Web Business Resource

by Elizabeth Morgan

Internet hosts provide you an opportunity to register your presence on the World Wide Web through a web site. A large number of Internet hosts continue to compete with each other to grab market share.

There are certain things that should not be ignored while choosing an Internet host. First, one has to decide how much webspace would be required for the site that needs to be hosted. An average web site does not need more than 100 MB of space. This is easily affordable for the average individual.

One has to be sure about the bandwidth requirements and capability of the Internet host in this regard. If your website has lots of audio and video files then it is preferable to go for a higher bandwidth. Remember that bandwidth determines the speed at which data is transferred to the user’s computer from the web site. The higher the bandwidth, the greater the speed of data transfer.

It is better to check the performance of the servers used by various Internet hosts. If there is a problem with the server, the website will not open. So, if you want to choose a particular Internet host, visit a few web sites hosted by the firm regularly for a few days. If these web sites do not open frequently due to server problems, it is better to go for another one.

A number of Internet hosts also provide support in terms of helping you to develop your web site and providing free software for doing so. Many of them claim to do so but once you pay the money, they may not provide enough support. So think twice before entering into a long-term contract with a new Internet host. It may be that a short-term contract is the best answer.

The below is an excerpt on attitude from the ebook by Tiffany Sutton, The Truth About Working At Home:

I truly believe that your attitude has a lot to do with being successful or not. You have to make the decision to be successful and then make it happen. Have you DECIDED to be successful yet? Or, are you waiting for someone or something else to get you there? You have to first decide what it is you want to do. I decided I wanted to work at home. I just had to find the right thing to do.

Once you find the business or opportunity that is right for you, research what you are doing as much as you can. Although others should be available to answer questions or provide tips, try to be as independent as possible. You don’t want to “need” someone else to be successful. You don’t want to depend on them for information. That is a mistake that I’ve made before, and it cost me a lot of my time and money. Don’t rely on what others tell you. Find out for yourself.

Set a daily, weekly, and monthly financial goal for yourself. Hold yourself accountable. People fail at working at home for two reasons. One, they were completely misinformed, lied to, or given totally false information as to what a business entails. That is not your fault if this happens. It’s happened to me. While this may surprise you, there are many people out there who have no concern about your financial well being. They are looking out for their money. You are nothing more than a few extra bucks. Once they get that money from you, they suddenly forget who you are. (It’s funny how that works.)

Next, you have people who want to be successful, but they really don’t do anything to make it happen. They will spend more time and money looking for a get rich quick thing, instead of doing something productive. I sense a lot of these people really don’t want to work or make the required effort. Maybe they are afraid of being successful? Maybe they don’t think they deserve it? Well, for those that do think you deserve more, it is up to you to make it happen. Unless you win the lottery, no one is going to arrive at your door with a big fat check.

Invest in good motivational books and audio sets. They make all the difference in the world. Whatever you pay for them, you will get it back ten times over. I personally prefer Tony Robbins and Zig Ziglar. I have learned so much from the information that they offer. Purchase just one of their books and you will see what I’m talking about. Work and finances will fall into place for you when you have the right mindset.

Surround yourself with successful people. Many statistics say that you will generally make within $5,000 of what your closest friends make. Look around you. Are your friends helping you or pulling you down? Make an effort to network with other professional people. Join groups where you can meet the type of people that can teach you something. Anyone can find people who have no skills and no good advice to offer. Stay away from those people. I know there were people that didn’t believe in me when I decided to work at home. That’s fine. Ask them if they’ve heard from me in the past few years? You have to get up each day believing in yourself and not focusing on what others think. If you have the confidence that you can make it happen, it will.

Although one benefit of working from home is being able to work in your pajamas, I don’t recommend it for everyday. Get up, eat breakfast, workout (or whatever you do) and get dressed for the day. That doesn’t mean sitting at your desk in Jimmy Choos and a business suit. But, if you are at least presentable enough to be seen in the grocery store, it will improve your overall attitude. I personally work in yoga clothing. It’s comfortable and does not require dry cleaning. Sorry, I don’t think being a slob contributes to a positive attitude or self image. If you think you’re a slob, so will everyone else. If you take pride in your appearance, it will come across to others in everything you do, even on the phone.

Lastly, my best advice is to not turn on the t.v. during the workday. I have a strict rule in my house, no t.v. before 6pm, period. People ask me if I saw *blank* on the news? The answer is always NO. Watching t.v. is counterproductive and will not do anything to contribute to your finances. Watching the news has proven to affect people’s moods in a negative way. Why do that to yourself? Watching fires, car wrecks, and natural disasters will not benefit you or your workday. Try to stay focused and as positive as possible. Listening to music is fine. Studies show it actually helps some people concentrate.

