Thursday, October 28, 2010

The Essentials of Business Advertising

By; James Copper

The success of a business depends a lot on the advertising skills used while promoting its product. In today's competitive world, advertising helps a business to reach its target audiences through a well-planned campaign. Business advertising brings the customers to a product, which is sometimes a costly process.

Lifeline of the Business

Advertising is the lifeline of any business. These days, no one can imagine the success of a product without advertisement campaign. With proper and planned advertising, your business can achieve its targets and potential market. Business advertisement is generally intended towards popularizing a product, even before it is introduced in the market. It aims at convincing the audiences regarding the product's features and its usability to them.

Business Promotion In A New Way

By; Paul Linder

If you are running a business or providing a service, it is most certain that you will be alarmed at the rate, which your competition is growing. Yesterday, it was you and your school chum who were running the online store to sell tattoo designs (or used jeans or whatever) and today you see that two more guys have opened up much better stores. Hey, they got all the products you are selling and something more. You are surprised. Tomorrow, it is certain that you will see few more stores popping-up and you will be, yes we all know, ALARMED!!

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Choosing the Right Keywords For Your Website

By; Karen Cayamanda

Keyword selection plays a big role in search engine optimization or SEO. From hundreds of terms which are related to a certain topic, knowing which keywords should be added to your site is paramount. This article covers several basic tips in choosing the right keywords for your site: 
  • Start with brainstorming. Ask other people what search terms they would use when looking for something online. Make a list of all possible keywords. After that, narrow it down and choose those that are closely related to your website.

Advantage of SEO - How Can it Help My Online Business?

By; Bryan Keller

SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is the process of optimizing one's website to improve the position in which the website will appear within the search results obtained from a search engine based on specific keyword phrases. The exact formula for achieving this result is a much talked about and debated issue. However, there is at least consensus on the basic approach to improving position and for anyone who owns an online business it is just about imperative to follow these basics for there to be any hope of appearing somewhere on the first or second page of Google, Yahoo, or Bing.


First and foremost and most importantly is the basic design and structure of the actual website itself. A carefully planned out, user friendly, logical, and straightforward landing page or home page is essential. It is very useful to actually layout the design of the website on paper before any computer design work even begins. Using a graphical flowchart also greatly helps keep things organized and makes the design much easier to understand for everyone who will eventually be involved in the design, coding or implementation of the final project. A flowchart is basically just a simple graphical representation utilizing directional lines, graphical symbols and arrows that is utilized to depict the design characteristics of a websites menu-flow, page-order, and logic path.

In designing the website keep in mind that as much useful, high quality, informative, data about the business or industry the website is focused on should be included throughout the site itself. A glossary of terms that relate to the industry the website specializes in would be a good place to start. Another very useful inclusion could be a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page that describes in detail the most common questions relating to the website's area of business, with descriptive answers. When it comes to SEO, there can never be too much information included in a website as long as it is all completely original (unless references are duly noted) unique content.

Original content means copying pages of data from the Wikipedia or using content pages from other websites simply will not work. This is one place where Google in particular, is very good at detecting copied content and will give no SEO advancement for such material included in one's website. If a business owner is not able to author original content themselves it would be advisable to hire someone to write original content for the website as original content is as important if not more important than any other aspect of achieving good SEO results.

Additionally, there are many so called 'article submission' websites that are available to host uploaded content articles written about almost any subject. As a matter of fact it is very possible that you may be reading this article on an article submission site at this very moment. The purpose, in SEO, to upload and submit articles to these types of websites is twofold: first, these websites have thousands of guests each day which is a huge potential market for readers of the submitted articles and second, as an author one is allowed to create a signature that can include a link that directs traffic back to the website of the author's choice.

This brings us to the topic of links, and more specifically 'backlinks'. The term backlink refers to a hypertext link, which is located on an external website that links or points back to one's own website. In addition to the link there is also a phrase, which is referred to as a 'keyword phrase', that is associated with the link. When used in this way the keyword phrase is referred to as the 'anchor text' of the link (more about this later).

