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February 7, 2012

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Steps that can help you increase your websites traffic

November 9, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

Everyone who has an internet-based business requires traffic to visit their website, because without
visitors it is impossible to market themselves and achieve sales. People will not just take it upon
themselves to visit you though, you will have to go out there and encourage people to spend time on
your site. The number of people who spend time on your site and actually go through with a purchase
equates to less than 5 percent. As such, it stands to reason that to reach a significant number of sales
you will need to reach a far greater number of visitors. Here we look at things that you can do to increase
the number of people who look at your website.

Write your own articles
One of the first things you could do is start a marketing campaign that includes article writing. If you
are not a confident writer you can employee people to do this for you. The easiest way to do this is to
write on a topic you are familiar with in a way that is understandable to the average reader. It doesn’t
need to be over complicated or formal, just simple and to the point. There are a good few article
directories out there that you can send your articles to so keep these in mind.

Ask if you can post a guest blog
Start working on adding to your reputation by asking to post on other people’s blogs. You can add in a
link that directs people to your website and if you can make yourself sound like a credible source people
will want to check out your website too. You could also think about writing reviews for other sites. The
better your rating on these sites, the more people will check you out and your link too.

Find out what keywords you should be using
Find out what the main keywords are that people search for when trying to find websites like yours.
Include these keywords in the text in your article and you will rank higher in a search engine’s results.
It goes without saying that the higher up your site ranks, the more people will see it and visit it.

Leave quality, credible answers on answer sites
If you want to direct people to use your site then you can do this by leaving ‘answers’ on sites like ‘Yahoo
Answers’ with your link. If you decide to do this though, do it with integrity. Only leave answers that you
feel will help people.Don’t simply post answers just for the sake of leaving your link because this could
affect you negatively in the end. If people don’t find your answers to be valid then they won’t find your
website to be valid either.

Give your visitors the opportunity to interact
The more interactive your site is the better it will be. This means allowing people the opportunity to
comment, share information, take part in activities or contribute to a forum. The more you have for
your visitors to do, the longer they are likely to stay. If there experience is a positive one then they
will more than likely visit you again, and if they do you will have more opportunities to convert their
visit to a sale. If they enjoy your content they are likely to encourage their friends to participate in it
too, which will increase your traffic further.

Get a business card
Create business cards. Sounds strange considering the fact that you are trying to get people to visit
your website, but you don’t only have to use the internet to increase your website’s traffic, you can
hand our flyers and businesscards with your website clearly displayed on it. If you include an offer
or discount code on your website that the person can use when they access it then that person is
more likely to pay a visit.

Create a podcast and get people talking
Tell people about your website using a podcast that people can watch. Post it on podcast directories
so that people can watch it and comment on it. The more enticing your podcast is the more you are
likely to turn your viewers into site regulars so really think about the content and make sure it is of
reasonable quality.One idea you could try is to advertise your site on a sign or billboard that you can
drive around with. You could have your car sprayed with your websites address so that wherever you
drive, people can see what you are advertising.

Use social networking sites to your own advantage
Don’t forget the importance of social networking sites. The obvious ones are Facebook, Twitter and
LinkedIn but thereare many more. You can create your own profile for people to become friends of or
you could create a page that people can ‘like’ or link in with. Once one person has joined, other people
can see this activity in their feed and may be tempted to take a look.

Give away an ebook for free
Think about what you can create for free that people might like. Ebooks are a great way to get people
interested in what you do and you can cascade this for free. Allow people to cascade your ebook
through their own websites too and make sure you provide a link to it in all of your email
correspondence.

Submit a sitemap
Think about creating a site map because this will make your site and all of its pages much easier to find.
There are a few options out there in this regard so take a look around.

There are lots of ways that you can encourage people to visit your site and hopefully the information we
have included here will help you get started. It may seem like there is a lot of work involved but if you
follow some of the advice above you will find that you can start to build on your reputation and grow your
website’s traffic in no time.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Tagged With: , ,

SEO Scalability – How to optimize multiple small websites

September 28, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

Is your company operating a large number of remote stores, branches or franchises?
It doesn’t matter whether these sub units are steel service centers, insurance agencies
or any other type of sub-businesses; you can experience a large improvement in your
online  performance by generating more organic traffic via the search engines.

