Quotes Rosalind Renshaw of UK news site Estateagenttoday. But there will be a crucial pivot point where the market picks up at a quicker pace than the skeletal industry base will comfortable cope with, putting pressure on agencies and decreasing competition. Thus increasing the cost to the end user; vendors.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that established businesses in the real estate sector are closing at a rate greater than 1% per quarter in the US, resulting in as many as 500 newly unemployed Real Estate agents every month through 2009. The stats indicate that this is an upward trend with unemployment in the sector increasing from 6.2% to 8.4% through the final quarter of 2009.

http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag531.htm

This may be the answer. RealPress.net have released details of the imminent availability of a Wordpress Real Estate plugin that transforms the standard blogging content management system in to a powerful listing tool. With free development sites and a low priced fully featured Pro version, this would seem to be ideal for the new smaller broker or individual Real Estate broker to launch their portfolio on the World Wide Web. Many of these new free agents, embarking on an independent career resulting from the closure of their previous employers or brokerages, will normally be looking at a significant investment in a web presents to compete in the marketplace.

RealPress say that web sites can be created free in less than ten minutes and that the creation and management can be administered by an office secretary or someone with a similar non technical level of experience. Development is aided by a series of videos on the way, designed to show the user a complete guide on using RealPress, Wordpress, Search Engine dynamics and creative marketing ideas.

RealPress Wordpress Real Estate Plugin can be downloaded from RealPress.net

If you have great knowledge in a specific area, then you could sell this knowledge out for cash. By creating your own e-books focusing on a specific topic, your e-books will attract a target group of people that are interested to buy your book.

Writing an e-book and sell it on the Internet to make money take a few steps.

1. Come up an idea for your e-book and do research to identify whether the e-book has a profitable market you can sell to.

Firstly, You must have an idea on what topic your e-book should talk about. It is not hard to get a topic. Just think about your interest or the field that you have most knowledge in. These can become the topic of your e-book.

It is important that you select a topic that you love so that you can always stay interested and motivated on what you are doing.

2. Register a domain name.

You must have a sale website to sell your e-book online. So, registering a domain name is a must. The domain name will become the web address of your sale site. When choosing domain name, you should look for those that is easy to memorized, short, easy to spell and related to your business. You can check out what domain name is available in Godaddy.com

3. Buy a web hosting package

When deciding which web hosting company to you, look for those well known and reliable hosting companies. These companies are proven to be providing good service. Godaddy or Bluehost are two of the top hosting companies you may consider.

4. Start creating your e-book.

You may have known a lot about the topic you want to write. But it is not sufficient to create a quality e-book. You must take the time to gather more information about your topic. There must something good you don’t know yet. The Internet and libraries are some of the good places to gather information. When you have got all the necessary information, you can start writing.

For those who don’t like to write, you can hire a professional writer to create the e-book for you. Just let the writer knows what you need and expect; the writer will produce a well written e-book for you.

5. Create a sale website.

Look for an experienced web designer. You will need the designer to build a professional sale website for your e-book business. A web designer usually is flexible. They will create the site based upon your requirement and request.

6. Write sale letter.

You need to have a sale letter in your website to persuade the visitors to buy your book. The sale letter will play an important role in making sales, so you are advised to hire a copywriter to create a sale letter for you. Copywriters are specialized on sale writing and have good experience; they will be able to create a sale letter for you effective for your business.

6. Release your e-book for sale

Both your website and sale letter are ready and put up on the Internet, your e-book business will begin. To generate sales and profit, you will have to create different advertising campaigns frequently to reach your e-book to your potential buyers. Hard effort must put in so that you can make money online with e-book.

Internal linking involves the links on your website that point to other pages on your website. Internal linking is very important because it allows the search engine spiders, those automated bots that scour the Internet looking for information, to find all of the pages on your website. In comparison, external linking are links that are on your website which link out to other websites, and there are specific tactics for those as well. In this article, however, we’re going to cover a few simple tactics and strategies to get your internal linking up to speed.
When you’re developing your website, you will tend to put a whole lot of pages of similar information tailored to a specific niche or subject that you want to convey to your visitors. You probably will have information, news, how-to articles, tips and sales pages, where informed visitors can buy your products or services. Your internal linking structure will not only benefit your visitors, but it will help you rank better with the search engines as well.

Having a good navigation system makes Google and Yahoo happy, and in turn, they will reward you because you are doing things to improve the visitors’ website experience. So, for example, if you have an internal linking structure that is seamless, intuitive and allows your visitors to quickly find what they’re looking for, search engines will give you more page rank, index more of your web pages and return higher search results for user queries.

Why? You have taken the time to help your website visitors have an excellent customer experience. As a result, your tactics and strategies should be geared towards giving arriving visitors not only the information that they seek, but have it presented in a way that they, and search engine bots, will love.

