Archive for May, 2008
« Previous Entries Next Entries »How To Improve your Credibility And Gain More Sales
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008Newcomers to the world of internet marketing find it very difficult to get their first few sales. This is largely due to an apparent lack of credibility in the eyes of the customer. Let's face it you are completely unknown, why should they trust you?
Your first major hurdle to cross is that of improving your reputation and credibility. One way of improving your credibility is to become well known amongst those members of the internet community that frequent your market niche. There are other relatively simple things related to your website which also have a huge impact on your credibility.
The following points all contribute in some way to the first impression your website creates in the minds of your customers and they all go a long way to establishing or destroying your credibility…
1) Nothing destroys your credibility quicker than if you use unprofessional graphics on your website. That first impression created by your website is incredibly important and it does not take much to turn a seemingly terrible graphic into something that looks neat, clean and professional, but if you don't have the ability to modify the graphics yourself, either find suitable free graphics on the internet or hire a graphic artist to do the work for you.
2) Use full contact details on your website. People feel a lot more comfortable when they are dealing with a real person, and not a "front" for a money making scam. Use your full business address on your website, not a P.O. Box. People like to know that you will respond to their requests for help, so put their minds at rest by also including your business, and mobile phone numbers. Make sure you use an answering service for those periods when you are unable to answer your phone.
3) Don't leave your email address on your website; it will be harvested by spam bots. Use a "Help Desk" system… Your customers have to register first and then create a support ticket. They immediately get an automated response explaining that their customer service issue is logged, gives them a tracking ticket number and explains that a customer service representative will respond shortly. This appears very professional to a customer and greatly increases your credibility.
4) Nobody likes to wait for an answer regardless of the circumstances, so include a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) on your web site. Many customer service issues happen more than once and by supplying the solution to a problem on a FAQ mean your customer gets the answer to their problems immediately. Every time you get a new customer service issue, add it to your FAQ, that's one less issue you'll have to deal with in the future. One spin off from having a comprehensive FAQ is your credibility increases because you've dealt with all those issues (or at least thought about them) in the past.
There are also a number of "off site" issues which greatly affect your credibility…
1) Not responding to customer service issues is a pretty quick way to destroy your credibility. Many people won't buy directly from the sales page and will have questions about your product or service that they want answers to before they consent to the purchase. Delay your reply to them and you loose the sale. Many customers may have a problem with the sale itself and if you don't reply quickly, they will ask for a refund, and what's worse is they will never buy from you again.
2) A very good credibility building task is writing articles related to your website's theme or topic. Submit these articles to as many article directories and ezine editors as you can, the more the better. Your articles will be included in many different ezines and newsletters and will also be included as website content. Hundreds, if not thousands of people will read your articles and over time your reputation and credibility will grow.
3) Participate in web forums or discussion boards as they are also known. Post your own comments, answer other people's questions, and even ask your own questions, always being honest and truthful. Never advertise blatantly, rather include a text link under each message you post. People will get to know you the more you post especially if they like what you write. Quite apart from the additional traffic you will get from people clicking on your text link to see what else you have to offer them, your credibility will increase dramatically.
Usability Testing in New York
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008We’re doing some usability testing in New York City. Join in if you’re in the area.
How to Recover from a Ranking Tumble.
Monday, May 19th, 2008As the search engines continue to improve, your SEO needs to as well. A ranking tumble for your website can be devastating. You need to recover as soon as possible – it’s not the easiest task in the world, but it’s not as hard as you’d think. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you cannot panic. You have to keep working on your SEO projects and you need to remember that listings and rankings come and go spiratically at times but that search engines won't let you down if your site is useful.
The experts’ advice to websites that have lost their ranking is usually to start over, following current and good SEO information. Look over your entire site and insure that you haven't done something that would have caused this sudden change in listings and rankings. Normally if you haven't done anything wrong, your links will slowly begin to reappear again especially if you have a nice sized linking network that is listed well.
One step that you can take is to narrow your site’s focus and work hard on one or two keywords. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s sufficient. Make sure each page of your site includes good enough navigation that someone can get anywhere from anywhere else, and make sure you do this with plain ‘a href’ links, not fancy JavaScript.
