Wednesday, 7 September 2011

SiteProNews

SiteProNews

Posted: 06 Sep 2011 07:57 AM PDT
business1When one starts their online business, generally speaking they cannot afford to spend a lot of money on PPC campaigns or pay for Google Sponsored Ads, especially when they don’t even know if their efforts will bring guaranteed success. So how do people start a successful campaign without an advertising budget to play with?
Well, you must’ve heard about Article Marketing. Most of us have heard about it but just feel it takes too much time and effort to do it. There must be an easier and quicker way to promote your business right? Wrong! Article Marketing has become one of the most risk free, popular, tried and tested online marketing strategies used to get more traffic and publicity for your online business, leading to more sales.
There are no shortcuts to building a lucrative online business. So the sooner you learn to accept that you will need to write your own articles for your online business or alternatively pay someone to write them for you, the better.
As they say; “the best things in life are generally free.” Well, it applies to article writing so aptly. You don’t need to know HTML coding or have any internet marketing experience or background to do it successfully. It is a tried and tested online marketing strategy; there is no escaping it.
You can reach global audiences, establish your business credibility, brand yourself, enhance the presence and visibility of your website online, sell any service or product you have, pre-sell your product, gain resell value for your brand and get niche-based international promotions for your business and products – and it can be done free (assuming you are willing to put in the time and effort). I guess it all boils down to, how badly do you want to make it online? How important is the success of your business to you? Are you really serious about gaining financial freedom online?
This article, and my personal website, is built around those who have a burning desire to make money on the internet by getting their businesses off the ground, leading to total online success, who need cheap, no cost or low cost ways to do it. It is for those who have a realistic understanding or acceptance that there is no quick get rich scheme or program online that can make you rich over night. All businesses take hours of sweat, tears and hard work to make them lucrative.
So how does one start? Here are some guidelines to help you in your Article Marketing efforts:
Your article should be theme based (based on the subject matter of your website, product or service).
It should be no less than 500 words.
Make sure your article has quality based content in it. Recycling useless information is simply not going to work – period! You should incorporate lots of useful tips and practical advice that the reader can follow, and substantiate what you are saying in your article.
Your article needs to be Search Engine friendly, ie. Search Engines will need the right set of keywords throughout your article so that they can easily index your articles on their search page. Think of the keywords relevant to your website, product or service. Keywords are the words that people are most likely to search for on Google, as well as keywords that are popular with your audience.
Make sure you have an end objective or a call to action at the end of your article, eg. – For more tips and tricks delivered to your inbox every week, join our Newsletter here.
Choose a captivating title for your article. This is one of the first things your reader sees. Your title will determine whether your reader will read your article or not. It either grabs their attention or not. Ensure your title also contains the relevant keywords. The title on your article actually determines its popularity or ranking online – so pay serious attention to it. Sometimes it is easier to write your article and then think of a fitting title for it. Keyword research can go a long way in helping you here.
Make sure your articles are unique and original. Don’t let your article or title be something everyone has already read about on all the scores of similar articles of recycled information available online. This will reduce your credibility and you will not be able to track your article online either.
Don’t use keywords in your title that have no relevance to your article or subject at hand. We all live in a fast paced world where no one has time to read stuff that is either obvious, redundant or unnecessary.
Don’t make the common mistake of putting your company’s name in the title – this is way too old and redundant. Don’t populate this limited space with unnecessary words like a company name. This title is to be seen as a one-way ticket to getting indexed on search engines.
Since time is precious to your readers and they don’t have time to scan your entire article to find out what is in it for them – try to put the benefits for them in your title.
Once you have completed your article, you will be required to fill in an Authors Biography. Sell yourself here. This needs to make a lasting impressing on the minds of the readers and will also enhance your credibility online. A Bio should highlight your skills, competencies, achievements and give the readers a glimpse of your experience and qualities. You really do need to make the most of this space too. Self flattery won’t work either. People need facts only. If possible, you should make a note of key milestones with dates in order to impress your readers, giving integrity to your work. Be sure, however, not to turn it into a fact sheet without personality or flavor. You need to devote time to creating your own impressive Author Biography.
Now you need to add the URL to your website, product, business or blog. Professional authors no longer use their real website name in the anchor text. They embed the link in a phrase that contains keywords. If you want to use your real website name in the link, consider doing it in conjunction with keywords, eg. “Website name – Your one stop book shop”, or something to that effect.
This phrase should be relevant to the audience you wish to attract and should contain keywords relevant to your site. This URL is the most crucial part of the Author Biography since this is what leads to better click through rates to your website. The Bio should only be one or two sentences long, so just mention things there that make you an authority on what you’ve written. These sentences must relate directly to your topic. You need to convince the reader that by clicking on your link, they will benefit somehow. You can even include a quote you like or aspire to which will assist the readers to connect with you on a more personal level. Selling is all about touching other people’s emotions and connecting with them. Start your Bio in the first person to give personal insight into your beliefs and values, shift a little later to the third person to give a more neutral and unbiased perspective to your authority on the subject matter.
