SiteProNews

MAKING SURE YOU DON’T SPAM

Social bookmarking offers you a lot of freedom, and can help you drive traffic to your website overnight. Still, abusing this freedom can lower the credibility of your business, your brand, and your company name. Moving beyond the potential for spamming will help you to build a strong and regular community, instead of being booted off a social bookmarking network.

It’s important to review your submissions to make sure you’re not overusing keywords. Keyword overuse is a turnoff for readers anyway, and you should aim for a keyword density between 6-8% at the maximum level. Most readers will easily pick up on articles that simply do not make sense, and this will limit your ability to promote quality work. Instead of focusing exclusively on SEO, create something unique with an attractive headline instead.

Google and Yahoo! are also becoming vigilant about catching spam-type articles and you will lower your chances of indexing as a result. The most important factors for indexing by Google include:

• Publishing content that is relevant to the heading or topic
• Quality formatting
• Appropriate links and references
• Appropriate amount of keywords

Reading all terms of use and guidelines will ensure that you can make the most of your participation, and grow with your community so you are developing a strong presence.

Avoiding Becoming A Spammer If You’re Using Duplicate Content.

Duplicate content makes it easier for you to write about your topic of choice, giving you a pre-researched format and guideline. Still, it’s important to make many changes to the article, and obtain permission rights from the author when necessary. A single sentence or paragraph that is copied word for word can be detrimental to your search engine placement, and may even lead to copyright infringement.

THE SOFTWARE QUESTION: TO BUY, OR NOT TO BUY

You’ll find a variety of submission directory software packages and applications available on the web today, but it’s important to review the risks involved with using an automated service. Since many of these can be blocked by spam filters, the efforts may not be worth your time. These software packages are designed to submit your content and information on multiple sites in one simple step.

Some social bookmarking submission software packages are designed to be compatible with multiple websites, but you may find that some of your content simply becomes pushed onto spamming sites and bogs. This is why submitting to quality directories and sites is even more important today. Automation does not necessarily guarantee quality, and only you can make the decision on whether this is appropriate for your business, your blog, or your website.

Still, you may find some value in free sites such as Socializer 2.0. Socializer is free web service from eKstreme.com that allows you submit one link to several social bookmarking websites by adding some code to your site. The company has also developed customizable Wordpress and Movable Type plugins and you can find instructions on downloading this information directly from the website.

You can book mark your articles to one folder in your IE Favorites, export it to it’s own folder and import all book marks in that folder to Del.icou.us and them tag/label them. Many of the other Social Bookmarking Sites have features that will allow you to import those favorites directly into your account from Del.icio.us.

IMPORTANT: Remember to mark all your bookmarks in all Social Bookmarking Sites as public. When you import bookmarks, most sites will automatically or by default mark them as private. When they are marked as private, no one including search engines can find of view your bookmarks. If you leave them marked as private, it of course then defeats the purpose of Social Bookmarking from a marketing standpoint.

Author:  Sean S. Sampson provides valuable resources, and information to help the home business owner, and online business owner prosper with their business. For more information about Social Bookmarketing, please go to http://www.makinglotsofmoneyonline.com

Sitemaps have been about for a while. They were originally created a visual guide to your website. As websites became larger and more complex webmasters used them as a way to view the entire structure of a website to find the connections between pages. Think of them as a kind of interactive table of contents and index rolled into one.

In recent years the search engines have been viewing site maps as a good way to index websites and find all the related content. Google led the charge to make this a mainstream web tool when it introduced XML sitemaps. Creating and submitting an XML sitemap to Google is still the best way to get your website completely crawled by Google. It has become a standard SEO best practice.

As with many things on the web, Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN and Ask all had their own specific way to use and submit sitemaps in the format they dictated. About six months ago a couple of these folks joined forces to create a standardized method of sitemap creation. They formed an organization called Sitemaps.org and agreed on using the XML sitemap format.

Sorry for the history lesson, but this is really good news for small business web site owners because it will greatly simplify the process of creating and submitting your sitemap and in doing so enhance your chances of getting your entire website indexed by all the search engines.

So, in today’s article I’m going to tell you how to create and submit your XML sitemap.

What is a sitemap?

According to Sitemaps.org: “Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.”

Building an XML sitemap

While there are several ways to actually create an XML sitemap I like XML-Sitemaps.com The good news is that if you have a rather small site (under 500 pages) you can simply use their free tool to create an xml sitemap. Over 500 pages and you need to get the $19.95 download.

