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Choosing a Domain Name for SEO and Branding

By SEO Sapien in Featured

Where have all the good domain names gone? You may be stumped about what domain name you ought to use for your new website. After all, there are several factors you must consider when choosing a domain such as if it helps to build your brand, if it is easy to remember, and if it has SEO benefits. Prior to brainstorming about a great domain name, you must determine whether your domain is disposable or permanent.

Disposable Domains vs. Permanent Domains

If you’re an affiliate marketer trying to make quick bucks selling acai supplements for weight loss, a domain such as acai-pill-for-weight-loss.com would probably fit the bill. Such a domain is considered a disposable or throwaway domain. You probably aren’t planning to use it for an extended period so making brand-building considerations isn’t really necessary.

If you have a permanent domain name that is an integral part of your larger brand-building efforts, you should use something that is easy to remember, distinctive, and credible-sounding. Your friends and webmasters would probably feel embarrassed linking out to a website with a domain such as acai-pill-for-weight-loss.com. Remember that you will have site visitors coming from several sources, not just search engines. A site domain that doesn’t look trashy is far more likely to get linked to on social media sites and beyond. Moreover, a site domain that is easy to remember will allow you to enjoy the advantages of word of mouth and score more return visitors.

Tips for Choosing a Brand-Worthy Domain Name

Great domain names are becoming scarce these days. That’s why when you get your hands on one it becomes an asset. So what defines brand anyway? A brand consists of experiences and associations that are connected to a person, company, or service. Think of a big brand like Nike for example. What do you associate Nike with? Perhaps you think of athleticism, victory, and self-confidence. Nike has successfully built a respectable brand image over the years. But what about small businesses who don’t have millions of dollars to spend building brand image? The little guys can come up with a memorable domain name through the soft branding technique, which consists of tweaking a concept already in existence rather than coming up with a completely “meaningless” name to represent your brand. Hotmail is an example of soft branding since people already understand the concept of “mail.” Google.com is an example of a “meaningless” domain name. People now associate the name Google with innovation, the future, and technology but when Google got its start, its name was little more than gibberish to most.

SEO Considerations when Choosing Domain Names

Some argue that it’s best to use a generic domain name that includes a target keyword because people are more likely to click on a URL that matches their search term. There is evidence which suggests that Google takes this factor into consideration when weighing the value of a website but different SEOs seem to have different opinions on the matter.

It can be difficult to include target keywords in your domain name if you want a brand-worthy domain that is unique and catchy. If you find that adding a target keyword would conflict with your domain name’s brand-building efforts, consider adding a byline. A byline describes what you do and contains your target keywords. Bylines become an important part of your brand as well. For example, if you sell curtains but your domain name is precision123.com, you could add a byline that says, “Window treatments in Philadelphia,” to give more details about your service.

Now that you are armed with this information, explore your options carefully when deciding on a domain name for your website. If you are looking to build a permanent domain that reflects your brand, by all means avoid cringe-worthy, hyphenated URLs and brainstorm to come up with something worthy of building your brand image upon. The key to success is coming up with a domain name that is memorable and distinctive and if possible, a name that hints at what product or service you offer.

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About the Author: SEO Sapien is a SEO Company. We offer affordable and guaranteed search engine optimization services. You can visit our site at http://www.seosapien.com for more information and SEO Prices.

7 Squeeze Page Tactics For Building Your List

By admin in Featured

When your building a successful affiliate business or any online business for that matter, one of the key aspects of your success or failure long-term will be if you are building a list.

It’s that important.

One of the ways to accomplish this is to have a Squeeze Page. This is a simple website with an optin form on it so that visitors can give you their name and email address in exchange for what some people call an “ethical bribe”.

Usually a free report, ebook or audio. Something that relates to the niche or topic.

This option form is connected to your autoresponder and it gets them subscribed to your newsletter or ezine. By doing this they are giving you permission to email them and start forming a relationship with them. You can have a set of emails ready to go out or at least a welcome email.

If they ever want to unsubscribe it is very easy for them to do so because at the bottom of every email should be a link.

So what makes for an effective Squeeze page?

