Yahoo pay per click (also known as Yahoo search marketing) is one of the leading Pay Per Click Networks available to advertisers. Prior to Google Adwords, Yahoo pay per click was the leading pay per click engine. The Yahoo ppc Network allows you to advertise on sites like:
Yahoo!
AltaVista
CNN
InfoSpace
If you are not using Yahoo pay per click you are missing out on a great audience of costumers, on some niches the costumers that you can get on Yahoo will buy much better than those on Google.
All the top marketers are using Yahoo pay per click together with Google Adwords. If you are looking to expand your advertising campaigns and reach a larger audience, Yahoo pay per click is your best choice as the quality of traffic is very good.
Yahoo pay per click has built a new interface which is very similar to the Google Adwords one. You also allowed to use more characters within your ad title and description than Google.
Another great services that Yahoo has for you are: Yahoo domains, great web hosting and eCommerce solutions but of course that you can only use the Yahoo per pay click (Yahoo search marketing).
If you always wanted to know what is affiliate marketing? Here is a short explanation about affiliate marketing:
Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.
Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.
The good news are that you can also become an affiliate marketer – and believe me, it pays much better than pay per click or any other form of making money online.
Most affiliates are using either Clickbank or CJ but there are many great networks out there with much less competition that can bring you some nice income like: Performics.com
You can also learn more about other ways to make money and becoming a better affiliate marketer for free by subscribing to this great Make money online list.
A nice example for affiliate marketing which really helps you understand what is it all about is this traveling company that offers people money for marketing the company – just watch the video clip.
So now that you know what is affiliate marketing – go and make some real money by putting it to work.
How can you write or find the articles that sell on Squidoo? Well, that’s pretty simple all you need is to master the basics of article marketing on squidoo.
So here are tips to pay attention to:
Give great content on your topic. People come to your lens for content and not in order to buy, but if you’ll have great content they are more likely to listen to your recommendations.
Choose the leading phrase of your lens – one of the main factors that will determine if your lens will be on of those articles that sell on Squidoo is the amount of traffic your lens gets from search engines – so you want your lens to appear high in the search results pages.
Check your key phrase on Overture to see if people are searching for it – if they don’t then look for a key phrase that has a lot of searches.
Check the key phrase in Google.com – enter “key phrase” to Google and check how many search results there are. If its less than 5,000 that’s good.
Make sure that in the first page of the search results there isn’t a Squidoo lens already.
Make your key phrase your lens title.
Make your key phrase your introduction module title.
Enter your key phrase to the first paragraph of your lens and to the last paragraph of your lens.
These are truly the basics of article marketing on Squidoo, if you want to learn how to make more out of Squidoo – check out John Reese’s favourite Squidoo guide.
Years in the internet marketing business: Since 2001 Internet marketing Specialty: Wealthy affiliate community manager
Kyle studied computer science in school and pretty fast found himself marketing rather than programming. Kyle began marketing on the internet in college. In September, 2005 he and Carson opened the Wealthy Affiliate community where people learn how to become successful affiliates online.
During the last years Kyle & Carson developed 3 top products to help their affiliate community members to succeed online.
Years in the internet marketing business: Since 2001
Internet marketing Specialty: Wealthy affiliate community manager
Carson studied computer science in school and pretty fast found himself marketing rather than programming. Carson began marketing on the internet in college. In September, 2005 he and Kyleopened the Wealthy Affiliate community where people learn how to become successful affiliates online.
During the last years Kyle & Carson developed 3 top products to help their affiliate community members to succeed online.
Direct marketing definition – Direct marketing is the type of marketing where you send your messages to your consumers without any intervention and in your message you insert a strong call to action thus making the success of the campaign easily measurable.
Top 3 Reasons Why Direct marketing Works
1. You Save on Media
In direct marketing you are directing your messages straight to your consumers with no media intervention
2. You can messaure success
In direct marketing you can mesaure your success very accurately
3. You can track your consumers actions
In direct marketing you can track your consumers actions and improve yourself gradually
To conclude – if you are not using direct marketing as one of your marketing channels then you should start learning how to use it today. Especially when it is so easy to create your marketing direct internet campaign. So I hope now you know what is direct marketing and how you can use it right.
Track web site visitors it’s the only way to increase conversions. If you don’t track your web site visitors you are loosing a lot of important information.
Here are a few tracking software solutions to check out:
Many people make the mistake of choosing a highly competitive niche and developing a business idea around it, only to find that the market segment is so inundated and crowded with competitors that it’s virtually impossible for a new comer to make any money at all. Many new comers start off by choosing a niche that is far too broad and as a result far too crowded. If you’re thinking of building a niche marketing website, a quick check using any online keyword research tool will tell you if this is the case. (maybe you should define direct marketing and meaning of direct marketing)
Even if you get there first and discover a unique tight niche and create products and services to offer your customers, the existing internet marketers will notice you have discovered a profitable market segment, and you will soon find yourself having to compete with them. In no time at all when someone searches for a keyword similar to yours, they’ll be amazed to find that there are so many other websites serving the same customers.
Before you start building a niche website, doing a little keyword research using an online keyword utility will return the number of web pages with a similar theme and which contain roughly the same content, this number being an indication of the competition you are facing. Bear in mind that even if the niche is narrow and tightly focused, it will start to become crowded even if only two or three new businesses start working on the same niche.
Unfortunately the plain truth is if you dominate a profitable niche market you will not be able to keep it a secret for long. No niche can be kept in absolute secrecy forever: there are too many smart people out there on the internet who all want to get their hands on a slice of the pie.
To keep your niche market profitable you need a constant stream of ready to buy customers, and one way to do this is to capitalize on search engine traffic. Use a good quality keyword research utility to uncover all the different words and phrases people use when searching for information on the internet. Next you create web pages which are optimized for these terms (known as keywords).
A point to bear in mind is some keyword research tools use the data from pay per click search engines to calculate the number of searches conducted for a given keyword, and this figure is not that realistic. Keyword research utilities such as WordTracker use data from the major metacrawlers like Dogpile to calculate very realistic keyword search statistics, and will give you the number of times any given keyword or phrase was searched for during the previous three months and a predicted count for the next 24 hours.
Each of these keyword research utilities maintains a very powerful database of raw data for your subsequent research. If the niche is starting to get too big, then the number of searches on your keywords will be in the thousands. Careful analysis will also reveal the number of websites in the niche, which will be a large number if your niche is crowded.
