Rahasia Sukses

How Do Spiders Register Content?

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:44:00 -0700

Creating a body of articles on your web site is one of the

best ways to get your site noticed by search engine spiders -
and getting the search engine spiders to notice your web
site is the best way to get it seen by your prospective
customers.
Ideally, if you can get your web site into the first
five pages of search results on the major search engines,
you’ve got a steady stream of traffic to your web site – and
a steady stream of traffic is what you need to market your
products. The closer to the first page you register, the more
likely you are to get visitors to your site. If you don't
register on the first page, chances that you will get visitors
from search engine results drop off quickly, and after five
pages, you can probably forget it.
So how do you get your web site up into those crucial first
five – or better yet, first two – pages? Understanding how
search engine spiders read and register the content in your
articles will help you choose and place your private label
articles to best effect.
Internet Spiders
Search engines are built around the technology of spiders –
little software programs that follow links throughout a
website, and take note of several factors. The way that your
articles are structured, what keywords appear in them,
where they appear and how often they appear throughout
your web site are all key factors that get recorded when a
search engine spider crawls through your web site. Other
factors include which sites you link to, and what other web
sites link to your pages. All this information, plus historical
data about your page, is put together to determine how high
your page ranks in a given keyword search.
To properly take advantage of what internet spiders can do
for you, you need to select your articles with the search
engine spiders in mind. It’s important to select the proper
keywords – the ones that customers would naturally choose
to use to find you and your site specifically. For instance, if
you're a florist in the Bronx who focuses on weddings, the
articles that you choose to publish on your web site could
include “Bronx florist”, “wedding flowers”, “bridal bouquets”
and “Bronx wedding florist”. The idea is to use key words
and phrases in your articles that your customers would use
in searching for someone that sells what you do.
Once you've determined what your keywords are, you need
to place them properly. In your web page, there are specific
places where a spider will give your keywords most weight.
For Google search spiders (and for most of the rest of the
industry), spiders focus on words in:
 Titles
 Subtitles
 Metatags (including keywords and description)
 Linked text
Google spiders look at other things as well (we think
including bullets, table headings, and image text tags) but
the specifics of what they look for are a closely-guarded
secret. After the four we're certain of, most webmasters
experiment with different methods. Every SEO-optimization
expert uses a slightly different method.
We also know that Google spiders seek out keywords in text
like articles, and pay attention to where those keywords are.
If you put all your keywords in your first paragraph, for
instance, you'll get a lower ranking than if you had put the
same number of keywords throughout your text; but
keywords in the first and last paragraph of text seem to
have a little more weight than those in the middle.
Clearly, optimizing keywords is a complex and confusing
topic. But you don't have to get it perfect if you have the
right keywords and if you're focusing on a niche market like
you should.
Optimizing Your Site
Outside your website, we know that the number of links to
you from other websites does raise your ranking, and the
frequency with which you put fresh content on your site
(especially the home page) also affects it. Sites that update
at least once a month seem to perform better in the Google
listings dance, so it’s evident that having a body of relevant
articles to which other webmasters will link, and updating
that content with new articles frequently is a key factor in
getting your web site noticed by the Google spiders.
Inside the website, there are a several things you can do to
ensure that your website gets the best ranking possible. The
most important of these is the placement of the keywords
you’ve selected. Your keywords should be used in metatags
on EVERY page in your web site – specifically in the title,
description and keywords. In addition, be certain to use your
keywords naturally in ALT tags on your images. You might,
for example, use the ALT text “Bridal bouquet designed by
Bronx wedding florist” for a photo of a bride carrying a
bouquet. Use headings in your articles rather than simply
bolding text – it appears that spiders pay attention to H1-H6
tags. Including a site map linked to your first page – and
linking to every other page on your site – will ensure that
the spider finds all of your pages and articles with keywords
in them.
Be certain with a new website that you submit it to the
search engines. If you don't, and if no one else has linked to
your website, the search engines can't find it! They must
have either a submission request or a link from another site
to you in order to find you online. Obviously, the more links
to your web site from others, the better the chances of your
site being found. The best way to make sure that you have
plenty of incoming links is to provide up-to-date, frequently
updated articles that are relevant to your web site’s
purpose. By providing a healthy body of private label articles
that offer information that people want, you’ll be
encouraging other webmasters to point their readers at your
web site with links to your articles – and waving a big flag at
the spiders to stop here and read!

Viral E-Books

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:43:00 -0700

Are you looking for a way to make the private label articles
that you bought do even more work for you? Here’s a
suggestion for a new way to use those articles in a tool that
can increase your market share exponentially. It’s called
viral marketing, and it works on the principle that people
enjoy sharing good information and products with each
other.
Viral marketing is a relatively new concept in sales that can
be used with private label articles. The idea is that, like a
virus, one site or individual can "catch" it from another. It's
the ultimate in word-of-mouth sales, and consists of six
simple principles:
First, it gives products or services away. It's usually pretty
easy to give away things, no strings attached. The hitch is
that this item you're giving away is going to encourage
people to spend money with you. For instance, if you are a
massage therapist, gather up those private label articles you
bought on alternative health and relaxation techniques and
compile them into an ebook. At the end of the book, or on
each of your private label articles, include your contact
information in some way that it can't be deleted from the
main book – for example, you could save your book in PDF
format. You might even go so far as to put your email
address on the bottom or inside margin of each page.
Second, it is easy to transmit to other people. Electronic
documents are particularly good for this principle because
you can duplicate them an infinite amount of times and
email them or transfer files to anyone who can receive them
– and every ebook that you give away makes the sets of
private label articles that you purchased even more of a
bargain – you pay for your source once, and then pass it on,
and on and on.. What’s more – an ebook of your private
label articles is easy for your customers to copy and pass on
to friends.
Third, it's very scalable. Again, electronic documents are
ideal. Back to the massage therapist example, the therapist
might think about giving away coupons for free ten-minute
massages instead of an ebook. If he or she has an
overwhelming response, there's no way they can make good
on all those massages. However, with the ebook compilation
of private label articles, he or she would be able to give
away as many as were requested – instead of being
distributed on a small scale, ebooks can be given away to an
infinite number of customers, and a newsletter mailing list
for articles is infinitely expandable.
Like a virus, viral marketing exploits everyday behaviors of
people. When they find a great idea, people naturally want
to share it with their friends. If they're offered something of
value for free, they are more likely than not going to take
advantage of it.
It utilizes existing transmission methods. Viral marketing
may take advantage of the gossip chain or email, of the
Internet download system or even of postal mail (though
that can get expensive) to get more use out of those private
label articles that you bought. Really, viral marketing uses
the same avenues of transmission as a chain letter – but it's
not trying to sell anything or overtly get you to do anything.
Instead, it's working on getting information about a person,
a product, or a service out to the public.
And lastly, it takes advantages of resources that belong to
other people. This does not make it a bad thing; rather,
that's the single tradeoff for your free gift. If it's an ebook,
your downloader is using his or her own computer memory
to get it, or they may be using their own email resources to
receive it from or email it to someone else.
As you can see, viral marketing is a powerful new concept.
So how can you take advantage of that for your business?
Creating Viral Ebooks
If you have an existing body of published articles on your
website, they should not be static; instead, you should use
them as an active marketing tool. If you don’t already have
a body of articles that can be converted, you can buy an
entire set of private label articles from a web content service
– or even a fully completed ebook. To be worth
downloading, though, it should at least the equivalent of 20
articles around one subject. Once you have a good
collection, whether your own articles or articles purchased
from a content service, compile them into a viral ebook that
you can disseminate to your customers and anyone
interested in your products or services.
Think about it: if your business centers around selling herbal
products and natural foods, then a viral ebook of private
label articles that tell consumers how to best implement
nutritional supplements for weight loss could be an ideal
marketing tool as well as a valuable source of information. If
you sell Beanie Baby collectibles, a compilation of the
articles you've written (or hired others to write) detailing the
most valuable collectibles along with good-quality
photographs will be valuable to your customers and might
also encourage them to purchase some of the collectibles
you're selling.
But viral ebooks extend beyond your own customer base.
Hardly anyone's customers exist in a vacuum; most people
have friends interested in the same things they like. With a
viral ebook, you don't have to depend on someone emailing
a link to your site to a friend; instead, they can email the
ebook to their friends. And since the ebook includes your
contact information and website with each and every article,
you have instantly made a new customer contact, just from
compiling your existing information into a more easily usable
tool.

Automated Web Publishing: Fresh Content Every Day

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:43:00 -0700

As the Internet grows ever larger, a few things keep your
customers returning to you day after day. One, of course, is
the excellent product or service you provide. But with many
products, you're only one of perhaps dozens of vendors
online offering identical items at identical prices. Once your
customer figures this out, you may lose him.
The key to keeping them at your site, though, is to offer a
little more. And the best extra you can offer is continually
fresh content. People browsing are hungry for information,
and they'll stay with you as long as you can provide it.
It's hard work to keep fresh content up all the time. But
there are several emerging technologies that can help
automate this task by allowing you to assembly-line your
web production: writing or preparing all your information
perhaps one day a week, then releasing it gradually to the
Internet for you.
It's web automation, and it's going to be very important to
your business in the future.
Blogs: The Easiest Way To Keep Content Fresh
More and more businesses online are discovering the miracle
of blogs, daily or at least regular web journals that share all
manner of information with their readers. From your
personal life to pictures to crucial business information,
blogs are a great and simple way to provide your website
with content.
If you have ever used a blog, you know that most of them
have a time-release function. You can tell your blog when to
release a new post. You don't have to be at home or even in
the country in order to update your website; you can have
your blog do it for you.
And you don't have to just use blogs as blogs. Instead, you
can set them up to use as continually-refreshing articlepublishing
engines.
XML
Despite the hype of a few years ago, most small businesses
have not yet discovered the power of XML. Based on HTML
and related markup languages, XML allows you to create
documents that behave like database entries, or databases
that create documents for you. You note title, content,
author, and other pertinent data, set up an XML template,
and when you combine them you have a web page set up
cleanly and efficiently.
If you maintain your articles in this manner, one of your
fields can be a release day. Your XML engine, residing on
your web server, would check your XML markup before
creating a page. If the date is later than today's date, it
would not create that page. In this manner, XML can provide
you with a quick and convenient method for setting web
pages up to release on specified days – again, with little or
no interference from you.
Today you can find several XML programs that can perform
these functions for you.
Professional Web Publishing Automaters
If you use a large server to upload your web pages, you can
use a professionally packaged web publishing automater to
upload web pages in a timed-release manner. These
packages tend to be expensive and may be more powerful
than you need them to be, but they will do the job.
Overall
Your best bet overall is to use an XML package to create and
publish your website. Why? Because the expense isn't
outrageous, the web pages created are clean, and XML is an
emerging technology with vast potential. For instance,
because most online bookstores and libraries use matching
XML code, it's very easy for them to trade information. XML
is designed to put database information on the Internet,
plain and simple. Most businesses selling anything today use
databases to track their inventories and most of their
accounting. Take advantage of using XML for your business
website. Ultimately, you can use the same system for your
web publishing and online catalog creation as you do for
your inventory and ordering.
But for now, if you have all your articles in an XML system,
you'll be ahead of the game. It will be easy for you to
automate publishing, and when the search engines make the
(probably inevitable) move to preferential treatment for XML
tags, you'll be ready for them with your already-coded
pages.

