Web Business Resource

by Ran Aroussi

One popular way you can make money with your website or blog is by promoting affiliate programs. Many people however have found that they do not make money with affiliate marketing - so what are the secrets? How can one ensure that they do make money from affiliate products?

The first step in making money with affiliate products is to have some way of capturing leads. Few people make sales the first time someone comes to their website or blog so you need to create some way of staying in touch with those who are interested. If you have a website this can be done using a lead capture page, if you have a blog you may wish to offer a newsletter on your blog or some free product that people need to give you their email address for.

This brings us to the second point: people won’t generally just give you their email addresses on a lead capture page or a blog. You need to offer them something free! Either create, have created or find a product with giveaway rights related to your affiliate products that you can give to your customers in order to get their email address. Once you have given them something of value and you have their email addresses, you will find your affiliate marketing that much easier.

If you create a freebie or have it created for you then turn it viral. This means that you allow other people to give it away as well and so you multiply your marketing. Embed the freebie with your affiliate links and then when people give out your product and follow the links they will be your affiliate links and you will gain the commission. This means that you now have a whole free sales force advertising your affiliate products for you.

Another important aspect of affiliate marketing is targeted advertising. Use forums, article marketing and email groups to advertise your affiliate products to people who are genuinely interested in the subject. Find forums on your topic, write (or have written) articles where you can advertise your affiliate links and join email groups where you can post helpful advice related to your affiliate products.

The secrets to affiliate marketing therefore lie in having a way to follow up on people who are interested in your affiliate products. An easy way to do this is by giving away a valuable freebie. Even better is if you can make this a viral freebie with your affiliate links in it so that you can multiply your affiliate marketing efforts. Use targeted advertising to get leads to come to your page with forum marketing, article marketing and email groups related to your affiliate products.

About The Author: This article was written by Ran Aroussi of http://www.AffiliatesGarage.com - a free service you can use to display ClickBank & PayDotCom text-ads on your website or blog. Go to http://www.AffiliatesGarage.com to get your “AdSense-style” affiliate ads that are relevant to your content and earn up to 75% commission.

by Jaz Lai

The tremendous growth of internet has thrown open several high income business opportunities. Many of these opportunities have little or no risk. And all this can be done from the comfort of your home. If you are willing to put in the time and effort, opportunities are plenty to make a high income.

Before looking out for high income business opportunities, you need to identify your niche. This will give you an edge and it will also reduce the risk. When you have personal interest in the business, you will be more inclined to work.

Today, one of the most popular high income business opportunities is affiliate marketing. The popularity of affiliate marketing is mainly attributed to its low risk. Many people have a wrong notion that low risk means less income. But this is not true in the case of affiliate marketing. If you are dedicated and hardworking, the earnings are huge in internet marketing.

A computer and internet connection is all that you need for affiliate marketing. You can join most of the affiliate programs for free. You also do not need to invest on products or services. You only need to make people click on your affiliate link. The purchasing and delivery of the products is also handled by the merchant’s web site. In affiliate marketing, there is also no need for employees. There are also no major legal formalities.

But before starting affiliate marketing, you need to do some basic research. Firstly, you should make a detail report about the product or service to intend to sell. People should have interest in the product you select. This is essential to make a high income.

The background of the company whose product you are intending to sell should also be checked. You need your customers to return to make an income constantly. Therefore always deal with a company which has established itself in the market.

If you are not keen affiliate marketing, you can check out the numerous online job banks. They have several different high income business opportunities.

You can earn a high income by providing online tuitions. But for this you should have a thorough knowledge about the subject you wish to handle. You can teach English to students in other countries. There is a high demand for English teachers. Another popular subject is information technology.

If you are creative, there are plenty of opportunities in web designing. There is also high demand for web content writers. You can also offer data entry and transcription services from the comfort of your home.

There are plenty of opportunities on the internet. Depending upon your skill, you can select a field. And if you are innovative, you can create your own high income business opportunities.

About The Author: Jaz Lai operates a High Income Business Opportunities. Learn how to create $10,045 sales in 24 hours just by sending out 5 emails without any list or website. http://www.onlineearningmakeeasy.com/free-report, Recommended resources http://www.jazlai.com

by Tom Thomas

Ok, you’ve purchased one of those money-maker products and it’s giving you all sorts of ideas for making money online. Now what?

