SEO BLOG

Online Marketing: Have You Tried Reverse Psychology?

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:46:00 +0000

An old saying goes "A knock is as good as a boost." and another says, "There's no such thing as bad publicity." Here's a couple of examples:

Alfred Hitchcock - do we really have to explain who he was? - would announce the commercial break on his TV show during his monologues. Most of the time, this was some dryly sarcastic remark about their sponsor, and sometimes it was even insulting. Advertisers bristled at first, but eventually fought for the privilege to be in the first spot after the introduction, because the viewers tended to pay more attention to the commercial.

A better example: Marmite! The TV commercials for Marmite yeast extract have made the tagline "You either love it or hate it!" into a household phrase, and their marketing has been a smashing success! Check out this commercial clip for a good example. Now, how refreshing is that? Market your product by suggesting that there will be people out there who hate it! How bold! How original! How funny!

So, back to web marketing: what's your online marketing campaign like? Is it earnest? Does it go for the hard sell? Does it take its product seriously? Is it by-the-book marketing-speak? Well, then... is it boring and unoriginal?

Sometimes the best web marketing is at least the kind which shows the world that the company doesn't take itself too seriously. Yahoo named itself after a word that means "uncouth rube". Google has used primary nursery colors and plain page design to suggest that there isn't much to them. Craigslist has one of the ugliest sites on the web, and then mocks itself with an ASCII banner. When the Twitter network goes down, it mocks itself for doing so by showing visitors the "Fail Whale" page. So what do Twitter fans do? They start a fan club for it!

That's the power of not taking yourself too seriously. Wear some pie on your face every now and then.

Peter Brittain

Do you need web hosting in Perth?

How To Conduct A Link Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 08:08:00 +0000

Link campaigns are a very important part of your online marketing strategy.

In your efforts to increase the number of visitors to your website, you would find that having strategic partners is very useful. It is very helpful to have mutual links with related sites, but not compulsory to have reciprocal links always. Having a link campaign is vital in online marketing, as search engines determine your site ranking on the basis of links with its results. The higher the ranking, higher are the chances to get more prospective customers to your website.

To manage your link building campaign, you have to make continuous efforts. It cannot be ‘a build it and forget it’ situation. To manage a campaign successfully involves adding new links frequently, as well as monitoring the existing links. If you do not check links regularly, it may result into some dead links, which is considered a negative by the search engines. Sometimes, it may even be the result of accidental removal of your link from the website, which may be disastrous to you rankings.

As you conduct your link campaign, you can undertake various activities. One of them is using link replacement. If you are in touch with your link partners regularly, there may be some, who may inform you of removing it. In such a case, you can make efforts to find a replacement to that link. You can immediately start with extra efforts to ensure that you do not lose out on ranking with reduced links.

You should regularly screen the email that you receive, which may concern link exchange requests. With maintenance and monitoring of partner website on a regular basis, you can ensure that your links are up and running on a consistent basis.

Peter Brittain

How To Conduct A Link Campaign 2

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 08:15:00 +0000

Typically, there are two ways of creating links, reciprocal and one-way links. Out of the two, reciprocal is a very time consuming one. As a Webmaster, you would have to contact other Web masters with a proposal to exchange links. You would mostly contact such Webmaster, who deals in similar topics or products.

You should first get a mailing list of such websites and then send them personalized emails with the proposal. You will have to wait for some time for the response and if it is favorable, then you can share each other’s links.

The other type is one-way linking. The search engines mostly prefer these. It may need you to spend some money. There are some free directories, to which you can submit your website link. There are, however some sites, which may do it for a one time fee. This is faster than other types of links and is very useful. You should preferably set aside some budget for it.

You have to ensure that you get listed into such sections of the directories that are related to your website. Another option is to write press releases and submit them to a service provider that promotes your site, from which you may get number of one-way links. A similar option is to write good quality content and submit it to article directories. If you provide very good content, you can get links with webmasters, who can post your content.

Link campaign is very important to your online marketing strategy and should be undertaken properly and in a planned manner. It is important to manage and monitor link regularly, so that your efforts are not wasted for any reason.

