Forum Posting: The 4 Do Rules

Forum posting takes some special considerations so that you can advertise your business without being sales like. There are four rules to follow when it comes to forum posting.

Rule1: Search Forums for proper Interest

You need to find forums that are going to want the products or services you sell. If you have pet supplies then you want a pet forum. It is important that any forum you choose has like interests so that you are not considered a spammer.

Rule2: Post an Introduction

Post an introduction about yourself when you sign up for the forums that are of interest to you and apply to what your business is about. When you post the introduction do not mention your website URL or products. Simply tell the readers why you joined the forum, what you do for a living, and start a conversation.

Rule3: Converse for more than a month

You will want to post regularly when you have something to say. You should not start off posting about your website. Instead, you might have found something cool to post about from another’s forum posting. You might have come across a cool picture that you want to share. You must share and become an authority on what you sell.

Rule 4: Discreetly add your URL

Once you have built up an audience and provide real content in the forum, you can start to add your personal details to the post. For example you might be talking about a Pin you saw. At the end you might say for more information check out this URL. It has to relate.

Forum Posting and Building Links

Online communities and forums are extremely popular on the web, which explains why they always show amongst the top ten search results amongst search engines. If you are using Bing, Google, or Yahoo to search something, you will always find results of forum links on the first page. Forums and forum posting can be thought of as being fun, easy, and brilliant for link building. Read on and discover the three ways to how you can build links from forums.

Signature

You can create a signature by making a thread or replying to a thread and attaching your signature. Your signature will always show below your post. When it comes to creating your signature, many forums have a special section for this, where you can easily place your links. You may use either HTML code, BBCode, or any other format that is offered by the forum in order to create your signature.

Profile

When it comes to forum posting, you can also create a profile, which needs to be cached by search engines. With your links, you can create a bio field, which is the same process as creating a signature. However, very few forums allow the field for bio. You may also enter the website URL or website title. However, very few forums have this option.

Posting and replying

Forum posting or replying gives you the option of inserting URL’s. If the forum does not let you create a signature, you can use the method to add links, which means you will be adding direct links to the posts.

Benefits of Forum Posting

Forums that are well established such as Sitepoint, DP, and Namepros have a vast majority of members. This gives you an excellent opportunity to build a relationship with these members, only if you participate honestly in the forums. From these forums, you can also get direct leads and referrals. In addition, if you post your signature, you can also receive referral traffic, and if the post count is high, there is no reason to why you will not attract a huge amount of traffic.

Forum Links as a Method of Link Building

The reason why forum links tend to be very powerful as a method of link building is because they are well cached by search engines, allow you to use deep links without any issues, and let you control URL and Anchor Text factor effectively.

Improving Your Business through Forum Posting Services

Online Promotion
It’s like going down a rocky road full of cutthroat drivers – loaded with speed bumps and populated by angry drivers looking to cut ahead of you and leave you in the dust. An online business can feel just as rough as that – you can’t let your guard down for so much as a second and have to scrutinize every last detail of your appearance online and your exposure. It’s essential for you to make your online presence impressive – and to make sure you’re out to your audience.

Most online business owners have an idea of what’s going to work and how to work up the website ladders – and there are quite a few ways for you to promote yourself online and keep that presence strong, even when you have to step away. Although most online businesses do similar things, the ones that really shine do those things in ways that are just a little bit different – the techniques remain about the same, whether you need exposure from blogs or forum posting or looking to another method, it’s best to make sure that how you do it is unique to you.

Forum Posting
Keeping a strong presence on forums is just one way to spread word and spread ways fast.
Like every SEO service that exists, there’s a flood of choices abound for services that pertain to forum posting, and because there are so many, it can be a touch difficult to figure out which service you need. Do a little research and you’ll find what’s right for you before too long.

Keep It in Mind
So you’ve decided to look up a forum posting service to help promote your business and strengthen your online portfolio. First off, ask yourself what your goal is, what you want to accomplish and then make a list of companies that might help you out. Bring it down on paper or on a notepad, and then start asking those companies questions – questions about previous clients and customers, ones who have taken the services and become successful or reaped great benefits from the use. You’ll be glad you invested the extra time in research.

