Article Categories

• Advertising
• Affiliate Marketing
• Article Marketing
• Blogs & Podcasts
• Branding
• Business
• Cloud Technology
• Ecommerce
• Email Marketing
• Facebook
• Google
• Keywords
• LinkedIn
• Linking Strategies
• List Building
• Local Search
• Marketing
• Miscellaneous
• Mobile Applications
• Page Rank
• Pay Per Click
• RSS
• Sales Copy
• SE Optimization
• SE Positioning
• SE Submission
• SE Tactics
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Security
• Social Media Marketing
• Social Networking
• SPAM
• SPN Featured Articles
• Technology
• Video Marketing
• Virtual Office/Telecommuting
• Web 2.0
• Web Design
• Web Development
• Webmasters
• Website Promotion
• Website Traffic
• WordPress
• Writing

SiteProNews Blogs

• Editor's Corner
• Darren Dunner
• Jerry Bader
• John Sylvester
• Kalena Jordan
• Mel Strocen
• Titus Hoskins

How to Out-Socialize the Gurus on Twitter and Other Social Media

By Marty Bradfield in Featured

Social media has long been touted as the latest and greatest Internet marketing tool that will bring new people to any online business seeking new customers.

For most online marketers, the social media environment appears over-hyped and ineffective. Between Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Delicious, online marketers waste plenty of time trying to tap revenue from these social platforms.

Why Auto-Following Will Always Fail

John Reese is one of those people who has become famous for his online marketing prowess, with a variety of product launches. Even with his genius for online marketing, John Reese failed to make the Twitter platform work for his business. In June of 2008, Reese realized that the auto-follow strategy of gaining Twitter followers was not working.

The auto-follow Twitter marketing strategy is doomed to failure. I actually lost a little bit of respect for John Reese because he had to learn the hard way that the Twitter auto-follow strategy would not work. A man with his genius should have known before he started that the technique was doomed to fail miserably.

SEO Lessons from Local Businesses

By Trey McMartin in Featured

More than once in the six years that I have been providing SEO services for websites, I have had the opportunity to discuss with individual business owners their search engine optimization needs.

Now and again, I run across an individual business owner who is quick to say that SEO is absolutely worthless. When confronted with such an absolute statement, I like to press for details.

It has been my experience that people who speak in negative absolutes will have a horror story to share.

In this article, I am going to detail some of the stories I’ve heard, which frequently tells more about some of the people in our industry, than it does about the effectiveness of search engine marketing.

PROBLEM #1 – “I rank number one in Google, and yet, I have never earned a dime from my website…”

When I first heard this story, I was very surprised… After all, if your SEO company did good keyword research, there is no reason why you should not be getting traffic and a few sales from a top ranking in Google.

I pressed for more details… I learned that the company who built the website also did the search engine optimization.

Are You Sacrificing Your Long Term Internet Marketing Success For Short Term Profits?

By David Hurley in Featured

One thing about internet marketing is that all the strategies you implement require a level of specialization in order to be successful. Very often, this causes internet marketing start-up businesses to sacrifice consistent, passive long-term profits for short-term gains.

This isn’t a bad strategy when done correctly, but it will most likely mean that you’ll always be looking for the next sale instead leveraging the power that you have gained over time. Here’s a look at some of the potential trade-offs that are often made.

PPC vs. SEO

PPC is a very common short-term tactic which is one of the quickest ways to generate targeted traffic to your web pages. The key to effective PPC campaigns is a mix of bid management, effective ad creation and conversions. While this approach can be extremely successful, it also involves consistent monitoring. The skills involved also require some level of specialization and time.

On the other hand, SEO has consistently proved that it’s the most effective way to ensure that your website has long-term visibility. While more work will be required at the outset to generate traffic, in the medium-long term, less and less time needs to be allocated to SEO. Plus, all of the work builds upon itself, so over time it will provide you with a large number of valuable assets that can be leveraged to promote new websites you may have in the future.

The trade-off between PPC and SEO is twofold. The first is time. Putting emphasis on one almost requires focusing less on the other when there is only a limited amount of time and resources. While PPC marketing can generate short-term profits, you’ll need to monitor and tweak your strategy consistently. Plus, if you decide you no longer want to pay for anymore PPC ads, you’ll no longer get any traffic.

