7 Internet Marketing Insights from Tom Antion’s ButtCamp 2016

This past weekend I spent all day Saturday at Tom Antion’s Virtual ButtCamp. Yes, you read that correctly.  He wanted to be different, and since his goal was to get butts in seats as well as teaching how to earn income while sitting on your butt, he decided to name this event ButtCamp rather than BootCamp.

Tom is an Internet marketer who has been training speakers and others about the latest, greatest Internet marketing tips, tricks and tools since the late 1990s.  He was one of the first people whose products I purchased, and I went to a live version of his ButtCamp in 2004 in St. Louis before the National Speaker’ Association conference.

Now he’s offering the ButtCamps virtually via Ustream, although you can attend live at his Internet Marketing Training Center in Virginia Beach, VA.  Once you attend a ButtCamp, you can attend future ButtCamps free of charge.  Because he offered the ButtCamp via streaming this year, I did have to pay a $15 streaming fee to attend.

Tom is offering all the videos, handouts and resources for his ButtCamp 2016 at https://donnarecos.com/buttcamp for $247.  If you really want to amp up your Internet Marketing, I highly advise you to invest and watch the videos.  I’ve been paying attention to Tom for almost 20 years and still learn something new from every product I purchase from him.

Trust me, it’s an investment that is well-spent.  I will caution you, though.  Tom is very direct and doesn’t mince words.  His language can be a bit crass, so keep this in mind if you’re easily offended. :0  I’m sure he will offend you more than once, but he certainly keeps it real! LOL

Here are my 7 Internet marketing insights from Tom Antion’s ButtCamp:

1.Google Search Console:  Every website should connect to Google Search Console. You need to have a Google (Gmail) account to connect. This tool was previously called Google Webmaster Tool. It  is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites.  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools  

2.  Search Engine Love: Two pages that search engines love are FAQ pages and Resource pages.  On your FAQ page, list and answer frequently asked questions that you get or are common in your industry.  If you don’t currently have a FAQ page on your site and want to create one, go to Google and enter FAQ <industry>  and substitute your industry name in the query. This is something I’ll be adding to my site.

For your resources page, you want to add links to credible sites.  For example, I’ll be creating a resources page for all the tools I use in my business, which will link me to highly reputable suppliers like ConvertKit and a2Hosting.

3.  Blogging:  Your blog needs to be on the same site as your primary website in order to ensure that your primary site is getting credit for any traffic generated to your blog.  So, that means if your blog is still sitting at WordPress.com or on Typepad,com, for example, export those posts to your current site.  This is easiest if your current site is a WordPress site.

Google loves blog posts, and apparently indexes them differently than articles on a static page.  So, if you have your content on static pages rather than blog posts, now is a great time to get that content into a blog.

Google still loves new content, so the more blog posts you create and publish, the more attractive your site becomes to Google.  And, as tempting as it might be, limit each post to one category in your blog.  Google doesn’t like it when you choose multiple subject categories for each post.

4. Videos:  If videos aren’t a part of your content strategy, then they need to be!  Videos are hot, hot, hot!  For best optimization of your video, whether it is on Youtube or your website, post a transcript of the content of the video to get the most Google juice.  Remember, Google is indexing content, so that transcript makes your video much more likely to appear in Google search results.

Optimally, videos should be 2-3 minutes in length.  If it’s longer than than, you lose the attention of your viewers.

5. Keyword Research: When you’re planning keywords for your site, don’t forget to use buyer-centric keywords. Examples of these are:

• Where to buy X
• Where can I buy X
• Where can you buy X
• Buy X
• X for sale
• X for sale online
• Who sells X

Granted, these work better for products and services.  I’m not sure I’d use any of these to search for a professional service business.

6.  Responsive sites:  Last year Google decided to begin penalizing those web sites that are not mobile responsive.  This led to many WordPress theme developers adding mobile responsiveness to all new templates.

Of course, Google has a quick test to determine if your site is mobile friendly: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly

And, there is a very cool tool here that will show you how your site looks on mobile devices, plus give you suggestions on how you can make your site more mobile friendly. https://ready.mobi/

7. Lead Magnets: My biggest “a-ha” was about lead magnets that work.  I have been hearing that shorter, checklist-type or tool or resource-type work better than anything to entice visitors or readers to sign up for your opt-in bribe.  However, Tom made a very good point that I hadn’t considered.  He said that if you give away a resource, like a PDF file or video, the person will most likely sign up with an email address that s/he doesn’t check often, but will use on occasion to retrieve whatever lead magnet lands in her inbox.

However, if you use an ecourse in which you put the content in the ecourse itself, the person will be more likely to use an email address that s/he uses regularly, as that person will want to access the content that you’re sending.  I had never thought about an ecourse like this!

I’m going to test this out and see what I discover. What I will be doing is putting one tool, strategy, etc. per email rather than lumping everything together in one download. You could do the same with multiple videos (chop up a longer video into 2 minute segments).

In addition, each email should contain 90% content and 10% sales info.

If you want to get great insights like these, check out the ButtCamp recordings at https://donnarecos.com/buttcamp for $247.