Treat your home office like a real office. Clearly, we all work at home for the peace and flexibility that comes along with it. I love that I can work when I want to. But, create some kind of a schedule for yourself and stick to it. I get few personal calls during the day because people respect me and my work. They know I am working on my advertising. I don’t go to their jobs and bug them, so I like the same consideration in return.

In order to be successful, you do have to have some kind of discipline. You can’t get rich sleeping until 2pm everyday or sitting around in your underwear eating chips. You have to make some kind of effort everyday. I manage to stay busy at my desk at least 6-8 hours a day. Most of my days are considerably longer than this. I do this because I am focused on the long-term. For the first time in my life, I am glad to work.

*If you called someone to inquire about a business and they had Days of Our Lives and a screaming kid in the background, how impressed would you be? Seriously? Would you want to have a conversation or spend a dime with that person? When was the last time you called an office or business and heard screaming in the background? -Exactly. Life happens. Dogs bark, kids cry, doorbells ring. But, if you are going to pick up the phone, try to have a quiet background. If that’s not possible, let it go to voice mail. The person on the other end of the phone deserves that much respect.

About The Author: Tiffany Sutton is the webmaster and owner of http://theworkplacesucks.com/. She has a successful Internet home business and ahe has helped several new online business owners get started. For a FREE Internet Home Business Ebook that tells The Truth About Working At Home, visit her website.

by Sanjay Johari

Newsletters are excellent means of marketing on the internet. The publisher of the newsletters gets a foothold in the market for standing and growing. The publisher could be an individual or an organization. But it is important for the publisher to form an identity and to establish himself in the market. The long term players in the market simply cannot do without forming an identity, a brand name. By brand name I only mean an identification to distinguish the publisher.

Newsletters can be used very well for branding the publishers.

But in the first place why do you need to brand yourself?

You are an internet based marketer. You are trying to market products and ideas. You are looking for like-minded people who would be interested in what you have to offer.

If you answer these two simple questions you will know why you need to brand yourself. These questions are:

1. Why will anyone listen to you?

2. Why will anyone be interested in your offer?

You have to first locate people who may have interest in your offer. Next, you have to build credibility so that interested people start trusting you. It is in this second process where you brand yourself. You establish yourself as an expert in the field who is there to stay and who can be trusted. You create a distinct brand for yourself which is unique.

The brand YOU.

In fact you market your name before you can expect to market your products in a big way.

You can use newsletters to meet both the objectives – to locate your customers and to establish yourself. Starting your newsletters is a long term strategy. Your newsletters should focus on a particular area which is related to the product you wish to market. The frequency of publication should be fixed and strictly followed. In every issue there should be fresh content to keep the readers interested. It will take time and persistence to establish the newsletter as well as the publisher, to increase the subscriber base and to grow the circulation. After initial hurdles are successfully negotiated you are poised for substantial growth.

The readers of the newsletter gradually get used to the style, presentation, periodicity of publication, the content and other features of the newsletter. They look forward to the next issue and expect to find the familiar pattern. The publisher of the newsletter should ensure that the newsletter maintains its unique features. There should be consistency in the content. The objective should be providing information which will benefit the subscribers. You can add stories and your personal experience to make the newsletters more interesting.

What should be the frequency of the newsletter? Once or twice a week can be a good frequency to maintain. It does not become a burden either on the publisher or the subscribers. If frequency is less than a month the readers may forget about the newsletter. If frequency is more the readers may lose interest.

There should not be any drastic changes from one issue to the other. The readers should get what they expect to find. If any changes are to be made in any of the features, the changes should be gradual. It often helps to inform the readers before the changes are made.

Newsletters are powerful tools for cultivating relationship. And relationship is the foundation of a successful business. The subscribers of the newsletters come to know the publisher. The owner of the newsletter gets an effective medium to share ideas and information. By inviting comments from the subscribers the newsletters can be made more interactive and popular.

The publisher should always shave in mind the best interests of the subscribers. This attitude somehow gets transmitted and readers can often see through the intentions of the publisher.

Your customers do not buy your products – they buy your recommendations. Once they have faith in you they will buy from you repeatedly with the confidence that they will get value for their money. That is the power of branding yourself, and maintaining your brand name.

It is ok to send offers to the subscribers occasionally. However such offers should not be too frequent. What is even more important is that the publisher should not send offers for un-tested and un-tried products. He should send offers only for those products which he would himself purchase. With the offer he should provide his own views, ratings and experience with the product.

