Low Cost Business

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Three Things You Must Do Before You Submit To Article Directories

To all writers and non-writers out there, now is the time to start digging up those creative writing skills.With modern communication technology comes the popularity of information-based marketing, which is one of the oldest and most effective techniques in getting targeted prospects to sites and converting them into buyers. This is

One question that gets asked thousands of times every day around the world is, how can I make money from home online? Although there is no right answer, because the Internet is allowing people to make money, in many different ways, there are a couple of ways that they can work for almost anyone. In this article we will talk about two of those.

The two ways, and I'm talking about our affiliate marketing, and blogging. When you combine these two things. You have a tremendous business model that is being used around the world by all kinds of different people to make money from home online.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is where you get paid to sell other people's products. The reason this is so popular is because almost everything is taken care of for you. You have one main job and that is to sell a product anyway you can.

Most affiliate programs are free to join, so therefore, anyone can. The downside to that is because you do not have an investment of your money up front you will not take this opportunity as serious as you should. If you will buck the trend and treat affiliate marketing as a business you can make as much money as you want from home online doing it.

2. Blogging

Blogging is the perfect complement to affiliate marketing, because anyone that can talk and can type blog. A blog is basically an online diary of your thoughts. By adding affiliate products you can make money with your blog. When someone buys one of your affiliate products you make a commission.

Blogging is a great thing for people who do not like to build webpages. By using a blogging platform that builds the pages for you, all you have to do is type in your thoughts and in essence, you have a new web page every time you post in your blog.

This is a dynamic combination because you can create a blog and an affiliate marketing products for virtually anything you can think of. If you like flyfishing in Montana you could create a blog and sell products to people who would be interested in that. If you like to cook French pastries you could start a blog about that and sell products that relate to that theme.

Once you understand what we are talking about, you will be able to answer the question, how can I make money from home online. You start a blog, add affiliate products to it, and then work on getting readers by posting comments in it.

Doing this will allow anyone to make money from home online and have fun as well.

Paul Jesse invites you to visit his make money from home online website today. His Work At Home Directory was created for people who want to make money online, make money at home, or simply start a home based business. To learn more internet marketing tips please click here now: ===> http://www.sheamarketing.com

Making Money with Your Blog!

A place for finding the Nuts and Bolts for Making Money Online with Affiliate Marketing Business Opportunity!

Once the darlings of the search engine spider, the influence of Meta tags vanished completely. This article discusses why and whether they may be making a very weak "comeback."

Meta tags, specifically the "keyword" and "description" tags, are designed to provide quick, thumbnail sketches of a web page's content in order to better classify it. At one time, the meta tags were a key factor in on-page optimization for almost all search engines. That "one time" was around the late 90's. It soon became apparent that a reliance on these tags could be exploited, and exploited it was. Today, after the "fall" of the meta tag, they are making a partial comeback as very low-weight on-page optimization factor.

The influence of the meta tag, especially the keywords, faded away once most major search engines either dropped them entirely from consideration in their algorithms or greatly reduced their weight. This happened in response to the vast amount of meta-spamming that took place once their power was initially discovered. Techniques we all recognize today as blatant keyword spamming were commonplace. Webmasters added completely irrelevant, but highly searched terms (particularly "adult" terms) to a site's meta tags, usually in concert with similar hidden text blocks. These techniques were done only to drive traffic to their sites, highly untargeted and generally unrelated traffic, but traffic nonetheless.

Search engines responded to the problem once they realized their results were no longer relevant. It seems Google completely ignored the meta keywords in response to the blatant spaming. The fall of the meta tags gave rise to a still strong trend today, that of on page text analysis for keywords. Instead of blindly looking at the meta tags to classify a page, search engines turned to the actual content of the page. Text in paragraphs and titles rose to importance, as well as other indicators like text in "alt" tags from images. These factors produced better results for the people using search engines. In theory, the meta tags were a simple, easy way for people to help search engines classify and rank their pages. In practice they were highly abused, as the commodity the search engines provided became very important, especially to the budding ecommerce community.

Today meta tags may be making a quiet comeback. Years have passed since the blatant, irrelevant spamming that caused them to be so thoroughly discredited. With penalties in place, search engines have a way to punish those who would use such techniques. Wise, conservative use of your meta keywords and description tags can only be beneficial. Today the meta description tag sometimes serves as the small page sample Google uses on its result pages.