Getting Your Sitemap found

Once you create your sitemap it’s still a good idea to create a free Google Webmaster account so that you can submit your sitemap directly to Google Sitemaps

Robots.txt file

Now here’s where the coming together of the search engines gets really nice. Not only will Ask, Google, Yahoo, AOL and MS Live accept the XML format for your sitemap they have also decided to accept an easy, auto-discovery method. In other words you won’t have to figure out how to submit to each as they will find your sitemap if you direct them using your robots.txt file. A robots.txt file is a very simple file that resides on your server giving information for the search engines. Many use this file to tell the search engines not to find certain information.

If you already have a robots.txt file, you can simply add the line of code below anywhere to it. If you don’t have one, simply create a file in notepad or other text editor, add the code below, save it as robots.txt and upload to the root of your site. (Obviously you need to put the actual URL of your site in here)

Sitemap: http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

Advanced tip - If you use the paid version of xml-sitemap generator you can set up what’s known as a cron job (it’s a Unix only thing) and have your site crawled on a weekly basis and update your sitemap. This is really great if you blog several times a weeks on your domain as it adds your newest posts. Ask your web host about this one.

Author:  John Jantsch is a veteran marketing coach, award winning blogger and author of Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide. You can find more information by visiting http://www.ducttapemarketing.com

Believe me or not, a business can survive and thrive on the Internet without good search engine placement. That does not mean that a Webmaster should not strive to get good rankings in the search engines, but it does mean that a Webmaster should not throw his or her entire advertising budget towards search engine optimization (SEO).

The SEO guys are rolling in their Ferrari’s as you read this. I would have said that the SEO guys are rolling their graves, but they are not dead, yet.

There Can Be Only Ten

How many web pages will be listed on page one of the search results at Google? How about on Yahoo or MSN? That is right; there can be only ten web pages listed on page one of the search results.

According to the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org), there are currently 85 billion web pages on the Internet. But, if you have ever used the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, then you know as I know that they have not archived everything that is out there, so that 85-billion number is actually smaller than the real number of existing web pages.

With only ten listings on page one of the search results, there are going to be a lot of disappointed people in the world. They cannot all be on page one of the search results.

First Things First

Search engine optimization is an expensive undertaking, so it should never be taken lightly. I talk to people everyday who are building their first website for the very first time. These folks, bless their hearts, know just enough about Internet marketing to blow their savings on a website that may or may not deliver a profit to them.

There are steps that people should take when they start their website, and SEO is not one of those first steps.

Here is a checklist of steps that the new Webmaster should use in the development of his or her website:

Step One: Select the products or services that the website will sell.

Step Two: Determine if there is a market for what will be sold.

Step Three: Analyze the competition and determine the competition’s weaknesses. Competition is about building a better mousetrap or reaching customers that another might be under serving.

Step Four: Build the website to sell the chosen products or services. Sales conversion is the most important element in any successful business model.

Step Five: Run test advertising to figure out what will generate traffic to your website, and more importantly, to figure out what one needs to do in order to sell goods and services.

Testing And Tracking Advertising Results Is Essential

I sold advertising in my newsletter to a guy one time. He paid a nice fee to have his advertisement run in my newsletter, but he did not invest any money in writing or testing his ad first. The advertisement itself was written very badly.

I asked him if he would like to tweak his advertisement before I ran it in my newsletter. He said he did not care what the ad looked like. He just needed me to run his ad.

I offered to rewrite his ad for him to enhance his chances of getting traffic from my newsletter. He agreed and I did.

As the newsletters I subscribed to began rolling in the following week, I noticed his bad advertisement ran in dozens of those newsletters.

I asked him later his results, and he said he had spent $10,000 running that advertisement and closed four sales at $25 each. He spent $10,000 to make $100. Needless to say, his website closed down just a couple months later.

The problem was clearly his ad, but his website may have contributed to his lack of sales conversion.

Starting Small Serves A Very Real Purpose

As we saw with the guy who spent ten grand to make $100, starting small would have been beneficial. It is all a matter of figuring out how to get traffic to one’s website and more importantly, how to convert traffic to sales.

One should start small with his or her advertising to find the ad formula that will actually deliver traffic to the website. Once the traffic is coming to the website, the webmaster needs to tweak his or her sales copy to make sure that the copy will close enough sales to justify the expense of a large advertising run.

SEO should be treated in the same way. By using Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC), a webmaster can get an idea as to which keyword phrases will actually generate traffic to a website, and with the right analytical software, the Webmaster can determine which keyword phrases generate clicks that will lead to a sale. .

Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) is a good program to help webmasters figure this out and it is free, but it has its shortcomings.

