Marketing Resources

Secrets of Winning Traffic through Search Engines

2008-09-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

Keyword: How Search Engines Work, Spidering, Indexing, Search Engine Program, Top Search Engines, Page-Ranking Algorithms, Ask Your Competitors, Pay-Per-Clicks, Title Tag, Web Copy, seo, Search Engines Submit, Search Directories, Show Me the Money, Link Popularity, Link Analysis, Reciprocal Links, Partner Sites, Talking to Webmasters, Website Optimizer, Manual Searches, Computerized Searches

It doesn't matter how great your website is, if no one sees it, you're not going to make a penny.

You can spend days producing the perfect design, weeks tweaking the copy, and months writing the code and uploading the pages, but if no one knows where you are, how are they going to know they should buy from you?

When I first started selling online, the first major problem I ran into was bringing customers to my door. I put banner ads on other sites, organized reciprocal links and joined web rings. Those methods all worked to some extent, but what really did it for me, what turned my business from a small earner into a major money-grabber, was figuring out how to use search engines.

Sure, I'd submitted my sites to the major search engines as soon as I'd finished building them, but I didn't really pay them much attention. After all, I figured search engines are just for people who are looking for information; they're not really good for commercial sites.

Boy, was I wrong!

One day, I sat down and checked out which sites were popping up first in the categories that suited my businesses. I found that all the top-ranked sites were my biggest competitors. And when I say biggest, I mean these guys were in a whole other league. They had incomes that were ten or twenty times the size of mine. No wonder they had top billing at Yahoo! and Google! And then it clicked. Search engines don't list sites by size, they list them by relevance. These sites weren't listed first because they were big; they were big because they were listed first!

That was when I began to optimize my pages and think about meta-tags and keywords. As my sites rose through the listings, my traffic went through the roof. And not just any old traffic! The people that came to my sites from search engines hadn't just clicked on a banner by accident or followed a link from curiosity, they'd actually been looking for a site like mine. My sales ratio went up like a rocket.

I'd created my own big break.

In this chapter, we are going to discuss all proven strategies of search engine optimization. We will discuss how to optimize your site, submit your pages and pick up the targeted traffic you need to make cash. This chapter is one of the most important chapters in the whole book. It's crucial that you read it carefully.

Let's start with search engines.

How Search Engines Work

Internet search engines are special sites on the Internet that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. There are differences in the ways various search engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks:

They search the Internet -- or select pieces of the Internet - based on important words.
They keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them.
They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.

Early search engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day. Today, a top search engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day.

Spidering

Before a search engine can tell you where a file or document is, it must be found. To find information on the hundreds of millions of web pages that exist, a search engine employs special software robots, called spiders, to build lists of the words found on websites.

When a spider is building its lists, the process is called crawling .

In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a search engine's spiders have to look at a lot of pages. How does any spider start its travels over the web? The usual starting points are lists of heavily used servers and very popular pages. The spider will begin with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most widely used portions of the web.

Indexing

Once the spiders have completed the task of finding information on web pages, the search engine must store the information in a way that makes it useful. There are two key components involved in making the gathered data accessible to users:

The information stored with the data
The method by which the information is indexed

In the simplest case, a search engine could just store the word and the URL where it was found. In reality, this would make for an engine of limited use, since there would be no way of telling whether the word was used in an important or a trivial way on the page, whether the word was used once or many times or whether the page contained links to other pages containing the word. In other words, there would be no way of building the ranking list that tries to present the most useful pages at the top of the list of search results.

To make for more useful results, most search engines store more than just the word and URL. An engine might store the number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the meta tags or in the title of the page. Each commercial search engine has a different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index.

This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different search engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in different orders.

An index has a single purpose: It allows information to be found as quickly as possible. There are quite a few ways for an index to be built, but one of the most effective ways is to build a hash table. In hashing, a formula is applied to attach a numerical value to each word.

The formula is designed to evenly distribute the entries across a predetermined number of divisions. This numerical distribution is different from the distribution of words across the alphabet, and that is the key to a hash table's effectiveness.

The Search Engine Program

The search engine software or program is the final part. When a person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the search engine software searches the index for relevant information. The software then provides a report back to the searcher with the most relevant web pages listed first.

Top Search Engines

I've studied how search engines work. An integral part of any Internet marketing or search engine optimization campaign is to know exactly which search engines to target. This section discusses some of the top search engines today.

Google

Google has increased in popularity tenfold the past several years.

They went from beta testing to becoming the Internet's largest index of web pages in a very short time. Their spider, affectionately named "Googlebot", crawls the web and provides updates to Google's index about once a month.

Google.com began as an academic search engine. Google, by far, has a very good algorithm of ranking pages returned from a result, probably one of the main reasons it has become so popular over the years. Google has several methods which determine page rank in returned searches.

Yahoo!

Yahoo! is one of the oldest web directories and portals on the Internet today, and the site went live in August of 1994. Yahoo! is also one of the largest traffic generators around, as far as web directories and search engines go. Unfortunately, however, it is also one of the most difficult to get listed in, unless of course you pay to submit your site. Even if you pay it doesn't guarantee you will get listed.

Either way, if you suggest a URL, it is "reviewed" by a Yahoo! editor and, if approved, it will appear in the next index update.

AltaVista

Many who have access to web logs may have seen a spider named “scooter” accessing their pages. Scooter used to be AltaVista's robot. However, since the Feb 2001 site update, a newer form of Scooter is now crawling the web.

It will usually take several months for AltaVista to index your entire site. Unlike Google, AltaVista will only crawl and index 1 link deep, so it can take a long time to index your entire site, depending on how large your site is.

Inktomi

Inktomi's popularity grew years ago as they powered the secondary search database that had driven Yahoo. Their spiders are named "Slurp", and different versions of Slurp crawls the web many different times throughout the month, as Inktomi powers many sites' search results. There isn't much more to Inktomi than that. Slurp puts heavy weight on title and description tags, and will rarely deep-crawl a site. Slurp usually only spiders pages that are submitted to its index.

Inktomi provides results to a number of sites. Some of these are America Online, MSN, Hotbot, Looksmart, About, Goto, CNet, Geocities, NBCi, ICQ and many more.

Lycos

Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the Internet today, next to Altavista and Yahoo. Their spider, named "T-Rex", crawls the web and provides updates to the Lycos index from time to time. The FAST crawler provides results for Lycos in addition to its own database.

The Lycos crawler does not weigh META tags too heavily. Instead, it relies on its own ranking algorithm to rank pages returned in results.

The URL, META title, text headings, and word frequency are just a few of the methods Lycos uses to rank pages. Lycos does support pages with Frame content. However, any page that isn't at least 75 words in content is not indexed.

Excite

Excite has been around the web for many years now. Much more of a portal than just simply a search engine, Excite used to be a fairly popular search engine, until companies such as Google started dominating the search engine market. As of recently, Excite no longer accepts submissions of URL's, and appears to no longer spider. To get into the Excite search results, you need to be either listed with Yahoo! or Inktomi.

Looksmart

Getting listed with Looksmart could mean getting a good amount of traffic to your site. Looksmart's results appear in many search engines, including AltaVista, MSN, CNN, and many others.

Looksmart has two options to submit your site. If your site is generally non-business related, you can submit your site to Zeal (Looksmart's sister site), or if you are a business, you can pay a fee to have your site listed. Either method will get you listed in Looksmart and its partner sites if you are approved.

Once your site is submitted and approved, it will take up to about 7 days for your site to be listed on Looksmart and its partner sites.

Search Engine Page-Ranking Algorithms

A search engine's main job is to provide results which most satisfy a user's query. If they present a result that the user visits and doesn't agree that the document is about their query, there is a very good chance that the user may not use that search engine again. Most search engines pay no attention at all to the Meta description tags.

Meta description and keyword tags are hidden attributes that you can add to the front of your document which are supposed to annotate and describe the document. Since the users will never see this information, they will be disappointed if you stick in invalid keywords or fail to keep the description in line with the document's contents which usually is the case.

Most Search Engine page-ranking algorithms rank pages based on the following aspects:

Content of the website
Representation of content, keywords, and links on websites
Location and number of inward and outward links on websites
Relevancy of search terms as compared to the websites

Given below is a brief description of the page-ranking algorithms of some of the most popular search engines.

Google

You can submit your website to Google at the following URL:

google.com/addurl.html . Submitting your site will only make Google aware that your page exists; it is quite possible that your pages may get crawled even if you have not submitted. It is advisable to submit the home page and some inside pages. Inside pages are added to the submission, just in case the home page is found too slow to load or crawl. The pages that are submitted should link to the rest of the pages. Google indexes the full text that is visible on any page that it crawls. It generally does not index the metatags – keywords or descriptions.

When Google lists your page in the search results, the description that is displayed is the extract of text that is around the first line where the search word appears on the page. It may thus be a good idea to write a good description of the page and build it around the most likely search term(s) and place that near the top of your page.

You should remember that one sure way of getting your site listed and indexed is if there are several links that point to your site and such links appear on web pages that in turn have several other links pointing to them. The term “link popularity” is used for this. It analyzes links of the pages that it has visited and this “link analysis” helps to determine the ranking of the page.

Google uses a proprietary PageRank algorithm for determining relevance and ranking of pages in the search results. Location and frequency of the search term on your web page are no doubt factors in ranking; however, off-the-page factors such as link analysis are more important. Generally, Google provides search results based on relevancy, meaning that it returns a list of pages ranked by the number of other web pages linking to each page, as well as other mathematical algorithms

Yahoo!

Yahoo! offers a human-powered directory and offers its results to visitors. The directory is supplemented by a web page index created by crawling. The directory is an important channel in the area of search engine marketing. It is popular and is used extensively by people to locate sources of information. Moreover, the directory is a valuable boost to your site for crawling and ranking in other search engines, as the directory provides a high-quality link to your website.

When a visitor is looking for information on relevant sites, she could either browse through the hierarchy of directories and subdirectories or search for an appropriate directory through a search interface. As your site can be listed in just one category, generally, the choice of category is an important step. Choose the top category that your target visitor who is making a search may select out of the different categories offered to him/her.

Select your target keywords and find out which categories relate to those keywords. For submission of non-commercial sites, the Yahoo! Express submission is recommended rather than the Standard submission option.

The results page in your chosen category will list your site in two possible sections (for most categories). One section is called "Most Popular Sites" and this is on top, while the second section contains the remaining listings in Alphabetical order.

Yahoo! does not reveal how it includes certain sites in the “Most Popular Sites” list. However, link analysis and click-throughs are likely to be factors. You cannot pay to be included in this section. Certain sites with sunglasses shown next to their name or an “@” symbol shown at the end of the name reflect that Yahoo! considers those sites to be excellent.

