Internet Marketing

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In this installment of marketing blunders, I’m going to touch on one that kills more people than a bad can of spam.

I’m talking about focus, or more accurately, lack of focus.One of the biggest mistakes new people make is to bounce around from program to program or do things that are simply non productive. Well, in this article, we’re going to touch on a few do’s and don’ts of keeping your focus. Hopefully these tips will get you on track and keep you there.

Let’s start with the bouncing around problem, which seems to be en epidemic with Internet marketers. For most new people, they’ll join a program of find some product, promote it for a week, see that they’re not making any money and move on to something else. Look, I am not saying that every program you latch onto is going to be a good one, but you can’t go jumping from one thing to the next.

You’ll never build any momentum and you’ll never get anywhere. You have to make a commitment to anything you undertake. I’m not saying to devote years of your life to something that isn’t working for you, but any new business doesn’t see a profit in the first year. Things take time, and if you don’t give them the time needed, they’ll never have a chance to grow into something.

Another big mistake that marketers make is not organizing their day. They’ll wake up each morning and quite honestly have NO clue what they are going to do for the day. They pretty much just wing it. News flash. You can’t wing your business. Everyday you have to have a schedule, that hopefully was made the night before, and you have to try to stick to that schedule. Yes, things happen. Your dog gets sick. Your kid needs a ride to the mall. The water heater breaks. But on a normal day, you must have a schedule and you have to do everything possible to stick to it.

Another problem that marketers have is that they spend too much time on activities that aren’t going to help them build their business. Look, I know it’s fun to go to forums and hang out with your buddies, and don’t get me wrong, you need to frequent forums to build a name for yourself, but if that’s all you do and never really get any work done, then what good is it? You may have 5000 posts but if you have no product to sell, you’re not going to make anything.

Forgetting about forums, too many people spend too much time on reading emails and surfing the Internet. Yes, again, you have to stay informed. But there should only be a limited amount of time each day that you spend on things like this. The rest of the day should be spent doing things that are productive and building your business.

The above tips are just a small sample of distractions. The more of these you do away with, the more you will begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Filed under: Web Marketing by Craig

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A course on SEO, or search engine optimization, could fill up a book. Actually, several books.

So obviously, it is beyond the scope of this article to teach you everything there is to know about SEO. Instead, we’re going to focus on one part of SEO and hopefully give you some tips that will be of use to you and improve your SEO strategy over the long haul.

One of the things that people seem to forget is that SEO is not just what you do on your web page. Yes, you have to make sure your meta tags are optimized and that you use header tags and format your links properly, making sure you have links from each page of your site going to other pages, but SEO is more than just what you do to the pages of your site. SEO is also about what we call off page SEO. These are things that you do that have nothing to do with making changes to your web pages themselves. We’re going to point out what some of these things are.

One of these things is getting inbound links. These are links that are on other people’s pages that point to your page. The more inbound links you have, the higher up the search engines you go, especially if these inbound links are on pages with high PR numbers. Okay, we should probably go over what a PR number is, at least briefly, so you understand why this is important.

A PR number is a number that Google assigns to a web page. This number is a relative indication of how important that page is to the keywords it is targeting. A page with no relevance will have a PR of 0. A page with the highest relevance will have a PR of 10. So ideally, you want as many links as you can on these higher PR pages. Now, getting them is not so easy.

The more relevant pages are going to want something in return for putting your link on their page. They’re either going to want you to link to their site and be an equally ranked page, or if you’re not, they’re going to want you to pay through the nose for the privilege of linking to your site. So, like I said, it isn’t easy.

The best way to go about getting inbound links is to write articles. Some of the top article directories on the Internet have pretty high PR numbers. E-zine Articles is one site that comes to mind. Their PR number is somewhere around 7. So, if you submit your articles to their site and get links pointing back to yours, you should start to see a gradual rise in your rankings. Of course, you are going to need more inbound links than just E-zine Articles to really move your site up.

Getting inbound links is a very time consuming but important practice. If you take the time to do it properly, you will definitely see your site climbing up the search engine rankings.

Filed under: SEO by Craig