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5 More Hot Tips For Linking With Other Web Sites

06 2008 Thursday

By admin in Featured

In this second article, we examine some more things to watch out for when you are creating a link building campaign. Hopefully by the end, you will be in a better position to obtain and maintain good quality backlinks that help launch your site up the search engine rankings.

1. Is The Links Page Indexed By The Search Engines?

If a link on pages is not being read by the search engines, then it is not of much use to you. The further the links page is from the home page, the less likely it is to be indexed. If a page has PR, then you know that it has been indexed (by Google at least), although no PR does not mean that the page has not been indexed. You can conduct your own test by typing cache: followed by the url of the page in question. If the page has been crawled, you should see some results.

2. Should You Be Wary Of 3 Way Links?

Many people feel that direct reciprocal linking has limited value these days. One way around this is the idea of 3 way links; where site A links to site B, and site B links to site C. Site C then links back to site A again. One problem with this is that it is harder to control where exactly your link is going to end up. If as a matter of policy you have decided that relevance if of paramount importance, then 3 way linking may not be for you, Or at least, it may be harder to organise.

3. Association With Particular Sites?

Your decision whether to link or not should be a bit easier having read this article (hopefully). You should have some criteria in mind as to what constitutes a site you want to be associated with. If the site in question meets your criteria, then add a link. Equally, if that site does not meet your criteria, then steer clear.

4. How To Keep Track Of Links Back To Me?

This is perhaps the hardest and in some cases the most time consuming part of your link building process. Obtaining links is a painstaking and time consuming process, and you don’t want to give your work away too lightly. To protect your links and the integrity of your sites, you should check that your link partners are keeping to their side of the bargain and keeping your links live. You could do this by maintaining a spreadsheet of all of the links, and checking them one by one. Ouch! I can suggest an easier way to do this which will save you many hours a week though. I will go into that at the end of this article.

5. What Are The Best Links To Have?

There is no definitive answer the this question. Maybe one way to answer this is the links that deliver the most traffic to you. Or perhaps the links that give the best value to your customers. There is no right answer. One way to find good potential partners is to type in a specific keyword into the search engines, and contact some of the sites that come up at the top of the results. These should be good potential partners.

What you have now are some good ideas for a link building strategy that allows you to make good decisions based on sound principles, and now you should be better placed to make those decisions.

Charlie Cory - You can make your link building life an easier by using tools that save you time and money. Link Checking is a breeze when you have the right tool to help you. This tool can also help you find better link partners. You can try some new link building techniques. These are very successful. Techniques that take the pain away from the link building process.

10 New Rules to Get a Flood of Traffic from Online Publicity

06 2008 Thursday

By Donna Gunter in Featured

I started submitting press releases in the 80s when I was a college student to help promote one of the many activities I coordinated as the vice president of service for a national service fraternity to which I belonged. Since that time, and especially since the advent of Internet marketing, the philosophy behind the strategy of submitting press releases and measuring the success of a release has completely shifted. The number of clippings from newspapers running your release used to be considered the hallmark in determining the success of a release. That’s no longer the case.

In today’s marketing environment, submitting press releases online is a very viable strategy for attracting attention to your website and to your business. However, the strategy is very underutilized by online service businesses. Why? Because most of us are still operating under the rules of traditional press releases. Many of the traditional rules of writing press releases no longer apply in today’s Internet marketing age.

EBay Warning: Dropshipping? PayPal Is Holding Your Money!

06 2008 Thursday

By Melody Wigdahl in Featured

EBay has been the ideal home based business for years. Most of us started with the ‘clean out the garage’ model, and over time graduated to dropshipping, and in many cases, it has turned into a pretty significant fulltime income.

Over the last several weeks, several VERY disturbing changes have taken place at EBay as EBay seems intent on wiping out the very business base that built the behemoth, to focus on the corporate clientele that have taken a much larger position on EBay over the past couple of years, using EBay to sell off their excess inventory directly, rather than selling to the large discount chains as was the previous habit.

Here’s an overview of some of the most significant - and damaging - changes that affect you and I, the folks that have built home businesses around EBay….

1) The EBay Feedback system now only allows Sellers to leave POSITIVE for Buyers. On the other hand, Buyers can leave any kind of feedback they want for Sellers. This means that if you have a problem with a Buyer (gee - that never happens, right?) you are pretty much out of luck! So, if the Buyer feels that he should have received his widget in 3 working days - even though you clearly state that it takes no less than 10 working days for the widget to ship - he can give you a negative! And you are pretty much powerless since there is no arbitration system in place.

2) Neutral Feedback? HAH!! Guess what? They no longer exist! All of your neutral comments have now been converted to NEGATIVE feedback ratings. Top PowerSellers have lost their PowerSeller status and the perks that went along with it - including the extra discounts that were often factored into their pricing. Although the PowerSellers were given a period of time to ‘correct’ the situation - the bottom line is that Buyers are not terribly responsive to such requests - and this means that a huge percentage of PowerSellers…aren’t. An interesting side note here is that one PowerSeller that was hit by these changes…..is also one of the speakers at this week’s EBay Live Conference in Chicago……should be a very interesting speech…….

3) The Final Straw…….dropshipping is huge on EBay. My hubby has been very successful dropshipping on EBay - both through EBay partners such as Doba and others, as well as resources of his own, through his 25 years in the wholesale gift industry. Today he received an email from PayPal stating that any orders that were ‘known to be dropshipping” would result in a 21 day hold on the funds from the customer! The only way around this is to send PayPal the tracking notice when the product ships and supposedly they will ‘release’ your funds.

Personally - I have dealt with PayPal in the past over disputes - and the response times are horrible. Basically, this means that if you have been earning a living dropshipping - you will now have to be financially solvent enough to cover all of your sales out of your own pocket, rather than paying for the product with the funds from PayPal. This pretty much will kill the entire dropshipping business model for most people on EBay.

4) No digital products - Ebooks were a HUGE seller on EBay and it was a great business model! Automated download, a real ’set it and forget it’ business model if handled correctly. But apparently it was not handled correctly by many and now ebooks and other digital items must be sold in DVD format and physically shipped. exactly why it was such a great business - you didn’t have to ship anything!

At one point, we had 4 stores on EBay and thousands of products, but we have been ‘branching out’ and are looking at other products, such as the EBay Affiliate program, niche store scripts etc.

After this latest round of changes, and the notice today from PayPal, we will be pulling 99% of our products off EBay.

As a home business - it no longer works for us.

Over the next few days we will be posting reviews of the various store models as we take them for a test drive - we will bring the pros and cons of every system!!

Melody Wigdahl is a serial entrepreneur, lifelong geek and founder of Work At Home Ideas For Women, and The WomensNet Network, Home Of The Amber Grants For Women Entrepreneurs , a networking and resource site for women entrepreneurs. Melody has been working from home for more than 2 decades - web based since 1996 - and loves to share ideas and stories with other entrepreneurs!