Search:
Site   Web

SiteProNews

SiteProNews

Article Categories





By Jeff Schuman in Featured

marketing3I am the type of writer that can look at the glass half full or look at it half empty. Sometimes I think Internet marketers need to fully realize what a sunny business they have chosen to be in.

Here are 4 things that bring a smile to my Internet marketing lips!

1. Instant affiliate commissions. I love the fact that I can get paid to sell other people’s stuff and I do not have to wait to see my money.

Today there are affiliate programs you can join that will set you up with your own PayPal url. When you make a sale your commissions are instantly deposited into your PayPal account.

WackyCentral.com has a great program. PaySpree.com is an instant payment affiliate network. Both are worth joining for free.

2. Easy blog set up. I admit that I do not like to build websites. Even setting up a WordPress blog used to be enough to turn me into an A #1 Procrastinator. Not anymore.

Most hosting companies offer a Fantastico icon you can click on for fast WordPress set up. This is simple enough that I can even do it.

Because of how easy it is you can also pay someone to do it for you and not break the bank doing it. Outsourcing a WordPress blog set up is very cheap to do.

3. Very good training available. When I started out online good Internet training was expensive. Today you can join membership sites for under $1 a day and get some really good personal coaching. The Affiliate Power Group is at the top of my list.

There are also many top notch discussion forums where you can get excellent training and meet some fantastic Internet marketers. The Warrior Forum is one of my favorites.

4. People will pay you to do things for them. I learned this by mistake at first. I had my son write content articles for me starting back in 2005. He was a journalism major and I wanted to expose him to Internet writing.

Out of that came our own Internet writing company and article marketing company. We have been able to turn that into a 6 figure writing business.

There are many examples of people getting paid by other Internet marketers. Some of what they do includes copywriting, blog building, virtual assistant, graphic design and so on. You will be smiling all the way to the bank when you get paid to stay at home and do things for online businesses.

These are 4 things that make me happy about Internet marketing. It is very easy to see the sunny side of this business when you think about all of the advantages it offers!

If you enjoyed this article by Jeff Schuman please visit his article marketing website today. If you are not an article writer he offers a hands off program for getting backlinks and traffic using the power of writing and submitting articles.www.HandsOffArticleMarketing.com.

By Nitin Aggarwal in Featured

webdevOutsourcing is a valuable tool if you hope to succeed as a small business online. The simple reason behind this is that outsourcing to trusted freelancers will cut down dramatically on labor costs, leaving you the extra time and money to better spend in promoting your business through marketing and product development.

Of course, you must make wise decisions as an online company when it comes to outsourcing by using outsourced employees for the more menial tasks, like writing content, administration, web development, link building, and blog management, while leaving the more important projects for yourself and your top staff members, like market research, managing social media profiles, and networking with other companies in your niche.

Once you have hired several freelancers as your outsourced staff, using the best tools will cut down on serious stress, disorganization, and potential pitfalls within any project that you embark on. In fact, it is not recommended to outsource without using these time tracking tools under any circumstance, or you could risk long-term problems in the productivity and success of your company.

  • RescueTime: RescueTime is an ideal tool for outsourcing that helps you to control and better understand how your outsourced staff spends their attention and time. One of the best portions of this tool is that it does not require any data entry, and all you have to do is install a small application that will track what websites and software are being used by your employees. This is best to manage a team of several people, especially if they are not working in a physical office with you. This tool alone will keep your staff accountable for their time and work within any project that you hire them for.
  • ClockingIt: This tool is a free hosting application that will help you to keep track of time and tasks for any freelance project. ClockingIt offers project management features so that you can plan, see the project schedule, and know if any outsourced employees have fallen behind. The Time Tracking alone is a valuable feature that will give you reports to offer to your clients on which tasks were completed within a project in a certain amount of time.
  • BaseCamp: BaseCamp is helpful software for outsourcing to several employees, which will offer features like web based documents, milestone management, to-do lists, time tracking, file sharing, and a messaging system. This tool is, in fact, perfect for outsourcing to people all over the country or outside of the country so that they can collaborate, communicate, and upload their work within a project for further editing or feedback.
  • ProjectPier: This is a free PHP application that is used for managing teams and projects with a user-friendly web interface. This tool needs to be downloaded and installed into your own server, and it will help your staff collaborate, facilitate communication, and complete tasks in an organized manner as an outsourced team. For any small businesses starting out in outsourcing, this is an invaluable free tool that will give you the freedom to manage several employees within other areas of the country.
  • ActiveCollab: ActiveCollab is fantastic project management software that allows you to collaborate within your own server or local network. You can work with your own staff and outsourced employees in a simple environment that will help you control and manage all project data. Some of the features of ActiveCollab include tracking progress on projects, assigning tasks, team communication, e-mail support, shared files, notifications, time trackers, milestone management, and the ability to invite new freelance employees to a project.

