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By Riley West in Featured

There are a few skills needed in Internet Marketing that the absence of which is used in exploiting the naiveté of the newcomers to this business. The biggest of these skills in this sense is that of building web pages.

One of the things a newcomer to Internet Marketing wants to avoid the most is the idea of having to put up web pages and maintain them. It sounds intimidating at first and the idea of being able to engage in Direct Selling by means of the Internet is appealing.

And, one of the favorite pieces of copy used by companies that prey on the newcomers inexperience is “You don’t have to have a website!” They know which buttons to push, don’t they?

But look at what we are trying to do as Internet Marketers. We’re engaging in Direct Sales by means of the Internet.

When I was first looking into the idea of affiliate marketing and making money online I liked the idea that “you don’t even have to have a website!” That is a standard piece of sales copy for many products and programs aimed at the newcomer, and, in some cases, it may be true.

But picture this… you advertise an affiliate product and someone hits your link to the product’s sales letter. They may decide to opt in to the sites list builder and/or buy the product right there. You have a commission in your Clickbank account. Mission accomplished. Next!

Do that several times, and that’s the idea, and you have piled up some money.

Good job, but something is missing. You don’t know your customers name, and you don’t know your customers e-mail address. On top of that, your customers don’t know who you are! You aren’t “Building a Business.” You are building an account, if you’re lucky and that’s about it.

Not everybody that lands on a sales page opts-in to the list, but, if it’s done right, many of them do. When you have that list you have a chance to do some real marketing.

Your list will be made up of people who didn’t buy what you were offering, but, they signed up to see what more you might have. There will also be those folks who bought what you were offering and they signed up for the same reasons.

But now you have them in an autoresponder and you can just keep piling them up in there! You can send them information you know they might be interested in based on what sort of product they bought or showed interest in.

That’s targeted marketing of the very best kind.

And that is the reason you need a website. At the very least you need a landing page (very small website) with an opt in offer so YOU can collect the names! (future sales)

You don’t want those names going to someone else. So that is why you need a website.

There are other good reasons to have a website, too, but nothing beats the potential increase in business a list will bring you. A list of your own customers who have been receiving your information for a time and have a familiarity with you.

If you treat your list with respect there is no one easier to sell or more satisfying to deal with.

Would you like to find out sensible ways to get started in Internet marketing? Riley West’s unique blog has been examining this and other basic Internet Marketing concepts for beginners. Go there now and get a FREE PDF MONEY MAKER and a FREE LIMITED EDITION 54 page Ebook at =>http://www.makinganinternetmarketer.com

By Colin Turner in Featured

Even if you know how important it is to market your business on the internet, you don’t have thousands of dollars to spend each month, and you may not be an expert on Search Engine Optimization or Keyword Advertising (yet).

This article is about using consistent, free (or cheap) marketing strategies that you can start using today to make a difference in your business.

The Goal of marketing your business on the internet is to get consistent traffic to your site from your target market.

The three key words to remember about internet marketing are Consistent, Targeted, and Smart.

Consistent marketing practices will help you build a trusted presence on the web, and catch people who visit the same sites regularly. New people are always suspect, and you may not start to get results until you’ve been around long enough for people to trust you.

A Targeted strategy will focus on the type of person who is most likely to be interested in your product or service. If your ideal customer is a truck driver between 40 and 50 years old, you should not be marketing to young single moms on Myspace.

Smart marketing means using the tools the big kids use. Find out what successful marketers are doing to get such high traffic and do what they do. My mentor Walter Hailey always told me that “It’s easier to copy genius than to create mediocrity.”

It will take time to create the kind of web presence that will generate consistent traffic (and revenue) for your business, but as long as your effort is targeted, consistent, and smart, you will attract quality customers without spending thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours of your time.

Let’s get down to specifics – what can I start doing in my business tomorrow that will put me on the path to generating more traffic for my site and putting more money in my pocket?

I will assume that you already have a website for your business, and a professional email address with a unique url (not generic like yourname@gmail. com or business@yahoo. com). If you don’t have one yet, you can get one free from Google. Your next step is getting your business name, image, and content onto the web where your target market will find it and become a customer/client.

There are three main categories of marketing strategies to investigate as you are creating a marketing plan: Networking, Blogging/Article Writing, and Advertising.

1. Social or Business Networking.
Become a part of a networking community where you can build your own profile or web page and interact with others in the community. There are a ton of networking sites on the internet, some of which are mostly for socializing about niche topics, others are more focused on doing business. Choose 3-5 networks to join, and make sure all of them are connected to each other, and back to your website.

