Why Bring Down Scam Artists?

If you have more of a personal interest in bringing down these scam artists than merely reporting them to the proper Internet authorities, here’s something you can do. It could be merely a matter of self-gratification. Sometimes it’s just fun to be this kind of devious. It could also, if done right, be far more effective than merely reporting them to ripoffreport.com or a website like that.

First of all, investigate the product and the company. You have chosen an enemy; now you have to know him before you take him on. Study his strengths and his weaknesses. Do his products have more complaints than compliments? Is he actually under investigation for dishonest practices? I know of one particular person that actually has an online coalition of consumers tracking his activity on Craigslist and warning other customers of what he’s doing.

Feeling out Their Internet Marketing

Of course, you can’t just settle with whether or not the product or company is legit. Remember, you’re out to beat him, and to that end you have to know what kind of Internet marketing he has going for him. If they have infomercials on television, there’s a good chance they’re not relying on organic traffic since the phone number and URL are on TV. Look for weaknesses such as that, as it will be vital in your campaign.  See if they’ve already took over on the keywords linking them to scams.  It’s good to also know their strengths.

Exposing Them with Your Website

Now you can create a free blog or a Squidoo lens named for this product or company. Talk about this product on your blog or website. Get some affiliate links and opt-in forms. I’m pretty sure that you see by now what we’re going for.

Now, put the complaints up on your blog or website and post it. There’s a very good chance that you will actually outrank this company’s or product’s home page. If you want to be really nasty about it, you can potentially use heavy Web 2.0 properties to completely move them off of Google’s first page and have it all to yourself. All you have to do is create multiple blogs and lenses in this way and back link.

Of course, someone might call this a smear campaign. These techniques could certainly be used to that end if one so chooses. What I’m talking about here is actually the removal of a scam artist. It’s more akin, I think, to giving a snake oil salesman the tar and feather treatment.

First of all, what is a Blog Carnival? Simply put, it’s a collection of blogs grouped by different subject matter. Different blog authors write the content of each post and submit them to the Blog Carnival’s host. They are then posted together on a host blog in groups of related subjects. The owner of the blog does the posting and provides links to each blog on his site.

Expanding Beyond Your Current Web Space

As said before, this is a great way to expand your influence beyond the confines of your claimed web space. Not only will you draw more traffic to your site this way, but posting to Blog Carnivals also provides quality backlinks, which are vital in drawing in clients. Backlinks are also an important consideration to keep up with in regard to your ranking with Google and other search engines.

Another benefit you get from posting on Blog Carnivals is that you can interact with other bloggers. This can be beneficial in that you can forge new alliances, get new marketing campaign ideas, and draw in more clientele. Never underestimate the power of word of mouth.

Finding the Blog Communities

“Great, so how do I do it?” you might ask. That’s pretty simple. Do a Google Search on “Blog Carnival” or “Blog Communities Publishing Magazines.” You can search for Blog Carnivals yourself and do all the leg work on your own. Depending on just how many Blog Carnivals you intend on using, it can get pretty tedious doing it this way.

You can also subscribe to a Blog Carnival Submission Service, which will do your Blog Carnival posting for you with an incredibly large number of Blog Carnivals, all for a monthly price. Depending on just how much you’re willing to pay, you can outsource nearly every aspect of this process from the blog writing to the actual posting of blogs. That’s all up to you.

As you can see, Blog Carnivals are an easy addition to your internet marketing campaign. It is so easy, in fact, that many marketers overlook it and forget to keep up with their Blog Carnivals. This is where you can get ahead of your competition. Just by investing about 30 minutes a day, you can post on about 20 Blog Carnivals, and be that much ahead of everyone else. That, or have someone else do it for a scheduled price, and get you in even more Blog Carnivals.

Having one or several of these accounts is appealing, especially because it adds a “human element” to your business. Many potential clients like to interact with the people they do business with, and this can lead to having repeat customers, which is particularly vital to many businesses that advertise in online communities. Many of these sites have a verification code during the signing up process, which can subconsciously tell site members that you’re more than some corporate robot.

Using Social Media as a Traffic Generator

Of course, it can’t be forgotten that accounts on these communities are also ripe for advertising potential. If you know how, or if you can imagine how, you can turn a Facebook account into a virtual traffic generator for your website. With a certain arrangement of keyword placement and promotion of your website, as well as backlinks wherever you can put them, you’re certain to increase the traffic to your site. Though more traffic doesn’t always mean more money, you have to have at least some traffic to make money and build your list.

