Author Archives: Tom Antion

An Easy Way to Add Audio to Your Blog

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One method to Add Audio to Your Blog.

This method uses Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is a dirt cheap place to store large files like audio and video.

Get a free player to put on your blog. The player connects to your amazon s3 account.

Connect the player to your Amazon account using your public key and secret key given to you by your amazon s3 account.

Copy the code for the player into your blog.

Amazon S3

We use Amazon S3 for our video storage needs. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is used by many people to store files, any type of files they want; including web hosting, image/video hosting, and as back-up systems. This service offers a cheaper option to storing files compared to uploading them to your own server.

Here's the steps you need to take:

1. You open up a Free Amazon S3 account. You will need an Amazon account to use S3.

2. You set up your S3 account, including your Access Key

3. Download either Cloudberry Explorer or Firefox Organizer (or both programs) to organize your files.

4. Start uploading files. ATTENTION: Since we are using S3 for video storage, there is one more step we take. Depending on what you use Amazon S3 for, you may or may not need to do this step.

5. We use a program that takes our video file, uploads it to Amazon S3, adds a player to the video, and then gives us an embed code for us to use on our sites. We just embed the code onto a page and that's it, people can view our video.

There are a couple program options you can use if you want to do the same thing. Two of the most widely used programs are EZS3 and the other is Mike Stewart's S3 Media Player. EZS3 is a monthly, “in the cloud” service. They charge $20 a month. Mike Stewart's S3 Media Player is a downloadable application and costs a one time fee of $249.

We use Mike Stewart's S3 Media Player and are pleased with the results. It's very easy to use; three steps is all it takes to get the embed code. The nice thing about Amazon S3 is that the files you upload to the server are available to you anywhere in the world as long as you can connect to the internet.

This is a prime example of cloud computing*.

Another nice thing is that Amazon guarantees S3 to have a 99.9% uptime. Probably the nicest thing about Amazon S3 however, is the price. Amazon S3's pricing is based on a tiered system starting at .15 cents a Gigabyte(GB) per month for up to 50 Terabytes(TB) of storage.

If you have over 50 TB of storage, the price per GB gets lower. You can see the whole pricing structure here: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

And the best part is you only pay for what you use, nothing more. Make sure you check out Amazon S3 and decide whether it'll work for you.

*Cloud Computing, or “in/on the cloud computing” is the term used to describe Internet-based computing. This is where software programs, services, and files are all available on servers on the Internet. As long as you have an Internet connection, you will be able to access and use these programs, services, and files anywhere in the world. Many experts believe Cloud Computing is the way of the future, thereby eliminating the need to install software on your machine and/or keep files on your hard drive.

Thinking of being a professional blogger?

Outsourcing Your Internet Marketing Task

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5 Quick Tips When Outsourcing Your Internet Marketing Task

Outsourcing Your Internet Marketing Task

Outsourcing Your Internet Marketing Task

At some point in every Internet marketers career you may have to make a decision regarding outsourcing. One of the biggest reasons for outsourcing your tasks is to give you the ability to work more efficiently, free oneself from a heavy workload, or you simply lack the expertise in some areas. Whatever the case may be, I will give you five tips to help you select the right person for the job.

First, let me point out a few tasks many Internet marketers tend to outsource frequently.

  • Web Design
  • Graphic Design
  • Article Writing
  • Link Building
  • Video Editing
  • Programming

Now, your probably wondering where could you find such experienced service providers without breaking the piggy bank. Well, below is a small list of well known websites that have tons of freelance service providers for all aspects of Internet marketing, at very low rates.

  • Fiverr.com
  • Freelancer.com
  • Elance.com
  • Odesk.com
  • Guru.com

Tip #1 – Escrow Service

All of the above websites with the exception of Fiverr.com, offers an escrow service to safeguard your funds until the job is completed to your satisfaction. In case an individual you outsourced the work to fails to meet you job description you have the right to withhold the funds until the service provider makes any corrections. This is extremely important, especially when you hire someone that's hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

Tip #2 – Post Detailed Job Descriptions

When ever you post jobs to any freelance website make certain to explain in FULL details about the assignment. By doing so, puts you and the provider on the exact same page leaving less room for errors . If you fail to cover all details you risk wasting your time and money.

Tip #3 – Check Providers Feedback

It's good practice to check each and every providers feedback before assigning your jobs. Make sure to choose only providers with positive ratings on past projects with an excellent completion rate.

Tip #4 – Providers Job History

It's very important that the provider you hire for a job has experience in your particular job description. For example,  if you looking for a content writer you need to check his or her feedback for past content writing assignments. This will tell if they're experienced and cut out for job.