Although it’s possible to generate Internet income without a website, you’ll eventually want one or even several so you can get listed in search results. But don’t forget, search engines love to send visitors to content-rich websites, so you’ll want to cram your sites with useful information. Here’s how it works… Good content impresses your visitors, who are then coaxed into buying.

What can you do to boost your fledgling online business? Study and learn, and then keep studying and learning! I know it sounds like work, but competition on the Internet is fierce and soon only the very knowledgeable will succeed. You can make yourself one of the success stories.

Here’s how to build a website business that will put more online cash in your pocket.

Step 1: Buy a product that includes a free, starter website.

Some money-making products offer a free website after you purchase the package. It’s a great start for your Internet empire, so take advantage of the offer.

Recommended: “Adwords Miracle”, “The Ultimate Wealth Package”, “The Rich Jerk”.

Step 2: Use Adwords ads to get traffic to your website in a hurry.

Check out books from the library or book stores to get familiar with Google Adwords (that’s the name of Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) ad program). These ads appear in the “Sponsored Links” area, to the right of web search results.

How does Adwords work? You pick targeted keywords and write a brief ad to entice your visitors to click. It’s the quickest way to get traffic to your website, but it will cost you. You bid on the keywords you want your ad to be listed for and pay the bid price each time a visitor clicks on your ad.

Recommended: If you have the money, buy at least one information product that teaches the basics of PPC advertising and gives you some insight into the techniques professional marketers use. Two excellent products are “Adwords Miracle” and “Beating Adwords”.

Step 3: Learn some HTML and put Adsense ads on your websites.

You will want to adjust and adapt your websites to add more income-producing content. For example, Google has a free program called Adsense where you place Google Adwords ads on your web pages. Google gives you the instructions making it easy to place Adsense ads on your web pages, as long as you know basic HTML.

Adsense ads are matched to the content on your pages so they’re relevant to your website and of interest to your visitors. If someone clicks on an Adsense ad from your website you get credit for the click at approximately 50% of the per-click cost the ad owner pays Google.

Here’s the benefit of Adsense: if your visitors aren’t ready to buy the products on your website, they may want to click on a relevant Adsense ad instead. If they do, you get some income to offset the cost of any Adwords ad they clicked to get to your site in the first place. In fact, some people actually make a living from Adsense revenue. You could be one of them!

Recommended: Your public library has books and CD-ROMs that can train you in basic HTML. If you prefer online instruction, try the free courses at W3Schools: (http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asp). For Adsense information: (https://www.google.com/adsense/).

Step 4: Become fluent in SEO (Search Engine Optimization.)

This is a fancy phrase that simply means adjusting the content and some of the HTML to make your websites more appealing to search engines, like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Search engines look for keyword-rich content and certain HTML tags to determine the topic of your site. The more “search engine friendly” you make your website, the higher you will appear in the search results. But why bother, if you’re forking-out cash to have Adwords ads send traffic to your site?

Consider this… Statistics show that searchers trust and click normal search engine results more than Adwords ads. So, if you tweak your site a little bit you will eventually get FREE search placement. Instead of clicking on one of your expensive Adwords ads, a prospective customer will see your website listed in the general search results and click there instead. That, my friend, is a NO COST click! Well worth a little study and some massaging of your website content and HTML.

Recommended: SitePro News. Sign up for their free newsletter about site promotion and search engine optimization at http://www.sitepronews.com. This is a quality site that won’t spam you.

Step 5: Repeat, then repeat again.

Once you’ve mastered the above strategies, you simply create more websites using what you’ve learned. Check the money-making product you originally bought for ideas for website topics and products to sell.

Your Strategy Summary.

Ok, let’s review how the whole process works. Here’s what you do:

(1) Buy a money-making product with a free website that jump-starts your online business.

(2) Use Adwords to generate quick traffic to your website.

(3) Put Adsense ads on your site to offset your Adwords costs.

(4) Tweak your HTML and website content to improve your search engine placement and visitor interest.

(5) Create more websites using the free site as a template and duplicate your success, over and over again.

That’s how money is made on the Internet. There’s no real trick to it, you simply go from one successful website to another, earning a little money from each one. With some study and a certain amount of work, you’ll eventually own a website empire that generates enough cash for you to make a comfortable online living.

by Alastair Harris

What is Affliliate Marketing? Why is the internet a buzz about Affliliate Marketing? And why to dot com millionaires always seemed to be involved in some sort of Affliliate Marketing?

If you plan to build an internet business or internet empire without a doubt affliliate marketing is something you need to become involved with.

