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Everyone in the marketing field is faced with this daunting task of reaching everyone on the planet simultaneously, on a daily basis. Lets say we have a brand new product, extremely viral, unique, and most importantly never before seen. A whole new dilemma stares you in the face as you need massive amounts of people viewing your offer before “the cat is out of the bag,” in order for you to maximize your profit.

Realize that what we are asking for is the exact same thing every single internet marketer, every single guru, every single business, is trying to achieve? That is to reach mass amounts of people, all at the same time.

• The short answer is to be able to email everybody. How about everyone on a list who’s seeking make money opportunities, diet and health products, or a specialty service. If you can swing interest with some who’s got a list, fine, otherwise there’s the usual like blogging or article posting.
• Write such an interesting article that everyone wants to publish it, that’s quite fast if you can do it.
• Publish a press release that is so interesting everyone wants to publish it.
• Do a deal with someone with a long list.
• Use advertising offline like craigslist, or online like USfreeads.
• Get your site really search engine optimized, then publish an article to as many article sites as possible. When Google reads them, and they will often, Google will also index your site through the link on the article, and then seo takes over.

All of the above take time, but we are all trying to get our message out to everyone that we can. Using these tactics are beneficial and just a great common practice.

The so called “Guru’s” get it out quickly because they have a boat load of affiliates who do it for them and they have a huge list of people to send it to. It’s much easier to have a “New Launch” when you have built a reputation and have a large following.

A solution for the common marketer

For the common marketer, a really great way is to rent a list of names, or buy a list of names that has been collected on opt-in subscribes actively searching for your product or offer. That involves using a list someone else owns and marketing to them. There’s usually a fee and the bigger the list the bigger the fee. Let’s focus on this technique.

I’ve seen many quality lists on specific niches well into the 100,000’s and very reasonably priced. Many will even offer the free emailing software compatible with their list formats. Finding the lists are relatively easy. Search engine dietary affiliate program seekers or MLM opportunity seekers, and you will find huge lists. Just make sure your mailings are CAN - SPAM compliant when marketing this way and the possibilities are endless. A helpful tip is to add the name, email address, IP address, and the date they filled out their opt-in subscription to the bottom of your mailings also. If you get a good quality list, you can expect it to contain all of that information. A quality emailing software will also let you utilize that information seamlessly.

My suggestion is to go after the huge lists. If you have a good product and can offer something of worth to them, they will respond appropriately.

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Looking for Legitimate Ways to Prosper On-Line? Visit Mark Tyner’s website at YourHomeBiz-Direct Or look in on his latest Business Opp | Retail-Auction.com

Tags: Marketing, opt in list

The majority of Internet marketers believe that the success is in getting the website ranked high for one or two primary keywords, and they put all the efforts to achieve this goal. This works, but not always.

If your market niche is too popular on the Internet and you have many competitors, it’s very difficult to rank well for 1-2 best keywords. And even if you do this, your success is less likely to be long-lived. Expenses are maximal, output is minimal. Thus, it simply doesn’t worth your effort and time.

Sometimes to achieve better results and convert your website visitors into customers, you need to think outside of the box, be original and unique. No, I don’t mean you need to create a totally new product. You can have one of the products of the kind but approach its marketing and promotion from a different angle.

One of the secrets for a stable success is to rank for long tail keywords (keyword phrases consisting in four, five or more words). It’s much easier to rank for long tail keywords because they are more specific and are not as trite as primary one or two keywords.

Let me show you an example in order you could better understand what I am talking about. Our company sells G-Lock EasyMail software. The first keywords that come into my mind and that I might want to rank for are “email software”, or “email sender”, or “bulk sender” or the like. But there is an incredible number of email senders on the Internet. And if most of email software owners think like me, it will be extremely hard to be in top ten search results for any of those clichés. Thus, I will follow a bit different way. I will look after long tail keywords. To promote my email sender software, I may want to rank for such phrases like:

• Email marketing software solution
• Email sending and tracking solution
• Bulk email marketing services
• Software for permission-based email marketing
• Create and send HTML email newsletter
• Download bulk email marketing software

Got the idea?

Now make a list of long tail keywords relevant to your niche. Write both the singular and plural versions of each keyword phrase if applicable, for example: Bulk email marketing service - Bulk email marketing services, Email marketing software solution - Email marketing software solutions.

Write an article containing 500-1000 words and be sure to link one long tail keyword phrase to your website. You can include a link to your website with a long tail keyword phrase as the anchor text either in the article content or in the Resource box.

When the article is ready, submit it to article directories. Then write a new article, optimize it for another long tail keyword phrase and submit it to directories. Write as many articles as the number of long tail keywords phrases (relevant to your market niche) you can imagine. If you don’t feel like a good writer, you can hire someone to write articles for you.