On the other hand, if you stop doing SEO tactics, you’ll still be able to generate traffic based upon your past efforts. In most cases, people can set-up small websites, and once efficient enough, can be left to generate passive income without any additional work. Thanks to effective SEO, these websites can continue to generate profits for years after they are left alone.

Possible Solutions

There are ways that you can include both PPC and SEO into your short and long-term marketing strategies. Regarding PPC, make sure that your landing page is focused on generating opt-ins to your newsletter list rather than trying to directly sell a product. This will allow you to use PPC to feed your long-term traffic and marketing strategies.

Also, if you’re currently only using PPC, then take 25% of your net profits and use them to start building your SEO efforts. Then, you’ll still be able to generate short-term profits from PPC but will also be able to invest time and money into creating and executing a long-term SEO strategy.

You can now see that it can be tempting to put off generating long-term passive income for short-term profits. However, if you plan accordingly and make sure to focus on the end-goal, then you can easily maintain both short-term profits from PPC ads and your dedication to SEO tactics. By doing this, you’ll cut down the amount of work that needs to be done in the long-run, without giving up on generating a profit in the short-term. This is the key to Internet marketing success.

---

David Hurley is an experienced Internet marketer who builds unique Free Business Websites and provides free training for his clients. Visit grasp-the-nettle.com to find out how David can help you get your business set up on the Internet, FAST and FREE.

How To Design Website Graphics With Commercial Design Software

By Peter Nisbet in Featured

If you want to design website graphics, then commercial software is the best way to go about it. There is a lot of design software out there, but it is generally expensive.

There is also inexpensive design software that is not nearly as functional as it needs to be to provide you with all the design tools that you need, and finally there is free software that offers about everything you will find on the most expensive.

Which you choose to use is up to you, but it is likely worth testing the free software first before anything else. If that works for you then you need look no further and save yourself a fortune into the bargain.

Good web graphics can be all that is needed to persuade visitors to stay and find out what else your website has to offer. The problem is that most people have no idea how to design them themselves and rely on free graphics images that are hardly unique.

While you might want lovely website graphics on your webpage, there’s not a lot you can do without good graphic design software. What if you want a new purchase button, or a nice looking header and footer for each of your web pages? What about an eBook cover for your new product?

You won’t get any change from $100 for a decent eBook cover, yet the software that will enable you to produce your own is available free online.

Perhaps you use a clipart bank, but the problem with these is that you pay for the graphics, and if you do use free ones they usually have an advert watermarked into them. In any case, standard graphics are not always suitable for your site, and need some editing before they look good.

Most clipart is no good for eBook or report covers, and you will struggle to find any that offer a decent website header.

Most people believe the only solution to be expensive software, but there is a lot more out there than you might be aware of. You can join a graphics club, for example, where, for a monthly fee you are sent a whole host of graphics. However you will likely find that you don’t need most of it.

Alternatively you can download graphics software that is available online at absolutely no cost whatsoever. As stated earlier, it’s your choice whether you want to use that or simply go straight to Photoshop or something similar. That might be the best option, for you at least, but you will never know if you have never tried something cheaper – or even free!

What is it with some people that they look down on free software? They would rather pay $500 or more than use free software that offers them everything they are likely to ever need. Is it because they believe that a free version can’t be anything like as good as the real thing? In some cases the free version is the real thing, and the paid version simply a copy of it.

There is a lot of Open Source software that has been hijacked, tarted up and sold in a fancy eBox under a different name. People will pay $199 for that, yet refuse to download the same thing free, and the only difference is the fancy box and fancy name.

You can use the same Open Source software by downloading it free without the fancy box or fancy name. You can use it to design your own website graphics, your own headers and footers, buttons, bullet graphics, eBook covers and even use it to edit your photographs.

Others believe that there must be a catch and that once you download it you will find that it isn’t much use without this enhancement or that plugin that you have to purchase. Not so. Nothing else is needed to design your first web page.

