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Put that website up, and they will come… NOT! And even if they were to come looking for you, standing on the street corner, shouting your name, will you be ready to respond? If you’re starting a business on the internet, you better fall in love with Internet Marketing.
Bill Gates has been quoted in 2000 saying “There are 2 kinds of businesses going forward: Those who have an internet presence and those who are out of business.”
Let’s face it, you must become knowledgeable about the internet. There is so much to learn and it seems like you’re just getting a handle on it, when something new comes along. In fact, unless you already enjoy having marketing experts on your team, you will need to make marketing your new love.
Marketing is more than advertising. Marketing is much more. It’s who you are in the marketplace. It’s what you represent. It’s what folks think when they think of you. Marketing is the way you compete for brain space. It’s your message. Most important, marketing is your road to wealth. If you are waiting for folks to find you, you will go broke. If you get in front of the people who are looking for you, and you communicate in a way that is compelling, you win. Marketing is the art of getting in front of those people who are looking for you and communicating in the language that they want to hear.
So here is the deal: Fall in-love with marketing. Make it a game. Keep score. Develop the marketing skills that will take you where you want your business to go. I believe strongly in finding a mentor in whatever area I want to master. I find the best for my current education level and my ability to afford them and study. I do what they do. And I make a point of learning from multiple sources. If you can’t afford to study personally with a mentor, read their books, listen to their programs, get on their email list and get busy.
The great thing about internet marketing is the tons of free information and strategies available. You can begin by searching out every marketing guru out there reading the free materials they offer. By starting with the free education, you learn the vocabulary and strategies that are currently available on the internet. I don’t recommend buying anything initially. Take a look at all the offerings and work to get your head on straight about what is available vs. what you need in your business. I make a point of subscribing to a number of internet marketing newsletters. I download Podcasts, those audio shows that are free for the download. I watch videos. Don’t forget to take advantage of our “free resource” page to get you started.
While I don’t do everything that is suggested, I find that the constant exposure to new marketing ideas keeps me fresh. I understand that marketing doesn’t come naturally to me: I must learn my game. This is a free and gentle way to keep myself thinking about marketing.
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We all know how important traffic is to our business online. It’s like someone told me once concerning a sign out side of my brick and mortar business-
“A business with no sign is a sign of no business”
In the beginning, e-mail was the one way that viral marketing was started. Since that long ago day, viral marketing has gone from a marketing strategy to an art form and there are many ways to accomplish the objective of creating a successful viral marketing campaign. Seven of those ways are:
Using a combination of these will keep people coming back or help keep you in constant touch with them. Just make sure when you add scripts, etc to your websites or blogs, they don’t take forever to load or all your hard work will be for nothing. Very few people have the patience to wait more than a few seconds for your page to load.
The Difference Between Autoresponder Programs and Autoresponder Services
An autoresponder of any kind is vitally important to your Internet business. If you have gathered information from the internet at all, you have undoubtedly signed up for a newsletter or something where you entered your name and email address to get something from the site. When you did that, you more than likely got an instant email message in your inbox with a link to confirm that you signed up. This is usually from an autoresponder, which just like the name implies, automatically responds to data input. Many newcomers to the Internet marketing arena are not aware that there is a vast difference between an autoresponder program and an autoresponder service. Not knowing the difference, they often purchase the wrong type of autoresponder, and find out too late that they have wasted money on a program that is useless to them.
An autoresponder program is a program that is set up on your web server. This is usually a free autoresponder that comes with your web hosting account. It usually is your site email account. With a lot of them, the most you can do is set them up to respond the first time someone submits their information, but then after that you’re on your own. Some people don’t like the autoresponder programs that come with their hosting accounts so instead, they use an autoresponder program that they have more control over. They will purchase autoresponder programs or scripts that must be installed on their web server.
Other people are quite happy with using an autoresponder service. This is a service that is usually paid for on a monthly or yearly basis. The fees are ongoing, and everything is browser based. In other words, you can set up your autoresponder messages and manage your opt-in list through your web browser – just as you can with an autoresponder program that is installed through your web hosting account. The difference is that the service runs on the autoresponder service’s web server – not yours or your web hosts.
Beginners are usually better off using an autoresponder service. These services are very easy to understand and to use, and no technical knowledge is needed to set things up. As a newcomer to the field, however, you might be concerned about the costs of an autoresponder service. If this is the case, you have the option of signing up with a free autoresponder service.