Like anything concerning search engine optimization, especially Google search engine optimization, make sure your meta tags appear to be as "natural" and "people friendly" as possible. If your description is just a word-for-word rehash of your keywords, that will not look natural, and may be a red flag to a search engine spider. Write out an actual description that a person would be able to read and understand. Use your keywords in the description, but don't repeat them. A single sentence or phrase should suffice, 2 at the most. The description is not a place to put a summary paragraph. The more words your description has the more watered down it becomes to the search engine.

Advice on the meta keyword tag varies a lot, but concentrate on your core keywords/keyphrases, placing the most important ones first and moving through to the least important. Don't use 50 keywords, even if you believe your site does, in fact, address all 50 in perfect detail. Keep the list short, and focused. Twenty is a good maximum, and only if you feel you absolutely must target all 20 keywords. Remember, its difficult to very effectively optimize a single page for more than 2 or perhaps 3 keywords. If you have a large number of them, then consider spreading your optimization efforts out across internal pages for certain topics. You can make these into "landing pages" that are specifically optimized for your secondary keywords. Note I said "landing pages" and not "doorway pages". Doorway pages imply pages targeted to a specific search engine that generally employ spamming techniques. A landing page is a natural part of your existing site, say a section title page, that you perform general on-page optimization on for a subset of your keywords.

Meta keyword and descriptions do not have the power they once did, and they never will. Giving that much weight to such an easily abused page attribute was a mistake the search engines eventually corrected. Today, your keywords and deceptions can provide you some small benefit if they are well crafted and devoid of any spaming techniques. Construct a friendly, natural description and choose your core keywords wisely and your meta tags should help you out, if only a little bit.

About the Author:

Mr. Lester has served for 4 years as the webmaster for ApolloHosting.com and previously worked in the IT industry an additional 5 years, acquiring knowledge of hosting, design, and search engine optimization. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers.

Established in 1999, Apollo prides itself on the highest levels of customer support.

Note: These articles are provided for general interest and content purposes only, and should not be construed as "support" materials. Apollo Hosting does not guarantee the information contained within. All articles are free to reprint so long as they remain unchanged, the "About the Author" section remains, all hyperlinks are preserved, and the rel="nofollow" tag is not added to the hyperlinks.

Making Money with Your Blog!

A place for finding the Nuts and Bolts for Making Money Online with Affiliate Marketing Business Opportunity!

I want to be honest with you; my goal is to build a massive responsive opt-in email list. So why am I writing all of these articles on article marketing? Because I know that if I master this, it will be the foundation I will be able to build my entire online marketing career.

How is that possible? Let's think about this for a minute. Isn't it words that determine and measure the course of everything that happens on the Internet? It all started with a bunch or research done by college professors and students at the major universities around the United States.

This research was stored on hard drives connected together by an information dissemination system created by the United States Military to enable them to maintain a wide area network in case of nuclear attack.

Doesn't that sound like something out of an old science fiction novel? What's funny to me is that the reality of today has exceeded all of our wildest fantasies of our yesteryears.

Today we have algorithms that are so complex they are able to determine and predict patterns not only in language, but in languages so specific they create thousands of different groupings which help us all find the information we are looking for out of billions of web pages all over the world.

I guess it is more accurate to say that Google helps us find it about 64% of the time, and on the high end, Yahoo helps us find it just above 70% of the time.

The amazing thing for those that have eyes to see, the opportunity is in the gap. A gap that will be narrowed someday I am sure but will probably never be closed. What do I mean? In that window of 25% to 35% of the time when the information people are looking for is not to be found, is the gap that is waiting for some enterprising individual to fill. And all they have to do is write something. Is that someone going to be you?

The most interesting thing to me is that there are clues and maps leading whoever is looking right to those unfilled gaps. Those clues and maps are found in the key words of those searches that go unsatisfied. For example, if the key words *Travel to Forest Lake Minnesota* was searched for 300 times a month, and the major search engines show zero results for that key word phrase, then this is an opportunity for someone to create content for.

By doing that, they now have an audience of people that they know are interested in travel to that location. The question they should ask themselves is what does this group of people want or need, and then find a product, service, or affiliate program that fills that need, and they can start to market to that group. An example might be, a hotel and campground guide for that area.

So let this be the call to action for those that have ears to hear. Write; write your way into the opportunity created by the information age and an insatiable appetite for more information -- more specific information, more personalized information, an appetite which only grows each time it is momentarily satisfied. Because the more answers we get, the more questions we have.

What if Dan Iverson could show you how to write about any topic on earth and make money? He'll teach you how to better understand human nature as it relates to e-commerce; how people, from their perspective, come to make a purchase on the Internet. I am talking about learning how you can pick a topic of interest, write about it, and with the right tools and a little research find connections between your readers and real products and services, of which you can become an affiliate and make money. Here is the best part. I will teach you all of this absolutely free. That's right, click on this link and you'll get the full Affiliate Masters Course Free. This is no joke, I promise once you start to read this course, you will see and learn the logical system of affiliate and information marketing. It will open your eyes to the greatest and most versatile opportunity in known history: the Internet. Even if you have a website, you can use these techniques. http://aggressiveinternetmarketing.net/free-tool.html

Making Money with Your Blog!

A place for finding the Nuts and Bolts for Making Money Online with Affiliate Marketing Business Opportunity!

The Secret to Creating Great Wealth is to be Recognizable. Youve probably heard it said that you have to be famous to be wealthy. That isnt quite true, but the idea is significant to the process.

If nobody knows your business exists, you wont make much money from the business. You must be both visible and recognizable within your niche. Niche Marketing will take you where you want to go once your customers know youre there.

1) Leave your calling card.

Business Cards are relatively inexpensive and can be left everywhere. I leave one on the table with my tip (and tip generously, I want the wait staff to remember me).

2) Elevator Speech.

Mention your business, and use your elevator speech often. Your Elevator Speech should be catchy, memorable, and tell exactly what you do. Dont be vague here - get the message out.

3) Send Reminders and Remembrances.

When you remember a person as an individual, they remember you. They know who you are and call you back, because they feel like your friend. Send them a greeting card, remember their birth date, and be a friend.

4) Refrigerator Magnets

I know this is clich, low end, and schnitzie, but do it anyways. Moms hang things on the refrigerator. If your business niche includes women, give magnets. Put your logo on them and give them away everywhere you want to be seen.

5) Brochures

Pass out brochures! Online you can do this with article marketing, using a great resource box at the bottom of your article, information brings them to your door. Locally, you can do this by leaving brochures about your business, everywhere you go. Pass them out, give them away, tell people what you do. Send them to your clients, give them out at parades, leave them at the Doctors offices.

Claim your FREE Subscription to The Branding Iron at http://brandyourmarket.com

2007 - Jan Verhoeff

Making Money with Your Blog!

A place for finding the Nuts and Bolts for Making Money Online with Affiliate Marketing Business Opportunity!

If you look around the Internet there are several recommended styles of article marketing so how do you decide which is the right way for you? On the one hand there are those who swear by writing several articles a day and submitting them to as many directories as they can. Then there are those who write one article and either use software to spin them into several articles or make small changes like title and first paragraph and submit the similar articles to the same sites. Then there are those who write one quality article daily, weekly or monthly and just submit to a few sites.

All of those ways of article marketing may work, but which works the best? Lets just go through the different ways.

1. Most of us do not have the time to write several articles a day and if they are about the same subject, intending to promote one particular site those articles can become repetitive and lose quality to quantity. Of course some people can write several good articles a day but I do not think that I am one of them.

2. Spinning articles might be a great time saver, but when you look at the results of spinning they can be laughable. The articles often do not make sense to the reader and can be difficult to understand in much the same way as badly translated articles. Many directories do not want those articles; I know that I do not want articles on my site that visitors may have difficulty in understanding.

3. Changing the first paragraph and or the title of an article and submitting it to different sites is great, that means there is not so much of a duplicate content issue. Submitting the altered versions of the same article to the same directories is not on. Last week a joker submitted the same article to my directory with slightly different titles 4 times using 4 different accounts. As if I was not going to notice the similarities when I looked at the list of articles waiting for approval!

4. Then there is quality and submitting to fewer sites. A quality article is a pleasure to approve. I enjoy reading the article, I know that the quality of my site is going to improve and I know that the quality articles are going to bring in more traffic to my site. I also know that a quality article does not need to be submitted to hundreds of sites or spun. A quality article will be picked up on by publishers and replicated pretty darn quick.

You can guess which article marketing style I prefer; its quality all the way. Looking at number 4 I sound like a proper know it all. I do not think that I know everything but I do know what my site stats tell me. The author articles that get the most hits are nearly always the articles that I have regarded as high quality, or have been interesting enough to read all the way through.

I have different ways of defining quality that may make me seem contrary, but I have always looked at things in different ways. A business colleague calls me a lateral thinker, I think he means a pain in the b**t!

Quality that is extremely well written, but on occasion no matter how well an article is written if the content is dry and boring the article is not going to fly for the majority of readers unless it contains specific information. I do not claim to be an extremely good writer, I think that I am an adept writer who can occasionally pull off unexpected great results almost by accident. I have had enough of those accidents to be able to figure out why those articles are hitting the spot and why articles such as this one is unlikely to produce masses of hits.

One of my accidents was an article about where I live. I wrote it as an example because I wanted members of my travel site to write about where they live. It started out as an article about a regular town and without initially intending to I added paragraphs about places of interest and tourist spots within 10 miles. It dawned on me after writing the article that although I live in an industrial town that would not be considered on it's own a tourist centre, like most places there are tourist spots close enough by to include a mention in an article.

That article does better for hits than most articles of my own and those of authors on my sites that have been especially written for article marketing. I asked myself why and came up with 2 reasons. One was that I had added a good variety of keywords and phrases without thinking about it. The other reason I suspect is that the article is unique, very different to any other travel article that I have seen out there. It is also obvious that I know the place well whereas most article marketing travel articles don't give you a sense of the authors knowing the places that they write about and show little personality.

Another accident was an article written a month ago about my bad experience with a spyware fraud. I was so cheesed off that I turned to writing to make myself feel better. I have never known an article get so many hits in such a short time. It has been picked up by a lot of webmasters, bloggers and ezines and I am sure it still has plenty of scope. I have even seen it on some geek sites, now that's something I never thought would happen to an article of mine!

I think that the article is doing well because it is offering information written from obvious personal experience that people want and need and those people have had the common sense to do a search before being scared into parting with their money.

The top 2 articles on my directory every month are my own scam warnings. They are only on a couple of my sites so the hits are not spread between zillions of article directories. Again I am providing information that people want and need. Neither of the articles were written for the purpose of article marketing and a variety of keywords and phrases happened naturally.

So to me a quality article is reasonably well written, packed with information written from experience that people want or need, unique or as different to other articles as possible and showing some personality.

The fatal flaw in my accidents is that I have not used the articles to promote money making ventures, just my sites in general. I will have to get a grip and accidentally make some money from them!

I'll end this far too long article by including a quote from a forum that made me think. 'Thats a major problem I see in article directories -- its so difficult to find good content in them that they are not nearly as useful to article consumers as they could be.'

Patricia Jones loves writing and owns a general subject article directory BB Articles and a travel article directory Articles Abroad
For free digital downloads visit Eprofits Centre

Viral marketing is a methods of list building

There are multiple methods of list building, and if you are just getting started, until you have gained mastery over one or two methods, it is advisable to use multiple methods of list building strategies. You’ll see every step of the process, no matter how small, in exacting detail so

So you've decided to create a Web site. The first thing you'll want to think about is search engine optimization. Using proper SEO will ensure your site gets great placement in search engine results. You can hire someone to help you or use SEO yourself.

Here are some tips on improving your search engine rankings:

1. Select and use strong keywords. You'll want your content to be rich with keywords, but don't go overboard. If you use too many keywords search engines will pick up on it and your site won't rise in the rankings. If you use too many keywords, your site could be excluded altogether.

2. Compare to other sites. You'll want to see what those with great placement are doing on their sites. Search for sites that are similar to yours. Take a look at the sites that have received high placement in the search results. While on the web page select "view" and click "source." This will give you the opportunity to analyze the keywords and tags that were used.

3. Use keyword tools. A keyword tool is helpful in determining how visitors search for sites related to yours. By using a keyword tool you'll be able to see how many hits a site would get using certain search terms. You can use the popular search terms you find to get better search engine placement.

4. Have working links. Make sure all the links on your web site work. If you have dead links on your site, it negatively effects your site's placement in search engine results.

5. Submit your site to directories. There are several free directories you where you can submit your site. Others charge a fee. Don't overlook paying this fee though because this increases your changes of having search engines list your site.

6. Create a sitemap. Creating a sitemap and submitting it to search engines will guarantee that all the pages of your site will be included when the search engines crawl the site. You can use a free program to create a sitemap.

7. Create backlinks. It can take awhile for search engines to find your Web site. One way to promote it is by using backlinks. Backlinks are links that point back to your web site from a different web site. Ways you can get backlinks are to write articles related to your site's topic and submit them to free article sources such as Ezine Articles. At the end of the article, write a little bit about yourself as an author and link to your site.

8. Use reciprocal links. Find sites that are related to yours and ask the web site owner to place a link to your site on their site. In return you'll do the same. You can contact sites that are complementary to yours. For example, if you have a site that sells a variety of hats, you can have links placed on sites that sell coats and jackets. You can get in contact with the web site owner by looking for the contact information on the site. Send an email and ask for a reciprocal link.

Brandon Sheley @ http://www.sheley.com & http://forum.vbulletinsetup.com