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Effective Search Engine Optimization

2009-03-08T07:38:00.000-07:00

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a collection of various techniques that help your site rank higher in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). It is a long process, which involves keyword selection, HTML source code (Hyperlinks, Meta tags, Alt tags...) configuration, content (all "visible" text of your pages) optimization and restructure of the whole web site.

Search engine optimization is very powerful weapon in internet marketing world. If used correctly, it can be the only marketing tool that you'll ever need. Many businesses have realized that and have employed search engine optimization firms to help their sites rank higher. Top placement in search engines can be very lucrative for any web site owner.

There are hundreds of millions of people all over the world searching for information everyday and this number is growing at exploding rate. As some studies say, 85% of people go to search engines and 80% of them look only at first 3 SERPs when they search for information.

Having this in mind, it's absolutely essential to have a web site at the top of SERPs by selected keywords and keyphrases. High search engine rankings will bring enormous amount of traffic and will boost your company's sales tremendously.

Keyword Research

The first step in proper search engine optimization process is researching keywords and keyphrases that describe your site. Doesn't matter if you already have one or just planning to have, keyword research is a must thing to do. Basically, it means choosing the words and phrases that describe the content of your site.

It is pointless to have a web site about "search engine ranking" and be found by keywords like "web design" or "website hosting". Visitors will click away, because they won't find what they're looking for. Before starting any optimization, define your keywords first. What people type in search engines to find your web site? What would you type in search engines to find your site?

After researching, you should optimize your pages for those selected keywords.

Search engine optimization is not only about gaining high rankings, but also about gaining targeted traffic. Try to attract people who are interested in particular information or services that can be found on your site. Then find the right keywords and optimize your pages properly.

On-Page Search Engine Optimization

After doing a keyword research, you should start creating or optimizing your existing site. On-page search engine optimization, as many call, is a process of optimizing html code, content, internal linking structure of your site. In other words, everything that is inside your web site.

On page search engine optimization includes:

Title Tag - It is one of the most important parts of a page. Page title is seen in bigger font in SERPs. It's crucial to put your most important keywords in title. You should put meaningful sentences there, not only a bunch of keywords. Keep in mind that if a visitor is not convinced of your title, he'll click on your competitor's link. So spend some time on creating good titles for your pages.
Meta Tags - Meta description and keyword tags should be different on all pages. Also, keep in mind that repeating the same Meta keyword tags could harm your rankings. It's called keyword stuffing and is treated as search engine spam.
Headings, Bold and Italic Text - As search engine optimizers claim, SE's give some weight on Heading Tags, bold, italic and underline text. So try to surround your important keywords with these tags.
Internal Linking - When you link from one page to another in your site, put your keywords in the anchor (Text that you see in a hyperlink) text.

Like Your Keywords. Keep in mind that those keywords should be found on a page where the hyperlink leads.

There are more factors determining site’s rankings, but those tips above should help you in your on-page search engine optimization process.

Off-Page Search Engine Optimization

This term describes everything that is outside your web site. That means all other factors used in search engine optimization process that determine your rankings. Very important off-page technique used right now is link popularity, which means all links from other domains pointing to your web pages.

It’s almost impossible to rank high for competitive keywords if you don’t have a decent amount of external links pointing to your site. All search engines have chosen to include link popularity factor in their algorithms when ranking sites. Links are the only way to reach top SERPs for competitive keywords.

Try to gain as much incoming links to your site as possible. It’s tough to gain only incoming links, so start link exchanges, though it’s very time consuming. But don’t try to get links from FFAs (Free for All pages) or link farms (pages containing many links to other unrelated web sites). Get useful links from related and quality web sites, which will benefit your users and search engines.

Remember that links are dominant factor when search engine spiders consider your rankings. On-page search engine optimization is important, but off-page is absolutely must for top positions. Without good inbound (links to your site) links, it’s very hard to get on the top of search engine results pages.

Unethical Search Engine Optimization Techniques

When you begin search engine optimization process, avoid unethical SEO techniques. They worked long time ago, but now are treated as search engine spam. If you use them, your site may be penalized or even dropped from search engine listings for a long time.

A couple of spammy SEO techniques are below:

Mirror Websites - These are sites with identical content but different URL's.
Doorway or Gateway Pages - Doorway pages usually contain little real value to the visitors and are optimized to rank highly within the search engines only.
Keyword Stuffing - Keyword stuffing means using the same keywords in Your META tags or elsewhere in the content over and over again.
Link Farms - These were mentioned earlier. A link farm is usually one page that consists of 50 to 100 or more links to websites that have nothing in common with the content of your site.

When a search engine catches you using illegal search engine optimization techniques, it blacklists your website and blocks your domain name or IP (Internet Protocol) address. You will have many problems while getting on board again. If you don’t want to be blacklisted by major search engines, try to avoid those techniques mentioned above.

Summing Up

Search engine optimization is a never ending game. Webmasters are trying to trick SEs and get higher positions. Search engines are trying to get rid of optimizers and provide the most accurate results for the searchers by complicating their ranking algorithms. If you want to win this game, you must learn as much as possible, test as much as you can and be up-to-date with the newest search engine optimization techniques all the time.

Ten Unique Search Engine Optimization Techniques

2009-03-08T07:35:00.000-07:00

In this article I discuss ten controversial search engine optimization techniques that should be used with caution, or even avoided altogether.

1. Duplicate Pages

In general, search engines ignore duplicate pages. In extreme cases, they may ban a site.

2. Invisible Text

Search engines consider the use of text that is the same color as the background color as spam. So stay clear of using invisible text.

3. Keywords In Comment Tags

Hardly any, if any, of the major search engines index comment tags, so don't waste time adding them for optimization purposes.

4. Keywords In Hidden Value Tags

Keywords in hidden value tags are considered spam by all of the major search engines, so don't waste time with this practice.

5. Keywords In Style Tags

Very few search engines index the content of

6. Link Farms And Link Exchange Programs

Search engines consider link farms and link exchange programs as spam, as they have only one purpose - to artificially inflate a site's link popularity, by exchanging links with other participants.

Do not confuse link farms and link exchange programs with reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking is the exchange of links with individual sites, and certainly an accepted technique for improving your site's link popularity.

7. Links Only Pages

I recommend adding text descriptions to link pages and site maps. Some search engines, such as AltaVista, have been known to kick out links only pages.

8. Meta Refresh Tags

In general, meta refresh tags set for under 30 seconds are considered as spam by search engines. As such, most search engine optimizers use JavaScript redirects.

Having said that, I recently read an article that said the Fast and Inktomi search engines recommend using meta refresh tags, instead of JavaScript redirects.

Are you confused? I certainly am!

So to be on the safe side, I suggest sticking with JavaScript redirects, until there is conclusive proof that search engines accept meta refresh tags.

9. Tiny Text

Many of the major search engines consider tiny text (i.e. font size 1) as spam. Some use of tiny text is fine. Search engines don't like web pages that use a lot of tiny text. The reason is because some webmasters have used it to fool search engines by "hiding" dozens of keywords in a web page.

10. Cloaking

Cloaking is the practice of serving search engine optimized pages to search engine spiders, while at the same time serving un-optimized pages to site visitors.

Cloaking is one of the most controversial strategies in search engine optimization. Major search engines publicly state that they consider all cloaking to be spam. However, many professional search engine optimizers have been using cloaking for years, with much success.

Until there is conclusive proof that search engines do indeed ban sites that use cloaking, I suggest you take care if you decide to use cloaking.

If you want more in-depth information on these and other search engine optimization strategies, read my Search Engine Optimization Guide.

Conclusion

There are many controversial search engine optimization techniques. There are people who despise the use of certain techniques, such as cloaking. But the fact of the matter is that there are no right or wrong ways to optimize a web page.

What might be considered as spam by one search engine may be accepted by another. What works today may be banned tomorrow.

The art and science of marketing is about testing to see what works and what doesn't. I recommend taking the same approach with search engine optimization. After all, it is just another form of marketing.

Top 13 Tips To Creating A Professional Looking Newsletter

2009-03-08T07:31:00.000-07:00

In this article I show you my top 13 tips on how to create professional looking newsletters.

1. Design Scannable Newsletters

According to recent study by usability expert, Jakob Nielsen, about 50 percent of readers skimmed or partly read the newsletters. Only 23 percent of readers read the newsletters all the way through. The remaining 27 percent were never opened.

So make the text easy to scan by:

using short paragraphs
using bullet points
including plenty of white spacing between topics
highlighting topics with uppercase or bold text in HTML newsletters

2. Insert Line Breaks

Improve the readability of your newsletter by formatting it with hard line breaks at 60/65/70 characters per line. You can use a text editor, such as TextPad, and set it to insert hard carriage returns at the end of each 65-character line.

3. Include Newsletter Title In The Subject Field

Include your newsletter title at the beginning of the subject field. This will help the reader differentiate your newsletter from junk emails. It will also allow them to filter your newsletter into a separate folder with the use of filters.

4. Make Your Subject Field Sell!

Advertise the most enticing story of each issue in the subject field. You literally have seconds to grab the readers attention, so make it count.

5. Include A Table Of Content

Include a table of contents at the top of the newsletter. This will allow readers to scan the topics to see if anything in the newsletter catches their interest.

6. Fix Long Links

Long hyperlinks may be broken when you format emails using hard line breaks at 60/65/70 characters per line.

To fix this problem, deselect word wrap after you have inserted the carriage returns. Then manually edit the links to ensure they are on one line. When the email is sent, a link may still wrap onto two lines. But now it will be clickable.

7. Avoid Spam Filters That Flag The "Unsubscribe" Word

Do not use the word "unsubscribe" in your removal notice. A number of spam filters flag emails containing that particular word as possible spam. The reason is many spammers now offer "unsubscribe" functions that don't actually do anything.

8. Avoid Spam Filters That Flag Chain Letters

Some spam filters are flagging emails that asks readers to forward the newsletter on as chain letters.

Avoid using the word "forward" and any of the following words in the same sentence, "all, anyone, every, friends, many, others, people." Instead of "forward," try using "pass," "share," or "send."

9. Reduce Remove Request Emails

There are two methods to reducing the number of remove email requests from your subscribers:

Include a removal notice at the top and bottom of the email.
Place the bottom removal request at the very bottom of the email, rather than a few paragraphs from the bottom.

10. Design User-Friendly HTML Newsletters

Most people use an 800x600 screen resolution, but the email preview pane is usually much smaller than the full screen. So format your HTML table widths at 500-600 pixels at the most. Better still, use a relative (percentage) width table, which will allow your newsletter to be resized when viewed in different sized windows.

11. Create AOL Friendly HTML Newsletters

AOL try to protect their users by eliminating potential security hazards. As such, AOL email clients do not support the following HTML objects:

ActiveX
Audio
External Style Sheets
Frames and IFrames
Java
Meta Refresh
Scripts: JavaScript, Perl, VBScript, etc.
Tooltips
Video

In addition, the following HTML tags are the only ones supported by AOL email clients:

Big: Big
Body: Body
Bold: B
Break: BR
Center: Center
Font: Font
Header: H1, H2, H3
Hyperlink: A
Italics: I
Paragraph: P
Small: Small
Strong: Strong
Subscript: Sub
Underline: U

12. Include AOL Clickable Links

AOL users can't click standard hyperlinks or email links. For links to work in AOL email clients, you must format them using HTML. This is why you sometimes see both standard and HTML formatted links.

13. Spell Check Your Writing

Last but not least, always spell check your newsletter. Text editors, such as TextPad, include a spell check function.

If yours doesn't, then copy and paste the text into Microsoft Word (assuming you have it). Make sure you have the "Check spelling as you type" option switched on.

To set this, select "Options" under the "Tools" in the top menu bar. Then select the "Spelling & Grammar" tab. Under "Spelling" check the "Check spelling as you type" check box and click "OK." Word will underline all of the words that contain spelling errors.

How To Get Free Links From Yahoo! Full Coverage

2009-03-08T07:29:00.000-07:00

In this article I show you a little known technique on how to submit your web site to the Yahoo! Full Coverage sections.

If you've got great content, use this little known tip to get a link from a popular section of Yahoo!.

Yahoo has "Full Coverage" pages on hundreds of news topics. Under those topics, they list useful sites. They're not the same as those listed in the Yahoo! Directory.

Yahoo! will consider suggestions for original content news and op-ed (opinion/editorial) articles, and for related web sites of a non-commercial nature. Do not submit syndicated or wire service content.

You may submit content to the following areas:

Full Coverage on Yahoo.com
Full Coverage on Yahoo! Asia
Yahoo! Movies Full Coverage
Full Coverage on Yahoo! Canada
Yahooligans Full Coverage

To submit your site for review, click on the "Submit links or send feedback to Full Coverage" link at the bottom of a page in the Full Coverage section, and you will end up on the "How do I submit a link to Full Coverage?" page.

If your content is deemed worthy by a Yahoo! editor, they might just link to it. In addition, Full Coverage editors may also post links to specific articles on your web site.

Inclusion into Yahoo!'s Full Coverage section will almost definitely increase your traffic, boost your credibility, and search engine link popularity of your site.

But be warned. You MUST be submitting great content. Inclusion into the Yahoo! Full Coverage section is pretty much reserved for the very best content.

It is for this reason that few submissions are ever successful. But it's always worth a try, right? Good luck!

Three Ways To Get Listed In Google

2009-03-08T07:23:00.000-07:00

In this article I show you three ways to get listed in Google, including one method that is virtually guaranteed to work.

I'm constantly surprised by what I find when dealing with search engine optimization clients.

One of those "surprises" is coming across sites that aren't listed by Google, even though they have been live for many months.

For most Web sites, Google refers more traffic than any other search engine. So it's imperative that your site is indexed in Google.

As of September 09, 2003, Google claims to index Searching 3,307,998,701 web pages. Yet somehow sites still fail to make it into the Google index!

There are three simple methods to getting listed in Google, but only one of these is guaranteed... well almost. ;o)

1. Submit Direct To Google

The first method is to submit your web site via Google's free submit your site form. Just submit your home page and Google's crawler, Googlebot, will crawl the rest.

However, Google does not add all submitted URLs to their index, and there is no guarantee as to when, or if, your site will be indexed.

2. Get Linked From A Site That Google Crawls

The second method is to get a site that Google already crawls to link to your site. So when Google recrawls the web site, it will find the link to your site and crawl and index it as well.

This is Google's preferred method of finding sites to index.

To get another site to link to yours, simply look for a site that links to your competitors and ask them to link to yours. You may have to offer a link back to their site in exchange.

You may like to read my link popularity article, "How To Quickly Improve Your Link Popularity." In this article I show you how to find link exchange partners.

3. Submit Your Site To The Yahoo! Directory & The Open Directory Project Index

The third method is to submit your web site to the Yahoo! Directory and/or Open Directory Project index, which is owned by Netscape.

As far as I know, this is the only guaranteed method of getting into the Google index.

Google has agreements with Yahoo! and Netscape to include the sites indexed in their directories in the Google index. So submit your site to either, or both (recommended), of these directories.

For more information, visit Yahoo!'s How to Suggest Your Site page and the Open Directory Project's How to add a site to the Open Directory page.

Once your site is included in either of these directories, it will appear in the Google index in about 4 to 8 weeks.

So now you have no excuse for not getting indexed by Google. ;o)

Free Ways To Promote Your Website

2009-03-07T19:47:00.000-08:00

Free Ways To Promote Your Website

Discover the keywords that will skyrocket your website traffic!

Website traffic - I guess this subject is one of the most popular subject in the web marketing. If you just started with your website and haven't got too much cash to spare on advertising, you need to find ways to get some free web site traffic. I'll try to share here with you some of the ways to start driving visitors to your website.

Let's be honest, none of this ways will bring you thousands of visitors in a day. But most of this methods will help you to announce your website, start getting some visitors and build up good traffic in future.

