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Sunday, May 25, 2008

List Building - Building Your Own Opt-in List of Email Addresses

In order to have a successful online email marketing campaign, it's important to have an impressive list of good, authentic email addresses. Without your list, you will not be able to conduct a successful email marketing campaign and you will not be able to survive the high level of competition that exists in the online world today.

There are many email list building strategies. You can use any one of them to create your own list of email addresses. Email list building is crucial to the success of your online business. If the list of email addresses has not been built properly, your subscribers will not buy from you. This is the reason that many people try to create long lists of email addresses by buying the ready made lists. This is not the right way to go about it as you might get blamed for spamming the email recipient if you do not have their permission to email them.

You need to build your own list. This may require some patience on your part as you will not be able to collect the required data in a day or two. One of the most effective ways to build a large, responsive list of opt-in subscribers is to use a squeeze page on your website to have your visitors opt in to your list.

By building your own opt-in list, you have the email recipient's permission to send promotional offers for your products or those products of your affiliate programs. By building a rapport with your own subscribers you will get a very high response rate for your product offerings.

Want to learn more about how I do it? Download my free guide here: Email List Building Secrets

Do you want to learn how to drive massive traffic to your website? Click here: Traffic Generation Secrets

Mike Upshaw is an experienced internet marketer specializing in list building, traffic generation, article marketing and affiliate marketing. http://www.secretstointernetprofits.com

Article Marketing and Website Traffic

Article marketing is an ideal way to improve your website traffic without expending too much energy. All you need do is to write a few decent articles, and your traffic will increase significantly.

The writing must be relevant to the topic or niche of your website, or at least the page that you intend to direct traffic towards. That is one tremendous advantage that article marketing has over most other traffic building programs: you can direct the traffic to whatever page on your site you wish.

This is done by means of your authors resource box, that is an area set aside by most article directories for a few words about yourself and a link or two back to your website. That link need not be only to your home page, but can be to any page on your site that you choose. The page you choose, however, must be relevant to the article you have written. You dont send a reader to a page on octopi if you have just written an article about giant squid or turtles.

One mistake that many authors make is to fail to understand what is allowed in the resource box, sometimes called a bio. Some allow HTML and others dont. Some allow links and others dont. If you are not allowed a link to your site then there is little point in providing a directory with a free article. Dont use these sites, and there are several of those that I have come across. Some directories do not provide a resource box, but allow you to add a few words with your url at the end of the article.

It doesnt matter, as long as you are allowed to provide a link back to your website. You then get a one way link to your site, but even better in many cases, you also get traffic from people that like your writing and click on your link to visit your website for more information. Depending on the topic of your article, and how you submit it, that can be a massive short-term jump, or a steady stream over a longer period. The ideal is a combination of each, but that depends on your submission strategy and how many versions of your article you submit.

The versions matter, because if you can produce a few versions and submit different versions to different groups of directories, then you will get better results. That is because after a while, the search engines will begin to detect that a number of article directories, and other websites, have the same content (your article). They will then begin to drop some of these from their listings as being less relevant, and this will continue theoretically until there is only one directory or site with your article on it.

So make the best of it and submit it to as many article directories as possible for a quick burst of traffic, then write others to keep it going. Rather than write four versions of your article for four sets of different search engines, you are better writing four articles, each to be sent to all the search engines. That works better because I have tested it.

Article marketing can be used to increase your website traffic, but you can maximise that increase if you use the directories and your articles intelligently.

Peter is a freelance writer currently ghostwriting articles form his website http://www.article-services.com You can get more advice on article marketing from his web page Article Marketing

Ten Tips To Help Your Web Site Rank Better In Google

Over 80 percent of Internet users use Google to find products and services on the world wide web. It stands to reason that if you want to generate more qualified sales leads you need to rank on the first or second page within the search engines results pages on Google.

As Google gets more and more sophisticated with each algorithm update, search engine optimisation methods have to change to keep getting good results.

Here is a list of ten important tactics that you can use to improve your Google rankings.