Maybe you have heard about free software being associated with Adware and Spyware. Now that is true, but only if downloaded from dodgy sites and the better free stuff is guaranteed free of this sort of malware.

It is your choice, though those have tried various types of Open Source software have been delighted with the results. So if you want to design website graphics, then there are free commercial software packages out there just waiting for you to try.

---

To download the Gimp and its manual free of charge, and learn more about using it, visit Pete’s website at www.onlinenetincome.com/gimp-download.html.

Tips For Google Adwords

By Richard Legg in Featured

One of the best Google Adwords tips I can give you is to not consider this a do it yourself type of traffic tool. Adwords has many elements to it and if you want to make more money than you spend you will need to find someone, or some course, to teach you how to get the most out of it.

Pay Per click (PPC) can work exceptionally well at getting hordes of very targeted traffic to your website virtually instantly. Of course, you may be asking, if it’s so good, why doesn’t everyone use it?

That is the crux of the matter. PPC is not an easy thing to learn how to do. It will take time and you need to be willing to invest not only the time but the money too. You will need to carefully test and track various elements of each ad that you place. In the start you will spend way more money than you will earn.

Another challenge is that Google isn’t really worried to much about you or your advertising budget, they are more concerned that their searchers get what they are looking for. The searchers on any of the search engines are the real customers and if they don’t find what they want they’ll go elsewhere. That is why Google wants to make sure to keep them happy by providing them with just what they’re looking for.

To do this, Google will periodically change the way they do things. They will rewrite an algorithm or make other changes and if you’re not right on top of those changes you can find that the ad that once made you a lot of money is now costing you a lot of money.

Here are a few tips that you can use to optimize your PPC campaigns:

1. Find a course or a mentor who can teach you the ins and outs of PPC advertising. If you try to just jump in and figure it all out on your own you had better make sure you have a lot of time and very deep pockets.

2. Carefully choose the keywords you use. Don’t even try to compete for the one or two word keywords since they will almost always have so much competition you’ll be spending way too much per click. Instead focus on the keyword phrases that have 3, 4, or 5 words in them. These ‘long tailed keywords’ can fly under the radar yet still get you some decent click through rates (CTR’s).

3. Always test your ads. You can do this by having several versions of each ad running at the same time. Find out which headlines get the most clicks. Which body text gets the most clicks, etc. Keep testing until you’ve got a winning ad. When testing make sure you only change one element at a time otherwise you won’t know which change really made the difference.

Out of all the Google Adwords tips I can give you the one I think is the most important is to find someone to show you the ropes. PPC is effective if you know how to do it right, but if not it can very quickly become a money pit.

---

Get more traffic tips at TrafficAttractionFormula.org

Article Marketing And The Eye Of The Spider

By John Tucker in Featured

Ever wondered how internet marketing worked? How does anybody who is into internet marketing inform his potential customers that he exists? And how do customers who are looking for something specific, know where to look for it?

Given the sheer profusion of pages on the internet, this can be a herculean task for both the buyer as well as the seller.

Internet marketing is all about catching the ‘eye of the spider’. ‘Spiders’ are ingenious little devices that search all the pages of the World Wide Web looking for those pages that are most relevant to the search term that the internet user has entered. Not only do spiders find the appropriate pages, but they also rank these pages in order of relevance, making it easier for the user to find what he is looking for. Goes without saying, anybody looking for something would first click on the page that is right on top of the list. If he finds what he is looking for, that’s it- he looks no further. It is only if he does not find what he wants that he will then go down the list of pages that the spiders have ranked in decreasing order of relevance. The key then, is to make sure your website is ranked right up there above all others that have the same keyword.

Here are a few tips on how you can use article marketing to catch the eye of that all-important spider and get your website ranked right up there, where it can be seen by millions of users.

Make sure your article content is original

Spiders never forget! They memorize every article they have ever crawled over. If they come across a similar article during subsequent searches they immediately pick it out as a plagiarized copy. Instead of the brownie points you would expect to win for featuring valuable content on your web site, your web site would get penalized for featuring copied content. It is critical to make sure that your article content is always original.