I have tried to discuss how newsletters can be used for marketing your other products. Publishing newsletters can itself be a business. That is additional advantage of publishing newsletters.

by Scott Hughes

So, you learned HTML and now your ready to design your website. Well, as an experienced web designer let me share some tips.

1. Use CSS (cascading style sheets). If you do not know CSS, learn it. CSS allows you to keep the formatting of your site (e.g. the color or size of a piece of text) on a separate single page - a CSS document. Thus, with CSS you can change the formatting of a common-element by simply updating one piece of code on one page, rather then updating all the pages of your site. For example, if you want to change the back-ground color of your website, you could just change your one CSS sheet and your entire website’s background color would change. Another great aspect of CSS is that you can use it to set the default properties of HTML tags. This can be used to counter browser compatibility problem - that different browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.) use different default settings.

2. Test your website in all browsers. Just because your website displays a certain way in one browser, doesn’t mean it will display that way in another browser. You should check that your website displays properly in all of the major following browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Netscape, and Opera.

3. Use open source software and freeware, if you want to create a dynamic website. Even if you know dynamic languages (such as JavaScript, PHP, and CGI) well enough to create your own software and features, you do not want to do that if you are a beginner. There’s no reason to create your own dynamic scripts (e.g. shopping carts, chat-rooms, etc.), if you can find full-functioning customizable freeware. A great benefit of this method is that the customization options will separate the code that changes your website’s look and feel from the functioning code. If you design the code yourself, you’ll be tempted to mix the look and feel with the functioning aspects. So, if later you want to update the look and feel, you’ll have to dig through the long software scripts. If you’re going to be using freeware or any other code that you didn’t design yourself, you should still be familiar with that language.

4. Don’t use free or cheap web-hosting. Okay, this isn’t necessarily a design tip. However, hosting is related to design. Free hosts may scatter your website with annoying ads. So, you won’t be able to load your site as is. Also, free and cheap hosts often don’t support dynamic websites. Unless you’re website is supposed to be a joke, don’t use a free host.

5. Don’t write your email address on your website. If you have a phone number or mailing address that your customers can use to reach you or your business, publish that on your website. Website’s with a phone number or mailing address appear much more reliable and honest than websites without contact information. However, don’t publish your email address, because spammers will use web-crawlers will to pick it up. Instead, design a form on your website that customers can use to send messages or questions without giving your email address.

6. Take it slow. Unfortunately, the only way to become an expert designer is through experience, but your business can’t afford sloppy pages. Don’t attempt to design complex and dynamic websites without the ability. If you try to design a code, but find it hard and the code begins to come out sloppy, don’t hesitate to just throw it out. It’s better to have a simple, sleek, and functional website, than to have a complex, sloppy, dysfunctional website.

About The Author: Scott Hughes creates and runs many successful e-businesses. Read more articles like this on his website, Web Business Resource at http://www.webbizresource.com/. You may republish this article if you keep all links intact and keep this “About The Author” footer.

by Barry Fenning

1. Optimise every page on your website

The major search engines are not looking at individual websites and ranking them, they are ranking pages from every website in the world. This means that if your website contains more than one page you should optimise for the specific content that is found on each page.

Optimising each webpage is overlooked by so many websites within Ireland and can be the difference between competing for a highly competitive keyword phrase such as “Irish Hotels” and competing for a much less competitive keyword phrase such as “Hotels in County Galway”. After that they can check out the rest of your website that is all about “Irish Hotels”.

2. Pick appropriate keyword phrases

This is the single most important thing to do when it comes to optimising your website for search engines. The keywords that your potential customers type into Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves are the keywords that your site should be using within the specific areas of your webpage (see below; Optimizing your Page Titles and Optimizing your Content). There are a number of useful keyword research tools available on the web. The most recommended and user-friendly are Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. Both offer trial versions.

3. Optimizing your Page Titles

All of the major search engines have 100’s of different algorithms that compute where your webpage should be listed for different keyword searches. Putting your keywords within the Title description (the blue bar you will see at the top of your screen) of your pages is one of the most important SEO techniques and will help your website climb through the rankings and allow your visitors to remember exactly what your page is all about when they save it to their “favourites”.

4. Optimizing your Page Content

It is sometimes very difficult to write content for your website. Not only do you need put the information that you want the visitor to see in front of them in an easy-to-read style, you also have to keep in mind the keywords or keyphrases that your page is targeting so that you can rank better within search engines.

One of the best pieces of advice that I have come across is to write for your visitors and include the keywords and keyphrases as much as makes sense. Read what you written out loud to yourself and a few others. If it sounds stupid… lather, rinse, and repeat.

