Highlights:

1. The event is completely free. .

No charge, really.

2. All you have to do is click here to register for Keep Them Coming! How to Increase Traffic to your Website.

(Both web traffic and SEO will be discussed.)

Update: Two prizes are being given to registered attendees.

One will be a free prize from me. The other is a surprise. One is a random registered attendee, the other is to the registered attendee with the best question.

3. Every person who registers, even if they can’t attend at the last minute, is getting a special freebie to help with their Web Traffic.

And no, it’s not 366 Traffic Methods.

4. Free tips on search engine optimization

Answering questions like “Why is SEO critical to increasing web traffic?”

5. Free tips on web traffic

Key information, such as: “Top 10 tips on how to increase web traffic”

6. You get to send me questions through the moderator.

I won’t be answering any questions about naked pictures, or accepting marriage proposals. Stay on Topic, People!

If you’re a Twitter Chat newbie, there are some tips on the post about the Women Grow Business Inbound Marketing Twitter Chat from April.

You don’t need  a free Twitter account to attend, but that sure makes it a lot more fun.

One more thing. I have a bet going with someone that I can get 100 people to register and attend.

So if you know people on Twitter or Facebook who you think would enjoy this free session or help save them money in their business, retweet this message or share it on Facebook. You can even email it your subscribers, or republish this whole post on your blog.

I’ll owe you one retweet or Facebook share that you cash in tomorrow morning, if

1. you’re one of the first 12 people, and
2. you respond to this message with your Twitter handle  so I can make arrangements with you.

Free Traffic Crash Course – Register Now! Details here.

Buit-in features for selected tabs:
* Close selected tabs
* Close not-selected tabs
* Reload selected tabs
* Duplicate selected tabs
* Move selected tabs to a new window
* Bookmark selected tabs
* Copy URIs/titles+URIs/HTML links for selected tabs to the clipboard
* Save (download) selected tabs to the local disk
* Print selected tabs

And there’s so much more!

Free Traffic Crash Course – Register Now! Details here.

After installation, “Compact Menu” icon is added to left side of Navigation toolbar.
If you want to customize it or, right-click on menubar and choose “Customize…”, drag “Menu” button, “Compact Menu” icon, “Bookmarks” button or icon to the position where you like on toolbar, then click Done.

To avoid any possible conflicts, please uninstall any other Compact Menu versions first.

Sweet as butter.

Free Traffic Crash Course – Register Now! Details here.

It’s a must have.

Free Traffic Crash Course – Register Now! Details here.

This one is being hosted by Smallvolution from Network Solutions, next Thursday on Twitter, from 1 pm to 2:30 pm Eastern/New York time.

I tell you.

If someone had told me I’d be working closely with the company I first registered my domains with, it would have been inconceivable.

Can you imagine starting a public access TV show then one day guest star on NBC? That’s what it feels like. And as always, I want to share my blessings.

Here’s what’s in it for you.

1. The event is completely free. .

No charge, really.

2. All you have to do is click here to register for Keep Them Coming! How to Increase Traffic to your Website.

(Both web traffic and SEO will be discussed.)

Update: Two prizes are being announced shortly. They’ll only be available to those who register for the event – so even if you’re not sure you can attend, REGISTER NOW.

3. Every person who registers, even if they can’t attend at the last minute, is getting a special freebie to help with their Web Traffic.

And no, it’s not 366 Traffic Methods.

4. Free tips on search engine optimization

Answering questions like “Why is SEO critical to increasing web traffic?”

5. Free tips on web traffic

Key information, such as: “Top 10 tips on how to increase web traffic”

6. You get to send me questions through the moderator.

I won’t be answering any questions about naked pictures, or accepting marriage proposals. Stay on Topic, People!

If you’ve never been to a Twitter Chat before, after you register, see our last post regarding the Women Grow Business Inbound Marketing Twitter Chat from April. You don’t need to have a free Twitter account to attend, but it helps if you want to be able to ask questions and join in the fun.

