Search Engine Optimisation Firm

Choosing a search engine optimisation firm is a big decision. Think about it: this is the firm that you will entrust with improving your website’s ranking and thus revenue but that can also damage your website and its reputation thus leading to a poorly executed and failed internet marketing strategy.

If you happen on a firm that utilizes black hat search techniques, you risk your website being blacklisted and your domain being banned on major search engines. A white hat SEO firm will on the other hand leave you sleeping well at night as you are confident that your website will not get blockaded on search engines without notice. I don’t mean to sound pedantic but at the end of the day, breaking the rules never wins in the longer term.

That said, going for an SEO firm is always better than doing it yourself, if you have no time or experience in SEO. It all boils down to the rule of a professional being the best at what he does. The SEO firm has the experience and expertise from active engagement in the SEO industry and your hiring them makes this wealth of knowledge available at your beck and call.

So what questions should you be asking to make sure that your choice of SEO firm is a wise one? First, ask if their company is able to do more than just optimize sites in basic HTML. I dare say that any SEO company worth its salt will have working experience in all common programming languages whether it is PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion, or simple HTML. Do they have experience in optimizing both static and dynamic web sites? If you use your website as an ecommerce portal, can they optimize your website without degenerating the quality of the ecommerce experience for your customers?

These are important questions to ask because, as some of us have had to learn the hard way, the more inexperienced SEO firms are merely submission services. In other words, they do not actually perform any active SEO tweaking on your website but simply submit your site to various website directories. Of course such firms or such a basic service is usually inexpensive since not much real work takes place on your actual site – there is no coding, linking or content development. You can expect to pay between $19.95 and $399 monthly for these types of services but it must be said that the results are often as unimpressive as the cost.

The next level up will offer to edit codes, analyse keywords, build links and write and/or adjust your site’s content. They may also do article submissions, press releases and write blogs. This mid-tier type of service will go for between $399 and $850 monthly.

The top level SEO service, whilst also executing the functions of the mid-tier SEO service, will also do conversion tracking and analysis. In short, top level SEO will continuously address what works and what doesn’t and will usually do this continuously under a monthly retainer. As would be expected, the catch is you could pay from $850 up to a whopping $10,000 monthly for this service depending on the complexity of your website and the task at hand even though most average is around $1,000 per month.

You should avoid SEO firms that treat the various aspects of an SEO campaign separately as this segmented approach can be harmful. This is because for optimization to be successful there has to be coordination and synergy in the multiple tactics employed on the overall SEO efforts and must be done either simultaneously or with deliberate timing on where one technique feeds into the other.

Go for an SEO firm that not only demonstrates having done a great job with other clients in the past, but also go for one that empowers you to manage a good proportion of the SEO tweaking and monitoring yourself. For instance, there are a number of tools that you can use and agree on as benchmarks for the success of the SEO project. Some of the best tools are those that show traffic trends and page ranking.

An example is the Alexa (not the best tool for tracking traffic volumes, but still a good one) toolbar which you can download for free from alexa.com which summarizes general traffic trend for your site compared to other existing sites over the last 3 month period. If your site is pretty new, it is unlikely that you will have an alexa rating or any visable data. This type of tool gives you a quick impression of overall traffic growth and trends.

Remember to temper your expectations about gathering more and more traffic as your page goes higher up: it is easier to gain rankings when you are at the lower end of the spectrum but moving up becomes more difficult as you approach the top and your site can slow down its movement to the top one day.

Another aspect you need to factor in your selection of an SEO firm is their client to account manager ratio. This is the average number of clients being handled by an account manager at any one time. It is important that you demand this information before signing the contract as it might be difficult to get it once you commit. Too many clients per account manager can see your project relegated to the back of the queue. The fewer clients, the better the odds of better service. Ideally, I would not advise you to engage a firm where each account manager supports more than 30 clients at any given time.

Another important parameter tied into the quality of service is the number of man hours that are available to your project. Have this in writing too and that payment be pegged to the fulfilment of these hours each month.

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Purchasing A Domain Name

So, you want to start an online business or get an online presence for your offline business. You have heard about all the opportunities that the internet presents and decided you need to get your share of this massive cake. I say welcome aboard! And don’t worry: there is more than enough internet traffic for everyone to share but only as long as you get your internet strategy right.

