[ WebNote Blog ]

Share files with friends while chatting using Qnext

2007-05-24T19:04:00.000+08:00

by:Mayank Sharma

Two of the most popular open source instant messaging clients, Pidgin (formerly Gaim) and Kopete, can work with multiple protocols, but neither is a great option when it comes to sharing files with friends. For that, try Qnext, a multi-protocol IM client with which you can share files with not only IM buddies but also contacts in your address book.

Unlike Kopete and Pidgin, which are open source, Qnext, which is written in Java, is free to download, but proprietary and closed source. It makes money by displaying advertisements in the Qnext client and in other places, such as on the page that lists your shared files. But Qnext offers innovative methods for sharing files between users, such as making image slideshows or music playlists. To top it all off, Qnext users can also interact and share files with people who don't use the application.

Installing Qnext is a piece of cake. Just grab the compressed tarball, inflate it with bunzip2 qnextsetup.tar.bz2, untar it with tar qnextsetup.tar, change into the qnext/ directory, and launch Qnext with ./qnext. Once the application is running, it'll ask you to log in to the Qnext network. If you don't have an account, you can create one for free from within the app itself.

After logging in, you're taken to Qnext's main screen, which is divided into two panes. The pane on the left keeps track of all your connections, while the one on the right has links to some documentation.

Instant messaging

Using Qnext, you can talk to buddies who are using MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, and ICQ. If you have friends on your list in Gaim, Kopete, or any other IM client, you can easily import them into Qnext. Just click on an IM client's icon in the bottom left corner on the main window to bring up a window where you enter your username and password. Once Qnext has logged into the account, your friends will appear in the left window under the General group, in either the Online or Offline category, depending on their status.

You can right-click on the General category to add another group. To add friends under a custom group, go to File -> Add Friend or click on the Add a Friend icon. From the window that comes up, you can choose the group to add your friends to.

From the same window you can also import contacts from an email account. Qnext can import addresses from MSN's Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail. Specify the service, then choose to either import the complete address book or pick out addresses you like. You can also enter the name and email address of a contact that's not in your address book. All addresses show up under the Email category.

Once you have added friends, you can send them instant messages. If you've got a microphone and a webcam, you can also have audio and video conversations with them. Under Tools -> Options, in the Devices tab, click on the Detect button to add these devices to Qnext. You can also send email to the contacts you've imported from within Qnext. Replies to these messages are delivered in your email service's inbox.

Qnext doesn't do IRC by default, but it has a plugin for it that you can easily activate. Tools -> Qnext Plugins -> IRC will open the IRC window in Qnext's right pane, and open the IRC properties window. Here you can select a channel, set preferences, such as enabling emoticons and logging conversations, and click on OK to log in. The application allows you to join multiple channels on multiple servers.

Sharing files

Qnext lets you share documents, photos, and music easily with your friends. There's no limit to the size of files you can transfer using Qnext, and you don't have to upload the files to any server. Your friends pick the files from your computer directly. For pics, Qnext automatically creates thumbnails and slideshows of all or selected images. Similarly, instead of just sharing music as normal files, Qnext creates playlists and streams music in your friends' browsers, if they don't have Qnext.

In Qnext parlance, all types of files are shared via a webcast. You can create webcasts by going to File -> Manage Webcasts and clicking on the Create button. This opens the "Webcast wizard," which helps you select the type of content in the webcast (files, music, or photos), and the files that you want to share. You can let your friends comment on your webcast items, and set access permissions on shared items, to enable those you choose to modify your webcast.

Once you've added a webcast, you can select an audience. Your audience can be IM friends or email contacts, or you can add new contacts directly from this window. The audience will be notified of your webcast, along with a link to browse and download the files in it. Your webcast is available only while your Qnext client is running.

While Qnext lets you add Ogg files to a playlist, it can play only MP3 files. If you want to allow your friends to simply download music (of any kind), then share it as files. When you create a webcast for sharing files, you can add files of any format and size. The music and photos webcasts save your friends the trouble of unnecessarily downloading music or images before they can be heard or viewed.

Detailed instructions for working with Qnext are in the Qnext manual. There's also a forum board to help users.

Conclusion

Qnext is easy to install and use for sharing files with IM buddies and email contacts. Since it allows audio and video conversations, and supports IRC, it makes a nice IM client as well. The only issue I have with Qnext is that its interface is overloaded with too many buttons.

Qnext is closed source, Java-based, and advertisement-driven, so it's not be an ideal application for everyone. But it's an interesting alternative for users who regularly share files with their IM friends

FoxTorrent, a Firefox BitTorrent client

2007-05-20T01:50:00.000+08:00

BitTorrent clients are all over the place these days. One of the newcomers, FoxTorrent, is a fully functional cross-platform Firefox BitTorrent client created by Red Swoosh, a company that is now part of Akamai. What FoxTorrent lacks in features it makes up for in simplicity.

As of this writing the current release is 1.03 (version 1.0 was released on April 26). This version fixes an issue that caused the extension not to work on Linux and OS X; I ran into this issue under Gentoo (Firefox 1.5), but everything worked fine with Ubuntu 7.04 (Firefox 2.0).

FoxTorrent works like any BitTorrent client. When it finds a torrent it starts downloading the files and displays a screen to show the user what is going on.

Out of the box FoxTorrent does not require any configuration -- it simply works. You don't need to configure NATs or UPnP, or bypass firewalls. The client also keeps running even if Firefox has been closed, because it starts a daemon process named RedSwoosh in the background when Firefox is first launched.

FoxTorrent has a small footprint. On my machine the client never consumed more than 5MB of memory while downloading files and 2MB when idle. Consumption rates depend on the OS, system configuration, and several other variables, so your results may vary. Some Microsoft Windows users have reported that the client has memory leaks, and has forced them to reboot.

The application's most noteworthy feature is the stream/play feature. When FoxTorrent starts downloading files, a button appears next to the download status that allows the user to stream incomplete files and play files that have finished downloading. Unfortunately, I could not get this feature to work on my Ubuntu system because Totem did not want to play the SWF file that FoxTorrent uses to stream audio. I am not sure why Firefox chose Totem to play the SWF file instead of the installed Adobe Flash plugin; my search for an answer was fruitless. FoxTorrent uses the Google Flash video player to manage audio playback.

It is great that FoxTorrent does not require any configuration to use; however, it also lacks the ability to be configured. The only configuration option that is currently available is the ability to change the default download directory. It would be nice to be able to throttle uploads and downloads, not start the daemon when Firefox starts, or bypass FoxTorrent and directly download a .torrent file (FoxTorrent automatically consumes all .torrent files when they are clicked).

Currently FoxTorrent does not continue to seed after a download has completed. In my opinion that is a deal breaker. Personally I like to let my torrents seed for several hours -- sometimes days -- after they have finished downloading, just to make sure that I am providing more than my fair share of the bandwidth. The FoxTorrent blog states that FoxTorrent uses the one-for-one protocol for uploading that is common in most BitTorrent communities, but I don't see how it is possible to make sure a true one-for-one transfer has taken place if the uploading is only done while downloading. I hope that in future releases the interface will show exactly how many bytes have been transferred to and from the client.

FoxTorrent is a simple, easy-to-use BitTorrent client. With that said, I still plan to stick with rtorrent until some of the issues I mentioned have been worked out -- mainly the ability to continue seeding after downloading.

RSS Feeds Monetization Tools: A Mini-GuideRSS Feeds Monetization Tools: A Mini-Guide

2007-05-07T23:17:00.000+08:00

RSS feeds are a popular data format used for serving users frequently updated content and they offer great opportunities to publishers who are looking for alternative systems to generate revenue from their original content.

With the growing popularity of RSS feed-based syndication, many Internet publishers became concerned that subscribers to their RSS feeds would not be be exposed anymore to the advertising on their web pages, as some readers could now read all of their content inside their RSS reader. In this light, some decided to publish only a short part of their articles in their RSS feeds so that those interested would click through to their site to read the rest of the content.

While initially this approach has given good results to those using it, recently more and more online publishers have decided to provide the full content of their articles inside their RSS feed not to alienate those readers on the move or offline who were frustrated by their inability to read the full content of the articles without clicking through to the main site.

In our experience, here at Master New Media, there is not a cut and dried solution which works best for everyone. It depends a lot on the type of content you offer and on the type of demographics your readership is made up of.

But then, and this is now over two years ago, some companies started to offer the opportunity to automatically insert ads inside RSS feeds. These RSS feed monetization services enable publishers to place ads inside their RSS feeds and earn money when these are read or clicked upon.

The revenue models offered by these RSS feed monetization services are different ones: they span from CPC, CPM to flat rate plans; additionally, publishers can choose between contextual text-based ads, banners and interstitial ads, which are often completely customizable.

In this mini-guide we have reviewed for you the most popular services that allow independent publishers that are interested in monetizing their content to generate an alternative revenue stream from their RSS feeds. While reviewing these services, I have identified the following traits as my points of reference:

Type of ads: the typology of advertisement offered, whether contextual or random text links, banners, interstitial ads, etc.
Every how many posts the ad is shown: the exact positioning of ads within the RSS feeds.
Ability to select and approve the ads: the possibility for the publisher to choose which ads can be included and which cannot.
Stats about ads performance: the availability of a control panel that allows the publisher to monitor the revenue and performance of ads within RSS feeds
Rate: the method of payment offered to the publisher, whether CPC (Cost Per Click), CPM (Cost Per Mille – which estimates the cost per 1000 views of the ad) or flat rate
Requirements: special requirements that the publisher needs to have in order to insert ads in her RSS feeds (which might correspond to a high authority, pagerank and number of RSS feeds subscribers)

Please note that this mini-guide does not aim to be considered an exhaustive resource of all the RSS feeds monetization services and tools available nowadays. The list of the items included in it is subject to changes and you are very welcome to suggest new items for inclusion anytime by using the Comments section below.

GOOGLE ADSENSE

Type of ads: contextual text links, banner

Every how many posts the ad is shown: N/A

Ability to select and approve the ads: NO

Stats about ads performance: YES

Rate: CPC

Requirements: AdSense account and more than 100 active subscribers

Price: free

Link: http://services.google.com/ads_inquiry/aff

AdSense for feeds is a program that enables publishers to place relevant ads in the feeds they syndicate. Google technology understands the nuances of language, and places ads that are closely matched (or "targeted") to the content next to which they appear. If you are a current AdSense publisher and your feed has more than 100 active subscribers, you may qualify for participation in AdSense for feeds (which is still in beta).

Kanoodle

Type of ads: contextual text links

Every how many posts the ad is shown: N/A

Ability to select and approve the ads: NO

Stats about ads performance: YES

Rate: CPC

Requirements: NO

Price: FREE

Link: http://www.kanoodle.com

Kanoodle is a pay-per click network which includes hundreds of thematic ad categories from which you can freely choose. Through BrightAds RSS, Kanoodle’s content-targeted sponsored links will be inserted directly into site owners’ RSS feeds within posts or as individual posts, with relevancy of the ads assured through Kanoodle’s topic-based approach.

Writing for Search Engines

2007-04-22T02:23:00.000+08:00

Much of the time when we take on a new client, one of our recommendations is that they íncrease the amount of unique, keyword-targeted, text content on their site. We generally recommend having at least 250 words of content per page, a number that continues to grow as the years go by. Ten years ago our minimum was 75 words. However, as competition on the Web becomes greater, the barrier to entry gets higher as well. Search engines are seeking even more expert content as a way to determine the most relevant sites for a particular keyword.

Conversely, there is no maximum number of words you can put on any one page so long as you are adding quality content. You'll notice that some BruceClay.com pages are over 5000 words. However, before you go after a strategy of building lengthy pages, remember that you want to build depth of content in your site. It's not about saying everything you have to say on one page. While it is possible to rank for a one page site, it is very difficult. It is much easier to establish a site wide theme, supported by depth of content and good internal linking.

Pages should be structured to address customer questíons or product information as they become relevant. This can seem to be a daunting task for many people, but it's actually quite manageable as long as you start your copywriting project off in the right direction.

Search engines want to be treated like any other visitor to your site, but while they are coming closer to the ability to mimic human judgment, they're not there yet. Search engines can still have trouble trying to accurately define what a page is about if the content is written in anything but a clear and well-defined style.

To understand what you should be writing, you first need to understand a little bit about the history of the search engines. The first search engines were set up for the people who were using the Internet at the time. Because the population of the early Web was largely researchers, scientists and educators, the focus of search engines was to bring back pages that fit the thesis model. This model persists today in the way Web pages are written: a title, description and some keywords that help define what the focus of the paper or page is.

In order to write effective pages to support your search engine optimization goals there are a few guidelines you should keep in mind. Assuming that you have generated a solid keyword líst (See Lisa Barone’s article, Five Steps to Effective SEO Keyword Research, and have assigned the words to pages, your next step should be to brainstorm the best way to represent the keywords in an informative way.

Brainstorming works best if you throw out all your filters. Don't critique any of your ideas, just write them down. The idea is to get out everything--great ideas and garbage alike. At this stage, no idea is too stupid. You can narrow it down later.

If you are writing content for your own Web site, your first response might be to feel frustrated. What on earth are you going to write about? Everyone knows everything that you could possibly tell them and you're not a writer anyway. But that's just the thing, they don't and you are.

Let's pretend that your business is selling cowboy boots. Brainstorm everything you can think of that relates to cowboy boots, even if it's only somewhat related. Once you have all your ideas down, pick a few of the best. For example, you'll want to focus a section of your site on the keyword "buy cowboy boots". Everyone, you think, knows about how to buy boots. It's just a matter of finding the right fit and style. You don't need to explain it to your site's visitors. But it's one of your keywords so you sit down and simply write all the obvious information.

You are an expert in your area. Of course you know how to chëck the fit of your boots and which styles will work best for which people. It's obvious to you that your jeans should be tucked inside your boots if you're working outside and that you should take certain steps to care for your boots. But for most people, that's not the case. That's why they're coming to your site in the first place. Your expertise is a valuable resource for the development of content. Explaining something that is obvious to you is probably the best way to introduce new customers to your products.

When I write my first draft, I like to keep the keywords that I want to incorporate on the page in mind. I'll tape them to my monitor or put them at the very top of the document. However, I don't worry about densities or forcing them in. If it doesn't sound natural to use the keyword, I don't use it. The first draft is just to get the information out. Use your keywords as a guide for the content.

Once you have a first draft, take a look at the tone of your piece. Are you writing to the right audience? Is your content engaging and informative? Does your content solve a problem or help the customer make a decision? If you're in a highly technical area where your customer isn't likely to know enough to ask intelligent questíons, have you educated them enough to feel comfortable?

Revise your draft with these ideas in mind. Knowing your audience means putting in the kinds of words that they will be looking for, the same kinds of words that will help them understand what the best choice of products will be for them.

After your next draft, the best thing to do is ask someone else to read it over for you. The best person for this task is someone who fits the profile of a site visitor. Have them read it to see if it answers their questíons in an easy to understand way. If not, revise the content to meet their understanding.

Once you have a final draft, incorporate your final product into the destination page and use the SEOToolSet's KDA or any other page rating tool to determine the strength of the document. Tweak it if necessary. Keep in mind what your linking strategies will be and how the content will support the Web site theme as a whole.

The final thing to remember about writing for search engines is that there is no magical formula for writing the perfect copy. It takes work and attention to detail to meet the needs of both the search engines and your human visitors. The best thing to do is start writing and go from there.

bout The Author
Susan Esparza sesparza@bruceclay.com is a senior writer at Bruce Clay, Inc.

E-Commerce - 10 Steps to Success

2007-04-18T03:30:00.000+08:00

There have been plenty of promises made to small businesses about how e-commerce can transform a poor business into a thriving success through simple technology. Before we go further, let's clarify something, e-commerce must be thought of as an extension to existing business models. What do I mean? If you have a solid business model prior to expanding online, there's a good chance your business will prosper through e-commerce. If your fundamental business model is flawed, then going online will only compound the problem. Having said that, this article will deal with the former scenario.

What are the Secrets of Succeeding in Business Online?

1. Don’t reinvent the wheel, or, in other words, don’t make the same mistakes as others have. Specifically, I'm talking about paying too much money for someone to build you a shopping cart (required for online transactions). While you can build one that meets your requirements, it can also suffer from serious security flaws. Purchase an off-the-shelf shopping cart that is open-source, i.e. the code is free to modify. That way, you can customize the cart to meet your exact requirements at a fraction of the cost of building one from scratch.

2. Pay extra for a quality design some people are going to argue about this, but let me explain. Put yourself in the position of the consumer and imagine visiting a Web site that looks a little dodgy, will you feel confident enough to submit your credit card information in such a case? Making purchases online is all about confidence; a customer must feel assured that you are a reputable company, and the best way to project that image is through a well designed Web site.

3. Set up a real-time payment gateway don't even think about accepting credit card payments online unless you have a secure merchant gateway to a bank. With the threat of hackers being so prevalent on the Web, you should NEVER store any credit card details. Let me repeat this point NEVER STORE CREDIT CARD DETAILS, the risk is too great. Besides, the benefit of real time payment gateways ensure receipt of your money straight away, and more people will be willing to purchase online if you have the facility to charge their card(s) at the point of purchase.

4. It’s not all about price Don’t fall into the trap so many businesses make when going online. Keep prices competitive, but concentrate on the value-added products and services. For example, offer next business day delivery; since most people who shop online are strapped for time. Nothing impresses busy people more than having their goods delivered quickly. Also, why not throw in some complimentary items? You’d be surprised how much people appreciate a gift with their purchase, even if it's just a chocolate mint.

5. Keep them informed A quality newsletter keeps your business fresh in the minds of your customers, but don’t overdo it. The key is to send out newsletters only when you have something important to say or offer your customers.

6. Viral marketing is the key This should be your PRIMARY marketing objective. People often spend thousands of dollars trying to promote their business through online advertising campaigns but forget the most important facet of a good marketing plan the customer. You'll receive more business through word of mouth than any other advertising medium. You must get people talking about your business (in a positive light).

7. Employ affiliates to promote your Web site This is especially important when trying to promote online shops, since most e-commerce Web sites are dynamic (database driven). Why? Well it comes down to how search engines index your Web site. Despite modern techniques, Google, Yahoo and other search engines have difficulties adding dynamic Web pages to their index. Hence, getting found on the Web can be difficult. A good affiliate can direct traffic to your Web site for a small commission should a sale be made.

8. Keep inventory levels to a minimum This applies not only to online business, but to bricks and mortar operations also. Excess inventory ties up cash and reduces business efficiency. The trick is to improve your supply chain so that inventory can be replenished quickly. There's always a trade-off between offering your customers everything and not making them wait for out of stock items. If in doubt, stock up on your main sellers and have a clause about availability for low selling items (keep in mind point 4 above, regarding fast delivery).

9. Provide customer testimonials but don’t fake it!! Nothing turns customers off quicker than hearing how you are the best thing since sliced bread. Keep it REAL only post testimonials which are believable.

10. Don’t wait! Seriously, this is paramount. The Internet is evolving at a rapid pace, most businesses realize that obtaining a Web presence is essential, fewer realize that the window of opportunity is decreasing quickly. I've seen it firsthand, those businesses that were making huge profit margins a few years ago, are beginning to see the market flatten out with increased competition. There's still the potential to make a LOT of money through e-commerce, but the time to act is now.

About the Author

John Greenfield has more than 12 years experience in internet related business specialising in e-commerce strategies.

AdSense Is Dead? AdSense is Alive?

2007-04-17T22:53:00.000+08:00

n September 12, Scott Boulch launched a controversial report titled The Death of AdSense.

On September 21, Boulch launched part two of the report, titled Life After AdSense, Climbing the Internet Marketing Food Chain.

What is Scott saying in these reports?

He's saying that due to Google changes to the AdWords program, AdSense is now practically dead and earnings from AdSense have significantly dwindled.

Some agree with Scott while others, including AdSense Pros disagree. For example, on September 25, Joel Comm released AdSense Is Alive report to say what the title reads.

The debate rages on in forums, chat rooms and boxing rings.

Regardless who you agree or disagree with, there is one thing that you can benefit from this whole discussion and debate. And there is one smart thing you can do.

The ONE Thing You Can Learn From This AdSense Debate Is... THIS!

The one thing you can learn from this debate is this:

Just like PPC/AdSense is a profitable monetization model, there is another lucrative one out there; Pay Per Lead.

Scott says Pay Per Lead is the basis of his monetization system that earns him more than $50,000 a month.

So, what is the conclusion and what is the smart thing for you to do?

Conclusion: Google AdSense seems to be alive and Pay Per Lead seems to be a lucrative monetization model.

The smart thing you could do is simply implement Pay Per Lead monetization model on your website(s) and compare revenue results with those of AdSense, or whatever monetization model you are currently implementing.

It's that simple really!

And remember... it's not one or the other. You could maximize your website revenue by implementing all three monetization models on your website: Pay Per Lead, Pay Per Sale (Affiliate Sales) and Pay Per Click (e.g. AdSense).

Pay Per Lead Power Ads System™ is the Quickest and Easiest Solution for (1) Creating, (2) Managing and (3) Maximizing Your Revenues From Pay Per Lead Ads!

Pay Per Lead Power Ads System™ is made up of three heavyweight software solutions:

(1) Pay Per Lead Networks/Programs Research Center

(2) Pay Per Lead Ad-Units Creator

(3) Pay Per Lead Keyword Ads Generator

No software to download, upload, install, update.

On September 12, Scott Boulch launched a controversial report titled The Death of AdSense.

On September 21, Boulch launched part two of the report, titled Life After AdSense, Climbing the Internet Marketing Food Chain.

Manage everything from an easy browser interface. Complete, 24/7 control over your own account, via an online control panel.
Go to Pay Per Lead Power Ads System

Article Submission done by: http://www.articles-submit.com

Blogging for dollars

2007-04-17T22:40:00.000+08:00

Jay Brewer of Arlington built Blogpire, a lucrative "blog empire," out of a cup of coffee.

Three years ago, Brewer bought a Senseo coffee maker and posted a review of it at SingleServeCoffee.com -- a thriving niche website that led him to create 17 other income-generating product review sites, ranging from ShavingStuff.com to SuperCoolBaby.com.

Rhea Becker , on the other hand, dreams about going pro, but makes only a dollar or two a day from The Boomer Chronicles, a blog that mixes personal anecdotes from her Jamaica Plain neighborhood with advice for baby boomers.

As a few star bloggers have made six-figure salaries or million-dollar deals off blogs, more and more people have been tantalized by the prospect of making money online -- even though the vast majority of the blogs are little more than online diaries.

"A lot of the blogosphere does not make sense if viewed from the point of view of a business model," said David Weinberger , a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. "Blogs remain, I believe, primarily conversational."

Still, hope for cashing in on the blogs has spawned an industry of blog advertising middlemen -- companies that see big potential profit in connecting brands to bloggers.

The term weblog was coined in 1997, shortened to the word blog in 1999, and has been mainstream for at least five years, according to research firm PQ Media LLC. As the number of blogs has exploded to more than 57 million today, the blog ad marketplace has also surged -- from $100,000 in 2002, to an estimated $36.2 million in 2006, according to PQ Media. Blog advertising is expected to grow to $300.4 million in 2010.

Some companies, such as Blogads, Gawker Media, Federated Media Publishing, Pajamas Media, and Weblogs Inc. -- which was bought by AOL in 2005 -- have brought together or created popular blogs under a single umbrella, giving advertisers an opportunity to reach an audience that rivals or surpasses the audience at traditional media companies. Gawker, for example, reported more than 100 million page views in February at a family of blogs that includes everything from popular media and gossip site Gawker.com to gadget mecca Gizmodo.com.

Then there are high-profile bloggers. Jeremy Schoemaker , the writer behind Shoemoney.com, posted a photo of himself holding a check from Google AdSense for $132,994.97 in September 2005, and today says he makes more than $100,000 off his blog .

Darren Rowse, the writer behind problogger.net, writes a blog about how to make money online, and bought a house two years ago that he called "The House that Blogging Built" on his blog.

But the vast majority of blogs -- the great unread masses -- are intended for only a few eyeballs.

A Pew Internet & American Life Project survey last year found that about half of all bloggers believed their words were read mainly by people they knew. Fifty-two percent of the 233 people surveyed said they blogged mainly to express themselves creatively; 85 percent said they did not blog to make money.

The woman behind "Boston Gal's Open Wallet," for example, began posting intimate details about her financial assets and decisions online as a way of getting advice and focusing on financial goals. She admits to feeling a little freaked out now that her blog, which includes a detailed spreadsheet describing her personal finances, is viewed by people from around the world. She says the income from ads is enough to pay the utility bills for the fixer-upper house.

But she, like many other bloggers, says she has no desire to turn it into her full-time job.

Even so, there is a small industry of businesses that see full-time jobs for themselves in serving ads to a cottage industry of small-time bloggers. And as the media landscape fractures, that small but influential group of bloggers may become even more important.

A group of local bloggers last year started a Boston blog ad network that sells and posts relevant Boston ads on about a dozen influential local blogs.

The idea, said Adam Gaffin , blog master at Boston community news website UniversalHub.com, is that even though the individual blogs attract a fraction of what a major media organization might attract, the blogs reach a dedicated local audience. Individual bloggers with day jobs do not have time to go out and sell ads, and farm stands that offer pick-your-own-fruit and small event organizers often cannot afford to pay a hefty sum at a website that commands lots of Web traffic.

Tim Flight, the author of GPSReview.net, said he started out two years ago hoping to find an outlet for his passion for maps and gadgets. The Concord, N.H., resident began writing reviews of GPS devices in his house, and posting relevant gadget ads.

He used Marlborough-based Chitika to create "eMiniMalls " -- customized ads for the consumer products that he writes about.

Today, Flight says he makes about $50,000 a year from the blog -- a full-time career out of reviewing GPS devices.

Retailers like Amazon.com offer affiliate programs, allowing bloggers to create virtual store shelves on their pages, and AuctionAds.com, launched in March, gives bloggers an easy eBay widget that allows them to embed relevant product ads .

And recognizing the power that word of mouth advertising can have in an increasingly fractured media world filled with banner ads, PayPerPost.com became a broker between advertisers and bloggers last year, offering to pay bloggers to write about a product.

Still, Barry Parr, analyst at JupiterResearch calls the blog ad market "a rounding error" in the total advertising budgets.

"Like anything else, you've got a pretty steep curve," Parr said. "There are a small number of incredibly successful bloggers, and it drops off pretty quickly."

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.

Top 10 Web 2.0 Winners

2007-04-10T17:06:00.000+08:00

The Top 10 Web 2.0 Losers list was an interesting look at companies and sites that possibly haven’t lived up to their potential in this era of the web. Today I am going to look at the top 10 sites that I feel have exceeded the expectations of many and have taken marketshare away from established leaders or have become leaders themselves in their industries. Again, these sites don’t have to represent the Web 2.0 concept of rounded corners and AJAX technology, they are simply showing strength during this time of the web.

