Posts Tagged ‘site promotion’

The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Auction Sales

Friday, June 10th, 2011

Auction sales are useful for all kinds of goods, but there is a need for caution, because you will not have sight of the item itself. This need not be a difficulty if you are purchasing something like bedding or dog’s food, but it can be vital if you are buying collectibles where condition is of prime importance.

For instance, the condition of stamps and coins governs the object’s value within the limits of the year’s or issue’s minimum and maximum catalogue values. However, you only see a picture and it could be of another coin or stamp – what you receive in the post might be a different kettle of fish.

In this piece we will look at the most serious pros and cons of auction sales. First, the advantages:

Auction sales can be traced from the opening auction bid to the end and you can choose how much you are prepared to pay over a fairly long period of time – days or weeks rather than minutes at an off line auction. You still have information at hand like minimum sale cost. This gives you plenty of time to weigh up alternative sales options.

There is a chance that you can purchase objects at well under market value. For example, numerous objects do not have a reserve price, so if the item is not popular among many people, you may buy it really cheaply. Also, if the minimum cost is not met, it is worth getting in touch with the vendor and offering a little more for a private sale.

If you go through a trustworthy on line auction site, you will be covered against fraud. If the item you receive is below par for the description of it on the website, you have a very good chance of getting your money back either from the vendor, the auction site or your credit card company – three layers of protection.

However, there are disadvantages too. These are the ones that most people think are the most serious:

You are purchasing sight-unseen, so there is a greater chance of fraud, but as we said above, the auction site and your credit card company do have a degree of liability, so please check what that is before you go bidding (or even shopping) on line.

Check the postage and packing fees. This is a favourite way of bumping up the minimum charge for an item. For example, a set of batteries may not have a reserve and you may be happy to purchase them for a dollar, but if the postage is ten dollars, you have been had.

Another favourite rip-off is selling copies. You might think that you are bidding for genuine Gucci sunglasses, but for sure the chances are that they will be cheap Chinese copies worth a tenth of what you paid. Would you really know the difference? Honestly?

You can get a bargain on an auction website, but remember that there are a lot of hungry individuals out there who are prepared to lie to earn a couple of dollars and that does not even include the professional liars and thieves.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a number of subjects, but is now involved with sales force automation software. If you would to know more, please visit our web site at Sales Force Tools

SEO Copywriting Services

Monday, May 16th, 2011

SEO copywriting services are provided by companies or people who will either write articles to order or will permit you, for a fee, to re-use and rewrite pieces that they have written beforehand. Some of these companies are fantastic, but most of them are worse than bad.

Some of the pieces that these companies sell are so bad that it would have been easier to compose the pieces from fresh rather than rewrite the gibberish that they sell.

The difficulty when you are searching for SEO copywriting services is that most webmasters who require these services are working alone and frequently those who do know a good firm offering SEO copywriting services would prefer to keep the knowledge to themselves.

Inquiring in a forum is virtually useless, because there are too many people who do not know but have to say something and there are others who would not know a decent article if they read one.

Therefore, the best advice is to be vary wary before you listen to advice and be very, very wary before you part with any money. There are different levels that these businesses work on, so it also depends what you need.

Do you want a company to supply SEO copywriting services in toto – that is, do you need them to write the articles and promote your firm for you or do you want to purchase articles from them and promote your own web site yourself?

The first choice is expensive, but there are two degrees of the second option: first, if you purchase original pieces, you will have the same worries mentioned above, but if you buy PLR articles (private label rights), you ought to rewrite them a little anyway in order to render them unique. This is an simple and far less costly quest.

Let’s start with the top end of the market. if you want someone to take over promoting your company on the Net, then you have to be certain that that firm understands the business that you are in. For example, would a firm that has had success marketing a garden centre be able to advertise a butcher’s?

Therefore, you need to see examples of the businesses that they have run successful campaigns for in the past and you ought to look at their web site and even contact the firm to see if there were any worries. A bona fide SEO copywriting services firm will be glad to show you these details, because they will be proud of their repute.

If you only need someone to compose original articles for you, you can afford to be a great deal less curious. All you need to know in this instance is the details of the warranty. If there is no warranty that you will like the articles, then go elsewhere.

If you are prepared to do a little rewriting of the pieces that you have bought, you can render them your own. This is the path that most people using SEO copywriting services take to add content to their web sites or use as pieces to advertise them.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on several topics, but is now concerned with the SEO Content. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at PLR Articles

SEO And How To Get More Backlinks Part Two

Monday, May 16th, 2011

Look at the subject matter of your web site. is it relevant or is it flashy? Does the content set out to help and inform your visitors or does it set out to show how clever a graphic designer you are? Most search engines cannot actually read graphics, but they can all interpret text.

Also, do not forget that just because you have high-speed broadband, not everyone else does. Some of your prospective customers might only stop, if they have to wait ten minutes for one of your pages to download at 56 Kbps or even 28 Kbps dial up.

Each page ought to have between 500-1,000 words of relevant, unrepeated content. Remember as well that the text must be in regular text (or HTML), but definitely NOT embedded in graphics or the search engines will not be able to read it and classify your web site.

Without spamming the search engines by reiterating yourself too often, look for legitimate methods to repeat your keywords. How? you may ask. Well, one method is to have a number of menus or navigation bars. You could have one in the left or right hand margin and one either in the info bar (between the header and the body) or the page footer. That gives you two, but if your pages are lengthy, you could have three: top, side and bottom.

Another way of putting a limited menu on the site is to have a ‘locater’ or a ‘You are here :’ line. You could also add a sitemap to your menus. You can also put a copyright notice in the page footer with an active link back to your home page. These methods give you four of five internal legitimate links on your site for which no search engine should penalize you.

Back to getting more backlinks, because getting more backlinks ought to always be your first priority. Write articles for each of your web pages with deep links directly to the page for which they were written. If you are allowed two links, one goes to your home page and one goes to the page within your web site that you wrote the piece to promote.

I personally have discovered that three articles per web page usually does the trick, but it can take more. You ought to join some relevant blogs and forums and take part, leaving just worthwhile, practical comments, but be certain that your backlink is in your sigfile (signature file).

This technique can produce hundreds of relevant unreciprocated backlinks, but be wary to keep it low key and relevant or the webmaster may delete your comments or even your account, wasting your work of weeks or even months.

Create a sigfile for your emails too. This does not supply true backlinks that a search engine will read, but it will produce random traffic to your website, particularly if your sigfile is attached to a good joke or a topical report.

Try to be innovative and work on getting backlinks on relevant websites. As you rise up the search engine rankings, people will email you asking to exchange links. Do not do this, no matter what how they put their case. A link out of your site is like having a hole in your bucket; you should be plugging the holes in your bucket, not making new ones.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on several topics, but is now concerned with the SEO Content. If you want to know more, please visit our website at PLR pieces

SEO And Getting More Backlinks Part One

Friday, May 13th, 2011

If you are at all serious about earning money on line, then you should be concentrating a great deal of your work on SEO and getting more backlinks. SEO is ‘search engine optimization’, but for those who are not certain what backlinks are, here is an explanation.

Backlinks are links from other websites back to your web site. Google and other search engines use the number of backlinks it can find to a web site to judge how popular (and therefore how good or and useful) it is. The most well-liked websites drift to the top of the search engine rankings.

However, there are two kinds of backlinks: reciprocated and unreciprocated backlinks. Reciprocated backlinks are those where Google finds a link from your website back to the other website, which it perceives as a one for one swap.

These links are deemed to be of less worth. Unreciprocated backlinks are perceived to be of high value because, Google reasons, you have to be so useful that webmasters will link to you for nothing.

I am sure that you appreciate that it is very useful to get to the front page of Google’s search results for the keyword phrase that you would like to rank for, but maybe you do not realize quite how vital it is.

On average, over 85% of surfers arrive at the web site that they would like by looking for it on a search engine and most surfers use Google. Not just that, but most people do not look further than the first page of results and most of those do not even scroll down to check the others that they cannot see on the first page (below the fold).

It could be that the numbers 1-5 in the search results get 10 times more clicks than the numbers 6-10 (assuming 10 results per page) and 100 times more than anybody on page two. After page two, you can forget it really.

Not only will your web site receive more clicks up on the top of the search results, but the people who click through to your site will be searching for what you have to sell, which results in more targeted visitors. If the product sells, the top three do extremely well indeed.

I will return to getting more backlinks later, because there are a few other little tweaks that you can check on to improve your search engine ranking (SEO). Firstly, make sure that the title of your website is relevant to what you are using the site for.

For example, if you are selling T-shirts, it is better to call the site “Mike’s T-shirts” than “Mike’s Clothing”. There are other methods of linking websites, if you decide later to sell collared shirts or jumpers. Remain focused. Begin earning money by selling T-shirts and then move on.

If you have several pages, make sure that the titles of every page are relevant as well. Check the source code for every page as well and be sure that the META tags are relevant: that is, put at least six keywords in the keyword meta tag and put a relevant description in the description meta tag – again keep them focused but do not repeat a keyword over three times per page.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on several subjects, but is now concerned with the SEO Content. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at PLR pieces

Blogging As An Art Form And Promotion

Friday, May 13th, 2011

If writing is an art form, then blogging can be seen as an art form too. Blogging is no less an art form than regular composing articles only because it is more popularist and does not require paper. Bloggers compose articles on all sorts of items, in fact they compose pieces on each issue under the sun. People write about their daily lives, their jobs, their hobbies and their worries.

Blogging started life in the mid Nineties for webmasters to maintain a record of their involvement with their computers, which is where the term comes from: ‘web log’. Web log became weblogs and then it was contracted to blog. Web logs soon became a popular fashion of recording and publishing other daily activities on line, much like a diary.

Blogs can get posted to a URL like a website is, or they can be posted to a free bloggers’ website. There are many of these free blogs, but one of the most famous ones is Google’s ‘Blogger’.

In spite of being free of charge, Blogger offers a fully flexible blog which can hold adverts like Google Ads and Amazon, so that the blogger can offer related things for sale and earn a little money at the same time.

If personal blogs are used to talk on daily life, business blogs can be used as rolling adverts for a firm’s products. The manager of the firm’s blog can compose pieces on innovations, new products, jobs vacant and special offers. The firm’s blog can be used as a private press release machine which can reach a global audience.

If you would like to make a blog for personal or business use, you will have to know something about blogging, so here are a few pointers.

This first thing to do is delineate what your blog is going to be about. If it is a company blog then that is easy, but a personal blog ought to have a target audience. It should appeal to a niche group. Strive to keep the niche group fairly tight, blogs that waffle on huge sprawling topics are not as well-liked.

For instance, stamp collecting is too wide a topic. Collecting British stamps is better, but British commemorative stamps of the 20th Century is even better. Include some images to keep the blog looking bright and colourful. This is easily achieved since most contemporary printers have a facility to scan images and send them to your computer.

In the blogosphere, information is the name of the game. Most surfers surf to gain information. They surf to get the solutions to problems that they are experiencing; in order to help with their hobbies or simply for general information. Therefore, you ought to make your blog a bearer of practical information.

You can make your blog interactive by allowing your readers to leave comments. Some software permits fairly lengthy comments so that visitors can leave their opinions in full. This interactivity will encourage readers to come back to follow the debate.

In fact, most blogging software will also inform the leaver of a comment that there has been a reply and it will also collect the commentator’s email address so that you can add them to a mailing list as long as you supply them with the ability to opt out of the list if they want to.

If you are interested in experimenting with Blogging As An Art Form, just go to our website on Blogging For Beginners.

How To Use Facebook To Increase Your Sales

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

Internet marketing is big. Not just big in that marketing and promoting is all pervasive on the Internet, but it can also produce big returns if you know how to use it. However, because the Net is still a new medium and because it is the most adaptable marketing medium ever developed, new ways of promoting on the Internet are being developed each month or two.

One of these new techniques of Internet marketing is called Facebook. In fact, it is a very subtle marketing machine, because most of the individuals who use Facebook are aware only of the benefits of using Facebook and think that the advertising is incidental or even helpful.

This is a tribute to the organizers of Facebook and the flexibility of the Internet. They have managed to imitate a quality newspaper, where the reader is not bothered by the adverts, because they are unobtrusive and the information delivered is well-worth the money.

For those unacquainted with Facebook, it does not deliver global news, rather it allows users, friends and family to stay in touch and spread their micro-news. Facebook is what is called a social networking web site and has a global membership surpassing most countries and even a continent. Any advertiser would be crazy to ignore the marketing opportunities that Facebook presents

Facebook allows a few kinds of marketing. You can put an item up for sale and visitors to your website can pick to look in your ‘shop’ if they desperately would like to spend money, but needless to say this approach does not yield results. The other kind of advertising is pay-per-click or PPC. This is equivalent to Google’s Adsense, but it only takes place on the Facebook web site.

However, the Facebook PPC advertising set up can be a great deal better targeted than Google’s Adsense. This is because Facebook has so many more personal details about the users who sign up for a free web page. For example, an advertiser can choose whose web pages his adverts go on. In fact, the advertiser has no end of flexibility.

An advertiser can pick: male or female; adult or child; gay or straight; from any continent or any country; any degree of education; any earnings bracket; marital status; home owner or not and so on and so on. This equals that I could target an ad on central heating to only those Facebook members who, for instance are: married with children; more than forty; home owners; earning a salary of over $50,000 and are living in the USA or not.

That would be precisely the group of individuals who would require a functioning central heating system and could afford to pay for it. And you pay merely for the click throughs that are made on your ads. If they are ignored, then there is no charge.

There are also a number of other tools that can help you promote your web site on Facebook such as the in-built links to other social networking sites like Stumble Upon, Digg and lots more.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a number of topics, but is now involved with sales force automation software. If you would to know more, please visit our website at Sales Force Tools

Sales Marketing Strategy

Monday, May 9th, 2011

Each product has to have a sales marketing strategy to support it. You can sometimes promote a few things together like a table and seats, but any device for which you do not have a sales marketing strategy is doomed to failure.

Let me put it simply, if you went out one day and saw that someone was selling his entire stock of bicycle tyres cheap because they were going bankrupt and you purchased them, who would know except you and the person you bought them from? And he is not likely to want them back!

You may say: ‘But I would not do that. I would put an advert in the paper’. Well, that is your marketing marketing strategy. I am not saying that it is a good one, but at least it is something. Something to improve on really.

The first thing to think about is who your target market is and how can you best reach them. The answers to these two questions will allow you to choose whether you are going to concentrate on on or off line sales. Never forget that the vast bulk of sales are off line, although the on line market is growing every day.

If you have a shed load of bicycle tyres, for example, you would almost certainly be better off marketing them in the classifieds section of the local paper. Or you could promote a one-off garage sale of cheap bicycle tyres or you could take them to a car boot sale. In your spare time, you could create a small web site, but in this instance off line sales are more likely than on line sales.

If however, you link up with a bicycle tyre firm that is willing to drop-ship (ie deliver) from their warehouse for you then a car boot or garage sale is useless to you. In this example, you should go straight on line, create an automated sales and payment processing page and advertise it on line by the various methods on hand.

If you really would like to, you could back up the on line sales with a bit of off line promoting. For instance, you could put a postcard in the newsagent’s window marketing that your web site has a stock of cheap bicycle tyres that can be delivered to the customers’ door. Then imply add the URL of your website.

Your sales marketing strategy should be customized to what you are trying to sell. In other words, you have to have a great deal of marketing tactics so that you can choose the ones that are correct for your product. No one sales marketing strategy is ever going to fit all the products. Therefore, if you rely on only one sales marketing strategy you will not succeed.

In summary, once you have your irresistible deal ready for sale, sit down and think about who will buy it and how you can reach them – ie how you can tell them that you have what they would like. Then draw up a plan – yes, I mean write something down! Write down how you are going to accomplish this and write down when the stages of your sales marketing strategy have to be completed by.

It is merely by having a solid sales marketing strategy that you can refer to that you will succeed in marketing. Failing to plan is tantamount to planning to fail.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a number of topics, but is now involved with sales force automation software. If you would to know more, please visit our website at Sales Force Tools

How To Generate Sales With A Viral E-book

Thursday, April 28th, 2011

Are you aware of the concept of viral marketing? Viral marketing is a way of getting other people to pass your website’s URL or address around the Internet for you. It is a similar idea to the old fashioned chain letter, but not really the same.

The trick is to write something so interesting to so many people that people who read it will send it on to their friends and family. And your contact details are tagged on the end of it.

Viral marketing can show your contact details to thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of surfers in a very short time and for no financial outlay. It is one of the most efficient types of marketing known to the Internet Marketer.

There are two principal ways of starting the viral marketing snowball rolling down hill. The fastest way is to find or write a very funny joke, attach your contact details to the bottom of it and send it to your friends and family. They will pass it on and the snowball is off. The only problem with this approach is that the message is not targeted.

In other words if you are selling insurance you would like to get your contact details in front of people older than the age of 18, but you have no control over who reads your joke. Half of the surfers reading it might be children who do not have a credit card or want insurance anyway.

If you want to reach a targeted audience, then you need to put a bit more effort into your campaign, but not that much more. This approach involves composing an ebook on the benefits of insurance and sending that to your friends and family. They will pass it to their friends, if it is interesting enough, but no-one would send it to kids, would they?

Hey presto, thousands of adults who probably have a credit card and need insurance of some type have your helpful information on insurance and your contact details. This line of attack works for most concepts. Do you have website on the Net game ‘Halo’?

Fine, write about Halo mods (modifications) and send that out. Very few kids would pass that on to adults, but they might pester their parents to buy them Halo for Christmas. Viral advertising is free and other surfers do your advertising for you. The ‘only’ thing that you have to do is compose an ebook (or report) that is interesting enough for people to want to pass on.

There are a few of interesting variations to this simple ebook. You could fill it full of associate links to products. If someone purchases anything after clicking on one of your links, you will earn a commission. If they join the same scheme from your link, you will earn a commission off all of their sales as well.

In the same vein, you could permit people passing the book on to join your sales structure (downline) and rebrand the book as if it were theirs. This gives all the Internet Marketers who see it a better reason for sending it on and you still get a proportion of their sales. You could soon have thousands of marketers in your downline earning you payments.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a number of topics, but is now involved with sales force automation software. If you would to know more, please visit our web site at Sales Force Tools

Effective Methods To Start Blogging

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

Everybody has something to say and most people are passionate about something that they would like to talk about. Individuals would like to take this desire to talk a couple of stages further – they would like to tell the world about it. That was impossible less that twenty years ago, unless you managed to be on TV or were syndicated in the world’s press. Now, of course, anyone can do it.

The Net makes it possible for everybody to have their say. The young and the old, the rich and the poor can discuss what they like on the Internet. You can use a website as your soap box or you could use a specialized web site known as a blog. If you cannot have your own web site for any reason, you could open a free blog at one of the numerous web sites that offer free blogs.

The word ‘blog’ is short for ‘web log’ and adding an article to your blog is called blogging. Blogs have become a very effective way of spreading one’s point of view. The latest kind of blogging is micro-blogging, which is the generic description for Twitter.

Blogging has been used successfully by peoples of countries where the provision of human rights is not a government priority. Only recently, dissidents in Iran, Iraq and Myanmar have kept the world up-to-date on repression in their countries through blogs. The blogs were frequently reprinted in the world press and reported on the International news.

If you would like to blog for free, search Google for ‘free blogs’ and take a look around. There are dozens of free blog sites around and they all offer different functions. Blogger by Google is one of the better ones, but there really are many different kinds of free blogs.

One consideration is whether you want your blog to be open or closed. That is, do you want anyone to be able to read it or do you want just a closed user group (CUG), which could include your friends, your family or your colleagues.

It should not take longer that thirty minutes to set up your blog. Some providers like to approve new blogs, but others do not. You could be blogging within the hour, so write an article welcoming people to your blog and post it to the blog. Make it ‘sticky’ if you can, so that it is always the first post that people read when they arrive at your blog.

Make your posts educational and endeavor to keep them topical. They should neither be so short that it is not worth coming to read them nor so long that they become boring – 400 to 500 is believed to be about correct.

You will need to promote your blog or no-one will know that it is there. Do this by posting your pieces (with your blog address affixed) to a few article directories. It is free and will give your blog a real increase in circulation. You can stop doing this when your blog is self-sustaining.

Allow all visitors to make comments on the blog, because it encourages people to come back, but check frequently for spam comments and delete them because a blog full of spam looks neglected.

If you are keen on trying Effective Blogging, please go over to our website on Blogging For Beginners.

Three Terrible Search Engine Optimisation Mistakes To Steer Clear Of

Friday, November 19th, 2010

There are numerous bad practices that can have a counter productive effect on your search engine optimisation efforts, most of these factors involve breeching the terms of service of main search engines, but there are different issues that can have a harmful impact such as rendering content or navigation in a fashion that search engines can’t easily read or comprehend. In this article I’ll outline a number of of the blunders which I recurrently come across as a professional provider of SEO Services These issues will result in your sites rankings being penalized, and by avoiding these practices where attainable, and correcting any of the below which are currently affecting your website, you’ll enhance your web sites on page SEO and make your web site more easily spidered by Googlebot.

1. Hyperlinks To Dangerous Neighborhoods.

Search engines understand that you simply cannot regulate who hyperlinks to you, and they will not penalize you for having links from sites of a doubtful nature, after all if this were the case it would be all too simple for unscrupulous web masters to sabotage the websites of their competitors by building a couple of links pointing to their websites from free for all links farms and different low trust type sites. Nonetheless, they also understand that you have 100% control over who you opt to link out to. In the event you make a poor decision and hyperlink to a spammy website or a link farm then you can be penalized because of this, so choose who you link to very carefully.

2. Flash Navigation.

Although Google can now read some data from flash files, this does not imply that the day when a web site can depend on flash as its sole type of navigation has arrived, the truth is its still a long way off. If you happen to have flash navigation on your web site, then be sure that its supported by text links. Additionally do not forget that not everybody has flash installed on their browser (or desires it installed) so your text links may also expand the general usability of your website.

3. Splash Pages.

Adding a splash web page as your web sites homepage is a surefire way to loose visitors and kick your web sites rankings to the gutter. The homepage of a site is the one most important web page, therefore it makes absolutely no sense to make use of it to display a web page which incorporates little or no textual content and basically consists of a pretty picture with a “click to enter” link. How would you feel if you went to a store to purchase something for your dinner, only to discover a vast banner hung over the doorway to the shop and a button saying “push to enter”? Splash pages are annoying to users, and will actually result in a reasonable share of those lucky enough to have actually found your web site to leave right there and then.

Furthermore the splash page isn’t going to even be indexed by google because it contains no textual content, therefore you have thrown away the most important page of your whole website. If you have a splash web page, do everyone a favor and remove it. During my career as a supplier of search engine optimisation Services, I’ve yet to find anything that provides me more personal satisfaction than removing a splash page!

Interested in learning more about SEO? Or interested in a quote for SEO Services? Look up our website, we also have a free SEO blog where you can learn about the basics of SEO and find some effective tips.