Once you are finished, submit your article to one or two article directories ONLY and make sure you read the guidelines. This gives your article exclusivity. If your article appears in Google with a page rank based on the keywords you’ve written about, your site traffic will suddenly increase and you will make sales. Now repeat the same exercise at least once a week, preferably more, and you’ll start to succeed with your new business online. What did it cost? Well, if you did it yourself, it cost nothing! So maybe it is true: “the best things in life are free.”
Remember, article writing is a tried and tested online marketing strategy that will guarantee you free quality visitors to your website that will enable your financial freedom online. Better articles equal better PR (Page Rank), better PR equals better business. Invest time into building up your new online business and you are sure to make money online.
For more direction to build your lucrative online business and make a success of it, visit all the many wonderful and best marketing resources and articles on our website, which is filled with proven online marketing strategies that have been tried and tested. Also, bookmark it for guidance and help as you build up your business online.
You too, can gain financial freedom online by starting your own lucrative online business for financial freedom online through Article writing.
Having been in the online marketing world for over 12 years, I have experienced first hand, the frustration of online marketers trying to make it online. I have finally come to the point of putting all that I’ve learned into easy-to-read and easy-to-follow articles, in an attempt to assist others in their online endeavors.
In order to assist new e-entrepreneurs online, Valerie has carefully studied online marketing to try to pin-point why the failure rate online is so high, and has put together guidelines for new online marketers to help them avoid the online marketing scenic route and gain faster financial freedom online. Her websites, free and paid online marketing tools, resources and articles can be accessed through this portal:http://just-visit.us/?i=185695/Article_SLOB-FFO
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Starting a Lucrative Online Business for Financial Freedom Online
Posted: 06 Sep 2011 07:38 AM PDT
business1The advent of social media and its integration into our lives has turned traditional marketing techniques upside down, but it has also given us many, new and unique ways to market that are creative and innovative. In the good old days you ran a marketing campaign and knew how much you spent and where you spent it and how much revenue was produced from it. But today the world moves a little differently. Social media marketing is here to stay and is, at times, difficult to measure as far as effectiveness is concerned.
Just as you have an Internet marketing strategy, you also need a social media strategy as more and more companies are getting on the bandwagon of advertising via social media. What you do with the data gleaned from your social media interactions is extremely important. Social media includes Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Foursquare to name a few. So, how do you measure success or effectiveness within the social media realm? Here are a few methods to gauge how you’re doing.
Awareness of Your Brand – Building awareness of your brand is one of the most important aspects of why you’re engaged in social media. Ultimately, you can measure your awareness by how many followers you have, the number of searches for your brand name, the number of site visits tracked through links, and the number of keywords or phrases searched for. You need to be able to trend this and track it.
Honest Discussion – The online discussion that you will get can have mixed blessings as it will be unfiltered and completely honest. This means you will get good feedback, neutral feedback, and at times, bad feedback. It’s often referred to as share of voice and it reflects the number of times your brand was mentioned in a conversation. You should use a monitoring program to track both your feedback as well as those of your competitors.
Sphere of Influence - Signals of influence can be found with the number of inbound links to your site. Microblogging sites like Twitter and social networks like Facebook. LinkedIn, YouTube, or Foursquare might have people that have made comments and Liked your brand or product. This is then shared with friends and others and the conversations continue. Measuring these social media tweets or likes can provide you with information about why they like the brand or why they don’t.
Signs of Interaction – The interaction between people and your site and your brand are important to see how interested people are in what you have to say or offer. This means the ratings given to your brand, the number of mentions good or bad, retweets, photos, video views, and the number of new pages of Facebook likes.
Popularity - This is really the number of people that subscribe to your email or RSS subscribers, followers on Twitter, members of LinkedIn groups, and number of people who like your Facebook page or other social media sites. Other places to track include industry hang outs or content communities like Flickr or YouTube.
Use Monitoring Tools – Seeing lots of activity on Facebook likes or Twitter tweets does not mean much if you don’t measure, monitor, and track the information that you are getting from these social media sites. Google Analytics and Measure Map are two tools that can be used to track and analyze the data so that you know exactly how people react and what you need to change in terms of advertising.
Listen and Learn – Pay attention to the feedback that you receive from the social media sites not just the positive feedback but the negative or neutral to see what you can learn and possibly change if necessary. Be proactive about tracking the data and USING it to make necessary adjustments to your ads or your way of advertising. Listen carefully to what is being said, make some suggested modifications, and you will be successful.
Color Card Administrator is the parent company of PrintBusinessCards.com and several other innovative Real Estate Business Cards website, we’re eager to share with you what it is we do. Give us a call today at 858-522-9335 or email at Author@CardAdmin.com for Print Business Cards. We look forward to discussing your comments, suggestions, or hearing any ideas for future article topics you may be interested in regarding online business cards design or business card management.
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