Inktomi (MSN Search, AOL Search, Hotbot)

Inktomi is a search engine that does not offer its search services through its own site, but through Partner sites – prominent ones being MSN Search, AOL Search, HotBot and others.

Inktomi, through its crawler, creates three different indexes. “Best of the Web” index has around 110 million pages that it indexes on the web and considers high in link analysis. The next set of around 390 million pages is indexed as “Rest of the Web”, considered as lower in link analysis. The third index is of paid inclusion. It also offers specialized regional indexes as well as targeted news, multimedia and directory indexes. It avoids duplication of the same page in more than one index. Link crawling and paid inclusion are the two most effective ways to get covered by crawling. For bulk submissions to its paid program, it offers IndexConnect (for 1000 or more pages). Again, there is a cost-per-click basis with a monthly minimum. Ranking at Inktomi is determined by a combination of factors including HTML links, keywords and description tags near the top of the page or in the title tag. If the search string matches with what is found at these places on the page, the ranking is higher. Link analysis and analysis of clickthroughs are other important criteria that it adopts.

AltaVista

AltaVista will accept free listings through its “addurl” link, but it also has paid inclusion features. Generally, their crawler may visit every four weeks. Paid inclusion may be desirable if you have a new website or web pages or if you alter your web pages frequently, and you do not wish to wait until the next cycle of crawling. There is an “Express Paid” inclusion service of self-service type for up to 500 pages at a time. This service will enable weekly crawling. Their bulk program called “Trusted Feed” will enable the pages to be directly linked to their index. Pricing for “Trusted Feed” is on a cost-per-click model with a monthly minimum. In this program you can submit the Meta data, descriptions and keywords directly to the index.

Nevertheless, the engine will check whether the destination page has the same Meta data or not and could levy a penalty for spam.

AltaVista's ranking policies are a combination of various factors. The frequency and positioning of keywords and descriptions is important, as are title tags or words that appear near the top of the page. AltaVista applies link analysis to determine relevancy and page ranking. It levies penalty on spamming and does not recognize invisible or tiny text, keyword stuffing, identical pages, mirror sites, or quick meta refresh tags.

Keywords - Optimizing Your Site to Get Top Billing at Search Engines

When a user enters a search term, also known as a “keyword”, into a search engine, the engine runs through the billions of pages in the database and awards each one a “relevancy score”. The higher your score, the higher your listing. If your site doesn't contain the keyword used by the searcher, the only score it's going to get is a big, fat zero. Your first task then is to make sure you know which keywords are most relevant for each of your sites. There are three ways to figure out your keywords:

Ask Your Competitors

This is the cheapest way to find many of the most important keywords. Simply log on to a search engine (AltaVista is good, Google is better) and carry out a search for sites like yours. Open the top site, and once the home page has downloaded, click on “View” in your browser, and then “Source”. That will reveal all the HTML used to build the web page, including all the keywords that have been specially inserted.

Some of those keywords will be relevant to your site. Others, of course, won't be relevant and there will be lots of other keywords that aren't obviously listed, such as “vitamins” for example. You can repeat the process on other sites, using different keywords, and build up a pretty long list.

Ask the Pay-Per-Clicks

Pay-per-click sites actually let you see how popular a keyword is.

They're not being kind; they're trying to make money. The more webmasters bid on those keywords, the higher the bids are going to rise — and the more money the pay-per-clicks are going to make.

FindWhat, for example, has a Keyword Center . Other pay-per-click sites offer similar features. One of the most popular key word discovery tools, however, was provided by former PPC giant Overture. You can play around with this free keyword selector tool at: inventory.overture.com

Use a Specialized Tool

Not too surprisingly, a number of companies have popped up to supply specific keyword services for a fee. The best of these is WordTracker.com . They're not bargain basement, but you get what you pay for. They'll give you all the keywords you need and in my experience, they're a sound investment.

GoogleFight.com is another useful tool to see whether one keyword is more popular than another. The site compares two keywords and tells you which is more popular. It's free and has a limited use, but it's fun to play with.

As you make up your list of keywords, bear in mind that it's also worth looking at key phrases. It's quite possible that a user looking to buy flowers online might search for “red roses” or “cheap bouquets” as well as just “flowers”. Key phrases are often overlooked by competitors, so you've got a pretty good chance of getting a high placement with the right combination.

Don't worry too much about the competition though. Some people will tell you that you're better off trying to find keywords that no one else has thought of and others will tell you to throw in keywords that are only slightly relevant to your businesses.

In my experience, that's a waste of time. If your competitors are using certain keywords, it's because they know they work. And if any of your visitors found your site using irrelevant keywords, you're not going to sell them anything. Don't try to reinvent the wheel here: just try to figure out the most popular keywords and the best key phrases to put on your site.

Whichever of these methods you use — and I tend to use more than one — you should end up with a pretty comprehensive list of keywords that you can stick into your website. The next question then, is how do you use them? When a search engine assigns relevancy to a site, it looks for the keywords in a number of specific areas.

Title Tag

The title tag is written in the “HEAD” section of the web page and after the “TITLE” tags. It's usually the line listed in the search results as well. For example, the New York Times' title tag at the time of this writing is “The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia”. Of course, they will change this tag from time to time.

The title tag is usually between 50 and 80 characters including spaces. Different search engines have different limits so you want to make sure that your most important words are near the beginning of the title.

The rest of the title is made up of keywords and phrases but in fact, you don't want to put in too many keywords here. Just place one keyword as the second or third word in the title. Too many, and your site could be seen as spamming.

You can also list more keywords in the “META Keywords” and “ META description” sections of the “HEAD” area, but because these areas have been so abused in the past, a number of search engines today will skip right past the title tag and go straight to the web copy.

Web Copy for SEO

The search engines will scan the text on a web page to see if your site is relevant to the search term. That means that in effect, your web copy is going to have to do two things: persuade a customer to buy, and persuade a search engine it's relevant.

When you write your copy aim for about 500 words a page, but throw in 4-8 keywords. You'll have to try to balance a smooth text flow against getting in all the keywords you need to be listed.

You can also consider adding text-only pages such as how-to articles, tips or tutorials to your site. Throw in some keywords and they can turn up in search engines and create opportunities for link exchanges.

So there's a few ways you can try to improve the position of your site in a search engine. More important than where you put the keywords is choosing the right keywords. That's not really a huge challenge as your competitors are likely to have done the job for you.

Of course, even if you do get everything right, it doesn't mean you're going to shoot straight to the top of Google. One of the criteria for relevancy is how long you've been online, so success on the search engines won't come overnight. The sooner you start submitting though, the sooner you can start to rise.

Submitting to Search Engines

Submitting sites to search engines is much easier than submitting them to directories or pay-per-clicks. In fact, you only have to submit the home page. The search engine's “spider” (a neat little software program) will then follow all the links from the home page and include your other pages. Spidering actually increases your relevancy score more than hand-submitting your internal pages yourself.

The disadvantage of spidering is that it can be slow. Google has the best spider but even they can take up to a month to index all your pages. For other search engines you can wait three times as long. Say What?! Is all of this search engine talk confusing to you? Do you want to make money online, but don't want to figure it all out by yourself? You're not alone. Click here for a turn-key money-making system that you can start earning from within the next 24 hours.

Search Directories – The Benefits of Browsing

Search directories differ from search engines by providing a range of categories for users to browse. Rather than enter a keyword into a search box, users click through categories and sub-categories narrowing down their options.

You could say that search engines are like going straight up to the sales assistant and asking what they have in evening wear; search directories are like browsing through the store and seeing what catches the eye.

How you make your site catch the eye in a directory is actually pretty similar to standing out in a search engine. It's all about relevancy — a mixture of keywords and links.

Submitting to Search Directories

Submitting your site to a search directory is a little tougher than submitting to a search engine. Directories don't have spiders. They rely on humans. When you submit your site to Yahoo! or any of the other directories, you'll have to complete a form that will include your “URL”, “Page Title”, “Keywords” and a “Page Description”.

Your keywords and title will play some role in your ranking, but for the description, it's much better to put a hard sell that will attract users. There's no point having a link at the top of a category if no one wants to click on it.

Bear in mind that because each submission to a directory is checked by a human editor, it can take quite a while for your site to be approved and listed. Some sites do have express services but these are pretty pricey (Yahoo! wants $299 and $600 for adult sites!), and if they decide your site isn't suitable for a category, you don't get your money back. It's usually worth the wait.

Pay-Per-Click — Buying Status

Pay-per-click programs (PPC's) allow you to buy a prime position in a search engine by selecting the price you wish to pay for each visitor you receive. This can place you exactly where you want to be in the listing, or let you decide precisely how much you want to spend on advertising.

The big advantage of PPC's is that you don't have to worry about messing with keywords or links or any of that. You can just figure out how much you want to pay for a keyword and buy your position. In addition, you only pay for people who actually click on your link (for banner ads, you often have to pay when someone sees it.) And you can also get cheap visitors. Bids usually start at around five cents per click. The top three bids though are often promoted across a network of sites so there can be big bonuses for bidding high.

This is how most pay-per-click programs work:

You create your page title, description and link as you want it to appear in the search results.
You enter the keywords and phrases that will prompt your listing to appear.
You enter your keyword bid (the amount you are willing to pay for each click to your site).
Your keyword bid is compared to that of other bidders for the same keyword. The results are returned to the user with the highest bid appearing first. - 90 -

Show Me the Money!

With PPC's, the name of the game is profit. You need to be careful not to get carried away with the ranking so that your promotion doesn't cut into your revenues.

This is essential! There's no point in being top if you're out of business in a month. You have to figure out what you can afford and keep to it. Base your decision on your visitor-to-sales-ratio (the number of visitors on average that it takes to generate a sale) and your net profit per sale.

So for example, if you get a sale from every tenth visitor, and you net a profit of $20 from each sale, then you can't pay more than $2 for each click without operating at a loss (unless you have an effective back-end sales campaign setup as discussed earlier). In practice, you might make one sale for every 100 or so clicks and pay perhaps 15 or 20 cents for each visitor, depending on your market.

It's absolutely crucial for you to know your visitor-to-sales-ratio.

It's also important to keep that ratio as high as possible, and that means only bidding on relevant keywords. If you pay for visitors who are looking for something completely different than the services you're offering, you're just throwing your money away. They aren't going to buy, and even at five cents a shot, those wasted nickels soon add up. - 91 -

On the other hand, because you can pay so little, it is worth bidding on as many relevant keywords as possible. The key is to balance high payments for top keywords with low payments that bring in less traffic.

