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So, you are the marketing manager of your firm, and you’ve finally decided to pull the trigger and hire the search engine optimization company that you’ve been talking to for months.  The budget has been cleared, the SEO firm is ready to start, and it should be just a matter of time before you start seeing a huge uptick in business.  Right?

Not so fast.

An experienced search engine optimization company will tell you that an ill-planned campaign can be a non-starter from day one.  This usually happens when there is no clear understanding of what will be required of the client to make the project run smoothly.

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Tags: search engine optimization, seo, Website Promotion

Classified ads can be very effective in online marketing. Free classified ads fit into every budget. It all comes down to how much time you are willing to spend creating, posting, updating and deleting ads. Depending on your particular product or service, it can be time-consuming to respond to interested parties, deliver goods or services and maintain a high level of customer service.

Selling through free classified ads can help you promote your business. Include your company’s name, product information and a website link in your ads to gain more attention. Include pictures whenever possible to give customers a better idea of what they can expect if they make a purchase from you.

The Benefits of Promoting on Classified Ad Sites

Aside from saving you money in advertising costs, placing ads on free classified sites has many other benefits. These include:

• Targeted traffic directed to your website.
• Instant posting.
• Few rules regarding what can be posted.
• The opportunity to test your ad copy at no cost before placing ads on websites that draw more traffic but charge a fee.
• The ability to track your visitors and gauge how successful each ad is.
• The ability to build your opt-in list and follow up with potential customers.

Tips for Promoting Your Business Using Free Classified Ads

Promoting your business with free classified ads is relatively easy. Still, there are some steps that can make your campaign more successful. Keep these tips in mind:

• Familiarize yourself with the terms of the classified ad site before posting. This will help you avoid having your ads deleted.
• Place ads frequently for better results. Update weekly to keep your posts at the top so you get more views.
• Remain professional, both in your classified ads and in dealings with potential customers.
• Make sure your ad shines and stands out from the crowd without being too loud or obnoxious.
• Include keywords to help targeted customers find your ads.

Classified Ads and Niche Marketing

One particularly effective way to get more targeted traffic from your free classified ads is to choose sites that are very specific in nature. For example, if you own a company that sells creative and unique baskets, then you can place your ad on a site for gifts. If you own a used car dealership, however, the gift site is not going to work for you. You can advertise in the automobile section of a general site, but you can also search for classified ad sites that are specifically geared toward car enthusiasts. The key is that visitors to these sites will already be interested in what you have to offer.

Traditional Advertising Versus Online Marketing

The advertising world has changed a lot over the last decade. Traditional print ads are not as effective as they once were. They also can be costly. Online marketing is the most effective way to promote a business, whether it is an online business or actually has a storefront. Free classified ads should certainly be included in your marketing strategy. Carefully track your website traffic to gauge how effective each ad is, and then make adjustments as needed. Online marketing is here to stay. Avoiding this valuable tool is like shutting the door on potential customers.

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This article was written by Jay Gaulard on behalf of FigLeeg Classifieds, a popular free classifieds website.

Tags: classified ads, Website Promotion

Every website owner strives to build a steady flow of traffic to their website and there are many various methods available, some more successful than others. But there are some that will not result in your quest for targeted website traffic. Picking a proven strategy will make a difference and you will avoid costly mistakes in time and money.

Listed below are 4 website strategies that you should always avoid is you want to build a steady flow of targeted traffic that could subscribe not just to your list but emerge as a paying customer.

1. Buying Traffic. This is where a website owner pays for links to their website. The trouble is these links could be placed on another website that does not compliment the product or service offered. The end result will be visitors to your website (it will generate some traffic) but the quality of that traffic will be poor. Poor quality website traffic is unlikely to subscribe to your list or buy your product or service. Spending more on links may just be wasting money as the concept is rather flawed in the first place.

2. Traffic Exchanges. These are websites that ask you to sign up and start surfing where you agree to look at other websites and get rewarded for doing so in the form of visits to your own website. Just remember, it will take you an enormous amount of time looking at other websites to build you reward points. This encourages surfing just for the sake of building points. Do you want visitors to your website coming for the sole reason to build their points? This is not the quality traffic that you are looking for. Some traffic exchanges cost money to buy into a higher membership level promising better quality traffic. You are unlikely to see an acceptable return on your investment using this method.

3. Banner Ads. You will have probably come across websites with flashing ads and graphics and you have probably now realised that they are now fewer in number. They have probably had their day. You placed banners or graphics that were clickable on a high traffic website and they took the viewer back to your website. Too often the banners or graphics were not related to the product and were used too often on the same website. It not just confused the viewer but could annoy them as well.

