You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as the bylines are included.
Power Training for your Website ? Build that traffic
By Marc Lindsay
We all know what it is like to get in the gym and do a darn good workout don’t we??
>It feels exhilarating and you walk away with a sense of achievement and that you have done something right to your body
Well I was in the gym the other day doing the strength component of my training and I it made me question myself. What is it that makes us bigger, grow more muscle, and get stronger.
Or in the Internet side of things create more traffic flow, have more links coming in and achieve a higher Search Engine Ranking.
They both require constant attention and work, It is better to work two or three major area’s at the same time doing "power movements" as this creates more "bang for your buck" so to say.
Well I have taken the major concepts of what is working for me in the gym and applied it to Internet Marketing. "POWER MOVEMENTS"
So what is this amazing "power movement" you are talking about.
It really is simple?? You are reading it.
That’s right by writing your own unique articles and submitting them to article submission sites you can do a Power Workout for your website by growing the three major groups. More traffic, more incoming links, higher search engine ranking.
It doesn’t have to exactly be about what you are offering as there are plenty of article accepting sites around. It could be on how to play golf properly but it is the recognition at the bottom of the article that matters.
A simple signature with a short description of your site. Aswell as the web address of your site. Similar to the one at the bottom of this article.
This is the "power movement" I am speaking of and trust me if you place one article a week and submit it to as many sites as you can then you will very quickly see a rise in incoming links, search engine rankings and traffic to your site for years to come.
A lot of articles you write may even be picked up by other sites that you haven’t even submitted to yet. This is the beauty of it all.
Write one small article and reap the "power movements" for years to come.
And that is it.
See told you it was simple.
Click below to find out how many thousands of sites are waiting for your hot article now
Or alternatively you could do a search at
http://www.yahoo.com With the search phrase "article submission"
For something so simple it is worth getting over your fears and as Nike would say "Just Do It"
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About The Author
Marc Lindsay has been working his own Work from Home business for over 2 years now. For more information, tips, tricks, hot products and articles check out http://www.work-from-home-blueprint.com
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A few Advantages Disadvantages Of Internet Marketing are:
* It’s on the internet so it’s low cost
* Very fast
* And you can reach a global audience
However it:
* Can leave the businessman feeling isolated
* Hard to tell if people are lying because you can’t see their face
* And you can be overloaded with information.
There are more Advantages Disadvantages Of Internet Marketing, but I wont cover them all in one article. However I will focus on a few important ones.
Positives:
Low cost:
The internet is made up of electrons, so there is not really anything physically to grab hold of like in a brick and mortar business. This considerably reduces your costs as you don’t really need many materials or buildings. Just a computer with world wide web capabilities : )
Very fast:
A great advertisement I saw once said “If you were an electron, you would be there by now”. This was an ad at an airport. It’s referring to the internet. It’s made up of electrons so it’s VERY fast. Click a link, and you could be looking at an Australian website, click another one and you could be in America. If you wanted to get information any other way from these countries, you may end up having to go there.The world wide web eliminates the need for this. Go any where you want with the click of a button.
You can reach a global audience:
By this I mean, you don’t have to set up shop somewhere and sell to the locals. You can set up an online shop, and sell to anyone in the world. This means a huge increase in potential revenues and a fraction of the cost it would take for you to set up shops all over the world.
Negatives:
Can leave the businessman feeling isolated:
This is very common. Because the world wide web is faceless (In most cases), it can appear cold and inhuman. This can leave you feeling isolated and very inward. Not a nice feeling at all. Everyone likes to socialize and meet people, but in this case, its quite difficult to, in business anyway.
Hard to tell if people are lying:
There is so much information on the world wide web now, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between crap and quality. A lot of the crap is targeted at newbies. Here’s an example “Make money fast by doing NOTHING”, sound familiar? I bet you’ve had a ton of emails saying something similar.
Information Overload:
Once again we get to the part of there being a lot of information on the world wide web. There can be too much good information too. There can be a lot of competition for an industry, this can leave you more confused than if there were presented with loads of crap. You might not be able to tell who to chose. If you are a veteran of the net, you wont have much to worry about, however if you’re a newbie then this is a problem.
The above are the positive and the negatives. Overall, I would definitely say that if you can do business online, then definitely do it.
By Stephen Warren, the creator of http://www.marketershandbook.com, the completely FREE guide to marketing online, with useful articles and links.
]]>Primarily, what you need to digest is the fact that search engines fall short of Mandrake’s magic mechanism! They simply don’t create URLs out of thin air but instead send their spiders crawling across those sites that have rendered prayers (and expensive offerings!) to them for consideration. Even when sites like Google claim to have a massive 3 billion web pages in its database, a large portion of the web nation is invisible to these spiders. To think they are simply ignorant of the Invisible Web. This invisible web holds that content, normal search engines can’t index because the information on many web sites is in databases that are only searchable within that site. Sites like www.imdb.com - The Internet Movie Database , www.incywincy.com - IncyWincy, the invisible web search engine and www.completeplanet.com - The Complete Planet that cover this area are perhaps the only way you can access content from that portion of the Internet, invisible to the search gods. Here, you don’t perform a direct content search but search for the resources that may access the content. (Meaning - be sure to set aside considerable time for digging.)
None of the search engines indexes everything on the Web (I mean none). Tried research literature on popular search engines? AltaVista to Yahoo, will list thousands of sources on education, human resource development, etc. etc. but mostly from magazines, newspapers, and various organizations’ own Web pages, rather than from research journals and dissertations- the main sources of research literature. That’s because most of the journals and dissertations are not yet available publicly on the Web. Thought they’ll get you all that’s hosted on the web? Think again.
