?Perhaps the most commonly made mistake is that of too early over diversification. You have thrown open the doors to your home business and you are ready to proclaim your existence to the world. Unfortunately, you forget that it is the local appeal that should be harnessed first, and thus while you are busy on the general Internet sites, the local ones remain underserved. If you neighbor cannot find your, it is immaterial if a person around the world can!

?Next to advertising to a target audience, the next most important aspect is the creation of creating an advertising campaign that sticks out. It is a mistake to advertise by text links and even small banner ads. Unless you get just the right affiliate to market your links you will find out quickly that this is a lesson in futility. Instead, go for the jugular by offering a free e-book giveaway that is directly germane to the item you are selling, setting up an affiliate program with a most generous remuneration package that will put feet on the ground and doing a lot of marketing for you, and of course sponsoring online contests and other giveaways. This is not the surefire way of getting out your website link

? Advertising on local television is a great way to gain exposure, but having your Uncle Otto with the camera come and shoot the commercial will most likely have the same effect as shooting yourself in the foot. Not hiring a professional for that kind of exposure is a mistake commonly made by small business, and you will do well to avoid it at all costs.

? The same does not hold true for radio ads. These are surprisingly expensive and although you will reach a large segment of the population, having an annoying ad will ensure that your name and web address is cemented in the minds of the listeners (remember that radio thrives on auditory learning, and sticking out is key in this medium) but not being too annoying is the difference between being remember and being turned off.

by Tracey Merrells-Fort

As I said, a web designer has to learn how to think the way your visitors think.

Situation A : Website with good navigation ( 2-3 hyperlinks to target page ), well planned in terms of placement, and design.

Situation B : Website with poor navigation ( takes forever for the visitor to reach his/her target page ), hard-to-read navigation fonts and poor placement of the navigation buttons/bar.

In Situation A, a visitor will always want to be able to access his/her target page. For example, the individual comes across your website, and is interested in the product sold, but wants to find more information. He/she finds the navigation with no trouble, and enters the particular product information page.

As for Situation B, a visitor stumbles into the website, and would also like to find out more information about the product. Unfortunately, due to bad placement and fanciful font-types, the visitor takes forever, or even fails to find the navigation bar. Even when he/she does so, links to the product information are nowhere to be found, (example : home > about > products > product image > etc…[a few more clicks] > product information ).

Analysis : In both situations, wouldn’t a website with characteristics similar to the Situation A be more rewarding ergo better?

by Sulamita Berrezi

What is Web 2.0.? The basic concept of Web 2.0 is that the internet users have the ability and platforms to give and share quality content.

In my mind, I simply see that it is like opening up a giant forum and chat room full of different topics and discussions.

Because of the linking of different topics and through the giving and sharing of quality content it has become many diverse communities inside one giant community.

What Is Quality Content.?

Anything that would be of interest to a group of people and is useful. It could be a whole range of content, from hobbies, fashion, food & drink, humour, sport, education, news, information, politics, health, business etc.

People love to share and receive content, they love to communicate. It is human nature. Web 2.0 has made it possible for anyone to communicate on the worldwide web with ease. And you don’t need to be an expert, you just need to make sure that what you share is the truth and correct and up to date.

A Bonus

Anyone with access to the internet can use Web 2.0 because it is Free.

Giving and sharing content has many rewards.

Here are just a few to think about, perhaps you can think of more:

The feel good factor,

Helping others

It can build self-esteem,

Create personal friendships

Build business and create good interactive business relationships,

Personal development and growth.

Improve communication skills.<i/>

How do you utilise Web 2.0 and link yourself to other users?

Well, it is quite simple, here are a few examples:

Social Network Sites

There are hundreds of these on the net, the biggest are MySpace and Facebook. There are others like Multiply, Gather, Twitter (more of a notice board site), Digg etc. For business here are the most popular: Bizpreneur, Bizzyblogs, Network2Connect. You also have business directories like Linkedinn.

These are platform communities where you can make a profile page about yourself, invite friends, build a friends list, upload videos and pictures, send messages, write blogs. You can also leave comments on others people’s profiles. But be careful not to spam them.

Forums

These are very popular still and have been used longer than Social Network Sites. There are thousands of forums on the net all covering different topics and discussions. You can either join a stand alone Forum or a forum within the social network sites. Just do a Google or Yahoo search for forums you would like to join.

Bookmark Platforms

These are sites where you can bookmark your favourite websites and either make them private or public. A very popular one is Del.ici.ous. There are others like Webmarks, Pluginn etc.

Blogging

Again there are a countless number of sites for writing and publishing your blogs. These are sites where you put regular updates about a particular topic or subject you are interested. Either for fun or for business reasons. You can put articles (these don’t have to be long, just a paragraph or two), pictures, videos, etc on these sites. People can then subscribe to your blog, and be kept up to date with your content. It is always advisable to keep your blog on the same topic. Again you can use stand alone sites, the most popular being Blogger, Hubpages, and Squidoo or you can write blogs within the social network sites.

Video Blogging

Also known as vlogging. This has become increasingly popular within the last year. People love audio and visual content particularly when it is done in a natural way. Although I am not saying that professional film making isn’t popular or commercials, on the contrary. Digital technology has made it easy for the average person to create their own long or short movies.

Free Movie Editing With Windows XP

Windows movie maker is a great editing programme which comes included with Windows, which is great because it doesn’t cost any extra money. Another great editing program which is not free is Camtasia.

Free Video Hosting Sites

There are hundreds of video hosting sites and most of them are free. The most popular and well known is YouTube. Others are Google Video, Yahoo, Putfile, Metacafe, Sumo.Tv, Sevenload, DailyMotion etc. Again you can upload your videos on whatever topic you like and people can subscribe to your videos, rate them and leave comments and messages. And you can do the same.

These examples mentioned above are the most common and easy methods to use. These will get anyone started and as a person becomes familiar and gets to know their way around other methods will be found. Also bear in mind that the internet is always changing and evolving so it is good to watch closely.

Enjoy Enjoy your Web 2.0 experience. It is a continuous learning curve but also lots of fun. So always remember to keep it fun!

by Andrew and Denise Chambers

In reality, there is no secret to achieving internet success. It takes hard work and a complete understanding of how making money on the internet works. It begins by having a product or service that people want or need and ware willing to pay for it and continues with how you get the word out that you have it for sale. Prior to the explosion of internet use, it was called advertising and for all intents and purposes, the same methods used then are used today to make sales.

The internet however has made it possible for people to sell things without actually delivering what you have paid for and too many people fall into the trap. No person of reasonable intelligence will send someone money expecting nothing in return, but there are some folks who will send out money hoping they get something back. When it does not happen, they chalk it up to experience and look for something else. If you are that type of person, there are a lot of people in the world who would be willing to sell you a bridge or two. Don’t worry. You can get your money back be reselling the bridge to someone else.

If that sounds far fetched, consider some of the offers you have received in your in box. You can spend a lot of time reading the email and then click on to their website and read some more, never really knowing exactly what you will receive when you send in your money. After you pay the fee, you may receive an instant download explaining how you too, can convince others to send you money. You then send out the same email selling others the exact same information.

Very similar to sending a self-address stamped envelope and a couple of dollars to learn how to make money stuffing envelopes. You receive instructions on how to place the same advertisement inviting others to send you a couple of buck in a self-addressed stamped envelope so you can send them the same information. And the offers continue to be advertised, but few complain because after all it was only a couple of bucks.

The real secret to making money on the internet is there is no secret. It is done the same way as it has been done for centuries. Delivering on promises of goods or services and treating your customers with the respect they deserve will provide an income whether online or off line. Goods and services sell far better than promises.

by Paul Holt

In later information packs we will discuss other methods of driving traffic but keywords are still important ‘fodder’ for the engines and should not be overlooked.

In my last article we discussed the importance of choosing the correct keyword. Today we will discuss “where to place keywords” for maximum effect.

Once you have found a ‘niche’ market to sell to before you even begin building your web page you need to thoroughly research your keywords. The competition on a generic keyword will be very high e.g. car. Nevertheless, this can still be used but if your site is on the topic of car maintenance. Here are some long tailed keywords that may apply, remember your customers will be specific and so should you be.

Main keyword is “basic car maintenance”,

Car maintenance tips, Car maintenance for beginners, Easy car maintenance, Guide to car maintenance, Car maintenance for women,

Once you have your chosen keywords, break them down into further categories and build a separate page for each. Thus, your website becomes like a tree branching off into different limbs.

In other words you might have the first page with an overview of what your site provides in the way of car maintenance. Use the main keyword in the heading and one to two times in the first paragraph. Use two to three of the other long tailed keywords in the body and finish up with the main keyword near the end. On subsequent pages keeps the theme running throughout but if for example the second page is about maintaining your car in order for it to get through its MOT or road test. Use car maintenance for a road test and further break this down but continue using car maintenance as the main keyword.

As you build the website. Ensure you use the main keyword in the first three to four words of the title. Also use the main keyword in the description. Menus can be right or left but I always use left as spiders will crawl a web page from top left to bottom right , the home page gets priority and also the top third. On your menu use the main keyword throughout but add long tailed variations.

Example

Basic Car Maintenance, Car Maintenance for tyres, Car maintenance for a road test, Easy Car Paintwork maintenance,

And so on.

One last tip. Always remember to allow for different areas, in the United Kingdom the term cars would be the most common but in the USA it would be autos. Also as in ‘freeway’, ‘highway’, ‘motorway’. So be careful with your selection and think about what you as a customer would use to search your chosen niche.

by Sandra Greenall

Google on the submit site page also states: “We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the web…We do not add all submitted URLs to our index.”

I know that the two giant search engines are not telling you not to submit your website to be indexed by their crawlers, but they are definitely telling you that it is going to take much more than submitting your website to be in the search results. Furthermore, investigating the two statements you can understand that submitting your web site to their crawlers might not make any difference!

I am not trying to stop you from submitting your website to MSN and Google, if you have it in your system and just want to do it, just do it! I still don’t think that submitting to search engines hurts your website, but I definitely believe it will not benefit your website at all. It also takes a couple of minutes so why not just do it and get it over with? I’ll tell you! The purpose of your website to be in any search engine’s database is to be in the search results when your content keywords are searched for. Logically, if submitting to search engines does not lead you to the purpose in the first place, then it is with no doubt the wrong path! Not to mention that it would be a waste of time and maybe money!

MSN and Google are not the only two search engines out there! In fact, if you are a website owner or in the process of getting a website, you might already have received a solicitation to submit your website to thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of search engines to increase traffic to your site. WORTHLESS!

Respected crawlers such as MSN, Google and Yahoo (the engines that send over 90% of website traffic) are now smart enough to find your website, even before you want them to crawl it! I have seen domain names appearing on Google results after starting to work on test pages of under-development web sites that are not decided to be in search engines yet (Note that this can easily and must be avoided!) .

Search engines are attracted to website content, they take this content and apply every technology available, every useful idea, and now even the behavior of your visitors towards your content to compare and rank your website. (Website Content has been mentioned more than two times in this article – because the purpose of this article is not to speak about content, you should note the term for further excessive research if you intend to be in search engine results!).

To succeed in your search engine optimization project you must do some work researching how search engines work, this procedure might at the end save you lots of time of working and then re-working. Search engines are software after all! This software takes the content on your website and analyzes it. Analysis is done differently on different search engines, and hence you see different results for the same keyword on different search engines. The keyword typed into the search box is the key that starts the whole process. After that the software behind the search engine tries to guess which website has the most appropriate result for the search term (the keyword/s). This guess does not come from vacuum, but from hints that your website offers to the search engines. These hints could be the website text content, image alts, title tags, description tags, keyword tags and more. As technology develops search engines are also becoming smarter.

In the near future search engines will be much smarter. They will be able to read text in images and videos, and I have no doubt that in the near future they will have the ability to read sound and translate it into searchable text.

The point here is to always keep track of how search engines work and how they develop, advance and evolve. Familiarity with this knowledge will help you optimize your website so you can see your website in search results.

by Hassan Sayed

1) If there are not enough ads to go around, that particular niche is too small to try.

2) If the “general economy” of the ads is rather low, avoid the niche too. That’s why there are high-paying keywords and low-paying ones.

3) If one site performs better than a similar one in AdSense clickthrough rates, that site will be served better paying and better performing ads. That’s how smart pricing works.

We’re sure Google has many secretive and subtle metrics to disqualify junk sites and the corporation insists on surrounding itself with webmasters who are committed to providing quality work.

Going back to point 2), no matter how genuine sites are in providing valuable content, webmasters need to know something about the state of the competition related to a supposedly high-paying keyword.

There is a general belief that “certain keywords pay highly” (granted), like bankruptcy, cancer, lawyers etc., but without research to back them up, such a belief does not stand on a foundation.

Google does not take from AdWords advertisers the maximum bid price they put in their account; this is important to recognize. For example, the first-placed ad may have a max. bid of $12, but the max. bid of the second-placed ad stands at only $2. The top advertiser does not always have to fork out $12 to maintain his ad in first place. Google Advertising works such that it has a sliding scale for the bidding process.

In other words, you bid on the keyword ‘bankruptcy’ and you decide that it is only worth $1.95 but you are willing to pay up to $12 against your competition. Then one day, your closest competitor’s bid is $2. Google will ante up 6 more cents on your behalf to keep you in the top position and continue to do so for as long as you can afford up to $12. Google sets these special perimeters when they set the account up for that keyword.

That means Google can only pay AdSense publishers as much as the next highest existing bid price. Then again, as you do your keyword research, Google only shows average CPC as the real numbers change dynamically. So it is crucial for publishers to appreciate the bid pricing gap between 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th-placed bidders to make an educated guess of how much they will be paid for certain AdSense ads.

With all that being said, AdSense is very much alive and well. The AdSense program is just an attractive incentive to make AdWords advertisers happy that their ads will be spread out with the help of publishers. Google Inc. can take down AdSense; it’s their choice, but it’s not helpful. Honestly, it’s the publishers’ fault that they abuse the system so the company fine-tune it…meaning, make sure the distribution of earnings is better deserved and justified to esteemed publishers.

by Nelson Tan

2. Use the subtraction (-) sign to exclude references that you are not interested in. For example, if you are not interested in web pages that talk about viral marketing, enter: ‘internet marketing strategies -viral’.

3. Sometimes, your search terms may be far off from one another on a web page. To ensure your terms appear together in a phrase, put them in double quotations, like this: “internet marketing strategies”. This is also useful when you want to look for specific topics, such as “how to remove spyware”, rather than having the terms scattered all over.

4. If you are looking for a word definition, Google has a tool for you. Just type: ‘define: widget’ to get a definition of the word from online dictionaries and glossaries.

5. Google even performs calculations. For example, enter ‘1+2+3′ and click ’search’ to get the result. It can also perform unit conversions such as from miles to kilometers. Enter ‘10 miles to kilometers’ and you’ll get 16.09344 kilometers.

by Nelson Tan

You must first understand exactly how much are willing to spend and how much you will receive in return.

This thought process is critical in your affiliate success.

Tip#1 — Look for more PPC search engines to advertise with (other than Adwords).

Many affiliates focus solely on Adwords, which can be a major mistake. They need to look at other PPC options to gain success.

Adwords can be very expensive and if not done correctly, an affiliate can burn through a lot of money.

So join other PPC programs such as:

MSN Ad Center MIVA Enhance Clickz Go Click 7 Search Search 123

And many other pay per click search engines can be found after some simple research online.

TRIP#2 Make Sure the affiliate has good training.

Many websites still don’t have a good training area for their affiliates. On one of my affiliate programs, How To Pick Up Sexy chicks, not only do we have many ideas to promote our course, but we have many training videos from You Tube.

We show people how to use different strategies to promote our affiliate program and you can learn how by going to http://www.howtopickupsexychicks.com/affiliate_program.html

Tip#3 Make sure you get paid regularly.

I have used Clickbank to host my dating products and they pay my affiliates every 2 weeks. So having prompt payments, keeps my affiliates promoting.

See example: http://www.dateromanianwomen.com/affiliate.html

Tip #4 Keep a checklist

Here is an under used method, create a promotion checklist that you can do on daily, weekly and monthly basis. Most big businesses are run by systems, and systems are simple checklists. For example:

Monday

1.Make a comment on your blog 2.Write an article with your home page and one inner page in the authors resource section. 3.Check Adwords Delete worst performing ads – rewrite best performing ad. 4.Submit your article to article directories

And so forth.

If you stick to a checklist and spend less time checking emails, you find yourself gaining momentum and success.

Tip#5 Expand your keyword list

Many affiliates are not creative enough when it comes to keyword research. Go to Amazon and search for online dating in books. There you can search inside books, I have gained many extra keywords by using this method. So make larger keywords list that are relevant to your dating niche.

If you follow these ideas you will become much more successful with your Dating affiliate marketing.

So make a list of different ways you can promote your dating programs and go out and take solid action. It the action of testing, promoting of dating affiliate programs that lead to a constant improvement of your online marketing results.

by Andrew C Clacy

Marketleap has a keyword tool, their Keyword Verification, checks if your website has reached one of the top three pages of a search engine by a certain keyword. The Keyword Verification tool only goes three pages deep in this search, because most people looking through search engine queries will not go beyond those first three page.

Marketleap designed their Link Popularity Check Tool to assist in search engine optimization, SEO. This helps Internet Marketer not only find out who might be linking to their site, but this tool also runs a benchmarking report, showing quickly where a marketer stands in comparision to other major players that are competing with them in the same market.

Marketleap also provides Internet marketers with their Search Engine Saturation tool. This tool refers to the number of pages the search engine has indexed for your site domain. This tool also provides you the resources, to compare your competitors search engine information. Keeping track of this count on a regular basis, provides you valuable information, whether your saturation in the search engine is falling or rising.

Marketleap is now Acxiom Digital Acxiom Digital is a leading provider of integrated digital marketing solutions for Global 2000 enterprises including Comcast, Marriott, Gap, Inc., and HP. Acxiom Digital combines agency services with world-class campaign execution on a proprietary technology platform to deliver superior marketing results for clients.

Acxiom Digital is maintaining this site as a free resource for the search engine marketing community.

Marketleap also offers their online University for understanding SEO. They provide free online information concerning site content, titles and meta tags, keyword market analysis, link popularity, link structure, dynamic site and urls and tips on Google search engine placement.

Digital employs some of the world’s leading search engine optimizers. We have successfully optimized and developed best practices for hundreds of online businesses, from the Fortune 500 to small one-man shops.

For marketers looking to drive relevant, monthly traffic at a fixed cost per click. XML Trusted Feeds are the best way to guarantee your pages are included and available to people searching leading search engines like Yahoo, AltaVista, FAST and more.

Unless a web page is indexed, it cannot generate any traffic to the website from search engines. If you could have more than one listing in the phone book for all of the products and services you offer, you would. Indexing is very similar. It’s the way that search engines include pages in their database and is the starting point for evaluating overall search marketing performance.

All of this information come together to make this company’s free University and marketing tools, one of the best resources available on the Internet. At no cost, online marketers can bone up on their game, staying current with the newest trends and information available; staying a step ahead of the rest.
by Brian Garvin And Jeff West