Wouldn’t it be great if you could sit back and make money—even when you weren’t actually doing anything?  With an affiliate program, you can!  As an affiliate, you direct people to another (usually commercial) website, and if and when they purchase something there, you make a percentage of the sale.

This article will focus on the Amazon affiliate program, which is, for my money, the easiest one out there for new webmasters to use.  It covers all the basics, from deciding to become an affiliate to signing up to the most strategic placing for your affiliate links.

So who should become an affiliate?  Well, obviously, your site has to be in line with Amazon’s affiliate requirements.  If you’re an adult porn site, you needn’t bother applying.  But outside of that caveat, the appropriate sites for an Amazon affiliate program are pretty broad.  Is there any chance that visitors to your site might be interested in books, music, DVDs, clothing, jewelry, or anything else that Amazon provides?  If the answer is yes—and it probably will be, since Amazon sells a lot of stuff—then you may want to consider joining Amazon as an affiliate.

Amazon’s signup page is simplicity in digital form. Read the terms of service very carefully, so you don’t accidentally do anything illegal or get kicked off the program once you do get in.  But, ToS aside, signing up is as simple as filling out their online form, then waiting until they review your site and get back to you.

As you’re filling out the form, on a separate piece of paper, jot down the questions and your answers.  (If the screen shot function works on your computer, you can also use this feature.  Make sure you get the screen once you scroll down, as well.)  Keep this in a safe place, a filing cabinet or a safebox.  Especially keep track of the email and password you used to sign up.  Nothing is more embarrassing than forgetting how to get into your affiliate program.

Once your site has been approved and you can access your account, you’ll want to start building links (with Amazon’s program, this is easier than it sounds, trust me).  Take a few minutes to look around your project page.  Familiarize yourself with the location of your reports (scroll down), the links in the top left, and the general layout of the account.

At the top of the page on the left-hand side, you should see several links and sublinks, including one which says “Build Links”.  By following this link, you will find six different kinds of links, including a search box link.  You can “play around” a little bit and practice building links.  When you find a link you like, copy and paste the code they provide to your website.  From their end, it’s as easy as that.

Which brings us to another aspect of affiliate marketing: your website.  What sort of links should you choose?  Where should you place them?  Should you be specific, recommending one particular book per link, or general, linking to an entire section?

First, let’s talk about placement.  In the case of the image links (whether banner links, search box, or other), they need to be placed where people can see them.  The left-hand side of the page is going to be the most visible for most visitors.  Because we read left to right, our eyes are naturally drawn to the left.  More people will see your link if you place it on the left-hand side of your site than on the right.

Strive for a clean, uncluttered look; don’t load the page down with advertisements.

Text links work best in context.  For example, say you have an article on your page about car engines.  At the end of the article, you might include a text link to a specific Amazon book, such as John Muir’s How to Keep Your Volkswagon Alive.  These links may actually be your most effective; you know what your visitors are interested in, and you have a book that is relevant to your subject.

Use a combination of image links and text links, to achieve the best results.  You don’t, for example, have to use each of the six kinds of links, but you should use at least two or three.  Recommend a balance of specific products and general areas.  A variety of links is your best bet.

Webmasters with very small sites may say, “But I only get ten or twenty visitors a week.  Is it really worth it to become an affiliate?”  The answer is a resounding Yes.  It doesn’t cost anything to join Amazon, and you can start putting the building blocks in place so that as your site traffic grows, you’ll already be an affiliate.

Don’t expect to get rich off an affiliate program, no matter how many visitors your site gets.  This isn’t a way to buy a cruise twice a year.  But it’s the gift that keeps on giving.  For a little up-front effort, you can get your affiliate links in place…and then do nothing!  The links do all the work for you.

Finally, have fun!  You’re recommending products you love and actually making money for it.  What could be better than that?

This post was generated by an RSS Feed from Website GoodiesYou may also like to read:

• Quick Facebook Fan Page tip – your web address
• Effective Link Building To Improve Page Rank
• Adding someone else as an Admin on your Facebook Fan Page
• Why I think you should always include a picture in a blog post
• Where to Get Links?

Share on Facebook

Becoming an Amazon Affiliate – And Making It Pay is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website

The Web has grown into a real jungle, and finding cool new sites nowadays isn’t always the easiest thing in the world. If you have a Website yourself, you’re dealing with the other end of this issue. How do you get noticed online, and is there anything you can do to increase your popularity?