Managing Your Social Media Accounts

Of course, though it would be ideal to collect as many of these social media accounts as you can, there is a certain capacity that you should consider. Either you would have to keep up with these accounts, or you would have to outsource the maintenance on these accounts. Search engines reset the ratings criteria regularly, which could bump an untended LiveJournal account to the bottom of the list. You have to change the content around some; you have to post new blogs; and it’s also in your interest to keep up with those who choose to interact with you on your blog. It’s ultimately better to have five accounts that you can manage than 15 that just go neglected. The latter would be good for an instant rush to the front page of Google, but it could quickly decline after so long of neglect.

Staying on Top of the Top Social Media Sites

So, which social media sites are the best? This is something that constantly changes. As said before, it’s best to pick out the five best. The best way to figure this out during any given month is to check out Alexa.com and do a Google search on “online community” or “blogging community.”

In summary, online blogging communities like Twitter and MySpace are useful for an Internet marketing campaign in several ways. You can advertise your business and provide backlinks to your site. You can also interact with your more-chatty clientele on these sites, and, for that matter, you can network with potential affiliates. So really, the possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

Nearly anyone can create a blog profile. Most blogging websites make profile building pretty intuitive. From there, it’s pretty easy to see how you can bring attention to your business on the basic level. For those with a great imagination and who are in the know with Internet marketing techniques, it’s a virtual gold mine of opportunity. It’s all in what information you enter where.

Blogging Doesn’t Have to Take Much Work

As I said earlier, blogging is relatively low maintenance. You might occasionally change around a few things here and there, and you will have to make blog posts regularly. That could be done on your website, sure. However, there are distinct advantages of using blog services like BlogSpot or WordPress over having a blog on your own website. One is that they are responsible for site maintenance, not you. It’s essentially free labor!

Also, if you don’t have the time or interest to actually do the blogging, you can always outsource it. There are several companies on the Internet that will provide that service to you.  The value of your time versus money is your choosing. Usually you can negotiate a good balance with your outsourcing company.

Advertising Your Website through Your Blog

Another technique is that by advertising your website on one or several of these blogging websites, you can use their ranking to your advantage. Combining the Google ranking of these websites along with the fine art of building a profile that’s a virtual advertising machine will shoot you straight to the top of Google searches. You just have to know how it’s done.

Blog Services are Interactive Lists

Finally, a great resource that using a blog service provides is a means to get feedback from your clientele. You can interact with them in the comments to your blog posts. This provides the advantage of knowing what your customers actually want. You can consider advice that they may give and, in general, make a lasting relationship with many of your clients. This can be advantageous to your business in that they may tell others about your services and draw more people to your profile and from there to your business’s website.

Another benefit with blogging is that you can network with other professionals. Obviously, by now, you’re not the only one who’s using this resource for their business. By building relationships with other Internet professionals, you can avail yourself of resources you might not have had otherwise.

As you can see, blogging is a multifaceted tool to use for listbuilding. You can cover a great number of avenues in marketing, customer relations, and networking using this tool. It’s all a matter of knowing what to do with it.

Enter the Search Engines

After a phase of mass-mailing to get traffic, a new technology called “search engines” emerged.  No longer were users limited to what AOL advertised.  Yahoo Mail and Hotmail came along, as well, and the game seriously changed for marketers.

The first thing we wanted to know was how to win rank on the search engines.  Was it a matter of page design?  Was it a matter of content?  What exactly drove the search engines’ ranking systems?  Someone discovered that “keywords” were how web pages were ranked, and so everyone tried to jam as many of these keywords on their pages as possible.

Google Dubbed Keyword Stuffing “Black Hat”

Eventually, keyword stuffing created a lot of problems in the Internet marketing biz.  Some people began posting pages that were nothing but keywords.  Google decided to put an end to that, coined the term “black hat” for this kind of marketing, and began de-indexing these pages.

Seeking ways around this de-indexing, many marketers changed the ways that they stuffed keywords.  They would match the keyword text to the background.  When that quit working, they created doorway pages (pages that were stuffed with a keyword which disappeared almost as soon as you entered a page), and continued to keep stuffing keywords.

Google’s Black Hat War Necessitated Social Media Marketing

As time went on and the rules for ranking on Google and the other search engines got more complex, someone got the brilliant idea to start marketing on social media.  It had been known for awhile that backlinks, as well as keywords, were essential to boosting page rank.  Most people didn’t bother too much with backlinks, though, since they were so hard to get.

This is where social media marketing, aka Web 2.0, changed the rules.  Now you could generate almost as many backlinks to your website as you could muster and boost your page ranking that way.  Of course, this was subject to abuse, and many social media sites began implementing the nofollow tag when you put your website link up.  Ultimately, what this means is that the search engine spiders no longer count the link to your website.

And so, here we are now.  The latest hot topic in marketing is the microblogs like Twitter and Facebook.  Almost every day, there is something new in how to draw traffic to your website through these sources.  In fact, directing traffic from these sites has almost replaced vying for search engine ranking for many marketers.  After all, if it’s harder to drive traffic from Google than from Twitter, it almost seems natural to use Twitter and forget Google.

