A2 Network Business Blog

Hello, my name is Jay Chen. I’m a fellow webmaster like Andy, and since he’s trying to get this blog running again, I’d thought that I’d help him out with some guest posts. I’ve actually wanted a business blog as my own, but since this blog is already established and promoted, I figure I’d just focus my efforts on this one. If you don’t know, I actually wrote a guest post a while back called How to Manipulate Stumbleupon. Anyways, let me get straight into it.

So. You have a site with potential. But how do we put that to good use?

Everybody always wants their site to be the next big thing. The next Youtube. The next Google. Imagine if you had a website where everybody talked about it, and that you didn’t have to spend countless hours submitting your site to directories, or crawling the forums asking for link exchanges. Imagine how simple it would be to promote a website where people basically promotes for you. How easy would your job be? Well, today I’m going to tell you how to achieve this. Well. Maybe on a smaller level

Let’s take a look at McDonalds for a second. A while back, McDonalds came out with this ingenious commercial for their Chicken McNugget promotion. I’m not sure about the details, but I think two fans made a rap about Chicken McNuggets, and recently McDonalds picked that up, and made it into a commercial. If you haven’t seen it before, watch it now.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=XSZ6k3QIsAk

This commercial became increasingly popular. After it’s release, most people knew about it. It was wacky, funny, and had a catchy rap. McDonalds took advantage of this and came out with a promotion. Buy a six/ten piece box of chicken nuggets, and get a box of six/ten chicken nuggets for free. The rap and the promotion were well known and I’d expect McDonalds profited from it all. To this day, my friends and I go out to the McDonalds every Wednesday and have what we call “McNugget Wednesday” where we just eat a lot of McNuggets.

How does have to do with advertising? Well, McDonalds basically had the best form of promotion. They put some commercials out, but the buzz from people talking about it is really what mattered. So this brings me to my point. How to achieve something like this? The upside is that the effect of word to mouth can be enormous and can drive a lot of traffic to your website. Probably a lot more than any paid advertising can do.

So I had this experiment to try to reach a “buzz” for my website http://freetextsend.com. Just a quick overview, FreeTextSend is a site where you can send free text messages to another cellphone. It’s just a fast, fun and free way to send free texts. So anyways, I came up with this way of advertising that is somewhat unique. This is basically how it works. I tell my friends to put a link in their AIM profile to my website, and if they do it, they get to pick an outfit for me to wear for school. Sounds simple right? Well, that’s the point. This idea works two fold:

The first, is that a lot of people are on AIM/MSN nowadays. I’d say the average person has at least 200 people on their buddy list, and if you get a lot of people to put their link in their profile, then there is a potential for a lot of exposure. Also, if I saw a link in my friends profile, I’d be more inclined to click it than if I saw it on some random website. Nowadays with identity theft and charging cell phones for unwanted ringtones and such, people are wary of giving away their personal information, such as their number. So if I saw a person that I trusted promoting it, then I’d be more open with using the service.

The second, is the “buzz” or word to mouth part. Say my friend thinks of some completely ridiculous outfit for me. The other day, I had to wear a headband, a long tshirt under another tshirt, short shorts, and long high knee socks with tennis shoes. As I walked the halls, people gave me weird looks. However, there were some people that came up to me and asked what I was doing. This was the effect I was looking for. By them asking me what I was doing, I was able to explain the promotion and the website to them. As time went on, almost everybody knew what I was doing, and I had a lot of people asking me, “Who dressed you today?”

See, it’s easy to do. The word to mouth effect doesn’t have to be on such a large scale as the one like McDonalds. I think I was successful because in the end, people knew of the website, knew what I was doing, talked to other people about what I was doing, and what I was doing it for. Plus, it was actually a pretty fun thing to do.

All in all, I hope you liked my post about advertising and word to mouth. It might not have been that informative, but I hope you got out of it that word to mouth is probably the best method of advertising, and that the potential can be huge. Stay tuned for more posts as we try and revive this blog.

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This is Carl, a friend of Andy. Today is the 4th of July and the Americans are celebrating. As we all know, Andy is a lazy guy that does everything last minute, so I wasn’t surprised when he asked me a few hours before deadline to help him with a paid review. Being the nice guy (and a better writer) that I am - how could I refuse?

I don’t know about you guys, but I am a big fan of motivational and self-improvement material. I believe that even the best of us can benefit from it and be inspired from time to time. Life Perspective is a website for just that. Below is the basic structure.

• Affirmations - Including categories and sub-categories of affirmations.
  • Spiritual
  • Physical
  • Emotional
• Galleries - An image gallery with truly inspiring and motivating pictures.
• Streams of Inspiration - An About page of the website.

The entries of the site consist of an image of a certain type of affirmation, along with a short piece of text describing it. Examples: Healing, Honesty and Forgiveness.

Usability & Design

In terms of design and usability the site has a bit to work on. The theme itself is professional, and although suffices for a site like this, I feel it still looks a little too non-personal. There is usability could be improved. On the top navigation bar, there are links that fade-in to categories, which then contain the actual entries. So to access entries from the top-navigation, which takes several seconds. Most web visitors are pretty impatient and like to be able to navigate a site directly. My suggestion is to either remove the fade-in all together or speed it up.

