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By Willie Crawford in Featured

TwitterTwo weeks ago, I noticed that termites were eating the wood around my front door. I was concerned, but not alarmed, since my house is bricked all around the exterior.

I called an exterminator who came out and eased my mind even more. He explained that while I did have a termite infestation they were the subterranean termites rather than the feared Formosan Termites.

If you Google the term “Formosan Termites,” you’ll come across pictures of a creature so veracious that houses infested by them often fell in half. House that are really infested by them often cannot be saved.

By Phyllis Zimbler Miller in Featured

If you are active on Twitter and want to promote your business, it’s important to know how to use Twitter for business marketing to consumers. Twitter isn’t an open invitation to spew sales messages at consumers; rather it’s an opportunity to create relationships with consumers.

Your Twitter profile needs to be human

It’s no good to use Twitter for business marketing to consumers if you are hiding behind the “corporate veil.” In other words, your Twitter username can be in your business name, but even if you are representing a large corporation, your actual name should also be on the profile along with your photo. People relate to people, not business logos.

A real person tweeting for a company is able to establish relationships with consumers that an anonymous corporate/company Twitter user cannot. Add bits and pieces of your personal interests to help create relationships.

You need to provide information before you provide sales pitches

If, for example, you are a footwear company using Twitter to attract new customers, it’s not enough to constantly tweet about new shoe styles your company is offering. You need to also provide useful information.

You might tweet links to research reports on the effects of going barefoot most of the time. Or you might tweet a link to a blog discussing cultural differences in what is acceptable footwear for “business” dress.

If you want people to trust your company enough to buy its footwear, you need to demonstrate you are trustworthy by helping consumers to know more about your field of footwear. You want to be known as a source of good information besides good footwear.

You can offer special deals to your Twitter followers

Although the majority of your tweets should NOT be sales pitches, it’s certainly acceptable to offer special deals for your Twitter followers as part of your Twitter marketing campaign. You can do this by providing a promotional code to be used on your site. And Twitter’s 140 characters makes Twitter ideal for getting your offer across in brief messages.

Also consider doing a fundraising campaign on Twitter – your company name is thus linked with a good cause. For example, anyone using the promo code will have 10% of his/her purchase go to a specific nonprofit organization.

Encourage questions from your Twitter followers

Use Twitter for business marketing by getting immediate feedback on issues of importance to your company. For example, if you introduce a new style in limited quantities, solicit opinions. Yes, some of the opinions may be negative. But it is better to know these opinions now while your footwear is in limited production than to find out this information after you’ve produced millions of pairs of this new style.

And make sure you monitor all mentions of your company on Twitter. You want to jump on positive comments – and thank people for those comments – as well as jump on negative comments. It’s much easier to put out a small fire than a large blaze.

In conclusion, how you use Twitter for business marketing to consumers is limited only by your imagination. If you share information first and then gently pitch your products, you should be able to reap the benefit of new customers who are loyal to your products thanks to having a strong connection with a real person from the company.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is an Internet business consultant. If you liked this article, you’ll love her free report on “How to Become a Twitter Marketing Expert” – grab your report now from www.millermosaicllc.com/free-twitter-report

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Question

Hi Kalena

In the past, I made sure I was not logged in to Google when I checked my Client website standings in search. But, now are we going to have to clear *Web History* and Disable customizations every time we want to check our client’s rankings manually?

This article claims that Google’s new ‘cookie’ extends Personalized Results to All Users. Here’s a quote: “Google has begun using a cookie placed on users’ machines to track their search behavior and offer personalized recommendations, even when they are not logged into a Google account.”

Regards

Mitch
————————————–
Hi Mitch

It’s true that Google have extended Personalized Search to all users, whether they’re signed in or signed out of a Google account. But you can turn history-based customization off – both temporarily and permanently. The method of turning it off differs depending on whether you’re logged in or out of Google, but in both cases the instructions are very simple.

Probably the easiest thing is to run your searches as normal and check to see if the SERPs you’re seeing have been customized based on personalization. As per Google’s official blog post:

“You’ll know when we customize results because a “View customizations” link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how we’ve customized your results and also let you turn off this type of customization.”

