What Blogging Platforms Are There To Choose From

Posted by admin on in Business Online

Most people inquiring about making money online come across the subject of blogging. Many Internet entrepreneurs make a living from running their own blog. Someone confronted with all of this for the first time might find it extremely confusing. There are many blogging platforms that aspiring bloggers can use to start their online journey.

A blogging platform is a special software which can be used by bloggers to aid them in running their own blogs. The software has the tools for carrying out all the main functions related to running this kind of site. These include functionality for writing and publishing posts, managing comments, marketing features, and so on.

Free platforms

There are a huge number of free blogging platforms available. Most of them are easy to access from the Internet.

WordPress

This is one of the most popular free environments and is said to power most of the blogs on the Internet today. It is under constant development and new updates are made available on a regular bases. There are two sites which users are able to access:

1. WordPress.org

The latest version of the software can be downloaded from this site. It also gives users access to a huge selection of design templates and modules to increase the functionality of your blog. Users need to find a suitable web host which supports wordpress to support their blog.

2. WordPress.com

This site allows bloggers to create their blogs directly online on wordpress.com. It is easy to get started and even the hosting is free. Blog owners who go this route are limited by the resources included as part of the environment.

Blogger

Google has its own free platform for bloggers. It works similar to wordpress.com and users are able to access the environment by going to http://www.blogger.com. Bloggers are able to get a site up and running in just a few minutes. As with wordpress.com, hosting is absolutely free when using this environment.

Commercial platforms

There are a number of online platforms which users need to pay for. They also provide access similar to many of the free environments, except that a subscription fee is required.

SquareSpace

SquareSpace is a commercial environment offering a platform bloggers can use to create sites with great functionality. It can be accessed by visiting http://www.squarespace.com. Potential blog owners wanting to make use of this powerful environment need to pay a monthly subscription.

ExpressionEngine

Expression Engine is another powerful environment in the commercial stable. It also provides all the tools to create professional blogs. Users who want to use this environment will need to pay a modest fee every month.

There are many blogging platforms available for aspirant bloggers to make their voices heard online. Some platforms are totally free while others require a monthly subscription. Only two have been mentioned in both categories, however, there are a huge number of blogging platforms that people are able to choose from. Fortunately for newbies, most platforms are not extremely difficult to use.

Make Your Website Highly-Visible Through White Hat SEO

Posted by admin on in SEO

Let’s get straight to the point: if you want to attain success in the online world and you want your website to be one of those most visited in the search engines, you have to consider using various SEO techniques. Among the most widely-used techniques nowadays is the ever popular White Hat SEO. It sounds cool, isn’t it? This employs various strategies that are indeed healthy and search-engine friendly for websites.

The embedded approaches in it are highly effective. As a matter of fact, many website owners are grateful for its availability because they attain the rank of their website that they want. The tactics used in it are indeed approved by Google.

You are definitely familiar with keyword usage, right? This SEO technique actually belongs to it. Keyword Usage maybe considered as an old-fashioned technique, but we can never deny the fact that many website owners benefit from it. Those who think that they don’t need keyword usage are hypocrites. Over the years Keyword Usage has managed to establish superb credibility among website developers. To properly use keywords, they must be seen on the titles, posts, as well as image tags. Every successful business started with excellent keywords.

Nowadays, there are several website owners who are engaged with Guest Blogging, which is actually one of the best SEO techniques. This tactic is about connecting to another blogger, which has same niche as yours, and asking him to make a guest post. Through Guest Blogging, you can promote your point of view very well.

Blog Commenting is also one magnificent technique attached to it. Many web enthusiasts are hooked with it. You can abuse it, but make sure that you’ll do it in the right way. Therefore, read and comprehend the content first, before making comments and leaving links.

An excellent tip in Blog Commenting, if you want to be considered highly relevant in the World Wide Web, make sure to target top-notch blogs, be up-to-date on new posts or blogs, most of all, provide comments that are well-thought. There are a lot of cases wherein even though the keyword-enriched anchor text is not included in the link, high website traffic can still be achieved.

If you want Google and other search engines to honor your content, you should take advantage of Interior links. Interior links also aid in disseminating link juice in your website.

The above-stated techniques are widely applied. Be aware that the internet has an evolutionary path. Perhaps tomorrow, these techniques may evolve into other new techniques. The point is, before change takes place, you have to apply the techniques at present for your business to become profitable like what the others do.

Why Should I Build An Email Mailing List?

Posted by admin on in Email Marketing

Many beginner internet marketers will undoubtedly hear at some point that “the money is in the list”. There’s a very good reason all seasoned marketers will give you this advice… because it works. But ultimately, with all the other methods being touted to make money online these days, the big question on most people’s minds is: Why?

The biggest reason why you should build an email list is because it allows for multiple follow-ups with the same person.

If you have a website, a visitor will come along and look at your website and leave. There’s a good chance that they won’t ever come back. If however, you capture their email address, you have the ability to contact them again in the future which increases your chance of doing business with them.

With email marketing, you have the ability to market several different products to people which will increase the likelihood that one of them will resonate with the subscriber which will result in a sale.

There is also an age-old saying in the internet marketing world that a person needs to be exposed to you, your product or your service 7 times before they feel comfortable enough to buy. With email, you can provide content to your readers which will slowly instill trust in their minds and also brand your products.

As they hear about your products over and over again, the chances of you making a sale become higher especially if you send out emails that show you are an authority in your niche and they can see you know what you are talking about. Email marketing allows you to demonstrate to your subscribers that you are genuine, knowledgeable and an expert in your industry.

Another great benefit of building an email list is being able to promote new products to people who have already bought from you. People who have had a good experience buying from you in the past are your most valuable prospects as they are the most likely to buy future products you release. You will find over time that there is a group of people who buy just about everything you release so having an email list of these people is absolutely essential.

For these reasons, I believe every online business should make use of email marketing to increase their revenue and build their brands not only because it works, but because it’s very economical.

Questions You Need To Ask A Pay Per Click Company

Posted by admin on in PPC Ads

When you are looking at using the flexible and convenient Pay Per Click services, you need to ask some pertinent questions before you choose a company out of the thousands of them that jumped on the bandwagon and started a PPC company. Not all PPC companies are created equal and PPC programs can and will get expensive depending on how targeted you want to get.

What Will A Pay Per Click Services Company Do For Me That I Can’t Do For Myself?

A PPC company will target the audience that is likely to buy your product or use your services. This takes an extensive amount of research and a lot of expensive specialized software that would hardly be worth it to you. By the time you finish tracking the every move of your target audience, it will be time to start again. Don’t fall for all the software out there that claim they can do it fast and easy for you because by the time you receive it a new version has been made and you are outdated.

What Are The Questions I Need To Ask My Potential Pay Per Click Services?

– Do they have a dedicated manager solely for paid search? Because the market changes so rapidly and so do platform rules and structure the company you choose should not have a bunch of hands in your pie. In other words, they need to have one person that manages paid search so you have one person to go to and you should be able to contact them regularly to stay apprised of what they are doing. So, no one should be passing you around nor should there be ivory tower managers.

– Transparency: You’ll actually see this word a lot as this is a key factor in your relationship. It represents how ‘transparent’ they are in letting you in on the details of what they are doing in your account, which is touching the account and anything of importance. If they are illusive, it is a flag to move on because they are amateurs.

– Experience: Don’t be shy; ask them how many years of experience they have and what their success rate is.

– Specialization: Do any of their account reps have a specialization for PPC accounts on any one-business niche?

– Platforms: Some companies will only have proficiency on Ad Words but it is better for you and the ROI on your advertising dollar if they specialize on multiple platforms.

– Your Reports: What metrics do they use in their reporting? How will you get your reports and how often? Will you be able to ask for them anytime? Will you be privy to reports on your own without benefit of the Pay Per Click Services?

The Value of Your Data

Posted by admin on in Internet Marketing

The lowest cost and most effective form of marketing is inbound internet marketing which is driven from existing information silos.

Inbound, means that it is effective because the people making the enquiries have reached out to you, rather than you having to spend time and money chasing them. Plus, they are interested enough in what you are selling to have voluntarily made an enquiry – that always has to be a good thing!

Internet marketing, means that it can be essentially an automated process, with very low costs, which targets exactly the right audience.

Don’t forget, you can even see your ROI specifically and down to the individual click, because with internet marketing, all your efforts result in countable clicks and those countable clicks result in a certain volume of sales, so the eventual sales value can be divided by the (admittedly low) investment and bingo, you have an accurate cost per client acquisition figure.

So, how can a software company make use of internet marketing techniques to drive a torrent of highly targeted, ready to buy future clients to it’s doorstep for a very low cost and what part do the existing information silos play a part in this process?

First, lets look at the information silos that we are talking about here. What information do you have locked up in your business, which is secret to the outside world, but that is actually a marketing asset waiting to be exploited?

Your customer technical support incident recording system of course!

Many software companies record details of their client’s technical helpdesk enquiries in an incident management system of some sort. The original queries are in there along with the conversations that took place between client and support analyst and even along with the final solution.

Some software companies make this information available to internal helpdesk staff, so that they can use past incidents to help solve future ones. Some software companies even go as far as making this information available to the clients who originally placed the call. But… very few of them make all the information in this system available to other clients or even, heaven forbid, people who are not yet clients!

Of course, there is a pretty good reason for this, the information that is tucked away in these systems is often a series of emails, hastily copied and pasted into the CRM system and often contains details of internal conversations and specifics about client systems which really, it would not do, to make publicly available. So there it sits, a wealth of information that your future clients would find incredibly useful, locked away from prying eyes.

How Bloggers Are Benefiting From Pinterest

Posted by admin on in Social Bookmarking

Pinterest is a fun website to visit when you want to see fashion, recipes, and DIY pins and information. Chances are good you’ve visited a few boards, got a few great ideas and pinned dozens of things you want to do, try and experience whenever you find the time to do so. You like the site, but how can you use it to boost your blog’s traffic?

Finding Pins That Matter to You

A good place to start is with finding pinboards that relate to your site. To do this, simply browse through the site with keywords that relate to your blog. That’s the first step to finding topics that can relate to your site. Go further, though. You want to find something that is unique, interesting or simply so strange it is too hard to pass up on. Look for those with lots of repins, comments and likes. That means people have something to say about them.

Pin Your Blog

You can also go about the process in the opposite direction. You can post a video or an image on your blog and then pin it on Pinterest, too. Be sure that it is your own content, of course. You also want to avoid things that are too self-promotional, too. For example, if you are a gardener and your blog is about gardening, create some outstanding close up shots to the plants growing. You can get controversial, such as creating a non-GMO promotional video or photo. Then, pin it on the site so people can start to use it and share it. They track it back to your site and visit to find out your stance on the subject.

It’s a Networking Tool

Pinterest is another networking tool to use. It is a great platform for you to use to build your brand, market your site and to find other people to get to know. The goal is to increase traffic. Consider the following.

· Connect with new people. Engage people who you want to be followers of your blog on Pinterest by following them and liking their posts.

· Find people who are already doing well on the site with the audience you want to have on your site. Build relationships with those people who you would call influencers in the audience pool.

· You can always use the images and videos as topics for your blog posts. Create a pinboard called “future blog post inspiration” and pin ideas to the topic to it. It’s easy to come back to it later.

Network, Network, Network – that’s the ultimately goal for anyone who wants to use Pinterest for their blog marketing. If you’ve spent far too much time just browsing the site, now is a good time to start making it work for you and for your blog’s traffic goals. Engaging people on the site, using its outstanding networking ability, and using it as content for your blog can all be simple but highly effective ways to make it work for you.

How to Get Your Web Pages Indexed Quickly by Google

Posted by admin on in SEO

We’re all guilty of it. In fact, a few weeks ago I published a new blog post on my site and found myself checking at least once every 15 minutes or so to see if it had been indexed in Google yet. Now, normally I would just leave it alone and let Google get to it on its own, but it was news so I wanted to get the post indexed as quickly as possible.

I’ve long known of ways to help speed up the process of getting a page indexed, in fact I used to have a little ritual I followed after creating a blog post. It went something like this:

  • Ping it
  • Like it
  • Tweet it
  • Plus One It

To ping it, I would go over to Pingler.com and enter in the title, URL and category then hit submit. Pingler will ping over 80 different services with your URL, alerting them to your content.

