You know that Twitter is good for business, when both Google, and Bing, begin to index Tweets in the search engine results.
Although we’re not sure how they are going to accomplish it; last week, both Google and Bing, made their announcements to that effect.
If you need to be convinced that Twitter is good for business, just go to some of the “big boys” websites to confirm my opinion.
Twitter has been steadily growing in importance, attracting more and more followers every day.
Since so many consumers are now using social media sites like Twitter, more and more savvy internet marketers have noticed that online merchants, are also testing the waters, and experimenting with Twitter.
To date, most merchants still do not seem to be paying much attention to Twitter, or to the other social media sites; however, with Google and Bing’s announcement, things are about to change!
If you’re not currently on a social website like Twitter, your competition may already be out gunning you.
You should consider using Twitter to promote your brand, increase your visibility, and maximize your earnings.
It’s obvious that Twitter is good for business, when e commerce merchants like Amazon, Sears, and Walmart, start using accounts dedicated to Twitter.
This should tell you something.
Some merchants like Amazon, use multiple accounts to manage different sectors of their business, while others like Sears, use only one interactive account.
If you decide to experiment with Twitter, it’s important for you to explain to your customers, exactly how you operate.
You should clarify how many accounts you have; and what type of information you provide on each account.
This clears up any confusion your followers might have, and gives them up to date information on your products, or services.
Keep your customers happy, and give them Tweets with the information they are looking for.
Twitter is good for business; take advantage of it, and use it wisely!
This is how to get automatic Tweets on your Twitter page, when you get too busy or overwhelmed to do it yourself.
Twitter Feed, is a simple free tool you can use to pull in RSS feeds from your blogs, article sites, or any other site that has an RSS feed you want to hook up with.
You can use Twitter Feed with only your own blogs, or in conjunction with your friend’s blogs and other quality sites that you would like to use to update your blog.
This works great for people who are often too busy to post to their own blogs on a regular basis.
First do a Google search for Twitter Feed, go to their website, and sign up for your free account by providing your email address and creating your password.
- You will then be directed to the second step where you create your feed for your blog.
Here is where you name your feed, and insert the RSS feed URL for your website.
The URL of your feed will depend on which blogging platform is used, but you can usually find it by clicking on a button or icon labeled “RSS”, “Atom”, “Syndicate”, or something similar or by clicking on the icon located in the right hand side of your browser address bar.
If you still have trouble finding it, you can always check the documentation of the blogging platform software that you are using. This should tell you how to find the feed URL.
You can click on the advanced settings to further customize how you want your feed sent.
- Next you move to step two where you configure your publishing services.
Here you can get automatic Tweets on your Twitter page, Laconia, Ping.fm, Hellotxt, or Facebook by just clicking on each service and either joining, or activating and authenticating your existing subscription.
That’s all the work you need to do to finish your feed and to get automatic Tweets on your Twitter page.
You can create all the additional feeds you like by signing into your dashboard and following the above procedure.
This is probably one of the easiest ways to get automatic Tweets on your Twitter page, Facebook, and your other publishing services.
It’s important to understand the benefits of Twittering, and that Twitter can be used for much more than just personal updates.
With the introduction of microblogging to the Internet, Twitter has reduced the time it takes to market content from hours, that it used to take from using previous forms of communication; to minutes and even seconds, through the use of Twitter Tweets.
Although many users like to put in cat updates, or tell everyone what they’re doing in the bathroom at 2:00 in the morning; Twitter has many more useful purposes than that.
Initially blogs used to have the same stigma attached to them; but with microblogging, the world suddenly woke up and almost immedately understood what the power of simple publishing, combined with citizen journalism could accomplish.
Twitter is a place where you can freely accomplish many things.
The benefits of Twittering allow you to:
- Promote yourself
- Promote your business
- Promote others (affiliates)
- Get advise on almost anything
- Run polls to find a consensus
- Acquire human resources
- Immediately broadcast important breaking news
- Socialize
- And the list goes on ….
