I am starting to consider to promote my business through Google Adwords.
So I started to research a bit about it.
And found a review about a E-book called GoogleCash.
Has anyone read this e-book?
Is it any good?

The review is on this page
http://amazh.110mb.com/googlecash.php

I like the pictures of the co-founders but didn’t like the links to Wikipedia in their descriptions. Also, if they are “experts” in their field I would shy away from telling readers that they don’t know it all – contradictory. And, the links to Tele… and their other websites give the impression that they want readers to leave the blog.

All that said, I better go review my own site and look for the same issues.
Good luck,
Helene

I fall into your target audience as a partner in both a startup blog business and a brick and mortar small business. I looked at your site from the perspective of ‘what would it take for me to become a reader?’. In general, I recommend you follow your own advice in the article “The Secret to Marketing Your Small Business Online” – Focus. You’re trying to do too much at once at too high a level.

Here are my thoughts on the specific requested categories.

Design – The design is clean and tight but at the expense of being generic. To take it to the next level, the layout needs design elements that consistently show personality and authority. Choose an art direction (minimally an expanded color pallet and illustration or photographic style) and update the template. Be careful about standard business clip art that can come across as cliché (such as the two suits shaking hands in the networking article). It doesn’t have to be expensive or completely custom, but it needs to be unique and targeted (I don’t know many small business owners who wear suits very often.) Your mug shots are front and center. Make sure your business personality is too.

From a layout perspective, the articles themselves get a bit lost in all the blog craziness. There’s more widgets, forms and social media than article on many pages. While some of that is standard these days, I would try to focus attention on the articles more in your next design update. All those widgets and such are ok for tech-savvy users, but if your focusing on non-savvy users (perhaps the dry-cleaners down the street trying to figure out how to grow online), you could scare them away. The percentage of daily internet users who are knowledgeable of social bookmarking, RSS, etc. is VERY tiny.

Content – As a potential reader, I would like to see more targeted content. Is your target market seasoned business owners, or folks just getting started? Online companies or traditional? The content I read was extremely high level…often common sense or cheerleading material (Now is the age of the Entrepreneur). There’s certainly a case for some of that content, but I’ve started my businesses and don’t need encouragement. I want to see case studies with techniques backed by numbers on small business you have marketed. Instead of the Amazon widget for recommended reading, I want to see an article about each book you recommend and the high/lowlights (More “Dessert with Seth Godin”) Expand on articles like “Protect your business by Removing Pages from Google”. What if a crazy ex-employee gave me a bad online review? How do I handle those Google results? Solve problems. Show me your expertise, don’t tell me about it.

Consider making your articles more scanable. Users spend a few moments circling around and scanning an article before jumping in. I did this (ironically) with “Are you Playing Hide and Seek with Your Customers”. My eyes hit the bullet list but it took me too long to find the title of the list and each bullet is twice as wordy as necessary – it took me too long too decide if that article was relevant to me. As you know, your reader has to be hooked in that first few seconds.

Promotion – Think about running competitions giving away marketing advice packages to entrepreneurs who subscribe or comment on your articles. This serves two purposes – driving traffic and adding in-depth content. Use these winners as case studies on your blog – write about your recommendations and the results. Hmmm….sounds familiar…..

Let your reader’s ‘guest blog’ short snippets about successes they’ve had marketing their small businesses. Give prizes to the ones you publish – the prize could be an ad on your site.

SEO – I think you’ve got a pretty good start. There’s a few minor issues that have been mentioned – such as validation issues. I’d like to see a cleaner separation between CSS and the HTML…but really your energies are better spent on getting inbound links. You can tweak your code all day, but that last 10% of XHTML perfection isn’t going to matter as much as quality inbound links. Depending on your target market, you should really focus here. Growing links via social media is great for those in the know….but a good Google ranking will give you better traffic from the non-tech savvy.

Monetization – Money follows traffic and so traffic and credibility should be your first focus.

However, since you’re dabbling there already, I recommend you get away from sidebar ads/links and move more towards personal recommendations. Bundle your expertise (your articles) with outside products and tools. In addition to the books, consider recommending third party services (as an affiliate)…what online newsletter services (for instance) should I be using? Can you get me a discount if I sign up through your link? One of your articles should also walk me through my first newsletter. If you researched the top newsletter services, and walk me through the thought processes of my first newsletter…or hosting my first site…I’ll buy from you.

Congratulations again on being brave enough for a public review. I hope this feedback is helpful and that you get some great advice here with this contest.

The logo needs a lot of work. While I believe in less is more, I also believe there needs to be a balance. Marketme definitely has mileage. What it needs is some refreshment. Black blue and white is professional, it signifies trustworthiness and the bold, authority. But, I have to say the logo at the moment, looks as though it’s a local financial advisor, or a jobseeker’s portal.

A little bit more graphics won’t harm the layout, or credibility. For example, the links on the title bar. Perhaps using a custom font might be a good investment as it definitely stands out and I know when I see a website with a distinctive (AND FUNCTIONAL! not purely aesthetic) then I will definitely remember the site. Author’s pictures sometimes help.

I’d change the colors, the layout (overdone) but most of all I’d get rid of that box on the bottom with the text links, the option to validate code and log in. 99.9% of the people visiting the site aren’t going to want to validate your code, sorry. It looks like something they left in the template by accident. Yank it.

* Content
There’s a definite “sell your expertise by giving away as much knowledge as you can, not teasing” feel here. I appreciate it. Sites that only exist to funnel traffic to their legit arms are annoying and no one wants to read them. I know that by subscribing to the feed of this site I’d learn about internet marketing.

Now, that said I’m not so sure they are on the cutting edge of internet marketing (where you really want to be). Their biggest selling point is newsletters. Great, but kinda passe. They have a grand total of two articles on social networking. Neither goes into any depth or shows a knowledge of sites like Facebook or even a good knowledge of LinkedIN. Not instilling lots of confidence that these guys know how to take advantage of internet marketing.

* Promotion
They seem to be using Blogrush, which is a waste of time and space. My blog used it for a very short time. My articles showed up on other blogs tens of thousands of times and no one clicked. Horray. And people click my titles in Digg and other online places, so I know my titles don’t suck royally. They need to ditch this blog deadweight.

I don’t know who they’re marketing themselves to, but there are a billion websites out there who might be interested in using their services if they knew about them. These sites uses systems like Entrecard to find each other. Replacing Blogrush with Entrecard would probably work well for this specific site.

They need to focus on getting some smaller sites in their blogroll who might reciprocate with a link. On a usual day they’d get no linkback from this site, copyblogger or the like.

* SEO
Really not my field, on my own site I focus more on design. But from what little I know…I like their use of folders to organize their posts. That’ll help. Their titles need some work, they’re way too vague. Specifics seem to work well with titles.

* Monetization
My favorite part of the site. I reviewed a site recently that was trying to sell real estate and still had plenty of Adsense ads. These guys know their business is going to come from their other sites and their consulting business. They give away as much as they can and trust people will come to them. Bravo.

Content: With a domain name like marketme.com, I honestly expected to see more marketing-centric titles on the front page. Consider writing “roundup” style posts that leverage your expertise in this crucial area to seperate the wheat from chaff and encourage people to click — things along the lines of “6 Ways to Make Your Website a Viral Hit,” or “14 Revenue-Generating Tips for Writing AdWords Copy.”

Promotion: I think you’re missing an opportunity for your readers to promote you themselves by not including “Bookmark this” links on the article pages, versus having the readers click a link, to go to a website, to bookmark your page. Personally, I find having to go to a secondary site to chose how to bookmark material I’m interested in to be a bit of a turnoff. Lower the barrier to entry, and more people will take advantage.

SEO: Your article titles on the front page seem a little hit-or-miss. The “Are you playing hide and seek with your customers?” title is great for readers (it got my attention!), but only so-so for SEO. “Make small appear big” is probably a miss for both readers and bots alike — I’m not really sure what the article is about, and the excerpt wasn’t quite tailored enough to tell me what I needed to know. But “Is your website self-service or self-serving?” both got my attention and would probably get attention from the Googlebot as well. I’d recommend trying to shoot for a greater percentage of SEO-friendly titles, particularly if you’re considering this a readership-building phase.

