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  • Discover The Power Of WordPress Blogging

    I am sure by now the term blog is well known by most people, if you don’t know it is essentially a style of website. It is a website platform that allows the quick and easy posting of content (blog posts) on a regular basis. They first gained popularity as a personal diary, but have since became one of the most popular platforms for a website period.

    Even your older traditional websites have moved towards at the least adding a blogging aspect to their website.

    This will be a controversial statement to some people but my favorite blogging platform is WordPress. I think that it is the most effective and user friendly blogging/website platform out there.

    Don’t take my word for it – try it out. Set up a free blog on WordPress.com. A WordPress blog hosted here isn’t as dynamic as hosting one yourself, but this is a great way to get used to the back end of WordPress and it is 100% free.

    You might be asking yourself why WordPress anyways? Why do I care?

    Well, when you are working online you will enjoy the power of WordPress.

    You will be able to build professional looking websites on your own through the use of themes.

    You will be able to easily add content from any computer that has internet access.

    The WordPress editor is similar in style to many word processing programs. Adding content to your site doesn’t require a web designer – it is so simple anyone can do it.

    You want to add fresh content to your site constantly, so having a platform that makes that easy is super important.

    Google loves WordPress and blogs in general. it also loves fresh content. If you want your website to show up higher in Google searches – then built it with something Google loves: WordPress.

    If you don’t have a website yet, consider building your first with WordPress. If you do have a website – consider adding a blogging aspect. It will make adding content easier on you, and the content will good for web traffic.

  • How to Resize Images with WordPress Media

    Video: How to use the WordPress Media tools to resize images you have imported to WordPress.

  • Things That You Should Know About Long Tail Keywords

    Keywords phrases, also called long tailed keywords, are any keyword that is made up of more than one word, usually 3 or more. This is very important for you to know since most of what you do online will most likely revolve around long tailed keywords.

    Most single keywords will just be way too competitive. They will literally have millions of online marketers all competing over that word. That is why the long tailed keywords make so much more sense.

    It will be much easier to rank for the term, “cheap golf balls” than it would be to rank for the term “golf balls”. Either way you will still have a lot of monthly searches but you may actually have a shot (pardon the pun) of ranking for the longer keyword phrase.

    Don’t get misled by the huge amounts of monthly searches some keywords get. If they are getting hundreds of thousands of searches each month you can bet that there are millions of competitors all fighting over the scrapes.

    Why bother? You can easily compile a long list of long tailed keywords. Each keyword can average over 1,500 searches a month. And the best part? You can rank high for most if not all of the keywords on your list.

    Just ranking high for one of those keywords might not get you a lot of traffic, but what if you had a list of 20 long tailed keywords, each receiving about 1,500 searches a month and you were able to rank high for all of them? That is a lot of traffic, traffic that you just wouldn’t get if you tried to rank for the much more competitive keywords.

    You can use the Google Keyword Tool, which is free, or many other online versions which are not, to find a great list of keywords associated with your niche market. Just start off by using a fairly broad term and then burrowing down to find a nice long list of highly targeted keywords that consist of 3 or more words.

    Once you have your keyword list you can then use those keywords for many things such as article marketing and on site search engine optimization (SEO). This will allow your website or your articles to show up high on the first page of Google for a particular keyword. That means a lot of highly targeted traffic to your website… all for free.

    Another important thing to keep in mind, you need to make sure that the keywords you choose not only have a decent number of monthly searches, and that they aren’t too competitive, but also that they are highly relevant to the content of your website.

    This is another parameter the search engines use to determine the rank of your site. If the keywords that you are targeting do not relate really closely to your website you won’t rank as high for that keyword. It’s not a big deal, just throw out any of the words on your list that don’t relate directly to your website.

    Finding the best keywords phrases for your online marketing is a very important step to take to assure your online success.

  • How to set up a capture form using your autoresponder software

    Video: Setting up a lead capture form using your autoresponder software.

  • Tips on How To Build a Top Notch Keyword List

    When doing your keyword research it’s very important that you don’t overlook a very obvious, but frequently overlooked fact: you don’t just want traffic to your site, you want targeted traffic. You want to draw the people to your website who are most likely to buy the product or service you are selling. For that reason you cannot forget to consider the relevant keyword when evaluating your keyword list.

    Make sure that the keywords you are targeting are relevant to what your website is promoting. If you find that you have kind of missed the boat you can either renew your keyword list or change some of the content on your website to make it match up more closely with your keyword list.

    All the search engines consider relevance very highly. If you target keywords that are not closely related to your website, the search engines will find that you have very low relevance and won’t rank your site as high.

    Do not get too caught up on one or two word keywords, in almost all cases they will be much too competitive and you will have a very hard time ranking for them. Instead, find a large list of keyword phrases. When you have a 3 or 4 word keyword phrase you may not get quite as many searches but you also won’t have nearly as much competition.

    Longer keyword phrases can still deliver a lot of searches, probably not as many as the more popular one and two word phrases, but they will also be much less competitive.

    When you first start your keyword research you can use many tools online, some of them are free, some of them are not. If you have a limited budget you should start with the free Google keyword tool. This one tool can give you all the information you need to compile an excellent keyword list.

    Again, the basics of a good keyword list is to have keywords that get a lot of monthly searches (around 1,500) and few competitors (usually anything less than 20,000, though this can vary, you have to find your own parameters).

    It may take you and little trial and error to find the highly relevant, well searched for keywords that also don’t have a lot of competition. This process can sometimes get a little tedious, but remember a good keyword list is like money in the bank. When you have a highly targeted keyword list you can get a lot of quality traffic to your website and that can relate directly into sales.

    To recap, in order to build a top notch keyword list that will allow you to get a ton of very targeted traffic you will need to consider several variables. One of them is to find only the most relevant keyword possible. The keyword must relate directly to the subject of your website. If it does you can have a much higher conversion rate and you can also get a lot more organic traffic.

  • Internet Advertising For Your Business To Stay On Top

    If you have a business of your own, or you are just interested in making money online, then you need to advertise online. Perhaps you have been online searching for information on how to do just that, and you are overwhelmed by all of the choices. All of those options can be a good thing, or a bad thing. They’re bad if they make you confused and keep you from taking action. They’re good because they can fit in with virtually any business. Here are some things to keep in mind about internet advertising.

    What a lot of new marketers don’t understand is that traditional advertising can be quite expensive. So, when they are confronted with something that costs $20 or so, and can reach 1,000s of targeted customers, they balk at the price. Perhaps this is because they believe that all online marketing should be free. But the truth is that it isn’t.

    Don’t get me wrong, you can certainly get started with internet advertising for little to no cost. But the price you pay will be in the form of time. It’s up to you if you would rather spend money or time, but the general rule of thumb is that the more you spend, the less time it will take, and vice-versa.

    Internet advertising is flexible enough to fit into any budget, and you don’t need to invest a lot of time either, though there are always trade offs between the two. With so many choices, it can be hard to decide where to start. Guess what? It doesn’t really matter! Nope. It’s far better to get started and try your hand at it, than it is to wait around until you “learn everything”.

    That being said, it’s still important to take your online marketing efforts seriously. Sure, it doesn’t cost much, and is relatively easy, but you are trying to run a successful business. Therefore, you need to treat all aspects of what you do as if they will have an impact on your bottom line, and internet advertising is no exception.

    You need to be careful about which methods you try, especially when you are just starting out. There really aren’t any bad methods, but not all of them work well for all businesses. So, before you dive in head first, think about who your target market is, what makes your offer unique, and the best way to present your offer to your market. Doing these three things are just the start, but they will put you way ahead of all of the people who don’t do them.

    Regardless of which internet advertising methods you decide to go with, the key is to get started as soon as possible. Start now if you can. The sooner you get in, the sooner you will be able to reap the rewards of your efforts. If you ask those who are successful online, they will tell you one of the biggest differences between failure and success is taking action. What you do now will determine the future of your business.

  • The Biggest Blog Traffic Mistakes Revealed

    Do you care about your blog’s traffic? Some people don’t really care about traffic, they just write about what they are feeling. They are happy to just have friends and family find their blog. There is nothing wrong with that. For other people traffic is king. Some people use blog to make money through ads or affiliate offers. Other people use it to build a brand and direct traffic to their money sites. In either of the latter scenarios, traffic is important. If traffic is that important to your site then you have to monitor it. There are a lot of free options out there to monitor traffic. The problem is that people get way too wrapped up in these. If you care about traffic and want to monitor it, then avoid these mistakes:

    1. A visible counter: These used to be found on a lot of sites, there is a reason they aren’t anymore. They are lame. Counters on your website are just too old fashioned. No one really cares how many people have been to your site, except you. Besides being cheesy, they are also completely useless and usually inaccurate. There are a lot of options that let you monitor traffic behind the scenes, so stick to them.

    2. Living and Dying by Alexa Rank: Alexa is a website that ranks other sites based on traffic. People new to blogging love to watch their site rise on the Alexa rankings. I used to be one of these people until I realized how useless it really is. First off, Alexa only counts when someone with the Alexa toolbar comes to your site. So sites that attract webmasters and technical people will have better results than a site that doesn’t attract people likely to have the toolbar. For example, I had a general interest blog that got about 13k hits per month. My friend had a blog that attracted more techy people and got about 3k hits per month. Even though he had 10k less visitors per month than me, his Alexa ranking was hundreds of thousands better than mine.

    You can easily tweak your ranking too. Just install the Alexa toolbar and surf your own site. I installed it last night, and checked out my site a couple times, I woke up this morning having gained 6 thousand spots on Alexa. That was with NO effort either.

    3. Stat Addiction: This happened to me and it was worse than crack. I had to wean myself off of checking my stats to curb the withdrawal symptoms. Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but it can be quite addictive. I had three traffic monitors on my site at one time. I had Google Analytics, StatCounter and Woopra all on one site. Besides negatively effecting my load times there is no need for this.

    There is no real benefit to monitor your traffic every 10 minutes. I can understand checking it after a new post or something. That way you can monitor how effective the post was. Besides that though, you need to chill out on the traffic monitoring. It is a huge time sink. I was checking my stats 10x a day, taking 5 minutes to do so each time. That is almost an hour of wasted time. I could have created two high quality blog posts in that time. I could have created dozens of backlinks to my site. I could have promoted my blog through social media. I could have done anything more productive than staring at my traffic stats! My suggestion is to check your stats at the start of the day each day, and maybe at the end of the day as well. That way you can still monitor the effectiveness of your content, but you won’t waste hours a week doing it.

    Monitoring traffic is important for most blog owners. We all want traffic right? With that said, make sure you avoid the above mistakes. Don’t get swept up in the traffic monitoring hurricane. Traffic is important, but it will come whether you monitor it or not.

  • Easily Install WordPress Plugins Automatically

    Video: How to insert and format images in WordPress

  • The Rights and Lefts of Tracking Program

    What if Jonas Salk hadn’t tested the polio vaccine? Or, what if Einstein never tested his theory of relativity? Do you think they would have been successful? In the science world, definitely NOT, and in the marketing world, testing is every bit as important if you want to achieve success.

    Any number of tracking programs are out there from Hits Connect to Track That Ad to the new Link Brander. Even server-side tracking scripts are available for purchase. Regardless of what you use, tracking every ad that you post, whether it be to a traffic exchange or to a safelist, you need to know how successful your marketing is. Why? Because if you don’t track your ads, you may spend tons of time and money chasing a dog that you’ll never catch.

    Tracking works simply. You place the ad URL into the tracker, which devises a new URL for you to use in its place. Every time you employ the tracker URL, that “hit” is recorded by the tracking system.

    Let’s say you buy 1,000 hits at XYZ traffic exchange. How will you know if they have been delivered, unless you’re using a tracking system? You won’t, and though it’s the exception rather than the norm, you may not get the hits you paid for.

    What should really interest you are actual click-throughs. That tells you how many times someone has actually seen your page and clicked on the link to take them to the site you’re promoting. In this case, you will use the tracker link as the URL in your “call to action” (the click here, join now, etc.) button on your splash page. Or, use it as the link in your safelist mailing, as an FFA link, or in any other form of traffic generation system. By using the tracking link, you’ll know every time someone clicks because the tracking system will tell you.

    As another example, let’s say we advertised site ABC on traffic exchange XYZ and we used a tracking link for our call to action. We did the same thing at traffic exchange 123. At XYZ, we got our 1,000 hits and only 15 people clicked through to our page. At 123, we got 1,000 hits, but 100 people clicked through to our page. In which traffic exchange do you want to promote that particular page more heavily? No brainer, right? At 123, of course.

    The only way that you can possibly know whether your advertising is working is by tracking the results. Check out several tracking services to see which fits your budget and has the features you like. Then, either buy the script or sign up for a subscription. A tracking system is one tool in your marketing toolbox that you cannot afford to be without.

  • How Keywords Impact Off Page SEO

    Your keywords are also important with regards to off-page SEO. Many people think they can’t control factors that aren’t on their own websites, but this isn’t true.

    There are two important things you can do to ensure your off-page SEO is as effective as possible:

    Make sure to seek backlinks from relevant sites.

    Make sure to control your anchor text.

    Relevancy

    A relevant backlink is one that comes from a page that discusses something that is on-topic for your niche. If you’re in the golf niche, you would want to seek backlinks from pages about golf. While almost any backlink is valuable, those that come from relevant pages are much more so.

    Anchor Text

    Anchor text is the text that is used to link from one web page to another. If you were going to create a link to Google, your anchor text would probably be “Google”.

    The code would look like this:

    Google

    If your page is targeting the keyword “buy golf clubs” that would probably be the keyword you would want to use for most of the anchor text linking to that page.

    Notice I said “most” of the anchor text linking to that page. You definitely do not want to use the exact same text as your anchor text 100% of the time. This would look unnatural and potentially get your site penalized by Google. Instead, use your main keyword phrase about 50-75% of the time, and use another two similar phrases (such as “purchase golf clubs”) the rest of the time. This will look much more natural.