So how do you accomplish this? There are a few basic tactics, you can use that will improve your internal linking structure right off the bat.

Number 1 – use the rel=”nofollow” HTML tag for pages that you don’t want to pass rank to Google. For example, let’s say you had a three-page site. Now, we all know that most people have more than three pages for an entire website; however, this will make it easier to follow.

The first page is your home page which gets 100% of the search engine ranking and love. The second page is an information or information/sales page, with the third being a checkout page. If you don’t use the nofollow tag on one of the pages, both pages will be passed half of 50% each for the link from the home page. So, they’ll each get 25% of the ranking and love passed through from the spiders. The search engine spiders will naturally give your home page the best page rank and index it first. Say, you want to link to the information/sales page and make sure that a lot of people find it, because the information page is what will sell your product or service. For ranking and indexing purposes, you consider the checkout page as useless, so you don’t care if the search engines find it or not. In fact, you’d prefer it if they didn’t index it all. What do you do?
When you link from your home page, you can do one of two things.

Link to the information page only from the home page. Link to both pages but use the no follow tag to the checkout page. In that way, if someone arrives who is already sold on your product, they can go directly to your checkout page and buy the product. However, if it is an uninformed visitor, they can clickthrough to your information/sales page or they click on the indexed Google or Yahoo link that’s been picked up by the spider.

Two things happen with scenario #2. You give the customer/visitor the option. Because, the search engine is applying SEO love to one page and not two, the page rank passed will not be 25% and 25% for each page, but 0% for the checkout page and 50% for the information page which needs it. You maintain the search engine indexing and page rank for those pages that are important.

This is just one thing that needs to be considered when setting up your website. Professional SEO firms use this algorithm in order to get specific pages on your website to rank higher and return results in the search engine results pages that are much higher than other pages like your checkout pages which you don’t care about.

Number 2 – Add extra links in your navigation area or footer area that link to important pages and main sections on your website. This extremely easy tactic is often overlooked by many websites, but it does return very good results for deep linking, and most SEO firms will review your footer links when they take you on as a candidate in order to utilize that other form of deep linking.

The reason for this is that so many people forget to do it, and many Web designers add really cool buttons, images and all kinds of funky image stuff that do nothing to improve your page rank or your results in a search engines. You should remember that search engines can’t follow image links or links created in JavaScript. So, you want to add simple text links that the robots can follow to index your website more fully.

These are only two of the tactics that are covered when you hire a professional, savvy SEO firm to optimize your web layout and linking structure.

In my years of helping online marketers promote their businesses, I have seen business models that seemed to have all of the elements necessary to ensure great success. And unfortunately, I have seen many of these perfect business models fail miserably, because their owners failed to honor their business with a realistic promotional plan.

Putting The Cart Before The Horse

When people begin to promote their new business, this is where most people begin to err.

Just recently, I spoke with an individual who started a business in a pretty competitive field. I don’t view heavy competition as being a bad thing. In fact, I find that there are often enough customers in any niche to support the additional competitors, especially when a new competitor answers a need not served by the current players.

The individual to whom I refer made his mistake by focusing 95% of his advertising budget on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), before he even knew what keywords would help him to be profitable in his business! He has so far blown $9,500 of his $10,000 to optimize his website for the search engines, and he still does not know what keywords will drive traffic to his website, leading to sales conversions for his website.

His “backwards” approach has left him with only $500 in his budget, with little hope for his future. He now emails me 4-5 times a week, always in a state of utter panic for the prospect of his future. All I can tell him is to be patient, since he has to learn how to “bootstrap” his way to success, now that he has no budget left to build strong and fast.

Test Your Copy First

Search Engine Optimization should “never” be a business’ first step in the promotion process. Although SEO can bring great rewards, it can also be very expensive to implement. Look at it this way. What good is search optimization if you have optimized for the wrong keywords?

The first step in the promotion of any business should be focused on attracting potential customers to one’s website.

The marketer needs to put human eyeballs on the website, so that they can test and tweak their sales copy for greater sales conversion.

Until a website has seen several hundred visitors, the sales copy should not be changed or tweaked. Sales copy should always be tested against a large statistical group of visitors, in order to ensure that the copy is given a fair and realistic test.

If the online marketer has a bit more money to start the process, often the best spent money will be to hire a professional copywriter to write the sales copy for the website. Professional copywriters have a skill, and that skill is to create the words that will drive people to buy what you are selling.

Test Traffic Is Important To The Process

Most Internet Marketing newbies are still focused on getting those first few hundred visitors to their websites.

