Archive for November, 2009
Many people, especially newcomers, when they register their domain names, are convinced to sign up for a hosting account with the company that registered their domain name. That could be godaddy.com, yahoo.com or any number of other domain name registering companies. That’s really unfortunate, because the hosting services those people usually get don’t generally meet the needs of an online entreprenuer. Those hosting accounts just lack the functionality you really need to promote your business.
Here’s what happens – the domain name registering companies will make you an offer of a low level hosting plan. Since the customers that are registering the domain names are usually beginners, they aren’t aware of all the hosting choices that are readily available elsewhere. They think that just because the company they’re dealing with can register domain names, they must have the best hosting too.
To make a large story short, people that buy into the hosting that’s offered when they register their domains are usually disappointed once they get started with their new online business. Although they got what seemed like a low price, they’ll find out later, when they compare it to other offers, that it really wasn’t such a good deal.
But that’s only part of the problem. As they become more and more involved in running their new online business, they discover that there may be some special software that they want to run on their website. Perhaps it’s a shopping cart or maybe a content management system. When they look at the requirements of the software and compare those requirements to their hosting account, they’ll see that their hosting account won’t support the new software. You see, most marketing related software will use PHP or mySQL databases. If your web hosting account doesn’t support PHP and mySQL, you’re just out of luck.
Of course, these customers can go back to their hosting provider, who will explain to them that the features required for support of the new software are available to them, but they’ll have to ‘upgrade’ their hosting account. And the upgrade isn’t free, by the way. Their original hosting may have cost only $7.95 a month, but the new, upgraded hosting will cost them $25 or $30 a month. Now, all of the sudden, that great hosting deal doesn’t seem so great anymore.
Don’t waste your time and money with ‘bargain’ web hosting that won’t do the job.
Another mistake is trying to run your business with free hosting. First of all, if you’re looking for free web hosting because you’re not willing to spend a small amount of money for your own web hosting account, you might as well just give up right now. If you want to do everything for free, you’re not looking for a real business, you’re looking for a hobby.
Usually, when you go with free hosting, your website URL will end up being something like “freehosting.megacities.com/18987/~parkavenue/1793″ If your only interest is in having a place on the web to display your family photos, maybe the free hosting is right for you. But if you’re trying to run a business, the free hosting can be a big handicap. For one thing, the URL doesn’t look very professional.
And the free hosting companies tend to display their own advertising banners on the pages of your website. How does that look to your potential customers? Just imagine that if you’re trying to operate a family oriented business and when prospects visit your website, banners advertising “Adult Chat Rooms” are on your pages.
Types of web hosting – Primarily, there are 2 different types of web hosting. One is Microsoft Windows based and the other is Linux/Unix based. My personal recommendation is to stay away from the Windows based hosting. I’ve had friends that went with Windows hosting, and then later found out that much of the software they wanted to run wasn’t compatible with the Windows server. Most all web based software that is used for marketing purposes is designed to run on Linux servers, so I wouldn’t recommend anything other than Linux based hosting.
As we’ve established the need for Linux based hosting and that you shouldn’t get hosting from the same place you registered your domain, the question is – Where do you get hosting?
I’m going to let you in on a small secret – all those banner ads and email messages you probably see pitching hosting deals – IGNORE THEM. The absolute best hosting I’ve seen is available at dirt cheap prices on Ebay. Yes, Ebay, the online auction.
Just go to www.ebay.com and search for “web hosting reseller” By getting a reseller’s hosting account, you’ll get all the hosting you’ll ever need. Here’s how it works – A reseller’s hosting account gives you the ability to sell hosting accounts to other people. One of the benefits of a reseller account is that you can usually host an unlimited number of domains.
Right now you may be thinking this isn’t for you because you’re not interested in selling hosting to other people. You just want hosting for your own business. That’s OK, you don’t need to sell hosting with the reseller’s account. You can just use it for yourself. You can use it to host the new domain that you recently registered and then, later on, if you register more domain names, you can host those also – without paying any more money for hosting.
I bought a hosting reseller’s account on Ebay about 3 years ago. It’s full featured, reliable, and the service and support is great. I pay $139 a year and I currently have about 95 domains hosted. Do the math – that works out to a little over a dollar per year for hosting that has everything I need. I think that’s a pretty good deal.
If you don’t want to get a reseller’s account, you can get by even cheaper. I have another hosting account I bought at Ebay that only hosts a single domain, but it only costs 75 cents a month. This 75 cent account supports PHP, mySQL, has unlimited space and bandwidth, unlimited email accounts and just about everything else you could think of.
