Marketing Online - Marketing Strategies - Marketing Tips - Internet Business

Since you would like to sell your product or services to the maximum potential customers, securing a high ranking for your website is very essential to increase traffic and visibility. Certain linking strategies are followed for securing high-ranking on search engines. Getting it wrong on linking strategy might prove costly to your business.

When we talk of linking, we are generally referring to reciprocal linking and one way linking. Reciprocal linking involves linking Site A to Site B and Site B linking back to Site A. One way linking on the other hand simply involves Site A linking to Site B. Both strategies will help your site move up the ranking ladder; since the number of links to your website is one of the most important parameters that search engines consider for ranking websites.

One important linking strategy is to create inbound links in such a way that they relate to the context of the website which is providing the inbound link to your website. Having all the inbound links point to the same page on your website will make those links less useful. The context-relative linking will not only help better your websites rank but also help you in meeting your objective by keeping the visiting user interested in your website and your products / services.

Another good strategy is to have inbound links appear within the text of a page. This would look natural for the reader of the site. In fact, it is most natural for a good high quality link to appear within the text of a page and you would be amazed to find that such a strategy, though a bit tiresome to implement, can lead to rich dividends.

One thing you must always remember is to never compromise on the quality of linking websites (for the sake of getting a large number of links). Though quantity is important too, but inbound links arising from blacklisted websites or from link farms can lead to your website getting blacklisted too. In such a case your websites rank may have a free-fall. And getting it back up might be a tough job.

Link popularity is, somewhat obvious, a loose term to describe the number of links pointing to your website, as well as the importance of those links. In a way, this is circular as you get higher link popularity, your outbound links gain power making the websites you link to rise in link popularity making their links gain power. On and on it goes.

A common way of describing your link popularity is by the use of (google) Pagerank. While this is not completely accurate, for the purpose of most hobby SEO:ists, it is close enough.

To gain link popularity you need to get more links pointing to your website, the more the merrier. Not all links are of equal value, links on important pages and/or on trusted websites are far more valuable than links from link pages used solely for link exchanging.

The time it takes to get the link should always be proportional to the quality; great links arent easy to come by, but if you can find them it will be well worth your while.

Gaining more links pointing to your website can be accomplished in many ways, some better than others. A few easy ways of attracting inbound links are;

Writing articles

Writing and submitting articles to various article directories will help you gain very high SE rankings on the targeted words. Be sure to target clever keywords within the anchor text(s) and you will see some great results.

Exchanging links with other websites

Reciprocal linking, where two sites link to each other, can be highly beneficial for link popularity and SE rankings. Relevant link exchanges will always work far better than linking to anyone and anything.

Actively blogging

Make a blog in your niche, try to update is as often as possible. Read and comment on other blogs in your niche, but do not spam. Link to your own posts only if they are relevant and on topic.

Using social bookmarks

Make use of the various and ever so popular - social bookmark services easily found all around. Use their buttons on your blogs and pages, and see to it you actively take part in at least one of the most popular ones.

Submitting your site to various web directories

An easy way of gaining one-way links is to submit your websites to web directories. Many of them offer free one-way links of medium quality. The problem with directories is the similarity of them, as well as the lack of content. Websites consisting only of links are rarely treated well in SEs, its only logical the outbound links are treated similarly.

There are plenty of more ways of gaining links and link popularity, but the above methods are fast, cheap (or free) and available for everyone.

No matter what method(s) you are using, altering your anchor text will be crucial for your success. Be imaginative; try to make the links look generic and not like YOU have added them all. Its no secret google and other SEs are constantly tweaking their algorithms to take SEO into account. No need to be obvious.

As most web site owners know, in order to rank well in the search engines, it helps to have links pointing to your web site. The tips below will help you to maximize your link popularity without spending a lot of money.

Have Link-worthy Content

1. The best way to attract links to your site, to adapt a phrase from an old Seinfeld show, is to have lots of link-worthy content. Some sites can compete well in competitive areas without a lot of ongoing link building work because they get natural links. I know of one site that started off with only a few links and made under $5 a day. These days that same site makes enough to cover the site owner’s mortgage payment with very little work on his part. It now has several thousand links, most of them unsolicited, and many are from high quality sites like nonprofits and schools. I think one thing that helped this site is that owner writes really unique articles. Except for the parts that other people have copied since he put the site online, all of the content is completely fresh, original and hard to find. Many of the other sites in this niche have content that is simply a rehash of other content already available on the web.

