How to Use Forum Posting to Market Your Website

February 7th, 2010

There’s many reasons why you see a lot of people on online forums. There are people who just waste time on them, but there are others who use them to promote their websites.

If you have a website, consider using forums as one of your marketing tools. Here’s a few reasons why forum posting is one of the best marketing tools on the internet.

The main reason why forum posting is a great local internet marketing tool is because there’s already an existing market waiting to be tapped into. If you visit a forum about cars, you know everyone there are interested in cars. If you have a website about cars that needs advertising, you’ve already found your visitors.

The major reason why people don’t buy products or services from websites is because there is a lack of credibility. Nobody has any information about your website, so trusting it is out of the question. By posting on forums regularly and interacting with the community, you create trust with others and build a relationship. The internet is very impersonal, but using forums correctly can easily fix that problem.

Online forums are largely free to join, so it is basically free advertising. This is great for anyone on a tight budget, since you just have to join a conversation in a forum to promote your website. Local internet marketing in forums can be in the form of placing information and a link about your website in your signature, so you advertise every time you post.

By helping the community out in online forums, you will gain familiarity and trust and become well-known with the other participants. By doing so, your name and business will spread as others talk about you and your website, and about how you help other people. This creates a viral effect and spreads your local internet marketing campaign widely.

The reasons above are the strongest reasons to participate in forum posting, but there are many other good reasons. It may be uncomfortable at first, but once you start posting and getting to know other members, it becomes much easier.

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Utilizing Proper Ad Placement to Monetize a Website

January 28th, 2010

Not to be confused with first page placement, which is the process of getting your website to rank on the first page of a search engine, first page ad placement utilizes key areas of your web page to gain clicks on your advertisements. Advertisments on websites may look distasteful to some, but it is a great way to offset the costs of hosting and managing a website. Another way to use advertisement space would be to create your own ads and place them on your site. This can move your traffic to certain areas of your website, where you may be selling a product or offering a service. Here are some tips to place ads properly on your site.

While many bloggers and SEO consultants recommend that you place ads in your sidebar, advertisements placed below the post title and above an article have a much higher success rate in receiving clickthroughs. Placing a text ad here makes it blend into your site, while an image ad will most likely irritate the reader.

Mentioned above, sidebar ads do not get a high clickthrough rate. Placing an ad at the top of the sidebar does. By blending it in to look like it’s part of the navigation, it will receive a large amount of clicks from visitors.

Another place commonly used is below your post. If you place ads below your articles, make sure it is directly below the articles. Using text links, so they look like a list of related links, will create a large amount of clicks.

Many websites offer products and SEO services and using advertisements on their own pages can give a substantial boost. Creating backlinks throughout posts or placing image ads in the sidebar “funnels” visitors into certain areas of the website.

By blending in your advertisements with the rest of your site, you can guarantee a high rate of clicks on your ads. Make sure the ads are related to your website, else nobody will be willing to click on them. By using these advertisement tips, your website can effectively pay for its PPC advertising and even its hosting costs.

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How Optimizing Your Blog Post Titles Can Increase Your Traffic

January 18th, 2010

Many websites will tell you to fill your blog post titles with keywords to make them more search engine friendly. While this will increase your rank on search engines, it won’t do much to entice visitors from social media sites or other referring sites. Basically, your post titles need to be optimized in accordance to how you do your internet marketing. Let’s go over your two major audiences and discuss how to optimize your blog posts.

Search engines, like Google or Yahoo!, are a major source of traffic for websites. While proper website SEO can and will create traffic for you site, post titles and proper keywords are the main way to increase your search ranking. Search engines use complex algorithms that determine the page rank of your website based off of several optimization factors. In order to rank high on Google, you must focus on using keywords in your titles, rather than catchy and creative titles. This is strictly to be recognized by the algorithm as relevant information to the search.

The other major source of website traffic would be from social media sites, such as Twitter and Stumbleupon. Marketing to these internet users is entirely different than ranking in search engines. You need to keep your titles short and sweet, while also making them interesting and appealing. These are strictly human visitors, not bots, so you must market accordingly. Include keywords that would interest visitors, instead of focusing on keywords that they would likely search for. Creating a catchy title that tempts them to visit your website is the key here.

There is a great tool for blogs built with Wordpress called the Platinum SEO Plugin. This plugin lets you define an additional title for every page, so you are able to create a title for both audiences. This is an easy and effective way to optimize your titles, and allows for an easier time marketing your website.

