Webside Chats Podcast by Jack Humphrey

Webside Chats is a podcast of interviews with industry leaders conducted by Jack Humphrey of the Friday Traffic Report. Jack is widely known on the web as one of the pioneers of internet marketing and branding.

“The goal of Webside Chats is to pull busy, successful marketing experts and web celebrities to the side of the web, away from the hustle and bustle of their daily lives, and get them to talk about their success.” -Jack Humphrey

Jack’s interview style is casual yet he’s able to get the most out of interviewees for his audience with careful research and prep before each interview. His interviews with experts in the blogging and online marketing industry focus on the people behind popular sites whose success stories captivate listeners and teach up and coming bloggers and marketers what it takes to be a “big deal” online.

Sample Webside Chats

• Heather Armstrong from Dooce.com
• Darren Rowse from ProBlogger.net
• Andy Beal from MarketingPilgrim.com
• Neil Patel from QuickSprout.com
• Michel Fortin from MichelFortin.com

Check out the most recent Webside Chats…

Want to be a guest?

If you’d like to be considered as a guest on Webside Chats, contact Jack’s team here. Let us know who you are, your site URL(s), and any other information that would help us determine if you’d be a good fit for the podcast.

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Tags: blogging podcasts, blogging success stories, internet marketing, jack humphrey, marketing success, Webside Chats

Social Marketing Genius Finally Sells Something

Dean Hunt. Social Marketer. Crazy man with killer bunnies video on his site.

You’ve heard the name here before and if you are in Social Power Linking, you’ve even read his excellent report “Web Traffic Orgasm” where he outlines just how to master Digg and social marketing sites like it.

He’s famous for just giving information away, but people are fed up. They want to know what’s up and why he refuses to sell stuff. They are suspicious. It’s not natural.

So in a fairly recent post, Dean politely asks his readers before he releases a product, if they’d be interested in more intensive training in social marketing, creating products, researching niches, and making money online.

He’s so damn polite about it!

My recommendation, which isn’t an affiliate link (I don’t think Dean knows how to do affiliate programs. He’s too busy being on the Digg front page all the time), is to go check out what Dean’s up to and help him decide if he should help you or not.

Tags: dean hunt, internet marketing, make money online, social marketing

Why Are Some People So Stupid?

Better still, how can someone be smart enough to work a computer, get on the web, sense there is opportunity to make money, and then do the most idiotic things to sabotage themselves?

I get Google Alerts on all kinds of keywords in my niches. I am the third guy on the web to know when there is something new in my markets. It goes like this:

1. The person puts up the content, 2. Google finds it, and
3. I get an alert.

You can imagine I see a lot of stuff before the rest of the world knows about it. But you might not believe some of the stupid things I see coming online. Rather, stupid things done by incredibly stupid people.

I see people scraping content… still. This is an old practice where you set up a site and simply send a $5 robot script out on the web to scrape up anything in its path and bring it back to a site or blog and regurgitate it as some kind of twisted, nonsense content. Scraping worked for 5 minutes and made like 3 people very wealthy.

The alerts I get are for blogs like bxdftgdh.blogspot.com. (That might actually be a real domain although I just randomly smashed my keyboard with my left hand to come up with it.)

At first I thought “maybe this is a serious black hatter who really knows what they are doing and they’re making a lot of money from this.” Then I check out the site and feel like crying for the depths of stupidity that our species can reach.

It’s very, very sad when you realize that the people doing this kind of stuff are not, in fact, intelligent programming aces gaming the system with exclusive programs they developed with their 150 I.Q.

Rather, these are people who saw something a smart person did and thought they were replicating it by puking stolen, random, nonsense content all over the web (in 2007!). I will see content that is so random, with just my keyword or name shoved inside it. Sometimes it’s just a piece of one of my old posts abruptly cut in half by another piece of content from some real estate site or other completely off-topic.

My friends would say “Blow it off. Don’t worry about this stuff. They are losers.” But then I started to realize they aren’t just losers. They are people with sophisticated computers, the smarts to turn them on, get on the web, and have this land of opportunity before them to make something really powerful that returns real profits and sells real products, and they chose instead to fail.

I mean, these guys work HARD to fail. I’m talking fireworks and ticker tape parade failure. It is harder to fail to make money online than it is to succeed the way these people are doing it!

