One Way Links Lead to Website Traffic

The name of the game on the internet is traffic and every webmaster realizes this. It does not matter what the niche of your site, if you do not have traffic they will never see what you have to offer them. If your site is an online business the simple reality is that you must get traffic to be successful.

Where can this traffic come from?

Email marketing is one source. You can generate a certain amount of traffic to your website by offering opt-in email newsletters and e-zines. Sending newsletters to your contacts will help keep your website in their mind and keep them returning.

Search engines are a major player in internet traffic and sent around 60% of overall traffic to those websites that are successful. The best thing about this method is that it is free and lasts, but you need to be indexed highly for relevant search terms by the search engine to get any traffic.

Links from other websites to yours can be a major contributor for traffic to your website. Traffic generated this way is typically more targeted to your niche and best of all it helps your site get indexed higher in search engine results to drive traffic in that way also.

The focus of the rest of this article will be on strategies for link building. How do you get those one way links to help you get indexed higher in the search engines?

The first and most effective way of building links is by submitting your site for review in the quality directories such as Yahoo!, Business.com and the Authority Directory. Submitting to quality web directories does not take that much time and will get you a high quality link to your website. You should be aware that there are many directories on the internet and they are not equal. A link from a quality directory can be the equivalent of links from hundreds others.

Another method of link generation is by writing articles that are rich in keywords related to you niche and them submit those to various article directories. Choose those articles directories of quality just like a web directory and Ezines is one of the best know. When you use this method make sure that you write a nice bio for the resource box that contains a link to your website with good keyword text.

Participation in online forums that relate to your niche is another good way to gain links that can bring traffic to your website. Make sure that you use the signature option with the forum to place a link back to your website. By being professional and making relevant and intelligent comments forums can be a powerful tool for your website. Do not make comments just for the sake of spamming them with your links. Comments in forums need to be relevant to the topic and offer something to the other readers. The same rules apply for blog post comments.

Always keep reading and searching out additional information as the internet can change quickly. Links will always be a stable source of gaining attention and traffic for your website.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/one-way-links-lead-to-website-traffic-315455.html

About the Author:
Increase your Websites online presence today by getting listed on The Authority Business Directory. Plus, don't forget to submit link for inclusion while you are visiting.

On Site Search Optimization - 11 Practical Tips

Google has raised the bar. If you misspell a word, it tells you. If you perform a search returning millions of results, they prioritize the results by showing you the most relevant page (usually). Compare that to most internal site search features on eCommerce sites. Not only can they not handle misspellings, they usually do a poor job of ranking results. Combine a poor site search feature with a confusing navigation, and you've got a usability nightmare. Why optimize your internal site search? For one, some research suggests internal site search users convert 3 times better than users who don't use search, assuming their query returns relevant results. Below I've gathered up 11 ideas for improving your internal site search feature.

1. Know What Visitors are Searching For: Optimizing internal site search begins with understanding what visitors are searching for, how often, and why. Do users resort to site search because of poor site navigation? Are certain queries performed over and over? Your website analytics must answer these questions (Google analytics recently launched a site search feature). In addition, track what percentage of search queries return no results. As you improve this feature, you’ll have a metric to benchmark your progress.

2. Intelligent Search Suggestions: An intelligent site search feature, that suggests common searches as you type, is an excellent usability feature that can prevent website visitors from making queries that return no results
or irrelevant items. Checkout Foodnetwork for a great working example of an AJAX intelligent search feature.

3. Show Non-Product Results: If you analyze your log files, you’ll likely find that many search queries using your internal site search are not related to products. For example, visitors will commonly search for terms such as “return policy” or “employment.” Make sure your site search can display results from your site content as well as your product database.

4. Handle SEO Keyword Searches: If you rely on SEO or PPC to drive site traffic, make sure that your internal site search can return results for the keyword phrases you rank for or bid on. For example, if your site ranks for “ipod accessories”, you may find that visitors immediately perform that same query on your internal site search. If the search returns no results, you’ll probably lose your visitor.

5. Filter by Department, Size, & Color: It can be frustrating when a site search query returns too many results. Allow your visitors to filter down the results to increase the relevancy. Common filter criteria are age, product
department, color, and size.

6. Sorting by Price, Age, & Rating: At times, prioritizing search results is more important than narrowing them down. Many customers will expect to be able to sort by price, the newness of the products, or user submitted ratings.

7. Handle Misspelled Search Terms: By analyzing searches that return no results, you should be able to identify commonly misspelled search terms. Because search engines such as Google have become sophisticated enough to
suggest corrected spellings of words, your customer may expect the same from your site.

8. Eliminate Expired Page Errors: There’s nothing worse than hitting the back button on a browser, and getting “This page has expired” error. This preventable error occurs frequently on search pages that submit queries via the “post” method.

9. Search by Item Number: Make sure your site search can handle item number queries. When a user enters an item number that matches a product in your inventory, take them directly to the product page rather than the search results.

10. Show Last Search Query in Search Box: After a user performs a search, populate the search form field with the exact query the customer entered. This will allow them to realize if they make a typo when searching, and easily adjust the search query.