Free services make their money by placing advertisements in each autoresponder message that you send out. Sometimes these ads appear at the top of your messages, and sometimes they appear at the bottom. Some of the free services are simply an enticement to purchase the professional version, and have many of the more advanced features, such as tracking, disabled.
One autresponder that a good percentage of the “gurus” in internet marketing use is Aweber . When you visit their home page you can get the info on pricing, etc. Their pricing is based on how many subscribers you have per month and goes up as you build your list. They just added a bunch of email analytic tools to the service and will even let you take it for a test drive first.
Another very popular autoresponder service is GetResponse. They are a little cheaper per month and claim to have more tools than the other autoresponders, but since Aweber added so many new analytics, I’m not so sure.
The thing about using autoresponders that make it worth the money you spend on them is your emails are more apt to get to your customers instead of to their spam folder. Another great thing about them is you can do a “broadcast” where you write one message and send it to your whole list all at the same time. This is very much a time saver as you don’t have to load up everyone’s email addresses one at a time. Whichever program you choose, if you don’t have some way of capturing names and email addresses, your leaving possible customers on the table for someone else.
Building Your Mailing List with Downloads
A mailing list is the lifeblood of your online business. The old adage “the money is in the list” cannot be true enough — if you had a targeted list of prospects to contact each time you have a new product, you will be able to save a lot of effort by marketing it to your existing list of targeted prospects.
You can actually build up a targeted list of prospects that are interested in your products by offering a relevant download on your website. For example, let’s take a look at a very good example — apple.com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via — guess where — iTunes!
In reality, you do not need to offer such a “heavyweight” download such as a full-feature software like iTunes. You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, a free wallpaper, and so on. The important thing is that your download offers enough value for the prospect to be willing to give away his/her own email address to get it.
However, slapping together a simple download and putting a link on your website won’t be enough to attract qualified prospects. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you.
First of all, you must place your download form prominently on your website. Preferably, dedicate a page to it and link to that page from every other page of your website. That way, there is no way your visitors cannot find the download page, and when they do, you’ll get some of them converted into your prospects!
Also, you have to put a little effort into promoting your download. Explain and elaborate on the values of the download, and why your visitors should download it. You might think why would anyone want to pass on a freebie, but most of your visitors would be too lazy to take the effort to download it because most of their downloads just sit on the harddisk collecting virtual dust. It is hence important to show your visitors why they should download your freebie.
I wanted to write a little something about one of my pet peeves when it comes to internet marketing.
As you can see from my “about me” page, I admit I am a relative “Newbie” when it comes to internet marketing. I try to drink in all that I can in advice, services, etc., but one of my pet peeves is when a “Guru” sends me
I don’t buy too much stuff anymore because I have gone almost completely broke and I have a ton of stuff sitting on my harddrive I haven’t even used yet. Yesterday I went to a site where the offer was just to cheap and to good to pass up, so I punched the order button. Nothing happened and after 3 tries I went away. They lost the sale.
One of the first questions that comes to my mind when I get an email or go to a site where the links don’t work is “how are they going to teach me when they can’t even get their own stuff working right?” I think that’s a valid question, especially if they’re trying to get my money.
Whether you are building a website, blog, “one time offer” page, when you’re done, go to the site as a visitor would and check your links to verify they are doing what you want them to. To me this is one of those “kindergarten” rules of Internet Marketing.
I personally usually email the person and let them know what’s not working right, but a lot of them have email addresses that go to a “noreply” autoresponder so they will never get the message. If you’re trying to earn money from your site, there will be a lot of people that don’t bother to tell you and you end up wondering why you’re not making any sales. I have a ton of email to check and by the time I notify someone their links don’t work right, I’ve already moved on to something else. Many times I don’t bother going back and that person has lost me
Rank High In The Search Engines For Your Keywords Every internet marketer or webmaster aims to have their websites in the first page of the organic search results for their targeted keywords. I’m going to reveal some vital search engine optimization tips that will boost your chances of being listed in the Top 10 results for your chosen keywords.
SEO has its advantages. It’s free, unlike pay per click where you have to pay every time someone visits your site, regardless of whether they buy anything or not. Being listed in the organic search results may also attract more visitors to your site than the paid listings; people are not inclined to click on ads and prefer to click on natural search items. The downside of SEO is that search engines change their algorithms often; but don’t worry. By following the search engine optimization tips below, you’ll stand a much bigger chance of being listed in the Top 10 for your desired keywords and keeping your position for a long time to come.
1) Keywords must be in the anchor text of incoming links
A different site linking to you counts as a vote in the eyes of the search engines. And if the anchor text of the incoming links has your keywords in it, then you will have better chances of ranking for those keywords
2) Keywords must be within the title tag
The search engines place great emphasis on the title tag; it tells them what your website’s topic is about. Place your keywords at the start of the title tag for best results. The title tag must not be longer than 60 characters.
3) Your link should contain your keywords
Having your keywords in your link will help you get ranked for those keywords. For example, if you want to rank high for the keywords “website copywriting,” your link should look like this: http://yoursite.com/website-copywriting.htm.
4) Play it safe with your keyword density
There is no specific rule regarding the “right” keyword density, because the search engines change their algorithms often. There have been theories that Google considers a keyword density of more than 2% to be spamming, but Yahoo and MSN are fine with up to 5%. Different SEO experts have mixed opinions on the ideal keyword density; so don’t focus all your energies on this. Just mention your keywords near the beginning and write naturally. To be on the safe side, aim to have no more than 2%, but space out your keywords from each other so they would look natural in the eyes of the search engines.
5) Put your keywords in headings (within the H1 tags, H2 tags, etc.)
The search engines place great emphasis on words between headings (H1, H2, etc.) so it would be a smart idea to have your keywords placed within them. Just make sure that the keywords are suitable to the content and you’re not “forcing” them.
6) Put bold, strong, or italicize tags between your keywords
The search engines take more notice of words that are either bolded or italicized, so placing your keywords within the bold, strong, or i tags can help you rank higher for those keywords.
7) Put your keywords near the start of your content
Although this does not count as much as the search engine optimization tips above, putting your keywords at the beginning of your content (not necessarily html code) is a good SEO strategy because the search engines place great emphasis on the first few parts of your webpage.
Put your keywords in metatags
This is another subject of controversy. Google overlooks metatags, but Yahoo and MSN still read them. So spend a few seconds putting your keywords in metatags to add to your search engine credits.
9) Put your keywords within alt tags
The search engines can’t read graphics or images, but they can read the text descriptions within the alt tag. If you have images on your site, fill in the alt tag with your keywords, but don’t overdo it.
10) Target specialized keywords
Some keywords have very high competition that you have lesser chances of ranking for them. If you have a target audience or niche, it might be a good idea to focus on those keywords that are more targeted and have less competition. For example, instead of having a competitive keyword phrase like “jobs bartending,” you can focus on “alabama bartending jobs” if your target audience is in Alabama.
11) Observe LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)
Don’t let that technical-sounding phrase put you off. To explain it simply, the search engines look for synonyms or words related to your target keywords to determine the relevancy of your content to your keywords. The search engines place more emphasis on those pages that have words related to the keywords as opposed to pages having only the targeted keywords. For example, if your target keyword is “self-hypnosis,” your webpage would have better search results if you have related words such as “auto-suggestion” and “visualization” rather than having only “self-hypnosis” in your document. For LSI suggestions, use Google Sets at http://labs.google.com/sets
12) Observe keyword proximity
Keyword proximity is the closeness of the keywords to each other. For example, you’re optimizing your webpage for the keywords “marketing strategies.” If you have “marketing” in the first sentence and “strategies” in the 4th sentence, it still counts but doesn’t have as much effect as having “marketing strategies” together without any words in between. Keyword proximity is used for keyword phrases that have 2 or more words.
13) Never engage in keyword stuffing
Don’t fill your content with keywords unrelated to your topic. This will have a negative impact on your search results for other targeted keywords. Never stuff your content with keywords deliberately, especially those unrelated to your content. If the search engines see you filling keywords in an unnatural way, you might get banned from the search results.
Hope these search engine optimization tips help you get first page rankings for your chosen keywords. Best of luck to your SEO efforts!
Don’t forget to check the “Freebies” page for some new resources.