And stay tuned, I’ll be reminding you again soon, with more tips and pointers about Twitterchats.

Free Traffic Crash Course – Register Now! Details here.

It’s happened to you. You’ve been scrolling down your Twitter stream, your FriendFeed home page, your Google Reader subscriptions, your Inbox. And you’ve stopped short to click on something that caught your attention.

Maybe, like me, you’ve secretly dreamed of having someone stop scrolling to pay attention to your headline so you could get more clicks, sell more products, or just stroke your ego for most-visited post that day.

Eventually I learned from having that experience several hundred times – and saving things that jolted me out of my routine in a folder – that there are 5 things I can rely on to crack out a quick but click-worthy headline when pressed for time.

(There are other things I do, one involves software, another reading magazines, but we’re talking about doing this in a time crunch. One like, where you’ve pledged to blog daily for 100 days and start over each time you miss a day.)

And the main thing I’ve learned is that getting someone’s eye to stop is all about pattern interruption. So here are five pattern-interrupting ways that I use to write hot headlines on the fly – with examples of their risks and rewards.

1. Use a Well Known Line from Popular Culture (TV, Music, Web)

Risk: People may not get it, or they may stop reading when they realize your line has absolutely nothing to do with what you’re writing. I took that risk today.

Reward: If people DO read it, you’re connecting to something they’re familiar with, something they may have liked or loved to hate. You’re stating you have something in common, without stating it. Most people who get this headline have seen the 1989 Batman movie, with Michael Keaton.

My favorite part of that period was realizing how much I under-estimated Keaton’s ability to not jut play, but become Batman.

2. Use a Cliff…. Hanger

Risk: People won’t jump off cliffs to follow something they don’t care about. If you pick the wrong thing, the cliff hanger will backfire.

Reward: In what Mr. Joyner taught me is the Zeigarnik effect, people can’t seem to resist the urge to get the rest of incomplete information. This is why even bad soap operas are funny.

It’s why you watch a bad movie to the end.

And also why Hollywood sequels are so popular even though each subsequent movie is normally less satisfying than the original by a factor of ten.

3. Pick a Question Everyone Wants the Answer to

Risk: Answer the question incorrectly or with information people don’t want to hear and they may never trust your answers again.

Reward: Choose wisely, answer well, and it’s just-add-water popularity.

4. Choose the Unpopular Side of a Controversy

Risk: You’re making yourself either the straight-shooter or the bad guy. Much fewer people buy from the bad guy. They don’t trust him.

Reward: Even if you’re the bad guy, when people love to hate you, everyone is talking about you. If you subscribe to the idea that even bad publicity is good publicity, that could work for you.

Example: More people apparently listen to Howard Stern that hate him than love him. They want to know what to villify him for next. Right or wrong, it made him a legend.

5. Say Something That Doesn’t Make Sense When Out of Context

Risk: It can come across as a typing error or mistake that you were too dumb to catch. Hyperbole is your friend here, so that no one could imagine you didn’t do this on purpose.

Reward: It’s a sure pattern interruption whenever the mind has to pause to try and make sense of something. There’s a dash of Zeigarnik in here as well, as the brain will follow the trail to find out if it was right, or to make sense of it all.

As an added bonus, put your text in context and you’ve given your reader a memorable way to solve a problem, recall a solution, make a connection. And when they remember that, they’ll often remember you too.

The moral of this blog post?

In most places where someone is going to encounter a path into your site, it’s through the headline. Pattern interruption is a sure way to get them to continue down the path.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

No, homie, the problem is what you’re doing.

It would be the height of jerkiness for me to call you a whiner whose mama dresses you funny if I didn’t pose some solutions to the issue you’re facing.

(I’m still kind of a jerk for doing that. But I haven’t had my coffee yet. It gets better.)

So here are some of my thoughts. Not that I’m a doctor or anything like that. But my social media IS working. By that I mean it brings me traffic, publicity or other types of attention that I then turn into money.

The Top 5 Reasons You Think (Correctly or Not) That Your Social Media Efforts Aren’t Working.