Use the right keyword phrase The most important factor in getting quality web traffic is to optimize your web pages for the correct keyword phrase. Getting the most sales is often a balance between search volume for key words and level of competition. Use the Overture keyword tool and Google Adwords tool to research and identify your best keyword phrases. Look for keyword phrases that have high search volume, but low competition. It also pays to see what key words your successful competitors are optimising for.

Put your key word phrase in your title tag Forget about putting your company name in the title tag (unless it is a valuable part of the key words), it's a waste of words and will not help you rank in the search engines. The first three of four words in your title tag should be the key word phrase you are trying to optimize for. Try to limit your total character count to 60 characters.

Write a compelling description tag Title tags are for search engines, description tags are for people. Spend time researching and writing a description tag that compels the reader to click on your listing. Come up with a great offer, use action words. Use shock and awe. Use anything that will get them to click.

Use H1 tags An often neglected search engine optimisation technique is to put your keyword phrase in H1 tags on your page. This tells Google that the following text is about your keyword phrase. Google weights H1 tags nearly as highly as title tags. This tip alone can drastically improve your Google. Similarly, the use of bold and strong html tags can emphasize a key word phrase within the paragraph text where it may not be appropriate to use H1 or H2 tags.

Get the right keyword ratio Aim for a keyword density of around 3-5% of the page contents. Try to work your key word phrase into the page so that it reads naturally. This may take some research and analysis of successful web sites. Remember to use headings and sub-headings that include your key words.

Use alt tags and description tags on images Key words used image file names, alt tags and description tags add to the key word density of any web page. They doesn't make a huge difference, but every little bit helps. In some product classes a Google image search may lead web surfers to your web site.

Get quality one-way incoming links through article marketing and directory submissions As far as Google is concerned; link exchanges are just about dead. They can help to get your web site spidered and indexed more quickly, but these days they add very little in terms of Google search engine rankings unless the link is on a trusted site and that site has excellent page rank. Wikipedia and DMOZ are examples of such trusted sites.

A more effective approach is to write interesting and informative articles and submit them to article directories. Make sure that you use the author bio/resource box to maximum advantage by using your key word phrase in the link anchor text, AND, by pointing the anchor text to the correct page. Your home page may not be the best choice of pages for your selected key phrase. This will also ensure that more pages than just your home page gets indexed.

Use Social book marking If you have something newsworthy, humorous, quirky, unique or shocking to say, submit a link to your web page to sites like digg.com or redit.com. These up and coming web 2.0 power houses can create a buzz overnight driving thousands of interested visitors to your web site.

Note, just because you build it doesn't mean they will come. If it's boring link it will quickly get buried by newer and more interesting stories. But what the hell, it's free to submit links to these sites and you never know your luck.

Record a podcast Google loves podcasts ... it just loves them. Get yourself a decent microphone and some podcasting software like Audacity and go for it. Once you have an interesting and tightly edited podcast, put it on your web site and submit it to all the major podcasting directories like iTunes and Podomatic.

Sign up for Google Adwords Although Google will deny it, anecdotal evidence suggests that Goggle favors Adwords customers over non-Adwords customers. This is true for new web sites that often take months to get spidered and indexed by Google. I have seen brand new sites get spidered, indexed and listed in the search engine results pages in as little as a week.

It doesn't have to cost a lot either. You can set up a low budget campaign of 50 cents to one dollar a day and still get favorable treatment.

John Hacking is Marketing Manager for a Brisbane web site design company and Product Manager for a Brisbane search engine optimization firm.

Amazing Article Marketing - Discover 6 Fast Secrets to Energize Your Article Marketing

If you are currently using article marketing and noticing that your website traffic and your sales potentials are dramatically dropping, I suggest that you energize your marketing efforts to pull up your numbers again. Here's how:

1. Improve on your titles. Make them more attention-grabbing and enticing by using powerful words and key phrases that can effectively push the buttons of your potential clients. Don't forget to communicate the readers' benefits or the reason why online users should check on your content. Keep your titles short but striking.

2. Improve your content. Pack your articles with valuable, detailed, and complete information that will help your readers better understand your topic. Never leave any stone unturned by not assuming on what your potential clients already know. Make your content easy to understand, direct to the point, and highly targeted to your potential clients' needs.