Hence, if you have several related websites, scalability of such sites with better search options will provide you
with increased success.

Search engine optimization techniques make it easy to generate natural traffic when one website is involved.
But what about doing so with over a dozen local websites at the same time?

Bear in mind that larger number of businesses in this situation put in place a kind of thin centralized marketing
department structure. While most have already taken these steps, others are not far behind in simplifying the
management of several domains from one centralized department or location.

This strategy incorporates brand establishment and content revisions.

It won’t be long before the dogged effort to achieve brand-protection activities takes you down a road that
involves the following:

  • Single Content Management System (CMS)
  • Structuring a single website design template, as well as navigational structure
  • Saturating each remote website with just one set of fill-in-the-blank content.
    Typically, the blanks would feature local business name,
    including geographical modifiers relevant to areas which the remote location has served.
  • Using a single account (put up for the purpose of enabling cross-domain tracking) to access the web analytic data.

It is good to know that substantial part of the online chaos is now structured into a set of brand supporting websites.
The brand supporting websites would ultimately deliver a specific corporate message. However, organic traffic
generation for the sites would be low – this is bad news.

When content and navigational structure is controlled tightly, SEO results are impacted negatively. We’ve seen
through  Google Panda Update that meagre and duplicate content will not meet the requirements. Again, it
would be almost  impossible to pass link power between and within the websites. So, your content must be
relevant to the audience in a  particular geography before Google and other search engines can deem the
content of your website relevant in that geographical location.


What initial SEO efforts are necessary?

Your focus at the beginning should be on the onsite factors such as choosing keywords, creating XML site
maps and robots. txt files, setting up viable webmaster tools, structuring and incorporating your SEO on-site
plans such as content  modifications, meta tags and internal link structure, and fixing issues related to
canonical codes.

The first strategy is to split your websites into groups that are manageable. A fewer number of sites should
make up the first  group, while the last group should contain most of the sites. The creation of the groups
should hinge on the following:  business rotation, available labour and the performance of the websites.

Subsequently, after a few months into the project, you can start testing the original notion regarding the
most traffic  generating keyword, which is also capable of converting at the highest rate. You can accomplish
this using an outcome  from the first SEO efforts especially from the first group.

There are other things involved as well, but the content here is a great way to kick off.

 

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Tools Tagged With: , , ,

Top 5 steps to outdo your competitor websites

September 14, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

Getting high listings on Google does not require a perfect website. Just make it better,
when compared to your competitors’ websites. Your website will be clicked on, only
if you can make it slightly better than your competitor websites. Optimize your web
pages for the right keywords, then allow the quality of the backlinks to make the difference.

Here are top tips to help you surpass your competitors.

  1. Locate who your real competitors are
    The websites that rank high for your keywords are your real competitors. This is what
    you are to do: use Google to carry out a search on your keywords (at least five of them),
    then write out the links or URLs of the sites that have the best rankings for the five keywords.
    These five URLs are the your potential competitors.
  2. Find out the PageRank spread of linking Webpages
    The PageRank number displayed on Google’s tool bar is an imperfect metric. However, this
    number can still be useful in discovering the secret behind the higher ranking of certain websites;
    while others are left out.You can search out the sites that link to your competitors’ sites and notch
    up the Google PageRank of each page. Certain providers have link managers that sort the sites by PageRank.If you find out that there are more backlinks from high PageRanked web pages to your competitors’
    sites than that of your own site, you can hire services from  some of the available providers to
    generate higher PR links.
  3. Do some analysis on your Competitors’ backlinks
    Find time to analyze the number of links to your competitors’ sites that have your major keywords.
    You can accomplish this easily using the link manager feature of some market providers.Once you key-in the action, IBP will display the web pages linking to your competitors’ sites and will
    also reveal the anchor text of these links. To find out if your anchor texts are incorporated, sort the
    displayed sites by anchor text.