If you are using frames, now is a good time to dump them. You can replace them with scrollable <div> tags and have similar looking pages that search engines can index more easily. The most important concept in recovering from a ranking tumble is to perform damage control. Any SEO operation that you have performed that could be deemed as controversial you should immediately disband. If you are lucky, your web site hasn't been permanently deleted from any important search engines.
Once you have performed all of the local damage control that you can it is a good idea to insure that your file sizes are relatively small. Make sure that you don't have any excessive images or large external files that will cause a search engine to give up on its attempt to index you. Make sure that you haven't created a linking loop that Google's bots can't find a way out of.
Links are very important to your website’s rankings, and you need to consider finding good link partners to improve your targeted traffic and keyword relevancy. If you have a decent corp of link partners already you can request that they move their links to your site to a higher traffic page for a short period of time so that you can get re-indexed. They may be willing to do this if you remind them that the links from your site to theirs are more valuable once you've been indexed than they are when you are unindexed.
If you submit to the search engines properly the first time and you have a good SEO maintenance plan, you’ll only need to submit your site once. You might consider hiring someone to keep your site regularly updated, as regularly-updated sites rank higher. If you have recently suffered a ranking tumble, use Google Sitemaps to get your page back into Google. This is the fastest method available and is the strongest damage control that you will be able to perform.
Build great content around your keywords or phrases. Remember that content is King for both visitors and search engines. Your content must be extremely relevant to your key words at this point. You don’t want to try to pull a fast one because this was probably the reason that your ranking tumbled in the first place. Remember: When you are recovering from a rank tumble, you are at the search engines’ mercy. You cannot possibly recover if you try to do anything that doesn’t seem right to the search engines.
Submit your website properly to each search engine and directory by hand, making sure you understand each site’s rules. Using automatic submissions is just not a good idea. There are so many things that can go wrong and you just don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. Work by hand and if possible, contact the search engine or directory and ask them if there is a specific reason that your site was suddenly removed. Ask them if there is any action that you can take to make up for any mistakes that you may have made.
Get as many one-way links as you can from directories or pay to have good websites link to yours. One-way links are better than two-way ones.
Monitor your results regularly to find out what’s working and what’s not. Don’t be afraid to make changes.
Keep all these things in mind and you can recover from a rankings tumble easily.
How to Find Affiliate Based Niche Products and Services to Sell
Sunday, May 18th, 2008The sole purpose of putting together a niche marketing website is to make money and to do this you need to sell products and/or services related to the theme of your site.
If you do not have your own product or service to sell you will need to find suppliers who allow you to sell on their behalf as an affiliate. The process is fairly simple; you join their affiliate program and use the special links they create for linking to their product or service from your website. For each sale you make from one of these links you will earn a commission. At the end of each accounting period your commissions are totaled and you are paid out.
There are thousands of merchants who allow affiliates to sell on their behalf, making the task of searching for reliable ones quite daunting. Fortunately for you this task has been simplified by those who created directories of affiliate programs, here are two of the better ones:
http://www.AssociatePrograms.com
This is a searchable directory of affiliate programs. No "adult", multi-tier (MLM) programs or known scams make it onto this directory and each affiliate program is rated by the people that use them. While useful, this system of ranking is only a guide as there are many programs that have not been rated yet.
http://www.lifetimecommissions.com
This is a directory of affiliate programs that pay lifetime commissions or residual commissions for life. What is the difference between the two?
- An affiliate program paying lifetime commissions pays you every time the customer buys something from the merchant, not just for the first purchase.
- An affiliate program paying residual commissions for life pays you commissions on all recurring fees your customer pays, such as monthly membership fees, web hosting fees or auto responder fees.
Both of these affiliate directories have search facilities. You simply type in a keyword related to the theme of your niche website and a list of related affiliate programs will be displayed.
There are also Affiliate Networks to consider. These are big networks which administer affiliate programs for hundreds if not thousands of merchants. The major advantage of joining an affiliate program through one of these networks is you are less likely to run into the problem of not being paid your commissions.
Three of the biggest Affiliate Networks are:
1) Commission Junction (http://www.cj.com )
Commission Junction is part of ValueClick, Inc. and allows you to make use of one very useful feature… You are able to get your commission payments paid directly into your bank account.
- LinkShare (http://www.linkshare.com )
Linkshare is one of the largest Affiliate Networks with an impressive number of merchants using their services. It is worth noting that they do not manage the commission payments for all merchants using their services.
- ClickBank (http://www.clickbank.com )
ClickBank differs in that they only deal with merchants who sell electronically delivered products like e-books. They control all aspects of the purchase and automatically pay commissions twice a month.
Not all merchants have submitted details of their affiliate program to any directory nor do they use the services of an affiliate network, so if you are still unable to find a merchant with an affiliate program who sells products related to the theme of your niche website, it's time to hit the search engines for your research.
The process is very simple, go to the search engine of your choice and type in a keyword related to your niche and then the phrase +affiliate+program. For example, if the theme of your niche website was related to cheese, you would type cheese+affiliate+program into the search engine's search bar.
It would then be a simple task of going through each result listed until you found the perfect affiliate based niche product you could sell from your website. Before joining any affiliate program take note of these important points:
1) Most affiliate programs have a minimum payment threshold typically between $10 and $50. You will only be paid when your commission exceeds this threshold.
2) Small affiliate programs can be troublesome when it comes to being paid your commissions. Try contacting the affiliate program manager who in all likelihood is the product creator and webmaster all in one. If you don't get a swift response it's unlikely you'll be paid your commissions on time (if at all).
How to Evaluate Your Own Site’s SEO Profile.
Saturday, May 17th, 2008Before you can evaluate your site’s SEO profile, you need to understand what an SEO profile is and how it works. An SEO profile for a website is just like a marketing plan or a business plan – basically, it’s a strategy document, putting your decisions into words. This is best performed on a computer program such as Microsoft Word as these programs do provide the best bang for your buck. All else aside, Microsoft does put out some excellent business oriented software so take advantage of it!
Writing your SEO profile should consist of the following:
An introduction – This should include a BRIEF description of your company as well as a purpose statement of some kind. If you can describe your company in a neat, tight format, you will be one step ahead of most in the SEO game.
Goals relating to your Search Engine Status - What do you want your page rank to be? Where do you want to be listed under specif key words? top 50? 25? 10? How many pages of your site do you want search engines to index? Do you want to pay for listings? These questions will get you started, but you must go more in-depth into your SEO goals. Also include the search engines and directories that you feel are necessities such as Google, DMOZ, Yahoo!, and MSN.
Information regarding SEO actions and achievements – This one is pretty self-explanatory. List everything that you do regarding Search Engine Optimization as well as any successes caused by these actions.
Once you’ve written an SEO profile, you can compare it from time-to-time with what’s going on with your site, before either adjusting the site to reflect your strategy or adjusting the profile to reflect a strategy change. Generally, it is wise to stick to the plan, but occasions may arise when you find that this is simply not logical anymore. In these cases, you must re-evaluate your entire plan because one change can effect the rest of your strategy. If you have an extremely intricate strategy that depends on one thing going well, you may want to diversify your strategy. Your profile should especially focus on special things you plan to do that aren’t standard SEO practice.
Standard SEO work can get you only so far. Every one of your competitors is probably doing the same things so get creative. This is one place where doing something for yourself can really push you to the top. If you already have a high-ranking site, you should use your profile to document the reasons why it has happened, to help you maintain your high ranking.
Keeping your SEO profile updated will allow you to stay current not only on what’s going on with your website, but also on what’s going on in the SEO industry. The SEO industry is very fickle. It can change suddenly without warning to reflect what a search engine or directory believes to be the opinion or benefit of the market. Remember that search engines are always in competition with one another to deliver the most results of the highest quality. If you stay on top of your quality, changes in the SEO industry will have minimal effect on you.
It is still important to track these changes in order to ensure that your site gets maximum exposure. Evaluating your website and profile regularly give you an advantage in the market – you should never let a profile get older than 3 months, and you should refer to it and update it every time you make major changes to your site. These changes include additions of services or removal of services as well as design changes and SEO work.
There is software available online that can help you evaluate your site's SEO profile. Some of these software are very useful, others are very overrated. The difference that these programs will make in your fight for page rank and listings depends on your interpretation of the results nearly as much as it depends on the value of the software itself. In order to find some software simply google for SEO software. Reading the reviews and making judgement calls is the best way to determine the worth of SEO software. If you think that its worth going for look at the cost of it. If the cost seems to high, it probably is. You can generally evaluate your SEO profile on your own once you have learned what to look for in an Search Engine Optomized page.
How to Choose the Right Keywords.