I strongly recommend that you check out the hosting offers on Ebay before you make any other commitments. Here are the features you want to make sure your hosting has -
1) Linux based web server
2) CPANEL admin control. This is the web based admin where you can check traffic stats, setup mySQL databases, setup email accounts and a whole lot more
3) Fantastico – This is an installation aid that’s really handy to have. It allows you to automatically install several high powered software applications with just a single mouse click. Want a WordPress blog? Click and you have it, ready to roll. Want an online forum – same deal, click and it’s there. Catalog and shopping cart – You guessed it, click and you’ll have it.
It goes without saying that you should check the the seller’s feedback on Ebay before you make any commitment. See what other customers have to say about the service. You want to make sure you’re dealing with someone that’s reputable.
Carson Danfield
http://www.articlesbase.com/web-hosting-articles/dont-make-these-web-hosting-mistakes-132152.html
Posted in 
You have written an absolutely fantastic e-book, put up a website and got a great domain name. You have done everything possible but your site sits there day after day with no visitors. What do you do?
Promotion and traffic generation is one of the major obstacles to making money online. Having a message and getting your message out there is all about getting visitors to your website. There are a lot of ways to generate traffic to your site and to get the best types of visitors- those who are ready make purchases immediately. This is one of the goals of any Internet marketer.
While there are a number of methods you can use, from pay-per-click to traffic buying services, knowing the types and what they can achieve will go a long way towards helping you make your decision.
Internet web site marketing techniques can range from being worthless scams designed to take your money, to targeted, keyword-focused methods to get visitors who are ready to buy products. So, naturally, you are probably looking for the latter.
First, scratch off the “almost worthless” type of traffic. These include pop-unders, guaranteed hits, surf traffic and banner impression traffic. These forms of advertisings are dated and generate almost nothing. Simply avoid these terms and you will not waste your time or money.
These forms of traffic generation are based on attaining an extremely high volume of 10,000+ visitors or more just to make one sale. If you are not prepared to purchase in high quantities – say, 1,000,000 or above, and to send them to a Squeeze Page, then this is not the way for you. A Squeeze page collects a person’s name and email address in exchange for an incentive report or offer.
Tracking is essential when you are attempting to build traffic. You want to know precisely where and how the person came to your site, so that you can duplicate things in order to increase traffic. For example, a keyword you use brings you 50 visitors in two days. You will want to duplicate that keyword or keyword phrase in order to drive higher traffic levels to your website.
Another way to track things would be if you paid for traffic and got 100,000 hits for $300. However, if that converted into $20 – $30 sales but your benchmark was $34 – $30 sales, it might not be a good advertising campaign worth repeating because you have fallen $400 short in result. After taking away your $300 investment, your profit will only be $300 instead of $700. While you did not lose money, another purchase from a different company may generate the necessary number of sales for the same amount of investment.
Knowing where your traffic is coming from is essential to your success. At the end of the month when you total up your revenue versus expenses, you want to be seeing profits. This is a given. However, if one campaign required a $200 outlay to make an income of $900, versus putting out $800 in order to make $1000 dollars, you will want to know what each one costs and the profit gained so that going forward will be beneficial for you.
You may invest $800 in the one that brought $700 profit instead of the one you had to pay $800 to make a $200 profit. It is all in the tracking. As you set up campaigns to get visitors, knowing these secrets will do more than simply attracting a broad spectrum of people to your website.
Pieter Van Der Gulik
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/internet-web-site-marketing-making-the-best-out-of-exit-traffic-482362.html
If you’re looking for the best information about the best medical billing training I’m going to help you with a few tips in this article.
Medical billing specialists actually handle a wide range of duties including medical office operations, electronic medical billing and coding, taking care of insurance forms, and using and keeping up with the newest medical billing software. Statistics report that there are more than one million of these specialists in the US.
You’ll learn the newest electronic medical billing software called medical practice management software, and the newest and improved versions are quite different from the older versions. But there is a variety of medical records software and electronic medical billing software packages that you will use.
As a medical billing specialist it doesn’t matter whether you plan to work for a health-related clinic or company or work from home. Medical clinics and physician offices, various insurance companies and your local hospital all need trained staff to take care of all the billing tasks.
The process of medical billing means taking care of the submission of medical claims and then following up on those claims to health insurance companies so you get payment for any medical services that were performed by a health or care provider.
If you take one of the Internet or online medical billing training courses you’ll learn the trade secrets and also how to use what you learn to start a medical billing business from the comfort of your home. And learning from your home computer may just be the best way for you to learn how you can start a medical billing career.
One of the first steps is to decide whether you should take your electronic medical billing training online or on a campus.
After completion of your training you can expect to earn between $25,000 and $30,000 annually if you’re working on salary. You can find medical billing jobs throughout the US, with wages ranging from $10 to $20 on an hourly basis depending upon your range of experience and your geographical location.
The smaller medical offices usually outsource billing and coding work to work-at-home medical specialists who have an established, reputable medical billing business. To completely understand the payment of a medical billing claim, the health clinic owner must have thorough knowledge of all the insurance plans that companies offer and know the laws and regulations that preside over them,
Because many health insurance claims are rejected because of faulty billing practices, doctors and health care providers only hire trained professional medical specialists for medical billing and coding. They no longer depend on regular office staff to handle it.
