Posts filed under 'Promoting Stuff'
They say the best things in life are free!
That statement holds a lot of truth, especially when it comes to starting an internet business opportunity. The problem is that most people don’t have the finances it requires to start their own business. The beauty of the internet is that it is one of the few marketing platforms providing ordinary people, with limited capital, an opportunity to create their own full time business.
Lucky for us, it is possible to start a profitable internet business opportunity with very little start-up costs. Below are a few methods to begin promoting your new internet business opportunity on a shoe string budget.
1. Optimize Your Web Pages for the Search Engines.
Make sure that your web site is properly optimized for the keywords you have selected for your web pages. It is important to do a few simple things right when it comes to SEO. First, use H1 and H2 tags on all of your pages, making sure that your headlines include your keyword or keyword phrase. Check your pages keyword density, it is best that you range from 3-5%. You may be able to go higher than that without spamming but you will just have to play with it.
2. Open an Account with Google and Place a Compatible Site-Map on Your Site.
The absolute fastest way to get indexed with Google is to place a site-map on your web site. Open an account with Google, don’t worry it’s free, and tell Google where to find that site-map. You will be indexed within 24 hours, it’s that simple. The quicker you are indexed by the major search engines the more traffic you will start receiving.
3. Write and Submit Articles.
There is NO better way to get free traffic than writing articles and submitting them to article directories and announcement lists. Writing articles provides a webmaster a multitude of benefits like linking and notoriety. By writing and submitting several articles a week you will build an empire of backlinks and a hail storm of traffic.
4. Write Press Releases.
Press releases are the country cousin of articles but don’t underestimate their power. Press releases are very similar to articles and can reap you the same type of benefits. There are a growing number of press related and syndication directories popping up all over the internet. Traffic and links are the paramount reason why press releases are a great strategy. Especially, for those that are looking for low cost marketing techniques.
5. Use Free Classifieds to Promote Your New Internet Business Opportunity.
Make use of the internet’s many free classified sites. This is not my most recommended marketing technique but the more you get your web site’s name in front of people the more traffic you will receive. Make sure that your ads are placed in the right network of sites for your targeted audience.
Starting a new internet business opportunity is a challenge! You are competing against billions of other web sites with more coming online everyday. By using the strategies outlined above you will be ahead of 99% of all the other web site owners on the net. The techniques are simple yet very effective and the best thing is they are all FREE!
Starting a new Internet Business Opportunity is a challenge, especially on a budget. Mark Williams can help by checking out his web site and more Internet Marketing Strategies.
April 3rd, 2008
The first book of Inheritance Cycle, Eragon, was published in 2002. Paolini started writing it after he graduated high school only fifteen years old. After it was republished in 2003 by Knopf, it became a bestseller with worldwide readership.
The book begins the story of Eragon (the title character) in the fantasy realm of Alagaësia. The book was widely criticized as drawing on both Lord of the Realms and Star Wars, but is nevertheless widely considered a great book by a talented author.
The third book of the series is yet unpublished, but will be published on September 20th under the name Brisingr.
March 30th, 2008
1. Discover a USP and Aggressively Use It: Unique selling proposition or USP is what your company does that distinguishes it from the competition. It could be something like service, product quality, price, delivery or any other factor that makes customers take notice. You are on the right track in developing a USP if the USP invokes a ‘how do you do that?’ response.
For example stating you ’sell car care products to the car enthusiasts’ isn’t likely to get much of a response. But saying something like “We sell a total car care experience’; it’s bound to pique people’s interest. Ask your website promotion company to use your USP as much possible.
From the web perspective, online users are bombarded with hundreds of advertising messages every time they log on. Showing them something different is a nice change.
2. Make Your Site Easy to Navigate: Nothing frustrates users more than having to scan up and down and side to side of a page to find the information they’re looking for. Use reader-friendly fonts, headings and subheadings to guide the reader through your site.
3. Use Professional Copywriters: It’s staggering to know minute changes in a headline or web content can skyrocket response rates by over 100%! Don’t write your own copy. You may unintentionally write something that confuses or turns away your customers. The way they show you this is they don’t buy. Stick with a professional.
4. Use Links and Reciprocal Link Programs: Links and reciprocal links are great ways to introduce qualified traffic to your site. Use them as part of your website promotion campaign. They can also help you set up mutually beneficial affiliate partners.
5. Domain Name Selection: Use a domain name that is rich in keywords. If you need to, use dashes (-) or numbers to differentiate your URL. Don’t fall for the myth that nobody will remember your URL name. Research shows most URL click-thru’s are a result of search engine results or other links.
6. Robust Hosting Services: Find a good hosting service to cater for all your hosting needs. There are many companies around offering various packages. Look for one that has solid hosting plus additional website promotion services integrated with its main services.