Peter Brittain
Slinky Internet Marketing

Steps To Internet Marketing Success

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 13:09:00 +0000

If you have your own online business, you need to have a good Internet marketing plan in place. If you have designed a plan well it can be one of the most rewarding experiences. Make use of various opportunities out there to succeed in your Internet marketing efforts. Getting traffic to your website is important, and converting it into sales is a challenge. With a few things in mind, and you activities planned properly to achieve your goals, there is no reason why you cannot succeed in your business.

Steps to marketing success

• Strive to be the best: whatever web activity you undertake, ensure that you excel, and to excel, you need to learn. Learning is the way of life in any business online or otherwise; therefore, understand technologies that are currently in use. Keep yourself updated with the latest market trends. Be sure about the market you are looking at, before you decide that it is your target market. Depending upon these factors, make your Internet marketing plans accordingly. If you offer the best quality product you should ensure that your website comes across as professional, to help in holding up your product’s authenticity and reliability. Prepare a website with all these things in mind.

• Study and understand the market: When you are taking a leap into the big tough market, it is necessary that you first study market conditions. Depending upon your target market, look at your competitors, and the tools and techniques they use; understand what products are popular, whether your tools and techniques match and exceed them. See how products similar to your products are being advertisement, and what sort of a response and popularity they have achieved. This helps you to get an idea of how your product may workout.

Peter Brittain

A Completely Unfair Court Ruling

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:41:00 +0000

The web hosting world just might have received the most shocking news it will have all year. TechDirt reports that a US court has decided that a web host can be held liable for a hosted website that sells counterfeit goods. Even though eBay, it is noted, cannot be held liable when somebody uses eBay to do the exact same thing.

What?

This is wrong on so many levels, that it would have to get overturned. There is a very handy analogy we could draw here: Should a landlord be held responsible if their tenant was found to be breaking the law? Should a commercial landlord be held responsible if a business that rented office space is found to have been engaging in criminal or even civilly violating activities?

Now, don't get us wrong. Web hosts do frequently take action against clients who are violating laws that are more on their jurisdiction. Spamming, for instance. Hate sites and fraud, for another. There's nothing wrong with expecting a web host to intervene in those cases.

But when you come down to violating copyright and trademark, who could possibly expect a web host to even know? Say you host party A, and party B claims that party A is violating their patent or whatever and demands a take-down. Before the case is settled in court! Now, if the host doesn't take down party A, they're liable. But if the host does take down party A and party A later successfully defends the claim, then party A now has a claim against their host for taking down their site without cause. There's a reason why computer geeks choose to be computer geeks instead of going into police work.

Peter Brittain
Perth Web Hosting

Why SEO Matters For Your Internet Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 13:14:00 +0000

It is true that a website needs to be appealing and attractive enough to increase the traffic. However at the same time, you cannot deny the fact that SEO matters the most. If your website is not a search engine optimized, you will have failure or very little success, when it comes to online business. As a newcomer we all are under the impression that a well-developed site is all what it takes to be successful in Internet marketing.

There are several well-developed websites that fail to get recognition on the World Wide Web. You need to make your website search engine friendly, so that it finds a place on the first page of Google or MSN or any other search engine. The mechanical settings do not understand the worth of good images, pictures and graphics. They only understand the mechanical codes and thus SEO matters more than the grooming of your website. You receive the rank on the web page, depending on the keywords that you use. Thus you need to make sure to use phrases and words that will be easily accepted by the search engine to pull it on the top page.

A better friendly SEO website has higher chances of being visible on the first page of the search engine. To make sure you have to use the right keywords. You can always refer to the sites that give you details about the words and phrases to be used. There is a particular pattern, in the way the browsers search for particular information. For example, if they are looking out for information on growing cherry tomatoes in a patio, you must make sure that you use the words, ‘cherry’, ‘tomatoes’ and ‘patio’ as your keywords. These keywords should be used at least four to five times, so that the search engine can easily pull it out, when somebody is looking out for it. You should also use synonyms of the key- words, as you never know what the browser will type in the search bar.

Peter Brittain

Why SEO Matters 2

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 07:19:00 +0000

The secret is using the key words more often in the first paragraph and then utilizing them in the entire content. However, the first part pays an important role and it helps to make your website SEO friendly. Always create content keeping your readers in mind. They will have their own way of typing words to get information. It is good to be aware of such keywords, so that you know how you can use them.

To achieve a better ranking always make sure that your keyword is a part of the title you use. For example, if your website speaks about garden equipments, make sure that Garden equipments become a part of your title. Your main keywords need to be used first and then you could use less important words in your content. By taking care of these keywords, you will definitely acquire a good ranking.

A search engine optimized website is surely to be very successful and could generate a lot of traffic. Every good website is incomplete without the right keywords. Hence make them a part of your web layout plan.

Peter Brittain

More Steps To Internet Marketing Success

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 07:02:00 +0000

More Steps You Should Take

• Prepare a budget: It is a basic need of any Internet marketing program that you undertake. It is important that you prepare a budget first, and then plan your activities accordingly. Only if you know your capacity to allocate funds for what activity, then it makes decision-making. If you are aware of tools that come at a low cost, and other which are useful but expensive, you can find it easier to allocate your funds accordingly.

• Persistence: continuous changes in markets result in business fluctuations, and there are times when your efforts do not show substantial results. If you keep persisting with activities you believe in, it can nearly always guarantee you success. Updating your website regularly, and keeping in touch with your customer is necessary to succeed in the efforts you take.

Peter Brittain

The Importance Of Press Releases In Internet Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 13:13:00 +0000

Writing online press releases has proved to be one of the great ways to distribute reports of special and local activities and acts as tool to create content and new pages on any website. Online press releases play an important role in publicizing important information and latest updates on the Internet. Online press releases help webmasters to promote their products and services in a better way. They may also be able to provide additional publicity, which may be an added advantage in gaining online exposure for your business.

Usually a press release is a recorded or written communication directed to members of the press. Online press release serves as a declaration of any special event, which may have some news value. Online press releases are one of the most effective Internet marketing strategies. People are now more interested in the news anytime and anywhere. Thus, more and more Internet savvy people have switched to the Internet for their regular quota of news.

The three most important benefits of press releases for Internet marketing are:

• It broadens the reach of your news item and website.
• It produces a sensible impact on search engine rankings for the terms targeted in the release.
• Draws traffic to your site.

Giant search engines such as Google or Yahoo have the largest online news viewers with an optimized press release in the news section that will give you a quick and ethical boost to your search engine marketing campaign.

Below are certain tips that could help you to write effective online press releases, which are quite useful for Internet marketing:

With an inverted pyramid: this one is a classic way to tell a news story; structure the information in descending order according to their importance. Start with most important information, put the most important keywords and phrases, and conclude with the least important bit.

Arrange your keywords: first, identify keywords and key phrases. Proper research and keyword selection is more important on a news search engine. Just ensure that you use these keywords in important areas such as the first paragraph, headline, summary, or sub-heads. However, you should not put too many keywords or search engine algorithms, since it could be penalizing. You can keep your keyword density near about 2% of the total number of words in a page.

Structure your press release: you can start your press release using a catchy headline with a short summary of your press release. Make it interesting by putting bullets, subheads etc. You can also add a note about your organization, at the end of the press release with the address of your website and contact details. Always keep in mind first write for your audience and optimize for search engines. It is always advisable not to write lengthy releases, and keep it within 300 to 400 words.

Use links: try to use links in important areas in your site within the press release. For example if you have written about a particular product or service, you can use it as anchor text to link the particular page in your website. You can also create a good landing page while hosting the press release in your website.

Therefore, with the growing importance of press releases it is very essential to provide good press releases to get a higher ranking in the search engines. Moreover, it is for sure that the press release links can definitely bring long visibility to your site.

