You see, when you put your email address on your website, it’s very simple to read it, add it to a list and then bombard it with unsolicited email. It’s annoying, but it’s easy to fix in two steps.

Step 1: Convert your address into an image

To do this, visit http://services.nexodyne.com/email/ if you use a web-based service (like Gmail) or http://services.nexodyne.com/email/index_custom.php if you email  account is in your own domain.

Pick colors for text, background and border, choose a font and click Generate. Then, save the generated image to your computer. When you do, use a file name that nobody would link with email addresses, such as nospam.png.

Finally, upload the image to your website. I will use images/nospam.png as an example.

Alternatively, run any image editor, type your email address in as text, (crop, resize and make any other modifications until you’re happy with what you get) and save the image.

Step 2: Clock your email address image

In your contact page code, include the following snippet of JavaScript code, which opens up a new message window on the site visitor’s, to be sent to your email address.

Replace “[your real email address]” with your real email address.

<script type="text/javascript">
function emailUs(){
var daReferrer = document.referrer;
var email = "[your real email address]";
var subject = "Website inquiry";
var mailto_link = 'mailto:'+email+'?subject='+subject;
win = window.open(mailto_link,'emailWindow');
if (win && win.open &&!win.closed) win.close();
}
</script>

To use your image, all you have to do now is include the code below:

<a onclick="emailUs();" href="#">
 <img src="images/nospam.png" border="0"
  alt="I hate spam" align="absmiddle" />
</a>

This will look like a valid email address to a human being, but complete gibberish to an automatic robot.

Final note: bots are getting smarter all the time, so you may choose to do some more editing to your image or use another image generating site to make the image harder to decipher.

That’s it! You’re protected, but your clients can contact you by email.

Gal

To the person searching for something, Google Caffeine will seem like plain old Google – the search page looks the same, the results look the same – so what’s so different and why should anyone care?

Well, “under the hood”, Google has aimed primarily to improve two things: speed and accuracy. Let’s take a look at each of them.

Speed

Google has made site indexing a lot faster and improved the speed of listing search results in the new version. Faster indexing allows Google to keep up with the growth of the Internet, especially with social sites, like Twitter and Facebook.

Website owners are now expected to help Google index things faster by implementing some coding guidelines that will improve site performance. Faster sites will be deemed better and show up higher in search results. Google has even made special programs available for analyzing site performance and reducing the loading time of websites.

The downside is that non-technical folks who maintain their own sites are now at a great disadvantage compared to professional site builders who keep up with technology. This is yet another reason to let professionals build your website.

Accuracy

Google Caffeine seems to rely more heavily on keywords than the old version. This is not surprising, because it probably helps speed up pre-processing of crawled pages and reduces the size of the Google search index.

This means that do-it-yourself site builders will again fall behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professionals, who have the know-how to put keywords in all the right places.

Bottom line

Now, more than ever, a professional Internet marketing consultant can help clients rank well on Google Search and get business online. Small businesses that try to go solo and save will end up getting less and less, while those who focus on their own craft and outsource their Internet marketing will benefit.

What you don’t know, doesn’t hurt you

Well, I’m here to tell you this saying is really wrong when it comes to getting business online.

You see, the Internet is a very BIG place and it keeps cHanGIng all the time, faster than anyone can keep up with, let alone anyone who happens to be busy making products, servicing clients or doing the accounting.

On the Internet, what you don’t know can hurt you. A lot!

For example, say you want to develop a website and all you know is Microsoft Word. You create a simple site that looks good to you and you publish it online. No niche research, no usability design, no speed optimization, no SEO and no dynamic content. Just an online brochure, really. You think, “It cost me nothing and it looks nice. Now, all I have to do is wait”.

WRONG! Your website takes months to be picked up by search engines and sits at the bottom of page 523, never to be seen by anyone, let alone buyers.

What you need is someone who can help you put business sense into your website from Day 1.

