Kathy Smith’s Blog and Your Gateway to Success

I have been receiving calls from many of my friends on their YouTube accounts disappearing and so I decided to share this information on my blog for those of you who may have also been effected by this and maybe you’ll find something of use.

The YouTube Slap.  If you are trying to find your YouTube videos and can’t find them, there is the potential that YouTube has shut you down if you have been using unethical ways of promoting your vidoes.  Hmm.  Maybe I should just say aggressive; or black hat techniques.  Basically if you have been downloading someone else’s videos, creating multiple channels; using massive tags that have nothing to do with the content of your video, spamming, etc. expect to be shut down.

Recently YouTube has been more aggressive about enforcing their rules and guidelines and confused YouTubers are wondering where their videos have gone.  One person I know tried to reach support and was told to go to the forum and ask questions and that got nowhere fast.

There are networkers out there already scrambling and coming up with ideas on how to circumvent this but if you choose to jump on the next bandwagon, I have some advice for you.  Set up one account where it is tied to only 1 IP address and you are advertising “within the guidelines”, so if you end up having your other youtube accounts shut down, at least you won’t have lost ALL your advertising efforts.

What are the guidelines?  Here are some recommendations to follow:

1)  Have just 1 YouTube account per ISP
2)  Don’t use automatic software to add comments, ratings, etc.
3)  Don’t upload duplicate content.
4)  Have videos that show value
5)  Don’t buy views – this is one of the red flags
6)  Have relevant tags to the content of your video

If you haven’t yet been found by YouTube, you might want to make changes now. If you’re like most people you want to be as aggressive as you can but still fall within the safe zone.  Make your priority to deliver value and build your presence with integrity and you’ll have a sustainable business.

Let me know if you hear anymore.  I would love to hear other people’s views.

And by the way, there is a business where you don’t have to worry about marketing.  The company does it for you.  If you’re interested, let me know.

Kathy

Blogging is becoming more and more popular and more people are seeking blogging advice as they start their first blog.  First I am sure you have heard about social networking.  For those of you that have not, basically social networking is about connecting with people and or information using web-based tools or software.  It’s a way of meeting other like minded individuals on the internet.

A blog is one such tool and has become very popular but many people start a blog with the wrong idea about blogging and that’s why I decided to impart some blogging advice to help you to get started.

First of all, you need to decide what software you are going to use and then you need to understand about the information you’ll be putting on your blog.  I prefer WordPress.  Many people will suggest Blogger because it is free.  WordPress is free too but I would recommend getting a hosting site because then you can use the SEO plugins.  If you choose to use Blogger, or any other free service that is hosted on their site, then you are subject to their changes without any control.  When you host a blog on your own domain, you only have to worry about the restrictions of that hosting site, which, by the way, I recommend Blue Host.  With blogger, it’s very simple but you don’t have as much flexibility in customizing it whereas with WordPress there are so many ways that you can modify it from the themes to adding plugins and widgets, that it makes it so much more powerful.  Some people feel because Google owns blogger that you will have your blog optimizied faster but there are many SEO plugins you can use with WordPress to be able to optimize it and have it in the search engines pretty quick.  It goes back to knowing your keywords and what to write about.  The blogging advice I am providing today is more about getting started but make sure you read my blog about keywords because that’s the foundation of anything you write for the internet.

After you have chosen which software, you want to select a theme and personalize it.  Many people ask me about this because they’re not sure what type of theme they should choose.  My advice to you is to pick what you like, not what “you think” someone else will like.  You want to attract to you like-minded people and so be yourself.  I helped my sponsor in one of my businesses get an internet presence and he chose a beach theme blog.  That’s not me, but hey – he liked it and that’s what counts.  By the way, a great place to get started with blogging is wordpressdirect.com.  They have great themes and you can host on their site for free.  That’s the recommendation I would make for anyone who isn’t really technical savy.  Some people choose to have one blog and write on many different topics and just categorize them or add pages.  I like to have different blogs depending on the focus and then just include them in the blog roll.

Okay – so now you are ready to start blogging.

Here’s the most important piece of blogging advice that you will ever hear.  Are you ready?  Write this down:  Be consistent and persistent with blogging.  Blog every day.

If you don’t write every day, there’s no reason for people to come back and you won’t have your blog optimized – remember Google likes fresh content.

The next piece of blogging advice is don’t be constantly selling.  That’s just as bad as when people create a list and instead of sending emails in their autoresponders that inform and establish creditibility and trust AS WELL AS having autoresponders mixed in that sell, they just sell sell sell and people just opt-out; opt-out; opt-out.  With blogging, it’s not that they will opt-out, but they just won’t come back.  Think of yourself as a reporter and provide information that people will want to read.  Go to other people’s blogs and post comments and reference back to your blog.  There are many different ways to have people find your blog, but when they do, you want them coming back and the only way that will happen is if you provide something of value.

Have a blog that is not completely covered with banners and ad-sense.  When you have too much on your blog like that, you are actually distracting people from your message and in some cases, it shows people that your only intent is to make money and not provide anything of value and that offends people.