11. Focus on Short Tail Searches: While long tail searches have been the focus of organic SEO for quite some time, you may find it more effective to optimize for more frequently searched keywords. You may find that a small percentage of unique queries make up a large portion of overall queries. In other words, grab some low-hanging fruit by optimizing for the most frequently searched terms on your site.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/web-design-articles/on-site-search-optimization-11-practical-tips-303414.html

About the Author:

Justin Palmer is a Web Marketing consultant who writes an

e-Commerce and Website Marketing webblog. Justin offers informational internet
marketing products such as an

e-Commerce optimization tips ebook and an "How-To" Guide for Email ISP Whitelisting.

The Top 4 Mistakes Made By Internet Marketing Newbies

If you are new to internet marketing you may find yourself a little overwhelmed. There is so much to learn, but there are 4 mistakes that are the biggest barriers to online success. If you can learn to avoid them you will succeed online, because the rest will work itself out.

Internet Marketing Mistake #1: FAILURE TO TAKE ACTION

The number one reason that new internet marketers don't succeed is that they never get started. To succeed in internet marketing you need to take action. It almost doesn't matter what action as long as you actually start something and follow through on it.

If you don't put your product on a website, you won't sell it no matter how much you have learned. If you don't find some product to sell, you won't succeed no matter how much you know about product creation or affiliate marketing. The point is if you do nothing, you will gain nothing. Take action!

Internet Marketing Mistake #2: TRYING TO BE PERFECT

Another major mistake new internet marketers make is they try to be perfect. Just a few more tweaks of the site and then it will be perfect. Just a few more, just this little adjustment, you can go on and on. Nothing you do will ever be absolutely perfect. If you wait until you think your product is perfect or you wait until your website is perfect you will always be waiting.

Nothing is perfect, but it doesn't have to be perfect. Does it do the job it is supposed to do? Does it look like it will sell a product? Then that's good enough to start with. Trying to be perfect is really another way of procrastinating. Get it going. You can improve the product or the website or anything else as you go along. Nothing happens until you finally decide to move ahead.

Internet Marketing Mistake #3: AFRAID YOU DON'T KNOW ENOUGH YET

Many new internet marketers don't ever get started because they think they need to know everything before they start. They buy every course and every ebook they can get their hands on. They study and read and study and read, but that is all they ever do. You will never know everything there is to know about internet marketing. Learning is an ongoing process. You will learn more by doing than you ever will learn from a course or a book. Just start and the knowledge will come.

Internet Marketing Mistake #4: AFRAID OF FAILURE

This may be the mistake that holds more new internet marketers back more than any other mistake. They are afraid if they market their product it will be a failure, so they never market it. How can you know something will be a failure before you try? If you don't try it's guaranteed you will fail.

New internet marketers, heck even great internet marketers fail alot. But there is no such thing as failure. All failure means is the next time you need to make some changes. It was failure that ultimately taught every internet marketer how to really market. Failure allowed them to find out what didn't work so the next time they could do different things that would work.

If you are aware of the 4 mistakes that most new internet marketers make, then you are already ahead of the curve. Don't fall into those traps.

Get started, don't try and be perfect, don't worry about how much you don't know and don't be afraid of failure. If you can do those things avoiding the 4 mistakes, you will be on your way to online success.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/ecommerce-articles/the-top-4-mistakes-made-by-internet-marketing-newbies-and-how-to-avoid-them-303449.html

To find out how you can successfully make a living online, and follow a successful and highly profitable advice to making money online, talk with Ray Johnson - Google.com No.1 Ranked eSeller: http://www.ray-johnson.co.uk/

How to Blend Adsense Ads With your Website

Adsense is a wonderful opportunity for you to generate additional income for your website. It doesn’t cost you anything is the best part! Adsense is also very simple. You have to complete an application with Google and be accepted to host advertisements for other businesses. Then you simply add lines of code to the html on the pages of the website where you are willing to have advertisements. With that all in place, how do you blend the Adsense Ads into your website so they don’t stick out like a sore thumb? You don’t want them to distract the consumer from what you are offering on your website.

You may not be aware of it, but you have a lot of say in how the advertisements are placed on your website including the placement, format, color, and style. There are many places on a website to put Adsense Ads. Some prefer to place it on the top of the page and others like the bottom of the page. Along either side of the text for your website is convenient too. Since we read from left to right, the right side is more common as it will attract attention as the eyes move across the page.

According to Google Adsense, the most effective location is at the top of the page because the entire ad can be seen. Often parts of it are hidden when on the sides unless the mouse is used to scroll over the information. This can be distracting to the consumer and lose the effectiveness of the advertisement. They also recommend using different colors for the ads to differentiate it from your website materials, but to use colors that compliment each other.

The format can be modified to make it different or the same as your website. Some advertisement hosts like everything to be in the same style and size to give a symmetrical look to the pages. Others like to have their information completely distinct from the advertisements. Both are effective so it is only a matter of personal preference as to how you want your website to appear. Colors including the background can be changed to make everything work together well. You might have to experience a little to come up with the right design you are happy with.

You want to blend the Adsense ads enough that they look natural appearing on your website rather than appearing to be out of place. If they don’t look natural they can be distracting to the consumer. They also won’t be effective because consumers don’t trust what doesn’t look professional when it comes to the internet. This could be damaging to your own sales on your website so pay close attention to this issue. It is a good idea to ask some others for feedback on how the information appears to them on your website. You should avoid placing ads to where they appear to be banners.

Adsense offers you some useful tools as well to get everything to blend. The Google Adsense Preview tools allows you to test the layout of your website with the ads in place. This gives you the opportunity to change anything that is ineffective before your consumers view in over the internet. You can also contact their customer support 24/7 for questions or concerns you may have.

