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If you are someone who has spent much time as an online publisher you may have had the experience of seeing your content show up on another website without your permission, and without any links to send its readers your way so that you might at least have a shot at getting their business. If so, you are most definitely not alone.

There are hundreds of thousands of prolific web content creators who are more than happy to share their product with others as long as their links go along, but all too often see their efforts simply hijacked, copyright laws notwithstanding. You may, in fact, have two or three favorite Internet authors without realizing that some of what they present may not be their work at all.

While the problem of web content theft may not have been going on too long at this point, there is a strong chance that it could grow to epidemic proportions as more and more advertising dollars in search of successful websites pour into the Internet.

It’s far cheaper for a website owner to simply search for well written copy to place on his or her site or blog, than to try actually pay for a ghost writer. If you’re a web content author, wouldn’t you like a foolproof way to keep track of where your content is being used, so that you can keep it out of the hands of those who want to present it as their own?

If you gave an emphatic Yes! in answer to that question, then you will definitely want to pay attention to a few tips on how to turn Google into your very own Sherlock Holmes and go on the offensive against content thieves.

* It’s an unfortunate truth that it takes a thief to catch a thief, so if you want to know where you copy has gone without your permission, you’ll have to learn to think like a plagiarist. When you enlist Google’s help, take it for granted that anyone who has borrowed your content without a library card will be smart enough to make a few changes in it to fool Google, and they will begin by giving it a new name.

* What you need to do is recall one of those splendid turns of phrase which brought a big smile to your face, or tear to your eye, when you first entered it on your keyboard. Hopefully it will be distinctive enough that your plagiarists will not have wanted to change it, and if they didn’t, Google will lead you straight to the den of thieves.

* One thing that may work in your favor is that if you have recently begun to publish on the web, Google will probably not have found you yet, so your early content will be safe from getting hijacked. But if you write as well as you think you do, you will eventually be discovered by an audience, and Google will notice your traffic.

* When that happens, anyone who happens to search on the topic of your writing might very well get directed to your work, and before you know it, your content will be showing up in the most unlikely places. If Google happens to return you search results with a message saying that it decided to omit those pages with similar entries, you have almost certainly stumbled into some of those places.

Hit the Google like to get to the unlikely places, and see if the writing on their walls isn’t very like the writing on your home website. Your home away from home, so to speak, except the owners would really prefer that you hadn’t dropped in!

* There are, however, limits to what Google will look for, and one thing it won’t look for is message board posts. Their content is simply too voluminous and changes too rapidly. If someone steals your incisive message board posts, you may simply have to let them go. So why not save your best work for your blog or website, where you’ll have a better chance of keeping tabs on what happens to it?

The web content theft issue, while it may not have been going on too long, and may not mean as much in dollar value just yet, is very similar to of the early days of Napster and MP3 music file sharing, when record companies and recording artists were being deprived of millions of dollars in royalties which were rightfully theirs.

If you’re writing web content, you deserve to get the sole credit for it, and if you’re paying to have web content written, you deserve to reap the full profits from it. So learn how to get Google on your side in the battle against web content theft, and when you catch a thief, don’t be afraid to take the next steps in protecting your rights!

Author:  Matt Garrett © 2007 www.CopyDefender.com | Protect Your Web Content Free automated website copy protection system! Web Content Protection

I am often reminded how important it is to develop a well thought out business plan. I speak with numerous clients each day, each having a passion to promote their service, information or product and yet although they may be experts in their field, they do not have the expertise or foresight on how to market the site. Often times the website is destined to stay in the closet and never get the online exposure they need and are hoping for. And often times the client lacks an objective perspective, sort of being amongst trees in a forest and not being able to see to whole picture.

The internet audience has matured and become more sophisticated in its expectations and delivery of information. No longer can one just throw up a site and expect to immediately generate business. Website readiness for online marketing can take many forms. In this and the articles that follow in the next few weeks, we will examine the building blocks to successful web marketing. We will look at:

1. How to work your marketing budget and timelines
2. How to work a realistic marketing business
3. Pitfalls of optimization
4. Most common mistakes
5. Optimization complete, now what?
6. Tiers for small -med -large business, how we customize them

Making informed decisions now will set the stage for easier transitions on future initiatives and this can help minimize your costly investments of time, labour and money. Your website should be viewed as a dynamic entity and it requires your consistent attention and nurturing. This is a cardinal rule.

The Building Blocks….

