9 Ways For Effective Content Marketing in 2010

July 27th, 2010

For everyone who is running an online business, web content is the driving force when it comes to delivering profits. However, in order for your content to deliver, its visibility is key to establish your brand and optimize ROI. But how can you increase content visibility with thousands of sites emerging every minute on the internet and new, promising services popping up like mushrooms in a forest while many services dry out and die at the same time?

The answer is pretty simple: Most web marketers use those old and even outdated strategies to market their content. They still cook the same old mushrooms while users change their eating habits frequently.

Here is your chance: Make sure that you constantly apply the latest and most effective content visibility strategies to date, so that you leave the bulk of competitors who do not keep track of the latest developments behind you.

Building a customer base around your web site is essential to generate traffic and to create returning visitors.

If you are a website owner and want to make visible your content, here are some of latest and/or currently still working content marketing strategies:

1. Mobile Devices

A rapidly growing number of users access information through their mobile devices such as mobile phones, iphone, PDA, smart phones instead of their traditional desktop PC’s. You can be sure that Google just recently didn’t buy the largest mobile advertising company admob without a reason.
You can increase visibility of your content in the mobile world in a number of ways. Create mobile compatible websites that fit into the small mobile screen easily. Create a list of mobile phone users and send text messages to phones with latest updates and notifications. Build (outsource) mobile applications for which run directly on mobile devices and display your content to mobile phone users when they are not connected through their desktop PC.

2. Use Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging site with unlimited potential; do not use it only to broadcast your sales and marketing message, use it to engage with your coworkers, employees, as well as provide support to customers and clients too.

3. Think Facebook

Take advantage of social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, just because 500 million people use it keeps growing every second. From teenagers to parents to grandparents. Everyone is on there. If you provide something useful to your community, the word may be spreading virally and you’ll benefit from it. It is a very good place to spread word about your e-commerce business.

4. Spread your content

Do not just focus on publishing your content on your own site only, instead use external services like ezines, blogs and content sharing sites to your advantage. Content sharing not only increases your business but also it helps a lot in regards to SEO.

5. Develop an API or widget

An API (Application Programming Interface) helps web developers and site owners to get your content with your authorization. A widget helps site owners and bloggers to display content from your site on their website or blog.

6. Integrate RSS

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an easy way to access web site content like news, articles, blog posts published on your website through an RSS reader. Users can reed your content in their browser or google reader application whenever you publish it. You submit your feed URLs to many free RSS aggregator sites so that your contant is instantly spread throughout the web and also available on search engines.

7. Include Multimedia

Every successful web site takes advantages of multimedia, which usually supports text content. Developing audio-visual applications is really effective in grabbing user’s attention.

8. Live streaming

Gradually, live TV will remove the pre-recorded and non-interactive materials and change them into real time presentations and chats. The main benefit of live streaming is that you can get customer feedback while you are demonstrating your products or services. Online schooling and training centers can help their students to interact with their faculties.

9. Email

Probably, the oldest online marketing tool is email. For start up businesses, it is a good place to syndicate their content to their target audience and list subscribers. If you are planning to build a mailing list, make sure that the list is opt-in (which means that users must click a link in the confirmation email to confirm their participation) and include information to opt-out in each email so that you are not accused of spamming.

In the ever changing cyberspace it is no longer efficient to start a website and wait for users to discover it. With thousands of sites emerging each minute you need to be active to stand out. If you are unable to attract buyers, they will turn around and visit one of your competitor sites and never turn back. To overcome this situation, make use of the latest content visibility strategies and analyse the difference they make on your websites and profits.

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admin Blog Marketing, Social Media, Web Content, Web Marketing

5 Ideas For Successful Content Marketing

July 19th, 2010

Most of us will not miss to recognize the names Yahoo and AOL. And that is because these companies have made their distinct mark in the competitive industry of demand-driven media. Here are several ideas for successful content marketing that could be beneficial to your company as well.

1. Research

An estimated 15.9 billion searches are made every month and only a small but important percentage of that is looking for you and your competitors. The first strategy is to assess the market opportunity by determining the approximate number of searches, keywords, and keyword phrases are related to what your company does.

2. Budget matters

The important questions that marketing companies must ask are: “How much do you spend everyday for every customer?” and “What is the average SEM spending?” Content-based programs will significantly help lower the cost for every customer because there are fewer people needed to get the job done and become competition has been less intense, so far. Companies desiring cost efficient strategies in marketing must plan to shift some budget dollars from SEM and other acquisition marketing efforts to content marketing – it delivers results with an improved cost structure.

3. Focus on content creation

Focus content creation on areas that align directly with your brand; where sufficient demand for your content will make content marketing worthwhile.

4. Low budget content creation

Create and publish as much content as possible. Search engines project findings to a search based on how recent the contents were made available. There is always fresh content at the top of search results pages, so 1,000 posts on a topic will capture more customers than a competitor with 5 – 10 posts.

5. Outsource management

Managing dozens of writers, achieving top search engine placement, and establishing content creation entails substantial costs in order to maintain content marketing because this requires specialized knowledge and training. Reduce your load by finding partners who deliver on the numbers they promise.

Never underestimate the value of excellent product or service quality as this makes an essential difference. Not only does Google continually try to put more emphasis on quality with algorithm updates, but quality does go a long way when you’re talking about reputation. You certainly wouldn’t want any lapse that will hurt your brand. As far as searching is concerned, Google’s Matt Cutts has said of the recent Mayday update that content farms are among the kinds of sites that are hit the hardest by the algorithm change. That’s another reason why churning out sub-par content and publishing it on random low quality sites is not going to be in your best interest. If you can walk the line of delivering content that people are searching for, and giving them content that stands out, there are lots of benefits for the taking for your website, blog and company.

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admin Blog Marketing, Web Marketing

Get Free Traffic Through Your Own Affiliate Programs

July 15th, 2010

Running your own affiliate program is one of the most popular methods to generate traffic to your website. But before we look into affiliate programs more closely, let us first take a brief look on all the vast areas that get you free traffic in 2010.

There are several social networking sites that you can use, for example popular sites such as Squidoo, Digg, Plurk, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Friendster, and Myspace.

Article marketing can also be your option as well as guest blogging and blog advertising. You could also take PPC campaigns (pay per click campaigns) into account, Google Adwords for example, however the traffic would obviously not be free anymore.

There are also more advanced techniques that can get you free traffic like teleseminars, webinars and podcasts. If you have the guts, you can begin your own podcast to get a large audience through the web. If speaking is not your type, you can voice what you have to say through blog writing.

Moreover, you can indulge into forums, classifieds posts, resale rights offers, press releases and joint ventures.

Additionally you can make your own viral software and tools. You can use your mobile phone with Utterz and you can also have other people pay you for publishing unique content on your website through services like Linknami while you can gain more traffic for your website from search engines.

As you can see, the techniques are getting more and more technical as well as time consuming. Focusing on these methods can enhance the performance of your website through effective traffic generation. Through the help of the mentioned techniques, you can surely increase your audience step by step.

However, to make a long story short, it is almost impossible for someone to manage this overload of information and be an expert in all areas without having tested countless hours of what works best for your products and services and what does not.

Expert status in every marketing technique can not be achieved over night. It will take time to learn every detail in order to maximize your utilization of those techniques so that you can spend valuable time on other things. This is the very reason why running your own affiliate program will be very beneficial for you.

If you have an affiliate program, you can rely on your affiliates to explore other areas where you may not be an expert in. Let your affiliates promote your products and service using all kinds of techniques, while you only have to focus on techniques that knowingly deliver you the results you are looking for.

You can not write reviews about yourself, however your affiliates can come up with free reviews on social networking sites and they can also write interesting and engaging blogs about your products and services. Keywords can also be optimized to effectively drive more traffic whenever people search for whatever it is you have to offer through popular search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Of course, extensive training your affiliates is something that you have to consider if you want to make sure that they are making the most out of the traffic generation to your website, but then again, you are the expert in your products and services (or should be) and spending time teaching your affiliates may be more worthwhile than applying new marketing methods and techniques you have never tried before.

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admin Affiliate Marketing, Web Traffic

How To Be An Expert Guest Blogger

July 13th, 2010

Article marketing used to be an effective way to increase traffic on one’s website through higher search engine rankings and from article directories. Currently there is a more straight to the point way to have your article content in front of a market that it is aimed for. Tweaking the way traditional article marketing work is what it is. Using traditional article directories like ezinearticles and isnare may be a waste of your content because the traffic is not targeted enough, these directories are way too big and your article won’t get enough attention on these websites.

So, if writing excellent articles is your thing, you write the greatest headlines and working with long tail keywords is easy for you, then you should consider publishing your articles on relevant niche blogs instead. Here are the benefits of being a guest blogger:

1.    You’ll create buzz and branding in your target niche.

2.    You’ll create authority by publishing your articles on well known sites within your industry on a regular basis (just make sure your articles are good to avoid bad reputation)

3.    Your article is published on a website with high volume of targeted traffic and also high search engine rankings.

4.    Content ping. Most blogging platforms automatically ping rss news aggregators whenever they post new articles.

5.    You get links from author bio and/or article content. As backlinks can increase search engine rankings, guest posting can help you get you those links.

6.    Make relationships with other bloggers in your niche and exchange views, tips and information.

If you want to publish your content only on the top authority blogs within your niche, try to Google them up. Once you come across a site with valuable relevant content and high traffic volume, propose to publish your articles on their website on a regular basis as a guest blogger. Keep in mind that not everyone is looking for guest blogger, but there are plenty of fish in the sea, if they decline, just keep on searching, it will be very worth your time.

But before you seal the deal, consider the following things first:

•    Get to know the site or blog where your articles are going to be published on.

•    For better acknowledgement, ask if you can have your photo in the byline of your article.

•    The time duration of your writing, be it week, monthly, bi monthly quarterly and so on.

•    How long the articles are going to be in terms of words. Large articles with lots of information usually do better than just articles of a few words.

•    Your advertising limitations, the number of links your author bio can contain.

•    Deadlines of course.

•    Other advertisements on the page.

•    Your article’s copyright.

•    If you can use your articles for personal use (but not for business purposes such as reselling the article to other websites).

•    The exposure you are going to get on the other parts of the site, or links.

•    “nofollow” coding – check if links in your articles are tagged as nofollow

•    Check if blog comments are nofollowed. If links in your articles are followed and urls in blog comments as well, you may still find yourself getting much less link juice from a page with 30 comments on. If this is something that concerns you, make sure to check it first.

Be easy to negotiate with. Be as courteous and polite as possible when negotiating with the owner of the website because guest blogging is a powerful tool to get targeted traffic to your site or blog. When sealing the deal, have in mind that advertisements will be shown on the page where your article is published but this shouldn’t concern you further since you are getting exposure, targeted traffic and backlinks from your article.

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admin Blog Marketing, Link Building, SEO, Web Traffic

Driving Free Traffic Through Online Radio Show Interviews and Podcasts

July 9th, 2010

Imagine yourself being a guest of a talk show sitting opposite a host who will fire questions at you before you throw answers at him. The idea may scare you but this is something that you can consider if you are determined to drive more traffic to your website or blog for free. You can have interviews on online radio and podcast for you to be able to have a wider audience.

There are some considerations that you might want to look into in order for you to be a guest on an online radio show and have the possibility to be called back some other time for another guest interview or for interviews on other stations.

It is best to know what the show is all about first. Do not mind listening to the show for a lot of times before you get on there. If you are not familiar about the show, then it is time for you to get into the details. Keep in mind that the concept must suit the target market of the show.

If you have recently done something that is interesting and worthy to be talked about, there is a high probability that a host will agree on having you as a guest on his show. The more innovative and up-to-date your idea is, the bigger the chance of being a guest on an online radio show as a way on driving more traffic for free.

However do not enter a talkshow just for the sake of it. If you do not have much to say, then it may not the best move to be a guest on a podcast or an online radio program. For you to drive traffic, it would be better to just purchase advertisements.

There are hosts that look into how you have been exposed to the media lately. If you have a sample about your past interview or if you have any reports about having one, then you can present it to the host.

One thing that you have to consider is to let the host learn about your product, service, or whatever message you want to convey to the public through the radio program or the podcast. By means of this, the host can have a prior knowledge on what is to be talked about.

If given a chance, ask for a copy of the entire interview that you can include on your website. This can attract additional visitors from search engines and backlinks. especially if the interview went well.

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admin Web Traffic

Social Media Techniques For Successful Internet Marketing

July 8th, 2010

Regardless of what you want to advertise or promote to the public, it is typical for an internet marketer to look for innovative techniques on reaching out to as many people as possible. Going for the trend these days is something that many internet marketers do. Now that the trend is the use of social networking sites and others or collectively known as social media, online advertisers go where people go to. There are now several social networking sites that can be utilized to promote whatever product, services, work, or company you have.

When thinking about “social networking sites”, the first thing that may pop into your mind are the popular social sites nowadays like facebook. True enough, this social networking site became a home for a hundred million users as it exponentially expands with several internet marketers who do “business” in a “social” medium. This is now something that must be taken advantage of. Even though popular social networking sites appears as a social medium as it was intended to be, it also paves the way for internet marketers to advertise.

If you are someone who wants to make the most out of your marketing strategies on cyberspace, you have to consider some things that can be greatly helpful.

1. Always consider your profile.

Since your profile is the main representation of who or what you are, you have to make sure that you present it in a fashion that brings interest to the public. As much as possible, make your profile user-friendly and open to the public. If you are going to make your profile strictly private, you are just trimming down the opportunities entailed on letting users know who or what you are all about.

2. Be accurate.

The confidence of the public is something that you must earn. In order for you to do so, you have to accurate on whatever you post on your profile. If you are going to update your status, it must showcase the real you or the real representation of what you are tendering to the users.

3. Frequently interact.

Remember that it is never a one-way street for you and the end users. If you will not respond to their inquiries, complaints, or whatsoever, you are just seemingly closing the opportunities for them to have interactions with you or what you represent. Frequent interaction is a vital aspect for mutual benefits.

4. Do not be forceful.

Even though you are in to basically sell, you do not have to be forceful on end users. They might be turned off if your wall regularly shouts “buy this”, “buy that” and “buy it.” Branding yourself is the best way to entice online users to know more of what you have in store for them.

Keep in mind that engaging into social media is just one of the effective channels that you can use to market effectively. It takes dedication to maximize your potentials in any available social media.

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admin Social Media

Get Traffic By Publishing Your Content On Membership Sites And Ebooks

July 7th, 2010

One way to get more traffic to your website is through membership sites. This is just like going along the flow of other websites in order for you to gain more traffic to your site or blog.

Let us look at one example. Say you are someone who has the expertise in car tuning. You would now contact possible car tuning and car accessories membership websites. Find as many membership websites as possible and ask if you can do an interview with them. You can also write a review or report about that membership website. In any case, your articles will always include links to your website or blog.

The membership websites that you can come up with surely want to make the most for their members and one way for them is to offer content like a review or an interview that has enough substance to draw more members to their websites. Once a membership website is satisfied with the interview or the report that you came up with, there will be a fat chance that they will be adding the content you created on a certain web page where members can easily read what you have to say. The tendency is that more customers are going to deal with that website and they are going to apply for membership on this website.

The more free traffic you want to generate to your website, the more content you’ll write for membership sites in your niche. This marketing strategy may be a familiar to them and they can surely take advantage of this as you follow their flow.

Another thing that you have to take note is the longevity of the content you created on the membership site. The longer it stays on the website, the larger the possibility that its audience will be driven to your website.

If there are too many sites to choose from in your niche, it is best to look for the currently hot membership sites out there. You can search the keywords through your favorite search engine. For instance, you can search for “car tuning club” or “tuning month” or “car accessories join” to end up to membership sites. Just always use the keywords “club”, “month”, “join”, or “membership” among many others.

You can also end up looking for ebooks rather than membership sites. Dealing with ebooks is another possible step that you can take. Just take note of your niche and from there you can look for ebooks where you can offer great deals for content. You can use keywords like “report”, “ebook”, and “affiliate” for this.

Whichever of these two paths you will take in driving free traffic, always make it a point to maximize your deals with either way.

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admin Blog Marketing, Web Traffic

4 Free SEO Analysis Tools for Websites

July 6th, 2010

SEO Analysis Tools are designed to help examine and calculate the potential rank of your website. With just one click, you can easily get accurate information on improvements that must be made to your webpage like off- and on-page optimization and competitor analysis optimization. As a full time SEO specialist, I use most of these tools at present. You can leave your comments below to inform me what you think.

Link Diagnosis

Link Diagnosis – With this online instrument and its Firefox addon, you will see a thorough analysis of your site’s backlinks. You will also get useful data like linking page’s rank, strength of the link, used keywords, and the like…

Rank Checker

Rank Checker – is a plug-in tool for Firefox that you can get for free. Aaron Wall, also the creator of SEOBook.com, created this. This tool keeps track of your ranking and your rank changes automatically on Yahoo, Google and Bing.

Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO – is a full backlink evaluation service created by Majestic – It is a free, however, it can only be used for a limited period of time. This tool provides backlink charts and reports every month. Most SEO specialists use this tool.

Spydermate

Spydermate – is a wonderful tool for both SEO beginners and experts. This SEO analysis tool provides a complete outline of the search engine rankings of your site, on-page analysis of keywords and a comparison of your competitors site by site.
Use these SEO analysis tools to optimize and maximize your search engine optimization campaign success.

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admin SEO

7 Article Marketing Money Making Tips That Earn You More

July 5th, 2010

Every article marketer applies different styles and strategies but the ultimate goal for all is to earn money with article marketing on a consistent basis through article promotion. The following will discuss tips on how to “sell” articles online.

1. Be Clear and Concise

Clarity and conciseness is important when it comes to article marketing. Articles must contain straight to the point information since readers don’t want to waste their time. Information provided must be true and a also accurate.

2. Provide Answers for People’s Queries

To be able to get more clients, one must make sure to provide what the clientele needs. In case of article marketing, it must offer answers to people’s question and problems. A question and answer style of writing is an effective way to get more people interested in your articles. Putting questions into subtitles is also recommended. This could also raise one’s author bio and resource box click through ratio.

3. Submit Articles to a Limited Number of Top Directories

Publish content on about 3 to 5 major article directories, then take the time and bookmark the publishing URLs in social bookmarking and social media sites. Spending time bookmarking is more efficient than simply posting articles to 100s of directories.

4. Publishing on Niche Blogs

Generating traffic to one’s site is important if one wants to make more sales. Publishing articles on some niche blogs as guest blogger must be considered. To find those guest post opportunities, in google type “niche + blog” like “dog training + blog” or even “dog training + blog + guest post”.

5. Try Ezine Publishers

Marketing on ezines can generate higher income if done precisely. You can choose from free to paid marketing on ezines.

6. Creating a Better CTA Resource Box

Call to Action Resource boxes are an element of promoting articles in a professional way. This will reflect the quantity of sales. Also offer readers to download sample products. Add some facts to encourage readers to click the site link.

7. Article PDF Reports

Creation of PDF reports of articles is a good technique for article marketing. This enables one to make use of their content repeatedly. These reports could be sold or given away. Make a compilation of your best articles in PDF format and give it a striking name.

Article marketing is straight forward when following these 7 techniques on a regular basis and if you post quality articles, traffic and sales will roll in sooner or later.

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admin Article Marketing

Introduction To Deep Links

July 2nd, 2010

A deep link is a link from any website’s page that point to an internal page of a given website. This type of link usually links to specific information or a related topic.

Deep links have become an important element of white hat search engine optimization and its results are pretty obvious. However, results may vary when it comes to SEOs and deep links.

In the age of social media, people are more into getting what they want in an instant. And when it comes to the internet, they want to get answers directly and quickly in form of keyword rich links pointing directly to the target page.

Search engines have improved their services with the creation of better search engine algorithms. This has provided more relevant and satisfying search results. Search engines should have made it easier and more convenient to find one’s internal pages and rank it.

Gaining an enhanced internal linking structure for a site is essential to direct search engine robots through a site. However, it is not a guarantee for a page to have a good ranking in search results.
Some internal links are made by webmasters and they have the tendency to become biased. Search engines may find it hard to trust them. These webmasters take advantage of utilizing black hat methods.

SEs will track these deep links, extract data and conclude the link and page’s valuation and and include them in upcoming search results.

Several factors could determine a deep link’s value. Also deep links have uncontested benefits in terms of advertising. Since deep links send highly targeted traffic to inner pages of a site, advertisements prices could increase if the heavy volume of traffic is proven. This in turn may lead to significantly more to sales. There are free tools available to track website traffic stats. Google Analytics offers detailed traffic and conversion statistics.

Use deep links now generate highly targeted traffic directly from source pages immediately and through higher search engine rankings in the long run.

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admin Link Building, One Way Links