1. You don’t understand what it’s supposed to do.

It doesn’t make your hair shinier.

It can’t buy you a new dog.

And it doesn’t make money jump up into your pocket.

Social media, to put it simplistically, makes information easier to move around, share and engage with. Yes, you can make money through your business efforts in social media. No, you can’t do it by applying old world marketing to the new media paradigm.

But you CAN connect the principles of marketing to the back end of social media.

You can have a blog that engages, and blog posts that aren’t sales pages. Then you can have a subscription box on every page, which leads to the first part of your sales funnel. And you can do it without pissing people off, too.

2. You aren’t measuring the right thing.

I have a friend who insists on doing things like putting a bit.ly link in his profile, putting obvious affiliate links on his profile and leaving signature links on his intrusive posts to other people’s walls in Facebook.

He looks like a fool.

I’ve told him as much.

But he insists that he’d rather get .01% of people he can track to click on his links now and buy today, than 30% of people he can’t track to do business with him in the next 90 days.

If that is your approach to social media, you are Insane.

As in, you need medication, not like an insult. Literally have someone examine your head.

It’s this approach that kills most social media efforts. Why not put some Google Analytics code (or some other way to track the origin of clicks) on your OWN site. No, it won’t track people who get an email or hear about your link because of a Facebook friend and save it to their bookmarks.

But it will get more people clicking. Folks like to know where a link is going to take them. And not everyone knows how to use tools that circumvent bit.ly and other URL shorteners.

3. You aren’t doing things that get people’s attention, and keeps it.

Bland content saved to delicious.com is still bland content. I know because I have written ten times the bland content as I have original, engaging pieces that people find useful.

You’ve got to find a different way to say it, or say something different that is closer to what your audience, your future customers, want to hear. Then you’ve got to do it in a way that makes them tell someone, and want to come back for more themselves.

If you can’t figure out how to do it, hire someone.

But try first. Honestly it’s not that hard.

4. You’ve got great content, but you’re not distributing it.

Great content that’s sitting on your site without being noticed is just as useless as bland content. Are you syndicating it via RSS? Are you emailing your subscribers when you have a worthwhile post? Have you turned the popular posts into podcasts?

Get your content out where it can be followed back to your site.

5. You’ve got great content, you’re distributing it, but your audience isn’t engaged enough to care.

Okay, you’re awesome. I know it. But you only tell me once a month. And when you tell me and then I comment back how super you are, you ignore me. So then I figure, why retweet it? So and so is a super-douche who doesn’t care anyway, why should I?

That’s not to say that you have to spend your life answering every single piece of communication in real time. We’re not all the Old Spice Guy.

But you can do your best to get in contact with your former, present and future customers, on multiple channels, in a way they’ll appreciate. You can update on a regular basis. You can say thank you for the retweets you get. You can find content at their sites to retweet too, or comment on.

My overall theory is this.

If I give you a toolbox, and there’s a hammer in it, if you use that tool to do anything but bang a nail into place, its effectiveness is going to go way down.

But you’d be crazy to say the hammer isn’t working if you’re using it to put on eyeliner. And if I’m going to call myself your friend – nay, a decent human being – I have to strongly advise you to stop doing that, any way I can.

One of the absolute best ways to market your website and increase your search engine rankings is through guest blogging. Every time you get a guest post published you are getting high quality backlinks to help push your site up the search engines as well as targeted traffic directly from the post itself. In addition to that, you are doing a form of networking with other bloggers in your niche which helps tremendously in building a name for yourself and getting your foot in the door for future partnerships.

There are many internet marketers who have built incredibly successful sites with high rankings, lots of traffic, thousands of subscribers, and great monthly earnings almost exclusively from guest blogging. It really can be that powerful if done correctly.

