A key part of your Net Traffic Machine is the ability to use analytics to leverage search engine results and create more visibility for yourself. To do that, you need to know & understand what the search engines do, in general. How do the SEs work? What is a search engine algorithm? You need to know the answer to these questions in order to get authority status for your website, leading to free search engine listings. And I know some of these words sound scary. But all they really mean is, “Track your results.” And you can get a simple WordPress plug-in to do that for you automatically.

How does Google decide who gets ranked #1 for any web search term? How do they decide the Top 10 results, which are the only ones that get on the first page when you click to search?

What we know is, Google measures key metrics. Here is their strategic thinking:

• How important is your content? Is it high-quality?
• How big is your network?
• Can your reputation be measured?
• How many people subscribe to your blog RSS feed?
• If you are on Twitter, how many followers do you have – and how big is THEIR network (their followers).
• So wherever you publish your niche, how big is your network and how big is your network’s network?

Google’s spider wants to know. Google is doing what marketers have done since the dawn of marketing. They track what people do. They use a spreadsheet to compile statistics and then they make their decisions, based on their measured actions of the crowd.

An easy, obvious way to measure your network and their regard for you is, who links to you? How many of them? Are they people of influence (measured by how many link to them)?

To get consistent high regard from Google, you must:

1. Consistently build inbound links from people of influence.
2. Consistently turn out content brimming with the LSI words that tell the search engines you really know your subject.

If you learn to execute these 2 steps every day, you should be very happy with the results you get from Google and the other search engines.

Richard Dennis

Let’s get rid of the nervousness & insecurity today. In a couple hours, you can just lie in the sun and snooze out, let lots of experts find the good stuff for you, and then, once you wake up, just snap up whatever great pieces you see that make  your mouth water.

Do you have a Google Feed Reader? If not, go to your Google account and click on “Reader” to set it up.

A friend of mine, Jennifer Billy, wants to do a blog on how to save money at home by couponing and other means. She came up with a list of a dozen keywords. Her next step is to take one keyword at a time and start Google searching like this:

• saving money +blog
• couponing +blog
• stay-at-home-mom +blog
• etc., etc., etc.

Pick the term that’s most real to you and start with that search. Look at 15-20 blogs in that category. This is your research. When you see a blog that’s really good, great info, very useful to you and to your market, sign up for their RSS feed (usually an orange & white button on the right-hand side of the page). You’ll have the option to have it come to your Google Reader, and that is what you want.

You need to wind up with at least 50 active blogs that you really like, plugged into your feed reader. So everytime one of “your researchers” posts something, you will get it within minutes.

What that means is you have all the research you could ever possibly need for your blog project, coming to you for free every day. You will get 100 times more ideas than you could ever possibly write about.

And there goes the nervousness and insecurity.

This step is absolutely key to your success. Get this done before you do anything else. Let me know if you have any problems with it.

Richard

I’m kind of dropping down into uncharted territory here.

I’m hopeful that the video I’ve just added to the top of the right column of this page will help visitors get a complete idea of what Net Traffic Machine offers and help those who want to learn to build a following online to make a quick decision whether or not they can get help here.

And as with everything else I do here, it’s a model for you. Stats show that visitors stay at your website longer when they can immediately view a video. And other stats show that the longer visitors stay, the more profitable your site has a chance to be.

So … whether you have experience with video or not … it’s something you need to learn about, and it’s one of the subjects we’ll be talking about here.

Anyway, I would like to hear from you. I am a marketer, and so I’d like to know any negatives that video leaves you with, as well as any positives. Marketing is all about learning from mistakes and getting better. I will absolutely ALWAYS tell you exactly what I think about your website. Please do the same for me. If you find the video boring, by all means, say so. Just use the “Comments” button below.

Thanks so much.

Richard Dennis

OK. The demon is sitting on my right shoulder today, angel on my left. The angel’s not saying anything, but that ol’ debbil demon is yapping his head off. And he has an idea … for you.

Might make you a lot of money. Might not. Want to hear it?