If you decide that you want to conduct business online you will need to register a domain name. It is the domain name that will give your website its unique locatable Internet address. There are four elements to an internet address: a standard prefix (www), a domain name, a domain suffix (.com, .net, .org, .co, info, etc.) and sometimes a country code (.ca, .uk, .au, .ru, .jp, etc).

If you are setting up a website for business, your choice of domain name is critical. It should not only sum up what your business is all about, it must also be memorable. Search engines also factor in the domain names in determining which search results they bring up in the first page so go for a name that is closely tied to your nature of business. Of course there are a number of times where we can use names that do not directly infer the type of business we do. But this should only be the case where you have a brand that is powerful and well known enough to be able to stand on its own.

Therefore, www.nike.com is an acceptable domain name for Nike Shoes because of the strengths and popularity of the brand worldwide.  However, if I am setting up a shoes store that is little known outside my block, then www.custommadeshoes.com will be a more appropriate domain name. That said, one of the main problems I had and most of us have is that a number of the common names have already been taken. But all you need to do is put on your creative thinking cap and find ways of fitting in your preferred word(s) while not making the address too long.

Now that you have a domain name you have settled on, you then need to register it with an accredited domain name registrar. Domain name registrars are in the hundreds so it is important that you go for those that have a solid reputation for delivery and exemplary customer service as opposed to making your choice solely based on price. I am going to talk about three of the most popular registrars on the internet.

  1. Namecheap.com is one registrar you can go to. Yet despite its name, it is not the least expensive registrar around. Cost of registration is at about $10 per year. Namecheap.com has one of the simplest processes to follow when registering your domain.
  2. GoDaddy.com is another registrar and is probably the most famous in the world. The main problem I have with them is that they will aggressively try to sell to you many of their other products when you are trying to buy the domain. I call it aggressive but I am sure many that have had to muscle through the sales attack would deem it offensive. Pricing for domain registration on GoDaddy.com varies from $9 – $15 per year.
  3. You can also go for Name.com which is also a reliable domain registrar. Name.com charge approximately $8-9 per year.

Many registrars and even non-registrar websites allow you to type in your preferred domain name on their site and search for free to see whether it is available or not. You must be prepared to be flexible and factor in variations to your original choice in order to find something that fits. Once you are sure you have a domain name that is available, you can then register the name for periods of between 1 and 5 years. Going for a longer period will often come with a price discount.

Another question you may need to answer is whether you should register a general top level domain (.com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .mobi) or a country code top level domain (.ca, .us, .uk, .au). To some extent, I would say that it depends on who your target market is. If you are targeting customers from one particular country only, then you might be better off with a country domain. Alternatively, if you are looking at an international audience, you will probably be better registering a general top level domain.

But even better would be for you to register both the dot.com, dot.net and dot.org domain as well as the dot.country domain in order to protect your domain name and thus your brand. Not doing so could see you fall victim to the notorious cyber squatters when your business grows. You could also have a malicious competitor register an identical name under a different top level domain and use that to soil your business and confuse your clientele. Registering your website under different top level domains does not mean that you have to have several websites-it just prevents anyone else from using it.

Once you have registered domain, you then need to have your web pages hosted so that you can turn the domain into a functioning website. Many registrars also offer web hosting services as part of their overall package. But you can definitely look for an independent web hosting company if you are not comfortable with the deal your domain registrar puts on the table. My personal preference has always been to go for separate service providers for domain name registration and for web hosting just as a way of reducing concentration of risk with any single service provider.

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Best Image Search Engine

Where do you go first when you are looking for images online? Well, whether by default or otherwise, most of us will start on Google thanks to its dominance of the general search engine market. But is Google really the best image search engine out there? Let’s look at three of the most prominent image search engines on the web today: Google, Bing and Flickr. I must say that Flickr might not necessarily qualify as an image search engine in the strictest meaning of the term but I consider its position as a source of images significant enough to talk about in this context.

Google Image Search

Google ImagesGoogle’s image search service was introduced in July 2001. Google image search uses the picture file name as well as the image’s replacement text to index images on the internet. When you search for a keyword, Google presents thumbnails of the images that you can then click on and follow to the website where the page is found. If you were just interested in finding, viewing and saving the image itself and not the website, Google images opens the link with a partition at the top where you can click on and view the image only in its full resolution.

