ThePrivatePage: Internet Marketing Center

July 05, 2006

Target the EXPLODING global Internet market - and watch your profits SOAR!

Hey, want to hear something awesome? Check out this incredibly cool stat: According to research giant comScore Networks...

There are now an estimated 694 million adult Web users worldwide!

(And when I say "adult," I don't mean those dodgy sites you're not allowed to visit at work — I'm talking about something WAAAY sexier: people who have credit cards and lots of disposable income to burn!)

Think about it... That's almost 700 million people. Talk about a HUGE market in which to sell your products or services!

And the cool thing about the comScore survey is that it's not just looking at North American users. Sure, the US has been the trailblazer in online use for many years... In fact, there are now 152 million Americans online! That's over half the country's total population!

But it would be foolish for American entrepreneurs to ignore the fact that the rest of the world is surfing the Web in ever-growing numbers — because all these international Internet users are also looking to buy things online.

In fact, many of them could soon become YOUR new customers — IF you know how to attract them to your web site and appeal to their buying instincts!

So, where are your potential new customers coming from? Take a look...

In Asia, China, Japan, India, and South Korea now have a combined total of 168.1 million Internet users.

And in Europe, Germany leads the way with 31 million people online, and the UK is close on its heels with 30 million Internet users.

Now, how can you take advantage of these growing international markets?

Well, take a second to think about your own products or services. Do you sell something that's cheap and easy to produce locally, but expensive and hard to find in other countries? Then there are probably a lot of people abroad who'd be eager to buy your product!

Or maybe you sell a service that would appeal to international buyers. Do you provide translation services... or teach a subject like English as a second language... or provide travel services? A service like any of these would be PERFECT to offer to international markets!

Alternatively, is there an item that you could add to your product list that people in other countries might like to buy? Don't worry if you can't think of anything off the top of your head... just keep your eyes open for any opportunities that come your way. Because the farther you can extend the reach of your business, the bigger your share of the global market will be — and the bigger your profits will be!

Think about ways you can make it easier for international buyers to make a purchase on your site. Is it worth getting your site translated into German, for example, if you see a large potential market there? Could you provide pricing in different currencies on your site to cater to foreign markets? Can you tailor some of your online marketing to people in other countries?

Sure, there are some challenges involved in selling to a worldwide market (such as dealing with customs issues or language barriers), but none of them are insurmountable. eBooks, for example, are as easy to sell to someone in New Delhi as to someone in New York. And if you can figure out how to tap into the potential of the global market, the payoff can be huge!

Remember, it's a big world out there... and thanks to the Internet, it's getting more accessible for small business owners by the day!

Posted by Derek Gehl at 07:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 30, 2006

Use Podzinger to find quality audio and video content

If you're thinking about adding audio or video content to your blog or web site, there's a cool new audio and video search engine that you should know about. It's called PodZinger and it performs searches on audio and video podcasts, making it easy for you to find multimedia content that's related to your particular industry.

Podcasts can be a great source of FREE audio and video content for your web site or blog. And offering industry-specific multimedia content is an awesome marketing strategy — it adds value to your site and encourages people to return on a regular basis to see what new content you've posted recently.

The only problem is, it can be difficult to find podcasts that are relevant to your target market, or related to the keywords you are actually searching for. The regular search engines — like Google and Yahoo — aren't much help, because they only allow you to search for audio and video files by their title. They don't let you search for specific words that are actually spoken within the audio and video files.

However, PodZinger now allows you to do just that!

PodZinger — which recently received a "Best of the Web" award from Forbes magazine — uses speech-recognition technology to create a text script of audio and video files. This allows you to find specific words located anywhere within a podcast, and jump to the point where those words appear.

With PodZinger, you can now search for podcasts by keyword in the same way that you use Google or Yahoo to search for written information on web sites.

To show you what I mean, here's a screencap of the first result I got when I used PodZinger to search for the keyword phrase "Internet marketing":

As you can see, the search result gives you the name of the podcast series (Six Pixels of Separation — The Podcast), the episode (Episode #6), a brief synopsis of what the podcast is actually about, and links to every mention of your search term. When you click on one of these links, you'll be taken directly to the place where your search term is spoken.

In other words, you don't even need to download a podcast before listening to it. You can play it right from PodZinger's search results page! The embedded player also lets you rewind, fast forward, and pause the podcast, as well as subscribe to its RSS feed.

You can also submit your own podcasts directly to PodZinger to have them indexed in its search results. There's an easy-to-find link that allows you to make submissions right on the homepage. Plus, the PodZinger "spider" scours the Web on a daily basis, adding thousands of new podcasts to its listings every week. PodZinger is already searching over 200,000 podcasts, which makes it one of the biggest podcast directories on the Web!

