Archive for April, 2007

Too Many Free Bonuses!

Who doesn’t like free stuff? Free stuff can’t possibly be bad right? How many times have you turned down a free bonus? You’ve been there before. You open a page to the next great internet marketing product and right before you get to the order button is page after page of free bonuses. The average user probably scrolls past those to see the price without even looking.

A lot of the time there’s so many free bonuses it gets distracting. Some sites over anywhere from five to eight or more free bonuses. Free bonuses are used as a value adding tool to their primary product, but at some point it needs to slow down. It’s best to not go overboard with adding free bonuses or it can eclipse the value of the product you’re actually trying to sell. This works for both the vendor and the affiliate in trying to outdo each other and other competing products since it can distract easier than most things on a sales page. Free Bonuses are sometimes used to justify a high price tag by giving more product than originally offered. This can be a mistake too as it can backfire and make the product look cheap.

Free bonuses can drop the value of our product. When using too many a potential customer may think you are offering so many free bonuses because you don’t have enough faith in your primary product. They may think the product can’t stand on it’s own and the free offers are meant to entice them to buy a suboptimal product with free stuff they’ll read or use. Those free bonuses will probably be better for opt-in lists where you can exchange them for their email address without losing them to your main product.

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Using SEO to Increase Client Sign Ups For Web Hosts

One of the ways that many web hosts fail to maximize the potential of their site is that they do not attract enough customers to it in the first place. You may have some of the best services and products around, but without potential customers visiting your site in the first place, how are you expected to sell? Therefore, getting sign ups is an extremely important part of web hosting, and with a little forethought and work, can be relatively easy. There are many ways to do this, but some of the best include:

Use a blog - although this may seem an unlikely way to get links and sign ups to your website, you’d be surprised. You could even make a dummy blog and sing the praises of your website or host, and that way interested or curious customers will start to visit.

Pay Per Click – this may be a little costly to start with, but in the long run the rewards far outshine the expense. Basically, Pay Per Click is where you pay a search engine like Google to make you a “featured” link on its front page, for instance. Then, when someone is looking for your product, your information is prominent. When an interested party clicks on your link, you pay Google a fee – for instance, ten cents per click. While this may seem like a lot, say you receive 100 visitors, at a cost of ten dollars, but you make a sale for double that. See how it makes sense?

Meta tags – this is one of the most under used yet important pieces of SEO that you can have. It’s no good having a site without advertising it properly. Keywords and Meta tags are a way to do this – when submitting your site to Google and the like, write a good introduction and article about your site that uses keywords. So, if your business is Jim’s Skate Boarding Store, write something along the lines of “For all your skate boarding needs, Jim’s Skate Boarding Store can fix you up with all the latest skates, boards and other…”. By mixing your business in this manner, you’ll be far more successful in being picked up by search engines.

Advertise – although this may be common sense, advertising is still one of the key ways to attract new business and visitors. Advertise your services in online magazines and ezines; that way you will attract the exact type of people you’re looking for.

Although there are a host of methods to enable you to increase your sign ups, each have their own plusses dependent on what your website offers, so look at who you wish to attract and this will make it easier to decide what way to proceed.

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What Makes A Good Web Host?

With the web hosting industry having over thirty thousand providers all offering different services, it can often feel like picking your way through a minefield to try and decide which one is right for your needs. After all, what may be fine for you as a personal website user is unlikely to be the same for a company looking for a web host, and vice versa. To make sure you have a good web host for you, there are a few important points that you should be looking for:

Quality - one of the main reasons that people choose to leave their existing web hosts and move to another is the quality of service offered (or not, as the case may be). With so many companies striving to get your business, you can afford to look around and compare. Find out what their support infrastructure is like – do they have twenty-four hour customer service seven days a week? This is pretty much standard now and is the least you should expect. Check into the background and reputation of the web host too – this can be easily found in various online forums, and will give you an insight into how legitimate your potential web host is.

Reliability – how reliable the service and back up is should be the next thing you look at. It’s all very well paying less for one web host’s services than with a competitor, but how reliable is their network? Can it cope with extra pages and content being added? Will it freeze when transactions are being carried out? Will any updates and repairs to the network adversely affect your website while they’re being carried out? Unless you can be sure that you’re picking a reliable network with support both immediate and on going, the savings made will be useless. Again, check web reviews and forums on a particular web host to see how they compare to others.

