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How to Solve Local Search, Once And For All

By Matt Greitzer in Website Promotion

This month’s column was going to be about Facebook. I had about half of it written before I stumbled upon something unexpected that changed my mind, and the content below.

I’ll start from the beginning. I’m in the early stages of gut renovating my apartment. I’m very handy, and can do most of the work myself, including rough carpentry, drywall, and finishing work. I can even do moderate plumbing and electric. The former I am actually quite comfortable with, the greatest risk being flooding my downstairs neighbors (they are very nice people, and I’m sure they’d understand).

Electric work carries considerably greater risks, like fire, and death. The latter is a pretty big risk. My last electrician offered advice on this topic, and told me that if you grab a live wire with one hand you’ll be fine, as the electricity will complete the circuit through your hand. It’s when you grab it with both hands that you’re in trouble, as then the electricity completes the circuit through your chest. I found his theory intriguing but controversial. Regardless, I can’t do either plumbing or electric work in the city of New York, as building codes prohibit it. So I’m in need of a good plumber and electrician.

Though they must exist, I know implicitly that there is no way to find a good plumber or electrician in New York City. It simply can’t be done. I can find a plumber, any plumber, no problem. My Google query for “New York City Plumbers,” for example, returned 14,700,000 results. (How is that even possible)? But finding a good plumber, one who will show up on time and provide an estimate with fewer than five digits, can’t be done.

This is where I thought I would start writing about Facebook, and the opportunity Facebook has to corner the local search and services market. No one out there is doing this well — not the major engines, not the IYPs, not even the new(er) social search and recommendation engines like Yelp.

I was wrong about that last part, and I’ll return to this in a moment. The problem with local search is not in getting accurate listings, that’s easy. The challenge is in getting relevant reviews on those listings.

In order to do this, you need two key ingredients. The first is scale, as in a massive, active user base willing to inform objective business listing with subjective opinions. The second is relevance, as in some way to ensure the reviews you are reading are not written by shills, angry ex-lovers, or crazy people.

Facebook can address both of these challenges: It has a massive user base, and it’s networked, which provides all kinds of useful ways to vet the trustworthiness of a reviewer’s opinion. If Facebook jumped into the local search space I believe they could corner the market. But I think Yelp has actually beaten them to it.

I was going to put Yelp in my original column as an also-ran. My original thoughts were that Yelp did not have the scale to capture this opportunity. It was in digging around on Yelp looking for examples to prove my point that I realized I’d misjudged it. Yelp does have scale. Though not nearly that of Facebook, Yelp has almost 8 million monthly unique users (according to comScore), and has doubled its user base over the last year.

Yelp can scale content, too. I found a variety of listings for New York City plumbers and electricians (not 14.7 million, but enough) with ratings that looked plausible (i.e. not all five stars). And Yelp has a pool of users that seems, well, not crazy. That is, they seem to make rationale critiques and rate services appropriately (unlike some travel review sites that shall remain nameless). You can vet the reviewers’ quality by clicking on their profile, and their community is even self-policing, calling people out when they seem like phonies, and knocking them back in line when they stray from the site’s main purpose - real reviews about real services.

It was at this point that I realized I had to rework my column and develop a new conclusion. So I’ve revised my point of view. Facebook should not build its own socially powered local search engine; it should just buy Yelp. This combination makes both companies better. It would instantly propel Facebook into the local search space with the backing of an active reviewer base and a proven service model. And Facebook’s scale would rocket Yelp from niche to mainstream, making a good service even better by combining reviewer opinions with vetting via the social graph.

So Yelp, if Facebook calls you up on Tuesday and makes you an offer, you know who sent them. But I’m not greedy. In fact, in return for encouraging a nine-figure liquidity event in your favor, all I would ask is that you pay my plumbing and electric bills. You may think you’re getting off easy, but you haven’t seen these estimates.

Matt Greitzer is vice president and global discipline lead of search marketing at Razorfish. (mediapost)

Avoid Broken Links: 5 Quick and Easy Tricks To Ensure Your Resource Box Links Work!

By Steve Shaw in Website Promotion

Article Marketing is a great way to build links to your site, resulting in long term targeted traffic and an increase in your search engine rankings.

How does that work?

With every article you submit you will also include an ‘author resource box’ or ‘author bio’ that includes some basic biographical information and also a link back to your website.

That resource box will sit below your article, and if a reader likes your article they will read your resource box and then (hopefully!) click the link that leads back to your website.

Also, every time your article is republished, you gain an incoming link to your site which can affect your website’s search engine ranking. With an increase in links, your website can start ranking higher when people do searches for your keyword terms.

So, a major key to success with article marketing is that link in the resource box that leads back to your website.

