The Internet has brought many new terms and practices to the business world. One of these is tag clouds. If you are a frequent Internet surfer, you may have used tag clouds. Tag clouds are trendy navigation tools that make it easy for site visitors to jump to the most popular links on your site. They also add some visual fun to the web page or blog, often appearing as a group of words stacked on top of each other, with some words much larger and bolder. The visual prominence of the words is determined by the popularity of the word.
What is a tag cloud? Basically, tags are related hyperlinks that allow the user to drill down into your site. The more frequently used tags are often represented in larger bolder fonts and stronger colors. Typical tag clouds have between 30 and 150 tags.
Types of tag clouds:
There are three primary types of tag cloud applications, characterized by their meaning rather than their appearance. The tags can appear in alphabetical order, in random order, sorted by weight, or in clustered according to the meaning of a word, phrase, sentence or text.
* A tag cloud for each item: With this type, there is a tag cloud for each item. The size represents the number of times that tag has been applied to a single item.
* Global tag clouds: This type, which is more commonly used, involves multiple tag clouds combining the frequencies of all items and users. The size represents the number of items to which a tag has been applied, indicating each tag’s popularity.
* In the third type, tags are used to categorize content items. The larger tags represent the quantity of content items in that category.
If you would like to create tag clouds, WordPress has many plug-ins. For a list and description of available plugins, search the WordPress Plugin Directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/. Be sure to check out the WP Colorful Tag Cloud plugin. WP Colorful Tag Cloud allows you to display an attractive tag cloud using a variety of customizable colors. Colors depend on tags weights and sizes.
Here’s how to install the WP Colorful Tag Cloud plugin.
1. Unzip and upload wp-colorful-tag-cloud directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. Customize your settings using the menu item under Settings, Colorful tag Cloud.
4. Remember to save your settings.
Learn to create professional looking blogs for yourself or a business!
The Secret to Making Money Online – A Good Work Ethic
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Hard work is always rewarded. Lately however, it seems that people are trying to find the Magic Bullet: some product or system that makes money without doing any work. There are online ads that proclaim fast riches for just sitting around on your butt. Images of cruise ships and bikini clad women surrounding this lucky young man who is making money while on vacation. Are scenes like this really true? Or are shady companies just trying to get you to sign up for something that doesn’t work? Well, yes and no.
You can make money while you’re on vacation. That’s just the nature of the Internet. While you have to man a cash register to make money with a physical store (and be open at a set time during business hours), you can make money on the Internet at all hours of the day and night, seven days a week. You can set up your products to be processed, fulfilled and delivered on automatic, so that you don’t have to actually be there live to make the sale. That all sounds pretty wonderful, right? The missing link however, the one that ads don’t tell you about, is the amount of education, work and dedication it takes to get all of this started. Just like any other business, if you want to be successful, it takes a good work ethic.
A good work ethic means doing whatever it takes to know the ropes. It means not taking fruitless shortcuts and only processing work and ideas half-way. Taking your Internet business seriously is the only way to make money. I know of no get-rich-quick scenarios that have actually worked. 99% of people who sign up for ‘make money at home’ schemes fail miserably. The difference between someone who is successful and the others is how they view the business: real work equals real money. The Internet is not a place to take miraculous leaps of faith.
A real business takes a real education. Would you open up a clothing store at the mall without some retail management training? How would you keep track of inventory and balance your books without going out of business? As fast as the Internet changes, you need to stay on top of the workings of the web more than ever. With the ease of putting up websites and the promises of quick riches, the Internet is flooded with people trying to make money. It’s not like the mall. That means that there is more competition and more obstacles to being noticed than ever before. The good news is that a majority of these Internet businesses don’t really know what they’re doing. Most websites don’t make money. Just because they’re online doesn’t mean they’re successful. “Build it and they will come” doesn’t work on the Internet. There is so much more to it than that.
There are proven ways to make money with an online business - ones that have been tried and tested over and over again. The big players know how it works. They take it seriously. IMTC has the proven system of education that not only sets you apart from the others, but focuses on dedicated work ethics that will help you succeed in ANY business, not just online. Look around at all of the ads and sign up for whatever you want to. But when you decide to take making real money online seriously, we’ll be here for you.
Online College Courses in Virginia
By · CommentsTaking online college courses at home is a great idea no matter what state you live in. At the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia, you can get a dedicated certificate in as little as six months that will open up bright new careers for you. Visit the site to download your free career guide.
