Monday, March 31, 2008

SEO and Yahoo Store

You can find many services on the Internet that will help you to use Search Engine Optimization in order to start a new Yahoo store online. First of all, you'll need to make sure that your SEO capabilities and your store design are unique and interesting places to go on the Internet to shop, then utilize the maximum search engine optimization in order to attract your customers.

Three services online that can help you in the store establishment process are listed below:

1.At YSdesigner, ysdesigner.com, you can obtain solutions for the perfect e-shop and a detailed explanation as to how your design can affect your listing in the search engines.

2.For beginners or even experienced e-store owners, you'll need tips and advice on the many quirks and unforeseen SEO problems that can come up with your new Yahoo store. My Store Solutions, solutions for Yahoo stores, has put together an ebook that can be downloaded free at their site at mystore-solutions.com that can help new e-entrepreneurs with these common SEO problems, so as to achieve the maximum search engine optimization with their new store startups.

3.At 1 Choice 4 Your Store, 1choice4yourstore.com, this online service offers an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) online class that teaches you specifically how to optimize your Yahoo Store.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

PPC Mistakes To Avoid At All Cost

Pay Per Click(PPC) mistakes so you can avoid them and launch your campaign on the road to success immediately. PPC marketing can be a powerful tool to launch your business, increase awareness, and increase conversion rates but it can also have a costly trial and error period.

1. Missing the long tail keywords.
Don’t bid on every keyword variation that you can think of. You’ll spend a lot of money for very few conversions. Instead, focus on long tail keywords – keywords that are highly focused.
For example, the keyword ‘shoes’ is too generic and while you’ll receive an abundance of clicks, you’ll likely receive very few conversions simply because people are rarely searching for ‘shoes’ they’re more likely searching for ‘distance running shoes’, ‘custom made Italian leather shoes’, ‘infant walking shoes’ etc…
Focusing on the long tail keywords also means that you’ll pay less per click because there is less competition for those words and your conversion rate will likely be higher because you’re hitting a more targeted customer. Don’t forget that people are often searching for local providers and you can add your city or state into your pay per click campaign. For example, ‘distance running shoes, Austin TX’.

2. Not including your ad copy on your landing page.
Make sure that your ad copy is repeated on your landing page where you’re taking your visitor. If you’re advertising a 50% off sale then that’s what people will be looking for. If your copy doesn’t immediately address the information clearly, your visitor will leave.

3. Not using your creative mind.
Many marketers are afraid to step outside of the box. Instead they merely copy ads that they see from their competition. That’s not a good way to achieve results. If you want to see your click through rates sky rocket, then unleash your creative side and don’t be afraid to take risks. The worst thing that’s going to happen is your pay per click ad will be ignored. Instead, look to identify what is unique about your product or service and what benefit people will receive when they purchase.
Still struggling for a creative ad? Consider using the seasons in your ad copy. You can advertise a "holiday special", a summer blowout, a clear away the mid winter blahs, etc…Your ad copy will stand out from the others, it will be timely, and your click through rate will increase.

4. Not bidding on your business name.
This is a very cost effective means of getting more impressions. Consider bidding on your name and your name and geographic region. Not only will you receive more impressions but you’ll be able to clearly see how many people are searching for your business and you can use this statistic to gauge growth.
Note: If your competition is targeting your company name as a keyword, consider taking legal action. Report them to the search engine in question and draft a letter asking them to stop.

5. Failing to track and test.
When you set up your ad campaign, utilize the learning tools available to set your campaign up correctly from the beginning. There are numerous tools to track every visit to your site by the exact keyword, campaign and ad group used. This tracking and testing can be done by establishing variables or by integrating the pay per click campaign into your website analytics software.

Don’t forget to look at more than the click through rate. Conversion rates are the real money makers. An ad that has a 50% click through rate but a 1% conversion rate compared to an ad with a 20% CTR and a 20% conversion rate costs significantly more for less profits.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

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Affiliate Marketing

Make building and running an affiliate business more advantageous than other business models, it's still to your advantage if you're an affiliate marketer to build a list.

1. by building a list, you can recycle the traffic that you receive to your site. Even though some will buy through your link when you refer your visitors directly to the merchant's site, most won't buy, and you've lost that traffic. Also, when you refer the visitor to the merchant directly, the merchant will have a chance to get the visitor on his/her list, giving the merchant additional opportunities to market repeatedly to your potential customers.

2. by building a list, it gives you an opportunity to build a relationship with your visitors. You can convert your visitors to readers and then to customers.
Let's face it. Many people online are skeptical. Because there are so many scams occurring online, many people are worried about being taken. The truth is, the more credibility you have, and the harder you work to build a relationship with your readers, the more you will increase your bottom line.

3. by having a mailing list, you can endorse other products that complement your current offerings, whether you sell only affiliate products or you have your own products and services.
By selling multiple products, even if they're not your own, you can increase your sales. It makes it easy for you to go out and find the very best products to offer in your business. People love information, especially online, and you can offer unbiased reviews, or reviews on the best of the best with products online.

4. the biggest advantage of getting others to subscribe to your list is that these potential customers are targeted. They're looking for what you're offering. The difference between targeted and untargeted traffic is conversion. A targeted visitor is more likely to convert to a sale than a non targeted visitor.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Important For Domain Names

The business done using domain names has ever been getting more and more popularity, and its time everyone became aware of it. We will leap into the concept of this business with the following tips and ideas…
Domain name is nothing but the name you type on your address bar while accessing internet say… “google.com”, “www.yahoo.com” etc. But how can you make a business out of them! It’s just by having the name registered to yourself. Simple terms, “you own a domain name” if you register it, and you can sell it as you own it! Let’s go a closer look at the tricks involved in making good throughput.

1. Obviously you can’t have google.com registered to you!! They are the once already registered to someone. So try to get the domain names whose name you think will be sought after in the months to come, and which is also a catchy name! If you have a boom in certain niche of business, you may well get hold of some related name to that niche.

2. Next comes the way you select a particular name out of the thousands you are confused with. Select the names that have high probability keywords like say “cosmetic” in case you are looking for a fashion related thing… etc. These are the names that other competitors of business will be looking forward too. So you will be in for a huge profit if they decide to get it for them at any cost.

3. The price you pay for registering is only for a certain limit of time, normally one year, and then you have to keep renewing your name. Hence try to register a contemporary and famous name. Don’t have a far futuristic thought and decide upon the name, because its you who will be paying for the domain until someone comes after it.

4. The Domain names in the period they are parked uselessly can be made use of by having the ads of related products into your domain name’s page. Here is where the richness of the keyword in your domain name comes your aid. The more popular it is, the more people click into it and view the ads, and more you get out of it.

5. The domain names when sought after will have their value increasing day by day. So don’t get hasty and sell it rights out on the first day someone asks for it. Sometime a few days wait can yield you tens of thousands more.

Affiliate Marketing

If you want to earn real profits from an affiliate business though, then you need real strategies for getting traffic and earning profits.
Now, if you're already a member of an affiliate program, the next thing you need to do is work on earning more commissions.

If you really want to earn more commissions, here are three strategies that will help you begin to earn, or earn more from affiliate programs:

1. Know which the best affiliate program to promote.
To select the best products to promote, there are several factors you should consider. These include finding programs that have a generous commission structure. If you're having to sell a lot of a product to generate small commissions, you'll have to work a whole lot harder.
Make sure you know who your target market is and go where that target market is to promote. You also want to make sure that the programs you choose have a solid track record for paying affiliates, as well as having a solid track record for sales. Some sites, like Clickbank, can tell you how well different products are selling.
With thousands of affiliate programs available for you to sell, you can afford to be picky about what products you promote. Although as an affiliate, your reputation is less at stake than the merchant's, you want to be careful about what programs you promote. If you've built a list, as well as a relationship with your readers, your reputation is still at stake, and you want to make sure that you offer your readers good products.
An easy way for you to promote affiliate programs is through free ebooks and reports. These can be reports offered by the merchant, or a short report you've written about the product you're promoting. This can help you distinguish yourself from other affiliates, especially when you write the report yourself because you are giving the reader new information other affiliates are not offering.

2. Give away your free report to those who subscribe to your list.
Once you set up the lead capture page and autoresponder, all you have to do is drive traffic to the page.
You can also offer follow up messages on the product to give readers more information. By offering followups to your initial contact, you are building a relationship with the subscriber, and you are more likely to convert the subscriber to a customer.
Once you get the subscriber to sign up for your list and download the report, then you can send the subscriber to the merchant's website.
You can also publish an online newsletter or ezine for your list. Not only will you have a chance to promote your initial offering repeatedly, but you can also promote other offers. Let me caution you though, you want to make sure that you offer plenty of good information in your ezine.
An additional advantage of publishing an ezine is that you can also use this content for your website by creating an archive of your ezines. This also gives you an opportunity to promote to your new visitors.

3. Try pay per click advertising to get traffic fast
You can test your ads first by using some of the lesser known pay per click search engines that offer free credits. By testing your ads first, you'll find out what works best for promoting your affiliate products.
Build your list, offer your potential customers more value than your fellow affiliates, and test your promotions, and you can easily increase your commissions.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Learning the Basics of RSS

What is RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; syndicating means republishing an article that comes from another source such as a website.
An RSS is a means of publicizing updates about websites. It may or may not include a summary and photos of the latest posting. But those that provide summaries (thus Rich Site Summary) allow users to skim through the article so that they could decide later on if they want to access the website source. The RSS feed usually contains the title of the update originating from the website. It is also usually the link to the website source.

What are the benefits of RSS?
RSS gives benefits to both readers (users) and web publishers.

1. It gives you the latest updates.Whether it is about the weather, new music, software upgrade, local news, or a new posting from a rarely-updates site learn about the latest as soon as it comes out.

2. It saves on surfing time.Since an RSS feed provides a summary of the related article, it saves the user’s time by helping s/he decide on which items to prioritize when reading or browsing the net.

3. It gives the power of subscription to the user.Users are given a free-hand on which websites
to subscribe in their RSS aggregators which they can change at any time they decide differently.

4. It lessens the clutter in your inbox.Although your email address will be required to enjoy the services of online RSS aggregators, RSS does not use your email address to send the updates.

5. It is spam free.Unlike email subscriptions, RSS does not make use of your email address to send updates thus your privacy is kept safe from spam mails.

6. Unsubscribing is hassle-free. Unlike email subscriptions where the user is asked questions on why s/he is unsubscribing and then the user would be asked to confirm unsubscribing, all you have to do is to delete the RSS feed from your aggregator.

7. It can be used as an advertising or marketing tool.Users who subscribe or syndicate product websites receive the latest news on products and services without the website sending spam mail. This is advantageous to both the web user and the website owner since advertising becomes targeted; those who are actually interested in their products are kept posted.

What are the drawbacks of RSS?
The disadvantages of RSS use are brought about by its being a new technology and some user-preference concerns.
1. Some users prefer receiving email updates over an RSS feed.
2. Graphics and photos do not appear in all RSS feeds. For conciseness and ease of publication, RSS feeds do not display the photos from the original site in announcing the update except for some web-based aggregators
3. The identity of the source website can be confusing.Since RSS feeds do not display the actual URL or name of the website, it can sometimes get confusing on what feed a user is actually reading.
4. Publishers cannot determine how many users are subscribed to their feed and the frequency of their visits. Moreover, they would not know the reasons why users unsubscribe which could be important in improving their advertising.
5. RSS feeds create higher traffic and demands on the server.Most readers still prefer the whole update over a brief summary of the entry, thus they still access the site.
6. Since it is a new technology, many sites still do not support RSS.

How do I start using RSS?
There are two things needed: an RSS feed and an RSS aggregator or reader. The RSS feed comes from an RSS-supported website. There are also websites that provide a list of RSS feeds of different websites. An RSS aggregator is used to read the RSS feed from the source website. It scans and collects data on latest RSS feeds from the worldwide web.

An aggregator comes in two forms: a downloadable program also known as desktop aggregator and an online or web-based aggregator. Downloadable aggregators may require payment before they can be acquired, while internet-based aggregators are usually free of charge. All you need to do is to register an account then you are ready to use their services. Both versions allow you to customize or choose which RSS feeds to enter.

Paid aggregators are usually chosen by more experienced users and they usually allow more freedom in customizing feeds.
1. Choose an RSS aggregator to use. For beginners, web-based aggregators are recommended since they are usually user-friendly
2. Scan the homepage of your target website for the RSS or XML button. It contains the RSS code you need to enter in the aggregator. Copy this code. Syndic8 provides a directory of websites that support RSS.
3. Paste the code (which contains the URL of the website) in your aggregator. There is a space provided for pasting the code.
After you have done these three easy steps, you can start reading the RSS feeds coming from the website. New postings appear as they are published real time at the source website.

RSS and Internet Marketing
The original idea of RSS came from Netscape, where their intention is to provide a means for users to customize their personal homepage to contain links to websites that interest them, similar to bookmarking websites.

The application of RSS to internet marketing was an unforeseen development to RSS technology developers. Since users are given the freedom to add RSS feeds to their aggregators, those who are interested in particular products and services available in the internet can now be notified real time. Marketing becomes more specific to interested people and not a hit-and-miss operation.

Those who intend to use RSS for marketing their products and services should consider linking up with email account providers, (e.g. Yahoo, MSN, Google mail); networking websites (e.g. Friendster, Multiply, My Space, Hi5); websites of newspapers and television network websites (e.g. New York Times, CNN) for medium to big-scale companies. Small-time industries can also look into networking websites as well as personal blog websites (e.g. Blogspot) and websites of clubs and organizations that would probably make use of their products or services e.g. a fishing supplies store can look for the website of their local fishing club for possible RSS marketing.

Clearly, RSS is an innovation in information management in the worldwide web as well as online marketing. We can expect better RSS technology in the not-so-distant future as its popularity increases among users and website owners alike.
By Bhaseer Ahamed