Who Should Know About A Forum Posting Service?

Every website has a search engine ranking. This search engine ranking can help a lot or do a lot of damage to a business website depending on the ranking of that page. What the ranking does is it finalizes whether your page will gain exposure and visibility through different major search engines such as Google. Without a good ranking people will not be able to see your site after searching with keywords. This can cause a business to lose profit, or even go under if the problem continues consistently.

• Ranking: Your ranking is based on how many people have visited your website. With more visitors, come more sales. Those sites with a larger amount of visitors are listed sooner on search engines. For example if I searched carpet installers  then a list relating those key words to web sites with the most traffic would come up, the most popular site being first.
• Search Engine Optimization: If you own a business then you want it to last and SEO services can help with that. Somewhat like a forum posting service, it improves your traffic flow and increases profit. Forum posting is when a business posts comments into forums and has links established from the forum page to the website. Both threads and posts are included in the URL of the site. Those who would like higher listing and ranking in search engines should research SEO service providers and other marketing methods.
• Forum Posting Services: These services are always in need of professional people who are capable and qualified to write relevant content. It is also important for these services to have professionals and possibly even their team posting to forums having discussions and debates.
• Important: It is also very important to ensure that you are working with the right professional. If not then you may end up redoing work which has already been done which costs money. As long as you work with the right person then the business will be able to save quite a bit of money among reaching many other goals.

Create Quality Backlinks by Hiring a Forum Posting Service

Forum posting is a useful way to create backlinks to your website. There are thousands of forums across the Internet, covering a wide range of categories. After finding a forum that deals with topics similar to your website, posting and responding to threads is a good way to increase your presence in the online community. By adding a link to your website with each forum entry, you are creating a backlink back to your website. As long as these forums are reputable websites, these will be quality backlinks. Most search engines use backlinks when determining a website’s search engine ranking. As with other website SEO techniques, forum posting can be tedious and time consuming. If you have the funds, then hiring a forum posting service can be of great use.

A good professional forum posting service should be familiar with all aspects of website SEO and know how to find the best forums for posting. You may even be able to find an affordable SEO company that offers forum posting and blog posting as part of their service. Whether you hire a forum posting service or do it on your own, make sure that the basic guidelines of forum posting are followed. Since the guidelines can vary from forum to forum, read the rules for commenting on each forum if there are any.

When posting on forums, the comments should be relevant to the thread. This means that you cannot just leave comments advertising your website. The comments should also include keywords that are relevant to your website. Finally, do not forget to include a link to your website with every comment. The same techniques used for forum posting can be used for blog posting. Find blog sites that cover the same topic as your website or blog.

Forum posting is an affordable SEO technique that can directly impact whether your website gets that first page placement on search engine results pages. Follow these suggestions and the guidelines of each site that you post comments on. While you might not see immediate results, over time, the visitors will start pouring in.

Everything Social — Bookmarking, Buttons, Banter — ALL of it Takes Time

As a business owner you probably don’t have a lot of time on your hands. You have employees to manage, accounts to keep straight and everything else that goes along with running the day-to-day business. You may have a website on top of that that you are trying to keep under control. The problem is you don’t have enough time to maintain it.

Search engine optimization takes a lot of time. It is easy to get to the top of Google for the business you are running in your local area, as long as you have the time to spend doing it. There are so many ways to go about getting ranked that it’s hard to keep them all straight, let alone find the time to implement the plan.

One of the things that needs to be addressed when you are working on your SEO is social bookmarking. Social bookmarks require constant maintenance. That is why they are called “social”. You need to stay in touch with your friends on Facebook, make new Tweets every day and do forum posting at least a few times per week. Who has the time to stay social when you’re also running a business?

You’re going to need to get some help with your social presence in order to raise your ranking in Google. You have two options here. You can either hire somebody in-house to do it or hire a professional company on the Internet. Using somebody in your business will cost a lot more than using a separate company.

Professional SEO companies have a system in place so that everything runs like clockwork. Things get done quickly and efficiently so that the work that needs to be done on your site is kept affordable. These companies also understand exactly what Google is looking for and operate based on this data alone. When you have somebody working in-house on your SEO projects it is easy to get sidetracked and spend too much time on Facebook or Twitter when other things need to be handled as well.

You’ll get more business as you become more social on the Internet. Word will spread about your company and what it has to offer. If you haven’t yet developed a social presence, now is definitely the time to do so.

Time Efficiency, Forum Posting, And Social Bookmarking — and Communities

OK, time to get into one of the more obscure elements of SEO work: time efficiency. It’s always hard to measure time efficiency — that is to say, how much rank a website gains per minute you spend working on backlinks for that site — but it’s vital.

If you spend 100 hours over a month and the website doesn’t meaningfully improve it’s rankings in that time, you’re clearly doing something wrong. On the other hand, if you’re seeing huge results for that 100 hours, you need to know what you did right so that you can repeat it for other sites in the future!

There aren’t a lot of studies done on this kind of thing, but around here we’ve noticed that two activities consistently seem to be pretty much the LEAST time-efficient things to do: forum posting and social bookmarking.

Now why would an SEO company talk about how bad it is to purchase two of their services? Because, as you might have guessed, I’m about to flip the script on you.

You see, by combining forum posting and social bookmarking, you can create side benefits that far outweigh their value in terms of improving your rankings directly. Both of them engage a very powerful force that most SEO gurus will rarely ever mention: communities.

Communities are groups of people online who gather to talk about a specific topic. If you’ve ever been part of a message board devoted to a single topic — whether it’s ‘Elements The Game’ or ‘How To The Economy’ — you know how rabid the posters on a dedicated forum can be. They also generally have a place where you can post links to stuff you like or whatnot.

Social bookmarking sites, on the other hand, have Vote buttons that allow you to give something a positive bump. Get enough votes, and your link might make it into some list of daily, weekly, or monthly Top X in a given category. If that happens, the result is an instant and long-lasting surge in traffic through that site.

See where this is going? If you can get popular on a forum related to your subject, create some material that the forum-goers would like, and then link to a social bookmarking site that links to the material you created, you can essentially get a huge pile of free votes from the forum-goers. Make it into the list with those free votes, and all that ‘lost’ time efficiency goes out that window as the traffic surges in.

Pretty neat, huh?

Ultimate Conversions: Targeted Email Marketing From The Outside In

Targeted Email Marketing (TEM) is NOT typically part of the services offered by a website SEO company. That’s because it’s not actually SEO — there is nothing about TEM that will get your website ranked any higher for anything anywhere.

What TEM is, however, is a way of improving the effectiveness of any SEO you’ve already done. That’s because of a simple calculation:

Traffic * Conversion Rate = Sales

What that means is that if you have 200 visitors, and you convert 3% of them, you’ve just made 6 sales. You can improve your number of sales by getting more traffic, or you can do it by improving your conversion rate. SEO is designed to get you more traffic — but at some point, you’ll make more money by improving your conversion rate than you will by adding another 4 or 5 visitors per day.

So, Targeted Email Marketing. Have you ever seen a website that offers you something for free, but asks you to put in your name and Email address in order to get it? That’s TEM in action. If you’ve ever done this, you know that the next step is to receive an Email that says “hey, is it cool that you continue to receive Email from this website?”, and you have to say “yes” in order to get the free thing.

What you’ve just done is confirm via Email that any further Emails the webmaster of that site sends you aren’t spam and you accept his right to send them to you. From his perspective, he now has a ‘hook’ in you. He can send you an Email whenever he has a new sale, a new product, or even just because he wants to impress you with how knowledgeable and competent he is in his field.

As you can imagine, it’s a killer way to turn visitors into buyers, because you can remind them of your product and your offer every week…forever! You can keep trying different angles until you find one that sticks. Every time you throw an Email out to your TEM list, you get a bunch of them back on your website for another chance at that 3% conversion rate.