Microblogging has become so widespread, that if you participate in any social media community these days; people probably already know that you’re also on Twitter.
While Twitter doesn’t in itself have the best methods of finding people; you can always Twitter to see who your friends are following, or just join the conversation without being too intrusive, and simply ask.
Don’t be bashful, join in and make your presence known.
When you get involved with the community, jump in and share your expertise. See what people are talking about, ask questions and give good answers when you have them.
Know the difference between pushing and pulling. For instance, when you post a link to your latest blog post to Twitter, you are making a push, or an action to grab the reader. Direct marketers have mastered the technique of pushing and have developed it into an art form.
Although some of your readers can ignore your posts; the people that appreciate your posts will immediately check you out.
On the other hand, RSS is a pull. Users generally check RSS at their own speed, and it usually takes much more time to get any “buzz” going around your content.
Read the Tweets that are already out there.
One of the benefits of Twittering is that there’s a lot of valuable information from a lot of smart individuals on Twitter, that you can use for yourself and your business, if you just take the time.
Social networking sites like MySpace, FaceBook, and even Twitter, can be great places to promote your website or blog.
Start by creating a group or groups, centered around your niche market and begin networking with other users who have the same interest in your niche topic.
FaceBook allows you to create a business or “fan” page that can be used to share and post information to promote your business website.
You can use your fan page to share information such as your hours of operation, location, etc. It can function as a marketing tool that can generate leads for and promote your business.
Twitter’s founders don’t actually classify their web site as a social networking site, but anyone using Twitter can tell you in a hurry that it definitely falls into that category.
Twitter is actually more like a micro blog; and although many people consider Twitter and Tweeting to be a total waste of time, if you learn how to use it properly, it can be a valuable sales asset and traffic generating business tool.
Just like anything else, social networking sites can be great promotion tools. But to get the best results, you need to learn how to use them effectively.
It will require a bit of testing and experimentation on your part to determine what works best for you. But when you DO get the right formula; you’ll be glad you “wasted your time” playing around with social networking sites.
We realize that social networking sites aren’t for everyone and that they’re not absolutely necessary to run a successful website or blog, but using them to promote your web sites can definitely make your life run a lot smoother.
Do Pligg site article submissions really increase site traffic?
Pligg site article submissions
In case you haven’t heard the term before; Pligg is an Open Source Web 2.0 CMS for social publishing of content that combines bookmarking, social networking, and blogging.
Pligg sites are very similar to Digg, where the site visitors are the creators, consumers and judges of the content.
Every news item that is submitted has a vote button, a URL and a short item description where visitors can vote and/or comment on the submissions.
At the end of the day, the vote count determines if items are either automatically promoted to the home page, held in a queue, or permanently deleted from the site.
Pligg sites are routinely used for article submissions, blog postings, websites, content, etc. In essence they are “mini article directories”.
Plig site submissions get indexed just as quickly as the content on Squidoo, HubPages and other authority sites like these.
Because of this and other factors, Plugg sites are often used for Search Engine Optimization and promotion of websites.
Although traditional article marketing works, it is no longer enough.
Because of the number of people that are already using article marketing to propagate their content and generate backlinks to their sites, its extremely difficult making any headway using traditional methods.
This is where Pligg sites come in.
In almost every case, Pligg site article submissions can boost your search engine ranking for highly competitive keywords much faster than article marketing.
They are an excellent way to generate backlinks to your website as well as reducing your SEO and link building efforts.
Pligg site article submissions have been proven to be an effective off the charts method of generating massive amounts of web traffic.
If you do a Google search for “Pligg sites”, you will find that over 4,780,000 sites are currently online.
If you can tap into just 1% of these sites and submit a short article with a link to your blog or website, you would generate a huge amount of link juice to your site.
That means that almost 50,000 sites contain backlinks pointing to your site.
If this sounds too good to be true, it isn’t. However, there is a downside.
Just like article directories, you have to register to these Pligg sites before you can have your articles published.
Although it takes a great deal of time to register and submit articles to thousands of sites, it’s still worth the effort.