Google comparison with Flickr and Bing

So how does Google compare with Bing and Flickr? One clear advantage for Google is its reach on the web. Google’s image search indexes images from millions of pages on the internet and in that sense provides a much broader variety than Flickr where you are only looking for images within the Flickr database. When compared to Bing, Google image search also demonstrates a number of strengths. First is the quintessential Google look: plain. The Google image search is like all other Google search services with little more than the image search text box and the Google logo before you perform a search.

This principle of keeping the site free from clutter has been one of the Google’s marketing home runs. Bing instead went for a colorful interface with an ever changing background image theme. I think this makes the page appear ‘busy’ but that is just me. Bing however trumps Google in the presentation of the search results which come out a little clearer that those on the Google image search results even though the two might actually be pointing to the same image. It might make the always comes with a theme look that is quite appealing. I would say Google’s image search is best for a conservative or beginner image search user.

Bing Image Search

Bing ImageBing is the most recent of the three image search platforms I talk about here. It was launched in 2009 as part of the Bing search engine but in reality borrows a lot from Bing’s predecessors i.e. Live.com and MSN.com. Bing pays a lot of emphasis on themes on its home page and seeks to capture an audience that not only doesn’t mind but actually appreciates the colorful background. Anyone trying to challenge Google’s dominance of the search engine market understands that this is a no mean task. For this reason, Bing has tried to come up with ways that would make it look less of an imitation of Google.

One of these is the idea of endless scrolling on search results. Instead of having to click on page after page of search results to find the exact type of image you are looking for, all you do is keep scrolling down on the first page and Bing will keep on bringing up the images each time. That way, if you find two images that might fit the criteria of what it is you were looking for but that would ordinarily have been on different pages of the search results, you can now easily compare the two by scrolling up and down as opposed to going back and forth between results pages. In addition, the default Bing view tries to keep results clean by not having any descriptions or a URL below the image. By hovering your mouse pointer over the image, you get the further image details. The argument here (and which I am inclined to agree with) is that most people searching for images are interested in the image itself meeting their criteria and not the description of the image or the URL it is sourced from (which they can always access anyway by clicking on the image itself).

Bing comparison with Google and Flickr

As a recent entry but with significant predecessors and a parent company with a fat wallet to boot (Microsoft), Bing has clearly done its research before hitting the ground running. Google search’s customization options are not so obvious and are in fact hidden in the default view all in an effort to keep pages uncluttered. Bing’s options are richer, clearly displayed and easy to quickly navigate. You can quickly filter for large images, go for square as opposed to wide format images and pick out photographs as opposed to illustrations by simply clicking on the appropriate option on the left side of the screen. Bing’s strengths over Flickr are very similar to those of Google over Flickr. Flickr searches through images uploaded by individuals more often for fun and for their friends. This means that the images might not necessarily be described optimally for search.

Flickr Image Search

Flickr ImageFlickr is an image hosting website that throws in a social networking aspect to image sharing. Many of the people using Flickr do so for purposes of sharing images with their friends. It was launched in 2004 and as at the end of 2009, Flickr had more than 4 billion images. In fact, Flickr is the single largest image database on the internet. Many bloggers use and reference Flickr for their images. The members uploading the images are encouraged to define the image with relevant tag words to make it easier to find during a relevant search. Unlike Bing and Google, Flickr’s image search is limited to searching for images only within their database.

Flickr comparison with Google and Bing

In a way, comparing Flickr to Bing and Google image search borders on comparing apples and oranges due to Flickr’s focus inward for its results and Bing and Google focus on other websites for their results. But if you are looking for a distinct and largely unique image or photograph, Flickr is bound to give you better results than either Google or Bing. The main issue with Flickr is the poor tagging that makes some relevant images difficult to find.

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Internet Marketing For Small Business

If you are like me, the first time you set up a website for your business, you might have expected the numbers to start rolling almost immediately. Of course the reality usually dawns on us quickly when we realize that unless you have an already strong brand outside the internet, your site can end up just making the numbers among the thousands of sites in your niche and the billions of web pages on the internet.

So how do you bring in the numbers especially if you are a small business that might not have the budget for engaging very expensive marketing techniques? Because make no mistake-you do need to do something if you are to attract traffic to your site. Getting a high number of relevant visitors is critical in delivering the returns you anticipated when investing in the website in the first place. As a small business, there are various ways through which you can market your business and your website on the internet.

