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Link Building Strategy To Get Top Search Engine Rankings

01 2008 Thursday

By Pawel Reszka in Featured

Being at the top of Google search engine is the ultimate goal for any internet marketer. The reason for that is because over 80% of the traffic goes to those websites that are ranking in the top 10 for their specific keywords. Google and almost any other search engine like Yahoo, or MSN determine ranking by the amount of backlinks given website has. But that doesn’t mean any backlinks either. The amount of highly relevant and anchor text links is the main factor that contributes to your rankings on Google.

How to get highly relevant and anchor text links?

Well, it’s in fact very easy to do. The most powerful ways of getting one-way relevant links to your site is through press releases, article marketing, and link baits.

Let’s go over each method and how I use it to get my niche sites on top of Google search engine.

Writing Press Releases - this method is highly effective and provides almost instant results if executed correctly. The effectiveness of this method depends on quality of your press release as well as on the press release distribution service you are going to use.

Here are some press release distribution services I use:

Webwire.com
24-7pressrelease.com
PrWebDirect.com
FastPitchNetworking.com
PrLeap.com

Those above services will provide great search engine visibility and exposure for your website.

I highly suggest that you write about 2-3 press releases per week with a link to your main site and subpages for better in-depth linking.

Writing Articles - If you are not writing articles then you are missing out on a lot of free traffic and backlinks. You should distribute about 10-20 articles per month with links to your main site and subpages. Write only relevant articles so the links will be coming from relevant web pages.

Here are article distribution services I use:

SubmitYourArticle.com
Isnare.com
EzineArticles.com

I am sure there are other ones out there, but those have produced the best results for me. Of course you don’t have to use those services, but they will automate the entire process for you, which will save you a lot of time.

When you distribute your articles make sure to include anchor text links within your resource box. Most of the time you are allowed to have two links in your resource box so make sure to include two links and not just one.

Link Baits - This method of getting backlinks is probably the most effective if done correctly. You want your link bait to gain a viral effect so your backlinks spread across the internet like wildfire.

How can this be achieved?

First of all, let me explain what link baits are. Link bait could be controversial content (article, press release, or review), useful web based tool, authority pages, or great service.

I think the easiest way to set up some link baits on your site is to write controversial content or hire a programmer to create a web based tool for your website’s visitors.

Some examples of web based tools that are great link baits:

tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/
www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-your-blog-worth/
www.affhelper.com/submit-content.html

The above sites either provide some useful tools, or services that other website owners would like to link to from their sites.

This generates a viral effect and you get to the point where you never have to worry about getting links to your site again. That’s where you start seeing great results and your website starts ranking all over the place for keywords that you never even thought of.

It’s an amazing feeling indeed.

As you can see getting top search engine rankings is not as hard as it may seem. Of course, there are other factors like high quality content that contributes to your performance within the serps as well. The only way you can achieve the results you want is by putting this information into action. Use the above strategies to get your site on top of Google.

Author: Learn how to convert traffic into sales and generate profits online by using the Mass Control marketing system. Not sure where to start? Check these cool ideas to make money online.

6 Astonishing Viral Marketing Strategies That Will Get the Word Out Quickly

01 2008 Thursday

By Ontarian Hawkins in Featured

Viral marketing or some may refer to it as buzz marketing, provides some of the most amazing results to almost any online business, products or services. It is a vast source of “one-way” links, sales leads and targeted website traffic. Surprisingly, several marketers are either not familiar with these particular strategies or do not recognize their capabilities or are not taking complete advantage of what they call the “viral factor” in their online marketing efforts.

Viral marketing pertains to the method of giving away something for free then allowing individuals to distribute or send it out to others. Viral marketing’s main purpose is to circulate your message or promotion to as various individuals as possible yet not spending any money for promotion or advertising. Although a very profound marketing tool, this method is probably the least used by many marketers online.

Generally, viral marketing strategies can be utilized by any online business or web site, be it small or big. Any online marketer can use such strategies provided that they are willing to devote some time to set up certain criteria to become positioned effectively. Viral marketing strategies done the right way will produce numerous benefits.

Simply put, the basic concept of all viral marketing strategies is to include a freebie in your ad that people can use or giveaway. The best benefits of viral marketing are:

Increase link popularity
Increase or improves targeted traffic
Builds brand recognition
Generates targeted leads
Automates marketing efforts

With that said, here are 6 astonishing viral marketing strategies that will get the word out quickly about your business, product, or service.

Writing articles with a resource box. Write articles pertaining to your service or products. Allow your recipients to reprint or copy your articles in their newsletter, website, ezines, magazine or e-books. Your article must include or display your “resource box” as well as the option for reprints of articles at the bottom.
Using forums and discussion boards. When you are capable of setting up a bulletin board or a forum, then you actually have a very effective marketing tool. You can invite and permit online users to utilize your “discussion board” on their website since many internet users do not have these tools.
Providing free website. When you are making use of a “dedicated server”, you are able to permit internet users to register for a web site for free on your own server. And because you gave away some space, you can oblige them or demand that they display your “banner ad” at the uppermost potion of their site.
Distributing free software. Permit your website visitors to distribute your software for free. Simply include your online business ad within the software. The internet provides numerous available tools that permit you to “brand” your software with messages and your contact information. You can pay for the rights and then you have your own software for free! Or, there are programs available that permits you to make your very own software. Just search the internet!
Offering free graphics, banners, templates, etc. If you have the skill and talent for web design, then you can be able to make graphics, templates, banners etc., upload all to your website and allow your visitors to pass on your fonts, graphics, templates, banners etc., for free, of course. Simply display your ad onto your designs or oblige recipients that they “link directly” to your site. Also be certain that you incorporate a “link back” to your website in your “copyright notice” and oblige your recipients to hold intact your “copyright notice”.
Free redirect service. Permit your web visitors to impart your “free online service” to their visitors, web site, e-zine or newsletter subscribers. It can be a free e-mail, “search engine submissions”, e-mail consulting, etc. Let your imagination soar and think of things that you can offer for free.

