New Marketing

I’ve been working from my home for over 7 years now. I have to say that in the beginning it wasn’t an easy choice. I had a very established job and was making decent money as a customer service manager for a newspaper company. I actually promoted a couple times within the company. However, something was missing and I still had that empty feeling in my gut every time I set out on my 15 minute commute to work everyday.

I missed my kids for one thing. It teared me up to put them in a daycare all day long so I could work. Also, I hated having to listen to a boss dictate how things should be done, even when I knew it was wrong. Getting screamed at on a daily basis because one of my representatives screwed up was always a blast (yeah right!). Oh yeah, and then I couldn’t take the early morning bundle ups to go trudging through 3 feet of snow to un bury my car and warm it up each morning. I was up to my ears with the 9 to 5 routine. I decided to turn in my resignation and start my own business from home. It’s nice to be able to look back and be happy with my decision.

When building a business, people tend to look at paid advertising. Paid advertising would include methods such as PPC (pay per click), paid classified ads, ezine advertising and purchasing leads (people who have an interest in your product or business). Although paid advertising is a great way to build your business, many people overlook the power of free advertising.

One method of free advertising is promoting free ebooks. Now, you can either write these free ebooks yourself or you can outsource the work (although this wouldn’t be free anymore, but the one time fee is worth it as you can use the ebook over and over again).

Things to include in your free ebook would be information relevant to what you are selling and other valuable information that will help the reader. For example, if you were trying to sell something like running accessories, you could write an ebook on physical fitness, general health, or even something as exotic as foreign marathons. In this free information you will be placing links to yours or other business. Eventually, once you have built trust with your readers, they will click on your links to see what your business is all about and hopefully join under you.

Free ebooks are viral, which means they tend to get shared all over the Internet because they are, free. When this happens, you will start to see an increase in traffic as well as business enrollments.

Just when you think that the Government has made as many dumb moves as it possibly could, they come up with yet another one to surprise us. This time Gordon Brown’s giving our finances and children a miss, and targeting on the UK justice system instead.

Now most of us, being of sound logical mind, are quite content that a punishment should fit the crime for which a person has been found guilty. Mr Brown however is thinking that perhaps it would be better if each person received a sentence that fitted not the crime, but rather the number of spaces available within the jails.

OK, so I’m just a member of “Joe Public” and so perhaps there’s a rationale that extends far above my commonsense intelligence level. To me it seems more appropriate to create more jails, or change the sentencing on petty crimes which removed the need to imprison people for say not ensuring their children stayed in school, or not being able to pay their community charge.

With the ideas that our Prime Minister is coming up just now I’m beginning to wonder if he’s tired of saying hello to the policeman outside Number 10, because he’s certainly not doing anything to inspire the voter confidence - criminals pending trial notwithstanding!

(Putting the Prime Miniter aside for a moment, I’d like to mention a thanks to the caravan insurance people over at stoneways for giving us a discount last week)

When marketing your product or company, it pays more as time goes by into looking into ensuring that you are visible in the search engines. Most people do this by hiring or contracting in someone to do search engine optimisation for them. Once you begin to rank in the search engines, you will begin to get traffic or visitors to your site. Most of your work has then been done, however it’s not over. You have to convert these visitors into paying customers, and this is where you really have to look at your landing page.

Your landing page is the one that people actually get to when they click the link. It is really important that the page they get to is as relevant as possible – preferably it is selling exactly what they were looking for when they first used the search engine to look around. Let me give you a good example. This cosmetic surgery site sells laser hair removal. Now when you search for it they appear quite high up in Google. Even better though, when you click on the laser hair removal link look where it takes you. That’s right, straight to the page that is selling laser hair removal. If it had gone to the home page, there was a chance that the short attention span of the visitor would have led them to leave before navigating through to the actual laser hair page. These people have done a good job, because the landing page is the one that the internet surfer is looking for.

I thought about providing you a bad example, but there are so many to choose from, I’m not going to. There is blog here called usage stats that talks about these things in more detail, and I would recommend it if you are interested in learning more.
Ultimately though, as long as you consider the page and look at it asking yourself the question, does this clearly sell what I want to sell, you’ll probably be able to solve half the problems straight away. It is surprising the amount of people that don’t do this.

High-quality inbound links are one of the surest ways to improve your website's rankings in search engine results. The question many entrepreneurs face, however, is how to get people to link to their content. Sure, it's possible to contact each of the major players in the industry and ask for links, but that is time consuming and not necessarily successful.  After all, no one really trusts an email from out of the blue asking them to link to a website.

However, it is possible to inspire other websites to link to your content through a process known as link baiting. In fishing, you use attractive bait to entice big fish to nibble on your line, and in SEO you use attractive content to get big fish in your industry to link to you.

Of course, it is not easy to know what will catch the attention of the big fish. However, here are some tips for creating effective link bait:

* Say Something Original. If you are spouting the same message as everyone else, there is no driving need to link to your site.

* Evoke Discussion. It doesn't really matter if someone agrees or disagrees with what you are saying, as long as you evoke their passion with your writing. Of course, you don't want to come off sounding ignorant or just plain wrong, but if you say something that gets people arguing the pros and cons, you're going to get a lot of links back to your writing.
* Be Passionate. No one argues about dry, technical writing. You want to spark a debate, not make a report. Let your passion for the subject shine through.

In ShoeMoney’s blog of 25^th May he states that press releases are overrated, but is this really the case?  I believe that there are many press releases that won’t be read but it’s not because they are yet another press release that landed on someone’s desk, or in their email in-box, I think it lies more in the content of the press release itself.

