Guest Bloggers

Making Money With Your Webinar- Structure Your Content in Five Easy Steps!

September 26, 2012 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

So, you finally decided to try out a webinar to make money. By now, you probably have an idea as to the type of webinar that you would like to make money from. Perhaps you have a pre-recorded webinar on your computer with a teaching or sermon that you would like to share with the world. Perhaps you recorded a how to get a full body workout in only ten minutes or conducted a teaching session on how to thrive in a stagnant economy.
It’s exciting that you’ve selected your topic of interest! The ideas that you have are indeed limitless, and the webinars that you could create are now within your grasp. You want your customers to come to you so that you can answer their needs. Every business fills a need, every customer has a need waiting to be filled. How will you go about filling this need with your webinar?

Dynamics of Content

First and foremost, you’ll want to understand the dynamics of your content and how it brings life or death to your webinar. Content answers the question of how to get your webinar off the ground. It also creates a hunger for the products and services that you have to offer. I don’t just go to any place to get my pizza fix. I go to a specific place because I know that I like the content of their pizza and the way that they make it. In the same way, your attendees are coming to your webinar for the content that you have to offer and the way that you offer it.
If you haven’t already created a webinar, you’ll want to decide on the software to hold a web conference first. Once you’ve finalized the software, you can begin to put the pieces of your webinar’s content together by following these five simple steps to ensure that your content meets the mark and your subscribers leave the session happy that they purchased your webinar!

1.) Know your audience.

If you’re lecturing NASA scientists, you can pretty much skip the fluff and beef up the content with more analysis and scientific research findings.

If you’re creating a session geared for Girl Scouts, you’ll want to include more things that they can relate to.

2.) Decide on your approach.

Do you want the audience to sit through the entire session or do you want to include short quizzes and test sections?

Do you want to be more informational and provide a lot of data or conversational and more relaxed? Which approach fits your audience better? Can you customize it to fit their needs?

Once you know what style approach you will be using, it is much easier to create a consistent webinar that exudes professionalism. There are many, many bad webinars out there that could easily be avoided if the webinars had only been consistent in their approach from start to finish.

3.) Structure your time well.

If you told your audience that you would be discussing XYZ in the webinar, make sure you don’t gloss over XYZ and skip over to ZZZ. I’ve seen this happen too many times and have been completely disappointed when this happens. Not only do I feel cheated out of my time, but I feel betrayed by the bait-and-switch method that seems to run rampant.

If it takes ten minutes to explain a key area, do not take more than that time to explain it. You want to engage your audience and keep them at the edge of their seats wanting more!

4.) Groom your content.

Are some areas too wordy and others lacking in content? Take time to comb through your presentation and cut out the clutter while beefing up the lean parts.

Does your outline convey your actual content? We often think that we have everything perfectly compiled only to discover that a key element was never included. A scan between your actual content (webinar) and your outline will help you get that 1:1 match.

Do your images and illustrations match up with your topic?

5.) Is your content engaging to your audience?

If I am going to sit down and watch a webinar that I paid decent money for, I must be looking for specific content that will help fill my needs.

Have you created the content that adequately satisfies my need (ie, my need to learn how to sew from your created webinar)?

The above are a great starting point when beginning to look into creating a webinar that has lasting results. No only will you come across as more professional, but you will also service a niche group that could potentially return time and time again.

Benjamin Baker is addicted to writing! He is a research hound and fills hard to find searches. He enjoys playing his guitar and spends his free time camping and fishing. He recently discovered www.webconferenceclassroom.com and is starting his own webinar mini-series on how to fish. He is happily married and is the father of 3 growing (and busy) teenagers. He lives in Denver, Colorado with his wife and kids.

How Exact Match Domains Have Weathered the Penguin Storm

September 25, 2012 by Basil Puglisi 3 Comments

Exact match domains have always had the added advantage of direct-type in traffic, giving them certain immunity to algorithm updates. Once an EMD is linked to a website, the webmaster’s behavior has more to do with rankings. Penguin sought out sites with too many exact match anchor text links, but the outcome had more to do with who can get away with it and to what extent. For EMDs, exact anchor text makes up part of the natural link profile.
Brand based anchor text is natural, i.e. www.brandname.com, brandname.com and brand name. When your brand is your exact match domain name, your website is not going to set off those same red flags for your exact match keywords. But, what you’ve done with your link profile beyond that is what does come in to play with Penguin. Is the rest of your link profile diversified with partial anchor text, long tail, and a nice mix of click here, visit this site and straight http: links? That’s most likely what sets apart the ones who were impacted by Penguin and those that were not.