Together with article submission, you can use directory submission to rank for long tail keywords. When you submit a website to a directory, you need to provide a title that will be then used as the anchor text for your website URL. Just enter one of your long tail keyword phrases in the Title field and it will be linked to your site.

The key is to get ranked for many long tail keyword phrases. You won’t generate much traffic from just one phrase. But if you rank for dozens of long tail keyword sets, the overall traffic can be high and can bring you many new customers.

Yes, copying/pasting a new long tail keyword phrase as the title in each directory can be a tedious and time-consuming work. But now we have a great time-saving solution - Fast Directory Submitter.

With this semi-automatic directory submission tool you can fill in the website profile form only once and enter as many titles (using long tail keywords) and descriptions as you want. When submitting your website to directories, Fast Directory Submitter will automatically fill in the submission form rotating your titles and descriptions from directory to directory. You just need to verify the suggested category, enter the verification code if required by the directory and click Submit button to go to the next directory.

Thus, your website will be submitted using different long tail keyword phrases. When your listings are approved, you will get hundreds of links to your website. After Google indexes those links, you’ll be on the top positions in the search results for long tail keywords.

The article author Julia Gulevich is a technical expert associated with the development of blog commenting software - Fast Blog Finder. You can find a lot more valuable information about how to increase your site popularity by building quality one-way links here: One Way Link Building Tips

Tags: directory submission, free traffic secret, long tail keywords

Those that are currently using social bookmarking certainly understand the great benefits that it can bring if done correctly. Social bookmarking though is quite an enigma to beginners. Many new bloggers have heard the term social bookmarking but are not quite sure what it is or what it involves.

Let me first start by explaining what social bookmarking is and why it is important to social bookmark all of your blog posts. Quite simply stated, social bookmarking will bring your blog more traffic. As internet marketers, that it exactly what we are all after. Social bookmark sites allow us to share our favorite sites with others who might be interested as well as increasing our back links at the same time.

Every time you bookmark a post, that link has the potential to bring a good amount of traffic to your blog. As you begin to regularly submit your link to authority social bookmarking sites, like Digg, Twitter, and Stumbleupon, your blog will benefit greatly by moving up rank rapidly in the search engines for your selected keywords.

Now just a quick tutorial on how to easily social bookmark your blog posts.

First, what you need to do is find a list of some social bookmark sites. There are plenty around, just do a Google search or go to SocialMarker.com.

Now you have to take the time to enroll at each site. This process may take up to an hour but keep in mind that you are only going to have to go through this process one time.

Once you have enrolled in all 40 or so social sites it’s time to submit your first blog post. The easiest way to do this is to type out your blog posts url, title, description, and tags in a separate window, preferably in Notepad, Article Notepad, or Wordpad. Any of the above will work.

Once you have the info typed out, go ahead and cascade the notepad and your browser so that they are side by side on your monitor. (If you are using SocialMarker you won’t have to use this method.)

Make sure the list of social sites is up and open on your browser, then right click and open the first ten or so sites in a new tab. If your computer is fast enough you can go ahead and open all the sites. If not, just open as much as your computer will allow.

Now all you have to do is click and drag the required info when submitting your blog post.

When you are done submitting all the necessary info with one, close it and move on to the next.

That’s it! That’s all that is involved with social bookmarking. A simple little task like this may take an hour a day but will greatly increase the amount of traffic you receive to your blog.

Keep in mind though that some social sites will penalize you for submitting too many of your own blog posts. Try to form a network of peers and take turns submitting each others blog posts to reduce this risk.

Whatever you do, do not under estimate the power of social bookmarking. Try to make it a point to submit one blog post a day. Doing so will really make a huge difference in the traffic you’re going to see as a result.

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Matt Helphrey invites you to follow his footsteps as he takes on his life ambition of making a full time income using the internet. Sign up today to receive free internet income training!

Tags: blog posts, social bookmark

Building a website that drives tons of free traffic to your business opportunity landing page is the dreams and desires of every home based business entrepreneur. But just having a nice looking website is not likely to get you the traffic you need to make huge profits. Your site needs to be optimized to drive that traffic your way.

I’m sure you have seen and possibly clicked on those nice fancy sites from some well-known business opportunity. It sure did look nice, and I’m sure they spend thousands of dollars having their experts create a well organized site. But did you buy from them or where you just browsing?

So although it’s great to have lots of free traffic coming to your site, it needs to be optimized to your target market so you’re getting the right people to purchase your product of service.

So just how do you get this coveted traffic?

Search Engines - make friends with your local search engine. And when you do you’ll find they really don’t care much about how pretty your business opportunity website looks. It can’t even read those nice fancy flashing graphics someone spent so much time placing in just the right place. What the search engines are looking for is content.

The internet is all about information. So the search engines are looking for good content when someone surfs the internet for information on your particular business opportunity.

