1. Not proof reading: A simple mistake but it can definitely make you look bad. Spellchecking is great, but you can’t rely on just that. You have to read your blog post 2 or 3 times to make sure you catch all your grammar mistakes. It might not seem like a big deal but here is one example of a mistake I have made. I wanted to write “now four styles to choose from” and I wrote “no four styles to choose from.” Spell check didn’t catch anything, but that one sentence means a big difference to the reader. If you want to take it to the next level, get someone else to proof read your blog post. They will catch things you miss every time.

2. Plagiarism/Spun Content/PLR: Alright if you have an adsense bait autoblog, ignore this mistake. Put up whatever crap you want. However, if you care about your personal brand and your blog, then at all costs avoid this type of content. Creating content can be a pain in the butt, but stealing someone else’s’ can hurt you dearly in the end. If you get caught (and you will) you lose all credibility instantly. The same thing goes for PLR content or articles you have spun. If you want to use these elsewhere to build backlinks OK, but keep them off your personal blog. It just looks tacky and people will notice.

3. Not being consistent: This might be the biggest mistake. If you are committing to running a blog then it is a commitment. Treat it as such. Don’t fire out 5 articles your first week then sit back and relax. You have to constantly create content in order to engage your visitors. Fresh content is also good in the eyes of Google. We don’t want to make the Google Gods angry do we?

4. Not marketing: I was guilty of this mistake. When I first started blogging I hid it from people! What the heck is the point of that? I posted away and hoped people came, but never worked at marketing it. I didn’t start to see success until I sent it out to my Facebook and Twitter lists. I began using Digg and Stumbleupon. I talked about it at social gatherings. I even got some business cards made up that had nothing but the URL of my blog. It began to work and I finally got to see some significant traffic. You can post all you want, but what use is it if no one sees it?

5. Not responding to comments: If you are lucky enough to get comments on your blog posts, then you should reply. For one it is the polite thing to do. Secondly it will engage web visitors and make them more likely to come back. Also people who haven’t commented will be more likely to comment if they see people getting responses. A blog full of active commenters is the start of a potential money making machine!

Cut out these five mistakes and you will definitely notice a traffic increase to your blog. You will also notice you have more interaction with your visitors and in the long run it will offer you more chances to monetize your site. If you have to only choose a couple from the list above, please post consistently and market yourself. Curing these two mistakes alone, will mean great things for your site.

However, if mismanaged, pay per click advertising could be extremely costly and just as ineffective. Many people who use pay per click advertising spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars each year for clicks that don’t go through . What’s the difference between those who use pay per click advertising effectively and those who do not?

One of the major things you can do to up your success rate (and lower your costs) when it comes to pay per click advertising is to go for low competition keywords. For example, a very high competition keyword might be “car.” This is the most common word that comes to mind when people think of motorized vehicles, so the cost of “buying” this keyword for pay per click purchases is very high. Any time somebody clicks on that ad that’s targeting the word “car,” the cost to the company putting out the ad is quite high.

For bigger businesses, this might be fine. However, if you’re a smaller car dealership, you might have better luck going for “auto,” which is a synonym for “car” yet a keyword with a lower competition level. These words will still show up when potential customers are doing searches (most people who are searching for “car” will likely search for “automobile”), and even if the event that the customer doesn’t search for “auto,” the keyword is related to “car.” Google and other search engines understand the magic of synonyms, and you could get included in a search for “car” even if you didn’t buy the keyword!

Using low competition keywords is a great way to get a lot of attention for much less money. When you sign up for pay per click advertising, be sure to do some research first and come up with commonly searched for terms that are lower competition. Don’t just go for the most obvious words – while it might seem that this would get you more advertising bang for your buck, remember that you’ll be paying out considerably more bucks for what might not even be a worthwhile bang.

In following articles, we talk about the best routes of finding these low competition keywords that will help you keep costs down while boosting site viewership. It might sound too good to be true, but effective pay per click advertising is a great way to get the attention of niche markets – and it doesn’t have to be expensive!

1. You need a third party Twitter client

2. You have to engage the community with value

If you keep those two things in mind then you will be off to a great start.