Tier 2 pages

What have the exact match sites done with their tier 2 pages? Chances are, most have targeted different keywords for those pages and not focused on as many brand anchor text links. Natural links to tier 2 pages often contain the title tag. Take a look at your back link profile and look how others linked to those pages. That’s a good indicator of what natural linking to those pages looks like.

Meta Data

Another issue any site could run in to is over-optimized title tags. So, if you repeated your keywords in your title tag in a spammy way, i.e. red shoes, cheap red shoes, not only does that page come across as spammy because of the title tag existing on it, but if a user linked to your site with the title tag, that appears spammy, too.
Keep in mind, if you keep on playing with your title tags, you set off a spam alert. If your title tag is webmaster tools compliant, don’t tweak it. Spammers will often watch if their title tag adjustments results in higher or lower rankings and if they drop, they will go back and revert the changes. This is when you get in to trouble. Your server records the file date every time you make a change and Google uses that data to make an evaluation.
Many exact match domains do continue to rank well in Google post Penguin, but no site is immune to future updates. Moving forward, don’t assume that because your website was not affected that it won’t be. We’ll always be left guessing what the next problematic issue will be.

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Theresa Happe works with Buy Domains, a leading source of domains for sale, including available and exact match domains.

Top 5 Social Media Moments Of The 2012 Olympics

September 8, 2012 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

The 2012 London Olympics will not only be remembered for its spectacular venues and amazing athletic performances, but also for the effect of social media on all aspects of the games. Twitter, Facebook, and other online social media were predicted to explode with content during the Olympics, but no one could have foreseen the direct impact these sources would have.
The following are five of the most significant moments that were directly attributed to the presence of social media during the 2012 Olympic Games:
1. Greek Olympian Barred from Olympics for Racist Tweet
Greece’s top female triple-jumper, Voula Papachristou, was barred from the Olympics by the Greek Olympic Committee because of what they called: a “tasteless” tweet. Her tweet was posted on July 23, 2012 (right before the start of the games) and said: “With so many Africans in Greece… At least the West Nile mosquitoes will eat home made food!!!”
The outcry from Greek social media was immediate and angry. Most of the responders wanted her kicked off the team, including the coalition government partner, Democratic Left. The Greek Olympic Committee responded by expelling Papachristou from the team.
Papachristou did send an apology tweet two days later, but it was too little too late in the eyes of the country – the damage had already been done.
2. Opening Ceremony Outrage
The London opening ceremonies had a lot to live up to after a spectacular show put on in Beijing. There was so much riding on this that leaders in London felt compelled to give their opinions to the world. The day after the opening, an English political party minister, Aiden Burley, tweeted that the ceremony was “leftie multicultural crap.” Prime Minister David Cameron was asked to comment and he said that it was an “idiotic” thing to say.
A lot of the criticism of the Opening Ceremony was directed at the American broadcast. The hashtag “#NBCfail” became extremely popular after the airing. British journalist Guy Adams was so disappointed in the broadcast of the ceremony that he tweeted out the email address of NBC Olympics president, Gary Zenkel, and encouraged people to email him their complaints.
3. Twitter Comments Lead to Arrest
The British athletes had more than just the usual Olympic pressure on them. They were performing in front of the home crowd with the reputation of the nation on their shoulders. British diver Tom Daley is one of the best in the world, but during the men’s synchronized 10m platform event he did not have his best day, and the team from Great Britain finished fourth.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, Tom Daley then received a Twitter message saying that he had let down his father. Tom’s father Rob died in May 2011 from brain cancer. The 17-year-old boy who sent this tweet was then arrested on suspicion of malicious communications (think about how full the prisons would be if this law was enforced regularly for Twitter comments).
4. The Fab Five
Some of the biggest moments on social media were supplied by the American female gymnasts, known as the “Fab Five.” Jordan Wieber was expected to compete for individual gold, but had a disappointing first day. She was able to get past the let down and help them win team gold. After her gold medal in the individual all-around, the whole world was tweeting about Gabby Douglas. Unfortunately, it was not all positive as enough people were tweeting negative comments about her hair that it made national news.
McKayla Maroney was expected to win gold in the vault, but after she fell on her second attempt she had to settle for silver. This did not sit well with the young gymnast and she made disgusted faces during the medal ceremony. A few people got the idea to photoshop the image of Maroney on the medal stand into pictures of famous moments with the caption: “McKayla is not impressed.” If she is a good sport about it, she might be able to combine the popularity of the meme with merchandise and turn a bad situation into a profitable one with the right type of small business shopping cart software.
Surprise star of the team, Aly Raisman, accidentally sent what was supposed to be a private tweet out to all of her followers saying that she was going to a club with the male gymnasts. She quickly deleted it and put out a new tweet about going to bed early, but it was too late.
5. Lochte’s Mom
The American swim team made a lot of news during the Olympics. Michael Phelps became the most decorated Olympian of all time, the women showed dominance and a youth movement that should carry over into the next few Olympic Games, and Ryan Lochte came away with five medals. But the story that really took hold in the world of social media was an interview Ryan Lochte’s mom gave where she told the world that her son doesn’t have long relationships, he has “one night stands.” Lochte quickly stated that he was sure his mom meant that he just goes on a lot of first dates, but the Twitter world was already buzzing.
Obviously, social media is still a relatively new phenomenon to the Olympics, but it is definitely here to stay. So if future Olympians take any lesson away from the 2012 London Olympics it should be to remember to re-read all of their tweets and if there is any question they could be taken the wrong way, just hit “delete” and nobody will ever know.
Daniel Brown covers celebrity news and sports from his hometown of Los Angeles, CA.

