Keith Goodrum

This is something that has been long over due.

I submit to blog carnivals, and have had several people kind enough to publish my submission. Well it’s about time I start thanking them.

Did you know blog carnivals is a great way to help build back links? You also get traffic, but the back links are good to get. It’s easy just go to http://www.blogcarnival.com find a blog carnival that matches your blog and submit your best post from the last week.

If your post gets accepted it will be published with a back link from the blog that hosts the blog carnival.

Here are the last few places that published my submission… go check them out.

http://leadinspectors.blogspot.com/2008/05/carnival-of-leads-to-making-money.html

http://www.oibo.org/internet-business-blog-carnival-edition-11.html

http://vidacomesperanca.org/socialentrepreneurshiptoday/?p=13

http://womeninternetmarketers.com/2008/05/06/blog-carnival/

http://www.businesscreditcards.com/bootstrapper/carnival-of-business-and-entrepreneurship-18/

http://www.successpart2.com/a-make-money-blogging-carnival-april-25-2008/

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Popularity: 9% [?]

On Saturday, Dec. 15th 2007 I attended Sterling Valentine’s VIP Launch Party & Workshop. The event took place just outside of Philadelphia. It was fun and everyone had a great time.

The group had about 35 people in attendance. The size made it easy to network, and meet people. Sterling being a master networker had each person stand up and give a quick introduction. That really broke the ice, and made it easier to meet people. There was time set aside to specifically to meet each other.

One person I got to meet was Ken McArthur. He is a great guy and very gracious with his time. Getting time from someone with the experience Ken has was priceless. This is the guy who consults with many of the top marketers. In fact he is the guy many of them call in to help behind the scenes.

I was glued to the advice Ken offered me about one of my projects. What he had to say made me reevaluate the direction I was taking. At first it was hard to hear, but I realized that his advice rang true.

I would like to thank Ken for his time and advice.

Ken has a book out called “Impact: How to Get Noticed, Motivate Millions and Make a Difference in a Noisy World. The book launched today…

If you order the book then enter your order number you’ll get instant access to some pretty valuable downloads. There are bonuses from Joel Comm, JP Maroney, Randy Gilbert and others…

Head on over to Ken McArthur’s Impact website for complete details.

Popularity: 10% [?]

This weekend I saw Chrysler advertising a new incentive program called Let’s Refuel America! I thought it was a brilliant marketing program. It sure beats the same old copycat “Cash Incentive’s” every car manufacture and his brother is waving around.

Cash incentives works until everyone copies each other. Once everybody copies a marketing tactic what happens to the tactic? It loses its power, and you no longer appear different. You become part of the herd, and cannot stand out from the crowd.

Another problem with cash incentives is two fold…

One is you are giving away profits. The only thing cash incentives do is profits. Think about it… every dollar you give as an incentive comes straight off the bottom line.

Let’s say you knock $20.00 off a $100.00 purchase. You only need to sell $20.00 to make up the difference, right? Wrong. Look at the math… you are giving up $20.00 in profit, not $20.00 in revenue.

Say you run at a 20% profit margin. (Single digit profit margins are more realistic… but we will go with 20%. ) To get back that $20.00 you need to sell $100.00 worth of product or service just to get your money back.

Now, I’ll admit that this example is overly simplified. If you want to see the real impact this has on your business get the book How to Sell at Margins Higher Than Your Competitors By Larry Steinmetz. This book will be a real eye opener.

Second is its easy to copy. Any clown can lower price… all it takes is a decision. So, all the competitors in town offer incentives. Then what happens is a competitor notices that the cash incentive is losing effectiveness. They figure if a $1000.00 incentive works… then $1500.00 will work better. Then the next bozo concludes… If $1500.00 works better then $2000.00 will knock their socks off! Where does it end?

Chrysler’s new incentive program might be hard to copy, and that should give them a longer competitive edge…

Steven Levitt at Freakonomics said today in his post $2.99 Gas that it would be hard to copy. That could mean Chrysler will be able to hold a completive edge that much longer. Here’s what Steve said…

If it works, I don’t think it will be that easy for the competitors to copy, at least not quickly (in contrast to the “employee discount” plan which spread like wildfire across the various car manufacturers). Setting up and administering this program must be a logistical nightmare. I could imagine it taking another company many months to get all the pieces into place.