Submit to DMOZ

2. When your new site has a substantial amount of content, submit it to the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org). I’ve noticed a bit of a traffic surge for new sites after they were accepted into DMOZ. For an established site that already has hundreds or thousands of inbound links, a DMOZ listing may not help much, but for a brand new site it usually gives a nice little boost.

Check out the Competition

3. Go through the backlinks of the other sites in your niche and analyze the sites that are linking to them. Be on the lookout for any free or inexpensive directories, sites that solicit link suggestions or sites that accept guest articles. See how often the sites get linked to from blogs or are book marked from places like Digg and Stumbleupon.

Submit to Free Niche Directories

4. Look for any free directories in your niche. Do a search for some of your main keywords plus the word “directory”. You can also try searching for your keywords plus terms like “submit site” or “add listing”.

Solve Someone’s Problem

5. Include lots of problem solving or “how to” articles on your site, especially for obscure problems that may not be covered elsewhere on the web. That way your pages may get linked to for answers in forums or online advice columns.

Utilize MySpace

6. Set up a MySpace page for yourself and put a link to your site from your page. Depending on the topic, many web site owners report getting significant traffic from MySpace alone, in addition to any possible link popularity benefit.

While creating and promoting a successful website, link building is one of the crucial parts in search engine optimization campaign. This helps to improve natural search engine rankings and an important off page optimization factor. Such type of process involves creation of inbound links to your website. Its simply search the database for link exchange, emailing the sites and asking the owners of these sites for links. Sometimes it proves to be very frustrating, difficult and time consuming but still it is vital part of any effective search engine optimization strategy. The basic concept of is getting as many links of your sites scattered all over the World Wide Web. Being an important off page optimization factor, it helps to boost search engine rankings.

The most important factor about link building is the relevancy of the websites. To get your link on the others page involves the process of link exchange or reciprocal link. This means they will put the link on their website in exchange for you doing the same. The more relevant the website is, the more beneficial it is otherwise non relevant website can have negative impact on your search engine ranking. If your site is related to garment then link exchange with cooking website is not going to be relevant. So it should be thought carefully Inbound links are necessary to increase link popularity and higher search engine rankings and traffic. The quality of an inbound link is considered on the basis of its page rank. It depends on your promotion strategy whether you need quality instances and back links then it is better to go for inbound links of higher page rank. On the other hand if you need more visitors to your website and main aim is link popularity then inbound link from page rank zero can also solve your purpose.

There are two types of link building one way and two way. In One Way there is link to your website with no back link or no reciprocal link. Two way involves a link to your website from an external source and a link from your website back to the external source. Link building is a time consuming and tedious process. Still it is one of the best SEO process for getting targeted hits from other websites. So it is an essential part of any search engine optimization campaign. This not only builds and increases links with other websites, it also enhances relationships of webmasters of different websites to achieve their web promotion goals in a collective manner.

The rate of Link exchange should be optimum. Some SEO experts prefer it not to be too fast as some search engines prefer the slow approach. But its a fact that search engine givers higher rank to those websites that have quality inbound links, consistent and relevant.

In conclusion, link building campaign can be successful on the basis of these factors. Choose the proper relevant website and then choose the most relevant category for link exchange. Then see the page rank considerations. If the aim is to increase traffic then even relevant website of page rank zero could meet your requirements. On the other hand if you need quality back links then you can for link exchange with higher page rank websites.

Referral programs are a brilliant viral marketing strategy because of their explosive growth potential. There are many kinds of referral programs, but they all are systems of benefits for service users that recruit new users. The benefits are sometimes cash, or commissions, sometimes account upgrades.

The explosive growth comes from the fact that each referred user may become a referrer himself. Assuming just five active users are referred by each user, a single user will end up recruiting 3905 users (five to the power of five) after five levels.

Referral Programs as a Marketing Strategy

Exponential growth is a good reason to create a referral program to market a service. The potential to grow is so enormous that everyone should at least try it. This is also a form of viral marketing, since users are doing the actual marketing work. The advertiser does not need to do anything once the ball gets rolling.

The important thing to keep in mind, when launching a new referral program is that most of the users should be of the type that will refer others. This is effectively used in the Get Paid To market, where users, who are trying to earn money online, are likely to try the referral program to add to their revenue.

