• 15 Solid Tips for Networking at Conferences
• The Internet Marketing Mindmap
• The Best Free Internet Marketing Ebooks
• How to Make More Money with Adsense
• How People Steal Your Hidden Files

I’ll be keeping this blog for random, personal posts so if that interests you at all, cool. If you’re more into the internet marketing stuff I sometimes write about, then be sure to head over to Genuine Internet Marketing.

The beauty of this is that still cameras can often capture images with a unique look that can’t always be captured on video. Then when you add motion elements to the photo through either photo manipulation or by stitching multiple frames together, you end up with a photo that is being brought to life in a simple, yet attention-grabbing way.

Some of the best cinemagraphs that I have seen have been created by photographers Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg. Check out their cinemagraphs below!

“Meet me at the bar” by Kevin Burg

“Fillerup Please” by Kevin Burg

“Louboutin Samira Strass” by Jamie Beck

“Prabal’s Beauty” by Jamie Beck

“A charmed life… locked in love with Tiffany’s” by Jamie Beck

“Busy day in Manhattan… but there’s always time for the paper” by Jamie Beck

“Evening is coming in Savannah” by Jamie Beck

“Happy St. Paddy’s Day!” by Jamie Beck

The blogs for the above two cinemagraph photographers can be found at:
Jamie Beck
Kevin Burg

If you have seen other amazing images brought to life with cinemagraphs then be sure to share the link in the comments sections below!

Say what? Whether the friends are there or not?

Correct…let’s say someone checks into a place on facebook and then tags you as being with them (whether you are or aren’t…doesn’t matter…facebook doesn’t care). Not only will it show on their wall that you are with them at that place, but it will also show on your wall that you are with them…at the place they checked into. It won’t even ask you to verify that you are with them! It just happens…and this feature is enabled by default once you “activate” places feature in facebook. Creepy huh?

Right about know you’re probably thinking of the funny places you could check your friends into……..and now you’re saying, “whoa…what if a friend checks me into some place I don’t want”. Yeah, you’re now wanting to quickly turn that feature off and stop friends from checking you into places on facebook!

So here’s how to disable friends from tagging you in places on facebook in 3 easy steps.

Step 1:
To disallow people from checking you into facebook places, the very first thing you need to do is go to your “Account” dropdown at the top-right of the screen when you’re in facebook and select “Privacy Settings”.

Step 2:
Next, make sure that “Custom” is selected in the left navigation as shown below and then click “Customize settings”.

Step 3:
Finally, scroll down to the “Things others share” section as shown below and disable the option for “Friends can check me in to Places”. That’s all there is to it! Now your friends will not be able to tag you as being anywhere with them and check you into places on facebook.

Over the years I’ve come across way too many people running way too many blogs/websites that promote way too much recycled junk that can send one through information overload and “paralysis by analysis”. I spent a lot of time “learning” and “studying” before actually doing something and taking action. Too many internet marketers want your “action” to be purchasing their up-sell, down-sell product or whatever the hot affiliate product of the week may be. It’s a vicious cycle that can easily suck you in and keep you from doing anything productive. Fortunately, there is someone has has stayed consistent and provided solid advice dating back to around 2004 that I’ve followed and has shaped a lot of what I do in internet marketing. That man is Darren Rowse.

Darren Rowse is the founder of problogger.net and also runs successful blogs including Digital Photography School and TwiTip – Twitter Tips. He uses the problogger.net site to share numerous blogging and internet marketing strategies to help websites of all sizes become successful. I’ve personally applied numerous tips of his on my sites that I can honestly say have increased traffic/conversions/income/etc over the years. I can 100% recommend Darren and his website/products to anyone that runs a website/blog of any size. This is why I’m excited about his latest product!

Darren ran a series of blog posts over the course of a month titled “31 Days to Build a Better Blog”, which was a huge success. Each post featured a single task to perform on your website each day along with why that task should be performed and how it can impact your websites. It was a very action-oriented series of posts that contained a ton of useful tips. Well, now Darren has packed all of those popular posts into a downloadable ebook available to purchase.

