Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams

Are you wondering how to get on the first page of Google, stuck on the validity of a particular META tag or need clarification on Adwords phrase matches?

Well look no further, just enter a search term below to search an exclusive list of the top 260+ Search Engine Marketing blogs, as chosen by Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing:

The Search Engine Marketing Search Engine Explained…

Well firstly we must thank two men - Blogologist Alister Cameron for developing the application, and Lee Odden for releasing his OPML file of top Search Marketing Blogs.

…While thinking through how that list would be most valuable, Alister enlisted the help of Google, and created the Search Engine Marketing Search Engine! (Insert imaginary sounds of drumroll and orchestral fanfare here. - Alisters request)

What sites does SEM Search include in its search results?

That’s Lee Odden’s decision, and his alone - the search list is based on his TopRank Online Marketing OPML file.

Here is a snapshot of some of the 400+ sites though:
– Analytics Talk - Justin Cutroni of EpikOne writes about the array of Google products, including analytics, he works with.
– Blue Hat SEO - Eli writes about some cool advanced SEO tactics.
– Dosh Dosh - This is one of my favourite blogs… Maki, a Political Science and Philosophy student in Toronto Canada, writes about making money online and along with that comes posts about professional blogging, affiliate marketing, get-paid-to programs, advertising networks and social media monetization.
– Google Analytics Blog - Official blog for Google Analytics with tips and resources from the GA team.
– Hitwise Intelligence - The HitWise team posts tasty insights about search trends.
– InsideGoogle - Nathan Weinberg’s long time blog about Google and the search industry.
– Matt Cutts - Google’s famous engineer and search spam fighter dispels wisdom, insight and squashes SEO myths.

Technorati Tags: seo, sem, search, engine, marketing, optimisation, Alister-Cameron, Lee-Odden, TopRank, Online, Marketing, Pete, Williams, Pete-Williams

Ok, so today we are here to talk about the wonderful world of Facebook Pages.

Facebook Pages are one of the newest features the team over in Palo Alto, Calif. have recently launched, along side Social Ads and Facebook Beacon (more to come).

So What Exactly is a Facebook Page ?

A Facebook Page is simply a modified facebook profile designed purely for businesses, bands, no-profits or even celebrities to interact with their ‘fans’.

Other Facebook users can express their support by adding themselves as a fan, as opposed to becoming a ‘friend’.

Basically, on the surface it appears no different to a typical profile, which is why it’s been launched without much fan-fare (pardon the bad punn) from the blogosphere… but from a marketing perspective it’s a whole lot more powerful.

Here’s why…

1. You Can Send Updates To Your Fans Regularly

See, unlike facebook profiles where it can be a royal pain in the rear trying to community with all your friends at once, sending ‘email’ blasts to all your fans is a breeze.

Having a tonne of fans, is exactly the same as having a traditional email database you do blasts too… But inside Faceboook there is no spam or no junk mail to contend with and with internet users opting for communication services like facebook over hotmail and traditional email its where the web is headed people.

In the current landscape of the web, deliverability is one of the biggest issues facing marketers.. but here inside Facebook it’s not an issue at all - your messages go straight to their facebook-inbox and their news feed (I think)

2. You Can Add STUFF to your Facebook Page

Just like a facebook profile, but in a much ‘cleaner’ way, you can engage/interact with your fans via videos, reviews, flash content, and much more.

For example, one of the biggest Facebooks Pages to date is that of the great band - The Dave Matthews Band - where they have added a tonne of this cool STUFF to their page… such as a discography, a bunch of pics, and online music player plus an online shop where fans can buy sh*t.

Ed Dale has done this really well on his Facebook Profile aswell - Here he has added a small number of videos, a few disucssion topics for his fans to gather and communicate (it’s basically a mini-social-network) plus he has already started to use the point above to communicate to his already 991+ fans.

3. Your Fans Love You, and their friends will know it too.

When your fans interact with your Facebook Page, the actions they take are automatically generated into social stories and added to thier News Feed, which their friends will see the next time they log into Facebook.

So when they become a fan, it’s link back to their Facebook profiles news feed, which in turn virally invites more people to interact with your page, which generates more social stories and drives even more traffic to your Page - it’s viral marketing on steroids.

As they say “Think of it as word-of-mouth marketing, only completely free and happening online.”