That’s the kind of tool that SEO companies typically overlook because they’re focused on traffic, but if you find an SEO company that offers TEM as a service, you know you’ve got someone who is focused on improving your profits from every possible angle — a great find.

Social Bookmarking Is a Sucker’s Game — Isn’t It?

There’s been a lot of changes to the social bookmarking game in the past few years. Even as far back as Google’s addition of the nofollow tag, social bookmarking pages have been declared ‘dead’ over and over again by various SEO gurus. Yet somehow, it keeps coming back like a zombie in a B-grade horror movie. The fact is that social bookmarking might not be the utterly amazing backlink that it was when Digg and del.ici.ous first invented the term, but they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

The reasons why are several, but the big ones are very big.

Control
A social bookmark gives you control over two things that are very important: the context around your link (what many organic SEO experts like to call “Latent Semantic Indexing” or “LSI”), and the actual anchor text of the link itself. Every time you get a link to your site, Google looks at the anchor text and the LSI to determine how relevant the linking page is to your website, and modified the link’s strength based on the relevance. That makes controllable links much stronger than uncontrollable ones.

Persistence
There’s nothing like investing a few thousand dollars in a massive and complex link building campaign and then discovering six months later than half of the sites you linked from have either disappeared or at least eliminated your links. That’s a lot of money and time down the drain. Mercifully, social bookmarking sites don’t do that. They are persistent, which means every well-controlled link you build on a social bookmarking site is here to stay.

Panda
Yes, I said Panda. Panda is the latest Google toy, and it’s designed to make sites more ‘user-friendly’. One of the things that the Goog decided when they built Panda was that social bookmarking buttons are totally cool to have featured prominently on a website (as opposed to, say, AdWords blocks or banner ads.) That means that, as the Web adapts to the latest twist Google has for us, social bookmarking is only going to get more and more used, which means social bookmarks will get more authority. What more do you need to know?

Who Else Should Be Looking Into Custom Blog Creation?

Custom blog creation is the name of a service that SEO companies have been selling to small businesses for years. It’s a very dependable way to improve a website’s rankings for particular keywords, which is exactly why it’s used — but it’s also relatively easy and inexpensive, which is why it’s marketed as a regular component of small business SEO.

A customized blog allows you to have content pages (which attract surfers) that then link back to your main site with controllable context and controllable anchor text. That, in turn, makes the site more likely to rank for the keywords that you use as anchor text. Thus, blogs serve as both an SEO tool and as part of your sales funnel — exactly the kind of multipurpose power that small businesses need in their tools. But there are other entities who should be looking into custom blog creation as well.

Individuals
If you’re a freelancer looking to make a name for yourself, one of the biggest steps you can take on the road to stable success is to build yourself a website. People who want to learn about you — to decide whether to hire you — are going to Google you; that’s just a fact of life. You can let them find your Facebook page with your drunken college pictures, or you can present them a professional face.

Having a blog attached to that professional face is a great way to show your potential employers that you know your game. Write about what you do, about your challenges and your victories, and about the details of whatever skill you apply on a regular basis. As before, not only do you get to show off, but you can optimize your website for killer keywords at the same time.

Public Entities
It’s one thing to be in business, but the public sector is another area entirely. One thing that both groups seem to consistently need, however, is more attention. If you happen to be a hospital director, a college principal, or the head of any other public institution, you might not be aware of just how easy it is to focus the right eyes on your Web presence: all you need is a blog. Everything said above applies just as well to an .edu or an .org than it does to a .com — don’t hesitate!

When and Why To Put All You’ve Got into Article Writing and Submission

There is ample evidence for anyone out there looking that article writing and submission is a killer SEO tactic. The reasons are pretty simple: content is king, control is key, and article directories are heavyweights.

Content is King
Google loves content. If you write an article that talks intelligently about facts that aren’t already discussed to death elsewhere on the Internet, Google will love you. You’ll rank well for quite a few keywords, and people will see your words. Put a decent call to action at the bottom with a link to your site, and you’re likely to get quite a few clickthroughs.

