Twitter, everybody loves Twitter, so what on Earth could be ‘even better than Twitter’s Micro Blog platform’?

I’ll get back to TweetGlide in a minute but first let me explain my problems with Twitter.

You are probably the same as me, you understand the potential of Twitter, you love how it allows you to follow people who influence you as well as allowing those you influence to follow you.

So, you spend a lot of time promoting your Twitter profile, probably just as much as you promote your website and blog! Here’s the thing, although Twitter ultimately owns your profile, wouldn’t it be a great place to promote yourself just that little bit more than just having that one single link in your ‘about me’ area.

Okay, you can upload your own Twitter background with a few images of links but that isn’t as powerful as providing your profile viewers with a clickable link.

But what if you could? What if you could add some elements directly to your Twitter profile page that gave you extra promotional possibilities for yourself and your business? What if you could monetize your profile, wouldn’t that be great?

Some people absolutely hate sponsored Tweets but I haven’t heard much objection to monetizing the Twitter profile page itself.

Well, all the things you wished you could do with your Twitter profile just became possible!

Take a close look at the two screenshots below and tell me if you can spot any differences?

Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2

I bet you noticed straight away that the second screenshot has 125×125 sized banner ads. Let me share another screenshot of that particular sidebar so you can take an even closer look.

After the ads I have a widget that shares the recent posts from my blog followed by my DandyID buttons that allow people to connect with me on other social networking sites. I also, at the time of writing, have a ProfileFly button and a share on Facebook button.

Have you guessed how I’ve done this?

Returning to the title of this post, I made a claim that there was something even more important than TweetGlide! Don’t get me wrong, the desktop app is great at what it does and if you haven’t downloaded it yet then I recommend you get it now!

Here’s the link: TweetGlide Desktop Application

More important than the TweetGlide app is the accompanying blog that you also get! Why? Because it is a more powerful version of Twitter, allowing you to make the changes you only wished Twitter would allow you to make.

What’s more, the changes I made to my profile took me five minutes. Just imagine what you could do if you took the time to really play around with it.

You’ll need to download TweetGlide to gain access to your very own version of the blog.

Fire-up TweetGlide and then locate the manage blog button. Click on the button and your default browser will load your profile blog page with you already logged in.

When you click on the settings button at the top of your TweetGlide profile page you will be taken to the back-office as seen in the screenshot below.

As you can see, the elements that I have added to my profile page are managed by placing code into the individual widget boxes.

You can then choose the order of how the widgets are displayed by using a drag-and-drop panel as seen below.

You probably have lots of ideas of how you can improve your profile page so what are you waiting for, if you don’t have TweetGlide yet go and download it now.

If you come up with a customisation idea that you think is truly awesome then come back here and leave a comment with your TweetGlide profile link so I can take a look!

I think you’ll agree with me when I say that the blog is probably more important than the application itself.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. Are you following me on Twitter yet?

P.s.s Don’t forget that you can place optimised links on your TweetGlide profile using keyword rich ‘anchor’ text. Just another benefit of getting one of these blogs for yourself.

One of the best blogging solutions is to attach a self-hosted WordPress blog to your existing website. In the past the only way to do this was to download the WordPress files to your desktop and then upload them using your FTP client followed by playing around with the configuration options; this was enough to prevent the non-techie-type from jumping into blogging with a self-hosted blog.

A real simple solution has come along that makes those manual upload days seem like something from the Internet dark ages, that solution being Simple Scripts. This guide will walk you through the installation process.

You will need a hosting account that gives you access to Simple Scripts. We use Host Monster to host the majority of our websites as they use cPanel in the user back-office. CPanel has revolutionised the ease of configuring your website, managing email clients and domains etc. The other reasons we use HostMonster is because the customer support is top notch, exactly what you need when something goes wrong with your site and you need to get back online quickly. Oh! Did I mention they are very affordable, with HostMonster you are not compromising on service either, making this a win win for you.

Head on over to HostMoster and register for an account here.

After you have signed up for an account simply follow the instructions to set up your domain etc. Assuming you have done this and have a website already with HostMonster then you’ll want to log into your cPanel area.

Now, how to easily install your self-hosted WordPress blog.

Scroll down until you find the Simple Scripts icon under the heading Software / Services.

For this example I am going to attach a blog to a squeeze-page of mine for a report about how to use Joint Ventures to generate targeted traffic to your websites and promotions.

Inside the Simple Scripts area scroll down to Blogs and click on WordPress.

