» search ranking

What Are Meta Tags and Why Do I Need Them?

Albert — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 15:39:08 +0000

There is no other way to put it; the World Wide Web is big business. As an example, you only have to look at the phenomenal success of the online bookstore, Amazon. In 2008, Amazon brought in over nineteen billion dollars in income, yet only required an operating budget of approximately eight hundred and fifty million dollars. It really is no surprise to anyone then that more businesses are investing in expanded web presence and capability. Yet, not every organization has the same successes. Barnes and Noble was selling books online before Amazon was even an idea, and yet it isn’t Barnes and Noble that people think of when considering online bookstores, it’s Amazon. The key? Amazon took greater advantage of the opportunity to effectively market their product.

Search Engines, Spiders and Websites, Oh My

The most important and often least understood tool for online marketers is the search engine. The primary type of search engine is the web crawler – these are largely automated programs that crawl through available web pages, indexing data according to a variety of parameters. In short, the crawler, or spider, examines each page of a website. Once it has examined the page, it submits it to an index. Then, when a person uses the search engine software, the index provides links to these pages, ranked according to relevance. It is worth mentioning two other points. First, not all engines index the same way. Some use keyword density; others focus on the content of the first paragraph. Second, any changes to a webpage are likely to affect search rankings, so webmasters must carefully consider each change and its possible effects.

I Never Meta Tag I Didn’t Like

One important part of preparing a page for good search engine rankings is effective use of HTML meta-tags. These tags do not directly relate to the position a site will have in a search result, but they do offer webmasters some control over the way their sites are presented when they come up in a search. In brief, meta-tags are additional bits of code added to the head of your HTML document, right after “TITLE.” Because of the tendency for unscrupulous coders to find and abuse loopholes in search technologies, search engines do not rely heavily on these tags for rankings. Their benefits to web users are important, however.

First, there is the Meta Description tag. This is a brief report about the content of the webpage in question. When a search engine presents users with a hyperlink, there is frequently a small description accompanying that result. In many cases, that is the Meta Description tag the Webmaster put in the HTML document so that when a spider visits the site, it indexes this information. This is not always the case, however; Google in particular will generate its own description for a site.

The Meta Description is often the first piece of information someone using a search engine will see. The URL may not mean anything to them, but this description will. If it is poorly written, the user will likely skim right past the site for one that presents itself more effectively. Thus, the key is effective, concise writing that conveys exactly what the site is about.

The second tag is the Meta Keywords tag. This tag is a list of keywords the Webmaster considers most pertinent to each page. Proper use of the keywords tag is also vital. While search engines use a variety of keyword systems, and have in recent years de-emphasized the Meta Keywords tag, it still contributes to website rankings and should not be neglected. The best method is to examine each page carefully, and pick approximately ten keywords that best represent the data therein. Too many nonspecific keywords will lead to inconsistent search results, and too few means missing an opportunity to get a message in front of users. In addition, many sites are actively on the lookout for keyword abuse. Google in particular is known to ban certain pages from its index entirely if they consider the article to be an abusive, loophole-seeking piece.

There are other, less relevant tags that can provide some benefits, though they aren’t as important as the previous two. An example is the Robots tag, which is only useful in making sure certain sites do not index a particular page. This can help a Webmaster keep their content from being associated with undesirable elements, but it does not contribute directly to higher search placement.

No Meta Tag is an Island

Once again, it must be stressed that meta-tags are not a magical solution to the very complex problem of online marketing. They must be regarded as one tool in an inventory of other tools, and should be used responsibly. Properly implemented, they will help complete an effective marketing strategy.Similar Posts:

Post from: Home Business and Work From Home Ideas and Opportunities

What Are Meta Tags and Why Do I Need Them?

How To Get Traffic To My Website?

Albert — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 12:56:58 +0000

How to make $1000 a month online from scratch – Part 6 of 8

When I was starting out, for a long time in fact, I felt that generating traffic was some kind of secret art form that only a few lucky people held the keys to.

Nowadays, I know that generating traffic isn’t anything mystical at all. It’s actually quite simple when you break it down. It boils down to a few critical and fundamental elements that given enough time and patience, anyone can achieve.

There are really two methodologies when generating traffic. One is generating it free, and the other is paying for it. These days, I’m happy to pay for traffic because I have a good handle on the numbers required to make it work. Of course having a decent budget behind you helps too.

However, we’re not going to look at any paid traffic (except one special kind) for now. Because of the limited budgets of most people starting out, I’m going to look at how to generate lots of traffic on a shoestring.

Free Traffic Fundamentals

There are really three major ways to generate traffic without any upfront costs. They are:

Via Search Engines
Via Direct Links
Via Affiliate Traffic (which isn’t free, but you don’t have to pay for that up front).

As usual, I like to follow the 80/20 rule when working at this stuff. I try to do things so they target at least two of these ways at once. So, for example, I like to target traffic that is going to help in my SEO efforts and generate direct traffic at once, rather than separately.

Now I am going to let you in on a traffic secret. Well, I guess it’s not so much a secret, but more of a revelation that I had about getting lots of traffic. It’s important to read this carefully because it’s easy to miss the gold here.

Getting lots of free traffic is about creating a snowball that keeps getting bigger and bigger as it keeps rolling. It’s about exponential effects when you have the right elements in place. Think about this carefully.

You can generate large, perpetual traffic like this:

Create content that people value
Get links to your content
Rank well in search engines
People find your valuable content and link to you
Rank even better in search engines
Create more valuable content
People find your new valuable content and link to you
Improve search engine and direct linking traffic
Create more valuable content… etc

As you can see, this has a snowballing effect. This growth is started and fueled by the creation of valuable content.

Which is why I keep raving on about it not being about the technology. It’s all about the content. You just need a framework that’s going to support your content being found. Once the snowball starts rolling and you keep kicking it by adding more content your traffic will just continue to grow.

The sooner you can get this drummed into your head, the more free traffic you’re going to get. Perhaps you understand the principle already. But are you doing it?

Keyword Research

The starting point for this whole process is by finding out exactly what people are looking for. Without this, you’re flying blind. You’re simply guessing.

An educated guess is OK, but our time is too precious to not get it right the first time. Especially when the actual results are often counter intuitive.

For example, what do you think would have more volume: “golf putter” or “golf putting”?

Well, I really have no idea. I would have to guess and say they are about the same. Was I right? Not even close.

According to the new keyword volume figures in Google’s keyword research tool, “golf putter” gets twice as much traffic as “golf putting”.

How To Kick Off The Traffic Snowball

Once you’ve found the content to create that is valuable to people via your keyword research, we’ve got to look at using the right methodologies and best practices to leverage this content as much as possible.

Much of this is hinging on search engine traffic and is supplemented by direct traffic. So we want to focus our energies on doing the activities that will work both of these angles in synergy.

Many people will have you think this stuff is incredibly complex. It can be at times with large sites and when you start pushing the optimization envelope into shady territories. However, solid, reliable search engine optimization is pretty simple really.

Just use the following principles.

On Page

If you’re lucky enough to be an SBI! owner, the best practices are recommended to you on the fly. So as you create your pages, it makes recommendations on how you can improve to generate more traffic. This is obviously very helpful for the beginner, and is a strong reason for using SBI as your site platform.

Regardless of your site building platform, ensure for every page you create, the page contains the following based on your keyword research for the topic you’re covering.

Put your keywords in the title tag

This should be no longer than 8 words. You should focus on having a nice blend of enticement and targeted keywords. So when people see the page in the search results it looks like a page that they want to visit while at the same time still being optimized.

Put your keywords in your meta tags

The meta tags are not as important as they used to be, but still shouldn’t be neglected. You should aim to have unique meta tags for every page. The most important is the description meta tag because this is often displayed in the search results.

So you want to have this as enticing as possible so when people see the top 10 results, they believe that your listing is going to be the best to answer their query.

Your site builder should allow you to specify these meta tags when creating a page.

Put your keywords in your page heading tags

In a similar way to your title tag, you should aim to have text based heading tags. This should be a natural and exciting heading, but still containing the keywords that you are targeting.

