ESPN Web Ads Go Local

Earlier today while browsing the largest sports website on the internet, ESPN.com I noticed something new, a regional advertisement next to a video story. As seen here-

When I clicked the ad out of curiosity I was taken here-

So what’s the big deal? Well for one ESPN.com hasn’t used contextual regional image ads in the past, most likely sorted and published by a quick glimpse at the incoming IP address of the visitor’s ISP.

This minor change helps to illustrate how large websites are becoming more visitor focused with specially tailored advertisements. If I was logging on to the same page from say, New York City, I highly doubt an ad for the upcoming South Carolina Gamecocks football season ticket packages would appear? One thing is for sure, this will help advertisers reach their target audience, and should increase overall conversation rates compared to non-geotargeted web display ads.

The 1 Year and 9 Month Long SEO Project

Never give up, no matter what, if you want page one results, never give up. That has been my marching orders for the past year and 9 months while I pursued an aggressive SEO strategy to get my book marketing service to the top page of the most costly keyword term in the niche. Here is the story from start to finish, I hope it inspires you to stick to your SEO plan for as long as it takes to achieve the results you are after.

September 2007-

Realized there was a major void in affordable full package book marketing services. Sure you could pay your publisher outrageously high fees for a press release or a media kit, but nobody was bundling it all as a single package, and certainly not for the prices I wanted to charge. The custom book release concept was born.

October 2007-

After spending a few days at Starbucks writing what was basically a manifesto against overpriced under delivering publisher-based book marketing packages, the site CustomBookRelease.com was built.

November 2007-

After less than a month of analyzing pay per click traffic for high quality SEO keywords (yes, PPC is a great way to learn about good SEO terms to try to rank for organically) I realized the money keyword for my new service was the term book marketing. I acquired BookMarketing.net for $1,400 from an undisclosed source, making it on the list for the top five most expensive domain buys that week for .NET registrations. Moved the CustomBookRelease.com website to BookMarketing.net within days of purchasing the domain.

December 2008 – July 2009-

Marketed the site in a variety of ways, published articles, submitted to directories, swapped links, and did press releases to help boost the SEO value of BookMarketing.net

July 2009-

Started to notice an increase in both sales and leads for our BookMarketing.net service, decided to check the search results for our main term, book marketing, was surprised to learn our site is now page 1 rank 7 in Google.

It took over 20 months to get to page 1, but with something as hard to obtain as that, chances are with good maintenance and some fresh updating to the site it will stay there for a longtime to come.

Posting From Air

I'm posting to this blog from an iPhone in an airplane. The reach of technology still astounds me daily.

Email To Clients About Our Top Secret Stuff

Hi,

So you probably know we are the leading SEO article writing firm in the world, maybe you’re familiar with the fact we write more press releases than anybody else online, but are you aware of some of the behind the scenes stuff we do for our clients each month?

I didn’t think so, c’mon, have a peek, it’s actually pretty interesting some of the funky stuff we do.

Top secret projects are the norm for us around here, in fact I’d say a third or our business comes from unlisted services that people pay for through email and as far as the greater world would know, never were done by us to begin with. These are the like the ghost services to match the ghostwriter aspect of our business.

So in case you are in search of a provider for some of those things we do that we don’t yet have a website for selling it, I’ve listed a few of our more popular services below.

Landing pages-

I love writing landing page copy, its short, to the point, and often requires a creative approach to convince someone to do something they normally wouldn’t do in so few words. It’s a challenge for sure, but it’s fun, and we’ve done landing pages for everyone from web app developers to professional sports organizations. The price is typically in the $500 to $1,000 range depending on the project, so it’s about 60% cheaper than our full blown sales letter writing service.

Product descriptions-

For as little as $3 a pop we can create fresh SEO friendly product descriptions for your ecommerce website. We’ve done tens of thousands of them for everything from diet pills to radio controlled monster trucks.

Weekly submissions-

Some people want to crush their competition online, nothing personal I’m sure, but these people don’t play around, so for them we create custom weekly submission packages. We write the content, submit all over the place, and send them a weekly report with live links to their content. It’s amazing what can happen SEO wise when people have us submit every week for them.

Community population- 

Ok, this is just a fancy word for forum posting. We do forum posting for a few bucks a post, and have done it for many websites successfully. We offer both one-off boost packages, and ongoing maintenance packages to keep your forum chock full of users.

Large scale social media management-

Our most popular service of the year has to be our social media management program, it’s an industry first in many ways, but some people wanted to juice it up a few notches. Since we priced it so comparatively low to anything else that even monitored a social media account, some clients have requested major additions to their packages such as integrating YouTube videos, LinkedIn networking, social bookmarking, blog comments, and so on. We can scale this thing up to 20k a month, can you even imagine what that would look like?