Now click on Install.

Step 1 – select the latest stable install and where you would like your WordPress blog to be installed.

If you have an existing site that you want to attach a blog to then type ‘blog’ as the subdomain or whatever else you wish to call it (blog being the most logical).

In the image above you can see that I am installing WordPress to the subdomain ‘blog’ on the GuruTrafficSecret.com domain.

Now you’ll want to select your login details, password and blog name. You’ll also want to tick the check box where it says ‘automatically create a database’.

Lastly, accept the terms and conditions.

Now click ‘complete‘.

If your installation is successful you will see the above screen. Your login details will also be emailed to you.

To login to your new wordpress site just add /wp-admin to the end of your URL. The login for GuruTrafficSecret is now at

http://www.gurutrafficsercret.com/blog/wp-admin

Log in to your website to configure your blogs information.

To make your blog stand out from the crowd you should install a new theme at the first opportunity.

Visit the Guru Traffic Secret blog to see a live demo of a WordPress blog and the first and only post.

I hope you found this post informative and easy to follow.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. To get the most out of cPanel and your website I recommend you sign-up for Discover cPanel as soon as you can. You can visit the site now and get instant access to a free video packed with information that you can put to use straight-away.

The services I am referring to are:

Search engine submission services for small businesses.

If you have come across these services, don’t stop, keep moving. If you are paying for such a service then cancel your payment immediately, you are wasting your money.

Let’s take a second to look at the claims that come with these services and dispel the myths that they are selling:

“We submit your website to 1000s of search engines increasing the chances of people finding your website.”

1000s of search egines? Get real!

If you are tracking your visitor statistics using Google Analytics or similar you will have very useful information at your finger tips. What I want you to do right now is to go to your Analytics account and look at your ‘Traffic Sources‘ and find the ‘search engines‘ data.

The screen-shot below was taken from my Analytics account:

How many search engines can you see?

Other than the different country variants (we are happily read across the globe) the search engines in the list are Google, Yahoo and Aol. Google has the largest share of the search engine market so having them as the main referring search engine in our site statistics is typical.

Now, can you see these 1000s of search engines in your referral stats?

I didn’t think you would!

Last question, the last time you used a search engine… which one did you use?

Returning to the claims of the search engine submissions services:

We submit your website to the search engines on a monthly basis.

Oh come on!

The big players of search, Google, Yahoo and Bing, do not need to be reminded that your website exists. If you are paying an on-going fee for such a service please terminate your payment!

Continually submitted your website to ‘anywhere’ may get you and your business website listed as a spammer.

I don’t want to confuse anyone and I understand that you may be left wondering what you should do to alert the search engines when you launch a new website .

The simple answer is that you can do NOTHING!

Google, Yahoo and Bing are powered by super computers that WILL find your website.

You can speed things up by getting some quality inbound links from authority websites pointing directly to your website. You can learn more about securing quality inbound links by following the tips in our newsletter and mini-course.

Another thing you should be doing is adding your XML Sitemap to Google so that they know what pages on your website are important to you.In doing this you may also make Google aware of pages that they have not yet indexed.

You can add your Sitemap by registering your account with Google Webmaster Tools. If you do not have an XML Sitemap you can use this free tool to have one created in a very short space of time.

You can also do the same with Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center.

With this information in hand please do not pay for a search engine submission service for your business website (or any other website for that matter), the search engines will find you.

Final words, read what Google have to say about submitting your website to them (this does not include registering your site with Webmaster tools but is talking about the sumbit URL method.)

To your success,

Karl Foxley

The title of this post may suggest that I am going to be talking about myself but in actual fact I want to discuss visitor tracking and monitoring.

I use a few tools to track visitor statistics, such as Google Analytics and StatPress (a WordPress Plugin).

What I have noticed is that I get visitors coming to this website by typing the following search term ‘Karl Foxley Marketing‘ into Google.

It makes sense to create a page specifically for this search query and give the visitors exactly what they are looking for, so before we continue:

If you are looking for an SEO service for your business website then you have come to the right place. Foxley Marketing Solutions, founded by Karl Foxley, is happy to discuss your SEO and other Internet marketing requirements with you. You can request further information by using our contact us page.

Returning to the focus of this post, are you tracking the search queries that are bring visitors to your website? If you are not, maybe it is time that you started.

Google Analytics is free, setting-up an account and registering your website can be done in a short space of time, allowing you to have a whole host of statistics at your finger tips.

