SEO Technique: What is Email Marketing?

When talking about email marketing, what comes to your mind? If you are a beginner, you may have both positive and negative opinions towards it. You may think that it is all about spam mails or you may also think that it is something that carries the power to make one rich overnight! And I am sure that you have heard about it in various blogs, forums etc. So, what actually email marketing means? Let’s talk about it from a beginner’s point of view.
What is Email Marketing?

Before going further, I want to make it clear that this article in meant for the beginners, who wants to make money online. If you are a seasoned player in the file of make money online or affiliate marketing, your point of view will be somewhat different and you may skip this article, though I always welcome your constructive feedback.

First, what is email marketing? In simple words, it is the use of the power of electronic mail or email in order to reach a wide range of potential customers or readers when offering products and services. Simply put, it is marketing via email and it is one of the most powerful tools one can have in internet marketing.

An alternative definition of email marketing, however, is when a company continues to foster communication with existing clients in order to enhance the service being offered and the relationship in existence. These are all done with the intent of gaining customer loyalty and patronage.

Email marketing, in either definitional paradigms, aims for the end of loyalty and patronage. If email marketing were to be used on potential clients, the role that the strategy has to play is that of trying to transform readers into real clients. The same idea holds true for existing clients. If existing clients were to receive continuous check-ups and evaluation of the service offered, the perception of forwarding the satisfaction of the customers would be made even clearer.

Email marketing, of course, does not go off without any negative perception from the society. Many individuals see themselves as greatly inconvenienced by email marketing, which is at times classified as spam. However, it has come a long way since those early days of a complete and absolute negative stigma of email marketing. Now people have the right to choose what they find useful and suitable content arriving into their in-boxes.

However, in email marketing, it is important to know what rights and limitations are in existence. In the United States of America, different states revolt. Some would legislate against email marketing (which is considered spam) and others would not. That’s why in preparing and serving an email marketing campaign, you must take care not to annoy your prospects with unwanted and irrelevant emails. The legality of receiving an article of email marketing is unquestioned when the customer being serviced is that with which the company has had previous transactions with. A pre-existing business relationship may vary, but it may very well be someone from whom the company has previously requested information from, or someone who has bought or acquired the services of the company. This implies a level of consent that must be present in all the emails that will be used in email marketing campaigns.

Because of these various reasons, there are some imperative steps that must be taken by a marketer or company wishing to take part in any email marketing campaign. For example:

* Maintaining the integrity of Content: Legislation against email marketing, and marketing general, are in fact in place because in past there was many reports of abuses. Therefore, it is imperative that of some of the things considered in an email marketing campaign is that of integrity of content. This would mean the inclusion of the senders’ complete and accurate information.
* Clarity of Consent: It is imperative that companies or individuals make sure that the persons they are sending emails to are those they’ve had previous transactions with, and are in good standing with each of them. There is a necessity to keep close track to each and every email address being added to the list of clients because similarly, it would be easy to duly evaluate consent in each and every scenario.
* Aggressiveness of Content: While email marketers may want to carry on with their aggressive marketing strategies, their interests must be balanced with the rights of individuals against marketing strategies that are far too aggressive and neglect their rights and wishes. So, companies and email marketers should use subject lines that reflect content, use a valid address, and make arrangements for the recipients to opt out of the service or from receiving future notices and marketing pitches.
At the end of the day, email marketing is a powerful marketing tool that really works. It works because of its low-cost and its far-reaching capacities. However, because there are no singular restrictions as to how it may be used without going to the extent of the legal borderline behavior, companies and individuals that wish to use it in its full potency must in return expect a degree of compromise to be made, which may not endanger the reputation of the company or the brand, but may, in the long run, help build a healthy brand image.

So, that was all about email marketing in a nutshell! If you are thinking about trying email marketing to make some money online, don’t forget the points that I discussed above. Then take help from a powerful tool like Aweber and jump into real work. I am sure that soon you will become a successful email marketer. Need some more elaborate information about email marketing. Watch out for my next few articles. Old player in this field? Still trying hard to get good results? Just keep it in mind that gone are the days of tons and tons of spam mails. Instead build a good list, create some creative and powerful email marketing campaigns and see the difference.

SEO techniques - How to use it correctly?

1. The high keyword density style

Not too long ago, the most relevant would have been the web page that contained most instances of the keyword (search term). It didn’t take long for some people to notice that if they filled a page full of that keyword, then that page would be smiled upon by Google. The result was thousands upon thousands of web pages being generated by software that reiterated the same keyword over and over again on a page, the rest of the text being practically nonsense. Here is an example using the keyword knitting:

“Knitting is popular. You can get information on knitting on the internet, and there many sites dealing with the subject of knitting. If you want information on knitting the information superhighway is full of experts on knitting, and there even lots of sites where you can purchase knitting that meets your requirements”

Meaningless, and providing no information whatsoever. The software could change any keyword for knitting, and it would still make the same sense, or lack of it. However, it was great spider food. They loved it, and many people made fortunes on Adsense using such software. However, Google found out and changed the rules. They now use what is commonly called LSI (latent semantic indexing) techniques to judge the relevance of each web page to the keyword.

It is not a true use of LSI, but that’s what it is called, so let’s stick with it. The Google algorithm looks at the keyword and decides what other words would be expected to appear if a human were writing about the topic of the keyword. Hence, for wool, it would be looking for sheep, knitting, knitwear, stitches, etc. If these words do not appear, then your page could be down listed. Nor is it looking for any specific keyword density: 1% could be too high, if it would not be expected to appear that often in normal speech or text.

The algorithm, or spider, looks for other related terms, and if you have your actual keyword as the title of your page in H1 tags, in the headline of your article, say, in H2 tags once in the first 100 characters of the text, and once on the last paragraph, that should be enough. Perhaps once more each 400 words, but no more than that. The 12 occurrences of your keyword if you stuck to 3% keyword density would be considered as keyword stuffing.

If you stick to these guidelines, and use plenty of text related to the keyword you are using, then your page should be regarded as being of value to anybody using your keyword as their search term, and it should be listed high in the search engine index for that keyword.

The reason why search engines no longer need a high keyword density is that they have wizened up to those that tried to take advantage.

2. The anchor text at the bottom of the page SEO technique

Anchor text is the actual linking text on a site. The user clicks on to navigate to that particular site or page with the anchor text. If a search engine finds many links to your site using the term "dog food", then the search engine concludes that your site is about "dog food". This is overlooked quite often, but it seems to have a very large impact on your search engine rankings for a particular keyword. Your anchor text needs to be the keyword or phrase you are trying to target. Try to avoid anchor text such as "Click Here" or "http://www.yoursite.com/".

The way to do:

Put keyword in the form of ALT text.

Put keyword in anchor text of inbound links.

Put keyword in name for your site

Put kenaming your folders and files

Two things to keep in mind. (1) Too many links is not better than just the right amount. Keep it user friendly and readable and I think that’s the balance Google et al. will like. (2) This is especially helpful for long tail keywords, which users are using more and more.

3. The high inbound link to one page SEO technique
Although the shift of weight from On Page Optimization to Off Page Optimization is relatively new, techniques such as inbound linking (particularly one way link building) is not new to web site optimization. The specific art of inbound linking has changed however. In the past, web sites simply amassed as many inbound links as possible from any page. As a web site owner, you may have received various spam email asking if you could link or reciprocate a link to another webpage. Due to the abuse of reciprocal linking for ranking purposes, the art of inbound linking has changed. For example, links from another page to your website should now meet the following criteria:

For optimum web site optimization, the inbound link should come from a page that is related to the content on the page it links to. Sometimes this is referred to LocalRank, a Google patented algorithm that may have been implemented in the notorious Florida Update of 2003. The anchor text used for the inbound link should consist of one or more keywords you have chosen (through keyword research) for the page it links to. The PageRank (Google’s ranking system) of the page linking to you also carries weight – an inbound link from a PR7 page is approximately 10 times better than an inbound link from a page with a PR6. PageRank can be loosely compared to the Richter scale in terms of incremental weight.

