I have been using W3 Total Cache Plugin and it has been great, but more importantly I activated the cloud option within the plugin. Now most of the media is being loaded from Amazon’s S3 platform. The images, js snippets, media, etc. It has resulted in my blog to loaded much faster and according to pingdom.com – 84% faster than most website.

How to Activate CDN with W3 Total Cache

It is fairly easy to install and setup the cloud or even the CDN option within W3 Total Cache. First you will have to enter your Amazon S3 credentials. Click on CDN in the top link menus and find the configuration option, enter your credentials. Once that has been verified you are rady to activate the cloud on your blog and you will notice the speed difference.

Now, simply go to the general settings of W3 Total Cache and find the option labeled CDN. Check off enable and choose your service. Since I already have an Amazon S3 service, I chose that from the drop down.

There are other things on you can speed up your blog from compressing JS and CSS code. Remove unwanted and unnecessary plugins and even reducing images on the blog. If you still want to have these perks, a CDN can be very beneficial and you are only paying for what is being used. Last month my Amazon S3 invoice came out to $3.26. Did not break my pocket at all.

Remember you want your users to start to engage in your blog and to start reading the content on it. If your website does not load then a potential reader or even a lead will leave your site. Also speed is being measure by Google as part of their search algorithm. Google wants to make sure they are providing the most relevant but also useful site to their users.

If you have went to a webpage  and it never loaded you get ticked off a bit and you leave. You do not want that happening with your readers. Utilizing W3 Total Cache will increase your load time and you will have happier readers. The best art this plugin is free, you ca easily download it from WordPress: Download W3 Total Cache from WordPress

Related posts:

1. WordPress Optimization: Speed Things Up a Bit
2. Tools to Utilize Amazon S3 for your Digital Media
3. Load Time is Whack: Are Gurus Whacker?

For example here is a screenshot of all the cities Google says there is reach, from  county in New Jersey.

Now there maybe some good traffic which can be captured. Even though Google Adwords can not tell the populate or reach of the area doesn’t mean there isn’t traffic there. Granted Google may pull their location for ads being searched in their location doesn’t mean it will always be covered.

To properly cover all these ’empty’ areas is to create a radial target. Zoom in the map and decide what city you want as a center axis and enter it in Google’s geo targeting tool, hit enter. It does not matter if the city you use as a center point is already targeted, you just need an axis for your circle. The default is a 20 mile radius, but you can go as low as 10 miles. Once you do that you will see an additional overlay over your original targets. It should look similar to this below.

As you can see the circular radius targets the non targeted area produced from the first screenshot. It allows me to extend my reach to these areas, even though they maybe less populated or have little reach. Since they are still within the reach of the other cities the client is targeting, this overlay reach will help with the campaign. If the client wanted to only target selected cities then this strategy will play no part. Since they are targeting a county, this will work well.

This simple overlay radial targeting will help increase reach, even find leads which Google thinks their maybe none. In essence you want to get a good reach of users or visibility to your ad. You just do not know if these ‘gapped’ areas will not produce a lead to your client.

I would probably say to use this strategy only if there are missing areas within your map. I would not use this strategy if there are missing areas outside. It would defeat the purpose and the client may not travel out that far from their office or target area. If you are missing cities that are already surrounded by cities targeted already then it would make sense to include them by using a radial target.

Related posts:

1. My Ad was Seen: Intro to Adwords
2. Check Everyday for your $50 Adwords Coupon
3. Comparing Google Ad Planner with Quantcast

Blog posts started to rank by themselves without any backlinking of any kind or magic seo. Now that I own several small content sites I want to start monetizing them all. There is the obvious, sell ad space, put adsense, affiliate marketing content, etc. With so much writing and content, it does get over whelming for me sometimes. I have to monetize each page without really thinking too much.

Besides the obvious, you can monetize content by simply adding a small piece of code on your website which will highlight keywords for you automatically and provide you income on a CPC basis. INTENTclick allows bloggers and website owners to make money form their content by creating in text ads.

What are intext ads?

Very simple explanation, it turns keywords within your website into ads. The way this works is simple. INTENTclick crawls and analyzes the page or blog post and if it finds a keyword with a relevant ad it will automatically turn it into an ad link. Simple.

INTENTclick is a network by Kontera but focuses more on direct advertising. INTENTclick is currently open for content about making money, debt consolidation, price comparisons, business opportunities, online quotes, mortgage refinance, trading, back to school, and online earnings. Basically anything to do with make money online.

… take a look at this blog post, I have the script working in the background. Do you see the double underlined words?