A member of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
Think Outside the Box
By · CommentsDid you see the Superbowl this year? If you’re like most people, even if you didn’t want the Superbowl, you had to see the commercials. They are everywhere now. If you miss the commercials on Superbowl Sunday, you can find them on the Internet monday morning.
I want to mention a commercial in particular. The Doritos Commercial. Frito-Lay ran a contest. They wanted to run two fan created commercials during the Superbowl. They got 6,100 entries. The winning entry scored one million dollars and instant fame. (Check the commercial out here: SuperBowl Doritos Commercial )
Jonathan Friedman said it cost him $20 to make the commercial. It cost Frito-Lay a cool million to Friedman for all his hard work, and however many millions the Superbowl spot cost. But they generated a lot of buzz with the contest and huge individual windfall. Heck, that may have even been a steal for what an advertising agency would charge to develop a commercial specifically for the Superbowl.
It’s a little bit of a gamble when professionals aren’t involved, hoping that something good would come from the thousands of entries, but it paid off well.
- Large reward (which may still have been less than they could have paid an agency to develop the commercial)
- Rags to Riches story (Jonathan Friedman made a significant amount of money in a short time)
- Company gets Goodwill / karma for helping out a little guy
It’s a nice story at the end of the day.
People have taken to the Internet in droves. We shop online, play online, work online. We find miracles and dreams online. The Internet has discovered and carried more and more people off to Hollywood. Singers, actors, stars! A YouTube video and a dream! Of course, a lot of the people who get discovered on the Internet have spent a LOT of time getting themselves seen. They have a TON of material—usually videos, usually linked in some fashion to current trends—and are hoping that if their name pops up in enough places that someone will notice them.
Marketing and promotional materials—either for products and services or for the people who are reaching for fame—are a necessary part of selling online. You have to have materials out there, just the same as in the physical world. Flyers, mailers, billboards, t-shirts. Everything is going digital. Think about your avatars and signatures in forums or discussion areas. Think about all the YouTube videos you can be out there making that cross-connect and link back to your materials. Did George Clooney just have a baby? Do you run a parenting site? Take a bit of his fame and do a video about why you think he would or wouldn’t be a good dad and how your product could help him!
The moral of today’s stories are, think outside the box and use tools that are available to you. Here at the Internet Marketing Training Center we’re here to show you how to think outside of the box and properly utilize tools in rewarding ways.
Content Marketing: Pinterest And Infographics
By · CommentsPinterest broke unique visit records last month with their fun and interactive image sharing site. Pinterest lets you “pin” photos and videos that you discover on the web to your virtual “board” so the rest of the world can see them. Other users can comment and share the images that you post and you can do the same for them. When you click on the image or video itself, it takes you directly to the website where the user found it. This is a great way to drive traffic to a website in a fun and unpresumptuous way.
Some photos seem to be more popular than others for sharing. On Pinterest, pictures of food and jewelry are the hottest shares, and people click on the photos to get the recipe or craft ideas. For the most part, these foodie blogs and Etsy stores are getting their fair share of business using Pinterest. While most marketers are still trying to figure out how to get traffic from Pinterest with information products, the idea of the “infographic” has caught on.
An infographic is a fun, clever and informative image with all sorts of facts and figures about a particular topic. It’s far more engaging than just another written article, not because it has any more content than an article, but simply because it’s different and easily shareable. With content marketing and syndication, easily shareable content is more important than the details. If it’s not shareable, the ‘syndication’ part is stifled, leaving the content lonely on your website unread.
I’ve included a snapshot of an infographic here on this post. Obviously it’s a lot larger than this, but you get the idea. You can create these in photoshop for your own business and post them on your blog and website, then share them on popular sites like Pinterest.
Guide To Choosing A Career
By · CommentsThe Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia is an Internet marketing school designed to teach you everything you would need to know about selling your products online. No only can you sell your products and services, you can also get hired by companies looking for the same thing. Check out http://www.imtcva.org for more information.
Free Content Helps Eliminate “List Exhaustion”
By · CommentsDo you ever get so many sales pitches from one or two companies in your email inbox that you can’t stand to open them anymore? Maybe that last “open” you did was to un-subscribe? That happens a lot lately with the email strategies businesses are trying to use. They have a hard time knowing exactly what the best kind of reaching out they should be doing. Most people who use their database list for email marketing fall into one of two categories: those who send out too many emails (list exhaustion), and those who are scared to send out enough (neglected list). The way to get around this hump is free content.
For those marketers who send out too much email, it’s important to find the rhythm of your list. How often do they really want to hear from you? You can go as far as to poll them to make sure you’re not killing them with mail. A heavy amount of unsubscribes could also be an indicator. With free content however, a solid core of readers will love to hear from you if you are offering real solutions to real problems. Content builds trust and rapport, and will keep your brand at the ‘top of their mind.’ The best email is one that has value. It’s your job to figure out what is most valuable to your readers and how often they want to receive it. With those two problems solved, you’re well on your way to successful email marketing campaigns.
For those marketers who don’t send out enough email, free content can help you feel at ease. If you’re nervous about ‘offending’ or burning out your list, solving their issues with your message can build you into a solid, trustworthy brand. Everyone loves free stuff – they will open the email as long as it has value. Again, finding the right rhythm regarding how often to send email out is the key to a happy list.
Now about pitching. Obviously, after a number of emails have been opened that offer ideal and free solutions, your list will be receptive to offers of helping them further with their problems. Most free content can be disguised as ‘eye openers’ or offering real solutions to problems that the readers didn’t even know they had. Let your list figure out what’s important to them, and they be receptive to products, training or advice to help fix it. A pitchy call-to-action is not necessary. A link to an important resource (your product) is all that’s needed. Trust your prospects that they’ll do the right thing, and more often or not, they will.
Vimeo Changes Interface to Compete with YouTube
By · CommentsIn the world of video marketing, YouTube is king. However, there are many other video sharing sites that still get a lot of traffic. One of them being Vimeo. Vimeo has just changed its layout in order to make it easier for users to find other content on the site. With the new redesign, it’s easier for users to follow subjects, keywords, and other users. Vimeo is known for its high quality videos and simple embedded player. Vimeo found that most bloggers had accounts on both YouTube and Vimeo, yet they would always embed videos on their blogs with Vimeo’s player because there are no ads displayed over the video. With these new features, Vimeo is hoping people will be attracted to the site and use it as another marketing tool as well as for their viewing pleasure.
Video Marketing is one of the fastest growing aspects of online marketing. See what else is HERE.
Most business sales letters, promo pages and lead generation pages love to focus on one main item: themselves. It stands to reason that a website promoting a business should talk about themselves as often as possible: how great they are, how easy their products are to use, how often they ‘beat’ the competition and other self-aggrandizing features. However, it is becoming clearer to online advertisers and copywriters that concentrating on the visitors themselves has a wider range of interest. Anything that sounds too ‘pitchy’ can easily raise walls of objection in the visitor, even if it is crafted to sound like useful features. Remember, it’s all about them.
What resonates with most readers is what can benefit them right now. On the Internet, most people are searching for information as opposed to radio and television, where commercials are a break in entertainment. The Internet above most other media, is a vehicle for making decisions: where to find the best deals, how to locate the nearest dentist, how to save money on their taxes and other information. This ultimately means that the end result needs to look more like ‘immediately usable benefits and answers’ rather than sales pitches. Good website copywriting can include both the elements of benefits and subtle pitch.
One thing that stands out to visitors subconsciously is the overuse of the words “We” and “Our” in the copy. While it is a very small error by most copywriters, it has a negative effect on the reader. It has a sense of ‘inward’ marketing, trying to draw the reader into the copy, rather than an ‘outward’ or inclusive feel to the reader. Reaching out to your prospect and touching the points of why they ended up on your website in the first place (concerns, understanding, problem solving, empathy) can make them drop their defenses and open up to receive a subtle pitch. If you feel that your copy is all about you, there is a cool piece of programming that will analyze your website for overuse of the terms ‘we’ and ‘our.’ Check it out: http://www.futurenowinc.com/wewe.htm (see above photo of one of our Founder’s sales letter’s results)
Just add your website URL to the form and see how customer-centered your website copy is. Good copy has a 2 to 1 ratio of customer focus to company focused jargon. At IMTC, we teach you how to write better copy. This can make you very valuable to big business because you will understand what elements drive online sales more effectively than their in-house marketing people (who love to focus on company ‘benefits’), or any outsourced people could ever dream of being. And you can probably work from home as well. Check us out…