Instead of offering cash incentive, having a sale or knocking down your price… what could you do to add value to your offer without giving away profit?

Popularity: 15% [?]

Looked at the dashboard today and saw this was the 100th post. It’s a cool milestone, and a chance to look back at the short life of this blog. Here are a few of the numbers:

• In 117 days there has been 100 posts.
• The last 2 weeks of January there were 694 unique visitors, and through the 1st 8 days in May there has been 1072. (Knock on wood that the numbers keep growing)
• Unranked in Alexa in January, and today 148,868.
• Zero page rank in Google, and PR3 today.

These numbers are fun to watch because they are fast improving. This is a new blog, and the numbers will make big jumps. And that’s always fun to track. Eventually the numbers will level off, and at best will see incremental moves. This is just the normal course of action as a blog matures.

The big question is what’s the reason behind this growth?

The easiest answer is… action.

Pretty simple, and not overly complicated. I’ve worked hard to get up 100 posts in 117 days. I remember reading once that a new blog should get up a lot of good content fast. And I figured blogging 5-6 days a week should be a way to get that much content.

Publishing this many blog posts a week was not easy. There were many days I got up with no idea what to write about. But I wouldn’t let myself off the hook. I made myself sit down in front of the keyboard and write. I would write 2 maybe 3 paragraphs not like what I wrote, and start over again. Many of those early drafts I deleted.

Sometimes I would write a complete post, and decide not to publish it. I was not happy with the way it turned out. It either got way off point, didn’t read good or the timing didn’t feel right.

So, I would start all over again. I was not going to miss my personal commitment.

Another curious thing happened because of this hard work…

It put me in position to receive a little luck. A couple of big name bloggers linked to my blog… I was lucky to have them do that. But if I wasn’t adding content on a regular basis would they have linked to this blog? I don’t know, but probably not. I got to interview copywriter Stephen Dean. That interview has generate traffic, and back links. If I wasn’t actively involved in the blogsphere I would have missed this opportunity. I got asked to participate in a Marcus Hochstadt blog contest. Would I have been asked to participate if I wasn’t blogging on a regular basis? Probably not.

I guess it boils down to this… Luck and hard work go hand in hand.

Here’s how I’ve always felt about this. It seems like when you are working hard you tend to be in the right place at the right time. You find luck out on the playing field. You have to be in the game. When you are out there working hard, making the plays, you will find yourself standing in the right place at the right time. If you are standing on the sidelines when luck happens by, you will miss out, because luck will pass you by.

I think that Will Wheaton, and Sam Adams make great points about luck & hard work. They both write that you need to be working hard to be in position to have good things happen.

Will Wheaton sums up about hard work and luck in his post yet another post about writing… and stuff

Finally, an important note to all artists: nobody in the world will work as hard as you will to promote your work, nobody will care about promoting it as much as you do, and your work will be as successful as you work to make it. Hopefully, you’ll get lucky like I did and get some good word of mouth and connect with a passionate group of people who will tell their friends about you, but that’s never going to happen if you don’t work hard — really, really hard — to make it happen.

Here is what Sam Adams says in his post titled Luck and hard work go hand in hand:

Luck is about being there. Luck is about showing up. I tease my kids all the time that it might be true that it is better to be lucky than be good; but I also tell them that you can’t get lucky if you are not prepared to accept it.

Every champion, in sports or industry, can look back over the course of competition and see places where they were fortunate, opportunistic and sometimes just downright lucky.

Everybody, and I mean everybody, gets lucky. What we all want in life is a shot. What we do with that shot, that’s the story we want to tell.

What do you do with the luck that falls your way?

So, what are you going to do to make sure you are standing in the way when luck comes along?

Popularity: 27% [?]

Here is something cool I stumbled on a couple months ago. You can add any YouTube member to your Google Reader. Check out the video to see how it’s done

Here is the url add the rss feed to Google reader: http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/USERNAME/videos.rss

Popularity: 32% [?]