Search Engines: It is the most important traffic source for you. This can your biggest source of traffic now and ever if you optimized& submitted your site properly. There are thousands of search engines on the web, but in reality you need to set the priority to get submitted to the main ones first: AltaVista, Excite, Yahoo, Hotbot, Lycos, Northern Light, Infoseek, Webcrawler. Then you can use some Free web based submission tools to submit to smaller search engines. See for example INeedHits site

Don't forget about the directories. Submission to directories almost always have to be done manually. The most important directories out there are: Yahoo, Magellan, DMOZ

Exchange links with other sites. You might not get a huge traffic flow from this, but link popularity is important to your search engines ranking. Read more about this in our article about link popularity.

Publish your ezine: If you are planning to start a newsletter or ezine on your website make sure you register it with ezine libraries. There are plenty of Ezine directories on the Net. Take a look at a few of the more popular ezine directories to get an idea of just how many ezines there are. Submitting your ezine to this directories can help you to get new visitors to your site, interested in what you have to say.

Write an Article вЂ“ hundreds of webmasters around the Net are trying to find a good content for their website. If you can share your knowledge with them it can benefit you both. When you wrote an article, submit it to ezine articles directories. Articles can re-printed by webmasters for free if they include author's info & links. So you'll get free links pointing to your sites and this links can be very effective, because if you what you wrote is an interesting content then people would want to hear more of what you have to say.

Free Classifieds. Hmm.. not exactly the best source for web traffic, but why not give it a try. After all it's free and even if you get only few visits from them it would be still worth it. Especially if you use automated tools to do submissions for you. Read more on the subject in our article about classified ads

Banner exchange: Exchanging banner impressions with other sites or within a network. This is 2 way street, if you don't have a lot of traffic and can't provide good number of banner impressions, then you will not get a lot of your banner impressions. However many banner exchange networks will give you free impressions as a sign-up bonus. It can be something from 5000 to 25 000 impressions. You can use them to start the ball rolling and get some traffic to your site. We are giving some valuable info on the subject in our article about banner exchange.

You do need to have a banner for your website to participate in banner exchange. Since we are talking about free staff, here is a good place to get a template for your banner which you can customize yourself - FreeBanners.org.

Signature file. A short message that you can include at the end of your e-mail messages, which can contain description of your website and services. It can have a good effect and free too

So here are few ways to start getting visitors to your website. All of them are free and you can start working on your web site traffic right now!

How to Drive targeted Traffic to Your Website and Earn Lots of Cash in the Process

2009-03-07T12:53:00.000-08:00

To increase your traffic and profits using paid advertising methods, you need to know that while there are lots of methods, some hardly work. In this series, all we are looking at are tactics that will produce results. You will not get anything that does not work here. So, in this edition, we'll be looking at three methods of paid advertising that keeps working:

* Paying to Build Email lists popularly known as subscriber lists.

* Paying to get listed in directories.

* Purchasing of Text links

* Advertising on EBay

If you cannot build your list yourself, you can get companies that will either help you build or who will sell lists to you depending on how much you are willing to spend. All you need do for this is simply search the web for those who sell email lists. I must warn you here that this is extremely risky because sometimes, these emails could be harvested, or gotten from third party companies and could have been sold to thousands of people who also require the same service. What usually happens in the end is the email list never produces results because they have been spammed continuously. If you decide to buy email lists, go to the forums and ask around for recommendations on any reputable email list broker. This will help reduce the risk involved and after searching, you are likely to come up with a very reliable email list provider.

Directories are a very viable way of generating website traffic. All you need do is visit these directories, look for their "add a link" link and enter your website address and description. The problem with this is if you use the free method, your link may not be listed until about 2 weeks and even then, may not attain top positions on the page. I mean what is the use of a link that is placed on page 10 of a directory. Unfortunately too, browsers usually don't go further than page 3 of a directory. If they can't find it there and then, they just assume it doesn't exist. This is where it pays to pay for link inclusion. Yahoo has one of such services. For a meager $299, you will get your link reviewed between 72 hours and appearing in top positions in the yahoo directory. This will singularly boost your website traffic as people searching for what you might have to offer, see you link quickly and click through to see what you have to offer.

If you also want to increase your traffic, eBay is the way to go. EBay has an estimated volume of 2 million visitors everyday, all buying and selling products and services. All you need do is visit www.ebay.com and sign up. Then, go ahead and start advertising your products in the right categories. This is usually done by placing bids on products that you intend to buy or listing your product. If your advert is placed in the right category, you'll get lots of visitors clicking through to visit your website and see what you have to offer. Use them to your advantage and profit maximally from them using tips previously discussed in other series.

Aurelius Tjin is The Publisher of The 'Unstoppable Profits Blog' With Over 22,000 Readers. Discover His Secret Strategies To Skyrocket Your Internet Marketing Business. To Get Free Internet Business Videos, Tips, and Strategies Go To http://www.aureliustjin.com

How to Create Viral 7-20 Page Reports That Will Continually Suck In Money for You 24/7

2009-03-07T12:49:00.000-08:00

Creating reports is not as hard as it seems to be. One thing you need to understand is that a report is nothing more than a compilation of thoughts on a particular topic. So, if you graduated from high school, you can put together a viral report with pages between 7 and 20 for a cheap fee. Some other big internet gurus have sold 15-paged reports for a whopping $150! Joe Vitale created a 10-page report within just 5 days without even creating a viral mechanism for it and sold it for $150 each; amounting to $15 a page. While some of us mere mortals may not be able to achieve this super human feat, it at least just shows you how profitable reports can be. In this article we'll be unveiling the secrets to creating viral reports that will keep grossing in sales for you long after you might have written it. It is really simple given the fact that it takes just about the same tactics to get it done.

There are various ways to go about creating a viral report. It could be through transcription; that is you translate an audio recording into an ebook or report. Lots of marketers have done this, and sold at a lower price. Most folks cannot afford the expensive teleseminars hosted by the top internet marketers. So, this option is really a form of relief for most who cannot afford the expensive costs of the teleseminars. You could also gather a collection of articles or newsletters you might have compiled over a period of time and compile them into a report. This method is usually best for series. For example, if you owned the series we did on article marketing, you could easily compile it together, add one or two touches, create a good sales page for it with lovely graphics and catchy features and sell off for just $14 each.

The third method could be as a result of finding out what questions are the most pressing issues at a point in time. Then find the solutions to those problems by doing some research on them and compile them into a well-written report. This method is highly profitable. You could write a 15-paged report and sell for just $29.99 and it will sell quickly and fast. You know why? You looked for needs that people will give anything to be solved for them. A typical example is children's allergy. Anyone who comes out with a highly informative report on averting the allergies and possible remedies will sell it at any price he wants and still rake in tons of profits from it because up till the time of writing this article, no cure or solution has been found to this problem. This is just an example of profiting from reports that may not take you more than one week to write. Imagine making a total of $8,000 from a 36 hour investment. Awesome isn't it? And that is not the end. You could easily replicate this in as many niches as you desire and these niches are limitless.

Creating a viral report that will spread like wild fire on the internet is a possibility if you know what to do and how to go about it. In case you are wondering what a viral report is, it is a report whose rate of spread over the internet is identical to the way a virus spreads either on the PC or among humans or animals â€“insanely fast!

How do you create a report that attains a viral status? Simple. Create a report that is vastly relevant and include incentives that will make people benefit from it. If you do this effectively, you will have a tremendous spread of the report over the internet in no time.

To make a report viral, there are three major tactics you could use:

1. Include a giveaway rights

2. resell rights benefit and

3. a rebrand rights benefit.

A resell rights benefit simply means the buyer has the right to resell the product and keep the 100 percent profits. This method is highly viable and increases sales conversion rates hence making more money for the seller of the product because of the benefit o being able to sell again and keep all the profits,

Another advantage this has is that the author of the report will still make money in the back end. How? By including links to his websites or products he is promoting by himself. So while people with resell rights are making money from selling the product and keeping all the profits, they are also indirectly promoting your products and expanding the reach of the report.

A report can also attain a viral level of exposure if you give people the permission to give away the product for free. This works like magic. Karen finds the report and is fascinated by it, and then she sends a link to Paul, Peter, and Jessie who in turn send it to four people each and so on and so forth. With this single method, you could have over 1 million visitors within one short month of releasing the report. Is that nice or what! Imagine the potential of duplicating these same results over and over again. To make money from this, youâ€™ll need to include the links to your website, products that you are an affiliate of, or services you intend to sell. Imagine the potential of 1 million people seeing your products and services. If just one percent of them were to buy your product at $29 each -which is more than likely because of the relevancy and the referrals from friends- you'll be grossing over $290,000 over that period of time. Not bad for an investment of less than $50.

The third tactic is giving away the rebrand or private label rights of the report. This means everything in the report can be amended. From the affiliate links to the name of the author. The bottom line is you lose all rights to the report. The only benefit is that you make money upfront after which the rest is out of your hands. As a result, you could end up seeing what looks like a mutilated version of your report somewhere on the internet. But in the end the end result would have been attained: Creating a viral report.

Simple Ways of Marketing Online

2009-03-07T12:45:00.000-08:00

Internet marketers already know these strategies by heart. But there may be some who just entered the online business and marketing community who may not have tried some of the simple ways of marketing online.

Marketing online isn't as difficult as it may sound. Internet marketers wouldn't be bragging of how much great a job it is if it was all that difficult and annoying. The downside may be that you need to put in a lot of time and effort to get a positive result in the end. Patience is also needed, and, for some, expenses are incurred. But in general marketing online is just a simple and easy task!

The main point of internet marketing is to generate traffic and lead visitors and customers to your site. Your site's visibility will be the key factor for you to attract customers and make sales. Online marketing strategies have this purpose in mind.

Let us count the simple ways of marketing online:

Link Building: To achieve greater visibility in the Web, you have to have a high ranking in the search engines. To have a high ranking among the search engines, building links is vital. Search engine spiders crawl across the Web to look for the number of links you have and use it as one of the important bases on ranking your website. Build links all over the Web by reciprocal linking, creating quality content, and submitting your site to the site directories!

Keyword Search: Search for your main keyword and other terms that are related to your site. When making links, you can use your keyword and terms as an anchor text for more visibility to your site. Make use of keyword tools available online to search for the most searched for word that you can use as your keyword.

Site Directories: By submitting your site to site directories, you are also placing another link for the search engines to crawl. This adds to your number of links and can increase your rank among the search engines.

Article Submissions: One technique in leading visitors and generating traffic to your site is by submitting relevant and interesting article to article directories. Submitting articles to the directories can also help you build more links to your site, thus gaining you more links and increasing your rankings. Don't forget to make the article creative and relevant, of course. Readers won't be curious to see your website if your article doesn't get their attention.

Affiliate Marketing: The downside of this strategy is that you'll have to spend for the commissions of affiliate sales. Nevertheless, this strategy is used by many internet marketers. Affiliate marketing usually works by networking with other websites that are in the same niche as you. Now since you are both in the same niche, most usually the traffic that you can generate through affiliate marketing is targeted. This is about the best thing abut affiliate marketing (aside from generating sales). You are also building links through the links (in the ads) on the website that you are affiliated with.

Newsletters and Subscriptions: Sending newsletters to the customers and clients will not only help in building professional and friendly relationships with them, but also brings in targeted traffic to your web site. Whenever you have something new to talk about and events to promote, newsletters can be a great way to let the clients and customers in on the news.

Email Marketing: This is another popular way to generate traffic and occasionally make repeat sales. This is kind of like sending newsletters, only your are more or less not sending news but rather promoting your latest products and services. Remember that when making your emails, you should avoid making it spammy and annoying. Make your email content original, creative and interesting.

Forums: You can see the most eager visitors of the online community in forums. Participating and giving great content in the replies will help in establishing you as an expert in your niche. This will give you a boost in the eyes of the online community. You'll be able to form relationships among the community and get them to be interested in your site and business. Plus, you can place links to your website on your signature every time you make a post! This can increase your rankings and visibility in the search engines.

There really is nothing to marketing online... now all you need is just a lot of time and effort to make your website known across the internet.

Using Digg.com To Generate Traffic

2009-02-20T07:20:00.000-08:00

So I finally hit it big on digg.com, I have been posting there for a while and I would get a few diggs, but nothing like this. First let me give you a little background of what digg is. Basically, digg.com is a site where users can submit their articles/videos about anything from politics to comedy. Once it is submitted users can "digg" them or bury them if they so choose. The site keeps track of all the diggs that you get on your article/video. The more diggs you have the more chance you have of making it on the main "popular stories" part of digg. You see when you first submit the story it goes into a "upcoming stories" section of digg, then once you receive many diggs they upgrade you to the "popular stories" part of digg. Once you make it there you can sit back and watch the traffic jump, it was really amazing.

When my story made it I had over 12,000 hits in one day alone, which is pretty impressive for sites like mine that are still in their infancy and don't have any real page rank. You can see all of my stories that I submitted to digg here and you can see the story that gave me the 12,000 hits here.

The beauty of digg is that the stories are chosen by the viewers and not some editor so everyone has a chance of making it big. So what are you waiting for go sign up and starting digging, it is a great way to promote your site. Who knows maybe this article will be the next to make it big... hmmm diggers digging a site about digg, I guess it makes sense.

Source: http://promotingyoursite.blogspot.com/

Adsense - Basic Ad Placement

2009-02-10T16:40:00.000-08:00

One of the most important aspects of running an Google AdSense campaign on your pages is getting the advertisements noticed by your visitors. Here we'll discuss the basics of good ad placement.

One well known fact by most webmasters is that ads placed above the fold performs very well. In case you don't know that the "fold" means, imagine that you fold your monitor in half horizontally. The area above that fold is where ads perform best (in general). This area is illustrated in figure 1.

However this is of course a rule of thumb and does not apply to all cases.

Each and every site will have different locations within their pages that perform better than others. What you must do constantly is to:

Place Ad
Test/Track Ad (Using channels)
Change
Repeat steps 2 and 3 over and over

This simple optimization technique is very simple but yet not carried out by all webmasters. Badly placed advertisements will yield very low Click Through Rates (CTR). Just think about it. You have a site with great content, good traffic but a CTR of 1%. With optimization you could increase the CTR to 3~5% which would mean a 3~5 fold increase in your revenue.

Anyway enough about that as all that will be covered later.

A useful page to visit when you are starting off is provided by Google. Have a look at this page for some advice from Google on AdSense Optimization.

As you can see from their "heat map" most of the locations that perform well are above the fold and to the left of the page. Again this is just a generic view of ad placement but it's a good starting point.

Successful AdSense placement also requires you to step into the shoes of your visitor. For example, if you have a page which is one long article an advert placed right at the end of the article may be a good idea (especially if you have little other navigation links at the bottom of your page. This is because the visitor will finish reading the article and then is presented with the ads when they are wondering "what next?". It's a great way of getting them to notice your advert and therefore increase the likelihood of them clicking on your ad.

Adsense Tips, Layout Optimization Tricks for Higher CTR

2009-02-10T16:38:00.000-08:00

Google Adsense is perhaps the easiest way to attract advertisers from across the globe to your blog. Just submit your blog to Google for approval. If Google likes what it sees, it will place contextual ads linking to products likely to appeal to the readers. Each time a reader clicks a link, the advertiser pays Google a small fee, and Google splits that with you.

