Blog

David Lewis

David C. Lewis, RFC is the owner of Twin Tier Financial. He writes extensively about personal and business finance, purpose and goal-setting, and both online and offline business marketing. Touch base with David by visiting twintierfinancial.com

FullTraffic manages its own ad network, a place that enables advertisers and publishers to exchange ad space. As we focus only on Full Page Advertising, FullTraffic is constantly improving to offer the BEST traffic quality.

5 Ways To Kill Your LinkedIn Account and Destroy Your Reputation

By David Lewis, posted on October 11, 2012

LinkedIn is one of the best business to business sites on the Internet. It's filled with professionals from almost every industry. Because of this, it's a marketer's dream. There's a lot Internet gurus on the net that write about how to take advantage of the social networking site, but a few things always seem to go overlooked. Breaking the TOS on LinkedIn is one of the easiest ways to get yourself banned and ruin any marketing potential you have there. So, if you want to cultivate some of the best leads ever for your company, don't: 1. Use a Fake Name - Fake names are a big no-no on LinekdIn. It seems like an obvious rule, but some people use nicknames to keep their anonymity and some small business owners use the company name while building a personal profile page. If LinkedIn catches you using anything but your real name, you could lose your account forever. 2. Spam Groups Discussions - It's unfortunate, but some marketers take advantage...

Continue Reading

Finding Killer Keywords Without Using Google (or the Internet)

By David Lewis, posted on October 5, 2012

Most marketers use the Internet to find new keywords. It's almost a given that you have to go online, use Google's Adwords tool, and piece together a keyword list to target for SEO purposes. Is this the right way to go about doing keyword research? Sometimes. Sometimes not. Kelly Ayres from the SEER Interactive blog recently wrote about a unique way to find new keywords: go offline. Ayres tells us to interview our audience, and mentions several ways to go about doing this. Here are a few more that you might find useful: Do a Direct Mail Campaign A survey conducted via direct mail is expensive, but it can yield some of the best results you'll ever get. First of all, an offline survey won't be snagged up and used by your competition. You'll get the jump on them, not the other way 'round. A survey could consist of several very pointed questions about the values, opinions, complaints, concerns, and questions that your target market has...

Continue Reading

SEO vs Usability: Is One More Important Than The Other?

By David Lewis, posted on September 30, 2012

In Internet marketing, usability and SEO aren't always synonymous. In fact, there s an entire school of thought that tries to separate "usability" from "SEO." It's thought that SEO is something done to a website to give it greater visibility in the search engines, while usability is how visitors interact with a website. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen examined how users interact with websites, and how they consume online content, back in 2003. Looking forward, it's amazing that user behavior doesn't seem to have changed much since then. In fact, Nielsen's statements back then were accurate predictions of what happens today and might be excellent predictions for the future. Your site's users don't stay on your site very long. When they do, they have a clear purpose for being there. When that purpose is fulfilled, they move on. This is the basic premise behind "information foraging," and there's...

Continue Reading

Why You Should Care About Apple Maps

By David Lewis, posted on September 26, 2012

There's been a lot of talk over Apple Maps lately. With Apple releasing iPhone 5, and iOS6, the map program developed by the geniuses in Cupertino is getting some heat. Apparently, people are getting iLost. The Apple maps program does need some work. The signs on the top of the program can be a little confusing, especially if you are moving the map around to see where you'll be going. That's ironic, since Apple pitches itself as a user-friendly company with a stunning UI. Critics are calling Maps a "complete failure." If that's the case, why worry about Maps? In a word: Apple users. The type of people using an iPhone are a very different kind of consumer. Most Apple consumers love Apple. They love their devices. They might go out of their way to use 3rd party apps, but if Maps is "good enough," most won't bother. What you need to be cognizant of is the fact that Yelp and Apple are like peanut butter and jelly....

Continue Reading

The Nasty Truth About Social Media Marketing

By David Lewis, posted on September 24, 2012

Everyone's using social media these days to advertise. It's easy to jump on board when big-name companies like Facebook and Google are showing you the number of users they have. These aren't black hat community sites. These are household names. They have real users. They have an awesome ad network. They must be telling you the truth about how many users they have, right? Not so fast. You can spend a lot of time, and money, on various social networking sites like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn only to end up with a big marketing bill and no leads. When you peel back the veil of secrecy on these companies, the numbers behind the hype aren't so appealing. In fact, when you learn the truth, you almost want to use so-called "blackhat" techniques to take advantage of what these social sites must already know: a big portion of their user base consists of fictitious users. Facebook Facebook is one of the most...

