Posted on Friday, 2nd January 2009 by Jeff

Ok, you’re probably wondering how a guy with a PR0 could give anyone advice on how to increase their Google Pagerank? You might even say that if I had the knowledge I would probably already be doing it. The fact of the matter is that some people have knowledge on certain things that they actually aren’t using. Some people may never use that knowledge but it will always be stored in some corner of their brain for a rainy day. Increasing your Pagerank is just one of those things that I know about. I know how to do it but never thought it was important enough to mess around with. One of the reason why is if you search Google for some competitive keywords, you’ll noticed that for some of those keywords #1 could be a PR3 and #2 could be a PR8. The importance of Pagerank is still questionable, however, there’s no proof that it’s unimportant. Therefore, I’m going to teach you a simple but “legitimate” technique that anyone can use to get a really high PR. If you work hard enough you might get to a PR 6 or 7.

In case you didn’t already know, Pagerank is transferred from one website to another. If you had a link coming from the homepage of Google, you would probably automatically get a PR8 just with ONE LINK!!! Getting back to reality, that’s not going to happen!!! But it is possible for you to get on the homepage of websites that have a PR 3 or higher without paying for that link. The easiest way to do that is with link exchanges. Most people exchange links with other website using a page that is linked to from their homepage. The problem with the typical link exchange is that the page your link is placed on has very little or no PR. Therefore, you could do a thousand link exchanges with these websites and still have a PR1 or 0. If you want to exchange links with other websites to increase your PR, you’ll have to do it with them on their HOMEPAGE.

Like I just mentioned, most websites don’t do link exchanges on their homepage. However, there is one type of website that does commonly do this. This website is the most popular kind of website known as the “blog” or “web log”. Most blogs have something called the “Blogroll” where the webmaster can place links to their favorite websites. Many webmasters actually use their Blogroll to exchange links with other websites. The links in their Blogroll usually appear on every page of their blog which makes this a “sitewide link”. Some people may argue that a sitewide link has lower SEO benefit than on that’s on just a single page. But if you want to increase your Google Pagerank, I would have to say that sitewide links are the way to go.

Now that you have a basic understanding of how you can increase your PR, it’s time to get started. If your website has a PR0 or no PR at all, it’s going to be kind of hard to find a link exchange partner. You can probably start by searching for some free directories that will place your link on a page that has a PR1 or PR2. After Google updates your Pagerank, you should have a PR1 or PR2. Once you get there, you can start searching for blogs that match up with the subject of your website, The more relevant the blog is, the better for your SEO. Let’s say you owned a website on the subject of “pets”. You can search Google for the keyword “pet blogs”. When the results come up, check each blog to see if they have links in their Blogroll or elsewhere on their homepage. This is to verify that they’re already doing link exchanges. If they do, check their Pagerank to see what it is. If you have a PR1 or PR2, you should find link partners that have a PR3. You only need to find 3 or 4 link partners. Once Google updates your Pagerank, you should have a PR3. Once you get there, search for 3 or 4 partners that have a PR4. Once you get there you can search for PR5 or PR6 partners and so on.

I think you’re probably getting the picture now. You should always search for partners that have a PR that’s 1 or 2 points higher than yours so you can INCREASE your pagerank. Finding partners that have the same PR as you will not increase your Pagerank it but will keep it the same. Once you get a PR 6 or 7, you can delete your old partners with a PR3 or lower to make room for new partners with a higher PR. Just make sure to contact your old partners to let them know you’re removing their link out of respect. One thing you also need to consider is that exchanging link your homepage is actually a way to “exchange traffic”. Even if your partner has a significantly lower PR, if they’re delivering quality traffic to your website it may be worth it to keep their link on your website.

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Posted on Thursday, 1st January 2009 by Jeff

If you purchased a PHP script directly from the source, there’s a good chance their price for installing the script could be $25 to $50. The best way to avoid paying this high cost is to hire a professional PHP script installer to do it for you. PHP Script Installation is a professional company who will install any PHP script for just $5. Their service comes with a 100% money back guarantee and they’ll have your script installed within 24 hours which is faster than most of their competitors. They also have some great lists of professional PHP scripts that are both PAID and FREE so you might want to check that out as well.

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Posted in Misc | Comments (2)

Posted on Tuesday, 23rd December 2008 by Jeff

Want to start your own social networking website? MyOwnSpace is a free PHP script that allows anyone to start their own “myspace-like” website with a few less features. In fact, the default template of the script is an exact clone of what myspace used to look like before they updated it with the current web 2.0 look!! The script is occasionally updated and is under the General Public License which means that it’s free for anybody to use or change the program to meet their needs. If this sounds like a script you would be interested in, feel free to download it HERE.

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Posted in Ideas | Comments (1)

Posted on Tuesday, 23rd December 2008 by Jeff

So here’s something to get you thinking really hard. Especially if you desperately want to make money off the internet. If you have a website with 1,000,000 “unique” articles, you could potentially make SIX FIGURES a year!!! In case you were born yesterday, this basically means that you would make between $100,000 to $999,999 a year!!! You’re probably asking yourself how you would come up with all these articles, and why exactly would you make that much money. Now I can’t tell you exactly how you can come up with 1,000,000 articles on a budget, but I can tell you why you would make six figures. The fact of the matter is, Google and Yahoo love websites with lots of “unique” content. If you had 1,000,000 million articles on your website, they would literally bow down and kiss your feet!!! If you properly optimized each page using unique page titles and meta content, you should do very very well with your traffic.

After you get your traffic, you’ll need a way to monetize your website. Since most of your visitors will be reading your articles, I would recommend you go along with Google Adsense. In order to maximize your earnings with Adsense, you’ll have to experiment with various sizes, placements, and colors to know what works best. While everyone seems to have their own theory on this, I would recommend you go with your own instinct since every website is unique.

So you’re probably still asking yourself “Ok. How the heck do I come up with the content?!”. Since you want to come up with “unique” content, the best thing you can do is write it yourself. Now you’re probably not going to be able to write 1,000,000 articles by yourself even if you dedicated your entire life to it! Another thing you can do is hire somebody off a website such as GetAFreelancer.com to “rewrite” some articles that you like. Depending on who you hire, this can cost anywhere from $.50 to $3.00 an article. When the freelancer is done, check their work on CopyScape.com to see if it isn’t repeat content. Even if the freelancer rewrote 50% of the article, it could still be considered as repeat content. Therefore, if CopyScape.com can brings up the “original article” in its results, you should ask the freelancer to do a better job.

The best FREE way to build unique content on your website is to get other internet marketers to submit it to your website. You know how some SEO experts tell you to add a blog onto your website for SEO purposes. A great alternative is to add an SEO-friendly article directory to your website. A great script I would recommend is Article Directory Pro. Make sure you advertise your article directory on your homepage either with a custom banner or with an obvious link so that people will know its there. You should only accept unique content since content that has been overly distributed isn’t worth a lot for SEO purposes.

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Posted on Sunday, 21st December 2008 by Jeff

So you have a great idea and the only thing that stands in your way is creating a professional looking website? The first thing some people do is search for a web designer who can get their project done for the lowest possible price. Many newcomers believe that anybody who calls themselves a “professional web designer” can make them an awesome website with bells and whistles. After searching through dozens of potential designers, they often choose the one who has the best price and portfolio. After paying the designer 25% or more upfront, they wait for the mock design that the designer promises will be made in just a few days. A few days later, they get an email with their mock design. But instead of a website that matches up with the designer’s portfolio, THEY GET PURE CRAP!!!!!! Since the design is far worse than they could’ve ever expected, they email the web designer asking for a refund of the money they paid them. Instead of being honest and refunding their money, the designer decides to take the dishonest route and keeps their money without responding back!!! In some cases, this could be hundreds or even thousands of dollars!!!

This kind of dishonesty just gets my blood flowing!!! I don’t understand how anybody could be so heartless just to make a dishonest buck!!! Most of the people they rip off are average people who are investing a significant amount of money to get their idea off the ground. They’re also trying to help out the web designer by giving them business that they otherwise wouldn’t have had. And how do they thank them? By ripping them off with their garbage work that should go into their “real portfolio”. This way the customer knows what they’re really getting themselves into before hiring them.

The easiest way to avoid this problem is to pay the designer in escrow or to not pay them anything until they have the initial design ready. Even if the initial design is exactly what you expect, don’t pay them everything upfront after that. Some designers will slack off after they already have most of the money. Pay them 25% for each part of the project. For example, you could pay them 25% after the initial design, 25% once half the coding is done, 25% for the other half of the coding, and the final 25% once the website is uploaded to your host and functional. Even if you decide to fire a web designer without paying them a cent, you may still lose some precious time which in some instances could be more valuable than money. Therefore, you might be better off hiring a more costly web designer with a solid reputation to make sure your project flows the way you want it to.

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Posted on Sunday, 21st December 2008 by Jeff

When Adbrite.com first launched off their website, they had lots of great deals on advertising space. I recall buying advertising space for as little as $.50 per week and getting a much better return on my investment than with pay-per-click. You could also scale the hell out of your campaign while still paying an extremely low CPC. Unfortunately, Adbrite figured their company would be more profitable if they went more in the direction of Google Adwords. That’s not a bad thing but you won’t get a lot of traffic if you don’t bid higher. While there are still a few marketplaces for fixed-price advertising, many of them don’t even compare to what Adbrite used to be. Therefore, the best alternative in my opinion is to find the publishers yourself. Especially if you want to advertise on a website that covers the exact niche you’re going for.

The first thing you need to consider is what types of websites you want to advertise on for your niche. Which ones do you think will deliver the most targeted traffic? In my opinion, the best ones to advertise on are ones that generate a huge amount of their traffic from the search engines. A lot of the websites that deliver targeted traffic from the search engines have lots of pages and content, This includes but is not limited to blogs, niche directories, and niche article directories. Remember, the websites you choose need to be in a niche and not just a general blog or directory.

Next, you need to figure out whether you want to advertise on their site using banner ads or text ads. I always liked banner ads when I used PPC because it always seemed to deliver better quality traffic. However, the fact that you’re paying a fixed price gives you the luxury of receiving some traffic that doesn’t convert to sales or sign-ups. If you choose text ads, then you probably won’t have a problem coming up with a catchy ad. However, if you choose banner ads you’ll probably have to hire somebody to create a catchy banner for you. I would recommend you go along with BannerMode.com since their work is high-quality and will give people a good impression of your business. Make sure it’s catchy and flashy since those banners usually get the most clicks. If you’re giving away something for FREE, use your banner to advertise that since the word “Free” always gets more people to click on your ads. You don’t want to sacrifice the quality of your traffic so make sure you’re giving away something that’s directly related to what you’re trying to sell.

Now that you’ve chosen which kind of websites you want to advertise on, and what your ad will look like, it’s time to find the websites you want to advertise on. If you want to advertise on blogs, you can probably join a blogging community or use a “blog search engine” to contact blog owners. For everything else, you can search Google or Yahoo. Depending on how much traffic you’re looking for, you might want to go along with websites that get a lower amount of traffic but still have an Alexa ranking of under 1,000,000. These webmasters will often give you a better deal since they receive less offers for advertising. Send them an email stating that you’re interested in advertising on their website and would like to know what the monthly or yearly cost would be. Ask them what spaces they have available and whether or not they would be willing to place your ad in a particular area. The closer to the top of the website your ad is, the more clicks you will usually get.

If you get a response from the webmaster with reasonable pricing, I would advise you to go along with their monthly plan for a single month to see how much traffic you can get from their website. Track all the visitors you receive from that website using a service like Google Analytics. If you’re paying $.10 or under per click then chances are you’re doing pretty good. If you have enough money in your ad budget, go ahead and upgrade to their yearly plan. Reasonable pricing for a yearly plan should be half the amount of a monthly plan if you calculate on a month-to-month basis. If their offer isn’t, try to negotiate with the webmaster to get a better deal. As always, make sure the website has been up long enough to where the webmaster won’t consider taking it down. Use a WHOIS site to check to see when their domain was registered and when it expires. You can also check archive.org to see if their website has been up for a while.

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Posted on Friday, 19th December 2008 by Jeff

Unless you have lots of people offering to exchange links with you, you’ll probably have to find your link partners yourself. The best link partners you can have are ones that are optimizing their website for “almost exactly” the same keywords as you’re going for. If you linked out one-way to their website, Google wouldn’t penalize you because they’re considered “useful” and “relevant” sources.

The first thing you need to do is create a page to add all of your partner’s links on. You could link to this from your navigation as “Useful Links” or “Useful Sources”. After you have your links page created, search Google or Yahoo for websites that are optimized for the same keywords you’re going for. Add a link to their website on your link exchange page and write a “unique” description of their website under that. For example, if you wanted my website as a link exchange partner, you could link to me using this link and description:

SiteStartups.com - A Unique Blog For Webmaster Ideas Find useful tips and tricks for succeeding on the internet. The owner of this blog also has a great list of interesting internet ideas you may want to use.

After you’ve done this for a few potential link exchange partners, you should create a new email address for your potential partners to contact you by. Don’t use a mailbox that’s already filled because you may miss some emails. I would recommend you use something like linkpartners@yourdomain.com since it sounds professional.

Go down your list of potential link exchange partners and send them an email stating that you already added a link to their website and that you want to exchange links with them. If you added the link and description I gave you above for my website, you could send me an email that says something like this:

“Dear SiteStartups.com Webmaster,

After analyzing the targeted keywords and quality of your website content, I’ve come to the conclusion that you would make a perfect link exchange parter. I have already added a unique link and description to your website at http://www.mydomain.com/useful-links.html and would kindly like to ask you to do the same. Please email me at linkpartners@mydomain.com after you have added a “unique” link and description to my website. I think this is a great opportunity for both of us to improve our SEO, and would recommend you accept my invitation. If I don’t get a response within 3 days, I will presume that you are not interested in exchanging links and will remove your link from my website.”

If the webmaster decides to exchange links with you, make sure they add your link on a page that will be indexed by Google. Some webmasters will create a page that cannot be accessed from the homepage which makes that link useless. You should also lookout for other sleazy tactics such as linking to your website with the “nofollow” attribute. Make sure to keep track of all your link partners and check your backlinks at least once a month using a reciprocal link checker to see if any of your partners have taken off your website.

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Posted on Friday, 19th December 2008 by Jeff

One of the most overlooked areas in SEO is your website’s compliance with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards. In fact, I was amazed at the number of professional SEO companies that didn’t have a website that was W3C compliant! Some SEO experts will agree that having a website that is W3C compliant helps you rank a little better than websites that aren’t. Others will say that this is more true with Yahoo than it is with Google. So how exactly do you check to see if your website is W3C compliant? The easiest way to do this is to use the validator tool that the World Wide Web Consortium provides for you. This tool will immediately tell you whether or not your website has any errors in the coding. If it doesn’t, you’ll have the privilege of posting a button on your website stating that your website is fully compliant with W3C standards. Chances are, however, your website will have errors even if you completely designed your site using an HTML editor. The easiest way to fix these errors is to hire a coder off a website such as GetAFreelancer.com to fix everything up for you. This shouldn’t cost any more than $20 and you might experience an additional boost in your search engine rankings. Another benefit of being W3C compliant is knowing that most internet browsers will view your website properly. This is a huge problem since your website could look perfect in one browser and screwed up on another.

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Posted on Wednesday, 17th December 2008 by Jeff

You probably already know how important backlinks are for your SEO. One thing you may not already know is that some of your backlinks may not count for your main website. If you submitted your website to Google as http://www.yourdomain.com, then all the backlinks that go back to http://yourdomain won’t count toward your SEO! This is a serious problem that lots of people don’t even know about. The easiest way to make all your backlinks count is to create a 301 Redirect. If your website is setup on an Apache/Linux server, then this can be easily done by adding the following codes in your .htaccess file:

If your website was submitted to Google with WWW in front, then add the following code:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sitestartups\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.sitestartups.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If your website doesn’t have WWW in front, then add the following code:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.sitestartups\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://sitestartups.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Make sure to replace my domain “sitestartups.com” with your own domain name. If the 301 redirect is properly installed, you should be redirected to http://www.yourdomain when you type in http://yourdomain.com. Or if your website doesn’t have WWW in front, when you type in http://www.yourdomain.com you would be redirected to http://yourdomain.com. If your website doesn’t have a .htaccess file, you may download these .htaccess files with the 301 redirect already installed. Choose the .htaccess file that matches up with your domain. Make sure to change “sitestartups.com” using a program such as Notepad and click on “Save”. When that’s done, upload the .htaccess file to your “main directory” and check your url to make sure it’s working. Remember, this only works for websites that are installed on Apache/Linux servers.

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Posted on Friday, 12th December 2008 by Jeff

Wholesale sourcing is one of the biggest secrets on the internet that many people are not willing to reveal. This has provided a HUGE market for wholesale scammers who prey on average people who have no idea what they’re doing. Believe me, I was one of them! If you’re thinking of starting an e-commerce store and need the facts about buying at wholesale, the information at WholesaleDistributorSecret.com should provide you with all the information you need to successfully find TRUE wholesale sources. You can use the wholesale products you buy to start your own successful e-commerce store or to sell on Ebay.

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Posted on Sunday, 30th November 2008 by Jeff

First of all, I want to tell you what the best time of the day is to submit to Digg. To keep the answer to this short and sweet - IT’S IN THE MORNING TIME AROUND 8:00 EST. Why may you ask? I’m not 100% sure but it may be because most people are getting up to go to work, and want to check Digg to see what the hottest news articles are. If you’re like me and don’t care about how many Diggs you get or how many people visit the articles you submitted, then you can submit at any time of the day.

While I haven’t worked that hard at this, the reason why most people get more Diggs than others is either because they get more traffic to their site, or because they have more friends. Honestly, I think having more friends will get you more Diggs than traffic because all your friends are definite members of Digg. Therefore, the more friends you have the better. This is why some people submit an article first and get about 50 Diggs, while another person submits an identical article afterwards and gets hundreds or even thousands of Diggs. If you Digg your friends’ submissions on a regular basis, then they’ll probably return the favor.

Unlike websites like MySpace, when you add somebody as your friend, they automatically become your friend. This makes it very easy for you to get thousands of friends on Digg. If you added 100 friends a day, you would have about 3,000 friends after just 1 month! What I normally do is find submissions that are related to the ones that I normally submit, and that have lots of Diggs. View all the friends of the member who submitted that post and add them as your friends. When you submit an article to Digg and a friend of yours Diggs it, then a unique green ribbon appears in the top, left-hand corner of your Digg button. If you go the the homepage of Digg, you will rarely see a top submission that doesn’t have this. This means that its almost impossible to get to the top without the help of your friends on Digg.

An obvious way to increase your Diggs is to include a Digg button within your articles or on your website. The best Digg buttons are the full-sized ones that keep track of how many Diggs you have. Having a small Digg button like the ones I have on my blog won’t motivate a lot of people to Digg your post. If your website doesn’t already have a widget for this, you can use the ones that Digg provides for you. I would recommend you use the one with your Digg count and a submission option. All you have to do is cut-and-paste this code on the pages you want Digged. Or you can place this on a particular area on your template so you won’t have to manually add it each time.

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Posted in Free Marketing | Comments (0)

Posted on Sunday, 30th November 2008 by Jeff

Even if you’re not a web designer, you can still create a template by hiring a web designer to make it for you. Considering how good the template looks, your initial investment will most likely be worth it in the end. The reason I chose to talk about templates is because they’re much easier and less expensive to make than widgets or software programs. Since the information on a template gets indexed by the search engines, and can be seen by all the visitors to that website, you’ll benefit more than if you created a custom widget or software program.

The first step to creating a free web template that will go viral is to choose which website program or script you want the template designed for. Some good examples would be Wordpress, Vbulletin, and PHP Link Directory. While you can create just a plain HTML or CSS template for anything, you’ll probably benefit more from a template that is made for a particular website program that has been proven successful.

After you’ve chosen the program, you want to find the right web designer for the job who can make you something “unique”. There are many web designers who specialize in making templates for specific scripts. These are the best designers because they already know what they’re doing. Even if a designer is good, they probably won’t know what they’re doing after they have the general design made up. You can also hire somebody separately to cut and install the template if this is the case.

Once you’ve created the template, you want to add your “copyright” and “license’ to the template which outlines the rules that all users have to follow. This is basically just one or two links on the bottom of the template back to the websites of your choice, and a notepad file which states that the user cannot remove these links. If a user really likes your template but doesn’t want to include the links, you can offer an affordable option to remove the branding.

The last thing you’ll have to do is distribute the template to all the major websites which distribute templates for the website program you chose. For example, you could distribute a Wordpress template on sites like wpSkins.org or on the actual Wordpress.org website. You can even contact bloggers who write about free templates to write about yours. If the website program is popular, you won’t have a problem finding website to distribute it for you. The more websites that distribute your template the better. If everything goes well you could expect thousands of free one-way links going back to your websites in your copyright as well as tons of free traffic.

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Posted on Sunday, 30th November 2008 by Jeff

If you’re like me, than chances are you’re the only writer for your blog. But did you know that some of the most popular blogs on the internet have lots of different writers and contributors? One of my favorite blogs to read is TechCrunch.com. While most of the writers for this blog actually work for TechCrunch.com, some of the writers are labeled as “Guest” or “Contributor”. What makes this blog so successful is that it’s actually run like a news media website. Unless you have lots of stuff to write about, getting a few more quality posts in your blog each week could create a lot more repeat visitors. This also gives your blog a more professional image.

You may have already noticed this without thinking if you have a Wordpress blog, but your blog allows you to have multiple users other than the Administrator (yourself). However, you can manually add Editors, Authors, Contributors, or Guest writers to your blog. This allows them to login to their own account but without having the full freedom of an Administrator account. If you want, you can even allow people to submit blog posts by signing up for an account on their own. Just change the “Default Role” of a user to another role other than a subscriber.

Most people won’t want to contribute to your blog unless there’s something in it for them. Therefore, you should allow all the users who contribute to your blog an area, either before or after the post, to give themselves credit for writing the article. They should be able to give themselves a link back to their website, profile, or web address of their choosing. This should motivate them to provide you with better quality posts on a more frequent basis.

You should also be aware of people who will try to sabotage your blog by submitting things they didn’t write. Use the website CopyScape.com to check for repeat content that was submitted to your blog. Not only is this bad for your SEO, but it could get you in some legal trouble if it happens too often.