Internet marketing and website SEO can be difficult tasks to undertake, but there are SEO professionals with the knowledge and talent to do it for you. Depending on your blog or website’s purpose, you may want to reach your visitors as fast and effectively as possible, without having to trial-and-error your way to getting traffic.

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Mobile Website Design Principles: Part 2 – Cross-Platform Browsing

January 8th, 2010

With web browsing on mobile devices on the rise, many web developers are creating mobile versions of their sites. Creating a mobile website can be difficult, especially since there are many platforms available on phones. By taking the following information into consideration, creating a mobile website shouldn’t be such a difficult task.

Let’s start with your markup language. A few different types are available for those building a mobile website. WML, or Wireless Markup Language, has been around since the early days of mobile web devices. It is an XML markup language. While it is available on every phone with web capabilities, it has been superseded by XHTML. XHTML is available in the standard XHTML rendered by desktop browsers, and XHTML-MP, the MP standing for Mobile Profile. The only difference between the two is that XHTML-MP has a few less elements and tighter restrictions to make it easier for a mobile device to render the website.

The next thing to keep in mind is the many screen resolutions available in the mobile world. The most common ones are 128 x 160 pixels, 176 x 220 pixels, 240 x 320 pixels and 320 x 480 pixels. By keeping these dimensions in mind, you will be able to optimize some of your content. However, it’s best to keep your site as minimal as possible, especially since there’s no mouse on a mobile phone and they are only able to move up and down a page. While there are a few exceptions in the market, such as the iPhone and the Nokia Internet Tablet, but these phones should be able to browse your regular page easily.

The goal for any web site should be to know your customers in order to deliver to them the best available content. This goal is even more important with mobile sites since you need to target the use of your site. Regular web users are most likely sitting at a desk facing a large monitor that has a high resolution. Visitors who are browsing your mobile site, however, view it through a tiny screen that’s usually less than 1/4 of your desktop’s resolution.

The final step in mobile website design is to test your design. While desktop browsers can be forgiving with code, mobile browsers don’t have the processing power available to automatically fix errors. This can possibly render your website completely useless. Luckily, there are some tools to help in this process. This W3C validator is designed specifically for mobile websites. The next step is to test the site on a mobile platform. While there are emulators available to see your website’s general layout as it would be on a mobile device, these tools won’t be 100% accurate. They can help in the design process, though. The only sure-fire way to test your site is to view it on a mobile phone. Try to test it on phones with different resolutions to ensure that it’s working correctly.

Mobile website design, while similar to standard design, can be difficult if you don’t have the proper tools available. There are many services available that can do it for you, thankfully. Even if you’ve designed your website without the help of others, mobile website design may be difficult.

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Mobile Website Design Principles: Part 1 – Assessing Your Audience

December 29th, 2009

With the number of users browsing the web from a mobile device steadily increasing, most mobile websites are still below standards. Many web developers just don’t understand how easy it is to create a good web experience for users of mobile devices. Mobile website design is steadily becoming a must-have skill for many small businesses. The first, and most important step, is to assess your target audience to see what the purpose of your mobile website should be.

There are three groups of visitors that use mobile web applications. Let’s look at them in detail:

Casual surfers act similarly to customers of traditional websites in that they aren’t really interested in one thing. They may just have a few spare minutes in between tasks and decide to take a look around. Since these users may only see your site for a few moments, your goal should be to make your content memorable so that they come back for more. Aim for small chunks that are just enough to keep them visited, but not so long that they can’t browse the entire site in one visit.

Repeat visitors are constantly returning for some sort of specific data. Since the interface of a mobile device is limited, avoid burying the content your customers want behind a few clicks. Try to keep your most viewed content at the top of the site.

The last group of visitors is the urgent ones. Depending on the business of your site, you may have a customer need some information or product as quickly as possible. By identifying the most important needs of these users and making that content available in the shortest amount of time, you’ll increase the usefulness of your site and keep these kinds of visitors around.

While you are building the website mobile version, you need to decide on a domain name. You will also need to work out how to advertise its existence. There are several options for choosing a mobile domain. You can use a separate domain name altogether, such as http://www.yoursite-mobile.com, use a subdomain, such as http://mobile.yoursite.com, or even use the .mobi extension, such as http://yoursite.mobi.

By finding out who your audience will be, you will be able to develop and market a mobile website to best match their needs.

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Social Media Marketing: Using Web 2.0 to Drive Traffic to Your Blog Part 2 – Social Bookmarking

December 19th, 2009

Following up Part 1 of this series on Social Media Marketing is Social Bookmarking. From Wikipedia, “Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.”

As a tool for web developers, social bookmarking allows your website to listed by topic along with thousands of other sites on popular pages visited by hundreds of thousands of users. With proper techniques, you can increase your pageviews by the thousands, and maybe even be featured on the front page of the website. Listed below are the most popular social bookmarking sites.

1. Twitter – Twitter is so popular that it was featured as a separate blog post on this site.

2. Digg.com – This technology-based social bookmarking site has over 30 million monthly visitors.

3. Yahoo! Buzz – Similar to Digg, Yahoo! Buzz ranks content based on votes. The more votes you obtain, the higher your ranking, and the higher your traffic. While they both rank content on votes, Digg also bases ranking on the rate of the submitter and their quantity of friends on the site. Yahoo! Buzz bases ranking on search-term popularity and what the current trend in reading is.

4. TweetMeme – TweetMeme takes all of the popular links from Twitter and determines which ones are the most popular. It also counts the number of times a link is retweeted.

5. StumbleUpon – Stumbleupon combines a social bookmarking site with a toolbar for your browser to quickly rank sites and find new websites.

This website contains the top 20 most popular social bookmarking sites listed by monthly visitors.

After choosing which sites you would like to submit to, the next step is to create accounts on those sites. After signing in, simply submit a new site. Here are some tips in creating a quality review of your site.

Many websites and blogs go unnoticed on these types of sites simply because their headline is not catchy enough. Your headline is usually the only thing users will see from your website, so your efforts in providing a good headline will effect your page views.

While the headline is important to draw attention, if you want to keep that attention you must write a meaningful description. Be sure to keep it short, as most bookmarking sites limit your description’s length. Make sure that you submit your site to the proper category. Social Bookmarking sites usually include a General or Miscellaneous category, and since these fill very fast, your chance to get noticed quickly decreases.

It is best when other people bookmark your site to social bookmarking sites, so make it easier for them by including a bookmarking button at the end of your articles. Here is a link to add social bookmarking links to your articles.

Although submitting your links to social bookmarking sites is the most important step, an often overlooked one is to maintain your profile on those sites. Become an active user on the sites and submit other interesting articles and websites. Respond to comments left by other bookmarkers. One final tip is to focus on getting your ranking up on one social bookmarking site after submitting it to a few of them. If a post is popular on one of the major sites it usually becomes more popular on the others, so it’s best to stay focused on one at a time.

Using these steps, you will create valuable backlinks to your website and increase your overall SEO.

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Social Media Marketing: Using Web 2.0 to Drive Traffic to Your Blog Part 1 – Twitter

December 9th, 2009

Social Media (or Web 2.0) such as Facebook, Twitter, and Digg contain a surprisingly powerful tool for websites. Having a strong presence in social media extends your reach to potential visitors and clients. By using these tools, you will see a major increase in traffic and create a new way for social engagement to take place on your site.

Twitter is a microblogging service that allows users to participate in discussions with thousands of other users. Simply by creating an account, following other users, and sending a “tweet” you have informed users of your web presence and allowed traffic to reach your website. Twitter clients, such as TweetDeck and Hootsuite make using Twitter a lot easier. Here are some tips while tweeting to create value in your posts.

Ask a question relating to your site. If you are offering a service, ask what others think about your offer and provide a link. Use a URL shortening service such as Tinyurl or Tiny.CC for your links.

Remark on the comments you receive. Try to create a conversation with other users. While selling yourself is important, blatantly spamming links will quickly get you un-followed by other users and will diminish your traffic. Having a sense of humor and helping others with your tweets will show people your good nature and will make them more likely to click your link.

Make sure you are continually looking out for new followers. Follow people with interests similar to your website or blog and try to start a conversation with them. If you have a lot of users who aren’t responsive, simply un-follow them. Hootsuite offers a mass-unfollow tool.

Creating a strong web presence through social media will not only get your website traffic but will give you a lot of quality feedback on what is expected from your website or blog. Using these tools properly can get you thousands of more visitors each month.

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Why Articles Are Important in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

November 30th, 2009

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great way to send your ad campaign to prospective clients. However, in order for search engines to be able to see your site, it needs to have your site constructed using relevant keywords.

Search engine work by detecting a relevant keyword from your site, so that it will be able to include your site on the generated search page. This means that, by putting up lots of quality content, this will help your site get indexed on top search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Putting relevant keywords mean that you need to have a good article writing and distribution system.

How do you achieve having a good article writing and distribution system?  All you need to do is to write different articles everyday and have them posted on forums and blog sites. These articles should contain information about the products or services that you sell. You can hire content writers to do it for you. Usually, if you enlist help from SEO companies, they will be able to provide you with a pool of writers that can make the articles using relevant keywords and key phrases.

Writing articles and posting them on the internet is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Moreover, another way of driving traffic to your site is to use press release services. These online services include news engine like major news websites. Press releases are great way to attract people to your site because it gives them a sense of security knowing that the product or service has been featured in a newspaper.

The articles make it possible to drive traffic to your site. If an SEO company will be employed, then these articles can go a very long way to provide the campaign boost needed by your business. The keywords found on your article will be determined and will be used to generate traffic to your site. This means that once the SEO company has launched the campaign, all you need to do is to sit back and relax and a lot of visitors will end up buying from your site. However, this does not stop here, as with most technology, there are a lot of changes in the search engines. It is important that your organic SEO or PPC Management will be able to detect these changes and eventually make the most out of your ad campaign.

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Determining the Best SEO for the Type of Company that You Have

November 20th, 2009

Local internet marketing is a great way to improve the sales lead of a company since it uses the internet to reach a large number of clients globally. It employs a lot of strategy such as targeted email marketing wherein prospective clients are sent emails that contain information about the product or service that they sell. Only people who somehow share the same interest will be sent an email.

Often times, this comes as newsletters from websites that you have made a subscription. Another way of  improving the revenue of your company suing internet marketing is through the use of search engine optimization (SEO).

What is this SEO? Search Engine Optimization employs the use of relevant keywords for search engines to find your website. What is good about this is that the more relevant your keywords are, the higher the ranking of website becomes. This will be reflected having your website at the top of search listings on search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

There are two types of SEO. These are Organic  SEO and PPC Management. So given these two types of SEO, how do you chose which one of these SEO are relevant for the type of business that you have? It is fairly easy. However, let us differentiate first what are the differences between these two SEO.

Organic SEO needs for you to pay an SEO company a monthly fee so that they can maintain your ad campaign. It is not a click-through based system unlike PPC Management. This means that you will not pay the number of clicks that a prospective clients makes when visiting your site for organic SEO.

Further, this means that no money was put to waste for unnecessary clicks made by a visitor who just happened to pass by your site. The fee that you have paid for organic SEO includes the maintenance of your site, as well as constant revision of your keywords if the keywords are no longer significant. Even if there is no conversion of the click-through rate for this SEO, the fee is somehow relatively bigger.

However, organic SEO is really effective. Since, people tend to visit these sites more often than once with pay-per-click system. This works well for big companies.

Given this fact, you might think that the organic SEO is by far the best choice. In contrary to that, if you own a very small company, then this SEO is not good for you. A PPC Management SEO can be used if you are running on a very low budget since it only allows you to be more active until your budget run out. This is a practical way of employing SEO.

The type of SEO to use really depends on the type of business that you have.

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How SEO Can Optimize Your Business

November 10th, 2009

If you are still starting out your business, and do not know what to do on how to tell a lot of people about your product, then you can always enlist the help of the internet to give your business a head start. How? You use local internet marketing to improve the sales of your company.

The premise here is that, the internet can reach a lot of people in no time.  Thus, using it as a media to introduce your product and services can be a very good idea. However, in order for you to do this, you need to create a website first.

Your website should contain relevant keywords or phrases to describe your product. In order for you to achieve this, you need to have an article writing and distribution system wherein you have a collection of articles that you can post on forums and blogs.

The purpose of blog posting and forum posting is that, these sites can link you to your website which acts as the first page placement of your product. So, for example, if a client is looking for cats, the landing page of the keyword “cats” should contain relevant information about the keyword “cats”.

Another thing to enhance your ad campaign is, by using social bookmarking. This is a method for internet users to store, organize and manage bookmarks of web pages in the form of tags. If your site has been bookmarked or tagged by other sites, then this means that the search engine will be able to easily find you and you will probably end up in the top spot of the search page.

There are limitless methods that you can try to improve your SEO. You can also use directory submission, wherein you will be submitting your website to web directories, after you have decided which category your business belongs to. If  possible, you can also use press release services to promote your product.

There are a lot of new engines, like the ones from BBC and CNN, where you can submit press releases. People are bound to be looking for topics from your category in any day. Finding these in a news engine, might convince people to try your products or services from the press release that they have found.

There are a lot of things that you can do in order to boost your ranking in the search engines. All you need to do is try one or two suggestions, if not all, and you are on your way to an improved traffic on your site.

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