Keyword tools provide data on keywords for specific search engines. But none of the data is correct, and you can tell because each keyword tool will give you different data for any given keyword. Instead, keyword tools guess on keyword data. In order to get accurate data, a tool would need to access the search engine’s database (not just API) on a CONSTANT basis and pull every keyword ever all the time. No tool does that. In other words, the only companies that know keyword data exactly are the search engines themselves. And that’s valuable data that they wouldn’t just give up to any keyword company. Think about it, if you were Google, would you rather give out your keyword data for $10 a month, or free to developers so they can charge $70? It just doesn’t make sense that search engines are giving keyword data away. But let’s assume keyword data on these tools is correct. Or at least somewhat accurate. Are they worth using in the first place? I would argue not really. Search engines are sophisticated enough now that they can decode intent. Basically, when you search beard trimmer, and a company is advertising a beard clipper, your search engine knows they’re the same thing. So it’s not about getting the exact keyword correct.Instead, bloggers should search focus on TOPICs instead of keywords, and CPG companies should focus on conversion. And as long as your content is thorough enough and helpful enough, you will rank.

Biggest sales number for the Christmas season. You can only expect this trend to continue. More and more people are shopping online. We’re not even close to peaking numbers. So even if your company is a brick and mortar, it’s important to have an online strategy. Chipotle is upgrading their strategy to include mobile ordering. Dominoes, Little Caesar’s, and other food places are doing or have done the same. The world continues to go mobile, which means that if you can reach your customers on their phones, you’re at an advantage. There’s even a drink shop that doesn’t have cashiers, you just take your drink and text them what you took, and then they charge your card accordingly. Even though there isn’t tons of news, every company is gearing up for 2020. Reflecting on the year and setting goals is vital to creating a successful marketing strategy.

Links:Clickbank: https://www.clickbank.com/JVZoo: https://www.jvzoo.com/register/707499ShareASale: http://www.shareasale.com/CJ Affiliate: https://www.cj.com/ Affiliate marketing is getting paid to refer people to products and pages online. The way it works is every affiliate is given a unique ID that is attached to every link you use. When people use your affiliate link and purchase a product, you get a commission on a sale.Is affiliate marketing legit? It is totally legit. There are thousands of people who make millions of dollars through affiliate income every year. Some products that have affiliate offers pay bigger commissions than others, so depending on how you position yourself, you can make a lot of money without a lot of sales.There are hubs where people post affiliate offers. The biggest one is ClickBank, but there are others like Share A Sale, CJ Affiliate, JV Zoo. You can literally go to these affiliate networks and pick an offer you want, sign up, get your link, and start promoting.The way affiliate marketing works, usually, is you pick a niche, create content surrounding that niche, create and offer, and drive traffic to your pages with affiliate links. If you want to get involved with affiliate marketing, the best thing to do is first pick an audience you want to serve, and then start generating content. Affiliate marketing is also a good way to supplement an already existing channel or stream of income.

Merry Christmas! I hope you do something good for someone else today. I hope to you spend some time with those you love, doing things you love, and showing love in the things you do. Marketing is about telling stories to an audience that are compelling enough to cause them to make a decision. If your marketing isn’t compelling people to make decision, it’s not effective marketing.In Marketing, we tell all kinds of stories. Stories about the product, stories about our audience. Stories about how our company came to be, and stories about the projects we’re working on.Furthermore, marketing allows our audience to tell stories themselves. Stories about what their life will be like with our product. Stories about their own background. Stories about what they want in life. Our marketing material is supposed to provide our audience with that ability.Branding is a subset of these stories. Specifically, branding is the story we tell others about ourselves, and it’s the story we want our audience to tell about us.Branding is not about your origin story or how you came to be, it’s about the story you tell with your imagery and the experience your customer has. Basically, branding takes place in two facets, what someone sees before they become a customer, and what someone feels after they become a customer.Amazon has a brand that has expansive imagery. When you visit the website, you see every product. They have more categories than most stores have square feet. That’s what you see.Amazon’s backend branding is the feeling a customer gets knowing they will get free 2-day shipping, free returns, customer care 24/7, and a ridiculously easy checkout process to kick it all off.It’s all part of their marketing, but the positioning Amazon has done to portray themselves as the everything store is their branding.