Enhancing Site Traffic with Easy Ebooks

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:42:00 -0700

It seems like free ebooks are everywhere on the web today,
so much so that it will soon be a waste of time to go to the
bookstore or even to the library. If you know where to look,
you'll find ebooks on every conceivable subject: search
engine optimization, herbal medicine, pet food, collectibles,
practical law, building miniatures, travel – the list goes on
and on.
It's an impressive thing to have an ebook downloadable
from your site. The secret here: you can do the same thing,
even if you don't have any real writing talent.
Creating Special Reports
If you already run articles on your website or within your
emailed newsletter, you already have most of the content
for an ebook. If not, you can purchase articles from article
brokers like YourOwnArticles.com that you can compile
into an ebook, or you can even have a book written for you
by a professional writer for surprisingly reasonable rates.
The key is that you want to have easily-accessible, useful
information that your customer can't get any other way. This
starts with the best content you already have on your site.
Compile that, put a good table of contents on it, index it if
you know how (pretty simple in MS Word), give it a nice
cover and put in a copyright page, then PDF the whole thing.
The PDF is the hardest part; most people don't keep full
copies of Adobe Acrobat lying around. If you want to create
PDFs for free, download a free copy of OpenOffice; it's fully
compatible with MS Word and will create PDFs for you with
its own software.
Give Away Ebooks and Reports
Now you're ready to give away your ebook. Why give it
away? Because it's a marketing tool. If you've created your
report properly, it's composed of articles that are on your
website anyway; you've just repackaged it into an easy-touse
format. What you're really doing is giving away recycled
information – information that costs you nothing because
you already own it. In addition, the information you're giving
away should have your information everywhere inside the
book. In particular, your name and the name of your
website should be on the front cover.
But don't just give it away to your own customers; they've
already read most of the articles anyway. Instead, give it
away to people who have never been to your site. Better
yet, put it where other people can give it away to people
who've never been to your site. This is a form of viral
marketing.
Upload your ebook to an article directory. These are large
repositories of articles and ebooks, free for anyone to use
provided they include a resource box with your name and
web address along with the free item. Every time someone
downloads your book and puts it on a website, you get a
free link back to your website from someone you've never
met. And every time one of this person's site visitors sees
your book, they also see your name and web address.
Link Back To Your Site
You should also link back to your site frequently throughout
the book. Don't cheat and leave important information out
so that the reader has to click to read it all; instead, give
them a full dose and a teaser: "For more information about
XXXX, go to www.mywebsite.com."
This is especially important for people who've downloaded it
from other sites besides yours; it gives them a real incentive
to go to your site.
You should also place a resources list at the end of the book,
just before the index. Don't be greedy here; give the reader
good resources that you use yourself, as long as they aren't
direct competitors or otherwise could impact your sales. But
include your own website as well, noting that it is your
website and you have much more information on this topic
there.
Instant Guru Status
Once your book has been included on someone else's
website, you are accorded Instant Guru Status. That is,
other people in your niche industry (particularly if it's a very
focused one) will start noticing and recognizing your name.
You may start getting odd emails asking you questions
about your specialty. Always answer them. A guru is there
to impart wisdom and knowledge. But gurus also make
much more money in the long run than people who are in
your niche just to make a buck.

Articles and Ebooks

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:41:00 -0700

Relevant, unique content is the key to obtaining and
retaining targeted traffic.
Dissecting that sentence:
 Targeted traffic is the specific audience you are trying
to reach – usually your customers.
 Unique content is content that no one else can provide.
 Relevant content is content that has meaning to the
targeted traffic audience.
And if you have that relevant, unique content, your
customers will be happy and keep returning.
But good content is more than just relevant and unique; it is
rich in keywords. These are the Reeses Pieces that keep the
spiders happy; if you have lots of keywords placed
intelligently in your text, the search engine spiders
(cataloging programs that look for and list websites) will
rank your site higher than they would a similar site poorer in
keywords.
The importance of this cannot be underestimated. Most
customers reach a site for the first time by using a search
engine. They feed the engine search terms, and the engine
looks up and spits out the relevant websites – that is, the
ones that rank highest with those keyword search terms.
That's a hard task, but the harder one is this: if you don't
capture your customer's attention within about ten seconds,
they will click onto a different site. Yes, they will leave you.
Web surfers are fickle creatures; if you don't believe it, pay
attention to your own behavior when browsing the web.
But you can captivate them with excellent content, the sort
that captures their attention and gets them focused on your
site. Ideally, it should also sell to them whatever it is you
have to sell, while also keeping them interested and
informed. And the best way to have excellent content is to
provide informational articles.
In today's electronic world, every website may be its own
publisher, its own newsletter or magazine, its own
advertising agent. Every website may be in the business of
providing the information that has, until now, mostly been
delivered by commercial magazines.
More than just providing information, articles can give you
guru status. If your website's articles are well-written and
provide intelligent advice, your customers will know that you
are an expert in your field. Answering their main questions
ensures that they will come back with followup questions.
And you can even get interactive, with a FAQ where you can
provide the answers to questions posed.
Some people are confident enough in their own writing
ability to go ahead and write their own content articles. More
often, though, webmasters either don't have the time or the
skills to write articles to load online. This is where article
brokers like YourOwnArticles.com can come in handy.
An article broker sells all rights to articles to webmasters.
Say you run a website on how to care for anacondas. A good
article broker can find you keyword-optimized articles
written by a professional that will work perfectly on your
website. And you put your own name on the article.
Suddenly, you're the author of "Top Ten Reasons You Should
Never Feed Alligators to Anacondas." It's keyword optimized,
so that when web searchers type "anaconda" into a search
engine, it returns your article near the top. And it's wellwritten
and informative, so your viewers see you as an
expert and are more likely to bookmark and return to your
website than they would otherwise.
If you want to crank it up a notch, you can buy a whole
ebook, not just an article. Ebooks offered for free on your
website show your customers that you are not only an
expert, you know enough to write a book on the subject. If
you offer this informative ebook this is an impressive thing.
Better yet, included in the ebook is your URL, so that the
reader can click and open your website right up, enabling
them to access any new information on your site and not
incidentally supporting your site by viewing advertising,
purchasing things from affiliates, or purchasing items from
you.
Ebooks can generally be purchased from the same article
brokers you purchase articles from. They are simply
documents created in MS Word and saved to PDF via Adobe
Acrobat or OpenOffice (a freely downloadable program
compatible with MS Word). You can write your own if you
feel confident in your abilities, but most webmasters choose
to purchase them from professionals.

Why Do I Need Private Label Rights?

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:41:00 -0700

When most people think about the Internet, they think
about music downloads, images, streaming video movies,
games, all the neat bells and whistles. The truth is, the
Internet was first developed as a way to share information in
text format between people, and it's never really lost that
focus. Search engines need good focused text in order to tell
what your site is about. Even when you see image or audio
search engines, they're not really searching for images and
audio – they are searching for the text labels behind those
things.

No matter how you look at it, the Internet is first and
foremost a text-based tool. If you can't write well, if you
write slowly, or if you just don't have the time or energy to
write articles and other information for your website, you
might have a problem.
Search engines catalog text. They do not look at your lovely
Flash animations, your interactive games, or your beautifully
laid out catalog. They are interested only in text.
So how can you get it?
Private Label Rights Articles – Your Best Option
Private label rights articles, also called PRAs, are articles
that are sold to you in their entirety, with the copyright in
your name alone. The original writer of these articles has
agreed to give up any right to them he or she might have.
Basically, you can do anything you want with these articles:
you can edit them to be more pertinent to your own website,
you can add or delete text, and you can publish them on
your own website or anywhere you want under your own
name.
They can be a remarkably powerful tool. With good PRA, you
can show your customers that you are an expert. You can
give them information and news they're hungry for, and you
can develop a real online relationship with them, that of a
mentor and a friend.
In short, good PRAs can make you into an Internet guru.
Other Options
Of course, PRAs aren't the only way to get articles for your
website. You also have the option of taking advantage of
article directories. These are large online repositories of
thousands of well-written articles, many by experts in their
fields, that webmasters can download free of charge and use
on their own websites.
So if these articles are good, they're free, and you can get
them, why aren't they the best option?
First, they don't belong to you. You cannot change anything
in the text, and you are required to duplicate the resource
box at the bottom of each article that contains the name of
the writer and, usually, a link to their website. This means
that anyone coming to your site isn't going to see you as the
expert; instead, they are going to put their trust into the
writer of the article you used, and eventually they're
probably going to visit the other website. In short, you're
advertising for the competition.
Second, you don't have exclusive rights to these articles.
They can be downloaded and used by thousands of
webmasters. When you offer these articles to your users,
you're not offering them something they can't get
elsewhere, and they will know it.
Free isn't free; there's almost always a catch.
How To Leverage Your PRAs
With PRAs, you're not limited to using them as articles.
Instead, you can feel free to compile them into ebooks and
reports, which you can distribute free to your customers.
Again, of course, there's a catch, but not for you. Ebooks
have a surprisingly high perceived value, and your
customers will respect the fact that you can not only write
an ebook for your area of expertise, but also afford to give it
away for free. Basically, you're trading the books for an
elevated level of respect from your customers, and that's
going to translate into trust.
And trust, today, is how business is really done on the web.
Your customers must trust that you know what you're
talking about, that you are selling them a product that you
really care about (and therefore will sell them only the best
and most cost-effective), and that you will take care of any
problems they have.
All these intangible qualities are tied up in your
demonstrating to them that you are, indeed, a guru.
And gurus are made online by great content. Maximize your
sales potential. Show your customers that you're a guru with
the help of PRAs.