Popular paid programs include:

• http://www.opentracker.net
• http://www.keytrail.com

Another two-dozen web analytics applications are reviewed here: http://www.cumbrowski.com/CarstenC/internetmarketing_webanalytics.asp

SEO campaigns should never be undertaken until one knows exactly which keywords will actually generate sales for a website. To do otherwise, one runs the risk of optimizing a website for keywords that will not help the website convert traffic to sales.

Advertising Lessons Learned

While testing your advertising and your PPC advertising, a few very important lessons were learned.

First, you learned how to tap into the Law Of Attraction to bring people to your website.

You have learned what keywords you should target, if you decide to optimize your website.

You have learned how to track your successes and your failures with your website analytical software.

And finally, you have learned to tweak your website for the purpose of increasing your sales conversion.

All are very important lessons, because each will contribute to how much money can be earned from a website.

Building Links Is Not About PageRank

If you remember, the title of this article is, “Internet Marketing Without Search Engines.” That should imply that this article is not about getting good rankings in Google. By extension, the title should also imply that what I am telling you has “nothing” to do with PageRank.

The fact is that every person using the Internet is clicking on links to take them from one website to another. Some links are in emails; others are in paid adverts on websites, or in informational web pages. Even social bookmarking websites have links to other web pages.

Building links to your website is about getting your sales message, with its accompanying link, in front of the people most likely to buy what you are selling, in a way that encourages your potential customer to click your link and visit your website.

Once you understand who your customers are and where you might be able to reach them, then you will know what steps you need to take to get your link within reach of their mouse.

You may need to buy advertising at that location. You might be able to write an article to give to them, in exchange for a link to your website. You might be able to participate in the website’s forums and leave a breadcrumb trail of links for your potential clients to find. You can even create social bookmarks that will point to your website or to a page that points to your website.

The goal of linking is to give your potential customers more ways for them to find your website.

An Ironic Twist To This Tale

Although this article is about thriving on the Internet without relying on search engines, any person who undertakes linking for the sake of attracting customers will find their websites climbing in the search engine results, due to all of those links on targeted and relevant websites pointing to their own website.

Imagine that — a link that will attract and deliver potential customers to a website AND influence how well a website might rank in the search engines.

Author:  Bill Platt has been writing reprint articles for the promotion of his websites since 1999, and now he has written an ebook to share what he has learned. His book is called, “Article Marketing For Traffic, Sales and Profit”. Included in the book are many examples and the Five Essential Elements Of Creating A Successful Article. To learn more about Bill’s business, visit: http://www.thephantomwriters.com

The first step in your campaign to market your website from a search engine optimisation standpoint is that you must create and place an “About Me” page on your website. When you do this the person visiting your website gets a real good feel for who they are doing business with. This is very important. If people are going to do business with an SEO services specialist they do not need to know how rich he or she is, they want to know what their experience and practical successes have been with search engine optimisation.

They want to deal with real people who are interested in genuinely helping other people succeed by providing proven reliable practical and successful SEO techniques and services. The more sincere and honest you are the easier it is to convey that message through and on your website. Also, keep this “About Me” principle in mind when you are configuring your website.

Ok, so let us go through the procedure, step by step, of what to do and how to approach your marketing campaign for your website. One. As discussed and detailed before, the title of your website is the search category that your website will land in on the Google search engine. The title must be keyword specific. This is a critically important SEO principle.

The title must have the words of the opportunity, service or product that you are marketing through your website. Be very focussed with your keywords and keyword phrases. Stay focussed right from the beginning of your website marketing campaign and follow through with a focussed approach to the end. Focus on one keyword area. Don’t broaden out your keywords.

For example do not go for the keyword phrase “home based business” when you start your search engine optimisation website marketing campaign because you will not get first page ranking on the Google search engine as it is a very popular category. It would take at least six months of consistent SEO work to get top ranking on Google for that category.

Two. In order to know what keywords to choose and to remain focussed with those keywords and keyword phrases throughout your website marketing campaign, you need to know, in detail, exactly what your program, opportunity, service, products are about. This is what you are promoting through your website and you need to know all the details at all times and you need to stay up to date with all the latest developments in your program.

Many people do not know what their program is about. This is internet marketing and search engine optimisation suicide. Do your research thoroughly before and after you join a program and stay up to date with all related changes. Three. Once you have decided on the keywords and keywords phrases to use, conduct a thorough research of the words and phrases you have chosen. Here is a ‘Rule Of Thumb” for keyword research in an SEO marketing campaign.

Do not get too tied up with your keyword research. You can actually lose focus and not do the work because you can become confused. Pick some relevant keywords and do the work to start the search engine optimisation process. This is not a complicated process and it is much easier than you think to get a first page ranking on the Google search engine. SEO requires consistency and effort and unfortunately many people just do not have the determination, perseverance and discipline to do that.

