Work from Home Base

There are multiple ways to drive traffic to your website. You can use pay per click, search engine optimization, email marketing, ezine advertising and many more.

One of the strategies that has been neglected in the past but is now taking more and more importance is how to build quality content and use it to get more traffic to your website.

If you have quality content, you can profit from that in several ways to increase your traffic. Here are 4 ways:

(1) Use content to attract the search engines

Search engines love good content and if your site has it, you can profit from that to gain exposure in them. How? You just need to optimize your article with proper relevant keyword phrases related to your content.

(2) Submit content to article directories or article banks

Some websites are in constant need for your valuable content. By submitting your content in the form of articles to the article directories, you increase your chances in getting your articles published on other websites. Many people go to these websites to look for articles which they can reprint for free in exchange for a link back to the author’s website. With this marketing strategy, you will increase your traffic because your author bylines at the bottom of your article will generate clicks to your website url.

(3) Submit content to ezine editors related to your industry

Ezine editors are in constant need for information to publish in their newsletters. If you can produce quality content and submit to them on a regular basis, you will receive massive exposure. Imagine your content article is published on several ezines each with only 1,000 subscribers, that adds up fast. Now there are even some big publications with tens of thousands of subscribers. That’s definitely huge publicity at no cost.

(4) Use content to get repeat visitors

Without any doubt, content is king on the Internet. People go online to look for information and if your site has good content, you will get repeat visitors and people will stay much more longer on your site, building trust and increasing your sales potential.

To find content, here are some tips:

(1) You can hire someone to write an article for you for instance and pay a fee for each article.

(2) You can write your own content if you have the necessary skills.

(3) You can use other people’s content on the condition that you give them proper credit and a link back to their website. If you are submitting articles to article directories or ezine editors, of course this should be your own content that you have written or content that you have paid for to get.

There you have it. Use your own content or other people’s content to start driving more traffic to your website. It will pay off in the long run if you continue to build content.

A blacklist, as the name implies, is a list of people or companies who have met with the disapproval of others. In
the online world a blacklist refers to those people who have been marked as responsible for generating spam in a very big way. Blacklists are also known as blocklists.

Blacklists are used to combat spam in a very specific way. When spam is reported to one of the relevant spam fighting organizations the IP address the spam originated from is added to a banned or blacklisted IP addresslist. An IP address is the unique location of you or your website on the Internet - think of it as your “home address” online. To put it simply every www.domain.com Internet address has a matching IP address. Any email coming from your website domain also has a corresponding IP address. If your IP address is present on a blacklist then you’re potentially wasting your time sending email to customers.

Why are you wasting your time? Modern spam blockers come with the most common blacklists installed and/or allow you to import updated blacklists into your spam blocker. This allows to you block a huge amount of spam but you may also, potentially, block legitimate email. Blacklists are not foolproof.

There are two types of IP address:

Dynamic - changes every time you connect to the Internet. Most commonly used for dialup Internet access. Spammers love these because they’re very hard to track and 100% disposable.

Fixed/Static - All websites, most large companies and some individuals use fixed IP addresses. This can cause huge problems if they’re reported for pamming.

When an IP address (dynamic or fixed ) is reported for sending spam it’s added to a blacklist. There are three different types of blacklists:

Temporary
An IP address placed on a temporary blacklist will have email coming from that IP address blocked for several hours. After a few hours the offending IP address is removed from the blacklist.

Permanent
When an IP address is added to a permanent blacklist any email server configured to block email from this list will never receive email from that range of IP addresses again.

Comprehensive
This is the most damaging of blacklists. Not only does it block a single IP address it also blocks the IP addresses next to it. For example if the IP address 192.156.66.67 was added to a comprehensive blacklist then all IP addresses close to 192.156.66.67 will also be blocked. This can be a huge problem for those website owners using virtual hosting because if your host has ever appeared on a blacklist then you’re also on the same blacklist, by default, because of the shared hosting from the same IP range.

It’s important for all website owners to check whether or not they’re on a blacklist. You’ll need your IP address (available from your webhost) and you can check your blacklist status at: www.mail-abuse.org/cgi-bin/lookup

Blacklists are a necessary evil due to the volume of spam being sent each day but are not an exact science. Take a few moments from your day and ensure that your website or email address is not being blocked.

They say the eyes are the window to the soul. Your website then is the window to your business. What would a passerby think of your “window”? Would they want to stop and maybe come inside for a few moments? Or would they just pass by without giving it a second glance?

The goal of any website is to make the visitor stay. The desired visitor response might be that they make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, enter a competition or simply complete a survey. The end result is the same - you need the web surfer to hang around your website for as long as possible.

There are, however, aspects of your site which can stop visitors from staying. Some of these are:

Sin #1
Slow loading
The ultimate website sin. Your homepage must, must, must load in 30 seconds or less. This is not optional. If a visitor has to wait more than 30 seconds they will stop what they’re doing and move on to the next website. Optimize your website to load quickly by using as few graphics as possible and then only use JPEGS and GIFS.
Your website should be no more than 20% graphics and at least 80% text. Why? Text loads faster and also keeps your visitor reading about your site as it loads up.

Sin #2
Poor layout
A visitor should be able to find what they need on your website in 3 clicks of the mouse or less. Any more than that and you’re losing valuable visitors. Your navigation menu should be easy to use and every single link must work properly. Make use of a sitemap. Do not use fancy cursors. Do not use complicated menu systems. Text should be legible but not too big. Keep it simple. Imagine how a new internet user would react to your website. Would they love it or hate it? Could a new visitor to your website easily find the information they’re looking for?

Sin #3
Awful color schemes
There’s nothing worse than searching for a website for hours only to find what you need and then realize that you cannot read the text on the pages because the owner though yellow text on a light blue background was cool. If you need guidance on how to choose colors for your website look at any magazine for examples. Black or dark blue text on a white background is the simplest and most effective color scheme.

For your menus and other background colours bear the following in mind:

Red is stimulating and agressive.

Blue is peaceful and tranquil.

Gree is calm and refreshing.

Yellow grabs peoples attention.

Purple is wealthy and luxurious.

Brown is solid and reliable.

Orange is bright and optimistic.

Sin #4
Poor spelling and grammar
If you’re selling a product or service online and your website is littered with spelling and grammar mistakes then you’re on a loser immediately. I recently reviewed an ebook that had 4 very bad spelling mistakes including the word business misspelled in the opening paragraph. Inexcusable. We all make mistakes but keep them to a minimum. A visitor may forgive one typo. You may not get a second chance.

Here’s 3 tips for checking your webpages.

1. Use a spell checker. Every word-processor has one.

2. Proofread anything you write from bottom to top. You’ll spot more mistakes that way.

3. Always proof read anything you’ve written 24 hours later. You’ll be amazed at how many mistakes you’ll spot.

Sin #5
Flashing graphics
Banners or logos that flash, spin, fade in and out and/or perform any other gimmick are a no go area. Don’t use them. Flashing banners and logos say “I’ve never put together a website before. Cool, huh?” Any website with this type of graphic element turns me off. A website logo or banner should be a static graphic or text. Online marketing surveys consistently report
that animated icons and graphics on a website are a major turnoff for visitors.

Sin #6
Hit counters
Only used by amateurs. Take them off your website. Please. Any decent webhost can provide you with traffic stats which will provide much more accurate information than a hit counter. Having a hit counter on your website was a good idea 8 years ago. The online world has moved on. You should too.

There’s an old rule of sales:

“If I could see through John Smiths eyes I could sell John Smith what John Smith buys”.

Design your website for your visitor and not for you.

Blogging allows bloggers to share their expertise and knowledge with a very large audience. Building a loyal audience is something that every small business owner would love to accomplish.

1: Building Trust Relationships

Blogging allows bloggers to share their expertise and knowledge with a very large audience. Building a loyal audience is something that every small business owner would love to accomplish and bloggers are able to do this by simply sharing their thoughts using their business blogs. Building a community that trusts you and follows your blog updates on a daily basis is one of the key ingredients that hundreds of bloggers are using in their business.

2: Easy To Publish

Blog software is simple to use. With the push of a few buttons you can post your thoughts, link to resources and publish your blog. Blog software companies provide bloggers with all the tools necessary to get started. Bloggers can update their blogs much quicker than a website which usually requires contacting a web designer or uploading yourself.