The next interesting question - How to Make Money with Google Adsense ? Here are The best Google Adsense Tips and Tricks for making more money (profit) from Google adsense program.

a. Strictly follow the rules mentioned in Adsense policies. You will always earn more revenue from Adsense by playing it clean.

b. Never modify the Google Adsense HTML code.

c. Don't ask your friends or visitors to click on your Google ads. Do not include incentives of any kind for users to click on ads. Don't label the Google ads with text other than "sponsored links" or "advertisements.".

d. Don't click on your own ads - Google is much smarter than you think. You should not reload your pages excessively. If you are testing your website layout with Google adsense, follow some precautions. Or you can use the unofficial Google Adsense Sandbox Tool that is accessible from Firefox, IE and other browsers to see what kind of Google ads will be served based on content (website address URL) or keywords.

e. Don't place ads in pop-up windows, error pages or even empty pages.

f. Don't start a "adsense asbestos" or "home equity loan rates" website merely to make money from accidental clicks (accidence). You will never make money out these "made-for-adsense-only" websites. Instead, write on topics what you are passionate about. Don't waste your money on high-paying adsense keywords lists.

g. For short articles, CTR is best when ads are placed just above the content

h. For long articles, CTR improves if ads are placed somewhere in middle of the content - visitors read the long content and then they are looking for more resources.

i. Use Text Ads instead of Image Ads as users get more options. If you still want to display image ads, consider ad formats that support image ads - Choose either the 300x250 medium rectangle or the 160x600 wide skyscraper - or both, if you display multiple ad units on a page.

j. Google Ads without background color and borders always perform better. Make the border color and background color same as your page background color.

k. Always put ads above the main fold. Make sure that the ad unit with the highest clickthrough rate is the first instance of the ad code that appears in the HTML. Since the first ad unit is always filled before the rest, you want to make sure that ad unit is located in the best placement on your page.

l. Try setting the ad link URL color to a lighter shade. If your text is black, you may make the adlink as light gray.

m. Go Wide - The large rectangle is the best paying adsense format (336x280) - The Google Adsense Publisher team also feels that the best formats are the wider ones - the ad formats that contain the widest individual ads. Try using the 336x280 large rectangle, 300x250 medium rectangle, or 160x600 wide skyscraper.

n. Placing images next to ads or above ads does help in attracting user attention.

o. Blend AdLinks with other navigation links or place horizontal adlinks at the top of your webpage. AdSense publishers are permitted to click on link unit topics on their web pages, provided that they do not click on any Google ads on the resulting page.

p. Organize an Adsense Party for your friends and colleagues - Request them to navigate your website, watch their activity - it will provide vital clues about which regions on your website draw more user attention. Try putting ads near those areas. (Thanks Darren)

q. You can put upto 3 adsense units on a page. Try putting a large skyscraper on the right navigation sidebar of your website. That area is close to the browser scrollbar. You can also add 2 AdSense for search boxes, 1 adlink unit and 1 referral button per product (i.e., 1 AdSense referral button and 1 Firefox plus Google Toolbar referral button).

r. The first few lines of your content are an important factor for determining what Ads are served on your webpage. That's the right place to put keywords in bold (strong or &ltb> tags) or header tags (h1, h2, etc).

s. Always select the setting to open Google Adsense search box results in a new browser window, so you won't lose your visitors. Click the Open search results in a new browser window checkbox and this add target="google_window" to your form tag.

t. Maximum people think the search box is on the top right corner. So you know where to put it.

u. Don't syndicate full content. If people can read everything from the newsreader window itself, why would they visit your website where your ads are.

v. Use URL channels to determine performance of individual pages. I track my most popular pages with Google Analytics, Statcounter and create a channel for each of the URL. You can even track Adsense Clicks with Analytics

w. For low CTR pages, try changing titles or adding more content to get better focused ads

x. Block low paying advertisers with Filters. Why to loose a visitor for 0.01 cents. Use Overture or Google Adwords Keywords tool to discover keywords that are less popular with advertisers.

y. The AdSense for search Top Queries report shows you what your users are looking for, by listing the 25 most common searches conducted through your AdSense for search boxes. Use this report to identify additional topics to add to your site, or to keep track of your most sought-after information. Focus and improve that content.

z. Not everyone has a RSS reader. Use RSS to Email services like FeedBlitz, Bloglet or Rmail to let users subscribe to your blog by email.

Remember, you are the best judge when it comes to choosing ad formats. Even Google doesn't offer the best advise always. For instance, in the visual heat map, Google suggests that webmasters are best served by positioning ads on the upper left-hand side of a Web page. But on the Google homepage, you will find ads on the far right.

Link Exchange Primer

2009-02-10T16:36:00.000-08:00

One method of promotion that many webmasters engage in is link exchanges. A link exchange is an agreement whereby two webmasters agree to link to each other from their respective sites. The benefits of a link exchange are twofold. Firstly you gain direct traffic from people clicking on the link, secondly you gain another incoming link for search engine optimization purposes.

Not all link exchanges are created equal and this article is going to explain how to optimize your link exchange efforts so that you get the most benefit possible.

Evaluating Partners

The quality of the sites that you exchange links with reflects on your own site. It is important for your site's image that you only exchange links with sites of quality. If the sites you link to look cheap, you do too. A fair link exchange is one in which both sites receive the same benefit. This doesn't mean that both sites get the same amount of traffic though. A site with a high amount of traffic might not advertise it's off site links as much as a site with lower traffic and so the amount of visitors sent each way might even out.

You can simply ask the webmaster how much traffic he receives, or you could use a tool like Alexa.com to get an estimate. You should also note where he places his links, as compared to where you place yours.

You will need to measure the PageRank of your partner's site, you can do this using the Google Toolbar. Specifically you should know their overall PageRank power, or the PageRank of their links page. If a person links to you on every page of their site then their overall PageRank power will tell you how much PageRank the exchange will give you. If you also link to the person on every page of your site then your overall PageRank power will tell you how much overall PageRank (spread throughout your entire site) you will lose in this exchange.

If you both employ separate link pages you can calculate how much PageRank you gain and lose by dividing the PageRank of your or your partner's links page by the number of links (both internal and external) on that page.

Doing the above will allow you to measure both your partner's PageRank and traffic contribution to your site so that you can decide if it is worth while to exchange links with them.

Deceptive Practices

There are many ways to mask links so that search engines do not see them. This can be done for a valid reason, such as denying a search engine access to a shopping cart script, or to stop the flow of PR to an affiliate program when you sending them PR is not part of the affiliate agreement. However it is my opinion that using such methods in a link exchange is unethical unless your partner is fully educated about the matter and decides he wants to exchange links anyways.

Introduction to Viral Marketing

2009-02-10T16:35:00.000-08:00

Viral marketing is an oft-used buzz word and it may not be entirely evident what it actually means. Viral marketing gets it's name from a virus obviously, so to understand how viral marketing works is to understand how a virus works.

A virus works by infecting a host cell and injecting it's own DNA so that the host cell starts replicating the virus until it can take no more and dies. Then, once where there was just one virus, there are hundreds or thousands, which then go on to infect other cells and replicate again, and again, and again, the virus replicates exponentially.

Like a virus cannibalizing cells, viral marketing works by enlisting your users, either wittingly or not, into promoting your site for you. So that one user enlists 2 more users who each enlist 2 more users who each enlist 2 more users, and so on, and so on. A viral marketing curve would thus look like an exponential curve with every user you get generating more traffic for you.

In a perfect viral marketing scenario each user would generate 2 or more new users. However, that doesn't always happen, especially with the most basic viral marketing applications.

You might in fact already be using viral marketing and not know it. For instance in it's most basic form viral marketing can be represented by an "Email to a Friend" script that lets one user tell another user about your site or product or article.

You can encourage this tell a friend behavior by appealing to the competitive side of a user if your site involves some sort of quiz, test, or game. Once the user gets their score you can ask them if they want to challenge their friends to beat their score and provide them with an email form for letting their friends know how they did.

Another method for getting your users to promote your site for you is with bribes. These bribes do not need to be monetary however. You can run a contest to see who promotes the most new users. The winner or winners could get a monetary reward but also you could simply offer more site features to them. If you run a forum this is very easy as you could offer them things like larger avatars, more private message storage, or other user enhancements. In this way you still get the viral traffic but it does not cost you anything.

If you run certain types of game sites you can provide in-game power or currency to users who do this. Many people game sites actually provide a unique link for each user and anyone who visits that URL ends up providing a power up of some sort to the user who provided the link. This is one of the most effective ways of promoting a new game and can approach the ideal viral situation I mentioned above.

The most successful types of viral marketing though tend to just be things that are either so interesting or so funny or so entertaining that people share them, post about them, and talk about them, so that a massive word of mouth campaign ends up delivering massive amounts of traffic for your site. It is very difficulty to engineer this type of viral marketing though, and it isn't going to be for every site, because it generally relies on some sort of pop culture multimedia content.

Viral marketing is one of the cheapest ways to promote your site, and as such there should be some sort of viral marketing component included with every website, even if it is just an email to a friend form. With other forms of marketing you end up paying for each visitor you get, with viral marketing you only need to get the ball rolling and eventually it could snowball into an avalanche of traffic. Only organic search engine optimization can approach the ROI (return on investment) of viral marketing.

So spend some time and brainstorm ways you can enlist your users to promote your site for you, the beauty of viral marketing is that, if you achieve the ideal viral scenario, you really only one good idea. One good idea to open the traffic flood gates.

Unleash the Power of Popups

2009-02-10T16:34:00.000-08:00

Popups are wonderful tools. Yes, I am serious. Sure most articles about popups focus on how users hate them, how they're annoying, or things of that nature. This article is going to be different, it will explain how you can use popups to your advantage to draw attention to a part or parts of your site. The kicker is, these popups shouldn't end up being annoying.

Applications of Popups

Popups might be annoying, they might be hated, but they draw eyeballs better than just about anything else. You can use their abilities to great success by advertising parts of your site using popups. Now I'm not talking about signing up with an ad network and paying for popups at $X CPM. I'm talking about running your own popups, on your own site, to advertise your own site. One might wonder, if someone is already on your site why do you need to advertise your site to them? The answer to that question is that you are not going to advertise your whole site, you're going to advertise a specific portion of your site. To illustrate this effect I am going to run through a few examples.

Suppose you run an informative website that has an accompanying newsletter. You put the newsletter subscription box on every page of your site, but even if it is up at the top not every person is going to focus their attention on it. In contrast if you promote your newsletter through a popup your site visitors will be forced to focus attention on it and your subscription rates will greatly increase. If you do run a newsletter I suggest trying this for a week or a month and seeing the results for yourself.

Another application would be to promote a survey. Many websites run demographic surveys as a way to obtain data about their audience, as well as to gauge on their audience feels about their website. This data is useful when planning site expansions and when selling advertising to companies wanting to target a specific demographic. The problem is drawing attention to your survey can be a hard. Anything more than a text link takes up valuable real estate and a text link by itself is not going to get a large response. The solution again is to use popups.

Yet another application of popups is to promote products or services. This is especially true if you only have a few products you sell. Ecommerce, even on a small scale, can greatly increase the profitability of a content site. The problem is letting your visitors know that you have goods for sale. If you're just doing small scale ecommerce then the bulk of your website will still be your content and so putting links on menus or elsewhere will not be that effective since the links will be outnumbers by links pointing to your content. The solution again is to use popups. If you're only selling one or two products anyways you can in effect promote every product you sell through a single popup window.

The above applications are all good, but just doing them isn't enough. You need to be able to control your popups in order for them to be effective, and you also need to limit their annoyance or you may alienate your visitors.

Google Adsense Optimization Secrets

2009-02-10T16:32:00.000-08:00

There are two ways to make more money from your website -- get more traffic or make more money from your existing traffic.

Google's Adsense program provides a great way for you to easily increase your current revenue, even if you already use it there are things you can do to increase your revenue with it.

In this article I am going to show you the methods I've used to double my own clickthrough rates as well as those of other website owners.

What You Can Control

One of the things that set Adsense apart from other banner ad programs is your ability to customize the code to fit the look of your site, and the wide variety of unit sizes available.

Advertisers write ads which are then shown on your site. As an advertiser I can increase my clickthrough rate by writing good ad copy. This means more targeted prospects visit my site. I then have the opportunity to "convert" them into my customers.

As a publisher I can control the color and placement of advertiser's ads - but I can't control the words. So in that way there is a limit on what kind of optimization I can perform. I can't make advertisers write better ads afterall, luckily though Google is constantly analyzing advertisements and ones that do not get clicked on end up filtered out or shown less often. In the end though color and placement simply draw attention, but it is the words that create the action (the click), and the words aren't under your control.

However, there is an unpublished feature called Google Hints that does give you some control. It does not allow you to edit ads, but it does allow you to give Google help on picking keywords for your site. You aren't supposed to use this feature without permission though.

As far as changing the color and appearance of your ads, don't worry, you don't need permission to do that. In fact Google encourages publishers to experiment to find the best placement. After several months as a publisher Google mailed me a little book which gave tips on increasing my clickthrough rates. You can visit Google's website to see an illustrated heat map whichs shows the best places for you to put Adsense ads.

How to perform Adsense Optimization

There are two different "theories" on how to place your Adsense code. One says blend it into your site, the other says make it stick out. My own experience has shown you need to blend it in but make it visible. By that I mean that you should blend your ads in enough so that they do not look like banners (which people tend to gloss over) but yet you don't want the ad to be too hard to see that no one clicks on it.

What approach do you take when building a new website? Do you create a nice layout and leave extra space for a few banner ads? This is the wrong way to do it. It is critical to think about Adsense when designing your website. If you want to maximize your earnings you can't just make a fancy design and plop the Adsense code in as an afterthought. By planning ahead you can insure maximum placement effectiveness. I specifically made a recent site with Adsense in mind. The result? Earnings 5 times higher than what I had predicted them to be.

So how is a website designed around Adsense? Match Adsense's font - that includes the size and color. Get rid of the CSS mouseovers on your links and make them plain and boring -- like Adsense. Also think about placement as you build the site.

MySQL Optimization Hints

2009-02-10T16:30:00.000-08:00

Every programmer loves to optimize, even when we know we shouldn't. To satisfy your cravings MySQL has several keywords that can be placed in your SQL statement to give the database server an explicit optimization instruction.

I should point out that using the hints incorrectly will most likley cause your queries to perform worse, so be sure that it actually makes sense to use them before you go nuts. This means use EXPLAIN and read the documentation on each hint before using.

It's also a good idea to enclose the hints within a SQL comment, for example SELECT /*! SQL_NO_CACHE */ columns FROM table. This can help to make your application a bit more portable.

Let's take a look at some MySQL Optimization Hints:

SQL_NO_CACHE

The SQL_NO_CACHE hint turns off MySQL's builtin query caching mechanism for a particular query. You can help MySQL make the query cache more efficent by using this hint on queries that are highly dynamic (such as a keyword search, or a report that only runs nightly). Make sure query caching is turned on otherwise there is no need for this command.

Checkout my article on the MySQL Query Cache for more info.

SQL_CACHE

If you have setup MySQL Query Caching to explicit mode (set query_cache_type = 2) then you can use the SQL_CACHE hint to tell MySQL which queries to cache.

My article on the MySQL query cache also covers this hint.

HIGH_PRIORITY

The HIGH_PRIORITY hint can be used on SELECT or INSERT statements to let MySQL know that this is a high priority query. This hint will basically allow the query to skip in line.

LOW_PRIORITY

The LOW_PRIORITY hint can be used on INSERT and UPDATE statements. If you use the LOW_PRIORITY keyword, execution of the query is delayed until no other clients are reading from the table. This means that you may wait a LONG time, or forever on servers with a heavy read volume.

INSERT DELAYED

An INSERT LOW_PRIORITY statment will not return until the statement has been executed, which could possibly be forever. Instead you can use an INSERT DELAYED statement. It will return immediately, but it will still wait until other clients have closed the table before executing the statement.

I have written an article on MySQL Insert Delayed as well.

Note: INSERT DELAYED only works on MyISAM, MEMORY, and ARCHIVE tables.

STRAIGHT_JOIN

This hint will tell MySQL to join the tables in the order that they are specified in the FROM clause.

Use EXPLAIN to make sure that MySQL has not already figured out the optimal join order. And if you specify an ill order you can make MySQL do a lot more work than it needs to.

SQL_BUFFER_RESULT

This hint tells MySQL to put the result of the query into a temporary table. This will free up a table lock while the resultset is being sent to the client. So you would only want to use this on large result sets.

SQL_BIG_RESULT

The SQL_BIG_RESULT hint can be used with DISTINCT and GROUP BY SELECT statements. It as you might guess, tells MySQL that the result set will be big. According to the MySQL documentation, if invoked

MySQL directly uses disk-based temporary tables if needed, and prefers sorting to using a temporary table with a key on the GROUP BY elements.

SQL_SMALL_RESULT

AS you might guess this is pretty much the opposite of SQL_BIG_RESULT. When enabled MySQL uses fast temporary tables to store the resulting table instead of using sorting. Since this is typically the default route of the optimizer, this hint is often not needed.