Tip #5 – Handling Large Projects

If you plan to assign large projects that extends over a period of weeks or months it's likely that you'll have to release some funds from escrow. By setting your milestones, your funds will be released in increments as each phase of your project is completed.

By using the tips above will help minimize your assignments turn around times, and avoid disagreements with service providers with regards to your projects.

To learn more about outsourcing visit The Internet Marketing Training Center of Virgina, and don't forget to download your FREE brochure.

How To Write a Compelling Opt-in Form

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Collecting emails for your database is getting harder and more competitive each year. As people receive more and more junk email to their inbox, they are becoming reluctant to sign up for things like they used to, and becoming more selective about what they think is really necessary information. In that regard, the information you are giving away has everything to do with getting that critical conversion. Critical, because building your email list is still the number one most important thing you can do for your business and making money online. These people are your fans: the ones that know you best and you have invested the time to brand yourself to. Your list is more receptive to making purchases than just random traffic. Getting people to sign up has everything to do with how you craft your message in your opt-in form and sign up areas.

Let's look at a couple of really captivating opt-in forms and why they're different from run of the mill stuff:

The above image is an example from Antion.com, the founder of IMTC. A couple of elements stand out:

* The ability to ‘listen to a message' helps make a personal connection.

* Lots of benefits:  ‘600 pages of content' means more than just an excerpt or ‘special report'.

* Concentrate on value:  “$247.00” and “get paid for it” speaks to the customer about saving and earning money in their industry.

 

The next example is from BrendonBurchard.com, a very successful info product marketer. The strength of this opt-in is that he is giving away training videos – far more dynamic and easy to understand than text based products. The videos are long, detailed and are made expressly to brand himself as the expert. They are made to funnel the customer towards additional training for purchase. The copy of the opt-in form is simple, concentrating on ‘helping', ‘getting paid' and ‘instant access.' These three elements speak about value in easy-to-understand language, without a bunch of hype.

 

This is my personal favorite. The above example is from Stompernet.com. They're giving away content so cool, they won't even tell you what's in it. It's disguised as a ‘contest', but it is simply an email gathering device. The promise of a $97 “gift” every week is almost to good to pass up. The visitor will at least sign up to see what the first free gift will be, so it better be good. If the information is sound, full of real world benefits and helps build your brand, you could have a home-run with this strategy.

These are not hard examples to emulate for your own business. They didn't take any more time to put together than the opt-in form on your own website. They may be just a tad more creative, however, helping make that hard-to-get conversion easier for you. Stop with the ‘special reports' and ‘newsletters' and think of something more creative. Make sure that what you are giving away helps make more money for you after the customer gets the email. What are some other techniques that can build a powerful database of customers?

 

 

The Strategy Of Article Marketing is Changing

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Earlier this year, one the largest and most popular article directories, Ezinearticles.com, took a hit from Google. Ezine enjoyed a positive relationship with Google for years, rewarded with good search placement for its authors. After some time however, far too many articles slipped through the cracks that were low-content or led to low-content websites. Google made a change to its algorithm that ‘slapped' content farms, or plainly said, reduced search rank for sites that published articles not based on quality content, but written to just to get the backlinks that Ezine provided. A review of the articles in the Ezine database revealed that nearly 30% were quickly written, low-content drivel published en masse for linking strategies. This caused Ezine to lose 71% of its search power for hundreds of keyword phrases.

This shouldn't be a concern for anyone, however. Content creation is still the key ingredient for getting high search engine placement. It works well with articles published on your website, or ones published on other major websites. To have a guest article, blog post or editorial published on a website with heavy traffic and high page rank could be one of the most powerful promotional linking strategies you can do for yourself. Google still searches out quality content to deliver to its customers. Whether it's a post, article, video or podcast, if you are writing for your customers and not solely for the search engines, your content will work wonders for you.

Smart marketers never published articles on Ezine just for the backlinks anyway. They did it to promote themselves, build their status in their industry, make themselves the experts and have people click on the links to drive traffic to their websites. Article directories are still a great place for all of this to happen. Ezine may attach ‘no-follow' tags to the links in their articles to amend the situation and get back into the good graces of Google. This is actually a good idea: writers who published crud just to get the backlinks will now have no incentive to abuse the system, and it will leave serious writers to benefit from the traffic.

Content is King on the Internet. It's the only way you can advertise and promote your business properly to your target market. Learn the correct ways to promote yourself online.

Content Creation Equals Inbound Marketing Results

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Inbound Marketing. That's a term that's been getting more popular over the past couple of years, but what is it exactly? Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers. It is similar to other recent concepts: relationship marketing and Seth Godin's idea of permission marketing. David Meerman Scott recommends that marketers “earn their way in” via publishing helpful information on a blog etc,  in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to “buy, beg, or bug their way in”  via paid advertisements, issuing press releases in the hope they get picked up by the trade press, or paying commissioned sales people, respectively.  Not only does that make conversions a bit easier and more tightly targeted, it helps spread your expertise across the web. Paid ads rarely build a marketers reputation as much as published content.