Here are a few to get you started: Facebook, Myspace, Squidoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, Direct Matches, Shmoozii, Biznik

2. Blogging and Article Writing.
They go together like peanuts and raisins. Every article you write for the blog should also be published on the web to as many article directories as possible, with your link included in the resource box. The more places your link appears on the web, the better. Update the blog frequently, put an RSS feed on your website and social networking profiles, and tell your friends about it. Search engines love fresh, new content that matches keywords, so including keywords in the blog content can help searchers find you.

For the beginner blogger, Google’s Blogspot is a good way to get started. WordPress, Squarespace, Typepad, and Thoughts.com all have great templates and can be set up in a day.

As for Article Directories, you can submit by hand, but I wouldn’t recommend it. People getting real results with article writing have an automated service that submits articles to hundreds of directories automatically. I have found two: SubmitYOURArticle (web-based) and Article Submitter Platinum (Software). They are not free, but they are worth it if you choose article writing as one of your marketing strategies.

3. Advertising using Adwords, keywords, pay-per-click, or traffic exchanges.
A much less personal approach, advertising can give you access to a huge number of people for a relatively small cost – and most sites have free trials or sign-up bonuses that can help you create an ad that works before you start paying for it. Use the same keywords that are on your website and blog in your advertisements, and search engines will like you even more.

My short list of Advertising sites would include: Adland Pro, Bananapile, ReaLook, Spiderjump, and HitsFrenzy. Also look at Clickable – a service that can manage advertising campaigns on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others simultaneously.

Using a few of the services from all three of the above categories in tandem will create a tight web to capture your customers and send them to your site. As long as you update Consistently, Target your campaigns accurately, and be Smart about where you spend your money and time, you can see results in a little as a few weeks and secure your long-term success.

Best of luck with your research, stick with it, and remember that even in the tedious moments, owning your own business is so much better than going to work at 9am in a job that doesn’t fulfill you.

Do Good and Be Well.

Colin Turner has been an entrepreneur since the age of 17, and is a regular blogger and writer about home based businesses. He has become a mentor and trusted source for information on Internet Marketing for Home Businesses. http://www.marketingsystemforsuccess.com

By Terri Seymour in Featured

advertisingIf you have been in this business for any length of time, you have probably heard the saying, “The Money is in the List”. Well, in a big way that is true. Building a mailing list and sending out regular newsletters, updates, etc. is a very powerful way of increasing your customer base. There are numerous things you can do to build your mailing list and most of them are free!

By Mel Strocen in Featured

SPNbabble, a micro-blogging site created for webmasters and site owners to share their tips, insights and expertise regarding any and all webmaster related topics – SEO, Web 2.0, search engine news and trends, web design, site development, marketing, promotion, ecommerce, web resources, linking strategies, etc. – has launched in Beta.

SPNbabble, as the name suggests, is an outgrowth of SiteProNews and is similar to Twitter but more vertical in that it was set up primarily for webmasters and site owners. The site has many of the same features as Twitter and Twitter users should find it easy to use. We hope that SPNbabble will serve as a useful medium for an interchange of ideas and tips.

We look forward to your feedback, particularly your comments on the site’s features and functionality. Speaking of features, here’s a short list:

* Account customization
* Receive message posts via IM, email or web
* Simultaneous posting to Twitter
* Direct messaging

* Message Groups
* Site stickers/badges for your blog or website
* Visualization map
* Automatic Friend Invites

Sign up for an account, invite your friends and send your comments to:

support-spnbabble@sitepronews.com

By Diego Norte in Featured

The Internet has changed the way we do business, and the way we do marketing. Ten years ago, it was enough to have a print ad in the Yellow Pages and a quick radio spot to spread the word about your business. Now there are new ways to market your business on the Web, and they’re wonderfully cost-efficient.

The internet is such a huge market place. People from all points of the globe are going online on a daily basis looking for products to buy. This huge demand has prompted a lot of marketers to take their business on the World Wide Web. Are you one of them?

Whether you are selling your own products or promoting affiliate products, it is very important that you know the elements and the tools that you need to use in order to secure great sales potential in the online arena.

Here’s how you can sell more over the internet:

1. The first thing that you need to do is to create your own website.

No matter how good you are and no matter how great your products are, people will not possibly take you seriously if you don’t have your own place over the internet. Hire a professional web designer to create an ecommerce website for you where you can showcase your products and services. Ensure that your website is easy to navigate, secure, and loaded with valuable information that are closely related to your offerings and to your chosen niche.

2. Drive traffic to your website.

Think of your website as a shopping mall. You will need to attract people to give it a visit before you can actually make a sale. Use different traffic-generating tools that can help you drive interested people to your website. You can promote your website on relevant forums, blogs, discussion boards, and social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.). You can also use article marketing and various link building campaigns that can make your website highly valuable to the eyes of various search engines.