Continue Reading

Making Social Media Work For Your Small Business

By David Lewis, posted on September 20, 2012

Old-school salesmanship and social media marketing have a lot in common. Contrary to popular belief, the best salesmen aren't the ones who talk their prospects into buying something. No, the best salesmen are the ones that listen. They listen to every word the prospect has to say before making a judgment about whether they can sell anything. Social media is a lot like that. For small businesses, this type of internet marketing is very different from traditional SEO because it represents a way for you to interact with potential and existing customers on a very informal level. Because of this, you're allowed entry into a world that you otherwise wouldn't be privy to. The key thing to remember, in a business context, is to listen. Do a lot of listening. Listen (or rather, read) everything that your potential customers have to say before offering them anything. Instead of rushing in with your solution, listen to their problems and challenges. Let them tell you what...

Continue Reading

How CloudFlare Speeds Up Your Website By As Much as 60 Percent While Simultaneously Protecting You From Hackers

By David Lewis, posted on September 12, 2012

Did you know that you can speed up your website load times by 60 percent, practically eliminate DDoS attacks, eliminate bandwidth usage limits, and eliminate spam on your blog? It seems incredible, but CloudFlare does exactly that. One of the issues on most webmasters' minds, at one point or another, is security. Making a site more secure builds trust between you and your visitors, reduces headaches for you, and allows you to focus on what you do best: content creation and running your business. Another issue webmasters face is limitations on bandwidth usage, spam attacks, and DDos attacks (if you're a semi-popular website). While it wasn't originally designed to act as a distribution channel and content delivery network, CloudFlare's serendipitous experiment has thus far given users far more than what they bargained for. How Website Security Usually Works Website security is often done "in-house" for most large websites. Corporate...

Continue Reading

Three Of the Best SEO Tools For Wordpress

By David Lewis, posted on September 7, 2012

The world of SEO is changing every day. That doesn't mean that you have to change SEO tactics every day. There are a lot of webmasters out there that believe that. They believe that since Google makes hundreds of algorithm changes every year, that they need to make at least as many changes to keep up. Wrong. Just follow the Google Webmaster blog. You'll find a common thread in all of the updates. Every update is aimed at trying to improve search results. If you try to swim upstream, you'll end up with endless headaches and feel like you're wasting a lot of time. SEO can be a stressful art - even for those who work in the business. Accept the premise that your job is to give your site visitors the best possible experience on your blog and it will make your life a lot easier. Here are a few plugins for Wordpress that can help you: Google Analytics Dashboard Everyone knows what Google Analytics is. It's possibly the best analytics...

Continue Reading

Are You Making This Dumb Mistake With Your On-Site SEO?

By David Lewis, posted on September 4, 2012

A lot of really smart webmasters are making really dumb mistakes with their on-site SEO. Everyone knows what SEO is, right? It's all about optimizing your keywords on the pages and posts of your site, making sure you have good H1 tags, that you bold keywords, that you do good interlinking, and so on. That's all there is to is, right? Right? Not so fast. What about qualitative factors? What about user experience. Believe it or not, user experience is these most important thing you can do to improve your site's ranking. Let Google Take Care of Ranking A lot of folks try to use anchor text and other link building tactics to increase their rank. On-site, they try to optimize keywords (whatever that means). The truth is that no one knows what future changes Google will make and no one really understands the algorithm at Google except employees that work there - that work on the algorithm. The point is this: focus on creating relevant content...

Continue Reading

Getting Your Wikipedia Link To Stick

By David Lewis, posted on September 2, 2012

A lot of folks are having problems getting Wikipedia links to stick. Editors are brutal, and the review process can seem like someone is unfairly taking your hard earned work and not crediting you with a job well done. You have to understand something about Wikipedia: links are extremely hard to get. That's what makes them so darned valuable. Getting a link to stick will mean that you've made it through a very serious editing process and have had some of the toughest editors on the planet give you a thumbs up. Before you can claim victory, however, you have to add value to the site. There are basically two ways to do this: 1) Write a Wiki page 2) Become a trusted editor Writing a Wiki Page To write your own page, all you need to do is fill in the gaps somewhere on a popular Wikipedia page. Keep in mind that, as far as Wikipedia is concerned, you don't own any of the material you publish. Yes, it's brutal. Anything you contribute will...

Continue Reading

Older Posts Newer Posts