So let’s answer the first question, What is Affiliate Marketing? Affliliate Marketing is selling on behalf of someone else in return for a percentage of the sale. You stock no product, don’t need to package or handle, nor do you have the normal business overheads. What you do need with Affliliate Marketing is web presence. The internet is now so huge - 8 Billion pages and growing - that the chance of someone stumbling on your site is low to nil without doing some tricks of the trade. (see my article or website on generate traffic and create hits) for further on that topic.

The simple fact of the matter is you will not get sales if you don’t get traffic. Think of it this way - an affliliate product is sold by advertising, therefore what will generate more sales? One ad or thousands of ads? That’s pretty easy, the more ads, the more traffic, the greater the number of sales. Understand that the conversion rate on the internet is low. A conversion rate is the number of views before a potential sale. Normally this hovers around 1%. It tends not to matter what you are selling this rate tends to remain the same, your offer could be the very best on the net but still the conversion rate tends to be 1% - or one in hundred visitors will buy and make you money. Anyone with a conversion rate of 3% would be considered to be doing amazingly well and most people can not achieve this kind of result. Compare this with the conversion rate of people visiting the local shopping center, apart those teenagers who just love to ‘hang’, most people going to the shops buy at least something.

Obviously the internet is a different kind of market. People are in the comfort of their own homes. The psychology of the sale is very different. Whereas people going to the shops are buying neccessities like the weekly groceries, online people are tending to buy luxuries. The spur of the moment sale is less demanding as well, because people can bookmark and know they can come back later - they can delay the purchase decision with no fear of losing their chance to purchase. Some internet marketers have tried to overcome this by saying only 50 left, only 33 left, etc, having a count down. But as they tend to be selling information packages and not hard products people still to not have the need to impulse buy. Whereas at the shop they are aware the stock is limited and may be sold out next week so the buy now mentality rules, hence why we continue to have increasing credit card debt.

However just because the impulse buy is not the overriding feature on the internet does not mean sales to not occur. They do, and do so on a regular basis. In fact just about anything and everything is sold via the net. Companies already on tight advertising budgets realise you can not dominate the net like you can television or radio advertising. You might have sole sponsership rights to a particular sports team or sports star i.e. Nike with Tiger Woods, but you can’t dominate eight billion individual pages. So the smart companies decide that the cheapest way to increase there internet present is to appeal to the millions of internet webmasters, etc. How? By giving them a slice of the action, from about 5-10% for sales of traditonal items e.g. flowers, hotel stays, etc up to 75% for informational products or services. Whilst one affliliate ad on one site may not generate a huge income, 1000 ads on 1000 sites can generate a small fortune. Although this sort of internet presence takes time to set up, once accomplished they keep on selling day after day with no further input from you neccessary.

So if you have no affliliate partnerships get moving and get some now. If you have sites, maximise their income potential by adding affliliate banners and links. The most popular providers of affliliate links are clixGalore, clickbank and Commission Junction.

About The Author: Alastair Harris’s favourite provider is clixGalore due to their easy to use interface and there provision of traditional product lines and worldwide coverage in most currencies if clixGalore and Alastair strongly suggests you join them. Alastair also likes clickbank and their advantage is that they affliliate programs tend to have a higher payout percentage. Commission Junction is the least favourite because many of its programs are very selective about who they have as affliliate partners. For original article and links to join clixGalore and clickbank to go http://affliliate-marketing.blogspot.com & http://traffic-and-hits.blogspot.com .

by Charles Cuninghame

A friend of mine had a job selling ad space for a local newspaper. He once sold a tiny ad to a delicatessen owner in a suburban shopping mall. The deli man put on extra staff the day the ad came out to cope with all the extra customers… who never showed.

It may have been because the ad was a dud. But it’s more likely that one tiny ad simply isn’t enough to build sales. The deli man didn’t know what all successful marketers know. As Jay Conrad Levinson so clearly explained in Guerrilla Marketing, “marketing is a process and not an event”.

Many business owners I talk have an event mindset when it comes to the web. They believe a website is a marketing silver bullet. They think all they have to do is get the site on the Web and the phone will start ringing and the orders pouring in. Unfortunately that rarely happens.

Getting the site built is just the beginning. You need to generate targeted traffic by search engine optimisation and/or marketing and offline promotion, you need to ensure you provide the right information to convert that traffic, you need to ensure you have sufficient functionality to satisfy customer needs, and you need to track performance and ROI.