Adsense is a great way for your website to generate additional income by offering to host advertisements for other businesses with similar products and services to offer consumers. You are still in control of the layout and design of your website.

What makes the idea of participating in Adsense more appealing is the fact you have the ability to change the color, format, and style of the ads placed on your website.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/online-promotion-articles/how-to-blend-adsense-ads-with-your-website-263442.html

Terry Detty, 42, enjoys his time away from work and getting out for a breath of fresh air occasionally. Need Search Engine Marketing, SEO Software or Credit Fix.

The Lowdown on Finding the Perfect Keywords

A good look at the use of keywords.

Whenever I teach a class on Internet marketing, it's inevitable that the term "keyword" comes up. Keywords tend to confuse people, mostly because there are numerous ways of figuring them out; not all of them are correct. Let me explain.

When we think of keywords related to our topic, we often go to "root" keywords or, in layman's terms: the first word that pops into our mind. For example, if someone were to say: "Give me a keyword for books" you might say: "publishing." That's a root keyword. It may seem like the right word to you, but it may not be a word that your reader or customer is searching on. Therein lies the key. You want to find relevant keywords in your market that people are actually searching for. Another example of this is the word: auto loan. If you've written a book on saving money you may think that drawing attention to your chapter on getting the best auto loan is a great idea. But what if your consumer searches on the term: car loan instead? Your keyword (auto loan) will go unnoticed.

There are some commonalities in keywords; for example, the best keywords have a strong relevance to your topic and a high search volume. What this means is that as you're trying to get away from 'root' words, you don't want to get uber-creative and use words no one is searching on. The other piece to remember is the age-old marketing term: supply and demand. Whatever your search term you want to make sure that there's a lot of demand, but very little supply.

If you're ready to start your search, here are a few sites that should help you. The first is the Google Adwords keyword search tool. What this tool will show you is a general overview of how popular a word is vs. how much supply there is for this word. While this site doesn't give you actual search numbers, it's a pretty thorough overview of search patters: adwords dot google dot com.

The second is a version of Overture (more on that in a minute) that will show you how many searches have happened across Yahoo and MSN for a particular search term in the last 30 days: yooter dot com/keyword/overture.php

Finally we have Overture. While this site will give you actual data, the numbers they give you aren't updated daily, in fact they're not even updated monthly. Some of the stats you see will be three or more months old. But data is data and unless you're sitting in a market that has heavy fluctuation, this should give you a good start: inventory dot overture dot com.

Now that you've zeroed in on your perfect keywords, where will you use them? Well, adding them to your web site copy is a great idea but the *ideal* place to use these is in your press release. Why? Because it's likely that you're sending your press release out online (if you're not, you should be) and with all the clutter on the 'Net you'll need these keywords to get noticed. Here's a quick rundown of where and how you should use them:

• Use these words in the headline and first 50 words of your release

• Keep your release to no more than 600 words

• Use keywords for hyperlinking: what I mean by this is that anytime you link to a page on your site or some other external reference, you'll want to use these keywords to help increase exposure to your press release.

In order to maximize what you're doing online, you've got to become very focused on your market and what your market wants. Figuring out the keywords and search terms your readers/consumers use will go a long way helping your message rise above the noise!

About the Author:


Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc., is a book marketing and media relations expert whose company has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns. Visit AME

Choosing Your Keywords

Everyone wants their site to be found easily in the search engines. The use of keywords, therefore, is important when designing the content on your site. The following offers some good advice on this.

These days, our needs for knowledge, information, everyday
necessities and novelty materials can be found just with one
single click on an internet website. It’s no surprise that
people prefer to surf the WWW rather than go to a library or
shopping center to look for or buy what they want. More and more
people use search engines like google to help them go directly
to the website that contains what they need.

This trend sparked a revolution in internet marketing
strategies. Web masters of vendor sites compete with each other
to place their websites in the top 10 search results of a user’s
searches. Various software utilities were created to boost the
chances of high SE rankings. Some of these utilities even
manage to cheat a high ranking out of a search engine even when
the website itself contains nothing of interest to the user.

As more and more web masters arm themselves with rank boosting
software, the effectiveness of their efforts begins to plummet so
much so that they find themselves back to where they started. A
new avenue for increasing their rankings became necessary.
One of these ideas is the saturation of keywords on a single
article. The entire philosophy of keywords hinged on their
relevance. In searching for a Ford truck, what search strings
would the customer use? How many of those search strings will
match the keywords? The more a search string matches your site
or article’s keywords, the higher you place on a search engine
result page. Keywords have gotten to be such a major concern
that private enterprises which offer search engine optimization
(SEO) services are now making a killing in the internet economy.

The first result that comes out of a search engine is usually
the website that contains the most similar number of keywords in
the exact same order as the search. For instance, if I used “DIY
Wi-Fi antenna” for my search string, the search engine will look
for the exact same words and word placement. Now, if I type the
word “ask” and perform my search using google, the common result
would be ask.com. Notice how the search engine immediately went
for the website with the domain name (ask.com) that matched my
query. On the other hand, if I type “asked”, google still comes
out with the ask.com webpage as its top search result. It’s all
about relevance.

To be able to fully utilize your website’s potential as a top
search result item, you need to orient your website towards the
product or idea you want to promote. If you cannot have the .com
name, you can rely on keyword optimization to help you with your
search engine rankings.

You do not need to consult a private enterprise to tell you
which keywords to use. All you have to do is think about your
product or idea and think of how you would look for it in the
internet using a search engine.

Keywords will not work for you if you keep them generic. Most
customers log onto the internet already knowing what they need
or want. Remember, these shoppers can’t hold or examine the
merchandise so they want to find out about them fist hand before
they actually buy. When they do decide to buy, they have a
specific idea in mind. They will use this idea as their search
string in search engines. Ergo, if you have multiple products,
you need to be able to generate a fair amount of literature
containing relevant keywords for each of your merchandise. If
you choose to limit your business to a certain area, be sure to
include the name of your chosen location into your keyword base.

You also need to take care of the literature or articles
you produce for your business. Make sure that they contain the
necessary keyword count. Do not sacrifice the quality of your
articles for the sake of keywords. Always present a detailed,
literate and informative article.

About the Author:

Len Hutton is an information publisher specializing in helping people start their own home based business. You can read up on how to create your own info products in one day without writing a single word by going to http://www.nicheresidualincomes.com/

How To Turn Other Peoples Hard Work Into A Part Time And Instant Internet Business

http://www.nicheresidualincomes.com/underground.htm

How to Make Sure Your Website Won't Need a Do-Over

The following offers up some great tips in regards to effective web design.

It's recess time on the elementary school playground. A group of third graders is playing kick ball in teams on the grass. Suddenly, there's a big argument over whether the last point goes to the girls' team or the boys' team.

The argument rages on for what seems like forever — almost a whole minute of precious recess time has been wasted! In third grade, wasting recess is a crime! And it must be stopped before time runs out.

One of the girls realizes, stops arguing, looks around and declares, "Do-over". The boys accept this proposal, the last play is forgotten, and the game starts again.

The slate is wiped clean, but the play has to be repeated

When you were young, do-overs were an easy way to resolve an argument, fix unfairness or quickly change history.

Why wouldn't you want to be able to do this with your business website? Unlike the playground game, designing a website takes a lot of time, work and money — it's just not a task that you're going to want to start over from scratch again!

And, once you've launched one website, it's harder to get a do-over from your prospects and clients than it is to get the other team to agree to one in elementary school.

Avoiding a do-over sometimes leads to project paralysis

At this point, a lot of entrepreneurs get scared — they don't want to create a do-over, but they don't know where to start down the right path. So, they put their project off, and instead stress out about getting everything ready. Plus, avoiding starting means they won't make any mistakes. That works itself up into procrastination and full-scale project paralysis — and the website project winds up never getting completed.

The reason that people get paralyzed is because they don't know how to plan and create a website in a way that minimizes the chance that they'll have to re-do it. But, there are a few ways to ensure that your site will be as permanent as possible, without driving yourself crazy with all the considerations. Five Steps to Creating a Site That Will Stick

1. Decide what you want your website to do for your business. A website should be more than just something you have to create for your business. What's your site's purpose? What are its jobs? Who will be coming to the site? What do you most want them to do once they get there? What do your visitors most want to know?

If you create the site with the end goal in mind, then your site will be more successful. This is because you can create every piece of the site to encourage the viewer to take a certain path through the site or a particular action. Planning the experience that a visitor will have on your site can help get more visitors to meet your goal on the site.

2. The function of your website will determine the types of content you'll need. Look at the job you want your site to perform, and who the site is for. That will start to give you hints about the types of content you should include on it.

In planning your basic content, consider the pages you'll need to include on the site. Also think about any subscribe forms, shopping carts, audio, etc. that would help you communicate with your target audience. Lastly, think about which of these pieces you need immediately and which you can add in later. This will help ensure your website project won't take forever to complete.

3. Don't get hung up on writing the text. The next step is to gather your samples and write your text for the website. A lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in this phase of the project. This is because they're not comfortable writing, they don't have the time to write their text, or they find that it takes a while to get the testimonials they need.

This is the one part of your site that's easy to revise later on — so don't stress out about getting the text "just perfect" — just get the text put together and then plan on revising it shortly after the site is launched.

4. Design the site to look timeless. There's no way to know what design trends are coming next, and what effects would make your site look like it was designed in a particular year. Sites full of cutting-edge effects and technology this year may look passé next year.

How do you design a site to look timeless? If you create your design based on your own logo and Visual Vocabulary and keep the design generally clean, the likelihood that it will look dated is lessened. Stick close to your own brand designs and you'll have a website that you can keep for the long haul.

5. Code the site cleanly. In order to make sure that your site will work across multiple browsers and systems and will work on future versions of those browsers, make sure that your code is clean. To maximize your search engine optimization results, you'll want to code the site in HTML instead of in Flash so that Google and the other engines will be able to read it. Coding in HTML also makes your site easier to update in the future — you'll want to add to your site's text and make edits to what's already there.

Recreating your website isn't as easy as a do-over on the playground. By following the 5 steps here, you'll create a website that will serve your business well for a long while. And you'll be able to avoid having to start the site all over again!

About the Author:

Erin Ferree is a brand identity designer who creates big visibility for small businesses. Her workbook, "Design a Website That Works", will walk you through all of the questions that you need to answer in order to create the best possible website. Visit http://www.elf-design.com/ and http://www.elf-design.com/products-webWorkbook.html

Making Money with Adsense

If you currentlu use Google Adsense on your site or plan to do so, the following article provides some helpful information to help you tweak your ads.