The truth is that as a small business, there are no better tools that you can use to manage freelance or outsourced employees. Outsourcing has its own slew of benefits when done properly, and these tools will make the process much more organized so that you can delay or even prevent using a physical staff for years into the future. Speaking of future, outsourcing is truly a modern concept that is becoming more and more popular as small businesses turn to freelancers online for many of their day-to-day tasks and support. In the same manner, numerous skilled professionals are turning to freelance careers in work-for-hire so that they can outsource to online companies based on their specific skills and qualifications.

With the multitude of skilled professionals available for outsourcing, this is the perfect resource to enhance the success and productivity of your small online business!

Nitin has been a full time blogger for over three years. These days he is busy with his outsourcing provider venture – Offshore Ally, a full time virtual assistant company. His team of seo assistants are trained on most blogging and internet marketing related jobs, so if you are looking for any help then its the right place to get you started. You can contact him on his website or catch up with him on his twitter profile – http://twitter.com/offshoreally.

By admin in Featured

Have you ever come across the saying “analysis – paralysis?” This is a superb phrase that ideally describes the processes and difficulties faced by a large number of entrepreneurs in this day and age. Just about anyone can easily end up spending most of their time thinking to themselves “what if”, and going over – repeatedly, the very reasoning behind their endeavours, or they can press on ahead. You can ask yourself whether your marketing campaign will yield real results, or you can go for it and see what happens. Most of the time, the aspiring entrepreneur falls short and will turn away from his or her targets due specifically to this kind of analysis.

If you are establishing an online business, you know that you need to use the power of Internet marketing to help you become established, to make people aware of your existence and to draw them to your sales funnel. One of the best ways to do this is to use the power of article marketing. In spite of the fact that this has been proven time and again to be one of the most powerful ways of marketing your online business – and a crucial factor in website development as well, many people still second and third guess its effectiveness.

It is quite common for newcomers to the arena to be exposed to the power of article marketing and to fully understand and comprehend its concept, yet the character sitting on their shoulder whispers some words of doubt. It is not good enough to accept that article marketing has been around for a considerable period of time and has stood the test of that time, but rather the question arises once again whether it is “for you.”

Understand that time does not stand still and neither do your competitors. One of the most important traits that you can possess as an entrepreneur is the efficient use of time. Time management dictates that once you have decided upon a course of action, you put it in place and continue to move forward toward the goal. Over analysis just wastes time. Once you’ve decided, after due diligence and research that you have a course of action, you must be willing to act on this.

There are a lot of people out there who see article marketing as a process which just takes too much time. The actual fact is that this is one of the wonderful aspects of this particular approach. The creation of educational and informative content and the distribution to others can scarcely be a better way of informing people about your authority, expertise and ability to meet their needs. By the time prospects arrive at your website, they may be partly qualified as they will have read through the information that you are putting out and have decided that they need to move towards the next step.

As article marketing is by definition a process that takes time, it is common for people to start such a campaign and then to stop it. If you are creating good content and distributing it accordingly, the odds are that your article marketing campaign will work, but it will take your confidence and ability to continue with the process until you see results.