Control is Key
When you create a backlink to your site, Google uses it to decide what your site is about. Having a backlink to a site about golf from a site about pit bulls confuses Google. When you write an article, you control the context of your backlink perfectly, giving Google a strong signal about what your site is about. Strong signals mean better ranking.

Article Directories are Heavyweights
Article directories are classic examples of what Google called “authority sites” — their pages are considered pretty trustworthy. What that means is that every link you get from a respected article directory gives your site a lot of ‘juice’.

So the question is When and Why to put your effort into writing articles (as opposed to building backlinks by doing some other form of website SEO)? The answer isn’t what you might think. The thing about article writing and distribution is that it takes a lot of time and effort per article. Articles should be high on your priority list if and when your ‘SEO basics’ are already taken care of. Before you get heavy into articles, make sure you’ve got a natural link profile consisting of:

• • Social bookmarks
  • Forum posts
  • Blog posts
  • Blog comments
  • Web 2.0 properties
  • Directory entries
  • RSS aggregations
  • Link exchanges
  • and Videos

Once your backlink structure has the low-effort, high-rankings-impact backlinks above built, then and only then should you invest significant money into getting articles written and submitted Getting there might take a month or three, but the effect of good articles backed up by a solid link profile is pure gold.

First Page Placement Doesn’t Mean Automatic Success

There’s a lot of emphasis put on first page placement by SEO companies. Like many industries, they have a strong motivation to sell you on the idea that they can solve all of your problems. In the Web Wide World, “all your problems” seem to spring from a single source: not enough traffic.

So long as X% of visitors convert into sales, then more traffic equals more money. It seems pretty simple. If only it really were. But it’s easily possible — in the case of someone unfamiliar with the basics of marketing, even downright probable — that you can get a site listed on the first page of a decent keyword and get nothing for it.

There are a few ways that can happen. The first is if you go the ‘sponsored placement’ route. That is, pay-per-click (or PPC) marketing. With PPC, every time a surfer clicks on your advertisement, you pay a few cents. They end up on your page. But if they don’t buy anything from your page, you lose those few cents. Over hundreds of clicks per day, that can add up pretty fast.

That’s why, if you’re going to go the PPC route, it makes sense to hire a PPC management team that knows their stuff. They can keep costs down and traffic high at the same time — something that’s virtually impossible for a webmaster working alone.

Another way that you can waste a valuable first page placement is by having a page that simply doesn’t convert well. If you manage to do enough organic SEO to get real regular search traffic to your site on a regular basis (virtually the only functional alternative to PPC), you still need them to buy stuff.

There are a lot of ways to encourage them to convert. Learning sales language and call-to-action prompts are good. Belcher buttons (look up) are virtually mandatory. Using a gimmick like a web presenter or a focus video can work well in the right fields. Regardless of how you do it, you have to pay attention to conversions as well as traffic. Only then will your first page placement really mean what the marketers want you to believe it will.

Go Local! Internet Marketing for Brick and Mortar Businesses

Local internet marketing isn’t a new phenomenon if you’re familiar with online marketing in general — but if you’re a brick and mortar business just starting to build your online presence, you might be curious what the hoopla is about. There’s a lot of people out there talking in a lot of very excited voices about online marketing; this is the straight scoop.

“Reach audiences worldwide! Have an online storefront open 24/7/265!”
You’ll hear this one a lot. The truth couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, a website could potentially get hits from Pak Gwak Kai or Orniok, but the fact is that Google knows where you live. Google isn’t going to show your trading-card store to someone searching for rookie Chesbro if that person is searching from Latvia. They’re going to show that guy a store in Latvia. Google isn’t dumb.

On the other hand, if you deliberately include your location in all of your marketing strategies — what we call local internet marketing — you’ll end up showing up high on the results pages whenever anyone searches for “trading cards in Los Angeles”. SEO gets a lot easier when you keep it local.

“All you need to make money is a website and some traffic! It just runs itself!”
Yeah. That’s kind of like saying all you need to run the United States is an Oval Office and the title of President. It’s easy to say, but actually getting those things isn’t terribly easy. I mean, putting up a website is pretty easy, but then you also have to have a website that people will buy stuff from. That’s harder.

