The Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia is an Internet marketing school designed to teach you everything you would need to know about selling your products online. No only can you sell your products and services, you can also get hired by companies looking for the same thing. Check out http://www.imtcva.org for more information.
Give Your Opt-in Freebie a “Value”
Having your website visitors ‘opt-in' for a freebie – an ebook, MP3 or video series – is a powerful way to build a database of email customers that you can market to over and over. Most freebies that you see on websites neglect to make the item more ‘valuable' by stating what the item would be worth if it were for sale.
Why would a freebie item have a price? Well, many items that were once for sale on a website can now be given away as a promotional item. And when you do give it away in exchange for a visitor's email address, be sure to tell them how much it used to be when it was being sold, to help increase the value in the visitor's mind. An example:
Which language sounds more exciting:
“Sign Up Below for Your Free Report” or
“Sign Up to Claim Your Free Ebook” (a $19.95 value)
Stating the price the ebook once sold for creates the illusion that the visitor is getting a $20 item for free. The free report is already “free” so it doesn't hold the same kind of ‘urgency' to sign up for it as the ebook does. Anytime an item has a pronounced value but suddenly becomes free (gas, milk, concert tickets, etc…) it can cause a sense of “I need that now” in the mind of the customer. That's exactly how to build a sound database very quickly. So don't forget to add value to your freebies as an extra incentive to sign up.
When a Visitor is on Your Website….
Lead them around
The worst thing you can do is confuse your visitor. They will leave immediately when they start to feel lost. Most people have far too many choices on their pages.
You must lead them through your site and introduce them to your information in a logical sequence and in digestible bites. And ALWAYS give them a bailout home button so they can start over again if they do get lost.
You might think, “That’s crazy. Some of the most successful sites in the world like MSN have a million choices on every page. Half the time I don't know where to click, but they're still successful.”
But you can’t try to compare your small business site to sites that have enough money to advertise on the side of every bus in America. The biggies can get away with things that would be suicide for your small business site.
Think about where you want your visitor to end up and what action you want them to take when they get there. Then work backwards to the most likely place they enter your site.
Review each page they will encounter along the way and make sure it doesn't send them off in the wrong direction.
University Online Marketing Course
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Certified to operate by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia
I Got Fired
Plenty of people are losing their jobs in this tough economy, you are not alone. Learn how you can discover the hottest and most in demand jobs available today. At the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia, you can get a dedicated certificate in as little as six months and be on your way to a great job. Visit the site to download your free career guide.
Certified to operate by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
Internet Marketing Time Management – Finding The Right Help
One of the main factors that many marketers find they have trouble with is time management: how can one do all of the things that are required for a busy online business? With so many new marketing tools coming out on a daily basis, how can one keep up with the tasks?
As time goes on and your business grows, you'll find that you need help. That help can be as simple as a part time virtual assistant, all the way to a full time employee. After years of marketing online and trying out what works and what doesn't, we have found some great places to find decent help for your business, even if you don't want to pay big money for it.
High School Students: No matter what age you are, most high school students are on top of the hottest and cutting edge services and software that could help your business. Videos, social networking and blogging are the heart of what high school kids do everyday, they're just not aware that there are ways to make money doing it. Instead of trying to learn everything yourself, high school kids can help you out, sometimes for very little money. They'll often help you out for a couple bucks an hour or a pizza, and you can learn the shortcuts to the latest techniques. Find high school students at computer clubs or even friends of your neighbor's kids.
Interns: if you take your business and marketing seriously, you could have an intern work for you. In most states, a sole entrepreneur can have an intern (check with your state laws). This gives a young person, or even someone who desires to change careers, the chance to learn a new skill. For a couple hours a week of work, you can teach them the effective marketing techniques you have learned in this school.
Outsourcing: there are plenty of outsourcing firms that can help you with your daily tasks, usually very cheaply. Do your research and make sure you review the outsourcing company before spending any money. Since they are mainly overseas, they will vary greatly in the quality of the work they do. Make sure you see some of their other work they've done and whether they have a good command of the language and good writing skills (usually their biggest weaknesses). The pluses are that they are great at social networking skills and graphics, and that you can get some outsourcing help for as low as $5.00 an hour.
Virtual Assistants: These are professional people that cost more to hire, but are usually well-versed in marketing and good at what they do. The best part is that you can hire them for as little work as you need done to as much as you need. They are as reliable as a real employee without the expense of hiring one: benefits, office space, computers, etc. Most virtual assistants will cost you about the same as an experienced employee per hour: $12 – 20 an hour range depending on their level of service, but you can hire them for only a few hours a month, usually on a retainer, because they often work for a firm with multiple customers.
Craigslist: a great free way to find an employee when your business grows to that level. Either part time or full time, even temporary or by the project, you can use Craigslist.org to find just the right help that you need without the expense of a job placement firm. Write a free classified ad to attract whatever level of help you need. Craigslist is one of the most highly visited websites on the Internet, attracting millions of job seekers.
Elance.com: a giant resource of professional people looking for work virtually. You can hire by the project and look over the qualifications of your assistant that are listed on their profile. You put out a bid for the work you need done, and the thousands of members of elance will browse the listings and accept the bid if they choose to do so. There are various levels of experience and rates on elance because it includes workers from the U.S and overseas.