1. There should be a strong attention grabbing headline in quotes. (I like to use Tahoma font in red)
2. A signature
3. Some bullet points of what they will recieve for opting in. (Whats in it for them) You probably don’t want more than about 8 bullet points.
4. Make sure the bullet points elicit curiosity
5. A strong call to action… “Just Enter Your Name and Primary Email address Below” (Tell them exactly what you want them to do.) If you don’t do this your prospect is likely to leave without taking the action you want.
6. Let them know that you will not spam them and that you will never sell there name and email address and stick to your promise.
7. Make sure there is nothing else for them to do on the page except optin. No other links should be on that page. It’s either optin or leave.

Once you get these basics in place you can test other things such as adding audio or video. Or adding your picture or other images. But again you want to keep it simple.

Make sure the copy on your squeeze page flows well and also include some power words.

To get an idea of what is working in your niche, do some research. Check out your top competitors squeeze pages. Get ideas from these and make a 2nd squeeze page and split test these 2 different pages to see which page gets the most optins.

You can use Google Website Optimizer for split testing. It’s free and can be a very powerful tool.

Oh, you will also need a web page editor. A good free one is Nvu. There are others out there but this is a good WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get).

So if you haven’t gotten around to getting your squeeze page up yet now is the time. The sooner the better so that you can start building that all important list.

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About the Author: Discover more Affiliate Secrets as they are revealed in the Free Affiliate Secrets Teleseminar series where you can hear secrets from top marketers such as Tellman Knudson,Willie Crawford,Ken McArthur, Tracy Repchuk and many more at http://InstantAffiliatSecrets.com Nancy Hults is a full time Affiliate Marketer and is helping others earn a full time income so that they can quit there J.O.B. She welcomes you to listen to all the free calls

Proceed to Checkout – Understanding Search Behavior

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

Business is all about exposure, value and availability which is the premise of SEO. When the need arises for consumers to find a product or service like your own, it is advantageous to create the path of least resistance when it comes to exposure and visibility of your unique selling proposition vs. your competitions.

In modern times, that path / search behavior is opening up a browser, going to your favorite search engine, Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN Live and typing in a keyword or phrase that best represents a phrase with the highest probability or garnering a relevant match for your query.

Upon investigation of the snippets (the title tag of the page and the corresponding segment extracted from the page) consumers base their intent on which pages best represent the chance of them finding a likely match once they click the result.

How to Optimize Images for the Search Engines

By SEO Sapien in Featured

Since SEO can be so focused on the written word, people often forget that images can also be optimized for the search engines. Images are an integral part of any website’s SEO campaign not only because they can be optimized but also because they attract traffic and links. People have short attention spans and there’s nothing like a visually stimulating photo or graphic to grab their attention and get them interested in what you have to say.

In addition to breaking up your copy, adding distinctive images, and avoiding large blocks of text on your website, you ought to consider following these tips to optimize the graphics and images on your website. Most of these tips pertain to Google Image Search but Google makes up about 72% of all image searches so it’s certainly a good idea to focus on optimizing your images for Google.

Can Twitter Really Dethrone Google & Email?

By Jim Mueller in Featured

I recently read an article where the author proposes the idea that Twitter could dethrone MySpace, Google & email. While I think the author’s title is exaggerating to grab attention, I do believe that some of the authors theories have some merit. Is Twitter going to dethrone Google and email?

One of the factors I think gives Twitter an edge is the fact that it’s real time, it’s short and frequent. We are quickly becoming reliant on “constant connectivity” and Twitter provides that, Google doesn’t. With regard to email, there are some many things during the day that we could share with a friend or colleague but just wouldn’t be appropriate for email. Things like, sharing a picture of something that just happened, had a quick thought and wanted some feedback but not from any one person. I think all of these new ways of communicating are benefiting from a human attribute that has changed drastically since the internet has come into our lives.

What happened to our attention spans? In my inbound marketing consulting business, I see that people’s attention spans are growing shorter and shorter. They’re communicating in much shorter formats. It started with texting, then Facebook’s status update and now Twitter. One of the attributes that’s making them so popular and viral is the fact that the messages are short and frequent. When we know that the message is not going to be long and drawn out we tend to engage more with that channel of communication.

Think about when you text someone, don’t you sometimes text someone instead of calling them because you know you can get the core message across while limiting the amount of time and interaction? I also notice that I’ll text someone several times during the day but I would never call them that many times. Facebook has a limit of 160 characters which is the limit for a single SMS or text message, Twitter has a shorter limit of 140 characters and Windows Live messenger has yet an even shorter limit of 128 characters. people are reading less books and reading more blogs, why, could it be because blogs deliver content in shorter more frequent formats? Online marketing companies are learning from this behavior and anticipating it when they design advertising campaigns.