You can then choose to view the same SERPs without customization to ensure you know how the results look to persons who have opted out of personalized SERPs. But keep in mind that personalization has been in place since 2005 and SERPs all look slightly different to everybody.

There’s really no such thing as a consistent SERP in Google so traditional *rankings* are somewhat meaningless today. I know that’s sometimes a difficult thing to explain to a client, but it’s true!

For more on how Google Personalization does or doesn’t impact SEO, you might like to read my SPN article: Can SEO Exist Beyond Google Personalization?

————————————–

Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Send it to kjordan [ at ] sitepronews [ dot ] com and you might see it featured here.

By Steve Shaw in Featured

I know that it can be mentally taxing to try to come up with new ideas for articles. After a while you may feel like you’ve written about every aspect of your subject that you possibly can.

Here’s some good news–you don’t always need to come up with new writing ideas. Sometimes all you need to do is look at your previous articles and go more in depth.

Your Homework:

  • Look at your last 5 articles.
  • In each article, search for at least one point that you covered that you could cover more in depth in a new article. No matter what your article was about, you should be able to dig a little deeper on every major point you make in your articles. You may even find some minor points that could use elaboration.

I’d like to give you an example:

I recently wrote an article outlining several ways to get out of a writing slump. As I was writing that article, I came up with about 7 or so ideas for getting your brain out of a creative rut with your articles, including some article template ideas and some writing productivity techniques.

I submitted the article, and then thought– Each of those ideas for getting out of a writing slump needs to be elaborated on and explained further. I can do a new article for each idea.

And so I did–so far I’ve bounced 4 or 5 articles off of that first article, and I have even more ideas that I’ve gotten from that first article that I haven’t written about yet.

This approach tends to work better for articles that are jam packed with information and/or those that take a broad, aerial view of the topic, but it can also work with articles that are a close up view of one specific topic.

For example, I’ve written many articles on how to create an effective resource box, and from that one very laser beamed topic I have branched off articles on extremely specific elements of that already specific topic.

I assure you, no matter what your article is about, you can write about it more in depth in a new article.

Alternative Homework for Blog Owners:

Look at your recent blog posts–are there any insightful comments that are worthy of being addressed more in depth in an article?

I get ideas all the time from comments on my blog. Or look at your blog comment replies–do you find yourself writing an in depth reply to anyone’s question about your post? That is often a good indication of a related topic that could use some more detailed attention.

Conclusion:

A trick to writing fresh content on a consistent basis month in and month out is to learn to look at your topic from all angles and all levels.

This is beneficial for your readers, because you are creating a library of information that covers your topic inside and out. This is also beneficial SEO-wise, because you are systematically creating a collection of resources that covers your subject backwards and forwards. This creates a greater chance of your article turning up for searches on every aspect of your niche.

Last but not least–learning to cover your topic from all angles and all levels of depth is beneficial for YOU, because it forces you to establish your expertise in your field. If you are not already an expert in your field when you start writing articles, you surely will be after a year of consistently writing articles on every conceivable angle of your topic each month.

For more info on how you can use article marketing to reach thousands of potential prospects for your website, go now to http://www.submityourarticle.com/report Steve Shaw is an article marketing expert and founder of the popular article submission service used by thousands of business owners.

By Adam Bauthues in Featured

marketingI know how the affiliate marketing game goes because that is what I do full-time. I know the ins and outs of the whole process, and the excitement of a well thought out and perfectly executed affiliate campaign, which results in a steady stream of affiliate commissions. I also know what it is like to watch those same successful campaigns dry up suddenly for no logical reason at all. Sometimes they never even get off the ground when all the indicators are there that they should be profitable.

If this has happened to you before here is what I think the main problem is and a solution to deal with it.

If you are an affiliate marketer it is highly likely that you take the following steps when building a successful campaign:

By Riley West in Featured

There are millions of things searched for on Google and the search terms, the keywords, the keyword phrases, etc. are what they use to search for information and things. What you want is to know what your searcher is looking for make that work to find you!

How do you do that? It’s not nearly as hard as you think, and it’s the way all the masters get their pages to the top for their selected keywords.

Here’s the way anyone can rank for a certain keywords at the top of Google. And why do you want to do that?