The Web is huge and growing exponentially. Simple searches, using a single word or phrase, will often yield thousands of “hits”, most of which will be irrelevant. A layman going in for a piece of info to the internet has to deal with a more severe issue - too much information! And if you don’t learn how to control the information overload from these websites, returned by a search result, roll out the red carpet for some frustration. A very common problem results from sites that have a lot of pages with similar content. For e.g., if a discussion thread (in a forum) goes on for a hundred posts there will be a hundred pages all with similar titles, each containing a wee bit of information. Now instead of just one link, all hundred of those darn pages will crop up your search result, crowding out other relevant site. Regardless of all the sophistication technology has brought in, many well thought-out search phrases produce list after list of irrelevant web pages. The typical search still requires sifting through dirt to find the gold. If you are not specific enough, you may get too many irrelevant hits.
As said, these search engines do not actually search the web directly but their centralized server instead. And unless this database is updated continually to index modified, moved, deleted or renamed documents, you will land yourself amidst broken links and stale copies of web pages. So if they inadequately handle dynamic web pages whose content changes frequently, chances are for the information they reference to quickly go out-of-date. After they wage their never ending war with over-zealous promoters (spamdexers rather), where do they have time to keep their databases current and their search algorithms tuned? No surprise if a perfectly worthwhile site may go unlisted!
Similarly, many of the Web search engines are undergoing rapid development and are not well documented. You will have only an approximate idea of how they are working, and unknown shortcomings may cause them to miss desired information. Not to mention, amongst the first class information, the web also houses false, misleading, deceptive and dressed up information actually produced by charlatans. The Web itself is unstable and tomorrow they may not find you the site they found you today. Well if you could predict them, they would not be god!…would they?! The syntax (word order and punctuation) for various types of complex searches varies some from search engine to search engine, and small errors in the syntax can seriously compromise the search. For instance, try the same phrase search on different search engines and you’ll know what I mean. Novices… read this line - using search engines does involve a learning curve. Many beginning Internet users, because of these disadvantages, become discouraged and frustrated.
Like a journalist put it, “Not showing favoritism to its business clients is certainly a rare virtue in these times.” Search engines have increasingly turned to two significant revenue streams. Paid placement: In addition to the main editorial-driven search results, the search engines display a second - and sometimes third - listing that’s usually commercial in nature. The more you pay, the higher you’ll appear in the search results. Paid inclusion: An advertiser or content partner pays the search engine to crawl its site and include the results in the main editorial listing. So?…more likely to be in the hit list but then again - no guarantees. Of course those refusing to favor certain devotees are industry leaders like Google that publishes paid listings, but clearly marks them as ‘Sponsored Links.’
The possibility of these ‘for-profit’ search gods (which haven’t yet made much profit) for taking fees to skew their searches, can’t be ruled out. But as a searcher, the hit list you are provided with by the engine should obviously rank in the order of relevancy and interest. Search command languages can often be complex and confusing and the ranking algorithm is unique to each god based on the number of occurrences of the search phrase in a page, if it appears in the page title, or in a heading, or the URL itself, or the meta tag etc. or on a weighted average of a number of these relevance scores. E.g. Google (www.google.com) uses its patented PageRank TM and ranks the importance of search results by examining the links that lead to a specific site. The more links that lead to a site, the higher the site is ranked. Pop on popularity!
Alta Vista, HotBot, Lycos, Infoseek and MSN Search use keyword indexes ? fast access to millions of documents. The lack of an index structure and poor accuracy of the size of the WWW, will not make searching any easier. Large number of sites indexed. Keyword searching can be difficult to get right.
In reality, however, the prevalence of a certain keyword is not always in proportion to the relevance of a page. Take this example. A search on sari - the national costume of India ?in a popular search engine, returned among it’s top sites, the following links:
?www.scri.sari.ac.uk/- of the Scottish Crop research Institute
?www.ubudsari.com/ -a health resort in Indonesia
?www.sari-energy.org/ - The South Asia Regional Initiative for Energy Cooperation and Development
Pretty useful sites for someone very much interested in knowing how to drape or the tradition of the sari?! (Well, no prayer goes unanswered…whether you like the answer or not!) By using keywords to determine how each page will be ranked in search results and not simply counting the number of instances of a word on a page, search engines are attempting to make the rankings better by assigning more weight to things like titles, subheadings, and so on.
Now, unless you have a clear idea of what you’re looking for, it may be difficult or impossible to use a keyword search, especially if the vocabulary of the subject is unfamiliar. Similarly, the concept based search of Excite (instead of individual words, the words that you enter into a search are grouped and attempted to determine the meaning) is a difficult task and yields inconsistent results.
Besides who reviews or evaluates these sites for quality or authority? They are simply compiled by a computer program. These active search engines rely on computerized retrieval mechanisms called “spiders”, “crawlers”, or “robots”, to visit Web sites, on a regular basis and retrieve relevant keywords to index and store in a searchable database. And from this huge database yields often unmanageable and comprehensive results….results whose relevance is determined by their computers. The irrelevant sites (high percentage of noise, as it’s called), questionable ranking mechanisms and poor quality control may be the result of less human involvement to weed out junk. Thought human intervention would solve all probes….read on.
From the very first search engine ? Yahoo to about.com, Snap.com, Magellan, NetGuide, Go Network, LookSmart, NBCi and Starting Point, all subject directories index and review documents under categories ? making them more manageable. Unlike active search engines, these passive or human-selected search engines like don’t roam the web directly and are human controlled, relying on individual submissions. Perhaps the easiest to use in town, but the indexing structure these search engines cover only a small portion of the actual number of WWW sites and thus is certainly not your bet if you intend specific, narrow or complex topics.
Subject designations may be arbitrary, confusing or wrong. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted. Never contains full text of the web they link to - you can only search what you see titles, descriptions, subject categories, etc. Human-labor intensive process limits database currency, size, rate of growth and timeliness. You may have to branch through the categories repeatedly before arriving at the right page. They may be several months behind the times because of the need for human organization. Try looking for some obscure topic….chances for the people that maintain the directory to have excluded those pages. Obviously, machines can blindly count keywords but they can’t make common-sense judgement as humans can. But then why does human-edited directories respond with all this junk?!