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When you need information, you go to the google search bar (or whatever search engine) type in a word or phrase, and the sites that have what “keyword” or “key phrase” you typed in, come up. For example, if you type in “puppies” you will get a million sites that have used that keyword so that when you type it in their site will come up. If you want to know something specific about puppies and so you can narrow down the results for what you actually want, then you would type in something like “house breaking puppies”. Hopefully any sites that don’t have that phrase in their “keywords” for their site will fall off the list of results.
The keywords are placed behind the scenes of your website. If you use HTML, they’re placed between the <head> and </head>. Without keywords it makes it very hard for people to find your site. You want them to find your site fast toward the top of the list of results, so it’s very important for you to do “keyword research” to discover what words and terms people would use if they were looking for the information or products you have.
One of the best free keyword tools available is the “Google Keyword Tool“. You can put your keyword in and it will give you search results for several relevent keywords. It also gives a graph of how much competition there is for the keywords you’ve chosen. You can take this tool and keep narrowing down your search to make a list of the most relevent keywords for you.
One of the great ways to use this tool is to put in the URL of your site and let Google suggest your keywords. This is one way not to avoid getting ”slapped” by Google when they index your site and punish you for irrelevant keywords.
Some other free resources for keyword research are:
Seo Book Keyword Tool
Hitwise
MSN Keyword Forecast
Sorry I don’t have these linked for you, but if you google them, they’re really easy to find. One paid source is Wordtracker and they will let you use it free. Certain restrictions apply. It doesn’t give you as many words as the paid version, but it’s worth using. Personally I think it’s a great tool, but when you’re on a tight budget, it can be a little expensive.
A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.
1) Site optimization purposes
We all want top rankings on Google, MSN, etc. It’s pretty hard to do when you’re an internet marketing newbie. There are a lot of internet marketers that have been around for awhile that are already there. This is of major importance to breaking through. When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website. On a blog this is usually done by your recent posts or archives. A great tool for this is in Google Analytics and it’s free to use. Just sign up for a free account.
2) Navigation purposes
You need it to be easy for your visitors to get where they want to be, or they’ll leave. A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browse your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.
3) Conveying your site’s theme
When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors time.
4) Organization and relevance
A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.
From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone.
As a web designer you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all, a welcoming experience. It doesn’t matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world — if your website is poorly done you won’t be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.
When I’m talking about a “good design”, I’m not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which contribute to a good website design — accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.
Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I’ve come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it’s high time to take serious action!
1) Background music
Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and everytime a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I’d just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site — users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.
2) Extra large/small text size
As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics — user accessibility is a really big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it’s illegible you won’t be selling anything!
3) Popup windows
Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention. I just close them on instinct everytime each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed every time it appears on a visitor’s screen. Your website loses its function immediately!
Let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it’s meant to do effectively. Don’t let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!
Whether it’s a "free report", software, or an article, almost everything has a license attached. You will see PLR, MRR, Creative Commons, etc. It’s good to know about each of these so you don’t get yourself in some kind of trouble.
1) Creative Commons License
If you see that something is covered by a Creative Commons License it usually means that while it’s useable by the public, the author of the works, be it writing or images, etc. has a list of what you are or are not allowed to do with the stuff they’ve created. To quote Wikipedia,
The Creative Commons licenses enable copyright holders to grant some or all of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.
2) PLR- Private Label Rights
Private Label License tells you specifically what you can or cannot do with a product, article, etc. Some let you republish with your name on it as if you are the creator. Some let you republish but only if you leave everything in tact as you received it. You need to go through the list to verify how whatever you have may be used.
3) Master Resell Rights
Master Resell Rights are pretty much just like it sounds. They are usually more expensive and while there is still a list of dos and don’ts, the product is pretty much yours to do with what you want. In most cases you can rebrand it as your own, you can sell it and keep 100% of the money, etc. A lot of times there are restrictions on how you give it away, as the author doesn’t want the value of the product to disapate.
4) Public Domain
Many times it’s hard to tell what is Public Domain and what is not. You need to do your research here. A standard rule is that anything written prior to 1923 is public. Also, usually on the bottom of an article etc. it will tell you about any copywrites.
One thing you don’t want to do whether you’re just getting started or been online for awhile, is wind up in court over stealing material. Also if you write something or put something really good together, you may want to copywrite your own stuff to determine how people are allowed to use it.
