Free Internet Marketing Methods

By Jo Han Mok

The best things in life are free, as many would say. This especially holds true with regards to advertising one's products or services. With free Internet marketing services, you can save a lot. Instead of shelling out big bucks for the marketing aspect of your product or services, that chunk of money could be put to other important elements of your business. Many information websites now offer info on Internet marketing services that comes with no price tag at all.

This is not to tell you that you are better off only focusing on plain free Internet marketing techniques. It will do your business more good if you mix traditional advertisement efforts with new marketing media.

Here are few of the free methods that you could utilize to make your products and services to be in their most visible, thus saleable, form.

1. Promote your business through free search engine submission and optimization.

Submit your website to various search engines regularly, if possible monthly. This will make more people know that your website actually exists. Aiming for the top search engines will help a lot in this endeavor.

2. Improve your articles.

Remember that information on articles with good content as traffic-bringer of websites? This time it's about making these articles serve your website better by using keyword suggestion tools that are offered for free. Update your web site's content by regularly checking the standing of your keywords with the current market.

3. Acquire free content.

If you have no time to increase the SEO or search engine optimization-friendliness of your articles, you can look for free content from article directories. All you need to do is retain the resource box of those write-ups.

4. Use free comprehensive web traffic analyzers.

These are valuable tools that you can make use of without costing you a dime. Your website's hits statistics will be produced by this kind of Internet marketing tool for your own analysis.

5. Learn to manipulate web design templates.

You don't have to be too techie-geeky to be able to design your web site. Oftentimes, web design templates or custom-made layouts are available free for the Internet marketer to use.

6. Monitor your website's visibility.

Tools such as search engine position trackers may be used to see your website's standing.

These processes are very convenient to use as long as you keep in mind that you use and try to master their use for your own benefit. Just don't get obsessed with your achievements when you finally learn how to use them and incorporate them in your Internet marketing efforts.

SEO and Positioning Your Website For Top Search Engine Rankings

By Davion Wong

SEO and positioning your website to grab top positions in search engines for targeted keywords require both good on-page and off-page optimization. On-page optimization refers to how you tweak the webpage itself, ie the meta-tags, webpage title, content, navigation sitemap, etc. It has everything to do with the web architecture. Off-page optimization is more of a technique applied beyond your website, without involving any change to your website. Let’s take a look at some important elements of SEO and positioning that would boost the ranking of your website.

First of all, we need to understand a bit more about the role of on-page optimization in SEO and positioning. In summary, on-page optimization requires you to craft the web page structure such that it is optimized for a particular keyword that you are targeting. Never build a site first before knowing what you hope to achieve, ie whether your aim is to drive maximum traffic and sell more products or just as a hobby.

You need to pay attention to the keywords you are targeting first, and do detailed researches before you start building your webpage and optimizing it for the keywords. A lot of webmasters fail to realize the importance of keyword research in SEO and positioning for top search engine ranking. They often do it the other way round, targeting popular and extremely competitive keywords and keyword phrases. You may have realized that competitive keywords like “search engine optimization” or “web traffic” are simply out of reach for a new or amateurish website. SEO and positioning your website for such keywords would only bring you disappointment as you realize that even with a fully optimized page, you are still on page 1000 of the search engine results.

One hint for you is to go for any keyword phrase with less than 1 – 2 million search results and fewer than 1000 competing websites in Google. How do you check the number of competing websites? Simply type in “Allintitle: Target Keyword Phrase” into Google search box and all the websites containing the specific keyword phrase would be displayed. It is common sense that any website targeting a keyword phrase would include it in the webpage title, isn’t it? Looking at the search results alone is vague and difficult to determine the level of competition. Once you have found the keywords for optimization, remember to include them in your page title, sub-headers, and meta-tags.

Off-page optimization looks more at the popularity of your website. The search engines are constantly changing the landscape of the internet but one principle stays constant, that is to give users relevant results. Other than meddling with the on-page factors, you need to be aware of how search engines measure your website popularity and keyword relevance. One major yardstick of SEO and positioning is using link popularity. Search engine spiders are not humans and can only understand web content to a certain logical extent. A human may see a web page as rich in content but a search engine spider may deem it as spam.

The unbiased and more accurate way of judging the importance of a web page in terms of keyword relevance is to leave the decision to fellow webmasters and search engine users, or in short, votes of confidence. A link to your web page is a vote declaring that your web page is worth mentioning for that specific topic. But I must emphasize that not all links are equal. Find out why at my blog and also learn basic and advanced tips and tricks about SEO and positioning your website for top rankings either manually or using tools that would conveniently and quickly rank your website.

Good Website Content-Why It's Your Most Valuable Asset

By Brian Cotsen

• What do you want to achieve?
• How do website visitors see your content?
• Visitors scan
• Visitors use the 'F' movement
• Visitors are impatient
• Keyword = content!
• One idea per page.
• Give visitors eyes a rest - use white space
• Build trust.
• Content for search engines
• Sum it up. -------------------------------------------------

What do you want to achieve?

• Why does your business website exist?
• What do you want visitors to do when they land on your website?

If you answered "to impress people" or "for fun" then you may have the wrong attitude towards your on line business website.

If you answered "to turn my visitors into customers" then you're spot on.

Good website content is all about turning those curious website visitors into feverish customers. Ones that buy, sign-up, click through your affiliate links/ adsense or what ever it is that you want them to do.

Good website content gets those visitors to TAKE ACTION

Getting visitors to your website is one problem... once they're there, getting them to 'take action' is quite another.

Website browsers read and react quite differently to written words presented to them on the screen to those in a brochure or magazine.

Good website content is created by understanding the way humans read off a computer screen. Understand this and you can win them over and achieve your goals...get them to take a desired action!

Visitors Scan - good website content writers know that visitors quickly scan the screen to find key bits of information. They don't read every word.

• Use subheadings for impact, to draw attention to the main point of the following paragraph.
• Use bulleted lists to deliver information in small chunks.
• Avoid mixing figures and words e.g It was found that 357, 000, that's 78%, of all visitors to London said the Tower of London was the best attraction. Better to have said "Most visitors voted 'The Tower' their 'top' attraction" - See how much more punchy that was.

Visitors use the 'F' movement

• Visitors scan the top & left column first, then move across to the right.
• Most read or noticed - Top left section.
• Least read or noticed - Bottom right.

Put important content or sign-ups 'top left' of the page.

Visitors are impatient - Good website content is:

• Brief.... enough said?

Don't use long words, flowery language or rambling sentences - you'll loose your audience because they loose concentration.

Keyword Rich - Good website content is 'Keyword focussed' Every page of your website should be built using a keyword... right? Good website content starts with your keywords, the ones that those visitors used in the search to find you. Using those same keywords will help you to connect with those visitors - empathise with them.

• Don't over use the keyword, it will disrupt the flow of your text.
• Aim for a density of 3-5% use.
• Find variations that use the keywords in different combinations.

Keep it focussed - One idea per page

• Website visitors will only focus on one new idea per page - keep it focussed.

Good content is 'Empty'

Blank areas of a page? What nothing at all? Yes it's known as 'white space' though it doesn't have to be white. Remember that reading from a screen is tiring. Often those poor visitors are bombarded by busy, visually noisy screens with too much going on. This causes them to feel bamboozled and switch off from the information in front of them. Think how nice it is to visit 'Googles' home page. Just one thing right in the centre of all that white space.

• Give the text or content room.
• Give the visitors eye's a rest... they'll be able to focus on the information on screen.

Good website content builds trust:

• Well researched.
• Accurate in it's facts and information.
• Deliver on their promises.

No readers are impressed by factual errors or poorly researched articles. If you want those first time website visitors to become regular visitors and customers... this should be your goal.

Think of Amazon, Google or Yahoo. Love them or loath them but they all deliver the goods that their users want.

Make sure you over deliver with your good website content.

So much for humans! Good website content pleases the search engines too.

• Headlines and 'H' tags
• Keywords/ keyword phrases
• Title tags
• Description tags
• Keyword rich content
• Relevant text rich links to other relevant pages

Don't forget those search engines that visit your website to read the content, they'll reward you and the website if the content is good (notice I used website, good and content in a different order).

So lets sum it all up - Good website content is:

• Brief - Scanable
• Positioned well - 'F' movement
• Keyword rich
• Focussed - One idea per page
• Empty - white space
• Accurate - Build trust
• Tight & Neatly punctuated.
• Crisp & punchy
• Remember those search engines

When you've finished writing get someone, who doesn't know your subject, to read it through.

• Does it make sense?
• Did it hold their interest?

So no excuses - make sure every page has good website content to keep turn those website visitors into feverish customers.

3 Reasons Why All Affiliate Marketers Should Have Their Own Website

Affiliate marketing is widely considered an easy way to generate an income online. Affiliate marketers do not need to set up website, develop any products, write sales copy or provide customer support. They can just concentrate on generating traffic to the product sales page and collect their commission when a sale is made.

However, successful affiliate marketers will go the extra mile to generate more sales. They will set up their own websites to promote other people products. Here are three reasons why you should also have your own websites as an affiliate marketer.

1. Offer Your Own Bonus

If a product is very popular, it will attract a lot of affiliates. In order to capture a bigger slice of the profit pie, you need to convince your prospects that buying through your affiliate link is the most sensible thing to do. The best way to do this is to offer a bonus that is related to the product you are promoting. For example, if you are promoting web hosting, you can offer to build a website for each prospect that purchase through your affiliate link. You have to make sure your bonus complement the product you are promoting. Do not offer anything that is in direct competition. Most important of all, you must deliver what you promise.

After setting up your own website that showcase your bonus, you can direct prospects to your website so that they see your offer first. This way, you are creating more value for the product you are promoting. In addition, you are establishing your own unique selling point and differentiate yourself from other affiliate marketers.

2. Ease of Tracking

When you have your own website, tracking becomes a whole lot easier and useful. Although there are many affiliate programs that offer you tracking capability, they are seldom up to the mark for serious affiliate marketers.

With your own website and hosting account, you can install your favorite tracking program to monitor all your marketing campaigns. Even if you do not use any tracking software, you can still obtain a lot of useful data from your web host log file. These data include the number of visitors that have visited your site, duration of their stay, where they come from and the keywords they used to find your site.

By analyzing the data from the web host log file or your favorite tracking software, you can gain a lot of market intelligence that will help you understand your target market better. In addition, it can also help you refine your offer to target the right audience.

3. List Building

To ensure the long-term survival and success of your online affiliate business, you must have a list of targeted prospects. With your own website, you can add an opt-in form on your home page requesting for your visitors’ name and email address. You will need to install your own mailing list management software or subscribe to a mailing list management service before you can start collecting visitors’ personal data.

Building an opt-in email list is one of the best ways to gather prospects. However, the addition of an opt-in form may distract your visitors from your main offer. You have to decide what action you want your visitors to take and design the home page of your website accordingly.

These are but three of the many reasons why all affiliate marketers should have their own websites. A personal website can definitely help to maximize earning potential when used correctly. The possibilities are endless and are limited only by your imagination and creativity.

By Stephen Chua