You can imagine how frustrating it must be to go through the effort of writing an article and submitting it, only to later realize that you made a mistake when entering your website URL into the author bio area.

If you’ve ever made that mistake, you’re familiar with that “Argh–I can’t believe I did that!” feeling, and I bet you’ll go to any lengths to be sure that it doesn’t happen again.

How can you be sure that your links work?

Are there any quick and easy tricks to make absolutely certain that the links in your resource box lead back to your website like they’re supposed to?

Thankfully, yes!

There are several recurring reasons why links break, and if you’ll follow these 5 tricks, you will submit an article with a resource box that has working links!

1) Be sure that your URL is fully qualified and has ‘http://’ at the start of it.

Now, I know that we’re all used to just typing in www. and then our website name, but when you’re entering a link into your author bio box, be sure that the link is a fully qualified URL. For example, http://www.examplewebsite.com

That http part at the beginning of the website address needs to be there. If you’re nervous about entering your URL correctly, you may try just bringing your website up on your computer, and then copying and pasting the URL from the address bar of your browser. Then, you don’t have to worry about making a typing mistake.

2) Don’t try to italicize or bold your website address.

If you know basic HTML then you know how to do bold and italics, but I caution you–do not try to put bold or italics into your URL. The HTML can mess up the formatting of the link and make it not work, and I know you don’t want to risk that happening!

Just keep things simple–enter your fully qualified URL and don’t worry about making it fancy with bold or italics or underline.

3) Put your URL on a new line.

Sometimes when a link is at the end of a line it can get artificially cut off, which results in a broken link. To safeguard against this, try entering your URL on a new line rather than at the end of a line.

Now, of course to make this look right, you need to make your URL be the last word in your resource box.

4) Don’t put punctuation after your URL.

Even if your URL is at the end of a sentence, you don’t need to put a period behind it. Putting any type of punctuation after your website address can mess up the formatting and break the link.

5) Preview your article and test your links.

Now, this is a foolproof way to be sure that your links will work–before submitting your article, preview it and click the links in your resource box.

When clicking your links, do they take you to your website?

If so, great! Then you know your links work, and you can put your mind at ease.

If not, then you can go back into the ‘edit’ page of your article and make your corrections. Maybe you typed your URL incorrectly, or maybe you made one of the mistakes listed above.

At any rate, isn’t it great to figure out that your links don’t work when you still have the opportunity to correct things? Absolutely!

After you write your article and get it all entered into the submission page, just take an extra few seconds to be sure that your links are formatted correctly and working–you’ll be happy you did!

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Want to build even more links with article marketing? You can save time and increase your exposure by using an article distribution service, SubmitYOURArticle.com, which distributes your articles to hundreds of targeted publishers with the click of a button. For more information go to=> http://www.SubmitYOURArticle.com

SEO Web Design, Harnessing the Power of Alt Text and Images

By Jeffrey Smith in Website Promotion

Today I would like to share an invaluable SEO web design technique to refine the focus of your pages using images and alt attributes for create relevance for SEO.

SEO, Images and Alt Text

Sculpting the focus of your pages translates into coherence and relevance for search engines. For example, if you have repetitive elements on a page, such as a legal footer (that is 200 words of legalese), a tag line in your title tags, overpowering navigation (which breaks down as a cascading tree menu), then all of these things are impacting the word count, text to link ratio and either increasing or diffusing the relevance of each page.

With examples such as this, you may consider using an image as an alternative (make a high res image with that text instead and use that instead of text) to lower the co-occurrence or non specific keywords and replace the nebulous shingles of text.

If in doubt, then look at your pages Google cache in text only view by clicking on a search result (cache link then selecting text only) link to see how spiders really see your pages with all of the style sheet information removed.

Frequently when conducting an on page website review and analysis we see multiple pages in a website that for lack of better terms are so similar to the market focus of multiple pages (which essentially means, since they are so alike, nothing distinguishes it from others).

As a result, lackluster performance impacts the relevance score of the page by diffusing the keyword focus and jumbling the phrases, modifiers and keywords in an attempt to make sense of what that page is really about.

Add to the fact that the anchor text is typically wide open with no real regard for continuity using off topic keywords for links (click here, contact us, etc), linking from multiple methods from one page to another (from the home button or link, from anchor text in the body and say for example an image as well) confuses the order of importance.

The remedy for this SEO web design dilemma is:

1) Add additional text on the topic - you can either add 100-200 additional unique words to a page or add 2-3 more supporting pages and internally link them to the target page to increase relevance for specific keywords.

