Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing

September 19th, 2008

 

I write this article because i saw many threads started at Digital Point Forum about Internet Marketing.Many people think internet marketing is just Search Engine Optimization. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a practice as much as it is a fast growing technology. The basics of SEO begin with website design and the way the HTML code is structured. Optimizing a website for high search engine rankings usually entails a long list of factors that must be calculated for the optimization to take full effect. SEO is still one of the best forms of marketing due to the characteristic of placing what the searcher is looking for directly in front of them.

seo_services.jpg

Website development can be defined as any activity on the website which is done to promote the website and to make it more effective and appropriate. This could also include the use of web development for website content or site optimization.

Blogging is also a very important factor for internet marketing and is sometimes known as the hub of internet marketing. The reason blogs work so well for internet marketing is because in SEO “content is king”. Blogs allow a site owner to post new content to their website easily, quickly, and effectively. Most blogs are structured to handle changes frequently much like the blogging platform of WordPress.

Part I: 8 Ways To Make Money Online

September 18th, 2008

Jay Brewer came with a blog on a completely exclusive topic:  coffee makers making a single cup of coffee at a particular time, in the spring season of 2004. Traffic to the blog doubled in a month. In another two months, the traffic doubled once more and companies started asking for advertisement in the specific site. Advertisers were aware of the thoughts in Brewer’s mind, readers who love to read about specific topic will surely care to click on the ad links provided on that topic.

“Blogs about particular topics will generate more traffic from blog readers who are attracted to the topic or who does research on it” – according to the CEO of Blogpire (www.blogpire.com) , which handles specialized blogs on specific subjects like shaving equipments and GPS receivers, apart from handling the above mentioned blogs on single cup coffee makers.

More CIO InsightsWhite PapersGeek-Speak Glossary: A Manager’s Guide to IT Terminology How to Use the Six Laws of Persuasion during a Negotiation ReportsNext in Line How CIOs Are Dealing with a Tough Economy certain websites in blogpire have a click through rate for advertising and affiliate marketing of as much as ten percent says Brewer. Moreover, as the blog becomes specialized on topics, the competition from other websites will be less. It is obvious that a search in Google for “dog” will return around 278 million results where as a search on “grooming products for Golden Retrievers” will give only a single result.

Selling your blog:

Once you do blogging for several months on end, you will be going through blogger’s fatigue, when you realize that you don’t have anything more to speak about the subject you have with you. At this point, instead of abandoning your blog, you can plan to sell it. You can see the listings of names of websites and domain names ready to sale through online auction programs in website like Sitepoint Marketplace.

In the recent online auctions of websites, a blog site that handled travelling in Cyprus was sold for as high as $850. Another site on Secure Digital Camcorders was sold for $150 and one on puppiesforsale.org was given away for $10,000. Sitepoint will also provide you tips on sales in their website. The simple tactics says “more traffic meant more money and it is really simple”.

Create a knol:

If you have a topic in hand about which an encyclopedia entry can be written and you don’t have enough time with you for writing a blog about it daily, you can try to create a knol. A knol can be described as an authoritative article speaking on a specific topic”, according to the introducer of knoll, in the month of July, the search engine giants, Google Inc.

This concept resembles the idea of online encyclopedia, in which the users of the website creates and edit the contents. There is a main difference: the person who creates the knol for the first time is known as the owner, and he will have the right to use Google ads and get benefitted from the ad sense revenue generated by that knol, if they want.

SEO and Social Bookmarking

August 9th, 2008

Social bookmarking, which allows Internet users to save , organize, share, and search bookmarks of websites or web pages, has become the new trend in search engine optimization or SEO. Sometimes, social bookmarking is called social bookmarketing as it has been used as an online marketing tool or strategy. Simply put, this kind of bookmarking is just like bookmarking your favorite sites on your PC. The difference is that you have to store your favorite websites to social bookmarking sites, and you get to share them with other Internet users.

Why is social bookmarking an effective tool in improving website owners’ search engine optimization? This is because social bookmarking sites are primarily “tag-based”. Once you bookmark a site, you tag or categorize them with keywords for future references or so that other users can just click on them when they need information on a specific topic.

What happens is that search engines index the tags and links at the same time. Thus, with your keywords attached to them, you are enjoying one-way links from high-traffic sites. This means more visitors and potential customers for your site. Also, when someone bookmarks your website, the social bookmarking site that you are a member of will check the tags to find out if the link already exists. Thus, when you change your bookmark tags from time to time, you can have multiple links with different tags on the same site. Social bookmarking sites are regularly crawled by search engines, thus having bookmarked links on these sites, your site will most likely be crawled at the same time. One thing you have to remember, though, is that you have to use proper tags if you want to have social bookmarking work for you in your search engine optimization efforts.

