Did Internet Marketing Kill Scribd?

There have been a huge amount of web sites that have needed to keep up with the times and make major changes to their business model or the way their site functions. This is simply the name of the game in the digital world. Your business must be built to “flip” not built to “last” in todays ever changing market. If you are interested in building an online business it is no different, you must be ready to roll with the punches and make changes as needed. Scribd has just make a huge change that effects every user on their web site. There are no more links on scribd!

What Is Scribd?

Scribd.com is a huge web site that allows people to share their informational documents with other uses. It has been a great place to share your content and build links in the past. However, they have received so much spam and low quality content that they have recently changed their sites linking rules. Now, when you upload a document your links are not live on their site. This makes the site obsolete for marketing purposes and they hope that the community continues to bring high quality content without the links.

Will This Help Or Hurt Scribd?

It will be hard to tell if this is the downfall for their site or if it will bring a new found life into their online presence. It is a fact that Google is now punishing content farm sites harder than it ever has in the past. It is sad to see a great resource have to take away permissions from users because it is getting over utilized or abused. When you are out there promoting your products, services and web sites, keep this in mind. You don’t want to be part of the problem or to be building links on sites that have already been dinged by Google.

What Happens To My Scribd Documents And Links?

If you have not uploading any new documents to Scribd.com in the past two weeks, you are most likely fine. However, if you have been uploading new content since then, you may want to remove your old articles and post them elsewhere. It is suggested that you wait at least a week before you repost, so Google does not suspect duplicate content. Your existing documents that still have links showing on them will be fine. All of the content that already has a live link on their site will be OK. Just make sure to check your account and remove the content with dead links on them.

To Success,

Nick Simpson

The Real Value Of Quality Content

In a time of internet marketing where there are so many tools to help webmasters turn duplicate content into usable information to publish, it seems like the real internet marketers who are putting in the hours to produce real quality content are being left in the dust. It really does seem like marketing anarchy when you look at what some people consider to be a usable and ethical way to produce content for their web sites today. If you are using some of the article content spinners you may have noticed that if used correctly these tools really can be very effective. There is no problem using tools like this if you are the originator of the content that is being spun, but if you are stealing others articles, there are some ethics questions that arise.

The reason that most people think these apps allow them to get ahead is the fact that they can use a single article to create many similar articles that have enough unique content to make them “seem” unique to Google. This may be a trick that works up front, but in the long run many times a single uniquely written article can outperform ten copies that are very similar. As Google updates their algorithm and as they get faster at spidering the internet, these similar articles soon drop off of Google’s radar, where true unique articles seem to grow in strenth over time. If you are producing your own unique content you already know that once they get ranked they usually automatically grow in popularity on the search engines and especially if there are others linking in to them.

Isn’t Creating Unique Content A Waste Of Time?

It does take time to write real unique information and if you are not knowledgeable on the topic, purchasing unique content can be expensive. However, if places on high ranking 3rd party sites and used in combination with a powerful link wheel or link magnet, these unique articles can pass on Google juice for years to come and help you strengthen the standings of any site you link into from them. There is a real value from fresh unique content that simply cannot be matched by using the new “SEO Tool” of the week or paying for spun content.

I Really Want To Spin

If you really feel the need to spin content or steel information from other people’s RSS Feeds, you may want to consider using these only on your second or third level of content locations or web properties linking back to the more authoritative and powerful unique content. This is one of the only ways I will ever use this type of content and you can do your own testing to come to your own conclusions of course. The only problem is that by the time most realize how low quality content may be effecting their sites rankings in a negative way, it is usually too late and the damage has already been done. This in mind, you may want to do it the old fashioned way, write your articles and if you don’t know about the topic, go learn about it first.

Real Quality Content

Content does not have to be articles. When we talk about producing content most fly by night internet marketers think articles to blast to a bunch of junk web sites using the cool new app they just bought on clickbank. In reality content can be an article, but even if we are talking about text it can be a blog post, a page on a web 2.0 web sites or it could be an email that you write for your mailing list subscribers. However, beyond text there are many different types of content that you can create online. For example, how about videos, images, podcasts and live events? If you really want to market your web site, blog or product like a professional, you need to learn how to start producing rich content like these examples. Multimedia content has a much higher chance of going viral and when people consume this type of information it seems much more professional almost every time.