Thursday, May 15th, 2008Many SEO experts will tell you that they have specific ways of choosing the right keywords for a website. Some do it using SEO tools – software that compares possible keywords to see which are used the most. Some will give you DIY methods with spreadsheets. We say, however, that you should try every method you can in the search for keywords. Here are some steps that might help:
Identify and create a list of keywords from meta tags, research on your competitors, your highest-converting products and biggest current traffic sources. For each term (typically between 30 and 50 terms overall), narrow the field down to about 15 or 20, choosing the terms you feel are most relevant to your website. Your higher ranked competitors are probably up there for a reason so take a look at what they are providing. Make sure that everything is directly relevant and try to stretch yourself out into some unchartered water. The less common that your key words are, the more likely you are to get the search engine results for these key words.
We would recommend a piece of software called WordTracker to find out how many searches have been done on a certain term. You can choose to work with this information however you want – spreadsheets are good, but you can use anything that will make it easy reasonably easy for you to track these keywords. You’re trying to find a popular word that has a low competition rate. Although this is easier said than done, it’s very rewarding to find an area where your site can succeed because of the lack of competition. You should remember, though, that these search databases are relatively small, and should be used for comparing keywords against one another rather than for estimating their true ‘market sizes’.
This keyword selection research should then be compared with client experience of which keywords may be most profitably optimized, as well as any current ranking on the target keywords. Data from PPC campaigns can be helpful for this. The outcome should be a focused list of, say, 15-20 keywords that are both strong performers in terms of search volume, as well as solid candidates for successful optimization.
When determining how profitable your key words are you should look into your web sites statistics and see what key words were used for what number of sales. This is called your conversion rate. The more sales that are associated with a certain key word, the more valuable that key word is. It is important to account for all of the variables, however. If ten people come across your site through a certain key word but only one of them buys an item this key word isn’t as profitable as a key word that one person finds your site through and still orders a product. It is important to work percentages into your decision of worth of a key word. Your “conversion rate” is the number of sales divided by the number of visitors.
You probably know who your competitors are, so go to their site and open the source code of a few of their pages (select ‘View Source’ from your browser’s menu). Look for the <META NAME="keywords"> tag to see which keywords they’re aiming for. Their keywords are often garbage, but if you look around at a few sites then you can often find keywords you hadn’t thought of. It is not good practice to simply copy and paste a list of key words. It would even be concievable that you would be charged with copyright infringement for such activities. Whether or not you get charged, it is morally wrong. Looking through and coming across a few extra relevant key words is one thing. Steeling an entire list is something else completely.
Another approach is to type in the keywords you have in mind and look at the current top results. Analyze their pages for keywords, descriptions and content – this will give you some idea of what kind of keyword density you should be looking at for your keywords. If the sites that come up are a different kind of business to you altogether then you’ve probably chosen a dodgy keyword – remember that you’re trying to get relevant traffic, not just any traffic.
The general rules that you need to keep in mind when selecting key words are:
1. Try to select unique key words that your competitors have not thought of.
2. Optimize for your most profitable key words. How many sales does the key word generate? How much profit is made for each of these sales?
3. Make sure that the key words are very relevant to your site so that people who find your site through your key words will not immediately leave.
4. Try to assemble a list of key words that covers your site very will so that you aren’t leaving anyone or anything out.
How To Explode Your Niche Product Sales Using Autoresponders
Thursday, May 15th, 2008The bottom line to selling a niche product or service online is you need to get as many unique visitors to your sales page as possible. There's no doubt about it, the more people who visit your sales page the more money you make, but just how do you get more people to your website?
There are many different ways of increasing the amount of traffic to your website, but every single one of them fail because they only get your sales message in front of them once. You spend all that time and effort getting them to your sales page, they have a quick look round and they are gone… Perhaps you caught them at a bad time, they might have been in a rush, or they might not have had any spare cash, or they were simply in a bad mood. It doesn't matter because they never bought your niche product or service, you missed the sale.
What if there was a way to get your sales message in front of your website visitors not once, but many times, a system which will regularly call attention your product. Fortunately for you there is such a system and it's easy to install and operate.
The internet marketing fraternity has come up with a utility called an autoresponder. Not the system you can setup with your email account that tells anybody who sends you a message that you've gone on holiday or whatever. This is a system which can send unlimited individual and unique messages to your website visitors at any interval you desire.