And here’s about those meta search engines. A comprehensive search on the entire WWW using The Big Hub, Dogpile, Highway61, Internet Sleuth or Savvysearch , covering as many documents as possible may sound as good an idea as a one stop shopping.Meta search engines do not create their own databases. They rely on existing active and passive search engine indexes to retrieve search results. And the very fact that they access multiple keyword indexes reduces their response time. It sure does save your time by searching several search engines at once but at the expense of redundant, unwanted and overwhelming results….much more ? important misses. The default search mode differs from search site to search site, so the same search is not always appropriate in different search engine software. The quality and size of the databases vary widely.
As a webmaster, your site registration with the biggest billboards in Times Square can get you closer to bingo! for the searcher. Those who didn’t even know you existed before are in your living room in New York time!
Your URL registration is a no-brainer, considering the generation of flocking traffic to your site. Certainly a quick and inexpensive method, yet is only a component of the overall marketing strategy that in itself offers no guarantees, no instant results and demands continued effort for the webmaster. Commerce rules the web. Like how a notable Internet caveman put it, “Web publishers also find dealing with search engines to be a frustrating pursuit. Everybody wants their pages to be easy for the world to find, but getting your site listed can be tough. Search sites may take a long time to list your site, may never list it at all, and may drop it after a few months for no reason. If you resubmit often, as it is very tempting to do, you may even be branded a spamdexer and barred from a search site. And as for trying to get a good ranking, forget it! You have to keep up with all the arcane and ever-changing rules of a dozen different search engines, and adjust the keywords on your pages just so…all the while fighting against the very plausible theory that in fact none of this stuff matters, and the search sites assign rankings at random or by whim.
“To make the best use of Web search engines–to find what you need and avoid an avalanche of irrelevant hits– pick search engines that are well suited to your needs. And lest you’d want to cry “Ye immortal gods! where in the world are we?”, spend a few hours becoming moderately proficient with each. Each works somewhat differently, most importantly in respect to how you broaden or narrow a search.
Finding the appropriate search engine for your particular information need, can be frustrating. To effectively use these search engines, it is important to understand what they are, how they work, and how they differ. For e.g. while using a meta search engine, remember that each engine has its own methods of displaying and ranking results. Remember, search strategies affect the results. If the user is unaware of basic search strategies, results may be spotty.
Quoting Charlie Morris (the former editor of The Web developer’s journal) - “Search engines and directories survive, and indeed flourish, because they’re all we’ve got. If you want to use the wealth of information that is the Web, you’ve got to be able to find what you want, and search engines and directories are the only way to do that. Getting good search results is a matter of chance. Depending on what you’re searching for, you may get a meaty list of good resources, or you may get page after page of irrelevant drivel. By laboriously refining your search, and using several different search engines and directories (and especially by using appropriate specialty directories), you can usually find what you need in the end.”
Search engines are very useful, no doubt. Right from getting a quick view of a topic to finding expert contact info…verily certain issues lie in their lap. Now the very reason we bother about these search engines so much is because they’re all we’ve got! Though there sure is a lot of room for improvement, the hour’s need is to not get caught in the middle of the road. By simply understanding what, how and where to seek, you’d spare yourself the fate of chanting that old Jewish proverb “If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.”
Happy searching!
Liji is a PostGraduate in Software Science, with a flair for writing on anything under the sun. She puts her dexterity to work, writing technical articles in her areas of interest which include Internet programming, web design and development, ecommerce and other related issues.
]]>(1)List Building: One of the most POWERFUL ways to promote
any website is to have your own list to promote with. This is something that you have heard
many times and it is the
first thing you should be doing to start your way down the
road to success. Building a list is not something that is
hard nor is it costly. There are many ways that you can do
this one would be to start your own newsletter or safelist.
This is something that is easy to do and it is very very
profitable.
(2)Ezine Advertising: Still the most powerful advertising
that you can get on the internet. Ezine’s have subscribers
that are looking for ways to make money or increase their
incomes. Solo Ads are the best! They are sent to the
publishers data base by their self with no other adverts,
Also TopSponsor Ads are a great source of advertising
because it is the first thing the readers will see when
they start reading the Newsletter Issue for that day.
(3)SearchEngine Advertising: Now with Affiliate programs
you do not have much control over the way that the webpage
is built. So in order to get your affiliate program ranked
in searchengines is to use a Frames Page Template. This is
a text template that can be put in HTML to mirror your
affilate page with your affiliate link. This way you can
add your own meta tags that will help you get a higher page
rank.
(4)Leads And Traffic: This can be very responsive
advertising because you can target your market of buyers,
Alot of time these lead companys are using FFA and
Classified Ads lead pages to get email addresses of people
that are looking for ways to make a income. Good Lead
companys use a Double Optin Process to capture leads of
people that are looking for ways to get advertising or
affiliate programs to join. You can do a search for Leads
and Traffic sites through your searchengines like google
and excite.
(5)PPC (Pay-Per-Click): PPC advertising can be some of the best ways to advertise any business on the internet. There are many of PPC’s that you can place your advertising with. Just do a search with google and excite and you will find that they are many of them to pick from. These PPC’s can drive all types of targeted traffic to your website or affiliate program for pennys on the dollar. You can also own your own PayPerClick system and send traffic to your site and at the same time use it to build your own targeted list!
The above information is what has pushed HaileysComet Weekly Ezine to the success that it has become and it will work for you as well. 90% of all people that are successful in marketing and advertising have the above or started out with the tools that it takes to make a living online. If you are wanting to jump start your success there is one tool out there that you can use that is proven to pull in loads of cash and help you build a business with the profit you make.
The product is called The Total Resale Package. It has every tool that you need to start,run, and succeed with your very own business. You can pick up a copy of the Total Resale Package here. http://www.haileyscometweekly.com/total-resale/
This is just one of the tools that will put you in the life that you want. It works for me and so many others that are just starting out and I share it with everyone. You can learn more about minisites and the above information with out any cost by coming to my site at the link below and signup for our weekly newsletter. It is packed with some of the most helpful hints and tips to get you started and keep you going in your venture to freedom!
Good Luck In Your Quest!
It’s true. Not many people actually ‘get it’.