The following checklist is an excellent strategy for achieving superb organic visibility and stable placement in the search engines. It will also help increase visitor retention and conversion. This information is portable; it does not matter whether you are in the planning phases of starting an online business, already have an existing website or are in need to redesign your presence. Although many of these stages (phases) can run concurrently the list below is presented as what should be implemented first, prior to moving into the next phase.

1. Marketing budget and timeline development
2. Market research
3. Website design
4. Competitor analysis
5. Keyword research
6. Content creation
7. Content management system and or shopping cart creation
8. Search engine optimization (SEO)
9. Link building
10. Blogs, newsletters, articles
11. Social media
12. Website analytics
13. Pay-per-click marketing (PPC)

Of course, your marketing strategy will be determined on whether you will be intimately involved or delegating stuff in-house or out of house. Do you have the time, energy, expertise for any, some or all of these important tasks? Will you go the consulting route and implement their recommendations? Is your service or product time sensitive? Does it need to be sold by a certain date? Your strategy, timetable and budget will vacillate accordingly.

Perhaps the best actionable word I can offer is to “Focus”. Focus on what it is you are all about and what sets you apart from your competitors. This may sound simple enough, however, try writing down in one sentence what one message you want visitors to receive when they come to your website. Surprisingly, many site owners I speak with have not or cannot do this. Determining such clarity before starting anything else can pay dividends. For example, organic visibility and placement in the search engines largely has been considered a game of inches; will you take advantage of this opportunity and create a keyword enriched domain name?

Market research offers data rich and timely information on what your competitors are doing. This can be approached from two angles and really, it is about how you define your “competition”. Perhaps you are aware of competitor sites from within your industry and want to learn more about how they got to where they are in the search engine result pages. Odd as this may seem, this method for selecting which competitor sites to analyze may not be the most effective route to analyze your competition. These competitors may not be well placed in the search engines and may not be targeting the same keyword phrases that you are. Should this be true, why bother analyzing them. On the other hand, if you have already determined one of your site’s primary keyword phrases you can type it into a search engine and review the resulting index page and choose from the list. The difference here is an important one to consider. Here you select your keyword phrase target and see who is competing for that term. It is not necessarily important who that company is or even what industry they are in. The important consideration is who is on top of the list for the keyword phrase you are shooting for and you are looking for any ammunition you can get to leap frog over their position in the search engine results page.

Market research will produce a blueprint for your web marketing direction.

1. Competitor analysis reveals information about their keyword targets and how they are positioned in Google, Yahoo and MSN. In looking at several competitor sites one can construct a universe of keyword phrases that have proven successful in the search engines. Understanding this helps determine your keyword phrases and aid in the creation of textual content for your site.
2. Links can be analyzed for their reputation and their popularity. Where are they coming from and are they paid links or from a link farm? Knowing who is linking to your competitor can make your task an easier one when developing your own link building campaign.
3. An index saturation analysis will show how many pages a website has indexed in a search engine in comparison to the number of pages actually existing within the website. The purpose of the saturation analysis is to evaluate the various design elements that may be affecting indexing efficiency and to ultimately determine whether saturation is playing a noteworthy role in the website’s (your competitor’s) ranking.
4. Optimization analysis will determine what (if any) particular optimization techniques are overwhelmingly influencing rankings for internal review pages of each site.

Click the link for more information on Competitive Research Tools.

Not everyone has the budget or expertise for this in depth type of data mining. A more economical approach may be to conduct keyword analysis. Quite possibly developing a realistic set of achievable primary and secondary keyword targets is the most overlooked aspect to any successful web marketing presence. This component will be looked at in the next article.

Author:  Bill Stroll is a sales and marketing manager at StepForth Web Marketing Inc.

If you really want to know how to use relevance in your web content for any page on your website, and write content for your website that cannot be misconstrued, you have to open your eyes and look at what you are writing. I have read so much hysterical tripe online, even on the first page of Google from reasonably respected websites, that I despair for the intelligence of many people.

Given that their sites are not at #1 - #5 due to a lack of ability or intelligence, then I also despair for their honesty. Who really cares about complex mathematical equations? This big term ‘Latent Semantic Indexing’, or LSI for short, is a meaningless term for webmasters and they should not even be bothering with it, let alone contemplating teaching you about it.

I have a page on my website telling you what it is not! Perhaps more people should read that. In fact, the Google algorithm contains an element of Latent Semantic Analysis, there is no such a term as LSI, and you certainly can’t make your website LSI compliant, since that term indicates a total ignorance in what it actually is. Any statistical mathematician can tell you that! It’s pretty basic.