When your prospective customer visits your website, you present them with an irresistible free offer in exchange for their name and email address. This could be a free information series based on your product, or it could be another valuable product on a similar theme to yours.
Once they have signed up for your free gift, you send them a series of messages spaced a few days apart and offer them useful free information with links back to your sales page. If they find your messages interesting and useful there's a very good chance they will decide to buy your product to get more information.
Don't think it all stops there… They are still subscribers to your list; they still expect to receive interesting and useful information from you, so give it to them. Continue sending emails to your list of subscribers at regular intervals.
The key is not to inundate them with advertisements; send them useful and relevant information in every email and place a link to other products of yours or join a few affiliate programs and offer those products.
To get your hand on an autoresponder, you have three basic options:
1) Join a free autoresponder. A search on any search engine will get you a list of many free autoresponders, but there is a price to pay… Many free autoresponders will display their own advertising messages at the top of each email sent out by them. This message detracts from your message and considerably reduces your emails effectiveness.
2) Join a paid autoresponder. Again a search on any search engine will get you a list of autoreponders to join, but there is one factor which can greatly affect the delivery rate of emails sent out… Many paid autoresponders are used by spammers and most email service providers will block emails sent from these autoresponders. Unfortunately this is not widely known and obviously the people supplying the autoresponders don't make this information public.
Before you join any paid autoresponder service find out how they guarantee email deliverability. If they don't do anything, or won’t answer you don't use their service.
3) Purchase and install your own autoresponder script. This is the option many internet marketers opt for as it gives them complete control over their email marketing efforts, but they also have to deal with spam complaints themselves. If you join a reputable paid service, the autoresponder provider will ensure all your lists are double opt-in which means every subscriber has to confirm their subscription, any spam complaints from subscribers to your autoresponders are handled by them.
When it comes to incorporating any of these autoresponder options, the service or script providers offer extensive documentation explaining how to get your autoresponder set up and working properly.
How to Choose an SEO Provider.
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008As the demand for search engine marketing continues to grow, so does the demand for experts in the area. In recent months, mass emails seem to be the new ‘promise’ of top search engine rankings. How do you choose an SEO provider that will understand the needs of your website and provide quality service?
Let’s breakdown the elements of SEO, to make it easier for you to recognize a good product. To find a good SEO provider, look for these things:
They need to be able to check your current site, evaluate it and set goals for it. They should develop a list of target keywords relevant to the site, write and insert good meta tags for you, and check all other tags to make sure that they’re alright. They should also check all your content and make recommendations on how to improve it to get better search engine rankings.
They should provide link-building programs, including writing and submitting listings to directories and giving you ideas on who to ask for links from. Reports tracking search engine referrals to your site are always good, especially if they explain what they mean and how they can be improved.
Website maintenance is a very important aspect of any SEO program. Once their site has been optimized, many people don’t realize that they need to keep up these methods over time. If you let your site lapse back to the way it was as you add new content, then you’ll need to start all over again.
What kind of price can you put on all this? Well, pricing structures for SEO vary a lot between companies. Some companies will charge more because they include a monthly maintenance fee, while other companies offer customized proposals based on a websites specific need. In general, good SEO can cost as much as $150 an hour, so be prepared for that. Keep in mind that the larger your site is, the more work will be involved. It will naturally take less time to optimize a smaller, simpler site, so keep this in mind when you consider the pricing.
After you’re more comfortable with what the services offered are and how they’re priced, you’ll want to make sure that the company you’re choosing as your SEO provider has the knowledge and skill to complete the work for you. You should talk to three or four companies before you choose one. Be sure to ask them these questions, and back off if you don’t feel like you’re getting an honest answer:
1. How long has your company been in business? Can you explain what your previous experience is and what principles your SEO works under?
2. What other services do you provide besides SEO? Do you provide Internet marketing services?
3. What kinds of industries have you serviced previously? Can you provide me with checkable references?
4. How will you break down the cost of your services?
5. How much will I need to do myself for this SEO project to run smoothly?
6. How much time do I need to set aside to communicate with you during the process?
7. How long does it usually take to achieve results? (SEO is a gradual process, so a reply of anything under 6 months should be a red flag for you).
8. Is it possible to have someone from your firm teach us how to maintain your SEO once it’s done? (If they tell you that you wouldn’t be able to do it yourself, then that’s another red flag).
