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Promoting Expensive High Ticket Affiliate Products
November 21, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
There are endless different products you can promote as an affiliate marketer. You can promote products costing a few dollars that pay you small commissions per sale, or you can promote high end expensive products which pay much larger amounts per sale, so should you concentrate on just promoting these high ticket items?
Well if you’re a person new to affiliate marketing and are still learning all the necessary skills such as how to make websites, drive traffic to your website, build a list, etc, then you should simply aim to get some sales under your belt. Therefore it’s best in this situation to concentrate on promoting quality products in the lower price range because once you start seeing some sales roll in, you know you are on the right track.
Once you have some experience of selling a number of products as an affiliate, you can move on to the next step – promoting high ticket products. This will dramatically boost your income if you do it correctly because in certain niches conversion rates for these top end products can be on a par with those of lower end products. In other words you will earn far more commissions for the same amount of effort.
The key to success lies with your methods of promotion. Placing random banners on your website or blog, or sending untargeted traffic to your affiliate links is unlikely to result in high conversions. Much more effective promotional methods include pre-selling through your email list, offering a bonus to people who buy through your affiliate link, and offering a personal review of the product you’re promoting.
So don’t be put off from promoting expensive products because you think that you are unlikely to make many sales due to the high price. You will often find that you can achieve excellent conversions for even the most expensive products, providing the product itself is of the highest quality of course.
You can also make a lot more money from even a modest conversion rate than you would promoting popular low-end products. For example let’s say you send 100 visitors to two different products. One costs $30 and pays $15 per sale, and one costs $400 and pays $150 per sale.
If you were to achieve an excellent conversion rate of 10% on the cheaper product, this would equate to 10 sales and $150 in commissions. You would need just 1 sale out of the 100 people you referred to the other product’s sales page, ie 1%, to make the same amount of commission. Furthermore a conversion rate of 1.5% would result in an extra $75, and a 2% success rate would equate to $300 in sales – an extra $150.
These are exaggerated figures as well. A conversion rate of 10% is much higher than most people achieve, so the reality is that the difference in the amount of commission you make from promoting both items is actually far greater in most cases. So hopefully you can see why promoting expensive products is much more lucrative than making lots of sales of less expensive items.
2 Simple Ways To Promote Your Affiliate Product For Free
November 21, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
There are many strategies that are available online which you can use to promote the affiliate product. If you are just starting, you might have very limited budget and you want to earn some money first before you even start to invest money on advertisement. The good thing about the internet is that you will still be able to drive targeted traffic to your offer but you will just need to have the right knowledge and the investment of your time. Here are the 2 simple ways which you can use.The 1st method is forum marketing. If you have chosen a profitable market, there is a high possibility that there is a forum for your market. You will want to join as a member and observe the kind of information that they are sharing within forum. Once you have a better understanding, you will want to start posting helpful information and be more involved in the forum. When you start to help people and share your opinion, more people will be aware of you. You will want to put your website url at the signature portion so that these visitors can go to your website if they want to get more information from you. This will be useful to get interested leads to see your offer.The 2nd method that you can use is article marketing. You will want to produce relevant content consistently and distribute your article through various channels so that it will be spread all over the internet. You have to make sure that you are writing a useful article so that it will be useful to the reader. If the reader likes your content, they will click on your website link which will be at the bottom of the article to get more information from you. This is a very powerful long term strategy which you can use to get traffic to your website.Above are the 2 simple methods which you can use effectively to promote the product or free. Be consistent in applying these 2 strategies if you want to have consistent traffic as both of them will requires to provide useful content in a timely manner so that more people will be aware of your promotion.
Zack Lim is an internet affiliate marketer who owns http://www.MyAffiliateMarketingOnline.com. He has helped hundreds of people to start their own affiliate marketing business.
He’s recently developed a free e-course showing you a step by step process for starting your own affiliate marketing business easier. To learn how to start your own affiliate marketing business without wasting your time and money, visit http://www.MyAffiliateMarketingOnline.com
Practical Affiliate Marketing Tips â How To Test The Lead Affiliate Product
November 21, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
If you have your own squeeze page, you will be either promoting the first product on your thank you page or you will be redirecting your subscribers straight to your affiliate link that directs them to the first product that you are promoting. The 1st product that you will be promoting to your subscribers will also be called the lead affiliate product. So how can you test the lead affiliate product to get more profits?The first thing that you will track is the number of subscribers that sees the affiliate product. You will want to let at least 200 people view the offer before you make any conclusion. Once you have 200 unique people who have viewed the offer, you will want to check the number of sales that you have. Most of the products will have an average sales conversion of 1%. This means that you should have at least 1 sale for every 100 people that view the offer.If you do not get any sale even after 200 people view the offer, you might want to consider changing to another lead affiliate product which have better sales letter. If you do get one which has a conversion of 1%, you might want to test out other product and choose those that will gives you a more then 1% conversion. If you choose those have better sales conversion, you will be getting more profits for the same amount of visitors that you drive to your website. It will be more practical to find one product which has better conversion as this will means that you will be fully maximizing the profits that you will get for every 100 people that you refer to the offer. When you do more to drive more traffic to your offer, this will simply means more sales for you. So start to track your lead affiliate product sales conversion and choose one that will get you more sales.
Zack Lim is an internet affiliate marketer who owns http://www.MyAffiliateMarketingOnline.com/FreeEcourse. He has helped hundreds of people to start their own affiliate marketing business.
Heâs recently developed a free e-course showing you a step by step process for starting your own affiliate marketing business easier. To learn how to start your own affiliate marketing business without wasting your time and money, visit http://www.MyAffiliateMarketingOnline.com/FreeEcourse
10 Basic Tips For Success In Affiliate Marketing
November 21, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Affiliate marketing is the most popular way of making money online. Anyone can earn affiliate commissions, regardless of their experience in internet marketing.This article presents ten powerful tips that will help you succeed in affiliate marketing and earn huge commissions. 1. Choose a specific niche or topic for which you want to promote affiliate programs. It is not advisable to sign up for a wide range of programs on different topics. Make your affiliate marketing targeted on a single market, and promote products that appeal to that market. 2. Research and select the best affiliate programs for your niche. You must choose the most rewarding, reliable and successful affiliate programs. The merchant must also supply you some marketing tools you can use to promote the products. The affiliate program or products must also be of high quality and must be well-priced. This will make is easy for you to sell them products or programs.3. Build a web site focused on your niche, and have high quality and unique content that is rich with your key words and phrases. 4. Have a budget for promoting your website.5. Drive traffic to your website. Your website will need traffic for you to earn affiliate commissions. Write articles, submit online press releases related to your niche and submit your website to search engines. You can also exchange links with high ranking websites related to your niche.6. Review your affiliate programs or products on a blog, and include your affiliate links. 7. Build an email list and offer free e-courses, articles or e-books. When you have a list, you can keep in regular contact with your prospects and recommend your affiliate products to them.8. Be available to answer any questions from your prospects and customers. Customer relationship management is very important in online business. Make sure that you provide your real name and an email address on your website so that potential customers can contact you with questions, and know there is a real person behind that website. This is important for your credibility. 9. Build your own network of sub-affiliates. Keep in touch with your sub-affiliates and motivate them to succeed because their success is your success too.10. Work hard consistently in promoting your website and have patience. These ten tips can help anyone succeed in affiliate marketing, and you too can achieve a lot of success and earn huge affiliate commissions!
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Home Business Internet Marketing – Use Social Media To Get Traffic
November 19, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
In your home business internet marketing efforts, there are many different methods that you can use for marketing your business. One of the methods that are becoming more popular every day is to use social media sites to drive traffic to your business. There are many different sites available that you can use but the one that you choose will depend on your marketing needs. So, you need to find a social media community that you can start getting involved in to build traffic and contacts for your business.
When looking for a social media community for marketing you want to take time to do your research about the different ones available. Some of the more popular social media sites as YouTube, MySpace and many others. You need to learn about the different sites that are available so that you can use the one that will help you the most with your home business internet marketing.
Now, when you find the social media community that you are going to use, you have to take time to learn how to use it effectively. You don’t want to just go in and start using it right away without knowing anything about it because if you do this then you won’t be using it as effectively as you could be.
So, take the time to find information about the social media sites and learn all you can. There are eBooks, reports, articles and many other ways to learn all you need to know about the different communities that you are going to be using. Don’t rush through the learning process because you have to know as much as you can if you are going to be successful with this type of home business internet marketing.
You have to learn how you can use a social media community to drive traffic to your business; how to build business relationships that will help you make money, plus how to build new friendships, which can also help you make money. These are all very important things to learn and if you don’t take the time to learn them then you will be wasting a lot of time trying to learn it without help that you could be using to effectively use the site for building your business.
