First: You need to be sure your home page is effective at explaining what service or product you are offering. Traffic exchanges have a timer so the person viewing your site has the option to leave within a matter of seconds. So your main goal is to give them a reason to stay!!

Second: Only choose traffic exchanges that offer manual surfing. Most people do not even watch the window when an autosurf is running. If it is a manual surf exchange they have to physically watch the pages in order to go to the next site. This gives you the best opportunity for them to actually see your site and be drawn in by your content.

Third: Be prepared to work. In order to earn credits for people to view your site, you have to view other people’s sites. That is why it is called a “Traffic Exchange”. The more you view other sites, the more your site is viewed.

With these 3 steps you can use traffic exchanges as an effective advertising strategy. It takes planning and work to get results, but doesn’t every advertising plan? I urge everyone new to advertising to do lots of research to find the plan that is best for you and your business.

Everybody’s doing it then I can do it too. This is the mentality that many of us have when it comes to making a choice in our life. Why do we do this? We do this because we all like to make the right decision when it comes to spending or making a lifelong commitment. If ten other people make the decision to purchase purple kittens then you believe it is socially acceptable for you to purchase a purple kitten as well. This is social proof and it is a powerful marketing tool.

If you manage to convince a potential customer of yours that there are hundreds of people lined up to buy your product then it would be fairly easy for you to convince that potential customer to purchase your product. They believe you because they believe that many other people have either purchased your product or is about to purchase it. You just earned their trust by letting your potential customer know of what others think of your product.

Here are few ways that you can utilize this:

1. Have a traditional testimonial section for your product. In this section you may want to post few comments and feedbacks you have received for your product. This has been around for a long time but this does not really hit a home run when it comes to marketing. People are used to this so you will have to make that extra step.
2. Have some other site do a case study on your product. Give free samples to some people and have them do a case study. Take the case study and post it with your product. This tells your potential customer what experience others had with your product and what the recommend. This is good if you get a case study done by a credible source.
3. Create a sense of “hype” or “urgency” for your product before and after the launch. Limit the quantity of your product and work on influencing your audience that this product is so huge and it will be sold out within days of launch. Let them know how many people are waiting to take a peek at it and how many wants to buy it from you. This influences them to make a choice to purchase your product because everybody around them seems to like it too.

The more people you engage to believe in your particular product then more acceptable your product becomes. There are many ways in which you can utilize the power of social proof.

Have the right product and use social proof with the right motives, then this can be a powerful marketing tool for you. If you like to read further on social proof or human influences, I would recommend reading “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini.

If you are selling your course, make sure to jam pack it with everything you know, that way your customer will feel like they are getting a lot for their money (depending on how much you really know.)

E-courses are simple to create because there is no need for fancy formatting, heading tags or conversions. E-courses are made in the same fashion as e-zines; by using plain text.

For a sample of my 7-day mini course, send an e-mail to: minicourse@aweber.com. You will receive the first portion of the course in just a few minutes, and then for the next 7 days you will get an email with a new section attached.

AOL USERS BEWARE: The only complaints I have ever received about the course not being delivered were from AOL members.

Heres a quick check list for creating your course:

• Pick your topic of expertise.
• Divide your material into specific sections. These topics will be your lessons. I advise starting out with a day-by-day course rather than splitting your material into weeks.
• Write an introduction to the course and a list describing upcoming lessons.
• If this is a free course: make sure to weave subtle hints throughout about all of the information that they are not receiving to give them incentive to purchase something (anything!)
• Once you have written your course, set up an account with a sequential auto-responder company. Every company will have different instructions for set up, but basically you will be cutting and pasting and they will deliver the e-mails/lessons at the appropriate time.
• Promote and advertise your course on your website and send out a notice to your distribution list: let people know about it any way you can.

The Internet is a constantly changing environment, and growing every day. My small little website was no match for the competition, and I had to do something to bring more traffic to my site.

I began looking at different marketing techniques. Things like buying ad space on larger websites that had more traffic. I also looked at such things as sponsorships, and even email campaigns. The results of my investigations into Internet marketing were just not in my favor. I was just a small business, and to place ads on large websites is very expensive. Sponsorships were also expensive, and email campaigns showed very little potential, as they are usually thought of as spam and discarded. I had to do something else, and it had to be something that a small business like mine could reasonably afford.

I discovered search engine optimization. It was a means of making changes to my website that would better suit the desires of large search engines. Since it is free for people to find a website in a search engine, and free for me to be there, this seemed to be my best alternative.

I began my research into search engine optimization (SEO), and discovered that I had much to learn. It was going to take some time for me to do everything that I needed to do, but it was certainly better than losing all that I had invested so far.

I started by adjusting my website to fit the known standards of most search engines, and then began a link campaign. I distributed hundreds of free links, as well as purchased a few for a fair price. I wrote articles and newsletters. I even joined SEO discussion forums, and participated in topics about search engine optimization. In the end, my efforts started to pay off. Traffic started to flow in, and I began to get a few sales.

All of this started to make me think. What if there was no such thing as a search engine? Could small businesses like mine even compete with large companies? For most of us, it would be entirely too expensive to even attempt. Big corporations would have far more money to use on advertising, and ?Internet real estate? would be far more expensive, as it would be the only real means of advertising. My conclusion is that search engines sort of level the playing field between small businesses and large companies. They give a small business the ability to have a chance at competing for traffic on the Internet.

Most of us start out with a dislike for search engines. We get discouraged because so many other websites rank higher than ours. However, there is a way for us to compete with those websites, and it means taking a little time in optimizing website content and links for search engines. With a lot of education, and some good SEO techniques, small businesses can compete, and they can bring in traffic.

Don’t hope for too much for traffic is not definite but definable. Some people say “When I launch my site, I will do 3 weeks of marketing and make big money.” Well, that’s a dream. You cannot get massive traffic in a short sharp campaign. Unless you go into 3 months to 3 years of steady sales drive, you won’t make money.

Therefore, you have two options: quit or work harder. If you choose to work harder, then don’t work extra hard, work extra smart.

Online marketing is like fishing in troubled waters. You have to do it piece by piece. Research, read, and learn various traffic techniques and apply them one by one. Here, you will learn that what works for one site may not work for you.

You have to also pay for traffic tools and services for there’s no free lunch. Then you think of limited resources. Remember that it takes money to make money. There are loads of experts out there who will help you or give you there trade secrets in exchange for dollars. Raising funds is part of traffic generating.

Finally, avoid changing your business concept. The concept is often fine, you only need more traffic.

Bright Johnson is the author of “Why Your Site Is Not Making Sales” which can be downloaded free at http://superriches.com

Source: http://www.365articles.com

To create a well written article takes time and effort. We have to get everything right: it has to be of relevance to the reader in that subject field; it has to be well researched; all spelling, punctuation and grammar must be correction; it has to be a genuine contribution to that particular area of specialization, and so interesting that the editor will jump at the chance of publishing it. And, oh yes, all the right keywords have to be there, of the right density and in the correct proportions.

The well-crafted article must satisfy both the reader and the bot; both the aesthetics of the eye and the strictures of the code. So those of us who try and be at least a little bit serious about things know that a second draft is always necessary, and then a third. Then it’s best to sleep on it. Even after that, we know that we have to forget about it for a few days until we are able to come back to it again with a freshly critical mind. You prune it and nurture it. You take off the sharp edges and you tighten it up. If necessary you know when you have to tear it up and start over again.

Only after we have got it absolutely right – and then after spending many hours submitting to directories, editors of ezines, article announcement sites and individual webmasters – are we rewarded, perhaps, with those hard-won non-reciprocal inbound live hyperlinks.

But wait. There seems to be a problem. It appears that an increasing number of people are quite happy to simply copy and paste our work onto their own sites without a link back. Or they don’t bother to check if the link is ‘live’. That would be bad enough. But there are other people who print our articles and then don’t even bother to name the person who wrote it.

But there’s far worse: those people who print our article and then announce to the world that they wrote it themselves! Some of those even have the temerity to add the copyright sign next to their name!

I may be being a bit too harsh. Perhaps these people don’t realize that they’re doing anything wrong. After all, the Internet was originally conceived as ownerless and based upon free and open source information. And I can think of nothing more Public Domain, in fact or in spirit, than the World Wide Web.

Yet just consider what it is these people are doing. They are stealing other peoples’ work and passing it off as their own. They are effectively also stealing the web traffic that goes with it, the traffic that our labours should be rewarding our websites with, and diverting it to their own. This is blatant plagiarism. It just should not happen. Theft is theft, in whatever medium.

I wrote an article a few months ago on Internet marketing for small businesses. A search for the title of that article on Google now returns 10,800 pages, so at least the title itself has been reproduced that number of times and in that number of different places. A search for a chunk of text from the middle of the article returns 536 pages, which suggests that the article text has been published in its entirety no fewer than 536 times. Great! So now I have 536 inbound links from that one article! Wrong.

I looked at individual entries of the article and in a surprising number of cases there were no backlinks at all. Also surprising – and somewhat sickening – was the number of individuals who wantonly attached their own names to my work.

I recently posted the same article to a fresh source of publishers. I was astonished at the response of one editor of a well-known directory who had rejected the article on the grounds that it was not mine! She had seen the same piece on many other websites under different names, she said, and it was not her policy to publish work that had been produced using “cookie cutter” techniques. I wrote back saying that it really was my own work, citing the URL of SitePro News where it originally aired as that day’s headline feature. She apologized and was even good enough to supply me with a list of names of people and sites who had published it as their own. I’m so tempted to publish their names here (perhaps I will on my blog; so watch out!) but have decided that discretion should rule. For the moment, at least.

But I think there is a clear message here. The fashion for article writing and publishing for content and backlinks is going through the roof at the moment. It’s like a mini Internet boom all of its own. And like any other boom it has attracted its own inevitable pack of rat-racers, chancers, charlatans and cheats; shysters who go for the shortcuts every time, while remaining quite happy for other people to do their work for them.

For the record, the convention is this: distribute and publish the article freely by all means. But it must be published in its entirety and unedited, and MUST include the resource box with a live hyperlink back to the author’s site (or wherever the author wants, for that matter).

Hey, now even my lawyer understands!

Next time I will publish their names gleefully, and be damned.

Gordon Goodfellow is an Internet marketing practitioner who lives and works in London, UK. He finds his efforts taken in spreading the word have been hugely reduced by the use of this helpful article publishing tool.

Source: http://www.365articles.com

Very often, the people who first recognize the potential benefits of professional SEO are not the key decision makers. They are the people on the front lines of the organization – the ones who deal with prospects and customers every day. However, proposing professional SEO as a new marketing initiative to the people higher in the chain of command can be a frustrating process – very often leading to disenchantment and a general sense that the marketing decision maker doesn’t “get it”. Usually, however, the approach was more flawed than the decision maker.

Reality

Before getting into some ideas for approaching your marketing decision maker, it should be mentioned that if your company does not have a history of trying anything new, you may be better off spending your energies elsewhere. Professional SEO as an addition to your marketing mix can be a hard sell to a company that is still relying on computers that were cutting edge during the Reagan administration, no matter how convincing the argument. If your experience with your company tells you that your efforts will be in vain before you begin, you obviously don’t want to waste your time.

Speak on Their Terms

As previously mentioned, your motivation for suggesting professional SEO may not necessarily inspire your marketing decision maker to immediately add it to your company’s marketing mix. What will? Most marketing execs have a hot button issue, and they are rarely shy about sharing it. Is he or she concerned with increasing overall revenue? Is he or she always discussing cutting marketing costs? Does he or she talk about reducing the cost per lead? Does he or she always espouse the value of improving your brand recognition? For each of these scenarios (and virtually any other), there are specific studies on SEO that will support your recommendation. If you approach your marketing decision maker without keeping the issues most important to him or her in mind, you will diminish your chances for success.

Use the Competition

While different marketing decision makers can have different hot button issues, few things seem to motivate companies as much as the action (or sometimes the inaction) of the competition. With professional SEO, there are two potential scenarios – either some of your competitors have added it to the marketing mix effectively, or none of them have. If they have, it is fairly easy to demonstrate this fact by taking your marketing manager through a few keyphrase searches on any major search engine and showing him or her that your hated enemy figures prominently in the results while your company does not. This, of course, makes a compelling argument. On the other hand, if your known competitors have clearly not embraced the channel, it is just as easy to show a few searches on keyphrases demonstrating that you can have (for now) a competitive advantage. Such keyphrase searches can also turn up additional competitors – lean, forward-thinking companies that are embracing new marketing tactics. This eye-opening experience can also encourage a decision maker to act.

Use Your Potential Vendors

Talk to some established professional SEO firms before approaching your company with the suggestion that they consider adding SEO to the marketing mix. A good SEO firm has encountered all of the objections that you are likely to face and should be able to help you with your approach by compiling relevant stats and offering compelling case studies. Your time is valuable, and you needn’t spend it reinventing the wheel when you can get professional assistance for free. If a firm is unwilling, or unable, to help you to present to your marketing decision maker in a manner that will speak directly to them, perhaps you should look elsewhere. An inexperienced SEO firm might not be able to help you in this specific manner, and an overburdened firm will likely be unwilling to spend the extra time to help you customize your approach. The good news is that asking for this type of assistance can not only help you to sell to your company, it can also help you in the early stages of the all-important vendor selection process.

Offer a Plan

Piquing interest from the decision maker is only the first step. You should be prepared to offer a clear project description, including the price ranges of your proposed professional SEO vendors, how long it will take to see results, and, most importantly, how success will be measured. This is another area where your potential vendors should be more than willing to help – good firms will collect extensive data at the outset to measure success, and will be able to clearly define what “success” will look like.

As many companies are discovering, professional SEO is an incredibly powerful and cost-effective addition to the existing marketing mix. It is a sure bet, however, that the marketing decision makers of many of the companies currently embracing professional SEO did not come up with the idea independently. Some underpaid visionary in their organizations brought it to their attention first!

About the Author

Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing (www.mediumblue.com). He has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, SEO Today, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue, a search engine marketing company, serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DuPont, and Georgia-Pacific. To receive internet marketing articles and search engine news in your email box each month, register for Medium Blue’s newsletter, Out of the Blue.

Source: http://www.365articles.com