That’s what I figured.

I ran into this site some months ago. It’s put out by Amazon, but I think it’s only available in the U.S. You can post work here and have it done for REALLY cheap. Here it is:

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Now … as you know, you will never create a presence online unless you can write at least some content. But it doesn’t need to be YOU who does the actual writing. That’s where the Mechanical Turk comes in.

You can post jobs there (just as you can on a lot of other sites) and have someone else do them. Difference here is, it’s generally a lot cheaper. You can Google

Amazon Mechanical Turk review

which I recommend you do. You’ll find a lot of negative comments. But guess what? The ones I saw are all negative about the way it’s being used … not about the results.

For instance … I bet you could go to an article directory online and copy three 500-word articles you like and then post a work order on Mechanical Turk offering $2.50 to someone who would re-write all three of those articles for you, making them completely different, and coming out to at least 400 words each. And I bet someone would take that offer and do it for you.

So the question is, what kind of quality would you get back? The good thing here is, it’ll be U.S. residents responding, mostly people whose native language is English. If you hate to write, this one is certainly worth a test.

And if you test it, let me know what you think …

Richard Dennis

Remember in the movie The Graduate, where Benjamin’s parents are having a party and celebrating Benjamin’s college graduation? Mr. McGuire, a family friend & local businessman, takes Ben aside and says, “I just want to say one word to you — just one word — ‘plastics.’ ”

Well … I want to take YOU aside and say one word to you. Just one word.

OK, OK. It’s actually three words:

Latent Semantic Indexing

Try saying it to yourself. Kind of flows off the tongue, doesn’t it? I’ll bet you really feel smart when you say it?

OK. I’ll try not to get too carried away here.

Anyway, last week, I was minding my own business, doing Google searches to choose which titles I’d use for some articles. I’d done about 6 searches in a row, for different but similar keyword phrases. Each time, each different search, the same article got the #1 rank in Google.

By the 6th time this happened, I figured I probably ought to actually look at the article. Maybe I’d learn something.

Boy, did I. It was a major revelation to me. I absolutely know a perfect example of latent semantic indexing when I see it. But I had no idea how effective it could be. I had no idea that LSI gets Google so excited, it practically slobbers all over itself.

Anyway, I’m going to be doing a 1-hour training call this Saturday night, February 14th, at 9 pm Eastern Standard Time, telling you exactly what my big discovery was and how you can use it to routinely get high listings in Google searches.

If you’d like the call-in information for this conference call, just email me: richard @ NetTrafficMachine dot com (of course, remove the spaces & replace “dot” with a period). Just put “Google slobbers” in the subject line, and I’ll send you back the call-in info.

If you can’t make it at that time, let me know, and I’ll send you a link for the audio file of the call. Plus, I’ve created a nice little tool you may find very useful, and I’ll give you that, too.

Take care,

Richard Dennis

Not a pretty thought, is it? We set a record low for the date of 14 degrees last night at the Tallahassee airport. I sure wouldn’t want my car to veer off the road and plunge into the lake in THIS weather.

Or – actually – any other weather.

And what if that car was your blog? You sure don’t want your blog drowning, either. And that graphic you see might actually help you keep your blog afloat & effective.

Studies show there’s a big advantage, consistently, to including a graphic in your blog post. More people will start to read the post, and more will finish it. With a WordPress blog, it’s easy to add a graphic in your post.

Now … about graphics.

You can’t just right-click and “Save” any graphic you see online. Most of them are copyrighted.

However, there are some really good online sources of graphics. These 3 all have free graphics and some also have pay-for graphics, that you may find worthwhile:

IStockPhoto

Public-Domain-Photos

WPClipart

You can find a lot of other resources for free images here:

Wikipedia

If you don’t know how to post a photo in your wordpress blog, look here:

how do I post a photo in my wordpress blog?

Read the listings and choose one to try.

If you have any questions or comments, just click on the “Comments” button below. Hope you enjoy and use these great resources.

Take care,

Richard Dennis