Keep in mind that your marketing message that will be relayed or transmitted by any type of viral strategy should be brief and clear; likewise it should be simple for your visitor to obtain your free offer.

In the same way each free item should carry a very simple course through which a recipient is able to inform his links or friends about it, in order that they also can obtain your free offer and simultaneously be able to view your message then supply you with their email address and names.

Viral marketing strategies are very powerful marketing tools; however, these are tools that are required to be carefully used with substantial thought. When you are offering something for free, note that it needs to be of good quality, of good value, and targets the needs of your prospects.

Author: Ontarian Hawkins is an established internet marketer, mentor, and business coach that teaches various pillars of marketing. To find out how Ontarian can help you with your marketing efforts go pick up his FREE REPORT on how he does it here => http://www.attractionwiz.com

Promoting Your Blog For Better Results

01 2008 Wednesday

By Anirban Bhattacharyya in Featured

When you decided to have a blog and or you already started one, the time is now to promote it. Though I am very new to blogging, yet I got some handful of information to share with you and trying for myself.

First of all, what you need to decide if you are at all interested in promoting it. If your blog only caters to a certain number or type of people then you shall not devour effort to promote it. Promoting not always means spreading your blog name and content wide across so that it reaches every nook and corner. Promoting can be specific target oriented or general. If your target audience is a group of people like if you have a blog on news for your local area, the way you will promote it should be altogether different.

A few ways to promote your blog.

If your blog is audience oriented or meant for local news, events etc you can try these methods. I am not sure how effective these are but definitely the ideas are unique and make sense.
Aaron Brazell in one of his posts stated how effective is his Guerrilla Marketing Techniques. Guerrilla Marketing is promoting your blog in some unique, powerful and aggressive way. Like Darren Rowse in one of his articles gave an example of such marketing.
I met a blogger recently who had a blog with a very local focus. His Guerrilla Marketing Tactic was to do a deal with three internet cafes in his area to make his the home page on all of the computers. In return for this he gave them some free advertising on his blog. The same blogger made a similar deal with the local library who also made his the home page of their public internet computers. This worked particularly well for him as his was on his local area.
You can use local newspaper to promote your blog. I am doubtful if it will succeed, but there’s noting to lose in trying.
Distributing leaflet, wallpapers or encouraging local shop owners to display your blog poster can add traffic to your blog. Because some people just out of curiosity will definitely check your blog at least for once. And if they like it, they will be committed readers.

If your audience is global or general then your promotion should be online and offline promotion will not be a big success. Here are some golden rules.

Content is king. So you must first concentrate on your content. If content is not good then you can draw visitors to your blog but cannot retain it. They will come and will leave and will think twice before re-visiting.
Use a good blog software. There are certain features which a blog must have. Auto pinging, trackback URL, good WYSIWYG editor, should include in the blog features list. In my opinion wordpress, typepad are very good softwares which you can use.
Search engine friendly url: Your URL at any point of time shall not look like domainname.com?blogtitle=xxxx, instead it should be like domainname.com/xxxx.html or domainname.com/year/month/date/xxxx.
Submitting your website to various search engines will be your next step to index it properly. There are free tools in the market which you can use.
Pinging various blog. If you are using any popular software, then these software automatically pings your RSS/Atom to various blog listing websites. If not then you can try Ping-o-Matic.
Joining any blog community or creating one is very useful. Because in this community you will get readers who are really interested in reading blogs and all of them are regular bloggers. You can read this article for further insight.
Promoting in myspace, xanga, orkut can add some traffic to your website but it cannot be very high, I bet.
Putting your website address in your email signature is a good idea as this will keep promoting your website to the section of people with whom you communicate on regular basis.

Once you have completed promoting, the next thing you should think upon is how you should earn money(obviously if you are a professional blogger or looking forward to a blogging career). I will come up with another article on this topic.

Useful Links

Author: Anirban Bhattacharya is an open source programmer and has almost 8 years of industry experience. For the past 5 years he is an active coder in LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) technologies. He has wide knowledge in project management and software development life cycle. He spends his free time in writing technical articles for his blog http://www.wertex.org. His past experience has enabled him to gather knowledge on various open source technologies, PHP frameworks and other related areas. He can be contacted at anirban76b@gmail.com

Self-Promotion Writing Tips for Companies

01 2008 Wednesday

By Tammy M. Ratcliff in Featured

One of the best ways for companies to “get their name out there” is through self-promotion. This is a little different than straight up advertising and usually more effective. Self-promotion involves providing information to potential clients by way of a written article instead of the standard sales pitch. Any company can proclaim their greatness on a banner or a billboard; however, when a company offers free advice concerning their area of expertise, it makes a much stronger statement to the potential clients. Here a few things to keep in mind when writing articles for self-promotion.

