Tag: internet marketing

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7 Viral Ways for Exapanded Online Reach

What would happen if one of your friends tells about your newest blog to her five friends and they, in turn, tell their friends and it goes on like this? Pretty soon you will have all the traffic you need for a comfortable income from your new-found writing careers. Is it possible to to achieve this kind of success using the virality of the social web, or does it sound like a pyramid scheme?

The emergence of social web provides opportunities for viral marketing that never existed before. Face to face talk or talk over the phone has its limitations in reaching your audience. The Web 1.0 offered forums for a limited viral marketing opportunity. The social web has opened up avenues manyfolds expanded online reach. This article describes seven techniques for using the social web to achieve virality.

1. Before jumping to social websites to launch your viral adventure, make your site social web friendly. Provide a link on your site for users to invite their friends. When someone joins your site through an invitation, reward points to the inviter. Announce a contest on your site and reward the top inviter with e-books or a t-shirt with your site logo.

2. Spend sometime at Digg. This is a community based news popularity web site. If your blog article hits the front page of Digg, you will get thousands of visitors and some of them will eventually become your regulars. Study the types of articles that end up on the front page of Digg. Write your blog articles targeted to Digg users.

3. MySpace is the ultimate social website because of its sheer size in terms of visitors. If you have lots of friends who have their MySpace pages, create a niche network community in MySpace with common interests. Post teasers of your interesting blog articles in your MySpace page with links to your full article. Ask your friends to write comments on your blog postings.

4. Take a look at Delicious. Google Delicious to get the url because it is not a dot-com domain. It is a social bookmarking site to store your bookmarks online. You should build a network of friends at this site and study their bookmarkings to assess the type of articles they prefer to bookmark. Tailor your blog articles to mimic the article style your network appreciates.

5. Visit a site called Squidoo. At Squidoo you create “lenses” (a Web page) about any topic. You can create as many lenses as you want and you can embed external links in your lenses. Squidoo lenses also have a good search engine credibility. So, your sites will get some good external in-bound links for free.

6. LinkedIn is an online community of experienced professionals. Create your account at LinkedIn and network with professionals in your fields. Offer some free services for other professionals in your network and solicit their recommendations. All recommendations appear in your profile. LinkedIn provides great opportunity for someone to find your business or services.

7. YourElevatorPitch provides a free online spot to announce your business and services. User rates your ad pitches. This site also allows you to link back to your site.

Other sites worth exploring for viral opportunities are Flickr and YouTube. Both the sides accept multimedia (photos for Flickr and videos for YouTube) contents. These sites are good for establishing your brand by regular posting of theme oriented humorous contents.

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7 Steps to Leverage Social Media for Increasing Web Site Traffic

Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc. have become popular among the internet marketers. Most marketers hawk their websites, blog, affiliate links, list building URLs, etc. all day long to drive traffic to their web sites. Not only it is annoying to the network members, but also the effectiveness of such a strategy is yet to be proven.

However, you cannot ignore this emerging medium. You need to embrace it using a different mindset. If you follow the seven guidelines discussed below, you will be able to increase traffic to your site from these social media sites without exposing yourself as a self-centered marketer who will do anything to cash in on every opportunity.

1. Create a profile page at each site and detail your interests, expertise, blogs, and websites in your profile. In Twitter, you are limited by text space and the number of URLs you can use in your bio. Facebook has more flexibility and you can pull your blog RSS into the Facebook notes.

Social network sites are pull medium where the old push marketing fails miserably. Your goal should be to pull people to your profile page by regularly posting valuable and interesting contents from other sites. You can post your blog article in Twitter occasionally but don’t submit every blog post your create.

2. The old school marketing relies on four Ps – price, product, placement, and promotion. The social media adds another dimension and one more P to the marketing philosophy and it is the participation.

You need to participate in the conversion and at the same time encourage others to participate. If you want to build a community that will trust you, you need to participate by providing expert opinions and valuable information. You need to help others when somebody has a question. Even if don’t know the answer, find it out by spending sometime on the Web.

You also need to draw others in the discussions by asking questions, giving controversial opinions, raising interesting issues that affect your niche. Passively posting your URL all over the place will not bring traffic to your site. Only concerted efforts to position yourself as a knowledgeable person in your niche will result in more visitors to your site.

3. To position yourself as an expert in your niche, you need to create contents that are fresh, interesting, and valuable to your readers. You also have to discover high quality contents in your niche for sharing with others. Subscribe to a few dozen blogs and scan them everyday for high quality contents so that you can share it with others in your network.

4. You cannot hide yourself in the social media world. If you are a fake, people will discover it fast and you will lose trust and traffic. So, be authentic, transparent and humble in all your conversations. If you make a mistake, admit it and move on.

5. To establish your credibility and expertise, you should read a wide variety of topics in your niche and explain them to others in the form of blog post, ebooks, white papers, etc. Give it all for free without any strings attached. Encourage others to distribute your materials.

If you are not sharing some valuable information, somebody else will share it. You cannot hide any information. It is better to be the first mover than wondering how did everybody find it out.

6. Be prepared to change your mind set. The old school mindset for driving traffic is posting you site links everywhere. The social media mind set is establishing yourself as an expert and sharing your knowledge. Once people know that you are a good resource for solutions to their problems, they will come to your site and you can monetize your site in different ways.

If you are wondering how you are going to make money if you give every thing for free than you need to understand this new medium before you jump into the bandwagon by posting your URLs every hour. Your goal is to drive traffic to your site. Your site may monetize using a variety of methods like, third party advertisement, selling tutorials, affiliate marketing, selling memberships, etc.

7. Social media is a marketing tool set that you leverage to drive traffic to your web site. For leveraging this new medium, you need to establish yourself as a good community member first. Don’t be farcical like Walmart who paid to Jim and Laura to blog around the country in Walmart parking lots capturing stories of Walmart employees and how they loved to work at Walmart.

You may enjoy a short-lived traffic boost to your site, but it will not last longer. When the truth is exposed, it will be a public relation nightmare for you or your brand. Build your brand by telling the truth. There is nothing wrong if you are sponsored by a corporation, just reveal the truth.

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5 Ways to Drive Traffic for Online Business Success

How do I increase traffic to my web site? That is the perennial questions in the mind of all web masters and Internet marketers. If you scan any webmaster’s forum, there are hundreds of questions all related to increasing traffic because traffic is the bloodline of a website. Without traffic, your website is dead; lost in the Internet black hole.

If you are thinking about starting link exchanges as a first step for increasing traffic than you are dead wrong. If you plan to plaster your URL in all the forums and social media sites you encounter, than you are in the wrong track. There is a wrong way and there is a way that leads to the success. Choose the road to success by following the methods described in this article.

1.  Create useful websites. Start with a website that provides value to its visitor. It does not matter if you are selling a product or giving information for free, it should be some thing that others desire. Once you have a site, create useful information, how to guides, and easy tools that benefit your site visitors.

2.  Write articles. Writing articles and submitting to article directories exposes your site links to others and establishes you as an authority in your topic. The key to successful article writing is quality. After you finish writing your article, ask yourself if you would read the same article if a newspaper or magazine prints it. If you are not going to read your own article, why do you think others will spend their time on your writings?

3.  Use forums. You site must have at least a forum. Forum is an excellent way to receive feedback from your visitors and customers. This helps you improve your offerings by using the voice of the customers.

Make it a routine to visit at least one forum related to general online marketing or your niche everyday. You should create your site link in the forum signature. Reply to a few threads with some insights and thoughts. Also, once a week start your own thread by asking thought provoking questions, writing a good how-to article, or sharing valuable information with others. Never try to sell any thing in these forums.

4.  Blog regularly. Besides a forum, you should also start a blog where you can write about your thoughts and insights on the topic related to your site. You don’t have to post every day. But make it a regular habit of posting one article a week.

Subscribe to blogs related to your niche and read them everyday. Share your thoughts and link to other blogs as references in your post. With out links, a blog is useless. Once you start sharing links of other blogs in your writings, others will start referring your blogs in their posts. Also take the challenge of writing guest posts in other blogs in the same niche as yours. This is an instant quality backlink to your site.

5.  Participate in social media. Social media is the latest web traffic magnet. Encourage your readers to submit your posts to digg and stumbleupon by providing some means to easily submit your stories. You should also regularly submit relevant articles and sites that you think will benefit others. Create a facebook group related to your niche and also join a few groups in facebook that are relevant to your site. Participate and share useful information in these groups. Sign up with twitter and ask your visitors to follow you on twitter. Using twitter, inform your followers about the latest sales announcements, site maintenance schedules, etc.

Creating web sites that are useful to others and using article marketing, forums, blogs and social media will lead to sustainable web traffic.

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10 Ways to Use Facebook for Increasing Web Traffic to Your Site

More than 115 million people login to Facebook every month. It is the largest social networking tool and a great place in the web for building your brand and driving traffic to your site. However, if you are not familiar with the viral techniques that work in the Facebook platform, soon you will find your brand tarnished. You can gain quick exposure to your businesses using the techniques discussed in this article.

1. Build a Facebook network. Before you start implementing any of the techniques discussed here, you need to develop a network of Facebook friends. To do that, join a few groups that are related to your business and a few groups that you are passionate about.

Ask people in the groups to add you as their friend. Facebook also has nifty tool that suggest people you would like to know. Send request to these people to add you as their friend. Send a short note explaining why you want to be their friend. If send 20 requests a day, you will have a network of more than 1,000 friends in two months.

2. Update your status every day. Login every day and update your status. Don’t use status messages like “I am sleeping now”, “Just came from work”. These types of status messages are not interesting. Use quotes from famous people about a specific niche, for example love, dedication, work ethics, peace, war, etc. You can also use jokes. Your aim is to draw people’s attention to your messages so that they would click on your profile to know more about you.

3. Wish birthday wishes everyday. Facebook also shows upcoming birthdays of all friends in your network. Every day send birthday wishes to friends whose birthdays are due. Read their profiles to know more about them and write a nice personal message on their walls. Don’t use canned birthday messages for everybody.

When you write on a friend’s wall in Facebook, everybody in the network gets updated news feed. You need to write something that get attention. You may craft a 10 to 20 attention grabbing birthday messages and than personalize them slightly for each friend.

4. Create a business page. Besides your personal page, you should also create a business page. Creating a business page is similar to creating a personal page in Facebook. Design a nice logo and use it for your business page picture.

Next, become a fan of your business page. You can use your business page to launch targeted Facebook ad campaign. Promote your Facebook business page using blogs, blog comments, etc. and ask people to become a fan of your business. Use some promotional materials, like free t-shirts, free eBooks etc as incentives for becoming a fan.

5. Tag promotional photos using friends’ names. Upload all promotional photos to your business page. Some people tag these photos with the names of their most influential friends in the network. Your promotional photos will show up in your friends’ news feeds. Once you setup a network of friends, make a list of friends with high number of friends, preferably more than 1000. Setup your mini network to tag each others names in promotional photos.

6. Change your relationship status regularly if it is possible. One of the least frequent activity in Facebook is changing the relationship. Because people don’t change their relationship frequently, Facebook places a great deal of importance to relationship change and send the news feeds to everybody in your network whenever there is a change in your relationship status.

People have explored this loop hole to attract attention to their profiles. They change their relationship almost weekly and try to attract visitors to their profiles. It is up to you to adopt this technique because it may not reflect your true relationship status. If you do adopt this technique, don’t forget to publish some promotional materials in your personal feed.

7. Attend Multiple Events. True to its college root, Facebook is all about friends gathering at some place for an event. Facebook gives high priority to events in the news feed. Your goal is to RSVP all the events in your network even if you miss a few of them.

When your friends see you as a frequent event attendee, they consider you as an event resource. The trick is to show your name in all the places you can. As your friends see your name multiple times, some will be curious to check your profile.

8. Import your blog post. If you have a blog, import your blog’s RSS feed into Facebook. Facebook will publish the articles in the feed as Facebook notes automatically. Encourage your friends to comments on your articles in Facebook notes. You can also tag friends in the articles but don’t overdo it.

9. Post comments on popular groups. Visit popular Facebook groups that you have joined regularly and post comments. Just like blog comments or forum posting, Facebook comments on popular groups will attract attention to your name and profile. Add something valuable or post a link that adds value to the topic under discussions.

10. Start your own events. Events are very popular in Facebook and if you can promote it properly, it will have viral effects and thousands will register for the event. Send invitation to your network friends who have thousands of friends in their networks and also to attractive female friends in your network who may not have a large number of friends.

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A Few Basics of Online Money Opportunity

Is it still possible to make a good income with Google Adsense? After all, there was a report circulating this past fall that said Adsense was dead.

Adsense took a beating a short time ago when Google made some changes. But it is still possible to make some extra money with a Web site or two. It is even possible to make a good living with it.

What You Need

You need a domain name, a hosting account, and a niche topic. Preferably the niche is one that you know something about. That makes it easier to fill it with content.

If you want to make a good income with one or two Web sites then good content is a must. Your goal is to create a site that attracts people and keeps them coming back.

There are sites on the Internet, created by people just like you, that are getting thousands of visitors a day. The content is written by the site owner who cares about the subject. They are passionate about the topic and write from their heart.

These sites have grown in popularity simply by word-of-mouth and maybe some simple search engine optimization tactics. Good content will get noticed, although optimizing for the search engines helps.

Getting Traffic to Your New Site

Before your site can become popular through word-of-mouth you need to get the first visitors to your site. How do you let people know about your site?

Free tactics include posting in forums or blogs and putting your URL in the signature, posting on Yahoo’s Answers and again putting your URL in the signature, and writing articles and submitting them to article directories. These are all free, and they work very well.

Here’s a hint: Write an article each week for each site. Do that consistently and you can’t help but get traffic. It’s a great way to get backlinks, too, which are very important in getting ranked high in the search engines.

For further education (and for examples) visit sites like StevePavlina and JackHumphrey. These are two sites that get thousands of visitors a day. They are using the blogging software put out by WordPress, which is free.

Blogs are a simple way to build a Web site. Anyone can start one, and then tweak it as they become more experienced. Jack’s site didn’t start out looking that cool. He’s done some major changes to it in the last year.

Steve’s site looks very plain, but that doesn’t bother the millions of people who regularly visit his site. They are coming for the content.

A simple-looking site can generate several thousand dollars a month in Adsense, affiliate products, and donations. Yes, people actually donate to sites that offer them good content for free. Steve uses a WordPress plugin for collecting donations from visitors who want to give him money as a way of saying “thank you.”

A free forum that can provide a great education on the topic of Internet marketing for any newbie is available at DigitalPoint’s forum site. Be prepared to spend hours there searching through all the posts that give good tips on how to make money online. You can also sign up for free and post questions.

The basics of how to make money online have been described here, along with some examples to study and a forum to learn from. Now it is up to you to get started.

Whatever you do, don’t put it off. You can’t earn money online by just reading about it. You have to take action.

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5 Steps to Abundant Web Traffic and Backlinks Using News Popularity Sites

Social media news popularity sites like digg, reddit, mixx, etc. are the latest sources for huge traffic, backlinks and search engine marketing. If your post hits the front page of one of these sites, you will get thousands of visitors, hundreds of back links, and repeat visitors to your blog.

However, it is not easy to hit the front page of these sites. Every day, hundreds of people submit thousands of articles to these sites but none of them make it to the front page.

Most of the articles submitted to these sites are spam, of very low quality and self promoting marketing materials. The regular visitors of these sites demand good quality, informative, fact filled, and funny contents. Contents that attack a different angle to old materials may also do fairly well.

By following the five steps described in this article, you will be able to reap the benefits of traffic and back links to your site without wasting time and efforts.

1.  Know your audience. The first step to creating posts that get the attention of the visitors of these sites is to study the front page stories on these sites. Different sites cater to different tastes. Find out the type of contents that are popular in each site. For example, stories dealing with technology, liberal politics, and entertainment do well on digg.

If you are writing a story that does not quite match the popular topics of the site, you need to create an angle for satisfying the taste of the site’s audience. For example, conservative politics does not do well in digg but if you can talk about religion in politics in an entertaining way, it may get more votes than a serious post on why religion should be a part of politics.

2.  Announce your presence. Sign up for a few sites and create your profile with authentic information about you. Include your blog links in your profile. Upload a picture so that everybody knows you are a real person, not an unknown spammer and scammer.

3.  Drum up your post. Use some visual cues, like a digg button, on your high quality posts. This invitation helps your site visitors to submit your stories to the news popularity sites easily. Don’t use these buttons for every post. You don’t want every post submitted to these sites. If you submit every post, regular visitors of these news popularity sites will consider you as a spammer.

4.  Create a friends network. Locate a dozen submitters, preferably bloggers in your niche, whose posts regularly appear on the front page. These submitters know what succeeds on the site and they spend lots of time finding stories that are likely to get votes. They also compete for stories to submit to these sites before anybody else.

Include these power submitters in your friend network and read stories submitted by these users. If you find a story interesting, positively vote on the story. Post comments on these stories.

Find out the sources of the stories of the power submitters. Subscribe to these sources using your RSS reader and set up Google alerts for news items related to the topics. If you find a story that matches the criteria, submit it before anybody else.

5.  Share your stories. Once you have established yourself as a positive contributor to these sites, invite a few power submitters to read your high quality post and comments on it. Use twitter and instant messages for taking your networking efforts with the power submitters to the next level. Not all of your network friends in the news popularity site will respond positively. However, you will find a few who are willing to share their insights with you.

Announce your best posts to your twitter followers and inform about them to power submitters using instant messages. Don’t do it for every post. It will annoy the recipients and they will abandon your as fast as they can.

If some of your twitter followers are bloggers who are interested in your post, one of them may create a post spun off of your article and provide a link to your original story. If this happens within a few hours of you publishing your post, it will boost the quality of your story.

Getting your stories into the front pages of news popularity sites is hard work and time consuming. If you want to invest the time and efforts, the reward in terms of traffic and backlinks can be worth it.

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10 Rules to Keep Your Website Visitors Engaged

Do you know that most visitors leave a website within 10 seconds of landing on the home page? And they may never return to the same site. To keep your website visitors stay longer, you need to engage them. Follow these 10 simple rules to build a set of core loyal visitors who will return to your site frequently.

1. If you have a brick-and-mortar business and you want an online presence, don’t just hand over your printed brochure to the web developer for your site’s contents.

2. Get good text, picture, and video contents related to your products or services and organize them into categories for your website publication. How do you get contents? You can ask your kids to write contents for you. Today’s kids are information savvy and know how to do research on right topics. They can help take pictures and videos of your products and provide narrations. If you cannot leverage your kids talents and you don’t have time to develop contents, buy them from online sources, like distributors of private level rights to articles and stock photographs. You need a small content set to launch your web site.

3. Ask your developer for some sample websites he has developed in the past and review them. If you find clutter, music, unprofessional graphics, etc. in those sites, run away from the developer. Tell your web developer to use basic search engine optimization techniques for your web site. Use a developer who uses content management systems (CMS) to develop websites. You or your kids and spouse will be able to maintain and add contents regularly to an CMS without much efforts.

4. You must have an About US page in your website that explains the expertise of your company and your unique selling proposition. Also, you should provide a phone number and an e-mail address for contact.

5. Publish a weekly tips section in your website. If you are in a business for a long time, you have a wealth of knowledge about your business, market, and technologies involved in your business. Make it a habit of jotting down one tip every day. You will have plenty of tips for your weekly publication.

6. Don’t use guest books, testimonials etc. These are so Web 1.0 concepts. Use a forum. Let your customers interact among themselves. Develop a value network. You get into the insights of your customers’ minds by reading their posts and your visitors know your products and services by talking to each other. As a result, you will be able to provide improved products and services and ask for a premium price.

7. Promptly answer all your visitor’s e-mail. This is one thing you should never delay. Use your visitors comments, e-mail, and other form of communications to generate ideas for new articles and tips.

8. Tell your web developer to include an RSS feed on your site and publish a filtered news related to the market you serve and emerging technologies in that market. Don’t use a weather report. Nobody comes to your site to check the weather.

9. Publish a frequently asked questions related to your products and services. It helps save your visitors’ time and efforts when they are looking for information on a particular topic related to your website.

10. Did you know that the average person must be exposed to an offer around seven times before they will make a purchase? Make your website an advertising platform for your most popular items. Advertise them through out your site but don’t use any ‘in-your face advertising’ techniques. You can use side bars for this type of advertising with interesting anecdotes, pictures, etc. Be creative and use your imagination.

Your website is your publishing medium. It is not your online catalog. You want repeat visitors who spend their time at your site for valuable information. The possibility of visitors turning into a paying customers improves when they stick around your site longer.

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10 Rules For Article Marketing

How do you position your website to rank high in search engines? Become a knowledge purveyor by writing and publishing articles. Though article marketing is a raze for improved search engine positions, quality articles are few and far between. Search engines value quality contents to remain competitive in today’s information hungry society. Knowing the following 10 rules will enable you to publish quality articles that feeds information hungry search engines.

1. Use the three Bs rule. Your article should accomplish at least one of the three Bs – espouse bright ideas, explain benefits of former ideas, or details how to bring about functioning ideas. If you are able to accomplish all the three Bs succinctly in one article, than you have truly created a high quality masterpiece.

2. Find your niche – things you are good at and subjects you like to explore. The only goal of writing articles should be to give knowledge to others. Forget about keyword optimizations, keyword research, traffic generation, monetization or what ever you have learnt before. Research your topics and explain it in the simplest way you can. You are successful in achieving your goals if a person with little knowledge in the subject is able to understand and adopt your ideas.

3. To remain on the top of your game, you must continuously generate new ideas to write about your chosen topics. Use an RSS reader to subscribe to half a dozen feeds about subjects you are interested in. Spend an hour in the evening to go through those feed titles and read a few articles and some interesting comments in details. Reading a few articles will keep you up-to-date and enhance your knowledge. Reviewing comments will make you aware of pros and cons of ideas discussed in those articles.

4. There are lots of techniques to generate new ideas. If you perform a google search, you will come across a dozen or so. Select a few that best suits your personality and environment. Sign up for Google Docs and Spreadsheet and keep your ideas online. Delicious is a online bookmarking site. Post URLs of new ideas you want to explore further in Delicious and tag them using appropriate keywords. The benefit of online storage is that you will have access to your resources from any computer connected to the Internet.

5. Don’t use commercial in your articles and don’t put any links to promote your products. Write for your readers who are human. Don’t write for search engines. Give information for free that benefits your readers.

6. Spell check and review every article after 24 hours of its completion. If you want to be regarded as an expert in your fields by others, don’t publish anything with errors in spelling, punctuation, or grammar. Have someone proof read your article if you are unsure about your grammar skills. Read blog posts at copyblogger and dailywritingtips to improve your writing style and grammar skills.

7. Use a resource box attached to the end of the article. Don’t turn it into a commercial shoutbox. It should be used to reinforce your credibility as an expert author on your chosen topic.

8. Publish in article directories. Search in Google for article directory and pick half a dozen directories to publish your articles regularly.

9. Start a blog and publish your articles in your own blogs without the resource box.

10. Combine related articles to make an e-book with an attention-grabbing title and give it away for free. Contact others and encourage them to give your ebook as bonus items with their paid products

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7 Ways to Establish Your Personal Brand for Online Business Success

Whether you are a freelancer, internet marketer, offline business owner, or a recent college graduate who is looking for a job, you need to create a strong and professional online presence to succeed in today’s business world. How do you create an online profile that is recognizable and trustworthy? Follow the steps in this article and within a couple of months you will establish a polished online personal brand for yourself.

1. Get a domain. A top level domain, preferably a dot com domain, is a must for your personal brand. It can be a your name, your business name or some other assumed name that you want to associate yourself with. If you already own an offline business you can start with your business name.

Finding a short domain name is almost impossible these days. In most cases, you will be able to find a three words domain name easily. If your own name is somewhat unique, you can be that lucky one whose name is not already taken by domain squatters.

Use DomainBot to do your domain research. When you enter one or more keywords in the DomainBot search box, the website will suggest a large number of available domains that are different variations of your keywords. If you like a domain, you can directly register the domain with one of the domain registrars like godaddy or 1and1.

2. Get a website. After you register a domain, you need to get a web host to host your website. If you are absolutely not going to spend any money for web hosting, sign up for Google’s Blogger platform to start a blog. It is free. Use your own registered domain, instead of the default sub domain that Google offers for Blogger platform.

If you are ready to spend $25 a month, you can sign up for a reseller account at Hostgator. With a reseller account, you can create unlimited websites. Hostgator offers a commercial script library called Fantastico that automates installation of web applications in your sites. Start with installing a Word Press blog.

3. Get your globally recognized avatars. A globally recognized avatars or gravatar is a picture that follows you from site to site appearing next to your name when you do things like commenting in a blog, posting in web forums.

You can use your own picture or a professionally designed graphic image for your gravatar. If you are using a graphic picture, make it unique and get it done professionally. If it is your own picture, take the picture in a lighted area showing your face clearly.

4. Start a blog. Pick a few topics that you are interested in. One of them should be your chosen profession or business niche. Also pick topics related to your hobby or something that you want to learn more about.

Create an about page in your blog, put your avatars and tell your story in short 300-600 words. Make it interesting, intriguing, or humorous.

Go to Technorati, a blog directory, and search your topics to find blogs related to your interests. Subscribe to a dozen high quality, popular blogs using Google reader. Make a habit of reading a few interesting articles in your niche every day.

Now start writing your own articles for your blog regularly. If you like writing, you can write couple of times a week. If you have hard time coming up with topics to write about, start with a few articles a month and slowly work towards one article per week.

5. Visit blogs and forums related to your topic of interest. Leave insight full comments in other blogs and create interesting posts in forums. Create a forum signature with your gravatar in every forum you join.

Use a back link to your blog in your signature. When you create a post in a forum, your signature will be appended to your post. When you post a comment in a blog, use the URL of your blog and your gravatar name. You will be instantly recognized.

6. Create Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin Profiles. Facebook and twitter are two popular social media sites with millions of users. Facebook is mainly used for networking with like minded persons and Twitter is for sharing short timely messages about news, industry trends, interesting articles, and if you are doing any interesting thing. Linkedin is for exchanging information, ideas, and opportunities with professionals in your field.

Update Facebook status and post twitter messages every day. You can start with sharing interesting articles that you have read, productivity tips, interesting pictures, etc. You will soon find people start following you in Twitter if you are posting interesting things every day. Using Facebook’s friend suggestion tool, you can request friendship with others in the Facebook network.

7. Learn and use search engine optimization. It is a very valuable instrument at your disposal to propel you websites and social media profile pages for higher search engine rankings. You don’t have to be a professional in search optimization, just learn the basics and apply them whenever you create contents.

You don’t need to buy any expensive books or sign up for extensive training program. Use free information available online. You can start with SEOBook site and download some free ebooks on search engine optimization.

 

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8 Steps to Affiliate Sales Using Classified Ads

Many websites advise not to use classified ads to promote affiliate programs. But they are wrong. If you know how to use classified ads effectively, you will be able to drive traffic to your affiliate sites without spending a dime.

1. Keep the ad simple. Don’t try to sell anything. You are trying to get clicks and drive traffic to websites. Your goal is to arouse curiosity in the readers’ mind and urge them to click on the link that takes to the landing page of the affiliate sites.

2. Create a compelling header. This is the first line a reader scans. It should grab her attention immediately. If it cannot attract her like a magnet, she will not read the rest of your ad description. Don’t write the type of headers that thousand other ads have in the classified site. Make it compelling and create a psychological trigger. To get the most clicks from your ad, use words like “cheap”, “free”, “proven” and “shocking”.

3. The next step in creating your ad is the first two sentences of the ad itself. According to many experts, the best way to make your ad appealing is to state a quantifiable benefit in these two lines. This benefit should make the reader recognize right away that they have come to the right place. A good way to do this is to tell the reader exactly what solution your product offers them.

4. The third sentence of your ad should be about a crucial feature of your product. This can be a unique selling point. The purpose is to draw the reader into clicking through now to find out the details and price of the offer. Just remember to keep the ad as simple as you can. The goal when advertising with classified ads is to use as few words as you can to achieve the greatest results.

5. Next you will need places to post your new ads to. The criteria here is to find places that will allow free classified ads that get large amounts of traffic themselves. Use Google and search using key words “free classifieds”, “free ads”, “free business ads”. Use the first two pages of Google listing and start visiting each site. Use sites that are simple and easy to use and keep a listing of those sites in you browser’s favorites.

6. Don’t forget to put a link in your ad. The link will take users to your affiliate site when they click it. Use classified sites that have an input box for URL. Put your link starting with http. If the site does not have an URL box in the ad submission page, just forget it unless you know the html syntax of a link.

7. Don’t spam the free classified sites by posting ads in irrelevant categories. You can post as many ads as you want but post only in a few relevant categories. If the site does not allow you to post multiple ads, there is no need to visit the site for the second time.

8. Use pictures or banners in your ad. If the classified site does not have a picture upload feature, you should give a second thought if you really want to use the site for your promotion. You can use it if the site gets lots of traffic.

By following these proven methods and a bit of perseverance, your success and profits will be greater. It will give more effective exposures to affiliate programs you are promoting. Just head to clickbank and pick up a few affiliate programs and start promoting using free classified ads.