You’ve heard the old business adage LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION. Well on the internet a businesses success is with INFORMATION, INFORMATION, INFORMATION.

So what do I do?

Simply provide the information your target market is looking for. Building a moneymaking website is not as hard as many may think. Here are a few tips to get you started.

1. Create a blog. These are interactive and easy to maintain. There are several nice Wordpress products available that will provide fully optimized templates, taking the guess work out it. Or you can use many of the free templates posted all over the internet and add a few plugins.

2. Make sure that you have as many on-page keywords in your blog posts that the search engines will look for when someone enters that as their search criteria for your niche.

3. Create as many hyper-links to your business opportunity product as you desire. This is your blog so you have the say so. Don’t go crazy however; you might be viewed as spamming.

4. Now use Google Analytics to monitor the traffic. This tool gives you great stats on who is hitting your blog and then going on to your product or service page. If you find that you have a lot of traffic that is not converting, change the keywords on the blog to more tightly target your business niche.

None of this is hard, just time consuming. And you don’t have to have any degrees to create your own moneymaking website. Everything mentioned here is free; other than some hosting that will cost you a little bit of money, making all the free traffic and potential profits a real deal.

Now you know what 99% of all the successful internet marketers know. Spend some time and reap the profits.

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Cindy is a full time internet marketing entrepreneur specializing in mentoring others to build a successful internet business. You can own your own business today that provides residual income for your future. To learn more about how you can secure your financial future… Go to: http://www.ThingsLookGreatIn2008.com

Visit our blog at http://www.BuildingOnlineBusinessSuccess.com for creating online business strategies.

Tags: blog marketing, moneymaking webiste

You will need visitors to your site that are looking for exactly what you are offering, which is known as targeted traffic. Here are ten proven ways you can drive quality traffic to your affiliate marketing business site and increase your online income:

1. Articles

Well-written, informative how-to articles are proven traffic baits for affiliate marketing business sites. Use the resource box to provide additional links and include links in the content body to similar or additional information that can only be read on your site.

2. Email campaigns

Email campaigns, used carefully, can easily drive targeted traffic to your affiliate marketing business site. By providing highly relevant and valuable information in the body of the email message and then offering a link that will take the recipients to your site.

You can provide the full content in the email message and then offer a link inviting the recipient to view more similar write-ups on your site. Or give only a portion of the content in the email and offer the rest on your affiliate marketing site. A link in your signature should also be provided.

3. Blogs

Apart from your affiliate marketing site, use a blog to keep in touch with prospective customers and members. Blogs are considerably more personal and lighter in tone than most affiliate business sites and they can be a great source of information, news, advice and tips from you to your prospects. Include a link from your blog to your affiliate marketing site. Allow comments too so your visitors can interact with you.

4. Ezines and Newsletters

Information is what people are searching for on the internet. By using proven methods to drive targeted traffic to your affiliate marketing business and offering a free ezine or newsletter about the subjects your visitors are interested in, will result in many visitors opting-in to receive your information.

Offer your visitors free bonuses such as eBooks for signing up to your free newsletter. Either use a separate landing page to handle the subscription process or have the subscription box placed above the fold on your website where it is clearly visible.

5. Discussion boards and forums

You can encourage other members to react and send you a reply by leaving useful and thought-provoking comments on discussion boards and forums. This will enable you to build a networking relationship from here. Be sure to sign with a link back to your affiliate marketing business website.

6. Social bookmarking sites

You will find that these sites are a rich source of targeted traffic that you can drive to your affiliate marketing business site. Your market demographics are also easier to define so sending out invitations to potential leads and members is much simpler.

7. Guest blogging

By becoming a guest blogger you could drive another blog’s captured traffic to your affiliate site. The site’s readership will find you interesting enough to follow you to your own site if you can write well and can offer unique and useful content.

8. Host a contest

Locate your target market and then promote a contest through ads or e-mails. All details must be found on your affiliate marketing website so you can drive traffic there. Registration must also be performed on one of your landing pages. Just make sure to offer prizes that visitors who will be coming in will find useful.

9. Allow bookmarks on your web pages

You can drive traffic to your affiliate marketing site by allowing your readers to bookmark certain pages that contain good content. This will help promote those pages and your website to other people who might be interested in the same subjects.

10. Offer freebies!

Everybody loves a freebie! There’s nothing like a free gift to drive targeted traffic to your affiliate marketing site. It’s easy to implement and can be relatively cheap or even free. Also, you can offer these visitors an incentive to sign up for whatever campaign it is you are promoting.

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Cynthia Minnaar runs her own successful online affiliate business full-time from home and is also a staff member of The Niche Power Group. Discover how 6 Mentors can help you achieve success with an affiliate marketing business or click here http://www.nichepowergroup.com/affiliate-marketing.html

Tags: Targeted Traffic, Website Traffic

Writing quality articles is one of the best, free ways to build traffic to your website or blog. One-way links pointing to your website or blog is what you need to build your traffic.

