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As bloggers the internet is our source to making money online, if we don’t treat it as such how can we expect it to pay off? I once read an interesting article in regards to Sam Walton the founder of the Walmart Store Chain.

Sam had a vision to offer the lowest prices on anything and everything and he believed in the end it would be a success and people would come to his store and buy things which have been marked down in price.

Walmarts slogan is “Always the LOWER PRICE” with a slogan like that it’s no wonder we all actually buy from Walmart on a regular basis. Sam never got to see his dream come into full reality but he set the stepping stones for his family to soak in wealth for lifetimes ahead.

The thing about Walmart that may surprise you is that their prices are actually not that much lower. Think about it, Walmart has been “Rolling Back The Prices” since they came to be. If that were so how come everything in the store is not $0.00 to buy by now? Surely a few products down the line would have come down to that?

I challenge you to do a test, go into your local Walmart store with a pen and paper. Go look at some prices of generic items like toys, light bulbs, hammer and maybe some car oil? Jot down the prices you see, then go to some smaller stores and compare those prices to the smaller stores where you can buy the same brand and products from. If you notice Walmart will most likely be the same price or in some cases more then the smaller mom and pop shops. Why is this so?

They have the Brand nailed, using their slogan “Always the LOWER PRICE” they have convinced you that they truly do offer the lower prices even if they don’t.

Today we are going to talk about some ways we can incorporate some messages to convince buyers that what we are offering is worth having!

When it comes to these tactics be sure to use them sparingly as we don’t want to spam our customers and lose trust from them. A loyal customer will bring more customers your way, treat every customer with respect and they will treat you the same.

Doing this effectively is not really all that difficult, look at things this way. If you sell a quality proven product that you have put through test after test and you know it’s the very best it can be. Then no press is bad press, meaning if your product is really a great product nothing someone says will change that nor will it change how many people buy it. There are defiantly some ways to encourage users to buy and those techniques are what I plan to cover today.

Legal Subliminal Advertising History?

The first thing I want to cover in this legal subliminal advertising bit is the fact that certain colors do impact the brain when it sees them for positive and negative results. Before I get into that though, you may be wondering why I keep saying “legal subliminal techniques” my reasoning behind this is simple, before I can just blurt that answer out you need to hear a little background on subliminal advertising and how it got started.

Way back in the day when there was no such thing as subliminal advertising there was one man who owned a Movie Theater who tried a little experiment. His experiment was quite simple to do but the results it yielded were unbelievable! All he did was periodically flash for a half second ads on the screen during the movie stating simple commands like “Eat Popcorn” and the one I love “Drink Coke” because it flashed so quickly the human eye could not see what was said and it was easily forgotten. However the brain can and does see things in an instant and tries to calculate everything it sees, this factor alone brought more sales to his movie theater of popcorn and coke.

If it were me that had discovered that I would have probably kept it a little secret and only told maybe a small group of friends so they could also improve their businesses (what am I saying, we all know I would spill those beans to) and make more money.

The technique was labeled subliminal advertising because subliminal stands for (existing or functioning below the threshold of consciousness) according to the dictionary.

As you can see subliminal advertising can and is a powerful marketing tool if you can get away with it, I personally have seen subliminal advertising on the TV in kids programs as well as programs like the Food Network. The government cracks down on the people who do it and it’s a good thing or we would all be broke buying anything and everything we were told to buy.

So how does this help us? There are certain things that we can do legally to affect the brain in a positive way and make people want to buy from us. Strap yourself down and get ready for a ride of enjoyment!

Can Colors Help?

Now to get into the good stuff! What are some real legal subliminal techniques we can use? For starters colors are just one of many ways to impact your visitors in a positive way. Colors alone won’t SELL your product; they can create excitement or a calm and peace about your product though.

A test was once done where a weight lifter bench pressed about 45 Lbs per arm. He pumped off 8 reps with no trouble. Then an assistant put a blue piece of paper in front of his face so he could not see anything but light blue. He tried to do the reps with the blue paper in front of him. He was barley able to do a couple of reps! Then the assistant replaced the blue with a red piece of paper and the weight lifter was able to do the reps even easier then the first time he started.