Amazon updates referral fees:Shoes, Handbags and Sunglasses have a referral fee reduction from 18% to15%Outdoor Furniture will be combined with the Furniture category and will see a referral fee reduction from 15% to 10%Personal Care Appliance products under $10 will see a referral fee reduction from 15% to 8%Activewear will be consolidated into the Clothing and Accessories categories and have a referral fee of 17%Ring accessories will be consolidated into the Amazon Device Accessories, which has a referral fee of 45% Amazon makes some changes to their fulfillment fees, which will result in an increase in fees of about 3%. Amazon updates its storage fees and increases the monthly fee by $0.06 per cubic foot, which isn’t that big of a deal unless you have a lot of really big items. These increases are pretty normal, but it’s another way Amazon can squeeze money out of their sellers. Some positive changes for the Small and Light program, which makes it cheaper than ever to enroll. Including eliminating long term storage fees for the first year. Amazon automatically enrolls subscribe and save eligible products and they fund the first level of savings of 5%. See here. Amazon continues to push people to enroll in FBA by offering free monthly storage, free removals, and free returns processing, plus $100 off on partnered carrier shipping for New to FBA ASINs. Links: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gc/fee-changes?ref=nslp_at_3170536113334560223_nslnk_1https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/GABBX6GZPA8MSZGW?ref=nslp_at_3170536113334560223_nslnk_2_GABBX6GZPA8MSZGWhttps://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/GZ5Q2VW5WF4JWRGC?ref=nslp_at_3170536113334560223_nslnk_3_GZ5Q2VW5WF4JWRGChttps://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/G3Z4AX6UNV5EN2VR?ref=nslp_at_3170536113334560223_nslnk_4_G3Z4AX6UNV5EN2VRhttps://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/GWHQRT98SAZC29VQ?ref=nslp_at_3170536113334560223_nslnk_5_GWHQRT98SAZC29VQhttps://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/headlines.html?id=864693466921348349

Episode #47 What is Wordpress and how does it work? Wordpress is a CMS. CMS stands for content management system. What it does is tell the files that your website is made out of what to do. Instead of coding everything from scratch, inside your CMS you press a button and the coding is done for you. Wordpress works with themes, which are precoded ways of structuring pages, blog posts, sidebars, headers, and footers. Wordpress is open source, which means anyone can develop integrations for the platform. These are called plugins. So if your theme doesn’t carry a function you want (like what typography your theme website uses), there are plugins that overwrite the code to allow those functions. The company that created Wordpress is also a hosting company, which means you can pay them to store your website files. Their hosting service is just fine—not the best for things like uptime or features, but their pricing structure is simple and straightforward, which can be really annoying with other companies. There are also features that Wordpress hosting has that a lot of other companies don’t have, like built in advertising options and payment processors. But as with most companies that claim to offer everything, it’s not as good as specialized companies. If you’re interested in just downloading the CMS, you can go to wordpress.org, if you’re interested in their hosting services, you can go to wordpress.com However, it’s overly complicated and unnecessary to download the Wordpress CMS. If you host with any major hosting company, they will have a one click install feature for Wordpress. There are a bunch of benefits to using Wordpress as your CMS. Because it’s open source, there are loads of themes and plugins. This means that if you want a feature, or you want your website to look a certain way, there’s a way to make it happen. Additionally, you can usually get most of your features for free. There are a lot of free themes, and there are a lot of free plugins. Many of them are good, but a lot of them are also bad, so always check to see if you’re getting a good plugin or theme. There’s really only two downsides to creating a Wordpress website: the first is that it’s hard to make it look fancy and modern. Sometimes, if you’re on a website that looks old, plain, or awkward, it’s probably built on Wordpress. Other CMS platforms modernize their look automatically. So although you’re limited in what you can do, what you can do looks good. The other downside is that Wordpress is designed for everything, not for any one thing. So if you’re looking for an easy to make eCommerce website, Shopify has an easier platform with a lot of intuitive plugins already built it (all apps). Essentially, if you have something really specific in mind in terms of functionality, but not design, there are other platforms that can make your website function better.

Link: clickfunnels.com Episode #46 Is Clickfunnels Too Good to Be True? What is Clickfunnels? Clikcfunnels is a sales funnel builder. It takes the idea of website and turns it on its head. The whole goal is to get your traffic to do one thing. So you don’t have a site navigation, no “about me” or anything like that. You create multiple pages and websites under the same account, all for different purposes. Instead of having on catch-all website, you have one website for every marketing campaign you have. The downside to Clickfunnels is its price and learning curve. Even though there are a lot of features, you still need to pay for integrations. The learning curve is with design. The platform is simple enough to get down, but you hope to create awesome looking landing pages…and then they look pretty normal or worse—1995ish. Clickfunnels does eat their own dogfood, which gives you an idea of what kind of businesses do best with Clickfunnels. Clickfunnels is legit, and it does help a lot of businesses make money. But it’s using a different model. And there are usually specific niches that do well on the click funnels platform. That’s okay, it’s just kind of limiting. There are many alternatives to Clickfunnels—I personally use Wordpress. I can make loads of landing pages with the GeneratePress Theme and BeaverBuilder plugin. LeadPages is another competitor—but a bigger one is Builderall. There are plenty others out there, so you’re not stuck with just one option. Clickfunnels has a lot of features—more than pretty much any other. But most businesses don’t use most of the features. So you’re mainly paying for someone else’s business plan.

In the News: Amazon, Facebook, and PandoraAmazon changes their review system to include ratings without a written review. Now customers can just give your product a star rating without writing anything about it. This leads to a jump in reviews. SO good for small business owners who struggle to get review traction. This low barrier of entry means that you can get more reviews faster as a startup business, or with a new product line. The question we need to ask now is how are these reviews weighted in the algorithm. Link to article: https://tamebay.com/2019/12/new-amazon-rating-system-causes-rise-in-reviews.html  Facebook Starts Using Info from Oculus to Serve Targeted Ads There’s a lot of controversy around using data to serve ads. I think it’s important it happens. It keeps adult ads away from kids and other ads we don’t want away from the rest of us. It helps in the long run. We should expect to see Facebook and Google and all of the other companies use as much data s they can to serve as detailed ads as we can. Link to article:  https://www.pcmag.com/news/372499/facebook-your-oculus-vr-data-will-be-used-for-ad-targeting Pandora Launches Interactive Voice Ads Now brands can interact with their customers through their audio ad on Pandora. You can ask your customer a question and, depending on how they answer, serve them custom content. This could be HUGE for advertising. The barrier of entry is super high on this one, but that probably means two things: fewer people are going to end up doing it, and it can be really cheap. Right now it’s in beta, and only certain partners are allowed to test these ads, but eventually, they should be rolled out to self-serve platforms. Platforms across the board, even. Link to article: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/12/pandora-launches-interactive-voice-ads/

