Spread Your Ideas and Your Reputation Will Follow

Spread Your Ideas and Your Reputation Will Follow

by: Scott Foreman

As we all know, Internet Marketing growth is all about increasing traffic to your website. Time and again, what’s proven to be the best way to dramatically increase traffic to your website?

You already know that answer. In fact, we’ve talked about it in the last few weeks…

Write original articles!

We won’t rehash the importance of creating unique, helpful content for your visitors. I’ll just assume that you are on the wave of massive traffic that is writing articles.

Now that you’ve written the articles what do you do?

Publish them!

Get your articles out on the web at targeted sites where potential customers will read them and publishers of high traffic web sites will reprint them. Not sure where to begin? Check out our starter list of great sites to publish your articles.

http://www.buildpassiveincome.com/cmd.php?ad=116604

When it comes to most consumer products or services there are three aspects: fast, good, and cheap. Usually, you’ll get two out of three. True to form, our resources listed about are good and they’re free, but they are certainly not fast.

In fact, the article publishing process can be very time consuming if you publish an article one website at a time. If you could save time in this valuable process, certainly you would, right?

If you’re willing to pay a little bit, you can find some great services that will take your article and automatically publish it on multiple websites at once.

You can see our favorite ขmass publishข program here:

http://www.buildpassiveincome.com/cmd.php?ad=116606

Whichever program you choose, make sure that you are using your time wisely. You already know the importance of writing and publishing original articles. Now take the next step of automating that process so that you can spend more time discovering even more lucrative business ideas.

Remember, be good to yourself and never underestimate the power associated with the intensity of your passion.

Copyright 2005 Foreman Enterprises

by Scott Foreman BuildPassiveIncome.com

mailto:[email protected]

We will pay you TWO WAYS to run this article!

First, we will pay you up to $25 for every person who visits our site and purchases a product as a result of you running or posting this article.

PLUS, once you confirm we will give you a FREE DISPLAY AD in our Internet Success Newsletter (thatกs how much we appreciate it)!

Make sure that you get your affiliate ID at: http://www.buildpassiveincome.com/affiliate

This article may be reprinted for use in newsletters and websites provided that the information box is kept intact. Email notice of intent to publish is appreciated but not required: [email protected]

About The Author

Wayne and Scott Foreman are coowners of http://www.buildpassiveincome.com

This Secret Book Made Terry Dean Rich! You Can Get it Free IF you click below now (you won’t believe the simple techniques it reveals that ANYONE can use) http://www.BuildPassiveIncome.com/secret

[email protected]

This article was posted on January 13

by Scott Foreman

Marketing Via Messageboards & Email Discussion Li

Marketing Via Messageboards & Email Discussion Lists An Alternative View

by: Sean Burns

One of the most suggested means of getting traffic to a site in the early stages is to get involved in messageboard and email discussions on your topic of choice. The idea is that you can show your expertise and therefore get traffic to your site via your signature file (most discussion lists allow you to include your signature file with your post a few lines with your name, site address and maybe a very brief description). Whilst this is a valid tip, I don’t believe that the real reason for why you should do this has been investigated far enough previously.

Firstly, if you post an ad for your site on a discussion list, your are spamming and will create a bit of a fiasco. This does not make good business sense. So, the way to do it is to look for people asking questions and answer them. The issue here is your reasons for doing this. If your reason is purely to drive traffic to your site, you probably won’t be terribly successful and, sometimes, people will work out what you are up to. Therefore, your goal should be to be seen as an expert in your field, not to get traffic to your site.

Even if you don’t include a signature with your posts, you can still make a name for yourself and, in the long term, this will prove to be a far more profitable approach. I have visited many discussion lists in my time and it is easy to see the people that have gained respect. From a business point of view, they are the ones who will benefit from this approach, not the people who post simple answers to try to get an immediate effect.

Your goal must always be to achieve success in your online venture and your personal credibility will play a major role in this. So, when looking at marketing on messageboards and in Email discussion lists, establishing your credentials as an expert in your field must be your number one priority, not short term traffic generation methods.

About The Author

Sean Burns is the author of the WebmastersReference.com Newsletter http://www.webmastersreference.com/newsletter. More than five years of experience in site design, marketing, income generation, search engine optimisation and more is passed on to subscribers hype free. Sign up today to get real information of real value to webmasters.

[email protected]

This article was posted on January 06, 2003

by Sean Burns

Learn How To Use These Six Explosive Marketing Tec

Learn How To Use These Six Explosive Marketing Techniques To Explode Your Website With Traffic

by: Reginald Turner

Learn How To Use These Six Explosive Marketing Techniques To Explode Your Website With Traffic

You could have the best opportunity, product, or service on the internet, but if you are not getting any traffic to your website, what does it matter? Getting massive traffic to your website is just the beginning of being successful over the internet. Nevertheless, itกs not the end.

