Wednesday, September 10, 2008

How To Generate Offline Publicity For Your Online Business

By Theo McLanahan


There are many advantages to using the Internet to do business. For example, you can contact lots of people and work wherever you want. But you do not have to limit yourself to online publicity only.

You can expose your business to a larger market by means of press releases. Press releases are simple documents that you send to the media which contain information regarding your business that you hope the media will do a story about.

Press releases follow the same standard format. You can find example press releases online. They should include facts about your company and details on special events or promotions that you will soon have. Press releases can be sent to newspapers in your area or online media sources.

Just giving someone a business card is a powerful publicity tool. You can promote your business by doing nothing more than putting your business card inside you mailbox, attaching it to the back of fliers, or simply handing it out.

Be on the look out for public events that your business could sponsor in order to gain more publicity. If your business is related to children, you could get more in the public eye by sponsoring a little league team. A local health fair would be a good place to get some publicity if your company deals with health issues.

Many groups, clubs, and organizations in your area would no doubt be interested in having you come and give a speech in front of a group. Even though this can be nerve racking, if you have the courage to do so it can be a powerful publicity booster.

Try to find a group whose members are probably in your business's target market. Then contact them on the phone and ask if they would be interested in having you come to give a presentation.

The Chamber of Commerce in your area would probably be very excited to have a web designer come give a presentation. You could talk about websites and any related topics that you know how to speak about.

The people who hear your presentation may be so enamored by your presentation that they will want to do business with you or at least they will be willing to suggest you to other people who need to work with a web designer.

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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Search Engine Optimization For Non-Techies

By Jack Sinclair


Everyone that wants instant web site traffic simply heads over to a search engine, and registers to get pay per click (paid) advertising, so when people search, their website gets listed. It can add up to quite a bit of money when you use ppc traffic.

Of course, the better your pages are, the more likely the search engines will list them for free, and let people click all day without charging you a penny.

You may have heard of this Page Rank thing. It is a google score between 0 and 10, and the higher the number, the better your page is. No one really knows how PageRank is scored, not even Larry Page (one of the key guys at Google). I can show you some simple things you can do to get better search engine rankings, and a better Page Rank.

Does that sound cool? It's easy stuff, and let's get into it straight away.

1. Generate links on other websites pointing to your website, using popular keywords.

Having a lot of other sites pointing to your site is a surefire way to get the attention from the search engines. If those links use words that people search for, you have a shot at getting on the results pages of the search engines.

A great way to do this is to write informative articles and use the author box to link back to your site, then submit your article to many article directories.

2. Include your keywords in your title tag.

The title tag is what you read at the very very top left of your browser. Make sure your keyword shows up there.

3. Include your keyword in your headline.

The headline is the big text on your web page. It is the "H1" tag, if you look at the code for your page. Your page should have only one big headline, and your keyword should be in it.

4. Put related keywords on your page.

Some folks call this semantic indexing, but you can ignore those big words, and simply write meaningful stuff on your page, and you will have related words that tell the search engines that this is stuff that humans should see.

5. Remove the programming jargon from your main html file.

Get the programming mumbo jumbo out of your html files, and put it in another file. Things like javascript and "css" mess up the search engine spiders that come and index your pages, so put that stuff on other files, and include it in one small line of code. That way, there is no chance of messing up the bots when the come to visit.

6. Put the full link to your internal HTML pages.

This is quite easy, and just means of linking to the HTML page, you link to it like it was on another site, using the fully qualified domain name (that http colon slash slash stuff). When you do this, the search engines know that these other pages are worth indexing too.

7. Update your site frequently.

By keeping things new on your website, it means you have active dynamic content, which the search engines love. So keep things maintained and updated, and your rankings in the "SERPS" will rise steadily.

Try these tips out, and watch your search engine results rise higher and higher. It is simple when you know what to do.