Peter Brittain
Slinky Internet Marketing

How To Get Your Affiliate Program Up And Running

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 13:13:00 +0000

Affiliate program requires associating with online members and webmasters to advertise your product. Businesses and affiliates make good profits from such programs. In simple words, it is nothing but other webmasters advertising your products. Rather than putting all your efforts on product advertising, you pay people to advertise your product and save on time and energy. The approach is to spend money on getting results. You may hire some high productivity affiliates who have the potential to reach to millions of customers.

Affiliate programs: Affiliate programs involve recruiting good affiliates on commission. Depending upon the level of profit generated, you have to decide on commission payable. Generally for products like e-books profits margin may be as high as 90% rather than paying an overall commission up to 50%, and may also be easy for you to keep your affiliates motivated. The affiliate programs are of varied types. You may use one-tier programs or two tier programs. One-tier programs are those where you pay the affiliates directly from profits earned. The two tier programs are those where your affiliate refers some other affiliates. You pay a part of commission from profits to these referring affiliates also.

The affiliate programs have become easier using automated tools for advertising your products. The benefit of such programs is it allows you to advertise the products 24 hours a day automatically. All processes like registering new affiliates, report generation etc., are automatic. There are options to run affiliate software. You can install CGI software, or you can use affiliate program systems like Commission Junction and many others or you may also use Third party processors. Each has its own set of advantages and disadvantages; some are good for short term while some for long term, check them out before you decide which suits your needs the best.

You also need some tracking programs. If visitor’s purchase from site assigned to affiliates, then you pay those affiliates accordingly. Another method is using cookies by placing small files on the visitor’s computer. If the visitors buy then you credit that affiliate. While the cookie method is good to track even those visitors who buy after a long time, the other method is simpler.

Sales tools to use

Once you decide what affiliate program to use, you need to start creating different tools that you need to promote your product. Tools like endorsements, banners, graphics, solo ads, classified ads, follow-up emails and article content need to be designed by you. You may have to provide these promotional tools to the affiliates. You also need to provide them personal support, keep in contact, respond to their queries, use auto-responders to keep them updated and so on. You can also come up with contests and prizes for affiliates which may be effectively used to motivate them. Finding super affiliates is the key in success of such programs. You need to actively look for good affiliates who can generate great leads and sales in turn for you.

Affiliate programs are a great investment for advertising your products. With enticing offers, you can make your program workout well for you.

Peter Brittain
Slinky Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing Success Tips

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Sun, 07 Nov 2004 08:05:00 +0000

Provide value: if you provide your customers good value, then you stand to succeed.

The aim of your Internet marketing activity is to provide customers with probable solutions to their problems. You should place your product into their requirement niche, to add more value to their lives.

Precise and clear product information is more reliable in pulling in customers, than exaggeration will.

Once you decide what product you want to sell, understand different matters like the tools and techniques to design your website accordingly. If you follow these steps, you can surely move towards achieving success in Internet marketing.

Peter Brittain

Gain Popularity With Directory Submissions

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Sun, 07 Nov 2004 07:50:00 +0000

In this highly competitive Internet market, your website has to stand out among other websites.

Website design and content is not all that can make you reach to more and more targeted customers. What is the key to get your website listed on top of search engines?

Your website can become popular, if you are seen as an expert voice on the matter under consideration. Article submission to various article directories and websites helps your website gain popularity.

There are numerous benefits of directory submissions. Directories have well classified articles listed out for their visitors. Customers reach out for whatever information they receive from various sections of directories. When you submit your sites to these directories, your name and URL are listed out, as customers search for particular information under a certain category.

The categories make it easier for visitors to find what they need quickly and are much simpler than even using search engines. You can get great publicity and credibility by providing your visitors with exceptional website content, as well as appropriate keyword placement. It is very important to ensure that your online marketing efforts prove to be fruitful.

Peter Brittain
Slinky Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing Strategies That Will Work For You

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 13:12:00 +0000

You can definitely achieve success in Internet marketing even if you are not aware of every facet of business. However, this does not mean that you set up an online business and will start making dollars within a short span of time. You have to give some time valuable and some useful strategies to make your online business work and budget your money accordingly. Observations show that the moment people invest cash they immediately want their return to double. Usually new marketers also make the mistake to use single strategy. The best way would be to adopt a wide approach to your online marketing.

