Dress for success
Things to do every day or regularly.
Turn the computer on and take care of day-to-day business. Check to make sure your Internet access still works and all computer-related equipment is operating fine.
Perform any financial tasks that are checking of major stats.
Learn a little each day in your niches and in the Internet marketing scene, since your market online and this business changes not every day but every hour.
Check in-coming email:
Delete junk mail immediately.
Log all site issues, stats, orders & other items as needed.
Keep only the emails that need replies. Then quickly reply to each one or make a note to reply later when time allows.
Misc – Don’t let this pile up! Make a ‘Misc.’ file, if necessary, and purge all your monthly emails into it as a backup.
Plan a Success story
Market, market, market! This is a must for your business to survive. So spend time on this. There is no short cut for success and there is nothing called instant money. You have to work hard according to the marketing strategies you have built or learn from the success story of the successful online marketer whom you think has worked hard for his success with his marketing strategies and marketing ideas.
For help, head to the Small Business Administration for helpful tips at SBA.gov, online articles about the latest internet marketing techniques that work for affiliate marketing, and marketing books at the public library.
What Not to Do With Your Website design
There are numerous mistakes you can make when first setting up a website especially if it’s a free website with free hosting, free domain, free template. All too often, they’re easy to overlook, but any one of these can quickly and immediately lose you both customers and traffic. Most importantly your reputation which might make you lose you confidence in the online business.
Counters
Don’t use a visitor counter. They can backfire easily, especially if they display low numbers and a visitor decides they do not trust your product due to a low audience. If you absolutely must have a counter on your website, use an invisible one that visitors cannot see. Better yet, sign up for a good statistics program. Google offers basic services for free.
Construction Signs
Don’t put up construction signs on your website. If you are not ready to share your website with the world, leave it offline. It should be live as soon as you activate it with some form of content that will entice visitors. Anything less will only create permanent non-visitors.
Keep it Simple
Don’t over-utilize snazzy-looking features. They are distracting and largely a waste of space. You want your visitors to see your products and your message, not your cool widgets. Not only that, but the heavier technology can slow down sites on older computers and there’s nothing less enticing to a visitor than a slow, unresponsive website.
Update Dates and Times
Don’t leave any old, outdated copyright notices or dates on your page. The first thing anyone looks for on a website is relevance and the best way to display relevance is through constant updates. If it appears you do not take the time to update and work on your site, then no one will care to look at it.
Keep it Short
Don’t get too wordy. People have short attention spans, especially online where they’re likely surfing during work or on a short break. You want to offer short, single-topic sentences and paragraphs that they can digest quickly. If you do it right, they’ll keep reading. Use bullet points and headlines as most people merely scan online copy and you want them to at least see the most important parts of your page.
Proper Grammar
The most obnoxious thing anyone can do when writing a website is not to take the time to write it properly. Poor grammar misspelled words and passive verbs are a killer. Using active sentences not only makes you appear more confident in what you’re saying, it spices up your copy. And nothing kills copy quicker than poor grammar.
Sell Your Product
Don’t merely show information. Throw out the best details you can muster about your product. What does it do well? Why do your visitors need you or your product more than anyone else’s. Be proactive and sell yourself. Finish with a call to action that gives your readers a clear directive to contact you, purchase something, or return at a later time.
Keep At It
These are all great tips that will help to create a productive, successful website, but you have to keep with it as well. Don’t give up or stop as soon as you website is built and no on visits. Be active and attract visitors with fresh content, new articles, and active link building.
Website Tips
Putting Together Good Content
Building a decent website is the key to having an impact on the Internet. It’s all about how you present yourself. Before you can hope for return visitors and customers, you must give them a good reason to return and that means offering a good website with quality content. There are dozens of good tips to putting a quality website together. It’s only a matter of knowing where to start.
The most important thing you can do though right off the bat is to offer quality content. No matter what the site looks like or how well it shows up in search engines, you need quality content to offer your visitors.
Choosing a Topic
You should have a topic that you know something about or can easily become well versed in. Don’t pick a topic that bores you and you know little about or it will be apparent to your visitors in your content, which will only bore them and reveal that you know nothing about it. You’ll see dozens of websites if you search quickly on google that are slapped together overnight and filled with horrible content, optimized for the use of Adsense. Don’t let that happen to your site.
Updating
You must have constant updates in your content as well. If you choose a boring topic, you’ll be unwilling to constantly update that content, and because search engines are hungry for new content on a near-daily basis to keep you at the top of their listings, you need to be willing to update. The key is to find a good niche online that very few people have much to say about and that you will be interested in. this allows for constant updates without duplicating content and a fun, content-rich site.
Quality Content
Write quality content. Do not slap together a quick 300 words every day without proofreading and spell-checking it. It’s important to present quality along with your informed, interesting opinions. This means taking a little bit of time writing it and checking your facts. You want your site to appear professional and to read naturally, not keyword optimized. If you have trouble with writing, you can always consider hiring a professional.
