Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Optimising Web Site

Optimising Web Siteg Webpage:

To get more traffic in your blog or website you need to optimise your blog or
website for the search engines. It’s not the latest and
greatest search engine optimisation (SEO) tricks. Just use the basic ones for your first time to optimize your website .

1) Add meta tags to your site like this:

meta name="description" content="…Description of blog or website…."
meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3"
meta name="robots" content="FOLLOW,INDEX"

Description is a general content website. keywords should be related to
the content of your webpage. For example: If your webpage is about health
you would put something cancer, yoga, herbal menu, slim, good stomach etc.
You do not need to change the third line.

Make sure you put the meta tags before the title tag on each of your
webpages.

2) Create a lot of keyword rich content pages. Put the keywords in their
titles. Each page should be optimised with meta tags, appropriate
keywords and of course, AdSense ads. Make sure these pages are
linked to each other.
3) Ad sdynamic auto updating content to your site. Like news feed.
Search engines like them.
4) Build your webpage content around high paying keywords such as
cars, shopping, credit repair, travel etc. Keywords in these niches pay
more money per click. So if a webpage on your site is about credit
repair, the AdSense ads on the page would be about credit repair
which is a high paying AdSense keyword. These keywords can pay as
high as $10 per click.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Understand the Truth

1. Trading or Games is Probabilities
Head I win one dollar then tail you win one dollar.
2. Plan Your Trades and Trades Your Plan
Your Jop is Trader, is a follow a trading plan, good plan is good luck
3. If You Don't Spend Much, You Can't lose Much
One of the biggest mistakes as a traders is have to much money riding on the table

Monday, November 9, 2009

Tactics to Improve Blog Search Engine Rankings

logs are often touted as good for search engine optimization. The reality is, blogs are simply software tools and what you get out of them from a SEO perspective is in proportion to how well you know how to use them. Good keyword categorization and content are a start, but blogs are not much of a SEO asset unless they attract links.

The myth of “Build it and they will come”. Not many businesses that start blogs have the patience to create great content and wait for others to find that content all on their own as a linking strategy. Without clicking on a link or finding it on a search engine, how will others find your blog? Content is King but only if you promote it.

Links from relevant, credible sources balanced with on-page keyword optimization make it easier for search engines to find, index and sort blog posts in search results. If there’s an expectation for a company blog to rank well in search results, be sure to consider some of the following link building tactics:

1. Create content worth linking to. No matter how many tactics you find here and elsewhere, there simply is no substitute for creating content that others may find useful. Take the time to look at blog posts that already rank well in search results and notice their structure, quantity of words and word placement.

2. Conduct backlink analysis on competing web sites or blogs – find out who is linking to competitor sites that are not linking to yours. Ask sites linking to multiple competitors to link to yours as well. If another web site or blog is already linking to multiple competitors, there is a chance they’ll link to your blog as well.

3. Make useful comments on other blogs that don’t have rel=nofollow. Comments should always be useful, but if you become aware of a topically relevant blog that does not discourage search engine spiders from crawling links in comments, it’s work spending the extra time to provide helpful insights a links to resources that you’ve published on your own blog.

4. Encourage social bookmarks & news submissions of your content using services without rel=nofollow. Show links to those services like Folkd, Spurl or Feedmarker in the blog post template code so they are visible for blog readers to use. Some social bookmarking services will make a copy of what you bookmark or a static web page of the bookmark including a do follow link back to the source (your blog).

5. Get listed on other blogger’s blogrolls. It never hurts to ask another blog that you’re active with to see if they’d consider adding your blog to their blogroll or curated lists of blogs.

6. Guest write on other blogs and include a link to your blog in the bio. In the course of getting to know blogs that already rank well on the keyword phrases you’re targeting, you may notice that they often accept guest blog posts from others. Contact the blog owner and suggest a compelling post that would be first and foremost, valuable to their readers. If it makes sense editorially to link from within the guest post to your own blog, be sure to use relevant keywords as the link text.

7. Submit to blog & RSS directories. Many directory links have no follow links or are not visited by a large volume of people, but making sure your blog and RSS feed are included in niche categories and collections of blogs can be a positive signal to search engines as well as to long tail users. Many bloggers that aggregate large lists of topically specific blogs will cultivate blog directories as a easy way to find blogs on similar topics. If your blog isn’t on the niche list in those situations, you won’t be included.

8. Submit to regular web site directories like botw.org. While there are blog specific directories (BOTW has one of those as well) many don’t discern web sites from blogs. If a quality directory has a relevant category with other reputable web sites in it, then it makes sense for your blog to be among them as a useful information source.

9. Be sure to include your blog URL in profiles and bios on social media sites. While most social media sites that allow users to add links to their profiles add no follow to the links, there are many that do not. Public profile links on LinkedIn and YouTube channels for example, are good links. Rather than focus on registering with 300+ sites using Knowem, just make sure that of the social media profiles you do set up inlcude a link back to your blog.

10. Write testimonials for services and software that you use. They may publish with a link back to your blog. Testimonials must be well written, genuine and specific in order to be useful for the service/product owner. Get at the essence of what’s great about the product or service and even add something unique. If you’ve written a review of the product/service on your blog, that can also get you a link from their press page.

11. Job listings should always have a link back to your blog. Blogs can be useful recruiting tools that help candidates understand the culture of your company. When purchasing job listings on other web sites, add a link to your blog. The listings may expire, but may also introduce your blog to candidates that write their own blog and decide to write about a listing with a permanent link to the hiring company blog.

12. Event listings should always have a link back to your blog. Blogs can be effective tools for promoting events and if you are listing your event with 3rd party services, a link back to your blog post with more details will be useful to readers that want to know more. That link can also be useful to search engines.

13. Contributions to non-profits often have a donor page with a link. These links are now very rare but you should contribute anyway.

14. Article syndication can still result in a few good links. Include your blog URL in the article bio. Take some of your best tips oriented blog posts and re-write them for specific industry verticals or applications. Then submit them to article repositories. When others re-use those articles, the bio link back to your blog can be picked up by readers and search engines.

15. Distribute press releases via a wire service with a link to your blog included. Our client, PRWeb, is a pioneer in providing competitive SEO value with press release distribution. Many blogs and some news web sites will re-publish your press release exactly as it was distributed, including good links back to your blog. Journalists use News search to look up past press releases and research on stories, which presents an opportunity to be found and included.

16. Contribute Op Ed pieces to Mainstream Media web sites. Contribute a link to your blog of course. If you suggest content to another web site such as a letter to the editor, why not keyword optimize the title? Why not include a link back to your blog where you’ve written many more articles on the same topic?

17. When you get media coverage (or placements) in online publications, be sure to ask the journalist for a link to your blog. Again, it never hurts to ask. Many publications have a policy not to link out from stories. Many leave it up to the journalist or their editor. If you don’t ask, you will never get the link.

18. Develop social networks and share especially useful content from your blog where relevant. Be useful to others and they will useful to you by promoting your content and attracting links. Don’t be gratuitous when sharing links to your own content, but when you have something particularly special and valuable that’s highly relevant to a particular network, then by all means, share it with them. Some are bloggers as well and may link to it from their own blogs as well as pass the link along to others.

19. Linkbait. Create or aggregate disparate content that provides value and is not easily found elsewhere. Promote it to those that would be interested and in a position to distribute to the right audience. Again, create useful content, but be thoughtful about packaging it in a way that makes it unique and is easy to pass along. Look at other blog posts in your topical category that have “gone hot” on social news sites and understand their structure, format and tone. Leverage what has worked for others in your own content to be promoted.

20. Sponsor content on web sites or newsletters archived to the web that allow you to include a link. It may be a nofollow link, but it may not. Many newsletters sent via email are archived to the web or have landing pages on the web. Ask those newsletters if you can buy an ad or even contribute a short article. The article credits should include a link to your blog.

21. Hire bloggers to write content for you. They’ll often cross-post it to their own blog with a link back to yours. Of course, you should be considerate and simply mention that this is ok, don’t ask them or require them to do it.

22. Run a contest that may involve others deciding to link back to your blog. This can be tricky, but Marketing Pilgrim does a great job of this with their SEM Scholarship Contest. Readers write blog posts and the first cut is based on which posts get the most traffic and presumably, links among other criteria.

23. Offer a widget, when posted to others’ web sites, includes a link back to a credits page for the widget on your blog. TopRank’s Thomas McMahon created a RSS buttons tool and it’s use by other blogs has resulted in over 322,000 inbound links.

24. Review other blogs and offer a badge for those that get included. We’ve done this with BIGLIST and it has resulted in over 64,000 inbound links. Focus on quality and be consistent. Also offer a version of the badge that does not include a link for those that want to display the “blog flare” but don’t or can’t link to it. You should include your logo on the badge for improved brand awarness whether there’s a link or not.

25. Create an exceptionally useful tool. Others will link to it simply because it is useful. (See step 1) TopRank created a Social Bookmarking Tool several years ago and still has over 50,000 links as a result.

Bonus tip: When others link to you, THANK THEM! Building good will is one of the most underrated marketing skills online. Be genuine, thoughtful and courteous. Also be SMART and driven to get links where it makes sense.

What linking tactics for blogs have you found to be most effective? What challenges are you facing in attracting other sites to link to your blog?
from link

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Internet Marketing Techniques - Advertise Your Business Online

Internet marketing has one of the best advantages in marketing - global reach, cheap, opportunities to expand your market and some advertising can run long-term without you having to worry about the advertising cost.

To start with online advertising, you need to have your website. Whether you are offering a product or a service, you need to have your website to let the online world know that you exist. Of course, if you want to promote your product or your services, you need to attract potential customers to your site, and this is where theinternet marketing techniques come in.

There are however internet marketing experts available in the internet but just be careful with who you are dealing with. Below are some internet marketing techniques you can use in marketing your product.

Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)

Pay per click marketing is a one of the most popular advertising tool online, most probably because it is cheaper, and it follows a system where you will only pay for every potential customer visiting your site. It is different from the normal advertising where you get to pay for the size of the ad space or whether how long your ad is running on TV whether or not people are interested in your product. Pay per click does not cost you anything in posting your ad, you only have to pay for each click. This made it one of the most attractiveinternet marketing techniques available online.

Pay per click can be done in search engines or in other websites. Google AdWords for instance is Google's advertising tool using PPC. You can also make use of the PPC tool in other websites by posting your ads on websites and paying the website owner for every click generated by the ad.

Affiliate Marketing

Your website will serve as your online store. However, you cannot just rely on your website to make a sale. You can also tap other websites who are willing to sell your products to their visitors and readers. They are called affiliates. In affiliate marketing, these affiliates will sell your products or services in their own websites and for every purchase made by their referrals, the affiliates get a commission from the sale.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is one of the internet marketing techniques that can have a long-term effect on your business. It is also a cheap method in online marketing. In this technique, you will need to write general and informative articles related to your product or your services, but not about your product, and submit them to different directories online. These articles contain a resource box where you can put a link to your website. This will be the means of bringing potential customers to your site. For as long as the articles are there in the different directories, your links will be sending visitors to your website for a long time.

Carolyn Anderson worked for an internet marketing company for about a year. To learn more about the tips and tricks of internet marketing, check out 12 Month Internet Millionaire. For techniques in earning money online, check out No Monkey Business, where you can find more than 100 money-making methods for your website.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Carolyn_Anderson

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

8 Secrets to Marketing Success

8 Secrets to Marketing Success
The profits of a business are totally dependent on marketing. Otherwise few, if any, sales will be generated. Learn the 8 secrets business owners can use to greatly improve their marketing success.
Let's discuss the 8 secrets business owners can use to greatly improve their marketing success.


Secret #1: Give marketing top priority
.

The primary reason any customer chooses to buy your products or services is because of effective marketing. The marketing process starts at the very beginning and continues forever! It begins with Product Development, ensuring that the product or service fills a need for potential customers, so they will want to buy it. The next step is Pricing to ensure that the business will achieve profits from sales and that customers will perceive price to be less than their value of the benefits they receive. Effective Positioning allows potential customers easy interaction with the business to evaluate the product or service. The final step is Promotion, where the business communicates with their potential customers about the existence and benefits of the products or services to entice them to contact the business to learn more. Marketing is culminated in Sales, when your customers value of their benefits exceed the price of the product or s! ervice. You generate successful sales only because you complete positive Product Development, Price, Positioning, and Promotion. In fact, you will want your business to be a marketing businesses. You will want to focus on marketing at all times, to succeed.


Secret #2: Do not confuse advertising with marketing.


Advertising is only a part of the last marketing step, Promotion, and it occurs late in the game. You will often think advertising is all there is to marketing, so you overlook the other 3 very important earlier marketing steps. Consequently, you will lose the opportunity to control and develop over 75% of all marketing, which must be well done first, to allow advertising to succeed.

Secret #3: Do not base your marketing solely on your own opinions and desires.

Owners believe their power and freedom of choice, as the boss, means that they don't have to deal with the opinion of others. "I am now my own boss" is only partly true. You are in virtual control of either succeeding or failing to convince - The Customer- to buy your products or services. You want to avoid IMPOSING your opinion on your potential customers. Focus on fulfilling the perceived wants and needs of your customers, from Their Perspective, so you will greatly increase the number of customers that will decide to buy your products and/or services.

Secret #4: Learn all you can about your potential customers.

You want to conduct in depth research of your chosen potential customers. You will want to learn everything possible about Who your potential customers are, What your potential customers THINK want to buy, Why they THINK they buy, How they THINK they buy, and When they THINK they buy.


Secret #5: Learn how to screen out undesirable customers.


You have the right and obligation to determine which potential customers you will agree to serve. You should screen out undesirable customers early so you can focus more attention on customers you want to serve. Sadly, you often may not know how to select desirable customers from the pool of potential customers you encounter. As a result, you often spend too much time, money, and energy trying to deal with a handful of hard-to-please customers who frequently demand lower prices at the expense of better customers, who go elsewhere because they were ignored. You should know the key criteria to help you decide which potential customers are acceptable.

Secret #6: Know and appreciate the value of your existing customers.

You may often become so focused on getting new customers you ignore your existing repeat customers. Your business will probably not survive without repeat business. Repeat customers present a wealth of opportunities to you. They frequently provide you excellent feedback; they provide an excellent reference and referral service (read free advertising); they are the least expensive and most likely source of additional business, and their unnecessary departure causes substantial damage. Upset customers will complain to at least 5 to 9 others. Stay close to your existing customers and learn as much as you can from them.

Secret #7: Create a positive identity that is distinct from your competitors.

Most customers compare. They need a good reason to choose your product or service over others. You complete more sales when you understand your competitors extremely well and position your products or services for positive customer comparison.

Secret #8: Consider the overwhelming power

Emotion has on the process of deciding to buy. The entire buying process is governed by emotional forces (some say over 80% of the entire process is emotional). Yet, you probably focus your energies on price and avoid the real emotional reasons customers will buy. You should know and feel the emotional connection your potential customers will attach to your business, your products and/or services, and the way customers interact with your business. You will want your entire marketing program to address the emotional issues to attract and keep the right customers.

The normal human thinking process of deciding to buy almost always starts with an emotional need. The emotional need causes the customer to consider buying something to fill it. The search and evaluation of the possible choices of products and or services is also frequently emotional, and additional emotional forces are often added. The price issue comes in near the end and, in reality, the customer wants to know the price to help justify the emotional decision they have already made. In fact, the request for the price from a normal customer is a very strong buying signal (does the cost allow me to buy what I want and is it fair for what I decided to get?). Business owners succeed when they know how to deal with this emotional process and permit the customer to complete this process through final payment.

What a wonderful opportunity! You can take charge of learning, succeed in your goals, and have a ball along the way.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

What Does Marketing Mean ?

You can have the best little business ever with wonderful potential, but if you can't market it, you don't have a business at all.

Learn how to market yourself, because you are your business. Don't confuse the terms "marketing," "advertising," and "promotion." These terms carry a different tune.

Marketing means informing your potential clients about your products or service, and finding ways to establish and keep a customer base. Your target market is the specific group of people that consume your product or utilize your service.

Advertising refers to the various media used to convey your message. Printed advertisement, radio air time, television commercials and the Internet are all part of advertising that convey your business message to the public.

Promotion refers to the various methods by which your convey your message to customers. When you communicate with the public, you're promoting your business. Many people will join business associations, or set up displays in malls and craft show for promotional purposes.

Many people feel lost and uncomfortable with marketing and promotion. However, the longer you research your market, your product and your competition, the more comfortable you will become in marketing and promoting your products and or service. It takes time to learn what works for your business. You will constantly need to effectively find new methods because the old methods will stop working.

Be the very best you can be by working on your personal skills, and successful marketing and promotion will ultimately follow. Best of luck!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sonia_Colon

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

The New Math of Customer Relationships

The New Math of Customer Relationships

Deeply satisfied employee = deeply satisfied customer = lifelong profit.

Harvard Business School professor emeritus Jim Heskett and professor Earl Sasser have pursued this seemingly simple equation in books including Service Breakthroughs (with Christopher Hart) and The Service Profit Chain and The Value Profit Chain (with Lenoard A. Schlesinger). Some of the ideas go back to Heskett's 1986 book, Managing in the Service Economy. A new book, The Ownership Quotient, is underway, written with Sasser and Wheeler.

These works have come to deeply influence how managers think of customers, and introduce the idea that not all customers contribute equal value. Concrete examples illustrate the self-reinforcing nature of the connections between employee loyalty and customer loyalty; and between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.

We asked Heskett to update us on the new research and on the impact of these works on practice.

Sean Silverthorne: It's been five years since The Value Profit Chain was published, and ten years since the arrival of its predecessor, The Service Profit Chain. What kind of impact did the books and their themes exploring links between satisfied employees and satisfied customers have on practitioners?

Jim Heskett: While we don't spend any time tracking the impact, Earl and I (as well as our coauthors who, over the years, have included Chris Hart, Len Schlesinger, Gary Loveman, Tom Jones, as well as Joe Wheeler) have been reminded of it in various ways.

First, of course, there are those organizations known to us that use the ideas for a range of purposes, all the way from guiding their marketing and service efforts to providing a cornerstone for their overall business strategies.

Then there are large and small organizations with whom we've had no previous contact that get in touch with us to check up on the latest thinking that they say has influenced their management over the past decade or so.

Finally, the service profit chain turns up in annual reports such as that of Westpac, one of Australia's leading banks. The ideas are reflected in remarks by managers, whether or not the actual terms are used.

In many respects, they have become generic, which I suppose is the ultimate mark of usefulness. In all fairness, they are the product of the work of many practitioners and researchers. We just happened to have packaged and measured the relationships in a way that made sense to a lot of people.

Q: Many companies approach creating a good customer experience as a discrete action: a customer satisfaction program, for example. But your books detail an integrated set of actions and corporate values involving almost everyone in the company. How difficult has it been for organizations to adopt this all-in approach?

A: Service profit chain concepts are deceptively simple. They require an integrated set of management initiatives to achieve. The initiatives have to address employees first, then customers. And they take time.

So it's not surprising that not all of the organizations that have implemented parts of the concept have utilized it as a driving force for an entire business. Hardest of all is the cultural change that you mention. It requires that organizations identify values, behaviors, and measures that help reinforce service profit chain relationships.

"Service profit chain concepts are deceptively simple."But it also requires actions. That is, when managers are not managing by the values and cannot be admonished or retrained to do so (which rarely works), they have to go. That's a difficult step for many organizations to take.

Q: Which of the companies that you profiled continue to shine today? Any notable exemplars from the past that have lost their way?

A: Identifying exemplar organizations is somewhat foolhardy. Every organization hits rough patches. We've been fortunate to have a reasonably high "hit rate" over the years. Among those that have inculcated the ideas, whether they use the terms or not, that we identified early on have continued to do well are companies like the Vanguard Group, the Omnicom Group, and Southwest Airlines.

One organization that has encountered challenges has been ServiceMaster. To cope with market challenges, the company divested itself of some of the businesses that provided its cultural core.

Q: Will you update the books? If so, which new companies would you add to your list of examples?

A: Earl Sasser and I are updating the books with a new one titled The Ownership Quotient. In it, we highlight organizations like Harrah's Entertainment, Rackspace Managed Hosting (a Website hosting service), Baptist Health Care, and Wegmans (a regional grocery chain). At Harrah's, a former HBS colleague and coauthor of ours, Gary Loveman, has led a remarkable period of growth by installing service profit chain concepts throughout the organization.

These organizations have been able to achieve what we might call SPC.2 by creating "owners" out of both customers and employees. By owners, we mean people who are not only loyal and willing to recommend the organization to others, but who make referrals, influence others to join as customers or employees, test new products or services and provide suggestions for improvements, and are willing to help in the selection of new employees.

At Harrah's these customers are called Diamonds and Seven Stars. They have the highest lifetime value to the organization and, in addition, exhibit a much higher willingness than other guests to help Harrah's improve its business. Interestingly, this kind of approach helps explain many of the successful behavior patterns in "New Age" Internet-based businesses such as Rackspace Managed Hosting, and for that matter Google.

Q: One of the most powerful ideas presented in the books is the realization that not all customers produce equal value—in fact, companies should consider "firing" the less profitable customers. Has this concept taken hold in practice?

A: When we observed a number of organizations leading to the original articulation of the service profit chain, we found a common behavior among the most successful ones. In various ways, they "fired" customers who either were abusive in their relationships with employees or were just difficult to serve, perhaps because they fell outside the core constituency (target market) identified in the organizations' strategies. In some organizations, this is a way of expressing support for employees. In others, it is a way of preserving the organization's strategic focus. This is typically not something that an organization advertises. But it is standard practice in a number of organizations today.

For example, at ING DIRECT, the fastest-growing financial services organization in the United States over the past seven years, the company, in as personal and amiable a way as possible, asks 10,000 customers to close their accounts every month. It's important to point out that this is out of a current base of about 6.5 million customers who give ING DIRECT the highest marks for satisfaction out of all U.S. banking organizations. The company fires customers who are especially "high maintenance" because they are unusually high users of the time of its support center personnel. This both preserves a low-cost base for its targeted customer base and, by the way, reduces a source of frustration for employees.

Q: Increasingly, companies are riding the coattails of globalization to send their offerings around the world. Is it more difficult for multinationals or other global companies to practice service profit chain management given this dispersing of resources?

A: Service profit chain concepts are global, subject only to local cultural practices. Early morning group exercises for employees are the Chinese equivalent in some ways to the daily shift huddles at Build-A-Bear Workshop in the United States. Companies like Wal-Mart and UPS have been able, over time, to export service profit chain practices globally. Further, non-U.S. companies such as Bouygues Telecom in France and Westpac, the Australian bank I mentioned earlier, have utilized them as cornerstones of their successful operating strategies. So the ideas travel quite well, with some adjustments necessary to recognize cultural differences.

Q: As we head into what appears to be an economic slowdown, what should companies be considering in terms of the service profit chain? Can it be a tool for competitive advantage in a cooling economy?

A: Relationships between customer and employee satisfaction, loyalty, and productivity become even more critical during times of economic stress. During such times, the most important advice that one can give is first remember that the service profit chain starts with employees—therefore, preserve that resource; second, consider dividing jobs at lower pay rather than laying off customer-facing employees;third, seek economic ways of making both employees and targeted customers know that you value their loyalty—this doesn't require a lot of money; and fourth, work even harder at creating "owners" by eliciting suggestions from employees and customers alike about ways of cutting costs while enhancing customer service