You can also use pay per click search engines to drive traffic to your website, but it’s worth remembering that popular keywords are expensive. If the niche is profitable, your competitors will be prepared to pay hefty sums to buy those keywords. The only way you are going to get cheap pay per click traffic is by finding keywords which your competitors aren’t using. Unfortunately these little known keywords won’t be popular so you’ll need to find a lot of them to get a reasonable amount of traffic to your niche site.
As your niche gets more and more crowded with new competitors these pay per click keywords will become progressively more expensive. There will be those new competitors who understand the value of keyword research and will discover the same keywords you are using. This will reduce the traffic to your website and so reduce the amount of money you can make.
A point will be reached when the niche becomes so competitive it is no longer profitable, and you will either have to abandon the niche or discover new methods of getting customers to your website.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is the fastest growing internet advertising media to date. The popular advertising technique of PPC involves placing sponsored links that are usually in the form of text ads on various websites, advertising networks, and also on search engine results pages. The auto-generated text ads are typically positioned near search results and the advertiser pays a certain cost for each visitor that click through on the link or banner to visit the advertiser’s web page. There are some businesses that rely solely on PPC advertising to earn money online, thus proving its effectiveness as a powerful marketing tool. And you dont even need to start to understand How does Google rank pages…
Generally, PPC advertising is all about bidding for the position you want on search engine results and listings. Advertisers do this by bidding on keywords or phrases that are relevant to their products or services. The higher the bid, the higher the position on the search results, the more people will find the ad and click on it to go to their websites. Some people call this “keyword auctioning”. Advertisers would then pay the bidding price every time a visitor clicks through to land on the webpage.
Pay Per Click advertising normally involves the following steps. First, choosing and setting up an account with a PPC search engine followed by depositing funds into the account. Next, creating a keyword list of specific keywords or phrases you want to bid for where your listings will appear on the results pages of the search engine. Then you carry on to bid on the ad position for the keywords or phrases you selected. Next, you write a relevant and compelling ad copy to entice visitors to click through. You then define which page you want the visitor to land on after clicking through. Finally, you confirm and place the advertisements on the search engine.
There are many advantages to Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, making it an effective marketing tool to promote your business and earn money online. Some of them are listed below:
1. Immediate Traffic PPC advertisements are implemented almost instantly thereby giving you an instant onslaught of traffic within the shortest time possible to earn money online.
2. Getting Highly Targeted Traffic
PPC advertising can provide you with a flood of qualified highly targeted traffic. Visitors who click on your ads are actually looking for the specific product or service that you are offering thereby increasing your chance to convert the visitor into a customer and earn money online faster.
3. Tracking Your Investment
Most PPC advertising come with a tracking system that will determine exactly how many visitors click through to your website and which keyword or phrase they found your advertisement on. Some tracking systems also allow you to determine the time spent by the visitor on your site and the number of pages they viewed. These are valuable tools in determining statistics such as click through rate (CTR), conversion rate and return on investment (ROI) which will increase your ability to earn money online.
The following are some of the important points to consider when planning a pay per click campaign.
1. Know Your Product
Knowledge of your product or service is critical to a setting up a good PPC campaign.
2. Stay within Your Budget
Determine your daily or monthly budget and stick with it. This means keeping your budget in mind and avoiding bidding wars whenever possible.
3. Bid the Right Amount
You need to master the art of bidding. A bid that is too high can easily exhaust your entire budget, while a bid that is too low can make you lose the coveted position.
4. Watch the Bottom Line
Measure your profit margin against your spending or expenses. Know when to stop and terminate your PPC campaign. If conversion is too low then spending more money on advertising is not advisable.
5. Building a Good Keyword List
Select the right keywords and phrases to bid for. Research your keywords well using existing search terms and online keyword suggestion tools. Know which are the terms that are mostly used by your customers when searching for your product or service. Concentrate on specific keywords or phrases and not broad ones.
6. Use an Effective Landing Page
A good landing page, be it a sales page or a lead capture page, is crucial to the success of a PPC campaign. The conversion rate will determine if you can earn money online successfully with PPC advertising.
Mastering the art of advertising with PPC can boost your profits and allow you to earn money online quickly and easily. With PPC as a powerful marketing tool in your arsenal, you can be sure to crush your competition and dominate your niche to earn money online successfully.
Since starting on this journey of internet marketing, I can truly say that it has changed my life forever. This is the most rewarding thing that I have ever done.
What I love the most about having an internet home business is the FUN factor. This has added “spice” to my life, it’s very addictive, and I find that I just don’t want to do anything else (including the housework until it gets out of control).
Internet marketing is very challenging. It’s not easy to learn and apply, especially when you first start out, for example you must pretty fast to start and grab a lot of new concepts like How does Google rank pages. But that’s what keeps it interesting. If it was really easy, everyone would be doing it and it’d soon become boring and lose its appeal. Because it is challenging, it tends to bring out the best in you and you begin to find resources (inside yourself and all around you) that you never knew existed.
One of the big things for me in starting an online business was and still is the freedom aspect. Not having a boss, getting to work from the comfort of your home in your own hours, and to take days off if you want to. Keep in mind though that, although you don’t have a boss, YOU are the boss. You need to put work and effort into YOUR home business, and stay motivated if you want to grow your business and achieve great things for it. The more you put into it the more you will get out of it. Treat it as a real business and not a hobby. If you “bludge”, you’re not going to make money and you might as well go back to a “normal” job.
I’ve found that there is such a huge learning curve with internet marketing, one where you never stop learning and never stop growing. I’m learning so much about the internet, forums, writing and submitting articles, advertising online, blogging, subscriber lists and autoresponders. I’m also learning more about dealing with setbacks, focusing on the “target”, taking continual and persistent action, and keeping the momentum going no matter what. As with anything, the learning never stops, and I’ve still got a long way to go. For example, HTML, building web pages, and adsense are things that I haven’t learned or attempted as yet.
A big bonus for me personally has been the satisfaction of helping others, by providing services and products that add value to people’s lives and help them to progress personally and financially as well. And, hopefully start these people into a successful and rewarding life in an online business of their own. To know that I can reach my highest potential and help others do the same has got to be the best feeling in the world.
I have never had so much hope for the future as I do now since starting an online business. In a world of such uncertainty, where job security is a thing of the past and debt is higher than ever, it’s great to know that I have my “extra income” and the potential to lead a very comfortable life. More and more people are getting on the internet every day and spending money online. It’s a growing trend. Also, the number of people wanting to work at home is increasing dramatically. I’m positioning myself to benefit from this trend, now and in the future.
I also own and run a small offline business, so the online business fits in perfectly with this (for now). Later, as the online business grows more and more, I’ll probably sell the offline business so that I can put more into the internet marketing and also to have more leisure time. Besides, life is there to enjoy.
Life is a game and internet marketing is a game. I think it’s a game worth playing, and one that I intend to play to the best of my ability. To find something that’s rewarding, that you love doing, and where you are helping people as well, (and getting paid to do it) is what life is all about. If it’s something that you would like to do, take action and go for it.
Andrew Jones has been a business owner for the past 10 years, and is now a Plug-In Profit Site owner. To find the best home based business ideas and opportunities so you can work at home visit: http://www.EasyCash-At-Home.com
Years in the internet marketing business: Since 2004
Internet marketing Specialty: Viral Marketing.
Mike Filsaime worked as a general manager in the automobile industry for 14 years (1990- 2004). On October 2002 Mike came across the Instant Internet Empires website by Frank Kern. Back then he understood 2 main things: you can make money on the net and getting people to opt in is more important than selling them a product.
On June 2003 Mike Filsaime realised his first product and named it Carbon-Copy-Marketing. 6 months later on December Mike Filsaime hits $25K a month for the first time with his first membership site – Don’t touch my ads. Mike’s third launch takes place 5 months later on May 2004 – the MyViralAds.com site. The third successful launch brings Mike to quit his day job in the automobile industry and to become a full time affiliate marketer.
3 months after quitting his job on August 2004 Mike reads John Reese’s 1 Man report where John Reeseexplains how one man with one product made one million dollars in one day. John presses everyone to follow their dreams and make them come true.
Mike Filsaime takes that advice seriously and on October 3rd 2004 he makes his first $100k month. Later that year Mike Filsaime meets Gary Ambrose and registers the domain ButterflyMarketing.com only to launch it almost a year and a half later.
On January 2005 Mike Filsaime hooks up with Stephen Pierce to make a teleseminar and on March 2005 Mike starts working on his first main event internet marketing seminar which goes live on September 2005 and making Mike one of the leading mentors in the internet marketing industry. During his seminars Mike starts to build the expectation around his butterfly marketing launch.
ButterflyMarketing.com launches on January 31st 2006 and makes Mike Filsaime $1M in sales in 5 days.
Years in the internet marketing business: Over 25 years in marketing in general and the over 5 years in the internet marketing consulting business.
Internet marketing Specialty: Direct marketing.
Jay Abraham is the man that can make a difference in your company’s bottom line. No matter what industry for $5,000 an hour Jay Abraham can make miracles for your business.
On March, 2000 the Jay Abraham was listed on Forbes Magazine as a top executive coach that can take an underperforming business and turn it into a sales and marketing wonder machine.
Some say that one of the best students that Jay had was Mike Filsaimebut i am not so sure about this fact.
Jay Abraham’s leading product: Jay Abrahame Book Online which sales for only $97 and that’s cheap compared to a $5,000 per hour.
Want to make money while directing more traffic to your website? You might consider pay per click advertising streams. They can direct Internet users who might want to pay for your information or products to your site at the same time you offer advertising space to sites your users might be interested in. Before you sign up with the first pay per click or affiliate program you see, do your homework and i am not just talking about knowing How does Google rank pages.
Google AdSense is the most popular pay per click program out there today. It has the benefits of being in the game for a long time and offering a great deal of research and development into their keyword matching. But what if you have been removed from Google AdSense or just want to branch out and try other services as well? There are other options out there.
Yahoo ppc! also has a pay per click program, theirs is called Yahoo pay per click! Publisher Network. It works similarly to Google’s AdSense program but has only recently come onto the scene. Users of both AdSense and Publisher Network have found that, though Google is quicker to remove an advertiser, they are still the most valuable. The Yahoo! service is likely not far behind, though.
Chitika and AdBrite are just two of the other pay per click advertising streams currently online. They offer a marketing service and affiliate program. Here’s how it works:
- You create your website to sell your goods or information
- You sign up for Chitika or AdBrite or a similar marketing program
- Other companies who sell goods or information that compliments yours also join the marketing program
- The program matches your goods/information and the complimenting companies
- You advertise their site and they advertise yours, through a variety of marketing formats that feed directly to your sites
There are four basic benefits of using a streaming advertising service:
- Intelligent, targeted recommendations bring product and information links related to your site content to the visitor
- Database that handles your ads continually “learns” which ads work best for your site and changes the ads as needed, in addition to regular ad rotation
- You get paid when your visitors click through the ads on your site
- You can usually bid on the cost of your ad appearing on other sites (at least with Google and Yahoo! programs), allowing you to easily manage your online marketing costs
Affiliate programs offer similar, but not the same, website advertising. There are large affiliate programs out there that only permit businesses with mid to high level traffic. There are small affiliate programs that swap a one-for-one link and let anyone take part. New businesses should look for something in the middle.
The best banner ads are those that are not rich with graphics. Textual link ads are the quickest to load so they are the most effective. The cost of affiliate programs range from tenths of pennies per click to monthly fees of $5 or more.
Regardless of the affiliate or pay per click program you use, it is good business practice to run reports frequently and change the ad streams if you aren’t making money from the ads on your site or aren’t receiving much traffic from your ads on other sites. It is also important to change the information on your site often or offer freebies to encourage visitors to return again and again.
Without traffic, you do not make sales, and your online business fails. This is a simple fact that anyone considering or already involved in internet marketing should know.
The search engines’ objective is to deliver to a searcher the most relevant results pertaining to their inquiry. For you as an internet marketing entrepreneur, the goal is to achieve a good flow of qualified traffic to your website. You must do your work – ensuring that your website has unique, useful and accessible content; and search engines will just pick your internet marketing business URL and send you traffic, boosting your internet marketing business.
In order for your internet marketing business to succeed, you must ensure that while designing or creating your website, you have the goal in mind to create a website that is optimized to get the traffic your business will need.
Although you can use various types of paid advertising, search engines are your cheapest and best source for targeted and organic traffic, which would boots your sales and internet marketing profits. In spite of this important fact, a lot of internet marketing entrepreneurs do not realize the importance of building their sites with search engine mind – some just build their websites without even thinking about how they are going to get traffic to their websites. For you to succeed in internet marketing, to get traffic and make sales, you will need more that a nice-looking website. A lot of people make the mistake of focusing on how the site looks, at the expense of how it works.
So, what exactly must you do or not do to make sure that your internet marketing business’ URL is found by search engines, and that you get free targeted traffic sent to your web site? or in other words how to get higher search engine rank?
1. You must have unique and useful content, and you must regularly update your internet marketing business website with fresh distinctive content. Your website must contain adequate volume of information relevant to the products and services that you offer. Is the information it well organized? Is it easy to get to?
