Tresor Yakro

On checking out the popular social networking sites, I noticed that a number of the most successful internet marketers have a high presence. These sites, however, are not meant for promoting your own business or affiliates. The general idea, is to interact with others, getting to know them, exchanging ideas and knowledge and then when it seems appropriate, sharing information on opportunities that might help them.

There are new social networking sites being added daily. Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are presently the most popular. The ‘new kid on the block’ is BetterNetworker. It is my prediction that its popularity will grow very quickly and by this time next year it will be receiving a large piece of the pie.

TWITTER — This is a micro-blogging service and there is no cost to join. You send messages to other users and these posts are called “tweets”. They are only in text form and you are limited to 140 characters per post. This is where you can put your copywriting skills to the test! You can connect your Twitter account to your Facebook account and when you post on one it will appear on the other site also.

FACEBOOK — It is also a free website that is privately owned and operated by Facebook Inc. Within Facebook you can join networks that are organized by city, workplace, school or region, to connect and interact with others. You can add ‘friends’ and send them messages. You can also upload pictures and short video. Facebook attracted 132.1 million unique visitors in June, 2008.

MY SPACE — It is also a free website, with an interactive network of friends, blogs, groups, personal profiles, music, video and photos and it is international. Back in June, 2006 it was the most popular social networking site in the United States. However, in April, 2008 it was taken over in popularity by its main competitor, Facebook. MySpace still attracts approximately 230,000 new users per day.

BETTERNETWORKER — This latest social networking site is the ‘brainchild’ of Mike Dillard and Perry Belcher. These are two very highly successful gurus in the industry. This site is dedicated to providing great content amongst its users. It gives a strict warning about trying to blatantly pitch your product or service. To date, I have been very impressed with the quality of the posts on BetterNetworker and I highly recommend it.

Just a word of caution….you can spend many useless hours navigating through these social media sites and getting sidetracked with trivia. It is definitely not a ‘quick fix’ to adding hundreds of people to your mailing list. However, if done right it can produce great results. A good friend of mine, who has developed quite an impressive following on Twitter, recently sent out a ‘tweet’ about a new opportunity. His followers went to the recommended site and a week later my friend had earned over $40,000.00 in affiliate commissions. This only happened because he had built a large group of followers, who liked, respected and trusted him.

A great percentage of the top producers involved in internet marketing can be found on these social networking sites. One would have to assume that if they are willing to put their time into these sites, then they have to be lucrative in the end. If this is done properly, then it can definitely reap very rich rewards.

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If you own your own business, making sure that you have the right web marketing strategies will be essential to your success. Considering that your business cant be successful without being seen, this is important.

You can find plenty of strategies and web marketing tips to help your business succeed. All it takes is a little information and preparation on your part to make sure that you market your business properly.

You can succeed very well by letting your business speak for itself, which is one of the best web marketing tips. All this requires is the proper setup on your end. The time that it takes to do this is minimal. All you need is the right information. The first step is to make sure you use Search Engine Optimization in your website text. This is the process of focusing on relevant keywords and placing them in your website text. For example, if you have a real estate business, you should use popular search terms like real estate in your text, but dont overdo it.

Make sure that you don’t overdo it, though. SEO, done properly, can give your website a great ranking on search engines. If you use too many keywords, though, you’ll likely get booted or banned for keyword stuffing.

There are many other free web marketing tips you can use, such as utilizing social networking sites. Build a blog, a Facebook page, or other social profile for your business. This will allow you to interact with people more personally. Its more likely that people will be interested in your business by doing this, rather than using old sales techniques. Using the social nature that is taking over the internet to your advantage will help your business succeed.

After all, its great that you can advertise your business for so many ways for free. Older businesses might not have been this lucky, but the internet is making marketing more affordable for everyone, and more accessible, too.

There are so many web marketing tips that you can use to grow your business. You simply need to know what works in todays world. Often, people are too caught up in what used to work to realize that things are different now.

The new world of internet marketing has no use for marketing practices of past years, even if they’re only a few years old. Hard selling and making sales pitches will no longer work like they once did, so you should embrace the social interaction that marketing has become. If you simply take the time to learn about the social web and how the free marketing can help your business, you’ll see the success you want and deserve.

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For many people who wish to start their own business and are looking for ways to make money fast, the internet has opened up a whole new world of opportunities, allowing them to copy any real world business model and turn it into a reality on the internet. The internet truly offers endless business opportunities.

