Archive for September, 2005

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By Richard Keir

When you take a look at the most visited sites on the internet, what hits you in the face? Change, growth, new content. In a sense, a search engine is the perfect web site. By it’s very nature, it grows and changes continuously and moment by moment adds new content. But, most of us are never going to build a Yahoo or a Google. The competition at that level is horrific.

But the lesson is there to be read. You could build a great site with terrific content never seen before and do very well - for a while. But the imperatives that control our success or failure revolve around growth, change and new content. An obvious solution is to continually provide new content for your sites. Basically this means writing or constructing new pages, preferably with unique content.

There are, certainly, several easy ways to get content for your site. The first is to use other people’s articles. Nearly all of us who do write and publish articles want people to pick them up and use them - with live links to our sites, naturally. Despite a lot of mindless babble about a duplicate content penalty, article syndication is alive and working as well as ever. Just don’t scrape a site and replicate it.

Another source is RSS. Most feeds are meant to be syndicated (but not all so you do need to check Terms of Use) and they provide updated content. Other sources include content in the in the public domain.

Like all easy solutions, there are a couple of drawbacks. Other people’s articles may not be focused as well as you’d like to your site content and goals. And they don’t help your site’s link popularity. Along with growth, change and content, incoming links are a critical success factor.

Using RSS feeds or other search-based content can raise copyright issues, irritate some feed or site owners, and may be even more poorly focused to your site’s content than articles. If you use RSS feeds, almost inevitably you’ll see content on your site that is absolutely irrelevant.

Public domain materials are extremely useful as content sources - if you can find matches to your site content. Assuming that you can, then you will need to convert the material into pages or into a form useable on your web pages. This can be time-consuming, but it may be easier than writing your own content.

Ghost writers are yet another alternative. Here you trade time for money. But this can be a tricky process. Some are not really fluent in English and you may need to do some rewriting. Also, you may need to double-check and make sure that the articles provided are actually original and not nearly identical to existing copyrighted material. Some ghost writers seem to work by finding a site with a related theme and then pretty much copy material from that site with minimal changes. Not a good idea for you to post that as your own.

Another source would be sites offering private label products. Many of those products can be mined for excellent targeted site content. Some products sold with Master resale rights also allow you to use the materials as site content. In this last case, you need to be certain exactly what you can and can’t do under the specific rights package. Sometimes you can alter the materials, sometimes you can’t.

Private label products with you having full rights, including the right to alter them and put your own name on them as author can be one of the easiest ways to meet all of the imperatives. With rights to an informative, new and interesting book on a niche topic, you can rework it a little, maybe add some nice graphics, generate a PDF and sell it.

Or you could generate that PDF and also generate pages for your site from the book. Give the PDF away in exchange for signing up to your list. Extract tips and ideas from the book and put together 2 or 5 or more articles based on the book. Publish and distribute the articles to generate links to your site and help brand yourself as an expert.

From one private label product you can generate a lot of new real estate for your site, add a viral product that you can use to build your lists, and through articles generate incoming links and do some useful branding.

It really doesn’t get any easier than that. It takes some time and effort, but nothing like the effort of writing 5 or 10 articles from scratch, building 30 or 50 or 150 web pages, and writing your own viral book for list-building.

What about the other people who belong to the same private label site? Isn’t everybody going to have duplicate content? In the real world, 90 percent of the people with access to a product will do nothing at all or the absolute minimum. Very few will mine the product, produce articles, produce web pages, or produce a nicely modified PDF. And of those that do, each will follow their own unique path. The chance of near identical content is pretty low. The PDFs produced may be more similar, but consider how many people make serious money with resale rights selling identical material.

There’s a lot of room out there. Even within the most competitive niches, a thoughtful, patient marketer who pays attention to the imperatives and works smart, can make a living few would complain about. But there are also less competitive niches where the same marketer could become the dominant force. The materials are out there to get you going. Use them and work smart.

None of this is rocket science. The first, and ultimate, imperative is take action. Too many will fail, because they never even really began. Start today.

Copyright 2005 Richard Keir

Richard writes, teaches, trains and consults on business and professional presentations and eCommerce related matters. For more information on eCommerce sites and eCommerce site building - http://www.building-ecommerce-websites.com - and http://www.building-ecommerce-websites.com/articles for more eCommerce articles.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

By Jeff Herring

1) A marketing necessity

I still hear it said from time to time that you really do not need a website if you are a private practice professional. I disagree. In today’s world, I think you are selling yourself short if you do not have a website, because you are not using one of the most powerful ways in which to market you and your services.

2) Websites are affordable

When I had my very first website in 1997, the domain name by itself cost me almost two hundred dollars. Today you can get a domain name and a month of hosting for just over eight dollars.

