Website as Storefronts

Website as Storefronts

A customer walks into the store, browses through products and shelves, picks up items, inspects, considers the prices, chooses a product and takes it to the cash register to pay. Now if you want to sell your products online, then your site must be enabled for e-commerce, where you must have the following features:

• You need to provide plenty of content and product description like sizes, dimensions, colors and comparisons with other similar products. It must allow the customer to choose a product, get a clear pricing and shipping costs on the product, complete the transaction and get an order number, and/or invoice confirmation via email. Allow your customer to choose a shipping method.
• You must tell the customer if the item is in stock or delivered against order. Ideally, you should have an email contact or live help if the customer has a question. Most importantly you must respond immediately! If you want to provide your own live chat and help desk services on your website, specialized softwares are available for purchase.
• Be sure your customer service links are large and clearly marked, so your client does not have to dig around to find information.
• Provide an ‘about us’ section or a section about your policies. If you have privacy statements and customer satisfaction policies, your customer will feel better about shopping in your store.
• You probably want to have customer quotes and references on the storefront page, as well, to let your prospective client know that others are happy with your service.
• Provide an FAQ with information about your return-back policies, guarantees, shipping prices and insurance charges if any.
• If you are so inclined, you can offer a print catalogue if the customer prefers to order one from your storefront and shop in the privacy of their homes.
• Do not annoy your customers by presenting products that are marked ‘sold’ or pages that say ‘under construction’ or ‘coming soon’.
• Do add new content frequently, so your returning customers will not be bored by seeing the same products they saw four months ago.
• If your site has got a date tag or has current references, be careful to change these references frequently so you don’t give the perception that nobody is attending or reading your site.

Tools to monitor your website

Tools to monitor your website

You can’t just put your website on the net with right keywords and all the right touches and expect your traffic and ranking will remain constant. As the web is an ever changing landscape, you have to keep track of your own web results like what is happening with the competition and also the best and highest ranked sites. There are many useful tools to help you find out what exactly is happening.

1. A tool which you can use to test your own website links or other websites for broken links:

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

2. With this tool you can check search engines for the number of back links to your URL i.e. other web pages linking to your site:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/backlinks/

3. It sometimes becomes important to know where the servers of your hosting company are physically located. Because, some search engines like Google have the ability to filter search results based on their physical location called geotargeting. This could be used to determine why your site is showing in only a certain country. This link can also be used to research the country location of a particular competitor’s website:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/website-country/

4. In order to track the location of the visitor or a customer to your website:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/geovisitors/

5. In order to check the Yahoo! web ranking of your’s or your competitor’s website use :

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/webrank/

6. Here is a link to check the web ranking of a website using a Mac or Apple computer:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/pagerank-mac/

7. You need a Google AdSense account for using this. This link provides you with charts and reports which will help you analyze traffic, clicks, and results from your AdSense advertising

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-charts/

8. If you have an AdSense account, you can analyze your website address or another website address to see what Google ads will be displayed when the customer selects certain website names or keywords:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-sandbox/

9. This link will take you to a cooperative advertising network where you can join to display and

share your ads with other website owners:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/

10. You can add the Search Functionality on your website which uses Google. This works only if your site is listed in the Google Index.

 http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/search/

11. Here are some links to free website counters which you can use on your website to track your traffic and hits:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/counter/

http://www.amazingcounters.com/?ref=gad033

http://www.cyber-counter.com/signup.php

http://www.statcounter.com/free_hit_counter.html

http://www.free-counters.net/

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http://websearch.about.com/library/tableofcontents/blsearchenginetableofcontents.htm

Traffic With Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is a source of very targeted traffic that many marketers overlook.  The time involved with it and the ease with which it appears Yahoo ban people puts them off.

The basic premise of Yahoo Answers is that people ask questions and other people answer them.  Think of it as an advice board, if you like.  Some of the questions are bizarre, some peculiar, whereas others are normal.

The quality of answers varies too from the single sentence, to the rude to the outstanding.  The latter is the type of answer you want to be providing.

Firstly, people are only banned if they abuse the system and provide consistently poor answers.  So long as you stay on the right side of their terms of service and provide good quality answers you will have no trouble keeping your account.  People have had the same account for years and have accumulated thousands of points, whereas others lose theirs in a few weeks because they break the terms of service.

The key to succeeding with Yahoo Answers is to find questions that you can answer and your website provides more information on.

The benefits of Answers are threefold.

1)  You gain traffic from people reading your answer
2)  Your answer, if chosen as the best answer, will rank in the search engines and get traffic directly
3)  You can get a backlink from your answer which will boost your sites rankings.

As Yahoo Answers is considered an authority site by the other search engines, having links from it are considered highly relevant and very beneficial.

You must do an advanced search to find the best questions to answer.  Search only questions opened in the last 7 days with your keyword.  This will give you the most relevant questions.  You then need to go through each question and find the ones you can answer well.

In order to keep your account and to get voted as the best answer, you need to provide high quality answers.  This means reading the question thoroughly and understand what is asked.

Start your answer with a greeting, e.g. "Hi there" or "Hi, thanks for your question".  This instantly makes your answer stand out from the crowd and will start to build a relationship with the questioner.

Then provide your answer and sign off with something equally friendly such as "Hope this helps you out" and then sign out with your name.

You should only put your link in your answer directly if it has been asked for.  Putting your link in every answer is likely to get your account banned.  Your link needs to go in the resources box below.  Don't worry, it will get seen and clicked on, particularly if your answer is voted the best answer.

Yahoo Answers provides a very good method of generating targeted traffic through to your website.  It works well for most types of sites and some people earn decent money just from Yahoo Answers.  Use it well and wisely and you can receive many benefits from it.

Traffic With Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is a source of very targeted traffic that many marketers overlook.  The time involved with it and the ease with which it appears Yahoo ban people puts them off.

The basic premise of Yahoo Answers is that people ask questions and other people answer them.  Think of it as an advice board, if you like.  Some of the questions are bizarre, some peculiar, whereas others are normal.

The quality of answers varies too from the single sentence, to the rude to the outstanding.  The latter is the type of answer you want to be providing.

Firstly, people are only banned if they abuse the system and provide consistently poor answers.  So long as you stay on the right side of their terms of service and provide good quality answers you will have no trouble keeping your account.  People have had the same account for years and have accumulated thousands of points, whereas others lose theirs in a few weeks because they break the terms of service.

The key to succeeding with Yahoo Answers is to find questions that you can answer and your website provides more information on.

The benefits of Answers are threefold.

1)  You gain traffic from people reading your answer
2)  Your answer, if chosen as the best answer, will rank in the search engines and get traffic directly
3)  You can get a backlink from your answer which will boost your sites rankings.

As Yahoo Answers is considered an authority site by the other search engines, having links from it are considered highly relevant and very beneficial.

You must do an advanced search to find the best questions to answer.  Search only questions opened in the last 7 days with your keyword.  This will give you the most relevant questions.  You then need to go through each question and find the ones you can answer well.

In order to keep your account and to get voted as the best answer, you need to provide high quality answers.  This means reading the question thoroughly and understand what is asked.

Start your answer with a greeting, e.g. "Hi there" or "Hi, thanks for your question".  This instantly makes your answer stand out from the crowd and will start to build a relationship with the questioner.

Then provide your answer and sign off with something equally friendly such as "Hope this helps you out" and then sign out with your name.

You should only put your link in your answer directly if it has been asked for.  Putting your link in every answer is likely to get your account banned.  Your link needs to go in the resources box below.  Don't worry, it will get seen and clicked on, particularly if your answer is voted the best answer.

Yahoo Answers provides a very good method of generating targeted traffic through to your website.  It works well for most types of sites and some people earn decent money just from Yahoo Answers.  Use it well and wisely and you can receive many benefits from it.

Tracking Your Traffic

We all love traffic coming to our website.  The more the merrier in most cases.

However, as a marketer, that isn't the case.  Marketers want targeted traffic and they want to know where it is coming from.  Not knowing where your traffic is coming from means you don't know which traffic generation methods are working.

The majority of marketers make no effort to track their traffic and are grateful for any visitors to their website.

If you are paying for advertising and not tracking your traffic you are throwing money away!  You have to know which adverts are working and which are not.  This way you can do more advertising that is earning you money and less of that which isn't.

Tracking your traffic doesn't need to be complex and can be done very easily.  You can invest in scripts and services that will track your website traffic for you.  These vary from the cheap to the expensive, the good and to the brilliant.

You don't need to have a script or service to track your traffic, but it can often make it much easier for you.

A simple traffic tracking method is to use Google Analytics.  This is a free to sign up service that many marketers are using.  The good thing about it is that it offers in depth stats and can track almost anything.  The downside of it that it offers in depth stats and can track almost anything!

The complexity of it is a good and a bad thing because you can find out so much about your website that it will initially confuse you.  However, once you have spent some time analysing the results it will prove very useful.

Firstly you have to add the code to your website.  This code is unique for each of your websites and needs to be inserted at the bottom of each page in your website just before the closing body tag.

Once it is reporting data, you need to drive a decent amount of visitors to your site to get some good results.

Analytics will report on all activity on your website and even go as far to overlay where people are clicking to help you understand the activity on your website.  You can link your analytics account with your Adsense and Adwords accounts to further help you understand how well they are working for you.

One of the biggest benefits of Analytics is that it can provide goal tracking to track sales and sign ups to lists.  It can be a bit tricky to get working behind scripts and membership sites, but is worth using.

The big appeal to most marketers is the fact that it has a lot of features, more than many scripts and is completely free.  Of course, Google get to understand exactly what happens on your website, but that is a small trade off for such in depth analytics.

Using Google Analytics will give you a good understanding of where your traffic is coming from and what it is doing on your site.  Through this you can improve your conversion rate, and in turn, your profits.

Tracking Your Traffic

We all love traffic coming to our website.  The more the merrier in most cases.

However, as a marketer, that isn't the case.  Marketers want targeted traffic and they want to know where it is coming from.  Not knowing where your traffic is coming from means you don't know which traffic generation methods are working.

The majority of marketers make no effort to track their traffic and are grateful for any visitors to their website.

If you are paying for advertising and not tracking your traffic you are throwing money away!  You have to know which adverts are working and which are not.  This way you can do more advertising that is earning you money and less of that which isn't.

Tracking your traffic doesn't need to be complex and can be done very easily.  You can invest in scripts and services that will track your website traffic for you.  These vary from the cheap to the expensive, the good and to the brilliant.

You don't need to have a script or service to track your traffic, but it can often make it much easier for you.

A simple traffic tracking method is to use Google Analytics.  This is a free to sign up service that many marketers are using.  The good thing about it is that it offers in depth stats and can track almost anything.  The downside of it that it offers in depth stats and can track almost anything!

The complexity of it is a good and a bad thing because you can find out so much about your website that it will initially confuse you.  However, once you have spent some time analysing the results it will prove very useful.

Firstly you have to add the code to your website.  This code is unique for each of your websites and needs to be inserted at the bottom of each page in your website just before the closing body tag.

Once it is reporting data, you need to drive a decent amount of visitors to your site to get some good results.

Analytics will report on all activity on your website and even go as far to overlay where people are clicking to help you understand the activity on your website.  You can link your analytics account with your Adsense and Adwords accounts to further help you understand how well they are working for you.

One of the biggest benefits of Analytics is that it can provide goal tracking to track sales and sign ups to lists.  It can be a bit tricky to get working behind scripts and membership sites, but is worth using.

The big appeal to most marketers is the fact that it has a lot of features, more than many scripts and is completely free.  Of course, Google get to understand exactly what happens on your website, but that is a small trade off for such in depth analytics.

Using Google Analytics will give you a good understanding of where your traffic is coming from and what it is doing on your site.  Through this you can improve your conversion rate, and in turn, your profits.

Socail Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is one of the best ways to get your websites ranking well and for getting direct traffic.  The search engines know that the social bookmarking sites are a direct indicator of what people are actual interested in.  Sure, they know marketers use it, but they realise that the majority of content that is social bookmarked multiple times is real content that people are finding useful and interesting.

You can take advantage of this and use social bookmarking to get your sites ranking well for their keywords.

Firstly, you need to open an account on some social bookmarking sites.  Rather than social bookmark each site manually, look at software such as OnlyWire which semi-automates the process.  This will make your life a lot easier.

Once you have your account set up, find some Internet marketing colleagues, friends or family who would be willing to set up an account themselves with Onlywire.

Then you simply trade bookmarks.  They bookmark your sites, you bookmark theirs.

Most marketers only have their sites bookmarked once, and very occasionally more than once.  The search engines are probably very aware of this and so pay more attention to sites that have multiple bookmarks on a single site.

This simple technique can easily get you multiple bookmarks and will give your sites a much needed boost in the search engines.

Alternatively, you can outsource the bookmarking and hire people to do it for you.  This will very quickly add up if you are creating a lot of sites.  You can find people on forums such as Digitalpoint who will do it very cheaply for you, but it is still going to add up.

You can apply the same technique to sites such as Stumbleupon and Digg, both of which can potentially get you massive amounts of traffic.  These sites expect more newsworthy and interesting articles.  With a well written article you can expect thousands of visitors in a day, quite literally.

Setting up multiple social bookmarking accounts yourself and bookmarking your sites is possible.  However, these sites are smart and will realise what you are doing unless you hide behind proxies.  This can be done, but often the hassle isn't worth it, particularly when it is easy to network with other marketers.

Networking with other marketers and trading bookmarks also has a side effect of building your network of contacts.  These could potentially turn into joint venture partners, product partners or more in the future.

Social bookmarking is an excellent way for you to get traffic both from the search engines and from the social bookmarking sites.  Do it well and you can benefit from great search engine rankings and massive traffic.

Socail Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is one of the best ways to get your websites ranking well and for getting direct traffic.  The search engines know that the social bookmarking sites are a direct indicator of what people are actual interested in.  Sure, they know marketers use it, but they realise that the majority of content that is social bookmarked multiple times is real content that people are finding useful and interesting.

You can take advantage of this and use social bookmarking to get your sites ranking well for their keywords.

Firstly, you need to open an account on some social bookmarking sites.  Rather than social bookmark each site manually, look at software such as OnlyWire which semi-automates the process.  This will make your life a lot easier.

Once you have your account set up, find some Internet marketing colleagues, friends or family who would be willing to set up an account themselves with Onlywire.

Then you simply trade bookmarks.  They bookmark your sites, you bookmark theirs.

Most marketers only have their sites bookmarked once, and very occasionally more than once.  The search engines are probably very aware of this and so pay more attention to sites that have multiple bookmarks on a single site.

This simple technique can easily get you multiple bookmarks and will give your sites a much needed boost in the search engines.

Alternatively, you can outsource the bookmarking and hire people to do it for you.  This will very quickly add up if you are creating a lot of sites.  You can find people on forums such as Digitalpoint who will do it very cheaply for you, but it is still going to add up.

You can apply the same technique to sites such as Stumbleupon and Digg, both of which can potentially get you massive amounts of traffic.  These sites expect more newsworthy and interesting articles.  With a well written article you can expect thousands of visitors in a day, quite literally.

Setting up multiple social bookmarking accounts yourself and bookmarking your sites is possible.  However, these sites are smart and will realise what you are doing unless you hide behind proxies.  This can be done, but often the hassle isn't worth it, particularly when it is easy to network with other marketers.

Networking with other marketers and trading bookmarks also has a side effect of building your network of contacts.  These could potentially turn into joint venture partners, product partners or more in the future.

Social bookmarking is an excellent way for you to get traffic both from the search engines and from the social bookmarking sites.  Do it well and you can benefit from great search engine rankings and massive traffic.

RSS Feeds Bring Massive Backlinks

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a method of taking content and syndicating it out to multiple sites.  It was primarily aimed at newsfeeds and providing content from news sites to other sites.

Like many other technologies, it has been hi-jacked by Internet Marketers who have found this is an excellent way to get backlinks.  It allows you to syndicate your content to hundreds of other websites at a click of a button, which in turn will boost your site in the search engine rankings.

In order to use RSS syndication, you have to have an RSS feed from your website.  The easiest way to do this is to use Wordpress when creating your website.  There are ways of making RSS feeds from normal HTML websites, but it is not always as simple as you may think.  Quite often it involves a manual process and manual submission of files.  However, there are a few websites that will automatically convert HTML to RSS for you.

Once you have an RSS feed you need to find some places to submit it.

There are two types of site you want to find.

Firstly you are looking for RSS directories.  A quick Google will bring up plenty of directories you can use.  There is software available you can buy which will automate the submission for you.

Once you have found your directories you want to submit your RSS feeds to them.  Manually it isn't the fastest process, but it can be outsourced.  You need to have your keywords, a title and sometimes a description prepared, but that won't take long.

It is often worth using different descriptions, titles and keywords to ensure each submission is unique.  What level of difference this actually makes no one is quite sure, but it does appear to help.

If you are manually submitting RSS feeds then you must keep track of which sites you have submitted where.  The reason being you don't want to submit the same site more than once.  Plus, you are likely to want to submit other sites in the future.

The second type of site is the RSS Aggregator. This is a site which takes a number of RSS feeds and combines them into a single feed or webpage.  This single feed can be submitted to RSS directories, further increasing your backlinks.

The RSS aggregator can be useful to mix up your RSS feeds on a topic with feeds from news sites on the same topic.  This will provide a higher level of authority and provide more bulk to the content.

When using RSS feeds, you need to also remember that many Web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo and many article directories have RSS feeds for the pages you create.  These can also be submitted to RSS directories and aggregators in order to further increase links and boost rankings.

Your RSS feed submissions will be updated every time you update your webpage.  Therefore, if you are regularly adding new content, you can find it syndicated out to many websites very quickly, gaining you backlinks to your site.

RSS feeds are a great way to get additional backlinks and to help your sites rank well for their keywords.  Use them, enjoy them and see the links flooding in.

RSS Feeds Bring Massive Backlinks

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a method of taking content and syndicating it out to multiple sites.  It was primarily aimed at newsfeeds and providing content from news sites to other sites.

Like many other technologies, it has been hi-jacked by Internet Marketers who have found this is an excellent way to get backlinks.  It allows you to syndicate your content to hundreds of other websites at a click of a button, which in turn will boost your site in the search engine rankings.

In order to use RSS syndication, you have to have an RSS feed from your website.  The easiest way to do this is to use Wordpress when creating your website.  There are ways of making RSS feeds from normal HTML websites, but it is not always as simple as you may think.  Quite often it involves a manual process and manual submission of files.  However, there are a few websites that will automatically convert HTML to RSS for you.

Once you have an RSS feed you need to find some places to submit it.

There are two types of site you want to find.

Firstly you are looking for RSS directories.  A quick Google will bring up plenty of directories you can use.  There is software available you can buy which will automate the submission for you.

Once you have found your directories you want to submit your RSS feeds to them.  Manually it isn't the fastest process, but it can be outsourced.  You need to have your keywords, a title and sometimes a description prepared, but that won't take long.

It is often worth using different descriptions, titles and keywords to ensure each submission is unique.  What level of difference this actually makes no one is quite sure, but it does appear to help.

If you are manually submitting RSS feeds then you must keep track of which sites you have submitted where.  The reason being you don't want to submit the same site more than once.  Plus, you are likely to want to submit other sites in the future.

The second type of site is the RSS Aggregator. This is a site which takes a number of RSS feeds and combines them into a single feed or webpage.  This single feed can be submitted to RSS directories, further increasing your backlinks.

The RSS aggregator can be useful to mix up your RSS feeds on a topic with feeds from news sites on the same topic.  This will provide a higher level of authority and provide more bulk to the content.

When using RSS feeds, you need to also remember that many Web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo and many article directories have RSS feeds for the pages you create.  These can also be submitted to RSS directories and aggregators in order to further increase links and boost rankings.

Your RSS feed submissions will be updated every time you update your webpage.  Therefore, if you are regularly adding new content, you can find it syndicated out to many websites very quickly, gaining you backlinks to your site.

RSS feeds are a great way to get additional backlinks and to help your sites rank well for their keywords.  Use them, enjoy them and see the links flooding in.

Dominiting Video Marketing

Video marketing is the next big thing online.  It is underused by many marketers and fantastically profitable for those that do use it.

Many marketers don't use video marketing simply because they don't know how to get started on it.  It isn't actually that difficult and you will find it remarkably easy when you do use it.

Videos can very easily go viral and you will find yourself getting a lot of traffic from them.  Plus, the search engines love video because it is very popular at the moment.  You can often see a selection of videos in the top five ranking for any search term in Google.

Creating the videos doesn't have to be difficult.  You can create a live action video using your mobile phone or digital camera, or if you live in the dark ages, a webcam.