You should also consider the quality of visitors the site will send you. The more targeted a directory, the better your visitor to sale ratio will be and that might make it worth increasing your bid price.

Submitting to Pay-Per-Clicks

Submitting your site to a PPC is certainly a lot faster than submitting to a search engine or a directory. You must, however, make sure you consider the following:

The maximum amount you can bid (I can't stress that enough!)
The keywords you wish to bid on.
The titles and descriptions of the site.

That last point is very important for making the most of PPC's. Just because you don't have to worry about putting keywords in your title and descriptions to please the search engines, that doesn't mean relevance isn't important. On the contrary, relevance still matters. You need to let the user know that your site is exactly what they're looking for. That means putting the keyword in the title and having a catchy, informative description. Remember, the more good clicks you get, the more money you are likely to make.

Google AdWords

If you do a search at Google, you'll notice that not only do you get a list of all the sites that return your keyword, you also get a list of other relevant ads on the right of the page and at the top of the listing. These are part of Google's AdWords program. Advertising like this can certainly be an important part of your marketing plan. Well developed ads with clever wording can prompt an immediate response from the reader to visit your site. Google makes a lot of money with this kind of advertising, and if they're making money, you can be sure their advertisers are too. You can learn more about Google's AdWords program here: adwords.google.com

Buying AdWords advertising on Google is a relatively simple and cost-effective way to promote your website. In effect, Google has combined the Pay-per-Click system with their own relevancy calculations. To get started, you'll need to select a keyword and write a short description. You will also have to choose how much you wish to pay for each click, but that won't guarantee your position.

Google advertisers enter a maximum bid per click and this is multiplied by the click-through rate (the percentage of users who click on the ad). That's the score Google uses to allocate position.

So for example, if you were prepared to pay a dollar per click, and one user in a hundred who saw your ad clicked on it, you would get a rank number of ($)1 x 1% = 0.01.

Let's say that gives you top position. You might then get even more users and a higher click-through rate of 2%. That higher rate would reduce your price to 50 cents (0.01 divided by 2%).

All very nice, and it's always fun to pay less than you've said you can afford, but how it works is less important than the fact that it does work. All you have to do is figure out how much you're prepared to pay for each click, how much you can afford to pay each month, and write a great description.

And once again, it's the description that's key.

Like the PPC's, your description has to persuade users that you're relevant; it doesn't have to play to the search engine's software. By all means repeat the keyword, but also make sure you have good, call-toaction copy like “Grab a great deal on DVD's today!” or “Buy now, while stocks last!” Remember, the more clicks you get, the more sales you'll make and the less you'll pay.

Always place your AdWords ad in the most appropriate category and track the responses you receive from it. Be proactive in redefining your strategy if you receive minimal response. You will probably need to experiment with the wording of your ads and your keyword selection for a while until you get the results you want.

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Link Popularity and Link Analysis

The majority of the major search engines use link popularity as an important factor in ranking relevancy. As search engines have become more sophisticated, so too has link popularity. Link popularity simply is the number of links from other websites that point to your website.

This strategy has gained immense success due to the crawling nature of most search engines. Spiders crawl from link to link and store pages into their database. Link popularity is generally gained through reciprocal linking. Other websites would usually link to your website only if you have a link to their website from yours first.

Years ago, the number of websites linking to your site gauged link popularity; little emphasis was placed on the "content relevancy" of the linking site. In an effort to gain more link popularity, "link farms" began sprouting up across the web. For a nominal fee, a website owner could join link farms and enjoy increased link popularity overnight.

Search engines caught onto this tactic and created better tools for detecting legitimate links. Websites that have links from websites with "similar" or "relevant" content score higher, thus earn better placement in search engines.

This being said, you should avoid joining "link farms" because most search engines consider them a form of spam. Many engines will actually penalize sites for maintaining an abundance of links from nonrelated websites. It is more important than ever to develop a solid "link-popularity" strategy. One excellent, although time consuming, method is to simply contact complimentary websites via email or telephone requesting a link exchange with the webmaster.

Link analysis is somewhat different than measuring link popularity. While link popularity is generally used to measure the number of pages that link to a particular site, link analysis will go beyond this and analyze the popularity of the pages that link to your pages. In a way, link analysis is a chain analysis system that accords weighting to every page that links to the target site, with weights determined by the popularity of those pages. Search engines use link analysis in their page-ranking algorithm. Search engines also try to determine the context of those links, in other words, how closely those links relate to the search string. For example if the search string was “toys”, and if there were links from other sites that either had the word toys within the link or in close proximity of the link, the ranking algorithm determines that this is a higher priority link and ranks the page, that this is linked to, higher.

Reciprocal Links and Partner Sites

Keywords and AdWords aren't the only way that search engines score relevancy; links to other similar sites are another important factor. Keywords have been so abused by some webmasters that links are winning much more relevancy points. Google is said to love them.

It might sound strange to suggest that your users should check out your competitors, but they probably know about them anyway. If your competitors have a higher ranking than you, linking to them can often give you a higher relevancy score with the search engines and the subsequent increase in traffic will make it worth your while.

Alternatively, you can link to your own site by creating a subdirectory.

This is like building another web page, but the URL will include your keyword. So if you were selling stuffed toys, the new URL would be YourDomain.com/stuffed-toys/stuffed-toys.html . You could then write a short paragraph on the home page, describing the new page and including a link. You'll get big relevancy points for this!

Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal linking means forming partnerships with other sites who place a link from their web pages to yours. You give them a similar link in return.

When you look for people to swap links with, make sure that you don't reduce the quality or content of your own site. You don't want users to click straight through without reading your content; you want them to buy first. One way to stop them from running away too quickly is to create a “Resources Page” and link to that page from your homepage. This doesn't take away from the content on your homepage and the links are just one click away rather than being buried deep within the site, giving value to your partners.

In any case, you want to be sure that your site is more than just a page full of links. If your site contains more links than content, it will not be attractive to webmasters, search engines or users.

Picking Your Partner

Your link partners should be sites your target market will visit. Think about your product and its subject area and brainstorm to determine where people interested in your product might be looking online. For example, if you're trying to sell a book about blackjack strategy, it makes sense that the people visiting online casinos would make great customers. Online casinos then could be good partners. Identify top-ranked, high quality casino sites and find the email address of their webmasters. You can also identify your competitors, see where they trade links and then follow suit.

Tips for Talking to Webmasters

Before you contact webmasters, place a link to their site on your home page or resource page to assure them that you will actually provide a high quality link.

Create a subject line that will encourage them to read your message rather than deleting it. You don't want them to think you're message is spam. (Something about their site or product is sure to capture their attention; they will probably open and read it, thinking that you're a potential customer.)

Begin your message by talking about your visit to their site and what you found interesting about it. Detail your product or service in one line and ask them to exchange links with you.

Tell them in detail where you have placed their link and emphasize that it is only one click away from your homepage. Tell them that if you don't hear back from them within 2 weeks, you will consider that to be a negative response and that you will remove their link from your site.

Inward Link Analysis

Like reciprocal linking, inward links to your website can be an effective strategy to increase your website's visibility. Inward links are links pointing to your websites from other websites without providing a reciprocal link from your website.

There are many techniques to improve inward linking. Many of these have enjoyed success. The most proven technique for inward linking is writing and distributing free reprint articles. You simply write (or hire a ghostwriter) a few 500-700 word articles related to the theme of your website. You also include an “About the Author” resource box at the end of your article that includes a link back to your website. Then you visit article directories (websites that accept article submissions) and submit your article giving full permission for other websites to reprint your article on their site as long as they include your resource box and a link back to your website along with the article. This is a win-win scenario. Webmasters get needed content to make their sites “sticky” and useful to visitors and you get free inward links pointing back to your website.

Other techniques include posting free ebooks, newsletters, news stories and press releases at other websites, particularly industry specific and general portals. All of these would contain a free link pointing to your website, thus, promoting your website.

Optimizing Your Website

To get listed correctly in the search engines each page of your site that you want listed needs to be optimized to the best of your ability.

Since the keywords that you decide to target will be used throughout the optimization process, choosing the right keywords is essential. If you choose the wrong keywords you will not be found in the search engines. Since the keywords you choose to optimize your pages with are so important I've put together a few tips to help you make sure that you make the right choices. You should utilize these tips when selecting keywords for each page that you want listed in the search engines.

Think "specific keyword phrases" not "keywords". Due to the extreme amount of competition for general terms in the search engines, if your keyword phrases are too general it is very unlikely you will rank well in the search engines. You stand a far better chance to rank well for specific phrases where there is less competition. The resulting traffic, since it is more highly targeted, should also be much higher quality too.

You should try to come up with as many keyword phrases as you can think of that relate to the page you are optimizing. Try asking a few friends and family what they would search for when searching for a site like yours. Check out your competition for ideas. Do a search using keywords that you already know you want to target and click through on the top sites that come up. Once on the site, view the source HTML code and view the keywords they have in their Meta tags.

Searching competitive sites' Meta tags will give you many more ideas.

Make sure to only use keywords that relate to YOUR site or page. To view the HTML code, simply click the “View” at the top of your web browser then select “Source”, or “Page Source”. You should develop a list of keyword phrases, using these tips, for each page that you optimize for the search engines.

Apart from these, there are certain aspects that should be avoided. These are:

Dead Links - As search engines index your entire site by crawling through hypertext links, you must make sure you check for dead links before submitting.
Graphics and Image Maps - Search engines cannot read images; be sure to include Alternative Text tags.
Frames - Many Search engines aren't frames compatible. Meta tags and the tags are important in this instance.
Spamming - Avoid resubmitting your pages repeatedly to search engines if your site does not get listed in the first few weeks. Allow at least 6 weeks before resubmission.

Continual resubmission (such as those caused by automatic submission software) can cause your site to be penalized.

Monitoring Your Progress

Okay, so you've decided on your keywords, inserted your links and submitted your sites. Now all you have to do is wait for the cash to start pouring in, right?

Well, not quite. You might get lucky with your first shot, but it has never happened to me that way. Once you've submitted all your links, you need to keep a close eye on them, and see which need improving and which can be dropped.

The crucial factor here is to keep track of your Search Engine Statistics. These will tell you how many people have come from the various search engines and how many of those become customers.

But it's not enough to know how much traffic you're receiving. You also want to know how you're doing in the rankings. There are two ways to do that:

Manual Searches

Dead easy, simply log on and look. First enter your URL to make sure your site has been approved and listed. That can take a little while. Once you can see that you're online though, you want to see how you're ranked in each keyword. To do that, you can simply enter each keyword into the search engine and browse the pages until you find your listing. This works, but it takes a while.