The fastest way to get in the top 10 is to get a link from a website already ranking in the top 10 for a keyword. Similarly, in order to make your on SEO page factors prominent, linking from a page (all about Topic A) with a relevant link (about Topic A) to you preferred landing page within your site, transfers that ranking factor through the anchor text.

The more competitive the keyword, the more internal links you should use, using a variety of modifiers, reversing the order of the words if applicable or related synonyms as links to the target page (you wish to elevate).

2) Use images as links when adding text links is not applicable. Images can be tactfully integrated into a page and the alt attribute harnessed to link pages with relevant keywords.

If you still have images on your page lacking alt text (spiders cannot interpret images so you need to tell them what the image is). For example, if you have an arrow leading to a free quote page, the arrow could say get a free quote as the alt attribute. If it is a link, then the text in the alt attribute counts as a viable link and that value gets transferred to the target page.

So, if you cannot change the text on the page (due to upper management bureaucracy , you don’t want to throw off the flow of the text, or whatever reason) you can use images to sculpt relevance, make a visual suggestion or act as internal links.

As a result, that page is infused with internal link relevance and then combined with the fact that the weeds have been removed or pruned (noisy words minimized while relevant keyword dialed in) your pages focal point is conveyed to search engines.

Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business

How To Pick The Right Way For You To Go In Internet Marketing

By Riley West in Website Promotion

If you are interested in the idea of making money online I want to extend you a warm welcome. It’s nice in here.

One of the things you rarely hear when first you look into this Internet Marketing thing is a description of the numbers.

Right now there are 3 or 4 million people looking at the Internet Marketing (IM) world as a possible place for them to thrive. In bad times, even more.

They’re just looking! They don’t do much except look. Sometimes they buy.

But these are not your competition. It’s my opinion that in the IM world there is no competition! I say that because I feel there is such a huge amount of people looking to buy online that all we have to do is get a very tiny slice of that pie.

Remember Sam Walton? He said “A very small percentage of a really big number is still a big number.” I agree.

The already successful Internet Marketers are your competition IF you choose to market Internet Marketing.

While IM is a huge niche it doesn’t take anywhere near as much know-how to sell info products or physical products to some very large “other” markets.

Like “weight loss” and “credit” and “baldness” and “abs and “golf”. Those are huge markets that are far easier to break into.

I’m here in the Internet Marketing arena because I have been in marketing and sales for 40 years. I’m a natural. I love it and I have something to contribute to the total.

You may be right for this, too! If you are I’d be glad to help you learn the ropes.

Regardless of the FACT that marketers will tell you “$30,000 in 30 Days..Without a Website!” there is a basic truth.

You have to know which market you are going to serve.

You have to know the basics! And that includes simple websites. Blogs. Traffic generation.

Then you have to settle in and go to work.

The reason so many marketers hawk the idea that you can make tons of money right away, without a website, is because there are thousands of people everyday, desperate, surfing the net, needing money fast, and they don’t want to waste time learning the basics! They want to make money now!

They are in a bad position to commence study of a complex career.

But the basics are what get you there! it’s always been that way and it will remain that way.

It’s always interesting to note that the marketers that are saying you don’t need a website are using a website to tell you this. What an irony.

If you are one of the legions of people who need money fast and can’t be bothered to learn the basics…then I can’t help you.

Neither can anybody else. The difference is, some will say they can.

They’re scammers.

Maybe one in several thousand marketers can take a stone newbie from nowhere to rich in 30 days but I don’t know any of them. And I have never seen it done.

You see, in this business, like all others, you are rewarded for what you do (action) and not for just being there.

Don’t let that little slice of reality dissuade you! If you are smart and willing to work hard AND you like the idea…you can do it.

Whatever it is.

Now I’ve been writing this to you as if you are a good candidate for Internet marketing (IM). But IM doesn’t cover only the subject of IM itself. (read that twice)

Internet Marketing covers the whole world and your life in it.

Picture yourself in a car on a nice day going down a typical commercial street. Can you see it? Look around as you move down the street.

What do you see? A fast food joint…an oil change outfit…a mall with clothing stores and a nice restaurant. Did you see a bookstore?

A bookstore sells information. It’s true that the information is sold in physical products but…the ratio of “other stores” to “bookstores” is just HUGE.

Like 99 to 1.

And it’s the same on the internet. Physical products and “real stuff” are the vast majority of the things sold. Both in the Internet world and the real world.

Consider that for a moment. Where is your best opportunity?

Is it in the small slice of the market? Or the big hunk? Well, consider this…markets are divided up into small niches. Mini markets if you will. There are thousands of them.

And one of them is probably just right for you. Don’t you wish you knew which one it was? Or maybe you do.

In any case don’t for a minute despair! What a waste of energy that is!

There are known ways to to sort out which way will suit you the best.