2. You must use keywords effectively. During the design of your website, this is a very critical factor to consider if you want to succeed in internet marketing. Select the precise keywords and prospective clients will find your website. You must not just search out a long list of words which are indistinctly and imprecisely related to your website’s theme or products and then filling them into a Keyword meta-tag. Instead, to effectively develop effective keywords for your website, you must think about this in terms of what products or services you sell on your site, and how prospective clients are currently looking for it. If you master this, then you will develop keywords that will effectively help search engines find you and send traffic to your website.
3. You must have your own paid website hosting. If you are committed to succeed in your internet marketing business and increasing traffic through being easily found by search engines, you must not use free hosting.
4. All your links on your website must be functional. This is an obvious thing, but sometimes internet marketing business owners do not check their websites to make sure that there are no missing website links. Check every page of your website for completeness of all your website contents, namely missing links and graphics among others.
5. You must understand how the various search engines work and How does Google rank pages. Search engines are different in how they operate, and sometime they do change over time. If you want to be visible on search engines, you must know the regulations of the major search engines, and you must regularly check that these rules are still the same.
6. You must not try to trick search engines. This is the deadly mistake which internet marketers commit. Well, it’s just not worth it, so do not try it. By trying to trick search engines, you can get your website or page de-listed, downgrade or even banned. Here are the key things which search engines can consider to be trickery, which you must not do:
7. Do not use the same keywords over and over again.
8. Do not use keywords which you think is ‘popular’ or ‘trendy’ but are not related to your website. Just because you have a word that is well-searched for and popular on your website; if it is not related to your website’s theme, then it will not help you with your website’s visibility.
9. Do not take pages, icons and texts from other pages to use on your own page – this is unethical and it creates duplication content.
10. Do not try and hide your keywords or phrases by making them hidden or invisible.
For your internet marketing business to succeed, you will need visitors to your website. The more visitors you receive, the more sales you make. Before you start your internet marketing business, you need to consider the factors outlined above. If you just build a nice looking website without taking into account the factors outlined above, then you will not be visible on search engines, and you will not get what your internet marketing business needs most to succeed – traffic.
No doubt you have come accross this time and time again; to improve your websites popularity, search engine ranking etc., you need to write articles. You will also probably think, as I did, that I can’t do this.
There are ways around this. But first you must learn How does Google rank pages and then you can purchase the rights to articles that will allow you to add your own resource box to the bottom. The content may not be the freshest and the newest, and many others may be using the same content or variations on it, but it is still content with your resource box tagged on at the bottom. There are numerous article submission directories and sites on the net, such as the biggies like GoArticles, to small ones like my own. You will be able to submit your article, even if it isn’t original, to some of these without duplicating existing content on the article directory. This is what I did first.
The next possibility is to go somewhere like FreeLancers.com, and pay someone to write articles for you. This is more expensive than the first option, but has the benefit that the article is original, so it is more likely to be copied and published elsewhere. Also, make sure you have the complete rights to the material you commission, so that you may modify, relabel, or amalgamate into an ebook if you desire. Usually, you should get several decent articles for the amount of money you spend.
Finally, my last note on Affordable web promotion – Are you sure you can’t write your own article? That you haven’t found out something in your life that will be of interest to others? There is a huge list of possible article subjects at GoArticles and other sites, and you will be amazed at what you do know if you sit and think about it. After all, as I said earlier, I didn’t think I was capable of writing an article, yet this is one I wrote myself, and it isn’t my first. If you’ve made mistakes, an article describing how NOT to do something can be just as useful as one describing how to do something. If you still have problems coming up with a coherent article, jot down your notes and pay someone to ghostwrite it for you. Again, check sites like FreeLancers.com for ghostwriters.
Why write and distribute articles in the first place? Free advertising and promotion. I submitted several articles to a handful (under five) of article directories. Several days later, after Google had done a recent crawl, I did a number of phrase searches on the web. If you enclose your search phrase in quotes, Google will search for that specific phrase. I searched for some of the article titles I had posted, and my own name (admittedly, this is only useful if you have a rare name that doesn’t bring up pages of search results for other people of the same name). I found the articles I had published showing up on several websites. What made this even better was that a number of the places where I found the articles weren’t places I had submitted them to. Other people had taken my articles and published them on their own websites. So the benefit is, lots of non-reciprocal links pointing to your website, that frequently you didn’t have to do anything beyond initially publishing the article to get. Free traffic, advertising and promotion for a few minutes work.
A final note. Make sure the articles are useful, and not just promotional sales letters. They don’t have to be long, 1-2,000 words is usually adequate as a maximum length for an article, but don’t just publish sales blurb. Your article won’t get syndicated elsewhere, and your reputation will suffer. Get known as a source of decent quality articles, and you will become known as an expert.
Traffic to your web site is absolutely essential to the short-term and long-term success of your internet home business. The challenge is to get the greatest amount of traffic at the cheapest price possible. The aim is to get a good return on your investment (ROI), and at the end of the day, make a profit and to learn the profession and things like How does Google rank pages. So let’s look at some of the most common ways to advertise your online business, both paid and free methods.
Advertise your online business through email – Email is one of the most cost effective ways to advertise, as you can really target the market that you’re after. You simply place your ad with an ezine (newsletter) owner (make sure it’s relevant to your market) and your ad goes before everyone on that owner’s list. You can either go with a classified type ad (very cheap but less effective) or with a solo ad (more expensive but better results). The solo ad is emailed to the list all by itself, so this has more chance of being seen and acted on. Just allow for the fact that some of your email advertising won’t work. You need to experiment with different sales copy and different ezines to find the best combination, so a reasonable budget is required for this to get the best results.
Advertise an online business with Adwords – Adwords are the ads that come up beside the search results depending on the keywords that are entered. You’re only charged for your ad each time someone clicks on it. This can cost a few cents each time up to a much higher price, depending on the bidding price for the particular keywords. Obviously this can really target your market, but it can be tricky for the inexperienced. If you get a lot of clicks on your ad, at a high price per click, and your sales page does not convert well, than you could be up for a lot of money. I’d suggest getting Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Google AdWords and studying that before you start… could save you a lot of time and money.
Traffic exchanges such as Traffic Swarm, Instant Buzz and TS25 are free methods (although you can upgrade to a pro membership and gain more benefits) are quite effective considering that they are free. Admittedly, most people that click on your ad are doing so to build up their advertising credits but if your sales page is effective, you will pull in a few sales from this.
