We all know that Google has wanted a good “user experience” for a long time now, and that they value this over how well we formulate our articles, work in backlinks, build anchor text and so forth. But Google has taken it to a new level and has slapped millions of sites that were once thought to be Google friendly and search engine optimized. Now, search engine optimization has taken a totally different look, and in some rather unexpected ways.

How to Improve SEO in Your Blog Posts

One of the biggest improvements you need to start implementing right away in how to improve SEO is in the way you write your blog posts. Aside from seeking out keyword phrases for the sole purpose of catching a visitor’s eye in the search results, using keywords anymore for any kind of density or anchor text purpose is pretty much passé. If you’re planning on pandering to Google, you’ll  have to first pander to the visitor or customer.

Google now despises it when you use your keyword phrase as your anchor text. So what should you use instead? For some reason, lingo such as “click here” and “read more” will now take precedence over “mac dvd ripper” and “ how to get rid of your acne.” Apparently, Google sees it as less commercial and more like what readers expect to see when they’re about to visit a new page.

Does this make your previous articles – which you spend hours analyzing for keyword anchor text capability – worthless? Perhaps not entirely, but the outlook for existing ones is pretty bleak. Article directories are now deemed of little value for backlinking purposes, and in addition, you certainly don’t want to be posting duplicate content of your articles all over the place anymore, either. So if anyone tells you that in order to know how to improve your SEO, you have to keep using article directories, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about.

How to Improve SEO with Your Keyword Selection

Getting nitty gritty with your keyword phrases is now the “in” thing to do in how to improve SEO. Due to not being able to leverage the ordinary evergreen niches quite so much anymore due to their spammy quality in Google’s eyes, many internet marketers are left looking for other sources of income. This may means that purchasing extra keyword research tools and reevaluating your data strategy are in order. Long tail keywords aren’t necessarily king just for being long. Really evaluate how well they convert in order to know how to improve your SEO.

Local mobile marketing takes a little different perspective than regular mobile marketing. It will obviously be a little bit easier if you’re writing a generic blog about how to get rid of acne that is applicable worldwide than if you’re trying to market a small bakery in San Francisco. You still have lots of competition, but you’re marketing to a much more select crowd.

Local Mobile Marketing Strategies

Coming up with a local mobile marketing strategy takes a little bit of skill, but more than that, it merely requires looking at things from the view of someone on the go. If you’re trying to help someone find your location, the first thing you need to do is make sure you have a Google Places page set up with a marker right over top of your business or the driveway to your business. On the website itself (the mobile friendly one, obviously) you need to have easy-to-find buttons for a map or directions, your phone number, hours of operation, and maybe even customer testimonials.

For the visual side, mobile-friendly pictures are always a must. Don’t upload images that take too long to download or that aren’t scaled for mobile use. Nobody likes to sit and see that little spinning icon on the screen when they tap a picture. From a local mobile marketing standpoint, that means death, because they’ll just hit the back button on their browsers and search for someone else with a more navigable site.

Additionally, you can’t have a website with half and half mobile-friendly and non-mobile-friendly pages. You can get a piece of code for your real website that detects when a mobile device is visiting, and it will automatically redirect to the mobile friendly version of your site. This is preferred to having a “mobile friendly version” button on a site that takes a long time to load that users must wait for to select.

Local Mobile Marketing Ideas

Above and beyond the essential local mobile marketing strategies above, you still need some inspiration for what to include on your mobile site. Again, think speed and relevance. Post short videos of less than one minute on the website about anything you can possibly think would be interesting to viewers. If you own a hair salon, post videos of your stylists in action. If you’re a bakery, show cinnamon rolls being made by hand. Even if your work isn’t necessarily hands-on, it builds trust in customers and gives your site SEO friendliness for having multimedia on it.

Use these local mobile marketing ideas to help you develop a mobile friendly site that users will enjoy navigating and feel driven to visit in person.

For example, how do you think so many people are able to write ebooks on how to get rid of certain diseases or sicknesses? Some are charlatans, of course, and others just copied what existing books have to say on the subject, but many of them actually had to go through the problem in order to find a solution. Once they found a solution, they saw their problems as opportunities and found a way to make money off of their suffering. It doesn’t always happen like that, but that’s just an example of one of the many ways to make the most out of their problems.

Seeing problems as opportunities in Your Online Work

As an internet marketer, you run into problems every day. Maybe the guy in the Philippines that you hired hasn’t returned your work for two weeks, and you have to start over with someone new. Perhaps you’re struggling to learn CSS coding on your own and can’t make sense of online tutorials. What are you doing to overcome these problems? Are you seeking out help elsewhere, or are you finding a way through the problem yourself?

In either instance, seeing problems as opportunities will encourage you to help others to figure a way through the same problem – for a fee, of course. Or maybe not. Perhaps you could write a five-page how-to guide on solving a very specific issue and offer it for free to readers willing to give you their names and email addresses. Then you can sell something to them on the backend later. How’s that for seeing your problems as opportunities?

The Mentality of Seeing Your Problems as Opportunities

Many sales gurus and internet marketers will tell you that it’s just plain good salesmanship to start looking at your problems as opportunities. Part of the reason is this. If you don’t look for a way through your problems, you’ll just give up or you’ll look at them the wrong way. You’ll let them get you down, and that will reflect on your whole life, including your online business.

But you could really be missing out on opportunities to make money if you don’t actively look at the current problems going on in your life and figure out a way to capitalize on them. Do you keep getting told no to a job? Then document your methods of going about finding a job, and seek help with what you might be doing wrong. Then, document your journey in making it right, and use your findings to help others do the same. Trust me, you’re not the only one who has the very problems you’re facing right now, and there are others just like you who are hungry to start seeing their problems as opportunities, too.

The thing about having high aspirations for internet marketing versus the actual drive for it is that those with aspirations often put their goals on too high of a pedestal for human reach. Those with the drive, though, are often burned out quickly, so there really isn’t a good emotion to pinpoint as the one you should have as an internet marketer. Sure, you should be inspired and driven to succeed in daily blogging, but don’t fuel yourself with those, or you’ll run out of gas almost immediately out the gate.

How to Keep Up with Daily Blogging

Daily blogging is not easy to get the hang of. In fact, daily blogging is usually the first thing to go when something comes up in your schedule. No one wants to sacrifice happy hour or a sports game when they could be… well… blogging instead.

You may well prioritize, but until that priority actually takes place in your schedule as well as in your brain, or in other words, in practice as well as in spirit, you won’t get anywhere with your daily blogging. It’s that simple. You either do it every day, or you don’t, but if you don’t, then don’t call it daily blogging.

Now there is one way you can circumvent actually doing it “daily.” Daily doesn’t always mean seven days each week. You can do it Monday through Friday or Monday through Saturday instead. It will probably do you good to take a day or two off, as trying to post something daily usually results in poor quality posts and a lot of filler that no one wants or needs to read.

How to Make Enough Topics for Daily Blogging

My problem with daily blogging is varying my posts enough that I don’t run out of ideas and readers don’t run out of interest. But it’s honestly very easy to lose steam when writing daily, as it’s difficult to think of new material and write it besides.

You need to get used to researching new topics that relate to your niche, even if you don’t write about them directly. Having new information knock around inside your head will give you fresh material to write about, if nothing else. Plus, you need to stay up to date with new developments in your niche, or you’ll fall behind. People notice that when they read a blog. If they’re keeping up with yours, chances are that they’re reading someone else’s too. Don’t think for a second they don’t compare yours to someone else’s. Just be sure you’re performing due diligence with your daily blogging to keep your readers informed and happy with the material you’re putting out, or you’ll be out of an audience. These tips should help you start to put the “daily” back into daily blogging.

This might sound a little strange to your ears at first. After all, why in the world would someone want to buy you? Well, this isn’t exactly what I meant, although it probably sounds like it. What I mean is this: you have to sell your style to the customer. They will decide in mere seconds whether they like the way you come across online, whether it’s the layout of your website, the ad copy you or a ghostwriter composed, your bio picture, your money-back guarantees – everything they see will go into their decision. It’s up to you to know how to sell yourself such that they come to a positive conclusion and buy from you.

How to Sell Yourself: Believe in the Product

Maybe you’re selling the product out of obligation – maybe you got roped into selling someone else’s idea in a partnership, or perhaps you couldn’t find anything better. Odds are you started internet marketing without much purpose, so you just tried a few different things to see which ones stuck. There’s no problem with this initially, but herein lies the rub: a customer can usually sense whether you REALLY believe in the product or not. If you don’t, that will come through in everything you post on your website.

For a customer on the fence about whether to buy whatever it is you’re selling, words and video laced with disbelief really don’t give them much confidence that this product is for them. Or if they’re sold on the product, they’ll move on from your website and onto another one where the seller is feeding into their desire to buy it. Knowing how to sell yourself means putting enough believable enthusiasm into your sales efforts such that customers feel confident making a purchase through your site.

How to Sell Yourself with Confidence

Speaking of a confident customer – another way to know how to sell yourself is to be confident in yourself when you present the product. Again, this shows through not only in your writing but in any videos you might make to promote the product as well. Even if you’re shy or don’t have a great camera presence, you can overcome your shortcomings by at least being confident. If you can’t maintain confidence, you should outsource the writing or video presentations to a professional who is, or you could cripple your efforts. Knowing how to sell yourself and analyzing how your work turns out accordingly will help you make far more sales in the future.

Most online business ideas don’t start out of somebody’s genius idea to reinvent the wheel. It started out of getting an idea from an already successful business plan that somebody figured out how to make better. So don’t rely too much on drawing inspiration from something, because that feeling of inspiration will wear off when you roll up your sleeves and get working. But nonetheless, you do have to start somewhere, so you might as well consider yourself inspired. Here are some online business ideas you can tuck in your memory bank for later.

Online Business Ideas for Products

Everyone thinks they have to have a product to sell in order to succeed online. While some business ideas are birthed around churning out an ingenious product, some are just built around an improvement. Take, for instance, the popularity of so many weight loss products and acne improvement books online. One person, or maybe a few people, started those online business ideas, then the rest of the internet marketing world saw how productive they were for money-making and followed suit. Fast forward several years later, and you have an internet inundated with articles, blogs, videos and ebooks that do nothing but siphon off people’s credit cards on account of false hope.

What you need to do is find a niche you like, find someone who is already successful in that niche, and pinpoint how you can improve upon it or do it differently. Find your unique business strategy. Can you do something better or differently than the person you’ve found who does it well? If so, then you’ve found one of the best online business ideas.

Online Business Ideas for Intellectual Content

Sometimes people have this inert desire to sell their advice or wisdom. In many cases, this is a great start IF you’re already an expert in a field. The whole problem with these sorts of business ideas is, some marketers get the idea that they’re truly an expert when they’re not. They start giving out bad information, turning it into a product, then wonder why they’re receiving refunds when their advice doesn’t work.

When you start internet business ideas, think them through before selling them to others. Your reputation online is of the utmost importance to your business. Getting your good name back is tough, if not impossible. Work on making a product that truly benefits the customer, not just your bank account, and your internet business ideas are always more sure to succeed. Going after the quick buck never worked for anyone. But making truly helpful online business ideas has a much higher tendency to yield the return you’re looking for.

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Thanks to Google, you can now visit one web page to choose from a list of mobile developers who are offering free or low-cost deals on mobile templates. With these mobile templates, you can customize logos, backgrounds, buttons and image slideshows to create the perfect mobile site to complement your real website.

How Do I Make My Site Mobile Friendly?

Google’s “GoMo” tool, which not only links to a variety of mobile developers, also links to a number of mobile resources you can page through to optimize your website before it goes live on mobile networks. And using online sources that let you view how your site looks from a mobile standpoint (without actually owning any of the mobile devices that will be trafficking your site) helps you get an idea of how well your color choices and image placements will work when your visitors try to use them.

You can choose from these templates to get your site mobile friendly way more simply and quickly than by trying to create your own mobile site app or by hiring someone to do it for you. Why reinvent the wheel when you can get something for free – at least for a while – that has the potential to make you so much money? That’s what you have to ask yourself when asking how to make my site mobile friendly.

Why Make My Site Mobile Friendly?

Okay, so you’ve already heard all the hype about mobile friendly websites, but where’s the answer to “why?” in all of this? Well if you read Google’s new Mobile Playbook, you’ll understand just how much the world is now relying on mobile sites to function.

Life is so hectic anymore that hardly anyone sits down in front of their computer to browse for stuff they want to buy. If they’re driving, they’re looking for places to eat on their mobile device. If they’re at home, they’re searching on their iPads in between watching a movie and playing “Angry Birds,” or whatever it is people do on their iPads these days. Browsing rarely happens on the computer anymore, so why invest in making your site so computer-friendly if everyone is moving to mobile?

The whole point is, not only do you not want to risk missing out on sales, you also don’t want to get stuck behind the curve. Because once you let the competition slip ahead, it’s tough to regain your spot. So that pretty much wraps up the answer to why make my site mobile friendly on many fronts.

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Local contacts are your ticket to instant trust. Whereas in the online world, you have to earn trust by working your way through customer skepticism by posting real-looking testimonials and videos, offering plenty of free products, coaching and a whole host of other nonsense that you can practically circumvent entirely, simply by promoting your sites to local contacts first, then letting them take it from there.

Local Contacts: Making the Connection

You might wonder where you start out finding these local contacts. After all, if you’re like a majority of internet marketers, you live a lot of your life in the online world, you stare at nothing but a computer half the day, and your spouse has to physically yank you away from the keyboard at unearthly hours of the night. In other words, you have no social life, and no social contacts.

We’re about to fix that. As much as you think your blog improvement might come through the latest social media tactics, it doesn’t if you have no idea how to connect with real people. So from one computer addict to another, here’s how it works.

Local contacts come to you through – guess what? – LOCAL venues. I started at a recreation center that is fairly popular in my town. Granted, I live in a fairly populated area, where it’s not uncommon to find plenty of people at a cardio class after a day at work, but even if you live in the boonies, there’s usually something around that will provide the hungry audience you’re looking for.

Once you find a place that attracts a fairly healthy supply of victims, or rather, customers, you need to get up the courage to just chat them up. That’s right. Turn on your sales skills and open yourself up to people. Hey, no one said it was easy, but if you want to make money, you must start with people. And these people happen to be the local contacts you need to get your project off the ground.

Spreading the Word to Your Local Contacts

You’re not a car salesman now, so don’t shove your product down their throats right away. But keep an eye out for a natural opening in conversation that will direct attention to your blog. Inevitably, someone will ask what you do for a living. Tell them about your project, and hand them a business card that you made with your domain listed under your name. Eventually, you’ll talk to these local contacts enough that you’ll start to get a trickle of traffic flowing in. Invite them to your social media, and they’ll likely share your blog or site on their Facebook or Twitter page with their own local contacts. Before you know it, you’ll have a network of lots of local contacts to draw from for a customer base.

But promoting your blog doesn’t have to be difficult, boring or mindless if you don’t want it to be. The whole point of promoting it is to get people to read it. So if you’re going about it in a way the bores you, the author, how much more boring will it be to someone else who is stumbling upon it in a search engine result somewhere? Putting things into perspective this way will help you realize where you need to go the extra mile for promoting your blog and making readers stay once they get a taste of your posts.

Promoting Your Blog: Mixing It Up

Think of a prominent blogger whose posts you follow daily or weekly. What is it about their posts that inspire or intrigue you? Do the posts always tell you what you want or need to hear? Do they help you with a specific aspect of your life or business? Is that the blog you visit for a much-needed laugh or piece of advice?

Chances are, nothing about each blog post is identical every time you read it. Undoubtedly, the blogger posts something entirely different each time they hit the publish button. Maybe it’s a picture of their cat brushing up against their monitor, preventing them from getting their latest post written. Perhaps it’s a video of them on the balcony of a fancy restaurant overlooking Lake Travis near Austin, Texas. Or maybe their advice simply hits home with you, and you can’t help but enjoy yourself while reading it.

Whatever the ingredients, the bloggers you enjoy following have a recipe. Your job in promoting your blog is to dissect that recipe and mimic one like it. Don’t be a copycat and plagiarize or rubber stamp your blog to be just like theirs, but you can use the same pattern pieces to cut your work out for you.

Promoting Your Blog: Appeal to the Reader

Too many bloggers make the mistake of appealing to search engines when promoting their blogs. So when promoting your blog, try to appeal to the reader as much as possible. That doesn’t mean you have to throw your keyword research to the wind, but if a sentence option comes down to the difference between a ridiculous-sounding keyword phrase and a proper-sounding “human” phrase, opt for the human one. Your article will be more likely to go viral if it sounds good to the reader than if you get a few more hits from Google simply because it was “search engine friendly.” Anymore, reader appeal IS search engine friendly, so keep that in mind whenever you are promoting your blog.

If you searched for how you can earn extra money from home, then chances are you don’t need to make your full income from an online source. Maybe you’re a stay at home mom with other duties, or perhaps you’re a single guy who wants a little extra moolah for cable television. Either way, you have the added benefit of not having to design an entire business plan around an online model, which leaves you open to experiment with lots of different money-making venues.

Ways to Earn Extra Money from Home

Your success with trying to earn extra money from home will likely be dictated by how willing you are to actually put forth the effort. Going at it half-cocked rarely produces the kind of results that make a person proud of their success. You’ll have to learn to be your own boss, or you might as well kiss online moneymaking avenues good-bye.

With that in mind, let’s explore some of the ways you can earn extra money from home. If you’re generally the lazy type, start out by applying for online surveys. There are websites set up solely for the purpose of paying you for your opinion. And while many surveys pay just over pittance, it’s a good way to get used to working in the online world. Hey, it’s how I got my start, and I’m much further ahead today because of it.

If you feel your skills are a bit more developed, however, you can explore the world of affiliate marketing, pay per click advertising, cost per action campaigns and more. These all take a bit more expertise in how online advertising and marketing are carried out, but if you didn’t shy away from the terminology alone, then maybe one of these is right up your alley.

Where to Earn Extra Money at Home

So you have the drive and a little bit of the knowledge – now you have to figure out where to put that all to good use. Well here are a few suggestions. First, try your hand at writing articles for someone else. You can make easy money the right way by writing well-researched, quality articles that clients will buy. I’ve written many custom articles for $10 to $15 apiece all the way up to brief online magazine articles priced at $300. When you make this kind of money, it’s easy to keep your options open.

Looking on freelance websites and independent contractor forums open you up to a number of well-paying clients. Look for references, be willing to write one or two sample articles for free, and you’ll find yourself well on your way to learning how to earn extra money at home.

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Aside from remembering to disinfect my keyboard and mouse after my cold is up, I don’t really have to do anything special to enjoy the benefits of working at home. I can go on with business as usual, take a nap to relieve my cold symptoms, watch a movie in one window while I perform keyword research in another – you name it. You pretty much get to dictate your own schedule regardless of your health, events that come up – everything.

Best Benefits of Working at Home

Many people work from home because they think they’ll make more money that way. Is this a fact? Quite honestly, it depends. If you’re the type of individual who can get out of bed each morning, dedicate yourself to several hours of work without a boss overlooking you, and still have time to do your daily household duties, then yes, you might make more money. Of course, there are a number of other factors involved in determining how much you will actually make.

You first must choose the ideal niche for your personality. After performing enough research to determine how much potential this niche actually has, you have to get the ball rolling with sites and content. Even if you don’t want to run your own website, you can always post content elsewhere and still make it your own online entity.

Misconception of the Benefits of Working at Home

Working at home is not all fun and games, as some people expect. It’s a lot of hard work, and it takes a good deal of self discipline, which not everyone has. There’s a reason so many people give up after trying to work at home themselves – it’s not as easy as it sounds to be your own boss.

Many people also don’t realize that life has to go on when you work at home too. The same things that make up the good part of working at home also make up the drawbacks of working at home. Your wife still has to cook and do the laundry, the kids are still going to run up and down the stairs, you’ll still be called upon to change that light bulb, and the grass still won’t mow itself. If you expected to have peace and quiet when you worked at home, then I hate to burst your bubble. It won’t be that way unless you live alone, and even there, you’ll still find distractions.

The benefits of working at home may be many, but you often won’t realize them until long after you’ve gotten into a good routine.

If you create an email blast for an old sales campaign, for instance, you can target customers who just recently signed up to your email list and aren’t yet used to the way you send out emails. The list you used a year ago might have seen this email more than once and not need to see it again, but a fresh crowd won’t know the difference, so you can market to them in this manner.

Create an Email Blast to Target Lists

Let’s talk about the types of lists you could target when you create an email blast. First, the more form fields you create in your email subscription form, the more filters you can add later and the more granular you can get in your marketing.

For instance, if you have an age box in your signup form, you could easily filter your messages by age brackets – for instance, 18-24 or 35-44. If you have a city or country field, you can filter by location. And so forth – you probably get the picture.

Create an Email Blast for Split Testing

You can send one email blast to one group of subscribers and a totally different one to another set. For instance, if you want to split test between mixed genders of 24-35 year olds, you can target one email blast to half of the subscribers in the filter and another email to the other half of the subscribers. This is basically equal split testing, and you can use a number of variables to fulfill your purpose.

During your split testing, you can use different subject lines, email openings, overall body text and calls to action to determine which one works better. If you only have a small list and an even smaller percentage of emails opened, it will be more difficult to determine if an email works or if you just can’t drum up enough interest within your list.

You should take the time to expand your email list before focusing too much on email blasts. The reason? Why bother spending time targeting an email list of only 50 people when by writing more content and publishing it online you could get another 500? Not only would you have more people to test on and sell to, you invest in your online content.

There is quite a bit of importance in trying to create an email blast for marketing your products, but understand that it can take hundreds – if not thousands – of subscribers before your blast really yields much in the line of results. But nonetheless, it doesn’t hurt to create an email blast for grins and try it out so that when you do get more followers, you know how to send a blast.

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Realize that sometimes, when you ask how to increase productivity, you have to look at the habits you develop when working as well as when wasting time. Even when you’re working, you don’t automatically use your time as well as you can or should. So we’ll explore a little about these problems in this guide here.

How Do You Increase Productivity with Work Social Media?

How do you increase productivity when you’re working on social media? One of those catch-22 issues when promoting your website is social media. On the one hand, your website will die without social media promotion these days and moving forward. But what happens when you get distracted by a cute kitty picture or start to participate in a 55-comment status thread?

A lot of your productivity relies on your own self-discipline. Without it, you’ve pretty much fouled up any chance at keeping yourself productive. But as a human, it’s in our nature to stop and look at something that’s more interesting than our work, sadly. So here’s what many experts recommend.

When it comes to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest that continually flash interesting pictures and statuses across the screen, you need a time limit for how long you should even be present on that site. For instance, you only need a few minutes to post a status update about your new product, and just a few more to respond to fans and followers or find new pages to “like.”

So here’s what you do. Next time you log on to Facebook to post a work status, set a timer for ten minutes and open only the tab of your fan page. Do what you need to, then leave the page. Spend no longer than ten minutes posting pictures, statuses and so forth. You’ll find you really don’t need to spend that much time on the site to promote your product.

How Do You Increase Productivity When You Don’t Feel Like Working on Your Website?

How do you become more productive when you’ve been working on your site for long hours and the work has sapped every last ounce of creativity from your veins? Start by scheduling your breaks. Give yourself something at each break that will make you look forward to it. Whether it’s a cup of coffee or juice or a fun snack (a healthy one, preferably), you need to give your body a break, and having something to look forward to on that break is often the only way it gets done. Hopefully, these tips help answer the question of how do you increase productivity, especially when working on a website.