    You need to have more inbound links on your site (than your competitors) that feature the keywords
    you desire to rank high.

  4. Analyze the high level domains of the linking web pages
    When targeting Google versions such as Google.co.uk, there should be more backlinks in your
    website – from sites that employ the matching top level domain – than the number acquired by
    your competitors..

Google pays attention to websites that link from related sites. Thus, if you market phones, make sure that you
link from sites selling phones as well. It is also needful to check your site’s content for compliance with Google’s
most recent ranking algorithm using Top Optimizers listed by several providers.

 

 

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Website Promotion Tagged With: ,

Tips for building trust and influence of your website

September 12, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

There are several aspects to Google’s Panda update, but one thing is certain:
Google is concerned with signals of trust, influence/authority, as well as real branding.
If you own a website or business, what steps can you take to send Google these signals?

Here are a couple of ideas that work.

Indulge in Public Speaking

When you are a public speaker, Google will see it as a signal that your source is trusted as well as
authoritative – having nothing to conceal. Your business name and domain on the web are signals
to Google that you are speaking. It doesn’t matter where you are speaking – industry conference,
community college seminars etc, there will always be a page that lists who is speaking. Usually,
such pages will provide you with a link. The citation of your domain counts anyway, whether or
not you get the link from the platform you are speaking from. So, you are not wasting time researching
and preparing for those quality talks you deliver, it pays off well.

Blogger Linkup
This is a daily email newsletter. Each day, there is email going out of blogs seeking to get guest posts,
as well as bloggers searching for sites that would accept them. Well, the entire truth is that this doesn’t
generate desirable response at times, since a good number of the sites seem to be somewhat dodgy – so
consider it critically before showing your commitment. One of the mighty errors with a good number of
guest articles is the repeated use of same bio box. This results in unnatural focus on inbound anchor text.
Ensure that you do not form part of this mistake.

HARO – Help A Reporter Out
Have you heard about Help a Reporter Out? This is a daily email list of reporters searching for experts in |
different industries that would interview or quote for stories project. Obviously, you may not stumble on
a request from big name magazines and dailies such as the New York Times; however, there is still high
value placed on up-coming dailies and magazines, or industry-specific journals and magazines.

Press Releases
If you are regularly doing things that are press-worthy, it is likely you are sending out press releases about
such things. An example of press-worthy event is creating science project PDFs for an institution. If you
happen to get a guest blog post related to the project, don’t forget to link to it or mention it there. This way,
you can maximize content that you spent a lot of resources on (money, time). Now, you do not need to bother
about link equity passing of the press release – just see the links as directions or pointers. Once people stumble
on your press release and click on your link, search engine will definitely index them. Thus, it is recommended
that you place up to two deep links on your press release.

Consider Educational Links
Speaking generally, educational links known as .edu sites are seen as having more trust and are more authoritative
compared to any other site. One of the best ways to generate links from educational sites is to create valuable and
relevant content or project to .edu websites. If you are not skillful enough, pay a high profile writer to create a
valuable content that would attract the attention of professors, teachers and top professionals. Place the content
on a special template and do not include any ad or commercial links – if possible, turn the content into an encyclopedia.
Make the content downloadable by putting it in PDF format.

 

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Website Promotion Tagged With: , ,

Permission based email marketing: Building a mailing list to increase business

September 9, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

The major focus here is “List Building Automation”. This is going to be a great system
for those who really want to build solid online business. On the other hand, if you love
taking chances, you may not benefit from this system.

As you explore this overview on List Building Automation system, it is up to you to
decide whether or not the system is for you.

Permission-Based Email Marketing

This overview was curled from a video system created by Matt Callen. Going by the content
of the video, one would conclude that the entire thing should have been called “Business
Building Automation” since it is all encompassing, rather than focusing just on “List Building”.

The opening video started with Matt comparing two business models; both business models
generating income online, paid advertising as well as list building. He made huge success at
first through the paid ad business model; however, later on, the business almost crashed
because the model’s reliance on particular services provision by a third party was not sustainable.

