Choosing an autoresponder
Let’s give a definition to autoresponder first. So, what is an autoresponder? Think of it as a ‘fax on demand’ service. When a customer sends an e-mail to the autoresponder address, this smart ‘robot’ sends back an e-mail response, usually informative letter.
You can set up hundreds of autoresponders. You can use them literally for anything you can think of, including customer support, new product offers, ezine broadcasts and a whole lot more…
Autoresponders can save you a lot of your hard earned dollars. They can be your best marketing tool, therefore, it is important to have a reliable service under hand. There are quite a few autoresponder services around that you might consider using.
But before you do so, I want you to read the following tips that will help you to choose the right service for you. The following features are the basic ones that would be worth your attention.
Options to choose from
Personalized messages
Sending personalized messages is a powerful way to improve your customer loyalty, which will then result in better response rate, and better response rate leads to more sales. So, make sure you can do that.
Unlimited followup messages
Even if you don’t have a big subscriber list at the moment, your list will grow along with your business. So, you should look for autoresponder service that has unlimited followup messages feature included in the account.
In other words, you should be able to broadcast unlimited autoresponder messages to your subscribers who will become your customers, your most powerful buying force. It will save you a lot of time and hassle in the end.
Unlimited length of your messages
You might have a lot of news or a long article that you would like to squeeze into one e-mail. What if your messages are restricted in length? Of course, you can split it into two parts, and send the second part in the following month, if you run a monthly newsletter. It’s up to you to decide, but is it really worth your time? You should be able to write as long messages as your imagination allows.
24/7 technical support
It’s important to send your messages in a timely fashion, if there is any unexpected problem with your autoresponder, quick round the clock technical support is invaluable. So, having access to 24/7 technical support might be vital for your business. While checking out any service, be advised of this feature.
24/7 access to your account
Edit, add or make any other changes to your account at any time. In Internet things happen fast. Sometimes, while surfing the net, you might get a new idea popped up in your mind. And you say ‘hey, it’s a good idea, I think it might interest my subscribers’. And you want to jot it down when the idea is still fresh and insert it into your autoresponder to be sent in the next broadcast. Having unlimited access to your account will help you effectively manage your e-mail campaign.
Toll-free phone support
Today business is not business without customer service. If you get live support over the phone, it takes a lot less time to solve a problem than it would using other means of communication like e-mail. It’s a quickest and most reliable method in dealing with any issue. Be sure you have access to it.
Free trial
Trying a product for free is the best way to get the feel of it. It gives you a full picture if the product is the product it claims to be and if it meets your expectations. After the trial, you will have a pretty good idea if the product is worth your investment.
With all the above features present, there is no reason in the world that would stop you from giving it a try. So, give it a shot. I am sure you will find an autoresponder right for you in the end. Because a good autoresponder service will reward you in spades, making you more money every time.
Enjoy!
Author Bio:
Bob Kosimov offers helpful articles, free webmaster downloads and link pages you will enjoy. Visit his site at http://www.activeresponder.com/?ya
Write Better Web Content
If you’re reading this article, chances are that you, like most professionals these days, understand the value of the Internet. It may be where you go to buy movie or concert tickets, browse restaurant menus, or plan your vacations.
Most likely, you also turn to the Web to research business strategies, vendors and other companies.
But what about those surfers who are researching your company? When they visit your Web site, will they find what they’re looking for? Does your site provide the information they need in an interesting format that will keep them there long enough to convince them to do business with you?
While an attractive, professional-looking site is an important start, content is king. (What else would you expect from a copywriter?) But seriously, your site will never be truly effective without well-written content that answers visitors’ questions and creates enough interest to keep them coming back.
So how do you create effective content for the Web? It may be easier than you think. With all the bad writing out there on the Internet, even minimal effort can help set yours apart. Here’s a start: Good Web content can always be described by these four adjectives.
1. Consistent
There’s nothing like inconsistency to make your Web site appear amateurish. Some businesses spell their own company names two or three different ways right on the home page. If your company name is written in all lower-case letters or with unique spacing, be sure you write it the same way every time. But don’t stop there; strive for consistency in all your content ‘ from the use of abbreviations, fonts and numerals to the tone, style and voice of your copy. Having one person write all the content helps keep it consistent, but when this isn’t possible, at least try to have one person serve as editor. If several people are contributing to your site, develop a style guide to inform them of your rules for consistent content.
2. Clear
As in all writing, the goal of Web content is to communicate with an audience, and clarity is essential. Try reading your copy aloud before posting; hearing it out loud can help you determine whether it all makes sense. If possible, have one or two others read copy before posting it to the Web and if your subject matter is technical or complicated, consider using an outside editor to help eliminate techno-speak.
3. Casual
The nature of the Web is more informal than many other marketing venues, so make sure your copy fits the medium. Your Web content should probably be more conversational than your traditional brochure or company presentation, and because many readers scan Web copy rather than reading it word for word, subheadings and bullets are helpful. In most cases, Web content should also be brief, making your points quickly without losing readers’ attention. However, many effective sites contain brief copy on the front pages with more detailed information available through additional links, which works to keep the attention of the general readership while offering more for those who want it.
4. Correct
Don’t confuse “casual” with “sloppy,” however. Correctness is still important, even on the Web, and errors in spelling, grammar, or facts will give most readers a negative impression of your company. Don’t just use spell check; read and re-read your copy before posting it, and if possible, get second opinions from those who know what they’re doing. There’s nothing wrong with being a bad speller, but there’s no excuse for refusing to double-check your work.
Author Bio:
Nancy Jackson, owner of The WriteShop, helps companies better market their products and services with powerful written communications including Web content, newsletters, brochures and publications. Subscribe to her free monthly newsletter at www.writeshoponline.com.
The ESA/T Marketing System
The reality of online marketing is getting harsher every day. Ad prices are up, conversion is down. Visitors don’t buy. Pay per click bids are insane’ but only the top ten advertisers in each category care. The rest get barely any traffic at all.
It is time to go back to the business basics. You need to focus on accountability and improving the return on your marketing investment (ROI). What’s needed is a system to help you spend less money on traffic and consistently convert more clicks into sales. Enter the ESA/T marketing system.
ESA/T, which stands for Enhance, Select, Analyze, and Test, has been used with great success for several years by a select group of online marketers.
The four-step ESA/T cycle works like this:
1. Enhance the visitor’s experience of your web site. This will ensure the traffic being driven to the site can be converted into sales and actions.
2. Select traffic sources and marketing strategies wisely.
3. Analyze your website statistics and ROI tracking data using metrics appropriate for your business.
4. Test and tweak to improve performance. Using your metrics, find what isn’t working and fix it.
These four steps can be repeated over and over in a dialectic spiral towards optimum marketing performance.
Step 1. Enhance
Before spending another dime on driving traffic to your website, you need to make sure that your visitors will land in the environment that is professional, relaxing and does not make them think twice about doing business with you.
Good website usability is a process, not a state. Never stop improving yours. If you can’t afford an industrial strength usability makeover, use baby steps. Asking your grandmother to buy something on your website and watching her do it is an excellent budget alternative. You just need to put your mind to it.
The Neilson Norman Group studied the effects of usability on e-commerce conversions. They found that web sites that went from paying no attention to usability issues to making significant usability improvements doubled their sales or more.
Step 2. Select
The next step in ESA/T cycle is ‘S’ ‘ Select your advertising sources.
Let’s look at the possible marketing and advertising strategies. These may include: Pay Per Click (PPC), pay per action, paid search inclusion, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), link exchanges, email newsletter ads, sponsorships, article writing, press releases, affiliate programs, forum postings, and offline promotions.
Your goal is to develop the marketing mix that’s just right for you. The blend that brings you the right amount of sales for the right price.
Be creative and methodical. Try an advanced search on Google to find the sites linking to your competitors. This will seed your list of possible places to advertise.
Next, develop a list of your company’s internal resources ‘ advertising budget, human resources, and time. Based on that, create a plan for working with the traffic sources from your list.
Step 3. Analyze
The next phase of the ESA/T cycle, Analyze, is about tracking and analyzing the visitor activity that’s relevant to your bottom line.
There are plenty of metrics to choose from. Be sure to avoid the ‘information glut’ and use only the metrics that will help you improve your website usability and traffic quality. Some of such metrics may include: The number of orders placed, average dollar value per order, average revenue earned per visitor, number of registrations, number of specific page views like product detail pages, time elapsed between first visit and first order, visitors’ paths through the site, and so on.
Cumulative statistics for all visitors on your site are extremely important, but in order to be truly of value, stats should be tallied for individual traffic sources so you can compare and contrast their performance.