One-way links are links that point to your website without your having to put a link on another website. Formerly, people would trade links: “I will link to your website if you link to mine.” Although this works to some extent, they balance each other out and aren’t very effective. In addition, when your site is about health food and you trade links with a site that is about ball bearings, it can do you harm.

Google and other search engines are on the prowl for good content. When they find it, they will send more traffic to a website or blog that produces consistent, quality informative articles.

One point about consistency: Consistency is very important: For example, if you write two to three articles per week, be consistent. Don’t write four articles, and then skip a couple of weeks. If you work hard and put together a large number of articles, don’t post them all at once. . . space them out.

One-way link building is more effective if you write about a topic using a keyword phrase that you are targeting. For example, if you don’t have access to software such as Word Tracker, or Ad Word Analyzer or a number of other analysis tools, you can go to http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ Seobook offers all you need, and it is free. Make sure that you put quotes around your keyword search phrase. For example, look for “one way link building” with quotes rather than one way link building. This will tell the search tool that you are looking for the exact phrase.

Spend some time searching for keyword phrases that show greater than 2000 searches per month and have a total number of results less than 10,000. It is even better if the total number of results is less than 5,000. You are looking for a keyword phrase that is popular enough to be used in searches, but that brings up a reasonable number of results so that your article has a chance of being shown on the first search page. Granted, this will take some time finding the phrase you want to feature, but the results are worth it. Just come as close as you can to these metrics.

Once you have found the particular phrase you want to write about, you need to use the keyword phrase: - In the title of the article, - Three times per one-hundred words, - In the last sentence of your article, - In the link to your article or webpage.

One-way link building can have a tremendous effect on the traffic you receive.

In this article of One-Way Link Building Using Articles, Part 2, let’s consider:

• The length of the article
• how to use paragraphs
• where to publish your article
• consistency of article publishing
• quality of the articles
• how to find the keyword phrase to feature
• the keyword density in the article

Article Length:

Your article should be about three to five-hundred words. You need to be sure that you use enough words to give some quality content, but internet surfers have ADD and don’t spend too much time in one place. If your article has to be more than five-hundred words, then it is best to break the article in to one, two or three parts as you see fit. In fact, making your articles short enough to have good content but breaking them up helps you to get more one way links to your site. Two or three articles provides more one way links, of course.

Paragraphs:

Your paragraphs need to be short.

They can actually be as short as one sentence long if you really want to make your point stand out.

Don’t have long blocks of dense writing. People will run from your article rather read it. They want to breeze through your article picking up bite-sized chunks of information…they don’t want have to work hard. It is easier to keep track of where you are on the page too if the paragraphs are short.

Where to publish:

One-way link building is most effective if you publish your article on your own blog first. Get a WordPress blog. The software is free, it is powerful and it is fun to use. There are many plug-ins that are also free to let you customize your blog, too.

After you have posted the article on your own blog, submit your article to:

• Digg
• Mixx
• Onlywire
• Reddit
• Shoutwire
• StumbleUpon
• articledashboard.com
• ezinearticles.com
• goarticles.com
• isnare.com

These article sites are highly ranked, free sites that will provide one-way links to your site. If you want to spend the time, you can place your articles on a couple hundred other article sites, but the payoff is not as great as just using the sites listed above.

If you decide publish your article to a large number of websites, look for article submission software. It will automate this process to some extent. Or, if you would like, you can go to elance.com or Guru.com and hire someone to submit your articles. For that matter, you can get competent writers to write the articles for you.

If you are marketing online, put your squeeze page URL in the author biography section so that your article drives more traffic to your squeeze, or opt-in page. If you are serious about building one-way links to your site, there are a few professional companies that will submit your article to a large number of sites for a reasonable fee. I use one company, and it saves me hours of work.

One-way link building is one of the best ways you can build traffic to your site - and it is free! Now get to work

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Richard Day - helps train and inform internet marketers how to increase website traffic. He employs the use of articles and videos to make it easy to learn the secrets of website promotion. visit http://www.trafficbumper.com to unlock the secrets. Here is a site that can help you with article submission: at http://www.submityourarticle.com/affiliates/idevaffiliate.php?id=923

Tags: article marketing, one way link building

If you are looking for improved search engine rank for any page on your website, you have to learn how to write articles in order to make use of one of the major and most useful resources online: article directories.

Just as website directories can be used to promote your website online, article directories can be used to publish your articles. These articles can in turn be used to promote a specific page on your website, and in this respect are more useful than a website directory listing that promotes only your home page.

