Web Marketing Tools

Small Business SEO

acemarketer — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 21:08:45 +0000

This article assumes that you for your small business want to create some brand loyalty and customer retention and generally be a good net citizen. My advice would be somewhat different if you were just trying to maximize your visits with no regard to the visitors experience. Since I don't like sites like that I'm not writing for you. (you can leave now) Branding is important for offline small businesses as well as viable online businesses.

Keep in mind that the search engines generally only care about individual pages not entire sites so the tips in this article are for optimizing a single page of a site. This is especially important in the link building section where those tips must be followed for each PAGE you're trying to optimize. This is why it's generally a good idea to not worry very much about optimizing every page of your site, but rather focus on optimizing a few pages very well.

Search Term Research and Targeting

Before you implement one change on your site you need to do the research to find out what keywords you want your pages to show up for. This is not as simple as it may appear. If you're selling toasters then of course you are thinking about the word toasters, but is that really the best word? Are there other, better words people use when they are looking to purchase a toaster? Perhaps they type in "kitchen appliances" or "4 slot toaster" or "2 slot toaster" or "white toaster" or "black toaster".

If you can determine that "white toaster" is more likely to be someone looking for a toaster than just "toaster" you are in very good shape. That means you're going to have greater conversions (people purchasing your product) than if you optimize for the word "toaster". Also, being a phrase instead of a single word makes it more likely that you can win a higher spot in the search engines.

A Google search for toasters returns 4.5 million pages, while white toasters returns just 725 thousand. That doesn't mean it's easy to rank high for white toasters, if you do the search you'll see there is competition there, but it does mean you have a better chance at ranking high. And if in fact people searching on white toasters purchase more often then you'll be making better use of your time by optimizing for white toaster rather than trying to climb past 4.5 million other pages for "toaster".

Here are some ideas on where and how to find the right keywords:

1. Check your competition. See what words they seem to emphasize. You probably want to compete on those words as well. Use SEMRush.com which is a new tool for "Search Engine Marketing" with a US database 25 000 000 keywords. Learn everything about your competitors including how much they spend on paid ads on the internet with this service.

2. Make sure you understand how your customers talk about a product. Many times the words you use in house are not what an actual customer would call something. Do interviews with your customers, talk to your support staff about words they commonly hear, and view online forums and weblogs in your industry.

3. Understand your customers phases during the buying cycle. Most customers go through 3 phases during their product search. Customers tend to use different types of search language during each phase.

Learning – Here they are finding out what kind of product they need (solutions for X, problems with X, why does X)
Shopping - They know what they want and are now looking for the product with specific features they need (goes 50mph, white toaster, dries in 10 minutes)
Buying - They are ready to purchase (part 8732662, Panasonic dvd-7654, Maui golf resort)

Make sure you understand the different phases and the words people use when they are in each phase. Many companies focus their SEO efforts on the buying phase because those words are easy to define. If you can capture search engine traffic from the learning phase that could give you a significant advantage.

4. There are a number of keyword tools out there. NicheBot is one where you can enter your keyword and it will show alternate queries as well as how each of these rank in Google. Another nice free resource is the search engine Teoma. Do a search and you'll see in the right hand column a box called "refine". The refine box shows related keywords to the search you entered.

5. In the world of "Pay For" keyword research there are a bunch of players. The one that has been around the longest is Wordtracker. It's not too expensive and they have nice options like one day of access for a few dollars. If you are only doing research on a single product this may be sufficient, but remember you'll need to do it every few months to keep up with changing trends.

6. Once you have your keywords you'll need to track your progress. You probably want to purchase a tool to help you with this. If you want to track the big 3 search engines on 10 different keywords and you want to see all your links that appear on the first 3 pages, that's 90 pages you'll need to check. You don't want to do that by hand on a regular basis. A few tools which get good recommendations are linked below and a bunch of others can be found on DWOZ.

Getting Started

1. You're not fooling anyone
Don't think that there are any quick fixes to your search positions. If you're doing something that feels shady then it probably is and the search engines will probably figure it out sooner or later and your ranking will take a severe drop. There are plenty of tried and true methods for getting a good search engine position so stick with them. They work now and will work in the future and most of the time they have the wonderful side benefit that your visitors actually prefer them as well!

2. Your target audience should drive all your decisions
The main thing to be aware of when optimizing your pages is to never forget about your audience. Sure putting the words "car parts" on your page 100 times might help your search position but you're probably not going to get alot of sales. Remember that humans read your pages and buy your products not search robots. If your pages sound bad people will leave your site.

Read the page out loud to yourself and a coworker. Does is sound bad? Would you click the back button if you found this page via a search engine? I'll talk about some strategies for effective web writing later on.

3. Technical components and search engine optimization:

The title tag should have 4-8 words in it. Words should include keywords your optimizing for on that page. Don't forget that the title needs to be HUMAN FRIENDLY. When your page makes it to #3 on Google you don't want your link to look like this: "car parts, parts for cars, honda car parts, toyota car parts, free car parts, cheap car parts". Humans don't like clicking on links like that because we're becoming trained not to. Try "Great prices on car parts for foreign cars" or "Car parts for foreign cars" or "Honda and toyota car parts" (remember search engines don't buy car parts)

Meta tags don't have too much use but some engines use the Description tag so you should have one. Make it a nice human readable paragraph that highlights the keywords you are trying to optimize for on that page.

XHTML, CSS, and the like: don't worry about them from an SEO perspective. The engines are very good at finding your content. In fact in some cases overusing these may hurt your ranking, but in general if you do the right thing and don't use CSS to create invisible text on the page, etc then you should be fine.

