e-Marketing Today

Hopefully, you will be able to use them before we all die because of global warming next year . . .

read more | digg story

By: Clarence B.

In today’s highly competitive internet universe, the importance of attracting highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be overemphasized. Routing web traffic to your site can be your only means of survival, especially in the cutthroat world of ecommerce. Getting a high search engine ranking can be very difficult. Fortunately, there is plethora of website promotion strategies you can use to drive traffic to your website.

There is a wide variety of strategies you can adapt, from paid advertising to affiliate marketing. However, most of these techniques require payment. Nevertheless, there are ways to promote your website and increase your web traffic without spending anything. Writing articles is one of the best web site promotion strategies you can use, and they can be very effective. How, you may ask, can writing articles help improve your web traffic? Here are the top seven ways in which it can help explode your business.

1.Reach more people

When you write good articles, it would be a shame not to share them with other people. You can post your articles in your website or you can submit them to other sites such as e-zines and online publishers. By submitting your articles to these sites, you give exposure not only to your ideas but also to your website. Simply include a link back to your site or include your information in the resource box. With this, you get exposure and free advertising as well. Submit your articles to popular e-zines and take advantage of their popularity. Other sites who find your article relevant may also link back to you. Thus, you increase your link popularity, which is one of the most important strategies in the internet world. Remember that most people are looking for information online and by filling this need with your quality article; you may reap the benefit of more exposure and higher web traffic.

2.Free Advertising

Submitting your articles to other websites presents an opportunity to advertise your website without paying exorbitant fees. Although you should avoid marketing language in your articles and make it informative and useful to your readers, you can always include your site’s link in the resource box. In addition, by making your article relevant and helpful to your readers, you are making a good impression for your website, which could ultimately lead to a visit and hopefully a purchase. Good quality content in an article is far better and more effective than a few lines of ad space. You have a very special opportunity to presell your product or service to your prospective customer.

3.Gain High Search Engine Ranking

Create a new web page for your article in your website. Optimize your article to make it search-engine friendly. Use top-ranked keywords and Meta tags that can give your website a high search engine ranking. As soon as you upload your new webpage to your server, search engines will spider through it and you can gain an increase in search engine ranking. Remember that search engine optimized content is a very effective strategy to gain a high ranking in search results.

4.Increases Link Popularity

Instead of looking for other sites who would want to establish reciprocal links with your site, you can simply submit an article to other sites. Just do not forget to include a link to your site in your resource box. When these websites pick up and publishes your article, you automatically get a link partner. Try to get as many link partners as you can. Link popularity is one of the factors used by search engines in determining search engine rankings. Make your article especially useful and appealing, so that more websites will be encouraged to publish it.

5.Optimizes your site for improved search engine ranking

By making your site keyword rich, you can greatly improve the search engine ranking of your site. Remember that keyword density is one of the most important factors that search engines use when determining the search engine ranking of site. However, you should always provide relevant, useful and pertinent information. Avoid the temptation of overusing keywords just to gain a high ranking as this may turn off most web surfers. Relevance and quality is still the most important things to consider when writing articles and it will be doubly useful to your site if you make these articles search-engine optimized.

6.Establishes a Good Impression and Reputation

By writing excellent, original and relevant articles, you not only give your site exposure, you are also creating a good impression on your prospects. Encourage more people to visit your site and do business with you by establishing an impressive reputation through your articles. Be seen as an expert in the field and your will ultimately gain more customers eager to do business with you.

7.Enhances your credibility through references and testimonies

Certainly, your articles are going to receive feedbacks and testimonies when you publish them in e-zines and free article sites. Record these positive feedbacks and comments and use them as promotional material in your website or in any of your advertising efforts. Your credibility will be greatly enhanced by these feedbacks, as it will create a good impression on your prospects as well as your existing customers. In this highly competitive world, excellent credibility and trust may be the only things you need to attract new customers or make loyal patrons out of your existing customers. Original, relevant, useful and pertinent articles are important tools you should utilize to improve and explode your business.

Due to online file sharing, there should be apt arrangements for data recovery group. There should be functioning data recovery programs in addition to the windows backup software. A data recovery software is like the nick in time.

By: Mal Huddleston

Traffic sources can take many forms. Some you can get for free, but usually at the expense of something like hours of your time, and some you can pay for.

Some of the solutions available will work for you, while others will do nothing but increase your statistics; If you choose to pay for traffic, be aware. Some unscrupulous operators will even send you software robots, not unique traffic at all.

* Search Engine Optimization - SEO!

One of the most general sources of traffic is of course search engines. The technique referred to as SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is the process of optimizing your web page so that you are considered important in the search engines eyes. There are basic techniques to follow, but to do it seriously is a major art.

The considered norm is to optimize each page for a specific term, or keyword string as it is called. Trying to optimize a page for a single word is fraught with danger, as you will find you have millions of pages to compete with. This brings me to the term coined as The Long Tail. The Long Tail refers to that part of the internet that the majority of users do not really think about, the millions of little niche areas, not in the main stream. This is definitely one area where, with a little work, and a little luck, you stand a good chance of receiving Unlimited Web Site Traffic.

Accessing The Long Tail really involves a process of optimizing your web page for a particular keyword string. Research is done to find a popular keyword string, a group of 3 to 5 words, for example, that has a good number of searches per month, but a keyword string where not too many pages are already available. A term that has only 5000 or less pages available allows you a much better chance of getting your page into the top ten, the first page of search engine results.

This at first would still seem almost impossible, however there are many pages on the net that have no optimization at all, so have absolutely no chance of getting a good result. You need to take advantage of this, as of course, if you are not in the top ten results for a particular keyword string, you can not expect anyone to find you. How often do you search past the first page?

* Play The Game To Your Advantage!

A trick here is not only to optimize your web page, but also to supply a similar page of information in the form of a keyword rich article. When this article is posted at a popular article directory, like ezinearticles.com for instance, that page can shoot to the first page of results in only a few days. Google, and others, play favorites. So use this to your advantage to build your own source of Unlimited Web Site Traffic.

Although one of the advantages of posting articles is the traffic you can obtain directly from people who read the article and follow your link in the bio, the link in the article that points back to your site is one way that the search engines rate your sites popularity. Each link to your site from wherever the article is posted is counted. When you post to hundreds of article directories, and furthermore, when these articles later get downloaded and posted on other web sites by web masters providing your information to their viewers, you stand to build an enormous amount of links back to your site. The search engines may then begin to love you, or your web page at least.

* Bypass The SEO Game!

You can actually bypass the SEO game by using Pay Per Click advertising. This stands to get you on the first page of results even quicker than the article directories can, but it costs. Pay Per Click advertising can be enormously expensive. The whole game is really a large auction, where everyone is competing for their position. Those that pay a higher price for a particular keyword string will rise to the top positions for these advertisements, which are usually displayed at the top, and to the right hand side of the normal search results.

There is any amount of software available to help you play this game. Some software will secretly spy on other people’s ads, and show you the ads which are likely to be making money. The idea then is to copy these ads for yourself, and hopefully you will stand a better chance of getting a return. Whether you think this is fair play or not, it is being done. Be aware, most people lose money using Pay Per Click, but if you become skillful, it is a sure way to boost your traffic results. With the right ad, and the right keyword string, you can literally turn the traffic tap on.

* Other Sources Of Unlimited Web Site Traffic!

Other sources of gaining internet traffic include bulk email and permission based email. What makes Bulk Email not Spam? Purely sending email to anyone
you can, without having some kind of consent first, is absolutely delivering
Spam. There is no grey area. It is Spam. Don’t ever do this, period. However,
you can access lists of email addresses of people who have given their consent to receive email about a certain topic. This, referred to as an opt-in list, is a suitable way to use bulk email systems.

Permission based email refers to the building of your own list of subscribers who have opted-in to receive your particular information. This is absolutely the best form of traffic generation, because if you treat them properly, and deliver them positive and useful information, they can be your customers for life. This is traffic that comes back to you, or at least clients you can contact time and time again. Make it your goal to build a list of clients who are interested in what you have to offer. This is the real deal with building traffic, and building a successful presence on the web.

Article Source: http://www.article-hangout.com

By: Greger Klen

For any website or blog, an increase in its traffic will almost be certain to leave you a similar increase of revenue. For websites with low to medium traffic, the difference can be much larger than expected. Although there are many ways of increasing your website traffic, these three methods have proven very effective for me, driving traffic to sites monetized with affiliate programs.

Social Bookmarking

The buzz around the social bookmarking scene is hard to miss, but not necessarily as easy to utilize. Researching which social media can help your site the best, can make wonders for your traffic.

If you are running a blog – or any type of regularly updated site with articles or similar – Digg, Reddit and similar may work very well. Even though inbound links will derive from any success on these types of social bookmarks, the main priority is to increase the traffic. If you see yourself on the first page, you will see a virtual spike in your traffic, commonly known as the “digg effect”. Make sure your web host can handle the traffic, if they can’t; switch to a new host. This type of social media relies on “voting”. If your content is good and interesting enough, you will do well.