Here’s Matt’s comment:

“When the third party you are relying on changes course suddenly, you are left with no
option but to change your own course suddenly in order to survive”.

This business owner has shown that he has what it takes to make nearly any system profitable;
however, by revealing his own overwhelming near-failure via the initial model, he was compelled
to embark on more broad-based system, which is also robust.

This business man is Matt: now, with his experience, the second model that proved more effective
is the subject of this series – the model’s driving force is a solid list.

Building a Solid List

Matt explains that, building a solid list is the sole way to achieve reliable income stream. It is also
the best way to build an asset whose growth would not be obstructed by changes that take place within.

It appears that the big players such as Google and Facebook are likely to change. The outcome will
impact the way you generate your list. However, if you have a strong list of customers, you will not be
affected while trying to acclimatize to the changes in pricing structure. Prominently, the list building
techniques can be broad and it is possible to have your lead gathering spread across a good number of
systems – including certain internal systems for lead gathering. Consequently, no changes made by
these big players will affect your list growing on the web.

Through experience, Matt has realized that several systems for generating online income can bring in
quick bucks. However, this is not sufficient – Matt believes that it makes no sense if such system can cause
your source of income to vanish suddenly, it’s simply a poor and devastating system of running a business.
This is because it is difficult for you to envisage that the source can suddenly vanish since you made it so fast.
At last, when the reality of the crash comes staring you on the face, it will all feel like being left with a hangover.
The worst is that the entire business will be created from the scratch, making so much effort to discover the
next online hit. The truth is that this one will also dry up eventually – so, do you really want to be operating
in such a manner and for how long?

The entire focus of Business Building Automation is to build up and protect a strong list of clients who will
ultimately become loyal to your business.

 

 

Filed Under: Email Marketing Solutions, Featured Articles Tagged With: ,

Internet marketing trends in 2011: What to expect

September 7, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

The past year was really a thrilling one for internet activities. In 2010, it appeared as though
Facebook was a big threat to the mighty search engine – Google. In the same year, there was
steady and continuous growth of social networking. Also, mobile web has became more
popular than conventional browsing using PCs – the iPad and iPhone played a major role in
increased mobile browsing rates.

2011 Internet Marketing Trends

Social Networking is here to Stay
Social networking will increasingly grow in leaps and bounds. Facebook and Twitter will continually
take a leap forward in taking share of Google’s huge market share and a lot of businesses are likely to
divert their attention from the ‘conventional’ to a social presence.

Obviously, the social network is here to stay, everyone is clamoring about it and lots of businesses are
benefiting massively from having a social presence. It is the best way to reach out to vast demographics
and place your business offerings before them. Your job is to learn the tips for getting followers in
these social networks.

There May be a New Face to Search Engine this Year
2011 may usher in a little change in search engine optimization; however, it will not stop being the major
marketing strategy for several online businesses. Just as it has been in the past years, focus will shift to
“long tail” niche markets – as competition for broad search terms become dense with big names
(renowned brands). Sensitive marketers would research long tail keywords in their niche, so that
they can crack up low traffic with ease.

Increase Rise in the Use of Mobile Devices to Access the Internet
Also, the use of mobile devices to surf the web will rise greatly in 2011. Businesses are increasingly taking
advantage of apps as they begin to realize how powerful these tools are for marketing. It is envisaged that
more people are likely to access the internet using mobile devices. than they would do with personal
computers. So, it’s time to join the mobile browsing bandwagon. Also, ensure that your website features
mobile-friendly tools.

The Use of Blogging as a Marketing Tool will Increase Greatly
More than ever before, a good number of mainstream businesses will join the bandwagon of those who are
already using blogging as an online business marketing tool. Don’t focus much on traditional news sections
feature on websites – more people are getting increasingly aware of the need for fresh information. So
web 2.0 will increasingly rise as Search engines are making concerted efforts to bring fresh and highly
relevant information to those surfing the web through them. Therefore, businesses that would embark on
regular update of their contents will be rewarded significantly. Also, Augmented Reality is likely to break
through into the mainstream market this year.