5. Create an inbound linking strategy

Submitting your site to online directories is a very beneficial way to drive targeted traffic to your website. People will find your listing in a directory and click on the link to go directly to your site.

This not only brings visitors to your website, but it also creates links for search engine “spiders” or “robots” to find your website and index your pages within their results. If your site doesn’t have a link pointing to it on the World Wide Web the search engines will never find it and you will never see any traffic from Google or the other big ones.

6. Descriptively labeling your links and images (aka the anchor text)

This technique is both common sense and good practice. Telling your visitors what the link that they are going to click on allows them to know exactly what they are going to be directed to. Saying “click here” is not enough to help them understand what they’re going to find once they click through. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive is that you can almost always describe the page you’re pointing to by using its main keyword phrase which is another one of those many factors search engines that into account when it comes to ranking your web pages.

7. Make sure your site is spider-friendly

Your website may look fantastic. You and your web designer may be talented graphic designers that can make Flash and Javascript dazzle your visitors with a show that would put RiverDance to shame. However, if your website contains Flash and Javascript it’s important to know that search engine spiders can’t read this code (or appreciate the effort you put into the design). The way around this is to provide navigation alternatives to allow the spiders crawl deep within your website and index the web pages within their results.

8. Create Fresh Content

When you are optimizing your website properly you will see a trend. If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it.

Search engines do tend to like websites that create fresh content regardless of the format. If they know any given site is adding new articles on a frequent basis, they will come around often to index it.

Blogs and forums are effective and easy ways of adding new information to your site on a regular basis.

However, if your only purpose of setting up a blog or a forum is for better search engine rankings then there really is no point in doing it. Only add a forum if it contributes something beneficial to your website and if you have the traffic to make it interactive enough for visitors to return to it. And, only add a blog if you have something of interest to say on a regular basis.

9. Do not think that you can trick Search Engines

As noted before, “If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it”.

If you try to trick the search engines by hiding keyword phrases in your pages by making the text colour the same as the background colour, hiding keyword phrases in tiny font, joining link farms, or any other sneaky practice your sites will be removed from the search engines and it will take you a long time to get back in (and you will also have to spend more time cleaning up your website before they will accept you).

10. Offer something unique

If your website offers something that is unique and interesting to your target market and it is properly optimized (by applying all of the techniques that are listed above) you will not only rank well within the major search engines, you will also get the added benefit of people linking to your website in forums, blogs, and through other websites which will send your site more visitors and create more inbound links which will help it rank higher.

About the Author: Barry Fenning is the owner of Website Promotion Articles - A website that is aimed at people that are new to the area of online marketing. The articles available on the website are suitable for people that want to learn how to conduct effective SEO campaigns. There are also a number of more “advanced” articles suitable for experienced webmasters.

by Mihaela Lica

SEO experts call SEO a science. That’s not so far from the truth. If ten years ago SEO meant inserting some keywords in the Meta tags, nowadays SEO is growing and transforming with a tremendous speed. What works today may not work in three months from now on. The search engines are changing their algorithms so often that getting high rankings in their results has become a fierce competition.

But whether this competition means hiring expensive SEO experts to implement “strategies that work… guaranteed!” or not, it’s still a matter of debate. Well, yes, there are SEO techniques achievable solely with money, but as already mentioned above search engines change algorithms fast. Is it really worth to invest huge amounts in short-term results?

Do you honestly believe that there are SEO secrets safe-guarded by the SEO experts? There are not. Getting high rankings in the search engines is not the result of an undisclosed alchemy. Getting high rankings implies hard work, dedication and… sure: some spending.

So let’s take a look at what you can do alone to boost search engine results positioning and increase traffic to your site, supposing you are not familiar with web coding and you’ve just begun your online business.

Step One: Domain Strategy

So you want to sell your products online, let’s say wine. What you need to do is get a domain related to your field of activity. For wine (please note: this is just an example, not advertising for any website) a domain such as http://www.wine-pages.com/ will do just fine, because, as you see, it contains your main keyword “wine”. Once you’ve purchased your domain and chosen your domain host, (please no free hosting providers) place it online as a single landing page. Instead of “under construction” write on that page some basic information about your company, provide contact details, write a short summary of what you hope to achieve with your website or what your potential customers could find there, and specify the expected launching date.