If your site doesn’t do well on sites like the ones above, you might try to switch to social media more focused on bookmarking than voting, and hope for the best. Delicious, Furl and Netvouz all focus on bookmarking, making those excellent choices for this tactic.

Most – if not all – social media have buttons you can add to your pages, allowing your visitors to bookmark and/or vote. Adding a few of these can drastically increase your website traffic.

Free Website Traffic

There are plenty of ways to get free website traffic if you are not picky with the quality. Autosurfs, Traffic Exchanges, Toplists and banner exchanges all deliver traffic, but of very poor quality.

With toplists and banner exchanges, you won’t see a huge increase in traffic, but the quality of traffic will be higher. Every visitor received will have actually clicked your banner or text link. If you make sure your ads are honest and clear, people will know what they are looking for, and hopefully convert.

Autosurfs – and to an extent Traffic Exchanges – will give you a noticeable increase of traffic, but not necessarily any conversions. Autosurfs are just what they sound like; Automated. Traffic exchanges – and their visitors – are at least present, but more often than not, they are only looking to gain more traffic to their own sites.

Never the less, these types of programs can help you increase your traffic, how you handle the visitors gained is up to you.

Free traffic does not apply well to Google Adsense or other contextual ads, simply because they frown upon automated traffic. If you are using affiliate programs – or selling your own products, the visitors may or may not be interested; try it out and see for yourself.

Methods like link exchange are now considered obsolete in search engine marketing. For an seo website it is important to keep up with the internet marketing guide and discourage methods like email marketing.

By: Connie McKenzie
You have created your website or have signed up as an affiliate and received a free website, now it is up to you to promote it and generate traffic to your business in order to make money.

Now you may be thinking that, in order to make money you are going to need money. Not true, for many of us, we just do not have the resources or money to generate traffic to our websites like some do.

Well, you don’t have to spend a penny; really all you need to do is to have the proper mindset and a lot of eagerness. As well, the perseverance and drive to work hard and do your research to generate traffic to your site.

How sweet it is to generate traffic to your website without having to spend a single penny. Now, I am not about to beat around the bush here, and I will tell you honestly that it may take a bit more time. When you pay for your advertisements you are going to get results faster. But at least you will have a fighting chance with some of the free methods I am about to tell you.

Write good content on your website Once your site is discovered and if the content is good quality content, people will return to read more or tell friends about it. Search engines will index it more frequently because humans are visiting often due to your great quality content.

Search engine optimization is also extremely important, but I am no expert when it comes to this topic. About the best advice I can give you about search engine optimization is that you will need to have the right keywords in order to get higher rankings in the search engines. But I can assure you that you can get plenty of free information about it if you type those keywords into your browser.

Enlist your website into the hottest Internet directories that are free. It is an easy and effective website promotion tactic. Start with this and the rest of the good things will follow.

Just don’t forget to spruce up your website so that you have a higher chance of getting accepted in your directory of choice.

Write articles You will want your articles to pique the attention of your target audience. Provide tips and guides of interest to them. The article must be related to what your website is about. That way, when they read your resource box, there will be a higher chance that they will click on your link so that they can get more information or buy your product.

Submit your article to article directories, many are free, and don’t stop at writing just a few articles because you are not getting any results. Keep it up, become known as the expert that you are in your field, and people will begin to trust you.

Exchanging links with other sites. All that is required of you is to reach an agreement with another webmaster to trade links. Ok, so it’s not all that simple, it takes time and persistence because some webmasters will not agree to link back to you, but it is possible and free.

As long as you link to the right sites, ones that are related to yours. You can attain a good ranking with the search engines.

Spend some time on online forums and online communities. You can locate forums that target your niche. You can answer and ask questions, wow them with your range of expertise about the subject. Build a good reputation for your company and build trust with the people in your expertise and knowledge.

Do not sell, but you can let them know about your site in your signature and attract instant visitors right away.

Each of these methods will generate more traffic to your website for free. It only takes a bit of effort and some additional man-hours. Educate yourself about the methods depicted here and you will soon generate traffic to your site without the usual costs that come with it.

Article Source: http://www.article-hangout.com

The most responsible stage of promotion begins - the process of reception of external (inbound) links to a site. Long-term stability of a site will depend on correctly constructed skeleton of external links in top deliveries of search systems, i.e. link ranging.

read more | digg story

Just because you have a blog doesn
’t mean anyone knows about it or reads it. Like any other website, you still need do some promotion to drive traffic. Otherwise you’re just a needle in the haystack. Here’s a few things you can do start bringing people to your blog.

read more | digg story

In April 2006 my parents sold the house they had lived in for the past twelve years and purchased an historic mansion in Moose Jaw, Canada.