There certainly is! Here are the top five ways you can strengthen your site and increase your online visibility.

1. Strong Hosting

This first point is mostly important for those who don’t have their own Website yet but eagerly want to create one. After you have selected your domain name, the next step is to choose a hosting plan. There are many good, affordable alternatives, but what professionals usually recommend is specialized blog hosting. This form of Web hosting allows you to set up a professional-looking Website in no time at all. Why is this important to mention when it comes to making your site more popular? Well, without strong hosting, you won’t be able to handle a traffic to your new Website, which means you’ll have no chance at all of becoming well liked.

Of course, finding strong hosting is often easier said than done. The hosting industry has grown very popular in recent years, and this has lead to large numbers of companies offering various hosting services. But don’t be fooled by their tricky ways of making it sound as if they are the best in the industry. We would recommend you partner up with a company that has a strong reputation and experience in the business. You might start at Web Hosting Search for reviews and other information to help you find the right fit.

When it comes to hosting, you should compare the different features included with the plan. Make sure you are guaranteed at least 99.9% uptime and that customer support is easy to get hold of. You never know when you could need them. Likewise, it is also good to know exactly what kind of numbers in terms of disc space and bandwidth will you be allowed to use and manage. Some providers also forbid their clients to upload music or video files to their servers even if it is for personal use. It’s important to ask customer support to resolve such issues before purchasing a plan. Some other things you might consider asking are whether your domain name registry information will be protected and how many different e-mail accounts will you be allowed to use as part of the hosting agreement.

2. Optimize Your Website

In order to be truly successful online, you will have to get a high ranking in search engines. To succeed in this, you should learn as much as you possibly can about search engine optimization (SEO). The subject of SEO is vast and can be quite daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to see the benefits immediately and will probably wonder why you didn’t get started with it earlier. A few things you can do to get started are to make sure you’re using the proper keywords and to write for your visitors as well as for search engines. Writing for search engines is important, since you want to get high rankings, and writing for visitors is of the essence because you want them to stick around and return to your Website.

When you are satisfied with the keywords and content on your site, it is time to start working with link building. Search engines determine much of the value of a certain page/site by looking at the number of inbound links. Link exchange is one of the most popular and successful ways to get a good rank on search engines, and it’s really easy to do. Simply visit a Website that you like and ask the Webmaster if they are interested in a link exchange — it doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

Having something interesting and distinctive on your page is a great way to attract potential link partners. For example, if you are running a Website about domain names, why not add a domain name availability checker to your homepage? It will most likely attract links from other sites related to the niche, and people will tend to come back again if they want to know whether a domain is available or not. Try to be extra creative to set yourself apart from competitors.

3. Take Advantage of Social Media Optimization

Even though SEO should be a big part of your site optimization, it shouldn’t end there. Social Media Optimization is probably just as important, since it’s one of the strongest marketing tools available today. A social media optimization campaign should include a few different things. First, make sure the content on your site or blog is relevant to your topic and not out of date. Visit similar sites and join the discussion in leaving comments on posts/articles — don’t be afraid to say what’s on your mind. Make yourself visible on Facebook and MySpace. Three other sites that can be useful for social media optimization are Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. The two latter ones are not always applicable. Make sure you only take advantage of them when the time is right — you might do more harm than good if you don’t.

Obviously, don’t forget to include outbound links to your Website on any social media site you utilize. Even if your link has a “nofollow” attribute attached to it (e.g. like in Facebook), you will still attract new visitors and potential customers to the site. Lastly, your campaign should be built on friendly platforms, such as CoffeeCup Flash™ Blogger, which make it easy to create and edit content.

4. Get Your Visitors Involved

A crucial point to make your site grow in the number of visitors is by getting them involved. Try to write in a personal style, and don’t be afraid to leave an open question. If this shouldn’t do it, why not hold a contest? This will most likely get people talking about your site. The prize doesn’t have to cost a fortune, since people like to compete regardless of what the award is — it’s human nature.

Other easy ways of getting your visitors involved is by including a forum on your site or the possibility to comment on your posts/articles. Everyone wants to express their own personal ideas and thoughts on topics, and by allowing them doing so, you also increase the chance of visitors returning to see how was their feedback appreciated. As an added bonus, if the topic is extra popular, the discussion could attract interest from other Websites as well!