As the number of podcasts continues to grow, it's becoming even more important for you to make sure your podcasts appear in the top search engine listings. So if you want people to find your podcasts, you should definitely submit them to PodZinger.

With its unique technology that lets users search for spoken words in podcasts, PodZinger has become one of the most popular places to search for podcasts on the Web — which means that if your site is featured high in its listings, you'll soon be seeing a whole lot more downloads coming your way!

Posted by Derek Gehl at 03:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

June 21, 2006

How a Game of "Tag" Can Direct Swarms of Targeted Traffic to Your Blog

Did you know that by adding a simple word to the end of your blog posts, you can skyrocket them to the top of the search listings on the 'Net's most popular blog community?

It's true! These simple words are called "tags," and they act as labels that help specialized search engines identify the subject matter of your blog posts. These tags also alert the search engines whenever you publish a new post -- so when someone uses one of these search engines to look for blogs related to a certain topic, posts that are tagged with that topic label will appear at the very top of the listings, with the most recently published post appearing first.

So what this means is, if you add certain tags to the end of your posts, you can drive a whole lot more traffic to your blog -- and all this traffic is going to be made up of people who are actually searching for blogs on the topics YOU'RE writing about!

Sounds pretty cool, huh?

Okay, so here's how tags actually work:

After you finish writing a blog post, choose a word or phrase that accurately describes the topic of your post. That word is going to be the "keyword" label for your tag. (For example, if I was going to create a tag for this post, I'd probably label it "Tags.")

You don't have to stop at one tag, though -- you can add as many tags to your blog as you want! (You just have make sure those tag labels are relevant to the content of your post -- people who do a search on those words and click on your blog will be annoyed if your posts have nothing to do with the topic they're looking for. And you DON'T want to annoy your readers -- otherwise, they'll never come back!)

So for this blog, I could also add the following tags: "Derek Gehl," "Internet Marketing," and "Blog Traffic," just to name a few.

Once you've created your list of tag words or phrases, all you have to do is attach a snippet of HTML code to each one, so that the search engines can recognize them as tags. (I'll tell you exactly what code to use in a moment... )

If you're the kind of person who goes cross-eyed at the thought of generating HTML code, don't worry! There are free online tools you can use to create your tags for you, such as the one at Keotag.com

Now, here's the kicker: the HTML code you use to create your tags is going to be different, depending on the search engine you want to "read" them. That's because tags work by actually linking your blog post straight to the search engine's index. (For example, if you go to Keotag.com, you'll see that you can make tags for Technorati, a popular blog community, or Flickr, the 'Net's largest photo blog community, or del.icio.us, a popular online bookmark site.)

Right now, the best place to link your blog tags is Technorati. In case you've never heard of it, Technorati is the Internet's most popular blog community. Currently, Technorati has over 45.3 million blogs in its index -- that's up from 24 million in January, which means it's grown a whopping 88% in just five short months!

And all these web pages are linked together via more than 2.5 billion Technorati tags that allow people to surf from one linked blog to another, or to find blogs related to certain topics by using Technorati's search engine.

This means that if someone does a search on "Internet Marketing" on Technorati's search engine, for example, this blog post should appear at the top of the listings. (Until it gets bumped off the list by more recent posts that are tagged with "Internet Marketing," that is... but in the meantime, I should get a whole lot of extra traffic to my site!)

Not only that, but if any other blogs are also tagged with the keyword label, "Internet Marketing," then they're going to be linked to this blog post as well -- which means that some of their readers might click on the "Internet Marketing" tag at the bottom of their blog post and be sent to mine!

Tagging in Technorati is easy. All you have to do is follow these three simple steps:

Create your own free account with Technorati.

Go to your Account page on the Technorati site and "claim" your blog (in other words, register it) under the "Your Blogs" header.

Include Technorati tags in your posts by inserting an HTML link at the bottom of each post. The tag should look like this:

[tagname]

All you have to do is copy the above bit of HTML and add your own "tagname" to it. The tagname is the word or label you want to use for your tag. For example, if I wanted to create a tag for "Derek Gehl," it would look like this:

[Derek Gehl]

Once you've created a new HTML snippet for each of your tags, using a different tagname for each one, you're done! Your blog post should now be indexed with Technorati, so you can take advantage of their HUGE community of blog readers.

If you have a business blog, I highly recommend you start adding Technorati tags to your posts right away. You'll soon find out that driving more readers to your blog is child's play. As in... Tag! You're it!

Technorati tags: Derek Gehl Internet Marketing Traffic Generation Internet Marketing Center Marketing Tips Blogging Tips Tagging