Myspace. Love it or hate it, this is the top dog on the Web right now and it doesn’t look like anyone is going to take it down anytime soon. With Myspace it was never about the feature set or interface because other sites offer more and look better, it was always about the community (if you are not on Myspace, you are not on anywhere) and the control you had over your page. What fascinates me the most about the site though is that it has gone beyond being just a social site and has now become a social platform where companies form around the sole purpose of developing widgets to use on Myspace.
That’s power that any site would love to have. With the amount of people that use the site, any new project that Myspace starts is bound to be an instant hit. Rupert Murdoch is already claiming that Myspace Video will overtake YouTube in 60 days which is no small feat when you consider that YouTube serves over 100MM videos a day.
WordPress. After dethroning SixApart (losers list) in the self-hosted blogging category, Matt Mullenweg set his sights on the hosted blogging space and has been kicking major ass. What makes this even more intriguing is that WordPress.com is essentially running on Open Source software so you aren’t left with the feeling that development will stop anytime soon as you do with MovableType or Typepad. Add to that, the service is free with addons costing a small price per year and you have a company that has a revenue model that doesn’t revolve around advertising (sad when I get that happy over something like that).
Flickr. A popular choice on any Web 2.0 list, this was the first real Web 2.0 breakout hit due to its use of tagging and sense of community. After being bought by Yahoo! things don’t seem to be slowing down and through the use of a great set of APIs the service has become a viral phenonmenon.
It has yet to really make a splash with the mainstream audience who still use the larger photo-sharing sites, but it is making great strides to catch up. A free service that uses ads or a Pro version which costs a minimal amount of money per year, Flickr has created a revenue model that revolves around the best of both worlds.
YouTube. In my opinion the most addictive site on the web. There has been a lot of talk lately about the value of YouTube and its ability to stay alive with all the copyrighted content it has on the site, but people tend to forget that the same companies that hold these copyrights are the exact same companies that have been looking for effective ways to reach the younger crowds online. A Chinese kid lip-synching to Backstreet Boys may be copyright infringement due to the use of the song, but how often can a 10 year old song be heard by over 2MM potential buyers in just a couple of days? Companies are starving for this kind of attention and they can get it now without even trying.
The company is demanding $1.5 billion to buy them out and it’s quite possible they will find a suitor. For all the talk that people are going to leave in droves to go to other sites that offer money, well let’s just say large sites like this just don’t die in an instant. YouTube will be around for a very long time.
Revver and MetaCafe. Not nearly as popular as YouTube, but still making large strides these two video sites offer producers monetary rewards for posting videos up on their site. Some of the more popular YouTube directors have been using these sites to generate some cash for their efforts, while still posting on YouTube to gain audience. That’s the kicker, even when another site offers them money for their content, they still post on YouTube because that’s where they will make their mark.
With revenue-sharing in place and a model similar to YouTube’s, both of these sites are looking very good right now.
Newsvine. Simply how news sites will be done in the 21st Century. With the way syndication of news works, you can read the same story in multiple places, but Newsvine offers reader feedback and a strong community to complement the news you read everyday. If participating isn’t your thing, you are still provided with up to the minute news reports just like any other news site.
Newsvine’s audience is mature and knowledgeable and doesn’t cater to just the geek crowd, which is refreshing in this era of the web. A clean design, the type you would expect from Mike Davidson, help to make the site a pleasure to get around.
Yahoo. The largest and strongest company on the list has a sense of where the web is moving. With early acquisitions of Flickr and del.icio.us, Yahoo understands the value of community sites with user-generated content. Now they are the forerunner in getting Facebook so even when people being to panic due to the cutback in advertising it still looks like clear skies for Yahoo.
And if you don’t believe in the power of being acquired by a big company, del.icio.us has just announced they have registered their one millionth user and showing a growth rate that has tripled since being acquired.
Digg. There isn’t much to say about Digg that hasn’t already been said. It has taken old school concepts and remixed them in a way that has become addicting. With over 500k registered users in less than two months their growth is almost unmatched. What makes this site so great and why it will continue to grow is the ease of use of the site. After registering you are thrown right into the action and can participate simply by clicking a Digg button. As the community grows their will be more and more turmoil, but that won’t hide the fact that if you are looking for interesting stories and sites, Digg will remain the #1 place to go for a very long time.
If you run a site there is no greater pleasure than having an article reach the Digg frontpage. If you want traffic, this is where the action is and that will help keep the site fresh moving upwards.
Skype. If you use VoIP you use Skype. That’s pretty much all you need to know.
Facebook. Potentially to be bought out by Yahoo for $1 billion, Facebook makes a strong case for not trying to cater to everyone. However, things will change now that they have opened registrations for all to use. However, the fact that you can’t manipulate your page like you can with Myspace may show that users want freedom and control if you want their attention.
Of course with such a great user interface I may be proven wrong.

This list was a bit harder to make than the Losers list because there were a couple of sites that could have easily made it.

I am definitely looking forward to seeing what happens to all of these companies in the next year.

A.M.D. Plans to Cut Back on Spending and Hiring

2007-04-10T17:00:00.000+08:00

By DAMON DARLIN

Advanced Micro Devices, which makes computer processors, said yesterday that a sharp decline in revenue was prompting it to make cutbacks in hiring and spending in order to reduce operating costs.

A.M.D. surprised Wall Street analysts yesterday by announcing that it expected to report revenue in the first quarter of $1.23 billion, far below what analysts had forecast. In making the revision, A.M.D. cited lower selling prices for its computer processors and “significantly lower unit sales.”

The announcement raised questions of whether the slowdown was a result of A.M.D.’s battles for market share with the industry leader, Intel, or whether it was an early signal of a slowdown of sales of PCs and servers for corporate data centers.

A.M.D. had said in January that it expected to report revenue of about $1.67 billion in the first quarter, but in March it warned analysts that revenue would be lower. The consensus among Wall Street analysts was $1.53 billion. The company’s latest projection is 20 percent below that.

“It’s a big drop,” an analyst with A. G. Edwards, David Wong, said, “But I don’t think it necessarily reflects on the end market.”

Other analysts also saw no unexpected slowdown in consumer PCs sales, although sales of computer equipment to corporations have continued to be weak.

It might suggest, Mr. Wong said, that A.M.D. was losing market share to Intel.

A.M.D. had gained market share last year, garnering as much as 25 percent at the end of 2006. But as it was doing so, its average selling price fell to $75 at the end of the year from $99 at the beginning. Intel’s average selling price fell, but at a far lower rate, to $130 from $137.

Intel revamped its product line in 2006 and sold more of its higher-priced chips to makers of servers. Intel has not cut its list prices, analysts said, while A.M.D. has cut its list prices several times in the last 12 months.

Dean McCarron, who tracks the PC semiconductor market for Mercury Research of Cave Creek, Ariz., said that A.M.D.’s problem might stem from the way it shifted much of its production to large PC makers like Dell in 2006. Demand slowed from the big makers, he said, and as A.M.D. tried to move the excess inventory to other smaller makers, it discovered those customers were buying from Intel.

“Demand that existed at the beginning of the first quarter didn’t exist at the end,” Mr. McCarron said. The shift in consumer preference to notebook PCs from desktop models may have also played a role — A.M.D. is not as strong in products made for notebooks.

A.M.D.’s plans to reduce its costs suggested to analysts that the company was acknowledging that the sharp decline in prices was going to continue. A.M.D. said it would reduce 2007 capital spending by about $500 million from $2.5 billion. It said the cutback would not affect its production plans for 2007.

News of the overhaul sent A.M.D. stock up 49 cents, or 3.8 percent, to $13.35. Intel shares rose 52 cents, or 2.7 percent, to $20.10.

The revenue shortfall also had Wall Street analysts adjusting their estimates of the company’s first-quarter loss.

Mr. Wong, for example, said that the company would report a loss of about $400 million, or 77 cents a share, including an adjustment for a merger-related charge.

The company plans to announce its first-quarter financial results on April 19. Intel will announce its results next Tuesday.

Readers 'need warning on content'

2007-04-10T16:46:00.000+08:00

Readers should be warned when they are reading blogs that may contain "crude language", a draft blogging code of conduct has suggested.

The code was drawn up by web pioneer Tim O'Reilly following published threats and perceived harassment to US developer Kathy Sierra on blogs.

The code begins: "We celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces frank and open conversation."

The draft says people should not be allowed to leave anonymous comments.

Blogs which are open and uncensored should post an "anything goes" logo to the site to warn readers, the code suggests.

Readers of these blogs would be warned: "We are not responsible for the comments of any poster, and when discussions get heated, crude language, insults and other "off colour" comments may be encountered. Participate in this site at your own risk."

The draft will now be assessed and amended by bloggers around the world.

The code states: "We are committed to the 'Civility Enforced' standard: we will not post unacceptable content, and we'll delete comments that contain it."

The draft defines unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that is being used to "abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others".

It also refers to libellous material, infringement of copyright or trademark and violations of privacy.

Prominent blogger Kathy Sierra called on the blogosphere to combat the culture of abuse online after a series of death threats forced her to cancel a public appearance and suspend her blog.

Ms Sierra described on her blog how she had been subject to a campaign of threats, including a post that featured a picture of her next to a noose.

At the heart of the issue is the degree of freedom afforded to people who want to comment on blog posts.

"If those published comments could be construed as a threat, and the perpetrator doesn't withdraw them and apologise, we will cooperate with law enforcement to protect the target of the threat," the code states.

The code has received widespread support among bloggers, including backing from Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia.

He told BBC Radio 5 Live's Pods and Blogs programme: "The question is: Do we allow people to use our blogs as places to embark on threatening behaviour and really abusive personal insults?

"You don't have to insult people to be frank."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/6540385.stm

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Why Dated Content And Dead Links Will Punish Your Site

2007-04-08T13:45:00.000+08:00

Along with the Internet boom came the massive proliferation of websites. Since many websites are made not just for private use but to make money as well, websites find themselves having to compete with other websites of the same category when it comes to reaching and keeping their target audience.

SEO and Factors Affecting Page Rank

In order to reach their target audience websites find that they have to rely on search engines to list their site among the top results of specific search strings. This is because of the fact that it is impossible for Internet users to memorize each and every website they need to and are interested in visiting due to the unbelievably large number of websites dealing with almost all kinds of information and offering all kinds of services and goods out there. Most Internet users doing research are found to not type websites’ URLs directly but instead usually click on the top results that their preferred search engine gives. Because of this fact, websites who wish to be noticed by a large audience actually has to be noticed by search engines first.

To get noticed by search engines, web designers use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. SEO is the method used to increase a website’s ranking in search engine results listings. Using SEO websites have a greater chance of getting noticed by search engines and thus get noticed by their target audience. Each search engine has their way of ranking websites but has at least several common ranking factors. The importance of the factors, however, varies for each search engine and some of the factors themselves are unconfirmed by search engine engineers. Although there are many factors that do affect a websites ranking in search engine results only two very important factors will be discussed in this article – content and links.

Despite the unknowns SEO experts agree on most of the factors and their importance. According to SEO experts the 10 most important factors that can influence a web document's rank at the major search engines, namely Yahoo!, MSN, Google & AskJeeves, for a particular term or phrase are the following:

• Title Tag
• Anchor Text of Links
• Keyword Use in Document Text
• Accessibility of Document
• Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages
• Primary Subject Matter of Site
• External Links to Linking Pages
• Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
• Global Link Popularity of Site
• Keyword Spamming

Importance of Links in Page Rank

As shown on the list above links rank among the top factors that affect a web document’s rank. As a matter of fact it was listed five times. Links, however, can affect a page rank both positively and negatively. Both internal and external links can affect a websites ranking. However, if many of the links on the website are dead links or links that lead to 404 pages then instead of being an asset those links actually create a negative effect. The quality of links found on a page is therefore very important. They should have relevant anchor texts to point visitors to more information they need and should lead to relevant pages as well. Dead links is considered to be undesirable and will subtract from page rank.

Importance of Links to Visitor Retention

Links do not only affect the websites page rank but will affect visitor retention as well. Dead links is a sure turn off to visitors. Visitors who click on links expect to go to an existing page with relevant information. If there are dead links on your website visitors might conclude that the site is updated that frequently and that the site is not of good quality. If this happens they will automatically try other websites that they feel caters to their needs and is less irritating.

It is also true that links to relevant sites might affect visitor retention for the worse since visitors might opt to stay with the relevant site. However, good anchor texts leading to relevant sites are still important. Remember that if your website really is a quality website although your links may increase the traffic to other sites visitors would still stay with your site and keep on coming back. Aside from that, visitors might perceive your website as a good starting point in their online activity and thus keep on coming back because of your links.

Importance of Content

As mentioned earlier, although you might have no dead links and your links may all be relevant, your website can still suffer if it is not a quality site or a site with quality content. Quality content means relevant and fresh content delivered regularly. Dated content is almost always a website killer. Visitors often go on the net to look for relevant and timely content, unless they are doing research in history or some other well established facts. However, being such a dynamic community, more often than not it is the new trends, new information, new products, new discoveries, and everything else new, that people who go on the net look for. Although the content of the website might be interesting and well written, visitors will not opt to go back more than twice or thrice if they see that the content is not updated periodically. After all what is the use of reading the same article over and over. Some websites even have last updated dates dated more than three years back. As soon as visitors see that date they will know that the content is dated and will most probably never visit the site again.

The Deadly Combination

Dated content and dead links should never ever be taken for granted if you want your website to be a success. A website with either of the two will be penalized enough by visitors who opt to never come back or by search engines that will rank the website a little lower. But a website with a combination of dated content and dead links is sure to be relegated to the end of search engine results listings. And if people ever do visit the website with such a low ranking, they are bound to never return to visit the site again.

About The Author:
http://www.theinternetone.net

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How To Get Your Visitors Returning Back To Your Website

2007-04-08T13:41:00.000+08:00

There are many websites starting up in business on the Internet every day. The more websites, that get set up on the Web, the harder it becomes to get traffic to your site as every site is competing with you to get as much traffic as they can. It also becomes harder to get good rankings in the major search engines. So once you have your traffic, how can you make sure that a good percentage of the traffic returns back to your site time and time again?

Some of the things you could do to get returning visitors are shown as follows:

1. Make sure that your website gets new content displayed on it on a daily basis. This gives a reason for your visitors to return to your site.

2. Making your site very entertaining is important. This can be done by adding sticky content to your website, or a bit of humor here and there, just so that your visitor gets entertained and it is then more likely to make your visitors want to come back to your website. Although entertainment is good, it also needs to be updated on a daily basis. For example, the games at: http://games.simplysearch4it.com is being updated on a daily basis. This means that at least one new game is being added every day. This gives a reason for the visitors to return to the site.

The more times your individual visitors return back to your site the more they will start to get use to it and what it has to offer. This is very good. This will mean that they will more likely get to know your brand and also your websites image. The more they visit your site the more they most probably like it and the higher the chance of them telling their friends.

3. Adding a forums or a place where people can hang out to your website is another good way of giving people a reason to come back to your site. This is one of the reasons why sites like MySpace and a lot of forums get returning visitors. This is because people like to meet other people and have a place online to hang out and chat, plus share things with new people and existing friends, plus they also like to learn new things.

4. Making your site so people can easily navigate it is very important. If your visitors can easily find things on your site then they are more likely to return, as people don’t want to be searching for something on the Web for hours. They want to go to a site and find what they are looking for in a few seconds. The quicker they can find something on your site the better.

5. The speed that your site loads up to the visitor is very important. Visitors are on the move all the time and don’t want to wait for a site to load up if it takes rather long. So the quicker you can make your sites pages load up, the more chance your visitor will stay on your site and also return.

6. When designing your website, it is best to spend more time designing your websites homepage to what it is with the other pages of your site. This is because your homepage is where a lot of your visitors normally visit and is considered the most important page of a website.

7. Giving your Website a good name is very important. If you give your site a name that has nothing to do with your sites topic or is to long to remember, then there is less of a chance that your site will get passed on through word of mouth and also, it will be harder for people to remember your sites web address and will then result in less returning visitors to your website.

8. Giving away freebies is not important, but can actually bring returning visitors to your site. For example, if you offer game competitions on your website where your visitors can win prizes, for playing your games, where they then compete with other players, then there is more of a chance that a visitor will play your games, than what they would with other gaming sites where they don’t offer prizes to their visitors.

About The Author:
Jonathan White has been doing online market research, advertising and other online activities for over 4 years now.

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Why The Search Engines Don’t Care About Your Website

2007-04-08T11:36:00.000+08:00

It’s a fact. The search engines don’t really care about most websites. If the search engines could talk (perish the thought) they’d tell you that for most keywords, only the first page or two of results are really worthwhile. The relevancy drops off very quickly, and the remaining several million websites stored in their indexes are irrelevant, and invisible. If this sounds like the problem your website is facing, read on.

In order to rank well, you have to do certain basic things. You can’t expect to get to the top of the pile without any effort. To get your website near the top, you’re going to have to break a sweat. The ten rules that follow aren’t the only rules in the SEO game. But they are good ones. Use them all, diligently, and your site will start moving up the charts within a couple of months.

1. Stay organized. Develop good planning habits and record-keeping and stick to them.

2. Start with a good website. If you site is boring, uninformative, and unoriginal, why would the major search engines want to send visitors there? They wouldn’t. So build great content.

3. Directory submissions are nothing to get hung up on. Just do it and move on. Directories are a small piece of the puzzle, not a whole campaign. You can find suggestions for good directories at www.directorylist.org, www.isedb.com, and www.searchengineguide.com.

4. Write regularly and promote your articles online. This is the guts of your search engine optimization work. To get found on the internet, you have to get your name known in your niche. You also have to get links back to your site, so you can rise in the search engine rankings. By publishing good quality articles via some specialized article distribution sites, you can accomplish both. You can also use article-writing to help you acquire links to important inside pages on your site. (Known as “deep-linking.”) Some reliable article distribution sites to check out include www.goarticles.com, www.articlealley.com, www.isnare.com, www.ezinearticles.com, and www.authorconnection.com.

5. Become a trusted community member. Search marketing is all about community and neighborhoods. If you don’t join in, you won’t get recognized. You can start by posting to forums in your field. Real posts, not just link-dropping. Social networking also belongs under this heading. You can join MySpace, and start spreading the word about your business, your hobby, your work, whatever it might be.

6. Start a blog and host it on your website’s domain. Learn about tags at www.technorati.com, and add them to each post. Start a “blogroll” of blogs you like. Do something useful with your blog (annoucements, reviews, advice, so on) then ask for links from trusted sites to help you keep blogging.

7. Do organized link searching. Pick your targets, such as “trade asssociations in the antiques business,” and go to those sites. Ask for links. Look at links on those sites, and follow them. And so on, until you reach the end of a particular line. The trick here is to keep it organized and keep good records. (I use Excel).

8. If organized link hunts are good, disorganized link hunting is just as good. Huh? Disorganized link hunting occurs when you track the competition to see who is linking to them. Then you go after the same links. That’s why it’s disorganized – you are just hunting around wherever your nose leads you. For in-depth tracking, consider the tracking service from www.googlealert.com. They are not a part of Google, but they track Google, and they are Google-approved.

9. Study your web statistics. For successful SEO, you must track who is coming to your site, how they are finding you, and how they navigate your site. Good stats packages can be found at www.google.com/analytics, as well as www.websidestory.com, and www.webtrends.com, to name a few.

10. Stay on top of the news, and be alert for random opportunity. This is often overlooked. When things happen in your industry – a new product, a show, a controversy – be ready to write about it. If you don’t, someone else will, and they will get all the links. If news breaks, talk about it in forums, on your website, and in your blog.

Sound like a lot of hard work? It is! The rewards go to those who put in the effort, not to those who want to “get rich quick” with a few tricks. Use all these 10 rules, and your website will become one of the few sites that the search engines really care about.

About The Author:
Neil Street is co-publisher of Small Business Online.

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How To Get Your Visitors Returning Back To Your Website

2007-04-08T11:21:00.000+08:00

Working Online - 5 Steps To A Profitable Forum

2007-04-08T11:18:00.000+08:00

When you have a website it is important that you keep it current and updated. If you can make your website into a community then you may find that you can build your income, rank better in the search engines and provide a better service.

Running a forum is an excellent way of creating a community. It can be a place for people to discuss issues, share knowledge and, perhaps more importantly, to talk about you, your products and your services.

Now this is all well and good and will drive traffic to your site and create a buzz, but how can you earn an income from this forum.

Firstly you can create special member areas. These areas require people to pay for access and reveal special secrets or allow more personal / deeper discussions. Exactly how you will do this will depend on your target market, but remember, it needs to be something worth the money they are paying to enter.

Secondly you can put some adverts on your forum – make sure they are discreet and do not interfere too much in the use of the forum and people will respond to the ads. You can use something like Google Adsense in this case to display the ads.

Thirdly – recommended products. As the forum owner, you are a trusted expert in your field, so you can recommend products and services (as an affiliate) to your visitors. Obviously you need to make sure that these are suitable and of good enough quality to maintain your reputation as an expert.

Fourth, you can email the forum members with special offers, discounts and deals that are only available to them. Select suitable products that are of high quality and send the offer out. Again, obviously do not bombard them with emails every day otherwise they will leave your forum in droves. If you are sensible and send occasion carefully chosen offers you will get a response.

And fifth, you can sell advertising space. There are always people who are willing to buy advertising space. If you have a vibrant and lively forum then you may find that you can sell advertising space through private ads or through the bigger advertising companies.

These are just five of the quickest and easiest ways to turn your forum into a source of income. Carefully applied with due thought you will find your visitors responsive and your income increasing.

Lama Kalla "The Cyberspace Invader" is a fearless author and entrepreneur both on and offline.

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Traffic, Adsense, Money - The Three Card Trick of Internet Marketing

2007-04-08T11:16:00.000+08:00

There are not many things in the Internet Marketing world that you can wholly rely on. Following the advice of the 'experts' does not always yield success. In my experience though, there is one area of Internet business that can pretty reliably deliver results. And that is 'Traffic, Adsense, Money'. In other words, if you send traffic to a site with AdSense on it, you will get paid! The good bit is that you will get paid by Google, which means that the income source is reliable. There is no waiting for payments, and no panicking if the provider will go bust before they send you your money.

So everything is rosy ..... or is it?

Can it really be as simple as that?

Well, in essence, it is that simple. Google have some simple rules which you must follow, but otherwise, you can pretty much count on receiving regular payments from Google if you adhere to the three card trick. Sending traffic to a site is not always straight forward, but there are many ways in which this can be achieved, although this is something outside the scope of this article.

What we want to discuss here, assumes that some traffic is coming to your site, and you have AdSense already established. We want to look at the 'money' element of the equation.

Whilst getting traffic to your site is a major part of the Internet Marketing exercise, it is not enough by itself. Undoubtedly, when you receive traffic to a web site with AdSense on it, you will get some people clicking on Ads, and you will receive some income. However, for every dollar you make on each web site, you could be losing another four or five. Let's read that again,

For Every Dollar You Make, You Could Be Losing Four Or Five!

Ouch! But it's true. I know because I have proved it.

When I started creating web sites a few years ago, I discovered AdSense, created an account, threw some code onto my sites and left it. Not surprisingly, nothing happened, and I forgot about it, and went onto other things (sound familiar so far?).

Imagine my surprise when about two years later, I received a cheque from Google for just over $100. I couldn't believe it. So, the first thing I did was to look at my AdSense account and see why they paid me. I also checked my web logs and lo noticed that traffic has appeared over a period of time, and yes, people had clicked on my AdSense ads. However, I was hungry for more information. After all, if I could do this without paying attention, imagine what would happen if I tried to replicate it. I started doing the math, and multiplying my results by the number of web sites I was going to put up. I could see dollar signs in front of my eyes, and was on my way to the travel agent, when it hit me.

I didn't know HOW to replicate this success. I didn't have enough information.

One thing was for sure. Web sites take time to attract traffic as a rule, and by doing nothing to promote my sites, I got some results, but it took a couple of years. So, we come to a rule

* There may be ways to speed things up, but you have to be patient.

And while we are at it, we can create another rule

* Track your results

Now, Google does offer some tools to track your web sites, but to my mind they are limited and cumbersome . They certainly didn't give me many clues as to how and why I received my cheque from Google I wasn't able to tell anything other than which sites has produced the income. Nice to know, but not enough to enable me to replicate my success. So, I had to find another way to track AdSense results. I eventually tracked down an awesome script that did everything bar get up and make a cup of coffee.

This script has everything that you need to monitor your AdSense campaigns. It not only tells you which sites are generating income, but it also tells you which pages on the sites, which Ads on the sites, which colors of which ads on the sites, which keywords were used to find you, which site referred your customer to you .... need I go on? It is a magnificent tool, and one which is indispensable if you want to succeed with AdSense

I just wish I had it four years ago .......

Anyway, back to the story ......

Once I installed the script, I started to see trends in my web sites, and as I built more sites, my AdSense income grew, and I now get regular payments from Google Please note that I am NOT one of those who makes tens of thousands a month with AdSense (I wish), and I still haven't discovered the secret to that level of success. I do, however, continue to monitor my results and to read any information that I can relating to AdSense

And so I come to my second point. .....

I recently purchased something else, which has had an immediate effect on my results. Please read that again

I Recently Purchased Something Else, Which Has Had An Immediate Effect On My Results.

I don't know about you, but I buy a lot of material to try and help me build my online business, and I can count on very few fingers on one hand, those that actually worked as described.

This is one of those that does what is says on the tin folks!.

And what did I learn from this tool?

First off, I should point out that the tool is excellent for the beginner, because it takes you through every aspect of setting up an AdSense web site. No stone is left unturned.

And I am testimony to the fact that it goes beyond beginners as well.

I have implemented some of the strategies outlined on some of my sites, and I have seen improvements in all of them. I would say that my clicks have doubled with the same amount of traffic. I do not have many high traffic sites, and this is where this really wins. It helps you get the most out of your existing traffic, and does not rely on you having to generate more traffic.

Needless to say, I will continue to apply these techniques to my other sites, and certainly apply them to all of my new ones.

Would you like to know what these tools are? Ok, just follow the link in the resource box, and you will find links to these sites live for you to investigate.

Source : http://www.selfseo.com/story-14558.php

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google adsense
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Why Use Google Adsense?

2007-04-08T11:09:00.000+08:00

The simple answer is because you can make money from it!

Wouldn’t it be good to spend maybe a few days setting up enough pages to run enough adsense ads to be able to then sit back and do nothing while our adsense campaign is out there working for us 24/7, in all counties and earning enough from that, to not have to work anymore?

Or, if it were to take you a few weeks or even months to do this, wouldn’t it still be worthwhile?

Ok, so how do we do this? First we need to consider how we can make web pages.

We can make each one manually and or use some kind of webpage building software.

If we choose to manually construct our web pages we also need to include enough content to make people want to go there in the first place so they can click on the adsense ad. But if the content is good enough to attract them in the first place then maybe they won’t want to go somewhere else anyway, so that really defeats the purpose.

So this brings us to another point of consideration. For our adsense ads to work best we need to have people landing on them who are looking for information about a specific subject. So our adsense page has to have lots of information about one specific subject, but not so much that they stay there.

To do this we can consider using software to make a directory of information pages, on these pages we have links to other sites that are providing the detailed information that our visitors are looking for. On our directory page we have a description of the sites that are listed there. And many of these sites have provided a “Reciprocal link” to our sites, home page! (This will be covered below) so we will now have a page with lots of great content (all the site descriptions) and this is where people come looking for specific information, so we place our adsense ads here!

They are targeted pages, and visitors arrive looking for something to click on! So it makes adsense to do this.

Setting up an adsense account:

This can be a little bewildering due to the fact that you need to create your first ad as part of the signup process. https://www.google.com/adsense

If you go here you’ll find that Google has taken care of everything by providing a step by step guide that tells you everything you need know.

