Here’s another example of how a little tweak can effect a huge change.

In this case, we are going to talk about the power of consensus.
Or the power of the crowd.

How does this fit into the “small change big impact” theme? Let me explain…

There’s this product where buyers can call in to buy.

The product was advertised as an infomercial.
And the call-to-action line was “Call now and our operators will be there to serve you”.

Well…the response was okay, but not fantastic.

So the call-to-action line was re-written and tested.

It now read, “Operators are busy. Please call back again later if the line is engaged”.

Straight away, orders went through the roof!

Why was there such a big impact when the change to the call-to-action script is so small?

Because of the power of consensus!

In the first case, you get the mental picture that operators are free, and are probably twiddling their thumbs waiting for calls to come in.

But in the second case, the picture is that of busy operators who have their hands filled with orders.

And if everyone is buying it, then it probably is going to be a good product. So I must get it!

See the difference?

Yet another example that demonstrate the importance of:
- Constantly testing and tweaking for higher conversions
- Paying attention to the even the smallest of details. Because sometimes they make all the difference.

As usual, I love to hear your comments.

All success,

Jag Foo

P.S Important => What if you can discover the secret element that can increase your profits by 1,000%…and more…

Will you be willing to do a small test – which you can implement in no time and cost zero dollars – that can potentially yield you disproportionally large results?

Click here now if you want to discover these secrets that Jay Abraham, Mark Joyner and other marketing legends have been exclusively to their clients => http://emoneymarketing.com/SmallChangesBigProfits/

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Editor note: I came across the great article on measuring Social Media ROI (AWAI) and I thought I published it down here.

By Kathleen Cleary

Congratulations! You’ve jumped on the Social Media bandwagon and set up your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. Perhaps you’ve even created a Facebook fan page and scouted out some niche-oriented sites to post comments to, answer questions, and start discussions on.

But wait … do you find yourself wondering if your Social Media efforts and time are really paying off? How do you measure the Return on Investment of relationship-building and engagement? How can you be sure you’re not sucking the time out of your most productive hours each day with little return?

If you are participating in Social Networks in a willy-nilly fashion — a tweet here, a blog post there — without much thought to what your true purpose is, you are just a ship without a rudder in the vast sea of Social Media. And, you won’t be gaining the kind of attention which will drive business to you, or to a client you may be advising on how to effectively use Social Networks.

Establish Your Clear Defining Purpose So You Can Unmistakably Measure the Return on Your Social Media Time

To see results from your Social Media activities, it’s vital that you have a “clear defining purpose” for being there in the first place. Let’s take a look at some of the common motivating factors to getting involved with Social Media …

• Build brand visibility
• Lead generation and list building
• Education and awareness
• Increased credibility and authority (Thought Leadership)
• Increased blog/website traffic and leads
• Promote products and services
• SEO and link building
• Gather insights into your community of interest (surveys, polls, market research)

As a copywriter, your defining purpose might be to: “engage and add value to (your chosen niche) community in order to increase leads and work opportunities.”

If you are consulting with a client on how to participate in Social Media, you must help them define their primary purpose before creating an effective action plan.

Let’s say your client is a fitness center. Their defining purpose might be to: “provide education on the life-changing benefits of proper health and fitness activities for members and prospects as well as to increase leads for new memberships.”

If your client is a natural beauty product retailer, their defining purpose might be to: “increase awareness of the lasting health benefits of using natural beauty products in order to increase the customer base for ‘X’ Brand.”

Once you are clear on your defining purpose, it’s time to set up specific and measurable goals, develop and execute a strategy, and then evaluate your Return on Investment. Social Media actually provides two types of ROI. There is the traditional Return on Investment, which looks at concrete dollars, customers, subscriptions, etc. And, there is also the Return on Influence. Both should be measured.

Return on Influence has more to do with brand authority/credibility and one’s levels of influence, engagement, and popularity in Social Media channels. Positive outcomes here will eventually have a real impact on the measurable dollar amounts which show up in the Return on Investment numbers.

So, back to setting your goals. Be sure they are not too vague or hard to measure. A weak goal for your fitness center client would be: “Our goal is to raise our brand awareness and increase our total number of memberships.”

An example of a stronger goal could be: “Our goal is to increase website traffic resulting in 75 new leads and 25 new memberships in the next six months.”

Perhaps your client is focused on connecting with influencers in their industry. A weak goal would be: “Our goal is to increase our brand visibility and unsolicited mentions of our company each month.”

A much stronger goal is: “To achieve 15-20 unsolicited mentions of our company in industry blogs, publications, and forums each month.”

As a copywriter, a vague goal would be: “To increase my Facebook fan base and Twitter followers.” A more specific and measurable copywriting goal could be: “To acquire 50 new leads from Social Media and contract with five new clients in the next six months.”

In looking at the two types of ROI provided by Social Media activities, here are some suggested ideas of what you can measure:

Return on Investment examples:

• 500 new subscribers
• 50 new product sells
• Six new clients
• Five new joint venture partnerships
• $10,000 increase in donations for a non-profit

Return on Influence examples:

• 1,000 new Twitter followers
• 2,500 participants in your Facebook Group
• 1,500 fans to your Facebook fan page
• 25 mentions per month in blogs, Twitter, niche social sites
• 400 new RSS subscribers to your blog

Useful Tools to Help You Track Your Social Media ROI

Be sure to take advantage of these very useful tools available to help you track your ROI:

1. Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics (This is a very good tool to track website visitor traffic and conversion from Social Media sources)
2. Feedburner – http://www.feedburner.com (Tracks the number of people subscribing to your RSS blog feed)
3. Frogloop – http://www.frogloop.com/social-network-calculator (This cool Social Media calculator is designed for non-profit campaigns, but can be adapted for other business campaigns as well)
4. BlogPulse – http://www.blogpulse.com (Shows the growth in bloggers talking about your business/your client’s company and tracks the growth in blog posts regarding a particular domain name)
5. Trendpedia – http://www.trendpedia.com (This is a comparative tool to track the number of blog posts that mentioned a particular keyword)
6. Social Network Influence Statistics:
   • Increased numbers in Facebook fans on your/your client’s fan/business page
   • Increase in Twitter conversations pertaining to your business/your client’s company
   • Increase in Twitter follows, Facebook friend requests, and FriendFeed subscriptions

If you want to be sure you are participating in the Social Networks effectively, discover the strategies fellow AWAIer Jim Turner uses to find all the clients he needs solely through his Social Network activities. Jim’s program, Social Networking: The 21st Century Way to Find New Clients details how you can use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to create a steady stream of hungry prospects and new clients for your freelance copywriting business.

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This title may sound like some self development words of affirmations or chanting of positive words but it is not. You are about to discover how you can turn your words into a fortune indirectly. (Some of you may be able to do it directly.)

At the same time, you will end up overcoming your fear of writing.

Writing For Traffic

When it comes to getting traffic with Google AdWords and article marketing, it is all about words. Using your words, you can write persuasive PPC ads that get people to click and to visit your website. You also use words to write articles with interesting titles and compelling resource boxes.

Writing For Conversion

With your words, you can turn traffic into profits. Simply by writing in a conversational yet persuasive style in your affiliate presell pages, your sales pages, landing pages and email follow ups, you can get your visitors to make purchases and you will get paid for it.

Writing For Help

At this point of time, you might be thinking of hiring people to do all that writing for you. Smart move! Other than having money to outsource your writing, you still need to be able to write so that you can hire people. After all, you need to write and post ads to find the right people.

Writing Required

By now, you realized that importance of writing and you just need to do it. It might sound intimidating for most people, however, once you do it, you will find that it is not as hard as you think. Just like most things, the more you do it, the better you get.

No need to take writing classes, just write like you speak. If you insist on not writing then you might want to record your voice then hire someone to transcribe your voice into words. This is a fast way to create content and many top selling authors use this method to write their books.

Last but not least, improve your ability to write and your life will get easier. All the best!

Samuel Ng

“Google AdWords System” (Value: $49.97)
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First of all, I am proud to announce to you the good news that there are no secrets to building and running a successful business online! There are no magic bullets, no big red buttons you can push to send money into your pocket.

Best of all, what you are about to read will surely help you succeed faster.

Education

If you have been online for at least awhile, I am sure that you have bought books from Amazon, courses from ClickBank and a whole lot of other stuff that is collecting dust on your shelves or collecting digital dust on your computer.

You are in the process of getting yourself educated so that you can have the knowledge of how to build and run a successful business online. This is a good thing, provided you will implementing what you are learn. If not, you need to practice more of what you know!

Action

If you have been to some personal development talks or some network marketing talks, you always hear about stuff like being self-motivated and taking massive action. Then again, what the heck is taking massive action?

