Marketing online has become fiercely competitive. Marketers are attempting to unravel and decipher online marketing to succeed. Some argue that there should not be a distinction between traditional (off-line) marketing and online marketing. Others feel that concepts applied to mail order work well on the web, while still others argue that online marketing is a breed of its own and what works in one arena may not work in another. While some standard practices like “above” the fold, hold true in both print and online copy, it is rare that you see the printed type face on the web the same as in printed advertisements. Regardless there are traditional forms of advertising that are viable and make sense to use on the web but many marketers do not.

These undervalued marketing opportunities are not the end-all be-all but are great supplemental channels, that compliment strong online marketing campaigns.

Buyers Guides

Many print magazines offer free listings in buyers guides. Buyers guides typically have a long shelf life and are viewed as a product resource, meaning it is one of the first places consumers look when wanting to purchase an item. Often magazines will include product reviews or sponsored placement in a buyers guide. Typically the standard listing is free, but optionally vendors can increase their exposure by adding listings in additional categories for a nominal fee. Regardless the free listings are a great value and worth pursuing.

Product Reviews

The impartial overview from a credible source can spark product interest. A third party independent review of your product or service is seen as a vote of confidence. Invite publishers or even bloggers to review your product or service.

When requesting a review, it is proper net etiquette to always provide the reviewer an evaluation product free of charge. After the review, be sure to thank the reviewer and if appropriate, link to the completed review.

Forums/Volunteering in Communities

Offering your time and expertise will establish expertise and knowledge in a specific industry. Participants who participate in forums have a genuine interest and are a great target audience. Posting helpful information rather than blatant product advertisements will enhance an image.

Article Syndication

Writing quality informative and educational articles will also establish expertise. Articles also educate users about related product or service. Generally educated users require less technical help and are an easier sale because they understand how the people or service will help them.

RSS Feeds

Provide content in an RSS feed. While RSS is becoming very popular there are still a number of industries and sectors where very little content is available via RSS feeds. Placing quality content in an RSS feed and being “early to market” will help your company shine.

When small businesses compete with big businesses there are a number of areas in which they can compete effectively. As more businesses turn to the web as an advertising model, it is important that marketers and businesses define themselves by giving themselves every opportunity to be found. Utilizing undervalued marketing opportunities will separate online successes from failures.

If you already have a website or want to get one then spending time learning what your website needs to have in order to increase online sales should be your primary step you take. In this article we are going to cover some major TOP 10 points on what your website should have to consistently drive online sales.

1. Get the attention through clear marketing messages – Your website should have a clear message about your products or business. Show your visitors the benefits they get if they choose your product or business. Make sure that you define your marketing messages clearly for all your critical audiences.

2. Make your visitors feel comfortable – Make sure that your visitors will feel comfortable on your website. Use nice and creative graphics with your content. Use your main business address on your contact page and not P.O. Boxes since it won’t make your business look very dependable. You should also have your phone number located on all of your pages on a visible spot. Your answering message should have the name of your business recorded on it. You are a professional right? Remember to always have your e-mail, phone number, or contact form easily accessible from all pages of your website so your visitors don’t have to struggle to get in touch with you. Another good idea is to provide FAQ page to give your visitors the extra confidence to buy without having to contact you.

3. Create a newsletter – Provide your visitors with a newsletter that they can easily subscribe to. This is your marketing tool that doesn’t cost you anything. It is something catchy that will grab their attention and make them want to sign up.

4. Include your specials – Make sure that you give your visitors good reasons to buy from you. When you tell your potential customer who’s just looking around that you will give them the best deal in town, and to call you back before they buy. I can guarantee that if you handled the communication good they will call you back before they make a buying decision. What you say to them will always be in the back of their mind. Now don’t think that you need to beat the price that they bring back to you. You can always include something extra special to the mix.

5. Keeping in touch with existing customers – Remember that your existing customer is more likely to buy from you again, or refer you to someone, than someone you find who in only interested in your product or business at the time. Remind your customers by phone, e-mail, or postcards about your website or business and let them know about the updates or specials that you have.

