About a year ago I heard about a social bookmark site called Diigo.  I saw it as another Delicious clone but figured I would look at it a bit deeper it just seemed to be more.  It was a good decision!

Since that time I have been using Diigo and their tool bar every day.   I use it to keep sites I want to find very easy to find and sort and search.  I use it to market my own sites and to put my sites into all the other top book mark sites including delicious.  I also use it to improve my daily productivity and the beauty is once set up it takes up no extra time to use it.  It becomes seamlessly integrated into your daily efforts.

I just did three training Videos on Diigo for our paying members, they are called,

• Social Bookmarking With The Diigo Tool Bar 
• Using Diigo To Mass Social Bookmark Web Sites
• Cool Marketing Productivity Features With Diigo

If you don't know about social book mark sites these videos will teach you what you need to know.  If you do know about them then these videos will take your efforts to a new level.  The social bookmark sites are going to become the Google, Yahoo and Ask.com's of tomorrow so now the time to get into them and build up your presence.

These videos add another 45 minutes of training to Marketing ICE, Mark Barrera just uploaded a few more as well.  We are continuing to grow and get better, remember we make videos based on your needs, if there is any subject you want to see let us know, just comment on the blog or in the members forum. 

 ~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: diigo, delicious, del.icou.us, social bookmarks, social bookmarking, social networking, social media, seo, sem, internet marketing

We have been getting some questions on how to get more traffic to your blog.

One of the biggest advantages I mention in my video, why blogs are sometimes better than web sites, is that blogs include rss feeds.  The purpose of an rss feed is to allow people to subscribe to your blog so that they can get automatically updated when you have something new to write about on your blog.

Another great element of rss feeds is that there are a lot of blog oriented web directories and search engines.  Some of them allow people to compile their own "news paper" that contains the latest articles from the blogs they like.  You can submit your rss feed to these directories because they want to compile as many blogs as they can to entice users to come back to their web site.

It's almost like the internet in the 90s when people like Yahoo allowed you to list your site for free instead of paying for it.  They wanted to build Yahoo into a super search engine so you could list your site for free, where now you have to pay $300 or more to get your site listed.

With blogs you can submit your blog or your blog's rss feeds to tons of free sites. So I just spent the last hour or so compiling a list of sites where you can submit your blog

 Submit rss feeds to these 74 blog directories and search engines.

If you have any new sites you want to add or if you have questions, please let me know!

 - Ben Fitts 

Hi Everyone,

I just had the chance to finish my series on how to outsource software using Rent A Coder.  The latest video is on how to finish your project at Rent A Coder,  pay your programmer, and rate them. 

I also uploaded a couple of new videos on Elance.  Elance is an alternative to Rent A Coder that supposedly has 2 or 3 times as many freelancers registered.  One of the interesting things about Elance is they also have categories for things like "writers", "project managers", and "part-time administrative assistants".

The Elance videos were on how to setup Elance for credit card billing, and how to list your project at Elance.

Please keep in mind that with these web sites you can not only outsource software but you can outsource web design, programming, and copywriting.  All important aspects of your internet marketing business. You may think it is expensive to pay someone else to work for you, but the prices are actually very affordable.  Check out these videos to get a feel for how easy it is to outsource software.

- Ben Fitts

I spent this weekend working on something we needed to have for our members of Marketing ICE.  Good sites have certain fundamentals done properly, the fundamentals are the core of your success or your failure.  There are many of these fundamentals that you need to be aware of.  Some are good copy, good lead capture, etc but one that gets over looked is the basics of on page Search Engine Optimization.

With changes over the past 2 years links have become all the rage.  Specifically one way links to your site and pages and they are with out a doubt the most important ranking factor in today's Search Marketing world.  

The problem is that has led to people just forgetting about good on page optmization techniques.  These are things like Key Word Densitites, Tags, Word Placement, Internal Link Structure and ton of other thigns.  The beauty is once you know what to do and how to do these techniques they add only a few minutes of time to the creation of each page and the long term benifits go on for years and years.

Take Title and Description tags as one example.  Even some professional marketers just don't bother to think about them any longer simply because they only have a moderate to weak effect on ranking.  However, THEY ARE DISPLAYED in the search engine results!  Think about this, you work hard, you get your term ranked say number 4 on Google and you are happy.

Do you realize that is only half the battle?  In many instances there are about 20 people on that page (paid and organic combined) and you are first competiting to get on the page then you have to get clicked.  Lets say you get ranked in the top five for a term with 50,000 searches.  If your listing gets clicked 5% of the time you get 2500 visitors that month.  If you get clicked on say 15% of the time you get 7500.  

You don't have to be a genius to understand one is a lot better then the other.  Well, it just so happens that the title and description tags are the most important factors (other then over all rank) that effect your click through precentage on a Search Engine listing.

So how can anyone ignore this?  Can you afford to just not worry about this?  How about the other key on page factors?  All of them together still have a massive over all effect on your rankings when used in combination.  You simply have to get the right and make them standard practice for every page you ever build.

I just did about 40 minutes of training on these factors for our paying members.  This is really one big lesson but I had to break it into three videos.  The videos are,

• Video One - Meta, Description and Title Tagging
• Video Two - Alt Image, Link Title and Heading Tags
• Video Three -  Internal Link Power, Key Word Density and Placement

Honestly these three videos alone are worth more then a full month membership to Marketing ICE by themselves.  If you learn these techniques and always apply them going forward over time they will pay dividends far beyound the small ammount of time it takes to insure they are being used properly. 

For our paying members you will want to watch these videos and start using these techniques right away.  For free members this is just one more reason to upgrade.  To upgrade to all access just Join Marketing ICE.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, on page, on site, search marketing, marketing ice, jack spirko

Please Note This Announcement Only Effects Customers Who Joined During our Beta Period.  Anyone who joined Marketing ICE ON or AFTER May 3rd, 2007 Does Not Need to worry about this announcement.

On May 3rd we officially came out of our beta period and while we are still improving Marketing ICE a great deal we are now full bore and taking in new customers left and right.  For those new customers we have be remarkably bug free despite the massive amount of custom Programming Ben Fitts has done in the past 60 days.  But Beta members are having some confusion due to the change.

Here is the deal we opened our Beta and offered monthly cost of 99 dollars a month with a deep discount on the first 60 days for monthly beta members.  Annual members paid 495 for a full year of access.  During the Beta we analyzed the cost to deliver services and determined we could at least in the beginning sell for a much lower rate.  This required a complete change of our process though.  Here is how each type of Beta member was effected.

1.  Free Members - Your membership was simply deleted.  You can now access the 12 free videos by opting in on the home page.  Using your old information won't work.  Free members now only get access to the 12 free videos.  The forum, the rest of the videos and all the other perks are for paying members only.  When you see our new pricing you will understand why.

2.  Monthly Paid Members - We wanted to thank you for your help so we rebated our monthly members 100% of their cost of membership.  That is right their full access during beta was totally free.  Unfortunately this required us to delete your membership information as well.  You now can choose to resign up with a new account at a much lower cost or just keep your refund.  Most of our monthly members have already chosen to sign back up.  But a few have been confused by the deletion of their old account.

3.  Annual Paid Members - We wanted to do something really really special for our annual members.  So here is what we did, we gave them lifetime access to the site with no more charges ever.  There were only a few that took us up on the annual membership and they made out pretty good on the deal.  Annual members were manualy converted so they do not need to resign up or anything at all like that, they can just continue to enjoy full access and will never get another bill.

Again any members that joined in the past week or so are not effected by any of this.

Let us know if there is any additional confusion,

~ Jack 

OK, Beta members I want to tell you that Beta is about to end.  Huge changes are comming and we are planning a live launch on Thursday with awesome new pricing I can't tell you about yet.  Paying Beta members are also about to get a huge surprise!  But I can't tell you about that either just that if you are a paying member you are going to be ecstatic about them!

What I can tell you is I am about to put several thousand people into the ICE System in the next two weeks (being conservative) and all of them will be taken to a sales page about the Marketing ICE System.

On that page I want testominals from our members, paid or free!

This will give you exposure to all our new visitors and members, remember we are talking thousands.  In your testominal you can add a link to any one of your websites you want.  Your testimonial should be positive in tone and tell others how valuable the training we offer is.  You should also send me a picture of you if you have one.  I may clean up and edit or shorten your testimonial if it is to long but I won't put any words in your mouth.  I will then put your link under your signature to any web site you want.

I know this is short notice but if you want a testimonial of yours on our sales pages get them to me ASAP.  Send me your testimonial, your picture (if you have one) and the site you want a link to right away and I will try to get you included on the sales page by Thursday night.  (email me at jack @ marketingice.com)

Again some huge changes are about to happen, lots of new videos, easier to navigate and find what you are looking for and one of the best affiliate programs ever created and special recorded coaching calls, just to name a few. Stay Tuned!

~ Jack Spirko