Step 4. Test
Remember the last time you wanted to buy something online and gave up? Remember the reason why? It was likely because the checkout process was confusing, didn’t answer your questions, or just took too long.
If that website’s marketing manager used ESA/T, especially Test, you likely would have completed your purchase and would be enjoying it today. Instead, that business not only lost a sale, but likely lost you as a customer forever.
Plot a bar chart showing the number of unique visitors and page reloads at each step of your checkout process. Suppose you observe a sharp drop in the number of visitors who moved from the second to third step of the checkout. At the same time, you note a high number of page reloads at the second step. This information could mean, among other things, that there is a consistent problem with the form validation algorithm — the system keeps on throwing visitors back to the previous step in the process.
The testing and tweaking you wind up doing to improve your site, your marketing campaigns, and ultimately your ROI, will be just as individual as your business and the metrics you choose to apply to it.
Even though we presented the four stages of ESA/T in sequence, you should return often to recheck and tweak any areas that need it. Your e-business will continue to evolve so constant monitoring of its vital signs is imperative.
As you can see, improving your ROI isn’t rocket science. It’s a simple matter of understanding these four steps and applying them to your daily marketing efforts. Those already using this system are reaping the rewards.
Author Bio:
About the author: Dmitri Eroshenko is CEO of Clicklab, an advertising ROI tracking service that gives you customizable metrics, usability testing capabilities, and click fraud protection. Sign up for our complimentary online ROI Marketing Mini-course: http://www.clicklab.com
A Powerful Structure to Search Engine Marketing
In today’s extremely competitive markets, sometimes search engine marketers try to “cut corners”, in an effort to save time and a bit of money. This is perfectly understandable, given the conditions they sometimes have to face, such as tight deadlines, limited budgets and overall difficult market conditions. However, neglecting to build a strong search engine marketing structure can seriously hinder any online ad campaign.
To be truly successful, plan for an initial trial period, followed by some benchmark testing, where you will be able to carefully measure each result of your online ad campaigns.
Any company, independently of its industry, should have a carefully prepared business plan where your search engine marketing foundation is accurately reflected and equally well spelled out, down to the last detail.
To truly achieve the best overall ROI and create the most impact, both with first-time visitors to your site, as well as repeat buyers, the four most important steps to the success of any good search engine marketing structure are:
1. Mission statement
2. Unique selling points
3. Targeting the right market
4. Finally, a strong call to action
Neglect any of these four important ingredients and you are wasting your time and your resources, while giving your competitors a chance to beat you to market.
Carefully writing your mission statement
A powerful mission statement that has a lot of “punch” can be summarized as explaining your single most important benefit to a prospect or client. An easy way to write this would be to accurately describe what your company does, using only one or two sentences.
A good example to this could be: “Our company produces powerful accounting software helping Fortune 500 companies get more work done in one day, while at the same time saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars every year”. Another good example could be: “Our company designs and manufactures highly accurate automated robots used in the automotive industry”.
Note the words that are the most important in each message are highlighted and in bold. Those are strong words that will remain in your prospects memory.
What’s important to note here is that anybody that receives such a mission statement could be a potential client or industry partner. It may not be right away, but some time down the road. The important thing is that he or she gets the right message, the first time.
You should always try to keep your mission statement short and to the point. If some of these people need more information, they will ask you.
Unique selling points
In writing your unique selling points, try to think of a unique fact or feature that truly places your company above all the others. Is your product or service really superior from the ones offered by your competition? Is it offered at a lower price? Maybe the warranty lasts longer or the product can be shipped the same day.
Using powerful facts similar to these will make your prospective client realize how different your company is, and will entice them to buy from you.
What’s also important is to prioritize all your strong selling features, beginning by the ones you think are the most important.
Targeting the right market
Try to mentally select what you think would be your ideal clients or customers. You might want to look at your current ones, or maybe look at your competitor’s clients, if you are a new company.
Important demographics such as age, marital status, sex, job title or geographic region of the country can play a significant role in this critical step at targeting the right market for your products or services.
For example, if you are a real estate broker and if you are trying to sell a house to a young couple just starting out in life, chances are that their needs will be substantially different than a middle-aged couple nearing retirement.
The more information you can find out about your potential clients, the better prepared you will be at accurately targeting your right market. Always remember that strong relationships play a key role in your first sales, as well as in repeat customers. It also becomes important for referrals, since these can be the best testimonials and, what’s more, they are totally free.