Finding Content
You do not always have to write your own content either. There are dozens of websites that offer thousands of prewritten articles for free usage with a byline attached. These are perfect ways to attach interesting new content on a daily basis to your website that will continue to draw visitors and keep you in the search engine ranks. Just remember, while that free content is a great way to get your site started, the only original content will help in getting you higher search engine rankings.
It’s no surprise that quality content is the key to running a successful website. It’s a hands-down the necessity for nearly any new webmaster just getting started. You just need to know where to start.
The Importance of Tag Titles and Descriptions
When optimizing your site for search engine statistics, one of the most important things you used to be able to do is offer a good title tag. Recently, search engines have begun to look beyond this simple headline to determine what your site is about and index it accordingly, but it can still go a long way toward putting yourself in a good position if you create good title tags with these simple tips:
Length
Google will take only the first 65 characters of any title tag to display. Any more than that and you’re wasting time and space. Be efficient and succinct right off the bat. Of course, you want to optimize your title tag as well for the best results, so you’re walking a very fine line here. The difference between optimization and intelligibility is not quite as thin. The best way to get the results you’re looking for might be to simply stuff keywords.
Making Sense
But, stuffing keywords doesn’t always make sense either. If you write everything out without a sense of what your site is actually about save the word “dog collar” repeated four times, you’ll get fewer visitors. You’re writing this for multiple audiences – the search engine algorithm as well as your visitors. Find the right balance.
Capitalization
Make this a headline of sorts. You should have every word that is of any importance, or just simply every word capitalized to grab attention. More or less all copywriting is better and more effective if you use this technique and hey if newspapers have been doing it for centuries, why not you as well? This is an important step you can take in separating your text from others; however, make sure not to capitalize every letter in your title. It looks juvenile and angry.
Unique Key Words for Every Page
It might be easier to just use a setlist of keywords and title tags for each page of your site, but by separating them out and utilizing numerous styles and phrases throughout your website, you can further enhance your search results. Otherwise, you’ll likely never see any of the subpages of your website ranking in the search engines. By optimizing every page individually, you can receive a better chance of each individual page being successful.
Company Names in Tag Titles
Don’t do this. It’s just a bad idea. All you do by adding your company name to a tag title or headline is waste space in a search engine. The only way this helps you is if someone searches for your company name directly, in which case they’ll likely find your site anyways. You want to use keywords that attract audiences looking for products like yours. If they are already looking for your product, you probably don’t need to optimize.
Optimizing your tag titles is a key step in providing the best and most efficient description of your website to both the search engines and potential visitors. Doing it correctly is important or you’ll likely find that no one visits your site or those that do, do it for the wrong reason.
Dos and Don’ts of Link Building
Way back when the Internet first evolved, link building was not nearly as important as it is today. With primitive search engine technology and limited access to incoming and outgoing links, the only purpose of building links and their popularity was in getting traffic from someone else’s sight. As the internet evolved though and search engines started ranking sites and links on the quantity and most importantly quality of incoming and outgoing links, link building’s importance surged.
Once upon a time, link building was something a site owner or webmaster would work on after all of the tedious work of actually building a site was done. It was an individual prospect. However, today it has become one of the leading industries on the internet, with millions in cash flow.
So what do the search engines look for that there are so many people making a living off of link building? It’s in the algorithms really. Search engines use complicated algorithms that break down the value and importance of each link and its authenticity. The more positive, organic links you have to your site, the more endorsements you’ve wrangled from the web community, something that search engines absolutely love.
Unfortunately for site owners, this organic link building is a very time consuming, tedious prospect and isn’t nearly as efficient as it needs to be. So there are multiple other methods that people have developed overtime to get the links they need. This can be a dangerous proposition though as the last thing you want is for a search engine to tag you as a malicious link builder. Fooling a search engine is tricky, so keep these in mind when building a link creation strategy:
Link Buying
Google doesn’t like this. The whole idea of their algorithm is that they are substituting mechanical processes of weeding through millions of websites for human opinion. Buying that opinion is considered cheating and it’s possible to not get credit for these types of links. This doesn’t hurt you in any way other than wasting your time. However, if you offer a link back to these link farming sites, you’ll likely find yourself in Google’s timeout, possibly losing your search engine index altogether.
Presentation
The whole point of search engine algorithms is to pick apart sites as a person would. For that reason, they attempt to decide if your links are user friendly and placed in easily reached places. Do not separate links to a links only page and keep them near prominent sections of your site. Don’t load everything with keywords either; it needs to appear genuine or you’ll lose your indexing.
To be Successful
You need to run your site as a casual, natural looking site. The search engines get smarter every day and if you farm or buy links and stuff keywords in them, you’ll likely risk losing whatever good you might have had or even losing your place in the search engines altogether. Don’t fall for the trap of ease over substance and you’ll be building great links in no time.