The National Finals Rodeo is an event that has been going on since 1959. This is an event that no other sporting event can hold a candle to. This championship last from December 2nd thru December 11th. It is held in the entertainment capital of the world, Las Vegas Nevada at the Thomas and Mack Center. There is no other event like it, not the Super Bowl, The Masters, or The World Series. This is the grand daddy of all sporting events and it pits man against some really bad beasts.
All the top cowboys and cowgirls are there. If they are one of the best this year then they will be there at the National Finals Rodeo. The champion in Bareback Riding, Steer Wrestling, Team Roping, Saddle Bronc Riding, Tie-Down Roping, Barrel Racing and Bull Riding will be awarded. There is also an award for the World All-Around Rodeo Champion Cowboy. This award goes to the highest-earning cowboy who has competed on a regular basis in more than one event.
There is not a bad seat in the house, but the best seats go first. The thing to do is go to NFR tickets 2010 and make your reservations today. This is one of those events that you really want to see before you die and you can take the entire family with you.

My wife and I have been married for almost 30 years. We have been through good times and bad times, flush and lean times. The thing that has been consistent has been that she has always been there for me.
When we first got married I bought her a new watch. This was a very nice watch and she wore it all the time. Then one day, about 3 months ago, the band broke and the watch fell in the road as she was crossing the street. Well you know where this is going, a car ran over the watch and it ended up in a thousand pieces. She was devastated.

I told her to look online and compare watches and find one that she liked. She took my advice and did her research. She was drawn to the Movado Watches. She liked the style of the Esperanza Black Dial. I told her that we just couldn’t afford to spend over $1,100 for a new watch. She understood but was very disappointed. She doesn’t know the real story.
I did some research of my own and found a site called www.bluedial.com. This site has the exact watch that she wants, the Movado Ladies Stainless Steel Esperanza Black Dial. This watch is part of the Esperanza collection. The Black Dial is made of lustrous stainless steel and has a sophisticated modern design that is very attractive. It has a slender tank case that is attached to an open link bracelet that oozes style. This is offset by a dramatic black dial with silver colored hands and a Movado signature concave dot. You know this watch is made with quality in mind because it is water resistant to 30 meters and has precise Swiss Quartz movement. This is all backed by a 12 months warranty.
My wife doesn’t know that I bought all of this for under $500 and that it is her Valentine’s Day gift. I want her to know that I love her all of the time. To me the Movado Ladies Stainless Steel Esperanza Black Dial is the perfect way to show my love all of the time.

Socially Conscious Marketing comes from a place of truth — not deception. It comes from a place of giving — not taking. As the name implies, being a socially conscious marketer means you hold yourself accountable to your clients or customers and you strive to be conscious of the impact of your message — beyond just getting the sale.

In the business development world, people want to grow relationships. It is often assumed that both sides want to develop the relationship. But in internet marketing, the relationship is often just one way. The buyer is going along with their life and the marketer is trying to persuade them to take an offer or make a decision — often when they are not really ready to make one.

The best way to bring all these things together and to make everyone happy (on both sides of the relationship) is to build trust and report with your audience. If we stop trying to hurry the close and push the service or product we always win.

The BizDevMark team is actually doing this with our marketing — to you. We are here for you every day, providing free content and resources to help make your life better. We very rarely present an offer or sales pitch because that is not what this site is about. We prefer to build a relationship and be accountable to you.

Yes I know that sounds corny and trite but it is the truth. So if you’re a marketing professional your job is to do the same thing over and over, until you can’t tell your friends from your prospects!

Dwayne

BizDevMark – Business Development Marketing

The thick and thin of affiliate marketing often comes down to a trade-off between work and worry.

Work: The work and time it takes to build good authority sites with high visitor value and long lasting serps positioning.

versus…

Worry: The stress over when those quickly ranked machine gun affiliate traps, slick redirects and frame pages will get nerfed or even flagged as spam.

Whether you’re designing an affiliate internet marketing plan from scratch, or if you already have affiliates sites deployed, you always need more testing and feedback to monitor your conversion-path effectiveness. The most common ways to adjust are spinning and split testing pre- and post-click components like ad copy, anchor phrases, and landing page copy. But if you operate networks of thin affiliate sites you are very limited in how effective your spin-post-test cycles can be since the goal is direct injection into the sale channel from the initial search click.

