Website Marketing Resource

If you haven’t heard the word ‘niche’ being batted around by Internet Marketers then you haven’t been listening. Finding a niche has become the antidote to competing in overly saturated online markets.

What is a niche?

According to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary a niche is described as “a place, employment, status, or activity for which a person or thing is best fitted… a specialized market”.

Have you noticed that despite the closing of many businesses in these harsh economic times, the local hobby train store is still around? That the ‘hole-in-the-wall’ eatery is thriving? Or that trends such as scrapbooking can start with a bang and still close within a year when four similar businesses start up in the same area?

The online business world reflects the same trends as experienced in the offline world - often with faster turnover and startup rates. Those who promote a product or site that targets a small, select audience can tap into a market that is otherwise not being served. Despite the limitations of the client base, the targeted nature of the business creates a devoted and active market - the aim of any business.

HOW DO I FIND A NICHE?

Today’s article is about the wonders of SEO. SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. If you know anything about our world wide web, than you surely know that the sites bringing in the most monstrous traffic are search engines. In the world of traffic, search engines control almost all of the pieces. If you stop and think about it, if you want to find something on the web, what do you do? Odds are you hop on over to Yahoo, Google, MSN, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, Kanoodle, and the list just goes on and on. Almost every method of obtaining traffic, other than offline sources and direct, random domain visits, all of your traffic is coming through these engines. Pay Per Click advertising, sponsered search, directory submissions, all these play off the search engine.

But what if there was a way to outsmart the search engines, (and keep your wallet nice and fat!)to use their own patterns and logic against them? Before we get started, you should know that a search engine finds you (for the most part)by sending spiders to your site, to index your pages and collect info, such as meta tags. But how does a search engine find you, and keep coming back?

One of the hottest crazes for online marketers is Adsense sites. These marketers trade in information and build sites that are tightly focused around one small niche. To build an Adsense site, all a marketer needs is a Google Adsense account, a website (or even a free blog account), and some articles. When the marketer makes his site live, he includes the Adsense HTML code so that it serves ads alongside his content.

These sites place well in the search engines because they are content-based. Most often, articles are keyword-focused, meaning each article focuses on one word or phrase. Once the sites are indexed by the search engines, and once marketers drive traffic to the site, they leave it alone, let it run itself, and create another Adsense site. It isn’t unusual for a marketer to have 50 or more of these sites scattered all over the internet.

The way the marketer makes money from these sites is via the Adsense ads. Because the ads are served based on the content, the ads are targeted. That means that if someone finds your site from the search engine, they are interested in your niche (because they were the ones searching!). Thus, they are also interested in the ads on your site. When they click on one (or more), you are paid a fraction of the advertising cost Google takes in.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and web-positioning techniques.
 by: James Saunders

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and web- positioning techniques.

Optimisation for search engines rankings

The Fact That Matters!!! Nearly 99.99% of these visitors came from search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL….etc.

Top 10 search engine rankings. Everybody wants it but a few achieve it.Search engines have always been an important source of traffic for many marketers. Achieving high search engine rankings should be one of your goals because it can be profitable in the long run.

It has many names (SEO, positioning, and web promotion, etc.) but the objective remains the same - improve your position on search results to get a huge source of traffiic without spending large sums of vital capital in advertising expenses.

Naturally, the most common objective for search engine optimization campaigns is to bring in targeted leads to ecommerce sites. A high degree of pre-qualification is possible, since SEO allows you to attract only those who are actively seeking for very specific products or information.

How to optimise for ranking.

When you make the decision to start an Internet business or for that matter any business you must have a plan (strategy). This is essential in order to succeed.

You don’t throw a dart at a list of possible business opportunities and settle for the one where the dart lands.

It must be a well thought out decision and plan on how you are going to make money in the business, if you read all the hype out there that tells you all you have to do is spend a couple of bucks, get a website and lay back and watch the money come in think again.

First don’t spend any money on those fancy internet ads telling how they guarantee you that the money will start rolling in as soon as you buy the software they are peddling.

There is a lot of good software out there, but if you are somewhat technically challenged, spend some time doing research the time spent will save you money and aggravation.

Remember the old saying haste makes waste, so take your time and read as many articles as you can on what exactly it is that you want to do.

Thinking about purchasing that premium SEO software that will hyper-optimize a website in under 2 minutes and 2 seconds?

Ask the following question first: What do I know about SEO?

If the answer is “nothing”, then don’t buy it.

Marketers are banking on the lack of knowledge among consumers. It is no different whether it is the SEO world or the automobile world or the cell phone world. The best search engine optimization tip I can provide is this: educate yourself.

Search engine optimization help often comes in two forms:

1) The Big Sell
2) The Complex and Mysterious

Attempts to “sell” search engine optimization software are really of no true help. These marketers are trying to sell something, not necessarily trying to help. When it comes to SEO, learn more about it before buying the latest SEO gizmo. Though it is true that we all need tools and services to complete tasks more efficiently and quickly, it is also true that we can better use those tools if we understand and learn the underlying processes. Let me state unequivocally that there is no need to go out and blindly purchase search engine optimization software that will cost $100 plus (sometimes much higher!). Just like anything else that someone will try to sell, take a step back, relax, review, reconsider and learn more.

Get Your New Website Listed In Google In 24 Hours
 by: Robin Dary

Yes, Google is big but you can get your site listed in 24 to 48 hours. Go to Google and look at “Submit a Site”. STOP! That is exactly what everyone does and it takes months to get listed that way.

Now you if want to wait for your new website to appear in Google, stop reading this.

Here’s the trick. Get a high Page Rank site to link to you. A PR (page rank) of 5 or higher will do the trick. Yes, it is that simple.

This won’t guarantee you the #1 slot for all your keywords but it’s a great start. At least you can be found. Google currently takes 6 to 9 months for a new site to appear - not even rank - but appear.

If you can find more than one PR5 or higher to link to you that just helps you even more.

As an example, go to Google and type in the search box, Parker Computer Guy. At this writing the site was appearing as listing #4. (Actually listings #2 and #3 are the Parker Computer Guy blog, www.parkercomputerguy.blogspot.com).

The market world is increasingly becoming specialized. Instead of offering a wide variety of goods or services, businesses prefer to cater to a select few. Also known as a niche market, serving such a well-defined segment gives businesses more time to focus on their customers’ needs and provide them quality service. However, the challenge is competing with bigger brands and how to beat them at their own game by using the key to niche marketing.

The key to niche marketing lies in getting ahead of the competition. This means getting to know your niche market, offering them services most big brands cannot provide, advertising heavily and giving them something more that just a smile. In order to use the key to niche marketing more effectively, one must be ready to abandon old marketing concepts, be creative and resourceful.

One element abandoned by the key to niche marketing is the principle of place. With the rise of the Internet, advertising, promotion and service have never been easier to get the key to niche marketing. You can do business online, set up shop in its virtual space or update an existing establishment and its services. The key to niche marketing is to know what your market segment more than the competition and meet their demands.

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 tracking capability.

The autoresponders that come with your web host don’t have built-in tracking capabilities. Tracking customer response with a paid autoresponder service can lead to more effective advertising campaigns.

Is anyone reading your newsletter? How many visits are you getting to your websites from your newsletter and autoresponders? Without the tracking capabilities of an autoresponder service, you’ll never know.

However, with paid autoresponder services, you receive these essential tracking capabilities. You can track all the clicks made from your newsletters and autoresponders.

Sometimes, you can even run split tests to see which ads or offers appeal to your subscribers. For example, one half of your list could receive an offer at one price and the other half could receive a different price offer. You can measure the response as an aid in determining your product’s price. You could run other split tests in order to make other marketing decisions.

Here’s what your website must have to get lots of traffic - links pointing to your site. The more you have, the more traffic you get.

But how do you get links pointing to your site? Well you could email webmasters and ask them to put a link on their site (reciprocal links). But that’s rather slow. You need something that will get other people link to your site.

How do you get other people linking to your site? Here are some ideas:

Content

People want content. If your site has lots of good fresh content try providing free content feeds. You get links back to your site, and they get free updated content from your site.

Articles

Write good quality and useful articles and put a link to your site at the bottom. Allow people to freely publish them. The better and more useful the article the more people will publish it and the more links back to your site you will have.

Services

For example on my website Crossword Heaven (http://www.crosswordheaven.com) I have a service where webmasters can add a crossword to their site. On my site PerkyPup.com (http://www.perkypup.com) I provide quotes that other webmasters can link to by means of a dynamic image.