Here are some tips for those folks who somehow learned to read, but are still dumb enough to do the following…

1. It is no longer necessary to have a domain like this: real-estate-secrets-make-money-at-home.com One could argue that it was never necessary and I wouldn’t put up a fight.
2. If you own a blog on blogger like this aksdkjhtoinj!.blogspot.com you are a bonafide idiot. A savant maybe, since you were able to even figure out how to turn on a computer and get that far, but you’re stupid. Dead in the head. Something the pool boy missed when skimming the gene pool for the crap that floats on the bottom in the Spring.
3. If your domain is decent, you have an actual site on it, you’re in a market where you could actually make money, and you go and f*&k it up by putting scraped content on it and hoping it will just run itself and rake in the dough, you’re certifiably stupid. You haven’t been paying attention. You’re not just stupid. You’re lazy and stupid.
4. When the trail of success is laid out in front of you and all the components you need are in plain site, and you still think you can do it on your own with no help from people who have tons of experience, you’re pretty stupid.
5. Making money online can be accomplished with hundreds of different, legitimate tactics. Consciously choosing one that is not on the huge list of things people can and have done to actually make money is not only stupid, but I’ve drafted a bill for my Congressman to introduce to make it illegal to be so stupid.
6. When you know that all that stands in your way is hard work and doing what the smart people tell you to do - yet you choose something that no sane, reputable expert recommends or endorses because it promises easy money - I’m sorry, but you’re a Grade-A Moron. USDA Certified Beef hanging in a refrigerator truck on a meat hook is smarter than you.
7. You spend thousands of dollars on consulting or coaching to have the road to success paved in gold for you and you don’t apply what you learn nor grasp what you’ve learned even if it was painstakenly laid out in a way a 9 year old could understand. What I can never figure out is how people like this even get thousands of dollars to spend on consulting!

I have no idea why so many weirdos are attracted to, and actually believe there exist, truly easy ways to make money online with a website. There is no easy way if they are not ready to study. It only becomes like shooting fish in a barrel when you’ve learned enough to build the gun, load it, and point it in the right direction.

My advice: Don’t come into a professional arena and take a big dump on it as if it isn’t as specialized, technical, complicated, and important as professions you were born to respect. The people who make money online with great ideas, software, ingenius products, incredible marketing tactics, and eye-catching design are geniuses in their own right.

No one would never train a surgeon by throwing them in the operating room with a scalpel and a book on basic anatomy. Everyone knows this intuitively. Yet the same people who know this come online and act as if online business and marketing is something you’d just need an ebook and hosting to succeed.

I am coming to believe that the disrespect for online business as a group of serious professions is what dooms most people to failure at whatever they try online. To me, some of the things people are doing, like above, is like taking a loaded gun and turning it around to look down the barrel. That’s evolution’s way of weeding out the sick, weak, and dumb. Even on the virtual highway you cannot escape old fashioned biology.

Are you a serious, business-minded, disciplined entrepreneur? Or do you just have an internet connection and wish you had more money?

Tags: internet business, internet marketing, marketing professionals, stupid people

Authority Site Building Defined…

Want to hear me and Howie Schwartz talking traffic and authority site building?

Here’s a free listen to our conversation earlier this week as Howie drilled down to the nitty gritty to get my take on what it takes to be a true authority presence in any niche.

Listen to the interview.  Mp3, About 30-40 minutes

Join me and a grand list of internet marketing, SEO, and website traffic experts in San Diego.

For my part, I will make absolutely sure you walk away with several things you can implement immediately for your site(s) to generate buzz, links, targeted traffic, and higher search engine rankings.

Hope to see YOU in San Diego for the Traffic Tactics seminar with Dr. Mike Woo Ming and friends.

Tags: authority, authority site building, internet marketing, traffic tactics

John Reese Drops A Bomb In “Rebirth of Internet Marketing”

I’ve been waiting for this report for awhile.  John Reese has been hinting at it and I knew to expect nothing less than groundbreaking content.

If for no other reason than the fact that the bar has been raised 10 stories high for free reports on internet marketing by some key players online including Michel Fortin and yours truly with Authority Black Book.

Today on the internet is John’s day.  He could blow it or blow people away.  I think the majority of people are going to experience the latter.

One of the key points in the report (I am going to make you download and read the whole thing because you must understand the things John is talking about if you are going to survive in the coming years online) is one that touches upon what I’ve been harping on for 2 years.

On page 29 begins my favorite part of the report:
“Another major evolution that’s happened online is the growing power of the authority site.”

In this section John talks about an important shift in internet marketing away from the old model of spreading yourself too thin and toward building a central authority site.

“The top players in all the markets will have most of their resources into ONE major site.”

This is true today for a tiny minority of online marketers, but it is coming true for more and more as days, not weeks, pass.

It’s been the case for me since May 2006.  The site you are on now is my authority site where most of my best work, time, and resources are housed.

John’s report will be an eye-opener for tens of thousands of marketers as they feverishly download and devour it this week.

His insight benefits from being online and “turning profits” since virtually the beginning of the internet and has made him a millionaire several times over.