Some prospects aren’t ready to buy right now or need warming up before they’ll convert. So you may need some stay-in-touch marketing, such as e-newsletters, email mini-courses, and downloadable reports or white papers. And you’ll need to update the content from time to time to keep the site looking fresh.

Your website is not an event. Think of it as a work in progress. Consider how your website can benefit your organisation over the long run. Make a wish list of the things you’d have on your ideal website. You may not have the resources or budget to do them all now, but you can build your site up over time.

Review your site’s content regularly. Ask for customer input and feedback on your site. What do people like/dislike? What would they like to see on your website? Fine tune your site to incorporate the best features of competitors’ sites and other sites you like.

If you do this your site will be more successful than the vast majority of business sites on the web. Slowly but surely you’ll transform your do-nothing site into a revenue generating asset.

About The Author: Charles Cuninghame is a website copywriter and SEO copywriter in Sydney, Australia. For a free e-book on how to improve the ROI of your website click here: http://www.text-centric.com/free/

by Adam McFarland

Here’s the scenario: one morning you open your email and your inbox is flooded with emails that your site isn’t working properly. Maybe your text or images don’t look right, or even worse maybe your site isn’t properly processing credit card transactions. How could this happen when you didn’t change a thing? Well, that morning could be the morning later this year that Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 7.

How are people going to get IE7?

According to Kevin Yank in a recent issue of the SitePoint Tech Times:

“Word on the street is that, upon its release (before year’s end), IE7 will be pushed out as a forced update to Windows XP users everywhere, as was done for Service Pack 2. The move to IE7 among the end-user masses will not be a gradual migration, but a sudden and significant shift.”

One night Windows XP users will go to bed using IE6 and the next morning they’ll wake up, install a routine update, and just like that they’ll be using IE7 to browse the web. That means, that as a site owner, you need to begin preparing immediately for IE7’s impending release.

What’s different about IE7?

From a user’s perspective, improvements include tabbed browsing, better printing, RSS feed integration, more advanced searching, and better security features, as well as a plethora of add ons to enhance the user experience (similar to Firefox extensions).

However, the most important changes that will have a more direct impact on how your site is loaded and displayed are:

• RSS integration – IE7 automatically detects RSS feeds and asks you to subscribe. It also gives you the option to have IE7 auto-check for feed updates (even when it’s not running). Is your feed properly recognized by IE7?
• Updated CSS behavior – the IE7 team worked very closely with the W3C workgroup to ensure standards compliance. They made over 200 changes from IE6 to become compliant with CSS2.1. Even if your site is standards compliant, it may not be rendered exactly the same as it is in IE6 or Firefox.
• AJAX XMLHTTP Request changes – the IE blog states: “to have your cross-browser AJAX work better with IE7, you really should be invoking the native XMLHttpRequest (the cross-browser one) first to see if it’s available before instantiating the ActiveX control, instead of the other way around”
• Added security features – everything from more secure SSL defaults to disabling most Active X controls by default has been changed to help make the user’s browsing experience more secure. These changes could drastically change your users browsing and purchasing experience.

You can get full details on all of the changes by visiting the IE Blog.

What should you do?

The only way to know for sure how your site will work in Internet Explorer 7 is to download it and try. The IE7 team recently released Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1 (RC1), which can be downloaded on the Internet Explorer web site. I’d recommend downloading IE7 on a computer other than your primary machine (you still want IE6 on your primary machine at least until IE7 is officially launched). RC1 is essentially the final version of how IE7 will display sites when launched, so if your site passes the test now you’ll likely be OK when IE7 is released for real.

In testing my sites there were a few instances where my site worked flawlessly in Firefox and IE6, but had small problems in IE7. The changes I needed to make were minimal, but regardless of how well you code there could still be some potential problems. It’s better to find and fix them now than to wake up one morning and have hundreds of customer complaints!

by Shana Shane

This interesting article addresses some of the key issues regarding SEO. A careful reading of this material could make a big difference in how you think about SEO.

The best time to learn about SEO is before you’re in the thick of things. Wise readers will keep reading to earn some valuable SEO experience while it’s still free.

E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let’s just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.

So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site’s content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.

You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimization. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company.

There’s no doubt that the topic of SEO can be fascinating. If you still have unanswered questions about SEO, you may find what you’re looking for in the next article.