“Anything you actually know about is fine…”, is one of the suggestions I received from my survey. It gave me a good laugh. Then I thought about it… How many people blog about stuff they don’t know anything about? How many are posers? They act like experts, and pass out advice about making huge bucks online, traffic strategies or marketing tactics and have no knowledge or experience using these tips.

I would like to think that most people who blog this way get found out. Probably not in a public way, but in a loss of readership. Most folks have a good ‘B.S. detector’ (aka common sense), and can sniff out junk a mile away.

There are 2 ways you can write about topics…

First you should write about what you know… yeah I know you hear this advice all the time. And there is a reason - It works. Writing about subjects you know comes through in your writing. You have a level of confidence, and comfort that surfaces. Credibility builds as you write about topics you know.

Do you have to be a screaming success to write about something you know? No… I think that many people believe this idea. You can write about your experience with a particular subject. Did you have some success? Moderate success? Or fell flat on your face? Then let everyone know about your experience. People can learn from your success, and your setbacks. You will also find that people gain valuable information from your experience… good or bad.

Writing about your experience is a great way to weave your knowledge into the story. Mohamed over at Internet Business Opportunities writes about how some bloggers do this…

Write About What You Know

Hi, When I first started this blog, I was in a bit of a dilemma. I mean, how would I write about something new everyday? I mean, I know full well how to do research and get ideas. I can sit down and push out articles pretty quick, …

You can write about something you don’t know if you do it this way…

Be up front and tell readers you don’t have any experience or knowledge when you started. Let them know you are not an expert. Then tell them what you did. Give the steps you took, and how you found the information.

Then tell the story… what happened, how it went, any hurdles you came across and how you overcame them. Then give the results… good or bad. Everyone knows that not all experiences are a success. Most people become suspicious if all you have are victories. When Babe Ruth retired in 1935 he held the career home run record of 714 dingers… he also held the career strikeout record of 1330.

Another great way to write about something you don’t know is to write a tutorial. Raj Dash over at Performancing gives a good tip on how to do tutorials..

Bloggers: How Do You Learn Something New?

You’ve probably heard/read the age-old advice to writers: write about what you know. Not to be contrarian, but there are ways to write about what you don’t know - or at least don’t know very well - and it’s a good way to learn a topic …

Transparency is a buzz word making the rounds lately. It’s a fancy word for honesty. Just be up front with your readers and I bet they will give you a lot of leeway.

Popularity: 35% [?]

Thursday May 8th is my friend Ryan Healy’s birthday. I don’t if you have ever read his blog, but it’s about Business growth, copywriting, ect. Ryan is a top flight marketing consultant & copywriter. He has written for some of the big marketers around. People like Alex Mandossian, Tellman Knudson, Ben Mack, Marc Goldman, Jimmy Sweeney, Pulte Homes & over 60 other clients.

So, why am I telling you all this?

He is giving you a chance to get a book he co-authored titled “Million Dollar Marketing Secrets” for a mere $7… shipping included for residents of U.S., Canada & the U.K. Any one outside of those three countries leave a comment on his blog, and he will get in touch with you privately. This a real book that will be shipped to your door.

I have a copy of this book, and it’s loaded with priceless marketing information. J.P. Maroney got 21 top marketers to each contribute a chapter to the book. Here are a few of the co-authors; Clayton Makepeace, Michel Fortin, Ray Edwards, Ben Mack, Ryan Healy, Jason Moffatt…

Ryan says the chapter by Clayton Makepeace is worth $7 alone… but in my opinion every chapter is worth that and more.

The deadline on this offer is Friday morning May 9th when Ryan wakes up. I’m not sure when Ryan wakes up on Friday mornings… or for that matter any day of the week. So, my suggestion is to head on over there and grab a copy while it still fresh on your mind.

Here is the post at Ryan’s blog: http://www.ryanhealy.com/marketing-book-birthday-gift/. Head on over there scroll down, click on the paypal button and get this book.

Popularity: 43% [?]

Could you do me a favor please?

I’m taking a quick one question survey about what topics to cover on this blog. The best way is to ask you what you would like to see covered.