Use the blog to tell your story; to help people; to provide valuable information and you will attract people who will come back to your blog.

It doesn’t matter where you want to start marketing on the internet, whether it’s your first blog; a lens; facebook; building a website, the first SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tip is understanding keywords.

What is a keyword? Every time you search on the internet and enter in words describing what you’re searching for — that’s a keyword. Ideally, you will want to identify the keywords that your prospects and potential customers are actually typing into the search engines, and create content on your website based on those keywords. There are many more SEO tips I will be blogging about, but if you learn this first, you will be successful in whatever you choose to do.

Keywords are the foundation to your building a successful presence on the internet. The keywords or phrases (long tail keywords) you choose will determine how your posts (pages, blogs, etc) rank in the search engines. This is the most important SEO tip I can give to you.

If you consider all the SEO tips you will learn, it will always go back to what is your target and you identify your target by your keywords. Think about reading an article in the newspaper. The reporter’s keyword is their title and their article expands on it. That’s the same way with Internet Marketing. Another SEO tip is to consider your competition. You can find many keywords when seeking your target, but you also want to make sure there’s not too much competition. An easy way to see if there is a lot of competition is to go to Google and start typing in the keyword and you will see results next to the word. For example, if you typed in weight loss, you would find 84,500,000 results for weight loss and if you put quotes around it, it brings it down to about 8,000,000 but that’s still a lot. Do you think it will be easy to get to the top of the search engine where people can find out about you with that type of competition?

Of course, there are ways you can narrow this down from searching on title; looking at what your competition is doing, etc. but that’s for another blog. Right now I want to focus on the first SEO tip which is keywords. Let’s take this a step further. What if you had a great plan for weight loss and instead of choosing a keyword weight loss, you chose weight loss plans. When I check to see how many people are searching for it, I find 479 actual visitors in Google per day and there’s 2,250,000 results in Google and if I put it in quotes (meaning people are looking for it in that order) there is only about 518,000 in Google Competition. If you just type in weight loss plans, you’ll notice you’ll find results like weight loss diet plans or meal replacement plan, etc. By typing it in without the quotes, Google finds all or part of the words. When you include quotes, Google only returns the exact match.

Another SEO tip is to know your search engine. There are tools on the internet that will help you in finding competition and keywords but they may be pulling from different search engines. Google is the standard that you should use. There are many other search engines and when you want to get involved with PPC and other internet marketing, I’ll talk about the other search engines but Google is, hands down, the most popular one.

Finding keywords or phrases that people are currently searching for and with low competition will help you to be listed organically in the search engine. You can write a blog or lens or whatever vehicle you choose on weight loss plans. The next SEO tips is you want Weight Loss Plans in your title and within the body you want to have the keywords’ weight to be around 3%, which is every 100 words, the keyword (phrase) should be repeated 3 times. You don’t want to repeat it too much because Google will consider that keyword stuffing and you could be banned or tagged as using black hat SEO techniques and you don’t want that. Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. What’s funny is it will work at first, but then you’ll end up getting penalized and that’s not fun.

I’ll go into creating blogs; best services and how to optimize your blog in another post, as well as talk about getting traffic.

Another reason not to choose single word keywords is it won’t get you targeted traffic. For example if someone was searching for tourism and you were a travel agent for destinations in Australia that may or may not be the customer for you. But if someone was searching for “tourist destinations in Australia”, he/she is your potential customer.

Also, the latter is called “long tail keywords”. “Long Tail Keywords” is another important SEO tip. When writing information for the internet, you want to have content and bring something of value to your readers, but you also want to be smart about it and optimize it for a keyword or preferably a long tail keyword. A long tail keyword is someone who could be your potential customer. There are two types of people browsing the internet – the curious and the serious. You want the serious because they will opt in to your website or even better, purchase your products or join you in your business. Just because you have a long phrase does not make it a long tail keywords. It means having the right combination of words reflecting someone who is getting ready to make a decision.

When starting to learn about SEO and reading tips and information on the internet, I want you to realize that Keywords and SEO is not rocket science. It’s just being aware of it and knowing the tools to use to help you to get the information you need.

To find out more about what keywords to use, you can use a free version of WordTracker. They have a new one where you can look at the trends.
It’s: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/

You may notice that the results that WordTracker displays is different that what you would see with Google. WordTracker assumes the “quotes”.

If you detail down on the results, you can check the search volume. If you have hardly any competition but there’s no one searching for those keywords, it doesn’t matter if you are in the top of the search engine because no one will be looking. Kind of like having a McDonalds in the middle of the Sahara Desert. I am sure there may be some lost soul who will be grateful to come upon a McDonalds but the bottom line for that McDonald’s store would be terrible!

So to summarize, before starting to write anything for the internet, you want to know the keyword(s) you will be focusing on and you want to make sure those keyword(s) are reflective of what someone is searching for and that there isn’t too much competition. You’ll also preferably be using long tail keywords instead of single words.

More information to come on this and if you’d like to get a jumpstart on Internet Marketing, enter in your name and email and take my course.