Umazon Blog

Creating a successful Internet presence involves much more than designing a great web site or having the “perfect” product. Listing your web site with the Search Engines is your first step; however, you must not solely rely on the Search Engines to bring you traffic.

You must design a complete promotional strategy and work it every day. If you’re launching a new web site, your first step will be to submit your site to the Search Engines and Directories.

Although there are many auto-submission software programs available on the Internet, make sure you manually submit your site to the main Search Engines and Directories:

Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html (Although you can submit your site map to Google, you will receive a higher ranking by allowing their robots to find your pages on their
own.)

The Open Directory Project http://dmoz.org/add.html
AltaVista http://www.altavista.com/addurl
Lycos http://www.lycos.com/addasite.html
Hotbot http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp

Once you’ve manually submitted your main pages, visit SelfPromotion.com http://www.selfpromotion.com to automatically submit your pages to a number of additional Search Engines and Directories.

A good way to organize your promotions is to set up a web page, for your personal use, that will contain your complete strategy. This page should be stored on your hard drive and not uploaded to your server. Your page should contain four sections.

1. Daily Promotions
2. Weekly Promotions
3. Monthly Promotions
4. Miscellaneous Promotions

Each of these four sections should contain the appropriate information for each of your promotional resources, such as web site name, user ID, password (if applicable) and hyperlinked web addresses for each web site you plan to use for your promotions. This will enable you to open your web page each day and visit the sites you have listed.

-> Daily Promotions

Discussion Boards

Visit some popular discussion boards and share your expertise. Although you may not advertise on discussion boards, you can include your signature file with your post. Before you begin posting to discussion boards, make sure you lurk a while and see exactly how the board functions.

Visit http://www.web-source.net/web/Discussion_Forums/ for a complete listing of some of the top discussion boards.

-> Weekly Promotions

Ezine Advertising / Ad Swaps

Your weekly promotions should consist of placing a paid ezine advertisement and/or arranging ad swaps with fellow publishers.

Visit the Directory of Ezines for a complete listing of hundreds of publishers and contact information for advertising.

To organize your ad placements and swaps, place the publication names, publisher names, ad dates and hyperlinked web addresses within your weekly promotions list.

-> Monthly Promotions

Your monthly promotions should include writing an article in the area of your expertise, promotional exchanges with similar web sites, and offline promotions.

To organize your monthly promotions, place the names and hyperlinked web addresses for each of your promotional resources within your monthly promotions section.

Writing Articles

Writing articles that may be freely published with your bylines is one of the best promotional methods online. Your article may be published in hundreds of ezines, on web sites or even in magazines.

For further information on writing articles, visit:

Promotional Exchanges

Cross promoting is a powerful technique used by many Internet marketers to increase the exposure of their products, services or publications. You simply decide what type of promotional exchange you would be interested in and contact fellow marketers to discuss an exchange.

The most effective technique used in cross promotions is recommendations. By providing each other with a personal recommendation you can increase your response rates tremendously.

Here are some popular cross promoting techniques you can use to boost your business:

Link Exchanges

Exchange links with web sites similar to yours, but not in competition. Many Search Engines are now utilizing a system that tracks and ranks sites according to the number of quality links pointing to a particular web site. By exchanging links with similar web sites, you will not only increase your Search Engine ranking, but you will also increase your web site traffic.

Ezine Ad Swaps

Exchange subscription ads with other ezine publishers. Ezine advertising is one of the best forms of advertising on the Internet. By swapping ads with fellow ezine publishers, you can run your ad in other publications free of charge.

Subscription Exchanges

Exchange subscription information with fellow ezine publishers. Provide recommendations within your ezine’s welcome message, thank you page and even on your multiple subscription ezine form.

Ezine Column

Partner with a similar publication and provide content for each other. This may be a weekly tips column, question and answer column or whatever you’d like.