3) A website increases your “expert-ability”

When you have a website featuring your area of expertise, you are perceived as the expert, no questions asked.

4) A website increases your prospects

One of the many useful strategies we teach in our TeleSeminars at BuildingYourIdealPractice.com is that you have to have a prospect first in order to have a new client. Prospects can visit your website, learn more about you, your services and the benefits available without you having to be there.

5) A website increases your publicity

A website gives you a worldwide presence. Even thought there are millions of websites on the internet now, a website stills says “I am here, I know what I am doing, and I can help you.”

6) A website increases your profits

One of my favorite experiences as a practice building coach is the look on the face and/or the sound in the voice of someone who has just made their first passive income on the internet. It’s very addictive. A website allows you to make money when you are doing something else. It’s a real kick to get up in the morning and have more money than when you went to bed.

7) A 24/7 worldwide store

How would you like to have a 24 hour a day, seven days a week, 365 day a year store whose sole reason for being is to promote you and sell your products that will help other?

Get a website.

Visit BuildingYourIdealPractice.com for more leading edge tips and tools for creating your ideal practice. You are also invited to visit our Private Practice Marketing Podcast

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

By Lois S.

While it is okay to admire and envy all those sites enjoy top ranking with leading search engines like Google, it is much more important to study these sites closely. You will definitely end up learning a lot that will prove to be very useful in helping you take your own site to the top of Google rankings. Topping the search engines will mean huge volumes of traffic on a daily basis without you having to do anything. Healthy traffic, as you know almost automatically translates itself to healthy revenue for the site. And when you consider that over 75 per cent of the traffic that finds its’ way to websites comes from search engines, you quickly realize how important and crucial top rankings in search engines are to any online business.

So what will you be looking for when closely studying some of the top ranking sites? The answer is in the fact these sites have done something right and have certain strengths which millions of other sites all over the world do not have. It will be even more useful if you can find a common thread that links all the top sites.

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You’ve spent many hours trying to increase your online traffic with your linking campaign. You’ve sent out 200 e-mails pleading with other web sites to trade links with your site. Many of your e-mails bounce back.

The requests that find thier targets get rejected for numerous reasons. For example, your Google pagerank is too low or your links pages are dynamic and not static, etc., blah, blah, etc., ad nauseum. Out of those 200 requests, you wind up getting 25 reciprocal links, if you are lucky.

So, you say to yourself, “Great, now i have 25 more links!”. But are these links really worth it? Do they generate any traffic?

There are many reasons why your links won’t even get counted or indexed by the search engines. If your link is on a page among 100 other links, or the page is irrelevant to your subject matter, the page probably won’t hold much weight with most search engines. It’s also rumored that Google is changing it’s algorithm to discount reciprocal links altogether.

So, what can you do to get your links indexed and noticed? Write your own content, distribute it to article directories or trade it with other related websites!

Here are 8 tips on increasing your online traffic with distributed content.

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Like them or love them, traffic exchanges always seem to get an opinion out of people. Some people can’t see the point and others love them to death. Sure, a lot of the time you are only going to find other people trying to punt their opportunity in them and you have to put a lot of clicking effort in to get results but the results we’ve had have been positive rather than negative. I even like idly surfing sometimes to check out when else there is out there!

As I said before, you need to actually put some effort and time into promoting via traffic exchanges. But then you get what you pay for, and promotion this way is essentially free. So it’s best to spend your time wisely and surf several exchanges at once. The best way to do this I’ve found is with the firefox browser because it allows you to have several pages open at the same time within the same window due to it’s “tabbed” browsing. Plus if you store the surf pages of all your exchanges in one bookmarks folder then you can launch them all at once by selecting “Open in Tabs”.

So, what works best in a traffic exchange? Personally, I think that the shiny corporate pages of your affiliate and networking schemes may work when that program is new - but surfers will soon gloss over them and not see them after too long. So what is the best option? Obviously you’ve got to come up with something better!

You’ll need some web space to put your files in, but you can get this at very reasonable prices. Then you need to create your advertising. One effective page would be to advertise is one that contains a list traffic exchange referrer URLs! Start to build a downline to earn your credits…

Another effective page is a very simple lead gathering page such as a generic recruitment one or a customer prospecting one. I usually design the first one to be totally company independent so that when somebody contacts me through it I can discuss what’s best for them in person. They also get directed to my site afterwards to read at their leisure. Short and sweet, that’s the key to effective advertising in the exchanges. You only have around 20-30 seconds to grab someone’s attention so come up with something that everybody else ISN’T doing, something amusing or topical.

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