Put your keywords naturally in your content

Your content should also naturally contain your keywords. You should consider mixing up your keyword usage within your content to try to capture other keyword phrases.

A good guide is to use the same keyword variations as you’ve put in your meta tags. So take your central concept that the page is about, and then think of the keyword variations that people might use to find this kind of content.

Think about grabbing a thesaurus and seeing if there are any other synonyms that you could be using as well.

Put your keywords sparingly on your alt tags

If you’ve got graphics on your page, considering writing a natural piece of unique, keyword rich text to apply to the alternative text (alt tag) on your image.

Put your keywords in your page name

One of the more important components is to include the keyword text within the page file name itself. So if you were targeting the keyword phrase “ping putter review” you’d want to have the file name on the page to look like this.

www.golfputters.com/ping-putter-review.php

If your site building tool can’t generate website addresses like this you should consider changing.

While there are other optimization strategies, if you can do all of these, you are well on your way to creating a traffic magnet page.

On Site

Some people forget about the onsite optimization. It’s an important aspect, and can get pretty advanced if you want it to. In reality, if you can get a few of the basics right, you’re doing enough to not be concerned with the advanced stuff.

The two things I recommend that you always follow:

Keep your site in themes

This is all about how your structure your site. Ensure that you work from broad topic down into more specific sub-topics. This will help the search engines to understand the content themes on your site and may help with your ranking potential.

Link to content within your own site with keyword rich anchor text

Be sure to link to all of your content within your site with text links that contain the keywords that you want the page your linking into to rank well for. So for example, if you had a page on “ping putters” then you should have text links throughout the site with the words “ping putters” linking to that page. The search engines see this as an indication of what the page is about, and doing so will help it rank.

Off Site

So once you’ve got the traffic-producing mechanics right with respect to the site itself, it’s now time to pour your efforts into doing the right things off site that help produce that synergistic mix of direct traffic that improves your search rankings.

The strategies I’ve outlined below aren’t all you can do. However, they do (in my opinion) offer the best bang for buck. You could focus ONLY on these and you should do well. These are all “white hat” or safe strategies that shouldn’t get you into strife with the search engines and with any luck will work for you well into the future.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is a popular way of building links. It’s simply the process of writing a quick, unique article that includes a resource box at the bottom of the article that contains a link to your site. This can’t be a copy of any articles on your site. It has to be unique.

You then submit this article to sites that allow people to take the article and publish it on their site (with your link intact) free. This generates some direct traffic, as well as builds links to your site which in turn helps your site rank.

You can do this manually to the hundreds of article sites. Otherwise, I would recommend using an article submission service. These services do all the grunt work on your behalf and do the submission for you. All for about $1-2 an article. Believe me, it’s well worth it. I recommend iSnare for this.

By the way, a useful tip for pumping these out is to do this: Have a look at an article you’ve already written on your site. Read it through quickly. Put it out of sight and then rewrite it from memory. Don’t try to use the same words, just paraphrase the same content.

This provides unique content (which is essential to make this work), but means you can pump them out quickly.

Press Releases

Press releases are a slight variation on the article submission process, but should have the same effects. For everything new that you add to your site, write a quick press release for it. Writing a press release is a different style which you’ll need to adapt to. Here’s a good guide on writing a press release.

Just remember that the focus of this is to get a link. If your press release is announcing something newsworthy and it gets picked up by other media then fantastic! But don’t bank on it.

Once written, submit your press release via your choice of press release announcement services. You can get them submitted free, or pay more to get greater exposure. Your options will be dictated by your budget. I’ve found that using the free ones most of the time are OK. When you’ve got something really newsworthy, think about using the paid version.

Here are some sites that provide press release announcement services:

PRWeb.com
PR.com
PRBuzz.com
PRLog.org

Guest Blogging

One strategy that is a more powerful spin on article marketing is guest blogging. This provides you with higher quality links and positions yourself as an expert. Consider contacting bloggers and site owners in your niche and asking them if they would consider a trial as a guest blogger.

I would appeal to their ego first and give them some praise on how good their site is. Then tell them you’d love to write some high quality content for their site free if you can use a resource box at the bottom of the article.

Bloggers often appreciate getting a break, which in turns gives you a break. Work hard on making it a good article, and you’ll probably get more opportunities in the future. This is an important tip.

Forum Posting

Find forums on your niche and see if they allow links in their signatures. If they do then sign up and set up your signature with an enticing statement that contains a link to your site. For the hypothetical golf putting site, I would do this at a site like this one.

You’ll then want to post there every couple of days with useful posts that contribute to the community. This opens up opportunities for highly targeted direct traffic, and positive SEO benefits if the site doesn’t tell the search engines to “nofollow” outgoing links.

Blog Posting

In the same way as the forum posting strategy, do the same for a selection of high quality blogs in your niche. Become an active and positive contributor to the blog.

This will give you direct traffic, may help with SEO as well as open up opportunities to become a guest blogger. In the same way as contributing to a community forum, you will hopefully start to establish yourself as an authority, which will help build links naturally from other people’s sites.

Newsletter/Autoresponders

A simple way to keep driving traffic back to your site is to regularly publish a newsletter. I would recommend publishing one once or twice a month. This can simply be a digest of what’s been going on at the site with a personal introduction to connect with your audience.

RSS

With any luck your site building platform should have RSS on new articles. You can leverage this by making sure it pings the RSS aggregators and encouraging people to sign up for your RSS feed.

You can use a service like Feedburner to track the number of subscribers you have, as well as making it easy. The way you set this up for each site building platform is different so you may need to ask for help on this.

Linkbaiting

Linkbaiting is the process where you write content purely focused on getting links to your site. You can do this by writing articles that push people’s buttons (but doesn’t turn off your readers), running competitions, providing top 10 lists or making a simple and useful tool.

This can be a bit hit and miss, but when it hits, it can give you a tremendous boost in traffic.

Problogger gives an excellent 101 on linking baiting here including 20 linkbaiting techniques.

Affiliates

I’m going to expand on this later, but running an affiliate program is a great way of generating links to your site. Your affiliates link to your site, plus it gives you an opportunity to submit your sites to affiliate directories (which are mostly free).

Correct Linking

When linking, ensure that you follow best practices when creating the links. Sometimes, only your URL will be allowed to be linked, but if you have control, you should do the following:

- Create keyword rich text links. So use your keywords in the links themselves.

- Mix these linked keywords up a lot. This makes it look more natural.

- Don’t just link to your home page. Try to get at least 30% of links to internal pages on your site. This makes your link profile look more natural to the search engines.

Timing

Another important point with respect to making your link profile look natural: Don’t send all the links to your site at once. Steadily keep adding links pretty much forever. Don’t just work like crazy for a month on getting links then get no more links for six months. Slowly and steadily grow your link profile.

Build Momentum

Once you’ve done this, keep the cycle going. After the first few months of building momentum, you can shift the main focus from building links, and focus more on the production of top quality content. Remember, this is a slow and steady process that requires dedication. Back in Part 2 I discussed the mindset required to pull this off. Review that when you find yourself getting slack.

Building lots of traffic requires persistence, but with enough dedication it pays dividends.

Think of yourself as a traffic-generating diesel engine that over time creates a snowballing traffic stream that simply cannot be stopped.

Now you’ve got all this traffic, I guess you want to know the best way to turn it into dollars!?

Next week we’ll be digging into this crucial step in Part 7 “The Money”. It’s going to be a big one, so set some time aside. It may just provide many of you the missing information in your quest for making money online. Look out for it.

Article Series
This article is part of a series. Other published articles in this series so far are shown below:

How to make $1000 a month online from scratch
The required mindset for online success
Choosing a niche for your online business
How to plan your online business
How to start your online business

AlbertSimilar Posts:

Post from: Home Business and Work From Home Ideas and Opportunities

How To Get Traffic To My Website?