One way is to type in the search at Google “list of niche markets”. Don’t jump on the first thing..you’re just looking.

But you are looking in the right place. Another great place to find out what’s hot is good old ebay. They even have a what’s hot and whats not list and trend analysis.

So does Yahoo!

From Info marketing to sales of physical products there’s a niche out there just waiting for someone like you.

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Riley West has trained retail salespeople and management for 30 years. Starting in 2006 Riley began studying Internet Marketing methods. Go to his blog today and you’ll receive a FREE MONEY MAKING PDF and a good education too! http://www.makinganinternetmarketer.com

The 10 Best Ways To Promote Your Website

By Peter D in Website Promotion

To make money on the internet you need an effective marketing plan. So here are the best marketing tips that you must follow to make your website a powerful magnet for traffic and sales.

Banner Advertising

Although many marketers already know about pay-per-click advertising, very few are purchasing guaranteed banner click-thru’s that are available on hundred’s of sites. Look for sites that cater to your target market and look for, or ask for, their advertising rates. Slowly but surely most of the sites that sold banner impressions are starting to offer performance advertising in the form of pay-per-click.

Write articles

Writing Articles is an excellent way to promote your website and best of all you can get recognize as an internet business expert. You can submit your article to ezine or article directory.

Exchange links

Exchanging links is one of the best method for getting web site traffic and ranking higher. When you start a site you should exchange many as possable links with sites that are RELATED to YOUR site. Robots are eager to find new links and fresh information.

Mailing List

Having a mailing list can bring wonders to a web site, not only will it help bring old visitors back , but they will send the newsletter to their friends (If they like it).This is like gold for you. The only real purpose for a consumer website is to capture leads and to sell products. Send out a monthly e-zine that offers FREE valuable information and mentions similar products they may be interested in. Search Engine Optimization It is no secret that search engines are the number one traffic generating method for driving visitors to web sites. Search engines are very useful in helping people find the relevant information they seek on the Internet. The major search engines develop and maintain their own gigantic database of web sites that can be searched by a user typing in a keyword or keyword phrase in the search box.

Search engine optimization

(SEO) is the process of studying the search engines in an effort to determine how to get your web site to rank high on user searches. Depending on the statistical information reviewed, search engines account for over 80% of the visitor traffic to web sites.

Free online forum

One forum can be about “Online Business”. Another forum can be about ” Joint Ventures”. When people join those forums, make sure that they need to come to your site first and log in from there, if they want to log on and post on the forum.

Market Statistic

You can use features on your website such as visitor polls, online surveys and your website statistics to find out what your customers like more and how they feel about certain aspects of your business to determine how you can improve your product and the way you do business.

FREE Advertising

There is alot of FREE Advertising on the Internet. There is Classified Ads. FREE For All Pages (FFA), Ezine, Article Submission and Newsgroup of course and many more.

Blogging

Blogs are a relatively new and popular way to publish content on the Internet. They allow the blogger to publish content; very quickly AND get feedback from the people that read it. Because they are new and content is created regularly, search engines love indexing them - and if search engines love them, you should too.

Real Syndicated Content

RSS marketing is a tool used by many on the Internet to deliver articles, advertisements, emails, customer support responses, ezines to clients and potential clients.

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Peter D - I’ve only scratched the surface of getting heavy volumes of traffic to your website. If you’d like to know more about using the new wave of traffic inducing methods to really get your business off the ground, then check this out: Secret Affiliate Code 2 Review

AdSense Sites: Correct This Basic Mistake

By Steve Weber in Website Promotion

Far too many marketers of AdSense sites fail in one very fundamental aspect of marketing. They fail to think about or even consider “time on site”. When you install Google Analytics on your site (which I hope you have done already), you can see how much time visitors spend viewing your pages.

Of course when Google sends someone to your site via their search results, they know this information as well. Simply put, if most visitors only spend a few seconds on your page, Google assumes the page is not worthy of ranking well.

Poor time-on-page is a “double whammy”. Not only does it hurt with respect to search engine rankings, it kills AdSense income as well. You NEED people to spend time enough on your site to click an ad…or two!

Too many marketers are so preoccupied with optimization and link building that they forget it is HUMANS who they are counting on to click their ads. The site’s pages must offer enough interest to keep visitors engaged on the site for as long as possible. The longer the visitors are on the site, the more likely they will click an ad. Additionally, sites that keep visitors for longer periods of time are more likely to also generate returning visitors! Imagine the page views possible if a new visitor could also be counted on to return two, three, or more times!

