Sometimes I work with or just help some pretty big sites which is why I think about testing trends, predictive seasonal changes etc.

Another thing I think about which might not be obvious are navigational elements to pages you want someone to visit.
A simple think like changing the size of tag links can boost CTR – splitting content might give you multiple ad impressions, but also a chance of multiple “first ad on page” displays which normally pay more per click.

If you can somehow do these things metrics driven, then it is marketing.

All the best Leo,
Dushan, from Switzerland

The Andy Jenkins thing was a complete oversight….It was not to slight Andy Beard in any way, shape or form.

!Lack of salesmanship!

While many of the successful — now trashed — so-called Internet marketing gurus have a sales background, most of the “wanna make some extra cash crowd” don’t even want to attempt to learn the skill.

They think selling is evil.

Okay, then let them go ahead, build a blog where they can write about themselves, and attract followers that don’t want to buy anything as much as the “self proclaimed authors and follow my passion believers” don’t want to sell anything anyway.

I guess the third tribe will teach that it’s not about them and that it boils down to selling something. … Oh, boy I already see the big disappointment.

P.S.: Is it on purpose that you say Andy Jenkins but link to Andy Beard?

Writing a post about why it isn’t a good idea to nofollow a first link, explaining other examples of how it can affect SEO on a blog, and also pointing to some more videos to learn, with affiliate links could be, especially if it became a term people searched for more information about, and the authority links gained to the content means you dominate the serps with a double listing.

Yeah, in a sense, that IS marketing as it incorporates a soft sale approach (in most cases) to the offer, guerrilla style. I think that that is probably the most used approach on the web though. But the SEO side of things isn’t really marketing. It is just a tactic to make yourself more visible. On the other hand, when you do rank for a targeted conversation, then you have segmented your audience to the most qualified to the offer, provided you aren’t simply shooting arrows in the dark. Geesh….I can see the argument on both sides.

I don’t know what Court is teaching, but even keyword research or testing different forms of advertising on sites is marketing because you have data and can make decisions based upon that, even if it is to maybe move into creating a product for a niche, promoting an aff program instead of adsense etc.

Court’s business is showing people how to find keywords that are easy to rank for using Pagerank as a qualifier and then doing the math to build up a profitable keyword list for a website and then monetizing it with adsense. I won’t argue that this isn’t a good business model, especially for folks that are new. But it IS adsense, and I believe that most new marketers are cutting themselves out of the bigger piece of the pie by partnering with google….that’s just my opinion.

Plus, aside from keyword research and content development, the only question that you have is what place on the page do the ads perform the best? It is definitely dummy proof but once again, you have to wonder what you are losing by going this route. I guess you could call that marketing. Personally, I don’t.

Court’s business model and how he promotes his keyword academy…now that is marketing. Putting out an hour and a half video on “Marketing 101″ in which he discusses how he builds sites for free and then following up with an email announcing that he is about to do the second part of his video series (he calls it “201″) for his members…oh and by the way…if you aren’t a member you can try it out for $1…….now that IS Marketing…and he is doing it the right way.

I am borderline on situations where you are managing lots of content, and deciding what needs to rank to maximise monetization, and the challenge of making it rank.

Yeah, I am too. I don’t think that Ranking Organically is necessarily the end all for marketing though and tend to try to look at a marketing plan based on a case by case situation. After all, it seems like everyone pigeon holes internet marketing with ranking online when there are so many other ways to become visible. In some cases, it is simply worth it to run a PPC campaign and start leveraging whatever it is you are selling immediately. In other cases, there are other avenues to explore. I think that people choose SEO as the only solution because of the belief that it is passive. In some cases, it may be. In other cases, you are fighting tooth and nail with other marketers. At that point, I think you need to take a step back and ask yourself, is there an easier way to get around this without having to have a marketing brawl on the first page?….I think that there are always alternative solutions. It is just a matter of discovering them.

How about changing site structure and promoting different content based upon seasons or performance in social media, or trending topics?

Never thought about changing actual site structure to fit something seasonal because I typically choose evergreen products. Trending topics are good for linkbait but the ROI, from an actual monetary measurement, for them is typically not good (at least from my tests…or maybe I am not doing it right, lol). That is definitely a topic that maybe I should look into.

Various forms of automated linkbuilding probably aren’t

Writing a post about why it isn’t a good idea to nofollow a first link, explaining other examples of how it can affect SEO on a blog, and also pointing to some more videos to learn, with affiliate links could be, especially if it became a term people searched for more information about, and the authority links gained to the content means you dominate the serps with a double listing.

I don’t know what Court is teaching, but even keyword research or testing different forms of advertising on sites is marketing because you have data and can make decisions based upon that, even if it is to maybe move into creating a product for a niche, promoting an aff program instead of adsense etc.

I am borderline on situations where you are managing lots of content, and deciding what needs to rank to maximise monetization, and the challenge of making it rank.
How about changing site structure and promoting different content based upon seasons or performance in social media, or trending topics?

As far as copy for selling perfume or a shoe, you could do a review page but that is the lazy marketers way out of things.. You could build the page in a storyboard format (write a story that centers on a character that has an issue and solves the issue using the product. I have seen story format ad copy that didn’t look like an ad that I was very impressed with; one in particular was a squidoo page that was ultimately selling an “increase your vertical jump” product.

Just curious, would you write any post about how to be an internet marketing. For instance, how can someone entice his visitors to buy a perfume or a shoe?

Right now, I just think, that the person just have to write good reviews of the perfume or shoe. Is there any other way??