Video - Seth Godin Speaks at Google

Seth Godin has written some great books on marketing, such as “All Marketers Are Liars” here we feature a great 50 minute video of him speaking at Google.

YolkSmoke’s Top 10 Ways to Get 100,000 Unique Visitors

At the moment, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and this is a photo of the Bay Bridge traffic heading from San Francisco into Oakland. You don’t want to take this bastard during rush hour! However, for your online business traffic is vital! In fact, you basically want to build a virtual bridge like this, or many virtual bridges like this, to your web site. To build this bridge you’ve GOT TO exploit every form of shameless promotion out there. So, here’s YolkSmoke’s Top 10 Ways to Get 100,000 Unique Visitors!

10. Radio Stations - Call up your local radio station and give them a newsworthy story to talk about, in exchange for a plug to your site! In line with this, there are a number of traditional means to promote your site, including tv, print advertising, give aways, contests, charity events, telemarketing (uggh), telethons! Ok, you get the point…

9. Schwag! - Oh, come on… the world could always use a little more schwag! If you’ve got some marketing dollars, print your logo on a friggin’ YO-YO and give it away to people. Find the latest , greatest lazer pointer gimmick that everyone will want to talk about, show their friends, and fuck around with for a while. The key is for it to be a great conversation piece! Humorous t-shirts are excellent, as they can be re-used.. and people become your walking advertisements… BRILLIANT!

8. Social Bookmarking - If you don’t know about this, find the links under YolkSmoke Tools and visit the sites themselves.

7. Myspace Posts - MySpace has roughly 50,000,000 users… that’s powerful. Many people create fake profiles of hot girls, sign up for Whore Trains to gain thousands of friends, and then they send out bulletins to their network of friends, which can include HTML links to affiliate sites, etc… I noticed today on Sitepoint someone selling technology which will allow you to post in millions of forums threads on MySpace, which could be insanely powerful as well.

6. Link Exchanges - Link exchanging can be important to building search engine rank of a new site. This process involves asking higher ranking sites to link to your site, in exchange for a link to theirs. It can be a cumbersome task to personally email them and try to talk them into it, when there is little gain for them, but it is a common practice. There are a number of link exchange programs listed in the YolkSmoke Tools section.

5. Forum Posts - Use BoardTracker to find a forum for your keywords, sign up, edit your signature to include a link or small banner to your site, and begin posting intellgently on the forums!

4. Press Release - A very powerful way to gain traffic and search engine rank is to run a press release for your keywords. PRWeb seems to be the service of choice to distribute your PR to the wire. Someone on Young Entrepreneur’s Forum had this to say about PRWeb, “I have written a few press releases and submitted them to PR Web for distribution and have had excellent results, www.prweb.com. All of those press releases made it to the first page on Google for my keywords. This is a great way to establish an online presence, get good se ranking and possible targeted traffic as well.”  PRLeap.com is also a good source.
3. Articles / Free eBook - Writing articles, commonly lists such as this, or even an ebook can be a viral way to gain traffic as the article/ebook can circulate the internet on it’s own as people share the content… assuming it is good! Be sure to pepper links back to your site!

2. Hoax Marketing - The idea here is to create a phenomenon that takes on a life of it’s own, gets people talking, and becomes a meme… a virus that works in your benefit to spread the word of your identity, your site, your product, etc… There are so many ways to execute this concept, and you can read a bit more about it here.

1. Link Baiting - There is a new art form and it is called Link Baiting. It basically comes down to creating a neat little web tool, such as ShoeMoney’s little tools. The idea is to get a ton of links as people start to blog about your free tool getting you a ton of backlinks, which builds rank, and helps your results in the search engines. One of the better linkbait campaigns is the “How Much Is Your Blog Worth?” tool. See, the dude just got another link from me about it! He probably paid a programmer $100 to code it.

SO… there you have it. Promotion is the most neglected, yet most critical aspect of running a successful online business… so print this out or bookmark it, and do it!

GeeSee has buzz…

…too many Web 2.0 companies to keep track of, but GeeSee is one that interests me, as I’m quite sick of forums, and have been waiting for someone to develop a chat app that works right. In fact, it astonishes me that a widely adopted chat application does not exist. While it wasn’t the end all, Yahoo Chat worked well until it got killed by spammers a few years ago.http://blog.geesee.com/

In-text advertising?

This idea isn’t exactly brand spankin’ new, but until today, I wasn’t aware of what companies were responsible for this service… now I know. Vibrant Media is one, and Kontera is another.