Too often, the first thing clicked by a new visitor is the back button. All the great SEO done was just wasted. When the human visitor arrives, your page has 2 or 3 seconds (at most) to convince them to hang around for a while. Targeting the traffic well is the obvious method to insure they stay for a while. Providing visitors with exactly what they are looking for is a sure way to skyrocket time on the site.

Also remember, the page needs to look half-way OK. No, it does not have to be drop dead snazzy looking. Just a simple and clean look will be fine. Do not run off visitors by using moving gifs and bright colors! Keep it simple! I see too many beginners spending effort trying to show off new-found web design skills which have no place on simple AdSense pages. Flash and Fancy scripts simply clash too much with the basic fundamentals of what makes an AdSense site work.

A perfect example of a site with very high time-on-page is Steve Pavlina’s website. Steve uses tons of great content to keep visitors engaged. He has stated he earns over 30,000 dollars a month with Adsense. Virtually all of his visitors initially came from the search engines and word-of-mouth. His high time-on-page has proved to be a gold mine in all respects. One of the fundamental truths of Internet marketing success is providing value to the world.

Other methods used to increase time-on-page are placing targeted photos on the site. In fact, I have one site which gets traffic almost exclusively from Google image searches. That site is about a very niche area which is conducive for having great pictures which I have optimized the alt tags for. Other ways involve using bullets and attention-grabbing headlines to keep attention. Additionally, having well placed links on the page using targeted keywords to your other pages is a great way to keep visitors clicking within your site.

Take a long and honest look at your own sites. What can you do to improve the amount of time visitors will stay? Ask your spouse or a friend to visit your page as you watch. See where they click and where they don’t click. Plus, don’t forget that Google analytics has a feature which shows screen shots with the percentages of where visitors are clicking. With that information you can adjust your page design and take advantage of what is working well and get rid of the parts which are not working.

Imagine if your time-on-site is now 20 seconds. What if you could double that to 40 seconds? There is a very good chance your AdSense income would make dramatic increases as well! And don’t forget, if you can increase the time spent by visitors on your site, the search engines will think your site is more relevant. In turn, you will find your site ranking better and better!

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Steve Weber quit the rat race and now works full time from his home. Want to learn how you can do it too? Click here for a free video =>http://www.weberinternetmarketing.com/videos/video-weber.htm

Niche Marketing With SEO - A Valid Choice

By Bob Podolsky in Website Promotion

What is Niche Marketing? What is SEO?

Niche marketing with SEO isn’t quite self explanatory - so here’s a simple overview. A niche is simply a product category that people are looking for and that doesn’t have overwhelming competition on the supply side of the demand/supply equation.

The ideal niche is one that has great demand and little or no supply available. Such niches are rare. You could spend a lifetime looking for one and never find it - so don’t count on this if you are planning to do niche marketing.

Fortunately, niche marketing with SEO doesn’t require that one’s niche be ideal to be good from our perspective - just good enough. Most people who set up marketing websites don’t research the competition very thoroughly while picking the market in which they are going to operate. This is a good thing for those of us in the know about online market research.

By picking a niche with relatively high demand and low supply, and by “optimizing” our website to attract the notice of the search engines, we can compete successfully in the marketplace.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It consists of two parts: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page optimization is mostly a matter of picking a keyword for your page that matches the informational theme of the page. A web page with the theme “niche marketing” would have “niche marketing” in the keywords meta-tag in the Page Source” view of your browser.

Off-page optimization is effected by the recognition accorded your web page by other webmasters - primarily expressed as links from their websites to yours. Search engines are able to track both optimization factors - and they give more weight to the latter than to the former.

A page will have matured when other websites, known to be authorities on niche marketing, bear links pointing to the page. SEO is a big subject and you will see it referred to repeatedly throughout many websites concerned with niche marketing. The first question that should occur to you at this point is - What Am I Going to Sell?

Rather than pick a product that is familiar to you - or one that you can create yourself - both of which are very tempting choices - I strongly suggest that you decide at the outset to pick one that you know people want. In other words do the market research first - find out what people are actually looking for and that can be sold profitably - and then decide what to sell.

If your research leads you to a subject that is not the most familiar, so be it. Learn the subject and then sell it. It is likely that you will find a niche in an area with which you already have some familiarity, because you are likely to start with something familiar as you begin doing the research. It is best if this is so, because you can write most capably about a subject about which you care passionately.

What Do I need to Know to Do Niche Marketing with SEO?

In simplest terms you need to know:

• How to set up a website properly
• How to select the search engine keywords that will bring traffic to your website
• How to structure your website to be ranked highly by the search engines - so it appears on the first page of “results” that a search engine displays when a visitor searches for your keywords,

* How to “monetize” your web traffic to create multiple streams of income, and

* How to lead your sites visitors to a decision to buy what you are selling - without using a heavy-handed sales pitch. This is called “pre-selling”.

