Web Promotion Articles

What is Internet Marketing?

Since I sold my last business in 2004 I have been trying hard to make a living online. Most of my neighbors knew what my last business was as it was very obvious from the garage full of soda, water, snacks and vending machines. When I say garage full I am talking about maybe 1000 to 1500 cases at least. Yes, I was a vendor and I did this for about 8 years. 8 years of people complaining about out of date soda, warm candy bars and dimes stuck in the machines. 8 years of 40 foot Pepsi and Coke trucks coming up to my driveway and unloading materials. 8 years of counting coins and dollar bills every day. Had it not been for the recession, 9-11 and the dotcom bust I would probably have grown to where I hired a few workers and I would still be doing it.

Add comment July 24th, 2006

Searches and Summaries

The Web is constantly growing and changing. The key issue for users of the Web is to know what is there that might help them, or inform them, or entertain them, and to find out in a timely fashion without spending all their time looking. There are two main ways to do this, searches and summaries.

Add comment July 24th, 2006

A Simple Guide to Analyzing All Those Web Traffic Ideas - Part 2

Just to recap - Part 1 of this article outlined some of the so-called “secrets” of website traffic being offered on-line and what you might expect for your money. If you missed Part 1 you will still be able to view it by clicking on the links appearing in the resource box at the end of this, Part 2.

Add comment July 24th, 2006

Why Pay-Per-Inclusion Search Engines are Dying

A Pay-Per-Inclusion search engine is a service in which a search engine charges you a certain amount to spider and include your website in its database. For this fee, regular repeated spiderings are guaranteed, so you are sure to be indexed.

However, rankings are not guaranteed. These pages have no advantage over any page submitted for free. A few years ago, pay-per-inclusion search engines such as Inktomi, Altavista, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo were introduced. However, they have failed badly and have lost traffic to Google.

Add comment July 24th, 2006

SEO 1,2,3 for Dummies

SEO 1,2,3 for Dummies

 by: Christopher Jon Luke Dowgin

Seo is Search Engine Optimization. A magician’s bag of tricks to get your web page on high SERP (Search Engine Rank Placement ) and High PR (Page Rank). SERP is when you search on Google for a keyword (word you are studying) like cats, you get a page of twenty web sites on cats back out of a hundred or thousand pages. SEO is the art of getting your web page to be listed for as many keywords pertaining to your site on the first page of hundreds. Since people have short attention spans, they tend not to search ten pages of returns to find your page.

That is the short skinny on the subject. If that answered enough quit reading. Still curious? Below is a more in depth but only basic description. It still is a basic description even if it lacks MTV brevity.

To get high SERP you can bid on keywords, through Google and other search engines you can bid on certain keywords. Every time someone clicks on my add in blue at the top and sides of Google pages (These are the auction listings, I will pay anywhere from .5 to $5 every time someone clicks on my site for the keywords I bid on. The one who bids the most gets to be on the first page for cats. The rest of Google is suppose to be based on scholarly research qualifications).

So you need to find a keyword that people actually look for but not too many people are bidding on. You got to niche your keyword. To find appropriate keywords you check your web logs to see what words people used in search engines to bring you to your site. Also their are online tools to use that suggest keywords and give a thesaurus of options along with how many times people searched for that keyword last month.

Then we get Page Rank which is based on how many people link to you. The higher page rank used to me higher SERP. But search engines update and change to keep ahead of SEO people. Google’s Jager update screwed me up. The Higher PR the higher you can charge someone to advertise on your page also. 10 is the highest. Now to get links you want people to link to you in the middle of a paragraph near the top of their page with reference to you desired keyword. By the way have you seen the updates to my Life Coaching site (www.docspond.org , but since html is outlawed in this article I display it this way without conventional a href tags)? This would be a better link, Natural linking, instead of a directory of 200 people to a page called mile high links. Natural linking is someone considering you more an expert than just linking by subject as in Mile High. Sometimes the first ten can get points from robots to get high SERP on mile highs but these pages in general start out with lower wealth. So sites charge you a premium to be listed on a home page or the top of a directory. But you will never get anyone to click on these links, the only importance you get from them is robots.

Robots are programs that scour the web following all the links on your page to each other and all the ones you list to other sites. They check to see you have good code and list your words for their directory so people can find any phrase you placed on your site. Now links to other sites within three pages of your home page toward the top of each page get better points than any deep in your site or toward the bottom of the page. Also they down score links if their is too many on a page.

