Biz Tips Blog: Online Marketing, Visibility and Business Blogging Tips

links for 2005-12-22

• People's Daily Online -- MSN Spaces rated the leading blog service provider in China
  Do you have a blog for your business yet? There are an estimated 16 million Chinese bloggers.
  (tags: blogs MSNSpaces China)
• openPR.com - Amazon Leads Internet Marketing Race for Holiday
  (tags: internet marketing Amazon Wal-Mart Apple)

My blog is worth $52,502.22!

Hard to believe!

My blog is worth $52,502.22.
How much is your blog worth?

links for 2005-12-21

• Santa now fills e-mails as well as stockings: SouthFlorida.com
  A great entrepreneurial idea!
  (tags: Santa email Internet Christmas holiday online)
• Jinglegram Voting Blog
  Santa's Blog! Who's been naughty and who's been nice?
  (tags: Santa blog Christmas holiday)
• Small Internet Retailers Are Using Web Tools to Level the Selling Field - New York Times
  (tags: ecommerce Internet retail marketing Amazon eBay e-commerce Yahoo)

Marketing Online Live

Recommended Podcast:  MarketingOnlineLive.com with Alex Mandossian and Paul Colligan. 

If you know of Internet Marketing guru Alex Mandossian, then you know that he always offers tons of valuable content.  I'm way behind on my podcast listening, but yesterday chose one at random to listen to while on the treadmill.  What I got was an excellent discussion and dissection of one of Alex's sales pages that generated a huge, unheard of conversion rate.  It was a great discussion and as soon as I got home, I went to the site he was discussing to study it in depth.

The episode I listened to was Web Conversion Strategies and the Fear of Loss:

In episode 10 of the Marketing Online Live Podcast, Paul Colligan gets Alex Mandossian to walk through the Web conversion strategies (while giving SPECIFIC numbers on his amazing conversion rates) he implemented at the Women's Power Summit Website. Specifics include: the use of audio on a Webpage, a/b split testing, cookies and the experience, vomiting on customers and more. (Women's Power Summit is an event held the day before Big Seminar).

I highly recommend this podcast if you want to learn tips and strategies from the masters.  You can subscribe on iTunes and get all past and current podcasts.

Update 12/21/05:  You can find the earlier podcasts on Yahoo Podcasts.

eBay Update #2

More follow up on my eBay experiment.

I relisted my CDs, both the 4 CD set and the singles.  The auction for the set was due to expire today and this morning there was one bid for $1.  Since they cost me considerably more than that to produce, I decided to go for it and crafted an email to send to all our prospects who have requested free blog related reports from us, nearly 2000 people at this point.

I pointed out that they had an opportunity to get these blogging interviews for an amazingly low price with the eBay auction and gave them the link to the auction.

It worked.  The winning bidder got the set for $8.51 which is a lot better than $1 in my book.  I've also made "second chance" offers to 2 other bidders so I have the potential to sell 2 more sets.

One of the buyers from the first round I did, is reviewing our Build a Better Blog ebook and may have some clients to refer to us.  So as a lead generator this could definitely work.