7 Ways to Measure Social Media Effectiveness for Your Company – A SPN Exclusive Article
Posted: 06 Sep 2011 07:00 AM PDT
business1SMEs are risking their online success by not analysing website data and optimising their sites accordingly. This is the warning issued by a panel of e-commerce experts at a recent round table held by hosting specialist UKFast.
Liam Ahern, Online Business Specialist at online marketing firm I-COM, told the panel that the key to e-commerce is the ‘trackability’ of the data. He said: “There is a lot of data and part of optimising a site is gathering all of it and analysing it. We need to know why customers buy a product before we can make decisions on how to improve a website.”
Nick Rhind, managing director of web development company CTI Digital, said: “Making a change to a website can make or lose millions. Companies need to prepare changes properly and ask what it is that they want to achieve, how they can do it and how easily they can revert back to the old style if it does not succeed.
“Clients have asked us to build their site around a particular page but when we have looked at it, it is the worst converting page on the site. Businesses need to analyse their figures properly because tools such as Google Analytics may only tell half a story; the page may get a lot of views, so the business thinks that it is doing well, but in reality visitors to the page are dropping off within five seconds and it is one of the worst pages. We need to look at the information as a whole to understand the site.”
Analysing information for every visit to your websites is a time consuming job and not all businesses have the capabilities needed to make the most of the data, especially smaller retailers.
David Grimes, director at MyParcelDelivery.com explained that time is not the only factor, having, or hiring, the right expertise is a worthy investment. He said: “From an SME point of view we have just engaged with a company to help with our SEO because we wanted that expert view on analytics. If I was to look at the data of a site, all I would see is a whole lot of statistics. I wouldn’t be able to drill down into it and that’s where we need that expert’s opinion to give us a really good insight into how our site is doing.”
Jonathan Bowers, communications director at UKFast spoke about the e-commerce businesses on their network. He said: “From what we can see the e-commerce websites that grow quickly are those that are obsessive about offering a great user experience and the majority of them found this out by directly gaining feedback and scrutinising the web data.”
Ahern explained that analytics tools should not only be used to monitor pages that need improving but also to see why and how customers are choosing to buy products.
He said: “Businesses still haven’t mastered what is called conversion attribution. What is it that makes a customer buy a product, where did they first see the product, what drove them to the site? Was it a TV advert or a magazine advertisement? Where did the customer go before visiting our site?
“If ultimately they click through a PPC advert to buy the product, even if they have visited the site several times before and been through a whole other journey, tools such as Google Analytics will only show that the sale came from a PPC ad.
“Proper in-depth analysis can give us a full picture of our site, but businesses are still yet to master this.”
Top E-Commerce Tips for SMEs:
* Don’t deviate from the norm in terms of functionality – consumers know how they like to shop online and expect to follow the same journey
* Focus on a simple and clean platform that gives users a quick and problem-free shopping experience with the option for an enriched experience if the user requests
* Invest in expert analysis of data
* Establish your delivery offer early on – it could dictate the design of an e-commerce platform
* Think about how to give users the ‘touch and feel’ experience online – through augmented reality and detailed descriptions.
UKFast is one of Europe’s fastest-growing technical companies (as ranked by Deloitte) and has been at the heart of the UK internet industry for more than 10 years. In addition to being named as one of The Sunday Times best companies to work for, it won the UK IT Awards Employer of the Year in 2010.
Previous accolades include the industry’s Best Customer Service Award in 2009 and being named the ISPA UK’s Best Hosting Provider four years consecutively. UKFast has over 400,000 web domains on its network and over 4,000 clients across all industries. Clients include Virgin, Microsoft and UKTV. UKFast is a member of the Cloud Industry Forum.
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

SMEs Foolish to Ignore Web Data
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)