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By James Gladwin in Featured

advertising to facebookBelieve me, in spite of the current financial turmoil, there has never been a better time to generate an online income stream! And yet it seems that so many budding Internet marketers are finding it hard to break through VNB – the “Visitor Numbers Barrier.” When I started, I thought there was some magic elixir or secret technique that would transform my visitor numbers! If only I could find THE ONE successful method!

Well, this article is to let you know that while there may be hundreds of ways to get visitors to your website – I’ve selected some of the techniques that work best for me.

By B Hopkins in Featured

In today’s world, if you are in business, and you want people to take you seriously, then you need a website. The common response to needing a web site is to just throw up a couple of pages about who you are and what you do and then hope for the best. Unfortunately, because everyone and their aunt does that, your website tends to look and feel like everyone else’s, and your results end up being less than stellar in their performance. Before you put your first page out on the Internet, it is important to have a well-planned Internet Business Strategy. To improve your chances of receiving more exposure and business for your website, you should know these 5 important things before you ever begin to design your first web page.

  1. Who is your target audience? This isn’t just the generic term like “my target audience is people with money to spend”, but who is your target audience really? What are their likes and dislikes? What kind of words and phrases are their “hot buttons”? What are their fears, and what kinds of problems do they have? What services to they require in addition to yours? If you don’t have an answer to any one of these questions, then you don’t really know your target audience enough to target your website specifically to them.
  2. What makes you different than anyone else in your field? You are a unique individual and have your own special way of serving your clients. Why would someone want to do business with you instead of your competition? Remember, people buy experiences along with the product or service. What is unique about your customer’s experiences with you? Can you articulate that? If not, you need to be able to do this because you will need to put this on your website.
  3. How do you want people to find you? This can be a 2-part question. If you want people to find you through the Internet, and via search engines, then you need to know what search terms your audience is using. Not what you THINK they are using, but what they are ACTUALLY using. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve received a list of search terms from clients that they want to optimize their website only to later discover that their target market doesn’t even search for the terms they optimized their site for. Sure, the terms may sound reasonable off the top you your head, but that may not be where their target market is coming from. Investing in a decent keyword research tool will pay for itself within the first year.
  4. What do you want people to do once they get on your website? This is the biggest and most important thing that you will want to have clarity about. It doesn’t matter how many people come to your website. If they don’t take the action you want them to take, then all of your efforts are lost. You will need to be clear about what action you want them to take and when. Make it as easy as possible for them to take that action and don’t make them work for it, or you will lose them. You should limit the number of things people can do on your website if you are using your website as a lead-generator, or to sell something from. The more choices you give them, the higher the chance that they will do nothing. People can’t be inundated with choices or they will just leave your site.
  5. How do you want to lead people through your website? There is a flow that you may want to take people through when they get to your website. What is the flow? You will want to understand and know what that flow is, and what to do when people come to your website in the middle of the flow. How will you guide the through in that case? Once you have your flow, you will know how to set up your website and where to place your navigation links, and call to action.

Understanding and getting clear on the things you need to know before you begin designing your first web page will save you time and money in the long run. Time from having to redo things and money in losing out on sales you could have made if you had set your website up to maximize returns in the first place. If you haven’t done these things yet, it is never too late to start.

B. Hopkins develops and implements Internet Business Strategies for businesses so their websites generate residual income. Discover exactly what you need to quickly get your web site ecommerce enabled with our free online ecommerce course called “Sites That Sell”

By Ed Duvall in Featured

Most of us, and that includes just about anyone who has been online for even a short while seeking to setup their own web business, has heard the phrase “do what you love”. Really, the biggest hurdle and challenges one faces in building a web business is figuring out just what it is we want to get into – your niche.

A “niche” is basically a topic or a market that has enough interest by others that you can develop a site or a product around. Now if this is your first attempt at developing your own website or online business and you don’t really know what it is you want to do then you may want to follow the tips below.

There are of course many other basic challenges that anyone wanting to set up their own online business must also consider:

  • deciding on a domain name
  • hosting account
  • setting up a website
  • adding content regularly
  • automating as much as possible
  • list building
  • marketing, promotion and traffic just to name a few

But none of that really comes into play unless you have decided exactly what it is you want your website to be about.