So, remember that you need to learn all you can about the different social media sites before you use them. Use one social media community at a time and learn how to use it effectively to get traffic to your business before you add another one. This way you will be using it to your advantage.
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David Ogden is an established online marketer who specializes in practical website resources and advice.
Social Media Marketing For Beginners
November 19, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
In the recent past years Social Media Marketing and Social Media have dominated and defined Internet marketing. The popularity of social sites like MySpace and social bookmarking sites like Digg has caused this push. Social media has two main components, user generated content and the networking capability allowing you to form groups of friends and others that you can share content with.
Sites like MySpace, Zubby, and Facebook allow users to create profiles using text, videos and pictures to design their pages. These can then be shared with a selected group of other people in a special “friends” network and if the user wishes these pages can be shared over the whole social network.
Sites like Digg, Flickr, Associated Content and YouTube allow users to submit links to their favorite news articles online, pictures, articles, and videos then vote on the content that others have submitted. The most popular content is displayed on the front page of the site and the other pages are available to the general public to browse through. These drive traffic to the site and to the pages that are bookmarked.
There are many different ways to use these types of sites, either together or alone.
The use of these types of sites to promote your products and services is what is known as social media marketing. The types of traffic you get once your content is discovered and becomes well known in social media are primary traffic and secondary traffic.
Primary traffic is the direct traffic from the site that you used to make your site popular. If you are using a site that has fairly heavy traffic like Digg to promote your site you could get a large amount of traffic in a short amount of time so you need to make sure your site can handle the traffic, otherwise it may crash.
Once a site becomes popular on a social media site it gets talked about. When people talk about these sites they post links to the site which draws more traffic to the content. This indirect traffic is the secondary traffic. It is the secondary traffic that continues to flow to your site after the initial surge of direct traffic slows.
The benefits of primary and secondary traffic coming from social media sites include exposure to your site initially. Once your site is known by the general public then organic traffic will begin and repeat visitors start to show up, as long as you have something to entice them to come back.
Natural links to your site are beneficial because they are given by people or companies who have nothing to gain from your business venture. These are generally from relevant sites increasing the likelihood that visitors are going to be genuinely interested in your products and services. These links improve your search engine rankings and improve organic traffic.
Social media marketing allows your site to get exposure in a larger site and to a larger group of people. If your traffic levels off you can use social media marketing to jump start your traffic and work on taking your search engine traffic to the next level.
The alternative for increasing your search engine traffic is using pay per click advertisement. Using pay per click campaigns can help you to sustain increased traffic from the search engines but this traffic comes with a price tag.
Using social media marketing is free and can increase your traffic and your ratings in the search engines. Getting your site notices a couple times a year in the social media arena can make your site popular enough to bring in traffic throughout the year.
Kevin Sinclair is the publisher and editor of Be Successful News, a site that provides information and articles on how to succeed in your own home or small business.
The First Steps Before Beginning Your Business Blog
November 19, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Before beginning a blog for your business, I recommend you take a couple of steps first to ensure you will have a successful business blog. Even though a blog can be put together a lot quicker than a website, it’s important to have a plan for your blog. A blog with a clear plan, goals, and expectations it’s on the way to quick success. One of the first steps I suggest my clients take before beginning their blog is to get involved in the blogging community.
Getting involved with other blogs allows you to get a feel for blogging and an opportunity to see what works and doesn’t work on other blogs. Start off by finding a few blogs in your industry or niche by searching Technorati. You can then comment on these blogs and start building a relationship with the blog owner. When you develop your own blog hopefully they will link to your blog and help you drive traffic to your new blog.
Make sure to determine the goal of your blog and decide what type of material your blog will cover. For business blogs, I suggest you keep the goal to a business nature and create a separate personal blog for personal topics.
Decide who will write for your blog and come up with a preliminary list of topics. If you’re struggling for topic ideas you can check out one of my recent blog posts at www.bestbiz.typepad.com to get you started. The more planning you can do before launching the blog the better off you will be in the long run. Will you have a ghostwriter write posts? Will you have guest authors? Will you have one author or multiple authors?
It’s important to come up with a timeline of how often you are going to post to your blog. It’s easy to forget about your blog when life gets busy, but with a specified goal of the number of posts you are more likely to stick to it. There’s no set magic number of how many posts to make to your blog. When you’re first starting out it’s ok just to post once a month until you get used to posting. Of course the more you post the easier it is for the search engines to find your blog. Eventually it’s best to post 2-3 times per week. If you’re going out of town, you can write several posts in advance and then schedule your posts to your blog.
