Craigslist Still Proves Itself To Be A Great Resource
Craigslist still proves itself for being a great tool for selling stuff locally. I recently posted an ad for a car alarm and received a pretty quick response. The alarm sold within 2 days of the posting date plus I received the entire asking price. People still love the convenience of buying something they can have in their hands the same day which provides a great opportunity for anyone who knows how to shop online to get great products at rock bottom prices. The alarm I sold sells in stores for $50 + tax and online for about $30 + shipping. The alarm ...
25 Affiliate Marketing Tips, Design Tips, Affiliate Strategies
Affiliate marketing can be exciting yet time consuming. At times it can also get tedious and frustrating. I’ve been marketing online for quite some time and I stepped into affiliate marketing a little over a year ago and have had a decent amount of success with it. The thing I like most about affiliate marketing; no shipping issues and no returns. Below is my list of affiliate marketing website tips and ideas. 1) Continue learning your product, your goal is to become the best resource for information on that specific product. 2) No following your links is a must. You don't ...
When it comes to building links you should really focus on building quality links. As you may already know a link is seen by search engines as a vote. There are good votes and there are bad votes. Consider yourself running for office. Consider, if you will, the name behind the vote having an influence. If this was the case, a vote from the president is going to be much more effective than a vote from Bin Laden. When it comes to websites linking to your site, some links will benefit your rank and some links will put you under, like a Bin Laden vote. If you have nothing but spammy links, your website will suffer. To begin building good links, the first thing you must do is make your website link worthy.
More on quality links…
Now I’m going to go back to this president voting analogy. If the president along with a couple of his colleagues votes for you to take office while a few random Joes vote for your competitor, who will get the job? One of the best ways to get good quality links is simply by having good quality website. A link from the major news website can cost you hundreds monthly, however if you are the best service in your industry you may find yourself mentioned on this website at no cost to you (especially if you drop a hint about it to one of the editors). If you do buy a link, which Google frowns upon, your website should be in position were it can be assumed that the link was given for free.
Those behind Quality websites only have to ask…
Having a good resources is also going to make it easier for you to ask for links from others. You’ll find by asking you will come up with your own type of approval ratio. Wouldn’t you like to say to yourself, “For every 100 people I ask, I get 10 links.” Next month I’ll try for 20 out of 100 requests. What can I do to earn that?
It will also help to put a little bit of research into asking for a link. Some relevant website may already be linking out to other quality web sites. The websites, or web-posts, you want to be included on must also be related to your web site’s theme and you should also be able to provide valid reason as to why this website owner should link to your site.
Affiliate marketing can be exciting yet time consuming. At times it can also get tedious and frustrating. I’ve been marketing online for quite some time and I stepped into affiliate marketing a little over a year ago and have had a decent amount of success with it. The thing I like most about affiliate marketing; no shipping issues and no returns.
Below is my list of affiliate marketing website tips and ideas.
1) Continue learning your product, your goal is to become the best resource for information on that specific product.
5) Be patient with your link building. Focus on your content and your website’s unique purpose.
30% Link Building and Marketing – Offsite Focus
6) Become a registered Business. I will write more about this later.
10) Purchase and upload tracking software. You may need to add code to the final page of the other website. Work this out with the affiliate company you provide leads/sales to. Implementing tracking and/or affiliate software will show your Affiliate Manager that you are serious and usually the Manager will help you get things tracking properly. If they don’t, another company will.
11) As marketing Guru Seth Godin says, “Be Remarkable”. Remarkable just doesn’t mean really neat. It means something worth making a “remark” about. Dedicate time into creating a resource that not only is “remarkable” but better than the sites currently ranking for the keywords you want top rank.
14) Design comes before marketing. Make sure you’re set on all logos, site design, etc. You cannot gain trust by changing your site’s template or logo once a week. Keep your design changes minimal. I’ve considered redesigning this site’s layout. I won’t make a change until I find something I can be satisfied with for the long run.
15) Use a secondary site for your grey hat techniques. One grey hat technique I believe can bring some good business is paid reviews. However the links that come with paid reviews can be seen as paid links which may affect your rank with Google. Your main site may be the one that feeds your kids. Don’t gamble with the site that feeds you.
16) Get familiar with code. I believe learning at least a little about code can really help. I tend to focus on xhtml, javascript and php. Extending your knowledge on databases can also help. You don’t need to be a guru, just learn as you go. As you learn more, you’ll find benefits to having this knowledge.
20) Better traffic gives you better leverage. The more sales you can convert, the better position you are in to request commission adjustments. Remember, loads of traffic doesn’t necessarily mean its better traffic. When I say better traffic, I mean traffic with a high conversion rate. Ask your affiliate manager who they target. If you provide leads to a lender, they’ll probably let you know they see higher conversion rates with applicants over 40 years of age. Purchasing advertising with sites like Facebook will give you the ability to target specific age ranges.