At this point, there are systems like Link Referral and Traffic Swarm that can help the new business owner bring in a bit of traffic to their website. In a test with Link Referral, I am seeing 250 visitors per month. The neat thing about systems like these is that other members will review your website and offer good advice on how to improve your website, if necessary. Membership is free for both systems, with an option for paid upgrades.

The Law Of Attraction

While the traffic exchange systems mentioned above can send some traffic to your website, you are not going to get rich participating in those systems.

Once you have positioned your website to convert visitors to buyers, it is time to start attracting a larger number of visitors (potential customers) to your website.

There are a number of ways to do this, but two of the most effective are: Article Marketing and Pay-Per-Click Advertising.

Article Marketing

Mark Silver recently produced an exceptional home study course about writing articles that will help you be much more successful in your article marketing activities (http://thephantomwriters.com/heartofarticlemarketing).

Just last week, a friend of mine told me that he has not promoted his website in over a year, yet he noticed that his website has a steady stream of traffic to it, from the three-dozen articles that he wrote and distributed in 2006 and 2007. He said that his ebook continues to produce new sales each and every month, and the only thing he can really attribute those continuing sales to is the articles that are available on the Internet that are promoting his website and ebook.

Article marketing, in and of itself, is a promotional tool that will allow a marketer to bring regular visitors to his or her website, and if the website does its job well, then the website will be able to convert those visitors to buyers. This is important, because all businesses need money coming into a website early, to ensure that the business can survive financially, until the long-term “recipe for profit” can be found and duplicated reliably.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a process where you bid on keywords in the major search engines, through Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, etc. You tell the search engine companies what words you desire to bid on and how much you are willing to pay for a visitor, and the highest bidders for that keyword phrase will be shown above and to the right of the free results in the search engine results pages.

Keyword research, utilizing systems like Word Tracker, or my favorite, NicheBot will enable you to brainstorm keywords and get a good idea of which keywords might be more profitable for your business.

By utilizing Google Analytics or Yahoo’s Panama Full Analytics (traffic analysis), an online marketer can follow a visitor from the search engine to the marketer’s sales page. Where this is important is it enables an online marketer to uncover the essential business knowledge of which “keywords” will bring people into a website and help convert those visitors into customers.

Essential SEO Knowledge

What one must keep in mind is that some keywords will deliver visitors who will never buy, while other keywords will deliver visitors who are extremely likely to buy. This one paragraph holds within it the secret to a successful SEO strategy. This is the essential knowledge that a marketer should have, before engaging in any Search Engine Optimization campaign.

Like I said previously in this article, “Although SEO can bring great rewards, it can also be very expensive to implement.”

If you are going to spend a lot of money to optimize your website for the search engines, doesn’t it make much more sense to target the keywords that will actually help you to earn back your investment?

The Backwards Thinking

The backwards thinking I referred to in the beginning of this article was the idea that many people put SEO in front of their keyword research, keyword tracking and keyword conversion statistics.

An industry I like to pick on is the travel industry. In order to rank well for the solitary keyword “travel” in the search engines will require an astronomical SEO budget. But most people seeking travel information are looking for something just a bit more specific, like: Disney vacations, Hawaii vacations, and European travel.

So long as a keyword has been proven to convert visitors and sales, then it makes sense to optimize for that keyword. But you will never truly know which keywords will convert visitors and sales, until you have invested some of your budget into pay-per-click advertising and traffic analysis.

Once the necessary “keyword” knowledge is in hand, then the marketer can make an investment into search engine optimization for those keywords that can actually make them money, and with good SEO deployment, the marketer can find that they can actually capture a lot of the search engine traffic for specific keywords through the search engines’ free listings.

Today, with a little basic information and $50 you can have a nice niche thing going. Or with that same $50 and some hard won insider tips you can OWN any niche you want. That’s what we’ll focus on.

Just ten years ago if you wanted to profit in a niche market it was typically an expensive and risky undertaking. First you had to do the research to see if the industry was big enough to support you. Then you would setup a shop of some sort, whether it was a storefront, mall kiosk, or kitchen table, run a mail order company and tons of little classified ads to bring in the business. It usually took at least six months to see if a profit was likely in your future and finding good suppliers for specialty items could be just as demanding as selling the stuff you managed to get hold of. Thanks to the Web, those days are long gone.

Today, with a little basic information and $50 you can have a nice niche thing going. Or with that same $50 and some hard won insider tips you can OWN any niche you want. That’s what we’ll focus on.

First things first, spend wisely. Setup a budget early on and find ways to stay within it. Use free tools whenever possible and when you do need to spend money on something, make sure it’s a bargain.

Okay, now for the good stuff. Let’s start with finding our keywords…

Part One: Finding Keywords

Finding Keywords 1: We can use a free tool to do this part. Go to Google Keyword Tool and type in a common word or phrase that describes your niche (check the Use synonyms box to get the best variety of results.) Alternatively Don’t know what keywords to use in your marketing campaigns? Alternatively Download the keywords your competitors use. Find out how?