4. Link It All Together With Social Ads

Some of the feedback I’ve got from my original post on Facebooks social ads, was on the fact that Facebook will not allow you to send traffic to a squeeze page… and savvy marketers kept asking ‘what’s the point if I can’t capture names for a database’ - Well this is the answer…

Send them to a Facebook page about you particular niche topic and encourage them to become fans with videos and content (described in section 2). This way, their whole experience is inside Facebook, they will feel more comfortable and thus increase your conversion rates…

P.S. Ed just released a short video on his Tubby Nerd blog you may be interested in - Check it out here.

P.P.S. If for some reason you are still not convinced joining the Edge is going to help you make bazillions online, i’ve got permission from Dan and Ed to create an ‘exclusive inside video tour’ of the Edge which I will post on the blog in a few days… Make sure you subscribe to the RSS Feed so you don’t miss that one.

P.P.P.S. Before you rush off to join the Edge, you may want to check out my “currently lame” Facebook Page and become a fan here… Please excuse the WannaBe America’s Next Top Model photo - I blame Fleur.

Click Here to become a Fan

Technorati Tags: facebook, social, ads, beacon, pages, ppc, pay-per-click, Google, Adwords, ed, dale, dan, raine, online, internet, marketing, immediate, edge, pete, williams, preneur, squeeze

To celebrate the release of Catasia Studio 5.0, the team at Techsmith are giving away Camtasia Stuido 3.0 for FREE.

I’ve been using version 4.0 for awhile and can’t speak highly enough of the software….

To download the free trial version of Camtasia Studio 3 simply click the link below:
http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe

Then go to this promotion page, complete your name, country and e-mail address and Techsmith will send you the software
key to unlock the program.
Here’s the link:
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/pcpls.asp

Technorati Tags: camstudio, camtasia, software, free, techsmith, scree, capture

For those of you who follow my Twitter Roll, you’d already know that I have myself one of them there cool new iphone thingys and have fallen head of heels in love with it…

Well, whilst working on the new theme for this blog [a few final tweaks still to be made] I stumbled across two really cool must have wordpress plugins that make the iphone that little bit cooler. Yes, the iPhone can get cooler!

1. iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme

This little baby automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on iPhone. It detects the browser being used and displays the content with a “special” theme only to iPhone visitors, whilst keeping the traditional WordPress blog skin for web-browsers.

Anyone who has used an iPhone to browse the web knows, first hand, the amazing job it does displaying web pages the way they were designed to be seen - unlike alot of mobile browsers available.

But what the iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme does is display an optimized version of your blog’s content, formatted perfectly to fit the iPhone touch’s screen - so visitors don’t have to zoom in to read the content or download large files etc etc.

Some of the cool features the team at Content.Robot included when designing this plugin are:

• Automatic formatting of your blog theme/content for optimized viewing on the iPhone and iPod touch.
• Simple iPhone/iPod-like theme with common interface elements that compliments the iPhone/iPod touch’s internal applications.
• and my favourite… Images larger then 300 pixels wide are automatically scaled down to fit the iPhone/iPod touch optimized width.

2. iPhone / Mobile Wordpress Admin Plugin

Now, not as exciting as the iphone plugin above… this funky tool adapts the WordPress Admin Interface and makes its more friendly to mobile devices, specifically iphones.

All the most common WordPress admin features are supported, such as:

• Dashboard sections: Incoming Links, Comments, Posts, Blog Stats
• Writing and editing posts (including auto-save)
• Tagging support in 2.3
• Comment Moderation
• Manage Posts page
• Manage Profile page
• Ability to toggle back and forth to the normal admin view.
• Support for plugins that include fields on the post page
• Compatibility with existing library of admin plugins

So if you have an iphone, or the readers of your blog are the type of people who would own an iphone [read: everyone] I would strongly advise you to invest the 8mins and install these two wordpress plugins, because the more ways you make it easier for someone to interact with you (and your blog) the more loyal followers they will become…

If you install the iWPhone WordPress Theme Plugin, please leave a comment below as i’d love to check out your blog….

Technorati Tags: wordpress, plugin, iphone, iwphone, admin, mobile, plugins, pete, williams

Well I have finally set up my FLICKR account, so you can see photos of the various things I have been upto.

For those that don’t know, FLIKR is an online photo sharing website that allows to to post, share and comment on photos.

You can check out my FLICKR account here.