There are solutions to manual Pligg site article submissions.
- You can submit your articles to a few Pligg sites daily to create more natural organic links.
- You could outsource your Pligg site registration and article submissions.
- You could purchase a Pligg submitter that does it automatically to thousands of sites at once.
Automatic Pligg submitters are designed to speed-up website indexing, optimize search engine rankings and increase traffic by automatically creating and registering user accounts, rotating proxy servers, parsing and spinning domain meta tags and submitting articles to thousands of Pligg sites, all on autopilot.
When used on a daily basis, Pligg site article submissions will quickly become your primary link building tool.
Here is a partial list of verified Pligg sites for your Pligg site article submissions in PDF format.
PDF: Partial Pligg Site List
Although purchasing a website to drive web traffic is not a new Internet marketing strategy, online retailers have refined the concept to increase their sales and profits.
Internet marketing is dedicated to driving web traffic to your website, with the expectation of generating sales and increasing profits.
More traffic ultimately leads to increased sales and improved profits.
Online retailers and Internet marketers have an arsenal of strategies they use to generate traffic.
This includes niche websites, blogging, videos, bookmarking sites, social media, banner advertising, PPC advertising, etc.
Purchasing a website to drive web traffic is just another weapon you can use in your arsenal of marketing strategies.
When you think about it, it makes perfect sense to purchase an established niche website that already has a steady stream of search engine traffic, to generate additional traffic to your site.
But how do you go about doing it?
First of all, the concept of purchasing one website to drive traffic to a second website isn’t unique.
Consider PPC advertising and how it works in conjunction with Google AdWords.
Based on specific keywords, some of the PPC ads that are placed on Google show up on Google’s search engine results page.
When someone does a Google search for a topic like, “learn to skydive”; the results page will provide them with the organic results as well as Pay Per Click advertisements on top and on the right side of the results page.
Google ads are also found on the “niche” websites of people who are part of the AdWords network, trying to make money using Google’s AdSense ads on their site.
The results page for the search term “learn to skydive” shows several skydiving websites which all feature various AdSense advertisements on “skydiving”.
As you can see in the following screenshot; Dropzone.com has PPC ads in the right column for “Florida Skydiving”, “Skydive Sebastian”, “Texas Skydiving” and “Skydiving In Virginia”.
These ad spaces link directly to the retailer who purchased each individual advertisement.
As you can see, in an effort to increase sales, all of these online marketers are using Google’s PPC AdWords advertisements to drive targeted traffic to their websites.
Now, think about the potential sales you would generate, if you could just purchase the Dropzone.com website, along with the targeted AdSense ads that link to each of the retailers.
This is the general idea behind purchasing a website to drive web traffic.
If you decide to go this route, there are several ways to find good niche websites to purchase that are already driving traffic to their retailers.
When merchants use PPC advertising, the referring sites are part of Google’s AdWords network and can be found using Google Analytics.
Once you find a site that matches your needs, contact the site owner to see if it is available for purchase.
You can also use the search engines to find sites that match the specific keywords you are interested in.
Sites that appear high in the organic search results are the ones you should concentrate on.
If you perform a Google search for “websites for sale” or “website marketplaces”, the search will hook you up with a ton of websites such as the ones below, that list sites for sale :
Flippa
Latona’s
digble
WebsiteBroker.com
Webmasters Marketplace
BuyMySite
BusinessBroker.net
Second Wind Marketplace
Before you decide to buy any website, always make sure you thoroughly check it out.
Although purchasing a website to drive web traffic can provide you with an additional source of targeted traffic and income, it can also be a risky proposition if you don’t do your due diligence.
Anyone can make money online freelancing, especially if you have some writing skills or just enjoy writing a lot.
Webmasters on the Internet are constantly looking for additional content for their web sites.
Although a Google search can pull up a considerable volume of writers, really accomplished writers are always in demand.
Skilled writers who have the ability to write good articles about almost any subject can earn a good living from Internet webmasters.