The first thing you need to do when new to Twitter is to get a Twitter client – I like to use Hootsuite. I suggest you also use this. The benefits are many.

First off the Hootsuite layout is much easier to use effectively than the actual Twitter set up. It will allow you to do much more than the traditional Twitter dashboard. In fact you will be able to:

Create Custom Search Columns – See every Tweet that mentions a keyword you set, as it happens in real time.

Track your Tweets – Hootsutie has great analytical tools that will track click on your Tweet links, retweets etc…

It Runs in Browser – So no downloads to worry about, you can access it from ANY computer that is connected to the internet.

Manage Multiple Accounts – It lets you manage more than one account and in fact allows more than Twitter. I have my Facebook linked as well.

Scheduling a Tweet – You can set up Tweets to be send out at any time you want. This will allow you to keep a consistent presence on Twitter, and is a time management tool as well.

Hootsuite is also free – so that is a nice addition!

Once you are set up on Hootsuite it is time to start Tweeting. Keep these best practices in mind when Tweeting:

Set up search columns that are based on key terms within your niche. Engage these people.

Don’t spam links – you want to offer value to the Twitter community. For every link of your own you promote, you should have at least 5 nonpromotional @replies to other peoples Tweets.

Retweet others links and interesting Tweets. This will foster a sense of community.

Engage with people on a personal level

Be yourself – it is OK to be different on Twitter

Respond to anyone who Tweets you or about you

Leave 20 spaces in your tweets so people can easily retweet them

Use and learn about hashtags!

Really the most important thing to remember is Twitter is a community. You want to be a valuable part of it and not a spammer. Think of Twitter as a cocktail party – you wouldn’t go up and give random people your business cards, you would chat first, get to know them, find some common ground etc… That is how oyu should use Twitter.

Building your followers might seem like a grind at first, but eventually you will get to the point where your followers start paying off – and then you will realize the grind was well worth it.

There are many great markets you can make money in online. But you will save yourself a lot of time and effort if you don’t try to go toe to toe with the ‘big boys’.

For example, lets say you want to make money in the weight loss market, which is an extremely competitive market. Why make your life harder than it needs to be by trying to go straight on against millions of competitors? That’s just silly.

Instead, why not find a ‘little’ sub section of that market where there will be much less competition but still enough interest for you to make a very nice living (and remember, this is just one website. You can repeat this method as many times as you want and have dozens of niche websites all making you money).

So, instead of focusing on such a broad term as weight loss, why not find a niche that targets “middle aged women and weight loss”? Or how about “teenage boys weight loss”? See what I mean, you are still in the weight loss market but you are targeting a more precise sub section of the market instead of trying to throw a net over the whole ocean.

Doing this will make it so much easier to make money online. It will just make your life so much simpler and you can find a great list of highly targeted keywords that you can rank for a lot more easily than you would if you went with the broad weight loss terms.

To find highly targeted keywords for your niche all you have to do is to use the free Google Keyword Tool online. Start by entering a broad search term related to your niche, say weight loss for moms. The tool will give you a list of up to two hundred variations of that keyword.

Some of the variations will work, some won’t. But it will give you a great place to start. From there you can drill down even further until you have a nice big keyword list to work from.

You also want to make sure that the keywords you choose are highly relevant to your website. Don’t choose a bunch of keywords that have a high monthly search volume if they are not highly relevant to what your website is all about. The traffic that you get won’t be very targeted and your conversions will suffer.

Finding great niche keywords is one of the most important tasks you can master to have a successful online business. Good keywords may take some time to find but when you do they are like money in the bank. Use the free tools online or invest in some down loadable software, it’s up to you. Just make sure you know what you need to look for and the difference between a good keyword and a not so good keyword.

I’ve got good news!

Sometimes the little guy wins. Heck, it isn’t easy and sometimes it’s a close call, but little guys do win and when they do… victory is sweet!

What can you do when you’re being threatened by the bully down the street?

1. Take a careful look at the Competition

Every business has its strengths and weaknesses. You need to be aware of both… your competitors strong points, and the places where room for improvement is quite obvious.