You can take all the action you want and if you do not have the proper knowledge, you will fail anyway. I have seen so many people take action without proper knowledge and all of them are totally burnt out with nothing to show for their effort.

Success

Success happens when you take pieces of the puzzle and you put them together to see the whole big picture. Getting educated is where you find the pieces of the puzzle, taking action and doing your own testing is where you put the pieces together.

Education + Action = Success

Mistakes

Do you find yourself making a lot of mistakes? Mistakes can hardly be avoided because it is all part of your learning experience. Always learn from your mistakes so that you will not repeat them again. Also, if you did your research properly, you will make less mistakes and they will cost you less as well.

Pace

Do not rush, do things at your own pace, 1 thing at a time. When you do 1 thing at a time, you are more focused and it may seem slow, however when you are done, you will realize that you did a good job at a reasonable pace.

When you are rushing, you cannot think clearly and clarity of mind is the best thing you need when you have an urgent deadline or when you are facing a tough challenge in your business.

Progress

Keep a simple journal or notebook where you can track your results, progress and mistakes too. This is where you will learn from your own mistakes and you can see clearly which are the exact activities that are useful for your business and which ones are not.

Productivity

Create 2 simple to-do lists, 1 for weekly tasks and 1 for daily tasks. Use short and simple words on your to-do list so that you will not get the feeling of overwhelm and overload.

Always block out 45 – 60 minutes time slots to do your core tasks. Make sure that you take short breaks in between these slots. Do your best to have enough sleep so that you can keep your energy level up.

Focus

Stay focused and stop chasing after the latest Johnny come lately guru of the week. Their job is to distract you and get you to buy stuff from them. Your job is to avoid them so that you can stay focused on what you need to do to make money for yourself!

Last but not least, be persistent and never give up. Mistakes will happen and you do have what it takes to make it right. All the best!

Samuel Ng

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To perform your market analysis, you need lots of information including information about your competitors, product, market environment, pricing, distribution, target market, and more.

I write about many of these topics on my blog, but specialize in market segmentation and gathering target market information. So I want to share with you how to do a free target market analysis that takes only minutes.

Step 1: You Need Demographics To Perform Your Market Analysis

First you must identify the best potential customers for what you sell. Then you need to know five major demographics for your target market:

1. Age provides generation and life stage characteristics.

2. Gender provides marketing appeals that differ between men and women.

3. Education provides social class and lifestyle characteristics.

4. Occupation is the best predictor of social class.

5. National origin, or race, provides characteristics that differ by culture.

Now this information is sometimes difficult to locate, particularly if your business is Internet based. But I recently discovered a site that provides age and gender demographics by keywords. You’ll be surprised at how many marketing characteristics you can learn from just these two demographics.

So go to http://adlab.microsoft.com/Demographics-Prediction/DPUI.aspx. and get age and gender demographics for your major keywords, those that you’re building your site or blog around.

By doing a Google search for your target market, you’ll discover additional demographics to perform your market analysis. This isn’t necessary, but the more demographics you have, the more complete you target market analysis will be.

Step 2: You Need A Simple Process To Perform Your Market Analysis

Just having demographics for your target market doesn’t help you much unless you know characteristics for them. That’s why I developed my matrix market segmentation process for my students when I was still teaching at the University of Oklahoma. I knew my students wouldn’t use the process unless I made it easy.

So I developed matrices that contained the major characteristics by each demographic segment. For example, generations differ considerably in what they value, what they trust, how they want to live and work, their concerns, and their hopes. So I developed a matrix for each generation so students could just copy and paste into a table. When finished the table contains the major characteristics for a target market.

This worked well and I provide a free report on how to use this manual process when you subscribe to my blog.

Step 3: You Need A Way To Perform Your Market Analysis Easily and Quickly

After I retired from higher education and started my Internet business, I soon realized that business owners need an even quicker and easier way to use my process. So I paid a programmer $550 to automate it. Now the program does all the work for you.

But it’s a good idea to read the free report before getting your free target market analysis. Then you’ll understand what the program is doing and how to best use the results.

You just login to AutoMarketAnalysis.com and do the regular opt-in routine. When you’re returned to the site, you’ll select demographic options from your research in step 1, and click the submit button.

Because this site was created by the programmer, it’s not very pretty, but if you can overlook its looks, you’ll be amazed at the information it’ll provide.