Computerized Searches

It's been a long time since I did a manual search. If you've got ten sites and you want to check ten keywords for each once a week, you're going to lose at least a day's work a month. That's too much for me. To automate this task, I suggest using a software program found at WebPositionGold.com . You tell the software all the keywords you want checked and it gives you an automated report.

When you look at your statistics, pay attention to which keywords are bringing in the most traffic. In general, the higher you are, the more traffic you'll receive and the more sales you'll make. But that isn't always true. It might pay more to be fifteenth on a keyword that gets a million searches a month than first on a keyword that gets just a thousand. And if you're fifteenth, you've still got room for improvement.

It's the improvement that's the key. If you see that your link is stuck at the bottom of a list somewhere, try adding more links, putting that keyword in more pages or adding keyword-rich content.

Three Words About Spam

Don't do it.

You can spam search engines by stuffing your site with keywords,

submitting them numerous times or filling your pages with links. And they'll just get you blacklisted.

Don't do it. It's just not worth it.

It used be accepted practice to create doorway pages (duplicates of a home page filled with different keywords) but search engines won't accept these anymore.

They will accept smart pages though. If you want to use more keywords than you can fit on your site, create a second page that is totally different from your homepage but which is still based upon your product or service. Here, you can expand upon a topic you merely touched on in your homepage. A great example of a smart page is to write articles on the benefits of your services using a different set of keywords to those on your home page. You can do that.

To sum it up, this chapter gave you a detailed view of many of the proven and effective search engine optimization techniques. SEO is one of the most important traffic generating mechanisms, and when done correctly it can do wonders for your website and your profits.

10 Tips - Exploit The Handheld Market

2008-09-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

Keyword: Exploit The Market, The Handheld Market, viral information, free downloads, Guru.com, Elance.com, or Scriptlance.com

This one is outrageously simple, yet almost completely overlooked. Next time you create a viral information product of any kind – whether it's an ebook, a special report, a white paper, a case study, or a compilation of articles – get it formatted for handhelds.

There are dozens – perhaps even hundreds – of sites that offer free downloads for handhelds. And most handheld users are always on the lookout for something to read on that little screen.

It will cost less than $50 to pay someone from Guru.com, Elance.com, or Scriptlance.com to format your product for the handheld market. And with over 11 million handheld users out there, that's a lot of potential viral traffic for your site.

Defining a Usable Site

2008-08-19T22:08:00.000-07:00

A usable site will:

Help users achieve a goal, usually to find something, such as information, or obtain something, such as a book.
Make it easy for them to achieve that goal
Make it possible to achieve the goal quickly
Make achieving that goal a pleasant experience

A site will be generally usable if:

The content is good and relevant
The content is easy to find
The content can be found quickly
The page is pleasant to look at and cleanly designed

Good Content is Critical

A site with good content, regardless of its subject, is one that provides products or information that is useful or beneficial to users. A good usable site will make it clear what information or content is available and at what price AND what is not available. A good usable site should define clearly all subscription packages offered.

Ease of Access to Information

Good navigation, precise location indicators, secondary navigation, clear linked text and a well-organized structure all contribute to making information easy to find for a wide range of different users.

Bearing in mind that many users are inexperienced, it may be necessary to include explanations of things you consider selfexplanatory. For example, an inexperienced user may need an explanation of how to use a drop down menu. Remember, make it as easy as possible for people to use your website.

Quick Access to Information

This is the aim of the majority of web users. It can be broken into two important aspects:

Speed of Page Loading - This requires, in particular, attention to images to ensure they are properly optimized and do not excessively delay load time. It may also mean breaking up long articles and ensuring that important content is at the top of the page where it will load first.
Speed of Access to Content - This is where the 3-click rule comes in - no important content should be more than 3 clicks from the home page. Some standards even say that it should be no more than two clicks. One helpful way to speed access to content is to consider each type of user, select the content that they are most likely to be interested in and create links from the home page to one piece of content for each group. This will get them quickly to the appropriate part of the site.

Cleanly Designed Pages

Cleanly designed pages are pleasant to look at and easy to read. It is almost impossible to make a site with an image shown as a tiled background usable - the whole thing is too distracting and confusing. It takes no great design skills to create clean pages; it just requires thought and adherence to the principle that when it comes to design, less usually is more.

Download Status

Most paid membership websites are limited to online access and information download rather than selling products. There should be clear download instructions provided. Your website should also state the size of the file in kilobytes and the estimated time of download for a user having a 56K modem, DSL, Cable and so on.

Usability Problems

While for large commercial sites investment in full-scale usability studies may be essential, few small sites can afford such luxuries. However, identifying problems with usability for your site need be no more complicated than asking a few (honest) friends to act as guinea pigs on your site and, if possible, watching them silently as they do this. Watching users try to find information at your site can be both instructive and quite surprising.

Remember that if at any stage you feel the urge to intervene and explain, then you have identified a usability problem.

List of the Most Common Usability Problems

The site does not state its purpose clearly
Java applets, huge images, banner ads or flashy elements slow down loading; 10 seconds is about as long as the average user will wait for a page.
The site requires specific software to be used. Have you ever actually changed browsers or downloaded a piece of software just to see a site?
Poor navigation, too little navigation, too much navigation and, not uncommonly, no navigation at all
Bad design leading to poor readability
Discomfort due to ugly design or inconsistent design. Almost always because a designer overestimated their skills.
Irrelevance of content - for example the business site that includes biographies and photos of each of the board members. Happy egos on the board; bored website visitors!
Complexity or excessive originality of design, which requires users to learn how it works in order to use it.
Inaccessibility because the site cannot be used by browsers for people with disabilities.

Building Interactivity and Personalization

Make your website interactive. Add feedback forms as well as email forms that allow your prospective customers to ask you any questions they might have pertaining to a product. Personalization of your website is another key element that can build a visitor's trust and increase your sales. Personalization technology provides you the analytic tools to facilitate cross-selling and up-selling when the customer is buying online.

Personalization tries to restore to the online business the magic of personalized attention which is one of the chief reasons why many people still prefer in-store purchase. You can use personalization to match your customer with the right products through either rulesbased or customer analytics-based processing. Thus as your software stores customer information and preferences, it can help categorize them into groups. At the same time, observations over time can suggest products to cross-sell and up-sell. Thus when a person buys a subscription to a fitness site, exercise equipment is also offered.

Amazon pioneered personalization on the net – when you a buy a book, it shows you other books in the similar genre saying “people who bought this book also bought these”, inducing you to buy more.

A consumer survey from the Personalization Consortium found that 56 percent of respondents say they are more likely to purchase from a site that allows personalization, and 63 percent are more likely to register at a site that allows it.

Graphics

Your site has to be aesthetically attractive with visually appealing organization and enticing images. Fashions change fast on the Internet, so when you come to choose a designer, make sure you take a good look at their portfolio. You want the user to just glance at your homepage and understand immediately who you are and what you can do for them.

Web Copy

Your website content should convince visitors that your service is either unique or superior to that of your competitors in terms of quality, and is competitively priced. It should show your potential clients that you can provide the solution they are seeking. Your product or service will solve their problems, answer a dream, enrich their lives, and/or improve their businesses. You are the dependable expert that they want and need!

Your website copy plays a major role in establishing and growing your customer base. Website copy creates the “voice” of a company, just as the look and feel of a site put a “face” on the company and on otherwise intangible products and services. On an ecommerce site, the copy plays a key role in closing sales as well as in up-selling and crossselling products and services. Good website copy delights first-time

visitors, encourages return visits and propels both customer acquisition and retention. People read a web page differently than they do a brochure or a newspaper. They scan, scroll, click, hit the back button, and hit the forward button. “Reading” is about moving around and being in control. You have one chance to make a first impression – to quickly convey the benefit of staying on your website. I can't overstate the importance of first impressions, which in web-time are measured in milliseconds. The layout, functionality, message and overall look and feel of your web page determine who stays – and who clicks away.

Your story should be clear and to the point. The goal of any web page should be to get the visitor to DO something: to move on to the next step in a purchase sequence or to click for more information about a product or service. Without readable, compelling copy and clearly organized hypertext links, visitors are much less likely to complete a transaction – and return to your site again.

Writing for your web page should always start from your visitor's perspective. What is your website visitor looking for? Why is she here? How can you make her visit as quick and efficient and positive as possible? You should take the time to clarify the goal of each page before starting to write. If the page is part of a transaction sequence, identify what may be hindering the buying process. Be sure instructions are clear and easy to read.

If you are selling a service on your website, your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is your service's most powerful benefit, in combination with a strong, unique feature of your business. It answers that most difficult question:

Why should someone do business with you?

Tell your customers what service you are selling and explain what your service provides. What is the key benefit(s) to your customers? What pain does it cure, what solution does it provide? Compare your service with that of your competitors and highlight what makes you stand out from the competition? Keep working on this until you can clearly separate yourself from the field. As stated earlier there must be a convincing reason for doing business with you, instead of your competitor.

Summarize the above into one tight, powerful, motivating phrase that will persuade your customer to do business with you and to trade their money for the benefits delivered by your service.

As you start to work through the above four steps, you may find this to be a lot harder than it looks. Don't blow it off and give up! You must have a USP. If it was easy, everyone would have a great USP! Come up with a tight, sharp USP that sells your service to your customer.

Write tight, get right to the point, be keenly aware of the audience for the page, and don't use a three-syllable word when a one or two-syllable word will do. Use call-to-action language and be interesting. The page should be so clearly organized that, in seconds, visitors can understand and get convinced to buy your product and be able to anticipate where a hypertext link – or a “Continue” button – will take them. Studies show that “ease of use” is the winning factor on an ecommerce site.

If you're going to promote your service and expand your customer base using your website, potential clients have to be able to trust you. Their confidence in you and your products has to be boosted.

Endorsements on your website from a valued friend or colleague, or a referral from a strategic partner are the types of “leads” that boost your credibility. You and your service must be perceived as being trust-worthy before your visitor will be confident enough to contact you or even buy your product.

Show prospects that you have their best interests at heart and that you can adapt or customize your service to meet their individual needs. Foster an ongoing relationship that steadily increases their trust levels and cements a view that you are an “authority” in your field.

Another important aspect of convincing prospective customers is to keep abreast of recent developments in your field. Check on what your competitors are writing about, and watch for new trends. This will keep your website current, razor-sharp and unique. By keeping your eyes open, you will be able to grab an angle or niche that hasn't been well covered yet by your competitors. Portray this angle or niche on your website.