A strong call to action
This last step is one of the most critical, and usually the one that many online and search engine marketers often forget. Ask yourself the ultimate question: “What do you want your visitors and prospective clients to do on your website?”
When I ask this question to people that are rather new to search engine marketing, most site owners or online marketers will usually answer they want them to buy something. While this is great and certainly very satisfying to most business owners, sometimes another call of action would be to subscribe to your free online newsletter, or perhaps to send in a request to get more information, either by mailing them a brochure or having a sales representative call them.
Finally, you should carefully review your call to actions both before, during and after you perform a keyword research, either using Wordtracker or other keyword research tools. Remember that for each call to action, your ad copy, your keywords used and your landing pages can all be changed to permanently improve your online ad campaign’s performance and ROI.
Conclusion
A good structure or solid foundation to a well-planned search engine marketing campaign can make a big difference in the overall ROI of any online marketing efforts, and will continue to yield long-term benefits if done the right way.
Planning any ad campaign without the four basic and important steps mentioned in this article would be to take unnecessary risks, both with your ROI as well as the outcome of your work. You should carefully review these four steps, both with your marketing or sales department, as well as your SEM firm if you outsource your search engine marketing to professionals.
Reference: “Search Engine Advertising” by Catherine Seda. 347 pages.
New Riders Publishing. Indianapolis, IN. 46240.
Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales
Is Your Search Engine Optimized Content Working?
In the past, most savvy website owners recognized the value of strong, compelling content; they appreciated the importance of copy that commands attention and persuades visitors with reason and with art to buy something or take a particular action.
But there’s a change happening. With the growing importance of search engine optimization, many e-businesses have shifted their content priorities. Satisfying the needs of human visitors has taken a back seat to keyword cramming and the scramble for higher search engine positioning.
And this has lead to some stilted and dysfunctional web content.
Search engine copywriting should help improve rankings, deliver traffic, AND convert it. Too many website owners employ search engine copywriting with the sole objective of driving traffic to the site. Period.
Then they cut that traffic loose to fend for itself. All those eager-to-buy prospects are dumped on the doorstep, facing a home page that offers them:
-No enticing headline.
-No benefit-driven, you-oriented sales message.
-No pitch explaining what makes this product or service superior.
-No irresistible call to action.
These visitors are clearly not getting the information or the motivation they need to make a buying decision. What they get instead is keyword-stuffed text that screams out, “Hey Google, spider this!” As a result, the site may get traffic but minimal or no increase in sales.
When it comes to search engine copywriting, doing half a job is worse than not doing it at all because you’ve wasted money on traffic that isn’t generating revenues and the substandard copy is damaging your company’s credibility in the process.
If you want to ensure that your web content is optimized correctly and that you will actually be in a position to convert some sales, here is a checklist to run on your copy after the keywords have been written in:
1. Does your optimized content offer useful information that’s compelling, informative, and easy to understand?
2. Does it flow naturally or are the keyword phrases stuffed in beyond the point of sense and sensibility?
3. Does your content obey the first commandment of good copy: “Thou shalt put thy customer before thyself.” In other words, does it talk benefits (“This is how we can help you”) or just glitzy features (“Look at me, look at me!”)
4. Could a first-time visitor arrive at your home page and be clearly guided to the information he/she seeks without getting lost or confused? Content is vital to successful usability.
5. Does each web page include enticing headings/subheadings and clear, persuasive body copy, wrapped up with a strong call to action (a link to another page, an invitation to make contact, or a buy button)?
In short, your optimized web content should adhere to the standards of good marketing communications that were selling products long before we became fixated on search engines. Because professional search engine copywriting never forgets that humans – not spiders – make the buying decisions.
To find out if your search engine copy is working at both levels, contact me for a complimentary website content analysis.
Author Bio:
Get a FREE website content analysis on your site with customized tips to make your content more compelling and search engine friendly. e-mail to heather@thewritecontent.com or visit http://www.thewritecontent.com/freereport.html
Value of a Keyword
A ‘keyword’ or ‘keyword phrase’ is a word or combination of words that people type into search engines to find what they are looking for. The search engines search the Internet for webpages containing that particular keyword or keyword phrase. The pages are then ranked and scored using a mathematical formula and with the results displayed to the user as a list in order of most relevant to least relevant.