If a hosting company is strongly linked with a website promotion company, then you have found a rare online gem. Having your hosting and website promotion coming out of a central location gives you great efficiency easier management of your website.
7. Use a 1 Stop Shop Provider: A company that can perform all of these services for you and offer written results guarantees is a company worth partnering with. Focus on your business and work closely with a website promotion firm that can take charge of your marketing functions and host your site simultaneously.
The Author has put together a resource website strictly to educate potential and current business owners about website promotion. You can visit it at http://www.1web-site-promotion.com
March 29th, 2008
A promotional item is an article given away free of charge to the populace in an effort to encourage business or increase interest in, or sales of, a product or service. Often given out at trade shows, used in direct mail as a marketing campaigns. Examples of promotional items include custom t-shirts, promotional hats, bumper stickers, and promotional pens. Everyone uses promotional pens. Think about it someone is always asking for your “John Hancock” on some document. That makes pens a great way to seal the deal. With every loan doc or contract you have signed give your customer a nice quality promotional pen with your company name on the barrel.
February 22nd, 2008
I have been a professional Ferrari Finder for over 10 years. I basically act as an agent between a buyer looking to buy a used ferrari and a seller who is looking (or not occasionally) to sell a ferrari. As the cars are worth so much it makes it worth while for a customer to use me to facilitate the purchase. In example I was asked to find a Ferrari Enzo last week, a phenominally hard to find car that had me climbing walls calling all sorts of numbers that should have ferrari’s for sale. In the end I managed it though, much to my favour as I got a good fee - almost 5% of the total cars worth, which was a lot I can tell you!
February 19th, 2008
The internet has the capacity, sometimes, to divorce not just our minds from our bodies and siphon us into cyberspace but also our common sense.
When it comes to business models the internet seems to have managed to make us forget everything we knew in the Real World (RL for the acronym lovers) and slow down the length of time it takes us to re-learn it.
How else can we explain the fact that the number one selling tool in the universe is so underused on the internet that hardly anyone remembers to implement it. All right, I’ve played games long enough, time to get real and tackle exactly what I’m talking about.
In the real world before you change your mobile phone, splash out for that flat-screen plasma TV or set out to test-drive the latest muscle-car at your local dealer you first discuss it with your friends. That’s because you’re the product of an evolutionary process that has conditioned us, as a species, to pool our resources in order to reach a decision that is far more informed than anything we could have managed on our own.
More brains than one
Left alone, on an island, without even a Man Friday to talk to our store of knowledge and our ability to make informed judgements would soon deteriorate to the point where the quality of our decisions would jeopardise our chances of survival.
The net is no different. We see a product that’s hot, a web page we like or a news item that’s topical and our immediate reaction is to tell a friend (or several). With the internet and email our telling a friend becomes both immediate and personalised. Except that when we’re in full flow, buried in reading the text on a page, checking out the stats on a sports car or weighing up the merits of a particular product we’re loathe to leave the page in order to load up our email programme and spend time firing-off a message or two.
Savvy website designers who understand this have responded with the ‘Tell A Friend’ facility, a nifty applet that, at a click, allows you to tell your friend or friends what you’ve found on the net. That way you and I, as sophisticated consumers, carry on with our online activity and still engage in the critical knowledge-sharing interaction that’s a characteristic of our species.
This is a classic win-win scenario. We do our bit. Website owners get to benefit by recommendations and fresh traffic and our friends find out about websites they probably wouldn’t have come across as quickly (if at all).
In website design parlance a ‘Tell A Friend’ facility is ‘empowerment’. It’s allowing the surfer to increase their interaction with the website and maximise their return from its use.
Not as easy as it looks
Of course, had all this common-sense behaviour really been as common as that I would not have written this article and, in all probability, you would not be reading it. I have no idea why website owners do not ask for it to be implemented more frequently, but I do know that when they do they don’t always get it right.
Remember the reason we didn’t use our email client to send a message to our friends in the first place is because by the time we find what we want on the net and launch ourselves into the web pages we’re in too deep to readily want to interrupt what we’re doing and send a message to anyone.
There are two types of ‘Tell A Friend’ facility you can use. The first takes you to another page where you can type in your friend’s email address, your own and (usually) a brief message. The second type allows you to do all this, prompts you for a message right from the page you’re surfing.
It is the clever use of the second type implemented by web design experts, PQL (http://www.pqlwebsolutions.co.uk/), that proved its mettle when it allowed the pages it appeared on at Cool Publications, an internet publisher website, to increase their traffic load by over 300%.
When analysing why this happened at the Cool Publications monthly traffic stats meeting it became apparent that while in the past we’d relied on valuable word-of-mouth publicity to spread through the digital equivalent of more traditional means (i. e. fire-up your email and send off a message much as you would have picked up the phone when you found a spare moment and talked to your friends about what you’d found), in this case we’d actually ‘prompted’ the surfer to tell their friends and, what’s more, made it possible for this to happen without ever leaving the page.
“Breaking the flow of concentration of surfers is never a desirable thing to do and neither should you take them off your website in order to have them send a message to a friend. The same one-click ease of use that got them there can conspire to take them somewhere else,” says Lead Designer, Paul Beardsell at PQL. “Taking advantage of word-of-mouth publicity is essential to your business but it should never happen at the expense of a sale.”
So, if you have a page on your website (or a product) which you think it’d set the world alight and surfers would like to share with their friends, go ahead and implement the code to make this possible. As long as you remember that empowerment also means ease of use and additional sales, and all this should work, seamlessly together.
David Amerland is the Projects Editor at Cool Publications, an internet publishing company that has revolutionised web marketing and publicity. Prior to that he reported for The European, worked in PR for a national sports corporation and was the lead reporter for Your Money, Savings and Investments magazine.
February 18th, 2008
Modifying a supra? god I am jelous! I have been finding supra’s in the local papers for years and not knowing whether or not to part with my new used alfa romeo tspark in the vane hope that a used modified toyota supra will be not too expensive to insure. In the end its never really going to happen, theres just no chance I will even find my ideal supra before its too late and they are all gone, crashed or rusted to hell! There was only ever 600 brought to the uk - a real shame because now I am in love with modified toyota supras. If you hear of one for sale under 5k then let me know.
February 15th, 2008
If you need to build a huge responsive list in a short amount of time then JV giveaways can be the vehicle that drives you to success. The concept is very simple but incredibly powerful. A group of people, usually but not limited to internet marketers, all contribute a product that will be given away for free. This is the hook that will bring in the prospects. Let’s face it, freebies always make good bait.
The well run giveaways are picky and only permit quality products to be given away. This ensures that people come back to the next JV giveaway. There are always new players involved that bring in new gifts and the old veterans usually do not offer the same product over and over again as response rates start dropping.
The power behind the JV giveaway happens when everyone starts promoting the site. With sometimes hundreds of people promoting the same url, the amount of traffic to the site can be huge. Everybody gets to leverage the efforts of the other JV partners. This means that even if you are a beginner with a small list, you get to benefit from the lists of all the other partners that are participating in the JV giveaway.
If you are an internet marketer looking to build a list you should be taking advantage of this tactic. After all, it is free. You only need a product to giveaway which is easy to attainable at the giveaways themselves. I have put together a nice list of all the on going and up coming JV giveaways here. It also includes some links to sites where you can pick up products to use in the JV giveaways.
January 26th, 2008
Many visitors to Canada will be exposed to Inuit art (Eskimo art) sculptures while touring the country. These are the magnificent hand made sculptures carved from stone by the Inuit artists living in the northern Arctic regions of Canada. While in some of the major Canadian cities (Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec City) or other tourist areas popular with international visitors such as Banff, Inuit sculptures will be seen at various retail shops and displayed at some museums. Since Inuit art has been getting more and more international exposure, people may be seeing this Canadian fine art form at galleries and museums located outside Canada too.
As a result, it will be natural for many tourists and art collectors to decide that they would like to purchase Inuit sculptures as nice souvenirs for their homes or as very unique gifts for others. Assuming that the intention is to acquire an authentic piece of Inuit art rather than a cheap tourist imitation, the question arises on how does one tell apart the real thing from the fakes?
It would be pretty disappointing to bring home a piece only to find out later that it isn’t authentic or even made in Canada. If one is lucky enough to be traveling in the Canadian Arctic where the Inuit live and make their wonderful artwork, then it can be safely assumed that any Inuit art piece purchased from a local northern store or directly from an Inuit carver would be authentic. One would have to be more careful elsewhere in Canada, especially in tourist areas where all sorts of other Canadian souvenirs such as t-shirts, hockey jerseys, postcards, key chains, maple syrup and other Native Canadian arts are sold.
The safest places to shop for Inuit sculptures to ensure authenticity are always the reputable galleries that specialize in Canadian Inuit art and Eskimo art. Some of these galleries have advertisements in the city tourist guides found in hotels. Reputable Inuit art galleries are also listed in Inuit Art Quarterly magazine which is devoted entirely to Inuit art. These galleries will usually be located in the downtown tourist areas of major cities. When one walks into these galleries, one will see that there will be only Inuit art and maybe Native art but none of the other usual tourist souvenirs such as t-shirts or postcards. These galleries will have only authentic Inuit art for sale as they do not deal with imitations or fakes.
Just to be even safer, make sure that the piece you are interested in comes with a Canadian government Igloo tag certifying that it was hand made by a Canadian Inuit artist. The Inuit sculpture may be signed by the carver either in English or Inuit syllabics but not all authentic pieces are signed. So be aware that an unsigned piece may still be indeed authentic.
Some of these Inuit art galleries also have websites so you could shop and buy authentic Inuit art sculpture from home anywhere in the world. In addition to these street retail specialty galleries, there are now reputable online galleries that also specialize in authentic Inuit art. These online galleries are a good option for buying Inuit art since the prices are usually lower than those at street retail galleries because of lower overheads. Of course, like any other shopping on the internet, one must be careful so when dealing with an online gallery, make sure that their pieces also come with the official Igloo tags to ensure authenticity.
Some tourist shops do carry authentic Inuit art as well as the other touristy souvenirs in order to cater to all types of tourists. When shopping at these types of stores, it is possible to tell apart the real pieces from the reproductions. Authentic Inuit sculpture is carved from stone and therefore should have some weight or mass to it. Stone is also cold to the touch. A reproduction made of plastic or resin from a mold will be much lighter in weight and will not be cold to the touch. A reproduction will sometimes have a company name on it such as Wolf Originals or Boma and will never feature an artist’s signature. An authentic Inuit sculpture is a one of a kind piece of artwork and nothing else on the store shelves will look exactly like it. If there are duplicates of a certain piece with exact details, the piece is not authentic.
If a piece looks too perfect in detail with absolute straight bottoms or sides, it is probably not real. Of course, if a piece features a sticker indicating that is was made in an Asian country, then it is obviously a fake. There will also be a huge price difference between authentic pieces and the imitations.
Where it becomes more difficult to determine authenticity are with the reproductions that are also made of stone. This can be a real gray area to those unfamiliar with authentic Inuit art. They do have mass and may even have some type of tag indicating that it was hand made but if there are other pieces on the shelves that look too similar in detail, they are most likely not authentic. If a seller claims that such as piece is authentic, ask to see the official Igloo tag that comes with it which will have information on the artist, location where it was made and the year it was carved. If the Igloo tag is not available, move on. The authentic pieces with the accompanying official Igloo tags will always be the highest priced and are usually kept in a separate (perhaps even locked) shelf within the store.
Clint Leung is owner of Free Spirit Gallery http://www.FreeSpiritGallery.ca, an online gallery specializing in Inuit Eskimo and Northwest Native American art including carvings, sculpture and prints. Free Spirit Gallery has numerous information resource articles with photos of authentic Inuit and Native Indian art as well as free eCards.
January 8th, 2008
In order to get top ranking in major search engines, the basics are getting the best possible contents for the site and search engines will pick up well-edited websites and furnish them to surfers through their related keywords by means of sophisticated algorithm that generates rankings.
Therefore, targeted clients, keyword and keyword phrases that reflect what clients are looking for and what the company’s major products are should be well chosen before the actual construction of any website. These carefully selected keywords or keyword phrases should be strategically placed all over your website should you hope your site be ranked by search engines.
However, it is usually not easy enough to grab a few good keywords that will represent company’s products and services. The following methods are proven ways to catch a head start.
1. Start imitating what potential clients will think
Always try to thinks like you clients, if you were them will type of words will you use to locate your products. Business conversations and meeting memoirs are good records are good data where correct keywords may be filtered out.
2. Make good use of related catalogues
Company catalogues and adverting literatures should be studied for popular keywords that clients are familiar with in business transactions. Repeated product names are certainly the one you should pay special attention to.
3. Keep a watchful eye upon the competitors
Track your competitors’ websites that are ranking well. Make sure what kind of keywords they are making use of and use them in your site if necessary.
With the methods listed above, you should be able to work out some useful keywords.
But further attention ought to be in place as follows
1 Use different combinations of keywords through good blending of words in their single or plural forms, synonyms, short forms and even misspellings.
2 Use well targeted keywords instead of general keywords. Use the word “mouse” instead of “computer peripherals”. Keywords too general will miss clients after all. In this case, more accurate and descriptive keywords such as optical mouse, wireless mouse or blue tooth mouse should be given enough consideration.
3 Avoid using single keyword. Single keyword carries the toughest competition and the least serious clients response. Search results will get blurred if single keywords are used.
4 Do not use keywords with copyright to avoid unnecessary legal accusations.
Keywords selection is the primary links of good search engine optimization. Time and experience are needed to study them fully.
Phillipe Wu is the marketing manager of B2BChinaSources.com, a B2B manufacturer marketplace & portal listing with full information of products, manufacturers, suppliers & exporters from China & Taiwan. B2BChinaSources.com is a leading B2B China manufacturers directory for global buyers to buy Taiwan quality at Chinese prices. Efficient in China products sourcing. All China products with high quality & low manufacturing cost. Direct contact with China manufacturers, contract manufacturing companies, factories and OEM / ODM manufactures & exporters. B2BChinaSources.com covers all industries & business from China & Taiwan, including Machinery Equipments & Tools, Electronic & Electrical Components, and so on.
December 19th, 2007
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