Online Marketing Chronicle

The most popular question asked by many online marketers is how to drive more traffic to their websites. The answer to this question is easy: "Have your website exposure to as many internet surfers as possible, once people can find your website, there will be traffic flow into your website". But to make your website successfully expose to internet users is not an easy task. Efforts, strategies and techniques need to put in place in order to make it as success.

Below are 8 common online marketing techniques used by most online marketers to drive internet traffic to their websites:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Successful search engine optimization will greatly increase the number of visitors that come to your website since over 60% of people who are looking for products and services use search engines to locate them. If your website is ranked high in the related keyword search by the search engines, you will get tons of free internet traffic to your website. One of the ways to optimize your website to be search engines friendly is by generating back links from other websites to your website. When websites provide a link to your site, the search engines deem your site as valuable and this affects your position in the listings.

2. Article Writing & Publishing Articles are the greatest tool for online marketing. It helps in SEO by generating back links to your website and it also helps in getting exposure for your website through your articles' hyperlinks. By writing short articles on the topic related to your website, products or services, you can offer these articles for other website owners or newsletter publishers to use by submitting them to article directories, forums or blogs. When the publishers use your articles in their ezines or websites, they will remain your bio information which contains links to your website at the bottom of your articles, which means that the publishers will contribute their link from their websites to yours. These back links are counted in SEO. When their visitors who read your articles and if they want to know more about your products or services may click the hyperlinks at the bottom of your articles to reach to your website.

3. Pay Per Click Advertising Pay Per Click is advertising provided by the search engine providers (Google, Yahoo! and others) where you pay for top placement. Most search engines give top positions to the highest bidder. It is a quick way to have your ad on the first page of the keyword search as listed in the search engines. There is a catch: you have to pay for every click to your web site. Make a budget and stick to it and make sure to monitor your account, those clicks add up fast.

4. Affiliate Marketing An affiliate program is another way to drive traffic to your web site. Your affiliates are your commissions-based sales people who make money when they sell your products. They drive traffic to your web site in exchange for commissions on sales. If you don't want to manage your affiliates yourself, you could subscribe to affiliate network such as ClickBank if your products are digital items. ClickBank marketplace is able to exposure your products to thousands of affiliates who are looking for products to sell online.

In Summary Any internet business will die without traffic stream into their website. If you already get started your website for online business, it's time for you to work out a marketing plan to flood it with traffic. The above 4 online marketing techniques are time tested & proven methods to drive more traffic to a website.

If you have a product oriented business, the Internet offers a unique ability to reach a broad audience. With new technology, it is easy to build your own e-commerce store.

E-commerce Store

Today's world is an E-commerce (electronic commerce or e-com) world. E-commerce, clearly termed as web commerce, basically means selling of merchandise or services over the Internet with electronic transactions and also through a secure network. E-com is not merely buying and selling or providing services but it is also a method of advertising and marketing through an electronic system as well. E-com also means facilitating the progress of commercial transactions electronically. Right now e-com is a well-established technology in all major countries. In most cases Internet marketing requires you to have your own E-commerce store for maximum return.

Requirements of an E-commerce Store

Building an e-commerce store is not an easy job. Software is required that can manage customers as well as their needs. E-commerce software should be able to handle inventory, shipping and handling costs, taxes, dispatching and payment processing of client's orders. You may encounter many options when setting out to build an e commerce store. Before choosing any of them it is important to have a clear view of your requirements. Technical requirements might include coupons, tracking systems, customer login options or any number of other things. Other requirements include what type of impression you want to provide to your valuable clients.
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Owning a small business in this day and age is becoming more difficult.  The fact is that major franchises, chains and large stores are taking over the little guys out there.  Everyday in every small town, people witness the little shops, stores and service providers slipping into the cracks and closing shop.  This is sad, especially with all of the tools and resources available on the internet.  Using the internet is just another method of advertising, a newer tool in the tool box that these small businesses can use to increase their annual revenue and remain open for business.

Not that the internet is a new tool, it’s simply not, but it is new to a lot small business owners out in the country struggling to stay alive.  To many small business owners, computers and the internet are a scary and uncharted territory for them.  These business owners have a false sense of cost and productivity that having a web presence can bring.  Not only is it essential to have a website in today’s changing market, it is essential to develop an ecommerce website that sells all of the products and services a business offers.  Trends are leaning towards people using the internet as their own personal tool at home to look for the perfect car, house, mop, jewelry, anything really.  Sitting at home and browsing is a lot less intrusive than going out in a car to the store, especially with the costs of gas going up, to find exactly what they are looking for. Continue reading »

5 Mistakes To Avoid When Choosing An Affiliate Program & 5 Tips To Choosing The Right Affiliate Program

When people decide to join an affiliate program to make extra money, or to have a full time job, they often do so with illusions and no idea of how the affiliate program actually works. Read the following top 5 mistakes people make when it comes to choosing an affiliate program and avoid these mistakes at all costs. Then, you will be able to be more effective and make more money for your time, so it is definitely worthwhile to read these warnings and avoid them.

#1 Don’t Compete, Support
Too many affiliate programs compete against their competitors which wastes money and puts affiliates out of business. However, if you are part of an affiliate program the more affiliates the better for getting more information and more money. One of the worst things to do is choose an affiliate program that believes in competing against other affiliates. Instead, choose an affiliate program that agrees with supporting and growing other affiliates to have a larger network and access to more affiliates.

#2 Little Reward
Another mistake people frequently make when choosing affiliate programs is choosing a program that offers little reward for the individual’s hard work. Too many affiliate programs pay too little and as a result affiliates find it difficult to make the money they should be making. Look for an affiliate program that has a good pay rate for your work.

#3 Old Statistics, if Any
You want an affiliate program that offers good, solid, real time statistics, not old statistics or ones that are no longer valid. There are not many affiliate programs out there that provide the kind of statistics an affiliate manager needs, but do your best to find an affiliate program that offers the most.

#4 No Support
Too often affiliates find themselves waiting days for an answer to an e-mail and an important question for their business. You want an affiliate program that guarantees you support round the clock if possible or at least within 24 hours. If not, keep looking for an affiliate program that wants to help you help yourself.

#5 Fresh Ideas, Creative’s
Many affiliate programs provide few ideas or creative’s to their affiliates and so thousands of web pages end up with the same advertising. However, affiliate programs would have a better success rate if many different ads were made available so affiliates could alternate ads and place different ads on different sites, depending on the products sold.

Commit these five mistakes to memory so you know exactly what you are looking for in an affiliate program, as well as what to avoid. You will be much more successful and happier as well if you do not get caught in these traps!

5 Tips To Choosing The Right Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs can be a great way to make money online. You don't have to spend time developing your own product, worry about taking orders, or take care of customer service.

If you already have a high traffic website or run an e-zine you can stand to earn a steady flow of commissions every month without a lot of extra work on your part.

To help you get started promoting affiliate programs, I've provided the following 5 tips to help you choose the affiliate programs that are right for you.

1. Choose affiliate programs that match the content of your site. If your site targets a niche market than choose affiliate programs that offer products to that niche market.

2. Choose affiliate programs that pay a high commission. For example 30%-50% on your direct sales.

3. Join affiliate programs that pay two-tier commissions. This enables you to not only earn commissions on your own sales but also on the sales of people who you introduce to your affiliate
program.

4. Join affiliate programs that offer a line of products so that you can earn commissions when your referrals come back and purchase other services or products.

5. Join affiliate programs that offer their affiliates great marketing support. Many affiliate programs offer their affiliates pre-written ads to use or get ideas from, sales letters, marketing courses, and articles to use in promoting their services.

Remember, the best affiliate programs will see their affiliate program as a partnership with you and combine high commissions with excellent support so that you can start earning money
promoting their products as quickly as possible.

You hear it all the time if you have been involved or are involved in the home business or internet business industry:

“You need a system to succeed.”

I like to take this a step further. You not only need a “system”, but in order to get the most out of your home based Internet business opportunity, you need to have an Automated System. To take that even one step further, your Automated System must hit your prospects from EVERY angle in order to achieve the highest levels of prosperity. 

Here are four techniques that if used on all of your prospects WILL increase your earnings with ANY home or internet business opportunity. Continue reading »

To all writers and non-writers out there, now is the time to start digging up those creative writing skills back.
With modern communication technology comes the popularity of information-based marketing, which is one of the oldest and most effective techniques in getting targeted prospects to sites and converting them into buyers. This is why article writing, submissions and publications are also getting popular.

There are already many tools that people can use to make the process of distributing their articles more easily. Though this is invaluable in getting the contents more exposure, which is only half of the story.

Let us take a look first at the common mistakes that some people make before submitting their contents to article directories:

1. Confusing the reason to promote the articles with the reason to write them.
In article writing, there are three key benefits why you are promoting them; branding, lead generation and promotion, which are all part of your optimization efforts.

But there is only one reason why you write an article, and that is to inform your audience. If the article is not focused on this primary and most important purpose, it will fail to achieve the three promotion benefits because no one will be interested in reading them.
You need to figure out first how to get people to read what is in your article, then make them click on your resource box. You can achieve this by producing better contents.

2. Failing to maximize the promotional opportunities of article marketing.
You may know already that your articles can help you generate additional links back to your site. But do you know that you can get more visitors and better search engine results from that same articles?
Mention keywords at strategic places. Just be sure not to overdo them. Some are even using anchor texts which is also an effective method. But it is important to know that majority of the directories are not able to support this.

Remember that is not only about the links back to your site. Part of doing well in your article marketing is getting picked up by publishers with a large number of audiences and gaining the ability of leveraging other brands because of the quality of your work. Better search engine results also are great benefits.

But these things do not put much money in your pocket. There are other factors that can turn your article marketing efforts into an opportunity that can boost your earnings. Not just increase the number of visitors to your site.
Start out with a plan and see to it that your article will serve the function that you intended it to have.

3. Publishing content that does not help your readers.
Maybe in the process of writing articles, you are thinking that all that is you wanted is links back to your site. And any visitors it can generate are fine.

Guess what? Not all article banks and directories are going to accept your content automatically. Oftentimes, they have some guidelines and specifications on the articles that they are accepting.

You can double the number of sites you can submit to by writing articles that the directories want to share with other people. All it takes is one publisher with a hundred thousand readers to increase your potential audience overnight.
Write the articles that publishers want in their publications if you want your article marketing to work the most effective way for you. This also means you have to obey the standard guidelines, spell checks, researching on a good topic and even hiring a writer to produce a good content on your behalf.

In the end, it is all really a matter of choice on your part. You can start getting a little exposure from increased links back but on a very basic level. Or enjoy massive exposure from a little extra time making quality contents.

It will be your choice. You may not be aware of the fact that an article submitted on directories is not meant to have the same level of exposure as highly-targeted content ones geared on a narrow group of people.

Learn the difference between these two and it will surely help you know what kinds of articles to write and to submit.

If you have a website then you already know the importance of traffic. Traffic is to Internet marketing as location is to real estate. It's the only thing that really matters. If you cannot generate targeted visitors to your site, you will not make any sales.
Usually the owner or designer of the website is the person designated to drive traffic to the site. The chief ingredient in generating traffic is the search engine. Of coarse, you can use advertising, but it's going to cost you. Using the search engines to generate targeted (interested in your product) traffic is the least expensive method known.

Unfortunately, many website owners do not understand the importance of search engine visibility, which leads to traffic. They place more importance on producing a "pretty" website. Not that this is bad, but it is really secondary to search engine placement. Hopefully, the following list of common mistakes, made by many website owners, will help you generate more targeted traffic to your site…after all, isn't that what you want.

1. Not using keywords effectively.

This is probably one of the most critical area of site design. Choose the right keywords and potential customers will find your site. Use the wrong ones and your site will see little, if any, traffic.

2. Repeating the same keywords.

When you use the same keywords over and over again (called keyword stacking) the search engines may downgrade (or skip) the page or site.

3. Robbing pages from other websites.

How many times have you heard or read that "this is the Internet and it's ok" to steal icons and text from websites to use on your site. Don't do it. Its one thing to learn from others who have been there and another to outright copy their work. The search engines are very smart and usually detect page duplication. They may even prevent you from ever being listed by them.

4. Using keywords that are not related to your website.

Many unethical website owners try to gain search engine visibility by using keywords that have nothing at all to do with their website. They place unrelated keywords in a page (such as "sex", the name of a known celebrity, the hot search topic of the day, etc.) inside a meta tag for a page. The keyword doesn't have anything to do with the page topic. However, since the keyword is popular, they think this will boost their visibility. This technique is considered spam by the search engines and may cause the page (or sometimes the whole site) to be removed from the search engine listing.

5. Keyword stuffing.

Somewhat like keyword stacking listed above, this means to assign multiple keywords to the description of a graphic or layer that appears on your website by using the "alt=" HTML parameter. If the search engines find that this text does not really describe the graphic or layer it will be considered spam.

6. Relying on hidden text.

You might be inclined to think that if you cannot see it, it doesn't hurt. Wrong…. Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them invisible. For example, some unethical designers my set the keywords to the same color as the background of the web page; thereby, making it invisible.

7. Relying on tiny text.

This is another version of the item above (relying on hidden text). Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them tiny. Setting the text size of the keywords so small that it can barely be seen does this.

8. Assuming all search engines are the same.

Many people assume that each search engine plays by the same rules. This is not so. Each has their own rule base and is subject to change anytime they so desire. Make it a point to learn what each major search engine requires for high visibility.

9. Using free web hosting.

Do not use free web hosting if you are really serious about increasing site traffic via search engine visibility. Many times the search engines will eliminate content from these free hosts.

10. Forgetting to check for missing web page elements.

Make sure to check every page in your website for completeness, like missing links, graphics, etc. There are sites on the web that will do this for free.

This is just a few of the methods and techniques that you should avoid. Do not give in to the temptation that these methods will work for you. They will do more harm than good for your website.

Not only will you spend weeks of wasted effort, you may have your site banned from the search engines forever. Invest a little time to learn the proper techniques for increasing search engine visibility and your net traffic will increase.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the method and enhancement of a web site in such a way to make it search engine friendly, and to increase the number and quality of visitors by utilizing keywords and phrases. If you aspire to have a small business website, you must understand what Search Engine Optimization is before you start designing your website.

Keywords are the words or phrases that an Internet user types in when making a search in a search engine. These terms and phrases are compared against the search engines indexed records. Other characteristics like keyword density, back links and other elements of the algorithms that the main search engines keep confidential are combined into the measurement, and the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is arranged depending on the results of the specifications.

The website developer or content provider must be knowledgeable about the various types of search engines determined by the sort of data desired. There are three fundamental sorts of search engines: spiders, programs that index data depending on what the spider discovers, as the web pages are "crawled", human input indexing, and a mixture of the two.

There are also all-purpose search engines that search blogs, forums and websites for particular content and subject matter (Google, Facebook, Ask.Com, Yahoo, etc.), in addition, there are engines that search maps and merchandise prices (MapQuest, PriceGrabber, etc). Modifying the site based on the distinct search engine technology as a rule will return superior ranking results. This is what SEO is.

SEO ought not to be the only tool utilized to push visitors to the website. Although Search Engine Optimization is essentially no cost, banners, back linking, and Pay Per Click methods could produce superior results since they guide a more targeted client to your website.

Since you can now define the term Search Engine Optimization, you can start creating a valuable website for your business.

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If you want your website to rank well in the search engines, there are certain features that should not be overlooked.  Here are five of the most important aspects:

1. Create your site with a clear and logical hierarchy, and good internal linking structure
2. Build a useful, information rich site, and make sure the content on each page agrees with its place in the structure.  Content should also be useful for your users.
3. Make sure that each page has a unique <title> tag, and it accurately describes the content on the page, and that all images have ALT tags that are descriptive
4. Frequently check for broken links and correct HTML – anything that is broken can hinder the spiders as they try to index your site
5. Use a robots.txt file on your web server which tells the crawlers which directories can or can't be crawled.