When talking about website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

The site of web design can meet your need of owning an attractive site by yourslef as some stars like Paris Hilton and Angelina Jolie do.

hosting review · Search Engine Optimization · web hosting

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a million times. The big money is in online list building. List marketing is probably the most powerful way to create a profitable home based business. You can’t afford to ignore this powerful approach.

Why it works

Most people won’t open their wallets after seeing a marketing message only once. Repeated encounters are a key to generating sales. You can create opportunities for multiple exposure by adding an individual to your list.

People are also more likely to buy from those with whom the feel a trusting connection. You can use emails to your list to forge a personal connection. Relationship building creates an opportunity to encourage sales.

How to do it

List building is an easy home based business strategy and it all starts with a squeeze page. A squeeze pages has only one purpose. It should encourage readers to become subscribers to your list. Nothing else really matters.

In most cases, marketers encourage list opt-ins by offering something of value to the prospective customer in exchange for their contact information. This time-tested strategy can substantially boost your bottom line.

Having a quality inducement won’t automatically make your squeeze page a success, though. It’s also critical to put together a squeeze page in the right manner. There are certain squeeze page strategies that produce the best results. You should emulate those proven techniques. That means you’ll want to follow these three guidelines.

Squeeze page basics

First, keep your squeeze page free of any links leading to other sites of pages. You want people to sign up for your list, not to have them click away to something else.

Second, you’ll need to write a short, powerful message. You want your squeeze page to generate those sign ups – everything else is extraneous and will decrease effectiveness. Remember, your squeeze page exists solely to generate sign ups. You should choose every word with that goal in mind.

Third, you will want to approach the sign up process as if it were as important as a big sale – close that deal! That means that you will need to make a strong, persuasive call to action as part of your sign up form. Clearly communicate the value of subscribing to those reading the page.

Summary

If you’re following those three pieces of advice and are offering a smart “bribe”, you’ll have a successful squeeze page! You’ll be able to build trust and credibility with your subscribers. You’ll also be able to put your message in front of subscribers repeatedly.

Online list building is a powerful way to improve your Internet marketing performance. It’s not a coincidence that top marketers all rely on their lists. The money really is in the list!

Email marketing · internet marketing · list building · squeeze page

You will find several ways to discover markets that are open to freelancers. Discovering places to submit your work is easy if you know exactly where to look.

Of course, your first stop is the Writer’s Market. The online version at www.writersmarket.com has some extra markets, such as newspapers and greeting card companies, and it’s more up-to-date than the print books. When an editor moves, contact information changes, or there’s a shift in the editorial needs, online markets guides like this one can make the change immediately, rather than waiting for the next print edition to come out the following year.

In addition, you are able to also use their handy submission tracker, which reminds you what you’ve submitted where and tells you when it is time to follow up.

Another helpful guide is the American Directory of Writer’s Guidelines, which prints the guidelines that magazines send to writers verbatim. I wouldn’t advise buying this one initial; buy Writer’s Marketplace, and if you have additional cash, purchase this one to supplement your efforts. Why? It often doesn’t list the important stuff like pay rates, rights, and response time, and half of the tips state the obvious things like “Read the magazine” that you truly shouldn’t have to read a hundred times over before obtaining the picture.

But every articles contains information and markets that the other doesn’t have, and by utilizing both, you can get a more complete image of each magazine or publisher you want to write for. The next best tools are on the web, and they’re free. The Web is really a fabulous place to seek out new markets.

Not all sites are equal, though; some market guides online are rarely updated. Whenever possible, look for a date on any guidelines you find online. Newsletters and e-zines that are mailed to your email address tend to be more current than the market lists posted on the web.

You can even run a search for “freelance writers,” “writers wanted,” or “writer’s guidelines” on any major search engine, and you’re likely to come up with lots of listings. Try specifying if possible; add words that fit your needs (example: paying markets, romance, teen magazines).

For more information visit Ferguson’s article directory: a site where you can submit for free your articles respecting the article submission guidelines.

advertising · business · marketing · Search Engine Optimization · seo · writing

Internet marketing is not always easy to understand if you are a beginner. There are a lot of things to learn about online marketing to the point that sometimes you might feel overwhelmed or confused. This article will look at some of the early processes required for you to start marketing either your own or someone else’s products or services online. Once you know the basics, everything really does become much clearer.

Before you begin to market any products and/or services online, you really should set up a central point of contact for your online business. Therefore the first step in online marketing should really be to set up your own website, or blog with squarespace.com as a good example. Remember that as well as including all relevant information about your products and services, you must also supply information about your business such as an ‘about us’ page. It’s also a good idea to be able to capture customer data such as name and email address with an auto responder like Get Response.

The second step is to start optimising your website for the search engines. This strategy is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation. Practising SEO means your website will get a higher ranking with the search engines allowing people who are looking for your products or services to find them. You will find that there are many strategies out there for SEO that can make it seem complicated. However broken down, SEO really only depends on three things, link building, keywords, and quality content.

