Telling the World About Your Blog or Website

28-03-2009 Russ No Comments

Have you always wanted a medium to express yourself? Nowadays, blog and websites can be created and customized within a matter of minutes – even without special graphic design or programming knowledge. Domain and hosting services like 1and1.com or GoDaddy.com offer bundle packages that include free blogs, email and website with domain registration for a low price. Or you can get yours for free with Blogger or Wordpress.

Now that have your blog, you want others outside of your social circle to know where they can find you, right? If you remember the shampoo commercial from the 1970s where the woman repeatedly chants, ‘And they told two friends…and so on’ while her image multiplies across the TV screen. Well, word of mouth is the most effective method of advertising, if not the cheapest – and it never goes out of style. An easy yet modern method of doing this would be to have a link to your blog underneath your e-signature. You can include your blog title and/or the purpose it serves in no more than two short sentences. A small graphic or logo can inserted for a personalized touch but is not necessary.

If you are a frequent poster on other sites, you might be able to include you blog or website address in with your comments. Of course, if you are not certain that this is permitted; ask the site owner or moderator (sometimes these are two different persons) before doing this as you don’t want to be blocked as a spammer.

One of the most popular (and quickest) is to submit your blog to a submission directory. These are like the Yellow Pages for websites but they are listed by category or interest. If you do a Google search by typing ‘blog directory’, you will come up with enough results to keep busy for a while. There are some that let you submit for free and others that offer a “premium” service which usually comes to a small amount that is billed monthly, quarterly or annually. If your budget is limited, the search can be narrowed by adding ‘free’ to your keywords.

Once you begin to build your audience, the best way to keep them is to post often. This can be daily or weekly but it must be consistent in order to hold interest.

Filed under:

Cost Per Click Basics

26-03-2009 Russ No Comments

A popular way of marketing on the internet today is pay per click advertising. In many ways this can provide you with high quality unique traffic for your web site. However, in many cases countless numbers of people try this form of marketing only to run into a wide variety of problems. One of the biggest ones that they face is cost per clicks. This is the overall amount that you have to pay when someone clicks through to your web site. To be able to be successful with your pay per click advertising means that you must control the overall amount that you are paying for your costs per clicks by effectively using different tactics to ensure that you are not overpaying for click throughs. Below are several tactics that will help you determine the right amount that you should be paying for your cost per clicks.

1. Set a bid price and stick with it, a common problem that many people have is they bid on a certain amount only to find out that their click throughs are falling because they have to low of a bid. When you see this kind of situation don’t get discouraged instead stay at the amount that you determined. The last thing that you want to do is increase your overall bid, causing you to spend more money to attract traffic to your web site than you are receiving.

2. Choose your keywords wisely, the more popular keywords are going to be the ones with the highest cost per click amount. What you want to do is find those keywords or phrases that are not being searched as much meaning that the average cost per click should be lower. What you would want to do is go to Google and use the keyword research tool, by just punching in one popular keyword it will give you a wide variety of other searches for keywords and phrases that are similar over the last month.

This will help you to identify those keywords and phrases that will work most effectively for you as well as have a low cost per click rate. Even though it can be difficult to determine what is the right amount you should be paying for your click throughs, using the above tactics will help you to effectively determine what you should be paying for your for you cost per clicks.

Filed under:

5 Easy Steps to increase your Search Engine Rankings

26-03-2009 Russ 1 Comment

Increasing search engine rankings can seem a lot like a catch twenty-two. It seems as though you need traffic to boost your search engine ranking, and you need a high ranking to boost traffic. So what do you do?

There are actually many ways to increase traffic to your website without having a high search engine ranking. Most of the things you will do to increase traffic to your site will also increase your search engine rankings. This is a little known fact to those of us who are not experts in seo. Here are five easy steps to increase your search engine rankings and your traffic.

  1. Content is King! This buzz phrase is tossed about a lot lately, and for good reason. It is absolute fact! The search engines really search content more than metatags these days. The more often your key words and phrases appear on your site, the higher your search engine ranking will be. However, be careful of spamming your website with keywords. Keep your density at around 3-5% for optimum results. This will also keep your website more human friendly.
  2. Backlinks are a must! Backlinks are links from other websites to your website, where you have linked back to the page with your website link. It creates a loop that some search engines will travel, forcing them to crawl your site more often. The more often your site is crawled, the higher your rankings will go.
  3. Update your content often. If your website doesn’t change content at all over three or four crawls by the search engine, your search engine rankings will actually decrease. Besides, new content encourages repeat visitors, and more hits means higher rankings as well.
  4. Submit a sitemap to Google. This is done through Google’s Webmaster Tools. Simple instructions on how to create an xml site map can be found on many helpful seo websites, or you can use a free online generator such as www.xml-sitemaps.com. Your sitemap will encourage Google to crawl more pages of your website more often.
  5. Invest a little money in sponsored ads. Especially if you do not have highly searched keywords, and if you opt to show ads only in your local area, you will definately benefit from Google Adwords. You likely won’t get enough hits to break your marketing budget, and you won’t have to pay as much for the clicks you do get.
Filed under:

Increase Traffic using Social Bookmarking

26-03-2009 Russ No Comments

Over the last several years the internet has changed the way many businesses make money. As times continue to change so does the different ways that you can market your web site. A new phenomenon that is taking the internet by storm is the social bookmarking. The way it works is instead of having the person who likes your web site book mark it on their computer this can now be done in an online account. When someone bookmarks your site it will help improve your overall ranking with Google and the other major search engine. As a general rule book marking sites can generate traffic more quickly because they can index and categorize the content faster than the search engines.

To use this form of advertising requires that you use certain tactics that will help ensure that your web site will see the traffic that you are looking for such as:

  1. Join a variety of different book marking web sites. What you want to do is join several different bookmarking web sites such as: Digg, Technorati, Stumble upon and Del.icio.us. This will give you many different web sites that you can go in and book mark.
  2. Book mark your web site with the social bookmarking sites, once you have joined the different social bookmarking sites you next want to bookmark your web site.
  3. Encourage your friends as well as family to do book marking, the next thing you want to do is encourage your friends as well as family to join these different social book marking sites and then book mark your web site URL.
  4. Be sure to add the correct tags, when you are book marking your site you want to be sure to include the appropriate tags to your site that way it can be seen properly. While social bookmarking can be confusing by using the above tips you will be able to increase the overall amount of traffic that your web site is seeing by using this new tool of internet marketing consistently.
Filed under:

Making Money through Facebook Advertising

26-03-2009 Russ No Comments

For anyone that knows about Facebook, it is a good place to start for advertising kind of purposes. To be one of the people that are making money through facebook advertising, here are some ideas to use in order to maximize what you have to offer.

  • Stick up your facebook profile on your business cards. I notice that there are lots of people that I do talk to have an account there and if you are one of the facebook users, take advantage of what they offer on there such as posting up your notes under your notes section on your own profile.
  • Under what’s on your mind, you can stick up a short notice about your service/products but have a website for it. If you don’t, how are you going to make any money? You can also be an affiliate member to something if you don’t feel like having one of your own to make from scratch.
  • You can advertise for free under “Market section.” With free advertising on there, you have the chance to be able to save yourself more money and get free advertising.
  • If you own a blog, why not advertise on there with getting everyone to help you to help spread the word? Blogs are more convenient for everyone else and stick up your facebook advertisement of what you posted on there.
  • Stick up different article marketing that you write about. It is very easy to do for facebook advertising. For example, why not affiliate at different places online and using your free advertising avenue on your profile, you can get away with that? Very easy to make some free money on your facebook profile.
  • Last idea for this would be to comment on other people’s sites, articles, and blogs if possible. Not only can you help spread the word this way as well but it would be great for others to see what you offer which are impossible to do alone.
Filed under:

How to Increase your Google Pagerank

26-03-2009 Russ No Comments

A common problem that both web masters and internet entrepreneurs have is the Google page rank that they have on their web sites. This is a scale that ranks your web site from zero to ten with ten being the highest. The way that it works is Google will rank your page based on what it perceives to be the level of importance. The higher that you are up on the page rank the greater the chances are that you will have a higher ranking when someone enters any relevant keyword searches.

There are a wide variety of ways that you can be able to increase your overall Google page rank such as:

  1. Wxchange links. This is when you put your link on another web site and they will do the same by placing a link on your web site. What you want to do is exchange links with similar web sites that are at least in the same field that you are by contacting at least five different web sites. In many cases you could receive no as an answer or no response at all if this does happen don’t get discouraged keep contacting the different web sites until you see the results that you are looking for.
  2. Join online discussion groups in an area of interest similar to your web site, what you want to do is visit message boards, social networking sites and trade show web sites. In many cases they will have a signature link where you can say your name, what you do along with your web site URL. Every time you post on a discussion, what you say along with this information will be posted on the discussion board. This will help promote your web site in other places and you can attract people to your web site that have an interest in what you have to offer.
  3. Do article marketing, this is where you write an article that tells you how to do something in the same kind of area that your web site is in. Once you have done this in the signature box at the end of the article should contain your web site link. This will bring your web site lots of additional traffic for free. Increasing your Google page rank can be confusing; by using the above tips you will be able to effectively increase your ranking over time.
Filed under:

A Guide to Marketing Online

26-03-2009 Russ 2 Comments

A common problem that many people have with their web sites is online marketing. In many cases they believe that all they have to do is build their web site and people will come. The fact of the matter is that to have a successful web site requires you to have a concentrated effort that will use multiple forms of online marketing to drive people to your website. This can be done by using a variety of tips and tactics such as:

  1. Build an opt in list, to ensure the continued long term success of your web site requires that you be able to collect email addresses of people who are interested in what you have to say. This can be done by putting an opt in email address box on your web site letting people know that they can sign up for your free newsletter or ezine. Once someone enters their email address an auto responder will send them an email asking them to confirm that they have wanted to receive further information from you by clicking on the link in the email. Once they have done this you can be able to send them information on any special or events to keep your web site in their minds.
  2. Promote your web site using classified ads, another great way to be able to generate lots of traffic to your web site is through the use of classified ads. What happens is you can go to many sites such as Craigslist and post your ad for free including the URL address where people can go to find out more information. Once you have done this over a period of time you will begin to see the amount of traffic that your web site is seeing continue to grow.
  3. Make sure that you are optimized into all the major search engines, when someone is looking for something online they often go to the search engines to find what they are looking for. Being optimized into the major search engines will ensure that you are able to find those people who have a need for something and would like to have this need filled. While marketing online can be confusing the fact of the matter is that using the above tips in conjunction with one another can help you to see an increase in traffic and sales to your web site.
Filed under:

7 Link Building Tips

25-03-2009 Russ No Comments

For everyone that knows about marketing, having a link building builds more credibility because your goal is to expose your company to as many people as you can. With this in mind, I would like to offer you 7 link building tips to help you with your online marketing and your offline sources.

  1. If you are on forums, take the time to leave comments because then that way, you can have your input into what you know and it would make you look more like an expert with the knowledge that you do share.
  2. If you have your own website and/or blog, have others rate yours too because maybe sometimes, getting some input from others can put things in perspective where others might know more than you do. It’s a way to share with one another.
  3. Social networking sites make it easier for people to post up stuff for free. If you are on one, why not take advantage of the free ones such as at myspace, facebook, gather and any other ones that you can think of. You never know what you might get with the people that you can connect with.
  4. Whenever you come across someone’s site that you really like, take the time to leave them a message and the site(s) that you own. Taking the time to let them know that you appreciate them for sharing their knowledge could lead to link building with others.
  5. Article marketing is another popular way to do link building whether you want to connect with others or not for online.
  6. Network with others in person which if you have your own business cards with the link on there, you have some free publicity and you have a feel of other local companies and businesses in your area.
  7. Squidoo lenses are a popular way to get link building. Many experts like the fact that they get paid to get the word out of what they offer and with the squidoo lenses, you offer people what you know and it’s great for networking purposes too. Too many people I know have one at least and read some made money.

With these 7 link building tips in mind, I hope that you will see that it is possible to spread the word. Use all of them if possible.

Filed under:

Optimizing your Adsense Click through Rate

25-03-2009 Russ No Comments

A very popular way to be able to market your web site is through what as known as pay per click marketing. This is when someone enters a keyword into a major search engine such as Google and are shown relevant ads based on the keywords that they entered. When they click on the ad that you have created you are charged a certain amount that you bid to receive this traffic to your web site.

In general this is a very effective way to be able to bring high quality unique visitors to your web site. Like all things the click through rates that you are seeing from Adsense can vary, by using certain proven techniques you can be able to increase you overall click through rate using certain tactics such as:

1. Find the right keywords to use, a common problem that many people have when they are trying to improve their overall click through rates are the keywords, often looking for those keywords that have the most popular searches usually ending up not seeing the click throughs that they had hoped for. What you want to do is find those keywords that have searches of at least 30 thousand but no more than 300 thousand searches. This will help you to find those keywords that are popular but not popular enough that everyone is trying to bid on.

2. Try a variety of ads, one of the biggest problems that many people have with Adsense is that they do not test their ads normally putting together one or two ads and that’s it. When they are not seeing the click throughs that they are looking for they give up. To increase the overall amounts of click through that you are seeing means that use must create at least eight to ten different ads.

Then test them over a period of a week to two weeks once you see which ads are most effective you continue to keep running them. Those that are not effective should be replaced with a new ad that you will test all over again. This will help you to isolate which ads work the best and those that there was not a favorable response from.

Even though Adsense can be challenging, optimizing your Adsense click throughs can be achieved by using the above tips

Filed under:

Search Engine Optimization for Beginners: Common Mistakes to Avoid

25-03-2009 Russ No Comments

For many beginners the internet can be a very confusing place with all the different terms and lingo that are used. An area that can particularly challenging is search engine optimization, while you want to be able to get your web site effectively optimized on the search engine, not knowing what common mistakes to avoid can often cause you endless amounts of frustration and money trying to learn the ropes. Some common mistakes to avoid in search engine optimization include:

Not having a site map: Whenever any of the search engines are looking for your site they will usually go to site map for information. If you do not have this the spiders from the search engine will not know what areas to find relevant content usually ending up with your web site having a lower ranking than it should.

Copying texts from other web sites: A major problem that some beginners have is copying texts either in part or whole off of other web sites. Not only is this copyright infringement but many different search engines will automatically recognize it and will not count it as fresh content resulting in a lower search ranking.

Writing poor ad copy: A common problem that occurs with many beginners is that they write ad copy that is poorly written and doesn’t incorporate those keywords that you will be using on your web site. To be able to have the search engines find you based on the keywords that you are using means that you must include those keywords into the different texts that you are using to be able to have the search engines rank you effectively based on your keywords.

Always have fresh content: A big factor that will play an important role in determining how your web site will be ranked is based on the amount of fresh content that you always have. This means that you must be constantly putting new articles on your web site. What you want to do is put new content onto your web site at least once a week, once this happen the spiders from the search engine will crawl your web site once a week. If it continually notices that you always have fresh content to your site then it will be ranked higher.

Even though search engine optimization for beginners can be challenging, by avoiding the common mistake of not having a site map, copying texts from other web sties, writing poor ad copy and always having fresh content will increase your site ranking with the search engines over time.

Filed under: