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Having launched more than 100 specialist content websites for clients over the last six months, I often get asked this question. My answer is always twofold.

Over the long term, which I suggest is 12 to 24 months, good-quality, highly focused and regularly updated content websites will triumph.

Google and the search engines are getting far better at separating the wheat from the chaff. They are 100% focused on finding the best content for each particular search request.

Once the search engines have visited your site and made an initial positive assessment, they will keep coming back and re-indexing your content. The more content you publish, the more frequently they will return. The more they like what they see, the higher they will rank you on the search results pages. The higher up the results list you appear, the more people will see your links and click on them. Hopefully, some of these visitors like what they read so much that they link to it from their websites or blogs. These inbound links from other sites are seen as positive endorsements of your content by the search engines, which respond by improving your site’s position on the search results pages.

And so the virtuous circle goes on and the traffic to your website increases.

The moral of this story is: keep publishing great content and don’t give up just because you don’t see instant results.

But this all takes time.

What can you do if you want to increase the number of visitors coming to your website?

There is a lot you can do. In fact, if you undertook all the activities that could build traffic, you would have no time to create content.

So where should you focus your early marketing efforts to get the greatest long-term benefits?

The answer is to build your presence, reputation and authority with your target audience so that you have a firm foundation of loyal and supportive readers who will help spread the word about you and your site.

To achieve this goal in the shortest possible time, you should focus on the handful of people in your market who can make a big difference. They will be characterized in the following ways:

1. They have a relevant audience of their own, probably via their own website or blog.
2. They have a good reputation for being authorities in your sector.
3. They are interested in what you write about.
4. They have shown they are happy to provide links from their site to other websites.

These are the people you need to engage with, so they will talk about you and what you have to say. If you are mentioned in articles written by perceived experts, you become endorsed as an expert yourself. This will bring targeted and relevant traffic to your website and will start building a loyal audience.

So how do you work with these very busy people who are continually being pestered for endorsements?

Here are some good ideas:

1. Get on the Radar - The best way to get on another blogger’s radar is to get him or her to see you as a useful and helpful ally. Most bloggers’ sites allow people to add comments after articles. The quality of these comments improves the site and turns it into a community. To get noticed, you should regularly add good-quality, well-thought-out comments on all the sites you want to work with.

2. Link to Their Blogs or Websites - Every successful blogger or website owner knows the importance of inbound links, so show your support by providing links to those sites, referring to specific articles (with links) and talking about them in comments and forums on other people’s websites.

3. Get in Contact - Once you have established yourself as a supporter, it is time to get in touch directly. But a word of warning; DON’T go straight in with a request for a link to your website. This will undo all the good work you have done so far. First you need to build a personal relationship, so think about how you can help the person be more successful. Here are some approaches that I know have worked:

a. Ask if you can do an interview, which you will publish on your site. Better still, make it a podcast that you publish on iTunes and similar sites.

b. Offer to write an article about a subject you know is highly relevant to that person’s audience for exclusive publication on his or her website. Try to become a regular guest writer.

c. Ask if you can republish on your website a specific article he or she has written.

d. If you have written an ebook, invite the person to be an official reviewer.

e. Ask him or her to comment on a particular article on your site that is relevant to something he or she has previously said.

4. Meet in Person - Nothing beats meeting in person to cement a relationship. Arranging to meet is usually best achieved at industry events, unless you are fortunate enough to live near the person.

5. Encourage Community on Your Website - Once you have engaged with all the key influencers in your sector, your ultimate goal is for them to start visiting your website regularly to see what you are writing about. When they visit, you ideally want them to leave comments or participate in your forum. For this to happen, you need to have created a community where you are visible and active.

Summary

Engaging with and being recognized by the key online movers and shakers in your niche is one of the fastest ways to build a core audience and credibility. Do everything you can to help these people become successful, and you will reap the rewards. Remember, to have friends you’ve got to be a friend!

Author:  SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to rapidly design, build and run your own content website. Publish for profit on the web. Website: http://www.subhub.com SubHub Articles Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SubhubStartASubscriptionOrMembershipWebsite-OnlineMagazineOnlineJournalOnlineNewsletter?format=xml

Writing a regular ezine (online newsletter) can sometimes feel like hard work. So if you’re putting in the time and effort to give your readers valuable content, consider implementing at least a few of the strategies in this article to help your efforts pay off in profits.