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Hobbies for money take a different shape in each instance, depending on the hobby. For instance, if you’re into building model trains, you have a head start on your business plan because there are thousands of model train lovers in the world, and that particular hobby already has a lot of momentum.  However, it also holds quite a bit of competition, so you have to be careful about selecting hobbies for money as sources of steady income.

Hobbies for Money: Pick Your Avenues

We all make mistakes when choosing which route to take for a business idea. One time, I thought I’d make handmade jewelry. I sought out a local gift shop that was very open to buying my products. The store owner ended up flaking, and I was left with a few pieces I knew nothing to do with. I tried eBaying them, and no avail. What I didn’t know at the time – and know now – is that sites like Pinterest, Facebook fan pages and Twitter could very well have helped me sell my merchandise – and build a steady customer base besides.

Sometimes when you want to start doing hobbies for money, you should ask your friends and even random people you meet in everyday life. I knew I could have had a winning seller because I got so many compliments on my jewelry when I wore it places. If I had a business card to give away at the time with my website on it, I could have directed onlookers to my site and perhaps made some purchases.

Another point I’d like to make in the hobbies for money category is that, you should never overlook a local launch in addition to an internet-wide one. Anymore, so many sales are made by friends and by word of mouth that it’s simply poor business sense to think you will only thrive on internet traffic alone.

Hobbies for Money: Choosing Wisely

In order to make a hobbies for money business plan work, you have to do thorough research on how popular or unpopular your hobby is. For instance, crocheting is hugely popular, but there’s so much competition that you can’t simply target crocheting as a whole. You have to find your niche or pick something else. On the same token, a too-specific niche hobby won’t produce enough traffic to make your efforts worthwhile. A hobby somewhere in the middle is the optimal choice. If your hobby is one of those hugely popular ones, try to think of a niche or sub-niche that will make your hobbies for money plan succeed.

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This is what many business owners ask themselves as they read their e-letters raving about social media sites each morning. It can be frustrating, to say the least, when the lady selling cat outfits is doing better than your acne site is simply based on the fact that people would rather look at cat pictures than acne ones. But don’t give up just yet. Social media photos and photo ops make themselves apparent in more ways than one, so let’s explore them here.

Social Media Photos You Can Take Anytime

Social media photos that help drive traffic are as simple as taking outdoor photos or pictures of you in action behind your computer. Seriously, people will comment on just about anything. Heck, you can even take a picture of the morning coffee you drink to stimulate your brain cells into writing that next big ebook. Anything and everything visual is king with social media photos, so don’t think your business is exempt just because you don’t sell pet products or Italian shoes.

If you have kids, take pictures of them and post them for people to comment on. People love kids, especially when they’re into messes. If you work at home, I’m sure your kids have distracted you at one point or another during your workday. Social media photos can be taken when you take a break to play outside with them, capture their latest clay creation or post their recent sketch art on your blog.

As you see, these photos really have nothing to do with your business or your work. They’re simply used as supplemental media for when you have no creative media inspired by your business or your website. After all, let’s admit it: you’d rather see a picture of your favorite IM guru’s pet than the guru’s product. It’s human nature – humanity is simply more interesting than some of that other stuff.

Social Media Photos Don’t Have to Look Professional

Too many internet marketers get wrapped in making all their produce look perfect. They don’t stop until they’re 100% satisfied that they’ve done 100% perfectly on whatever it is they’re posting. Don’t cripple your social media photos by trying to take them in perfect light and then airbrushing them. Just post them as is, and I guarantee you’ll have better success with your photos. It might take a while for your pictures to take off, but trust me – social media photos are the way of the online future, so don’t give up!

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You have to wonder as you’re signing up, though, if it’s really worth all your time. After all, we known how some new social media sites are simply a flash in the pan. The “experts” tell us our businesses are finished unless we have a profile on this site or that site, then come to find out, they get bought out or slide to the bottom of the stack. And while you don’t know the future of the site (or you would probably buy up their stock in a heartbeat) you should at least spend some time researching these new sites and sign up for the ones that look promising.

New Social Media Sites that Might Not Be as Beneficial to Your Business

When I started doing work for a company recently, one of my colleagues in the business recommended that I sign the company up for profiles on Posterous and Plurk. I’d never really heard of either of these prior to the recommendation, so I was pumped to check them out.

In the short time that I have had company profiles on these new social media sites, Posterous has been bought out by Twitter and Plurk has, well, not done much from what I can tell. Sure, a lot of Plurkers fritter away their time plurking about who knows what, but I couldn’t see much benefit in the service from a company perspective. If you sell “fun” products online and already have a lot of followers on other social media sites, then I could see some benefit, but right now, I’m not highly impressed.

Posterous is kind of like a different version of Tumblr. You can post long or short blocks of text, upload pictures, embed videos – much the same way you can on Tumblr. I don’t really think it adds much value to the internet, so I would only sign up for it if you really think you have something to gain by posting yet another blog-esque website.

New Social Media Sites to Consider

The newest social media site I’ve found that might have potential is Pingram.me. It’s a direct combination of Pinterest (which I’ve talked about in previous posts) and Instagram, a photo sharing site. Essentially, Pingram lets you “pin” photos like you do on Pinterest but with some of the recently added and popularity features of Instagram.

If you believe the “experts,” then you know how popular videos and photos are going to be in just a few short months. Content is king, but it comes in different forms, and anymore, it’s coming in the form of viral photo sharing. Even if your business is not highly photo-oriented, you might try to find a way to share photos in some respect, or you’ll find yourself behind the new social media sites.

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Here’s the things about strategies for online marketing: you can’t go at them half-cocked. You either make a plan and stick to it or don’t bother making one at all. Those are pretty much the only options you have. Going halfway really won’t do you much good. So here in this article, I’d like to share a few things with you that I have gleaned over the years as far as online marketing strategies go.

Strategies for Online Marketing That Work

Using online marketing strategies is much like going on a diet. They all work, and then none of them work. In a sense, every diet works if you actually stick with it, but they stop working when you give up and quit. Same goes for online marketing plans. They work until you don’t see progress, then you get frustrated and pull a rage quit. That doesn’t work!

Part of the secret to making strategies for online marketing work for you is picking one and just sticking with it. That goes for whether you see results or whether you don’t. Until you’ve really tried one out long enough to see if it will give you results in the end, you shouldn’t necessarily dump it altogether.

Sticking with Strategies for Online Marketing

Going back to our diet idiom, you might need to factor in some other tactics for your online marketing strategies. Consider accountability, for instance. Perhaps you should choose a friend or colleague who can check in on you and see if you’re following your strategy of choice or if you’re him-hawing around with it.

There’s nothing like not being able to move on with something when you don’t have any encouragement. Whoever you choose for accountability to your plan should be encouraging you as well. It might sound silly for such a trivial matter, but when it comes down to it, the success or failure of your online business may very well hinge on whether your strategies for online marketing are sound. Putting it into that perspective, it makes a little more sense to take it so seriously.

You probably clicked on this article thinking you would find an actual cure-all strategy for online marketing. Sorry to disappoint you, but there is no “one size fits all” strategy for everyone. It’s something you often develop as you go, or you research the strategies that work best for your niche. Whatever you choose, be sure to document everything you do. You  never know when you might have to recall the information or start over with a new site. Trust me, in the end, you’ll be glad you took notes when you developed your strategies for online marketing for your business.

A domain name purchase entails much more than just going to godaddy.com and buying a domain. Not even the pretty picture of Danica Patrick makes all buying experiences easy, but if you know what you’re up against, you can more aptly plan how you want to go about it.

 What to Do Before Your Domain Name Purchase

Your domain name purchase takes a little pre-planning. Sure, some of the domains are only $10, but why waste the money when buying the wrong one? Doing  a little research will help you avoid spending more money or time on the project than necessary.

Here are the first things I do before buying a domain name. For starters, Google other websites like the one you want to create. Make note of their domain names and see if they’re something you can mimic. Secondly, determine if you want to “brand yourself” by picking a snazzy domain name, or if you’d rather pick a low-competition keyword phrase that will boost your chances of being seen in the search results.

Third, plug your desired domain name into the Google AdWords keyword extractor. This is obviously a little more helpful if you chose the “low-competition keyword phrase” option than the branding option, but still, you might as well give it a shot. Then plug it into Google itself to make sure it doesn’t bring up any shady-looking sites that might give yours a bad name just by name association alone.

Last but not least, your domain name purchase strategy should include looking for online coupons. There are many online coupon codes you can copy and paste into sites like GoDaddy to save a little money on the domain purchase or the hosting. And speaking of hosting, that’s the last thing you need to determine – do you need hosting? Chances are, if this is your first purchase, you do.

What to Do During Your Domain Name Purchase

While you’re filling out the online form fields during your domain name purchase, keep several things in mind. Double, triple and quadruple check the domain name spelling to make sure you didn’t misspell it and buy the wrong one. Secondly, pick the least expensive hosting you need. If you’re only hosting one domain, get economy hosting to avoid paying for extras you don’t need. Third, write down the details you used to buy the domain, as you will need to refer back to them if you ever need to call tech support about your domain name purchase.

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This might sound like near blasphemy to some internet marketers who think free blogs are the death of their marketing strategy. But understand that I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever use a hosted blog. It’s just that there are a few benefits to using Blogger that you won’t see when you use your own blog.

The First Reason to Use Blogger

As one marketer taught me recently, one of the first reasons to use Blogger is to launch a blog for a local business or a product. Blogger is essentially a Google entity, as evidenced by the fact that you have to log into your Google account to use Blogger. Therefore, Blogger is considered extremely Google-friendly, and you know what that does for you when it comes to you websites. If you haven’t yet made the connection, when you use Blogger, you’ll get a big jumpstart on your traffic.

The Second Reason to Use Blogger

Blogger also lets you input your own meta data, which is of utmost importance when inputting geographic information for a local business. This obviously isn’t quite as important for a website’s blog that really doesn’t do business based on location.

The benefit here is that people searching for content whose IP addresses are in your area are more likely to see your blog in search results than the results of a business thousands of miles outside their locale. Google can draw the meta data from your blog and populate more relevant results to viewers in your area, which means more qualified traffic to your blog.

Now just because Blogger gives you a head start on traffic doesn’t mean you should neglect getting your own blog. Far from it. If your sole purpose in having a blog is to drive traffic to a brick and mortar business, then Blogger is fine. But if you want to host your entire internet marketing business and still use blogger, then you’re barking up the wrong tree. Blogger still controls, to an extent, what gets posted on their platform, and if for some reason there’s ever a problem with your blog, they don’t always contact you about it first. They might just shut you down, not questions asked.  And true to typical Google protocol, they don’t always offer much recourse for you once that happens.

That being said, to use Blogger isn’t going to be the life or death of your online business. You simply need to outline your needs as they relate to locality and quick traffic, and make your decision about whether you should use blogger or a “real blog” from there, and you’ll likely succeed either way.

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In this guide, we’ll explore several reasons why you should host a blog, rather than using a free blog on another domain. Of course, there are a few very valid reasons to use free blogs on other sites as well, but for the most overall benefit to your business, using your own is definitely the way to go.

Host a Blog for Content Control

When you host a blog yourself, you get to decide what content you put on it. When you use a blog from Blogger or WordPress, you are bound by their terms of use. For instance, WordPress does not allow Google AdSense ad blocks anywhere on your blog when you host it on wordpress.com. But for many internet marketers, AdSense is an integral part of their online marketing strategy, making a WordPress-hosted blog the wrong way to go.

Then let’s take Blogger’s limitations. If you want to use any kind of PLR – and I’m not talking the kind that embodies black hat SEO, but rather the type that you honestly have the rights to use – they very well may lock you out of your blog, as they want you to use unique content, or at least not content that looks repurposed. That’s why you should host a blog yourself – you can’t very well get locked out of your own blog if no one else has the password!

Benefits You Get When You Host a Blog

So if you host a blog, you know for sure that you’re going to spend a little money. But it’s actually not as costly as you might expect. If you purchase a domain name for $9.99, then purchase economy hosting for $4.99 or so per month, you’re only out about $70 per year. That’s less than six dollars per month you’re spending to have control over your own blog. That’s less than two Starbucks drinks!

This little bit of spending gives you peace of mind that you’re not going to get banned from Blogger or WordPress. Plus, you still get to use a WordPress blogging platform if you want to, since most hosting services offer WordPress as an option from your control panel.

And instead of choosing just from the free templates offered on WordPress, you can purchase a paid theme that gives you even more say over how your blog looks.

If you want to host a blog that you plan to turn into a steady stream of income, you’re making the right decision to not host it on a free blogging site. That doesn’t mean you should use it as a reason to post black hat SEO on your site, but you can certainly host a blog for every legitimate purpose you can think of.

WordPress blogs often get a little more credibility when there is an author picture and bio blurb attached to the blog owner or main author. Instead of the Mystery Man image, which is easily identifiable with its gray silhouette and dark background, users will appreciate that you took the time to fill in profile details and give them a glimpse of what you look like. Now, why WordPress just doesn’t allow picture uploads for avatars is beyond me, but I’m sure the reason had something to do with consistency across blogs and not letting people pretend they’re someone they’re not. Evidently, they would prefer to leave such issues to Gravatar’s end.

Gravatar on WordPress: How to Create a Gravatar

Gravatar on WordPress, in case you haven’t already guessed, is a play on the word “avatar.” By creating a Gravatar profile on gravatar.com, you can make a universally recognized profile. Here’s how it works.

Sign up for Gravatar on gravatar.com. The site says you can use your preexisting WordPress login details, but when I tried using mine, the system didn’t recognize them. So I had to do it the old-fashioned way and create a new account. No biggie though, since I’m only using Gravatar on WordPress. Sign up with the same email you used for signing into WordPress, as you’ll need it later to connect with WordPress.

Pick a perfectly square picture to upload and use as your Gravatar. Remember, wherever you use this profile, this same picture will appear, so choose it wisely. Once you’ve finished, you don’t have to do anything else on this site.

Implementing Your Gravatar on WordPress

Now it’s time to log into your blog and implement your new Gravatar on WordPress. Head over to the “Settings,” “Discussion” section and scroll all the way down to the bottom. Do you see a blue “G” icon tipped on its side? This is the Gravatar icon selection. Click the radio button next to the logo and hit “Save.” Your settings should update automatically.

That wasn’t so hard now that you know how to put a Gravatar on WordPress. But did they have to make it so un-user-friendly? Who would’ve guessed just by looking at their dashboard that you had to make a profile on a third-party site just to display their own picture? It doesn’t make much sense, but that’s how it’s done.

If you want to display your Gravatar on WordPress sidebars, there are widgets that take the feed from your settings and display your picture and bio on the sidebar as a sort of author spotlight. Styles vary widely, so play around with them after you’ve connected your Gravatar on WordPress.

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In this guide, I’d like to share a few tidbits of wisdom with you before you embark on your blogging journey. Hopefully these will spare you from learning some of what I had to learn from scratch, enabling you to shoot right past and get started.

What to Consider As You’re Building a Blog

If you’re building a blog, you’re probably hyped to get it off the ground and onto the search engines. But hold your horses, cowboy – you’ve got a few things to do first, like turn off search engine crawling. Head to the privacy settings in WordPress and turn off search engine crawling until you get your SEO friendliness squared away.

Next, remember that the theme you pick has a lot to do with how much messing around you’ll have to do with plugins. Read reviews, look at screenshots, preview the installation and look at its overall compatibility before installing it for good, or you could be messing around with the design aspect more than you’d like – or know how to accomplish.

Building a Blog After Choosing Your Theme

Once you’ve gotten your theme chosen and installed, it’s time to think about graphic aspects. You weren’t planning to keep that default image as the header, were you? As cool as some of those default graphics appear, you need to change them for the sake of branding your blog. While graphics and personalized logo designs can eventually get pricey, avoid the temptation to get lazy and leave graphics until the last minute.

Next, carefully pick your widgets and plugins. Install them through WordPress, rather than uploading them one by one, in the interest of saving time and hassle. Again, look at screenshots, star ratings, reviews and compatibility comments whenever possible.

If that’s not enough to boggle your mind, don’t forget to play around with your navigation while building a blog. You’ve got plenty of options in the more open themes. Choose between left and right sidebars, top or side navigation, two or three columns, headers above or below your navigation bar – the possibilities can make a final decision elusive. But in the interest of keeping your blog clean-looking and easily navigable, think about having a navigation bar with a two-column choice and no navigation bar with a three-column choice.

So, building a blog doesn’t look so easy now, does it? I tell you all this not to discourage you, but to keep your focus on more than one aspect. In the end, this mindset will make building a blog a piece of cake – more or less, anyway.

With a regular book, you can write it for free, but you can’t publish it for free. The same can be true with an ebook unless you do it the absolutely free way and use just the software on your computer or what you find available on the internet. By glancing through the CNET downloads website, it’s easier to find what you’re looking for than just by browsing aimlessly for publishing software. Really, all you need is a program to type in and one that turns your document into a PDF file.

Write an Ebook for Free with Free Software

You don’t need Word to write an ebook for free. You can use NotePad, which is available on most computers, or you could try Open Office. They have a free program that functions much like Word and comes with similar programs like Publisher and Excel.

If you already have Word on your computer, then don’t worry about downloading a new software to write your ebook, as you can do it just fine in Word. Don’t let anyone tell you that you need a special ebook software just to write down a few chapters. You might need software to embellish the design just a bit, but it’s hardly necessary to make sales.

How to Write an Ebook for Free

One of the easiest ways to write an ebook without spending a lot of money is to do it yourself. This might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many “authors” end up relinquishing the job to a hired freelancer simply because they got bored or didn’t have the drive to finish what they started.

Once you start an ebook, the cheapest way to finish it really is to complete it yourself. But the thing you should remember is that you don’t have to make it your life work. An ebook really should be only as long as necessary – there’s no set length you should reach. Thus, if it only takes 10 pages to get your point across, then don’t make it any longer than 10 pages, plus a few for title and copyright. A lot of marketers get wrapped up into the “quantity” rather than “quality” end of things, and this will result in lost sales.

Your time, however, is not free. Thus you need to really schedule out your writing time into the rest of your life, or you’ll either neglect it or let it consume you. Either way you can end up burning out or giving up, so you will just have a harder time reaching your goal.

Sometimes, you just have to bite the bullet and “get ‘er done.” But these tips will still help you write an ebook for free nonetheless.

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If this is your dream, then don’t let anyone talk you out of pursuing it. However, it’s prudent to look into exactly how much effort you’re looking at expending to get to the point where you’re making steady revenue from ebooks.

The Startup Process to Make Money with Ebooks

There are several steps to starting to make money with ebooks. The first begins with a budget. How much are you willing to spend? If you take the “bum marketing” route, then you probably plan to use nothing but link redirects and free blogs and social media. If you want to have control over your content, spend a little money and buy your own web domain and hosting. Then you can change links whenever you need to and build out your website if you so choose.

Next, think about things you are both interested in and good at writing about. Then pick a niche that you can produce content for without hiring another writer, unless you’ve budgeted for article writing. It’s crucial that you really think about a niche you like, or you’ll get bored of or sick of your choice very quickly.

Next, pick the article directories to which you’ll submit the articles you write for ebook promotion. Not only should you target article sites, but you need to also include sites like HubPages and Squidoo. Social media platforms like Plurk and Posterous are growing in popularity as well, so keep these in your promotion strategy site list as well.

The Follow-Through Process to Make Money with Ebooks

Starting to make money with ebooks is always the fun part. You’re pumped, you want to make money, and the reality of how much work is ahead of you hasn’t really set in yet. It’s the follow-through that really kills the stamina of many an internet marketer.

In ways, their loss makes it easier for the rest of us – and for you – if you stick with it. But in others, it’s a testimony to just how much you need to stick with it before you see any – and I mean ANY – results whatsoever. Making money with ebooks is a process that is sometimes difficult to track progress with unless you’re raking in sales and tracking them in sites like ClickBank.

But you cannot give up if you want to see results. If you quit after a few months, of course you won’t see a return on your time! It takes several months sometimes before your efforts return any measurable profits. But if you keep at it, you CAN make money with ebooks eventually.

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We all know what it’s like to hit a road block in our blogs. After writing at least one post per day for days at a time, it’s human nature to reach a plateau. Not only does it get tough to formulate advice for readers out of thin air, but it gets tempting to repurpose material, which gets you sliding into some pretty gray areas of the SEO world. So before you slip that far, think about using one of these ideas instead.

Boring Blog? Try Reading More Than Writing

A boring blog becomes a boring blog because you run out of fuel in your head to write about. So to fix that, it makes sense that you need more fuel intake. Borrow magazines and books on your niche from the library. Watch TV shows (like on Discovery or cooking channels) that even remotely tie into your niche. Pick just one idea from your media choice and work it around to be the theme of your next post. Since you’ll likely get more than one idea from a post, you should get enough content for at least a week’s worth of posts.

Next, go blog searching on the web. Seek out experts in your niche that you can safely go to for advice without worrying that you have to sift through what’s good and what’s not. Make a collection of about five blogs that you can visit whenever you’re bored. Better yet, read them on a regular basis, and you’ll have a steady stream of information from which to draw from when you start running dry on your own. Just don’t pick boring blogs, or that will be just as bad as your current boring blog problem!

Still Suffering from a Boring Blog?

It’s not always easy to shake Boring Blog syndrome, but it’s always possible. Try deviating a bit from your niche every once in a while to give yourself – and your readers – a break from the day-in, day-out routine. For instance, instead of writing about the latest and greatest tech gadget, do a piece on your five least favorite gadgets. Chances are, this will incite lots of comments from your visitors, which in and of itself might inspire your next few blog posts.

If your boring blog problem still isn’t fixed, perhaps it’s time to take a break from writing! Compile 20 pictures that relate to your niche, put them to royalty-free music and make a video out of them. Better yet, do a vlog of your own featuring yourself blabbing about whatever it is that you blab about in text. But it’s in video version, so Google will still love it. And that, boys and girls, is how you fix the problem of having a boring blog.

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In this guide, we’ll go over a little bit of what you need to know differently between regular SEO and local search optimization. Who knows – it just might help you weather the next Google update!

Local Search Optimization: Don’t Overstuff Your Website

As I was perusing the interwebs today, I found something interesting about content as it relates to local search optimization. You know how you hear that “content is king” when it comes to your website, right? Well as it so happens, this is only the case with a web-based business. When it comes to a local business, Google gauges the size of the site and compares how much content it has versus how big or small the business is.

Where am I going with this? Google may come to the “conclusion” that the business owner is stuffing the site with content if the website is huge and the business is small. Of course, you don’t want to skimp on necessary pages for your website, but attaching a full-blown blog to your website might just not be the right move.

Alternatives to Ordinary SEO with Local Search Optimization

So what should you do to promote your website if you can’t simply write content day in and day out? Well there are alternatives for local search optimization, as it turns out. One way is to create a separate website for your content, such as a blog on Blogger. Then create your original content there, and link it to your website.

The other option is to work more on your social media presence and not so much on your content. The more you do with Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and similar sites, the less you have to focus on long-hand content, and the more you can focus on short blurbs that will eventually build up your audience and help increase traffic all on its own.