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Posted on Sunday, 30th November 2008 by Jeff

If you ever tried advertising with Adwords, there’s a good chance you created a text ad since that’s your easiest option. One thing I recently tried using is banner ads to promote my wholesale e-book at WholesaleDistributorSecret.com. I’m actually quite impressed with the results so far. It seems that whenever I get a few clicks, I get a sale. This is despite the fact that I’m not getting as many clicks as I normally get with a text ad. But the “quality” in the traffic seems to be pretty good. Maybe it’s the mindset that the people are in when they click on my ad. Either that or my banner ad clearly describes what my website is about which avoids any confusion as to what my website is about or what its selling. While text ads are always a good option, you might want to run a campaign using banner ads to compare the results.

As I mentioned in my title, I used the Adwords “content network” which is not the same as the search network. These are basically the “Ads By Google” that you see on my site and other websites all over the net. Login to your Adwords account and setup a campaign as you normally would. When creating your ad, click on the link that says “Image Ad” which is right next to “Text Ad”. Upload the banner you want to use for your ad. Google has a clear description of what ad sizes you can use. If your banner is animated GIF or Flash you can use the following “full” sizes:

468 x 60 Banner
728 x 90 Leaderboard
250 x 250 Square
200 x 200 Small Square 336 x 280 Large Rectangle
300 x 250 Medium Rectangle
120 x 600 Skyscraper
160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper

However, if your banner is static or is not animated, you should take off 22 pixels of height off the skyscrapers and 11 pixels of height off all the other banners. When I say “take off”, I mean that you should actually get them designed in these sizes. If you don’t, then your ad will be resized to make room for the “Ads By Google” and web address that appears on the bottom of the ad. Use the following sizes if your ad IS NOT ANIMATED:

468 x 49 Banner
728 x 79 Leaderboard
250 x 239 Square
200 x 189 Small Square 336 x 280 Large Rectangle
300 x 239 Medium Rectangle
120 x 578 Skyscraper
160 x 578 Wide Skyscraper

I would highly recommend you use a well-designed image ad to make a good impression on your visitors. Websites such as BannerMode.com will create an eye-catching animated banner for you for a dirt-cheap price. The fact that the banner is animated will allow your ad to maintain its full size whenever it comes up. But remember, the animation only continues for 30 seconds so you have to make sure that the final frame tells your visitor what your website is about in case they don’t see the ad while the animation is going on.

Another thing I thought I should mention is to use placement-targeted ads as well as keyword-targeted ads. Setup the keyword-targeted ads like you normally would with a text ad. But with the placement-targeted ads, you will only be allowed to advertise on websites that allow the sizes of banners that you have available. Therefore, the more banner sizes you have available, the more placements you will be able to choose from.

As always, don’t get really cheap when bidding on your cost-per-click. The lowest you should bid is $.20 if you want a good amount of traffic. If you bid $.40 or higher you should get enough traffic to keep you happy. If the traffic converts to sales really well, you should bid even higher to “maximize” your sales. Remember, you want to earn as much as possible and sometimes bidding higher is your best option. If you bid higher, chances are you won’t be paying your maximum bid when Google bills you.

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Posted on Saturday, 29th November 2008 by Jeff

If you dream of having your own e-commerce store that receives hundreds of customers a day from all around the world, then you’re not alone. The problem there is that you’ll probably have competitors from all around the world as well. One of the largest untapped internet markets might actually be where you live. The fact that you’re catering to local customers means that you can literally deliver the products directly to their home. Not only will this be beneficial for your customers, but it might actually take a huge burden off you. The chances of a customer not receiving a package or receiving broken merchandise will be completely eliminated.

Marketing to local customers is also a lot easier as well. Almost every potential customer you come across won’t have any problem trusting your business because you’re not that far away from them. You can easily get the word out about your business simply by placing ads in your local flyer or newspaper, or through online classified such as CraigsList.org. Advertising companies such as Google Adwords also have options to where your ads only appear to people that live in a certain area. In fact, you can even get customers by handing out business cards or leaving flyers on the hoods of vehicles. Almost every kind of marketing method that local businesses use can be applied to your internet business.

So you might be asking yourself what kind of products you should carry for your local e-commerce store. Almost every single product you can think of is the best answer to this! The great thing about running a local e-commerce store is that you can carry products that are easily broken during shipment such as glass or ceramic products. If you offer home delivery, some people might order from your store even if they’re not really interested. The fact that there probably isn’t another business like this in your area might catch their interest.

Before starting a business like this, you might want to check with your city to make sure this is kind of business is legal. Some places may not allow your customers to come by your home to pick up their orders. Others might require you to have a storefront. If that’s the case, you can run a local business both online and at the same time have your own storefront. The sky is the limit if you run a local e-commerce store. If this kind of business sounds interesting to you, I would suggest you check it out.

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Posted on Saturday, 29th November 2008 by Jeff

Some of the best internet startups, in my opinion, are ones that are simple but ingenious. The reason I came across this startup was because their web address was stamped on a 1 dollar bill that I got back in change from Burger King. Having no idea what the website was about, I decided to check it out when I got home. To my surprise, it was actually a website that allows you to track where your bills go. Basically, you put a stamp on a bill of your choice that says “WheresGeorge.com” after entering the serial number on the website. Write the serial number down in your Notepad or on a piece of paper for future reference. If the next person who receives the bill visits the website and enters the serial number, they can figure out where the bill was when the last person entered it. If every single person who receives that bill enters it into the website, then you’ll be able to see every single place its traveled over time! Now if you check the bill a few months after you had it, make sure to choose “No” under “Do you have this bill right now?”. If you choose “Yes”, then the system will record that the bill is currently where you’re at which won’t be accurate.

I’m a little uncertain about the legality of marking U.S. currency with a web address. But because the bills are voluntarily marked by individuals and not the website itself, I don’t think anybody can be held liable for this. If you are the person who stamps a bill and puts it back into circulation, only do 2 or 3 bills (preferably 1 dollar bills) to be on the safe side. The fact that 1 dollar bills don’t have any obvious security features means that they’ll stay in circulation much longer. However, some banks might trade marked bills in for newer ones.

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Posted on Saturday, 29th November 2008 by Jeff

I actually asked this question a few weeks ago and got quite a few interesting responses. Overall, most people agreed that one-way irrelevant ads are better than two-way reciprocal ads on websites that are related to yours. Why may you ask did I come up with this conclusion? In my opinion, Google really doesn’t like websites that exchange links. Exchanging links is not a “natural” way to build up your backlinks while building one-way links is more natural. Even if you submitted the link to a website such as a directory, the fact that you don’t have a link going back to that directory helps you out. If you still want to continue exchanging links, don’t do it for SEO purposes. Think of the word “traffic exchange” instead. In other words, make sure that the website you’re exchanging links with is related to yours and is delivering traffic to your website. If they’re placing your link in a directory on their site with a bunch of other websites, then chances are you won’t get a lot of traffic from their site. Unless of course they’re a really busy website who gets hundreds of thousands of visitors a day. Pick your partners wisely and don’t dwell over link exchanges as your sole form of building backlinks. Chances are it might be hurting your SEO more than helping it. Until Google reveals what they think about link exchanges, all we can do is speculate on their answer.

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Posted on Saturday, 29th November 2008 by Jeff

If you’re searching for the finest Wordpress themes that money can buy then I think I found them for you! ElegantThemes.com carries high quality themes for a very reasonable price. For just $19 “a year” you can get access to ALL their themes (they currently have 18). Once you see the quality in these themes you’ll probably want to stay a member for as long as their service is available. In my opinion, each theme is probably worth about $30 a piece. And the fact that they allow you to remove the copyright on the bottom adds even more value to them. If you used a free theme you would have to keep the copyright on the bottom of your theme to abide by the designer’s rules. Therefore, everybody will know that your theme isn’t unique. Even if they didn’t allow this extra benefit, you still wouldn’t find a lot of free themes that match the quality of the ones at ElegantThemes.com. The designers who make these themes are definitely first class designers who probably charge you about $1500 for a custom design. Most of these themes aren’t widely used so in my opinion they’re just as good as a custom design. My advice to you is to get your membership now at this extremely cheap price before they get smart and end up doubling or tripling the price of their membership. Even at that price it would still be a bargain!

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Posted on Saturday, 29th November 2008 by Jeff

Every now and then you’ll startup a website and find that your Adsense Ads don’t perfectly match up with your content. I actually recently had this problem when I launched off a new Wordpress blog. For some odd reason my banner ads were relevant, but my text ads were related to Wordpress and Joomla which isn’t what my site was about. This problem only existed on the homepage. If you’re in this position, there’s one easy solution. Since I always seemed to have problems finding this code, I decided to create this post so I myself can refer back to it for future reference.

Simply place these tags in front and at the end of the text that clearly defines what ads you want on that page. It can be one paragraph or just one keyword. Doesn’t really matter. It may take up to a week or two before your page starts showing relevant ads. However, it usually starts working within a couple of days.

< !– google_ad_section_start –>

< !– google_ad_section_end –>

Visa versa, you can also target a section that you DO NOT want the Adsense system to factor in when generating your ads. I would recommend you use the other tags but you might want to try these tags out if you think they’re more appropriate.

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

<!– google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) –>

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Posted on Saturday, 22nd November 2008 by Jeff

One question that many new affiliate marketers ask is whether they should promote affiliate programs that pay you for getting people to fill out a simple form or programs that pay you to get somebody to actually buy something. While getting somebody to fill out a form is a lot easier, it isn’t necessarily always better. The fact of the matter is that there is no simple answer to this question. There are some pay-per-sale programs out there that convert fairly well. On the other hand, there are programs out there that pay extremely good commissions ($3.00 or more) just to get somebody to fill out a form for something they actually want. You might even decide to sign-up yourself! The best thing you can do is explore your options. Join as many affiliate networks as you can and see what companies are offering. Every now and then you’ll come across affiliate programs that have a lot of potential and aren’t widely promoted.

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Posted on Saturday, 22nd November 2008 by Jeff

The great thing about starting a website is that you don’t need a huge, complex website to attract visitors. Some of the simplest websites attract millions of visitors a day. For example, one tool that I use quite often is TinyUrl.com which is one of the busiest websites on the internet. Another tool I like to use is an image host at ImageShack.us. If you check around the internet there are probably hundreds of image hosts just like it that are doing fairly well. The fact that one tool isn’t necessarily better than another makes this an open playing field for anybody who would like to startup a website like it. Since the website is a tool, nobody really knows how many people are using it. Unlike a dating website or social network, you don’t need a lot of people to get it to work. If you want to startup a website like the two I just showed you, you can visit HotScripts.com to see what’s available out there. There are actually quite a few free scripts out there since these tools are fairly simple for a coder to come up with. For example, I just found this free image hosting script at Scripteen.com.

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Posted on Thursday, 20th November 2008 by Jeff

One idea that I always thought was ridiculous was starting your own Ebay-like auction website. I know, the idea sounds pretty exciting if you’re entirely to the concept. However, if you are familiarized with it, you probably know that getting your own auction website to workout is almost IMPOSSIBLE. First of all, too many people are trying to do this. There are probably almost 100 auction scripts out there for you to choose from that has Ebay-like features. This makes it very easy for the average Joe to setup their own auction website. Secondly, why would anybody want to sell on your website when it has no credibility and probably barely any traffic?