Using a tool such as Camtastia or Camstudio you can capture the screen and demonstrate some software or a website.  These are very effective videos because people can see what they are buying or what they need to do.

Promotional videos can be created by Windows Movie Maker, which is installed on most Windows XP and above computers or on a website such as Jing or Animoto.  These websites create some fantastic videos which you can use as adverts.

Your video needs to be concise, to the point and entertaining.  You want your viewers to see your video and be captured and want to know more.

Before you start submitting your video, you need to know which keywords to use as tags.  This means doing some keyword research.  The Google External Keyword Tool will tell you everything you need to know, or you can use your own favorite tool.

You could manually submit your video to various video directories, but this takes a lot of time.  You could outsource it, which will get expensive, or you could use a tool to do it.  Alternatively, you can use the TubeMogul website, which is free to use.

This allows you to submit your video articles to a handful of video directories automatically.  Once you have produced some videos and are established on their site you can increase the number of video directories.

Once the videos are approved (and some sites will turn them down) you can then sit back and watch your videos spread all over the Internet.  They will be picked up by websites and other directories that feed off these main sites, giving you more of an audience.

Set up a Google Alert for your video name and you will be surprised to see how far a single video will get you.  So long as you have put your URL in the description and in the video itself, then you will get a good amount of traffic from this.

Video marketing is emerging as a very powerful and effective method of getting traffic.  It is still underused and one that you can start to use to further boost your sites in the search engines.

Dominiting Video Marketing

Video marketing is the next big thing online.  It is underused by many marketers and fantastically profitable for those that do use it.

Many marketers don't use video marketing simply because they don't know how to get started on it.  It isn't actually that difficult and you will find it remarkably easy when you do use it.

Videos can very easily go viral and you will find yourself getting a lot of traffic from them.  Plus, the search engines love video because it is very popular at the moment.  You can often see a selection of videos in the top five ranking for any search term in Google.

Creating the videos doesn't have to be difficult.  You can create a live action video using your mobile phone or digital camera, or if you live in the dark ages, a webcam.

Using a tool such as Camtastia or Camstudio you can capture the screen and demonstrate some software or a website.  These are very effective videos because people can see what they are buying or what they need to do.

Promotional videos can be created by Windows Movie Maker, which is installed on most Windows XP and above computers or on a website such as Jing or Animoto.  These websites create some fantastic videos which you can use as adverts.

Your video needs to be concise, to the point and entertaining.  You want your viewers to see your video and be captured and want to know more.

Before you start submitting your video, you need to know which keywords to use as tags.  This means doing some keyword research.  The Google External Keyword Tool will tell you everything you need to know, or you can use your own favorite tool.

You could manually submit your video to various video directories, but this takes a lot of time.  You could outsource it, which will get expensive, or you could use a tool to do it.  Alternatively, you can use the TubeMogul website, which is free to use.

This allows you to submit your video articles to a handful of video directories automatically.  Once you have produced some videos and are established on their site you can increase the number of video directories.

Once the videos are approved (and some sites will turn them down) you can then sit back and watch your videos spread all over the Internet.  They will be picked up by websites and other directories that feed off these main sites, giving you more of an audience.

Set up a Google Alert for your video name and you will be surprised to see how far a single video will get you.  So long as you have put your URL in the description and in the video itself, then you will get a good amount of traffic from this.

Video marketing is emerging as a very powerful and effective method of getting traffic.  It is still underused and one that you can start to use to further boost your sites in the search engines.

Maximum Traffic

Submitting articles to the search engines is a time honored strategy for generating traffic.  It has been used since the early days of the Internet and is still an effective traffic generation strategy even in our Web 2.0 times.

There are a lot of questions over the best method of submitting articles for maximum traffic and effectiveness.  What are the best techniques and which are the most effective?

The first technique is to submit your article to the granddaddy of all article directories, EzineArticles.  This site has built a reputation of being the best article directory in town.  It is loved by marketers and by readers and most importantly, by Google.

It is a source of frustration to many marketers who find it hard to meet the submission guidelines or cope with the timescales for articles to be approved.

However, if you read their guidelines and stick to them, your articles will get through without a hitch.

Once they are in Ezinearticles you instantly receive benefits from it.  Articles in this directory tend to rank very well in Google, even without backlinks to them.

Add in a few backlinks and suddenly you find your articles are ranking in the top ten for moderately competitive keywords.  In fact, even without backlinks they can often rank well just because they are on Ezinearticles.

Once your article has been published you need to do some simple backlinking to it just to give it that extra boost in the search engines.

Firstly, take your Ezinearticle author RSS feed and submit it to RSS directories.  You can either use a tool or do it by hand.  If you are doing it by hand, just pick the top ten directories in a Google search and that will be good enough for now.  You can always submit to more later on, so make sure you keep track of which ones you have added your feed to.

You can also use one of the many ping sites to ping your article.  This does give Ezinearticles a lift, but it also gets your article noticed.

Finally, social bookmark your article.  Again, you can either use a tool or do it manually.  If your article is newsworthy and well written then you can look at adding it to sites such as Digg or Stumbleupon to get further links and traffic.

Of course, there are other article directories out there, but none of them carry the weight of Ezinearticles.  Google Knoll is a current contender and is very popular with marketers who are using it to submit their articles too.  So far though, these don't seem to be ranking as well as Ezinearticles, but it is a good way to get the Big G to notice your sites.

For the other article directories it is not worth submitting articles manually to them, except maybe the top half a dozen big directories.  Many of the rest get so little traffic it is not worthwhile, except for the backlink.  Therefore you should either outsource or automate these submissions to free up your time to concentrate on building your business.

If you are submitting articles then you need to make sure they are on Ezinearticles for maximum traffic.  Do some simple backlinking to your article and you will easily find your articles ranking well for their keywords and bringing you good traffic.

Maximum Traffic

Submitting articles to the search engines is a time honored strategy for generating traffic.  It has been used since the early days of the Internet and is still an effective traffic generation strategy even in our Web 2.0 times.

There are a lot of questions over the best method of submitting articles for maximum traffic and effectiveness.  What are the best techniques and which are the most effective?

The first technique is to submit your article to the granddaddy of all article directories, EzineArticles.  This site has built a reputation of being the best article directory in town.  It is loved by marketers and by readers and most importantly, by Google.

It is a source of frustration to many marketers who find it hard to meet the submission guidelines or cope with the timescales for articles to be approved.

However, if you read their guidelines and stick to them, your articles will get through without a hitch.

Once they are in Ezinearticles you instantly receive benefits from it.  Articles in this directory tend to rank very well in Google, even without backlinks to them.

Add in a few backlinks and suddenly you find your articles are ranking in the top ten for moderately competitive keywords.  In fact, even without backlinks they can often rank well just because they are on Ezinearticles.

Once your article has been published you need to do some simple backlinking to it just to give it that extra boost in the search engines.

Firstly, take your Ezinearticle author RSS feed and submit it to RSS directories.  You can either use a tool or do it by hand.  If you are doing it by hand, just pick the top ten directories in a Google search and that will be good enough for now.  You can always submit to more later on, so make sure you keep track of which ones you have added your feed to.

You can also use one of the many ping sites to ping your article.  This does give Ezinearticles a lift, but it also gets your article noticed.

Finally, social bookmark your article.  Again, you can either use a tool or do it manually.  If your article is newsworthy and well written then you can look at adding it to sites such as Digg or Stumbleupon to get further links and traffic.

Of course, there are other article directories out there, but none of them carry the weight of Ezinearticles.  Google Knoll is a current contender and is very popular with marketers who are using it to submit their articles too.  So far though, these don't seem to be ranking as well as Ezinearticles, but it is a good way to get the Big G to notice your sites.

For the other article directories it is not worth submitting articles manually to them, except maybe the top half a dozen big directories.  Many of the rest get so little traffic it is not worthwhile, except for the backlink.  Therefore you should either outsource or automate these submissions to free up your time to concentrate on building your business.

If you are submitting articles then you need to make sure they are on Ezinearticles for maximum traffic.  Do some simple backlinking to your article and you will easily find your articles ranking well for their keywords and bringing you good traffic.

Interactions Between Blogs

 Interactions Between Blogs

As your blog’s content increase, people in your niche will definitely mention you for intelligent or interesting discussions. This is, in a sense, an initiation of an interaction. When people speak of you, you should thank them for the mention and build up the interaction!

When you use a traffic tracking script such as the free www.statcounter.com, you can see where traffic comes from. If a large number of visitors come from a certain blog, you can be sure they have mentioned you in their latest post or linked to you from their sidebar or links page. What you should do is pay them a visit, leave constructive comments on their posts and build up a conversation!

As you continue doing this, you will start to gather a lot of friends in your niche. This is helpful later on when you decide to do collaborations such as interviews. In fact, when you’re out of ideas for writing on your blog, you can interview other blog owners in your niche! Human beings are curious creatures, so naturally they would like to know more about a person whose writings they read so often.

If you’re using Wordpress, Textpattern, MovableType or any other advanced blog engines, you can also post trackback links on your posts. This means you can post an article about what other people have posted! Your particular post will then appear as a link on that post you have written about. This is definitely a great way to get traffic if you post brilliant insights about a post on a very famous blog. Since the famous blog already has a per-existing pool of readers, this is like a shortcut to hog their visitors! The only thing you would want to observe is to keep your posts sensible and insightful, or you’ll be viewed as a spammer.

On the other hand, if you’re using Blogger, you would not be able to use trackback links. However, you can post insightful comments on other people’s blogs and subtly include a link back to your blog. You can make it seem like you’re pointing to your blog as an extra reference to the subject of discussion. Of course, this technique is not only limited to Blogger users and users of other blog engines can employ this strategy as an additional traffic source. 

Interactions Between Blogs

 Interactions Between Blogs

As your blog’s content increase, people in your niche will definitely mention you for intelligent or interesting discussions. This is, in a sense, an initiation of an interaction. When people speak of you, you should thank them for the mention and build up the interaction!

When you use a traffic tracking script such as the free www.statcounter.com, you can see where traffic comes from. If a large number of visitors come from a certain blog, you can be sure they have mentioned you in their latest post or linked to you from their sidebar or links page. What you should do is pay them a visit, leave constructive comments on their posts and build up a conversation!

