Here is a great little video that gives away tons of secrets if you’re thinking of launching a viral video campaign on the web. There are tons of examples like, the video for Chocolate Rain, the Laughing Baby , and others…

But how do we launch our own Viral Video Marketing Campaign? Now that’s a good question…

Watch this video and learn. Great stuff!

All right, I have finally done it. In an effort to bring my clients great results, I have, for far too long, neglected this site. So, with a burst of energy, I did a major overhaul and full redesign.

I feel it is very representitive of my overall work and felt it was very important to showcase that work in a frame that did it justice.

I would appreciate any and all comments

Have a great day

Lennie

I am so happy to announce, that the FreeMarket Media Group e-book entitled “The WordPress Beginners Guide” is available. This e-book walks you step-by-step through everything you need to know about the WordPress blogging system.

Even if you’re not a beginner, this book is for you. Why? Because this book will walk you through everything WordPress’ completely revamped version 2.5 has to offer

There are a ton of content management systems out there but in my humble opinion WordPress has a leg up on the competition. On the Web you’ve always had really only two choices.

(A) Become a coder and build a website or (B) use a content management system like Joomla and become a coder. But now with WordPress version 2.5 you can manage everything on your website from one simple administration area. Can you send an e-mail? Then you can use WordPress.

In this guide, I will walk you step-by-step through everything WordPress has to offer. But that’s not all. I have also included a special section in this book called “the keyword primer”. With the keyword primer you will learn how to leverage the power of your WordPress blog to get killer search engine rankings.

Packed with over 60 pages of information, including pictures that cover every step in the process, you will learn to quickly master your WordPress blog.

Isn’t it time to ramp up your presence online? The new paradigm dictates that if you want to do business online, you need a blog! Common wisdom also dictates that if you have a job an hour from home and there is no public transportation, you need a car. But first you need to learn how to drive. Consider this your WordPress blog “driver’s education”.

The developers of the WordPress blog spent over six months completely redesigning and re-engineering WordPress. So, if you’re a beginner, and you need tools to get you started, then this book’s for you. If you’re familiar with Word press and want to make the jump to version 2.5, without the learning curve, then this book’s for you too.

Because I want you to have this book, I’m gonna make a special deal. Looking around the Internet I found an outdated WordPress e-book for $97 and I’m sure it’s still selling. I found another WordPress tutorial e-book, yes, this one is outdated to, but you can have for just $40.32. Well, that kind of sucks doesn’t it. Just what we all want to do, go out and buy a beat up used car for more money than the brand-new one. So here’s a special deal, I want you to have the shiny new car. $17! That’s right, only $17. And the best news, once you buy, you get to download this book immediately and get your WordPress blog working for you.

I have had a running argument on one of the popular search engine optimization and blogging forums about whether or not Google favors posts in its Blogger blog platform in search engine results. Now, that’s neither here nor there, what I’m going to talk about today is just how damn cool Google really is.

Did you know that Blogger has its own channel on YouTube? I LOVE IT! The folks at Google, who own both Blogger and YouTube, have saved me the trouble of building my own Blogger tutorials. Talk about Good luck!

If you haven’t heard this from me before, Google is so loaded with great, free resources: From Gmail, to Webmaster tools, to Google analytics, to add words, and now these great blogger tutorials.

Blogger is such a great tool. Here’s how you work it. Create a blogger blog, making sure that you name the blog using the keywords you are targeting. Add a handful of relevant ARTICLES ( blog posts). Make sure that you use your keywords in the body of all the posts on this blog. Using the keyword method of linking, link that keywords or key phrases to the relevant page on your site. Not only are you getting “backlinks” you are getting back links from a site with relevant content using relevant keywords leading to a page with more relevant content.

What a great strategy to use.

As a little primer, here is a tutorial explaining how to set up your first Blogger blog.

What are you waiting for, get your blogger blog today. Here’s the link to the blogger tutorials.

Improve your marketing and sales with some auto responder Improvements. Try some of these:

1. Publish free reports to send via your auto responder. The reports should be related to your business or web site & contain info, ads and links to your sites. People love getting freebies

2. Collect vital customer satisfaction information by publishing a survey to send via auto responder to those who sign up on your site in exchange for a free eBook, software or trial period at your membership site.  This type of information will help you understand their needs, likes & dislikes better.

3. Instead of answering each customer question that is e-mailed to you, publish “Frequently Ask Questions” and make them available via auto responder to those who sign up. To save time and support headaches.

4. Instead of publishing all of your customer testimonials or endorsements on your website, publish only a few there. And set up an auto responder form that invites visitors to receive a complete list via your autoresponder. Give them a power-packed list; it’s more effective to include all of them.

Mix and match. Change your auto responder strategy to change your auto responder results!

Top sales pros confirm that it often takes seven or more communications or sales messages before prospective customers make a purchase. They also confirm that itís generally easier to sell to a referral, because someone they know gave positive testimonial about their products or services.

What would happen if you combined both of these powerful ideas? A nifty and thrifty two-step. Try this two-step tip:

1. Collect leads with your auto responder. Ask for mailing addresses and telephone numbers, too, for additional ways to follow up with each person. When you download the e-mail digest of everyone’s e-mail addresses and other information from those who requested additional information from your auto responder, follow up multiple ways. Send postcards. Call. Mail sales letters and other promotional pieces.

2. Publish a price list of all the products and services that you offer in an insert, direct marketing package and / or .pdf to be made available via auto responder. You could also include order forms, product descriptions, and other sales material. Then send to the people in #1 above with monthly updates, announcements of new sales and products / services, and a request for referrals.

So why not improve your closing ratio and reach out even farther at the same time? Do the two-step!

The Internet offers many means of affordable marketing with auto responders. Here are a couple of popular ways of using them.

DIRECTORY

Some webmasters set up link or article directories on their sites. They create a directory on a specific industry topic, placing their own ad or banner along the top. Then they invite others to add their website links via a link exchange program, listing themselves in your directory. Or they invite articles to be submitted that include a resource box at the bottom of each with a link to the authorís website. This results on increased traffic as sites link up across the World Wide Web. Enter “link exchange software” or “article directory software” into a favorite search engine for help with each.

TEACH A COURSE

Some marketers write up a simple step-by-step instructional class in their area of expertise. Then they break it up into smaller portions or messages and set them up in an auto responder as email messages, including short ads within each message to invite sales & website visits. Then they invite website visitors to sign up through on online form or email subscription address offered through the auto responder service. As people sign up, they will learn more about the products and services through the teaching series.

Huh?! If you haven’t ever heard this term before, you need to run (yes, run don’t walk) and by Seth Godin’s book, “Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable”.

Imagine driving down a beautiful rural highway when suddenly you see the most extraordinary cow. He’s big, muscular, black and white (like most cows we see) - but he is truly remarkable, unlike any “normal” cow we’ve ever seen. Well, we take note. As we continue to drive we see a few more of these “remarkable” cows. As we see more and more of them, the become less remarkable until we no longer notice them at all.

No imagine that this cow is a bright shiny purple - I think it would be something that we’d  never forget. This is  exactly Seth’s idea.

I started thinking about Seth’s Purple Cow after reading his blog post titled “How to title stuff“.

He gives us 3 ways:

1. Pick a completely descriptive, generic, boring name that precisely describes what’s inside. Like “Shredded Wheat” or “12 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog. This is the one  that Google likes. . .
2. Pick a more clever name that’s designed to entice the reader to read the subtitle, or the first few lines of your post. Your visitor likes this one. . .
3. Pick a name that gets talked about. To create a phrase that you hope will enter the vocabulary.

Now I usually try a combo of numbers 1 and 2, but number 3 is pretty powerful. Seth’s is famous for coing the “Purple Cow”.

Seth Says: Yes, that’s my strategy. My goal is to have people call something a Purple Cow or eviscerate the boss for suggesting yet another Meatball Sundae.

Yes, he coined the  term “Meatball Sundae”.

If  for some reason you don’t know about Seth Godin, you are doing yourself a disservice, seek him out, pay attention and learn.

Coming up with a clever title for something you are doing might be one way. Being innovative in the way you do business is something far more powerful!

In his book Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, Seth Godin says that the key to success is to find a way to stand out–to be the purple cow in a field of monochrome Holsteins. Godin himself may be the best example of how this theory works: The marketing expert is a demigod on the Web, a best-selling author, highly sought after lecturer, successful entrepreneur, respected pundit and high-profile blogger. He is uniquely respected for his understanding of the Internet, and his essays and opinions are widely read and quoted online and off.”

Forbes.com

So what the hell is linkbaiting you ask. . .

Well, let me spell it out for you. Linkbaiting is a method to get other sites to link to your site. There are a lot of ways to do this including, giving away tools, having contests, being a really compelling blooger among others.

Darren Rowse gives us a pretty good list of linkbaiting techniques on Problogger.com.

In his list he includes some things like controversy and attack (to create controversy). Controversy maybe, but  if you are running a business site, the attack method may not be the best plan.

Stuck in an auto responder rut with only your eZine going out regularly? Get out of the rut with some of these ideas for improvements.

1. Provide back issues of your eZine archives via your auto responder instead of hosting all your archives online. This will give your subscribers and web site visitors easy access to them and offers a chance to include graphics, audio and video and other components all rolled up in .pdf files for quick, easy download.

2. Help with tech issues and publish your entire web site, save it in a pdf file, and load it into an auto responder. Sometimes visitors don’t have enough time read your entire site or they lose their Internet connection or time online. So this way, they could print it out and read it offline.

3. You could offer your eBook via an auto responder. Often your visitors won’t have to download it or have the software to read it right away, so this way they can take it ìto goî.

4. For a handy - -and nice legal - touch, you could include the terms and conditions to purchase transactions and load them into an auto responder that is triggered with each purchase. This could include return policies, purchases, refunds etc.

Marketing through auto responder series is a popular strategy to increase repeat website visits and sales. Here is a popular strategy.

EZINE EBOOK

Instead of trying to publish a small daily or weekly eZines, try publishing one large monthly eZine (similar to a monthly magazine) as an e-book format delivered via auto responder, preferably an Adobe .pdf file. You could have it made up of a large number of articles per issue and insert regularly featured areas throughout like inspirational quotes, industry tips, favorite sites and advice from the pros. You could also insert full-color graphics, multimedia components like audio / video file links and ads. Then you can charge a monthly rate, with an annual discounted package purchase, and sell advertising spots to sprinkle in your auto responder announcements for each issue and with an informational series to announce your monthly eZine to new prospects.

In summary, by using customized marketing techniques like an eZine or eBook, tailored to fit your own products and services, you can reach out and increase your website traffic and sales opportunities. Internet marketing can mean more ways to grow your business.

With the awareness of the importance of list building, comes a recent Internet Marketing trend which was started just a couple of years ago for the mutual benefits of all Internet Marketers and mailing list owners.

This method is more recognized as a “starting a Give Away venture”.

In a real sense, a Give Away event is much like a big time version of ad swaps. In a nutshell, a group of mailing list owners partner together and pool in their individual gifts in one limited-time event.

Each participating partner contributes a gift to the event. The gift can be a free product, membership pass or a product he is already selling (if he is kind enough to offer into the event).

The participating partner prepares a Lead Capture Page where he gives the gift in exchange for the subscriber’s email address. In other words, in order for a visitor to download the digital gift, he must opt in and subscribe to your mailing list.

When the gifts are pooled together into one event (site), every partner will then endorse the Give Away event to their own mailing lists.

The result: lots of visitors to one event as a collective effort of several participating partners!

With so many visitors downloading gifts from one focused event, it is a true win-win situation. This is because the visitors get to download several free gifts for their own use and every partner gets to build their own mailing list!

You can easily get notified about a Give Away event in the making by communicating with other Internet Marketers often or participating in Internet Marketing discussion and Joint Venture boards.

Alright, not sure exactly what social bookmarking really is? No worries, the guys at Common Craft have created a short movie that explains the basics. So if you want to get an understanding of the concept of Social bookmarks and bookmarking, have a look.

Now for the purposes of marketing your small business online, with a little help from a whole gaggle (I think that’s the first time I’ve actually used that word in a sentence) of social bookmarking sites, you can increase traffic and increase ranking.This movie walks you through the sign up, bookmarking, tagging and retrieval process on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. This is a great start, but did you know that there are literally hundreds of social bookmarking sites. In addition to del.icio.us, some other great bookmarking sites include: propeller, Digg, ka-boom-it and more.Now for the purposes of increasing business, you follow the same steps as described in the video, only you are using the description and tagging features to force your keyword (tags) to begin showing up in searches. The real beauty of this isn’t simply getting your own page to show up, it’s getting multiple pages to show up on google’s front page for your terms like this example below:

All the links marked in red ultimately lead to the main site. Wanna find out how to accomplish this? Go here and sign up to receive my FreeMarket Media Group Starter Kit.

Also known as the “squeeze page” or “lead capture page”, you can build your mailing list by funneling all of your would-be subscribers through the creation of a landing page. Not only do you do the work just once, your traffic driving efforts can be focused onto just one effective method.

The following are tips in creating a successful landing page that converts visitors into subscribers on a very huge percentage.

Success Tip 1: Offer a freebie in exchange for your visitor’s firstname and email address. I very much endorse this method of building your mailing list. You can offer a special report or a sample of your paid product to your visitor in exchange for their details such as name and email address.

Success Tip 2: The landing page must be written professionally. When writing your page, treat it as if you are writing a sales letter. While you are not necessarily making a hard sale or try to get someone to buy your product upfront, being able to entice your visitors to give their details to you is just as important as selling.

Success Tip 3: Other than your opt-in form and perhaps important disclaimers and terms, there shouldn’t be any other links on your landing page.

Success Tip 4: Rub in the benefits of the freebie you are offering more than a mere subscription to your newsletter. You should focus most of the attention of the letter on encouraging your prospective visitor to download your free offer. Later, you gently remind your prospect that he or she has nothing to pay but just merely subscribe to your newsletter in exchange for the freebie.

As a final reminder and conclusion, in order to build trust, you can include your hand-written signature or a photo of yourself explaining where you are coming from and how you can help your visitor through your free report on offer.

This just in:

With the lack of new dramatic programming on TV the world has finally discovered the vast amount of video entertainment (and otherwise) available online. Or so says Daisy Whitney on TelevisionWeek (tv.week.com)

Even if the writers strike ends this week, the genie isn’t going back into the bottle when it comes to Web video.

With an agreement looking likely to come soon in the three-month writers strike, online video experts aren’t worried that viewers who have been turning to the Internet for their entertainment fix in the last 90 days will suddenly tune out.

“The strike opened many people’s eyes to the wide range of video available on the Internet,” said Jim Louderback, CEO of Internet TV network Revision3. “It’s also going to take [television] a while to ramp back up to full production, which means even more people will find how good online video is.”

Consumer behavior already has begun to shift to the Web. Solutions Research Group recently found that in November, about 20% of Internet users watched a TV show online each week.

You can read more about the Internet Video boom here from TVWeek.com.