Inside Google Analytics you can click on the ‘Traffic Sources‘ tab and then ‘Keywords‘ to see how people are finding your website.

Recommendations: You may see keywords and phrases that are very similar that can be grouped, why not create a content page that targets them so that your visitors now have a page that closely matches their search query.

You may see a lot of single search queries that bring visitors to your website, I wouldn’t waste too much time creating content pages for each instance of a search query as it may never be typed in again.

The reason you will want to create content pages to match search queries is simple: if you have too many search queries being met with loosely related content, searchers visiting your site will scan your content and probably leave again as your content will not meet their expectations.

By monitoring what brings searchers to your website you will be able to give them exactly what they want instead of relying on loosely related content pages, this makes the searcher happy and in return makes the search engines happy.

I hope you found this post useful.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. If you are using WordPress you can grab the StatPress plugin here.

photo credit: Ivan Walsh

I’m a subscriber of many marketers’ email lists so I can keep track of the latest developments across the web or because they send out some amazing content.

Here’s the thing, some marketers send out emails that have messages that look like this to try and get past the spam filters:

Grab your f.ree report…

Your f/ree report is ready…

Start making making m.oney…

They may even include a symbol instead of a word in an attempt to fool the spam filters (I doubt that it actually does and is probably more likely to get your message filtered). I’m sure that you’ve come across a similar emails by now, honestly, I bet they don’t leave you with a good impression no matter who it was from.

Here is my problem with this, firstly, the emails look extremely unprofessional, and secondly, ESP’s like AWeber have built in tools to test your spam score before you send your messages.

I understand how important it is to get your message in front of your customers but if you are sending a message with f.ree or m.oney in the subject line and email body text, then your message may just get past the spam filters but it is going to look like spam to your subscribers all the same.

It does not take that much time to think of alternative words to use in place of words that may trigger the spam filters, sending your message to the spam folder; try using ‘no cost’ instead of ‘free’; you get the picture.

Another trend I have seen is affiliate marketers grabbing the pre-written emails for an affiliate product and sending it our without making any alterations even when the message includes the use of misspellings.

If you are an affiliate marketer, take the time to customise the message and attach your own personal flair. If your subscribers are on the email lists of many marketers you’d be surprised how many of the same message they will get on the launch day of a big product, all with the exact same message.

Remember, every time you send out an email on behalf of your company or an affiliate promotion, it is your reputation and your credibility that you may be damaging by misspelling words or adding extra symbols to try to game the spam filters.

If you would like to test your emails for their spam scores before you send them then I recommend you grab an account with AWeber.

To your email promotion success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. If you want to learn of the art of writing emails that sell I recommend you take a copywriting course. One of the best courses on the Internet for these economically strapped times is Five Minute Copywriting by Robert Plank.

photo credit: Nancy Wombat

I recently created a post about Polite SEO that spoke about blog commenting as a way of building links and how NOT to do it!

The secondary reason was that Polite SEO generates 170 global searches per month according to the Google Keyword Tool.

As it never hurts to go after the low hanging fruit I figured I would target polite SEO and see what happens.

What I discovered when I was checking on my progress is quite interesting and something I want to share with you.

If you have a website that does not stock Halloween products you can sign-up for an affiliate account with Affiliate Bot and look for merchants that do. Once you sign-up for an account you will be able to find merchants to promote that are related to your niche. Once accepted as an affiliate by a merchant, you can start to promote their products by adding affiliate banners to your website or by creating promotional pieces such as content driven pages themed around Halloween and the affiliate products you are recommending.

Once you have created a content page, the search engine optimisation process is essentially the same as what you would do for any page on your website that you would like to do well in the search engine result pages, the only exception is that you will want to target Halloween themed keywords. If SEO is new to you then I recommend you read our previous post Understanding SEO that will work you through the main elements of search engine optimisation.

To find keywords to target for your promotions you can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. If you are looking to take your keyword research to the next level then I recommend you start using Keyword Elite 2.0 (not free but worth every penny).

Maybe you do not have Halloween or seasonal themed products and you do not want to promote affiliate products, what can you do then?

You can give away seasonal discounts. Who doesn’t like 10 per cent off or a BOGOF (by one get one free)! Don’t be worried about a promotion running at a loss, a good seasonal promotion can drive your sales up through the rise of seasonal search traffic that can give your profits a nice boost.

To your Halloween success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. Now may be the time to start thinking about the promotions you can run for Christmas and the search engine optimisation you’ll need to do to get your pages ranked highly enough to be profitable.