What’s the next step now… get involved in the blogging and social networking community and get your business out there in a big way!
Are you ready to start blogging, but don’t know how to set up your business blog in order to attract more clients? The answer is laid out step-by-step in my Blogging For Business System. You can get yours at www.BestBizBlogging.com.
Jennifer Haubein publishes “SiteNotes” a FREE bi-weekly ezine for small business owners who want a website that actually works. If you’re ready to get insider tips website developers don’t want you to know, and start making more money online, get your FREE tips now at http://www.BestBizWebsiteSolutions.com/newsletter.html.
Some Important Tips for Creating a Blogging Business!
November 19, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Blogging businesses haven’t been around too long. However, already there have been a few exits. One of the first internet companies on the blogging scene – Weblogs Inc – sold to AOL for around $30M. And, there have also been several other exits in and around the same price level. Some blogs and blog networks that have yet to have a liquidity event, for more details visit to www.your-own-blog.com or even raise cash to help pin-point a valuation, will likely be worth more than this number.
What entrepreneurs shouldn’t forget is that blogging is just a style of writing, and that a
blog is just a type of website. For more details go towww.greatblogbox.com.Therefore, you should look at any company that monetizes editorial through advertising as a similar business. However, a blogging business has many advantages over a traditional media business or even a traditional internet media business:
• It’s much simpler to start a blog than it is to start most types of websites. You can use software like Word Press to get started with minimum technical knowledge. However, if you are starting a serious business you will most likely want to use the services of a development and design team to make sure everything looks great and works perfectly.
• It’s easier to drive traffic to a blog than to a traditional website. Bloggers are more inclined to link to their competitors, and therefore if you write good content you should be able to get coverage much quicker than other internet media businesses. Also, when you get more links from other bloggers you will also get more search engine traffic too.
Tips for Creating a Blogging Business That Matters
Don’t make your blog too reliant on you. Too many bloggers allow themselves to become the only recognizable face of their blog as they rise to internet stardom. This is great at first; however it causes more of a problem when you want to focus on growing your business and less on being the face of your blog. This is also something that will put off any potential buyer. Try to get writers on board that are able to earn an equally great reputation with your audience.
Spend money on building a cool internet brand. Too many blogs are built on sub-par domain names, and have horrible looking designs. This is okay for your personal blog, but it’s not okay for your business blog. Be prepared to spend some money on getting your blog design right, and making sure the back-end works fine too. If you don’t, you can be sure this is a decision you will regret further down the line. Build contacts and get exclusives. Nothing builds a blog’s reputation like getting an exclusive on a story. And there are no ways to get exclusives other than having sources. If you start breaking stories, you will start to develop a formidable internet brand within your industry. Go to conferences, network, and use internet sources like Linked In to get put in touch with the players in the industry you write about. As you build a bigger and better reputation this becomes easier.
Radio Advertising Costs Demystified
November 18, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
“How much should I spend on radio advertising?” “How do I know I am getting the best radio advertising rates?” “What radio stations should I advertise on?” “What are good and bad radio advertising prices?” “How many spots should I air on a radio station?”
Every day at Radio Lounge, we hear radio advertising questions such as these.
Honestly, there is so much confusion about radio advertising floating around – we can’t blame you for asking these questions. Why is advertising on the radio so mysterious? The answer is – radio advertising is not mysterious. It just helps to know how it works.
Effective radio advertising relies on two major components – the message (the radio commercial itself), and the media (that the radio spot airs on).
The Message
Let’s look first at the radio commercial itself. Before even thinking about which radio stations to air on, or how much to spend on radio advertising rates, you must think about what you are going to say in your radio ad. For this article, we are assuming that all call centers, fulfillments, websites, etc. lead generation, and sales closing processes have been put in place by you, the advertiser. Creating a radio commercial that helps drive traffic is extremely important to the advertising process.
The advertising industry is full of voice talents, radio personalities, DJ’s and others, all claiming to create radio commercials. Be careful here. When entering the arena of radio commercial production, look for a radio advertising agency that has experience and a track record of successful ad campaigns. Anyone can create a radio ad, but not everyone can create a radio ad that pulls traffic. Some radio stations provide free radio commercials if you advertise on their station. Most of these free commercials are never based on strategy and are just one of several dozen commercials that have to be created by an overworked radio production person in a five to fifteen minute window of time. Remember, you usually get what you pay for.
