A recent newspaper review of a new book, Selling Sickness, got me thinking about niche marketing (The Globe and Mail, Saturday, August 6, 2005, D8-D9). The book in question considers case studies that purport to show how "Big Pharma" (the entire pharmaceutical industry, from manufacturers to drug salespeople) manipulates data to "create" a disease that they have the "cure" for.
Add comment July 17th, 2006
Creating a new website is only the first stage in what is a long, arduous process to internet success. Millions of new websites, many of them intended to be commercial, are created every year and then????nothing happens. No, or very few, visitors come to the site. But what can seem worse, not even the search engines are in a hurry to come visiting. Most search traffic is likely to come from Yahoo and Google, and increasingly MSN. Yahoo and Google, though, have always taken a long, long time to bother to crawl your website with Googlebot and Inktomi Slurp. These are the robots that scour the internet listing website pages and storing them to provide the database for their search results.
Add comment July 17th, 2006
Even the best websites with the best marketing plans can run into some problems with traffic every now and again. However, if this happens to your website don’t worry because there are many different ways you can boost traffic with just a little effort. Consider the following 10 suggestions to re-gain your customers and boost your traffic.
#1 New Content
Adding new content on a regular basis is important because you want to keep your website fresh and provide new information for returning visitors.
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Internet surfers use search engines more than any other tool to find things online. Search engines rank their results using a complex formula that considers web page content, link popularity and other details. This is why you should Search Engine Optimization (SEO) your web site.
First before you start you need to identify your keywords. It is critical that you know and understand the search terms surfers will use to find your web site with. If your not sure yet try thinking of search terms you would use to find your site. After you find your keywords make a list of about 50 (If you can find that many) keywords and target them.
Add comment July 17th, 2006
Successful websites extend their reach far and wide! They build links, connections, partnerships, or use whatever means they can to extend the reach of their sites. By extending their reach, these websites create greater exposure, bringing in more targeted traffic, leads and sales.
You should do the same with your site. It will greatly increase the importance of your site — boosting name recognition and increasing your site’s visibility.
Add comment July 17th, 2006
Free Gifts
by: J Square Humboldt
Gift-giving is a year-around enterprise these days, so allow me to do a favor to your wallet whilst assisting you with the spirit of giving …
Cyberspace is loaded with free items that can even make opening Christmas cards a pleasant surprise. It won’t cost you anything, for example, to postscript your greeting with a URL that leads to something enjoyably free.
If you know someone who likes games, there are five sites you might want to share:
1. GameDept.com features a number of free online games, from actionware to puzzles. The list is often updated and includes a rating system that is quite useful in making selections.
2. PlayerPlaza.com allows the stakes to be raised, if so desired. Not only do they have free games that allow for online competition, they also include the option of playing for money. This is a site for the pro who really thinks they’re a pro.
3. Mindgames is for the Mensa candidates. Its menu is composed mostly of card, board and word games that, to quote them, are ‘an eclectic collection … to challenge the mind.’
4. Download Free Games has over 200 items on offer. The site also does well with providing developers’ details and game descriptions.
5. Free Games could be the best of the lot. The quality of the software is excellent, the downloading is elementary and the variety is vast.
Of course, many cybernauts even deliver their holiday cards via e-mail. There are a number of sources for free greeting cards, and here are three of them:
1. Funny eCards has something for any occasion, with a good assortment of animated offerings.
2. 1000 Greeting Cards is true to their name, which means they have a selection for any and every occasion under the sun. Most, if not all, have the capacity for personalized messages, so they’re a good choice for adding the URL of a freeware site.
3. Ace Greetings has a well-designed home page that displays its menu quickly and throughly. I also share Longer Life’s belief that ads are considered content on websites — if you’re not checking a good site’s ads, you’re probably missing a great deal of good information — and the ads on Ace are useful leads to even more high-quality e-card providers.
It’s not uncommon to give lottery tickets as gifts these days. You can expand on that theme by giving the URLs to these three sites, as long as you inform your recipient that a registration task is involved:
1. The ‘I Won Cash Giveaway’ puts $10,000 on the line every day, along with other monthly prizes. This is a portal site, so be ready to complete a questionnaire.
2. Win4Now is for British residents only, with a prize list that spans from cash to electronics.
3. The Daily Draw says ‘Win a million for free!’ to get your attention, and if you’re a British resident, their online lottery game gives you a daily chance to match four, five or six numbers and hit the bigtime.
USA residents can offer URLs that offer opportunities to win a Chrysler Crossfire or a Harley-Davidson V-Rod. The British can try to drive away in the new five-door hatchback Seat Leon by requesting a brochure at the bottom right side of the homepage.
Nothing says ’special occasion’ quite like fragrances — just ask the Wise Men who brought frankincense and myrrh to the manger — so here are three ’sampling’ sites to keep the tradition going:
1. Lacoste Essential UK sends you a postcard ‘tester,’ so preface your URL ‘gift’ by saying so in a warmly personal way, such as ‘if it works once, you’ll know it will work again!’
2. Hugo Boss UK has three samplings to give in return for responding to a short survey.
3. Stetson Black is new on the market, and is available in the USA while supplies last.
American men and women can also ensure smooth and sheer holidays, compliments of your consideration and Gillette. They’re offering a free M3 Power or Venus Design (a $10 value each) in return for your completion of an online registration form and subscription to a free sponsored offer of your choice.
I’d like to mention one final thought for those Americans who might have been victimized by the economy or the elements or both. Cool Savings allows you to download and print coupons from a variety of sources. They’re good for groceries, baby items, pet items, diets, travel and free samples. It’s free to register at their site, and the novelty of being able to use your own printer to get the coupons is a sufficiently unique approach to pierce the pride of anyone who might not otherwise accept a bit of charity.
A few keystrokes can spread a lot of good will, both now and at the last minute. Here’s to a good start.
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About The Author
J Square Humboldt is the featured columnist at the Longer Life website, which is dedicated to providing information, strategies, analysis and commentary designed to improve the quality of living. His page can be found at http://longerlifegroup.com/cyberiter.html and his observations are published three times per week.
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Add comment July 17th, 2006
Using Free Traffic Exchange
by: Jakob Jelling
These days internet has emerged as both, a market and hub for marketing. Unlike the ‘brick and mortar’ world where large manufacturers manage to squeeze out the market bases of smaller companies, the internet provides haven like the free traffic exchange. They are extremely useful to those product and service providers who do not have the advertising budget to compete with large corporations.
Free traffic exchanges can be described as opt-in-clubs, which only other manufacturers of products and services can join. By joining these exchanges, a member is obliged to look at other members’ web pages. To gain membership you have to submit in your website which then goes into rotation with the hundreds and thousands of websites already registered with that particular traffic exchange. (This works best for people with high-speed internet connection.)
These exchanges are generally of two types - auto surf and manual. In the former, the exchange automatically keeps on flipping the pages in the web browser. In a manual exchange you need to click on a graphic or banner control to change pages. Most exchanges operate on the credit system. You gain credit by spending time (for example, 30 seconds) on a particular website. The more the number of sites you spend time on, the more your credit. However your credit gets reduced when another member visits your website. With increased credit your website goes into heavy rotation insuring a more effective and wider reach. You can easily register with these exchanges. Most just request some personal information and your URL.
However, you have to be quite alert in choosing a traffic exchange that would suit your business needs. Select one with many members as this helps in getting more exposure. One factor that is conducive to an effective exchange is demography. You should insure that your business is similar to those available on the exchange. Suffice it to say that a manufacturer of handcrafted china won’t get out of an exchange dominated by marketers of leather goods. The drawback of this is that in an exchange where everyone is offering similar services, you would have to work harder to insure that your site does not get lost.
For beginners it is always a good idea to join a few exchanges of both auto run and manual varieties. You can survey the sites and then decide which works best for you. However, it is the manual ones which are better in the long run because the possibility of actual sales is much higher. One of the tricks of the trade is to use a multi-tab web browser. The browser continues to run several websites in multiple tabs while only one window is open for viewing. You can easily surf many exchanges at the same time in this manner.
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About The Author
Jakob Jelling is the founder of Sitetube.com. Please visit http://www.sitetube.com/promotion.shtml and learn how to promote your website.
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Add comment July 17th, 2006
The Mechanism
First a brief glossary of terms:
Adwords: The program advertisers use to make their adverts.
Adsense: The program Website owners use to display the adverts
CTR: Click Through Rate (the number of page impressions the number of clicks on a advert)
Add comment July 17th, 2006
We have all heard that adding quality content to your web site will give the search engines a good idea of how to index your web site, it’s a topic we covered in "Content, Content, Content" back in November 2004. But the secret to luring the search engines to your web site, and in part to improving your position within those listings is your inbound links.
Add comment July 17th, 2006
Those webmasters that stick to the old ways and focus entirely on Google are missing out on a lot of search traffic these days if they are not also well ranked by Yahoo and MSN.
For the first few months after Yahoo decided to go their own way with natural search (and MSN decided to get serious about the search business), the search results provided by those two could only be described as bizarre. Enough time has now passed that the dust has somewhat settled and there are three main (from a traffic standpoint) sites for quality natural searches.
Add comment July 17th, 2006
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