So if you’re considering becoming a ‘medical biller’ you need to decide whether you want to go to a local vocational or community college or take an online medical billing training course. Check with your local Better Business Bureau to check out the reputation of any local schools you’re considering. You want to make sure they have no outstanding complaints.
When deciding on the best program for you make sure to compare all the offerings and make sure it includes everything you need. Read over any contracts thoroughly so that you know exactly what you’re committing to – what it’s going to cost, what happens if you can’t complete the course, etc. Have a trusted friend, parent, spouse, partner or advisor read the contract also. If you’re going to an accredited college or university this will be less of an issue. You want to know that you’re signing up with a reputable online or vocational school.
Today starting up a medical billing business from your home is easier than ever. You don’t need a college or university degree to become a medical billing specialist. Learn all you can about medical billing before you sign up whether it’s a school online or an on-campus school.
Some of the online medical billing training programs have basic introductory classes, intermediate classes, and classes for those who are advanced. Once you finish your training you’ll be fully trained and informed and immediately ready and able to either start a work-at-home business or comfortably find a medical billing job. It’s not well publicized but the federal government has set aside money for online degree courses and you should check this out so you can save money on your course.
Helen Hecker
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-education-articles/medical-billing-training-how-to-find-the-best-avoid-scams-and-get-financial-help-455006.html
Every day, millions of people click online for a variety of reasons. From researching information to finding a date, the internet seems to offer just about everything. Work and employment has by no means taken the back burner. Thousands of people are clamoring to the internet everyday in an attempt to earn a daily income, make some money, or get financially free. And it is being proven time and time again that “there is money to be made on the internet”.
From research projects, to software engineering, the younger and eager generation is presented with a boundless array of opportunities to show off their intellectual properties. Certainly, there is no shortage of work or possibilities online since cyberspace is “virtually” limitless.
But what about investments, network marketing and the vast array of “get rich quick” schemes? Do they really work? Can you really trade in your measly $20.00 for a comfortable paycheck of $2000.00 to $5000.00 per month? The answer is “yes and no”.
Let’s take a brief moment to examine network marketing. As a network marketer, you are selling something that you already own–a membership to a website in most cases. Let’s say you pay $19.95 to become a member of company “Make You a Star Dot Com”. Your $19.95 will be payment for the product (usually information, training and marketing tools). On top of that, you have the potential of making money by “referring others” to the company “Make You a Star Dot Com”. When they join by clicking on your affiliate link, they are placed in your “downline” and you earn a fraction of their membership fee… as well as the membership fee of the people they sponsor–up to five levels deep.
Many people are of the misconception that the membership fee of $19.95 is paid for an income opportunity alone. And that they need to sit back and wait for the checks to start coming in. Of course, it wouldn’t be off the mark to say that these people were deceived into thinking so. Many network marketers do not place emphasis on the value of the product they are selling in their advertising campaigns, or what the product really is or offers. All they tout is the potential to make money just by joining. This is an impractical proposition–if everyone pays 19.95 to receive $5000.00, where does the money come from?
A typical network marketing company may offer a cutting edge training center prepared by experts aimed at making an entrepreneur out of you. It will give you all the tools, advice and information you need to run a successful business, online or off. It may include sections for example on “setting up a legal entity”, “bookkeeping and accounting”, “ecommerce and merchant tools”, “self improvement”, “real estate” etc.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you join a network marketing company, by all means, make use of what you are paying for. Go into the training center, or resources section, or back office, or whatever you call it, and max it out…get your money’s worth. The “two thousand to five thousand dollars per month” will come on the side!
In order to become a successful network marketer and earn a six figure income in the least amount of time, any “Guru” will tell you that you need to understand how to use an autoresponder programmed with a newsletter, ezine or follow up emails. It is an established fact that people tend not to buy into a program on the first pitch. So if you’re thinking of investing your precious time into this lucrative field of business, think “autoresponder, follow up messages, and subscribers”. At first, learning how to use such tools might seem like a daunting task, but like most computer technology, once you get to know it, it becomes pretty simple and transparent.
A typical network marketing company will also provide training, tools and resources on how to recruit others into the company. These may include autoresponder training, Google tutorials, web design and various other advertising strategies. However, to avoid the mass of confusion and possible wastage of money associated with first starting off in network marketing, it is best to join under a successful network marketer who will show you exactly how to copy his/her success in a no-nonsense, simple and step by step process.
Patrick Carpen
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/what-is-network-marketing-246243.html
There are so many free tools and software programs for SEO enthusiasts that it almost becomes overwhelming and difficult to grasp the ‘right’ tools to use in your SEO efforts. Everyone has their own personal preferences which makes this predicament even more perplexing.