Below I have listed some of the most powerful methods you can use for your small business.

  1. Good quality web design. Before launching any form of internet marketing campaign, it is important that you have a professional looking website that is representative of your business image and brand. Ensure the lay out makes it easy for a visitor to quickly locate the information that brought them there in the first place. Use legible font size and color. Read all text on your website and have someone else proofread it to ascertain that there are no grammatical and spelling errors. Whatever information that is on your website must be thoroughly researched and presented in an interesting tone. That way, you will keep visitors to your site coming back.
  2. On-page search engine optimization. Search engines are the primary originators of traffic for the majority of websites. To maximize the amount of traffic routed to your site from search engines, you must optimize the content of your website for your niche keywords. Look for keywords that resonate with the products your business sells. However, avoid keywords that are too general, as they will lead you to competition with too many well established websites focused on the same keywords.
  3. Press release. Develop a press release or engage the services of a copywriter to develop a press release for you. Do this once your website is ready for visitors and make a note of doing so whenever there is some significant news around your business. There are a number of websites that are dedicated to publishing press releases. All you need to do is submit the document to several sites that can provide you with the most visibility within your target market. Do not forget to include your contacts as well as a link to your website.
  4. Article submission. Article submission is not only a great way of providing a preview of what visitors can expect to find on your website but also a means of developing good back links to your website from sites that are rated highly by search engines. Among the most popular article submission websites are Ezinearticles.com and Articlebase.com. Write informational and instructional articles around the different products that your business is engaged in making sure that they are of the same top quality and keyword rich as the content on your website.
  5. Blogging. Blogging is a great way of constantly keeping in touch with your client’s needs. You can have a blog section within your website and/or one in any one of the free blog hosting websites such as Blogger.com and Wordpress.com. As you interact with your clients, you are able to better understand what their preferences are and if there are things that you need to change to make your product resonate more with them. Use your blog to channel your thoughts on current events but makes sure you do not make any false assertions. Be an authority in your subject matter as this is one of the best ways to draw people to your website over and over again.
  6. Free offers and contests. Having giveaways in the form of free samples or, if you are selling software, trial version downloads, can boost your publicity. When you provide freebies every so often, it shows that you are confident in your product and do not mind it being tested by real clients first before they buy. If you provide freebies just before you completely roll out the product can also help you catch any previously undetected bugs or any aspect you might not have factored in during the product’s development. That way, you may be able to make some last minute changes before you go all out in your marketing.
  7. Monitoring your performance and your competitors. As you roll out the different techniques for internet marketing, continuously monitor the performance of your website as far as its page rank on the major search engines goes and its ability to dominate your keywords of choice. You can also check and see how well you fare against your competitors and whether you are catching up or falling behind. There are various tools that you can use to do the monitoring including Alexa, Yahoo Site Builder, Link Diagnosis and Search Status. The information from these tools is important in helping you know how much work you need to put in to catch up with your competitors in your market segment and whether the effort you have put in so far is bearing any fruit.

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Pay Per Click Affiliates

Everywhere you go, it seems like there is a new course promising to teach you how to use PPC and affiliate marketing. There are tons of success stories in blogs and forums about affiliates who woke up one day and started making six figures. There are even a few stories about some affiliates going on to create multi-million dollar businesses.

If you’re like me, you’re probably skeptical about this ‘make money with affiliate marketing’ deal. To be honest, I used to be skeptical too. But curiosity got the best of me and I started to do a lot of research on the affiliate marketing business model. What I found surprised me.

There is a whole industry dedicated towards PPC affiliate marketing. There are affiliate marketing conventions where affiliate networks and affiliates get together to do business, there are seminars devoted to the topic, and there are many groups that get together to discuss the latest affiliate marketing strategies. The reality is that this is a legitimate business and there are many successful individuals in this industry.

So how do pay per click affiliates make money using PPC advertising?

You’re probably familiar with pay per click advertising. The 3 major companies in this field today are Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The whole idea is that you bid on certain keywords and every time a visitor clicks on an ad, you pay exactly what you bid. Your bid and other factors also determine the rank of your ad on the search engine results pages.

Many affiliates use pay per click to drive traffic to their landing pages. Their landing pages are designed to presell the visitors on a product or service. Whenever the visitor buys or signs up for an offer, the affiliate makes a certain amount of commissions set by a merchant.