Get Link Exchanges with Great Content

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:40:00 -0700

Because of the way search engines work, links to your
website from outside websites are crucial to ensuring you
receive a high search engine ranking. Just a couple of links,
properly set up, could make the difference between your
ranking at #23 and your ranking at #500 – and that is the
difference between being seen by searchers and not being
seen at all.
How Linking Improves Your Rank
Search engines catalog your content, looking for keywords
that they then use as criteria for ranking you. But keywords
aren't the only thing that determines your rank. They can't
be, especially with popular keywords; there are too many
pages vying for the same high status on the search engines.
A better way to determine how well a web site matches the
keyword criteria a searcher inputs is examining how they are
linked to other sites.
Part of what search engines look at is how many times a site
is linked to from other sites. Sites that are more frequently
linked are more likely to be good information resources,
which are exactly what people using search engines are
looking for.
Sites that are well-correlated with a search term are more
likely to be linked to from other sites, and the best ones are
probably going to be linked to from sites with identical or
related keywords. For instance, a dog grooming company
may recommend their customers to go to Dogs.com for
more information on how to keep a dog's coat healthy. Both
sites probably have "dogs" as a primary keyword, and
therefore that link gets rated high. Chances are good that a
person searching for "dogs" is going to be looking for
information like that on Dogs.com.
Sites that have the highest degree of correlation with a
keyword are more likely to be linked with that keyword; for
instance, if you want to link to the New York Times, you're
probably going to use the words "New York Times" on the
link itself.
What this means to you is that the perfect link:
 Comes from a site with similar information to yours,
but not competing,
 Uses your keywords in the link term itself, and
 Is one of many similar sites linking to your page.
Now that you know what you're looking for, how do you get
it?
Acquiring Links from Other Sites
Great content is the key to getting links from other sites. Put
yourself in the position of choosing links: what are your
criteria for recommending a website to your customers?
First, the website has to be complementary to yours, not a
direct competitor. Second, it has to look professional – this
reflects on you. Third, it has to have great content that you
cannot duplicate.
The third criterion is the most difficult to achieve. You can
rewrite information on other websites; if it's been picked up
from an article directory (more on these in a moment), you
can go out and put the same information yourself. The key
to great content other sites cannot duplicate is continuallyfresh,
quality articles. You would send your customers to
someone else who always had the latest news, right?
This is what you want your site to achieve: professionalism
and an article bank that is continually updated with new
articles, corrections and updates to old articles, and similar
items. Blogs are good, as are newsletters. Once you're ready
with your content, you can approach other webmasters.
You already should have a pool of potential trades; they're
the websites in your niche market (outside your direct
competitors) that you already visit. All you have to do is
email the webmaster of the site politely, sending a link to
your site and asking if he or she would like to trade links. In
certain informational sites, you can instead ask if they would
like you to donate an article to their collection; most will
happily take good-quality articles, leaving your name and
URL intact in a resource box at the end.
Article Directories: Another Way to Link
Donating articles, in fact, is a great way to get links in
exchange. There are several article directories online with
thousands of quality articles free to the public; the only
thing the authors require in exchange is that nothing in the
article or in the resource box be changed. If you have a
great article you think others would like to pick up and put
on their own websites, submit it to an article directory. Be
certain you set up the URL link with your keywords so that it
gets those bonus search engine points.
Now you're done, right? Nope. To keep your links fresh and
growing, you must do this regularly. Schedule time for
yourself every week or month to grow more links for your
site, and to review everything you have right now. And
watch your ranking in the search engines rise.

Using Squeeze Pages to Encourage Registration

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:40:00 -0700

It's being seen more often these days: you go to a website,
but before you can do anything an opt-in form page pops
up. All they want is your name and your email address, but
it slows you down and annoys you. Why do these people
persist in serving up these pages?
In the case of these – squeeze pages – it's because,
according to those who use them, you can get as much as a
40% increase on the number of signups in comparison to
the number you get without a squeeze page. This is a
significant change to your newsletter circulation, and can
make a huge difference in customer retention and in your
newsletter circulation.
It works because it gives customers something they perceive
to be of value.
The Trick to Using Squeeze Pages
There are two basic types of squeeze pages, and if you want
to use them on your website, you should experiment with
both to see which gets a better rate of signup. The first is a
small, undersized interstitial. It's often used by newspapers
and magazines to get people to subscribe; but you can turn
it to your own purposes. It can pop up every time, and say
something like: "To get our free monthly newsletter, enter
your name and email address here." This kind of squeeze
page is by its nature optional; it's open in a second window
with your regular website beneath, and it can be easily
bypassed.
The second type of squeeze page is more intrusive, but
according to many it works very well. This is a regular page
that comes up and won't let you bypass it – much like a
required registration page for a newspaper. With this sort of
page, you can put in a short note about what the customer
can expect to get from his or her experience on your
website, and ask them to please register – for free – in order
to use your site.
The second sort is much more intrusive and demands much
more trust from the customer than they may be willing to
give. Though sites promoting squeeze pages claim that they
dramatically increase the number of people registering on
your page, it's probably a good idea to experiment with it,
perhaps on a secondary site, before dropping it on your
page. It's possible that it works for some communities and
not others; it's also possible that sites promoting squeeze
pages are exaggerating the potential for their own purposes.
What you can do with a squeeze page is "personalize" the
visit of your visitor – refer to him by name at the tops of
pages, pre-enter name and email on any forms you'd like
them to fill out past the squeeze page, etc. This, too, is of
dubious universal value. It's possible that certain
communities would eye personalization like this with distrust
and loathing, sort of like the salesman who's too friendly,
pats you on the back too many times, and makes a point of
using your name too much.
Squeeze Pages Versus Building Trust
Squeeze pages are probably an adequate solution if you're
building websites that probably serve one-time customers;
for instance, if you're selling a single piece of software, or if
you're running a quick one-time promotion. However, if
you're planning to have a long-term relationship with your
customers, it's probably better to captivate them with
excellent content and an opt-in signup for your emailed
newsletter.
Great content builds trust, over time. A squeeze page may
force limited trust, but it's so annoying that it may damage
your ability to initiate trust with your customer.
Alternatives
Nevertheless, the concept of a pop-up window trumpeting,
"Sign up here!" is a seductive one. It's easy for your
customers to miss the link to their newsletter page. It's also
easy for them to procrastinate signing up until later – and
then forget, clicking off your page to go elsewhere and never
returning. A happy medium might be a small interstitial or
pop-under that requests your customers to sign up for a free
newsletter.
Or you can have the sign-up form prominently displayed on
your home page. If your customer signs up from there, a
cookie is deposited to tell your site not to generate a pop-up
page. But if they leave your site without signing up, a small
interstitial pops up, asking, "Thank you for visiting Buck's
Popsicles. Did you forget to sign up for our newsletter?"
By popping up at the end, you don't alienate a customer
who just got to your site. And when the pop-up does appear,
your customer has probably done one of two things – not
signed up for your newsletter because he or she is not
interested, or not signed up because they didn't see the
registration form or they simply forgot to. A polite reminder
at the end of your customer's visit is a good way to catch
the absent-minded customers while not irritating anyone at
the beginning of the visit.

Why Should You Have Articles?

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:38:00 -0700

Few webmasters relish the thought of writing tons of articles
and posting them to a website, even if the articles are about
personal obsessions. But in today's online marketplace, it's
crucial that you have them. They give you more than an
edge, they give you a whole new sword, and they can set
you apart from the fifty other websites offering exactly the
same product. If you need reasons to write or buy articles
for your website, here they are.
1. They set you apart. If you sell lingerie, have you ever
done a web search to see how many others sell lingerie too?
Let's face it – you're not Wal-mart, and the vendors you get
your products from don't sell to you exclusively. There's a
fair chance that you're competing against dozens of other
lingerie sites that sell exactly the same items on their
website you sell on yours.
Consider putting up content that will draw your customers.
One lingerie site has two things that set them apart from the
rest of the marketplace. First, they sell really nice, sexy
lingerie to plus-size women – bustiers and go-go boots for
the X-crowd. Second, their web content focus is on romantic
erotica for larger-size women. It's a brilliant concept, and it
makes them very hard to forget. Can you come up with a
similarly creative hook that your customers will love?
2. They give you fresh marketing tools to sell to your
customers. Along with products, old-fashioned hardware
stores used to offer good old-fashioned advice – information
on which wood to use for which project, how to get screws
to stay in drywall, and what to get to seal your bathroom
properly. You can still get service like this in some stores,
but most employees today either don't know or don't have
time.
You have an edge here. For your online hardware site, write
(or purchase) articles on how to seal a bathroom perfectly –
and run a special on the products you mention the same
week. Offer special discounts and deals in your emailed
newsletters. Create ebooks on designing and building the
perfect patio, using mostly articles you've already written for
your website. The only limitation you have to the marketing
tools you can create is your imagination.
3. They give you viral marketing capability. Remember
that ebook on designing and building a perfect patio? What if
you could give that book away to a thousand people, and
each one knows your name, where your website is, and that
you sell the kits that go with certain projects in that book?
Or suppose you have a fine spirits site, and you have given
a thousand copies of your ebook on developing a taste for
wine to visitors to your site?
Now suppose you could put this book on a website, freely
downloadable and usable for other webmasters. Suddenly,
people you never marketed to and wouldn't have guessed
existed (where is Eritruria?) are coming to your website for
more information? You suddenly have a whole new customer
base, and you did no extra work to get them. That sort of
spread is viral marketing, and it has a whole different sort of
market power.
4. They give the search engines much more to catalog.
When your site contains good articles, chances are good that
they are search-engine optimized (and if not, you should
learn about that and make sure it's done in the future!).
With good search engine optimization, you get better
placement in the search engine listings. And with constantlychanging
information on your website, many search engines
will give you even more of an edge.
5. Your customers will remember your articles, even if
they forget your inventory. Have you forgotten about the
site mentioned earlier that does lingerie and erotica? And
you only read about it! You can develop similarly
unforgettable content on your website, and if you can get
people to download ebooks you develop, you'll be even more
difficult for them to forget about.
6. With great content, you achieve guru status in your
niche market community. Many, though not all people,
are impressed by those who have written books, even if they
are self-published books like ebooks. When you've published
ebooks and had them disseminated through article
directories, you will receive instant recognition and status in
your niche market simply because you have proven to many
people that you know what you're talking about.
Don't forget to note this in your email sig line – something
like, John Smith, Author of Perfect Patio
Landscaping, with the link taking them straight to a
download site for your ebook.
Convinced?