Take a second and answer the question below. You don’t have to leave the page, or take more than a few seconds to answer. You can leave a quick answer like… how to get traffic, How to improve Alexa or How to set up a blog. I’m just looking for what you would like to read about.

I would appreciate your input.

Thanks,

Keith

Popularity: 41% [?]

Christmas morning, used to be very exciting in my household. My brothers, my sister and I would get up at the crack of dawn… actually I’m pretty sure I never fell asleep. We were eager to attack the pile of presents under the tree. Everybody was excited to see what he or she would get. The funny thing was, sometimes we didn’t always like what we got. Some of us were very excited about our gifts Christmas, and some of us were less than excited.

The last few days, most people have been blogging about the Google page rank updates. Judging from what I’ve read the Google page rank updates have been a lot like Christmas. There are some people that are blogging about the increase that they receive from Google. There are some that are bemoaning the fact to they’ve lost page rank. Just like Christmas, some are happy and some aren’t.

Many Blogs rely on Google Page Rank for revenue

I can see how some people are upset about their Google page rank, because of how they base their business model. A blog and that relies on page rank and or Alexa score to determine the value of their revenue hangs on the results. Personally I find it unsettling to allow a third-party to determine how much money I’m going to make.

So after reading several blogs I decided to go ahead and check my page rank. My page rank has been zero for the past four months, but today when I checked, I saw that I’ve been given a page ranking of three. Imagine my surprise.

Seeing such a big jump in my page rank this kind of cool. But since I don’t rely on these numbers to determine revenue it’s more for fun.

So, how did I manage to get a Page Rank of 3?

The big secret is… I don’t really know. I haven’t given it much thought. There are no secret SEO tactics being deployed here. At least not consciously. No keyword optimization, no secret linking strategies and no black hat tactics.

I’ve just tried to write content that I think people would like to read. Used some basic traffic generation techniques. Then got involved with the blogging community and networked with other online businesses. That’s it…

Darren Rowse over at Problogger in his video post Google Page Rank Updating… BUT… summed it up perfectly. Don’t build your blog for the page rank… just build a quality blog.

Congratulations to those who got a wonderful Christmas present from Google. And to those who got a lump of coal my condolences.

Popularity: 51% [?]

10 Minute Blog Post

An easy to duplicate blog writing process will make posting a breeze.

Writing blog posts is one of the best things you can do to help bring traffic to your blog. Having a consistent publishing schedule lets people know they can stop by and get plenty of original content.

Some people seem to be gifted with the ability to write fast, concise and with ease. I often picture people like Darren Rowse, Michel Fortin, or James Brausch cranking out pages and pages of prose effortlessly.

I on the other hand use to struggle with my writing. Taking hours to write a simple 300-350 word blog post or article. It was agonizing and slow process. I would get easily frustrated, and give up. I had a blog that had what I would call a streak publishing schedule. I would go through spurts of writing posts with great effort. That would last for a very short period of time, and then it would be weeks before I would write again.

I always felt guilty not keeping a consistent publishing schedule. In fact that was one of the reasons that would get me to sit down and write a several posts at once. But that would take practically all day to produce 2 or 3 posts. And the blog suffered because of this erratic publishing schedule.

It was time to learn how to produce original content on a consistent basis

After doing a lot of research I could not find a good system that would work for me. I studied material about writing articles, books, copywriting and blogging. The end result was combining several methods to come up with a system that worked for me. And that is how I came up with 10 Minute Blog Post.

Because of a delay getting the DVD ready 10 Minute Blog Post will be available as a digital download

I’m not the most technical oriented person around. But my mistake is your gain… I was going to delay the release until I figured out the problem. However I’ve decided to release this as a downloadable product. And for this weekend the price will be $29.95.

So, if you want to get instant access, and a great price head on over to http://10minuteblogpost.com/ to get a copy. This special price will only last until Monday May 5th at 9am. Then it will be available only as a DVD, and at a price of $100.

Update Due to some recording issues I’ve temporary pulled “10 Minute Blog Post”. It will be ready to go in about a week. Thanks - Keith

Popularity: 52% [?]