Your Comments Please

I am always open to discussion about any of my ideas, strategies or writing, so please let me know your opinion. Just leave me a comment below or click on my name to contact me directly on my official blog.

To Success,

Nick Simpson

Pro-Active Problem Solving For Online Business

With so many options to start your own online business it is hard enough to try to think of ways to get your business going and what business to get involved with that many new online marketers don’t even have the time to think about pro-active measures to make the future of their business simpler and more profitable. The easiest way to make your businesses future bright is to start off on the right foot and move forward very slowly.

This is not what most new online business owners want to hear, they want to be told that you can get rich tomorrow and that is not realistic nor is a good though process for those who want to build a real online business that will be able to last through the test of time. Slow and steady really is the best way to build a huge online income and if you are looking for get rich quick methods you most likely will never put in the work that it will take to build a real business. In all actuallity, those who are looking for a fast way to make money usually just pay the bills for those who have spend the time and effort to build a giant business. These are the guys who buy many of the “internet marketing products” and never take the time to follow though with the steps laid out for them.

There are those who spend years building up a huge amount of trust with the online community and then release products, these guys make huge pay checks and then there are the guys who don’t want to build this powerful online presence but will buy the other guys products day in and day out looking for a shortcut. Well, thats enough on that if you are new to the online marketing world, in a year or two you may look back and think that this really was a powerful insight and if you have been researching and spending on these products for years, you already know I am right. This article is not about the “haves” and the “have nots” it is about how to become pro-active for the future of your online success and marketing campaigns.

How To Think Pro-Actively

The easiest way to really think pro-actively is begin with the end in mind. All you have to do is start with where you want to end up and fill in the spaces. If you want to be a millionaire, think about how many customers you would have to have, how many products you would have had to sold and most importantly how would you have to treat people and what type of effort would you have to put in  to achieve this?  Once you start thinking with the end in mind, you can start to see some of the pitfalls that may arise along the way. Don’t wait for these problems to come up, do something today that will fix these problems before the appear. This is one way to remove the roadblocks between you and your success.

How To Be Pro-Active With Customers

Your customers are the lifeline of your business and your online income, you need to learn to treat each and every customer like they are gold! If you can treat every customer that you have just like you would like to be treated as a customer your business is most likely to flourish, if you don’t well you know what happens. The problem for many new business owners is that they are not sure how to make sure that their customers are satisfied. One easy way is to ask them. Yes, sounds like a no brainer but many people never think about this. Give them a call, send them an email or what ever it takes to make sure that they are happy with their purchase from you, if they are not make it right. This is one sure way to win over your customers one by one and if you are lucky they will tell a couple friends about how special you made them feel!

Save Money, Save Time Be Pro-Active

There are so many benefits to being pro-active that it really is not worth listing them all here. The fact is that being pro-active is one of the biggest tools that any successful marketer can have on their side and all you have to do is “Just Do It” it does not cost a dime to be pro-active and in most cases it can prove to be a huge cash maker down the road as your business begins to bloom into a huge online money making machine. Just keep in mind that what you do today may not pay off for a long time, but you are laying down the groundwork for the rest of your life and maybe even for your children; if you do it right now, you won’t have to re-do it later!

If you are one of those guys who like to procrastinate, let me tell you what you need to do with procrastination, just put it off. You will have plenty of time to procrastinate later, get your business done first!

To Success,

Nick Simpson

Are You Building A Mailing List Or A Spam List?

So here is a question that I many times get asked by a new online marketer who is concerned about building a mailing list for their business.  I have heard it a thousand times before, so I am sure that the same question may be on the minds of some of the readers of the Professional Online Marketing blog as well.  The question usually comes out like this, “I don’t know if I can build a list, I don’t want to spam people for money” or maybe like this, “Who will sign up for a spam email list, I hate those things”.

This may sound familiar or maybe it does not.  I can tell you that I never sent out a single piece of spam email in my life and I have many mailing lists with thousands of subscribers.  My readers are happy to receive my messages, they are responsive to my products and have never once accused me of spamming them.

