I think of myself as part writer, part musician, part philosopher and part adman. But mostly adman.

My adman career began when a friend and I provided the ads between segments of a show our Grade 10 Class put on many years ago. It has continued in fits and starts ever since.

I studied philosophy in University - mostly political philosophy. But I felt especially attracted to the philosophy of education because it has always seemed to me that education has a lot in common with persuasion and propaganda and therefore with advertising.

I like advertising, think it is reasonably important, and also think far too many people are naively unware of how much their attitudes are influenced by it.

Many people think advertising is, by its very nature, manipulative, deceptive, and misleading. I don't agree.

I also don't agree with those who assume it is acceptable to mislead others as long as they don't tell out and out lies. Many people in internet marketing are like this. The claims they make are often nonsensical and completely indefensible and yet many of us think wholesale exaggeration of this sort is perfectly acceptable. Usually because we think it is not possible to distinguish between exaggeration that is informative, and exaggeration that misleads and deceives. I don't believe it is very difficult at all.

I also don't like it when people say "you are entitled to your opinion." What they mean is "I don't want to discuss this with you any further, and I am too lazy, undisciplined, or close-minded to think about this topic anymore. So you are entitled to your opinion."

Thanks. I really appreciate that.

But the truth is I do not subscribe to the theory that at some point "we must just disagree." I know most people these days believe this, but I am not one of them. This suggests that at some point dialogue must end because there is nothing we can talk about, or we are too unreasonable, too unimaginative, too lazy, or too fixated on some hidden agenda to continue talking. This is what leads to disputes and ultimately to war, and why some guys think it is better to fire missles at "implacable enemies" than to engage in dialogue with them.

Rick Hendershot,
November 25, 2007
Conestogo, Ontario, Canada

Of course these are not "new" SEO principles. These are just new insights I have had since studying various things on the importance of narrowly focusing your sites on more specific rather than general keywords.

Frankly I have always assumed that a healthy does of PPC was necessary to get the right kind of traffic. But I am changing my mind. I now have some definite targets in mind for about 10 different websites and three or four different blogs that I have simply not had time enough to properly focus.

We'll see if the "new" principles work. You can see a fairly detailed description of these principles at my online promotion site.

Here's the video ad...

Linknet Video is not just another video sharing service. It is a video production and traffic generation service. We create regular videos on interesting features and then embed client video ads into them. For more information see Linknet Video.

If you're like me and know very little about StumbleUpon, then this series of blog posts should help a lot. RobbDogg has written an ongoing series of posts about StumbleUpon where he describes how it works, how to get friends and fans, how to get involved and use that involvement to get exposure for your own stuff.

Check out Robb's StumbleUpon series here.

This is a bunch of materials about using Web 2.0 sites for marketing and traffic generation, which were turned into a membership site. The site contains tons of reports, audios and videos as well as a members forum where you can share ideas and insights.

With all the materials available for downloading right off the bat you get your $29/mo back in about 5 minutes.

I haven't had time to absorb many of the materials, but I did take a look at the overview of StumbleUpon called "StumbleUpon Traffic Stampede". This is exactly what I needed to help me figure this site out without spending hours and hours to get going. It describes how SU works and what you should and should not do to get involved.

There are similar reviews for Digg, Delicious, Propeller, Squidoo and others.

As with all the Web 2.0 sites, it's all about content and participation, and these reports make that perfectly clear. They are not guides describing how to spam social networking sites. Quite the contrary. They describe how to network, make connections, get your own material noticed, and so on.

I highly recommend Jack Humphrey's Social Power Linking.

Here's a collection of photoshop videos that will be useful to anyone who uses or wants to use Photoshop. Check out the free photoshop videos here.

For expert advice and professional article marketing service see Linknet-Promotions. For examples of informative articles check out this article site.

Often the smartest advice you can get is to outsource your article marketing to an article marketing service where the impact of your article marketing efforts is fully utilized.

You should also make use of techniques that will help you avoid the duplicate content filter. This is a process used by the major search engines such as Yahoo, Google and MSN to determine if articles are just duplicates of each other. When they find hundreds of duplicates of your articles you will not get credit for the links on most of the articles and this will severely impact the effectiveness of your article marketing.

Here is a tool to help you outwit the duplicate content filter:

Unique Article Wizard - creates unique versions of your articles and distributes them to hundreds of sites.

Unique Article Wizard is one of the tools we use to get the most out of our Article Marketing Service.

This video is from Linknet Promotions - online promotion

It is easy to gloss over the significance of this... to just say, "Good good, I know and I believe" and then do nothing about it. Because we get caught up in the mad scramble to promote our websites by getting "traffic" or "links", and we forget that nobody will visit our site - or if they do, they won't stay long - if we don't have something helpful or useful for them to see, read, watch or hear.

This is the other side of the Search Engine Marketing problem that is too often misunderstood or its significance too often underestimated.

Generally speaking website promotion will be successful and web traffic will come your way because people are interested in what you have to offer. The search engines analyze your content, draw conclusions about it, and then reward you for what they take to be the value of what you are offering.