Articles are the absolute best method of promoting your online business. You write good informative content that helps your readers, submit these to as many article directories as possible, and these will tend to spread all over the internet in no time at all. Have the link to your web site at the bottom in the author’s resource box, and not only will potential leads be clicking on this, but all these links are pointing back to your site, slowly increasing your back links and page rank. Definitely have a go at writing your own articles, as this has your own “voice”, is free, and shows YOU as the expert. But if you can’t write your own then the other option is to hire an article writing service to write them just for you (this cost will add up though).
Blogging is second to articles in my opinion. Set up your own blog (blogspot is a good, free way to get started), post your own articles to it, or add other relevant content to it. If you post to it regularly, you will eventually have quite a readership that loyally keep coming back to your blog to pick up the latest news, tips and information. Have your links on the blog so that leads will be pointed towards your web sites, and this will also give you one way links to your site to increase your back links and ranking with the search engines.
Also, submitting your URL to the Link Directories and reciprocal linking with other webmasters will increase your back links. This all helps to increase your page rank, and this in turn will increase your traffic for free.
Leads are obviously very important, but if you only have one shot at them, you will waste a lot of your advertising dollars. Try to point all your leads to a lead capture page first to get their details. That way you can follow up with them and develop a relationship. Research shows that people need exposure to your product up to 7 times before the buying decision is finally made. If you don’t have their details, you can’t follow up and you will lose sales.
Good sales copy in your ads and sales pages is vital, so invest time and money learning how to do this properly (lots of good books and courses available on this). Track your ads, keep testing and tweaking and measure the results. Ads that work – invest more money into them. Ads that don’t work – dump them.
And finally, keep taking action on a consistent basis. Allow time for your advertising to take effect and build momentum. Advertising is an INVESTMENT in your online business, NOT an expense, if done properly.
Andrew Jones has been a business owner for the past 10 years, and is now a Plug-In Profit Site owner. To find the best home based business ideas and opportunities so you can work at home visit: http://www.EasyCash-At-Home.com
Is Your Web Site Missing These Crucial Conversion Factors?
Smart online marketers never guess. They base their decisions on precise testing. Unfortunately, 90% of online marketers never test at all. However, for those that take the time to test properly, they can quickly rise above the competition.
Want to know how to increase your profits without increasing your web site traffic? Proper testing and tracking is the key.
You should test all of your sales letters, landing pages, order forms, and web designs. Here are some of the crucial elements that you should test on every page along with some advice on the best practices.
Keep in mind that nothing beats your own testing because different market segments will respond differently to your sales copy.
Headline
Simple changes to the headline have been known to produce up to 1,900% increase in conversion rates. The headline is the single most important part of your sales letter. If they don’t read past your headline, they will never reach the order button.
An effective headline will capture your visitors’ attention and draw them into your sales copy.
You only have about 8 – 10 seconds to capture your visitors attention. To do so, your headline must hit your visitors deepest needs and desires.
One of the most powerful headlines is a question. Why? Because questions irritate the brain and make your grey cells go haywire. Psychologically, questions are extremely powerful.
Here are 3 quick tips for writing effective headlines:
- Ask a question that begs to be answered.
- Create curiosity. ( Our brains our naturally curious)
- Embellish your visitors deepest problem.
If you are not testing your headline, you are most likely leaving lots of money on the table.
DropCaps
Many people ignore the possiblity of including a dropcap on their sales page. However, through testing, it has shown to increase conversion rates.
As online marketers, we have been left in the dark. Many offline advertisers and marketers have been using dropcaps for years.
One of the first people to confirm this technique was David Ogilvy. David Ogilvy wrote “Ogilvy On Advertising” and also produced advertising for brands such as American Express, Sears, Ford, Shell, Barbie, Dove, Maxwell, IBM, and Kodak.
Ogilvy is quoted as saying, “The drop capital increases readership of your body copy by an average of 13%”.
This one simple change could boost your bottom line.
Colors
Psychologists have suggested that color impression can account for up to 60% of the acceptance or rejection of a product or service.
Changing a few colors on your web site can instantly increase your conversion rate. When color is used correctly, it can send a number of messages to your readers. It can also highlight important points.
Color triggers a variety of emotions. To know which colors will appeal to your visitors, you must know your audience very well. This is where market research comes in.
McDonalds has already done much of the testing for you. It is certainly no coincidence that McDonalds uses the colors red and yellow. They did intensive research before determining that those were the colors that would attract the eye. Take a look as you are driving down the street. There are now countless numbers of businesses who use red and yellow in their advertising.
Red is one of the most effective colors to use for your headlines and sub-headlines. Blue has proven to be the best color for links. However, like all of the other elements of your web page, you will need to perform your own testing.
As a web master, color is definitely something you will want to research and test on your web site. It could mean the difference between a sale and a lost customer.
Offer a Strong Guarantee
Guarantees help to alleviate any anxiety that your potential customers may have.
Give your customers a risk-free guarantee . Let them know that they can take their time consuming your product and that if it doesn’t work out for them, they can quickly return it, no questions asked. This may sound contradictory, but it’s good business for you and for them. Guarantees will increase sales. However, many people do not know that guarantees will reduce return rates as well. Therefore, they are a vital component of your sales letter.
A longer guarantee creates fewer returns than a shorter guarantee. A 90-day guarantee will produce fewer returns than a 30-day guarantee.
If you are truly marketing a quality product or service, then you should not be afraid to back it up with a 100%, no questions asked, lifetime money-back guarantee.
In addition, it has often been found that people return a product less when they are allowed to keep some bonus items even if the product is returned.
Here are a few techniques that have often been found to be successful in creating a garuantee:
- Circle the garuantee
- Use a guarantee icon
- Write your guarantee in your own handwriting
P.S.
Believe it or not, the P.S is the second most important element of your sales page. Many of your visitors may not read your entire sales letter, but they will read your P.S. It is second only to the headline.
In fact, did you know that P.P.S. is the most important postscript.
Many successful online marketers use three postscripts. So, what do you say in a postscript?
Listed below are some important topics to cover in a P.S.
Use one that identifies your risk reversal guarantee.
Use another to remind them of the urgency to take action now.
Use another to inform them on how life will be without your product and what life will be improved with your product
Images of Your Product
No matter what you are selling online, you can increase your conversion rates by using pictures of your products. This is especially true for e-books. So much of the online world is intangible. However, whenever you create a 3-d image of your product, you turn the intangible into tangible.
If you decide to do this, make sure you have your images created professionally. Nothing can kill sales like poor graphic design.
Bullets
Bullets are captivating, short, sweet, and pleasing to the eye. Not to mention, all of the top marketers, historic and present-day, use bullets. Clustered bullets offer a burst of benefits.
In your bullets, be sure to use the words, “you,” “your,”, and “yours,” rather than “I,” “us,” “our,” or “we.” By using possessive words, you transfer ownership and allow them to visualize owning your product.
Here are some phrases you can use to transfer ownership:
“Your widget will be delivered in 5 days…”
“You will receive…”
“You will learn…”
“You will discover…”
Tell a Story
Many people online forget that they’re doing business with PEOPLE. It is often easy to forget that each and every one of your customers have emotions, thoughts, and ambitions, even though you never see them face-to-face.
Successful selling is dependent upon creating relationships. One of the most effective ways to develop a relationship with your customers is by telling a story. By telling a story within your sales copy, you become more human. You also establish credibility and develop rapport.
Your visitors are able to connect and relate with your experiences. Instead of thinking of you as a salesman, they think of you as someone who has had the same burdens, troubles, and even some of the same hopes and desires that they have.
By adding that personal touch.. that human factor… you will have more fun in your business and increase your sales at the same time.
Background Color
The color of your background is a very simple change that can instantly increase your conversion rate. The most effective background colors include white, dark blue, grey, and black. Of course, you will want to test this out for yourself to see which works best for you.
The optimal background color can change depending on your target market. Remember, nothing beats your own testing.
Add your picture, signature, and contact information
Post your online and offline contact information on your web site so that your customers know that your business is solid.
Your should always have a phone-number on your site. What reason do people have to trust you if they can not contact you? By adding your contact information to your site, you add an extra layer of credibility.
Don’t worry about receiving tons of phone calls, most people are too afraid to pick up the phone and call someone new. However, for those that do, you will have the opportunity to truly help someone and create a lasting relationship with your customer.
By establishing yourself as someone who truly cares about your customers and takes the time to help them with any problem they might call in about, you develop a unique selling proposition that is extremely valuable online. Most online marketers simply aren’t willing to go that extra mile.
Once you have implemented some of these strategies, test your sales copy on a small scale. Optimize your copy to it’s fullest potential and then begin your major campaign.
Many online businesses do not test at all. They never optimize their sales letter, landing pages, or order forms. As a result, they are leaving money on the table.
I do not want you to make the same mistake!
Test Everything…. Never Assume
People believe that building a list in a article marketing is a little difficult. But if you possess the right tools and tactics, obtaining that list is effortless. If you are a new guy in the domain of article marketing, then you have to uncover the basics first. Understand the appropriate ways of writing articles and gather on how you can be read by people by submitting your articles to websites and e-zines. Separately from this, teach yourself on how to attract customers to look in on your website using your articles. Always incorporate links to your site and offer additional knowledge. Once you learn of these things, then you should begin building your list. To help you out, here are certain things that you should learn so you will not have to put much effort and save time and energy.
Offer compact and absorbing information
Article marketing is genuinely worth trying. Though, most business outfits are trying it too and if you are not smart enough to counter them, your articles might not even be read. You can do this by offering compact, educational and compelling articles. Write ‘how to’ articles or real strategies. Like for instance, if your into an aquarium business, then write something about how to start an aquarium, discuss the necessary essentials and what are the frequent problems that a newbie will come upon. You can even begin a sequence of these articles so your readers will keep coming back.
Wow them with your articles
One of the best things that you can do in order to build your list is to wow people with your ideas and discussions. How to do that’ Read! Read the current news about your business, read the news and integrate it to your business. Get the superior information offered not just in the internet but also on your region. The best thing to do this is to talk and deliberate alongside others. You may believe that these things are a misuse of time, but it will give you an edge to your fellow article marketers considering you can deliver new and brilliant ideas. Separately from this, always try and produce discussion amidst enthusiasts. In this way you can discover the things that are important to your customers and put them in your articles. A acceptable way to do this is to begin a forum in your website that discusses specific materials and issues around your business.
Offer subscription
Ask people to subscribe to your free articles. You can do this by making a weekly column or article that deals with the exact subject related to your product. If people are fascinated, they would absolutely subscribe to your articles. The best thing that you can get from this is that you can go straight to the person’s inbox and offer them deals. Just be sure that your article is good reading and integrate your product within the article itself.
Free is the key
Offering free knowledge is good, but offering it without even obtaining the e-mail address of your customer is bad. Here’s what you have to do when you begin offering free articles. First, offer a basic article that gives a general aspect of the dissimilar articles on your site. And then offer them that by registering to your site, they will get some free new articles. In this way, you get the reader to provide bits of information and you can start dealing with them through their e-mails. Most people who register are genuinely interested in your free articles, so that means they are actually possible customers.
Building your list is not really easy, but nobody can say that it has to be too hard too. Apply the steps noted above, and you can be certain that your list will begin growing. Always bear in mind that article marketing, as the label tells you command pretty good articles to start with. So make certain that you have them and always improve your mentality with new things. After that, remodel your website and apply these advices, and your list will grow without too much effort. These strategies are time savers and stress busters, and they can make certain that you maintain your share of customers.
To start making money online relatively quickly, you need to find those subject areas that are not currently over-saturated by other marketers. You need to find your own niche, and one that is relatively uncompetitive.
Topics like health, internet marketing, gambling, etc, are all fiercely competitive, and very difficult for inexperienced marketers to make any decent money from. You can of course target these markets over time, but I recommend finding your own niche first, and marketing to those people in these more narrow markets. These people are most likely not yet over-exposed to traditional marketing methods associated with internet marketing like squeeze pages, opt-in forms, sales letters, and so on, so you are more likely to be successful.
A potentially profitable niche would be one that has a decent number of keyword searches conducted every month, I would say at least a few thousand, and one where you could potentially achieve the number one spot, or at least get on the first page of results, for this keyword with a pagerank of 5 or less. This is Google’s measure of how many links and the quality of links that a site has, and although it is not the only deciding factor, a higher figure will generally result in a higher ranking.
If you carry out a good link-building campaign, and fully optimize your website, it is not too difficult to achieve a pagerank of 5 or more within just a few months, and start climbing up the rankings. However, you have to remember that it can take several months for this high PR to be rewarded with a good ranking, particularly with Google and Yahoo.
To begin thinking up potential niches I recommend starting off with a blank piece of paper, or a blank page on your computer, and start brainstorming. Start listing all the things you’re interested in, and also break these down into smaller, more narrow subjects as well.
You can also find out what other people online are talking about. Visit blogs, article directories, forums, groups, etc, and see which subjects seem to be cropping up over and over again. Again list any related keywords you can think of. You never know, one of these may be a potential goldmine.
Next take a look at the book and magazine sections of Amazon, and see which type of publications people are currently buying by looking at the top 100 or bestsellers list. Similarly you can go to Ebay and find out which items are selling more than others, and are therefore currently in demand.