Properly utilized keywords can provide a great Return on Investment (ROI). Thus, it is very important to gauge the costs associated with marketing a keyword to its potential value to your business. Money spent on a keyword should be proportionate to its perceived value (either monetary or knowledge based) to your company. You do not need to spend a lot of money on a keyword phrase, but its value to you and your competitors is proportionate to its potential income. Some companies generate large amounts of revenue from specific keywords.
Determining the value of a keyword ahead of time is very difficult, and its value will change as your markets and competitors change. A quick guide would be to take the average bid of the top 5-listings on Overture or Google Adwords. These are a good starting point since both are very popular and a higher percentage of businesses make money by using them. There are also tools available that can you can use to get a more accurate gauge for the value of a keyword but most of these can only be utilized once you have some listings for your keywords.
The following formula can be used as a guide to calculating keyword value:
((estimated number searches per month) X (average cost per click on Overture) X (average click potential percentage)) = (keyword value for 1-month) Unfortunately, there are a number of flaws with this calculation as the first 3-variables are estimations/ judgments. Nonetheless, it can be used to compare one keyword against another to gain a grasp of its worth.
Profits and Visitors
Increasing the number of visitors does not guarantee increased sales. Thus, getting high rankings based on generic keywords may not actually be beneficial to a business. Keywords need to be specific to your business so that the right customers are directed to your website. Generic keywords deliver a higher level of value to certain businesses and much less to others. For example, a search for “community college” would result in higher keyword value for colleges that have campuses all over the US or offers on-line courses than for a local college in say, Grand Rapids, Iowa or any other local college. The reason is simple; very few people living outside of the local college’s specific region will actually be looking to attend there.
In the above example, the keyword phrase “community college Grand Rapids” would hold a much greater value for the college because it is more focused and directed towards the people who are mostly likely to attend the college. This becomes apparent when you look at the actual conversion rates of visitors to the website. The rates will show that the greatest numbers of conversions were for the people who lived in and around the Grand Rapids area. As such, the college stands to reap greater profit from the targeted keyword than from the generic one. Hence, it is very important to look at the value a keyword holds for your business than just the number of people searching for it.
This is what the numbers look like if we apply the previously mentioned formula to the case of the above college. Say there were 13,956 searches for “grand rapid community colleges” on Overture with an average bid of $0.10 per-click. Its calculation would be (13,956 X $0.10 X 5% = $69.78 per-month). For “community colleges” there were 80,244 searches on Overture with an average bid of $0.85 per-click. Its calculation would be (80,244 X $0.85 X 5% = $3,410.37 per-month). Now, that value looks ridiculously high! Could it possibly be worth that much? That’s difficult to say, but it could be -to the right business.
When you consider that there are hundreds of colleges in the US, it is easy to understand that the conversion rate for the keyword phrase “community college” is going to be fairly low while its marketing cost is going to be much higher. On the other hand “grand rapid community college” is very targeted making its conversion rate much higher and its marketing cost much lower. Therefore, it would cost less to promote the targeted keyword, and at the same time get better conversion rates than using a generic keyword.
Keyword Relevancy Is The Key!
Promoting the right keywords is essential to attaining a good ROI. Finding the right keywords to promote requires research, and the development of proper content to support them. Once again there are tools available to help do your research but there coming up with the good content is up to you. Or you could work with a search engine optimization (SEO) firm that can work with you to develop a SEO strategy for your business. Promoting specific and relevant keywords allows businesses to promote more keywords and make more profit and that�s why the value of a keyword is something that should not be taken lightly.
Author Name: Chris Genge
Company: 1st on the List Promotion Inc
Author Bio:
Chris Genge is the President of 1st on the List Promotion Inc, a professional website promotion firm. He writes on current and emerging search engine marketing theories. Chris has been involved in the SEO industry since its very early days, and has since 1997, focused on researching and implementing the most effective search engine optimization techniques.
A Network Of Web Sites Is Not Enough!
The big thing these days is your ability to capture the market. So how do you do that?
Do you…
1) Use spam tactics?
2) Have a massive banner campaign?
3) Spends lots of money of PPC Advertising?
4) Build a huge web site?
5) Link to everyone in the world?
or do you…
6) Own a network of more than one web site? – Thinking that your network will help your search engine rankings since you can control your own link popularity!
#6 is starting to be the norm out there. Companies are just consuming a mass amount of domain names in order to increase their chances of being found online.