Also, getting traffic to come to that site isn’t all that easy, either. The best way to go about it is to get your site ranked on various relevant Google searches, but that means paying for someone to optimize your site for those keywords. Because local keywords are much lower competition than broad keywords, they’re much quicker and much cheaper to rank for — making local internet marketing a much smarter option.

What It Mean to Be Affordable? SEO and Cashflow Economics

Let’s just get one thing clear: the economy ain’t recovering. It’s not a matter of time, it doesn’t matter who’s in office — the economy isn’t going to recover for decades. That means that every single entrepreneur who tries to get started online is looking for the same thing: affordable SEO.

But what is affordable SEO? Affordable means a lot of things to a lot of different people. If you’ve got a J.O.B., affordable means it’s within your monthly budget. If you’re rich, affordable means it’s purchasable. If you’re an entrepreneur, however, affordable means it fits within your cashflow.

That’s because an entrepreneur has to deal with invoices — both incoming and outgoing –that are much less reliable than a paycheck. Sometimes, all of an entrepreneur’s money comes in at once; sometimes, it trickles in bit by bit every day. The question for an entrepreneur isn’t whether something is affordable overall; it’s whether the payment can be spread over a long enough time that there’s never a cashflow issue generated when the payment comes due.

In that way, most forms of organic SEO are still affordable to most entrepreneurs. Sure, there are always SEO companies who want you to pay three large on the first of every month to get their ultra-platinum superservice, but they’re dying if not dead. Real SEO companies have options.

Of course, you still need to have a bit of an idea what your cashflow needs will be — but the beauty of SEO is that it’s cumulative. From a cashflow perspective, that means you can get a little bit done when you have a little money, or if you catch a lucky break, you can buy a better service for a month or two. SEO isn’t a startup cost, that must be paid all at once — it’s not even like a bill that has to be paid every month.

What SEO is is a marketing expense — and any business guru will tell you what when money is tight, the best place to put your money is in advertising. How else are you supposed to start bringing money in? Especially online, SEO is the key to traffic which is the key to sales.

In the end, then, SEO is affordable when it doesn’t ruin your cashflow, and that’s the only consideration, because every ‘unit’ of SEO you purchase promises future income. The ‘right’ move, then, is to buy what you can afford when you can afford it, consistently.

Google’s Games: Is Organic SEO Still Viable?

I just heard the worst words an SEO guy could ever hope to hear: a client told me on the phone that “organic SEO just isn’t working anymore.” He was talking, as you might have guessed from the title, about Panda.

If you’ve never heard of Panda, here’s the story. A Google software engineer named SomethingLongAndIndian Panda came up with a learning algorithm that keys off of the “user-friendliness” of a webpage. The Goog did a bunch of research into what pisses users off about websites, and turned it into a bunch of “do-nots”, taught the Panda algorithm about them, and then let Panda inform the Google main algorithm about website rankings.

The end result? If your webpage isn’t easy to use — and that means easy on the eyes, not just easy to find the “buy now” button — it won’t rank well, period. There are a few things that Panda takes a look at that aren’t on the traditional list of website SEO rules:

Readability
In other words, is your content interrupted by crap? Adwords, banners, even poorly-located navigation bars are considered ‘no-go’ by Panda. If you want an example of a website that reoptimized to Panda’s standards, go look at any article on EZineArticles.com. There’s an author pic, an unobtrusive info panel with social buttons, and that’s it until after all of the content. All of the crap that the reader might consider unimportant comes at the bottom.

Fat Content
It used to be that a 200 word article was adequate for SEO purposes — not anymore. Panda hates thin content. You’d better have at least 400-600 words on a webpage if you expect Panda to consider it quality enough to get a decent ranking, straight up.

Broad Quality
Panda also knows your sister. Or rather, your webpage’s sister. While Panda gives a quality score to every page, it also gives a quality score to an entire site, and the two modify each other. So if you have one Panda-perfect page on an otherwise horrible site, you can’t expect it to rank. Quality has to be across all pages.

In the end, I told that client of mine that he had no idea what he was talking about. The truth of the matter is this: Panda isn’t a whole new set of rules — all of the old rules are still there, and they still work. We just have a few more points to take into consideration, that’s all.

PPC Management And The Power of Sponsored Placement

Pay per click marketing is an incredibly powerful tool under a limited set of circumstances — you need to have a decent starting budget, a site that converts like gangbusters, and a strong PPC management team on your side. Basically, if you’re a starting webmaster and you’re canny enough to be utilizing conversion tools like targeted Email marketing, quality Flash banners, a Web Presenter, and the like, you’re probably in the right place to make the most of PPC advertising.

The thing about pay per click is that there is very little middle ground. Few people break even on Google Adwords or it’s various competitors. They either have a PPC management team that knows how to pick the right bids and (more importantly) the right keywords, or they don’t — and the difference is like investing with Warren Buffett versus investing in lottery tickets. Because there are a lot of losers in that equation, PPC has gotten a bad rap in recent years, but think for a second about what it does.

You set up an ad, and you attach it to a keyword. Anytime someone searches for that keyword, your ad appears on the first page, right next to the first organic results. If they click that ad, you pay a few cents or a few bucks if it’s a popular keyword. If they don’t, you pay nothing.

That’s pretty much the definition of targeted traffic, and if you do a decent job of choosing your keywords — making sure that you’re not paying in the dollars for traffic of the tire-kicking variety rather than the purchasing variety — you can assure a pretty good conversion rate from it.

There’s not many other tools out there that can get your website in front of that many people who are sure to be interested in your site — and all of them will make you pay per exposure, not per person who actually visits your site. That’s a lot of impact from a single tool — which makes it very worth it to accept the risks, especially if you can find some talented PPC management to mitigate those risks for you.

5 Reasons Targeted Email Marketing Makes Good Money

Targeted Email marketing might seem like it’s outside of the range of a typical organic SEO company — after all, it’s not SEO. There’s nothing about Email marketing that makes you rank higher for a keyword, or improves the amount or quality of traffic to your website. What it does do, however, is make phat money. Here’s why.

Targeted Email Marketing lures customers in. They give you their Email address in exchange for something — usually relevant information. From the moment they do that, you have their permission to Email them, which means you can remind them that you exist and that they have a problem you can solve.

Targeted Email Marketing establishes your expertise. A good Email marketer knows that if they hit the customer with a call-to-action right away, they’ll bail. That’s why they spend a few to several emails just plying them with information. Not only does it give them a sense of security, but it convinces them that you know your stuff.

Targeted Email Marketing hits them where it hurts. People don’t sign up for emailing lists because it’s fun — they do it because they have a problem that needs solving. By continuously but softly needling that need, you bring it to prominence in their lives. That way, when you hit the call-to-action button, they’re ready.

Targeted Email Marketing brings them back over and over again. As soon as someone has purchased your product, they get added to a special, second Emailing list for “proven customers”. What that means to you is that they’ve proven they’re willing to give you money — and in all likelihood, they’ll be wiling to do it again if you hit them up with another call to action.

Targeted Email Marketing doesn’t ever end. Unless you irritate someone enough that they unsubscribe from your list — or you run out of Emails to send them — people will stay on your list for years. You never know what will hit their button and make them get out their wallets, but with this tool, you’ll never stop giving them good reasons.

Targeted Email marketing is amazing, and if you’re not using it, you need to talk to your organic SEO company about it today.

Leveraging The Incredible Power of Article Writing and Distribution

Of all of the services that most typical affordable SEO companies offer these days, few have the potential of a talented article writing and distribution crew. Such a group of people — a combination of researchers, writers, submission experts, and sometimes spinners or other specialists — can turn the slow but powerful process of SEO into something that can generate traffic and sales from day one.

A well written article is almost perfect SEO entity. It offers control over the anchor text, control over the link’s environment in terms of latent semantic indexing, an authoritative page (the article directory) on an established site, and of course it links to exactly where you want it to link to. That’s not insignificant in any way, and yet the effort required to write a really good article scares many people away. That’s too bad, because if all they’re considering is the SEO factor, they’re missing out on a large part of the power of article writing and distribution.