How To Setup A Profitable Blog Or Mini Site

Albert — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:00:43 +0000

Step 1 – Niche Research

The first key to the success of a blog or mini site is that it has to target a group of people (a niche) who are hungry for information of a specific nature. In other words, I’m talking about the selection of your niche.

The group of people that your blog or mini site targets has to be a group of people who have problems. Problems in the sense that they are looking for a solution to something, looking to improve something. Furthermore, in a great niche, that SOMETHING, is something that causes pain. Financial pain, physical pain, emotional pain, some sort of pain, for the simple reason that people who have pain are the people who will want to buy solutions to that pain, and hopefully from your website.

If that sounds a bit sick, trying to exploit people with pain, it’s not. It’s called marketing. You’ve had marketers doing it to you your whole life and you probably never even knew about it, why can’t you do it too? And what’s more, you’re actually going to provide these people with a real solution, so you’re being helpful!

Anyhow moving on.

So you’re looking for a group of people with a problem, but that’s not all.

Your next concern has to be whether there are enough of these people searching for solutions to their problems on the internet. How many is enough you ask? It’s a good question. With certain kinds of sites, all you need is 10 visitors to your site a day and you can turn a nice monthly profit. Other niches and products that you promote you might need thousands per day. It all depends on what you sell, and who to, AND how much commission you make when you sell to them.

The things you should do are look at the search volume, as indicated by a tool like Wordtracker. Here you’re simply looking at how many searches per day a particular keyphrase gets in the search engines. Then after that, you want to look at whether there are other sites or blogs that are competing in the same niche.

Contrary to what alot of people think, NO competition isn’t necessarily a good thing. NO competition could and often does mean that it’s not a profitable niche. What you actually want is SOME competition, but CRAPPY competition that you can DESTROY by making a better site, providing better content and in a better way.

The final piece of the puzzle of finding a good niche, is whether the niche has a quality product for you to promote. You need something to sell to these people, that is high quality, has great marketing material (sales letter etc, so it will convert your traffic well) and pays a decent commission.

This is of course assuming you’re looking at the affiliate marketing model of making money with your blog – which I suggest if you’re looking to retire from your job and earn a full time passive income, you SHOULD be. There are other ways to make money where you might think about some different factors in your niche selection.

So if you can combine all of the above factors when selecting your niche, you’ll be giving yourself and your new blog the best possible chance of success.

Step 2 – Site Creation

Once your niche is selected, you obviously need to create a website to capitalize on it.

Blogs in particular have become such a popular choice for niche marketers because of their extreme ease of use, ease in maintaining, and ease in updating. Not to mention that the structure of a blog is generally by nature, search engine friendly. AND furthermore, where it isn’t, there is always a third party plugin to make it so.

There are many ways to create a successful blog, and the one you choose should reflect an understanding of your target market. What we’ll look at here is an example of one such method, that focuses on the generation of free traffic, and the promotion of an affiliate program for monetization.

The first thing you need to do is create a blog that’s visually or aesthetically sound. A visually sound blog, other than just looking pretty, is arranged in a way that maximizes all the content you create, by maintaining your readers attention, and drawing the most attention to your affiliate program.

There are a few ways you want to do this:

1. Choose a blog theme with a predominantly white background and with black text. Simple advice, but often ignored. Black on white is the easiest for the eyes to read. Other colour schemes can quickly tire the eyes and make it hard to maintain concentration.

2. Choose a clean and neat theme. You don’t want too much going on. It should be very clear where your content is located, very clear where your sidebar and navigation is located, where your other categories can be viewed and so forth. If a reader comes from a search engine, they should know exactly where they have to click to get the information they want. Generally I say the less options the better in terms of other features on your blog.

3. There are certain pages you absolutely want to have on your site. These are a Privacy Policy page, an About Us page, and a Contact us page. Google in particular looks at these things as indicators of a serious, quality, non spammy site. Furthermore, you want to have an archives page (easily achieved by the SRG Clean Archives plugin if you use WordPress), so as not to have your archives taking up valuable room in your blog sidebar.

There are more factors but for the sake of this article not being 9000 words, we’ll move on.

Once you have an aesthetically pleasing blog, you need some reader pleasing content.