Well, maybe your auction covers a certain niche that none of these other auction sites cover. It’s still very hard to workout even if you use a niche! The only time I would startup a niche auction site is if I already had the traffic. Let’s say you owned a blog about building custom PCs that got 25,000 unique visitors a month. If you cross-promoted a free auction website for selling PC parts, you might get enough people who are motived to post their items for sale. You can also add catchy phrases on your auction site such as “Get Your Items Seen By 25,000 PC Builders A Month For FREE!”. If everything works out you might even be able to charge people in the future.

This is the only scenario that I think would work with starting an auction website. Anything else is just a dream that probably won’t materialize. Especially if you’re using a popular auction script and running the business out of you bedroom.

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Posted on Thursday, 20th November 2008 by Jeff

I just acquired this list of forums that allow dofollow signatures. They also allow you to advertise your website through your signature which some forums don’t. Just make sure to contribute to the forums in a professional manner and never try to “spam” a forum. If you don’t have an interest in the forum then don’t join it. It’s hard to create a conversation about something you know absolutely nothing about.

1. 5Star Affiliate Forum -One of the top affiliate marketing forums on the internet
2. Ableton - A forum that has to do with audio and musical topics.
3. Abestweb - An affiliate marketing forum where you can ask questions and discuss various topics on the subject
4. Abundance - A place for you to post FREE advertisements
5. Addicsports -Discuss various sports in this sports forum
6. Affiliateseeking.com -Talk about affiliate marketing and various webmaster topics
7. Acorn Domains - A well-known community among people who own domains with the .uk extension. Discuss domains or post your domain for sale
8. Admin Zone Forums - A community mainly for people who run discussion forums
9. Adult Webmaster Info - Do you own an adult website? Then this community is for you
10. Affiliates4U - Forum for people interested in affiliate marketing in the UK
11. Allcoolforums - General discussion forum for all kinds of topics
12. AMD Forums - Does your computer run on an AMD processor? Do you like building computers with AMD processors? Ask and discuss your questions here
13. Baseballtalkpro - A forum mainly for people interested in basketball
14. Blogger Forum - Blogging has become a favorite pastime for internet users. Discuss blogging here
15. Blogger Talk - Another forum for blogging enthusiasts
16. Business Forum - Interested in business? This forum is for you!
17. BZ Image - Various topic discussions on the subject of web design
18. Capital Theory - For anyone interested in making or managing their money
19. Clickbank Success - Clickbank is one of the top affiliate networks on the net. Join this forum if you’re a member of Clickbank
20. Clicks Forum - Learn how to market your business on the internet
21. Cnet Forums - Forum for technical tips about various types of software, gadgets, and other related topics
22. Code4gold - Yet another forum for webmasters
23. Comic Book Resources - Interested in comic books? Talk about this subject with other collectors just like you
24. David Castle -A UK forum where you can talk about SEO
25. Deviantart - The largest art forum on the internet
26. DDBoard - Discuss various kind of domain names with different extensions
27. Digitalppoint - One of the busiest webmaster forums on the internet
28. DirectoryJunction - A brand new forum for webmaster discussions
29. Discuss Names - Another dofollow domain names discussion forum.
30. DN Forum - Post your domain name for sale, get free apparaisals, or simply discuss domain names
31. DN Lodge - Another domain name forums
32. DN Scoop -Talk about domain names and other topics for webmasters
33. Domain Name Forums -A typical domain name forum like all the rest
34. Dreamteam Money Forum - A forum for people interested in make money
35. Ecauldron - A community for Pagans
36. Egadforum - A general chat community
37. Ewealth.com - Growing community for webmasters
38. Filesharingtalk - File sharing talk and disucssions
39. Free Ad Forum -Another forum where you can post free ads
40. Free Advertising Forum - Post unlimited free ads at not cost
41. Freewebspace - A community for people looking for free web hosting offers
42. Fogengine - Talk about search engines, SEO, and all that good stuff
43. Geek Village - A smaller but popular webmaster forum
44. Gento Forum -Talk about programming and other technical subjects
45. Golden Talk - For people interested in high-yield investments
46. Googlecommunity - This forum covers every subject about the Google search engine and their services
47. GPT Boycott Forums - Forum for get-paid-to opportunities
48. Hablarmierda - A general Spanish talking forum
49. Harmony Central - A favorite online forum among musicians
50. Hit Tail - Real ways to get traffic to your website
51. Hot4s Online Forum - Australian forum to talk about cars and motors
52. Hotsurfs - Discuss ways to make money with auto-surfing
53. HTML Forums - Forum for webmaster who own websites built using HTML
54. HYIPs Talk - Another high-yield investment forum
55. IDN Forums - One of the many forums for domain name owners
56. Intel Forums - Community for Intel software developers
57. Im4newbies - Are you a newbie to affiliate marketing. Learn all the basics here
58. Internet Marketing for Business - Just another SEO and webmaster forum
59. IQ 69 - Webmaster talk for everyone
60. Iwebtool - Discuss various webmaster tools
61. Lex224 - Forum for computers and various computer games
62. Live Journal - Forum for Live Journal users
63. Microsoft Forum - The office support forum for Microsoft users
64. Money Maker Group - Forum that mainly focuses on HYIP’s.
65. Movie Lists - Talk about movies and show business
66. Moneyfanclub -Chat about HYIP’s and auto-surfing
67. Mygamebuilder -Yet another gaming forum
68. MySQL Forum - Chat about the popular MySQL database
69. Namepros.com - One of the most popular domain name forums
70. Online Books Club - For people who are interested in books and reading
71. Oracle Forums - A support forum for Oracle databases and support
72. Paganforum - Religious pagan forum
73. Payment Processing - Talk about various payment processing companies including Paypal
74. PhpBB Forum - A Support forum for people who run PhpBB forums
75. PokerBRB Forum - Like to play poker? Discuss it here
76. Revenue Source - For affiliate marketer and SEO
77. Search Engine Forums - Not another SEO forum!
78. Search Engine Roundtabe - Talk about Search Engines and SEO
79. SEO Chat - Your typical SEO forum
80. SEOForum - This SEO forum is for Australians!
81. SEO.com Forum - SEO forum for all discussions on the topic
82. SEO Guy - Need advice on SEO? Then ask the SEO guy!
83. Sidetalks - General forum to chat about anything
84. Simplemachines - For people who use the Simple Machine Forum software to run their forum
85. Siteowners - Another forum for people who own websites
86. Sitepoint - The biggest webmaster forum on the entire internet.
87. Sitesell Forum - A community for SiteSell members
88. Small Business Forum - One of the popular discussion forums for small business owners
89. Startups - Looking for startup a business? Then this is your forum
90. Static-Subs - Talk about anime characters
91. Submitexpress -Discussion board for all search engines
92. Talkfreelance.com - Are you a freelancer? This forum is for all freelancers
93. Tattoo - Tattoos are awesome! Discuss them here
94. Textpattern - Support forums for text pattern
95. The Free Ad Forum - One of those forums for posting unlimited FREE ads
96. The Green Nation - A typical HYIP forum
97. The V7 - A growing webmaster forum
98. TheHYIPforum - HYIP forum for all subjects about HYIP
99. TriPHP Webmaster Forums - Doesn’t matter what your experience level is. All webmasters are welcome here.
100. Ubuntu Technical Forum - Technical talk and personal computer related talk
101. W3SEO -We just can’t get enough of these SEO forums
102. Warrior Forums - Talk about internet marketing and copyrighting
103. Webdegity -Your webmaster forum for all your webmaster needs
104. Web Design Forums -Talk about web design
105. Web Developer -For programmers and web designers to exchange ideas and discuss topics
106. Webicy -Webmaster forum
107. Web Life - Talk about e-gold and stuff like that
108. Webhosting Canada - Interested in web hosting in Canada?
109. Webhosting Talk - The most popular forum for web hosting discussions
110. Webmaster Forums Online - Not another webmaster forum!
111. Webmasters Help - Webmaster help and discussions
112. Webmaster-talk - A populated forum for webmasters
113. Webproworld - A website for professionals in the e-business world
114. Webtalkforums -Talk about everything related to doing business on the web
115. Windows Forum - Forum for Windows users
116. Winamp - Support forum for Winamp users
117. Work at Home Moms - Are you a work at home mom or want to work at home?
118. Work-at-Home Moms - Another work at home mom forum
119. World of Warcraft - Forum to talk about World of Warcraft and other games like it
120. Xandros - The place to take about Xandros software

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Posted on Thursday, 20th November 2008 by Jeff

The top way to easily get a bunch of one-way links to your website is through directory submissions. While there are many directories out there, most of them will require a reciprocal link for submission. Unless the directory is a “niche directory”, this could be bad for your SEO. Therefore, the only “general” directories you should submit to are ones that don’t require a reciprocal link. While there are many lists out there, the granddaddy of them all is at DirectoryCritic.com. This is probably the biggest list of FREE one-way link directories on the internet. If you do 25 submissions a day (not that hard), it should take a couple of months to get everything done. Despite what people normally tell you about directory submissions, it’s okay to submit to several directories a day. Some directories will approve your website immediately while others may take one or two month. It really depends on whether or not the webmaster keeps up with everything. Therefore, you won’t build up your backlinks to rapidly which isn’t a good thing in Google’s eyes.

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Posted on Thursday, 20th November 2008 by Jeff

Ever since I started setting up websites on the internet, I heard about Bravenet.com but I never actually tried it. If you’re like me, you could be missing out on a real treat! There website offers a FREE assortment of various webmaster tools, templates, and more! They’re even offering a FREE basic version of SitePal which allows you to place a talking character on your website with the message of your choice. The tool I’m currently trying out right now is their mailing list manager. This tool lets you add a subscription form on your website to build a mailing list. Includes all the features that you normally find in a premium service. Again, their basic services are free so you have absolutely nothing to lose so sign-up now.

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Posted on Thursday, 20th November 2008 by Jeff

Despite the fact that there are many search engines out there, the only ones you have to worry about submitting to are the top ones. This includes Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, and MSN Search (includes Live.com). Submitting only takes a couple of minutes and if your website is properly optimized you should get a good amount of traffic. Here are the links for submitting to each search engine.

Google Submit

http://www.google.com/addurl

Yahoo Submit

http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

Ask.com

In order to submit to Ask.com you will need a sitemap. If your website doesn’t currently have a sitemap, you can create one using a site like XML-sitemaps.com. Add the link to your sitemap in the following url where it says “www.yoursite/sitemap.xml”.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yoursite/sitemap.xml

MSN Search

http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx

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Posted on Wednesday, 10th September 2008 by Jeff

I know it’s been well over a week since I’ve written in my blog so I thought it was about time to get another post out there. After logging in to my Wordpress administrator panel the first thing I noticed was how many comments I had. After checking each comment individually I noticed that almost every comment I received was SPAM! Can’t these idiots figure out a better way to market their websites besides trying to comment spam every single blog they come across! Not to mention most of their spam comments are either blocked by Askimet or are automatically deleted by the blog owner. It makes you wonder whether these idiots are actually earning any money. The reasons I believe why most of these “spammers” resort to these techniques is either because they’re lazy or simply because they can’t figure out a way get to traffic to their website without doing this. If you’re one of these people my advice is to look back on the “basics”. Start writing articles, marketing through forums, creating viral videos or e-books, put your website links in your forums signatures, and so on. It’s not as hard as it seems people! If you’re a frustrated spammer and need some one-on-one advice feel free to email me and I’ll give you some. Just don’t spam up my blog because I’m not going to accept your ridiculous comments!