Designing your adsense display:

Once you have your adsense account set up you’ll be able to choose the type of add you want and Taylor it to suit your site. Some things to consider when doing this are, do you want it to appear as a part of the page? Or do you want it to jump out as something different? It’s difficult to say which is best, because that depends on a range of variables, such as your target market, your overall objectives and promotional plan.

To track your adsense ads performance you can use the “channels” option while creating your ad boxes, this will help you to determine which ads in which pages are doing the best and that, in turn, will enable you to decide on the best possible style and position for displaying your ads.

Placing an Ad display on your page:

First, this all depends on your skill and knowledge of html, if you’re new to web page building and html, you may find this a challenging task. If you are experienced you can skip to the notes in this section, these notes may save you a lot of time and worry

Many html composers will allow us to edit the page in the “view” that we would see in if it was a live page. So all we have to do is place XXX in the page were we want the ad to appear, and then switch to “html view” (or whatever your composer calls the page that you edit html code on). In the html view we find the XXX, then simply delete the XXX and paste the adsense ad code in its place. EASY!

NOTES:

Some composers won’t run the script in any view after you paste it, ARGH! This may make you think it didn’t work. In addition when you load it to your server and run it live, you may still not see your ad display! It sometimes takes a little while for everything to propagate on the page. So, as long as the code is there in html view, don’t waste your time trying to figure out why it isn’t showing, just come back every hour or so to check it.

Also you will notice at first, the ads may not be targeted or may only display partially, just be patient, I have had to wait up to 3 days for some of my ad displays to appear!

Bill Boyd, is a full time professional Internet Marketer.

adsense
google adsense
Turbo Tagger

Improve Your Google Adsense Earnings

2007-04-08T06:36:00.000+08:00

The advent of Google Adsense has made making money online easier than ever. Just add it to your blog or web site, and you're on the road to riches, right? Well, that's the general idea, and just about anyone with a decent amount of traffic can make a few pennies, but there's a big difference between making a little bit and planning your retirement on your own private island. If you're looking for ways to make more with Adsense, the follow tips should help, whether you're working with a blog or a web site:

1. Blend advertisements with the background of your page. This is a basic tip, but many people haven't figured it out yet. Countless studies have shown that people are more likely to click Adsense ads that have the same font and link colors as the rest of the page and that share the same color background (ditch the border altogether by making it the same color as the background).

2. Keep Adsense above the fold. In the web world, the "fold" is the bottom of the page. Anything that's below the fold means people have to scroll. I know you think your content is riveting, but the truth is that many people are busy and aren't going to read a whole article. You can't count on them to scroll down. Instead position ads above the fold so visitors are certain to see them.

3. Cut down on clutter. If you have menus upon menus on pages surrounded by polls, pictures, and lots of other features that can distract the visitor, you may really be hurting your Adsense CTR (and thus your total earnings). My highest CTR sites (well into double digit percentages) often have nothing but a title, an article, and a small navigation menu. Visitors are much more likely to notice and click on those ads this way.

4. Make sure every page you have Adsense on has content in the form of text. Although pictures are beautiful, the Adsense bot is not very good at figuring out what advertisements are relevant to them. If your site is picture heavy, do yourself a favor and add a paragraph of content below each image.

5. Focus on a niche. As smart as the Adsense bot is, it has a hard time figuring out what your web site or blog is all about if you're writing on everything under the sun. To maximize potential Adsense earnings, make sure your blog or web site is on a specific topic. That goes for page level stuff too. Don't write articles or blog entries that are all over the place. Focus on a single subject, so Adsense can target your readers with relevant ads.

6. Get more traffic! This always seems like an obvious tip, but so many people wonder why they aren't making good money (or any money) with Adsense, and it turns out they only receive 5 or 10 visitors a day. You don't necessarily have to have millions of page views a day to do well with Adsense (though we can all dream), but you do need to get up there in the thousands before you can start thinking about making a living this way. Make sure you have a quality site, and then study forums where people talk about ways of promoting their web sites. The more you read and learn, the better you'll do at getting more people to your site.

These tips may not change your life, but I hope they'll in some way help you improve your Adsense earnings. Everyone deserves the opportunity to make money from home (and maybe even quit their dead-end jobs some day). The great thing about the web is you don't have to be the biggest most popular site out there in order to make good money. Just stick with it, pay attention to tips like these, and you'll be making more in no time.

TC Thorn is the author of many content web sites, such as Pest Control Information, which earn money through Adsense and affiliate programs. She has been making a living from her web income since 2004.

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google adsense
Turbo Tagger

Adsense - Maximising Your Income In The Holidays

2007-04-08T06:29:00.000+08:00

Have you noticed around the American bank holidays, like July 4th & Thanksgiving, your Adsense income takes a nosedive? Do you wonder how you can make the most of these holidays and actually maximise your income?

These income nosedives are something I've noticed particularly over the past year and each time is happens my heart is in my mouth as my Adsense income plummets and I wonder if it's ever going to return to more normal levels. Of course, it does, but just for a day or two you're wondering just what has happened to your normal income levels.

If you've been making money with Adsense for any time at all - you'll know that your Adsense income can be unpredictable to say the least. From one day to the next you can experience quite big fluctuations for no apparent reason.

You may well have noticed that particular days of the week are far better than others - this will depend on the particular niche that your site is in. For me, my best days are Wednesdays, with Saturdays & Sundays being particularly quiet. For my daughter's site, she often has better days at the weekends. It will depend very much on your site content and just who your visitors are. My daughter's site is fashion related, so I guess that a lot of her visitors are teenagers and young women who have more time to browse the internet at the weekend.

Of course, the upside of these Adsense income fluctuations is that the build up to big holidays, such as Christmas, can see some big increases in income. If your site is one where you can cash in on this market, you'll want to consider preparing for this several months beforehand. Especially so as the Christmas rush starts in early November!

By creating your content pages embedded with your Adsense code in good time you're giving the search engines plenty of time to find them & index them. You've even got time to tweak them if you find that they're not coming high enough up the search engine results.

As well as building pages, don't forget that all-important building of links. This is more important for MSN and Yahoo, as Google seems to penalise irrelevant links. However, it's worth building links to your new pages from related sites, as this will improve your search engine rankings and thus your Adsense income.

It's especially early to get an early start creating new pages that you want to get ranked in Google as they are now only re-indexing their pages every few months so it is taking longer to get new pages ranked well by them. Making sure you've got a Google Sitemap can help to get over this problem. There are plenty of free tools available to help you create your Google Sitemap - just type “free Google sitemap” into the search engines and browse through the available options.

Of course, the great benefit of building your internet businesses with Adsense, is that they'll keep earning you money whilst you take your holidays, allowing you to take a well-earned rest.

So, instead of dreading the holidays, learn to make the most of them plan for them, and use them to make even more money with Google Adsense!

For the latest information on making money with Adsense, visit Google Adsense secrets & tips.

To get a free email course on how to make more money with Adsense, sign up for our free Adsense course.

This article was submitted by Jennifer Carter.
Jen started her own home internet businesses in 2005 and writes articles to share her experiences in building an online business and shares tip for making money with Google Adsense.

adsense
google adsense
Turbo Tagger

Easy CSS for Maximising AdSense Earnings by William Lee

2007-04-08T06:20:00.000+08:00

Being able to convert more clickers ultimately means greater earnings from the same amount of traffic. Extensive tests have proven that certain areas of a webpage receive more viewing time than others. It can be shown that with all else being equal, the likelihood of a click conversion is proportional to the amount of exposure to a particular ad block. So it makes sense to try and keep ads in the visitor's field of vision, particularly in the most popular areas of a webpage known as the hotspots.

Google is known for supporting AdSense

Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc'); return false;">AdSense publishers. This isn't surprising when you consider that they want to provide the best performance for their advertisers as well as making as much profit as possible from their own cut of each ad click. To this end, Google have provided AdSense

Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc'); return false;">AdSense publishers with a 'heat map' that shows where these visual hotspots are located.

When it comes to positioning ad units on a page, CSS comes into its own. Developed for the control of presentation, CSS can reduce the amount of work you have to do in order to implement some of the ad placements suggested by the heat map. In particular, the two ad units that I've found to be most effective are the rectangular blocks when in a floating position within an article body and the link units placed where navigation links are usually found.

-- in the top left corner of a web page.

Why Use CSS?

There are many benefits to using CSS for the positioning of ad units, including:

Faster page load times -- CSS stylesheet files can be cached by web browsers so the same files referenced by multiple pages don't need to be downloaded repeatedly as the local copies can be used instead.
Easier website maintenance -- the appearance of each webpage that references a stylesheet can be changed by modifying the stylesheet alone. If every webpage of a website uses the same stylesheet then changing it would allow you to make site-wide changes from a centralised file.
Separating presentation from the logic of a webpage by means of an external stylesheet allows a designer to work on the appearance, whilst a programmer works on the functionality without their being any conflict between the two.
Floating, Embedded Ad Blocks

More specifically, CSS can be used to implement one of the more effective ad placements much easier than using older techniques involving tables. In order to embed an ad block within the body of a piece of content, simply wrap the AdSense

Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc'); return false;">AdSense code with SPAN tags and apply a float style e.g.

< style="float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;"> AdSense

Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc'); return false;">AdSense code here< /span > Content here
This snippet of code is all that's needed to float an AdSense

Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc'); return false;">AdSense block within a body of content. The content automatically wraps itself around the ad block with a margin of 10 pixels to keep the two from crashing.

Using CSS can provide an AdSense

Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc'); return false;">AdSense publisher with much more elegant coding that's faster, easier to maintain, more accessible and more search engine friendly than with the common use of nested tables.

Learn how to analyse and enhance your AdSense

Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc'); return false;">AdSense performance with AdSense

Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc Adsense is a program by Google Inc'); return false;">AdSense Tracker -- discover what Google won't tell you. This article brought to you in conjunction with Mersey Inks for Epson Stylus compatible inks and Search Engine Optimisation SEO Liverpool.

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Article Resource: http://articles.sakshay.in

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google adsense
Turbo Tagger

How To Use Adsense Tricks To Benefit Your Site And Boost Profits?

2007-04-08T06:02:00.000+08:00

Adsense is really making waves and making its presence felt especially on the affiliate industry. The result of this is that most of the weak affiliate merchants have disappeared. Likewise ad networks are beginning to lose their customers due to Google’s adsense.

If you are a web site owner and you’re losing more rather gaining using affiliate programs that you are advertising then I guess it’s high time that you consider shifting to adsense marketing and start earning which is what you should be doing in the first place.

The best thing about Google is that the adsense that they will put on your site are carefully chosen to match the content on your pages, which is good since your web visitors have a much better chance of clicking on them since they are related to the information that they have search on your site.

Another benefit that you derived from this is that it enhances further the usefulness of your site since other related information that are not found on your site is conveniently supplied by Google through its adsense. This is actually just one of adsense trick.

With Google’s adsense you will no longer have to waste time and effort in choosing various types of ads for the different pages of your site. Google has made everything easy as well as convenient for you. There are no difficult codes to deal with all you get are ads that are carefully chosen to match every contents found on your site.

This will provide you with lots of time to do other important things like creating better and quality contents since most of the search engines considered contents as one of their basis in choosing the sites where they are to put their ads.

Another great thing about Google adsense is that even if you have already existing affiliate links on your site your site will still be allowed to add adsense ads. This means that you will be able to still earn from adsense ads. Plus you may even customize the adsense so that it will appear as part of your web page. You use Google’s custom palette for such an endeavor.

The rationale behind matching the adsense to the theme of your site is that most of the web visitors today are used to clicking on a link that is blue. By having your Google adsense to match the theme of your web page will make it looks like a part or portion of your content. This adsense trick is ideal since it will make the web visitors to click on it thinking that it’s just a link to another page of the web site.

Aside from that you will also be able to filter out those URLs that do not meet your guidelines. You may also block your competitor from advertising on your site. Bear in mind that the fact still remains that adsense is somewhat competing for some space on web sites that all other revenue generating ads are sharing.

With adsense on your web page together with your content people will definitely flock on your site sicne yo have everything that they need. In the long run having an adsense on your site will both benefit you in terms of increase in revenue as well as increase in your web site’s hits.

About The Author:
Finally.... An All-In-One System That Runs ALL Your Joint Ventures On Autopilot!

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google adsense
Turbo Tagger

150 Highest Paying Adsense Keywords Revealed! by Kevin Miller

2007-04-08T05:36:00.000+08:00

Rank Keyword

1 mesothelioma

2 cheap auto insurance

3 consolidate student loan

4 life insurance quote

5 cheap car insurance

6 refinance home

7 car insurance quote

8 refinancing

9 online car insurance

10 online insurance quotes

11 criminal defense lawyer

12 debt consolidation

13 refinance home mortgage

14 medical malpractice lawyer Michigan

15 bad credit home loan

16 loan refinance

17 tax attorney

18 online insurance quote

19 laptop data recovery

20 medical malpractice Michigan

21 car insurance rates

22 equity home loan

23 register domain name

24 data recovery service

25 life insurance rates

26 auto insurance rates

27 cheapest car insurance

28 domain register

29 dui attorney

30 lawyer medical malpractice

31 home loan

32 credit card consolidation

33 car accident lawyer

34 free debt consolidation

35 car insurance

36 term life insurance

37 second mortgage

38 hard drive data recovery

39 dui lawyer

40 refinance leads

41 raid data recovery

42 home loans

43 mortgage loan leads

44 refinance

45 mortgage internet leads

46 domain registration

47 credit card debt consolidation

48 low rate mortgage

49 mortgages

50 fitness franchise

51 debt consolidator

52 california home loan

53 medical malpractice new york

54 credit card machines

55 digital asset management

56 malpractice attorney

57 help desk software

58 criminal defense attorney

59 domain names

60 mortgage loan

61 accept credit cards

62 mortgage broker leads

63 best mortgage rate

64 online credit card processing

65 personal injury lawyer

66 mesothelioma attorney

67 fixed rate mortgage

68 accident attorney

69 conference calling

70 sub prime mortgage leads

71 home improvement loans

72 domain hosting

73 defense attorney

74 credit card 0 apr

75 data recovery

76 credit card merchant account

77 credit card acceptance

78 injury lawyer

79 currency trading

80 mortgage leads

81 merchant credit card

82 business intelligence

83 injury attorney

84 network marketing software

85 sales leads

86 online college degree

87 leads lists

88 mba online degree

89 debt counseling

90 malpractice attorneys

91 debt management

92 domain web hosting

93 crm software

94 edi software

95 credit card service

96 lawyers malpractice

97 cheap web hosting

98 web content management tool

99 Chicago medical malpractice

100 ecommerce web hosting

101 mortgage rate

102 subprime mortgage leads

103 mortgage rates

104 balance transfer credit card

105 safeco insurance

106 annuity leads

107 mortgage leads for sale

108 attorneys medical malpractice

109 debt consolidation leads

110 stock trading online

111 inexpensive web hosting

112 web content management software

113 virtual web hosting

114 credit card processor

115 life insurance

116 medigap insurance

117 web hosting reseller

118 hosting

119 california mortgage

120 orlando medical malpractice

121 online trading

122 crm online

123 special finance leads

124 direct mail lists

125 asbestos lung cancer

126 business sales leads

127 debt free

128 asset management software

129 debt solution

130 low interest credit card

131 card credit debt

132 exclusive mortgage leads

133 whole life insurance

134 mortgage interest rate

135 discount web hosting

136 debt relief

137 lawyer houston

138 online associate degree

139 web site content management

140 lawyers medical malpractice

141 credit card machine

142 orange county search engine optimization

143 wireless credit card

144 adjustable rate mortgage

145 asset management technology

146 debt help

147 online bachelor degree

148 duplication dvd

149 mortgage

150 automotive direct mail

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Article Resource: http://articles.sakshay.in

adsense
google adsense
Turbo Tagger

10 Reasons Keyword Research Is So Important To Adsense Sites

2007-04-08T05:34:00.000+08:00

With the vast popularity and the wide usage of Google’s Adsense in the internet community, many tools and programs have come up to help or assist Adsense sites make more profits. Adsense sites make profit by the pay per click scheme that is employed. Every ad that gets clicked coming from a certain Adsense site provides revenue for the site owner.

The traffic flow into the Adsense site dictates the number of clicks a certain Adsense site may incur. Also, the number of visitors your site gets determines your Adsense income.

One major factor that makes a website get good traffic flow is its content. No matter how beautifully developed a site is, if it doesn’t have good content it wont have a good number of traffic coming in. Your site must arouse the interests of the people who visit it and will encourage them to come back for more. And to achieve that, you must have good content.

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google adsense
Turbo Tagger
Good content coupled with the right keywords and you will see earnings from your adsense site grow everyday. Make your site the money making Adsense site it should be. Here are ten reasons keyword research is so important to Adsense sites.

1) Get high in search engine results. With the right keywords, you can lord it over all the other millions of similar themed sites as your site and be very accessible to the millions of searchers. Many people only go to the sites that are on the first page of the result page of the search engine. If you make it to the top ten, or better yet the top spot, you get a great chance of attracting visitors to your site.

2) Having the right keywords will attract the right niche. Having a niche will attract a certain market making sure that you can get a sure group of people that is looking for your niche and has the same passion as you.

3) Niche keywords will lead your target market straight to your site and to the advertisers’ sites spelling profit. If you research on what the good keyword is for your niche, you will find out what people in that certain market are looking for. As time and interests change, so does the content of your site.

4) Researching for good keywords will spell more sales for your sites as you can produce a product that can cater to that keyword. Knowing what people wants and demands is a marketing tool and sales tool that will always help boost your earnings.

5) Keyword research keeps you and your site updated and well informed a characteristic every internet entrepreneur should always have. Information is a great weapon in the ever so competitive ecommerce market.

6) Another reason keyword research is so important for the Adsense site is that it makes people more aware that your site exists and is available. With millions of sites on the net, a person doesn’t have the time to search them one by one, with good keywords; they can easily discard and choose the site they need to go to.

7) Researching for keywords makes the content of your Adsense site more interesting to your projected market and this will help in the rise of the popularity of your site, also;

8) If you have updated keywords in your content, many visitors would repeatedly come to your site. Even recommend them to their friends and fellow enthusiasts of the niche you choose increasing traffic flow and potential clients.

9) Researching for good keywords offers the opportunity to be linked to other sites with good traffic. Links can be easily exchanged when the other sites know that you have good traffic as well as good keywords.

10) Many more advertisers would want to be included in your Adsense making more revenues and increasing your monthly take as more people would have more choices in the ads to click. With that, people need not go to other sites. They would just stay in your site and do their search there. More clicks mean more money and profit.

Kevin Anderson has been marketing online since 2002.

The Basics On How To Start Making Money With Adsense

2007-04-08T05:28:00.000+08:00

The concept of Adsense is really simple, if you think about it. The publisher or the webmaster inserts a java script into their website and each time the page is accessed, the java script will pull advertisements from the Adsense program that is relevant to the topic of the page. The ads that are targeted should ideally be related to the content that is contained on the web page serving the ad. If a visitor clicks on an advertisement, the webmaster serving the ad earns a portion of the money that the advertiser is paying the search engine for the clicks.

The search engine company i.e. Google is the one handling all the tracking and payments, providing an easy way for webmasters to display content-sensitive and targeted ads without having the hassle to solicit advertisers, collect funds, monitor the clicks and statistics. It seems that there is never a shortage of advertisers looking for exposure.

The first reason why Adsense is essential for content sites is because it already has come a long way in understanding the needs of publishers and webmasters. Together with its continuous progression is the appearance of more advanced systems that allows full ad customization. Webmasters are given the chance to choose from many different types of text ad formats to better complement their website and fit their page layout.

The different formatting enables the site owners the possibility of more click through from visitors who may or may not be aware of what they are clicking on. It can also appeal to the people visiting and provide them more information. This way the advertisers get their ads exposed and sites possibly visited and the publisher (that’ you) earns some extra income.

The second reason is the ability of the Adsense publishers to track not only how their sites are progressing but also the earnings based on webmaster-defined channels. The recent improvements in the search engines gives webmasters the capability to monitor how their ads are performing using customizable reports that has the capacity to detail page impressions, clicks and click-through rates on individual pages. Webmasters and publishers can now track specific ad formats, colors and pages within a website. Trends can easily spotted and the ads that result in the most clicks can be duplicated on more pages.

With the real-time reporting at hand, the effectiveness of the changes made will be assessed quickly... The ever-changing demands would be met while generating cash for the webmasters and publishers. More flexible tools are also allowing webmasters to group web pages by URL, domain, ad type or category, which will provide them some accurate insight on which pages, ads and domains are performing best.

The last and final reason is that the advertisers have realized the benefits associated with having their ads served on targeted websites. Thus increasing the possibility that a prospective web surfer will have an interest in their product or service. All because of the content offered on the page and the ads themselves.

Adsense is all about targeted content, the more targeted your content is, the more targeted the search engines’ ads will be. There are some web masters and publishers who are focused more on their sites content and how best to maintain that rather than the cash that the ads will generate for them.

There was a time when people were not yet aware of the money to be achieved from advertisements and Adsense. In those days, the content was the most important factor and that should still be the case but now the option of adding Adsense does not devalue the page but offers more options to the reader. It is a win win situation. There is a ton of information on Adsense out there for those willing to learn more. Buyer beware, there is lots of misinformation and overpriced products that make outrageous claims of making millions with Adsense.

Source: http://www.goodadsense.com/adsensebasics.php

adsense
google adsense
Turbo Tagger

How To Find A Profitable Niche For An Adsense Site

2007-04-08T05:15:00.000+08:00

When the dotcom balloon burst everybody thought that was the end of an era. Many saw the internet as a cash cow and when many sites collapsed, this notion popped. Internet investors went scurrying away hoping to save what was left of what they have invested.

But the internet is not one to be counted out. One great idea alone can turn into huge profits. And even if it’s not as what it was before, many people can still count on earning some extra money from the internet. All it takes is one good idea and a bit of diligence.

Google’s Adsense is such an idea. This is a great ad program that allows many webmasters and site owners to profit from their sites as an advertising partner of Google. Adsense allows sites to have access to Google’s advertisers and direct the certain market or product based on keywords and content to a site that has the same market or niche.

When a visitor of the site clicks on an adsense ad, the webmaster or adsense site owner gets a percentage of what the advertisers pay per each visitor from the linked site. This is what we call pay-per-click advertising. Many sites have caught on and have seen the growth and potential of Adsense, so many in fact that Google has rejected some of those who have tried to apply.

Having your own site doesn’t guarantee a sure spot in having Adsense in your site, or for that matter making it successful. You have to find a niche that can get you the traffic that can guarantee you a market. Finding a niche is not that easy, there are many competitions in the internet market, but to succeed in such endeavor, there are certain steps to go through to at least give you a fighting chance. Follow these easy steps on how to find a profitable niche for an Adsense site.

Decide which niche you can do based about your passions and interests.

If your niche Adsense site is based upon what interests you and is something your are all too willing to undergo, everything would seem easier since you would be enjoying working on your Adsense site as well. Hours would just seem minutes and before you know it, you have your Adsense site.

Spend a few minutes or a couple of hours deciding on the niches you like. List them in order of their priorities to you based on your passion for them. If you can’t think of one there are many sites that can generate many niche website ideas that can help you. They are based on what is popular and rapidly growing in the internet based on their keyword searches in search engines.

Find out about all the other people who may share your passion for the niche you have chosen.

It is important that you find a niche market online that can act as your customers or clients in the future. If you plan on making money for your Adsense site (of course you do!) then you have to make sure that you find people who share your interest on the niche you have chosen.

This is one of the easiest procedures or steps you have to do before making your niche for your Adsense site, research. All you have to do is go to Google and type in the keyword of the niche you have selected and off you go.

Go to sites that have forums that are based upon your niche. Read and join in their discussions, learning more about your target market along the way. These people will become your market in the future. Find out about what they want and need so that you can get many ideas that can help make your site better.

Make sure that the niche you have chosen has a market that is willing to spend money.

Make sure of this point so that you are ensured that your site can make profits. This will also be relatively easy to find out. Check out all the pages that feature the niche you have chosen and see if there are many ads there. You may also check out the search results page of Google after searching the keyword if there are many sides on the ads side. If there are, then you can be pretty sure there is a market out there willing to spend some money.

Get your site running.

Armed with your research on what your niche market wants, get a product that can be sold to your market. Find sub niches that can also provide other needs. These sub niches should fall into the main niche category. Find good keywords for your site so that you can generate traffic. With good traffic you can see the people just rushing in toy our site and clicking on the Adsense on your page. The more traffic and the more clicks could spell more income for you.

About The Author:
Kevin Anderson has been marketing online since 2002.

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Mom discovered 16 year old son with $70,000 earned from Adsense.

2007-04-08T05:12:00.000+08:00

This interesting article addresses some of the key issues regarding Adsense. A careful reading of this material could make a big difference in how you think about Adsense.

If your Adsense facts are out-of-date, how will that affect your actions and decisions? Make certain you don't let important Adsense information slip by you.

Who Else Wants To Make Money With Adsense?

Fact number 1: Kids in high school are making thousands of dollars every month with Adsense.

Fact number 2: Housewives, retirees, mom and dads, who are just staying at home and have never made a dime on the internet have created full-time incomes by simply placing Adsense ads on their web site or blog.

These are just some of the “super Adsense earners”. You may have already heard about their story for they are among the few who are on their way to making millions worth of cash just by promoting Adsense sites.

Anyone, any age and gender can become money generating Adsense publishers as long as they what it takes. How does one go about this Internet advertising?

Writing articles for Adsense is the way to do it. Using the right keywords in your articles and having Google ads on a certain site has become the most profitable way of marketing that anybody can get into. No experience and level of education needed. If you are not using this strategy, or may not be aware of it in the first place, chances are you may be losing thousands of dollars worth of extra income and still do not know it yet.

This is one of the many reasons why writing original quality content articles is now the latest in marketing buzz. Content and links. When combined together becomes a really powerful tool to a successful web site and richer individuals. Many internet marketing professionals are already aware of the value of an original quality content and how using keywords can drive targeted traffic into their sites from the search engines.

So why don’t all these web site owners write and submit their own articles if that is what is important?

The simple and understandable answer is that it takes time to write articles, submit them and get targeted traffic to their websites. That is why they get the services of those who can spares sometime to write the articles that would cater to their site purpose but still turn out as a good quality and unique piece of work.

To get into the Adsense marketing business and start earning some good cash, ask yourself. Did you enjoy writing when you were in school? If you answer yes to this question, you already have an initial advantage over most internet marketing business owners that wants to make money online and doing it at home.

With the boom in the Adsense market comes the need for sites to want fresh, quality and original keyword rich content. This way, web site owners can have a steady supply of articles with the proper keywords that they relate to their site contents. The result of this is seen in the sites page rank when indexed by the search engines. Which, in turn, gets moreAdsense ads to show above, below or next to the article on their website with targeted traffic.

What do people have to do?

Write quality and original content, keyword or phrase rich articles with links to your website in the resource box. Then build a website or web page with targeted keyword or phrase rich original content for the targeted traffic that originates from the articles you wrote. Finally, you will have a Google Adsense ads that are targeted to your keyword or phrase rich original content site where visitors will get to visit when they come looking for information.