Step Two: Promotion Strategy Part One

Yes, you’ve got that right. Start promoting your website. Immediately. It’s true, you don’t have a full operational website just yet, but you do want it indexed in the major search engines and you’ll definitely need a few back links to get those high rankings you dream about. At this point in your ranking strategy stay away from press releases, but do write relevant articles related to your field of expertise. If your site is about wines, then write an article explaining how wine could benefit human health and what dangers are related to it. Don’t forget to include a link to your website in the anchor text (also called “about the author” or “resource box”) and submit your article to a few reliable article submission sites. Searchwarp or GoArticles are very good for this purpose. Writing articles leads us to…

Step Three: Content Strategy

Write your own content. Please don’t copy! It’s not ethic. You don’t want your visitors to read your pages and leave saying: hey, I’ve read that somewhere. Write your pages with your visitors in mind, but make sure you consider the search engines as well. It’s not so difficult to write optimised content. Let’s see: you sell wine. What kind of wine? Red. That’s good, so choose “red wines” as your main keyword phrase. But there are too many companies selling red wines. You should then optimise your content for something more specific than that. Where is this wine produced? California? Perfect: California Red Wines. Well, that’s your main keyword phrase.

But it is not enough to choose one phrase. Let’s think about a second phrase to bring more targeted traffic to your website. What about “homemade red wine”? It could work if that’s really what you are selling. Think about it: don’t deceive your visitors hoping to rank higher in the SERP! At the end, it doesn’t matter how many hits you get to your site if no one buys your products.

As you see, it’s not such a philosophy to choose your keywords. Just think what best describes your product and you’ve got it right.

You’ve got your two main keyword phrases. Now start writing your content.

Place your main keyword phrase ONCE in the title (header):

Example: California Red Wines for Special Dinner Parties

Write your content. Try to write at least 300 words and include your main keyword phrase two-three times in the text. Two times for the second phrase will do just fine. Also include a few variations of the words in the main keyword phrases: Californian, reddish, wines, vineyard, winery, home, etc. Make sure your content is readable. Read it our loud. How does it sound? Well if you like it, you’re done. That’s all the optimising you need for the content.

Step Four: Write the Meta Tags

Yes, you can do it yourself. You write the Meta tags and the web coder will know exactly what to do with them.

The main Meta-tags you can write are: title, description, keywords.

You wrote your own content and chosen your own keywords. Remember? You’ve got two main keyword phrases: “California Red Wines” and “Homemade Red Wine”. That’s your Meta Title tag: California Red Wines | Homemade Red Wine. Please note: there are no “and”, “or” in the Meta title, but your very own keyword phrases. Many search engines use the title tag to determine website relevancy. As these keywords are moderately repeating in your text, you are already on the right path.

The second important tag is the page description tag. That’s also a central for a few search engines. Keep it short, to the point and try to include some keywords there too. Moderately. Don’t spam the search engines! The description should be written like a sales pitch, calling potential visitors to action: “Buy full of flavour homemade Californian wines from our company! Taste Californian winemaking tradition with every sip!”

About this description: is short, to the point, keyword rich and appealing. Both search engines and visitors are going to like it. There is no exaggeration there, no “best of” no “extraordinary”. Just the metaphor “taste tradition” increases the value of the simple statement: “full of flavour wines”.

Meta keywords… well, you already know them: California red wines, homemade red wine, winery, winemaking, Californian, home. The shorter your keyword tag, the better.

Step Five: Chose a Web Designer

A complete wed development service is costly. If you wrote your texts alone, you already know why. But there are web companies offering low cost solutions for small businesses: simple coding, no text optimisation, and no search engine submission. Hey! You don’t need it anyway. If you’ve followed the first four steps, you are already far! Just insist that your web designer creates a user-friendly layout, respects the Meta tags you wrote, includes relevant alt attributes to your images and provides a valid html code. Ask your web coder to stay away from frames and flash. Plain html is what search engines like best. Besides, many users just hate waiting for fancy flash sites to load.

Step Six: Write a Press Release to Announce Your New Web Presence – Promotion Part Two

Once you have the complete website online write a relevant press release and submit it to a few online media outlets. There are online press portals where you can submit your press release for free, so don’t ignore this important step: it will bring you a few extra one way links. Having many sites pointing to your website will determine the search engines to index your site and place it higher in their results. You don’t need to submit your site to google: google will come to you, following these links.

Well, these are some basic steps that will help you cut costs. But for many entrepreneurs time means money. So if you don’t have the time to do-it-yourself, make sure you choose a reliable web development company, one that will not throw your site into the black SEO trap, one that will not make false promises such as “top ten results… guaranteed”.

Mihaela Lica, founder of the online PR, web development and SEO company Pamil Visions is an experienced journalist, with a broad online public relations knowledge. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mihaela_Lica

by Scott Hughes

My clients often ask me, “Do I need to do business on the Internet?”

They want me to compare and contrast online business with offline business. I usually just give them the bluntest response: The phrase ‘business on the Internet’ is redundant. Like breathing the little bit of air left at the top of a sinking car, the remaining offline businesses are just trying to last as long as possible in the new ever-changing technological world. Like the dinosaurs, offline entrepreneurship is an artifact of history.
The question is not “Do I need to do business on the Internet?” The question is “Do I need to do business?” If you need to do business, than you have no choice but to do it on the Internet.

You need not fear the Internet. Many people new to the Internet business seem nervous or even afraid at the thought of doing business online. Many people hesitate to move their business to or start their business on the Internet. However, they should fear offline business! One can find opportunity, new developments, and emerging markets all over the Internet. The offline market dries up more and more everyday. It is not the desk and computer that business-people should avoid. It is the “brick-and-mortar” store that is dangerous and failure-ridden.

The Internet is the Wall Street of the 21^st century.

The great thing about this new Wall Street is the empowerment it gives to the little guys and to the beginners. The questions of a beginner (or an expert for that matter) are always one Google search away. With an email account a new entrepreneur can instantly talk to anyone anywhere in the world. Even better, with a website a new entrepreneur can do business with anyone anywhere in the world. In the comfort of one’s own home or local office, one can fiber-optically connect to people, businesses, and information in an instant.

No longer is this form of business capability monopolized by high-rollers with private jet planes and satellite picture phones.

Such efficient and available access to the Internet brings opportunity - opportunity not just for the few, but rather freedom of opportunity for everyone. To those who worship meritocracy, the Internet truly is the messiah.

So, if you plan on doing business, you have to do it on the Internet, but that’s not a bad thing; that’s a great thing.

About The Author: Scott Hughes creates and runs many successful e-businesses. Read more articles like this on his Web Business Resource blog at http://www.webbizresource.com/.

You may republish this article if you keep all links intact and keep the “About The Author” footer.

by David E Nettey

Many people start a website because they think that it is going to make their business grow, or get their name in front of a lot of people; and this can definitely be true. But unfortunately, without the appropriate amount of promotion nobody will know about your site; and if nobody knows about your site it is not very useful.

Website content is one of the most important aspects of promoting your site. If you have good, informative website content people will visit your site just to see what you say next. They will spread the word that your information is top notch, and word of mouth will start to increase your traffic. When searching for website content, you will want to stick to information that is easy to understand, but also informative to the people that will be reading it. Website keywords are important if you are looking to get your site ranked high on the search engines. For example, if you are writing about home based businesses you will want to make sure that you use applicable keywords such as work from home, home based, online business, and so on. This way the search engines will recognize your site.

In order to increase website traffic you will need to have a good promotion strategy in place before you even make your website live. Your website marketing campaign will be what decides if you get a lot of traffic, or if your site is just sitting stagnant. A good website marketing campaign will incorporate many different promotional tactics in order to ensure that you do not miss any important avenues.

If you already have a website, but are having a hard time increasing traffic you may want to look into updating your website. Updating websites is one of the best ways to increase traffic because you are giving it a complete makeover. This way you can have the same domain name, but advertise that you are launching a new and improved site. This should draw interest from outsiders who are interested in your industry.

To find a good website marketing strategy you may want to ask for help from other people in the industry. If you know of another successful website that is similar to yours, you may want to ask them what they do as far as website marketing is concerned. Often times they will be able to tell you exactly what works, and what you need to avoid. This way you will already be ahead of the game from the very beginning.

Overall, it is important to have a solid website promotion strategy. This way you will ensure yourself that you website will be worth the time and money that you put into it.

Copyright © David E Nettey

by Tiffany Sutton, TheWorkPlaceSucks.com

Although I’m an early morning person, I get up when I’m well rested. I don’t have an alarm clock. I put about 2,000 miles on my vehicle each year and fill it up with gas maybe once or twice a month. Compared to the 15,000 miles a year and $250 a month for gas, when I was in the workplace. I used to spend $80 a month on dry cleaning and $250-$300 a month on going out for lunch. Now, dry cleaning costs me about $30 a month and I eat my lunch here most of the time. (I have been able to eat healthier as a result of this.)

I used to spend a lot of money on a work wardrobe, as being trendy and image were everything in my line of work. When you add up all of these things, it’s a lot of money I am no longer being forced to spend. I have more time to focus on the things and people that are important to me. I proved that I could in fact make a decent living working here, even more in some months than I was able to make in my highest paying job. I can write off a portion of my expenses based on the fact that I am running a business.

Daily errands, vet visits, house hunting, or meals with my family are never an issue. Putting my own back against the wall forced me to be accountable for what I did (or didn’t do) everyday. It made me a better person. I knew if I didn’t make effort, I wouldn’t have any income. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you put yourself in this position. My only regret was not having done it sooner!

When I see people leaving for work in the pouring rain, I am so thankful I don’t have to do that anymore. I don’t miss one thing about being in the workplace. I am definitely more self confident than I was in working for someone else. (In fact, they were my biggest motivation!) It’s hard to put your best foot forward when someone is telling you how and which foot to use.

Overall, I am much happier and healthier. I used to always get sick in the workplace, always under extreme stress. (Traffic, employer, sales quotas, co-workers, schedules.) This enables me to work when and with whom I want to. Imagine that. I no longer wish to cater to other people to have an income. I am doing exactly what I want to do at this point in my life. My happiness and freedom are worth more to me than any amount of money.

About The Author: Tiffany Sutton is the author of the e-book, The Truth About Working At Home, availiable at her website: TheWorkPlaceSucks.com .

by Aaron Walker

The best way to start this article is to highlight its purpose with a relevant quote - and of one of my personal favourites: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail” - Benjamin Franklin. We don’t always pay enough attention to the wisdom of those who have come before us. This idea rings as true today as it did back then especially in business issues. Realistically nobody is going to deliberately set out on a new business venture planning to fail almost entirely. That, however, is exactly what many new online entrepreneurs actually do. They’re totally and utterly unprepared for what lies ahead of them and 95% of them will never achieve anything above a few dollars per month income. So what exact steps do you need to take to fail at making money online?

Do not attempt to research your market under any circumstances. Don’t even dream of checking how competitive or profitable a market might be. Simply pick the first idea that pops into your head and design a product or website around it and then hope that the money comes pouring it. Market and keyword research is for suckers right?

Now you need a webhost for your new “creation”. Never research the forums and messageboards for feedback on great webhosting. No just go ahead and find the cheapest, most unreliable, most akward, free web hosting package on the ‘net and upload your work to that. Who cares if it’s covered with annoying banner ads, shuts itself down for hours at a time and the tech support guys never get back to you? A webhost is a webhost and your potential customers and visitors won’t care will they?

Do not focus on a single niche market. Build a website that has information on everything in the universe and that is purely random in nature. While you’re at it sign up for as many flashing, rotating banner programs as you can and just paste them all over the place. It doesn’t matter if they’re for dating, viagra or lasik eye surgery - your visitors are sure to just keep clicking on them so you can get paid.

Forget about mailing lists. All the guru types are full of crap when they say “the money is in the list”. Never set up a sequential autoresponder series on your website. Basically do everything you can to avoid collecting customer and visitor information. Oh and never offer any kind of incentive for them to give you this data.

Search engines? Smearch engines! You’ve spent at least an hour designing your website and you have it stuffed full of the right words. That’s what search engines love don’t they? I mean your website is such a work of art that Google, Yahoo and MSN will be beating a path to your door to send visitors to you. Title tags, Meta Description tags? Pointless! Building incoming links? Why bother! Somebody said that SEO was all hocus pocus anyways…. so they’re probably right aren’t they?

Do everything yourself. Spend weeks learning html, php and graphic design. Create all your own templates, write every single word of content yourself and never, ever stop. Never invest in any tool which might make your life even a little bit easier or make you more productive. Nobody can do it any better than you right? Why outsource your work and pay somebody else when you’ll get it all done… eventually… one way or the other.

Never finish any project you start - no matter what. Once you get 50% of the way through any online project just stop and leave it there. Start on the next project because you’re bored with the last one. Your ideas are so utterly brilliant that they’ll generate money regardless of whether or not you finish them.

Never try anything different. Don’t create a new line of products or even dream of becoming involved in a different market. Do not create a mixture of Adsense and affiliate sites. Create an information product to sell online? Why would you even try? Don’t attempt to learn anything new and do not, under any circumstances, find a mentor that you can learn from. You know best after all.

Does the above seem overly sarcastic and cynical? I’d agree - it is. The shocking part is that I’ve personally made all of the above mistakes to some extent over the years - as have the vast majority of online business people. Use this article to help you avoid making the same mistakes. Now that you know where all the pitfalls are you can just sidestep them on your way to success.

by Scott Hughes

Most experienced web professionals cannot think of a worse way to market an online business than with spam emails, or anything that seems like spam emails. Spam earns a business a bad reputation, the risk of getting black-listing, and pissed off customers… nothing more. There is a way to get your business links into the email boxes of potential customers without self-destructive spam. That method is publishing an ezine, an electronic newsletter or electronic magazine, sent out via email.

