I am an avid dog lover which is why I get along so well with two of my clients: Bree Robbins of Paddington Pups and Cory Andrews of The Dogs Country Club Kennel and Resort in Victoria.

I’m sure they’ll refer to this blog post from their blogs since it’s one of the many Internet Marketing Strategies I covered at the recent Blogging for Business Sales Lead Generation and How To Converts Your Online Browsers To Buyers Workshops – now both available as convenient Webinars.

When Angela Muzyczka sent me this joke, I just had to share it with you, not for SEO reasons, but because it’s funny.

The Difference Between Dogs And Computers

Favorite Food
Dogs: Kibbles
Computers: Bits

Method used to end undesirable behavior
Dogs: Hit with rolled up newspaper
Computers: Hit control-alt-delete

After destruction of personal property
DOGS: Dog not found
COMPUTERS: File not found

Favorite trick
DOGS: Roll over
COMPUTERS: Play dead

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Many small business people treat one of their most precious assets as an afterthought, rather than as one of their most precious assets. It’s not inconceivable for a website to be worth $100,000+ when there is a legitimate brick and mortar business “behind it”.

Put differently, years ago, when you bought a Yellow Pages ad, you’d SPEND thousands of dollars with NO appreciation in the capital asset value of the phone book. With the Internet, every dollar spent on your website should increase its capital value. Think about it this way – if you were assess two identical businesses, one with a website and the other without one, which one would YOU buy?  Enough said.

Most small businesses don’t proactively deal with their website and/or web online presence for a long list of reasons including:

• “I don’t get all this Interweb stuff”
• “I don’t like Facebook and don’t understand why people waste so much time ‘talking’ to complete strangers”
• “My son-in-law, nephew or neighbour seems to understand it and is not charging me much to handle my website…”
• “Technology is changing too quickly, I can’t keep up.”
• “I don’t get any web inquiries so it’s not worth worrying about.”
• “My staff’s taking care of it, in fact, we all kinda pitch in to get stuff done.”*

Whatever your excuses, as a small business person, in this day and age you simply cannot hand over your online presence to just anyone anymore than you would give them the pin code to your bank card. I am totally serious.

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I was interviewed by Ludwina Dautovic for Red Tent Radio yesterday and I have to admit it was one of the most fun interviews I’ve done in a long time. We got started and before we knew it, the 40 minutes were up! We talked about blogging for small business owners. The interview will be released as a podcast in a few weeks, but before it comes out, I thought I’d take this opportunity to remind you that we’re staging a 4-hour Masterclass called “How to convert your online browsers to buyers” in Sydney and Melbourne on April 11th and 18th respectively.

NEWS UPDATE:

CLICK THE HYPERLINK to download the Blogging For Small Business
Interview With Ludwina Dautovic on Red Tent Radio!

If you missed our exceptionally popular workshop “Business Blogging For Sales Lead Generation“, you’re in luck – it’s now available as a 4-hour webinar you can stream to your computer. A webinar is great because you can stop, pause and rewind to make sure you don’t miss any important details.

Ludwina and I discussed WHY small business people need to blog,
what NOT to do and HOW to get started quickly and easily

As you’d expect, I have a very different take on most marketing strategies – one of them is I am not a fan of Social Media… I don’t adhere to the common propaganda that’s proliferating “out there” that you need to be on Facebook and Twitter. If you want to hear an honest viewpoint that will benefit your bottom line and save you from wasting countless hours, make sure you keep an eye out for the interview – I will blog about it when it comes out and you’ll be able to download it for free.

But, by that time, you’ll realise you should have attended my 4-hour Masterclass called “How to convert your online browsers to buyers” in Sydney and Melbourne on April 11th and 18th respectively.

So you know what to do – take the time now to have a look at the event page and keep in mind it comes with a 100% no-questions-asked money back guarantee. If at the end of the 4 hours, you haven’t received at least 2 or 3 times the cost of admission, we’ll refund you and remove you from our mailing list. That’s how confident we are of the immense value we’ll be revealing.

Here’s one of the concepts Ludwina and I touched on during the interview – it’s called the Miser Mentality. With a Miser Mentality, the focus is on the cost of something rather than the value or potential. A prime example is someone who drives 15 to 20 minutes to save a few cents on petrol. They have no appreciation for their TIME VALUE. A Miser can only see the COST (petrol saving) – not the BENEFIT (paying a little more, but saving time).

The strategies I will reveal at the next DIY Internet Marketing Masterclass can increase your website traffic anywhere from 15% to as much as 200%, depending on what you’ve done and how well you’ve done it. But here’s the thing – anyone who has a product or service that is worth at least $300 would get a benefit of $3,000 to $5,000 from the strategies I will reveal as a MINIMUM STARTING POINT.

So if the question was:

Would you pay $300 to get $3,000 in sales
in the next 12 months?

The answer should be YES! but the problem is that with a Miser Mentality there is a filter, a bias, a distortion that comes into play – that PREVENTS the POSSIBILITY from being even considered.

It might be thought, in a fleeting moment, but not seriously assessed or considered at its full (potential) value. Therein lies one of the key differences between the abundantly wealthy people who seek and focus on potential opportunities whereas misers miss those opportunities NOT because they aren’t there, but because they can’t see them.

In the psychological literature it’s called a Scotoma. The best example is looking for the salt when the salt shaker is right there in front of you…

I will address some of these inhibitors to success at the upcoming Exponential Extravaganza in May and June, but before that event takes place, the Internet DIY 4 hour Masterclass takes place.

Can you see the dilemma EVERYONE FACES – you know you want the benefits, results and rewards… But you have to consider and BELIEVE it’s possible. Quite the tug of war isn’t it?

I know. I struggled with it more than 30 years ago. I don’t remember what the trigger or catalyst was, but at some point I decided that the Miser Mentality can’t work – so I gave Boundless Opportunity Thinking a try. Once adopted, I transformed it into my own Exponential Mindset Thinking and the rest as they say is history…

So what “history” will you create for yourself in 2012, 2013, 2014 and beyond…?

Have you ever wondered why old farm tractors have super big rear wheels and tiny little ones at the front?

The same can be said about “what’s the point of having a business blog?”

You might not be a farmer and might not care why the rear wheels of an old tractor need to be that big, but in business, you can’t afford not to know why blogging has become so important for lead generation.

That’s why we’re staging a 1/day workshop called Business Blogging For Sales Lead Generation on the Gold Coast, Sydney and Melbourne.

But then again you could go back to the paddock and give plowing a go…

I recently published this 2-minute link optimisation tip to avoid a common mistake a lot of people make.

I’ve blogged about long tail niche marketing before with a YouTube video that has become a classic amongst the exponential marketing community. Just click on the hyperlink to view it.

Even though as a small business, Internet advertising is not something you’re probably engaged in, a recent report by CONTEXTWEB reveals something that I have known all along, albeit anecdotally -

Average click-through rates (CTRs) for ads placed
on long-tail websites are 24% higher than
those placed on short-tail sites.

Long tail versus short tail marketing refers to specialised niches versus broad mass markets respectively. What’s of particular interest is that the MORE specialised and targeted you are with your web strategies, the greater the returns you’ll produce.

Our clients have known this for years – often out-performing their much larger, national competitors with very deep pockets.

Long tail websites—the millions of smaller websites with niche audiences—offer significant ad performance advantages across a wide number of verticals.

Among all 20 categories studied, long tail ads registered increased CTRs over short-tail ads, led by alcohol beverages (50%), B2B (48%) and charities (48%). The lowest long-tail lift observed was for auto advertisers, but still had (12%) better CTRs.

The trade off remains between quantity and quality of the communication. This is something we cover in depth in our Killer Kopywriting Konversations™ workshops as we help our clients design Killer Kampaigns That Konvert Klients™.