But let’s say you got some help and your website looks professional and even includes a shopping cart for your products, but you have not done your Internet marketing research, so your keywords are off and your structure is sub-optimal. You cleverly figure out that AdWords can get you traffic quickly and create a campaign.

BAD MOVE! Your ads will receive low quality scores by AdWords, which means they will appear lower than they should and you’ll be paying a lot more than you should. If that’s not enough, you’ll get the wrong type of visitors, the kind that doesn’t buy.

What you need is someone who can help you put business sense into your website from Day 1.

But let’s say you hire someone to put links all over the Internet back to your site. Surely, this will help bring you site up in searches and get you more business, no?

Nope. It will certainly improve your position, but working outside your site can only improve so much. Incorrect structure and content will still result in a low conversion rate and require a lot more links to make any noticeable difference to your business.

What you need is someone who can help you put business sense into your website from Day 1.

I could go on for a while, but the gist of it is

On the Internet, what you don’t know can hurt you. A lot!

If you don’t do this stuff (Internet marketing, that is) all the time and stay on top of things, you will pay more and get less than you should and make a lot less profit. Why waste time and money and why frustrate yourself? Find an Internet marketer you can trust (I know this great guy) and hire him to get you business quickly and easily from the ground up.

You new Internet business is not far away.

Talk to you soon,
Gal

When you sell something online, or just when you want to get your name out, social networking sites can be great promotional tools for you. Here are some of them:

• StumbleUpon – very quick to bring traffic, but visitors only stick around if you can really grab their attention. Friends and groups are helpful, but once your page makes it into the SU database, it may get propagated by random users who “stumble upon” it with the toolbar
• Digg – mostly news items and technology, but famous for bringing sites down due to the massive amounts of traffic sent over a short period of time. Requires time to build a following
• Twitter – a “mini blogging” platform, surrounded and supported by a host of applications for filtering tweets, vetting friend requests and grouping friends. Tweets can go to and from your mobile phone while you are away, as well as to and from your website automatically
• LinkedIn – invitation-only website for professionals and business people, featuring excellent group discussions and allowing you to build business affiliations, create joint ventures and find strategic clients online. Self promotion is frowned upon, so participation and adding genuine value are the best approach

Of course, there are others, like MySpace and Facebook, and the social interaction can quickly take up all of your time if you are not focused, so you must do your homework before choosing the best social networking sites to promote your website, pick the best tools and consider hiring people to help you do the work, while you are busy selling.

I’m doing quite well out of the social scene and getting good content, good referrals and lots of traffic for several of the sites I promote. If you’d like to get my help with your site promotion, let me know.

Happy marketing,
Gal

Of course, this service is not as detailed and customized as my full website review service, but it contains valuable information that will get you started on improving your online presence and looking professional to the search engines.

Best of all, it’s FREE, so you have nothing to lose by contacting me and asking for the quick (and free) website review.

1. crates – plastic2go.com.au is #1 – this website receives well over 100 significant inquiries every month
   
2. plastic crates – plastic2go.com.au is #1
3. plastic pallets – plastic2go.com.au is #2
4. bulk containers – plastic2go.com.au is #2
5. life coaching – behappyinlife.com is #4 & #7 – very tough keyword phrase (others are Wikipedia and large coaching schools)!
6. life coach – behappyinlife.com is #9 – very tough keyword phrase (all others are large coaching schools)!
7. parenting classes – behappyinlife.com is #2
8. organic gold coast – celticorganic.com.au is #9 (and listed in business results in #1C)
9. african connection – africanconnection.com.au is #1 out of over 36 Million results and against YouTube videos!
10. family matters – ronitbaras.com is #6, ahead of familymatters.net!
11. middle eastern music melbourne – ashkarmusicanddance.com is #1

Is this good or what?! I’m so proud of myself I’m going to explode.

Of course, the best part is that from all this ranking comes traffic and from all the traffic come leads and sales. Another good part is that this is all free search. There is no cost involved here whatsoever. I did my online market research, I did my magic with the sites, I did my magic in other places and voilà!

Business from the Internet is not far away. Inquire here.

Internet shopping is vastly different from offline shopping

Internet users search for different products and service than they would offline and the use different ways to search for them. Based on this premise, the first step in any Internet marketing campaign is to find out how the online market thinks, what it is looking for and what online niches will be profitable to engage.

Search engines are rapidly losing their leadership in driving traffic

With the advent of social networking and social bookmarking sites, which is the online equivalent of business breakfasts and social circles, more and more traffic is directed at websites from mega-sites, in which there is some built-in mechanism for implied trust, sharing and reciprocating. Therefore, a good Internet marketing strategy examines the online social vibe, as well as search trends.

Website content and structure are critical to having a profitable website

Bringing traffic to a site that does not convert visitors to business leads is a waste of money. Whether it is link creation, paid advertising or newsletter marketing, having a focused website with quality content reduces the costs and increases the effectiveness of the online marketing by at least a factor of 5. Therefore, work should be done on the website itself to prepare it for the off-site promotion work.

The local game is not the same

The Internet is everywhere, so the best online business is one offering products or services to the entire world. Competing in a local arena requires specific focus and a totally different set of strategies in order to avoid getting too much “noise” and wasting money on visitors who will never become clients. Therefore, it is best to acquire knowledge of the local market and possibly couple the online effort with an offline promotion to raise awareness and start a local “vibe”.

The Internet is ever changing

No matter how much effort is spent promoting a website, incoming links will always “fade”, as the number of links on referring pages grows, the number of pages on referring sites grows, the referring pages move away from the top of the referring sites and more sites are created on the Internet. If this is not enough, there is a disruptive change every 18-24 months in the world of technology, which either puts “state of the art” methods in the baseline or makes them obsolete. Therefore, Internet marketing is an ongoing operation, much like offline marketing is.

As always, if you need any clarification on these things or you want my help to take your own business to the Internet, you are more than welcome to contact me.

The answer is: right here, of course. Let’s start at the beginning, then, shall we?

Finding a Niche

In the offline world, when customers want to buy something (say a bottle of olive oil), this is what they do:

1. They go shopping at the nearest mall or shopping center
2. They enter the store where the product is most likely to be sold (say Wal Mart)
3. They find the shelf or aisle in which the product is kept
4. On that shelf, they typically find several types and several brands of their product
5. They start reading labels and price tags and compare the different options against one another and against their needs
6. They decide what to buy and add it to their shopping basket, in which there are other, completely unrelated products

Sounds familiar?

In the Internet world, however, things are totally different. When Internet shoppers want to buy something (say a bottle of olive oil):

1. They go looking for information using their favorite search engine (say Google)
2. They type in “olive oil”
3. They take a look at the title, description and URL of the websites listed and consider ways to fine tune their search
4. They type in a more specific search query (say “extra virgin olive oil” or “cold pressed olive oil”)
5. They take a look at the title, description and URL of the websites listed and pick out the most relevant sites
6. They visit only the sites that seem relevant, typically from top to bottom, and stop reading when they believe they have enough information
7. Now they are ready to buy
8. They look for sites that sell their preferred choice of olive oil, possibly by searching for “buy cold pressed extra virgin olive oil” or by clicking one of the sponsored links around the search results
9. They directly “land” on the page that sells what they were looking for and they buy it

Different, isn’t it?

So you see, even if you have a pretty successful offline business selling olive oil, putting up a website featuring all your products on one page or mixing your shopping cart with some history of olive oil or olive oil recipes will get you absolutely nowhere on the Internet compared with sites that have a page dedicated to one very specific thing – cold pressed extra virgin olive oil. One click to get to it, one click to buy.

The upside, of course, is that you can have as many pages as you need on your website, so you don’t have to save. There’s not rent to pay for commercial space by the square foot, no cleaning for the extra pages, only the setup cost. But the returns, oh, the returns!

The difference between having your website listed at the top of the first page of search results and having it listed on, say, page 15, is pretty much like the difference between having a website and not having one. So you must identify your online niches first, and then have your website designed to have dedicated pages for each niche.

Doing this step first makes all the rest of your search engine optimization (SEO) possible. If you don’t do this first, you are effectively crippling anything you will do later on.

Of course, being deeply involved in your own business and having an offline mindset, it is best to engage an Internet marketing consultant to help generate ideas and check how often people search for them, because some niches are not worth your effort. Not wasting your time and money on those niches and discovering “golden nuggets” you couldn’t think of yourself will bring you more than enough value to cover anything the Internet marketer will charge. Guaranteed.

Google AU search for"be happy in life"

See for yourself.

“But this may be only in Australia”, I said to myself and checked on the main Google site. Be Happy in LIFE was showing in the first and second positions there too.

See for yourself.

“This is too good to be true!”, I thought in excitement, “I wonder what’s happening on the other major search engines”.

Well, in MSN/Live Search, Be Happy in LIFE appears first and my contact page appears second.

See for yourself.

If this isn’t amazing enough, Yahoo! Australia agrees with Google.com, showing the Be Happy in LIFE home page first and the free inspiration articles second.

See for yourself.

The only one that rained lightly on my parade was Yahoo! global/USA, listing Be Happy in LIFE in the 5th place and the free inspiration articles page 6th. I decided this was OK and my day was still great.

Of course, I share the secrets of how I’ve done this with my clients, so that they can get the same for their business. Would you like your business to top the search engines too?

SEO is aimed at getting your website top ranking in the search engines, typically measured on Google Search. The assumption is that the higher your website appears in the search results, the more traffic it will get, the more sales or leads you will convert and the more dollars will make it into your pocket.

So shifty operators contact unsuspecting business owners or website owners and offer to get their websites a top search engine position at a surprisingly low cost. Sometimes, this cost seems even lower, but it must be paid on an ongoing basis.

“Wow”, thinks the website owner, “I’ve been struggling with this for so long, and here is an expert who does this for a living. Surely, my sales will skyrocket within days and I’ll be rich in no time”.

Unfortunately, this is not quite the way it happens. When the owner (let’s call him Jim) sits with the SEO expert (let’s call him Bob), Bob asks Jim to tell him about his website. Let’s say Jim runs a doorknob business called “Jim’s doorknobs” and lives in a small town called woopwoop. Bob suggest that the best thing to do is to get Jim the first position in Google for the keyword phrase “woopwoop doorknobs”, which Jim excitedly agrees to. Bob, stating he was going to give Jim great service by working with additional phrases, throws in the keyword phrases “jim’s doorknobs” and even “best doorknobs in woopwoop”.

Jim leaves Bob’s office all pumped up and patiently waits for the sales to start pouring in.

A month goes by and the sales are pretty much the same, so Jim rings Bob. “Great news!” says Bob, “Like I said, you’re number one for your keywords now. Google them now and you’ll see”.

Sure enough, Bob has delivered on his promise, and Jim’s doorknow website is now the first to appear for his 3 chosen keyword phrases, but he gets no business. “Bob”, he says, “Why am I not getting any sales?”

“Oh, this takes a bit of time to build up, because of the way the search engines work, you know. Give it another month or two and you’ll see”.

After 3 months, Jim starts to suspect that something is wrong, so he calls his friend Bruce, who knows a little about Internet marketing. As soon as Bruce hears the chosen keyword phrases, he says to Jim, “I think there may only be a handful of people looking for these. Being number one for a keyword phrase nobody looks for will make you proud, but not rich”.

So next time someone tells you they’ll put you at the top of the search results, ask them how many times they think people might be using this keyword phrase each day on the Internet. Anything over 300 is good. If the answer is “I don’t know”, run away fast.

Of course, the keyword phrases you choose must also be directly linked to the problems you solve, the solutions you provide or some unique aspect of your business, so that you get qualified traffic you can convert to sales.

Remember, you want to get more business online, not more traffic, not a higher position, not a higher page rank and so on. More business! That’s the only way to measure the success of your website.

Gal