  • Traffic!
  • Targeted traffic!
  • Money Making traffic! The traffic YOU want!

If the person types in “red umbrellas” and you have a good offer for red umbrellas then you want them to find you right at the top of the Google organic listings…FREE!

Free targeted traffic …it really doesn’t get any better than that.

So, here’s the plan. You have picked a keyword. Now you set out to get put at the top of Google Page One for that term.

  • First – Put the keyword in your domain name! Or, at least do it this way…http;//www.yourdomainname.com/keyword.
  • Second – Put a bunch of relevant content on your page with the keyword in it several times but not over 1%.
  • Third – Now that that page is up, you can write an article describing the benefits of the offer on that page while using your “keyword” in the Title and Body of the article.

Fourth – This is the “coup de gras” as the French like to put it or “the biggie” as Americans are fond of saying. You write an authors resource box that asks the reader to click back to your offer for more information and the clickback (not Clickbank) hyperlinks have to look just like this example… “For the best in [rain umbrellas] selection and accessories go to my page on [rain unmbrella] (I use the singular and the plural) and NOW you have what Google wants to see. Keyword links back to YOUR site!

Getting ranked for a keyword is largely a popularity contest. The more “rain umbrella” text links pointing to your “rain umbrella” page that has your “rain umbrella” offer on it, the higher goes your ranking. One day you’ll write that last article who’s text link pushes you to the top.

One way to get a lot of the anchor text backlinks you need for Google to see fit to put your offer page at the top of Page One is to write an article and put those text links in your resource box. Everybody does this. It works.

Still, if you only submit one article to one place you are going to get only one backlink or maybe two if you go for two different keywords.

I like to write one article and get dozens to hundreds of backlinks. So would you!

And before I go off topic too far, let me suggest that you look into one of these “mass submission” article outfits. It’s what I use and I have thousands of links going all over and growing.

Even better than that is the fact that I’m on page one for some of my terms and I’m picking up more and more targeted Google traffic all the time.

This is something that works and it’s something you can do!

Riley West recommends that you should start putting up offers and driving traffic to them! It’s one of the quickest ways to see how much money you can make! You’ll find FREE DOMAIN NAMES AND WEBSITES at Easy Affiliate Marketing and you will find the best ways to send traffic to your offers at Free Website Traffic – The Post at the Famous Blog!

By Willie Crawford in Featured

One of the most useful tools to come along in recent years for online marketers is url shorteners.

There are sites where you can paste a long, ugly url into a form, and the site will give you a much shorter url to use in your emails, newsletters and promotions.

There are also scripts that you can install on your server, that allow you to generate your own shortened urls, which is what I prefer, due to the great control it gives you.

In-case you are not using the tiny urls, you’re probably losing a lot of sales and traffic. The benefits of using shortened urls typically include:

  • They allow you to conserve space when posting to micro- blogging platforms such as Twitter, where each of your posts is limited to a mere 140 characters.
  • They look more professional than long, unwieldy affiliate urls (especially if they have your own domain name in them). Longer urls can wrap to two lines in your emails, forcing many readers to copy and paste the pieces of the link before they can visit a recommended page. Many won’t jump though that hoop!
  • They allow you to log into a control panel and change where a particular link sends traffic without you having to track down all of the places where you have placed that link and manually swapping them out. This comes in handy if you are promoting a particular product, and due to whatever reason, you decide to promote a different product in the same category.

There are also times when affiliate programs change the software that power things, forcing you to change your affiliate links for a given product. If you use the right url shortener, you would merely need to log in to your control panel, click an edit button, change the destination link, and all of your links scattered across cyberspace now STILL point to where you want them to.

This is essential for ebooks, because once an ebook is in your customers’ hands you can’t update those links in most cases. Only ebooks that connect to the Internet each time that they are read (which most of MY customer don’t like) allow you to change links inside the ebook after it’s distributed.

There are literally dozens of third-party link shortening services. I’ve used several of them and they work great except that they control YOUR links. If they get any complaints, or simply decide to change their business model, they could kill off all your links instantly.

Premium, third-party url shortening services also hold you hostage. They charge you a monthly fee for extras, or for the ability to have more than a handful of urls on their platform. Some charge you extra if you generate more than a few thousand clicks – they penalize you for being successful.