Another thing about the interface that concerns me is the links on the left sidebar. They are basically the same as the ones in the top navbar. These should be removed, replaced with other links or perhaps more advertising. The way it is now is redundant.

The final thing to be said about the interface is the bottom half of the pages, where there are RSS links to news and articles. Some entries are related to the theme of the site, others not. I don’t really see the purpose with the RSS link unit, but if kept, I feel it should be integrated better and would recommend the blue border surrounding each link to be removed.

SEO Aspect

Looking at the SEO aspect, one can see that LifePerspective.com has good, descriptive permalinks - which is good. On the negative side is the fact that there are no <h1> tags to be found, instead a CSS class titled contentheading does the job. Unfortunately, search engines only recognize headings as <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and <h4> tags, so a better headings should be implemented.

Back to the RSS links at the bottom, if they are to keep existing, should include the rel=”nofollow” tag. Many outbound links in comparison to inbound links will do no good for SEO and PageRank accumulation.

Conclusion

Life Perspective seems to be a fairly new motivational site. Everyone could make use of motivation and inspiration from time to time, especially us web entrepreneurs. There are however some small annoyances and quirks that need to be fixed in order for continued growth - it has the potential to grow big! It is an interesting site that will definitely keep an eye on.

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Firstly, I’d like to thank Andrew for the guest post invite, and I’d recommend a look at my blog Biz-Blogger.net if you find this post of interest…

For my Guest Post here, I thought I’d look at something that applies across the board to basically everyone trying to make it online, and something which can definitely provide value to any online business owner - networking.  The importance of networking is often underestimated online, yet still it can provide the answer to a myriad solutions and open up numerous doors for the future of your business. 

Luckily, with the so-called Web2.0 and the growth of social networking sites it’s becoming more and more possible to communicate directly with those that share interests.  But in business, as I’ve learned from personal experience, it can be better to think beyond the traditional boundaries of your chums, and move towards those that can actually provide value for your business to help boost your bottom line.

In my recent post on building business through parallel thinking I spoke about the ways I have found to build a sustainable customer base without having to spend heavily on marketing, primarily through networking and offering yourself to a wider audience than your traditional end consumer.  Networking with anyone and everyone is a kind of extension to this, and by doing so you can build a strong safety underneath your organization to provide you with support when you need it.

One of the best ways to establish and market yourself would seem to be through webmaster forums, like digital point, particularly if you are operating online.  It’s a great way to make friends (and enemies…) with other online entrepreneur across various skill sets which can eventually provide you with someone to ask for advice and exchange ideas with throughout your online career.  On top of that, you might find cross-referrals between you and your new online network, which is obviously a great way to bolster your existing business and strengthen your sales.

All in all, it’s about a bit of creative thinking, which really goes a long way in business.  It’s a competitive dog-eat-dog arena, and you’ve got to work beyond your traditional comfort zone to ensure your business is left standing when the dust finally settles.

David Fraser is an online entrepreneur based in the UK.  His new blog, Biz-Blogger.net, looks at some of the issues surrounding internet entrepreneurs and internet business.

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Hello tonight I will be doing a guest post for my friend Andy. I am a young web entrepreneur like Andy, I have a blog called Russell Wagner check it out! But anyways, on with my post for tonight.

Blogs are a great tool. They allow you to add new, fresh content to your site. They are also a great way to build readership. Think about all the blogs you read. I’m sure that if you’re reading this, you’re also likely subscribed to a few or at least check them on a daily to weekly basis. Why? Is it because it is entertaining, informative or both? Blogs have been given a bad name because of splogs. Darren Rowse has a terrffic blog Pro Blogger where he posts daily with tips for bloggers. Darren has discussed the “Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers”, which consist of tips from highly successful bloggers who tell you what they do and make suggesstions as to what you should do.

So, how does all this help you get one way backlinks. Preferrably, you want people to link to you naturally. The best way to do that is to give them something worth linking to. Let’s say I was an Adobe Photoshop guru (which i’m not). My blog might be about relatively unknown tips and tricks on how to use Photoshop. Many people who work with MS office would be interested in that. They may like the tips so much that they list it on their blog or site.
What makes a good blog? Information? Yes! Consistency? Absolutely! However a great blog has to have its own style and flare. A blog that invites its readers to participate in the post is a golden rule. That’s almost a guaranteed way to ensure that people will be coming back for more.

If you want to get traffic to your blog, one of the best ways is to leave comments on other blogs. Keep in mind, however, that it has to be done in a smart way. People can always tell when something is spam, so avoid being so obvious. Limit your posts to those blogs that are at least somewhat related to your blog. If a blog is about automobiles and you try to plug your aquarium business, you’ll do more harm than good. Go to blogs that are related and take part in the discussion. The more informative and intellectual your comments are, the better chance your post will stay around long enough to be read. That is how you can start to build your readership. If you can convince people what you have to say is worth reading, they will come and read it.

Regardless of what you do to get people to your blog, the proof is always in the pudding. If you can’t keep them coming back, all the advertising and work you put into creating traffic will mean nothing.

I hope you enjoyed my post, feel free to leave your feedback by leaving a comment.

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