There are plenty of internet marketing books, dvds, ebooks, etc available on the market…some going for thousands of dollars, so the cost of 31 solid, action-oriented tasks that will boost your website could easily be high. You’ll be surprised…it’s less than a dollar per task!

$19.95

That’s it…just $19.95…that’s about $1.55 per task. You could easily make that many times over with this series of tasks. I know I did.

People ask me all the time:

• “How do you make money online”
• “Can you give me some tips on running a website?”
• “How can I bring more traffic to my website?”
• “How can I get more people to buy my products?”
• “How can I make more money with my website?”

…the list goes on and on.

I love helping people make their websites successful, but I can now easily recommend this ebook to those that really want to knuckle down and take action in making their blog/website the best that it can be.

If you want a better blog…if you want a better website…this is the ebook to get.

Click here to get more details and start building a better blog

*note*: If you purchase the ebook through the link above, I do receive a commission from the sale. If you would rather me not receive anything you can make your purchase directly at http://www.problogger.net/31dbbb-workbook/.

I was going to do a screencast of this, but wasn’t sure what data would violate any Google terms of service agreements. So, as much as I love all ya’ll I’m taking the safe route and will just list the steps necessary.

First off, you need to have a Google Analytics account and the analytics tracking installed throughout your website. If you don’t have Google Analytics, just click the link above to go sign up. The next step (if you don’t already have this) is the most important step: you have to link your adsense and analytics accounts together. If you don’t have them linked, you can go to Google’s Adsense Blog and click the link that says “interest form” at the top of the article on the page. Fill out that form and you should get linked up fairly quickly. Once you have adsense, analytics, and they are linked together you will need to wait at least 24 hours for Google to start providing some decent data. Once you have some data to look at you’re good to go!

So here’s where it all happens…here is exactly how to dramatically increase your adsense revenue.

The Research

1. Login to Google Analytics, choose your website profile, and then click on Content on the left side of the page and then Adsense and finally Top Adsense Content. Here is where the magic happens.
2. At the bottom of that table, choose to show 25 or 50 rows so that you get a good sample of pages
3. Next, sort the rows by eCPM (estimated cost per thousand impressions). This shows you the pages that earn you the most money…in order. That rocks! While this is awesome, don’t stop here! You’ll miss a very important step!
4. Now…take a look at the next column over…CTR (click through rate), which is the percentage of clicks those ads get. You need to find the pages with high CTRs…as well as a decent number of page impressions. The page impressions are important as higher page impressions mean more accurate data for the eCPM and CTRs.
5. Jot down your #1 page….the one with a high eCPM, high CTR, and decent amount of impressions. This is your money-maker and the golden egg of your research. Well done! Now the fun stuff…

You can grab a couple of the next highest pages with high eCPM, high CTR, and high impressions, but picking just one page will yield great results…and choosing just one will help you get something implemented right away and see how it works.

The Implementation
Ok, so you have your bread-winning URL…the MacDaddy of all the pages on your site. What do you do with it? This is where it gets crazy cool, so buckle up.

Think of your website as a funnel. All of your pages are the top of the funnel. What you want to do is take everyone that lands on your pages and funnel them into your “Big Kahuna Page”. To illustrate it, I put together this incredibly detailed and fancy graphic.

Ok, so now you see what I mean by “funnel”. The graphic may not be fancy and detailed, but you get the point. Simply put, no matter how a user gets to your site you want them to end up on your money page. Here are some tips to make that happen.

1. Sitewide links – This is an obvious and easy action to take, which is where you can immediately increase your adsense revenue. To make it even stronger, think of it as more than a standard “link” on all of your pages. Consider featuring it as a cool graphic or an obvious “button” that entices the user to click. Also, if it is a sitewide link then it has the added benefit of looking more important to search engines, which can help your money page rank higher…double sweet!
2. Share the URL in your social networks (you are social…right?) or on any other website/forum/ect where people visit. Don’t spam it, though…unless you want to kiss your money page goodbye.
3. Consider guest posting on another blog/website and pointing a link back to your money page
4. Do some keyword research to see if you can rank your page higher in search engines. Is the page about a certain topic that is highly searched? Is there much competition? I’ll get into keyword research methods in another post, but I use a combination of Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool and Nichebot. That should lead you down the rabbit hole.