24) If you haven’t already, maybe its time to think “community”.
25) No affiliate links should be present on the homepage. For an affiliate website I will generally keep all affiliate links about 3 clicks deep. Good content should be primary.
Check out some more seo tips.
I recently came across a company that was offering an insurance policy to their customers if at any time their customers network was hacked. Now to me this just sounds like a future box of fraud from customers bad intentions. Anyways, since this product was unveiled the company signed up 100 new customers over a 6 month period. Intereted in learning more I attempted to jump over to their website and take a look at their products and services. Once the website loaded my browser came up with a page that revielled the image shown on the right. Did the company get hacked, is this just a internal glitch or is it just an update?
I’ve always been told, if an expert hacker wants to infintrate your network, they will. You can stop a majority of hackers with upgraded software, firewalls, etc. However, there will always be a select few out there that can get into about anything. These are the ones you hear about in the news from time to time.
More on ICSA’s Company’s Release
The ICSA, International Computer Security Association, is now offering $250,000 of insurance for customers of it’s TruSecure service. This insurance will cover customers if their network is attacked by any malicious hackers, even if no losses are suffered.
ICSA’s President Peter Tippet mentioned how they expect claims from time to time because what they do is reduce risk, not totally eliminate it. A recent study conducted by ICSA revielled that more than 70% of 200 internet servers had security flaws that made these servers vulnerable to outside attackers. This was the result of the study even though most of the servers had firewalls in place. This survey study was performed on companies of all sizes from small businesses to fortune 500 companies.
One fact that was mentioned was how operating systems have built in vulnerabilities. Proper configuration of firewalls is crucial to get the most security oout of your network.
The insurance policy offered to customers pays out $20,000 per occurence for each certified site up to 2 times the customer’s annual subscription. The $250,000 is the maximum annual payment.
Tippet also mentioned how this insurance is in part a device for marketing. However the company has signed up 100 customers in the last 6 months for the TruSecure service. The company now is discussing network risk and liability coverage with a Major U.S insurance companies who may in the future offer coverage with higher limits.
Currently the TruSecure service starts at $40,000 a year and this pays for the complete service. This service is aimed to protect an organization’s network from outside penetration. The service involves scanning for vulnerabilities and bringing the networks up to security standards. TruSecure will also conduct on-site audits, updates, alerts and periodic spot-checking.
Today Google threw one of my website homepages in the basement from #1 positioning on google for several terms. Once I experienced this I started thinking to myself some of the changes I’ve recently made. Nothing I did came to mind that could have caused this. Then I checked for php injections and found no problems there. Then I gave it some more thought and remembered how Google recently indexed that particular website’s homepage with https instead of http. After some research I found that this does in fact cause a duplicate content penalty.
This is what I did to hopefully fix this issue. I’ll follow up on the status within 24-48 hours.
Review updates at the bottom of the article.
First I submitted this into my htaccess file
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$
RewriteRule ^robots\.txt$ robots_ssl.txt [L]
This little snippet I found online will serve up two versions of your
robots.txt file; an http and https version.
So the http version shows the robots.txt file you currently have.
Next you need to create a robots_ssl.txt file and upload it to your root file.
Contents of the robots_ssl.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
What this will do is block all https: urls from indexing.
No more duplicate content penalty? Did it work? Update coming soon…
Updates
Same day 4 hours Later:
Appears my rank is back but https is still showing on search engine listing. However I just checked my google webmaster tools to see if my robots.txt file was recently crawled and it appears the last download was just a couple of hours ago. Ill update this post again once I see the https come off in the search results.
Next Day
Well I clicked online today and guess what, as expected the https is gone and the rank is where it was prior to the shake up. I even moved up 2 notches on a competitive phrase (which could of been for any other reason). A good start to a tuesday morning.
Craigslist still proves itself for being a great tool for selling stuff locally. I recently posted an ad for a car alarm and received a pretty quick response. The alarm sold within 2 days of the posting date plus I received the entire asking price. People still love the convenience of buying something they can have in their hands the same day which provides a great opportunity for anyone who knows how to shop online to get great products at rock bottom prices.
The alarm I sold sells in stores for $50 + tax and online for about $30 + shipping. The alarm sat under my bed for about 6 months and then sold for $40. I didn’t make all that much as far as profit but I could of bought 3 of these alarms at this price and got free shipping which would of resulted in a higher profit.
Now the sale went pretty smoothly but you do have to take scetchy people into consideration when selling stuff on craigslist.
- Some people will make an arrangement to meet and never show up.
- Others may try to buy your product with conterfeit money.
- Some will agree on a price and come without the full amount.
- When buying, be skeptical especially with electronics.
With high risks there could be hefty rewards but most things that sound too good to be true usually are. Making profits on craigslist by buying items online and selling them locally are realistic. It takes work and research. Test a few products and see which one works the best. You’ll find some products to fly off the shelf while others don’t even get a bite.
Well I opened my website this evening and said to myself, egh as I cringed at all of the gif offer images popping up along the right side. Is this what I’ve come to? There were a few online services I personally use from which I had set up affiliate accounts. I enjoyed these services and the idea of making a few extra bucks here and there but to be honest, the sidebar was getting to be just a little too much. So on that token I decided to take everything off except a single adsense bar along the sidebar. I may even take that one down a notch from a large vertical adsense to a smaller block.
After making the changes I now feel a little more comfortable about the over all presence of this page and am looking forward to writing more articles about marketing, seo and online business. The overall design is also a bit out-dated (maybe an understatement).
At some point I will probably hold a template design contest for some type cash gift. If this is something you would be interested please leave a comment about your interest and what the prize should be. If I get enough people interested, I’ll definitely set the contest up.
Halfway through the week!
Dec 09
9
Develop your Marketing Plan
The plan of marketing is a tool for us to determine the steps we need to take and the methodologies and time to reach some specific objectives.
The marketing plan is our tool that permits us to design our road to success. Every business designs strategic plans for the achievement of their objectives and goals. These plans can have short, medium and long time limits.
First I would like to start by discussing some information regarding Google.com
As of March 31, 2009 Google has approximately 19,786 full-time employees. Many of these employees being some of the best programmers in the World. I personally feel Google has over a million employees from which 19,786 are paid. Anytime one webmaster rats out another, they’re in a way working for Google. Google runs thousands of servers worldwide and processes millions of search requests each day and about 1 petabyte of user-generated data every hour.
Predict Tomorrow’s Google Guidelines
It’s a living document. Are you currently breaking Google’s Guidelenes? Will strategies today break Google’s guidelines tomorrow? Google guidelines will continue changing as the company continues pushing forward with the goals they have set.
The are a number of important factors that come into play when blogging. The following list provides a few things to keep in mind when posting articles to your blog.
- Start your article off with an interesting title such as 30 better, 5 Cool tricks, etc… Doing this will help increase CTR (click through rate) and at the same time help maintain the Reader’s interest.
- Add informative links within the posts that may help the reader understand the article better. Many tend to post links to the Wikipedia for definitions.
- Do you want to be seen as a regular blogger or the topic expert. Be the topic expert when posting each Article. Provide ideas that are new and fresh to your readers; that are not provided elsewhere. (An incentive to come back.)
- Share real experiences. People love to learn from experiences, not just prediction.
- Add value by including surveys, photos, statistical data. A little reseach never hurts anybody. The more reseach you put into an article, the more authority it will gain. Are you willing to put in more time than your competitor would?
- It’s important to take the time and respond to any comments or emails sent to you from your readers. Your readers questions and comments should be your #1 priority. They are the reason why you blog. Your quick response will also encourage your readers to revisit and subscribe to your RSS Feed. Comments in a blog may make up half of the article in some cases.
- Keep an eye on grammar. Worpress and other blog platforms will highlight errors for you. Too many errors can make you look not so cool. Math has always been my strong point, therefore writing has never been. Because of this, I usually read my articles several times before posting.
- If you’re new to blogging, DON’T GIVE UP! So many people start blogs only to quit a month later. A blog needs time to grow and blossom. Those who have the most success post compelling articles daily and never quit. This is why it’s important to blog about something that will interest you for the long haul.
Also read Quality before SEO
London Get some SEO Knowledge. Workshops will be presented in London by Search Engine Strategies, a well known leader in online marketing and seo. SEO sessions will be held in the mornings from 8am to 12pm and in the afternoons from 1:00pm to 5:00pm
There will also be an introduction to mobile marketing during the morning session. This workshop will be presented to you by Cindy Krum of Rank Mobile. This will be the session from 8am to 12pm
During the afternoon sessions, SEO and Social Media will be the focus of conversation led by Lee Odden from TopRank Online Marketing. Once again this will be held from 1:00pm to 5:00pm
These sessions will be held on October 26, 2009. For more information visit searchenginestrategies.com
About Search Engine Strategies
Incisive Media’s Search Engine Strategies is a leading global conference and training series focused on search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Other Incisive resources for interactive marketers include the ClickZ network for digital marketing news, information, commentary, advice, opinion and research and Search Engine Watch which provides news and information about search, analysis of the search engine industry and tools for improving search marketing effectiveness.
I would like to open this blog up to any Internet Marketeting and SEO saavy individuals who would like to contribute / write for us / guest post for seinternetmarketing.com.
