Perry Belcher is an Internet Marketing anomaly. He appeared on YouTube around the end of 2008 with some interesting concepts in using social media for marketing and an apology for his past endeavors; defrauding consumers with fake healthcare products. Controversial he may be, his ideas on social media managed to reach a wide audience with his use of….social media.
Some of his videos are infact very entertaining, and this one I found particularly useful for organizing daily tasks and ideas. However I have added my own twist. Watch the video and then check out linoit to take this concept to another level.
The ingenuity of this video though is that it was part of a carefully orchestrated plan to sell a high priced course in social media marketing. Don’t doubt Perry’s ability to use NLP techniques to pre sell you with his wacky brand of internet marketing.
In order to make my WordPress installations run as smooth as possible I devised a checklist for when I set up a new blog. This is a great starting point to ensure the blog is search engine optimized and reasonably well guarded against spam attacks amongst other things.
Fantastico. To make the wordpress install as quick and painless as possible I will go to my hosting accounts Cpanel and select Fantastico. From there I will simply install WordPress directly on the server. If you don’t have a clue how this Fantastico business works then take a look at this tutorial for using Fantastico to install wordpress on your website. Even better there is a video at the bottom of this page.
Theme. I have often spent hours trawling the net looking for a theme, but there have been some great looking themes available from within the WordPress install lately. One of my current favorites is the Arras Theme. This is a highly configurable magazine style theme that can be used to make a basic blog look like a highly interactive website.
SEO. One of the best methods for improving the SEO of the blog is to use this nifty FREE traffic getting software by Jeff Johnson. This basically performs some tweaks that will make SEO for your blog a piece of cake.
Plugins. Once you install the SEO software you are presented a list of plugins to install that are required to make the tweaks. I usually install all except the ’sociable’ plugin. For this I use AddThis WordPress plugin. I also add the Google Analyticator plugin. This will allow you to enter your Google Analytics tracking code so you can analyse where your blog traffic is coming from. ‘There are thousands of extra plugins that can be used depending what you are trying to do with the blog. More on the extra ones I use later.
Akismet API key. This is a very important step. You need to have registered an account with wordpress.com to get your API key. Once you have it enter it into into the box on the akismet page in your blog admin area. This will track spam comments that are posted. One time I neglected to activate the akismet and the blog came under attack from spam comments at a rate of 1 every second. There were over 17 thousand spam comments pointing to viagra sites. I had manually go into the SQL database and delete all the entries.
Optimize The Blog. Using Jeff Johnsons blog software I optimize the blog. This will fix up any tweaks that are required after installing any plugins. Also enter in your blog headers and keywords using the SEO for wordpress plugin that was installed.
Fix Permalinks. The optimizing that Jeff Johnsons software does include changing the permalinks to/%post_id%/%postname%/.
I prefer the format
/%category%/%postname%/
as this includes more words for the search engines to pick up. Maybe I’m being a bit over the top with my SEO, but post id only gives us numbers instead of words. Please note that once you optimize the blog again using Jeff Johnsons software it will change your permalinks back to the post_id format. This will lose any inbound links to existing posts in the category format.
Once all these are done I’m pretty much ready to start posting and will add custom plugins and widgets as required depending on the blog.
About a year ago I turned to the internet in search of ways to earn a living online. The recording studio I was working at had just shut up shop, the label I was involved with had recently fallen apart and I figured I needed a break from music for a while.
After digging around on some internet message boards I found out about ‘Internet Marketing’. I ended up signing up for some ‘online coaching program’ and registered this domain www.davedunnonline.com.
Over the next couple of months I discovered what a crock of shit most internet marketing is. Especially in the ‘Make Money Online’ arena. Eventually I ended up pulling this blog down in dismay, discouraged at the thought of the sheer amount of crap that is peddled in the hopes of getting people to buy crap so that they can be sold even more crap. I wasn’t down with it and I didn’t think it was what I could call ‘job satisfaction’.
But I did learn a lot. I realised what makes the internet work and why certain sites place certain adverts in certain places. I realised I’d been gamed a few times before I even discovered internet marketing; by some savvy marketers simply ’showing me something for FREE’. (No you can’t ever win at roulette and the Docs Money site is an absolute joke)
Over the past year I have absorbed ‘internet marketing’ till it came out of my ears. I’ve had to abandon 3 email addresses due to the sheer amount of lists that I signed up with at the beginning. It actually became overwhelming.
One of the lowest points was about six months into it all. I’d be getting an email from some marketer or other every 5 minutes. I went and vented my frustrations on some guys blog.