John Reese needs a moment of your time to blow you away today.  I highly recommend you let him do so.  In return, you are going to have a clearer idea of how to develop a long term strategy for an online business that is unstoppable and certainly profitable.

Check out the “Rebirth of Internet Marketing” ASAP.

Tags: free reports, internet marketing, john reese, rebirth of internet marketing

7 Blog Promotion Strategies That Work

I just finished looking at my stats and thought I would show you where my traffic is coming from and what marketing tactic I used to get it.

Below are only the things that produced visitors to my site in the last 48 hours. Nothing theoretical whatsoever.

1) Search Engines

Yesterday was my biggest day yet with this new site platform and the performance is unlike anything I have ever experienced before.

I had more search engine traffic from more phrases in one 48 hour period than ever.

From very nice short tail keywords like “video syndication” to fat long tail phrases like “how to get more friends on myspace.”

And everything in between.

How do I do so well in the engines?

I use the very best publishing system on Planet Earth. Nuff said.

2) Article Syndication

LOL - right? Wrong. Article syndication is still a very powerful traffic driver if you do it properly.

Rather than try to be on every article directory on the web, I go for the most important article directories on the web.

I also write the best content I can on highly relevant, topical, hot issues in my niche.

I do not wirte and syndicate articles for links. I write for traffic. Huge difference most people completely ignore.

I syndicated this article over the weekend and am getting traffic from the following article sites:

• GoArticles.com
• Ezinearticles.com

I will get traffic from many others, but I am only showing you today what happened to drive real targeted traffic in the last 24 hours. (People don’t do this anywhere else that I know of by the way!)

I syndicate my articles exclusively with SubmitYourArticle.com.

3) News Readers

Because I have several feeds to choose from, and a wide range of related topics I publish on, I have feed subscribers on all kinds of readers.

In the last 24 hours I have gotten traffic from people using feed readers from:

• Yahoo
• Google
• Bloglines
• Delicious, and
• different versions of desktop readers like MyWebTop.com.

4) Links

I’ve gotten significant traffic in the last 48 hours from sites such as:

• BradFallon.com
• CreativeBits.org
• WillieCrawford.com
• MichelFortin.com

and many many others.

These are link partnerships or just people pointing to specific posts here and commenting on their blogs.

The better your content, the more people comment and trackback your site. So good content equals good link traffic.

5) TrafficSwarm

I get a good amount of traffic each day from TrafficSwarm, which is no new kid on the block.

I have tested the traffic from this service and opt-in rates are good, meaning the traffic isn’t junk traffic, if you were wondering.

They have a free and paid version. Don’t bother with it on the free level. It is extremely inexpensive traffic compared to Adwords and Co-registration, and there are other benefits of membership aside from direct traffic and subscribers.

6) Video Syndication

I have been doing screen capture blog marketing videos lately and syndicating them on all the free video sharing sites available.

Since I started (I have only done 4 so far) I can attribute top 10 rankings in Google for terms like “blog marketing videos” and many others to this marketing tactic alone.

Since video sharing sites are all popular (none of the sites I syndicate videos to are under PR5, most PR6 or higher) the links are worth a lot and the traffic is great each time I submit a video.

Video syndication will be one of the buzz phrases of 2007. Glad I am in the top 10 for that phrase too!

7) Tagging and Pinging

Or simply posting properly and showing up automatically (and practically instantly) in places like Technorati which track blogs, is a big daily traffic driver.

Right after I post this I will see traffic from Technorati and other sites that I ping.

Kind of encourages me to post regularly knowing every post brings me more traffic and another chance to score in the engines for more keywords.

If you don’t know how this is all done, the best information available on the subject is from Sean Wu.

Again, the above tactics all resulted in real, live, free targeted traffic to the Friday Traffic Report in the last 48 hours.

Thought you’d like to see what is working based on my actual log files rather than more theoretical pieces from people who don’t necessarily use the tactics they push to drive traffic to their own sites.

Tags: Blog Marketing, getting links, getting traffic, getting visitors, internet marketing, Website Promotion

Are you broken down on the side of the information super highway?

A friend told me something last week that cracked me up. She has a son who was making fun of her for not having a computer or ever getting online.

(I know, there are still some of them left!)

He told her the funniest thing I’ve heard so far this year.

He said, “Mom, you are broken down on the side of the information super highway and, pretty soon, you won’t be cute enough to hitch hike.”

What gave me a laugh also gave me pause.

I see a lot of people broken down on the side of the road as opportunity passes them by because they are not learning the right things about what makes traffic happen on the web today.

Before Web 2.0 there was well over a decade of factory-line production of pretty much the same materials, courses, and seminars on how to drive traffic.

But now there is a whole new and massive world of social, interactive marketing out there.

I teach it here, and subscribers are having a lot of fun picking up easy traffic. (Ever recall the old way of marketing being FUN?)