Finally, be wary of broadening the theme of your site too much. Try not to dilute your product or service's targeted niche simply to expand your base of merchant partners. Remember; focus on your selling your service. That's where the “meat and potatoes” of your business will come from.

Choosing a Domain Name

In the physical world, you can distinguish a business because of its structure, window displays, or signs. You can tell that a bank is a bank, or a clothing store is indeed a clothing store.

In the Internet, however, it is an entirely different story altogether. Your domain name is the only clue to your online business.

You do not have visual clues: no location, no look, and no store design. Instead, users have to type in a word or a set of words to reach your site. Your prospective visitor has no way of knowing what your site is all about until she finds it and reads its contents. Who can ever tell that Amazon.com sells books? Or that Excite is a search engine?

Your domain name can spell your success on the Internet. A good domain name is the best asset you can ever have. It can make your business stand out in the crowd, or just float aimlessly in space.

The need to provide immediate clues to an online business led to the prevalence of generic domain names. Generic names instantly provide the user with an idea of what a business is all about, what to expect and look for in a site. For instance, Etoys.com is a toy store.

The temptation of the generic name has been so powerful; that some companies even paid ridiculously high prices to get the name they want. The domains Loans.com and Wines.com were both bought for $3 million each. Telephone.com was acquired for $1.75 million, while Bingo.com sold for $1.1 million.

However, generic names do not necessarily create the “buzz” that you'd like surrounding your website. Branding has always been about proper names: McDonald's did not name their store Hamburger. Hertz is not called Car Rental. FedEx is not Mail Carrier. Kodak is not Photographs. Google is not Search Engine. Microsoft is not Computer Software.

For better branding results, your domain name should stand out and be easy to remember. Consider the following tips when creating a domain name:

The domain name should be short
The domain name should be simple
It should be suggestive of your business category
It should be unique
It should be easy to interpret and pronounce
It should be personalized
It should not be difficult to spell
It should not be difficult to remember

Domain names can be registered through many different companies (known as "registrars") - a listing of these companies is available at ICANN.org. You can register for domain names from 1 to 10 years in advance and prices can vary anywhere from $8 to $30 per year for each registered domain. Most website hosting companies, as explained later, will handle the registration process for you, but make sure that you are properly listed as the owner of the domain when it is registered. If you have registered a domain name for a specific period, make sure you renew it in time. You'd be surprised at the number of cases, where website owners have lost their domain name to a competitor by not renewing it in time.

Using Expired Domains to Skyrocket Your Traffic

Domain names provide a great opportunity to make easy money.

I'm not talking about Internet real estate, where you buy up good names and sell them on for a profit. If you didn't get positioned in that market early on, you can forget about it. The bottom's fallen out of the market and the best domains are long gone.

I'm talking about expiring domains. Thousands of webmasters invest time, effort and money to promote their site and build up traffic. Many of them then lose interest and move on, leaving their site active. That means that although they still own the domain, they're not actively promoting it. But they don't need to. All the automatic marketing systems they've put in place are still bringing in traffic. The site runs itself.

Now, at some point the ownership of those domains is going to expire. If you snap up those domains once they come back onto the market, you've got a pre-built stream of customers. You can either rebuild the site, or redirect the traffic to your domain.

It's that easy. In fact, websites like DeletedDomains.com actually do all the legwork and let you reap all the rewards. Do be careful when using other sites though. There are some swindlers out there that will sell you subscriptions, provide you with outdated lists, take your money and keep the good domains for themselves. It happens, and there's little point in taking a risk with other companies when DeletedDomains.com does such a great job.

The Host

Let's start where the Internet starts: with a host. A host is a server that provides a home for your website on the World Wide Web. Just as your computer contains all your files, so a host contains all the files needed to run your website. Why can't you just keep all those files on your own computer? Because that would mean visitors would have to connect directly to your computer to see your website and that's not a good idea. It wouldn't be secure and it would make your machine run like a tired snail. With a host, you can simply upload everything you need to the server and your users can then connect there to see your site. It lets the site run faster and allows it to have all the security and extras it needs.

Selecting a host is the first important step towards building your Internet business.

Hosting services and companies vary from totally free, shared servers to large-scale dedicated machines. You'll have to decide which is right for you and your business.

Your choice of server will depend on how much money you have available at the beginning and how much you plan to grow in the future. In my opinion, for commercial sites, free hosting is a waste of time. Your users are going to get blasted with annoying pop-ups every time they surf to your page, it's going to be impossible to get a decent position in a search engine, and you don't even get a real business URL. No one's going to remember your web address if they have to type: FreeWebsiteHosting.com/my_site. However, it is possible to choose a cheaper host at the beginning and move up as your business begins to bring in money.

NOTE: One of the most important factors in choosing a website host is the customer service you receive once you've signed up. There are many technical issues that can come up once you have your own website, and if you don't have a truly dedicated hosting company to support you and help you resolve these issues when necessary, you could, quite simply, lose your business. Trust me, I've seen many thriving online businesses fall apart because they chose the wrong hosting company. When hosting is cheap, there is a reason for it. With website hosting, you get exactly what you pay for and you should never compromise when it comes to who to host your website with.

Testing and Performance

You have designed a very usable website, you have hosted it using a very reliable web hosting company, and you have integrated a safe and trusted payment processing system with your website. However, all these can prove to be useless until you know your site is actually working and accessible. If you want to create an accessible website, you will need to test, test and test again.

A recent Forrester Research report reported that failure to ensure website quality will cost the average small or mid-size company thousands of dollars in wasted expenditures on website redesigns, forfeited revenue, and lost customers. Testing a website is a long and tedious task, but it's perhaps the most important task of all. There are numerous stages to testing, all of which are very important. Ranging from browser testing to content testing, none should be excluded.

Visual Acceptance Testing

Visual Acceptance Testing is the first port-of-call for all webmasters. This type of testing generally ensures that the site looks as it is intended to. This includes checking the graphic integration, and simply confirming that the site looks good. In this stage you should assess every page carefully to ensure that each looks the same. The site should be tested under different screen resolutions and color depths.

Functionality Testing

Functionality testing is perhaps the most vital area of testing, and one which should never be missed. Functionality testing involves an assessment of every aspect of the site where scripting or code is involved, from searching for dead links, to testing forms and scripts.

You should also test your payment processing system completely and thoroughly. After all, you wouldn't want a potential customer to get stuck at the last stage and eventually leave the site just because there is something wrong with payment processing.

Content Proofing

This stage of testing removes any errors in your content, and ensures that your site has a professional appearance. In this phase, you should reread each page on your site, and check for spelling and grammatical errors.

System and Browser Compatibility Testing

This test phase is completed in order to ensure that your website renders correctly on a user's screen. To begin with, you should test several pages from your site on different browsers such as Internet Explorer 4, 5, 6, Netscape 4 and 6, and Opera. This can be extremely important - if your site does not work properly with the Netscape browser, Netscape users will end up annoyed, and they'll go elsewhere.

Monitoring and Tracking

Understanding what your visitors do on your site is crucial information, not to mention interesting. If a large majority of your visitors who proceed to purchase a product leave the site when they get to a specific page in the order process, you need to know about it. It could be that the page in question is confusing or hard to use. Fixing it could increase your sales exponentially. In fact, it is not uncommon for small website changes in headlines and order processes to result in a 200%-300% increase in sales. This is just an example; there are many reasons why you want a detailed analysis of your site visitors.

Most website hosting services offer a stats package that you can study. If you're not sure where this is, call up your hosting service and ask them. Statistics are a vital part of tracking your marketing progress. If you don't have access to website statistics get a package that can help you in this area. Do not get a counter that just shows how many visitors you've had. You'll be missing out on vital information that can help strengthen weaknesses in your site.

A good website hosting service would offer traffic logs that provide an invaluable insight into the traffic being referred to a web site from various sources such as search engines, directories and other links.

Unfortunately, traffic tracking provided by web hosting services is often in the form of raw traffic log files or other hard-to-comprehend, cryptic formats. These log files are basically text files that describe actions on the site. It is literally impossible to use the raw log files to understand what your visitors are doing. If you do not have the patience to go through these huge traffic logs, opting for a trafficlogging package would be a good idea.

Basically two options are available to you and these are: using a log analysis package or subscribing to a remotely hosted trafficlogging service. A remotely hosted traffic logging service may be easy to use and is generally the cheaper option of the two. In fact, you can get a powerful free tracking tool at: StatCounter.com. Other reliable tracking programs include WebTrends.com and HitsLink.com.

These services do not use your log files. Typically a small section of code is placed on any page you want to track. When the page is viewed, information is stored on the remote server and available in real time to view in charts and tables form.

A good traffic logging service provides detailed statistics pertaining to the following:

How many people visit your site?
Where are they from?
How are visitors finding your site?
What traffic is coming from search engines, links from other sites, and other sources?
What keyword search phrases are they using to find your site?
What pages are frequented the most - what information are visitors most interested in?
How do visitors navigate within your web site?

Knowing the answers to these and other fundamental questions is essential for making informed decisions that maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your website investment.

The most important aspect of tracking visitors to your website is analyzing all the statistics you get from your tracking software. The three main statistics that will show your overall progress are hits, visitors and page views. Hits are tracked when any picture or page loads from your server on to a visitor's browser. Hits, however, can be very misleading. It is quite an irrelevant statistic for your website.

The statistic that is probably the most important for a website is Page Views/Visitors. This gives you a good indication of two things.

First, how many people are coming to your site, and secondly how long are they staying on your site. If you have 250 visitors and 300 page views you can figure that most visitors view one page on your site and then leave. Generally, if you're not getting 2 page views per visitor then you should consider upgrading your site's content so your visitors will stay around longer.

If you see the number of visitors you have increasing as well as the number of page views per visitor increasing then keep up the good work! Always look for this stat as an overall barometer of how your site design is going and if your marketing campaigns are taking hold.

Also, a good stat to look for is unique visitors. Once a person visits your site they will not be added to the unique visitors category if they visit again. This is a good way to track new visitors to your website.

Page views are a good indication of how "sticky" your website is. A good statistic to keep is Page Views divided by the number of Visitors you have. This statistic will give you a good idea if your content is interesting and if your visitors are staying on your site for a long time and surfing.

Some people are intimidated by web traffic statistics (mostly because of the sheer volume of data available), but they shouldn't be.

While there are many highly specialized statistics that can be used for more in-depth web traffic analysis, the above areas alone can provide invaluable information on your visitors and your website performance.

Remember, this data is available for a reason. It's up to you to use it.

Tracking Your Sales

Like any business, it is absolutely vital to track and maintain your sales records. You should have a clear understanding of your income and expenditures.