To like it, I just hit the Facebook “like” button on the page. If your website doesn’t have a Facebook Like button, then you should seriously consider getting one. It’s fairly simple to set up and is pretty much necessary if you want to keep up with your competitors.

Next, I head over to Twitter and post a new tweet containing my URL (normally shortened with Bitly or any other URL shortener). You can take this a step further if you someone else who has a Twitter account by having them retweet your original tweet. This will make sure that it gets indexed as quickly as possible.

The next step is to “Plus One” the page with Google Plus. I’ve found that any activity within Google Plus (such as plus one, adding authorship/publisher status, or even just sharing a URL) gets Googlebot crawling the page rather quickly.

If, after trying these four things you find that your URL still hasn’t been indexed, you may need to break out the big guns. If you have a Google Webmaster account, there are a number of tools within your dashboard that will help your website or single pages get indexed. Between the “XML Sitemap Submission” and “Fetch as Google” tools, you can literally have your entire website indexed within just an hour or two when used correctly.

There have been times when I have had blog posts indexed within an hour using these methods alone, but then again there have been times when it seemed as if I was unable to get a page indexed no matter what I did. For times like this, I like to use a little trick that I call the “Instant Indexer”, with which I have literally had pages indexed within minutes. This trick is super-simple and only takes a few seconds to do.

So why didn’t I just say to do this in the first place? Well, to be honest, this trick just gets your page indexed but provides no other benefit. By using social media signals to get Google to crawl your site, you’re giving yourself a little bonus link juice as well by having Google crawl through to your page from a valuable social media link.

However, for those times when nothing else seems to work and you need to get your page indexed fast, just follow these steps:

    1. Go over to Google’s Keyword Tool at: https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS
  1. Rather than adding a keyword, put the link of the page you want to get indexed into the second field that’s labeled “Website”, fill out the CAPTCHA (if you’re not signed into AdWords) and hit the “Search” button.

What this basically does is it tells Google to go over to whatever address you typed into the form, crawl the page and return any keywords that it finds the page is relevant for.

This is essentially “forcing” Google to crawl the page, which in turn gets the page indexed almost immediately. I have never seen this method fail at getting a webpage indexed quickly. If used in cunjunction with all the methods I’ve laid out here in this article, not only will your page get indexed faster, but it will also rank higher almost immediately!

Larry Sheckell is an internet entrepreneur and SEO expert that’s been involved with internet marketing since early 2002. After seeing first-hand the crummy SEO and internet marketing services being peddled upon the general public, Larry started his newest venture, Web Marketing Wizardry – a company dedicated to providing small business and website owners services that ACTUALLY WORK to get them more traffic and higher rankings in Google.

Writing Blog Posts for Traffic Can Help Increase Sales

Posted by admin on in Traffic Building

If you have a website and are dependent on traffic to it, for any commercial or other venture, you will be always concerned with the number of people who visit your site. Blogging is an easy and often used way to increase the traffic that helps you to sell services or products.

The topics of your blogs need to be of topics that are relevant and very much in the news. They of course need to be related to your website in some way, even if it is just a discussion on the present economic scenario that affects all businesses. The topic needs to be one that many people are searching for information about. Search engines like Google give you the popularity of the words that people use and this can be used in your blog, when you are writing blog posts for traffic.

Any blog needs to have a catchy title. If keywords that are popular, can be part of that title you are already on the first step to writing blog posts for traffic to your site. Most web surfers scan titles and go further to see the site, only if the title catches their attention. So any title must trigger an emotional response that allows you to instantly bond with the viewer or visitor to your blog.

Blogs need to be short and must refrain from being very wordy. Language needs to be simple and easily understood. Keywords must be judiciously used and there must be no stuffing. Blogs with keywords stuffed in them quite often get ignored by search engines, even if such keywords are relevant.

Content in any blog needs to be readable and interesting if you are writing blog posts for traffic. Give people information about your service or product that they will find useful and informative. A well informed customer is far easier to deal with then one who does not know what he or she wants.