Here are 4 ways to help your ezine make you more money:

1. Self-promote

Besides giving valuable content in each issue of your ezine, don’t forget to add a little self-promotion as well. After all, it is one of your best marketing tools, and you want to make sure that you’re letting your subscribers know what products and services you have available for them. It’s best to do this in a separate section of your ezine, instead of in the copy of the article you write for your readers. A short blurb about you and what you offer, as well as a bit about one of your products and services with a link to more information is all you really need to do.

A tip: If space allows, consider adding one or two short testimonials from your clients/customers who are raving fans, too.

Depending on the method through which you are publishing your ezine, you can track how many times your links are clicked on, which gives you valuable market research information about what your readers are interested in finding out more about.

2. Give Options

If you are a service professional, know that there are many people who would like to hire you one-on-one but that option doesn’t fit into their budget just yet. If you offer them other options, and promote those offerings in your ezine, you’ll turn some of those prospects into paying clients.

For example, if you coach or consult one-on-one, consider offering a group coaching program with a price point that would be much more accessible than your private fees would be. Or take your knowledge and package it into an ebook, or a series of teleseminars, or an ecourse, and price them reasonably. Then promote them in your ezine.

3. Offer specials

Your readers may find the content of your free ezine valuable and would really like more, but they might need a bit of encouragement to buy from you. So give your subscribers a special discount on something you offer, with a time limit for purchasing (which really does encourage people to “act now”).

For example, offer a 2-for-1 deal on your ebooks, or 20% off one of your programs if they register within a week. This strategy will move some of your readers from the “free” part of your funnel into the “fee” part of your funnel, which is exactly what you want.

4. Offer recommendations

I get so many questions about the services I use in my business that I periodically give recommendations in my ezine. These products and services are ones I truly believe are of high quality, because I have used them personally or because they come highly recommended to me by my mentor coaches. Some of these I am a reseller of (an affiliate), meaning I make a small commission on every sale I refer, and others are products and services I love and know would be of value to my subscribers.

Don’t forget that your number one priority with your ezine is to provide valuable content for your subscribers. Proportion 10-20% of your content with promoting you and your offerings, and you will be working smarter and not harder.

Also remember that with each issue you put out, you are building trust and rapport with your list, becoming known as an expert in your niche, and gaining lots of exposure (especially if you submit your ezine articles to article submission services), all of which are so important to the overall success of your business.

Author:  Alicia M Forest, MBA, Multiple Streams Queen & CoachT, founder of ClientAbundance.com and creator of 21 Easy & Essential Steps to Online Success SystemT, teaches professionals how to attract more clients, create profit-making products and services, make more sales, and ultimately live the life they desire and deserve. For FREE tips on how to create abundance in your business, visit http://www.ClientAbundance.com.

There are many keyphrase tools out there, but any quality search engine optimization company should know that they are in no way replacements for true market research. When one is embarking on a campaign of marketing on the Internet, it is important to select keyphrases that represent an understanding of one’s audience. In this article, we’ll discuss two crucial aspects of keyphrase research that your search engine optimization company should be taking into consideration: knowing the prospect and knowing the company.

Knowing the Prospect

There are many powerful and specific keyphrases available from which a search engine optimization company can choose to bring traffic to your site. But marketing on the Internet should go beyond traffic for the sake of traffic and instead focus on getting the right traffic. A search engine optimization company can target a phrase that is very popular, but 90 percent of those searching on it will not be true prospects. Or, the company can target a phrase that might be less popular in general but that is more likely to bring in the right types of prospects. Guess which is easier. Guess which is more effective.

For the best results when marketing on the Internet, you can segment your prospects in three ways:

• By geographic region
• By level of service desired
• By place in the buying cycle

By Geographic Region

If your business only offers services in a particular part of the country, then you don’t need to be marketing on the Internet with generic phrases that will bring in people who cannot take advantage of your company. A knowledgeable search engine optimization company will suggest specific phrases with geographic modifiers to bring in the traffic that will be most helpful for you.

For example, the keyphrase “real estate agent” may bring in a great deal of traffic, but if you are in Georgia and the searcher is looking for a home in California, this isn’t helpful. Instead, your search engine optimization company would target “Atlanta real estate agent” and you would see true leads coming to your website.

By Level of Service Desired

Another way to target your keyphrases when marketing on the Internet is by the level of service desired by your customers. For this, your search engine optimization company will want to find out from you (or your sales department) what types of customers you attract.

For example, if you are an email marketer that offers high-level packages and when you are marketing on the Internet you use the phrase “email marketing,” you will again be attracting a large amount of traffic that is not really interested in your services. Your search engine optimization company should instead be targeting a keyphrase like “premium email marketing,” which may be less popular but will still bring in more leads than the generic phrase.