Catchy Titles

An article’s title is one of the most important devices used in getting a reader’s attention. The title can literally make or break an entire article since it will most likely determine whether or not a reader keeps reading. If the reader doesn’t finish the article, he will not see the link at the bottom that leads to your company’s website. So, while creativity is always appreciated, accuracy is much more important.

In other words, the title really needs to say exactly what the article is about. If George Clooney’s name is in the title, the article better be about him. People do not like to be tricked into reading something that has nothing to do with the subject they are looking for. The goal with self-promotion articles is to provide useful information to people who might use your services. George Clooney may be the hottest man in show business, but if he doesn’t use or endorse your product or service, it is best to keep his name out of it.

Beginning Paragraphs

An article’s first paragraph is just as important as its title. This is, hopefully, the attention getter! The first paragraph should feed off of the title and set up the rest of the article. It should do so in an informative, interesting way that encourages the reader to keep reading. This is also a good place to set up a general scenario that most readers will be able to relate to. If the first paragraph is successful in grabbing a reader’s attention, the likelihood greatly increases that the reader will finish the article, thus discovering the company responsible for its content. Mission accomplished!

Length and Language

Time is so important to people today. Therefore, when writing self-promotional articles, keep them relatively short (around 700 to 1000 words). Make sure they are written so they are easy to understand. When a person is seeking information today, they want to be able to find it fast and read/learn it even faster. Big words and long articles are just not compatible with this mindset.

The Professional Edge

You may know everything there is to know about cars, but if you can’t put your thoughts to paper in a clear, concise manner, consider hiring a professional writer. Self-promotion through writing Internet articles can only be successful if the final product provides a positive representation of your company. Therefore, if your article is filled with misspelled words and dangling modifiers, the only thing it will succeed in doing is making you look incompetent. People who run their own companies often do not have time to spend looking up the rules of punctuation and parallelism. However, writers do! If need be, take advantage of someone else’s writing expertise to help promote your business in the most professional way.

Editing

Editing is another area where outside help could be needed. Even the most careful writers make mistakes. Unfortunately, once an error is printed, it is too late to correct, and even the tiniest typo can mar the judgment of a potential client. Because of this, hiring an editor may be a worthy investment. An experienced editor will go beyond checking for misspelled or misused words and look for shifts in voice or tense, as well as subject-verb agreement. Using an editor doesn’t guarantee an error free article, but it increases the likelihood a great deal.

Conclusion

Self-promotion using Internet articles can be a great way to increase your business. This type of instructional marketing emphasizes knowledge instead of gimmicks. Taking the time to create a well-written article may seem counterproductive to your actual business, but the results will speak for themselves.

Author: Tammy M. Ratcliff, (http://www.thePhantomWriters.com) Stop throwing your money away on Ineffective Article Marketing Campaigns! Learn the Secrets of writing reprint articles that can generate thousands of dollars in new sales. The techniques shared in The Phantom Writers $37 ebook could even help you to get more effective articles from your ghost writers. Get your own copy of “Article Marketing For Traffic, Sales and Profit” today.

The Power of Two: MySpace, Squidoo, and Free Link Building

01 2008 Wednesday

By Darren Dunner in Featured

Link building is staple in online marketing for websites. Anyone that wants a chance at traffic will put their link out there on a variety of different sites. If you are focusing on building links to your own site within your own site by creating sub domain names and redirects then you will find your site a sinking ship in the vast ocean of the world wide web.

Link building is important in that search engines use them to determine a website’s popularity. There are a number of ways to build quality one way links to your site that only require your time. The amount of sites out there that allow you to place your text link on their site are numerous and these sites are aggressively putting themselves out there offering you this chance at a one way link.

To give you an understanding of why these sites are so willing to give up a link is that they are using their sites to advertise various types of companies, adsense and other means to bring in an income to their site. By having your link on their site typically means you have contributed in some way or fashion content in the form of blogs, articles, discussions and other various forms of content. Your time and effort is rewarded and rated by other users and this is all visible to the search engines.

Link building may sound difficult, but it really isn’t. There are many websites and programs that allow you to build your links quickly. The danger in this is that it’s possible to generate a lot of link building that end up going nowhere; if your site does not contain quality content, then visitors will stop by once and keep moving to another link that will not only capture but keep their interest and compel them to try or buy your services or goods.

Your Goal here is twofold in that you want to build quality and powerful links back to your site and you want to make sure your site has great content that directs them as to what you are offering and how or why they need your particular offerings. We will not cover how to prep your site in this article but wanted to make you aware that once you follow these steps below and start receiving a flood of traffic, that anything after that is in your hands so be prepared on both ends.

Two Methods for Powerful Link Building

MySpace and Squidoo are two powerful online entities that utilize link building in order to generate heavy website traffic. The cost to do this is free, but does require a bit of care and talent. The blog features on MySpace offer a great opportunity for link building, and the lens features on Squidoo are equally ripe for similar link building chances. Since the key to successful link building is quality content, MySpace and Squidoo are websites rich with link building potential: MySpace via the user-friendly website design options and blog feature, and Squidoo with its plethora of article lenses.

MySpace

MySpace (www.myspace.com) is a popular social utility site where people can create profiles, jazz up their profile pages with customized backgrounds, picture slide shows, music, and yes even start link building. MySpace also allows independent music artists a platform where their music can get out to the masses without the political red tape that may be inherent in a music contract with a major record label. One of the most popular MySpace features is the blog, where each person can blog on their profile and allow others to read it. Through the myspace blog is a great potential to use link building for other websites.

