1. Email Marketing Glossary - Omnistar has compiled a comprehensive glossary introducing you to the terminology you will need to understand when working in the field of email marketing.

2. Keeping List Members Interested - Getting people to sign up with your email list isn’t everything, after all, you need them to keep reading your marketing copy. This article provides you with a number of methods for keeping your list subscribers interested.

3. How Often Should You Email Your List - Once you have an email list, choosing how often to send out your marketing emails will impact the effectiveness of your marketing. Knowing how often to send is key to maximizing the effectiveness of your individual efforts.

4. The Best Day to Send Marketing Emails - Choosing when to send your periodical emails is an important decision, because open rates and click-thru rates are greatly affected by when your customers receive your email.

5. How to Avoid Spam Filters - Spam filters have become increasingly aggressive, as spammers have developed numerous ways to bypass them, and because of this your marketing is more likely to be capture as well. Avoiding Spam filters is an important step to increasing your email campaigns success.

6. How to Increase Your Click-Thru Rate - Getting people to click links within your email is important, it makes the difference between email that arrives and gets deleted and emails that get opened and read. Improving your advertising is an essential part of improving your marketing’s success rate.

7. HTML Vs. Plain Newsletters - Using different formats for your email is necessary because so many users read in either HTML or Plain Text, this article explains why this is, and how you can take advantage of these different behaviors.

When writing for your website, it is easy to focus too heavily on keywords for SEO; you have to ensure that each page of your site gets its point across. Each page is there for a reason, so make sure that a reader can immediately tell what information the page will provide them. You should also include useful and descriptive entries in your meta tags, because this information is what is shown to users searching for your site on Google.

You should be aware by now, but due to the breadth of the internet, it is likely you are in direct competition with more than a few web sites. Your site should make a specific effort to address what makes your product unique, superior, or otherwise the best choice for your customers. You have to address the issue of competition, because otherwise you won’t stand out. List what you see as your signature features, and highlight your product’s superiority at certain tasks compared to the competition. Its all about selling your product.

You should not, however, forget about Search Engine Optimization, while it often gets overemphasized, it is still important. The key is, you must make your keywords a natural part of your copy, incorporating them seamlessly into sentences, descriptions, and html titles. Use title tags wisely, they are given more weight as keywords, so take advantage of this. The key is to make your SEO invisible, its there, but the customer just reads through it, because it feels natural. This approach means you get the best of both worlds, great copy for your customers, and a good search engine rank for your site.

Finally, you have to remember to make clear what you want your customer to do and how. If you want them to read your blog and leave a comment, indicate that on your site, make sure the comment button is large and instruct the reader to post a comment if they are interested. If you are selling something, tell the reader its time to buy, there’s never been a better time, etc. and make sure your buy button is large and easy to find. By focusing your writing on your reader, not Google, you will get much better results from your site.

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The company has developed the software to use fewer computers to index more content, and this alone may give them an advantage against their larger competitor. As well, the site was founded by an alumnus of Google itself. Backed with enough capital to try to take Google down, the site has officially launched.

As a first impression, I have to say I immediately disliked Cuil. Clearly the site is Google inspired, and to that degree it may be similarity that bothers me. The designers learned from the failure of Yahoo! and others to take down Google, clearly when it comes to search people prefer minimalist design. The site is a stark black, sporting only a logo and a search box, along with a few token links and the text “Search 121,617,892,992 web pages.” Unfortunately the design is off center, the text box seems small for the screen, and the site itself doesn’t evoke the same familiar feeling as Google. This is, of course, just my opinion of the site layout, which could easily be changed substantially over the next couple months. On to searches!

Unfortunately my dislike of the search engine only grew when I entered my first search. I started with an easy one, searching for the musicians Belle & Sebastian. Whereas Google returns, in this order, their official site, their Wikipedia article, their Myspace page, and their Last.fm page, Cuil’s first two entries are the same, the American and British versions of the artists’ home page. A significant number of the first page results were subpages from their site, subpages from wikipedia, and sites not in English. Even worse, rather than displaying a list of results, the search engine displays results laid out across the screen, without actually ranking them.

The site introduces an interesting feature, allowing you to try your search within specific categories, but really I was so frustrated with the layout by this time that I had completely lost interest in the search engine. Obviously, this is just my opinion, but the site designers need to rethink their method for displaying results. There is a reason Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and others all display an ordered list, its easier for our brains to process information that is grouped and ordered. By displaying the equivalent of a desk strewn with results, Cuil creates major visual whiplash for this reviewer. Conceptually, their goal seems admirable, expand the search base, and provide a more informative look at the site before navigating to it. Unfortunately, the problem with Google isn’t really that search results don’t give you enough information.

In the end, Cuil represents an interesting concept wrapped in an unfortunate implementation. While the idea of adding more pages to a search engine seems admirable, I worry that they focused too much on this aspect of their engine. They seem to have made some major assumptions about how people process information that are flat out wrong, and frankly that worries me. The site may meet the needs of others, but I didn’t see anything worth switching for in my brief encounter.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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It may seem like a simple step, but by reducing the overall quality of the images that likely take up most of the space on your website, you can take a big dent out of load times. This is because most image editors save pictures in the highest quality by default. But there isn’t a large difference between a high quality picture and one that has been reduced in size by reducing the quality. The key is to use an image processor and select the options save for web, or optimize for web. You will then be prompted to set a number of levels. If you are experienced with image manipulation, you can tweak specific settings, but a general user should pay attention to the quality slider. You should not overwrite the original version of the file, but rather save the new file to a different folder. Compare the two, and you will notice that there are subtle differences between the larger file and the smaller one, depending on what level of quality you selected. Higher than 60-70 % is difficult to notice, but below that isn’t advisable.

A fairly substantial amount of an image’s size is related to the level of quality, so your images will now be much smaller and easier to download. By optimizing, your site is going to load faster, especially for users connecting via cell phone networks, DSL, and those still using dialup. There are a number of other improvements you can make for your site’s efficiency, but this is by far one of the easiest.

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The other benefits provided by load balancing include the ability to pull a server down to do maintenance without worrying about downtime, the ability to deal with corrupted data or damaged hardware without downtime, and a great deal of control over your traffic, as you are running all traffic through one machine first, so you can use traffic shaping if you find it necessary. Of course, running one of these systems is only strictly speaking necessary if traffic regularly brings down your server, if you have to regularly do server maintenance, or if you are already using multiple web servers and you would like to bring them together.

There are some down sides to using such a system. Load balancers are newer technology, so make sure you buy one with thorough support, as well as one which is used by sites of a similar size, so you know it can handle your traffic capacity. As well, problems with your load balancer will likely take down your whole site, since all traffic has to go through one central location. But the problems associated with load balancers are a fair trade if one is in a position to need one, as having to process all your traffic with one server quickly becomes impractical as your business grows. Do your research and you will likely find a system that works best for you.

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Stumbleupon often sends traffic that isn’t looking for whatever you are selling or posting on your site. While a certain percentage of this traffic is simply going to press the button again, if you offer them something compelling users will stick around long enough to convert into a sale or a regular visitor. In order to achieve this, you need to concentrate on only submitting pages with interesting content to the network. If you have a blog, it is always helpful to submit it to stumbleupon, especially when you can easily submit different posts to different categories. You may also want to offer web applications to users, even flash games, which are a popular category within stumbleupon.

You can also improve traffic by improving your own stumbleupon account. The more you use the software the more your recommendations are weighted. You should also encourage users to rate your site and leave feedback comments. These will increase the rate at which users are sent to your site. Remember, the traffic generated is usually coming from individuals who are looking to be entertained. Starting off trying to sell them something is a mistake, and generally the users are savvy enough to realize when a site is trying to market to them. You can avoid losing these users by offering real, quality content they want to see. That is the true key to using stumbleupon wisely.

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This is the important benefit of a social network, it allows you to target your advertising without constantly asking your customers to provide you with their information. The other services provided by the software, such as a steaming video player, widgets, and the ability for users to generate content, all provide entertainment for your visitors without requiring you to do anything besides what you are already doing. Once your visitors are communicating you can just sit back and watch your network grow. Obviously, the software’s ability to network with advertisers is its most invaluable selling point, as it provides revenue beyond what you are already getting from your site, all thanks to KickApps!

Their services are an invaluable way for anyone running a website to develop their own social network. You can even start using their software for free, as they have an offering that charges you a portion of the advertising revenue and pays you the rest. That means there’s no reason NOT to try it out.

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1. Address your readers:

Your writing is, after all, for them, so ask them to get involved, even if its just suggesting future topics or encouraging them to express an opinion on the topic. If you can target your readers needs and interests, you will get a lot more repeat traffic.

2. Respond to comments:

Comments aren’t a one way street, if you aren’t responding to your readers you are ignoring them. Every reasonable question and comment deserves a response, so stay engaged!

3. Offer benefits to users who participate:

You may even want to offer frequent visitors the opportunity to write for you, but at a minimum you want to reward your frequent visitors with something, whether its the ability to add a custom image to their comments or just keeping track of the total number of comments they have made.

4. Be nice:

Your readers are your customers, and by being harsh with them you will alienate them. Instead, you should always interact with readers in a friendly manor, after all, people are less likely to comment if they read rude responses.

5. Make sure commenting is easy:

Depending on your software, you may need to change it from its default settings. You should make it so as many people can comment as possible, generally even if they haven’t signed up with your site.

6. Review Products:

If you review products, you can ask readers to input their own experiences with the product. This will encourage readers to come back and read each others comments, and will help improve the quality of your reviews.

7. Write Controversial Posts:

Don’t be too offensive, but offending people a little bit is a great way to get them to post on your site. This will lead to arguments and discussion, which is all added content and traffic.

8. Poll Your Readers:

Introduce a daily or weekly poll question to encourage lurkers to participate. This will benefit you in other ways too, since a regular dialog improves your ability to provide for your readers’ needs.

9. Write a lot:

The more you write, the more there is to respond to. If you write daily, you’re off to a good start, but getting more comments means writing even more often. This likely means you need more than just one writer, so consider expanding.

10. Build a website around your blog:

Make your site more than just a blog. If you can create a community your readers will spend significantly more time on your site, so offer features outside of the blog itself to help network your readers and give them content they want.

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Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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http://www.omnistaretools.com/seo-videos.htm

The first 4 videos cover Title Tags, Meta Description Tags, Backlinks, and the Google Site command. Title tags are important for bringing in traffic to every page of your site, and they are an important place to deploy keywords. Meta descriptions are another perfect spot to use keywords, but take less precedence in search engines like Google. Backlinks are extremely important for search engine rank, so we take you through different search engine tools for examining your links. Finally, we demonstrate the Google Site command and recommend how you can use it to examine your site.

Search engine optimization is one of the simplest ways to improve traffic to your site. All it takes is a little attention to detail and you can start making it onto Google’s results and bringing in traffic.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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