About The Author: Shana Shane is a Full Time Adsense Publisher and She Makes her living from Adsense. She is passionate about sharing her Adsense Knowledge: traffic.mydomainname101.com

by Wendy Mcleod

Q1. What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of guiding the development or redevelopment of a website so that it will naturally attract visitors by gaining top ranking on the major search engines for selected keyword phrases.

Q2. Why should I go in for search engine optimization?

Search engine optimization is required to gain more exposure on the Internet. This helps to drive more good quality traffic to your site. So every site needs optimization for better performance.

Q3. How long will it take me to get to the top of the search engines?

It takes around 1 month to 6 months to gain ranking. Google takes more time to spider up the websites than other major search engines

Q4. Are search engine rankings guaranteed?

A, It is not possible to guarantee top ten rankings for generic terms. Secret algorithms that are programmed by the search engines determine the rankings. No SEO firm has control over the algorithms, hence it is difficult guarantee rankings.

Q5. What are the factors on which your site rankings depend?

The below listed factors are responsible for good rankings.

o The competition for your key phrases

o Number of links pointing to your website

o How long your site has been on the web

o The magnitude of your current web presence

o How much good content is provided on your site

o The strength of your post monthly maintenance plan

o The design of your website

About The Author: Wendy Mcleod works for Internet marketing Las Vegas.

by Stephen Mcbride

Promoting a business on the web has its own challenges,albeit, a little more complicated than the normal promotional activities undertaken. No doubt, there are hundreds of ways to do this.

The challenges include presenting to a global audience, servicing more and more geographical areas and increased investment on web services, marketing techniques and back end logistics to service global customers. To begin with the following steps are necessary to make a head-way:

1. Listing: Getting listed on various business directories and associated databases is the first and foremost step in promoting a web business. Most listings are given away for free. These listings or directories are the first place when people look for products and services like electricians, designers etc.

2. Contacts: Word-of-mouth promotion can get a lot of business while starting out on a web promotion spree. Making personal connections and asking friends and relatives to buy from the site can get a lot of direct goodwill and increase traffic to the web site. In the long term, these personal contacts will keep you in good stead building local business and goodwill.

3. Website: Make sure your website is aesthetic with good, clean and crisp design and colors. Good and easy navigation is a must with easy to use shopping carts. Try and use one or two good testimonials to give the website a professional and disciplined look. Keep information on a need to know basis, product or service wise.

5. Advertise: Initially advertising on relevant sites would bring in good traffic. You can use banner or pay per click advertising to achieve this. Parallel to this, the process of search engine optimization can be undertaken, so that, when you finish off with pay per click or banner advertising, the traffic does not stop but increases due to better search engine placement.

6. Freebies and Schemes: Another important way to advertise on the web is to combine advertising with freebies or discounts on products and services that can induce visitors to come and buy from the website.

8. Branding: Whatever advertising route you may take, make sure that branding and image remains intact. Always remember web promotion is to help you promote your brand and is not a substitute to normal business. Always treat web business and promotion as an extension of normal business unless you have only a web based business. The synergy between normal and web based business should remain intact irrespective of marketing and sales practice differences.

Start small on web promotion and accelerate gradually to have a successful long term web based business.

About The Author: Stephen Mcbride’s flash website is located at http://noahsraindesign.com

Starting an Online Business? 6 Must Have Features That Your Hosting Company Should Provide for Free
by Lynn VanDyke

In a recent study, 72% of Americans expressed interest in starting their own online business. Are you one of those folks? If so, I have some valuable secrets to share with you.

One of the first issues you will address as an online business owner is selecting your hosting company. A hosting company charges you a monthly or yearly fee in exchange for allowing the world to “see” your site online. You cannot create your online business without a hosting company. Choosing a hosting company can be extremely tricky and challenging to beginners and experts alike.

During your search for a hosting company be sure each feature listed below is included. These features are crucial to running a successful online business. With growing technology you need a smart, efficient, low cost hosting program that delivers results. Do not pay extra for these features!

Here are 6 must-have features that your hosting company should provide to you- for free!

1) Complete Traffic Analysis- You need to know how your visitors are finding you. Many hosting companies provide a below par traffic analyzer. You should know what keywords yielded visitors, what search engines referred visitors, what websites referred visitors, how many unique visitors you receive each day/month, what country your visitors are from, what page your visitor entered/exited your site, how many times each page on your site was viewed and more.

All of these traffic analysis features should come included in the cost of hosting.