The first of these questions is answered very thoroughly by sources that I will reference in subsequent articles. It is a big subject - beyond the scope of this article.

The choice of keywords has also been covered by many writers on the subject. Each has his own angle on doing the research, and some make useful tools available to you either free or at modest cost.

How To “Monetize” Your Website

To monetize your website is simply to connect your site’s readers with an opportunity to buy something in such a way that you make money in the process. There are a number of good choices in this regard, and you can use more than one of them.

For starters, you can directly sell something via your website using your own merchant account or PayPal account. Your product might be a tangible item that you are prepared to ship or drop-ship to your customer - or it might be an e-book, a piece of software, or an information product that you will deliver immediately as an electronic download.

Then again, you might sell a product produced by a company of whom you are an affiliate. There are many good affiliate programs available. In this case you simply include on your website a link that takes the reader to a website provided by the product supplier. The link identifies you to the supplier, so if the reader becomes a customer, you get a commission on the sale. Such commissions can run as high as 75% and be very profitable to you.

And/or you might contract with a product or service provider to be paid a fixed fee for each referral that you send their way via your website.

And/or you might sell advertising space on your website, either via Google’s Adsense program, which will pay you on a per-click basis, or through one of several other programs. Some of these pay you on a weekly or monthly basis and can be more lucrative than Adsense ads.

A Note On Monetizing

One of the most common mistakes that beginners make when setting up a commercial website is to monetize the site too soon. Until the site contains enough useful content, its readers should not be expected to trust its author enough to buy anything on the site. Why should they? The traffic to the site will tell you when that trust has been established - then you will have “earned” the right to monetize it.

If you monetize too soon, before you have at least thirty highly informative pages and twenty unique visitors per day, then you run the risk that both search engines and human visitors will just see the site as a sales pitch - and accord it little value or rank.

The Value Of “Pre-Selling”

As I said earlier, most Internet surfers are not looking for advertising when they use the search engines. They are looking for useful information - authoritative information that informs them about the subject of interest to them. When you provide such information, you gain a level of credibility in your readers’ eyes that you can never achieve by presenting them with a sales pitch.

Niche marketing is all about credibility. As your readers recognize the value of the information content that you provide, they become more open to the idea of buying something from you. As this occurs, the likelihood that they will buy from you rises, the percentage of visitors who are “converted” into customers rises accordingly - and the ease with which you make money online soars.

If you are serious about making money with niche marketing, the next thing you need to study is the choices you will need to address in deciding how you will go about doing so.

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A retired scientist, former psychotherapist, and author of five books on ethics, Bob Podolsky has been involved in Internet marketing since 1994. To learn about more important choices relevant to online marketing, visit http://www.create-easy-money.com/ways-to-make-money-online.html

How Digg Got Me On ESPN and Fox News

By Brian Cuban in Website Promotion

What is Digg? For those who do not know, I will use the description right off their web site:

“Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.”

I will not go into all the ins and outs of Digg. You can read a good article about it here. You basically submit content you find interesting to the Digg Community. The community votes it up or down. If enough people vote it up and not too many vote it down or “bury it”, your submission makes it to the “Front Page” which can generate thousands of hits to the submission.

Is Digg beneficial to the “obscure bloggers” of which I count myself? It can be if you remember the key phrase coined by Viacom movie mogul Sumner Redstone “CONTENT IS KING!”. I actually thought my brother Mark Cuban coined the phrase until I read about Redstone. This is the golden rule that drives the Digg community.

What is your blog about? Is your blog about getting traffic from front page postings regardless of quality of the content because you are ad supported? I see a lot of that on Digg. That kind of content in my opinion is not king when it comes to blogging because it is almost always content generated by someone else. Why not spend some time building a loyal readership base with quality and or original content? If you don’t people are not going to come back until you have another popular submission. I want reader loyalty. I want people to stick around and look at my multiple posts. The only way they are going to do that is if they enjoyed the initial post I submitted to Digg. When a Digg submission of mine hits front page, it is just as or more important to me how many other of my articles are clicked.

There is nothing wrong with writing about other people’s news. Unless you are writing an original screenplay it makes sense to write about the world happening around you. The key for me at least is to take an event, even if 500 other people have written on it, and make it mine with original ideas, thoughts and viewpoints. If I can not add something new (at least new to me) to an event, I tend to stay away from it.

The tendency of some Diggers is to read only the lead-in when they digg. I try to create a lead-in that encourages readers to click on the link to my blog rather than simply digg and comment off of the lead-in. A bad lead-in can get an article buried as quickly as a bad article itself. The art of writing a good lead-in can be compared to a a teaser for a Hollywood movie. You want to capture the interest of your audience quickly without giving to much information. You want them to be curious enough to go see the movie.(your blog) It is a continuous learning process.