5. Emphasize Usability in Your Design

Investing in a good design is more important than some people seem to think. With a beautiful design, you will grow in trust among your readers/visitors. An important fact to remember is not over-designing the Website. It doesn’t matter how many hours you’ve put into designing the site if no one understands how to use it. Let some non-Internet-savvy friends navigate through your Website before launching it at a full scale. If they find it easy, so will the rest of your visitors.

It is difficult to say exactly what makes a beautiful and functional design. What looks good to one person might seem terrible for another. However, there are basic trends in Web design, and if you follow these, you can be sure to please most of your visitors. A few popular Web design trends for 2009 are multi-column layouts, large illustrations, and lots of white space.

If you wish to stay on the safe side, then it is a good call to make the layout and design features on the page easily accessible and simple to understand. Try to use standard coding and avoid over-the-top Flash animations. Some people may have browser settings that prevent them from viewing Flash, which means you might lose valuable visitors. Try to think how the visitor thinks, and your Website will grow more popular and respected day after day.

This post was generated by an RSS Feed from WPDFDYou may also like to read:

• Search Engine Optimization In A Nutshell
• Forget SEO, You Need SPO: Search Person Optimization
• Ever Regret Your Domain Name Choice?
• What is Social Media Optimization?
• SEO 101: Everything You Need to Know About SEO (But Were Afraid to Ask) – Part 1

Share on Facebook

Top Five Ways to Make Your Site More Popular is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website

There are many websites starting up in business on the Internet every day. The more websites, that get set up on the Web, the harder it becomes to get traffic to your site as every site is competing with you to get as much traffic as they can. It also becomes harder to get good rankings in the major search engines. So once you have your traffic, how can you make sure that a good percentage of the traffic returns back to your site time and time again?

Some of the things you could do to get returning visitors are shown as follows:

1. Make sure that your website gets new content displayed on it on a daily basis. This gives a reason for your visitors to return to your site.

2. Making your site very entertaining is important. This can be done by adding sticky content to your website, or a bit of humor here and there, just so that your visitor gets entertained and it is then more likely to make your visitors want to come back to your website. Although entertainment is good, it also needs to be updated on a daily basis. For example, the games at: http://games.simplysearch4it.com is being updated on a daily basis. This means that at least one new game is being added every day. This gives a reason for the visitors to return to the site.

The more times your individual visitors return back to your site the more they will start to get use to it and what it has to offer. This is very good. This will mean that they will more likely get to know your brand and also your websites image. The more they visit your site the more they most probably like it and the higher the chance of them telling their friends.

3. Adding a forums or a place where people can hang out to your website is another good way of giving people a reason to come back to your site. This is one of the reasons why sites like MySpace and a lot of forums get returning visitors. This is because people like to meet other people and have a place online to hang out and chat, plus share things with new people and existing friends, plus they also like to learn new things.

4. Making your site so people can easily navigate it is very important. If your visitors can easily find things on your site then they are more likely to return, as people dont want to be searching for something on the Web for hours. They want to go to a site and find what they are looking for in a few seconds. The quicker they can find something on your site the better.

5. The speed that your site loads up to the visitor is very important. Visitors are on the move all the time and dont want to wait for a site to load up if it takes rather long. So the quicker you can make your sites pages load up, the more chance your visitor will stay on your site and also return.

6. When designing your website, it is best to spend more time designing your websites homepage to what it is with the other pages of your site. This is because your homepage is where a lot of your visitors normally visit and is considered the most important page of a website.

7. Giving your Website a good name is very important. If you give your site a name that has nothing to do with your sites topic or is to long to remember, then there is less of a chance that your site will get passed on through word of mouth and also, it will be harder for people to remember your sites web address and will then result in less returning visitors to your website.

8. Giving away freebies is not important, but can actually bring returning visitors to your site. For example, if you offer game competitions on your website where your visitors can win prizes, for playing your games, where they then compete with other players, then there is more of a chance that a visitor will play your games, than what they would with other gaming sites where they dont offer prizes to their visitors.

By Jonathan White. Jonathan White has been doing online market research, advertising and other online activities for over 4 years now. He currently owns http://www.simplysearch4it.com , http://games.simplysearch4it.com , http://articles.simplysearch4it.com and http://products.simplysearch4it.com.

This post was generated by an RSS Feed from Website GoodiesYou may also like to read:

• Top Five Ways to Make Your Site More Popular
• SEO 101: Everything You Need to Know About SEO (But Were Afraid to Ask) – Part 1
• Forget SEO, You Need SPO: Search Person Optimization
• Google Analytics For Better Search Engine Marketing
• The Death of the Professional, Brought to You by Google

Share on Facebook

How To Get Your Visitors Returning Back To Your Website is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website

Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.

In nutshell, Social media describes websites that allow users to share content, media, etc. Common examples are the popular social networking sites like Friendster, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. Here we listing and describing Top Blogs For Social Media Updates that you should read.

Social Media Networking really important for people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail, blogging, instant messaging, photo sharing and gaming services.

Social networking has created new paths to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people, and it now seems that social networking will be an enduring part of everyday life. This is one of the beat ways we as a society show our growth and our progressiveness.

This post was generated by an RSS Feed from Instant ShiftYou may also like to read:

• The Future of SEO
• What is Social Media Optimization?
• Don’t Take the “Social” Out of Social Networking
• Are your efforts online paying off? Really?
• How a Little Blogging Can Make a Big Difference for the Small Business

Share on Facebook

30 Top Blogs For Social Media Updates is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website

Setting up a blog is easy but maintaining and promoting it in search engines needs specialized skills. You need to understand how blog functions and in what ways it can be promoted successfully to generate instant and constant stream of traffic.

Whenever you update or add posts to your blog, you can ping to let services (designed specifically for connecting blogs.) know your blog content have changed since last update. This is like telling others that you have changed. It is seen that pinging increases traffic to your blog.

With WordPress, checking for updates in your blog is done automatically and the changes are reflected usually by moving you blog links on top of bloggers blogroll list. This way you get more clicks to your blog.

If you want to increase more traffic to your blog, you can install additional pinging services. Its seen that pinging frequently increase traffic to your blog. Most of the blogging software comes with at leas one ping updates which pings every time you add a new post; but if you want to ping even if you edit your post to update it, you need to install additional plug-ins.

WordPress bloggers can add additional update ping services by simply login to there account and adding more update services in their list present at the bottom of the sub-sub menu Writing tab under Option menu. A long list if services to be added can be found here at http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2004/11/21/a-list-of-rpc-and-rpc2-to-ping/ .

Besides pinging services, you will also need to submit your Rss feeds to various directories and search engines to increase traffic to your blog. One advanced tip (often missed) while making your Rss feeds is to carefully select keywords which are high on traffic but low in competition and use them in the text of the feeds. Also update your feeds more often to increase your chance of being found in the SERPs.

Nothing else can beat the power of adding keyword rich contents to your blog frequently. This has the major impact in attracting quality traffic to your website as more and more posts from your blog find their way into the search results. Usually it is seen that blogging frequency is most when you have newly installed your blog and after 2-3 months of blogging the frequency of blogging tends to decrease. So, it is the continual efforts that will get your blog the much-deserved traffic.

Happy Blogging!!

By Rakesh Ojha. Rakesh Ojha is a SEO specialist and Online Marketing Consultant with over 5 Years in SEM Industry. Contact him at rakesh@searchengineoptimization4u.com or visit his website at http://www.searchengineoptimization4u.com. Read latest SEM and SEO articles on his blog at http://semblog.searchengineoptimization4u.com

This post was generated by an RSS Feed from Website GoodiesYou may also like to read:

• Forget SEO, You Need SPO: Search Person Optimization
• Benefits of Search Engine Optimization for your Website
• Embed Article Plugin
• Running A Small Business Website
• What is an RSS feed?

Share on Facebook

Traffic to Your Blog is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website

Other things you could consider are:

1. Add an entry to Wikipedia and link your site to it
2. Create a video for www.youtube.com for a product or service or just to get you noticed
3. Run fun contests or other promotions
4. Create an ebook
5. Join forums and communities and pass on your knowedge for free
6. Write an article for an article sharing website such as www.ezinearticles.com
7. Create a subscription option for email updates and create a regular e-newsletter.
8. Offer to be a guest writer for other websites or blogs
9. Create a FREE company profile on www.freeindex.co.uk
10. Create a page (Lens) on Squidoo.com
11. Join a banner exchange program
12. Contribute on other people’s wikis
13. Create a fan page or a group on FaceBook
14. Use a socialiser button on your website so visitors can bookmark and share
15. Contribute on Yahoo Answers
16. Join a Banner Rotator Program
17. Swap articles with other blog owners and other webmasters
18. Create promotional items displaying your url – pens, pencils, stickers
19. get a logo on your van or a decal advert on your rear screen
20. List your website on your local library’s website or local council’s website
21. Start your own Internet radio show
22. Get interviewed on other people’s Internet radio shows
23. Register and advertise your business on some of the free advertising websites listed here
24. Join and participate on experts.com or websites for your industry expertise
25. Use digg.com

Just some ideas, let me know if you can think of anymore and I will add to the listYou may also like to read:

• What is an RSS feed?
• 10 Benefits of a Website
• Effective Ways to Promote Your Business Offline
• Becoming an Amazon Affiliate – And Making It Pay
• SEO Tools

Share on Facebook

25 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website

Social Media Optimization is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Blogging, posting industry articles, being active on forums, publishing RSS feeds, posting videos on sites like YouTube, etc, etc.

Social Media Marketing is a very powerful component in your marketing strategy. It is a great way of getting traffic to your website.

SMO is the online version of “word of mouth” marketing. In the old days that was one of your only options, but it’s surprising how many companies and website owners do not take advantage of this free modern marketing strategy.

Unlike traditional search engine marketing, social media optimisation has a dual focus. Not only does it aim to drive traffic to a website through the social media networks themselves, it also aims to boost a site’s ranking by getting mentions all over the web. This is why Social Media Optimization is currently considered a smart way to optimise your website.

What’s the benefit to SMO?

The benefits of social media vary depending on what you want to achieve. For some sites, SMO offers the instant exposure and influx of inbound links. With any luck, a significant portion of your new links will be coming from quality sites. However, you need to capture those first-time visitors and convert them into loyal site community members. To capture those visits you need to have good website content. You should already know that good, frequently updated website content is something which Google loves and helps your page rank higher in search engines. Well, SMO inspires you to create good, interesting content, while gathering inbound links. SMO actually helps you implement SEO techniques by reinforcing what you should be working towards through your search engine optimization campaign.

Starting Your SMO Campaign

As with SEO, most sites can benefit from some form of social media optimization but you need to determine which site/s are right for your SMO Campaign. Think about your target audience and where they are likely to be active on the web. Would they be on Facebook, Twitter or Digg?

Without knowing your audience there’s no way you can offer them a great tool or a compelling piece of content. You need to consider what actions will produce the strongest reaction and use the least amount of resources. You need to choose the best sites for your audience and concentrate on them. Choosing too many sites will become unmanageable and dilute your efforts. Take into account what your desired outcome is. Are you looking for increased conversions, traffic, links, industry credibility, brand recognition, something else?

Once you know your goals you can start deciding which sites are best geared towards helping you meet them. Right now the three sites that seem to be driving the most traffic are Digg, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us, respectively. If you are wondering what on earth those sites are then you really should be checking them put. Here are just some sites which you should investigate. Take time to understand the focus of each individual site.

• Digg: Digg is a user-driven content site where members can vote, bury and comment on stories submitted by other members. Getting onto Digg’s front page often results in thousands of visitors flocking to your site.
• Del.icio.us: Del.icio.us is a Yahoo-owned social bookmarking site. Del.icio.us allows members to publicly save bookmarks using tags. Don’t be afraid to tag your own content. Del.icio.us does not provide link backs to your website but you will get click throughs, then its up to you to make them want to stay and bookmark you.
• YouTube: YouTube videos often appear at the top of Google content. If you could create interesting videos with your websites content it may be worth investigating this tool. Again, it’s simply a way of driving traffic to your website.
• FaceBook: Create a presence that looks and behaves like user profiles to connect and engage with your customers and amplify your voice to their friends.
• Twitter: Twitter is a free social networking service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.
• Reddit: Reddit is a source for what’s new and popular on the web. Users like you provide all of the content and decide, through voting, what’s good and what’s junk.
• Technorati: Do you publish articles, blogs, etc. Would you like to reach a large and growing audience, and join a community of fellow writers? Technorati publish original content an a wide variety of topics. Your articles will get a huge audience, you just need to take some time to write them.
• MySpace: This was one of the first SMO tools. It’s a bit old fashioned now but is still worth investigating for some marketing strategies.
• StumbleUpon: StumbleUpon acts as a discovery/recommendation engine and match users with Web sites, videos, images, etc. based on their interests that they may have been previously unaware of.