2) Search Engine Optimization- Each webpage of your online business should be optimized for search engines. You have a few choices for optimizing your pages: learn how to do it yourself, pay a professional or use your hosting company’s free optimizer tool.

Learning how to optimize web pages is a long and boring process. If you are a serious online business owner, then you will not have time to learn the SEO (search engine submission) process.

Paying a professional is expensive. There’s not much more to say about it!

I’d save your time and money by allowing your hosting company’s tool to optimize pages for you. This feature is crucial to ranking well at search engines. This tool should be included in the final monthly or yearly hosting fee.

3) Search Engine Submission- Your online business must be seen! There are 3 major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are several smaller engines that are also worth mentioning. Every single page of your website should be submitted to all search engines.

The problem here is time. Who has time to read through search engine submission guidelines? Again you have the option to pay a professional, do the process yourself, or have your hosting company do it for free.

Your hosting company should automatically submit each and every webpage to all major search engines. It should submit each page upon its creation and upon making any changes. Your hosting company’s submission program should submit your site and pages within each search engine’s submission policies.

This feature should be free and included in the monthly or yearly hosting fee!

4) Newsletter- This one is often overlooked. There are many third party newsletter providers, but why pay the additional fee when your hosting company can provide the tool for no cost at all?

Be sure the hosting company follows anti-SPAM guidelines, and be sure that you have the ability to create, edit and send emails to your list at your convenience. Lastly, you need to know the statistics of your mailings. You need to know how many people opened the email, how many emails were rejected, how may people, if any, reported you for Spamming, etc.

5) RSS and Blogging Capability- This feature is blossoming as you read this article. The future of online businesses may very well rest in the hands of RSS and blogging. This tool allows people to keep in touch with your online business. Many people do not want to sign up for newsletters for fear of Spam. This is their answer.

Many people know have RSS readers. Your site visitors should be able to sign up for your RSS feed or blog to keep in touch with updates, news, specials and more. This feature should be free from your hosting provider!

6) Friendly, Business-Oriented Help Forums- There is a difference between a remote help desk and forums. These days forums are infested with cranky folks chasing the next black hat trick or trying to sell you a tool you do not need.

Your hosting company should have free and friendly help forums where other online business owners can meet, network and discuss online business issues. This may seem like a feature you can overlook, but I urge you not to.

Successful online business owners know the impact of fast, reliable help. There’s nothing worse than feeling alone and confused about online businesses. A forum filled with success-minded folks is a true gem.

These 6 must-have tools and features should all be free. Each and every one has proved invaluable to my online business success. Should you have any questions or need assistance in selecting the proper hosting company for your online business, please feel free to contact me.

Your success depends on you, your tools, and your budget! Nuture all three to the fullest and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the outcome. Best of luck!

Copyright 2006 Lynn VanDyke

About The Author: Lynn VanDyke provides several options for business owners including a “Jump Start Your Online Business” CD-ROM. Visit http://www.LynnVanDyke.com to learn more about her and her services. Lynn’s content website is ranked in all 3 major search engines and is in the top 1% of all websites worldwide according to Alexa. She recommends this hosting company for your online business: http://my.sitesell.com/buildit

by Deanna Mascle

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of rumblings around the internet marketing community that say ezine advertising is dead and gone.

I have to tell you that ezine advertising is alive and well — and still one of the most effective and powerful forms of internet marketing available.

There are several reasons this is true but I’ll simply concentrate on three main points.

Today’s ezines and newsletters are permission-based which means subscribers want to receive these messages in their emailbox. Responsible publishers are proactive about giving subscribers total control over their subscription and working closely with their mailing service to ensure as close to 100 percent deliverability as possible. Ezines deliver because they have to do so or shut down.

The experts in internet marketing and search engine optimization offer wide ranging and diverse opinions about what the best marketing technique may be, but they all agree on one point — content is king on the internet. Content is attractive to search engines and visitors alike. It is content that makes a site sticky and successful. And content is one area where ezines and newsletters reign supreme. In today’s permission-driven environment they need to deliver quality information or they’ll quickly be out of business. Imagine your ad placed in a prominent position beside high-quality information that your target audience wants. That is what ezine advertising can deliver.

If content is king then links are the lifeblood of the internet. Without links surfers could not navigate around the internet and without links search engines will not locate web sites and pages. Oneoften overlooked aspect of ezines and newsletters is the powerful text link benefits offered by ezine advertising. While most people are attracted by the immediate return of their message appearing before X number of subscribers, they do not realize that their ezine ad could work for them weeks, months and years after it was read via email. Almost all ezines and newsletters are archived on the web and because of the content they provide often those archives are crawled regularly and ranked high by search engines — and provide you with valuable back links to help increase your search engine standing.