It takes about five to ten minutes to create a profile on MySpace. You create a profile name, enter your real name, address, email address, and other required information, and MySpace generates a personal link to your profile page. Your profile name can be changed as many times as you want, but your profile link is permanent unless you delete your account completely.

Squidoo

Squidoo (www.squidoo.com) is popular social website which allows people to post lenses (articles reflecting their own personal viewpoints and expertise) and have those lenses accessed by thousands. Visitors can leave comments on each lens, which is also an opportunity for link building. Lenses allow users to meet new clients, start fan pages, sell items, have virtual fundraisers, make recommendations, and more. It takes about ten minutes to set up a Squidoo account and from there, you can begin to create your own lenses, as well as access the lenses of others in the Squidoo community.

How Link Building Works with MySpace and Squidoo

MySpace
Blogs on MySpace are a prime opportunity for link building. With thousands of members, it is simple to search for blogs and read them, and leave a comment on what you’ve read. Music groups have increasingly used this phenomenon to sell albums and fan comments utilize link building as a self-promotional tool. The more comments you leave with links, the more chances you provide for link building traffic to your website.

Also, posting your blogs on subjects related to your industry carries over with it additional linking power. Make sure to put interesting facts or details that will cause others to comment on it. Don’t forget to spend some time each day adding new friends and encouraging them to read your posts and comment back on it.

Squidoo
Squidoo offers users the opportunity to comment on the lenses written by Squidoo community members. With each comment, a user can leave a link that will generate traffic to that user’s website. Squidoo has a member base similar in size to MySpace, which allows link builders many chances to increase the traffic generated to their sites – all from one powerful source.

You can also post your own lenses (articles) to Squidoo and make sure to take the time to build on the community and make friends.

Conclusion:

If you spend about 15 minutes on each site commenting or adding new fresh content and building new friends you will have great success in link quality link building.

Successful link building is the result of great content, not link farms (groups of several websites that have links to each other, solely with the intent of building their search engine rankings). Keep the content of your site fresh, witty, and engaging, and make sure to update it regularly. Write it, and link building will come.

Aauthor: Darren Dunner, Editor for SiteProNews your best resource for SEO concepts, web development ideas and online marketing. Darren has been in the web industry since 1999 and currently customizes and brands blogs for marketing purposes along with offering multiple ways to creative backlinking.

The Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals in 11 Steps

01 2008 Tuesday

By Carsten Cumbrowski in Featured

People use search engines to find things. Although you should avoid making your business depending entirely on free traffic from search engines, so is it still important to consider search engines in your overall internet marketing strategy. Ignoring search means leaving a big chunk of business on the table, which will make it much harder to stay competitive depending on the industry you are in and what your competition is doing. SEO isn’t rocket science and to a certain degree technical. It has nothing to do with magic and fairy dust will do nothing to help you with it. It also requires a long term strategy and commitment in order to become and remain successful. There is no silver bullet and no shortcuts.

Because of its long term commitment necessary, is a well formed strategy key to success, a strategy that is followed and verified and scrutinized along the way.

While all 11 steps below are part of a repeating cycle over the time while you are doing business on the internet, so are only step 6 to 11 task that need to be on going on a much more frequent basis. Due to the fact that steps 1 to 5 are not repeated very often, is it necessary to give them special attention and care to get them right at the beginning. Errors made there will affect all the others in a negative way and hurt your efforts along the way.

1. Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most important first step that should not be taken too lightly. While you can easily test and change hundreds of keywords in paid search campaigns, so is this not possible for organic search optimization. You usually concentrate on one to five key phrases for the whole site (theme) and one to three phrases for a single page. For large sites with thousands of pages is it hard to optimize every single page to the full extend due to the limits in time and other resources.

2. Competitive Intelligence

Know you competition! What are they doing? Where do they rank, for which terms? Who is linking to them and why? The things you have to do depend on what your competitors are doing. The less competitive your vertical is online the easier is it for you to outperform your competition. This is important to determining cost and resources for your SEO efforts.

3. Web Design and Development

Fixing something that is broke is always harder than building it right from the beginning. If you are in the process of creating a new website, make sure to consider search engine friendly design and architecture before and during the actual development of the website. This will save you a lot of time and money and in most cases put you already ahead of a considerable number of your competitors. Search engine friendly design is not rocket science and search engine friendly design does not have to be ugly. Search engine friendly design is for the most part user friendly design as well, but there are some exceptions where compromises have to be made.

4. Get Your First Inbound Links

Don’t submit your new site to search engines and by no means pay anybody to do it for you. There are many cheap services and software products out there that offer for less than $100 submission to and #1 ranking in thousands of search engines. Don’t do it. If you see an offer like that, hold your wallet and run. Your site should be found by search engines naturally and they will find your site if a page that is already in their index links to you. Why? Because this is what search engines do, following links to discover content. There are plenty of methods to get your first inbound links. Some web directories are recognized by search engines and a listing there will do your site good. Most recognized directories are commercial in nature and charge a fee for reviewing your site. Also check with vendors or good customers (B2B) who have a website for the opportunity to have them place a link to your website.

5. Sitemaps

The larger search engines allow webmasters to submit a sitemap to them via a webmaster console. The search engines also provide reports and other useful information, such as technical problems with your websites you might not be aware of via their console. Even if you decide against the submission of a site map to the search engines, is it advisable to create an account and register your website with them for the reports and statistics they provide for free and which are invaluable for your internet marketing efforts.