If your blog focuses in any of these area, you can utilize INTENTclick to start making money almost immediately. In comparison to adsense, INTENTclick is within the content. This means as users read your content, they see a unique style link. Hover over it and it shows a relevant ad to that keyword.

With adsense or banners, they are in a fixed location and with banner blindness at an all time high, it can be hard for users to even see that specific adsense block. By the way, an advantage to full content monetization is you can utilize both Google Adsense and INTENTclick at the same time and on the same page.

… the system itself and backend.

Once you sign up as a publisher, the backend is very simple. Inside, you are presented with an overall view of your account showing you how many impressions, clicks, ctr, conversions, payout etc. Very simple detailed report with an overall graph of your progress.

One part I like about INTENTclick is the keyword report, it will show you what keywords are highlighted and clicked out. This means you can start wrapping your content on what your readers are interacting with. With this in mind, your content will be more compelling and create more interaction with your intext ads.

Again the backend is very simple, another report they provide is where the click originated from. Meaning, if they clicked on post

Optimizing and monetizing your content isn’t hard. Finding the right tools in which can help you monetize your content can be troublesome, but with INTENTclick it is simple. You register, grab your code, paste within your content site, make money, simple.

Related posts:

1. Content is King Which Equals Cha Ching
2. Monetize Your Blog/Website by Testing First
3. Blog StartUp: Content Creation 3 Strategies Used

We are moving into a mobile space right now, a lot of users have cell phones, a big majority have a smart phone! As marketers we need to adjust to this and make sure we can reach our traffic whether they are looking on it from a standard FireFox browser or their iPhones. For example I have a virtual card on IanFernando.Me.

It has all my information and it is the only business card I need now. When someone scans my QR code, 2 things happen – there is a check that see if it is a smartphone or not, then redirects to the proper page. Since users can go to my virtual card form their browser, I still want to make it browser friendly and attractive.

But if they are viewing it on their cell phones, I want to make sure they get access to the right information fast. I do this by creating a mobile friendly page or in the case of my virtual card – a mobile friendly service that houses my information. You can visit my virtual card on your phone and it will redirect you JumpScan, a service that holds my contact information on a mobile friendly page.

In order to do this, I use a code that checks the screen size of the browser and then redirect the user if necessary. The code below is added to the TOP page of my html page. This code will be the very first line of defense to mobile users, making sure they are sent to the right page.

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
if (screen.width <= 699) {
document.location = "http://jumpscan.com/ianternet";
}
//-->
</script>

This small snippet of code says if the screen size is LESS than 699 in pixels, redirect to JumpScan profile. If you go to my JumpScan profile from this blog, on a standard browser you will see a standard and browser friendly page. If you viewed it on a mobile device, you will a very friendly mobile landing page with my contact information. This is why I keep it on JumpScan.

You should take advantage of both parties and redirect users base on the type of browser they are on. DO not permanently switch to mobile as a BIG majority of users will still be PC/MAC browser base traffic. You should cater to your users and make things easier for them. For example ability to watch videos, load times, smaller image file sizes, etc. There are a lot more you can do to optimize your website to cater to mobile users.

I know I personally work on my iPhone a lot and I tend to view emails and websites on my phone. It bothers me that I have to magnify the website I am looking at to see and understand what I am looking at. Making everything easier for the end user is the best way to gather leads and make sales.

Use the code above and paste it ABOVE any other code of your website and redirect it to mobile friendly services such as JumpScan or download and edit mobile friendly themes. If you are using WordPress, just use WPTouch to turn your blog into a mobile friendly theme.

In either case mobile marketing will have to be part of your marketing model.

Related posts:

1. Engaging Mobile Users with QR Bar Codes
2. Mobile Marketing with QR Codes, Right and Wrong Ways
3. Cross Reference the Advertisers Landing Page!

The things that took the most time out of my day was Twitter, Skype, and Facebook. It is definitely an attention grabber with status updates, skype calls, and video shares. It just breaks my concentration and I end up clicking on the link and looking at everyone’s statuses. I even found myself on youtube for almost an hour.

Not good when I got a whiteboard filled with things to do. So this week experiment was born and I think I did pretty well. I got a lot of things done, contracts reviewed, offers going up, products needing traffic, research keywords etc. I did a lot of things. Instead of me reading DamnYouAutoCorrect.com or finding new mixtapes on Datpiff.com – I was full productive on what I had to do.

… and yes the occasional cat pictures.

Here are somethings that has helped with my productivity….

• Every morning I write my goals for TODAY and what I want to accomplish for today. This puts me in a goal oriented mood where I want to cross one of those task off the white board, and it feels good doing so.