Monetization: At first glance, I didn’t even know this site was monetized! Even on my 1280×1024 monitor, all of your sidebar ads appear below the fold. I would seriously consider reorganizing your sidebar to give your ads greater prominence. Perhaps move the “About the Authors” widget to below the fold. If your readers are interested enough to scroll your front page, they’re probably interested enough to learn more about the authors.

Sorry to say by first reaction is boring. Use graphics in your posts or on the pages to make it more pleasing to the eye. Maybe add a light backgorund color to the tight column. Cut back on the wasted white space between posts.

Content – Looks good but again boring. Find a way to have fun more from time to time or to be bold a opinionated. I liked the Dessert With Godin headline for example.

Try some list posts – Top 10 Rules That Every Small Business Marketer Should Never Forget – example. They not only score well with the search engines and get picked up by other bloggers they make good archive content for you. Speaking of that you need a best posts or top tips section with older posts.

Promotion – Leave smart comments on other business and marketing blogs, trade posts, trade ads with similar blogs.

SEO is not my area but it does not look like you are even using tags. Start.

Monetization – Don’t hesitate to well ad and use some biz related affinity programs. Everyone does it. But also considering writing your own e-book on the subject. Give away a couple of chapters as a “report” and sell the rest for $5-$10.

…that’s my opinion anyways =)

I really cannot make out from the “About” page if MarketMe offers marketing services or not..

Linking mechanics: I find a post in the Archives, read it, but then can’t directly go to the next or previous post by date – I hate that!

XHTML: Tim Paulino is an expert in Website Architecture but the site doesn’t validate.. hmmm.. worse, it’s all simple errors: &’s instead of & and upper case SCRIPT tags.
If Betty Boop or Joe Blow does this, well, who cares. When “experts” do it, I think you are sloppy.

I LIKE the look of the home page. Most bloggers won’t because it’s not what they are used to, but I think most ordinary readers will find it clean and attractive. Bloggers tend be be very conservative and suspicious of anything different :-)

Monetization? I dunno: if MarketMe IS selling services, then you don’t need any. If not, then yeah, there’s plenty of room here for ads. An ebook would be great – the content is good, so an ebook would be seen as a great buy. But don’t to the “free” path: I think you’ve good enough advice to sell it.

On the positive side, I like how minimal the header is in size. I think it allows for the most amount of content above the fold.

However this is where the trouble starts. I don’t think that they have utilized this ample space they have carved. The ads and their websites could easily be included at the top of the sidebar without losing the content that is currently there. If they are trying to gain revenues or promote their other websites, they are not helping themselves with the current layout.

Also, the small profiles of “Brandi and Tim” are not coded correctly. Brandi’s info moves down on the page when I view it. And they trade places when you move to the “about” page. I also think this info could be incorporated into a drop-down tab in the navigation header.

To help with their slogan, I would simply eliminate “internet marketing for small business.” Its implied in the next line anyways.

The content seems to be somewhat short or brief for the subject matter. I think a few longer, more focused posts would help. If they are worried about the reader getting bored with long-winded posts, they can use the techniques that Darren teaches (lists or using bold colorful texts and pictures to break the content up). I would also look to guest posts or interviews with marketing guru’s to make their content more lively and diverse. Possibly use some cross promotion with other marketing bloggers.

Lastly, “Practice what you preach!” I saw that used in one of their posts about Seth Godin’s book. If they are in the business to market their product, they really need to focus on grabbing the readers right away. Their site currently is just too vanilla (colors, content, layout).

Upon looking at their other sites, I see the same layout and templates used for those. It makes me wonder about the legitimacy of their company if 3 out of 4 of their websites are copycats of each other…?

There are some issues with the author’s bio box being messed up in IE 6. Brandi’s picture is outside and below the box in my IE 6 browser. I may be a dinosaur, but a big percentage of surfers still use IE 6.

I also agree that the tagling is way too long. Either the font should be made smaller or it should be shortened. It’s not a phrase many people will remember or recite to someone else.

As far a monetization goes, there isn’t any. Putting an Amazon widget at the bottom of the sidebar will take you a million years to earn $100. Get 4 125 x 125 banners at the top and sell private advertising. Anything is better than Amazon.