We’re going to assume here that you have a product selected. Of course the next step after picking your niche (sometimes these tasks are one and the same) is to select a product that you’ll promote to the niche. This is where you’ll earn your cash.

So once you’ve got a product selected, and the base of a good blog created as above, your job is to create some content that the people in your niche will find valuable and use that content to drive your website’s visitors to the merchant’s page and earn an affiliate commission.

At this point, you should have your niche’s keywords researched – by that I mean you should have some idea of what might be a good place to attack the niche from. Ideally you’d have some keyphrase related to your niche that are uncompetitive in terms of the number of pages optimized for them in the search engines.

Where you’d ideally start your content creation is by writing an article on this uncompetitive term, posting it on your site and getting it ranked in the search engines. From here, you can develop as much content on search phrases from your niche, as you desire (remember you got those phrases from a tool like the Wordtracker keyword tool) in order to increase traffic to your site.

Some factors we didn’t get to mention in this article are things like On page optimization, making your pages of content rank well in the search engines – and monetization – the art of getting the highest percentage of visitors to your site actually making you money. But for a basic overview, I think we’ve done alright.

Step 3 – Traffic Generation

Here we’ll look at the primary ways of driving quality traffic to your niche site. Keep in mind that the phrase QUALITY traffic is important – we only the want the visitors who might buy our products and make us money – we don’t want freebie seekers in this business model.

The first and best way to generate traffic is to do as I’ve described in the previous article, which is to produce content based on long tail keywords from your niche. After optimizing your page well for this term, and using the in built pinging fucntion to notify other websites of your new content – you can be ranking and getting traffic for uncompetitive terms within the first few days of your site’s existence.

After this, there are many ways to approach your traffic generation.

1. Article Marketing: This is essentially (though often misunderstood) the process of having articles you’ve written, published on websites other than your own, for the purpose of including a link back to your site and funneling traffic from their site to yours. You can do this with article directories or with other blogs and websites by contacting the site author. Either way, the extra exposure from these sites can drive through important relevant visitors to your pages.

2. Ongoing Keyword research and SEO: The reason I believe in having a big focus on SEO is that the people who have a specific problem and are looking for a solution, tend to gravitate toward a search engine. Yes there are millions of web viewers who don’t go near a search engine but they can be harder to target and can represent not as high a quality traffic. In other words they don’t tend to make you as much money.
Continually finding new keywords that represent relevant traffic for your products, and continually creating content to target those visitors is about as smart as you can be with ongoing traffic generation.

3. Link Building: This is both for the purpose of boosting your search engine rankings and increasing exposure to your website. You have probably heard that links back to your site from relevant websites indicate your site is more trust worthy and worthy of better SE rankings. At the same time, a link on a relevant website, whether in a piece of content on a sidebar, can increase visitors to your website. You should make it a point to continually do activities that motivate similar sites in your niche to link to you – or even if not in your niche, site’s that could send you relevant visitors.

4. Using Social Networks: Using the myriad social networks like Digg, Mysapce, Facebook, Stumbleupon etc can be another great way to increase traffic to your website. Just by submitting all the posts you make to your blog to site’s like Digg and Stumbleupon, you can earn yourself extra backlinks, and the potential to have your content seen and then shared by new members of your target audience. As is becoming clear, almost EVERYONE online hangs out at some social network for some reason, and if you can find where your target market is hanging out and leverage that, your traffic can increase exponentially.

Finally, remember that when trying to generate traffic to your blog, you should consider your niche before deciding which methods to utilize. As I’ve said before, using a social network might be great, but certain niches might be too technically unadvanced to know about social networks, and they only use Google. Some niches might be more easily approached by use of visual media like video rather than article content. The bottom line of traffic generation is where are my target market hanging out, and how can I get my site in front of them in a way that contributes value to their lives.

Next we’ll look at the management of a successful blog.

Step 4 – Management

The final step in the process of having a successful and profitable niche blog is the management of your site.

Here I’m talking about management in terms of keeping your site running, monitoring what’s working and what’s not, and monitoring the success of your site so you know how much effort to commit to it on a continual basis.

