My Internet Marketing Do-Over
Posted on June 21, 2009
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It’s been so long since I’ve written a blog post, it really feels like I’m starting out from scratch here.
There’s a couple of reasons why I decided to have a “do-over” of my internet marketing career.
The first reason is simple… it’s in my blood. I tried to walk away. I tried to do other things, like concentrate on niche markets, be just a service provider to others, and I can’t do it. I love building websites, creating products, testing new traffic methods, and sharing what I find with anyone who will listen.
The second reason is just as simple… I love helping people. I’ve been at this a long time, and although I’ve never reached “guru” status (and never wanted to either), I’ve learned a bit on my trips around the internet marketing block. I love being able to answer questions, share the things I learn, and know that even if just one person “gets” what I’m trying to say and it helps them, I’ve had a good day.
Someone asked me yesterday why I was in internet marketing and this is what I told them:
“I’m not really in internet marketing for the money. I do it because it’s something I can’t not do. I love trying new things, testing to see what kind of results I can get, helping people…. Helping people is a really big one for me — I get a real charge out of seeing someone “get it”. The look on their face when the light bulb goes on is a beautiful thing and even though I’m not very good at being a people person, when I do get a chance to help someone out, it just makes my day.”
What I hope for this new version of The Ritchie Report is that it helps you “get” internet marketing. I hope that you find the information that you need here, and that if you don’t find the answer you’re looking for, you’ll feel comfortable enough to ask questions. The hardest thing I find about blogging in any form is to know what to write about. So please, feel free to tell me what you want to know and I’ll do my best to make sure that you get the answers you need.
So please, don’t be a stranger. Introduce yourself, say hi, tell me what you need help with and we’ll take it from there. Oh yeah, and do leave me a link to your blog so I can return the visit.
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Cool New Add-ons for Firefox
Posted on February 12, 2008
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Well, new to me anyways 
As a reward for completing Day 3 of Dr. Mani’s CHD Awareness Squidoo Challenge (yes, I’m way behind), I’ve allowed myself to spend a half hour catching up on reading twitter posts and I’m finding some really cool stuff here.
First up, Merlene made my life so much easier today by blogging about a Firefox add-on called Vertigo. By putting the tabs down the side I can see everything I’ve got open without having to do the horizontal scroll. (Kinda sounds like a really bad line dance, doesn’t it?) I don’t think I could cope with anywhere near 74 tabs at one time, but I’ve got 12 open now and this morning that was driving me nuts.
From there I wandered over to check thefluffanutta’s twitter page (it’s a goldmine for Squidoo users) and found myself checking out a post on the SquidU forums which led me to this article by Darren Rowse on The Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers.
Reading that gave me some ideas for how I could use Twitter a little more productively, and it also led me to the Treader by Bob Lee. With that installed now I can tweet directly from my Google Reader. And considering how many times I’ve thought about tweeting about a blog post and procrastinating because I didn’t have Twitter open at the time, I’m really excited about the possibilities of this.
Not bad for a half-hour of semi-random trail wandering. As things go it’s a pretty good reward for having a productive and wakeful day. Sure, I could’ve opted for a nap as my reward, but if I make it until midnight it will be the first time in over a year that I’ve been able to stay awake all day.
The New Traffic Plan
Posted on January 28, 2008
Filed Under Traffic | Leave a Comment
It’s been one of those weekends where nothing went according to plan. I’ve been trying to get this post up since Saturday afternoon!
I’m starting on the traffic-getting portion of my new project on Monday. In the last two weeks I have set up a store using the BANS software, and added a new wordpress blog to go along with it. On Friday night I added a sitemap and fixed up all the pages so that they have proper titles, keywords and descriptions — all that good SEO stuff. It still needs some tweaking on the store side, and the blog needs more content yet, but it’s good enough to start getting visitors and making sales. I can tweak as I go so that any new content is tailored to what people are searching for. (At least that’s the plan.)
In the interests of doing this semi-scientifically, and so that I have a proper starting point for reference, here are a few relevant stats:
1. Site started January 10, 2008
2. Unique visitors since January 10: 112
3. The site has been visited by five different robots so far: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa, and 1 unknown.
4. Alexa rank on January 26 was 2,205,535. That’s up considerably from the 5million plus it was a week prior.
5. So far I’ve been able to find 8 pages indexed on Google, and none in either Yahoo or MSN.
A couple of notes:
1. The best traffic day so far was the day I posted content on the front page of the site. That brought 104 unique visitors, mostly from Stumble Upon.
2. The best ranking I have out of the 8 pages so far is #286 of 34,100 competing pages. So there’s definitely some work to be done if I want to have any success with organic search engine traffic.
3. I’m not going to show you the site at this point because I don’t want to skew the site statistics. Normally I’m totally against not showing actual results, but I can see how that would render some of the testing less than useful if people were going just to have a peek.
Now that I have a starting point, it’s time to work at bringing in the visitors. Since I don’t have a budget for doing paid advertising at the moment, I’ll be focusing on no-cost methods such as bum marketing tactics, and social media marketing. I have a ton of courses and ebooks and videos that I’ve bought over the last few months, and this project will be an educational experience if nothing else as I put what I’m learning into practise.
Starting February 1st I’ll also be taking advantage of the social marketing training that Dr. Mani is offering. But since I don’t want to wait another week — I’d actually like to have at least my first sale by the end of this month — I’ll plunge into the deep end by myself for the first part of this week.
I’ll be posting updates here, so make sure you’re subscribed to the feed or the mailing list so that you don’t miss the good stuff!
keep looking »