White label affiliate sites-

Pay to be affiliates? Yep, some people with an existing customer or email list base of people our services would appeal to actually pay us big money to build their own robust websites with killer sales copy to get people to buy from them so they can then turnaround and buy from us, at a profit of course. Some affiliates make some very good money this way, and relatively speaking it’s cheaper than opening a McDonalds.

Consulting with sales letter packages-

At nearly 5 G’s our consulting plus sales letter retail price is not cheap, so when you do need both we try to knock off some of the price as a reward for signing up for these high ticket services. Inquire today about this with more info about what your needs are and we'll see what we can do.

Kitchen sink deals-

This is probably our most popular special request, the kitchen sink deal. Here we basically toss in a bunch of things our clients request into a single monthly package, send them a special link to sign up, send them a special link to fill out their various information, and get to work helping them build their business online. Not only can you save some cash with these deals, you also receive a more streamlined level of service since you aren’t forced to go to the various websites of ours to sign up each month.

Want to work with us on any of the above? Simply reply to this email with details about what you need and I’ll do my best to reply to you with a quote via email, info on turnaround time, and what all it would take to get the job done for you.

Oh yeah, do it soon, I’m off to San Juan this Saturday and if the place is as beautiful as people say it is, I just might toss my laptop in the ocean and stay there.

Cheers,

Clark

www.ClarkCovington.com

www.Twitter.com/ClarkCovington

How to Engage with Others on Social Media Websites

Clouds part as the heavenly father ordains social network websites like Twitter and Facebook saint like entities online. There is no way to dispute the facts, these websites are so popular they are inescapable for business owners that want to reach out to customers and potential customers online. How can you not use these websites in some fashion if they are on the tip of virtually everyone that uses a computer's tongue? The challenge then isn't convincing people to join these networks since they are already there, rather it's about appropriately engaging with them on websites such as Twitter and Facebook to get them to pay attention to you.

Read more HERE.

Writing Again

After what seemed like an endless amount of moving (both personal and professional) over the past 3 months, I've finally had time to start writing again. I'm working on a series of articles on social media do's and don'ts that I'll share here as they are published. I'm also working on the beginnings of my fourth non-fiction book, which should come together nicely once it's fully outlined.

For those writers out there, now is the time to get things done, as the fall seems to bring with it so many new distractions. At least that's what I keep telling myself these days.

Create Your Own Twitter Contest

I’m ready to give something away on Twitter, I just don’t know what yet. Got any ideas? If so, comment on this post below with your contest idea, if your idea is selected I’ll send you a autographed copy of my new book Strange Business, and a $50 Best Buy gift card.

So what should we giveaway? How should we do it? Remember, it’s got to include Twitter in some fashion. Comment away!

Back From The Beach

After a restful and productive week at the beach I’m back, and there is a lot of exciting things bubbling in the company pot right now.

Here are just a few things going on right now-

We’re moving into a new office space in the next 2 weeks, more info on that later, hopefully this will be the last move for while. There is some interesting options out there, so my goal of bringing this business more public could be reached in the near future.

New Twitter services, nobody can deny Twitter is an all out movement on the internet, and we are creating services at breakneck speed to help you get the most out of the service. Stay tuned for everything from a contest service that guarantees everyone wins, to a niche service for restaurateurs that want to harness social networks to promote what they’re cooking. Tasty!

Crowdsourced book revisions. I’ve been tinkering with this concept for a year now, and it’s almost ready to launch. For those that author books this service will change the way you get feedback from people on your work. I’ve already committed two of my upcoming titles to this method as a way to test it out, and all I can say is, wow. It’s coming soon.

Changes in our submission services. We’re going to adjust some of our article submission services to better suit our customer needs, this will count eliminating some services that people aren’t using, and juicing up others that have been very popular in recent years.

Affiliates, we’re working on it. We had an outstanding response to our call for affiliates a few weeks back, we’re sorting through all the information and working on developing a program now.

As the heat starts to really amp up in the month of July I feel like it’s energizing our business with productivity fueled innovation, I know a major breakthrough is in our near future, hopefully you’ll be there with us when it occurs.

Headed to St George Island

Leave it to me to mix business with pleasure on a holiday as widely celebrated as July 4th. I’ll be out of the office from 7/4 to 7/11 visiting what I hear to be the very pet friendly St George Island, Florida.

I actually own a site, St George Island Florida.org that gets some significant traffic, and as obvious by it’s appearance is in need of some serious fresh content.

I plan on taking a bunch of pictures and videos that I’ll share with you all on the SGI site. I hope everyone enjoys a thunderous 4th of July celebration, that is as safe as it is fun.