If you are just starting online with your first website, you have quite a learning curve in front of you. I know that your learning curve is still long, because I have been making money online for years, and I am still learning new stuff everyday.

Every year, more people are coming online. And every year, people struggle to figure out how to tap into the economic engine powered by the Internet. The one thing that newcomers to the Internet frequently fail to realize is that those of us, who are making the most money online, spent years learning our trades.

The good news is that Internet newcomers have one major advantage that my mentors and myself did not have when we started our online enterprises. The newcomers have people like us who are willing to teach others what they have learned.

First And Most Important Lesson To Learn

There are three kinds of commercial websites on the Internet: product/service merchants, advertising providers, and non-profit websites.

Now, the Red Cross and the United Way are non-profit websites by choice and mission. But, the majority of non-profit websites on the Internet were designed to be for-profit websites, but the website owner will have been lucky to have earned enough to pay their web hosting costs.

By the end of this article, I hope that I will have provided you enough information to be able to turn any non-profit website into a profit generating machine.

Merchants sell services. They also sell products made by others or themselves. Some merchants produce their own informational books and e-books, on a wide variety of topics.

Many people make the mistake of assuming that they do not know anything of value that other people would want to know. But, that just isn't true. Call me an optimist if you will, but I believe everyone knows something that other people would be willing to pay a certain amount of money to learn.

Ii is a fact that some of the smartest online entrepreneurs I know make a lot of money by writing and selling books and e-books, on topics ranging from cryptograms (http://www.cryptogramsbylouise.com/), to how-to cure acid reflux (http://www.refluxgoneforever.com/), to finding the hero within (http://www.herosoul.com/), to how to be more successful with an online business.

I have bought many e-books and I have to say that some were better than others, but all of them helped me to learn what I needed to know in order to be successful with whatever endeavor I was undertaking.

Advertising Providers build websites with the intent of attracting a huge and loyal audience, so that advertisers will consider their website to be a good place to spend their advertising dollars.

In those dark days before Google Adsense (http://adsense.Google.com) and Yahoo's Publisher Network (http://publisher.yahoo.com/), we little guys were just tough out-of-luck if we wanted to sell our advertising space through a larger network of advertisers.

I remember having a website that was finally serving one thousand unique page views per day, or 30,000 page views per month. I remember thinking that it was time for me to see whom I could sell advertising space. So, I started doing my research.

I looked at one advertising network, and then another, and another. Without fail, most advertising networks required one million page views per month in order for a website to participate in their network. I was just poop out of luck.

So, I started advertising space on my site to my visitors. I sold some advertising, but I did not make a living doing it. The main issue here is that the people on my site are looking to learn about travel and other things, and advertisers generally spend their time on sites learning about doing business online.

Then in 2003, it all changed with the rollout of Google Adsense. Suddenly, all I needed to do was to apply to participate in Google's program. On approval, I could add one little piece of javascript code to my website, and I could start earning money from Google immediately, by making their client's advertising available on my own website.

Finally, my information website had a method for earning money that did not require for me to spend all of my waking hours chasing one sale after another.

Some Background

When I started my first online business, I had set up an Yahoo store (http://www.yahoo.com). I did very well with it, but after a couple years, I realized that I did not want to keep doing the same thing for the rest of my life.

Three rooms of my home were committed to storing merchandise that I was buying for resale. When I made a product purchase, I had to take photos and then sit down to my computer, upload the image and make an appropriate product description. Then I had to spend all of my spare time, making new listings at Yahoo and running to the post office to ship the merchandise I had sold.

One day I realized that the reason I had started my business is to provide my family a better standard of living. I had accomplished that goal, at the cost of time with my family. I was literally working from the moment I got out of bed, until I collapsed into my bed at the end of the day.

After parting ways with Yahoo, I researched other profit models and settled on a membership site. In order to be successful with a membership website, one must be willing and able to add new good quality content to the website at least three or four times per week. That is a job in itself.

While my membership site did well monetarily, I found myself in a position similar to when I had my Yahoo store. I was spending all of my spare time with my business and not my family.

Finally, I Wrapped My Head Around The Solution

What I needed for myself was a website where I could sell other people's products and services, then let the other person handle the entire process of collecting the money and delivering the product or service. I needed to build my business in such a way that I could build my website, when I wanted to invest the time, and I could collect my checks at the end of the month.

The advertising website is the best kind of site to have when your goals are the same as mine.

So, I embarked on building a website that had information on a wide variety of topics.

Three years after I started my current website, Google launched their Adsense program. I applied to Google's Adsense program and was accepted within just a few days. I then applied my Google Adsense code to my website.

Over the years, I have been building links to my website so that people could find me. The articles and directory links have produced good traffic results for me on a consistent basis, since I started the process of building them.

The Next Lesson Can Literally Double And Triple Your Income

When you undertake to design a website that will host advertising, don't be shy about it!

• Don't stick your advertising in a corner somewhere; • Don't design your advertising to look like something other than an advertisement; • Don't be afraid to test your advertising placement; • Don't be afraid to tell people that they can buy advertising on your website; • Don't be afraid to charge good money to advertisers to have a placement on your website.

Don't be afraid and don't be shy. Your reason for putting advertising on your website is to give YOU a way to make money from your work. But, in order to keep your advertisers happy, you need to make sure that they get a good return for their investment.

