Archive for June, 2009

Why Article Marketing is Important in Today’s Social Web 2.0

If you’ve studied article marketing, you already know that articles in the right places can be great for generating backlinks.  Here are a few other reasons to put article marketing in your IM toolbox.

Articles are user-generated content.  If you’ve read anything at all about Web 2.0 then you know that it is largely driven by user-generated content.  Article marketing shows that you are one of the people, instead of a company trying to just make a buck off the people.

People love to buy, but they hate to be sold to.  Having quality articles makes you into less of a seller, and more of a real person who happens to have a product to buy.

Give away good information in your articles and you’ll be seen as a valuable and trustworthy member in your niche.  You’ll also whet people’s appetites and have them wondering what kind of useful information they might find in your products and services.

You don’t have to be a lone individual for article marketing to help you out, though.  Companies can make themselves more real and personable with article marketing.

For one thing, make sure the articles placed for your company do not have the company’s name in the author bio box.  Each article should list a real person in your company as the author.  It’s not a bad idea to have a profile page on your site for each author.

Each author’s page should give a little bit about not only that person’s business background, but his or her extra-curricular involvements as well.  This will go a long way towards making your company look more warm and personal, and not just like another company.

Showing that you are a fellow citizen and participant in the online world makes your brand more trustworthy and attractive than the average.  After all, who would you rather buy from–a company with great products, or a living, breathing, likable human being with real products?

Tips for the Newcomer in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is an appealing field for many Internet marketers.  It seems simple enough; you put up a link on your website and you get passive income.  You make money without even thinking about it.  This kind of thinking will never get you anywhere.

Some simple rules to observe when becoming an affiliate:

• Know the product you’re promoting.  This cannot be stressed enough.  For one thing, if you promote a junk product, that reflects on your reputation.  For another, you can bet that people following your link will have questions for you.  While you COULD leave it to the product’s support department, being able to give answers yourself will help your reputation.  It may even generate some word of mouth promotion by your customer.
• Don’t put too many affiliate links on one page.  Avoid creating a page or a Web 2.0 account that is just a collection of affiliate links.  No one will want to sort through them just to find out what a product is.  Especially if you’re affiliating with several different niches.
• Give adequate descriptions and above all SELL the product you’re linking to.  Many successful affiliates will have one page dedicated to one link, and generate a sales page around it.  This is a good plan, especially if you can find a cheap domain server.
• Do not affiliate with businesses that aren’t relevant to the page you have your link on.  This can make the normal visitors uneasy and decrease the traffic to that page.  This would be shooting yourself in the foot.
• Something else that’s shooting yourself in the foot:  Putting up an affiliate link for your competition!  You might think this is a no-brainer, but you have to be careful to investigate who you’re setting up a link for.  It’s not always obvious who it is.

These five tips will keep you out of most of the trouble you could get into with affiliate marketing.

What To Do If You’ve Been Banned From Google

So 2-3 months after you build your site, you finally got a more or less consistent ranking (maybe it was your first ranking, or maybe you ranked early on, got put in the sandbox, and finally came out).  You try some SEO to get your ranking higher–then suddenly you’re not in Google’s index at all.

This can be frustrating, anger inducing, and scary.  But don’t decide the sky has fallen just yet.  There are steps you can take to be re-indexed.

First, go through your pages and make sure you’re not violating any of Google’s current policies.  Nine times out of ten, they don’t like something somewhere.

Check your pages on textalyser.net to make sure you’re not overdoing it with your keywords.  Check your tags to see that your keywords aren’t mentioned more than once in each tag (twice for the discretion tag is okay).

Once you’re done, you want to ask Google to reconsider your site.  Log in to your Google webmaster tools account and click “Request reconsideration” on the right-hand side of the page.  Tell them what you’ve just done to try to make your website kosher.

Make sure you’re polite.  You don’t have to bend over backwards to be nice, but yelling at Google isn’t going to help you get your site indexed.

Be sure to admit any errors on your part that may have caused the de-indexing.  Assure them that you have fixed the errors and will be careful in the future.  If this is your first time being de-indexed, let them know that, too.  There’s no guarantee that it’ll help, but it can’t hurt.

What do you do next?  You wait.  Hitting them up with two or three requests every day, or even every week, won’t help you out any.  You just have to wait and see what happens.

But if you’re sincere, and not a repeat offender, you’re likely to be back in Google’s search index again.

Do You Want A Work At Home Job?

Many people are beginning to understand that all those e-mails a get for work at home jobs are not necessarily scam e-mails. While you have to be careful if you’re going through e-mail, there are plenty of ways that you can get a work at home job.

This article is explaining work at home jobs that concern working online and not other types of home office work. In other words, this is discussing work at home jobs where you do all of your work online and may never meet your boss. You will not have an outside office, and you may never speak to the person who pays you on the phone.

There are plenty of work at home jobs available for those who are willing to be self-starters and dedicate themselves to the job home. There are jobs in website design, search engine optimization, freelance writing, journalism, Internet research, data entry, copywriting, software developing, graphic design, translating jobs, website game design, and many others.

It’s all about finding what you’re good at, what you enjoy, and then pursuing your online business. Most of the time working online is considered freelance work, you are in charge and your success depends solely on you.

There are websites you can go to to discover jobs, you can scan your e-mails, and you can use your favorite websites to find jobs.

Using your favorite website to find a job means that you’re actually looking to work for the owner of the website. Often, you’ll see a faqs sheet concerning careers with the particular company that has set up a website. It may be in developing new products, it may be working on the website, it may be in sales, or just about anything else the website does.

Remember your success at a work at home job is all up to you, and the best part is, once you get started and have a bit of experience you can work much as you want. This means that there is no cap on your paycheck, you can put in as many hours as you can stand, and take on as much work as you can handle.

I recommend SEM Business Blueprint. You can do it anywhere in the world and work at home.

The big thing to remember when it comes to working at home is that it is a business and your success depends on how you run your business. Be professional, be courteous, meet deadlines, and communicate effectively.

Blessings to Michael Jackson – King of POP

Michael, You will always be in our hearts. Rest In Peace.

Thank you for entertaining us.