LINKS:BrickWork India: https://www.brickworkindia.com/Get Friday: https://www.getfriday.com/Income School Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCytOqtKYpACcWMD14UjhSeQ Episode #44 Are SEO Companies Worth The Money?The simple answer to this question is do they bring in more money than they cost? If an SEO agency isn’t showing you the returns you need, then the cost isn’t really justifiable. But the answer really goes deeper than that. Really you need to answer three questions: 1. What are you trying to accomplish? Do you need leads, sales, or just page views? 2. Do you need SEO for that objective (probably not for the first two)? 3. Is it more cost effective for me to do it myself, or do I need to outsource it? The reason you probably don’t need SEO for ecommerce or lead generation is because SEO takes a TON of time before it shows results. If you’re testing a product or a landing page, you need results fast so you can iterate on changes you need to make. Advertising is probably the better route for these two because you put money in and you get results back out. It’s fast, it’s measurable, and it allows you to make changes quickly.Let’s assume that you do need SEO, though. Should you outsource it? Well, odds are, unless you’re a pretty decently sized company, probably not. Most agencies aren’t designed to help the little guy because small businesses don’t have tons of money. So if you bringing in less than a half a million dollars a year, you probably will only be able to afford an agency’s lowest package—which doesn’t give you much, but it does cost you. Instead I would hire a VA (you can get some pretty good ones for not very much money) and have them do it, or take it in house. The returns you’ll see will be much better that way.If you can’t afford any of those options (agency, in-house, or VA), there are ways to learn it and do it yourself. There are a lot of differing opinions on how SEO works and what best practices are, but I recommend Income School. They have a YouTube channel that is all dedicated to doing SEO yourself. It’s great. Their target audience are people who are looking to replace their income by blogging full-time, so it is a little slanted, but I haven’t seen very much info out there that’s quite as high quality.

LINKSCanva: https://www.canva.com/Fiverr: https://www.fiverr.com/Google Fonts: https://fonts.google.com/ Episode #43 How much time and money should you spend on branding? Branding is important. On the internet, sometimes a first impression is the last impression you get to make. So if it’s bad, you can kill your possible conversions.Having a good identity is risk mitigation. Bad branding leads to mistrust, good branding leads to trust. That being said, branding is a cross between having a remarkable design and having something that isn’t distracting. You want people to be focused on your product, not your logo.When it comes to identity design, less is more. If you can get something that looks good but is really, really simple, you’re on the right track. So how much time and money should you spend on it? That depends on how big your business is. If you’re small the answer to both questions is not much.If your company isn’t making money yet, don’t spend money. So if you can, either DIY the logo or outsource it to Fiverr. If you’re comfortable and familiar with the basic elements of design, I recommend a four-step process to create your logo:Get a Canva accountPick a simple shape to put your logo inPick a nice Google Font pairingPut the name of your company in your headline font inside the shape Your Logo really doesn’t need to be more complicated than that when you’re starting out. In fact, if it is, you’re probably headed in the wrong direction.If you don’t feel comfortable making a logo yourself. Outsource your logo creation to Fiverr.Most of what goes on on Fiverr isn’t great, but it’s good enough to get started.  You can get a decent start for $5.Search “minimal logo”Filter price from low to highPick a designer you like for $5 that does minimal, flat logos.Again, with this, less is more. If you’re thinking “wow, that’s really cool for $5” you’re thinking about it the wrong way. Look for something really simple.The process of using Fiverr can take a few days, but most designers of logos only take 24 hours.Last note: make sure you get your logo in a PNG file and a vector file. That might cost extra, but it is totally worth it and REALLY important to do.In either case, you shouldn’t spend more than a couple of hours on the project and it shouldn’t cost you more than $25. If your company has already made money and you’re looking to rebrand or get a really nice logo, you should really pay a professional that knows what they’re doing.A professional designer should have their own website where they showcase their work. Many of them will have a “logo folio” where previous logos are displayed.Ask them what you get in an identity package. It should include a logo, a wordmark (as applicable), a color selection, a font selection, and a style guide.Prices for these kinds of packages can range from around $500 to thousands. Don’t be surprised if a good designer asks for $5k. Big corporations pay hundreds of thousands of dollars oftentimes. But getting it right gets more important the bigger you get. Any way you cut it, when you’re first starting out, you shouldn’t spend much and it shouldn’t take long.The longer you take getting set up with your branding, the more you push shipping your products back, and the more likely you are to fail.Branding can be a really awesome asset, but if you spend too much time on it, it becomes a huge liability.