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Posted on Sunday, 31st August 2008 by Jeff

When starting an e-commerce store the first word that should come to your mind is “TRUST”. Will people trust your e-commerce store enough to make a purchase? What most people don’t understand is that low prices alone does not constitute TRUST. You need to go “all out” when starting an e-commerce store and should NEVER cut corners.

Your E-commerce Store’s Design

The first thing somebody will notice when visiting your store is your website’s design. Does your design’s theme match up with your product line? Does it give people the impression that you’re a legitimate company? If it doesn’t, then you should definitely consider a re-design. Go to a website such as Guru.com and hire a professional web design company or freelancer to give your e-commerce store a makeover. While this may cost you up to $2500, it should be worth every penny in the end.

Professional Customer Service

One thing every e-commerce store should have is a toll free number. Unless you run your store off Ebay, this is extremely important because it gives you a “big business” image. When people call your toll-free number they should be greeted in a professional manner starting with your business’s name. If your name was Tom and your store was called CheapestGolfClubs.com, you could greet them with something like, “Thank you for calling Cheapest Golf Clubs. This is Tom speaking, what can I do for you?”. If a customer calls around hours when you’re not available, they should be greeted with a professional voice mail service to take their message. Other forms of customer service you should consider are Live Chat and basic email. However, most people will contact you over the phone to make sure your company is legitimate. Especially if they’ve never purchased from you.

Website Reviews

When somebody is unsure whether they should purchase from you, they often search the internet to see what other people are saying about your business. Not having any customer reviews is just as bad as having lots of bad reviews. Get your e-commerce store listed on several “review” websites such as ReviewPage.com and ask some of your customers to leave a good review. You should also have “customer testimonials” on your main website for potential customers to read. This will usually build enough confidence in some people to make the purchase.

Low-Price Guarantee

Even though price isn’t everything, it certainly is an important factor when making a sale. Even with superior customer service, people will often compare your prices with the prices of your competitors. Having a “low-price guarantee” is the best way to keep people on your e-commerce store. You can also offer to match the price of any competitor even if it means making very little profit. Remember, your goal as online retailer is to build up your customer base and to get your customers to spread the word about your online business. More customers increases “word-of-mouth” which can lead to a successful viral marketing campaign.

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Posted on Saturday, 30th August 2008 by Jeff

Link exchanges can be a real hassle especially if you don’t have the time to do it. One of the easiest ways I’ve found to exchange links with other websites is to use a script such as Link Station Pro to do the work for you. This script completely automates the process for you and allows you to concentrate your efforts elsewhere. Basically, a potential link partner submits their website and adds your link on their website. The system can be setup to where it verifies that the link is on your reciprocal partners site and includes their website if it is. If you find that one of your link partners doesn’t have a relevant website you can easily delete their link through the administrator panel. One feature that you might find really useful is the system’s ability to trawl over all your link partner’s using spiders to validate that none of your partners have removed your link and sends back a report to you. Since it only sends you back a report, you can manually verify that some of your partners aren’t simply having downtime. If this link exchange script sounds interesting to you, I would advise you to download it now because it’s available for FREE for a limited time only.

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Posted on Thursday, 28th August 2008 by Jeff

After visiting my local Walmart, I was pretty surprised to learn that Walmart now sells Dell XPS computer systems. In case you didn’t know, XPS is Dell’s “top-of-the-line” brand that is widely used by many professionals around the world. The latest “complete” Dell XPS system is the 420-105W which includes impressive features such as 3 GB of DDR2 Memory (crucial for Windows Vista Premium) and a ATI Radeon HD 2400PRO graphics card for top-quality graphics. If you buy this computer from Walmart.com, you can get FREE site-to-store shipping and you may even be exempt from paying sales tax. Did I also mention that this system would cost you hundreds more if you bought it directly from Dell?

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Posted on Wednesday, 27th August 2008 by Jeff

Those of you who already know what a search engine friendly URL are probably thinking this is a pretty stupid question. But I’m sure many of you have no idea what a search engine friendly URL is or have maybe looked over the importance of them. Basically, a search engine friendly URL is a URL with “keywords” in it. When somebody searches Google for a certain keyword or phrase, Google searches your main website as well as your URL to see if you have those keywords in it. If your URL does have those keywords then Google will bold the keywords in your URL and will take that into account when deciding your search position.

So how exactly do you make your URLs search engine friendly? If your website is “static” or HTML, then this is quite simple. Simply save your .html files using the keywords you’re going for. For example, let’s say you created a web page on “How To Wash Your Dog”. After optimizing your web page using the techniques I talked about in previous posts, you could save it as “how-to-wash-your-dog.html“. This will appears as “yourdomain.com/how-to-wash-your-dog.html” considering the file is in the main directory. The reason why you should use dashes is because Google may think of it as one word if you don’t.

If your website is “dynamic” such as a PHP website, then there’s a good chance your website may not be generating search engine friendly URLs. For some odd reason many coders who design these scripts don’t take SEO into account when creating them. If your script is generating a URL such as yourdomain.com/show.php?fid=4, then chances are you’ll probably need to hire somebody off a website such as GetAFreelancer.com to set your website to generate search engine friendly URLs. Make sure they set your website to generate URLs with dashes between the keywords. Some dynamic websites such as Wordpress blogs already have this option but simply need to be changed in the configuration area. I currently have my blog set to generate the “post name” within the URL. If I wanted to, I could even change my URL to have “custom” keywords that aren’t in the post name!

Simply having keywords in your URL can help improve your position in the search engines and adds extra brownie points toward getting the #1 position. Remember, SEO is a game to see who can do the best job at showing the search engines how “relevant” your website is for specific keywords. Small factors such as your URL or page title can really make a difference if used together.

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Posted on Tuesday, 26th August 2008 by Jeff

Out of all the banner design services I’ve tried, one of the companies that definitely stands out is Banner Mode. Their prices range from $8 to $25 for work that is stunning and is sure to catch your visitors’ eyes. For their “dirt cheap” prices you also get your choice between static or animated. I always choose animated since they seem to deliver the best results. Other quality services they offer are peel away ads and sales page design for ebooks.

So why exactly would you ever need to hire a banner design company? One reason I’ve hired this company in the past was to design banners for my affiliate program for one of my e-books. Some people even get custom banners designed because they don’t like the banner provided by a certain affiliate program. Banners can also come in handy if you want to advertise various parts of your website. An example of this can be seen on ola.com. If you click on their banners to the right of their homepage you’ll probably notice that they actually link to another part of their site. If you’re serious about internet business there’s a good chance you’ll eventually need to hire a company for these services. I would suggest you keep Banner Mode in the back of your mind for future reference.

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Posted on Monday, 25th August 2008 by Jeff

Most people that are new to affiliate marketing wonder what the best way is to promote an affiliate program. Should you refer your visitors directly to your affiliate link or should you use a “landing page” to try and sell your visitor before referring them to the main affiliate link? There are two different types of affiliate landing pages in general - those with content and those with little or no content. Landing pages without content are usually used to refer a customer to the areas of your choice and/or to mask the fact that you’re promoting an affiliate program. Many of these landing pages are a simple web page with a few details about the product or service. You can purchase this kind of landing page at LPVault.com. This kind of landing page works great if the product or service sells itself or is “self-explanatory”. However, if the affiliate program you’re trying to promote needs a little extra work to sell the customer your best bet is probably to use a sales page. Sales pages are commonly used to promote digital products but can also be applied to promoting affiliate programs. Basically, what you’re doing is writing a sales page which includes images of the product, and every reason why you feel the visitor would want to buy the product. At the end of the sales page you can include a “payment” link which is actually your affiliate link. Hopefully, by the time the visitor clicks on that link they’re already sold on the product and are ready to purchase. The thing I love about sales pages is that they’re “content-rich” which can help you get more visitors from the search engines as well as improve your “quality-score” if you’re using Adwords. You can also use other sales techniques such as pop-ups or exit pop-ups that are commonly used to sell digital products.

If you’re thinking of using a sales page to promote affiliate programs, I would advise you to hire an experienced sales page designer to get the job done right. Include images of the product you’re trying to promote in the header image of the sales page to make it look more professional. Use a catchy headline to hook your customer onto the page, and tweak your sales page until you feel it’s just right. Considering the market isn’t overly saturated, you should do fairly well using this affiliate marketing technique.

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Posted on Friday, 22nd August 2008 by Jeff

I was just getting ready to create a posting about my online rental idea, but what I didn’t know is that somebody already launched off a marketplace with a similar concept. Zilok.com is a San Francisco, California startup that was launched off recently and is supposed to revolutionize the way you rent things. Like Ebay, you simply post things that you want to rent out to other people at a set price. Everything from a basketball to a Bently Continental can be rented off this online rental marketplace. If you find an item you want to rent, all you have to do is purchase the rental off Zilok.com and drive over to the person’s house to pick up the item. Each listing comes with a map on the bottom which tells you exactly where the item is located before you rent it. Some items might require a deposit prior to renting for security purposes which I feel is fair on both ends of the deal.

While this is a new startup, it seems to being doing fairly well for its age. The design of the website looks great and gives you the feeling of a marketplace you can “trust”. This site was also considered one of the Top Websites Of 2008 by PC Magazine. I’m really hoping this website works out because I feel like there’s definitely a market for this sort of thing. With enough publicity and the right marketing strategy we could very well be looking at the next great online marketplace! Did I mention it’s FREE to list your items?

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Posted on Friday, 22nd August 2008 by Jeff

Most people think that backlinks are simply backlinks. Your most useful ones are “supposedly” on websites with high PR and that are relevant to your website. What most people don’t even consider is what their backlinks are actually telling the search engines. In one of my previous posts I explained the basic concept of optimizing your website for the search engines. After you’ve optimized a page of your website for 5 to 10 keywords, you can “further optimize” your website by using the keywords you’re going for in your backlinks. Too many people don’t think of this and end up building backlinks that either say their website address or something other than the keywords they’re going for. For example, if you started a free dating website called TonsOfWorms.com and submitted your website to online directories using the title “Ton Of Worms”, you would be optimizing your website for that phrase. A better title would actually be something like “Tons Of Worms - A 100% Free Dating Website” or simply “A 100% Free Dating Website”. Since your title is usually the link in online directories, you would be optimizing your website for the keywords free dating, free dating website, 100% free dating, and 100% free dating website simply by using that title. That’s not to say that a backlink that says “Tons Of Woms” won’t help out your website. I’m just saying that search engines such as Google seem to look more highly at backlinks that tell them what your website is about.

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Posted on Thursday, 21st August 2008 by Jeff

According to a card I received in the mail today, Commission Junction is having some serious legal problems. Allegedly, their system has allowed commissions to be hijacked or stolen which ultimately lead to lost commissions for both advertisers and publishers. The official hearing starts January, 2009 and they’re supposedly going to pool out $1,000,000 to all of its members or old members that could have been effected. The affiliates who earn the most will most likely get the highest payouts.