A win-win situation if you think more about it. A favor for persons looking for quality content and information. For the persons writing the original content articles. And the person with the quality original content rich website. Of course, the search engines and its advertisers are getting targeted traffic and sales but so what? As long as you are getting something in your favor, it does not really matter what the others are getting for themselves.

So who else wants to start earning money with Adsense. You. Everyone. Anybody. Internet marketing has many opportunities wide open for this people. Writing articles and using Adsense for your kind of internet marketing strategy is one sure way of getting a piece of that action and cash.

Better not be left behind the many making millions already.

So now you know a little bit about Adsense. Even if you don't know everything, you've done something worthwhile: you've expanded your knowledge.
Sinta is a Full Time Adsense Publisher and She Makes her
living from Adsense. She is passionate about sharing her Adsense Knowledge.

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Turbo Tagger

How To Maximize Adsense Earnings From Your Blogs

2007-04-08T00:05:00.000+08:00

Earn Adsense income from your Blogs

Did you know you can use Google adsense on your blog? Don’t have a blog? Running, starting, and maintaining a blog is cheap, and in some cases free! So why haven’t you put Google adsense on your blog yet? Oh you don’t know how! Here’s why and how!

First if you are considering adding ads onto your blog, you should learn more about the specific rules Google has in regards to blogs, though it is very similar to the rules they have for sites.

Blog content is what Google likes

Using blogs for Google adsense plain makes sense! The content is original, and is considered high quality from Google’s concept, even though you and I know some of the Blogs on the net are plain idiotic! So qualifying a blog is often easier than a site!

Due to the nature of blogs, there is usually a lot of varying content, meaning on a Blog you can have thirteen different subjects, whereas on your site you are supposed to have only one or two. This makes getting very diverse and specific ads on your Blog, far easier than on your site!

A blog that invites feedback or interactivity with a user may attract a lot of clicks, because it attracts a lot of visitor’s. Your blog has the ability to attract a specific set of people who will be interested in your material. Thus your adsense ads will be even more specific!

You can also add a blog to your commercial site. Really! You can talk about your products or specific information that your customer’s might be interested in. You can talk about your company, or even get a little personal! Besides having the added benefit of getting you some adsense clicks, it might actually make people like you! Studies have shown that people will buy more from a person they find personable or that they know a little bit about. Tell them about you!

You can start a blog for free, like those on Yahoo! Or you can get software to start a blog on your site. The latter is best, because you will have the most control. Again you can visit Yahoo! web hosting and use the tool for free.

When you decide to get ads on your blog, remember there are a few ways to increase your click through rates, which are really about the same as on your site.

Optimize your Adsense ads

Make your ads as much a part of your website as possible. Use the same font, font-color and background for your Google ads.

DON’T use boxes, tables, or anything else that yells; Here are the ads for my site. Don’t hide the ads!Design your ads to closely resemble links for your site, or make them blend as part of your site. Use your preview toolbar when creating your ads, which will give you a clear indication of how your ads will look.

Remember, a good ad is one that does not distract, that blends in, but still arouses the interest of your visitors.

How long does it take to get a blog indexed with Google? Well unlike websites, blogs can be all-set with Google, in as little as three days or less in some cases!

Once you feel you are comfortable with Google adsense, you can then take the steps to get your blog to making you a little money! Go over all the rules for using the Adsense program, and remember, just because you are a blogger in this case, that doesn’t mean Google won’t remove your ads quicker than a dog can scratch a tick, if you are using profane, abusive, slanderous, or otherwise universally unaccepted public topics!

That in mind, the rest is easy. Google will explain the whole process, on the same site that I have already listed at the beginning of this article.

Use your blog to your advantage. Getting approved for ads on a blog is easier than a website, and if proper steps are taken to design your ad well, and provide interesting content, you can make some money with Google Adsense on your blog!

About The Author:
Andrew Perry makes it easy to maximize your adsense earnings and avoid the scams.

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Adsense Income for Websites and Blogs - Target Adsense Revenue with Keywords

2007-04-07T23:37:00.000+08:00

Why is Adsense such an important income generation tool for webmasters and bloggers? First, let us look at how Adsense works. An advertiser buys a banner or text advertisement and pays only when a potential customer clicks through to the advertiser’s site. The advertising rate is determined by market forces – the sum paid by advertisers and to webmasters varies according to the value of the keywords.

A website publisher or webmaster signs up with the advertising agent and pastes a javascript code on to their web page. Whenever the page is viewed it will display advertisements from the Adsense program, which are targeted by the spiders to relate to the web page content. For example, if the site is about parrots you can see ads for parrot training lessons (that is not a joke: check it out). There is no shortage of e-commerce advertisers willing to buy advertising, as the targeting possibilities increase the effectiveness of their advertising spend.

Every time a visitor clicks through on an advertisement, the website owner receives a share of the advertising revenue. This is a win-win for webmasters – no need to find advertisers, no rates to negotiate, no click monitoring, no invoices to issue.

Adsense and similar advertising packages are good for websites promoting affiliate programs and MLM as they offer the chance to customise the appearance of advertisements to suit the website’s needs. Site owners can choose from different advertising formats, selecting prominent boxed displays or lineage ads that look more like editorial content according to the tastes of their niche market.

These options should improve click through rates from visitors who may or may not be aware of what they are clicking on. This way the advertisers gain improved exposure for their advertising and the website makes money. Webmasters can access reports that show details of page impressions, clicks and click-through rates. Webmasters and publishers can now track the success of specific ad formats and spot trends.

The most successful formats can then continue, and less popular formats can be scrapped. With very little practice these ad tracking tools are easy to use. Advertising can be placed on a site in minutes, the site owner chooses whether to allow banners or text ads, and can block advertising from their main competitors.

Adsense is all about targeted content – if your content is rich in keywords it will attract quality ads from the search engines. There is a lot of hype at present about the income possibilities, and lots of junk sites are attempting to attract Adsense income using pure spider food. But the basic requirement has not changed: content is the most important factor, and the search engines can spot the difference. The smart webmaster can produce copy that satisfies the niche website’s audience and provides quality spider food as part of intelligent content.

Anyone working from home with an affiliate program and home based website, especially network marketing, will know there are not enough hours in the day for everything you need to do. If someone else is willing to produce and rotate the content, collect the money and pay your share to your bank every month, you have more time to produce good keyword content and drive traffic to your niche website.

Adrienne Davis runs Brilliant4Biz and has extensive experience in marketing, business start up, and eBook publishing.

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Adsense - Improve Your Earnings by 5 Folds

2007-04-07T23:35:00.000+08:00

You may find many Adsense Gurus on the net, offering you thousand ways to improve your Google adsense earnings! Mind you guys, just buying some genius adsense template and expect it to produce thousand dollars a day is a sure impossibility!

I am telling you with my practical experience that nothing would work unless you are prepared to go that extra mile. You should get hold of the adsense secrets that are unique to your site. You must be prepared to make continuous changes and measure effectiveness on a continuous basis.

Following are simple but effective steps successfully followed by the author, which may help you to improve your adsense earnings by five folds or even more! However, keep in mind that nothing would work unless you customize these options to suit your requirements.

The Best Position - This is always the demarcation point which decides you should be earning in hundreds or thousands! You must identify the most likely position where the reader would be most tempted to click. At first you might have to follow what Adsense Gurus have suggested. However, you must keep in mind that what they have said is not unique to your site.

You should be bold enough to do your own research and identify the best positions unique to your site, 'cos there could be exceptions to what Adsense Experts have proposed. Best example I can quote is 'Plentyoffish.com' a dating site which earns half a million Dollars a month just by displaying a single Google ad in each page with completely different link color format than the rest of the site using!

White Is In Demand - Having more white space around the article and the Ad will definitely increase your click through rate. In my case, this is one of the real secrets behind the high click through rate in my Adsense ads. Your objective should be to get the reader's attention to the Adsense ad and the article. Therefore, it is important to have other areas blank as much as possible to centre reader's attention to the Ad and the article. Remove all unnecessary items which are cluttered around the article and the Ad and have more white space on either side of the page.

What is Your Ad Size? - Highly effective Ad formats are 336x250 and 768x120. However, it is up to you to find out the best size for your site. These are the widely tested and accepted sizes. Tyr them out and see the outcome.

Be Discreet - I personally don't prefer to server image ads in my Adsense campaigns because they dilute the effectiveness of the Ads. It is starkly obvious to the reader that they are clicking on Ads and the sole purpose of putting them is to make money! Just don't make it so obvious! Instead, include text ads which are relevant to the theme. Place the ads where the reader is likely to seek a break while reading the article or your copy.

Artistic Way To Be Discreet - The font, color and texture should match with the rest of the page. This will make the ad looks like part of the article. You have the options to use either an ideally matching color or a contrasting color. Either way is effective.

Use The Maximum but Have a Balance - Always try to use maximum number of adsense ads in each page. Don't lose balance however! Ads should not dominate the page.

Measure the effectiveness of Ad units - Always make use of Google Adsense channels to identify which position or format has produced high click through rates. Be prepared to change the Ad format, color and position according to your findings. These simple but effective methods surely drive you more income you never ever expect if you are prepared to follow those in your own way. Find out your way out today.

Theodore kith is the owner of SEO friendly Article Directory FileBlogs.com where you can access to more adsense articles to
find out adsense related stuff.

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Turbo Tagger

Adsense Income Secrets to Success

2007-04-07T23:15:00.000+08:00

Adsense sites need planning and work to be successful. If you are thinking of producing sites for adsense income, or perhaps you already have sites that are not producing a good income if any.

To be successful, takes a lot of work no matter what you may read because there are so many people promoting products that promise to make adsense income easy.

Well some of these products may help, but there is no simple solution to receiving great income quickly.

Extensive planning is required before you start. It is important to carefully consider the topics or niches that will be targeted. It is very important to see what type of competition there is for certain niches.

If you are beginning with your adsense sites, it is better to start with niches that are not too competitive. The reasons for this are that in any niche it will take time to get traffic to the sites and make money.

Extensive keyword research must be carried out before building new sites. It is far better to target say 20 keywords that are not at the top of the keyword results.

Many newcomers make the mistake of seeing the high prices that certain words achieve, but do not realise what is involved to compete with these words.

So choose 20 related words to the main keyword, and then build a page for each of these sub keywords. It is very important to have closely themed sites as well, meaning that you are not trying to offer information on a variety of subjects.

Search engines are now looking for sites that offer their visitors good quality information following the keyword searches entered.

It is also important to have sites that are easy to navigate, so that visitors are able to find what they are looking for easily. Clear navigation linking is essential.

Another point to remember is that search engines will reward sites that are constantly updated with new content. It is best to work to a plan with new sites that allow new content to be added on a weekly basis.

Incoming links to sites are very important to achieve good rankings in the search engines. There is only so much on site optimisation that can be done. This includes different keywords and descriptions for each page, use of H1, H2, H3 tags etc.

It is essential that good quality original content is offered to visitors. Due to the abuse that occurred in the past where many people were using various software to produce hundreds of pages of worthless content in literally a matter of minutes to try to make money with adsense.

It is a good idea to work on getting links back to sites on a weekly basis also. Another good idea is to register with directories also on a regular basis.

Adsense can be a good source of income, but it involves a lot of work before the results appear. Extensive research must be carried out to check competition. It is vital to do thorough keyword testing. Then produce sites that are closely themed with a separate page for each targeted keyword. Then new content and links must be on the agenda for good adsense results.

John is the owner of 1st Make Money Online, the site that will offer help to anyone looking to make money online.

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Top 10 AdSense Tricks To Boost Your Commission

2007-04-07T22:14:00.000+08:00

Google AdSense is fast becoming the preferred way for people to earn an income online. Forget eBay and multiple affiliate programs. Whether you are a work-at-home mom trying to make a little extra cash or an Internet entrepreneur with hundreds of monetized websites, AdSense is truly the easiest way to earn money.

Simply sign up for a free account, grab your ad code and paste it in your site. But here's the amazing thing - no matter how much money AdSense is making for you right now, a few simple tweaks can increase that amount considerably. And I should know, after learning about these tricks, I more than doubled my AdSense commissions!

The self-proclaimed AdSense gurus and experts are sharing this insider knowledge, for a fee.

You can learn all these secrets from them, as long as you buy their e-book, sign up for their seminar or purchase their newsletter. But I'm going to share all their AdSense tricks for free. Here they are:

1) Color code your ads to match your web site palette *exactly*. Don't use frames around your ads. Instead, in the AdSense code generation interface, make sure you choose the same color as your page background for the ad frame and the ad background.

When choosing the ad heading colors, match them to the *exact* color of your page headings. Use the exact same ad background shade as your page background. Use the exact same ad text font and color as the text on your pages. You can see an example of this color-matching on my Search Engine Advice Blog at - http://www.searchenginecollege.com/blog.htm - notice the 4 link ad unit at the top and the skyscraper text ad unit on the left hand side under the heading Ads by Google as you scroll down the page? The link and text colors are identical to the color palette used throughout the rest of the page.

Near enough is NOT good enough. If you can't quite get the color matching right, use Google's built in color palette together with the RGB to HEX or vice versa color converter on this page - http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Style. That handy little tool was a life saver for me.

This is probably the one single tweak that made the most difference to my commission levels.

2) Try not to use the traditional horizontal banner style or leaderboard image ads because people are blind to them.

3) Use Google's own AdSense optimization tips at https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html and visual heat map to assist you in deciding where on your page to place your AdSense ad code.

4) Research competitive keywords using a keyword research tool such as Keyword Discovery at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/?id=22487 or grab a list of the most popular keywords from various sources and use them in your web site pages where relevant. This article - http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/article.php/2156041 - is a good source of frequently searched keywords. Targeting popular keywords should trigger AdSense ads on your pages that utilize those keywords. The more popular the keyword or phrase, the higher AdWords advertisers are generally willing to pay per click for it so the higher your commission on those clicks.

5) Incorporate the AdSense code into your page so that the ads look like a regular part of your site. You can see an example on this Internet Dating Stories site - http://www.lovestory.com.au/ - where link ads are incorporated within the regular left hand navigation of the site under the heading "Feature Links".

6) Use Google's new 4 and 5 link ad units wherever possible. They seem to have a much higher Click Through Rate (CTR) than regular ad styles. You can view all the AdSense ad formats at https://www.google.com/adsense/adformats.

7) Place arrows or images next to your ads to draw attention to them. You can see two different versions of on this search engine article library page - http://www.searchenginecollege.com/articles/article-library.htm - at the top (where a pointing hand directs your eye to the ad) and the bottom where 3 images draw your attention to each of the three AdSense ads.

8) Use the full allowance of multiple AdSense ads on each of your pages - 3 regular AdSense ads, plus 1 link unit. Use careful placement of these ads so they blend into your site and don't distract from your content. Clever use of this allowance can be seen on this page about bad Internet dating stories - http://www.lovestory.com.au/bad-stories.htm - where you see:

- 1 horizontal 4 link ad unit towards the top of the page under the first paragraph.
- 1 vertical skyscraper text ad unit about halfway down the left hand side under "Sponsor Links".
- 1 vertical skyscraper image ad unit down the left hand side under "Sponsor Links".
- 1 horizontal text banner unit at the bottom of the page with images above each ad to draw attention to them.

You can also include 1 AdSense referral button in addition to the 3 other units.

9) Tailor your page content to a particular niche or focus. Page content that is tailored towards a specific theme is more likely to trigger AdWords ads that closely match the content and are therefore more likely to interest your visitors and inspire them to click.

Don't create pages merely for the sake of placing AdSense ads. Visitors (and search engines) can see through this ruse in an instant.

10) Use custom Ad Channels for each of your ad placements, for example, "Top 5 Link Unit Blue Palette" or "Left Side Navigation Image Skyscraper" etc. Tweak, track and measure the success of each of these custom channels so you know what gives you the highest CTR. Some ad formats and colors will work better than others, but you won't know which until you test, test and test some more!

ARTICLE RESOURCE BOX:

The above article may be re-published as long as the following paragraph is included at the end of the article and as long as you link to the URL mentioned below:

About the Author:

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena manages Search Engine College -

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How Much Does Your Google Adsense Really Make

2007-04-07T03:38:00.000+08:00

Since its introduction in 2003, the Google Adsense program has greatly help bloggers defray hosting charges and other costs related to running blogs. Blogging can be very expensive especially when you have high levels of traffic and numerous pages. Many are turning to Google Adsense to generate some revenue from their blogs and what’s more, earn some extra on the side.

What Google Adsense Is

Adsense is an advertising program run by Internet giant Google. Google Adsense allows you (blog owner) to sell advertising space on your blog. The program enables you to display relevant text and banner ads on your blog’s content pages. Banner ads are the most common form of online advertising displayed at the top of many blog pages. Google pays you a fee when the visitor clicks on the ad.

When you join the Adsense program, you get access to Adsense for content which places ads on your content pages. Because the ads are targeted to what visitors are looking for on your blog or they match the interests of the visitors your content attracts, you earn and at the same time enhance your content pages. Google uses its vast search technology resources to serve ads based on blog content. In this regard, Adsense has become a popular choice for placing advertisements on a blog because the content of the ads is relevant to the blog. For example, ads for kitchen utensils will appear on a blog post about healthy cooking. Google has an extensive inventory of ads for all categories, business, practically for all kinds of content. If Google is unable to display targeted ads on your blog page, you can display a default ad of your choice.

A companion to the Adsense for content is the Adsense for search. It allows you to add a Google search box on your pages. This keeps the visitors on your blog longer since they can search from right on your blog. When a visitor searches the web using the search box, Google shares any ad revenue it makes from those searches with you and you shell nothing to participate.

Another recent addition is the Adsense for feeds. This runs on RSS and Atom feeds. RSS and Atom feeds are standards for publishing regular updates to blog-based content. Ads are displayed in the most suitable feed articles. You are paid for your blog’s original content; visitors see appropriate advertising and more relevant feeds to choose from.

How to Join

There is no rigid criteria to conform to for acceptance into the Google Adsense program, unlike other online ad networks that place minimum traffic requirement to be accepted. The only real criterion is acceptable content. Of course, any ad program wants to attract quality content blogs only. Assuming you already have a blog on which you can include Adsense links, you first need to be accepted into the program. The first step is to go to http://www.google.com/adsense to sign up. Google will review your blog to find out if you have the necessary traffic and the content that would bring in sufficient clicks to make your taking part in the program beneficial to Google and to you.

Once you are accepted, all you need is a bit of javascript code to incorporate the advertisements into the accepted blog site. Google does the rest like providing appropriate ad links from its inventory of clients to your blog. Targeted ads will start showing up on your blog.

How It Works

There are two sides to Google advertising – one for advertisers selling a product or service called Adwords and Adsense for blog publishers. Advertisers pay Google to have their ads designed using Adwords appear next to the search page results in Google and a list of significant keywords for their offerings. Google will display an ad only if the provided keywords conform to a visitor search. An advertiser pays Google on a cost per click (CPC) basis. This means an advertiser pays only for that ad if the visitor clicks on the ad and visits the advertiser’s site. Advertisers compete with one another to buy search keywords usually from five cents and above. Nevertheless, Google also takes into consideration the search engine ranking of the advertiser blog, so no one site can just buy keywords. For example, a purchase of the keywords “digital camera” produces ads next to Google search result in its home page. Said purchase also shows Adsense ads for digital cameras on other blogs where digital cameras are mentioned.

For their part, blog publishers using Adsense create relevant pages. Google sends out Mediabots (digital robots) which use special algorithms to crawl the host blog page and evaluate the content to determine what keywords are relevant and report the result to Google’s ad server which then serves the appropriate ads. Blog publishers get paid a percentage of the fee that Google receives from the advertiser. This is done through a combination of a pay per click (PPC) and pay per impression basis. Impression is the number of times a specific ad has been displayed. A blog publisher is reimbursed at a fixed rate per thousand impressions. If a page isn’t significant enough, a blog publisher doesn’t get paid as much. There is no charge for the blog publisher to join Adsense. All costs are covered by the advertiser who participates in Adwords.

How Much Money It Makes

The amount of money you (blog publisher) can expect from Google Adsense depends upon several factors. If your blog draws tons of traffic and you focus on a particular niche, Google will serve ads that appeal to visitors of your site. For instance, if you maintain a popular blog devoted to portable media player, you can make a windfall because of the high level of competition for related keywords. Rates for competitive keywords can exceed $1 which impacts your blog’s earning potential. Conversely, if you are in a less competitive niche, you get occasional traffic only, thus less visitors click on your ads which equates to less money earned.

How much each advertisement pays per generated click is also another important factor. Each Adsense ad is not worth the same. An ad may give you ten cents while another may give you $1 per click. It depends on the demand for that kind of ad. If a number of advertisers are bidding for the same advertising space, the advertiser offering the most per click will get their ad displayed first.

Ad formats and placements influence revenue. Placing ads on the right part of the blog page is significant so that visitors looking at your page will see the ad, at the same time it will be not be overly intrusive to put visitors off.

Fundamentally though, it is all about content. To make money from Adsense, you have to know what your visitors are looking for. It may be information on a topic, a product they want to buy or a service they want to avail of and entertainment. Offering visitors good content will generate highly relevant ads which in turn will draw more clicks on the ads displayed. To optimize content, the same basic rules for search engine optimization apply.

Google doesn’t publish the percentage it takes as a commission and only displays what the blog owner receives in member reports. However, you can make a rough estimate. The average click through rate (CTR) for online advertising is generally around 0.5 to 1%. CTR is the rate at which visitors click an advertisement usually calculated as a percentage of ad impressions (number of times a specific ad has been displayed). What each click pays is dependent on the content and keywords that are generating the ads being served.

Although Google doesn’t release the amount it pays for keywords, you can sign up as an advertiser on top of being a participant in the Adsense program for $5 and see for yourself how much advertisers are paying Google for various click through. For example, a thousand page views with Google ads on them per day, at 1% click through rate and 25 cents per click will yield $2.50 per day. Not a lot but it can cover hosting fees or service fees.

Google Adsense is not a get rich quick program. But there are documented cases of bloggers earning as much as $5,000 a month and more. In fact, Jason Calacanis sold his blog network, Weblogs Inc. for a whopping $25 - $40 million on Google Adsense revenues of $1 million yearly. There isn’t any sense why a blogger can’t earn much from Google Adsense program. Definitely, there are thousands of dollars worth of reasons to make money from Google Adsense.

About The Author:
http://www.theinternetone.net

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Making Adsense Work In The Smart Pricing Era

2007-04-07T03:35:00.000+08:00

Smart pricing has changed Adsense. Publishers are seeing lower per click payouts and are lamenting the inability of their old methods and systems to produce a profit under the current circumstances. The old guard of Adsense gurus, meanwhile, continues to hold tight to a perspective born before smart pricing became a reality. They continue to encourage new publishers to follow their methods for Adsense success. Others have overreacted, announcing that Adsense is no longer a viable moneymaking opportunity. Some have even argued that smart pricing killed Adsense.

The old guard gurus are merely protecting their own best interests. As long as they can pretend nothing meaningful has changed, the longer they can continue selling their systems and software. Those tolling death bells for Adsense are stirring up controversy for the sake of promoting click-flipping and other wealth-production strategies. The only people who seem to have it right are those publishers who have noticed that the old Adsense gravy train has run out of steam and who have discovered that the future of Adsense lies in treating it differently than before.

Instead of proclaiming the death of Adsense, savvy users are taking a different approach to the changed environment. Adsense still has a place and can still be a valuable part of a successful overall strategy. However, the previously embraced strategies that were premised on constructing lower-quality sites en masse and monetizing them exclusively with Adsense are no longer tenable.

Instead, Adsense can be used as one of a multiplicity of revenue-producing tactics on smart sites designed to provide visitors with real value. Earlier Adsense techniques were based on sending mass traffic to a site and collecting ad clicks exclusively. In many cases, the sites were actually designed in a way that aimed to make people want to leave rapidly, using Adsense ad blocks as an “escape route.”

Smart pricing has decreased the per click payout of such prices by such a substantial margin that one cannot hope to profit from those strategies in any meaningful way. Instead, smart publishers will create better sites that really interact with visitors in a meaningful way. Relevant contextual advertising fills the role of one many services offered to visitors. Instead of being the “only way” to make a dime, Adsense can be used as part of a full roster of moneymaking opportunities.

Not only does this strategy allow webmasters to effectively tap into to other revenue sources (some of which are more valuable than Adsense ever was in its heyday), it also comports with Adsense’s own recommendations for improving per click values in a smart pricing environment. There are more ways to make money and one can make more money with Adsense at the same time. Regardless of what some might be announcing, there is no reason to give up on Adsense. You just need to use it differently.

Adsense did not change in a vacuum. While it lumbered toward smart pricing, web access, technology and user expectations were also in a state of flux. Today, the old methods of top-down site design premised on the old publication model is outmoded. The arrival of what many are terming “Web 2.0” reflects the convergence of several different trends. Those who will successfully use Adsense as a monetization strategy today and in the future are aware of those trends and how to approach them to effectively generate a substantial income.

Adsense has changed. Do not believe those who tell you that “business as usual” will still work like a charm. Adsense is not, however, dead. It is still a strong and vibrant means by which to earn. The old Adsense business models are dead. They just do not do the trick anymore. You can make money with Adsense, but it will require the use of strategies that merge appropriately with the current environment and trends. Sites that seek to provide real value to visitors can make use of multiple revenue earning strategies including Adsense and will succeed regardless of smart pricing adjustments.

About The Author:
JP Schoeffel

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5 Ways To Increase Your Adsense Earnings

2007-04-07T03:23:00.000+08:00

If webmasters want to monetize their websites, the great way to do it is through Adsense. There are lots of webmasters struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites. But then some of the “geniuses” of them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Adsense ads on their websites. What makes these webmasters different from the other kind is that they are different and they think out of the box.

The ones who have been there and done it have quite some useful tips to help those who would want to venture into this field. Some of these tips have boosted quite a lot of earnings in the past and is continuously doing so.

Here are some 5 proven ways on how best to improve your Adsense earnings.

1. Concentrating on one format of Adsense ad. The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). This same format have the tendency to result in higher CTR, or the click-through rates. Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically because the ads will look like normal web links, and people, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links. They may or may not know they are clicking on your Adsense but as long as there are clicks, then it will all be for your advantage.

2. Create a custom palette for your ads. Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, try to use white as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. Again, This will result to more clicks from people visiting your site.

3. Remove the Adsense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your Adsense. Put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between Adsense locations can make when you see your earnings.

4. Maintain links to relevant websites. If you think some sites are better off than the others, put your ads there and try to maintaining and managing them. If there is already lots of Adsense put into that certain site, put yours on top of all of them. That way visitor will see your ads first upon browsing into that site.

5. Try to automate the insertion of your Adsense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side included). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your Adsense code in a text file, save it as “adsense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then using SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.

These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. It is important to know though that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. So focusing on a specific topic should be your primary purpose because the displays will be especially targeted on a topic that persons will be viewing already.

Note also that there are many other Adsense sharing the same topic as you. It is best to think of making a good ad that will be somewhat different and unique than the ones already done. Every clickthrough that visitors make is a point for you so make every click count by making your Adsense something that people will definitely click on.

Tips given by those who have boosted their earnings are just guidelines they want to share with others. If they have somehow worked wonders to some, maybe it can work wonders for you too. Try them out into your ads and see the result it will bring.

If others have done it, there is nothing wrong trying it out for yourself.