Additional reading: 5 Search Marketing Tips for the Holidays.

If you are unfamiliar with Sidewiki here is what Google say it is:

Google Sidewiki is a browser sidebar that lets you contribute and read information alongside any web page.

So the Sidewiki is a type of commenting system. Well, it’s a bit more than that, it is a way for experts to share their knowledge and skills across the web. People can leave comments to be displayed in the Sidewiki for a particular website / web-page for others to see and add further information to; making this a community tool.

I’ve got ahead of myself, let me quickly walk you through the installation process.

To be able to use Sidewiki you will need a compatible browser and and have the Google Toolbar installed.

Here is the link to Firefox, free to download and has many features you won’t find in other browsers, and here is the link to the Google Toolbar with Sidewiki.

Download Google's Toobar with Sidewiki

After you have successfully installed the toolbar you’ll need to restart your browser. If you’ve been successful you should see the following screen.

You've installed the Google Toolbar with Sidewiki

So why are people excited about the new Sidewiki feature? Well, below you will see a screen-shot taken from our homepage with the Sidewiki open.

The images below shows you what you are greeted with if you have Sidewiki open when you visit Foxley Marketing Solutions.

The next image is a close up of the Sidewiki message I wrote as a greeting to our homepage visitors.

As you can see I have created a custom message that quickly welcomes our visitors, tells them about the site and our search engine optimisation service, and finally, how to grab our RSS feed.

This is an exciting development because, as the site owner (you’ll need to verify your ownership of a website inside Google’s Webmaster Tools), my message stays at the top of the Sidewiki, as mentioned in Google’s documentation.

Returning to the fact that the Sidewiki is a community tool you may be wondering how Google will stop spammers and your competition from adding negative statements in the Sidewiki for your website.

Although I don’t have the answer to this what I do know is that Google say that they will be using multiple signals to score the relevancy and quality of the post plus using user-feedback as a quality score.

“Sidewiki uses a quality algorithm and user ratings to determine the order of the entries that appear in the sidebar for a given page. The entries that are scored as being the most helpful and pertinent are more likely to display.”

Will this stop abuse? I hope so but we will have to wait and see how this works out.

Another great feature of the Sidewiki is, if you leave a quality comment that provides value to the site owner and the community of readers then you increase the chances of your message being shared; that’s right, you will be able to send your favorite entries by email, post to Twitter and / or Facebook.

You will also be able to embed YouTube videos into your comments.

To read more about the features of the Sidewiki and watch a short video click here.

While you are at it, it’s time to grab your Google Profile like I have here.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

Although the report is about micro-blogging in general, it does feature information about the ever popular Twitter (for some this is the only micro-blogging platform of choice).

What you will see below is a PDF document that is Day 4 of our Website Promotion Success Email Mini-Course.

I recommend you sign-up for the course and to our newsletter as you will get extra benefits that you will not get from reading the blog alone.

The report you are about to read covers the benefits of micro-blogging, how to get started and some useful resources you may find handy.

In the report you will also find a list of other micro-blogging platforms that you can use as an alternative to Twitter or alongside, depending on your needs and time restraints.

Micro-blogging sites are amongst the most popular websites on the Internet today and you’d be crazy not to tap into the marketing (conversation) potential.

The report is short but is packed with practical information that you can start implementing straight away.

If you find the text is too small then use the buttons on the top right side of the document to switch to full screen mode or toggle page size. Enjoy!

I hope you enjoy the report useful.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

photo credit: M i x y

Video Marketing Tips

This post is about video marketing as a way of generating targeted traffic to your website and promotions as well as establishing yourself as an expert in your niche.

What you will see below is a PDF document that is Day 3 of our Website Promotion Success Email Mini-Course.

I recommend you sign-up for the course and to our newsletter as you will get extra benefits that you will not get from reading the blog alone.

The report you are about to read covers the benefits of video marketing, how to create videos and where to submit them for the world to see.

Video sharing sites are amongst the most popular websites on the Internet today and you’d be crazy not to tap into the marketing potential.

The report is short but is packed with practical information that you can start implementing straight away.

If you find the text is too small then use the buttons on the top right side of the document to switch to full screen mode or toggle page size. Enjoy!

Just to give you an insight into the power of video, especially those that go viral (get shared over and over again), this McDonald’s Rap video has been viewed over 10,000,000 times; and no, I’m not saying you need to start rapping!

To your success,

Karl Foxley

photo credit: Jakob Montrasio