There are many ways to get visitors to your money page, but those few should help increase adsense revenue dramatically.

So there you have it. Basically, find your high eCPM/CTR page(s) and funnel your traffic to those pages. It really is that simple. That’s my google adsense secret. If you have other methods to increase visits to a single page or have anything you’d like to add to this, please share it in the comments below.

]]> http://www.shaneeubanks.com/internet-marketing/how-to-increase-your-adsense-revenue/feed/ 2 http://www.shaneeubanks.com/internet-marketing/the-internet-marketing-mindmap/ http://www.shaneeubanks.com/internet-marketing/the-internet-marketing-mindmap/#comments Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:01:04 +0000 shane http://www.shaneeubanks.com/?p=71 When most people are asked “What do you do?” they often respond with a job title or a simple description of their line of work. As an internet marketer, my response is more of a chuckle followed by a deep breath…after all, my official title at work is Manager of Marketing Technology. Whether that sounds impressive or insanely boring to you I’m sure you’re wondering what in the world it means. Well, I’ve put together what I call the internet marketing mindmap to provide an overview of what an internet marketer does.

The internet marketing mindmap has a foundation of “increase website traffic”. While many would say that “making money” is the primary goal, it’s actually the traffic that leads to success. Also, “making money” may not always be the ultimate goal. It could be to win a contest or election, increase awareness to a cause, build a community of like-minded people, etc. Whatever the “goal” is, there is always the foundational requirement to increase website traffic. So, with that said, let me break down what you’re about to see.

First, there is a foundation of “Increase Website Traffic”. Under that are three keystone methods for doing that:

• Search engine optimization
• Direct traffic
• Referral traffic

That is the simplest breakdown of internet marketing and what I do to increase traffic to a website. From there, I created the mindmap below to expand on the various methods I use to do each of the three steps above. I’ve tried to keep the map as general as possible so that it can be utilized with any website marketing strategy. Feel free to print out the map and use it for your own sites. Hopefully this provides a sense of method to the madness and can help your projects or even help you communicate to others exactly what you do for a living.

Right-click and choose “Save Link As” on the image below to save it, print it, post it, etc. You can also click it to preview.



As a side-note, I used ConceptDraw’s MINDMAP software for the Mac to create this.

If you have methods that you’d like to add, please share them in the comments section below!

]]> http://www.shaneeubanks.com/internet-marketing/the-internet-marketing-mindmap/feed/ 5 http://www.shaneeubanks.com/internet-marketing/how-to-find-ceos-on-twitter/ http://www.shaneeubanks.com/internet-marketing/how-to-find-ceos-on-twitter/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:49:22 +0000 shane http://www.shaneeubanks.com/?p=67 Here’s an extremely simple way of finding profiles of CEOs on Twitter. All this does is search the twitter.com website for the exact phrase “bio ceo”. So if on the user’s profile they have CEO listed beside their Bio it wil show in the Google results. I know it’s not perfect, but this is an easy way to find and follow numerous CEOs.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:twitter.com+%22bio+ceo%22

If you want to find Bios of CEOs on twitter as well as Presidents of companies, use this search query:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22bio+ceo%22+OR+%22bio+president%22+site:twitter.com

]]> http://www.shaneeubanks.com/internet-marketing/how-to-find-ceos-on-twitter/feed/ 2 http://www.shaneeubanks.com/internet-marketing/must-read-internet-marketing-ebooks/ http://www.shaneeubanks.com/internet-marketing/must-read-internet-marketing-ebooks/#comments Tue, 26 Aug 2008 02:38:16 +0000 shane http://www.shaneeubanks.com/?p=36 I’ve come across quite a few internet marketing ebooks over the years and thought I’d share some that I have gathered nuggets of info from along the way. All of these are free, but some require you to submit an email address before being able to download them…not a huge price to pay for what you get in return. Some of these are great to print out and take on a flight, outside on the porch, or even the bathroom (don’t act like you don’t take “reading material” to the bathroom). There are great pieces of info in all of these ebooks and I can fully suggest each of them.