Source : http://www.selfseo.com/story-19225.php

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Google Adsense and How You Can Earn More From Adsense Ads

2007-04-07T03:09:00.000+08:00

Any web site owner or webmaster who is trying to earn a profit from their sites are likely familiar with Google Adsense.


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Google Adsense is a great and easy way to make money from your site if it is done right. Adsense will allow any person with a blog or an informative site to earn money, simply by placing a little code on their site pages. Rather than trying to figure out exactly what ads to put on their web pages, Adsense gives web site owners the ability to concentrate on their sites content.

Many webmasters are able to make a living from Adsense, however, there are also quite a few who spend all their time just trying to figure out the "magic trick" used to earn from Google Adsense. Earning a living from Google Adsense ads, can seem difficult, but it's not impossible.

If Google Adsense is going to be your only source of income, you will want to do more than just taking some Adsense code and placing it on your site. That is just not enough; you will need to do some experimenting, with placements, formats and choice of keywords.

You really should take care to build your page around a specific topic or keyword that is relevant to your site concept. This will ensure that any Adsense ads which are placed on this page are appropriate and useful to any visitors who want to know more about the topic and they will more than likely end up clicking on the Adsense ad.

You will want to take care where you place your ads. It has been proven that visitors often first look to the top left of a website when they arrive. Because this is were your visitors attention is likely to first, it is going to be one place where you might want to consider placing some ads. You can read the Google help on the Adsense website to learn more about the best locations for placing your adverts.

Another consideration when placing your ads, is to put them on high traffic pages. You can identify the pages visited most on your site by taking a look at your logs or your Google account, where you will get the page-by-page details of your visitors.

Although the skyscraper and banner ads may look good on your site, you may want to avoid using them. Often times, banners are ignored. For example, have you clicked on any banners of sites that you have visited lately?

You will want to blend your Adsense ads into your web page by using the Adsense formats. Google supplies a variety of palettes allowing you to change font colors, borders and backgrounds. There really isn't much point in putting an ad on a page if it doesn't blend with your site.

A very important resource that many webmasters ignore is the Adsense preview tool. This tool will allow you to preview the ads that will go on each of your pages and gives you sample ads and formats. Here is where the destination of your ads can be checked, as well as, geo targeted locations.

Remain focused on what it is that you want to achieve. However busy you may be, you must take some time and experiment with your Adsense ads so that CTR can improve. No matter what the experts say, just follow the basics, that's the real magic to making more from Gooogle Adsense.

Connie McKenzie is a full-time work at home mom who is dedicated to providing detailed information on various subjects including working from home.

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A Profitable Web 2.0 Project Developed In 24 Hours?

2007-04-07T03:00:00.000+08:00

It took seven months to get the One Million Masterpiece charity project online. The site is complex and needed the development time, but in the last few days I’ve had a yearning to see if I can still turn around a project in 24 hours. Back in the early days of the Internet boom I’d sit in my bedroom and knock out html websites all night long, but almost ten years on, can it still be done in a time where profitability and interactivity are the key measures?

So, it’s 7am and I’ve got a plan. The new pressures I face in life (work responsibilities, family etc) have been dealt with and I have a clear 24 hours ahead of me. An idea for a site has been kicking round in my head ever since I sold a site last year. This site was a very specialist software comparison site that generated referral commissions and Adsense income. It was an excellent earner and I’ve wanted to recreate that success, but on a larger scale.

So last year I bought the domain http://www.shoutdown.net with the intention of building a software comparison style project. I want the site to be in the informal blog style, where the posts are product summaries (written by me), and the comments would be reviews submitted by other people. I’d also throw in a rating system, and way of attaching news releases or other relevant pages to each product post, plus link related posts (for example different versions of the same software).

So the idea is there, it’s 7:30am and my first job is to select some mp3’s to get me through to lunch. Here goes…

08.00
By the time I’ve chosen my music, switched off my Google desktop bar and responded to essential email it’s already 8am – crap. So, first job is drawing out a schematic of the database that will power my site. What information do I want to keep and how will I organise it? I’m having five database tables. For ease I’m calling them level1, level2, level3 etc because I see them as levels of information about each software product – the top being category information and the bottom being the reviews and ratings.

09:15
Took me quite a while to get the structure clear, but now I’m sketching out the homepage on paper. I’ve looked at a few blogs that I like and have basically copied their layout for ease. I’ve also worked out the sizing of my main columns and rows and know the positions of the adverts, main blog posts and navigation. I still like to work on paper at this stage – I’m an artist at heart!

09:55
OK let’s get on the computer. I’ve fired up Paint Shop Pro and my first job is to work out a colour pallet. I want three colours, so I blob different combinations on a blank white image until I get the right combination – orange, purple and grey. I then make a note of the hex codes for each colour on a post-it – this will save LOADS of time later. While I’m in PSP I’m going to mock up a logo as I already know the size of image I need from my plan. Actually I really like the logo so it will probably be permanent.

10:21
Time to start on the site. I’m using a single html page at the moment with a linked css file. Using some basic tables and css I’ve laid out the top bar, the post area and two columns (one for ads and one for navigation). I’m sticking to a tried and tested blog layout.

I always use Dreamweaver, but always hand code. Why use Dreamweaver then? Well, I find the preview quite accurate, but other than that I have no idea – just habit.

11:38
I’ve just finished the main site layout, including place holding text that will eventually be dynamic. I’ve left space for some ads on the site, so I’ve justed logged in to Adsense to generate the code. All I need to do is use the colours on my post-it to get them fitting in nicely. I’ll also take a look round for some other nice banners in my affiliate accounts.

12:43
That took longer than planned, time for lunch

13:17
OK time to fill up my database with some data, then I can start writing the php that will populate the pages. I’m going to sign up for a few software affiliate accounts and write some sample reviews on the software. At the moment I haven’t got time to write really good reviews, but in time I intend to fully try each title and write some good stuff (positive and negative). For now I’ll be brief.

15:20
Right, let’s get back to the site. I’m going to sort out the navigation side bars first, and then I’ll split my single page up.

16:45
This isn’t working. I’ve got a very limited knowledge of php so I’m having trouble dynamically generating category headings and software lists dynamically. It’s taking too long to sort out so for now I’m going to simply print a list of all software titles in the database. I’ll make up for it by also providing a list of software categories, plus a list of the most reviewed software.

16:58
I’m going to split up my single html page now into a header, body, nav and footer, and use a php include to pull the pages together. In total I will only need three main template pages for the content of this site – the homepage, a category page and a product page.

18:24
I’ve finished the layout of the three pages, including all the code that pulls info from the database. Everything’s working pretty well and I’m please with the simplicity. My next job is to create an rss feed of the posts and reviews, but first I need some DINNER!

20:04
After some pasta and tv I’m ready for this rss feed. It’s pretty easy to create a php page that will pull the necessary code and place it in the rss 2.0 layout. Once I’m done I’ll just save the php file as xml and ensure that my .htaccess file remembers to parse xml files for php code.

21:36
I checked that the rss feed was valid using a standard validator. It took a little time to sort out the date formatting to be honest.

21:57
I’ve been developing using Firefox to test the layout, but I just checked the site in IE and noticed the background colour was dodgy. It was a css error – fixed.

22:15
OK back to content. The reviews at the moment are boring so I’m going to add some images and expand them a little. I’m also going to add some reviews that I’ve been collecting over the last few months. The good thing about buying the domain and posting up a test website for six months is that the search engines have already crawled the site, and hopefully will help me avoid the Google sandbox.

02:30
I’m absolutely knackered. I’ve just spent the last few hours trying to get the navigation system working but with no luck. The problem is that I’m trying to dynamically generate an information tree (apparently that’s what it’s called after much research) but I just can’t get it working. I’m giving up.

04:49
OK, I’ve just created a rating system which will only accept one software vote per IP address. Seems a bit buggy but I really really tired and can’t be bothered to go through it again now.

So what’s left to do? I need to create forms to input reviews, news and bookmarks but I’m just too tired to continue. So much for 24 hours, but actually I’m really pleased with the result. On the surface the site looks like any other blog, and you might question why I decided to hand code the entire thing. Well, I have some ideas for some advanced functions, but I’ll only be able to implement them if I know the site inside out. Plus I just like the challenge.

I wont have time to work on the site all week, but I’m already planning my next 24 hour session – marketing. I’ll be sure to keep you updated on that, and how the site is doing generally!

About The Author

Paul Fisher

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Building Your Internet Empire – Having Multiple Websites

2007-04-07T02:59:00.000+08:00

Nothing changes quite so fast as the internet. In order to keep up with changing trends, many internet business owners choose to utilize several websites in order to have a steady stream of income. Multiple websites means having more income security and some protection in case one site runs into problems.

Staking an entire income on one website is a dangerous way to make a living. It is also much more difficult when there is only one site to promote. If the advertising of that one site is ineffective, or the market for the product sold on the site runs dry, you’re down by the overpass holding a sign that says will click for food. Diversify to construct a more secure income stream that is resistant to tiny changes in the market.

Building multiple websites isn’t really much harder than building one. And, considering how little it actually costs to run a website, the cost isn’t going to be much higher. Having multiple websites does mean extra advertising costs, but it also allows more wiggle room in case one advertising method is failing. Someone owning one website will find their business completely dependent on that one site for an income. If the ad costs run too high and the income gets too low, you’re out of business unless you can find a way to change things fast. With multiple sites, there is room to watch and wait on some of the sites to see how profitable they will be. If one is consistently costing too much and not bringing in the cash, the owner is free to dump it and concentrate on the others. The steady stream of income from the others buffers and changes that need to be made.

Multiple websites also means you can diversify in the items that are being sold. When one item suffers from too much competition or outdated technology, there are a score of other sites in your arsenal waiting to take up the slack. And separate sites for different items make a lot of sense in terms of creating trust in the items and in the seller. Each site will sell something that is built up to be a good, reliable product or service, something that the buyer needs to have. Will that still be believable when the site sells diet supplements and ebooks about internet auctions? Diet products and real estate books? Each item that is not related really should have its own site with its own sales page and its own related content if desired.

And lastly, more sites simply mean more money. Using the technique of weeding out the duds and staying with the proven money makers, it is possible to expand the number of websites that are bringing in money almost indefinitely. Using this technique, the multiple sites will be much more profitable than relying on one site. And when the sites are run by an affiliate selling someone else’s product, it isn’t much harder to run many sites than it is to run one. Running many sites may mean automating what you can, or even contracting out some of the work, but the profit potential is enough that it will be worth keeping the empire going strong.

Article Source: Enzine Articles

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Website Success = Content! Content! Content!

2007-04-07T02:57:00.000+08:00

We have all heard the real estate slogan: “Location! Location! Location!”. Well, if that is the slogan of the real estate industry then “Content! Content! Content!” is certainly the slogan for all webmasters. Maybe I should rather say it SHOULD BE the slogan for all webmasters…Unfortunately many webmasters are only focusing on how they can make more money instead of providing visitors to their website with good content.

I recently heard that more than 40% of all people with an internet business have only been online for no longer than 6 months. I am not sure about the exact percentage but I can believe that 40%+ is not far away from the truth.

One thing is for sure: Many people start an internet business believing they are going to make a fortune online within a very short period of time. The reality is that very few people actually achieve any sort of online success, especially in the first six months. The result is a constant stream of new webmasters and a constant outflow of disillusioned webmasters.

Most newcomers are totally disillusioned with the internet after only a couple of weeks or months. They often fall prey to unscrupulous dealers that sell them expensive programs “guaranteed” to make them succeed on the internet. Most of these programs do not work and they leave with the bitter taste in their mouths of being conned.

Do the statistics prove that one should not attempt to make money online or that the internet is a big hoax? No, they prove that people give us too soon. They prove that people have unrealistic expectations. They prove that people do not acquire enough knowledge before embarking on an online business.

What are the most common mistakes?

1. No clear strategy. Newcomers often have no clear idea of what they want to achieve and how they should go about achieving it. They try to go of in all directions at once or use the shotgun approach of firing away at everything that moves hoping they will eventually hit something.

2. Unrealistic expectations. People often spend $25,000+ pa. on college fees for three years just to earn $40,000 pa. when they graduate. However, when it comes to making money online they refuse to invest the time to learn how to succeed and expect to make $10,000 from the very first month working only a couple of hours per day.

3. People are often chasing money without taking the time to put the necessary structures in place that will enable them to earn money.

Assume you want to open your own restaurant. Do you try to make money without a location or any food to offer your customers? No! You start by drawing up a business plan - What are you planning on doing, how & when are you going to start, who are your competitors, how long will it take before you start making money, how much money do you need to invest, what does your cash flow look like, etc.

Many people still think they can build a quick one page website or get a free affiliate website and that they will have a constant stream of visitors eager to snap up anything they have to offer. Nothing can be further away from the truth.

Think about it logically. Put yourself in the shoes of a visitor. Most people search the internet looking for information (content). The search engines know this and reward unique content websites by indexing them more favorably than poorly constructed websites, websites with very little content or duplicate websites. There are millions of websites on the net. I am sorry, but if a visitor runs a search for a keyword such as “business opportunity” and your site is number 99,000,000 of 100,000,000 then you are never going to get any visitors. Accept it.

What can you do? The first and most important step you can take is to ensure that your website has good content. Write about something you know and are passionate about. If you struggle to write one page about a certain topic then rather forget about it. You should be able to write many pages of relevant content that other people would like to read. Try to remain original and focus on unique content.

There are many things you can do to improve your website in the future by making it more attractive to your visitors as well as the search engines. However, there is really nothing you can do to improve a website with poor content until you do something to improve the content.

Whatever website you want to establish, remember the golden rule: Content! Content! Content!

To your success!

About The Author

Francois du Toit

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Double Your Income: Take A Chance With Internet Affiliate Programs

2007-04-07T02:55:00.000+08:00

If you want to produce a profitable web site, then affiliate programs are the most ideal approach.

Certain affiliates of companies or corporations out there are looking for help regarding their marketing. The affiliates’ money is weighed greatly on the commissions taken from the players registrations, and most often these affiliates do not know how to carry this alone. Thus, they needed an instructor to get the proper methods in affiliate programs.

This instructor is the internet itself. The affiliates when studying the procedure simply visit the web sites and search on the programs concerning affiliate marketing. These web sites along with the programs are presenting the various schemes of marketing that the affiliates can apply to boost their possible lower commissions.

These affiliates are expected to widen more their knowledge regarding marketing if they will search further to the web sites and to the affiliate marketing programs.

For instance, the use of banner is the largest element of affiliate marketing programs. And then, the web sites and the affiliate marketing programs will detail everything to the affiliates.

The affiliates can utilize a banner on the other web sites to employ traffic to the site of their mother company where they are employed as an affiliate. This is the main thing that is being covered by the affiliate marketing programs and sites.

These web sites and programs are stressing the use of banners because it performs a vital function in employing traffic on the sites endorsed by the affiliates.

The assistance of banners in employing traffic is very effective, though this is not the sole scheme to augment the affiliates’ commissions, the web sites and programs cannot deny the fact of the success it brings compared to the others.

These affiliates are always searching for the possible ways to boost up their earnings and turn it into bulk profit, so as to increase their commissions as affiliates. Likewise, they are also finding for ways to learn the strategies in marketing their works as affiliates.

Hence, when these needs occur, they immediately search for the offers in the internet that could help them. This occurrence directly means a profit for the websites and affiliate marketing programs owners.

These affiliate marketing program web sites are utilized by the affiliates on their own advantages as they look for guidance in boosting up their incomes.

Since there are numerous ways to boost the affiliates profits, ways that are not entirely familiar for the affiliates, these web sites have been designed to increase their knowledge on it and help them to understand it deeply, and through these knowledge they were able to generate more money.

Basically, these programs and web sites instruct the affiliates on various things that are concerned in increasing of their profits. And through this, it isn’t impossible for them to accumulate commissions as gambling affiliates.

These web sites and programs have been a great help in boosting up the affiliates status in marketing. Even today, these programs and web sites earn more income as they assist these affiliates into profitable commissions.

It is like a give and take process, as the web sites and programs feed the minds of the affiliates about the competent marketing strategies and skills, which later is turned into revenues or their commissions. These web sites and programs likewise earn their turnovers.

About The Author

Mario Churchill is a freelance author and has written over 200 articles on various subjects.

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Website Designing - Looks vs. Works

2007-04-07T02:52:00.000+08:00

Web developers with extensive graphic arts background often pay more attention to how a page looks than considering how visitors are going to find the page. The consideration on Usability and Business gets sidelined. On the other side of this issue, SEO consultants obsess about how much traffic it generates and how well a web site works. Sales and Business gets a front seat for them.

Designers want more 'pretty' graphics, but SEOs want lots of 'ugly' keyword-rich text, bullet lists, and text links. The more graphically complex the website the longer it will take to load.

To balance those Looks vs. Works, currently a web design company is in demand, which have an advanced knowledge on marketing, designing, programming as well as aesthetics. Designers having absolute control over the size and dimensions of all aspects with an eye on marketing are pitching to success. Today, fixed browser-friendly designs are more frequently chosen over the liquid designs.

There is a usability reason for why a designer may choose a more fixed layout. There is usually an optimal line width in terms of readability. There is a rule which tells that lines should be between 40-60 characters long, or approximately 11 words per line, though users can choose their windows size and font selection to optimize the factors which are important to them.

It becomes difficult sometimes to create a fixed layout which looks well and sells. Well, if the content is agreed upon, there is always a little difficulty in developing.

Storyboarding

To maintain an adorable balance between LOOKS and WORKS, the modern web gurus emphasize on storyboarding. Storyboarding covers the business, audience, purpose and the content. So the web designing is going to be more and more of calculative engineering than liberal art.

Storyboarding records description, purpose and title of each page in a given website. Then those elements are linked together according to the most effective and logical diagram patterns. It is like a prototype where there are options for feature enhancements and future improvements.

Audience Research

The key step in web designing/planning is defining the audience. They are the group of people who will visit your website – the market being targeted. Those people have a certain reason for visiting your site. And it is important for you to know what they are looking for. Technology and Eye-Candy designs come much later.

A clearly defined goal of the site and an understanding of what visitors want to do when they come to your site helps to pitch your message to identify the target audience. Upon considering who is most likely to use the content. There are some common factors a webmaster should take care. They are:

Audience Characteristics - Age, Language, Education

Information Preferences - Techies, Naive

Computer Skills - Beginners, Masters

Web Experience - Web builders, Web surfers, Lay-users

About The Author

Kathy John is an eminent analyst and writer in internet marketing related topics like web design firm, search engine optimization and web hosting.

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Small Business Websites - Is Yours Doing Everything It Can to Help?

2007-04-07T02:50:00.000+08:00

As you no doubt know, having a website is a critical component of doing business in today's marketplace. More and more people are going online to find their service providers instead of opening up the old Yellow Pages or one of the various knock-offs. Since that's the case, it's become increasingly important for you to be there when your potential customers come looking for you.

But having a website that actually works for you is more than just a bunch of fancy graphics and some information about your company. If you want a tool that works for you 24 hours a day 7 days a week to help grow your business, here are a few keys to keep in mind about your website:

Have you made it easy for the visitors to your site to leave their contact information? If not, how do you know who's coming to your site and how do you plan to stay in touch with them once they leave? It's mission critical to have a mechanism for easily capturing the contact information of the visitors to your site, otherwise you don't have much more than an online brochure.
Are you losing potential visitors even before they make it to your site? While many things such as splash pages (those fancy graphics that dance and sing then have a button that says 'Enter Site', or something similar), annoying animation, large graphic files, or other 'eye-candy' techniques used by many web designers might look nice, they often do nothing more than scare away over half your potential visitors. Believe it or not, there are still a large number of internet users that use dial-up, which means their connection is slow, which means anything that slows down a site from loading any slower than it already does will limit the number of potential customers that actually stick it out to see your site.
Does your site talk enough about your prospects and all the benefits they'll gain by using your service, or does it spend too much talking about you? Remember, no one cares about you. The only thing your visitors are concerned with is what can you do to help solve their problems or satisfy their needs? Answer that question, and your site becomes infinitely more powerful.

Now, these are just a few of the questions you need to ask yourself as you analyze your current website or the site you're planning to build, but they should provide a good starting point for creating a website that truly does become an integral part of your overall marketing toolbox.

The internet is such a powerful medium for getting your message to many more potential prospects that you could reach traditionally and if you learn to use it correctly, it will help keep your pipeline full of eager prospects waiting in line to put your services to the test.

About the Author:

Chestin Salisbury is President of Lawn Care Marketing Magic, a direct response marketing company located in Charlotte, NC that focuses on the lawn care and landscaping industry. He has been helping small businesses grow for 7+ years by creating magical marketing systems that use time-tested direct response marketing principles to grow business by 100-500% in 120 days or less. Guaranteed.

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3 Secret Weapons for the High Rolling Affiliate Marketer

2007-04-07T02:15:00.000+08:00

What does it take to become a successful Affiliate Marketer? What are the ingredients of an affiliate marketing success story? Is there a shortcut to Affiliate Marketing glory? All these questions play around in the minds of affiliate marketers who want to make it big in this business.

Although affiliate marketing is touted as one of the easiest and most effective ways to earn money online, it is not as easy as it sounds. The wise affiliate marketer plans every action and executes it the best way he can. He should also maximize the potential to earn by utilizing the right tools necessary for a successful Affiliate Marketing business. If you want to be a successful affiliate marketer, you have to treat it like a business. We have consulted some of the most successful affiliate marketers in the business and below are the top three necessary tools for a successful affiliate marketing business.

Important Tool #1: Domain Name and Web hosting

The most important and indispensable tool in Affiliate Marketing is your own website. The first step in any successful affiliate marketing business is building a good, credible and professional looking website. Your website is the jump off point of all your marketing efforts. Thus, you must first build a user-friendly website, which will appeal to your prospects and encourage them to click on the links to the products and service you are promoting and make a purchase. Therefore, you must first concentrate your efforts in building a website that will cater to what your prospects need.

The most important thing you should consider is that almost all web users go online to look for information, not necessarily to go and buy something. Above all else, make your website full of original, relevant and useful content. People will love articles that are appealing and helpful. Keep in mind that, in the internet, content is still king and good quality content will not only build your credibility, it can also help you achieve a higher search engine ranking. By posting relevant and useful articles, you establish yourself as a credible expert in the field, making you a more trustworthy endorser of the product or service you promote. Establishing a good reputation is a good step in building up a loyal consumer base.

Highly Recommended Web Hosting: Site Build It

Important Tool #2: Professional Autoresponder

A professional autoresponder is one of the lifelines of your business. Even if you go to the super cheap route on all your other tools, do not settle for a cheap, low quality autoresponder.

Yes, there are free autoresponders available online, but I guarantee you they’ll cause more headaches down the line (and lost profits) than you want.

To read more about responders click here

Important Tool #3: Link Popularity

The importance of driving highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be emphasized enough. The all-important web traffic is at the top of the list of the most important entities in the internet world. Attracting people to your site should be the first step you should carry out. Do everything to achieve a high search engine ranking. Link Popularity is one of the factors that search engines use to determine search engine rankings. Therefore, to enhance your link popularity, you must launch an aggressive reciprocal link campaign.

One of the best ways to do this – at no cost at all – is by submitting articles, with your website's link at the resource box, to e-zines and free article sites. You will not only gain exposure, you will also have the opportunity to advertise for free, just include a link back to your site. The more sites you submit your articles to, the better your link popularity is. Make your articles original, relevant and useful so that more websites will pick it up and post it.

These are but three of the many tools that an affiliate marketer can use to maximize earning potential.

About The Author

Refine your marketing skills with Donny Gamble, a top affiliate for thousands of affiliate marketing products.

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15 Fixes For A Failing Website

2007-04-07T02:06:00.000+08:00

If your website's not performing, here's what you can do to improve search engine rankings, engage visitors and convert more sales.

1. Align the site with your objectives

Have your business objectives and goals changed since you launched your website? If so, then you need to revisit your website's content to ensure it supports your current business needs.

2. Remove useless items

Every item on your website competes for your visitors' attention, reducing the impact of your key message. Is that welcome message necessary? Are some of those buttons redundant? Scrutinize every element to help deliver a strong message and eliminate distractions.

3. Update your information

Keep time-sensitive information on your website up to date. If you don't have adequate resources, keep time-sensitive information to a minimum.

4. Edit your web copy for consistency

Businesses often have different people adding web copy at different times, which leads to inconsistencies. Review your copy from start to finish with a keen eye on spelling, format, style, narration, tense, flow and so on.

5. Split text blocks into scannable chunks

Massive blocks of text discourage visitors from exploring your website. Break up web copy with relevant headlines, subheads, bullet points and short, one-topic paragraphs. Your visitors will thank you by spending more time on your site.

6. Review fonts

Check your fonts to ensure consistent size, style and spacing. Consider using a style sheet. Fonts optimal for the Web include Arial, Courier, Georgia, Time New Roman and Verdana.

7. Add new web copy

Add relevant web copy frequently to satisfy visitors and search engines alike. Improve search engine rankings and give your visitors a reason to keep coming back.

8. Refresh your graphics

Renew your image with new graphics, charts and photos. Many are royalty free. Type in terms like "clip art," "graphics," and "free photos" into your favourite search engine and you're on your way.

9. Make your graphics search engine friendly

Give your images tags with keywords to help improve search engine rankings.

10. Consider your colour theme

Go over your colours to ensure they are a part of or at least complement your logo and brand. Dump backgrounds that make it difficult to read web copy.

11. Extinguish flashing content

Flashing content irritates visitors and turns them away. It's one step away from announcing, "Congratulations! You're the 1,000,000th visitor! Click here to claim prize!" If you want it to make a point, do so with compelling web copy, placement, font size or colour.

12. Speed it up

Your pages should load fast. Don't make your visitors wait 30 seconds or so just to watch your logo spin around. How many times have you retreated from a site while waiting for its intro to load? Relevant web copy is much more likely to grab the attention of a potential client.

13. Re-evaluate PDFs

Are you guilty of throwing PDFs onto your website to save time? PDFs are designed for print, not the Web. Unless it's an e-book or a form, offer the information as a webpage and give your visitor the option of viewing it as a PDF.

14. Leave music to the DJs

Don't blast music at your visitors. It slows access to your site and can cheapen your presentation. If music is required, hand over the controls to your visitor by making it optional.

15. Repair or delete broken links

Check all your links and be quick to repair or delete any that bring your visitors to the '404 file not found' message. If a section is under construction, take it offline.

Article Source: Enzine Articles

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How To Find A Proven Legitimate Online Business

2007-04-07T02:04:00.000+08:00

Tips and guidelines to help you find a proven legitimate online business thus preventing you from falling prey to the get rich quick scams.

If you are looking for a proven legitimate online business there are a number of things you can do to try and establish whether the opportunity is legitimate or a scam. This is not always easy but it is to your advantage to invest some time in researching the opportunity before parting with any money.

There are thousands of scams on the internet as well as proven legitimate online businesses and for new visitors to the internet the task of trying to distinguish between the two can be very overwhelming.

Often the scam sites look so attractive and offer such great incomes or rewards that it is hard to believe that it is not legitimate, hence the reason so many people fall prey to the scammers. So one thing to be wary of is those sites that make huge income claims, like earn $10 000 in your first week or month. This really is totally unrealistic and if that amount is perhaps fives times your current salary, do you really think it is possible to earn such a huge income in such a short period of time with no prior experience of the business?