Other social media sites to consider utilizing are Wikipedia, Flickr, Spurl, Blinklist, Shadows, Simply, Yahoo Answers, Ning, 43 Things and Frappr. However keep your eyes open for new sites for your SMO strategy.

Don’t Forget SEO

Social media gives site owners a way to gain visibility to their sites without relying strictly on the search engines. It’s a powerful tool for building brand recognition and increasing visibility, but don’t mistake SMO for a substitute to search engine optimization. Social media optimization just gives site owners another set of tools to add to their marketing toolbox. Together social media optimization and SEO pack a power punch, both for you and your users.You may also like to read:

• Search Engine Optimization In A Nutshell
• Benefits of Search Engine Optimization for your Website
• Forget SEO, You Need SPO: Search Person Optimization
• Top Five Ways to Make Your Site More Popular
• 30 Top Blogs For Social Media Updates

Share on Facebook

What is Social Media Optimization? is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website

I have tried to make these steps as simple as possible, if you do not understand anything then simply leave a comment for me.  Hopefully, you will be able to understand how simple it is to link your blog to your Facebook profile using the Notes application from these easy steps:

1) Log in to your Facebook Account.

2) Check your Profile page and if you see the Notes option shown in image below, then simply click on it. Otherwise you will have to install it to your profile by going to the Notes Application page, then click on “Go To Application” button on the left side of the page and install it to your account.

3)  After adding the Notes Application to your profile, click on “Import a blog” under “Notes Settings”.

4) On the settings page shown below you will need to add your feed address. It usually looks something like: http://www.yourdomain.com/feed, depending on what type of feed or service you use.   If you don’t know it, just click on the RSS button on your blog and it will take you to the URL that you can then copy.

That’s it, now your feed should automatically show in your notes page every time you create a new post.

Enjoy!

You may also like to read:

• How do I add Google Analytics to my Facebook Fan Page?
• How to promote your Facebook Fan / Like page to your Facebook contacts
• Recommended WordPress Plugin – Facebook ‘Like’ Button
• Recommended WordPress plugin – Photodropper for WordPress
• Adding someone else as an Admin on your Facebook Fan Page

Share on Facebook

Publish Website RSS Feed in Facebook Notes is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website

I did not realise until I started building websites for people how much I knew and how little others knew about the Internet and websites. It even surprised me how people didn’t even know the basics and I had to adjust how I explained things and put it in layman’s terms. Why? Because for years I had been surrounded by other IT “geeks” for want of a better word, who knew as much, and in some cases a lot more, than me! I took my skills and knowledge for granted until I spotted the potential to use that knowledge to build myself a business.

Sell Your Knowledge

I see it all the time: people work in a particular industry / job for so long, they only speak to their colleagues about “work type” things, they fail to realise the potential advantages of what they know. You get a gas man to come and fix your boiler and ask them how they spotted the fault and they just say, “ohhhh just through experience”. They’ll it’s just brush it aside, taking their knowledge and skills for granted. The reason? Because to them, all of the things they know seem common place, they have known them for years, and half the time think everyone knows most of what they know……….I know I do it when it comes to “IT stuff”. They’ve been working so closely with it for so long, they forget that everyone doesn’t know this stuff as well, and so they don’t take advantage of chances to spread their knowledge around, and improve their image at the same time.

Promote your Knowledge

Promoting on Forums

I have built websites for tradesmen before, many of which will ask me how to get more visitors to their site, other than adding to directories, etc. First thing I say is join a forum. A DIY forum, a specialist forum for their topic, or any forum where their advice would be greatly appreciated by the audience. Why? Well, on forums you can not only subtly become an expert resulting in perhaps having someone ask you to provide a quote for a job, but you also become trusted. Not only that, often you can put a link in your signature to your website, so everytime you answer a question or provide some comments, you get a free website promotion. Granted, sometimes you are not allowed to do this, but as long as you are constructively contributing to the forum and not blatantly promoting yourself, most communities do not mind.