You have few opportunities to direct search engine spiders directly to a page of your own choice, and when one arises it should be made good use of. In fact, other than article directories and links on your own website, you are unlikely to find such an opportunity, and it should be seized whenever it arises. However, very few people actually know how to make best use of such an opportunity and to use their articles intelligently to drive masses of traffic to their site.

You can use your Author’s Resource to achieve that, but in order to get the Resource read, you have to get the article read. For that to happen, you have to write a good article and then make people read it. To do that your title must be good enough to persuade people to read it. To achieve that you must be able to write a good title. So how to you achieve all of these things? That is the purpose of this article: to teach you how to craft a title that will get you article read, and then to craft a resource that will compel the reader to visit your website - or the web page that you want them to see.

So, first the title: Before you can craft your title you will need a good topic or subject to write about. There are several ways to decide what that should be, but that is another article. Let’s assume that you have decided to write about how to cure a slice in golf. The obvious title would be: “How to Cure Your Golf Slice”.

Would that really be a good idea? How many web pages are there online with that title? A few thousand? A few hundred thousand? In fact if you use the term as a Google search you will find it is 387,000. You have 387,000 other websites competing for these keywords. Now, let’s change it to “How to Cure a Golf Slice”. You get 71,500 competing sites. Just one small word change: ‘your’ to ‘a’ reduces the competition by almost 82%.

What that means is that with fewer competing sites you have a lot better chance of having your website listed close to the top of the listings for the keyword. However, you also have to take the demand into consideration: if nobody is using these keywords in their search you won’t benefit by using them. Using Wordtracker I get three times as many people, searching for ‘cure A golf slice’ than ‘cure YOUR golf slice’. So based upon keyword research the title will be:

How to Cure A Golf Slice

This has three times the demand and over a fifth of the supply of the alternative with ‘YOUR’ in the keyword. That’s the difference that one simple word can make to the success or failure of a keyword or keyphrase.

In practice it will make little difference, unless the prospect uses the exact phrase, in which case ‘how to cure a golf slice’ is the more likely of the two terms for somebody to use. Were the term ‘cure my golf slice’ used, both would have the same number of results.

You then write the article, making it as interesting and as useful to the reader as possible, and try to persuade them that they have to find out more by visiting your website. However, the purpose of this article is not to show you how to write articles, but how to use them. You do that using your Resource Box. This is a section that some directories provide in which you have to persuade the reader to visit your site. The directory won’t describe it as such, but that is basically what it is. In fact not all directories provide a separate data box for this, so you have to add it to the end of your article, but either way you design it the same way.

Keep in mind that the resource box should not be used as a bio, even though the directory might ask you to provide info about yourself, you should use it to promote your website. Here are some ideas for your resource box.

1. Offer more information and a free gift “For more information on this topic and a free gift check out Pete’s website at xxxxxx
2. The Second Part Offer “You will find Part 2 of this article at xxxxxx.com, in which you will learn how to put this information to practical use.”
3. The Final Offer “If this article interests you, you will find a limited period free offer on xxxxx.com, that will help you to cure your golf slice.”

These are various uses to which you can put the resource box, and they are all effective in getting the important clicks. However the format that works best for me is something along the lines of: “”For more information check out xxxxxx where I will show you how to make every article rock with cash generating pizzazz that makes you more in a month than your website does in a whole year.”

That’s how to use your articles and your resource to make money. Some people don’t want the resource to look like an advert. Why not? Advertising is your life’s blood and your resource is the only place in your article where you really can advertise.

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Peter Nisbet - For more information on how to get a rapid listing on Google visit SEOcious where you will also be shown by means of HTML screenshots how Pete gets very high listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN , plus step by step instructions on how you can do it too.

Tags: article writing, content writing, improve search engine rank, Writing

Over the years, eBay has introduced all sorts of different auction types, in an effort to give people more options when they buy and sell their things on eBay.

For every seller who doesn’t like the idea that their item might sell for a far lower price than they intend, there’s another who wants to shift hundreds of the same item quickly. eBay tries to cater to all tastes. This email gives you an overview of the different kinds of auctions and their advantages for you.

Normal Auctions

These are the bread-and-butter of eBay, the auctions everyone knows: buyers bid, others outbid them, they bid again, and the winner gets the item. Simple.

Reserve Auctions

Reserve auctions are for sellers who don’t want their items to sell for less than a certain price - a concept you’ll know about if you’re familiar with real auctions. They work just like normal auctions on eBay, except that the buyer will be told if their bid does not meet the reserve price you set, and they’ll need to bid again if they want the item. If no-one is willing to meet your price, then the auction is cancelled, and you keep the item.

Fixed Price (’Buy it Now’) Auctions

Buy it Now auctions can work in one of two ways. You can add a Buy it Now button to a normal auction, meaning that buyers can choose either to bid normally or to simply pay the asking price and avoid the whole bidding process. Some sellers, though, now cut out the auction process altogether and simply list all their items at fixed price. This lets you avoid all the complications of the auction format and simply list your items for how much you want them to sell for.