3: Search Engine Traffic

One of the greatest benefits that bloggers receive is search engine traffic. Search engines love to spider pages that contain quality content and are updated with fresh content on a regular basis. Smart bloggers optimize their blogs by keeping their content focused on a specific niche.

4: Cost Effective

Blogging is a low cost alternative to having a web presence. Blogging has given small business owners the opportunity to create a web presence without the time to learn html or the income to hire a web designer. Blogging is quickly growing with popularity as an inexpensive method to get the name of your business out on the internet. Gone are the days of having to come up with a large investment to create a web presence.

5 Spam Free

With Spam problems and email filters creating a huge challenge for email marketers to publish their newsletters, bloggers are now using blogs as an additional option to communicate with their subscribers. The advantage of using blogs is that you don’t have to worry about spam and email filters because your message will be delivered by using RSS (Really Simple Syndication). You can use these syndicated RSS “feeds” to display the latest news from major newspapers, for example, on your own web site or read them on other sites collecting these feeds. There are special programs and web-based services called “RSS feed readers” or “RSS aggregators” that, given the URL of an RSS feed will fetch the latest headlines periodically and let you read them comfortably and efficiently.

In Closing…

If you are looking for another source of traffic that is cost effective, spam free, search engine friendly, and perfect for building relationships, start publishing your own blog today. Once you get started, you too will experience the secret benefits that bloggers love and enjoy.

Article marketing is the latest buzzword for marketers looking to promote their sites and products online. But how do you define article performance? One way to measure article performance is by checking how many times your article has been picked up and reproduced on various sites.

Copyright © 2005 Priya Shah

Article marketing is the latest buzzword for marketers looking to promote their sites and products online. But how do you measure the success of your article marketing campaign?

It probably depends on what you expect your article to achieve for you - better branding, more sales, or more publicity.

One way to measure article performance is to check how many times your article has been picked up and reproduced on various sites.

To do that, just copy and paste the article title in quotes into a search engine like Google, and you’ll see how many sites it’s been reprinted on.

My article “How To Get To The Top Of The Marketing Food Chain” shows 1061 links in Google.

That means Google has indexed 1061 sites on which this article appears.

This gives me about 1061 quality links to each of the sites I included in my resource box.

As you can see, this makes article marketing a very powerful way of building quality links.

So how do you ensure that your article gets picked up and reprinted by as many publishers as possible?

1. Pick A Topic That’s Hot Or Always Fresh

For instance, my article on Neuromarketing got picked up pretty quickly because it was a hot topic.

The problem with hot topics is that they also tend to cool off quickly. So while they may get a lot of reprints over a short time, they may get very few reprints once the craze is over.

There are some articles that are slow starters but eternally fresh, like the one I wrote here.

To Be A Champion, Become A Child (591 links in Google)

These are the ones that will give you reprints over a longer period of time. I think in the long run, these are more valuable.

2. Target A Large Audience

Another way to get a lot of coverage is write an article for a large target audience or one that is very active online - like bloggers.

This article gave me 164 links back, mostly from other blogs, even some for which I had to use a translation service

This shows 248 links back

316 links for this one

But again, it’s the quality of links back that matters - not the quantity.

Another large target audience is the health market. I get a lot of links back from my health articles.

3. Craft A Catchy, Relevant Title

A catchy title ensures that your article gets the attention of publishers - the first step to getting your article published.

Follow the basic rules of copywriting to make your article interesting and readable.

Publishers are more likely to pick up an article if its title includes the keywords that they (and you) want to target.

Use your main keywords in your title, preferable in the first half (like I did in the title of this article), to ensure better rankings for those who reprint it.

4. Offer Publishers A Monetary Incentive

Give people an incentive to publish your article. I have an affiliate program and I allow publishers to use their affiliate link for my ezine in the resource box.

Allow publishers to earn by publishing your article and they will gladly reprint it.

5. Write An Article Series

Break up a long article or report into a series of articles like I did with my “Marketing With Blogs” series here.

Marketing With Blogs - Part 1, 2, 3 and 4

These gave me 5270 links back in all. As you can see, a series of articles can be a very powerful link-building technique.

6. Distribute Your Article Widely

Ensure that your article is distributed to the best and most appropriate article directories and announcement lists online.