How do you do it? Simple…

You just seek out blogs in the same niche as yours (and similar niches) and check to see if they accept guest posts. Often times it will be obvious if they do because they will have a very visible link to a page explaining their guest blogging rules and how to send the posts. Other times it won’t be so obvious so you might have to dig around to see if they accept guest posts or contact the owner to ask if they will. Make your message very personal to show you are sincere and actually checked out their blog before contacting them. If it’s a spammy message or obvious that you sent it in bulk, you will certainly get rejected.

A large percentage of bloggers will accept guest posts if you contact them about it, even if they hadn’t thought of it before or don’t make it obvious that they do. They are getting free original content without doing any work or spending any money for it, so it benefits them to accept. But many won’t for whatever reason so you should expect some rejection. If they don’t then just thank them for their time and move on.

When you do find blogs to write for then be sure to write very high quality posts that the owners are likely to publish and their visitors want to read. Become very familiar with each individual blog. Look at what type of content they have on it and their style of writing, so you are sure to write something that fits well with their blog. Match the quality of their content or even go above it to ensure you are up to their standards and set yourself apart from other bloggers who are also sending them posts.

Don’t forget to proofread your post several times and put it through a spelling/grammar checker before sending it. The last thing anyone wants on their blog is a post full of mistakes so that is a sure way to get your posts rejected.

Another very important thing to remember is to only send them 100% original content written by you and not published anywhere else. This is vital to being successful with guest blogging! Nobody wants content sent to them that is copied or posted elsewhere. I can almost guarantee you they will check so don’t try to slip anything by them either.

Guest blogging is great way to market your website and it benefits both parties. The blog owner gets excellent content for free and you get more exposure for your site. I highly recommend you use it as a part of your internet marketing strategy.

This is what we’ve discovered so far. No offense to Local Business Money Machine, which has been a complete blessing this past year and really helped us get off the ground and headed in the right direction, but this is a MUCH better program. Of course, it’s about three times as expensive, so that’s something you’ll need to take into consideration. But, especially if you’re a “newbie”, this program breaks everything down into very manageable chunks. And the videos are incredibly professional (what else would you expect from the guys at Traffic Geyser) and even entertaining.

In fact, this program is broken down so well, that I am going to try my hand at some of the technical parts of it. I’m going to create a landing page myself and see whether someone who’s technically capable but completely unpracticed can do this. I won’t get it done in time to tell you the results before the program closes, but the fact that I’m willing to even TRY is a testimony to this program. Keep in mind that when I graduated from high school, I asked that my parents give me a typewriter instead of a computer, and I usually tell people that “I eat breakfast and talk to people, and George does all the work.” Perhaps I’ll no longer be able to say that

What else have we discovered? We would have paid as much for the level of Traffic Geyser membership included as we paid for the entire Main Street Marketing program. So, even if you’re thinking about trying out Traffic Geyser, go this route instead. You’ll get not only the great video marketing training that Traffic Geyser includes but marketing materials for your new business; over 40 hours of video training by everyone from Mainstreet Marketing success stories (they really do tell you EXACTLY what they did to be successful, even role playing some of the client approach strategies they use) to Bill Glazer; planners; free report templates; fill in the blanks autoresponders… I really could go on and on.

Is this program for everyone? I would still say “no”. There are plenty of people who won’t implement the steps and won’t follow the program. If this is you (you know who you are), don’t buy this program. If you don’t like interacting with people, and you’re not willing to take on a partner who can handle the client interactions, this probably isn’t the program for you. I think, however, that it is appropriate for people with varying skill levels when it comes to internet marketing. You do need some degree of comfort with technology, in general. But if you’ve ever blogged at all or are comfortable with Facebook, then you should do fine.

Like Local Business Money machine, you’ll need some time to set aside for this. The Traffic Geyser trainings are pretty quick and easy. There are eight lessons in the Express Lane training. The longest lesson I’ve seen so far is about 15 minutes. Then there are assignments that go along with those, which I think will take a minimum of 30 minutes to a couple of hours. So, you’ll need around 15-20 hours, probably to get through those trainings. And then, of course, you’ll need to go through the Main Street Marketing steps. Plus, making the pages and acquiring your clients. In other words, don’t think you’re going to buy this and five minutes later start depositing checks in your bank account. But, really, if any of you HAVE discovered a system that works that way, you should contact George about writing for this blog because clearly you’ve found a way to make money grown on trees and a quick way to harvest it.

