How to kick start your business with SEO & SEM

admin    SEO Marketing     Business, Kick, Start

How to kick start your business with SEO & SEM

Who is this for?
If you are a webmaster who is about to start his/her first online business or web site, you probably know that it is not that easy to get high traffic to your site. In fact, nowadays it takes a lot more work to be successful online, than it had been some years ago. The main factor that influences your success is that most business or web site owner do not know anything (useful) about search engine optimization (SEO) and/or search engine marketing (SEM). These terms are wide-spread, however, a lot of people just know of it as a way to get ranked high in the search engines.
There are tons of webmasters and web site owners who would like to know more about SEO strategies in order to kick start their business. If you have enough funds to hire a SEO company to do the promotional work for you, you would probably not sift through the internet and find out more about SEO, unless you are eager to learn more and more. So this article is mainly for those who start out with SEO and want to know more about the strategies to not only rank high in the search engines, but also prosper and do well in satisfying visitors or prospects.
Why do I need SEO & SEM to rank high?
The question is why businesses and web sites do need to promote their web sites well these days, unlike some years ago, when everyone was about to submit to a few of the established directories and was seeing an increase in traffic through spreading the word. The answer is: A few things have changed. The search engines have developed very complex algorithms in order to find relevant web sites and separate them from the non-relevant web sites. These algorithms are quite complicated and not revealed to anybody outside of the search engines.
The problem is that, in order to reach high ranking and traffic, you need to prove your web site to be trustworthy and relevant for the world. Relevance can be reached through search engine optimization, whereas trustworthiness is reached through the marketing and promotion of your web site to other relevant and related web sites. There are theories about a so-called sandbox or trustbox that is used by Google, however, they have never been confirmed to be existing to 100%. This sandbox theory claims that every new web site is put in a box for a specified probation period. While in the box the site is not ranked well and does not receive a PageRank. The trustbox theory claims that the probation period is more likely to be defined by trusted and relevant back links.
Whether one of these theories is real or not, fact is that you need to optimize your business for the search engines and then promote it. The main thought is that you should try to gain as many one-way links as possible. One-way links, also referred to as inbound links, are link that are directed to your site without your site to be linking back to that site. In past the so-called reciprocal links have been wide-spread in order to build your linking and prove your trustworthiness and/or relevance. However, these days, one-way links are more than appreciated and worth it!
How to approach? How to gain one-way links and kick start my business now?
This is a very complex topic and it is impossible to tell you about any existing and proved strategy at once. Nevertheless there are some easy but time consuming ways to kick start your business or web site. Before everything can begin, however, you should first optimize your website. There are some resources on the internet that tell you about optimization etc.
After you are done with it, promote your web site to (free) web directories first. Web directories provide you with one-way links without the need to link back to them. Well, in fact there are a lot of directories that require reciprocal links back, but these are not the ones you should submit to. Submit to SEO friendly free web directories first, apart from the Open Directory Project/DMOZ. Then after you have done this exhausting work, write quality articles and spread them. Be active in forums. Publish a blog relating to your area and regularly write in it to attract readers and prospects. These are one of the main sources for getting your first traffic and back links, which raise your PageRank.
Now go on and find out about the variety of mistakes you can do while optimizing and promoting: Over Optimization.

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Seven Low Cost Traffic Generation Methods To Kick Start Your Marketing

admin    Twitter Marketing     Cost, Generation, Kick, Marketing, Methods, Seven, Start, Traffic

Seven Low Cost Traffic Generation Methods To Kick Start Your Marketing

There are multiple ways to get traffic to your website for very little cost that can make you money online.

Even if you only get a small percentage of your visitors to convert successfully, it hasn’t cost you any money just your time.

There are two hard facts of any internet business that you cannot escape.

To make money online, you need to generate traffic to your website and second, you need to convert that traffic into buyers.

You might try to do this directly by sending them to a sales page or you may do it indirectly by sending them to an opt-in page to capture their details or to your information site or blog.

First, you should focus on identifying your killer keywords – the ones that attract the right kind of people into you business.