As you continue doing this, you will start to gather a lot of friends in your niche. This is helpful later on when you decide to do collaborations such as interviews. In fact, when you’re out of ideas for writing on your blog, you can interview other blog owners in your niche! Human beings are curious creatures, so naturally they would like to know more about a person whose writings they read so often.

If you’re using Wordpress, Textpattern, MovableType or any other advanced blog engines, you can also post trackback links on your posts. This means you can post an article about what other people have posted! Your particular post will then appear as a link on that post you have written about. This is definitely a great way to get traffic if you post brilliant insights about a post on a very famous blog. Since the famous blog already has a per-existing pool of readers, this is like a shortcut to hog their visitors! The only thing you would want to observe is to keep your posts sensible and insightful, or you’ll be viewed as a spammer.

On the other hand, if you’re using Blogger, you would not be able to use trackback links. However, you can post insightful comments on other people’s blogs and subtly include a link back to your blog. You can make it seem like you’re pointing to your blog as an extra reference to the subject of discussion. Of course, this technique is not only limited to Blogger users and users of other blog engines can employ this strategy as an additional traffic source. 

Monetizing Your Blog

 Monetizing Your Blog

You have been working hard to produce good-quality, original content on your blog and you have attracted a decent amount of traffic by doing so. However, money is not going to appear out of thin air just because you have traffic. You have to turn your traffic into money.

There are several ways to generate profits from the visitors of your blog, and Google’s Adsense programme allows you to do so with ultimate ease. First, visit their website at http://adsense.google.com/. You’ll find out more about their advertising programme there, but here are some extra bits I’d like to tell you.

First, Google’s Adsense programme is a really useful way to monetize your blog because when users finish reading your newest post, chances are they want to leave your blog because they have nothing else to do on your blog. If your Adsense advertisement block is visible on your blog, they might see advertisements relevant to them and click on them to exit your blog. Ka-ching! You’ve just cashed in on your first virtual cents!

But yes, your profits will only be cents if you don’t “do it right”. This involves placing your Google ads in the right places and ensuring they blend in to your site so that they appear more like links rather than advertisements to your visitors. Consult the page https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html to see the “heat map” of your blog. The “hotter” a certain area, the greater the chances of someone looking at your blog.

Once you get a Google Adsense account, you can change the colour of your advertisement text and links. You will want them to match the colours on your blog. If your blog’s text is black and the links are red, do the same for the ad blocks too! It’s that simple.

Another way to earn profits from your blog is to recommend products to your readers. When your visitors buy from the merchants you recommend, you get to keep a little commission too. This is known as affiliate marketing and it is very easy to start because you don’t have to create your own products or services.

Anyway, let’s refer back to our technological gadgets blog example. Let’s say you discover this Gadget X on a merchant’s website, and they offer an affilliate programme. What you would do is to create a post in your blog and do a mini-review on this Gadget X. Rip it apart and point out its benefits and bad points, if any, and include a link (which is given by the merchant) for the visitor to purchase the Gadget X online.

If your visitor clicks and purchases the gadget, the merchant will track from the link that the purchase is referred by you, so they will send you your share of the profits. Imagine if 1 out of every 100 visitors you get purchases this product, and you earn $27.00 commission from each purchase! If you get 10,000 visitors in a month that would be a $2,700.00 paycheque for you just for writing about ONE product.

Now, affiliate programmes are very nice ways to generate profit, but how do you find affiliate programmes that are related to your blog’s theme? Easy, just go to Google and search for <your niche> +”affiliate programmes”. Another slightly better way is to go to http://www.associateprograms.com/search to look for affiliate programmes in your niche.

The two ways mentioned above are basic ways to generate profits from your blog. We’ll be discussing other great, profitable ways, so keep your eyes peeled!

More Monetizing Options

More Monetizing Options

We’ve discussed about using Google Adsense programme and other merchants’ affiliate programmes to generate profits from your blog. However, we have a lot of other options ot monetize your blog, so we’re going to look into that today.

The first option we’ll be looking at is Chitika (www.chitika.com). Chitika is a very innovative contextual advertising programme because it can serve very detailed advertisements. For example, on your technological gadget blog, Chitika will show advertisements for tech gadgets such as iPods. The way they show it is in different tabs: one for “Best deals”, another for “details”, another for “reviews” and so on. This way, it is more of an informational section for your visitor rather than an advertisement, and naturally the click-through will be higher. You can apply here: https://chitika.com/application.php?type=mm

You can also be an affiliate for Amazon.com. Amazon offers a wide range of products but its predominant domain is in books. Whatever your niche is about, you can probably find a book about it on Amazon.com. Join their Associate programme here: https://associates.amazon.com/gp/flex/associates/apply-login.html/

Once you join them, you can refer visitors to them and earn up to 10% commission. It’s not a lot but if you can manage to refer big volumes of visitors, Amazon is for you. This programme really shines when it comes to the ways you can refer visitors: you can use their predefined templates to pull up recent items that match a certain criteria you set, you can target your ad to show a specific item on sale or you can just simply weave your referral links into your blog posts.

Last but definitely not least, you can sell advertising space on your blog if your blog is truly popular. Just take a look at blogs like http://xiaxue.blogspot.com. That blog receives over 10,000 pageviews every day and naturally merchants will want to strike a deal with the blog’s owner to post their advertisements there. If you manage to pull in huge amounts of traffic like that blog, you can definitely get people to buy ad space on your blog for prices from $150/month upwards, depending on your blog popularity.