Here’s a heads up on how to keep relevance to your topic and keywords, or to phrase it another way, maintain contextually relevant content on your web pages. ‘Phrasing it another way’ is a good way, in fact, to maintain that relevance without repetition. This is what Google likely mean by LSI (a misnomer in any case), since it works perfectly for me.

The first thing you have to do when writing content for your website is to determine your keyword or phrase. To me ‘Relevance in your Web content’ is a keyword. OK? That’s normal accepted terminology. Your keyword can be a single word or a long phrase – what is called a ‘long-tailed keyword’. Decide on the keyword you are using, then use THAT as the title of your web page. Use the Title html tags for it, and put it in H1 tags at the top of your web page.

Now study that keyword very carefully, and break it down into its components. Is their any way that an alien using a dictionary for every word could come down to earth and misinterpret the meaning of your keyword? If so be aware of the fact, and immediately put the alien right in the very first sentence of your article or page content. Here are two examples. Once is very commonly used on the web and the other is not. Have you spotted the second already? It is in this article! Now the first:

Take the keyword ‘How to Train German Shepherds’. Great – good keyword, lots of demand and it makes a good title. However, let’s break it down. In the Concise Oxford Dictionary, ‘german’ can mean having both parents the same, and shepherd is somebody who tends sheep. So your alien could believe that your article is about a shepherd tending his flock with two parents the same. Illogical? Perhaps. Semantically correct: certainly. So now, for the alien read the Google algorithm.

Your job is telling the alien exactly what you mean by your use of words. First, you might mention the German canine – so the alien does his thing and comes up with one of the front teeth of a person from Germany. Get the drift? So-called LSI has nothing to do with it. You have to write using vocabulary that explains exactly, and incontrovertibly, what the subject of your page is.

In your first sentence use ‘dogs’, ‘Germany’ perhaps, Alsatian, dog training, puppy, and so on so that when put together the meaning is obvious. Leave that till the last paragraph and the spider will be off wondering why you are trying to train a shepherd with two similar parents that have front teeth - and wear dog collars! Perhaps they are German vicars!

Write using as much text as is reasonable and normal in your article that describes the true meaning of your page, and the message it is conveying. Don’t overuse your keyword: in the title, first 100 characters and last paragraph is enough, plus once each 400 words. Certainly not 3% - 15 times in a 500 word page? That’s spamming and you will not be listed. The algorithm is looking for no more times that you would use in speech or normal writing: the rest should be of similar meaning. Use a thesaurus: thesaurus.com is a good reference.

OK? Get the idea. Now for another twist to this. Check out my title again. “How to Use Relevance in Your Web Content”. You know what I mean and I know what I mean, but we don’t determine the listing position of this article on a search engine. What does? A spider!

What does a spider think of when it sees the juxtaposition of the words ‘Web’ and ‘Content’?

You don’t have to be ‘Fly for white guy’ to work that one out. Use the first paragraph to begin your explanation, so that the spider isn’t salivating thinking that your article is relevant to its dinner!

Author:  For more information on how to write your articles and optimize your web pages so as not to get your spiders hungry, but to satisfy them, visit Improved Search Engine Rank where you find out what real SEO is and also Article Services for writing advice.

All online business owners want to attract as many targeted visitors to their websites as possible. Their favorite kind of visitors are the free ones and the best source of free targeted website traffic is article marketing. The concept is simple: you write an article, it gets distributed in ezines and posted on other people’s websites where potential customers will read it and click through on a link to visit your website.

The articles you write will also be used as additional content for your own website, and this is valuable for SEO purposes as well as for attracting visitors. Your articles are more than just reading matter for visitors, though; you could think of article pages as mini-sales pages.

When you are adding content to your website, look at each page you complete as if you are a visitor entering the site for the first time via that page. Is there an obvious way for the visitor to find the home page, site map, contact details etc? You might think it is easy enough to scroll to the bottom of the page and squint a bit to see the small text hiding against a camouflaging background, but then you knew it was there all along, your visitors won’t see it because they won’t go looking for it.

It is a big mistake to expect visitors to hunt around for links; they won’t bother to work that hard when it is easy to hit their “back” button and find a more easily navigable website. Place the links where they will be seen easily by any visitor. It is best to make the links obvious by having a contrasting background to make them easy to read. You can have all kinds of fancy roll-over effects for links but these are not essential. The best way to deal with links is to have them underlined because everybody is accustomed to underlining indicating a link.