3. Promote your products.

Promote product awareness by properly advertising your offerings online. For this, you can use PPC advertising, search engine marketing, paid links, banner ads, ezine publishing, email marketing, etc. Since promoting your products using all available tools can be exhausting and time-consuming, you may opt to hire professional internet marketers to help you out. You will need to share a certain percentage of your earnings with these people in exchange of their services.

4. Take good care of your customers.

As they say, the most effective advertising strategy is word-of-mouth advertising. Ensure that you keep all your customers happy and satisfied through your products and through your customer service. By doing so, these people will surely recommend you to their friends and family members who might need your offerings.

For more information about running a successful Internet business, visit Diego Norte’s blog here: http://www.DiegoNorte.com/blog/

By Ed Duvall in Featured

So you’ve created an RSS feed and it contains current cutting edge information in your field of interest. Now how do you get the word out to other  webmasters who might be interested in putting the content from your RSS feed on their site?

Just how easy, or hard, is it to publish your feed and have other webmasters pick it up and publish it on their site?

If you’ve created your feed and validated it then most of the hard work is complete. Now you’re going to get the word out about it being available.

So what should be your first step?

I think I would first give the search engines the easiest path to find your feed and index it. To get the search engines to do this you should add this short piece of html code to between the tags on the webpage that has a link for your feed.

Be sure to replace http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml with the URL to the RSS feed.

Next, I would be sure to display the Feed on your website using a graphic. The basic RSS or XML graphic in bright orange rectangles, will lead people visually to the feed.

Here’s an RSS graphics tool that will allow you to customize a graphic for your site:
http://www.feedforall.com/public/rss-graphic-tool.htm

Now that you have it on your site I would begin submitting your feed to all of the RSS directories and search engines you can find. The last time I reviewed them there was well over a hundred (that I could find).

There is a large list of RSS directories located here:
http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm

By submitting to directories and search engines you will be helping to increase the link popularity of your feed and your site.

You can also use email to promote your RSS Feed. Simply include the feed url in your sig file on all outgoing mail. If you have an ezine be sure to include it in each issue. I would also go so far as to provide a link to a either or both a desktop RSS reader and a website reader for those webmaster who may want to use your content on their site.

Another way to promote your feed is to include the feed on a personal my.yahoo or my.msn home page. This is probably the fastest way to have your feed spidered by Yahoo and MSN. If you don’t already have an account and a personal webpage go to each site and create one. After you have created your account add your RSS Feed. In Yahoo, go to your personal page click on Add Content, then add the URL of your blog RSS feed into the Find Content box.

A good point to keep in mind is to have content available in your feed before you add it to either of your personal webpages on the SE’s above.

To keep the search engine spiders coing back you can implement a simple strategy to let them know you have posted new material and it’s time to come back. This strategy is simply called ‘pinging’.

You can let the main RSS/blog directories know you have placed new material by “pinging” them. Now you could go to each of the directories individually or you could automatically ‘ping’ all of them at once by going to this site:

http://www.pingomatic.com

You type in your rss/blog URL, Click Submit and Pingomatic will send your ping to all of the large directories available on its page. Doing this will bring the spiders back to your site almost immediately!

Be sure to add relevant content to your RsSS feed as often as you can as the more often you add new content the more likely you will be to develop more traffic.

Once you’ve started implementing these ideas and strategies you should be well on your way to getting more recognition for your RSS Feed.

Ed Duvall is webmaster for http://www.cashway.com and http://www.instantnettraffic.com providing internet marketing tools and resourcesto help you with your online business.

By admin in Featured

advertisingNo this isn’t another how-to-setup-and-optimise-an-AdWords-campaign article, there are plenty of those already. What this article concentrates on is the non-technical aspects of AdWords that are often overlooked in all the excitement of choosing keywords and writing copy, but which are actually critical to the success of your campaigns. It doesn’t matter how good you are at setting bids and optimising your account, it will all be for nothing if you get these fundamentals wrong.

By Mel Strocen in Featured

Nielsen Online just released its search engine share rankings for December 2008 and the big winner (surprise, surprise) was Google with a search market share of close to 63% and a year over year gain of more than 33%. Yahoo despite its recent troubles didn’t fare too badly either with a year over year growth of close to 14%. In fact, web search over all continued to grow with a jump of 19.6%.

Looking at the published stats virtually every major search player made gains, including Ask, AOL and less well known players like Comcast and AT&T. Microsoft Live Search on the other hand showed a year over year drop of 15.5%. Steve Ballmer may be playing hardball with Yahoo regarding a possible purchase of Yahoo Search, but with stats like those just published, Yahoo might be in a better negotiating position than Microsoft.