One of the advantages of starting your own internet business is that you don’t need to have a college degree or be a rocket scientist. Everything you need to know to get things up and running can be found on the internet and its free. There are so many instances where ordinary folks are being paid big money for doing things they enjoy. There’s even a true story where a man made over $187,000 in online sales teaching people how to play video games! The possibilities are indeed endless.

Another significant advantage of starting an online business is the low operating costs. All you need is a PC and a reliable internet connection and you are in business. Of course, having a comfortable and cozy location where you can concentrate on your work is certainly even more ideal.

Without the shadow of a doubt, there might possibly be more than a million ways to start your own online business, but the truth is that there are also many cases of people failing even to make a single cent online? When you truly ponder and examine the reasons why so many people still fail online, you will be surprised that the odds are somehow rendered to a just a few more well defined reasons.

And if that is the case, then maybe the fastest track to online business success is not to first look at the abundant opportunities on hand but to understand what are the major reasons why so many people are failing online, subsequently learn from their mistakes and avoid making them ourselves.

In my opinion, there are about 5 common mistakes that most people make that often results in the high number of online business failures. And these include the following.

Mistake No. 1 : The “Illusion” That No Work Is Required. This may be the most appealing aspect of most Get-Rich-Quick programs but the Achilles heel of most aspiring entrepreneurs when starting their own online business. Maybe in the short term, you might make a small profit but it’s highly impossible that one can sustain long term business growth and profitability if no work is needed right?

Mistake No. 2 : Lack Of Branding For Your Online Business. The inability to establish your business’s online branding could result in disastrous outcome for your online business. Without credibility and trust, nobody would want to do business with you. That is why you need to build your online credibility by becoming the “Expert” in your own niche. Give out valuable and relevant advice to visitors and potential customers.

Mistake No. 3 : Helping Build Other People’s List Instead Of Your Own. Most beginner business owners often make the mistake of sending referrals directly to their associated affiliated sites without even collecting their visitor’s contact information first. By doing so, they are practically giving their potential customer base to other business owners who have an opt in box all set up to reap the benefits of your marketing efforts. This gives them absolutely no benefits for any future marketing opportunities.

Mistake No. 4 : Inadequate Positioning Of Ads. The position in which your ads appear on your website is essential. If you are sending paid referrals to your site for the sole purpose of making a sale for the product you are promoting, then it makes no sense to plaster ads all across your site that might possibly divert traffic away.

Mistake No. 5 : Pay Per Click Dilemma. Pay Per Click advertising can make or break your online business if you do not know what you are doing. The key to online business success using this particular traffic generation technique lies in the fact that it is a skill that needs to be learned and mastered if it were to perform wonders for your online business. Unfortunately, most beginner online marketers fail to realize this simple fact and often wasted huge chunks of advertising dollars with no significant results.

To sum things up, there may be many more reasons why so many businesses fail online but the main lesson any business owner can benefit from this could well be the fact that the fastest track to online business success lies not on the business opportunity on hand but to first learn from other people’s mistakes and not make the same mistakes when building their own online business.

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I work with my own sites and I also consult with sites owned by other people to help them get to a good position while conducting search engine ranking projects. I have been successfully working with a few hundred customers in my short history in the area of keyword ranking and have come across a concept that continues to make the customers I have all the more happy while costing me nothing to provide. The concept is that of secondary search terms ranking successfully when a site ranks well for a few more competitive terms.

I have understood that many of my clients enjoy this concept when I have follow up conversations with my customers about their search engine ranking projects. I will try to achieve high rankings for three to five keywords to rank well for a website and then the website will find that many other keywords also rank well as a result of the effort of the work on the few more competitive terms. This can be an absolute windfall for many of my customers.

I have recently discovered that when my firm begins to work on a handful of competitive keywords (writing articles, primarily) is that the search engines begin to index the site at a more rapid rate that before. They do this so they can use the new backlinks that are being created in their ranking algorithm. As the articles are published and the links begin to show up they need to be added to their internal calculation. As part of that calculation the search engines start to visit the sites and index additional, often times deeper, information about the site than they had previously indexed.

I also find that the theme of the site becomes very important as the links are added and that most of the time, the new keywords being indexed are all part of a theme that the search engines think are the core of the website. An example to share is that of a commercial food photographer who was unranked for any keyword after having his site operational for almost 2 years. This web site had a few categories listed such as commercial photography, food photography and had a very nice portfolio. The client really wanted to be ranked well for the term commercial photographer and we have him at number three as of the writing of this article.