6. Web Analytics

You can’t determine success or failure of any of your internet marketing activities if you do not track and measure their effectiveness. Engaging in any type of marketing campaign online, be it SEO, paid search, display advertising, email marketing, social media or affiliate marketing is like fishing in the dark without any type of web analytics solution in place. The options range from free services to very expensive and heavily customizable package. You have to determine what solution will work for you, but you have to start with one so don’t put it off. Web analytics helps you to determine where to improve your site and your marketing campaigns to channel your resources and money to the things that work and pull it away from the things that don’t work. Web analytics is not a cost center if it is done properly.

7. Content Building

A website is never done. It has to change and grow over time. This is a natural process to adjust to changes in the market, with maturing in this type of medium and your normal business growth. Providing good quality content that is related to what you do, but not necessarily aimed to sell something directly is the best opportunity to increase traffic and exposure of your business. Most people do not link to pages that only serve the purpose to make a sale.

8. Link Building

The internet wouldn’t be a “net” without links. It would only be a collection of independent pages that are not connected to each other. Disconnected pages cannot be found and that defeats the purpose of them, wouldn’t it? Inbound links and internal site linking is important for organic traffic, meaning people seeing and clicking on those links to get to your website, but they are also important for SEO. Inbound links play an important role in virtually every search engine when it comes to ranking pages in their search results. This is a never ending process and while it happens naturally. Be a bit more pro-active to get more and good inbound links. There are plenty of sites out there that should link to you, but don’t know you and your content.

9. Engagement, Trust and Community Building

Social media and Web 2.0 might be buzz words, but the underlying core elements they are made of are much more elementary and fundamental. Don’t live in a bubble and talk to people without allowing people to respond and to interact with you. People will talk about you, with or without you being around. Take the opportunity to become part of the discussion to build trust and deeper relationships with your customers or potential customers. Listen to what they say and learn about their wants and their needs. Hear what they say about you and your products, especially the criticism and improve on them.

10. Ranking and Traffic Analysis

Check where you are today to be able to compare it with data in the future. Look for trends and evaluate the success of your goals, which you should have specified before you engaged in any type of marketing campaign. You did set goals that are measurable I hope. Improving ranking is important for SEO, but more important than the ranking is the traffic that comes with it. Does the change in ranking yields in the traffic you expected? Does this traffic actually convert?

11. Conversion Analysis

No matter what you do, everything will come down to one critical factor at the very end. What is your bottom line? Did you make profit or did you lose money. While losing money in the short term for strategic reasons is okay, so Is losing money in the long run deemed to failure and the end of your business altogether. Whatever you do, it has to contribute directly or indirectly to a positive Return of Investment. Web Analytics is part of the process of making this determination among other tools and methods. Expand the things that work and help your bottom line and rid yourself of the things that don’t. Improve of details to increase conversion. This requires testing. Don’t reject anything upfront without testing it first. Things that work for others might not work for you, but the same is true the other way around.

Author: Carsten Cumbrowski is an internet marketer, entrepreneur and internet marketing strategy consultant. You can find tons of resources to the various channels and topics in internet marketing free at Cumbrowski.com including further details about the SEO fundamentals that were discussed in this article.

Top 10 Internet Marketing Tips for 2008

01 2008 Tuesday

By Gillian Meier in Featured

Internet Marketing has grown phenomenally over the last few years but the shift has quite clearly moved to a market that is driven by the consumer and that is no longer dictated by journalists and corporates. Online consumers are responding more favourably to non-intrusive, relevant and socially attractive campaigns and have quite frankly had enough of intrusive, forced online advertising campaigns.

The top 10 internet marketing tips for 2008 are:

Optimise your website’s content
Create a content development strategy for your website
Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign
Publicise your website through article marketing
Develop a social media marketing strategy
Create a Company Blog
Experiment with video marketing
Engage your audiences with web widget marketing
Discover the benefits of mobile marketing
Create an effective email marketing strategy

Let’s look at each of these in more detail:-

1. Optimise your website’s content:

First and foremost, get your website content right. Make sure it is easily read by both humans and search engines. An essential variable applied by Search Engines in the way in which they rank websites is based on the relevancy of the content that the search engine is indexing.

2. Create a content development strategy for your website:

In addition to optimising the existing content on your website, it is essential that you develop a strategy to continuously increase your website’s content on an ongoing basis. All new content should be written specifically with the web reader in mind and should also be optimised for the search engines.

3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign:

When you pay for traffic (visitors) that click on your advertisements that are being advertised on search engines, this is called pay-per-click or search engine advertising. Paid search allows you to quickly leverage search engine traffic by bidding for keywords that are related to the products or services that you promote and sell on your website. Paid search advertising is particularly beneficial to companies who are not yet well ranked on search engines through natural search.

4. Publicise your website through article marketing:

Article marketing is regarded by Internet marketing experts as one of the most effective promotional methods to publicise your website and to increase the number of back links (incoming links) to your website content. To ensure ongoing awareness, articles should be submitted to suitable article directories, content publishers, article announcement lists and content syndication (RSS feeds). Each article should be published on your own website first and should include a bookmark button to encourage social bookmarking.