When you can help your advertisers make money, then you will by extension earn money from your website. It is a beautiful concept; when I help put money in my advertiser's pockets, they put money in my pocket.

Specific Tips To Maximize Your Advertising Click-Through Rates (CTRs)

The default link color on the Internet is blue; so make the links in your advertising blue.

The default text color on the Internet is black; so make the text in your advertisement black or whatever color is the default text color on your website.

Make your advertisement block stand out from the rest of the content on the page. Putting your ads directly in your visitor's face is good. Within a text block, I have found the 300x250 to be the most effective ad block size. To see an example of the 300x250 text block in action, view my blog here: http://www.clintondouglasiv.com

Other ad block sizes that we have seen good results include: the 728x90 leaderboard, 468x60 banner, and the160x600 wide skyscraper.

Be The Next Advertising Success Story

I advised a friend of mine to make these kinds of changes on his own website. He already had great traffic, but he was not making as much money as I thought he should be making.

On my suggestion, he changed his Google ads from the bottom of his left sidebar to the main part of his pages. He told me that his CTR increased from 0.8% to 2.4%. I told him to change his ads from the 468x15 link unit to the 468x60 banner ad. He told me that his CTR increased from 2.4% to 4.7%. Then I told him to change his links from black to blue. Within just a few weeks, he reported back to me that his click-through rates jumped again, this time from 4.7% to 7.8%. He even reported that on some individual days, his new layout generated as high as 11.4% CTRs.

On my friend's website, his CTR jumped from 0.8% where it had been for a couple years, since he started using Google Adsense, to 7.8% on average. While most webmasters will see an average increase of two- to three-times, my friend has experienced a nearly tenfold (+9.75%) increase in his advertising revenue through that website.

What could you do with ten times more advertising revenue from your website? You will never know until you implement these kinds of changes on your website to increase your own advertising revenue.

About the Author:

Clinton Douglas IV, writes E-Business articles. "In less than 7 Days" you could have your own Highly Profitable Website. Visit his site now; Read the insider secrets to Building an Online Empire ==> Learn how to make fast online money by visiting: http://online-empire.vasrue.com/

Personalize Your Site Using a Favicon

In a world where competition is fierce, the need to make your site stand out is imperative. Here is something creative that you can do now.

With the ever increasing number of web sites on the internet, why not take advantage of this simple method of being able to personalize and distinguish your web site from others?

If you bookmark a page with Microsoft IE you will notice some sites have a special icon associated with their respective bookmark thus differentiating or branding site A from site B. Think of it as internet marketing.

It dawned on me recently how easy it was for me to locate web sites that I had bookmarked and appeared in My Favorites menu with a little icon displayed next to the web site name, so I decided to find out if I could put one on my own web site to make it stand out in the My Favorites menu and easier for whoever bookmarked my site to locate.

I started my search on Google and discovered that the little icon that replaces the IE logo (in IE) is called a Favicon (pronounced fav-eye-con) and is short for Favorites Icon or it is sometimes called a bookmark icon. The Favicon also shows in the address bar as well. Notice the red Y! symbol that appears in the left-most area of the address bar in Internet Explorer when you open Yahoo!, or the butterfly in MSN . What a great way to personalise your site.

You will require IE 5.0 or higher and a favicon.ico can show up in at least three different places in Windows:

1) In the Favorites list selectable on the Start menu;

2) In the location bar of the browser when you are visiting the web site;

3) On your desktop if you first bookmark the site, click Start, Favorites, hold down the control key and click on the bookmark to drag it to the desktop (it copies the icon as a shortcut).

The favicon.ico can also show up in the following two places:

4) On the taskbar if you bookmark the site, hold down the control key, then right click on the bookmark and drag it to the task bar, it copies the icon there;

5) On the links bar if you bookmark the site, hold down the control key, then right click on the bookmark and drag it to the Links tool bar, it copies the icon there.

If you search in the engines for favicon you will find that many sites come up offering favicon tutorials, online tools to create favicon icons, free favicon icons and installation instructions too.

A favicon should be 16 X 16 pixels with 16 colors and the file name must be favicon.ico and ideally you should search for a program that allows you to create favicons online. Remember, if you do not save it as favicon.ico it will not work. Do not make the mistake of just shrinking an image to icon size and renaming it with a .ico file extension. That will not work either because it is not a real icon file. Do not be surprised if your own favicon does not show up in your own browser when you open your site, as sometimes this can take up to a few days and even disappear again only to reappear.

I had fun creating my own personal 16 x 16 pixel image in MyImager and then found a site on Google that created a favicon.ico file and I uploaded my image and clicked on generate favicon and that is how easy it was. I then uploaded the favicon.ico file to the root web directory, in the same location as the index.html page of my hosted website and bingo, I now have a Favicon and have personalized and distinguished my web site from others. Creating such an icon adds to the professionalism of your site, marking you as a web designer who attends to detail.

So now when someone bookmarks my site with a browser that supports favicons, my favicon will appear, as opposed to a default image (a logo for Internet Explorer), which is used instead if no favicon.ico had been provided. I am sure if you look through your own Favorites Menu you will notice that the bulk of the images are the IE logo.

The favicon allows the webmaster to further promote their site, and to create a more customized appearance within a visitor's browser. Often, the favicon reflects the look and feel of the web site or the organization's logo. Have fun creating your Favicon.