When you think about it, the whole point of local search optimization is to simply drive more traffic to your business. Once you get your buyers, you want to make lifetime customers out of them, so simply feeding them article after article probably won’t do the trick. You need to communicate with them and interact with them more than educate them and drive your sales. Once you build trust, the sales will come.

With that in mind, keep building out your social media and local search result presence online. It will be much better in the long run for your local search optimization than regular SEO, guaranteed.

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But how do you define what good website content is? Perhaps a better question would be, how do the search engines define good content? If you’re trying to please both your visitors and the search engines, this guide is a great place to start.

Good Website Content: Multimedia

When we talk about good website content, we don’t only mean text content. We want to include anything and everything that might pique a user’s interest. So if you’re not into blogging long posts all day long, don’t fear; there are alternatives to generic media that prove just as successful.

Think videos and vlogging. People love to watch daily or weekly video updates of the gurus they follow, so why not become one yourself? By vlogging instead of blogging, you can use Google-friendly content embedded from YouTube to take the place of written content that takes you forever to write.

Visitors also love to look at pictures. Take the ever-popular cat LOL’s and Walmart fashion faux pas photos as examples. This information is easily digested and goes viral quickly. And you don’t even have to be a master photographer to pull it off. Just take photos of whatever you’re doing that even remotely relates to your blog, and post them for all to see and comment upon.

Good Website Content: User Generated Content

Good website content can also be accumulated using visitor reviews and product testimonials from your customers, if that’s the type of site you run. If you sell something online, ask for testimonials and post them on your website. Keep updating the testimonials from time to time to keep your static pages fresh.  Never rewrite or write your own testimonials – always be sure to get them from real customers who have used the product. Today’s website visitor is savvy enough to know when the testimonial is true and when it’s not. Sometimes, they’ll be skeptical of any testimonial, but fake ones are often easy to point out.

If you want good website content, you might have to hire someone else to write it or create it for you. If you don’t have the time, the willpower or the creativity to pull it off, enlist a professional. But take precautions, like putting their articles through a plagiarism checker, to be sure they’re not screwing you out of good website content. There’s nothing worse than paying through the nose for rehashed content that will only hurt your site.

With these things in mind, start thinking about how you can put quality work on your site or blog. Remember, good website content begins with helpful content in general, not just words pulled out of thin air.

Many newbies (include myself at one time) rush headfirst into forum posting without taking forum etiquette into account. Not only does such behavior scream that you’re new to the forum, it also hurts the reputation of both yourself and whatever website you’re trying to promote.

Forum Etiquette: Choose Your Forums Wisely

Forum etiquette begins with selecting the forums you wish to post on. Choose a forum that is related to your website. In other words, don’t go on a veterinary forum to post about a cooking blog. You need to know your audience if you want to pique their interest enough to visit your website.

Secondly, take a day or so to thoroughly scroll through some of the posts on the forum. Don’t just look through the most recent ones – dig up some of the old archives so you don’t make a fool of yourself posting about something that was hashed on a long time ago. Nobody likes the guy who drags up old topics.

Once you’ve selected the forum you wish to post to, read the forum rules for best forum etiquette. Many forums have strict rules about forum etiquette and how often you can post links to your website and where you can do that. Some will disable your signature line until you’ve written at least 50 posts. This keeps away most of the spammers and maintains a productive forum.

Forum Etiquette: Don’t Be a Know-It-All

Everyone hates a know-it-all, especially on a forum. Your forum etiquette should exhibit constructive help when posting, not an attitude. Plus, you need to make doubly sure you really know what you’re talking about before responding to someone’s post. And if you’re the twenty-fifth poster in the group, be sure you read all the previous comments in the thread to avoid rehashing someone else’s answer just for the sake of upping your post count.

Another forum etiquette foul that many posters make is walking into the forum like they own it. The tone of their posts would assume they’ve been posting there for ages, but when their post count reads “9” instead of “900,” other forum posters tend to get irritated, and rightfully so. You have to earn your right to gain credit on a forum; it doesn’t just come with being another blogger/website owner out there who’s trying to post backlinks to his or her domain.

Also, remember that since most forums have link following turned off, your only real way of getting traffic to your website comes by wooing other forum members into clicking your link with your excellent forum etiquette. They’ll only do this if they feel you had good advice to offer and think your website might be worthy of looking at.

Keeping these forum etiquette tips in mind will help prevent you from making some embarrassing mistakes for many to see.

Even beginning bloggers will get spam comments from time to time, especially if they have  a WordPress blog in which they turn off the Akismet plugin. These comments especially need moderation if you don’t want your blog to look like it got spammed big time.

Blog Comment Moderation: Controlling Fake Comments

How do you know a spam comment when you see one? Often, they’re written by foreigners who have no idea how to put English words together in a proper syntax. Their comments are typically generic, meaning they could be posted on any blog and still “fit in,” so to speak, because they don’t say anything about the post content.

Others will be overly praising of your blog post and look ridiculous beneath your comment section. Things like “This is such a great post, I can’t wait to read more!” followed by a link to a completely unrelated blog is blatant spam and should be removed whenever possible.

Of course, to really squelch spam comments, you can turn on blog comment moderation. However, if your blog becomes the target of a lot of spam, you could be sifting through several comments daily to find the ones that are legitimate.

Blog Comment Moderation: Don’t Feed the Trolls

You’ve probably heard of “trolls” and “trolling” when it comes to the internet and posting comments on content during your blog comment moderation. If you run any type of blog that is controversial or has the tendency to create flaming debate, you can be sure you’ll be the target of trolls at some point.

But what is a troll, or trolling, exactly? A troll is a person who makes a comment with the intent to enflame the rest of the commenters into some sort of frenzy over the post. Sometimes they drag completely unrelated topics into discussion and derail productive conversation. Then, after their work I done, they sit back and watch the frenzy.

When it comes to “not feeding the trolls,” it means you should delete troll posts or ignore them entirely. Part of blog comment moderation is knowing when to respond to a post and when not to. Trolls generally leave the discussion platform if they don’t have the desired effect on the thread, so it’s best to encourage them to leave early.

You don’t have to – and may not have time to – delete every single troll comment that your blog receives. But in the course of your blog comment moderation you may notice that others are feeding the trolls unknowingly. If you find this to be the case, you can delete the offending threads so that productive discussion can ensue.

This might not seem like a big deal in the long run, but blog comment moderation really does help keep your online reputation intact.

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Before we start, realize that many of the name brand email marketing service types are quite fine to use. You just have to know their strengths and weaknesses before using them. Knowing them ahead of time will help you know how to implement the software to get the most out of it.

Email Marketing Service: Typical Email Software

The typical email marketing software will be designed for you to create your own mass emails to send out to your list. They usually contain pre-made templates for “prettied-up” emails that aren’t HTML-based. They usually have an HTML version of each template so your HTML-only recipients can still read the emails without getting them filtered into the spam folder.

The nice part about these email marketing service types is that you can filter through your list, send emails to recipients who signed up within a certain date range, exclude other recipients, personalize titles and email openings and more.

Oftentimes, you’ll find that you can integrate the biggest name brand email marketing service choices with other software, like membership software, or plugins. This makes using the software even easier when blogging or broadcasting social media.

Email Marketing Service: The Ones That Aren’t As Ideal

There’s email marketing service types for those willing to work hard, and there’s options for those who aren’t so keen on writing. Of course, something is sometimes better than nothing, but in the case of emails, the more direct to your purpose they are, the better.

Unfortunately, not all these services are made with sales in mind. For instance, I recently worked with a company that made email newsletters that were built like a newspaper. They had stories about everything under the sun in them, but very few were directed at making their customers any money. I take issue with this, because it just detracts the reader. Not that the reader should be “funneled” into buying something, but you need to make your message clear and direct. Someone who subscribes to your newsletter for tech advice doesn’t want to read about how to clean up puppy messes, and that was the disparity I saw with using this particular company’s service.

I don’t mention all this to discourage you from using an email marketing software. But I would like you to be prudent in selecting one. Pay close attention to what they tell you is “free,” and what you’re actually paying for. Do you get up to the first 500 subscribers free? Then what happens after that? Do you get any written emails, or do you have to write them all yourself? Is that what you planned on? These are all things you should consider when choosing an email marketing service for your business.

Email broadcasting can also keep your list up to date with developments on your website. Some email broadcasting is for the purpose of combining several blog post highlights in a newsletter and linking to the full article on your site. This serves two purposes. First, it encourages your audience to open an email and respond to getting your name in front of them. Second, it drives traffic to your website, keeping your site afloat in search.

Email Broadcasting: What to Say to Your Following

Email broadcasting on a regular basis will eventually make you feel – and sound – like a broken record. Truth be told, it’s tough to come up with fresh content all on your own. Some internet marketers cop out of this part by hiring someone else to write their emails for them, and it’s a valid solution if you’re really making enough money to make it worth your while.

But if you’re not ballin’ just yet, perhaps you should explore some do it yourself options for email broadcasting that are not only free but also effective besides.

Email Broadcasting: Ideas for Your List

Your email broadcasting list will get bored quickly, trust me. They’ll get all excited and read the first couple of blasts, but after the third or fourth one, they’ll lose interest and hit the “delete” button as soon as your email hits their inboxes. They probably don’t mean any offense, but they just get bored with your email broadcasting or don’t glean much from what you send them.

Here’s how to rectify that. Start following other internet marketers in your industry who do the same thing you do in your niche, only on a larger scale. Try to pattern your email broadcasting after theirs. Don’t copy, and don’t plagiarize, mind you, but you can learn from their patterns. How often do they advertise, versus how often do they send out helpful emails? What do the helpful emails include? Is it just a tip worth 100 words? Or is it a full-blown guide?

You can even combine your email broadcasting efforts and put them into an ebook to sell. So think of it this way: anything you send out in an email broadcast should be good enough to put in a book someday. If it’s not, you probably shouldn’t put it in the broadcast as part of an “informational” tactic. Now advertisements and one-off emails are a different story. But for the most part, you should be comfortable with those outside of your list seeing it as well.

Email broadcasting isn’t difficult if you break it down into easy to complete steps. It’s when you overthink your email broadcasting that it becomes a challenge.

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While you have to pay attention to your online review management to a certain extent, you can’t let every bad review get to you. After all, if all users see are five star reviews, they’ll think you paid off your customers to write good reviews, or worse, they’ll assume you made a bunch of different accounts and wrote them yourself. In either case, a high rating is optimal, but you need a few three- and four- star reviews sprinkled in here and there, too.

Online Review Management on Google

Google Maps for online review management, which shows up in populated results for Google Places, dominate the search results when a visitor searches for a business. If you have a local business or an online store that sells products, chances are that someone has written a review about you. In case you weren’t aware, you don’t have to create your own business page to have someone review you. They can write a review on your business listing, and then you can go in and claim your page after the fact if necessary.

The online review management comes in after visitors have written reviews about your store. As the owner of the page, you can “respond publicly as the owner” and clarify any misunderstandings so that everyone who visits your page can see both  sides of a negative story. On the other hand, you would also do well to respond to positive reviews so visitors who leave good experience stories are rewarded for doing so.

Online Review Management on Yelp

Online review management on Yelp is another story. Yelp actually filters reviews, and seemingly on a whim. They’ll take a perfectly good review from a legitimate customer with a true story and send it to the “filtered” section of your page if they think it demands filtering. When you ask their team for a reason why a good review was filtered, they’ll say it was up to their automation system and that they cannot remove it.

One reason this is the case is due to the fact that Yelp likes continual Yelpers, not one-time Yelpers. In other words, a customer who signs up just to review your store might get their review filtered because Yelp may see them as a spam or rigged review. While this certainly doesn’t happen every time, it happens enough that it becomes a habit.

Even though you can’t get past this part of the system, you can still respond to any review as the owner of the page. Online review management in this case works much better when a customer can see both the owner’s side and the customer’s side.

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But for the rest of the world who gasps at the thought of sitting behind a computer all day unless it’s to play World of Warcraft, video marketing blogs offer a welcome respite to the regular blend of blogging. Video marketing blogs, while still requiring negligible amounts of text in posts to keep the blog afloat in the search engines, take significantly less writing and are more optimal for people who enjoy shooting videos rather than shooting off an article on a keyboard.

Coming Up with Material for Video Marketing Blogs

Video marketing blogs are all about, well, video marketing. But you’re not actually hawking your products with each and every video, as the name implies. Just as with every other type of internet marketing, you choose your niche, then promote as necessary while parsing each advertisement-esque post with plenty of informational and advisory posts in between.

Plus, if you get bored, you can always substitute a written post or a photograph in place of a video. Just because you wanted to get into video blogs doesn’t mean you can’t spice up your feed with a little variety. It just means that your primary mode of broadcasting content is via video, not text. But honestly, Google’s not going to ding you for using text instead of a video. In fact, Google loves it when you combine different mediums, as it gives visitors a good experience when checking out your website.

It’s easiest to come up with material for your video blogs when you come up with a schedule of topics and stick to it. Let’s look at an example. Suppose one of your video marketing blogs was all about teaching others how to cook. Your schedule might dictate that you cook lasagna on Monday, teach chopping skills on Tuesday, bake a layer cake on Wednesday and so forth. That way, you’re not found copping out of a video just because you can’t think of what to make a video on.

Maintaining Video Marketing Blogs

Keeping up with your video marketing blogs is the best way to stay afloat in search engines. Just as with regular content, you need to keep that blog percolating with fresh stuff! Otherwise your YouTube channel that you upload videos to, as well as your blog, will both go stale. And once it goes stale, it’s hard to get it back up to where it belongs in search.

These video marketing ideas should help you get started with your own marketing ideas. Pretty soon, you’ll have the hang of video marketing blogs down pat to the point where it becomes second nature.

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If you’re really into SEO career searching and you live, eat and breathe SEO, then an SEO career might be something you want to look into as a career path. However, there are ways of having a “do it yourself” SEO career that aren’t nearly as cutthroat to get into and don’t tie you into 8-5, five days a week business hours. Want to find out how? Then keep reading this guide.

SEO Career: What You Can Expect in an Office

Working for someone in an SEO career else has its perks, no doubt. Free meals at the office when your manager orders pizza, insurance and dental for qualified employees, and a cleaning crew to pick up your mess are always nice. But what about the hour commute each way? How are you liking the co-worker next to you who insists upon playing Bluegrass music as loud as he can get away with? Do you wish you could have an SEO career without going through the regular office drama?

Luckily for you, you can have a career in search engine optimization without working for an online advertising company, content management business or similar workplaces that are usually located in downtown areas of cities with poor parking.

How to Have a Profitable SEO Career

“Making it” in SEO depends on several factors. Can you work your own hours without giving up and getting lazy? Oftentimes, computer-based jobs are great work-at-home careers, but if you don’t like sitting in front of a computer all day long, then perhaps a do it yourself SEO career really isn’t for you.

Do you keep up with all the current Google algorithm changes? You should do so if you run websites that rely more on Google search rankings than brand domination. But if your eyes start to glaze over as you read about updates on a website, then maybe a different career path is one you should pursue.

Can you perform your own content production? Do you know how to select images, write articles, post on social networks and keep up with daily blog production? If not, you’ll have to budget for outsourcing it or learn how to do it yourself quickly. Neither of these is a problem as long as you have a flexible budget or the willpower to learn new skills and keep improving them all the time.

This guide isn’t designed to scare you off from an SEO career. But you need to know what you’re getting into before you go applying for SEO jobs or quitting your current job to work at home as an SEO expert. Make sure you have what it takes first before committing to making the jump into the online world of SEO. But if you have the determination to make it happen, then your SEO career is certain to succeed.

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Let’s start with a little groundwork before getting into the SEO guide. Do you know what a search engine is? You might not know what a search engine is, but you probably will recognize the names of some if they were thrown out in a conversation. Do you know what a keyword is? Most people have a pretty good grasp of what these are, but are confused as to how to go about using them. These are some of the basic elements that any SEO guide should have, and that’s what we’ll explore here in this guide.

SEO Guide Tip: Let’s Talk About Search Engines

What is a search engine? Can you explain or name a few search engines? If you answered with Google, Yahoo, Bing or MSN, you’re right. But did you know that there are hundreds of “search engines” on the web? What makes some of them so big and others so little-known?

While there are several answers that fulfill this question, you can pretty much sum it up in one word: Relevance. Google is the top dog when it comes to search engines primarily because it provides the results with the most relevance to a user’s search. Some searchers are unhappy with Google, which is why they switch to search engines like Yahoo, MSN, Dogpile or Ask.

You’ve probably heard a lot of ruckus in more than one SEO guide about Google continually changing its algorithms and ticking off internet marketers. Why doesn’t anyone ever complain about Yahoo’s updates or Bing’s algorithm changes? Quite frankly, those search engines only own a percentage of the search volume that Google does. Plus, most SEO guide tips will show that they aren’t nearly as strict when it comes to algorithms, so between these two “dequalifiers,” so to speak, there’s no reason to play up to search engines other than Google.

SEO Guide Tip: Picking Keywords in More Than Just Your Content

Here’s another SEO guide tip about selecting and using keywords. Picking your keywords goes beyond just using them in an article or a title. Google looks at the relevance of a user’s search query to the keywords in your domain. Think about it for a second. Suppose someone did a search for “how to get rid of bed bugs.” If your domain name had keywords for making money online in it, Google’s going to promote several pages of other results rather than bring yours to the top, no matter how well you worked on optimizing the keywords on the rest of the page.

Hopefully this SEO guide has helped you get an idea of what Google is looking for as far as content and keywords.

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Most of the time social network is given a bad name because of the time-wasting that goes on there, usually on behalf of bored employees and teens after school. But there is a way to use it without making it a time-wasting endeavor.

Social Networking Sites for Business: LinkedIn

Some people don’t view LinkedIn as a social media site like Facebook but more as a resume-building site like Monster or Indeed. But what you might not realize is that LinkedIn gets a lot of exposure on Google and other search engines. Thus, when someone types in your business name, chances are that they will stumble across your LinkedIn page, where you have a strong opportunity to showcase your website, your geographic location (which helps when people search for you in the search engines) and a contact area.

So for the record, yes, LinkedIn is a great way to put your resume on display, but it’s also a great way to get plenty of exposure for a small business, website or product. In addition to the aforementioned benefits, you can also link to your other social media entities, giving you even further opportunities to grow your business.

Social Networking Sites for Business: Google Plus

By now, you’re probably familiar with the Google Plus social media platform, but not as other social networking sites for business. If not, let’s just suffice it to say that it tries to be a variation of Facebook. And while a lot of people don’t really get good vibes from Google Plus, there’s nothing like a Google-owned entity to get you some decent exposure.

In addition to creating a regular Google Plus profile, you should also create a Google Plus page. (Sounds just like Facebook, doesn’t it?) And while Google Plus pages don’t seem to be set up in the same logical way as Facebook, it still behooves you to have one, if for no other reason than getting nods from the search engines. And just like Facebook and Twitter, you can “follow” the page and ask your fans to do so as well.

As long as a fan is logged into their Google Plus profile and follows your page, your page will be listed in their search results for related searches that they type in. This is a bit of a stretch for some who may not have a huge following, but for those who do, this is a huge benefit.

Make sure you also utilize Google Bookmarks when placing new content on your site. Just use the same profile you used to create your Google Plus profile, and you’ll be good to go.

Use these social networking sites for business, and you will begin creeping up in the search engine results quickly.

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Implementing social media in business is a task many internet marketers delegate to an employee or an outsourced independent contractor. Why? Because it’s such a daunting task to set up multiple social media accounts that most serious business marketers don’t care to take the time to do it themselves. But if you’re a fairly small-time internet business, you’ll have to decide for yourself which is worth more: your time or your money. Is it worthwhile to hire someone else to handle your social media so that you can spend more time working on your business? Or are you on a shoestring budget where it makes sense for you to do the work yourself and expend half an hour a day managing your social media presence?

Social Media in Business: Must-Have Accounts

There are hundreds of website profiles one could make that technically fall under the category of “social media.” But not even half of them are necessary to build your presence online. There are probably less than 15 social networking sites that are truly crucial for you to use in building your social reach online. We’ll go over some of them here.

Anyone who has been on the internet for the past few years knows that it’s absolutely necessary to have a Facebook page, plain and simple. You need a Facebook page to connect with fans of your site or product, and quite honestly, you should want one because of the many advantages you have in reaching out to your customers and offering them exclusive deals.

Next, you need a Twitter account, but in many cases, Twitter is really only used as a placeholder so you don’t have to have an empty Twitter icon on your website. A lot of people still use it, that’s true, but it’s more for fun than anything, in some cases.

If your brand is fairly popular, make a Foursquare account, too. You can offer so many exclusive deals to your customers that you’ll be top on their list of vendors pretty soon. If you only have a few fans, however, it will do you well to reserve your page, but you probably won’t see much benefit out of it until you grow your fan base.

Social Media in Business: Smaller Accounts

There are several lesser known social networks that merit signing up with for your social media in business strategy. For example, Tumblr is a great place to blog just a few words of text, an image or a new video you uploaded. Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon are good for bookmarking, as is Google Bookmarks. Speaking of Google, you should also create a Google Plus account and a Google Plus page. These networks will help make your social media in business plan complete.

Trying to get in on quick money making ideas sounds great in the short term, because it is designed to provide nearly instant gratification. But at what cost to you? That’s what we’ll explore a little here.

Quick Money Making Ideas: Building Poor Work Habits

Trying to make a quick buck is a bad mentality to have morally-speaking. As humans, we were designed to work for a living. Shortcutting the work process might seem like a satisfying way to beat the system, but in the long haul, it’s not. Why?

Let’s put it this way: most quick moneymaking schemes don’t last very long. They’re a flash in the pan before they fizzle out and a new one takes its place. Whether it’s a TV fad, a fake weight loss gimmick or a way to get rid of acne overnight, you’re not doing yourself or anyone else any good by getting in on the action, so to speak.

Taking part in quick money making ideas gets your brain into this bad habit of expecting quick money. When you get used to getting paid after very little effort, it becomes like a drug, and you get used to it. But what happens when the program you’ve been promoting gets discontinued – or the owners get sued? Where does that leave you?

In some cases, internet marketers have gone from promoting programs of ill repute to making their own reputable online empires. However, this is the exception, not the rule. Usually, a marketer goes from program to program, trying to fulfill that need for quick cash, and coming up short. Eventually they give up entirely and leave internet marketing. You don’t want to become “that guy!”

Quick Money Making Ideas: Investing Wasted Time

Most of the time, these quick ideas for making money generally just waste your time. In many cases, if the program you’re promoting isn’t a scam, it’s a highly saturated market because it is profitable. That means your PPC clicks are through the roof, keywords are tough to compete against, and a lot of other domains already inundate the search engines, leaving little room for a successful startup.

So instead of trying to make a quick buck, why don’t you try creating your own product? Seeing a need and fulfilling it is often harder than it sounds, granted, but it is possible. Even if you don’t get rich off of your idea, you will develop the skills you need to launch a new one. Entrepreneurial efforts are almost always more beneficial in the long run than quick money making ideas.

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A lot of us, especially those of us who have been in the internet marketing business for a while, tend to take for granted that those around us who we talk to on a regular basis know some of the same things we do. For instance, I spoke to an individual the other day who didn’t know you could upload YouTube videos for free by making a YouTube account. It might seem pretty elementary to us, but there’s a market for that sort of thing if you know where to look. Let’s just say this person would have enjoyed website gifts of a pre-built website and pre-made social media accounts.