Finding Keywords 2: Now click on the “Approx Avg Search Volume” header to sort by the average monthly volume. You are going to take each of the search terms that look like good possible keywords and run a search on Google for them. But lets keep track. Take a sheet of paper (or Excel doc) and jot down the keyword, then the “Approx Avg Search Volume” and finally the number of pages returned on Google.

Finding Keywords 3: When you have that information for a good handful of keywords you want to come up with a success potential ratio for each. It’s easy. Just divide the “Approx Avg Search Volume” by the number of pages on Google. This is your success potential ratio. The higher the number; the better.

Example A: Approx Avg Search Volume (6,500) / Matching Pages on Google (100,000) = .065 is your Success Potential Ratio

Example B: Approx Avg Search Volume (9,750) / Matching Pages on Google (233,000) = .042 is your Success Potential Ratio

Example B has a lot more searches performed but with even more competition than A. Long story short, this means the keyword from Example A is likely our best bet to target.

Part Two: Securing Domain Names

Securing Domain Names 1: Now go to your favorite domain registrar (like Godaddy.com, Register.com or whatever) and run a domain registration availability search for the keyword phrase with the highest Success Potential Ratio.

Securing Domain Names 2: Use dashes! And don’t feel like the splits need to be perfect. For example, if you have a possible domain that is three words long, first try it without any dashes. That will be gone, I can almost guarantee. Next try separating each word with a dash. Maybe it’s taken, maybe not. If not, grab it! If it is taken, don’t despair. Try just one dash between the first two words and let the second and third run together. If that version is taken, move the dash so it is between the second and third while the first and second run together. Chances are you will find one that works. And the best part is the search engines read it as the same keyword!

Keep in mind, this domain and resulting Website is for SEO purposes NOT branding. Who cares how long it is or how many dashes it has? Certainly not you. The search engines will love it!

Securing Domain Names 3: A word of advice… Get your domain name as quickly as possible. The older it is, the better in Google’s eyes. And they actually run date scans on domains using a Whois registry so they know the exact date and minute the domain was registered.

If you haven’t used one, check out AllWhoIs.com or BetterWhoIs.com and enter any domain name. It tells you all kinds of stuff, including the owner, registrar, date or registration and even the owner’s home phone and address if that’s what he or she used to register.

Securing Domain Names 4: As for the domain type, .com is best bet and .net and .org extensions also do well. I don’t bother with the others and I really strive for .com whenever possible.

Part Three: Deciding on Website Type

Deciding on Website Type 1: Do you want a blog or a regular static site? For quickest results I recommend setting up a WordPress blog (free technology with thousands of free templates.) Google loves blogs because they are fresh, dynamic and already nearly perfectly optimized for their spidering bot.

Deciding on Website Type 2: If you do go with WordPress, I also recommend installing the free WordPress plugin “All in One SEO Pack” by Michael Torbert. It’s amazíng and totally free.

Part Four: Finding Web Hosting

Finding Web Hosting 1: There are tens or thousands of companies you can go with or you can even just host your site at WordPress.com.

Finding Web Hosting 2: Personally I like to maintain full control of my site for future expansions and customizations. And I have so many niche blogs in service that saving even just a few bucks is a big deal. I use the starter blog package available at Host Monster Host Unlimited Domains On 1 Hosting Account. Hosting starts from about $6.95. It’s also got push button WordPress installation, which is nice. So I’m up and running in about five minutes.

Finding Web Hosting 3: But again, there are literally tens of thousands of hosts to choose from. Shop around and stick with one you really like. It’s much easier to track each of your niche blogs with a single host (control panels, stats, etc.)

Part Five: Optimizing Your Site

Optimizing Your Site 1: So far we’ve covered how to select the most profitable keywords, purchase unbeatable domain names, use the Website type most revered by Google for quickest results and how to get reliable inexpensive hosting with bonus features. And we have only spent about $35 ($10 for the domain and $6.95 for hosting.)

Optimizing Your Site 2: Now we move onto the actual optimization part. I will laundry líst the things you need to keep in mind for a competitive edge and recommend a tool bargain if you decide you need one.

Use two of your most important keywords per page; the primary and a secondary.

Use your main and secondary keyword in the page or post title.

Try to make each page about 500 words in length or more, using at least five paragraphs.

Mention your main keyword about four times on the page as follows: Once at the beginning of the first sentence, once in the second paragraph, once in the third paragraph and once towards the end of the final paragraph.

Mention your secondary keyword about four times on the page as follows: Once towards the end of the first sentence, once in the third paragraph, once in the fourth paragraph and once towards the beginning of the final paragraph.