Most affiliates start small and slowly build a portfolio of profitable affiliate marketing campaigns. Then successful affiliates take a good portion of their earnings and reinvest it back into advertising. This helps them find more profitable campaigns to add to existing profitable campaigns.

They also grow their campaigns by using other PPC networks, increasing their bids (and thus their traffic), promoting back-end offers, using the content network (another advertising method), and through other ways of monetization (such as display ads, Google Adsense, etc.).

Right now there are 3 different ways that affiliate marketers are making money.

  1. CPA. CPA stands for cost per acquisition. CPA networks have become very popular in the affiliate marketing industry. They even provide offers from such major companies like NetFlix, BlockBuster, Microsoft, and more. These companies are looking for affiliates to promote their businesses and drive more traffic to their sites. Many of these offers are trial offers where customers pay a small fee to join a service or agree to a future purchase.
  2. Cost per lead. These are offers carried by CPA networks but to be specific, in this scenario affiliates are paid for leads rather than sign-ups for offers. Whenever a prospect enters their email, zip code, or phone number, they are paid a flat rate for a lead. This is a very effective way to promote for affiliates because the conversion rate for these offers is relatively high. As consumers do not have to use their credit card, they are more likely to agree to give out their information.
  3. Cost per sale or by percentage. This is the most common way the affiliates get paid. Affiliates promote a product or service and get paid a percentage of the sale or a flat rate every time a sale is made. This compensation method is commonly used by eCommerce stores and digital product merchants. There are even programs that pay you a monthly commission if the sale is subscription based.

So, what are the pros and cons of affiliate marketing using pay per click advertising?

Although the whole idea of pay per click advertising is very promising it is not without any faults. First of all, the benefits of using PPC are obvious. PPC advertising is very quick, easy to test, and you can see instantaneous results. This is why so many affiliate marketers prefer using PPC over other promotion methods.

At the same time, PPC advertising can be very costly, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. A failed campaign can result losses from as little as a couple of dollars to as much as thousands of dollars. There are stories where advertisers have lost thousands of dollars in days because they forgot to set budget limits in their campaign.

There are little nuances and techniques here and there that you need to learn if you want to succeed with PPC. And, frankly speaking, although it’s easy to get started, pay per click advertising is incredibly hard to master. But once you know how it works, PPC advertising can be extremely profitable.

Why PPC rather than SEO?

SEO or search engine optimization is also a viable way to promote as an affiliate marketer. So why do many affiliates prefer PPC? Many affiliates prefer PPC because they can get instantaneous feedback on their campaigns. SEO involves a process where you have to build links and content to rank high for given search terms. In fact, if you don’t rank in the top 10, you will not get very much traffic to your site.

Although SEO is cheaper than PPC, it is very time consuming and is more complicated than PPC. SEO also involves more work. It may be free but you will probably end up paying in the time spent and you will also spend money outsourcing for the purpose of being efficient.

In conclusion, there are many pay per click affiliates making money online. This is a very viable and legitimate business. Like other businesses, it involves capital, a lot of work and perseverance. My research has proven that this industry is huge and it will continue to get bigger. Although affiliate marketing has been around for many years, there are still lots of opportunities for new marketers because new products and services are being introduced to the market every single day.

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Economical Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is by far the best way of drawing relevant traffic to your website. I know it because of the changes in traffic volumes coming to my websites that I have experienced time and again after applying SEO techniques to an otherwise bland website.

Indeed, many webmasters have realized the powerful role that search engines play in drawing traffic to their sites and are increasingly applying SEO techniques to their website themselves or engaging the services of an SEO expert. Certainly, many SEO experts may be too expensive to hire, especially for small internet businesses. But I can tell you that there are still many either free or cheap ways that one can employ to his or her website or blog in order to optimize it for search engines.

Note, that it is only when these techniques are applied consistently and patiently that you will eventually improve your search engine ranking for your selected keywords. I list below what I consider the most straightforward and budget friendly ways to apply economical search engine optimization to your website. They are in no particular order.

Website directories and back links. Submitting your website to directories is a great SEO approach since these directories link back to your site in the selected categories and therefore improve your ranking. Many of directories are free but even where they charge, the cost is reasonably low. However, you must be careful when selecting the website directories to be listed on. Some free directories are blacklisted because they are notorious for link spamming and this would negatively affect your site ranking. Go for a website directory that has high PageRank and, therefore, some trust in the Google’s eyes.

