Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

America, and I am assuming the rest of the world, is slowly becoming less and less literate.

People don’t read books, text, or instruction manuals nearly as much as they did 50 years ago.

I am not saying this is bad, it is just different.

Communication does not need to go through words, but words do allow for very technical nuances to be communicated.

Facebook has brilliantly identified our lack of ability to communicate clearly through words anymore and have given us stickers.

By now I am sure you have seen the cutesy little stickers available when you comment. Just hit the smiley face.

As a quick test, on my own wall and on the wall of an internet marketers group I belong to, I started a thread saying you could just use stickers.

It is one of the quickest filling threads I have ever seen, and definitely the most colorful.

It allows you to be cute, colorful, and creative all with a click of just one button.

We used to do this a long time ago, but it fell out of style.

Welcome back to hieroglyphics.

I aint judging, just different.

At Pubcon 2014 we are throwing parties and special events.

It sounds simple enough. Shoot a video. Put it on your page. Run ads to it.

In actual practice it is surprisingly complicated, and there is very little written about how to do it.

Works like a bomb though.

The biggest problem I know most of you have, is not having an authentic message you believe in to put on the video.

The whole trick to shooting video for the internet, is just to say what you feel and not try to fake it at all.

I am doing a marketing event at Pubcon 2014. It will be a bit of a pubcon party, in our suite at the Wynn.

We are marketing to companies grossing $50 million dollars per year or more.

So how do you impress someone controlling that kind of budget?

I know these guys, I work with them every day.

They are not impressed by your clothes, or your car, or your home. Obviously you don’t want to show up with a ripped tshirt with food on it either, but trying to outspend them in appearance is not what they care about.

The only thing they care about is how much is this going to cost, how much is it going to make, and how long is it going to take? Also, there better not be any liability, legal or other as a result. If you hit those points, you win.

Sure you don’t look like a super model and neither do I. They don’t care about that either.

So a simple video describing what you are doing, and helping to answer those points above.

I don’t want to give away the entire story either, so you give the broad overview, and then lead them on to the next content that will tell them more if they are interested.

We use this same basic flow for lead gen for our clients as well.

Here is how you do it.

Create a video and upload it from your facebook page.

Make sure you are logged in as the page admin and not yourself or it may not work.

Write a bitchen compelling headline.

Select a frame of your face on the video for the still that people will be interested in. (good looking not required)

Click the title of your post so you can get the url of the post, not the page.

Go to facebook ads to create a new one.

Click on Page Post Engagements

Paste the URL in when asked.

Fill in the demographics, ad some money and post.

Here is the actual ad that I am promoting as we speak.

If you have followed me over the years you have seen me connect, connect, connect, connect over and over with the biggest players in our industry. My email list is huge and full of executives, owners, investors, and movers and shakers in the internet business world.

One of my best ways to connect with these folks is using niche events. Today I am going to go over exactly how to do this..

Back in 2007 when I first went gung-ho networking and building my list, people were not even using the term opt in or lead gen commonly.

I wasn’t trying to be a laser effective internet marketer, but instead just did what seemed natural. I cared about the people in the industry and wanted to connect with them.

So naturally when I held my first big poker tournament at Pubcon, I used a Survey Monkey survey to find out where they wanted the tournament, what they wanted to drink, what was important in terms of prizes, when it should start, when it should end, and even the design of the t-shirt.

Here is a walk through on how to use Wufoo to create a survey in literally a few minutes.

As a result I developed what became one of the first, most popular, and longest lasting events in the internet business world.

We chose survey monkey at the time because it made so much sense on so many levels.

The funny thing is that I recently heard about a course that teaches you how to use surveys like this for lead gen.

As soon as someone fills out a survey, if you get their contact info, they become a lead.

If you are reading this post, and have been to Pubcon in the past 10  years, there is a high chance that you ended up on my email list because of this.

More about the Pubcon story and how I used wufoo and survey monkey.

Lately we have been experimenting using the Survey Monkey Alternative WuFoo. I can only describe it as being lighter, and more agile than Survey Monkey, but very powerful, and easy to use. (Full Disclosure, Survey Monkey is partnering with us but everything I am saying here is exactly true.)

I find now when I am making a survey that I am putting more thought into, and where I want more control of things like urls, and how the results are going to be processed in the final analysis I tend to use Survey Monkey.

When I want to get up a survey really fast, or if I want to embed the survey on a facebook page, or on a webpage such as wordpress, I grab wufoo.

A few months ago on Facebook and Youtube I saw people becoming really alarmed about the Japanese radiation spreading to the U.S., especially into the fish supply. I asked people I knew, and there were people who seriously were really concerned about radiation and our food supply.

Whenever there is a crazy fear in the world I look to see if there is something I can do to fix it, provide people with real information, and alleviate their fears.

It suddenly occurred to me that the solution to worrying about radiation, was to know if your food was radioactive.

Being a doctor, and having a strong science background, the obvious solution to me was a Geiger counter.

Turns out your average Geiger Counter will not work with food. Since the amount of food you would measure is so small, you need an antenna that surrounds the food to pick up the random particle that would shoot out from the food in an unpredictable direction at unpredictable intervals.

This meant we would need to have these Geiger Counters custom built. I checked around, the technology was all there, and it would just require an investment to get a few thousand of them built.

Decades ago I had learned to test my marketing before building the product.

So I put up a page with a WuFoo form on a wordpress page to gather information from the visitors. If this worked, this also could end up being my lead generation page.

I ran a few hundred dollars of facebook ads to the form.

We got some clicks. We also got a few form fills on the Wufoo form of people requesting more information.

I had expected a possible flood of interest on this, but got an average responses and not a flood.

Another big project jumped in front of me, so I dropped the Geiger Counter idea, since it did not fly immediately.

The moral of the story is that I saved tens of thousands of dollars to get the Geiger Counters produced, and the time it would have taken me to perfect ads, and maybe then would have made a small profit.

I have been solidly sold by all my influencers on launching quickly and cheaply, and then seeing what the results are. The amount of money I have saved by not committing to a new product until it has been tested is enormous.

The ability to get a wordpress site up in 15 minutes, put Wufoo on it, and run facebook ads to the Wufoo survey to gauge interest, saves me a fortune every year.

Like the idea?

Go get a great idea, a free Wufoo Account, a facebook page or a wordpress blog, a facebook account with your credit card in, and you can be testing your idea within the hour for ten bucks worth of ads.

I just sat down at a new Vietnamese place in San Diego. LOL, now their yelp review will rank well in Google, and they will never know why!

The place is awesome, just opened 3 months ago.

I was talking to the owner about Facebook ads. 5 Minutes later I had an add up and running to his facebook page.

Such a powerful technology. I don’t think any of us have even begun to grasp the power of this thing.

I am proud to have been part of it since the very early days of facebook advertising. (Even though Harrison Gevirtz literally beat me by years at the age of 15!)

Welcome people who live in the Zip, are between the ages of 30 and 45! Enjoy your dinner! 🙂

So a year ago hostgator forced us to change dedicated servers. That story was documented then. Over time we have been working to move our websites to new hosting companies. So far all of that has gone well. We still have some sites hosted on hostgator.

Tonight I needed to get access to my WHM. I have been on the phone with Host Gator for 22 minutes, and they have been unable to change my password to give me access to my server.

This is no exaggeration, about the 6th time in the past year we have had a similar conversation with them.

They are very nice and apologetic, but somehow can not get the most basic function of the server, the ability to log in and out of it, to work.

Really the only reason I am writing this, is a hope that someone there will finally take enough responsibility to fix this for us.

It will still be some months before we are finished migrating all of our sites off of hostgator.

They have with no exaggeration caused me an extra 40 or more hours of work this past year, all because of the forced server migration when I was traveling, while begging them not to do it.

Now I bet Brian is going to tell me that this was updated 9  months ago and I missed it.

I normally never go on their site, but we are trying to sort out some issues that come up when local listings pop up in Google sometimes, and then are not seen later, so I was called in to figure it out.

Authority labs is doing great on this, it is just Google that keeps changing whether they show the local listings or not for this client.

If you have not seen the new interface go check it out.

You guys did a really good job on it.

Super clear. Sharp self explanatory logos. Easy to find your way around. No unnessesary options, just the things you need, and an easy way to get to support for the things not described. I know from the past that they get back to you lightening fast.

Brian and Chase, I am imagine how much work went into the design. Love it!

I have been a huge fan of Naked Juice for decades.

I have bought probably tens of thousands of dollars of their products and consumed them over the past decades.

They even worked with me to help the San Diego firefighters when the City of San Diego could not supply the firefighters with enough food the first few days of the big fires. For this they are still appreciated.

I have promoted them.

I had not seen Naked Juice around as much as I used to the past year.

I had thought they just were not selling as well.

According to multiple reports in the news, Naked Juice got popped by mislabeling their juices.

They were using additives as sweeteners and bulking agents that are genetically modified, and made in factories.

I feel betrayed. Not cool.

Another one of my allies that I have done deals with Whole Foods has been selling this stuff for decades. This tarnishes their reputation. Whole Foods is one of the most ethical companies in the U.S., and have saved an untold number of lives. I have known many of their executives. The guys at the top of Whole Foods are there for real to do good for the planet. One of their executives from Follow Your Heart, has been living what they say for almost half a century now.

Many of us spend an enormous amount of time and energy to put the healthiest things possible into our bodies.

The exact items they are reported to have used were Archer Daniels Midland’s Fibersol-2 (“a soluble corn fiber that acts as a low-calorie bulking agent”), fructooligosaccharides (an alternative sweetener), and genetically modified soy.

I am hitting 50 years old in a few months, and have more energy, enthusiasm and am more mentally quick than most 25 year olds I know.

Not a small part of this is due to my eating very clean food since I was 16 years old.

Virtually no artificial flavors, artificial colors, or preservatives. I eat organic when possible, and take the best vitamins I can find.

