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skydivedad on 12seconds.tv

Spring is in the air and so am I! Couldn’t come soon enough!

In the recent months, the internet marketing community has begun to take advantage of a new income opportunity known as Offline Gold. This method of making money is extremely easy to grasp, and it’s essentially a combination of online marketing skills and offline clients.

You, the internet marketer, provide a set of services such as local search engine optimization and website optimization to a local business owner. In this case, you are considered to be an internet marketing consultant. By providing just those two services for that business, they have the potential to gain more customers because you are helping them to take advantage of the local search opportunities that the internet provides. Although this is only an example of how the Offline Gold method would work, it’s a very accurate representation of how you could start making money in this arena.

Being an internet marketing consultant doesn’t require you to have a college degree nor do you have to have ‘guru’ status as an internet marketer. If you have had some success with internet marketing, whether it be in terms of search engine rankings or pay per click advertising, you can offer those services with which you have experience to local business owners.

Most brick-and-mortar business owners don’t have a website, so of course, they don’t know the potential boost in business that the internet could bring to them. You, on the other hand, are very aware of the local search opportunities available on the internet and they could very well bring new customers to these businesses by the dozens.

Nowadays, most print materials such the Yellow Pages or other phone books are available in digital format so when people want to buy something or are in need of a particular service, they will turn to the internet to find it.

Most people have the habit of typing in something like ‘my local area search term’, and this will bring up all the results for that type of business in their area. If you were to go into one of your local businesses today and ask the owner to do the same in reference to their own business, they’d likely be nowhere to be found in any of the listings. This could be because they don’t have a website, or if they do, there has been nothing done to make sure that website can be found by the search engines. As an internet marketing consultant, you would be able to improve upon this matter, and likely with extreme ease.

Business owners would probably be surprised to find out just how many local search opportunities they are missing by not putting the internet to use for their businesses. Google, for example, is one of the most widely used search engines, and millions of people turn to it looking for information everyday. Depending on the population of your locale, and the number of each kind of business in that area, many business owners could stand to gain a phenomenal increase to their bottom line just by taking advantage of a local business listing.

For instance, if you met with a local business owner who had a simple website but they didn’t have a local business listing in Google, you could offer to get them listed for a fee. This is a very basic service to offer, but it’s something that their business needs. In addition to the listing, you could also offer to revamp their website and perform some search engine optimization to help them garner rank in the search engines. Acting as an internet marketing consultant, you would be providing a service of extreme value to the business owner, and because of that, they will be more than happy to pay you for your time.

One good thing about the Offline Gold method is that it’s not very hard to build a customer base. Nearly every local business owner in your area probably has some use for the services you can offer, so you don’t really have to do a lot of searching for clients. Most internet marketers will tell you that they just walked into random businesses as they were out running errands and just began talking with the owners.

This is one very effective way to position yourself as an internet marketing consultant and a great way to get your feet wet. You already know what you’re good at doing, and if a business owner mentions something you’re not so familiar with, you can always outsource the task. Many have reported making several hundreds or even a few thousand dollars their first day of working the Offline Gold method. You could be doing the same, all you need to do is take action

We’re developing some amazing tools here at Blue Sky Publishing, LLC that are going to launch soon. They’re going to revolutionize the Offline Gold Business! So stay tuned……

to be continued

Just a quick post as I’m buried in catch up mode over here. My internet connection failed right at the start of a weekend I had planned out research and online surfing. When it’s -8 below F. what else is there to do but watch movies or surf the web. I’m right in the middle of several major projects and losing internet access just buried me. It’s amazing how reliant I’ve become.

So, the ISP finally gets it fixed (whatever a Stage 2 outage is) just in time for the start of a new work week. I find myself totally buried in work. I get a tab unraveled when I lose control of my schedule. SO I’ll do some thinking and find a way where my schedule is less vulnerable to ISP interruption. There has to be a lesson or Product here somewhere as I would hate to think this disruption won’t bare fruit somehow.

There’s a new virus floating around out there thats already infected 9 Million Machines. I had a heads up earlier in the day and Microsoft released a patch for this on Tuesday.