Post your original articles on your own website first

By posting your original content on your own website before distributing it to other sites, you stake a claim to your article, and prevent those spiders from penalizing it for duplication. Also, when the spider picks up your article during a search, if the article is posted on your website, it will lead the reader straight to your site circumventing the round-about route.

Embed those keywords and keyword phrases

Using appropriate keywords and keyword phrases throughout your article while maintaining optimum keyword density, is critical. Proper keywords used correctly helps spiders index your website and leverages your search engine optimization. It is important to remember that proper usage of keywords and keyword phrases is critical. Keywords that are randomly placed throughout the article, known as keyword stuffing, will only help get your article disqualified and penalized by search engines. And if your article that is unintelligently keyword stuffed, does get past the search engines, your site visitors will be none too impressed with the quality of your articles and will almost certainly turn away. Once this happens, it is almost impossible to lure them back again.

Increase your link popularity

Spiders determine the popularity and relevancy of your website by the quality and quantity of inbound hyperlinks from other websites to yours. Include an “About the Author” section with a link to your website in every author resource box at the end of your article. It is obligatory for other websites to include this section if they decide to publish your article on their site. This in itself will guarantee you unlimited free publicity. If your article is informative and interesting, and is placed on several sites, you would automatically get plenty of links pointing back to your site. This is guaranteed to catch the eye of the spider and increase your search engine ranking.

Maximize your exposure through article distribution sites

By submitting your articles to large distributions sites such as GoArticles.com or eZine.com you increase the chances of your article being re-purposed by other webmasters who are continuously seeking quality content. This can have a kind of viral effect and send a continuous stream of significant traffic towards the direction of your articles.

Persistence pays

Writing just one article, no matter how good, is not enough to get you the desired results. Catching the eye of the spider takes time. To reap the benefits of article marketing requires time and patience as well as the unswerving commitment to generate and disseminate good quality articles consistently. This is what will create a valuable footprint in your field of expertise and help increase the number of back-links to your site.

Maintain that word count

Most websites will only accept and distribute articles that meet their specified article requirements with regard to minimum and maximum length. As a rule, articles should be no more than 500 words and no less than 300 words.

---

John S Tucker is the founder of Think Ahead Marketing Limited, based in London. The company has recently released the Strategic Online Business Masters E-Course, covering all aspects of online business. This can be downloaded for free at internetbusinesscore.com/sobmasters.html.

Social Media Marketing is Dying

By Duncan Wierman in Featured

If nothing is certain, one thing is – social media is losing its magic. What once was a new and improved way to keep in touch with your closest loved ones has become just another sales pitch to convince you to sign up to another dreadful business opportunity, newsletter, product, or service. There is no opening or closing – simply raw advertisements that lack sincerity. The people advertising their products don’t care about you or your general interests. They’re too set on the idea that you’re going to sign up and turn them into a success.

What’s wrong with this picture? Could it be that the advertisements lack taste and real value, or could it be that the people who want your business care less about who you are and what you are interested in?

What business entrepreneurs are forgetting is that they are on the other side of the fence of social media. They are on the advertising end, which means without a real connection to the “the people,” they are getting nowhere. At some point, a real connection needs to be established or otherwise all efforts to make a sale or spread the word are pointless.

Could Tomorrows Storefront Be Your Web Site?

By Stephen Monday in Featured

There is good news. Web based sales have continued to spiral upward year after year. Sales are projected to hit $200 billion by the end of the year. The better news: by the year 2012 this figure will increase to $335 billion.

The internet is making mega dollars for those who implement wise usage of it’s vast potential. It has continually grown in online sales, as more and more people take advantage of buying and selling online.

With the spike in gas prices, it becomes reasonable to shop from home – save the commute to town, save time and effort during the Christmas rush!

Not to mention the bargains that can be found through online auctions, close-outs, and retailers who do not even have to worry about overstocking, or inventory- due to on demand shipping.

It is a safe bet, that those who go global now, are positioning themselves to reap the rewards of this huge marketing bonanza! More and more businesses are stepping up their online presence to where more than half of their overall sales are coming from the Web.

And why not? Why pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a brick and mortar store, where only hundreds of visitors may occupy, when they can have an online store which thousands can occupy daily?