So what’s my opinion on this whole thing? I honestly don’t think a lot of it to be honest with you. I’ve been a CJ affiliate for quite some time now and currently run their ads on SiteStartups.com. I’ve always felt that they’ve been honest with me and paid out the amounts they owe. The reason why people are going after them is because they’re one of the best affiliate networks on the internet and are the most popular. I think the problems they’re experiencing right now can be found in some other popular affiliate networks but are simply covered up. In fact, some other affiliate networks “purposely” scam their affiliates and keep their commissions while charging their clients for the sale. If you’re thinking of pulling their ads off your website I would advise you to think twice about that. Chances are these problems have only effected a very small percentage of their affiliates, and you’ll only be hurting yourself if you do so. Unless there’s solid evidence that these problems have effected a significant amount of members I’m going to stay a loyal CJ affiliate.

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Posted on Thursday, 21st August 2008 by Jeff

If you’re searching for the perfect e-commerce shopping cart I would recommend you look no further than CS-Cart. While it may be a little pricey for the average person, this cart comes with every feature you need to start a successful e-commerce store. One of the most crucial features is an affiliate program built right into the shopping cart. This allows you to run your own in-house affiliate program without having to hire some expensive service to do it for you. Another cool feature you might like allows your customers to purchase gift certificates for friends and relatives. You “rarely” see this feature on most shopping carts. The look and feel of the cart is highly customizable, but if you can’t hire a web designer, the “default” templates they give you are some of the best in the market. To add onto these features, this cart runs off PHP which simplifies the process of setting the cart up and customizing it. Unlike some shopping carts, the creators of this great piece of software give you all the source code for custom upgrades.

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Posted on Monday, 18th August 2008 by Jeff

A few weeks ago somebody posted on a forum warning people about a Google Pagerank scam that’s going around. Basically, some people have figured out how to hack the Google Pagerank tool on your browser to where the PR is higher than it actually is. After the scammer sets up a few websites with fake PR, they’ll find people with related websites and offer them a link on their homepage for a special price. After you’ve paid them the amount their asking for, they’ll take your hard-earned money and include your link on websites that are actually a PR0 or PR1. By the time you’ve figured out the scam it may be too late to get your money back.

If you’re somebody who is trying to build up your Pagerank, this might be something you would go for. Honestly, I don’t approve of buying links to increase your PR and feel that it really doesn’t help out your website. Building your PR should come naturally over a period of time. However, this scam can also be used to get you to exchange links with a supposed high PR website. To prevent this from ever happening to you, you should always check a website’s PR by using a reliable tool such as PRchecker.info. If if the tool on your browser is hacked. this tool will show you a website’s “real” Pagerank which is impossible to fake.

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Posted on Monday, 18th August 2008 by Jeff

One marketing technique that I believe should be more widely used is the usage of “Tell A Friend” scripts or forms. Websites such as myspace.com have proven that this simple tool is an effective way to virally market your website. Just imagine if every visitor to your website referred an average of 10 of their friends or online acquaintances! And chances are those people will refer other people that the original referrer didn’t. You know what they say - “People know people who know other people”. So you may be asking how exactly do you add a “Tell A Friend” form to your website. If you have a Wordpress blog you can use the one I just added to my blog. However, I don’t like the fact that you can only refer one friend at a time so maybe one of you guys can recommend a better one for Wordpress. One of the scripts that I found really interesting is called Get My Contacts. This scripts allows your visitors to refer every single contact they have through services such as Hotmail or Yahoo. According to their website, the average internet user has around 30-150 contacts which is huge! The fact that this script can automatically detect a user’s contacts increase your chances of getting more referrals. Another script you might want to consider is called Kmita Tell Friend. This is your more traditional kind of form which allows you to refer more than one friend at a time and also has a captcha to prevent anyone from abusing this feature. When choosing a form, you need to consider how well that form can be implemented into your website. The best place to add the form in my opinion would be on your sign-up form. Since the user is already filling out a form they’re more likely to take the time to refer some people they know. This would work great for websites that are membership-based such as online discussion forums. If used correctly, the sky is the limit for your website!

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Posted on Saturday, 16th August 2008 by Jeff

Don’t you just hate it when you join somebody’s opt-in list expecting to get useful information but instead all you get is tons of SPAM!!?? The reason why most people fail at email marketing is because they don’t do it correctly. They want to get straight to the promotions before they’ve built up a loyal subscriber base. What I mean by “loyal” is that the subscribers on their list are actually reading their emails. In a sense email marketing is almost like blogging. You wouldn’t write a blog that is strictly to promote affiliate programs or other people’s products would you? If you did, nobody would come back to read your blog after the first time. In order to build a loyal subscriber base you need to feed your subscribers tons of useful information that they could use in a timely manner. For every 5 to 10 useful emails you could send out 1 useful promotion that is relevant to the subject of your emails. This promotion could be your own product or somebody else’s product (affilaite programs, solo ads, etc.). Remember, email marketing is all about building your subscribers’ trust. The more they trust you the more successful you will be.

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Posted on Saturday, 16th August 2008 by Jeff

I think the answer to this question really depends on how you go about it. So how do you market through Yahoo Answers without being flagged as a spammer? By answering questions that are “relevant” to your website and by ONLY including your website address in the correct area. The first step to marketing on Yahoo Answers is to find questions that are “Open” and are still accepting answers. Go to the Advanced link next to the Search box and type in your search criteria. Make sure to check Open Questions. If you owned an e-commerce store selling healthy dog treats you could search for terms like “dog treats” or “healthy dog” to find questions that are relevant to your website. For each question you answer offer a unique and comprehensive answer to their question. Even if the question is similar to the previous one you answered you should never give them the exact same response. In the “What’s your source?” box include a link to your website including the http:// in front so your website address shows up as a link that people can click on. Only include your website address and don’t add any other details to make it look like an ad. Preview your answer before submitting it and make sure your website address is correct. I usually like to cut-and-paste my website address so I know for a fact that it’s correct. If you do everything correctly you probably won’t get flagged for spam. In fact, you’ll probably receive lots of FREE targeted visitors to your website for just a few minutes of your time!

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Posted on Friday, 15th August 2008 by Jeff

While I wouldn’t call myself an SEO expert, I’m knowledgeable about most of the basic SEO techniques. When I look at some other people’s websites it almost makes me sick to my stomach to see how bad their SEO is. Some of these website would probably get 10 times as much traffic as they currently do from the search engines if they simply changed a few things on their website. Search Engine Optimization is actually quite simple and can do wonders for your website if you use it properly. Therefore, we’re just going to go down a list of a few of the important basics to see how your website is really doing. I’m sure some of you will realize that you’ve been doing this wrong the whole time.

Proper Keyword Research

Most people’s version of keyword research is randomly coming up with keywords off the top of their head starting with the most competitive ones. While I think it would be awesome to rank in the top 10 for a keyword that gets 200,000 searches a day, it’s just not going to happen overnight. In fact, some of the best SEO experts in the world would have a hard time doing it. Therefore, the smartest thing to do is to go for 5 to 10 keywords that get about 50 to 1,000 searches a day. I usually go for 5 because it’s a lot easier to concentrate on just those keywords. Remember, even keywords that have lower search counts can be difficult to get if the market is saturated. Go to Keyword Discovery and type in the “general keywords” that are related to your website. Unless those keywords have 1,000 searches or less a day you shouldn’t even bother going for them. Let’s say I owned a web design company and I wanted to optimize your website for 5 keywords with the word “web design”. After typing that word into the keyword tool I decide to go for the keywords web site design development, design web pages, web design service, custom web site design, and professional web design. While I could go for more keywords, search engines such as Google looks more highly at websites that knows which keywords they’re going for. Some people like to “keyword spam” their website as an attempt to come up in more searches. Chances are they’re hurting their website a lot more than they’re helping it.

Properly optimize your titles and meta content

What amazes me is how many website don’t even use meta tags on their web pages! Some people have been passing the word around that search enginse don’t even use meta tags which is a bunch of bull crap! I know for a fact that Google uses meta tags so I believe they’re extremely important to tell Google which keywords you want to go for. Using the keyword example I just gave you, I will give you an example of how to optimize your meta content and title for these keywords. You want to be able to create all the keywords you’re going for out of this content.

<title>Custom Web Site Development Service. We Design Professional Web Pages</title>

<meta name=“description” content=“Are you searching for a custom web site design development service that can fulfill your every need? Our professional web design service will design web pages that will meet your expectations.” />

<meta name=“keywords” content=“web site design development, design web pages, web design service, custom web site design, professional web design” />

Now take the time to closely analyze what I’ve done here. Look at the page title I created as well as the keywords I’ve chosen. You should be able to create all 5 key phrases I’ve chosen using the title I have. It doesn’t really matter if the words that make up the phrase are in the same order. Just as long as the “indivdiual” words that make up the phrase are there. The title is also less than 70 characters which follows the correct seo guidelines we are taught. Anything more than that is too much and will often be cut off short by some search engines.

The next thing you should look at is the meta description I created. You meta description should be no longer than 160 characters. Like my page title you can also make each of my key phrases out of the description. Your meta description is actually the description that will appear in Google so it’s very important to make it catchy so more people will click on your link. Remember how I suggested in an earlier post that perhaps Google uses CTR (click through rate) as a factor when determining your position.? Treat your description like an advertisement and you should get a few more visitors through the search engines.

Properly optimize your main content

Even if you have the first step correct you should never overlook the optimization for your main content. This is a step that most people (including myself) often overlook. Like your title and description, you should also have each of your keywords in the content of your website at least one time. If possible add it 2 or 3 times for even better optimization. The keywords should go into your content naturally and should not be “keyword spammed”. Some people like to add a list of keywords at the bottom of their page which will probably get your website at the bottom of the SERPS (search engine results pages) or even kicked off Google! A controversial technique that I sometimes use is to actually bold each keyword. I’ve used this technique for a few of my websites and it actually seems to help.

Optimize each of your pages

Maybe I forgot to mention that each of your web pages needs to be treated like an individual website. Do proper keyword research and use unique keywords, meta descriptions, and titles for each of your pages. While most of your SEO efforts will probably be going toward your homepage, you should never neglect or underestimate the SEO advantage of your other pages as well. In fact, over half the traffic on some of my websites comes from web pages other than my homepage!

Analyze your competition

Using the information I just gave you, you might want to check Google to see who you’re up against. Type in each of the keywords you’ve chosen and see what the website in the #1 position has done to get there. Check their titles, meta descriptions, and content to see if they’ve properly optimized their website specifically for the keyword you’re going for. If not, then it’s probably going to be a lot easier to get in the top 10. While on-site optimization isn’t everything that’s involved in SEO, it certainly does help out a lot!

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Posted on Thursday, 14th August 2008 by Jeff

One problem that most people have when using Google Adwords is maintaining their CTR and getting a good return on their advertising dollar. Without a good CTR your minimum bid will usually cost $1.00 or more which is a complete waste of money in my opinion. Some Adwords experts will tell you otherwise but chances are they’re not factoring in your conversion rate. The key to maintaining a good CTR to get you $.10 to $.20 clicks really has to do with “niche keywords”. When somebody types in a niche keyword or phrase they’re looking for something specific which has huge benefits on your part. Not only is it possible to get a lower cost-per-click, but you’re also generating more targeted traffic than you usually would if you chose the general keywords.