5. Develop a social media marketing strategy:

Studies show that by the end of 2007 more than 60% of top global companies will have had some form of social media marketing strategy in place. Corporates and small business owners should create a clear social media marketing strategy as part of an integrated communications and marketing strategy. Social Media has become an essential component of online marketing and search engines are adjusting their rankings to include search personalisation. One of the effects of the social media revolution is an exponential increase in the amount of content online.

6. Create a Company Blog:

In the past, corporates have been focusing marketing and communications efforts on becoming faceless. This has changes significantly. Where the online consumer has become very much in control, companies will no longer be able to connect with their customers in a meaningful and emotional way without having a personality. More and more companies are starting to realise the significance of establishing a company personality and we are starting to see more Corporate Blogs coming alive. Business Blogging will continue to become more lucrative as more and more people look to new media such as Blogs and social websites for insight.

7. Experiment with video marketing:

There is tremendous power and revenue-generating potential in Video Marketing. With the rapid ongoing growth of YouTube’s traffic in addition to the emergence of Internet Television websites, streaming video is dominating the international web and marketers are quickly scrambling to capitalize on this exciting channel. As companies seek to simplify video sharing, video marketing will become more interactive which could have huge implications for Affiliate marketing.

8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing:

Widgets have made significant strides as an accepted marketing technique in recent months. Many new Blog oriented services are launching Widgets providing businesses with the opportunity quickly introduce their services and new products to audiences.

Web Widgets are small applets that live in HTML and provide miniature versions of a specific piece of content outside of the primary web site. Web Widget Marketing is not only an exciting new marketing technique; it is fast becoming one of the leading brand-building marketing strategies for businesses advertising online.

9. Discover the benefits of mobile media marketing:

Mobile media marketing has continued to grow at a meteoric pace as many web companies recognise the huge potential in mobile marketing. As new technologies emerge and standard websites are converted to ones can easily be accessed by mobile devices, companies will need to ensure that there websites are mobile-friendly. This leads the way for new and innovative opportunities to provide the consumer with improved brand and marketing experiences.

10. Create an effective email marketing strategy:

Introduce an effective Email communications strategy as part of your marketing strategy to grow your existing customer base and to expand your client base significantly through permission marketing and regular targeted communications. Engaging your customers with relevant, targeted information when, where, and how they want it is crucial to marketing success. By combining technological advances with tried-and-tested best practices, the future still looks bright for email marketers.

To conquer commercial combat, a significantly powerful Internet presence, supported by a brilliant E-Marketing Strategy, is paramount to ensuring that you remain competitive, increase revenue and magnetise your customers!

Author: Blue Magnet is an Internet Marketing Training & Consulting company in South Africa. Visit http://www.bluemagnet.co.za for more information.

How to Convert Customers While You Sleep

01 2008 Tuesday

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

You might be surprised to hear this, but many of today’s Internet marketing millionaires actually make their money by doing nothing. That’s right, they make money by doing nothing at all. How? They have their Internet businesses set on automatic pilot. They’ve put systems in place to gather leads, generate content, follow up leads and convert them into customers automatically, while they sleep, travel abroad or laze around on a beach somewhere. Sound too good to be true? Well it isn’t.

For example, we use an autoresponder at Search Engine College whenever somebody decides to download our free sample SEO101 lesson. As soon as anyone enters their email address into our online form, they are sent an email by the autoresponder asking them to verify their email address and confirm their interest in opting-in to receive our information. The recipient does this by clicking on a link embedded within the email.

Once that occurs, it triggers a series of emails to be sent to the recipient at different time intervals following the original request e.g. a day later, a week later or a month later. These emails can contain further information on the original item downloaded, links to other products, a special offer, a mini-tutorial or any other information you like. The primary aim of the autoresponder is to convert the lead into a customer over time. It’s a well-documented fact that it can take up to seven interactions with a lead before they convert to become a customer and your autoresponder can set this process in motion and manage it for you automatically.

Many people think that creating a series of autoresponder emails is difficult, but it is actually very easy! Your emails don’t have to be clever or witty or long. They just need to contain an immediate benefit to the customer or information that the reader will find useful. Ideally, you should create at least 10 initial emails and decide on a time-frame and order in which you want to send them. Then you can simply add 1 or 2 new emails to the list each week as you find time to write them. Any new leads added to your autoresponder will receive the entire series of emails, in the order you intended. Existing leads will be sent any new emails you add to the series, in the order and time-frame you specify.

Sound complex? Let me give you a concrete example. Imagine you are a jeweler that specializes in selling gold chains via an online store. Here is a sample autoresponder series (and trigger) that you could create:

Trigger: Visitor signs up to receive your monthly jewelry catalog via email.