What happened to the other keywords associated with his website is the real reason for writing this article, however. He began to have all types of keywords for food photography get high rankings along with the words we were doing the work on. We had a contract with him for 5 keywords and he wound up with more than seventeen primary phrases listed in the top 10 by the time the project had run for 5 months. These secondary results are what many times have helped him to create new customers.

This is a great win for him and a great win for us in that they will end up being a repeat customer for new opportunities to help him continue to get more business in his specialty of commercial photography.

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If want to have an online presence, you will need to have a website. A website is like your home, People identify you by your website. So naturally, You need to have a nice home in order to retain your visitors ans make them want to come back again.

Step 1: Choosing a Domain Name

First, you need to choose and purchase a domain name that is relevant to your website topic. Try to use keywords that receive high traffic, as they are likely to be ranked higher by search engines.

Step 2: Choose your Colors

Use colors that are soothing to the eyes, and matches your whole layout of your Website. Bold words to catch attention. Colors like red, yellow are good and striking for attention catching to important words you want your readers to catch. Use colors to draw readers’ attention to the area you want them to focus on.

Do not use too many bold and colors as it will distract the readers attention. You want to focus your readers’ attention on important information that will lead to a sale.

Step 4: Structure of Content

Make sure that your content flow through your website smoothly and is reader friendly. Do not try to put all information in one page. You can use different web pages to store your information,

Step 5: Opt-In Form

Install an opt-in form in your website to capture email contacts of visitors for future updates. Not all visitors who visit your website the first time will buy your product. You need to follow up with them to increase the chances of a purchase in future. You can offer a free gift to visitors who leave their email contact.

It is very addictive to try to add fancy gadgets to your website. Try to control the urge, make the website functional and have all necessary gadgets working. Start to do your traffic strategies and improve on you website while marketing it.

One other test you should do before you can say your website is successful is testing. You need to test the conversion rate of your website. Do a A/B testing of your website to see which website design works better in converting

Your website only works if it can convert leads into sales. Being functional is more important than being just a fancy site.

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It is not a well-known fact, but using RSS can offer great benefits to your business. Below are some examples that are often used. Please be aware though, some of these techniques could possibly be abused. So please use carefully.

Twitter: Automatically create a new tweet when you have new posts. There are many ways to do this, a popular and free tool to use is Twitterfeed.

Facebook - like twitter, Facebook can also be updated automatically when you post. One recommended application to use is “My Blogs”, as using Facebook app’s can sometimes be unreliable.

Widgets - create a widget that updates with your blog, so others have the option to display the feed on their own blogs or even their desktop. Example applications include “Spring Widgets” and “Google Gadgets”.

File delivery: If you are already publishing a podcast, then it should be easy to start offering PDF documents or video downloads via RSS.

Create affiliate branded RSS feeds: Let affiliates display your blog content and let them be rewarded for it. I’ve created a custom feed for my affiliates, which contains the affiliate’s ID.

Deal finder: we all like to save money, especially when it comes to spending money on our business. Large online stores like Amazon or shop.com offer “deal of the day” or similar offers. These offers can be subscribed to your feed reader, so they will display as soon as they are available.

Package tracking: have your RSS feed update to alert you to the status of your deliveries. Use a solution like SimpleTracking.com.

Track latest questions on Yahoo Answers: Answering questions on Yahoo Answers can be very effective to promote your business. Subscribe to the RSS feed of the category you’re interested in so you’ll be notified when a new question you can answer comes in.

Track your own or other blogs’ comments: Sometimes email notifications quit working. But the RSS always does. If you are using a WordPress blog, your comment feed is usually: http://yourblog.com/?feed=comments-rss2 or http://yourblog.com/comments/feed/

Competitor watch: Find out what competitors or other marketers are doing on social networks, blogs, video and more using FriendFeed.

Track what’s going on in your industry: Do a search on Yahoo or MSN for a keyword or phrase you’d like to watch. Using Firefox or IE 7, an RSS feed icon will appear. Click to subscribe.

Advertise: While I personally have not done any RSS advertising, I have displayed ads in RSS feeds. The click through ratios for that one site performed better compared to web site click through. You can advertise on RSS feeds through Text-Link-Ads, Pheedo and FeedBurner.

Service status update: keep your clients and customers in the know by displaying your service status via RSS feed. This is especially useful for those that offer web hosting, shopping carts or payment gateways.

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