So What Is It That I Am Doing That These Other Guys Are Not?

Maybe absolutely nothing, but if you want to learn what it takes to build a email list that gets results and not a huge list that gets put into your readers spam folder, keep reading. There are a few things that come into play, so I apologize upfront for the lengthy post here, but it had to be said to make sure that everybody understands how to make a killing with their own email list and not fall into the “internet marketing spam” categorizeation.

What Makes People Excited To Open Email Sales Letters?

So lets get down to brass tacks here folks, you may have heard some super duper guru tell you that that the Money Is In The List and you know what there could not be a more true statement.  The problem is that many people though time have either registered for email before the ICANN Spam Act was in place or they have simply registered for a mailing list that did not have anything to do with what they really are interested in.  If you have joined, oh I don’t know, lets say a daily deals mailing list.  I bet you are pumped every morning to see what the deal of the day is from that mailing list provider.  Now, this is only a great example because in all actuality these people are shoving products down your throat, but at the same time you are Excited To See what they have for you.

So do you consider this spam?

Of course you don’t think that this is spam, but by most peoples definition of spam mail, that is exactly what it is!

So Here Is The Secret

The big secret or epiphany if you will, is very simple. The only difference in between a spammy crappy mailing list and powerful money building list that folks are dueling at the mouth to read, is their expectations and what you deliver.  If you have a mailing list that guarantees to deliver some amazing golf tips, you had better darn well deliver on your promise! This is what those “in the industry” call adding value and if you are not doing this, then most likely people think you are spamming them too. Now, if you want to put in some special promotions in your list, go for it.  As long as you continue to deliver on your promise, add value and build a relationship with your readers, they will not only be open to your product and service suggestions but may even be glad to buy from you simply because you have already helped them so much.

How Do I Profit From A Solid Mailing List

If you really want to make money from your mailing list, the first thing you can do is forget about the money.  Ask yourself what you would want to find in your inbox if you have signed up for the same list. Then either write the content for your auto-responder or if you can’t, simply outsource it. If you need help creating content, contact me and I would be glad to share my sources with you.  The second thing you should focus on is building a relationship, are you talking to your readers in first person? Are you telling them what you have learned and how hard it was to get to where you are?  Are you using seasonal references?  These are all things you can do to make your list more personal-able and this does count!

Now that your mailing list has some True Value added to it go back and look at the different sequences in your mailing list.  Think about what product may tie into each message.  You can add the products at the bottom of each message or my personal favorite, just sprinkle your adverts in between the “meat” of you mailing list and let the subscribers know that you have found something special that they may also enjoy.  If you want to build a powerful mailing list, signup for about 10 mailing lists on the same topic that you are working on, read every message and learn what they do.  Once you have studied a few successful mailing lists you will be a master and ready to start blowing up your own list in no time at all.

To Success,

Nick Simpson

Are You Tracking Your Success?

If you are building an online business and you are trying to grow you business, tracking your success and failures is a must.  There is no way to move your business forward when you do not know which efforts are effective and which efforts are simply wasting your time and money.

Becoming a successful online business owner is difficult enough without flying blind, but this is what many new online marketers do. They take action and plenty of it and when they start to see results, they simply believe that what they are doing is working.  This may be true, but without some hard stats on what you have done and what the positive results are you really have no way of telling. You may have received all of your sales from one single effort and everything else you have done was in vein. If you can attribute your sales and conversions to specific actions or tasks then this will allow you to spend your time more effectively and more importantly, get more results with less effort.

Tracking Results

Depending on what type of business you run online there are many different scripts, apps and services you can use to track your results.  For basic website information you can use a variety of web stats options if you have a cpanel hosting account and you can always use the free Google Analytics as well. Google Analytics does offer some very powerful metrics that can be displayed in some very useful ways.  If your online business involves affiliate marketing most websites offer their own “on site” tracking information so you can measure click through and conversions on specific products or services. EzineArticles, HubPages and Squidoo are some very popular and free websites that are used to promote websites and if you are not already using these great tools, you should look into them.  Each of these sites offers great tracking information and this along with your other data sources can give you a realistic look at the big picture.