Email 1: Welcome and thank you for signing up. Includes link to current catalog download page.
Time-frame: Immediately

Email 2: Follow up on catalog and request for feedback on jewelry selection.
Time-frame: 7 days after trigger

Email 3: Special offer to members – 20 percent discount on all gold chains for 7 days only. [Includes unique discount coupon that expires in 7 days.]
Time-frame: 21 days after trigger

Email 4: Reminder that discount coupon expires in 3 days. [Includes unique discount coupon that expires in 3 days.]
Time-frame: 25 days after trigger

Email 5: Latest jewelry catalog. Includes link to current catalog download page.
Time-frame: 33 days after trigger

Email 6: Helpful article about how to clean jewelry.
Time-frame: 47 days after trigger

Email 7: Information about unique or value added service e.g. free monogramming or free shipping.
Time-frame: 54 days after trigger

Email 8: Latest jewelry catalog. Includes link to current catalog download page.
Time-frame: 64 days after trigger

Email 9: Special offer to members – free pair of earrings with every gold chain purchased for 7 days only. [Includes unique earrings coupon that expires in 7 days.]
Time-frame: 78 days after trigger

Email 10: Interesting article about the difference between various qualities of gold e.g. 9 kt, 14 kt, 24 kt and why they are used for different pieces of jewelry.
Time-frame: 88 days after trigger

Email 11: Latest jewelry catalog. Includes link to current catalog download page.
Time-frame: 94 days after trigger

Get the idea? The more leads you acquire and the more often you contact those leads, the more likely you are to convert them into paying customers. If you can add to your autoresponder series on a regular basis, you’ll have established automatic communication with your leads for months or even years to come.

I should stress here that you should ALWAYS use a double opt-in email sign up process to ensure your readers really do want to receive your communications. The extra verification layer prevents unintended subscriptions by persons who’ve had their email address entered into your sign-up form by others. You should also make it clear to subscribers what they are opting into – if you plan to contact them beyond the trigger event, make it clear on the sign up form or in the verification email exactly what type of communications they will receive and how often.

You will also need to use autoresponder software, a host that supports autoresponders and/or an email marketing service such as A Weber that creates multiple autoresponders for you.

So what are you waiting for? Go switch your email marketing to auto pilot and convert customers while you sleep!

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.

Social Networking Communities

01 2008 Monday

By Sean S. Sampson in Featured

Social networking communities offer another opportunity to join the social media channels. Every effort you make to identify your brand and web presence can be increased tenfold when you join a consumer-driven and user-generated community such as MySpace, LinkedIn, or other social networking platform. These sites encourage regular interaction in a casual and conversational style; although you won’t be submitting specific articles or content, you will be growing your brand presence with your users. IN addition, you can use the Search features on any of these sites to narrow down your target market.

VIDEO SHARING

Video sharing can work well in conjunction with your article and content submissions, and is becoming especially popular with social bookmarkers. Creating and publishing videos to deliver a message can easily be picked up by many social bookmarkers and shared instantly; the idea is to create something unique and creative so that more people are driven to view it-and ultimately, head back to your website!

VIRTUAL REALITY AND EVENTS

Virtual reality and events are another way to attract new viewers to your website, and can create an instant impact with other marketing efforts. If you submit a press release about your event or the latest innovations on your website to different social bookmarking networks, the chances of increased exposure are much higher.

Making sure all of your submissions are tagged and indexed in the right categories will help you create a strong presence in the community; essentially, you are notifying your community of the upcoming event or news in press release form. If you catch onto a trend or other newsworthy subject, you can gain instant favor on a variety of social bookmarking communities such as Digg, Technorati, or Reddit. This is a great example of buzz marketing at its best, and can benefit your website promotion efforts in multiple ways.

ONLINE AUDIO EPISODES

Developing online audio episodes of content is quickly becoming a popular activity for bloggers and website owners, and including this type of media on your website can help you promote your work in a new way. The immediate attraction of audio on your website can also be submitted to social bookmarking sites and other media channels, and once you have a system in place for publishing these files on your site, you can start sharing the link on a regular basis. Sites including Digg and Technorati now have a section for podcasts and audio files; more people are becoming interested in simply listening than reading, and you can begin to reach a much wider market by taking advantage of this trend.

LIVECASTING

If you have a business or website that can create news, tips, or advice, then Livecasting may be another opportunity for you. These segments of online video are designed to share an idea, showcase an event, or even stage a seminar. The idea is to generate enough interested users who ‘join’ the session from anywhere; livecasts are online events that can be used to generate buzz. A press release that highlights the event can easily be submitted to social bookmarking sites and directories for instant exposure.

MEDIA SHARING

Media sharing is one of the precursors to social bookmarking and networking, developing from the concept of photo sharing and music exchanges. As these sites have grown, more people are learning to share and create profiles so that they can fit into different communities naturally. Flickr and Zoomr are just a couple of examples of these, and you can create a small profile of your own to join. Always remember to include al ink back to your main website, as this will be the ultimate driver of new traffic.

All of these social media platforms offer you an opportunity to establish a presence within a community, and then start to network with other individuals. Always keep in mind that any piece of content that is published on the web has potential for sharing; the link is what will be submitted to social bookmarking directories and networks, and you can work on building a profile of your won, or counting on your customers to do this for you. The goal is to create a valuable and consistent presence in a variety of social media outlets so that the chances of being bookmarked and shared are much higher.

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

How do I get more traffic to my site?