6. Create an online marketing campaign – Set some time aside every once in a while and keep looking for ways to promote your website. Establish new linking partners that will advertise your website on theirs. Write interesting and resourceful articles that can help other website owners to provide for their visitors. Establish your monthly budget and invest it in search engine marketing or good business related websites that will bring you quality visitors.

7. Improve you website graphics – Try to stay away from clip art images or something out of style because it won’t have much effect. Make your graphics unique and come up with nice and catchy advertising tag lines. If you need help, hire an agency that will help you come up with the appropriate marketing messages and design eye catching advertising pieces that will seize your visitors’ attention.

8. Perform a regular competitor and customer research – Continue doing research on your competitors and customers. Try to keep your website updated and competitive. After all, the website is your best educated and most knowledgeable salesman that works 24/7.

9. Customer is always right – Your customer is always right, even if they are not. It is important to acknowledge the comments or concerns your customers may have. This will allow you to improve your website in order to make future customers completely satisfied. After you have changes made, jump right back into selling again.

10. Choose a reliable web hosting – Don’t settle for less or judge the hosting by price. You need your website to be available to the world all day everyday. Please note that there is no such thing as “unlimited bandwidth” in web hosting. Any good network engineer or technician can explain why that is.

These 10 tips will help you understand how to increase your online sales. To finalize this article I just want to add two more very important things. Please do not put your picture on the home page. Your navigation of the website should be easy to follow and fool-proof. Don’t complicate things by providing too many options for the customers that will just get them lost. Now go sell.

Search engine rankings are an important factor to consider when you have a web site that needs more traffic. If your web site doesn’t have a good position in the rankings then it will be hard to find.

Since most searchers click on the first few results, you need to make sure that your web site is ranked highly enough so that people can easily find it on the first page of search engine results. Although no search engine optimization company can guarantee a high rankings for your site permanently, often times hiring a web marketing company will pay off many times over. For those of you doing it yourself or those of you that want to ensure your marketing company is doing a good job, here are some tips for raising the search engine rankings of your web site.

Content

Content is an important factor in high search engine rankings. Make sure that you have plenty of content throughout your site with your target keywords in the articles. It’s also worth doing a search for web sites similar to yours and taking a look at their articles for ideas. Keywords are an important factor and they should be used throughout the content of your website.

Web Site URL

Your web site’s URL can help you rank higher with the search engines if it contains your keywords. However, don’t think that naming your site after your keywords will always help your rankings – you need to do more than just that. But still, it is one of the factors in improving a search engine ranking.

Search Terms

Search terms should be written out in text, instead of graphics. If you use pictures, be sure to give them alt tags. If you want a good rank in search engines then these things that may seem small should be considered, as search engines can read the text but not the graphics.

Page Title

The title of your page is very important, and if you choose the title properly then it can surely make a big difference in search engine ranking. Terms such ‘free article on safe children’s toys’, or ‘contact the children’s toy expert today’ are good to use as titles on pages containing such content. The titles themselves are very specific to the page and also may not have much competition being as specific as they are. The title area is the most important place to include your keyword phrases, so make sure that you utilize it.

Master these four tips and you’ll be on your way to getting free traffic. Look for other tips to keep your site moving up.

Article marketing is simply the process of writing articles, publishing your articles on article directories and syndicating your articles.

To be successful in article marketing, you need to:

1. Write high quality and keyword optimized articles.

2. Submit a series of such articles to article directories on a regular basis.

An article that has good content and that contain the keywords that readers are searching for has many page views. Imagine if each article generates a page view of 500 readers, if you have ten of such articles, you will get 5000 page views. With article syndication, you get more back links for higher ranking on search engines and can also brand yourself as an expert in your area of online business.

But what constitute good content?

Here are some useful tips:

1. Your content answers a need or solves a problem that your target readers have. Specifically, your article contains keywords that readers search for. For instance, if you are targeting readers with hair loss, then “hair loss” is a keyword phrase that you can use in your article. However, a better keyword phrase is likely “hair loss remedy” as your article content can be on remedy solutions for hair loss, thus addressing the needs of your reader.

2. Your article contains useful resources. Using the same example for hair loss, you can write about where your reader can find the remedy solutions.

3. Your content contains practical tips that your readers can easily apply. A step-by-step guide on preparing a remedy right out from one’s kitchen is interesting and unusual.