Well enough about me and my love of words; let’s get down to business: What are some of the best free SEO tools on the web?
Cool Tools
Google Keyword Research Tool: When this free tool came out the other week we all had a little dance party in the office we were so excited! Well to be honest, there wasn’t any dancing involved but it sure did give us a reason to celebrate 
This tool is amazing! Simply type in your keyword and you can see a long list of related keywords with approximate search volumes for those keywords as well! You can even customize the results with this tool: everything from the location (country) of your keyword results to finding out which month had the highest search volumes. For more information on how to use this keyword research tool check out this great article.
This free keyword research tool immediately replaced my other keyword research tools by Wordze and SEO Book after just one test use: that’s how powerful it is. In short, the tool rocks and it instantly makes keyword research way easier and much more efficient!
HTML Playground: This tool is great for those that have limited HTML knowledge or just aren’t sure how to apply the right formatting in an easy and efficient manner. Well this free tool takes all the ‘hard work’ out of HTML coding for you. It has a list of all the most popular tags; simply click on the tag, customize the parameters and colours you desire and the HTML code is ready to go! It even shows you a preview of what your text or image will look like once uploaded! This tool is simply vital for any HTML rookie or beginner.
Firefox Extensions
There are hundreds of free Firefox extensions readily available at Firefox Add-ons. They have tools and add-ons for just about everything! My favourite Firefox add-ons for SEO are:
SEOpen: This add-on lets you place a toolbar in Firefox to quickly analyze everything from the number of Yahoo! Backlinks to verifying whether the PR of a site is legitimate or not; and that’s just the beginning. I think of it as in all-in-one SEO resource that is absolutely mandatory!
SearchStatus: This nifty little add-on simply lets you display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere on your browser. It also allows you to highlight nofollow links and comes equipped with a fast keyword density analyzer. Pretty sweeeeeet!
SeoQuake: This tool is one of the most advanced Firefox add-ons for SEO. Yet it’s perfect for both beginners and advanced users. Basically, SeoQuake displays the parameters for search results and even includes the findings into the search engine result pages ‘SERPs’ for the most popular search engines. You can then set these parameters to display by ascending or descending order; so you can search for any keyword in Google or Yahoo! and then set the order to show the highest PR’s, or the most Yahoo! backlinks, or by whatever parameter(s) you are most interested in.
And now, my favourite Firefox add-on is (insert drum roll) Speed Dial!
This add-on lets you visually display your most used websites so you can access them instantly! Forget about using bookmarks ever again! Simply open up the add-on and enter the number of columns and rows to determine the amount of sites displayed in your speed dial. To enter in the sites simply click on the boxes and type in the URL’s.
When you want to access your favourite sites simply hold CTRL and press the number of the site (number set in speed dial options) to open it up in a new tab or window. Or you can press the speed dial button which displays all your sites in one window and then you can just click on the site you want to open. Once you get the hang of this add-on you can instantly access your favourite site(s) with just a couple of clicks: saving you both time and effort! It’s a win-win situation like no other!
These cool tools and Firefox extensions are really useful and can dramatically improve your SEO efforts while simultaneously saving you time and improving your efficiency. Be sure to check them out and feel free to share your own favourite Firefox extensions!
Amy Nutt
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/cool-tools-and-firefox-extensions-for-seo-enthusiasts-530199.html
As a staff writer at ‘home based business’ we regularly answer questions submitted by our members one great topic is how an online company should handle their customer service.
Before the days of online sales, people would have no choice but to visit local retail or specialty stores. If they needed help, they would have the opportunity to talk to the employees there, face to face. Answers would come right away, or someone would get back to you within a few moments.
Now, with the amount of transactions made online growing every year from small sites to huge Amazon.com sites, people have become increasingly insistent upon better customer service. Waiting days for an email to be returned becomes stressful and irritating. Being put on hold for 20 minutes (if not longer) for a simple answer leads to unhappy customers. Questions that go unanswered altogether can lead to a customer so dissatisfied with the service they refuse to shop there again and will spread the word to friends and family about their bad experience, leading to more possible sales lost. Some may even go father, wanting to inform the entire Internet world and relate their experience on their blog, write a scathing review on consumer product sites such as Epinions.com, or even developing sites to negate the business, such as IHateEbay.com.
Neglecting customer service in a customer driven business is not a wise choice. Should a prospective customer bump into a bad review about your site even before visiting, they could be turned off completely and the sale is over before it has even begun. This is one good reason our ‘home based business’ staff personally answers e-mail questions.
Even if your business is small, there are a number of things you can do to help keep your customers happy and returning again and again.
1.)Create a page dedicated to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).People will often want to know more about your business and what you can offer them before making any purchases. What are your return policies? Shipping rates, times, and options? Do you offer discounts? There are numerous questions people may want answers to depending upon your service.
