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Most Recent Articles For: Internet Marketing

Written by Lucas Heijn on July 16th, 2008
by Lucas Heijn

Do you want to start an online business? Work from home? You are not alone in your quest. You have probably already looked at many things and some of these have cost you money. I want you to imagine you’re looking through your newspaper in the classified ads columns, and you come across an ad that reads something like this “Profitable Business Ready To Go” it’s an ice cream franchise.

This sounds a really good business. I could really enjoy this. This is for me. You find that it comes with a brand-new ice cream van, plenty of ice cream and chocolate topping. The area that your franchise is assigned to is a new suburb, so new in fact; there are no houses, no people, no customers. This means you really have no business.

Products you may have bought on the Internet may have ended up exactly the same. Beautiful website, great product, no customers. You would have spent time editing the site and making sure the payment buttons worked. After checking that everything worked just as it should, you sat back and waited for the sales to come in. And then what happened? Nothing. Very disappointing.

Your new business is just like that ice cream van. It is beautiful and new and very well stocked, but you have no customers.

When you bought the business. You were told you could be making money within 24 hours. This was hype.

So is there a difference between hype and being scammed? Well, there really is some difference. Hype is often not total untruth. It often stretches the truth to make something appear better than it really is. The thing that makes hype similar to scamming is the fact that both are after your money. Hype is used to convince you to buy.

The difference is a scammer is much like a con man. The scammer uses totally dishonest means, total untruth to get you to part with your money. They often pose as something they’re not. I’m sure you have received e-mails from people posing as PayPal asking you go to the site and fill in your login details. With this information, they can fraudulently use your account your money.

Hype, on the other hand offers you a legitimate product, but it over states the truth. Any product on the Internet that promises you instant success is hype. If you want to start a business on the Internet there is no such thing as instant profits. Anyone that promises you other wise is stretching the truth.

As in any business venture be it online or off-line, it will take time to build. You will need time to build a customer base. You need to get your customers trust. And even more important than all of this, you need to get customers.

Remember our ice cream van? Great new van. Plenty of products. No customers. Your new website is exactly the same. Nobody knows you’re there. You need to draw traffic to your new site. This doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process that takes a lot of time and hard work.

To get traffic to your site is really another subject. I will explain this in another article.

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Written by Lucas Heijn on July 16th, 2008
by Lucas Heijn

Designing your website is usually done with sales in mind. First impressions are very important. It’s much like visiting the headquarters of an off-line company. For this reason, it is very important to keep good design principles in mind. Your site needs to be unable to reach the maximum number of people in the most styles possible.

Plan Navigation

keep your navigation simple. It must give clear direction on how to navigate your site. It must be uncluttered and easy to follow. Make sure you avoid confusion, if you’re visitor becomes confused. They were just leave it and go somewhere else.

Visitors come to your site, because they’re interested in the content. Let’s say you have a large number of articles or downloads available on your site, you need to make it simple for your visitor to find what he is looking for. You may do this by providing an SQL driven data base search, or just a simple index. By providing one of these features you have made it simple for your visitor to to be able to find the content they were looking for.

Your goal in navigation should be to keep it so simple that even a young child would be able to navigate your site. Multi tiered drop-down menus and complicated flash-based navigation should be avoided. If your visitor can’t work out how to navigate your site they will leave.

If your site has many pages and your visitors become deeply engrossed in surfing your site, you will need to make sure that they know where they are and how to get back to the main page. It is important not to create confusion with visitors. Confusion means abandon ship!

Here are a few more tips that will help.

#1 Do not use splash pages.

On some websites the first page you come to is a pretty page that welcomes you to the site and may also have something like “click here to enter”. This is a splash page. It serves no real purpose other than to be pretty as often they are highly graphical pages. The reason to avoid splash pages is to give your visitor no reason to click the back button.

#2 Do not use excessive banner advertisements.

Even the newest people using the Internet have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements. This means you would be wasting valuable Web real-estate in using banners. It is far better to provide valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content. This will lead your visitors to feel they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

#3 Avoid Audio

If you want a visitor to spend a long time on your site reading your content you need to make sure they’re not getting annoyed by some looping audio on your website. If you’re determined to add audio to your site, make sure they have some control over it. This could be volume or muting controls, these would work fine.

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Written by William Stanislaws on July 16th, 2008
by William Stanislaws

Now that you have a website the next step is to get it found on the search engines. If you talk with a search engine marketing consultant, he or she will have certain recommendations about what you need to do to ensure your website shows up near the top of search engine results. Search engine marketing ensures that your website will have the ability to be near the top of search engine results. People who are searching for your particular topic will then be able to click through to your website, giving you prospective customers if you operate a business website.

If you talk with search engine marketing services companies to ensure you receive great traffic, much of the attention and questioning will revolve around how many incoming links you have, your content, and how your site is optimized around your main keywords. These factors help determine your ranking in search engines and whether you will show up in the top ten rankings or not. This article will explain six important factors in a brief period of time you should look for when doing search engine optimization marketing.

The first important factor a search engine marketing services company will look into is a competitive analysis. This will help determine which companies are in the top ten rankings for certain keywords and why they are currently there.

Another factor which will be examined is keyword research and what keywords are used and what kind of results happen with these. If you do not have the right keywords used, you will not have as strong of an audience visiting your website as you could have hoped for.

A search engine marketing consultant will then look at your page optimization. Your pages need to be optimized for the various keywords so that your pages will show up in search engine results for different keywords depending upon the content of a particular page.

Search engine marketing services companies will then examine your site usability. It is important to have your website show up in search engines but you must also make sure that it is easy for your audience to get around your website and find what they are looking for.

Off page optimization is important and includes such activities such as link building. Search engines place great emphasis on this because you have to show the value of your website to other website owners who see enough value to link to your website.

One other factor you will want to look into is paid search engine marketing. This would include Adwords and you may want to think about this because you can put your website in front of your audience immediately.

Can you not see the importance of these tips if you were a search engine marketing consultant? There are certain steps that must be done to develop a highly successful website and this website covers many of those steps. Be sure to use these to maximize your website’s chances for success.

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Written by Debra Unplugged on July 16th, 2008
by Debra Unplugged

This is exactly what I did in less than 1 week to create THREE (3) unique Reports that I needed to give away for Free with my Opt-in box. Now I know I’m using this method to create a unique Information Report, however the very same methodology can be used to create your very own digital book! I taught this method to my students and they went absolutely crazy over this strategy that several of them went out and implemented it right away! Below is my STEP BY STEP process. Remember you can use this for unique Reports or eBooks.

STEP 1: Decide On Topic and Name. Your first Step is to decide on the topic and name for digital book/unique info Report. I needed 3 unique Reports. Here are the topics and Headings: “Creating A Successful Consulting Business”, “Creating A Successful Coaching Business”, “Creating A Successful Seminar Business”.

Keep in mind my purpose and intent here was to provide general info in the form of a unique info Report that would entice someone to opt-in and give me their first name and email address for my unique info Report. I’m using this for my blogs. Note that my Headings are pretty generic. That is just fine for right now and for the purpose of creation. I will come back and enhance these Headings to make them more persuasive later.

STEP 2: Secure Content Writer. You need someone to write these articles for you… don’t try to do everything yourself. And remember it doesn’t have to be perfect…. it just has to BE! Get yourself going by having someone help you. You can always come back and improve later, that’s the easy part. Here are some resources: www.forums.digitalpoint.com - this is where we get our writers, www.craigslist.org - simply search for services or post an ad, www.elance.com - this is a site a lot of top marketers use.

What should you be paying per rich Content? Answer: $5.00. If it is more than this, keep looking. Also… if you are looking for a lot of articles, consider negotiating a package rate or for a long term relationship. The key here is not to mention that you need a digital book! Because then the price goes up to $1000 or higher! All you want is the info and then YOU will format it into your digital book or unique info Report.

STEP 3: Create Your Content Headings. Okay, now you need content for your digital book or unique Information Report. The way to do this is to go to your Content writer and give them the topic and a list of articles you want written. Remember these Headings will change later to be your chapter Headings… for now all the Content writer needs to know is that they are writing articles.

The articles will be about 500 words in length. It doesn’t matter what order you put your request in, however the closer to your book outline you can get, the easier it is for the rich Content Content Writer to see the flow and make the info seem continuous. This is the flow you want. This isn’t set in stone and you can always change it later. As a matter of fact I rearranged the chapters to make them make even more sense and to put them into a more logical sequence for my audience.

STEP 4: Format The Content. Once you get your articles back from your article writer (average time is 24 hours to 4 days) you are ready to put them together as chapters into your eBook or Special Report and then format the content. You can implement a few strategies here to increase the content. 1) Request more articles and combine the content into chapters, 2) Add your expert opinion as content and supplement the information, 3) Add case studies to demonstrate the key elements of the content, and 4) Add graphics, charts, tables, testimonials. All of the recommendations should be implemented to create a value and content-rich product that is unique and exclusive to you.

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Written by Mike Spencer on July 16th, 2008
by Mike Spencer

One of the most enticing benefits of using article marketing in your online business, is that it is completely free of charge, and is a method anyone can use to get free traffic to their site. The purpose is for people to find your article, read it and then follow the link to your site from the blog or other place they read it. Many places accept articles without any charge but they should be sites with a good page rank; within a relatively short period you should start to experience more visitors at your site.

This is the benefit of using popular sites that have authority and providing they accept your contribution it will help you as well; trust is probably more important on the Internet because most people are faceless.

If you perform this article marketing and submission process on a regular basis, people will begin to search for your material and trust your work. This is why it is so important to show people that you know what you are talking about so they trust the content you provide in the area you write about.

Although it can take a while, this traffic from people that trust you will help your own search engine ranking; this can help improve your organic visitors as your positioning on Google improves. The more websites that link to yours, the more traffic you will achieve; more importantly, none of this traffic actually costs anything at all!

With article marketing, a number of links to other sites can be inserted into it and providing there aren’t too many you will not be penalized. Your article must have good content if you want it placed in many websites because this in turn will link back to your own website which of course will increase the website ranking.

Unfortunately you cannot normally expect your site to be listed straight away with the search engines. Although you cannot rush the search engines directly, submitting more articles and using the authority sites will help enormously.

The content on your website is what brings the search engines and hence visitors so therefore part of your article marketing campaign should be to continually add fresh content to your website. Don’t forget that many visitors to your site are not visiting to buy something. The more truthful you are about what you are doing, the more visitors will appreciate it providing the information you supply is relevant to their search.

Once on your site it is not a complicated matter to show your visitors what it is you are selling. Doing it this way ensures the visitor is not mislead and is happy to be shown what you are selling. The last thing you want after making the sale is to return the money so by doing carrying out this process you lessen your chance of it happening.

If you want visitors to your websites then you must continue your article marketing this way; this process must be repeated on a regular basis for it to work. An additional benefit from writing quality articles is that other website owners will either link to your site or use your articles on their own site; having your articles on numerous sites just improves the exposure of your site. There are no charges to article marketing and is still the number one way to get traffic to your site; with relevant, quality unique articles, visitors will keep returning.

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Written by Terry Stanfield on July 16th, 2008
by Terry Stanfield

If you were to talk with a search engine marketing consultant, they would have certain tips to give you. There are many websites these days which do have a website which is optimized for search engine marketing. This is important because if you do not have a website which is optimized and shows up in search engine results, you cannot get traffic to your website without having to buy it and this gets expensive.

If you are concerned about how your website shows up in websites, you may inquire about search engine marketing services. These services will usually focus their attention upon three main areas: incoming links, your content, and your keywords. These are factors which are important for the search engines and will result in your website being placed higher in results if you focus on these factors. This article will talk more about this.

The first of the six factors a search engine marketing services company will examine is competitive analysis. This is done to see how your website stacks up against the competition along with which companies are in the top ten results and why they are there.

The second factor to look into is keyword research to see which keywords are actually used by your prospective audience and how competitive these keywords are. Without proper keywords, your website is not visible to your niche audience searching for what you have to offer.

A search engine marketing consultant will use page optimization to see which keywords are emphasized on various pages. This will ensure that your set of keywords is used properly throughout your website so that you show up for all keywords you are targeting.

Search engine marketing services companies place great emphasis on site usability. Without a site that is easy to get around, your audience will become disenchanted and exit your site quickly which is not good for your business.

Off page optimization such as link building is the next area which will be focused on by search engine marketing services companies. Link building is important because this is a factor in search engine rankings.

You can also think about using paid search engine marketing such as Adwords. This is an option some search engine marketing consultants will recommend because you can get your website in front of your audience faster than organic search engine marketing optimization efforts.

Can you not see the importance of these tips if you were a search engine marketing consultant? There are certain steps that must be done to develop a highly successful website and this website covers many of those steps. Be sure to use these to maximize your website’s chances for success.

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Written by John Wallen on July 15th, 2008
by John Wallen

I just got back from vacation, I was out in Maine in Acadia national park. What a beautiful shoreline, I seen many amazing things I have never seen elsewhere. This is one of those places that is on the list to visit in one’s lifetime, a real adventure that would be worth every moment.

It’s not easy coming home from such a beautiful place, but that?s the way it always is. I’m just grateful to be part of such an experience, my memories and the wonderful pictures I took will always be a pleasant reminder when that rainy day comes around and I need a little sunshine.

When I returned home and got everything put away I settled in to my regular routine and logged into my back office where I do business with this company online. This company I’m affiliated with is the best thing that happened to me when it comes to making money, their incredible.

While I was away the internet was getting it done once again for me. This is an awesome business, I profited ninety three hundred sixty one $’s! Once everything is set in motion, the world wide web is working 24/7, making me an excellent income, even when I’m not home.

I’ve been doing this for a year and two months now, and have no regrets. Think about it I’m making great money while I’m away on vacation! When I think back on the time I took this first step in taking control of my future, I remember telling myself a mediocre live was not for me.

This would be a great opportunity for anyone, if I can do it you can to. This is a complete turnkey business, meaning everything is ready to go for anyone to start profiting quickly. This is a top of the line wealth creating system, a method that has never been created by anyone else.

This is no lie, you wont have to do a thing but start marketing on the web. You keep one hundred percent of the payout plus residual, and it’s is put directly into your bank account, no waiting for a check. Heck the owners put their number on the website and will close your sale if needed to.

So are you an optimistic person or does you skeptical side keep getting in the way, cause this is not going to cost you a thing to look at this carefully. You will see for yourself the best marketing system ever put together that will make you more money than anything else out there!

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Written by Lucas Heijn on July 14th, 2008
by Lucas Heijn

Designing your website is usually done with sales in mind. First impressions are very important. It’s much like visiting the headquarters of an off-line company. For this reason, it is very important to keep good design principles in mind. Your site needs to be unable to reach the maximum number of people in the most styles possible.

Keep Navigation in Mind

Avoid confusion.You must give clear direction on how to navigate your site. If your visitor is confused about how to get around your site they will just leave it and go somewhere else. Your navigation, must be clear, uncluttered, and concise.

Visitors come to your site, because they’re interested in the content. Let’s say you have a large number of articles or downloads available on your site, you need to make it simple for your visitor to find what he is looking for. You may do this by providing an SQL driven data base search, or just a simple index. By providing one of these features you have made it simple for your visitor to to be able to find the content they were looking for.

Once we have the visitor to our site, it is important to keep them there. They will only stay if they can work out how they can get to the content they want. if they can’t work out how to navigate the site, they will leave. I would recommend that you stay away from complicated flash-based navigation and drop-down menus.

You need to make sure that there’s navigation on all your pages. visitors can become deeply engrossed in surfing through your site, so they need to know where they are and how to get back to the main page. Make sure your visitors never become confused. Confusion means that they leave.

A few more pointers that may help.

#1 Do not use splash pages.

A splash page is the first page you see when you arrive at a website These are often very beautiful with graphics. They often have the words welcome or, click here to enter. In fact, they are just pretty pages with no real purpose. Don’t give your visitors a reason to click the back button. You then give them the real value of your site up front without the splash pages.

#2 Be careful not to use too many banner ads

Even the newest people using the Internet have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements. This means you would be wasting valuable Web real-estate in using banners. It is far better to provide valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content. This will lead your visitors to feel they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

#3 Avoid using audio on your site.

With plenty of content on your site your visitors will spend quite a lot of time reading the content. You will need to make sure that they do not become annoyed, because of some looping audio on your website. If you feel that you must have audio on your site, make sure that you also provide a volume control or muting.

About the Author:

Written by Debra Unplugged on July 14th, 2008
by Debra Unplugged

This is exactly what I did in less than 1 week to create THREE (3) Special Reports that I needed to give away for Free with my Opt-in box. Now I know I’m using this method to create a Special Report, however the very same methodology can be used to create your very own eBook! I taught this method to my students and they went absolutely crazy over this strategy that several of them went out and implemented it right away! Below is my STEP BY STEP process. Remember you can use this for Special Reports or eBooks.

STEP 1: Decide On Topic and Name. Your first Step is to decide on the topic and name for digital book/unique info Report. I needed 3 unique Reports. Here are the topics and Headings: “Creating A Successful Consulting Business”, “Creating A Successful Coaching Business”, “Creating A Successful Seminar Business”.

Keep in mind my purpose and intent here was to provide general info in the form of a unique info Report that would entice someone to opt-in and give me their first name and email address for my unique info Report. I’m using this for my blogs. Note that my Headings are pretty generic. That is just fine for right now and for the purpose of creation. I will come back and enhance these Headings to make them more persuasive later.

STEP 2: Secure Content Writer. You need someone to write these articles for you… don’t try to do everything yourself. And remember it doesn’t have to be perfect…. it just has to BE! Get yourself going by having someone help you. You can always come back and improve later, that’s the easy part. Here are some resources: www.forums.digitalpoint.com - this is where we get our writers, www.craigslist.org - simply search for services or post an ad, www.elance.com - this is a site a lot of top marketers use.

What should you be paying per article? Answer: $5.00. If it is more than this, keep looking. Also… if you are looking for a lot of articles, consider negotiating a package rate or for a long term relationship. The key here is not to mention that you need a ebook! Because then the price goes up to $1000 or higher! All you want is the information and then YOU will format it into your ebook or special report.

STEP 3: Create Your Content Headings. Okay, now you need content for your digital book or unique Information Report. The way to do this is to go to your Content writer and give them the topic and a list of articles you want written. Remember these Headings will change later to be your chapter Headings… for now all the Content writer needs to know is that they are writing articles.

The articles will be about 500 words in length. It doesn’t matter what order you put your request in, however the closer to your book outline you can get, the easier it is for the rich Content Content Writer to see the flow and make the info seem continuous. This is the flow you want. This isn’t set in stone and you can always change it later. As a matter of fact I rearranged the chapters to make them make even more sense and to put them into a more logical sequence for my audience.

STEP 4: Format The Content. Once you get your articles back from your Content writer (average time is 24 hours to 4 days) you are ready to put them together as chapters into your digital book or unique Information Report and then format the content. You can implement a few strategies here to increase the content. 1) Request more articles and combine the content into chapters, 2) Add your expert opinion as content and supplement the information, 3) Add case studies to demonstrate the key elements of the content, and 4) Add graphics, charts, tables, testimonials. All of the recommendations should be implemented to create a value and content-rich product that is unique and exclusive to you.

About the Author:

Written by Theo McLanahan on July 13th, 2008
by Theo McLanahan

Essential to doing any sort of business activities on the Internet, a website acts as a sort of online store front, presenting your business to countless international customers. The success or failure that your Internet based business has is greatly influenced by the graphics you choose to use on the website.

Above all else, well made, high quality graphics will give your website a great professional touch. Conversely, the entire website will be affected negatively by low quality graphics or images that are poorly arranged, blurry, or otherwise unappealing aesthetically. Right or wrong, visitors to your site will judge your entire business based on the appearance your graphics present. If they consider yours to be amateur, they probably won’t be real excited to do business with you.

To be as effective as possible, the graphics you choose should help to create brand recognition and convey the message you are trying to send to the world. Take Nike, for example. Their famous “swoosh symbol” is featured on their website, as well as pictures of shoes, athletes, and other sports-minded images.

Nike’s concept, “Just Do It,” is well represented by the images and graphics that are placed on the company’s website. Think for a moment about how you would feel if, upon arriving on the Nike home page, you were greeted with pictures of cookies, cake, and ice cream. You would surely be confused and would probably start looking for the website you were actually after in the first place.

The same theory applies to your website; if the graphics do not convey the message you are trying to send, your visitors will end up confused and click away. The quality of your graphics also affects success of your affiliate programs as well as the number of incoming links you may receive.

Asking other businesspeople to join up with you in an online affiliate program brings with it a certain level of responsibility. Since you are requesting that they sell your products and services, you will want to have high caliber graphics on your website. Otherwise, affiliates will be hard to find. They will not be able to advertise or promote your products if you provide them with poor quality graphics.

Likewise, when you ask someone to partner with you on a link exchange, they are going to expect a quality graphic. They will be displaying this graphic, with a link to your page, on their website. If you send them an unprofessional-looking graphic, it is going to bring the look of their site down. They will more than likely decline your offer.

As you can see, graphics play a big part in your business. If you do not have experience with graphic software or don’t feel that you are the best one suited for creating your graphics, you should hire a graphic designer. It may cost more up front, but think about how much money you would lose by having a poor image as your graphic. It is well worth the investment to hire a professional.

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