In the early days of the Internet backlinking was the holy grail of SEO. One merely needed to acquire many, many links pointing back to one's website to achieve a very high position within the result set of a search engine. At that time it was mainly just the quantity of backlinks that determined a websites PR and not the quality of the incoming links. Those days, I'm afraid, are long, long, gone. The search engines are much 'smarter' today and the number of backlinks is not nearly as important as the 'quality' of the backlink in determining whether or not the backlink will provide a benefit to SEO at all.

To prevent the misuse of linking farming and other types of link manipulation the use of the 'no follow' attribute has been implemented. When the use of the 'no follow' attribute is applied to a link it directs the search engine to award no benefit to the landing site no matter how high the page rank of the referring site may be. This has been successful in helping to reduce the amount of spamming and 'spamdexing'.

Other methods that were once popular but are no longer effective include: keyword stuffing, hidden or invisible text, unrelated hidden content, and meta tag stuffing. If someone mentions any of these techniques as a means to improve your SEO be sure NOT to do business with them! None of these methods work at all anymore.

At this point it becomes necessary to discuss PR or PageRank. PageRank is the method of grading a websites 'authority' or importance on the web and the process was developed primarily by researcher Larry Page (hence the name 'Page' Rank) at Stanford University as part of a research project. Page and another researcher named Brin later founded Google and took the technology with them and it is still the basis of the Google search engine and search tools to this day.

A website's PageRank is a numerical weight ranging from 0 to 10 that is assigned to a website based upon, among other things, the number and the PageRank of the external websites that link in or have inbound links to the target site. A website that has many inbound links from websites that have high PageRank themselves will in turn be given a high PageRank as well. According to Google's website the PageRank is calculated by 'considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms.'

Needless to say trying to understand an algorithm this complex exactly will never be possible but there are still many things that can be done to boost a sites PR and help improve its placement in search engine results.

We have discussed the importance of a high quality website design, the need for very informative original content, article submissions, backlinking and PageRank. This would be a good time to begin discussing the process of determining keywords and keyword phrases.

Selecting the correct keywords and keyword phrases to focus the SEO efforts on can determine whether or not it will be possible to successfully achieve the intended result. It is very important to take the time to do some research on competition and keyword popularity. In general the most common terms that describe a business would be the best place to start. For instance if you own a business that provides roofing contracting services keywords that you might consider focusing on might be 'Roofing Contracting' or 'Roofing Contractor'.

Google provides a tool that displays the average number of searches for selected keyword phrases. You can find this tool by searching Google for 'keyword tool'. After entering the keyword or keyword phrase and pressing the 'search' button a page of results will be displayed that indicate the number of times the particular keyword(s) has been searched for on average each month.

Also displayed are many other similar phrases that most closely match the keywords that were searched for. Take the time to scroll through this list and many good alternative phrases can be found in this way. Choosing the phrase that has the most searches and most closely matches the website's line of business is a solid practical approach.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

RSS Feeds - A Website Owner's Friend in Disguise

We've all heard about it-it seems like all the buzz right now in the search engine marketing industry is RSS. If you're a website owner, than there are two ways your website can benefit from using RSS on your website-you can provide anRSS feed or, for the not-so-technically-inclined folks like me, you can use anRSS feed to keep your site's content fresh.

RSS is a way to syndicate website content. According to Wikipedia, "RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by (amongst other things) news websites and weblogs...the RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data." Wikipedia goes on to say that "A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled web pages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major web sites, as well as many smaller ones."

If you're a website owner, you can use RSS to your advantage in two ways: use someone else's RSS feed or produce your own RSS feed. 1. Install a script on your website-whenever a web page on your website is loaded the script automatically loads data from an RSS feed. If the RSS feed you choose to use is the latest news, then the latest news will appear on your website. This is fairly easy to set up and is good for search engine optimization purposes. I'll discuss installing an RSS feed script on your website later on in this article.

2. Provide an RSS feed of your website's content so others can use it. By providing an RSS feed of your website's content, you're essentially allowing people to use the content on their website or through their feed reader. In either case, you're also providing links back to your website, which is good for search engine optimization purposes-it will also get visitors to visit your website. Providing an RSS feed of your site's content can be tricky to set up-or it may not be appropriate if you don't have a lot of content on your website. I'll discuss your options later on in this article.
If you're a website owner, then chances are you want to keep your website's content fresh. By updating the content on a regular basis, the search engine spiders will take notice-they'll visit your website more often and index the new content and new web pages-which can ultimately bring more visitors to your website. 

For example, if your website is about real estate, you might consider including the latest real estate news on your website. Users typically search for topics that are related to items in the news, so if those topics and keywords are included on your website you can typically be found in the search engines for those terms. It's like having your own real estate news staff on hand, 24 hours a day, adding the latest news on your website.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Residual Income Online Business Ideas

By; Cynthia Minnaar

There is an extremely important factor that determines success or failure as an affiliate marketer and that is whether or not the company pays you once or pays you residual income for a single sale. This is a major factor you need to consider before you join any affiliate program.


As an affiliate, you need to work with companies that put you first. You are, after all, the one driving the traffic to their site and they do not have a lot at risk since they only pay you when you generate a sale. Many affiliate programs do not understand that. In fact, many programs out there are paying 5-15% commission on products they should be paying you a lot more for.

If you are promoting products from affiliate programs that only paid you one time for a sale, you would still need a job somewhere else to cover your basic living expenses. You need to work exclusively with programs that pay you residual income.

Residual income, on the internet, is basically selling a subscription service. When someone buys the product you get paid up-front one time and then each month when that person's subscription renews with the company, you get paid again, every month for as long as that person continues using the service.

It is a fact that 90% of the people fail at generating any significant residual income online from affiliate programs because they are promoting products that do not pay a substantial residual income. You need to exclude any program that does not pay you residual income.

Affiliate programs that pay only one-time for a single sale are not good for your financial health. Think about it. It takes the same energy on your part to promote something that pays you only one time as it does to promote something that pays you every month forever. So would you rather spend a day to make a sale that you get paid for that day and that day only or would you rather spend a day and make a sale that pays you for the rest of your life?
There is only one right answer to that question. You should only focus on programs and products that pay you residual income.

Examples of products and affiliate programs that pay residual income online:

1) Internet Membership Sites
There are many sites on the internet that charge people a monthly membership fee to gain access to their services. As an affiliate you earn up-front when one of your prospects joins the program and per month for the life of their membership.

2) Web Hosting Services
For those who want to have their own website on the Internet a good web host is required. The great part about promoting hosting services is that when people get a website host, they usually stick with it for a long time. Promoting website hosting services is a great way to generate residual income online.

3) Online Business Opportunities
Online business opportunities offer another great way to get paid residual income online. The reason for this is simple. Millions of people are flocking to the Internet every day looking for a reliable way to earn extra income, so online business opportunities have become a huge industry.
The great thing about online business opportunities is that they are much easier than offline business opportunities. All you really need to do for these is find out where the people are searching for these online business opportunities and position yourself in front of them. You do not even have to sell the opportunity. People are going to join these opportunities anyway so all you do is setup your marketing in such a way that people find the opportunity through your link instead of someone else's.

The key is choosing the right programs.

If you are promoting the wrong program, one of the following things will happen:

You will find that people will not join. Some will join and then quit and you won't make anything. You will get lots of people to join and then not get paid fairly for your efforts. You will get lots of people to join, get paid well for a few months and then the company will go out of business. Sometimes you will get people to join and never get paid.

To ensure that you have the best possible chance to succeed as an affiliate marketer take heed of this online business idea. Focus on promoting five or six affiliate programs that pay residual income online. This is often the biggest difference between success and failure for most affiliates.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

How Can the Integration of LinkedIn and Microsoft Outlook Affect Email Marketing?

written by; Gary San

Outlook, Microsoft's popular desktop email software for professionals, has become one of the latest tools to help bring email marketing and social networking under a single umbrella. This was all made possible through integration with LinkedIn, the increasingly popular business-oriented social network. Thanks to an add-on by the name of Outlook Social Connector, the mail program can now provide both professional and social context to enhance the everyday email experience. When users receive a message from a member of the LinkedIn community, Outlook automatically displays an expandable pane housing details on the contacts most recent activity on the social network. The partnership offers tremendous potential to email marketers who want to reap the benefits of LinkedIn using Outlook.

Features and Capabilities

The social connector tool comes with a host of interesting features, the most obvious and significant being the connection of the two platforms. Thanks to this integration, you can open the Outlook client and view important information about your LinkedIn contacts, which is pulled directly from their profile. This includes their profile photo and the people they have recently connected with on the network, as well as status updates. You can also view the latest professional details such as the contacts most recent job, and where they are located. Perhaps the most intriguing attribute is that even if you are not connected with someone on LinkedIn, the add-on allows you to easily connect with that person via Outlook.

Another added bonus is seamless synchronization of your Outlook and LinkedIn contacts. Outlook automatically consolidates the data for your existing contacts, and the people you connect with on LinkedIn. You also have the ability to email your social contacts directly from the mail client. When composing a message and tying in the name of one of your contacts, their information will be logged into the system and automatically appear just like anyone else in your address book. If that contact happens to change their information on LinkedIn, it will be automatically updated in Outlook as well. To make the deal even sweeter, the social connector add-on lets you invite people to join your LinkedIn network by simply clicking a button in your email program.

Although the Outlook Social Connector is included as part of the Microsoft 2010 Office Suite, email marketers do not have to purchase a new software bundle to enjoy the new social-friendly features. The add-on can be downloaded and installed to work with both Outlook 2003 and 2007.
The LinkedIn Outlook toolbar has been on the market for a while now, but this integration represents the first major partnership between the software maker and professional social network.

The Next Great Email Marketing Tool

Considering the dependency on email and social networking, the Microsoft-LinkedIn partnership will likely prove valuable for both parties. Outlook receives an instant boost with social networking features that put it light-years ahead of any webmail system, and LinkedIn finds itself in the inbox of millions of professionals that use Microsoft's email program. While Outlook may not be the tool of choice for large-scale campaigns, marketers who realize its value will be able to take full advantage of the integration.

Step by Step Affiliate Business Plan

By; Bernie Dozier

If you're looking for a good source of income that could turn into your main income stream, then the Internet is probably your best bet. Of course, you will have to know the basics about online businesses. In order to succeed, a step by step affiliate business plan will put you in the right direction.

To become an affiliate of any product, whether it is digital or physical, is very simple, and requires little or no investment at all. With that said, there are different ways to market said product.
With a no money down affiliate business plan, you can start earning money by finding a product you want to promote. These products can be found virtually anywhere on the Internet. However, there are specified companies that act as middlemen. Such companies enable affiliate marketers to pick from thousands of products. They assign you your own affiliate ID number that will be tracked each time a customer you send purchases something. This ID number guarantees that you receive compensation for your part in the transaction.

With that said, the most important part of your affiliate business plan would be to get customers. One way to do this without any charge to you or any investment on your part is by writing a few articles regarding the subject that it is related to. Once the articles are written, you can submit them to article directories which have a better page ranking than you do, therefore can reach more readers and buyers that are interested in that subject or product.

Each article directory enables you to "advertise" yourself in the resource or authors bio box. This box is usually at the end of each article that you submit. Ensure that you use this space wisely and placed a live link, where visitors can click to come to the page you decide to send them to, i. E., either your website or the the company's website of the product you are promoting. It's as easy as that.

Best Online Business Tactics to Make Your Online Business Flourish

By; Dean C Branwhite

There are plenty of people that have their own online business with some managing far more better and interesting online businesses than others. Your own online business may have some interesting aspects that should get all kinds of prospects and consumers excited. But the real success of your online business depends on the tactics that you as a webmaster practice. Consider trying these four online business tactics to make your online business stand out from the rest.

Unveiling a Brand Early

Your internet business should have an identity right after your site launch takes place. That identity should be consistent from the domain to the site logo and design so you have a name that you can spread around once you begin your serious marketing campaigns. This may not seem like much, but the results can be really uplifting in the long run for your business. Never launch your website without unveiling a brand early. You can even pay professional people for assistance because that investment will be well worth the money.

Keeping your Website Clean and Minimal

Combine that powerful brand with a clean and minimalistic website. While there are some websites that are high on graphics that work, minimal websites are a lot less riskier and if executed correctly drives more interest among visitors because of the site's quick loading and often easy navigation. Adding uniqueness to your website is always a plus and in designing, you are limited to your own creativity. Again you can let a professional assist you here.

Placing Appropriate Contact Forms and then Some

Content is also important in your online business website and one of the most important pieces of content is your own contact information. People need to know if your internet business stands out from the rest of the scam sites where contact forms are completely absent. If you have press material or testimonials to show, be sure to include those as well. Even videos and other multimedia content can help making your online business site more interesting.

Marketing in Areas that Matter

Marketing in areas that matter means going to all the marketing areas where you can reach out to groups of people. Social networking sites are a fantastic start because most likely you have accounts of your own in the most popular websites already. Large forums that share topics that are related to your website are good areas to market your site as well. The exact areas to market depend on what people are involved with these days so be sure to research every now and then so you know where to head to.


These are just the basic online business tactics that can apply to make your online business flourish no matter what it is all about. You can put your own creative techniques into the mix as long as you keep these four fundamentals in check. You can branch out from there once you master these areas. It is very important that you practice these with consistence especially if you want success early.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Sales Process - How To Easily Boost Your Closed Sales Ratio

By; Marc Savage

Understanding the sales process is vital to attract potential customers. Using various mind control techniques, covert hypnosis, NLP with each particular client to close the deal will get you the results you want quickly.

Once you have found likely potential clients at the beginning of the sales process you need to these prospective customer the right questions in order to help guide them towards a sale. The types of questions you need to ask are incisive ones.

These are questions that allow you to get to the heart of a matter quickly and that can give you the outcomes you seek in the least amount of time. This can take some planning ahead a time, but the results are well worth the effort in the early stages of the sales process.
Neurolinguistic Programming or NLP focuses on the power of words and language and how they influence people and behaviors. You can use this power of the word in your marketing and advertising to attract the right customers.

Language can elicit emotional responses in others and you as well. NLP techniques used toward the end of your sales process can help you steer people through their emotional needs toward buying your product. Using covert hypnosis in the sales process also helps you achieve your goals.
read more....

Monday, October 11, 2010

Internet Marketing Methods - PPC Vs Organic Search


By; Ramakrishna Gudipudi

When someone thinks of Internet marketing two popular methods come to their mind - organic search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising.

Pay per Click (PPC) advertising is a paid online advertising model, such as Google AdWords. Pay per Click results typically appear as "sponsored links" above or beside the normal (Organic) Search

Engine results.

Organic search engine results are the natural, unpaid search engine results that are determined by the Search Engine. These are generally varied and contain a lengthier description of the web page they are presenting.

Ideally, using both these methods can lead to higher visibility for your site and get the traffic flowing in. But this is often not possible primarily due to limited budgets or minimal resources. When you are faced with a dilemma on zeroing down a specific choice, how do you decide which is the best one for you?

Surprisingly, studies and surveys have revealed that less search engine users visit pay per click advertising sites than visit organic sites because they have a greater level of trust for organic search than for pay-per-click. In fact 4 out of 5 search engine users report that they never click on PPC results. Compare this with the 70% of search engine users who reported visiting organic listings daily. The 'trust' factor is not to be taken seriously considering the black hat techniques that are often adopted by organic marketers.

The best thing about pay-per-click campaigns is the instant results they produce vis-à-vis organic ones that can last for months together and in fact, will show results after a certain gestation period. An organic campaign if done gradually in a proper phased manner, can literally promote increased traffic and rankings for years together.
read more........

Discover Why Email Marketing is the Perfect Internet Marketing Tactic


By; Don Meyer
So, now we have to figure out how are we going to create more qualified sales leads that we can convert into buyers. We can generate sales leads through many forms of advertising; such as, article marketing, pay per click advertising, blogging, social media marketing, press releases, ezines, classifieds... the list goes on and on.
One of the best tactics I have found for internet marketing and finding high quality leads is through email marketing. These days just about every professional in the industry has an email marketing campaign, where they get their sales lead to fill out an opt-in form to get a free e-book or free tips.

There are many reasons that make email marketing so appealing:

o Email marketing is one of the cheapest forms of advertising.
o Almost everyone has an email address.

These two reasons together make the potential of email marketing an absolutely incredible marketing tactic. Not only can you communicate with anyone in the world with just a push of the button, but if your opt-in list was 3,000 people or 300,000 people you can communicate with them with one push of the button. It is extremely efficient.

With email marketing you get feedback quickly; you can have orders coming in almost immediately. It is easy to track and measure the success of a campaign. There's an old advertising saying that goes "I know I wasted half my advertising budget, I just don't know which half". You are also able to see how effective your ad campaign is compared to the number of responses and you can adjust your ad campaign accordingly.
read more.........

The Perfect Internet Marketing Plan Can Work Wonders For Your Business


By; Steve Waganer

Most people lead a very busy and hectic life and have very little time to actually sit down and map out the perfect Internet marketing plan for their business. But if you want to be really successful and earn lots of profit form your online business venture you will have to seriously find a good Internet marketing plan. If you feel that it is not possible on your part to find out and implement the internet marketing plan, you can always get help from an internet marketing firm to do the work for you.


Your effort does not end here. After you have implemented the marketing strategy you must constantly find out if your plan is working favorably for your business or not. Make and implement all the changes that you feel is necessary for making your site easily accessible to online visitors. Changes that are done for the betterment of your business prospects are sure to spell success for your online business venture.


There are several ways and methods that you can utilize for finding out if your internet marketing plan is working successfully for your business or not. One way of finding this out is to see if your sales are actually going up or not. If your plan is successful then your sales will touch the roof, what better proof can you have then this. Ask you clients and customers how they came to know about you. If you find that a particular source is working really well for you then you can put major emphasis on that area. Also you can ask them to recommend your goods and services to their family and friends. Word of mouth is a good way of doing successful business.
read more........

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Affiliate Program Business Basics

By; Darewin Amio Ocampo

Affiliate Program Business Introduction

A website is the flag that signifies the company it belongs to. In the past only the well established and highly profitable companies have their own websites. But nowadays, thanks to the continuous evolution of the Internet, setting up a website has become so easy anyone can do actually do it. The fastest and easiest way of building a website is by using an online website builder that has ready-made templates and other webpage elements you can choose from to construct your very own unique website design. These sites will also be the ones to provide your sites URL for you. The downside to using these site builders is that most of them attach advertisements on webpages that are made with them, and their greatest advantage is the ability to design a website and get it online in less than an hour.

Design only grabs the attention of human readers, but before people can marvel at the beauty and greatness of your sites appearance, they must first be able to find it. And for people to find your site, the best and fastest way is that they find it in the results page of the major search engines. And one of the best ways you can get good rankings on the trusted search engines is through search engine optimization or SEO. SEO however can prove to be complex and hard to do especially to those who have never even heard of it before. A good alternative to SEO in getting your website seen is engaging in an affiliate program. Such action allows you to profit from your content-driven website's traffic as well as make sales with the same website.
Affiliate Program Business Definition

An affiliate program sometimes also called associate program in layman's terms is a system of arrangements in which an online website known as a merchant website pays affiliate websites commissions to send traffic to it. The affiliate websites post links to divert the traffic they receive to the merchant site. They are then paid depending on the affiliate agreement. The commissions may be based on the number of visitors the affiliate site sends to the merchant site, the number of people the affiliate site sends to the merchant site and clicks at least one of the product advertisements, or the number of visitors directed to the merchant site by the affiliate site and actually makes a purchase. The framework of the agreement is that the merchant pays according to the agreement the associate whenever his affiliate site brings site traffic or money to the merchant website. The recruitment of affiliates is not only a great way to sell products over the internet but it is also a great marketing strategy as it provides the merchant website a unique competitive advantage. Networking can be said to be one of the best and most effective ways to get your site famous online.


There are at least three parties in an affiliate program transaction:

1. The Customer

2. The Affiliate Site

3. The Merchant Site
read more........

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