Here they are in no particular order:

• Authority Black Book by Jack Humphrey (email submission required)
• Bend the Web by Jack Humphrey (email submission required)
• Link Building Secrets
• Blog Profits Blueprint by Yaro Starak (email submission required)
• Any of Michael Campbell’s free ebooks at Internet Marketing Secrets
• Wordtracker’s Keyword Research Guide
• Internet Business Manifesto by Rich Schefren (email submission required)
• The Attention Age Doctrine Part 2 by Rich Schefren (email submission required)
• Zero Dollars a Little Talent and Thirty Days by Jennifer Laycock

If you have found other free internet marketing ebooks that have helped you, please share it in the comments section below!

This post was inspired by the Group Writing Project over at PloBlogger…a website I highly recommend for anyone interested in internet marketing.

]]> http://www.shaneeubanks.com/internet-marketing/must-read-internet-marketing-ebooks/feed/ 6 http://www.shaneeubanks.com/internet-marketing/the-vacation-that-blogging-bought/ http://www.shaneeubanks.com/internet-marketing/the-vacation-that-blogging-bought/#comments Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:52:52 +0000 shane http://www.shaneeubanks.com/?p=28 If you run any type of website aside from your dayjob, then you may or may not have some sort of goal to make enough extra funds from the site to do something “substantial” with. I put substantial in quotes as it is a relevant term to different people. Buying a house may be substantial to one person while buying lunch is more like it to someone else. For me, the goal was to take my family on a week-long vacation using only the funds made from a few blogs that I run in my spare time. If you would have told me a few months ago that this would be possible, I would have laughed as I knew the amount of time & energy I would have had to pour into making it happen. There probably wouldn’t have even been a family to take on vacation had I tried to “work harder” and “make more money online”. So what did I do? What changed? Simple…I worked smarter.


I focused on good content…content that was popular yet had little competition online. For the travel websites that I run, I would simply check out forums such as TripAdvisor to see which forum topics had the most replies…or which topics kept popping back up. I generated a list somewhat like a FAQ and then started to plan out articles for my sites. For each article, I did just a little bit of keyword research using mainly the following three tools:

• SEObook Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Nichebot
• Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool

These tools are free and helped my find popular keywords/phrases for my articles. I then used those keywords for:

1. Page Titles
2. Article Titles
3. Bold Text
4. Anchor Text
5. META Descriptions
6. Image Alts & Titles

Pretty soon, I had articles ranking quickly in search engines and bringing more traffic. More traffic meant more earnings. The math is simple…the concept even simpler…the execution on the other hand takes time and dedication. I admit it was difficult to spend spare time at home doing these tasks, but now I have somewhat of a routine and have even outsourced some of it. The thing that worked for me was to establish a tangible goal (take my family on a week-long vacation) rather than saying “Make x amount of money by x date.” Sure, I knew about how much I would need to earn, but having a solid goal helped push me…as well as my wife who wanted a vacation even more than me!

So where did we go? We spent an entire week in a beach-front condo in Panama City Beach. We took our 6 month old son to the beach for the first time and it was an amazing experience. He absolutely loved the ocean, sand, people, etc. We ate out every night at some incredible restaurants, played some golf, did some shopping, and most of all…just relaxed knowing the trip and everything we decided to do was already covered financially. That was an awesome feeling.

I’m not saying this to “brag” or boast about my accomplishment. It’s just that I want you to know that you can do something “substantial” with your website if you have the right mindset (that works for you) and if you take care of the fundamentals. Since I run content-based sites (I don’t sell physical products) the fundamentals were to establish good content using strong keywords from popular topics. If you run an e-commerce site, then the fundamentals may be to increase conversions using techniques such as better descriptions, better images, improved “buy” or “add to cart” buttons, an easier checkout process, utilizing a newsletter, etc. The important thing is to provide value to your customers. They say content is king…well…to some extent it is, but to go deeper than that, valuable content is king. Add value to others in everything you do. It’s like Zig Ziglar is famous for saying, “You Can Only Get What You Want, If You Help Enough Other People Get What They Want.” The saying holds true even with internet marketing.

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