Recently, eBay added a twist to fixed price auctions: the ‘best offer’. This means that buyers can contact you to negotiate a price, which could be a good way to get sell some extra stock at a small discount. The only downside to reserve and fixed price auctions is that you pay a small extra fee to use these formats. In general, it is more worth using reserve auctions for higher-priced items and fixed price auctions for lower-priced ones - but remember that you can combine the two formats.

Multiple Item (’Dutch’) Auctions

These are auctions where you can sell more than one of a certain item. Dutch auctions can be done by bidding. Buyers bid a price and say how many items they want, and then everyone pays the lowest price that was bid by one of the winning bidders. If you have trouble getting your head around that, then don’t worry - everyone else does too! These auctions are very rare.

What is more common is when a seller has a lot of one item, and lists it using a combination of two auction types: a multiple-item fixed price auction. This just means that you can just say how many of the item you they have, and offer them at a fixed price per unit. Buyers can enter how many they want and then just click Buy it Now to get them.

Now that you know about the different types of auctions, you should make sure that the items you plan to sell don’t violate eBay’s listing policies.

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Michael Tasker operates a successful information marketing business and continues to expand to various websites plus direct marketing channels as well. Discover the secrets to become an Ebay power seller in the new A-Z guide and power yourself into the 2% Ebay elite. The audio and transcript guide shows you everything that the elite use to generate a huge income selling on Ebay. Sign up for a free course at: http://www.goodbyemoneyworries.com/ebaycashpoint/ebaysign.html

Tags: auctions, ebay, Ecommerce

Most bloggers recognize the incredible potential that exists with social media marketing. Many want to maximize the traffic they receive from social media, so they add a Digg button to their posts or sign up for an account at StumbleUpon. What too many bloggers overlook is that Digg and StumbleUpon are just two of the hundreds of available options, and they may not be the best fit for every blogger.

In order to get the most out of social media traffic you’ll need to put some thought into choosing the social media sites that are the most appropriate for your blog and your audience. Unfortunately, none of us have the time to be an active member on more than just a few social media sites, and trying to target too many of them by adding countless buttons and widgets to your blog will only make it cluttered and ineffective.

Among social media sites there is a huge variety of audiences, types of content that is popular, amount of traffic that is sent to popular links, etc. I think most of us would agree that quality traffic is more important than quantity of traffic. The quality of traffic that you receive from social media will be largely dependent upon finding the right fit for your blog. You’ve probably read that social media traffic is very low quality. From my experience, this is not always the case. Traffic from poorly-targeted social media sites will be low quality.

When you are evaluating social media sites pay attention to these factors. Find 2 or 3 that are a good fit for you and get the most you can out of them.

What type of audience? General or niche?

With so many different social media sites out there, the audience will vary greatly from one to another. Obviously, there are a number of general news sites, like Digg, but there are a growing number of excellent sites that focus on a specific niche. These sites typically will not send as much traffic as the major players, but the traffic will generally be of much higher quality and greater networking opportunities may be possible. If you’re looking for niche social media sites in your industry, check the categorized list of social media sites that I compiled.

What type of content does well?

One of the main things you’re going to want to study is the results of different types of content. Visit the front page every day for several days and look for patterns or habits that you can identify. Most social media sites will have an audience that generally prefers a few specific types of content. Learn whatever you can from the popular items, and try to create your own content that will have some of the same appeal to users. For example, if you see resource lists constantly on the front page, you may want to create your own resource list. Or, if you see controversial articles covering current news topics, try to go that route. Of course, whatever content you create should also appeal to your regular readers and subscribers.

What type of content does not do well?

At the same time you are looking for types of content that routinely draw results, also pay attention to what types of content you are not seeing on the front page, or what is drawing a negative response from readers. Just like each audience has its own likes, each will also have its own dislikes. Trying to promote the wrong type of content at a specific social media site is a waste of time.

Do users submit their own content?

If you are planning to target a specific social media site you will definitely want to know if there are any written or unwritten rules about submitting your own content. If so, you’ll need to rely on your readers to submit it, or ask friends to do so.

How many votes does it take to be popular?

Some sites, like Digg, can take over 100 votes (and more in recent months) to make it to the front page, whereas smaller social media sites may only require a few votes. Obviously, the larger sites also tend to have more users, so in some ways it can be easier to get votes. Still, this is something that you should consider. For my primary blog I target Design Float, a niche site for designers. One of the great things about promoting content at Design Float is that it only takes about 3 votes to get to the front page. Although it takes just 3 votes, popular submissions can easily receive a few hundred visitors in a day.