About the Author:


Cynthia Minnaar works from home online and invites you to visit http://www.cyns-home-biz.com for web income generating ideas and opportunities, articles and marketing tools.

Article Source: iSnare

Website Design and Legability

Many web designers fail to take into account the importance of web colors and text legibility when building their site. Watch this video which talks about this at length.

Money For Content and Your Clicks For Free: Turning Web Sites, Blogs, and Podcasts Into Cash

Anyone currently earning money online using blogs, podcasts or web sites knows that it is much more than simply sticking some ads up and hoping that you can sit back and reel in the dough.

JD Frazer has written a book, Money For Content and Your Clicks For Free: Turning Web Sites, Blogs, and Podcasts Into Cashwhich expoless the many ways that you can earn money online. As per the review:

If you're a blogger or podcaster, an artist or musician, or someone who creates any other type of online content and dream of earning income from your creative efforts, you have endless options on the Internet. But to seize them, you must become part businessperson—a creative entrepreneur. If that thought intimidates you, you're not alone.

JD Frazer has been there, and he shares with you everything you must know about syndication, advertising, branding, merchandising, copyright protection, ethical considerations, how to attract consumers, and more. If you want to earn a living from what you create, here's what you need to do:

• Make wise decisions that protect your intellectual property and your interests

• Approach the subject of paying for content without alienating your audience

• Understand the realities of self-syndication

• Weigh the advantages and disadvantages of membership features on your Web site

• Learn how branding and merchandising apply to your art

• Be prepared for fame as well as anonymity, and the hazards of both

• Recognize the ethical balance that exists between creator and consumer

• Explore online resources that assist the creative entrepreneur

The author, JD Frazer, is a cartoonist and writer who enjoys a readership in excess of 1.5 million fans internationally. His site, Userfriendly.org, is the first stop on the Web in the morning for a vast number of Information Technology professionals.

eCommerce Design- Increase Your Sales

A great article regarding web design and the relation to online sales.

The Two Most Important Factors In eCommerce Design
By: Philip Bennett

OK, so the title isn't strictly true there is one important factor in ecommerce shopping cart design and two things you have to do achieve it. The goal is to make people purchase your product. The two things you have to do to make them buy is to help and persuade.

When you design a site you need to pay serious attention to it's usability and it's persuasive abilities. The aim of a good eCommerce solutions is to gently (or not so gently) persuade the sites user to purchase the product they want to make sure that they find this as easy as possible you need to make sure that your website is as usable as possible. There are thousands of usability and persuasive design methodologies and we don't intend to cover them all in this article. We have identified a couple of the most important factors in both areas and given you some tips and guidance to help you tailor your shopping cart software to increase sales.

Usability Design

When a customer lands on your internet store they will only have a certain amount of patience, once this all runs out they will give up and leave your site for one of your competitors. The easier your site is to use and the less they have to think about how it works the longer they will stay on your site, and the more likely they will be to purchase from you.

With the increase in the use of CSS and the increasing accessibility of graphic manipulation packages people are able to completely customise the way the 'things you click' on their web-site look, the limit it pretty much their own imagination. Unfortunately this can lead to some confusion for users who have to think about what is clickable and what isn't, this will cause them to get frustrated.

With text links it's best to follow HTML tradition, keeping links in a contrasting colours and keep them underlined. Users also like to know where they have been, so keeping links that have been visited in another colour is good practice.

The best course of actions with buttons is to .. well .. make them look like buttons. I know it seems patronising but a lot of people forget this when they have spent a lot of time making sure the buttons on their site fit in with the design. Raised looking buttons are difficult to make look nice and clean without them looking a little '2001' but it's really worth spending a little time thinking about your buttons.

One of the easiest way to lose customers is to actually lose them. If you customers can't find their way around your store, or can't find their way to wherever they want to be they're not going to buy from you.

What's the best way to achieve this? Well it's probably by using tabs. they give a good idea of where the user is, and how they can get to where they want to be.

Tag Lines are frequently dismissed from modern website design in order to make at design look less cluttered, and certainly there are situation where removing a tag line will do no harm but generally there are useful. It is important that a customer know as quickly as possible if your site will sell the product they are looking for. A good example of this is Amazon when they first launched they used a tag-line similar to 'Online Bookstore' because when customer landed on their page they would have had to think a little to work out that a company called Amazon was in fact an online book store. However as Amazon are now so well known they have removed it as it's no longer needed.

Persuasive Design

Once you've addressed the Usability of your store and your visitors can find their way around your site easily and find their way to where they want to be, you must then consider the second important part of the design. You need to make then go to where YOU want them too, the order confirmation page. Below are 3 tips for making this happen.

Once the user has put some items into their cart and clicked on the checkout button there is a good chance that they really want to buy something. So whatever you do make it as easy as possible for them to put their credit card details in and click the order confirm button.

A design practice that we implement is removing all unnecessary links from the order process. For example all links to the home and search boxes are removed. If the user goes searching for other products then it's possible that they'll get side tracked and forget that they were going to buy your products. But make sure that the user still has access to the information about the product that they're buying, we try to implement this by including all the information on the shopping cart page, or by linking to pop-up with the info in, we do not link back to the original product page as this could lead to further distractions.

Long checkout processes with multiple pages is also something that should be avoided. Only ask the customer for information that you really need.