4. Safe Lists. These are lists that you sign up to and agree to receive emails from other website owners. In effect it cut out spam. You have to pay for the service and in return are promised that you will receive a torrent of targeted traffic to your website. Often, the torrent turns out to be a trickle and those that do pay your website a visit are mostly likely not who you are trying to target. This can be costly for you and should be avoided.

For every one poor website traffic strategy there are lots of genuine ones that are proven to work, don’t cost you anything and are easy to implement. Website traffic strategies andsearch engine optimisation go together as the higher up the search engines your website is the more traffic it is likely to generate. If website owners are paying big money to use Google’s Adsense, then this proves that a high search engine placing will bring traffic to your website. But there are other methods available that are free to gain high search engine placings that anyone can use.

By using the proven methods for website traffic generation a website owner will always have a better chance of targeted website traffic flowing to their website rather than use these outlined methods that will cost you time and money but result in very little if any traffic, and mostly unlikely any targeted website traffic that a website based business requires to thrive.

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Michael Tasker started an online information product business last year with the aim of making some extra money. His first ebook has just been published I’m No.1 In Google! where every detail is explained in easy non tech language how his website made it to no.1 in the search engines. Just follow these steps for your website’s traffic generating success. http://www.goodbyemoneyworries.com/google

Tags: seo, Website Promotion

Anyone who has been marketing online knows that business is the traffic of a site. More visitors equal more sales. There are some ways that you can tweak your sites with to improve sales without the need to get more visitors.

The first is to put in your personal touch in your sales message. Nobody wants to be sold to by a total stranger, but many people will buy what friends recommend to them. If you can convince your audience that you are a personal friend who has their best interest at heart, they will be convinced to buy your products. Remember to speak to an individual in your sales letter.

Many people entice their prospects with the benefits of their product, sell to them with stories of how it has solved many problems, even offered killer bonuses but forget to ask for the sale. Give a clear instruction on how to buy your product (e.g. “click the button to buy now!”).

Remember to not just work your business, but grow your business too!

Use visual representations for the problems and solutions that your product offers. Not everyone will read your text copy from the head to the tail, but most people will pay attention to images on your website.

Understanding the type of people who visit your site is a very important.What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have?Design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience.It doesn’t matter if you have the greatest product in the world — if your website is poorly done you won’t sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design. Your website is your online business; it is the virtual representation of your company.

A very major consideration we have to make for users is the loading time of your website. There is nothing worse than a website that will not load or takes forever-your customer will click away so fast you will never see them again.Ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds.

Offer multiple payment options. Some people feel comfortable paying via Paypal, some may only want to pay with their credit card and others might want to send a check. The more options you offer, the better your chances of completing the sale.

Test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links!Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site.A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site.

Your website is where your business resides. It’s the headquarter of your company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

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Willard Fassett - If you are looking for an expensive sleep-aid, buy their program. If you want to start making money TODAY, get mine.http://www.cash4uguide.com

Tags: Website Promotion, website sales

We’ve all tried different ways to get that holy grail of websites - traffic eager to buy! Schemes come and go and leave behind them a trail of disappointed people. It’s time for some group therapy as we all admit to past mistakes and the 20 really DUMB ways of promote a website. How any have you fallen for?

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Tags: Website Promotion

That’s what I used to ask myself as numerous acquaintances kept tagging me to be part of their realm of contacts in FaceBook.com or LinkedIn.com. It seemed a nuisance until I sat down with an old contact, Don Tinney from EOS Worldside (EOS=Entrepreneurial Operating Systems). Don is an EOS Implementer whose job is quite simple. He says simply, “We make millionaires out of owners of small to medium size companies”. So maybe he has something to say I should know.I was in both LinkedIn and FaceBook and didn’t see the significance. My business was humming along just fine and didn’t need the distraction. Don forced my mind open a bit and so I took it upon myself to find out if there was some gold to mine there that I had missed. Like hunting for Morel mushrooms, it went from “none to be found” to being surrounded with all kinds of uses. Here is my quick rundown of uses in the hopes all our business partners can begin to take advantage of these tools.

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Tags: facebook, linkedin, Website Promotion

Roughly a year ago, local search engine optimization was all the rage - the new frontier in search engine marketing.  For a while, it seemed that everyone was interested in the local search angle - even multi-national companies.  However, for many companies selling products or services to the entire United States, or even globally, it seemed like a non-starter. Companies that counted on people looking for certain products or services that did not require close proximity to the company’s location were unaffected. As far as local search engine optimization goes, things have changed a bit since then - at least for some.