• LeechBlock, is one Firefox plugin that I used to help stop myself from going to WorldStar, Facebook, Datpiff, Youtube, and all these other sites that I tend to randomly go to.

• SimplyNoise, replace my Winamp player and Grooveshark.com because I notice myself picking and choosing songs I want to play and listen to. This actually helps  a lot and relaxes my brain actually as well. It did take me getting use to but it definitely is worth it to have playing in the background.

• Close out Tweetdeck and try not to open it. Twitter, I do not know why I find it so interesting maybe because of what certain celebrities say that interests me or the funny remarks from music artists. I did manage to not look at twitter on my PC but did tend to look at my iPhone twitter app – but not as often – so that is a plus.

• Closed out my email. I started responding to emails more so towards later in the day and via my iphone especially if it was important. This help a little with more screen real estate, allowing me to move more windows around when necessary.

I think that was it. Just these things alone definitely helped with my daily productivity and how I manage things. It s a good thing that I have workoffice to help with managing my VAs and partners. In all I think I had a hell of a week, so cheers.

enjoy your weekend!

Related posts:

1. Sync Twitter with Your Facebook, Why?
2. Facebook Privacy Issues Benefits Facebook Marketers
3. Networking with Twitter

Testing is important and its important to alter images to see which catches the eyes of the end user. For example Facebook and Plenty of Fish use an image size of 110 * 80. It does get annoying to resize a bunch of images that you think will do well, but you can actually let Google do this for you. You can use Google to search and grab the perfect size images for your campaign and then use a FireFox plugin to automatically save all those images for you.

The problem is that Google has an auto thumbnail script which prevents you to bulk download the perfect size ad images for your campaigns. So when you try to right click on an image and save it, you are actually not saving the right size but the thumbnail size.

So in today’s video I show you how to quickly and easily download a full page of images at the size of 110 * 80, the perfect size for Facebook Ads and Plenty of Fish.

Resources explained:

1. DownThemAll – Plugin for FF
2. Google Image Ripper – Basically a ripper

With these 2 tools you can easily save a ton of images to your desktop and then use tools to help you bulk upload thees images to your campaign for testing. It is pretty easy. Once the FF plugin is installed, you just use the Google Image Ripper to ‘dethumb’ the images and then right click to use DownThemAll. Rapidly save a perfect image size of 110 * 80 straight to your pc for testing.

You obviously want to filter out through the images to see what will work and what won’t. You should have a good sense of what to use.

Watch the video at the top to see the tutorial on how I save a ton of images to my PC with just a click.

Related posts:

1. 3 Reasons Your Facebook Ads Campaigns Are Probably Failing and How You Can Start Making Profitable Ones
2. Have you tried Facebook’s new Ad Manager UI?
3. Facebook Privacy Issues Benefits Facebook Marketers

With 2 networks on his belt, his network is getting a lot of attention, especially BLAM Ads. His method of promotions, direct banner buys. Since I am seeing his banners everywhere, I decided to just study his method of banner strategies. I found out why his banners are so attention hungry because the Eagle make sure they grabs the attention of the end user.

Not only does he brand himself in some banners but some banners users actually take the time to interact with. Even though users are not directly going to the website, there is a branding perspective going on as well.

I am going to break down some of the banners I have seen all over the internet.

First is the button ad, which I get consistent emails about. This specific button get so much attention some blog readers contact me and tell me that it is annoying. The amazing part about this is it is consistently catching the end users attention.

There is no context – it just spins 360 degrees over and over. So this specific banner button get the attention by the bright colors and its repeated rotation. The purpose of no text is to create curiosity. Seeing what the ad is about users will click on it. It is an interesting button ad of a skull just spinning, for what? That is the reason why it gets clicks and attention.

Next are some sets of 728 x 90 banners which consists of mostly text. These sets of ads are either static of they are animated. The top 728 banner animates with some information and Blam Ads logo.

This banner is dark but it works to the texts advantage. It makes anything in the banner stick out more, especially if the colors are bright and are bold. For example Eagle starts with white fade text with this banner, then goes into into bright yellow/orange. It then flashes into a description of what Blam Ads is and their logo.

The strategy of this banner is to grab your attention by “What does Rest in Peace to the Competition mean”? It also flashes bright yellow/orange just in case you missed it the first time. Then it goes into a quick comparison description, meaning it make you wonder why you you are working with the other networks.

The last part of this banner is it has the skull logo and bullet points, giving a quick benefit to the end users. Great way to end the banner flow for the person looking at it. It starts off with curious -> why -> benefits. A really good banner flow strategy. Creating curiosity for the end user and then making them realize why they are not working with Eagle in the first place, and concluding it with benefits.

This is a static banner and is just straight text. There is just 2 factors to this banner but definitely gets the attention because of the colors and the way Eagle works the copy in this banner.

Eagle first gets your attention by the colors and borders. It has 2 primary colors red and blue. These 2 colors are primary and it is the most recognized colors throughout the internet. So this makes this banner very visible because it isn’t blinding. Also this banner isn’t a full image, it breaks. By breaks, there is text in it – acting as if it was a paragraph. The white space improves the banners visibility since it will blend with anything surrounding it, but also gets more visibility because of the border and colors.

Now the text is the amazing part – ad copy is the key to this banner. He is following 3 concepts to actionable ad copy: What I have, What it will do, What I want you to do.

First he introduces himself then talks about Blam Ads and its benefits. He gives you a reason why it is the best content locking system out there and then tells you to join. It perfectly flows together and it is a quick fast read for the end user. Eagle definitely knows how to get the user to flow with the banner, even with text.

This last banner is also static and very simple. It is just text with a negatory influence. Just reading the banner is a bold statement, asking yourself why – then ended up clicking on it. It is a quick banner that requires a quick action. The banner is bold and is going to be bigger than any text on any website, breaking the traditional style of a website.

If a new user or repeated visitor visits a blog, the style or organized design is broken by this ad. So the end users’ brain looks at what is broken, reads the statements, then mentally ask why. This simple design is a powerful ad in itself just because it forces the brain to recognize it, since it is out of place within the website.

Conclusion

These banners are very simple, but have a lot of mental influence on the end user. Colors, words, web site structure, etc plays a big role in how Eagle is designing his banners and placing them on sites which will have the highest eye balls to see. He also isn’t just creating more potential affiliates to his network but also creating brand recognition.

The strategies mentioned above are very simple, but combining them and understanding how users react plays even a bigger role. For example banner flow is very important and not everyone does it. Colors is another great influence, but most designers rather have a pretty banner than a high converting banner.

Look at Ryan Eagles banners around the internet and see if you can spot other influences he is doing.

Related posts:

1. Ads in Your Face Like… BLAM!
2. Creativity is Free – Just THINK!
3. Blog StartUp: Content Creation 3 Strategies Used

In the past I have been using the Socrates Theme for quite a while now because it is easy, clean, and has a lot of options when it comes to customizing. It also allows you to incorporate social and banner ads within the theme as well. I have used Socrates on several info base membership sites and it is very easy and simple to use. You literally can have a membership site running in about 15 minutes.

Socrates also comes with several pre-defined headers as well, so there will be an image waiting for you when you grab Socrates. Another big reason why I like it is it integrates with Wishlist Member with ease.

With the Socrates Theme I can create a separate page for Optins, Sales Page, Contact form, etc – this theme was intended for online marketers. Having these pre built functions helps with your membership site out of the box. Create a site and then create a sales page all in Socrates and all in WordPress.

Then there is the Genesis framework, which is a theme by itself. The theme is really simple to use and the framework is easy to use, there isn’t much backend coding you need to do. Install and configure via the Genesis backend configurations. For membership sites, this is a very easy and very clean theme to utilize.

This specific framework is very straight forward, this blog itself uses the Genesis Framework. With genesis you can quickly switch the style, from 3 column, 2 column or just 1 column. There are a lot of options within the posts as well as the SEO side of this theme/framework.

To go along with this framework and a very familiar theme is the Twenty Diez theme. I stumbled on this theme from Twitter and found out Jared was behind this theme. This specific theme is the original Twenty Ten theme when you first install WordPress. I like this theme for my membership sites because it is also simple, but it is a bit bolder than the Genesis Theme. Bolder meaning fonts and navigation seems to stick out more. Either or they compliment each other very well. Both look exactly a like, just one looks a bit bolder.

Each theme is going to be base on you and how easy you want to customize the theme. In both cases there is rarely any customization besides putting up your logo. Both themes allows you to use widgets which makes everything much easier. Again I use both these themes because it easily integrates and looks good with the Wishlist Membership plugin.

Simplicity is key, having something that is too complicated can deter your user base or you may be spending too much time on design than your actual members. Remember Keep It Simple Stupid! (KISS) Both Socrates Theme and the Genesis Framework are simple and easy to use.

Related posts:

1. Creating Niche Mini Sites for the Holidays
2. Membership Script Battle: Round 1 – Wishlist Member
3. Membership Script Battle: Final Round – Overall

I do not know why but I like utilizing Facebook a lot, it is a portal of just pure traffic. I have been using a specific site to find trends base on a keyword I type in. Today, I have decided to share this site with you. The website is called YourOpenBook.org.