A good way of knowing which questions to post is to create a specific email for FAQ. Then you will have a good number of possible questions to post and answer for future customers. If you have an extremely comprehensive and well-organized FAQ page, you can devote more time to specific questions customers might have. Prompt response is the key to the busy business world.
2.)Make Contact Information easy to find and offer multiple ways of being contacted. Even if someone decides not to contact you, knowing they always have the option helps make them feel better and instills faith in the business. If a question is not answered on the FAQ or happens to be about a specific transaction, they can use this contact information to get the answer they need.
Obviously you may not always have earnest or excited customers emailing you with a good question, but you cannot avoid them either. Exceedingly slow response times or no response at all is a surefire way of getting a bad reputation on the Internet from angry customers.
3.)Keep your customers up to date with an Automated Sales Process. You can easily take the time to set up auto responses to customers to make purchases. An auto response lets them know you have received their order and plan to get it to them soon. You can also request they join your email list, or simply thank them for doing business with you. Using an automated process keeps you free to do other things concerning your business and your customers remain feeling satisfied that things are going smoothly.
You can use automated emails to generate more sales. Aside from feeling good and wanting to come back at another time, you can help entice your customers by giving them coupons to use on their next purchase or giving them related information about other products similar to the one they just purchased.
4.)Personalize Email Messages.Doing this one little thing helps customers feel better about their purchase and gives the impression that someone on the other end is paying attention to them and wants to see that all transactions are efficient. By simply adding the consumer’s name to the email, you have already increased the probability of that person wanting to do business with you again.
By adding in information such as items they may want to purchase due to a past purchase, sending special occasion offers, and overall tailoring the email to that customer, you can do a more precise job of increasing the likelihood that they will return. You can easily obtain software to help you manage personalization, so just a few extra time and dollars can help generate even more sales.
5.)Give your customers A Chance to Respond.If there is something a person did not like about your service, by providing them the chance to fill out a short survey or other response form, any edge they may have had can be taken off. Customers get the satisfaction of knowing they were able to give the business a piece of their mind, whether or not the business takes any action on the information.
Of course, it is always best to actually consider and execute some customer requests. Should people return and find out their suggestion was acted upon, they will know that the business actually cares about their customers and will continue to return, purchase more, and tell friends and family. Recently members of Epinions.com raised an issue about a specific ad campaign which was taken care of very quickly by Epinions staff to see that their members remained happy.
The little things you do for your customers can be the difference between your business succeeding or falling into Internet disfavor.
The staff at www.homebasedbusiness.com regularly updates the Home Based Business website with new information on the up and coming work at home jobs and other Internet based home businesses opportunities.
Bill Scott
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/great-online-businesses-have-great-customer-service-116570.html
Here’s a fact: The difference between highly successful businesses on the Internet is in the important factor of customer follow up.
Because it’s been proven that it’s many times easier to sell to your existing customers again and again, instead of going out there and finding new prospects and trying to convince them to buy from you for the first time.
So let me ask you a question: After you have spent a lot of money and energy to finally gain a prospect’s trust and get them to order your product, what do YOU do?
Do you forget about them and go for getting new prospects and continue trying hard to sell to them?
If you do this, let me be frank with you: You are losing over 80% of your profits.
So here are 3 powerful techniques to help you avoid losing so much potential profits by easily following up with your past customers…
Technique #1: Automated Follow Up Emails
This is the best and fastest way to follow up with your customers, build a strong relationship with them, and sell more and more of your products to them automatically.
You can simply use a powerful autoresponder solution and put all your followup email messages on autopilot, so that the software keeps sending them your messages week after week, month after month, completely automatically and without you lifting a finger.
Sending email is free and fast. That’s why email marketing is one of the hottest Internet marketing strategies these days that all successful Internet businesses use.
Technique #2: Customer Follow Up with A Newsletter
A newsletter is one of the best ways to keep in touch with your customers and create an on-going relationship with them.
Your newsletter will be a more effective follow up strategy than just keep sending your customers promotional, sales letter like emails, because you first pre-sell to them by giving them helpful information.
Then after you have gained their trust and respect, you will let them know about your products and it’s obvious that they will listen with a much more open-to-buy mindset.
Also creating your own newsletter is very easy. You just need to create a template for your newsletter or use ready-made free newsletter templates easily.
Technique #3: Snail Mail Customer Follow Up
Even though there’s email and it’s much faster, easier, and cheaper to send your messages to your customers via email, nail mail in still an effective medium.
And these days with the huge amount of spam that people receive, the odds that your email gets neglected is much higher than your snail mail letter. Also sending your customers a professional letter will make you stand above the crowd between your other competitions.
Final Thoughts
Today you learned 3 powerful customer follow up strategies that will easily help you at least triple your profits.
Also it will make you look unique and stand above the crowd because your competition don’t know how to use a powerful followup strategy. So your customer will see you are the most professional business out there.