Ebook Exchanges

Partner with fellow Internet marketers and create free ebooks to freely distribute. The ebook should mutually benefit and promote both of you, while providing valuable information for your visitors.

Ride Alongs

A ride along is any extra information (advertisements) sent along with a direct mailing. You can use this same technique with any ezine solo mailings you may run by including an exchange recommendation within your mailing. In addition, you can include recommendations within your thank you letters you send out when you deliver your products.

Up sells

An up sell is used when your customer is in the process of ordering your product. Another product is introduced, for a small additional cost, just as you’re closing the sale. This technique is used with many infomercials when the customer calls in their order. The operator will introduce an additional product for a minimal extra charge. You can use this same technique on your order page by trading product recommendations with fellow marketers.

A quality recommendation will pull a much higher response rate than just a link or banner. Cross promote with individuals you truly respect and believe in, as your professional reputation is on the line.

Offline Promotions

Promoting your web site offline is another great way to increase your traffic. Below are several resources to assist you:

Put your web address on your vehicle. IDit Plates are a great way to continuously promote your web site. They’re triple chrome plated and blend in well with your vehicle.

Visit iPrint http://www.iprint.com for your printing needs. From business print items to promotional items, iPrint has it all.

Place ads in newspapers, magazines, on the radio, or on TV. Visit these links for complete listings:

Gebbie Press http://www.gebbieinc.com
Newspapers Online http://www.newspapers.com

For even more promotional products, PromoCity can add your logo to any one of over 500,000 items. http://www.promocity.com

-> Miscellaneous Promotions

Your miscellaneous promotions might include paying for traffic, text and banner advertising.

Visit the following web addresses for further information:

http://www.web-source.net/ad_camp.htm
http://www.web-source.net/pay_traffic.htm

Once you’ve implemented your promotional strategy and continuously work it each day, you’ll be amazed with the results of your efforts. Consistency will be the key to driving massive traffic to your site.

Copyright © Shelley Lowery

About the Author:

Shelley Lowery is the author of the acclaimed web design course, “Web Design Mastery” (www.webdesignmastery.com) and “eBook Starter - Give Your eBooks the look and feel of a REAL book” (www.ebookstarter.com)

Visit www.Web-Source.net to sign up for a complimentary subscription to eTips and receive a copy of Shelley’s acclaimed ebook, “Killer Internet Marketing Strategies.”

You have permission to publish this article electronically, in print, in your ebook, or on your web site, free of charge, as long as the author bylines are included.

With business cards, that is. They are one of the most powerful
weapons in marketing your business or company is through the use
of your business cards.

Many people have not been using their cards effectively in
making them achieve some results and sales to their site and
business. With the many people using their business cards as a
marketing tool nowadays, there is no guarantee that yours is the
ones that they will notice.

How do you make them stand out and be the important tool that
they are?

Use full color printing. Full color printing was expensive
before but not anymore. With the many printing companies
offering full color printing, you can already an inexpensive
printer that give high quality prints. Prices now have dropped
because of the abundance and stiff competitions.

Have a tagline. This is a one-sentence benefit statement. Just
pretend that you are writing an ad for a newspaper or a
billboard. Sine you only have a limited space to write your tag
on, think of something that can describe best what you want to
say. This will likely catch the attention of the ones reading
your cards.

Put a picture on your cards. Studies have shown that people have
the tendency to keep business cards with a photo on it. It could
be a picture of you, your products. Better if it’s a combination
of them both. Putting on a picture is highly recommended because
they get attention.

Do not use business card templates. There are many websites
offering already-made business card designs that are called
templates. The problem with using them is that many people may
have used them already. Thus, using them on yours will make your
business cards appear just like everyone else’s. So much for
standing out.

Let a professional do the designs. It will take a lot of time if
you will be designing your card yourself. And chances are, you
would not be happy at the results. Leave the designing to the
professionals and let them do their work. You do your part in
selling the product and service.