Order is important, the search engine knows what text is higher up on the page and weights that more heavily. Keep your most important keywords "above the fold". This is important both for search engines and users!
This also means that you have to be careful about your source code ordering. If you have a very long left hand column or top navigation in terms of the number of bytes of code then the search engine will think these elements are more important than your main content.
URLs:
Dynamic website are not penalized! It's ok to have a ? in your URL and generally 2-3 parameters after are fine (?id=74&cat=97). You should, however, avoid having more than that or the search engine spider may abort the crawl.

Having them doesn't hurt your optimization, but it also doesn't help. URLs with keywords in the page names and directories do help your results. Use dashes (-) as separators instead of (_), since they are generally preferred. Also use dashes where necessary to make sure the search engine understands your words. ex: mensextremeskiing.html vs mens-extreme-skiing.html

There are no penalties for deep directory structures as long as the crawler can find everything.
Don't misuse alt/title attributes in image and anchor tags. If the image is clickable then the alt attribute can help you slightly, but don't fill it with keywords. Simply describe the image or navigational element. That is the purpose of the alt and title attributes. Also visitors using a reading browser don't want to hear a paragraph of text for each image.

Writing for Search Engines

Writing for search engines is a tricky proposition. You need to balance some very conflicting needs. The main content (body) of your page is the primary source of keywords for search engines. So you need to highlight your keywords while not sounding like an idiot! Remember, humans need to read and understand what you're trying to sell them. If you get to a top position but everyone clicks the back button once they land on your page then you're not going to sell anything.

There are a few tips that can help you with your SEO writing. First, remember that this doesn't necessarily apply to every page of your site. Some pages simply don't lend themselves to search engine optimization and that's OK. When you're getting ready to optimize your site you need to pick a subset of the pages to focus your optimization efforts on.

Now some tips:

Search engines can only read actual text. So don't ever put the body content of your page or important keywords in images because search engines can't read images.
Try to get about 250 words on pages you're trying to optimize. This doesn't have to be all in the main body. Perhaps you have a table with some information and a right side column with more text. The 250 word count is for all the readable content. More is generally better.
The number of times a keyword appears on the page is important (keyword density), but don't keyword bomb your pages. Here's an example of a site with too many keywords in the content. Can you guess the phrase? (click to zoom)

The engines are getting better a picking this out and of course it's totally useless for humans. There is no information in there.

To get a good keyword density without sounding silly try having opening and closing paragraphs on your pages which use the keyword, but limit it's use in the middle paragraphs.
Try and target a maximum of 2-3 keyword phrases per page. Don't forget that by targeting a phrase you are inherently targeting the individual words as well.
Get rid of those marketing words, forget your thesaurus. So don't use "retreat" when "vacation" will do. People generally search how they talk, if you're using words people don't say then they probably don't search on them either.
Try and use the variations of a keyword like plurals and past tense

Link Building

Most of you are probably familiar with Google Pagerank. This is what Google calls their algorithm for determining a pages relevancy and a major factor in this is how many external links point to your webpage AND how relevant those sites that point to you are. This last point is extremely important. Getting a bunch of links from any old domain isn't going to help you very much. You need to focus on building a collection of inbound links from sites which are relevant to your topic. This is important for all the search engines not just Google.

So how do you get people to link to your page? Well first scroll back up and read writing for search engines again …………. OK good. Writing good content that people want to link to is key. If you're only stuffing your pages with keywords then humans that do the linking aren't going to link to you. This is by far the easiest way of getting links because it will happen without any additional work on your part.

Now once you have good content you can start to go looking for links. Be smart! Don't waste your time sending thousands of emails to every site you can find asking for links. In fact you want to avoid links from sites which aren't relevant to yours. If you sell FTP software then having links to your site from real estate agents isn't going to help you and it may even hurt your ranking.

A good strategy is to do searches on your keywords and see what comes up in the first 20-30 spots. Those are the sites you should be contacting about links since those are the sites that the search engines consider the most relevant. A link back from a few of them is worth more than a hundred from non relevant sites.

Obviously your competitors won't link back to you so look for informational sites, directories, and weblogs in the results which may be willing to link to you. It may also be worth purchasing a link from these top ranking sites, but don't pay too much since results are far from guaranteed. Also be sure if you purchase a link that they directly link to you and don't put your link through some type of redirection script which they use to track click through. That will hurt or potentially eliminate any value the link has in terms of search engine optimization.

A note on inbound links. The more links a page has that link out to other websites the less each link is "worth" in terms of SEO. If you're thinking about purchasing a link for SEO purposes, make sure it's not on a page with lots of other links because they may not help you very much. Sorry I can't define "lots" because it's highly dependant on the individual page

When you're asking for links make sure that you have actually have looked over the site and send a unique message to the webmaster. Generic messages get deleted instantly. Remember these sites are looking for good content for their visitors. If you have an appropriate site for their visitors they should want to link to you so take the time to do things right.

Schedule time to look at sites linking to you every month. Remember links get removed and sites taken down all the time so keeping track of who's linking to you and if they've gone away is important information to know.

Links for Linkings Sake

This section has nothing to do with search engine optimization so skip it if you don't like good advice

OK, when you're thinking about building your link network don't forget about the fact that links on good sites actually drive visitors to your site all on their own. It's important to have links on appropriate community sites, information sites, etc because links on those sites drive qualified visitors to you. Forget about SEO! They are valuable all on their own.

So when you're out looking for sites to link to you and if you know there is an important site but it's ranked 1000 on Google you may still want to ask them for a link because they may be reaching people who are very important to you even though they may not greatly increase your search rank. Remember you need to be where your customers are and sometimes that's not in the first 2 pages of Google search results.

Also some sites like association sites may be password protected or personalized. These sites may not be in Google at all but having a link in them could be very good for your business.

It's Not Entirely About Google

Don't forget about the other search engines. Google (and AOL which they power) are about 44% of the current search market, but that means 56% of all searches are done somewhere else. Don't leave half your customers on the table. Check your positions in the other engines. Yahoo and Bing are the most important with Ask a distant 4th.

Conclusion
Don't forget to test. The ideas above work "most" of the time for "most" of the people. Constantly tracking the performance of your optimized pages is key to success so make sure you budget your time wisely.

Excerpts taken from Ian Landsman's article. He runs a helpdesk software firm

How To Bulk Unfollow On Twitter

acemarketer — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:02:28 +0000

You can use ManageFlitter for fast and easy unfollowing on Twitter, but is a catch: although it lists all your followers in pages of 100 with checkboxes, but without a "Select All" option.

Twitter put their foot down on "Mass Unfollowing" in April, 2010. All twitter supplemental applications either had to remove "Bulk Unfollow" options or the "Select All" option to continue to operate within Twitter’s updated Terms of Service.

The "select all" function is just a JavaScript call and happens in your browser, so all one has to do is find a plugin/add-on for the browser to allow the "select all" function.

An add-on is available for FireFox 3.0 called Check All but it doesn’t work in FireFox 3.6. This does have another version out that is supposed to work for Firefox 1.5-3.6 Check All 0.2.3

Another Mozilla add-on is CHECKFOX that also enables quick check/uncheck of checkboxes, and works in Mozilla Firefox 3.6. You have to select a text area, encompassing the check boxes you want, and then right-click the text area and click on "check" in the context menu. It'll then check any boxes within that selected area. It's a little tough, because the text isn't always uniform or in the same field (for instance tables), and the checkboxes do not highlight – making it hard to tell if you have the correct boxes selected. Give either of them a try.

Steps To Bulk Unfollow On Twitter:

Download Check All 0.2.3 or CHECKFOX
Next go to ManageFlitter and login to your Twitter account.
Click “Show All” and you’ll be presented with a list of your followers in pages of 100 with a checkbox next to each and an Unfollow button on the left.
Hit Ctrl+A for "select all",
Riight click on a highlighted area and you’ll see the new plugin option “Check All Selected Checkboxes”,
Click Unfollow,
Click Next, Ctrl+A, Right Click, Select All Checkboxes, Unfollow.

Internet Marketing Resources – A Rolodex

acemarketer — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:54:23 +0000

Some of these web sites are advertising platforms and others are simply resources to help you make more money – a Rolodex

Feel free to leave any internet marketing web sites, tools or resources you feel will help everyone in the comments section. Copy/paste these links. there are no affiliate links here.