Continuity – this can be looked at in two ways, and is extremely important in both. You want to be sure that your web host will still be around in a year, two years, ten years and so on, and again this is tied in with quality. If you’ve a lot of information that’s been built up over the years and you suddenly lose it or have to transfer it because your web host has gone out of business, this can be a major disaster. Similarly, if the web host needs to make changes to its infrastructure and implement new software, will this affect the design and functionality of your website, or will things continue as normal, just in a better manner? Check online again for how your web host is viewed by others.

Although it can be frustrating and take time to find the right web host for you, in the long run it won’t only save you money, but possibly something more important – time, investment and peace of mind.

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An Ultimate Lifestyle Secret - Search Engine Direction in 2007

It is the beginning of 2007 and if you have a website you are probably wondering what the year will bring in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO ) changes. Well, the changes can be summed up in one word, “relevancy.”

If you are going to talk about search engines and search engine trends, then you are really talking about what Google is doing. Because Google is the leader in this field, it is extremely rare that another search engine will innovate before Google.

Very early in 2007, Google filed some new patents. Google’s new patents talk about using relevancy to determine whether a site is worthy of being included in the search engine results. Relevancy, as far as Google is concerned, is about how the words on your page compare to every other site’s pages that include information on the same topic.

As an example, let’s say that your site is about politics. And, let’s say that it is about Republicans. Pages on your site will be compared to other sites that have pages about Republican politics and politicians. Suppose you have several pages that mention President Bush. If you do, then those pages should also mention the White House, the Vice President, Congress and current events that they are involved in. Why would that be necessary? Because there will be other sites that are relating George Bush to these other key phrases. For your pages to be considered, you’d better work them into your content also.

Using the Relevancy rule to your advantage will help your site to be viewed as a possible authority site. If you can accomplish this, you will have a distinct advantage because Authority sites rate higher placement in the search engine results. Unfortunately, educational and government sites are viewed as authority sites just because of their domains. It is difficult to beat these pages, but you can do it if you provide better content.

So, for 2007, your goal is to have the search engines consider your site an authority by providing content that is not only original but also viewed as relevant when compared against the web as a whole. Keyword stuffing of a web page will no longer get you a high placement. The search engines are slowly being developed into artificially intelligent “machines” that can learn to recognize patterns and use those patterns to manipulate their output.

Google was the first to file their patents, but you better believe that Yahoo! and MSN are not far behind. Only time will tell if all of Google’s patents will be accepted due to the wide-ranging impact of the relevancy concept. But, at least for 2007, you had better make sure that your site has the best possible relevant information on your topic or your site ranking could sink into oblivion.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gilbert_Griffiths

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When You Want It Done Right The First Time, Do It With Outsourcing Keyword Research

One of the most common mistake that website owners make is not properly researching the keywords that they are using for their site. The result? Poor search engine rankings and less traffic coming in. In the end, all the hard work in creating the best design and the money spent on promotion will not bring in the result you want.

Over the Internet, there are already a lot of keyword research tool that site owners can use to come up with the right keywords to use. These are the tools that can produce the combinations that can bring the most visitors and profit to your business. Having an aggressive keyword sets or phrases will make it easy for the search engines and the people to find you when they need you.

Answering to the need for keyword research are the numerous keyword tools that can be found online. Along with these are the persons that cater especially to keyword generation, gathering and sorting.

Not all businesses have with them the skilled individual that are capable of keyword research. This is why most of them have turned to outsourcing keyword research in order to find the person and the tool to do it for them.

With outsourcing keyword research, you will be be provided with the persons to:

1. Get to know more about the clients you want to visit your site. This is done through surveys or queries that visitors will put on your website.

2. Study your competitions. A vital part in search engine optimization is understanding who your competitors and what they do in relation to what you are doing.

3. Look for the keywords your site will appear under. This is based on the product or service that you provide.

4. Identify specific keywords that are related to your business. Usually done using online keyword tracking tools. To know best what people are clicking on when they are looking for a specific product or service.

Keyword research may just be the ingredient that is missing in your website. When you do not have the person to do it, you can always outsource it to people who really knows what they are doing.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Florie_Lyn_Masarate

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Where Would We Be Without the Search Engines?

Internet has given us the ultimate opportunity of reaching out to places we would never imagine to even know earlier. Internet has become the most powerful tool to communicate trade, carry out business, enjoy and almost have a virtual life parallel to our normal life.

