Write what you know

Articles help build your expertise, your brand and your credibility. They are a part of your business and can help drive valuable traffic to your websites to sell your products and services. Take parts of your books or even transcribe your MP3s, CDs and teleclasses to create content.

You're going to hear a lot about the value we put on article writing. Here are a couple tips. If you hate to write, but love to talk, you can get voice recognition software. Here are two programs that will take a load off your fingers:

https://www.nuance.com/dragon/dragon-for-pc.html    Dragon Systems Naturally Speaking

The next tip is to simply carry around a mini tape recorder or mp3 recorder, and then get a college student to transcribe/ghost write for you. Try the English or Journalism department of your local University or Community College.

Here’s an ebook on using Ghost Writers:

http://hop.clickbank.net/?powertips/ggmine

The site mentioned above https://www.ezinearticles.com can also act as an article trade site. You just put your articles there and other people take them. Or, you can go there to find articles for your newsletter or website and all people ask is a link to their website or a link to their E-zine in return.

You could buy content from professional and freelance writers. It’s not expensive if you put it out for bid and it keeps your content fresh. No one wants to read content they’ve seen at 50 other places and Google won’t like you too much either if you use rehashed articles on your site.

You can find ghost writers and outsourced help to have your articles written for you at:

https://www.upwork.com

Using Graphics for Keywords

Instead of making the file name of a photo “joe.gif” you could name it “presentation-skills.gif” Anything you can do to boost yourself without spamming is a good idea.

The secrets of better search results revealed…

Pinterest  

Pinterest, one of the fastest growing social networking sites ever, is a social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies, and more. It is unique in that it uses a ‘pin-board' style website design that is easy to use and navigate.

Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, re-pin images to their own collections and ‘like' photos. Pinterest gives it's users the ability to share their ‘pins' with facebook and Twitter followers, interacting with a broad community.

The appeal of Pinterest for marketers is the ability to share photos and videos of interesting material, and then have friends leave comments on the photo. The image itself can be clickable out to a website of the ‘pinners' choice, helping drive traffic to blogs, Youtube channels, Facebook profiles or sales letters / squeeze pages.

The most popular images are those of crafts, hobbies and travel. Food blogs have gained an entirely new way to get free traffic to their posts. Pinners put up images of delicious food ideas and their friends can leave comments. The friends can ‘re-pin' the photo to their own boards where others see it, and they in turn leave comments. This results in a fast-sharing, ‘viralism' of images that when clicked on, lead back to the original source of the image – the food blog.

Once there, visitors can subscribe to the blog, sign-up for a newsletter or purchase a recipe book. This same sharing marketing model can work with jewelry retailers, crafters, book sellers, clothing designers, real estate listings, travel agencies: just about anyone can use images to drive free traffic to their websites and services.

Learn more about how Pinterest can help with website promotions!

While searching around the web for marketing information, you've probably come across the term “Inbound Marketing.” It seems to be gaining more and more steam, and people are more interested in what Inbound Marketing is and how it can help them.

Inbound Marketing is the practice of bringing warm, qualified leads into your sales funnel rather than reaching outward to cold, questionable targets

Traditional “outbound marketing” was largely focused on outbound methods such as cold calls, print ads, attending tradeshows, etc. The idea behind these techniques was to get in front of cold leads and warm them up to the point where they would try your product or service.

This form of marketing was largely a numbers game – you knew you had to, on average, get in contact with a certain large number of people before one of them would be interested and make a purchase. This method was inefficient and expensive, causing marketers to waste time getting in contact with tons of people who may have had no interest in their offering.

Due to the past recession worries, Inbound Marketing has become more popular as marketers look for efficient and affordable ways to acquire new leads. Some of the most popular Inbound Marketing techniques are blogging, interacting on social media, search engine optimization, and webinars.

All of these inbound methods pre-qualify the leads that discover your company, so you can be sure that your message is greeting welcoming ears rather than random outbound contacts. By bringing these warm leads into you, you will greatly save time and money on the old outbound strategies.

How Can I Use Inbound Marketing?

The most important part of a successful inbound marketing strategy is creating great content that will bring people into your sales process. Another important element is ensuring that you have a site that is optimized to close leads into deals and engages visitors once they “land” on your website.