If the opportunity is legitimate then it would not be unreasonable for somebody who has been in the business for a couple of years to be earning a huge income. But be warned that nearly all the business opportunities on the internet advertise the income of their top earners who have been working hard for a couple of years. They rarely advertise the income of those just starting out in the business. An online business is like any normal business, you will need to work hard at building it up over a period of time to produce a good income.

So then do not get carried away with excitement when you find a website making such unrealistic income claims. The internet does not have magical powers to enable us to earn magnificent incomes overnight.

One can get so caught up in all the hype that it is easy to sign up for an opportunity that does not live up to its promises and this can result in huge disappointment, so a website that is not promising the earth is probably a safer route to take.

When you find a website offering an online business opportunity that appeals to you, spend some time going through it and do not jump in immediately and part with your money.

Have a look on the website to see if there is any contact information, either an email address or a Contact icon like an envelope, and send a short message expressing your interest in the opportunity and see if you receive a response. Check also to see if there is a physical address on the website as this adds credibility.

Look for logos on the website of the respectable bodies on the internet like the Better Business Bureau (BBB), Truste.org, Alexa Ranking, i-Cop.org click on these logos and you should see information about the site. You could also look up the domain on the DomainTools.com (previously called Who is) website and you will see the registration details, spend time to see if they look legitimate, for example you do not want to see a phone number listed as 1234567890. You will find a lot of information from this websites, so it is advisable to spend time doing some research.

Check on the website if there are any guarantees offered, such as a 30 day 100% money-back guarantee or perhaps a 14 or 30 day free trial offer. It is also a good idea to see if any training is offered, this is really important if you are new to internet marketing.

There may also be the opportunity to sign up for a free Newsletter, which will give you the opportunity to not only learn from what the newsletter offers but also enable you to get a general feel for the opportunity and put you in touch with your referrer.

At the end of the day, once you have researched thoroughly the opportunity you are interested in, sleep on it and take heed of your gut feel and all being well you will learn how to use the internet to generate an income with your own proven legitimate online business.

About The Author

Cynthia Minnaar lives in South Africa and works from home online.

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I Hate Writing Articles - There Must Be An Easier Way?!

2007-04-07T02:02:00.000+08:00

Owning, running and maintaining an internet based business or a site needs articles. Plain and simple, everyone who has a site knows this. Even those who don’t have sites but are frequent internet users knows this as well. Articles quench the thirst for information and knowledge of the people. Plus, the articles provides many other benefits for the site.

The benefits that articles provide are putting a site high in the ranking in search results of keywords and keyword phrases that pertains or are relevant to his or her site. They also provide attraction to website visitors when they are appreciated and is linked to your site from another site or newsletter. Articles provide for the increase of the confidence and trust levels of customers to your site and company.

Many articles are also beneficial to both company and its traffic. When the readers like the articles, they would tell more of their friends, family and peers and recommend your site to them, providing for a larger volume of traffic. You get bigger sales if your traffic trusts and believes in you. Your product or services would be much easier to sell when they know you know what you are doing and talking about.

So ok, we have established that articles are very important to a site and to business. Articles are crucial and to keep ahead in the game, a site must have an article, it is imperative. There is one dilemma though, not many people like writing articles.

Many website owners would rather spend their time on something else, and unless you’re a big time company, you don’t have the necessary resources to use on a pool of article writers. Plagiarism or copying of other articles is frowned upon and could easily get you into trouble, worst case scenario; a hefty fine and jail time.

So what are the other options?

Well, for starters if you hate writing articles and you can’t afford to hire people to write for you then don’t. Get free articles. The first place to look at for free articles is the public domain. Here you won’t have problems with copyright infringement and the following penalties and fines if you get caught for plagiarism.

Public domain articles are articles freely given to the public for public use. You can do whatever you want with it. You can place it on your site, name it as yours, put it in a newsletter its you decision. Always remember though that you will have to choose articles that is very relevant to your site.

The downside to public domain articles is that since it is free for everybody, many of your competitors may have access to them as well. Since every site needs to be original and unique even though you have the same niche, this could be a predicament. You may also have to edit them a bit to place more keywords and keyword phrases to make them better.

Another way to get free articles is to allow other sites which has the same subject or topic as yours to submit articles to your site. This would be only to augment your existing content or else all your articles would be leading to other sites since these articles would have resource boxes with them that could link or direct the readers to their site. That’s why it is important to have your own articles; you cold use them to link your site to other sites as well.

But, to truly feel the impact of what a good article to you, go for original ones. There are many article writers who do part time and freelance article writing jobs that charges only minimal fees. You can get good articles that have all the keywords and keyword phrases you need and people are looking for.

The investment you made for these articles would be worthwhile because you could use them for all the benefits you could offer. You hold copyrights to them and you will be able to use them anyway you want. As your articles help you in building your business and your site, you will have more articles to write and maybe then you wont be having second thoughts about articles.

About The Author

Besides corporate professional positions Mr. Francisco J Parra developed his own consulting and entrepreneurial activity advising his clients in both domestic and international financial opportunities.

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How To Build A Successful And Profitable Blog/Website With Minimum Resources

2007-04-07T01:53:00.000+08:00

I have not been a webmaster for a very long time but I just want to share some things that helped me increase my traffic and hopefully will do the same for you too. This is my second site. My first site runs pretty much on its own or what they call "autopilot". Here are some simple tips I believe can help you build a fairly successful blog or a website.

Domain Name:

The first step in building a successful website is registering a domain (Of course). It is always better to register a longer domain name easier to remember and that makes sense than a shorter one that doesn't. Try sticking with just letters. Numbers, hyphens and other unknown characters can confuse your user. And register the '.com' domain rather than '.net' or '.org'. It should be obvious why. Last point about registering your domain- It is always helpful if your domain name is related to the content of your site but don't worry even if it doesn't.

Web Hosting:

The second important thing is to choose your web host. Read reviews and compare different web hosting sites. My site is hosted by www.1and1.com and I chose this because it's cheap compared to others. For the first six months I paid $15 for the hosting and received two free domains. They were having a sale when I bought it but I think the current price is still cheaper than other web hosting sites. No matter what hosting you choose make sure they have PHP script and MySQL database.This site runs on Wordpress but you can install Drupal or anything other software you are comfortable using. Choose proper template. Making a site look professional is very crucial.

Content:

Ok, now when your blog is set, important thing to focus on is your content. Originality and regularity are the two most important factors that will determine your site's fate. Think what you know that most people don't. What are your fields of expertise? Make it your niche. Try to write at least one new post a day. New content is very important to make your visitors come back to your site. Write posts that needs to be read immediately. If you don't have time to write a new content everyday or if you are just lazy, write something that is timeless. Timeless content will keep your site fresh no matter when your visitor reads it.

Spread The Word:

Participate in different forums and reply on posts that matches your sites content. Some of the well-known forums are webmasterworld.com and digitalpoint.com. If you think you have written something amazing, interesting or unique then dig it. Submit a new topic on digg.com and you will immediately see some traffic. If you write something extraordinary and it lands on the home page of digg.com then you will receive thousands and thousands of traffic. Some other sites similar to digg are del.icio.us, fark.com, technorati.com, etc. There are whole bunches of these kinds of site. Submit your story on as many sites as you can. If nothing happens, you will end up getting free backlinks from these high page ranked sites. But this technique will be only feasible for a short period. You will have to keep providing good content so that the visitors want to come to your site directly. Email subscription and weekly newsletters are some of the ways to remind visitors that your site exists. If you are selling products on your site, go for pay per click advertising. This will help you receive good targeted traffic which means the conversion rate will be better.

Monetizing Your Site:

Some webmasters claim that they don't want to focus on monetizing the site unless it gets some traffic but I believe that you have to think about monetizing even before you register your domain. Think ways how you can earn money without loosing the professionalism of your site. Don't just fill your site with junk ads. Google adsense and adbrite are probably the best source of income for webmasters. If you were banned or rejected by Google adsense, read my other post where I have addressed this issue -Adsense-Adbrite . Your revenue will depend on your ads placement, your traffic origin, number of new visitors because returning visitors are blind to advertisement and of course your luck. Also check for affiliate marketing because it can help you earn a lot of money in a small period of time. Read other webmaster forums as mentioned above to know what are the latest money making trends on the net.

And finally, be optimistic, don't give up and pray.

This is just a brief description on what are some simple but important steps in building a successful site. These might sound obvious to some of you but obvious is usually the hardest thing to see. There are other lots of details I have not covered in this post but will try to do so in the future.

Pratik Ghimire writes about the Latest Trends On The Net on PratikG.com

Article Source: Enzine Articles

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The Popular But Wrong Way To Build A Website

2007-04-06T06:52:00.000+08:00

There are many websites that are simply built from the wrong end. And believe it or not, if your site is built that way, you'll be spending money without getting commensurate results. So what's this popular but wrong way and what is the right way or ways to build a website?

The wrong way to build a website is to start from setting up a beautiful site that catches your fancy. It is going all out for great graphics, flash and animations we all love to watch.

It is going all out to get a merchant account, a payment processor and a shopping cart. It is getting all your product description up and ensuring that you have the best shipping arrangement and a few more.

Is it that these things are bad or unnecessary? By no means! They are important for you to sell online although you can still be a massive success online without any of those. However, you can't succeed despite all those if you do not determine how you will get steady and high quality traffic to your site.

A lot of website owners online discover what's most important after they have spent a few thousand dollars building a great site that gets no visits. It is then that a simple reality dawns on them: That a website is worth nothing if it is not visited.

So, do not make that mistake if you want to build a business online. Take your time to study the ways of getting massive traffic. When you've done that, build a site that is designed to get massive traffic. You can't get too much traffic. It will make the difference between another internet success story and a person who stays awake all night wondering how he/she got into such a mess.

If you've made the mistake already, you can still retrace your steps. You're certainly sadder but also wiser for it. Devote your main efforts and resources on getting as much traffic as you can handle. That's the right way (no, the only way) to succeed in your internet business.

About Author:
Chimezirim Odimba writes to help hardworking folks succeed online.

Article Source: Enzine Articles

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How To Advertise Your Business On The Internet - Important Tips

2007-04-06T06:48:00.000+08:00

Important tips:

For a successful website you need to include the following information:

1. Details about your business
2. The services/products you offer
3. Why the customer should select your business
4. Your qualifications/experience

1. Details about your business

Describe your business. A short summary of the services and products you offer, how long you have been in business, how long your business has been operating, etc.

For example:

PERFECT PERGOLAS PTY LTD is a team of fully qualified tradespeople who are experts in their field of developing quality outdoor living spaces for you and your family to enjoy. We specialise in pergolas, decking, verandas and carports. We believe in working together with our clients to create the perfect home. Our team with 15 years experience in the building industry have been servicing the Melbourne Metropolitan area for over a decade. We offer you quality workmanship at an affordable price.

2. Services / Products offered

In this section you need to include information on your webpage about what your business specialises in and what services / products you can offer.

An example for a Building / Construction Company would be:

We specialise in:
• New homes
• Extensions
• Renovations

For businesses that specialise in a number of different services, you can have your information listed in different subheadings or columns.

For example:

The Building / Construction Company may build new homes, do extensions, as well as, renovations of bathrooms and kitchens. It may also offer a building consultants service.
New Homes Extensions Renovations
Units Second storey extensions Bathroom
Single storey homes Family living areas Kitchens
Holiday homes Additional bedrooms Painting/Carpentry
Ensuites Plastering
Garage Tiling
Windows

3. Why the customer should select your business

When someone is looking for a tradesperson / team they usually have a need to fulfil. They are looking for the most suitable business that will be able to deliver the services / products they require. Therefore, it is important for you to list some reasons why a customer would want to select your business out of the many businesses that are advertised.

Firstly, you can include a subheading ‘Why Choose Your Business Name’? followed by 4 good reasons why the customer would want to select your business.

An example for a Home Extension Company might be:

4 Great Reasons to choose HAPPY HOME EXTENSIONS:

Professional Job – You can relax when choosing Happy Home Extensions. We are Registered Builders with 20 years experience so you are sure to get a professional job with 6 ½ years guarantee on all work done.

Personal Consultation – We will work closely with our clients to determine your needs and preferences in order to deliver to you a quality project that everyone can be proud of.

Job Completed to Schedule – We have significant project management skills and resources and will endeavour to complete your job on time.

Affordable Price – We offer all our customers the best quality job at the most competitive price. We are able to do this by using our established network of contacts to buy quality materials at wholesale prices.

4. Your Qualifications / Experience

Somewhere on your website (preferably on the ‘About Us’ page if you have one) you need to include your qualifications, your ABN number, Public Liability, your relevant licences and any other professional associations you belong to, your years experience and also any awards or certificates of achievement you may have gained over the years.

* We hope these tips have been helpful and wish you good luck and success in all your business endeavours.

http://www.melbourneconcretecontractors.com

About The Author

Julie Polini
C & J Polini Concreting Services operating 6 days a week in the Melbourne Metropolitan area (Australia)

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URL Forwarding and Redirection

2007-04-06T06:29:00.000+08:00

Webmasters and common Internet users have a constant need for URL forwarding and redirection. The reason is that there are many long URLs that are not convenient to use. The solution is using a URL redirection service that would create a shorter URL and forward the long URL to the short one. URLic.com is a new free URL forwarding and redirection service that meets these needs. URLic.com can instantly turn every awkward and inconvenient long URL into a handy and easy to use short URL. URLic.com also allows you to choose your own suffix (the part after the "/" in the URL), so the URL will be easy to remember and represent the page it refers to.

So why would someone want to use it? Here’s a few common cases:

For Your own use:

Let’s say that you often search for the map of Brooklyn in Google maps. The URL is

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=new%20york%20map%20brooklin&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl

Of course it’s not convenient to use and it’s impossible to remember.

Using URLic you can create this URL: http://urlic.com/map1

This can easily be remembered.

For emailing and posting:

Let’s say that you want to post a long URL on your website or in an article or just send to

your friends in an Email or to you customers in a newsletter. Long URLs just don’t look good. With URLic.com you can create an Easy and Friendly URL for posting or Emailing.

For your website:

Let’s say that you have a website or a webpage on a free web host, without you own domain.

The URL would be something like:

http://www.my-internet-host.com/~myusername/my-page.html

This is not easy to use, remember or tell people.

With URLic.com you can easily create a URL like: http://urlic.com/john

To hide your Affiliate link:

Let’s say that you have affiliate referral links on your site, this links usually contain numbers and are not easy to use. Besides, many people know that these are affiliate links and don’t want to click them. With URLic.com you can mask these links into short and good looking links.

What are the other advantages of URLic.com ?

URLic.com is a 100% WEB 2.0 website, built with AJAX. The meaning is that there are no page reloads of any kind, and the user experience is just like of a desktop application. URLic.com also allows you to choose your own suffix, unlike some other services. When using the automatic URL (without choosing a suffix), URLic.com will always give you the shortest possible URL.

About The Author

Web Sites - What Do You Need To Do And More Importantly Not Do?

2007-04-06T06:24:00.000+08:00

You’ve finally decided to get yourself a web site, you’ve got some products ready and you are all set to go. So here are some "rules" for a good site.

1) Decide on the subject of your web site, make a single subject and ensure that it is very clear to your visitors.

2) Have a constant theme, color scheme, fonts etc.

3) Make the site easy on the eye and don’t use moving and uncomfortable to view graphics.

4) Make it easy to navigate. - use a logical navigation system, including "home" button. Navigation is usually found at the top or left hand side. Links to minor pages are usually found at the bottom of the page.

5) Include such standard pages such as "about us", "contact us", "legal", "terms and conditions", "privacy", "links".

6) Keep your pages to about 1 screen depth – people rarely like to keep scrolling down.

7) Make your graphics of good quality and quick to load.

8) If you wish to sell from the site - use a recognizable and trusted payment processor.

9) Make it easy for people to purchase from you by using a clear payment path and reassuring instructions.

9) Web logs and visitor buttons should be invisible to the viewer. Counters on the front page are for show offs and amateurs.

10) Keep advertising to a minimum and appropriate to the web site.

11) Have interesting and changing information.

13) SEO your site to give it the best possible chance of getting into the search engines.

14) Market your site intelligently to build up your links and make your site more visible.

15) Lastly have fun with your site.

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© Copyright 2007 Biz Guru Services Ltd Lee Lister, writes as The Biz Guru, for a number of web sites including her own sites. With over 20 year’s management and business consultancy experience with businesses large and small as well as being a serial entrepreneur, she now helps others set up, develop and market their businesses.

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Article Source: Enzine Articles

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10 Tips To Creating Fast Loading Websites

2007-04-06T05:25:00.000+08:00

Seems to me like most web users (me included) are always in a hurry when browsing. Statistics show that, without a compelling reason, the average user will not wait for much more than 10 seconds for a page to load. So does that explain why your visitors seem to spend less than 5 seconds in your site? Probably your site is taking too long to load thus putting off visitors.

As you design your site, loading time should always be a priority if your site is to be an effective business tool. Balancing usability and aesthetics is a delicate matter when creating a fast loading site. You can have a colourful website but takes ages to load while on the other hand you can design a simple site that loads faster than you can brink. Below are 10 tips and tricks that I have found very useful that you can use while designing your fast loading website.

1. Use images sparingly.

Images may enhance the appearance of a website but it greatly increases its loading time. While optimizing images will make the pages load faster, overuse will not have the desired effect. For example, if you use over 75% of your page content as images chances are that your pages will load very slow.

2. Use HTML to design your pages

HTML when used well can be very effective in creating fast loading pages. You can create simple and elegant sites using plain HTML, CSS and few images.

3. Minimize animated gifs and flash usage

Wherever possible use very few animated gifs and flash files. As much as they enhance web page appearance they usually bog down the loading times so use sparingly.

4. Use background images

Instead of using full images, use background images for headers and footers. In this way you get to use a strip of the image of uniform design instead of using an image 779px wide.

5. Avoid using Javascript and flash scripts

Most of these scripts contribute greatly to slow loading pages because they usually have to load some items first before they are rendered. For example, Javascript drop menus are very useful in creating seamless navigation but unfortunately increase page load times significantly. Consider using CSS with which you can have drop down menus.

6. Optimize your HTML

One of the reasons why pages may load slowly is huge page size as a result of useless or repeated HTML tags. Validating your site is one way of optimizing your HTML.

7. Avoid using multimedia files

Unless your site is an entertainment one don’t use multimedia files especially as background music unless you absolutely have to. Providing a download link or an online player is better than using the files as background music.

8. Use Templates

Using templates will not only ensure uniformity throughout your site but will enable subsequent pages load faster because the structural images will have cached and thereby reducing the load times significantly.

9. Optimize images

Using an image editor like Photoshop, or Ifarnview, images can be optimized to load fast depending on their intended use. Appropriately resized and cropped images will greatly reduce the loading times of a page and at the same time maintaining their integrity.

10. Check your loading times

Finally check your loading times using plugins such as Fasterfox in Firefox to see how long your pages are taking to load.

About The Author

Hilum Mburu

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Web Development - Ups And Downs Of Web Development

2007-04-06T05:11:00.000+08:00

It's funny how many people have an unrealistic idea about a computer online business. They somehow conceive of the idea that an internet business is easy to develop. The funny thing is, almost every legitimate entrepreneur begins a sales pitch with the caveat, this is no G.R.Q scheme. (get rich quick)

This case was brought to my attention: Partners started an online business with two others. None had any experience with online marketing. The first two suggested they build their own web site. After a couple of months the second two grew tired of waiting. They figured all they had to do was have a web site built because their product idea was so good it would sell itself.

The first two learned a lot more work had to be done in addition to having a site and product. The second two hired a webmaster and paid him $5000,00 to build a site. That was just for the design and web pages. They both completed their sites around the same time. The second two had no marketing skills and no marketing was included in their price. The first two picked up a lot of marketing skills along the way. Who do you think was successful?

So, here's the drill, if you're going to start an internet marketing online business, give yourself a reality check. What you should know.

Having someone build your website:

Research and shop carefully for price.
Find out if your webmaster includes any marketing features.
Find out all you can about how online businesses work and apply yourself diligently.
Be prepared for times, when nothing is happening with your site and you become frustrated.
You will have no control over your site, you're at the mercy of the webmaster.
Will, in most cases be quite expensive.

Building your own site.:

You will have total control.
Will become knowledgeable about building websites.
Will be much less expensive.
Will understand the importance of marketing.
Will understand how to apply marketing.
Will feel pride in your accomplishment

Whatever you do, do not undertake this venture lightly. There can be a big difference in what kind of money you put out. Neither of the partners had any idea what they were doing when they started. The second couple could have saved themselves a lot of money if they'd had this article.

Article Source: Enzine Articles

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Are You Searching For Home Based Success?

2007-04-06T05:00:00.000+08:00

Everyone is searching for home business success! Home based businesses are popping up every day and numerous others will start a home business within the next year. Experiencing home business success is important to anyone who desires to work at home. For those of us who already have a home business we are continually looking to grow and connect with others who are like-minded.

Work at home “Dads” are becoming as popular as work at home “Moms”. Maybe even more so, as large companies continue to “cut-back” and downsize their operations. Home based businesses are becoming the norm. Most households already have two “bread winners” in the family and have turned towards starting a home business part-time.

If you are looking to improve your bottom line and have pondered the thought of beginning your own home business, now is the time. Taking the right steps to home business success will get you off to a fast start. The key for continued home business success is to plug into a PROVEN system that you can follow to the top! If you are looking for an opportunity to work from home and don’t have a great deal of money to start a home business, you can search most any search engine for home based success stories and get free information on the subject.

True home business success requires effort, just as any other type of venture you may pursue. Moreover, your home business success may be directly tied to how much “thought” and “action” you give to it. You’ll rise to the top much faster by finding other individuals who have already experienced home business success and willing to show you how they did it.

Find a mentor (someone who has already been there – done that – and got the T-shirt) and implement their home business success formula. After all, they most likely will be able to show you where the “pot holes” lie and how to avoid them! Success Coaches are the key to most any rapid success, especially when working in a large industry. Sometimes you’ll come across too many “different” ideas or approaches to a given outcome. A Success Coach will help keep you on track and keep you away from all the “noise” they may distract you.

Take it from me … run from the ones who make you promises in order to get you “in” to their work at home program! Most of these guys only succeed in “recruiting” and not actually building a true, long lasting, residual type of income we all desire from working a home based opportunity.

So what are you to look for in a home based business? Well … we all have our opinions and below you will find a few of my own:

- Solid Leadership - You’ve heard it before, “Leadership is everything, and everything rises and falls on leadership”. Without quality leaders (proven in the field) you are placing your trust and work effort in uncharted waters! Find out “who” is behind the wheel and what their game plan is (should they have one).

- Financial Stability - Too many times we’ve experienced or heard of a once thriving company, having to close their doors (usually due to poor leadership) due to lack of funds. Let’s face it; finances are the key to any company’s success and or failure. Without money to keep the lights on and pay the necessary overhead, it’s only a matter of time until “lights out”!

- A Vision – It’s the old saying … “without a vision, you perish”! Therefore, if there isn’t a “plan” (a foreseen outcome or objective), then failure is most likely what’s around the corner.

Of course all three of these issues go together and are entwined or fused together. Sort of like one is no good without the other and without one, neither of the other two really exist. But then again, that’s just an opinion!

Ultimately selecting the best home based business for you, requires you to know what you want and know your outcome. If you simply just “jump in” as some would have you do, you may find yourself drowning in the process! You are much better off to research and select a home based business that offers you PROVEN SYSTEMS for your success. Once you’ve found the right one for you … work the system!

About The Author

Aubrey Richardson

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5 Website Navigation Tips

2007-04-06T04:53:00.000+08:00

Unclear website navigation is much like trying to read a map in the dark.

Many people who are new to web design and e-commerce have trouble creating effective website navigation. Having the expectation for your shoppers to use your website without clear and easy navigation is just like expecting them to blindly find their way to a destination with all the lights out. They will leave your site, lost and confused, without bothering to find out what you offer, and will go to find a website that is easier to understand and navigate.

Building a quality and easy-to-use website navigation will lead to many more sales and is actually very easy to do. To help you create a more effective website, experts at Bright Builders have compiled five easy tips to help you create effective website navigation that will quickly guide your customers to the products or information they’re searching for.

Tip One: The Navigation Bar

The Navigation Bar or Menu is the list of links that appears on every page of your website. It is the first cue to your customers about which pages they should visit in the website. Link names should be short, clear, and accurate at describing the products, services, or information contained on the linked page. It is also a good idea to use keywords as often as possible in the links in the navigation bar.

Navigation bars should not be too long. The customer shouldn't have to scroll down to view all of the links in your navigation bar. If your site offers a large number of products, create links to general categories instead of listing each product individually.

Tip Two: Using a Sitemap

A sitemap is crucial for any website. Simply put, the sitemap is an organized page of links to every page in your website. Normally organized as an outline, a sitemap includes links to each category, subcategory, and page on your site.

Sitemaps make it easier for both search engines and customers to easily access all of the information your site has to offer. One of the main goals of any website should be to have all of its pages indexed by search engines. This is because the more pages your site can be found for and ranked for, the better your chances are that customers will be able to find you in the search engines.

Tip Three: The Three-Click Rule

Studies have shown, on average, if a customer cannot find a wanted item or piece of information within three clicks of entering your site, they will leave your site. This means that your competition is getting the sale that you could have had, simply because the product or information was more readily available.

Many website owners do not understand that buyers are not the same as shoppers. Buyers know what they want and they want it now, but shoppers are simply browsing to see what is available. Make sure your customers can access all of your products and pages within three clicks from any page on your site to ensure that they buy from you.

Tip Four: Repeat Links

Having a Navigation Bar is very important for the ease of your website, but it is just as important to repeat those links in other areas on your site including in the body text or accompanying images.

You should also repeat important navigation links at the bottom of each page of your site in a link tree. This gives customers the ability to look at an entire page and then continue onto other pages without having to scroll up to the top to find the Navigation Bar links.

Tip Five: Page Titles and Subject Headers

If a customer ever has to ask “Where am I?”, you are almost guaranteed not to get a sale. Page titles and headers are just another way to clarify to the customer what page they’re visiting.

Found at the top of each page or dividing content by subject, headers should be bold and in a larger font than the page content. This clearly defines the purpose of the page and the content found on it, allowing the customer to easily navigate throughout the page.

Conclusion

Customers need to be able to navigate through a site with as little work as possible. The easier it is to navigate throughout a site, the more likely it is that your customer will stay long enough to purchase and continue to come back. By following these five simple tips, you help customers and search engines navigate through your site, thus increasing your sales potential.

About The Author

Shawn Hart is an internet marketer for Bright Builders.

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How To Immediately Increase Your Adsense Clicks

2007-04-06T04:42:00.000+08:00

Would you like to make one tiny addition to your pages and dramatically increase your AdSense clicks -- perhaps as much as threefold?

It's laughingly simple, yet the effect can be immediate.

All you need is to get some colorful digital photographs, either from your own stock or from a royalty-free web site. Then using a graphics program, such, as Real Draw PRO or Photoshop, create a strip of four rectangular photographs with a space in between each. The overall size of the strip should be 728 pixels wide by about 108 pixels deep.

The content of the pictures should be relevant to the content of your web site. In order not to violate Google's Terms Of Service, you should avoid pictures that are animated, advertisements or induce the visitor to click on the AdSense ads. If you are in any doubt, take a look at the ads on my web site or check with Google's Terms Of Service.