It is better to have an Internet marketing plan before you start your business; this not only fetches you good profits, but also helps you understand various policies and strategies, which could help you to be successful in this field.

Below are few strategies, which may work for your business to grow and earn maximum profits:

Design a comprehensive plan: firstly, you have to design a comprehensive plan and make sure that you use at least two marketing tools. It is better to use as many tools as you can for Internet marketing.

Target your customers: the second step would be to target your customers. You may use various kinds of marketing tools but if you can target your customers, you can earn profits and success at the same time. You have to create such products, which the customers are looking for and provide them through an easily accessible mode. Most of the customers would be willing to buy from you otherwise they would not have looked for them. This is target marketing or niche marketing.

Develop your website: the third step would be to develop a website. The website should be created so that your products could be sold in a better way. The primary motive of your website is to turn your visitor to get into action. The most powerful tool you have is language and words. Using the wrong words may drive away your visitors. Thus, your words form the entire foundation of the business; in fact, all your marketing strategies depend upon the words you use. Always remember graceful graphics do not make sales but words do. Your words, sentences, and headline should attract customer to your page. Your website copy should be written in such a way that customers feel that you are talking with them. The bottom line is to try to persuade them.

Short term and long term marketing strategies: marketing strategy is the final stage of your plan. The strategy must be both short term and long term in order to achieve success. Short-term strategies bring about a temporary boost in traffic.

Short-term strategies include:
• Bulletin boards
• Purchasing advertisements, and
• Search engines

Long term strategies gets you traffic for a steady period over the time. These strategies will show results in the long way.

These include:
• Freebies
• Content and,
• Opt in lists

If you can use the dynamic strategies, the long term and the short term you can definitely achieve success and get the targeted traffic easily.

Peter Brittain
Slinky Internet Marketing

Search Engine Marketing Tips You Must Not Ignore

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Sat, 11 Oct 2003 13:10:00 +0000

Search engine marketing is a type of marketing that aims at visibility of websites by various search engines. The popular way of marketing is by using search engine optimization techniques.

Other methods like paid placement and some use paid inclusion. The basic idea behind search engine marketing your products is by using different techniques so that your site gets listed out in listings of all major search engines.

Important tips to search engine marketing

When you plan to use Internet marketing content that you develop has to be relevant and precise to what you are selling. It is important that you use all those tools that will help you to reach your target customers.

• Research of market conditions is important for your marketing plan. As a part of the marketing strategy you need to understand what other business owners are doing, what tools and customers they are targeting. You may also be able to understand which strategies prove to be fruitful in current conditions and which do not. You may also be able to understand what keywords your competitors are relying upon for their success.

• Setting realistic goals is the key. You cannot aim for the moon if your resources are limited. Start small and improve steadily. Continuous improvements are relevant to ensuring that your marketing strategies do not fail.

• Search engine optimization is most important for search engine marketing. It is nothing but designing your website with content that would be easily detected by the search engine spiders. More important is fact that you should use keywords that are relevant to your business. If you list in searches that are irrelevant to your business, you would not find any leads that may be converted to sales. It is not just getting lot of traffic that matters, but it is getting some useful traffic, which is important. The keywords used should be such that they give you best results. With persistence, you can set your target to reaching high on relevant searches and achieve it.

• It is necessary that you keep on updating your content. Catch up with the latest trends. You can use keywords often in your content, but not so often search engines like Google reject that it. It is important that you analyze the results that you are getting. If you feel that the current plan is not getting you much traffic you may make appropriate modifications and update your website that can be helpful to reach more customers.

• You can also contribute by putting some articles onto different article directories or sites. These can be used to link them to your website. Similarly, it also helps establish you as an expert in your field. If you participate in discussions and blogs, you can paste the link in some comments that you put. If you build up an image for yourself, you may find more visitors relying on your website for their needs. They may feel assured of your product reliability and may be ready to buy it whenever they need it.