With this test it shows us that the color blue (Especially Light Blue) creates calmness about the situation, while red created excitement and passion. If you have ever noticed in hospitals the walls are generally a light blue or similar light color. They do this purposely to calm the patients down. Think about how a doctor would have trouble if a patient was in a red room, they would be fighting back like crazy!

The key to using colors in our advertisements is to use a combination of both excitement and calm colors. If you even look at a successful eBay ad they use colors to create excitement about what they are offering to you. A large % of successful eBay sellers use the colors to help with there sales in general. We can learn from these people by doing the same, I have experimented slightly with this technique on my sales ads on forums and other blogs. It has yielded more successful results for me, so I encourage you to do the same. But don’t be afraid to tinker with not only colors but also bolding, underlines and italics. All of these catch the eye and make people want to buy more.

Can Words Help?

Secondly when it comes to subliminal advertising there are certain key words that can help you sell better. Here is a small list of words that can help you sell your products better.

• Guaranteed
• Free
• Bargain
• Best Price
• Love
• Success
• Dream
• Reality

These words affect the brain differently for every person, so within your sales letter it’s important to use a mix of them. Don’t spam the ad with these words like we talked about earlier, gaining your customers trust should be your #1 goal. There is an old saying which states “If you have one satisfied customer, you really have 10!” what this means is more then likely a satisfied customer will tell someone else about you and that person will tell another and before you know it your seeing a chain reaction of customers flowing in. It’s hard to do sometimes as some customers just cannot be satisfied no matter what you do. But if you can overcome that and ensure every customer always gets what you promised then you will have loyal readers to your blog and customers for your products.

Thank you for reading this article, I have tried my best to provide accurate info within that I have tested myself over and over. I hope it yields you better results then your currently getting as it did for me and you can do it to!

When alexa first started they created a basic traffic meter by how many times the alexa toolbar tracked someone visiting a website. If you have looked at your alexa before you know all about this.

A lot of alexa users (including me) complained about how inaccurate alexa really was, which was a true shame as its a great selling point for advertisers. As alexa announced here, ask and you shall receive. Alexa has taken it upon themselves to revamp the way the grab data so all of us can enjoy it with more accuracy. While not all the new features are into alexa right now you will start to see changes in the coming months according to the alexa announcement.

I for one am glad they are making some changes, instead of just the toolbar they plan to pull info from multiple sources to give a traffic rank. This will eliminate spammers and scammers from lowering the alexa rank with fake bots. Its also a great way to now promote your advertising as its much more difficult to achieve a low alexa without actually having the correct traffic.

Once again you can read about the full release and be sure and read the alexa faq on that page to ensure all your questions get answered!

Before we can talk about how to avoid being penalized first we need to know why google would want to eliminate paid links. Google has said “Do Not Do It” in the past, but a few months ago they have really started cracking down on people and they are allowing people to snitch on each other so Google can eliminate people easier.

Google wants to eliminate paid links for the simple reason that it effects their algorithum and they have no control over it. Google wants you to think that they are in control and have the BEST search engine known to man kind. However with some of there recent actions and crackdowns on paid links they are not doing themselves any favors to speak of.

This is what I basically gathered from ShoeMoney in his excellent video. You can watch his video right here or visit his blog at www.ShoeMoney.com to read more tips and updates about this matter.

ShoeMoney brings up many interesting points but he doesn’t answer the question of how to avoid a penalty. I want to go on record saying “I do not buy links for any of my sites”. I have not needed to as I create content that people like and link to. I have been blessed in this regard and I still believe its the best method for success instead of cheating through paid links. But for those who want to know how to buy links and not receive a penalty lets continue.

If you use services such as TLA or TNX to buy / sell links of any kind you are already in deep water. These services make it easy for a human google editor to go into and see who is and is not buying / selling links, you need to avoid such public venues for buying or selling links.

Its best to contact people individually asking for a link and that your willing to compensate them for linking to you. While it may seem like a primitive method it works very well as you can then specify which type of links you want (relative links are best). Just remember not to email your competition or they may snitch on you and get your penalized or banned!

