Internet Marketing Tell All

I start my blogs with an assortment of widgets and buttons and … stuff. In the beginning, I will put up anything that I believe serves a purpose or brings me more traffic.

Later? Not so much. Over time, I decide that if it’s not honoring a committment, bringing me traffic, reminding me to do something, or making me money, it has to go. Those four things are good yardsticks, though the order may vary for you.

I like to give most things two weeks to a month to take root, but if it’s not giving me one of those four types of booty, it’s bye-bye no matter how much it hurts.

MyBlogLog is on its last legs but it stays. It sends me enough traffic to be worth the headache at the moment. I’ll probably test the speed of the site without it later - right now, BumpZee is beating the pants off it as far as getting visitors is concerned, and they do page views, not just home page visits.

The BumpZee commmunity is less about “visit my blog and I’ll check out yours” and more about whose blog is good, and that’s part of what makes it smart to target a site like not just to marketers, but to an area of marketing. BumpZee stays (it’s really BUMPZee but I’m lazy) and may go up higher on the page.

That Blogroll button? Gone. Number 13 with them, not one visitor. Bye.

Carnivals widget. Bye. Doesn’t match the site, so I’ll have to remember to enter carnivals another way.

The rest of the Special Appreciation area stays. The buttons are small enough not to be obtrusive.

Maybe I’ll put an abbreviated tag cloud right there.

As far as additions, I’m gonna look for a better, possibly smaller MyBlogLog widget. I saw one that was just faces the other day. And I’ll be figuring out how to implement social media without making the page look like crap.

==>Sidebar, long one.<== I decided not to go with the hassle of trying to make the bookmarking sites launch in another window. You’re smart enough to come back if you wanted to, and whenever you bookmark a site in a shared area, you’re thinking about returning And bringing new people with you.

New windows within posts are different - I lose my place while surfing all the time and then get distracted, so I consider it a service, but it occurs to me that you might not. If you find it annoying, holla back. Your opionion is what matters.

Number One: Trying to do have too many income streams too soon, from one blog.

Proof that I’m right: Go to a prominent blogger’s site, one who makes a great income from their blog like Shoemoney, Steve Pavlina, or Problogger. Do you see 16 different banners for Amazon, Barnes and Noble, four different blog ad networks, Clickbank RSS Generated feeds and Google AdSense? Do the pages seem cluttered to you?

Those cats have just a handful of income sources, usuallly just a couple. If there’s more than two they are spread out cleanly across the page, not bundled up in one section.

The clicking process is like the buying process. People go into a type of hypnosis when they’re reading or browsing the web and decide to follow a link. It’s part of their stream of thought and they wander off incidentally.

Which brings us to mistake Number Two.

Trying to sell even as few as two completely unrelated things from your blog, whether it’s your product, someone else’s, or ads is utter nonsense. Go back to the basics.

Proof that I’m right: Reference Ken Evoy or the late great Cory Rudl or Michel Fortin.

In not as many words, they’ll you that the focus of your site should be on some narrow area. We all know that, it’s basically common knowledge, so why do we ignore that when it comes to the products we promote?

Until you’re a high traffic site, it’s just not smart, and even at that point, you’d make more money targeting narrowly.

Note: I’ve been honored once again to be included in the Working at Home Blog Carnival. Please visit my fellow participants.

It’s marketing to everyone. More than that, it’s not picking a speciality. There’s a great post that you must read every word of by Troy Pentico on the subject of picking a target market that I found through Plug IM.

Best part of the article: It gives action steps, not just theory.

Here’s a small drink of the magic.

I also knew right away that he could be way more successful if he broke down the Internet marketing community into smaller niches markets and target those marketers like me who will will SEE his vision and KNOW what the service could do for their business without having to spell it out to them in as detailed a process as you could possibly imagine.

You can find the rest on his blog. Read it. The day I figured this tip out is the day I made my first small fortune in internet marketing.