From an effective search engine optimisation point of view the number of keywords in your Meta Tags that you place in the back end configuration of your website should not exceed a thousand characters. The number of characters in your title is totally up to you. Most submission companies usually only permit title lengths of a maximum of one hundred characters. A hundred characters can be very beneficial for you in your title because you can use many specific keywords in that title.

Be concerned with the product or service that your website is marketing. This applies specifically to your management of keeping up to date with the changes that your business opportunity makes with their products and or services. You need to know all your opportunities details so that you can write related content in your website to market that information. Concentrate on how you can configure or design your website from an SEO angle to promote your business product and or service. Focus on how you can capture keyword categories to place in your title and website content that will place your website on the first page of Google.

The more keyword categories that you can capture on the Google search engine the higher traffic areas you will get into, the better off for you. This could result in more sign ups into your business which will bring you more profits. When configuring or designing your own website effectively you need to ensure that you accomplish one critical SEO aspect.

Choose your website title and then do some testing of that title by conducting searches on search engines and by using keyword selector tools. See how popular it is as a search term in the search engines, specifically the Google search engine. Everything in search engine optimisation is testing by trial and error to see what works and what does not. When involved in your campaign you need to test a lot. You need to test to make sure that you stay up to date with how the Google search engine works.

Look for Series 2 for more information.

Author:  If you want to know how to make real money online, visit Elaine Currie’s Work At Home Directory which features the best ways to make honest extra income at home

A sitemap is a useful tool for a web site in that it allows visitors to your site to understand the navigation of your site and plan their destination pages. It also enables you to showcase all of the items and topics on offer on your web site.

Surfers across the internet will search for sites with useful and related information. If these surfers are happy with the site and are able to navigate the site in a way that the information is easily available, they will no doubt re-visit the site for further updates or information from time to time. This makes a sitemap a valuable and integral asset for your online business.

Here are some tips to help you make your site map functional and user-friendly, and of course, enable visitors to find information on your web site with ease and comfort.

• Ensure your sitemap is in a simple form without complicated graphics and detail – keep it simple
• Name the page ‘sitemap’ so that visitors to your site know exactly where to go to find the information. Otherwise you’ll find the whole reason for having a sitemap in the first place has lost its objective
• Do not use dynamic site maps. Again, keep it simple so that visitors to your site can link to the information they need with one simple click of a mouse
• If your sitemap is made up of text links, utilise the ‘title’ tag of the link by entering relevant keywords into it
• It would be beneficial to add a description of the page contents below or next to each particular link
• Your sitemap should be a tool or resource to complement your web site and certainly should not be used as the only navigational tool for visitors to find their way around the site
• There should be a visible link to the sitemap on all pages of the web site. It could be an option in the main navigational area, or an additional link at the bottom of each page, but it should be clearly visible so that users can click directly onto it to help them further navigate your web site
• You could further make your sitemap user friendly by ensuring that visited links are a different colour to fresh links, and perhaps even a separate colour for links that are hovered over. This will save the visitor from having to revisit pages they may already have landed on during their navigation of your site.

As well as the obvious benefits to visitors to your site, a sitemap also serves an important purpose for spiders and robots of search engines. You should, as a web developer, be thinking about how to get exposure for all of the pages of your web site on the internet. Through search engines, each of the pages of your site will be picked up via the links on the sitemap. If you manually submit no other page to search engines, the sitemap is the one page that should definitely be submitted. Through the links on your sitemap, each of the pages on your web site will be indexed by the various search engines.

There are two important questions to consider when planning your sitemap:

1. Are each of the pages on your site designed effectively; and do they carry a continual theme throughout the site?
2. Will the web site appear as though it was thoroughly planned, rather than lots of ad-hoc additional pages? If you draw up your sitemap before even attempting to plan and create the whole of your web site, you will be able to decide on the design and content based on the pages and links you have decided upon within the sitemap.

Here are five essential pointers that will help you to create an effective sitemap:

Sitemap must-have #1

Ensure your logo always carries a hyperlink to the homepage or index page of your web site

Sitemap must-have #2

You should place a link to the sitemap either at the top of the page or on the upper left section under the header so that it is clearly visible to visitors to your site.

Sitemap must-have #3

The sitemap link should be placed in the same section on every single page of your web site. That is to say, do not place it on the top right on one page then the top left on the other. It needs to be easily identifiable and recognised as a link to a sitemap. It is there for convenience and ease of navigation after all, and your visitors shouldn’t have to search for the item that’s deliberately there to help them.

Sitemap must-have #4

There should always be a clear and visible link back to the homepage or index page of the web site. This could be in the form of a logo. You should also include a ‘contact us’ link and a further link for users to go to the ‘about this site’ page.

Sitemap must-have #5

The most important rule for a successful sitemap is that it should allow visitors to navigate to their desired section in as little mouse clicks as possible. A well-structured sitemap will give visitors to your site the opportunity to find information quickly and conveniently, without having to browse several pages or lines of text before finding the relevant topic.

Author:  Jeff Spires - For FREE killer secrets, tips & tricks on how to Generate even more leads. Go to:Free Downloadable Marketing Ebooks. Download 8 bonus Ebooks for FREE, Instant access.
http://www.downloadable-ebooks.org

Skip local sub navigation

Search engines are enhanced by having the most relevant results in their index. For a site to gain in these indices, there needs to be a strategic interest to develop an understanding of a site’s usability.

Search engines weight the importance of sites in many different ways.  One way, for example, is the importance of online bookmark site such as StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and other social bookmark sites.  If others think the site is noteworthy enough to remember, search engines will also follow that lead.

Bounce rate is a key part of usability.  High bounce rate is when a visitor stays a very short time or only visits one page. Determining the causes of high bounce rate and correcting that problem, is key to better site usability. The better the usability, the longer the visitor stays on the site.

Usability is also a key factor in driving the acquisition of high value inbound links. For example if you want a university or a government site to link to yours, they must be able to quickly and more importantly, easily understand what the page and site is about. Again, usability is a major factor in this process.

From the architectural level, having a clean site hierarchy and an easily understood navigation structure will benefit both usability and SEO. For example, providing a logically thought through hierarchy that matches up with the nature of the theme/content of the site. Therefore the site should have a easy-to-use consistent global navigation structure and a breadcrumb bar.

One very important key point:

For the best-practices in site development, follow this chain:

Usability -> SEO -> Web Design/Development -> Testing -> Site Launch -> Constant Site Monitoring

But why does SEO come before Web Design/Development?

• Upfront target audience research will determine the kind of site architecture and navigation to implement.
• Defining which markup tags in the coding is as important as what will be said on the page.
• Titles of the page and the page URL needs to be planned to match about what the page will convey.

Involving optimization into your web design process in the beginning enables you to lay down the appropriate framework for your site. If you ignore SEO best practices when designing your website, it can lead to immediate search engine problems and certainly can cost you time and money later.

Organic Search Engine Optimization is another concept to understand before jumping into it. Prior to launching an Organic SEO campaign, it is important to prepare keyword research and also discover/understand the competition. Discovering this information first is crucial to successful and profitable Organic SEO campaigns.

So the conclusion is, that it is highly recommended that you do these things before even creating your site. Since you are planning to build a new site, it would be a good idea to start with some basic questions.

• What is the purpose of the site? There are many good answers to this question, such as lead generation, selling services, selling advertising, or reduce support costs, etc. Understanding the answer to this question is where everything starts. Conversions are the fulfilling of this purpose.
• Who is you target audience you want to attract to the site? Who are those visitors you want to bring to your site that might convert in the short or the long term? There are many distinct groups of visitors. They can be divided into several groups such as first time visitors, repeat visitors, visitors from different countries, buyers, tire-kickers or advanced users?
• How is your site useful to your visitors? What are their interests and/or goals etc and how can you help fulfill them? Depending on the targeted group of visitors, think about the types of information, products and/or services they want to see on your site.
• Will the visitors know where to find what they are looking for on the site? Will they arrive at your site, be one click away from finding what they are looking for, or from converting, but instead simply leave because they cannot find what they seek?  Since you know who your target audience is, you should ask yourself is the site useful to them. Is the usability for that group correct for that group?

In conclusion, this concept can help your rank better utilizing better usability and the best proven methods of SEO. When this occurs, you should see better visitor interaction with your site.  And that you can translate into whatever you need.

Author:  This article was written by John S. Britsios, Web Architect & Principal SEO Consultant at SEO Workers. Add his expertise to your Google web searches.

Would you like to know how to make real money online without a website and using only free resources? It is possible, I assure you, and it is not particularly difficult. Don’t get me wrong: I am not suggesting you join one of those programs which promise you will get rich without having to do any work. When I say it is not particularly difficult, I mean just that: this is a way to make real money online that anyone of average intelligence with an average education can learn to do.

The simplest way to make some extra income online is to do affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing means you join a company as an affiliate and promote their product in return for payment of commission on all sales you generate. Commission rates vary but it is not uncommon for commission to be as high as 70%.

Affiliate marketing is highly popular because it is straightforward and hassle-free. All you have to do is promote the products and you get paid commission when people buy; all the financial transactions, delivery etc are handled by the merchant direct. You can make money without having your own website because you will send potential customers straight to the merchant’s website.

If you need to make some extra money, chances are you won’t want to start off by paying out for advertising, and that is why we are going to look at how to make real money online without a website using free tools and resources. First we’ll look at the basic steps you need to take and then we’ll look at each one in more detail. This is the procedure in five basic steps:

Choose a product you want to promote

Sign up as an affiliate to the merchant company

Do research to find keywords to use in your promotion

Write an article relating to the product

Submit the article to high traffic article directories

1. Choosing your affiliate product.

You can choose to promote literally anything but it is obviously a good idea if you choose something in demand.

2. Become an affiliate

The easiest way to become an affiliate is to sign up to a reliable affiliate program directory such as Clickbank or Share-A-Sale. These directories also help you to find popular products to promote.

3. Do keyword research

If you are new to affiliate marketing, you probably got a bit lost at the third point but it is absolutely crucial to your success. If you type “free keyword research tool” into a search engine query box, you will get thousands of results. There are many excellent free keyword research tools available but you must learn how to use them effectively.

4. Write an article

Write an article of not less than 500 words relating to the product you are promoting. The article can be in the form of a review, a personal story, a “how to” tip etc; it doesn’t matter, as long as the article is relevant to the product and contains the keywords you selected.

5. Publish your article

Submit the article for publication at top article directories such as isnare.com and go articles.com. When submitting the article, you need to append to it what is called a “resource box” or “author’s bio”. This is where you include a link to the affiliate product website.

That’s the procedure, now a word about how it works. When potential customers use your chosen keywords in search engines queries, your article will appear in a high place because it is posted on a high ranking article directory. People read your article and, with any luck, will be sufficiently interested in what you have said to click on the link in your resource box. This takes them to the merchant’s website where they make a purchase.

That, in a nutshell, is how to make real money online without a website and without having to spend any cash.

Author:  If you want to know how to make real money online, visit Elaine Currie’s Work At Home Directory which features the best ways to make honest extra income at home

With the advent of broadband Internet access and the proliferation of free video hosting sites like YouTube, Blip.tv, Revver and Veoh.com, today anyone with a camcorder and an Internet connection can produce a video and share it with the world. Producing video for the Web can be a powerful marketing tool for your business. Some obvious benefits include:

1. Free or low-cost publicity and exposure for your company
2. Instant access to a worldwide audience on the Web, 24/7
3. The ability to use your video hosting site’s HTML code to add the video to your own Web site

Here’s a step-by-step guide for getting started:

1. Produce a short video

“Short” is the key word here, for several reasons: First, online viewers have a much shorter attention span when watching video on the Web. Second, longer videos mean larger file sizes. Most free video hosting sites have a 100MB limit; some even less.

Additional resources: For great, do-it-yourself, online video tools, visit Serious Magic and look at their inexpensive “Vlog It” software. Videomaker magazine also features tips for creating online video.

2. Output your video for online viewing

Once you’ve got your video, it still needs to be encoded and compressed to make it “Internet-friendly.” Video files can be enormous, but compression software shrinks the video file size so it plays more smoothly on the Web. Remember to save or export your file to an online-compatible size, which is 320 X 240 resolution; and compress it so it’s under 20MB, if possible. Be sure to save your video file in a format that most video sites accept, such as a Quicktime movie (.mov), a Windows movie (.wmv) or Flash (.flv) file.

Additional resources: QuickTime Pro (for Windows or Mac) is ideal for compressing your video and transferring it to whatever file format you prefer (Windows, Flash, MPEG). The software is about $30 (US) and is worth its weight in gold when it comes to converting files for online video. Another option is Blaze Media Pro. ($50)

3. Upload to several free video hosting sites

Now comes the fun part - You get to upload your video and share it with the world! Most of the popular video sites have relatively easy upload instructions: First, you’ll have to create an account for each site. The video hosting sites usually have a two or three step process that allows you to browse for your video file on your computer; add a title and description; and then click “upload” to post your video file. Most sites will also give you options for adding a thumbnail photo, selecting your genre or category or, in some cases, signing up for revenue sharing. (Don’t expect the money to start pouring in unless you’ve got a wildly popular “viral” video!)

Additional resources: Go beyond the obvious sites like YouTube and Yahoo, and upload your video to some of the more feature-rich sites such as Veoh, Revver, iFilm and VideoEgg Visit the individual sites for easy upload instructions.

4. Promote and share your new “online TV channel”

After you’ve uploaded your video, these free video hosting sites provide the option of “sharing” your video by giving you a link/URL that you can e-mail to your contacts. Most sites also include a great feature that allows you to copy the HTML code and “embed” the video into your own website or blog. Simply cut and paste the code provided into your own site. Finally, use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to offer “subscriptions” to your online videos.

Additional resources: I find the most “user-friendly” sites to be Blip.tv and VideoEgg. Sites like these and Brightcove.com tend to be geared toward businesses and a bit more professional. Popular (and free) RSS feed providers include Feedburner and Mefeedia.

Finally, keep in mind these special considerations for web video:

• Since your screen is typically much smaller on the web, avoid wide shots with a lot of people in them. It just doesn’t translate well on the Internet.
• Avoid pans and zooms. Rapid movement is harder to watch on a smaller screen.
• Keep it simple. Don’t go crazy with a lot of titles and graphics. They may be too small to be effective.
• Keep it short - Less is more on the “short-attention-span” Internet!

Author:  Lou Bortone is an award-winning writer and video producer with over 20 years experience in marketing, branding and promotion. As an online video expert, Lou helps entrepreneurs create video for the web at http://www.TheOnlineVideoGuy.com . In addition, Lou works as a freelance writer and professional ghostwriter, with a ghostwriting site at http://www.GhostwriteForYou.com.

Several months ago, I shared with members of The Internet Marketing Inner Circle what I considered THE key to a top-selling Internet marketing product. That key is to make sure that the product solves a HUGE, painful problem.

I also shared that one massive problem that I considered WORTH tackling is the dismal email deliverability rates that many email marketers are experiencing.

After all, what good does it do to build a list in the hundreds of thousand (which is where my database is at), if much of the email doesn’t get through.

This is a problem that I have discussed with numerous top online marketers. Many of these marketers, with lists in the hundreds of thousands, and even millions, long for “the good old days” when a much higher percentage of their email was delivered.

Many ezine publishers confide that they sometimes send out a mailing and then wonder if ANYONE received it. Responses can often be that low, and if it’s a well-written email, the problem HAS to be that it didn’t get through.

Many marketers have started doctoring up individual words used in their emails, thinking that this will partly solve the problem. I find that words broken up with strange punctuation, or deliberately misspelled, hurts overall response rates more than it helps!

Many marketers have grown so frustrated that they’ve started simply publishing their newsletters on their blogs, giving up on the notion of delivering their full message right to subscribers inboxes. They just send out a very short email inviting the reader to the latest blog post. I don’t consider that the best solution.

However, setting up your email system so that more of your email gets through isn’t beyond the capability of the average email marketer.

This is a topic that even those who don’t use email marketing need to understand because then they’ll know exactly why they often don’t get emails that they WANT to receive.

The step-by-step instruction on how to remedy this problem are beyond the scope of this article. It would take a book to explain ALL of the intricacies. In-fact, there is an excellent primer on the topic entitled, “Email Delivery Secret - EXPOSED.” This primer is brief yet thorough, and very inexpensive. You can get it at: http://IncreasedEmailDelivery.org

Both this ebook, and experts that I’ve talked with on the topic, explain that the key is how the server that the email is sent from is configured.

Things that kill email deliverability, but are easy to correct are:

1) Having open DNS server settings… allowing spammers to send email through your server, and also causing many ISP’s to block all email from your server. I once had a host that had ALL email from ALL customers blocked for this very reason. Hundreds of screaming customers forced them to fix that oversight!

2) Having an improper DNS server configuration. This may be beyond your control, but may also indicate that you need different hosting. 3) Missing Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records, which other servers use in deciding whether or not to accept email from you. The SPF record is used to prevent or detect forged “from” email addresses.

4) Missing key mailboxes on your server, such as abuse@yourdomain.com, and others.

On the other side of the coin you need to understand that ISP’s such as Yahoo.com, Hotmail.com, and AOL, have fairly strict guidelines on what email is allowed onto their servers…. and into their customers’ inboxes.

The thing is, conditions that cause these ISP’s, used by million of your potential customers, to block your emails are all published polices and procedures.

To get more of your email through to customers who receive email at those ISP’s, you really only need to make a few changes in your email setup. These are things that make for logical, secure email practices in the first place.

The bottom-line is that you CAN get a much higher percentage of your emails delivered if you’ll just set aside a little time to discover why it’s actually not getting through. Those reasons aren’t secrets that the ISP’s hide from you! You just need to learn them and then start working WITH the ISP’s.

