SEO Updates

Are you wasting too much time working in your business…

… and not enough time working ON it?

One thing I often hear from new Internet marketers is what a drag it is to answer the same customer service questions over and over again.

Not only is it boring, it also wastes time you could be using to research lucrative NEW business opportunities (or ENJOYING the money you’re already bringing in!).

Fortunately, with the right kind of software, you can reduce the tedious hours you spend emailing back and forth with your customers to just a couple of hours a week…

…and improve your overall reputation AND explode your back-end sales at the same time!

Here are a few regular tasks you can start automating right away with software, so you can spend more time focusing on the important stuff!

Increase Sales with Follow-up Offers

Did you know you can use autoresponders to make more sales without lifting a finger?! Here’s how it works:

Say someone signs up for your free newsletter. You automatically send them an email thanking them for their subscription, and offering them a discount on one of your best-selling products.

They decide to order the product, which triggers another email thanking them for purchasing, and then offers them another product that is the perfect companion to the one they just bought. So they order that product, too… which of course triggers another email… and so on.

So you end up making several sales — automatically — just by getting someone to sign up for a free newsletter. And once that series of emails is set to go, you’ll never have to do a thing to keep making these sales, over and over!

Eliminate Repetitive Customer Service Responses

According to a recent survey, 15% of your customers expect a response to their emails in as little as ONE hour! A further 13% expect to hear from you within six hours, and another 45% within 24 hours! Those are pretty high expectations to live up to…

Fortunately, you can set up your site to automatically respond to customer questions INSTANTLY.

Say a visitor arrives at your website and is interested in making a purchase, but they have a question first. So they email you at an email address you’ve set up specifically for this purpose.

Now you know from experience that you get the same five or six questions all the time about your product… so you put together a “frequently asked questions” email that responds to these main questions.

When someone sends an email to that special email address, the FAQ email goes out immediately… and you make the sale because the visitor is SO impressed by how responsive you are to their questions!

Impress Your Visitors with Instant Information

With the right software, not only can you deliver your free newsletter or report the instant someone asks for it, you can deliver your electronic information products right away, too!

When someone orders your eBook, you automatically send them an email that has a link to where they can go to download it, along with the unique username and password they’ll need to open it. You can literally sell and deliver your products while you sleep, turing your website into a 24/7 selling machine!

6 Easy Ways to Drive Paying Customers to Your Site

Quality traffic — it’s the “Holy Grail” of online marketing.

After all, there’s not much point in having a website if your potential customers aren’t able to find it!

This week, we’re going to focus on some of the different ways you can drive quality traffic to your site. (And by “quality,” I mean visitors that are likely to BUY what you sell on your site!)

In this article, I’ll talk about 6 of my favorite ways to attract more customers to your site. (And all of them are cheap or even freeee!)

And in the article below, two very special “guest contributors” are going to give you ANOTHER hot tip — and talk about how you can use one of the ‘Net’s hottest communication tools to drive even MORE qualified traffic to your site!

So let’s get started with my top 6 tips — if you’re not using any of these strategies, the time to get started is today!

Traffic Tip #1: Give away content

This is one of the best traffic strategies out there… Simply write a series of short articles that are packed with useful information and tips, then submit them to online article directories and other free content sites.

Not only will you get some great inbound links pointing to your site, which will help you with the search engines — other people can republish your articles on their own sites, which will help spread the word about your business and build your credibility as an industry expert!

… Want to know more? Click here to visit my blog and discover what my other 5 traffic tips are!

4 Ways to Attract Traffic — With a Blog!
By Rosalind Gardner and Anik Singal

[Note from Derek: One of my readers recently asked me how she could use a blog to drive more traffic to her site. Since my friends Rosalind and Anik are true blog marketing experts, I asked them to provide an answer -- and they ended up writing an entire article for me! I hope you enjoy it... D.]

Blogging — both writing blogs AND reading blogs — has gone from being a “fringe” activity to one of the most popular pastimes on the ‘Net. In fact, blogging is now a global phenomenon. There are currently 112.8 million blogs in existence, with 175,000 new ones launching every day.

… But did you know that blogs are also a great way to drive traffic to your site?

Blogs, by design, are built to quickly and easily attract traffic, whether it be from search engines or from a rapid influx of links. The moment you publish a post, your blog goes to work for you letting the world know that you’ve made an update - the search engines come running and you find yourself ranking #1 for keywords in no time.

Here are 4 ways to attract traffic to your site using blogs (and 4 reasons why you NEED to start blogging):

1. Long-Tail Keywords

Instead of using only the most obvious or generic terms related to the topic of your post, focus on more specific words and phrases, i.e., long-tail keywords.

For instance, if you are writing a post about nordic skiing at Sun Peaks Resort near Kamloops, British Columbia, you don’t want to target keywords such as ‘travel’ and ’skiing’ which will put you in direct competition with Expedia.com, SkiNet.com and the like.

Instead, use “cross country skiing at Sun Peaks Resort” and not only will your post show up in a blog search, but it’ll soon rank in the top ten in Google’s organic listings as well.

Blogs are notorious for ranking high and fast for long-tail keywords. Over time with hundreds of these, the traffic is far more valuable than having one “highly competitive” keyword.

2. Bookmark with OnlyWire

Onlywire is a service that allows you to automatically bookmark your post on well over 17 high-traffic sites.

It takes just a few clicks to do this every time you post. You simply click a button on your browser, type in a few keywords and hit “submit.” Yes, the service is absolutely free.

Onlywire is a great way to not only attract visitors but to also get the search engines running in to index your new post.

3. Leave Blog Comments

One of the best ways to get traffic and highly valuable links in the beginning is to leave comments on other high-traffic blogs in your niche.

Finding these blogs is easy — either just search Google or visit Technorati and find the most popular in your topic.

A couple of key techniques to use:

A) Don’t use your name, use something catchy (or a keyword). When they post links to your site, they link the “name field” — so as long as you use something enticing, you’ll get people to click.

Or you can use a keyword and that way you get more search engine recognition for the term you are optimizing for.

B) Don’t abuse this — You can easily find yourself blocked from leaving future comments. Leave a comment that is useful and shows that you read what you’re commenting on. Not only will this make the blogger happy but it’ll get you more traffic and credibility.

4. Involve the Press

Too many people have forgotten how great press releases can be for traffic — mostly because they don’t know the “right” way of using press releases.

The trick is to base your press releases on information that actually MATTERS to people.

The easiest way to generate the valuable content for press releases is to quickly poll your readers (or get another blogger to help generate the results). So long as you can get at least 50 people to respond, you can issue a press release with your new-found data.

The press loves data, readers love data — posts and press releases like this make their way around the Internet very fast.

If you don’t already maintain a blog, you should seriously think about starting one up right away. It’s the easiest way to establish a solid online presence.

Here it is:
Step 1: Find a niche market — Use research tools like Wordtracker to find a niche market of HUNGRY buyers eager for your product or service

Step 2: Write your salescopy — Write compelling copy that leads your visitors smoothly through your sales process

Step 3: Set up your online store — Turn your website into a selling machine using a simple design, easy navigation, and automation

Step 4: Drive buyers to your site — Create “paid search” ads that attract INSTANT traffic (without draining your bank account!) and use free search engines to get your site “front and center”

Step 5: Drive more cheap and FREE traffic — Use strategies like article-sharing and press releases to drive even MORE people to your site

Step 6: Use email to get MORE sales — Build a subscriber list of people who WANT to hear from you, so you can convince them to buy over time

Step 7: Find MORE products for your customers — Offer your customers even more products you know they want to buy

Step 8: Get other people to sell for you — Recruit an army of salespeople to sell your products on their websites (and you won’t have to pay them a dime unless they help you make a sale!)

Step 9: Grow your business BIGGER — Create dozens of new streams of income to multiply your revenues

Step 10: Use hot new tools to create a buzz — Bring visitors back to your site again and again using the hottest new tools and techniques
Of course, this is just a brief overview… Our guaranteed 10-step system includes so many tested and proven strategies you can use to create a highly profitable website, I can’t begin to list them all here.

When you did the keyword research for your website, you probably found a lot of simple words you’re now incorporating into your website. These general terms are things that many people search for, and are not necessarily going to help your business or website to be number one in the search engine for, other than bragging rights.

What you need to find are the long tail keywords. Keywords that are searched for far less, but searched for by people interested in something specific enough you can be pretty sure they’ll buy if you are offering something that remedies the problem.

Are you wondering how to search for long tail keywords? There are a couple ways. The first way is to use a site like NicheBot to find the terms that people are searching for. Good long tail keywords can be three or even four words long. These keyword phrases are things people actually type into the search engine. Think about how you search on Google. Do you just type in one word or do you type in a full phrase? Some people even type in questions, complete with question marks on the end!

The second great way to find long tail keywords is ask people. Start with your friends and family – tell them your niche and then ask them what they would type into Google to search for your product, service, or site. The more people you ask, the closer you will get to understanding how other people (that aren’t as close to your subject as you are) look for what you have. No jargon, no buzzwords, just the real searches. You can use this information to add important keywords to your website.

Many people enjoy using flash on webpages. They feel that moving images and movie-like quality make a website seem more flashy, more professional, and cooler. The problem is that when you use flash Google has no idea what that super-cool movie says.

What does this mean for your SEO? Any keywords you use in your flash graphic or header are worthless – it’s like giving part of your website away for nothing in return. If you’re trying to target keywords for organic search, every keyword counts. Google doesn’t know if that section of your website is relevant or high quality. It just sees it as space, because search engine spiders cannot crawl that area.

Even if you think that flash is amazing and high quality, do a survey of your demographic. The odds are they would feel less overwhelmed finding information if there wasn’t a bunch of moving pictures distracting them from your menu or content.

Making sure your website is simple to navigate and easy to read is a far better alternative for both your website visitor as well as the search engine ranking of your website.

Everything you do for your website should be geared toward your visitor and the search engine. When in doubt, definitely default to the needs of your visitor, because even if Google sends oodles of traffic to your website, it won’t matter if your website usability is nil due to a bunch of flash graphics all over your site.

Keeping it simple can not only save your pocketbook, because flash is not inexpensive to contract, it can also help your conversion rates once you do get visitors to your website.

Pay Per Click consultants and agencies are holding their collective breath…

Yahoo! Is going to use Google for paid search…to see how it’s going to go. According to Marketwatch.com - Microsoft and it’s increasingly aggressive acquisition deal is freaking out at Yahoo! using Google paid search. The head of legal is saying that will bring 90% of all paid search to Google, a possible antitrust problem.

But the ads Yahoo is planning on using will only total 3% of all paid search, and they’re only doing it temporarily.

This is fantastic for those of us doing PPC, because Yahoo needs to find a better way to run the backend of their PPC campaigns.

The Yahoo backend is clunky and confusing, while Google’s MyClientCenter is sleek and easy to use. Yahoo could take many lessons from Google and I hope they do during this possible try-before-you-buy time. If Yahoo could incorporate some of the Google strategies of backend usage as well as not making it darn near impossible to work with Yahoo if you haven’t already spent $1,000 with them would make my life as a PPC consultant so much easier.

Yahoo has the right idea. If your system is broken, look at someone else’s (preferably someone that has paid search in the bag, like Google does) and use the knowledge to improve your own systems.

Or just merge with Google PPC so those of us running campaigns don’t have to spend three times as much time to run the same campaign we do over at Google. It’s just silly.

So you’ve got your page titles, image title tags, and keywords all picked out.

Your copy is amazing and you have everything in order.

What does your navigation structure look like? Do you have pages labeled “About” “Home” and “Services”? Have you researched the keywords you want to use for your page links? If not, you should be doing your Search Engine Optimization due diligence and research the best keywords for your page links.

For regular websites:

• Make sure your page titles are keywords - Instead of “Home” call that link “Name of Company” so the linkback points to the right page with the company name instead of that page just being labeled as “home” by the search engine spiders.
• For the “About” or “About Us” page - Make it a little more interesting and help the search engines love you. If you were an accountant or financial advisor, call the link “About the Accountant” or “About (your first name)” something a little more specific than “About” will help the search engine know what’s behind the link.
• The “Services” page is more neglected than most pages - You could either split your services into categories and label them accordingly (so the page behind the link matches, thus giving it more weight in the search engine.) Or, you could do something as simple as saying “Financial Services” instead of just “Services.” Again, a little can go a long way, as long as you do something beyond doing the bare minimum.

Images are becoming more and more important when it comes to Google.

When you insert an image into a blog post or a website, you need to be making sure you’re adding the title tag attribute to the picture. The title tag tells Google what the picture is, and pictures hold more weight when Google spiders crawl your site.

If your website says flowers for sale, it could easily be a scraping site just pulling feeds to make some quick cash. But if you take the time to put pictures of flowers on your site, Google thinks that means you are probably more legitimate because you put pictures of flowers for sale on your site.

Make sure you use keywords in your title tags whenever possible. If you have a picture of a flower on a gardening site, don’t just put “flower” or “rose” as your title tag. Put something like “we have the best roses at the best prices.” You could specify red roses or yellow roses if you have different pictures on your site.

Using the title tags can really help boost your SEO presence online, and will also help Google bring you targeted traffic by making sure that when people search for what you have, they find your site, your pictures…and your flowers.