3. Improve your resource box. If your conversation rate is not impressive at all, I'd say rewrite your resource box and make it more powerful and enticing. Aside from your name, your website's URL, and your expertise, don't forget to include the benefits that you can offer to online users when they visit your website. You can lure them with more valuable information or freebies.

4. Write more. Dramatically increase the number of your inbound links by multiplying the number of your submission. Strive to write at least 5-7 articles per day or hire ghostwriters who can provide you with quality articles for reasonable prices.

5. Widely distribute your articles. Aside from article submission sites, you can also post your articles to your website, blog, forums, and social networking sites to increase their exposure online.

6. Check your progress. Consistently check your click through rate and how your articles are performing online. Continuously improve on them until you reach your goals.

To learn more, download my free guide, "How to Generate $15,000 Per Month Online" here: "How to Generate $15,000 Per Month Online"

Sean Mize is an internet marketing mentor who teaches people to generate over $15,000 per month online via automated systems and product funnels.

Lucrative Article Marketing - Announcing 7 Turbo Secrets to Energize Your Article Marketing

If you have been using article marketing for quite sometime but can't seem to get the results you were hoping for, you definitely need to energize your marketing techniques. Here's how:

1. Write in a conversational tone. Make your articles sound warm and friendly by writing as if you are directly talking to your potential readers. Avoid sounding too stiff or too formal so you will not bore your readers.

2. Improve your titles. Be more aggressive in grabbing your readers' attention and make your titles more enticing and intriguing. This can potentially increase your clickthrough rate.

3. Improve your content. The best way to convert a reader to potential client is to gain his/her trust. You can do so by presenting content that mirrors expertise and professionalism. Strive to provide your readers with content that they will find useful and relevant to their pressing issues or areas of interest.

4. Be direct to the point. Avoid using fillers or too much introductions when you present your information. Get straight to the point and avoid beating around the bush as people online can easily get annoyed with articles that seem to waste their precious time.

5. Write for your readers. Getting to know your target market is one of the crucial elements in making sure that you produce articles that are highly targeted and relevant to their needs.

6. Write for publishers. You would want to increase the chances of your articles being posted online, wouldn't you? Thus, you need to know and follow the rules set forth by article submission sites to make sure that publishers will post your articles online.

7. Write for your business. Drive quality traffic to your website by writing articles that are highly relevant to your products and potential readers.

To learn more, download my free guide, "How to Generate $15,000 Per Month Online" here: "How to Generate $15,000 Per Month Online"

Sean Mize is an internet marketing mentor who teaches people to generate over $15,000 per month online via automated systems and product funnels.

How Surfers Will Find Your Articles Buried In Those Millions Of Competing Web Pages?

If you are marketing online for more than two months, you may already know that content is king. It's the heart of the world wide web. More and more people write on their websites and blogs. The new web 2.0 is the cause of even more content because users don't even need a website to write what they think.

You may wonder how surfers will find your articles with billions of competing web pages?

Don't worry, if you write interesting articles, "la creme de la creme", you work will be noticed and your public will read whatever you write. Why? Simply because there are not a lot of real experts on the web.

If you are an expert in your subject, start writing immediately and submit those articles to directories. It can be a daunting task to submit to ten directories every single day, but you can use an article submission software like articlesubmitter.com or articlepostrobots.com.

If you are too busy to use these tools, you can handle the work to isnare.com or article marketer. Your articles will spread over the Internet like windfire. I don't recommend the two services above anymore (although I used them in the past) for two reasons.

Reason 1. They don't submit to the best directories. In fact, they will distribute your articles to hundreds of sites, but not to the big free article directories. You will still need to do this yourself.

Reason 2. Many of your articles will disappear in the supplemental results (in a nutshell, it's Google quarantine) after a few months.

Are you ready to write these articles and make more money?

To learn more, download my Free Guide: "How To Earn $100K Per Year With Article Marketing".

Franck Silvestre makes thousands of dollars a year from affiliate and article marketing. Wonder what the secret to his success is? Discover how he does it at: http://www.mynetmarketingland.com/article-marketing/