4. The Wikipedia attack
Definition: An attack page is a Wikipedia article, page, template, category, redirect or image that exists primarily to disparage its subject

A behemoth with an appetite for embellishing on everyones content through a massive piggy back / content management / internal linking / I’ll take the credit and dominate the SERPs technique. Any keyword it consumes it becomes a ranking juggernaut for, and we are dumb enough to feed it (Argh!) This tactic is also seen on scraper MFA (made for adsense) sites, posturing as the original post, with a unique spin on where the links are directed (tisk, tisk, tisk, come on now, dude - write your own!).
This technique should be avoided and do not use it anymore

5. The old school reciprocal link cover letter and close SEO technique
Reciprocal linking blah blah blah, if your link to me we will rule the web technique, yada, yada, yada - only to have them remove the link one week later and sap your page rank (no thanks). This SEO style may as well join technique #1 as defunct indefinitely.
This blackhat technique should not be used.

6. The Social Profile Image Bait
Link Bait, in simplest terms, merely means creating content that others would want to link to (tell others about) in some way (in a forum, on a blog, a social media site and so forth). This dual citizenship (of SMM and SEO) makes it all the more an area of interest for the modern web marketer.The true power of a link baiting program is that the links are generally diversified and natural. One of the most important aspects of a well rounded link profile is natural editorial links. When done right, link bait activities can build a very natural link profile which is an essential ingredient in the recipe. But if you just add one stunning photograph, post and wait, your site can not be promoted.

7. The Keyword Stuffing Pipes in the Title SEO technique
Keyword Stuffing | Even more Keywords | Even more Ridiculous Stuffing | Company | Services | City | State | Birth Date | SSN | Address | Location of First Kiss with Girlfriend|, etc. you get the point so stop it already.

8. The hidden .css 1px table with 55 keywords inside SEO technique
- very famous in the UK, but known for trying to migrate to the US. Also known to travel in packs with the comment spam and Google bombing technique…so beware. Google do not like it and you will be fined soon.

9. The h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, bold, italic SEO technique
Enough said…use it don’t abuse it. Use it correctly will help to promote your site. I have already
make a post about this technique. Find them SEO category.

10. The submit your site to 5000 directories and 3,500 search engines SEO technique:
Search engine now is more intelligent and they no longer to get links from directory. And you can be considered farm link. So get backlink from good site which has high pagerank and have the similiar pagerank.

Extending AdSense for domains to all publishers

Extending AdSense for domains to all publishers
Many publishers have approached us looking for a way to monetize their domains, and today, we're excited to announce the expansion of AdSense for domains. This product allows publishers to earn revenue through ads placed on undeveloped domains.

With AdSense for domains, users can find relevant information rather than see empty pages or "page not found" errors. Today we present ads, links, and search results on the pages, and may add other useful information in the future. To ensure positive user experience and the quality of our network, these sites are monitored for policy compliance and prohibited from using text and images designed to confuse users.

Advertisers also have additional opportunities to find their customers, and ads on these pages convert well. In addition, we regularly receive requests from advertisers who have found domains to be an effective way to reach their users.

The product will be initially rolled out in phases to English-language AdSense publishers located in North America, and we'll expand to additional regions and languages in the future. To check whether AdSense for domains has been enabled for your account, log in and visit your AdSense Setup tab. For more information, please visit our Help Center.

Make Money Online: Supplemental Results

They’ve been called "the Kiss of Death", "Google Hell", and "Screwed Pages" (Ok, I just made those up), but in any case, Supplemental Results is not where you want your pages to be if you expect traffic from Google.

Let’s see google’s official defination from their webmaster page:

Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its PageRank.

yada yada…."auxilary index"? "fewer restraints"? huh??

Here’s the stuff they aren’t telling you:
Pages from the "regular" index will almost always show up first for any searches. The only time you’ll usually see "supplimental results" is if there’s not many, or any, results in the regular index. What this means, is that if you’re page about "blue widgets" is in the "Supplemental Results" then you’re screwed as far as having your page rank at all (will not show up at all since there’s pleanty of results for "blue widgets" in a google search. Your only chance of rankings a page that’s in the supplimental results is if someone searched for something super specific like "blue widgets in southbend kansas on market street").

Supplemental Results also tend to have old Google Caches…..in other words, once google has sent them to "Google Hell", they tend not to come back….thus you’ll find pages in the Supplemental Results are dated long ago.

Why does google put pages in the Supplemental Results?
I’ve been able to identify 3 main reasons:
1. Duplicate Content - take someone elses content, get sent to Google Hell (Supplemental Results)
2. No Content - create pages with no content (remember the days of directories that would create 1 million pages with only 100 listing?) - empty pages get sent to Google Hell.
3. Orphaned web pages. Pages that no one links to, including yourself.

Now, for the dirt - how to get out.
1. If you stole content - change it.
2. If there’s no content - add some.
3. If it’s orphaned - link to it.

Now, that’s not eneough…remember, once page are sent to the Supplemental Results, they tend not to get revisited. Once you’ve done your changes, submit a google site map and cross your finders.

If that doesn’t work, try publishing them on new URLs.

Make Money Online: Basic SEO

Create good content

You want to rank well in Google, but you need to ask yourself: why should you rank well? It’s more obvious why you want to rank well; you want more visitors, you want to spread the word on something that is important to you, you want to change the world, or maybe you just want to sell something, facing strong online competition. But why should you rank well? In the eyes of Google and others, you’re just another webmaster – but search engines first and foremost cater to the searcher. So you better make sure you deserve to be ranking well in Google for whatever it is you deliver to the searcher. Only if you do can you move on to steps 2 and 3. Here’s how:

• Search engines mainly understand text. So you need to make sure you create interesting, in-depth content in the form of text. It won’t hurt to include Flash animations, videos, or lots of images – but it also won’t help the search engine. A good test of whether your text can be seen in search engines is to open the source of your page (right click your site and choose “view source”, or however your browser calls it) and then check if that text appears.
• There’s a huge variety of search queries that may later on lead to your site. You better give up early on trying to optimize your content for each of those search terms. A more realistic strategy is to have lots of content on your site. If you sell dog supplies, well then write about dogs, dog food, dog coats, dog coats fashion, tips on putting on dog shoes, and throw in an article or two about dog breeding during Renaissance Italy (and then translate all those articles into as many languages as you can).
• Let’s say you sell dog supplies, but your competitor does the same, and she also has lots of content on her site. There’s only one thing that will help you: you need not only to have lots of content, but you need to have original content. Create that special feed-the-dog game on your website. Show off interactive charts on the evolution of dogs. Provide a wallpaper download area for dog lovers. You get the idea – do something original no one else thought of. Being unique means that visitors have a reason to come to your site instead of your competitor’s site.
• Creating lots of original content is almost the easy part. What’s much harder, and there’s no short-cut, is to become an authority in your field. It’s possible you already are – great, then I suggest you share your expert knowledge freely with the world. People will like your site more if they get the best tips from you, ideally, those that make a change in their life, however small (maybe you are showing them a more effective way to do something, or you answered one of their questions). If, on the other hand, you’re not already an expert in a given field, I suggest you start a blog – a knowledge and news journal for which you need to research an hour or so every day, learning while writing. Just wait half a year, and you’ll be an expert in you blog’s topic.