Many entrepreneurs do not feel confident enough to create the content themselves and this is where a ghostwriter can come in very handy indeed. Consider hiring a virtual assistant to help you create the content according to your requirements, and to help you distribute it to the best authority sites on the Internet. A dedicated approach here and a commitment to success will undoubtedly bring real results.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an Experienced Executive Virtual Assistant who collaborates with businesses and individuals with the sole aim of accomplishing their professional goals. Want to learn more about these comprehensive online business building success strategies? Contact VMF Today at=> http://www.virtualmissfriday.com

By admin in Featured

Twitter has, on several occasions, staggered a little bit under the weight of its explosive growth – and occasionally, when a major news break happens, “tweeters” from around the world spring forward and crash their servers. It’s difficult to think of anything that has had such an amazing growth curve as this upstart social networking platform. Twitter didn’t exist at the beginning of 2006, yet today it’s ranked as the 25th most important website in the world by a number of visitors, and it has many millions of active followers.

Twitter does break the usual trends somewhat, insofar as anything to do with social networking has an established “trend” of course. Twitter allows you to post messages, either through a web portal or on your mobile phone, letting everyone know what you think, where you are or what you’re doing. Your message is restricted to 140 characters or less, so it’s always succinct. You have the option of selecting who you want to talk to, and who you want to hear from – known as “followers” or “following” in the world of Twitter.

At this particularly early stage of its ongoing development, Twitter doesn’t really seem to have any business model as such. You can quickly sign up and start “tweeting” your message at no cost whatsoever. Marketers take a long hard look at the viral capabilities provided by this service and they begin to salivate. Opportunities await those who seek to harness its power.

Twitter is ideal for communicating news or interacting with your peers. You can send a message directly from your mobile phone using one of the currently available applications, without even having to visit a computer. It’s difficult to estimate the actual number of users because of the fluid nature of the platform, but many experts do caution that the number of avid users, or those who actively follow and get followed, represents a very small proportion of the total user base.

While the number of engaged users may be only a few percentage points of the total user base, the Twitter platform can still be viewed as having good marketing potential. Internet marketers need to approach the task of soliciting followers carefully. Whatever your niche, the first thing that you need to do is to seek out other experts who are regular “tweeters”. You can do this by using a simple search within the program. Once you find these experts, take a constructive look at their list of followers, as your job is to try and add friends or followers to your Twitter feed in a concerted and sensible way.

As it appears that the vast majority of members do not actively keep up with Twitter, it follows that there is no point in adding followers without trying to qualify them. If you can see that the potential follower has an active list of people who he or she is following and, in turn, is being followed by, then they are potential targets for you.

Work toward building a list of followers by initially just following the individuals who you think might have a particular interest in your specific products or services. If you’ve taken the time to qualify them and you discover that they follow you in return, then you’re well on your way.

While you can get away with just including your information in the profile supplied by Twitter, most internet marketing experts recommend that you also design some sort of banner or customised template rather than using a generic wallpaper background. This should include your branding, logo and message and it’s something that all serious marketers maintain.

As is the case with any form of Internet marketing, make sure that you do not spam and that your messages are always relevant, informative and/or entertaining. There is a time and a place for you to include your marketing message, and you must always do this in a subtle way. Happy Tweeting!

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an accomplished Executive Virtual Assistant Service which helps companies of all sizes reach their commercial targets. Want to get more information about online business building success strategies that really work? Then why not Contact VMF Today at=> http://www.virtualmissfriday.com

By admin in Featured

Internet marketing has been revolutionized over a few short years by a phenomenon known as social networking. You probably wouldn’t have needed a crystal ball to imagine that the Internet would develop its social theme as more and more people realised the reach of the web, and became increasingly connected through the use of smart phones and other new gadgets.

Many people consider MySpace to have initiated this trend, but in recent times the buzz has all been around Facebook, and to many people MySpace has become “very 2005.” Facebook is now the number one social media site. Its strength seems to revolve around its platform, and its clean and tidy appearance; many people consider it to be more upscale than MySpace, for example.

Facebook was devised by Mark Zuckerburg, Justin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, who were student roommates at Harvard University. The site was initially intended for use by college students, but it quickly expanded nationwide through the school system, and eventually to everyone else. Zuckerberg’s original “Facemash” has now grown to over 200 million users. Some people put its current value at $5 billion.

Facebook is, simply, networking at its finest. Not only can you use the platform to interact with family and friends, but from a commercial point of view, it’s great for marketing as well.

One of the first things that you should do as a business marketer is to construct a profile. This needs a great deal of careful consideration, as your profile is a critical factor in your potential success. Incorporate a branding strategy, but make sure that you understand what environment you’re working in. Within social networking of any kind, commercial branding and marketing has to maintain a far more subtle approach, and it shouldn’t ever be “in your face”.