Be sure that your site is also worth bookmarking for. Its content should be specific and valuable. This means Take note that social bookmarking works like word of mouth, a tested-and-proven marketing strategy. When someone finds your site interesting and bookmarks it, the person can share it to his or her friends who share the same interests with him or her , and the cycle can go on, leaving your site popular for a specific group of people.

If you are an SEO professional, you cannot afford to utilize the ability of the social bookmarking sites to generate traffic for your site.

Source

When Should You Add a Newsletter to Your Blog?

July 16th, 2008

3 Reasons Why You Should Consider Starting a Newsletter in the Early Days of Your Blog

1. ‘Capture’ Early Readers - while some would argue that when you don’t have many readers it can be more effort than it’s worth to start a newsletter I have found that it’s not the case. When I started Digital Photography School I started a newsletter very quickly after launch and found that it was a great way of convincing those first time readers to come back to the blog for a second look.

Your blog might only have 10 readers a day - but if you can send those 10 readers an email once a week that reminds them to check out a new post on your blog then over a year you’ve effectively created 500 new visits to your blog from just 10 readers. Recruit 10 new readers a week to subscribe to your blog and by the end of the year you’ve got 500 subscribers.

In short - it’s never too early to start creating loyal readers on your blog.

Read more here

Announcing Google Affiliate Network

July 1st, 2008

Today AdSense announced that they are drawing their ‘Referrals’ program to a close and are relaunching a new Google affiliate network. In actual effect the new affiliate network is not ‘new’ - but a rebranded version of DoubleClick’s Performics Affiliate Network which they acquired in March.

Google Affiliate Network

The new Google Affiliate Network does not something that everyone will be able to use. They say that they are targeting sites with largely US based traffic - I’m yet to see any clarification on how they’ll be filtering publishers, whether there is a traffic based minimum to get in etc. Time will tell as publishers start applying. At present I know that Performics has accepted me as a publisher (I was previously using it) so it’s not too hard to get into I hope!

Source Problogger 

UK Franchise Opportunities

June 26th, 2008

You should have knowledge about the franchise businesses before you decide to start one. For starting a franchise you should have previous business experience, better financial back ground and the personal skills to run the franchise. Above all you should have good knowledge about the franchises in UK.

There are three types of UK Franchise Opportunities which include products, services and wholesale distribution. Each person can select the franchises according to the personal skills as well as their experience in the field of franchising. So if you are into finance, Finance select UK would be a good choice. Or if you have a cleaning work history then, Clean Machine UK would be a good move. But ultimately, any franchise with the correct training can be mastered.

The success and failure of a franchise mainly depends on the dedication of the owner, without a hundred percent dedication the franchise business will be a failure.

6 Ways To Improve Your Blog

June 20th, 2008

Blogging is hard work, and I’m not just talking about the writing part. Keeping your blog looking good and running smoothly is a real challenge, and I thought I would share some improvements you can make to your blog to make it more effective and easier to read.

1) Make sure to use paragraph headings, and just being bold isn’t enough

Headlines need to be darker and larger to stand out - people jump from section header to section header.

2) Show your best posts

Most bloggers show their best posts (if at all) on the sidebar navigation or on top. this is the wrong place, it should be at the bottom of your posts. Reason: whatever brought the visitor to your page in the first place, is why he is there. He first wants to deal with that, then he can turn attention to other things (but he doesn’t want to have to remember that you had some good posts up top and therefore scroll back up. Your best posts have proven to overall get you the best engagement with visitors, so you should always bet on them (would you bet on the horse that never ran a race yet you like? Or, on the horse that ran 50 races and won 35 of them?)

3) Timely relevance is key

Group similar posts for various occasions (e.x. - holidays, winter, breast cancer awareness day), put them in a table with an outline, add an image which delivers immediate understanding, and urge visitors to prepare themselves for the occasion by reading some of those posts.

4) Call to action

When you link to other posts within your post, try to use action words (such as “learn about blogging”) instead of just plain nouns. You’ll get a higher click-through rate, since the reader knows what to expect to receive from clicking the link.

5) Get a custom wordpress theme

Let’s face it - Ferraris are memorable because they are rare. In my testing, the default theme had an 80% bounce rate, while my custom theme instantly lowered my bounce rate to 50%, gave me 15% higher pageviews per visitor, and increased the amount of time spent on the blog by a whopping 98%.

6) Show them your good side

Add a photo of yourself on the main page or the about us page. People are reading your blog. People like looking at people a lot more than at text. Make people happy. It lets them attach a face to the name and the writing, and they will remember you better.

How to Make Money With AdSense

June 18th, 2008

Easy as Cake - Not Quite

Never buy into any idea that offers an easy way to make money on the internet. A lot of people have bought into the simplicity of AdSense as proclaimed by various sources, but the reality is vastly different. People are fast realizing that there are various prohibitions put into place by Google, when it comes to utilizing AdSense and the answer to how to make money with AdSense is not as easy as they thought it would be.

The Prerequisites

If you want to make money with AdSense, you not only have to stringently comply with the various AdSense policies but your website must also duly comply with all the policies underlined by the Webmaster of Google.

You must understand that only if you can attract many visitors to your site, will your AdSense endeavor be successful. This can be achieved through a combination of techniques like Search Engine Optimization, Article Submission, Link Exchange, Pay per Click and various others. Moreover, the layout of the web pages is such that they must blend in with the Ads that you host on the site. Make sure that your Ads cannot be ignored; this is one of the important pointers that must be kept in mind in your quest to learn how to make money with AdSense.

Tackle the Competition

Many a times, and I would go so far as to say that it is a common enough occurrence; when you start hosting the Pay Per Click Ads you will find that there are many Ads from your competitors. Learn to host these Ads on those pages that are not as successful for you as the other pages. Otherwise you can put off posting those ads till the time you are busy enough so that you can at least earn some amount of money off your competitors. When you think about how to make money with AdSense, you must keep a watch on the Ads of your competitors.

Not a Money Making Machine

The purpose of Google AdSense is not only offering a monetary advantage to the people who host the Ads, but also to offer a promotional advantage to people who want their Ads to be hosted. Never think of it as a machine that churns out money. You have to put your question of how to make money with AdSense in perspective. The program is multi-beneficial and hence has to be worked upon, learnt, and expertly handled before you can think about making substantial earnings. Patience and Hard Work are the keys here.

Make Money Online With Pay Per Click

June 16th, 2008

Many people have considered signing up with Pay Per Click as a good way to make money online. While it is still entirely possible to use this method as a profitable means to make money online, there are a few things that you have to consider if you are to get the most out of it.

One of the first things that you have to realize is that the days of using Pay Per Click to make money online easily are over. There are far too many online marketers - most of them new to the business - that have grand plans of earning big money by way of pay per click advertising with Google AdWords and by buying traffic on Google. While it is indeed the fastest way to draw traffic to your web site, it is by no means easy. Sure you can buy loads of traffic fairly easily, but making money with pay per click is another matter entirely.

You also have to keep in mind that Pay Per Click is not a get rich quick scheme. This is another common misconception and one that far too many people have learned the hard way. It is certainly true that pay per click is still a huge market with a great potential for opportunities and financial rewards, but if you are expecting to get rich quickly it simply wouldn’t be too realistic to expect that. Furthermore, it appears that new advertisers - especially on Google - are in fact at a huge disadvantage as far as Pay Per Click is concerned.

While we are by no means telling you that you should discount Pay Per Click outright, it is important to figure out how it can best work for you in order to maximize its potential to earn money for you. There are still many web sites that make a lot of money through Pay Per Click advertising and it is possible for it to work for you as well. You do have to be aware that the success of Pay Per Click varies from market to market, with some areas enjoying huge success and others failing miserably. In some areas it can even take months and months before these efforts begin to show profits.

The key to make money online with pay per click is figuring out a method that will helps you hone in on effective keywords and combining them into effective ad groups.

How I Can Make Money Online Buying and Selling Domain Names

June 11th, 2008

Most accepted ways to earn money on Internet is by buying and selling the domain names. Domain names are low-priced and give a very low risk of investment when in comparison to other types of investments on Internet. When you invest in domain names you have got something to show for it.

The most horrible thing that can occur is you buy a domain name, which can’t be sold. But, that is very uncommon to occur because people place the value in efforts made towards mounting it.

Domain names are inexpensive and if efforts to sell the domain name for upright income fail, then one can always draw back on selling domain for an original purchase price.

A key to find achievement in buying and selling the domain names comes from learning proper strategy and plans in the trade. If you have awareness in the business of buying and selling the domain names, you will need to invest time and money in educating yourself.

What makes good domain name?

A suffix is most important thing like .COM, .ORG, and .NET are by far most popular one. I will go with .COM since they are the easiest to sell.

Would any Webmaster or business would want it?

Ask manually that question, if you cannot right away say “Yes!” don’t buy it. Keep in mind it is unlawful to register the business name or a trademark, which you do not possess. This is said “cyber-squatting” and strong laws are now in position to guard against this.

Shorter the domain name better. These are most brilliant and simplest to market. At time of writing this, there are about thousand three character of domain names left.

Tips When Buying a Domain Name

Stay Anonymous

When buying a domain name, it is necessary to stay anonymous as you can all the way keep the cost as low as possible. The domain names will not have set prices, and so the price of the domain name arrives entirely from debates between the buyer and the seller.

Don’t reveal that you are setting a website.

If the domain name individual knows that you are intending to develop a site, specially a marketable website, price of your domain name will go high, and you will finish up paying extra to the market value for the domain name.

Never reveal your name and personal information.