If you stop paying for these premium services, they often shut off all of your links INSTANTLY. Once you have all those links floating around cyberspace (in ebooks, articles, ads, press releases, ezine editorials, etc.) you don’t want to just kill them off, so you’re STUCK often paying hefty fees, month after month.

I recently looked at one service that had the audacity to charge $97 per month to allow you to “white label” their third-party service, and use your own domain name with their service. Using your own domain name within shortened links is a great idea because it brands you and your domain. If properly configured, it also passes along “link love” from the search engines, and helps you to rank higher for your keywords.

However, paying a monthly fee is unnecessary, and therefore wasteful. Instead invest that money in another area of growing your business.

Here’s the better solution that I use…

I’ve installed an inexpensive link shortening script, that works just like those third-party hosted shorteners, on my OWN server. I paid less than $40 for this script AND I own it and can use it forever, on as many of my own domains as I want to (in-accordance-with the terms of their license).

Think about it. If you’re using one of those services that cost just $30 per month, you’ll save $360 per year using the solution that I use. You’ll save $1164 per year compared to that company charging $97 per month!

Heck I could even offer MY OWN url shortening service to my customers if I wanted to, using this same under-$40 script. I don’t because spammers love these services, and would harm my brand and the reputation of my domain name.

That’s another reason why you don’t want to use a third- party hosted url shortening service. Many ISP’s get so many complaints about emails containing urls from some of these services, that they filter against emails containing some of their domain names. It does no good to build a list of 50,000 if only 20% of your email gets through because of a poor decision that you made. You’re missing 80% of potential sales.

If you are the only one sending out from the domain name that your url shortening script resides on, and you market ethically, you should not have this problem of being blocked by spam filters.

I’ve just shared with you some things that most marketers using url shortening services never really give much thought. Now that you understand these things, you can set up links that will work for you long-term, brand you and your domains, cost you very little, and provide all of the benefits that led many marketers to use those third-party hosted solutions in the first place. The big difference will be that you’ll be in-charge of your links instead of being a hostage to those third-party url shortening services.

Willie Crawford is an Internet marketing consultant and super affiliate who has been marketing goods and services over the Internet for over 13 years. To closely track his promotional efforts and to cloak ugly affiliate links he recommends using a url shortening script hosted on you own domain. Willie’s favorite script is at: http://YourOwnShortUrl.com/

By Enzo F. Cesario in Featured

While video and multimedia technologies are rapidly expanding, the Web remains a largely a text-oriented system. Text utilizes far less space than video or audio, and remains the go-to medium for the majority of the web’s public content. This means that there is a lot of copy on the web, so a savvy copywriter should be on the lookout for any technique that will improve the material he puts forward.

Tip 1 – Know Yourself

This piece of advice has been kicking around for several thousand years, and it has persisted for a reason – people make better decisions when they know their strengths and limits. If your writing lends itself to narrative structures, find ways to tell stories about the product, perhaps in the form of a testimonial or an interview. If you aren’t capable of writing technical articles, don’t try to bluff it.

Tip 2 – Improve Yourself

The web changes, language changes, people change, products change… in short, everything changes. This is a good thing. Improvement and training are important changes that everyone must go through in some degree if they want to remain relevant. You may want to consider enrolling in a writing course, study new SEO and copywriting tips, pick up a highly rated style manual, or continue refining your skills in some other way.

Tip 3 – Target Your Language to the Audience

There is always an audience. Whether writing a letter specifically to one individual or composing for a website to be viewed by international customers, take the time to find out who your audience is and tailor the writing accordingly. Academics will have different writing standards than a DIY auto repair services, and neither will appreciate receiving articles targeted to the other.

Tip 4 – Write Coherently

Compare the following two statements:

  • The Large Hadron Collider, created and maintained by CERN in Geneva, is designed to locate and study the Higgs-Boson particle, which will provide insight into the origin of the universe.
  • CERN intends to use the Large Hadron Collider to locate and study the Higgs-Boson particle in an attempt to gain insight into the origin of the universe.

The first sentence is full of asides and parenthetical statements while the second conveys the information more fluidly. There are times when asides and references are important, but as a general rule, take any opportunity you can to simplify your writing. Your message will be stronger and clearer for the effort.

Tip 5 – Write Specifically

Again, consider this ambiguous sentence; “Anti-nuclear protestors released live cockroaches inside the White House Friday, and these were arrested when they left and blocked a security gate.”

While it seems innocuous enough on the surface, this statement does illustrate the problem with ambiguous grammar. Good copywriting is precise and unambiguous. Here it comes across as funny, but if your customers aren’t coming to your site to laugh, go with a clearer example.

Tip 6 – Write Concisely

Strunk and White’s ‘The Elements of Style’ sums this up as ‘Omit needless words.’ Stick to short, clear paragraphs and sentences. Elaborate where needed, but focus on efficient writing that gets the message across without pointless extras.

Tip 7 – Start Strong

Journalism focuses on a technique known as the lede. In short, this is all the relevant detail of the story conveyed in one sentence, and it always comes at the start of the article. “A local man was arrested today in connection with the recent kidnapping of a foreign exchange student.” Notice it doesn’t give names or quotes, just the hard-core facts. While online copywriting rarely needs to emulate this exact approach, it still illustrates a key point; good articles present their best facts quickly while hooking the reader.

Tip 8 – End Strong

There are countless examples of writing that start out with the proverbial ‘bang,’ only to wander off pointlessly. Focus your writing on its key message and make sure the final statement is as strong as the first. Write your beginning statement and ending statement at the same time and make sure the article is always leading toward that killer end sentence that ties the article up in a powerful way.

Tip 9 – Read

While this partially falls under the idea of improving yourself, it’s also a specific example that deserves its own mention. Read constantly. Read good articles and bad, seeing what works and what does not. People who are widely read write better than comparable writers who don’t read as much.

Tip 10 – Write Constantly

Copywriting is a talent like any other. Daily practice with writing will expand your ability to try new ideas and reinforce good habits. Even if you have no copywriting assignment at the moment, browse the web looking for websites in your area of expertise, and see if you can’t improve their copy. Then you can either consider it free practice, or perhaps give the authors a call to see if they’re interested.

Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. Go to http://www.Brandsplat.com/ or visit our blog at: http://www.brandsplatblog.com/

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Google is no longer a search company.

That’s right – the launch of an online mobile store yesterday to sell their new smart phone means Google has crossed the threshold from search company to consumer electronics retailer.

The Nexus One was officially revealed at a press conference at Google headquarters in Mountain View yesterday, but details about the handset had already been leaked and available on the web for weeks. Referred to by Google staff as a *Super Phone*, the Nexus One is being touted as an iPhone killer and has been designed specifically for Google’s Open Source Android operating system.

While the Nexus One does look very much like an iPhone, the first difference that strikes me is the trackball. How very IBM ThinkPad. It also features a thinner profile at 11.5mm, a 5 megapixel camera, 2 microphones (one for noise cancellation), a 3.7″ OLED touchscreen display and the handset weighs in at a tiny 130 grams. Comparisons to the HTC Droid Eris phone are no coincidence – HTC manufactured the Nexus One.

Another gloatworthy, geek-pleasing feature that the Nexus has over the iPhone is the voice-activated keyboard, which I noticed a few launch attendees testing today on Twitter, with amusing results. For more details about the launch I recommend Danny Sullivan’s live blog coverage.

To coincide with the launch, Google installed the world’s largest Nexus One in their foyer. While it’s not an actual working phone, it’s still pretty impressive.

US customers can now buy the Nexus One directly from Google’s web store with a two-year contract with T-Mobile USA for US $179 or the unlocked handset for $529. Vodafone will supply Europe, Hong Kong and Singapore with the Nexus soon.

Google expects it to roll out to other countries and carriers within the coming months.

By Philippa Gamse in Featured

WebmastersImagine that you own a beautifully designed yacht. It looks great on the surface of the water, with superb lines, gleaming decks, a well-appointed galley… but you’re having real trouble getting out of the harbor and you can’t figure out why!

You investigate, and you find that beneath the surface your beautiful boat has a number of slow, silent, leaks. None of them are big enough to sink you on their own, so there’s no obvious immediate crisis – just a constant drain on your efficiency and your speed.

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