Facebook allows you to expand your network of friends infinitely. Start off by building a network of your actual friends, and then move on to establish contacts with “friends of friends”. You will discover that a concentrated effort will enable you to rapidly increase the number of your contacts. Make a point of never spamming anyone, and always keep your enthusiasm under control. Build relationships – not just numbers.

Within Facebook you will find that there are many, many online groups and there will certainly be groups which are associated with what you do. Every kind of professional service provider has at least one group of some sort, and ideally, you should belong to all the groups which are within your area of expertise. You can make all kinds of contacts in this manner.

If you cannot find a Facebook group that fits your vision, you can always create your own. You’ll need to work really hard to get new members, and to help you along your way, you should regularly publish unique content articles and give away high quality information, literally for free, to generate some fast moving buzz. You can create a Facebook “fan” page, especially if you find that your original page has reached its limit for membership, which is currently 2000. The fan page creates an additional subtle marketing opportunity, and it’s all a part of the process of getting people into your sales funnel and ultimately to your checkout.

If you have a blog and you regularly update this with great information, tips, tricks, solutions, assistance and generally good stuff – then you should syndicate it so that your posts appear on your Facebook profile page. The goal is to get as much exposure as you can, which in turn of course converts to readers, visitors and potential sales.

If you’re holding any events or creating a milestone of any kind within your business, you should create an event page within Facebook. By sending an open invitation, you solicit people to go to your events page and find out what’s going on, and they can then advise their friends, creating even further exposure.

Facebook should be an integral part of your business strategy, but you must also have your “fun” face on when you’re there. Warning – Facebook is addictive (not to me of course – but to many), so don’t let it take over your marketing programs altogether!

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an accomplished Executive Virtual Assistant Service which helps companies of all sizes reach their commercial targets. Want to get more information about online business building success strategies that really work? Then why not Contact VMF Today at=> http://www.virtualmissfriday.com

By admin in Featured

When someone has a great idea for a business, they often fall over themselves in excitement and anticipation. They can’t wait to get to market, unfold their vision and ride the high waves to financial freedom. Whilst enthusiasm and vision are important, you need to sit down alone for a little while and work out some of the basics. Before you even start telling anybody about your idea or what you may have to sell or promote, you must first figure out your branding.

When you create a brand, you set yourself apart from the competition. This differentiation allows you to create a potential bond between yourself and your target audience, convert your prospects into clients and then retain them. Branding has many elements to it, and you must ensure that you pay attention to each one.

Before you start, you’ll need to work out what your overall message is. People out there will perceive you and your organization according to your message; first impressions are crucial and you have to make a great one.

One of the initial things to do when you’re setting up a brand is to choose a company name. Many people incorporate the company name with their website domain name and make them one and the same. Note, that while your legal corporate name may be one thing, your “doing business as” name, whatever it may be, should receive your full branding attention, and be fully reflective of your business goals.

If you’re very clever with your trading name, you can much more easily go on to achieve great heights. You’ll realise you’ve attained the summit of success when your corporate name also becomes a well-known verb, like “Hoover”, “Google”, or “Xerox”.

Along with the selection of your company name, you must make sure that your domain name is perfectly relevant. Realistically, no enterprise can survive without a website nowadays, and your website will probably be the first point of contact when it comes to client marketing. Creativity is the key, but you must make sure that – technically speaking, your domain name will make sense in the world of search engine optimization and have a high level of viewability. Your domain name should ideally incorporate your primary keyword or keywords, which relate exactly to whatever you are promoting or selling. So, in an ideal world, the keywords relating to your “hot potato” new marketing idea should appear prominently within your domain name and within your company name.

Keyword selection is quite a complex subject which we have already touched on in (R – Right Keywords) but, as we have seen, is important within your branding set up. Keywords should appear within your mission statement and in all marketing materials. It’s vital that they accurately illustrate what your potential client is seeking from you.

Visual image is everything. Once you have a great company name, domain name and the keywords selected, you can move on to create visuals. Your logo should essentially sum up what you’re trying to achieve. The logo doesn’t necessarily have to incorporate your company name or your domain name or your keywords, but it should be a great visual representation of all of these and project the very reason for your company’s existence. The logo is one of the first things that a potential client will see, so take as much time as you need in this area, as it’s likely to leave the biggest impression.

Once you’ve established your logo, you should create all your marketing materials according to a particular style and presentation. Maintain this throughout your organisation and don’t dilute your message by going off point.

Your website is your window to the world. A correctly composed website speaks volumes about your business. Don’t forget that in business it’s all about perception, and if you don’t maintain a storefront of any kind in the real world, people will judge your business by looking at your website. You should always maintain a high degree of professionalism and clearly display this throughout your site. It doesn’t matter if you’re a one-man band; you should still give people the impression that you’re a highly successful, well-organized and thoroughly established enterprise.

Pay careful attention to branding and maintain your position throughout your business cycle.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an accomplished Executive Virtual Assistant Service which helps companies of all sizes reach their commercial targets. Want to get more information about online business building success strategies that really work? Contact VMF Today!

By admin in Featured

Using Back Links to Improve Your Website SEO Put simply, back links are inward-bound links to a particular internet site or page. What this means is that the other site has a hyperlink “pointing” directly to your website. Regarding search engine optimisation, you want as many back links pointing to your site as you possibly can, even more so if the site is directly related to your area of interest.

As the number one goal of a website is to achieve traffic, i.e. people actually looking at the site, it follows that you must make the website visible. Generally speaking, to make your website visible, people must be able to find it when they search for keywords directly related to your product, niche, service or whatever else your website represents. Individuals tend to be seeking such information via the big search engines, whose operators have rather complicated algorithms to help them decide whether a certain website is applicable to the searcher’s request, or not.

Although they will not divulge exactly how they go about composing these algorithms, the search engine operators do assure us that relevancy, as viewed by others, is most important. If they see that you have a back link or a number of back links from other websites that have some relevancy to yours, this is a plus. In addition, if the site linking to you has a fairly high “page rank”, this helps as well. Page rank is Google’s proprietary method of allocating a number (zero being lowest and moving up to ten) indicating how important a site is within its particular niche of operations.

There are a number of ways to achieve back links for your site:

ARTICLE MARKETING

As Bill Gates once said, “content is king”. Article marketing is known as one of the most solid Internet marketing methods. By writing highly relevant and informative articles and submitting them to high profile article directories you do several things, not the least important of which is to help establish you or your site as an expert in your niche. Within your article, published in the article directory, is a resource box which contains your details – who you are and what you do, and a link back to your site, the all important Back Link.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

There are many hundreds of social bookmarking sites, and their primary motive is basically to provide a way of informing people about the existence of content related to any niche or interest in a very manageable format. You can sign up and initiate a process of notifying social bookmarking sites about fresh content, including back links in many cases. You should note at this stage that some webmasters apply a “no follow” tag which can void the effect of a back link, as the tag instructs the search engine spider not to give you points, or what’s called “link love”.

SOCIAL MEDIA – TWITTER

Whilst Twitter and other similar sites are becoming increasingly more powerful in marketing terms, you should know that to include links within your “tweets” or in your URL profile box is not a powerful back linking strategy, as these are all allocated the dreaded no follow tag. However, you may find that it is possible to link within a bio box and get some link love this way. Also, if you syndicate, your Twitter feeds are updated via the RSS aggregators, earning you back links.

BLOG COMMENTING

First of all, you will have to locate blogs or forums that are relevant to your area of expertise. This is fairly simple to accomplish as a straightforward and pertinent search will locate hosts. Once you find these blogs you can sign up and create a profile. Often you will be allowed to create what is called a “signature”, and within that signature you incorporate your links. Note, you should check to see if there are any no follow tags, as these will appear occasionally.

Enter into the spirit of the place by interacting with other members and making entries and posting comments that are relevant, useful and educational. As well as a back link being displayed each time you post a comment, you’ll also create a potentially profitable bond with other members – and this has the potential to lead to all kinds of new possiblities.

Back link building remains one of the most important SEO strategies to adopt.