If you want to dig deeper, have lots of articles on MySQL, and I can also recommend the book High Performance MySQL by Jeremy Zawodny and Derek Balling from O'Reilly.

AdSense Optimization Tips (from google)

2009-02-10T16:27:00.000-08:00

Google recently held a webinar for AdSense publishers. They gave out some adsense optimization tips that they have gathered over the past few years. The transcript is pretty lengthy, so here's the summary:

Ad Location - "the middle, above the fold location perform best." Also "if you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is actually pretty successful"
Ad Formats - "the top three formats are the 336x280 that you see on the page; the 300x250 medium rectangle; and then the 160x600 wide skyscraper." Additionally "the wider ad formats are doing better than the other ones and the reason is that they actually take up fewer lines. And so with every additional line, you have a chance of losing that interested user."
Ad Colors - Pick colors that blend well with the site. Matches the background color, and compliments the site. Make them feel like a part of the site. They give an example where a customer went from blended background to yellow, and clicks dropped 65%
Ad Blindness - if the colors stick out too much, readers may immediatly identify them as ads and not even look at them. Also frequent readers may stop reading ads so you could alternate positioning and colors to get their attention. "The more you blend in with the site, the less chance that ad blindness will occur."
Experiment - this was a big theme in the webinar echoed by all experts. Use channels to test different colors, positioning, and formats to find out what works best. They show that you can more than double your revenue just by finding the right color, position, format combo.
Image Ads - If you want to maximize revenue they recommend turning them on. I personally disable them in my account, because I find them too distracting/annoying to the user. Yes you may increase your CPC, but you will probably decrease impressions over time.
Link Units - Don't take up much space, and also "allows the user to refine what they're interested in. So if they may not be interested in specific ads on your page, they might be interested in a particular topic, and by clicking on a link unit and a link in the link unit, they'll be able to specify that they're interested in that specific topic and get a lot more options and variety on the ads that might appear." I also bet google remembers what they click on and then tries to generate better ads for the page... just my speculation.
AdSense For Search - You can use this for your site search, and you get a percentage of ad clicks.
Focus on Content - Duh!
Don't click on your own ads - One of the callers asked the question "I was just noticing that someone asked about clicking on their own ads and it says you're not supposed to. And I don't remember reading that. And I occasionally do click on the ads... So is that detrimental in some way?" - I can't believe they said that to google. Google's response was: "Yes, that's sort of chief among the terms and conditions".
Impression Counter - Google confirmed that Page Impressions are counted when a public service ad (or alternate ad url or color) is displayed.
Your site is unique - all these things may not matter, the best location, format, and color is different for every site. So again, go experiment.

Successful SEO Needs Effort, Not Quick Fixes

2009-02-05T03:21:00.000-08:00

It would be nice if we could master search engine optimization, and procure high rankings simply by editing Meta tags, but thats just not going to happen.

The reason is because, in order to achieve SEO success, a combined effort of different, long-term methods is required. There is no one quick fix that will solve the problem.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that there are no easy solutions, people still insist on using various techniques to try and find them. For instance, it is possible to quickly generate high rankings from words that no internet users will search for. However, even if you rank number one, if no one uses the words, your business will flop.

In addition, the following are some more quick fixes that many people try, and fail at:
Changing or Adding Meta Tags " Search engines are limited when it comes to deciding what sites should be shown in the result list of a keyword search. Meta keyword tags assist search engines and help them select the pages with the most relevancy that pertain to the keyword of a Web surfer.

Of course, there is a difference between a public search engine, like Yahoo, and an internal search engine. A public search engine contains virtually every webpage they are aware of. Therefore, they cant trust all the Meta tags they find, as not all website have been designed to provide the internet users with relevant information on the keyword they are searching for. Some website have been set up for the sole purpose of advertising and generating traffic. Thus, the goal of a public search engine is to weed out these irrelevant websites and help searchers find exactly what they are looking for.

An internal search engine, on the other hand, consists of only a small amount of web pages or products. Therefore, it is less difficult for the search engine to produce the most relevant pages. Moreover, the Meta tags that are present on the internal search engine on your site are trustworthy; because your goal is to help your visitors find what they are looking for.
When all is said and done, by adding or changing the Meta tags on your website doesnt quickly or slowly fix anything. The bottom line is this method will have not effect on the result of your SEO traffic.

Increasing Web Content " Increasing web content can boost your SEO success, but this is something that takes plenty of time. Sure you can quickly increase the content by writing useless puff pieces, using auto-generating software, or ripping off content from other sites, but none of these methods are actually going to improve your business profits in the long run.
The only web content that is going to secure your success is information that is relevant and valuable. It takes time and experience to generate this type of information, so dont try to cheat your way to the top with wasted words or words that are not your own. Stay true to your business and keep your integrity.

Link Popularity - One of the most popular quick fix methods out there are link schemes. Anyone who does business on the internet knows how valuable links are. Links are what help to increase web traffic and increase website visibility. That being said, you will want to avoid becoming a link farm, because if your goal is to only get links to increase your SEO rankings, youre not going to take your business anywhere.

As tempting as it might sound, you need to ignore link popularity. Your focus should be on your target market, and how you can reach them to let them know your website exists. Thus, you need to market your website, which means you may have to dish out a little money to publicize your website in local newspapers, magazine, or even in a television ad. The more your site is recognized, the better chance it has of ending up in the right niche markets to attract the right attention.

If you want to be successful with search engine optimization, you need to commit yourself to achieving long-term results. This does take patience, but is necessary if you want to come out on top. The following tips can help bring you closer to your high ranking goal:

Tip 1: Conduct thorough research for keyword phrases " use effective keyword programs such as KeywordDiscovery or WordTracker. The paid programs of their software will help you generate the best keyword phrases for your business.

Tip 2: Valuable web content " Dont create a website that is overrun by graphics. SEO spiders will crawl right over these graphics and pass you by. Your website needs a reasonable amount of web content that is pumped full of valuable information. It needs to be clear and concise, and should also convey your website message which needs to include the keywords youve selected to rank high for.

Tip 3: Relevancy " Ensure that all your link anchor text and title tags are relevant to one another, as well as to the web content that is presented on your site.

Tip 4: Patience is a virtue " It will take almost a year, or even longer, before you begin to see any traffic from the natural results of search engines. Try not to let this get you down. Take this time to continue to improve your site and give the competition a run for their money. Eventually, your persistence, patience and positive thinking will pay off.

Always remember, it doesnt matter how well you market your website, you are not going to achieve overnight success. Just like most things in life, taking the easy way out when it comes to marketing your business online isnt going to create you long lasting success. If you want an impressive future that provides you with plenty of reward, you need to spend the time and money, and do things right the first time.

Author: Mark Nenadic

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 8 - Miscellaneous Adsense Tips

2009-02-04T06:50:00.000-08:00

We have unpacked our Adsense Equation in detail and have given numerous tips for maximising Adsense Revenue. Whilst there are occasions that Adsense doesn’t perform as well on some websites for no particular reason as others we can safely predict that if you work on each of the four areas you should see an increase in the amount of the cheque that Adsense sends you at the end of each month. Remember though that your revenue will only be as high as your weakest link - work on all elements of the equation - not just one or two.

As well as the proceeding tips there are a number of other things that might be helpful to know in using Adsense that we couldn’t find a place for in previous posts.

Outgoing Links - One theory going around is that pages with fewer outgoing links result in higher click-throughs. Give your readers fewer options of links to click on and they are more likely to click on your ads. This MAY be true, but don’t let it determine your content. My Digicam site has many outward links because it is a page that acts as a hub of information from around the web. I’ve not noticed that this makes my revenue levels suffer - in fact I suspect its because of these helpful links that people come to my site.

Using Frames - If your site uses frames I’m told you should make sure your ads are placed in the frame where you content is or else it will not provide relevant ads for your content. Thanks Greg for this tip.

Don’t click your own ads - It might be an obvious way to get a few click throughs and increase your Adsense revenue - but Google is very clever at working out if your clicks are genuine or not. Its not hard to track IP addresses and to see patterns emerging between where clicks are coming from. It is not worth the risk of being banned from the program for a few cents per click. Especially don’t click ads from the same IP address that you check your stats from - this is asking for trouble.

Don’t encourage your readers to click on your ads. Its against the agreement that you enter into with Google. Once again they will track you down if you break these rules. I’ve seen a number of people who have been banned from Adsense for this. Let your ads speak for themselves.

Monitor your Statistics. Many adsense users check their stats all day everyday. Whilst this might be overkill (its like watching grass grow) it is useful to track what is happening at this end of your campaign. Use channels to monitor which pages are doing well and which are not. Tweak pages that are not doing well and make more pages similar to those that do.

Alternative Ads - Use alternative ads for when Adsense cannot serve ads to your page. When they cannot find a suitable ad for your page Adsense will serve you with a ‘Public Service Announcement’ (PSA). These ads may be for a good cause, but they will not relate to the content of your page and will not earn you any money. Instead Adsense allows you to nominated an alternative ad that they will serve into the position instead of the PSA. I use Amazon for this, but also have experimented with affiliate alternative ads Affiliate Sensor which I find works really well as it lets you choose from a wide range of affiliate products and still target them to your site.

That is the end of our Adsense tips for Bloggers series. Feel free to submit your own Adsense tips and strategies in comments below. You also might like to check out some of the following alternative Adsense Tips pages for more tips from around the web. You might also like to check out the the Chitika eMiniMall Ad system which I make most of my income off these days. I reviewed it here and have a series of tips for getting the most out of your eMiniMalls.

Article Source: www.problogger.net

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 7 - Well Placed and Designed Ads

2009-02-04T06:45:00.000-08:00

Revenue = high readership + high paying ads + relevant ads + well placed and designed ads

The forth element of our Adsense Equation is that of having well designed and optimally placed Adsense Ads. I’ve found that ad positioning is incredibly important. I remember shifting the ads on one of my blogs a while back and being over the moon to discover the next morning that the move had doubled the click through rates that I’d had over night! Its worth doing some tweaking.

Adsense Ad placement and design is an issue that is often hotly debated in Adsense discussion forums. It seems that each Adsense user has their own strategy - some like ads that blend in, others like ads that stand out from the rest of the page. Some like ads in banner positions, others in skyscrapers, others like to put them right in the middle of content. In my experience, different strategies work on different blogs at different times. The key tip I’ll give you is to experiment. Try new positions and design and track your results. One of the best ways you can do this is by using Adsense Tracker which is an amazing tracking package for adsense which gives you much more control over what and how you track your adsense performance. It does cost to purchase the tracker but in my experience you’ll make your money back pretty quickly by using it to adapt your Adsense strategies.

Let me also share a few other tips that you might like to experiment with.

Blend - Most successful Adsense users seem to be taking the approach of blending their ads into the overall theme of their page. This often means making the ad’s background (and often border) the same (or similar) colour to the background of the page and making the title and URL the same as links of the rest of the page. In this way the ad does not stand out as being ‘ad-like’. Having said this I know of a few bloggers who take the opposite approach and make their ads as bright and ugly as possible in the hope of attracting the attention of their readers. I don’t

subscribe to this because I think it cheapens the overall feel and look of a page.

In Content - More and more bloggers (and webmasters) are putting their ads inside the main body of their posts. In this way the ads are prominent and more likely to be seen by readers as they read your content. If your text wraps around the ads this can be quite effective. On the flipside of this argument is that you may run the risk of frustrating your readers with dominant ads. People reading content online are a fickle bunch and get easily turned off by blatant advertising.

Above the Fold - it is generally accepted that your Adsense ads should be placed towards the top of your page and be visable without your reader having to scroll down. Studies show that blog visitors stay on average for only 60 or so seconds, many without scrolling down. If you ads are hidden towards the bottom of your page you decrease the likelihood of them ever being seen let alone clicked.

Left is Best - Google has put together a ‘heat map’ which is probably the best thing that you can look at when thinking about the positioning of your ads. You’ll see from it that they have found that ads on the left hand side of the page do much better than those on the right hand side.

Too Dominent? - The position and design of your Adsense ads needs to be balanced with the overall purposes and design of your blog. What is the priority of your blog - is it to make money or is it something else. I have a number of blogs - and place ads differently on each depending upon their purposes. For example this blog is not a commercial blog - I’m more interested in building relationships, sharing and hearing others ideas and updating those interested in what I’m doing with my life. As a result my Adsense Ads are in a less prominent banner position and are designed to fit with the overall theme of the blog. However on my Digital Photography Blog there is obviously a more commercial intent (as well as it being something of a passion and hobby). As a result I experiment with more prominent Adsense ads (usually skyscraper and within content).

I cannot stress enough how useful it is to experiment. What works on one blog doesn’t always work on another. I’ve also noticed that if you have a blog with regular and loyal readers that it is good to keep things changing as your readers tend to get used to the way your blog is and become blind to things like Adsense Ads. I notice that when I move my ads around that it often creates higher click throughs for a few days - until the blindness kicks in again. Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense is an excellent E-book written with lots of good tips on positioning your adsense ads if you’re wanting to get another person’s opinion on this topic.

Article Source: www.problogger.net

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 6 - Relevant Ads

2009-02-04T06:43:00.000-08:00

Revenue = high readership + high paying ads + relevant ads + well placed and designed ads

The third element of our Adsense equation is that of relevant Adsense ads. It is all very well to rank high in search engines to generate high levels of traffic, but without relevant ads that relate to the content of your blog you are not likely to generate much in the way of click throughs.

Let me give you an example. Recently I was asked to help a fellow blogger who has struggling with his Adsense ads because whilst his content largely focused upon the topic of ‘health care’ - most of the ads being served to his blog were focused upon ‘blogging’. He was getting quite reasonable traffic levels and had a reasonably high paying topic (there are some good health care ads out there) but as you’d expect, people coming to a blog about health care did not click on ads for blogging software and services at a very high rate. The challenge was to get his ads reflecting the content of his blog.

Another fellow blogger had the problem of not getting ANY ads being served to his site. Instead of paying ads all he was getting was the public service ads that Adsense serves when they couldn’t find any relevant paying ads (these pay nothing).

How do you get relevant ads? Here are a few things to try.

Make sure there are ads available - My friend who didn’t get any paying ads served was focusing on a key word for which there was no or very few ads. A simple way of checking this is to do a search on Google for the key word you are targeting. If they don’t serve ads on their own search results page its an indication that such ads are scarce - if not non existent. They way we got ads on my friends blog was to experiment with other related keywords. He didn’t have to change the focus of his blog - just the way he described his topics. For example if there are no ads for ‘bed linen’ try ‘blankets’, ’sheets’, ‘quilts’ etc. Experiment with different combinations until you find something that works.

Increase your Keyword density - The more you use your keywords the more likely you are to get ads on those topics. Its not common knowledge exactly how the Adsense bot decides what ads suit your content best (if someone knows feel free to post it in comments below) but it’s a pretty safe bet that if you put you keyword in your title, at least once in your first paragraph and then scatter it throughout the rest of your page that you’ll convince the Adsense bot of what your topic is. It MAY also be helpful to include your keywords in the URL of your page (Moveable type can let you do this - ie look at the URL of this page - it incorporates my title and therefore some keywords). It MAY also be worth putting your keywords in outward links, bold, italics etc. All of these strategies also help optimise yor blog for search engines which won’t hurt either.

Examine your Sidebars, menus, header and footer - It is not just your main content that the Adsense bot searches to find the topic of your page, but also your other areas. When I looked at the healthcare blog that was getting ‘blogging’ ads I noticed that he had the word ‘blog’ in his title, three times on his sidebar and once in his footer. It was also in his URL and he also used the word quite often in his content. My recommendation was to remove the word from as many of those places as possible and to increase his health care keywords. The ads improved their relevancy almost immediately.

Stick to one topic per page - Obviously this may not be feasible on your front page - but attempt to keep each individual blog entry/post as highly targeted as possible. I’ve noticed that some people often include two or three topics in one entry - this will confuse Adsense’s bot so split them up into two entries.

Block irrelevant Ads - Sometimes despite your best intentions Google just gets it wrong and serves your ads that have nothing to do with what you write. If you’re getting some repeating irrelevant ads block them. Adsense lets you do this to quite a few sites and its easy to do. I have a number of ads blocked, some because they are philosophically not consistent with what I write about, but mainly because they just are not relevant to the topic of my blogs.

Ask Adsense - If all else fails notify Google Adsense of your issue. Of course they are busy people - but Google prides itself on being responsive to its users. I’ve emailed with queries a number of times, once on an issue of irrelevant ads, and every time I’ve had positive results from my query. You’ve got nothing to loose - shoot them an email!

If you do all of the above you SHOULD find Adsense serves you with relevant ads. In conjunction with the other elements in our equation this will contribute to increased click throughs and hopefully higher Adsense revenue. Next in this series on maximizing Adsense revenue is a post on Well Placed and Designed Adsense Ads.

Article Source: www.problogger.net

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 5 - High Paying Ads

2009-02-04T06:40:00.000-08:00

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

The next element of this Adsense equation to be examined is how to get high paying Adsense Ads running on your site. Obviously in any business one way to get higher profits is to charge more for your product - whilst you have no direct say in how much is charged for ads run on your site - there are ways of targeting types of ads that might bring in a higher return than others.

As we mentioned in our initial explanation of the equation, the PVR Blog is one example of a blog that targets a well paying ad type - ads for PVR technology. Whilst I do not know specifics of earnings I would suspect blogs like Gizmodo who run Adsense ads would also be generating a higher paying ad, due to their focus on technology.

The lesson we can learn from blogs such as these is that they attract specific ads (that presumably are well paying) by keeping their content targeted on the same topics. To over simplify what we’re saying - if you want ads about Camera Phones blog about Camera Phones.

Finding High Paying Ads is not as easy as it sounds (is anything?). Do a search for Google on High Paying Adsense Ads and you won’t find too many sites listing the best keywords for Adsense. The top Adsense users in Adsense discussion forums tend to be pretty secretive about not only what keywords they focus on, but also what sites they run. I don’t blame them either - its good business sense really.

Having said this there are a number of strategies and tools that you might like to employ to help find high paying keywords.

Buy them - Finding high paying keywords for your blog is possible by yourself for free - but as with everything a few entrepreneurial types are willing to do the leg work for you to save you some time and give you a comprehensive result. One service that you might like to try to find good keywords is Top Paying Keywords.
Trial and Error - I know this will frustrate some of you who want a nice and easy quick fix but overall it is one of the best pieces of advice I can give. Try writing on a topic - track the results - if it pays off do it again….lots. Adsense allows you to track specific pages or sections of your blog using its ‘channels’ feature - if you’re smart you’ll watch which sections of your blog are generating the highest ads by dividing your overall earnings by the number of clicks and comparing it to other channels. Keep trying new topics until you strike gold and then dig in like crazy!
Are there Any Ads? - This is a good first question. Despite the many thousands of advertisers using Adsense there are some topics where the answer to this question is no. A simple way to check is to head to Google and do a search for the key words you’re wanting to blog about. The results page will bring up not only a list of other sites writing about that key word (they are you competitors) but on the right hand side there will be a list of ads - these are the same sorts of ads you’ll get on your site if you write on the topic. If there are ads there, it is a good sign. If there are not - maybe its worth finding another topic to write on if you’re hoping to attract ads.
7 Search has a list of the 100 of the top paying keywords (in their advertising program - not Adsense) at the moment. Its a bit depressing actually to see a list like this because you’d have to sell your soul somewhat in order to go with many of them. Its an interesting site to check out though.
Also from 7 Search (and more useful) is their Keyword Suggestion Tool which gives you an idea of what people are paying per click on different tools (again this is not specifically for Adsense but it will give you an idea of what the going rates are). Find What also has a similar service.
Google Adsense’s biggest competitor are Overture (they run the ads on Yahoo) - they offer a service where you can enter your keywords and they will not only tell you how much advertisers are paying for the words but also how many people are searching for the term. This is a very useful tool.
Sign up for Adwords - One way of getting a feel for how much people are willing to pay per click is to sign up with Google as an advertiser yourself. It doesn’t cost much to start a mini campaign and do some research this way. You’ll get a feel for what people are bidding on different words very quickly this way.
Word Tracker is the best tool I’ve seen to help in finding keywords that people are searching for in the major search engines. The excellent thing about Word Tracker is that they also tell you how many other sites out there are targeting the same words! This is very handy as it will stop you targeting ‘Britney Spears’ as a Keyword phrase even though its one of the most searched for keywords on the web because literally hundreds of thousands of other sites have beaten you to the punch. Word Tracker has a free version to trial it and their paying version is even better - well worth the investment.

Targeting High Paying Adsense Ads is an important aspect of generating an income from Adsense. It is not enough in and of itself however. You can have $10 per click ads (I’ve not found any of these yet) but without generating any traffic your research into the right ads will be useless. Likewise it is one thing to identify which ads you want to target - but it is another thing to actually get these relevant ads showing on your site. It is to this topic which our next post in this series will head - Finding Relevant Adsense Ads.

Article Source: www.problogger.net

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 4 - Increasing Traffic

2009-02-04T06:34:00.000-08:00

I have argued the case for our equation for increasing Adsense Revenue

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

I now will turn my attention to each of the four elements of good Adsense revenue in turn and give some practical easy to implement tips to improve each from my experience.

Increasing Traffic Levels is a key component to increasing Adsense revenue. As I wrote previously, ‘The more people that see you Adsense Ads, the more likelihood there is that someone will click on them.’

Increasing the readership of your blog is not as simple as it sounds, it takes time, patience and hard work (and sometimes a bit of luck) Having said that there are many things you can do to get your blog in front of a wider audience and there exposing the adsense messages on your site to more potential ‘clickers’. Here are a few tips…

Quality, Interesting, Useful and Original Content - What are the blogs that you read the most? If you’re anything like me they are blogs that have quality content that ’scratches me where I itch’. This is essential to increasing your readership unless you have a pretty amazing ‘gimmick’ to bring readers in.
Good Blog Design is really important if you want your blog to create a good first impression. With millions of other blogs and sites out there its worth some effort to make yours stand out. Also worth a read is Good Weblog Design and Layout.
Link to others - be generous with your links to other bloggers big and small. You’ll be surprised how many links come back your way. This not only brings traffic from their sites but doesn’t hurt your ranking in Google.
Comment on others blogs - Some of my most loyal readers came to my blog because I genuinely interacted with them on their blogs through comments. Hear me now, I say genuinely because its easy to spam in comments, but this will have the opposite effect of generating readers to your blog.
Update Frequently - There is nothing that turns me off a blog faster than seeing that it hasn’t been updated for a month or more. Keep it rolling over with interesting content.
Interact with Readers - Having an interactive blog that invites the involvement of readers is one way of generating repeat visitors. I’ve written a tip on Interactive Blogging including a number of interactive tools that you can use on your blog. Also check out this tip on using comments effectively to increase interactivity on your blog.
Optimise for Search Engines - I can’t stress enough how important Search Engines are to increasing traffic, especially traffic that will click on your ads. I find that 95% of my traffic comes from Google and have found that anecdotal evidence suggests this traffic clicks through on Adsense ads at a higher rate than traffic from links on other blogs and sites. So work hard at getting listed and highly ranked on Search Engines.
Add a signature to your outgoing email - Learn a lesson from Hotmail who have used signatures on the bottom of their users emails for years to promote their home page and generate interest in their product. Be careful though if you don’t want your worlds to collide!
Web Rings - There are literally thousands of webrings that you can sign up for. I’m not sure how effective they are these days, but some people still swear by them.
Add an RSS feed to your blog - more and more people are reading blogs without ever visiting them through News Aggregators that pick up information using RSS. Whilst this does not guarantee those reading through aggregators will visit your blog (and therefore see your Adsense Ads) it certainly increases the chances of them dropping by, especially if you invite comments and have internal links on your posts.
List your site on Portals - There are a growing number of sites which exclusively list blogs. If you want people to find you its worth submitting your blog to be listed on them. Some focus on specific topics while others list blogs on a wide variety of topics (like Eaton Web and Globe of Blogs). Other portals like BlogShares and Blog Street also list a lot of blogs in different ways which might increase your blogs profile.
Blog Search Engines and Indexes - Get yourself registered on sites like Blogdex, Technorati, Popdex and Daypop (they require RSS I think). These sites have features that allow people to search for blog entries via topic and keywords. They also list the most popular recent topics and each have other interesting features which can enhance your blogging experience.
Start a Newsletter - Offer your readers a newsletter service to keep them up to date with your latest posts. I’ve found since adding a free weekly newsletter to my digicam blog that hundreds of readers have signed up for regular updates of my latest posts. Think about this - hundreds of people have given me permission to invite them to come back to my blog - every week!
Get Involved in Blog Projects and Memes - From time to time other bloggers will invite your participation in a blog project of theirs. Get involved, support their project and you might find it pays off. On the flip side start your own blogging project or meme. Do something that is of service to other bloggers. I tried something like this with Underblogs and Blogger Idol.
Get involved in other web forums - Genuinely participate in web forums and discussion pages on topics related to your blog. Many of these allow you to add a signature to your posts which raise your blogs profile.
Promote your Posts - If you think you’ve written something worthwhile spend a few minutes letting others know about it. I regularly shoot other bloggers to notify them of what I’ve written if I think it will interest them. Think about it before you send the email and don’t bombard the same people constantly with every topic you write on - be selective, concise, polite and helpful with your emails but don’t be afraid to promote yourself.
Add a ‘Email a Friend’ Option to your posts - make it easy for your readers to tell others about what you’ve written. I know this function gets used regularly on my blog and brings in new readers that I would never otherwise have been able to reach.

These are just some of the ideas that I’ve used and seen others use to increase the readership of a blog and thereby increase the exposure of Adsense ads to a wider audience.Many of the above tips were taken from my Blog Tips Series including the ‘Finding Readers’ Series.

What methods have your found to be effective at increasing the readership of your blog? What works for your and what doesn’t? What tips would you add to this collection?

Of course increasing traffic alone won’t greatly increase your Adsense revenue, but it can help! In our next Adsense Tip for Bloggers we will explore ways to generate High Paying Ads - the second component in our Adsense Revenue Equation.

Article Source: www.problogger.net

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 3 - An Equation for Success

2009-02-04T06:31:00.000-08:00

There are many factors that impact the level of revenue generated from a blog using the Google Adsense program. Books have been written explaining expert strategies for Adsense - However for the purposes of this series we’ve boiled it all down into four elements that we believe impact your Adsense earning capacity the most. Speaking in general terms here is a simple equation that illustrates how the factors each contribute to Adsense Revenue.

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

Its not Rocket Science. Each of the above four elements contribute directly to the total revenue that your Adsense Ads will produce. Don’t just work on one of them though because if any one is weak it will hold your potential earnings back. Lets break each factor down….

Traffic Levels - The more people that see you Adsense Ads, the more likelihood there is that someone will click on them. As I examine the statistics provided by Adsense that report my daily earnings I notice that my earnings in the past 8 months have increased considerably as my total page impressions have increased. For example earlier in the week when Slashdot linked up to this post I had an influx of 50,000 visitors in 24 hours to my blog - it doesn’t take a genius to work out what this did to my Adsense earnings that day! Work on increasing your traffic levels and you should see an increase in your Adsense Revenue.

High Paying Ads - Once again I’m stating the obvious, but if the content you provide on your blog attracts high paying ads you’re going to do significantly better. For example it has been documented that the PVR Blog is doing pretty well when it comes to high Adsense earnings - the secret of its success is partly due to it being served with ads that are high paying. The topic of the PVR blog is, as you’d expect, PVR technology including TiVo, Replay TV etc. This is cutting edge technology and therefore advertisers are willing to pay top dollar to get their products and services out there! In comparison if a person was to start a blog on ‘toothpicks’ I suspect the ads are not likely to pay very much. It would take very high traffic levels to earn as much from a toothpick blog as it would the PVR blog.

Relevant Ads - A second reason the PVR Blog is successful is that it servers relevant ads. To put it simply people looking for information on PVR technology are confronted by Adsense ads for PVR technology. I recently visited a blog that was having trouble getting relevant ads - they had a blog on Tourist destinations in Australia - but unfortunately they were getting Adsense ads for remote control cars. You can guess what their revenue was like. Increase the relevancy of your Ads to your content and you are one step closer to increasing your Adsense revenue.

Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads - One of the coolest things about the Adsense program is that they give you freedom in choosing the best position and color scheme for your ads. Just like in the wider world of advertising - positioning is a key element to an ads success. A Billboard positioned on a road where no one drives is not likely to get the same results as one positioned on a busy intersection. The position and design of your Adsense Ads is critical - if they are out of site they’ll never get clicked on.

Bringing them Together - The above four elements are in many ways pretty obvious when spelt out like this - the challenge comes to improving each to optimize Adsense revenue.

Your revenue will only grow as high as the weakest one of these factors on your blog. For example if you have high paying, relevant, well designed and positioned ads but no traffic you’ll not do well. Likewise if you have high traffic, high paying and relevant ads but they are poorly designed an in a position where they’ll never be seen - you’ll waste all your other hard work. Its not enough to work on one element.

How do we improve each? In the next four posts we’ll examine each area in turn and suggest a number of ways that you might try tweaking them to increase your revenue.

Article Source: www.problogger.net

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 2 - Is Your Blog Suitable for Adsense?

2009-02-04T06:27:00.000-08:00

Is your blog suitable for Adsense? - Before you rush into signing up for Adsense expecting it to earn you a million dollars it is worth asking the question of whether Adsense is the right revenue strategy for your blog. By no means is it the only option - you might like to check out this tip on other ways of making money from blogging.

Whilst there are some amazing success stories about earning big dollars with Adsense out there, it is worth taking a realistic look at some cold hard truths about the Adsense program.

Google does not accept every site that applies to the Adsense program.

Google Adsense Program Policies indicate that the content of sites must not contain things like excessive profanity, pornography, illicit drugs etc. Basically your blog needs to have content that is reasonably ‘family friendly’.
Also in their policy document is a reference to them not normally accepting pages of a personal nature. This is the topic of discussion in many Adsense forums and is obviously open to different interpretations. Many (if not most) blogs are personal in nature - however to maximize your chances of approval by Adsense a blog should be targeted on a particular topic/s. For example whilst this blog is often personal in nature - most of my individual posts (pages) focus on very specific themes which are repeated throughout the blog. update - this may have changed recently with Blogger now allowing blogger blogs to use Adsense.
Sites accepted into the Adsense program are also required to be easily navigable, have an adequate quantity of text based content (don’t apply if you’ve been blogging a week) and be written in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, or Spanish. They may not to have excessive advertising or other contextual/competing advertising.
Whilst not stated in the Adsense Policy document, many also believe that sites accepted into the program also need to have reasonable levels of traffic. If your blog is new, it may be worth waiting a few weeks or months before applying to build up traffic and content levels. Others speculate that a professionally designed, well-organized and privately hosted blog has a better chance of being accepted. The more professional and successful your blog appears the more likely it is to be accepted by Adsense.

If still in doubt after reading Google Adsense Program Policies you can email Google for clarification or just apply and see how you go.

Of course, acceptance by Google into the Adsense program does not guarantee your success. The fact remains that certain blogs will always be more successful than others at generating income.

Future posts in this series will focus upon strategies and tips for increasing your revenue but it should be stated here that the most successful sites are generally sites with very high traffic levels and/or content that is directly related to a particular product or service (the more targeted and niche-like the better).

It is also worth saying that Adsense works best on pages with lots of text content. It only reads text in determining ads, not images so make sure you have enough relevant content.

Article Source: www.problogger.net

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 1

2009-02-04T06:13:00.000-08:00

I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog - and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.

Covering costs of my Digital Photography Blog is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense - blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.

Whilst the agreement you sign with Google stresses that you are not allowed to give specific information about your earnings from the program I can say that I’m glad I’ve signed up because its well and truly covered my costs - and then some. In fact I think its quite feasible to expect that Adsense coupled with other strategies for making money from Blogging could quite easily generate a decent living. It takes time and hard work, but I think its very doable. (Update: Since writing this series I’ve revealed that I am now looking at making over a six figure income this year in 2005 from blogging).