Try to follow these tips and see the change in the result it
will give you. Sometimes trying out different styles and
techniques, even though risky, can bring more positive than
negative results.

Try to find the ones which will work out for you and make the
most of what business cards can do.

For comments and inquiries about the article visit
http://www.losangelesprintingservice.com

Pixel Advertising?

What is all the hype about this new trend of online advertising
called Pixel
Advertising? If you don’t have a clue what it is, well
basically it is just a website where a big portion of the main
page or the home page is designed and laid-out in grids or
blocks. These blocks are measured in pixels, usually 10 pixels
by 10 pixels. Now the advertising part comes where you buy a
portion of that main page in terms of how many blocks you want
and put your site image/graphics with a hyperlink to your
website.

A lot of internet publishers and businesses joined and jumped in
the wagon. That includes me, with my pixel ads site OnlinePixels4u.com. If
you are wondering how you can earn a lot of money from a single
page, it’s just simple math. If you sell each pixel at $1 each
and create a home page with 1K pixels by 1K pixels to sell, you
do the math.

The next question you will probably ask is why would someone buy
pixels from a website for $1 per pixel? It all boils down to
Google’s page ranking. The higher your site’s page rank is the
better for search engine spiders/crawlers.

If you are thinking that is easy and you can do that, I’m not
discouraging you but it’s not as easy as you think. Building the
pixel ad site is not the problem, you can even use a free script
for that. The hard and gruelling part is the building of your
page ranking. Anybody who knows Search engine optimization knows
that building a page rank for a site is not easy and it involves
a lot of time and effort.

For those who have an existing pixel site, you might want to add
your site to our directory list at eDirectoryPages.com.
This will help you with your page ranking and popularity.

One of the marketing strategies you can use is to initially sell
your pixels at a cheap price, let’s say $0.01 per pixel. Don’t
jump straight to selling it at $1 each as nobody will buy it,
not unless you can wave your magic wand and make your new site
page rank from 0 to 7. While you try and improve your ranking
and site credibility, then gradually increase the price of your
pixel. To entice advertisers to buy your pixels, you can give a
portion of the site for free to big named companies to build
your site’s credibility. Most advertisers are also looking into
your terms and conditions, especially the part on how long will
their pixel advertisements last, pixel publishers usually run it
for around a minimum of three years.

If you are still determined of building your own pixel advertisement
site, I can help you with that. I’m currently writing a new
article on how to build your pixel advertising site, and it will
be out soon. Or you can send me an email at
info@onlinewebpublisher.com to help you build and install the
site at a minimal cost.

For now, try visiting OnlinePixels4u.com and
have a feel of the site.

Back 20 years ago when the Internet was just in its infancy, the only way to build a webpage was simply to use notepad, a free text editor supplied with Microsoft Windows. Now as the Internet has become a collage of music, special effects and flash, the art of writing HTML code is slowly being lost to HTML Editors like Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. Yet, whether you like it or not, to be able to effectively build websites you still need to know at least basic HTML Code.

Let me explain …

HTML or Hypertext Markup Language is in all essence the language of the World Wide Web. Without HTML our Internet Browsers like Netscape, Internet Explorer or Firefox would not be able to interpret our webpages. HTML is made up of a series of tags that describe the inner workings and structure of how you want to present your webpages. Now in all seriousness you could survive building webpages without knowing one little bit of HTML but to be truly successful on the web this is not true.

Search engines are now one of the main tools utilised on the web and everyday you see Microsoft’s MSN, Yahoo and Google jostling for the number one position in the search engine stakes but as a web programmer being able to position yourself into a top ranking spot is probably one of the most important skills you will need to master. As being in one of the top positions for your keywords means that you will be receiving free focused traffic to your website which is much better than having to pay for it via Google’s Adword, Overture and any one of the other text ad based services.

So why is knowing HTML going to help you in getting your website positioned into a top spot in the search engines …

The first thing you need to know is how to correctly format your header tags of your webpage because without properly formatted header tags, the search engines won’t know what your sites about and what keywords you wish to associate with the webpage. One of the big issues I have seen with some of the HTML editors is that they don’t address this issue of Header tags or in particular meta tags, which means if you are building a website you are already compromising the websites ability to be placed into the right position within search engines.

For example many of the HTML editors will provide you with popup forms that will help you set your meta data for your descriptions and keywords but they miss out other important meta data such as whether the search engines spiders should index all the pages, the language of the webpage, the character set and what type of document you are creating based on the HTML Standard.

PLEASE NOTE: I have substituted the < > tags with [ ] brackets simply because many of the article submission companies and websites will not allow you to lodge articles with HTML Tags in the body of the article. To use the code sample below in your webpages simply replace the [] square brackets with the < > tags

[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”]
[html]
[head]
[meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”en-us”]
[meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=windows-1252″]
[meta name=”GENERATOR” content=”Microsoft FrontPage 6.0″]
[meta name=”ProgId” content=”FrontPage.Editor.Document”]
[TITLE]Your Title Goes Here [/TITLE]

[META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Your Description Goes Here”]
[META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”Your Keywords Go Here”]
[META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”index,all”>
[/head]

[/html]

One thing I should note is that just because you provide all this information does not mean that -

a) All Search Engines use this information
b) You are guaranteed to get a top place in the search engine

But having each of these small elements in your webpage, certainly do when put together makes an improvement in your search engine place. Remember though that every search engine is different and that the algorithms they use for website placement is incredibly complex and certainly a well guarded secret but if you do add these elements at least you will get a few points in the positive direction.

There is another reason for putting this information into your website. Not having some of this information can also affect the ability of a visually impaired person to view your website. This might sound a little strange but visually impaired people have tools that convert screen webpages into brail messages. However, in some cases not including some of the information outlined above in your meta tags like the content language and character set can affect whether their brail software will read your website correctly. So if your customer base is built on say a 30% market of those people who are disabled with visual impairment then you could be costing yourself money.

One of the other key reasons why you should know how to write at least basic html code is to help you build incoming links to your webpages. A technique you can follow to build those incoming links is to write articles that provide information for people about what you do. For example if you owned a Golfing Website that sold all things Golf, then you might consider writing articles on how to select a Golf Club or where the best Golfing Clubs and ranges can be found.

When you are submitting your articles to places like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com or ArticlesON.com they will ask you to use certain html tags to help accentuate your article. For example generally in the body of your article you can only use things like bold, italics, underline and list items but in other areas like where you put your details you can add things like Hyperlinks and Hypertext. Now in the three article submission sites mentioned before, if you want to add a Hyperlink then you must know your basic HTML code, because they do not build your links for you, you have to write the HTML Tags from scratch.

When you are building your hyperlinks to link back to your webpage, you will want to make sure one two things -

1. The Hyperlink, that is the webpage or website you are linking to contains the keywords in either domain name, folder name or webpage name.
2. Make sure the Hypertext or better known as anchor text uses your keywords as well.

Let us look at a basic example. If I had written a really cool article on a brand new Golf Club that I knew was going to sell millions and had a lot of interest in the market then my link back to the webpage that provides more information on the Golf Club would be built in the way shown below. Let us say the name of the Golf Club is called the Lion Heart X9.

[a href=”http://www.GolfProAustralia.com.au/LionHeartX9.htm]Lion Heart X9 Golf Club[/a]

Note -Once again the < > tags have been substituted with [] brackets simply to meet the article submission requirements. You must use the < > bracket tags in your webpage or you webpage will not work.

If you didn’t know how to write the hyperlinks in the way shown above and the search engines found your articles on a number of different websites, then they would not be able to give you credit for the links back to your website and again this is going to cost you web traffic.

The bottom line is this. If you want to build serious webpages and sites that are going to make you money, you will definitely need at the very least good basic skills in using and understanding HTML code.