2. Make your content accessible

We’re now leaving the field of your expertise – dog supplies, or whatever it is you’re doing! – and move on to the technical part of making your content accessible. This part is technical simply because when search engines access your website, they won’t be seeing things the same way human visitors will. Instead of pictures and text, a search engine bot will see stuff like HTML tags, page titles, links, headers, and lots and lots of words. HTML is no rocket science, but you can also get many things wrong, so if you don’t want to tackle it yourself get someone who will; just make sure a couple of points are respected:

• Every page should ideally be doing one thing only (and that one thing well). If you have a page where you sell dog coats, then it should have a header that reads “dog coats” along with a dog coat photo, your dog coat articles for sale, and a description of just what a dog coat is. Furthermore, there should be a (limited) set of links on that page leading to related areas of your site, like a page where all dog supplies are found, a page that describes your company (handing out contact info like your company address and your email address), a page leading back to your homepage, and so on.
• Every page title should be unique to your site, and accurately & briefly describe your page’s content. If you sell a blue dog coat on the page, then your page title needs to be anything from “Blue Dog Coat” to “Buy a Blue Dog Coat at BestDogSupplies.com”, but it ought not be “BestDogSupplies.com” or “BestDogSupplies.com coats shoes fashion outdoor indoor dogs cats buy for sale”.</li><li><strong>Use proper markup</strong>, with tags like <h1> and <h2>(headers), <p> (paragraphs), <a> (links) and so on, and make sure it validates as HTML4 Strict or XHTML1 Strict by checking with the “<a href="http://validator.w3.org/">officials</a>”. There’s a multitude of ways to display a header – using an embedded Flash animation, for example – and there’s a multitude ways of displaying links – using dropdown combo-boxes, or JavaScript, to name just two – but steer clear from any of that. Keep the HTML simple, and use JavaScript, Frames, or any of that only where you absolutely must, and use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to deliver a page layout.</li><li><strong>Make each page rest on a simple, stable, and quick-loading place.</strong> For example, don’t move your pages to different URLs all the time, don’t create redirects, and don’t use overlong, complicated URLs. Simple & stable pages invite others to bookmark your pages or link to them, and it allows search engines like Google to assign a “trust" value to your page. If your page is about red dog coats, its URL should consequently be something like “BestDogSupplies.com/coats/red/” or “BestDogSupplies.com/products/red-dog-coats.html”.

Following these points takes a bit of trial and error, sometimes. But you don’t need to get it all right at once. Ideally, set-up a CMS (Content Management System) of some kind where you, or your developer, exercise full and direct control over tweaking templates and such. As a litmus test: if adding a new product or article, or adjusting the global headline size, or replacing the footer on all pages turns out to be a major headache, you know you’ve chosen the wrong system.

3. Tell others about your content

There once was a time when people could add lots of keywords to their page to optimize it for search engines. Today’s search engines – luckily for searchers – aren’t that easily fooled. Instead of looking at your site, Google and others mostly look at other sites to determine your site’s trust... specifically by checking the other site’s links to you. And the more trusted your site is, the higher it ranks for a variety of search queries. So how do you get others to link to you? Well, you already got great content (point 1 above), and you made it very accessible so it’s easy to link to (point 2 above). Now what’s left is to get the word out so others may feel inspired to link to you; not out of pity, not because you promise a link in return, and not because you paid them, but because they consider a page of yours just right for their visitors. So...

• Get involved offline! Go to conferences, trade shows, and every other place where people might be interested to get to know about your website.
• Get involved online! Sign-up for mailing list of your site’s topic, participate in newsgroups and web forums of your topic, look for online directories (like the Open Directory) dealing with sites like yours, contact webmasters and bloggers who maintain sites in your topic area. But don’t just get involved to promote your site, as such selfishness is deemed “spam”. Instead, take time to help others... for example, you may want to offer another site to write an article for them. Just pasting your URL everywhere you go is littering the online world – and you may end up being permanently kicked out of the places in which you littered.
• Get involved everywhere else! Maybe there’s a TV show which discusses websites? Well, it won’t hurt if you drop them an email, introducing them to your site. Be creative in finding people that might be happy to hear about your site, be it a newspaper, radio show, magazine, and what-not. To get a mention in any of these places, it always helps if you do something wacky (run across the football field naked, your site’s name printed on your back) or otherwise noteworthy (write a book, dressed or naked, whichever you prefer). To stick with the topic of dog supplies, you might want to train your dog to bark the name of your web site, and then upload the whole thing to a video sharing site like YouTube.
• If you got some money to spare, buy ads on search engines, like Google AdWords. While they’re never as effective as ranking well in the real search result, they can help get the word out while your site is still in its infancy.

What, there’s more?

OK, if you did all of the above – if you created good, accessible content, that starts to become widely known – you can take a break for a while. And then get back to continue to grow your site. But don’t worry about Google results for the first couple of months, in fact, don’t worry about Google results at all. Your site might not appear in search engines in the beginning, and maybe once it does, your competition will rank higher than you... but these things take time. (Don’t forget to ask yourself not why you want to rank higher, but why you ought to – and if your competitor is a large, well-known, well-working and trusted site maybe it deserves to be ranked higher than you.)

What you can do, though, after a couple of months, is to supervise your site and check what kind of search queries people entered to find you. To do so, get a web statistics program like Google Analytics. They’ll ask you to insert some tracking code into your website, and after some days you’ll be able to check which of your pages are the most successful, and which receive the most traffic from searchers. Using this data you can fine-tune your approaches for the future.

For example, when you find out that searchers just love your dog shoes fashion tips, then maybe you can create some dog coats fashion tips as well, and add a visible link to “buy dog shoes” from your dog shoes fashion tips page.

As another example, maybe a large group of people everyday finds your site searching for blue dog coats, but the page they end up on only sells blue dog shoes and red dog coats – in other words, you’re getting the wrong kind of traffic due to a “misunderstanding.” But maybe you do offer those blue dog coats somewhere else on your site, so having learned about this misunderstanding, you can now add a link to this page from the place where people accidentally arrive at.

Of course, once the search engine optimization basics are all done, you can dive deeper into the topic and read more search blog news, or hire a search engine optimization consultant. However, be careful, as some of the advanced tactics you’ll read up on are known to backfire... as may hiring the wrong SEO consultant. Here’s a quick checklist of “optimization” approaches you should avoid:

• Don’t stuff too many keywords into places where they don’t belong
• Don’t optimize for search engines at the cost of human visitors; if someone told you adding a dash to the domain name helps your rankings, but you feel that dash might confuse your customers, then don’t add it
• Don’t trust people who promise you “instant #1 rankings”, “guaranteed top 10 positions” or anything of the sort
• Don’t link to others from your site just because they promised a link back to you
• Don’t link to others just because they paid you, unless you know exactly what you’re doing (i.e. you know about “bad neighborhoods,” the “nofollow” attribute, PageRank, JavaScript-ads vs text links, what it means to get googleaxed and so on)
• Don’t create multiple pages with exactly the same content
• Don’t “litter” your URL on other people’s sites (and don’t let others people “litter” URLs on your site; if you have a web forum, keep it spam-free)
• Don’t invest in a cheap server that won’t be able to cope with your traffic; don’t build your whole site on free website tools only – if you want to have a high-quality site & server, you need to pay for it
• Don’t worry about a page’s meta descriptions, meta keywords and such; your time is better spent creating content
• Don’t use tools that automatically submit your site’s URL to directories, search engines and such
• Don’t present different content to search engines than you present to users; for example, don’t hide your text to visitors and show it to search engines
• Don’t “over-optimize"; relax, if search engines required webmasters to heavily optimize, they’d be doing a very bad job
• In general, don’t try to outsmart search engines (unless perhaps you intend to dedicate your life to that task); those maintaining search engines are paid to outsmart webmaster tricks, so in the long run, chances for successful tricks are low

With all that in mind... good luck!

Make Money Online: Tags SEO

I look at a lot of sites on a daily basis. There are a lot of common problems I see on sites. Some people may have tags set-up improperly or use tags that have no real purpose. I have compiled a list of the 5 top do-it-yourself SEO errors. It’s safe to say that many do-it-yourselfers may have at least one of these errors on their sites. These should help you omit these often costly mistakes and pull you up in the ranks.

1) Keyword tag – A keyword tag is for keywords, but not for any keywords. You can’t just stuff this tag with keywords that your entire site is related to. The tags should reflect keywords only on that particular page; not the entire site and not every keyword you think your site might be searched on. Also, you should have no more then 20 words in the tag. You should not repeat any word more than 3 times. If you sell tickets, for example, don’t write: Broadway tickets, circus tickets, hockey tickets, boxing tickets and so on. Do use Broadway, circus, hockey, boxing, tickets and so on.

2) Abstract tag – It is sometimes used as a replacement for or combined with a description tag. However, more and more people are using these to stuff keywords. Search engines like Google are interested in what is on the page. More specifically, what visitors can view. In my opinion, the abstract tag has no place on a site.

