Website Marketing | WritingShares.com

CNN Marketing News Video: Google’s Top US Searches Of 2012 (Whitney Houston, Hurricane Sandy, Election 2012, Hunger Games, And Jeremy Lin)

The following CNN marketing news video contains a list of the top US searches on Google in 2012. It is from the Starting Point TV show. Dr. Sanja Gupta is reporting from the studio. This clip was added to the CNN website on December 31, 2012.

Note: Although this list is comprised of US searches, it does include searches in other languages. In all, 1.2 trillion searches were included to compile this list.

Kevin Allocca is the trends manager at YouTube. He is interviewed on this video and gives the list of top Google searches.

1. Whitney Houston
2. Hurricane Sandy
3. Election 2012
4. Hunger Games
5. Jeremy Lin

Looking at overall trends, Kevin Allocca says that people, celebrities, sports, and athletes are big searches. As a marketer, I have to say this does not necessarily mean you are going to be successful at getting website or blog traffic for celebrity topics. I have found it very difficult to get a lot of traffic on celebrities and athletes. There is just too much competition. But if you can find unique angles, such as specific interviews that celebrities have given on various TV shows, then there is some money to be made there. But just generically writing articles on Miley Cyrus is usually not going to work.

The same goes for sports - especially scores and results and stuff like that. Way too much competition. But writing about schedules of sporting events as far in advance as possible can make some money.

There was some mention of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” video being the #1 viewed YouTube video of all time. It passed one billion views recently. But there was no list provided of the top videos, other than the generic mention of “Call Me Maybe” and the Kony 2012 video.

“Duplicate Post” Free WordPress Plugin Clones Your Posts To Save Time

As great as WordPress is at optimizing your Web pages for SEO purposes, it takes a lot of time entering the categories, tags, and titles. When you have similar content to write on the same general topic, the Duplicate Post free WordPress plugin clones the posts you make to save potentially hundreds of hours of typing and article setup time.

Example: I write a lot of American Idol articles that use the same exact categories and most of the same tags and a similar headline. Trust me. I just spent an entire season of Idol manually entering categories and tags for hundreds of articles. I made some good money writing those articles, but I would have done it so much faster if I had known about Duplicate Post. Yes, I am slow sometimes. For the life of me, I never thought to just enter “make duplicate posts in WordPress” in a search engine to find this plugin. Stupid me.

Who This Helps:

If you have a niche blog that uses most of the same categories and tags for your articles and blog posts, you should be using the Duplicate Post plugin. See my American Idol example above.

If you have specific links you want to use in articles and blog posts over and over again, you can make a draft and include the links in the draft. Duplicate Post will save all the links so you don’t have to manually enter the text or the hyperlink. This is a huge time saver, as the links creator in WordPress is not exactly efficient.

How To Use Duplicate Post:

Programmers sometimes overly complicate things. There are many ways to clone your WordPress posts with this plugin, but I am just going to give you the instructions for how I use it to keep it simple.

1. Make a draft template with all the relevant categories, tags, and a title if you are going to use the same title. If applicable, add text and hyperlinks to the body of the draft post.

Example: I am currently writing some articles on yearly TV ratings. In this case, the title of each article in your draft template could be the following:

2011 TV Ratings For xxxx For Total Viewers

You put that “xxxx” in the draft and just change it for each blog post after cloning the template.

2. Once you have saved the draft template, then click “All Posts” in the WordPress admin menu.

3. Find the draft template in your list of blog posts. It should be right there at the top.

4. Hover over it to get the menu below the title. You will see the word “Clone.” That word appears after you have installed and activated the “Duplicate Post” plugin.

5. Click on “Clone.” This is the easiest way to instantly clone and make duplicate posts with one click.

6. Just repeat that one-click process for as many articles as you want to make.

That’s really all there is to using Duplicate Post. You can check out the plugin’s home page on the WordPress website for other ways to clone. However, I found the instructions there confusing. That’s why I just wrote the 6-step process above to make it simple for you.

This plugin is going to save me countless hours of time every year.

Note that I have no association whatsoever with this plugin. But I have personally tested it, and it’s working fine on my WordPress Version 3.3.1. You can also check the link below. This is one of the very few WordPress plugins I have seen with 5 stars out of dozens of ratings and over 200,000 downloads.

Sources:

WordPress Duplicate Post Plugin Page

Are Free PLR Articles Even Worth It?

What Are PLR Articles?

Private-label rights (PLR) articles allow you to take an article already written by someone else and publish them as your own. The supposed value and benefit of this content is that you can get free traffic from the search engines. Some people sell PLR articles, and other marketers provide them for free. There are a myriad of problems with using either free or paid articles of this type. It’s not that they are not worth it at all for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes. But you need to be careful about how you use this website content to get traffic from the search engines.

PLR Problems and Disadvantages

The first problem with PLR articles that I have seen is that they are poorly written. You can find some PLR packages that have decent writing, but many of these packages are full of articles written by people whose first language isn’t even English. I would never buy this type of content unless I had a money-back guarantee. There is just no telling what you are going to get until you see it with your own eyes.

The second problem is that most of the PLR articles I have seen were clearly not written by SEO experts. They choose very broad keywords that have way too much competition in the search engines. Even if you were the only one to publish these articles, you would still often get little to no traffic. Even if you were start your own article directory or content site with 10s of thousands of PLR articles, you won’t get much traffic if the actual content is not optimized for SEO traffic.

The third problem is more subtle. Sure, you can get tens of thousands of free PLR articles, but they are not unique. Other marketers are publishing the same exact articles. Google could easily decide to downgrade your site for poor quality if it finds out you are posting free PLR content.

Note that many people providing PLR articles will just tell you to change the articles to make them more unique? Really? So how long do you think it is going to take to change 5,000 or 10,000 articles? You may as well do some good SEO keyword research and write your own articles. And changing a low-quality PLR content to make it more unique is NOT going to get your more traffic if an article’s keywords are not optimized for the search engines. It’s like putting lipstick on a pig.

If you want to use one of the packages floating around the Internet that offers free PLR, then I highly recommend you put them on a free blogging service like WordPress or Blogger (Blogspot). That way, you will not potentially harm the reputation of your other websites in the eyes of Google and other search engines.

How to Find Free PLR Articles

You can easily find this free content by going to Google and running a search for “free PLR articles.” In the end, I decided not to spend my time on PLR articles. They just aren’t very good for getting traffic from the search engines because the people writing them are fairly clueless about what it takes to use SEO for search-engine traffic. That makes most of this content near worthless.

How to Use The ListJoe Credit-Based Safelist to Get Free Website Traffic and Email Marketing Leads

ListJoe is an email marketing service. Although you can pay to send marketing emails to other ListJoe members, you can also just click on emails and earn credits to send emails. People in the industry typically call this a credit-based safelist, which is much better than a standard safelist because you have to earn credits to send emails instead of letting every lazy member send emails.

ListJoe can certainly get you free website traffic, but there is a right way and a wrong way to get website traffic with programs like ListJoe. Most members of these programs are Internet affiliate marketers who use their credits to send visitors to affiliate sites. This is not nearly as effective as building an email marketing leads list with your ad credits.

The reason for this is that you can send follow-up offers to your list after using ListJoe to generate email marketing leads. When you directly send members to a Web page with a sales letter, you have completely lost contact with that visitor. This is just not how successful marketers do business. You need to have constant contact or the ability to contact previous visitors for future campaigns, products, articles, etc.

To build a list with ListJoe, you need a lead capture page. You are welcome to copy and paste the one I use for WritingShares.com. Here is my lead capture page that I use with ListJoe. Notice that it is very simple. Don’t confuse ListJoe members or create some complicated sales letter just to get someone to subscribe. These people are very busy and would rather sign up to your list and check out your offers later when they have more time.

You could use either a free or paid autoresponder and email newsletter service to capture leads. The important thing is to get people on your list so you can remind them of your main offer and send related offers in the future.

Without going into long details, suffice it to say that virtually every successful business maintains a database of customers for future follow-up communications. This is what your email marketing list does for you. So whether you are a paid or free ListJoe member, you should be building a list if you want to create long-term customers.

SEO Recommended Titles for MBA Degree Programs

This SEO niche is all about detailing MBA degree programs and tips on how to get accepted into these business graduate schools.

If you claim this assignment, head over to Google and enter the school name plus “mba program.” You can then find the school’s home page.

Once on that page, you can find out things like the average GPA of the school, the GMAT averages, average years of work experience, and other things that factor into the application decision for each school. Your job is to outline these factors and give some tips on how to get accepted.

Make sure you include the complete official name of the school, contact information and a little bit about the history of the school as long as that can be found on the school’s website.

Here is a sample article that I wrote that is on Hubpages:

Tips for Getting into the Howard University MBA Degree Program

Absolutely do NOT try to just copy and paste that article and change words like the school name and GPA. You have to put every article at Writing Shares in your own words.

I have 100 titles here you can claim and will add more when these are completed. If you are the first to put the title in the comments section, then you have that article claimed. Make sure you complete it within 24 hours to get 5 lifetime profit shares.

You may only claim one article at a time. Once your article is accepted, you can then claim another if it has not already been reserved. We don’t have that many active writers yet, so this topic is yours for the taking if you are here now. If you can do one of these, then there’s no reason why you can’t do all of them. No special skills are required to write about these MBA degree programs.

American University MBA Program Admissions Tips (Do Not Claim; already completed)
Carnegie Mellon MBA Program Admissions Tips (Do Not Claim; already completed)
Clarion University of Pennsylvania MBA Program Admissions Tips (Do Not Claim; already completed)
Clarkson University MBA Program Admissions Tips (Do Not Claim; already completed)
University of Delaware MBA Program Admissions Tips (Do Not Claim; already completed)

Drexel University MBA Program Admissions Tips (Do Not Claim; already completed)
George Washington University MBA Program Admissions Tips (Do Not Claim; already completed)
Georgetown University MBA Program Admissions Tips (Do Not Claim; already completed)
Howard University MBA Program Admissions Tips (Do Not Claim; already completed)
Lehigh University MBA Program Admissions Tips (Do Not Claim; already completed)

University of Maryland MBA Program Admissions Tips (Do Not Claim; already completed)
Penn State University MBA Program Admissions Tips (Do Not Claim; already completed)
University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business MBA Program Admissions Tips (Do Not Claim; already completed)
University of Pittsburgh MBA Program Admissions Tips (do not claim; already completed)
Strayer University MBA Program Admissions Tips (do not claim; already completed)

Temple University MBA Program Admissions Tips (do not claim; already completed)
University of Virginia MBA Program Admissions Tips (do not claim; already reserved)
Virginia Commonwealth University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Virginia Tech MBA Program Admissions Tips
West Virginia University MBA Program Admissions Tips

William and Mary MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Akron MBA Program Admissions Tips
Anderson University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Ball State University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Bowling Green MBA Program Admissions Tips

Case Western Reserve MBA Program Admissions Tips
Central Missouri State MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Chicago MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Cincinnati MBA Program Admissions Tips
Cleveland State University MBA Program Admissions Tips

DePaul University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Drake University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Eastern Illinois University MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Illinois at Chicago MBA Program Admissions Tips
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign MBA Program Admissions Tips

Illinois Institute of Technology MBA Program Admissions Tips
Indiana State University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Indiana University MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Iowa MBA Program Admissions Tips
Iowa State University MBA Program Admissions Tips

John Carroll University MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Kansas MBA Program Admissions Tips
Kansas State University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Kent State MBA Program Admissions Tips

Miami University MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Michigan MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Michigan -Dearborn MBA Program Admissions Tips
Michigan State University MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Minnesota (Carlson) MBA Program Admissions Tips

University of Missouri - Columbia MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Northern Iowa MBA Program Admissions Tips
Northwestern University MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of North Dakota MBA Program Admissions Tips
Northwood University MBA Program Admissions Tips

Notre Dame MBA Program Admissions Tips
Ohio State MBA Program Admissions Tips
Ohio University MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Oklahoma MBA Program Admissions Tips
Oklahoma State MBA Program Admissions Tips

Pittsburgh State University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Purdue University MBA Program Admissions Tips
St. Louis University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Southeast Missouri State MBA Program Admissions Tips
Southwest Missouri State MBA Program Admissions Tips

Valparaiso University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Washington University in St. Louis MBA Program Admissions Tips

Webster University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Western Michigan University MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Wisconsin (Madison) MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Wisconsin - Whitewater MBA Program Admissions Tips
Wright State University MBA Program Admissions Tips

Babson College MBA Program Admissions Tips
Baruch College MBA Program Admissions Tips
Bentley College MBA Program Admissions Tips
Boston College MBA Program Admissions Tips
Boston University MBA Program Admissions Tips

Brandeis University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Bryant College MBA Program Admissions Tips
Canisius College MBA Program Admissions Tips
Clark University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Columbia University MBA Program Admissions Tips

University of Connecticut MBA Program Admissions Tips
Cornell University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Dartmouth MBA Program Admissions Tips
DeVry MBA Program Admissions Tips
Fairfield University MBA Program Admissions Tips

Fordham University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Harvard University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Horstra University MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Maine MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Massachusetts MBA Program Admissions Tips

MIT MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of New Hampshire MBA Program Admissions Tips
New York University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Northeastern University MBA Program Admissions Tips
Pace University MBA Program Admissions Tips

Quinnipiac College MBA Program Admissions Tips
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute MBA Program Admissions Tips
University of Rhode Island MBA Program Admissions Tips

Hulu Plus Affiliate Program Review (Thumbs Way Down)

Hulu is a website that lets you watch TV shows broadcast on U.S. television after the shows have been broadcast. Hulu Plus has some additional features, such as less advertising, for a fairly cheap monthly price.

I was already upset with Hulu before checking out their affiliate program. As a United States citizen living overseas, I found that Hulu blocks access to their videos. They always claim that a video is not available in my area. Supposedly, the wisdom of this is that some of the shows will still be broadcast overseas at a later time. All it does, though, is make me upset that I can’t access my favorite TV shows back home on the Internet even though people back home who usually don’t even need to watch online can access the videos any time they want.

First, as an affiliate program, this ridiculous policy limits potential sales. Someone like me is an extremely targeted potential buyer of Hulu Plus. But I can’t even purchase the service because it is not available in my country.

So I was already upset with Hulu for its exclusionary policies, but I wanted to check out the Hulu Plus affiliate program because it is pretty close in terms of interests with the people who visit this Writing Shares blog. Most of my articles are entertainment or news, and I think many of them might be interested in Hulu Plus for watching American Idol and other reality TV shows.

So after joining Commission Junction as a publisher (CJ is an affiliate network where you sign up and then apply to separate advertisers within CJ that will pay you a commission for referring customers), I applied to Hulu Plus.

Well, after seeing their arrogant and exclusionary policies already, I am hardly surprised that Hulu Plus rejected my application to become an affiliate. Is it because I have less than 100,000 visitors per month? Possibly. Leave it to Hulu to come up with some dumb reason to exclude small or home-based affiliates like they exclude U.S. citizens who just happen to be overseas.

As of yet, I haven’t seen anything good about Hulu other than the actual content. But anything having to do with business decisions or policies makes Hulu look like jerks.

Feel free to apply to the Hulu Plus affiliate program if you want. Don’t be surprised if you don’t get accepted, though. And you will likely get no response as to the reason for the rejection.

By the way, I am checking the Hulu Plus affiliate program’s profit potential now. According to Commission Junction’s numbers, they have a 3-month EPC of only $4.56. This is a horrible conversion rate and not even that profitable, anyway. Steer clear of Hulu Plus and its affiliate program. These arrogant media types definitely do not deserve your hard-earned website traffic, anyway.

Twitter Trends and Trending Topics For April 1, 2012

It’s April Fools today. No doubt, there will be loads of Twitter trending topics based on that. I am updating those plus other major trends from the Top 10 list. You can also check out previous trending topics by clicking on the tags at the bottom of this article.

Twitter Training Offer: Paid4Tweetn

In my experience, “Waffle House” trends on a regular basis. As a marketer, I’m not sure you could make money from this, but that thing constantly trends.

Affiliate Offer: Twitter Online System

“J. Cole” is trending a very long time today on Twitter.

Twitter Trends and Trending Topics for March 31, 2012

I am monitoring Twitter trends throughout the day today. The list below contains many of the trending topics in Twitter’s Top 10 list. I will also highlight the ones that stay a very long time or keep coming up on a frequent basis throughout the day.

The “Why Google Might Be Going” trend is about a nonsense article that says Google’s stock may go to $0. But it does show how complete nonsense can trend in the social networking world.

As one might expect, I have seen Easter trending in Twitter off and on for several days.

Rise & Grind

Affiliate Offer: Twitter Online System

Big Trends: The following three hashtagged keywords are trending for a very long time:

Twitter Training Offer: Paid4Tweetn

Good Morning Everybody

As a marketer, some of these trending topics are nearly worthless. Oh, it might get you a follower or two here or there, but Tweeting “Good Morning Everybody” is not going to do much else.

#ThingsIDoWhenIAmHomeAlone

Affiliate Offer: Twitter Online System

Twitter Training Offer: Paid4Tweetn

This concludes the Twitter trends for March 31, 2012. Check the tags below for trending topics on other days.

The Problem With Article Video Robot

Article Video Robot is a service that lets you turn articles into videos. You can then take these videos and post them on YouTube and other places. This will certainly get you some traffic to the videos that you post on other sites. The question is if it is profitable.

Well, let’s just first start with a logical inquiry. When you break down the price of Article Video Robot, it comes to right at $1 per video. From the beginning, this is already a potential problem. When you are dealing with articles (not sales letters, but information articles) and relying on search engine traffic, it is not that easy to guarantee $1 in profit per article. Have I made more than $1 per article across multiple niches? Yes, I have done that on Hubpages articles that I have posted there. I have also done it on Associated Content.

But the first problem with this is that I am talking about SEO articles that I have learned how to write over time. If you are not good at writing SEO articles (including keyword selection, word placement, and everything else), then you may have different results.

The second issue is that you use Article Video Robot to place videos on someone else’s site (such as Google’s YouTube). To maximize your profits from posting videos, you really need to get accepted as a partner with YouTube so you can run AdSense ads on your videos. Do you know anyone posting hundreds of articles turned to videos that YouTube wants as a partner? I have never seen anyone using Article Video Robot on a grand scale that has those partner AdSense ads in their videos. This means you may have serious difficulty monetizing the traffic that you do get to these videos. And even if you are a partner, how are you going to guarantee yourself more than $1 in profit per article? The answer is you can’t.

The next issue is that it is a well-known fact that people have cancelled their expensive accounts with Article Video Robot. If you read the site, they really make it seem like this is a foolproof method of getting lots of traffic and profit by turning articles into videos. Well, this technique is not going to make you money unless you do at least three things:

1. Select the right niches that are going to give you traffic from YouTube and other sites.
2. Get the traffic.
3. Find a way to make money from the traffic.

If you don’t do all 3, then you are going to lose some or all of your $1 cost per video for Article Video Robot.

The people making money from YouTube are the partners that have AdSense in their videos. Without that, good luck just placing links in your videos and getting people to your website. This is a very hard way to monetize your traffic, and then the visitors would have to click on ads or buy something if they do visit your site. Compare this to putting your own article on your own website. This is a one-click process. The visitors find you in a search engine and then can immediately click on your ads or other things that make you money. With videos from Article Video Robot, you have an additional step to get people to your website. After watching the video, they may or may not be interested in visiting your website.

If 1000 people visit a video and 10 click through, that’s only 10 visitors to your website. But if you put your own article on your own site, you only have to get 10 measly visitors from the search engines to equal what you are getting from YouTube. Anything above that is gravy.

Lastly, remember that all these videos are costing you money with Article Video Robot in addition to whatever you are paying for website hosting. You pay nothing extra to post articles directly on your website. I can see the value of using Article Video Robot, but not for the devastating price of $1 per video. You might as well gamble your money at those prices. At least you might get rich buying a $1 lottery ticket.