Another related issue is that the program needs to have enough incentive. If the gains are not high enough, the referral program will not get enough attention. Ways to make it more appealing without risking too much money include adding multiple referral levels, and giving a percentage commission from recurring sales. The potential gain for the referrer is so much higher for these kinds of programs that they are very likely to get noticed.

Potential for Referring

If you have a large network of online contacts, referral programs are a good way to monetize it. When recruiting other it is important to have a good idea of the service through using it yourself first. Then an honest review of it may convert long term users.

The programs to choose are the ones, which offer multiple levels of referral commission, because you also benefit from the exponential growth of the downline. Also those programs with recurring commission instead of a flat referral fee have more potential in the long run.

It is important to choose referral programs with the correct theme to market. If you are marketing them in your blog, or a website, choose ones that fit the theme. Otherwise readers will rarely be interested. It is important to use all channels at your disposal, when you market a program. Don’t just stick with a blog post, but contact any email and IM contact that might be interested.

Many individuals build their websites and are left their holding their breath waiting patiently for hordes of traffic to come pouring to their websites. After a couple of weeks have passed, the website is still suffering from complete loneliness, they might contact their web designer trying to figure out why they didn’t have a single person visit their website. The common answer is the “usual” it takes a while for all of the search engines to find you and index your website’s pages.

What you never really hear is that the website designers are both indeed correct and terribly wrong at the same time. The major mistake that many people make is marketing their online business, promoting your business on the internet is really the last thing you should do.

If you’re considering in building a site that people are going to be interested in, start off by choosing your target audience. An excellent way to do this, is by simply blogging. Setting up a blog takes a small portion of the time it actually takes to construct a website and once it’s set up you can immediately start adding content to the website.

Blogging is an excellent free website marketing method it’s also a decent way to test a certain industry. You can than ensure that your marketing efforts weren’t wasted if you have already tested your website’s content and business model with a blog first.

Rather than begin an internet store, first get yourself connected to the market. Create your blog, market it and than work your way up all of the search engines by using article marketing. This can possibly build you up some readership that can also provide you with very useful content for your site once you’re finished with it.

If you’re able to build traffic to your blog within a month, you than already know that you have a viable market. Create a couple of videos to market your blog and than to sign up subscribers to an email list.

If you take necessary measures or effort in order to build your target audience in order to construct your internet’s credibility, you would than find it much easier to build traffic to your website once it comes to an end. You will than find it much easier to improve your website’s traffic and thus build targeted traffic to your site once you’re able to implement using in your blogging experience as a point man for your website’s project.

Online traffic is a really daunting task and should really be the last thing you do when it comes to the actual promoting of the website itself. You would certainly need some expertise in website optimization and marketing after you have finished your website, but you would certainly find it a lot easier if you write a couple of blogs first to immediately establish your keywords search engine optimization or simply SEO strategy.

This free website marketing tactic can make a huge difference between an expensive failure or internet success.

If you were to ask anyone on the internet what is the major factor in determining a website’s success and they would mostly respond with one particular word and that word is no other than “TRAFFIC.” Yes, when it comes to succeeding on the internet website traffic is absolutely key. Consider the following:

1. If you have a website that is well designed, it wouldn’t be worth much at all if not one person visits that website. If you have created a commercial website and the new traffic stays at bare minimum levels then it’s certainly not going to be a very lucrative website. Also, even if your site is more of a hobbyist pursuit you would still want to accumulate as many unique visitors as possible so the fruits of your hard labor of love can be gladly appreciated. Yes, when it comes to publishing a highly successful website the traffic is the key to your online success regardless the niche your currently involved in. This than means you need to establish a strategy for increasing the overall volume of web traffic to your website.
2. There are a variety of ways to boost web traffic to a website. One of the key methods is by simply adding solid original content to your website. This free content management often comes in the form of articles related to the subject of your site. For instance, if you’re creating a website that involves mlm than a variety of articles would extol the praises of mlm would tremendously help in improving your website’s traffic.
3. So how does free content management work? Well, it’s actually quite simple…
4. When you’re adding original content to your website, the search engine spiders would than find them as they crawl the web. These spiders are the key informational pipelines that help in the ranking of a website’s search engine placement. So, if you have a 13th article on mlm than these articles would be scanned upon by the spiders and will then certainly be added to the popular search engines.

Now, eventually someone comes along and searches for information on mlm. The individual searches for this term into the search engines, which in turn would search for related content. If your articles are related to the content of the search query then they would be shown upon in the results of the search engine. From this, direct traffic is than provided to your website. This is clearly the reason why quality free content management is an added benefit to increase a website’s traffic very easily and effectively.