To optimise your keywords, think of the important words that people use to search for something that you sell. The keyword tool from Google is a useful tool to help you find the keywords that people use to search for what you want to sell online. You should then place those keywords in strategic places such as titles, headers, subtitles, and the first paragraph of an article.

As another pillar of SEO, quality content is also very important. You need to have many articles and content with high quality on your site. If you cannot write them yourself, consider hiring freelance writers to write for you which can be done cheaply if you look around or at fiverr.com for example. Ensure that your articles are relevant with good SEO keywords. However, do not put too many keywords in one article or page or Google may penalise you for it.

SEO is a continuous process. Anyone who is involved in internet marketing should always work on their SEO strategies over time to improve them. If you are not able to do that on your own, you could consider hiring professionals, again if you look around this doesn’t have to be expensive.

Online advertising is part of any internet marketing strategy once you have set up your blog or website. To do this effectively you need to get noticed otherwise your site and products will simply be buried amongst everyone else’s. You can find numerous cost effective places online where you can place your ads such as Ad Land. It all really depends on your target customers and your budget.

Some people suggest using social networking sites for business promotion purposes. These sites are free for anyone to use, unless you buy a space for ads. Like everything else, invest some time and a little money to work this part of your strategy for your benefit and you’d be surprised at just how quickly you start to get results.

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affiliate · affiliate marketing · home based business · internet business · internet marketing · internet marketing strategies · make money · make money online · marketing · MLM · money · Online Business · Search Engine Optimization · SEO business · working from home

No one can deny that you need traffic to your website in order to succeed online. And free traffic beats everything else. Where does free traffic come from? Google and other search engines.

How do we get free traffic from Google?

You’ve experienced this process a lot of times. You go to Google. Enter in a word or phrase you want to research. And click one of the links that shows up. Well, the link you clicked on just send free traffic to that website owner. We will be discussing here how to get website traffic to you for free.

Most people only click results from the first couple pages. In fact, the first page of results receives almost all the free traffic. What’s even more amazing is the the first 3 links get more than 70% of the free traffic.

So to get any significant amount of free traffic from Google, you really need to be on the first page. And this means Google needs to “rank” you as a top 10 result. Which brings up..

What is SEO?

SEO means that your website is clearly about something specific, Google knows that that is and thinks others will agree and find your site useful. The formula Google uses to determine this is known only by Google. But there are several things that we know for sure.

Getting indexed

First, before you can get ranked highly, Google has to know you exist. This is known as being “indexed.” When your website gets indexed, Google stores information about it in their massive database.

To get indexed, you have to help Google find your site. Links from other sites are the easiest way to accomplish this. Google will actually follow the links on sites it already has indexed to find new sites and index them.

A couple of great places to do this are in your Twitter or Facebook profiles. Google visits these sites many times every day. And follows new links it finds immediately.

Gaining ranking

Once you have been indexed, you will start working on increasing your rank. Just getting indexed does you almost no good, considering that Google has billions of pages in their database.

There are three components of gaining ranking:

• Content
• Links
• Activity

Great content

This is also called on-page SEO. And it means that the content on your page matches the keywords you’re targeting. The topic of this article is clearly SEO. One reason Google knows this is because the words search engine optimization appear inside it. And another way this is determined is by the other related phrases like traffic generation that are also in the article.

In addition to the content on the page, other things to keep in mind are the title tags on the page, and the domain name itself. These all play a part in helping Google determine what your website is about.

Your links

The second factor is your linking. The links coming in and the links going out are included in this. You want to make sure you have more inbound links than outbound links. So the number of inbound links is important.

A very easy way to get a lot of links to your site is through article marketing. With this strategy what you do is write an article about the topic you’re targeting. Then create a bunch of different versions of it. And post unique versions to lots of websites that accept articles. And the more you do the better.

Make your site active

And lastly, it’s seems clear that Google expects important pages to be actively updated. Static pages that just sit may rank at first, but will fall off over time. So you need to update your pages often. One way to keep adding new content it through RSS feeds.

But the best way is with active discussions on your page itself. So, obviously, you need to get people to visit your site on your own, too. Online forums are simple source of real live visitors.

What you need to do is sign up with several forums in your niche. And post their often. And link back to yourself in your signature file. This will get your more inbound links. And it gets people to visit the site you link to.

Conclusion

Each step listed above is critical. However, writing a bunch of different articles on the same topic. Creating profiles on a ton of forums. And visiting all the sites to post up your comments and articles takes a really long time. And the bad news is that you probably won’t do it.

The good news is that there are automated software programs out there that will do this for you. So my best advice is to automate as much of this as you can. And then you’re sure to get it done. And not doing it means you will never get free traffic from Google.

free traffic · internet marketing · Search Engine Optimization · seo · traffic generation