Information marketing has much in common with the ‘old school’ mail order business. In fact, many of the practices you see online today such as two page direct sales mini-sites, mailing lists and unique products, come directly from the mail order model.
Every Internet Marketer would benefit from studying the mail order industry. The basic marketing principles and practices employed by the industry translate naturally to the online environment.
The five core priorities of successful mail order companies parallel those of the online marketer. They are: demographics, targeting, testing and tracking, up-selling and customer follow up. If you aren’t focused on these key areas yet, read on to discover why should be, and what it will mean for your bottom line.
Direct Response Lesson #1: Demographics
Demographic information provides an in depth profile of your potential customer. There are two ways to acquire demographic information, and two separate motives for each method.
You can:
? Acquire data from consumer data mining companies such as MarketShare Online ? Acquire data from your existing customer base
The preferred source depends on your product development process and your current resources. Professionally gathered data allows you to survey the market and create highly targeted products. Rather than searching through keyword lists for potential niches, you can use demographic data to target specific classes of consumers based on their spending habits and disposable income. Your marketing strategy becomes much clearer with this data in hand. It allows you advance insight into your customer’s interests, pricing points and mindset. Now, you have a baseline against which to test the effectiveness of your sales message.
You should also acquire as much demographic data as possible from your existing customer base and mailing list. Even when you possess the resources to pay for this information you should still query your own customers.
Why?
Quite simply, you need to compare the profile of your existing customer base against your expected customer base. For example, if you sell a high-priced information product targeted towards small business owners, yet find that 50% of your list is composed of non-qualified tire-kickers, something is off with either your sales copy, your targeting or both.
Direct Response Lesson #2: Targeting
Here is a rule of thumb for you to memorize: interest and need alone are not enough to generate a sale. This is a controversial statement, I know. Ask yourself the following question, though: how often have you found yourself interested in a product yet not purchased it? How often have you needed a product, yet not been able to afford it?
The truth is that, in either case, despite your interest and your need, you were only marginally targeted when the offer was presented to you.
This subtle case points to the synergy between demographics and targeting. This is why mail order companies go to such great effort to acquire detailed information on the marketplace. Whether you send 100, 000 pieces of mail or pay for 100,000 visitors to your web site, the goal is the same: put the offer in front of the right people, at the right time. If you put the right offer in front of the right person at the wrong time, it’s the same as no offer at all. It is untargeted.
Direct Response Lesson #3: Testing and Tracking
You absolutely must test and track everything you do. You must track your pay-per-click campaigns, your newsletter mailings and the paths taken by visitors to your web site. You must test your ad copy and your product pricing.
The testing and tracking phase of a marketing campaign marks the proving ground between demographics and targeting. Once you’ve acquired the data on your potential customer’s behavior, you must track their actual behavior to find out if it matches the expected results.
Until you do this, you are really only guessing at what works. Every mail order company places a tracking code on their post cards. This allows them to zero in on the exact location, age, income, race and marital status of responsive customers. When you first launch a product online, however, you are essentially blind to this information until you start tracking. As you gather your data, however, you will discover which search engines and which newsletters pull the best. Over time, you will be able to match this up with deeper demographic data collected from your list and discover, at the very least, the age and income of your customers and which search engines they prefer.
Can you imagine knowing that men between the ages of 24-34, for example, prefer Google, or that stay at home mothers prefer Yahoo? This type of data is priceless because it directs your targeting up front. This is the exact goldmine which awaits you when you devote careful attention to testing and tracking your campaigns.
Direct Response Lesson #4: Create Robust Order Forms for the Up-Sell
Your order form can pull more profit through impulse purchases than you realize. Many internet marketers seem to believe that one product should lead to one simple order form. This is probably due to so many of us being self-taught. We copy what we’ve seen.
Have you ever stopped to examine a mail-in coupon or catalog form? Even when the offer ultimately focuses on one major product, the form still includes an up-sell and sometimes even a counter-offer.
For example:
"Yes! I’d like to order the Incredible Bikini Wax System for $49.95 today! Also, please include my 14 ounce bottle of Instant Soothing Moisturizer, a perfect complement to the Incredible Bikini Wax System and a steal at only $9.99" (Up-Sell)
"Yes, I’d like to subscribe to Golfing Today! Instead of the incredible offer of 12 issues for $14.99, I’d like to receive a full 52 issues a year for $29.95" ( counter-offer)
The reason for doing this, of course, is that the customer is already interested and already in a buying mindset. You’ve done all the hard work to lead him to your site and you’ve enticed him with your sales letter. He’s on the order form with credit card in hand. Why not use this moment to make a complementary offer? You can up-sell a related product of your own or that of one of your joint venture partners for a profit split.
There’s really no harm in making the offer. The customer will either take you up on it or he won’t. The important point here is that a robust order form, with additional offers, helps you squeeze out extra profit and cuts down the work of luring that customer back in the future to make additional purchases.
Direct Response Lesson #5: Post Sale Follow Up
What happens to your customer after the sale? Take a page from the book of mail order secrets and follow up with that customer! If you’ve ever purchased anything through a catalog, you know what happens. You end up on their mailing list and continue to receive catalogs and other offers in the mail.
In fact, you may receive so much mail from that one company that you become irritated! While I don’t recommend going overboard with your mailings, I do recommend moving your customers to an announcement list or newsletter.
You don’t want a one time shot with that individual. Rather, you want to build a lasting relationship. Your follow up process should be designed with several goals in mind:
? Keeping your name and brand in front of the customer ? To build trust and credibility by sharing supporting material that adds value to the product ? To maintain contact so that you can make additional offers in the future
Customer follow up is so important it can’t be stressed enough. There is a rule which states that 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your customers. In other words, if someone purchases from you once, they are likely to purchase from you again provided you take appropriate action and keep them connected to you.
Remember that your customers are human and may go through a variety of emotions after making a purchase.
They may experience buyer’s remorse. They may feel nervous about sharing their credit card information with you and then never hearing from you again. They may absolutely love you and your product and want to reach out for more information. You must tend to each of these variables in order to gain the customer’s trust and appreciation, so follow up!