I have a hunch that one of the biggest factors that has driven us to such short attention spans, seeking short and quick bursts of information, is the enormous amount of information being thrown in front of us because of the internet. I think our psychological answer to the world’s information overload is “give me what you got but keep it short and sweet”. I don’t know who came up with the character limit first and whether it was based on any psychological data, however, I have a feeling it will be looked at as revolutionary.

Maybe we’ll settle into a “standard” number of characters that people respond to the best, who knows? So, is all this short quick fire communication helpful or harmful? I’m going to say it’s neither. The harmful argument might go something like this, “when a person is not getting a thorough version of the story, whether it be a news story, a product review or a personal reference, they cannot form an accurate opinion”. The helpful argument might go something like this, “when a person is getting input from their Facebook friends, their twitter followers or their 10 RSS blog feeds, they are benefiting more from the increased number of information sources than they are being hurt from the lack of depth in the information”.

A good example of this is Wikipedia. Some argue that Wikipedia is “non-authoritative”, which is a way of saying they’re not entirely accurate. Some also argue that the entries lack the depth of explanation that a traditional encyclopedia offers. However, the fact that there are millions of additional entries and the entries are constantly updated make Wikipedia, as a whole, a much better information source even with the inaccurate entries. It operates on a “probabilistic system” which is based on “likelihood” instead of “certainty”. But our brains are not wired that way, we want to know if a certain piece of information is right or wrong, we want to know that our information came from an authoritative all knowing source.

The fact is, these sources can be inaccurate and therefore providing a false sense of security. In spite of the fact that Wikipedia is totally comprised of entries that anyone on the planet can author, a 2005 study by nature, the scientific journal, reported that in 42 entries on science topics, there were an average of four errors per entry in Wikipedia and 3 in Britannica. the funny thing is that right after the report was published the Wikipedia entries were corrected while the Britannica entries will have to wait for the next printing. Wikipedia also benefits from what some call, “the wisdom of the crowds”, Wikipedia has input and expertise from millions of people compared to the traditional encyclopedias which are limited to the editorial input of hundreds not millions. The same argument could be made for receiving information the way we do today.

So, as we begin to communicate in these new ways are we moving is a positive direction as human beings or negative…only time will tell. Let me know your thoughts Here’s the post that inspired this post. http://mashable.com/2009/05/01/twitter-dethroning-old-guard/

Jim Mueller has over 20 years sales experience, 15 of which have been in the telecommunications industry. More recently, Jim has gained valuable experience in the internet marketing/search engine space. As the VP of Sales/Business Development for a VoipReview, Jim helped grow the company to become a leader in their industry and an attractive acquisition which transpired in 2008. Jim has caught the entrepreneurial bug and is currently managing partner of a new joint venture called ReignNet.

10 Tips to Keep Members Glued to Your Site

By Jeremy Gislason in Featured

The more times your customers visit your site, the more time they will have invested in your relationship and the more they will come to trust and rely on you. By building up their loyalty in this way, there is more chance that they will buy from you, follow your advice and buy your affiliate products, or click on ads that you recommend.

Put simply, a sticky site equals customer loyalty. Customer loyalty equals revenue.

1. Content. We can’t stress the importance of content enough. Keep the content up to date, and ‘time sensitive’. Remove out of date content so that it doesn’t affect the credibility of your site.

2. Give your site a personality. There is a huge amount of information on the internet, and you can be sure your members could find what you are providing elsewhere. What your members are really paying for is the way you present that information.

3. Remain focused on your niche. Don’t forget that your members joined your site because they had an interest in your niche. While it is fine to include content on a slightly different subject if you are sure it will be relevant and interesting. Never lose sight of your original subject. Wander too far off the subject and your may find your customers wandering off your member list.

4. Make information easy to find. Ensure the content on your membership site is organized in such a way that your members will find what they want easily. If your members view your site as a valuable information resource rather than just another website, they will want to us it again and again.

5. Provide what your customers want. Encourage your customers to ask for an article or information on a certain subject if they can’t find it. Writing an article specifically for one customer may seem like a lot of work, but if you think long term, that customer may then stay with you for the lifetime of your membership site.