One of the main ways that people will look for products on your site is by using the search box. Rigging (or Mapping) your searches will allows you to map products to keyword, so when a customer searches for a word related to a product that does not include the keywords in the title or the product text you can make sure the products show up. This is just like a customer asking a shop assistance for a product when they know what they want the product to do, but are just not sure of the name of the product.

You need to make your product descriptions and products images as descriptive as possible, do not ever assume that your customers are as well versed on your products as you are. If there is something they want to know and you haven't covered they will do one of three things:

- Ask you, which happens a lot less than you would imagine.
- Go and look on a competitors web-site, if they have the information then it's likely you've lost a customer.
- Give Up.

Also the more information that you include the more 'spider food' there is got the search engines, writing the product descriptions is a good time to focus on Search Engine Optimisation.

Following a couple of these simple guidelines you should see a marked increase in the conversion rate for your store. There are also many other usability and persuasive design models that you can apply and we defiantly recommend searching for some more to apply to your shopping cart.


Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software is a one stop shop for all the information you need about shopping cart software and ecommerce solutions. This site is brought to you by Bennett Enable eCommerce Solutions

Google AdSense- Increase Your Online Income

What is Google AdSense? Well, it happens to be one of the most effective means of advertising for online providers to promote their product or service. On the other hand, AdSense can also be a great way for web site and blog owners to make extra income from their site. Here is a great overview of Google AdSense:

If you look at the Internet a few years back, you'll see that advertising was done in a way that was very similar to other types of media like television, or actually, more like what you see in a newspaper.

You'd enter a site, and in some location you'd get to see a banner (often these were quite numerous and very large), which would present and ad for whatever company was paying for adds on your space.

But there was one problem with this kind of advertising. It really wasn't exploiting the fact that the adds weren't in some newspaper, but were instead presented over the Internet.

You've probably noticed a lot of things like this over the pages you've browsed. You're looking at an on-line shop, looking for a watch but you get a banner that advertises a car.

While you might, at some later point want to buy a car, right now you're looking for a watch and it would have surely been nice if the banner were advertising a watch, because then you would have probably clicked it.

Well that's also what the folks at Google thought of, so they came up with a killer idea. This is knows as Google AdSense, and it's known as a targeted advertising program

What you do (as a web designer / website owner) is, instead of jumping through hoops to get some banner on your site that your visitors won't even care about, is you just allocate some region of the screen.

You then sign up for the Google AdSense program, you insert a small snippet of code in your webpage and Google ensures that in the location you specify, a banner will appear, presenting adds relevant to the contents of your site.

It's very easy for Google to do this because Google is a search engine company. It looks for the key words in your page, searches a database of websites to find the ones related to whatever is on your page and presto: a targeted ad.

You (the webmaster) get a fee for each visitor that clicks on an adsense banner on your site. Now that's bound to happen more often then with a traditional banner because people are actually interested in what's in that banner (otherwise, they wouldn't be on your page would they?).

But, this also does wonders for the people who want to advertise. And it's because of the same reason. The greatest thing about Google AdSense is that all the content in a banner is relevant.

This relevancy is the key to the programs success, and also the reason why everyone remains happy. The advertiser has a relevantly placed advert, the publisher earns money from their content and Google take their cut.

Of course, as always, Google has set some high standards for its AdSense program, in terms of looks and functionality. You can't have more than two such banners on your website and Google only inserts text in these banners.

So an extra benefit is that AdSense advertising is a lot less obtrusive then regular advertising. But this also means you should position the banner better because it's possible that visitors might miss it altogether.

So in the end, Google AdSense is an advertising program that is unique because the ads are relevant to the content on the site. Anyone that wants to advertise pays Google for it. Anyone who wants to place ads on their site does this through AdSense, getting paid by Google in the process.

All transactions are run through Google, and the advertisers and publishers get access to statistics which help them to understand and moderate the effectiveness of their campaign.

The whole process is elegant, simple and effective from anyone in the chain, from site visitors to advertisers, and it's one of the reasons Google are known for their innovation and new thinking.

Much has been written about Google AdSense and how to effectively tweak the program to maximize both advertising success and revenue produced from it. The AdSense Code: What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense is one example. From the review:

Hidden on the Internet, scattered among billions of Web pages, are the clues to an incredible secret. For those who know the secret, the result is untold wealth. Each month, a small group of people - an elite club who have uncovered the mysteries of The AdSense Code- put their knowledge to use and receive checks for tens of thousands of dollars from Google. And untold numbers of additional site owners are regularly generating supplemental income via AdSense while they play, sleep and eat. The AdSense Code is concise and very focused on the objective of revealing the proven online strategies to creating passive income with Google AdSense. The AdSense Code reveals hands-on solutions to many of the concerns and challenges faced by content publishers in their quest to attract targeted traffic, improve content relevance and increase responsiveness to AdSense ads - using easy and legitimate techniques that have worked for those who know the secrets. Google AdSense expert, Joel Comm, provides you with the keys you need to "crack" The AdSense Code and unlock the secrets to making money online.

Others have made videos which highlight the many features of Google AdSense. The following is one of a series of videos that Joel Comm, Internet Entrepreneur, produced in which he explains some of the fundamentals of Google AdSense.

Google Website Giveaway- Free Website

What cheaper and better way to add to your online marketing campaign than with a free and professional looking website from Google? It's easy and takes just a few clicks to build.

Here's a quick video that will walk you through the process of setting up your own.