Website Gifts: Domains and Hosting

The average Joe really doesn’t know how buying domains and hosting them on a server works. Put a few of your non-techy friends in front of a GoDaddy account, and I guarantee you, they won’t know where to start. But when you talk to them about goals they have for their own fulfillment or financial augmentation, you’ll realize they really do want in on some of the action, and giving them website gifts will help.

So if you’re running dry on which gifts to give these individuals in your life, tune into their desires for a few minutes and see if you can’t get them website gifts of some sort. If you’re willing to spend $50 to $60, you can purchase a domain as website gifts  on their behalf and buy the hosting as well. Whether you keep it in their name or yours is up to you. But keep the option of switching ownership open to them so they can choose.

Website Gifts: Blogs and Social Media

You’d be surprised at all the people who still don’t know how to make Facebook accounts or Facebook pages. Even some teens and  young adults who spent more time in front of video games than an actual computer really don’t know how to work these pieces of online real estate. If you don’t want to teach them how to make a profile, do it yourself, and give it to them pre-made as website gifts.

If you choose to go the blog route with your website gifts, be sure to install WordPress on the domain for them before handing over the keys. Show them how to change their password so they don’t feel as though you can “hack in” to their website gifts just any old time.

These website gifts and ideas are probably a little outside the scope of your usual gift list, but I guarantee you that they will be a hit – at least with some people.

As blog ideas go, this is often how it happens, so don’t think that it’s just you or that there’s something wrong with your method. But before you get too deep into the mire of writer’s block, take a step back and consider these blog ideas for your website or daily blog.

Blog Ideas that Break the Mold

These blog ideas will help you consider themes for your writing that you might not have thought about previously. And you won’t necessarily get them by doing a Google search for blog ideas, either, so consider yourself fortunate to be reading them (wink, wink).

One of the best blog ideas, especially if you are in the business of selling goods that are slightly difficult to get excited about, is the concept of writing on the overall theme of your business. For instance, today I was writing a blog post for a car dealership. But instead of writing with the intention of selling vehicles, I wrote with a slant that helped the consumer keep themselves and their vehicles safe during an upcoming local festival. Not only does this gather rapport for your business, it’s actually helpful information for the audience to take away.

In the case of my car dealership client, we wanted to implement local and geographical tags in our posts, so we used the festival as a way to integrate city and state names for the region we wanted to target. This is very SEO friendly in Google’s eyes and can work in our favor when trying to rank for keywords searched for in a certain location or with certain city names attached to the keywords.

Blog Ideas that Interest Readers

Nobody likes blog ideas that are narcissistic, or in other words, blog ideas that only benefit you, the website owner. So no posting blog ideas that promote, promote, promote your affiliate products all the time. You need to sprinkle in – or rather, pour in – blog posts that help and interest your reader.

If you run out of your own blog ideas, use those of other people – but use them the right way. For example, if you’re on Tumblr and you see a cute picture, don’t be afraid to re-post it with attribution. So what if it doesn’t benefit your business directly? It draws attention to your feed and builds reputation with your readers and customers. Don’t make too much of a habit of this; just use these blog ideas naturally and sprinkle them in between other posts, and your writer’s block problem will be solved.

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Let’s start with the age of the domain and how long you’ve had content up there. The age of a site is kind of like wine. The older it sits there and permeates on the web, the better Google likes it. Of course, it has to be quality to start with, or the only thing going for you is the domain you’re hosting it on. Despite all the web search optimization you could do with a site, you still must have unique, quality content in order to make the search engines truly love you.

Web Search Optimization Tips for Your Home Page

Your home page is usually your first chance of making a statement. The exception to this is if someone comes to one of your child pages through a Google search or a link from another website. But in general, if someone looks for your business or clicks on your link from your social media page, chances are that they stumble upon your home page first.

You need to have excellent Meta data up there in your website’s header. Keywords, descriptions – the whole works. If you don’t know how to do it well yourself, then you need to have someone else do it for you. It’s just that important.

Secondly, you need to have alternate text for the images on your website. These are keyword relevant as much as the content on your page, so don’t forget that tip!

Third, be sure to use your headings in the right order. Some people use H1 tags first, then use an H6 tag for a subtitle, then skip to an H3 tag further on down the page. They’re numbered for a reason. They shouldn’t go in reverse or mixed order; Google likes it when you keep them in numeric order.

Web Search Optimization Tips for Mandatory Pages

Web search optimization tips for mandatory pages are never as fun to implement as for the rest of your website. After all, who likes reading – let alone writing – disclaimers, terms of service and contact pages? Pretty much nobody – unless you’re an attorney who gets paid for doing stuff like that.

Thankfully, there are websites with pre-written text to help you out. For these web search optimization tips, all you have to do is plug in the name of your website (in most cases), hit a button and presto! You have a ready-made legal page for your website.

It’s especially necessary to host such pages on your website if you’re selling affiliate products. You need to disclose that you could make money off of products that you recommend to buyers, otherwise you could get in trouble with the FTC. Put these web search optimization tips to good use before you get your website up and running.

Implementing web page promotion that will work for your unique site really does boil down to your needs and what your site offers. Plus, if you plan to do any sort of pay per click ads, you need to budget out some PPC page promotion. But all in all, there are several secrets to web page promotion (that aren’t really secrets if you’ve been doing your homework) that work for everyone’s web page, pretty much no matter what.

Web Page Promotion: Doing It for Free with Social Media

Promoting your web page on social media can actually be fun if you do it the right way. And since it’s so beneficial to your business, you can put your mind at rest that you’re not actually wasting time – well, at least not most of the time, anyway.

But no longer is it just acceptable to have a Facebook and a Twitter page for your web page promotion. You need a lot more than that to impress the search engines – and your following – these days. You need a presence on Google platforms like Google Plus and YouTube, on blogs like Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr, and on social bookmarking sites like Digg. In fact, the more social media sites you can connect back with your website, the better.

Now, to the problem of coming up with content on those sites. True, it’s difficult to think of daily or weekly content to continually pump onto those pages. Thankfully, you can more or less duplicate the content you put on each, since many social media managers will broadcast the same message to each of your social networking profiles. However, it always helps to vary the message just a bit for the sake of keeping your following interested.

After all, how would you feel if the exact same followers who fanned you on Facebook also were your followers on Twitter and Tumblr? Would you want them reading the same exact words in each place? Probably not. So as mentioned previously, it helps to keep things changed up.

Web Page Promotion Aside from Social Media

Web page promotion is possible aside from social media outlets. After all, if your site has little content, you’re not going to be able to promote it and have it stick no matter how hard you try. You have to impress the search engines in your own right, too.

Keeping that in mind, you need to do your due diligence in keyword research, and think about using some SEO tools that will help you keep track of your rankings. There are several tools and software pieces available to help you accomplish this. Some people even find web page promotion nearly impossible without it.

People aren’t stupid anymore when they read a page on a website. Sure, you can pull the wool over the eyes of some for a while, but readers these days know what to look for and can smell a fake when they see it. When you write an article for your website, it needs to be good content in order to get your readers to return again without getting a bad taste in their mouths.

How to Write Website Content with Boring Keywords

Oftentimes, you’re not left with much to work with after your keyword research. Which means, of course, that your content is back to boring and useless. But it is possible to know how to write content that sticks even if you have terrible keyword choices. Here’s a little secret.

When you’re writing to a particular keyword that doesn’t fit well into an article using natural speaking phraseology, you can work around it by referencing the reason for writing the article itself. For instance, how are you supposed to target a keyword like “best laptop review” and still use that same phrase within the review itself? It generally sounds funny. But if you say something like, “In this best laptop review, we’ll be discussing…” or “It’s sometimes difficult to find the best laptop review online…” then it fits in more naturally than if you were to say “Need a best laptop review?” The lattermost sounds gimmicky and very obvious that you’re targeting a keyword phrase.

How to Write Website Content for Social Media Virality

Knowing how to write website content for use on social media requires a different tone than writing for a website. True, you’re still writing for a “website,” (i.e., yours) but it’s for a different purpose. You want social media to take off and go viral, and long-winded posts – or even 450-word pages that are Google’s friendly number – don’t cut it. Social media requires blurbs and a lot of multimedia to draw attention these days.

Writing content for social media oftentimes means accompanying photos or video with a caption or just a two to three sentence blurb. Anything that’s shareable is a good length for social media like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and more.

Don’t get too complicated with social media content. True, you need to include a keyword or a geographic location (for targeting a local business, if that’s your thing) where needed. But don’t be worried about keyword density. Make it personal, make it fun, and you’ve got a good recipe for content. If you can get the hang of this, then learning how to write website content that people actually like will be a breeze.

Google search optimization is tough to accomplish, especially when their rules aren’t crystal clear and it seems their algorithms are ever-changing. But as hard as it might seem, it is possible to make Google happy – while maintaining your sanity.

Google Search Optimization: Backlinking

Whenever you hear about Google search optimization, you probably hear the word “backlinking” quite a bit. And while backlinking is pretty serious business when it comes to search engine rankings, it takes an art to getting it done right.

Here’s the thing: you can’t just have any backlinks and expect to get a higher search engine ranking. If you have 1,000 .info backlinks to your site, Google might think your site is spammy and will penalize it. However, if you have ten backlinks from .gov and .edu sites, Google will more than likely spur your site to the top of the search results.

Sometimes you can have too many backlinks. Building a bunch of random backlinks from sites with no relevance will look like downright spam to Google, in which case you’ll drop in your search rankings. But if you have just a few backlinks from quality sites – those that have been around for a while, are relevant to your site’s niche and already have their own “happy Google juice” – then you’ll have a better chance of rising in the search results.

Google Search Optimization: Helping Google Find Your Site

Google search optimization won’t do you much good if your site doesn’t at least have the basics in order. Things like Meta data, Meta descriptions for each page, Meta keywords and more all help get your site found. Additionally, if you’re a local business, having a listing in Google Maps (and therefore Google Places) certainly helps. Just make sure that you personally go in and submit your contact info and location identically in every site you sign up for in order to stay uniform across the web. True, other users can go in and change the details of your business, but it will still help to maintain consistency.

It’s the little things we overlook that make Google search optimization that much harder. Even doing due diligence in keyword research won’t make up for not having the mandatory pages on your site or getting your Meta data in order. That’s why it’s important to make sure you get as much in order as possible before you hit the “publish” button on your WordPress blog or Dreamweaver site. The more you have in place before submitting your website to the web, the less Google search optimization you’ll have to do after the fact, as it’s a lot easier to do prior to publishing than afterward.

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Remember that you have to consider being Google friendly when starting to build a landing page. Google bans users who don’t comply with their guidelines, so always be sure to check with AdWords guidelines and policies before you launch a landing page on Google. But once you’re in with Google, you should be good to go as far as design goes, provided that your particular industry or affiliate program doesn’t have any other policies for you to follow. If they do, be sure you adhere to them.

Build a Landing Page with Nice Graphics

Graphics are key to a good user experience when designing a landing page. Having a landing page that looks like it was created back in 2002 is a big problem, yet we see it every day on websites with lazy web designers. You know the type – graphics that look like they were taken straight off of a stock photo site, very little coding and “dressing up” – all in an effort to take shortcuts. In effect, they shortchange themselves by not making their landing page user friendly.

You don’t have to load up your page with a bunch of graphics, but it should look sleek and more than presentable. Graphics should load quickly and be in the proper extension format so they don’t hang up the page when it loads.

Build a Landing Page with Relevant Content

The number one cause of getting banned on Google (aside from not following policies and guidelines) is not having relevant content. You can get a Google slap if your page is not relevant, keyword and content-wise, to the user’s query. Your scores will start slipping, and eventually, you’ll start paying a lot more for the ads.

After that, you’ll find that trying to build a landing page was a waste of time. So it helps to have things like dynamic keyword insertion and geographic backlinks in place (in the case of a local business) that tell Google you did your due diligence.

What kind of content should you have? Instead of just building a “squeeze page,” make sure you actually filled the page with helpful content. Perhaps 250-300 words of unique text would fit in somewhere.

Once you’re finished with filling the page with relevant content, you also need to include mandatory pages like the About Us, Contact Us, Disclosure, Privacy Policy, Terms of Use and so forth. Don’t forget to include a link to your home page, which should be a home page to a website with plenty of content to back it up. You don’t want your home page to be your chief landing page, in most cases, unless it has plenty of content to satisfy Google’s needs. Use these tips to build a landing page, and you will be successful eventually.

Local search SEO isn’t just about placing the right keywords in all the right places. It’s about networking with other businesses in your area, getting restaurants, doctor’s offices, car dealerships and more to make friends with you and link to your website. Chances are, some of these websites already have more “Google cred” than you do, so it’s beneficial to link up with them where search engine friendliness is concerned.

Local Search SEO: Linking with Your Own Sites

When you make local SEO apply to your social media – as in your Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Foursquare and more – you’re giving Google some helpful local search SEO. This goes from putting location into in actual status updates to placing your address and a list of surrounding areas into your “about” or “bio” boxes. The more you tell Google where you’re located, the better off your sites will be if you want to drive local traffic.

Let’s say you run an art gallery and someone is visiting your area for the day. They’re an avid art fan, and they want to spend some free time at a gallery. So what do they do? They go to Google on their mobile devices and type “Art gallery.” You want to come up first, second or third in the search results in order to capture that traffic.

Local SEO will be more effective if you link your website to your social media pages and also to well-established web pages that have a strong Google reputation already. These are harder to procure at times, but certainly aren’t impossible.

Local Search SEO in Practice

Now, just because you’ve done due diligence trying to tag local search seo keywords in your pages and websites doesn’t mean Google will give you preference in the search results. There are many times when, due to better reviews, a better website or longer standing, Google will simply blow you off and feature your competitor. While irritating, there are things you can do to improve your local search seo.

First, incentive your customers in writing reviews that will benefit your website. For example, if you’re lacking Google Places reviews – or have some nasty ones sitting there already – you can offer coupons or free stuff to customers in exchange for them writing a better review and giving your business five stars. Make sense?

 Sometimes you can’t control everything, and that’s where customers come into play, especially where local search seo is involved. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because you have great META data on your website that Google will give you preferred treatment. They won’t. They base their algorithms on a lot more than data these days, and local search SEO is a product of that.

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SEO location makes your posts, photos and videos search engine friendly in several ways. First of all, it helps Google track where exactly your business is located. Secondly, it helps Google pair your potential customers with your business. Third, it makes your business more relevant when someone in your area is searching for keywords related to your business. In other words, you become more relevant all the way around, and relevancy is key in Google’s mind.

SEO Location: Making Yourself Relevant

One of the first things on your list should be to give your business a geographic location on Google Maps. You’ll want to check this off the list as soon as possible to prevent someone else from taking over your page (such as a former employee, the competition, etc.) Granted, Google has ways of checking up on this, but why make it complicated? Such a simple SEO location task can be done within a matter of five minutes, so there’s no need to procrastinate.

The trick to SEO location and making yourself stand out from the competition when performing SEO location placement in Google Maps is by setting your pinpoint as close to a major street as possible. Even if you’re located out in the boondocks, you could put your pinpoint by a driveway, instead of on top of your actual building, to help Google navigate your customers to the right area. It also makes you look like a more viable option when someone compares which businesses are closest to them.

SEO Location: Putting Location Information in Web Documents

When it comes to SEO location, it’s easy to add into things like posts, photos, videos, “About” pages and other web documents. You don’t actually have to do any “geo tagging” per se, but you should include location information. Here’s a personal example of what is done on many competitive web pages of local businesses.

Wherever it makes sense to place the name of your city or a surrounding one, do so. For example, the words, “ We serve hungry customers in Dallas, Fort Worth, Denton, and more” is a way to tell Google that anyone within 100 miles of Dallas might be a potential customer – and so forth. Obviously exact SEO location strategies differ for everyone, but this is a good example.

You can also place SEO location information into your photos when you upload them. Say something like “Here I am at Walgreen’s in Los Angeles picking up a new package of bandages for this scrape I got while reviewing my new skateboard.” Make it personal as well as local, and viewers will love you for it.

When it comes to SEO location in videos, be sure to place tags of your town and surrounding areas into the description and keyword areas.

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Why is this such an issue with business profiles or Facebook fan pages? Facebook thumbnail pictures are no big deal when you’re using a personal profile because Most profile pictures are centered on your face or the object in the focus. But with a Facebook fan page or business profile, chances are you featured a logo as your profile picture, which might be all different shapes and sizes and might look chopped off in a Facebook thumbnail. Here’s what you can do about your thumbnail’s appearance on Facebook pages.

Facebook Thumbnail: Editing the Thumbnail

You don’t have to go through any fancy steps to make a presentable Facebook thumbnail. To see how yours looks like at the moment, log into your account, click on your profile picture and hit the “Edit Thumbnail” option. This will draw up a new page (or a dialog box, depending on what type of account you have) and give you a few different options.

First of all, you get to compare the difference between your full-size photo and your thumbnail. Chances are, it will take a good portion of the top part of your picture while chopping off the entire middle and bottom. This can look pretty empty – or ridiculous – depending on the type of photo you have if you’re not careful.

Moving on, pick between the two options you’re given in order to adjust it to the correct settings. You can either scale the picture to fit, meaning you’ll fit the entire photo into the Facebook thumbnail, or drag the picture to adjust its focal point. This way, the Facebook thumbnail will end up displaying the pixels you want shown on every post and comment you make.

Facebook Thumbnail Alternatives

If you still can’t edit your Facebook thumbnail to your liking, you do have a few other options. First, you can upload a square photo instead of a rectangular photo (which is what most businesses do these days), which will take out most complications when focusing on a particular part of the picture. You can also make a totally different image for the photo that is already optimized for use on Facebook. But you’ll probably find that making a Facebook thumbnail that works well isn’t too hard.

Also, you could hire someone to create a professional-looking Facebook thumbnail for you. Although this isn’t necessary, it’s still an option, especially if you have no interest in becoming a graphics guru.

Your Facebook thumbnail isn’t the number one most important aspect of your social media presence, but it sure does help when people see a nice photo on every post and comment. The more professional your overall appearance, the better, especially when it comes to making a good first impression online.

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So to answer the issue of Facebook profile or page, it’s not always a cut and dried as it might seem. Both give you benefits that the other doesn’t supply. In the end, you can sometimes choose both, but if you’re not into social media, or you don’t have time to really dedicate to both, it can be overkill. Your efforts are sometimes better used when directed into one stream.

Facebook Profile or Page: Benefits of a Profile

When you set up a business profile on Facebook, you are able to manage several different pages from one location. Or, you can just manage one. Of course, you can do this with a personal profile as well as a business one, but this way, you can keep your business profile separate from your personal one.

With a business profile, you can use Facebook as you would ordinarily with a personal profile. You can make friends and interact with them, but you don’t have to follow their feeds in order to friend them back. You also don’t have the ability to chat with them either. This way, you stick to business and don’t get sidetracked while you work on getting down to business. You can also post a banner across the top of the profile, unlike on a page, where you have to rotate your most recent five wall pictures.

Facebook Profile or Page: Benefits of a Page

With a fan page, you have less interaction functionality with fans, but you have more right to broadcast promotional messages than what your “friends” would think appropriate on a business profile. For instance, if you “friend” someone on a business profile, they don’t want a bunch of promotional messages coming down the pike. On the other hand, with a page, your fans and followers are practically expecting to get sold on something or read promotional status updates. If they like you enough, they won’t mind. Just don’t forget to mix in a few non-promotional statuses here and there to insure your fans don’t feel too “sold.”

Unfortunately with pages, you can’t very well control how your photos turn out on your display. You can rectify this by placing a different tab as your home page and letting guests view your photos in the Photos tab. You can also upload five photos that rotate between each other that can stand alone but still promote what your page is trying to get across.

So, Facebook profile or page? The end choice is up to you. facebook profile or page options will each give you very similar functionality, so even if you accidentally pick one over the other, you will still reap benefits.

It’s important to guard your reputation from the beginning. That means a multitude of things, which we’ll delve into here in just a moment. But before we get started with this reputation management online guide, just remember that your reputation begins with you and the way you operate. All the tools and statistics in the world can’t change how customers feel after dealing with you online. Now with that in mind, let’s take a look at what’s available.

Reputation Management Online Starts with You

Start your reputation management online the right way by treating your customers decently. That means the content you put on your website should be customer-friendly and in a nice, professional tone. The service you provide should be timely, delivered as promised and even over-delivered upon if you really want to make points.

Remember that a scorned customer with one bad experience will be much more inclined to give you a bad reputation than a pleased customer with ten good experiences. Why? Because anger often drives customers more than happiness. It’s a more “motivational” emotion, so to speak. So always try to resolve any customer issues when they creep up, and don’t wait until you read a bad review about your service to rectify the problem.

Reputation Management Online: Tracking What Customers Are Saying

Reputation management online tools like Demand Force, Raven Tools and others provide monthly subscriptions that help you track what your fans (and detractors) are saying on social media platforms and online review sites like Google Places, Yelp and more. Be sure you set these set up before you do a lot of business so that no one else sets them up in your name and controls them. Some sites even let you reply to feedback so you can salvage your reputation management online before it gets out of hand.

Your reputation management online is very crucial, especially if you run an offline business. Customers are even more inclined to write reviews about service they get in person. This is especially true if you run a personal service, restaurant or coffee shop, car dealership, or other high profile type of business. The bigger you are, the more likely a person is to write a candid review online.

It will behoove you to keep track of these places in your weekly sweeps of online checks. If you have anyone at your company in charge of SEO, this should be part of their job description. It’s important that you tackle any recurring problems quickly, before too many customers get a chance to post about them.

This reputation management online tactic should help you catch problems, help your business and make the buying experience at your company better for everyone involved.

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Now when I talk about how to integrate websites, I’m not talking about integrating them with e-commerce tools or membership platforms. I’m talking about integrating them across the web so that they always direct readers back to wherever you want to funnel them. Let me give you an example to help you get a better idea of what I’m talking about.

How to Integrate Websites: An Example of What Not to Do

As I mentioned previously, I’d like to touch on my recent experience with a project that was not set up well. This was with a local business that wasn’t necessarily SEO-oriented, but wasn’t SEO ignorant, either. The problem was, no particular person was in charge of website details. That means a few people did this, a few others did that, and a few others pitched in here and there. For your reference, this is a downright terrible way to handle business, especially online.

The problem is, the search engine details and social media aspects of the business were not respected. They didn’t put a lot of effort into them because they probably didn’t really expect it to work. Well, in the end, their tactics were a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it was just a hodge-podge of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Yelp stuff that never really melted too well in the melting pot.

How to Integrate Websites Properly

If you’re going to learn how to integrate websites the right way, do yourself and your business a favor by integrating them all at the same time. That means reserving all of your profiles at the same time. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Foursquare, Pinterest, YouTube – any social media platform you intend to use, try to get your own username for it. You can always add the lesser-known ones later, but these are the main ones.

Secondly, establish goals for your site. Are you simply trying to drive traffic? Are you trying to sell products? Do you want to drive everyone to your home site, or do you want them hitting hard on your social media? It’s all up to you, but your integration habits need to pattern that goal and then drive it. There should be no half-baked ideas being thrown out. Each and every status update or post needs to have a purpose. No futzing around on the website, no allowing guests to post just anything under the sun. Your content should have a driven purpose, or it shouldn’t exist.

That’s not to say you can’t have fun with your content. But you need to keep your goals at the forefront at all times when learning how to integrate websites.

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There are so many ways to make money online these days. What with social media, organic search, paid search and more, you have plenty of options to choose from. You can pick between blogging, vlogging, consulting, writing, graphic design, website design, independent contractor work for odd jobs – you name it, and you can market it. You don’t even have to be web savvy to do so.

I Need to Make Money: Where Should I Start?

I need to make money, but I have no idea where I should begin! This is a common problem many people have when they aren’t very “internet literate,” so to speak. Even if you’re no stranger to computers, you won’t always know which websites to go to if you want to start making money.

For older teens and adults with highly creative noggins, Fiverr.com is a great place to start. They let you offer your services for $5 apiece, whether it be a graphic design, a drawing, a voiceover or a video message. If you can do it for five bucks, you can sign up on Fiverr! Of course, if five dollars sounds a little cheap, you can always charge buyers extra gigs for a service, especially if you need more than half an hour to complete the task.

If you’re a photographer, you might look into marketing your photography on websites like Fotolia.com and iStockPhoto.com. Many internet marketers use these sites on a regular basis and are looking for photos to use in their blog posts and internet articles. By taking quality, high resolution photos, you can get paid royalty stipend for every purchase made from your photography. Of course, knowing how to promote your photography on a personal blog, website, YouTube channel, Facebook page and other social media outlets helps as well.

I Need to Make Money: Places to Make Higher Income

You need to make money, you say, but you also need a place that delivers higher income. If you can devote several hours per week to working online, then there are a multitude of websites that help you promote your services.

Take, for instance, freelance websites like eLance.com and oDesk.com. Submit your portfolio, enter your personal information, and set a price that website designers and contractors can hire you out for. You can also “bid” on projects that you search for on the website, although be aware that many of these have a lot of competition, and it can be a hassle to do a lot of bidding and work submissions without pay.

Warrior Forum is a great place to advertise your services as well. Just pay a $20 fee for your post, and they’ll set you up in front of thousands of visitors who may be interested in hiring you. These sites are all you need to start answering your “I need to make money” concerns!

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Local online advertising is often performed on website directories like CitySearch, Google Places, Yahoo Local and more. There are several ways you can make sure your website – and therefore your business – gets found without doing a lot of keyword research, SEO on your site, paid search advertising and so forth.

Local Online Advertising: What Works, What Doesn’t

How are you supposed to know which types of local online advertising work and which don’t? That’s a good question, especially if this is all new to you. The key is to look for well-known sites, especially subdirectories of popular search engines. What do we mean by this?

Take, for instance, the fact that Google is the biggest search engine out there. How can you tell Google that your site exists? First, you submit your website to Google’s search engine. They have an area where you can submit details about your website to get it crawled in the search engines. Secondly, submit your site, local business details and contact information to Google Places. You’ll notice that eventually, people who frequent your business may write reviews about your business. Some of these may be good, and some may be bad. With local online advertising, you might want to check your site’s ratings now and then to be sure someone is not intentionally bashing your website.

Local Online Advertising: Don’t Forget the Smaller Directories

It makes obvious sense to perform your local online advertising on Google. After all, they’re #1 in their industry. But you shouldn’t rely on just one website to do all the work for you. You need to submit your website and local business contact information (as well as a brief description about your company) to other directories. So who all is on the recommended list?

Think about the smaller search engines that still have a huge online presence. Yahoo and MSN are next to Google in popularity and aren’t really considered “smaller search engines” – the just happen to be smaller than Google. Next up, we have Ask.com and AOL. These both have areas for local listings that can be searched and user-rated.

Local online advertising is also about online reputation. Sooner or later, a disgruntled employee or shady competitor may write a poor review of your site or business, give it 0 or 1 star for the star rating and encourage others to do the same. While you will probably get yourself banned from submitting multiple positive reviews about yourself to the same website, it behooves you to respond to these remarks and encourage your customers to write positive reviews about your business.

Local online advertising can be easier, less costly and less complicated than regular SEO; you just have to know where to place your site for best visibility.

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But when a small business SEO team like yours wants to promote HP, Dell, Proactiv or other big-name brands as an affiliate marketer, it’s difficult to compete against others in the search engines. In some cases, these names are trademarked and branded such that you cannot bid on them in paid search. And in organic search, you’ll never rank in the top five search results because there are too many commercial websites already established with these keywords.

Small Business SEO: Finding What Works

Small business SEO is all about finding your niche and then finding keywords for that niche. These keyword phrases often have less to do with an actual brand name and more to do with what people are searching for. If you’re a small business who sells your own products, then you don’t need to worry about branding any name except your own. With small business SEO, you can use social media connections like Facebook and Twitter to make your brand popular enough to deserve using as its own keyword phrase. Targeting keyword phrases with your own product name in the phrase is a great way to brand your site and keep on top of the search engines.

Small business search engine optimization also needs daily attention. Bigger sites might get away with updating every few weeks or so, but you need to give your website face time every week – and several times per week at that, preferably. Getting ahead of the competition means working not only just as hard as they are, but harder. Lots of site owners tend to get lazy, so if you can keep yourself on a schedule, you’ll be ahead of them in the search engines, provided you do your homework with your SEO strategies.

Small Business SEO: Managing Your Social Media Presence

Many small businesses are tempted to buy Facebook likes and Twitter followers. It sounds like a good idea at first, especially if you want to rocket your likes up to 100, 200 or 500 in a matter of a few hours. But here’s the rub: even with small business SEO, it can still look pretty bad on your Facebook page.

Small business SEO strategies make it pretty obvious that you want to put some type of Facebook widget to display who “likes” your company and to encourage more likes in the future. But what happens to your online reputation when you see a bunch of followers who have the same – or similar – avatars? Or how about the ones that use painfully obvious celebrity or model photos? They don’t look very real, and your authentic followers will figure that out pretty quickly.

Small business SEO isn’t hard to develop; it’s doing it right that counts.

The reason so many site developers want to develop their organic search optimization strategies is probably obvious. First of all, it’s free. Secondly, it works for you and keeps on working months and years later, unlike ads, which have a finite running period.

Organic Search Optimization for Your Website or Blog

Some people stop their organic search optimization with their individual articles. Yes, it’s a great idea to pick keyword phrases to target article-by-article, and it’s good practice to make a new headline for each with the keyword phrase intact. But it’s the way you tie your entire website together that really pleases the search engines – or sends them looking for another site to list in the search results.

One of the best organic search optimization practices is tying your posts or pages together with other pages on your website. For instance, you need to include at least one link in every page that is anchored on your keyword phrase text. Instead of leading the reader to another website, why not keep them on your own website by linking to a relevant article? This serves two functions: It keeps the reader looking at the ads and products on your website, not someone else’s, and it helps ensure that the link never gets removed or broken (unless you do it yourself).

Organic Search Optimization with Plugins

Let’s face it: You can’t babysit every part of your website every day. But stuff happens. Maybe you spelled a link wrong, and it’s broken. Perhaps you forgot some alternate text in an image on a page you just published. Whatever the problem, using SEO plugins helps you find those missing links on your site and tells you how to fix them.

Some of these plugins require premium payment. Some come free or as a free trial. Try them out first, if possible, then invest in the whole product if you see fit. You shouldn’t spend money needlessly on frivolous plugins that only serve menial purposes, but if it truly saves you time and helps keep your site alive in the search engines, that’s the key.

Now, these plugins obviously only work if you are on a WordPress blogging platform. If you decided to host your own website without publishing a WordPress template on it, plugins aren’t much of an option. But you can still check links and SEO content yourself to make sure everything is in good order; it will just take you longer to accomplish your organic search optimization goals this way.

Many website owners find it tempting to go through an agency for several reasons. And with all the studying that many SEO experts do to learn the ropes of working on the internet, it’s no surprise that you might consider having someone else do it for you. But if you can save time and money and still get the same results, you might consider doing it yourself instead.

Why You Should Choose a Web Marketing Agency

Some people really shouldn’t try to do their own search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Those who really don’t like working on the internet, have trouble understanding search engine concepts or those who have no interest in building websites or creating content are probably better off hiring a web marketing agency to do the work for them.

Sometimes doing your own web marketing is like micro managing. If your online business is pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars – or even millions – ever year, then you probably don’t have to do everything yourself. In this case, you can afford to invest in a good web marketing manager to do the work for you.

Why You Shouldn’t Choose a Web Marketing Agency

If you’re the type of person who runs small websites on the side, makes a little money off of each and intends to grow their presence online, but you don’t have a full-fledged online business just yet, then you probably need to be your own web marketing agency. Why?

Because a real web marketing agency will cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars every month. Chances are that you’re not making that sort of income online just yet. That’s your goal, but until you get there, you can’t spend that much to have someone else do your web marketing for you.

The only exception would be if you absolutely couldn’t grasp the concepts you needed to successfully market your business. And for that, there are plenty of courses online – not all of which are expensive – that can help you learn.

Quite honestly, it’s best to know something about search engine optimization and search engine marketing before handing the controls over to someone else regardless. Why? Because not all agencies are reputable, and not all employees are competent. Sometimes you have to check up on their work to see if they did it right. If you don’t know what to look for, you could be getting screwed over without even knowing it.

In the meantime, you can take steps both to learn how to do your own web marketing and how to find a good agency once you determine you make enough money to give the job to someone else. Until then, you can probably get by without a web marketing agency of your own.

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There are more and more search engine marketing tactics coming out every day. Tactics for using Facebook and Twitter are constantly getting altered as smaller social media platforms start taking center stage. Sites like Tumblr are becoming more prevalent for small businesses and large websites alike, and Pinterest is emerging as a visually appealing platform for many websites to use as a way to promote physical products online.

What Is Search Engine Marketing: Can Anyone Do It?

If you’re asking, “What is search engine marketing?” then you’re probably wondering if just anyone can do SEM or if professionals alone can sign up for SEM accounts. Anyone can become a search engine marketing manager. Since most avenues of SEM are free to sign up and often free to use as well, you don’t need to belong to any big-budget corporation to start your own promotions.

If you’re a newbie, however, you might want to compile a list of social media sites to sign up for and research best practices for promoting your materials on those sites. For instance, certain tactics work on Facebook and Twitter that aren’t as highly looked upon on a Tumblr account.

What Is Search Engine Marketing and How Can I Start SEM?

If you want to know what search engine marketing is, then chances are you don’t know which sites to start advertising with. Let’s go over a few easy ways to start search engine marketing that give you a good idea how to manage social media accounts.

• Facebook: Facebook best practices for marketing require making a fan page. You can have unlimited fan pages, so don’t be afraid to experiment with different pages for different products. You can either create a fan page for your business in general and promote all your products from there, or you can also create additional pages for individual products.
• Twitter: You probably don’t want to create a Twitter account for every product. People follow other people or companies on Twitter, not products, so it’s best to create a company or website profile account and do all your promotions through that account.
• Tumblr: You can really let your creative juices flow through you on Tumblr. Combine videos, short text snippets and photos of just about anything related to your website or business. The more visuals you can upload to your Tumblr profile, the better. Tumblr is probably the easiest and most fun social media outlet to promote yourself on, so don’t overlook this microblogging platform as a viable search engine marketing tactic.

If you still want more answers to the question, what is search engine marketing, you should also take a look at sites like Foursquare and Pinterest, which are also geared toward small business/small website promotion.

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When you look for SEO tutorials, check the age of the document you’re looking at. If it’s a blog post, you can usually find the date easily. Why is the date so important? Partially because so many SEO algorithms change all the time, and certain information gets outdated quickly. Some advice is timeless, but others do tend to change from time to time. This guide will give you a few of those “timeless” tips you can  use for building your website the SEO-friendly way.

SEO Tutorials: A Word About Creating Links

How you build your links in blog posts, blog pages or website pages can make all the difference between getting found in the search engines and having Google search elsewhere. It’s always, always, always about the keywords, especially where your links are concerned. What does this mean for link creation?

SEO tutorials usually tell you to include the keywords somehow in your link. But in these SEO tutorials, you’ll see how best to create your links for optimum SEO friendliness.

Categories and subfolders are fine, but where blogs are concerned, the less folders you have to go through to reach the keyword phrase, the better. If you can build your link so that you have your regular domain, a backslash and then the keyword phrase, you’ll make the search engines happy. There’s always some controversy in SEO tutorials over whether to put dashes or underscores between each word in the keyword phrase. Ideally, you should use dashes, not underscores.

SEO Tutorials: Choosing Tags

A lot of people go hog wild on picking related tags after reading SEO tutorials telling them to place related keywords in their posts. But you should really try to target specific tags, not every related phrase under the sun. Try to stick between three and five keywords to stay on target. These keywords should be closely related to your article. If you used LSI tactics, they should even be keywords you used inside your article to build SEO friendliness along with your main keyword phrase.

For example, let’s say your main keyword phrase is “make cats stop peeing.” Perhaps your article contains phrases like “cat urination” and “cat peeing behavior.” Good SEO tutorials will tell you that such tags are ideal for using as related phrases and as LSI additions in your article.

SEO tutorials often make SEO friendliness out to be nearly impossible to achieve without paying hundreds of dollars for advice and software. But in reality, you can find seo tutorials for free that do give you good advice as long as you know how to implement it.

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Do you know how to create a really good title for your post? Do you know how many times you used a keyword phrase in your article? Have you taken the time to insert META keywords before publishing? If you answered “no” to any of these questions, then you definitely need to consider installing this WordPress plugin. It will save you a lot of time and hassle by having most of your SEO needs all in one place.

The WordPress SEO by Yoast Interface

The WordPress SEO by Yoast user platform is located just below the text field in a New Post or New Page area on your blog. The guts of the program are at your fingertips on the plugin sidebar, of course, but you’ll be spending most of your time on the New Post page.

The plugin gives you a quick snippet preview of what your blog entry will look like in the search engine results, starting with the heading and working down to the description. If you would click on your link because you like what you see in the preview, chances are that other people will too. But if you think it looks like a mess or seems nonsensical, you can change it. That way, you don’t get any random text from your blog post popping up in the search result description and confusing your readers.

Next, you can get a full count of how many times you used your keyword phrase in the article. You tell the plugin what your focus keyword phrase is, and then it does the rest of the work from there. If you have the Easy SEO plugin (which is not free) you can compare the your keyword phrase count with the keyword density and get an idea of how many times to insert a keyword per word count.

Other Aspects of the WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin

You do have to manually write your own META description when using the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. You can use this opportunity to draw the reader in even more by using promotional text rather than informational text. Your META description needn’t contain any of the actual content from your post. It needs to begin with the keyword phrase you’re targeting and then describe what the reader will learn when they click on your link.

That’s it! The WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin is incredibly easy to use and does not require much SEO knowledge, so anyone can install it on their blog and glean quite a bit of value from it.

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You should not take your keyword research lightly, especially if you’re researching keywords for a PPC campaign. The keywords you choose cost money, and if you approach the task cavalierly, you could end up wasting quite a bit.

Google AdWords Free Keyword Search Tool

The Google AdWords Keyword Extractor is by far one of the most accurate and widely used keyword tools in all of internet marketing. Since this keyword tool is put out by the search engine themselves, it’s not hard to figure out why they might have some of the best options.

One of the reasons the Google AdWords tool is so widely accepted is that it gives you several options for delineating keyword qualities. For instance, you can do broad searches, exact matches and phrase matches. In addition, you can sort by a number of data types and weed out any negative keywords that you already know won’t perform well for your website.

WordTracker Free Keyword Search Tool

When internet marketers think of a free keyword search tool options, WordTracker often pops up on the list. WordTracker is technically a paid subscription, but they offer a free “membership” that gives you 20 keyword searches per day when logged into their website. They give you the number of daily searches a keyword or keyword phrase represents, rather than the monthly or local searches that Google supplies.

WordTracker is sometimes considered a little more granular and accurate in terms of actual use. Oftentimes, if you’re looking for content purposes only and don’t need PPC results, you can use WordTracker in addition to or instead of Google AdWords. You can also compare the two and see how closely the results align.

A lot of other software sites offer a portion of their keyword tools for free. Trellian, another popular free keyword search tool, allows you to input a seed keyword into their search form and draws up a list of related searches with that keyword in the search phrase. The result it displays represents yearly searches, rather than monthly searches. When compared with Google AdWords, it doesn’t always quite compute, but there are always different algorithms used for each software’s metric, so no two search tools will give you the same reading.

You want to make sure that whatever tool you use takes several search engines into account. For example, Trellian uses Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and more. Certain free keyword search tool software types also give you the option of finding common misspellings or misuses of a keyword so you can target these (or rule them out) as well.

Be sure to double check keyword results in the search engines themselves by checking for competition and actual search numbers before taking a free keyword search tool reading at face value.

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When it comes to trying to make money online now, there are a few things you should consider. First, do you only want to make instant cash, or do you want to start building your own empire of websites that won’t make cash right away but will end up making you more money down the road? While there are many reasons to want instant cash, there is something to be said for slow and steady cash flow, too.

Make Money Online Now with Other Companies

There are several companies online who are happy to take you on as an independent contractor to do many odd jobs for them. Some pay you anywhere from a paltry sum to $70 to participate in online surveys, phone surveys or focus groups. While this income is not steady, it is almost always instant cash. But in order to redeem your check from these make money online now companies, you have to reach a certain threshold, such as $30 or $50, before they’ll pay you.

Other make money online now companies give you the option of writing content for them. They are basically third party or “middle man” entities who take a small portion of earnings when another company (usually a website) hires them to produce content. You can become a content producer and make money from writing articles, blog posts or social media quips.

Make Money Online Now Through Freelance Sites

There are hundreds of websites online, such as elance.com, freelancer.com, odesk.com and others, who allow you to post your resume and portfolio or look for jobs posted by others who need freelance services. These online services are vary from graphic design to content production and voiceover services to website coding. You can perform nearly any online or offline-to-online service for a client on these sites and be paid fair rates. However, you sometimes face steep competition when trying to win a job from a posted position.

There are several things you should look out for with make money websites. Do they ask for a lot of personal information? Do they ask for your credit card? Do they demand that you order a “kit” or “package” that will teach you how to do what they specialize in? Oftentimes these are ploys to get you to pay the company hundreds of dollars. When you order the materials, they sometimes never arrive. Other times, they never teach you what you  need to know about making money online and as a result, you lose a lot of money on something the company never intended to teach you in the first place. That’s why you should do all you can to research make money online now sites before signing up for “earnings.”

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A Pinterest invitation is necessary for consumers who want to use Pinterest. And while it doesn’t appear that businesses need to sign up for a Pinterest invitation (which is free, by the way; you only need to input your email address to place your name on the list), it’s probably a good idea that you get one anyway.

Pinterest Invitation: What Does Pinterest Do for Your Website?

If you’re not familiar with Pinterest and have no idea what a Pinterest invitation is, we should probably take a quick peek right now. Pinterest prides itself in being the most popular online bulletin board ever. Basically, instead of simply “liking” a Facebook page and adding it to your Facebook roster of “liked” pages, a consumer can “Pin” a product from your website to their online bulletin board. This gets added to the list of other online products or pictures that they like.

If you have products that are visually attractive (such as clothing, pretty ebook covers, software, hardware, etc.), go to the “Goodies” section of Pinterest.com and scroll down to where website owners can add a “Pin It” button to their websites. Naturally, getting a Pinterest invitation first doesn’t hurt. All of you have to do is place links to the image and write up a scant description. Just add the code to your website (preferably near other social media buttons) and anyone who is a Pinterest member can “Pin It” to their bulletin board. Not only are they likely to come back and buy your product, but anyone who views or follows their bulletins will also see it.

Pinterest Invitation: Do You Have to Pay for Anything?

Unlike Google AdWords or Facebook ads, you don’t have to pay Pinterest to add a button or promote your products with a Pinterest invitation. As mentioned previously, even the Pinterest invitation itself is 100% free.

Getting your site in the flow with Pinterest doesn’t even take complex coding. Pinterest codes everything for you, and all you have to do is highlight and copy the code, then paste it in the desired location on your website or blog. How easy is that?

All in all, a Pinterest bulletin addition looks a lot more like a Tumblr post than a Facebook status or Twitter tweet. But unlike Tumblr, you don’t have to continually update your blog on a third party platform. You can add pins straight from your website without doing too much work.

Not only do Facebook users have access to Pinterest and a pinterest invitation, but Pinterest also has an app for the iPhone. That means you’ll get more exposure both on the computer and on mobile devices. This social media network is so easy to use, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be using it.

The time to get a pinterest invitation and start using Pinterest is now, before it grows so big that you get behind the curve.

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For instance, let’s say you started a PPC campaign with a $500 per week budget. This sum is by no means simply “nominal;” that $500 per week really adds up! In order to tell if you’re making any money off of your campaign, you need to be able to track whether a click converts into a sale or if the visitor merely clicked off of your page.

You Waste Money If You Don’t Know How to Track Leads

You’re literally leaving money on the table if you don’t invest in some way of figuring out how to track leads. Actually in some ways, you’re dumping it right down the drain. Using that weekly budget of $500, let’s say you spend all of that on a Google AdWords campaign. You take a look at the Google tracking and see which keywords got the most clicks. Then you look at how many sales you made for the week and probably assume those sales came from the most highly trafficked keywords.

But did they really? You have no way of really knowing. That’s why you should put certain indicators in place to tell for sure if your marketing tactics are doing any good.

How to Track Leads with Marketing Ideas

Some marketers figure out how to track sales by using different landing pages for each keyword they target. Once on that landing page, they can choose a specific link that the visitor can click through to purchase their product. That link could contain a piece of information that is logged in software to determine if the user ended up purchasing through that link.

Sometimes you can also use optimization software that takes the keyword from the search engine query and passes it through in a cookie to the purchase page. This is another way to know how to track leads with your PPC campaigns.

But what if you sell offline products? Let’s say that you want to sell gym equipment, but your website really only advertises for your local store. How do you track non-internet sales?

That part is actually easy, because you don’t have to use as much tracking information. Simply give the customer an incentive, such as a $25 gift card to print off, or a promotional code to bring into the store to receive a percentage off of their purchase. Using a different promotional code for each ad will help you determine which keywords and/or landing pages really converted into sales. That’s how easy it is to figure out how to track leads!

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It’s best to start good SEO habits early. As the term implies, whatever you start with becomes a “habit.” That means if you take a half-baked approach to content and mix a little un-rewritten PLR with new content, you’ll continue that habit, and it can be detrimental to your site’s SEO friendliness. This guide will help you develop the best SEO practices early in the game so you’re never behind the curve where SEO is concerned.

Best SEO Practices for Blogs

When you first develop a WordPress blog, you need to take it off of search engine indexing. This can be done through the “Settings,” “Privacy” section of the blog. Why is this so important? When you first begin dinking around with your blog, Google will pick up on the changes and index them in the search results.

 If you haven’t been careful with your SEO and content, you’ll end up indexing some unwanted information. That information will stay relevant on the search engines until they crawl your site again, which could be some time. So in order to keep Google from indexing your rough drafts, utilize best SEO practices where privacy is involved. Just remember to turn it back on when your blog is ready to go!

However, when you turn off the privacy, it can be difficult to remember to turn it back on. This is a crucial step when your blog is ready to be seen! Make a reminder for yourself on your phone or calendar to turn the privacy settings off when your blog has plenty of content and is utilizing the best SEO practices.

Best SEO Practices for Blogs and Websites

One of the most overlooked SEO practices for newbie site owners is headers with key phrases. Google likes to know that a web page is really about what the keywords say it is, and including headers with the key phrase you’re trying to target is a way to please the search engines.

Here’s an example. Let’s say your key phrase is “pet scorpions.” In order to really make the search engines happy, you would need to include that key phrase in the title or H1 tag, in the H2 tag and the H3 tag. You should position the H2 header after the first two paragraphs of an article and the H3 tag somewhere after that, preferably more than one paragraph from the end of the article.

Thus, for best SEO practices, you might label your article “Best Types of Pet Scorpions for Scorpion Lovers.” Then, the H2 tag might say, “How to Choose Pet Scorpions” while the H3 tag might read, “How to Care for Pet Scorpions.” These are all easy best seo practices that you can implement into your content immediately.

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But there’s a certain recipe to making a successful Tumblr website. This guide will show you how to use Tumblr in such a way that you attract visitors and keep them coming back for more. And this website, unlike Facebook and Twitter, lets you customize your page to more easily brand your blog, so to speak. So not only does this social media site give you yet another platform on which to push your website, you get to do it your way – more or less.

How to Use Tumblr: Templates

Tumblr is still somewhat of a closed editing environment. In other words, they don’t want you making a LOT of changes to the design, so they let you pick from templates instead. These templates offer enough variation that you can choose one that suits your fancy and not think that it looks like everyone else’s Tumblr page.

Knowing how to use Tumblr entails knowing which template you should choose for your needs. If you run a professional website, you probably don’t want to pick an artsy design. But if you’re more of a free thinker and you want to promote your beadwork and dream catchers, you might pick a more whimsical template. In a way, it’s similar to selecting a WordPress template, except that there are far fewer to have to sift through.

How to Use Tumblr: The Right Formula

As we mentioned in the beginning of this guide, there’s a certain recipe that really makes “Tumblrs” tick when it comes to posting content. If you look at the Tumblr pages of big businesses who use this social media platform, you’ll notice a widespread trend.

This trend involves uploading high-definition photographs to a post and adding about three to four sentences of text. That’s right – that’s all it takes to really know how to use Tumblr the right way. You don’t even have to write a lot, so if you’re not a writer, this should thrill you to bits.

Another way to really please your following is to post or repost a video. Anything visual like a video or a photograph is sure to attract a lot more attention on Tumblr than a bunch of blocky text that takes forever to read.

You can also choose Tumblr templates that feature a Twitter feed on the left hand side. So if your website is on Twitter, you can display your feed on Tumblr and kill two birds with one stone – no pun intended.

So what should you post about if you just have a website that doesn’t come out with a new product every week? Give visitors a peek into what goes on behind the scenes. Post a picture of your cat pestering you at your desk while you’re writing a new article for your blog, or shoot a videocast of yourself giving a tour of your home office. Anything that personalizes your website will help you endear yourself to customers and is a great start to how to use Tumblr.

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 http://imsclink.com/imsctv

Hey guys, have some great news for you! I’m just wrapping up some of my killer projects I have set to release in the next few months and now it’s time to get back to the studios for another Great Episode of IMSCTV! I get a lot of emails for people, and I would say the majority of them are all about creating an income online. Read that again, an income. So we’re not just talking about a dollar here and there, I’m referring to a full time income.

So in this weeks episode of IMSCTV, I’m going to show you how you can very easily create a six-figure income online. However, I’m not only going to show you how to achieve a six-figure income, I’m going to give you the formula to achieve that goal!

What do YOU need to do to reach a SIX-FIGURE Income?

Now the big question, what engine are we going to use to reach this goal? Well there is one sure fire way I have learned to reach six and even seven figure very quickly. That solution is product creation. As intimidating as it sounds, product creation is probably easier, and more enjoyable then anything else you have tried online.

The only thing you need to do is find an answer to people’s problems. When you learn to do this you will have the key solved to this big IM mystery. Think about it, look at all the big IM launches, plugins, software, courses, what do they all have in common?

Ever one of those items identify a problem and then provide a solution to that problem. Very simple guys, and you are willing to pay for that solution to. Well there are people that will pay you for a solution.

So how do we identify the problems that are out there? It is actually easier then you think. However, before I give away to much I want you to check out the video above. Please be sure to leave comments on that page, and I’ll see you next time on IMSCTV!

 http://imsclink.com/imsctv

But if you want to expand your customer or website visitor base – and ratchet up your sales in the process – then Foursquare for business is something you should consider, rather than overlook. This guide will give you a quick overview of how Foursquare can drum up customer interest in your website or business.

Foursquare for Business: Making a Page

Making Foursquare for business work for your website is probably easier than you realize. In many ways, it’s just like making a Facebook page. The page itself isn’t too fancy and simply includes the basics – a logo, company description, a website address and so forth. You can choose connections that your website “likes” just like on Facebook. However, you can also create your own company hashtag, just like those used on Facebook and Twitter, and encourage your fans to use them in their comments.

The Foursquare for business section of the website gives you two options for a company page. The first option is the Venue option. This is specifically for brick and mortar companies who want local customers to follow their updates and “check in” whenever they visit the store. The second option is devoted to Brands, which is what you, the website owner, will be more interested in. You can register your website with Foursquare and get started with branding your company online right away.

Foursquare for Business: Badges and Other Goodies

Using Foursquare for business gives you the ability to enable all sorts of functionality to your page. First of all – and probably most importantly – you can create badges. Badges are what give users the ever-coveted “mayor” title and other honors in the Foursquare application.

Now, the partner badge functionality does entail a fee to use on your own application. Foursquare actually has to approve campaign ideas and such for badges, so you don’t get to implement those right away.

Foursquare for business lets you also create a personalized app using their API system. These apps help users do more with Foursquare via their mobile devices, plus it gives you a more personalized touch for your page.

Foursquare does take a little more “delving into,” so to speak, than Facebook or Twitter does. With so many ways to optimize your page, it can get a little confusing at first. But their website is set up in such a way that the step by step directions help you navigate through each function, better enabling you to help your site stand out more quickly.

The whole objective of creating a Foursquare for business account is to encourage visitors to reference you in as many of their “check ins” as possible and offering perks in return.

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Tumblr, like Facebook and Twitter, is used in a number of different ways. For instance, an artist looking to spread the word about their paintings might make a page on Tumblr and upload copies of their work. Each “post” is like a blog post, except in a much shorter variation. What is the purpose of these posts? We’ll explore that in this guide.

Tumblr for Business: Posting Updates

Tumblr for business and website use is kind of like a combination between Facebook and Blogger or WordPress. On the one hand, each post is a blog post, because you can upload photos, videos or text. But on the other hand, each post is more like a status update, due to the nature of how short the post is intended to be.

As a website owner, this is great news for you. This means that to use Tumblr for business, you don’t have to hire someone to write copious amounts of content for your profile. If you want or need someone to manage your social media presence for you, then adding Tumblr to their list of duties isn’t a big deal.

Keeping your Tumblr profile updated is crucial for maintaining a following. It’s just like Facebooking and Tweeting. In order to keep your audience interested, you need to post updates on a regular basis.

Tumblr for Business: What to Post About

It happens the same way for everyone. You get all excited about creating a Tumblr for business profile, then you are at a loss for what to post about. But if you run a website or a business, then it’s easy to post updates.

For example, if you have a new product coming up, post about it! Give the details in 200 words or less to keep it short and easy to digest. Include pictures. Post a video. Or do all three! It’s up to you, but you need to at least do one or two. This is the only way you’re going to keep your audience interested.

You can also interact with your audience. Tumblr for business and personal profiles both allow you to repost someone else’s post. So if you see other people talking about your website or your products, (hopefully in a good light), then reward them by reposting what they said and adding it to your feed. Not only does this provide free content for you, it gives them a little ego boost, too.

Whenever possible, use multimedia, like images and video, on your Tumblr. Tumblr profiles, even the Tumblr for business ones, spark curiosity with more visual interest.

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When some businesses think of best social media practices and social networking, they often think they’re wasting their time. After all, they might just be marketing to 12-year-olds who only click “like” and stop at that, for all they know. But in reality, anyone who’s anybody is clicking “like” these days. So are their friends. And anymore, people are using social media to determine where they shop, where they eat, and what they buy online more than ever before. Thus, you’re hurting yourself if you’re not participating in as many social media venues as possible.

Best Social Media Practices: Tumblr

If you get around in the online world, then you’ve probably heard of Tumblr.com. What you might not know is that one of the best social media practices these days is to create a Tumblr blog for your business, whether it’s online or offline.

How does this help your cause for best social media practices? Tumblr is a very easily digestible blogging platform. Technically speaking, it’s a microblog. That means you can post pictures, videos or text updates that are short and sweet – no need to spend half the afternoon developing a post. In a way, it’s almost like updating your Facebook status, but only in a more sophisticated format.

As a business, you want to post to Tumblr often to network with customers. Instead of posting what you ate for lunch (unless your business is a restaurant) you should upload pictures and videos of new products, post updates about what’s new with your website and even blog a promotional code that’s only good for customers who visited your Tumblr page.

Best Social Media Practices: Foursquare

Chances are, you’ve heard about Foursquare from the same people who play Farmville. After awhile, Facebook, Foursquare and Farmville all end up sounding the same, so no one will blame you if you’ve begun to drown them out in your head. But don’t drown out Foursquare in practice, however. For some businesses, Foursquare is responsible for drumming up quite a bit of interest.

Here’s the “in a nutshell” version of how Foursquare could work for your business and how it’s one of the best social media practices. Customers visit your business, either offline or online, and have a good time. If you have a presence on Foursquare (and they have an account there, too), they can “check in” to tell their friends that they’ve been to your store or visited your website. After so many check-ins, you can award badges, as this is the overall objective of the website. Once customers earn badges, you should also honor them with discounts or free products. That’s right – just for mentioning you on Foursquare. It sounds like small fries, but that’s the way a lot of businesses get new customers. Perhaps their friends have never heard of your website, but they’ll hurry by when they find out five purchases earns them a free product or discount.

Some of the best social media practices may seem a little unorthodox, but they’re well worth it when you consider the benefits of gaining new customers online.

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Online keyword search tool options are often pretty straightforward to use. However, once the actual keyword selection process is drawn up, you have to use specific criteria for selecting which ones will work for your needs.

WordTracker Keyword Search Tool

The WordTracker keyword search tool is one of the most effective for finding daily search results that a keyword or keyword phrase enjoys. If you want a more specific calculation of how much search each keyword gets, this is the tool to use.

Naturally, there are free versions and paid versions of the WordTracker keyword search tool. With the free version, you need to sign up with WordTracker by giving them your email address and making a password. Once signed in, you can use the tool for up to 20 searches per day. If you want unlimited searches, then yes, you need to pay for it. However, I would highly recommend trying out the free version as much as possible before subscribing to a monthly subscription to WordTracker.

Google AdWords Keyword Search Tool

If you’ve ever made a Google AdWords campaign, then chances are you’ve used the Google AdWords keyword search tool. This tool gives you much more data than WordTracker and is still free, but the difference is that they don’t show you daily results.

Google works based on monthly search results and search trends. You can also sort by global search versus local search, which makes a difference if you’re selling something that is based in a particular country.

You can use two options when it comes to this keyword search tool. The first is placing your own made-up keywords and keyword phrases into the search box. Google will draw up a list of those words as well as exact, broad or phrase matches. You can sort through the results to see which ones fit your needs.

If you don’t know what keywords you want, however, or if you’ve run out of creativity to think of more, then find a website similar to the one you’re searching for keywords for. Copy and paste its home page or page link into the “website” area of the search tool. Google will draw up a list of results that come from that page or are closely related to topics on that page. You can even do this with your own preexisting pages on a website to see what Google thinks this page is about. In the end, it can be very telling.

Using these free keyword search tool websites, you’ll be able to save a lot of money – and time – on a possibly needless piece of software, as you can get similar results from these free tools.

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You often hear about how you should “fulfill your passion” when working online. That’s easy to say for someone whose business revolves around telling others what they should do, but it’s not so easy when you’re the one trying to figure out how to market a passion that might not be all too marketable after all.

Good Ways to Make Money with Websites

You don’t have to be a master website developer to make money with websites. There are several ways you can work with this one. Of course, there is the traditional route of developing your own website. If you don’t have coding experience enough to use Dreamweaver, you can use a software like XSite Pro, which offers many ready-to-use templates and simply has you input text, images and links.

But if you’ve already tried that route and found it to be unsuccessful or distasteful to you, then you might try flipping websites. This method counts as one of many good ways to make money because, instead of starting from scratch with your own niche, you can take someone else’s material, improve the graphics, layout and design, and resell it for more money than for what you purchased it in the first place. It’s basically the same theory as “flipping homes” – hence the name – but only on a much smaller and more manageable scale.

Good Ways to Make Money with Social Media

Have you ever tried paid search campaigns? If you launched campaigns on Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing, you probably found that the bids were pretty high.

Well, on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, you can buy ads for much cheaper than you can at Google or Yahoo. While there is still an element of high competition, you’ll tap into a market that isn’t nearly as saturated as the previously mentioned search engines, which gives you a better opportunity to make money.

If you really don’t want to put too much effort into making money online, but just need something to do on your work break or the weekends, you can take paid surveys. And yes, taking paid surveys is a legitimate method of making a small stipend each month. I know, because that’s something I did back in the day. No, it doesn’t pay much, but you don’t really have to put forth much work, and it eventually does pay off. This is also an ideal job if you’re a college student looking to make a little extra money for rent, gas or pizza.

Depending upon your skill set and interests, you can choose from any of the above options and find that they provide good ways to make money in some way.

If you want to make real money online, you have to be willing to work for it, and work hard. These days, you won’t make measurable income by selling the same thing everyone else is selling unless you can give yourself an edge that no one else has taken yet. However, you don’t want to reinvent the wheel, either. So how do you straddle this happy medium? You try to sell your own product. Does it always work? No. But oftentimes, you’ll make more money than you were banking on, so it makes it worth your while to at least try.

Make Real Money Online: The Drawbacks

Let’s get the negatives of selling your own product out of the way first. While there should be nothing stopping you from creating your own product and marketing it, you should be aware that unless your product puts a different spin on something else that is already for sale, you might just be an addition to the heavy white noise.

For example, let’s say you wanted to market an ebook about how to get rid of acne. This is a hot market, but there are already several products on sites like Clickbank that are vying for attention. And guess what: they have several years of success on you already, so breaking into that market will be that much harder.

Additionally, you will probably have to launch a new website for your product. Your new website won’t have near the page rank that your competitors’ websites have, so it will take a while for Google to put yours on the front page of organic search results. You can get around this by launching a PPC campaign, but the ad cost for this niche is astronomical, so unless you find highly searched words that don’t have a lot of competition, you’ll either be paying a bundle or suffering from no traffic.

Make Real Money Online: The Benefits

Now let’s talk about the reasons you should try to make real money online with your product. First of all, you won’t have to share commissions with anyone. Once you sell the product, you get to keep all the revenue. You can determine if you want to offer a money back guarantee or not (although this often entices buyers to purchase the product).

You also get to enjoy having full control over the marketing process. You’ll know firsthand if it is selling or not, and you can collect data on existing sales that will help you determine if and when you need to improve the quality of the product.

Selling your own product is a great way to put your creativity to work. Selling your own product gives you a sense of accomplishment that no other method of trying to make real money online will ever match.

Each blogger has their own ways of making money, but most of them overlap to an extent. They might each choose different companies to work with, but the overall methods are often very similar. In this guide, we’ll explore popular blog monetization methods that you can replicate yourself.

How Blogs Make Money with Affiliate Programs

If you’re an internet marketer, you might wonder how blogs make money with affiliate programs versus how websites do it. Turns out, they method is very similar. It’s all about how you present the material to your readers.

For instance, let’s say you just purchased a piece of video editing software for yourself. You’re so happy with the software that you decide to write a series of how-to posts on how to perform tasks inside the software. Instead of directly asking your readers to purchase the software just because you said it’s great to use, you should place your affiliate link in anchor text within your post to entice them to click on it naturally. If you cloaked your links properly (and reputably), they might not realize it’s an affiliate link unless you’ve mentioned it. You should put a disclaimer on your website if you plan to advertise affiliate programs so your readers aren’t under the impression you’re doing it all for free.

How Blogs Make Money with Ads

If you’ve ever wondered how blogs make money with ads, and if Google AdSense is the only option you have for an ad network, here’s an answer that will clear up your doubts.

Blogs make money with ads the same way websites do – by placing the ad code naturally within their posts. If they’re using a plugin, they can tell the plugin how many times they want the code to appear on the page (up to three times, if you’re using AdSense), where to place it in relation to the post and what size ads you want in which area. Of course, you will need your own AdSense account to insert any kind of code into your posts.

But Google AdSense isn’t the only way that blogs make money with ads. Other networks, such as Konterra and Chitika, offer ads too. You might also see InfoLinks pop up every now and then. These are all options you can choose from when selecting an ad network for your site. And yes, you may choose to use more than one.

If you want to make money with your own blog, you can use these ideas to foster other branches of the same method. For instance, you can sell ebooks instead of actual affiliate products. You can also choose to market your own product and receive all the money, not just the commissions. Thus, there are several answers to how blogs make money online.

Quick money making ideas online often have to do with submitting assignments of some kind to another website. Such websites advertise making a small stipend of cash (usually paid through PayPal) in return for submitting an article or digitally uploaded media that they or a client are interested in purchasing. We’ll explore some of those options here.

Quick Money Making Ideas for Writing

Oddly enough, you don’t have to be a writer or published author – or even a whiz at grammar – to make money writing online. There are multiple websites available that offer amateur writers upfront payment or performance earnings based on the quality and popularity of their articles.

Here’s how it works with these quick money making ideas. Let’s say you sign up at a company like Associated Content, which pays up front and performance earnings for your articles. You don’t need any prior approval, but you do need to abide by their guidelines for word count, keyword density and subject matter. An editor will take a look at any article you submit and determine if it is worthy for upfront payment. If it is, you will be paid for the article and then earn performance revenue for the views it receives once it is published.

Quick Money Making Ideas for Other Digital Media

The quick money making ideas mentioned above are highly popular and also somewhat competitive. If you would like to contend with less competition – and do something besides write articles – you might check out a place like Fiverr.com. This website lets you offer almost any service for five dollars. They’ll take a cut, naturally, but you get to keep most of what you make.

So what do you offer on Fiverr? Some gigs advertise professional-sounding voiceovers for five dollars per 30 seconds. Others offer a picture of themselves holding a drawing of a company logo for a company’s website or brochure. Still others offer Skype lessons for music or foreign language learning. If you have a short ebook to sell, you can offer copies of your ebook for a flat fee and send your buyers a link to the download. This basically means no extra work on  your part and gives you a highly trafficked avenue on which to promote your ebook, besides.

Finding easy money making ideas online is sometimes difficult, as some sites are total scams. Before signing up, check out the site’s reputation on forums and see what others have to say about it. But don’t let a few bad apples ruin the whole bunch; there are plenty of quick money making ideas to choose from.

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The answer is yes, you can make money blogging online. However, not just anyone can set up a blog and start raking in the cash. You need a blueprint, and most importantly, a way to distinguish yourself from the noise of all the other bloggers who have asked the same question and preceded you in creating a blog.

Can You Make Money Blogging About Your Hobbies?

Can you make money blogging about hobbies like pets, gardening, cooking or fishing? Quite honestly, unless your niche is so small that only a few people in the world even know it exists, you can make money blogging about nearly any subject. So yes, blogging about your hobbies – however uneventful they might seem – is often a great idea. Why?

Because if you like the subject you’re writing about, you’re more likely to stick to your blogging goals and not falter when you don’t see money coming in right away. Plus, you won’t have to spend time doing a lot of research about your niche because you have firsthand experience with it.

Do you want to know something that will greatly increase your chances of making a go of it while blogging? Add multimedia to your blog posts. Visitors love pictures, especially those that you took yourself. And no, you don’t need a fancy camera. All you really need is a camera on your phone to take a picture of yourself doing something with your hobby. Better yet, provide step by step how-to pictures accompanied by detailed instructions. How-to guides perform very well online.

Can You Make Money Blogging About Work?

You might find work very mundane. In a lot of cases, it is. But chances are, someone in the world would like to know more about how to do what you do. Are you a cashier at Wal-Mart? Blog about dealing with some of the bizarre clientele that you undoubtedly work with each week. Are you an accountant? Publish posts about how to figure out personal taxes, how to keep track of spending and how to live within one’s means.

You never really know what will stick until you try it. With blogging, you have very little to lose besides your time. If you believe it will take off before you even publish the first post, you might consider investing in a domain name and hosting so that you can host your own blog and have complete control over it. Otherwise, you can get your feet wet by signing up with a free blogging service like Blogger or WordPress. With Blogger, you can monetize your posts with Google AdSense ads. WordPress itself does not allow this, but if you use WordPress as your blogging platform on your own website, you can use AdSense plugins to install this function on your blog.

Hopefully this guide has answered your “can you make money blogging” question and has inspired you to start a blog of your own!

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Knowing how to work Twitter helps a lot when it comes time to launch a new website or blog, promote a new product or advertise affiliate products. But you must tread carefully when doing so to avoid losing followers and loyal fans.

How to Work Twitter: First Steps

You must realize that when you first create a Twitter profile, you look like a brand new marketer, not a seasoned one. You probably don’t have many followers, and if you don’t spread the word about your profile, you likely have to follow others first in order to get a follow back from them.

You always need to be watching for opportunities to communicate with others. On Twitter, this means direct messaging them to make them feel special and let them know you appreciate them as a follower. “@” reply to their tweets or randomly post to their feeds using the same handle. Give free shout-outs to your followers on Follow Friday. All these things help you build a friendly relationship with your followers, not just a cold, commercial one that is likely to get you unfollowed eventually.

How to Work Twitter: Make Them Want to Read Your Tweets

Even better than waiting for you to reply to them is tweeting in such a way that your followers specifically look for your updates in their timelines. Maybe you’re sharing a funny story, a joke or an inspirational quote of the day. Whatever you do, make sure not all your tweets are filled with ads for your affiliate products and e-books. Someone might report you as a spam profile, while others will just get sick of promotion after promotion filling up their feed and will hit the “unfollow” button.

When you do update with promotional tweets, don’t just paste in a big ol’ ugly link. Shorten it with a service like TinyURL or use HootSuite to manage your tweets and shorten your links by default. Additionally, try to accompany the tweet with a keyword hash tag and some descriptive text. And this time, the text can use promotional language to entice followers to click on your link.

Knowing how to work Twitter is all about strategizing your tweets and timing them the right way. You can make a schedule for yourself, but don’t make your tweets so scheduled that it’s obvious you only carved out one specific time each day to be on Twitter. Make it look natural so that people will look at your profile as similar to their own, not as a merchant.

Above all, I cannot stress communication enough. The interaction between a profile and its followers is really what gets you the best quality Twitter friends. Without it, knowing how to work Twitter is pretty much a useless skill.

How to work Twitter specifically for internet marketing is a mystery to some but an obvious choice for free PR to others. The truth is, using social networking strategies like tweeting opens up a lot of free, unlimited avenues for advertising and creating connections in your industry and in your own niche.

Knowing how to work Twitter helps a lot when it comes time to launch a new website or blog, promote a new product or advertise affiliate products. But you must tread carefully when doing so to avoid losing followers and loyal fans.

How to Work Twitter: First Steps

You must realize that when you first create a Twitter profile, you look like a brand new marketer, not a seasoned one. You probably don’t have many followers, and if you don’t spread the word about your profile, you likely have to follow others first in order to get a follow back from them.

You always need to be watching for opportunities to communicate with others. On Twitter, this means direct messaging them to make them feel special and let them know you appreciate them as a follower. “@” reply to their tweets or randomly post to their feeds using the same handle. Give free shout-outs to your followers on Follow Friday. All these things help you build a friendly relationship with your followers, not just a cold, commercial one that is likely to get you unfollowed eventually.

How to Work Twitter: Make Them Want to Read Your Tweets

Even better than waiting for you to reply to them is tweeting in such a way that your followers specifically look for your updates in their timelines. Maybe you’re sharing a funny story, a joke or an inspirational quote of the day. Whatever you do, make sure not all your tweets are filled with ads for your affiliate products and e-books. Someone might report you as a spam profile, while others will just get sick of promotion after promotion filling up their feed and will hit the “unfollow” button.

When you do update with promotional tweets, don’t just paste in a big ol’ ugly link. Shorten it with a service like TinyURL or use HootSuite to manage your tweets and shorten your links by default. Additionally, try to accompany the tweet with a keyword hash tag and some descriptive text. And this time, the text can use promotional language to entice followers to click on your link.

Knowing how to work Twitter is all about strategizing your tweets and timing them the right way. You can make a schedule for yourself, but don’t make your tweets so scheduled that it’s obvious you only carved out one specific time each day to be on Twitter. Make it look natural so that people will look at your profile as similar to their own, not as a merchant.

Above all, I cannot stress communication enough. The interaction between a profile and its followers is really what gets you the best quality Twitter friends. Without it, knowing how to work twitter is pretty much a useless skill.

But it’s not necessarily an easy or quick task to get blog followers. Think about how many blogs in your niche – let alone how many blogs there are in general – and you can take a pretty good guess at how much competition you have to contend with. But it’s not all about “standing out” from the rest or making an exceptional blog. You need connections.

Get Involved to Get Blog Followers

You probably won’t get blog followers unless you actively seek them out. Simply publishing blog posts daily and doing your homework on keywords and SEO isn’t enough. You’ll get a few that way, of course, but they might not turn into return readers, and you will definitely stunt your readership growth if you stop at organic search.

Remember above where I said you needed connections? You’re probably wondering how to get these, especially if you’re new. Using social networks, you can more quickly follow others and encourage them to follow you back until you gain enough of a gathering that you no longer need to follow others in order to get them to read your updates.

Reciprocate to Get Blog Followers

You can use Facebook fan pages as well as a Facebook profile to get blog followers if you want to go the Facebook route. Twitter is almost just as good of an avenue – if not better – for the blogosphere, as many fellow bloggers might be in the mood to click on a link more so than on Facebook.

When you identify other bloggers, try to connect with them through direct messages or “@” replies. Retweet their posts with links to their blogs to gain favor with them, but don’t do it so often you look like a suck-up. Your behavior should be genuine, as a lot of people will be on the lookout for fakes.

Be sure to post updates daily on your Twitter feed and Facebook profile. Include links to your blog some of the time, but not every time, otherwise you’ll get called out for being overly promotional. Switch out your own links with the links of others sometimes. Tell them you’ve done so, and you’ll probably get a follow back (if they’re not too big of a profile to where they won’t follow others back) or at the very least, they’ll retweet your post so you get more exposure.

If you want to get blog followers, you have to write quality posts that are somewhat relevant to your following. If you’ve done your homework, chances are you’ve already attracted others who are interested in the niche you write about. But if you want to make sales or ad commissions from your site, you need to prominently place them around your posts, or you probably won’t make any sales.These tips will all help you get blog followers more quickly.

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It’s important to think ahead about what you will do when anomalies come up in your blog schedule. Think about your first plan of action in different cases. What happens if an accident happens and you can’t write for a while? What will you do if you go on vacation or a business trip and don’t want to write a blog post while you’re gone? These are all things you can plan ahead for.

The Emergency Blog Schedule

Let’s talk about your blog schedule as it relates to those little emergencies that creep up. You know the type – you forgot your daughter’s dance recital was on Saturday, or you got sick and had to go to the doctor’s office. If your blogs do not depend on day by day news, you can keep one or two spare blog posts in your repertoire.

Then, if you find you don’t have the time or inclination to write a post, publish this piece on the day that you’re tight on your blog schedule. That way, you give yourself a little breathing space before you have to write another post tomorrow.

The Long-Term Adjustable Blog Schedule

Let’s say you’re going to Cancun for two weeks because you made bank with your new product launch. Your blog schedule says you’re supposed to write a new post twice per week, but perhaps you’re not going to have good Wi-Fi at the hotel, or you might not feel like ripping yourself away from the beach long enough to write a couple posts.

Fear not – adjust your blog schedule so that you write posts in advance. Instead of writing two posts per week in the days before your trip, write four or five posts. Then, schedule them for future publishing on your blog.

How do you do that? It’s simple. Go to your blog dashboard and add a new post. In the “Publish” area, hit the “Edit” button and select the date and time you would like the post to hit the internet. You can set a publishing date for just about any day you want, which gives you the option to pre-write every blog post that you would otherwise have to write during your vacation.

Your blog schedule can suffer a few disruptions now and then, but what you want to avoid is getting into the habit of letting your blog schedule slip entirely. It’s hard to start a good habit for blog publishing, but it’s easy to break the habit and start a bad one. Don’t let yourself go for too many posts without publishing one, or you could end up getting off on a very whacky blog schedule that’s hard to bounce back from.

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But before we go on, you should know that you should never expect anyone to blog for you without receiving anything in return. If you don’t plan to pay them a small stipend for the post, you should at least promise to link back to their website from the blog post they wrote as well as give them credit for authorship.

Find a Blogger to Write Relevant Posts

When you find a blogger to guest write a post, be sure to tell them the parameters they must be aware of when writing the post. The whole objective in allowing guest bloggers to post on your website is to get a fresh perspective on your niche while still remaining relevant to your blog’s theme and to your readership base. For instance, if your blog is written around restoring old cars, you don’t need someone guest blogging about childcare. Not only will you lose a few readers (and confuse the rest), the deviation from your niche might hurt your search engine ranking just a little.

Find a Blogger Willing to Write in Return for Links

When you do find a guest blogger, ask them what their criteria is for guest blogging. Not everyone wants to write a blog post for free, especially if they don’t have the much to gain by getting a link from your website to theirs.

Sometimes you might offer to exchange posts. For instance, you’ll guest blog for them in return for them guest blogging for you. This way you both receive the same reciprocal benefits. Be sure to link to each other’s blogs/websites, and maybe even include each other’s links in your permanent blogroll. There are many ways you can compensate someone for guest posting once you find a blogger, so don’t let that hold you back from searching one out.

When you find a blogger, you also take a little bit of stress out of your life. If you’re away on vacation or can’t write content, find a blogger or two to take your place. The more bloggers you find, the more opportunities you have for a fresh perspective, so you can look at it that way, too.

Find a blogger in reputable places, too. You don’t want to exchange posts with one who has a reputation for copying and pasting other online content or not doing his homework on keyword research. They need to be held to the same guidelines that you hold yourself to, or else it’s pointless to have someone else blog for you.

Social networks and internet marketing forums are great places to find a blogger. Start with your own friends and colleagues, then move onto recommendations or post statuses and forum threads asking for volunteers. You’d be surprised at how many bloggers are willing to help you with your blog in return for the same favor.

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The problem with some of those themes is that they take a long time to load, they distract from the purpose of the website and they look like you didn’t make any effort to change the style. Because, in fact, you didn’t. That’s why this list of best blog themes will help you get your new blog started off right this year, as they are designed specifically with purposeful blogging in mind.

Best Blog Themes with Plain Styling

As an internet marketer, the best blog themes to choose from are those that have a simple color scheme and few preexisting graphics. If you choose a theme with a lot of “theme-ing,” so to speak, you run into the possibility of having to change your business logo or other site designs that would not match well with the color scheme.

For example, the Blogging Pro theme for WordPress looks much like an article directory or business news website, due to its orange and blue coloring, white background, below-the-logo ad placement and column options. The navigation bar is at the very top of the page, which keeps it out of the way of your content.

If you’re more of a personal blogging expert, one of the best blog themes is Insense. Its blue, white and beige color scheme look both personable and professional, and is ideal for posting daily newsletters and updates.

Best Blog Themes with More Styling

Okay, so let’s say you’d like something slightly more stylish than the above options. A theme like Yoghourt for WordPress gives you the option of a left side navigation bar with tidbits about the author in the lower half of the column. It leaves the rest of the page open for actual content. The only drawback? It doesn’t allow for optimally-placed ads or affiliate links like the above themes seem to .

Another one of the best blog themes to choose from is the Overstand theme. Featuring orange and black logo lettering, its black and white category headings with orange subheading text and gray accents give it a modernized retro feel that looks pretty amazing when it’s all put together. With three columns of space to work with, you’ve got a lot of options open to you with this theme.

Picking WordPress blog themes is fun on the one hand, but very time-consuming on the other. Choosing from a pre-approved list helps narrow down the process quite a bit. You can also spend time browsing other blogs and seeing which styles they use in order to better pattern yours after one of the best blog themes already in use.

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Features of blogs generally come in the form of widgets or plugins. Sometimes you can even add extra code to the template HTML to insert a pop-up advertising your new product or asking first-time visitors to subscribe to your list. These often work based on a site visitor’s cookies, so unless they have their cookies turned on, your code may not always work as it should.

Advertising Features of Blogs

There are multiple ways to advertise something on your blog. The upper right hand corner, usually in the farthest right column on your page, is a great place to put the subscription field for an email list or a big graphic for your latest e-book release. If you’ve partnered with any other websites or affiliate programs, advertising your links there can greatly increase traffic to that site.

Secondly, you can use small drop-down banners from the top of the page. Have you ever looked at the top of the Google home page when you’re logged in? The banner you see there is about the size you would want on your own blog. Just be sure that the color you pick is such that it is visible against your page without disguising the text that’s on it. Your visitors need to be able to read the text and click the links!

Social Media Features of Blogs

Connecting with your readers via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube is almost just as important as selling them on your affiliate products right from your website. If you can get them to “like” your Facebook page, follow you on Twitter and subscribe to your YouTube channel, then you have that many more avenues with which to advertise to them in the future. Procure their email address through your subscription field, and you’ve got it made!

Plugin features of blogs help you decide how visible you’d like your social media plugins to be. Sometimes, you might use the Facebook widget that displays other fans of your page as well as the icon for your fan page. Other times, you might want a square area with icons of all the social media networks you want your readers to connect with. Naturally, the links on all of these icons go straight to your fan page, your Twitter profile or your YouTube channel.

Sometimes, depending upon which plugin features of blogs you picked, you can supply “like” and “follow” buttons right there on your page, meaning your reader never has to leave your website and get distracted with something else. These options are probably the most optimal features of blogs as far as social media networking is concerned.

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SEO basics help you get a friendly nod from Google and just about any other major search engine. You need the help of the search engines to drive organic traffic, and that’s just not going to happen unless you’ve dotted all your “I’s” and crossed all your “T’s.”

SEO Basics: Tiny Details on Your Page

SEO basics are more than just adding keywords to your articles. Did you know that you can earn extra points with Google by adding keyword-specific anchor text to your link? Let’s take a look at an example from this guide. Our keyword is “SEO basics,” in case you didn’t figure that out already. If we needed to link this page to another page for some reason, we could do so by highlighting an instance of the words “SEO basics” and using that as our anchor text for the link.

However, you don’t want a visitor to click off of your page too quickly, so it’s best to place that link towards the middle or bottom of your article to avoid the search engine noticing how quickly your visitor left the page.

Adding subheaders to your articles or blog posts is ideal practice for SEO basics as well. For instance, some articles use H1 headings for the title, H2 headings for the first subsection and H3 headings for the second subsection. SEO basics tell us we need to place our keyword phrase into each of these headings for best results.

SEO Basics: Behind the Scenes

Google sees far more than just your page content and images. They crawl the entire page, including the “fill in the blank” areas of the code before your header code for the page begins. This means that you should give your site a title, a description, META tags and so forth. In fact, it helps if you choose a main keyword phrase for the theme of your site and find a domain name which includes that phrase.

In a WordPress blog, there’s a whole section for adding info about your site. You need to fill these in before launching your first blog post, or Google may crawl your site and notice that this information is lacking. There’s a spot in the WordPress template where you can completely turn off any search engine crawling until you’ve got your blog or WordPress-based site up and running. Then, it’s time to turn it back on and let your skills from learning SEO basics do their thing.

Learning the SEO basics you need to know is a crucial task to fulfill prior to uploading or publishing any website or blog.

Why is it important to learn SEO? As soon as you upload the files to your blog or website, you give Google the opportunity to “crawl” it with their robots. If your site is mostly unfinished, you’ll give Google the wrong impression about what’s to come. They’ll see a lack of content and depth and will likely avoid putting it in the top search results – for a while, anyway.

Learn SEO Dimensions for Websites

You should learn SEO strategies, at least some basic ones, before even creating your content. First, let’s take a look at your site dimensions. A lot of developers like to focus on what’s “above the fold” – in other words, what a viewer sees first when they visit your site before scrolling down for additional content.

This area is generally a 1024 by 768 pixels, ideally speaking, if you have a website that pretty much just provides content and minimal scripts. Not everyone has a huge computer monitor to work with, so making a huge website won’t allow their monitors to display it optimally. Obviously, the size may need to differ if you find that this is not wide enough for everything you need, but stay within close parameters so you don’t have a lot of visitors scrolling side to side as well as up and down.

Learn SEO Practices for Content

Learn SEO practices for written content prior to actually publishing articles on your website. You can get the entire design up before ever writing your first piece, so this can be the last step if you need it to be.

When you learn SEO strategies, you’ll find that keywords are a big part of not only your content, but also any page titles, the domain name, the META tags and the alternate text of images. You can also distinguish between overall site keywords (like those you’ll find in the domain name and META tags) and the keywords you use on an everyday basis for things like images and written content.

It’s not only important to learn SEO for an individual website, you need to learn SEO practices so you build good habits. Because once you get into the habit of operating a certain way, it can be hard to break it and start over fresh.

You can even see what other sites do to establish good SEO credibility in order to learn SEO. By right clicking on their web page and selecting “View HTML,” you can take a peek at a good portion of the code involved in creating the page. Pay special attention to the META tags, keywords, alternate text and footer text to see where they’re placing keywords. In other words, looking at the sites of those who have gone before you is a great way to learn SEO.

You will enjoy less independence when writing ads and choosing targeted keywords with Google PPC marketing than on other networks. Google PPC tries to be very user-oriented, and as a result sets stricter guidelines about which niches are even allowed on their network in order to cut down on scams and spammy products.

Pleasing Google PPC Monitors

Oftentimes an individual Google employee will check out a campaign once it is uploaded and during its active cycle. In other cases, Google software goes through and flags campaigns that may not adhere to Google’s guidelines. Trying to anticipate what is and is not allowed in a Google PPC campaign when it comes to the niche you want to market can be a strenuous ordeal, and some marketers even get their campaigns or entire accounts shut down in the process.

If this is your first time building a Google PPC campaign, you might consider contacting a Google AdWords representative. They will take your criteria, find keywords, build your campaign and activate it for you – all for free – and the only thing you have to do is put up the money for the actual campaign spending. Then you can ask them for advice while monitoring its results, and they will give you answers coming “straight from the horse’s mouth,” as it were.

Google PPC Precautions

You’ll trip a flag in a Google PPC campaign if you try to market certain niches on their networks. Google rejects organic search content on some niches like acai berry, getting rid of acne in three days or less and other highly sought after affiliate programs from commission networks like Clickbank. So you want to be careful when choosing your niche on Google if you don’t want to get your account canned. Again, if in doubt, contact an AdWords representative for a clear answer. They seem to be more responsive than other branches of Google in some respects, as you can actually call them on the phone, not just send an email through a contact form.

Also, be sure to bid low to start with. Google PPC campaigns always take a few cents more per day than your overall budget, so keep an eye out for pausing and restarting your campaigns. If you feel as though you’re spending too much and receiving too little, you may need to put the reins on the campaign.

If you don’t feel comfortable starting with Google PPC campaigns right out the gate, you can always try a network like Facebook, Yahoo or MSN first. Get your feet wet, then come back to a google ppc campaign when you have more experience – and perhaps a bigger budget.

Some marketers use more than one search engine to display their ads. This means submitting a campaign at more than one paid search platform. For instance, Google is probably the most popular search engine based campaign platform, but Facebook campaigns are in high demand for placing relevant ads next to a person’s profile even when they’re not searching for anything in particular.

Pay Per Click Campaign Management with Sponsored Search

Managing a pay per click campaign on a sponsored search platform is often more expensive than listing ads on a contextual ad network. However, you also give yourself a better chance for click throughs, since your sponsored ads will appear at the top or right sides of the search engine results. By writing tantalizing yet descriptive copy, you can target the right customers while they search for related items on Google, Yahoo or MSN.

The actual pay per click campaign management itself comes into play when you decide on a budget, select your keywords, place bids and activate your campaign. During its active period, you need to keep a watchful eye on your click throughs versus your conversions to make sure you’re not losing money. Some buyers get what internet marketers call “click happy,” meaning they’ll click on any search result they see, even if it isn’t relevant to the search or exactly what they’re looking for.

However, just because you’re getting a lot of clicks but few conversions doesn’t mean someone is spam clicking your ads. It means your ad copy may not adequately explain what the reader will find when they click through, or perhaps your page was not attractive enough to make them want to buy what you’re selling.

Pay Per Click Campaign Management with Contextual Ads

Pay per click campaign management with contextual ads opens up a few more options as far as your budget goes. Contextual ads appear on actual websites near article copy or other written and video content. Since these are not as highly targeted, you don’t pay as much per click.

Google, Yahoo and MSN offer contextual ad placement on approved websites. However, if you find you’re getting clicks from a website that is irrelevant to your niche and are getting no conversions, you can block these websites to avoid losing money on them.

Facebook’s contextual ad placement is another option you can use if you only want to advertise on Facebook. With this network, your ads will be placed near statuses of people who have posted or searched for something that lines up with your niche. For example, if they just visited Avenged Sevenfold’s official band page, your ad about buying guitar equipment or Avenged Sevenfold merchandise may show up on that page or on their home page.

Pay per click campaign management helps you get your ads in front of a wide audience that is targeted to your niche, and therefore gives you a better chance of conversions than organic search alone.

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For as popular as stock photos are with internet marketers, it’s surprising that there aren’t more images available for notions like ebooks, articles and other digital forms of internet marketing. See for yourself; just try typing these keywords into a stock photo site sometime, and see if you’re not slightly disappointed with how many unrelated – or slightly off – pictures the search engine comes up with.

Putting Web Design Images on Your Website

Finding web design images for your website takes abiding by a few specifications for search engine friendliness. And how you upload and customize that photo after you purchase it will make a difference in how SEO friendly it turns out in the end.

One of the biggest killers when it comes to making a good experience for your site visitors is images that take too long to load. No one – and I mean no one – will have the patience to wait for a huge photo to load, especially if they’re viewing your site on a mobile device. When you choose a photo, you either need to buy one that is small enough in the first place or resize it in a piece of software.

Loading too many photos onto your website is a killer on bandwidth, too. The more images you intend to load up per page, the smaller each image needs to be, otherwise it will just take too long to load.

Selecting Web Design Images from a Stock Photo Site

Web design images that are site-friendly should fit several criteria. First, it shouldn’t be offensive if your site is available to anyone under 18. Thus, try to choose tasteful photos or images that aren’t too shockingly violent or disgusting.

Secondly, keep an eye on how much the web design images cost. Pictures are expensive, and can cost around $50 for a premium shot. Most are in the $2 range however, and can be used for just about any website purpose you need, unless it says “for editorial use only” in the terms and conditions.

Third, make sure the image isn’t too big. One image can be several thousand pixels on each side, so be prepared to resize and save a copy if necessary.

Pick the right file type as well. JPEG, GIF and PNG files are all internet-friendly, but depending upon the specifications you give them, they could end up pretty large. You can get away with lesser quality photos in a smaller size since the distortion won’t show up like it will on large photos. But try to buy quality photos regardless, unless you’re taking pictures yourself. No matter how you choose your web design images, always plan on making small changes of some sort in order to make them web friendly.

If you don’t like doing everything yourself, then you’re a great candidate for reaping outsourcing benefits, because you already have a mindset that is ideal for outsourcing. But there’s a fine line between outsourcing just enough to get the job done and so much that you stretch your budget a hair too far.

How to Know When You Need Outsourcing Benefits

So how should you know when you need to start making use of outsourcing benefits? Here are a few indicators.

First, are you spending too much time trying to learn a skill that you will never use again or have no desire to learn? You might consider hiring an independent contractor. Examples include making graphics for your website, creating a logo or coding preexisting graphics for use on a website.

Secondly, are you devoting a majority of time to content creation when you need to be writing sales copy or managing a paid search campaign? If so, then perhaps you need to outsource to a writer. They often provide package bundles that make buying articles in bulk more of a deal, which makes these outsourcing benefits more attractive to a small budget.

Outsourcing Benefits for Use on Your Website

Outsourcing benefits can be seen on a much larger scale, too. For instance, perhaps you’re putting up a website with a full shopping cart integrated with your warehouse of goods. There’s no way you can manage that all on your own. In many cases, you can hire a third party service to build your website for you, integrate the shopping cart and build your product pages. Then you can devote your talents to marketing the site itself, not spend your time reinventing the wheel when so many other companies have it figured out and can get it done in a short amount of time.

Remember, outsourcing benefits include saving time as well as money. You can always make money, but you can’t make time, so keep that in mind when deciding whether you want to learn a new skill or just hire it done.

You could technically have every aspect of your website outsourced if you wanted to. You would need someone to create the site design and graphics, code the side to search engine friendly specifications, then have a writer draw up content for it on a regular basis. You can have someone else choose your niche and affiliate products, too, but unless you intend to have the entire project outsourced on a permanent basis, you may want to include yourself in that particular decision.

Outsourcing benefits do come with a cost, but in many cases, that cost is worth the end result. Make up a list of things you can start hiring out today, and see how many outsourcing benefits you can enjoy!

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If you’re looking for an article submission list from an expert, chances are that you’ll get several different opinions. For one, different affiliate experts have distinctive needs that influence which directories they recommend. This often has to with what each directory offers.

Article Submission List Best Inclusions

For the most part, Ezine Articles still tops the article submission list of most expert affiliates. Why? Because they are highly trafficked, have a (mostly) good score with Google and now have some of the strictest guidelines of any article directory. The only thing they still allow that doesn’t fall into a strict category is submitting your article to several sites, not just their own.

Websites like Articles Base come next in line. They have a very accessible author dashboard, they allow the use of several pen names and the articles you submit there sometimes enjoy a better click-through rate than at Ezine Articles. Why? Because they allow self-serving links to be distributed throughout the entire article, not just in the resource box. Many internet browsing individuals don’t bother to read to the very end of an article, so you risk getting a crippled click-through rate at Ezine Articles. You don’t take this risk at Articles Base, because they allow up to three self-serving links in the body of the article and two in the resource box. That’s why they make it to the top of many article submission list pages.

Article Submission List: Things to Watch for

Beware of article directories on article submission list pages that do not have a “do follow” code in their articles. Half the point of submitting articles to a directory is to get a good quality back link from the “do follow” code on a website more popular than yours. If you submit to a website without the “do follow” code, the only thing you have to gain is getting traffic from your article to your website or sales page.

There are plenty of mediocre article directories that are still worthy of inclusion on an article submission list simply because their website might be big enough to give you a good back link. Don’t count on getting a lot of traffic through these websites, as they often don’t rank that high in the search engines regardless of how well you strategized your keywords. But you can figure on building credibility on your own site from having that nice back link. Plus, if you post a link from that website to your social media feed, it doesn’t matter which site it’s on if you’re now relying on traffic from your profile instead of from the search engine.

You can compile a list of your own after determining which sites are your favorite to work with. You might even make money by posting your article submission list on your website to help others.

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That being said, ebook affiliate marketing can be very prosperous for you, and you don’t really have to put that much more effort into it. You just need to dig into the minds of your buyers a little more before trying to market an ebook to them through article marketing or paid search.

Getting the Right Mindset of Buying Through an Ebook Affiliate

Another aspect of trust comes in when you’re an ebook affiliate. Let’s say you recently sold some products from Amazon.com or Buy.com. The buyers were more than willing to give these companies their credit cards because they recognize the website. But guess what – Amazon doesn’t generally sell ebooks like the ones you’re promoting as an ebook affiliate. As a result, the buyer looks at the website the ebook is listed on and has second thoughts about giving them their credit card number – even if the site is reputable. They don’t know that ahead of time, so you risk losing the sale.

Getting Snookered as an Ebook Affiliate

On the flip side of the coin, you, the ebook affiliate, have to realize that you can get screwed out of your commission by an unscrupulous buyer. For instance, most ebooks come with a money back guarantee in the event that the buyer isn’t satisfied. Some buyers would take advantage of that and return the ebook regardless of whether it was helpful to them or not.

And you know what happens when an affiliate program gets a refund – they refund your commission as well. This is a less likely scenario in the case of physical products, since the buyer must prove that it was faulty, or at least must take the time to repackage and re-ship it back to the company.

There are a few ways you can help yourself when it comes to being an ebook affiliate. First, see if you can promote ebooks that offer a money back guarantee after a period of coaching. For instance, if the guarantee lasts for 60 days, and the personal coaching lasts for 60 days, the buyer is less likely to refund the item. At the very least, he might forget that the 60 days are running out and may be less “on the ball’ in trying to get a refund.

Both you, the ebook affiliate, and the buyer take on more risk when you’re an ebook affiliate, but rest assured, you can get over those risks by carefully selecting the products you promote. An ebook affiliate should also check the refund rate of any ebook to make sure he is not setting himself up for a lot of returned commissions.

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Getting more website traffic through a reputable means isn’t hard; you just have to be diligent in following through the process of making sure your website pages are submitted to all the proper site feeds and social networks. But it takes more than back linking to get more website traffic. Here’s how.

Using Better Content to Get More Website Traffic

Sometimes the reason you’re not getting as much traffic as you want isn’t due to too much competition in the search engines. Sometimes it’s due to operator error. That means you need to fix your content before the search engines will reward you by giving you the opportunity for more traffic.

Improving your content is a great way to do that. This improvement could entail a lot of different options. First, you could start adding images to each of your web pages. Adding a unique image for each piece of content adds interest for the reader and gives you the opportunity to please the search engines. Be sure to include an image title and alternate text using your targeted keyword phrase for best results.

Other times, you need to improve the actual quality of your content. Is your article less than 400 words? Beef it up a little bit. Did you fulfill in the article what you promised in the title? If not, users will hit the back buttons on their browsers, and the search engine that drove them there will make note of that.

Updating Your Website for More Website Traffic

If you haven’t added new content or made changes to the old content in a while, don’t expect Google to do you any favors. Search engines look for new, fresh content, not the old stuff that’s been sitting around a while.

Some website owners tend to think of their websites as wine or cheese: it gets more valuable as it ages. To some extent this is true, but only if you dust off your wine bottles on a regular basis to keep the cobwebs from accumulating. Make a schedule for yourself, and do one of two things to keep your website driving traffic. First, add new articles on a regular basis. Daily or weekly is best for a blog, while weekly or bi-weekly is ideal for a website. Of course, you can always add more content if you so desire.

This process gives you a chance to get more website traffic than ever before with social networks. Every time you add a new piece of content, you need to link to that content in your Facebook and Twitter feeds. Upload a video to YouTube every so often, and that can help boost your ratings when added to an article on your website. Either way, the more website traffic options you keep open, the better.

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The best article sites changed their policies while the not-so-reputable ones did not. Now granted, the latter of this group represents sites that aren’t as popular as directories like Articles Base and Go Articles, so they had less to lose when Google’s new algorithms hit the search engines. However, if you are a fan of using some of these sites in your automated article submission process, the home website that you link to from those articles could be affected.

Best Article Sites and a Little Background on Submissions

The best article sites like Ezine Articles rarely allowed automated submissions from article spinning software or submitters. Smaller, yet still popular, directories that allowed them in the past started disallowing them one by one.

The whole purpose in automated submissions from spinners and submission software or plugins was to save time on the part of the submitter. Instead of submitting articles one by one into the forms of 300 websites, you could plug in a few values into a piece of software and have that software do it for you.

But alas, many internet marketers abused this method, and as a result, a lot of spam articles hit the internet. Google proactively took a role in trying to clean up the environment by penalizing such articles and the websites that hosted them.

Qualities of the Best Article Sites

But you won’t always know which of the best article sites are still the best – and which you should avoid in the future – unless you take a look at their submission policies and allowable categories. Look through your submission directory and visit each website personally. Do they allow a lot of gambling or adult content on their websites? This is your first red flag. Do they allow keyword stuffing or have few limitations on keyword density? This is also a sign to watch for.

Additionally, short articles that are less than 350 words are pretty much denied inclusion in Google, especially from these directories. Check the word count limitations of the directory policies to see if you’re still competing against 300-word spam articles in their directory, or if they require articles to be at least 350 words long. For your reference, most “quality” articles are at least 450 words long, and don’t string out over about 900 words total.

You can always ask what reputable internet marketers think are the best article sites on forums built around the topic. If they are all for the practices mentioned here, and they can prove they have successfully sold affiliate products through these websites, then find out which of the best article sites they recommend.

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But where did bum marketing go wrong? Like almost any other venue of internet marketing, its supporters found a way to abuse it. The search engines didn’t like that and began to penalize spammy or scammy articles and websites fostering this practice.

Is Bum Marketing Dead?

Bum marketing, in its original form, has gone the way of the dinosaur. In most cases, you can no longer include direct links to affiliate products in your articles. Anyone trying to stuff too many keyword phrases into the article gets their articles rejected or their accounts suspended. Too many submissions about the same topic in a short period of time will have the same effect. And most importantly, if you found a way to skirt around these issues and fly “below the radar” with unapproved practices, the search engines will penalize you by not displaying your bum marketing articles in the search results.

Does Bum Marketing Work at All?

The theory of bum marketing is still very successful for many people. The difference between today’s bum marketing and what it looked like five years ago is that you must now be much more selective in choosing keywords and affiliate products. Some directories placed a ban on certain topics, or are more strict about their guidelines.

 Diet programs, acne helps and many “make money online” topics are looked down upon due to their spammy reputation. Existing articles were placed back into editorial review or deleted completely. You might also notice that more directories disallow publishing your articles in other places on the internet, including your own website.

However, if the product you promote is a reputable one, you just need to select respectable keywords in order to please the directories and search engines alike. Instead of picking a keyword like “get rid of acne by noon tomorrow,” you might select “tips for getting rid of acne.” Avoid making false claims and choosing keywords that lead a prospective buyer to the wrong conclusion.

Also, bear in mind that you should knock down the keyword density just a bit in your bum marketing articles. If Google thinks you’re trying to stuff too many keywords into your article, you’re setting yourself up for instant rejection in the search engines.

Overall, the ban on bum marketing was largely to make articles less commercial and more reader-friendly. This looks like an obvious advantage for the article directories over the article submitters, but in some respects, the readers were due for material that wasn’t so commercial. The moral of the story? If you want to continue bum marketing, or are interested in getting started with it, make sure you start off on the right foot.

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Article marketing is one of the most effective options for driving traffic that doesn’t require shelling out funds for a paid search campaign on a social networking site or a search engine. As long as you write the articles and submit them to article directories yourself, you can pretty much do it for free. If you don’t want to write them yourself, however, you can always outsource them to a professional writer, who may charge anywhere from $1 to $20 per article, depending on the quality and subject.

What Is Article Marketing Through Affiliate Sites?

What is article marketing as it relates to selling affiliate products through their websites? It often depends on the article directory’s rules. For example, some websites do not allow internet marketers to link from the article on the directory straight to the affiliate website using their affiliate link. They need a page in between, preferably on their own website, that contains content and then links to the affiliate website.

Some marketers can get around this by setting up link redirects to the affiliate site that technically go through their own websites first. If the editor clicks the link and sees that it goes to an affiliate site, they may ask you to remove it, but in many cases, the link can stay.

What Is Article Marketing Through Your Own Website?

What is article marketing and the difference between sending readers to your own website and an affiliate site? Here’s how it works. If the reader likes your article well enough, he may click the link to read more of your work. This work, of course, is available on your website.

The problem is, if he doesn’t like what he sees on your website or finds he doesn’t have time to read it all, he’ll leave. Thus, you probably won’t get him to click the link to the affiliate site and earn a sale. If you can use your affiliate link in the article and link him directly to the sales page, this is often optimal, as you have less chance of losing sales.

But since so many internet marketers abused the policies of the article directories years ago, the rules changed and most require that a link goes straight to your website. That means it’s up to you to build the most attractive page you can in order to get them to click on your affiliate link.

In some cases, you might have to pay a copywriter to develop a sales page. In others, you just might need to provide more valuable content that you did not have room to include in the original article.

So to answer your “what is article marketing” question, article marketing is a great way to advertise your affiliate products for free, provided you supply quality content to do so.

But ebook covers aren’t just about one 3D graphic with a front cover and a binding. Depending on the product you want to sell, you might need multiple covers in different sizes as well as different binding types. For instance, workbooks and study guides might sell better if they look like they’re spiral bound in the picture. If you include audio files with your download, then a zipped case of audio CDs might make a nice addition to your main product. The possibilities are endless with ebook covers and the software that creates them. All you have to do is let the software think outside the binding for you.

Free Websites for Making Ebook Covers

You’ve probably seen plenty of free websites online that provide services for making ebook covers. Some of them offer more than acceptable finished products. The problem is, you often have to create your own graphics and upload them into the template, which is more than half of the task in and of itself. If you’re not a graphics designer or do not have access to graphics creation software, then you’re not left with much to work with.

That being said, you can always use these websites as an option if you’re on a tight budget or are making a one-time product, in which case you won’t be needing software for ebook covers again.

Using Software for Ebook Covers

However, if you plan to create multitudes of digital products, you might consider getting software to help you make ebook covers of your own. You don’t have to be a graphics genius to produce slick covers in any shape, size or style you need.

These types of software give you a lot of control over how the finished graphic turns out. Some of them integrate gradients similar to those you’ll find in software like Fireworks and Adobe PhotoShop. These gradients are perfect for adding an eye catching color scheme to the front of your ebook covers.

Additionally, you can add and change title text in this software. So you’re not committed to making a text box in your own graphic and uploading it several times to a free website only to change your mind once you see how it turns out on the finished image.

Think about how website friendly your graphic is, too. Your potential buyers will get frustrated if your ebook images take too long to load when they visit your sales page. Software for ebook covers will help you determine which formats to save your file in. If they don’t give you this option, you can always resize the graphic as needed.

You need pictures of ebook covers to help sell your ebooks a majority of the time. It gives buyers a feeling of tangibility in a digital world that is often uncertain when it comes to guaranteed satisfaction after product purchase. Just pick software for ebook covers that best fits your needs.

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From the competition’s standpoint, if you’re a new seller without a well established reputation, you’re embarking on the trail way after many others have blazed a path. From the buyer’s viewpoint, you’re not the only kid on the block selling lemonade on a 101 degree afternoon. If they don’t like what they see in the first few seconds of reading your sales pitch, you’ve lost the sale.

How to Market an Ebook to Your Email List

Hopefully you’ve been smart about taking care of your email list. By this, I mean you’ve broadcast a steady stream of emails to your readers to keep your list warm. You’ve mixed information-only emails with promotional emails in the right amounts. If so, then your list is probably ready to hear about your new ebook.

One of the best ways to market your ebook to a list is by building up the anticipation one email at a time. Involve them in the process. Share one or two chapters for free. Give them a taste of what you’re writing, and they’ll be tempted to purchase it. If they give you negative feedback, you can always take what you’re told, evaluate it and make changes as you see fit.

How to Market an Ebook Using Paid Search

You can’t always rely on organic search to drive copious traffic to your sales page. Although this works with certain keywords, you’re still looking at fending off competition, which is easier to do using paid search.

Figuring out how to market an ebook using paid search is all about researching keywords diligently. Instead of simply pulling out keywords from the book itself, think about where your audience is coming from. Who needs your ebook? Answer this question, then ask yourself, what search terms would they use to find what they’re looking for? It might not be a term found anywhere in your ebook, so keep an open mind.

Your sales page is even more important than the ebook itself. After all, it doesn’t matter if your new book is worthy of inclusion in the New York Times bestselling book list if your sales page fails to sell readers on the notion of buying your book.

Not everyone can be their own copywriter. Sometimes it takes a pro to really make your sales copy shine. Not only the wording itself, but any graphics, testimonials, videos and highlighted text you use. Use text colors that are soothing to the mind, such as blue and green, and keep red and black bolded text for the truly earth shattering statements.

Now that you know more about how to market an ebook using various methods, it’s time to get started with your promotion tactics!

You don’t need expert graphics talent or expensive software to make your ebook. True, it helps if your ebook has a full color cover with a computer-generated product look, but that’s not necessary for selling it online. A descriptive title with a relevant keyword is key to succeeding in making your ebook work for you.

How to Make an Ebook with Proper Formatting

Some authors tend to skip steps when writing ebooks. They get the content down, then they forget to go back through and format it properly. This makes for an awkward reading experience for the reader.

One of the worst mistakes in most ebooks online is the amount of typos that slip paste Autocorrect. Some writers don’t like to use it, but it makes your ebook look like a lesser quality production when you don’t go back through and fix your mistakes.

Not leaving enough space between lines and margins is another issue. Use this to your advantage! You can double space paragraphs and make more pages out of the same amount of words to give your ebook the illusion that it’s bigger while making it even easier to read for your audience. Thus, there’s more perceived value, even though you haven’t added or taken anything away from your ebook.

How to Make an Ebook Cover

Making flashy ebook covers doesn’t have to be costly or difficult. All you need are three rectangular graphics: one for the front, one for the side and one for the back. You can make these graphics in a software like Fireworks or PhotoShop Elements, or you can purchase stock photos, which may be less expensive and less hassle.

Then just Google “free ebook cover software” or “free ebook cover website” to find an ebook creator that you can use without paying for one. However, if you want to customize your ebook cover, you should look into a software that offers several different styles.

Knowing how to make an ebook cover isn’t difficult, but it can be time consuming. Don’t be tempted to cut corners, though. It’s easy to leave your product at “good enough” and not take it one notch further to where it’s a hit seller.

Skimping on an ebook when it’s a bonus or free giveaway is also a big no-no. Even though you won’t get paid for it upfront, you shouldn’t sacrifice quality. Why? Because your readers will remember how well or how poorly you wrote it, and whatever they taste will stay in their mouths the next time they think about buying from you. So do yourself a favor and learn how to make an ebook properly the first time around!

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In order to pull this off, you need to pick a template that doesn’t scream, “I’m a brand new blog with no new posts.” You probably recognize the type when you see it. The template generally has a coffeehouse-esque motif, a huge header, very few navigation buttons and default stock photo images. If left for too long without some TLC, you’ll also notice the “Hello World” default blog post that graces the front page of any new blog using WordPress. Naturally, one of your firsts tasks is to remove that blog post and replace it with one that is keyword-savvy and fits your blog.

Your First Step in How to Make a Blog Website

You need a little action plan before diving into making a blog website. You need to have a purpose in mind first. Too many newbies – and even seasoned professionals who should know better – start out their new blog with great ideas and big ambitions only to find that they got in a little over their heads and weren’t able to finish what they started.

Making Goals Before Learning How to Make a Blog Website

So before you move on, let’s set a goal for your new website. For instance, if your desire is to make a stream of income from this blog, then you need to decide whether you will post ads, sales letters or affiliate links on its pages. In some cases, you can do more than one of these options on the same site. Just don’t inundate your posts with commercialism, or your readers will feel like they’re being sold every time they visit.

But before you get too much money on your mind when learning how to make a blog website, remember that content is king, and without it, your blog will get nowhere. So you need to make a solid blueprint that dictates content creation goals for your new website. Who will write the content? Will you do it yourself or hire someone else? How often will you publish new posts? Search engines love blogs that get updated on a frequent, regular basis, so adding new posts each week – or even daily – is ideal.

Formatting Your New Blog Website

The whole objective in making a blog website is knowing how to give it a website feel while still maintaining a blog format. In other words, keeping your blog posts on the left and the column for recommended posts on the right is proper form, but you probably want to change out the headers and graphics that came with your template.

Be sure to brand your blog like you would a website. Come up with your own logo and place it in the header. Be sure to add plenty of navigation buttons to the navigation bar beneath the header. Allow users to navigate freely around the site whether you publish new content in posts or static pages. These tips will help you know how to make a blog website very quickly.

First, edited videos show your viewers that you care about their viewing experience. Nothing screams shoddy workmanship like a video that you uploaded straight from the card on your camera. Almost every video, no matter how perfectly it was filmed, needs editing of some kind.

How to Edit Your Videos by Trimming

Knowing how to edit your videos involves trimming off unnecessary portions of the file. For instance, let’s say you made a few mistakes in the script while you read it off, and you needed a retake. You should always watch the video in the video editing software so you can make marks for trimming it up. Otherwise, you’re sure to forget which parts need removal.

How do you know which parts to trim? Let’s say you filmed your video all at once and just “winged it” when it came to the script. This works for some people, but others tend to stray from the original topic. You need to cut out any parts that seem to ramble on forever or contain a lot of mistakes.

How to Edit Your Videos with Watermarks

Watermarks are a great way to brand your videos. Knowing proper video editing videos involves learning how to place a watermark on top of your video. In many video editing software types, you can do this in one of two ways.

First, you can put your own logo or image on top of the video. Lighten the opacity to give it more of that “washed out” watermark look than just an image overlay. However, a plain overlay works just fine, too.

Secondly, you can simply add a text overlay. This is ideal if you don’t have or don’t like the look of a graphic. Simply select the text editing tool in the software, draw a rectangular area near the bottom of your video with the mouse, and type your text into this box. Again, you can decrease the opacity to make the text look washed out.

Transitions make a great addition to your skill set of knowing how to edit videos. You probably noticed a lot of awkward cuts between scenes when you took out your mistakes or excess silent periods in your video. You can fix these by adding scene transitions that dissolve one frame into the next, add a rotating cube or slide effortlessly into the next topic.

Want another tip involving how to edit online videos? Use chapter breaks between topics, especially in long videos. Insert a graphic or a plain slide with a color, then use your text tool to label the chapter name and topic. All of a sudden, your video looks ten times more professional!

It might seem like learning online video editing would take a long time. In reality, you don’t need any fancy editing skills or $1000 software to learn how to edit your videos the right way.

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Sales videos that feature a person – preferably the website owner or product creator – often help conversions the most. Why? Because the fact that the owner is willing to put his or her face and name on the product gives the integrity of the product a big boost. This means that the creator is not ashamed of the product and is willing to put his or her reputation on the line in order to make sales.

Sales Videos Featuring You

There is a right way and a wrong way to make sales videos. Unfortunately, a lot of product creators and site owners get so wrapped up in their own product and forget to take a step back for a second to see things from a third party perspective. Here are a few of the mistakes you should leave out of your sales videos.

• Making assumptions: Present your video from a bare-bones perspective. Unless you’re selling videos on advanced coding and programming, in which case your audience should already have some experience or they have no business buying your product, you need to see things from their experience level. Don’t assume they know what you’re talking about with your product. Describe it from the ground up.
• Treating the product like it’s their child: There’s nothing more annoying than a sales video that merely touts the benefits of the product as if there’s none other like it. Viewers will call foul immediately and quit watching. Be sure to throw a few disclaimers in there, such as, “This product may not be for you if you’re not comfortable using a computer.” This builds trust with your viewers.

Sales Videos Featuring Others

Sales videos that feature a site mascot (such as a pretty lady or a super-fit guy) are all right as long as they are the site mascot for your entire product. No one wants to see an actor or actress presenting the video from the creator’s point of view unless they aren’t being touted as the creator themselves.

If you feel you need someone who is more appealing to your intended audience, feel free to hire out the task for your sales videos. But don’t mix your information. Keep this actor consistent with the rest of the information on your site. In other words, don’t promote him as the site owner in the video, then put a picture of yourself as the site owner in the “About Us” section of your website.

Testimonial Videos

If you don’t feel comfortable making regular sales videos, make sales videos featuring real users. If your product is brand new and no one has used it yet, offer several copies for free in exchange for the user being willing to create a positive testimonial video. This way, you can receive nearly-free content without lying to your customers with fake testimonial sales videos.

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But when it comes to the right sales language for your needs (and trust me, everyone’s needs are different depending on the product and the audience), it’s hard to define this line. That’s what this guide will help you find out, so you can leave out the guesswork next time you write your own sales copy.

Sales Language That Leads Your Customer the Right Way

A customer does not like to feel that they’re being led straight into a sales pitch on the fast track to your online store. They don’t want to feel as though they’re being sold on something they don’t even know if they are interested in buying yet. That sort of sales language is taboo.

Thus, you need to tread carefully when so-called leading your customer. For example, assuming you know what they are thinking when they read the sales language in your copy is often poor practice unless you avoid certain words.

Stating your opinion, then asking things like, “Aren’t you disappointed when…” or “Wouldn’t you like the magic bullet to freedom from…” are both ways of leading the customer. This type of language works for some things, but only once you have established a good reputation with them.

Your objective in the language you use should be to get them nodding their heads in agreement with you, but without your prompting.

Sales Language That Turns Them Off

Sales language in a lot of sales copy breaks on common rule of selling the customer: It makes them feel stupid. Your customer should never feel stupid when they read your copy. If you ever wonder whether a sentence you wrote will turn off your customer, pretend you’re the customer and are getting sold on a product you really don’t want to buy. How would you feel? If you don’t like how it makes you feel, get rid of that sales language.

Improper grammar and sentence structure is another sales language turnoff. Not only is it a sign of being unprofessional, it looks like you cut corners when writing your copy, either by doing it yourself to save money or hiring a non-native English speaker who was cheaper than the native English speaker.

Your customer is very perceptive. They’ll pick up on your sales language in just about every way, from the grammar and punctuation to the questions that lead them down a funnel to the call to action button at the bottom of your web page.

If you want to really make your choice in sales language easy, remember the golden rule of selling: Treat your customers as you would want to be treated – or better. If your sales language is offensive, overbearing or downright obnoxious, don’t be surprised when prospective customers hit the back button.

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