Freelancing articles, press releases, email content and even video scripts for webmaster’s websites will make money online, but one type of writing can make you even more money.
Copy writing
Copy writing is simply the writing of commercially oriented content or advertisements.
Not all writers have the ability to write good advertisements.
It takes a unique skill, that also requires a great deal of word mastery, to write good advertisements that sell.
Good copywriters command high prices for their copy and get it.
If you have the ability to write good advertising copy, you have a valuable bankable skill that will make money online freelancing.
Although this article is geared toward article writing, freelancing isn’t just limited to writing.
Any professional skill that businesses will pay you money for, is suitable for freelancing.
Anyone with professional skills or who has expertise in a hobby or activity can set up a website and offer their skills to businesses or the public.
Photography, business consulting, writing, fishing, private investigation, Psychological Stress Evaluation, hypnosis, etc. are all suitable for freelancing and can be marketed online. The list is almost endless.
If your skill is location based, you can optimize your website for a specific area or city to make it more user friendly.
For example: If you are a guide or know how to catch fish in a specific area such as the Mosquito Lagoon in Central Florida, your websites title tag could read “Fishing Guide Mosquito Lagoon Florida”.
There are other optimization tips you or a SEO professional can implement to get your site recognized by the search engines for your location.
Whether you’re a writer, a fisherman or have some other professional skill that a business would pay for, you can start make money online freelancing just by setting up your website.
Strategic keyword placement in your content is by far the quickest way to get your site recognized by the search engines.
All Internet marketers know that content is the most powerful and useful search engine optimization tool you have in your arsenal.
Posting content that is relevant, keyword optimized and updated on a daily basis, is the quickest way to get your website to the top of the search engine results page and keep it there.
Most people erroneously believe that keywords are only used for meta data.
This is not the case.
Strategic Keyword Placement
Keywords play an extremely important part in how the search engines sort out the relevance of various web sites compared to what people are actually searching for.
They also help the person searching find a site that matches what they are trying to find.
How often you should use keywords in your content is a matter of opinion.
Ideally, you should try to make your keywords blend into your content so it reads easily.
Sometimes when marketers try to “force” a number of keywords into the content, it reads awkwardly to humans.
Beginning Internet marketers and Ezine article writers often try to use way too many keywords in their content.
Some beginners try to put a keyword in every sentence.
Not only does this make the content awkward reading, it could get your site listed as a spam site.
If you write your content first and then go back and do some strategic keyword placement, your content will be much easier to read and be more recognizable to the search engines.
Remember that the main reason for strategic keyword placement is to make your content relevant and useful to the human reader that searched for that specific keyword.
Loading your content with keywords not relevant to the search may get someone to click to your site, but they won’t stay there long.
In addition to your primary keyword, make sure to sprinkle other relevant keywords throughout your content.
If your content sounds awkward when you read it out loud to yourself, you probably have used too many keywords in the wrong places.
Strategic keyword placement means just that.
Position your keywords so the search engines recognize them.
This means to place them in…
- The headline
- The headings and sub-headings in your content
- The first and last paragraphs of your content
- At least once per page (primary keyword)
- Images and videos used in your content
Strategic keyword placement doesn’t mean that each page of content should be optimized with a bunch of keywords.
Your content will be more relevant to the person doing the search when you optimize each page with only one primary keyword.
Sometimes you can use a secondary keyword that enhances your content description, but never try to use too many keywords.
All this does is dilute the search results for the person doing the search.
Strategic keyword placement is extremely effective in getting your site ranked high in the SERPs if you just keep it simple.
Whenever possible you should always try to use SEO friendly images in your site content.
Getting search engine traffic from images is extremely underrated by most web masters and Internet marketers.
Like strategic video tagging, images can be made search engine friendly.
Search engine robots can’t read images but they can read the SEO attached to images.
Descriptions, tags and titles that you attribute to your images are crawled by the various search engines and indexed.
For this reason you should attribute all your images with well defined ALT and TITLE attributes.