Here’s a helpful article to help you more on how to create your own powerful customer follow up system easily. You will learn effective tips to put it all on autopilot to save time.
To your customer follow up success,
Ladan Lashkari
Ladan Lashkari
http://www.articlesbase.com/customer-service-articles/customer-follow-up-strategies-3-powerful-techniques-to-build-your-empire-88683.html
This is the kind of mistake that most new affiliate marketer will make. Not protecting your affiliate link will cause you to lose a lot of time and money. So this article will list why not protecting your affiliate link will cause you to lose money and what is the solution to solve this problem.
Failing to protect your affiliate links is a major blunder and mistake. Link theft is so prevalent these days that your commissions might just be stolen by some very dishonest individual. It is thus necessary to hide and cloak your affiliate links whenever you are doing any affiliate campaigns.
So what are the solutions to solve this problem? One of the ways that you can do is to shorten your affiliate link which will cloak and cover your affiliate link. You can do it from www.tinyurl.com. The 2nd way that you can do is to buy software that will enable you to link it to your domain name. When the customers go to your affiliate link, the customer will just see your domain name extensions. Both of this method will effectively cover your affiliate ID.
So remember to always cloak your affiliate links whenever you are doing a campaign for a affiliate program to prevent you from losing commissions. Do not make this mistake and you will get the maximum profits that you richly deserve.
Zack Lim
http://www.articlesbase.com/affiliate-programs-articles/affiliate-marketing-mistake-6-not-protecting-your-affiliate-links-137107.html
It was the best of times. It was the dodgiest of times. I’m
sorry Mr Dickens but the birth pains of the web revolution, as
with the French one, also require expression in the superlative.
It was unbelievable, unaccountable, indefinable and dodgy as
Hell. Good money following bad through the S-bend of e-commerce.
Those were the days, but have they changed for the better?
It was around about this time at the dawn of the new Century
that I first heard the phrase Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Although back then it was unsophisticated and tended to mean
little more than keyword stuffing in page meta tags. This meta
information being the initial lines of HTML code that serve to
define and describe web page function and format. This early SEO
was more geared towards getting eyeballs to the site at all
costs rather than pre qualifying referrals. It was the era of
dot com companies going to market with inflated values based
upon artificially boosted traffic figures. When the snake oil
salesmen could reel off estimates of $100 per online member, and
still keep a straight face.
In the race to IPO things got swept under the carpet. Rules got
bent. Ethics got twisted. It was not uncommon to type a high
profile company name or brand into a search engine and be
presented with a selection of competitors and porn sites as
rival webmasters tried to manipulate the system with keyword
spamming. Traffic was God. Big numbers meant big valuations. Get
to float, cash in then get the Hell out of Dodge.
The metrics were flawed as well. The money managers failed to
grasp the technology and were taken for a ride. Advertising
revenue was based on easily manipulated statistics and was duly
exploited. The biggest rort was the use of hits as a measuring
stick. Even today people who should know better still refer to
hits as being somehow meaningful in terms of judging a site
performance without realizing what it actually means. A hit is
recorded every time the host server is “hit” with a request for
a specific element. Most web pages display a range of components
so that for any given page display the server will be hit
multiple times. It is therefore quite simple for a sneaky web
master to deliberately distort this figure.
I can still remember analyzing a competitor’s site to find that
their nice big header image had been sliced into 100 pieces and
so registered at least 100 hits every time it was loaded,
distorting the performance figures and hence advertising revenue
for their banner ads. Other techniques involved using
transparent gifs and JavaScript code to continually refresh page
elements. The creative agencies either did not know or turned a
blind eye as the cash rolled in until it all hit the fan in mid
2000. A lot of the slick talkers went back to selling Gold Coast
swamp land but in many ways the reputation of the industry never
fully recovered.
That truism about damned lies and statistics could have been
written specifically for the web. If it can be measured it can
be tricked. Stats mean everything and nothing. The only stat
that matters for a web business is the effect on the bottom
line. Either your website is saving you money or it is bringing
it in either directly or indirectly. Intangibles such as
branding are nice spin offs but if this is the only reason you
are online then you are in trouble. The web is a pull technology
not a push one. Find out what people are looking for in your
space and then target these keywords. It is not just about
getting traffic it is about getting the right traffic.
Attracting people who are in a frame of mind to buy and
directing them to your sales team. It is about building specific
calls to action into your site and then tracking these.
The trick is that times have changed. It is now not just about
stuffing your meta tags with every key term you think might
relate to your business. Internet search has grown up and
evolved as have the search engines. Search companies reacted
against the tide of SEO spamming by moving towards relevance
listings. Google came out of nowhere and blindsided the industry
to dominate search. If you weren’t in Google you didn’t exist.