4. If you are writing a discussion topic, you present alternative views and a healthy discussion on each view.

5. Your content is personalized. You write from your own experiences.

6. You have an opinion on a discussion topic and your ideas are well supported. Support can be in the form of testimonials from experts or references to scientific and proven research. It is okay to write an article based on general information but winning content are those that have supporting reasons for your opinion.

7. Your article is up-to-date with the latest information on trends. No one likes to read outdated ideas. This is especially if you are writing on an area that is fast moving like IT or even fashion.

You have probably heard a lot about social bookmarking lately. As a matter of fact, you can spend hundreds of dollars right now just to find out what it’s all about. Well, not here. I am giving you this information.I did the research and found this to be a super way to get more traffic to your site. The best news is, it’s 100% FREE.

What is Social Bookmarking?

It’s a public list of your favorites. Not all your favorites, just the favorites you want to share with others. You can add any website to your public list and retrieve it from any computer. (This is done on someone else’s server, not your computer)

When you list a site in your bookmark list, anyone looking for that same type of information can do a search at the bookmark site and find the sites that you have bookmarked. It is like a search engine without all the trash.

When you do a search in a search engine, you get all the sites that have something to do with the keywords you typed into the search box. It is easy to get a bunch of garbage sites that are loaded up with keywords but have poor content on the actual site.

The great thing about social bookmarking sites is the only sites you will find there are sites that other people have looked at and decided were worth saving for future reference. Real people have decided to save (bookmark) the sites, not robots. Real people also monitor the sites so if trash does get added, it is soon deleted.

The more people who bookmark a site, the more popular it becomes. As an example, lets say you are selling widgets for a really great price. You bookmark your home page on many public bookmarking sites. When someone is looking for a widget, they do a search at the bookmarking site and your bookmark comes up. They go look at your site and decide your prices are so good, they might want to come back later when they need another widget. So they add your site to their bookmarks for future reference.

When someone goes to one of these sites and types widgets into the search box, your site listing will come up in the search. If many people have bookmarked your site, you will be listed high in the search results. It’s kind of like a voting system. If you site is good enough to bookmark, other people will want to see what all the fuss is about.

Unlike search engines where all you have to do is good seo, the sites you will find in the Social Bookmarking sites are quality sites that other people enjoyed enough to save. You don’t really have to have a good site to get listed in the search engines.

How do you get started?

Do a search for social bookmarking, many sites will come up.  Go to each site and register for an account. It’s FREE! Once you have your account set up, start listing your site. Make sure you add proper tags to your listing.

Tags are the same as keywords with a twist. These sites will tell you what the most popular searches are on their site. You choose the tags that will work with your site or page and are also part of the popular list. Many of the sites will also offer a spot to write a small description of the site you are bookmarking. Add a description that uses some of your tag words for added benefit.

Building popularity

As with anything that is worth doing, this will take you a while to get it all set up and running smooth but the end result will be very well worth your effort.

Start with one bookmarking site and one page from your site. (Start with your squeeze page and build your newsletter list) Set up your account with the bookmarking site and add your page to the bookmarks. Make sure you use the best tags and description you can. (Check the popularity list on the site) Doing this in itself will help you get more traffic. Now you can go one step further and work both sides of the system.

Add a link to your site that will lead back to the bookmarking site that has your page bookmarked. Ask your visitors to bookmark your site on the social bookmarking site.

My example is below

Bookmark my site at Blinklist.com and access it from any computer, anytime. Create a link to the bookmarking site so your visitors only have to click.

You want to make sure the page opens in a new window so when your visitors are done setting up their account, they will still have your page handy to bookmark.

Next Page

Now move on to the next page. You will want to offer a different bookmarking site on each page. Why? So you can get as many bookmarks on as many sites as possible. Use the same information in the example above but change the social bookmarking site you are promoting.

Won’t this look odd to your visitors? No. Most people will ignore the suggestion once they have bookmarked your site. They won’t even notice that you have changed the name of the link. They will see, Bookmark my site, and think, “I already did that”, and they will move on.

Final Note:

Don’t SPAM the sites. Make sure what you are listing is relevant and useful. You don’t want to bring traffic to a page that has nothing but links, you will probably get banned form the bookmarking site. Only bookmark your pages that have actual content. Ask yourself if you would truly add this page to your own favorites list? If your answer is no then don’t list it.