Alt tags, while not quite as important as title tags, should not be forgotten. The alt tag on a photo is what the little box will say that pops up when you hover over the photo. This can be as simple as “You can buy these!” or you could just duplicate what your title tag says. Having those little boxes pop up with words in them entertains your potential customers while letting them know what they are looking at.

Niche marketing is a simple concept, that can help your business to gain an advantage, even in very competitive online categories.

You know that 20 percent of buyers consume 80 percent of your product, so the idea is that you could sell much more products with much less effort if you can identify that 20 percent and find others like them.

People that’s interested in it, and consume your product, can be thought as a market niche.

So the idea behind the niche marketing is to target, communicate, sell and obtain feedback of your best customers.

Consumers are becoming each day more demanding because their choices trend to expand in this global economy that we live now.

So the idea behind the niche marketing is the need to satisfy and keep that part of the market that really want your product or services.

But not any niche market will be good for you, you need to estimate the size of your target or niche market.

It should be big enough to sustain your business year after year. Once you have identified your niche market you need to have information about your niche market’s size, and the numbers that you need to know are not only the total size of the niche market but, the size of the niche market that’s interested in your products, the size of the niche market that your company can reach with advertising and then distribution.

When you decide to pick a niche market you need to be sure that you are going to have enough sales volume and profitability, and you also need to know how strong are your competitors to attract your niche buyers away from your products.

And you also need to have an idea of how many competitive products are going to be offered to your potencial niche marketing prospects.

You might think that the niche maketing was invented to help the new or small companies, but even the large ones have embraced the niche marketing idea, and keep on trying to divide their market and target it with different offers.

And you know why?

Very easy to answer!

If you are interested in buying a dog, would you care for a shampoo advertise?

You need to offer dogs to the people that want dogs and shampoo to the ones that want to wash their hair, you need to make niche offers to your niche market and then you will maximize your selling chances.

Those that repeatedly use your products, your “heavy users” are the niche market that you should try to dominate.

You should divide the whole universe of your potential buyers, into different segments, based on different factors.

Your can divide them by age, by family size, by gender, by economic status or by geographic locations.

It all depends on: what are you going to offer them?

All these niches need, or are interested, in different goods and or services. And the question is: Do you expertize or have a special knowledge in a certain niche?

For example you might be an experte selling used cars, of fixing bicicles, or writing articles, etc.

No matter what niche market you can cover, you can always atract that specific kind of people to your web site and that’s exactly what you have to do.

If you are trying to sell a mass articles, unless you are so creative that have a unique aproach to the products, it can be very tough to market them

This is an interesting point, you can have a very special niche article OR a very special niche aproach to an article.

The result is the same: look for a very targeted traffic to your web site and you will sell well.

The same that happens to mass articles it happen to some niche markets: they are tough to reach.

So you must narrow the focus of your site, the more narrow the focus, the easiest will be the niche marketing.

There should be tons of oportunities in your field of interest, if you narrow your focus.

But if your business is broad based, then niche marketing is not for you, you should develop a good affiliate’s program, then thousands of affiliates can work the search engines, reaching for their particular niche, and then offer your goods or services.

Theme based content sites are perfect for niche maketing and for making good profit from the search engines.

If you sell dogs, then it won’t be difficult to find a niche for dog’s food, dog’s shampoo, dog’s brushes, etc.

Once you define your niche you must look for the most profitable keyword for that niche, then determine the demand and the suply for that niche market, and this will give you the profitabilitty of each keyword (How to Sell on The Web teaches you how to do it).

When you have chosen the most profitable keywords for your niche market, you only have to start writing good content web pages.

My last words: before starting your niche marketing business, make sure that your niche market it does exist on the web, that’s big enough to produce continuous good profits, and that’s within your reach.

Google recently made a stink on the Internet when it devalued some well-known websites of their high PageRank. The reasoning? Well, from most accounts people believe it has to do with selling paid links. Google recommends those who sell paid links to use the No-follow tag. That way the link doesn’t count in the eyes of Google, therefore no ‘link juice’ is passed along.

Google has been promising a crackdown on websites that sell links and apparently have made good on that promise. Many quality websites have taken a hit, which has some questioning just how reliable PageRank is of true web authority.

Eatonweb, a blog directory, announced earlier this month that it will be eliminating PageRank as a factor when it comes to assigning value to blogs. While it isn’t surprising that some webmasters are disillusioned with PageRank, when companies begin to take notice of the flaws in PageRank you know something is wrong with the system.

It will be interesting to see if other ranking websites follow suit and if Google will have any response to their decisions.