Everything that we are allowed to experience in our real world is available in the virtual world. Enterprising people have enabled the use of internet for several things at the same time. In the race to be known to more and more people around the world, we are using different methods. But all these methods would not be of any use without the search engines.

The quality of the search engines to literally consume information about billions of sites over the world into one space has made them most indispensable for us. It has become every web master’s dream to reach into the top five positions on all the search engines. The reason is not new to any of us, it is only those who are the top will get better business.

To be noticeable to search engines we are using different methods. Some of us are more direct; we pay these search engines so that they include our sites in their databases, the better the deal the more are the chances your rankings will improve. But you cannot give an empty site to a search engine and tell it to place in the top five or for that matter ten. You need to have sufficient matter to support the search carried out by the search engine. Your site would not be detectable to the search engine if it does not have the required keyword percentage.

Therefore, people are noticing the importance of putting quality content on their website, something informative as well as interesting for people to come and read and understand and in some places share. This race has benefited us immensely. The search engine need for quality therefore makes people find more information and place it on their sites to keep them new and interesting.

There is another type of search engine marketing for all those who believe in doing direct marketing by becoming affiliates and selling one product or the other. Introduction of pay per click has been like a boon to such people. Pay per click provided the users with immense profitability mixed with practicality. You pay for each click above your limit your ads don’t show, the best way to circulate ads so that each person among us gets to earn.

Some of us do the marketing indirectly. We are like at Ezine, writing articles and selling or sharing information we have. This is innovative and extremely challenging. This has also enabled us to depend on ourselves better than search engines. If your content is good be sure the search engine spider with notice and your article will show. There is nothing more complimenting that to know people are reading the content, some might find it useful and interesting others might not. But to know the number of people reading articles is good enough.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ujwala_Bapat

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Web Advertising Secrets

Once you have decided on pursuing the administration of a website, you have to be open to the idea of web advertising. Practically, your website could not survive long if nobody would know that it actually subsists. Web advertising is a must if your business is web dependent. The life and blood of any business is surely none other than the customers but of course you could never have the desired number of customers without prompting web advertisement.

Of course there are several types of web advertisements and these advertisers would often use on you flowery and convincing words. But then you could never be definite that such web advertisement scheme would do your website any good. As you know then, there is literally no point in continuing any subscription to a web advertising method if you know for a fact that it is not compatible with your actual business. Why would you be continuously spending and henceforth get nothing?

If you want to gather ideas on what possible web advertising methods would be the best for you, better read on and find out.

There is firstly the pay per click analysis. The pay per click analysis is certainly among the best-held web advertising technique to prefer. This feature contains a lot of varying advantages and the ads connected to pay per click are obviously tracked by this method. By using the pay per click analysis as a web advertising method, you could monitor your revenue and sales volume. It goes to show the conversion values and rates of your web advertising. This could also aid you in figuring out the keywords and key phrases that are more functional and help you in deciding which should be eliminated.

The keyword analysis web advertising method. With this feature, the keywords that attract a large volume of sales are deciphered. You will be made aware which keywords are often keyed in by those who browse the net and those keywords that are high ranking in the search engines.

The trend analysis web advertising scheme. Trend analysis refers to the method of looking into the entire makeup and performance of the sales, the conversion rates, as well as the volume of traffic that your website achieves. Indeed, it provides you with a clear picture regarding the performance and status of your web advertisement.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ronald_Firquain

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Traffic Building - Site Promotion or Custom Lead Generation

What is the difference between Web Site Promotion and Custom Lead Generation?

Site Promotion: is an internet marketing term that refers to the activity of publicizing the vendor’s web site to consumers.(i.e. advertising)

Lead Generation: is a marketing term that refers to the manufacture of connections between well-matched consumers and target corporate vendors.

Custom Lead Generation: is an internet marketing term that refers to producing specific types of visitors to your web site yourself from specific publicity about your web site offer.

In layman’s terms that simply means communicating with, and attracting a qualified visitor to your web site, willing to provide you with their contact information, and have a need for your specific offer today, and are potentially going to purchase today, and again in the future.

What is a custom lead?

Somebody you have communicated with

Somebody attracted to your specific offer

Somebody willing to provide you their contact information

Somebody that wants your product, solution, or opportunity

Somebody that has bought your product, solution, opportunity or a competition’s

Somebody that is capable of making purchases immediately, and in the future

Site promotion therefore is just telling everybody about your web site, hoping they will visit sometime (i.e. branding for example)

Custom lead generation is a very specific process that results first in the capture of a specifically defined somebody’s contact information, and finally with multiple repeat sales transactions with them.

So if you intentionally will start off to generate custom leads instead of promoting your web site, your methods of advertising, communicating, requesting information, making your offer, asking for their order, and after sales communicating will all automatically change for the best for you.

Custom leads are generated for the sole purpose of creating profits online for your business, and one of the best methods of generating your own custom leads is through article marketing. You are writing articles to communicate with somebody that is already interested in your niche market that you publish the article in.

After reading your article, and if they like your style, and your offer they are very willing to give you their contact information when they get to your capture page on your web site. Since you are targeting somebody who has already demonstrated they are capable of buying, have bought similar items, or want your offer they will sign up, and buy in much higher numbers that visitors from site promotion.

For example: Somebody that is wearing tattered old shoes may very well need to buy new shoes, so you think they are a prime target for your exciting new shoe offer. The reality is the best custom lead is somebody who is already wearing shiny new shoes, with a few rather new looking shoes in their closet already.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Leo_Hanes

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Email Marketing For The Small Business

Do you own a small retail or service business? Have you learned how to harness the power of the internet, specifically email, to advertise, market, and promote your business to new and prospective customers? If not, here’s a short article on why and how to use email effectively.

Approximately 60 billion emails are sent every single day. Billion… with a “B”! Of course, most of those messages are some form of SPAM or pornography, but you can also assume that many millions of those messages are communicating some type of marketing or sales message. What’s sad is that many of THOSE will be left unopened, and of the ones that ARE opened, most will never be read.

I can show you how to use email effectively in your small off-line service or retail business, and how to get those messages opened and read by your prospects and customers. The question is, “Why aren’t you using small business email marketing?

Marketing your small off-line business using email gives you a very low-cost and time-efficient way to communicate to customers and prospects a tightly-focused marketing or sales message. In addition, once you discover an effective tactic, it becomes easy and in-expensive to repeat it. What could be better than that?

Think of a time you needed to make sales fast- either cash was in short supply, or you had an overstock. How did you get the word out. If you had your customer’s and prospect’s email addresses, and you had been set up to blast an email message to them, you would have known just what to do. The good news is, those are both simple things to set up for yourself, if you know how. Once they are in place and working smoothly, it’s like having your very own staff of personal couriers delivering your message directly to your customers.

Maybe you’ve always believed that small business email marketing was beyond your capabilities, but I can safely say that anyone with even the most basic computer skills can set up an email marketing campaign in a single afternoon. Then, in under one hour per week, you can maintain regular, personalized contact with all your customers and prospects.

If you could let each of your customers know when you have a special, a sale, or a discount with just the press of a few keys on your keyboard, wouldn’t you like to do it? That’s a pretty accurate description of small business email marketing. If you’re not on board, it’s not too late to start.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ben_Fesxbe

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Online Business - Email Marketing Tactics (Part 1 of 3) Writing Headlines That Grab Your Customers

Headlines are absolutely vital for all your marketing efforts. Whether you plan to use them on your website, your emails, your newsletters or anywhere else, they’re the hook that grabs your readers, reels them in and turns them into customers. There are dozens of different kinds of headlines that you can use and some of them are better than others. These are the ones that I use, and that I’ve found the most effective.

The No Nonsense Headline

The first type of headline you can use is the simplest. No frills, no tricks, no hooks, just a straightforward description of the contents of your message. You could produce something like:

Tips To Save Money On Your Weekly Shopping
The Best Way To Choose Your Next Car
Real Estate Agents That Shift Property Fast!

Notice that you can still use explanations and hard-hitting adjectives to get your point across, but these headlines do little more than tell the reader what to expect.

The advantages of these headlines is that they’re easy to write and easy to read. You don’t have to try to come up with some hard-hitting sales message and customers aren’t put off by a document that looks a piece of promotional material. On the other hand, they’re a bit weak and that makes them hard to turn into cash.

When to use it

You can use No Nonsense Headlines when you don’t need to work hard to make the sale. If you’re sending information that you know your customer will read, either because it’s free or because it makes no obligation on them, these are the kind of headlines to use.

The Question Headline

Question headlines work by asking customers a question that plays on their worries and promises a solution further on. These are great devices when you really want to grab a customer and ram your message home.

Want To Save Thousands On Your Home Insurance Bills? Learn How To Cut Your Costs In Half! Where Do You Look For Love? Discover The Best Places To Meet Your Match! Suffering From Termites? Drive Them Out With The Extermite-Ator!

To write these headlines, think first of what problem your product is actually going to solve. (If it’s not going to solve a problem, then you’re going to have a problem selling it!) In the first half of the headline, you ask your customers if they’re suffering from the problem. Just by asking, you’re suggesting that they do. In the second half of the headline, you tell them that you have the solution. Dead easy and dead effective.

This is a really simple formula to follow: all you have to do is state the question and promise the answer. And it sells too; you’ve put the problem in the reader’s mind, now you’re offering the solution.

Of course, these kinds of headlines depend on the reader empathizing with the problem. If they don’t, or if they decide that the headlines looks too long to read, they’re not likely to buy.

When to use it

Question Headlines are most effective when your product is going to clearly solve someone’s problem—and when you know your customers are going to empathize with that problem. If they don’t say yes to the question, they’re going to say no to the sale.

The How Headline

This is pretty similar to the Question Headline—but only offers the solution. It makes for a shorter read than question headlines so you get your point across faster, but you lose the empathy.

How To Fix Up Your Home Without Breaking The Bank!
How I Made $3,000,000 With One Phone Call!
How I Lost 33 Pounds On A High Fiber Diet And A Revolutionary Light Exercise Plan!

These kinds of headlines cut straight to the problem-solving aspect of your product. They’re short and to the point and can be easily absorbed with just a glance.

When to use it

How Headlines are great when the rest of the document is going to reveal information. That information might just be details about your product, but the focus should always be on telling customers how they can solve a problem. These work best when you’re selling information products like books or newsletters.

The Numbered Headline

There’s a good reason that magazines like Cosmopolitan use headlines like “6 Ways To Drive Your Man Wild!” They work. Most people are put off by the sight of a giant slab of text. They want their information in bite-sized chunks. When you put a number in your headline, you let your reader know that the information you’re offering them is going to be easy to read:

7 Ways To Make Your Computer Run Faster
15 Top Tips To Turn Your Website Into A Money spinner
23 Sales Tools That Guarantee A Sealed Deal

The advantage of these headlines is that they promise easy reading, increasing the chances that your text will actually be read. It’s also easy to slip a call-to-action sales message into these kind of documents: one of the tools, deals, or ways etc. will be “buy my product”!

On the other hand, easy reading isn’t the same as interesting reading. The headline still has to grab your readers to make them want to read it.

When to use it

Numbered Headlines are most effective when you’re confident your readers will find your message interesting and you don’t have to fight to make them read on. They’re best used when you’re competing against other articles or sales letters. I use them a lot in newsletters, especially when I know it’s going to published in a joint venture partner’s newsletter.

The Testimonial Headline

These are some of the toughest headlines to write. You take a chunk of text from a letter written by a satisfied customer and use that as the headline for a sales letter:

“Last Year, I Was Working 12 Hours A Day And Making Just $36,000. Last Month, I Made $32,000 And Worked Three Days A Work—And It’s All Down To Your Amazing Methods!”

“I’d Tried Every Weight Loss Program Ever. I’d Tried Dieting, Exercise, High-Fiber, Low Fat, High-Carbs… You Name It, I’d Done It And Nothing Worked. Then I Tried The Lose Fat Fast Program. I Lost 33 Pounds In The First Two Months And I’ve Never Felt Better!”

“Within A Week Of Sending Out My Resume, I’d Got Three Interviews And A Fantastic Job Offer. I Couldn’t Have Done It Without You!”

These headlines puts your reliability right at the top, increasing the customers’ confidence to buy. They explain in detail precisely what you’re offering and what you can do for the reader. They also create massively long headlines that are difficult to absorb at a glance and can put a reader off.

When to use it

Testimonial headlines are best used in industries where reliability is a bit of a problem. If you’re selling weight loss products for example, or any other life-changing service, then a headline like this goes some way towards proving to the buyer that you’re on the level.

Those are just five kinds of headlines that I use in my businesses every day. There are dozens more, but these are the ones that I’ve found the most effective. There’s certainly enough here for you to get started. Play around with them, figure out which ones would work best for your business and try them out.

But even the best headline will only grab a reader’s eye and get him reading. They won’t close the sale. After the headline you’ll have to describe all the wonderful benefits of your product—you’ve got to get the reader to actually take the action that will seal the deal. That’s the call to action.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tim_Yu

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