Credibility, Trust, and Your Name at Stake

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:37:00 -0700

The Internet is turning out to be a commercial engine based
not on technology, but on trust. Ebay figured that out early,
when it started rating vendors using its services according to
how well they'd fulfilled the letter of their contracts. Most
people today prefer online vendors to have an offline store;

it makes them seem more permanent if they have invested
in creating a bricks-and-mortar business, even though it's
just as easy for a business like this to fail as one online.
But this shows you something important: it's all about
appearances online, and unlike appearances in the real
world, an Internet vendor must work hard to create the
proper one. More than with any other business form, you are
really creating your online brand identity. Because it's so
easy for people to praise or castigate you online, your
business practices online are more transparent than they
could possibly be offline.
And yet your customers probably don't even know who you
are – only your virtual identity.
The key is convincing your customers that they can trust
that virtual person you show them online. You do this by
demonstrating that you are an expert.
Creating A Guru
It takes time to build up a stock of trust in your customers,
and is just as much an investment as anything you put into
your company. The first thing you must do is show your
expertise. You do this by talking about your product online.
And the medium people talk in online is text.
Ideally, you need to create articles under your name – your
byline – that demonstrate your expertise in your field of
knowledge.
If you can't write, this might pose a problem. And that's not
uncommon. You may know your field inside and out, and
you may be able to talk about it for days, even sell it in
person as if you were Andrew Carnegie. But online, it
doesn't matter if you can't express yourself well in writing,
or at least seem as if you can.
The ideal solution: purchasing articles. PRA (Private-label
rights articles) are a good possibility; you purchase them in
bulk, ten or twenty or fifty articles on your area of expertise
or on a related one, and you own them completely. This
means you can modify them to support your business, you
can put your own name on them, and you can add or delete
any text you like. Another somewhat more expensive
possibility is to hire a writer to create articles to your
specifications, purchasing all rights in a similar manner and
publishing them online under your name.
How Long Does It Take?
Once you've started putting articles up online under your
name, if your customers like them and appreciate the
information they're getting they will start building up trust
right away. The key is to focus on a narrow niche market
and figure out what they really want to read about. You can
do this in part by soliciting feedback on your site – perhaps
putting a response form at the bottom of each article. This
helps you target your articles closer to what your customers
really want to read.
Just like anything else in business, it will take some time. If
you publish a fresh article every week (leaving the old ones
up as well), it could take six months before you start seeing
a real change in your bottom line. But that also depends on
where and how you publish your articles.
Where Do You Publish Your Articles?
This is where you can maximize your guru-building. Most
people will publish articles under their own names on their
own website. But there are dozens of other places you can
publish them. For instance, you can start an ezine and mail
it out to your customers on a regular basis – this can be an
amazingly powerful sales tool. You can compile groups of
articles and put them together into an ebook for some
serious added credibility.
Or you can go off your site entirely. Many experts and gurus
publish articles to article directories, sites where thousands
of articles on every imaginable topic are stored for free
download to any webmaster who needs good content. You
contribute your article; in return, the webmaster retains
your resource box with your name and your keywordoptimized
link back to your own website. This gets your
name out to prospective customers you would not otherwise
reach, and it also gives your website a boost in the search
engine ratings with that link.
You can also look at websites such as about.com,
howto.com, or specialty informational websites covering
your niche industry. Many of these websites are hungry for
information, and will be overjoyed to get your good content.
They will also include your resource box, just as in an article
directory, and you get both a very valuable link back to your
site and byline exposure to a ready audience in your field
through a site with which you are already familiar.
One Last Note
If you have a name that is somewhat common (you can
figure out whether yours is by Googling your own name in
quotes and seeing how many different people come up with
your name), it might be wise to establish your byline identity
with a middle name or even a nickname. The easier it is for
people to Google you and come up with you, the more brand
identity your name will have, even when divorced from your
business name.

Using Private-Label Rights Articles To Enhance Your Business

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:37:00 -0700

Good written content is critical to the success of a website,
and a web-based business can live or die by the quality of its
content. Content adds value to your website by:
 Making it easier for search engines to catalog
 Keeping customers on the site
 Convincing customers to subscribe to a mailing list
 Helping you sell new products
 Encouraging other webmasters to link to you,
increasing traffic and your spot in the search engine
rankings
Though many people seem to think that the bells and
whistles of a website are what interest and impress
customers, nothing could be further from the truth.
Customers want a website run by someone they can trust to
know what they're doing and be able to guide them if they
need help. Websites with fancy flash animations and other
gee-whiz components make a website seem colder and more
distant, while great articles and good blogs can win
customers over with the force of the webmaster's
personality.
But if you're like many webmasters, you don't know how to
do good web content. How do you do search-engine
optimize text? For that matter, how do you get started on
articles? How do you even find ideas?
For webmasters who have trouble writing articles, who
dislike writing articles, or who just don't have the time,
private-label rights articles may provide a solution.
Private-Label Rights Articles
These articles, also referred to as PRA, consist of a collection
of related, search engine optimized, web-friendly articles
that are sold in their entirety to webmasters and others
interested in adding some good content to their websites.
You can purchase these articles and use one or two or all of
them; you can change the content to better reflect your
website and your products; you can add or delete text, or
you can compile documents to make your own. You're free
to use PRA in any way you see fit, and you can use them
with your own name.
PRA aren’t terribly expensive, and are available for every
imaginable topic. They can be used to fill out your website,
or to put regular fresh content on your homepage and other
key pages, which may improve your listing on search
engines. With good content on your site, your customers will
be more willing to sign up for an emailed newsletter, giving
you a way to drive sales out to the customer rather than
waiting for your customers to come and see you. And if you
have good keyword-oriented articles, you'll have an easy
time running other ads on your site if you choose to do so,
such as Google's Adsense.
Or you can take advantage of the traffic-driving qualities of
article directories. These large repositories of articles,
thousands on everything imaginable, are really viral
marketing articles, designed to increase traffic and search
engine rankings for the authors. You can put PRA articles out
there as your own, with a resource box set up to send traffic
(and search engine spiders) to your website.
And PRA articles aren't limited to a one-time use. You can
use these articles and your modifications of them as many
times as you like. Collections of articles on related topics can
become ebooks. Ebooks can be placed on your website as a
free reference for your customers to download, or on article
directories so that your resource box points to you, the
writer of the ebook, as a real expert.
If you choose to do an ebook, don't just stop with the
resource box. Put your ebook in PDF format so that it can't
be modified, and make sure your website address is on
every page in the header or footer of the text – discreetly, of
course, but clearly. At the end of the book, you can put a list
of further resources that includes your own websites and
any affiliates, driving interested traffic directly to your
website.
Resources
You can find several article directories at the following
websites:
 http://www.goarticles.com
 http://www.ezinearticles.com
 http://www.ideamarketers.com
 http://www.marketing-seek.com.
Just remember: if you choose to use any of the articles you
find here on your website, you're doing for that other person
the exact same thing you're trying to have done for you –
driving traffic from your website to theirs. Be very selective
about which of these articles you choose to download, and
by no means should you fill your own website with articles of
this sort. You're always better off owning all rights to your
content.

Advertiser-Supported Ezines – From Your Site

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:36:00 -0700

A secret that few people know is that the newsstand price on
most mainstream magazines – Reader's Digest,
Mademoiselle, People, Vogue – is all or nearly all profit for
the magazine publishers. All their expenses are covered by
advertisers, who pay hefty fees to reach the market of the
magazine.
Your little website ezine won't have the name recognition of
any of these magazines, but you can use some of the same
strategies.
Keep Your Circulation High
The most important element in advertising is the number of
eyeballs you reach. With a high circulation from your ezine,
you can make a profit selling a limited amount of advertising
space to complementary websites (e.g., seed websites when
you're running a landscaping website). You will have to
maintain accurate counts of the number of subscribers, but
once you have an established ezine running regularly to
customers, you can start offering advertising space to your
affiliates and sites that have traded links with you.
The key to keeping circulation high is to consistently offer
content your customers appreciate. If you maintain the
same high quality in your articles, your customers may not
even notice the addition of advertisements.
Finding Advertisers
If you have an ezine serving a targeted market of a
thousand customers or more, you won't have any trouble
finding advertisers. Potential advertisers are your suppliers,
affiliates, webmasters you've exchanged links with, and
business contacts who maintain websites similar but not
competing with your website.
You can also sell space to people who have published a book
attractive to customers in your niche market, and when you
do this, you can even offer to sell the book on your website
as an affiliate.
The one thing you should not do is write articles designed to
sell items for your advertisers, no matter how much they
offer to pay you. Your ezine is designed to support your site,
so of course it's going to rotate around selling things on your
site; however, when you are writing content designed to sell
your advertiser's products, you may be crossing a line your
readers don't like. It's better if you have your advertisers
contribute their own articles, making it pretty clear that they
are also interested in selling their products.
What About Advertising Your Site?
You don't exist in an ezine vacuum; there are hundreds of
thousands of little websites with ezines they send out to
customers who are eager to get them. Some of those ezines
are going to cross into your niche market. These are the
perfect ezines for you to advertise in.
Advertising can take the shape of block advertisements
similar to what you see in the newspaper want-ad section,
or you can offer to run complete articles in the ezine. If you
find someone with a very different subscriber list from you,
you might even suggest trading articles – you write one in
his ezine, and allow him to write one for yours.
No matter how you acquire advertising space in the other
ezine, the most critical thing is that you ensure your website
and contact information is included along with your article.
Other Ideas
Your ezine can be leveraged into other types of advertising
as well. Many large companies spend a fortune on press
releases, gambling that somewhere, one of the newspapers
or periodicals they've sent the release to will publish an
article about their company, giving them free publicity.
You can do something similar, and you might have a much
better chance of placing your article. Instead of sending out
press releases to magazines that cover the same niche
market you're serving, find your best informational article
and send it to the magazine, asking if they'd like to see
some more of your work. For several years now, magazines
have been picking up articles from ezines and running them,
and in a niche market you have a better chance of selling an
article. Yes, selling. You can not only get free publicity, you
can even get paid standard second-rights article rates for
your article. If you do this, read your contract carefully; you
may lose the rights to reuse the article, or even to archive it
on your site, if you're not careful about what publication
rights you're selling. If you have any questions, ask the
magazine editor to explain it to you.
But even if you are selling your rights, having your name
and URL in a magazine focusing on your target market may
be worth losing one article from your treasury. Consider it
carefully.

Maximize Your Search Engine Traffic With Great Articles

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:36:00 -0700

Article content is crucial to drawing your audience,
particularly with those niche markets hungry for specialized
information. Just as critical as content, however, is making
certain your articles are search engine optimized (SEO).
Search engines have a decade and a half of increasingly
sophisticated technology behind the way they find and rank
web pages. In the very earliest days of the text-based web,
there were few enough pages that ranking wasn't really
important, and the search engines in use at that time –
Archie, Veronica, Jughead – indexed only websites that were
submitted directly to them. When HTML was invented and
the first web browser using this rich and easy-to-use
language came about, the number of web pages online
began to increase exponentially.
Soon, it was necessary to have a search engine like Lycos,
which went out and looked for websites by itself. Search
engine technology grew rapidly, overcoming wave after
wave of attempt to take advantage of them through various
schemes. Today's search engines use sophisticated textbased
algorithms that look at a variety of things on and off
your web page to determine where to rank it in relevance
when someone searches for specific terms.
How Search Engines Work Now
Every search engine works a little differently, but they all
search for keywords, metaterms, and links to your site.
Keywords are terms that are used frequently in the text of
your document, and generally correlate directly with the
words someone searches for. For instance, if you search for
"dogs," the keyword your search engine relates to that is
"dogs." Some search engines are smart enough to use
synonyms (so "canines" and "collies" would also be looked
at), but you can't count on this.
Obviously, there are hundreds of thousands of pages that
would love to get your "dog" traffic, so search engines get a
little more complex. They also look at the frequency and
distribution of that keyword in your web page. Is it common
at the top, but less so at the bottom? Do you use the term in
your headers, your page title, your subheaders, and your
metaterms (the hidden keyword sections in the HTML header
of your page)? A complex algorithm puts all this information
together and rates your page for relevance.
It also looks for spam. If you use the term "dog" as every
other word, then clearly your page is not going to add a lot
of value. If you use the term "dog" frequently in your
metaterms but not once in the body of your text, search
engines are going to rank your page down, or not at all. And
your words must show some sort of grammatical structure.
Next, search engines look outside your page. Do you have a
lot of people linking to you using the term "dog" in the link
text? If you do, this is a huge boost.
What makes all this a challenge is the exact formulas search
engines use is a closely guarded secret. And every search
engine runs its searches in a slightly different way.
How You Can Use Articles To Get Traffic
Understanding how search engines work is a critical first
step to optimizing your articles for search engines. Ensure,
first, that the articles you have are good articles that add
value to your website and are easy to read and understand.
It won't do your business any good to get all the viewers in
the world who read your articles, get bored, and move on.
After this, start optimizing. Make certain your keyword is
present frequently in the headers and subheaders of your
article; and use the H1-H6 hypertext header markup, not
bolding and font size changes, to denote headers. Try to
ensure that you have a 3-7% rate of appearance of your
keyword in your article; the more often the keyword
appears, the more likely the article will rate highly. Don't
overdo it to the point that you ruin your article.
Optimize the search engine text in your page: the page title
and the metatags. Make sure your keywords appear in these
critical sections.
Finally, try to encourage linking to your articles using your
keywords. You can do this by exchanging links with other
webmasters, or you can submit your articles to article
directories, where other webmasters may download them for
free in exchange for retaining a resource box containing
your name, your site, and a URL link set up the way you
want it to appear – ideally, with the keywords appearing in
the link. It's better if you use articles different from the ones
on your site, but equally good quality to draw more
webmasters to use them.