You already know that you have an excellent website, and an awesome product, but you are in demand for actual people to view it or somehow come across it, the only way to simply do this is by knowing how to go about the website traffic building process.

1. Have the Highest Quality Website:

Researching your niche’s competitors, how or what do their websites appeal look like? Does your site look much better or far worse? Does it look much better? It really needs to. You may only need to tweak a couple of changes, or it just needs to be completely reconstructed. Either way, it has to contain high-resolution pictures, it has to have abundantly rich content, and have pretty cool graphics, a nice logo, color scheme and entire branding package. It also needs be very user-friendly so it’s easier for your visitors to navigate through.

2. Monitor Keywords :

You already know by now what keywords help best describe your company. You mostly feature them in your ads, articles, on forums, so that when the people think of the keywords that best describe your particular niche, they are already thinking of you.

3. Offer E-mail Marketing and Newsletters:

You enticed your traffic to submit their e-mail address to you, and they invited a few friends. Now you can keep those people interested by constantly offering promotions through e-mails in which you provide them with a newsletter. This not only provides great PR for your business but would also give them what they want: perhaps funny articles, interesting facts, or inspiring stories. You will always keep your content up to date and fresh.

4. Advertising :

You take part in online advertising. You are already utilizing the above methods and than incorporating them into your PPC Publishing and Advertising. You are marketing your articles to internet directories and publications and in return are obtaining free marketing.

5. Feedback :

One of the greatest ways to help in the building process of your website’s traffic is to also consider asking for honest feedback from your more loyal visitors, listen and than adjust in order to continue forward with your traffic building process.

When you start an ezine, you realize after a few short weeks that you will actually have to promote it in order for it to be successful. But how do we do that? We have all asked ourselves that question. When you begin to seek out solutions, most of us quickly discover Announcement Lists. But, how effective are they?

New List Announcements are great, but you can only use them once!

When you start out with a new list and begin promoting on the announce lists, you are thrilled by each new subscription. But after some time passes, you begin to notice that your new subscriptions are waning. Most list owners will reach this point and start playing with their ads a bit. This is a good exercise, it will help you learn to craft a better ad. Let me give you some of what I learned when I started trying to create a better ad.

You can learn a lot by watching your own methods for looking at announcement posts. If there are certain things in an ad that trigger certain reactions in you, then you can be fairly certain that other people will react the same way.

Take for example white space. White space is wonderful. It is much easier on the eyes than an ad that runs along for miles without a break. It provides a clean appearance and seems more professional.

Subconsciously, we may be equating white space or the lack thereof, to the different subconscious reactions we have towards a clean person versus our reactions towards a bum in an alley way. By paying attention to my own reactions to various ad styles, I have learned that you do need that white space to break things up, or people will skip your ad altogether. My ad efficiency increased by 25% by learning just this one lesson.

You need to try to cycle your ads and try different things. Each week, try a different approach for your ads. By doing this, you will begin to see what works best for your particular ezine. Different ezines will need a different style of ad, to represent the differentiation of subject materials and the people who read them. Despite the differences of the various genre, some tactics will be effective for all of them. The remainder of this article will continue to address some of those constants.

Some of my early growth explosions came as a result of using testimonials in my ad copy. I know you have heard people talk about that before. I know, because I have read more articles on the subject of using testimonials than for any other subject material.

I highly recommend that you will want to include the single best testimonial you have received from your subscribers. It is not important how many testimonials you have, as long as you have one that is really descriptive and informative. It only took me one ad with one testimonial to understand the importance of using testimonials in my ad copy.

Because my own newsletter appeals to such a wide audience, I wanted to make sure that I was able to include testimonials from folks from every level of computing experience. I have found the four best testimonials from my readers, and the testimonials represent all levels of computer users from the new computer user, to the experienced computer enthusiast, to the computing professional. Two of the four testimonials address the new user, each from a different perspective.

Depending on where I place an ad swap or announcement, I have enough range in my testimonials to provide incentive to anyone to subscribe to my ezine. I have even updated my subscribe page to include all four testimonials, so that anyone contemplating subscription, will discover at least three more reasons to subscribe.

My readers tell my story the best, and the vast majority of folks who will be reading my ad want to know what my readers think of my ezine, before they are willing to consider subscribing. If you would care to see my testimonials in action, please feel free to visit my subscribe page to see for yourself:

http://topica.com/lists/WindstormComputing

The point is, you need to try out different ads all the time. In their order of importance, the two ad structures that provided the best returns from my announcement ads have always come from:
1. testimonials, and
2. ads that included tips or materials from my newsletter,

Announcement lists are a great source for testing out your ad structure, and discovering what works and what does not work. But, in time, you will notice that what has worked before, does not seem to have the same pull that it used to. It is at this time that you need to start exploring the other great avenues available for producing new subscriptions.

The other day I was cruising around, and I realized why, after a time, why we get such a slim return from our postings on announce lists… Between all 20 or so lists that I submit to, there are maybe 2000 subscribers between them, and my bet is, most of those subscribers are people like you and me looking for their own subscribers!

By Bill Platt

Why Do Most Brick-and-Mortar Businesses Fail On The Web?

“Build it and they will come” has always been the mantra of the Internet. In the old days, when there was only a few thousand websites, the saying could have been true. But, to look at the Internet honestly, in December of 1999, it was estimated that there were over 16 million websites out there to attract the interest of the surfer.

A few months ago, I read an assessment of traffic on the web, and it provided some startling details. The Top 1000 sites contain 85% of the content on the web and receive 90%+ of all of the web traffic. What’s more, 93.6% of the web traffic travels through the Top 10 search engines, with 43.5% of all search engine referrals coming from Yahoo.com and 10.5% of all search engine referrals coming from AltaVista.com.

One of the greatest misnomers of the Internet is still that old mantra, “Build it and they will come.” Folks go to great lengths to build a beautiful website, and then submit the site to the Top 20 search engines, and then they are confused, dismayed and upset with their website designer or host, because traffic is not what they expected. Further, the folks who own the websites, can often feel neglected when they try to locate their sites on the search engines and don’t find themselves near the top, if at all.

There are several factors that contribute to this common frustration. Let’s take a look at the “brick and mortar” world of business for a moment. Companies understand that they must always wave their name and message under the noses of prospective customers in order to maintain a presence in the mind of the consumer. This process encompasses using advertising in various formats, including newspaper, radio, television, direct mail, etc. It involves maintaining a fresh cycle of advertising materials with different information to attract the prospective buyers. It sometimes even incorporates a saturation of advertising to a specific local market. Yet, the same companies might expect to spend a one-time fee to build that beautiful website and have it submitted to the search engines, and spend a small monthly fee to have it hosted by a web provider or ISP. These same companies, with all of their real world experience, fall in the same traps over and again when they make the transition to the Internet. They expect that in the free world of the Internet, that they can effectively reach their customers with no regular cash expenditures beyond building and hosting the site.

OK, you visit your favorite search engine and type in the keywords that you most closely associate with your website, you hit Enter and wait for the results. The results come down … OK, you’re not in the Top 10. So, you click Next 10. Then you discover you are not in the Top 20. In desperation and annoyance, you click Next 10 a couple of more times, yet after having submitted to the Top 10 Engines, you still don’t register in the Top 50. So, what happened? There are 16 million websites vying for the surfers attention and you wonder why your site doesn’t come up in the Top 50?

In the local market, a business only has to compete with anywhere from two to two hundred competitors, depending on what type of business they are in. But, in the world of the Internet, the same business is competing with the world for the attention of the consumer. There are over 16 million websites trying to get the attention of the consumer. Granted, only a portion of those sites may be in direct competition with the business in question, but again, Internet numbers can usually compress the potential of the Internet to 5,000 keywords.

In five years of learning the Internet game, I have designed, built and promoted over three dozen websites. Yet, I have only built five that have reached Top 20 placement in over 6 search engines. I have one site right now that currently registers a #1 on over 4 search engines and Top 10 status on 4 others. The five websites that I have taken to the top of the engines are the last five websites I have built.

Before we begin, I must note that every search engine has it’s own set of submission rules. If you submit your site to certain search engines more than the search engine allows, your link can be barred from the engine due to “search engine spamming.” These rules often change and the best way to stay current is to go to the ‘add url’ link of an engine or directory and follow the link to the FAQ’s (Frequently Asked Questions). Most directories only permit a site to be submitted one time, but spider search engines (also called robots or crawlers) allow the same site to be submitted repeatedly. A general rule of thumb to keep in mind for spider search engines is to only submit the site once a month. By adhering to the following rule, you will get the most out of the Internet’s promise: don’t submit your site too often — make the most out of each site submission…

By Bill Platt