6. Keep in touch with your members. Contacting your members via e-mail is essential to keep them engaged with your site. Send your members updates, informative newsletters, and reminders, and ask them for their feedback.

7. Ask them to take part in surveys. Ask your members to complete a survey about your membership site and then make sure you act on their feedback and let them know you have done so. Send out a special edition of your newsletter showing some of the results of your survey and detailing how you have responded and any changes you have made. Feeling that they have had a hand in shaping your site will really make your members feel engaged in your online community.

8. Allow customization of your homepage. Having some functions that your members personalize on your site will really make them feel involved. Even a simple message at the top of the home page saying ‘Welcome back [member name]’ will have a huge impact on making your members feel valued.

9. Build a sense of community. Being part of an online community is one of the main reasons your members will renew their membership. Here are a few additional tips on creating that sense of community.

10. Promote an active forum. This provides a place for your members to get to know each other and begin to care about each other. Stopping their membership once they have become involved in your forum would be like losing a whole group of friends. Provide a function that allows your members to send private messages between each other. If you run competitions, or encourage your members to submit content, make sure you acknowledge the winners or contributors. Nothing makes a member feel a part of your site like seeing their name in the latest newsletter.

Jeremy Gislason is a leading expert on membership sites, marketing and online business. Do you want to market and sell all of your products faster? Free how to business and marketing courses at: http://www.MembershipMillionaire.com

How to Optimize for Google – Part 3 of 3

By Scott Van Achte in Featured

In Part 1 and Part 2 of How to Optimize for Google I discussed general website optimization, links, and Google webmaster tools. In Part 3 we will look at a number of other considerations which play a role in successful rankings in Google, and also touch on some tactics which are best avoided.

Completing Optimization: Other Considerations

Lead Management Software, The 5 Mistakes That Kill Sales

By Bill Rice in Featured

In today’s business climate it’s no secret for the need of a strong customer base and to keep attracting new ones. Yes, we all want more customers with less leads. This is a strategy that greatly improves your profit and saves your company from throwing away money for marketing. Bringing in customers with less leads is key in this climate. Companies are throwing away opportunities every day. If you want to win more deals its important to use proper sales management to increase your sales numbers! It’s important to fix these gaps in your sales process to put you on top!

Here are 5 common lead management mistakes that should be fixed to increase sales performance:

1. Email Doesn’t = CRM Software

This is unquestionably the top killer of sales leads. Email is a communication tool. Meant for short-term discussions or collaborations, not sales account management. It is not a tool to build sales relationships, with hundreds of clients, over numerous years.

Fact: the human brain can only manage so much information.

Your attempts at remembering to follow-up and diligently stay on top of hundreds of prospects and customers is a guaranteed failure. Real sales performance needs a system that will routinely automate some contacts and remind you to reach out personally on a regular basis.

2. One Call Close are Unlikely

It is certainly the stuff of sales legend, that Boiler Room like close. The real sales pro’s understand that this ranks up with winning the lottery. So, if you hit it be happy, but don’t expect to pay your bills and feed yourself playing that game.

This is why a disciplined process of following up, on all prospects, is critical to success. Industry surveys show that the average lead takes a minimum of 5-7 contacts to close and generally requires 30-60 days. So, don’t get frustrated and toss out that two week old lead–nurture it.

3. Stop Picking Threw Leads

The Call of the Wild fouls this one up too, our primal nature lures us to the biggest fish (whale) of the freshest meat (new lead). Two notoriously bad choices.

We can’t pick the right leads! We invariably gravitate to our biases, which is typically counter productive to our sales numbers.

Grabbing for the brass ring (tackling only the biggest accounts or loan amounts) and neglecting the opportunity to land a few small ones along the way, is the perfect example. Your sales management system should help you create an ideal lead profile for each of your sales agents. You will be amazed at how different your “perfect lead” looks from your “preferred lead.”

4. Start to Value Your Leads

Are you trashing valuable non-responsive customers? More so than ever, leads need to be effectively nurtured. Challenging economic conditions slows everyone’s buying decisions. Stay top of mind, so you will be first in mind when the pain or the need becomes right for the big buy.

This doesn’t mean just throwing all your old leads into the autoresponder. Smart sales people build a detailed follow-up plan that includes email, mail, and telephone. And don’t forget the value at each of those touch points–an interesting article or report, an example of success, or best practices session.

5. Get to the Next Lead!

Sales usually always comes down to the numbers.