At the very least, you should have a link to the home page but you can also induce visitors to explore by having a link to your site map or a “you might also be interested in…” menu and providing a bookmark button is good way to encourage return visits.

Having a search box at the end of an article page is an easy way to earn some extra money from the page and you can make more money by having some Ad sense (or similar) advertisements on your article pages.

Another great way to make money from your online article pages is to embed your affiliate links into the body of the article. This creates a real “mini-sales page” but it involves a little extra work to create and to keep up to date. Links embedded in articles offer a natural-looking way to introduce your long term affiliate programs to visitors. Dead links create a bad impression, so this type of contextual linking is not something I would recommend for affiliate products that are liable to be changed or discontinued at short notice, unless you are very organized and are prepared to make regular changes.

An easier way of incorporating links into your article text is to use context advertising links, such as the system provided Amazon. All this requires is for you to copy and paste a small script into the foot of your web page. The software will automatically pick out keywords and link them to relevant products.

Visitors to your website won’t all arrive in an orderly fashion via your main index page, your article pages will be additional entry points from which you can steer visitors to your home page or sales page, or even make a sale right there on the article page.

Author:  Elaine Currie is the owner of a Free Work At Home Directory and author of the book Ezine Article Writing - 10 Steps To Success

One of the most telling things you can do in any business is study your competitors. Your competition can reveal weakness in your business and open your eyes to new opportunities in your industry. The same is true in the web world, and with search engine optimization in particular. Why does your competitor consistently rank higher than you for important terms? What programming, content, and link building strategies are they using to help attain those rankings? Answer those questions and you’ll be one step closer to out-ranking them and bringing that traffic and those sales to your site.

Who should you study?
A lot of industries will have hundreds of direct competitors, and many more indirect competitors. You can very easily get caught up in “paralysis by analysis” if you try to analyze every possible competitor that you have. The purpose of studying your competition is to better your business, so I prefer to limit my analysis to ten sites or less.

You probably already know a handful of your adversaries. Either they were the incumbent leaders in your industry when you began, or your customers constantly remind you that they have lower prices, or every time you Google a phrase in your industry they come up first in the search results. Those sites are the first ones you should add to your list to research. Fill the rest of the list in by picking sites that consistently rank high for the most searched phrases related to your business. If you haven’t already done keyword research, I recommend starting with the SEO Book Keyword Research Tool. Once you understand which terms are searched the most, it will be pretty obvious which sites consistently rank high.

What information should you collect?
There are a plethora of potential metrics that can be used to gauge the competition. The six below can be collected for free in a matter of minutes and do a great job of explaining why a site ranks as well as it does.

• Site Age - the age of a site is generally considered to be one of the top five most influential factors in how high a site ranks. While it’s something that is out of your control, sometimes you’ll see a site from 1999 consistently outranking a better site from 2006 and it’s helpful to understand why. You can see the history of a site using a nifty tool called the Wayback Machine.
• Y! Links – the number of backlinks the domain has in Yahoo. As you probably already know by now, the quantity and quality of links pointing to a site is extremely relevant in determining how high it ranks. Looking at the particular links that your competition has serves as one of the best ways to learn how they market their site. It is also one of the best ways to brainstorm potential link building ideas for your site. For example, if your competitors products are all reviewed on a popular blog in your industry, there’s a good chance that same blog would want to review your products as well (giving you free publicity and quality links).
• Pages indexed – this refers to the number of pages listed in a search engines index (also referred to as cached pages). Sites that rank high are generally easy for Google, Yahoo, and MSN to spider and thus have nearly all of their pages included in their indexes. You can check how many pages are indexed by typing in site:www.yoursite.com, or by using a tool like the Indexed Pages tool on SEOmoz. Using sitemaps is a great way to ensure that every page on your site is indexed properly.
• Last indexed – this is the date of the last time Google visited the home page of the site. Ideally your site is indexed every single day, but it usually depends on how frequently you update your content. If you update content regularly, you should be being indexed at least once per week. You can find this date by clicking the “Cached” link next to any Google search result.
• Home Page PR – this refers to Google Page Rank, a 0-10 score that Google gives to assess the value of a web page. It’s primarily determined by the quality and quantity of incoming links, and is a quick and dirty way to see how popular a page is. Since it’s a universal metric that all webmasters can quickly check, it’s often misused to assume how much traffic a site gets or how high it ranks – neither of which correlate very well with PR. For our purposes though, it’s a nice barometer to look at. It can be checked using the Google Toolbar or a site like PRChecker.
• Strongest Pages – SEOmoz has a great strongest pages tool that will list off the most important pages on a domain, based on number of links pointing to it and its current rankings. This gives you an idea of what content on their domain is causing the high rankings. Is it popular articles? Is it product pages? Whatever their strongest pages, you should take note and use those pages as guidelines for potential additions and modifications to your site.