You can dismiss ezine advertising as dead and gone and concentrate on other forms of internet marketing. Yes, you can dismiss ezine advertising, and you can miss out on immediate results from a targeted audience and you can miss out on valuable back links working for you long into the future.

About The Author: Deanna Mascle shares her Ezine Advertising tips in the free ebook “How To Write A Powerful Ezine Ad”. Publishers who want to reprint this article and/or give away the ebook away should visit How To Advertise With Ezines to learn how to benefit.

By Groshan Fabiola

Undoubtedly, online marketing is a powerful and continuously expanding industry, which has gained a lot of ground in the last few years. As a result, thousands of businesses nowadays choose to promote and sell their productsservices via the Internet, permanently aiming to acquire, develop and implement the latest, state-of-the-art online marketing solutions.

Apart from always trying to obtain and use the most efficient and competitive existing Internet marketing solutions, you should also consider building reliable short-term and long-term marketing strategies in order to improve the exposure and profits of your online business. Although they account for many other different aspects, the great majority of today’s Internet marketing solutions and strategies revolve around a common objective: attracting as much targeted website traffic as possible.

Regardless of the types of products, services or affiliate programs you are promoting and selling online, the most basic goal behind online marketing consists in attracting high-quality, targeted traffic. Although any kind of traffic can help boost the popularity of your business, only targeted website traffic is capable of increasing the profitability of your company. While normal website traffic consists of random, occasional visitors, targeted website traffic mostly consists of potential costumers! In order to start selling more and become more popular, you should channel all your efforts towards drawing large numbers of possible clients to your products or services. Here are the best ways to achieve this:

Offer valuable products free of charge! Obviously, this online marketing strategy is very effective in attracting new visitors. And if you think about it, giving away a certain type of product for free won’t actually cost you any money at all! The process of distributing free products on the Internet doesn’t cost you a dime; all you have to do is find something interesting to offer to your visitors, give it away free of charge and then simply observe the results. Popular freebie examples are: e-books, software products or tutorials.

Achieve a high position for your website in the search engines! This is a very common and extensively used online marketing strategy, renowned for its efficiency in drawing more quality visitors. However, it is important to note that the process of submitting your site’s URL to the popular search engines is not sufficient for positioning your website higher in search engine queries. In order to achieve higher search engine rankings, you should carefully optimize every page of your website, improve your site’s content and try to convince more affiliate websites to link to your pages. By doing so, you will soon begin to achieve higher search engine rankings for your website and attract more costumers to your business.

Consider advertising in ezines! This type of advertising is very cheap (especially compared to traditional, offline means of advertising) and can get you lots of new quality visitors in no time. Ezine advertising brings many benefits to website owners: it is very reliable, doesn’t require much time and effort, and it is also more affordable than other forms of advertising. In order to get the most out of this commonly applied Internet marketing strategy, you shouldn’t miss the opportunity to publish your own ezine! E-magazines and e-newsletters have great potential for attracting more targeted traffic to your web pages; all you have to do is come up with a way for website visitors to accept receiving your regular email notice. This strategy will help you establish and maintain a permanent connection with your websites’ visitors, and is vital for hanging on to your already existing costumers.

Establish joint ventures! Joint ventures are a very effective way to get high-quality, targeted traffic and thus boost the profits of your business. Considering the fact that joint venture marketing is extremely popular these days, you shouldn’t face any problems in finding competitive joint venture candidates. You should contact multiple webmasters who are interested in forming joint ventures and stick with the most serious and reliable ones.

Write and post articles at your website! Last, but not least, this Internet marketing strategy is renowned for its simplicity and great efficiency in attracting new visitors to the pages of your website. This method mainly consists of creating topical, interesting articles, posting them at your website (it is best to post articles whose contents are relevant to your business) and offering other webmasters the permission to republish your articles on their websites. As long as your website contains articles of good quality, this strategy works like a charm!

These popular online marketing solutions and strategies are renowned for their great potential of attracting more targeted traffic to businesses who sustain their activity online. Spend some time experimenting with each of these methods and use the ones that best suit you and the business you are running.

About The Author: Groshan Fabiola’s website has information about online marketing and internet marketing.