So content seems to be the key to getting inbound leads. Content can be carefully crafted by savvy marketers to push subtle ideas and information to a targeted audience. We noted blog posts in the above definition, but let's take a look at other content marketing strategies.

Webinars: this is one of the most popular forms of content marketing due to the dynamic way in which it teaches people. Videos and graphics married with an audio presentation or even a webcam can make critical points to your audience like no other medium.

Articles: the written word still stands as the most prolific way to publish content on the web.  The well-crafted word can make a huge impression when done right, but articles have long been a search engine favorite due to the fresh and deep content. Written content is still the easiest way to get good search engine placement.

Online videos: the fastest growing medium on the web is dynamic, fun and interactive.  It can show visual information best: how to use software and programs, offer testimonials and record stage presentations. Online video is also become a fast favorite of search engines due to the popularity of Youtube and mobile devices.

Tweets, Facebook and Comments: micro-blogging isn't just the toy of celebrities and 13 year-old girls. Smart marketers have been using these popular and powerful social networking tools to spread the message of their services and expertise. It's easy to talk about yourself, but trying to stuff interesting content in 160 characters or less can be a challenge.

There are more ways to spread content around the web that can bring an avalanche of interested leads. Find out how you can take control of this powerful medium for yourself.

The Internet Marketing Training Center Media Open House

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Next Tuesday January 17th, 2012 will be the Open House for the local media to tour the new facilities of the Internet Marketing Training Center in Virginia Beach.

Over 300 local news reporters from the Virginian Pilot, local radio and television stations have been personally invited to come into the facility, listen to presentations by Tom and learn more about what the school offers.

Many have already shown interest in doing a story about Tom and the school prior to even attending the event. They are excited that a local school here in their home town is offering the kind of unique training found nowhere else, and helping local residents (and people from all over the world) to excel in the new career of Internet Marketing.

It is of great interest to the military community that another open door to an educational experience has opened for active service personnel and their families, who may be entering the private sector for the first time. IMTC is helping educate the military, stay-at-home moms. high school students and people recently laid off to find a new career.

Find out more about IMTC and its courses and most of all: wish us luck on Media Night!

Content Marketing Strategies For Big Business Social Networking

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Facebook and Twitter have grown to enormous popularity in our culture. It's no surprise that companies large and small are taking to these massive social networks to promote their products and services. But under the surface of strictly promoting products, there is a dialogue emerging: one that is full of ideas, opinions and significance. A dialogue that is dynamic and alive, and NOT controlled by the companies, but by us. For the last 125 years of common advertising, transitioning from newspapers to radio to television, something unique has taken place. The web has given the consumer power to take control of the conversation and the drive for content creation. It's the media owned by the people.

On Youtube, the Coca-Cola company researched (as much as they could) the number of views generated by the words “Coke, Coca-Cola” and other trademarked brand terms related to their business. They found that 26 million views had been generated by advertising and content created by the company itself, but over 150 million views were generated by fans and consumer owned content. This shocked the company to say the least, quickly realizing that brand recognition and opinions were owned by the consumers, not the company. The control over how Coke had always presented themselves to the public (30 second ads) was now lost to the whim and power of the consumers themselves. The people now controlled more than just the money, they controlled the image as well.

The strategy to keep hold of the brand image turned from promotion to curation. To curate that input meant to be ‘conversational' and engaging. Coke needed to nuture and seed those opinions and consumer input into a “dialogue”, and not just an ad. They concentrated on featuring ‘fan content' into their marketing: sharing the stories of their consumer base and making the consumer the focal point and not the drink itself. To push hard advertising in the face of social networking was met with resistance. Consumers reminded Coke and other larger companies that “this is our arena.” If you take a look at the details of how Outback, Pepsi, Nike and others use their Facebook pages to engage and celebrate their fans, you'll see a stark difference in how advertising has changed.

How can small businesses use these examples to engage their fans? A company is a company, some may have millions of fans more than another, but the rules of engagement stay the same. Most small companies have a hard time re-working their thought patterns: they have always related success to big, expensive advertising. Then again, there are others who get it. Success is all about conversation and relationships. Reaching out and curating the thoughts and opinions of your customers – making them the stars. A marketer who understands this model will be in extremely high demand as an employee. Could this be you??