The old rules no longer applied, or at least, not as much as
they used to. The cataloguing and ranking techniques were
shrouded in mystique and marketers were subtly pushed towards
paid listings. First it was Google and Yahoo then the other
search companies went “me too” and jumped on board. It is a
trend that continues to define the market.
The Internet has grown up as well. It is no longer the side show
of the late nineties. It has infiltrated everywhere and
increasingly everyone. According to Netcraft (www.netcraft.com), who run
regular surveys of web server usage on the Internet, in February
2000 there were at least 10 million web sites in operation (a
conservative estimate). In its May 2004 report this result has
grown significantly to over 50 million sites. It is little
wonder that on the web you can be lost in the crowd and the
search engines are very quick to have their hands out for your
hard earned lucre.
Looking at the main players, Google has Adwords and Yahoo has
Overture. New kids on the block Sensis are making noises on the
fringes. There is money to be made in paid search listings.
Every day more and more people are making purchasing decisions
through their mouse and keyboard, whether at work or at home.
You might have the best products or services but are you getting
this message to them before your competitor? Paid listings can
help at least get you on the same page, even if it is in a small
advertisement on the side or above the main listings.
The key is however to choose the right horses for each course. A
smart marketer should choose wisely. Paid listings are not the
be all and end all of Search Engine Optimisation. A good
“natural” listing will always generate better results than a
contrived paid one, however obtaining good rankings are an
ongoing process. The paid links are ads and look like ads,
however they are at least contextual to the search term rather
than the splatter gun approach of other forms of Internet
advertising. Anecdotal evidence suggests that people are still
hesitant about clicking on these advertisements in the side bars
however the Google and Overture statistics (that word again)
indicate that a significant number of users of search engines
do. It would be silly to ignore this technique entirely however
it is equally folly to limit the exploration of search engine
marketing to the paid services.
The nature of pay per click means that you are in a bidding war
for your chosen keywords from the outset. The system works easy
enough allowing you to set bid limits and play a range of
keyword combinations. How much you will have to pay to secure a
top listing will depend upon the popularity of the term. Want to
nail down top spot for Tractor Maintenance and it could cost you
only $0.10US per click. Try for something competitive like Web
Design and you will be stung around $2.54US. Top of the scale is
Mesotheliona, that nasty cancer you get from asbestos dust.
Fuelled by litigation payouts the top bid is currently $100US
per click on Overture (www.overture.com). Unbelievably four US
law firms are paying this price. According to Overture 36,695
searches were done for this term in June 2004, not to mention
the other possible keyword combinations. Expensive stuff if you
get the clicks, it all boils down to how much a click through is
worth to your business. That difficult concept for old school
web marketers, return on investment.
Running a paid campaign will help boost your overall site
ranking in the search engines. Doing this alone, however is
unlikely to get you the prized top spots for your chosen keyword
string. That is, unless you have chosen a very niche term with
little competition. In which case you could probably have got
there without pay per click.
Another key component in this process is to make sure that when
choosing the target keyword combination (known as a string) that
you are realistic. If you are a small shoe store based in outer
suburban Melbourne don’t shoot for a highly singular generic
term like “Shoes” by itself. Be more specific regarding product
and location. The type of person that will respond to any online
pitch is likely to know how to use a search engine and use
keyword combinations to narrow their search results. Better to
target “Ladies Shoes Melbourne” or similar combinations thereof
to make better use of your paid listing spending. It is no point
boxing out of your division on a global scale if you are
targeting local business.
Accountable Web Marketing is achievable, however you do get what
you pay for. After the crash when the bottom fell out of the
market companies retreated in-house or farmed out work to back
yarders that were prepared to work for food. Cutting corners and
scrimping delivered cheap sites and even cheaper results. The
web site became a necessary evil rather than a valuable tool,
the thunder box out the back rather than the en-suite. When it
failed to work miracles it was fobbed off as a white elephant.
It became a classic Catch 22 situation. Content is and always
was king, but once bitten and several times shy the marketing
managers, who could have made best use of the technology,
refused to spend their budgets on updates. So, at the very time
when the search engines started rewarding context and content,
the corporate world retreated into safe static options or the
short term fix of high profile flash dynamics. Two extremes,
neither of which deliver good long term search engine
performance. If your site is not optimized then you have no
alternative but to pay for referrals. If your content is stale
and boring then who is going to buy from you. The site is
hamstrung from the start and destined to fail. So the cycle
continues.
You get what you pay for. That is the e-marketing lesson. That
doesn’t mean you should throw bucket loads of cash at the
nearest pony tailed web designer bouncing on his Pilates ball.
What it does mean is that you should make a realistic online
plan complete with goals and targets and exit strategy and then
commit to it. If you are going to dabble in pay per click then
be prepared to fight for a first page listing. If you are number
22 on Google Adwords for your primary key term then your half
hearted listing will deliver half hearted results at best. More
dollars round the S- bend. Use the tool aggressively. Do not
expect miracles from token outlays.