2011 is really loaded with changes in online marketing! Don’t be left out.

 

Filed Under: Featured Articles, Internet Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Top tips on how to get more online finds for your website

August 25, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

A good number of people face this challenge with their online business marketing.
Getting established online, appears really hard with the surging rate of competing
websites. The value and essence of a website gets defeated when it cannot help you
get customers. You need to establish your online presence and drive traffic
(prospective customers) to your website.

However, you don’t need to worry about this challenge; Google’s webmaster channel
is very valuable when it comes to making your website successful.

Quick tips on making your website more visible:

  • Ensure that your topic will enhance your ranking on Google search results or other search engines’ result pages.
  • Also, you can have your website listed as a resource in relevant as well as authority sites. This is one of the great ways to generate quality traffic. This can even be more effective than search engines sometimes, depending on the quality of websites you get listed on.

Also, the nature and structure of the following will help in determining whether or not your website would be found online:

  • The title featured in each page’s header
  • The texts in each web page
  • How you use descriptive words in your Meta Tags at your webpages’ header sections.
  • The text featured in the initial paragraph of your page
  • The relevance of the featured texts in relation to the keywords contained in your meta tags.
  • Links that include keywords
  • The quality of the external links to your site

The design of your website plays a massive role on your online visibility. By design, we are not referring to the graphics and other decorative features, but the features outlined above, among other factors.

 

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Tagged With: ,

Top 7 tips for effective link building

August 1, 2011 By admin 1 Comment

A lot of people have the misconception that link generation is an uphill task. In fact the majority of the people also think that they need sophisticated looking website to attract backlinks.

Here are simple but effective tips for generating backlinks to a website.

  1. Your membership to Industry association could be helpful
    If your company has received an award before, or if you are in membership with any related industry association, you can find out whether these sites link to your site, you may possibly stumble on related businesses that you can extend invitation to link to your site.
  2. Make your website linkable
    Do you have features on your site that can attract other websites to link to you? Create a page that reflects the uniqueness of your business, your success stories, attractions such as freebies and other specialties that people can find hard to resist. This can greatly increase your chances of generating more backlinks.
  3. Create testimonials
    The testimonial is for another company that you love their product or service. Simply construct a great testimonial to such a company. They are most likely to list the testimonial on their website, together with a link to your company’s website.
  4. Keep a track of the places that your target audience go online
    You are likely to generate links from the social networking platforms, forums or websites where your target audience congregate.
  5. Assess the existing backlinks
    Going through your existing links would reveal the most linked content on your site, so that you would work out how you can use the same content or a modified version to generate more backlinks.
  6. What social activities or sponsorships can you benefit from?
    If your company sponsors any local activity or relief groups, you can gain from such activities in return by asking the sponsored organizations to link to your site. It would be sensible as well, to write a linkable content that would reflect your sponsorship activities. You would place the content on your site.

You can also take advantage of the link manager to find related sites, forums and blogs. The tool would also go through the new backlinks pointing to your website. You can also employ some commonly available link managers to verify if there is nofollow attribute featured in the sites that linked to you.

The importance of generous backlinks cannot be overemphasized; it is one of the criteria for ranking high on Google’s search result page.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Link Building, Link Popularity Tagged With: , ,

5 Top rules that guide affiliate marketing

July 22, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

If you do not want to bug yourself with the hassles involved in putting up a website, but would love to make some money online, affiliate marketing would be a great option for you.

Contrary to what a lot of people think, creating affiliate marketing is not an uphill task. What matters most with affiliate marketing is to select the right product that you can go into partnership with, then start promoting the product. This form of affiliate marketing implies that you are referring sales and customers to the company that owns the product, and you will earn remuneration in return known as commission. This type of online money making source is quite convenient for those who do not have time or resources to run their own businesses.

Here are top rules that work to help you generate excellent result with affiliate marketing.