Most big stores close for the night, where the dot-com stores never have to close! Why put hundreds of thousands into payroll for employees, when one server can meet the same needs in the digital world?

Why pay megabucks in health care and retirement – if the same results can be gained by retailers who simply sell and do not manufacture?

Don’t get me wrong, there will always be mom and pop stores simply because there are plenty of services that require employees.

But many are finding they can sell online – at a fraction of the cost, of building a retail outlet! This is a trend which will only get bigger.

Which is better, banking three or four million a year in profit, or taking in nine or ten million a year, only to bank two million after overhead?

Those who already have a huge online business, can only look forward to growth. They have proven themselves as a worthy online retailer to their customers.

The customer is pleased to know that whoever they send to your site will get the same treatment as they did.

It becomes a win-win exchange. This is how Fortune 500 companies, and other online retailers can know their expected growth is most likely certain.

It pays well to have your customers best interests at heart, for clients will reward those who take the time and effort to make sure their customers are well pleased.

Who would you buy from? Those who prove to you how important your business is, or those who seems indifferent and treat you as a number?

Your web presence and online appeal is directly related to how your prospects view your site. If it is polished, and a help to their needs and interests first, you can be sure of repeat business.

However, if it comes off as “thrown-up” and offers no help or assistance, but simply offers a shopping cart and an order now button, it is doomed. Bad news travels a little faster than good news in the business world.

If you are serious about growing your online sales, and want to prosper in the coming boom, do yourself and others the favor of hiring a professional writer for your Web content.

It will pay you many times over what you pay them, and once that expense is absorbed, you can face with confidence profits upon profits!

---

Get your FREE Sales Page evaluation from Professional Web Copywriter – Stephen E. Monday Please visit the URL below:
www.AAAWebcopyservices.com. Click the Contact Us page, then enter the URL of the page you want evaluated, and click submit.

How has the Internet Developed into Web 2.0?

By Anadi Taylor in Featured

The term Web 2.0 was coined in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci, a consultant on electronic information design in her article “Fragmented Future” and became closely associated with Tim O’Reilly who used it in a Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004 to describe the future, as he saw it, of the World Wide Web. The term, seen by many as misleading, stuck. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, labeled the term “a piece of jargon.” Although the term Web 2.0 implies a new or updated version of the World Wide Web this couldn’t be further from the truth. There were, and have not been, any technical updates to the Web.

So what is Web 2.0? It actually refers to websites and web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability and user-centered design.

What is Interactive information sharing?

A great example of interactive information sharing is Social Media websites. People use websites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and WordPress – to name but a few, to share information in the form of photos, music, photos – in fact, anything digital. The great thing about these mediums is that once the information has been published it is available around the world. Some of this will be in the public domain, like blogs for example and some will be kept only for confirmed friends and family – like Facebook. This form of sharing falls into one of the four Sharing design patterns: one-to-one sharing, one-to-many sharing, many-to-many sharing, and many-to-one sharing. Technologies that meet all four of these design patterns include blogs, wikis, really simple syndication (RSS Feeds), tagging, and chat.

What is Interoperability?

Interoperability refers to systems that work together or that inter-operate. James A. O’Brien and George M. Marakas define interoperability as: Being able to accomplish end-user applications using different types of computer systems, operating systems, and application software, interconnected by different types of local and wide area networks. A good example of interoperability is the use of XML or Extensible Mark-up Language. XML is a generic format intended for maximum flexibility to provide information in a wide variety of structural formats. It is not dependent on any particular platform (Windows, Mac, Linux or Unix for example) and is therefore inter-operable. In fact RSS feeds are a very good example of being able to present data in a format that can be interpreted on just about any platform, even mobile phones. This is interoperability.

What is User-centered design?

User-centered design is a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of end users of a product are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process.

This is a multi-stage problem solving process that involves testing how users will use a product. It is multi-staged because every interface design has to be tested; this is based on what a first-time user of their design experiences. If a developed and designer of a product do not go through this process, users may not intuitively understand how the product works. To provide true user-centered design, it is necessary for these products to have changeable user interfaces that is appropriate to each user-class. User-centered design of a web site, for instance, seeks to answer the following questions:

* Who are the users of the document?