Ethically Spy on Your Competition’s Keywords
Ethically Spying on Your Competition’s Keywords
Here’s a great idea. Why not let your competition do lots of work for you and you reap the benefits?
You can find out what keywords your competitors are using by opening their websites in Internet Explorer browser. After the site you are spying on is open click on “view” then click “source”.
In Firefox click “ctl” then click “U”.
A window will open and it will show you all the behind-the-scenes HTML coding of the site. This most likely will include the keywords that site is using to try to grab traffic. (not all sites will display this and some won’t have META keywords because they aren’t as important as they used to be, but as of June 2010 the description META tag is making a comeback.)
Some very sophisticated webmasters can hide this information from you or even feed you false information, but that is very rare. For the most part you will see what words they are using.
Just because you find these words don’t assume the webmaster for the site you are looking at knew what he/she was doing with them.
Your job is to look for words that you may have overlooked and take them to the Majestic http://Majestic.com to see the popularity of the keywords you find.
Video Marketing – Get More Views of Your Youtube Videos
Keywords in the titles of your videos will give you good exposure to the search engine results giving you the majority of your views. Whether it's searching on Google or Youtube, both engines look for the proper keywords for positioning, just like a regular webpage.
Most of your views will come from natural search engine results by people looking for that information. That's why the proper structure for titling your videos and doing your keyword research ahead of time is so important. Titles will be covered more in a lesson coming up in this class.Your subscribers will give you your initial views early as soon as you upload it, creating a high search result on Youtube.
Here are some other clever ways to get additional views of your videos: Share them on your social networking profiles – Every social networking site now makes it easy for you to share videos with your friends. Facebook lets you upload videos directly from your computer to your Wall for everyone to see. You can tag your friends by typing their names in the ‘tag your friends' feature, so they will get a notification to watch the video. You can also just copy and paste the URL to your Youtube video right into the status update of your Wall and it will play on the Wall.
Copy and pasting a video URL in a Twitter tweet will make it play on the new sidebar area of your profile. People can watch the video right on Twitter without leaving to go to Youtube, but it still counts as a view. No matter what social network is your favorite: MySpace, Orkut, Flickr, Bebo, Squidoo or Ning, they all have the ability to share videos with your friends.
That's not all. you can use Pinterest, blogging and even press releases to get more views of your Youtube videos.
Keyword Prominence Explained
Keyword Prominence
Your keyword prominence is simply the placement of your keywords in your content. In SEO, it is not only important to use certain keywords in your content but ensuring you have proper keyword prominence.
Typical SEO practices will get you to include your keywords as often as you can without making your content difficult and un-natural to the reader. Solid SEO practices should also include the proper placement of those keywords in your sentences and paragraphs.
Where a certain keyword is placed on your page, paragraph and sentence, a percentage can be calculated that will determine how effective the keyword will be to the search engines.
Imagine your webpage or paragraph as a big piece of paper. The farther to the beginning of the upper-left hand corner of the paper a keyword is placed, the more prominent it will be to the search engines.
Keyword prominence is placing your keywords close to the beginning of sentences and paragraphs. Simply placing your keywords at the very beginning of your content will not work. Your keyword prominence must fit in your content making sense to the reader and easily flow with the rest of the content.
You can also try the use of bulleted lists containing your keywords to further increase your keyword prominence. Of course, the list needs to fit with the rest of your content otherwise your SEO efforts will be in vain.
Using the heading tags ( H1, H2, H3, etc.), anchor text, and bolding font near the beginning of sentences or paragraphs and make the keywords stand out perfectly clear to a search engine spider.
A keyword prominence analyzer: http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
Writing For The Web Tips
When writing for a website or blog some things are the same as writing in a printed document and some things are different.
Things that are the same:
Write at a level that makes sense for your audience. If you have a very young gaming crowd, you would write with lots of gaming slang and abbreviations. I might add if you aren't a gamer, it would be almost impossible for you to write at their level. They would know something was very artificial about your writing. You should hire a gamer to help you.
If you're writing on a stock market tips site, you better use proper grammar. People make an impression about you in part by the way you write. A person could see you make a grammatical mistake and immediately get a bad impression and move on to get their stock tips from someone more literate.
You will only use references to things your audience can relate to. For instance, if your market was stay-at-home moms, the word “Ellen” would immediately mean something to them. For those of you that aren't stay-at-home moms the reference is to “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” which is on during the day and very popular.
Things that are different:
One of the main things you have to be careful of on the web is jamming too much text in too little screen space. Because of the nature of computer monitors many people can't stand reading on the web. They get eye strain, headaches and irritability.
– You must add lots of white space around your writing and keep paragraphs short. This in itself opens up more white space.
– Readers mostly scan web pages. You must use emphasis tags like bold and color to catch reader's eyes as they scan.
– We avoid underlining on the web because people think the text should be a clickable link if it's underlined. If it won't click, then people think there is something wrong with your site and leave.
– We also avoid italics, especially for small fonts because on a screen they look fuzzy and unprofessional.
We highly suggest you read anything by Jakob Nielsen when it comes to usability of a website. Here's a link to his findings about writing on the web