For images, this is the equivalent to doc titles and meta descriptions that are attributed to web pages.
All your images should be given a relevant name, preferably with your primary keyword placed in the first position.
Instead of using the original file name (DSCN0052.jpg) in the image below right, it was renamed using the keyword “Stained Glass” in the file name.
Stained Glass Singing Frog
In this case “stained glass singing frog“.
As a webmaster, the original image file name of “DSCN0052.jpg” might have some meaning to you as a file reference .
However, for the search engines crawling your web site, it doesn’t mean a thing.
Naming the file “stainedglasssingingfrog.jpg” is a much more relevant and descriptive to your readers and to the search engines.
Plus, you have your primary keyword “stained glass” prominent in the name.
The newer versions of WordPress have some great image optimizing tools already built into the platform that makes it easy to create SEO friendly images.
Instead of having images open in a lightbox or in their own separate page, you can use WordPress’s built functions to put them in attachment pages.
Although many people fail to use SEO friendly images in their content, you don’t have to be one of them.
The All in One SEO Pack WordPress plugin combined with SEO friendly image attachment pages will help keep your site on the front page of Google’s search engine results pages.
If you haven’t yet created an effective mobile website for your business that mirrors the same basic goals as your existing website; what are you waiting for?
Well over 70% of the world population now owns a mobile phone and a good majority of them are “smart phones”.
This trend suggests that mobile web browsing has become the norm for consumers worldwide.
If you don’t yet have a mobile website or if your current mobile website isn’t as effective as you hoped it would be; it may need some tweaking.
Below are some suggestions for creating an effective mobile website.
- Make sure you publish the right content for your audience.
Examine your existing website and edit the copy for mobile phone use.
Decide what specific information on your site is necessary to meet your customer’s needs and use that information on your mobile website.
Condense the content and eliminate any unnecessary verbiage so that busy smart phone users can more easily digest the information.
- Don’t make things complicated.
Many webmasters with dazzling online websites don’t do well on a mobile website.
Mobile website design should be kept as simple as possible.
Smartphone users are “on the go” people and opt for speed not “bling”.
They want data to load quickly once they get into your site and they don’t care about the glitz.
With limited exception, images that take a long time to load, graphic buttons and flash should always be avoided.
If your site was designed with flash and java script, you need to re think using it on your mobile website.
Instead of making your visitors scroll around your site to find additional information, use text links to direct them to their location.
Scrolling on smartphones isn’t a big problem, but it is on some feature phones.
The best bet is to limit your scrolling and use text links instead. Don’t forget to use a text link back to your online website.
- For an effective mobile website, use SEO
Keyword optimize your URLs, heading tags, meta tags, etc.
Many people will be using mobile search engines or search applications to find your site, so it’s a good idea to ensure that your site is properly Search Engine Optimized if you want to have an effective mobile website.
- Don’t forget to use mobile social media applications on your site.
A small Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook button will not appreciably slow down your site from loading quickly and is a benefit to viewers who want a quick link to their social media accounts.
It is NOT a good idea to put social media feeds into mobile websites.
- Install a Blog optimizer Plug-in
There are blog plug-ins available that can be installed on your blog that will automatically optimize it for the smaller mobile browsers.
Blogs are arguably one of the best tools you can have for marketing your website, especially when used in conjunction with an effective mobile website.
The plug-ins eliminate the need for you to create a blog specifically for the mobile browsers.
- Make sure your that your mobile website can be easily viewed on a variety of mobile browsers.
Some sites don’t look as good on a mobile browser as they do on your desktop hardware. And some mobile websites that look good on an iPhone, may leave a lot to be desired when viewed on a Blackberry.
A really effective mobile website is one that will look good on the majority of mobile browsers.
It’s apparent that browsing the web from mobile “smartphones” has quickly become the norm for consumers around the world.
Why go to your laptop or desktop computer to look for a birthday present you forgot to buy, when you can just search for it on your smartphone?
The need for creating an effective mobile website has become a necessity in this day and age.
