When I was working for someone else, one of the things I wanted to do was direct mail. Unfortunately, my superiors rejected my recommendation and they allowed the sales team to push them into doing an expensive nationwide TV and radio campaign which we honestly had no business doing yet. Simply because the budget did not allow enough money to purchase enough spots to really be visible. Oh well, that’s a whole new story. I thought Direct mail was the answer and always been fascinated with the industry. In many ways Internet Marketing parallels direct marketing. Lately, USPS sent me a card that asked me to go online to claim a free t-shirt. If I preferred, I could mail back the card as well. I’m not a free t-shirt type of gal but this caught my eye because they said they’d personalize it for me. So I did. I went to the website printed on the mail piece. It asked me a few questions and to select the most likely answers: If I had a superpower, it would be… My guilty pleasure is… My favorite way to say hello is… I believe in… All with fun answers. So I went

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Whenever I talk to an entrepreneur about automation many seem to think big things like push button software that will blast their articles to multiple directories at one go. Hands free shopping cart and digital delivery. Automatic membership site signup and member management and of course auto responders. These are all good ways to free up repetitive tasks but… I think misses out on the many simpler tasks. I was struggling a little to figure out the mechanics of a web site lately but I kept insisting on one thing which I considered a corner stone. That information should only be entered once or the fewest number of times as possible. I didn’t want to copy and paste, I didn’t want my assistant to copy and paste if I can help it. To me, that is the very basic building block in automation. How many things are you copying and pasting every single day? How often do you or your assistant have to transfer data from one system to another e.g. from email to blog post? I bet if you really tracked it all your copy and paste list would be much, much longer than you ever imagined and this

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This article on WSJ.com caught my eye. Generally it talks about how marketers should look into Web 2.0 methods to reach their market. We are not talking about us Internet Marketers who are already savvy with these things. Rather, marketers and companies who generally spend most of their budgets in other media. I totally agree with the general idea of the article – not saying that the tactics they suggest are new secrets or anything. With the world economy in shambles, I think the Internet particularly what is commonly known as ‘Web 2.0′ will shine as the best ways to spend marketing resources for businesses big and small. That is partially the reasoning when we created BlogEnergizer – to allow connect marketers and bloggers. But that’s another story. Anyway, something within the article caught my eye. That is… …a growing number of marketers are using Web 2.0 tools to collaborate with consumers on product development, service enhancement and promotion. But most companies still don’t appear to be well versed in this area. I hope all the Internet Marketing/Social media experts or hopefuls are paying attention to that one. They even coined a name for those who are Tech, Marketing &

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You know how some people post their email like this email AT gmail.com or emailATgmaildotcom all over the web? Frankly my dear, I’m afraid that won’t help very much. It is just as easy to write a robot to find strings of text that match an email address as it is to program it to match and pick up strings of text with the ATgmaildotcom. If you really must broadcast your email address, use an image. There are many email badge or image generators online. Or better yet, use reCaptcha MailHide. photo credit: Mzelle Biscotte

From the very beginning of my ‘Tech Based Marketing’ career, I’ve always known that applications (software) can be used as a marketing tool. Never has it been so clear than these days with the number of free web tools, widgets, plugins, themes and just about any tool that your target audience is attracted to. A few months ago, I released the List Post Authors plugin for WordPress to do just that. Results? I’ll admit it has been rather slow. But am I striking it off my list. Absolutely not. I probably just chose a good plugin that filled a need requested by many but not it seems not as big as my research told me. This will not be the last plugin I will release and you know what? Whatever traffic it brings me, be it a trickle or a flood, it’s traffic I wouldn’t have received if I had not built it. So, I’m still ahead of the game. There are tons of free software that are released especially those that revolve around Twitter that get good traffic. Tweetwasters and Mr Tweet are great examples. Because they is also tied to a highly viral social network and taps into

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Every morning, I get an email from several of my websites with nothing but raw HTML code in them. Reason? So that I can check for any anomalies. With the popularity of WordPress, it is inevitable people will begin to attack it and sure enough they did. Earlier this year it was more apparent – blogs running versions 2.3 and below were the main targets. You still hear about attacks regularly if you follow the security thread on WordPress. So this is why I have I check the code every day. Why email? Why not just view them on the browser? Because some hackers are very smart and sneaky. You will never know your site has been exploited because it is done so that you won’t see it on a regular browser, but a search engine robot will and therefore suck you of traffic or pagerank juice. It only takes me a few minutes to scan the code – although sometimes it is a huge pain that’s why I’ll probably offload this to a tech assistant soon but worth it? Oh yes. photo credit: dougww