Michelle Dale is CEO of Virtual Miss Friday, an adept and highly-proficient Virtual Assistant Service which works closely with enterprising people who really want to succeed in their chosen field. If you’d like to learn more about online business building success strategies that are tailored to your needs, Contact VMF Today at=> http://www.virtualmissfriday.com

By admin in Featured

Posting and adding comments on blogs and forums really needs to be a fundamental part of your Internet marketing approach. Yet again, we can see the influence of networking at work in this field, and similar key points apply – be consistent, be interesting and always avoid the “hard sell”.

Whatever niche you’re in, there are forums galore out there. Here you can meet people who are actively and intently interested in your subject, and have taken the time to become a member of the particular forum because they value the information. Where could you find an audience with better potential? While there are numerous forums for each particular field, there are even more independent blogs, created by people who are also interested in your speciality. You may think of these individuals as rivals in many instances, but that shouldn’t mean that you can’t engage with them for general marketing reasons.

One thing to always remember when commenting on blogs or forums is that you should consider the power of the content that you post as opposed to any potential benefit that you could receive from links. This is very important. Some people undertake a commenting strategy with the sole purpose of getting back links. In some cases this can be technically flawed anyway, but you had better make sure that the content posted next to your individual or corporate name is good!

Blog and forum commenting is highly recommended as part of an overall strategy. As is the case with blog production in general, or with social media network interaction, the material that you publish will be read and its composition judged. You don’t want to be posting irrelevant comments, or comments that are designed just to get your name out there. It’s largely pointless just writing “great post”!

Blog owners will usually look at comments with great interest, and forums are almost always moderated by motivated individuals. In every case, whatever you write will have an impact. If you have something contrary to say, make sure that it’s constructive. It’s not necessarily wrong to be negative, as long as it can be seen as a positive addition to the discussion in view. Being negative just for the sake of it, or to create some kind of viral controversy isn’t really a good overall marketing technique for you.

You should note that some blogs have installed a “no follow” link policy, which means that if you have a link associated to your post, either in the signature or otherwise, the search engines are being told not to score the link. Most experts in this area recommend that you give more attention to the content of your posts and make sure that they are informative and contributory, rather than worrying about a potential back link to your site.

Start a strategy of posting on active blogs and prominent forums connected with your niche. Use your competitor’s sites in a creative way to build your credibility as well. Remember, as is the case with many Internet marketing strategies, a subtle yet consistent approach is key.

Michelle Dale is Chief Executive of Virtual Miss Friday, an adept and highly-proficient Virtual Assistant Service which works closely with enterprising people who really want to succeed in their chosen field. If you’d like to learn more about online business building success strategies that are tailored to your needs, check out the Campaign for FREE Virtual Assistance right away!

Subscribe to SiteProNews Articles

Receive New Articles As They are Posted


Webmaster Headlines

Amazon Axes Cloud Storage Prices

Microsoft, 24/7 Want To Better Serve Your Customers

Trendnet security cam flaw exposes video feeds on net

Apple supplier employee describes working conditions

Google Chrome Is Now Available For Android (And It's Fantastic)

SEO and Social: It Isn't One or the Other

How to Create Marketing Offers That Don't Fall Flat

9 Free Tools For Link Discovery & Content Creation

7 Must Have Search Related Chrome Extensions for 2012

8 Quick Tips for Writing Bullet Points People Actually Want to Read

Recent SiteProNews Articles

RecentSiteProNews Articles

7 Things NOT to Waste Your Time On When Doing SEO – A SEO-News Exclusive Article

How To Write An SEO-Friendly Article

Guru Kool-Aid: Are You Drinking It? – A SPN Exclusive Article

How to Generate Leads With Linkedin

Technology Solutions: Cloud Computing

9 Common Title Tag Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

SiteProNews Blog News

Google Celebrates Art Clokey’s Birthday
Not many people will recognize the name Art Clokey. But a lot more people will recognize the green c...
more >

Reader Rescue : Should My Meta Description Tags Just Duplicate My Title Tags?
Hi Everyone From early days learning SEO, I went ahead and did all my meta descriptions with a bi...
more >

Death of Steve Jobs Fails to Break Twitter Record
We all heard the sad news yesterday that Steve Jobs, founder and visionary at Apple, had died at...
more >

Recommended Links


   Get Facebook Fans

   Submit Express - SEO Services

Wordpress 3.3.1