Brent Hathaway…in my own words

I read a really good book recently, and thought I would mention it. It is called Crush It, written by Gary Vaynerchuck. 

It is a really good read at approx 170 pages, and basically it was a “Here’s how I increased business by 10x by creating a personal brand, using blogging and social media.”    The author has close to a million followers on Twitter, and over a hundred thousand fans on his facebook fan page.  Based on that alone, it peaked my interest.  I went out and bought it at Chapters for $25.99, although it can be found on Amazon for less.

I read it in the span of two days, and I thought it was filled with great nuggets, as well as free tools and sites that worked for him. Sometimes it takes someone connecting the dots like this. There are ways I hadn’t thought of that can make all the difference in the world.  It gave me excellent ideas on some things, and it made an immediate difference.

If you are looking at building a personal brand, increasing your sales, blogging, or using social media at a corporate level (or individual level) – be sure to check it out.

Monetizing the Blog – the Natural Desire

Let’s say you’ve got a business selling shoes. You’ve done the research, and promoting your own narrow niche of shoes online.  Then you added a blog, and fresh original content.  You’ve also got e-commerce on the site, where you SELL those shoes that you promote.

Now you’ve got a flow of customers flocking to your blog, reading the latest about shoe fashion.  Then you figure, “Hey, sales are down, but blog traffic is up – I’ll monetize my blog!” 

How Adsense Works

Google Adsense looks at the content of your blog, in realtime.  It then matches up clients how are buying advertising (them) with clients who are selling advertising (you).  They place ads on YOUR site – this not to be confused with Adwords, where you are the one paying.  By placing ads on your site, you are effectively selling advertising on your site.  Google keeps a portion of the revenue generated by the Adwords campaign, and passes on a portion of the revenue to you.  Sounds great!

Here’s the dilemna  – Adsense looks at all of that content, and says, “shoes”! It then places ads of your competitor selling shoes on your site.  Whoa – we don’t want to sell other people’s shoes – we want to sell our own shoes!

Sure, someone may click on the ad, effectively giving you SOME money – but in most cases I gotta believe you’d make more money off the sale of the shoes instead of the ad.

Solution

Why not focus on converting your own sales instead?  You might say, “But, Brent – you can disable those competitor ads in Google Adsense”.  Yea, fine…but what a pain in the butt.  How can one monitor all the different ads that appear on your site, and then investigate each link?  Maybe you are focusing on the WRONG google tool for this scenario.

Sign up for Google Analytics, and see what your bouncerate is.  As defined on wikipedia, a bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website. The tool can also tell you what percentage of people are dropping off as they proceed thru the online sales process.  That will tell you where to start making your tweaks.  Things to look for:

Is the page loading too slow?
Am I communicating where they are in the purchase process?
Are people abandoning their filled shopping cart?
Is it FUN to purchase on your site, or does it feel clinical?

I really think that Adsense is great for bloggers who are NOT selling what they are blogging about. There’s a reason why certain Adsense keywords pay more – it’s because their actual sales of the product generate revenue!  That drives the ad prices up.  So why not increase that actual sale for yourself?

Let me know by your comments – how do YOU handle this situation?

Is it just me, or did other people experience big changes in rankings on Google Local Business Center?

In the few weeks, I noticed that my rank didn’t just drop – it dropped off completely from the map on ALL my keywords (which were few).  The search engine rankings are about the same, so I am guessing that it was not Google Caffeine.  The only thing that I did differently on my end in the past month prior to noticing the problem was to link to the website from a PRzero site (formerly PR4) - which was…here  

A quick search does not reveal any blogs about any changes.

I did notice in the last few days that my business info listed suddenly was showing as only 93% complete, when it was 100% before. Could this have affected things? I did not see any additional items added, oddly enough. So, I uploaded a Youtube video. Nope - that wasn’t it. Still showing 93% complete. I went in, and made some minor text change, and then it showed 100% change. It didn’t, however, affect my map listing at all for my keywords. At least not yet.

So the quest to get back continues.

I guess the only bright note was that the changes obliterated some of the competition as well.

What are your thoughts?