Welcome to The Truth About Internet Marketing - Internet Marketing Solution

This blog was the first blog that I ever setup and I can tell you that I was the biggest blogging dummy there is. If you are as ignorant as I was about blogging in the beginning you probably are as big of a blogging dummy as I was.

I was such a blogging dummy that I had no idea what a blog was or how powerful of a marketing tool a blog really is.

I’ve been in Internet marketing for a long time but I’ve always owned html websites. With what I know now about blog websites and the benefits that come with a blog I will never go back to an html website again.

Here’s what a blog is in case you are just as big of a blogging dummy as I was. The word blog is short for weblog, which is basically an online journal. At least that was the idea of a blog in the beginning and a lot of bloggers still use a blog for this purpose but blogs have morphed into much more than that over the years.

Over time, online businesses saw the potential of setting up a blog and monetizing it so that they could do business from the blog because of the built in tools that would help them drive potential customers to their website.

In case you are a real blogging dummy and have never come across a blog until now, wordpress is the best and most powerful blog software out there because of its flexability and because you have full control over what you want it to do and look like. Wordpress is a free standalone blogging software and was perfect for a blogging dummy like me because of its ease of use. You can find wordpress here.

If you own an online html website and are not doing well with it, it might be a good idea to move it over to a blog because it will be a lot easier to get traffic with a blog. I know that you are still a blogging dummy but the best way to learn how to use a blog is by actually using it. I know it was for me.

You can find more info on blogging here. First go and download wordpress because it will be a lot easier to learn it as you go. You won’t be a blogging dummy for long because it is pretty easy to learn. I was a blogging dummy and I can tell you that I now have it down cold.

Because of what happened to this blog overnight last night compels me to post this.

If you have a blog and don’t use any kind of spam filtering plug-in you are asking for trouble. I woke up this morning to 102 spams that were caught by spam karma.

The moron who attempted to spam this blog must have been using some sort of submission software because he or she attempted to post a comment to every, one, of the posts in every category on this blog.

If I didn’t have a spam filter in place I would have a serious mess to clean up after because some jerk thought that spamming a blog would be beneficial to his or her marketing approach.

The spammer has absolutely no clue on how to market because he or she didn’t even bother to try to spam a blog that is relevant to the product he or she is promoting. I don’t think that IM and Insurance quotes are real relevant.

Anyway, the point is, if you don’t yet have some kind of spam protection in place get it done right away. There’s no excuse not to. WordPress comes with Akismet so if you have a WordPress blog you don’t even have to find a plug-in for it. You only need to activate it.

Just because you haven’t had a problem with spam to this point doesn’t mean that you never will. At some point in time a spammer will find you. Make sure that you are protected when that happens.

I was asked this question not too long ago and I really couldn’t give much of an answer because I was very new to blogging. I remember when I installed wordpress on my server about a year ago and thinking what the heck, am I supposed to do with this thing. I had no idea what a blog was or what it was for. Needless to say I deleted wordpress and went back to my familiar html website where online life was easy to understand.

About 3 months ago I reinstalled wordpress back on my server and imported all of the information that I already had on my html based website into my new blog website. One thing that I had to my advantage that most people don’t have starting out was quite a bit of content. Most start with nothing and have to build their blogs from scratch. I only needed to pick up where I had left off. That’s a big advantage considering that a blog is a content based website.

A blog can be a very powerful marketing tool and there are quite a few things that happen with a blog that I would never have expected in the beginning. Here’s the biggest value that I found in having a blog and the advantage it provides

The biggest thing that I’ve noticed is that I’ve gotten quite a bit of traffic from the search engines for unintended keyword phrases. For example, I have been found on Google for the keyword ‘paidsurveyprogram’. That’s not a misspelling. That’s how the keyword was searched. The funny thing about it is that I have been found many times from different search engines for this exact keyword. The thing is that I have never written, nor do I promote anything about paid survey programs on this blog. I was found because one of my readers commented about a survey program that she had to pay for. That is the only reference to pay survey program on this blog. Google found me through that keyword because someone simply commented about it.

I wrote a nothing post about the fall of the gurus manual and it certainly wasn’t one of my better posts but I am found through all of the major, and smaller, search engines for the keyword phrase, ‘fall of the gurus’. I have gotten hundreds of clicks with that one keyword phrase which was not my intention when I wrote that post.

You may be thinking that those are not targeted clicks. I thought that myself, at first. I have changed my mind on that because while those keywords have nothing to do with the content on this blog it did drive a lot of people who do want to learn about marketing on the Internet. I know that because many of those clicks stayed here for long periods of time and many come back over and over again. While neither of those keywords is targeted, the results are the same as if they were. There have been many other instances as well. The two that I mention here are the most prominent.

Commenting on other blogs is not only a great way to get incoming links to your own blog, it’s also a great way to make some contacts with other like minded bloggers that in return can get your blog mentioned on their blog not to mention the traffic that it will drive to you as well.

I could go on about this forever but I think you get the idea. The bottom line is, the biggest value of a blog is that it is a mean, lean, content driven, traffic machine.

If you are using wordpress or are planning on installing wordpress sometime in the near future, here are some great plugins that you may not know about that will help make your wordpress blog more powerful and user friendly. I will give you a short overview of what each plugin does but I won’t give you any instructions on how to install or configure the plugins. You can download or view the documentation from each of the respective plugin websites.

User Sitemap Generator

The user sitemap generator plugin is a human viewable map of all the posts and pages that you have on your blog site. When the user clicks on the sitemap link on your blog, he or she will get a list of links of all of the posts and pages on your blog site. If you want to see what the installed sitemap looks like, you can click the sitemap link on the sidebar, under “Highlights”. This plugin is available here. user-sitemap generator:

Google Sitemap Generator

The google sitemap generator plugin is a map that allows the google spider to find all of the posts and pages when it crawls your blog. Simply put, it is a sitemap for the google robot. google sitemap generator:

Spam Karma2

Spam karma2 is a plugin that prevents users from spamming your blog through the comments system in wordpress. You really should install this plugin, otherwise you could end up with a blog full of adverts instead of content rich information. Without it, you could find yourself constantly deleting spam comments on your blog. comment spam filter:

New Visitor Invitation

The new visitor invitation plugin will display a message on your blog the first time a visitor comes to your blog inviting him or her to subscribe to your email alerts, or RSS feed. This message will be invisible to return visitors. This plugin is a great way to remind your first time visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed. new-visitor invitation:

FeedBurner Plugin

The feedburner plugin detects and sends all of your traffic information to feedburner and will detect all ways to access your feed so that you can track all of your subscribers. This is a plugin that you really should install. You can get more information about feedburner from the feedburner site. http://feedburner.com and you can get the plugin here.
feedburner (RSS tracking):

Mighty AdSense

Mighty AdSense is a plugin that will automatically insert your adsense ads in your posts and on your blog pages so that you don’t have to copy and paste your adsense code every time you post to your blog. The plugin will insert it for you. The nice thing about this plugin is that you have the option of displaying your adsense ads where you want them to show on your blog pages. This is a must plugin if you have adsense ads on your blog. You can get Mighty AdSense: here.

StatCounter for WordPress

StatCounter is a must have plugin. This plugin is installed to your wordpress blog and sends your stats to an outside source where all of the stats for your blog will be kept. You will need to register a free account with statcounter. You will have to read all of your stats from statcounter. Simply login, to your statcounter account to get your stats. This is an excellent tool that allows you to see where your visitors are coming from, how long they are staying, whether they are returning visitors or not, and way more statistical information than I can tell here in this post.
StatCounter for WordPress:

All of the above plugins are open source and are free of charge. These plugins will make it easier to manage your wordpress blog and will allow you to see first hand how your blog is performing.