Developing Newsletters with Private Mailing Lists

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:35:00 -0700

If you've paid attention to marketing trends, you know that
being able to email information to your customers works
much better overall than counting on them to return to your
website of their own volition. There are far too many
distractions online, for one thing. And people forget.
But you also can’t just spam them; all that generally
achieves is a lot of hard feelings. And if you have a small
niche market, as most young web businesses do, then you
can't afford to annoy many of your customers.
What you can do, however, is offer them a fair trade:
information that can help them out in exchange for their
email addresses. This means developing a newsletter from
your website, and asking people to give you their email
address so that you can send it to them every week. The
most important thing for you to do, then, is to develop
content on your website that convinces your customers that
the information you'll send them in the newsletter is good,
accurate, and something they couldn't get anywhere else.
Developing Online Content
There are webmasters out there who are talented writers,
and who can easily and quickly write excellent content for
their customers. There are others who are less talented, who
hate writing, or who just don't have time. For you, there are
private-label rights article lists,
Private-label rights articles (or PRA) are collections of
articles sent to subscribers. These articles are search-engine
optimized with specific keywords, and they are yours in their
entirety. You don't have to put someone else's name on
them; you can modify them in any way to enhance the
content on your site, including adding or deleting text; and
you can use them as many times as you want.
Better yet, when you have PRA content on your website, its
already-good keyword structure works in your favor,
encouraging search engine spiders to raise your ranking in
searches.
Create Your Newsletter
Once you have good content developed and a steady supply
of content to maintain your website and your newsletter,
you're ready to solicit subscribers for your free newsletter.
You may not have a lot of subscribers at first; if you have
trouble convincing people to subscribe, run a contest or a
special offer that's only disseminated in your newsletter. But
don't let low subscriber rates dissuade you; your mailing list
will only grow.
You don't have to put all your content on your newsletter; in
fact, it's a much better idea to direct your subscribers to
your website instead of having everything delivered to them.
Ideally, you should have full articles on your newsletter as
well as teasers to bring viewers to your website.
Once you have your newsletter set up and mailing out to
your subscribers, check your website statistics the day after
each newsletter is sent out. The pattern of hits over the first
twenty-four hours can tell you a lot about your customer
base, and if they appear to be especially interested in one
topic, you should consider developing it further.
But newsletters aren't just a means to get your subscribers
to come to your website; they are a selling tool. If you have
a special you want to run (a special pre-Christmas sale, for
instance) your newsletter is the perfect place to advertise it.
Or you can sell a limited amount of ad space to your
affiliates and others who share a similar customer dynamic
to yours.
You can also set up newsletter-only specials, treating your
newsletter customers as a special group to reward them for
trusting you with their information. For instance, instead of
going to your regular online customers with overstock or
closeout sales, take it to your newsletter subscribers first.
You'll probably sell it faster, make these loyal customers
happy, and give others even more incentive to sign up for
the newsletter.
Once you have a good body of articles available from old
newsletters and discarded content, you can go through the
best of it and use it to create an ebook, which you can offer
free for download to customers, or disseminate it as a viral
marketing tool to article directories. Once you have good
content developed for any part of your web business, you're
certain to be able to use it over and over again.

Using Reports to Build Subscription Rates

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:35:00 -0700

What do you think your most powerful tool is for selling
products online?
A lot of people answer "a great web site." Others think it's
having a product that sells itself, or good testimonials from
customers.
In reality, your very best tool and guarantee for success
online is the repeat customer.
Businesses everywhere pour money into attracting new
customers to their business – and that's important. New
customers help a new business get established, and an
established business to grow. But the real problem is that
many businesspeople take their current customers for
granted.
It's like getting married. You have the excitement of the
wedding, and then the honeymoon, and then all of a sudden
you just don't really notice the other partner anymore – you
take them for granted. And when the spouse up and leaves
you, you feel betrayed.
Well, it's usually your own fault if you've been taking them
for granted. And the same thing can be said for the
established customer. Reward them! Send them frequent
thank-you's if possible, and when they haven't bought
anything from you for a while, send them a special deal –
discounts, opportunities to buy things on clearance, or
anything else to get them to pull out the credit card.
But what if you don't know who your customers are?
Of course, if someone has purchased an item from you, you
have their name and contact information. But they're not the
only people you should count as customers. The faceless
people who visit your site regularly but haven't bought
anything yet are also customers, or can be converted into
them much more easily than the average consumer.
Yet a lot of web businesses ignore those in-between people
even more thoroughly than they ignore their own customers.
Instead of doing this, take action to get these people to give
you contact information. Try offering a free report in
exchange for registering with you.
Free Reports
A free report is really an informative ebook you've compiled
from articles in your newsletters, articles from your website,
and even original articles. It's a perfect tool to get your
lurking pre-customers to come out of the shadows; these
people are visiting your site for the information they've
found there, and are always happy to get their hands on
more.
What you do is advertise on your home page the free report
you've got available. You can even write a short article or a
blog entry about the report if you like. Then you set up a
download link that can only be accessed by registered site
users, or by entering your email into a text field. Your
customers don't have to agree to let you email them stuff;
all they need to do is let you know they exist. You should
include an opt-out option next to the text field so they
realize that you aren't out to spam them.
Alternatively, you can have your customers fill out a form to
have the report emailed to them. This is generally less
successful; people like to have power over downloads, even
if the file in either case is the same file. It is, however, a
good way to make first email contact with a customer, a sort
of icebreaker.
When they receive your report, they should be impressed
with the quality and quantity of information available in it.
Never give away worthless information. You should always
be striving to impress your customer with the level of your
knowledge, the amount you care about the customer, and
your generosity and honesty. All these things lead to a
trusting relationship, which is the key you'll need to seduce
your customer into eventually buying things from you.
Reports as Viral Marketing
Getting people to register with you is not the only thing you
can do with your report. After a reasonable amount of time
has passed for people to register – maybe a couple of
months – offer the report for free either through your
website or through an article directory service. And
encourage anyone who downloads it to share it with other
people.
Containing your information and knowledge, a report can be
a wonderful marketing tool to draw in new customers
interested in the things you have to offer. And by
distributing it as a viral document, you ensure it will get the
broadest possible spread, and continue working for you long
after you've moved on to other things.

Article Directories: Good Idea, or Dead End?

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:35:00 -0700

So you were browsing the Internet and stumbled across this
amazing thing – a huge database filled with articles, many of
them about your very specialty, and all of them free to use!
And now you want to know why on earth you should ever
pay for anyone to write articles for you; after all, you have
access to all the free articles you want.
There's a principle you should remember here: nothing is
ever, truly, free. Even when you give away things for free on
your website, it's with the hope of generating a sale from it.
Article directories are no different.
Finding Article Directories
There are several major article directories online, including
the following:
 http://www.goarticles.com
 http://www.ezinearticles.com
 http://www.ideamarketers.com
 http://www.marketing-seek.com.
It's a great idea to contribute articles to them. In general,
however, it's a bad idea to use articles they want to give
you.
Every article in these directories is a viral marketing
scheme. The idea is that you'll download their article and
place it, for free, on your website. But with each of these
articles, you also have to download what's called a resource
box. This is a graphic box with the name of the author, his
or her URL as a clickable link, and sometimes a bio. You are
barred from deleting this resource box if you're using the
article for free.
Here's what happens: you have a website you've carefully
developed to display your expertise. All over the website,
you've used your knowledge, tastes, and personality to bring
your customers what they want. But now you place an
article with someone else's name on it, and a handy
clickable link. Aha! says the customer. Another expert! And,
because Internet audiences are notoriously fickle, he or she
clicks on the link, taking them away from your website and
into the website belonging to the article author.
The article has done exactly what it was intended to do –
bring someone else more business. And you may lose more
than the customer's momentary attention. If the writer of
the article has a website that competes directly with yours,
then you may have lost that customer entirely.
How To Use These Articles
There may be times, however, when you feel you really
must use an article from an article directory. There is a right
way and a wrong way to do this.
First, never violate the terms of the agreement of the article
directory – in other words, don't remove the resource box
from the article and try to pass it off as your own, and don't
tamper with the link in the box in any way. It's ethically
wrong, and besides, in small niche markets people talk more
than you might realize; if the author catches what you've
done (surprisingly easy to do) and starts talking about it on
bulletin boards and egroups, you could find your reputation
ruined very quickly.
Second, use articles from an article directory sparingly and
with great care for what they say. Ideally, only articles that
contain information or news of major importance should be
used on your website. Articles by recognized experts in the
field are also fine, though, particularly if you know that most
of your customers know who this person is.
You can also use articles from an article directory if you have
an affiliate link with the person who has written the article
anyway. You get the free article from someone who's
sending you traffic, and if you let them know you're running
their article, they'll be flattered and might return the favor.
Look around in the article directory's terms of use. You may
find that the directory allows you to purchase the right to
use articles without the resource box. If you have this
option, you should take advantage of it.
Using Article Directories Yourself
A better use for article directories is to upload your own
articles and allow people to download them on the same
terms as the other authors. It’s viral marketing: you're
giving away something and allowing other people to spread
the virus – your information and the fact you are an expert –
using their own resources. Next to active word-of-mouth
advertising, viral marketing of this sort may be one of the
best tools you'll ever find to publicize your business.
Why Use Keywords and Keyword Phrases?
Keywords are something of a venerable institution on the
web. Long ago, when AOL was one of the lone pioneers
(along with Compuserve – remember them?), they
catalogued websites by using keywords. At first, you told
AOL what you wanted your keyword to be; later, they sold
keywords to you. That keyword, whether it was roses or
dogs or computer software, was the most important search
method on the Internet.
Then Alta Vista, the web's first search engine, came along. It
catalogued pages by the phrases it found in the metatags in
the header of the web page. (Metatags are places you can
put keywords and descriptive phrases and not have them
show up on the web page itself.) This worked pretty well for
a while
Then people found out you could abuse the metatags.
Webmasters who ran adult sites would simply look for the
most popular search terms online and put them in the
metatags. No matter that dolphin, cooking equipment, and
running shoes had little or nothing to do with the content on
their pages – they'd use them simply because it caused their
rankings in search engines to go up.
This was the birth of keywords as we know them.
Keywords and Keyword Phrases
Keywords and keyword phrases are words and/or phrases
the search engines look for when they catalog your site.
Search engines only work if they can return relevant content
to the people who are using them to search, so it's very
much in their interest to find articles that go well with the
search terms people insert in the search box.
Search engines look for keywords in several places:
 In the metatags at the beginning of a web page
 Within the header tags of a web page
 In the body of text on a web page, especially in the
first paragraph and the last paragraph
If your page is about cooking, for instance, you want to look
for keywords like cooking, recipes, utensils, ingredients, etc.
to trigger the search engines to properly catalog the web
page. And you want to put in enough keywords that the
search engine will understand that this is an important page
on that topic, not just mentioning the keyword; yet not so
many keywords that your content is unreadable for the
people who browse to it. Most keyword article writers think
between 3% and 7% of your words being keywords or
keyword phrases is optimal.
But what if you've put these keywords in your site, only to
find that your site is not ranking high at all with the
keywords you want? There are several other variables that
can affect search engines (though the exact recipe they use
to determine where your page falls is a closely-guarded
secret, and it changes periodically anyway).
How Search Engines Work
Search engines use a text-based algorithm to determine
where your site falls in their rankings, part of which depends
on the keywords you use, where in your document you use
them, and how they're used. But they look at keywords in
another place as well: the links that connect to your site.
If you've participated in link exchanges with other
webmasters or if you've donated articles to article
directories, search engines will observe and record these
links. If your main keyword is not in these links, you've
wasted your time developing the links and the content. But
if your keyword is included in the links in some way, it will
strengthen your website's relationship with that keyword.
This is one of the most powerful search engine tools you
have. Use it.
In addition, search engines check to see if you've updated
your content recently, and whether the content you're
providing is very similar or the same as content on another
page. Frequent updates will raise your search engine
ranking. Content that looks like another site, whether you've
been plagiarized or not, can lower your ranking or eliminate
it entirely.
And that's really about all there is to it.
One More Thing
When you optimize your site for the search engines, be
certain you retain its ease of use for humans, too. That's
who it's written for. And a number 1 rated site, no matter
how content-rich or how hard you've worked to improve its
ranking, is absolutely worthless if your viewers look at it and
then click away.