Do not be afraid of the comments. When a submission goes front page there can be hundreds of comments. Many of them are hateful and tough to read but if you shrug those off and find the meaningful ones you can learn a lot about ways to improve your writing and content selection skills. I routinely got tortured for my grammar before I started working harder on it. I still get tortured to a degree but the complaints have reduced dramatically.

Here is an example of how Digg recently worked for me resulting in two ESPN interviews and an appearance on The Fox News Channel.

On June 6 2008 I wrote an article entitled “Why Athletes Go Broke”. It went popular and generated 814 Diggs. This is a fairly modest number for a front page submission. In contrast, the actual article on my blog received 30 thousand hits. This is again, not an unusually large number of hits from a front page submission. The real benefit is the other search engines and blogs that pick up on this large number of hits. This process got my post noticed by the New York Times. The Times linked to the my blog in their Freakonomics Section in a post entitled: Why Do So Many Celebrities Go Broke. It was also posted in their “Whats Online” section. The Times postings resulted in my submission being picked up by news blogs all over the world. This resulted in two ESPN interviews and a national appearance on the Fox News Channel.(video below) I have also received several offers to write for publications.

What lessons can be learned from this? There are some that will say that this only happened because my last name is Cuban. I dispute that assertion. I have written many blogs that have gone front page and not generated any interest beyond Digg. It proves that Digg does work for bloggers even in the face of any disdain by the Digg community towards the blogging community. I have no idea if this disdain actually exists but I read about it frequently. It proves that regardless of any Digg variables, content will always be king. If you have content that is timely, interesting and hits a “public nerve” Digg will work for you. Digg is not just for distributing hard news around the internet. Digg can work to distribute your thoughts on that news as well. You just have to have something worth saying. Digg can pull back the curtain but the audience still has to like the show. Be original-Be timely-Be bold as a blogger. The Digg community will stand up and take notice.

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Brian Cuban - You can read Why Athletes Go Broke here. You can watch the Fox News interview here.

Ways To Find “Freebies” To Add To Your eBook and Ideas for Viral Marketing

By Angela Meyers in Website Promotion

If you shop online regularly I’m sure you are already familiar with the marketing techniques many webmasters use by offering you FREE bonuses, gifts and other incentives in an effort to encourage you to make a purchase from them.

That is all well and good.

However, did you know that (depending on what rights you are granted with the freebies); you can use those “Freebies” to your advantage to add value to your eBooks and other products?

Here are just a few ways that you can find Freebies and things that you could do:

Do a Google search on the internet to find free gifts that are related to your product.

Search under a few keywords such freebies, free reports, free eBooks, free software, free gifts, etc.

Look for products that compliment your product that you can give away as a free gift in your eBook.

By doing that you will make your product more appealing to your readers and you will increase your chances of making a sell.

Look for eBooks on the same topic of your eBook that are published by established expert publishers or by other publishers who have a different take on the same topic.

You can accomplish this by placing your keywords in every chapter of your eBook and researching those keywords in your favorite search engine(s).

Once you have found the free eBook that you are looking for add a link to it in every chapter of your eBook.

Don’t be afraid to search, as many sites have freebies and they want you to distribute them.

Here are a few ideas to help you start your viral marketing campaign:

1. Purchase the branding rights to a viral Book and allow people to give away your free eBook to their subscribers. When their visitors give away the eBook it will take on an exponential effect and spread like wildfire all over the internet.

2. If possible, set up a forum or bulletin board and allow visitors to use your forum or bulletin board for their website. You can include your banner at the top of the forum or discussion board.

3. Write articles pertaining to your niche and allow others to reprint them on their website, in their newsletters, ezines, eBooks or magazines. Always include your resource box at the bottom of each article along with the option for the article to be reprinted.

4. Search the internet to find products with branding rights that allows you to add your name, website information, and contact information to the product and those that allow you to pass it along to others “free of charge.”

5. If you are creative you can design your own graphics, software, templates, fonts, etc., include your own ads on them and include a link directly back to your website.

To preserve the integrity of your designs, make sure that visitors to your website agree to keep any copyrighted information that you provide in tact and include in the copyright notice a link back to your website.

Once they have agreed to your terms and conditions you can then allow them to give away your templates, graphics, fonts, software, etc.

6. In exchange for allowing your website visitors to advertise in an eBook that you have written, make sure they agree to give away your eBook to their ezine subscribers or to their website visitors.

Always over-deliver and give your readers the very best offer possible. They will appreciate you for it.