I don’t drink, and I don’t take drugs.

Do not mess with my food supply.

If a company wants to make crap and sell poor health to the masses, that is their choice, and the choice of those who buy them.

But you best label your products accurately. If you tell me it is made with fruit and fruit juice it better be.

If Gypsy Boots were still alive right now he would throw a football right through your window.

A whole new level of egregious link spam/removal has begun.

We are in the midst of removing a penalty from an important site, and I took a sample of the bad links to look at myself for a little quality control. I cam across a site listed below called, gimmewealth.com. This of course is a funny name, but with a sting when you figure out what they are doing.

The site I am working on had hired an Indian firm to build links for them. The client at the time thought they were writing articles, and then posting them in different places as a way of getting links. The client had no idea that there was anything wrong with this at all.

So we are helping them to remove these links, so that they may get the penalty removed.

This site shown below may have been a link built by the Indian company, or possibly was something even more evil which I will explain below.

Google has told us that bad links should be removed. When you search for bad links, you come across pages like this.

This bad link page, which is a pile of crap to start with, has actually put an automated payment system in place to have you pay them to remove the link.

They are smart in that they set the cost at a point, where most people will actually pay it.

Now here is the question?

Did the links on this site end up there because of Indian and other shady SEO companies building the links? Or did this company build this site, and put the crappy links on their site along with the paypal button as an entire business concept of it’s own.

Step 1 – Build a Crappy Site

Step 2 – Build Crappy Links to your site from porn,  gambling and pharmaceutical sites.

Step 3 – Link out to millions of legitimate websites.

Step 4 – Put an automated button for people to pay to have your link removed.

Bad Luck? Or Evil Genius?

Sean Rasmussen (The name listed as owner of this domain), if you see this post, please comment so we can hear the whole story?

= THE BELOW IS A  SCREEN SHOT OF THE PAGE =

On facebook my SEO friends have been whining about Google hiding the search data from them.

If you don’t get this, when you go to Google Analytics, which is Google’s tool for seeing what is happening on your website, they up to now have shown you a great degree of what keyword people were searching for when they came to your site.

Those of us in the Google ranking, and Google penalty removal business, use this data as indicators as to how Google is ranking our sites for different keywords. In fact it has been extremely useful for me to figure out exactly what is causing the penalty.

Google has decided to hide all of this data from webmasters, and now webmasters are whining about it.

My good buddy and secret weapon Dan and I have a basic philosophy which is the harder and more expensive something is to figure out or get past, the better for us.

It is like having a 20,000 foot cliff below our front porch. Only the strong and the smart are going to make it there. Most people are tremendously lazy. If there is any barrier to entry at all, then they are not even going to try to get in. That leaves plenty of room at the top for those smart enough, and willing to work 16 hour days to get to places where the masses, and even the leaders of the masses will never see.

We just got through doing a sideways reverse engineering of a big piece of google. By this I mean we took a way Google is looking at sites, and then came in from the side, worked our way through the webbing, and found an amazing new way to build links that are Google compliant, Google loved, and will get sites to rank even better than we have for cheaper. To do this took 2 months of research on top of what we have been dong for years. Then once I had the idea, I spent three 16 hour days writing up the specs for the programmer, who then banged out version 1 for me.

How many people are going to go through that much work? Not many.

So every time Google makes it harder for SEO’s to get sites to rank well in Google, I give Google another round of applause.

I know as the challenges get tougher, I will work harder and smarter that I ever have before.

As Google tightens its noose against crappy links, and crappy writing, and sloppy lazy analysis, we just keep pulling further ahead.

I will tell you one more secret.

Not drinking and taking good care of oneself goes an awful long way in being able to work hard, and well, for decades at a time 🙂

Making it a bit tougher for us Google ranking folks Google?

Thanks! 😉

As most of you know, we have been working flat out the past few years helping very large sites and our own large sites rank well in Google.  A big part of this has become getting rid of the penalties.

As a result we have a large research team and some amazing white hat link building teams literally working around the clock these days. The sun never sets on the empire as they say.

Today there is an interesting new twist. Google is actually telling you flat out if you have a manual penalty. For some webmasters they got a notice from Google, it disappeared, and then they never saw it again.

Today in Google Webmaster tools showed up a button under Search Traffic, Manual Actions. It then tells you if you have a manual action and some details about it. Most often if you have one, it is going to be about unnatural link warnings, although I am sure there are others.

If you click on it you get Manual Actions, Site Wide Matches, and Partial Matches.

The Site Wide Matches will probably shake out to be more Panda related penalties, and the Partial Matches more Penguin stuff.

I applaud Google for being a little more transparent at this.

I once asked Matt Cutts a question in front of a few hundred webmasters, a bit tongue in cheek but also seriously, if Google was asking webmasters to be entirely transparent in what they were doing, when could we expect the same from Google? This is a step in the right direction.

If you have one of these penalties on a significant site and want to chat, email me at dk (at) purposeinc.com