How to Avoid the Google Sandbox in a New Blog

July 23, 2012 by Basil Puglisi 1 Comment

If you run a web site, which you want to be visible on the search engines, you should know about the Google sandbox and how to avoid it. The search engine giant, Google, implements measures to keep violators at bay.
What happens if you committed errors using Google’s applications and services? Well, if you incurred violations, Google may remove your web site from its search engine result pages. This is called deindexing. To find out if your web site is not indexed, visit Google and key in your web site domain in this pattern:site:yoururl.com
What Is Google Sandbox?

If you can see your web site moving from the first pages to the 10^thpage or more of the SERPs, then, you are not yet deindexed. But

this is a possible sandbox effect. The sandbox is a place where web sites, especially the new ones, are placed until they have proven their worth in ranking. Sometimes, your web site is thrown into a sandbox if for an instance, your web site ranks for a certain keyword today, and gone from the ranking tomorrow.
What Causes Google Sandbox?

The sandbox happens if you have done something that agitates Google in matters such as SEO and backlinking. Common instances where inviting a sandbox is imminent are when you create myriads of backlinks to your web site in a very short time or create backlinks within poor quality content.
In a way, sandboxing a web site is a punishment done by Google by putting your web site down below the ranking where there is no traffic. But being in a sandbox is not permanent. It can last from a few days to a few months.
How to Avoid Google Sandbox?

Having diverse backlinks is important. If you use hundreds of backlinks by employing ScrapeBox or XRunner, then being sandboxed is very likely. New web sites are more vulnerable to being thrown in a sandbox than older web sites especially iftheir SEOis not well diversified.
For example, if you are running a new web site on diet, and have created two thousand backlinks in its first week of launching into the media buzz, you must ensure that those backlinks are from various sources like comments, articles, blog posts, forums, news releases, to mention a few. For Google, those backlinks could have been generated naturally.
How Should You Plan Your Backlinks?

One sure way to avert Google sandbox is to diversify your backlinks by creating them gradually over time. Rather than rushing in to create many backlinks in a short time, concentrate on creating several backlinks from different sources. While Bing and Yahoo give more value to quantity, Google is giving more weigh to quality of pagerank that each created backlink has.
So, the next time you begin with your SEO campaign for your weight loss web site, ensure that your backlinks are well diversified to avoid the penalty of being sandboxed.
Author:
Richie Richardson is passionate about SEO and SM. He occasionally writes on topics related to weight loss, Bistro MD diet and other diet programs like Medifast and Nutrisystem. Click here to know more about him and his blog. You can also follow him on Twitter @zarrylyms.