Mostly, however the lesson is to use multi channels. The
starting point should always be your site. The mistake of the
late nineties was that companies tried to trick search engines
to deliver traffic. The task now is not to fool Google but to
work with it. Search engines continually espouse the virtues of
their technology in producing relevant results so work to make
your site as relevant to your target key terms as you can. A
keyword spammer will soon be exposed for what they are but a
site tailored to reinforce its core contextual message will
prevail. The key to this is content and it is important to
realize that content imbedded in images and flash movies cannot
be read by search engines. It might be painful but some surgery
may be required.
A good URL is also important but it requires a user to be
already exposed to your branding. This is no problem if you are
Coca Cola but a worry if you are Fred’s Smash Repairs. New
business is unlikely to come directly through your URL. Think
holistically.
Developing an effective website is a balancing act between four
competing elements, Design, Usability, Bandwidth and Search
Engine Optimisation. Try too hard on one and you will impact on
another. Jacob Neilsen is often held up as the guru of web site
usability however anyone who has been to his site (www.useit.com) and implemented
his suggestions without question will soon recognise that he is
to design what Dr Pritican is to Christmas dinner. On the flip
side how many times have you been frustrated by the inability to
print off a key piece of information from the funky flash site
that you just stumbled upon, or left in frustration whilst that
self indulgent animated splash screen took forever to load on
your dial up connection. Similarly a perfectly optimised web
site for search engines would consist of nothing but ugly easily
searched and catalogued plain HTML text. The art is therefore a
balancing act in determining the level of compromise to suit
your business needs.
This then is the key question. What is your core business
requirement from your website? Unless your site achieves this
you will not be satisfied so define it and then tailor your site
to achieving it. Return on Investment for a website is not just
about “paying for the bloody thing.” It is about sustaining it
at a level that maximises its effectiveness. Set and forget is a
recipe for failure and different businesses will have different
capacities for achieving this quickly. The specific goals may
vary depending on the industry and the individual business
concerned.
A few points to consider…
• Put specific calls to action on your site. The best measure of
success for a website is tangible client contacts. Encourage
visitors to use the website contact information by offering web
only deals or other incentives.
• Target your primary selling points and products in your
keyword strings and cover appropriate cultural/market
terminology variations. (For example Mobile Phone in Australia,
Cell Phone in US, and Hand Phone in Japan; or Crayfish in
Victoria and Lobster in NSW)
• Don’t put too much information on your site. People use the
web increasingly for research. Put enough content up to convince
them of your credentials then encourage visitors to contact you
directly for more information and make it as easy as possible to
do so. Put your phone number on the site. Monitor and respond to
email enquiries immediately.
• Set realistic review periods. Different search engines have
differing lead times to catalogue new sites and index. A new
site can often take up to three months to fully make its way
through the system. Be patient … to a point.
• Monitor frequently. Search engines and their listing criteria
change frequently and often arbitrarily. Tweaks and changes will
be required sooner or later. Have a plan in place with your web
developer for reacting to any sizeable position drops. Sooner or
later your competitors will react and you have to be ready
Tim Giles
http://www.articlesbase.com/sem-articles/the-new-web-accountability-2461.html
In the world of 21st century, it is no longer surprising to find
that most business had already establishes a web presence to
support their brick-and-mortar businesses. There are many
advantages of establishing a web presence on the Internet such
as selling globally to prospective customers and disseminating
information to the public.
Most business owner would have already understood the importance
of a web presence to their business. What most of them had
failed to understand is that the domain name in their website
can contribute significantly to their online marketing strategy.
First, we look at a few rules of a good domain name. Most would
agree that a good domain name should:
1) be able to describe your business when people first look it.
2) include hyphen in between the words to make it easier to
read. 3) have an appropriate .com, .net, .biz, .info, .org to
reflect the nature of the business.
What I differ in opinion is that a long domain name
“mysuperduperbrandflyingsite.com” can be as effective as a short
domain name “superduper.com” depending on the context where the
domain name is used. Many people would definitely disagree with
me on this point as they believe that a short domain name is
easier to remember. However, a long domain name can be just as
effective depending on the context where it is use.
Having a catchy long domain name such as
http://www.dont-miss-a-thing.com or
http://www.once-in-a-lifetime.com/ would definitely helps to
draw attention to your business promotion rather than promoting
your website name http://www.yourcompanyname.com which is
mundane.
When people reach http://www.dont-miss-a-thing.com or
http://www.once-in-a-lifetime.com, you can communicate a short
sales message before driving them to the appropriate web page.
Thus, depending on the context where the domain name is used, a
domain name can actually help to make or break your overall
marketing performance.
Justin Koh
http://www.articlesbase.com/domain-names-articles/business-domain-name-biggest-benefit-of-using-a-long-web-domain-name-as-a-marketing-strategy-948.html