Contextual Networks

Google Adsense http://adsense.google.com

Valueclick http://www.valueclick.com

Kontera http://www.kontera.com

Pulse360 http://www.pulse360.com

Adbrite http://www.adbrite.com

Chikita http://chitika.com

Clicksor http://www.clicksor.com

Contextweb http://www.contextweb.com

Bidclix http://www.bidclix.com

Bidvertiser http://www.bidvertiser.com

RevenuePilot http://www.revenuepilot.com

PPC Ad Platforms

Google Adwords http://adwords.google.com

Yahoo Search Marketing http://advertising.yahoo.com/smallbusiness/ysm

MSN Adcenter http://advertising.yahoo.com/smallbusiness/ysm

Looksmart http://www.looksmart.com

Ask.com http://www.ask.com

7Search http://www.7search.com

Clicksor http://www.clicksor.com

Findit-Quick http://www.findit-quick.com

Pulse360 http://www.pulse360.com

Advertise.com http://www.advertise.com

Ad Sonar http://www.adsonar.com

AdKnowledge http://www.adknowledge.com

Miva http://www.miva.com

Validclick http://www.validclick.com

Marchex http://www.marchex.com

AdMarketplace http://www.admarketplace.com

PPC Blogs

Google Adwords Blog http://adwords.blogspot.com

Yahoo Search Marketing Blog http://www.ysmblog.com

MSN Adcenter Blog http://community.microsoftadvertising.com/blogs/advertiser

7Search Blog http://blog.7search.com/blogs/7search

Social Media Ad Platforms

MySpace Ads https://www.myads.com

FacebookAds http://www.facebook.com/advertising

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/directads/start

Twitter.com http://www.twitter.com

Sponsored Tweets http://sponsoredtweets.com

CPM Ad Platforms

BuySellAds.com http://www.buysellads.com

PlentyOfFish http://ads.pof.com

ValueClick.com http://www.valueclick.com

Casale Media http://www.casalemedia.com

CPX Interactive http://www.cpxinteractive.com/advertisers

Burst Media http://www.burstmedia.com

Advertising.com http://www.advertising.com

Traffiq http://www.traffiq.com

Adtegrity http://www.adtegrity.com

TribalFusion http://www.tribalfusion.com

Double Click http://www.doubleclick.com

Adoori http://www.adoori.com

Yield Build https://yieldbuild.com

CPMStar http://cpmstar.com

Adsdaq http://adsdaq.com

Adroll http://www.adroll.com

Yahoo Adready http://www.adready.com

MegaClick http://www.megaclick.com

PPV Ad Networks

Media Traffic http://www.mediatraffic.com

Trafficvance http://www.trafficvance.com

DirectCPV http://www.directcpv.com

Lead Impact http://www.leadimpact.com

Adon Network http://www.adonnetwork.com

Linksador http://www.linksador.com

Clicksor http://www.clicksor.com

CPA Networks

NeverblueAds http://www.neverblue.com

Affiliate.com http://www.affiliate.com

Inuvo http://www.inuvo.com

Revenueloop http://www.revenueloop.com

CX Digital http://www.cxdigital.com

MonetizeIt http://www.monetizeit.com

GetAds http://www.getads.com

Hydramedia http://www.hydramedia.com

MaxBounty http://www.maxbounty.com

Azoogle http://www.azoogle.com

Flux Ads http://www.fluxads.com

Rextopia.com http://www.rextopia.com

Offerfusion http://www.offerfusion.com

Adfish http://www.adfish.com

Mundo Media http://www.mundomedia.com

Web Jam Ads http://www.webjamads.com

Ad Valient http://www.advalient.com

Convert2Media http://www.convert2media.com

7Reach.com http://www.7reach.com

Clickbooth http://www.clickbooth.com

Market Leverage http://www.marketleverage.com

yMultimedia http://www.ymultimedia.com

Copeac http://www.copeac.com

Offerweb http://offerweb.com

FYCDirect http://www.fycdirect.com

ROIRocket http://www.roirocket.com

DirectLeads http://directleads.com

CPA Tools

Offervault http://www.offervault.com

Affiliate Paying http://www.affiliatepaying.com

Keyword Extend http://www.keywordextend.com

Internet Marketing Blogs

Gauher Chaudhry http://www.gauherchaudhry.com

John Chow http://www.johnchow.com

Shoemoney http://www.shoemoney.com

Jonathan Volk http://www.jonathanvolk.com

Cash Tactics http://cashtactics.net

Pro Blogger http://www.problogger.net

Ad Hustler http://www.adhustler.com

Eric's Tips http://www.ericstips.com

CPS Networks

Commission Junction http://www.cj.com

Linkshare http://www.linkshare.com

PayDotCom http://www.paydotcom.com

Clickbank http://www.clickbank.com

ShareASale http://www.shareasale.com

ClixGalore http://www.clixgalore.com

Keyword Spy Tools

Keywordspy http://www.keywordspy.com

SEMrush http://www.semrush.com

Spyfu http://www.spyfu.com

PPC Bully http://www.ppcbully.com

KeyCompete https://yieldbuild.com

Compete http://compete.com

Merchant Processing

2Checkout http://www.2checkout.com

PayPal http://www.paypal.com

Authorize.net http://www.authorize.com

Charge.com http://www.charge.com

RBS Worldpay http://www.rbsworldpay.com

CCNow http://www.ccnow.com

Propay https://epay.propay.com

iPayDNA http://www.ipaydna.biz

AlertPay https://www.alertpay.com

TrialPay http://www.trialpay.com

Internet Secure http://www.internetsecure.com

MerchantSeek http://www.merchantseek.com

PayByWeb http://www.paybyweb.com

List Servers & Autoresponders

Aweber http://www.aweber.com

Getresponse http://www.getresponse.com

iContact http://www.icontact.com

Stream Send https://www.streamsend.com

1AutomationWiz http://www.1automationwiz.com

Send Free http://www.sendfree.com

Free Follow Up http://www.freefollowup.com

Supersponders http://www.supersponders.com

Topica http://www.topica.com

Shopping Carts

1ShoppingCart http://www.1shoppingcart.com

3D Cart http://www.3dcart.com/

Delavo http://www.delavo.com

InfusionSoft http://www.infusionsoft.com

Secure Net Shop http://www.securenetshop.com

X-Cart http://www.x-cart.com

Designcart http://designcart.com

Clickbank http://www.clickbank.com

Romancart http://www.romancart.com

Search Engines

Google http://www.google.com

Bing http://www.bing.com

Yahoo http://www.yahoo.com

Ask http://www.ask.com

Excite http://www.excite.com

Dogpile http://www.dogpile.com

Altavista.com http://www.altavista.com

Webcrawler http://www.webcrawler.com

Cuil http://www.cuil.com

MetaCrawler http://www.metacrawler.com

Free Traffic Exchanges

TrafficSwarm http://www.trafficswarm.com

Trafficg http://www.trafficg.com

Easy Hits 4 U http://www.easyhits4u.com

Blog Traffic Exchange http://www.blogtrafficexchange.com

ProClickExchange http://www.proclickexchange.com

Classified Ads Sites

Kijiji.com http://www.kijiji.com

Craigslist.com http://www.craigslist.org

USFreeAds http://www.usfreeads.com

Classifieds For Free http://www.classifiedsforfree.com

Classified Ads http://www.classifiedads.com

Its My Market http://www.itsmymarket.com

Skepter http://www.skepter.com

eBay Classifieds http://www.ebayclassifieds.com

Penny Saver http://www.pennysaverusa.com

Backpage http://www.backpage.com

Marketing Forums

Warrior Forum http://www.warriorforum.com

Wicked Fire http://www.wickedfire.com

Digital Point http://forums.digitalpoint.com

5 Star Affiliate http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5staraffiliateprograms.com

The IM Forum http://www.theimforum.com

IM4Newbies http://www.im4newbies.com/forum

Webmaster World http://www.webmasterworld.com

Website Analytics

Statscounter http://www.statscounter.com

Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics

OneStat http://www.google.com/analytics

Yahoo Web Analytics http://web.analytics.yahoo.com

eWebAnalytics http://www.ewebanalytics.com

Clip Art & Images

ClipArt.com http://www.clipart.com

Classroom Clipart http://classroomclipart.com

1 Clipart http://www.1clipart.com

Dreams Time http://www.dreamstime.com

Hassle Free Clipart http://www.hasslefreeclipart.com

AAA Clipart http://www.aaaclipart.com

Getty Images http://www.gettyimages.com/creativeimages/royaltyfree

Fotosearch http://www.fotosearch.com

Free Software Downloads

Download.com http://www.download.com

Download 3000 http://www.download3000.com

Freeware Files http://www.freewarefiles.com

File Hippo http://www.filehippo.com

Tucows http://www.tucows.com

Brothersoft http://www.brothersoft.com

Free Download Center http://www.freedownloadscenter.com

123 Free Download http://www.123-free-download.com

Top Download http://www.topdownloads.net

Soft32 http://www.soft32.com

Free Email

Gmail http://www.gmail.com

Yahoo Mail http://mail.yahoo.com

Hotmail http://www.hotmail.com

Mail.com http://www.mail.com

Inbox http://www.inbox.com

AOL Mail http://webmail.aol.com

Hushmail http://www.hushmail.com

Email Account http://www.emailaccount.com

Internet Marketing News

IM Newswatch http://imnewswatch.com

Marketing Pilgram http://www.marketingpilgrim.com

MarketingNewz http://www.marketingnewz.com

Banner Rotators & Builders

OpenX http://www.openx.org

Ad Butler http://www.adbutler.com

Image Ad Builder http://www.mattharward.com/image-ad-builder

Google Builder http://www.google.com/adwords/displayadbuilder

Ad Text/Image Generator http://www.adtextgenerator.com

Keyword Rockstar http://www.keywordrockstar.com

Mobile Ad Networks

MobPartner.com http://www.mobpartner.com

SponsorMob.com http://www.sponsormob.com

Offermobi.com http://www.offermobi.com

Mobile PPC Networks

inMobi.com http://www.inmobi.com

Admob.com http://www.admob.com

Quattro Wireless http://www.quattrowireless.com

Decktrade https://www.decktrade.com

JumpTap http://www.jumptap.com

Mojiva http://www.mojiva.com

ZestAdz http://www.zestadz.com

Mobile Solutions

Grasshopper http://www.grasshopper.com

Toll Free Number http://www.tollfreenumber.org

Keyword Research Tools

Google http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Good Keywords http://www.goodkeywords.com

Traffic Travis http://www.traffictravis.com

SEO Book http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook

Wordpot http://www.wordpot.com

Word Tracker http://www.wordtracker.com

KWBrowse http://www.kwbrowse.com

Spacky http://www.spacky.com

Nichebot http://www.nichebot.com

Quintura http://www.quintura.com

Keyword Elite http://www.keywordelite.com

Auctions

eBay http://www.ebay.com

iBidFree http://www.ibidfree.com

UBid http://www.ubid.com

Overstock Auction http://auctions.overstock.com

eBid http://www.ebid.net

BidStart http://www.bidstart.com

Social Media Web Sites

Facebook http://www.facebook.com

MySpace http://www.myspace.com

Squidoo http://www.squidoo.com

Propeller http://www.propeller.com

HubPages http://www.hubpages.com

YouTube http://www.youtube.com

WordPress.com http://www.wordpress.com

Digg.com http://www.digg.com

Delicious http://www.delicious.com

Twitter http://www.twitter.com

LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com

Outsourcing

Elance http://www.elance.com

Guru http://www.guru.com

Rent A Coder http://www.rentacoder.com

Freelancer http://www.freelancer.com

oDesk http://www.odesk.com

Scriptlance http://www.scriptlance.com

iFreelance http://www.ifreelance.com

Textbroker http://www.textbroker.com

Article Directories

Ezine Articles http://www.ezinearticles.com

Go Articles http://www.goarticles.com

Articlebase http://www.articlesbase.com

Article Alley http://www.articlealley.com

Article Snatch http://www.articlesnatch.com

Helium http://www.helium.com

Article Dashboard http://www.articledashboard.com

Article City http://www.articlecity.com

Articles888 http://www.articles888.com

Article Rich http://www.articlerich.com

Domain Registrars

name.com http://www.name.com

GoDaddy http://www.godaddy.com

Namecheap http://www.namecheap.com

InterNIC http://www.internic.net

eNom http://www.enom.com

1 and 1 http://www.1and1.com

Active Domain http://www.active-domain.com

Network Solution http://www.networksolutions.com

Domain.com http://www.domain.com

Domain Register http://www.domainregister.com

Planet Domain http://www.planetdomain.com

Video Sharing Sites

YouTube http://www.youtube.com

Google Videos http://video.google.com

Yahoo Videos http://video.yahoo.com

Viddler http://www.viddler.com

Adhysteria http://www.adhysteria.com

BoFunk http://www.bofunk.com

Esnips http://www.esnips.com

GUBA http://www.guba.com

iviewtube http://www.iviewtube.com

Kewego http://www.kewega.com

LiveVideo http://www.livevideo.com

MegaVideo http://www.megavideo.com

Metacafe http://www.metacafe.com

Motionbox http://www.motionbox.com

MySpace Videos http://vids.myspace.com

Bulk Video Uploading

TubeMogul.com http://www.tubemogul.com

TrafficGeyser.com http://www.trafficgeyser.com

Survey Tools

PollDaddy.com http://www.polldaddy.com

SurveyMonkey.com http://www.surveymonkey.com

Zommerang http://www.zoomerang.com

MisterPoll http://www.misterpoll.com

Survey Gizmo http://www.surveygizmo.com

Domain Research

Alexa http://www.alexa.com

Quantcast http://www.quantcast.com

WhoIs Lookup http://www.whois.net

Nameboy.com http://www.nameboy.com

Blogging Platforms

WordPress.com http://www.wordpress.com

Blogger.com http://www.blogger.com

Weblog http://weblog.com

Weebly http://www.weebly.com

Blog.com http://www.blog.com

Thoughts http://www.thoughts.com

MyBlogSite http://www.myblogsite.com

Web Hosting

Powweb http://www.powweb.com

Liquid Web http://www.liquidweb.com

Host Gator http://www.hostgator.com

Blue Host http://www.bluehost.com

Just Host http://www.justhost.com

Godaddy http://www.godaddy.com

Fat Cow http://www.fatcow.com

Dream Host http://www.dreamhost.com

Dot Easy http://www.doteasy.com

Host Monster http://www.hostmonster.com

Host Clear http://www.hostclear.com

LunarPages http://www.lunarpages.com

HTML Editors

Coffe Cup http://www.coffeecup.com/software

Page Breeze http://www.pagebreeze.com

Dream Weaver http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver

HTML Kit http://www.htmlkit.com

Edit Plus http://www.editplus.com

Microsoft Frontpage http://www.microsoftfrontpage.com

EditLive http://editlive.com

Internet Marketing Resources

Web Marketing Today http://www.wilsonweb.com

Associate Programs http://www.associateprograms.com

Dynamic Media http://www.dynamicmedia.com

Google Insights http://www.google.com/insights/search

MSN Labs http://adlab.msn.com

Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends

SEO Book http://www.seobook.com

INC Magazine http://www.inc.com

Forbes http://www.forbes.com

Entrepreneur http://www.entrepreneur.com

TheSiteWizard http://www.thesitewizard.com

Anonymous Proxies

WorldProxy202.com http://www.worldproxy202.com

Proxify.com http://www.proxify.com

ispConf http://uk.ispconf.com

Warp Proxy http://warpproxy.com

Proxy Table http://www.proxytable.com

Audio Editors

Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net

Nero http://www.nero.com

Free Audio Editor http://www.free-audio-editor.com

Sonic Memo http://www.sonicmemo.com/sonicmemo.html

Ad Trackers

AdTrackz Gold http://www.adtrackzgold.com

Tracking202 http://www.tracking202.com

Hyper Tracker http://www.hypertracker.com

Ad Watcher http://www.adwatcher.com

Clixtrac http://www.clixtrac.com

Hits Connect http://www.hitsconnect.com

Mind Mapping Software

Free Mind http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Download

Smart Draw http://www.smartdraw.com

Xmind http://www.xmind.net

Visual Mind http://www.visual-mind.com

MindJet http://info.mindjet.com

Banner Exchanges

1800 Banners http://www.1800banners.com

Click 4 Click http://www.click4click.com

HitExchange http://www.hitx.net

ExchangeAd http://www.exchangead.com

NEO Banners http://www.neobanners.com

16 Useful WordPress Plugins

acemarketer — Thu, 06 May 2010 21:01:19 +0000

Sphider: It can provide insight as to which keywords you could target, as well as determine if your visitors are finding what they are looking for as they browse your website.

Magpie RSS Simplified: This plugin allows you to implement MagpieRSS easily within your theme. MagpieRSS is already integrated with WordPress.

WP-Menu: Customizable hook to pull Page Navigation into a theme. Page Exclusion, Inclusion, Site Map, Top Level, Secondary menus and more.

Better Feed: Plugin for WordPress blogs that allows you to enhance your RSS news feed. This plugin will allow you to add anything below each entry in your RSS feed, so you can insert any text link / banner advertisement that you wish.

Sociable: Sociable appends a list of the social bookmarking sites (ie. Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit) at the end of your posts and allows your visitors to bookmark.

FlikrRSS:This plugin allows you to easily display Flickr photos on your weblog. It supports user, public and group photostreams. The plugin is relatively easy to setup and configure via an options panel. It also has support for an image cache located on your server.

Google Sitemap Generator: If you need to generate a XML compliant sitemap for search engines, Google Sitemap Generator is the best choice (supported by most popular search engines: Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, and MSN)

Adsense Deluxe: Adsense Deluxe is probably the best Adsense plugin available on the web. Very easy to use: first you define your ad code through the Admin options, then insert a HTML snippet ("") anywhere in your post content, and it will automatically repace it with your ad code.

Admin Drop Down Menu: This is a must have plugin for every WordPress site. It saves a lot of time and clicks. It basically makes your secondary menu activate on mouseover. For example, instead of click Write, then click Page; you can mouseover Write and click Page (this will save one click and one pageload).

Gravatar 2 Plugin: It basically displays a Gravatar (globally recognized avatar) of your commentators. Automattic (WordPress creator) owns Gravatar.

WP PageNavi: WP PageNavi adds a better paging navigation to your WordPress site. It is nice if you have a lot of posts because it allows your visitors to skip from page to page.

Sideblog: One of the popular WordPress plugins, Sideblog is the best way to post short notes on the sidebar. It gives you options to define the sideblog category, how many entries to display, and whether to exclude from RSS feeds.

Intouch Ajax contact form: It works very well and filters all the spams. NO SPAM at all. It also allows you to customize the email subject, thank you messages, and adds additional form fields

WP e-Commerce: If you want to sell stuffs on your blog? You must check out this WP eCommerce plugin by Instinct. It is an Ajax powered shopping cart, very easy to use. You can setup your shop in minutes through the Admin panels.

Ajax Polls: , it adds a Ajax poll system to your site. It is very flexible with a lot of features. Layout is completely customizable via Admin panels. It also allows you to archive the polls. Highly recommended!

Cforms2: It is not just a contact from, if you need it to be it can be configured into any type of form you can think of. Do not be put off by the functions list, these are understood by the pro,and taken for granted by everyone else, upon using the plugin you will see how easy this plugin is.

Easy Way To Create Unique Feeds For Blog Categories

acemarketer — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:24:00 +0000

How To Create Unique Feeds:

If you’re using WordPress (other platforms also offer the same functionality), there is really not a whole lot of work to be done.

You may already know (or not know) that you can serve up your categorized posts simply by clicking on that category, if you offer it out as a navigation point in your site. In the case of webmarketingtools.org, all posts linked to the “Internet Marketing Resources” category can be found by serving up the URL of, “http://www.webmarketingtools.org/category/internet-marketing-resources/“.

Ready to serve up the RSS feed for that particular category? Tack on the word, “feed” at the end of the URL. Our URL goes from:

http://www.webmarketingtools.org/category/internet-marketing-resources/

http://www.webmarketingtools.org/category/internet-marketing-resources/feed

Use this URL and submit it to a Feed Aggregator, like FeedBurner.

How To Increase Your Blog Traffic

acemarketer — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:04:36 +0000

1. Commenting On Popular Blogs Can Bring You Initial Traffic

My first visitor other than myself was someone clicking over from a comment I had left at another highly visited blog. Visitors can come from comments you leave on ShoeMoney, Mashable, Chris Brogan and other relevant blogs. For example, leaving a relevant post related comment on a blog like GetRichSlowly can send you unique visitors.

2. Stumbleupon Can Be A Traffic Booster

I started looking for targeted people on StumbleUpon fairly soon after launching the blog. Or you can "stumble Upon" your own website to get the ball rolling. Stumble can be one of the top sources of your blog's traffic

3. Use Twitter To Get A Following, For Socializing And Eventually Spreading Your Links

Join Twitter, start looking for people with similar interests, follow them, leading to some will following you back. This will start getting you unique visitors that do not stop as long as you keep networking and connecting with people. Twitter along with Google can become the biggest source of your traffic.

4. Write A Guest Post For The Most Popular Blog In Your Field

Publishing a gust post at ProBlogger can send you many unique visitors even on the first day of publishing. Writing guest posts not only sends you traffic, it gives you authority, spreads your name to a targeted audience and also gives you a great value link for your search engine optimization.

5. Keywords In Your Domain Name Can Provide A Boost To Your SEO Ranking

Best Web Marketing Tools
Web Marketing Tools
Getting Web Marketing Tools

Looking at the traffic Google sends me, the 3 most popular keywords used to find my blog are very closely related to my blog domain name itself.

If I went with myownname.com I would have had a much harder time getting ranked for these three keyword phrases.

6. Use big brands to attract attention to yourself

6 things every blogger can learn by “studying Perez Hilton”
How “Gary So & so” built a multi-million dollar empire around a video blog
11 blogging lessons learned from “Seth Godin”

In some of my most popular posts I have used other brand names to attract attention to myself. It is a great strategy as these brands have many fans so it is much easier to attract them to click over to you, much easier to get them to comment and also much easier to get them to share the story with their friends.

7. Write Effective Headlines

In RSS, on Twitter, in Google search results, we are bombarded with choices to click on wherever we are online. The only way to attract attention among tons of other blogs is to write remarkable article headlines. In my experience “how to” and “top list” headlines work the best, are very clickable and shareable.

8. Hitting Digg or Delicious gets you oodles of links

Spikes in traffic come from days when your posts or articles go “viral”. These events also bring you lots of links and that improves your SEO and increases your traffic in the long run.

9. Be A Drama Queen

By being constructively and tastefully confrontational you can get tons of traffic. Even if you do not have a popular blog, calling out certain companies or individuals who are tracking their buzz will certainly get you a little traffic boost.

RSS:

Create separarte RSS feeds for your individaul posts and feed them to a feed aggregator. For more on this, visit this article: RSS Twist – Get Unique Feeds For Your Blog Posts

All these factors should contribute to your blog getting a momentum in social media and search engines, and this along with you writing great content regularly, would be able to achieve you similar or even better blog traffic results in your first year in blogging.

RSS Twist – Get Unique Feeds For Your Blog Posts

acemarketer — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:33:32 +0000

To get individual feeds for each of your blog posts use a service like Dapper, this allows you to create an RSS feed which can be manipulated to display the title, and you can choose a variety of items from your post to appear as the content of the feed.

The general idea:

Make sure your blog posts are keyword optimized,
Give the posts relevant categories,
Tag them properly for your target keywords,
Copy the URL of your article or blog post into Dapper to create a unique RSS feed (this will create a unique feed for your post or article),
Submit your new unique RSS feed to the various RSS directories and RSS aggregators.

List of feed aggregators

Link Wheel

acemarketer — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:07:15 +0000

The toughest part about starting a new website is getting it ranked in Google. Over the past few years it has been getting harder to rank well in Google – that is an understatement. The best way to rank a site naturally, and quickly using the the better SEO techniques is to build links to your new site -the right kind ones. If Google finds a paid link on your site then you get a slap, or if they find reciprocal links then itʼs another slap. So what the hell are you supposed to do??

In SEO, backlinks are king, (a backlink is a link to your site from another site)

In backlinks, variety is king ( aka link diversity)

Variety in backilinks is achieved through a properly optimized link wheel.

The Link Wheel:

Interlinked Web 2.0 properties, pointing towards the site you wish to rank with.

Only a properly optimized Link Wheel can achieve great PageRank (PR) so they are the most powerful types you can possibly get.

Some suggested web 2.0 sites to use:

Blogsome.com
Blogger.com
Squidoo.com
Wetpaint.com
WordPress.org
EzineArticles.com
VOX.com
Quizilla.com
Weebly.com
LiveJournal.com
HubPages.com
Onsugar.com
Prlog.org
Devhub.com
Yolasite.com
Terapad.com
Beep.com
Webnode.com
Viviti.com
Jimdo
And some social networking websites: Wikipedia has a list

Steps For Creating A Link Wheel

Write your main article (you'll just make variations or use subtopics to create a variety of articles articles),
Choose the overall topic for your link wheel
Create your accounts at the sites mentioned above,
Post your articles, and
Make sure that within the article, have 1 link that goes back to your target site, and 1 link that goes to another of your link wheels. Instead of linking all your sites in order, i.e, site 1 links to site 10, site 2 links to site 5, Use a random linking so that if site 1 links to site 6, then site 6 links to site 2, etc. Just be sure that none of your sites link back to each other, and you are going to be in good shape.
Ping Google using FeedPing to let them know you have created new sites so that Google's spiders can go and index them.aggregators also.
Submit your RSS feed to RSS directories and RSS

Some points to keep in mind:

For a larger site:

use a network of more than 100 different sites,
all on different C-class servers

For all sites irrespective of size:

Update your link wheels every 2 weeks
Use unique content, do NOT use spinning services

Creating backlinks using a link wheel is the way to go to rank your website on the first page of google. Read the RSS Twist to get another take on this idea

PPC Tracking & Cloaking Software

acemarketer — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:05:17 +0000

Prosper202 provides pay per click affiliate marketers with free, self hosted ppc tracking software. Real time tracking is part of the package. The best thing about it – IT'S FREE.

To have your tracks hidden:

prosper202/tracking202

your referrer is hidden, nobody but you can track where your traffic is coming from,what your keywords are. Prosper202 provides pay per click affiliate marketers with free, self hosted ppc tracking software. Real time tracking is part of the package.

It comes in two flavours:

Tracking202.com: lets you start tracking your PPC campaigns in seconds and they take care of the hosting for you.

Prosper202.com: if you want the great feeling of knowing your keywords are safe then download Propser202 and install it on your own server

Common Features:

Track every PPC network
EPC Calculator
Prosper202 Pages — maximizes EPC (Earnings Per Click) calculations.
Spy View - you can see real-time actions your visitors make with your ads.
Top-Performing Keywords — tells you which keywords are making you money and which ones are losing you money.
Keyword Cloaking— the ability to cloak their keywords from advertisers and affiliate networks-so all of your top-performing keywords are a secret.
Direct Linking or Landing Pages — works with direct linking through PPC campaigns or with your own landing pages. Now you can track whether your campaigns profit more with direct linking or landing pages.

A Few PPC Pointers:

If you are new to PPC marketing, use direct linking as a way to learn PPC at first until you’re comfortable with it, then start building landing pages. (Going through the process of creating a landing page and adding substantial content for a better Google Adwords quality score takes time. If your affiliate campaign then flops for some reason you ended up doing all the work for nothing.
If you’re unsure about a niche, test it with direct linking for a day or two with a limit on your per day ad spend.
If you have started a campaign with direct linking and it is successful, switch over to a landing page as soon as possible.
If, based on market research, you’re confident your offer will be profitable, and you’re past the complete newbie stage (refer to point #1), then build a landing page right from the start.

“Arthemia” Theme Help

acemarketer — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:44:13 +0000

It is available for free and is one of the best magazine style templates out there. With this theme the homepage is no longer a long list of post after post. But the magazine template gives your site a unique look and feel which sets the site apart from its competition. However as with any magazine theme, Arthemia can be a bit difficult to setup mostly due to the number of features and options built in to it. Here is a quick and dirty list of things to do when installing Arthemia for your own blog.

Installing Arthemia

Installing this theme is no different than any other theme in the WordPress directory. Visit the theme page and download it to your computer. Unzip the file. Then upload the files to /wp-content/themes directory on your webserver. Once the upload is complete go to Appearance – Themes and Activate the Arthemia theme.

Arthemia Logo

The Arthemia logo is located in your WordPress installation directory under themes/arthemia/images/logo.png Ideally the the logo should be about 400px wide and 100px high. This will give you enough room for the 468×60 ad block to the right of the logo. I have had no problems with a logo that is 468×99px. For easiest installation name your logo image as logo.png and upload it in the same directory. When asked to confirm just overwrite the default image. If you are using a different logo size then go to WordPress dashboard – Appearance – Editor and edit Header (header.php) Look for the following line and delete width=”177px” height=”39px”.

/wp-content/themes/arthemia/images/logo.png” width=”177px” height=”39px” alt=”"

Custom Image Field

One of the features of Arthemia is the auto-thumbnail and resizer function that puts an associated image next to the post. This image is then associated to the post on the blog home page, category pages, tag pages and archives. This is done by creating a custom field called Image and the value should be wp-content/uploads/2008/04/pool.jpg or wp-content/uploads/image.jpg unless of course you have the image upload specified to a different directory.

Categories Bar On Homepage

To specify the categories in the bar on the homepage right below the Headline section you have to do a small code modification. Go to Appearance – Editor in WordPress dashboard and click the Main Index Template (index.php). Then find the below line and change the numbers with the category id’s that you want to display. You can easily find the category id’s by going to the blog dashboard – Posts – Categories and clicking the category name. Then look at your address bar and it will have the ID listed as &cat_ID=7.

php $display_categories = array(3,4,5,8,9); $i = 1;

List Of Posts On Homepage

In most cases you would like to list the latest posts on the home page. If for some reason you would like to block posts in certain categories from displaying then you can specify them in the code. On Main Index Template (index.php) locate the following line and specify the category id’s you would like to block. In the below example the posts in category 27 & 28 are blocked from displaying. In the same line you also have the ability to limit the number of posts displayed per page.

query_posts(“cat=-27,-28&paged=$page&posts_per_page=5″);

Sidebar Ad Block 300×250

Go to Sidebar (sidebar.php) and locate this line and replace it with your ad code.

< img src="< ? php echo get_option('home'); ?>/wp-content/themes/arthemia/images/banners/square.jpg” alt=”" width=”300px” height=”250px” />

Header Ad Block 468×60

Go to Header (header.php) and locate this line and replace it with your ad code.

< img src="< ? php echo get_option('home'); ?>/wp-content/themes/arthemia/images/banners/wide.jpg” alt=”" width=”468px” height=”60px” />

Header Links

Go to Header (header.php) and locate this line and add links to sites in between li tags. You can add them before or after the wp_list_pages function. That line basically adds a menu item for every page created on your site. Sub-pages are created and added to the menu items as drop-down links when you hover over the parent page.

< li > < a href = " < ? php echo get_option('home'); ? >/”>Home< /li >
< ? php wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&title_li='); ? >