Also look around you, closer to home. Visit libraries for potential ideas, and also go into newsagents, and look at the magazine section. If there’s a magazine on a particular niche subject then there must be a decent demand for it, otherwise it wouldn’t be in circulation.
Just be creative and you will soon have a large list of potential subjects and related keywords. Once you have this information you are ready to start conducting keyword research, as I mentioned earlier. There are various tools available, both free and paid services, but a good place to start is Yahoo’s search marketing site. Just keep entering the keywords you’ve gathered, and you will soon uncover high demand, low supply keywords that you could potentially base a website on, and start making some money from.
James Woolley is a successful marketer who has several money-making sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free tips and bonuses.
The internet is very dynamic, and in order to succeed, you need to be well informed and up to date with the various techniques of marketing on the internet.
Indeed, marketing on the internet has changed considerably over the past few years. Nowadays, methods for promoting products or services on the internet require an increasing selection of multimedia features and capabilities, much different and advanced from days past.
· Provide and share expert tips and ideas. Successful internet marketers share various tips and secrets their email lists, or online customers on a regular basis. Some internet marketers offer daily ‘tips’ which they send through an auto responder. These days, having a trusting and confident relationship with your clients and potential customers is very essential. This boosts your sales and increases your internet marketing business profits.
· Publishing e-Books – A very popular approach for generating profits and revenue to publish and promote e-book on the topic related to your business. You can give these out for free with links to your website. On the other hand, the internet is now the major source of information. So you can write and publish e-books on any topic. You can sell these online and earn a lot of money.
· Educational activities – One of the single most important ways to increase your personal knowledge and expertise with any given topic is to get involved somehow with teaching this topic to others. Once developed, separate the materials into small sections for delivery and distribution. There are a number of ways to distribute the materials out to your potential clients. Direct mailings over a period of time, or many successful marketers set the individual segments up into an email marketing auto responder program that sends the messages out to a predetermined list of clients and customers over a prearranged rate. Distributing this information gives you the perfect opportunity to include small “snippets” of promotion for yourself or various products or services which you sale or promote. You will be amazed at how effective this particular technique is.
· Link Exchange Directories – Although not everyone thinks of it, you must sponsor a directory website with open invitations for others to include links, banners and promotional advertisements back to their sites. Beyond including your banners, links, and advertisements sprinkled throughout the page; you gain the added benefit of having reciprocal links exchanged with others in the process.
Developing, marketing, and selling of materials utilizing internet marketing ideas and techniques can be fun and profitable. Finding new, creative, and innovative methods for growing your internet marketing business requires some effort. Because the internet is very dynamic, you must always be well informed about the tools for promoting your internet marketing business.
You must be flexible and keen to explore possibilities and new techniques for your internet marketing business. Have fun trying different promotional strategies for your internet marketing business to see what works best for you and your products.
Jeff Casmer is an internet marketing consultant with career sales over $25,000,000. His “Top Ranked” Earn Money at Home Directory gives you all the information you need to start and prosper with your own Internet Home Based Business.http://www.ArticleStreet.com/
Many internet marketers own some unprofitable websites or businesses with no short or long term internet marketing strategies. Some internet marketers do not have any goals, while some seem to jump from one ‘online business opportunity’ to another. Also, some internet marketers treat their internet marketing business like a hobby, and yet expect to earn some good checks from it. The fact is that to succeed in internet marketing, you need to apply some strategic internet marketing techniques.
So, what are the long-term strategic you can use to develop your internet marketing business?
You must have a promotion plan that employs effective and proven marketing devices to get high converting results for your internet marketing business.
You mast use a list of selected marketing plans that are effective; and you must make sure that you perfect your skills in these strategies in order to make them effective. The first thing you will need to do is to establish your advertising budget. You must establish how much can you spend per week or per month.
Every promotion for your internet marketing business must have a purpose and it is critical to track the results of each and every advertisement. Tracking your ads means that you can then identify the strategies that are bringing the best results for your advertising dollar. After you have identified the ads that are working, you can allocate more money towards those. By tracking your ads, you can also find out which ads are not working, or which ones need adjusting.
There are proven marketing strategies that can guarantee you success in internet marketing if you apply them consistently.
a) Start Your Own Ezine
This is most likely the most powerful marketing technique on the internet. Having your own list of subscribers to send a newsletter to on a regular basis is a powerful way of expanding your internet marketing business.
b) Write and submit articles
A very effective and cheap way of promoting your business. Writing articles builds your credibility and also drive plenty of targeted traffic to your site, all for free.
c) Pay per Click Advertising (PPC)
PPC is the fastest way to get traffic to your internet marketing business’ website. However, to make this strategy successful and cost effective for your internet marketing business, you must educate yourself about keyword selection and bidding for your keywords.
d) Linking
Learn How does Google rank pages – One way or reciprocal linking is critical to your online success. This tactic takes time to develop, but it is well worth your effort. Search engines assess the importance of your web site by the number of incoming links pointing to your site. You can build one way links by articles writing and submitting and also participating in relevant forums etc.
e) Viral Marketing
You can give ’stuff’ away that people can use and put links to your web site in it. Information is a powerful tool in marketing. Give people rights to share the ’stuff’ with their friends and email lists. In the long term, this will build a lot of traffic to your website.
f) Search Engine Optimization
Your pages must be fully optimized for the search engines. The most inexpensive and targeted traffic you can receive will come from high search engine rankings.
If you follow the strategies outlined above, you will lay the foundation for future growth of your business.
Khemal Dole owns and operates http://www.PaychecksDirect.com, a completely FREE service which helps many first-timers and even experts find their perfect Work At Home job. Visit www.paychecksdirect.com right now and see for yourself why so many are flocking to his site.
A lot of people are now looking for opportunities to earn money online. If you have your own home based online business, you have the convenience of working from home, you set the goals and you apply the necessary effort needed to achieve those goals.
There are various business models with which you can make money online. Whatever business model you choose, there are certain traits you will need to be successful in internet marketing?
1. Confidence.
This is the first trait you will need to succeed in internet marketing. Internet marketing requires a lot of hard work, commitment, patience and focus. If you are confident, you can achieve all the success you desire.
2. Convincing advertisements.
Avoid exaggerating in your internet marketing business’ ads. People generally know whether they are being told the truth or otherwise. This is particularly important since the internet is now full of scams. Avoid writing ads that may make people think that your ad is one of those scams. Make sure that the approach, language and tone is your ad is convincing. Your goal is to represent your business as a reputable internet business that does what your ad says.