Some time ago, Google introduced a “geographic box” at the top of its search results.  This is tied in to its mapping feature, and, when it was first introduced, the engine would display three results at the top of its search results whenever somebody entered a geographic modifier into the search box (”Atlanta widgets,” for example).  The Google algorithm then has the intelligence to determine whether the query calls for results that are primarily local in scope.

Since that initial trial, Google has obviously found that its users appreciate the feature.  The engine now displays ten local search results at the top of the listings for certain queries, provided that they have a geographic modifier attached.  For example, if you type in “Atlanta gyms” in Google, you will see ten results alongside a map that shows the location of ten gyms in Atlanta.

It should be noted that you will not see local search results for all queries that contain a local modifier.  In certain instances, it almost seems as if Google somehow “knows” when a geographic modifier really means that you only offer services in a particular area.  Yeah, those guys are pretty good.

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Tags: local search, local search engine optimization, Website Promotion

Those who have been in the industry since the late 90’s have seen huge changes in SEO. The industry has really matured. But in the grand scheme of things, if you were to plot SEO on a product life cycle chart you would see that the industry is still in its’ infancy.

Except that we’re poised for some serious growth.

SEO - Introduction Stage - Starting about 1998
Companies who were around in the introduction stage often had to build product awareness and develop a market for SEO.

In the early ‘2000’s, many of our clients had just build their first websites. This was a significant investment for them and they thought that now that they have a website, the online sales would just flow in. Many didn’t realize that they had just invested serious coin into an over-priced business card. Because nobody could find them.

At this point, there was little consistency in the product. And as the algorithm got more complex, the SEO offering varied more. Some companies were offering to “submit to hundreds of search engines” (some still are) whilst others were offering usability, analytics and site architectural input in addition to on-page and off-page SEO.

SEO - Early Growth Stage - we’re still just at the beginning of it.
In the early growth stage, smart SEO companies are beginning to think about building their brand and to increase market share.

Demand is increasing as more customers understand the benefits of “getting found”. There is some competition at this stage but because the market is broadening so much, competition is limited and there is still a huge amount of camaraderie within the industry.

10 years into it, it’s easy to assume that our industry is more mature than it actually is.

We’ve only just begun.

Customer Implication
Demand has already started to increase but it is going to skyrocket. And it’s going to come from all types of business from very small customers to Enterprise type of businesses.

Up until recently, the neighborhood dry cleaner didn’t care if someone across the country found their website because they deal within a 5 km radius got very little benefit from optimizing their website. Now as search gets much better at localization, those local business will become much more serious about the opportunities online

It is also likely that we’ll see a lot of growth from Enterprise clients. These clients previously resisted SEO due to the complexity of working within legacy back-end systems. As technology increases and back-end systems become less expensive for more capability, we’re going to see companies replace their antiquated CMS’s with SEO friendly options.

Another change that this stage of the product life cycle will bring is in our relationship with the client. As SEO becomes a bigger part of the mainstream marketing mix, our customers will become more and more knowledgeable about SEO (we’re already starting to see this).

We’ll move from having a sales / consultative role to being a thought partner. Our clients will have a good understanding of what needs to be done but they’ll outsource it to us because we’re more efficient at implementing.

Competition Implication
With high growth in revenues, low barriers to entry, and no certification required, the SEO industry is prime for attracting any and all new entrants.

There have always been new competitors. But the face of our competition is going to change greatly. Up until now competition has focused primarily on small start ups and web design firms who decide to add a search component. Some stick around but many are wiped out with the next major shift in the algorithm.

This phase of the SEO life cycle is going to attract better capitalized, stronger competition from many sectors. These new entrants are attracted to SEO by the potential for profits not by the fit with their offering.

We are already starting to see traditional media firms seek to protect their eroding revenues by grabbing a slice of the online pie. But WalMart has shown us that future competition could be anyone. And it will be.

No all new entrants are attracted by dollar signs. There are also companies that are feeling increased pressure to offer a more well rounded package. As the integration of offline and online marketing services increases, customers are putting more pressure on agencies to handle the full scope of their marketing spend including the online component.

Although we’re already starting to see increased competition, many existing SEO companies aren’t feeling the pinch yet because demand is also increasing.

One implication of increased demand coupled with new entrants to the market is the impact on supply. We’re starting to experience a shortage of experienced SEO talent

SEO talent is a scarce resources. And this scared resource is not yet being renewed at a fast enough pace. Whilst some colleges are starting to offer digital media / internet marketing diploma, these grads know very little about what it takes to optimize a website.

Moreover, what they do know is limited to theory. It’s one thing to know that links are important to ranking. Its an entirely different thing to know how to effectively build links.

So what?

Who cares where we are in the product life cycle?

Although we’ve already experienced a lot of growth, this growth is nothing compared to what we’re about to experience.

In this next stage of the SEO life cycle, we’re going to see shifts in our clients, competition and product offering. Knowing that this is coming, will allow you to prepare.

If we know that face of our competition is going to change from other small to mid sized SEO’s to large Agencies and Enterprise size companies in totally unrelated industries then we can prepare for this by determining how we’re going to differentiate ourselves from the new entrants.

And if we know that there is going to be increased pressure on skilled resources then we should be developing in house training programs now.

The future is now. And it’s only just begun.

Tags: search engines, Website Promotion

Sometimes the best SEO Strategy is to do nothing at all (after you have set the stage for website authority to augment future growth). With so many facets of search engine optimization, battles in the SERPs (search engine result pages) are won every day across millions of competing phrases by careful adherence to relevance, popularity, consistency and engagement.

What may not be as clear are the contributing factors that elevate one website consistently higher than any other in the category. My hypothesis is simple (1) the content must be impeccable and (2) the sources that reference the site must have trust. The graduation from just another site into industry expert is a crowning achievement.

Instead of building links, if more webmasters focused on who links to you, what anchor text they are using and where the link is pointed (hopefully at the most appropriate page), then acquiring top 10 rankings would not be out of the ordinary. Search engine algorithms are mathematical guardians of the index. Their job is to ensure order and relevance and function transparently behind the scenes of every search.

The first objective is based on the worthiness of your content (creating the ranking criteria that can get you in the top 1000 searches). From there it is a series of on-page and off-page combinations that toggle relevance and affect where you content lands in the search engine result pages. This metric is often easily influenced (particularly when endorsed from authority sources). So, just because you rank in the top 70 for example, does not mean that ranking is etched in stone.

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Tags: seo strategy, Website Promotion

I always like to write articles that talk about how to make money online and succeed.

After seeing so many people do things that can have a negative impact on their internet business, I have decided that I want to write something about this topic.

If this is the direction that you are in, then you will know what to do.

First step: Don’t allow people to subscribe to your email newsletter on your website

If you really want to make less sales every month from your online work at home business website, then don’t offer your visitors the chance to subscribe to your newsletter. Don’t try collect their name and email directly from your website. Don’t even think about doing this.

Even if you already have an auto responder system up and running, make sure to buy non double opt-in lists from someone else. Keep spamming other people who have never really opted into your personal newsletter. This means that they never gave you their personal permission to email them.

2nd step: Spend all your advertising funds in one place

Take your money that you have and spend it all in one place only. Put all your eggs in one basket. If this ad does not work out for you and you lost all your money, call it quits.

Instead of testing different ads and seeing which ones bring in the best results, do the opposite.

3rd step: You know it all, right?

If you really want to fail, don’t find a role model. When you have the chance to learn from someone who is a guru and wants to help you, don’t listen to them. Just try to do everything in your way and try to “reinvent the wheel” all by yourself.

4th step: Jump from one program to another

Get your internal juices flowing and get excited about a brand new online business. Pay the fee to get started. Work it a few days and when it doesn’t work out like you wanted it to work, quit it. Then start looking for the next great web based business. Join that too, work it a few days and when that program doesn’t work for you, quit that one too. Repeat the same cycle over and over again.

5th step: Don’t write down any goals

One of the best ways to fail online is to never write down any short term or long term goals. If you really want to fail online, don’t even think about writing your goals down.

6th step: Associate with negative people

Another good way to fail on the internet is to take advice from people who have tried to make money online before but failed. If they tell you that you can’t make money online, then listen to them. They know what they are talking about.

If your friends and family tell you that you won’t succeed, then follow their advice too.

Don’t ever listen to a successful online marketer who is trying to teach you the same methods that they have been using to make a nice full time income on the world wide web.

If you follow the steps above, you will reach your goal of online failure. If you really want to succeed with your own internet home based business, then just do the opposite. It is that simple.

Tal Fighel is the owner of The Work At Home Income Directory: http://www.work-at-home-income-directory.com/A-6-Steps-System-To-Online-Business-Failure.html . You can find more of Tal Fighel’s articles here: http://www.work-at-home-income-directory.com

Tags: Website Promotion