Focus On Successes

We all know how important positive reinforcement is and even when it is for yourself, it is just as important. When you start finding which of your articles are getting results, study them.  Once you find a few common themes or styles in your writing of you most successful article you can focus on producing more with the same successful characteristics. If you are working with sales pages, capture pages, or squeeze pages split testing is a must, it is important to only change one factor on your split tests at a time. This will allow you to quickly zero in on the exact factors that make you pages more successful, but keep testing. These are some quick ideas to get you headed in the right direction.  The point is to keep your eyes on the prize and keep moving toward your goals and remembering not to focus on your less successful efforts online.

How To Deal With Failures

Lets face it, no matter how well your online marketing efforts pay off, you will always have your fair share of failures too. The biggest thing you can do to deal with failures is to simply forget about them and keep moving on to your next success.  There are some areas of online business that you may find you are having more failures than successes. If these are important parts of your online business, you may consider outsourcing this part of the business or finding some educational information to help you become stronger in these areas of you business. The hardest thing for most online business owners is simply identifying these problem areas. If you are using the correct tools to enumerate your efforts, you should be able to find where you need help very easily.

To Success,

Nick Simpson

Creating Winning Partnerships

Online business is just as tough and time consuming as many brick and mortar businesses.  There are many single entrepreneurship who have found success by themselves.  However, most all who have made their way in the online business world by themselves would agree that it could have been much easier if they had just had some other like minded people to work with. This can be achieved in many different ways.  You do not have to form standard type business partnerships to work together and be productive on the internet today.  You can find groups on many social sites that can help you form relationships with others who are working on similar projects and this can be a great way to get your feet wet and see who else is out there that you may be able to work with in a more professional manor in the future.

Finding people who are not only interested in, but also active in the same type of business that you are involved with is a “must” when it comes to finding successful people to partner up with in the online business world. Online forums and other social sites can simply be a goldmine to find great people and start new successful business partnerships and relationships.  You must make sure that you start off by building an accurate and informative profile on any site that you plan on using as a resource.  This will not only let others see that you a legitimate business person, but this can also attract others with similar interests and businesses to you.

Many people build partnerships by using outsourcing services. These again are not necessarily a traditional business partnership, but they can be very effective and prove to be just as beneficial as others.  You should try to use outsourcing services where you can contact those who are completing online tasks for you. Then you can grow your relationship and build a stronger partnership as you continue to work with the person or persons helping you grow your business.

Even after you have cultivated a successful business partnership, you need to always keep your personal information private. There are some people out there who have not had success online and will try to copy or steal your work and success.  This is just a fair warning, because the internet can be a crazy place and some who do not have the perseverance to build a successful business for themselves will pray on others that are looking for help. Just be careful and make sure to move your business forward without allowing people who you are not working with face to face to have access to anything that is not recoverable or reconstructible, just in case.

To Success,

Nick Simpson

Maximizing Strengths and Minimizing Weaknesses

Maximizing strengths and minimizing weaknesses is a long way to say, focus where you are effective.  There are so many people in standard businesses and online businesses that try to be a jack of all trades, this is fine and dandy but a smart many once told me that a jack of all trades is a king of nothing.  I am not trying to make those hard working marketers and businessmen feel bad about all the effort that they are putting into their business in hopes that it will eventually flourish and become a self sustaining and very profitable venture. Rather, I am offering some words of wisdom that may help you utilize your time and focus on areas that are most effective for yourself and the growth of your business.

Get More For Less, Really!

The concept is simple, excerpt your energy where it is worthwhile. I was at a huge business conference about ten years ago and one analogy that a speaker there used still hold just as true today as it did then. He was talking about people who would waste hours of time just “trying” to do something for themselves that they could have got done for them just by asking another, just to find out that their time had been wasted and that the project was total chaos. He said “I know you all know the popular band The Rolling Stones, right? Do you think that the members of The Rolling Stones book their own concerts, setup their stages or tear down the equipment after the concert?”  Of course we all know that they do not do any of these things. He went on to say “The Stones are good at one thing…Music! That is why they are famous and they know this. They do not even try to do the things that they are not good at because they understand the simple concept of focusing their energy on their strengths and outsourcing the work that they are not good at to others”.

I Can’t Believe I Have Wasted So Much Time

This story was very compelling to me at the time, especially if you knew what business I was in at the time.  However, the concept is solid.  If you are great at dealing with customers, but really don’t do well with book keeping. No problem, hire an accountant. If you are great at content creation, but cannot perform a quality marketing campaign to save your life, hire a seo service.  If your great at creating valid links and creating a buzz for your site, but hate writing articles, get a content writer to pick up the slack.  There is no reason to spread yourself so thin and believe that you have to do it all.  That is simply not true.  If you don’t have the startup capitol to hire workers, ask your friends, try to build some partnerships and give a portion of profits to workers or do something! Just don’t allow yourself to drive your business into the ground when you can find another person that excels where you lack.

How To Implement

It really is a simple problem with a simple solution. If you are not sure where your weakness is or if you are trying to find a person to help you pickup in your weak areas and can’t seem to find the right person for the job.  Feel free to contact me, I work with many people who are looking for and offering services and I would be glad to see what I could do to help you with your business. I simply love to see others succeed and if you need a hand, I am always here for you.

To Success,

Nick Simpson

Building Your Online Business With Integrity

Many people start off an online business with every intention of being a very trustworthy marketer that has much integrity.  However, many people get pulled down the dark alley known as the easy way.  You know the guys who have this problem, they are the ones who copy your websites, steal your ideas and stamp their name on them and even may go as far to start smear campaigns to attempt to hurt their competition.  This along with many other blackhat methods of internet marketing may show a quick dollar in return, but inevitably end up in self destruction.

It seems that the easy way is not always so easy down the road.  This is why anybody who plans on making a lifetime business out of what ever industry they choose to get involved with online, have to understand that the internet is not going anywhere and neither are the footprints of all the “shady” things that you may try to build your business along the way.  The only way to build a constantly growing and long lasting income on the internet is through hard work, continued learning and always holding true to the highest standards and business ethics.

For some that read this, these words will be forgotten before they leave the page, for those who want to grow a huge stream of online income, they will remember where they read this and take heed before trying something that is less than savory. The point here is this, you must understand that every time you write something online, everytime you send out an email to your list (goldmine) or even when you comment on other people blogs or social profiles, you are making an impression. This impression is just part of what people will eventually come to know as you and your business.  This means that when you run into a hot head, let them be just that, when you see something that makes you angry, talk to somebody who can help, when you find an easy way to drop thousands of links, think about what google will think of this technique.

One thing that has helped many marketers online, is learning to become pro-active.  The problem with simply “reacting” to a problem or situation, is that in most cases you act out of your emotional state, even when ill placed.  If you want to be known as a professional online marketer, you must act like one at all times.  This is of course easier said that done and many marketers on the internet who could have been great, will find their failings soon after an emotional outburst online.  This is a problem that you can correct before you fall into this very common pitfall for new internet marketers.

So keep your head up and keep moving forward.  The only people who loose in the online marketing business are those who quit or those who stop bettering themselves.  If you can keep these simple rules in mind you are well on your way to success and are hopefully beginning to build a strong online presence for yourself and your company.

To Success,

Nick Simpson

Welcome To The Professional Online Marketing Blog

This blog is dedicated to bringing its readers high quality information about real internet marketing tactics that have been tried and true for others. You will not find the flavor of the week internet marketing strategies that other websites are flaunting here. Just like any business an internet based business must be build though time.  If you want to build a strong online presence, it cannot be done overnight and it cannot be done alone.

Most all other online marketing sites are really promotion sites in disguise.  We do not review every product that gets added to clickbank just hoping somebody will buy from our links.  This site is here for real world information that any webmaster or internet marketer can implement into their own business to boost productivity, traffic and sales.

We hope that all the information we share here is useful and that you take the time and effort to apply what you learn. These very methods have paid off for other online marketers and we know that they can for you too, if you put in the work.

Thank you for reading and please feel free to comment on any of the posts here, so we can bring more of what our readers are interested in and less of what they are not to our site.

- Nick Simpson