Although getting traffic to your website should be your main focus, there is just more to it than just getting traffic to your website. In the next following section, we will talk about the six explosive marketing techniques that you would have to apply to your internet marketing efforts in order to become a successful internet marketer.

1.Testing When you are marketing over the internet, you are going to have to know what works and what doesn’t. Thatกs why you are going to have to experiment with different types of advertising to find that out. If you are experimenting with different types of advertising, how are you going to know what type of advertising is working? This what leads me to the next following marketing technique, Adtracking services.

2. Adtracking Services Ad tracking services are a great way to test which form of advertising is working and which is not. Some of these services are capable of keeping track of your hits, sales, etc. To find an ad tracking service, just go to a major search engine and type in กAd tracking servicesก and plenty ad tracking services will come up. After this happens, do some investigating and choose the one that is best for you.

3. Website Design You want to make sure that you have a decent looking website to promote your product or service. Don’t get to caught up in all the fancy graphics when it comes to designing a website. These fancy graphics that you see on other websites could cause your website to load real slow. You must remember when people are browsing on the internet, they like to get on a website to find what they are looking for and get right off. If your website takes a long time to load, you could loose a lot of sales. When you design your website, make sure you use gif or jpeg graphics because they load really quick. Remember, the amount of time it takes your website to load, could determine how many sales you are going to make, or lose.

4. Good Content Itกs very important to have good content on your website. The product or service that you are promoting should strongly state the benefits. You should talk about how the benefit of your product or service could improve the quality of their lives. Remember, people are not concerned about the features of your product or service, but they want to know what it can do for them.

5. Website Traffic If your internet business is going to survive over the internet, you are going to need a lot of traffic, but just not any kind of traffic. When you are marketing over the internet, you are going to need to get ‘targeted traffic.ก What do I mean by targeted traffic? For example, if you are promoting a service that deals with selling envelopes, you are not going to promote it to people interested in health care are you? Absolutely not. You want to make sure you market to an audience that is interested in your product, service, or business opportunity. For example, if you are promoting a service selling marketing software, make sure you find an audience of กinterested buyersก who are interested in marketing software. If you don’t target your audience, your career as an internet marketer will be short lived.

6. Time Management Again, going back to the adtracking service. If you use an adtracking service to track your marketing campaigns, you could use the statistics from the ad tracking service to tell where you should spend your time marketing. For example, lets say you use two different methods of marketing such as ezines, and submission software. Now you go to your ad tracking service to check the results of the two marketing methods that were just mentioned. You find out that your marketing in ezines bought you 1,000 hits, and your marketing using the submission software bought you 100 hits. I would not tell you to stop using the submission software because obviously itกs bringing you hits. It will make more since to spend most of your time marketing in ezines because it brought you more hits. Iกm definitely not saying what was mentioned in the above example will happen, but it just gives you an indication where you should spend most of your time marketing.

This article was not written to critique internet marketers in any way. It was written to help internet marketers become more efficient and smarter when it comes to marketing over the internet. Some internet marketers only focus on getting traffic, but some neglect things such as web design, testing, and good content which could make a big difference. Remember, getting traffic to your website is just half the battle won, but converting it into sales is a complete victory.

For more info about website marketing techniques, please visit: http://www.adalyzer.com/727/traffic_attack

About The Author

My name is Reginald Turner and my purpose in writing articles is not only to help internet marketers become more efficient and smarter when it comes to marketing over the internet, but to teach them how to quickly find out what type of marketing works and how to make more money over the internet in less time while exploding traffic to their website. If you would like more info about website marketing techniques, you could eithr visit: http://www.adalyzer.com/727/traffic_attack or just send a blank email to [email protected].

This article was posted on November 23, 2004

by Reginald Turner

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

Complete WebSite Optimization For Search Engines

Complete WebSite Optimization For Search Engines (Part 1)

by: Pavel Lenshin

SEO or search engine optimization strategy now becomes widely popular among online business operators. Nothing strange about it as it allows to substantially increase your gross income, as a result of growing traffic or visitors flow.

That is why one point should be stressed out your business return on SEO is directly proportional to the results your business have now. It means that SEO strategy, unlike marketing optimization, directed to boost quantity, not quality. If your business enjoys 1% response rate for any action you demand, whether it is sale, subscription, feedback or other it keeps on having similar response rate after SEO will be accomplished, although the response will grow in absolute numbers as a result of increasing traffic flow.

As you see SEO is not a panacea. The highest and the most efficient return on your SEO campaign as well as business investment may be reached upon one condition. Only when your current business model and marketing campaign has already been optimized and reached high level or response rate and efficiency, it is smart to grow your business กin quantityก.

The reason for such attitude lies within the next speculation as well. Having inefficient business model under conducting website SEO will force growing number of visitors to turn your online business down for good. The obvious reason is that too few people actually return to the site once they left it for any reason, so having low response rate will substantially decrease your SEO result!

Letกs draw an example. With previously mentioned 1% response rate from every 100 visitors you get, would mean that 1 visitor only takes desired action. Suppose SEO campaign increased the flow of targeted traffic to 1000. Using childrenกs math we can easily come up with 9 new people, who would start to express their interest in your offer every month.

Now what if your, as some marketers say, กconversionก rate is 10% (10 visitors from every 100) and the SEO helped to bring the same 1000 targeted traffic. You now have 100 ขdesired actionsข per month! In other words, your net SEO achievement is 90 new people. Compare this to 9 people with 1% conversion rate and it all becomes clear. That is why SEO is mainly about quantity, while response rate is mainly about quality.

I haven’t intentionally mentioned about high quality of traffic search engines generate. Many experts would probably be skeptical by now for my eveningout the quality of traffic and focusing on quantity only. The explanation is simple the quality of SE traffic is an Individual parameter.

Unlike many marketing and SE experts I cannot tell you how กqualityก visitors coming from SE will be for your particular business as I don’t know your present promotion methods. That is why the quality of traffic SEO campaign brings may be neutral, slightly positive or even negative. Yes, it may be negative.

I anticipate a small shock among online marketers, who were taught for their whole internet business career that search engine traffic is the most quality traffic they may have. It is not true under some conditions. If banner or classified ads were the only ways of generating traffic for you, then SEO will surely bring a quality improvement to your business response, on the other hand, imagine, that your present visitors are interested readers of your books, ebooks, reports, articles and other publications. Do you really think that ‘response qualityก of people coming from กDescription tagก of your search engine listing will be higher? Hardly, you can surely expect a slight decrease in response rate of SEO campaign, despite the unquestionable quantity growth in accordance with our previous example.

Next vital point is to understand that before anything we, firstly, should have those webpages, otherwise there would be nothing to optimize. That basic logic will lead to another obvious conclusion. The more themebased webpages you have the better SEO result you can achieve. If your online business represented by 3 webpages (main sales letter, about the author and contacts), your initial SEO ‘resourcesก are too weak to reach any substantial goal. SEs look for information, that is why, content rich websites may truly enjoy advantages of SEO.

Secondly, your pages should have already been listed in SEs. If you haven’t submitted your website to SEs yet, no point to optimize the SE listing position you don’t have.

An important dilemma every business operator faces is the extent s/he allows to reach in desire to get outstanding SEO results. Here is what I mean. As we all know the basic rule of successful website optimization is focusing on keywords with low or very low competition. In other words, the less supply of internet resources for some particular keyword or phrase is, the more chances are for your webpage of being กnoticedก and ranked high.

Here is the problem, if you want to get a maximum for your website SE position you should be prepared not just to rewrite or edit your webpages, but to completely change the theme structure and priority of informational content!

There would undoubtedly be website sections or pages with extremely high competition that would stress the popularity and importance of that topic, so if you decide to keep it กas isก, optimization will raise your listing, but somewhere from 796,021 place to 545,932. Does it help you?

The extent of your กflexibilityก and how far you can go to look กprettyก from SE viewpoint is what should be decided beforehand, because there are always 3 parts: you/your business, target market/consumers and search engines/directories, between which about 90% of informational preferences are common, but the rest 10% differ and it is up to you to decide what themes you should focus on. Whenever you are implementing any of the SEO tactics mentioned in this publication, keep in mind your business and consumersก needs.

Having understood these fundamental features of SEO, could we make a step further into a complete website search engine optimization, expanding your business to the new markets.

Note that SEO, despite all mentioned above, is all about กasking for high rankingก and there cannot be any results guarantee as no one except for SE developers themselves control ranking algorithm and determine กwho is whereก. More than that, SEO takes much time before effecting your listing positions and this timeframe may range somewhere from week to several months, so don’t panic if your optimization efforts haven’t resulted in Google #1 position by tomorrow morning.

Structure

Letกs start from drawing a scheme of your website link structure very similar to one every webdeveloper draws before designing a website. Under other equal conditions, we will speak about later, it is also clear that the more theme based webpages or even website sections you create, the more chances of being ranked high you have, no matter how optimized your competitorกs single webpage is.

Each webpage of website section should represent a particular theme or topic. This way you can diversify your กkeywords marketก, increasing chances of high rankings. Despite obvious visitors advantage your site is more likely to win market recognition.

For now try to have กhorizontalก as well as standard กverticalก link connections between pages. If one of your pages got a high ranking position (Google Page rank) it may help to improve the rankings of webpages connected to it as well.

Keyword analysis

Next step is to determine keywords, mainly, phrases that we would like to target. Talking about mentioned dilemma, I would like to point to the other approach you should know about, that is suggested by some experts. Letกs call it SEoriented approach.

According to this approach, before creating a website your first step implies searching for the best key phrases via competitive analysis on main SE and then starting to develop content around these keywords. It means that your website will get highest SE ranking, but the informational richness will be dictated by neither you nor your consumers. Under such conditions it is SE or, to be more specific, your compe tition will determine what kind of content you will have at your website. As you see, according to SEoriented approach, the more competitive some key phrase and based on it topic is, the less attention you should pay to developing that theme at your own site.

My attitude is slightly different. I offer at first to create and evaluate your current website content based on your business preferences and your nichemarket needs and then optimize those webpages according to keywords taken from your existed webpages, no matter how tough the competition may be. Of course, you are free to create new pages around keywords with low competition just for traffic building purposes, but the primary accent should be focused on your business development and marketing needs.

As for the keywords, the basic rule is to choose the most targeted phrases rather than single words for two reasons:

Phrases could describe your webpage theme usually more precisely than a word;

Phrases usually have substantially less competition in comparison with oneword.

Write down 35 the most targeted key phrases for each webpage or section we are going to optimize. Then by evaluating supply/demand ratio find the easiest keywords for SE positioning.

Standard procedure of determining your key phrase competition or, as i said กevaluating supply/demand ratioก is to look at their supply and demand at popular SEs. Supply is determined by results of searching them on SEs while demand can be found through query on PPC programs at Overture.com or Google.comกs AdWords that have tool for discovering how many time keywords or phrase have been searched on them.

By doing so we are searching for the most prospective and promising for optimization key phrases. Having them allow us to go further and start optimizing the webpages themselves.

(to be continued)

About The Author

Pavel Lenshin is a devoted Internet entrepreneur and founder of the entrepreneurship portal, where you can find discounted Internet services, FREE ebooks http://ASBONE.com/ebooks/, FREE reports http://ASBONE.com/reports/, and finally uncover innovative strategies through FREE กNET Business Magazineก

[email protected]

This article was posted on October 31, 2003

by Pavel Lenshin

5 Power Tips To Double Your Sales

5 Power Tips To Double Your Sales

by: Michael Southon

กHow Can I Double My Sales?ก that must be the silent prayer of thousands of webmasters.

There are two ways to do it: you can either double your traffic or you can double your conversion rate.

Letกs say you have a conversion rate of 2% (1 sale for every 50 visitors) and you get 100 visitors a day you’re getting 2 sales a day. You could get 4 sales a day by increasing your traffic to 200 visitors a day.

But you can get the same result with your existing traffic by doubling your conversion rate (2 sales for every 50 visitors).

Here are 5 ways to double your conversion rate:

(1) Direct Response: Make sure your website is a กDirect Response Websiteก. A DRW is a site where the only options are to Buy, Bookmark, or Leave. The more options you give your visitor, the less likely they are to buy.

(2) Free EBooks: Include Free EBooks as bonus gifts with your product. This can easily double your sales especially if the Free EBooks are genuinely useful. Here are some places you can find Free EBooks:

http://www.freeebooks.net/

http://www.ebookdirectory.com/

http://www.ebooksnbytes.com/download.html

(3) Testimonials: Make sure you have plenty of testimonials on your website. Preferably, they should be from customers who have achieved results from your product (e.g. more traffic, more sales, saved time etc).

(4) Follow Up: Youกve probably heard this over and over again but itกs worth repeating people have to see you your message about 7 times before they buy. The biggest mistake you can make is to try and sell your product on the first contact alone.

It just doesn’t work, and the statistics bear this out: the 1st contact produces 2% of sales, the 5th to 12th contact produce 80% of sales.

So in your ezine ads and at your website, offer something free in exchange for an email address. And then follow up with sequential (or followup) autoresponders.

Here are some sites that offer free followup autoresponders:

http://www.autoresponders.net

http://www.informationbyemail.com

http://www.getresponse.com/orderfree.html

http://www.rapidreply.net/free_features.htm

(5) Backend Sales: Itกs no secret that successful businesses make up to 80% of their sales from previous customers. Why? Because people who have bought from you before are much more likely to buy from you again (they know you, they trust you, they were happy with your product).

The hard work in marketing is getting a customer. Once you have a customer, theyกll buy from you over and over again.

Contact your previous customers and let them know about another product that compliments the product or service they bought from you. Experts reckon that the value of กa lifetime customerก lasts about 3 years make use if it.

If you follow these 5 tips, you may well find that you can double your online sales with the traffic you already have.

Wishing you every success!

(c) 2001 by Michael Southon

About The Author

Michael Southon has been writing for the Internet for over 3 years. He has shown hundreds of webmasters how to use this simple technique to get massive free publicity and dramatically increase traffic and sales. Click here to find out more: http://www.ezinewriter.com

This article was posted on August 30, 2002

by Michael Southon

Summer’s Internet Traffic Jam

Summer’s Internet Traffic Jam

by: Rob Young

Summer is finally here, and while for many, summer implies barbeques, schoolbreak, vacations and trips to the beach; for most Internet businesses, summer implies slower traffic.
For an online business, traffic is paramount. Without it, conversions drop off, ROI’s dwindle and businesses can fail. In the United States, netScore reported that seventyfour percent of the top 50 Internet properties experienced less traffic between May and June of 2001. A big reason for this huge reduction is the decrease in atschool Internet traffic. Visitor traffic from atschool computers, which represented almost 8% of U.S. Internet traffic in May, began declining as summer vacations started and decreased 40.5% in June compared to May. Traffic doesn’t see an increase until midAugust. This means that for nearly four months, online sites are not seeing the traffic they so desperately need.
International Web usage is seeing declines in the summer months as well. Between midMay and July of 2002, Russia reported a twentypercent decline in summer Internet usage. Sweden saw its summer traffic stifled by eighteenpercent as early as July 1999, and many other countries around the world are feeling the hit of summer traffic reductions as well.
Seasonal traffic fluctuations are a recent phenomenon. The first few years of Internet usage saw such rapid growth in both the number of users and the number of pages visited, that seasonal variations were hardly noticeable. In recent years, however, Internet growth rates have slowed dramatically as the United States and the rest of the world crawls towards the user saturation point.
While most sites see drastic reductions of traffic from May to August, certain summeroriented sites tend to be protected from the summer burn. May, June and July kick off the blockbuster movie season, drawing millions of visitors to Cinema sites. According to movietickets.com, traffic to their site rose 66% to 600,000 visitors and Twentieth Century Fox Film reported that web site traffic jumped 26% to 372,000 visitors. For the lucky few online Cinema sites, summer’s heat fires up traffic.
Weight loss and travel sites have also seen increased summer usage in the past as people try to slim down before venturing to the beach.
As noted above, Internet traffic regains strength beginning in midAugust. Ecommerce and apparel site usage increases dramatically with backtoschool sales, and by September, vacationing begins to decline and general Internet usage rises to normal levels.
The important thing to note for online businesses is that decreased traffic doesn’t necessarily have to mean decreased profits. Make the most out of summer Internet traffic and prepare your site for fall and winter traffic increases. Now is the perfect time to update and optimize your site.

About The Author

Rob Young, Manager of Natural Optimization and Creative Director of fullservice interactive marketing and advertising agency UnREAL Marketing Solutions, has been with the company since its inception in 1999. Young oversees the Natural Optimization and Creative departments. www.unrealmarketing.com

[email protected]

This article was posted on July 12, 2004

by Rob Young

How To Really Profit from Domain Names

How To Really Profit from Domain Names

by: J. Stephen Pope

Have you heard about domain names that sold for over a million dollars? Inspired by this, you imagine registering a great domain name, hanging onto it for a while, and then selling it off to become the next multimillionaire. It could happen, but don`t count on it!

First of all, many of the truly great domain names are already taken. Second, the dot com bust took some of the wind out of inflated domain name prices. (If you sell your domain name for millions of dollars worth of stock in a publicly traded dot com flop, what is the name really worth?)

The cybersquatter buys domain names totally on speculation. Sometimes he will register names of famous brands, companies, or individuals. Time and again, these domain name speculators learn the hard way that they must respect intellectual property rights. They hope that some large corporation will pay big bucks to them for the use of the company`s own (already trademarked) name. Instead, they end up with threatening letters from a law firm for their attempts at extortion.

However, you can still make money from domain names if you are sensible in your approach. Here are some suggestions on ways to profit.

1. Affiliate Programs: Use your domain name to promote an appropriate affiliate program. Either redirect to the affiliate site or write a review that links to them.

2. Informational Sites: Create content and then profit from it by earning advertising revenue through Google AdSense or a similar program.

3. Redirect to Your Own Site: Some reasons you might want to do this include preventing competitors from using a particular domain name and benefiting from searches some users perform by domain name. (For example, if they wanted to order flowers, they might just type กflowers.comก in their web browser. You could get some traffic and sales this way.)

4. Product Sites: Create your own or sell someone else`s product appropriate to your domain name.

5. Park Your Domain Names: You might feel that your name has real potential for resale value. There are companies that will allow you to park your domain on their servers, advertise that your name is for sale, and split advertising revenue with you.

The trick is to generate traffic for your domain name. That traffic in turn will create revenue. Then, when you go to sell your domain name, you will have a few things going for you.

First, you will have a fully developed website. A fully constructed building on a piece of land increases the value of the real estate property. Similarly, the value of your domain name is enhanced by a complete and operating website.

Second, you have traffic. Just as a shopping mall with no traffic results in no sales, so a website must have traffic to generate income.

Third, you have income. An income property, such as an apartment building, can be appraised on the basis of its income (as well as other factors). Similarly, the gross income, net profits and cashflow of a website have value. For example, if someone offered you $1,000 for your domain name and website when it was generating $10,000 per day in profits, you would likely laugh at him.

You really can profit from your domain name investments by adding value and properly developing your web properties.

For further information about profiting from domain names, visit http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/domainnames.html

About The Author

J. Stephen Pope, President of Pope Consulting Inc., http://www.popeconsultinginc.com/ has been helping clients to earn maximum business profits for over twentyfive years.

For valuable Work at Home Small Business Ideas, visit: http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/

This article was posted on February 28

by J. Stephen Pope

Five Step To A Successful Online Shopping Business

Five Step To A Successful Online Shopping Business

by: Linda Quinones

Before you set out to explore the online shopping market you should do some planning, take a piece of paper and pen and write down the steps that will help to bring in traffic to your website.

And once they have visited you must have something to entice them to remain and do some shopping, in our website: www.shopshopshop.org. We try to mix our affiliate, we have some highly recognizable name and some not so well known.

One frequent complain we get is the cost of shipping, people are willing to pay for convenience but they do not want to pay for shipping, so we use the free shipping banners when available.

And the great savings the affiliates are offering, this is a lure to catch their attention, after all when people are saving money and are provided with theconvenience of shopping from the comfort of their home they are happy.

Step (1). Mix your affiliates you want some well known names, but remember the well known retailer pay the lowest commissions and are the most demanding.

Don’t settle for the first affiliates that accepts you, you may start with a few, but if you build your site right some of the affiliates that turn you down will revisit your site and approve you.

Make sure to keep good records, and stay on top of the affiliate emails to be able to use the incentives they provide to induce people into buying the products your affiliates are offering.

Develop a program where shoppers will provide their email address so that you can inform them of future promotions and savings available to them.

(2). Links are a way to have search engines give your site a high ranking, reciprocal link exchange are a good way to get started , many businesses are in the same position you are in and are looking to link to somebody.

The more links you have leading to your site the better the search engine will rank you. You may choose to pay for links and here again make sure they are giving you good companies to link with.

If you a have a family oriented business you don’t want to be link to an adult site. You want sites that related your business or are complimentary.

A example would be if you have a site that sells only clothing you would like to link with a site that sells jewelry or footwear.

(3). Keywords: key words play a crucial role in your internet business, people must be able to find you. Keywords are what people search for on search engines.

People who have never heard of your company are not going to look for youby name but they go on the search engine and type in keywords to be let to a site that matches the keywords provided.

If the keywords type in relate to the keywords on your site then you will getcustomer to come and visit your site, and hopefully buy something.

You will want to have as many combination of keywords as possible in order to drive web traffic to your site, Make sure you have the most popular search terms and use as many as possible.

Keywords is the key to traffic and traffic the key to sales, when your web page comes up near the top ten in response to a searches on searche engines , your traffic will increase and so will your sales.

(4). Contacts: everybody knows somebody so start using the those contacts to promote your business, but do so in a tactful manner so that people are not turn off by your aggressiveness.

Giving somebody a business card and asking them to checkout your website might be a very soft sell that might lead to conversation about your business and help you gain a potential customer.

Just think of all the people that you come in contact with on a daily basis, by themselves it will not be enough to make a fortune but added to the other marketing results it could make your business venture a profitable one.

(5). Incentives: Offer businesses incentives to continuously use your site for their purchases, businesses expend thousands of dollars every month on office products and other essential items for their businesses but get nothing in return, so offer them some kind of rebate or free items for purchasing through your site.

Offering a free gift for individual is also a good policy but make sure that it is contingent on purchases being made so that you don’t attract all the freeloaders.

Everybody shops the question is where? Your job is to make sure they do it on your site. Or preferably at www.shopshopshop.org.

About The Author

Linda Quinones has been active in promoting her own site while helping others to succeed in the Internet marketing field. Previously she was involved the financial sector for several years. Her website is: http://www.shopshopshop.org.

This article was posted on August 12

by Linda Quinones

Earn Money From Your WebSite With Affiliate Links

Earn Money From Your WebSite With Affiliate Links

by: Knut Holt

If you have a website with some traffic, you can make money by having links to merchantsก online shops on your site.If someone goes through your links into the shop of the merchant, and buys something, you earn commission from the sale, between 5% and 40% depending on type of merchant. Some merchants also pay for each click or each lead. A lead is a new visitor to the shop that asks for more information or prize offers.

People or companies having these links on their websites, are called affiliates, and the links are called affiliate links. The administrative infrastructure by the merchant that the affiliate register into, in order to get the linking code, is called an affiliate program.

To register into an affiliate program is usually free, and through the program you get freely all you need to make the linking code, to monitor the traffic through your links, and to see what commission you have earned.

An affiliate program is not a MLM program, since the affiliates only earn from sales, leads or clicks.

However, in many programs you can recruit other affiliates and earn some commission from the sales made by the recruited affiliates too.

There are also common networks operated by thirdpart companies where several merchants use a common software and administrative infrastructure to recruit affiliates and monitor the traffic from affiliates. These are called affiliate networks. Both the merchants and potetial affilliates register into the network, and the affiliates can find links to the online shops of hundreds of merchants to use at their website. Examples of affiliate networks are Commission Junction and Clixgalore.

From my experience, the best affiliate programs are for merchants selling althernative health items or items for erotic improvements. I also have good experience with programs in the fields skincare, cosmetics and hobby.

What will work best for you, will however depend upon the kind of traffic you have, and the interests of people visiting your site.

About The Author

Submitted by Knut Holt

http://www.panteraconsulting.com/salg2.htm

http://www.abicana.com/affiliatenetworks.htm

Knut Holt is an international internet marketer with a focus on health items.

[email protected]

This article was posted on April 07

by Knut Holt

PayPerClick Advertising & Search Engine Optimiza

PayPerClick Advertising & Search Engine Optimization

by: Carrie Reeder

There are proกs & conกs to both PayPerClick advertising and optimizing for natural search engine traffic.

PPC advertising has many great benefits. First of all, you get your traffic going quickly. I have used this advantage many times. I test new products and even new websites through PPC advertising before making a decision to promote or scrap my new website or product idea.

I am a firm believer in testing new products before throwing large amounts of money into advertising. PPC advertising is a great way to do this. For example, with Googleกs Adwords program, you can post your ad, pay a $5 signup fee and have highly targeted traffic to your website within an hour. How is that for efficiency?

Also, you can moniter your click charges and stop them before they get too expensive. By the time you have spent your budget on clicks, you should have a pretty good idea of how successful your product is going to be.

I think of PPC advertising as being the most useful when starting a new business or product. WIth PPC advertising, you can quickly and efficiently find out which keywords you need to target and which products are the most popular.

Once that testing period is over, however, itกs time to look into Search Engine Optimization. PPC advertising can be very expensive, costing hundreds, even thousands a month in advertising costs. Once you know what keywords to target, itกs time to put together a plan on how you are going to optimize your website. The drawbacks to search engine optimization is that it requires a lengthy amount of time to get your site to rank high with your keywords. That is why I suggest using this method after the testing period is over, when you already know your business will be profitable.

Search Engine Optimization is definately a slow way to get your website traffic if you plan on not using PPC traffic. It could be a long, expensive road before you even begin selling your product. Search engines can take months, even years to start pulling up high with the search engines. But, natural search engine traffic is definately the best long term way to get the majority of your traffic.

When getting your site to start pulling up in SE natural listings there are 2 main things that need to be done:

Add Content

Add Backlinks

Search engine traffic requires you to submit your site to many different search engines and wait, maybe even months for them to spider your website.

I have had much better luck with another route. You can pay a fee to have your website listed in a very high ranking directory like www.dmoz.com (free), www.yahoo.comกs directory ($299), sbd.bcentral.com (only $50), or another website where your link is on a page that has a page ranking of 4,5,6 or higher. The sites I mentioned above have rankings of 8 or 9. When you have your link on a site with that high of a ranking, the search engines are spidering those sites constantly and will find your website and spider it very quickly. Not only will they find it quickly but because you are linked to a high ranking site, you will also rank higher with the SE.

When looking for backlinks, focus on sites with content related to yours and high page rankings of 4 or higher.

As for content on your site, try to include about 200500 words of content or text on most of the pages of your site. Text makes your site bulkier. Make sure to integrate all of the keywords you want to target within the content of your site. Don’t worry about cramming the same keywords in over and over. Search engines may possibly even blacklist your site for keyword stuffing, if you try to do that.

There is a lot to know about Search Engine Optimization but, those are the 2 main factors when getting started.

In summary, when starting out, I suggest using PPC advertising for testing products and keywords. Spend time optimizing your site for search engine traffic after you have tested your products and keywords.

About The Author

Carrie Reeder has been a web marketer for 3 years and has various websites where she sells a variety of products from software to clothing accessories.

www.thelevelcollection.com

[email protected]

This article was posted on November 02, 2004

by Carrie Reeder

Your Alexa Rating Is It Really That Important?

Your Alexa Rating Is It Really That Important?

by: Richard Grady

A discussion in my forum has prompted this newsletter as I think it is important for any online entrepreneur to understand how Alexa ratings work in order that they can understand why they may not be that important to the success of their online business. Too many people make the mistake of concentrating entirely on improving their Alexa ratings but at the end of the day, these rankings are just numbers they won’t put money in the bank.

Alexa is a company owned by the Amazon group and it aims to rank every single website on the Internet in terms of how much traffic it is receiving.

Quite simply, the lower your Alexa ranking, the more traffic your website gets. The ideal scenario would be to have an Alexa ranking of ก1ก. This would mean, in theory, that your website receives more traffic than any other website in the world. Currently this position is held by Yahoo.com and as you would expect, other top sites include Microsoft, Google and eBay.

It is generally considered that a website with an Alexa rating of 100,000 or less is receiving a reasonable level of traffic but Alexa can be wildly misleading and very easily manipulated.

To understand why the rankings are misleading, you need to understand how Alexa gathers the data that it uses to create the rankings in the first place. This is really very simple Alexa has a free toolbar that you can download and install within your Internet browser and this reports back to Alexa with the details of every single website that you visit.

Alexa can then use this information to see how many users are visiting a particular website. Then, because not every Internet user has the Alexa toolbar installed, Alexa will multiply the number of visitors by a specific margin to estimate the total number of visitors that a site may typically receive. The important word in the last sentence is กestimateก.

Letกs assume that the above multiplication margin is ten that means that for each Alexa toolbar user that visits a specific web page, Alexa assumes that another nine nontoolbar users will also visit the same page. This means that if 100 toolbar users visit a specific web page on a given day, Alexa will take this as meaning that a total of 1000 people visited the same page in that 24 hour period.

This is where the figures can get distorted. If you have a website that attracts a higher than average number of Alexa toolbar users, then you are going to gain a lower Alexa rating because Alexa doesn’t make any allowance for the fact that their toolbar users visit certain types of site more often. A typical example of this is Internet marketing sites. Most Internet entrepreneurs will have the Alexa toolbar installed because they like to see the Alexa rankings for sites as they visit them (the toolbar shows you this information as soon as you visit a site). But this means that if your website attracts a lot of Internet marketingtype visitors, then your Alexa rating will be inflated above what it should be.

Here is a truelife example:

There was a popular Internet marketing site for sale last year and it had an Alexa rating of about 19,000. I figured it must be getting heavy traffic but when I discussed the matter with the owner/seller, I found that it was only receiving 6000 unique visitors a month! The reason that the Alexa rating was so low was because the majority of these visitors had the Alexa toolbar installed and therefore the calculations were being thrown out massively.

It is also possible to purchase software that will generate false hits to your site using the Alexa technology so that Alexa is fooled into believing that more people are visiting your site. This pushes your Alexa ranking down.

At the end of the day though, what is the point of having a low Alexa rating if you are not making any sales? Sure it is nice to be able to say that your site is in the top 20,000 websites in the world but if the site isn’t earning you an income, this ranking means very little (assuming that it was your intention for the site to earn you an income of course). Personally, I would much rather have a high Alexa ranking but a good income than a low ranking and minimal income.

Of course, there are benefits to the Alexa service and it can be worthwhile installing their toolbar. The toolbar will give you an indication of how busy a particular site is and in turn, how popular it is. This can be helpful when making a decision as to whether to make an online purchase for example. It is also handy for checking out your competitors 🙂

Just don’t get too hung up on Alexa as a measure of how well your business is doing. The real statistics that you should be watching are actual traffic numbers, conversion rates (ie. how many visitors actually buy something) and overall sales. These are the figures that will help you put cash in the bank and improve and grow your business.

If you are interested in finding out more about Alexa and if you wish to install their toolbar, you can do so at http://www.alexa.com

Copyright 2004 Richard Grady

About The Author

Richard Grady has been helping people earn online since 1998. Find out more about Richard at: http://www.thetraderonline.com. Free wholesale search engines: UK http://www.wholesale118.co.uk and US http://www.thewholesaletrader.com.

This article was posted on September 16, 2004

by Richard Grady