Promoting with Articles

Further, think about writing an article for a magazine, news paper, articles websites? Find industry magazines or Industry websites and offer to write an article in exchange for a small mention of you and your services and a link to your website. If you take a closer look at these magazines and websites you will now notice how many people in your industry do this. EzineArticles is a great place to start.

Its all effort and time but can really pay off. With all the experience you have there is going to be a lot of possibilities for things to talk about, tips to provide, useful information for potential customers. In today’s world if something breaks, many try to fix it themselves because all they have to do is google for a tutorial on how to fix it! They don’t have to go buy a manual to do it anymore. So write a tutorial, provide that advice, and if the fault is bigger than they thought they may just call you to come and sort it.

Set time aside each month to dedicate to a different subject within your industry. Write out a mini article/ tutorial dealing with what you know. You can even simply provide a list of different places they can go to learn more on the subject.  Article writing is offering your knowledge for free and people like that.

Promoting with Leaflets

There are loads of ways to spread your knowledge. Ever notice the popular hardware stores such as B&Q who have free handy hints leaflets in their doorway telling you how to wallpaper or fix a leaking tap, well they don’t do this for fun, they do it since they know you appreciate it, you will remember it, you may keep it and file it, it instills their brand in your mind and when you start decorating again, their store is the first place you visit.

Perhaps on your general adverts provide a tip of the month from your knowledge. On the leaflets that go out to local communities provide a mini tutorial for fixing that tap. Give them reason to keep your leaflet over the competition. Make people respect your opinion and your advice – build trust, making your advertising different at the same time.

Knowledge is Power!

I hope this article has got you thinking about how special your knowledge is, how much you take it for granted and how much more you could do with it. This is a strong way of getting your name to your customers and helping to improve your image. Put that experience and knowledge to good use for marketing your website and business.

You may also like to read:

• 10 Benefits of a Website
• Blogging To Help Search Engine Ranking
• 25 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website
• How a Little Blogging Can Make a Big Difference for the Small Business
• 5 Free Solutions To Create A Question-Answer Website

Share on Facebook

Promote Your Website With Your Knowledge! is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website

It makes absolute sense to blog to improve your search engine ranking and get traffic to our site. We all know that the more pages we have out there on the Internet the more chance someone will find us. Blogging is one of the best ways to get more traffic to your website.

Here’s the data from HubSpot. Those who blog see:

• 55% more visitors to their website.
• 97% more links to their website - want a higher ranking, get quality links to your site.
• 434% more indexed pages – this is the number of pages that show up in search engines. Just because you have a site doesn’t guarantee it is being indexed (findable). Just because some of your pages are in search engines doesn’t mean all of your pages are.

With that kind of return on investment who wouldnt want to blog and see those kind of results?

Blogging is Not for Everyone

When asking for ideas to improve your search engine ranking you have probably been told time and time again to blog. Well, while “blogging” is suitable for some, it’s not really suitable for others. For example, for me, for this website, writing a blog about what I am doing and where I am going and what kind of day it is outside is really not going to interest my audience. When you are told to blog you are probably being told to “write articles” of interest to your viewers or customers. Time and time again I have been asked, “I don’t know what to blog about?”. This is because you are thinking of blogging as a “diary” rather than as “useful articles” to attract your potential customers.

While the main goal of your blog may be to express your thoughts, talk back to your customers or as a vehicle to promote your product or services, you also need to provide your potential customers with what they want to know! For me, it is writing articles like this. For a children’s party organiser, it may be writing some articles on tips for entertaining your kids on rainy days!

Think this over:

• Do you have content to write about? If you don’t have much to say blogging isn’t a good medium for saying it. Can you come up with content? Are you a good writer or does it take you all day to write a paragraph. For me writing is easy, writing an article takes literally 15 minutes. My return on investment, return on effort is high since it does not take me long. If your talents lie elsewhere then concentrate your efforts there. On the otherhand, most businesses can write useful atricles, try to think of blogging as both a diary as well as useful articles, and choose what suits your business best.
• Can you commit to writing regularly? Google rewards consistency and consistency builds trust with people. If you can’t maintain a blog then it’s probably better not to.
• Do you have the technical background to install and maintain a blog (plugins, features, etc)? Are you computer literate enough? Will you be able to handle your blogging tool?
• Does your website allow you to blog? If you have a static site you will need to think about upgrading your website to allow you to add content. You need a content management system. This will cost money. Will you get your money back with the increase in visitors to your website?
• Would you need help posting on a blog? If you need to hire someone to write your blog for you then is this investment going to be worth it? Do you trust them to write suitable content?