Thin affiliate sites have minimal original copy and limited visitor value. It’s tough to bring them up the serps and get these kinds of pages organically ranked. No kidding right? No not really. The cause-effect relationship between value and organic ranking is made more difficult by the constant adjustment required to address ever changing search algorithms and ever increasing human-assisted page ranking.

But thin sites have one huge advantage; deployment speed. While everyone else is hoeing away on their content, trust relationships, and logical link building, the thin affiliate farmer has already grown a huge 100 acre co-op and by shear scale has socially self-promoted their sites into the top 10 or 20.

Unfair? Unethical? Slimy? Maybe so, but that’s not the point of this post. Let’s get back to main idea: The choice that YOU as a web developer and marketer have to make when planning your deployment strategy for a certain niche or product line.

You may find my attitude callous but honestly I don’t waste much time thinking about which way to go. I want to do what works best for my clients. The real choice depends on the market. Let me explain.

When you approach a campaign that is affiliate based you are faced with strong competitive challenges from other affiliates and also from the product/service originator. Competing affiliates create market buzz but that buzz quickly turns into noise once everyone breaks into the game — or if you are late to the party and there is already strong brand and social exposure working against you.

Competition from the brand is also a serious challenge — especially these days, when SEO consultants are everywhere (ahem). It is no secret that many companies are collapsing their affiliate programs and putting the resources into brand and buzz building and dabbling in social link promotion.

So before you flex your affiliate site creative muscle, consider a balance of thick and thin affiliate properties. Sure, thin sites can help you achieve faster conversions, but high quality pages build real link equity and will help you survive in the long run…and isn’t this all about the long run?

Talk soon;

Dwayne

When you operate an Internet based business, all the world is your customer. The problem for most web-based businesses is reaching out to the world and getting your offer seen in a raging sea of competition, crowd noise, and surfer confusion. It’s critical to your survival to provide the best product or service, but it’s equally important to get the message out to potential customers.

No matter how good your lead generation, in-house marketing or list building efforts are, the key to adding zeros to bottom end of your bottom line comes from adding new buyers. New customers are the foundation of our entire future marketing effort. So it follows that the acquisition of new customers is the master key to your business success or failure.

It’s common for internet businesses to get stuck in a SEM or SEO sales channel and marketing strategy that leaves them in a narrowly focused competition pool. Here they fight it out with other trapped marketers vying for a share of a fixed volume of daily searches. Each competitor has their list of keywords and live or die over how many sales they can win from the daily available inbound search volume.

So how do we fish new buyers out of this stagnant pool of traffic? We reach outside of our fixed list of keywords. But not just any new keywords will do. We must find keywords that are returning traffic at levels we can pull fish, er potential customers out of.

Search Suggestion Tools

There are several ways to learn what people are searching for and to new build keyword silos to bring them into our network. We’ll go into content creation and keyword farming in later articles. Today we want to focus on a great way to find the missing link between what we think our market is about and what the public thinks it is about.

How do we do that? And what does it cost?

Search Engine Suggestion is the answer and it’s completely free

Here we go to the various online tools (overt and covert) to gain intelligence on what Search Intent Anticipation (SIA factor) suggestions engines are returning for your base keywords. The idea is to reach out beyond your own ideas of what your market is interested in and to see what real human traffic is looking for. Very often, this simple process will break you out of a marketing rut by opening new sales channels you can work on — to market them or even develop new products.

Please note that since most major search engines have refocus on monetized search, their main interest is in delivering quality search results. A big component of result quality is to anticipate and drill the surfer down to where they need to be when they started the search session. So the concept is to anticipate the surfer’s needs and deliver the best suggestions to fill in the blanks created by the surfer’s gap of imagination, laziness, or lack of keyword or typing skills, etc…

Also note that since the engines really want to monetize you they are always balancing Visitor Value (VV factor) with accurate anticipation. Even if they don’t admit it, there will always be heavy algorithmic gravitational pull towards commerce-specific results. You can be assured that commerce will play a factor because profitable search engines survive by driving traffic to monetized search.

A shocking but simple rule: If there is high search volume there will always  be monetized search.

