Article Categories

SiteProNews Blogs

The Importance Of Top Posts On Your Blog

06 2008 Monday

By Richard Adams in Featured

The “Top Posts” area is increasing in popularity all the time on the most well-known and popular blogs and for good reason. If you don’t yet have such a feature running on your blog, I’m here to spend just a minute to tell you exactly why you need to implement this powerful strategy as quickly as possible.

The first factor to remember is just how many blogs there are these days. This means you need to stand out from the crowd and offer something new and interesting.

Secondly, most internet users are time-poor - in other words you need to grab their attention as soon as they arrive at your blog and show them enough interesting, relevant content that they stick around and have a read. Also, you hope, they will keep coming back for more.

Which Internet Business To Choose?

06 2008 Monday

By Yunis Khan in Featured

With the rise of the Internet and the huge growth in online businesses, there is now a myriad of Business Opportunities available to people who would never have thought to start a business on the net.

There seem to be literally hundreds of new business opportunities coming onto the market every week - all of them promise to make the people who take them up vast sums of money with little or no work on the part of the buyer.

We all know that there is no guarantee of success when starting a new business, the statistics on traditional business starts shows that 9 out of every 10 new businesses fail within the first year. My guess is that new internet businesses have an even greater failure rate as the financial entry level is much lower and the take up rate is much higher.

There is no doubt that if you achieve success with an internet business then the level of that success can be dramatic and in some cases fantastic. It is this possible future success that encourages so many people to try their hand at new internet business opportunities.

So the question comes, which internet business should I choose and why? What criteria should we use to identify the best of the new internet business opportunities?

That’s a hard question to answer, but there are many pointers to consider when choosing which internet business to select. I will outline the main qualities that make up the most successful internet businesses and which ones that the novice should consider:

Website:

This may seem an obvious point, but in almost all internet businesses you will need a website:

Are you provided with a website or are you required to create one?

Are you provided with the tools to create a website?

Can you change the website that is supplied?

How much will I be charged for website hosting?

Getting a website is only a very small part in making a successful internet business, you must be able to get targeted traffic to your site.

It is no good having the best website in the world if no one knows about it.

Internet Marketing - getting traffic:

This is a huge subject in its own right and there are many experts and companies that have invested millions of dollars into this field. However for our purpose it is necessary to know:

Am I provided with any Internet Marketing training?

Does the company teach me the basics of getting traffic to my site?

Is my site already configured for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

Does the company make it clear that I may have to pay to get targeted visitors to my site?

Does the company help with getting traffic to the site?

How will I get prospects for my products?

As well as getting targeted traffic to the site, you will also need to know how to ’sell’ your products to prospective customers and to convert visitors to your site into paying customers.

Internet Marketing - converting traffic into sales:

The best websites automatically convert targeted visitors into customers, they do this in a number of ways:

How good is the sales copy on your new website?

If you surfed the site, would you buy its products?

What are the products, how much do they cost and what is the profit margin?

What methods of conversion are used (static, audio, video etc)?

Does the site automatically follow up on enquiries?

Do they use autoresponders to automate this process?

Products:

One of the most important aspects of any internet business is what products you are selling and how exclusive they are:

How exclusive are your products and are they sold at competitive prices?

How are they shipped to the customer? How does the customer pay for the goods (credit card, wire transfer etc)?

What is the after sales process?

What is the process for customer complaints?

Is the business Replicable?

This really is one of the key questions, just because the owner or creator of the internet business is very successful it doesn’t necessarily follow that you will be too.

One of the key questions is - can this business be replicated by me?

This really gets to the point, because all of the questions above will lead to knowing the answer to this last question:

If I buy this business, then can I make a success of it?

I have been involved in many internet businesses throughout the last 5 years and through sometimes bitter experience and sometimes fantastic success, I have learned how to set up and be successful at new internet businesses I set up and operate.

Hopefully, this article will point you towards asking the questions that will enable you to make a decision on what your thought process should be when considering a new internet business opportunity.

I sincerely wish you all the success in world, because if you choose right, it can really change your life.

Yunis Khan - I have been involved in Internet Businesses for the past 5 years and have gained some valuable experience, sometimes bitter, sometimes with fantastic results. I hope my experiences can help others become successful Internet Business owners.

How to Pick an SEO Firm

06 2008 Monday

By Jennifer Horowitz in Featured

SEO is the foundation of your marketing campaign - at least it should be. Aside from any other marketing that you participate in, you should also make sure your site is ranked in the top of the engines so you can tap into the millions (actually over 400 million) searches performed daily.

So, how do you pick an SEO Firm? It is a very important decision.

I was talking to a man recently who told me the problem was he didn’t even know what questions to ask, let alone how to evaluate the answers.

