For any aspiring internet marketers you should check out a decent blog I’ve recently start to read written by internet mogul John Chow. His blog John Chow dot Com is designed to help you make money online. He is offering to link to your blog if you write a review which should help to send you a ton of traffic your and boost your page rankings.

So what’s good about John Chow’s blog?

He has a great post on the seven habits of successful bloggers which will help any newbies. I particularly agree with his ideas that giving out link love is important, particularly if you want to get some traction with other bloggers in the blogosphere. Also posting regularly is vital. If your readers are picking up new content regularly through their RSS feeds then they’ll keep coming back - assuming your content is good.

It’s also interesting to read about the salaries some of these “internet moguls” are taking home. Seems some of the most well known bloggers are earning well in excess of $100k US a year. Now if that doesn’t inspire you, then I don’t know what will.

Happy blogging!!

By the way - this is also a great example of viral marketing.

Thanks to Duct Tape Marketing I’ve come across what looks like another blinding marketing tool. This one’s for those of you interested in advertising on email newsletters.

The product is called Amigo and is offered by UK based Carson Systems. Essentially it matches newsletter publishers to relevant advertisers based on content. For example, if you’re selling iPod accessories and you find a newsletter being published to a community of podcasters, then you can advertise your products in the text.

Just like paid for search, you set a price per click and a total ad spend per campaign so you can control your costs. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Yes I think so and I’m fairly confident it will be. But Duct Tape is running a test campaign so I’m going to wait and see how they get on before jumping on the band wagon.

How will you manage the site once it has been launched?Building your site is only the first step in successful website marketing. Once launched, you’ll need to maintain it to get the most value for your outlay. You should think about content updates, hosting, domain name registration, security updates, managing interactions with browsers (blogs, contact forms, forums) and more.

Do you have the skills and time internally to manage this, or will your agency be responsible? If you are going to manage this internally, do you need to train up a member of staff, if so what costs are associated with this. Can your design agency train your staff, or will they provide a maintenance pack / instruction manual to help.

Choose your designers carefully if you think this could be a problem for your business. If you choose a cheap agency they may not have the capacity to provide ongoing support.

Building a Website - 7 Essential Questions (part 4)

Do you know what content you want to include on your site?

You need to think about both the text and images you want on your website. Not only what you want to include, but how you will create it. For example, do you have the content in house already, or will you need to take some photos or write some new text. Will you need a professional copy writer to help put this together, or edit your writing?

Once the content has been created, think about whether you will want to change and update it regularly, or if it will remain fairly static? If you want to be flexible then you’ll need a content management system (CMS) running at the back end of your site. These aren’t particularly expensive (in fact you can get some open source CMS programmes that are excellent) but your designer will need to set them up to work on your site.

Think carefully here as the content will have a dramatic impact on the cost of building and maintaining your website.