Add your keywords and META descriptions to the WordPress plugin “All in One SEO Pack” and let that do the heavy lifting for you.

Optimizing Your Site 3: If you have an SEO analyzer tool, use it. This is a tool that goes through you site just like Google will, and does the same to your top competitors that dominate your search engine of choice, then tells you EXACTLY what you need to do to steal their top positions.

Optimizing Your Site 4: If you don’t have a tool like that but think it would help, you can download a free tríal version of one of the better ones at iBusinessPR0M0TER.com. If you decide to buy it, you will have the same tool that makes eBay number one all over the world. And for about $250.

Well that’s it. You can dominate any niche you want with little time, effort or expense. Why do I feel so confident about it? This is the exact process I have used to dominate over fifty niches from Bass fishing to coin collecting and, of course, search engine optimization.

Above all else enjoy the ride. Best of luck!

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council has just completed a study of channel executives, distributors, resellers, and other channel representatives. The results of the surveys may not surprise you, but the contrasts of the responses provide a shocking insight into the sheer volume of missed opportunities. This is good news for you, because missed opportunities by others can create new opportunities for you. While you may agree with the initial results of the survey, consider how you can adjust your approach to the market and leverage these opportunities.

According to the survey results by the Chief Marketing Officer Council, most valued source of leads is from customer referrals.

• 54% Customer Referrals
• 14% E-Mail or Direct Marketing
• 8% Internet
• 7% Events
• 7% Leads from Vendors
• 3% Third Party Lead Generation Organizations
• 8% Other

Would you agree that the best leads come from the referrals of satisfied customers? Is it surprising that customer referrals were ranked as four times more powerful and valuable than E-Mail or Direct Marketing campaigns? Customer referrals were ranked nearly seven times more likely to result in sales and new business than leads derived the Internet.

Customer referrals are a means of providing immediate credibility. With the increasing ability for consumers to share personal expression on the Internet, Blogs, E-mail, and word of mouth, the ability to communicate has enhanced the voice of the customer. In business-to-business transactions, a customer referral is more likely to lead to an appropriate contact with a relevant message, which is far more powerful and likely to result in success than a cold call from a third party lead generation. Events and trade shows can be a powerful platform to market a brand, but fall short in delivering valuable leads.

With all of this insight, how did the same channel executives, distributors, resellers, and channel representatives respond to the survey by Chief Marketing Officer Council with regards to tactics for generating new leads in the coming year?

• 14% Plan to use Direct Marketing and E-mail campaigns
• 13% Plan to use Sales Brochures and collateral
• 10% Plan to focus on Tradeshows for lead generation
• 8% Will use Seminars to generate leads
• 7% Will rely on Print Advertising
• 7% Plan to use Public Relations and Article Placement
• 7% Plan to use the Internet and Online Advertising
• 6% Will revert to Telemarketing
• 6% Plan to invest in Internet Search Engine Marketing
• 5% Plan to engage customers in User Group Gatherings
• 4% Plan to rely on Yellow Page Advertising
• 4% Will experiment on the Internet with Blogs and Social Networking
• 3% Will use Online Directories
• 3% Will create Webcasts
• 1% Plan to use Content Syndication
• 2% Will try something completely different

The results of the survey regarding lead generation tactics for new business acquisition are hardly surprising. Very little has changed in the planning and tactics as conveyed by the survey response, and yet, the contrast in comparison to the most effective and valued leads is staggering. Even though 54% of respondents acknowledged that the most valued leads are based on customer referrals, the first mention of leveraging this goldmine occurs in the 4% of respondents that plan to engage customers in user group gatherings.

Fortunately, it would appear relatively that fourteen percent of respondents believe the most valuable lead generation comes from Direct Marketing or E-mail, and fourteen percent plan to use this tactic for lead generation in the coming year. However, even though only seven percent believe that the best leads come from trade shows, there are ten percent planning to take this tactic, and another eight percent who will augment this activity with seminars.

Although only eight percent believe that the highest chance for success comes from leads acquired by the Internet, there is a staggering number of diverse plans to leverage this channel of communication. The tactics include seven percent Internet and Online Advertising, six percent investing in search engine marketing, four percent using blogs and social networking, three percent using Online Directories, and another three percent experimenting with webcasts. The Internet provides an exciting vehicle to be creative, showcase the brand, and communicate to a very large audience. However, is it targeting the most valuable audience by engaging the most valuable leads that come from customer referrals?

As you can see, the tactics are not groundbreaking or unusual. On the contrary, the approach to market is contrived on establishing a brand, shouting a message to the masses, and hoping that the merit is recognized by the appropriate lead. The Internet, Trade Shows, Brochures, and Advertising, provide effective, if not innovative vehicles for spreading the slogan. While it may be necessary to invest in these channels of communication to maintain competitive placement, there remains untapped opportunity for higher rates of success when tactics engage customer referrals.

Stop what you are doing right now and imagine how referrals from satisfied customers could generate valuable leads and grow your business. It does not matter what kind of business you are in, or what responsibilities you have in the organization. Every member of an organization contributes directly, or indirectly, to customer satisfaction. Your actions may results in testimonials, endorsements, or positive word of mouth. If you could harness the power of customer referrals, your sales force would blossom with representation from independent trusted advocates.

So, how do you encourage and empower customers to grow this incredible pipeline of valued referrals? You ask them, of course. However, before you make such a bold request, your customers must know that you are fully engaged and obligated to their aspirations. When customers are assured that you are a trusted advocate, committed to customer satisfaction, they have the confidence to share referrals and recommendations.

Once customer confidence is established and the relationship is mutually rewarding, then it is just a matter of creating the appropriate opportunity for referrals to occur. This can be as simple as asking for referrals, or as formal as creating gatherings for existing clients and potential prospects to meet and exchange experiences. Introducing existing clients to potential prospects demonstrates immense confidence in your own relationship with your customers, because you are not fearful of losing the mutually rewarding relationship. Group gatherings and communications creates a unique opportunity to endorse your customers, grow their circle of influence, and for them to provide a third party endorsement of your efforts.

There are many ways to empower customer referrals by engaging individuals in group gathering or discussions, leveraging the Internet or Advertising, or by collecting a powerful collage of testimonials. The tactics for getting the most out of this goldmine pipeline are as diverse as the markets and customers in them. It all begins with recognizing the most valuable source for leads, acknowledging the value of these resources, and creating specific action items in a plan to unleash these untapped opportunities. Actively and effectively mining the most valuable source for leads will give you an advantage over 95% of your competition.

A: Better SEO, total control, more traffic and more sales – although those reasons won’t apply if you’re not blogging for business!

When I started out blogging I opened a blogger.com account. That worked fine for me at the time because I was new to blogging. In fact, I knew so little about it at the time that I didn’t even realise that I could host my own.

Even if I had realised that, it’s not something I would have given a moment’s thought to. I was too new to working online. I was (still am) totally non-techie and it would have been too daunting a task.

So I happily blogged away on my blogger account until I logged on one day to find that Google had translated all the admin pages into Chinese. I live in Hong Kong so Google, thinking they were being smart, used my IP address as the basis on which to make the decision to translate it.

Not being able to find the help link (because I can’t read Chinese) I logged into my Google account (Adwords, Gmail, etc,) to raise a request for them to translate my blog back to English.

After a week nothing had happened. I’d got no reply and still couldn’t read my admin screens. So I simply decided to transfer my blog to Wordpress.com.

By this time I had learned enough about blogging to have heard that Wordpress was the place to be. So I imported all my old Blogger posts and started to learn Wordpress. Given what I’d heard I was looking forward to great things.

One thing I noticed immediately was that my posts were suddenly figuring much more quickly in the natural search results, so it looked as though at least some of what I’d heard was correct.

And I happily blogged away until…

…one day I tried to log on to be met with a notice telling me my blog had been suspended for infringing Wordpress’ terms and conditions.

DAMN..!! Twice inside a month I’d been blind-sided by my blogging platform and the second occasion was even more damaging than the first. (It doesn’t look too professional when your visitors are told that your blog’s been suspended for infringing terms and conditions).

So, finally, I was pushed into the realisation that I had no option but to set up my own blog and host it myself.

So off I clicked to Wordpress.org to see what I could find out. And I was pleasantly surprised.

Firstly – the instructions they’ve set out for downloading and installing a WP blog are delightfully clear and easy to follow.

There are a few minimum requirements set out, which pretty much every hosting provider meets. You can always check with your provider if you’re not sure. Mine does, so I printed off the instructions and got going.

First step is to set up the database. Easy to do – the instructions are very clear, include screen shots for every step of the way and are written in simple, non-techie language.

I then downloaded and unzipped the blog files, entered my newly created database details into the config file, (just followed the instructions), uploaded the files and accessed the installation screen via my browser (the URL is provided in the instructions). That kicked off the installation script and I was all done.

It was, literally, a 5-minute exercise.

However, the majority of hosting providers now give you an even easier method than that:

One click installation.

I’ve never done a 1-click installation so I can’t confirm whether it really is one click or whether a few more are involved – but it’s definitely very easy and it doesn’t involve any downloading, unzipping and uploading of files.

So what are the benefits of running your own blog on your own server?

You have total control. You can write what you like, you can drive traffic to affiliate programs, no one is going to translate it into Chinese, and no one is going to lose your database.

You can customise it as much as you like. Customisation is done through plug-ins, and there are plug-ins for just about anything you can think of. You decide what you want to do with your blog, then you can either go to the Wordpress plug-in directory or do a Google search for a plug-in for the function you want.

Download the plug-in, unzip it, upload it and activate it through the blog admin screens. It’s that simple. Really.

But of all the sexy things you can do with your self-hosted blog, probably the biggest benefit of all comes from the SEO elements.

This really turns your blog into an incredibly effective way of figuring strongly in the natural search results.

Optimising your blog for the search engines is simply a question of installing and activating the appropriate SEO related plug-ins. And you can find probably the best list of these in Jack Humphrey’s Authority Blackbook.

If you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up your own, self-hosted blog then you should absolutely download this book and follow the guidelines in there for optimising it properly for the search engines.

Firstly, it’s free and secondly, if you don’t set up your blog properly you’re wasting an enormous portion of its SEO potential.

It would be like buying a Ferrari but never taking it out of the city centre.

I’m now using my blog as my primary means of drawing in traffic. I haven’t spend a dime on promoting it – and I don’t have any intention of doing so going forwards.

And yet my blog is now attracting a little over 50% of the total traffic I’m getting on a weekly basis – that’s traffic to my blog plus traffic to all my other sites – and that’s almost totally due to the SEO effectiveness of my plugin-rich, self-hosted blog.

Within the next year I’m aiming for that to be well over 80%.

About this author

Martin Malden grew up in Zimbabwe and now lives in Hong Kong. He writes a blog covering tips, techniques and resources for small- or home-business owners. For more information check out his blog here:
http://www.wealthydragon.com/blog/

Rand surveyed the Top 37 SEO experts in the World. Basically the Survey is a series of questions asked of each expert. This group of experts could not come up with an agreement rating more than 1 on many of the questions!

So now that we know the experts can’t agree, I might as well tell you the mistakes I’ve made plus the ones I see done by many Webmasters when link building.

Failing to Procure Reciprocal Links.
I’ve seen so called SEO Guru’s say that reciprocal linking is dead and they will hurt your site. This just isn’t so. The important thing to remember is to make sure the links you trade are from quality sites. It doesn’t matter if they’re PR0, just make sure they’re not from a spam/ adult/ pharmacy/ hate type site. Reciprocal links can be on a resource page if you run a website or a Blogroll for you bloggers. Just remember to trade!

Failing to Acquire Low PR Links.
For some reason, many Webmasters do not want PR0 sites linking to them. This is link building suicide! One day, those PR0 sites could be the next PR5 or better. Frankly, I don’t care who links to my sites. I can’t control it and if they’re passing any amount of authority, and even PR0 sites pass some, I’ll take it. It also looks natural when you have many more low authority sites pointing to your site than all high PR sites.

Failing to Link Out.
Once again, we’re talking about making your site look natural to the Search Engines, especially Google. Authority sites link out to other authority sites. Google expects to see this. I can’t tell you how many times Ive had a site stuck in the SERPS only to get a little boost when I linked to a higher authority site. So link out to authority sites!

Failure to Check Your Reciprocal Link Partners’ Websites.
Once you exchange links with someone, you need to follow up on a routine basis and make sure the link back to your site is still there. Some sites go down, accounts are closed, domains expire and are purchased by someone else, Webmasters change website topics and some Webmasters simply take your link down after you exchange links. I’ve seen people put the “nofollow” attribute on the links after they’ve made a trade. I’ve seen it all happen, that’s why I monitor my link partners and you should also.

Failing to Use Anchor Text in Your Link.
If someone gives you the opportuníty to use Anchor text in the link back to your site, use it! In my opinion, anchor text in a backlink is the second biggest off page ranking factor for SEO. Only the relevancy and authority of the page where the backlink originates is more important in my experience.

Failing to Cover Up Your Paid Link Footprints.
Look, from here to the end of time, people will sell links. And from here to the end of time, Google will be trying to find paid links. And from here to the end of time, you’ll see blogs, websites and blog networks (think Backlink Solutions) get de-indexed for selling links. If you’re going to buy or sell links as part of your link building plan, you’d better be hiding your footprint or Big Daddy G is going to find you one dark, cold and stormy night. There are several ways of hiding your footprint, I covered one way in my link laundering article a few weeks ago.

Failing to Build Links.
I see people on the forums all the time asking how they should go about link building or how to get started link building. Many say they don’t know how and so they don’t even try. People! I hate link building as much as the next person, but it’s not Rocket Science. You may be able to rank high in a low competitive keyword niche with on-page SEO, but for a competitive niche where’s there’s money to be made, you’re going to need some relevant backlinks!

TIP: One of the most effective link building strategies you can perform is to find out who’s linking to your competition and get links from them. You simply go to Google and type in link:yourcompetitorssite.com. You’ll then get a líst of sites that are linking to your competitor’s site. Browse that site to see if there is a place to put a link to your site at. If not, simply Contact the person running the site and ask kindly for a link. Many times they will not respond, but some will. Now, out of those sites, do the same thing. See who’s linking to them and get links from those sites!

This is probably the easiest way to get relevant backlinks but it’s a technique very few Bloggers and Webmasters use! Sure it’s tedious and time consuming, but in the long run, those top rankings will be worth all the time you practiced link building!

2. When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submittíng to other search engines but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Also submít your site to reputable high PR web directories, open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, etc.

3. Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com (sitemap for search engines usually in XML format)

4. Offer a sitemap to your site visitors for easy page navigation. (sitemap for visitors in HTML format)

5. Create unique and rich content sites. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but the same content.

6. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keyword stuffing.

7. Use text instead of images in your content, links and important subjects.

8. Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords.

9. Your Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length.

10. Your Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters, including spaces. (about 25-30 words)

11. The keywords Meta Tag must be 15-20 words maximum.

12. Optimize pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site’s primary keywords.

13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.

14. If your site contains dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engine spiders have difficulty indexing dynamic pages.

15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as a link farm by search engines.

16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site.

17. Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.

18. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since your site was last crawled. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.

19. Use a Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders that index your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. With bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn more about the Robots.txt file.

20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.

21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engine ranking.

22. Avoid links to bad neighborhoods such as web spammer, link farm, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, pörn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affect your search engine rankings.

23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.

24. Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings or perform other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as a spammer.

25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show the search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site’s reputation.

26. Do not attempt to create pages that contain phishing, scam, virus, trojan, backdoor, spyware, adware or other malicious programs.

27. Make your site useful and informative.

28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links is far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site’s visibility, popularity and ranking. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.

29. Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.

30. Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some use illegal and questionable methods to improve rankings.

31. Do not buy or sell links.

32. Do not create sites that contain purely affiliate links and no valuable content that is useful to users.

I hope these tips will add more popularity and visibility to your site. Enjoy!

If a business has happy customers and a lot of return clients, it should have testimonials. You wouldn’t hire a contractor to remodel your house without checking references. Therefore be proud of the work you do and get some testimonials. Customer testimonials will help increase sales as well as boost the confidence of potential customers.

The Difference Between Good and Better

In order to have testimonials work for you and increase clientele, you must be careful how you phrase them. Testimonials are a marketing effort, which means that they need to be geared toward making your company look spectacular. For example, instead of writing “I love their vitamins”, write “Taking these vitamins everyday gives me lots of energy and keeps me feeling great all day long.” The latter testimonial is a lot more eye-catching and will be more effective in gaining a customer’s confidence than the former. Ask customers who are willing to write testimonials to be specific.

Cherry Pick Your Testimonials

If you don’t have any testimonials, check your company’s email inbox for customers who sent compliments. If you can’t find any ones you like, look at your client list and find out who is buying your products and at what frequency. Call or email a handful of your best customers and ask them to write a specific testimonial. Have them send a picture as well. This will give potential customers further reassurance of the validity of the testimonial.

Testimonials will not only improve your business, but will also improve your company’s image as one that values customer satisfaction. So make the effort to get some strong testimonials.

Four Tips for Effective and Eye-Catching Locations

1. Once you have the testimonials, you need to figure out where to put them on your site. Placement is key, particularly when using flash. You want your testimonials to give maximum impact. The most common place on a website is for them to have their own navigation button titled either “Testimonials” or “Rave Reviews”. This way more testimonials can be viewed on their own page.

2. Another option is to use flash testimonials on a sidebar on the homepage along with the customer’s name, job title and company or logo. If you are using the testimonials in the masthead, they should rotate every 7-10 seconds then stop after all testimonials are shown. You don’t want a testimonial to be so distracting that it takes the emphasis off of the content and what you are selling or offering. By having the flash cycle stop, you are allowing viewers to see the testimonials and then freely look at the content without the excess flash.

3. An alternative way to present testimonials is to sprinkle them throughout the site, highlighting them within the content using graphics, such as a color block background, upper and lower bar, etc. These visual stops are equally effective in reinforcing your credibility and can act as an additional selling point for specific products or services.

4. If you have the option for audio or video testimonials, this can be very effective in boosting your company’s credibility. Audio is easy to record using Audio Acrobat. Video, on the other hand, requires more thought to positioning and angles. If you are at a trade show or with a client, you may want to pre-plan these testimonials for more impact.

Remember that in order for a testimonial to be effective, it needs to be specific, believable and placed in a credible location. With these three tips in mind, your testimonials will build customer confidence and web success.