I do think that you should be able to get through enough training and start implementing the program and figure out whether it works within your 30 day trial. That is, of course, if you don’t wait until day 25 to get started. And that’s my recommendation to you. If you’re interested, buy the program. Work the program for the next 30 days (no excuses— just get busy). If you realize it’s not for you, there’s no way you’re going to do it, you haven’t even opened the files— for crying out loud, return the program! It’s risk free if you’ll just take that step if you aren’t using it.

So, in summary, are we abandoning Local Business Money Machine and switching to Main Street Marketing? No. We’ll do a hybrid of the two for our business model because we’re already making money with Local Business Money Machine. There is a lot of overlap in these two programs, as they both target Local Search marketing opportunities. However, there are some areas that are mentioned in less detail in Local Business Money Machine that we haven’t really pursued as much as we could have (including doing more direct marketing and, of course, video marketing). These are the areas where we’ll be using Main Street Marketing Machines. Do I think you can use Main Street Marketing Machines without Local Business Money Machine? Absolutely!! It’s a completely different model and will stand on it’s own with no problem.

So, take some time to think about it. Write down the pros and cons, where you want to be a year from now and whether your current path is going to get you there. Then, if you think this is a good match for you, buy it! I think you’ll be glad you did.

P.S. Oh, and if you have any questions about the program that you’d like answered before tomorrow, let us know. We’ll be checking comments for the next couple of days pretty regularly so that we can answer anything that will help you make a decision.

PPS. To get our Main Street Marketing Machines Bonus, please remember to use our affiliate link by clicking here. Then send an email to info @ mantywebdesigns .com with a copy of your receipt. Once we have verified that you purchased through our link we will contact you to set up a one hour phone consultation with us to answer any of your questions after you have used the program for at least 30 days. Also, we will follow that call up with an email to check on your progress.

Please, let us know if you have any questions about our Main Street Marketing Machines review.

As most of you know, about a year ago my wife, Jill, and I invested in the Local Business Money Machine program. Since then, we’ve built a successful business utilizing that system. We’ve posted about the system before, and we still think it’s a good one, but one of the weaknesses we’ve pointed out is that we think it’s not an ideal match for absolute beginners.

Now there’s a new system that looks similar to the Local Business Money Machine with some noticeable differences that will make this program so much easier for those who are true beginners. Check out the first videos by clicking here:

http://www.mainstreetmarketingmachines.com/cmd.php?af=32477

Many of the materials are ones that we would utilize and that we may have to create ourselves eventually, so we think that any cost up to $5000 will pay for itself. While we’re not 100% sure yet whether we will be signing up (we are at about 99%), we are absolutely sure that anyone who is interested in starting a business helping market local businesses should consider this program. And if you’re already running this type of business, you should check out the materials in the program to see if this would complement your current business plans. You’ve got nothing to lose by checking out the following free video, so head over there right now.

http://www.mainstreetmarketingmachines.com/cmd.php?af=32477

If we do sign up tomorrow, as I’m currently planning to do, I’ll take a quick look at what’s included and give you a thumbs up/thumbs down report, hopefully before the program closes.

MY BONUS:

If you sign up using my affiliate link above then send me an email of your receipt and once I have verified that you purchased through my link I will contact you to set up a one hour phone consultation with Jill and/or I to answer any of your questions after you have used the program for at least 30 days. Also, I will follow that call up with an email to check on your progress.

Note: Some of the links above are affiliate links and I will make money if you buy from them.

UPDATE:

I just bought the Main Street Marketing Machines program. It should take me about week to test it out. If it looks like the doors are closing sooner then I will try to get a post out about what I think so far and will leave occasional comments on this post about it.

PS. Be sure to use my affiliate link for my Main Street Marketing Bonus.