01 2008 Monday

By Gary Mattoc in Featured

On the Internet, by the end of the day, it’s all about traffic, and more so, it’s all about relevant traffic. Relevant traffic is the lifeline of your online presence and you need to make a continuous effort to keep getting good traffic to your website. Now, you can get targeted traffic from:

The search engines: The search engines are the primary source of your relevant traffic, in most of the cases. It doesn’t cost you tons of money to get traffic from the search engines. Millions of users conduct billions of searches every month.
Pay-per-click programs: They are not as hot as the search engines but they are your way to instant targeted traffic. Sign up for a pay-per-click program like AdWords and you’ll be getting traffic within fifteen minutes. Pay-per-click advertising options are present on independent content publishing websites too.
Inbound links from other websites: If you publish compelling content then many website owners put your link on their websites to add value to their existing content. Such links can be put their voluntarily, or through link exchange. Link exchange is discouraged these days, so the best way of making others link to you is to produce high-class, linkable content, on a regular basis. You can even interact on various online forums to increase your link visibility.
Emails: Up till a few years ago email marketing was considered the most effective advertising tool the world had ever witnessed. Spam killed its charm but in some quarters it still performs well, especially the opt-in email newsletters. Email advertising campaigns, provided they are done properly, are still the best way of getting highly targeted traffic.
Blogs and RSS Feeds: Only the most ignorant can discount blogs and RSS feeds as highly productive tools in terms of generating targeted traffic. Blogs are a constant source of quality information and hence they get instant traffic from other websites and the search engines. RSS feeds, without being intrusive like emails, instantly notify people whenever you publish something new on your blog or website.
Social media and bookmarking websites: Some of such websites are: Digg, Netscape, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.
Offline sources: If you prominently display your URL on your visiting cards, letter heads, brochures and other stationery you can get some good traffic from there too. I have seen people printing their URLs even on their T-shirts and vehicles.

In order to get traffic from all these sources, you have to take care how you create your website and how you organize your content. Given below are a few things you should constantly keep in mind while creating and maintaining your website, and while writing content for your website.

Stick to your central theme as much as possible; The more you stick to your central theme, the more expert content you’ll have. Don’t try to create content for every interest under the sun (or the moon, or the stars). Think vertical if you want to get high-value traffic. Cover all the topics that belong to your central theme. It acts like fodder to the search engines. The search engines love specialized content; give it to them and they’ll give you loads of traffic in exchange.

Sticking to your central theme also earns you great respect and loyalty, and also hundreds of inbound links. When you keep generating content on your subject, people take you as an expert and linking to you becomes a prestige factor. It also increases your keyword-density across your domain.

Provide information that helps your visitors; This is what keeps them coming back to your website. You cannot always be selling this thing or that thing. More than that, develop a bond with your visitors. Show them their happiness matters to you. Make your website a resource of useful information. Publish content that adds value. This is a sure-shot way of increasing traffic as well as loyalty. Information that provides help, for instance, how-to articles, get linked to a lot by other web masters and blog publishers, and this leads to higher rankings on various search engines.

Conduct a thorough keyword research before generating content; Most SEO campaigns fail to zero-in on the right keywords. You’ll be surprised to know what all keywords and key expressions people use to find businesses such as yours. Target a few wrong keywords and you can bid good bye to an effort of six months of SEO. It’s not always necessary to use keywords that your competitors are using. First of all, they might themselves be optimizing for the wrong keywords, and second, there might be a slew of keywords that are being used by the users but are being ignored by your competitors. Use your keyword research to find out such keywords and optimize your web pages for them. This will increase your traffic manifolds.

Create a simple, accessible but elegant design; When you create fast-loading, elegant and accessible web design you accommodate the entire Diaspora of your prospective market — you don’t exclude particular sections of the society. Even search engines prefer accessible websites because almost all accessible websites conform to the W3C web designing standards. Good design also means using the right colors (that cause no eye-strain) and right contrasts to assist seamless browsing. The navigation bar should be designed in such a manner that all your important pages should be reachable within 2-3 clicks. A well-defines sitemap of all your pages help your human visitors as well the search engine crawlers.

Do well-organised onsite optimisation; Onsite optimization means using your keywords at all the right places like within the header tags (

), as anchor text (, and especially in the navigation) and with the bulleted lists ( and ). Also, try to highlight the occurrence of the keywords here and there, but don’t overdo it. Although this is not necessary, use the keyword at least once in every paragraph.

Create a title (the text that comes between ) that not only carries your keywords, but also represents the true highlight of your page content. Never try to deceive your visitors with a title that does not completely represent the content of your page. Your title shows up on the search engine results pages when your link appears on them. A compelling title makes people click it, and having those keywords in your title that people are looking for increases their probability of being clicked.

Regularly create new, relevant content; People come to your website again and again if they are expecting something new there. Similarly, the search engines index and re-index your pages with greater frequency if you update your website regularly. Having many pages increases your chance of at least few of them getting ranked higher by the search engines.

Remain active on the Internet; Known people get more traffic on the Internet. Keep the buzz alive by maintaining an active blog, participating in the comments sections of other blogs and various subject-specific online forums. Blogs are a great way of getting high-quality traffic both from the search engines and from other blogs and websites. If you continuously generate quality posts and encourage productive conversations on your blog more and more people gradually start coming to your blog and some of that traffic gets spilled over to your actual business website. Another benefit of maintaining a popular blog is that if you put your business website link their it gets extra point when the search engines rank your website.

Link to others; Link to them and they’ll link to you. Linking on the Internet is a two-way activity especially if you are not a celebrity (if you are a celebrity people link to you anyway). If you select the outgoing links with caution it also tells the search engines that you link to quality information sources. People who are looking for such links will visit your website repeatedly knowing that you constantly add new links.

More often than not people to whom you link, link back to you.

Well, I could have written a 101 Ways of Increasing Traffic To Your Website but my main purpose was to give you exactly the pointers you can use to increase traffic. Follow the steps mentioned above and you’ll definitely notice a surge in your online traffic.

Author: Gary Mattoc is the CEO of Peterborough Web Design Company Doublespark and also the Chief Editor of SEO Blog.

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