This specific website looks at your search term and then searches Facebook statuses. You can see what people are talking about and if they mention something important. This is similar to twitter search and twitter trends, but it uses Facebook statuses. I am uncertain how often it updates but it does provide some value to research.

I first found this website when the craze of Facebook privacy was a HUGE issue. Also this website arise when Facebook was posting FourSquare locations – showing people their friends are not home and the opportunity to rob them. OpenBook wanted to show to Facebook users their privacy wasn’t really private. It was a campaign to show everyone Facebook lacks and has privacy flaws.

Well I decided to take this website to my own marketing efforts and use it for good use. Market research.

Though this website will not search every Facebook’s user status, there is still a lot of information you can pull from the search terms you put in. A lot of users has protected their profile, but a good majority still have not adjusted their profile privacy. With so many users joining Facebook on a daily basis, they will not even know what their default privacy is. So this still benefits online marketers who want to use this service as a research tool.

For example this website is great to find problematic issues and create an info product or promote a specific offer. It is about putting in the right keywords to find what you are looking for. Even finding trends and then taking advantage of that specific trend with an affiliate offer.

One other aspect I like is you can filter this website by male or female, helping you create a Facebook campaign geared towards that specific gender. With each gender you can find the right vertical to promote to that specific group of users. Gender targeting is definitely a strategy when it comes to online promotions. In any case this specific website helps you find the niche or trend which you can immediately take advantage of.

If you see a trend in twitter, do a search at OpenBook to see if users are also posting to their facebook wall. Then look at the profiles and see their interests. Now you have a targeted campaign. It is repetitive and boring to go look at every profile, but it can help with your current Facebook campaigns when trying to target specific users. Outsource this!

The website is used to show the lack of privacy, but it still provides data such as – profile interests, genders, trends, new niches, etc. Again it is how you use the website and how you look at the data. Data and information is important in any business and in life, it is how you utilize the information.

Related posts:

1. Start a Facebook Campaign for Less than $30
2. Twitter: TwitScoop – Finding Trends
3. Sync Twitter with Your Facebook, Why?

Content Gateways is something fairly easy to use with marketing, you just need to have a high enough need. My first site using content gateways was trying to take advantage of a trend last year. It kinda of worked, I did get a very small conversion but a lot of bounces as well. I am not sure if that is normal but there are some people who actually fill these gateways out.

Now, I only know of Mr. Eagles BlamAds, so that is where I was using his system. He recently upgraded and has a bunch of awesome features and templates to start off with.

Now some of these template may work depending on what you are locking and what offers you are pushing. The goal is to make it attractive and blend with the website. I personally found creating your own gateway does better, I think because there is full cntrol on how it can look.

There are just a lot of variables to test – amount of offers, text color, text size, border, etc. So here are my personal experience on using BlamAds Content Gateway and getting users to interact.

1. Border Thickness and Color - Border thickness is important, sometimes a thin border doesn’t create a yield to the end user’s brain and doesn’t send any message. Having a thick border and a color works, I personally use an amber color for my content gateway’s border.
2. Amount of Offers – I only use 3-5 offers and asking the end user to complete 1 offer. I mix the offers with a simple submit or a download offer. Depending on the demographic I do games and prizes as they seem to be the easiest to get users to quickly interact and complete.
3. The Need – This is actually the most time consuming part, I think. Finding the right niche and the niche is media, now the sub niche is the hardest. I thought I can just take videos and lock it but it is a very searchable popular term. It was hard to get the traffic I wanted. The media can either be pictures, videos, or games. I found videos to be popular.
4. Overlay Transparency – Yes, I tested this. For some reason a transparency of 90% does well. I assume its because they can see the content enough that they can make out what it is and are still curious enough to want to keep going.
5. Font Sizes – There is a fix size when it comes to BlamAds Gateways, templates. But if you create your own it can be adjusted to whatever width or size you want. I have a headline that is fairly big but not massive and the offer links to be just 2 sizes smaller.

The way I came up with these tips is testing. When I started I noticed a bunch of people immediately bouncing. I needed to see how to control the traffic. I just tested a bunch of variables, since there is a lot to play with. I found that these small changes makes a difference with stats especially “time on site” and “bounce” – to me I think they are these are the numbers that play a big role with content gateways.

Related posts:

1. Ads in Your Face Like… BLAM!
2. What to Do with Content Bully’s Data
3. Forum Link Building tips (it’s not just your signature!)