One of the most popular methods to accomplish this goal is by keeping an updated blog. A blog can provide many benefits for your organization, and almost all of them relate to Inbound Marketing. By creating great content, you'll rise in organic search results, create linkable content, and educate your audience. All of these outcomes will help you bring in warm leads that have been pre-qualified through a Google search for relevant terms or by reading similar content that links to you.

In addition to blogging, there are many other forms of great content to create that will bring interested visitors. Hosting webinars, offering e-books for download, and article / content syndication will all attract leads that are interested in your offerings and are eager to engage in a conversation with you about your business.

By sticking with these Inbound Marketing strategies, you'll continually bring in new leads and grow in authority, however, it won't happen overnight. While Inbound Marketing will save you money, it does take an ample commitment and patience. You won't be the top Google result for desired terms overnight and your first webinar may only have a few people register, but by making a longterm commitment to inbound marketing you will see results.

This commitment requires that you create quality content through a Content Management System, engage with people through social media, and try new ideas to bring traffic to your site.

Take the next step towards a rewarding career…

Paid Search Results

One way to find targeted traffic is to pay your way to the top of the search results. This is called Pay-Per-Click or sponsored ads. You have seen them often almost every time you search online. They will be typically on the top of the page or the right hand side of the search results on Google with websites that match your inquiry.

The reason it can attract high quality targeted traffic is that your ad will match what the searcher is looking for based on the exact keywords they type in. By paying for search positioning, not only are you putting yourself right in front of your target audience, but you are skipping the process of waiting for natural search positioning and putting your website up on the top of the results within hours of signing up.

This is a great way to test products and new ideas. If you pay for a sponsored ad and your target market doesn't click on the ad or buy anything, you may have a dud of an idea or haven't worded the ad just right. It would be a shame to have spent time and money on a product that no one wants.

Learning to write an ad properly is important to keep the wrong people from clicking on the ad. We will discuss this more in detail in Semester 103. You could go broke very quickly if people are clicking on the ads for no reason. You have to word the ad to attract your specific target market and ‘disqualify' people who wouldn't ultimately be interested in your products or services.

On Facebook, they have their own version of pay-per-click. It's a little cheaper and easier to use than the Google sponsored ads, even though social networking sites generally have lower conversion rates than search engines. This is because when someone is searching for a particular product on Google, they may be ready to buy. On Facebook however, they are there for the most part to socialize and have fun. That doesn't mean they won't buy something from an ad.

How could writing effective ads make you more valuable in the workplace?

When your blog is brand new, it may seem as if no one is reading it. Keep on posting and keep on asking readers questions. You have to go out on the edge and stir things up a bit sometimes, but do it authentically. Also, you must educate your readers and tell them how to comment. Many people are new to blogging. Tell them to click on the comment link and share their opinions. The more you persist with this, the more likely you will get people to comment and participate in the conversation. Commenting also helps your findability on search engines. When readers comment, that adds new content to the page on which your blog post is created. New content alerts the search engines to index your blog on a regular basis.

Most blogging software can be set up to notify you when someone has posted a comment. Be sure to respond by sending them a personal email thanking them. You can also respond to them in the blog comment section, just make sure they are notified that you have done so. Your list of recent posts and recent comments should reflect an active blog with information that's relevant to your targeted group of readers. If it doesn’t, take it up a notch by writing more frequently, focusing on your blog’s purpose, and directly encouraging readers to leave comments.

Link to useful websites, products and services

Linking is the currency of the Web. Besides being common courtesy to link to your sources of information, you can also link to your own posts, websites, and your products and services. Weave them into your posts so they contribute to the context of your writing, however; too much blatant marketing of your own products and services doesn’t make for good reading, and can turn readers off. Think of a blog posting as a conversation at a cocktail party: you wouldn’t monopolize the conversation just talking about yourself and expect people will stand around for a long time listening. Every time you post, review your article for names, books, and places.

All of these can be linked to a site on the Web. Even ideas and concepts can be linked to a page in Wikipedia. Failing to link to outside sources is bad etiquette in the Blogosphere. And, don't forget to add links to your products and services in the sidebar of your blog. Make sure people know how they can get more information about you and what you offer.