You’ll immediately get characteristics that are shared across demographics, the best marketing appeals for your target market, and for some target markets, media preferences and buying behavior.

Step 4: After You Perform Your Market Analysis, Implement It.

When you’ve got your free target market analysis, you have to use the results in your marketing strategies and tactics. It will do you no good to perform your market analysis if you don’t use it.

But with your free target market analysis report, you’ll have all the information you need to select marketing appeals that your potential customers will relate to and be influenced by. So why wouldn’t you use it to improve sales and customer relationships.

Step 5: Gather The Other Information You Need To Perform Your Market Analysis

As stated earlier you’ll need additional information about your competitors, product, market environment, pricing, distribution, etc. To start you can go to my blog, click on “Site Map” in the top navigation and see categories with links to my posts on each.

I know you’ll find my posts helpful as you perform your market analysis.

Linda Morton writes on many aspects of marketing on her blog at http://StrategicMarketSegmentation.com/blog. But her specialty is market segmentation and target marketing.

She wrote a national column on her market segmentation process for ten years. To use her automated process, go to http://AutoMarketAnalysis.com.

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In the previous post (part 1), we talk about using the principle of consistency technique that helped a restaurant reduce their cancellation of table reservations by 30%.

This was achieved just by adding 2 “small words” to the call script used by the phone receptionist.

Today, we are going to explore another “Small Change Big Impact” scenario.

I got this from a newsletter issue from John Forde’s Copywriting Roundtable. I thought it’s pretty relevant to today’s theme.

And I think you will like this. It goes like this:

In Italy, and for many countries for that matter (including Singapore where I am based), you get penalized with points if you commit a traffic offence.

Once you accumulated points to a certain level, your driving license get suspended.

Now Italy is well well-known for bad driving on the road. And while this measure probably work to a certain degree, the authorities decided to do a small tweak to the system.

They Flipped It Around!

That means you start of with points on your record. With every violation, you get points taken off. If you hit zero, you are IN LUCK! Say goodbye to your license!

What happened after that?

Traffic deaths went down. Accidents went down. Speeding incidents went
down. Helmet and even seatbelt use went up!

Small change. Big impact.

But why?

Because fear of loss is a powerful motivator!

When it’s down to “fear of loss” versus “benefit of gain”, the former wins. Hands down.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at the stock market. It can take years for a stock to reach its absolute peak. But you only need a matter of months (or even days) for the stock to plummet back to square one during a panic.

Wonder why weekend clearance sale work so well? Because people are afraid of missing the bargain. There is “scarcity” involved. That’s very effective in getting people to act. And act now.

Amazing how human emotions work right?

As usual, let me know your thoughts below.

All success,

Jag Foo

P.S Important => What if you can discover the secret element that can increase your profits by 1,000%…and more…

Will you be willing to do a small test – which you can implement in no time and cost zero dollars – that can potentially yield you disproportionally large results?

Click here now if you want to discover these secrets that Jay Abraham, Mark Joyner and other marketing legends have been exclusively to their clients => http://emoneymarketing.com/SmallChangesBigProfits/

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I’ll cut to the chase.

Here’s why knowing your market is important:

• When you understand their fears, frustrations, wants and aspirations, you can offer them a well-suited solution to their problems or needs.
• When you give them what they want, the chances of them turning into your customers become much higher
• Because your have your intimate knowledge of them, you are in a better position to over-deliver value to them.
• With this, they will love you for it. And it will increase your customer loyalty towards you.

And why segmenting your market is crucial too:

• Customers respond better to specific offers
• Customers are happy because they get offers specific to their wants/needs.
• Again, when they are happy, they will stay longer with you.
• You make more profit!

These are a no-brainer right?

Now recently, I had the pleasure of communicating with Linda Morton via email. She is a Professor Emeritus from The University of Oklahoma.

And she is the author of Strategic Market Segmentation.

In her blog, you get the finer points of market segmentation strategies and how to discover what gets your customers ticking.

She is also the author of “Know ‘Em, Sell ‘Em”, that drills down into the finer points of what appeals to your customers.

Look. Market intelligence is important. You don’t need me to spell this out because you already know this. What you need to know is the exact process. And she lay them down for you.

All success,

Jag Foo

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Mr Market claimed yet another victim!

Do you know that you can have significant increase in revenue just by making seemingly “small changes” to your business?

Most people tend to think that if you want big results…you need big change! You need to spend big money! But that’s not entirely true!

If you know how to make the RIGHT change, you can still achieve great results even if it may just be a small tweak.

Let me tell you a story illustrating this concept.

I read about this story in one of Robert Cialdini’s presentation about how to be more persuasive.

Robert Cialdini is a world-renowned authority in the study of influence. He is also the best-selling author of “The Psychology of Influence”.

And it goes like this.

There is a restaurant that takes advanced booking by phone. But there was a problem. There were many customers calling in to cancel at the last minute.

The thing is that the receptionist was trained to say “Thank you for calling our restaurant. Please call if you want to cancel your reservation” to all the customers making their booking.

Later, a small change was made to this statement. To be more precise, 2 extra words was added.

What was it?

Now, the receptionist says, “Thank you for calling our restaurant.

Will you please call if you want to cancel your reservation.”

That’s it. And because of these 2 extra words (“Will you”), there was a 30% reduction in cancellation.

What happened here?

Let me tell you, the restaurant just applied…

The Principle Of Consistency

We like to be consistent. And if someone points out any inconsistency in your behavior or actions…it will cause you to feel highly uncomfortable.

Therefore, when we insert the extra 2 words “Will you” into the question, it subconsciously tells the person on the other end, that now he has got to take responsibility.

He made the booking at first. And now he cancels. The receptionist wants him to know that he is being inconsistent. By using the word “you”, the person is now more aware of this fact.

Amazing isn’t it? The addition of just 2 words!

Can you apply this concept to your website’s sales copy to make it more persuasive? Definitely.

Test it. And you will see the result.

The next time you meet a client, see if you can implement this principle to get the other party to do what you want.

While you may not be succeed all the time, it will surely increase your odds.

In the next part, I will share with you another “weapon of influence” that can yield powerful results with just another small tweak.

All success,

Jag Foo

P.S Important => What if you can discover the secret element that can increase your profits by 1,000%…and more…

Will you be willing to do a small test – which you can implement in no time and cost zero dollars – that can potentially yield you disproportionally large results?

Click here now if you want to discover these secrets that Jay Abraham, Mark Joyner and other marketing legends have been exclusively to their clients => http://emoneymarketing.com/SmallChangesBigProfits/

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Most people think of WordPress as a blogging software. However, you will notice that some people are using it as a website building tool.

This gave me the idea to use it for landing pages. It will work for you if you are an affiliate or if you sell your own products and services.

On-Page SEO

The link structure of Wordpress makes it easy for your site to be indexed by the search engines. I have zero programming background background, yet I can rank well on search engines when I use WordPress because it is SEO-friendly by nature. With a few simple tweaks in my settings, my on-page SEO is done.

This is great for quality score when you are doing Google AdWords. Of course, quality score is not 100% about on-page SEO, however it does help you to get a much better quality score than if you skip your on-page SEO. Remember, higher quality score translates to cheaper clicks.

Dual Function

How about having your blog and your landing pages all on the same domain and on the same platform? This is what you can do with WordPress. For blogs, you create posts and for landing pages you create pages. Just make sure you do not have too many distracting links on your landing pages.

Multiple Modules

You can add additional modules with WordPress, they are commonly known as plugins. The good news is, most of them are free and they are very easy to install, once again, no programming knowledge needed here.

Would you like to run surveys? Maybe you want to add different title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords on different posts and pages? Maybe you would like rotate different banners? Yes, you can do all that and more with these free plugins.

There is a plugin that allows you to add Google Analytics code so that you do not need to paste it on all your pages manually. There is another plugin which allows you to add Google Website Optimizer code conveniently so that you can do split testing on your site.

Easy Editing

You can easily add new pages or edit existing pages, same thing, no programming knowledge needed, just use the WYSIWYG function within WordPress. You can scale up your small site to a huge site simply by adding new pages over time. In this way, you can build a stronger online presence for your business.

Professional Image

Many of the free WordPress web templates actually look very professional. You can strip out the dates if you want your site to look less like a blog. Most of the templates do load fast as well, if you want, you can tweak it to load even faster!

WordPress Themes

WordPress templates are commonly known as themes. For landing pages, I prefer single column themes and if I have to use a 2 column theme with right sidebar, I would add an subscription form and some testimonials on the sidebar.

Once again, you want your landing pages to have no distractions, so that you can convert more leads and sales which is why I always recommend that you use single column themes. You can download them for free or you can buy them at affordable prices. If you want a custom built theme, it would cost you much more.

Samuel Ng

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Getting to Grips with Google Part III continued – OnPage SEO

If OnPage SEO is all about getting Google to understand the contents of your web pages, then OffPage SEO, link building, is all about giving Google a good reason to put your website high up in the search results.

The success of Google in the Search Engine arena is down to its highly accurate search results.

These are due to its primary ranking system – PageRank. Now, while there is much debate as to how important PageRank actually is these days, there’s no escaping that it’s still one of the major factors in generating Google’s SERPs.

The idea of PageRank is a simple and thoroughly democratic one. The theory goes that in a network of interlinked documents, such as the World Wide Web, the pages with the most inbound links to them are going to be the most important, and most authoritative pages.

In simple terms a link from another web page to yours is considered a vote, a vote approving your content and recommending it to others. It is this “voting” system that is the key to Google’s results generation.

Essentially, the more votes you get, the higher your PageRank, and the higher your PageRank, the higher you will appear in the search results for keywords relating to your content.

There are other factors involved, such as the authority of the page that has the link on it, but for the purposes of this article we’ll be looking at the basic principle of a link equals a vote.

Firstly, let’s have a look at what the anatomy of a perfect inbound link would be:

• Keyword/phrases in link Anchor Text
• The link is on a page with good PageRank
• The link is on a page with relevant content
• There are few other links on the page
• The link is nestled within some relevant content

Now going back to our Rattan Furniture example, an ideal link for that site would come from a page about Rattan Furniture, or at least furniture of some description, the anchor text will be something like: Rattan Furniture Suppliers and will be one of few outbound links on that particular page and the page would have a high PR.

Realistically, a link that ticks all of these boxes will be difficult to attain at first. We’re going to start with a realistic link building campaign that will get us started, and get Google noticing our site.

We’re going to start building up a good amount of links that whilst not being great scoring links, will increase our PR slowly.

We are also going to bear in mind that getting links aren’t just useful for SEO purposes, but they are also promotional tools. Links bring people to your site, and hopefully a percentage of them will spend money with you.

So where should we start our campaign? We are going to start by building a good foundation of easily attainable links. So for this we’ll start with forums.

There are web forums for pretty much every topic and niche you could imagine. What we need to think about is the kind of forums where our potential customers might be using.

This would help promoting the site to future customers as well as bringing some backlinks from pages with relevant content.

For our Rattan Furniture example, we could target forums for realtors, interior designers, house wives and so forth.

Once we’ve searched in Google and found some relevant forums, we join them and make a signature for ourselves.

This will appear at the bottom of every post we make and can contain a link to our site.

We want this link to contain our keywords, and have some related text around it, and we also want to use slightly different variations for all the forums we post it.

For a start, we’ll aim for 5 or so forums, and our signatures could be as follows:

• Order Quality Rattan Furniture Online
• The Best Rattan Patio Furniture available online
• We supply Rattan Furniture at Trade prices
• Enjoy the outdoors in comfort with our Rattan Garden Furniture
• Rattan Furniture Suppliers

The anchor text in these links gives Google a good idea what content the landing page is going to contain and is also punchy enough to catch people’s eye in the hopes they visit our site and become a customer.

Now if you think back to our anatomy of a perfect inbound link, these signature links tick 2 of our criteria: our keywords are in the anchor text and it’s on a page with relevant content.

To get the most benefit from the forums it’s important to remember to join in the discussions and post frequently.

Don’t simply post advertising SPAM, this will get you banned very quickly. Join in debates, answer people’s questions and enjoy it – forums are social places and can be a lot of fun, and they can be a good way to get direct to your customers.

Don’t pressure-sell or just post a promotional link. Always remember to make all of your posts meaningful and helpful, and always respect the rules of each forum.

If you get involved it’s reasonable to expect to that a daily visit between your forums could bring in 2000 inbound links within a few months. 2000 low-grade links, from my experience, should be enough to get you a PR of 2.

This isn’t set in stone of course, but its good target to aim for. These links, provided they’re placed in relevant forums, should also bring in some traffic, and help promote your product or service to the right people.

Next time we’ll continue looking into building a good foundation of inbound links through blogs, directories and portals. Until then, get into those forums and get link building!

Editor Note: Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.

He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.

He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.

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Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Getting to Grips with Google
Getting to Grips with Google – Part II – Keyword Analysis
Getting to Grips with Google Part III continued – OnPage SEO
Getting to Grips with Google Part III – OnPage SEO