Feel free to browse through my own collection of article directories and announcement lists

Local Business Advertising & Google Adwords - How local businesses can effectively use Google Adwords to maximise their advertising spend.

“I don’t need the Internet to advertise - I’m a local business!”

Okay…

If you could spend £0.04 (or $0.05 in the US) and have a new  customer - what would you do with your local business  advertising budget?

I hope you would spend that money again and again! Granted this is the ideal example and you are likely to pay  much more then £0.04 per customer you acquire, BUT - herein  lies the rub for local businesses: An internet presence announces your business to the world.

When you are online, you have little control about where traffic is coming to you from (if you are not actively driving traffic that is), but what if you could  make sure that people who lived in your area, who buy your  goods and would make ideal customers could be targeted! Google Adwords can help you target local people, not people from New Zealand if you live in the UK - but people close to you. Pinpoint geographic targeting of prospects is an optimum  use of your local business advertising budget.

Is it 100% foolproof?

Alas no, but it’s a good start.

How do I do it?

Well the easiest way to do this is as follows:

Create a national campaign with your search terms and your location terms - eg:

If you’re a plumber in Poole then “plumber poole” would be a good keyword.

Create a geo-targeted campaign (this can be done in a couple of ways - I’ll leave the nitty gritty details out for now) which means your ads are served to local people when  they search for your keywords.

So in the plumber example if a local person types in “plumber” and doesn’t mention anything else, your advert will be shown.

So goes the theory anyway.

Does it work all the time?

Like I said - Not always very well. This is because Google uses IP addresses to determine location and this method is somewhat of a cleaver when a scalpel is required.

It all depends how diligent ISP’s are when allocating IP addresses to their customers, the only way you can know is through empirical means.

What if the regional targeting is producing no results?

If this is the case then a national campaign with location terms included (as mentioned above) is your best  bet.

If you were to run a national campaign on the same keywords without the location terms, you will be competing with other players who have a national presence for your particular product/service which could prove very expensive.

Your local business advertising budget spend should at the very least give Adwords and PPC advertising in general a tryout. Remember there are an infinite number of keywords in any target market.

Just because the big boys may have a stranglehold on the ‘obvious’ terms does not mean your market is saturated.

Learn about the research that you must do before you build your website to ensure success.

Is your Website Doomed for Failure Before you’ve Built it?

One of the things that many people overlook when building a new website is keywords. I have to admit, I did exactly the same thing myself when I started out. You can build the flashiest, most professional looking website, with lots of great content, but if you don’t think about keywords first your website is most likely to be doomed for failure - at least as far as search engines are concerned.

Visitors from search engines are the most targeted types of visitor that you could hope for. People coming to your site from a search engine are actually looking for the information that is on your website. What you need to do is find out which keywords these people are using when they search in Google, Yahoo or MSN and ensure that your web page(s) are optimized for these keywords.

When researching your keywords you need to make sure that you

1. Choose keywords that people are actually searching for. Don’t optimize your site for keywords that people rarely search on.
2. Choose keywords that are not too highly competitive - unless you’re an SEO whiz that is

If you keep these two goals in mind when choosing keywords you will have the best chance possible of rising to the lofty heights of the search engine results pages.

So, what’s the best way to do keyword research? I’ve tried many different tools, but my favorite by is Wordtracker. You can sign up for a free trial of Wordtracker   but if you’re serious about your keyword research consider using the full version as it allows you to select unlimited keywords and includes results from 8 different search engines, 3 different directories and 4 different pay per click engines, compared to 1 search engine and 30 keywords in the trial version.

Once you’re logged into Wordtracker I recommend using the “Keyword Universe” to brainstorm for keywords. You just need to type in any keywords related to your area of interest and then use the built in thesaurus to find related keywords and synonyms. For example if I enter the keywords “internet marketing” Wordtracker returns 300 related keywords including “web site marketing”, “promotion” and “online marketing”.

Wordtracker then allows me to view a list of all the keyword searches that have included my keyword phrase. If I click on “web site marketing” Wordtracker returns 118 rows of keywords that include that phrase, for example “web site marketing”, “web site marketing strategy”, “web site online marketing” and more.

If I like the look of these keywords I can just add them to my  basket and continue choosing keywords until I have 100s of keywords. For this example I’ll just add the 118 results to my basket and continue on to Wordtracker’s “Competition Analysis”.

