Marketing Blagger

For those who are new to this blog you might like to take part in the regular reader poll in the right hand side bar. For those that have been before, here’s the results to the most recent poll where I asked:

Which of the following internet marketing techniques are the most successful for you?

Answers: Affiliate marketing, Articles / PLR, Adverts (inc AdSense), Joint ventures, eZines, Blogging, SEO, or other.

Before I summarise the results I’d like to thank all of those who took part. It wasn’t a huge turnout this time around, but none the less you can still take a little value out of the answers. So here goes.

50% use blogging successfully as part of their internet marketing mix.

Not surprising really as most blog readers are bloggers themselves. Great to see how important blogs are in the internet marketing mix though.

20% have some form of advertising in their marketing mix, either Adsense or others.

I think it is fair to say that Adsense is the most popular blog monetisation tactic, at least until bloggers / internet marketers move onto a range of other tactics, such as article / bum marketing or PLR marketing (which came in a 10%.)

20% Also employ search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics as part of their marketing.

The survey didn’t ask in any detail what this includes but there are a variety of options for you to consider.

10% Use articles or PLR marketing.

It’s no secret that article marketing is a great way to drive traffic to your site and to increase your rankings. PLR stands for Private Label rights, which is essentially when you buy an existing ebook and rebrand the content as your own. Again this is not a new tactic but interesting none the less.

Nobody voted for joint ventures, affiliate marketing, or ezines.

Although perhaps due to the size of the sample this is not actually not that surprising. The other choices are clearly the most popular forms of marketing and making money online.

So as an internet marketer what can you take away from this?

First of all get your blog working and attracting traffic as they are a great platform on which to develop your internet business. In terms of costs of setting up a website, a blog has to be the cheapest available option there is - in some cases it’s even free. If you want more advice on this, check out Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind programme.

Secondly you should add AdSense to you blog / websites as soon as you can. It’s clearly a good way to make some money. You’re not going to get rich overnight with AdSense, but you should start to see a trickle of money fairly quickly.

The third point is to consider search engine optimisation tactics. I’m not going to go into great detail on what you can do here as I’m certainly no expert. Get yourself over to Aaron Wall’s site and pick up a copy of his SEO Book.

The final recommendation is to do a lot more than the first three steps. If you stop at that i.e. setting up a blog, adding AdSense and doing some SEO, you won’t get very far at all. The internet is full of opportunity and you’ll need to work hard to capitalise on what’s out there.

If you’ve been here before you’ll know I always have a reader poll running on the right hand sidebar. Please feel free to spend 10 seconds taking part, you never know you might actually find the results quite interesting.

Today I’ve closed down the last poll for analysis and replaced it with another. The question is simply:

What blogging platform do you use?

As you will no doubt be aware there are a huge variety available, but which one is the best. I’m hoping this poll will start a conversation to find that out, but also more importantly a further discussion about which is the best platform for making money online.

Your help is as ever much appreciated!

I’m not often one to sing Google’s praises too much, but credit where credit is due, they do seem to be smartening up their act with the AdWords support programme. Perhaps this is in response to Microsoft adCentre’s excellent telephone support line.

Well anyway, just a short post to say well done Google. The recent problems I’ve been experiencing with My Client Centre and Analytics are being handled by a very polite and responsive lady by the name of Niamh (pronounced Neve for those non-Gaelic readers). I will let you all know how quickly the problem is resolved, but for now I’m happy in the assurances that Niamh is on the case.

There are two very interesting pieces in today’s Media Guardian that really got me thinking. The first is actually a letter from Tes Alps of advertising marketing company Thinkbox. Tes talks about the fact the TV advertising is still very effective despite the growth in the amount of time people spend online. Tes explains that “we are watching 10 mins more TV per day than 10 years ago” which suggests that internet usage is not overtaking the goggle box. What I like best about Tes’s letter though is the point that value should not be measured in terms of time spent, but in terms of advertising opportunities, so for example half the time people spend online is on email and therefore not available for advertising - unless of course it’s on hotmail etc which have advertising al over it.

The second piece was on Social Networks by Anthony Lilley from Magic Lantern. Anthony’s piece addresses an equation that describes the difference between TV advertising and web 2.0. Essentially Anthony suggests TV is purely a one to many communications medium, i.e. you broadcast your message one way to many people at the same time. Web 2.0 on the other hand enables you to broadcast to networks of people, supposedly with overlapping common interests. The message therefore spreads more quickly, but worryingly for marketers, your messaging is less controllable.

So what then is particularly interesting about these two pieces? Well for a start it’s clear that TV advertising still has a long way to go. After all if we’re watching more TV then there’s a good chance we’re watching more adverts. With this in mind maybe some of the social networking sites are a little overvalued i.e. MySpace and Facebook. Secondly it seems as far as internet advertising goes, despite it’s obvious benefits from a network perspective, it’s both less controllable and less clearly measurable.

What’s most interesting however is the approach Tes suggests which is to use internet advertising as a complement to TV advertising. Is this integrated marketing communications then? I think so.

So what’s the relevance of all this then to the small business or internet marketer. Well it’s the whole integrated approach, or multilevel marketing lesson again. Obviously you aren’t going to be into TV advertising, but you might have a small video on YouTube, which you compliment with a blog, an email campaign, a free ebook and much more. So in reality internet advertising is not really leading the way, but it’s just part of a varied communications mix.

(This post refers to the UK Guardian’s media pages. In no way do I want to infringe their copyright or steal their content, just comment on what is generally an excellent newspaper. I would suggest you buy the paper or look at the website for more quality content.)