To wrap up all you have to do is avoid public venues, this raises the all interesting question “Where do I get links then?”. I have talked about blog commenting in the past as well as other techniques for building back links for free.

However these free link building techniques can only do so much if your on a tight schedule and you need to get things going quickly. Let me emphasize one last time how I do not endorse buying links and I highly suggest you never do it.You sure you don’t want to change your mind now? Alright read on then you google cheater you!

To buy links safely just sign up to the multiple webmaster forums around the net. The best ones are probably BzImage, DevHunters, DigitalPoint, V7N and NamePros. If you cannot get links from these 5 forums then you should probably quit your job as an seo wannabe!

I Know I know, your saying wait… I already know about these sites and buy links at these forums. How are these going to help me avoid a penalty? To put it bluntly you only buy the links that are not displayed publicly within a thread. The links you want are the ones where you have to reply to a thread or pm the seller to get the url, these are the links you want as Google reps are to busy to contact hundreds of thousands of members about buying and selling links via private messages.

It really is that simple, just avoid publicicty at all costs. If you can do that you should be safe from penaltys now and in the future. Try it out and be sure to share your results with me below.

Hey guys, I just found this awesome phpld 3.3 template that my buddy over at DevHunters released. Its pretty cool and worth grabbing a copy if you have a phpld 3.3 directory.

Here is a quick screenshot of the template! As you can see it combines some beautiful colors of purple grey and white!

See Live DEMO, You can download this puppy at the DevHunters forum here.

Generally I don’t tend to talk a whole lot on how to improve your actual blog writing as I believe the way you write is up to you as a blogger, its what makes each of us different and unique. If you want to have bad spelling and grammar mistakes you should be allowed to, this may seem like a prehistoric thought on my part but I believe its essential to let readers decide who, what and why they want to write a blog.

At the same time I receive a lot of questions and emails asking me how to improve blog writing and all the jazz I don’t care to write about however I have decided it was a good time to break into this world and start offering up some basic tips on the idea and hopefully we can get everyone up to pace with what is and is not acceptable when blogging.

Today we are talking about a bloggers voice, you may be asking what I mean by bloggers voice? Basically when a visitor comes to your blog what message is relayed to them? I am not talking about design either, really it just boils down to writing style and possibly the format of your posts.

I have tinkered with different ways of formatting posts till I found something that looked good and got my message across rather quickly. I hate to have my time wasted so I took the same approach to my blog. I see no sense in wasting someones time if its not necessary. GET TO THE POINT ALREADY!

With that said it is important to develop a particular voice for your blog. First lets look at some big name moguls and what voices they have. Remember a voice is simply the message that you relay to your visitors and the search engines.

For my first example I will bring your attention to the JohnChow Dot Com Blog. Johns voice is very outgoing, he basically has said that he is going to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants to and the search engines can do nothing about it. While that is true John was taken out of the search index for disobeying the rules of google’s link penalty. However it paid off for John as he now has a rss readership of over 20,000 subscribers and makes a killing through advertisements.

For another example lets look at ShoeMoney, he has a particular voice as well, do you know what it is? From what I can see ShoeMoneys voice is one of reason, he likes to dig up dirt and reveal untruthful things on his blog. Remember people love controversy and ShoeMoney creates that by unveiling lies and even truths in some cases.

Just in these two examples you can see that both have there own DISTINCT voice that no other blogger has. I have talked with both these guys in the past and John just puts on a big show and acts tough. “He is really a soft teddy bear inside and loves to help people out”. ShoeMoney appears easy going on the outside with his shaved head and black frames. However if you get on his bad side he will make you pay for it.

These distinct qualities make these guys who they are and I for one am thankful for it. I have learned so much from both and I relay that info to you all in my own voice. To sum all this ranting up, answer these questions by commenting below!

• How would you describe my voice?
• Do I need to refine my voice more, Does my blog relay what I am truly like?

Please answer these below so I can ensure my blogs voice is distinct and different then any others. I believe it is but this is why you all are here (to prove me wrong).

After you answer those questions I leave it in your hands. I have provided some basic info about a bloggers voice and its importance. Now its your time to take that knowledge and make your own voice that people want to listen to, are you up for the challenge?