2. Be Flexible

Don’t expect your competitor to broadcast his next move so that you can be prepared to block it. You’ve got to think a step ahead, and be ready to outsmart his next maneuver.

3. Use a little Judo

You don’t have to be big and brawny to successfully use Judo. Why? It’s an art that uses your opponent’s momentum to trip him up. So what if you don’t have thousands of dollars to invest in a campaign.

When you’re competition has invested his tens of thousands in one, you’ll be able to make a quick about turn and counteract quickly with a smaller campaign of your own.

He’ll either forfeit his investment or continue through, but loose steam.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret about your competitors that might encourage you. Although big businesses often have a wide variety of products filling their shelves, they often don’t have depth.

Think about it this way.

You may run to your local department store and find everything ranging from make-up to camping equipment. The problem with that? …chances are they don’t have an extremely wide assortment of their products.

This means that if you’re an avid outdoorsman, you probably wouldn’t be satisfied choosing between two cheap brands of tents when there is an amazing variety on the market. An outdoor related store could get one over on the big department store by offering the widest variety of fewer products in a focused field.

Another asset about being the small guy, is that it’s easier to make a quick turn. Hey, how many managers do you have to get okays from to make a quick decision? Think of the weeks it takes for a local department store to send a request from a customer for a certain product to the regional or national management? Yeah, too long!

As a small business, you can have a new product on your shelves within a week. If I were a customer wanting a new tent, I’d prefer to not wait until summer was half over to get it.

There are a lot of benefits to being the small guy. Don’t take bullying lying down. You have what it takes to get the best end of the stick and come out a winner.

The great thing about a forum is that it’s an easy place to establish a reputation of expertise. What you should absolutely not do is join a forum and start spamming it with ads for your business. This will only annoy the other users of the forum, and could possibly end up getting your account deleted by the moderators of the forum itself.

The best way to use a forum is to join one that is specifically related to your area of interest and product sales and start offering advice. For example, if you own a car dealership, you should look for dealership-related forums that pertain to the kinds of autos you sell. Then, you put in the address of your website or social media profile in the “signature” area of your profile and start answering questions. Giving out advice for free sounds like it might not be the best way to end up producing revenue, but once you can establish yourself as an expert on the forums, you can start drawing people into being curious about your products and services. After all, if you’re so helpful on the forum, you might have something useful to offer in the realm of sales, as well.

Another way to drum up trust in your business area using forums is to create your own forum. Of course, you’ll need to go through proper advertising channels in order to make people aware of your forum, but this is a great thing to announce on your Twitter feeds and Facebook profiles! If you can get a lively forum going that is directly attached to the website you have for your offline business, it’s a great way to get traffic to your site and a lot more customers, since you’ll have daily traffic to the forum. A successful forum might even have thousands of hits per day!

Establishing a reputation of excellence and expertise is the lifeblood of any small business. As it’s likely that you’re competing with a big box store of some sort, your bread and butter is the personal touch that you can add to your customer’s experience. When the business is online, or when you’re advertising your offline business online, a great place to show that you actually do possess both excellence and expertise is by engaging people on forums. In this way, you start building relationships of trust with the online contingent, and draw them further into your store and products.

1. Price – WordPress is free, you can even use their WordPress.com service to host your site for free. You also don’t have to pay any money to design your family website. WordPress has thousands of free themes that will change the whole design of your site with the click of a button.

2. Dynamic Nature – WordPress is the ultimate tool to post dynamic content. What that means is it is made for publishing time sensitive content that is continually being updated. Out of the box with no settings tweaked WordPress will naturally publish your content by date, with the freshest news displayed.

3. Easy Picture Galleries – WordPress makes it so simple to upload a picture. You just click one button and you can add a picture to your latest news posts. Take it one step further though and upload a number of pictures. WordPress has a built in gallery feature that will allow you to share all your Christmas pictures in one post. They will appear in a nice grid formation as thumbnails that expand when clicked.

4. Add Authors – You can easily add other authors to your WordPress powered site. Why is this important? Well imagine you and your family live in NY, but your brother and his family live in LA. You can add your brother as an author and he will be able to add his own family updates and pictures. You can add as many family members as you want as well. WordPress will also show which author wrote what, so you won’t get confused on updates.

These four reasons alone should be enough to show you that WordPress is the best way to deal with family updates and/or newsletters. The ability to add content constantly, have it organized and include picture galleries means that your family newsletter will never be looked at as boring again.

You have now realized that video advertising is not only more effective, but may end up costing you less money in advertising in the long run. We have also talked about different ways you can do your own marketing using video advertising for free.

If you have decided to contact an advertising company about using video advertising on the internet, such as Google or Microsoft, which is now coming out with a new program, you will have many different options as to where your videos can be placed.

Just like television advertising, you will want to reach your target audience. This means that a video advertising a rock band will not be promoted on a website that deals with travel. The wonderful thing about using a professional service is that they know exactly what websites are out there and where to promote your video.

Costs for using a professional advertising agency will depend upon how often you want the video used, the sites you want it to be used on, and the length of the video. Naturally, if you want your video splashed across Yahoo’s front page, it is going to cost you a lot more than if you want it on a blog that accepts google ads.

The choice will be up to you. Perhaps you own a travel business and are promoting a tour to Cancun. This is a tour that will be all inclusive and is a great deal. Where will it be promoted?

The video can be promoted on websites that are upscale and perhaps designed for either families or couples. For example, if you are advertising a romantic getaway to Cancun, this can be placed on a variety of websites. Dating sites may be one. Websites for jewelry companies can be another. Any site that is designed for romance or married people or couples is a target. Certain travel magazines have websites, this may be an excellent place to advertise your romantic getaway.

Perhaps you are offering a three day stay in Disney World. You will want your target audience to be people with children. There are many different family oriented websites on the internet, parenting advice websites and so forth. The advertiser will know where to find them and how much it will cost to advertise. This is what you are paying for – their expertise of knowing the best websites on which to advertise on the internet.

If you do not want to spend a lot of money but have a quirky type of ad that can generate business and maybe has a little humor to it, it may be advertised on someone’s blog. Many people have discovered the joy of blogging and certain internet blogging websites offer google ads for bloggers. The ads are free and the person who blogs gets a little bit of money every time someone clicks on your ad. The advertisers know the blogs that get the most traffic and your quirky little ad might just start making the rounds all over the internet.

If you want to place the video ad on your website or on free internet websites that allow videos, you will have to make sure that your contract stipulates that you have the right to do this. While some advertising companies will allow you to promote your own ad, others will not. Some want exclusive rights. If the advertising company actually developed the video ad for you, they will retain exclusive rights and you will not be able to use it anywhere without their written permission.

Video ads can go just about anywhere banner ads go. The beauty of the video ad, however, is that it is more closely paid attention to than a banner ad and you do not run the risk of someone accidentally clicking onto it.

There are literally millions of websites on the internet. Web advertisers are familiar with the traffic that these sites generate. Your fee will be based upon the amount of traffic the website expects to see.

In addition, the length of your video matters a great deal in video advertising. It is best to keep it short. Not only is it cheaper to run the video ad this way, but people generally have a short attention span and something that is too long generally bores them.

Take a look at television commercials prior to embarking on your video ad venture. See which ones you pay attention to and which ones you can’t even remember. See which ones you get bored of and dread every time they come on. Your video advertising is similar to this. No one wants to constantly see a long, boring video all over the internet. A short, entertaining video that is used sporadically, however, will generate more interest and may even develop a cult following.

People are crazy about internet videos. They use them on their personal internet community pages such as MySpace and Facebook and often e-mail them to their friends and relatives. This can happen to you. You may come up with an advertisement that is clever, entertaining and brings you instant internet notoriety.

If you decide not to use a professional agency, you will be able to put the video anywhere that is free. You can also act as your own advertising agent and make deals with certain websites yourself. This can be difficult and you should have some knowledge about copyright laws and legal contracts before doing this. And unlike the professionals, you may not know much about the website. Unfortunately, on the internet, websites come and go. You would hate to make a deal and pay money to advertise on a site that closes within the next week.

If you use a professional internet advertising agency, chances are that you will hit your target audience with your video ad and will find it more successful than a banner ad. Your video will be able to go just about any place on the internet that your banner ad can go, or your word ad. The difference will be that more people will pay attention to what you are trying to sell.

This short report will cover the most critical items you need to be aware of when it comes to search engine optimization.

Google Rules: As of today, Google has a stranglehold on the search engine market. They hold about a 70% market share. When you are optimizing for the search engines, it usually means Google. It has the best chance to consistently send you leads.

It’s All In The Keyword: The strength of SEO is that you can attempt to rank for whichever keywords you want. Keywords are the terms users search for on a search engine. The strongest SEO campaigns will begin with properly researched keywords. The basic cycle is to brainstorm a list of words you think people would search to find your business or offering. Then you plug this list into online tools like the Google Keyword Tool, and you will be given even more options. You can also view the competition and the amount the keywords are searched. This way you can figure out which keywords are worth ranking for.

Think Local & Long-tail: Quite often ranking for a location based keyword is easier than just the keyword itself. Similarly, ranking for keywords that are 3-4 words long is also easier than one word queries. For example, ranking on the top of Google for “Bakery” would probably be very hard. If you add a local flair to it, it becomes much more likely. Ranking for “Tallahassee Bakery” will be a lot easier. Even easier than that would be a long-tail term like “Tallahassee Wedding Cake Bakery”. Each of those keyword terms are progressively easier to rank for, but the trade off is they are searched less. Counter that by trying to rank for as many related long-tail terms as possible.

Your Web Platform Matters: While any type of website can rank in the search engines (so breathe easy if you already have a website built), the platform you build it with can speed up the SEO process. The single most powerful platform I have used is WordPress. Google seems to love it…and for good reason. WordPress was initially a blogging platform, so it makes it very easy to add new content. Google loves new content (more on that later), so WordPress is favored since it likely includes fresh content. WordPress also includes many free plugins that are designed to boost your SEO rankings. The navigational set up of WordPress is also more inline with the type of interlinking Google values. They want to send people to sites that are easy to navigate. If you are choosing one platform to build your website with, seriously consider WordPress.

On-Page and Off-Page: Once you have your website platform chosen and list of keywords you can begin to optimize your website. The two major ways are on-page and off-page. It is a widely held belief that you should spend 20% of your time on-page optimization and 80% off page.

On-page optimization is making your site search engine friendly. One of the major concerns you want to address are the title tags on every page. Each page should have it’s own title and include a different keyword term. This way each of your websites pages can rank for a different search engine term. If you use WordPress you can install plugins like All in One SEO to help with this. You will also want to make sure your keywords show up in your site’s content but do not stuff them in. They have to be used moderately and naturally. Other on-page concerns include cleaning up any broken links on your site, including a sitemap, a privacy policy and proper working navigation.

Off-page optimization comes down to almost purely link building. One of the best ways to get your website into the search engines is if lot’s of people link back to your site. Actively building backlinks can be a grueling process but it works. For best results you will want your keyword to be the actual text of the link. Whatever words form the actual link are known as “anchor text”. You want your anchor text to be your chosen keywords! To get started add your website link to any online profiles you may have.

Consistent Content: This is one of the best ways to properly optimize your site for the search engines. You must be creating and posting content on your site regularly. It doesn’t have to be daily (although that would rock!) but I think weekly is a great goal. If you can’t do that yourself, you can get an employee to take that on, or find cheap outsourcing solutions.

Content is the lifeblood of your website. It is why people come to it and why people stay. Creating content also gives you more chances to rank in the search engines. If you are posting helpful articles to your site, make sure to get some keywords in the title so they can show up in the search engines. This is why WordPress is so powerful, it makes adding content easy.

Google loves fresh content as well. Sites that have fresh updated content are more relevant by their very nature in Google’s eyes. Commit to creating content consistently and you will see your search engine rank grow along with your traffic and revenue.

Search Engine Optimization is one of the best advertising opportunities online today. Start your SEO efforts today, and soon you won’t have to worry about cold calls because your customers will be finding you.