How many times do we spend too much time organizing or getting ready to do something? The best strategy in most cases is to do as my Dad was found of saying, “Do something, even if it’s wrong.”

Simply getting onto the next lead will produce more sales than any other strategy. Get To Your Leads Now!

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Increase your sales performance with Lead Management Software and start converting more leads. Generate more sales with the art of Social Selling.

How To Analyze Article Submission Statistics

By Steve Shaw in Featured

You’ve probably noticed that most major article directories provide statistics for how each of your articles performs on their directory, but you might not have known exactly how to use that information to benefit your article marketing campaign.

That information is provided for a reason–you should be able to look at your article stats and then get clues as to what has been successful for you and what hasn’t, and then be able to use that information to tweak your articles in the future.

Usually you’ll be able to see how many times your article has been viewed, how many times the republishing page has been looked at, and possibly how many times someone has grabbed the content feed for your article.

The most important statistic for our purposes here is the “Views” count.

Articles that have been published the longest time ago have the most time to rack up the views, while an article that you just submitted yesterday will probably only have a few views on it. As time passes, the likelihood that your article will be viewed by more and more people increases.

This is a key aspect about article marketing that many people miss:

When you submit an article, you’re not just going on a one time link building spree.

Each article you submit has the potential to continue to work for you for years and years to come, being viewed again and again. Each time your article is viewed, the reader is presented with your resource box, which has some information about you and your business and a link back to your website.

All these views of your article and your resource box translate into a steady stream of targeted traffic to your website over the long term–that’s why you started submitting articles in the first place!

When you’re trying to submit articles that have long term potential and are not just one shot deals, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Your article will continue to bear fruit well after it’s first distributed if you…

• Write on a topic that is of value to your target market.
• Write a quality article–a quality article is well written, grammatically correct, informative and easy to understand. Articles like this have timeless appeal, and they will continue to generate views long after they’re first submitted.

Now, let’s say that you’re looking at your article statistics, and you notice that some articles have more views than others even though all the articles have had a chance to accumulate plenty of views.

Which of your articles have the most views?

Can you deduce any reason why particular articles are super performers?

For example, I can have an article that has 60,000 views, and then another article that was submitted at the same time that has just 1,500 views.

That’s two articles submitted at pretty much the same time receiving view counts on the opposite ends of the spectrum–what gives?

From analyzing the articles, I’ve noticed that usually the super performing articles had one or more of these attributes that likely caused the massive increase in views:

• An in demand topic: The article was written around keyword terms that were in demand with search engines.
• A great title: There was something about the title that really motivated people to click through and read the entire article.

How can we use this information to increase the success rate of future articles?

1. Try focusing an article around a keyword term that you have researched and know to be a hot search term.
2. Pay very close attention to your titles, and experiment with phrasing that will (hopefully!) inspire more click-throughs on your article. Remember, your article title will show up in search engine results listings and also of course on the article directories themselves on the summary pages, so a compelling title can have a big impact on how many times your article is read.

Obviously, in order for your article stats to give you information of real value, you need to have submitted several articles already and not just one or two.

In order to see the results you’re looking for with article marketing, you need to be submitting articles steadily every month. The more faithful you are with your article submissions, the better results you’ll see.

Also, the more consistent you are with your article submissions, the better you’ll be able to use your article stats to figure out ways to tweak your articles so that more articles become long term high performers.

By just following the one or more of the suggestions in this article, you can make a drastic impact on your article marketing success this year!

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Submit your article to more publishers, and your article will receive more views. You’ll also build more backlinks and drive more traffic to your website. Steve Shaw created the web’s first ever 100% automated article distribution service, SubmitYOURArticle.com, which distributes your articles to hundreds of targeted publishers with the click of a button. For more information go to=>

How to Optimize for Google – Part 2 of 3

By Scott Van Achte in Featured

Optimizing for top Google rankings includes a number of factors. In Part 1 of 3 we discussed onsite optimization. In Part 2 we will touch on incoming links as well as using Google Webmaster Tools.

LINKS
Links are very important in today’s Google rankings, but just how many links you need will depend on both the competitiveness of your target phrases, and the quality of the incoming links themselves.

Essentially the number one rule of links is to keep it relevant! Topical relevance is very important in order for inbound links to give your site the most value. If the page that links to you is relevant that is good, if the entire site linking to you is relevant, that is better.

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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