For some people doing what they love comes easy to them but for many others it’s a struggle trying to find out exactly what they like to do that translates into a web business. Here are a few things to think about to help you find your own niche that you will feel fits you best.

The first thing I recommend is that you do some brain storming about your personal likes and dislikes. Find a quite spot somewhere, such as your easy chair or anywhere that works for you, as long as you can limit the distractions and let your thoughts flow. Have a pen and paper handy to write down any thing that comes to mind that could be a niche you would enjoy.

Write down 6-12 ideas that come to mind. If your having problems coming up with ideas it may take a little more time. You can also do this over the course of a week or longer if necessary. After you have your topics written down then get online and do a keyword search to find out how many searches are done for the topic your interested in.

Keep in mind some of your topics will have a good amount of searches while others will show little or none. You may have to dig down through the initial keywords to find a niche that suits you. After you have drilled down to find your ideal niche then you will want to give some thought as to how you can serve this niche before you actually set up your website. Can you solve a pressing problem? Provide a useful product? You can generally find what people are looking for by finding and reading forum posts about your niche.

Pick a keyword from your selected niche that seems to suit you and go to Google and do a search for it. Take a look at the top right of the page and see how many web pages there are about this keyword. If it’s 5 figures or less then I’d say you have a pretty good niche idea to either set up a mini-site or full blown content site and then optimize it to obtain a top 10 ranking. If your going to develop a full content based site keep your keyword list as you can use it to create content such as articles, RSS feeds, videos, etc. Using the tips above you should easily be able to come up with a niche of your own in a relatively short time.

Ed Duvall – To learn even more about finding your own Niche Markets grab our FREE REPORT on Find Your Very Own Massively Profitable Niche http://www.cashway.com/g/rtr.htm Reprint OK when resource box remains intact

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

se-optimizationSince you can’t peek at your competitors analytics to glean a distinct competitive advantage, you never really know how many ambient rankings they currently enjoy. The thing to consider about SEO is, over 30% of search queries are unique (which means that even search engines have never seen them).

So, although it may be easy to divulge the various peaks of semantic phrases that peer above the tip of the competitive landscape / iceberg of your competitor’s keywords and SERP (search engine result page) positioning. Ultimately it’s all about market share and not overlooking long-tail / ambient short-tail and related key phrases that provide the highest conversion.

By Marcia Yudkin in Featured

Many of my clients get excited about the power of press releases to attract media attention, generate sales and move a site higher in search engines. They engineer one or two big hits and get even more excited about the possibilities. Then, despite their enthusiasm and success, I see their publicity efforts halt in their tracks, because they have run out of ideas for additional press releases.

Here are three methods I recently used to generate fresh ideas for a publicity-savvy client who had suddenly gone blank in the publicity angle area of her brain.

The first brainstorming method was using one known keyword to search in Google News for news stories relating to the client’s specialized service business. This turned up several catchy new phrases that reporters are currently using in trend stories (for example, “reverse brain drain”). Then I clicked on the articles using that keyword phrase and discovered other catchy phrases reporters are using, which in turn led me to some political news my client wasn’t aware of that relates to her business service.

So several things happened with this method. First, I discovered some currently popular phrases around which the client can write some additional press releases. Reporters read other reporters’ work. So using those phrases in future releases can get her company on the radar when media people search Google News. Second, we discovered a political controversy and facts around which we can tailor additional releases. And third, those keywords will be good to have on the client’s web site for “long-tail” search engine optimization long-term.

The second brainstorming method was using existing press releases on another topic to generate ideas. Another client of mine had gotten excellent results with a press release headlined, “7 Proven Strategies for Keeping Small Business Cash Flow Positive During Tough Economic Times.” We quickly came up with a bunch of great headlines using the frame, “7 Proven Strategies for ___ During Tough Economic Times.” What’s great about this kind of approach is that you can take things that are true in any economy or that don’t seem to be timely and yet pitch them interestingly as tips for right now.