As shown below, among 21 publisher categories, 16 categories registered increased CTRs on long tail sites whereas in five content categories, ads on short tail sites underperformed long tail ads.

Data Source: CONTEXTWEB‘s Intelligence Report: Using Long Tail Sites to Optimize Media Spend was published in March 2011. It analysed digital media performance from roughly 18,000 publisher sites across 1,000 campaigns in the second half of 2010.

During my recent Business Blogging For Sales Lead Generation event tour in Adelaide, the Gold Coast, Melbourne and Sydney, participants heard a preview of my rant on Privacy Pirates which I’ve been proselytising about for quite some time. Karen Bonanno, a 2011 Exponential Entrepreneur Of The Year Award Winner, sent me the infographic below that I just had to share with you.

I will expand on this in an upcoming Do It Yourself Google Sales Lead Generation For Small Business series of workshops… But in the meantime have a good read of this infographic. You’ll start to get a sense of where I’m coming from and how I am guiding my clients to avoid being victims of the Privacy Pirates.

I have an event coming up called Business Blogging For Sales Lead Generation that will reveal how quick, easy and fun strategies can help you improve your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and acquire new leads for free by blogging.

Here is an example using an Infographic. Karen Bonanno posted an interesting infographic (shown below) on what happens on the Internet in 60 seconds on her School Management Library Blog.

Along with these amazing stats:

• Search engine Google serves more that 694,445 queries
• 6,600+ pictures are uploaded on Flickr
• 600 videos are uploaded on YouTube videos, amounting to 25+ hours of content
• 695,000 status updates, 79,364 wall posts and 510,040 comments are published on Social Networking site Facebook
• 70 New domains are registered
• 168,000,000+ emails are sent
• 320 new accounts and 98,000 tweets are generated on Social Networking site Twitter
• iPhone applications are downloaded more than13,000 times
• 20,000 new posts are published on Micro-blogging platform tumbler
• Popular web browser FireFox is downloaded more than 1700 times
• Popular blogging platform WordPress is downloaded more than 50 times
• WordPress Plugins aredownloaded more than 125 times
• 100 accounts are created on professional networking site LinkedIn
• 40 new Questions are asked on YahooAnswers.com
• 100+ questions are asked on Answers.com
• 1 new article is published on Associated Content, the world’s largest source of community-created content
• 1 new definition is added on UrbanDictionary.com
• 1,200 new ads are created on Craigslist
• 370,000+ minutes of voice calls done by Skype users
• 13,000+ hours of music streaming is done by personalized Internet radio provider Pandora
• 1,600+ reads are made on Scribd, the largest social reading publishing company

This blog post alone has 6 embedded strategies to help Karen and me attract new sales leads.

If you want to know what they are and how other business owners are leveraging their blogs to generate free sales leads, you’ll have to attend the Business Blogging For Sales Lead Generation event!

Even though small businesses in Australia lag in Internet adoption with most small businesses either not having a website established or not having a fully integrated, functional website, in contrast, Australian consumers are quite techno-savvy.

According to recent research, 37% of Australians use smart phones and is predicted to be 50% by the end of 2011. 92% say they use smart phones while consuming other media; 46% while watching TV, 43% while listening to music, 36% while online. A whopping 26% say they have purchased something on their smart phone. Average number of apps is 25, with 8 being purchased. Nearly 50% browse the web every day on their phones.

Nielsen research shows Australians are #1 in usage of social networks

Neilsen reports that Australians spend 7 hours 17 minutes per person each month on social networks and blogs. Australian social media usage was highest for the second year running, out of Nielsen’s Internet-metered markets including: Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, U.K., and U.S. This means Australians used social media 25 minutes more per month than the previous year. That’s quite a bit more.

Most small business owners still don’t fully appreciate the value of social networking for business purposes.