Using the information to your advantage
Pretty quickly you’ll start to realize that all of the sites you’re analyzing have been around for a few years, are indexed frequently and thoroughly, and have a lot of quality backlinks. So how do you get there? Well there’s nothing you can do about site age, but the rest are very much in your control: you can model title tags and page headings after the competition, you can structure your site and internally link the way that they do, you can add sections related to topics that they rank high for, and you can most definitely expand your link building plan by studying what has worked for them. Ultimately, analyzing and understanding your competition will reduce your learning curve and accelerate the growth of your site.

Author:  Adam McFarland is the co-founder of Faceup-Sites and the author of the Faceup Web Marketing Book: The Perfect Combination of SEO, SEM, and other tactics to maximize results without breaking the bank. Faceup-Sites specializes in helping businesses develop highly customizable sites that are easy to update, visually pleasing, and search engine friendly at a fraction of the cost of what most developers charge.

Making money online as an affiliate is becoming tougher and tougher as competition continues to increase. Affiliate marketing is a growing trend at this moment and each day more people are realizing that it is a legitimate way to make a lot of money online. You must be committed to learning certain skills and strategies if you want to succeed as an affiliate, here are a few tips that will hopefully help you become a more successful affiliate marketer.

Tip 1: Avoid the hard sell tactic

It is very easy to get desperate and then to try and force the product you are selling as an affiliate to your visitors. This strategy rarely works because most people usually only buy once they feel they have done some research and trust the product or service being sold to them.

This is why it is important to inform your visitors first either on the product itself by doing an honest unbiased review free of hype or by giving them another article related to your niche and then at the bottom of these articles you can then be a bit more aggressive and tell them to purchase by clicking through to the sales page.

If you own a website resist the temptation to display the products you are selling above the fold of your site. Instead offer free useful information related to your product or the niche you are in and then at the bottom of your pages make your product recommendations.

Tip 2: Use article marketing

Many people hate the idea of writing articles since it does require some effort on your part as far as researching and becoming an expert in your niche. Article marketing has been working for those smart enough to use it since the invention of the internet and it should continue working well into the future.

There are two primary benefits to article marketing and that is that you get traffic in two ways. The first is from the article directories themselves as people click through on the links at the bottom of your article to visit your site. The second is from improved search engine rankings as the link popularity of your site grows.

Simply write an article around 500 to 700 words and then submit it to major article directories. Focus on quality and creating something informative and useful. Never blatantly promote your products in the body of your articles otherwise they will not get published.

Tip 3: Create your own site

Many people are not comfortable with trying to learn basic html so they try to avoid creating a website or rely on others to do it for them. Remember that there are many free html programs like Dreamweaver that are very easy to learn and there are also many great site builders you can use to easily create sites that look great.

Make sure your site is focused on providing information rather than simply promoting your affiliate program. Add useful articles on a regular basis, at least add a new piece of content to your site once a week. This will help to attract more visitors to your site since you always have new content.

Another benefit of having your own site is that if you do use article marketing then the link popularity of your site will grow with time and your site will get free traffic from the search engines due to better rankings. When you are choosing a domain name for your site it is a good idea to pick something that is keyword rich.

So do some keyword research, you can use the free google keyword tool and look for a heavily searched term in your niche and make sure to have that term in your domain name. This should also help with your search engine rankings so make sure you do it. Affiliate marketing is not complex but it does require effort and commitment to make it work just like anything else worthwhile in life so focus on the future rewards to keep you motivated to continue taking action.

Author:  Jitender Zaman runs several websites. We recommend Google Assassin to help you make more money online. Be sure to read our Google Assassin Review. Also make sure to visit our site on the top work at home business opportunities.

Every day hundreds of domain names become expired and become owner-less due to some reasons. An expired domain that is useless for someone may become usable and beneficial for others! An expired domain can offer several unique advantages and benefits for the person who uses it. Right now, increasing numbers of people are flocking together to own expired domains just to create a huge wealth and unlimited profits out of them. Intelligent and smart entrepreneurs are also using an expired domain as a tool to expand their online business operations and functions.