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Wednesday, September 3, 2008

How To Create A Blog

By Rex Stevenson


Creating a blog can be the best thing you do for your website or business. First it can create traffic for you very quickly, and in many cases can create a nice income for you too. Its just a matter of learning how to become a successful blogger.

Blogs are very popular, and if you haven't started one then you are probably missing a lot of readers who have like interests with you. Internet users love to read blogs and love to come back to blogs to see what's need. Search engines also love blogs. Google and Yahoo realized that blogs have the most current content on the web and that content is continually changing. These tips will help you learn how to create a blog and avoid technical problems when blogging.

Choose a Blogger - Choose between one of the two programs for blogging, either blogger or Wordpress. You may have seen where these two companies like to compete against each other, and each has their advantages and disadvantages. The best way to choose between the two is to look at both sites and use the one that is easiest for you. If you ever want to change from one the the other, the process is fairly simple

Find your passion and you will find your Blog - Choosing your platform is half the job, but you also need to decide on what you will blog about, so you need to choose a subject that you truly like, because this is what you will be writing about, and answering questions to. A blog is like a daily newspaper so it needs to be about something you want to learn about and write about.

Bloggers that are passionate and love their hobbie and their field love to exchange information with their readers, and want to continually interact with their readers for years to come. When you choose to blog about subjects that you have no real interest in, then you lose interest and your blog loses readers.

Be a Good Blogger - There are many bloggers out there that make between four and five figures a month by blogging and it is possible for you to make the same. You just need to become well known and you have to have information that people are interested in too.

Starting the blog is just the beginning - the real work starts when you have to start adding stuff to your site. The value of your blog to readers is what makes your blog interesting and effective. It is so important that you continually add content and information that can be valued by your readers. This is like your own online newsletter or newspaper, and that means you either need to post daily or every other day.

Once you have started the blog you need to learn to get traffic to it. Getting it up is easy, and its even easy to add some content, but getting traffic to keep coming back can be a little tricky and you need to keep on top of things. Read as much as you can about driving traffic to your site and getting your readers to stay there.

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Monday, September 1, 2008

Can You Be a Successful Affiliate Marketer?

By Tony Buel


Affiliate marketing is a business model where you as the affiliate marketer sell products and services, which you don't own in order to generate sales from which you get a percentage.

Affiliate Marketing works because it allows you as a seller to directly participate in the growth of a business or industry.

Affiliate Marketers attract an audience of buyers for the products and services people are searching to buy. This can be via banner ads, Pay per Click ads, websites you own, email marketing, blogs, etc. There are a myriad of ways to generate this traffic.

The way you as an affiliate marketer make money is that whenever a buyer clicks through one of your links and purchases a product you receive credit for the sale.

Now you need to know that Affiliate Marketing is work. It does take some know-how and effective use of your time and resources. Some marketing techniques you use will cost money - for example advertising. Others can cost you near nothing (such as SEO to get your site ranked high in the search engines), but can take some time. Balance is the key.

The harder you work, the more research you do into winning strategies, and the more you implement what you learn, the more successful you will be as an Affiliate Marketer. And the money will follow close behind.

Affiliate Marketing is a business. Diversity is the key to being a successful in this business. The more programs you sign on to and promote, the better the chance that you will pick a real winner. Not all affiliate programs are equal and it does take some trial and error to find the good ones.

The successful Affiliate Marketer knows how to drive consumer traffic to those areas where they will be compelled to click through your link and make the purchase. The better you are at this, the more income you can generate for yourself

Good Affiliate Marketing will make use of the entire internet. In a coordinated effort these can work quite successfully in funneling the traffic where you need it to go.

One of the cool things about affiliate marketing is that while it does take work, once it is properly set up it can generate income for months. Once the hard work is done on getting a particular program up, all that is necessary is some routine maintenance and tweaking here and there to make sure things are running smoothly.

But in some ways it can be thought of as the ideal 'set it and forget it' business. You can keep things in place generating a substantial income for you while you go and research other lucrative affiliate programs.

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