PalatnikFactor.com

If you havent heard about SERPH yet, it acts like a search engine for popular stories and things that are being searched for in the Social Media websites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, etc.

It just came out of BETA and I guess the results of how well it will do with the public are yet to be seen.

According to Alexa: Traffic Rank for serph.com:97,369

Personally, with the right marketing, SERPH can be a very useful and used engine for the public to go to one place for those who are Social Media fanatics and submit and read stories in each of the popular S.M. sites.

If i can predict this correctly, SERPH will be another engine for us SEMs to place sponsored ads and could be very promising delivering good traffic, which i hope it will do. Anyway, something to keep an eye out for.

Are you using any types of analytics to keep track of stats on your website? If you aren't, you're already moving in the wrong direction! Analytics is critical to successful online marketing campaigns, you NEED to know what's going on.

I've always praised Google Analytics since I started using it and it's been a great source for improving campaigns, conversions especially. At the retreat in San Francisco, I picked up CrazyEgg. This program is really amazing in terms of what you can gather from using it.

When I saw it, my initial thought was, "I already use Google Analytics, I'm good." WRONG! This is really different in terms of what you get from it. This program is basically getting known for its Heat Map detecting where your visitors are clicking. Personally, the overlay option of CrazyEgg has been my favorite feature.

If you are running sites with Adsense, this is a must! Believe me, you'll understand exactly where you should be placing ads, etc. The program is now free but you can upgrade to a paid account, I got mine upgraded (Thanks Neil!). BTW- this is owned by Neil Patel (Social Media Guru).

I guess it is inevitable that the internet will keep progressing in almost every industry, business, service, etc. If you really think about it, it’s amazing to see how far it’s come in politics.

Barak Obama has set up his own social network like a Myspace (Check It Out Here) to get closer to his supporters and answer questions members can post, etc. One year ago, this wouldn’t have been the case I believe with any candidate to invest in the 6 figures to make a website that can mock one of the most popular websites online.

Every candidate, whether you hear about it or not, are setting up websites (as they always have) but now are pushing it more than they have in past years and some plan to spend more money in this form of media than any other.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, than you haven’t heard about the big story in the news about the Pro Obama/Anti Hillary commercial which was put on youtube (made some serious headlines).

If you think these politicians don’t have internet marketing experts working on their campaigns, think again. Type in Barak Obama in Google, the first sponsored link to the right is the Hilary Clinton official website (Did Hillary login adwords and create her own campaign? I don’t think so). Now, type in Hillary Clinton in Google and you will also see on the right hand sponsored search the Barak Obama website.

It’s a close race and its only the beginning. The internet will dictate a big part of this election in terms of how the candidates will target their…well target.

Recently the 2007 Politics Online Conference took place which was ran by the George Washington University. The conference was to see how political campaigns can benefit from Google services such as adwords, analytics, YouTube and more to further improve their online marketing campaigns.

This is a cool little gadget I just picked up (fairly new) and find very useful as I’m sure most of you will as well. Attentionmeter.com gives you a quick snapshot comparing any domains you want (traffic) from Alexa, Compete, and Quancast.

I’ve always used compete and you’d be surprised how useful the information provided could be for your internet marketing efforts if you haven’t used these tools yet.

In my last blog post I wrote about the top 5 social bookmark sites where you should be marketing your articles/website. If you don’t find the time to be submitting to all the bookmarks and haven’t done your research as far as which is most popular, etc, these tools can help you.

Here is comparing the Social Bookmarks with Alexa (went to AttentionMeter.com, could just go to Alexa.com but couldnt get the snapshot from the main page)

If you do a lot of seasonality marketing, and havent used this tool yet, you're missing out on a big resource. Now you know!

If you’ve just started to get into the small world of what is now social media bookmarks, there are five websites which you should be submitting your articles, websites, etc to get traffic (strategizing for traffic is another story) and backlinks.

People Month Δ Year Δ
digg.com 12,156,271 35.4% 1607.6%
The reddit.com 433,070 56.0% 4748.0%
stumbleupon.com 390,523 12.6% 200.9%
netscape.com 5,832,349 -1.8% -42.8%
delicious.com 2,556 18.6% 1538.5%

It’s no mystery that submitting articles from your website will get you instant traffic from these websites. If you combine the traffic of all these sites together on a monthly basis (as of now), you’re looking at around 18,814,769 monthly visits.

Not only can you gain instant traffic but it’d be also wise to look at it from an SEO stand point. Many of the readers who are really involved in these sites checking for stories everyday own websites themselves and almost every website owner is always looking for content. If you’ve got a good story with good content, you will most likely be linked from another source who considered your story relevant to their website.

I was able to get 100 visits in one day to one of my websites from a website that linked to my story from Digg.

If you’re trying to optimize your website and haven’t tried this method yet, start submitting articles or writing content to strategize with the social media bookmark sites and within a few weeks you should see more backlinks to your website, if not days.

So, you really think I'm going to give away the secrets I picked up at the Elite Retreat earlier this week? I won’t do that, but I will share my experience with you.

First and foremost, I’d like to say what great people I had the pleasure of meeting, both the panelists and participants. From the first 5 minutes, the atmosphere was really comfortable and everyone was there for the same reason, optimizing our business and how we would take it to the next level.

I have to say, I was impressed with the participants' websites and projects they have going. There will be a couple of buy-outs I'll bet. It’s hard to summarize the event with so much information shared from the panelists. Even when I thought what I was about to hear wouldn’t really apply to my business, I was dead wrong. Every one who spoke gave me an idea that sparked something in my head to move forward with.

I came to the conclusion that the only problem I'll have to really battle now is TIME. So many opportunities, not enough time.

(King of Arbitrage/King of Ringtones)- Great presentation. One thing I really enjoyed about the retreat was that everything was really easy going. Shoe shared tips and the how-to’s on monetizing in certain engines.

(King of Arbitrage 2)- Kris has different strategies than Shoe when it comes to creating his campaigns etc, but putting both formulas together can make a million dollar campaign!

The optimization of social media is still a new market and Neil Patel had the insight. Again, not something I had in my plans to monetize or use to brand a business, but there are great opportunities in this market.

Lee Dodd, Darren Rowse, and Aaron Wall as well had great insight in their fields. I would recommend reading anything posted online by these guys and start following what they write. It really will help you in your business and goals you have set fourth.

You can check out some of the pictures from the retreat on Shoemoney’s site.