Like most deals, it’s all in the timing. Microsoft’s window of opportunity in the web search arena could be closing and 2009 could be the year Google buries its search competitors once and for all.

To see all the stats, go to: http://www.emediaworld.com/press_release/release_detail.php?id=323053

By Karon Thackston in Featured

At this time of year, it’s hard to resist making predictions about what the coming days hold.  Financial analysts, doctors, politicians and experts from virtually every industry in the world give insights into what they think may happen during the course of the next 12 months. Although my mother always warned me about following the crowd, I’ll chip my two cents into the pot anyway and give you a couple of predictions about the future of SEO copywriting.

Looking Back Before Gazing Forward

In the beginning was the word.  The keyword, that is.  And when it was placed into the keyword META tag of any web page, that page received high rankings.  Then the Internet boom raged throughout Cybertown.  It soon became a greater challenge to rank in the coveted top 10.  Enter search engine copywriting.

As algorithms changed, a need arose to use keywords (and soon, keyphrases) throughout a page’s copy in addition to its tag set. Here’s where typical Internet behavior set in.  The online marketing mindset that is so common took hold: If one is good – 1,000 is better. Well-meaning copywriters began to shove keyphrases into existing text willy-nilly.  It didn’t take long before site owners and their customers began to baulk at the way SEO copywriting sounded.

But, with theories about keyword density and fears of keyword stuffing floating through Cyberspace, copywriters did their best to find balance.

Coming Full Circle

Due to unceasing demand by site owners for copy that sounded natural while still being optimized, SEO copywriters began to flush out ways to write content that didn’t sound “like that.” And so, we came full circle – from virgin copy that was written exclusively for the site visitor to copy that was butchered horribly in the name of higher rankings to natural-sounding SEO copy that pleased everyone.

Seems as though all is well and SEO copywriting has settled into an acceptable balance, right?  Yes.  But other changes were taking place behind the scenes that should influence the future of SEO copy.

Search Engines Get New Skills

Along the way, Google and other engines have been picking up new skills for indexing and evaluating copy.  Many years ago, Yahoo! and other engines gained the ability to read PDF files.  As time went on, SEO taboos – including frames and the dreaded Flash – became less fearsome as engines adapted, acquiring the technology to read these formats as well.

Prediction #1 about SEO copywriting is this: Search engines will begin to index the copy that is superimposed on the screen of videos, in video voiceovers and in audio clips.  The technology actually already exists for the most part.  Closed captioning for the hearing impaired could easily be adapted for this purpose.  Search engine copywriters take note: You’ll soon be asked to write optimized voiceover and audio scripts.

Rather than simply optimizing the web page that hosts these files, the scripts themselves will require a search engine touch.  This will make it all the more imperative that copy be written naturally.  It is annoying enough to read something like this:

Texas Web Design Firm in Dallas, Texas

Welcome to our Texas web design site.  Our Texas web design staff is highly skilled in creating beautiful and functional sites.  When you need a Texas web design firm to help build your Internet presence, one of our Texas web design specialists will be glad to speak with you.

Ugh!  Can you just imagine having those words spoken as part of a voiceover?  The old tip of reading your copy out loud to see how natural it sounds will absolutely become standard practice once scripts are indexed.

Prediction #2: Latent semantic indexing will continue to evolve, making the use of synonyms in SEO copy vital.  Early in 2008, Google announced it was indexing synonyms (although not heavily from what I’ve seen).  I think this practice will be put into full force in the next year or two.  For example, we’ll begin to see results from a search for “handbags” that contain that term as well as “purse,” “pocketbook” and “bag.”

I also believe that Google and other search engines will consider the overall context of a page more, in addition to the keywords and phrases that are used.  Hopefully this will alleviate much of the elementary SEO copywriting that goes on now.  (See Texas example above.)

As with everything online, change is inevitable.  While certain core practices and techniques will remain foundational to SEO copywriting, advancements in search technology and site visitor preferences will continue to alter the face of this copywriting niche.  Adjust, adapt, advance!

See Karon Thackston live in Boston April 2-3, 2009. Get info at http://www.highrankings.com/seo-workshops Or buy Karon’s SEO copywriting course and learn at your own pace. http://www.copywritingcourse.com

By Ed Duvall in Featured

link baitTo get visitors to your webpage you really need to know what keywords people will type into the search engines to find the service or product your webpage offers. Before you say “Oh no, not another keyword research article”, let me just say you will learn exactly how to quickly and easily do keyword research and create backlinks based on that keyword.

Clearly one of the most beneficial ways to generate more traffic to your site is to create backlinks to it. Creating backlinks from relevant sites helps to boost your page rank and can even get your website or a particular webpage showing on the first pages of a Google search for that term.

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