At the competition analysis phase I have a number of search engines, directories and pay per click engines to choose from. I can choose a maximum of two search engines, but for speed I normally tend to just go for Google, since it represents 35% of all searches. I can always go back later and look at other search engines if I have a good set of keywords.

Now the interesting part begins…

Wordtracker returns me a table with the first 100 keywords from my earlier keyword selection. The keywords are displayed in order of “KEI”, which means “Keyword Effectiveness Index”. This is a measure to allow you to quickly identify which keywords are likely to give you the best results. Keywords with high KEIs are the best targets as these represent keywords with a combination of a high number of searches and a low amount of competing websites.

Other important statistics provided by Wordtracker are:

24 Hours – The predicted amount of traffic for a single day, for this search engine only (Google in this case)

Competing - The number of competing websites for this keyword phrase.

Here’s an example of two of the results returned from my “marketing web site” search:

Example 1
“marketing web site design”
KEI - 54.256
Count - 46
24Hrs - 17
Competing - 39

Example 2
“web site marketing”
KEI - 0.256
Count - 505
24Hrs - 171
Competing - 998000

You can see from these examples that the most popular keyword phrase here is “web site marketing”, with approximately 171 searches in Google every 24 hours. However, this keyword phrase has almost a million competing websites, so if you decided to target this you would have a long hard slog to get on the first page of the search results.

In this example, my preference would be to choose the “Marketing web site design” phrase. Although there are 10 times less searches on Google per day for this keyword phrase, there are only 39 competing websites. So the chances are that I can get onto the first page of search results very quickly. I could also combine this keyword phrase with a few others from my research to build up the number of visitors to my site.

Once you have finished researching and have a good keyword list, ensure that add your keywords to

 - the page title
 - the h1 and h2 tags
 - the image alt tags
 - the keyword meta tags
 - the copy itself

Also make sure that you include the keywords in the anchor text when you are linking to your site from another site.

Going through this exercise of choosing keywords each time you set up a new website or create a new webpage will ensure that you have the best chance of getting targeted search engine visitors.

It takes only a few minutes and is easy to setup your own weblog using the Blogger weblog system.  By completing only three simple steps, creating an account, naming your blog and choosing a template, you too can join the thousands of people now blogging on the web. Here’s a detailed step-by-step guide to help to get you started using Blogger

1. Go to Blogger.com and click on the arrow that says “Create Your Blog Now.”  You’ll be asked to create a username and choose a password that you’ll use to access your Blogger account;  choose a display name that will be used to sign your posts (e.g., moody mom, bloggerx, etc.) and provide an email address. You’ll also be asked to check a box indicating that you accept Blogger’s Terms of Service . Then click on “Continue” to go the next screen.


2. On the next screen to name your blog (e.g., The Blog Report, Myrah’s Insanity Report, etc.) You can choose any name you wish. After you choose your blog title, you need to choose your URL address. This is the web address that people can click to access your blog. Again, as long as it’s not taken, you can choose any address you want. Remember, the shorter and easier to spell the better it will be for people to remember.  Also remember, that many thousands of people use Blogger to host their weblog and it may take you a while to find a web address that hasn’t already been taken. Finally, for security purposes, you’ll need to provide word verification by typing in the box the word that is displayed above the box on the screen.  Then,  click “Continue” to move to next screen.


3. On the next screen, you’ll need to choose a template for your blog. This is the design of your blog, what your blog will look like to visitors. Blogger provides 12 different templates to choose from. Pick your favorite. You can change the look of your blog at a later time by choosing a different Blogger template or using of the hundreds of free templates that are available across the Internet.  After you choose your template, click “Continue.”  Blogger will begin creating your blog.


4. Once it’s created, click on “Start Posting” and write your first post for the world to see. Click on “Publish Post” and Blogger will tell you it is publishing your post. Then click on the “View Blog” tab and you’ll find that you’re officially a member of the blogging world.

When I first started building Singaporedirectory1, I was asked quite a number of times by friends and relatives: “Isn’t it easier to just type something into Yahoo and Google?” Well, I myself hardly spend much time on directories searching for information. So, Isn’t it really a waste of time to build directories?

Unlike in the past, directories today serve a different purpose. They are hardly meant for information searching. Instead, directories serve as validation sites for search engines today. Websites included in reputable directories are often ranked higher in search engines.

This essentially means that if your site is accepted by www.abc-directory.com, abc-directory thinks that your site is worth a visit by search engine robots, and hence should deserve higher ranking in search engines. (For example: you may type “Singapore directory” in MSN. Do you find us on the 6th position?). For newbie internet users, this is what I meant by search engine ranking - ranked top in search engines for keywords that you intend users to find your site.

How will directories help your site in search engine ranking?

- Increase relevancy of your site with certain keywords and phrases
Search engines are robots crawling the web, and see all websites as a vastly interconnected “spider web”. Directories are organized in categories recognized by popular keywords (eg. Education, business). This helps search engines to determine which categories should a website falls under, and the theme of keywords and other websites that it should be related to.

- Directories serve as Expert documents for search engines
Besides bringing relevant search results, search engines want to deliver good quality websites to internet users. Importance of websites is often determined by the top down organization structure of directories. Hence, directories with certain quality control and good hierachy ranking structure helps to determine whether a site is worth visiting. Let us take a look at Google’s Pagerank technology: Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B”

- Protection from spammers
There are millions of spammers on the web constantly trying to manipulate search engine result to boost their sites’ ranking. Search engines search the web and index pages using web robots (or commonly called “spiders”), with the shortfall of not having human eyes of directory editors. This can be dangerous when spammers try to cheat the robots. However, spammers are not able to get through the human eyes of directory editors. One or two directory editors may accept a site, but Google may analyse the links from as many as few hundred directories pointing to a site.

Will search engines treat all directories with same respect?

Certainly NOT. Directories are built by human editors. And there are certain downsides:

a) Directory listing can be outdated very fast

Buidling a good directory requires effort and time. Often, website listing found in many directories are not updated, and broken links can be found in many directories. This is especially so when websites today are updated more frequently. It is indeed time consuming to maintain a directory with more than few thousand links. Directories that are more accurate with their listing is definitely more welcomed by search engines.

b) We also come to a question of fairness here

If editors themselves own affiliate sites, isn’t it possible that they manipulate their own directory listing and prevent certain listing of competitive sites. Well, search engines are not stupid. They accumulate analysis from many other directories to determine proper ranking for a website.

Feel free to visit article: Directory submission tips for further reading.

The word “podcasting” is used often around the internet these days, although many people are still not exactly clear on just what a podcast is!  Simply put, a podcast is a blog (web log) that is made available in audio format.  The audio portion is a standard MP3 file that contains a program or “show” that can be created by anyone.  Think of it as a radio talk show that can be transmitted from a computer.

The podcast transmission uses Real Simple Syndication (RSS) technology.  It may seem complicated but, as the name implies, it is actually fairly simple.  There are many resources available to help people learn how to record and set up a podcast.  The step-by-step instructions are easy to follow.  In fact, with just a few easy to learn skills, some low-cost (or free) computer programs, and the basic computer equipment and internet connections that you probably already have, YOU can create a podcast and host your own show. 

In addition to setting up a podcast, you’ll also want to provide a written blog that offers helpful, supplemental text for your podcast material.  For example, you may briefly mention a topic in your podcast and then tell your listeners: “For more information on this topic, please see the web site….”  In this way, you can expand the amount of information your subscribers receive from your transmission. 

When you have set up a blog and website, anyone with an internet connection can subscribe to your show.  Listeners will use an RSS “aggregator,” such as Doppler or Ipodder.  Both of these are FREE downloadable program that allow others to subscribe to any podcast of interest.  They’re easy to set up and can be pre-configured to check for new podcast updates at set intervals.  In this way, a subscriber doesn’t have to be “tuned in” to your podcast at a certain time; he can just receive notice of an update that is automatically downloaded to his computer and then listen to it at his leisure.  Subscribers listen to these files just like their music files, using Windows Media Player, iTunes, or any other similar audio program that is compatible with MP3 files. 

Needless to say, the topics of a podcast are limitless.  For example, maybe you have a special interest (even expertise) in fly fishing.  What a great idea to have a podcast devoted to the art and adventures of this great sport!  You can share techniques, stories, and even take live calls during pre-set transmission times.  Podcasting offers you the opportunity to become a true “internet personality.”