To gauge how much pageviews and visitors you get everyday, just use the free tool available at www.statcounter.com. They have a very detailed setup guide there so I won’t go into it.

If your blog has not acquired large amount of visitors yet, you can still sell ad space on your blog on a per click or per impression basis. Just visit sites like www.adbrite.com. For a complete list of these sites, visit http://performancing.com/node/60.

Hopefully, that will help you maximize earnings and profits from your blog!

More Monetizing Options

More Monetizing Options

We’ve discussed about using Google Adsense programme and other merchants’ affiliate programmes to generate profits from your blog. However, we have a lot of other options ot monetize your blog, so we’re going to look into that today.

The first option we’ll be looking at is Chitika (www.chitika.com). Chitika is a very innovative contextual advertising programme because it can serve very detailed advertisements. For example, on your technological gadget blog, Chitika will show advertisements for tech gadgets such as iPods. The way they show it is in different tabs: one for “Best deals”, another for “details”, another for “reviews” and so on. This way, it is more of an informational section for your visitor rather than an advertisement, and naturally the click-through will be higher. You can apply here: https://chitika.com/application.php?type=mm

You can also be an affiliate for Amazon.com. Amazon offers a wide range of products but its predominant domain is in books. Whatever your niche is about, you can probably find a book about it on Amazon.com. Join their Associate programme here: https://associates.amazon.com/gp/flex/associates/apply-login.html/

Once you join them, you can refer visitors to them and earn up to 10% commission. It’s not a lot but if you can manage to refer big volumes of visitors, Amazon is for you. This programme really shines when it comes to the ways you can refer visitors: you can use their predefined templates to pull up recent items that match a certain criteria you set, you can target your ad to show a specific item on sale or you can just simply weave your referral links into your blog posts.

Last but definitely not least, you can sell advertising space on your blog if your blog is truly popular. Just take a look at blogs like http://xiaxue.blogspot.com. That blog receives over 10,000 pageviews every day and naturally merchants will want to strike a deal with the blog’s owner to post their advertisements there. If you manage to pull in huge amounts of traffic like that blog, you can definitely get people to buy ad space on your blog for prices from $150/month upwards, depending on your blog popularity.

To gauge how much pageviews and visitors you get everyday, just use the free tool available at www.statcounter.com. They have a very detailed setup guide there so I won’t go into it.

If your blog has not acquired large amount of visitors yet, you can still sell ad space on your blog on a per click or per impression basis. Just visit sites like www.adbrite.com. For a complete list of these sites, visit http://performancing.com/node/60.

Hopefully, that will help you maximize earnings and profits from your blog!

Monetizing Your Blog

 Monetizing Your Blog

You have been working hard to produce good-quality, original content on your blog and you have attracted a decent amount of traffic by doing so. However, money is not going to appear out of thin air just because you have traffic. You have to turn your traffic into money.

There are several ways to generate profits from the visitors of your blog, and Google’s Adsense programme allows you to do so with ultimate ease. First, visit their website at http://adsense.google.com/. You’ll find out more about their advertising programme there, but here are some extra bits I’d like to tell you.

First, Google’s Adsense programme is a really useful way to monetize your blog because when users finish reading your newest post, chances are they want to leave your blog because they have nothing else to do on your blog. If your Adsense advertisement block is visible on your blog, they might see advertisements relevant to them and click on them to exit your blog. Ka-ching! You’ve just cashed in on your first virtual cents!

But yes, your profits will only be cents if you don’t “do it right”. This involves placing your Google ads in the right places and ensuring they blend in to your site so that they appear more like links rather than advertisements to your visitors. Consult the page https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html to see the “heat map” of your blog. The “hotter” a certain area, the greater the chances of someone looking at your blog.

Once you get a Google Adsense account, you can change the colour of your advertisement text and links. You will want them to match the colours on your blog. If your blog’s text is black and the links are red, do the same for the ad blocks too! It’s that simple.

Another way to earn profits from your blog is to recommend products to your readers. When your visitors buy from the merchants you recommend, you get to keep a little commission too. This is known as affiliate marketing and it is very easy to start because you don’t have to create your own products or services.

Anyway, let’s refer back to our technological gadgets blog example. Let’s say you discover this Gadget X on a merchant’s website, and they offer an affilliate programme. What you would do is to create a post in your blog and do a mini-review on this Gadget X. Rip it apart and point out its benefits and bad points, if any, and include a link (which is given by the merchant) for the visitor to purchase the Gadget X online.

If your visitor clicks and purchases the gadget, the merchant will track from the link that the purchase is referred by you, so they will send you your share of the profits. Imagine if 1 out of every 100 visitors you get purchases this product, and you earn $27.00 commission from each purchase! If you get 10,000 visitors in a month that would be a $2,700.00 paycheque for you just for writing about ONE product.

Now, affiliate programmes are very nice ways to generate profit, but how do you find affiliate programmes that are related to your blog’s theme? Easy, just go to Google and search for <your niche> +”affiliate programmes”. Another slightly better way is to go to http://www.associateprograms.com/search to look for affiliate programmes in your niche.

The two ways mentioned above are basic ways to generate profits from your blog. We’ll be discussing other great, profitable ways, so keep your eyes peeled!