What exactly is an expired domain? There are several explanations that define what an expired domain really is. However, in simple terms an expired domain is a domain, already used by its previous owner, but abandoned and left orphaned due to some unknown reasons. Similarly, an expired domain name is not used currently by anyone. It could also be termed as a domain that is quickly approaching its renewal date. In other words, it could also be termed as “soon to be expired” domain name, while a domain that is past its fixed renewal date without the renewal subscription fees paid out is termed “an expired domain”.

In real terms, an expired domain could be anything in its nature like:

• It could have been a well-developed web site in its previous avatar.
• It could have been a web site that was well promoted and advertised by the previous owner.
• It could have been a well placed web site in the most popular search engines.
• It could have also been actively linked to different web sites and directories.
• It could have also been associated with a number of business deals and partnerships.
• It could have also been the big compendium of plenty of reciprocal links attached to it.
• It could have also been a web site that changed several ownerships in the previous months.

A domain can become expired due to several reasons and factors like:

• Lack of cash resources to run and manage the web site
• Lack of required funds to renew the domain name
• Wrong and invalid email addresses that can result in bounced mails.
• The owner loosing interest in the web site itself.
• A domain can also expire as a result of business closures and shutdowns.
• Sheer lack of knowledge and ignorance about the real value of domains
• Unknowingly forgetting to renew the domain name.

The overall control or ownership or dominance of a particular web domain is granted only for a limited period of time of one to two years. However, the ownership also comes with certain critical riders like:

• The owner will follow the right and prescribed registration procedures
• The owner will pay the prescribed renewal fees on time and within the fixed deadline.

By chance, if the owner of the domain either declines or forgets to pay the prescribed renewal fees within the deadline, the said domain will soon expire and become an expired domain. Once a domain becomes expired, it will soon go back to the pool of unregistered domain names; eventually, such a domain will be announced for open sale or auction to the general public. Though, subscribers register their domain names for one or two years, it is also possible to retain the ownership of the domain name for a period of two years or more. For such a lengthy period of registration, one can avail a generous amount of discounts and rebates for the domain name of choice.

An expired domain could be your goldmine of excellent business opportunities and chances. One of the biggest benefits of owning or buying an expired domain name is its capacity to set up a source of constant income. If you are looking for a viable business opportunity or if you have been searching for increased web traffic or when you want to sell your domain for a sustained profit, then an expired domain could the timely answer!

Author:  John Khu is the well-known author of a new e-book titled “Expired Domain Secret”. He is also a seasoned professional with vast experience in expired domain name business. He is also the owner of the path breaking web site called http://www.expireddomainsecret.com which provides complete and up-to-date information on expired domains and their eternal secrets.

When it comes to Pay Per Click campaigns, there tends to be a lot of focus on the quality and content of landing pages in order to increase conversions.

That’s all well and good, but to get people to visit your landing page, you first have to convince them to click on your ad. This is often much more challenging because while your landing page generally has your visitor’s full attention, your ad is just one of several ads all vying for the same attention.

That tiny ad has just 2 or 3 seconds, a tiny headline and a very short amount of copy to convince the viewer your site is worth visiting. So how do you make your ad jump off the page and become a click magnet? The secret is *triggers*. Your ad headline and copy need to trigger a response within the viewer instantly.

Pretend for a moment that you own a florist business in Miami that specializes in bridal bouquets. Imagine you have set up a Google AdWords PPC campaign to attract customers to your web site where they can order their bouquets online.

Here are some of the triggers you could use in your ads:

1) Ask a Question

People are naturally curious and seeing a question addressed to them automatically triggers a reply in their minds, whether they intend it or not. By asking a question in your ad headline, you are taking advantage of this curiosity and making your ad appeal to them on a personal level. Here’s an ad example our fictional Miami florist could use:

Need Wedding Flowers?
Gorgeous wedding flowers
delivered free to your door
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

2) Use Humor

People like to laugh. If your ad headline or copy makes them chuckle they are already associating your ad with positive emotions and are more likely to be receptive to your message. Here’s a humorous ad example our Miami florist could use:

In the Dog House Again?
Sweeten her up with a dozen roses.
Free delivery to your door!
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

3) Use: Colons

Using a colon after a word indicates you are about to sum up or define an idea. This creates an automatic trigger in readers to pay attention to the content following the colon. Our Miami florist could take advantage of this with:

Bridal Bouquets: Stunning
Browse our unique and stunning
bridal bouquets. Free delivery.
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

4) Get Regional

Depending on how you’ve set your ad campaign’s regional/demographic settings, it often pays to use regional triggers in your ads such as city or state names. Persons from the mentioned areas will automatically recognize that your ad is relevant to them and be more inspired to click on it. Our florist in Miami could use:

