Link building is a major piece of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) toolkit. Search engine ratings are raised by quality links to your website, and higher ratings lead to more visitors

Here are the 10 Top Link Building Tips:

1. Participate in discussion groups on forums focused on your topic, to improve your credibility. Adding your website to your post signature will provide a reliable source of backlinks.

2. Ride the wave of what others are talking about: share newsworthy items, perhaps as press releases, such that other sites will point to as a source of information.

3. Increase exposure for your site through free online directories. These are an excellent source of links.

4. Build up a credible reputation by freely posting quality information on forums related to your niche or business. Your signature can be a hyperlink to your site, attracting additional visitors who have come to read your posts.

5. Get involved in free online directories. Many have been successful at getting site exposure and links through these directories.

6. Whenever your site is updated with something newsworthy, create a press release to inform the public that your website is a great place to link to for information. Press releases can generate additional visitors.

7. Creating top 10 or top 100 lists of resources, tips, and ideas can bolster your status as an expert, especially if the list becomes the industry standard and is used by others as a link to an authority document.

8. Submit several articles to article directories each month, increasing your internet presence and getting your links out there.

9. Submit your posts to Web 2.0 sites such as Digg, Squidoo, Twitter, and Del.icio.us, in order to increase article availability. There are currently hundreds of different sites to choose from.

10. Use as many Web2.0 sites as possible: Digg, Squidoo, Del.icio.us, Twitter, and the lists goes on…

Here are a few tricks on how to market your product without spending too much cash:

1) Market your business consciously. Talk about your product with your friends, with your friend’s friends, or with anyone you interact with. You don’t need to do hard-selling or hand out flyers to strangers. The main point is, if you have a product that you are proud of, show it off to your friends and let the “word of mouth” work its way.

2) Promote your site using the internet. Blog, join group discussions or forums that are related to your business or your product. Expand your contacts by joining Social Networks and be sure to keep them updated. There are a lot of good sites available on the internet; Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are just a few social networks that may help you increase your target market.

3) Give out freebies to promote your product. If you have a cart that sells lotions or shampoos, try giving out samples. Giving out samples to customers would also show that you are confident of your product.

4) Promote your business or product through seminars and presentations. It will help people know more about your business and it will also give you a chance to showcase your product’s special features.

5) Make sure that each outgoing letters from you has your business logo, whether it’s thru postal mail or electronic mail. You can print out stickers that have your logo, or give out memo pads, calculator, mugs or office supplies that have your business name or logo. Business stationary is an old trick, proven to be effective in marketing your business!

6) You can do “cold calling”. Randomly calling out people to promote your business might be challenging but it’s a sales tactic that can be very effective if it’s done the right way.

7) Give free information. Help your clients by offering information that is relevant to your business or your product. If you are selling cosmetics, give customers useful tips on how to apply the right eye shadow color for their skin tone, or how to prevent their mascara from running dry.

Try to reach out to nonprofit organizations, schools and colleges or even other businesses that have customers who may need your services.

9) Take advantage of free ads. You can have your company and your product listed in a directory free of charge. Most professional associations often publish such directories.

10) Ask your existing clients or customers for referrals and make sure you reward them for it.

You don’t have to be a big brand or have a lot of money to create link bait. Many people have created link bait on purpose–and many have created link bait without even knowing it. It doesn’t have to cost that much to create something that people will link to. For example, it’s sometimes difficult–if not impossible–to get your competitors to link to you. But, consider this–take, for example, the case of Andrew. He works for a high tech company with a lot of competition. Andrew recently took his digital camera to an industry convention where he took photos of many of the attendees, the booths, and some of the after-hours events. He posted the photos on his web site after the convention, sent out a few emails to his colleagues and other industry insiders he met at the convention. Before he knew it, most of Andrew’s competitors were linking to his web site and the photos he took.

One way to create link bait is to get ranked well for phrases that will become popular in the future. As I sit here writing this article, the term “link bait” might be a good target if you’re in the search engine marketing industry. By searching Google for the following: allintitle:”link bait” you can determine about how many web pages on the internet are targeting that search phrase. Right now, as I write this, Google returns 25 results. Since that’s not very many, writing content about link bait would be a good thing for your web site. By informing the search engine marketing industry about link bait–and because the term is new, there’s a chance that others will search for it as it becomes a more popular phrase. As that phrase becomes more popular, others will need something to link to–and by ranking well for that phrase there’s a good chance that your web page about link bait will get links from other web sites. This is a phenomenon that I’ve been following since 1996 when I created my first “link bait” type of web site. If you’re a search term innovator, people will link to you–and links from other web sites mean better search engine rankings.

One of my ‘pet projects’ over the years (since I started doing search engine optimization in 1996) has been to follow the news–and if there’s a topic that I am passionate about I usually create a web page or a web site about the subject within minutes of the ‘breaking news’. In the cases where I have a web site about a particular topic and there’s breaking news about that subject, I immediately post it on my web site. Since I’m one of the first to have information about that subject, I end up ranking well fairly quickly–sometimes within 24 hours. Other people follow suit and post information on their web sites about that topic–but since my site is already ranking well for that search phrase, they end up linking to me. What they don’t realize is that they’ve fallen for my “link bait” which catches them–they’re actually helping me by linking to me and I end up ranking well in the search engines for a very long time, sometimes even many years. How can you take advantage of this? If there’s news in your industry, be the first to post it on your web site (or add a new page to your site). Be the first to get it to show up in the search engines and other people will link to it naturally.

Create an entirely new web site on a new topic. The new site could be funny, controversial, or just informative. Take, for example, Paul English’s IVR Cheat Sheet that he recently created (http://paulenglish.com/ivr/). Mr. English is now enjoying thousands of links to his web site because he created a web page that’s helpful to all of us. Not only that, because of his cheat sheet that he’s posted on his site, companies are now seeing a backlash according to an article posted on Yahoo! (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20060118/tc_nf/40949). “Companies that rely on automated call centers have been weathering a consumer backlash in recent weeks…” reports the article. I don’t have access to the number of visits to Mr. English’s web site, but I would suspect that he’s getting a lot of traffic based on all the high-quality links that he has–and I would suspect that he hasn’t requested any of them.

Although the term “link bait” is fairly new, the entire concept of link bait has been around as long as the internet itself. People have been creating controversial, funny, and informative web sites and web site content that others naturally link to. And with the ever-increasing popularity of blogs nowadays, the bloggers need something to link to and talk about–why not create some link bait on your web site so it too, can enjoy better search engine rankings–just reel them in.

Those who have decent eBay businesses and aren’t interested in making more money should just ignore this article. For everyone else who wants to grow their business and increase profit margins, here are a few simple tips that you can put into practice immediately.

1) Building a list of past customers. If they purchased from you in the past there’s a good chance they will buy from you again. Send them emails of special offers, new inventory, or rare items in stock. All you need to do is get their emails out of PayPal and into an autoresponder.

2) eBay’s Publisher Network. eBay will send you money if someone buys an item on eBay after clicking through your link. Use this with tip #1 and you can really see some great results.

3) Pricing. Be sure to check your listing prices often to see what the market is doing, and then change your prices accordingly. You might be able to make more money by selling inventory a little bit faster by cutting your margins just a tad.

4) Inventory clearouts. If you have inventory sitting around too long you can really hinder business growth. Old inventory ties up capital, takes up space on your shelf, and hinders cash flow. Clear out your old inventory and replace it with some quicker sellers.

5) Saving money is just as important as making money. With eBay policies these days, we’ve found ways to cut our listing fees by 60-80% with just a few simple strategies. We used to have multiple listings of the same item for more listing exposure. Now, we get the same sales and exposure by optimizing our listings for eBay’s new ‘Best Match’ search and putting any multiple items in the same listing. We also use the 30 day or good till canceled listing duration. Just by making those few adjustments, in some months we have seen our eBay fee invoices go from over $1500 a month to under $300.

On the surface, pay per click marketing does look good. Who cannot say no to loads of traffic, and being on top of the ‘paid listing’ of search engines? The interested business owner will of course go for it, since this can bring in great results for his business. But is it really all good things about this form of advertising?

Like any other advertising tool, there are also drawbacks in pay per click marketing. It is therefore important for any business owner to know these before starting out with their pay per click campaigns.

To easily understand pay per click and its drawbacks, below are the major issues that should be kept in mind to avoid failures in pay per click.

● Cost. Implementing a pay per click campaign can hurt your budget if not properly done and if not being careful with it. In Yahoo! for example, setting your campaign to ‘auto bid’ might give you more harm than good, as it automatically increases your bid to maintain your rankings. In PPC, you might also be competing for a keyword which will not give you your targeted results.

● Hard to measure the Return on Investment (ROI). In pay per click, you need to determine how many of the clicks to your website have been converted to sales of your product, and determining the revenue you gain per investment on PPC may be difficult. Conversion tracker may however be helpful on this aspect.

● Junk Traffic. In pay per click marketing, you will have to face the risk of getting traffic you would not want in your site. These are traffic not in any way relevant to your business. These are most often brought in by some other sources and might not be helpful in your advertising campaign. It is advisable however to get traffic from major search engines.

● Pay per click does not scale. When you eventually get a good number of site visitors after engaging into pay per click, there may be good chances of earning more and cost per click on your ad may not increase but the entire cost will increase.

These reasons should be carefully examined before you engage in pay per click. Indeed pay per click marketing is a very helpful tool for those who want to earn online but its risks should also be considered to make this advertising work for you.

Google Adwords is one of the most effective mediums of promoting your business on search engines. If you are focussing your efforts on search engine optimization, then it can easily consume around 6-8 Months ( even higher than that) to get your website optimized on top pages of Google, Yahoo and several other search engines.

Yahoo on the other hand provides similar feature which is bit more advance than Google. However, the popularity factor of Google is higher than Yahoo, but Yahoo’s Sponsored search provides you more flexibility in terms of selecting text, link, and ads. Similar to Google, Yahoo will also advertise your website on popular websites.

Following are some the tips offered by the internal team of Adwords optimizers which will help you generate more ROI from your existing adwords campaigns.

1. Focus your ads on low prices and savings.
2. Use value-related keywords.
3. Make sure your ad groups are targeted and relevant.
4. Don’t waste money on irrelevant clicks.
5. Make it easy for customers to buy.
6. Focus your money on your high-performers.

You can read more about each of these tips including examples and instructions at http://www.google.com/adwords/tactics and you can also view these tactics in a pdf format at http://www.google.com/adwords/tactics/top_tactics.pdf. We hope these tactics will help you continue to see good returns from your AdWords investment. Share and Enjoy:

]]> http://www.pcmoneysecrets.com/adwords-optimization-seo-tips/feed/ 0 http://www.pcmoneysecrets.com/the-google-adsense-profits-mixed-in-with-affiliate-marketing/ http://www.pcmoneysecrets.com/the-google-adsense-profits-mixed-in-with-affiliate-marketing/#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:14:43 +0000 admin http://www.pcmoneysecrets.com/?p=170 Why Affiliate Marketing? Well, simply because affiliate marketing is the easiest and probably the best way to earn profits online, unless otherwise you are a businessman and would rather sell your own products online than advertise other businessman products on your site. But even online retailers can benefit from affiliate marketing programs, because affiliate marketing actually works for merchants as well as it works for the affiliates. Affiliate marketing, simply said, is a relationship or agreement made between two websites, with one site being the merchant website and the other being the affiliate?€™s site. In the relationship, the affiliate agrees to let the merchant advertise his products on the affiliates site. The merchant, on the other hand, would agree to pay the affiliate in whatever method they have agreed into. This would generally mean easy income for the affiliate, as he would do nothing but place the retailer ad on his site. This would also be very beneficial for the merchant, as getting affiliates to advertise their products would be a lot more affordable than hiring an advertising firm to promote their products. There are a variety of methods on how the merchant would compensate the affiliate for his services, and for the webmaster, these methods simply translates to the method by which he would earn easy cash. Among the more common methods of compensation are the pay-per-click method, the pay-per-lead method, and the pay-per-sale method. The pay-per-click method is the method most preferred by affiliates, for their site visitor would only have to visit the advertiser site for them to gain money. The other two methods, on the other hand, are better preferred by merchants, as they would only have to compensate you if your visitor becomes one of their registrants or if the visitor would actually buy their products. Getting much profit on affiliate marketing programs, however, does not depend so much on the compensation method is it does on the traffic generated by your site. A website that can attract more visitors would generally have the greater chance of profiting in affiliate marketing programs. What about Google Adsense? Google Adsense is actually some sort of an affiliate marketing program. In Google Adsense, Google act as the intermediary between the affiliates and the merchants. The merchant, or the advertiser, would simply sign up with Google and provide the latter with text ads pertaining to their products. These ads, which is actually a link to the advertiser website, would then appear on Google searches as well as on the websites owned by the affiliates, or by those webmasters who have signed up with the Google Adsense program. While one can find a lot of similarities between Google Adsense and other affiliate marketing programs, you can also see a lot of differences. In Google Adsense, all the webmaster has to do is place a code on his website and Google takes care of the rest. The ads that Google would place on your site would generally be relevant to the content of your site. This would be advantageous both for you and for the advertiser, as the visitors of your site would more or less be actually interested with the products being advertised. The Google Adsense program compensates the affiliate in a pay-per-click basis. The advertisers would pay Google a certain amount each time their ad on your site is clicked and Google would then forward this amount to you through checks, although only after Google have deducted their share of the amount. Google Adsense checks are usually delivered monthly. Also, the Google Adsense program provides webmasters with a tracking tool that allows you to monitor the earnings you actually get from a certain ad. So, where do all of these lead us to? Where else but to profits, profits and even more profits! Affiliate marketing programs and the Google Adsense program simply work, whether you are the merchant or the affiliate. For the merchant side, a lot of money can be saved if advertising effort is concentrated on affiliate marketing rather than on dealing with advertising firms. For the webmaster, you can easily gain a lot of profits just by doing what you do best, and that is by creating websites. And if you combine all your profits from both the Google Adsense program and other affiliate marketing programs, it would surely convert to a large amount of cash.

Several recently introduced products and services, including WrapMail, mailPrimer, BrandMail, and Exclaimer Signature Manager, offer these so-called e-mail enhancements. Prices and features vary, but they all take a company’s outgoing e-mail messages and turn them into marketing mailers, complete with stationery-style borders, banner ads to promote sales and new products, and embedded links. Or as WrapMail describes its service, “It’s like an e-mail signature on steroids.”

As the name suggests, WrapMail takes an outgoing e-mail message and wraps the borders in clickable images. Companies create banner ads, add them to a template, and specify which webpage should appear when someone clicks on an ad. Employees don’t need to install anything — the ads are automatically added after they hit Send. For companies with fewer than 200 employees, the service, which costs $5 per user per month, routes outgoing e-mail through WrapMail’s servers. For larger companies, it’s an additional $3,000 to install a WrapMail server on-site.

Guerin saw results right away. In the first week, someone who clicked on an e-mail banner ad bought an $8,000 printer. The e-mail in question? A reply Guerin had sent to a friend, saying he would attend a dinner party. Guerin’s friend forwarded the RSVP to the host, who happened to work at a photography studio that needed a new printer. Guerin was so impressed that he later joined WrapMail’s board.

There is some evidence to suggest that everyday e-mails make for a persuasive marketing platform. According to a survey by Forrester Research, 77 percent of people say they trust the information in e-mails sent from people they know. That ranks well above the 46 percent who trust what they read in newspapers. And whether or not recipients fully trust the ads in e-mails from acquaintances, they at least look at them. WrapMail claims that nearly all of the e-mails sent with its service get opened. A typical e-mail marketing newsletter, in contrast, is lucky to get a 50 percent open rate.

The e-mail ads may be especially effective in niche markets. Tim Davey, president of Global Marine Travel, an agency based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, that arranges flights for people who work on oil rigs, cargo ships, and private yachts, says WrapMail helps the company target its marketing efforts. Because airlines offer these workers special discounts through Global Marine, the company doesn’t widely publicize its promotions. “We spend about 50 percent of our time turning down people who aren’t qualified to use these fares,” says Davey. About 24 of Global Marine’s 78 employees get ads placed on outgoing messages — about 500 e-mails a month — to cruise-line executives, yacht owners, and other travel agencies. About half of all recipients click on the ads, says Davey.

Of course, there are some drawbacks to plastering e-mails with ads. The messages sometimes get tangled in spam filters. There are also concerns that the in-your-face ads will turn off customers. When WrapMail was mentioned on a tech blog recently, it drew some criticisms. “If I was regularly receiving e-mails with wraps…I would stop dealing with that company,” wrote one commenter. Another added, “Just what we need, more advertising to invade our personal space. Stay out of my inbox!”

WrapMail allows each recipient to opt out of the ads and receive just normal, plain-text e-mails. And a company can omit the ads for contacts who receive frequent e-mails. But Guerin isn’t worried about his ads getting on people’s nerves. “You can’t hit people over the head hard enough when it comes to making them aware of the products you offer,” he says.