Website Marketing Resource

Build Your Opt-In Email List: 7 Important Basics
 by: Elizabeth McGee

You’ve heard it before, your best friend online is your opt-in email list.

Time and time again you have heard how important it is to develop a list of email subscribers that will allow you to place your products, special offers and priceless information in front of them on a regular basis.

Not sure about that? Let’s consider the facts:

Fact: Online buyers are skeptical.

Fact: Online buyers need to trust you before they buy from you.

Fact: Online buyers require your product or service to be placed in front of them an average of 7 times before they actually buy from you.

Fact: Buyers that buy from you once are likely to buy from you again.

Fact: Your email subscribers need to be extremely targeted (interested) in what you have to offer.

Fact: Most visitors leave your site and never return.

So what do these facts mean to you? They mean your success as an online marketer depends on creating, nurturing and communicating with an opt-in email list.

This is what your email list will do for you:

Creating a network — meaning a community of users — for your company is something that has always been valuable, but has become virtually indispensable to the success of any Internet company. The leaders of the Internet — such as Google and Yahoo! — all apply the idea of creating a network, and have profited substantially from it.

The best way to create a network is to provide your users with free services. This accomplishes two vital goals:

Attracts Users. Getting qualified traffic to your site is one of the most fundamental objectives of any online business. If you don’t get people to your site, you’re probably not going to make any money.

Giving away quality content and/or services free from your site is probably the best way to attract users. You increase the likelihood of other people linking to you — as your site will have quality content worth linking to — and thus will boost your rankings in search engines. By giving away something for nothing, you also encourage word of mouth; people enjoy informing others of free offerings, and virtually all of us love the idea of receiving something for nothing. As a result, giving away free content and/or services can be one of the most cost-effective ways of getting new users to your site.

Every once in a while–and probably more often than we should–we find ourselves reviewing our SEO pricing models. Pricing SEO has always been a real sticking point for me because there is no one-size-fits-all pricing metric. As I began our most recent review of our pricing something really starting to become quite obvious; search engine optimization is requiring more and more research and analysis than it ever did before.

After doing SEO for several years (since 1998) I recently put all of our regular SEO duties into a spreadsheet and noting the amount of time spent on each activity on a one-time basis, monthly basis, and a per-page basis (both one-time and monthly). This format allows me to quite easily see the man-hours and costs involved in each distinct duty that we perform over the course of an SEO campaign. It also allows me to see the changes that occur in our SEO processes.

Free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips - Step By Step
 by: Robert Toth

Before submitting your site to search engines it is very important to optimize your website. If you can not afford a search engine optimization service, make sure to follow our search engine optimization tips to have your web site well optimized for the top placement in search engines.

Step 1. - Analyze your competition

The best way to start optimizing your web site is analyze your competition. Take a look at the web pages that currently have top rankings (Top 10) on Google and try to find out what these pages have done to get these rankings. - analyze the first top ten web sites related to your branch

• analyze keywords they are using
• look at their source code, meta tags
• look at their keyword density
• look at their comment tag, alt tags, title tag
• internal and external links on their websites
• look how many sites linking to them
• check out the quality and link popularity of sites that are linking to your competitors
• look how many pages they have

After all you can tell is it easy to beat your competition or it is not.

Google is at least as interested as you are in having your ads perform well on your site. And they’ve gone to some work to provide the information you need to optimize your AdSense.

What’s fascinating to me is that apparently not everyone bothers to read their tips. And even some that do, fail to apply it.

That said, you need to be aware that simply using their tips doesn’t guarantee successful ads and decent CTR (Click Through Rate). How many times have you heard this? You have to test. You have to try alternatives and see what really works best for you, on your pages, with your content and your visitors. Test, test, test some more. Track your results, analyze them, try variations. Too many of us don’t test. We hear the mantra, but we don’t do the work.

First, let’s see if we can get an idea about location. (The graphic is included in the article on my site or you can take a look at it at the Google link included below) Generally, above the fold, at the top center of your content, below top navigation is the hottest location. Not immediately below which is good but not quite as hot. In a left sidebar, to the immediate left of primary content or below the primary content are also good. Most other locations are generally cooler.

Your website is ready. Your content is in place, you have optimized your pages. What is the last thing you should do before uploading your hard work? Validate. It is surprising how many people do not validate the source code of their web pages before putting them online.

Search engine robots are automated programs that traverse the web, indexing page content and following links. Robots are basic, and robots are definitely not smart. Robots have the functionality of early generation browsers: they don’t understand frames; they can’t do client-side image maps; many types of dynamic pages are beyond them; they know nothing of JavaScript. Robots can’t really interact with your pages: they can’t click on buttons, and they can’t enter passwords. In fact, they can only do the simplest of things on your website: look at text and follow links. Your human visitors need clear, easy-to-understand content and navigation on your pages; search engine robots need that same kind of clarity.

Looking at what your visitors and the robots need, you can easily see how making your website “search engine friendly”, also makes the website visitor friendly.

Can a Blog earn you a prison sentence? Ask Mojtaba Saminejad. He is an Iranian whose Blog, published in the Farsi language, earned him a two-year prison sentence in June 2005.

The online community is fast waking up to the power of blogs which have spread across the internet like wild fire. If you are still grappling with the word BLOG, these are online websites which are diary-like in approach and people are free to publish news or their ideas and thoughts. Blogs are very popular as they are simple to use and in most cases, free.

However, professional bloggers (people who have a decent no. of hours of blogging to their credit) will admit that blogging is not as easy as waking up in the morning, checking out some posts and putting together a few witty lines before you brush your teeth. You do need to be knowledgeable about the subject you are writing on or you are likely to be torn apart by people who are.

Having a Blog has its own set of inherent advantages which are obvious and some which are not so obvious. The better known advantages are:

PPC Easy As 123
 by: Zac Radford

What are PPC (Pay Per Click) search engines? How do they work? How can PPC search engines benefit my business? How cost effective are PPC search engines? How fast can I gain new cliental by using PPC search engines? Where do I go to find the right PPC search engine for my business? All of these questions will be answered and more, in the following article.

What are PPC search engines and how do they work? PPC search engines are a very strong source of advertising for any type of business, on and offline. By placing bids on keywords related to your business, you can generate fast cliental. (Ex: Your business sells used cars; you would place a bid on the phrase “used cars,” say for 5 cents per click. So you pay 5 cents per new customer.) All customers must perform a search using your key phrase, making all customers targeted to your business. The higher you bid, the higher you will be placed in the PPC search engine. Ultimately this is a great way to gain new customers for your business.

Another powerful reason for making the switch from using the unlimited autoresponders that come free with your web hosting account to paying a monthly fee for an autoresponder service is improved deliverability of newsletters and other e-mails.

Are your subscribers even getting your newsletter? You might be shocked to find out how few of your subscribers are actually receiving your e-mail. I know I was!

Paid autoresponder services cultivate relationships with major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and online services. It is in their (and your) best interests that your e-mails get through and they work very hard to achieve high deliverability.

Some services supply a spam test to show you how spam filters would rate your e-mail. If your spam rating is too high, you can edit your e-mail to improve deliverability.

When I moved my newsletter over to a paid autoresponder service, I received several e-mails from autoresponders. They basically said that because of spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail), I had to confirm that I was a real person who wanted to communicate with the recipient.

With the paid autoresponder service, I received these e-mail messages and was able to respond to them in order to try and retain my subscribers.

Recently I came across a web site with the heading “How to get a million visitors without spending a dime in advertising.” Unfortunately the web site didn’t actually tell me how I could do that - that information was only available through an eBook sold on the site. The price of the eBook was around $200USD. Now I live in New Zealand so $200USD is more like $400 and is kind of a bit beyond my budget, or more exactly what I’m willing to pay for an eBook I haven’t even seen.

But it got me thinking, is it really possible to get a million visitors without spending a dime in advertising? And in a short time too (around a month)?

The answer is yes. There are at least two ways.

The first way is to leverage spam with a two tier affiliate program. Basically what you do is send out spam to newsgroups and/or bought email addresses saying you have this great way to make money, just visit my web site (you’re targeting potential affiliates). On your web site you get people to join your two tier affiliate program. What this means is that as well as getting money for selling your product they also get money for getting other people to join your affiliate program. And you tell them to spam newsgroups and the like. Except you don’t put it quite that way. Maybe you sell them software that automates posting of messages on newsgroups or something like that. Anyway, you get the drift.