* What are the users’ tasks and goals?

* What are the users’ experience levels with the document, and documents like it?

* What functions do the users need from the document?

* What information might the users need, and in what form do they need it?

* How do users think the document should work?

So the term Web 2.0 is more about the development of the technologies used on the web rather than the web itself.

These developments are based on user experience and user expectations. The freedom of communicating with friends regardless of time and distance, and the ability to share anything in digital format are the expectations that have led us from Web 1.0 and static web pages to Web 2.0 where we can create our own interfaces for our social websites and share our videos with friends and family on the other side of the world.

---

For online Flash Video Streaming Solutions please visit www.iMediaLibrary.com – Our solution allows you to manage your video content, publish it to the web, add and track banner ad’s, synchronize images with your video and charge visitors to see your content on a Pay Per View basis.

Mythbusting: How Many Article Submission Sites Should I Submit To?

By Steve Shaw in Featured

Here is an excellent question that I get sometimes: “Is it okay to submit the same article to multiple article submission sites?”

Sometimes people are afraid to do this, and that fear is completely unfounded. Let’s start by looking at the purpose of an article directory.

Article submission sites (aka article directories) are like libraries. They specialize in having content (free reprint articles) on all sorts of topics that can be “checked-out” for free, like in a library.

The difference is that with a library you need to bring the book back eventually, whereas the articles on directories do not need to be “returned”.

Publishers go to the article directories looking for content for their websites. They find an article that they like, and they may reprint that article for free, with the agreement that they will also republish the resource box with its link.

The purpose of an article submission site is to provide free reprint articles for publishers. Each article can be republished a limitless number of times–the more the better.

When you publish your article on a directory, you want it to be republished. That is how you build links, and building links impacts your search engine ranking, which in turn impacts the traffic you receive to your website.

So, article directories are never meant to be the end of the line–you do not publish there thinking that it will be the only place that your article will be published. That is not how article marketing works.

The power behind article marketing is in the republication of the articles.

You write one article, and it gets republished many times. You submit your article one time to a directory, and then let’s say 100 publishers find your article on that directory and put it on their site.

So, from one article submitted to one directory, you created 101 links–the first link came from the directory itself, when you submitted your article there. The other 100 links were the result of publishers finding your article on the directory and republishing it.

Let’s go back to the original question–is it alright to submit the same article to multiple article directories?

The answer is “yes”, and you will benefit greatly if you take the initiative to do that.

If you submit your article to one submission site, then you are totally dependent on the results that that one directory can bring. You do that one submission and you wait, and wait, and wait. Kind of passive, isn’t it?

But, if you submit your article to several directories, then you have helped your cause in two ways:

1 – You are automatically building more links by submitting to more sites. Submit your article to one directory, and you know for sure that you have build one backlink. Submit your article to ten directories, and you know for sure you have build ten new links.

2 – You multiply the opportunities for your article to be picked up for publication, which also multiplies your opportunities for building backlinks.

For example, submit your article to one directory, and then 100 publishers republish your article. That makes a total of 101 backlinks for you as a result of publishing that one article on that one directory.

Not bad, but what if you submitted your article to ten directories with the same result–101 backlinks build as a result of publishing on each site. That’s a big increase, isn’t it?

Would you rather have 101 new backlinks or 1,010?

When you submit your articles to more directories, you drastically increase the number of links that you can create.

Article directories are not expecting that they will be the only website that contains your article–the very purpose of an article submission site is to propagate the republication of articles.

Each article that you write should only be submitted one time to each directory, but you can submit that same article to as many directories as you like.

---

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

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

Home Newsletter Archives SEO Forums Webmaster Tools Webmaster Resources Link to SPN Top SEO Tools Website Templates SPN Partners Contact Us Privacy Advertise

ExactSeek SiteProNews MetaWebSearch SPN Videos EzineHub ISEDN DropJack NewWebDirectory.com SEO-News SEO-News Forums Blog Search FreeWebSubmission SmartWebGadgets