If you are looking for more website traffic, there are several marketing strategies you can do to increase your traffic. Knowing and understanding each one is crucial to determining which ones work best for you. If you use trial and error, you can quickly discover which marketing is generating more website traffic for you. Here are a few ways to create more website traffic.

Submit To Search Engines

If you submit a site map to the search engines you have a better possibility of them examining your site more often. With visits from search engine spiders you will get more website traffic as your site climbs higher on the search engines.

Article Marketing

There is almost no better way to get more website traffic today than article marketing. By writing articles you can use keyword optimization while placing a ad for your website on the bottom of the article. Then all you have to do is submit the article to various ezines and newsletters. You can then place articles on your own website giving people the impression that you are an expert on whatever it is your website is on, which will create more traffic and return visitors as well.

Press Releases

This form of marketing is often overlooked by internet marketers. It is a completely free way to quickly generate more website traffic easily. All you have to do is have a subject announcing a new product you sell or something newsworthy and submit it to online press release companies. If it is written well enough you can then have it be picked up by top search engines such as yahoo and google.

Affiliate Programs

If you sell a product or e-book on your website you should set up an affiliate program. This will allow visitors the chance to join your affiliate program and sell your product for you. Now you have a business within a business and this will allow you to receive more website traffic.

Joint Venture

If you team up with a company that sells similar products, you can swap links and promote each others’ business as well. This will allow you to get more website traffic from their site to yours.

To the uninitiated RSS is the buzzword but what is it?

RSS is a family of web feed formats, specified in XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) and used for Web syndication. RSS is used by (among other things) news websites, weblogs and podcasting.
· Really Simple Syndication

Web feeds provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other metadata. (Literally data that describes other data)

RSS, in particular, delivers this information as an XML file called an RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, web feeds allow a website’s frequent readers to track updates on the site using an aggregator. (A type of software that retrieves syndicated Web content )

It can be a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites, and personal weblogs.

But it’s not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into small items and can be syndicated via RSS, anything that has any kind of content makes an interesting RSS feed. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.

RSS-aware programs, called news aggregators are popular in the weblogging community. Many weblogs make content available in RSS. A news aggregator can help you keep up with all your favourite weblogs by checking their RSS feeds

How can I receive RSS feeds?

There are several ways of receiving RSS feeds, but the technology is moving forwards and adapting very quickly. The main method is to download a program called a ‘News Reader’. You can then set up this program to receive RSS information from whatever websites you wish that offer it, and browse headlines and story summaries that link through to the full story on the website.
There are several News Reader programs available for all platforms, many of which are free.

Alternatively, most of the web browsers offer similar functionality already built-in which will detect whether the website you are viewing offers an RSS feed and will then let you create a constantly-updated list of links in your ‘bookmarks’ menu.

Search engine is all about content and every SEO gurus have been trying very hard to optimize their pages just for the search engine and often forgetting that the end user is actually the human reader. It is of paramount importance that a page has to be written for humans and designed for search engines in terms of SEO.

There is nothing more important than creating unique content for a site. In SEO, allocating keywords in the title, header and bold HTML tags not only helps the reader to identify the topic of a page easily but it also aids in optimization since search engine takes into consideration of the keywords in these tags.

Many writers are concerned about the perfect keyword density for the maximum benefit of SEO. Unfortunately, there are no hard figures for a perfect keyword percentage. The most important factor when creating content is to make it readable and unique. As long as the content is readable, there is no need to follow a set percentage of keyword density.

Designing a page to facilitate the indexing by the search engine bots is another important factor to consider next to content creation. A page with rich content without indexed by the search engine bots is equivalent to no content at all. To help the search engines to find the page, the navigation system and sitemap plays important roles here. It is advisable to have text links navigation so that bots can spider all the internal pages smoothly. Avoid using JavaScript and Flash made navigation system because most bots will ignore them but designer can always include a set of text links at the bottom of the page where these kinds of navigation system are used to overcome this issue.

Some search engines place great emphasis on the content near the top of a page. Therefore, it is advisable to design the layout in such a way that the content appears before other parts of the page. One example is to use the content first CSS template; it allows the navigation to appear on the left of a page followed by the content but the content is the first to appear in the codes. This method helps search engine bots to identify the important content of a page and index them since they are placed near the top of a page. Another easy work around is to employ a right side navigation menu.

The ultimate purpose of SEO is to make sure that the designated content appears in search engine according to the specific searches. Making the content readable and designing the page for easy indexing should always be the first priority for webmasters when SEO comes into play.

What Is Organic SEO?

Put in the simplest manner possible, organic SEO is search engine optimization done manually using no black hat methods, no underhand methods and no automated scripting. It is the purest form of optimizing your website for the benefit of search engines, while still retaining interest for your site visitors, and done well it is exactly the thing that search engines are looking for in a website. Once they find it they will reward your site with better rankings and improved positions within the search engine results pages. Throughout the course of this article it will be referred to as simply SEO.

Understanding The Search Engines

Understanding Search Engines and their general concept is vital to the use of effective SEO methods. Search engines enable their visitors to enter a specific word or term, known as keywords. Once submitted, all pages containing those keywords that can be found in the search engine’s directory are listed on the search engine result pages. Each page is “ranked” according to relevancy, popularity and a few other factors. Therefore, in theory, the more relevant a page is to a given keyword the more likely it will appear at the top of the listings.

Introducing The Search Engine Spiders

Another important factor to remember about search engines is that they don’t use real people to crawl the billions of websites and judge how relevant they are. Instead they use automated software called a “spider” or a “bot” that does this work much quicker. The calculations that the search engine uses to determine the ranking of a website are called algorithms and in the case of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN these algorithms are changed on a regular basis. The changes and the specifics of the algorithms are not released to the public in order to prevent black hat SEOs from manipulating their sites to reach the top of the pile despite containing to information relevant to the search query or keyword.

Optimizing For Search Engines – Optimizing For Visitors

Of course to some extent, all of us reading this article are probably guilty of altering our web pages to meet the whims of search engines but it must be done in a positive and organic way. We understand that optimizing a page purely for the benefit of search engines spiders may massively detract from the actual value of the site to your visitors. Search engines understand this too, hence the evolution of the algorithms. With each new algorithm created and usually patented by search engines like Google, we are getting closer to a structure whereby sites are genuinely judged on their value to visitors. It may sound like an Isaac Asimov novel but the algorithms and the spiders are basically becoming more human like.

Basic Components Of SEO

The actual methods of optimizing your website are saved for another article, but the basic components of an SEO campaign are broken down into on page and off page optimization techniques. On page SEO includes factors like keyword inclusion, content optimization, page structure etc… whereas the main contributing factor of off page optimization is inbound links. There are many different factors to each of these areas and different SEOs will give you varying information on which factors are the most relevant to gain higher rankings. These extensive differences in opinion occur because nobody is certain of the algorithm criteria.

The Benefits Of SEO

SEO is probably the most beneficial way to conduct Internet promotion. It is highly cost effective, can yield long term results and the leads it generates are opt in and targeted. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider trying out alternative methods of advertising your site. For many, banner advertisements, press releases (can actually be used as part of an SEO campaign as well), PPC campaigns and sponsored listings prove to highly beneficial and including these will help your site’s popularity.

To Cost Effectiveness And To Life

The cost effectiveness is easily determined when you look at the potential of an SEO campaign compared to the method that many consider to be the next best thing – PPC. A PPC campaign will usually cost you anywhere upward of 5 cents per visitor generated. This means that for every thousand visitors you receive you will have paid $50. Some fairly basic SEO work on a web site containing ten pages will generate this kind of traffic on a monthly basis relatively quickly.

$50 doesn’t sound much but consider that you pay this in one month to receive the desired one thousand visitors. Over the space of a year you will have paid $600, and so on. Now consider that you are competing for a relatively competitive keyword and you find that you need to be paying a minimum of 50 cents per click to generate just the one thousand clicks in a month. All of a sudden you’re paying $6000 per year and you are still only getting one thousand clicks every month. $6000 will buy you an awful lot of SEO work and you should find that within a few months you are generating a lot more traffic using SEO.