But I monitor what’s going on around the web and all the old stuff is still there, with newbies coming online and thinking it is new.

YOU are in the right place, but you are in the minority. If you know someone who needs to call a tow truck to get them back on the highway, send them this URL or link to FTR from your site.

There’s a long long way to go before we have even a tiny percentage of the new marketing content to compare to what the last decade has produced on generating traffic on the old web, but we are here for the long haul.

Let’s help the tens of thousands of site owners broken down on the side of the road (submitting classified ads, buying “500,000 Search Engine Submissions!” and trying to understand how search engines work - or worse - hiring an SEO firm to get ranked!)

Tell your friends about the Friday Traffic Report.

They have to be wondering why you have that big smile on your face lately!

Tags: Blog Marketing, internet marketing, Social Power Linking, Website Promotion

Are You Taking Advantage Of Web 2.0 Marketing?

This is such an exciting time on the web for people creating magnetic sites filled with content their niche is after.

I just don’t understand why so many people are fighting it tooth and nail.

From arguments that never end about the “birth of this” and the “death of that” to arguments over the monikers of change like “social networking” and “web 2.0.”

My thing, since the beginning, has been “Who cares what people are calling everything on the new web, let’s just acknowledge the obvious: this is a new web we are dealing with!”

Smart people are staying out of the fights over semantics and taking in all the new possibilities offered to them for marketing their sites.

For instance, the fact that SEO is easier than it ever has been should be the Number 1 topic of discussion and jubilation on the web.

Finally people with more ideas for great sites, products, and services can simply publish great content and do extremely basic SEO and rank high in the engines.

Even over the geeks who invented the complex, technical SEO of yesterday.

The way I build sites gets me into the top ten just as fast or faster than the SEO of yesterday.  And I stay there as long as I want.   The geeks cannot push me out (give it a try pocket protector man!) because I am not even playing their game, and they don’t understand mine!

No longer do we have to trick engines. We simply give them what they want and they actually reward us for it.

The critics (always people who make money from SEO services) say that it takes months to take a content site to the top of a niche.

That is complete spin to keep us sucking on the teat of SEO firms who have everything to loose in Web 2.0.

The only people on the net who badmouth social marketing, content development for the sake of visitors instead of search engines, and “post and rank” technology are SEO firms and individuals who make money by keeping search engine optimization confusing.

Enough is enough!

If you want out of the SEO game, embrace and enjoy the new web and all it has to offer.

Go long tail for keywords and leave the one and two word phrases to people who want to be #1 for the most generic term in their niche.

You can enjoy hyper-targeted traffic while they get their bandwidth chewed up by tire kickers and lost surfers.

Get into social bookmarking, link sharing, sticky content development, and link bait (another word everyone argues about which simply means “attractive content” that gets linked to).

Get into custom RSS feeds and autodiscovery. Get a blog and be part of the discussion in your niche that will go on with or without you.

The people taking advantage of interactive media are raking in traffic, rankings, and profits for their sites.

The people arguing the semantics and whether there really is anything all that special going on are woefully out of touch.

The fact that they cannot accept the writing on the wall and don’t know there is indeed a monstrously sweeping change taking place on the web is proof they are lost at sea.

Don’t listen to the naysayers. Take advantage of the interactive web marketing that is available in your niche and create something powerful, special, unique, and profitable!

Everything you need to understand how to thrive on the web of today is right here in front of you.

Study up and take down your competition so easily it will make you feel a little guilty.

That’s what I do!

Tags: Blog Marketing, internet marketing, marketing trends, social marketing, web 2.0

4 Things The Winners Will Be Doing In 2007

Free Targeted Traffic Sources

• Power Linking
• Automated Traffic Without PPC or Other Paid Advertising (Hint: Every single player online uses this tactic!)
• The Right Publishing System That Attracts Attention By Simply Posting
• Video Marketing

These 4 things will earn sites millions this year. Millions of visitors and millions of dollars in sales.

There’s no theory involved and the tactics work for anyone who uses them, newbies and pros alike.

Tags: blog promotion, free marketing, free visitors, internet marketing, marketing tactics, targeted traffic

Does PageRank Really Matter?

Karen Brown

I found an article that debates whether Google PageRank matters. According to the author, PageRank matters because he sees it as a credibility index. Higher PageRank means a better site.

I guess that works if your site is for other internet marketers. Ordinary folks don’t won’t have the Google toolbar installed, and couldn’t tell you what PageRank means if you held a gun to their heads.

If you want to be successful at internet marketing, make sure that your visitors are your highest priority. PageRank is secondary to making sure that your visitors return to your site (and tell all their friends).

Tags: credibility, google-pagerank, google-toolbar, internet marketing, marketing

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