Blogs need to be linked to other blogs or websites that are concerned with the same range of topics. This can also help traffic to your website when those linked websites are viewed. Linking strategy needs to be aggressive, but at the same time, too many links can cause search engines to be wary about your blog. Social websites can be useful to create links to your website and encourage people to visit it. This can at times help your blog to go viral and this can greatly help to attract the required traffic.

Picking The Best Strategy And Affiliate Product For You

Posted by admin on in Affiliate Revenue

Are you looking to join affiliate marketing for the possibility of having a successful online business? Well if you are, then you are making a wise choice. People are making lots of money with affiliate marketing each and everyday, and you can do the same too. It all depends on your marketing strategy, and the kind of products that you are promoting.

Some products are winners, and some are dormant. There are a lot of affiliate marketplaces on the internet that you can use to find products to promote. Some of my favorites are: ClickBank, Paydotcom, JVzoo, Click2Sell, and Commission Junction. All of these sites have great products and programs that you can use to earn money with affiliate marketing.

Even though getting started with affiliate marketing is easy, it doesn’t necessarily mean that making money with it is easy. This is something that a lot of beginners experience and see for their own eyes when they get started with it. You have to be diligent, you have to be patient, and you have to have a good marketing plan.

The most commonly used form of marketing for selling affiliate products successfully is building up an email list. With an email list, you get to market repeatedly to the targeted prospects that signed up to your email newsletter. This is effective because you can win these people over with your excellent email content, and get them to perceive you as an expert in your niche.

The more you win them over with your content, the more credibility you will have in their eyes. This is something that is very powerful. If you want to get predictable and reliable affiliate sales, then this is something that you will want to do. But there are other ways to get sales with affiliate marketing other than building an email list.

One such other option is with something called “pre-selling”. Pre-selling is all about leading a prospect to a specific page on your website or blog, and then conditioning them to your review about the product that you want to promote. Some people do this in a wide variety of ways.

Some people like to do a product review about a particular product, some people like to write articles, and some people like to simple “direct link” to the affiliate page. Direct linking is the least effective strategy that you can do. So you might as well not even try this strategy, because it won’t produce a lot of sales for you.

Affiliate marketing is easy, but newbies make it complicated with their ideas of the best way to sell and promote an affiliate product. Don’t do this. Just follow the already proven strategies, and you will have success with affiliate marketing just like a lot of people online. Don’t re-invent the wheel… instead, follow the proven path that has been laid out for you.

Take these affiliate marketing tips, and come up with an effective strategy that will help you to earn money. Make sure you pick a winning product too. You can’t go wrong with these 2 things.

Tips For Choosing The Right Search Engine Optimsation Company

Posted by admin on in SEO

Search engine optimisation is an essential marketing tool for the success of nearly any online business. Having the chance to make sure that your customers can go to a search engine and find you easily is invaluable. These are some of the essential things to consider when choosing a SEO company.

Look for an agency that can show you some examples of how to use different SEO techniques to bring in results. There are some clients who will need to improve their profile link. When you are shown different methods on how to get fast results, you will be sure that the company is going to make the changes accurately and appropriately. In the event the results will not be improving, they are not going to continue doing the same thing.

Look for an SEO agency that is going to work closely with your content team, developers and other agencies. Your agency needs to be an extension of your team. There are a variety of elements that are needed for your SEO to be a success. You need to avoid using companies that say they have their own network for link building. The ability to affect your clients link profile fast and cost effectively can be beneficial. If you get an agency that states they think that one of the greatest selling points they have is that they have got their own network of sites which they can get in touch for links, this is a bad sign.

There are a lot of sites that link out exclusively to clients of the same SEO agency and this is not something that you want as part of your link profile. It is far much better to use a variety of different techniques to build links and not just one. A network can also be used as a way to force you into using that agency. When you leave them, they are going to destroy your link profile and lower your rankings.

Look for an agency that is going to be transparent on the way they work. They should be willing to show you exactly what is done when building links, comprehending a competitor’s sites profile and investigating indexing problems. When you know the above, you are going to be more confident in seeing the value that they are going to be adding and be sure that there are not going to be any hidden issues or use of unlawful techniques.

There are also very many other questions that you can look for to get a SEO agency to respond to. You should make sure that the company is reputable and they have a lot of experience as well. You can get this information by asking the agency directly.