When they do send you a proposal on the project, you will want to make sure that it contains everything you spoke about, and everything else that should be there. If the answers to any of these questions are missing, you should walk away:
1. What specific services are included in the contract? Are any omitted? Make sure that what you discussed and wanted is included.
2. What is the name or position of the person you will be working with? Are you dealing with a salesperson, a designer, or someone else?
3. Are allowances made for communication with you? Are there any additional fees for contact?
4. How will the company be providing support? By email? On the phone? Do they stop supporting you after a month or so?
5. Are there extra fees for re-optimization or additional consulting? Is it really necessary? What maintenance is provided? If not, what is the additional cost of it? When maintenance is not included with the plan you need to be careful, as there are people who will charge you exorbitant amounts of money to maintain their optimization.
6. What reports are provided and how often will they provide them?
7. What are the total charges? Are there any additional charges?
By taking steps like this you will guard yourself against bad practices, you will also have a better understanding of the service you are getting, and you can easily compare offers to find the best one. But how can you tell if your provider is operating ethically? Well, that’s is pretty easy. Here’s a list of the sales pitches that bad SEO providers will use on you. If you hear any of these from a company, use someone else instead.
1. Guaranteeing top-ranking placements. This is impossible to do since the algorithms of the search engines change often, and any good SEO provider will tell you that.
2. Offering a service that includes the development of ‘doorway pages’. These designs often don’t take your visitors ease of use into consideration, and search engines will ban your site if they catch you using them.
3. Telling you that you need more than one domain name pointing to your website. You can get banned for domain spamming, so don’t take the risk.
4. Any company that says it will get thousands of inbound links to your website – they will be using free-for-alls, which are very bad for your rankings.
5. Companies that offer you search engine submission software. Good positions always come from hand submission. If they tell you that submission by hand is not the best way to go, don’t stick around.
Many SEO providers use unethical ‘spam’ practices because they are cheap, easy to implement, and do provide very short-term results. Beware of any provider that uses them.
The best way to tell if the provider’s SEO practices are ethical is to ask: "Do these changes benefit visitors to my site as well making it more search engine friendly?" A good SEO provider will always say ‘yes’, as SEO is as much about the users as it is about the engines. After all, what’s the point of a high ranking page if it’s nothing but unusable rubbish that will have people rushing for the ‘Back’ button?
Don’t be overwhelmed by these things, but always be on the look out to make sure that you’re getting the best service possible. Good SEO companies can boost your site’s traffic without resorting to unethical practices, and keep up with changes in the industry.
How to Develop Your Own Niche Products or Services
Monday, May 12th, 2008If you create a product based on what you like, or what you think people will like, you will be extremely lucky to sell one single copy, and you'll probably have to bribe the person to buy it!
The only way to create niche products or services that become best sellers is to discover what your potential customers want. What problems are they facing that you can solve. What pain are they experiencing that you can soothe.
There's only one way to get this information… You have to conduct some research. You have to uncover your potential customers needs, their pain, even their dreams and aspirations. Here are a few idea to get you going:
~Use Forums
Use the search engines to find a number of forums related to the niche your're interested in. Visit these forums regularly and find out what questions people are asking and how often they are asked. The same question asked by many different people on many different forums is a possible topic for your product or service.
~Use Surveys
If you own an opt-in email list, send a brief survey to your subscribers to discover the problems they are facing. If a common problem emerges from your survey, providing the solutions to this problem is a possible topic for your product or service.
If you don't own an opt-in email list, you could send a solo advertisement to a few ezines with a large subscriber base and invite people to take part in your survey by offering a useful reward for their participation.
If you own a website which receives a lot of traffic, you could use a popup to invite people to your survey.
~ Use Wordtracker
Wordtracker.com is one of the most useful research tools on the internet. You can use it to uncover what people are searching for on the internet.
Not only that, you can use it to find out how often people search for different topics. It is a great tool for discovering niche markets.
On its own, Wordtracker is unlikely to point you to your next best seller, but when used in conjunction with surveys you have a very powerful research tool.
Once you have discovered what problems your potential customers are facing it is time to set about creating a product to solve them using any of the following three methods:
1) Use products which come with Private Label Rights.
If you purchase a product with Private Label Rights you can do virtually anything you want with the existing product, you could:
- Insert your name as the author/creator
- Re-arrange the contents
- Add to or remove contents
Private Label Rights is by far the quickest method of creating your own product. The only real disadvantage is other people will be using the same content as their own, so if you use the contents "as is" you won't have a unique product.
2) Use products found in the public domain
If a product is in the public domain, it means the copyright on it has expired and you are free to use the contents. While not as quick as Private Label Rights products, using a product from the public domain means you can get yourself a unique product.
Do a search for public domain products and once you have found one purchase a copy and have it digitized (made into an e-book). You could do this yourself with a scanner and good character recognition software, but you will be busy for many hours proof reading and correcting. A quicker route is to have the work professionally digitized as they do all the proofing and correcting as part of the service.
You can copyright your new digitized product, meaning nobody can sell copies in that particular format.
3) Create your own product
Even going this route doesn't mean you have to do all the work. There are many people willing to write articles, write e-books and even code scripts for a price.
By going to websites such as Elance.com you can negotiate a fair price with people willing to do the work for you. Part of the contract being you keep the copyrights, they simply provide the finished content (known as ghostwriting).
The biggest disadvantage is you have no idea whether they have used other people's content. If they have you will be charged with copyright violation, not them. Before using a ghostwriter, try and do a background check and check their references thoroughly.
How to Check Your Site’s Ranking.
Sunday, May 11th, 2008First, go to the search engine where you want to check your site’s ranking, and enter the keywords you want to check. Your result pages will come up, and you will need to look through them until you find your website. SEO experts recommend that if you aren’t listed in at least the top 20 then you should continue to optimize, as most people won’t look any further than that. This is simply common sense. When you are determining if your rank is high enough simply think to yourself, “Would I look for this long for this page?”
You will want to do this with each search engine and directory until you have some idea of where you are. Check your website's rankings regularly, because changes to algorithms can affect them drastically and quickly. Keep in mind also that thousands of new web pages are added daily, and many of them are actively trying to get ranked ahead of you. That’s right. There are thousands of other in on the same game as you so you must keep sharp. Your competitors may be reading these same articles and using these same tricks!
If you can’t find your website in a search engine’s results, you should enter “site:” your domain name in the keyword field to see whether you are listed at all. If your URL appears with the name or description of your site then you are somewhere in the search engine’s index. If all you get back is a blank page, then you’re not in the search engine’s database at all – you need to wait longer. This trick of typing “site:www.yourdomain.com” also helps you to determine how many pages you have indexed on each particular search engine. The more pages that are indexed, the more likely somebody is to encounter your site.
If you find that your website is miles away from the top 20, don’t be discouraged – you can change that! You may need to re-evaluate your keywords, and try to find new ones that are more relevant to your site. Many search engines have human-edited rankings for the most commonly searched-for phrases, and it is often difficult to get in that list. Good content is the best way to increase your chances of getting a high ranking for a certain topic. The more popular that your page is with the masses, the more popular it will be with search engines.
Search engines are a perfect example of “the chicken or the egg.” In this case, there is an answer! Search engines attempt to deliver sites that the populous has deemed important, not the other way around. This is why it is so important that you have good, relevant content and plenty of it.
If you want to check to see if a single web page on your site has been indexed, visit the search engine and enter the complete URL, like this: http://www.yourpage.com/yourpagename.html.
If the search engine has indexed that particular page then it will come back with a description of it. If it hasn’t then you’ll see a message saying something like “Sorry, no information is available for that URL”.
On Google, if your URL has been indexed, this page will offer you to show the cached version of the page, or to find similar pages, as well as pages that link to your page or that contain your URL on the page.
You could go ahead and use these manual tracking methods, but we would recommend that you consider using online tools or downloadable software that will allow you to check these things more quickly. It can be a very tedious and time-consuming job to do by hand, especially if you have several sites to monitor.
Top25web.com is one such search engine-ranking tool. You can find out where your website ranks in Google, Inktomi and AltaVista for free. You can also analyze the results of a particular keyword search, to create a plan for improving your site’s ranking.
URL Ranker offers instant, online reports of website rankings in 17 top search engines, including Google, Yahoo, AOL Search, MSN, AllTheWeb and AltaVista, again for free. It will tell you if your site is listed in each engine, and tell you the ranking if it is.
These tools alone offer an excellent way of checking your sites rankings. Once you know where you stand, you can continue with your SEO plan, and move on to other aspects of marketing too.