To get your site index by robots you go to search engines and go to the bottom of the page and find a link called submit your URL. there you put your address in and hit return. Anywhere from 3 weeks to four months it could take a robot to find you for the first time. Then it will index you once a month unless in your pages code in meta tags you tell it to visit every day if you like. Also it is good to submit URL on search engines every time you change your home page. More times you change your home page the better for points.

Some engines charge you to be listed. But in time they will index you because people on their engine have links to your site that their robots will follow to you. Then you are indexed for free. Yahoo charges to be listed in their business directory some think like $300 a year.

Now to get links is a tedious process of sending out hundreds of emails with a friendly greeting, Your site title with appropriate keyword placement in it, and site description. For their listing you, you give them a reciprocal link with their title and description on your link page. You can get people to link to you as an expert through natural linking. You can do the same for them. But if you get a link without giving one, it equals you higher points. Which in turn give you higher SERP. Other way to get natural links is to create something buzz worthy or give free tools. If you have a cool video of someone winning a Darwin Award, some one might say ” Check this Dumb Fuck out!” and link to your site. If it is a popular page you get more points for the link. or if you have a free tool like these; Whois (I can find out your IP address from you computer from my web log and see which state and country you come from and your Internet provider to bitch too), Keyword finder, or Favicon creators (Little icons that appear at the top of the browser to the left of the URL).

Last but not least are RSS, Blogs, Newsletters, and Article submission. RSS is real Simple Syndication. It is a poor mans AP wire service. People have attachments to their browsers called aggregators that read this peculiar code. It can also have placement on your web page. Say you can have a feed from the latest news updated daily by the New York Times which helps keep fresh content on your site to get points. Or you can have people list your articles on their site giving you links back to your site. Then we have Blogs. If you blog you will put a link back to your other page. When this gets higher PR so does your other site. Also it is something else to attract clients to you in another arena. Also every time you comment on a board or blog, make sure you link back to your site in your signature. All post tend to be indexed by robots. If they find your link they come back to your page and give you points. Then newsletters you create will do the same. Links from emails count too. If you click on the links above, you will give points to that web site. But mostly newsletters are marketing to gather sales and inform the public on your product. Then we have article submission. By submitting articles to directories, they get published by other web sites and provide links back to your site.

That is the basic of SEO. Image the expert article. Hmmm….

Add comment July 24th, 2006

Lead Generation Marketing

Lead Generation Marketing

 by: Desmond Mantor

Lead Generation Marketing Makes More Sense

Most people starting out in any business don’t have a lot

of money in their advertising budgets. Traditional

marketing strategies emphasize using mediums that can

reach as many people as possible with the hopes of

converting a miniscule percentage of readers or viewers

to buy the product or service being advertised. But you

are not some fast food chain or car company with millions

of dollars in your advertising budget. You need to make

every marketing effort pay dividends. This is precisely

why you need to concentrate on lead generation marketing!

Lead generation marketing may sound like the latest thing to

hit the advertising world but in actual fact it encompasses

established marketing techniques such as direct mail

campaigns, ad space in trade publications or shows and

outbound telemarketing. The rationale behind this technique

is that rather than reaching out to the entire population,

you target only those people who are interested in your

product or service. For example, if you come up with a

treatment for diabetes, you could either set up a stall at a

diabetes convention or place an advertisement in a medical

journal about diabetes. Nowadays, online methods of lead

generation advertising can fetch you better value for your

advertising dollar than more conventional methods.

Search engine marketing is a form of lead generation

marketing. You are targeting a specific group of people

and therefore avoiding the time and expense related to

sifting through an entire population. Through careful

website design and content that is keyword optimized, you

are able to reach people already interested in the products

and services you sell. This form of marketing is definitely

an Internet hybrid but the results are the same: qualified

leads that are ready to hear your best sales pitch.

A direct mailing campaign can be an expensive proposition

what with the cost of postage, producing promotional

material, ad copy, etc. E-mail marketing is an option that

will help you reach your potential customers just as

effectively as direct marketing, but at a much lower cost.

Your only investment is purchasing the software which is

simple to use and cheap. As with direct marketing, email

marketing will target only those people who are interested

in your products or services. However, you will reach a much

wider audience with this method and end up securing more

customers. This in turn will lead to higher sales and

profits.

As the internet gets more advanced, lead generation

advertising will also develop and become more effective.