Matching up searches with your content means the resulting traffic will be pre-qualified and pre-disposed to your offer.

If no one goes to your site, it hardly bares a chance of generating an income.

BUT, it doesn’t take thousands to generate website traffic to your site.

While there are ways to jumpstart your traffic flows, the holy grail is knowing how to generate low cost website traffic without having to run up a huge daily advertising bill.

Here I present to you my top 7 strategies to generate low cost website traffic that could help make money online for you.

1. Link exchanges

This is a well known and proven strategy. It’s rare these days to see a website without a link to another site.

Many business owners are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more visibility for their sites.

The more you create back links to your website from other pages, the more the traffic you’ll see coming as you’ll start to rank higher.

If you’re exchanging links with other sites, it’s important that the link is relevant. This usually means it is in the same niche or a relate niche as your own site.

This is more likely to please your human visitors as it provides additional information or services related directly to what interests your target traffic.

Exchanging links with authority sites or sites with high page ranks will also increase your traffic even more significantly, as it will boost your rankings in search engine listings.

This is known as SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.

2. Article Marketing

There are many electronic magazines (called ezines) and online newsletters around on the internet which provide free space for you to submit articles.

If you want to keep your costs low, you can write the articles yourself. But you can save time, by using the many freelance writers who are willing to create articles on your best converting keywords or keyword phrases. The fees are much smaller than you might think.

Write articles that complement your website, product, business or other offer. Write on topics that you have expertise on so you develop your knowledge researching around the subject and can come across as an authority.

Write articles that produce tips and guidance on the subject or your niche. Checking what has already been written means you can identify topics and solutions that are less competitive so your article will rank higher on your chosen keywords.

At the end of the article submission process, you can insert a “resource box”. It’s here that can say something about yourself or your business and provide your visitors with a link to your site if they want to find out more.

If they do go there, they are already impressed and predisposed to your offer, wouldn’t you say?

Once you have your article accepted in your primary article directory, you can also send variations to other article directories.

There is a lot of free article submission software available to automate the process and if you are doing a lot of article marketing, a great paid service I personally use is SubmitYourArticles.

3. Video marketing

Video marketing can send literally thousands Of visitors to your primary business. It really is the social medium of the moment. Just look at the popularity of YouTube! 5-10 minutes is all you need to get your point across.

You can either use a camcorder to video your own talking head or create a footage around your product or offer and add the audio later.

If you’re not yet confident on camera, you can also create a series of photos and powerpoint slides and record an audio commentary around that.

It’s important to put your website address in your titles along one edge of your screen.

Once you have a few videos made, you then need to drive traffic to them. The best way is to submit them to video sites. The most popular are youtube.com, metacafe.com and dailymotion.com.

To really maximise exposure and get the most traffic back to you website, you can use video submission tools. There’s a free video submission service, TubeMogul. An even better tool is a paid service I use is Traffic Geyser.

When you have registred on the prime video sites, the submitter tool will submit your videos automatically to various video sites and get you lots of traffic to your url.

4. Forum marketing

This is completely free – it only requires an input of your time. Do some initial sculking around to identify the kinds of problems people have in this niche.

Once you feel you understand the community, you can start to feedback a comment, start a post, here and there, using your knowledge and expertise.

You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site.

With every post, you can add a link to your site. But remember first to give value, not just blatantly advertise your site.

As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your site that could be frequented and trusted by many people.

5. Twitter marketing

Twitter and blogging go hand in hand. They help you build your authority and social networks within your niche.

Twitter has totally transformed the way that people communicate online and since it’s free, it really should be an indispensable part of your overall marketing strategy and link to your blog.

Twitter is free to join and you can get set up with an account in a matter of just a few minutes.

Twitter has proven itself to be incredibly addictive and, for business owners, very valuable too.

Technology such as Twitter has the potential to give us more than just an opportunity to tell others what happened in our day. It can be used to connect with people in a meaningful manner.

Imagine if you had cost-efficient and fast marketing tools that met existing customers where they are and that also helped you acquire new customers.

Imagine if you had the power to build a network of like-minded peers, a community of shared ideas and creativity.

6. Blog marketing

You blog should therefore be one of the main hubs for your business. It’s all about YOU Inc.

As your name gets passed around, you can widen your public awareness and build an opt-in list and RSS subscribe feed for people who regularly visit your site.

People buy from people they know, like and trust. A blog is like dating – you wouldn’t propose on the first date so why shove your sales pitch down a new visitors throat.

You can point your articles, videos, forum posts and social media activities all through your blog.

This may sound like hard work because of all the articles you may need to use to build a blog but on the contrary, this is not so. There are many many sources of ideas and inspiration for your blog, which come from your day to day activities and your own personal development.

7. Facebook marketing

Social networking has always been a main part of many internet marketers strategy. But most don’t use it effectively at all. They flood the likes of Facebook and Myspace with offers and promotions. This won’t work.

If you want to use social tools like Facebook to generate traffic to your website, you first have to identify the right groups and then invest something of yourself.

You need to be prepared to make a personal connection with other folks in the community. It’s all about relationships and connecting with people on a personal level.

Posting up useful content on social networks will get you some awesome rankings on Google. The search engines seem to put a premium on sites like Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Squidoo and Hubpages.

In all these free or low cost traffic generation methods, it’s all about giving value to your niche community.

Leads generated in this way will be far more valuable as leads back to you – interested, highly targeted, committed and profitable.

Now is the Time to Kick Your Website Marketing Into Gear For 2010

admin    Website Marketing     2010, Gear, Into, Kick, Marketing, Time, Website

For those of us not in the retail industry or holiday type businesses, December can be a slow month. Most people go into the holiday mode right after Thanksgiving. This means less new projects, decisions, and ongoing business takes a backseat to holiday cheer.

So if you fit into this category of non-holiday business, it’s an excellent time to start planning and executing some new website marketing efforts for 2010. There are several areas to work on but first you should take a look at the last year to see where you might need the most activity. Doing a quick analysis of what worked, what didn’t work, and what might be the best ideas for finding new clients and business for the new year.

If you determine that you have some glaring problems, schedule a review and corrective action for those first. Once you’ve dealt with any problems, an area that can always use some attention is your website content. No matter how many web pages you have now, there is always more information that you can provide to attract more visitors. More content that directly relates to your chosen subject matter can help you expand your presence and increase new visitors.

There are a couple of good ways to determine the best content or subject matter for your new web pages. One way is review some of your competitor’s websites and see what keywords they use to attract visitors. How do you find the best competitors to review? Do a search on your chosen keywords in your favorite search engine and review each website at the first 10 or 12 listings. Actually, it would be a good idea to look at all three major search engine results (Google, Yahoo, and Bing).

Another good way to find good subject matter is to expand on your current keywords with common modifiers that may apply. A good example is if you sold sprinkler systems and used that term as a keyword you could add yard sprinkler systems, rural sprinkler systems, automatic sprinkler systems, automated sprinkler systems and so forth. There are several good keyword tools both free and commercial that can help you find new variations and give some idea on the number of searches.

And the content? Well the easiest way is to start creating relevant content to your new keywords, like how to winterize your automatic sprinkler system or how to extend your lawn sprinkler system to your garden. This adds value to the visitor and also can help establish your website as an expert in related subject matter. That’s something that the visitors and the search engines love.

So now that you have new content based on new keywords you want to expose this new information to interested readers and the search engines too. You can do that by writing a few articles about different aspects of sprinkler systems and put the link to your website content in the article or resource box. A resource box is simply a paragraph at the end of each article that references links to more information of similar interest. The best way to present the link is using descriptive text rather than just the website URL.

So now we have all the parts to the puzzle. We created a plan of action based on our research into expanding our subject matter and content. We also have a method of promoting this new content to interested readers and the search engines. Now we need to figure out a good schedule of adding the content and publishing the articles that promote the content over the first few weeks or months of the new year.

Even if you don’t have the extra time at the end of the year, this is a process that should be a top priority if you want to find new business and expand the reach of your website. You can never have too much good content that is of value to your potential target group. And expanding that content on a regular basis is paramount to expanding your business generated from your website.