You cannot afford to ignore these basic things. With lots of hard work and constant research, and updates to your web pages, you can succeed in your search engine marketing efforts.

Peter Brittain
Perth Internet Marketing

Advantages of directory submissions

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Thu, 07 Nov 2002 07:57:00 +0000

With directory submission, you can reach out to even wider range of customers. Your website is not just listed on search engines, but it is also found from quick reference directories. Moreover, with directory submissions your major advantage is the SEO benefit it gives your website.

Because you have submitted your website on multiple directories, you will have many links from them to get a number of visitors to your website. As you have huge traffic to your website, you may get higher rankings in your category. Another important advantage is that, as you have many links or back links coming in, search engines would consider giving you page rankings.

With multiple links, you can get to the top of search engine rankings.

As you share links, you can benefit from the traffic coming to that website. As your products may be related to each other, it can help get other web site’s traffic towards you. It is very important for you to remember that these links that you share should be appropriate. If your link comes from a quality website, you would also be considered highly for rankings.

The content of your website and articles should be of a high quality. When you develop articles for submission, you should keep in mind the SEO needs as well as the need for quality and reliable content. Make use of keywords wisely and keep in mind the LSI and use synonyms of keywords, which will enhance your content. Ensure that you get to stand high in search engine algorithms. Sharing links with similar websites and allowing your link to be used for someone else’s website could be designed wisely in order to get SEO benefits.

When you submit articles to directories, ensure that you select typically those which are established and regarded by readers as highly reliable ones.

Directory submission can be highly effective as a SEO technique. Using directory submission gain popularity and work towards increasing trust among customers to reach your ultimate profit goal.

How To Get High Search Engine Rankings 2

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Sun, 03 Nov 2002 08:26:00 +0000

Another technique for search engine ranking is off page optimization. In this technique, you can take number of inbound links from other websites. When you create a website, it becomes very important to understand the words that will be used by your potential visitors. Once you make use of right words, you are done half way and can obtain a high rank on search engines like Yahoo, MNS and Google.

There will be several other competitors using similar words to increase their rankings. Thus to survive the competition, the only way is to create quality and original content. Make sure your title includes the keyword. It is important for the keywords to appear in the first paragraph of every article. Later, as the content flows, use it in between and also at the end part. This is the best way to increase your chance to appear on the first page of search engine.

There are people from search engine marketing background, who can be hired to help you design a search engine optimized website. Though there will be several people using popular and common keywords, proper and correct use of them will help you achieve high search engine ranking.

High ranking plays an important role, when it comes to reaching out vast number of people. There are several people, who do not understand the importance of SEO and thus face failure. It’s time that you realized, how SEO works and generate huge traffic that could boost your business.

Peter Brittain
Slinky Internet Marketing

How To Get High Search Engine Rankings

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Brittain) — Mon, 07 Jan 2002 08:22:00 +0000

If you want to be successful in your online business, it is important that you are aware about the Search Engine Optimization techniques. What is the use of your well-written content, if it has no readers? To enjoy visibility and maximum exposure, you need to earn high ranking for your website.

There are ways and strategies to be followed to help your website appear on the first page of every search engine. Visitors typically view websites with high rankings. To survive in the online business, you need to master the art of SEO planning strategy.

The best way to generate traffic for your website is to increase the ranking on search engine. Here are few tips to ponder, when it comes to earning high search engine ranking. When it comes to search engine optimization, keywords play a very important role. Your content should have wide number of words that would be used by your visitors. There are many tools available on Google that will give you a list of words that are commonly used by visitors.

A well-written article needs use of proper and popular words that are widely used by vast number of browsers. When you use page search engine technique, you are required to use your keywords in the title tag, the description tag and in the keywords tag.

You also need to use them in the introductory paragraph and then also make them a part of your content creatively. When you use these keywords, the search engine finds it easy to locate your website, when the visitor types the keywords in search bar. Search engines do not understand the quality of your content, but it only knows how to detect the keywords and pull those websites on the first page.

Peter Brittain
Slinky Internet Marketing