The most effective radio commercials are built on a solid, proven strategy. The copy is written using time tested formulas that maximize potential response. The talent is handpicked to best connect with the end user and the production is based upon clear, quality, and easy to absorb audio.
So…what does the radio commercial production process cost? The majority of radio commercials that work best usually fall into the $500 to $1000 price range. There are always exceptions to the rule (lots of revisions to copy or audio, additional voice talents, celebrity endorsements, etc.) but this figure generally covers development of a solid strategy, copy from experienced copywriters, performance by high caliber voice talents, and the highest quality production services.
The Media
For many with questions about radio advertising rates, and radio station prices, here is where the mystery begins. We will try to simplify the mystery of radio media buying as much as we can in this small amount of space.
A good radio advertising buy focuses on a few different things:
* Finding the best radio stations in a market that match your customer’s demographics (age, gender, income level, etc.) and psychographics (interests, beliefs, hobbies, personality traits, etc.).
* Finding the dayparts that best reach your target customer. Mornings? Middays? Afternoons?
* Selecting the top radio stations that most efficiently reach the highest potential customers, the right number of times (defined as frequency), for the least amount of money
Usually, when researching radio advertising costs, many potential radio advertisers have a pretty good idea of the first two points. However, when it comes down to finding the best station (or stations) at the best price, the radio advertising process becomes a little more challenging.
Here is how we tackle the process at Radio Lounge and determine how much to spend on radio advertising costs. Within the market you want to advertise in, we find the radio stations that have the best potential to reach your target customer. This is based on the formats of the radio stations. Urban Hip-hop stations will target different demographics than a News/Talk, or Soft Rock station. After we select a group of radio stations, we contact those stations to let them know we are thinking about advertising on their radio station. We ask for specific data from the radio stations called “rankers”. This is ratings data that most radio stations can provide based on specific requirements we have requested. From this point, we have a good idea which stations perform the best in our target demographics.
Once we have narrowed down the radio stations to just a few that will effectively reach our target customer, we then request a proposal based on certain criteria – dayparts, frequency goals, etc. From these proposals, we can see who reaches the target audience most efficiently – using tools like Cost Per Point (ratio of spot rate to ratings percentage), Cost Per Thousand (ratio of spot rate to audience category totals), etc. If a radio station is not competitive, we will often ask the station to resubmit a more competitive proposal. But, how will we know if all of the station’s radio advertising rates are too high. Radio Lounge has access to data that allows us to compare proposals against historical figures to determine if radio station prices are in line with market averages. We negotiate, and help execute the purchase.
Great…but what does this cost? It depends on the size of the market you wish to advertise in as determined by Arbitron (the radio ratings services). Radio advertising rates can be as high as $800 per 60 spots in a top market like New York City, or as low as $3 per 60 spots in Kerrville, TX. How will you know what to spend?
Here’s a valuable system we have used from our history of working with radio advertising rates. The system is based on a solid branding schedule that may run one spot per day in the morning drive, one per day at midday, and one per day in the afternoon drive – Monday through to Friday, and two spots on Saturday and Sunday. That’s nineteen spots a week at sticker price. This type of schedule is good for achieving a desired frequency level of three (meaning the average listener to a station will hear the radio commercial at least three times). Under these broad assumptions, you can use the following chart as a rough guide to budgeting your radio advertising campaign.*
*Note, these are gross rates and do not include production costs or agency discounts. These are market averages for the standard radio schedule mentioned above, actual costs may vary. Different combinations of dayparts on different stations may cost much less.
* Markets 1 -5 (ex: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc.)
Expect to pay from $4000 to $8000 per week/per station for a top performing station.
* Markets 6 – 20 (ex: Dallas/Ft.Worth, Houston, Phoenix, San Diego, etc.)
Expect to pay from $2000 to $5000 per week/per station for a top performing station.
* Markets 21 – 50 (ex: Denver, Cleveland, Kansas City, etc.)
Expect to pay from $1000 to $3000 per week/per station for a top performing station.
* Markets 51- 150 (ex: Akron, Syracuse, Baton Rouge, etc.)
Expect to pay from $800 to $2000 per week/per station for a top performing station.
* Markets 150+ (ex: Myrtle Beach SC, Green Bay, Topeka, etc.)
Expect to pay from $500 to $1500 per week/per station for a top performing station.
You may be saying, “Wow! That can be expensive”. Relax, these are standards and radio advertising schedules come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, schedules are smaller depending on advertising goals and objectives. However, we do recommend that you are able to commit to the range of minimums.
Leftovers?
Notice we have not mentioned remnant radio advertising here at all. Remnant advertising is the practice of buying unused inventory at deep discounts. Remnant advertising success exists more in theory than in practice. However, this is not to say that there are not advertisers who are having success with remnant advertising. If, and when, remnant advertising falls into your lap, we suggest you look into it. However, basing your entire radio ad campaign on remnant advertising may be shooting yourself in the foot. With the exception of a few times a year, most top performing radio stations do not have that much unsold inventory. Often, the largest advertisers have contracts that guarantee so many low cost/no cost spots that have to run. The reality is that if large advertisers (with the big dollar schedule) need their spots to run, or if another advertiser pays just one penny more than you did for your remnant spots – bump! You just got bumped off the air that day. You may pay for twenty spots and only get two that air. The stations will make it up to you, but what if you were counting on that advertising to drive sales. Or better yet, in the age of consolidated radio groups your remnant advertising might run on the third to the last rated station in the market. The result is NO RESULT and you have just wasted money for nothing. We really do believe that when it comes to radio advertising YOU TRULY DO GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.
Now that radio advertising rates have been explained, you may ask the question, how long should I advertise? The type of radio advertising helps define the length of a campaign. Advertising for an event? We recommend shorter, more compact schedules to create buzz leading up to the event or launch. Branding a product? Often, long term schedules with a bit of breathing room work best. Maybe even flighting could work (on two weeks, off two weeks). Most of the time, the two things that will determine how long to run a radio advertising campaign will be advertiser goals (traffic numbers), and external factors such as sales cycles. Oh yeah, and usually budget affects the length of the campaign. It is not desired, but that’s reality.
The Total Cost
You may be thinking, “So if I want to run a spot on three top Houston radio stations, I should expect to pay $1000 for a commercial, plus $3000 per week per station…that’s $10,000 for one week’s worth of advertising!” That’s true, and may be just what it takes to reach over half a million potential well targeted customers. The real question is, “How much money can you make off half a million potential targeted customers?” Is it more than $10,000 a week? $40,000 a month? These are questions to ask yourself, because in the world of advertising, that is pretty good traffic.
It works even better when you let Radio Lounge reduce that cost even further. What if Radio Lounge was able to get you a great radio advertising schedule by providing an instant discount ABOVE the negotiated lowest radio station price?
Launch Your Radio Advertising Campaign
You may still have many questions about radio advertising. That’s why we are here. We want to help you get the biggest bang for the radio advertising buck. Radio Lounge has worked with thousands of radio advertising campaigns. We know what works and what does not. Let Radio Lounge help you with all facets of strategic development, creative development, copywriting, production, media planning, media negotiation, and monitoring of your radio advertising campaign.
Call for a free consultation. Toll free 1-866-4-AUDIO-9…that’s 1-866-428-3469.
Let Radio Lounge help you drive traffic with powerful radio advertising solutions.
http://www.radioloungeusa.com
M. Bruce Abbott is Creative Director/Partner of Radio Lounge, a direct response radio advertising agency. If you are thinking about advertising on the radio, let the experienced direct response radio advertising professionals at Radio Lounge make your campaign a success. Call us for a free consultation. No pressure, just friendly people who love to help companies succeed with their advertising on the radio. Call toll free, 1-866-4-AUDIO-9. That’s 1-866-428-3469…but we would never say it like that on the radio 
OR visit www.radioloungeusa.com Remember…Direct Response Radio Advertising Works – when done right, it can achieve powerful results.
Search Engine Marketing And Blogging Techniques
November 17, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Search engines are the web’s most used means of driving traffic to websites, and knowledge of search engine marketing is essential to anybody wanting to succeed online. However knowledge of blogging techniques is also instrumental in gaining you a high position in the search engine listings fore your chosen keyword.
Sure, you can promote your site in many ways and there are more ways than a top listing on a search engine to drive traffic to your website, but there is nothing to beat a top ten listing on Google or one of the other major search engines such as Ask, Yahoo or MSN to provide you with consistent sustained traffic day after day after day.
It is not difficult to get listed in a search engine, but it not so easy to be listed in that all-important top 20 position. The top 10 is the ideal, but if you are listed on one of the first two pages of a major search engine, then the traffic will come to you. That is guaranteed. Naturally, the higher you are listed the better, and you will do an awful lot better on the first page than on the second, but if the best you can do is page three then you are going to need a lot more than search engines to help you attract business.
So what are the main essentials of search engine marketing? You have two objectives, the first being to get listed and the second to reach the top 20. It is easy, as I stated earlier, to get listed on a search engine. Many design their site, submit it to Google and then wait for the Google Dance, when Google carries out its World Wide Web search for websites.
Forget that: do not submit your site to Google or any of the other search engines because that can delay your listing. Instead do one of two things. The best is to write a few articles on the topic of your website and submit them to the top article directories. If you can’t write, or if English is not your main language, then use an article ghostwriter. There are plenty people online offering article services at good rates.
Google and the rest frequently visit the higher ranked article directories and will pick up on the link to your website in your ‘author’s resource’, or bio. When they find your site, you get listed, and that can happen in less than 24 hours. That is the main way, but the other is blogs. Add a blog to your site, and it will soon be listed. Google, especially, likes blogs, particularly if it is a Blogger blog, since Blogger is owned by Google. You are virtually guaranteed a listing. If you are not too keen on Blogger, you can switch once your site has been listed. Wordpress is arguably the most versatile blogging software available at the moment, especially if you are running it from your own web space.
Once you are listed, you can improve your position by optimizing each website page for the topic of that page. Don’t forget that search engines list each page separately, and so each page should be optimized separately. However, you should initially focus on your index page, since it is that page which almost invariable gets listed highest. Once your site does have a reasonable high listing, it is possible that another page could get listed higher than your index page, although this is not generally the case.
You can then post a blog on the topic of the page, and add new postings on a regular basis. You should also include a link to your blog from your web pages and a link on your blog sidebar to your website. This will enhance the probability of your home web page being listed, as it also will your blog, since your blog can also be listed on Google and other search engines.
There are some simple things that you can do to make your index page more attractive to the search engines. Bear in mind that your listing is for one search term only, as used by someone seeking information related to the topic of your page. You can receive another listing for another search term (or keyword) on a different index. So, what you must do is to determine the best keyword for which to optimize your index page.
Once you have decided that, include it in the title of your page and place the title in ‘title’ tags. Try to make the title a bit longer than your keyword, so if your keyword is, say, ‘lock design’, make the title ‘The History of Lock Design’, for example. The main heading for the page need not be the same, but should also contain your keyword. A good heading, for example, would be ‘Lock Design from the 18th Century’. Place that in H1 tags to tell the search engine algorithm that the heading contains important text relating to your web page.
In order to accentuate the fact the ‘lock design’ is an important term in your web page, use it in the first 100 characters and again in the last paragraph of the page. You can also use it once for every 300 words if you want, but don’t overuse it. Use plenty of words that relate to the term, in order that the algorithm used to determine the relevance of your page can decide what the actual subject is. Hence, in the example used, it is still not clear if the locks referred to are canal locks or security locks. You should make that clear in the syntax of the page.
For example, your title could be changed to ‘Canal Lock Design from the 18th Century’, and you could make lots of reference to canals, barges, longboats, plan, construction, locks and design. These words will make it clear to the statistical mathematical formula that makes up the LSI (latent semantic indexing) algorithm that determines the meaning of the words used on your page, and determines that the page is about canal locks and not locks and keys.
There are many other ways in which you can optimize your web page to make it more relevant to the search term, and the more relevant the search engine deems it, then the higher the listing in the index for that specific keyword. Blogging can enhance the effect of your SEO, and not only improve your listing position, but also be listed itself, thus providing even more traffic to your website.
Search engine marketing involves a good knowledge of search engines and how they work, but if you get it right then the rewards can be very high in terms of traffic highly targeted to your product. The problem is, unless you know how, or have the right advice from people who know what they are talking about rather than trying to sell you a service, then it takes a long time to learn.
If you want to learn the essentials of search engine marketing quickly, then check out Pete’s site on http://www.improved-search-engine-rank.com>SEOcious where you will find out how you can get rapid listings on Google and optimize each of your web pages to improve your search engine rank, and listing position for your keyword. Also check out his blog on http://www.seoscopy.com/BlogonBlog>Blog on Blog on how to use blogs to promote your website.
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