First, someone I know asked people to vote on the best title for a forthcoming book.

That’s unwise, because what people say they like in a book title:

* Doesn’t necessarily distinguish the book from others

* Isn’t necessarily clear, sellable and free of negative connotations

* Doesn’t mean those who are the best audience for the book will “get it”

* Isn’t always easy to remember and repeat

* May not perform well in search engines

Second, according to The New York Times, the state of New Jersey put its prospective new tourism slogan to a vote years ago. The winning entry, “New Jersey: Come See for Yourself” received just a few more votes than “New Jersey: The Best Kept Secret.”

Both the winning and the runner-up New Jersey slogans flunk an elementary test for the effectiveness of a tag line or slogan: It should distinguish the company, or in this case the state, from most or all others.

Try this out yourself by plugging in names of other states besides New Jersey – most of the time, the slogan becomes no more and no less applicable. This means the slogan cannot make a strong case for the Garden State. More bluntly, it’s mainly hot air.

The New Jersey contest had another serious flaw. To be eligible to vote on the best slogan, you had to be a New Jersey resident. While residents do have the greatest stake in improving the reputation of their state, they by definition don’t belong to the target market of the tourism slogan. To understand what would appeal most to non-New Jerseyans, don’t look to New Jerseyans en masse.

Many will be clueless about this and get it upside-down. Outsiders are the ones who need to understand the slogan and respond.

I’ll never forget an ad for a Great Plains software company that obviously assumed that a photo of a flat-to-the-horizon landscape without trees was an appealing image. For me, a die-hard New Englander accustomed to heavily wooded hills, this picture had the opposite effect – it filled me with horror.

Of course, someone who lives in New Jersey or North Dakota may be perfectly capable of portraying their region appealingly to outsiders. Instead of asking any group to vote on a winning name or tag line, set up your contest so that people can submit suggestions. Then have either one person or a committee cull the entries according to a list of criteria drawn up beforehand.

By selecting and judging rather than mass voting, you’re most likely to end up with a name or slogan that wins over your audience.

One such trend is the use of the web for targeting your market locally, nationally, or internationally. This can be achieved through pay per click advertising (also known as PPC). There is a myth that PPC is risky and expensive. While that can be true for those who don’t understand how it works, the truth is that PPC can be a great way to increase your profits. The best part is that you don’t need a big budget to get started. You can simply start small, then ramp up your efforts as you generate more revenue with your PPC efforts.

PPC really comes down to selecting the right keywords. In basic terms, keywords are those terms your potential customers will be entering into the search engines for more information. Therefore, you need to give careful thought to which keywords and phrases you want to be associated with. That means you shouldn’t be looking only at the cost to you per click. Sure, you may be able to find a great deal on a low-competition keyword, but if it’s not a good match for your business, then you are only throwing your money away.

The good news is that you can find out what the top keywords being searched for are. Again, don’t just select a keyword because a lot of people are using it. You need to also consider your specific needs, and what your customers are looking for. For example, if you are selling custom-made, luxury yachts, then you wouldn’t want to select “used boats”, “cheap boats” or “second hand yachts” for your keywords–even if they get a ton of searches and have a low per-click cost–because they aren’t what your ideal customer would be searching for.

Pay per click is one of the internet advertising trends that is too effective to pass up, but it isn’t the only trend you should be plugging into. Another one of the big ones is the use of social networking sites. While most people are familiar with sites like Facebook for staying in touch with family and friends, such sites also provide enormous benefits for marketing your business. Make it easy for people to add you to their contact lists.

However, don’t think you can just keep blasting them with your marketing message. Instead, try to foster relationships with the people who have added you. Also, anything you can do to get them to interact will help you establish yourself as the go-to source in their eyes.

We have only covered two examples of internet advertising trends, but there are more, and who knows what the future has in store. Do your best to stay informed of any new opportunities that come along, and be ready to take advantage of them if they’re a good fit for your business.

lethargic response time

on page confusion

ugly design lesions

In some rare cases – outright fatal errors.

Chilling, I know! Luckily this disease is easily avoidable and fully curable. You just need to protect yourself with these steps:

1. Self Analysis – Take a step back and think about if you really need a plugin. Plugins add a lot of great features to a site but do you need to have each one that tickles your fancy? My guess is no. Take a look at your installed WordPress plugins and really think about if you need them. Does your plugin help generate traffic? Does it help keep people engaged? Does it offer a feature you need on your site? If you say no to all of these you might want to think about deleting that plugin. When you start adding plugin after plugin you are risking slowing your site. You also risk a possible conflict between plugins or a plugin and your theme.

2. Eliminate Redundancy – One of the quickest ways for plugin fever to set in is to have multiple plugins that do the same thing. Go through your plugins and see if any of them offer you the same functionality. If they do, then one of them is redundant. You don’t need 4 SEO plugins. You only need one XML sitemap generator. There are plugins that will help your visitors submit your site to social bookmarking sites — one will do the job. Every redundant plugin you have has a chance to break or slow down your site. Instantly remove any redundant plugins.

3. Upgrade – Once you have trimmed the number of plugins you use, make sure all of your plugins are upgraded. This is an easy process and should be taken care of quickly. Plugin upgrades will usually address security and any possible conflicts. You can do this in your back office easily so there are no excuses. Everyone has some plugins, and they need the same care you give the rest of your site.

These three steps can help ward off Plugin Fever. It is up to you to ensure your site is in perfect working order, and these three steps can help optimize your plugins. It is easy to get carried away with plugins since they can do just about everything. You need to remember that too many plugins can slow down or break your site. They can also conflict with each other and your theme so be very selective.

One last piece of advice. If you ever notice serious issues with your WordPress site – then deactivate all plugins and see if that fixes the issue. If it did, reactivate each plugin until you find the one that caused the error. Remove the error causing plugin. This will come in handy at least once in your WordPress days, that I can promise you. Good luck and may all your plugins run smoothly!

Place the ad on the free sites. You never know, the one person who really needs what you are selling may just be looking there right now. Why anyone would ignore such a good resource is beyond me but even I know someone who has listened to the naysayers and she has not been very successful in her internet business endeavors because she has no online ad traffic. Just think of the millions of people she could have reached if she had just placed that ad on the free sites.

Learning how to write a n effective ad will put you one above the rest. If you can’t write or are intimidated by the process then hire someone to write it for you. You will need to make sure you have the budget for this.

The cheapest way is to learn to write for yourself. My advice to you is to take a look at what is out there for writing samples on the internet. If you can speak English and can hold a pen in your hand you are qualified to write your own ads. Some of the stuff you find out there is so bad it will leave you shaking your head in wonder as to how they ever got published in the first place. Some of it doesn’t even make sense!

Anyway, you can do this, I have faith in you. First, make a list of, say, ten free classified ad sites you think you can trust. Then, research them to be sure you can trust them. Make sure they are on the up and up with no funny stuff going on. When you get ready to submit your ad, be sure to follow their rules for submitting ads closely. Remember you are trying to get more traffic to you website not the other way around.

Read all of the directions before you do anything. Find out if you can upload a picture of what you are selling. This will help increase sales. The free sites may not allow pictures but check it out and if they do then put one up. It can’t hurt.

These free sites may not have categories of ads listed so your ad may get lost in the jumble but like I said if it is not out there then it surely will not be seen. Use every advantage you can find when it comes to trying to drive online ad traffic to your site. Use the free sites to start and then graduate to paid sites when the money starts rolling in.

2. Plan and write out your next sales conversation. Got a meeting next week with a hot prospect? Write down the words you will use to find out who the decision makers are, what the budget is, the scope of their problem, and how you’ll ask them to take next steps. If you have no idea how to do this, send me an email and I’ll help you think through it.

3. Read a marketing article. Most non-marketers don’t go out of their way to read about marketing. A painless way to stay motivated, though, is to read one new article every week. Start here: YOUR BLOG HERE

4. Pay attention to the marketing messages all around you. See if you can pick out the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?) and call-to-action (what they want you to do). Practice thinking like a marketer.

5. If you manage others who perform your client work, visit a client with your employee to show interest. This keeps you fresh and demonstrates your commitment to the client. It also shows the client that there’s more to your organization than their sole point of contact.

6. Give a copy of this article to your staff and ask them to come to the next staff meeting prepared to talk about the ideas that this generates. Ask people to commit to one new task. Have them give a progress report at the next meeting. Rinse, repeat.

7. Draft a 3 or 4-question survey to do short, conversational telephone interviews with your target audience to find out what they struggle with…what’s on their wish list…what they want from you.

Do NOT ask them if they want to buy anything from you. This is a relationship-building task, NOT a sales call. That comes much later. Ask others you work with to pick two clients or prospects and call them. Compare notes and discuss your findings.

8. Think of small solutions that you can offer to important problems. Or small solutions to little problems. The key is to think small. It’s less intimidating for your customer to “sample” you and makes it easy for them to take a first step.

9. Practice saying your Positioning Statement out loud. To the mirror. In the car. In the elevator. If you don’t know what your Positioning Statement is, that’s a problem. Email me and I’ll give you a hand.

10. Visualize doing any one of these things successfully. Really – it’s what professional athletes, speakers, performers, and successful people do all the time. Visualize it, and it will be so.

The next time a scientist tells me they can’t market, I’ll know better. These ideas clearly prove that theory wrong!

There are companies online that specialize in doing all the seo your website needs. The prices for such services will vary depending on several variables. For one thing, the number of keywords you will be targeting in your seo campaign. The more keywords you want to target, the higher the cost will be.

The more competitive the keywords you use, the higher the cost will be too. SEO isn’t a “set it and forget it” method. It will take ongoing attention. That’s why the more competitive keywords will cost more, they will take more time and attention.

Most SEO companies will sell their services in packages. Usually they will be divided up something like: 1 – 10 keywords, or 11 – 50 keywords,etc. The package you will choose will be based mostly on your budget.

Another important element to website SEO is back links. Many times companies will set their pricing structure on the number of back links they are creating.

Back links will gain more importance, and cost more, if the link comes from a highly ranked site. A back link from a website that has a PR4 rank will be priced differently than a PR8 website.

The truth is for most new, and smaller internet marketers, seo campaigns are out of bounds from a financial point of view. But that doesn’t have to mean that you can’t still benefit from seo optimization.

There are many places online where you can learn to do simple seo techniques that will allow you to benefit from optimization techniques. You can use these methods for your website, your blog posts and your articles.

If you do decide that you have enough of a budget to hire a company to do SEO for you than you need to carefully check them out. Find out what they will offer, how much it will cost and how much time and attention you can expect to get from them.

It’s also a good idea to find out what other people have to say about the company and their services. This can be a fairly big investment and you want to make sure that you hire a company that knows what they are doing, and can really help you get the results you want.

You also want to make sure that there are no surprises, that you know exactly what you will get and how much it will cost. Having a written contract in place is very important too. That way there can be no misunderstanding; both parties know what is expected of each other and how much it will cost.

When it comes to seo pricing remember that cost is only half the issue. You want to make sure that you get the service and results that you are really looking for.

Yes, it’s true – there are people who make their living by controlling the Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles of people and businesses. The good news is that if you’re a small operation, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t manage your own social media optimization. There’s very little about the process that’s acutely difficult – the most annoying thing about it is that it can be time consuming, which is why some companies choose to outsource the work. Once your social media optimization reaches a certain point, you might deem it necessary to outsource it as well, but for people who are just starting on the path to social medial optimization, it’s recommended that you take control of it yourself.

The reason why social networking is so pivotal when it comes to niche marketing is that the entire point of social networking in the first place is to find a niche. Think of it this way – when you create a personal profile on these sites, you’re seeking to find people who you can network and connect with. On personal profiles, these are likely friends that you know in real life, so you can build up your communication methods with them. In essence, you’re creating your own little niche where you can find others easily through social networking, and others can find you.

Working through social networking with a business is the exact same thing. You’re putting your business out on the waves, looking for people who might be interested in your goods and services, or what you have to say. The art behind using Twitter and LinkedIn is the same as it would be with email advertising or working on forums. Post regularly enough so that your account is obviously an active account and people stay aware of your existence, but don’t spam the accounts of your friends and colleagues multiple times a day. To do so is to becoming annoying, and even though you’re looking to keep a steady stream of conversation going, if you become irritating, people will “defriend” your social network account.

Good things to make your “friends” on social networking sites aware of are promotions, blog updates, sales, discrepancies in business (like if you will be away from the computer for a while or the business will be closing for a period of time), or tips and tricks. Keep your updates fun, interesting, and relevant. A good rule of thumb is that if you don’t have anything to say, don’t say it. However, you should have something to say about your business at least two times a month – should this not be the case, you need to work on making your business more dynamic!

Assuming you are already into an affiliate program, what would be the next thing you would want to do? Double, or even triple, your commissions, right? How do you do that?

Here are some powerful tips on how to boost your affiliate program commissions overnight.

1. Know the best program and products to promote.

Obviously, you would want to promote a program that will enable you to achieve the greatest profits in the shortest possible time.

There are several factors to consider in selecting such a program. Choose the ones that have a generous commission structure. Have products that fit in with your target audience. And that has a solid track record of paying their affiliate easily and on time. If you cannot seem to increase your investments, dump that program and keep looking for better ones.

There are thousands of affiliate programs online which gives you the reason to be picky. You may want to select the best to avoid losing your advertising dollars.

Write free reports or short E-Books to distribute from your site. There is a great possibility that you are competing with other affiliates that are promoting the same program. If you start writing short report related to the product you are promoting, you will be able to distinguish yourself from the other affiliates.

In the reports, provide some valuable information for free. If possible, add some recommendations about the products. With E-Books, you get credibility. Customers will see that in you and they will be enticed to try out what you are offering.

2. Collect and save the email addresses of those who download your free E-Books.

It is a known fact that people do not make a purchase on the first solicitation. You may want to send out your message more than six times to make a sale.

This is the simple reason why you should collect the contact information of those who downloaded your reports and E-Books. You can make follow-ups on these contacts to remind them to make a purchase from you.

Get the contact information of a prospect before sending them to the vendor’s website. Keep in mind that you are providing free advertisement for the product owners. You get paid only when you make a sale. If you send prospects directly to the vendors, chances are they would be lost to you forever.

But when you get their names, you can always send other marketing messages to them to be able to earn an ongoing commission instead of a one-time sale only.

Publish an online newsletter or E-zine. It is always best to recommend a product to someone you know than to sell to a stranger. This is the purpose behind publishing your own newsletter. This also allows you to develop a relationship based on trust with your subscribers.

This strategy is a delicate balance between providing useful information with a sales pitch. If you continue to write informative editorials you will be able to build a sense of reciprocity in your readers that may lead them to support you by buying your products.

3. Ask for higher than normal commission from merchants.

If you are already successful with a particular promotion, you should try and approach the merchant and negotiate a percentage commission for your sales.

If the merchant is smart, he or she will likely grant your request rather than lose a valuable asset in you. Keep in mind that you are a zero-risk investment to your merchant; so do not be shy about requesting for addition in your commissions. Just try to be reasonable about it.

Write strong pay Per Click ads. PPC search engine is the most effective means of advertising online. As an affiliate, you can make a small income just by managing PPC campaigns such as Google AdWords and Overture. Then you should try and monitor them to see which ads are more effective and which ones to dispose of.

Try out these strategies and see the difference it can make to your commission checks in the shortest of time.