Many of us in the web promotion business see Page Rank as a direct reflection of this reward. But Page Rank is only an indirect indication of your site's "value" as determined by Google.

It is much more important to score high in the search engine results for your primary key terms. This will turn directly and almost immediately into traffic, will begin to attract links, and will in turn influence your Page Rank.

This is what we call a Content Oriented Approach to Search Engine Marketing. Here is a basic outline of how it works:

1. Do a detailed analysis of your primary keywords, and settle on specific keyword groups. Each keyword group should be targeted to just one fairly narrow niche.

2. Create "web properties" that you want to drive traffic to. This is normally your primary website, but should also include other supporting sites such as a tightly focused blog, and/or a Squidoo lense. In other words, each keyword group might have three or four focused web properties all of which are aimed at pulling traffic on that keyword group.

3. Build content for each of your web properties. This is critical. Make your website's home page tightly focused on your primary keyword. Employ standard SEO strategy. If your primary keyword is, for instance, "carpet cleaning Chicago", then use that keyword within the title, headline and in several places throughout the article. Add variations and related keywords drawn from your initial keyword analysis.

4. Consider putting a detailed article on your home page that focuses directly on your primary keyword. You can safely assume that if the search engines see a long detailed article about "carpet cleaning Chicago" on your page with lots of related terms such as "carpet cleaning techniques", "carpet cleaning FAQ", "tips for carpet cleaning", etc., they will assume this is useful information that potential readers will be interested in. Do not use garbage content. Do not spam. Just use quality text drawn from your expertise. If you need someone to help you write it, then hire someone to do it. You will not regret it.

5. Do the same with your secondary web properties - blog, Squidoo page, etc. Add content that focuses on your primary keywords and optimize accordingly.

6. Continue to add content to your blog and Squidoo page until you have a number of articles which are tightly focused on your primary keywords or closely related keywords that are part of this keyword group.

7. Do not use these secondary web properties just to create links to your primary website. View them as "traffic bait" - places to draw traffic that can then be redirected to other target URLs if need be.

8. Once your targeted web properties are in place start an intelligent link building program aimed at building traffic, and search engine exposure for each of them....

More on this link building aspect in the next post.

1. To drive traffic to specific target pages, and

2. To build links to target pages and enhance the SEO focus of those target pages.

Here are some tips to increase the SEO impact of your article marketing efforts. Some of these things may seem obvious, but it is surprising how often they are not done by article writers.

1. Make sure your target page (the page you are linking to) is properly optimized for a specific keyword phrase.

2. Include that keyword phrase in the article title.

3. Use that keyword phrase in the link or links pointing to your target page (as anchor text).

4. If you are submitting your article in different versions - using a service such as the Content Spooling Network or Unique Article Wizard - include some variations in your anchor text. For instance, if the keyword phrase you are targeting is "golf swing improvement", use variations such as "golf swing tips", "golf swing advice", or even just "golf swing."

5. When distributing your article make sure you place it on the sites that Google considers the most influential - such as ezinearticles.com - Some distribution services will distribute your article to lots of lower tier sites but leave these better sites out. For a partial list of such sites see SEO and Article Marketing.

The list is here Do Follow blog roll.

There must be about 400 blogs in the list. The fact that these bloggers have added their blogs to this list means they want you to visit and make comments. They view this as a way to generate traffic.

There are two distinct issues you have to address, and for the newbie both of them can be pretty overwhelming.

First, there is the little problem of actually creating the video. I don't want to get into production in this post. I'll save that for later. Right here I want to address the second issue...

How do I get my video on my website?

The first thing you have to do is choose whether you want to self-host (host it on your own site, or another site you have access to) or use one of the video sharing sites such as Youtube. (I will use "Youtube" as a short form for "Youtube or other video-sharing sites".)

The advantages of self-hosting are that you have full control over the way it will appear, what the thumbnail will look like, and a few other things. You will also not get the Youtube branding or accompanying ads that they are often putting with videos now.

This little software program helps you overcome the two biggest problems with posting to bookmarking sites. First it helps you register for multiple sites. It makes a very tedious process about as simple as it could be.

Second it helps you post URLs. You just punch in a URL. The program goes and gets the meta-data right from the site you want to bookmark, including Title, Description, and Tags (keywords). You then add variations because it will randomize your titles and descriptions.

Then you click and away it goes.

Right now it posts to about 20 different sites, and has the potential to post to many more once I understand better how it works.

We expect to be bundling this service in with our website promotion services in the very near future.

Check out Bookmarker Demon.

Check out the video at SEO for Video, Part 2

But a lot of bloggers use the "nofollow" attribute meaning that the search engines won't follow the links and give you credit for them. If it's link value you're after, then you want to post on blogs that don't use the "nofollow" attribute.

In this little $1 item you'll be shown how to find blogs that don't use the "no follow" attribute, and you'll also be given a list of many top ranking blogs that are happy to have your comments.

How To Find PageRank-Passing Wordpress Blogs