3) Description Tag – The whole point behind this tag is to describe what the “page” is about. Keywords related to the page should be implemented as well. The limit on words should be 20 – 25. I see many website owners stuffing this tag with keywords, or having a description that is entirely too lengthy. Stay within these guidelines and you will be fine.

4) Title tag – This, to me, is the most important tag. This is the first tag the search engine reads. It tells the search engine what the” page” is about. Don’t put your web address here. Do not add your company name in the beginning of this tag either. It should not exceed 60 characters.

5) Content- If you notice, I have been commenting on relevancy to the “page”, not your overall site. Each page has it’s own keywords. Tag the title tag, description and keyword tags. All of these keywords should be the same. Add them to your content as well. Now your page should be fairly well optimized.

Why do sites fall short? Simple, content is not optimized. Search engines are, for the most part, pretty basic. You type in a search term and it retrieves sites containing those terms while also taking a few other factors into account. So, if your site doesn’t have these terms, how will you be found? You won’t. Over do it with keywords and you will experience the same result, but for different reasons. Sometimes reading everything about SEO can be bad. Trying too many tricks, tips or methods is like too many cooks spoiling the soup. In the end they can do more bad than good. These are very basic rules that should be followed by all. In, doubt? Always consult or hire an SEO professional.

Make Money Online: Keyword SEO

We shall use the site: www.networkstepbystep.blogspot.com to show you how easy SEO is, and that it can be done free. CCNA are our main focus. First thing you need to do is find which keywords are being searched for. The two keyword research tools we use are:

http://inventory.overture.com/ ( when it works )
and
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php

Searching on these sites to find the most popular search keyword. These are the keywords we want to target. But other searched for terms are collections, faqs and collectors, so we will want to use these keywords too. This will improve keyword densitity, which we will explain in future blogs.

Keywords of single words is useful to attract the general audience and helps in getting high ranks,if the web site is new. Keywords of single words should be used more in the root level pages or top level domain pages. This is because these pages are the ones that attract the general traffic & are generally the pages which do not specify specifics. Hence single word keywords based on themes can be targeted for on these pages.

Keywords of multiple words are useful to attract a targeted audience, therefore should be used topic wise for each page according to subject of that web page. Relevant set of Keywords should be use in Title tag, Header Tag, Meta tag, Body tag, Alt tag, Anchor tag, Comment tag and in the url of that specific web page. Use underscore or hyphen to differentiate Keywords. These keywords are normally targeted upon in deeper level or sub directory level pages.

Keywords based on theme is useful to attract targeted audience therefore they are strongly recommended to be used. Typically, although it is not a hard and fast rule but in theme based keyword we use general keywords in root level and uses specific keyword in directory level.

Overall one can safely say that in keyword targeting one uses a dart board strategy. Wherein the smallest circle attracts your core audience & hence should have theme oriented multiple word keywords. As we move up on the theme (dartboard) the circle ( traffic) tends to get larger & the keywords tends to get simpler( singular) even though they are theme based.

Keywords and keyphrases used in domain names & urls of directory pages is also a factor in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well as it helps to inform the targeted audience, about the sites content. Therefore, special care should be exercised in choosing a domain name. All the search engines start reading each web page with its respective domain name.

Having said that, let me add that there is a raging debate amongst the seo community to determine the exact importance of keywords in the domain name. One camp believes that it is hugely important to have keywords in domain whereas the other maintains that brand building domain name is more important than keywords incorporating one.

When Keywords and Keyphrases are used in a Domain name then its called Keyword specific domain name. Keyword in the domain name to my mind has one advantage: It is better to have a keyword domain name for it is worth remembering that most of the people link to you using your URL. If your URL has the keyword or the keyphrase then you are automatically using the keyword in the very important anchor tag.

Make Money Online: Page Title SEO

You have your site all setup but no-one is visiting! That is where you need SEO - search engine optimization. You can pay money to a SEO expert but it is also possible to do it yourself, FREE.

There is much debate about whether the domain name should include one of your main keywords. I look at it as another little plus in our SEO plan. So if you have a domain name without one of your main keywords you can still use these tips.

We are using our other site www.zipposuperstore.com as an example.

So we have our three popular main keywords for our zippo store:
zippo lighters
zippo tricks
zippo collections

If you look closely all contain the word “zippo”. This is to make things easy when we look at off page ranking, which we will talk about in future blogs.

First thing we need to look at is the page title. The page title should only include our main keywords. Try not to use too many words as Google will give more weight to each of your keywords and you will rank higher.

Please, the page title should not say, “Welcome to our website”. Also do not use say ” zippo lighters and zippo tricks and zippo collections”. Though the last does contain our keywords it does looka little long.

So we will shorten it by doing this “zippo | zippo lighter tricks | collections. Notice We took out the “ands” and replaced them with a “|”. Also only used “zippo” twice for keyword densitity. When possible always combine your keywords to cut down on the total number of words used in your page title. When google looks at our title it will see all 3 of our keywords.

SEO H1 Tags

Some search engines will give words found in the “H1? tag a boost in relevancy. The H1 tag is used to specify page or topic headings. The problem with the tag is that it’s often too big and ugly to use very much. In most browsers H1 is an oversized font that often looks out of place on a page.
The good news is that there is a clever way you can get the best of both worlds by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). With CSS, you can specify that the browser display the H1 tag or other tags on your page anyway you please. This is great since you can get both a boost in relevancy and get better control of your page’s appearance in one easy step. How?
In the <HEAD> area of the page, put the following STYLE lines:

<STYLE TYPE=”text/css”>
H1 {font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: black}
</STYLE>

The above will force all H1 tags on the page to use a 12 pt Arial or Helvetica font in black text. You can adjust the point size or font to whatever values look best on your page. By using this CSS tag, you are free to use the H1 tag on ALL your pages to gain extra relevancy WITHOUT sacrificing the look of your pages. Since many engines give more weight to keywords that appear within H1 heading tags versus the regular body text, this is one tip you’ll definitely want to implement today!
or

H1 {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 12pt;
color: #000000;
background-color: #ffffff;
}

or

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
color: #000000;
font-size : 12px;text-decoration: none; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;}

Secrets to Affiliate Millionaires

It appears that to become a high successful affiliate marketing entrepreneur, running multiple streams of affiliate marketing income is the best way. In this article, you will learn how to combine the affiliate marketing strategies such as pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, and article marketing, to maximize profits online through multiple sources of income.

Obviously, running multiple streams of affiliate marketing income is totally a great idea to grow your affiliate commission and online business. With those multiple sources of affiliate marketing income, you are running multiple affiliate marketing strategies at the same time. Also, you will maximize your profits online with those many affiliate marketing strategies. In this article, you will discover and learn basic steps to run multiple streams of affiliate marketing income.

With those steps, it is easier for you to run your own affiliate marketing business and build your own multiple streams of affiliate marketing income. You will leverage those simple steps and learn how to maximize your affiliate commission below.

Affiliate Marketing Income #1: Discover High Performance Keywords.

The first step is to discover high performance keywords for your affiliate marketing business online. With those high performance keywords, you will ensure that you can maximize your profits online and earn huge of affiliate commission. To discover the high performance keywords, you can use pay per click (PPC) search engine to test and find out which keywords are super-profitable and high performance for your business. Without testing systematically, it is difficult to identify which keywords are super-profitable and valuable for your home based affiliate marketing business.

Affiliate Marketing Income #2: Write Quality Relevancy Content with High Performance Keywords.

The next step for running success multiple streams of affiliate marketing income is to write quality relevancy content with those high performance keywords. You have to build your own original related to your market based on those high performance keywords. The highest recommendation is to focus on your reader’s mind and the proper of writing.

Affiliate Marketing Income #3: Build Your Website Ranking Based on Your Content.

The next step is to upload your content given from previous step on your website. You have to optimize your web page with those high performance keywords as well. It means you must include those high performance keywords into your web page and content for your affiliate website. Also, there are many search engine optimization techniques on the internet to help you to build your website ranking in search engines.

Affiliate Marketing Income #4: Consolidate Your Content into Your Own Article.