Already the internet has replaced many time honored methods

of marketing as more and more businesses are waking up to

the benefits of using the internet for advertising their

products and services. Search engine and e-mail marketing

are two very effective ways of increasing your customer base

and maximizing profits.

Add comment July 24th, 2006

Build Your Website to Be Seen

Build Your Website to Be Seen

 by: Phillipe Wu

In terms of e-commerce, websites are built for the sole purpose to be seen and to be able to do successful Internet marketing of products manufactured. Fine link building strategy is where you should start first. When you are building links to increase your website popularity, whom do you link to? The question of where to link to increase ranking can be confusing. Logical thinking is needed to achieve link popularity in a natural way. Yes, indeed, Google page rank should come first and foremost. Page rank is part of the algorithm of Google’s ranking in the search engine results. Other search engines use link popularity in their algorithm to evaluate your website as well. But page rank is only one of the 100 plus criteria Google uses to evaluate your web pages. Use the idea of page rank as a “tool” to help make decisions, there’s no need to live and die by the results. Link popularity itself is merely one-way to improve your ranking.

In fact, there is a general fear of reciprocal linking to websites who inadvertently link to a “bad neighborhood” with penalties or page rank zero, passing on problems to you. Use your common sense. Is this a website you would want to visit or your visitors would want to visit? If the answer is no or you can’t tell what the subject of the site is, make a note of it and keep looking. A website full of links with little content doesn’t “make sense” because what benefit is it to you or your visitors? Of course you are going to link to your partners in business or maybe the small website that is doing a bang up job of selling widgets and providing widget information.

The idea of acquiring link popularity by linking back and forth to other sites to boost your popularity artificially is a popular method. But is it of value to your website? Ask yourself: Would you link to this site if link popularity in the search engines didn’t matter? Would your visitor care about this link or find it helpful? Does the website have good content? Is this an opportunity for you to publicize your website by being listed there? Will this link cause you to spend a great deal of time worrying about it?

Is the link “just a link” or do you want a link from any site whose visitors care about what you have to say

It makes sense to list your website in the search engines and directories. In fact, one-way linking, such as listing your site in directories, is a good way to improve your link popularity naturally. Well, you say to yourself, of course I’ve done that. Besides the major directories, what else is out there? You’d be surprised at the amount of good secondary and specialty directories that drive traffic. Some even specialize in a topic - maybe your topic. If you have a product to sell, look at who your competitor is linking to. Search for directories and business sites on your topic. Look for websites that talk about the widgets you sell and see if they accept submissions to their directory listings in the category for widgets. Do they accept original articles, product reviews, press releases or white papers about widgets? If so, submit your topical articles and watch your link popularity rise naturally. With your good content on other websites as well as archived on your own website, there you have it, links pointing back to your website.

Finally, enhance content stick-ness and optimize your web pages using proper keywords in your site to develop your website so once your visitors arrive, they will want to stay. The World Wide Web uses linking to connect us all. By using hard work to create a quality website and common sense when linking you can stop worrying and start succeeding in internet marketing attempt.

Add comment July 24th, 2006

AdWords Campaign Set Up AdvancedTips

Make Your Ads Different

Your completed AdWords ads are going to run right along side everyone else’s. You need to use words that will make yours stand out. Again, here is where you need to look at your competitors ads to see what they are saying. Once you’ve done that, you need to figure out how to make yours stand out.

Don’t use the same terms at beginning of titles and sentences. Think of synonyms for more commonly used words. Think of different ways to say things.

Add comment July 24th, 2006

Search Engine Monopoly

Ever wondered how one search engine is dominating the entire web. In any business, you have so much stiff competition. Is there any business that you can start that has no competition ? Whether you decide to open a restaurant or a real estate company - you are going to have a lot of competition. And picture the competition that you will have - you will have 100’s or probably 1000 other people doing the same business. But in search engine competition, you can probably count in your fingers as to how many search engines there are. But still people are hesitant to go into this field.

Add comment July 24th, 2006

10 Ways to Make Sure Your SEO Goes Out of Its Way for You

If they want to have success, companies should do everything they can to ensure that their SEO firm doesn’t provide lousy service. Here are 10 tips to keep in mind:

1. Be realistic.

Don’t waste your time or the SEO firm’s expertise by arguing about broad search terms. Don’t say you want to be in the Top 10 for "e-commerce." The SEO firm should ask: "E-commerce and what else? E-commerce consultants? Please be specific."

2. Think long-term.

Add comment July 24th, 2006