What will you do with the five lessons presented to you in this article? You have before you a nearly complete outline of a profitable business system for online marketing. Take these principles to hear and put them into practice. Know your market. Speak to your market. Connect to your market. I guarantee your profits will soar.
Copyright 2004 Jo Han Mok
Jo Han Mok is a frequent guest and featured speaker at Internet Marketing bootcamps and conferences on subjects such as copywriting and Joint Venture Marketing. Visit his website to get a simple step-by-step plan that can take you from ground zero to having money deposited in your bank account from an online business every single day for the rest of your life! ==> http://www.SuperFastProfit.com
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How does this benefit you as a marketer?
Well, for example, let’s says a top Internet Marketer comes out with a new product that you review and write up a little article on, and that your competitors do the same.
Google generally tends to index pages at the start of the month and if you miss that update, you will probably need to wait till the next month to even see your entry in.
But, since your site has RSS feeds, it now gets indexed more frequently. So the chances of getting your page indexed quickly are much higher.
This gives you an advantage over the competition, as your review will show up sooner in the search results than theirs.
Imagine what an entire month’s advantage could do to your affiliate sales!
Why Javascript Feeds Are Not Effective
Some sites offer javascript code that generates content sourced from RSS feeds for your site.
These are of absolutely no value in terms of search engine rankings, as the googlebot cannot read javascript and the content is not interpreted as part of your page.
What you need is code that parses the RSS feed and renders the feed as html content that’s part of your page.
This is achieved using server side scripting languages like PHP or ASP.
A good free ASP script is available from Kattanweb
http://www.kattanweb.com/webdev/projects/index.asp?ID=7
An equally good PHP script is CARP
http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/
So in conclusion, besides optimizing on page and off page factors, adding RSS feeds to your pages should be an important part of your strategy to boost your search engine rankings.
Satyajeet Hattangadi is the CEO of Novasoft Inc, a software
solutions provider, that specializes in affordable
customized software solutions. http://www.novasoft-inc.com
Get the Free Email Course “RSS Riches” and learn how to use
RSS to get high search engine rankings and monetize your
website at http://www.trafficturbocharger.com
A few years ago, we were struggling to drive traffic to one of our websites. We were immediately overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge and skill it took to successfully drive traffic to our site. We had assumed that if we created a site that was worth seeing, it would be seen. We could not have been more wrong.
We ran into a number of companies who offered to take over this daunting task for us. We decided to try out a number of them to see how our competition stacks up.
They offered many packages of visitors. I remember my first purchase. I bought 5,000 targeted hits from them for $10. My product cost $15 at the time, so I figured at least 1 person out of 10,000 would purchase. The days went by, and my counter went crazy.
The Results
After our contract expired, all my hits had been delivered as expected. I did not have one sale!!
I Should Have Learned My Lesson!
Thinking this had to be a fluke.. I switched to another company, and bought the same package.
Again, I GOT NO SALES!!
I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I was confident my ad’s were written well. The site was well designed and planned, and my product was in demand…
I Started To Investigate
Frustrated, I started to investigate exactly where these visitors were coming from. I discovered, that I had fallen victim to one of the most common scams on the internet. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first discovered the secrets these company’s use to drive traffic to the clients sites.
I checked the script I had installed that was used to check detailed stats on all of our traffic. All 10,000 of our hits came in 2 days, and all 10,000 of them were logged in for less than 3 seconds. Not a single one of them navigated past our main page. My stats script will also tell me where my traffic was referred from, and what keywords they used. All of these hits had the same referral, and didn’t use keywords. This last fact isn’t important, because any company, good or bad, will redirect their traffic sources through their domain. This is just to keep competitors from stealing their sources (good or bad).
I believe that these company’s are going to pay for their greed and dishonesty sometime in the near future.
In the next few pages, we are going to reveal exactly how these greedy companies scam you. This will help you avoid such scams, and put your money to good use, instead of wasting it.
You Will Be Shocked at what these company’s do to send you traffic!
This is the most immoral, unethical, and dishonest business practice I have ever come across online. These companies know exactly what they’re doing. After all, if their traffic methods work, wouldn’t they use it themselves? Why is a company offering millions of hits to their visitors, when they are only getting 10-15 hits a day? They don’t use their own methods, because they know their hits are useless.
I fell victim to this scam, as have thousands of others. These companies give you a sales pitch something like this…
Suppose that you sell a product for $25 and that in a worst case scenario only 1% of your visitors purchase your product.
An average site gets less than 100 hits per day (3,000/month). Thus, approximately 30 people will purchase the product every month (1% of 3,000). That means you are taking in only $750 per month (30 x $25)
With our service: Suppose the site owner (you) purchases 100,000 visitors with our service. Using our assumption that only 1% of visitors will purchase the product, a total of 1,000 purchases will be made. That’s a value of$25,000! And that is if only 1% of visitors purchase the product! Think about the return on your investment!
If you’re like me, you got pretty excited when you read that. After all, there’s no conceivable way you can’t at least earn your investment back, right? WRONG!!
You give in, order their service, and at first, you get excited, because traffic is pouring in! Soon you realize that your money is earning you nothing. In fact it’s costing you your bandwidth, and not delivering any results!
Of course no company, no matter how credible they are, can guarantee you sales. That depends highly on your ad copy, price, and the demand of the item. I can guarantee though, that some of these company’s have thousands of clients, and not one of their clients has ever made a sale.
I bought my traffic… Now where are all my orders?
Now remember, worst case scenario is that 1% of your visitors will buy your product. Right? WRONG! If that’s the case, then where are your orders? These company’s place these ads right in your face when you visit their website. This way, your sold before you even see the price, and you’ll buy into their high prices.
Naturally you are going to believe that you’ll pay off your “investment” right away, and make a ton of extra money. After all, you spent hours writing that “perfect ad,” so you’re going to draw in a lot more than 1%.
I’ll let you in on a secret. No matter how good your ad is, it doesn’t do any good if it’s never read.
You sit there and watch traffic come flying in at hyperspeed. Then they fly out. You don’t make any sales. What do you do now? If you’re like me, you’re going to email them, complaining how you didn’t make any sales from their services. They’re going to tell you some variation of the following…
“I’m sorry you didn’t make any sales. If you read our terms, you would see that we can only guarantee that we send the traffic to you. The sales are your responsibility. We cannot guarantee sales, because we are not involved in the writing of the advertisement.”
This leaves them clean from delivering any refunds. Trust me, they won’t refund your money!
Starting to get suspicious? The truth is your traffic was delivered in a misleading way.
You were sent FAKE VISITORS, or GHOST VISITORS, as they are widely called online.
Have you been tracking your traffic?
Many people don’t realize that there are free scripts that you can install on your site to track detailed statistics about your traffic. I’m not talking about counters. Counters are inaccurate, plus they don’t tell you anything about your visitors.
If you actually monitor your traffic, you can learn lots of things about your visitors. Including the countries they’re from, their IP addresses, the time they came to your site, the time they left your site, the site’s they were referred from (google, yahoo, etc..), and the keywords they used to search for your site.
My statistics were shocking!
The traffic I ordered had no IP address, no search engine, none of my visitors navigated past the front page! I paid for these “Guarantee’d Real Visitors,” and I have the right to know where they come from. Guess what, I figured it out!
A few of the hits that they had sent, slipped up, and didn’t disguise their origin as well as they should have…
I kept seeing the same IP address over and over and over again about 900 times in one day. I thought somebody out there really must love my web site or it’s the scam hit company I hired. Well I clicked the link that night which was labeled with an IP address, not the actual web site .com name itself just the numbers of the IP address….I clicked that and wouldn’t you know it? I received just a site telling me it doesn’t exist.
With my campaign still running the next day along with all the “unknown” places I seen a peculiar url and had to click that to see where over 500 of the same people were coming from and I ended up in Pop Up hell! You know that hell don’t you? Where you are swarmed with so many pop ups that you literally have to pull the plug on your computer to get out of it? The sad part about that link is that all the Pop Ups were from PORNO sites!
It’s no wonder these companies don’t tell where they deliver their traffic from! After all, what ethical business wants to advertise on those disgusting adult sites?
So you want to know exactly how this all works?
After following the slipped up referral link, I was directed to a website where anyone can post their own free adult site. (If your going to try and follow these links yourself, I would suggest switching your browser to text only mode, as I did. Otherwise you’ll get flooded with pop-ups, and disgusting porno pictures.)
Now we have determined that my traffic was coming from this site, but I didn’t see my site at all…
I switched back to my traffic log, and hit refresh. I WAS STUNNED! At the top of my log, I had 12 hits to my site, all with my IP address!!! By viewing this site just once, I recieved 12 hits!!
I switched over to www.Alexa.com. Alexa is a site ranking service, that can tell you how popular a site is. This adult site that I was listed on was recieving 786,376 hits per day, on average during that week. Multiply that by 12, and that’s where all my traffic came from!
So now we know what site is generating the traffic, but how are they disguising the IP address. Why wasn’t my site ever shown on screen to me? The answer lies in the HTML source code…
Here are the secret codes!!
One of the tricks that these companies use is a the way they hide where your traffic is coming from. The way they do this is through a redirect code. A redirect code is simply a cade that webmasters use on their websites to take one website and send it another way.
The biggest trick is how they can mysteriously load your site multiple times, without you seeing it. They do this by embedding your site into theirs, and making it tiny. So tiny in fact, that it looks like a period. So instead of using periods at the end of their sentances, they just embed their clients sites sites to look like a period.
Try it for yourself
Open up your HTML editor, or notepad, and create a sample page using this code.
Testing the Embed Script
Now open it in your web browser. What you get is a small box in the left hand corner of your website. For this example, I made the code 5x larger than these companies do. So you can see how easily they disguise these sites. Inside that little square, is actually an entire website!!
So your thinking, they just embed my site into that little square, 10-15 times on the page, and that’s where my hits come from. Yes, and No. Essentially that’s how it works, but if they put your website into that square, you could easily trace the traffic back to the adult site. So what they do is put their redirect page into that square, and redirect it to your site, so now it looks like all the traffic is coming from them.
So let’s put it all together.
You order traffic from a traffic company.
The traffic company creates a free adult site and lists it into a directory of free adult sites. According to our alexa review these sites get 786,376 hits per day. If their redirect page gets 12 hits every time someone loads the adult site, that means they have an average of 9,436,512 hits per day, which they divide among their clients.
For some of the Monster Traffic Companies, 9.5 million visitors a day just isn’t enough. They can easily turn that 9.5 million visitors, into as many as they need. Instead of embedding the redirect page. They embed a page full of these periods. That way, when their “period farm” page loads, they can have as many sites load as they want.
They simply change the redirect page to whatever client they want the traffic sent to.
Your counter goes crazy, and all your hits are delivered.
You never make a sale. Now you can understand how you could have thousands of visitors sent your way, and never make a sale. Your site is never really displayed.
The traffic company has delivered exactly what they said they would, and are clear from any refunds.
Our Company, www.CadenzaWeb.com Provides You with REAL traffic, that you can track, and get detailed statistics on. Our Sales have quadrupled since we started using this ourselves. Check Out www.CadenzaWeb.com for more information.
Interested in becoming an ethical traffic reseller? We have a dedicated website just for resellers at wholesale rates as low as $1 CPM (per 1000). www.Sell-Traffic.com
Want to use this article on your site? Please do, just leave our name and link attached.
For your consideration below are the “Top 10 e-mail issues targeted at business men and women. These are the issues business owners and their employees minimally need to be aware of in their day-to-day online communications.
1. SUBJECT: Field: The SUBJECT: field is the window into your e-mail and can many times determine even if your e-mail will be opened. If this is your first contact with a customer based on their request through your site or otherwise, be sure to have a short SUBJECT: that indicates clearly what the topic of the e-mail is. Never be misleading in this regard! Typos, all caps or all small case can give the impression you are a spammer.
2. Level of Formality: Never assume a position of informality in your business e-mail. Only time and relationship building efforts can guide when you can informalize your business relationships. And, in some cases that time may never arise. Do not assume that e-mail is impersonal or informal when it comes to your business communications. It is very personal - a window into the type of person you are and how you run your business. Remember, people do business with people not companies. One should communicate as if your e-mail is on your company letterhead at all times. This is your business’s image you are branding!
3. Addressing: How do you address your new contacts? I would suggest initially that you assume the highest level of courtesy: Hello, Mr. Anderson, Dear Ms. Jones, Dr. Osborne, etc. Until your new contact states, “call me Andy” or “you can call me Diane. Keep it formal until it is clear the relationship dictates otherwise. You will also be able to get clues by how your contacts approach you and their tone. Most business people do not mind being called by their first name, however, in a global economy that can be perceived as taking premature liberties in the relationship if used too soon.
4. TO:, From:, Bcc, Cc fields can make or break you:
..In the TO: field make sure you have your contact’s name formally typed. John B. Doe - not john b doe or JOHN B DOE.
..In the FROM: field make sure your have your full name formally typed. Example: Jane A. Jones. Not: jane a jones or JANE A JONES. The later two give the perception of lack of education or limited experience with technology. Always use your full name. By only including your first name or e-mail address you are giving the perception you have something to hide or do not know the basics of configuring your e-mail program.
..Bcc: use this field when e-mailing a group of contacts who do not personally know each other. By listing an arms length list of e-mail addresses in the CC or TO fields of contacts who do not know each other or who have never met is conducive to publishing their e-mail address to strangers. No matter how great the list of people may be to you, never make this decision for others! This is a privacy issue! With those you are forging partnerships with, visibly listing their e -mail address in with a group of strangers will make one wonder what other privacy issues you may not respect or understand. Not good.
..Cc: Use this field when there are a handful of associates involved in a discussion that requires all be on the same page. These business people know each other or have been introduced and have no problem having their e-mail address exposed to the parties involved. If you are not sure if a business associate would mind their address being made public, ask!
5. Formatting: Refrain from using it in your business communications. Unless you would type something in bold crimson letters on business letterhead, don’t do it when e-mailing for commercial gain. Even something as simple as using a different font makes your e-mail’s display contingent upon the recipient having that specific font on their system or it defaults to their designated default font. The recipient may not have their e-mail program configured in such a way as to display your formatting the way it appears on your system - if at all.
6. Attachments: Do you think your relationship with a potential new customer is enhanced when you send them that 5M Power Point presentation they didn’t request and you fill up their inbox causing subsequent business correspondence to bounce as undeliverable? Nope. And, if they don’t have Power Point they couldn’t open the file anyway! Never assume your potential customers have the software you do to open any file you may arbitrarily send.
If you need to send a file over 200,000 in size, business courtesy dictates you ask the recipient first if it is O.K. to send a large file. Next, confirm they have the same software and version you do and what is the best time of day to sent it to them to ensure they are available to download the large file and keep their e-mail flowing. Do not send large attachments without warning, on weekends or after business hours when the recipient may not be there to clear out their inbox and keep their e-mail flowing.
7. Using Previous E-mail for New Correspondence: If you want to give the perception of lazy, find a previous e-mail from the party you want to communicate with, hit reply and start typing about something completely irrelevant to the old e-mail’s subject. Always start a new e-mail and add your contacts to your address book so you can add them to a new e-mail with one click.
8. Down Edit Your Replies: Don’t just hit reply and start typing. Editing is a skill those you communicate with will appreciate as it lends to reflecting a respect for their time and clarity in your communications. Removing parts of the previous e-mail that do not apply to your response including e-mail headers and signature files removes the clutter. In addition, by making the effort to reply point by point keeps the conversation on track with fewer misunderstandings.
9. Common Courtesy: Hello, Hi, Good Day, Thank You, Sincerely, Best Regards. All those intros and sign offs that are a staple of professional business communications should also be used in your business e-mail communications. Always have a salutation and sign off with every e-mail. Here again - think business letterhead.
10. Signature files: Keep your signature files to no more than 5-6 lines as this can be viewed as a bit egocentric. Limit your signature to your Web site link, company name, and slogan/offer or phone number. Include a link to your site where the recipient can get all your contact information from A-Z - that is what your site is for.
Don’t forget to include the “http://” when including your Web site address within e-mails and your signature file to ensure it is recognized as a clickable URL regardless of the user’s software or platform.
The above Top 10 items will certainly allow your business communications to rise above the majority who do not take the time to understand and master these issues. When forging new business relationships and solidifying established partnerships, the level of professionalism and courtesy you relay in your business e-mail communications will always gain clients over the competition that may be anemic, uninformed or just plain lazy in this area. Went it comes to business, regardless of mode of communication used, professionalism and courtesy never go out of style.
About the Author:
Judith Kallos is an authoritative and good-humored Technology Muse who has been playing @ http://www.TheIStudio.com for over a decade. Check out her popular E-mail Etiquette site @ http://www.NetManners.com
Even though it is essential to increase your rating with search engines, to purchase pay-per-clicks, and to participate in link exchanges and banner exchanges, discussion forums can often provide an extra, non-conventional sales medium to your campaign that allows you to quickly pull in customers with personal contact and conversational presentations of your product.
You can find these boards by searching for the specific product you sell and then adding the word "messageboard" or "forum" or "discussion forum" after it in quotations. For instance, I sell marketing tools and online business-builders on one of my websites, so when I look for forums to market my products in, I go to google or overture and type in "business messageboard" or "marketing forum." Find as many of these highly-trafficked forums as you can and sign-up. Some of them will require you to confirm it through your email address.
Before you begin actually posting on the boards, you need to lay down some general rules of approach. I would suggest the following methods, but you can decide for yourself what you think is appropriate for your business and situation.
These are my rules:
When I market on discussion forums, I always try to provide more for the board than I take away from it in potential sales. Not only is it ethical, but it’s also good business. When people ask questions, I use the expertise I’ve gained from Internet business-building and marketing to legitimately answer their questions. If I signed up for every board I could find, and then slapped a boilerplate marketing pitch on every site, I’d just get ignored or banned.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to legitimately get involved with the forum community. It is definitely a goldmine for highly-targeted customers and it is possibly the fastest marketing medium on the Internet, but it is also very important to respect that it doesn’t primarily serve as an ad host. If you stay low-key and helpful, people will respect your opinion more and will want to see what you have to offer. This is where your signature comes in…
When you create your account for most boards, they will give you the option of creating a signature, which they will attach to the bottom of every post you make. This is the best way to pull customers from messageboards–by alluring them with your signature. Write something catchy or intriguing and then slap a link to your site or email address on it. Remember: the more helpful you are (the more times you post advice/hints), the more times your signature appears… and the more potential hits you’ll get to your site.
Next, you’ll want to decide when it’s appropriate to market outside of your signature. I personally only market in three situations outside of my signature in forum discussions. If a person asks a question about a specific product or service I market, then I’ll respond because I’m qualified to do so and because I truly believe they should use my products to achieve the best possible results. If there’s a discussion thread where everyone is marketing products and it is generally accepted, I will market my product if a) it is related and b) I have already posted several times on the messageboard. Also, I will market my product whenever there is a forum solely dedicated to marketing your products.
Last, you’ll want to decide how much original content you want to post and how much you want to be boilerplate. You’ll want to find a healthy combination of the two to avoid being called a spammer or wasting too much time marketing on forums. I personally have several boilerplate ads that I have saved for signature files, ad-only forums, and personal product marketing discussions. I keep them all saved on a word file and I pull them up to copy-and-paste when I’m spending a night of advertising on messageboards.
Discussion forums can drive buying customers to your site faster than any other marketing medium. Do not abuse them, establish a reputation in your forums, streamline the process. . . and your work will come back to you quickly in profit.
Isaiah Hull publishes Work At Home Right Now, a fresh and informative newsletter about making money on the internet and using proven methods to increase your site’s traffic and profitability. If you’re looking for time-saving and money-saving tools, as well as honest business advice, come by and subscribe at http://www.workathomerightnow.net
]]>So, what should you look for in a consultant, and what guarantees can you expect?
Choosing The Consultant
The consultant should ask a lot of questions about your business and your objectives. They need to be very clear about the specific goals of your site. Do you want as many visitors as possible (as in: “We get millions of hits on our Web site”), or are you more interested in attracting qualified leads? Are you selling products? Are you looking for new customers, sign-ups for your newsletter or events, media coverage, etc.
It’s possible that there could be different markets for each of your objectives. The consultant should show that they clearly understand the demographics of the audience you want to attract. This includes whether your markets are currently online, whether they are comfortable using e-mail, etc. It’s also important to clarify any restrictions on your marketing - for example, if you’re only targeting specific locations.
The key to effective Web marketing is to have a comprehensive, integrated plan that focuses on where your markets "hang out" online. It’s absolutely not enough to concentrate your efforts on search engines - that’s a passive rather than an active approach. You want to reach out to your potential visitors, not wait for them to come to you. And, you want to ensure that your offline marketing includes your Web site - up to a third of your traffic can now come from real-world sources.
So, the consultant should propose to you a wide-ranging plan (assuming that’s appropriate for your goals) that includes:
* Search engine strategies
* Paid (bid for placement) listings
* Review sites and directories
* Linking with other appropriate sites
* Advertising / e-zine sponsorships (depending on your budget)
* Online public relations opportunities
* Integration with your real-world marketing
Effective Web marketing must also include an e-mail strategy. The consultant should include in their proposal some ideas for targeted, personalized (and fully opt-in) e-mail that is compliant with all State and Federal laws. This requires a contact database that you can use to select out the different audiences that you might have for these messages. The consultant should also be able to help you create this, if required.
And finally, the consultant should explain how they propose to evaluate the success of any marketing campaign against your goals and objectives. Marketing is an ongoing process, during which you’ll learn a lot about your site and about your visitors. This knowledge should be analyzed and used to tweak your site and refine your business strategies. A good consultant will be able to work with you to achieve this.
What Guarantees Can You Expect?
Let’s be very clear - there is a distinction, which often gets blurred, between sales and marketing. The job of a marketing consultant is to bring qualified traffic to your site (or in other words, into your storefront). Completing the sale is then a separate challenge.
Marketing is also a very gray area, in which it’s difficult to provide cast-iron guarantees of results. This is particularly true in the area of search engine optimization, since the search engines are so unpredictable. In my opinion, if a consultant promises you “top ten placement” you should be very wary - it’s possible that they are using tactics that could be classified as spam - soon if not now.
And that can really hurt you - I have a colleague who was banned from Google because he hired “experts” who used this type of approach.
Obviously you do want to check that the consultant has a good track record, and that they can provide references from other clients. I believe that good Web knowledge and proven online marketing tactics are as important as an in-depth familiarity with your industry.
In setting your contract with the consultant, it’s important to have a mutual comfort level with your goals, expectations and budget. There are many opportunities for free promotion online, but if you’re prepared to spend some money, you can potentially build your traffic faster. Since building awareness of a site takes time, perhaps a minimum six-month period would be advisable, but with appropriate get-out clauses for both parties.
Conclusion
Good Web marketing is a team effort! Hire a consultant who you feel very comfortable with, who asks lots of questions to really understand your business and your goals, and who seems genuinely interested in promoting you. But then be prepared to work with them - respect and consider their suggestions, and allow them to be creative in their approach.
? Philippa Gamse, 2003. All rights reserved.
Philippa Gamse, CyberSpeaker, is a Web strategy consultant and professional speaker. Check out her free tipsheet for 23 ideas to promote your Website: http://www.CyberSpeaker.com/tipsheet.html Philippa can be reached at (831) 465-0317.
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