But does it really increase their chances? Let’s see…
Since recently, Google has been crawling through “DNS”information in order to sniff out who owns what. So for instance, if you own 20 web sites, google will find that out by the information you have on all the registered domains.
Given that you own these 20 web sites, doesn’t that give you the ability to create your own high page ranking, link popularity building campaign? Answer is yes, so what happens from that? Absolutely nothing. Nothing happens to increase your rankings I mean.
For instance, let’s say you are trying to build everything off of one mainly large web site of yours. Let’s also say that you intend to link to site #2 for this key phrase “Boosting Rankings”. You’ve done a lot of work to add that title and link pointing to site #2 on all of your pages within your one, main, larger site. Here’s what happens to your rankings for both of them.
It is known now that google has come up with this “Sandbox” effect. This is simply known as keeping an eye on certain network of web sites and the targeted key phrases they are after.
So your site #1 isn’t the target of this sandbox effect, it’s your smaller, networked web site that is. Instead of getting any type of rank for the phrase “Boosting Ranking”, this site is added to a pool of web sites that are doing the same thing. The catch is that this “pool” is nowhere to be found, unless you know how to look for it.
On the other hand, your main, large web site will now take over the ranking for “Boosting Ranking” and will probably do pretty good within a search!!!
So does owning a network really help you? NO, not unless you know how to better your “smaller”, network web sites so that they don’t get caught in this “Sandbox Effect”.
So how do you do that?
Simple, instead of relying on your network to boost your page ranking, outsource some of that strategy elsewhere. See, “Google” is only saying, if we don’t do this to your network, then it gives you the sole ability to control your search engine rankings for all your sites. We are merely stating that we know you have a network and worked really hard to build it but we also want you to promote other peoples sites as well.
It’s that simple. If you start today and keep building more links on other peoples web sites with your network, your entire network should see a big difference within 30 days of starting.
I hope this article helps you out!
Author Bio:
Martin R. Lemieux Smartads – President Affordable Web Site Design & Web Site Marketing Web Site Awards & Webmasters Playground Food for your mind & Entrepreneur Traits Read over 200 articles on advertising!
Building A Mailing List
In most every business building a loyal client base is important to the overall success of your business. Internet marketing is no exception. In order to build your client list you need to capture email addresses from prospects that either sign up to receive your newsletter or buy a product or service from your website.
One of the most important elements of building your mailing list is that you build a trust relationship with your prospect. According to The National Sales Executive Association 80% of sales are made after the 5th contact with a potential client or customer. So this should tell you that you need to have quality content in your newsletter so the prospect will stick around to receive your newsletter past the 5th attempt. Another good thing about building your mailing list is that you can notify your prospects about up coming events or special offers you may be working on or know would be of interest to the prospect.
Let�s examine some of the different ways in which you may be able to build your mailing list.
Pop Up Ads
If you have surfed the web for anything you have undoubtedly found a site or two that use pop up ads to promote various ideas and opportunities. Most internet marketers use pop ups to capture prospects emails for there newsletters or promotions. Recently, a new type of pop up is being used, it�s called a pop over or hover ad that just appears on your site and will not be blocked by various pop up blockers that are installed in the google toolbar and the like.
These type of ads are very good for promoting your newsletter. The prospect signs up using there name and email address and are automatically add to your autoresponder.
Website Forms
If for whatever reason you do not want to use a pop up ad you can create a subscription form on your website that will accomplish the same purpose. Write up an ad that promotes your newsletter and the benefit to your prospect and give them the opportunity to sign up that way. Using subscription forms and pop ups are great if you have a lot of targeted traffic to your website.
Lead Services
Lead and subscription services offer you the opportunity to get a prospects name and email address. These are usually people looking to start a home business. You write an ad about your newsletter, advertise it with the subscription service and prospects sign up to receive it. There are plenty of companies that offer these types of services for various amounts of money. You buy a certain amount of prospects each month and they get delivered to your autoresponder where you have your newsletter. I would suggest trying as many of these services as possible. It is to hard to say which company offers the best leads, so using multiple companies will at the very least build your mailing list.
E-Zine Ads
You may want to place ads in other peoples newsletters or e-zines. Depending on the number of subscribers prices range from $10.00 to over $100.00. Once again you write an ad about the benefits of your newsletter and submit it to an e-zine owner. You may be able to get your ad for free if you make a joint venture with an e-zine owner and swap ads.
These are just some of the ways you can use to build up you mailing list. However, none of these methods will work unless you offer a newsletter with unique content that a potential client will want to read.
Good luck!
Author Bio:
Dirk Wagner is CEO and owner of http://team4success.biz and the free, easy to install #1 home business toolbar with automated updates.A website dedicated to helping the home-based business entrepreneur start and succeed with there very own home-based business.
Do Static IP Sites Rank Higher than Sites With Dynamic IPs?
This is a hotly debated topic. Some SEOs claim that sites with a static IP address rank higher while other SEOs claim that shared hosting is just fine… that it would be stupid for search engines to penalize shared hosting since we are running out of IP addresses and so many sites are currently using name based hosting.
First, let’s define what we are talking about when we say “static IP” vs “name based” hosting. Here are some synonyms:
For “static hosting”, the following all mean the same thing: static IP, dedicated IP, http/1.0, non-shared hosting. For “dynamic hosting”, the following all mean the same thing: dynamic IP, name based hosting, http/1.1.
Let’s take a brief history of the Internet to put things more in focus. Once upon a time, every host on the Internet had a unique IP address. It is usually expressed as 4 numbers from 0-255 separated by dots. An example would be 207.44.161.131. There are billions of such IP addresses possible… however, there is a finite number.
An organization called ARIN hands out IP addresses in the western hemisphere while another organization handles Europe and another Asia. Those organizations noticed several years ago that we were going to eventually run out of those IP addresses because of the proliferation of web-sites. At the time, every website had it’s own dedicated IP address that was associated with it’s domain name.
The solution? A new protocol was developed called HTTP 1.1 (to replace HTTP 1.0). The new protocol allowed more than one domain/website to share the same IP address. In fact, hundreds of websites can now share the same IP address.
The new type of hosting is called “name based”, “shared IP”, “http 1.1”, etc.
Some SEOs theorize that your choice of dedicated hosting vs. shared hosting might affect your rankings. Some others claim that is ridiculous because all hosting will eventually be shared in order to preserve IP addresses.
Which are correct?
I decided to run it through our statistical analysis engine to get the facts. Here is the methodology I used to answer this question. I gathered the results of the queries naturally performed last month by myself and three associates using Yahoo and Google. I then pinged each site to get it’s IP address. I then tried to visit the site using the IP address. With shared hosting, this isn’t possible. You get some kind of generic page instead of the specific site you want. I tallied my results for each of the first eight rankings.
On the Y-axis, you will see the number of sites found that use a static IP (do not use shared/name based hosting). On the X-axis, we have rankings from 1 to 8. Here is the graph showing Yahoo and Google results:
First, it is interesting to note that the number of sites using shared vs. dedicated hosting is just about half and half. We expect that as time goes on, more and more sites will be using shared hosting.
The second thing to note is that there is no trend for either Yahoo or Google that would indicate any preference for either type of site. Google might show a slight preference for static IP. Yahoo might show a slight preference for shared hosting. The net effect is null. The correlations for both are very close to zero (on a scale of -100 to +100, Google’s correlation was a +35 and Yahoo’s was a -21). I generally consider anything from -35 to +35 to be statistically insignificant.
Do you use dedicated hosting in order to improve your rankings? Don’t bother. There isn’t any advantage in this factor. Often dedicated hosting is more expensive than static IP hosting… so save your money and invest it in other factors that do affect your ranking!
Notes:
1. Over 1,000 queries and over 10,000 sites were examined for this study.
2. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords. I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by myself and three associates during the prior month.
Conclusion:
Sites using static hosting do not rank significantly higher or lower than sites using shared hosting on both Yahoo and Google.
This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from this study whether the leading search engines purposefully entertain this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant from the factor we studied, but the end result is that both of these search engines do, in fact, rank pages with a “window.open” command higher on average.
Author:
Jon Ricerca
Writing For The Internet
Writing for the Internet, whether you call it e-copy, web copy, web text, or website content� is essentially a craft.
Ordinary Writing With A Job To Do
Most websites contain text copy written primarily for the benefit of the visitor. Websites however, really have two very different audiences: people and search engine-indexing spiders. Both require a different style of writing and yet both need to be addressed by the writing. While this may be best left to the talents of a professional web content writer, for now I will explore some basic rules that technical writers use for crafting their writing to serve both.
If it means business, then your writing should attempt to grab the reader’s attention quickly and it must be engaging enough to keep them reading until you have successfully led them take some form of action.
Writing For The Two Audiences
In reality, it is perhaps more important that your website copy satisfy the needs of the search engines. After all, in order to become visible to your second audience (the visitor) your website must first receive adequate ranking by your first audience (the search engines) and be listed near the top of the listing results� preferably within the first two pages.
Let’s first consider your website’s second audience, the visitor.
Most website visitors come looking for something specific and they want it fast so your website better deliver.
Writers must clarify their goals and understand the purpose of the website. The site’s “unique selling proposition” or USP, must be in line with the visitor’s purpose for being there. Writers must know the type of person being targeted and then write in a conversational style that is simple and direct.
Concise Writing & Clear Headings Help Visitors We tend to read differently from computer screens than from other offline print mediums. Basically we don’t read� we skim read, ignoring details to better our reading speed. For this reason website text content must be more objective, more concise and easier to browse through. The message must be written so it can be easily scanned.
Every word on the page must fight for its rightful place and stay true to that old adage “less is more.” The opening statement must first solve the visitor’s problem. The body of the page should then list the benefits, not the features.
Writers ask how the product or company features translate into customer benefits. What are the benefits for the visitor is choosing this product or service? Navigating through web page content must also be intuitive for the visitor. What works best are proven layout formats and conventions that most visitors easily understand.
Closing statements must offer an effortless “call to action” using the easiest, most direct route for the visitor to take, to get what they came for. The call to action must be clear-cut with rewards that are irresistible and reaffirms for the visitor why this is something they need.
Satisfy Your Site’s First Audience�The Search Engines For most, this is a hidden problem when it comes to crafting their writing. What the search engines want is completely different from what visitors are looking for.
Search engine indexing spiders work primarily with text, visible HTML text that is. They simply cannot read flash, JavaScript, graphical text, etc. Your web page text copy must therefore be placed within the html coding so that it is more accessible to the search engine spiders, more “search engine friendly” if you will. But just as text copy must be properly placed within the html coding in order conform to the needs of the search engines, the writing itself, also needs to be “search engine friendly”.
The writing needs to be keyword rich with relevant content that supports the keyword phrases being targeted within the page. When a searcher types in a “keyword phrase” the search engine tries to match up web pages in the order that it thinks is the most relevant to the searcher’s request. Essentially, the search engine scans through its database looking for web pages that contain the keywords used by the searcher. Using an algorithm (a mathematical formula based on hundreds of pre-set criteria) it then ranks the web pages from those deemed most relevant to those deemed least relevant.
Web page copy must therefore be written to satisfy the “keyword criteria” needs of the search engines in order to be ranked at the top of the listing results. Web pages that consistently maintain high rankings are usually constructed with excellent keyword rich html text on static pages.
“Search Engine Friendly” Copy -Giving Search Engines What They Want Professional web content writers understand this and write keyword rich text content that satisfies the needs of the search engines while still being valid for the visitor.
Once they research and understand what phrases visitors are using to find what a site is offering, they choose their keyword phrases carefully. Each page is then written to be content rich around a theme that supports a main targeted keyword. Inevitably writers will use variations of a keyword phrase (or other less compelling keyword phrases that relate to a particular theme) and work them into the copy as well.
Search engines look at a variety of criteria as they relate to keyword phrases including keyword frequency, weight, prominence, proximity and placement within the text and within the html. While each search engine has its own criteria there are a few accepted norms for keyword placement within the text content and within the html coding. It is the writers’ responsibility to understand and utilize these norms.
Spam techniques like hidden layers or hidden text should be avoided to protect your site from being penalized or banned all together. While individual pages should contain unique content they still must work to support the targeted keyword phrases throughout the site.
Conclusion
Use Writing That Makes Both People And Search Engines Happy Writing for the Internet is a craft that has its own style and set of rules and peculiarities� especially, when it is trying to address both people and search engines. As such, it is imperative that your content be well written/ crafted to satisfy these two distinctly different audiences.
Remember, before it can convert visitors into clients, your website must first satisfy the needs of its first audience, the search engines, and achieve top rankings with them so that it can become more visible to your second audience, the searcher� your customer.
Author Bio:
Chris Genge is the President of 1st on the List Promotion Inc, a professional website promotion firm. He writes on current and emerging search engine marketing theories. Chris has been involved in the SEO industry since its very early days, and has since 1997, focused on researching and implementing the most effective search engine optimization techniques.