As an internet business owner, having your own ezine gives you the promotional benefits of email marketing without the drawbacks of spam-like email ads. By sending out an ezine, you regularly remind old customers and potential customers of your business, by providing them with a complementary service. You not only retain your respectability with your market, but also increase it. A long list of interested potential customers happily receive a free magazine/newsletter from you. Talk about win-win.

In addition to the amount of benefits an ezine entails, starting one is rather easy.

First, you decide your ezine’s subject (e.g. sports, news, or etc.). Obviously, you should choose a subject that relates to your online business. For example, if you have a website selling fishing equipment, you can make an ezine about fishing.

The second step is to create an opt-in option on your website. If people register at your site or purchase something, a great place to put an opt-in option is on the registration or check-out page. Otherwise, the best place to add an area where a customer can sign-up is on your website’s homepage or a common-element (i.e. a part of your website that’s on every page of your site, usually a header, footer, or sidebar). You should not need to create a separate sign-up page, because you only need the customer’s’ email, and perhaps a name.

The third step is to begin writing your ezines. Unless you have a staff of writers, you probably will have to get some of the articles for your ezine from third-party sources. In most circumstances, you can just get free articles from a multitude of online repositories (e.g. ezinearticles.com). Your ezine doesn’t need to be long, just a few articles per issue. Remember to include any news with regarding your business and a link back to your website. (For more tips about ezine writing, please visit http://webbizresource.com/?cat=9 .)

Done right, ezine publishing offers internet business owners a great way to honestly market and promote their website.

About The Author: Scott Hughes creates and runs many successful e-businesses. Read more articles like this on his Web Business Resource blog at http://www.webbizresource.com/. You may republish this article if you keep all links intact and keep this “About The Author” footer.

by Chantelle Schmidlin

I spend a lot of time reading cleverly written articles by Affiliate marketing experts covering topics like “what is an affiliate program”, “how to go about marketing your business through affiliates”, “how to go about choosing an affiliate network”, “getting more out of your affiliate program” and many many more along these lines.

I have, however read very few articles on developing good affiliate relationships and really knowing who your affiliates are. Is this an important aspect of a successful affiliate program? YES! Without good affiliates, no affiliate program can be truly great!

Developing Your Existing Affiliates First

So, how to develop those relationships, I hear you ask? Simple. Let’s start with the affiliates you already have, even if they generate measly amounts of traffic or sales. These are people who have already expressed an interest in wanting to sell your product on your behalf, but their plans to promote you have not necessarily worked, or they have placed a banner or a link in a position that is not optimal on their sites or worse yet, they have implemented the tracking codes incorrectly. Your task is to get these affiliates generating big(ger) sales!

Draw up a list of who they are, excluding the top 20% of registered affiliates you have. This top 20% are your Super Affiliates. Incentivise them, get their feedback, and have your Affiliate Relationship Manager visit their sites every month. Most importantly, speak to them!

With the rest of the list, get into contact with every one of them, get to know them. Often all that is required is a human voice to guide them through the basics of the program. Host an Affiliate Conference to train your affiliates on your system and how it works. Treat them to a day of lunch, fun interactive workshops and allow them to give you suggestions, ask questions and really get involved. The best feedback you could ever hope for is the feedback you will get from your affiliates. Chances are they are affiliates with other companies too, and they will know a lot about how it works.

The Value of Tracking

Pay special attention to affiliate sites that generate a lot of clicks but no sales. Start by offering specific tips on which links are performing best. Propose new placements on the site for your links. Check the tracking. Do some research into the demographic of the affiliate site, and see if it matches the type of user you know is successful on your site. For example, chances are that a 30 year old, mid-income group woman may be interested in (so she clicks) but unable to purchase a Ferrari, for example (high clicks, low sales). The success of your program and the relationship you have with your affiliates is dependent on finding the right match!

The Benefits of Relationship Building

What you hope to achieve by doing all this, combined with regular contact with your affiliates, are good solid affiliate relationships. Affiliate marketing is all about these relationships and they can only develop if you take the time to understand who your affiliates are. You’ll find that this time spent will pay off in the way of happy relationships and, therefore, business success.

Remember, size doesn’t necessarily matter when it comes to affiliate marketing. You don’t have to have a huge database of mediocre affiliates. Rather, concentrate on getting to know the affiliates you have by keeping the numbers down and on building those relationships first! Less is sometimes More!