Internet marketing today is fixated on the 5+ page-scroll-down-forever-and-you-eventually-find-what-they’re selling kind of letter.  Perhaps this does work on websites where people have searched for a particular item and this letter presented itself.  To copy and paste this into a press release however is where the press release value disappears.  

People who glean press releases looking for news worthy items, or products to try and recommend, do not have time to read 5+ pages to find out whether or not they’re interested.  They will scan the first page of the press release and if the information’s not there, they’ll move onto the next release in their pile.

Don’t blame the press release for the lack of feedback from it, blame the person who didn’t have the commonsense to realize that sending a press release requiring a staple to someone who receives hundreds a day isn’t a smart idea!  

Bring the press release down to the basic facts – what it is, who needs it, and where can you get it, and if you’ve actually thought what your USP (unique selling point is) all the better – and then send that press release to the media who are targeting your demographic, not to the world at large! 

It’s not the press release that over-rated, but rather the belief that anyone can write one!

Microsoft announced today that it is spending $6 billion to acquire online advertising company aQuantive Inc.  This is surely a response to Google’s purchase of online advertising giant DoubleClick for a little over $3 billion in April.

Google and Microsoft have been rubbing elbows on the internet more frequently.  Both companies run similar services, including pay-per-click advertising, free online email, and office software.

Furthermore, Microsoft may well see Google as a threat to their ability to control user experience, since Google’s offerings are cross-platform and operating system independent.  For example, Google’s spreadsheets, word processors, and other office programs can be accessed online from any computer.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer mentioned as part of his announcement of this merger that more and more software services were turning to internet hosted platforms.  Microsoft is going to have to ape Google, a company that was once insignificant in comparison, and make the transition to online services if they want to stay competitive in the future.

Many webmasters fear that having content duplicated in different locations on the internet will cause their website to receive a penalty, or even be blacklisted from Google.  Duplicate content can have legitimate reasons – for example, offering a separate version of a page that is formatted for easy printing – or it can happen when another site strips your content and publishes it themselves.

The good news is that there is no Google penalty for duplicate content.  However, Google does try to prevent the exact same content from appearing over and over again in its search results.  After all, it doesn’t do the user much good to show 20 results that lead to nothing but the exact same article.  Therefore, Google spiders will attempt to find the most relevant copy to index.

For that reason, it’s a good idea to help Google’s spiders find the exact pages that you’d like to index.  You can do this by using 301 redirects instead of duplicating your website pages, by judiciously using the robots.Txt file to block spiders from the copied pages you don’t want indexed, and by using a consistent linking theme.  For example, instead of linking to both http://www.Yoursite.Com and http://www.Yoursite.Com/index.Html, pick one and stick to it.

Other than that, don’t worry too much about duplicate content, but rather on creating the best and most informative website for your visitors.

A balance between quality articles and keyword rich contents is a must for all sites. Webmasters must see to it no contents contributed by the users will cause any negative effect on the pages optimized contents. This includes blogs, forums, wiki and other related sites where primary source of contents are those contributed by users. The feedbacks or comments the users posts, the bigger is the possible that the pages keywords will go astray unless the posts contain the enough keywords to compensate for the added contents. Several ways can be done in order to ensure that a page’s keywords are protected from accidental abuse. Dominate the first part of your page with keyword rich contents Since major keywords are best placed at the beginning of the page, as much as possible, posted articles must be kept at an acceptable minimum length. Length must not be less than 150 to 200 words depending on the amount of anticipated responses from the users. This will ensure that the first part of the page is occupied by the article you wrote containing the proper keyword density you are targeting. Encourage friends with good knowledge in SEO post the first replies If you have friends who are knowledgeable both on the subject matter of your articles and in SEO, let them post their comments first before other users do. Since usual comments from users are just questions and passing comments, it is most beneficial to get a more meaningful and keyword-safe responses from someone who knows how to protect your contents. Perhaps an additional to what you have already discussed or an elaboration of a major point in your post will do. This way, discussions flow naturally without sacrificing your SEO efforts. Reply to comments with keywords Do answer comments with phrases or sentences like “Yes, that will do.” or “I’m sleepy now. Let’s talk about this tomorrow.” if your topic is about revolutionary vacuum cleaners. Those words will be irrelevant to search engines and will only add trash to your page. Instead of saying so, you can answer with this, “Yes, you can use C3PO vacuum cleaners on your pet’s purr” or “I will be answering your questions on C3PO vacuum cleaners tomorrow.”

Wikipedia is an open and free online dictionary under the GNU Free Documentation License. It has an extensive collection of articles on almost all topics thinkable to man. It is also one of the most linkbacked sites in world, in fact, the Wikipedia English section alone has a Page Rank of 9 under Google standards. Since anyone can edit the contents of its pages, many webmasters seek an opportunity to cut a little piece from its ranking by posting their links into related Wikipedia pages. As a common SEO rule, if a high ranked page links to your site, the higher your site’s rank becomes.

This is not true with Wikipedia.

While Wikipedia allows almost all types of contents to be posted on their pages including outbound links to another site, the target’s benefit would be close to nothing. This is because Wikipedia uses a special “nofollow” tag on all user-defined links. The “nofollow“ tag within links prevent search engines, particularly Google, from crawling it and counting the link as a valid linkout.

Recent controversy, however, came up when several links appeared on Wikipedia bearing no “nofollow” attributes pointing to pro-profit sites which gives great suspicion to everyone whether Wikipedia gives equal regard to all contributors in terms of link building and rank sharing. But still, Wikipedia’s policy on outbound links apply, no sharing for those who can’t afford their high price of link placement.