Targeted Content Can Increase Affiliate Sales

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:34:00 -0700

Less than a decade ago, Amazon.com, an upstart little
online bookseller, started a unique new business model:
have other people's websites sell books for you. It made so
much sense that other booksellers started doing it as well:
have fishing websites sell fishing books, and needlepoint
websites sell books on knitting and crochet. Any site that
sells a book, they decided, deserved a piece of the profits
made from the book.
Affiliate sales program today still make up a large chunk of
Amazon's sales, although many other innovative online
business models have come into practice. And with several
years of experience, those affiliates have learned a number
of tricks to maximize their book sales. These tricks don't
work only with books, but with any number of affiliate
programs.
Know Your Customer
Affiliate sales sites that try to sell everything are going to be
a turnoff to the average consumer. Even though the Internet
is an anonymous electronic force, consumers want to feel as
if the website owner knows about and cares about them as
individuals, and a website that tries to be Wal-mart to you is
going to get exactly what it deserves – nothing.
At the same time, if you understand the type of person
coming to your website and you can deliver to them items
that they really want and need, you're going to get a repeat
customer. Ideally, your affiliated sales should take place
within articles or in the right sidebar of your website, and
when your customer sees the item you're selling, they
should instantly want it.
Use Targeted Content
Once you know exactly what you should be selling to your
customer, you can target your content to support those
sales. Consumers, more than anything else, want
information on products they may want to buy. And those
who sell products depend on "buzz," people like you talking
about the product's advantages and disadvantages, to get
those products sold.
Targeted content can be the obvious reviews of books, new
products, etc. But it can also be things like descriptions of
fishing trips where you drop in links to affiliated products
you actually used. For instance, if you caught a huge bass
last weekend using a particular lure, you can drop in a photo
of the lure, linking the photo and a text reference to your
affiliated sales page where you actually allow the consumer
to purchase that lure.
This is a trick that television networks are just catching onto.
While recent fashions may have been largely driven by the
clothes characters wear in popular TV shows, there was no
way to purchase those fashions without searching for
something similar throughout stores. Just this season,
networks are starting websites where you can purchase the
sweater Jennifer Aniston wore, or Tom Welling's jacket, even
funky new glasses frames. It's the ultimate targeted-content
model, if they sell it right.
You probably don't have a network to sell your products on.
But you can develop a dedicated audience that knows your
recommended affiliate products are good, reliable, and
exactly what you say they are.
Develop a Reputation
The largest sales driver online is trust. This is a rare
commodity in today's world of corporate scandal,
downsizing, and sell-it-now trends. If you can develop a
growing loyal customer base who know they can trust you,
you are guaranteed success, no matter who tries to move in
on your territory.
One of the best ways to do this is by writing excellent
reviews. Another is by giving information away on your
website. You must be able to write well to do all this, or at
least contract with others who can write well and to your
specifications.
To grow your customer base, you must expand your
communications outside your own website. You must be able
and willing to distribute articles to other newsletters,
websites, and content distributors who are willing to print
your information and retain your personal name and URL in
a resource box attached to the article.
You also must be honest about the items you write about. If
it's junk, you should be willing to say it's junk. You won't sell
many of the junky things, but you'll gain something
priceless: respect from your customers.

Reap Traffic from Article Directories

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:34:00 -0700

You may have seen them online: vast databases that hold
thousands of different articles written by experts and not-soexpert
individuals on every imaginable topic from lion
droppings to screws on nuclear submarines. And what seems
like the best deal of all: they're free for the taking.
All you
have to do is run a small blurb (called a resource box) at the
bottom identifying the writer, with perhaps a short bio, and
a link back to the writer's website.
You may even have decided to download an article that
particularly took your interest, faithfully complying with the
wishes of the article directory as you pointed back to the
writer's web site. And you may have noticed no real
difference in your own website traffic, or maybe even have
reaped some compliments on your discernment at having
downloaded and shared with your customers such a fine
article.
But don't pat yourself on the back yet. Though you didn't
notice a difference in your web traffic, there's a fair chance
that at least some of the readers of this article noticed that
link and clicked on it, and if the author is selling a product
similar to yours, another fair to middling chance that they
chose to purchase items from him instead of you simply
because that's the last place where they landed.
One or two customers from your site – that may not seem
like too much. But if you look at the math, that could pay for
two or three good articles on your site by other talented
writers.
For the lucky author of the article you put on your site, that
means that they got at least a sale or two out of the article
they wrote. If several other people did the same thing you
did, they may have gotten more sales, making that article
they wrote and posted for free very lucrative indeed.
Before getting annoyed at this person for poaching your
customers, unbeknownst to you, consider this: you can do
the same thing.
Posting Articles to Article Directories
Whether you write your own articles or purchase them from
writers and article brokers like YourOwnArticles.com, you
can get articles up with your own resource box, with your
link to your page and your bio. It's simple. You put together
an article you think other webmasters that sell something
similar or identical to what you sell would be interested in
placing on their websites. You can write it, commission it, or
just purchase pre-composed articles from an article broker.
Then you go out to the article directory you like. Register as
an article contributor, and post your article online.
That's it. Or almost it.
Making Sure You Get Yours
Although article directories are supposed to ensure that
anyone using your article also gives you credit for the work
you've done, when you're working with thousands of articles
it's impossible to do this perfectly. Your best bet is to do a
periodic Google search for your articles to ensure you know
where they're posted, and also that they are properly
credited to you.
To do this, select a unique phrase of about five or six words
from the middle of your article. Copy the phrase into the
Google search bar, putting quotes around it, and then
search. Any site that comes up from this search should be
one that is hosting your article. Double check each one and
ensure that they are properly crediting you. If they're not,
report them to the article directory webmaster, and politely
email the transgressors yourself to ask them to credit you or
remove the article from their site.
If they don't comply, you can also try reporting them to
Google.
The most that will probably happen is that they'll be
blacklisted from the Google search engine, and the article
directory will yank their privilege of using articles from the
site. It's notoriously hard to catch criminals online, and for
the crime of plagiarism you're not likely to get much
satisfaction. But at least you'll know who to watch for in the
future.
You'll also have surveyed the sites that are legitimately
using your articles, which is important to know. Even if
someone's copying your information and using it without
your information, chances are good that you're getting some
good traffic directed to your site from everyone else. The
quality of the traffic, not the fact that some people will steal
your information, should determine whether you continue
using article directories.

Using Clean Content Design to Improve Your Website Stickiness

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:33:00 -0700

Have you ever watched someone use your website? Do they
seem to find what they want right away and either click it or
start scrolling down?
Or do they get distracted, sidetracked, have trouble and
ultimately get bored?
If your answer is the second, you've got a problem.
Fixing Your Website
Whether your website is hard to read, too wordy, too laden
with images, or just laid out poorly, you can fix it. Website
stickiness is the quality to a website that holds viewers
there, encouraging them with one-more-interesting-item to
remain at your website; the longer they stick to your
website, the better your chances of making some money.
Just like with tape, your website's stickiness is better if it's
not cluttered with other stuff. If you're running other
people's banner ads on your site, now is the time to stop.
Banner ads are distracting and often unpredictable. With
slow computer speeds, the ones with multiple animations
(you know who you are, Low Rates!) will lock up a page so
that it doesn't load at all. Worse, if you're selling ad space
on your website to a service that sends up ads to random
but similar services, you may be advertising competitors on
your website without knowing it – even if the service
promises this won't happen!
So eliminate the banners now. If you have large graphics
(anything that is larger than 50 K is large), animations, or
Flash, lose them now, or move them off your home page.
Use the simplest possible web design: a menu across the
top, a menu across the bottom, and three columns between
the menus, keeping the bulk of your content in the center
column, where most people look. Don't use huge graphics at
the top of the page.
Newspapers have a philosophy called above-the-fold. This
means that the real estate of the paper on the front page
above the fold should hold the best and most important
stories in the paper. Similarly, you should keep your most
important real estate above the fold – in the part of your
page that shows up on the screen after the page has been
downloaded, and before any scrolling happens. This is why
people like banner ads – that's the most valuable part of
your page. Don't give it away.
In that crucial top part of your page, you should have:
 A navigational menu
 Your logo, kept small and preferably in the top left
corner
 A title that will hook your viewer
 The first part of your site's content
Besides this content, you should have – white space. Look at
the bulleted points above. They stand out nicely against the
rest of the text, right? You see them long before the items in
the middle of any given paragraph. That's because bullets
are designed to take advantage of white space.
Your most important points should always be surrounded by
white space.
Color and Design
White space doesn't necessarily mean your site should be
white; in fact, white backgrounds are sometimes harder to
read. Choose light colors for the background of your site,
and make sure your font is legible on more than one
computer with more than one browser.
If you've done everything recommended up to this point,
your home page should consist of:
 A menu at the top of the page
 Content right down the middle
 A second menu or more information down the left side
of the page
 Room for a sidebar or ads down the right side of the
page
 A second menu or room for information about you and
your business along the bottom of the page.
Each of these items should be separated from the others
clearly by significant white space or by a graphic line. You
shouldn't get any fancier than that. If you have items or
sidebars you want to offset from the rest of the site, you can
use a different background color that doesn't contrast
harshly with your main color – yellows often work well for
this. Break up long articles, and if you have big chunks of
paragraphs, try to break them into smaller paragraphs.
Most importantly, you don't need any bells or whistles for
your site at all. Keep it simple.
Once your site's been cleaned up, have someone try to
browse it while you watch. If they have an easier time
finding what they're seeking, you've done your job right.

What's Wrong with Content Generators?

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:33:00 -0700

Content generators are programs that create multiple copies
of your website, look for synonyms for the words you used
in your articles, and then posts fresh, each-a-little-different
pages up.
It sounds like a great idea: you take advantage of
the way the search engines catalog websites, get several
extra hits per day, and take in the advertising revenue for
each of those hits. The search engines get their views, you
get your money, and it's a win-win, right?
Wrong. First, any time you use the words "take advantage
of," you should know instantly that what you're doing is
ethically wrong. If everyone used content generators to
duplicate their sites, search engines would be unusable in
short order. And though you're maximizing advertiser views,
you're not selling a product, which is what the view system
is set up to do; instead, you're annoying web visitors, and
they will eventually dump your lame site and go somewhere
interesting, like a music download site.
Second, any time a technology threatens the search
engines, they instantly go on the defensive. Rest assured:
somewhere out there a team of web geeks are working on a
language program that will be able to deduce when a site
has been using a content generator. When they are
successful, they'll shut down entire domains, not just
individual sites. Content generator sites will be found in
violation of search engine usage agreements, and they will
not be listed any longer.
Worse, the revenue you've been accumulating through that
same search engine is going to shut off completely, and you
may find lawyers on your doorstep stating that you are in
violation of the advertising agreement you made with the
search engine and thus are liable to pay back all the money
you collected for advertising – plus extra money for legal
fees, taking up the search engines' time, and just being a
nuisance to the engines.
This is not a good end to your experiment with content
generation. The only winners in this situation are the people
who've made money by selling content generators to people
willing to take advantage of them. And these are the people
who will build the next generation of software designed to
take advantage of the search engines – and take your
money while they're at it.
What's the Alternative?
Many people don't use content generators to effectively
spam search engines. Instead, they use content generators
to create lots of pages with links back to their own web site.
There are better, more reliable, and above all completely
legal methods for driving traffic to your web site. The
drawbacks: they're not instantaneous, they do take some
work on your part, and they may cost you a little more
money.
First, add real, valuable content to your website. That's not
the content the generators wanted to add, where the same
article has been reposted in different words. Instead, it's
using actual creative content written by human beings. This
sort of content is not that costly, though it's generally not
free either. You can contract with a professional writer, a
college student, or an article broker like
YourOwnArticles.com to supply your site with content;
and you can either supply the topics to be written on (with
or without guidelines) or you can trust the content producers
to come up with their own.
Second, develop a relationship with your customers and site
viewers. This can be as simple as just setting up community
bulletin boards, an FAQ, or even an email response form
that you actually respond to right away; or it can be as
complex as a blog, real-time chats, emailed newsletter
subscriptions, and special offers for your best customers.
Now you're ready to drive real traffic to your website. Start
exchanging links with sites similar to yours that have
content and information you yourself find useful and
interesting. When you exchange links, try to do it by
mentioning the other sites in articles on your website, or in
your blog. Take some of the articles you have archived or
freshly-written articles and take them out to free article
directories, posting them to share with other sites. These
other sites get your information, but in exchange will post
links crediting you for the information and directing readers
to visit your site. Be certain to give the titles and links
names that reflect the keyword you're focusing your website
around; this increases the value of that keyword to you by
emphasizing to web spiders that it has to do with your site.
And start tweaking your site. Look at other ways to include
content, or to include keywords. Keep up with developments
in the search engine industry, and laugh as you find out that
they've shut down the content generators that you were
smart enough to avoid.

Using Article Directories to Drive Traffic to Your Site

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:32:00 -0700

You measure your website's success in hits – how many
people go and look at the site. There are several ways to get
your link out to customers:
 List well in a search engine
 Advertise on search engines, other sites, or via Link
Xchange or another ad-swapping service
 Get your URL in a news story online or offline
 Spam (very bad idea!)
 Legitimate emails
 Advertising in emailed newsletters
 Advertising in your bricks-and-mortar store or in fliers
to your potential customers.
Most of these methods have a problem that make them
either difficult, a bad idea, or expensive. Search engines
take time to place well in, though this is the number one
best way to drive traffic to you. Advertising online is
expensive, and ad-swapping services drive minimal traffic to
your site while forcing you to accept an ad on your own site.
It's really hard to get enough notice for the news to talk
about you – even for a blogger to talk about you takes some
work.
That, by the way, doesn't mean that you shouldn't send out
press releases; it just means you shouldn't depend on your
website making it into any stories on the basis of them,
though it could happen.
Spam is how you lose your business; just don't do it.
Legitimate emailed advertisements entail purchasing the
rights to a mailing list or becoming an affiliate with a larger
site, something that will almost certainly cost you some
money. Advertising in emailed newsletters or in your own
store and town are the most cost effective and reliable of
these methods, but they won't reliably drive a large amount
of traffic to your site. And you need a lot of traffic; few page
views result in an actual purchase, depending on the
industry as little as one in a hundred.
So what do you do?
Leveraging Article Directories
One great way of driving all kinds of traffic, including traffic
you wouldn't expect, to your site is to write excellent articles
and post them to article directories, encouraging people to
download and use them for free.
Yes, for free. Article directories are huge repositories online
with thousands of articles on every conceivable niche market
and large market, and they'll accept articles from almost
anyone who wants to donate one. Register, set up the byline
you want to use and your URL, and your article goes up, free
to the world to download.
But why would you want to give them away for free?
Because with every download your URL and your name and
often a short bio as well, are required to be set up along
with the article in something called a "resource box." This
means that if a hundred webmasters download your article,
you have just gotten a hundred free links to your website,
many of them from sources you'd never have thought to ask
prior to this. It also means that your name has just received
the status of "recognized expert" to every person who
thereafter reads your article on the other website. You give
away free content, but you get real recognition and status in
return.
It's one of the best forms of free advertising you can find.
What If I Don't Write?
Here's the other secret: you don't have to be a talented
writer. You can hire a writer to create your articles for you,
either to your specifications exactly or with general
guidelines. You can even purchase articles from an article
broker like YourOwnArticles.com, getting content and/or
keyword rich articles that you can share with other
webmasters in exchange for a link to your site.
And another secret: if you include in the article title the
keyword you're trying to capture for your own search engine
optimization purposes, you've just made that keyword more
valuable to you. The search engine spiders seeing these link
backs will apply every one of these keyword links to your
website's ranking. And when people search for that specific
keyword, they'll be that much more likely to pull you up in
the top ten.
One more piece of advice: google yourself. If you see a lot
of people out there with your name, you might want to use
your middle name or even a nickname as your byline to
avoid confusion. You don't need someone else taking credit
for your gurudom.

It's All About the Content: Generating Sales with Articles and Newsletters

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:32:00 -0700

Everyone who's online today seems to be interested in
selling something, whether it's a product, a service, or just
information or space for advertising. There's nothing wrong
with that; in many ways, the Internet is the greatest sales
engine ever invented.
What many web designers don't realize is that it's not the
bells and whistles, the fancy Flash animation, or the great
graphics that draw customers to a website. Instead, it's all
about the content.
The Internet is, first and foremost, a text-based technology.
You read it. You may look at the pictures, and you may
laugh at the animations, but the things that compel you to
click on them, to wonder what else is here to inform you, or
to purchase an item are generally the words that are written
on the screen.
Instead of being seduced by the flash and the bang,
consider letting your words do the talking for once, and
generate some sales with articles.
Using Articles To Interest Customers
One of the best ways to get people to buy stuff from you is
to get them to trust and like you. And one of the best ways
to do this on the Internet is to write articles and post them
online for your customers to enjoy and use. Besides this,
once you've written an article, you have instant recognition.
Even if you didn't write it but actually purchased it, your
name on an article instantly transforms you into an expert.
That's not the only secret of the written word. Large
companies like Hewlett-Packard and IBM know something
many small vendors don't: when you get people to write
stuff about you, you're giving yourself instant sales mojo.
When you've written something, that's nice; but when
you've been written about, that's magic.
So here's a new idea: instead of just exchanging links with
other vendors you have a relationship with, why not
exchange mutually-admiring articles? You post an article on
your website referencing the other vendor and talking about
how well his or her products work with yours, and they can
do the same. If you write it in all sincerity, and he does the
same, you're both going to drive extra traffic to each others'
sites.
There are dozens of methods like this you can use to get
your customers more interested. One is using your articles
to inform them about a new product that they may not yet
be aware of. Another is to talk about a nifty item that's just
a slow mover, or to discuss one that is coming up on a
seasonal popularity boost.
Or you can just write plain old informational articles, being
certain to reference items that you sell on your site. For
instance, if you have a gardening site and you want to talk
about the right way to plant bulbs, you can set up links
inside the article or as a sidebar to places your reader can
go on your site to order the bulbs, special measuring tools,
or protective cloths for their newly-planted garden.
Using Newsletters to Sell Your Products
Newsletters are very similar to articles resting out on your
site, with one exception: the customers on your site are
already there and more likely to be in a mood to buy.
Customers reading your newsletter are those who showed
up months or even years ago, filled out a form, and have
been reading your information ever since. The trick here is
to get them to come to your website.
Treat newsletters like you'd treat advertising in a
newspaper. Use coupons to push sales. Talk about special
deals on specific products, or discuss items that can only be
purchased on your website.
Above all, use your newsletter to reference further
information on your website. By pushing your newsletter
readers to your website, you have taken them one step
closer to the "purchase" button, which is what you really
want from them. And once on your website, they may
rediscover everything they liked enough about it to sign up
for the newsletter to begin with.
Finally, don't be afraid to sell a little advertising on your
newsletter. This will generate a little more income for you,
and may result in more sales on your site as well if you're
careful to sell the advertising mostly to vendors who already
work with you.