There are many ways to keep track of your sales. Using orthodox methods such as keeping a paper journal is time consuming. Simple spreadsheet programs as well as basic accounting software are available at minimum or no cost. However, it is advisable to install advanced accounting software such as QuickBooks, Quicken, or Microsoft Money to keep track of your accounting.

Such advanced programs save you time by sorting your register transactions by date, transaction amount, document number (e.g. check number), order entered, or cleared status. The tracking feature included in such software tracks, by user, changes made to each transaction. Daily, weekly, monthly as well as yearly sales reports can be generated with a few clicks. These reports help you analyze the sales of each and every product. Logs and reports can be generated to keep track of all your customers.

NOTE: Affiliate marketing solves many of the aforementioned tracking problems for you automatically. When you become an affiliate and resell other company's products for a profit, the company you are affiliated with keeps track of your traffic and sales automatically and presents all this information to you in easy to read charts and graphs.

Building Credibility and Maintaining it

Finally, make sure that you build trust and credibility for your business. We discussed earlier the importance of credibility. Credibility is a key ingredient for any successful business venture. Building and enhancing the credibility of the products and services you offer is an ongoing and full-time effort.

Why not make sure the website you use works as hard as you do to establish credibility? Let's look at elements that can be built into a well-designed website to enhance credibility in the eyes of your potential customers.

Offer a Guarantee

Nothing beats a solid, believable guarantee for building credibility online. It may be hard to believe, but buying via the Internet is still unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory for many people. It is up to you, the business owner, to put their minds at ease. One way to do this would be to offer an unconditional, 100% money back guarantee.

By assuming all of the risk, you will earn instant credibility points with most potential customers.

Provide Contact Information

Even the best guarantee won't help establish credibility if the potential customer cannot contact you. Post accurate contact information on your website and make it easy to find. Provide as many methods of contact as possible; do not simply post a link to an email address. For maximum credibility, post the complete mailing address, phone number (preferably a toll free number), and email addresses for customers to use if they feel the need to contact you.

Provide a Brief Bio

Familiarity is one of the most effective tools for building credibility on the Internet. How do you establish familiarity in a faceless, impersonal medium like the Internet? Simple, tell people about yourself. Post a page that provides a thumbnail sketch that describes who you are. Be sure to include personal data as well as professional credentials. Place your photo on the page so people can put a face with your name. Creating familiarity will impart another level of credibility for you and, by extension, for the product you represent.

In this chapter, we looked at how to build your website and explained many of the elements your website must contain to be effective. We discussed web hosting and domain names and even talked about how to use expiring domain names to get free traffic flowing to your website. And we're only getting started! In the next chapter, we're going to look more closely at some of the more popular and successful Internet business ideas

Internet Business Ideas

2008-09-04T09:36:00.000-07:00

keyword: online business, global market, Ipsos Reid, huge marketplace, landscape of Wall Street, valuable content, educate and research, mail order, back-end selling, cross-selling

Leverage the Advantages of the Net

The Internet is a vehicle that has been used to enable higher levels of communication between people, companies and countries throughout the world. It means your online business does not just have to concentrate on local markets – and almost no place is out of reach! If your business has a website, this in itself means it is accessible by the global market, and it is vital that your business take advantage of this.

Internet selling is on the rise. There are many research studies and statistics that support this statement. A study conducted by the Ipsos Reid market research firm in February 2003 concludes that in the year 1999 only 28% of worldwide Internet users purchased a product or service online, whereas this figure rose to 62% in the year 2002 and about 70% in the year 2005. And these numbers continue to climb. Nielsen/NetRatings supports this finding with its own research.

The Internet is a huge marketplace that has attracted businesses with its potential for big-time revenues. Dizzying success stories of ventures started in a basement that grew to become stock market darlings are constantly celebrated in the media. Small businesses came to the Internet, tentative at first, and then in droves - eager to sell everything from fake jewelry to handcrafted tapestries.

You can sell just about anything from soup to nuts, as long as you have a product that has a market.

What Businesses Are Succeeding on the Net?

After the settling down of the dot-com bubble, sanity checks have brought realistic expectations to the fore. Initially, a backlash was seen, forecasting the doom of the Internet. Finally, merits have made the Internet gain its rightful place. In breakthroughs that show the promise of ecommerce wasn't all smoke and mirrors, many dot-coms including eBay Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Expedia Inc., FindWhat.com Inc., E-Trade Group Inc., Google Inc. and others have successfully re-defined the landscape of Wall Street.

There is a growing tendency amongst Internet users to pay for valuable content along with quality products and services offered online. Hundreds of paid content and product-oriented websites have already proven this unmistakable trend. The discerning buyer values her time and is willing to pay for access to quality information and the convenience of purchasing products and services online.

However, not all products can be sold on the Internet. Some products may be better suited for online sales than others; others simply will not work online. According to an Ernst and Young study, the most popular online purchases are computer related products (40%), books (20%), travel (16%), clothing (10%), recorded music (6%), subscriptions (6%), gifts (5%) and investments (4%).

Businesses offering paid services have also prospered enormously. The top three categories (Business Content/Investment, Entertainment/Lifestyles and Personals/Dating) consistently account for 62% of all paid content revenue. One statistic indicates that 85% of all money spent by U.S. Consumers for online content goes to the top 50 sites in most categories.

In terms of “stickiness” of different categories, Business sites - especially finance and investment rank the highest. In other words, users are more likely to spend more time surfing through a business website compared to other categories.

Should you be selling a product or a service?

The Internet is primarily used to communicate, entertain, educate and research. It is thus no wonder that nonperishable, informationintensive products - including computers and software, books, travel, consumer electronics, magazine subscriptions - are the most popular online products at present. Content-rich sites, subscription-based sites to advertiser-supported sites focusing on a wide range of topics, have been sprouting up all over the Internet.

Services such as hotel reservation, air travel and investments have successfully transitioned themselves to the Internet. Unique services such as online driving schools have been prospering too. In fact, many states in the US have already set up online payment sites for Government services. Residents can now get online to pay most of their bills and other expenses including parking tickets to local courts.

However, all kinds of services cannot be run entirely on the Internet. The Internet is less effective when face-to-face selling is needed to close a deal. The Internet can give lots of preliminary information that's useful in setting the scene for the closing. But the actual closing takes place offline - i.e., not on the Internet.

Products can also be marketed and sold successfully on the Internet. The kinds of products and services that sell best on the Internet are those that take advantage of the convenience of the Net.

Remember that convenience is the primary reason consumers flock to the Internet in the first place. People can shop at any hour of the day at most sites. They can avoid crowded stores, irritating sales clerks, and even avoid pickpockets.

Offbeat or unusual products and services often attract online attention and sell strongly. You would generally not try to sell items people can get at the corner store. Thus, few toothbrushes are sold on the Net; the same thing with daily food and beverage purchases. But special cheeses, rare cigars, Turkish plates, long-aged wines, even diamonds, can and do sell well on the Internet.

Most products sold by catalog and mail order also sell well on the Net. However, people tend to buy only those products that can be shipped at a reasonable price. Higher shipping costs diminish the price competitiveness of online products and turns-off a lot of potential buyers. In fact, high shipping costs is the primary factor that discourages some people from buying online more than any other given reason. An Ernst and Young report shows that 53 percent of online shoppers are concerned with shipping costs that are too high, compared to only 19 percent who are concerned with credit card information being stolen.

As an online merchant, you have to work out the advantages as well as disadvantages of selling either products or services online. If you choose to sell a product or service online, you must evaluate your offering to ensure that the total costs of the product or service including shipping are not much higher than what is offered elsewhere.

Importance of Back-end Selling

Considerable effort is required to get customers for your products. You might design stunning web pages, work hard for high search engine rankings (or pay for them), submit classified ads, etc. but still not manage to sell enough to make the kind of profits you desire. This is where the concept of back-end sales is useful.

Most marketers are successful because they apply back-end selling into their marketing efforts. Back-end selling is when you sell other products or services to your existing customers after they have purchased an initial product.

It is always easier to sell products or services to your existing customers because you have developed a relationship with them when you sold your first product or service to them. You will find it less expensive to sell to old customers as compared to selling to new customers.

Your conversion ratio will be dramatically higher with existing customers. In fact, to increase your online profits dramatically, you should continually locate or create new back-end products and services to recommend (sell) to your existing customers.

Many businesses sell their front-end products (initial products) at almost zero profit in order to generate back-end profits. These businesses do not care even if they lose money on the front-end products or services; they want the back-end profits.

How do you make backend sales? There are several ways. When you order a product from a mail-order company, they'll send you a catalog along with your order, or put you on a mailing list and send you new catalogs from time to time. They might also send you a sales letter for another product. This may be related to the first product in some way. Many companies implement such a strategy.

To implement this technique online, you can put the sales pitch for your backend item in the email to the customer that confirms their order. If you have an online catalog, you could include a link to it, or even include a coupon or special offer "for all valued customers".

For a faster response, you should put the backend offer on the "Thank You" page that is generated by a credit-card sale. The customer just bought something from you and has a credit card in his or her hot little hand! Why not ask for another purchase while they are in the mood to buy. In case you do not sell more than one product or service, affiliate programs might come in handy.

Back-end selling can also be integrated with “Up-Selling” wherein you introduce more expensive products or services to your existing customers in similar ways as those mentioned above. This will almost instantly raise your sales and profits.

Cross-Selling

Another successful strategy similar to the ones discussed above is cross-selling. One of the best examples of cross-selling via the web is on Amazon.com. If you search for a book on the Amazon site, a message will appear on the same page, saying “Customers who bought this book also bought…” and will list half-dozen other books for your consideration. This is an excellent way to cross-sell additional services or content to your members.

You can also direct visitors to other parts of the site to consider products and services that they hadn't previously considered.

Successful cross-selling is the result of recognizing a customer need and meeting that need with a useful product or service. Customers benefit from needs-based cross-selling efforts because they receive the services they need and want.

Cross-selling can help your business realize its objectives: providing useful services, retaining customers, attracting new customers, and staying competitive with other websites.

In conclusion, you can offer a range of products and services on the Internet. The key is proper research and a great marketing plan. We'll be talking about marketing strategies for your product or service in the upcoming chapters. In fact, in the next chapter, we will discuss one of the most important Internet marketing strategies – search engine optimization.

Affiliate Marketing

2008-08-31T04:51:00.000-07:00

What is Affiliate Marketing ?

Affiliate marketing Definition by Wikipedia

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.

Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of Internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies, and in-house affiliate managers, specialized third party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies

Affiliate Marketing Definition by John Mann

One Affiliate Marketing definition is the one we tell our friends. "Affiliate Marketing is the business process where one person acts as the commissioned salesman (me - the affiliate) for a person with a product they would like help promoting on the internet (your merchant.)"

But for those of us in the industry or aspiring to become successful in the industry, there is a second Affiliate Marketing definition. For me this Affiliate Marketing definition is the one that describes a "successful" Affiliate Marketing business.

In this Affiliate Marketing definition, the business is run like a business. Scheduled tasks are completed adhering to a schedule, time is managed wisely. The business represents only those products which really benefit their customers and the merchants behind those products help their affiliates to become successful in any way they can.

Affiliate Marketing Definition by EzineArticles.com

Definitions of affiliate marketing on the Web:

A type of advertising system based on the CPA payment method whereby web sites run advertiser's banners for free but get paid on any sales or ... - onlineadvertising.net/glossary.html
A system of advertising in which site A agrees to feature buttons from site B, and site A gets a percentage of any sales generated for site B. It can also be applied to situations in which an advertiser may be looking for marketing information, rather than a cash sale. ... - email-marketing-blitz.com
Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses (merchants/advertisers) in which an affiliate (publisher) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts. - signature.gb.com
this involves websites selling or promoting something from another website and receiving some sort of commission or percentage in return. - onlineadvantage.co.nz
A method of marketing where other websites can sign up to sell your products for a commission. - outsource2india.com
Affiliate marketing is an advertising system in which the affiliate merchant rewards the affiliate partner for every sale and/or visitor. - impnerd.com
Using other online marketers as a source of referrals; payment is usually per click, per lead, or per sale. - multichannelmerchant.com
A system of selling products or services in context over the Internet that allows online merchants to promote their goods or services within the content of tens of thousands of Web sites. Affiliate marketing allows merchants to pay their affiliates based on performance. - getrichfree.com
Affiliate marketing is revenue sharing advertising between two websites. The affiliate website will display an online advertisement of another ... - marketresearchterms.com
Affiliate marketing is utilized on this site as a revenue generation tool. All affiliations are chosen with care but tommysellers. ... - tommysellers.com
Web site that sells products or services of other Web sites, called affiliates, to help market the products.The affiliate website will display an online advertisement of another website and receives a percentage of sales or some other form of compensation generated by that traffic. - webandrank.com
Can be identified in the case of affiliate programs and is that part of the marketing process involving the advertising and selling of products conducted by affiliates. Lately it has become known as the actual method of selling goods and services through the use of affiliates. - cosminptr.com
An agreement between two sites in which the affiliate agrees to feature adverts for the others products or services in return for some form of compensation typically a commission. This is typically a PPA system. - technogumption.com
The method of promoting your business (the merchant) online through third party sites (the affiliates) and then rewarding them for every sale or lead that they generate on your site. This reward could be a percentage of the sale value or a fixed cost per activity. - awamedia.com
this is a profit sharing arrangement between a online merchant and an online affiliate marketer. The affiliate marketers site features the merchants products or services with a unique ID link to the merchants site. ... - affiliatemarketingbasics.com
A way for a company to sell its products by signing up individuals or companies ("affiliates") who market the company's products for a commission. - best-affiliates-program.com

Predominant compensation methods

Eighty percent of affiliate programs today use revenue sharing or cost per sale (CPS) as a compensation method, nineteen percent use cost per action (CPA), and the remaining programs use other methods such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (CPM).

Diminished compensation methods

Less than one percent of traditional affiliate marketing programs today use cost per click and cost per mille. However, these compensation methods are used heavily in display advertising and paid search.

Cost per mille requires only that the publisher make the advertising available on his website and display it to his visitors in order to receive a commission. Pay per click requires one additional step in the conversion process to generate revenue for the publisher: A visitor must not only be made aware of the advertisement, but must also click on the advertisement to visit the advertiser's website.

Cost per click was more common in the early days of affiliate marketing, but has diminished in use over time due to click fraud issues very similar to the click fraud issues modern search engines are facing today. Contextual advertising programs such as Google AdSense are not considered in the statistic pertaining to diminished use of cost per click, as it is uncertain if contextual advertising can be considered affiliate marketing.

Types of affiliate websites

Affiliate websites are often categorized by merchants (i.e., advertisers) and affiliate networks. There are currently no industry-wide accepted standards for the categorization. The following types of websites are generic, yet are commonly understood and used by affiliate marketers.

Search affiliates that utilize pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers' offers (i.e., search arbitrage)
Comparison shopping websites and directories
Loyalty websites, typically characterized by providing a reward system for purchases via points back, cash back, or charitable donations
Coupon and rebate websites that focus on sales promotions
Content and niche market websites, including product review sites
Personal websites (This type of website was the reason for the birth of affiliate marketing; however, such websites are almost reduced to complete irrelevance compared to the other types of affiliate websites.)
Weblogs and website syndication feeds
E-mail list affiliates (i.e., owners of large opt-in -mail lists that typically employ e-mail drip marketing) and newsletter list affiliates, which are typically more content-heavy
Registration path or co-registration affiliates who include offers from other merchants during the registration process on their own website
Shopping directories that list merchants by categories without providing coupons, price comparisons, or other features based on information that changes frequently, thus requiring continual updates
Cost per action networks (i.e., top-tier affiliates) that expose offers from the advertiser with which they are affiliated to their own network of affiliates

10 Tips - Old Fashioned Business Networking

2008-08-19T22:07:00.001-07:00

Yes, even though we're all buried in Spam, it's still possible to make new business contacts online. The recent JV (Joint Venture) craze reflects the simple principle that in the end, people do business with PEOPLE – not with pixels, bits, and bytes.

Old fashioned networking is still alive and well online. And it's the best method for getting some good exposure if you're just starting out and have no money for marketing. By building strong business relationships, you'll soon have other marketers offering to link to you, publish your articles, write about your site in their newsletter, and even offer you free advertising.

One of the best places to make business contacts in your field is in forums. For example, if you've started an affiliate web site that sells specialty dog training devices, hang out in the many dog-related forums and newsgroups.

But instead of trying to help end consumers so they'll visit your site, make friends with experts in related fields. In this case pet sitters, groomers, dog trainers, veterinary assistants, and even animal behaviorists can all be excellent contacts.

As with all business networking, look for ways to help your colleagues. If they have their own site, offer them a link on yours. If they have an opt-in list, perhaps you can set up a special web page, and give them a rebate on any commissions you make. If they write their own articles, perhaps you can turn them into a mini-ebook and offer it to all your visitors.

And there's no reason you can't be proactive, and send an email to noncompetitors – or even competitors – whose sites you admire. You don't have to consider every competitor your enemy. In a future special report we'll explain exactly how you can create powerful partnerships with your competitors. But for now, simply look for opportunities to be helpful.

One easy way to help – provided you do it diplomatically – is to point out a problem on someone's site or in their ezine. If you find a broken link or some other error, drop them a note. Most webmasters WANT to know if a link suddenly stops working or if their database is generating internal server errors.

Another way to make powerful friends online is to read your Spam. That's because ALL online merchants want to know if someone is promoting their affiliate product via Spam. It's not just the Spammer who can suffer some stiff legal penalties – they can too. So if you see someone's ebook or software being sold via Spam, write to them and let them know. Make sure you keep the original Spam, and send it to them as an attachment (not forwarded) so they receive all the headers intact.

How can networking help get you targeted traffic? If you make 20 strong, personal, one-on-one business contacts every month, at least five of them will end up sending you traffic. Somehow, someday, they'll start pushing the right kinds of visitors to you.

It might be by linking to you. They may mention your site in a viral ebook or one of their articles. They might want to do a joint venture or partner on a money making project. They might do all these things – and many more.

Yes, it's old fashioned. It's not autopilot. It's not passive. But networking costs you nothing except time – and can be worth gold in the long term.

10 Tips - Get Listed On Coupon And Special Offer Sites

2008-08-13T21:57:00.000-07:00

Keyword:special offer, coupon, rebat, coupon sites, targeted traffic

There are dozens of special offer, coupon, and rebate sites online today. Simply go to Google and type in “coupon sites” and you'll see what we mean. “Coupon” is searched at least a few hundred thousand times a month. Some smart folks are getting a lot of traffic with simple sites that are just lists of links to various sites with special offers.

How can this help YOU get targeted traffic? The people who visit these sites are looking for a discount, a deal, a freebie, a rebate, or a bargain. If you can offer some kind of special bonus – whether it's a cash rebate, a physical or digital product, or a service – you can ask to be included on these sites.

As long as you can come up with an offer that qualifies, you'll get accepted. If you wish, you can create several web pages, each with a slightly different special offer, and see what makes the most sales.

Very few affiliate marketers are taking advantage of this. Yes, it does mean you have to create a little something extra for the people who buy through these sites. You'll have to track their purchases. But considering that you'll also be getting incoming links from some very highly ranked web sites, it's worth the little bit of extra work.

10 tips for High Traffic - Paying For Links

2008-08-08T20:22:00.000-07:00

The reciprocal link principle is simple – find websites with good rankings and plenty of traffic, and trade links with them. But when you’re just starting out, why should a big important site give a little upstart like you any kind of link at all?

At AffiliateClassroom we like to say that there’s only one way to find out – ASK. It helps if you have some kind of relationship with the site owner. But even if you don’t, you can sometimes use the time-honored principle of bribery to get a link from a well-ranked site.

Ask for a link. If you get turned down, say “Would you consider linking to me for $100?” You’d be surprised at how many webmasters will take you up on your offer!

This technique works best with privately owned sites that rank in the top 10 for targeted keywords in niche markets. There’s no point in trying to get a link from Kiplinger’s or Newsweek’s or Vogue’s web site. But if you’re selling weight loss products, and $50 will buy you a link from a small web site that’s ranked #1 for “low-carb dessert recipes,” you’re probably better off buying that link than buying $50 of PPC advertising. This also can’t hurt your own search engine ranking.

Make sure you have a simple written agreement about exactly what the link will say (you want your keywords in it) and the duration of the link – 6 months, a year, forever, etc.

A similar technique involves finding all the sites that link to your competitors, and offering them a cash incentive to add your link to their site. You can find these sites by going to Google and typing in “link:www.yourcompetitorslink.com.