The background color should exactly match the color of your AdSense pages. It helps if you can place a narrow blue border around the individual photo (but not around the entire strip). This arrangement is ideal for a page containing an article and the best position within the page for the picture strip is at the top of the page, immediately below the page headline, but above the start of the body text.

Once you have done this, go to your Google AdSense advert codes and select the one for leaderboard, which is 728 pixels wide by 90 pixels deep. If the 728 pixel width sounds vaguely familiar, it's the exact size of the width of your picture strip. Make sure you delete Google's border code before pasting your leaderboard code under the picture strip, save the page and load it to your server and start enjoying up to three times the clicks on that style of ad.

If you already have the maximum number of three AdSense blocks on the pages, where you insert this picture strip/leaderboard combo, do be sure to delete one of the existing ad groups, so you don't violate Google's Terms Of Service, which only allow three ad blocks per page.

About The Author

Build A Professional Website That Pulls Targeted Traffic

2007-04-06T04:37:00.000+08:00

No Matter What Type of Product or Service You Offer, This System Allows You To Quickly and Easily Get Noticed, Ranked and Pulling In More Leads and Sales Than You Thought Possible.

This system is easy, professional and produces results. What more could you ask for?

I will admit that it does cost some money to set-up but not nearly as much as you would think and the cost is about the same (maybe even less) than using the traditional methods of doing it yourself.

After all if you are building a business, you have to expect that there is going to be some set-up cost. It really needs to be viewed as the cost of doing business and is part of your business investment.

I only wish I discovered these simple steps before I spent the money to set-up my business sites. Since that time I have switched to using these tools.

Important Note: These tools have not been developed by me. They are from several different sources (and I am not even sure these other sources know about each other.) I endorse them because they have produced results for me. They have made my life easier and more productive.

Since, I have gotten involved in using the web to get my message out, my tool use and process has evolved. But I am going to start with where I am right now and then work my way back in time. The benefit for you is that you can see (and maybe relate) to my examples, solutions and successes. So, let's get started. Current System and Success Achieved

The Three Main Components of The System

Build your site by intergrating both a website and blog as one system. I use wordpress (which is free) and is included as an install in the better hosting services available.
I use Blue Host as my primary hosting service. They are the best and very easy to use. In fact, you need to be careful because not all hosting services are created equal. You will need to load wordpress in the root directory. Blue Host allows you to do this easily and quickly. In fact it takes me about 30 seconds to set-it up.
Then I install a set of wordpress templates called SemioLogic Pro Package These are absolutely outstanding, professional and built to automate all the key performance enhancements that you want and need to help you get noticed and monetize your site.

That's basically it. Of course I do a little customizing to the system but overall using this system will get your site looking professional and ready to get you the traffic you need to generate leads or make you money right away.

Greg Meares is a partner of http://www.blueskybrothers.com and he and his partner Jerry discuss the latest internet marketing techniques and business ideas.

Article Source: Enzine Article

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Top Tips to Dramatically Increase Traffic to Your Website

2007-04-06T04:32:00.000+08:00

Web traffic is a major part of a website. Websites are not able to function without it, as it is the amount of data and information received and sent by a website visitor. A website should have increased web traffic in order to survive. To increase the web traffic, a website should have many visitors.

How are you going to increase the web traffic of your web site? If you are a web developer or ecommerce owner, increasing the amount of visitors in your website is of extreme importance. For you to gain many visitors, you need to use the following methods to learn more about increasing the traffic of your website.

• You only need to maintain a particular content of your website. Your website should contain all the information your visitors need. The information you should feed your reader must contain many links to your website. You also have to put quality content to give your visitors reason to come back.

• Have a regular distribution of newsletters. Newsletter serves as a reminder to your visitors that your website still exists. You should send newsletters especially to those who have subscribed but has failed to visit your site for a long time. Write and send newsletters on a regular basis. It can be monthly or weekly as long as the newsletter you will be sending to your subscribers is of quality and has convincing content.

• Make a forum or community posts. This will give you information to all the asked questions of your visitors. Not only that, it also answers all the questions of your visitors including yours. It also gives you information that you can add to your website. Get your self involved in the forum, and add your advertisements as well as your URL.

• You can run contests or promos that will encourage your visitors to log on to your website repeatedly. Promos and contests will catch the interest of your visitors. Make them go after your good prize; it will make them excited to win. You should make your visitors aware of your rules, like the most times that a visitor uses your website, the more chances of winning. This catchy promotion will absolutely increase the web traffic of your website.

• Invite good writers to your website. From writing your own web contents, you are sure to save money from it. However, there are things you need to master before you can write a quality article. By inviting writers with good reputation, your site will be a good hit to the visitors especially to the ones who appreciate good insightful literature. They are going to write quality articles that will make your visitors comeback to your website.

• You can also invite special personalities in your website. They can join the forum together with all your visitors. You can hold a special event where your visitors will be given a chance to chat with a prestigious personality. They are given special privilege to ask questions and chat with the special personality invited.

• Advertise your website through banners, text links, magazines, newspapers, media and offline advertisements. This is an invitation that should catch the attention. Make sure to make convincing advertisements. Aside from the mentioned above you can also try giving away free e-books or articles as well as classified ads.

• You can also give the top visitors free items or freebies. These items are given to the frequent visitors of your website. Pens, shirts, stress balls and many others that can be given with your website’s name and URL. This will be a good advertisement.

To build a good website, you must build a good reputation. It is the most effective way to make your website famous. This is attained through writing emails and making good contents of your website. You can also write articles on other websites as long as you put a small resource box after your article. This will serve as the link to your website. With more articles you made, the more chance of getting more traffic in your website.

You are able to get the major numbers of traffic in your website by using the following methods. If you want to earn money, you have to work for it, and you need to do lots of effort to attain effective and positive popularity of your website.

About The Author

Richard Legg is the Creator of the Highly Successful "Succeed In 30 Days" Internet Marketing course and Manual.

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How To Optimize Your Website For Google’s Top 10 Ranking - More Steps

2007-04-06T04:27:00.000+08:00

Search engine optimization is the process of choosing targeted keyword phrases related to a website, and ensuring that the website places well when those keyword phrases are part of a Web search.

ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION FACTORS:

The Major Factors Are:

Meta Tags, Header Tags, Text-body tag and Alt image tags:

1- META TAGS:

Meta Tags are code in your HTML that is invisible to the visitors of your web site but are read by some web spiders and search engines.

Meta tags used by a large percentage of the top search engines as one of the main guidelines on how they will index your site

The Main Meta Tags are:

• Title Tag
• Description Tag
• Keyword Tag

Targeting the right keywords:

Do keyword research- it is very important in building traffic

To do your keyword research visit this website http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Select a short list of 3 to 4 keywords

Title tag:

The page title should include ONLY your main keywords. The least amount of words you can place in the title, the more weight Google will give to each of the keywords and the higher you will rank.

The title is the most important piece of information search engines use to index Web pages. Include the title of your page and 3-5 important keywords. Format your site title as follows:

Site title, keyword1, keyword2, keyword3

You may use your URL, or the name of your company as your site title.

• Make sure it specifically describes your product or service,
• Makes proper use of 3 or 4 keywords,
• Use between 10 and 80 characters long.

Tips:

• Taken out all of the "ands"
• Replaced one of the "ands" with a "|" character
• Always Combine Your Keywords In The Page Title

Description Tag:

The Meta description tag describes your site's content, giving search engines' spiders an accurate summary filled with multiple keywords.

• Use a descriptive paragraph or sentence that is relevant to your page.
• If possible, use a sentence or paragraph that is present in the content of your page
• Use up to 500 characters, including spaces.

Keyword Tag:

Use a list of keywords that are relevant to the content of your web page. Use your url as the first key word and separate the keywords with commas. Format the key words as follows:

www.sketch-plus.com, keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, …..

Add 5-10 Keywords

• For best results a tag sized between 50 and 250 characters.
• Note that keywords should be separated with commas.

Free Meta Tag Analyzer:

This Meta tag analysis tool will help you analyze your web pages and
check for search engine compatibility.
http://www.hypergurl.com/form.html

More Sites for SEO:

http://www.submitnet.net/
http://www.submitexpress.com/

2- HEADER TAGS:

Headers are used to break entries up into logical sections.

Add h1 header tags- (Place your most important keyword) it's best to place your h1 header tag on the top left hand or top/middle portion of your page.

When Google reads a webpage, it views the text from the top left hand side of the page to the bottom right hand side of the page.

Add h2 header tags- (Place your 2nd most important keyword) should be placed somewhere towards the top half of your webpage.

3- TEXT- BODY TAG:

The body element defines the documents' body. It contains all the contents of the document (like text, images, colors, graphics, etc.).

• When writing the content, try to evenly sprinkle your main keywords throughout the copy. Don't overdo it though.
• Try to mention each keyword in a natural way as you are writing
• Include at least one of the keywords per 1-2 paragraphs, depending on how large your page is.
• Make sure to mention your main keyword at the very top left and the very bottom right hand side of the webpage
• Bolding, italicizing and underlining...Once we've finished writing the copy, we should go through and bold, italicize, or underline some of the keywords only 1 time each, maximum.
• Any keyword must be used 4 times or more in your site's HTML body. This is highly recommended for best ranking results.
• Avoid Excessive Keywords- No word to be used more than 30 times throughout the page.

4- ALT IMAGE TAGS:

ALT tags are images' descriptions.

• Place your keyword 1 in the alt image tag of the very top image in your webpage.
• Place your other 2 keywords plus an extra word like "picture" or "image in the alt image tag of 2 more graphics throughout your webpage.

LOAD TIME ANALYSIS:

If your Web site does not load in 12 seconds or less with a 56k connection, statistics show that about 45% of visitors will leave the site.

• Optimized you site for 56k modem users- Load time 12 second or less.
• Try to keep your homepage under 50k and your other pages under 40k.

SEARCH ENGINE GUIDELINES:

Always remember this general rule when building your site: “Search engines do not like to be fooled”. Do not try to manipulate your listings through sneaky methods. Provide useful, relevant content, and you will never have to worry about search engine guideline violations.

• Hidden Text - you never hide text.
• Excessive Keywords-Use keywords naturally in sentences and paragraphs.
• No word to be used more than 30 times throughout the page.
• Repeated Keywords- No keywords to be repeated multiple times in a row. We recommend using keywords naturally in sentences and paragraphs.
• Doorway Pages- Doorway pages are discouraged by most search engines.
• Harmful Redirects- Redirecting pages have a hard time being indexed by search engines.
• Frame Issues- It is recommended for sites that use frames to implement a descriptive NOFRAMES tag with relevant text content.
• Macromedia Flash Issues- Don't create all-Flash pages for any content you want to get indexed - instead, put that content in the HTML portion of the page.

About The Author

Faraj Balousha is the founder of http://www.49adwinners.com and http://www.Sketch-Plus.com, he enjoys giving tips on how to design and develop your website.

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What are the Website Strategies for Internet Entrepreneurs?

2007-04-06T04:24:00.000+08:00

Your Internet Business website is like the engine of your Internet Business. You need to have a website up and running, in order, to move forward. Below are 6 website strategies that Internet Entrepreneurs need to follow. It does not matter if you are a beginner or if you have recorded successful sales. You can always twist your website to make it more effective.

1) Forget about what your website designer said to you. Forget about creating beautiful websites. These kinds of websites are not very effective in Internet Business. You should look at the websites of successful Internet Entrepreneurs. It has been proven that websites, which are more, toned down helps to increase sales.

2) Do not use Java and Flash for your Internet Business website. These are unnecessary and may cause some viewing problems for your visitors. For example, some of the visitors may not have the latest flash player installed. Some visitors' Internet browser may face problems when it runs Java.

Use HTML in your website. HTML is viewable in nearly all web browsers and loads quickly. The most important thing is that you must create easy navigation for your visitor.

3) Do not use audio and video in your Internet Business website. Avoid the usage of too many graphics. Do not use all of these because they have a large file size. Hence, it will take a longer time to load your website. When it takes a long time for your website to load, your visitors will get impatient and leave the website without looking at it properly.

If you still want to use graphics, then, you must compress their file size. You do not need to have photo quality.

4) Create a powerful header that can interest the visitor. You can ask a graphic designer to create one for you.

5) Use headlines and direct response copy writing on all your websites. A great headline will make the visitor want to know more. If you want to place a picture with your headline or in your website, you must make sure that the picture prompts the visitor to read the headline or the accompanying text.

6) The main purpose of your squeeze page is to generate leads. Your squeeze page must have the copy that prompts the visitors to subscribe to your list. In the end, you need to drive traffic to your squeeze page.

If you follow these 6 website strategies, you will have a successful Internet Business website.

About Author: Niralan Bobalan is an Online Business Expert

Article Source: Enzine Articles

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Easy Ways To Make Extra Cash Online

2007-04-06T04:23:00.000+08:00

There are numerous simple and easy ways to make some extra cash online. This article will give you some ideas.

Surveys

One of the best ways to earn some extra cash online is by taking surveys. There are many companies that need consumer opinions on a wide range of topics, and many of them will pay you money or with points you can redeem for cash or prizes. It's easy and free to signup and the more surveys you take, the more money and prizes you will get. It just takes a small investment of your time.

Writing

If you have decent writing skills, there are many publishers and content distributors who need content for their websites. Two such sites are AssociatedContent.com and Helium.com, they will pay you for each article you write. You don't have to be a fantastic writer either, just have a good grasp of English and be able to write something of interest on a given topic.

Blogging

Blogging is fun and easy and, again, you don't need great writing skills. You just need to be able to communicate your thoughts and ideas well. You can get your own customizable blog by getting a domain and hosting package that includes the Fantastico module. This module allows you to install the blogging software, WordPress, with 1 simple click. It's super fast and easy and you'll be blogging in no time. Once you have some visitors, you can add Adsense ads or affiliate ads to leverage your visitors and make money from them. Remember, the more interesting your topic, the more people will be interested, and the more readers you get, the more money you will make from your advertising. Blogs can be about anything, what do you have a passion for? What is your interest? Blog about it!

Affiliate Marketing

Many online companies have affiliate programs. Amazon.com, for instance, has a great affiliate program that allows you to sign up and get a customized URL to any page or area of their site. Then you can send this URL to your friends and family and encourage them to buy gifts from Amazon.com. With every purchase from your affiliate link, you get a commission! There are thousands of other affiliate programs out there, in addition to Amazon's program.

Sell Your Extra Stuff

We all have extra stuff laying around our houses or garages. Why not get rid of it and make some money too? Get your stuff and take a picture, write a description and put it up on eBay. You may find that something you thought that wasn't worth anything, is actually worth something!

Contests, Sweepstakes and Instant Win Games

Everyday there are new contests, sweepstakes and instant win games launching. If you are vigilant and spend an hour or a few a day entering contests and playing these games, you will win something eventually. Playing these games and contests is often fun anyway, so why not take a chance? Check out sweeps.ws for a great list of contests, sweepstakes and instant win games.

Free Lottos

You know how you go to the convenience store every week and spend a few bucks on lottery tickets? Well, there are also online lotteries where you can get tickets and win cash prizes. The difference is, these lotteries are free! Yes, free! You can find a list of free lottos at sweeps.ws.

Online Casinos

There are hundreds of different online casinos on the web. I bet you thought that you needed money to play at them and win? Well, you were wrong. You can signup for free poker tournaments that have cash prizes. There are also slot, roulette and blackjack tournaments that you can play that have real money prizes. All for free! Check out freerolls.net and gambling.com for listings.

There you go, 8 fun and easy ideas to make some extra cash online!

About The Author

Lydia Quinn writes for PaidSurvey24.com, a free and comprehensive paid survey directory list.

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Copywriting Tips to Make Any Website Sell Better

2007-04-06T04:19:00.000+08:00

It’s a fact that one website will pull many times the leads or sales as a competing website. What causes this large variance in results? It’s the copywriting on the website.

Here’s what works best from actual results and testing on dozens of websites we’ve done the copywriting for.

1. Websites have one main end purpose and that is to sell your products and/or services, to move people to action, to make money. In today’s high-tech world, most copywriting on websites forgets this vital fact and that is why they don’t perform better.

2. Make the website easy to “scan” with headlines, sub headlines, boxes, sections, colors and the like that give the reader the main benefits he will get. Almost all people are “scan first” or “scan only” readers. The headlines and sub headlines should take advantage of this fact.

3. Tell the reader what he will LOSE if he does not take the recommended action. Fear of loss is a great motivator.

4. Build up excitement, enthusiasm, passion and urgency to get the reader to take the desired action right now. Yes, excitement is contagious and it sells!

5. Make a great offer to get the prospect’s email address. In today’s overcrowded environment and with spam concerns, it’s not enough to just say “enter your email address for our newsletter.” Make a great offer including special reports, bonuses and the like in addition to the newsletter to get the maximum number of qualified signups.

6. Focus the copywriting because people want to buy from the expert specialists in a field. If the copy is too broad it will lose a lot of the best prospects, who of course, are the most likely to buy. A great way to do this is to have separated focused web pages for separate types of people or industries on the website.

7. Make the website as easy to use and find things as Amazon.com (for consumers) or Dell.com (for businesses). The copywriting and organization of these sites is a key reason they are ultra-successful.

8. Start thinking like the website reader (the prospect) and stop thinking like the marketer. Figure out what the prospect wants most from the products or services that they deliver, then come right out and tell him what benefits he’ll get, why, and what he needs to do now. Simple but it brings in billions.

9. Compare the product or service against the competitors to show and prove it’s superiority.

10. Copywriting is king and queen for the website to sell the maximum number of people. The right copywriting can bring up to double, even triple or more the current results for no additional marketing cost. Hire the best copywriter the business can afford, and don’t skimp because this one-time investment can be one of the best investments.

11. Test everything, measure it, use the winner, and always keep testing. This is the key to “optimizing” the website and all your marketing. Don’t guess – test and let the only vote that matters (the prospects) decide what works best.

About The Author

Michael B. Pavlish is a successful copywriter who has sold products and services for almost every type of business since 1978 and the author of a best-selling ebook.

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Associate Program: Your Ticket to Get Rich

2007-04-06T04:12:00.000+08:00

Having your own website does not do a lot to your life. It will only be a place where people can visit and read the things that you put in your website. However, by having your own website, you can turn it into a moneymaking machine that can land you large amounts of profits.

Joining an associate program or an affiliate program is one of the most rewarding and the most lucrative Internet home business that you can ever get in to. Besides, you don't have to invest a lot of money for it. You only have to have a website where you will put your affiliate programs.

Affiliate or associate programs work by promoting your affiliate company's products and referring potential clients visiting your website to the affiliate company's website. When the visitors from your website purchases a particular product or services from your affiliate company, you will get a commission out of the sold product.

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This may seem simple enough but there are things that you have to consider in order to profit a substantial amount from this kind of home business. First of all, successful affiliate marketers work hard in promoting their website through articles. By writing articles related to the product you are marketing for your affiliate company and publishing them to numerous article publishing websites, you will be able to get targeted traffic in your website.

The first thing you have to do is that you have to dedicate your website to a particular niche related to your affiliate company's products. The topics in your article and also in your website should be similar to your affiliate company's products. Besides, you would not want to have an affiliate program that promotes guns if your website is about dogs or pets. You have to choose your affiliate program to be related to the topic of your website.

With this, there will be a greater chance that you will attract more people and more potential buyers to your affiliate company's website. This will result in greater income opportunities.

You have to remember that in order to be successful in the affiliate program business, targeted traffic should be your main priority. The more targeted traffic entering your website, the more chances you will have in earning a lot of money and getting rich.

To do this, affiliate marketers publish articles with topics related to their website's theme and also the product that the affiliate companies sell. This will generate targeted traffic to your website and in turn, more income opportunities.

Affiliate programs aren't a "get rich quick" scheme, it is something that you should work hard on and it is also something that you should dedicate some of your time in. Spend some time developing your website and it will come to a point that your website will be comfortable for use by everyone.

There are things that that you should consider when starting your own online business as an affiliate marketer. By knowing about affiliate programs and how it works, you will definitely be on your way to success. You will also be making a lot of money through affiliate programs.

Just remember that you should choose a topic and a product that you plan on promoting for a particular company that you are familiar about. Writing articles about a particular product that you do not have any knowledge on, will only result in letting you look like a complete fool explaining something that you don't know anything about.

Remember these things and you will be surely on your way to success and getting rich with affiliate or associate programs.

About The Author

Steven Gerber is a professional copywriter & marketing consultant. He is a protégé of Dan Lok, the World’s #1 Website Conversion Expert, & in Steven’s totally biased opinion simply THE BEST.

Ensuring A Profitable Home Based Business Opportunity

2007-04-06T03:52:00.000+08:00

If you would like to be one of many who has found a home based business opportunity and become successful with it, then hard work is going to be needed to achieve this goal. A home business opportunity is quite popular now for various reasons. Some people need a home business to help them supplement the income received from there regular job, while others need the home based business as a way for them to keep busy as they might not have another job.

There are many different and numerous types of home based business opportunity for people to become involved in. They range for medical transcription services, to selling cosmetics and toiletries. Each opportunity is unique and suitable for just the right kind of person. There are a number of people or companies who will try to convince you there home business opportunity is perfect for you, when in fact, it might not be. It is up to you to weed through all of the different opportunities to find one that will make you successful. The question, which now arises, is how to ensure that when you have started your home business opportunity that is a profitable one?

You should be aware that a profitable home based business must first start with the correct home based opportunity. Most people choose a home business opportunity, which is quite popular, and everyone knows about. However, the problem, which arises with this, is, without realizing it, the market has already become saturated with many people selling the same product. In this way, your chances of having a profitable home business will diminish due to over availability of the product. On the other hand, choosing a home business opportunity that no one has ever heard of is too risky if this is your first time working with a home based business opportunity. Just because a product or concept might be new, there is no guarantee that it will sell. Therefore you run the risk of not making a profit at all with your home based business opportunity.

In order to ensure you are on your way with a profitable home based business opportunity, everyone thinking about working at home, should think about the amount of money necessary in starting a business. Each different type of home based business opportunity will require various amounts of time and finance dedicated to the job to make it work. For you business to be profitable, it is necessary to first plan out how much will initially be invested into it. A new startup business can quickly drain a bank account if a business plan is not initially drawn up. Therefore, to ensure you business is a profitable one, spend time budgeting out your much money will be allocated for each aspect of the business, and stick to this business plan without spending carelessly.

When first starting a home based business opportunity, a lot of hours are necessary in order to make the business as profitable as possible. This would initially include time spent away from family and friends growing your business to a stable level. Therefore, to ensure your business is profitable, the hours spent away from loved ones must be factored in.

After considering the amount of money and time which is needed to make your home based business opportunity profitable, the most important advice would be to start marketing your business as much as possible. There are many forms of business marketing available such as word of mouth, business cards, brochures and flyers, or ads in the newspaper. Yet whatever type of marketing you choose to adopt, be consistent with it. With more people becoming aware of your business, and telling their friends about it, the more profitable your business will be.

About The Author

Leonard Bartholomew, B.S. Computer Science.

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A Quick Look At Web Site Statistics

2007-04-06T03:18:00.000+08:00

If you’re going to be an internet marketer, you better get a handle on web site statistics. While there are hundreds of different tools for measuring web site activity, here is a quick guide to some of the more common statistics prepared by most tools.

Hits. “Hit’s are the number of times someone made a request for information on your site. It’s important to note some statistics tools count a hit as any information not necessarily a single visitor. For example, with some tools, if you’re home page has 3 pictures on it, a visitor to your home page might register as 4 hits – 1 for the page and 1 to download each picture.

Unique Visitors. Unlike hits, unique visitors are just that – how many unique people visited your site irrespective of the number of pages they viewed. If you’re trying to build traffic, this is the data to watch.

Pages. Page counts tell you how many pages on your site have been viewed. Theoretically, the smallest number of pages viewed would be equal to the number of unique visitors (if every visitor views just the home page before going elsewhere). A page count higher than the number of visitors is a good thing – this means visitors came in and went deeper into your site than just the home page. Some tools offer “by page” counts that will show you exactly how many times each page has been viewed.

Entry Pages/Exit Pages. Entry pages are the pages that a visitor first entered your site with. Exit pages are those that they left the site after viewing. This data is important to tell you what’s happening with your visitors. How they arrived will often tell you what offer they are responding to (if you use separate “landing pages” for email promotions, for example) and the exit pages will tell where (and hopefully why) they left. For example, if a high percentage of the exits are from the home page, it means a high percentage of people haven’t gone deep into your site. If, on the other hand, a high percentage have exited from the contact page, that may correspond to increased sales activity coming your way!

So, by all means, get familiar with these and other web statistics -- in the final analysis, internet marketing is all about web statistics.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

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

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10 Easy Tips to Help You Profit From Your Website

2007-04-06T03:16:00.000+08:00

Hundreds of thousands of webmasters across the world make money online with their websites. Why not you? Here are 10 easy tips that you can use on your website to make it profitable. As with any good website however, you first need quality original content!

1. Google AdSense - Make money selling advertising space. While banner ads are not worth your time for the most part, Google AdSense is. Many web site owners make a comfortable living off of AdSense profit alone.

2. Affiliate Marketing - Make money referring your website traffic to other websites. Don’t have a product? That is 100% O.K. Just add someone else product to your site by joining an affiliate program and forget about it. If you have related content (free information) you will see a slow trickle of income from your affiliate links.

3. Write an eBook - Sell your own idea or product. I know it sounds like a day dream, but people do this all the time. In fact, it is the most common method that people use to make money. Write an eBook, offer consultations, or make something people will use. In this category, you are only limited by your imagination.

4. Create an online directory - Sell text links. Add a directory area to your site and offer to place links to other web sites for a small fee.

5. Become a Paid Blogger. Offer to blog for companies. Blogging is fast becoming an important link building strategy for online companies. There are hundreds of small businesses that could benefit from a professional blog but, do not have the resources to hire a full time employee. You have a website, put it to use!

6. Open your own eBay store. Buy low, sell high. There is no easier place to sell than online with your own eBay store. You can concentrate on a particular type of product like coins and antiques or you can sell a wide variety.

7. Host an online competition. Offer prizes for the first, second and third place winners. Your competition can be on almost anything. Think of a way to offer a competition, create a small entry fee and you are set!

8. Create a member only area. You can create a members only site about anything from Fan Clubs, Online Newsletters, Courses and Training, Stock Trading Tips, Dating Sites, Personal Advice, Horoscopes, Family Trees, and so on. Again, your only limitation is your imagination. If you have a site already up and running, offer something in your paid member’s area that they cannot easily get for free.

9. Begin a paid advice service. Free information is great and will draw readers to your site. Once there, help the reader out with some basic information. Save the real “meat” for those that are willing to pay a small fee.

10. Sell your site. Why drag on a project for years when you can get in, get out and turn a quick (albeit smaller) profit? Create your site, get it listed in the search engines, make sure you get a few dollars a week in online advertising and sell your site for a few thousand dollars.

About The Author

Joshua Watson is the author and webmaster for both and How To Guides websites.

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Hiring Web Developers - What to Know

2007-04-05T22:52:00.000+08:00

1. Basing your Decision on Price Alone

Price is always an important factor when choosing any product or service. For those who are not familiar with web design companies and don’t know what questions to ask, often the default is to choose the lowest bidder and this could be a serious error. It is very likely in the technology field to run into problems when awarding jobs to the lowest bidder. Web developers who quote low prices are usually taking some kind of short cut in their development. Some shortcuts are the omission of statistics or the use of template style designs. Although some templates look reasonably good, if your web developer has done work for other companies, even your competitors, your sites may come across with striking similarities. Once your site is completed you may notice new sites popping up in your community designed by that developer with the same template. In the end, you need to evaluate the price/ performance proposition and ask yourself if you really want the lowest bidder building what could be your most visible marketing tool.

2. Get Someone who can Provide Ongoing Support

Many business's web sites contain information or material that is incorrect, obsolete, or just plain out of date. Some web developers will move onto their next project and forget about your site's existence leaving you with no human support for future changes. Be sure that your web developer will look after all aspects of your website; a single call or email is all you should have to do to get what you need.

3. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Statistics

Make sure your web developer will provide you with detailed, real-time web statistics. Some developers may provide basic hit counters, or worse, no statistics at all. As the owner of the web site you need to see your web site's statistics to measure its effectiveness and make changes as necessary. Be sure that you have access to traffic, and detailed statistical information. Knowing which pages on your site get the most visits, how long visitors spend on each, which search engine sent them to you and where they can from are just a few of the tools that will enable you to periodically fine tune your web site for better results. Also, you should never have to rely on a web developer to send you reports - be sure you have online access to this anytime you want. Ask in advance if it is free with the web site or an additional cost or monthly fee. You wouldn't drive your car without a dash board – don't try it with your web site either.

4. Insist on Formal Training and Experience

Your developer needs to understand design aspects and accessibility issues. This comes directly from having proper experience and training. Ensure they have the required knowledge of web programming to build custom applications from basic to advanced as your business grows. Database security and integration is essential when storing sensitive information on your website. Your developer should always keep up-to-date with upcoming technologies and programs.

5. Overlooking the Possible Need for Scalability

One major downfall of sites created by amateurs is the lack of scalability. At some point you'll need new features added to your site. Not only will it make your site more profitable, but it will make your job, and your staff members' jobs less time consuming as you begin automating tasks within a web environment. When the time comes to expand, your site will need to be scrapped and a new one created. This is one of those "pay me now or pay me later" situations.

6. Mistaking a Directory Listing for a Web Presence

Many business owners have a vague understanding of the Internet and how it works. Web directory listings may seem like an appealing, inexpensive solution to business owners who are not familiar with Internet marketing. A web directory listing is a web page within a larger web site. Capabilities on a directory listing site is minimal if any. Some will provide only basic company information and not much beyond that. Future development would be nearly impossible without switching to a real web developer. Any business trying to promote a successful image needs to have a customized professional web site with a unique domain name – www.yourcompany.com.

7. Be Sure You Can Pick Up and Move if You Want

Some web designers lock you in with them for the duration of your site. They may actually hold the rights to your domain name (www.yourcompany.com), which means if you ever decide to move, you can't take your name with you because it doesn't belong to you. This is ethically and morally wrong. Always retain the rights to your domain name and have access to your registration information. If you don't take the necessary precautions at the start, it may cost you down the line as your site grows in popularity while you're stuck with a designer that has limited abilities.

8. You Should Need Only One Number to Call For Any Problem

Having a web design company who will look after all aspects of your website will save you time, money and headaches. If you have any problems it's best to have one number to call for a solution and only one number. You don't ever want to find yourself managing an issue among various service providers, especially when the technical issues become complex. It is very easy for a developer to say "oh no - that's not my problem, you need to talk to your web host, or your internet service provider, or your domain registrar". Have a single person who knows what they are doing and willing to be accountable and solve your problem, even if they need to deal with a third party regarding the issue. At least you know you will be looked after with only one phone call on your part.

Written by Ryan Barichello, Development Director of the Toronto web design company LinxSmart. His website can be found at http://www.linxsmart.com.

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Site Maps-Are They Important?

2007-04-05T22:43:00.000+08:00

Site maps, are they important? Do you really need one? These were several questions that I often asked but was hesitate to ponder to closely because of the technical aspects involved. But as the number of pages began to add up, I had to seriously consider the relevancy of a site map to that of SEO, the search engines, as well as, accessibility to my visitors.

SEO, visitors and your site map

A site map is important and should be utilized when, or if you are expecting your site to continue to grow. With that being said -- a site map should be as simple as possible for the search engines and your visitors.

If you construct your sitemap correctly, it should provide:

1. the search engines with a ready source to better understanding the structure of your site, which in turns, helps them to better categorize and index your pages into their database. The more pages that are indexed by the search engines, the better the chances that more visitors will find your website.

2. those that visit your website with a ready resource for searching your site, if they are wanting to do a quick search or find your navigation to be a little confusing or misdirected.

When to Use it

A site map is a necessity if you have a website greater than 100 pages. If it's a one page mini-page, you would definitely have no need to supply your visitors with a sitemap.

However, if you know your website is going to grow to greater than 100 pages you should construct an organized sitemap that will burrow down to all levels of your website. Again, if it does nothing else, it does help the search engine spiders to better find all your pages.

Many say that if your site is going to be under 100 pages you can be more liberal in your sitemap organization. However, my thought is simple: why do it twice, start with organization and stay focused, as your site grows.

Updating your site maps:

When you add another page or you make changes to your web pages than your sitemaps should be updated and uploaded to your servers for the search engines to pick up. As you may have noticed in my last statement, I said "sitemaps". There is more than just the html or visual sitemap that we are accustomed to seeing; There is also the "behind the scenes" sitemaps that you present to all the search engines to further help them with indexing your site.

Different sitemaps for different search engines and the human eye.

The behind the scenes sitemaps is yet another important step that will help you to get the search engines to notice your site. But, as with everything, there are different sitemap protocols that you need to conform to--and that which the search engines will accept. Here is the breakdown:

Google -- requires the xml format, and prefers that you gz-zip before uploading to your site and to their site. Yahoo -- uses a text sitemap -- which is a text file. You submit it once to Yahoo and then they will periodically check your sitemap for updates. Independent search engines -- ROR sitemap -- is an independent sitemap that is used by any independent search engine. Html Sitemap -- Yes, the search engines uses the html sitemap as well. But this is helpful to your visitors.

I know that you are probably saying, this is alot of work. Or, I don't have this type of knowledge to get the job done. What can I do? These were the same questions that I had. The answer is simple. Go to XML-Sitemaps (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/) and they will create all the sitemaps you need, to the specifications of Yahoo, Google, the independent search engines, and an html sitemap for your visitors. How much does it cost? It's free. How long does it take -- just a manner of seconds. All you do is put in your index page, and they will crawl your site. The only limitation is that your website has to have 500 or less pages, if it is more you will have to buy and download the standalone.

To conclude, sitemaps are important for your visitors and the search engines and most definitely your site. Remember a sitemap can increase your traffic do in part to better indexing opportunities you have given the search engines to finding you.

Vickie J Scanlon -- Visit her site at: http://www.myaffiliateplace.biz for free tools, articles, ebooks, how to info, affiliate opportunities, travel and tech accessories, software and computers for the online business. Or check her blog – My Affiliate Place Blog (http://myaffiliateplace.blogspot.com/) .

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Tips For Building Niche Websites

2007-04-05T22:36:00.000+08:00

The first step is to find a niche area. You could draw inspiration from your friends, media, books, yellow pages, or from top affiliate programs. Once found that, the next important thing is to market the website so as to attract a good traffic to the website everyday. In fact, this is the difficult most part in building a niche website. This article discusses few tips that could effectively help one to market his/her niche websites.

1) Write articles and submit to various popular directories. This is an efficient method to drive traffic to your websites. But, ensure that the articles have a link back to your website.

2) Participate actively in various discussion forums in your niche. Find few good and popular forums in the web and register for an account. Observe the activities in the forums for few days to get a feel of it and then have a go at it by answering few questions, all the while subtly promoting your website.

3) Use blogs to your advantage. Publishing your blog with RSS feeds and updating it regularly will ultimately increase the visibility of your website.

4) Link exchanges can increase a website’s page ranking. Hence link to other relevant and high quality websites in your niche. However, it must be kept in mind that linking to low ranked websites could be counterproductive.

5) Posting comments in other blogs in your niche is also a good way to improve the visibility of your website. But, while doing so, never attempt anything unethical like abusing a particular entry or making hostile criticisms.

6) Another effective way to popularize your niche website is through periodic press releases, on something news worthy that is happening in your portal. Designing an affiliate program and recruiting hard working affiliates in exchange of a share of your profits is also a decent idea you can try out. Finally, if you are prepared to shell out few bucks, consider pay per click advertising – like MSN AdCenter and Google ad words – banner advertising or buying paid links to high PR websites.

7) All these aspects could increase the popularity of your niche website. But what purpose it serves if the website does not figure in the first few search results in a search engine? Therefore, some serious SEO while designing the website is also important. Sans SEO, it is next to impossible to remain visible in the web.

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

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Top Tips for Search Engine Friendly Web Site Designing

2007-04-05T22:19:00.000+08:00

Want to have a flashy web site for your business. Will your flashy web site will be able to bring you good business. Read about how you can make your web site more search engine friendly and generate good ROI.

Designing a website that also ranks well in search engine results is a job that requires a blend of art, creativity and optimization. Wondering what a web site designing has got to do with the optimization of a web site or its ranking, then I must tell you that 40% of ranking positions are increase because of web site design. Web site designing is not restricted to Photoshop and Fireworks, rather a good website designer must build a superior architecture of the website. Below are few features that a web site designer must take care of while designing a website.

1. Do not use browser specific functions, as all users may not have the same browser installed on their machine.

2. Use small and less images, if it is mandatory to use bigger images then slice them and keep in mind point 1.

3. Always mention the height and width of the images in the code part. It helps browser calculate the space needed to be left for the images and the rest of the page can get downloaded faster.

4. Do not forget to put ALT tag on all images, sometimes few images are unable to appear especially if the connection is slow.

5. Try to keep the average page size less than 30 KB. On an optimum basis the page should not take longer than 5 sec to download.

6. Try to avoid “Mystery Meat Navigation”. Keep your links highlighted so that user at least knows where to click to navigate to other pages. Try to keep navigation easy for users.

7. Display the path of the pages on the navigation to help user know where they are.

8. Keep the design simple and soothing. Colors that are too bright and too many flashes may distract the users, beyond making your site too slow.

9. Do not use too much plug-ins and fancy fonts. Sometimes user may not have installed the fonts you are using on your webpage in that case your page will appear to him in ‘Times New Roman’.

10. You can split your page in two or more tables for fast processing. Like you can put header in one table, body in another and footer in the third table. This will help some part of the page (with small table) to download especially with slow connections, inspiring the user to become more patient.

Thus it makes sense that designing a website in not enough. It should score up to certain requirements in order to rank fast and high in the search engine results. With many new or existing businesses wishing to exploit the incredible potential of the internet, it is important to have a professionally designed and maintained web site. You must get your site w3c certified in order to be search engine friendly. A w3c certified site can be easily crawled by the search engines. Now time has arrived to improve your site design and results and increase your traffic and ROI.

About The Author

Written by Mridu Sinha, a web site designer and developer in web site design company New Delhi. Get FREE and expert opinions on your website with the best web site designer in New Delhi at http://www.dobhaltechnologies.com . Mridu Sinha, as a professional web site designer has designed a lot of sites that ranks well in search engine. She design the web sites according to the search engine policies thus making them more search engine friendly. You can also join her online club for web site design company New Delhi. Get more information at http://www.mangosoftware.co.uk

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10 Web Site Design Tips Guaranteed To Attract Visitors And Get Them To Spend More Time On Your Site

2007-04-05T19:09:00.000+08:00

Marketing through a website is different in some ways from other forms of marketing yet there are many aspects which are virtually identical.

It's different in that the technical requirements of the medium itself are different but that's where most of the differences end. The basic principles of marketing remain the same and, of course, the objective is the same – to entice people to buy your product or service.

What Every Web Site Needs To Do

When Marketing through the Web you should remember these five words: Attraction, Interest, Desire, Action and Satisfaction. Your website should be able to fulfill each of these concepts in order to not only entice visitors to your site but to keep them there and turn them into customers.

Web site design is more than simply finding a cool photo you like and a color that works with your company's logo. It also incorporates readability, functionality, and usability - all of which lead to your most desired outcome: making your website work for your business.

Burn These 10 Tips Into Your Brain

It's impossible to compile a list of 10 web site design tips without mentioning at the beginning that it's only a partial list of the things you need to do to make your online business succeed. There are literally scores of important web design considerations, and we'll talk about them later in this article but, first, we need to explore some basic principles of good design without which none of the others will matter.

1. Aesthetics-only May Not Click With Your Visitors

When people search the Internet they are looking for information, not beautiful web sites. Unfortunately, too many web designers are preoccupied with aesthetics, or "coolness". They forget that effective web site design requires that you incorporate certain fundamental elements that will make your web site work for your visitors.

So keep this fact in mind: Fancy graphics and the latest cool animations, sound, etc, most likely will annoy your visitors.

2. It's All About Readability

Make "readability" a fundamental part of your web site design. If you want a professional-looking web site that encourages visitors to read about your business, products, or services, the first thing to do is make sure visitors can, in fact, read what's on your pages easily.

Stay away from all capitals in your writing and use common fonts that are easy to read. The standard fonts that most web surfers are used to are Arial and Verdana. Don't try to be different.

3. Let Logic Prevail

Organize your content into logical sections. This takes some planning but it's key to a successful website. Make it a snap for visitors to find the information they're looking for.

4. Browsing Is Not The Same As Reading

Incorporate headlines into your web site design. Web users will browse more often than read. Because of this it's important to use headings and subheadings to give visitors a quick idea of what your page has to offer.

Someone in a hurry should be able to scan your headings and subheadings to quickly understand what products, services, benefits, or other information they will find on the page. Put your most important phrases in bold letters, too.

5. Use Bullets To Hit The Mark

Grab your visitors' attention by including:Bold Words
Bullet Points
Section Titles and
Short Paragraphs

The visual experience on a web site is quite different than on a printed page.

6. Eliminate Background Noise

Never, repeat, never use patterned or distracting background images as part of your web site design. Your content will be "lost" in the noise.

7. Easy on the Eyes

Don't use bright text with bright background colors. Make reading easy on your visitors' eyes. Basic text colors (read "black") and a white background work best with the many different ways your pages will look on different monitors and with different browsers.

8. Consider Color-blind Visitors

Approximately one in ten people (95 percent are men) have some form of color-vision impairment. Effective web site design, therefore, considers color-blind visitors. Certain combinations of colors, usually shades of red and green, may be invisible to some of your most potentially valuable customers.

9. "No Graphics" Mode

Always bear in mind that some of your visitors may have "graphics" turned off (yes, they can do that to your beautiful web site design). Therefore, always use ALT tags to label graphics with descriptive text.

10. Use An Appropriate Font Size

Find a happy medium between too big and too small. Typically 10-12 pt fonts work the best.

What Else Do I Need To Consider?

These 10 web site design tips are implemented in all effective web sites but they are by no means the only ones you need to consider. At Web-Host-Watch we've compiled a list of 100 web site design tips that go well beyond the basics and provide insight into the design secrets used by the pros who make their livings from web marketing.

We provide this comprehensive list of web design tips for free to all visitors of Web-Host-Watch.Com because everyone benefits from web sites that work!

About The Author

Anthony Hamill is the founder of http://Web-Host-Watch.Com which helps online business owners master the basics of web hosting. Get all the facts you need to find affordable web hosting plans including tutorials, tips on avoiding common mistakes, a glossary of web hosting terms, and a web hosting review that profiles the web hosts who provide the best overall value in each hosting category.

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Tips on Building A Website

2007-04-05T19:06:00.000+08:00

Building a new website or re-desigin an existing website is a complicated endeavor. Often, we see the trees instead of the forest. By this, I mean we focus on individual aspects of a website, without regard to its whole. Here are some tips to keep you on track while building a website.

First, write down the goals of your website and how you plan on measuring them. This will keep you focused during the process. If you feel you are getting off track, ask yourself how your current tasks are supporting the goals. If they aren’t, stop and refocus. Having goals you can measure is important. If one of your goals is to increase the number of people coming to your site, how will you measure it? By measuring your goals, you will have a higher chance of delivering a website that accomplishes those goals.

Second, it doesn’t matter what you, your marketing department or the CEO think about the site. This can be a hard point to swallow, and an even harder point to get across to people in your organization. But, if you have ever spent 4 hours trying to come up with a color scheme, simply because certain people don’t like a particular color, you will understand. You need to find out what your visitors want in the site. What will make them happy, not what pleases everyone in your company. If you make a decision based on customer feedback and it meets disapproval, ask “Do you want a site that pleases our customers and or a site that pleases you?”.

Lastly, do competitive analysis to determine features your site needs. But look farther than your immediate competitors. Review large and established companies, like Amazon, Ebay and others for inspiration. Obviously, you don’t have the same resources as they do, but you can take inspiration from what they are doing and translate that into something important and relevant for your site.

About The Author

Rob Bolton works for 60AT6 (http://www.60at6.com) and is an active member in the barter network BizXchange (http://www.bizx.com/barter-network-system.html).

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Five Tips for Turning Your Web site into a Lead Generator

2007-04-05T18:57:00.000+08:00

Remember the days when it seemed as if every Web site began with a home page that featured some sort of animated flash, with the “skip intro” link as a way out? With all due respect to some highly creative interactive Web designers, today’s Web sites need to be highly focused, content-rich, and finely-tuned in order to achieve maximum impact, visibility, and usability. In my own experience working with our clients at Nowspeed Marketing, we have found that most companies can take their existing corporate Web site and optimize it for effective lead generation.

Below are five best-practice tips you can use to help turn your Web site in to a lean, mean, lead generation machine.

Tip #1: See your Web site through the eyes of the visitor

Visitors to your Web site want to understand immediately who you are, what you do, and, most of all, what you can do for them. They want clear, logical paths for navigating through the site to get more information. This means you must design content and offers that speak directly to different target audiences, in terms of their demographics and job functions, and that also ork well across the buying cycle (“tryers” vs. “buyers”.) Start with your home page, but don’t stop there. Make your interior pages content-rich and offer-specific as well.

Tip #2: Keep it clean, clear and concise

A common mistake is to put so much information and so many links on the home page or interior pages, that they quickly become cluttered. Think of the page in terms of valuable, limited real estate. Utilize it wisely. For the home page, Include an SEO-optimized description of who you are and what you do. Provide short blocks of text and clear click-through paths for different types of visitors (customers/prospects/info seekers). Place high-performing, relevant offers where the eye can see them without much effort. Whenever you can, avoid making the user scroll down the page.

Tip #3: Balance search with simplicity

Optimizing your site for organic search is critical. Jupiter Research estimates that organic indexes generate 87% of commercial referrals from search engines. However, you need to weigh the benefits of high keyword placement with simplicity and usability from the visitor’s perspective. Don’t go SEO-overboard. Our advice is to SEO-optimize your copy and tags around keywords that have the following characteristics: high traffic, low competition, and are a good fit with your business. For example, the keyword phrase “B2b lead generation agency” works better for our marketing agency than “interactive agency.” Keep copy targeted around these parameters, and you will not only connect well with your audience, but your will also rank high in organic search.

Tip #4: Evaluate traffic patterns for best offer and content placement

Use a Web analytics tool to see where people are clicking through from your home page, and which interior pages are receiving the most click-throughs and/or longest retention. Then, place your best offers there. You may be surprised to find that what you think is important, such company news links on the home page, is in reality a low traffic area. If that is the case, consider replacing that link with one to a page that is more relevant. Or, if your “About Us” page is getting a lot of traffic, place more links and offers on that page to encourage them to explore other areas of your site and request information.

Tip #5. Test, update, and fine-tune

Once you’ve got a solid, lead-based architecture in place, monitor visitor behavior and fine-tune various elements of the site until it is performing at the highest possible level of effectiveness. Utilize Web analytics to perform offer and message testing. Remember that, like content, offers can become outdated fairly quickly. As their popularity begins to wane, refresh your site with new offers.

About The Author

David Reske
Partner and CEO
Nowspeed Marketing (http://www.nowspeed.com)

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Why To Improve Website Ranking?

2007-04-05T17:28:00.000+08:00

With the increase in the number of internet users all across the world, online businesses are definitely on a great raise. Even in emerging markets like Brazil, China, India; the usage of internet is becoming very huge. Thanks to globalization, penetration of internet and liberalization of economic policies in most of the markets; now you can take your small, home-based business to anywhere in the world with just a well designed and perfectly optimized website.

Having a website, is just a prerequisite to any business in today’s scenario. But, merely having a website is not going to do any good to your business if you are not able to generate good amount of sales and revenue trough your website. To generate good sales, you need to have quality web traffic first. According to the research more than seventy percent of the web traffic all across the internet is just coming through the search engines. So, if you are looking for quality web traffic, you need to improve website ranking on most of the search engines.

To improve website ranking, you need to do lot of things, but not in a rush. You should first analyze who your target audiences are. And then, you need to analyze what are the keywords or phrases that your target audience are using on the internet while doing web searching. This is very important. Because, if and only if your website has a very rich content with full of those keywords, you will have a chance to improve website ranking on any search engine.

You also need to update your content very regularly. This improves website ranking quite dramatically. This is because of a simple reason that most of the search engine algorithms give top ranking while indexing the websites if the content is updated frequently.

So, it is quite evident that you need to have a lot of knowledge on SEO if you want to improve website ranking. Normally, most business owners or webmasters will not have sufficient knowledge that requires improving website ranking. Or, they will not have enough time to do so. In either cases, it is quite perfect if you go to professional SEO consultants to improve website ranking.

In this world of outsourcing, it has been proved that it is always a better idea to outsource the work which you are not good at to a person or a company who is good at that work. To improve website ranking, you can get many professional SEO consultants to work for you. You can even get a professional consultant at a very cheap price if you outsource the work to countries like BRIC nations, INDIA or China.

About The Author

Darren Dunner is the author of this article on Improve Search Engine Ranking. Find more information on the subject at http://www.the-content-writers.com.

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Web Site Security: 8 Tips

2007-04-05T17:22:00.000+08:00

The computer age has made the personal computer affordable for most people of virtually every industrialized country. Whether it takes the form of a desktop or laptop, all computers are used for a wide variety of functions. As the number of people on the Internet soars ever higher, security becomes an increasing concern. Here are some tips to help ensure a personal or business Web site is secure against attack.

1. Passwords are the first line of defense. Most programs have a maximum number of characters for the password, and it is best to use all every available character. Each additional letter or number in a password makes it that much more difficult for someone to figure out what it is.

2. It is very common for people to use important dates, names of loved ones, and other things close to the heart their heart as their password. Unfortunately this information is not very difficult to discover. Then it simply becomes a matter of trying each likely candidate until one works. Passwords should never be these kinds of things so that the contents of the computer will not be compromised.

3. The worst kind of passwords are those that are simply a sequential series of letters or numbers, or those where the log in name and password are the same. This lack of imagination practically begs for a security breach to happen.

4. Only the owner of a Web site should be privy to the security codes on it. No one else should know password and it is best never to write it down. If the password falls into the wrong hands, or is even suspected of being compromised, it should be changed immediately.

5. Some passwords are case sensitive. If the password was originally entered with the caps-lock off, but upon logging on it was typed with caps-lock on, the system will not honor the password. A clever user can take advantage of this feature by randomly distributing capital and lower-case letters in a password.

6. The natural assumption when trying to guess someone’s password is to believe it to be a real word. However this need not be the case. Some of the most unbreakable passwords are those which are not words at all.

7. Another security problem that some people create is the act of using the same log in and password when logging on to many different sites. Should only one of these sites be cracked the chances are the others will also be compromised. It is best to use a different password for each site. At the very least, reused passwords should be limited only to applications where security is not important. For example, Web forum memberships, if compromised, represent very little danger to the user so long as the password used for those sites is not reused for anything where sensitive data could be stored.

8. When using Web sites that require a login, simply closing the browser is not sufficient to prevent other users from accessing that information from the same computer. It’s possible to simply re-open the browser and gain access to the site without needing to log back in. Use the proper log-out procedure on the Web site before closing the browser in order to avoid this from happening.

Keeping secure on the Internet is not just the job of those who create software products for the consumer. It is also the responsibility of each and every computer user. The user can feel at ease knowing the contents in the Web sites are safe by simply taking the appropriate safety measures.

About The Author

William Davis writes for several popular web sites, especially http://tasup.com and http://fidew.com.

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How To Analyze Your Search Engine Competition

2007-04-05T14:40:00.000+08:00

Analyzing a competitor’s web site may seem like a big job. You should have the mindset that you are going to do this as a learning experience though. This will help you along your way when you may feel like giving up.

Before you even begin to analyze a competitor’s web site you should make sure that you are equipped to do the job. If you do this job properly you can gain a lot of information that will help you to increase your site’s traffic and popularity. These sites can also help you to analyze your own market. After all, if a web site is getting a lot of hits then it must be doing something right. If you take time to see where it is ranked, what key words are being used, how the site is formatted, and what you can do to make your site better while not violating any copyright laws then you will be well on your way to success.

The first thing that you need to do is identify who your major competitors are. The best place to do this is to look in Yahoo’s directory for large companies, innovative approaches and new products. While looking through this directory you should also try to identify any niche markets that your major competitors have not yet identified and exploited. When you find these new niches you will be set for traffic. Another thing that you should do while here is try to get your site listed. Little associations like this are important if you want to start to build up your traffic so that you can conquer a niche or category. Some other associations that you can build occur when you figure out where the big sites’ webmasters are hanging out and you start hanging out there too. Believe it or not, knowing the right people is going to make your business bigger and better.

If you visit Media Metrix 500 you will be able to see what companies are getting the most traffic. Alexa will also teach you about relative traffic. They offer a free browser add-on that shows you how much traffic a site is getting. This will help you to see where your competitors fall in the pecking order.

Once you have found your closest 5 or 10 competitors it is time to closely study them. You really can learn a lot by looking at and analyzing your competitors’ website. The main things that you should be looking for include:

1. Take a minute to see what products or services that they are offering. Make notes of anything that is different from what you are offering. If you see any gaps in what they have to offer think about whether or not you could possibly fill these gaps.
2. Think about how their website looks, feels and functions.
3. Look at the various advertisements they are offering.
4. Act as a client for a moment and think of where their strengths and weaknesses lie.
5. Spend some time trying to figure out their strategy.

If one of your major competitors is s a publicly traded company then you can get detailed information from their SEC filings. Take a moment to jot down who their key players are so that you can read their interviews and speeches. These may also give you some insight into their website.

Once you have gathered all of this information together you need to spend some time summarizing the information for each competitor. Make sure that you highlight their strengths, weaknesses and strategies. This will be useful as you become resourceful in countering and exploiting these sites’ weaknesses.

You can also use this research in order to create a marketing plan. This should include what steps you intend to take in order to deal with this competition in such a way that your website comes out on top. Of course, you are also going to decide whether it is even worth competing with these sites or if you should try to find a market that is less saturated.

Before you even get started with trying to analyze what your competitors do you should know that it might feel overwhelming when you see what the big companies online do. This should not intimidate you though. Instead it should encourage you to concentrate on customer satisfaction.

About The Author

Chris Taylor - author, internet marketer and SEO specialist - Catdynamics.
http://www.catdynamics.com/

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