Why Search Engine Traffic Should be Your Top Prior

Why Search Engine Traffic Should be Your Top Priority

by: Richard Zwicky

Most Internet marketing methods are risky and many will not have any affect on traffic to a web site. Some online marketers will sell you anything from banner impressions, to mass email campaigns (spam), to popup ads. All these marketing tools can work, but they are also extremely risky. Some people I know find popups and spam so annoying that they will never purchase anything from a business that uses them. These plans are probably not the best customer acquisition strategies, and more likely they are a total waste of money. So why would anyone bother risking money on marketing strategies that probably will not increase traffic to your website? Why not concentrate on what does work? The search engines.

Have you ever been contacted by online marketers who promise to deliver a ‘ton of trafficก to your websiteก ? I get these emails every day. Hereกs a quote from one I used to get 10 times a day (until I automatically filtered it to trash):

กHi I visited www.metamend.com, and noticed that you’re not listed on some search engines! I think we can offer you a service which can help you increase traffic and the number of visitors to your website.

I would like to introduce you to thispromotioncompany.com. We offer a unique technology that will submit your website to over 300,000 search engines and directories every month.

Youกll be surprised by the low cost, and by how effective this website promotion method can be.

To find out more about thispromotioncompany and the cost for submitting your website to over 300,000 search engines and directories, visit www.thispromotioncompany.com. (…)ก

Have you ever received one, and wondered why they were contacting you? First off, how did they find your web site? What search engines are they referring to? If they really could deliver on their promise, then they would have so much repeat, and word of mouth business, that they wouldn’t have time to be calling or emailing you. Lastly, how many people actually believe that there are 300,000 search engines?

While itกs true you need traffic from the search engines, you don’t need to use spam techniques to get it. You need real results, and not false hope.

Increase Web Site Traffic,.. Naturally

It is true that the best way to obtain lots of targeted traffic (customers) is to acquire it based on relevance, via the search engines. Various studies show that anywhere from 83% to 92% of first time visitors to a web site find it through the search engines. Thatกs an incredible statistic. If you are not acquiring those customers as a result of a relevant query, then they will be disappointed. They may be disappointed with the search result, but more likely, they will be disappointed with your web site.

In the online world thatกs your first impression. We all know how important a first impression is. You can never get a bad one back, and a good one will carry you a long way. You have to make sure that the search engines are sending you visitors that are looking for your products or services. If your web site matches their interests, they will remember it, and come back, even if they do not make a purchase on that visit. If they find it irrelevant, they may have subconsciously formed a negative opinion of your online business, through no fault of your own.

Search engines provide a continuous stream of targeted visitors to your website, and for the most part, itกs free of charge. Some engines do charge a listing fee, but most do not. The only thing the search engine asks is that each web site operator makes an effort to provide relevant and good information to web surfers for a particular search phrase. If a web site does so, the search engines will reward the site with increased good quality traffic.

Search engine traffic is a winwin situation for any online business. It doesn’t take much to improve on most web siteกs search engine traffic it just takes optimization. Did you know that as of January 1 2002, there were 160,000,000 domain hosts in use worldwide? Did you know that 88% of the web pages worldwide are not indexed by the largest search engines? 88% of web pages are not optimized. How can any business survive on the Internet if it is not optimized for the search engines, and thus can never be found? How can they exist if over 83% of first time visitors never find their web site? How much more money could a web site operator earn if they ensured their web site was even partially visible?

If you have an informative web site, the search engines want to send you lots of customers. Thatกs because the more web surfers find what they want, the more theyกll use a particular search engine and recommend it to their friends. The search engine also benefits, as it becomes known as a resource that gets its clients the searchers to their destinations quickly and efficiently. The more people recognize how well the engine works as a resource, the more it gets recommended, and used. As the popularity increases, so do the engineกs revenues from advertising.

What Does Your Web Site Need To Receive Traffic From The Search Engines?

Small web sites with only 1 or 2 pages set themselves up for failure, simply because they usually don’t have enough content of interest. There are of course exceptions, where the 1 or 2 pages are each as long as a book. But these are awfully frustrating to read, and no one will be satisfied with them. Most often 1 or 2 page sites are simply too short to provide any useful information, so the search engines don’t take them seriously. Among other factors, the search engines examine how deep a site is. The more meaningful content present, the more weighty the site is viewed as, and the more importance it is given.

If you are wondering about whether to bother, ask yourself this: Why does your company have a web site? What does the company do with it? Think about it. Most companies today have web sites, and most market the web sites to facilitate customer acquisition, to increase their customer base, and to improve customer retention rates.

There are a number of reasons for having web sites. Many companies use theirs to enhance their customer service. Using a web site as a marketing vehicle is a great way for a company ‘to put the word outก about products, services, or offerings.

Most importantly, remember that your web site is an online resource that your clients can use to find answers to frequently asked questions, กhow toก tips, and to educate themselves. When including content on a web site, always remember that the knowledge shared may be common to you, but itกs likely that you are an expert in the eyes of your clients. People visit your web site for your product or service, but also for information. If they find useful, relevant, information, they will keep coming back, and will likely make purchases. People like to buy from experts.

Instead of thinking of your web site as nothing more than an online billboard or business card, think of it as an online menu, that lets people get an idea of what it is you do, and how you do it. Develop a content rich website, optimize it, and let the search engines increase your website traffic, naturally. If you optimize each major web page within your site, you will increase the rankings in the search engine results and therefore receive targeted traffic for each of those pages.

Doing each of the above ensuring relevant content is present, and optimizing the pages will ensure that the search engines have what they need so they can do their work. It will also ensure that they can send you targeted traffic (customers), so that you can get that 83% of first time visitors your online business needs to survive.

About The Author

Richard Zwicky is a founder and the CEO of Metamend Software, www.metamend.com, a Victoria B.C. based firm whose cutting edge Search Engine Optimization software is recognized as the world leader in its field. Employing a staff of 10, the firmกs business comes from around the world, with clients from every continent. Most recently the company was recognized for their geolocational, or GIS, and phraseology and context search technologies.

[email protected]

This article was posted on November 20, 2003

by Richard Zwicky

Blog And Ping To Build Links

Blog And Ping To Build Links

by: John Taylor

Just What Is Blogging and Pinging?

There is a new partnership in cybertown called Blogging and Pinging. It is not a new comedy team or even a singing group, but a new way to build links and attract visitors to your website and to make more money. Blogging and Pinging is a marketing tool that can help anyone build their online business.

Let’s start with a definition of a blog.

Blog is short for weblog. A weblog is a journal that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author of the Web site.

Ok, so what about pinging? Originally, a ping was a program that bounced a request off another computer or server over a network or the Internet to see if the remote computer was responding. That same program is now used as a method of informing others that your blog exists and it also let’s them know when a new post has been made.

When you put blogging together with pinging you get a technique that is extremely effective at getting any web site, no matter how big or small, indexed by the major search engines.

Why Is Blogging and Pinging The Newest Marketing Tool?

Most of you are now saying, กYeah, so what? I can get my site indexed now. What’s the big deal?ก The big deal is that blogging and pinging gets your site indexed almost immediately and it is free!

If you have any experience trying to get a site indexed and listed in the major search engines, then you know that it is frustrating and very difficult to get done in a reasonable amount of time. After working hard to get your site together, collecting and writing content, worrying about keywords and keyword densities, you are not even close to being finished. Now comes the even harder part! Now you have to manually submit your site to all the major search engines. And finally, you get to wait.

That’s right, you have to wait for the spiders to come to index your site. This could take weeks or it could take months. There are some methods that will help bring along the spiders a bit faster, but these take lots of time and effort and money. And still, you can’t be sure that the spiders will come fast more quickly.

Blogging and pinging solves this problem. You can guarantee that spiders will come to your site and that you will get listed in all the major search engines with minimal effort and no money in about 48 hours.

How does it work? The largest search engine, Google, owns Blogger.com. This is the site that many people use to create their blogs. Google frequently sends their search engine spiders through Blogger.com to find new content.

So, if you have a blogger.com account you can add content from other websites to the content of your blog and when you blog the content of your site the URL of the page you are blogging is automatically attached. That way, when Google’s spiders index your blogger.com pages, they see your website URL within the content. If that URL isn’t listed in the Google database, the spiders are almost certain to follow the link to index your site!

So, rather than wait for weeks, months, or even up to a year, you can get your site listed virtually immediately! Google themselves will tell you that they would rather discover new URL’s by finding links than getting them via submission. So, why not blog and ping and give them what they want!

One critical success factor in boosting your link popularity is to use the blog and ping technique to notify lots of other sites anout new content on your web site. This is achieved by using your blogger.com publishing function to ping the major blog directories such as Technorati and Blo.gs.

Another good piece of news is that once Google has indexed your site, other search engines that use Google’s feed will list your site too. And it all happens at lightening speed!

Blogging and pinging is a really effective method to get your site spidered by the major search engines and, more importantly, getting those all important links.

Copyright John Taylor PhD August 2005 All rights reserved.

About The Author

John Taylor

To learn more information about Link Popularity I strongly recommend that you visit http://www.LinkAdvantage.com

[email protected]

This article was posted on August 11

by John Taylor

Instant Traffic Using Expired Domains

Instant Traffic Using Expired Domains

by: Wayne Ford

Every day thousands of domains กexpireก and are put back into the pool of available domains that anyone can register. They can be very valuable if you are looking for a quality domain for your online business, or if you want to resell them for profit. But wait! There is another huge advantage to a domain that was previously owned Instant Traffic!
As I said above, expired domains have all been owned by someone in the past. Many of these previous owners built Websites for these domains, advertised them, registered them with search engines, and even exchanged links with other sites. All translating into traffic to that domain name.
Now, why would someone who took the time to do all that work let the domain expire? It could be one of several reasons:
* the author simply lost interest * an online venture ran out of funding * poor management of the domain * they couldn’t afford the fees
Whatever the reason, it happens. And you can reclaim some of the wasted traffic and use it to your advantage. You can either point it to your existing site or use it to jumpstart and add value to a new site.
How do you know if an expired domain has traffic?
While there is no way to gauge the actual amount of traffic going to an expired domain, you can find out its link popularity in the major search engines. This will tell you the number of Web pages listed in a particular search engine that link to that domain. The more links, the higher link popularity and the more traffic that domain is getting (in some search engines, the higher ranking, too).
A free online tool to help you find the link popularity of an individual domain at five top search engines can be found at http://www.Webofsuccess.com/popularity/popularity.cgi
Another way I recently discovered is to use this powerful software program called Popular Domains. Among other features, it allows you to import a list of expired domains and automatically check the link popularity of each one. To learn more about it, check out http://www.Webofsuccess.com/domainsweekly/popular.html
As you can see, this can be an affordable way to gain instant traffic to your site. Be nice, though, and do not abuse this technique, make sure the site you are sending traffic to relates to the domain. For example don’t register the expired domain กehairplugs.comก just because it has a high link popularity and then forward the domain to your site about Internet marketing. Other than that you may use your new domain with กbuiltinก traffic however you wish!

About The Author

Wayne Ford, [email protected], is the founder and president of DomainsWeekly.com the leading supplier of daily expired and soontoexpire domain lists. He also publishes a free weekly newsletter packed full of domainrelated information and a list of quality available domains. You may subscribe by sending a blank email to [email protected]

This article was posted on January 16, 2002

by Wayne Ford

4 Rock Solid Reasons For Building Your Own Website

4 Rock Solid Reasons For Building Your Own Website

by: Robert Evans

What is the point of having a website, you may ask, when the affiliate programme you have joined has provided you with your own web page to promote? This is a fair question. The answer has to be that with your own site and of course your own domain name you will have a lot more control over your business. Here are four reasons why you should be grabbing your piece of internet real estate right now.

1) To begin with, it serves as the focal point for your business. Once you have it properly set up you can have all sorts of pages leading off from it, effectively creating an entire network of interlinked pages. Adding fresh, unique content to your site on a regular basis, can also help take your site from obscurity to top rankings on the major search engines in a relatively short space of time, resulting in high profile exposure for whatever business you are operating.

This is not a pipe dream that only top level search engine optimisation experts can achieve. Anyone can do it. Believe me. Try to remember this simple process whenever you add something to your site:

build a page with fresh content relating to the theme of your site. This can of course be on the subject of the product you are promoting, whether it is your own or someone elseกs.

optimise it with appropriate title and description tags

make sure it is linked to the home page

give the page itself a descriptive name

2) Another rock solid reason for having your own website is so that you can take advantage of some really neat scripts and features you can add to it, such as a classified ad service, a pay per click service, a search engine, even a web hosting service. Some of these features can also make you a healthy income.

3) You can use a web page as the gateway to an automated followup system that is activated whenever a visitor submits his contact details via a form. Why would your visitors give you their details? Because you have something they want. And you are going to give it to them in exchange for their name and email address. This can be a free report, ebook or other product.

Once they submit their details, the first of a series of emails is sent to them containing whatever they requested together with an ad for the product or service you are promoting. You should also set the system up to send them further emails over a period covering about a month.

By setting up such pages and systems you are leaving yourself free to concentrate on developing your business and bringing in new visitors. Which brings us to the fourth rock solid reason for having a web site.

4) Joint ventures. This is another excellent reason to have your own site and either your own product to sell or one which you have the resell rights for. Don’t be put off by the thought of approaching other business owners with a joint venture proposal. Just go to your favourite search engine and do a search under กezine directoriesก then contact a handful of publishers whose ezines fall into the same category as the product you are selling and offer them a (sizeable) percentage on any sales they generate.

You supply them with the ad copy, or work with them to produce something that their readers are likely to respond to then sit back (but not for long) and wait for the sales to start coming in. If you have found the right partner and he or she has a sizeable subscriber base, this could result in quite a healthy return.

In order to enter into a joint venture arrangement you would, of course, need to set up a special page that your joint venture partner will send their subscribers to. Make sure you insert their name or Affiliate ID into your payment buttons. This can easily be done in PayPal by simply adding it after the name of the product.

Copyright 2005 Robert Evans

About The Author

Bob Evans has been doing business on the internet since 2000. He builds web sites and writes fresh unique content on just about any subject for use by both novice and experienced webmasters.

http://www.bevansmarketing.com

This article was posted on August 22

by Robert Evans

1 Simple SEO Strategy To Get More Visitors To Your

1 Simple SEO Strategy To Get More Visitors To Your Site From Google

by: Jean Lam

Did you know that you can dramatically increase the number of visitors that come to your site on a daily basis from Google? And itกs not constantly improving your position in Google search engine result pages(SERPs) for your competitive keywords which can take some time after working on your search engine marketing campaigns.

I take this example from Google because Iกve experienced it some time back now. Apart concentrating on getting and maintaining a top 10 ranking in Google, there are lots of easy traffic sources that you haven’t exploited yet. We are still talking about search engine traffic here.

Whatกs that strategy you ask? The answer might surprise you but itกs a technique that works and is pretty legitimate. Itกs not creating stand alone or doorway pages with practically no content, overly optimized with keywords and a link back to the homepage. Doorway pages work but only if you know how to do it well. And this article will talk a bit about this topic as well.

The strategy is to search for overlooked keyword phrases which are not too competitive and create effective doorway pages related to these keyword phrases. These pages can be promoting a product for instance.

Just by adding a few effective doorway pages, I managed to make 9 sales in just a few short weeks and earned $364.59.

Imagine you come up with several keyword phrases that generate a few monthly searches, you now have several pages. So each page targeting a specific keyword phrase is worth traffic and not any type of traffic but it will be targeted.

So if you have one page which brings you only 1 visitor per day and you have 50 pages, you can easily receive 50 visitors per day for free. You see the potential now.

Keywords that have about 1000 searches on Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions previously known as Overture at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion are valuable keywords with lower competition.

If you are using Wordtracker at http://www.wordtracker.com, a keyword with only 10 searches per day can get you a good ranking and bring you traffic.

If you have already a website which is generating traffic, you can dramatically increase your numbers, simply by adding relevant doorway pages targeting a specific keyword. These pages have content and have your optimized navigation menu on it with their specific keyword phrases. These pages are just an entry to your site nothing more nothing less.

They should not be overly optimized with keywords but they must have some optimized content which is readable by your visitors and friendly for the search engines as well.

If you have a good website which is crawled by Googleกs robot called กGooglebotก often, your new pages will get spidered and indexed fast and will start bringing you small loads of targeted traffic.

But be careful when adding pages, don’t go in a frenzy with this and add hundreds or even thousands of pages all of a sudden. For eg if your site has 50 pages already indexed in Google and ranking well and you add 100 new pages at once, your indexed pages might suffer a temporary drop in rankings. The key here is to add pages on a regular basis say 1 or 2 pages daily until you reach the total number of pages to be added.

Why not capitalize on this free source of traffic? The key is to research your keywords well first, work on your content and create these pages afterwards.

Your website will grow bigger and bigger with time and it will attract loads of targeted traffic from multiple keyword phrases.

Good luck and happy research and optimizing.

About The Author

Jean Lam is the author of the highly acclaimed eBook ‘top Search Engine Ranking Secrets in Google Revealedก, a concise, stepbystep guide to high search engine ranking for the beginner to intermediate level webmaster available now at http://www.toprankingstrategies.com.

This article was posted on April 13

by Jean Lam

Fun Free Feed Tools for Both the Publisher and the

Fun Free Feed Tools for Both the Publisher and the Reader

by: Tinu AbayomiPaul

As you’ve probably been reading, there are basically three problems many webmasters have with web feeds (that is, among those who are already familiar with them on a basic level).

The three concerns I hear the most are:

ขHow do I deal with the bandwidth hit?ข

ขIs there a way to include information that isn’t in the automated resource I use to populate my feed without touching any code?ข

and

ขWhere can I find a costeffective, simple way to display feeds on my site?ข

Say Goodbye to Bandwidth Overages with FeedBurner

http://feedburner.com

If you’re a publisher, chances are, you’re familiar with the bandwidth increase that occurs every time your audience reads the latest update to your feed that for some webmasters lead to the possibility of exceeding monthly bandwidth limitations. There’s an easy solution.

Burn your feed with FeedBurner. They’re happy to take the burden off your server. (And yes, they say, FeedBurner is one word.)

Whether you’ve just created your news feed or you have been RSSing for years, you can create a free account at their site. Their service will also:

translate your feed from Atom to RSS or vice versa,

make a browserfriendly page that explains what web feeds are to the new user,

allow you to splice any link into your feed using some of the more popular social bookmarking services.

FeedBurner also allows you to study your demographic by giving you statistics on how many request have been made for your feed contents, down to the item if you like.

Though I offer both the burned version of my feed and the original to my audience, they love the extra information my FeedBurned link provides them.

Social Bookmarking Share More Info with Less Hassle

http://furl.net

http://bloglines.com

http://del.icio.us

Social bookmarking allows you to create a bookmark online, and share those bookmarks via RSS.

Some services even allow you to share your collection of links, as you can do with the service from del.icio.us . Furl.net, newly acquired by LookSmart, also adds the capability of saving an old version of a page you have visited with the bookmark feature. And at Bloglines, you can get ezine subscriptions via feed by subscribing through a special address they give you.

All three of these services can be coupled with FeedBurner to splice external links or other internal links from your own site into the ขburnedข version of your feed.

Display links on your site for free with RSS Digest

http://www.bigbold.com/rssdigest/

Youกve heard about the value of displaying feeds from other sites (with permission of the publisher, of course) on your site. The theory is that the frequently updated headlines add freshness to your site, which results in more frequent visits from search engine spiders. This can lead to better rankings for the site carrying the headlines, and more backlinks for the feed publisher. Everybody wins.

For the most part, I’ve found this to be true, with a feed that frequently updates, at sites that have suitable content for both the visitor and the spiders to enjoy.

The trouble for many smaller web property owners is finding a costeffective manner in which to employ this technique. Most free tools that do this with javascript are fine for site publishers who are using the headlines for content, but if you also want the search engine benefits, it doesn’t help as many spiders don’t register content that appears in this format.

RSS Digest will do this for you in HTML, as recently reported in Search Engine Journal.

It’s not as sophisticated a tool as CARP or RSS Equalizer, but if you want to offer your feed to an audience and they don’t mind using an IFRAME or pasting PHP code into their pages, this will do the job just fine.

If you’re good at supplying tips, finding resources, or locating fresh information, after viewing some news feeds for yourself, you might find that you’re ready to take the next step and publish one. If you’re already a publisher, utilizing some of these free tools may help you build a better feed.

Either way, good luck!

Copyright 2004 Tinu AbayomiPaul

About The Author

Tinu saw a 75% increase in site traffic using only promotion of her web feeds, not taking into account increased exposure in search engines. She compiled her findings into a quick, everevolving guide this past July that you can download from http://www.freetraffictip.com, in addition to the semidaily free traffic tips you’ll find in her blog.

This article was posted on September 23, 2004

by Tinu AbayomiPaul

When to Hire a Professional SEO Firm?

When to Hire a Professional SEO Firm?

by: Corey Wenger

In efforts to increase sales and profitability, more and more companies are turning to online marketing initiatives – specifically, search engine optimization. Search Engine Optimization or (SEO) is the art and science of blending technical and marketing skills together into a finely tuned website that is both search enginefriendly, ranks well for specific keywords and phrases, and is tailored to your audience from a buyer and seller perspective.

According to a recent U.S. study, only 20% of all businesses outsource search engine optimization programs to professional SEO firms. The remaining 80% either do not conduct search engine optimization at all or they believe they have the resources and skills to do it inhouse. Of this 80%, it is probable that 90% of these companies can’t be found on the web – they don’t exist. In order to generate any amount of significant web visibility, your website must typically rank within the top30 results.

So, the question comes down to what is in your company’s best interests?

Conduct your SEO program inhouse or outsource it. To answer this question, let’s first take a look at the knowledge, skills and resources necessary to implement and maintain a successful search engine optimization program.

SEO knowledge and skills required

1) Basic understanding of how search engines and directories work.

This may seem overly obvious, but you would be amazed how many people do not understand how they actually work. This knowledge provides the foundation for your SEO program.

2) Website design

Although SEO is not completely a technical marketing process, it does require a fair amount of technical knowledge of what constitutes search enginefriendly web design. Certain web design elements can either help your search engine rankings or hurt them. You simply have to know which is which.

3) SEO experience

This is the most important and most difficult knowledge to obtain. If you have never implemented a SEO program, then you are in for a big surprise. Search engine optimization programs require a lot of research and are extremely time consuming. Most importantly, they require actual SEO experience. This means knowing what SEO strategies and tactics work and which ones don’t.

Inhouse vs. outsourced SEO programs

If your company is considering conducting your search engine optimization program inhouse, here are some questions to consider.

Who will be responsible for analyzing, developing, implementing and measuring the success of your SEO program?

Is this considered the role of your IT department, Marketing department or some other individual(s) within your company?

Do they have the time, knowledge, and resources to successfully implement and maintain your search engine optimization program? And do they really care if it works or not?

IT Department

Typically your IT department handles multiple daily tasks from troubleshooting your company’s LAN or WAN to fixing the sales department’s laptops? Out of a busy IT person’s day, what priority and focus do you think he or she will commit to for your SEO program? And even if your IT department has some skills in web design or development, these skills make up only a small percentage of the knowledge required for a successful search engine optimization program.

Marketing Department

Typically, your marketing department juggles many marketing projects at once and faces strict completion deadlines. From handling new print collateral campaigns to getting ready for new product or service launches, marketing personnel’s time is spread very thin. In addition, how knowledgeable is your marketing department in the technical aspects of web design and search engine optimization? Do they have the time to become wellversed? Do they have sufficient internal resources? Often the answer to both questions is no, they do not.

Other individual(s) within your company

Ok, so the responsibility falls onto someone outside of your Marketing or IT department. Who will that be and why are they responsible for your SEO program? Providing these individuals with a new ขproject of the month,ข will typically result in another check mark off of their monthly todo list and frustration by top management of why their website is not producing any sales results.

Summary

From a business standpoint, it makes sense to try to leverage internal resources to maximize your company’s productivity and profitability – whenever possible. However, there must be a line drawn in the sand between knowing what your organization’s capabilities are and what they are not.

As you can see, there is more to search engine optimization than meets the eye. In order to implement and maintain a SEO program, you must acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and resources. This can be done by hiring a professional search engine optimization firm. Professional SEO firms have dedicated resources and experience to support your company’s web marketing initiatives. By leveraging their experience and knowhow, your company can quickly and more efficiently implement a successful search engine optimization program.

About The Author

Corey Wenger is owner of Key Position Web Marketing and is a professional Search Engine Optimizer and Consultant who has over three years of experience in helping companies increase sales and profitability through strategic web marketing programs. For more information, please visit www.keyposition.com or email him at [email protected].

This article was posted on October 22, 2004

by Corey Wenger

How To Use RSS Feeds In Your Marketing

How To Use RSS Feeds In Your Marketing

by: Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian

It was Friday night. I finished reading a book about RSS feeds. Quickly set up one for my site, submitted it on directories and went to bed.

Sunday morning, I noticed a sale. Idly, I scanned my logs to see where the buyer had found me.

It was from Yahoo! Now that may not seem surprising, except… I had not been listed in Yahoo! before.

Curious, I did a Yahoo! Search for my domain name… and almost fainted in shock! There were 123 of my pages listed many of them in the top 10 ranks on my best keywords.

My RSS feed had been listed within 48 hours and since my other pages were linked from it, they had all been indexed by Yahoo! just as quickly. And for free!

Since then I have heard many others share similar experiences. It is no fluke. RSS is HOT. And search engines LOVE it.

So what is RSS? An acronym for Really Simple Syndication, it is a web language format designed to help syndicate content across different sources.

RSS has been around for more than 10 years but has only recently become popular. RSS feeds provide headlines and summaries of information in a concise and standardized way.

The rise in RSS popularity, specially among marketers, has many reasons. Email filters and new legislation have lowered the effectiveness of email marketing. Content syndication in many different ways is gathering momentum. And fresh, frequently updated content is the very essence of the Web.

How can you use RSS feeds in your marketing? Is there a way to turn RSS feeds into profits?

Absolutely. Here are some ideas:

Beat email filters. Ask your subscribers, prospects and clients to sign up to your RSS feed along with your email newsletter. If the ezine gets blocked, theyกll still get your RSS feed.

Spread the word. Offer your new, valuable content to many other กlazyก website owners in return for getting extra exposure of your name and brand to their audiences.

Get listed on search engines. No one knows how long this กhoneymoonก will last. But ride the wave and get into search engines quickly, inexpensively by submitting your RSS feeds to them.

Use the firstmover advantage. Dedicated RSS directories are mushrooming. Make sure your RSS feed is indexed in them and you could futureproof your business. Imagine if you were one of the first sites to be indexed in Google or Yahoo 5 years ago!

Offer your readers new content. Keep creating your own content but also use RSS feed syndication to offer other peopleกs content to your list. Less pain, less strain, more gain.

And thatกs not all. On a bet, I sat down and listed 41 different ideas to profit from RSS feeds. Iกm sure you can do it too and turn the hot new revolution in online communication into a money magnet for your ebusiness.

Happy blogging.

Dr.Mani

About The Author

Dr.Mani Sivasubramanian has been marketing with blogs for over 3 years. His free 5 day RSS Primer explains the basics of RSS Marketing sign up here: http://www.RSSMarketing.com He is also author of กHow To Profit From RSS Feeds 41 Quick & Easy Ideas For RSS Feed Publishersก http://www.RSSMarketing.com/book.htm

This article was posted on November 15, 2004

by Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian

How To Make Affiliate Sales In 15 Minutes

How To Make Affiliate Sales In 15 Minutes

by: Dan Farrell

If you are one of the 98.6% of affiliate members that never make one cent from affiliate sales or make small $5.00, $10.00 commissions, then this article is for you. Even if you are making nice checks, this will interest you.

You really can start to make affiliate sales in 15 minutes with Google Adwords.

Your ads will start appearing with 15 minutes for the keywords you have selected. If this has you scratching your head :o) I don’t blame you. I was totally new to Adwords until I read about Chris Carpenterกs experience in making $3,405 with just one ad in his very good ebook http://www.adalyzer.com/727/google You know those ads on the right side of the page of Googleกs search page? Well those are Adwords. You pay per click with the minimum at .05, which is less than Overtureกs .10 PPC. Placement of your ad is based on two factors, the Cost Per Click and your adกs Click Through Rate (CTR).

I have set my maximum CPC to .06 and the daily budget $5.00 until I see that the keywords Iกve selected are working and the affiliate program is making sales. To cut through a lot of learning curve you should find a niche keyword with Good Key Words or Word Tracker. The first is free and the second has a free trial. You can Also get some high paying Adword keywords (some Keywords pay $up to $80 per click! You can get a free Sample from TopPayingKeywords at: http://www.adalyzer.com/727/adsense

The other is a software tool, Adword Analyzer. http://www.adalyzer.com/727/adwords It will find a list of related keywords, the number of searches per keyword and the number of advertising campaigns per keyword. Boy, do I love this software! I enter a keyword, say, mortgage, and it gives me all of the above in minutes. So you can find high traffic search terms that no one is buying Google Adwords for. Another use is to identify niches that are too competitive to enter. As you can imagine it will save money, time and most importantly find the search terms that you line up an affiliate for and start making money in minutes.

You see, that is the very essence of success with any affiliate program, finding a product that is hot, has little or no competition and developing an ad campaign for it.

The strategy that I use now is to find high paying keywords, buy a domain name with that keyword in it, create a simple landing page, add three Google Adsense ads (they allow up to three per page and don’t forget to create Adsense channels for tracking) then I optimize the page with the keyword in the title, spread throughout the body (top, middle and bottom), add articles for content to other pages and create a new Adwords campaign to get some traffic started.

Then I will either buy or request reciprocal links from high relevant websites. With PR4 and above. You buy links with PR5 and above for a reasonable amount. Do a search for Then watch my Adsense income build!

Google loves relevant content on your site or sites linking to it.

Another way to get listed in the top 10 or Google is writing articles. This is another article coming soon!

With Google Adwords you can get clickthroughs within minutes and if targeted to the right prospect, sales in minutes.

About The Author

Dan Farrell is the owner of 1staffiliatemarketing.biz. You can get more affiliate marketing articles, tips and ecourses that will show you exactly how to make money online with affiliate programs. Find Out at http://www.1stinaffiliatemarketing.biz.

[email protected]

This article was posted on August 26

by Dan Farrell

Focus on Your Target Audience!

Focus on Your Target Audience!

by: Robin Nobles

Search engine optimizers often forget who our true audience really is. We get so wrapped up in trying to please the search engines that we forget to focus on our target audience: our users.
What weกve got to do is forget about the search engines and concentrate totally on our customers. I call it . . .
Optimization without optimization . . . focus on your target audience and forget the search engines!
Fact #1:
Onpage factors have made a come back, and Iกm thrilled. If weกve played our cards right and continued to use our tags as we should have, we’re right where we need to be now that the major engines are once again considering the contents of META tags when determining relevancy.
Fact #2:
Concentrate on giving your users what they want to see when they visit your site: good quality, wellwritten, valuable content.
Fact #3:
Focusing on one particular theme/focus on each of your Web pages is crucial to the success of that page. Don’t deviate from the focus of each page, including the outbound/inbound links.
Don’t forget to focus on your target audience!
When writing new content for your Web site, focus on your target audience and what they want to see when they visit your site. What type of information are they looking for? What do they want to learn when they visit your site?
If you have an online jewelry store, can you provide information on how to clean silver jewelry? How to polish gold? How to clean diamonds? How to clean fragile opals?
Focus on your target audience! (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/beyond_keywords.htm)
If you sell antique books online, what about creating informational pages about some of the more famous authors that talk about their lives and their books, with links to the books you have for sale?
Let your creative juices flow. Visit http://www.wordtracker.com/moreinfo.html and do some searches to see what people are doing when they go online.
Read this interview article with John Alexander, http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/wordtrackerR.html which goes into more detail about how to focus on your target audience when doing keyword research.
Create a page thatกs highly focused on one topic only. Don’t deviate from that topic. Put other topics on other pages.
Finally, once you have your page(s) created, create your tags based on the focus of each page. Use your keyword phrase in each tag.
Now, you have a page that your users will appreciate and enjoy a valuable page that is focused on your target audience.
And . . . youกll also have a page that the search engines will love too . . . because they love focused content!
And you didn’t even have to try hard or spend a lot of time optimizing it, now did you?
In Conclusion
Remember to focus on your target audience when creating new Web pages. Forget about the search engines! Youกll create good quality, valuable content that your users will love . . . and so will the engines.
Though this may not seem like a standard business marketing practice to create information pages for people . . . not the search engines this virtually free plan will help you focus on your target audience, bring them to your Web site, and increase your bottom line. Isn’t that what online marketing is all about? Why not start today! You have all the tools you need with your own creativity and Wordtracker http://www.wordtracker.com/moreinfo.html.

About The Author

Robin Nobles teaches 2, 3, and 5day handson search engine marketing workshops thru http://www.searchengineworkshops.com in locations across the globe as well as online courses at http://www.onlinewebtraining.com/. Robinกs partner, John Alexander, recently published an ebook titled, ขWordtracker Magic,ก at http://www.wordtrackermagic.com (which offers great tips for helping you learn how to focus on your target audience.)

[email protected]

This article was posted on July 25, 2004

by Robin Nobles