Part of the story comes from the potential of a given article to rank higher than your page on the search engines. Google “article writing and distribution”, for example, and you’ll find that several entries on the first page are blogs that point at other pages — the pages that are actually trying to rank for that particular keyword. That’s only one example, of course, there are literally millions of keywords for which an EzineArticle or some other directory page or blog is sourcing traffic to its linked page.

Another aspect of the power of article writing is in the strength of building a personal brand. One of the things that Internet customers are very ready to do is distrust. In order to overcome the basic assumption that you’re a marketer rather than someone who really knows about Betta fish, you have to display that knowledge. Getting a few dozen articles written about the little fishies and getting your name attached to them on some very public sites goes a long way toward giving yourself an air of credibility.

A Three Step Plan to First Page Placement

First page placement isn’t some lofty goal that you should hold yourself to attaining ‘someday’ — though for many a novice webmaster, it certainly seems that way. Rather, first page placement is something that can and should be obtained immediately and held onto through a variety of different methods as time goes by.

Step one: Pay Per Click advertising
Pay per click (PPC) advertising can sound like a very scary investment for anyone not talented in the arena. Indeed, thousands of webmasters who have done solo into the realm of PPC have lost everything — but the smart ones who hire a good PPC management team have found that the profits to be gained from the instant ‘sponsored’ placement it provides more than make up for the cost.

PPC gets you onto the first page on day one — and yes, it costs money to get there, but the money you make when you have a PPC manager working the game for you is more than it costs to pay the manager and the bid costs.

Step two: Indirect Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization takes some significant amount of time to kick in, so it can’t do what PPC does for you. The first result of your Search Engine Optimization will be that pages that aren’t actually yours will rank for certain keywords. For example, it’s not uncommon for an article that you turn in to EzineArticles to rank higher for your chosen keyword than your own page does at first. You’ll still get considerable traffic and sales from these indirect rankings, but it’s only the beginning.

Step three: Direct Search Engine Optimization
Give it six or twelve months, and you’ll find that your SEO starts to pull in a lot of organic traffic, because YOUR page is achieving first page placements for a variety of your keywords. Even while you’re exploiting the benefits of PPC, you’ll feel the power of the SEO adding more and more to your business over time. Eventually, you’ll reach a point where your business comes more from your SEO efforts than it does from your PPC campaign.

Is Mobile Website Design Going The Way of Hidden Text?

You might remember the days of hidden text on the Internet — it was one of the earliest forms of black hat website SEO. Webmasters would want their site to rank highly for a pile of keywords, so they’d just copy the keyword and several similar phrases dozens of times each and make the text color the same as the background color, so human eyes never saw it (unless you hit Control A). The search engines of a decade ago ate that stuff up. Then along came Google and they killed it as swiftly and surely as Seal Team Six killed Osama Bin Laden.

So what does this have to do with mobile website design? Simple — some experts are starting to think that mobile website design will soon be a dead art, like speaking in Latin or giving your own car a tune-up.

Mobile website design exploded with the creation of the iPhone and other similar web-capable smartphones. Such devices couldn’t quite handle a normal website, so a special language was developed that displayed the mobile version of a page if it was informed that the page was being accessed by a mobile device. The mobile version of the page had fewer pictures, less media to load, and was generally stripped down.

(In a comedic twist, at one point the web browser Opera was being used in so many devices that many webpages always showed Opera users the mobile version of a page, even if they were actually on a standard computer. That caused a lot of chaos until it got sorted out.)

The problem, of course, is that now as we move boldly forward into the realm of the 5G phone networks and mobile devices that can handle all of the pictures and media of a normal webpage, the need for special mobile pages is fading quickly. On the other hand, however, there are a lot of people who don’t have one of these new omnicapable devices — heck, there are people out there who are still fighting getting even one of those super cheap Jitterbug cell phones. So it’s safe to say that while mobile website design might be losing a little bit of importance, it will still have a place for years to come.