Articles Resources:

When paying for link in does it help to link to multiple pages inside 1 site... - http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum12/1979.htm
If you are paying for link building, read this! « RISMedia Real ... - http://rismedia.com/forums/topic/if-you-are-paying-for-link-building-read-this
Paying for Link Bait - http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=5371061
AD: Paying for link sellers - DNForum - Domain Sales, Domain Forum ... - http://www.dnforum.com/f60/ad-paying-link-sellers-thread-158181.html
Why is Paying for a Link to Bidding Web Directory Useful? - Volkswagen - http://volkswagen96350.blogspot.com/2008/05/why-is-paying-for-link-to-bidding-web.html
Is it worth paying for link exchange! - SitePoint Forums - http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=557699
Paying for link building - Business Forum UK - Advice Help and ... - http://www.a1businessforums.co.uk/forum/seo-advice-help-search-engine-optimisation/2405-paying-link-building.html
It is not all about paying for link ads or buying the pay-per-click illusion ... Check this page rankings in Google for marketing reggaeton - http://www.miislita.com/reggaeton/marketing-reggaeton.html
Increase Website Traffic, Pulsar Marketing loan and credit card affiliate program news & media ... If you are not careful, you may end up paying for link placement ... - http://pmrss.com/log/blogs/193/Increase-Website-Traffic
Huge Red Flag at Netscape, He’s paying for link whores. As I posted on digg, ...... than simply marketing the jewel that was the former Netscape.com more prominently? - http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/19/huge-red-flag-at-netscape/
Google To Penalize Sites That Pay For Links - Page 3 - eSyndiCat ... - A website without well-done Search Engine Marketing is as good as non-existent. ... How can google find out who is paying for link and who is not. ... - http://www.esyndicat.com/forum/showthread.php?p=89917
Stop looking for link exchanges - When paying for link - http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum12/1980.htm
If you are paying for link placement, you need to track your click through's (CTR's) ... Successful Internet Marketing Without Search Engines Washington DC ... - http://http://articles.directorym.net/Essential_Elements_of_Developing_Copy_that_Generates_Real_Traffic_Washington_DC-r868190-Washington_DC.html
Website Marketing, General Marketing and Promotion - http://forums.webicy.com/showthread.php?t=1396
SEOmoz: Four Fundamental Principles of SEO - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/four-fundamental-principles-of-seo
BlueTheme for phpLD 3.3 - Webmaster Forums in Directory Junction - http://www.directoryjunction.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3923
Shannon Brownlee: All Publications, Events and Press - http://www.newamerica.net/people/content/404/all/feed/
Letters to the Editor - http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/266991_ltrs18.html
Jackie Huba adds, “”Your control over marketing was lost long ago. .... BW item seems to agree, saying that “These companies are paying for link traffic… - http://www.openthedialogue.com/?m=200607
Search Engine Optimisation Specialists - You may also want to think about paying for link ads on other sites... - http://cobraconsulting.com/
Search Engine Optimization - Page 2 - SitePoint Forums - Is it worth paying for link exchange! - http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=3&order=desc&page=2
Paying for link submitters an affordable advertising and family friendly ... - http://www.1artiste.com/
Visual Orange can assist you with this as they offer online marketing services and search ...... Paying for link gets you can search engine performance. ... - http://www.andlyweb.info/
Visual Orange can assist you with this as they offer online marketing services and ...... Paying for link popularity is the link bidders - just place a bid, ... - http://www.agarticles.info/
Paying for link bidders.Why PurpleSpiderSEO dot com is one of the benefits ... - http://www.wathblog.com/

The Easiest Way - Seven Step

2008-08-08T06:52:00.000-07:00

Blog Contests

Contests are nothing new in the online world. Many people have been using contests to get free web traffic for years. However, there is a slightly new twist since the blog revolution that has made running a contest much more effective and fun.

The concept is the same. You come up with a prize (or many prizes) that would be appealing to your blog readers. Of course, offering your own product as the prize would be preferable since you can mention it on your blog (so everyone who sees your contest will also see your product link). But, if you don’t have your own product, you can easily ask around and find people who will donate.

Immediately after you post your contest, send a mailing to each of your ezine lists, letting them know about the contest. You’ll want your loyal readers to have the opportunity to win.

Next, contact your circle of influence (your friends) and let them know about your contest. Offer to do a blog post swap. If they’ll blog about your contest, you’ll owe them one the next time they have something they want to spread the word about.

Then, go and submit your contest to all of the contest websites. Yes, there are sites that list contests and free offers. This is obviously more effective in certain niches than in others, but it is free exposure to your contest. (Search google for “submit contest” & “submit sweepstake”.)

Of course, if you really want good mileage for your contest, you can also post on message boards in your niche with the signature pointing to your contest.

Online Radio & Podcast Interviews

Imagine being a talk show host for a weekly podcast. What’s the one thing you need every single week? Guests. Lots and lots of expert guests.

You think finding content for your website is hard? Trying pinning down guests each week for interviews. My good friend, Kelly McCausey, has been recording an online show since 2003 – every single week at WAHMTalkRadio.com That’s a lot of guests.

Here are some pointers to increase your odds of getting on a show and being asked back:

1. Actually listen to the show a few times before even thinking of contacting the host as a potential guest. Make sure your concept fits into the market that the show reaches. If the show is about Health, then don’t pitch your candy-making cookbook on there.
2. Do something newsworthy or interesting. Are you having a special event for charity? Have you recently won an award? If your idea is timely, you’ll stand out and the host may contact you sooner rather than later.
3. Have something interesting to say. If you just plan to talk about your products, then don’t ask to be a guest. Buy an ad instead.
4. If you have sample interviews or media exposure, tell the host about it in your inquiry letter. Direct her to your media page where you link to past interviews, if you have them.

3. Become a Featured Expert Columnist.

However, a much more direct way of getting your website in front of your target market is by doing something a bit more targeted than traditional article marketing.

Basically, we’re taking out the middle-man and going directly to the sites we want to have our articles published on. But, with a twist.

But, there is an easier way. In addition to writing and submitting articles to the big sites, hook up with a website that is in your niche and become a columnist for that site.

I’ve got to tell you that I have several columnists for my niche websites and it’s actually quite difficult to find people that are willing to do this. It’s insane that I have to look so far and wide to find writers who are willing to stick with a schedule and give me articles on time.

What do they get out of it?

Exposure to their target market forever. (As my site grows, their exposure grows.)
Guaranteed publishing on a targeted website for each article. (Assuming it’s a good article, of course.)
Exposure on a high traffic website that has some great Search Engine rankings.
Exposure in my ezine and possibly autoresponder as new articles are added.
Exposure on my blog.

What do I get?

Fresh, unique, quality content. (This is much better to me than using PLR articles or hiring a ghostwriter, because I’m finding experts who know the topics inside and out.)

Find membership sites and ebooks that are HOT and offer them content.

Find one membership site each week and offer them great content. You’ll get your marketing message in front of a lot of very targeted eyeballs who are interested in your topic.

Many membership sites archive their content. Be sure to check before you agree to do an exclusive interview to make sure that it’ll be getting exposure for a long, long time.

You can make this offer even more appealing by allowing the membership site owners to use their affiliate link for your program in the report or alongside the interview.

How do you find these hot membership sites? Easy. Search google.com for the following terms:

“keyword club” (example “dog owners club”)
“keyword month” (example “diabetic month”)
“keyword join” (example “divorce join”)

Of course, don’t fret if you find ebooks instead of membership sites. That works, too. Find hot ebooks in your niche that are just a little different than yours, but in the same field, and offer them a bonus for their customers. I recommend you search directly in the clickbank.com marketplace for those.

Once you set this up, each and every customer who buys the ebook of a competitor will receive a copy of your audio or report. If you set this up properly, you’ll turn your traffic on autopilot.

More google research ideas:

“keyword report” (example “fitness report”)
“keyword ebook” (example “recipe ebook”)
“keyword affiliate” (example “dog affiliate”)

Jump into Social Networking.

Social Networking comes in many shapes and forms, but the good thing is that it’s easy to dabble in and I’ve, personally, seen great results with little effort.

Many of these Social Networking sites expect you to be an active participant. You’re expected to rate and comment on other people’s contributions. Just jump in and play with it and watch your stats to see what is and is not working. You’ll see the traffic start to trickle in if you play by the rules and share quality information. (Don’t be afraid to have an opinion and stand out!)

Hot Tip! Of course, you can make this even more viral by talking about your affiliate program on Twitter or on the Social Networking Sites above. That way, instead of getting one visitor to your website, you’re getting a person who can send you additional traffic. You’re tapping into their lists, their connections, and their traffic instead. Pretty smart, isn’t it?

Create something buzz-worthy.

This is a very fun way to get some buzz about your website.

Create something fun and buzz-worthy.

1. Example of Using Graphics Creatively: www.MarketingComics.com – 15 hilarious comics about Internet Marketing – some may hit a little close to home! ;)
2. Example of Using Video Creatively: www.DinnerTimeVideo.com – a video to promote a family menu planning service.

If you’re not a very creative person, then you can certainly hire someone on elance.com to create an item for you. I’ve worked with illustrators on elance.com and I’ve had good luck so far. Just communicate your requirements clearly so there are no misunderstandings. In fact, after I write out my project requirements, I run the wording by two of my assistants and ask them to tell me what it says in their own words before posting it just to make sure it’s clear.

Your Own Affiliate Program!

I promised that I’d save the best for last, and I sure did. I even hinted (not so subtly) throughout this report about my favorite method of traffic generation.

Let me lay it on the line here. I told you at the beginning of this report that I quickly came up with 26 methods of generating traffic off the top of my head. I’m sure, if I sat and thought a bit longer I could easily make that 100 or more.

Just a few ideas from my list…

Squidoo
Stumble Upon
Digg/Reddit/etc.
Article Marketing
Ezine Advertising
Google Adwords
Craigslist
Offering Resale Rights
Webinars
Teleseminars
Offline Marketing
Twitter
Forums
Joint Ventures
Press Releases
Creating Viral Software & Tools
PayPerPost
Utterz
Viral Free Reports
Starting your Own Podcast
Search Engine Optimization
Blogging

Are you an expert in each of those things? No? Me, neither. I know quite a bit about each (more about some than others), but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert in every single one of those in any way, shape or form.

Do I have time to learn about and do each of those things on a regular basis? Not a chance. It would be insane to even try to do each of these things each day – or even every week.

This is where an affiliate program comes in handy. My affiliates are experts in these areas. Where there is only one ME with only 24 hours each day, my affiliates are many.

My affiliates have created Squidoo lenses to promote my products.
They’ve StumbledUpon pages with links to me.
They’ve posted about my free reports on Craigslist.
They’ve set up Adwords campaigns.
They’re blogging about my products.
They’re posting on forums with signature links promoting my products.
They are making graphics for my free reports, before I can even do it!

Articles Resources: