Earn Huge Online

The reason why most people log onto the Internet is to find out information. In reality the net has evolved in this way as a free and unrestricted medium for the sharing of new information and knowledge.

The reason that it has gradually taken on a commercial role is that a few enlightened marketers realised that here was an opportunity to transform the Internet into a worldwide shop window. It is still a tiny percentage of people that actually have it in their mind to buy a product or service when they log on. The vast majority of surfers still use the net solely for acquiring free information.

So based purely on the facts, you need to keep this constantly in mind when considering or planning the construction of your website and your sales pages. It is not enough to just offer a good product or service and expect instant success in sales.

It is vital that you offer your prospective customers a lot of information, help and even advice and then treat your product or service as an extension of this. The more your site offers your prospective customers a feeling of caring and involvement the more sales you will achieve. It is also vital that your site is kept up to date with original content, which will also attract traffic to your site.

There are literally millions of sites on the Internet and no one knows that your web site exists unless you make a conscious effort to attract people to it.

It is important that you register your site with the main search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The search engines that spider your site are constantly looking for relevant keywords and adding content on your site is essential to give you any chance of a decent ranking. Obviously without this you have little chance of attracting visitors.

Another good way to increase your chances of getting a higher ranking with the search engines is to get links from other sites. You could achieve this by creating a directory of other web sites on a particular topic that is related to your target audience.

Contact these sites and ask them to reciprocate by adding your URL to their site. This will not only help with the search engines but you will get extra visitors from these other sites who are interested in what you have to offer.

One of the best methods for getting, what are called, backlinks to your site is to write articles about your niche, service or product. You need to write a minimum of about four to eight hundred words and submit them to article directories that will offer them to webmasters for free inclusion in their ezines or newsletters. At the end of your article you will have what is called a resource box where you will write a brief description of who you are and, most importantly, a link to your web site.

Writing articles will not only dramatically increase the number of visitors to your site but just as importantly over a short period of time you will be considered an expert in your niche which will result in people having more trust in you and consequently being more inclined to buy your product or service. The other great advantage is that your site should get better ranking from the search engines because of these links.

If you have a site in a niche market, do your research and check out other sites in your niche. Make sure that the information you are offering is better and more comprehensive than theirs and not available anywhere else. If you don’t specialize and offer them valuable tips and advice you will not succeed. There is no substitute for staying focussed and making sure you are on top of your competition.

It is also very important that your site is easy on the eye – not cluttered – and simple for your visitor to navigate. It is also a fact that if your home page looks complicated or is hard to instantly understand a visitor will, after as little as five seconds, move on to another site. Make sure this doesn’t happen and include an opt-in box in the top half of your home page where your visitor can enter their name and email address in order to subscribe to your newsletter or to receive a free ebook about your niche. In this way you will build up a list of potential customers who you can email to with your new products for years to come.

My intention here is not to discourage you but to get you thinking of how you can quite easily increase traffic to your site. Always try and think from your visitor’s perspective and in this way you should overcome most of the obvious problems.

William Nash is an established Internet marketer who concentrates mainly on writing articles and marketing. For information and tuition on Internet Marketing http://www.opiy.com/insidersecrets.html. To establish a successful business on Ebay http://www.opiy.com/ebaymillionaire.html. Article Source: EzineArticles.com

Why use SEO?

More than 80% of all Internet users find new websites through search engines. That means that about 1.4 billion people use search engines to find websites, though less than 15% of these are from North America – which is still more than 150 million people. (source:www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm)

Search engine users are some of the most qualified and motivated visitors to your website you will ever have. People searching for information online are in fact PRE-DISPOSED to BUY, as they have taken the initiative to hunt for online resources.

When you start looking into SEO, be aware of…

· Unethical Search Engine Optimisation…

Some companies use unethical techniques to get you quickly ranked, they are able to artificially boost the search engine rankings of a website. This dilutes the quality of search results and search engine companies punish websites using these techniques. In the long term you will only hurt your online business, as e.g. Google will end up banning your site from its rankings.

· Being offered a “Guaranteed Position”…

Some companies guarantee your site to achieve certain rankings if you let them do the work. It is not possible to achieve naturally guaranteed positions. No company can give you a guarantee to get a specific position in the search engines unless they are talking about paid for submission. If a company promises guaranteed natural positions, take a closer look at the small print of their offer. The catch is often that the company selects the search terms. So you will end up getting listed for obscure search terms nobody searches for.

· Automatic Search Engine Submission…

Most search engines don’t like automated submissions, and search engines get a lot of “spam” from these tools. You can be sure that at the very least your submission will be ignored, if not even harm your site.

· The promise to be submitted to 50,000 search engines…

There aren’t thousands of search engines on the internet, most of these 50,000 “search engines” are free for all (FFA) links pages, and getting your site on these results in you receiving thousands of spam email messages. There are only 3 major players in the Search Engine world: Google, Yahoo and MSN (Bing). They are responsible for the greater part of the search engine traffic you can get, because they also power other search engines, for example AOL search displays Google results. In addition, there are country-specific search engines, so you should also submit to the most popular country search engine relevant for your site. Again, there are not more than 3 or 4 per country on average.

What to do to get it right:

It is very important to note that there are four stages to get “Natural” Search Engine rankings:

1. Do proper research in finding the right keywords for your site/company.
   • Use the right keywords, and start with phrases. Phrases are much easier to get ranked for than single words.
   • Select the most profitable keywords – keywords people actually use while searching for your services. This will ensure your website is build around what people are looking for online – giving you the edge over your competition.
   • Use only keywords that are relevant to the content on the page you are working on.
2. Optimize your (selected) web pages for these keywords.
   • Optimize your pages for the keywords selected. Each page for one or two keywords only, to receive maximum results – ensuring that the Page Title, Meta tags (description and keywords) etc are all incorporated correctly and that the text is around the topic of that keyword – be careful not to overuse your selected keyword though, or you may be penalized for spammy content.
   • Get your pages checked to ensure they are completely HTML error-free.
3. Submit your web site once to all relevant search engines and directories.
   • Submit to relevant search engines.
   • Submit to relevant directories (some of these require renewal annually).
   • Provide a sitemap in machine-readable format in the root folder of your site (see Google’s instructions about this), and keep it updated regularly. If you have a WordPress blog, there is a plugin which will do this automatically for you
4. Get links from other websites and make sure these links again contain your keywords.
   • Increase the link popularity of your website – the amount of websites that link to yours, without which it will be harder to achieve successful rankings.
   • Continue to do this regularly over the lifetime of your site. Some sites have as many as 20,000 backlinks, or even more. It’s not possible to build up to this sort of level without ongoing commitment to link building over the long term.

If you get these four steps right, you will over time generate good rankings for any site.

Anneloes is the Founder of More Than Just…, a Marketing & Sales Consultancy specialising in helping companies find faster, and smarter ways to grow their revenues, sales and profits. Simply put, More Than Just can help you grow your business online and offline.

With one of the largest hosting companies they now market an affordable “Build-Your-Own-Website-Package, which incorporates the SEO explained above. By simply following the steps as, it is easy to build a site that works! No technical knowledge required, there is guidance every step of the way, with great support available 24/7… For more information go to www.makeyoursitework.co.uk or download a FREE e-book describing how to Make Your Site Sell – click here.

For those companies that do not have the time, nor have the ability to do it themselves, they also offer affordable Design packages. Article Source: EzineArticles.com

When you are trying to establish your company’s position in the market, company branding plays a major role in the marketing planning. Company branding involves the Identity, differentiation, and reputation of the company and the products related to the company. The effectiveness of your company brand can be measured by how people perceive your company and its products.

A brand is essentially a way of communicating a promise or an exchange between you and your customers. It is a way of communicating to your customer who you are and what you promise to deliver to them.

Company branding should be left to the experts. Engaging a professional independent marketing consultant or a marketing agency can help you to arrive at the right branding message to communicate to the community. They will also help you determine how to effectively communicate the message to the people you need to get to. You want your prospects and companies to immediately think of you as their preferred resource when it comes to your product or service. A strong brand will foster this.

When people start recognizing your logo, and come to know the great practices your company stands for, then they will rely on and associate with the products as well. You have to create a niche for yourself first, and then things will be easier for you. It takes a significant amount of effort to market your products and this needs to be sustained over a relatively long period of time. This is where you need to consult the agency to assist you.

So, right from the very beginning, you have to work towards building a strong brand and creating brand awareness. If you have a strong brand presence, people will automatically be drawn to you when they are looking for that particular product. This is what every business aims to achieve – an automated customer.

Scott Geld is the V.P of Marketing at Marketing Blaster, Inc.. Feel free to email Scott with any comments about this post at: www.MarketingBlaster.com/contact.html

Anyone who’s ever tried marketing IT products or services knows that it’s a specialist field. Your customers in the IT industry have very unique and specific requirements, and that means you do too. In order to write compelling copy around your offering, you need a copywriter with a solid understanding of the IT world – someone who’s not afraid to call themselves an “IT Copywriter”.

So how do you know when you’ve found an IT copywriter? And – more importantly – how do you know what to expect from them? The following 10 tips will give you a good understanding of the qualities to look for – the things that make a copywriter an IT copywriter.

1) IT background

Perhaps the most beneficial quality in an IT copywriter is a solid background of some sort in the IT industry. If your copywriter shares an understanding of your domain, you’ll spend far less time explaining the benefits of your product or service. Remember the last time you watched someone glaze over as you waxed lyrical about the wonders of your latest technology? You don’t want that to happen when you’re briefing your copywriter. More importantly, you don’t want that happening when your potential customers read your copy!

2) Technical writing experience

Good technical writers are experienced in bridging knowledge gaps. This means they have to understand the technology, but they also have to be able to talk about it in the layperson’s language. A copywriter with technical writing experience in the IT industry is likely to have domain knowledge and an ability to hit the ground running. They’ll be quick on the uptake, so they’ll understand your product or service more rapidly than most.

Of course, not every technical writer is an IT copywriter. You need to be sure they can write compelling copy – not just dry instruction manuals. Take a look at their samples and testimonials before making a decision.

The other important consideration – especially if you’re after a website copywriter – is, do they have online writing experience? Writing for an online medium is entirely different to writing for print. Readers have different requirements and objectives, and reading conditions are very different. Many technical writers have written online help, so they should know how to cater to these differences. To be sure, ask them to recommend a maximum page length or word count per page. The correct answer should include some comment on the trade-off between the problems of scrolling and the need for a high keyword count for SEO. Ask them whether they prefer long sentences or short (and hope to hear “short”).

3) Further Education

IT products and services are generally very complex in themselves. What’s more, the needs of the end-customer are also very complex and unique. This means there’s normally quite a steep learning curve for anyone new. Ask your IT copywriter if they have tertiary qualifications. It’s not essential, and – by itself – it’s no guarantee of quality copy, but it’s generally a good indicator of someone who’s been trained in the art of learning (i.e. researching, information filtering and modelling, knowledge retention, etc.).

The flip-side of that coin is to be wary of people who are technically qualified. Don’t discount them on sight (many technical people have made great IT copywriters); just remember that technically trained people have a tendency to take a lot of things for granted when speaking to lay-people. Your IT copywriter needs to be able to understand the technology and its complexities, but still relate to the issues of the non-technical customer.

4) Management Experience

Anyone with management experience – at any level – has dealt with decision makers. They may even have been a decision maker themself. In any form of promotion, you need to appeal to the decision maker. Your IT copywriter needs to develop an understanding of the needs, influences, pressures, problems, work environment, and constraints of your typical decision maker(s). The more understanding your IT copywriter brings to the relationship, the less time you’ll spend schooling them.

5) Marketing Experience

Actual marketing experience is a big plus. It brings with it a broader understanding of strategic marketing and the realities of working with a range of challenging people and evolving products and services. Look for an IT copywriter with corporate experience as a marketing manager or marketing coordinator, or someone who runs a copywriting business with a heavy marketing focus.

6) Testimonials

Anyone can call themselves an IT copywriter; few have the client testimonials to prove it. Testimonials are a great way to validate your IT copywriter’s claims. Ask to see some and read them carefully. Don’t just look at the company name and logo. You need to determine if the clients’ words back up the copywriter’s claims. And make sure the testimonial relates to the type of work you’re commissioning (or something with similar requirements).

7) IT Samples

The proof is in the pudding. ALWAYS ask potential IT copywriters to send you samples of their work. And – as with testimonials – don’t be fooled by flashy packaging, big names, and recognisable logos. Read the words. Are they relevant to your project? Do they convey a clear understanding of the subject matter? Do they convey benefits or just features? Are they written in a style that you find easy to read, yet compelling? And after you’ve read the words, double-check exactly how much input the copywriter had in their writing. Not all copy is written from scratch. Some copywriters work in teams, and others do more editing than writing. Make sure you get a clear understanding of your IT copywriter’s abilities and experience before commissioning them.

Understand Benefits

Your customers aren’t interested in what you do; they’re interested in what you can do FOR THEM. In other words, they’re interested in what benefits your product or service will deliver. How will it make their day easier, more enjoyable, less stressful, safer, or more profitable? Identifying benefits is one of the hardest tasks in any advertising project. In fact, many people rely on their copywriter to help them uncover the most compelling benefits. Does your IT copywriter truly understand the benefits you’re promoting?

9) Contributes value

A good IT copywriter should have solid professional experience. They should bring value to your marketing push which goes far beyond the written word. Strategy, tactics, imagery, contacts, anecdotes, corporate identity… Your IT copywriter must bring more to the table than grammar and punctuation. Expect them to make suggestions, not simply take notes and say “Yes”.

10) Plus all the normal copywriter requirements…

Of course, your IT copywriter must be able to satisfy all the normal copywriter requirements. Ask for a contract of works to be completed, a time estimate, a plan of attack, a CV, and SEO copy skills (if search engine presence is important to you).

Conclusion

Traditionally, copywriters have been seen as a small cog in the big advertising machine. As a result, most copywriters have risen through the ranks of generic advertising agencies. These days, however, more and more people are sidestepping the agency and going direct to the copywriter. This approach gives them consistency across all of their written collateral, more compelling and engaging copy, and more responsive service. Within the industry, this change means that copywriters aren’t confined to ad agencies, and are able to specialise. The end result to you? While finding a good IT copywriter with an IT background is still a big challenge, it’s certainly becoming easier. You simply need to take the time to ask the right questions.

Good luck.

For more information about what to expect from a normal copywriter, see www.divinewrite.com/websitecopywriter.htm. Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter and website copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles.

If you are promoting your product with Adwords, you may have found the whole thing quite confusing, especially when it comes to the Quality Score and how it affects the price Google charges for your clicks.

Google has recently posted a video explaining exactly how this works. It’s all laid out in a very step by step explanation, so it is easy to understand. It’s also very short (less than 10 minutes), so you can watch it a couple of times if you like.

Here it is: