on your website (Adsense for search).

https://www.google.com/adsense/

In order to make a decent amount of money with Adsense you really need to find out what the top paying key phrases might be, i.e. those that Google Adwords users are bidding most highly upon.

You can research potential Adsense payouts using a tool such as SEO for FireFox which has a traffic estimator feature which will also give you an estimated Adwords Cost Per Click on any given Adwords keyword. You can download SEO for Firefox here: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

There is also a very useful list of top paying Adsense keywords here: http://makemoneyseotips.blogspot.com/2008/07/free-high-adsense-keywords-listget-lots.html

Making money with Affiliate Marketing

With Affiliate marketing you place banner link ads and text link ads on your website and every time a sale is made as a result of somebody clicking on your link you will receive commission.

Find advertisers related to the subject matter of your website and display their banner ads and text ads on your website.

Some affiliate marketing programs that you might try include some of the more popular ones such as

http://www.clickbank.com/index.html

http://uk.cj.com/

here is also a categorised affiliate program directory here: http://www.top-affiliate.com/

Pay per post

If you have your own blog, many companies will pay you to blog on content of their choice. There are plenty of brokers out there who will give you a choice of subjects to write upon, and you can get paid for it.

Blogvertise will pay you £12.00 for every 100 words you put into a positive review of one of its customers.

PerPerPost will hook you up with many advertisers who will pay you to blog about them: http://payperpost.com/bloggers/get-paid-to-blog.html

Warning: There are risks involved in pay per post, and some bloggers have reported being penalised by Google. However, if you are being paid to promote something, then cover yourself and nofollow any links that you give to your clients. See this 2007 article for instance: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/12/payperpost

Drop ship

Drop Shipping allows you to sell other people’s products from your website as a retailer, while letting your Drop Ship company worry about the order taking, administration and the shipping. Each time a sale is made through your website you will receive a commission payment, based on the difference between the wholesale price of the product and the retail price which you sold it for.

Some drop shippers will provide you with a ready-to-go sales platform or ecommerce system. In order to achieve your potential, you will need to customise this and tailor the content extensively, so that you can find your niche and stand out from others using the same system. This will also help you to avoid search engines duplicate content penalties and help to get you found on the search engines.

One of the major advantages of drop shipping is that you usually need no upfront cash to get started selling products online.

You can learn a lot about the pros and cons of drop shipping on the Drop Ship forum: http://dropshipforum.co.uk/

Other ways to make money on the Internet

Third party sites where you can create pages and make money:

1. Squidoo gives Adsense revenue share on your squid pages: http://www.squidoo.com/



2. http://www.syncone.net/ - this is a social bookmarking site that allows you to add affiliate marketing and Adsense on your page.



3. eHow will pay you for writing articles telling people how to do something (US residents only). Payouts are based on the amount of traffic your article generates and upon the quality of the content: http://www.ehow.com/



4. You could also add a price comparison service to your website or blog. PriceRunner will also give you a small payout for every click through they get to their price comparison website. You can set this up through Commission Junction (see the Affliate Marketing section): http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/



5. Sell your digital photographs to stock photography websites. Stock photography websites that will buy your images include http://www.stockphotography.co.uk/ and http://www.photographersdirect.com but there are plenty more. Check their terms and conditions, since some require a minimum number of photos, and others have stringent quality guidelines while others are more lenient.



6. Write an ebook and sell it, just like this one – you can do this through paypal or even through download.com: http://www.download.com/

For a more comprehensive guide to making money online have a look at this article: http://www.experienced-people.co.uk/1042-top-ways-of-making-money-online/

Tip: One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to start making money online is to start up your own blog through WordPress or Google Blogger, both of which are free and require almost no technical knowledge to set up. Then you can integrate Adsense, affiliate marketing and even some paid for posts on there and start making some money almost instantly.

One of the best strategies here is to write about what you know, and monetise things that you do in your every day life. So if you eat out a lot, maybe start a restaurant review blog, or if you enjoy skiing or golfing write a blog based around that. You could start a blog about places you have visited or even concentrating on your own town, city or suburb – the possibilities are endless. The trick is though to make it easy for yourself and write about something you know, and or participate in, since this will save you a lot of time and energy researching.

Tip: Build up as many revenue streams as you can. The more sources of revenue you have giving you a payout every month, the better insulated you will be from any downturn in day-to-day business i.e. those times when numbers of new on-off customers are less than usual, or when you lose customers. Moreover, with multiple channels of revenue you avoid the risk that many less versatile businesses face of struggling when their major revenue source underperforms or dies off. Take Ford as an example, they were playing a zero-sum game whereby their survival depended on people buying cars. This was a fifty/fifty bet which they would always lose eventually over a long enough timeframe, because people either buy enough cars to keep you in business or they don’t, and once they don’t your business is over, unless you have multiple streams of revenue.

You should also always be on the look out for more revenue streams so that your business grows reliably and steadily.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Internet marketing but were afraid to Google

We have a working title for our forthcoming Internet marketing guide now, and the release date draws ever nearer. We are giving this away free for the first 30 days and if you would like to pre-order a copy, please email me at seo@foursquareinnovations.co.uk

You can read the introduction to our internet marketing handbook below. and you may also find of interest our recent ehow article on making money online without becoming a couch potato:

FSI Internet Marketing Information Handbook Introduction

This Internet Marketing booklet is your SEO (search engine optimisation) bible and essential online marketing guide which will provide you with the information you need in order to help you get started with your first Internet marketing campaign. Here you will find SEO information for beginners and also learn a few juicy SEO secrets that you might not find anywhere else on the Internet. Most importantly, you should find the subject matter in this SEO e-book an indispensable 101 reference guide for strategies that will help you to get found on the major search engines, make the search engines like you and drive relevant traffic to your website. You will also learn how to harness Web 2 and social networking services to create additional interest in your website.

The role of search engines is to gather, organise and serve up information and the search engines that do this best are the most successful and receive the lion’s share of search traffic. There is a really important lesson here – the quantity of information, the quality of information, the care with which it is organised and the efficiency with which it is served up and delivered are all key factors to online success. This applies to any website or blog just as much as it does to search engines and it is something that you should try to keep in mind whenever you are marketing a website online on the Internet.

The skills required for Internet marketing successfully fall into three main categories:

1. technical – the technical skills needed to market a web site online are often overrated by those not involved in Internet marketing. You will need them and you can’t do without them, but Internet marketers are not nerds, techies or geeks, and usually not IT gurus or web design geniuses, they just know enough to harness these skills in order to facilitate the promotion of their online writing and their web marketing in the most effective way possible.


2. arts/humanities – the ability to write interesting, compelling and useful information, and to a lesser extent to provide attention-grabbing images, is an absolute must for online marketing success.


3. marketing – the ability to gauge what will grab people’s attention and turn them into customers and to provide them with it. The dedication to identify and exploit aggressively the best opportunities for getting online content found and seen. Again essential.

These are all skills that you will develop and cultivate as you gain experience marketing your website online, but be warned, there is no shortcut to learning how to do this, no silver bullet for search engine optimisation, and no such thing as Internet marketing for dummies, guide to SEO in a nutshell or overnight online success. You need to build up a good combination of technical skills, develop your aptitude for writing and your flair for marketing and utilise them all to drive your online publicity machine. This search engine marketing booklet will furnish you with much of the Online know how and many of the Internet resources that you need to drive traffic to your website, but without a flair for marketing and writing your web site visibility will not reach its full potential. Most of all though, you can get a very long way with hard work and perseverance, and if you explore all of the Internet marketing opportunities given below thoroughly then you should go a long way. Good luck!