Demonstrate Your Expertise with Articles and Ebooks

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:32:00 -0700

So you're an expert – so what? In today's world, anyone
with a little money can be an expert too. Websites
everywhere market "life experience PhD.'s" to anyone willing
to pay their fee. And if you're chatting, you really have no
idea who's on the other end of the communication.

There is, however, a simple way to show the Internet
community that you are indeed an expert in your field: by
writing articles and ebooks that show your knowledge in
your niche industry. Anyone can start a website selling
paper dolls, vintage model trains, or used clothing; but only
an expert will be able to talk intelligently about the history
of Victorian paper dolls, how to preserve the paint on the
outside of your model train without destroying the value, or
how you can mix nostalgic clothes with new ones to create
your own fashion look.
Articles for the Non-Writer
But what if you can't write well? This is definitely a
disadvantage. Though you can put together flashy
animations, great catalogs of your merchandise, and an
awesome inventory, if you don't know how to communicate
your expertise correctly, you will lose sales.
Non-writers aren't always just people who can't write,
either. Lots of people who can't write for the Internet have
that problem due to physiological issues like dyslexia, or a
genuine fear of writing instilled by years of public education,
or a focus on numbers or business instead of words. That
doesn't mean you don't know what you're talking about.
But you can identify writing that does know what it's talking
about, and that's where you can fix your problem. All over
the Internet, talented writers who want to write, but who
don't necessarily want to sell things on Ebay, are showing
up. Why not hire one, or contract with an article broker like
YourOwnArticles.com, to get the writing you need done?
Article brokers sell all rights to articles pre-written by
talented writers to people like you who need that content.
These articles are often keyword optimized so that you can
get better placement with search engines. They're wellresearched
and informed. And you can either purchase prepackaged
articles that you can place on your site or in an
emailed newsletter, or you can contract with the broker or
writers to have articles tailored to your specific needs.
It's a new expense, but it can be surprisingly affordable. And
since all rights are sold to you, you have the choice of
recognizing the writer in the byline, placing your own name
in the byline (as many celebrities already do with their
ghostwritten autobiographies), or of just putting it up as
content with no byline at all.
What About Article Directories?
You may have seen other sites online that offer Free Web
Content. I don't know about you, but when I see the word
"free," I always ask what the hitch is.
And article directories do have a hitch. Articles in these
databases are written by people who are often experts in
their field, and often have a website that competes with
yours. You can indeed use their article on your website for
free, but you will have to include a resource box with the
author's name and, if included, website with a clickable link.
This means that you are putting someone else's content on
your site, acknowledging them as an expert, and then giving
them a free link back as well. This allows them to steal
customers from your website, not for you to retain the ones
you have hooked.
Instead of using article directories as sources for free
content, use them as a marketing tool. Purchase batches of
content from a writer or a broker like
YourOwnArticles.com. Use some of the articles you've
purchased to enhance the content on your website or in your
newsletter, but take one or two of them and put them into
the article directories under your own name, with your URL
attached. Then if someone else downloads your article, the
URL from their website will point to you.
What About Ebooks?
Lots of people are looking at ebooks as a great way to selfpublish
books and sell them online. But they really make a
much better marketing tool.
If you compile your ebook into a PDF, it can be downloaded
and read, but it can't be changed. That means anything you
put into it will remain there, including the URL for your
website and all the contact information to you and your
business you like. And there are no printing costs for these
documents. Instead of selling an ebook on your website, put
them out there for free, no strings attached. Your customer
may question it, of course, just like you and I question
freebies, but the answer to that is the truth: it's a marketing
tool. With an ebook, you can show your customer you know
what you're talking about, and you can give them
information that they can subsequently use. But since the
book has your information in it, including the URL, the
customer who uses it will be reminded every time that you
exist.
Just like with articles, you can hire outside writers or
contract with article brokers like YourOwnArticles.com to
acquire ebooks, or you can compile a collection of related
articles into an ebook yourself.
If you don't have the capacity yourself of creating a PDF,
you can use the easy PDF creator in the free download
OpenOffice; it's compatible with MS Office, and easy to use
if you're used to Word.

Articles Boost Your Income

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:31:00 -0700

You're selling snowboots, and you're doing reasonably well.
Suddenly you notice that the hits to your website are
dropping off, and your sales are following. It's winter; they
should be moving really well! What's happening?
Chances are good that a competitor is siphoning off your
customer pool. If your website isn't search-engine optimized
or if your content is stale, your customers may be going
somewhere else. Here's what happens: your website is
established, providing a nice catalog selection of snowboots
and accessories. Paul's Snowboots springs up out of
nowhere, and determines that the way to get a good
customer base is to make his website better than yours.
So Paul studies you. He figures out what keywords pull up
your site, and he uses those on his site. He figures out who's
linking to you, and he requests reciprocal links from these
vendors. And he discovers that you're not offering anything
to your customers but a nice place to buy snowboots at a
fair price.
Paul starts writing articles, one every month on different
aspects of snowboots. He posts articles on his website. He
submits them to article exchange databases, finding more
URLs to link to his site. He creates a regular newsletter, and
once he's captured a customer's attention with the
newsletter, he can continually remind them that he's there
and waiting whenever they're ready to buy snowboots.
There's a finite customer pool for snowboots; inevitably,
you're going to feel the pinch.
So how do you stop it?
Writing Articles To Capture and Keep Customers
Today's average web consumer is terribly spoiled. He or she
is used to getting a little something free. If your customers
have been coming to your site for months or years and
gotten nothing extra except a nice thank you note and a
good price, then they may be ready for a change.
And the best freebie you can give them is an informative
article. That's what Paul knows that you don't know.
So Paul has been writing articles: how to ensure your
snowboots are waterproof, why you should buy a size larger
than you think, what you can do to keep them smelling fresh
inside, everything he can think of. And customers have been
flocking to him, reading his articles, using his advice – and
buying his boots.
The only way to fight back is to provide your own great
article content, and even a newsletter.
But you don't know how to write.
Finding Articles to Keep the Customers
That's okay, believe it or not. It'll cost you a little extra
money, not much, to buy all rights to web-optimized content
from a professional writer. You can guide the writing of the
articles, or you can purchase them pre-written; whichever
way you go, your main task is going to be ensuring the
articles add value to your customer's trip to your website.
You can find articles to purchase from article brokers like
YourOwnArticles.com, or you can hire writers directly to
write for your website. Either way, be certain you can put
your own byline on the article; this makes it your own, no
matter who wrote it to begin with.
But don't stop there. Go ahead and start a newsletter, and
ask your customers to sign up for more great information.
And post some of your free articles to an article exchange
site; you can get people linking to your website for no more
work than sharing a single article.
And if you really want to one-up Paul, hire someone to write
an ebook for your site. You gain guru status, your customers
who have downloaded the book have a permanent reminder
that you're there, and Paul doesn't know what hit him.
And Another Thing
Articles are useful for income generation in another way. If
you have an emailed newsletter with a decent sized
audience, you can sell advertising space on it to other
vendors or to the companies that provide you with your
brands of snowboots. A one-line ad from Lands End, another
short ad from a startup making custom socks, and an ad
from a site that sells Eskimo-style parkas. If you start selling
advertising on your own newsletter, you can make back
enough to pay for the newsletter at minimum, and you may
even start to make a profit.

Finding Articles for Your Newsletters

noreply@blogger.com (Dedy Saputra) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:31:00 -0700

It's undeniable that one of your most powerful marketing
tools is the emailed newsletter. Customers who want it have
to sign up for it – that's a contact. When you put it together,
you can slant the editorial content toward your products.
You can use it to drive traffic to your site by putting in links
to more complete information. And you can use it as an
advertising tool for yourself or your affiliates, slipping in
subtle little teasers between articles or at the end of the
newsletter.
But maintaining a good emailed newsletter can be difficult,
even nearly impossible. You must publish them regularly
(this is part of setting up a trusting relationship with your
customer – how can you trust someone who doesn't keep a
regular schedule?), you need fresh new information in each
one, and they must all drive your business in some manner.
The hardest part, of course, is supplying it with articles.
The best articles are always the ones you've done yourself,
provided you have some writing skill. You're the expert here,
and you know better than anyone else what your website
needs to accomplish. But you can still use articles from
others if you know exactly what you're looking for.
One of the best ways to keep a pool of fresh, interesting
articles is by using PRA – private-label rights articles. This is
generally a collection of articles sent to you, the subscriber,
on a regular basis. The articles contain information about
the markets you're interested in, or about a variety of
different things, depending on the subscription options you
chose. And though they're written by someone else, they are
completely yours once you have paid for them. This means
you can change the text, add or delete information, add
graphics, and finally sign your name to the articles as the
writer if you choose. The text is yours; you are not required
to retain a resource box or otherwise indicate that you did
not write the article.
Using Private-Label Rights Articles in Your
Newsletters
When you put together a newsletter, you should have a
theme in mind, something that holds the whole thing
together. If you have a collectibles website, perhaps a Star
Wars theme or a doggie collectibles theme would work; or if
you do alternative health, consider themes like acupuncture
and Eastern medicine, touch therapy, herbs native to North
America, or using humor. If you've subscribed to a privatelabel
rights service, you probably have a stockpile of articles
you've never used. You can mine these articles, either for
ideas on what to put in your newsletter, or for articles to go
in virtually unchanged.
Even if you are using a varied private-label rights service –
one that does not focus narrowly on a field – by focusing on
a theme in your newsletter, you can dramatically change the
number of articles you can use. For instance, with the
doggie collectibles, you can include an article on dog
statuettes (that's from collectibles), an article on vintage
dog collars (also collectibles), and then an article on the
history of dogs in art (that's either art or dogs). By keeping
an open mind, you might be surprised at the ways you can
leverage these articles. And by using a service that is less
focused, you might find that your newsletters are more
interesting and complete than those of other competing
vendors.
Recycling Private-Label Rights Articles
Once you've used private-label rights articles in your
newsletter, you're done with them, right?
Wrong. One of the wonderful things about PRA is that they
are flexible and malleable enough to use in a variety of
different documents. You can use the articles you've
developed for your newsletter to put on your website if you
like; or you can include them as part of a downloadable
ebook or report.
Or you can use them as a viral marketing tool to spread
information about you and your business. Article directories
are repositories of viral documents just like this; you
register and contribute your article, and others download it
to use for free, retaining your resource box with a link to
your website. By using a variety of private-label rights
documents to put together your newsletters, you might find
some surprising cross-marketing.
For example, suppose your "History of Dogs in Art" article
winds up on a website focused on dog breeding. It intrigues
some customers there, and they follow the link in to your
website. Your focus is on collectibles, but you have a nice
stock of dog art and dog statuettes – and the dog breeders
love them. You've just acquired customers you'd never have
marketed to on your own.
That's the beauty of viral marketing with creative articles.