So how do I make money from Google Adsense? Let me share some AdSense Tips that heve helped me.

This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Let me say up front I’m no expert - there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money than I am using Adsense - however most of them are not telling their secrets - well not for free anyway. I’ve got no secrets to hide and am willing to share what I’ve learnt since I signed up for the program 8 months ago. If you want a REAL expert’s opinion on Adsense I’d recommend buying Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense E-Book. Joel earns $15,000 per month from Adsense and has some good things to share.

I know some bloggers are put off or offended by the idea of making money from blogging so I’ll try not to let these posts dominate my blog - however if you are not interested in the topic, simply skip over these posts.

I am going to assume a few things in this series to cut down the amount of introductory comments I have to make. Here is what I am assuming:

You have a blog. Whilst most of the following tips will apply to other types of websites I run Adsense on blogs and will speak from that experience.
You have (or will) read a basic overview of Adsense and have some understanding of what it is.
You have(or will) read the program policies as outlined by Google. These give details of site eligibility, ad placements and other requirements for using the system.

Article Source: www.problogger.net

$3 Million in 6 Months With Adsense!

2009-02-03T11:07:00.000-08:00

The Power Play Interviews: Markus Frind- $3 Million in 6 Months

This is the first in a series of Internet Success Stories that you will begin to see on the Power Play Blog. Hope you enjoy them!

Markus Frind, the creator of Plentyoffish.com is a success story worth noting, as he has managed to take a niche formerly ruled by giant corporations and give it his own brand of marketing savvy. A case of David vs. Goliath, where the little guy comes out on top in the end. Markus is the top "individual" adsense publisher in terms of pageviews. Lets find out what some of his secrets are as he shares some advice with our readers. Feel free to comment!

Markus, what is your experience in computer programming and how did it prepare you for becoming a webmaster?

The average pageviews a day is around 14 million for the last week. I'm getting another 80 million pageviews a day from users polling the site to see if they have new messages. Really intensive bandwidth wise!

When I go to your website, I notice that the ads are targeted to my region, yet I have not even registered- can you explain to our readers how you accomplish this feat?

I'm just using ip2location.com- Basically i take your IP, look it up in the database and it tells me what your city is. I then bring up a list of users in your city, nothing magical about it at all.

Are most of your visitors coming primarily from search engines (SERPS), or are you finding that they come from other avenues? Do you actively advertise in the media?

Search engines account for something like 2% of my traffic. The vast majority of my traffic, like any other site with over 5 million pageviews a day comes from word of mouth, and repeat visitors.

The services on your site seem to be offered at no cost to the registrants. Is there some advantage you have over your competitors that allows you to do this?

I've developed new algorithms that allow me to create a mega site for next to no cost. Several years ago I created algorithm that was thousands of times faster then the algorithm used in the 1990's to find a string of 22 prime numbers. At the time a professor used several super computers and hundreds of regular computers over the course of several years to find a record. I did the same thing on 1 computer in 2 weeks.

Fascinating! Are there any other sites you currently maintain, or is plentyoffish.com the only one?

Its the only site at the moment. I've got a few other sites I registered for friends so they could learn to do marketing/affiliate stuff. At this point i think 1 site is enough.

Any tips for those looking to create a profitable endeavor on the internet?

IF someone else thinks what you are doing is a cool idea I'd say it isn't... Find something no one else thinks is important and build up a site with big traffic in that area. Also keep in mind, sites that have low monetization today but have traffic may be the gold mines of tomorrow. In the internet world anything and everything will be monetized at some point and traffic is king.

Traffic is King- very wise advice, Markus. One last question- How do you find the time to maintain such a large commodity on the internet? Surely you must have some other interests in life besides programming and website monitoring?

It only takes a hour a day on average, but its very tiring work. I spend the other couple of hours reading and seeing what is going on.

Thanks Markus!

Ten Simple Ways to Promote Your Website

2009-02-03T11:06:00.000-08:00

If you're in business, you're in business to succeed. Instead of simply hoping for the best, you need to take action in order to guarantee long term growth and profits. But for some reason, many business owners seem to think that online business are different. Actually, running and promoting an internet business is more difficult. With these ten tips, you can make sure to promote your business and make internet retail look easy.

1. Pick a simple domain name – When you're building your website, make sure to pick a website name that is easy to remember and that clearly indicates who you are and what you sell. You want to always be in the minds of your customers and prospective customers.

2. Put your domain name in your emails – When you want people to find out about you, you need to make sure they know where to find you. Have your website name at the bottom of your email signatures for everyone you email. This will help you spread the word, even though you're not directly selling.

3. Be a forum poster – Get onto forums and chat rooms where prospective customers are and make sure to interact with them, posting your website address if you can. Show that you are knowledgeable about your business and your market.

4. Include great website content – When you have keyword filled articles that also give your visitors something worth reading, you will increase the chances of your website showing up early in web searches for your particular business or product. The articles on your website should be interesting and relevant to the products or services you are selling and should be written for people to read, not just to bump up your keyword counts.

5. Link with other related sites – There's safety in numbers when you are in the online business world. Be sure to talk with other sites that might want to post your website link if you post theirs. Most webmasters are happy to do this if they feel like your site offers them a change to address other customers they might not have been able to find any other way.

6. Start a blog – Start a blog about related things to your business so that you attract attention to your regular business website. Include a link to your website at the bottom or within your web blog entries. Blogs are free to start and can be up and running in just an hour.

7. Use press releases – When you have a new product or service, create a press release that informs your target market about it. You can submit these to press release websites as well as to your local newspapers and news stations.

8. Always have your website name in view – Get magnets and put these on your car. Put the website name on your checks, your flyers, your business cards, etc. The more you put your website name out there, the more people will want to find out what you're about.

9. Tell your friends and family – This sounds simply enough, but just by telling people about your website, you will start a chain reaction of free advertising.

10. Write for articles websites – When you submit articles that you have written (or have had ghostwritten), you can establish yourself as an authority on your business, and include a link to your website at the bottom.Promoting yourself and your website might be a bit more difficult than it is with other businesses, but it is also low cost for the return you can get.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com

One Idea For Making Money On The Internet

2009-02-03T11:04:00.002-08:00

There are probably as many different ways to make money online as there are people searching for them. The real problem is matching you with a way to make money you can actually do. Millions of people face this obstacle everyday.

They do not know what they want to do, just that they need an idea for making money on the Internet. I always liked the theory that if you dowhat you love the money will come.

Someday when you get a chance read by Confessions Of A Lazy Super Affiliate by Chris Rempel. His whole idea is that you want to find niches where people are ready to spend money right now. He thinks that those of us telling people to get involved in a niche you have a passion for is bad advice.

I see where he is coming from, but for a new person starting out with Internet marketing who do not have skills, I disagree with this. You will stick with it longer if you enjoy it. This can be hard when you are not making any money.

Another excellent book I read a week or so ago was titled 20 Ways To Make $100 Per Day Online and it was fantastic. I learned two ideas myself that I can use next year to add to my income.

You can see I get my ideas to make money from home by reading what others are already doing. I think it is a good idea to take what you learn and re-do it to make it yours.

One thing they talk about in the 20 Ways book is thinking about what you know how to do right now that you could sell as a service.

- How about writing email marketing campaigns

- You might be to set up autoresponders for people.

- Maybe you know the best way to set up a traffic exchange campaign and you offer that as a service.

How about building websites or setting up blogs.

Look at all of the small businesses who are not on the internet yet.

- You could publish a newsletter for busy business owners

You get the idea. Some of this stuff makes more sense than just selling affiliate products in a niche you have a passion for. I do think the lazy affiliate is right on this.

When you look at it this way you are not following your passion, but one where you are an expert. You are selling your knowledge to people who will pay you for it.

This seems logical if you are an expert in something. This is a great idea for making money on the Internet because you will never run out of business. As long as there are website and blogs there will be people willing to pay for help to start and run them.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com

Internet Marketing Made Easy

2009-02-03T11:04:00.001-08:00

Hello I'm Roger Mazerolle; I have taken several courses in international trade, which has opened my knowledge awareness that we all are living and working within a global economy.

I have joined the Vortex Marketing Group to expand my knowledge base regarding online networking and business development. Through the voucher system I have become a pacesetter and now have a collection of resources and tools used to work towards goals within the digital products and information age.

We are working together to build each of our teams. The voucher system allows you to get in on a ground floor business and continue to build it with information and digital products to do your marketing and sales with, thus by working from home you minimize your overhead and you need not stock any inventory or buy any stock. So you can have immediate cash flow from your present job, which give you the freedom to develop your own online business as a sideline and make a residual income from whether you want to market your own product, the product or service of an affiliate company or our products and services, we show you how.

A wise entrepreneur once remarked that the only thing that is both necessary and sufficient for the establishment of a successful and profitable business is “Customers”. We will present some of the easiest and most powerful long-term marketing strategies. By implementing these strategies you will see how “online marketing is made easy.”

With millions of "newbies" logging on to the internet everyday, the opportunity to capture new market share has never been better. John Naisbitt in his book “Megatrends” describes the rise of networks as one of the ten major forces shaping the future. Networking is people linking resources and ideas with other people.

So with products in demand, a team of like-minded people, tools, resources, and free knowledge from experienced internet marketers you can have you own online business.

Cordially Yours Roger Mazerolle Pacesetter Vortex Marketing Group

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com

How Free Web Content Has Become The Internet Marketing's Driving Force

2009-02-03T11:01:00.000-08:00

How did he do it? How did your geeky cousin come up with such a cool website? Not only does it have great pictures of your latest family get together, but it also has the actual latest news headlines and even stock quotes. (And you never even knew he was into the stock market?)

Actually, he probably isn’t. Chances are, he was just smart – he used free web content sites to spice up his own website.

Free web content sites and free article sites are quickly growing in popularity on the internet. And no wonder: They allow webmasters to quickly refresh their sites with new stuff, thus ensuring visitors will keep going back to them. (In the internet world that’s called “stickiness”.

What kind of content is available? Just about anything, from the latest news, trivia, quizzes, animation and clip art. Some even provide templates to help you design your website and counters to keep track of how many people visit it. Another nifty feature many free web content sites offer is a link to advertisers: If you link to one of them and a visitor from your site clicks the link, you could earn money. That’s an easy way to earn a few extra bucks, isn’t it?

Where does the other free content come from? Mainly from writers who want to gain exposure (or at least keep their hand in writing).

For instance, someone who is a trivia junkie might like to come up with fun quizzes. Rather than try to have the quizzes published by conventional means, he or she can submit them to a free web content site. If enough people select those quizzes for use on their website, it could generate enough of a “buzz” to make a publisher take notice. Even if that did not happen, the trivia junkie still gets the joy of sharing his or her hobby with others.

Are you a writer but don’t know what to write about? Many of the free web content sites have lists from publishers who are seeking specific subjects. Some sites allow web designers to have material custom written for their site. Check these lists to see if something meets your special interest.

Does it sound too good to be true? Maybe yes, maybe no. Remember the old adage, “You get what you pay for.” But with the publishing industry as competitive as it is, you may find some really valuable information in that free article. Just be sure to carefully read the content you are considering to make sure it is accurate and well-written enough. Badly written material is bad news for your website, no matter who wrote it.

Also, it pays to do a search to make sure the article wasn’t ripped off from someone else. Simply type a key phrase from the material you are considering into your favorite search engine. If the search reveals another article very similar to the one you are considering, it may have been plagiarized.

It is also important to consider readership. If your website is mainly geared toward “Star Trek” and its many sequels, do you really want that wine review article in the margin? Likewise, if you’re fairly conservative, read that romance column carefully to make sure it does not espouse values that you don’t agree with.

Part of the beauty of free web content is that there is so much available. You can change content as often, or as little as you like. You can experiment with both the look and the content of your site – and have fun doing so.

Likewise, if you are a writer, you can try your hand at writing movie trivia and if nobody seems interested in it, you can always go back to sports writing instead. As long as your content meets the site’s parameters, it will still be available for others to see, and perhaps use. It is helpful that many web content sites have a rating system. It allows you to see how your work compares with similar works and perhaps help you to match your material to reader interest.

Using a free web content site has many advantages, both for writers and for web page designers. Find them by typing “free web content” into your favorite search engine. You’ll be amazed at what’s out there for you to use – free. Who knows, you may even find stuff written by your geeky cousin – and use it too.

Article Source: http://freearticalepro.com

Online Business And Marketing

2009-02-03T10:58:00.000-08:00

Sometimes your job just seems like it is not enough at all and you simply cannot make ends meet in your financial situation. So, you are looking for some ways that you can try out in order to make a little bit of extra money that will boost your income and your lifestyle so that you do not have to worry about money problems anymore in your day to day life. You know that the internet is definitely a really good place to start looking for opportunities because there are so many different resources and tools that you can use in order to do almost anything you want and in a way that helps you help yourself in that you can gain experience and knowledge of how the internet works. However, it can always be really scary to start something new no matter what it was. You know that everything requires practice to become a master at it like riding a bike, learning to drive a car, or becoming skilled on a musical instrument. All of these things take time, practice, effort, work, and a guide that will help you to pace yourself and understand everything and the basic conventions of what you are trying to do.

So you know that there are a lot of opportunities and ideas for you out there for you in the world of cyber space and you also know that you need some help learning how to navigate in this new world so that you can really make the kind of money that you want. Well the good news is that I know of a couple tricks that will help you start getting checks that have amounts you will begin to love and goals that you will shatter as you learn more and more about online marketing. The first thing (which you probably know about) is that you should associate yourself with some affiliate sites so that you can start to gain not only a reputation on the internet but also some experience in advertising and marketing through other people's products and methods. The Pro2 system is something that you should really look into in order to give you some insight into affiliate marketing because it is a program that offers you professional information and advice and a guiding hand through a step by step process that will teach you how to work affiliate sites to your best advantage. The trick is to set lower goals for yourself at the beginning so that you can spend a lot of time learning how to do everything as opposed to obsessing about making it all perfect so that you can reach some outrageous goal that you have set for yourself.

Have you ever heard of online malls? Well, the Pro2 system works closely with a particular affiliate site called ClickBank which is a cyber mall that has all the products you could ever imagine. You can look through here and start getting ideas of what products you are good at promoting and how you would like to promote them and your own sales.

Article Source: http://freearticalepro.com

If You Are New To Internet Marketing, You Need To Know This

2009-02-03T10:57:00.000-08:00

To succeed on the Internet, you have two challenges. First you must drive traffic to your site and secondly, you also must get site visitors to convert themselves into customers. And that is it! But of course, that only is the start of the process.

When boiled down, online marketing is a pretty simple proposition. The complications only arise when you consider the options involved in making it happen. Some of the first questions you should ask yourself about starting an online marketing business are:

* Do I know how to find prospects on the internet?

* Do I know how to convert my prospects into customers?

* How long will it take for me to start making enough money to keep me interested in pursuing this online marketing business?

* What do I do to start this online marketing business making money fast?

The answer to all those questions vary so wildly, there is simply no way to address them in this article. You would have to approach your online marketing from various angles depending on the price, profit and nature of what you are marketing. That is also why buying a particular software program or e-book will really not be the end all solution you had hoped it would be.

Choosing your marketing business should be based more on the help or mentoring available than the actual product that you would be marketing. That sounds kind of backwards doesn't it? Think about it. There are literally thousands of successful money making opportunities out there. Any one of which could be just the thing for you. But how did the people who are getting rich in those opportunities do it?

They were either lucky or had already know what they were doing or they had a mentor to help them.

Making better than average income via online marketing is not hard. However, it's not so easy that anybody who watches "8 full hours of the super duper video" can reasonably expect to have a chance at it.

Before getting envolved, the top things to look for in an online marketing business are:

1. Do you have access to a mentor to help you get started faster and effectively?

2. What kind of access do I have to this mentor? Is the access via video tutorials or live, one on one contact and interaction?

3. How motivated is that mentor? It has to be Win-Win for your mentoring to be truly effective. Do you pay your mentor directly or does you mentor get paid more the better you do at your new business. (Hint: The second option is best.)

4. How long will that mentor's interest in helping me succeed be? One sale? Two sales? Indefinitely? (Hint: The third option is best.)

Of course there are other important things to look for in starting your home based business. One of the most important considerations is your cost vs profit. For example, weight your expenses per sale against your profit per sale.

In as concise and straightforward manner as I can possibly muster, what I really am trying to get across to you is that without a mentor you would, at best, only be guessing that your business formulas are profitable. If it is experience that you don't have, what experience are you pull from? It would have to be from a video or an e-book? Would you stake your future on that?

Simply put, a personal, live and accessible mentor is your most valuable asset.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com

Internet Marketing - The Right Way to Become an Internet Marketing Consultant

2009-02-03T10:56:00.000-08:00

Internet marketing is a lucrative business. There are many individuals who are earning substantial revenues by just selling their products or services over the Internet while at the same time endorsing the products or services of other Internet marketers. Revenues are flowing out of different outlets—through affiliate programs, direct product selling, or offering Internet marketing-related services.

With several features such as round-the-clock operability, opportunity of widening clientele base, and low starting costs, it is not surprising that the Internet marketing industry is now full of mushroom businesses owned and operated by novices who are eager to share the wealth of this lucrative industry. However, in order to grab a slice of wealth offered by Internet marketing, you must bear the stiff competition over the market. In this stiff competition, Internet marketers who possess the knowledge and capability on this type of investment will win the game.

The rule of the Internet marketing game is simple: learn the rules and apply necessary marketing strategies in order to win the game. Though you have several websites that are easy to navigate and contain useful features such as complete inventory listings as well as shopping cart facilities, if it is unable to generate generous amount of traffic, your Internet marketing career will be a total failure.

To avoid reaching possible career failure, it is important that you seek the help of an Internet marketing consultant. One of their business objectives is to provide their clients the necessary strategies or possibly handle the situation by themselves in terms of generating web traffic to their clients’ sites. This can be done through various ways such as affiliate marketing programs, web page optimization, web content development, or pay per click advertising. Even though as an Internet marketer, you are familiar with the aforementioned marketing concepts, you need sufficient time and expertise to apply it to your Internet marketing business. To fill up the gap, an Internet marketing consultant has the capability of applying the necessary strategies to build essential web traffic that will result in increased sales and generated revenues.

In case you have the knowledge and technical expertise about Internet marketing, you may also consider the career of an Internet marketing consultant aside from being an Internet marketer. If you have the marketing background and such is proven to be effective for other Internet marketing business, you may serve as a consultant to other Internet marketers, especially the new ones.

To be a successful Internet marketing consultant, you need to conduct an “inventory” of your Internet marketing skills and knowledge. You start by figuring out your strengths and determine what particular areas of Internet marketing you are weak. From such information, you will be able to construct a plan that will help educate yourself and improve your weak points. Begin by working out in your weaknesses and consistently testing it to determine if you have improved or not. Once you have developed your skills and you feel that you can go on, you are now ready to embark the career of being an Internet marketing consultant.

Once you are now in the field, always prepare because you will deal with numerous clients of varying needs. You will be able to meet complete novices as well as seasoned veterans on the Internet marketing industry. If you have come across clients who knew nothing about the business and ask you to take charge, you will have to take them under your wing. As a consultant, it is your responsibility to provide your clients their needs, whether they are complete novices or marketing gurus.

Start your consultant career on one or two areas of expertise. You may specialize on search engine optimization, newsletter writing, and other Internet marketing strategies. Identify the niche which you are strong with and make sure that you are regularly updated about any developments on those particular areas of expertise. You may also try concentrating on “hot niches” by typing your question on major search engines and see what comes after.

Being an Internet marketing consultant has the responsibility he needs to bear on serving the marketing needs of his clients. However, it takes common sense, solid knowledge, and enjoyment on what you are doing in order to help other Internet marketers in the long run. If you think you have the edge over a certain aspect, you can always go to that consultant direction. All of these are really up to you to think about.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com

Starting An Online Business - Some Basic Steps

2009-02-03T10:54:00.002-08:00

If you really want to achieve your goal of earning extra money or a living through an online business there are certain steps, which you need to follow. Today, there are thousands who have tried to set up their own online business only to fail after a few weeks or months simply because they have not had the patience and persevered with it. Below we take you through a few of the steps when it comes to you starting an online business.

Step 1 - Rather than going with a product that seems to be popular on the internet you should be looking for those, which will help others. So look around for those people who have a problem that needs solving and then find the solution to it and then begin advertising on your website.

Step 2 - It is important that your website contains good quality content copy. Remember it is this, which will help when it comes to selling the product or service that you are offering. There are plenty of proven ways a person can use to ensure that they end up producing the right kind of sales copy and which will end up getting visitors to their site to purchase the product in question.

Step 3 - Along with writing good sales copy, you need to design and then build a great looking website as well. It is important that you keep it as simple as possible and also ensure that those visiting it your site find it friendly to interact with. Remember you will only have around 10 seconds in which to grab the attention of the person who has come to your site before they choose to move on to the next one.

Step 4 - Once the site is up and running you need to start to get it appearing in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN as quickly as possible. One such way is through the use of pay per click advertising, which once incorporated on your site will help to get your site quickly recognised by the various search engines.

Step 5 - To further help increase the amount of traffic to your site you need to start establishing yourself as an expert. One of the best ways of doing this is by writing good unique articles and then submitting them to sites such as Ezine Articles and iSnare.

Step 6 - Also another way of helping to get more people coming back to your site is through the use of e-mail marketing. This is an extremely useful asset to have with your online business as in many cases those who sign up to receive e-mails from you are likely to purchase from you as well.

As long as you keep, the above basics in mind when starting an online business you should be soon on your way to achieving the goals that you have set for yourself. However, do not expect everything to happen all at once, it will take time and you will need patience and perseverance if you want to really get the rewards that you deserve.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com

Make More Money On The Internet

2009-02-03T10:54:00.001-08:00

Whether you own the website you advertise on or not, you can still benefit from increased, highly targeted traffic to that site.

It is true. I do not have a website, however, one of my articles - Computer Hackers Must Be Stopped - is presently being used in eight spots on the first page on Google. On AOL the same article is being used in seven spots on the first page. I haven't checked the other search engines. These rankings were accomplished at little cost and with a great passion for my topic.

I am sure you would expect to pay a lot of money for such rankings. If you are using Pay Per Click it is nearly certain that you are paying dearly for visitors on the first page. But, you can get great rankings for virtually nothing.

If you have rankings such as these, what are you paying for them? If your answer is "nothing", leave things alone! If the answer is anything else, I will tell you of a way to lower your costs and to increase your profits.

To use this tool, you need only the ability to write a letter. To use it to its' greatest advantage, you need both knowledge and passion about your product and the ability to pass on that knowledge and passion to others.

I am referring to Unique Article Wizard. At the present time, Unique Article Wizard (UAW) submits accepted articles to about 650 directories. After your article is accepted for publication, you do not have to do anything more. Everything else will be done for you.

Unique Article Wizard is a comprehensive program which contains all the information and instructions you need. It even includes a step by step video tutorial which takes you from an idea right to a finished product. Simplicity itself!

UAW submits your articles but does not forget about you. You will be kept informed about changes being made to their site, new services and their plans to expand to include submissions to new directories.

Now, back to the value of this service. How long and how much effort would it take for you to write and re-write your articles and submit them to all those directories? How much time which of course is money - would that cost you?

Remember this: Rankings equal traffic, but highly targeted traffic equals money in your pocket. Now, the Unique Article Wizard is NOT a free service, but the cost compared with the potential for the increased revenue you could see is truly negligible.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com

You CAN Earn $15,184 In Only 24 Hours ...Guaranteed!

2009-02-03T10:51:00.000-08:00

A lot of people ask this question all the time. "How do I make money online quickly?" My answer is generally, "You don't!" You have to work for it to make it happen.But, the truth is, there are a few ways to make money rather quickly and even as soon as today.

Making money is just one step in the money process. Making Money is not the real fundamental reason why a blog is in existence. Making Money is the new Discworld book from Terry Pratchett, and guess what. Making money is a good way for your child to learn some real life skills, but be sure they are ready

Entrepreneurs everywhere are always looking for the next best way to advertise their products and/or services. One way to advertise on the Internet is known as cost per click (CPC) or pay per click (PPC) advertising. According to Wikipedia, the free, online encyclopedia, pay per click advertising is where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser's website. Advertisers bid on keywords they believe their target market would type in the search bar when they are looking for a product or service. When a user types a keyword query matching the advertiser's keyword list, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser's ad may be shown. These ads are called sponsored ads or links which appear next to, and sometimes, above the natural or organic results, or anywhere on a content page.

Depending on the demand of the product or service you are selling, pay per click advertising can be highly effective. However, the only sure way to know if people are interested in your product or service is to use all of the traditional less expensive ways to advertise first and rate your success of each. Pay per click advertising is not cheap and is a gamble. Some of the top keywords used to describe the product or service you are marketing may be as high as $5.00 or more per word. Anyone considering this advertising medium must have a budget and be willing to create, change and renew ads frequently. Oftentimes, you may find yourself having to babysit , then as you notice your ad and keywords are bringing traffic and making sales, you won t have to sit at the computer as often.

Before you decide to sign up with pay per click companies, be sure you know what to expect.

1) First, be sure to scan your computer with fully up-to-date anti-malware solutions, because there is a network of computers that are infected with Clickbots. These computers are being used to defraud pay per click systems, registering clicks automatically and providing lucrative returns for the creators.

2) When deciding on a pay per click company to advertise your product or service, take the time to research business forums for entrepreneurs, sites that report rip-offs and search blogs to find out others experiences. Be sure to type in the name of the company in the search box at these sites to see what others have written about it. Some companies have been known to offer high price services to create your ads and submit it to search engines that aren t at the top, then they take some of your advertising dollars and invest it in their own search engines.

3) How much does it cost to sign up? Are there additional fees? When will you be billed? What is the fine print when it comes to free trials? Know the answers to these questions before you sign up. Provide a gift card instead of your bankcard information when possible. Gift cards that can be used as credit cards will give you better control over your budget and some online security. This way if for some reason your campaign doesn t work out, you discover fraudulent business practices, etc. you won t have to be concerned about money coming out of your bank account and possibly incurring overdraft charges. If you must use your personal bank account, keep a close watch on your statement and contact the company right a way if you see anything questionable.

4) Make a list of as many keywords related to your product or service. Know how much your top keywords will cost. Review others campaigns for about a week or two, if you still notice those companies are advertising their products, they may be doing well. Visit a few of your competitors sites to get ideas on possibly more keywords.

5) Formulate three different ads all advertising your specific product or service. These ads will be rotated and whichever one does the best, you will use that same ad at other pay per click companies.

6) Know which country and/or state your will be advertising in before you sign up. Some countries do better than others because they may not be as saturated with your product or service like the United States.

7) If you should notice your ad campaign is not doing well and you proceed to stop it, be aware that the site may not stop running your campaign until 24 hours later. Meanwhile, you will continue to accrue clicks and charges.

I know that last one was a bit overly simplistic, but like I said, "It's way too much to get into here." Keep in mind that these are just 5 among the dozens of other ways to make money online. Take action and change your life!

Making money is better than losing money, for sure, but if you can make more money elsewhere, or if the money you are making really is insignificant, then you have to ask whether it’s really worth it or not to sell.

Make Money With Your Website

2009-02-03T10:49:00.000-08:00

Webmasters always want to make some extra incomes from their websites. It is true that it seems pointless if you pay constantly to run a website without any income from it. The website should at least be able to support itself for all the expenses. In fact, you will be able to do that with affiliate programs. Yes, you can make some money with these programs from your website!

So how do affiliate programs actually work? You have a website and there are visitors to it. And you can join programs with products or services related to your websites. You will then be provided with some affiliate links.

After you get the links, you will need to put then on your website. You can then start making money with your website. Here is how it works: When a visitor or customer in your website clicks a link and purchases some products or services in the merchant site, you will get a part of the sales as commission. And this is the way you make money with your website.

You can also find something more than just links from the affiliate programs. They will usually provide webmasters with tons of promotional tools and these tools are very useful for the visitors. If you put these tools on your website you can add value to it. And these useful tools can attract even more visitors to your website.

The tools and resources may even attract other webmasters to link to your website. These will help to boost the PageRank and you may get a better ranking in the Google search results. Positioning well in Google will certainly mean more visitors to your website and you can make even more money from them.

At this point you may want to join some programs right away. But you may not know what programs are available. In fact, there are lots of affiliate programs out there and each program will have its own strength. Some of these programs are commission junction, clickbank, azoogle and moreniche. You may also find some more programs when you search on search engines.

There are also choices of making money apart from affiliate programs. And Google Adsense is probably one of the most popular systems webmasters will join. You can make money when someone clicks on the links. This can be an advantage because in the case of affiliate marketing you can only make money when visitors make purchase. To this end it may be a better choice in order to make money. But webmasters are also reporting that they can make more money with affiliate programs than Google Adsense. You should try on your own to see which is a better choice for you.

You should start joining some affiliate programs and make money to support the expenses of your website. In fact, you will find that the money you make will be a lot more than the expenses for the hosting fee and domain registration. You may even make your living out of your website with affiliate programs.

How to Start a Niche Marketing Strategy

2009-02-03T10:47:00.000-08:00

Internet niche marketing can be implemented in a few different ways. The first and most obvious is advertising. This can be done through an agency where you will have various banner ads and displays designed and placed on a niche website. You can also write articles for directories that you have found with the correct niche marketing group. Your niche marketing strategy would also include email marketing to various people you have found on directories, through community based sites you can use forums and blogs as a great niche marketing strategy. In fact any kind of advertising strategy you would normally put into practice you can use as a niche marketing strategy, but obviously finding your niche is the most important aspect of making this process profitable for you.

When you have to start your internet marketing scheme there are a few things that you can do to make the process go smoothly and successfully. This first thing you can do is to make a plan about what you are going to do and when you are going to do it. You can find a list of niche website addresses that you must contact and advertise on, use a niche ebook to help you, decide what your profitable niche is and stick to it and keep looking for online niche sectors that are new. It is an ongoing process and to keep up with the ever changing world of the internet, you need to work at it constantly.

Revise your niche marketing strategy every so often to make sure you are hitting the mark and making the amount of sales you need. Also think about how you can improve your sales with other affiliate niche groups and different internet marketing approaches. There are many ways to start and maintain your marketing strategy if you keep working at it and looking at it with fresh eyes.

Once you have your step by step niche marketing strategy written down and dated, you can begin with the process. Make sure your adverts and banners are complete. Have everything ready at your fingertips so that when you find a slot or decide to advertise you can straight away. Have your details written out so you can make use of forums and free ad opportunities easily and efficiently. The most important thing to remember about niche marketing is that it is supposed to be cost effective. Instead of advertising to the masses because it is easier, you have chosen to find the niche online and target them specifically to save as much money and time as you can. Make sure you are doing that otherwise you might as well not bother. Make your niche marketing strategy work for you in every way possible. Once you have started doing your internet niche marketing strategy, you can start to decide on great ones and filter out the ones that are not working. This will help you to be more effective and spend time on the places that are really profiting at the moment. Remember that what is popular one week might not be the next, so have your back up niche website options and various other secondary strategies so that you can swap when you feel it is necessary.

SEO Your Images: Enhanced Image Search

2009-02-03T10:42:00.000-08:00

We already know that ALT tags should be used for relevant images (I say relevant because you can skip putting ALT tags for images placed in your page for purely aesthetic and/or organisational purposes such as borders). However, what many neglect to do is to take advantage of Google’s enhanced image search. The enhanced image search is actually very useful for helping the images in your pages rank better in Google images SERPs. Enhanced image search actually helps you rank better through the selection of labels that are more relevant to the images in your site. According to Google they are able to associate the image sin your site with relevant labels through the use of Google Image Labeler.

To opt-in to Google’s enhanced image search simply login to Google Webmaster Tools, choose the URL of the site you wish to have the enhanced image search enables, click Tools, and then click on Enable enhanced image search.

If you have a graphics intensive site you should really opt-in to this feature. If you worry that your images will rank better than your site and that users will end up simply ripping off your images (many actually do not visit the actual site but only go to the image URL) you can remedy this problem by redirecting users sent by Google. You can also disallow hotlinking of images.

Image Rank Factors

2009-02-03T10:29:00.000-08:00

While most are conscious about ranking well in SERPs many overlook the need to optimise for image search. Image search should NOT be overlooked since it can bring in considerable amount of traffic. As an example, in my personal blog it’s really funny how the search term “Mila Jovovich” gives me the most search traffic and how a vast majority of that traffic comes from image search. Note too that I only posted about Mila Jovovich a couple of times. Goes to show that you just don’t know what will really bring you lots of traffic.

To make sure you don’t miss out on the traffic image search can bring (if you post images on your blog!) here are the factors you should take note of:

text surrounding the image - Note that the distance of the text from the image also counts so it makes sense to place the image as near as possible to the related text.
text of pages linking to the picture
the number of websites containing the same or similar image - This helps determine relevancy of image to the search term
size of image - Usually the image with higher resolution ranks better. Note though that users can filter search results by file size. The reasoning behind this may be more for the viewing pleasure since a higher resolution image looks better.
Remember though that loading your page with lots of high resolution images may bog down your site causing it to have a longer loading time. Make sure you do not sacrifice usability and accessibility!
link relationships between images - Images that are linked together and have related associated text will help determine relevancy
frequency of image’s appearance in website - This pertains to logos and other recurring images. It helps determine importance and relevance of image to the website topic.
face and name detection - The more faces on an image the higher it is usually ranked. On the other hand if a specific name is queried then a single face with the person searched for will rank better.

10 Tips for Effective Reciprocal Linking

2009-02-03T10:24:00.000-08:00

Due to excessive exploitation of this tactic many webmasters, and even SEO consultants doubt the benefit of carrying out reciprocal linking campaigns. Reciprocal linking means exchanging links with slightly similar, complimenting websites for search engine optimisation. Search engines, especially Google, rank those websites higher that are linked to by various other websites. They assume that when people link to your website, they endorse the value you provide to their visitors.

Reciprocal linking goes back to the late nineties in fact. Many websites (called link farms) were created specially to facilitate reciprocal linking, but such websites were soon blacklisted by various search engines. But this hasn’t mitigated the significance of well-crafted reciprocal linking campaigns. In this post I’m going to list 10 things you should consider while engaging in reciprocal linking.

Choose your linking partners carefully: Some websites have a bad reputation. Links going to them from your website and links coming from them to your website can significantly harm your rankings and can even get your website blacklisted. I’m not going to mention what sort of websites are disreputed because the idea of disrepute differs from person to person.
Choose websites that add value to your website: There is no use exchanging links with websites that are in no way related, even remotely, to your website’s theme. For instance, if you are a web design company and you don’t offer SEO services it would be OK to link to SEO websites and get links from them but linking to escort services websites or car rental websites wouldn’t make any sense (if they are your clients you should have their links on your portfolio page).
Have a clear-cut policy on your website: Dedicate a separate page to your reciprocal linking policy and state in the policy what sort of links you can accept and from what kind of websites you would appreciate incoming links.
Make sure proper anchor text is used: It’s very important what anchor text the linking websites use when they link to you. If you are a web design company then the phrase “web design” or something similar must definitely be a part of the anchor text otherwise the incoming link is of no use. If you are using an image request then to use the phrase in the ALT attribute of the image tag.
See that the page is not dynamically generated: Hand-coded links are better search engine optimised compared to dynamically generated pages. Some webmasters use JavaScript (a client-side script) or other server-side scripts to generate the page on which they display reciprocal links. There is no use exchanging links with such websites.
Exchange links with highly ranked websites: This is often a difficult task but not unattainable. When you approach webmasters for reciprocal linking offer check the page rank (although it’s not a perfect indicator of a website’s popularity). Links from highly ranked websites carry more weight compared to low-ranked websites.
Be patient: It’s not that people will start exchanging links with you the moment you send them an email request. It may happen that even after more than 20 emails nobody responds or even if they respond they politely (or rudely) refuse your offer. Don’t feel daunted; everybody goes through this. Unless you are very popular very few people will exchange links with you readily. It will take time, so practice patience, lots of it.
Have great content, and a great website: Provide an incentive to the others to link to your website. It’s very difficult to get people to link to you if you have a lousy website with meager content. Some websites are so well-maintained and have such rich content that people love linking to them. You’ll always have an upper edge if you have a great website with lots of content because then everybody knows that sooner or later you are going to rank very high on all major search engines.
Reply to as many link exchange requests as possible: Treat people as you would like to be treated. Politely reply to all link exchange requests even if you are not interested in exchanging links with the requesting party.
Avoid page that have hundreds of links: The more reciprocal links a website has, the less is the impact of the inbound links you get from it (unless that website is a niche online directory). Make sure the page containing your link doesn’t have more than 25-30 links.

This basically encompasses all the things you should keep in mind while carrying out your reciprocal linking campaigns.

The Value Of Quality Link Building In SEO

2009-02-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

Quality link building involves getting inbound links to increase the overall SERP positions of not only your website’s homepage, but also your deeper URLs.

Simply exchanging links indiscriminately with other webmasters and bloggers, although this creates lots of noise, it does not necessarily generate any great SEO value for you. In order to engage in meaningful link building exercise the placement of the links should be voluntary and only between related sites. For instance it doesn’t make sense that your web designing website links to bodybuilding websites and the bodybuilding website links to web designing websites, nor would it give great value.

The external links that you have on your website should add value to your existing content. If you design websites but don’t provide SEO services than it makes perfect sense to recommend to your visitors some quality SEO websites and online resources. Similarly an SEO company can link to a website or websites that provide a search engine friendly website designs or the websites that contain useful web designing tips and tricks.

Indiscriminately Exchanging links with all sorts of websites can actually have to be counterproductive because the search engines can penalise you for linking to websites that have a bad “reputation”.

When you have lots of quality inbound links it conveys to the search engines that your website contains really valuable information and hence it should be ranked higher for the related topic. Even when you link to other external websites and if those websites contain trusted information then too your website earns higher rankings.

So always remember: when it comes to exchanging links the quality matters far more than the quantity.

The Importance of back links in SEO

2009-02-03T10:20:00.000-08:00

The importance of back links in SEO (also referred to as inbound links) stems from the fact the Google uses them to evaluate or at least as an indicator as to the quality of your content. In fact they attach so much importance to back linking that back in 2005 Google filed a patent application based on search technology based on back linking.

Anyway, the important thing here is that getting quality back links, or inbound links is very crucial for higher search engine rankings and webmasters and online publishers employ various methods — legitimate or illegitimate — to get back links.

Why Back Links Are Important In SEO?

Back links tell the search engines that people respect your opinion, it is like are voting system, and they are voting for you.. If lots of people link to your web pages, using anchor text appropriate to your theme, this is taken as validation of your content. The logic is: why would people link to you unless you have something valuable to offer?

But sadly this logic crumbles when people pay other websites to get back links. For instance, would it make sense if some poker website paid me to put their link on this web design and SEO blog (unless of course I specifically mention that it is an advertisement)? The buying and selling of links has become so rampant that Google is contemplating penalising people indulging in these tactics?

So What Is a Good Way Of Getting Quality Back Links?

Lots of link-worthy content. You should get back links in a normal, natural manner and back linking should be voluntary, not mercenary. No, I haven’t turned Leftist all of a sudden, but if you are publishing external links for moolah, the least you can do is mention it on your website or blog that you are being paid to publish those links, and Google even goes to the extent of recommending the attribute for the websites you are linking to.

So the best way to obtain high-quality back links is by generating valuable content regularly, over a long period of time. Webmasters and bloggers enjoying high traffic always like to refer to an external link rather than explaining a topic from scratch. Give people something to link to and see how your traffic surges up.

This Friday my post will be “10 tips for effective reciprocal linking”.

What is Google Page Rank?

2009-02-03T10:18:00.000-08:00

Your Google PageRank tells how important your website is. The importance of your website is gauged by how many websites link back to you. And it is not as simple as it seems. Even the websites linking to you too must have a good Google PageRank. This means the websites linking to you should also be linked to by websites being linked to other, well-linked websites. So in a sense, every website being considered for your PageRank should enjoy a higher PageRank.

The inbound links to your website are counted as “votes”. So the more votes you have, the higher PageRank your earn. You can view a website’s (including yours) by installing (if it is not already installed) the Google Toolbar that resides in the upper part of your browser once the Google toolbar is installed. In the Google PageRank button there is a green bar that ranges from 0/10 to 10/10. As a said, the websites sending you inbound links should also enjoy higher PageRanks (PR). The more links you get from higher PageRank websites, the less links you have to garner in order to attain a higher PageRank.

People have written complete research papers on how Google calculates PageRanks but if you are reading this just to search engine optimize your website, then the only thing worth knowing is that you should get inbound links from trusted websites that get lots of targeted traffic — this is the only thing that matter as far as your PageRank goes.

PageRanks used to be taken seriously a long time back, but not now. They do matter, but not to a great extent. You can enjoy top rankings in the search pages even with a PageRank 1.

Google Page Rank Problems

2009-02-03T10:16:00.000-08:00

Seen changes, whether good or bad, in your Google page rank lately? You shouldn’t be surprised since Google since according to Matt Cutts there was a PR update that took place end of last month. If your site was adversely affected by the PR update my advise is to NOT sweat it because page rank alone does not determine how well you do in Google’s SERPs.

Take Phoenixrealm, we do not have a really great PR right now (were down to just 3) but if searching for us in Google using the very competitive term SEO BLOG I’m very happy to see that we still have the number 5 spot. So you see page rank is not everything.

There are those who will find a lowered page rank a real problem though but only because:

A) their clients (or they themselves) still subscribe to the myth that page rank is everything, or

B) they have blogs that rely on sponsored posts (Pay Per Post, etc.) for revenue.

If you fall under category A then it is time to realise and make your client realise that the green pixels showing the site’s page rank doesn’t count as much as the other factors in order to place well in Google’s SERPs. To help reinforce this belief all you need to do is look for websites that do not have high PRs but that do well even for competitive terms.

If you fall under category B then you do have a bigger problem since in many cases opportunities for sponsored posts are doled out based on PR. What you can do to help you is focus more effort on rebuilding your PR by doing link building and looking at your site’s link architecture. On the other hand you could also of course also find other ways to increase your revenue. There are plenty of ways to do this online and if your site/blog has been around for some time now and you get a good amount of traffic then do look into other options.

Rehashing Relevance

2009-02-03T10:12:00.000-08:00

One of the key things in search engine optimisation is relevance. Before I discuss relevance though let me give you the dictionary definition of the word it was derived from, relevant.

relevant (adj): closely connected or appropriate to the matter at hand

Hence when talking about relevance in SEO terms what is taken into consideration is the just how relevant or closely connected the search terms entered by search engines users are to the actual contents of a web page and/or an entire website. Because of this fact SEO is definitely more than just making sure that your page has the lots of keywords and phrases but also making sure that the search engines can clearly see they are indeed highly relevant to the rest of the contents of the page.

Here are some tips to help emphasise the relevance of keywords within a page with respect to each other and the entire page’s content:

Unless it is the homepage, make sure that each page has a theme or specific topic.
Use a broad spectrum of keywords from the generic to the more specific and from the highly competitive to the more obscure ones.
Jumble the words used within phrases to accommodate for different search patterns of users.
The most important keywords should be used in the page title and the headings.
Organise your paragraphs/sections so as to place relevant words nearer each other. The proximity of related terms will further increase the apparent relevance of the search term to the page’s contents.
Remember that search engines are smart and getting smarter each day. Don’t try to fool them by placing hidden unrelated text (we all know what this is called!) in hopes of conning people to get to your irrelevant (to the search term) page. It will likely work but you can get caught!
Don’t forget to put a keyword(s) on the anchor text of links and make sure that you only link to pages that have the same/similar topic.
Don’t sweat over words with the same spelling but different meaning search engines can now (for the most part) determine what you really want to convey…especially if you did your job and followed the tips above.

Making Money Online With Pay To Click Sites

2009-02-03T10:04:00.000-08:00

It's been a very, very long time since last posted on this blog, the main reason for this is because I'm trying new money making techniques that do need some time. I haven't had a lot of succes using these techniques, but I'm still trying -Rome wasn't built in one day you know....

BUT I've made some smal cash from PTC sites, that I had mentioned before. I just wanted to test them out and see if they were really paying. And after a couple of weeks of clicking I earned my first few dollars....

Here are the reports:

Neobux: $2

This is one of the most reliable PTC's I've encountered and I've read a lot of good comments and YES they pay. (already been paid $2)

ClixnCash: This is PTC site I discovered recently and I have already been paid, I really like this PTC site because it only has a payout of $0.50 with PayPal. (been paid $0.60)

Crewbux: With a payout of $5 it's easy to get money, I'm only clicking for a few weeks and I already have $4 expecting to receive my payout by the end of the week.

PPC Advertising – The First Step In A SEO Marketing Campaign

2009-02-03T09:35:00.000-08:00

Often, sites view SEO and PPC marketing as exclusive marketing techniques. Each marketing method has its advocates. In reality, both have a place in the Internet marketing process. If you intend to pursue a major seo effort, a PPC campaign is a critical early step.

PPC for Testing

Let’s say you have a site offering a service or product in the travel market. You’ve put together a healthy budget and decided to go for broke. Yep, you’re optimizing and trading links in an effort to go after keyword phrases with major traffic and competition. For instance, you’ve decided to have a go at “Europe travel”, which has roughly 400,000 searches each month and major competition for high rankings. You spend two years trading links, adding content and so on. Miracle of miracles, you pop on to the first page of search results. You start shopping for your private jet only to realize a very disturbing thing. You are getting thousands of visits, but few sales. After running calculations, you find the site is converting at 1 in 10,000.

Houston, we have a problem.

A PPC campaign should be used to test your site against keyword phrases before you spend the time and money on an seo campaign. The best platforms to use for your campaign are Google Adwords and Overture. Yes, click fraud is a problem, but less so on these platforms.

After opening accounts and laying a credit card down at the PPC alter, you need to give some thought at to how you will test your keywords. Here’s a hint. The campaign should be designed to test the keyword phrases, not maximize sales. This may sound like a strange statement, but keep in mind the purpose of the campaign. You are determining whether you have picked appropriate keyword phrases for the seo campaign. So, how does it all go wrong?

With both Overture and Adwords, you have the ability to designate the reach of your keyword phrases. Most pick the “broad match” option, which is terrible for testing. With broad match, your advertisements are going to appear for your keyword phrase AND variations of the phrase. Since the ad is appearing on a variety of keyword phrases, the results can give you a false impression of the value of the primary keyword phrase.

Going back to our example, we start a Google Adwords campaign for “Europe travel” and use the default broad match option. After a month, we are happy to find the ads converting at 1 in 70. Having validated the keyword phrase, we set off on the long seo campaign. But are we really sure about the validity of the keyword phrase. Since Google has been known to seriously expand keyword phrases under the broad match option, how do we know that the true keyword phrase isn’t “European travel”? We don’t unless we take a few additional steps.

The first step is to limit the PPC advertisements by bypassing the broad match option. Instead, you want to limit the appearance of the ad only to searches for the exact keyword phrase. In Adwords, this is known as the “exact phrase” match. To designate it, you simply place brackets “[]” around the keyword phrase. Second, you need to track traffic originating from the ads. This can be done using tracking tools on your server or through the tracking options offered by each PPC platform. Regardless of your choice, the resulting data will give a much truer picture of the value of the particular keyword phrases.

Nothing is more aggravating then getting top rankings, but miserable conversions. The only way to beat this problem is to test, test, test. Using PPC campaigns at the outset of an Internet marketing efforts can save you a lot of headaches later on.