Why is that? Because anything that has a high volume of search will create a focus and concentration of human interest that will in turn lure Internet marketers into the game. Internet Marketers love the crowd because as P.T. Barnum claimed there is a sucker in every crowd.

So even on innocent subjects and strongly academic search terms, human interest generates the search volume and the search volume generates marketing interest, which in turns ignites search activity (remember that Internet marketers have to constantly study the subject to steal content to power their content-centric internet marketing information product marketing efforts).

But I digress… What we want to focus on is the margin created between human interest and marketing interest. Why? Because in that gap are seething pools of fish for you to drop a baited line into. And one of the best tools to discover the gap and create whole new channels you can exploit for free is search suggestion.

Google for example now has search suggestion based on absolute metrics. Just hit their main search site for real time search suggestions. Type in a few letters of your key phrase and the suggestions are instantly delivered to you. As a bonus they also throw in the number of indexed page results. Yahoo, has been providing these for a long time and they still work great. MSN Live and Ask.com are also helpful, but their anticipation-suggestion engine is very strongly weighted to commerce results. This makes sense considering their market positioning and struggle for share.

It’s easy and free to add new life to your web marketing by using the free tools provided by the search engines. So go for it! And happy fishing.

Still following the folks at Q-Based and this week they are unveiling their brand new version of the dermatechrx.com website. No longer an ecommerce site, now Dermatech has been retooled to be a free and comprehensive research center and media library covering all manner of skin ailments and research into cures for such things and carpal tunnel syndrome, scabies, skin parasites, arthritis, and more.

For several years DermaTechRx was the brand for Q-Based products. Now they have expanded into their All Stop line of products are making the best use of the newly designed DermaTechrx website to help people learn from their research and experience in skin related problems, topical pain relief, and human parasites.

You’ll find eGuides covering details and symptoms — complete with visual aides, videos, and charts to help you get the most of your visit. The developers also mention they are adding interactive flash presentations to help parents and educators in the classroom.

We’re excited by this new site and applaud Q-Based for giving back to the public.

Dwayne

Man what a brand!

The folks over a Q-Based Healthcare have busted out their new All Stop brand. The brand is topped by their new logo (caduceus / Asclepius staff and forward leaning fonts). The colors are strong and keep the medical theme moving forward. I imagine it took a few heated marketing meetings to approve the bold red & green color scheme, but I have to admit it works! The new look speaks to power, knowledge, and vitality.

The new All Stop brand name is technically a rebranding of their flagship DermaTechRx product line. They do have a statement about this on their site at http://www.allstop.com/faq/brand_notice.html

So why All Stop?

Folks who remember the DermaTechRx product line know they worked great on various skin ailments. Q-Based has been selling relief for arthritis pain, scabies, lice, eczema, bed bugs, poison ivy and ringworm for years. The bulk of their business is done online and they claim nearly 200,000 satisfied customers. I have used their products and always been satisfied.

All Stop has become their new brand to signify the power of the products to STOP ALL the ailments they are designed to treat. They certainly can stop lice and bed bugs, and ringworm (oh my), but more than that; these solutions help thousands of people help themselves with affordable home treatment solutions.

Not everyone can afford to go to a doctor for non life-threatening problems. Smart shoppers have learned to leverage Q-Based ‘heathcare advisors’ (read customer service reps) to get helpful tips on saving money and using products wisely. Issues never more important than now; with a ragged economy and rapidly increasing food and fuel costs.

Smart Shoppers… Smart Marketers.

So the brand works well to express the product. All Stop products work for many common ailments and parasites. Need to treat bed bugs? They have that. Raging Jock itch? You’re covered. (With my sympathies).

Along with the rebrand, their website has also undergone some effective retooling work. Now their sites are SEO compliant. The structure follow logical tree flow and their URLs are really search engine friendly. In the last week they look to be adding some link building features. With the new design they could easily move into the social networking traffic cloud.

Check out a corporate page at www.allstop.com or a sample affliction landing page at: http://www.allstop.com/lice/head-lice-treatment Pay close attention to the new packaging. More facelift work here. I suspect these folks are going retail shelf any day now. I’ll post updates as they grow. It is very interesting to watch a young growth company like this in its early stages.