Need Flowers in Miami?
Floral bouquets for every occasion.
Free delivery throughout Miami.
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

5) Use Power Words

There are a number of keywords known as “power words” that are proven to attract attention and sales. They include words like “secret”, “free”, “super”, “now”, “limited”, “exclusive”, “must”, “save”, “expert” and so on. Our florist in Miami could tailor his ads to use some of these. For example:

Free: Roses
Order a dozen roses and receive
half a dozen free! Limited time.
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

6) Use Catch Phrases

People recognize popular catch phrases used by major brands. Provided you are careful not to directly infringe on their trademarks or copyright status, you can use them in your ads. For example, our Miami florist could use:

Got Flowers?
Floral bouquets for every occasion.
Free delivery throughout Miami.
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

7) Use Personalization

Just like ads asking a question, ads that specifically address the audience are much more likely to gain attention. Our fictional florist could use this to his advantage with ads like:

Your Bouquet is Ready
Your wedding bouquet can be ready
within 24 hrs if you order online.
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

Tell a Story

Internet searchers are good at recognizing advertising and blocking it out. So your ads can sometimes be more effective if they have a storyline and appear less like advertisements. Stories create empathy and parallels with the reader’s own life. For example our florist could try an ad like this one:

Your Perfect Wedding Day
Dress dirty. Veil torn. Rings lost.
At least your bouquet was gorgeous!
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

9) Use Emotion & Senses

As well as personalization, your ads can appeal to the five senses of readers: sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Our Miami florist could achieve this with:

Stop to Smell the Roses
Nothing beats the heady fragrance
of a bouquet of lush red roses.
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

and finally…

10) Use Calls to Action

In my experience, ads that achieve the highest click through rate (CTR) are ones that use a call to action within them, for example “download now”, “read our e-book”, “sign up now” and “call us toll free”. Our fictional florist could achieve this with:

Gorgeous Wedding Bouquets
Order your wedding bouquet online
and receive free wedding-toss posy!
www.funkyfloristsmiami.com

Apply a few of these triggers to your current PPC ads and I guarantee your click-through rate will improve dramatically.

Author:  Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Every website needs links. However, because not all sites are created equal, not every website needs the same amount of links or the same kind of links.

Links are like referrals. If you run a sporting goods store and you’ve got somebody in your store that’s looking to buy golf clubs, you’re only going to refer them to one of your salespeople. However, if you’re running a local golf conference, you’ll be handing out business cards left and right for golf instructors, golf pros, golf courses and golf stores for every person who asks.

Good linking is but one step in optimizing your website, but it’s an important one. The links you use should enhance your site, not detract from it or, even worse, drive visitors away.

Here are a few tips for getting the most out of the links on your site.

Links on sales sites versus knowledge sites

If you run a sales site, you want to limit the outbound links you have for one simple purpose: you’re trying to sell these people something, so you want to keep them on your site as long as possible.

If visitors click on a link and it whisks them away to a new site, then you’ve upped the chances of them not returning. Even if you’re linking something important like the Better Business Bureau or Verisign, you want them to pop up in a new window, rather than the current one.

It’s like having a customer walk into your store, then ushering them right back out with directions to the Better Business Bureau down the street. They may even run across one of your competitors in the meantime.

Links on a knowledge site

If you’re running a knowledge site, on the other hand, you should include as many outbound links as you can.

If you’re running a golf information site, for example, you wouldn’t just want to bring people to your site and leave them there. You would want to link to the best sites to purchase golf clubs. You’d link to golf courses and country clubs. If you had an article comparing golf clubs, you’d want to link each golf club brand’s website.

You want people to be able to get the information in the best way possible, and you want them to be able to retrace your researching steps. This way, they know you’re trustworthy, and it adds credibility to your site if you provide your users with ways to get more of the information that they seek.

For tips on linking, and especially evaluating link quality, check out this article: http://entirewebs.blogspot.com/2007/11/eleven-things-that-define-what-quality.html

Limit the clicks it takes to buy

The great thing about the Internet is that so much of it is instantaneous. Want to send a strongly worded letter to a newspaper or comment on a blog? No problem; just click a button and type away. In real life, you have the chance to hem and haw over what you write before you actually write it.

The same goes for sales online. Granted, you don’t want to take people to the “Congratulations on your purchase” page immediately, but the more links you have in the buying process, the greater the chance you have of your customers being overwhelmed by buyer’s remorse, just like in real life. They’ll talk themselves out of purchasing your product and click away, never to be seen again.