Targeted Leads

Targeted leads are the best type of leads you can generate. It means that the visitors to your site are already predisposed to the basic topic of your site and are interested in what you have to say. It means that they will be more likely to purchase goods or services from your site, click on affiliate links or click Google ads to earn you revenue. Because SEO leads are physically searching for the topic that your site relates to you are guaranteed that they are interested in whatever you’re offering. First of all they search using keywords relevant to your site. They then read the description and name of your site and this further compounds their interest in the page in question and click on the link. Already they have become highly susceptible to the message of your web page.

So Remember…

SEO is a webmaster’s greatest tool but treated badly it can quickly blow up in your face. By ensuring you stick to the very letter of the law and do not use any underhand methods you should soon benefit from powerful leads that will frequent your site and earn you revenue.

It is easy to win a race and be on top but the same saying does not go with keeping yourself at the top. Having a head start in the business of Article Marketing would require dedication and skill. Aside from persevering in the market, you must be in the know of what makes other article marketers fail and devise of ways to avoid it.

Failure in article marketing is not new. Many have tried and many were beat. Where did they go wrong? Perhaps, they had the wrong audiences targeted. Maybe they didn’t make articles that were good enough. There are a lot of reasons. However, when businesses fail in Article Marketing, several crucial factors can be pinpointed.

The greatest evil in Article Marketing is plagiarism. The issue has long been addressed but hasn’t been avoided as well as it should have been. Let it be known that plagiarism is illegal worldwide and several technologies have been created to quickly identify plagiarized work. Subsequently, if your article is found to be plagiarized, search engines would give you a low rank, hence traffic to your site will be minimized. To some extent, your articles and other entries may be deleted and you will not benefit as much from your endeavor, or worse, not benefit at all.

There are surefire ways to avoid plagiarism. If you want to write an article about a certain topic, you start of by researching for common contents. The most favored site for research is of course, through the Internet. Once you have found the articles you want to use, instead of copying and pasting them on your empty document right away, take time to read the article first. Make sure you understand what the articles say, highlight point s you agree with and want to address in your own article. You may also want to bullet or summarize the article you have read. In this way, it is ensured that you won’t have a plagiarized product. The next step would be to write in your own words, what you have understood from the research you’ve done. Do incorporate the important facts you’ve discovered in the articles that you’ve read but make sure that they are still written in your own words.

In Article Marketing, originality may just very well lead you to success. This is because search engines that analyze your work and find no discrepancies with regards to plagiarism or duplication then the rank they will give you would be higher. What is the advantage of a higher rank? Not only will it generate traffic, it would also lower the cost of the pay-per-click of your article or website.

Another factor that usually leads to failure in the domain of Article Marketing is the failure to write enough articles of interest. Many of those who start out in Article Marketing usually begin with just a few articles and think that that is it. But it is not it, because a few articles would not accomplish a name or even a reputation for your business. You have to write as many articles as you can. Though tiring, it is very well worth it.

The job of having to write articles may be made easy by writing topics of your own interest. Choose products to advertise whose interests are similar to your own and who you know so much about. The greater the interest and the greater the body of knowledge you hold for one particular topic, and then there will be no limit to what you can write.

Failure of your articles to be exposed would also result to the failure of your business. If you do not expose your articles to as many consumers as possible, your bank account would not change a cent. The lesser consumers you have, the lesser your rank will be and you will be lost among other business in line for Article Marketing. You will have to work hard for your articles to be circulated. This can be done through article directories, link partners, forum sites, newsletters, the approaches are not at all limited, what with the capacity of the Web to reach different audiences. If the means are not limited, then you should not limit yourself as well. Explore what other ways can ensure the distribution of your articles, this just has to be done in order to survive in the business.

Frankly the most important factor of all that lead to most business fading out in the area of Article Marketing is the failure to stay long in the race. Many have succeeded, so why should followers fail? Longevity is one factor that will contribute to the success you will experience in Article Marketing. Let’s face the facts, traffic is generated for a period of time and may even go as long as years to wait. Profits would depend on the traffic you generate, as your traffic steadily increases, your profit would also steadily increase.

Like any other business, whether online or outside the World Wide Web, much has to be invested in order for it to succeed. If you are willing to work hard and have faith in what you do, then you have a greater chance of avoiding these pitfalls in Article Marketing.