Advantages of Blogging for SEO

Blogs Promote Fresh Content

The main advantage of blogging is the freshness of content that a search engine likes and rewards. Blogs give you an increased presence on major search engines. A well-written, routinely updated blog can enhance your chances of high rankings on search engine. Establishing a frequent pattern of posting pattern means you’ll have the Googlebot coming to your site every few days. Your pages get indexed on google more quickly and create “backdoors” for any potential customers who find them on google. Imagine, a potential customer is browsing for things to do to entertain their children on a cold, wet day, they come across an article your wrote about such a situation, they then start browsing your site after enjoying the article, they realise you do children’s parties, oh it’s the youngest girls birthday next week, what a fantastic idea, a “princess party”……….now where is the phone?

Blogs Offer Low Cost Maintenance and Advertising

Blogs are inexpensive to set up, operate and maintain. To get a content managed website, or have a static site converted to allow you to add content, can cost as little as £300 – one off fee (with FABI Designs anyway!) How much does it cost to keep putting and advert in the local paper. If you placed an advert in the paper every quater, how much is it costing you? How much business do you get from it? Consider the fact that once your blog is built you can keep placing your averts for free, each article is a new advert, which stays in the public domain for ever!

Blogs Help Brand Building

Blogs serve as another channel on which to promote your brand and company. Blogs give you the opportunity to tell your story over and over, they help set you apart from the competition, promoting and building your brand.

Blogs Help With Relational Marketing

Blogs provide a way for you to speak directly, openly and honestly with your customer allowing you to build personal, long-lasting relationships with your customers that foster trust. Blogs are a fantastic PR tool! They can leave comments on your posts too creating a conversational dialog with your customers to further promote trust.

Blogs Improve Links To Your Website

Another advantage of blogging is the fact that people may find your article useful and link back to you, thus giving a vote for your website. Blogs are a source of free one-way links to your site. Google likes one way links and rewards them highly. 

Position You As An Expert

Blogs enable you to articulate your viewpoints, knowledge and expertise on matters pertaining to your industry. If people know you release articles regularly and they find your articles interesting, they may well sign up to your RSS feed and keep coming back to your website. Thats more sales opportunits for you, repeat custom, isn’t that the aim of every business?

Search Engine Optimise Your Blog

You can optimise your blogging too. It’s not all about just writing a useful article or useful content. You need to think carefully about “how” you are writing. Simple SEO basics are called for here. I won’t go into details about the technical aspects of SEO, I will write more articles about this in the future. However, there are a couple of things to be aware of while writing your “blog” page.

• The title of your article should grab attention, while containing keywords too. Think about what your viewers may be searching for. if they are likely to search for entertaining kids on a rainy day – what do you think your article title should be? Most blogging or CMS tools use the title and place it in the important tags that search engines use to rank your page. The title is KEY!
• Blog articles must be well-written and padded with appropriate keywords so that search engine spiders will find them and index them. Remember your keywords in your content. Using the same example as above, your keywords would be, “kids”, “entertainment”, “rainy day”. Make sure you use these words regularly throughout the article. It’s how google identifies what your page is about and assigns relevancy. Be careful not to over use the words though, google will see this as spamming, just write naturally, with regular mentions of the words.

In conclusion, while the main objective of a blog should be to get your message out, don’t forget to take a little time for SEO and you should see your efforts payoff in the search engine results pages. Now there are some great reasons to blog: What are you waiting for?You may also like to read:

• Search Engine Optimization Tip: Adding Content to your Web Site
• How Small Business Owners Can Build a Blog Without Blowing the Business
• How To Write Articles For Blogs Or Websites
• 67 SEO Pointers for Blogging Beginners – a free guide
• Where to Get Links?

Share on Facebook

Blogging To Help Search Engine Ranking is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website