7 Quick Tips For Choosing the Right Web Hosting Company

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Choosing the Right Web Hosting Company

7 Quick Tips For Choosing the Right Web Hosting Company

7 Quick Tips For Choosing the Right Web Hosting Company

Choosing the perfect website hosting service can be a bit overwhelming for many new website owners, especially nowadays because there are literally hundreds of web hosting companies offering many different hosting packages. Below I will point out some of the must have features of a good hosting plan you should look for before signing up for any hosting service.

Web Hosting Cost

Whether you plan to build just one website or many the hosting cost should fall somewhere between $5 – $12 per month. Typically you can save more money if you select to pay the full year in advance. To receive additional discounts you may also have the option to prepay for the service for two or more years. The longer the hosting service duration, the lower the overall monthly cost.

Web Hosting Control Panel (cPanel)

Most popular web hosting providers include cPanel as their web hosting control panel. cPanel helps users to manage their domains through an online interface. It gives users the ability to configure and manage their websites, set up multiple email accounts, create and edit databases, set up and manage sub-domain names, ftp access and more. cPanel normally comes with a commercial script library called Fantastico. With Fantastico you have access to numerous scripts for installation such as WordPress, support desk, forums and shopping carts to name a few. Cpanel is also the most popular and widely used control panel throughout the hosting industry.

Ability to Host Multiple Domains

If you plan on hosting more than one domain name on your account then you must make certain that the hosting company allows multiple domain hosting. Most popular hosting providers offer unlimited domain hosting which allows you to host as many websites as you like with just one hosting account.

Monthly Bandwidth

Your monthly bandwidth is added up each time a visitor accesses data from your website. Being that bandwidth is the biggest culprit of hosting costs, you want to check the limits placed on each hosting plan to see if it fits your websites criteria. Many hosting companies offer unlimited bandwidth with some of their plans.

Disk Space

In order to store your website files such as pages, graphics and videos you must make certain to obtain adequate disk space for your hosting service. These days you can find numerous hosting companies offering unlimited disk space at reasonable costs.

Hosting Service Reliability

There are many hosting companies that guarantee 99-100% up-time. What this basically means is your website is guaranteed to be live at all times with no interruptions. Typically hosting companies that boast this guarantee normally have backup servers in case of technical issues.

Customer Support

If you should run into any technical issues with your website, having access to 24 hour customer support is essential to your online business. Be sure to choose a hosting provider that offers 24 hour tech support by phone or live chat.

These are a few important features you should look for when purchasing your hosting service.

To get more tips about web host selection, and other valuable online marketing techniques, please visit the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia – http://imtcva.org , and remember to download your FREE online career brochure!

Internet Marketing Career And Employment Options

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http://www.imtcva.org

There are more career and employment opportunities than ever before. Learn how you can discover the hottest and most in demand jobs available today. At the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia, you can get a dedicated certificate in as little as six months and be on your way to a great job. Visit the site to download your free career guide.

Certified to operate by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia

How Does Google Search Engine Work?

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Google Search Engine and How it Works

Google Search Engine and How it Works

Google Search Engine and How it Works

Whether an Internet marketer or website owner, receiving traffic to your website or sales letter should be one of your biggest priorities. One method of getting free traffic is by organic search results using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are other paid methods for driving traffic to your website such as Pay Per Click (PPC) and Pay Per Impression (CPM).

When someone types into Google's search bar, either a word or phrase, this is known as a keyword or key phrase. The results that are displayed after the search query is known as Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

Google SERPS

When it comes to the SERPS there are two types of results that are displayed, sponsored and organic results. Sponsored results are located in two areas of the page, at the very top center and on the right hand side. These sponsored ads are known as Pay Per Click which are paid ads that appear whenever someone searches a particular keyword or phrase. The owners of these ads are only charged once their ad is clicked.

Organic results make up the majority of the SERPS and get 5-6 times as much traffic than PPC ads. These results are displayed by Google's algorithm as the most relevant websites that match the keyword or phrase search criteria.

Making it to the first page of Google is the objective for most website owners who understand the value of being where their targeted audience lurks. This could mean literally thousands of visitors to their website each and every month. So how exactly do we make it to the first page of Google?

Making the First Page of Google

First off, there are two main things that Google's algorithm uses to determine which pages should appear on the first page of any search query, that's good content and backlinks.

Google tends to reward web pages in the SERPS that are relevant, have well written original content and informative to it's users.

Google also rewards for backlinks – Backlinks are external links from other websites that point back to your website giving it “popularity points”. The more popular the link source, the more credibility this adds to your website. So websites with higher page rank will affect your website SERPS in a positive way.

To learn how to catapult your website to the first page of Google and enjoy thousands of targeted visitors per month, please visit the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia – http://imtcva.org , and remember to download your FREE online career brochure!