I was harmlessly surfing the web and went to a site burid in the SERP’s on page 24. I quite often look at pages buried i the SERP’s when I am researching keywords. As soon as I opened that page 4 count them 4 viciously flashing pop-ups started going wild on my screen.

I didn’t click a thing but launched task manager and immediately shut down the browser. I than  ran a virus scan using my up to date McAfee Security Suite. It found nothing so I than used the awesome online scan provided by Trend Micro which also came up clean. phew… Tricky stuff and a vicious virus.

The Trend Micro “Housecall” online scan is something I highly recommend you use in addition to your regular virus scan software. It’s saved my bacon more than once. Thanks for the heads up earlier today Thankfully I wasn’t unprepared. Note to self. Don’t click on any part of these pop-ups.

Microsoft issued a security update Tuesday to deal with the so-called “Downadup” or “Conficker” virus, which appears to be a new version of a bug that popped up in October.

Microsoft said the virus is spreading by gaining access to one computer and then guessing at passwords of other users in the same network: “If the password is weak, it may succeed.”

I’m finished making a new set of backups for all my fills and I have made a complete image backup using this awesome freeto use Backup software called DriveImageXML. DriveImageXML makes an image file backup of your entire drive or selected files ad folders and it uses an XML file which means in case of a crash you won’t have to be digging around for money to reinstall your image with some propriety file format from a piece of software.

Moral of the story, scan your computer with more than 1 piece of software and you can never have enough backups.  Spend some time soon doing both!

All The Best

Paul

Image via CrunchBaseSave yourself the bandwidth cost and stream YouTube video’s on your website. This isn’t a new idea webmasters have been doing this for several years now.  It’s not so clear however webmasters know these simple steps to getting the best SEO opportunities from displaying these video’s. Here’s 4 steps to take when streaming YouTube video’s from your website that will get you more bang for YouTube’s buck.

1.  Write a keyword based description about the video and use keyword “anchor text” to link back to your YouTube Page.

2. One YouTube Video per page! Build your webpage for only one YouTube video and use keyword rich text thats relevant to the video you’re displaying.

3. Universal Search only optimizes 4×3 not the new 16×9 Widescreen Format for the thumbnail display on the Universal Search SERP. Don’t use the Widescreen format if you want better SERP opportunities.

4. Use Google Analytics and Google’s Website Optimizer to split test the video’s you stream. Changing out the YouTube Video is easy and use different versions of your own video’s to track which one is delivering the best results. Remember to use Google’s Website Optimizer and than change nothing but the video.

to be continued…

Image via WikipediaComScore Media Metrix, October 2008 showed over 100 million YouTube video viewers, for a total of 2.5 billion searches! When optimizing your video for YouTube remember to treat YouTube like it’s a search engine because it does have a search algorithm . The search variables to optimize for in your video submission should include the values that algorithm is looking to discover about your video.

The YouTube search algorithm includes variables such as  title, description, tags, views and ratings. So be sure to include keywords in your title and description, write your description as a call to action and include of course your websites’ URL. Treat your tags as an opportunity to fine tune your keywords and widen the breath of search query possibilities.  Handle these variables properly and you can improve your placement not only within YouTube itself but Google’s “Universal Search” also.

Remember you are trying to get into the “Universal Search” SERP for your keyword selections and because Universal Search is optimized for 4×3 thumbnails do not use YouTube’s new 16×9 widescreen settings.   

Keep in mind you only get 27 characters for the anchor description (the 1st line) so  be creative and don’t waste them squeeze in a clickable URL on that important 1st line. (27 characters maximum or it gets truncated) Think Twitter by 1/4 !

Brand your video throughout with a watermark or lower third  if you don’t know how to do that join AskMrVideo.com and take advantage of the expertise available and grab the awesome free software that can handle that task and many others as well. Include a call to action within the video itself that is a reference to the URL in your anchor description. If you are including a phone number put it on a solid background.

All videos on YouTube include the “nofollow” except the “Recent Activity” section. Bear that in mind and think of systems that you can implement that keeps your video located on “Recent Activity”

More on optimizing your video tomorrow.

to be continued…