  1. What is the earmarked commission percentage?
    You need to determine what the percentage for the affiliate commission is, so as to know if it appeals to you or not. There are affiliate marketing programs for digital products and those of physical products – the former usually offer commission percentage as high as 50%. On the other hand, e-commerce store and physical products would usually pay lower percentage of the entire price, as low as 10%. However, there are times you may earn much money promoting physical products, it all depends on what you are promoting.
  2. It pays better to promote a product per time
    Your success in business is usually measured by how consistent you will be in focusing and concentrating on those activities or tasks that grow your business and thus raise your revenue/profit.  Therefore, once you start dividing your focus and concentration between two or more products, you will lose focus of all and could eventually come crashing down. So, it is better to stay with one product at a time and help grow it until you realize enviable results.
  3. Settle for an ideal price point
    Check the price differences between the products or companies you’ve researched and settle for the one that offers the best price – your price choice should be influenced by supply and demand in the marketing you are targeting. How valuable is the product when it comes to providing timely solution to problems? This is another important point to consider.
  4. Is the product something you would want to buy?
    This is a true test of whether or not people are going to demand for the product. You may even purchase the product and test its effectiveness, so that you can decide whether to go ahead or not, and to also have the right words to describe the product, how to use it and the results to expect based on your own personal experience with the product.
  5. Is the product starting from the scratch or does it have an established market?
    It is better to settle for a product that people are already searching for or demanding; the product must not necessarily be from a big company – what matters is whether there is a take off and substantial awareness about the product already. It would be easier to sell a product that has a base already.

Apply these valuable tips to your affiliate marketing and you would see how successful things would become eventually.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Top 10 blunders to avoid when promoting your website

June 23, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

The common blunders I’m about to reveal here are obstacles to search engine rankings. Have a look at them and do avoid these blunders:

  1. Using frames
    Search engine spiders tend to get confused when frames are involved. Therefore, if you have a frame site, your site may be likely ignored often by the search engine spider. There is nothing wrong with writing script or fine-tuning the content to function within frames; but, is it not better to divert that time to something more beneficial to your website in terms of higher ranking?
  2. Over-doing it with title tags
    A better strategy for effective website promotion is when you stay within 70 characters for the titles, and also for punctuation (comma in particular) inserted between phrases in each title tag. The webpages that feature limited content should use fewer characters.
  3. Using Flash
    No doubts, flash appears appealing – however, it affects the ranking of your site. Also, flash slows user experience. Most web surfers are not willing to wait a moment longer. Readability of the keywords by search engines could be improved by flash in the future, but this may also be meaningless if the webpages do not feature visible as well as readable text.
  4. Using design to mask text
    Design has a way of concealing text. Ensure that your visible text is strategically placed high on the page.
  5. Using effective search phrases
    Do this always; incorporate effective search phrases that are true representations of the content featured within your title tags.
  6. Using the wrong words
    Most websites owners prefer to use single-word search phrases since it appears such keywords generate more traffic. However, the reality is that only very few web surfers who use such broad terms may be interested in your offering. It is more effective to incorporate search phrases that contain 2 – 4 words, this is the best way to target a wider range of people who may actually be interested in what you have to offer.
  7. Not taking link building seriously
    Embark on massive link building, and concentrate on the websites that have categories and content relevant to your offerings. For instance, if you are offering computer software services, it would make no sense to link to websites that are marketing clothes.
  8. Using long URLs
    For those taking advantage of a database to maintain their websites, this may ultimately result in the use of long URLs with multiple session IDs, as well as parameters that give rise to multiple equality signs and question marks. The summary is that long URLs may be obstacles to proper indexing of webpages by search engines. You can consult your website developer to shorten the lengthy URLs, or even get rid of them completely. Your ultimate goal is to be visible to those who are looking for your offerings, anything that would constitute an obstacle should be reconsidered.

Finally, do not overstuff your webpages with keywords; avoid using same keyword sequentially up to ten times. Just spread your major search term throughout the page as many times as possible.

Filed Under: Website Promotion Tagged With: ,
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