Take a look at how many clicks it takes to buy something on your site. Now imagine being a customer with credit card in hand, clicking through each of those pages, enthusiasm waning as the pages continue with no end in sight. Buyer’s remorse sets in, and with yet another confirmation staring them in the face, your potential customers say, “Forget it,” and close out of your site.

Cut down on this effect by eliminating the number of steps it takes to purchase a product. Make your conversion funnel as simple as you possibly can, and you’ll reduce the chance of customers hitting the wall of buyer’s remorse before they hit the “buy now” button.

Limit their options

Don’t limit customers’ options in terms of what you offer, but merely in what you allow them to do once they’ve hit a sales page. Too many links here will reduce the chance of you making a sale.

Once they get to a sales page, give them two choices: buy now (or try now), or go back. The “go back” option is sort of like a safety net for customers. If they get uncomfortable or change their minds, they have an easy out. The fewer the options, the better than chance you have of them clicking the “buy now” button.

Implement a follow-up

If customers do decide to abandon your site, a follow-up would be immensely helpful. If they leave in the middle of the buying process and you have their contact information, send a short email with an ad or perhaps a limited time discount on the item they were searching for, or a similar one. Take advantage of the impulse buy.

It might also be a good idea to ask them why they decided to abandon. If several customers are abandoning your site at a certain time in the process, then maybe something is wrong with your site. Asking for feedback is a great way to help you fix what’s wrong and keep your site working best for your customers.

Don’t just throw links on your website and pray. Take the time to utilize them effectively, and the links will pay off in big dividends for your site.

Author:  President and founder of Xeal Inc., Tony D. Baker is Oklahoma’s leading Internet marketing expert with more than 10 years of Internet marketing experience. You can catch Tony on the Xeal Radio Show on Sunday nights on 1170 KFAQ Tulsa. Sign up for a free 25-point website evaluation and pick up crucial tips at Xeal’s free Thursday webinar at http://www.xeal.com/webinar.

When you are creating your Internet marketing plan, knowing how people LOOK for, and FIND information online, is the primary reason for having a niche website instead of a general interest site.

The important point here is how people LOOK for information versus how people will FIND a site like yours.

First, look at how people will generally FIND your website:

• Word of mouth: On the Internet, ‘word of mouth’ is email. Look how many times you have received an email from a friend telling you about some information they found at a certain website.
• Advertisements: This could be the ad’s you see running down the right hand side of the page on many websites.
• Articles: There are thousands of articles circulating on the Internet and this is one of the BEST free ways to invite people to visit your website - writing an article about your area of expertise.
• Search engines: If your websites content and keywords match what people type in their search phrase.
• Links: This is when one website puts a ‘link’ - a type of pointer - on their site pointing to your website.

Example, if you have a site that lists animals for adoption, a pet food manufacturer could have a link on their website pointing to your site. Think what that would do to increase the number of visitors to your website.

Now, contrast how people may FIND your site, with how people LOOK for information online.

While there are many ways that people may wind up visiting your website, there is really only one way that people look for information online and that is by using the search engines such as Google or Yahoo. That is why Larry Page and Sergey Brinx are billionaires … they founded the search engine Google.

Because of the way people look for information, sites that target only one niche are much more efficient then a large site that tries to market a variety of products to everyone.

It works like this:

When people go to a search engine like Google, they type in a ’search phrase’ which is also called a keyword or keyword phrase.

Example, let’s say a person is looking for information about education for an autistic child. At the search engine website they would type in something like this keyword phrase: ’special education for autistic children’.

If you own a site that specializes in information about autism, has the word autism or autistic in your website title and website address, has a keyword list that includes autism and autistic, have links from other sites to your site and have web pages full of fresh current information about education for autistic children, then your site will climb to the top of the search engine list.

On the other hand, if you have a general interest site and you just happen to have a story about an autistic child your site will be displayed way down the search engine list, where most people will never find it.

The best way to capitalize on people’s habits of how they LOOK [search] for information online is to setup your websites to target niche markets.

Author:  Here’s another Internet ‘Street Smarts’ lesson: Everyday thousands of people search the Internet looking for this one thing. Do you know what this one thing is? Read the real life online adventure about a maverick young mom that has decided to say goodbye to working 50-60 hour weeks and stay at home for more Internet “Street Smarts” lessons. Go here ==> www.bathrobemillionairesclub.com/20/