Here is some guidance on what to ask and what to expect in response.

Do you have any initial or set up fees? How much and what are they for? Are there ongoing fees and how much are they?

They should be able to outline all fees and tell you exactly what is included. Different firms price things differently. If they require full payment up front, that may concern me. Most firms will require some payment up front, and that is to be expected. You need to look at what they are proposing, make sure it is clear to you and make sure you are OK with it.

Is monthly maintenance necessary?

Any SEO Firm that knows what they are talking about should tell you that maintenance and monitoring of rankings is required to ensure you don’t start losing rankings. If they tell you that you will lose rankings as soon as you leave them, they are lying—or more accurately they are just guessing. They don’t really know for sure. However experience shows us that rankings do tend to maintain until the next major algorithm shift and then if no one is maintaining them for you, they may begin to drop. SEO is not the kind of thing you do once and then you are done. To maintain and hopefully even increase your rankings, you need to have someone continually working on your behalf. Alternatively, you could learn to handle some of the maintenance items yourself. But the key is to realize that someone needs to monitor your rankings and work on your in order to hold on to your top rankings and grow them. Don’t forget the engines themselves reported that approximately 25% of searches each month are never before seen phrases. So, at the very least you’ll want to monitor what new phrases are popping up and make sure you are getting exposure for them.

How long is my term of service?

Typically you should hear anywhere from 3—12 months. Anything less than 3 months isn’t long enough to see any matured results. Six months seems to be the industry standard middle ground. With six months you aren’t locked in too long, but it does allow time for the campaign to mature.

Do you offer a Guarantee?

Contrary to popular belief, guarantees aren’t all bad. You just have to make sure you aren’t being promised something that no one can actually deliver.

- Top rankings in less than 30 days? Not likely.

- Guaranteed amount of site visitors or conversions? With regular SEO and no other services no SEO Firm can guarantee the precise number of visitors or the conversion rates.

- If you are told you will get rankings on a precise keyword within a precise amount of time, that just isn’t possible unless they are doing PPC or have magic fairy dust.

The kind of guarantee that is safe is the kind where the company states they don’t control the engines and can’t predict exact timeframes but they will not stop working until they have delivered what they promised (ex: 20 rankings within the top 20 for 6 months—so they may have to work 8 or 9 months of real time to deliver the full 6 months of “guaranteed” time.) This offers you protection but it also honest and lets you know that the Firm does not control the engines.

Do I own the work you do for me? Where does it reside?

The answers should be: yes you own the work (once it is paid for in full) and it resides on your server. If they are hosting content on another server or another domain, you want to think twice before getting involved.

Do you provide regular reports and how often are they provided?

You should be provided reports once a month to show the results and your site’s rankings.

When will I start seeing results?

That is a question that varies from site to site. Your site’s history and competitiveness of the industry are big factors and the SEO firm should try to answer honestly considering what they know about your site. Any blanket statement is just a guess. They could also tell you their average time for other clients and that is a good indicator of what you could expect.

What engines do you submit to?

This could change as things in the industry change. Basically you’ll want to look at the list of engines they give you and make sure you have heard of them all. Most Firms focus on the Big 3 (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) and then about 6 or so other engines.

What about past results?

Do you provide references and testimonials? The answer should be YES! They should be happy to show off past results.

What techniques do you use to optimize my site?

An ethical SEO Firm will focus on content and on-page optimization as the foundation. They should also look at whether you are in need of links and may include linking as part of their strategy. More people tend to get links on their own, but they don’t focus on the on-page portion, so maybe all you need is the on-page work. The SEO Firm should evaluate that and let you know what your specific needs are.

They shouldn’t hide any text or code on your site, and they should be willing to explain every step of their process and not want to hide any information from you.

If they tell you they have a special relationship with Google, or proprietary techniques that should be a warning sign to you.

Do I have access to anyone on your staff, so I receive personalized service and can ask questions at anytime?

The answer should be yes. SEO can be confusing and you need a Firm that will work FOR you and WITH you.

Any SEO Firm that is worth working with should be happy to spend time going over each of these questions with you. Selecting an SEO Firm can feel intimidating but if you use these questions as a guide and follow your instincts, you should be fine.

Jennifer Horowitz is the Director of Marketing for EcomBuffet.com. Over the past 10 years Jennifer’s expertise in marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has helped clients increase revenue. Jennifer has written a downloadable book on SEO and has been published in many SEO and marketing publications. Jennifer is the editor of the popular Spotlight on Success: SEO and Marketing newsletter. Follow Jennifer and stay current on SEO, marketing, social media and more. http://twitter.com/EcomBuffet