By Place in the Buying Cycle

Your search engine optimization company should be asking you what your goal is for marketing on the Internet. You may want to be the information source when someone is looking for your type of service, or you may instead want to be the destination when a prospect is ready to close the deal – or possibly a combination of both.

So if you are a real estate firm that is marketing on the Internet, you have two directions in which you can go. Your search engine optimization company can target phrases like “Atlanta real estate,” which will bring in prospects that are early in the process and looking for general information about the area. In this case, you would want to make sure you have whitepapers and other informational pages available on your site.

You can also target a phrase like “Atlanta real estate agents,” which is more likely to be searched on by someone who is ready to buy a home in the area. Those searchers will come to your site ready to close the deal. A good search engine optimization company will ask you the right questions before research even begins to find out which of these phrases would work better for your strategy, or to determine whether both types would give you benefits when marketing on the Internet.

Knowing the Company

In much the same way, marketing on the Internet should involve knowing the specific goals of your company. Your search engine optimization company can hone your keyphrases in three ways:

• Those that bring in higher margin business
• Those that boost underperforming business areas
• Those that focus on new services

Those that bring in higher margin business

Your search engine optimization company can focus your marketing on the Internet toward products and services that bring in the highest margin. This is preferable to treating all of your products and services, and therefore all of your keyphrases, equally. For example, you may have two lines of business – one that nets 30 percent and one that nets 70 percent. If your keyphrases focus too heavily on the business that nets 30 percent, the overall effect will be a decrease in margins across the board. Conversely, focusing on the business that nets the larger percentage will bring you an increase.

Those that boost underperforming business areas

Your search engine optimization company can also find out from you which areas of your services or which products haven’t gotten enough attention, and can focus on those. Your strategy of marketing on the Internet could then bring in fresh leads for those areas. For example, you may have a line of business that is underperforming, and it has been made known by the powers-that-be that this lagging area needs improvement. Your search engine optimization company should be aware of this issue, because it can allocate a sizable number of keyphrases to this underperforming sector. If you don’t give your SEO firm this information, whether it asks or you volunteer, your keyphrases may be allocated equally, and you will lose the chance for this boost.

Those that focus on new services

If you let your search engine optimization company know about products or services you have in your pipeline, it can start searching for appropriate keyphrases early on. Then you can start getting traction ahead of time, rather than waiting until your product is already out to start your marketing on the Internet in that area. If your SEO firm asks you what is coming up for your business, let the company know about any initiatives up front.

Conclusion

When you target your prospects while marketing on the Internet, the benefits will become clear very quickly. And when you target specific areas of your business and do not treat all of your keyphrases equally, you will see the results in the places that matter most.
Plus, you will save your sales department a great deal of time because they will no longer be tied up with bad leads from people finding your site for services you do not provide. Instead, the leads will already have been filtered and your sales people can close more deals.

Author:  Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was recently named the number one search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld.  Scott has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide.  Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

Many consider affiliate marketing as the easiest and fastest way to earn money online. But don’t be fooled if you think there’s no work involved. You CAN earn a 6 figure income through affiliate marketing. But you need to be smart, take action, and most of all you need to make your business unique.

Today I’ll point you in the right direction for being smarter and more unique. You’re the one who has to take action!

You must have your own website or multiple sites that are yours. I’d recommend you avoid the cookie cutter sites that hundreds of others get for free. Sure… they’re easy to implement and convenient. But you’ll be shooting your self in the foot. NOT unique.

Quite often your market will need repeated exposure to your marketing message. And you can do that with your own memorable domain name and unique site. Imagine what a potential customer thinks if they have already seen many sites similar to yours? Then it doesn’t matter really who they buy from.

Your marketing message gets diluted and you’ll only be hurting your own business.

People get bombarded every day by hundreds of ads everywhere they go. So create your own unique ads, banners, whatever you plan to use. It’s the same idea behind having your own website.

You NEED to be unique in every way.

In time, or sooner if possible, create one or two of your own products to market to your affiliate list. ( You ARE capturing names and emails and creating your list… right?) If you have difficulties with product creation, you can try getting master rights or resell rights only if you can find something good and NOT old. And then try to make it your own as much as possible. Be creative and you’ll see what you can do!

Build a strong relationship with your list. These are current and potential customers.

You’ll get lots of questions from potential customers about your affiliate products. So the ideal is to buy the product, or products, you’re promoting so you can speak from authority. That’s best!

People love experts and those in the know. You’ll be marketing from a position of strength when you know all about the product. And that fact will come through in your marketing communications.

When you’ve bought and used the product your support will be better. You can even create stand alone tutorials you can use as bonuses. Be creative.

Also, you may buy a product and discover it’s horrible and worthless. And that will save you. It’s much, much more difficult to rebuild your credibility than it is to create it.

As much as some marketers will have you believe… your list is NOT an ATM machine. Although when you’ve done your work sometimes it can seem like it when everything is working as it should.

So don’t try to market everything you come across to your list. Be selective. Be smart. Think about the number of times you email your list on a monthly basis. Then use that number to determine how many times you’ll promote something to it. And please…

Only provide good, high quality information to your list. When you do, you’ll find them much more receptive and responsive to your offers.

Remember… the customer decides what to buy and not you. You, the affiliate marketer, simply offers, or produces, products catering to the needs and wants of your target market. It’s about them, not you.

Author:  A former college dropout, Dan “The Man” Lok transformed himself from a grocery bagger in a local supermarket to an internet multi-millionaire. Discover how you can maximize your website profits in minimum time. For a limited time, you can test-drive Dan’s Insiders Club for 30-days Risk-Free and get $1,165 dollars worth of bonus gifts. Rush cover to: http://www.websiteconversionexpert.com/testdrive.html

More and more companies are using RSS as a means to communicate, so having an RSS feed that is professional and well polished will help differentiate your company from your competition. What makes an RSS feed professional? Follow these simple steps to polish your RSS feed and take it to the next level…

1. Feed Image
Add an image to your RSS feed. The image will be displayed by many feed readers each time your feed is displayed. This will help build and reinforce your brand or image in the minds of people who read your RSS feed. Adding an image to an RSS feed is relatively easy, and adds a level of professionalism.

2. Images And Links
Add images and links within the RSS feed. The process of adding images and links to the description field of an RSS feed is really quite simple if you are using software to manage your feed, while it may be somewhat complex if you are hand-coding your feed. Incorporating images or hot links in the feed’s content will allow your readers to explore further and dig deeper into your content. The added benefit, of course, are the additional web links back to your site from any sites that choose to syndicate or display your feed’s contents.

3. Validate
Properly formed code is important, in order to ensure that all RSS readers can read and display your feed. But it is also very important for another reason… nothing is more embarrassing or unprofessional than an RSS feed that is broken or stops working. Use software to manage your feed creation, and validate your feed on a regular basis.

4. Easy To Subscribe
Make your RSS feed easy to subscribe to. Include the traditional RSS icon, or an indicator site-wide, so that website visitors can easily locate and subscribe to your RSS feeds. Include basic directions on how website visitors should subscribe to your RSS feed.

5. Auto Discovery
Add “auto-discovery” code to the HTML header of your website. Many RSS aggregators include an auto-discovery feature, which allows them to automatically detect when a website offers an RSS feed. So, if your website visitors are using one of those aggregators, they will instantly know that an RSS feed for your content is available from your website.

Instantly create auto discovery code - http://www.feedforall.com/autodiscovery.htm

6. Favicon
Add a “favicon” to your website. Favicons (short for “favorite icons”) are typically a tiny version of a company or Web site’s logo, and appear in the URL bar of the user’s web browser. When a user bookmarks a specific Web page that includes a favicon, that Web page loads the customized icon into the user’s browser. Because the favicon is usually displayed next to the web site address, it can act like a small logo or an icon that visitors can use to remember the web site or the site address. Feed directories and RSS Search Engines will often use a favicon beside an RSS feed’s listings. So be sure that you have one on your website; otherwise, you’ll have nothing but a generic icon beside your feed. Webmasters can establish branding by creating a favicon for their website. Here is a free service from HTMLKit: http://www.html-kit.com/favicon

7. Subscribe To Your Own Feed
Always subscribe to your RSS feed, so you can see what your website visitors are seeing.

While it is not essential to incorporate the above elements in your RSS feed, the additions will result in a more professional and polished RSS feed that stands apart from competitors in news aggregators and RSS directories. Spending a few extra minutes here could easily draw more attention to your feed.

Author:  Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com audio recording and editing software.

The search engine optimization (SEO) industry continues to grow everyday. In just the past three years, SEO spending has increased in the neighborhood of 400%, and this trend is forecasted to increase even more in the near future. This year alone, over $1 trillion will be allocated to online marketing efforts.

Yet while search engine optimizers (SEO’s) have continued to use many of the same methods to increase the visibility and positioning of their clients’ websites in search results, the search engines themselves have continued their evolution. Now SEO’s must do the same in order to keep up with the constantly evolving search engine algorithms of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and a number of others.

Within the past year, many companies have no doubt noticed large relevancy fluctuations in the search engine rankings. While most SEO’s keep scratching their heads and wondering what happened, others research and test to identify the cause of these changes. Then they use these findings to alter their online optimization strategies. But just how have these algorithms evolved? More importantly, what can we as SEO’s do to retain top positioning?

One reason for this shuffling of results has been attributed to the inclusion of latent semantic indexing (LSI) technology into the search engine algorithms. Google, in fact, implemented LSI into its algorithm a few years ago and has continued to use it since.

But what is LSI and how does it affect page rank? LSI is a system that allows search engines to identify what a page is about beyond matching the specific search query text. In other words, LSI looks for word relationships within page content, just like a human being would do. It determines the keywords of a page and then looks for related words that are semantically close. Therefore, LSI grants related words within page content a higher importance and value, while lowering the value of pages that only contain specific keywords and lack related terms.

Yet while LSI technologies don’t understand the meaning of any of these words, the phrase relationships they identify between words are a major determinant of search engine positioning. For example, a page about McDonald’s will naturally contain terms such as “hamburgers” or “Happy Meals.” For this reason, pages that target a range of related keywords within the page content often have higher and more stable rankings for their primary keywords.

But how do we know what words or phrases Google would consider to be related? The best way to discover these semantic relationships is to perform a search of Google with the tilde (~) character in front of your query. For example, type “~hamburgers” into the search box and Google will return pages with bolded related terms. A search for “~hamburgers” returned the related terms “fast food,” “ground beef,” “burger,” and even “fast food restaurant.” Thus, Google expects to see related words like these within the contextual content of a page targeting the term “hamburger.”

As you can see, when performing search engine optimization, it is advantageous to error on the side of too much information than not enough due to the fact that LSI expects to see related words and phrases.

This is especially true because Google uses LSI to evaluate the relevancy of your website’s link profile. This means that Google identifies how relevant each of your external and internal links are to your keywords and website as a whole. This fact is another great reason to mix the anchor text of your links. If all your links are based around a particular phrase and never mention any related or similar phrases, your site’s ranking will suffer thanks to Google’s LSI algorithm.

As search engine algorithms continue to evolve and come ever closer to mimicing human behavior in order to return the most relevant results, we as SEO’s must do our best to present page content in a way that is most useful to users. The power of latent semantic indexing to identify relationships between words, within content, and even between pages is changing the way search engines determine relevancy results and position. As SEO’s, we must utilize the power of latent semantic indexing to diversify our pages or we’ll be forced to watch them slowly fade away.

Author:  Nick Yorchak is an SEO expert and Search Engine Marketing Specialist at Fusionbox, a full-service Denver Internet marketing, web design, and web development company. He can be reached at his Fusionbox email (nyorchak@fusionbox.com) or at (303)952-7490.

Web analytics has been around for a long time but only in the last few years has it grown to provide data more useful to online shops and websites. The basic web analytics services were based off log files, and this service usually came packaged along with your hosting server. It simply worked by tracking each action conducted on your website as a hit and then converted this data into reports. In the following years it moved on from using log files to using transparent images to track the visitors directly. This opened a whole new line of data for web entrepreneurs to use their arsenal for better web promotion.
WHY TRACK?

The simplest answer would be to improve on your website’s purpose. But this is only possible if you correctly use the statistical information you have collected on your visitors. A basic analytics program would tell you six things:

1. NUMBER OF VISITORS
To see growth and also better understand your visitors and fluctuation of traffic on a hourly, daily and monthly basis. This helps better sell your advertising space once you have an idea of the exposure your website has.

2. PAGE VIEWS
Find out how many impressions you have and if visitors see more than a single page on your website before exiting. This would help pinpoint any webpages on your website that are not ’sticky’ which you can then improve on.

3. ENTRY/EXIT
See which webpage your visitor entered from and where they left your website. Sometimes you would be able to see if certain webpages made your visitors felt lost or just didn’t display user-friendly navigation to allow them to move on to your target pages.

4. REFERRERS
Is your website positioned well in search engines or do you mainly receive traffic from other websites and banner advertising. Find your website’s strengths and weaknesses and see what needs to be done to improve overall.

5. SEARCH PHRASES
Sometimes visitors find your website using keywords you wouldn’t expect. One of the quickest ways to increase traffic to your website would be to find keywords your website is popular for and build more pages based around those words. It is difficult to sometimes tell why search engines choose your website as the source of information for a certain keyword but knowing it will help you capitalize on the situation and not waste your time and resources focusing on less frequently occurring keywords searches.

6. GEOGRAPHICAL / SYSTEM INFORMATION
This is a broad array of information covering where your visitor is located, his PC and browser information plus various other details that would help you better build your website to suit your public. A simple example would be that if most of your visitors are using Internet Explorer browser in 640×480 resolution then it would be very important your website look nice and usable at that settings.

NEW LINE: ECOMMERCE
As websites grew more complex and online shopping became a norm, web entrepreneurs needed more information to better server their shoppers. This gave light to a new list of statistical information that would prove very useful, mainly the following three:

1. REVENUE TRACKING
Is your traffic converting to sales? Which keyword do customers type in search engines that actually go on and convert to sales? Find out this and more to better target your products to customers.

2. CAMPAIGN TRACKING
Due to the competitive nature of online shopping, advertising is standard practice for ecommerce websites. Popular advertising services such as Google Adwords, Overture and MSN AdCenter allow websites to make quick sales with no downpayment, strictly on a per-click basis. But how do you know which advertising campaign has a good ROI. Collecting information on this helps you better decide where to invest your advertising dollar for maximum effectiveness.

3. CLICKPATHS
The main focus of ecommerce websites is to make the sale. Once your visitor has found the product they are put through a series of pages to make the purchase. Obviously you can’t guide them through the whole process in person but if you could see the path they had taken it would be as good. Find out where your customers get stuck, at which checkout step they decide to leave your website or look for your FAQs page. This information will make your website more user-friendly and in turn help you increase sales.

BOTTOM LINE
Statistics is a very important aspect of any website. It covers a wide gambit of points that website owners should be aware of in order to effectively optimize their website. This includes popularity i.e. website growth, advertising space value and maximizing conversion of sales. But this is all only useful if you know how to properly utilize it. Basic statistics is easy to understand for any beginner but if you run an ecommerce or high traffic website with valuable advertising space it is highly recommended you get in touch with a professional to guide you through how to read the reports and properly utilize the results.

Author:  As Internut’s Projects Director, Vinay Gorasia has successfully managed analytics campaigns for small start up to Fortune 500 companies. All solutions are custom designed to increase productivity of every website by providing relevant statistics. To find out more visit http://www.internut.com.my today.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has been referred to as a “pull” technology rather than a “push” technology. Similar with autoresponder, this technology allows people to keep up-to-date with new information without having to visit the site that provides the information every day. However, the capabilities of RSS technology have made many people believe that RSS publishing will replace email marketing.

Nowadays, people have realized the importance of using spam filter to catch spam emails. Thus you need to think about avoiding your email messages from getting caught by spam filtering software. With RSS, there is no risk that your messages will end up in spam folders. RSS is a much less intrusive way to communicate with potential or existing clients and customers.

RSS can help you drive traffic to your website too. This is done by submitting your feed information to RSS directories and search engines. Moreover, some webmasters might use your RSS feed to provide dynamic contents on their websites. Allowing others to publish your contents will drive more visitors to your website.

Without RSS, if a webmaster find your article and wanted to display it on his site, he would need to copy that article and integrate it into his template file. With RSS, this time consuming and tedious process can be eliminated. Publishing contents which are created by others can be performed automatically with software like Carp.

However, although RSS enables you to perform various marketing tasks which cannot be performed by using email, there are times where email marketing tools such as autoresponder come into play. It is arguable that email marketing will still be around for quite a long time. Even many successful marketers today still market their products on the internet by utilizing autoresponder.

Until today, autoresponder is still used for sending out follow up messages. This marketing tool allows you to personalize your messages with subscriber’s name and other personal data. Personalizing your autoresponder messages will most likely improve your response rate. Research has shown that personalized emails are opened more often, and people are generally more receptive to the contents of the email message. Although possible, it is still uncommon to perform such activity with the ordinary RSS technology.

Many autoresponder services and software also enable you to setup a thank-you page easily that can be utilized to perform something likes displaying a One Time Offer to new subscribers. Thank-you page is a good place to recommend other similar products or services. There are many sales that have been made by using this marketing technique.

When someone places an order through your website, autoresponder enables you to immediately acknowledge the purchase. This email marketing tool also gives you chances to ’speak’ to him/her in the future. For instance, to let him know about other products that work well or similar with the one that he purchased. If you have a good relationship with your customers, they will be anticipating your new offers.

So far RSS has proven itself as becoming the preferred method of distributing news and information online. This technology has been widely used to deliver headlines, links or virtually any other piece of information to news readers. In addition, submitting RSS feeds to directories and search engines has become a popular way to drive more visitors.

In summary, there are times when RSS is a preferred method to perform particular tasks. On the other hand autoresponder is still an important marketing tool. Modern autoresponders provide various controls which are needed for marketing or sales applications. Although many marketers claim that email marketing is dead with the increasing of spam complaints, the reality is many companies, even the reputable ones, still use emails to perform various marketing tasks such as to develop a relationship with potential customers.

Author:  Heris Yunora ImmediateReply.com - Tips to find a reliable automatic responder to perform permission based email marketing.

Search Submit Pro (SSP) is designed primarily for large direct and brand marketers. With Search Submit Pro, Yahoo! crawls your web site as well as an optimized XML feed that represents the content on your site. Yahoo! applies its algorithm to both the actual web site pages and the XML feed to determine which listing is most appropriate to appear in the organic search results when a user conducts a search for relevant terms. Yahoo! charges a CPC, determined by category, for each time a listing established through SSP is clicked on. The CPC charged is usually significantly cheaper than the CPC the site is paying in paid search.

Components of a Yahoo! SSP feed

For every URL that is submitted, the following corresponding XML components must be present in the feed:

Doc URL – the landing page URL of the page submitted; this will appear as the URL under the search listing

Title – the title of the page, which will also serve as the title in the search results

Description – summary of the content on the page; will also appear as the search result description

Body – additional copy that explains the content a user would find on the page

Keywords – a list of 12 keywords that the page is most relevant to

Tracking URL – if you want to track the placement through a third party ad serving platform such as Atlas, Doubleclick or a third party analytics package, you would include the appropriate tracking URL information here. This URL is not visible to the user.

How to get started

If you are a web marketer and are interested in having your site participate in SSP the first step is to contact your Yahoo! rep or a trusted reseller of feeds. A trusted reseller is a company that has demonstrated to Yahoo! through a lengthy testing period that it has the technology, experience, and ability to produce high quality feeds on behalf of clients.These resellers have partnerships with, and work very closely with, Yahoo! to deliver the best results for clients. While marketers could work directly with Yahoo!, the majority work with resellers as usually there isn’t an additional fee for doing so. Yahoo! shares a percentage of the click costs with resellers as Yahoo! recognizes the value that the resellers bring to the table in providing a level of editorial review, optimization, reporting, and customer service.

The next step is to determine which pages should be submitted through SSP. The majority of sites submit their home page (which is referred to as a TLP - Top Level Page), category pages and product pages. If you are working with Yahoo! or a reseller, usually you will need to provide a raw data feed of these pages that will be used to build the optimized XML feed. This shouldn’t be a difficult task for an IT team as the information required typically exists in a database.

If you are only going to be submitting the home page and category pages and these pages don’t change very often, then a raw data feed is not necessary as the information can easily be pulled directly from these pages. In some cases, when it is not possible for a marketer to pull a raw data dump, a reseller might employ crawling technology on the site to pull the needed data. This should be a last resort; as even the best crawling technology will not capture the full site, it will run into the same types of problems that search engine spiders do.

Optimizing a paid inclusion feed

Once the data is acquired it is time to build the optimized XML feed. Like a shopping feed, you can make modifications to your feed (within reason) to be more “optimized” both for keywords and for user clicks. You can control the copy on your listing in the organic results.
Building an optimized XML feed is similar in some cases to optimizing meta data and web copy for SEO. The first step is keyword research to determine phrases that lead to a large amount of traffic and/or conversions. It is important that the title, description, body, and keyword field for each URL contain keyword-rich copy specific to that URL.
In 2006 Yahoo! rolled out a new feature called Quick Links, which should also be considered when building the TLP feed.
Yahoo! is allowing advertisers in SSP who submit their TLP page to utilize Quick Links. These can be about 30 characters in length and are used to lead users to deeper pages in the site that might relevant to their immediate needs. For example, a user searching on “ING” could now click directly to the mortgage, savings account, or certificate of deposit section of the site. Yahoo! is reporting that only 1-5% of the clicks on the TLP are generated through the Quick Links. However, these clicks do tend to convert higher, and just the presence of Quick Links helps the listing to stand out in the search results.

SSP Reporting

Sites participating in SSP also have access to extended reporting for traffic generated through the SSP program, which can provide interesting insight to search marketing campaigns since traffic is supposedly “organic” and not part of clearly disclosed advertising section. Advertisers can see the following:
Clicks per URL
Top Clicks
Click Data
URL Status Data
Feed Status
Impressions
Share of Voice
Demographic Insights - age, gender
Geographic Insights - DMA, state, time zone
SSP offers several advantages over regular crawling:

• Capture dynamic or seasonal content
  • Ensure all relevant products/information are represented in Yahoo!
  • Drive traffic to popular information/new products
• Better control of titles and descriptions
• Improve CTR by utilizing customized, fresh messaging
• Targeted marketing messages
• Sync offline/online messaging
• Include seasonal promotional messaging
• Include sale/discount/free shipping promotional messaging
• Less than 48-hour refresh
  • Quickly add new products/content to Yahoo! Search
  • Quickly remove products/content that are out of stock or out of date
  • Fast optimization of titles and descriptions based on best performance
• Insights and reports
  • Demographic / geographic insights
  • Keyword discovery
    • Find valuable “tail” keywords to add to Sponsored Search campaigns

SO why isn’t everybody participating in Yahoo! SSP? First, many marketers are not aware of the program; and second, some are concerned that they might be paying for traffic that they would otherwise be getting for free in the organic search results. This will probably differ by advertiser and would depend on the extent of their paid search program, percentage of overall pages listed in Yahoo, the current organic rankings for these pages, the marketability of the title and descriptions for these listings, and the need to get information into the search results in a timely manner.

Author:  Rob is the founder of Avenue A| Razofish’s search engine optimization department. He serves as the senior search engine optimization expert for the agency, and oversees the agency’s feed management offering. In addition he sets the strategic vision for all organic search technology product development initiatives for Avenue A| Razorfish.

Whether you built your business website or not, you need to learn about SEO. Search Engine Optimization is the key to getting your website in the forefront of visitors’ minds. Based upon the idea that the more keywords you have in your site, the more likely you will match the visitor’s query, SEO is the hot topic of debate among those with websites. And with its ever changing rule system, you need to find out what the rules actually are and how to use them to your advantage.

SEO is More Than Keywords

It seems simple enough ‘ add more keywords and you will rank higher in search engine listings. This used to be the main rule for websites, but things have changed. Though you are still ranked according to how many keywords you have in your site, it’s also ranked according to how many other related keywords you have as well as other factors. In the ‘old’ days, websites used to just stuff their sites with keywords, making the text unreadable and often unrelated to the visitor’s search. Those in charge of the ranking system realized just how easy this rule could be manipulated, so you should think about more than just the keywords.

SEO Works for Websites

But while it sounds like it’s getting trickier, SEO does work and you can make it work for you. Once you learn the rules of SEO, you will be able to see a large jump in your page’s relevance on the search engine result page. And what’s more, the more people who come to your site because of this jump, the higher your site will be in the listings over the long haul.

SEO Requires Quality Articles

One of the first things you need to keep in mind for writing the text of your website is that the text needs to be relevant to what you are selling. For example, though ‘vacations’ is an often searched for term in search engines, you can’t put a bunch of travel articles on your website to get people to come to your site when you are selling bowling balls. You need to create content that is interesting to the kinds of visitors you want on your site ‘ that will place you higher in the rankings. Try to build these articles around relevant keywords too, but use no more than 5% keyword density ‘ most experts recommend between 1 and 2% density.

SEO Needs to be Truthful

In the past, website developers used to try to ‘trick’ the search engines by creating invisible pages on their websites that were filled with keywords, driving traffic to their site, even if the keywords weren’t relevant. However, pages that do this now are going to be either banned or pushed far down the search engine result pages. Search engines are looking for this dishonest practice now, so it’s not worth trying to chance it.

SEO Will Probably Change

Of course, even though these are some of the rules of SEO these days, that doesn’t mean that things aren’t going to change in a few years. The rules are forever changing as technology changes and website developers figure out new ways to tip the search results in their favor. Try to keep informed about SEO by reading web developer sites and news stories about internet searches.

SEO isn’t something that you can simply ignore anymore or think isn’t relevant. Though you might not be able to simply stuff your website full of relevant keywords, you can use the new rules to your advantage.

Author:  Scott Oliver offers free video coaching to help you build a profitable home business FAST. Get an hour of “Website Traffic Secrets” and “Minisite Creation Tactics” for FREE — immediate access here: http://www.InstantWebsiteBusiness.com