Originally built in 1908 by one of the wealthiest men in the city, the 3-story mansion has been a bed and breakfast since 2001.

Seeing that Moose Jaw had become a tourist hot spot over the past decade my parents intended to keep running it as a bed and breakfast.

I volunteered to help them with their marketing efforts and this case study outlines the things we did to improve the profitability of the business.

Increasing revenue for a bed and breakfast

There are three ways for bed and breakfasts to make more money:

• Increase the occupancy rate - Less empty rooms mean more money.
• Increase the amount paid per occupant or per room - When my parents bought the bed and breakfast the rooms were under priced for the market, so they have gradually increased the rates. My dad is a journeyman carpenter and has been making improvements to the property which will allow them to increase the rates further.
• Add more products / services - Since the property has a huge front yard with a large fountain and sits at the top of a hill overlooking the Moose Jaw river, my parents started offering Wedding services. They also sell gift certificates which are very popular during the holidays.

The Marketing Plan

The previous owners had created a website themselves and submitted it to a few bed and breakfast directories which worked surprisingly well. However, taking the bed and breakfast to the next level would require a marketing plan that included branding, professional web site, SEO, PPC, and off line marketing materials.

Branding

A logo or identity that is both professional and visually appealing can go along way in promoting a company. Often times a logo is the first impression that a potential customer has of a company. My talented grandmother did an amazing pencil-crayon drawing that we used for an icon in the logo and on all marketing materials including the website, business card and brochures.

Website

Since most people find and book a bed and breakfast through the Internet, our marketing strategy had to focus on creating an informative, functional and professional-looking website that converts traffic into sales. In November 2006 we created a web site that reflects the warmth, charm and history of the property. The Wakamow heights Bed & Breakfast web site includes:

• detailed information with multiple photos of each room/suite
• ability to check availability and make reservations online
• information and photos about the history of the house
• useful information about things to do in Moose Jaw
• a press section
• map and directions to the bed and breakfast
• comments from satisfied guests
• information on having weddings on the property

SEO

To build high-quality inbound links into the site, we submitted it to some Canadian bed and breakfast directories and a few local directories. We also traded links with a few bed and breakfasts. Our keyword research led us to optimize the site for ‘Moose Jaw Bed and Breakfast’ and similar terms. Currently the site ranks #1 in Yahoo! and MSN for ‘Moose Jaw Bed and Breakfast’ and is second in Google to the largest Canadian bed and breakfast directory which Wakamow Heights is listed in.

PPC

We implemented a Google Adwords Pay Per Click campaign that costs about 20 cents per click and puts us in the top spot for terms related to Moose Jaw Bed and Breakfast. Pay Per Click can be a very effective tool for local businesses considering how inexpensive it can be.

Off line Marketing Materials

The off line marketing materials consist of a two-sided business card with map and directions, and a rack card. The business card is given to guests to pass out to friends and family, and the rack card is put in brochure racks at many of the local business around Moose Jaw.

PR

There was never a public relations plan in place, but my parents have been very fortunate in that their bed and breakfast was featured in a few publications over the past couple months. Chatelaine Magazine included Wakamow Heights Bed & Breakfast in it’s Coast-To-Coast Travel Guide for the July 2007 issue, and the local newspaper did a story on area bed and breakfasts that featured their property first with two large photos including one on the cover. If you have a great product, people will talk about it.

Results

Wakamowheights.com had over 1500 unique visitors in July 2007 compared to 450 in July 2006, and the rate of occupancy is up atleast 150% from what it was a year ago. Implementing the Webervations software which allows users to check availability and make reservations online has been a huge time saver for my mom because she spends a lot less time on the phone taking reservations. This is an example of a simple marketing plan focused primarily on Internet marketing that has had excellent results.

Conclusion

I see a direct relationship between the rise in popularity of bed and breakfasts to the rise in popularity and use of the Internet. Without the Internet most bed and breakfasts would fail miserably, which is why there weren’t many of them 20 years ago. Effective Internet marketing can also allow small businesses like Wakamow Heights Bed & Breakfast to grow very quickly.

Next time you’re passing through Moose Jaw, Canada stop in at Wakamow Heights Bed & Breakfast for a good nights sleep, delicious breakfast and one of a kind experience.