As previously pointed out, a good starting point is the ebook, “Email Delivery Secret - EXPOSED.” It will point you to a lot of tools and resources to check things such as whether your domain (or IP address) is blacklisted, and how to get it unblocked. That inexpensive ebook, with some excellent screenshots for the various server control panel setups, is at: http://IncreasedEmailDelivery.org

Here’s another thing… just taking the time to learn these few good email practices will put you light-years ahead of your competitors. Many of them just seem to prefer “sticking their heads in the sand” and pretending that the problem doesn’t exist.

Low email deliverability rates are a real problem. Now, you know how to do something about it.

Author:  Willie Crawford has been teaching others uncomplicated methods of building successful online businesses since 1996. Today, he does most of his teaching inside an exclusive membership site filled with other experts dedicated to uncovering the truth about how to succeed online. Join Willie and dozens of other “old-timers” at: http://TheInternetMarketingInnerCircle.com

The best prevention is avoidance. If you’ve got a steady stream of ideas to draw from, writer’s block will never be a problem. The trick is to understand the ebb and flow of creativity. Harness the ideas when they are flowing freely, then stock up for dry seasons.

Because dry seasons will come. Ten new clients dropping into your lap, a new speaking engagement, upcoming seminars, and dozens of other wonderful opportunities can drain your time and energy. When the well of ideas runs dry, the blog is usually the first to feel the effects of the creative drought.

Even if you’re in the middle of the desert, ideas may be flowing beneath your feet. Here are some ideas to help you draw water from the rocks.

News

Weigh in on trends, events, and people in the public spotlight. When the world is watching, you may be able to show up on the radar as well. Relate it to the topic of your blog and add value with your unique perspective.

It is important to take a new angle on the news. You do not want to blend into the thousands of other voices in the media whirlwind. If someone failed, point out ways they could have turned it into a success. If the story illustrates a point you’ve been making, draw out the analogy. If a new idea is taking your area by storm, sound out about it.

If you have a niche blog, you can also talk about little-known news that hasn’t made big waves yet. There is always a demand for interesting stories the rest of the media is missing.

To learn more about getting publicity from news, read this post about Online Press Release Mistakes and How to Avoid Them: http://www.xeal.com/blog/index.php/marketing/2007/08/27/8_online_press_release_mistakes_and_how_

Respectfully disagree

Controversy, when kept at a professional level, can be a great spur for conversation. You can generate comments and page views with trackbacks to the original post that inspired your commentary as well.

This must be handled with extreme care. With any controversy, you take on the threat of negative comments towards you or your company. Tread lightly and courteously when testing these waters. If not, you risk offending a very vocal community leader with an established audience.

Agree…with a new twist

A less turbulent option for interacting with other blog communities is adding your unique spin to an existing idea. This carries the same benefits of traffic and comments via trackbacks. Choose blogs with an established audience, if possible, or smaller blogs closely related to your own.

Since you are effectively sailing in the slipstream of another blog, this should be used sparingly. Commenting on posts from other blogs is a very effective technique. However, you can lose your credibility as a thought leader if you’re always riding edge of someone else’s wave.

Highlight useful links

Since ancient times, farmers have diverted water from existing rivers to help nourish their crops. For years, the Web has generated a steady stream of incredible resources. Mentioning any one of these resources can keep your blog going and deliver helpful content to your readers.

Spin old ideas into new articles

Re-visit old articles you’ve written and look at the subjects you touched on. One or more of those sub-topics might have enough information to become its own article. For example, if you talked about the top 5 things to do to improve your golf swing, you could create an article focusing on one of those 5 things. Or if you wrote an article on choosing the perfect putter, you might be able to do a similar article on choosing the perfect driver as well.

If you’re short on ideas to begin with, check out this post on 20 surefire ways to beat writer’s block:
http://dmiracle.com/general/20-surefire-ways-to-beat-writers-block/

Any or all of these techniques can help you survive a creative dry spell. Once the creativity starts to kick in, keep tabs on the ideas when they’re flowing. Creativity comes in bursts, and it pays to ride the waves when they come.

Not only will you be able to keep your blog rolling along till the next big rain, you might have the chance to build community as well through commentary and links. Who knows? You might help someone else break out of their creative slump too.

Author:  Jessica Cox and Michelle Pierce are graduates of the University of Oklahoma’s College of Journalism with a background in Internet marketing and writing for the Web. They currently provide PR services at Xeal Precision Marketing. Sign up to get crucial Internet marketing tips at Xeal’s free Thursday webinar at http://www.xeal.com/webinar.htm.