To find existing press releases to brainstorm from, go to PRWeb.com or PRNewswire.com, select a category that’s different from your own business and then have fun changing the headline so it fits what you do. Copywriters call this method “swiping,” and it is not copying – it’s simply finding inspiration.

The third equally fruitful brainstorming method was going to a good article bank such as isnare.com, searching for her keywords and finding ways competitors of my client have written up tips for the general subject area. One of these slants was myths about the topic. From these articles, I was quickly able to list ten myths my client could build press releases around, one per release, using current facts and statistics, survey results from her web site and her general knowledge to make her take interesting, unique and timely.

If your excitement about generating traffic, earning credibility and attracting new customers from press release grinds to a halt from using up your ideas, use these methods to come up with dozens more publicity angles in little more than an hour or two of enjoyable exploration.

About the Author: Publicity expert Marcia Yudkin, author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity and 10 other books, has engineered coverage in the Wall St. Journal, Entrepreneur, Success, Women in Business and around the world. Get her free audio recording answering common publicity questions: http://www.yudkin.com/publicityideas.htm

By Grace Alexa in Featured

Creative designs can attract a web visitor, but it cannot cast any major influence on the buying decision of the web visitor because the website has failed to address the target audience. So before a website designer decides to start working on a particular website design they need to analyse about the potential target audience are and to whom they are trying to communicate through this website?

It is obvious that you are creating a website to register your web presence and you intend to attract web visitors to know about your services. So it becomes your responsibility to make the visitor understand what your website design is trying to convey to them and what is it all about?

After finding the group of people who are likely to visit your website the next important phase for the web designer is to define the remaining part of your website development. Like who will read your contents? which graphics and sounds will be appreciated? what keywords will bring you more visitors and all? Once you identify your target audience it is really important to understand that you cannot communicate with everyone around, which means if you are targeting a woman then it will not be useful for the men to read through your webpage’s.

So web designer should wait to analyse the pros and cons of particular web design initiative. It does not matter what kind of website a website designer envisions but they can determine their audience. So it’s important to design a website which communicates with the beginners.

Website design gains momentum if it is interactive. Interactivity is possible only when you reach out to your target audience in reality to understand their views and their needs. So interviews or surveys some of your target audience will help you to pick the insights. This lessens the issues or errors in the final project. Remember the end user to finally approves your web design is the person with whom you are trying to communicate, not the person who is paying you.

Marketing segmentation which helps you to arrive in desired website design is:

  1. Age group: Define clearly to whom you are intending to present your products or services.
  2. Education: Whether you are aiming at school children or college going student or professional, their educational background will help you to come into the conclusion about the lucidity of the language to be used during website design.
  3. Technical knowledge: If you are dealing with some technological services then analyse which type of technical knowledge your end users possess as this will help you to analyse about their strengths and abilities.
  4. Graphical orientation: Judging the taste of the customers will help you to arrive into the correct graphical orientation to drive sales to your website.

So when the web developer clearly outlines all these aspects of website design by studying the target audience all other things become easier. Like the screen resolution, graphics format, fast load times, language etc.

So by understanding the needs of the target audience it becomes relatively easy for the website designer to solve many questions that come up during web design.

About the Author: Grace is an associate editor to the website http://www.sigmainfotech.com.au an Australian based Website Design Website development firm specialising in cheap Website Design web Application Development and Web Development Australia.

By Robert Harris in Featured

businessIn late February, I had the pleasure of delivering a seminar for a national sales conference in conjunction with a colleague who specializes in sales, marketing and business development.

We were co-presenting to an organization that was requiring its sales force to take a new approach to its selling efforts.   Today’s economic climate has presented this organization with some tough business challenges that require its sales representatives to think and act differently.

By Tom McCarrick in Featured

Google’s position as search engine leaders is undisputed, and they wield enormous power over all who have designs on having a successful “paid search” campaign, otherwise known as Adwords. They basically call the shots on what are the ingredients of a successful campaign and they are first and foremost customer focussed. And that is understandable – they have every intention of continuing at the forefront of both paid and organic search. Organic search is what you see in the main body of the search returns when you do a search query on Google; paid search results are the more compact ads denoted “sponsored links” which appear along the right-hand side of the page (and sometimes at the top of the main page also).

And they have every right to “call the shots”. They are sometimes touted as being one of the Internet marketer’s enemies, as always playing “hardball” with the frequent “slaps” that they deliver. But at the end of the day, they must strive to deliver a positive search experience to their customers. Advertisers are going to be compelled to have ever more focussed, specialised campaigns as Google seeks to eliminate redundancy. For affiliate marketers, there is an ever-increasing need for their campaigns to include useful content for their prospective customer, and to deliver just what their ad says will be delivered.

And you could never accuse Google of leaving the web marketing community to fend for themselves. What a plethora of tools they have made available – and 90% of them are free.

Within Adwords itself there are many valuable tools for refining an advertising campaign:

Keyword Tool – A keyword tracker/keyword suggest tool that provides up-to-date keyword search volumes.

Campaign Optimiser – Performs analysis on a live campaign and suggests additional keywords and ad variations.

Website Optimiser – A more comprehensive feedback tool that monitors several important metrics to do with website layout and content. It takes a while to get up and running with this, but any time taken to implement it will be repaid with interest.

Budget Optimiser – Where you can tell Google your monthly budget, and ask it to go and get the maximum number of clicks for you. (I have found with Budget Optimiser that I never overspend, as I do when I have control over the campaign myself)

Keyword Diagnosis – The latest addition to the armoury of the pay-per-click advertiser. This will actually analyse which keywords are performing and which ones you are better off without. And it tells you why they are not performing, and what you can do to remedy it.

All of these tools are freely available within the Adwords interface and I am convinced that the majority of PPC advertisers don’t even realise that they are available. They are probably as good, if not better than many of the commercial keyword tools that are available.

I have not even mentioned the other great Google resources, like Suggest Labs, Google Analytics and iGoogle, which is your own branded page that you can load with various SEO statistics and data on popular searches. A discussion of these and other resources like Google Webmaster Tools, may be better to leave for another occasion.

About the Author: Tom McCarrick http://www.onlineglobalbiz.com http://www.ideal-biz.com

By Pete Moore in Featured

Ok maybe it’s not mysterious but how to get links to your website? seems to be a common question amongst newbie webmasters and internet marketers, so I have decided to share 5 tips you can use to start building incoming links to your website.

Why is link building important?

There are 2 reasons, how many links your website has coming from other websites on the internet is one of the major ranking factors for all search engines. Second the more links you have on other sites, the more exposure you site will receive (meaning more traffic).

1. Create a list

People love lists for example lists of resources, tips, top 10′s and how to etc this will give other websites a reason to link to you. To put this tip in overdrive you could contact other sites in your niche and tell them about your article/ blog post, especially if you have linked to their site as part of a resource list. A list can have a massive viral effect if the information is useful to others in your market.

2. Submit articles

I know this is an oldie but it is still a very effective way of building links to your website. Other sites may publish your article especially if the articles are good. Also some article directories tend to rank well so you can use their authority with the search engines bringing in traffic for highly competitive keywords. The key here is to write a compelling resource box so the visitor clicks through to your site.

3. Social Bookmarking

Create accounts and bookmark the pages on your website or blog, this can be a tedious process as with most link building activities so using tools like socialposter.com and socialmarker.com will semi automate the process.

4. Use Free Blog Type Sites

There are many places you can create sites for free e.g. wordpress.com, blogger.com, squidoo.com, hubpages.com, wetpaint.com and the list could go on. Get some articles written and post them to the various sites this gives you the power to link to your main site using whatever keywords you want. Again this is another traffic generation tactic as your free sites will get traffic on their own.

5. Sign up for Google alerts

If you’re not familiar with Google alerts let me enlighten you. Google has a free service where they will email you news stories, articles and blog posts related to any keywords you specify. What you can do is have a scan through these alerts for any stories related to the topic of your site. Then you would check out the site the story or article came from and see if they have a way you can leave a comment directing people to your useful resource list in a very helpful manner of course ;-)

There are absolutely loads of ways you can build links to your website or blog, just use your imagination and make sure you allocate some time everyday to building incoming links you will be surprised how quickly your traffic will increase.

Pete Moore is the business development manager for Public Domain Resource. We show you how to profit from public domain information in our FREE Public Domain Profits Report.

By Dave Snyder in Featured

I just got back from Pubcon South and was surprised when a fellow marketer asked a question about certain tactics utilized on Twitter being “blackhat, whitehat, and grayhat.” The question surprised me firstly because it was a historically SEO adjective being applied to social media, and secondly because I am not sure there are even ethics in relation to Twitter, a service that is a little over two years old.

Before you start spitting your coffee in rage, I understand that if someone breaks the terms of service of a social community they are seen as having soiled the “ethical” code of that small society. But the reality, the same as it is with search, is that not everyone is held to the same ethical standards.

Google’s webmaster guidelines of course tell us:

Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Meaning, keep from scraping content and polluting the web with the same content someone has already hosted. They feel this practice devalues the content on the web and the user experience. Of course in the end a search engine crawler is simply scraping content, and a search engine is simply publishing that content for the end user. Don’t believe me? What would happen if every site in the world excluded Google’s crawl tomorrow? Ethics here are being determined by those with the most leverage in the relationship.
The same goes for social media.

Recently I took a look at some of the recommendations made by Twitter in their “Twitter Rules.”

Impersonation: You may not impersonate others through the Twitter service in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse, or deceive others

Serial Accounts: You may not create serial accounts for disruptive or abusive purposes.

Spam: You may not use the Twitter service for the purpose of spamming anyone. What constitutes “spamming” will evolve as we respond to new tricks and tactics by spammers. Some of the factors that we take into account when determining what conduct is considered to be spamming are:

  • If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;
  • If you have a small number of followers compared to the amount of people you are following;
  • If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;
  • If a large number of people are blocking you;
  • The number of spam complaints that have been filed against you;
  • If you post duplicate content over multiple accounts;
  • If you repost other user’s content without attribution.


Major users such as the @delloutlet, @nytimes, and @britneyspears all break some of these rules. Does this make them bad? No, because the community likes their content and presence. However, when other users create serial accounts, create updates consisting mainly of links, or are blocked, they are treated in a much different manner.

Look closely at every account in the “Twitter Elite”, and tell me how many of those aren’t placed where they are today due to their owners serially clicking the “follow” button to boost their network.

I sat in a session at Pubcon South with Ricardo Guerrero, the guy who had put Dell on Twitter. He asked the participants to “please report spammers.” I wonder what would have happened to Dell if he had given that advice a year and a half ago. A Dell that has 21 accounts, tweets nothing but coupon codes on its most successful account, and who specializes in duplicating tweets.

Again I am not saying Dell is bad, I am saying the concept of ethics is flawed in social media because the rules are not steadfast.

Digg.com is another great example. The company actively promotes writers who utilize their accounts to self-promote their work, however in Digg.com’s community guidelines they warn:

You’re not fooling anyone. Digg is not for commercial use. Please don’t use Digg for selling or promoting products and services. If we discover that you’re involved in Digging for profit we reserve the right to terminate your account permanently.

I think professional writers probably work for CPM based sites, and thus the traffic they are getting from self-promoted content is profitable.

The crux of the issue is really that social media is too new to even understand what its ethical parameters are as of yet. Some will try to argue this with me, but in the end I can create a pretty good argument that many of the most successful social media campaigns were in some way “unethical” or “spammy.”

Anyone who has read my work before, or seen me speak, knows I make no excuses for what I do in either the search or social media realms. I make money. It is my only goal, and it is why people hire me. For this reason, I see the entire online world in a shade of grey.

I am not advocating spam on search engines, or via social media. I am just a realist, and see that the rules are not equal for everyone.

What I am advocating is that we as marketers approach the issue with a slightly wider viewpoint than the average social media user. A small line separates what the social masses believe is “ethical” anyway. I would rather be on the more profitable side of that line. Where do you want to be?

By Dave Snyder As posted in Social Media

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