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Angela Meyers is a writer and internet marketer who writes and publishes eBooks and media material on various ways to make money online. Want to find out more? visit: http://www.resellrightsandplrmadesimple.com

Impulse Surfing, Click Triggers and Keywords

By Jeffrey Smith in Website Promotion

Since no two people think or surf alike, the keywords each employ are susceptible returning search results and click triggers that can either promote impulse surfing (much like impulse shopping) or settle in to a relevant result that encourages conversion.

Since you never really know where you will end up when you use a search engine, as a site owner, the daunting task of second guessing to identifying keywords that convert can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack, unless you know where to look or where and how to focus your research.Since there are no rules of search, prospective customers can type in the most obscure long-tail terms to identify an objective query. As a result, considering how to position your pages, either laser like and precise for competitive keywords or broad and nebulous to funnel and convert broad match or related traffic.

Regardless of your best effort, semantic word stemming occurs over time when you create enough content about a topic. As a result your site starts to appear for numerous related phrases (where potentially any two words on your pages are keywords). The more supporting information you have on a topic, the higher you can rank for other semantic variations.

Keep in mind that over 30% of all searches are unique (which means that even search engines have never seen the combination before) so broad match and keyword stemming are excellent tools to find keywords that hang in the balance. Not to mention a prospect used to finding results through PPC (pay per click) sponsored advertisements searches differently than someone who understands search engine semantics and is used to being specific enough to evoke the appropriate keywords in a query for organic search.

The distinction between those who type in “search engine optimization company” than those who try to find the same result using “make my site rank higher” are two different personalities. Both have subjective mindsets that cognize and perceive context, words and concepts differently and each is unique to their own comfort zone, exposure and life experiences and as a result. Just as no two people are alike, no two people search alike which is a good thing if you take that in consideration when optimizing your pages.

Both individuals are susceptible to their own unique emotional triggers that could occur at any time as a result of skimming the returned search result snippets. Just like impulse shopping when you go into a store with one purpose in mind and come out with 40 additional items that mysteriously jumped into your shopping cart, much in the same way impulse surfing can take you to the most obscure pages and websites as a result of an inkling of an impulse or search.

The snippet for those unfamiliar with the term, are the 255 characters under the main link of the returned search result. This information is consistent “if you use the meta description tag” or if you opt not to, search engines will piece together a description of their own extracting content from the page or the site to match the query.

Surfing prospects can be hooked by any one of the keywords or associated “call to action” from the search results, that alone may be enough for a prospect to abort the original intention long enough to investigate your page to determine if it is a relevant result.

If enough of the factors they seek are present, or you have clearly delineated a clear path to a target that does chime in with their intent, then chances are you will have one more visitor perusing about with the intention to purchase (if that is your objective).

On a side-note, where they are in the sales cycle also can influence which modifiers you should focus on (using gap analysis) to find related searches you may not have considered. Keywords like pricing, rates, on sale, discount, affordable or other modifiers all come into play under this premise.

Now for the application:

If you have an analytics program, check your server logs or keywords that delivered traffic to your pages for the past 90 days, look at keyword instead of key phrase. From there, look at the highest combination of broad match terms to find the keywords delivering the most traffic to your site.

For example we created a post called “Using Related Search to find Google’s Most Searched Keywords”, and prior to that one month before we did a tandem two part post for called “Optimizing your Site for the Most Search Keywords” and the same title with a slight variation “Optimizing the Most Searched Keywords to Target your Niche” (using pages in tandem is an excellent SEO strategy).

As a result we gained more “broad match” traffic than most competitive keywords day and night from the links and keywords arching across the semantic bridge to create relevance (not to mention a double listing in search results for a 200% increase in conversion).

Using another post as an example about “Action Words” titled; “How to Use Action Words To Increase Traffic and Reader Response” created to work in tandem with another post about “Creating a Clear Call to Action for Conversion” had the same effect, topical relevance which is a precursor to website authority for those keywords.

The fact they are linked through the blog and have an RSS feed are enough to push it through for the first 30-60 days, after that you should go back to your server logs or analytics software and look for the phrases or pages that are dropping back a page or so, create a related post and freshen up the keywords again to set off a chain reaction / traffic stampede for anything remotely related in your website.

This is a process based on virtual theming, the process of using related keywords to deep link to pages specifically about the keyword. When used properly not only can you squeeze more traffic from a page than ever thought imaginable, but you can keep content lively and active in search engines while creating multiple double listings along the way to dominate search results. The good thing about it, you control the content, depending on what your write about.

So it is through the process of analysis, such as the basic technique outlined above that puts you in the driver’s seat of how you target competitive keywords and everything in between.

Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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