The article marketing is one of the most effective affiliate marketing strategies to drive quality relevancy traffic to your affiliate website. All you have to do is to consolidate your content into the articles. You have to focus on writing, article layout, article structure and article formats. With those stuffs, it is easier for you to maximize the profits through your articles. Additionally, submitting your articles to other article directories is a good idea to build up your reputation and creditability. Also, it will help you drive more quality traffic to your affiliate website.

Affiliate Marketing Income #5: Post Your Articles into Your Blog.

To run the multiple streams of affiliate marketing income, building your own blog with those same articles from previous step is a great idea. However, you have to customize those articles for your own blog. There is a different point between post messages in the blog and article. You have to put more your personality and be more personalised into your blog. For blogging online, you have to build up the relationship with your readers. That’s why you have to be more personalised and socialised, rather than writing the articles.

Affiliate Marketing Income #6: Include Your Articles into Your Newsletter.

Providing newsletter strategies has proven that it is very powerful to drive more traffic to your affiliate website. Thus, to run multiple streams of affiliate marketing income, newsletter is one of the best strategies you should not forget. You can include your articles from the above step into your newsletter.

Affiliate Marketing Income #7: Participant in Forum through Your Articles.

Many studies reveal that participating in forums through your articles will help you boost skyrocket affiliate commission and grow your affiliate marketing business. The highest recommendation is to use this strategy properly, rather than trying to sell your affiliate products in the community. You have to share and exchange the ideas and information related to your affiliate products among other people in the forums. That is the best way to maximize the power of forums and articles together!

Affiliate Marketing Income #8: Place Online Classified Ads.

The last step to run multiple streams of affiliate marketing income with multiple affiliate marketing strategies is to place online classified ads. With the content and high performance keywords from above steps, you can conduct your own online classified ads. The best approach to maximize profits from classified ads is to include properly your high performance keywords and benefits into your ads.

Final thoughts, it is important for affiliate marketing entrepreneurs to run multiple streams of affiliate marketing income. In this article, you have learnt how to combine several affiliate marketing strategies, like pay per click online advertising, search engine optimization, article marketing, blogging online marketing and email marketing, to run multiple streams of affiliate marketing income. The real key to your success for multiple streams of income is your creativity. You have to combine those affiliate marketing strategies together to maximize your profits.

Avoiding Affiliate Scams

Affiliate can be a profitable and fun way to build your business. However, it is very important to be sure that you are choosing the right programs. There are a lot of good programs, but there are an equal number of companies that are outright scams and will never even pay you for your hard efforts. Worse still the company can suddenly close and still owe you your commission.

How to avoid these scams: The best way to avoid these scams is to do your research well. Check out these points before joining:

1. Does the company have good support? Do they answer emails and have valid contact information?
2. Do they have a valid offline address?
3. What % of commission do they pay; 30%-50% is the best.
4. Tracking system - this should be in real time and accurate.
5. Products, should be well targeted for your market and of good quality

Where to research:

1. Forums, related to your industry. There are many savvy people who use the forums and you may be sure they will tell it like it is. There are few programs out there that at least somebody has heard of and can give educated advice on.
2. Discussion lists
3. Look into the program carefully yourself
4. Put the company name, plus the word scam, into the search engines and see what comes up. Use your own judgment, as sometimes these reviews may not be 100% unbiased.

The golden rule to avoid being scammed is to look before you join, and do not be afraid to ask other people’s opinions. If it looks too good to be true it very likely is, so do not get involved with a company that needs to hype up its opportunity or program. When you are alert and use caution before rushing into something you will be able to choose good reliable programs that will help you in reaping profit for many years to come.

Using Forums to Bring Traffic to your Website

Every website owner is looking for ways to bring more traffic and in particular targeted traffic to their website. By doing this you will most likely increase your sales and therefore your revenue and profits. There is no doubt that forum posting is a very effective way of increasing your website traffic.

Done properly, each and every forum post will increase the number of people that visit your website. More importantly it is a very fast and easy thing to do and something that every website owner can do for themselves. Below is a step by step guide of the best way to go about things.

Step 1 - Find Forums Relevant to Your Business

Obviously you need to find the forums where your posts will be most relevant and reach the largest number of people that are interested in your industry. The easiest way to do this is go to Google or any other search engine any type into the search box “YOUR INDUSTRY + FORUM”. You could also replace forum with discussion board. This will give you a list of the most used forums for your industry.

Step 2 - Join the Major Forums

It is usually very easy to join a forum, but the most important thing to consider when joining is to set up your signature correctly. Your signature is another name for your resource box and it is vital that you include your website address within your resource box. Without this interested forum users will not be able to find you. This information will appear below each and every post that you make and those people that like your post will likely follow your link.

Step 3 - Get Familiar with the Rules of the Forum

If you are not aware of what you can and cannot do there is a chance your posts will be deleted and then you will just be wasting your time. Usually most forums will not allow you to post obvious adverts so don’t even try.

Step 4 - Ask Users for Input

If you have written an article on your website a good way to get people to your site is to ask them what they think or ask them if there is anything they would add to it. This will get people to your site and reading your article and possibly contributing. You can then add the ability to subscribe to your newsletter box at the bottom of the article which would allow you to get a customer base. This is a great way to gain exposure to your site and your business.

Step 5 - Answer Users Questions

If you are reading the Forum and a user has asked a question that you can help with, give as full and complete an answer as possible. If you have something on your site that could help with the problem recommend it and ask for feedback.

Asking for feedback will help you to get some honest critique on what you have to offer and it will also encourage people to visit your site. In addition if your answer is relevant and useful it will help you to gain some positive comments from other Forum users.

There are many other things that you can do on forums to engage with your audience and encourage them to visit your site. However the most important thing to remember is to get involved. Be a regular user and provide as much information for other users as you can. This will help to make you an authority and bring large amounts of targeted traffic straight to your website.

Affiliate Program Tutorial

1. Define goal:
To succeed you have to know input and output. If you know what you want and know what people want you will succeed. But at the beginining, you should achieve small successes first (300$ for example), see the money in your hands or in your bank account, and then increase your goals.

If you have much larger goals. That's OK. Whatever your goals, I strongly recommend that you serve your apprenticeship by taking all the steps. They'll give you solid knowledge and experience on which to build your affiliate business.


2. Find your niche.
As i said in first step, this step help you to find what you want. Find the niche that you have knowledge on it. And because you are planning for your business, you have to be patient and slowly. You should avoid some niche which have high competitive like makerting online, make money online... It is much easier to chose less competitive niche and you will succeed with those niche. And this niche must be easy for you to write. That's all.

3. Choose a profitable niche.
How to chose profitable niche? You can use google adword and word trackers. Do some research on Google AdWords and Wordtracker to choose the most profitable niche from among the ones you've chosen. Because you're planning to use AdSense, you want valuable keywords or key phrases, if possible ones that people are paying at least 50 cents per click for on Yahoo! Search Marketing and AdWords. You must find the keyword which people usually search this BEFORE you start building your web site. That's critically important.
You can also see how many people searched for the phrase the previous month. For a number of reasons, this figure is often unreliable and can be grossly exaggerated. That's why I double check results using Wordtracker.
Wordtracker's free trial is fairly limited. Fortunately, they allow you to subscribe cheaply for a day or a week at a time. It's very fast, so you can do an awful lot of keyword research in a day. I use the annual subscription now.
Go to Google's AdWords and find out how much advertisers are willing to pay for the keywords or key phrases you're interested in. You can do that by playing around with Google's free Keyword Tool.
For example, try putting in a keyword or phrase, such as "recipe" and click on "Get More Keywords". Pretend you're willing to pay the maximum per click the tool allows - 100. (It won't work properly if you ignore this.) Over on the right side of the page, make sure that "Cost and position estimates" is selected.
The tool will calculate for you the estimated average CPC (cost per click) for a whole lot of words and phrases. Try entering a different word, say "debt" or "hosting", click on "Re-calculate" and watch how the CPC changes.
You don't HAVE to choose a topic which has expensive keywords. Often topics that have expensive keywords are very competitive. You may do better choosing a less competitive niche with cheaper keywords.
Beware: If you choose certain topics, Google will not allow you to place AdSense ads on your site and you'll miss out on a very lucrative opportunity.
Such topics include gambling, firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles; beer or alcohol; tobacco or tobacco-related products; and prescription drugs.
For a full list of topics you may wish to avoid see: https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US
Publishers can choose to have their ads displayed only on Google or also on a large network of sites. Will AdSense ads you see on Google appear your pages? To get an idea, find web pages that have material similar to the content you're planning to create and look at their AdSense ads. You can also use AdSense's preview tool to see which ads are being displayed to people in different countries.

4. Research affiliate merchants.
Do research to see if there are suitable affiliate merchants which match your topic. You want ones that have excellent products, excellent reputations and sites that look as though they're good at selling. The good place is forum digital point. You can ask community whatever you want.

5. Build a useful, interesting web site on your niche.
Content is king. To make money, you have to have content. So how can we get content? Is it not difficult. First find the information from google, news, blogs. After getting enough information, write article. Use image to illustrate and then you have a article about the niche you chose. The skill you need is sumary and analysis. Chose hot topic from newspaper.
Note: do not try to copy totally 100% other article. If you do it, google search engine will push you back. You will never on google search and no visitors ==> no money.
Another point is you have to write for target audience. Define target audience first and then write a post.

6. Add affiliate links.
As you write the articles for your site, weave affiliate links into them. Always have a typical visitor in mind as you write the articles. Speak to that visitor. Your task as an affiliate is to help your visitor decide what to buy.

One successful technique is to gradually lead your visitor towards a purchase.
+ Start by outlining a problem
+ Discuss a good solution that has worked for you
+ And end the article with a link that is a call to action, such as a hyperlink that says, "Find out more here."

Your task as an affiliate is NOT to sell (that's the merchant's job) but to presell, to warm up your visitors. You want your visitors in a ready-to-buy frame of mind when they arrive at the merchant's site.

The affiliate links have to be hidden. Search on my blog, i have article about how to hide affilitate link. Someone does not like affilitate link. Therefore they will go directly to website and you will not earn any commision.


7. Place AdSense ads on your site
Earn more money from adsense. It is free to sign up. But do not cheat google.

8. SEO and Link Building
Link to other sites. Choose sites that have similar or related themes, and invite those sites to link to you. This is hugely important. Search engines love sites that have many links to them – especially if those links come from sites which are themselves popular. Now you see why I said build a useful, interesting web site. If you do that, people are more likely to link to your site.
Here are some techiniques
+ Anchor text: To search engines, anchor text is very important. So chose it carefully
+ directories and niche directories: List your site in major directories:
Gimpsy
Skaffe
Joeant
GoGuides
Business.com
SevenSeek
ThisIsYourYear
Looksmart (probably too expensive)
BlueFind
WowDirectory
Best of the Web
GeniusFind

+ Write articles: If you have article in high pagerank, trusted article site, your site will also trusted and have higher pagerank and is well-known

The last not least: Be patient. Some first few months, It is very difficult to earn money but you will succeed later.

Getting Affiliate Marketing Started - Affiliate Marketing is Easier than you Think

Hi! I work with thousands of affiliates on a yearly basis and I am always recruiting and talking to webmasters about how to do affiliate marketing effectively and generate killer revenue. Its really all about putting up pages on your site or posting on your blog about the affiliate offers you are representing and including the affiliate banners on the particular post or a text link under the post. Unique content on all pages is a must. Try to write as grammatically correct as possibly as well. If you have you ad units arranged well on your site in 3-5 ad placement areas, you should be able to build pages or posts in order to get organic traffic related to the offers you are promoting. As webmasters become less impressed with Google Adsense revenues they are looking more and more for affiliate programs to replace them. Often times, affiliate offers yield better than adsense anyways. When looking for offers I find that CJ's EPC system is a pretty good gauge for how well an affiliate program converts. But you have to keep in mind that the EPC can be skewed if that advertiser has a lot of ppc affiliates which convert well. Inhouse affiliate programs are great because you can work with their affiliate managers and beat them up for a higher payout after you have produced for them. Once you have decided on the affiliate programs you will market you then have to either launch a new site or blog or create a section on your current sites to promote the merchant by name or the products they sell. If you post daily and acquire some inbound link to your sites/blogs you will start to generate some good organic traffic. You are then on your way to affiliate income! This is a simplified explanation of affiliate marketing but I think necessary for all the beginner! Comment on this post if you have question about it. Good luck

Technique to hide affiliate links!

+ It is sometimes necessary to hide, or cloak, your affiliate links to stop people stealing your commission or bypassing the affiliate link and going straight to the main site. Affiliate link hijacking is a big problem, some people will change your affiliate URL to their own before purchasing a product so they themselves get paid the commission giving them a discounted product. This problem is far worse if you are promoting to the affiliate marketers crowd as they can spot an affiliate link from 100 yards away! They will just replace your affiliate ID with their own and "hijack" your commissions.
+ Some people just simply hate the thought that you will make a commission from their purchase and will just cut off your affiliate ID at the end of the URL. If you don't take steps to try and hide your affiliate links from hijackers, then you will carry on losing commissions.
+ So the other advantages to hiding affiliate links are that if people see your link in a post or email, they just won’t click it just because of the affiliate connection, hiding links WILL increase your CTR (Click Through Ratio)

How can we hide affiliate links
1. Use shorter link:
The quickest way to hide your links is to use a company like http://tinyurl.com/ which is free to use and turns links like http://www.YourUglyAffiliateLink.com/?12345 into something like this http://tinyurl.com/35q7rl, however this is only really a quick fix and is better to be used for mailing your opt-in lists, the people who trust you, people who don’t know you can’t tell where that link is going to take them, it could be a porn site for all they know, you will get better click through rates using another method.
IMPORTANT: Some link cloaking techniques may prevent some sites from dropping tracking cookies into your visitors computer which means you may not get credit for that referral. Check all links to make sure they work correctly, if you are still unsure use something like Power Link Generator to be on the safe side.

2. Using a redirect php script
This is an easy technique to implement, all you have to do is create a single php file that includes a small piece of code, so if you are trying to promote www-yourID.merchID.hop.clickbank-net then you way create a blank page called, say, http://discounts.php that just contains the redirect script, so the actual link you promote would be www-yoursite-com/discounts.
Unfortunately this technique does have one drawback, some affiliate merchant links will still be visible in the browser address bar, it works great with clickbank products.
<?php header("location: http:// www .YourUglyAffiliateLink"); ?>

3. Hide your affiliate links using a zero-frame code
This technique has a little more code than above, but it actually frames the site you are promoting.

Again, you will need your own website to use this technique but it’s just as easy to do.

The following code frames the site you are promoting making it look to the visitor as if they are still on your site, in other words, no matter which page they go to on the framed site they will only see your domain in the browser window.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Product Title</title>
<META name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
</head><frameset rows="100%,*" border="0">
<frame src="http:// www .Your-Destination-Link" frameborder="0" />
<frame frameborder="0" noresize />
</frameset> document.removeEventListener('click, clickHandler, true);
</html>

4. cloaking link
Becareful with this technique or you will be banned from google search.
<a onclick="parent.location.href='http://www.Affiliate-link';
return event.returnValue=false"
href=http://www.Display-Link>Anchor Text</a>

5. Hide affiliate links using htaccess
redirect 301 /AnyNameYouLike http://YourAffiliateUrl

Just add the above line of code to your htaccess file, the /AnyNameYouLike is the directory or page you want to use for redirection, for example, if named it /dog-food your link would look like this http://www.yourdomain/dog-food which would redirect traffic to your affiliate link.

You don’t need to create any pages or directories using this technique, just add the redirection code to your htaccess file.

How Do I Get My Site The First Page On Google?

As we know, pagerank has the important role when google return search result to user. It is a factor used to order url in search result. So if you want to be in first page when user search, first thing is make your site has high pagerank.
Google works by tracking incoming links from other pages, but it's not necessarily the quantity as it is the quality. Google assigns each web page a PageRank (click for wiki article).

Basically the PageRank can be 0-10. It is better to have a few links from PR10 sites than a ton from PR0 sites. The PR of incoming links also plays a major role in determining your PR.

Building your PR is very challenging and often people resort to link farms, but this only lasts a while because eventually Google recognizes a link farm for what it is and penalizes its PR.

You best bet is to build a quality site with original work that people will apreciate. It comes down to "if you build it, they will come."

How Do We Profit From Twitter?

Twitter doesn’t make any sense on the surface:

“Some startup is paying squillions of dollars so that you can broadcast free SMS messages to your friends worldwide?

And people actually sign up to have their mobiles clogged with annoying and mundane text messages of no-more-than 140 characters?

And some venture capitalist actually paid for this to get off the ground?”

It reeks of a type of here-we-go-again - dot-com-boom - this-time-in-Web-2.0-form hysteria - and sounds (on the surface) like some venture capitalist was so eager to jump onto the Web 2.0 phenomenon that he bought the first thing that came through his door.

Or at least this is what I thought when I first heard about Twitter.

“Where’s the value in this?” I asked myself.

But the more I scratch the surface (of the Twitter riddle, not my head), the more potential value I see in it.

Twitter is Growing at an Exponential Rate

Twitter’s membership base was said to be 100,000 strong as of late March, and was doubling every three weeks, according to Technology Review

And if the Unique ID’s of the RSS feeds are anything to go by, then as of earlier tonight (when I checked it out) there were at least 4,177,800 users!

And thousands more sign up every hour!!

This is a growth rate which new Web 2.0 services dream of - They type of massive growth experienced by MySpace and YouTube.

And already fan sites are popping up – like Twitterverse – a mashup which looks at the most commonly used words on Twitter.

As Steve Rubel points out, with these sorts of vital statistics it’s only a matter of time until Twitter gets snapped up.
Twitter’s Value is in its ability to Communicate

From a user’s perspective, the real value of Twitter is in its ability to help you communicate with people.

In that way, it’s just like a blog.

If you’re running an internet business, you probably already know the value of a blog: The more you communicate with people, the more likely it is that they will think of you and want to buy from you.

Twitter is just the same – although it has its own strengths and weaknesses.

On the downside, you can only send messages of up to 140 characters.

On the upside, people can receive your messages straight to their mobile phone – meaning you can access them in their daily lives in places where blogs, e-mail and other web technologies can’t reach.

And Twitter foots the bill for you!

What’s more, people WANT to hear about the mundane stuff that happens in your life.

Check out the Twitter account of 2008 U.S. Presidential hopeful, John Edwards - he already has over 2,000 people signed up to find out what he’s doing on a particular day.

Check it out:

(from staff): 1st quarter fundraising deadline is tomorrow…Sen. Edwards will be in KY, IN, OH, and FL today for the final push.

Riveting! :P

So what’s in it for Twitter? How does Twitter benefit from all of this?
Twitter’s Value is also in Its Huge Database

But from a business perspective (ie - from Twitter’s point of view) the real value in Twitter is in the size of its database.

SMS marketing companies pay millions to build their databases.

Twitter already has a database of millions of users.

If I had this sort of database, I know what I’d do.

* I’d start collecting demographic data from people (as they signed up, or next time they accessed their account). Age, gender, location – and perhaps some interests;

* I’d then start profiling the database, looking for what people are interested in / what they do. For example, a quick scan of the Twitterverse shows coffee is used often;

* Then, I’d look for companies who wanted to market to these people, by targeting their demographics or certain keywords.

Imagine it - Starbucks sends a broadcast out via Twitter to all users who had ever mentioned the word “coffee”, who lived in an area close to a Starbucks coffee house advertising their latest frappe – and offering people a free upsize if they show this SMS when they order!

Something like:

Try Starbucks new Lychee Frappe: Get yours upsized for free if you show this message when ordering. Today Only At Starbucks.

And you still have characters to spare! ;)

This is all well and good - but it doesn’t answer the question:
How Can You Profit From Twitter?

Ever since Ed Dale posed the question on his blog, making money out of Twitter is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and researching.

I plan on talking about more in a few days time (so if you’re not subscribed to my RSS feed, then I recommend you hook yourself up right away).

Here’s just one idea – Woot (the site that sells one thing every day) is using Twitter to let people know about their daily specials – and already they have 2054 people signed up!

(Sorry John Edwards - more people are interested in hearing about cheap LCD TV’s than your 2008 Presidential Campaign. ;))

So how do you plan on cashing in from Twitter? What are your ideas and strategies?

Let’s get the conversation started

(brenthodgson)

How to promote website use Twitter?

The main way is:
+ You build relationships
+ Add people up
+ Build either a following or follow someones twits.

Then you earn from finding job or freelance opportunities that you will not find quickly enough or in time via normal methods. And you can also get insider info on prospective jobs and prospects. When you see someone twit: "Having a hard time with so and so ..." you can start offering your services cheap!
Some people blurt out job requirements - so that helps too. Someone upgrades to 4Gb RAM and you know you can get 2 1Gb sticks cheap! Tama ba?

Prepare for earning by Twitter: Plugins for WordPress

Want to enhance your blogging experience by integrating Twitter feeds or Twitter tweets with your WordPress blog? Just check the following WordPress plugins. I am sure that you will find a suitable one for your requirements.

* MyTwitter : MyTwitter allows users to display their recent Twitter status updates (tweets) on their Wordpress site and update their status through the Options page. Includes customization options including number of recent twitters to display, formatting options, and stylesheets. It can be called as a function or used as a widget.
* Twitter Widget Pro : A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link parsing. Feeds can be for a single user, or can include all their friends’ tweets as well (like their Twitter home page does). It supports displaying profiles images, and even lets you control whether to display the time and date of a tweet or how log ago it happened.
* Twitter for Wordpress : A simple plugin that displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog. Twitter for WordPress has several configurable options. If you use WordPress widgets, just drag the widget into your sidebar and configure. And if you are not using widgets, just add a simple code to your theme.
* Twitter This : This plugin adds a simple “Twitter This” button to your blog posts, that allows your readers to share your blog post at Twitter. In order to share, the user must login to Twitter.
* SimpleTwitter : This plugin allows Wordpress blog owners to add Twitter messages to their templates. After installation, you need to call it by adding a piece of code to your blog theme. There’s no formatting. It returns the most recent Twitter post found for the configured Twitter user. The message will be cached for the configured number of minutes. After this time, the plugin checks Twitter for new messages.
* Twitpress : Submits a user definable tweet to your twitter account notifying any twitter followers or friends that a new blog entry has been published on your blog (or an existing published entry has been edited). Supports inclusion of a permalink to your blog posting in the tweet.
* Twitter Tools : This plugin creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It enables you to pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.

Six ways Twitter can make money

A web 2.0-sized boatload of buzz has surrounded Twitter, the addictive service that allows its users to answer one simple question: what are you doing? The service has made appearances in everything from your friend's blog to the New York Times, and everyone seems jazzed about how fun tweeting is. While we're all having a good time, however, its creators, Obvious, keep hinting at how many practical uses they have up their sleeve for Twitter. Even though they haven't revealed any of their cards just yet, the rest of us are left wondering: how is such a seemingly frivolous service going to make money?

As a user who has taken the Twitter pill hook, line and sinker, I've been mulling this question for some time now. I came up with a few strategies, but then I figured: why not run them by the Twitter crew themselves? The least they could say was 'no comment,' but fortunately Evan Williams, one of Obvious and Twitter's founders, responded with a few of his own. Read on for my attempts at making Twitter some money (I'm waiting for my job offer Ev), as well as some choice words and ideas of his own from Evan.