Here are some of the elements involved in the management area of a successful blog.

1. You need to manage and track your search engine statistics. Here I mean two things. 1. is the doings of your search competition and 2 is the rankings and traffic from various pages of your site.

In 1. You need to be always checking up on your search competition. Just by knowing what sites link to your competitor site can allow you a way to gain new backlinks. You contact the same people and get the same links PLUS keep doing all the good SEO you’re already doing, you can steal their spot.

in 2. You need to monitor your own search rankings to see what search terms are bringing you traffic. At this point you can either choose to focus more of your content on those terms, giving readers coming from those terms more to look at and more opportunities to get pushed to your affiliate link OR you can look harder at the monetization of those pages. This might include testing different affiliate link positionings, changing the text, and more.

Following on from that, something else that needs to be tracked on your blog, is how successful your content is at converting visitors to sales.

This has traditionally been tough on a blogs because the way they are set doesn’t generally allow for any form of split testing. However, a new blogging software called Firepow has made this possible. What you can do is test which content your audience responds best to. You can use variations of two different posts, have them alternate for each new user to the blog, and see which version of the post generated the most affiliate link clicks.

Optimizing your content like this may be the easiest way to increase your bottom line. After all think about this: If you want to double your profits from a site, you can either double your site traffic, or you can double your conversion rate… what’s easier? In a lot of cases, it’s doubling your conversion rate.

Finally, something that needs to be managed on your blog is the updating of your content. The most successful blogs and mini sites always have something new for their readers all the time, and when you’re running more than one blog, this can be an ongoing challenge. The best thing you can do here is get yourself the help of some software like the above mentioned Firepow, which can help you manage a number of blog’s content from one control panel. Something like this will give you the ability to post content on schedules, get notified of when a blog needs updating, and offer you options of how to get relevant content on to your site without your effort.

Combined with all the elements we’ve talked about in this article, managing your blog will put the profit icing on your blogging/mini site cake. I trust that you’ve found this post informative and helpful.

by Andrew Hansen from FirePowSimilar Posts:

Post from: Home Business and Work From Home Ideas and Opportunities

How To Setup A Profitable Blog Or Mini Site

Email Is STILL The MOST EFFECTIVE Online Marketing Tool!

Albert — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 20:40:26 +0000

Email marketing always gets a bad press? but a new study proves it?s actually the most effective and efficient marketing tool available to online entrepreneurs.

Sure, spam is still as problematic as ever. But if you?ve got a targeted list of opt-in subscribers and a message they want to hear, email marketing can be incredibly powerful!

A new survey by Forrester Research and Shop.org says email marketing messages sent to in-house subscriber lists provide the highest return on investment of any type of e-marketing activity.

The report says the average value of a sale generated by email marketing to in-house lists is $120.27. At the same time, the average cost of making that sale is only $6.85.

So the Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) is 17.56, which means the average value of a sale made through email marketing is 17.56 times more than the amount it cost a business to make the sale.

ROAS is calculated by dividing the sale value (dollars earned) by the amount spent on corresponding advertising (dollars spent). Any value higher than 1 represents a positive return on investment.

So, 17.56 is a pretty impressive figure!

But remember, this only refers to email marketing using in-house subscriber lists. In other words, people who?ve actively asked you to contact them, not random email addresses you got from a rented list.

The survey says search engine optimization is the second most effective e-marketing tool, with an ROAS of 12.71.

However, I think this is much more difficult to measure ? because it?s harder to attribute a sale to general SEO marketing than a specific email campaign.

Nevertheless, it emphasizes the importance of a top organic search ranking.

In third place is affiliate marketing, which can be easily measured. It has an ROAS of 10.01.

Bottom of the pile ? rather predictably ? is banner advertising, which has an ROAS of just 1.58.

So, as we?ve always said at IMC, email marketing works! It just needs to be used with a targeted list of subscribers who are interested in what you?ve got to say.

For more information on the report and these statistics, click here.

And if you?ve been neglecting your email marketing for newer, sexier strategies ? get back on it!