The word spam, itself, in terms of electronic interfacing, refers to bulk or excessive stuff. In video gaming, the word spam is used to refer to performing repetitive actions, i.e. “I spammed my heavy attacks on the boss until it was dead.” While this has virtually little to do with Internet Marketing, perhaps it will serve to illustrate that in the world of interactive electronics in general, spam is not just a four-letter word.

Is Spam Electronic Messaging Junk Mail?

Typically, most people see spam as being essentially the electronic messaging equivalent of junk mail. It’s unsolicited, it’s unwanted, and nowadays can sometimes be malicious and dangerous. Most people are familiar with the e-mail version, but there are many other types of media that you can get spammed (or do the spamming) in. These include mobile phones where you have text message advertisements; forum spam where advertisements are posted on an Internet forum; spamdexing where you manipulate a search engine to make your webpage look more popular; blog spamming where advice and links to other websites are placed in comments; newsgroup spams; and IM spamming.

Looking at this list, and ask yourself how many of these things do you actually do? As it turns out, many of us in Internet Marketing spam without quite realizing it. The real trick to this situation is not so much what is ethical spam, but what is effective spam?

Ineffective Spam Lands in the Bulk Mail Boxes

Ineffective spam is, obviously, the stuff that makes it to people’s bulk mail boxes and the websites that cram as many keywords into them as they possibly can, raising a red flag with the search engines. Also, those blog accounts that are configured badly enough that the blog community administrators kick them off for pretty much the same reason that search engines block out some web sites. The point is that no one responds to it.

Effective Spam is Your Mailing List—What People Want

Effective spam is well crafted, and it’s what people on your mailing list are expecting. Far more likely than the ineffective type, there is usually a human behind it instead of some robot that can hardly generate a coherent sentence. It’s also the helpful or insightful person on a forum or blog who just so happens to have a website in his or her signature line or suggests a website for a solution.

In a nutshell, some spam is junk mail.  It’s not wanted and is very imposing.  This is what you should avoid doing.  The spam you want to put out is just the kind people ask for.  My final word of advice is don’t buy mailing lists!

This is especially pertinent in social media like Facebook.  How many times do you think that people “like” something just because their friends do?  By and large, as social animals, many people just like the same things out of habit.

Great, but Does Conformity Do Anything for Converting Traffic?

Yes, in fact, it does.  If you play your cards right, the same reason people do what their friends do can apply to converting traffic.  You just have to convey somehow that these followers’ friends are clicking through to your sales page.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’ve put out a message on Facebook that “This website has the greatest stuff ever!” and provide the link.  People click on the link and see a phrase like “This is what they’re all talking about!” pointing to the link to your opt-in page.  A small little phrase like that will suck them into your list and sales page.

This Thinking Increases Upselling

One of the trickier parts of Internet marketing is upselling.  Most people don’t want to spend more than they absolutely have to for a product.  Sometimes, merely informing them of the benefits of buying the “platinum package” isn’t nearly enough.  A lot of people will just think, “That’s great, but the standard package does all I need.”

Now, try upselling to the platinum package by saying in so many words that “everyone is doing it!”  Even better, say, “Don’t miss out on the great stuff your friends (or competitors) are getting!”  Chances are, with a little bit of social pressuring, more people will cave in to the upsell than without it.

To a lot of people, 15 extra features simply aren’t worth the extra ten dollars to buy the larger packages.  Most people will simply settle for “good enough.”  However, with just a little peer pressure, the upsell is worth the extra 50 dollars as long as everyone else is doing it.

This is quite often how television ads work.  McDonald’s emphasizes that people all over the world are “lovin’ it” with the Big Mac.  7-Up shows how their soda makes a cranky celebrity “bubbly.”  You, too, can capitalize on this in 420 characters or less.

Having this quasi-humanitarian streak may seem refreshing, but it will never make you money. Customers, being what they are, will automatically make choices that aren’t in your best interest if given the chance. When you’re in business, the only place for humanitarian gestures is in the charities that you choose to give to.

Soft Selling Affiliate Marketers Let Money Go

The weaknesses that these soft affiliate marketers have are various. The most common one is that their webpages leave the viewers with too many options. When people shop, they’re looking for the cheapest options available. If the business owner gives too many choices between similar products, the customer will naturally choose the cheapest one. The business owner will lose money from this. It’s not that this principle is necessarily a bad idea, that having similar products with varying prices is non-profitable. However, varying the price too much without giving them a reason to buy the more expensive product will definitely decrease your profit.

Letting People Leave Your Affiliate Page—Bad Call

Another mistake that some new affiliates make is that they allow people to leave their affiliate page too easily. On one hand, this is fine if you’re not selling anything, but if you are selling something, it’s practically an invitation not to spend money at your site. The only links that should be on any page from seeing the products on to the confirmation page should only lead inevitably to the confirmation page. You should not have any other links, period. Keep their paths away from buying your product to a minimum. It’s all just a waste of time and bandwidth otherwise.

Be Careful Who You Do Affiliate Marketing With

Affiliate marketing can be a money waster, also, if you’re not careful. Some people don’t actually pay attention with whom they’re affiliating and advertising on their page. You may wind up advertising for your competition if you’re not careful. That, or you may wind up advertising for something that would actually be an embarrassment for you or make your viewers uneasy.

When all is said and done, it’s amazing how easily people just throw away money that could be theirs. It isn’t about being agreeable, just coming to an agreement. You want your way and they want theirs. Just don’t let them know that they could have what they actually want in this transaction.

For one thing, it establishes you as an authority in your field. The more informative articles you write in your area of expertise, the more respect you get among your peers and the more likely your articles are going to get published. Exposure is the key element here. Of course, you really don’t have to know everything about your field, but a little research can certainly make you seem like quite the expert. The point is, ultimately, to get your company’s name out there.

Keyword Placement is Essential for Online Articles

Gone are the days when keyword placement was the more the merrier. Now, if you squeeze a keyword in anywhere you can fit it, you’ll get flagged as spam. It’s not hard; in fact, it’s easier now to create a natural sounding article with only a very few keywords strategically placed in your document. Keywords are also geared towards exposure. The better your keyword placement is, the higher you will be ranked on search engines. The higher you get ranked on search engines, the more likely it is that you will be spotted.

Although articles should be informative about specific details in your field, you should never fail to mention your company or your product at some point in the article. After all, you’re not just doing this to offer free advice. You’re doing this to drum up business! Without mentioning your company, providing a URL or a hyperlink, you are simply wasting your time.

Speaking of being effective with your time, there is absolutely nothing wrong with outsourcing writers for your articles. Many content writers only need to know the keywords and the subject matter that you want, and they can take it away from there! This may take some shopping around, but ultimately it’s well worth your while to have some outsourced writers for your articles.

Article Writing is Cheap and Time Tested

That being said, article writing is overall less expensive as part of an advertising campaign than buying web space or hiring an advertising agency to do all the work for you. Granted, it can mean more work for you, but especially when you’re first starting up, you can’t afford to pay exorbitant amounts for work that really isn’t all that hard.

In summary, article writing is one of the oldest methods of Internet marketing out there and for good reason. It has worked and still continues to work through all the changes there are in the Internet market. It’s a way to establish a reputation as an expert in your field; it exposes your business by putting your name out there; and it’s by far less expensive than hiring and advertising agency.

Submit Articles to Article Directories

Article marketing is the backbone of almost every marketing campaign, and article directories are your resource for it.  For starters, you will have keyword specific backlinks to your web page.  This can drive targeted traffic to your page, which is great.  The article itself can usually get page one status, since article directories are considered to be authoritative pages by the search engines.

If listbuilding is your objective, then your link in the author bio or resource box will need to lead to your opt-in.  If someone clicked on the link in your bio, then they already want to know more about what you have to say about your niche.  In other words, they want to be on your mailing list.

Blog for Fun and Profit

Writing a blog is another great way to draw attention to yourself.  Simultaneously, you can show that you are an authority in your niche and can entice people to join your list on a more personal level.

You can make the blog itself into a list by using RSS feeds.  Including this button on your blog or some other “subscribe now” option can keep people informed of the developments you’ve made or have noticed in your niche.  If you use products like FeedBurner, you get free analytics on your list.  This will help you to more easily add contextual advertising, which can be challenging on your own.

Get Into Joint Ventures with Other Marketers

While marketing can often be a cutthroat business, joint ventures are still a great way to build a list.  As a beginner especially, the saying “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” applies.  The top shelf marketers can be powerful enemies or powerful allies.  It’s your choice.

If you’ve researched your niche properly, you know what marketers you want to team with.  Write them individually, thank them for what you’ve learned from them, butter them up however you choose to, and propose a joint venture.  Do a list swap, and even if you only get as many people as you give, you’ve still doubled your list.

Giveaways are a Great Listbuilding Strategy

Giveaways are pretty much a staple part of listbuilding these days.  The idea is pretty simple:  If you want people to give you their names and e-mail addresses, you have to give them something in return.  Here are some popular ideas for giveaways.

Self help courses or eBooks are a hot commodity.  Whatever your niche, people like lessons in having the right attitude.  You can also provide free webinars on your niche subjects.  You can also provide marketing tools as an additional impetus.  Whatever your giveaway is, it must have value to the customer and cost you virtually nothing to provide.  In this electronic world of information, it’s pretty easy to come by.