3. You must have a high quality product and/or you must believe in the product.
Whether you have created your own product, or are selling a product as an affiliate, the product must be of high quality and you must believe in it. If you are an affiliate, you must know the product very well, and you must be proud and passionate about it – this is very important if you want to market the product appropriately. If you are not proud of the product, you will not be able to promote it compellingly. This means that you will need to be completely well informed with the details of the product or service.
4. Your sales letter must clearly show the benefits of the product or service you are selling.
To succeed in internet marketing you need to make many sales. In order for your website’s visitors to buy from you, they will need to be informed clearly how the product will benefit them or solve a problem they may have. Your sales letter or website must clearly emphasize the key reasons why the visitor must buy the product; and also what they will lose if they do not buy your product.
5. A budget for some start-up and ongoing resources for your business.
Some people seem to think that you can make money overnight and without spending anything in internet marking. This is not true. Internet marketing is similar to any other type of a business; you will need some money to start the business and also to promote it. To be successful in internet marketing; you will need to allocate some start-up and monthly marketing budget. You will also need to invest some time, effort and dedication into your internet marketing business for you to succeed.
6. A good reputation.
A good and respected name on the internet will make it very easy for you to build your internet marketing business. Make sure that you keep your customers happy. If you look after them well, you are ensuring that you get good reviews and of course repeat business. In your internet marketing business, always make sure you deliver your promises on time and in great quality. It is important to build relationships with customers and also with your prospects.
7. Be well-informed about the current and effective marketing techniques that are on the internet.
The internet is very dynamic, and you need to develop and learn accordingly about the best strategies for building your internet marketing business. You must know about all the tools you can use such as auto responders, mailing lists, viral marketing, search engine optimization and paid advertising among others. You will need to master these promotional techniques and make them very effective. It is also a good idea for you to consider which selected few marketing strategies will work best for your business, budget and knowledge.
8. Care for your customers.
In whatever you do in your internet marketing business, apply more effort and bring in a ‘personal touch’. It is very easy these days to run a 100% automated business with the auto responders, lists and ezines among other tools. However, whatever you do towards promoting your business or when dealing with your customers, try to do more – which will show them that you really care about them. You will build a good relationship with your customers and they will come for repeat business, and you also build trust with your prospects and they will buy from you.
If you want to succeed in internet marketing, follow the guidelines stated above.
Khemal Dole owns and operates http://www.PaychecksDirect.com, a completely FREE service which helps many first-timers and even experts find their perfect Work At Home job. Visit www.paychecksdirect.com right now and see for yourself why so many are flocking to his site.
If you’ve just started your very first website, be it a small business, or a simple content site, you have probably encountered the phrase “search engine optimization.”Search engine optimization and getting to the top of the search engines presents a dilemma for most new websites. Herein lies some information about the challenge of search engine optimization and some useful tips for webmasters.
Traffic for most websites is feast or famine because most traffic is directed to a website by way of a search engine. If you’re on the first two pages of a search engine for your target keyword, you’ll likely get tons of traffic. If you’re on page 3 or worse, traffic might be sparse. Getting on the first two pages of the search listings can be the difference between receiving hundreds of thousands of hits per day or receiving a couple thousand hits per day. So, how can you optimize your website and increase your ranking?
There are many important factors for getting the best possible position on a search engine, the most rudimentary of which is that your web pages be “optimized.” In other words, you need to make sure that your web page contains the keyword that you want to be ranked for and for that you must understand how Google ranks pages. If your website is about frogs, for example, and you want people searching for “frogs” on Google to find your website in the top position, then your website needs to have the word “frogs” appear more than once or twice. If your pages don’t have at least some significant content containing the word “frogs”, then the search engines will not deem your website relevant for information about frogs, and you won’t receive a decent ranking for that particular keyword. To optimize your webpages, you must also have META tags (META tags are tags that you must include in your HTML so that search engine crawlers can get a quick gist of what your website is about before scanning the rest of your page).
But the most important factor for receiving a high search engine ranking, and by far the most challenging, is having a high number of quality, inbound links to your website coming from other websites. This is commonly referred to as a website’s “link popularity.” The more websites you have linking to you, the more “significant” you become to the search engine, and the higher your ranking will be. For example, Yahoo’s website currently has over 30 million inbound links, and Michael Moore has over 500,000 links pointing to his website. This is a tremendous number of links.
So, how can a new website receive this many links? Well, it can’t. However, you don’t need a million websites linking to you to get listed on the first page of the search engine. For certain keywords, such as “email forms,” or “frogs” (I have frogs on my mind today), it may only take 1,500 inbound links to get on the first page. Some of the search results on the first page of the listings for a certain keyword may have 50,000 inbound links, while others might have 1,500. The reason for this is because of the aforementioned criteria already described in the beginning of this article which also play a part in your ranking (keyword relevance, design, etc.). Also, it helps if the links to your website are from websites that have a high ranking for the same keyword that you are trying to target.
If your website is about frogs, and the website that is currently ranked #5 on the first page of Google for the keyword “frogs” has a link to your website on their website, Google considers that a significant link. A single important link, rather than a bunch of irrelevant links, can substantially enhance your ranking. However, getting other websites to link to you is an extremely difficult task.
Extremely well known, popular companies, such as Yahoo, Amazon, and GEICO, already have thousands upon thousands of websites linking to them because they advertise on television. Those companies are household names, and they provide important services, so, naturally, a lot of websites link to them. For the other 99.9% of websites that don’t do any real advertising offline, there are several ways to obtain a high number of inbound links.
One way is to exchange links with other websites, one at a time. They’ll often link to you if you link to them. This is a very time consuming task, as it would take a long time to get a thousand links working in this manner. Another way is to submit your site to various directories where they’ll include a link to your site in their directory without requiring an exchange. This is a much better way to do it.
Also, it might be a good idea to perform a search under the keyword for which you want to receive a high ranking, and then contact the webmasters of those sites that are ranked on the first and second page, and ask to exchange links with those websites (the higher the ranking of the site that links to you, the more significant the link, and the more it will help your ranking). Also, you can write articles and sign up for services that will submit your articles to a huge number of article directories where websites look for content. You can usually include a link to your website in the “author description” portion of the article. If your article is submitted to all of these article directories, and then that article spreads over the internet and is posted on other websites, you can receive a tremendous amount of inbound links this way. Perform a search under the keyword “article submission service” or “submit my article,” and you’ll find dozens of companies that will submit your articles to these directories for you.
Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing, everyday job. There is no shortcut to success. But, if you work diligently and follow all of the procedures outlined in this article, you’re likely to get a good ranking and climb steadily towards the top.