* Twitter Pro - This is one obvious move. Twitter Pro could be a paid service that offers more features, unlimited tweets vs. a 'standard' account that receive a daily/weekly limit. It could also include a mobile phone/Windows Mobile/BlackBerry client with more robust tweeting/following tools that use the web to transmit tweets, avoiding those nasty SMS charges. It could also allow tweeting pics and videos from around the web with a Tumblr-like K.I.S.S. philosophy.
* Merchandise - A while back (though I admittedly can't find a link right now), Evan said merch was a big revenue generator for Blogger, and Twitter has worlds more buzz surrounding it right now. Heck, they even rolled out a small batch of shirts for SXSW, over which users seemed to be pretty excited. As ready as we may be to plunk down some cash for the privilege of using a t-shirt to tell people where we waste most of our time, Ev directly replied to this one: "RE: merchandise - It was, at one time, a noticeable part of Blogger's revenue, but that's when Blogger was just me, scraping by; my guess is it wouldn't make a blip in Twitter's costs today. Unless we figured out how to be a trendy new apparel brand." Sorry everyone, but it sounds like apparel isn't exactly on their list of features to roll out in the next update.
* Twitter for Business a lá Google Apps - Customized, secure software that businesses can run on their own intranet. BlackBerry and WinMo clients are a more apparent option here. Obviously, this could become tremendously useful if Twitter built in some hooks that work like Stikkit and Google Calendar, allowing employees to easily tweet appointments and tasks to a centralized PIM system, and automatically be subscribed to their team's tweets without any extra effort on their part.
* Twitter Forums, ad-supported - Finally, an innovation brought to the aging discussion forum format. Sort of a Twitter approach to Yahoo! Answers, allowing users to post questions and follow threads they're interested in, with the Twitter format forcing everyone to keep things simple and on-topic. Instead of ads, this could also possibly be just for Pro customers. One of the catches here is that Twitter users only see tweets from people they are following. When submitting a question to a Twitter Forum, you would be able to see all replies to the question, even the ones from users you've never met and aren't following.

Evan didn't let me have all the fun with brainstorming, however, and he offered two of his own ideas which I would assume are a good bet the company is working on, since he shared them with this lowly blogger:

Two more-straightforward ideas: 1) Ads on the site. We have a little AdSense on there now, but we haven't really tried. As the traffic grows, some tasteful sponsorships might be sellable. 2) Charging companies who are using it for marketing or other commercial purposes. If an organization finds Twitter to be a valuable communication tool with their customers/constituents/etc -- especially if we're sending lots of SMS's for them, which cost us money -- it seems viable to make an offering around that.

So there you have it: six ways Twitter can make money, two of which are straight from the lion's mouth. Judging from the sheer magnitude of buzz surrounding the recently-incorporated company, I wouldn't be surprised if these six are but a drop in the bucket. There's good news for those who fear change, however: no matter which way Twitter decides to start paying their exponentially growing bandwidth bills, Evan assured me that: "Our top concern when it comes to monetization will be to do so in a way that does not negatively impact users." Good show guys; your users will appreciate being able to spend their time tweeting about how they're spending their time, with the least amount of distraction.

Should we buy "Paid Traffic"? Is it Good or Bad?

I am sure we are all familiar with the term “If it’s too good to be true…it probably is.” in the world of the internet this is usually the case. I am sure that you have all seen ads or e-mails that claim to get you thousands of hits a day. The internet seems to be full of these companies that are promising large amounts of traffic at a fraction of the cost of normal PPC, but is it really worth it?

1. How can those company can bring traffic to your site?
What these companies do really depends on the method they use to get traffic.
+ Methods: Some use browser tool bars, some use spyware programs, some use instant messenger, and some even use viruses.

About toolbar: Have you ever seen a “free toolbar” or some other “free tool” that you install on your computer? That’s them and they are everywhere. Of course not all of these tools are bad but how are you supposed to know which ones are and are not spyware, its simply not possible in most cases. Because of this fact these programs spread across the internet and get hundreds of thousands of users. When user installed it, it may be works as virus/spam, automatically tracked users and browse your website. And of course, user does not know that they visit this website. The result is this traffic is bad. They can not increase sales, clicks on ads ... etc.

Another method is used: pop-up ads, pop-under ads, or even bot traffic. What this means is that if you sign up for a traffic program, your page may now have become spam. Your website would be popping up on thousands of desktops world wide to people who could not care less about your products. With bot traffic, it’s even worse in that the user may not even know they went to a website at all. Their computer automatically visits the site for them, with out them ever knowing.

I know some pop-up program can make your site be considered as spam like pop-under.ru ... You should avoid those traffic.

Now you can see why these paid traffic companies are often a bad idea, and why you should avoid them. The traffic is so cheap that many only need one sale to cover the cost, but so is its quality.

If you really want quality traffic that converts, the only way is to stick to what works. Stick to reputable companies with proven track records and always research a company before you enter into a contract with them. A simple internet search could save you hundreds of dollars and your reputation. It may take more time and cost a little more, but it’s better than the alternatives.

Huge list of social bookmark site.

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Google Adsense Tutorial - Part 9

Search Engine Optimization
In the previous chapter, I talked about a number of different ways that you can increase your traffic. Probably the most important method though is to get a high ranking on search engines. That’s free traffic. Again, there are all sorts of books and experts who can help you improve your SEO and win a top spot at a site. I have had experience with a number of strategies that could help you improve your ranking. I’d like to share them with you now.
Robot.txt
The first thing you need to know about indexing your site at search engines is that you control which pages are indexed and which are excluded. You do that with a file called robots.txt.
Robots.txt contains nothing more than a record of which robots should index which pages.
Without going into too much detail, there are two conventions used in a
robots.txt file:
User-agent: [Defines which robots the site is addressing.]
Disallow: [Allows you to list the sites or robots you want to
exclude.]
In general, you’re probably going to use “User-agent: *” to make sure that you’re addressing the robots of every search engine and you’ll probably want include all of your pages (although you might want to exclude your directories: “Disallow: /cgi-bin/”). Robots.txt just allows you to control which robots index which pages. It’s important to have in your directory but it won’t really increase your search engine rankings. Titles, URL’s and links are much more important.

Titles And URL’s
I mentioned back that Metatags just aren’t what they used to be. I also said that it’s important that your titles and URLs contain the most important keywords for each of your pages in order to keep the ads relevant. But those titles and URLs don’t just influence your ads; they also affect your search engine rankings. A page about toy cars called cars.html might have a low ranking when someone looks for information about cars. Change the name to toy_cars.html and you should get a much higher ranking when someone looks for “toy cars”. The more relevant your URL is and the easier it is to read, the better. www.domain.com/page is always an improvement than http://domain.com/page.php?newsid=1234583373. One of the first places you should look when you want to improve your rankings then is your titles and URLs.

Links
The more links you have, the better. And the better the sites that list those links the more they’ll be worth. It’s one thing to swap links and ask for links but it is worth aiming to put
your links on sites that look good and have high rankings. In fact, being listed on a poor site can bring your ranking down.
One of the best places to place links to improve your search engine rankings is on forums. Add a comment and include your URL in your signature. Google’s spiders love forums and review them every week. And because these sites tend have quite high ranking, those posts will do wonders for your listings

Create Gateways
Usually, your links will lead directly to your home page. That’s where you see your site as starting and that’s where you want them to enter. But if the content the user wants to see is on one of the internal pages, there’s no reason for them to have to click around to find it. Fill that page with keywords that relate to the content on that page and it will have its own search engine ranking — and well-targeted ads. So if you have a site about cats and one of your pages was about cat food, it would make sense to put plenty of cat food keywords on the page. That
would get you cat food ads and a high ranking on search engines when someone does a search for “cat food” rather than just people who wanted to know about “cats.”

Automatic Submissions
Submitting your site to all of the search engines from Google and Yahoo! right down to the smallest ones, and optimizing each of your pages for high ranking can be a drag. You also have to keep submitting the site on a regular basis and constantly check your position if you want to keep it. The search engines are always re-indexing and reorganizing. A site that can be in the top spot one week can be a couple of pages over a week later. (Good news if you’re low down, not so good if you’ve spent hours changing your pages to climb the rankings.) That’s why many webmasters simply outsource their SEO so that they can concentrate on content. There are lots of companies that do this. Search Engine Blaster for example, lets you choose from over 600,000 engines but there are plenty of others. Personally, I think that’s a bit of a waste of time. Only Google, Yahoo and MSN are important, in that order.