The first thing you need to do is find niche keywords that people are actually searching for. Most people use the Adwords Keyword Tool when choosing their keywords and basically just load them in by the hundreds into one ad group which is an improper technique. I feel that the best way to choose your keywords is to actually use a tool such as Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker that estimates how many people are actually searching for that keyword on a daily basis if any. Find up to 50 niche keywords that people are searching for that you can relate to certain parts of your website. Let’s say I started a website selling Honda parts and you carried items such as exhaust kits, body kits, and spoilers. Niche keywords that I can use are honda exhaust kit, honda body kit, and honda spoilers. If I had parts for specific Honda models, brands of parts, or part models that people are searching for I could also use various keywords relating to those which would be even more targeted. The deeper your niche is the better the conversion rate.

Login to your Adwords account and create your campaign for your Honda parts shop. Now here’s the secret that most people don’t even consider. When setting up your campaign use 1 ad group for each of your keywords. You’re probably wondering why you shouldn’t just jam them all into 1 ad group called “Honda Parts”. Because using 1 ad group per keyword allows you to create an ad specifically for each keyword and also allows you to direct your visitor to the specific area on your website where each product is. Let’s say I was setting up an ad group for the keyword 99 honda civic spoiler. I could name that ad group 99 Honda Spoiler and would move on to creating my ad. For the ad I would use the title 99 Honda Civic Spoiler since that’s the keyword they typed in. If the keyword or phrase is longer than 25 characters try to shorten it to where it’s still relevant. For the description I could use High performance Honda spoilers. The cheapest prices in town!. For the destination URL I would use the link to the area on my website that lists all the 99 Honda Civic spoilers I carry. You don’t want to direct your visitor to your homepage unless the information they need is on your homepage. After you’re done creating your ad include the keyword that you want to use for that ad group which in this case is 99 honda civic spoiler. The only other keywords you would want to add are alternatives to the phrase you’re using, but I always prefer to have the exact keyword or phrase that’s in my ad title. Set your bidding to $.20 a click to complete the ad group. Chances are you’ll pay a little bit less if there’s not that much competition. To make your ads appear more often go to your main campaign page and click on Edit campaign settings. Choose your delivery method to Accelerated and only allow your ads to appear on Google Search and Search Partners.

Now this concept is circumstantial and may not work for some websites. If you plan on starting a new website and Adwords is part of your advertising campaign then you should do your keyword research prior to starting the site to make sure there are enough niche keywords that would be relevant to parts of your site. Keep away from “general keywords” unless the keyword is 100% targeted because those are usually the most competitive. Unless you have extremely high profit margins the cost of advertising will probably exceed your earnings.

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Posted on Wednesday, 13th August 2008 by Jeff

While I’m not using one of Alexandru Cosmin’s Wordpress themes for SiteStartups.com, I have used one or two for some of my other sites. The thing I love about his themes is that his work is clean and he strategically creates areas for advertisements. This way all you have to do is replace his mock advertisements with your own. His new theme called AcosminMAG is quite a piece of work and I would highly recommend it. Even if you feel that none of his themes have the look you’re going for, I would definitely keep up-to-date on his latest work because I think it’s wonderful. Keep up the good work man!

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Posted on Wednesday, 13th August 2008 by Jeff

“Joe has an exciting internet idea that he’s sure will make him an internet millionaire. He plans on creating a website similar to myspace except it’s primary purpose is for car mechanics. He calculates that there are approximately 2 million car mechanics in this world which he thinks is a huge market. Since Joe doesn’t know how to design a website he decides to find somebody who can make his website for him. He goes to a professional web designer and finds out that it will cost him $5,000 to create his website. Since he believes he’s going to make millions he dives into his life savings and pays the designer upfront. After weeks of waiting his website finally gets finished. He sets his website up on a $300 a month dedicated server because his web designer advises him that it’s the best solution for busy websites. Joe feels that his dream is finally coming to life and all he has to do is get people to join his website. After some research into SEO he properly optimizes his website and submits it to the search engines. He writes about 20 articles on being a car mechanic and submits them to a few article directories. He also joins some car mechanic forums and includes the link to his website in his signature. Joe feels that he’s done everything he needs to do and all he has to do is lay back and wait for people to join. Within a month Joe has managed to get 1,300 unique visitors to his website but only 5 members have joined. He also hasn’t earned a single penny off his website. Since free marketing isn’t producing the results Joe wants he decides to try his hands at paid marketing. He signs up for a Google Adwords account and sets his bid to about $.30 a click. After about $50 in clicks he only gets 1 sign-up and realizes that paid marketing isn’t working out either. He’s frustrated and confused and feels that he’s done everything he can do to get his website to work. Instead of continuing with his website and losing more money he decides to put his website for sale on Ebay to split his losses. Since his website is custom it sells for $2300 which is about $2700 less than he paid for it. He also needs to factor in the $600 he spent for hosting his website on a dedicated server. Joe feels terrible because he worked really hard for the money he invested into his website. From then on Joe never looks back at the money he lost, but never tries his hand at internet business ever again.”

Why do you think Joe’s idea didn’t work out? Was it the idea itself or was it simply Joe’s failure to not have a good marketing plan ahead of time? I think it’s a little mixture of both. Most people get so excited about their internet idea that they fail to see the whole picture. First of all, Joe failed to answer the question “Why?”. Why would anyone want to join his website? Was it to help car mechanics network and share ideas? Or was it simply a random niche he took from a website that already existed? Even if your idea is unique, if it doesn’t have a useful purpose that isn’t already covered by another website then chances are you’re wasting your time. It doesn’t matter how many visitors you get to your website because most of them won’t stick around. Another thing he failed to see is that big websites like myspace have huge marketing budgets. This includes hiring experts to help you out. Joe decided to take marketing into his own hands even though he was entirely new to the subject. In order to run a website that is comparable to big internet websites, you need to treat it like a big company and not as a “one-person” small business. This includes getting huge loans from investors and hiring a full staff. If you feel this is a little too much for you to handle then your best bet is to go for a smaller and more guaranteed idea.

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Posted on Wednesday, 13th August 2008 by Jeff

For those of you who don’t know what the Bum Marketing Method system is, you can get the information for FREE by visiting Travis’s website. Without giving you too much information ahead of time, the system basically tells you to write articles and to submit them to top article directories such as Ezine Articles. In the “resource box” at the bottom of the article you should include a link to a related affiliate program you’re trying to promote. When people read your article and scroll down to the bottom there’s a good chance they’ll view your affiliate link and click on it. If you’re lucky they’ll purchase the product or service you’re trying to promote and you’ll get paid a commission. So is this method as promising as it sounds? For the average article I’d have to say “No”. Now don’t get too carried away because I’m not finished yet! It seems that the average article I submitted to Ezine Articles gets about 25 clicks. Since most affiliate programs get an average of about 1 conversion for every 100 visitors you’d be lucky to get 1 conversion off a single article. So how do you increase your chances of making a commission per article? By writing about information that is sought after but written less about! Travis actually had an excellent tip about this in one of his emails. He stated that the more unique your article is the longer it will stay at the top of the search results in the article directory. This can easily get you 3 or 4 times as many clicks as you normally would. Other tips I can give you is to use tags (HTML link) for your affiliate link instead of of just typing in “http://www.youraffiliaelink.com” to automatically generate your link. Not only does this look unattractive but you’re also exposing that you’re promoting an affiliate program. If possible, purchase a relative domain name and forward or redirect the domain to your affiliate link. When writing your tags use a catchy phrase for your link so people’s eyes will move over to that. If you were trying to promote a dating affiliate program you could use something like: “Tired of overly priced dating websites that don’t deliver results? Find TRUE LOVE today”. This simple technique could easily double the amount of clicks you would have gotten if you were just using a regular link. As always, you should re-write your article and submit it to other top article directories for even better results. If you’re lucky some websites will use your article with your affiliate link as the source of the information which will generate you additional clicks and perhaps even a few sales!

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Posted on Tuesday, 12th August 2008 by Jeff

I think this is really a question of what the topic of your forum is about and whether or not you already have an audience that will join your forum. For example, if you ran a website about SEO and already had about 100,000 repeat visitors coming to your website each month then it wouldn’t be as hard. If you decided to add a forum to your website then chances are many of those people would join your forum. But if you don’t already have the audience then my answer to this question would be - “it’s VERY hard”. Most people that start a forum find it hard to keep people around or even to take a few minutes sign-up. Especially if there are already established forums for the niche you’re going for. So how can you compete with the bigger guys? Lots and lots of hard work over a long period of time! Many of the forums on the internet that have 10,000 members or more took years to build up. So if you’re a newly established forum here’s a few tips I can give you:

Exchange Posts With Other Forum Owners

Even if you have 20 friends who will join your forum this usually isn’t enough to get your forum off the ground. Therefore, a common technique that many people use is to exchange posts with other forum owners. Basically, you post on somebody else’s forum in exchange for them posting on yours. I usually exchange 5 or 10 posts with other forums owners this way I can get a higher member count. Especially if the subject of their forum doesn’t really interest me. A great place to find other forum owners to exchange posts with is at TheAdminZone.com. They actually have a section called “The Exchange” that is solely for this purpose. If you’re willing to create 50 postings on other forums you can have your website featured in their section called “Launch Team” for a few weeks. Basically, choose 1 or 2 of their new launch forums that you find interesting and dump all of your posts there. Email the administrator when you’re done and they’ll add your forum as a candidate for being featured. Trust me, it’s well worth your time and effort.

Hire Forum Posters

I’ve never used this technique but some people swear by it. Instead of exchanging posts with other forums owners you’re basically hiring a service who hires 10 or 20 people to post on your forum. I’m a little skeptical about using services like this because I find it hard to believe that you can find that many people who have a common interest in the subject of your forum. If you’re running a general forum about “anything” then it would be pretty easy, but if your forum was about something like “chemistry” then chances are the quality of the postings you receive won’t be that great.

Join Other Forums

Now I’m not telling you to join every forum that’s identical to yours to try and steal some of their members. Most people that join forums have one thing in common - they like posting on forums. Many forums have an area where you can add a link to your forum called a “signature”. Add a link to your forum and maybe you’ll find a few people who are interested and willing to join.

Be The Top Poster On Your Forum

You can’t just launch off a new forum and expect your new members to build it up for you. When somebody creates a new posting you need to be the first person who responds. Chances are you may be the only person who responds to start off with. If your forum covers a unique niche such as “making money through affiliate marketing” then most people that join your forum will actually be people who are asking questions rather than answering them.

Give Away A Related Incentive

This is a technique that I’ve used in the past that works fairly well. Most forum software such as vBulletin and phpBB is setup to where you can send out a “Welcome” email to each of your new members. What I usually do is include a download link to a free e-book or other related download in this email. While some people may join your forum solely for the incentive, a lot of your new members will actually stick around and create a few postings to thank you for the freebie.

Send Out Emails To Your Members

Getting people to join your forum and create a post or two is one hard task but keeping them around is another. Allowing your members to receive a “response email” is one feature you should enable on your forum from the start. Some new members will create a posting and will never come back to see if somebody responded. If they receive an email stating that somebody responded they’re likely to come back to your forum and maybe even create more postings. If some members joined your forum and never created a posting the best way to get them back to your forum is to send out a monthly newsletter. Add lots of useful information and maybe even more valuable downloads, and there’s a good chance you’ll get most of your members to come back to your forum.

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Posted on Monday, 11th August 2008 by Jeff

I usually like to check websites like KillerStartups.com and various webmaster forums to see what the newest ideas are out there. What amazes me is the number of people who are trying to find a niche within a niche. While I wouldn’t call this a bad idea in general, there are a lot of circumstances where it is a bad idea. For example, lots of people are trying to start video websites like YouTube except for a certain category of videos. Even if your website is flawless, why would anybody use your website when all they have to do is search YouTube for that particular kind of video? Unless the niche you’re going for is huge and you feel you can provide that niche with a more “feature-rich” website than I would suggest you either go for the general niche or find a unique niche that nobody is using.

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Posted on Monday, 11th August 2008 by Jeff

Ok, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement but it seems that coffee helps your brain think a little bit better. According to this coffee FAQ at PositivelyCoffee.com, coffee helps stimulate your energy, memory, and learning abilities which could assist you when you’re writing or blogging. Personally, I won’t blog unless I’ve had a fresh hot or iced coffee from Dunkin Donuts bright and early in the morning even if I’m fully awake. Some people call me a “java junkie” but I’m really not addicted to coffee. I only dirnk it because I feel like it gives me that additional boost that I normally wouldn’t have. So if you’re a blogger and need some medicine to help you blog better than I would suggest you prescribe yourself a daily dosage of high-quality caffeine. Works for me so it might work for you!

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Posted on Saturday, 9th August 2008 by Jeff

Some people that have a poor CTR through Adsense often blame this on their ad colors or placement. A lot of people have even come up with terms for why people don’t click on their ads such as “Adsense blindness”. One thing they didn’t even consider is that their website’s niche could be the problem. The truth about Adsense is that some niches deliver better results than others. Different niches will deliver different visitors to your website with different mindsets. If the visitors to your website already know about the websites that appear in your ads or don’t find them interesting they’re far less likely to click on them. You also need to think to yourself, “Do the visitors to my website already know what they’re looking for or are they in a desperate situation?”. Two really great niches I’ve used in the past were “dating” and “wholesale”. The reason I think dating works so well is because many of these people are desperate to find the love of their life and will search anywhere for it. When they see an ad that interests them they think to themselves, “If I don’t click on this ad I could be missing out on meeting somebody really special”. The same thing goes for the wholesale niche. Most people don’t know how to source for wholesale products therefore if they see an ad that interests them they’re likely to click on it because they believe if they don’t they could miss out an opportunity to make some serious cash.

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Posted on Saturday, 9th August 2008 by Jeff

How often you should blog is really a question of what the purpose of your blog is. If your blog is to inform a certain group or club about special events then you can easily get away with blogging a few times a month. Blogs that are used for this purpose are more of a newsletter than a blog. However, if your blog is about a subject in general then you should be blogging at least once or twice a day. Why you might ask? If somebody visits your blog and likes what you’re writing about they’re likely to become regular visitors to your actual blog. If you’re slacking off on how often you update your information then you’re likely to lose many of your readers. Most people think, “Well, if they liked my blog they would subscribe to my RSS feeds anyway”. That’s probably true for a few of your visitors but most people don’t subscribe to your RSS feeds or even know what their purpose is. Almost all of my “favorite” blogs to read are ones that are coming up with new information on a daily basis, and I’ve never even subscribed to their RSS feeds. These include Problogger.net and Talking Points Memo. In other words, if you want to become a professional blogger with lots of readers you need to copy what other top bloggers are doing.

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Posted on Friday, 8th August 2008 by Jeff

Over the years drop-shipping has become the preferred choice for people who want to start an e-commerce store but don’t have the money to purchase in bulk. But how can you be sure that the drop-shipper you’re dealing with is legitimate and won’t rip you off? One drop-shipper that you can trust and that most people don’t know about is actually one of the largest discount retailers on the internet! I’m not talking about buying product through Amazon.com and instructing them to ship the products to your customers with Amazon.com as the seller. In case you didn’t know Amazon.com actually has a business solution called Drop Ship By Amazon. For a small fee Amazon.com will ship any one of their millions of products to your customer with “your name” as the shipper. What’s also great is that the service is FREE and you can use their “Free Super Saver Shipping” option to save money on shipping. My suggestion is to charge your customer about the same price as Amazon.com but charge them for the shipping as well since you get that for free. This way most of your profits are coming from the shipping so it doesn’t look like you’re ripping them off.

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Posted on Friday, 8th August 2008 by Jeff

About a week ago I suggested on DP that maybe Google used CTR to determine your website’s position in the main search results. I was surprised that a few people actually agreed with my theory. I came up with this idea because some of my websites seemed to move up and down in the search results. One day I could be #8 and the next day I’ll be #4. If my listings were consistently moving down the search results then I could be doing something wrong with my SEO. But the fact that I’m in the top 10 and changing positions by the day probably didn’t have anything to do with that. So I thought to myself, “If Google uses CTR to determine your position in Adwords then maybe this is true for main search results as well”. If this is true then the quality of your meta description is an SEO technique that people overlook. Despite what people say Google uses your meta description in the search results if you have one. My suggestion is to write your ad description like you would if you were creating an Adwords ad. Have a catchy and relevant meta description and page title. In fact, you may even want to split test a few meta descriptions and titles to see if one generates more clicks then another. While this theory is still unproven I believe it may help you maintain your top 10 position for the keyword you’re going for.

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Posted on Thursday, 7th August 2008 by Jeff

I know what you’re probably thinking - “Wow! A pen with the Google logo on it. Who cares!”. This isn’t just any ordinary pen though. According to the person who gave me this, this is one of the pens that Google actually uses at their company. If this is true, then I’m ecstatic for having a very small piece of a company that I so greatly admire. If it isn’t, feel free to comment this post to let me know that I’ve made a complete fool of myself.

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Posted on Thursday, 7th August 2008 by Jeff

I was just watching this video on the best Adsense colors and all I can say is that this guy’s opinion is WAY OFF! There are no Adsense colors that are the best!!! The best Adsense colors for your website really depends on the colors of your website. I’ve had fairly good results using colors such as purple, orange, white, and so on. In fact, the worst results I’ve had were with blue links but I would blame that on the subject of my website. What you need to realize is that people actually read your Adsense ads before they click on them. If they don’t find them interesting they’re not going to click on them. It doesn’t matter what your Adsense colors are! What you mainly should concentrate on is the placement and size of your ads. Your website should also be balanced out so it doesn’t look saturated with ads. The better your setup the more likely people will read your ads which could lead to more clicks.

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Posted on Thursday, 7th August 2008 by Jeff

When most people think of link building they usually think of directory submissions, article writing, and exchanging links with relevant websites. What most people overlook is the technique that most internet startups dream about known as “link baiting”. If used correctly, this technique will bring hundreds if not thousands of one-way links to your website that search engines look highly at. Basically, what you’re doing is coming up with information or tools that are so interesting that people will want to link to it or talk about it. Sounds impossible for your kind of website? Well here’s a list of some link baiting techniques you might want to consider. In case you didn’t notice the list I just referred you to is actually a successful link baiting article. They created this list because it’s original and they knew people would link to it. Remember, the more unique and useful your content is the more likely people will link to it.

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Posted on Wednesday, 6th August 2008 by Jeff

Everybody on the internet has their eyes on the new search engine Cuil.com. In case you didn’t know “cuil” is actually an old Irish word meaning “knowledge”. Some people are even considering this site to be Google’s next major competitor! Even though the creators Cuil “claim” to have over 121 billion web pages indexed, I think it’s going to take A LOT more than that to compete with the big G. What you have to remember is that Google didn’t become #1 solely because of the buzz it got when it first came out. It became the top search engine because of its superior search technology. Unless this new search engine can prove its search technology is superior to everything currently out there I’m going to remain a loyal Google user.

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Posted on Tuesday, 5th August 2008 by Jeff

Why should you bother hiring a logo designer to create you a logo when you can do it yourself? Did you ever notice that most logos are just basic text with a graphic or something unique done to the text? So basically all you really have to do is find a unique font and graphic that go well together. For unique fonts I usually go to UrbanFonts.com since they allow me to type in my website address to see what my logo will look like. After you download the font you want unzip the folder and go to Start > Control Panel > Fonts on your PC. Move all the font files into your Fonts folder and they will automatically install to work on all your programs. To add a graphic to your logo, you can either use an icon or a special kind of font known as a dingbat. Dingbats install just like regular fonts and will generate images when you type in certain keys instead of letters. UrbanFonts.com also has a unique selection of useful FREE dingbats.

If you’re curious how I created the logo above let me show you EXACTLY how I made this. If I hired somebody to do this for me it probably would have cost about $50. Fortunately I have the basic skills required to do it myself. Basically what I did was opened a 350×100 box in Photoshop. I typed in the name of my website address and chose the font Geometr231 Hv Bt and set the font size to 44pt. I added my .com TLD to the end of the logo and made that a little smaller at 24 pt. To diversify the colors I made the word “Startups” in the logo black since I thought that would blend properly with the green. I searched through the dingbats at UrbanFonts.com and came across a dingbat called Alien Mushrooms. I then added the dingbat to the front of my logo by first choosing the font AlienMushrooms and pressing the M key on my keyboard. I adjusted the size to 48pt and made it the same color green as my log. After saving it as a .jpg file I had a fairly decent logo that some would consider “professional”. Did I mention that it took me less than 5 minutes to make?

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Posted on Monday, 4th August 2008 by Jeff

A few months back I got suspended off Digital Point Forums for an argument I had with one of their members over whether ringtones affiliate programs were a scam or not. In my opinion they definitely are. This guy claimed to be earning thousands of dollars a day by marketing ringtones affiliate programs. While I’m unsure whether his earnings claims had any merit, there’s one thing I was completely certain about - he was using these programs to scam underage kids who think they’re getting free ringtones. You’ve probably run into several of these landing pages yourself. Basically what most of them tell you is that you’ll get 10 “free” or “complimentary” ringtones if you enter your phone number on their form. While the $9.99/month price is within view if you look “closely”, they setup these pages to where 1 out of 50 or 100 teenagers won’t see this price and will signup thinking they’re getting 100% free ringtones. When they get their phone bill in the mail a month later they find out that the ringtones they got really weren’t free. Most affiliate marketers who do promote these programs will argue with you that it’s not their fault if somebody misses that on the form. What I think they need to understand is that a majority of the money they’re making is “dishonest” and shouldn’t be allowed. I would have to estimate that over 50% of their signups are from people who didn’t know they were signing up for a service. If everybody saw the monthly fee on the form it would probably be almost impossible to make a profit with ringtones affiliate programs. Fortunately, Google is supposedly closing in on people who promote these programs through Adwords.

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Posted on Monday, 4th August 2008 by Jeff

My only answer to this question is “Maybe”. So far I haven’t really been successful with affiliate marketing using PPC so I’m not the most qualified person to answer this question. I have, however, drawn the conclusion that it’s very difficult to get consistent results using PPC search engines. One issue I’ve found is that the top search engines charge a lot of money if you’re going for competitive keywords. I find it very hard to believe that you can get any kind of decent conversions by paying $1.00 to $3.00 a click. Even if your landing page is good you can usually expect to get a 1 out of 50 conversion at the best. So if you’re paying $1.50 a click and the affiliate program you’re promoting is only paying $35.00 a sale, then it would cost you about $75 to make the sale! In my opinion, all these people that claim to be averaging 1 out of 15 conversions paying these amounts either have found high-paying, untapped niches or they’re simply lying to get some attention.

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