A career as a professional blogger is only a click away…

Keyword density, also called keyword weight, is the ratio of a certian keyword on a webpage compared to all of the other text on the same page. How does this work? Let's say that you have 100 words on your homepage and 5 of them are keywords. Therefore, you have a 5 to 100 ratio or a 5 percent keyword density.

The importance of keyword density is that the search engines look for a certain density to determine a webpage's importance. If Google is looking for a 3 percent keyword density, a webpage with less than 3 percent density will look like it's not significant enough on that particular keyword and anything over 3 percent looks as though it's spamming the search engine.

Having just the right amount of keywords on a page compared to the other text is critical in search engine placement. But to keep webmasters from figuring the exact percentage out and manipulating the search results, search engines constantly change the ratio to keep it from being abused.

That is why some pages will rank high for certain keywords one month, then drop a few positions the next. This is normal and to be expected. The average keyword density however, is somewhere between 1 to 5 percent. Each search engine has different densities that they favor for positioning.

One way to get around the fluctuating density percentage is to create modern day sidedoors for your website. Side doors are article pages added to your website that will have varying percentages of density. One article on your website may have a density of 2 percent and another may have a density of 4 percent.

As each search engine changes it's ratio of what it is looking for, one or more pages of your website will meet the right criteria for keyword density. Having many articles, even on the same topic, with varying densities will give the search engines an bigger target to hit, increasing your chances for good placement in the results.

Learn the techniques that get the best results. 

http://www.imtcva.org

Picking the right domain name takes more than just finding a URL that nobody else has. You need to incorporate keywords, buy the domain, register, and switch DNS numbers. At IMTC, we teach you in the first semester about Domain Name Selection

When starting out in Internet marketing we have a tendency to get excited and carried away with all of the new found knowledge concerning search positioning.

We all want to be on that first page of search results as quickly as possible to see the money start rolling in. But using short sighted techniques to try and game the system can backfire.

You might not think up these bad strategies on your own, but there are numerous instances where innocent website owners were banned because they listened to behind-the-times pseudo experts who used old techniques on their website.

You don't want to be temporarily in the highest results, you want to stay there as long as possible. This takes time, dedication and a willingness to avoid gray areas that promise big results but actually may hurt your results permanently.

Getting banned or penalized by Google could take months or more to correct (sometimes you can never fix the damage and have to throw away the domain name) so let's take a look at what kinds of Google penalties there are and how to avoid them.

Why do sites get penalized?

Simply, …if Google doesn't like what you are doing on your site, who your site is affiliated with, or how you are attracting traffic to your site, you run the risk of being penalized.

The Google Webmaster blog states that site builders are welcome to make their sites however they want, but Google reserves the right to protect the quality and relevance of their index. And this is true. Google is a business and they are in the business of providing a quality product (search results) to their customers (everyone doing online searches).

Search results are where the new business comes from on the web, so keeping in their good graces means money for you in the long term.

Information that can make you a valuable asset to employers…

Squeeze Pages

You may have heard this term and you may have thought that this was some cool new concept. A squeeze page is a page with very little content on it that requires you to register your name and email address before you can proceed to look at what you came to that site for.

Most of the time the page makes some big promise and then sends you to a sales letter. Admittedly, when everyone jumped on this bandwagon some big email lists were built in a hurry.

The problem was that because of all the hoopla, and because of Google’s mission to give good content to people, Google jumped in and did what is known as the “Google Slap”. I.e. they raised the pay-per-click charges sometimes from 25 cents to $10.00 per click on people trying to send Google Adwords (Google’s pay-per-click program) traffic to these worthless pages.

Of course, this caused trouble for people sending Google Adwords traffic to one-page salesletter sites too. Google came out with a quality score for landing pages which from all observations (remember Google doesn’t admit to anything) has something to do with the amount of time spent on a landing page and whether there are more than one page available in the landing page’s entire site.

The bottom line is that a simple squeeze page will still work if you aren’t depending on Google pay-per-click traffic. You still may want to put additional information on the page to keep people reading longer and put more multiple pages on the site where the squeeze page is located.

Reverse Squeeze Pages

This has to do with giving some great content and then asking for the person’s email address and name with a statement something like this. “If you would like more great content like this, please put your name and primary email address in the box and click submit.” This is a much better angle because your Google quality score rises the longer the person stays on the page. Just make sure the site is multipage and it should work just fine.