Are there tools/widgets that you can use on your site

I’m sure you’re familiar with voting buttons and widgets. The Digg button is very popular, and several others are also common. There are some widgets and plugins that allow users to vote at just about any site they want, and there are others that are specific to a particular site. If available, consider whether or not you should use voting buttons on your site. My opinion is that voting buttons can be very effective if you don’t use too many of them and if you choose social media sites that a decent number of your regular readers use themselves.

How much traffic do popular submissions typically receive?

Of course, you will want to have an idea of what type of traffic you can expect if your content becomes popular. There are so many social media sites out there that many of them send next to no traffic at all. Don’t necessarily write off a particular site because it doesn’t send thousands of visitors, but you also don’t want to waste your time chasing after 10 visitors.

Is the profile of the submitter important?

Some social media sites, especially Digg, will be impacted by who submits the link. Certain “power users” have hundreds or thousands of friends that follow their submissions and vote them up. On other sites the profile of the submitter has very little or no impact. This is important for a few reasons. First, if the profile of the submitter does play a large role in the success of the submission, you’ll need to either find influential users to submit your content or build a strong profile yourself to submit your own content (which can be frowned upon). Second, sites that don’t favor particular users will place more value on the quality of the content rather than the network of the user.

What are the demographics of the users?

Ideally, you’ll want to find a social media site that has similar demographics to your target audience. For obvious reasons this will improve the quality of traffic that you receive. Some social media sites tend to have users that are in a particular age bracket, a specific sex, or from a specific geographical location. To determine these items you may have to spend some time on the site and visit the profiles of a lot of users. See what you can find out about them.

What views prevail?

The audience of different social media sites tend to have varying views on different issues, and some audiences can be very passionate about certain things. This can either help or hurt you. Cater your content to fit in with popular opinions and you could see impressive results. Write a post that goes against the majority view and you could see some backlash, depending on the site. This really can apply to just about any topic. For example, Apple vs. Microsoft, or conservative vs. liberal views.

What formats are accepted?

Many of the major social media sites are accepting pictures and video in addition to just standard links. Some social media sites even have specific sections or categories for different types of content (Mixx does this very well). As video continues to become more and more common, more social media sites will add specific elements to accommodate video submissions. For now, you’ll want to take this into consideration to determine if your content would be a good fit for a specific site.

How can you network with other users?

One of the basic elements of social media is networking with other users. Regardless of what site you are targeting, having a strong network of other active users will be extremely valuable. Not only will it improve your chances of getting traffic, but you can also make some great connections and help others along the way. Some social media sites offer much better networking opportunities than others. StumbleUpon is one of my favorites for networking. Being able to send messages, share links, and review other users all right from the toolbar make the networking on StumbleUpon hard to beat. If one of your goals is to improve your network through social media, make sure that you spend your time on sites that will make networking easy.

Are there specific sub-groups?

Social media sites that allow you to start your own group can improve your ability to meet others that share your interests. Again, this is something that Mixx does very well. Users can start a group or join and existing one, and group members can invite other users to join. If you’re looking to do some networking with others that fit into a specific niche, this may be something to consider.

Are the users connected to other social media sites?

Almost all social media users are active at more than just one social media site. If you can identify the relationships between various social media sites you may be able to use this to your advantage. For example, many popular submissions at Digg wind up on the front page of Delicious after a bunch of Digg users have bookmarked the page. Maybe you would like to target Delicious, but only a small percentage of your readers use Delicious. If it’s easier for you to get to the Digg front page, you may be able to create something worth bookmarking and transfer that Digg traffic into a spot on the Delicious front page.

Another effective approach is to use smaller, niche sites to send a smaller rush of traffic and try to convert that traffic into Diggs, Stumbles or Delicious bookmarks. Making the front page of a niche site is typically easier than hitting the front page of the major sites. Maybe you can take a small step towards a popular submission at a niche site that will allow you to take a bigger step towards success at a major social media site. Several months ago I wrote a more detailed explanation of this approach, How to Set Up a Domino Effect of Traffic.

How long does the traffic last?

Social media sites are notorious for sending a quick rush of traffic, and then nothing at all. With most social media sites, popularity doesn’t last long. StumbleUpon is one of the few exceptions. With SU you can still be getting trickles of traffic for several months or longer. You should consider whether or not sustained traffic to your submissions is important to you. In order to get a consistently high level of traffic from most social media sites you’ll need to be hitting the front page every couple of days, which in most cases isn’t realistic.

How many links can be generated?

Link building is a priority for many social media marketers. If you fall into this category, take some time to research how many links popular items are getting from different social media sites. You can do this by going back through items that were popular a few days ago and do a Technorati search for the specific URL of the page. This will allow you to see all of the links that Technorati is tracking to that page. One thing to remember here is that not all of the links you see will have been a result of popularity on a specific social media site. If an item was popular in one place, chances are it was popular somewhere else too. Still, if you check several different items you can get a good idea of the link building power this way.

Is there a feature/option to share submissions with friends?

If you have an established network of friends, you may want to ocassionally share some of your links with them. Each social media site has its own way of allowing this. StumbleUpon’s can be done straight from the toolbar without ever leaving the page. Digg uses the shout system to send email notifications, and many other sites have their own versions. If you want to be able to share your links and ask your friends for votes, this is important to consider. If you don’t want to share your links and you don’t want to be bothered by other users sharing links with you, these features may be more of a negative (although you can turn them off on many networks).

Is having friends important?

Social networking obviously involves being social. Most social media sites have a system that allows you to add other users as your friends, and for other users to add you as a friend. At some social media sites this is more critical than at others. The number and quality of friends can sometimes have a significant effect on the traffic that you receive. This is important to know before targeting a specific site, because it may mean that you’ll need to spend a lot of time networking and gaining friends.

Conclusion:

My opinion is that the ideal strategy will involve targeting 2 or 3 different social media sites. That is enough to get some results, but not too many to spread yourself thin. If possible, be an active user of at least one major social media site and at least one niche site, although not every niche will have an effective social media site. If you have other things that you look for, please leave a comment.

My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the guy behind ProBlogger. You can read a little more about my journey of blogging on the About ProBlogger page - but let me take a moment to give you a bit of glimpse at who I am.

Tags: online marketing, social media, Web 2.0

Although my day job is working for design agency The Studio 4 (http://www.thestudio4.co.uk) I also have a secret pastime: I’m a ‘blagger’. Not a blogger, but a blagger, i.e someone who attempts to get products for free. The two may not seem linked but there’s no reason every webmaster can’t get something for free. This article explains how:

The Secret
First of all, shed your preconceptions; Companies do want you to have free stuff. Whether it be to increase brand loyalty, get closer to key decision makers or simply to one-up the competition. The trick is making them realise that you, and your site, offer something viable that makes it worth their while, and that key to doing that is your unique offer.

Mastering Your Unique Offer
Each webmaster has something about their site that they can offer a company simply by having a voice online. The simplest form of this is to run product reviews about anything you have an interest in. Make sure the content is honest to keep your readers loyal, but at the same time write about products that you currently use and enjoy to get you started.  Then you can approach similar manufacturers for a free product.

Become a Source of News
If reviews aren’t your thing you can always go down the much easier option of reporting on news in the sector you want to ‘blag’ from. Ask a few companies for press releases, run each piece with a few edits of your own and before you know it you will have key contacts with companies in your target market. After this, work your way in to any press screenings or events they have, meet the key people in person and you’ll be fixed in their mind.

After that it’s a simple case of deciding on a feature you wish to run “Top five MP3 players, new beauty products for 2009″ etc and asking if they have anything you can try for the feature.

Use the Media
Likewise companies are desperate to try and understand new media options such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. So if you can find a way to leverage these tools as promotional outlets for your website, you then have the potential to encourage companies to send products for you to expose in this format. Run a video blog? Offer to showcase new products. Got a lot of Facebook friends? Set up a group praising a type of product. Like Flickr? Photograph products in unique settings.

Dr Pepper’s Cherry Chocolate Rain (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2×2W12A8Qow ) and Blendtecs’ ‘Will it Blend’ series (http://www.willitblend.com/) are just two examples of the type of brand exposure you can carry out.

Become a Reporter
Anyone with a website is only seconds away from becoming a journalist. You don’t need a special qualification just the balls to brand yourself with such a title, and a website to write about products. Once you realise this you can talk to companies in a different way. Ring them up, brag about the stats on your website/ the products you’ve featured by their competitors and what you can offer them if they send you something.  A product being featured on a website is no different to a newspaper so you should be able to command the same authority.

For an even quicker option use Peter Shankman’s HARO (http://www.helpareporter.com/), an email list that connects journalists to sources, and market your site as a product portal. In doing this I received 23 product for free by simply writing a 50 word pitch.

Submit Articles
The last option is to establish yourself as an authority on a particular subject, and the best way to do this is to become a niche site. Look for gaps in the market and make a site focusing there. There’s a million video game review sites but none for ironing board covers. Set one up, and suddenly you have the authority to attract companies that need such an outlet.

With these ideas in mind you should now feel comfortable to leverage your site. Although there’s no such thing as “something for nothing”, if you are willing to give products a little bit of time on your site you can expect plenty in return.

Mike Essex is the author of “Blagman: Don’t Buy it, Blag it”, a guide to how just about anyone can get just about anything for free. He regularly shares tips from the book at Blagman.co.uk (www.blagman.co.uk) and has received everything from a diamond encrusted organiser to a kitchen sink for free.