A lot of it is due to ignorance (not knowing) and confusion. For example, there’s a common misconception that links last a lot longer on Facebook than Twitter, because the newsfeed moves slower than the stream, but recent research confirmed this is not the case.

The half life of a link (i.e. the time it takes to receive half its total clicks from when it’s first shared) is on average 2.8 hours on Twitter and 3.2 hours on Facebook – not a massive difference, although on YouTube links last considerably longer.

What’s more interesting is that a link pointing to a topical news story – like an earthquake – is likely to have a lot shorter half-life than a link pointing to something oblique (like lolcats).

The graph below illustrates this phenomenon, but once again ignorance (not knowing) can be damaging. The concept of the half life of a link is important if you’re in the news business, but if you’re a business looking to stay in business for years to come, what is important and relevant to you is the value of the individual links established, not the half life.

Half Life Of Internet Links In Social Media Networks

This is a vitally important concept we will cover at our Business Blogging For Sales Lead Generation event, it’s an exclusive by-invitation-only event that you need to contact us if you want to attend.

Why is a blog important for business?

Blogs are used to establish contact and communication with a business. A website by design is static, whereas a blog and Facebook are interactive, engaging the prospect. More importantly, he/she can read and assess the type of communications others have had with you/the business.

In this day and age, it’s not a nice-to-have sales and marketing tool, a blog is a must-have sales, marketing and customer support and brand building tool.

Let’s face it, if you’re not blogging, you’re just not serious about sales lead generation.

I’ve already blogged about Linked In Polls,but since it’s quick, easy and free – it’s worth reminding you to consider polling your clients and asking them questions that your other clients might be interested in. This poll for example is interesting because I am not a user of Google Chrome and didn’t think that many people were using it. Of course this is a VERY small sample, but still surprising. What I really like about the Linked In Polls is their outstanding graphics… Don’t you agree?

Google Instant is not new, but it is having a dramatic influence on how people search….

As you can see when you use Google, the search results change dynamically AS YOU TYPE. The suggestions DO influence what people will type in – this is having a dramatic effect on Google Adwords…

Ray Keefe of Successful Endeavours sent this Google Warning article link to me several months ago. I shared this with my clients giving them hints and suggestions, but those are beyond the scope of a blog post.

If you’d like ‘instant’ access to tip and tricks to make sure you avoid mistakes and are kept informed in ‘real time’ – contact us to join one of our many programs.

If you have the need to translate text or documents, Google has a great translation tool. This is handy when you do a lot of blogging or have a lot of YouTube videos and someone posts a comment in a foreign language… It still has difficulty with vernacular, but it’s always improving!

This is a great example of how to explain something, step-by-step. A picture is worth a thousand words. Always, always Keep It Simple Stupid (K.I.S.S.) especially when it comes to instructions and explanations.

As you’ve come to expect from me and my blogs, I come at things from a different perspective and paradigm. My goal for my blogs is to be the catalyst for ideas that can help you grow your business. The Internet is an exponential tool that can help in countless ways. Today’s post is another example – using tools like Linked In Polls to gather valuable information.

It’s pretty self-explanatory and that’s OK.

Exponential Internet Marketing is not rocket science. It’s all about “doing stuff” that works and having the discipline to follow up and follow through.

On the last night of every Exponential Business Building Bootcamp there is a session on Internet Strategies where participants can ask any question to increase their online traffic, sales and/or conversions. The Internet Marketing Strategies we teach are proven and tested for real brick and mortar businesses – not the spam like ‘link building’ and other affiliate marketing strategies associated with get rich quick schemes.

This November, in Melbourne, we’re staging the last Exponential Internet Marketing Bootcamp. We’re not abandoning Internet Marketing Strategies, we’re just going to restrict access to our Platinum Program Members. As I’ve mentioned before, there are too many Internet Marketing Spruikers out there selling empty dreams at multi-speaker salesfest events. We don’t want to be associated with that genre. We’re focused on producing GUARANTEED RESULTS for our clients.

Today’s post is an example from Ray Keefe of Successful Endeavours. At this year’s Exponential Business Building Bootcamp, I explained how to blog to optimise Search Engine Optimisation for new lead generation as well as improving your Google Keyword Ranking. Ray, as a multi-award winner, knows that you need to take action to create results.

His latest blog post, called Squash Lessons For Engineering is an ideal example of how to do it. It’s a derivative of my Squash Lessons For Marketing and another case study in how to grow your business exponentially leveraging my 1 Percent Improvement Doctrine. Too many people chase the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow when all the success, wealth, health and happiness is right there, within their reach – if only they knew what to do and how to do it… That’s why you should seriously consider attending one of our events – our programs now include a RESULTS BASED GUARANTEE.

Last week, I mentioned in my blog that you should leverage other people’s youTube videos. I’ve since realised that I should lead by example and show you what I mean by leveraging someone else’s video – in this instance it’s Paul Telling, T-E-L-L-I-N-G’s video.

YouTube Tip: Use Other People’s Videos

This example is ideal because it triangulates a lot of VALUE for you. First of all, you need to know who Paul Telling is. He’s an amazing graphic artist, client and friend. You can access his website at the hyperlink above. He was also a participant at our inaugural edition of the Unleash The Speaker Within event.

By telling you about Paul, I am also creating a series of hyperlinks for you to see what we’re all about, I Kall them Killer Konversations – part of the Killer Kopywriting System I’ve developed.

Of course Paul has attended the Killer Kopywriting Workshop…

But getting back on track – Paul attended Unleash The Speaker Within and this was his final performance:

Paul Telling’s Testimonial about the Unleash The Speaker Within event is below:

And now for HIS video… that I have embedded here for you: It’s an exercise as part of the Professional Protege Program that encompasses the Unleash The Speaker Within event…

What Makes Paul Telling Unique

So there you have it in a round about way – LEVERAGING the power of YouTube for YOUR benefit!

If you need any help with your video production – contact Paul Telling. If you want to get better results online, check out our Internet Mastery Programs and events!

As you know by now, my short blog posts are rare. This is one of them. This YouTube video is a must watch for anyone involved in Internet Marketing. It is absolutely priceless. I know you’ll want to watch it more than once and forward this blog link to colleagues and friends.

The Social Media Revolution Is Here

There are several reasons why you want to have a blog. You can review the recent posts on AustralianBlogs.com.au to find out what they are. With that being said, quite a few people have been excited about my blog posts, asking how to use them to their advantage. Here’s how:

Traffic Building Tip

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Today’s post is about a little known Linked In tool you might want to consider, it’s called the Reading List – it’s a list of books that you’re reading that LinkedIn maintains within your profile. With a 5,000 word comment field, I am sure there is a lot that can be done with it.

I am currently testing it with my first submission with a blatant self-promotional comment that I will edit later on.

I often take notes and extract distinctions that I could quite easily place here and refer to – the question is whether or not LinkedIn will make it easier to access that list in the future…

For the time being, this is a ‘new’ option to consider if you’re looking for that extra 1 percent improvement.

If you don’t know what www.LinkedIn.com is, you really need to subscribe to one of our Memberships, you can start off with the least expensive program, the Internet Mastery Silver Momentum Membership for $97/month simply because NOT knowing this is costing you MORE than $97/month in lost sales, leads and FREE traffic.
Onward and upward!
Dr Marc Dussault

The Exponential Growth Strategist

P.S.

If you’re keen to improve by MORE than 1 percent, you’ll want to check out another Linked In strategy I highlighted on www.AustralianBlogs.com.au that explains how to post your blog on www.Linkedin.com.

As you can well see, each 1 percent improvement on its own is quick and easy. The thing is that it all adds up to FREE traffic that ends up buying from you BECAUSE they know you exist and have something of value to offer.

If they don’t find you, they can’t buy from you.