Other than website directories, go for back links from websites with a high page rank in order to increase your website’s own ranking. As an example, a backlink from well known and credible sites such as Wikipedia.org or About.com would be a huge boost to your page rank as opposed to a back link from a less known and less credible site.

Link exchange. Another way of optimization your site is by exchanging links with a website with related or complementing content. You would have to get in touch with the webmaster for your chosen site in order to organize and complete the link exchange. Again, the better the page rank of the website you exchange links with, the better the chances of you going up the search engine ranking. Some websites will insist on a fee. If the fee is reasonable and the website has good relevant traffic, you should not put off paying for the link.

Article submission. Submitting articles to prominent article directories is another way to push up your page ranking. By writing good quality articles and submitting them to highly ranked article websites, you will not only have a good backlink but you will also get good traffic forwarded from the website. You can either write the articles or get a copywriting expert to do it for you. Many article websites will freely publish your content as long as it meets their editorial guidelines. Examples of such websites include Ezinearticles.com and Articlebase.com both of which have a relatively high ranking on search engines. Ensure that the articles have quality content and good grammar.

Choosing and using right keywords. By correctly positioning your keywords throughout your content, you will be bettering your site’s chances of appearing higher on search engines whenever anyone looks for those keywords. Ensure that you use the appropriate keyword density. When a keyword is over used, Google may interpret it to be spamming and you can easily be penalized for this. Of course don’t go for the other extreme of very low density. Best practice and what has indeed worked for me is always having the keywords as close to the beginning of your content as possible. If it is an article, I always recommend having your keywords within the first three lines.  You should also insert your keywords within the article headings. And don’t forget the domain name and page URLs. Actually that is where keyword optimization should start. Google, Yahoo and Bing all give preference to links where the URL contains the keyword as opposed to those with symbols and non-dictionary text.

Using a site map. Googlebot and other search engine website crawlers are configured to easily understand the order of your website’s more important content based on the site map. Use the site map to define the hierarchy of your website. For webmasters with large websites, I would suggest that you go for site maps for different sub sections of the main site as this enables better indexing of your website by search engines.

Start a blog. Another way of optimizing your website is by starting a blog. A blog can improve your search engine in various ways. You will start getting back-links to your website as people refer to your articles from their websites. You will also link back to your main website pages and this will also improve your rankings. You may run your blog on an external website like Wordpress and the back-link will even increase your PR further. A blog also enables you put up new content continually. Generally, Google gives you a better ranking for sites with fresh content.

Advantages of Economical SEO

So what are the benefits of economical saerch engine optimization? Well, it enables small internet businesses that often have to work with meager budgets to optimize their websites for search engine traffic and by extension better their prospects for revenue growth. If you choose to take the do it yourself approach, you not only save the cost of hiring an SEO expert, but you also end up learning and building basic SEO skills within your business that can be used if you ever need to optimize a new website for your business.

Disadvantages of Economical SEO

Low cost usually comes with the risk of mediocre quality. You thus stand the risk of losing out in the search engine race to your competitors that may have gone for higher cost but more effective techniques. This likely to be the case if you choose to do the SEO yourself instead of hiring an experienced SEO professional.

Final caution

Remember that some SEO experts can use very risky tactics to improve your website’s ranking. These techniques are referred to as black hat methods and could land you in problems including having your domain permanently black listed by search engines. So if someone offers you an extremely cheap service but still promises an unusually speedy result, you must be careful.

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“How Do I Start A Blog?”

Ever been in a situation where you had that nagging feeling of not connecting with the crowd around you? That is exactly what I experienced when I would hear everyone talking about ‘blogs’ and ‘blogging’. To be honest, I just could not get around ridding my mind of the image of a Cyborg or a terrifying beast from ancient times-yes, I know-crazy! Of course once I understood how simple a concept blogging is, I could not (and still cannot) stop laughing at myself.

The term “blog” is a short form for the original term “web log”. Blogging has evolved from a simple online journal to a kind of a forum where all sorts of discussion and information take place.

Now that you know what a blog is, the next question is how you get in on the fun and business by starting your own. Truth is that it is relatively easy to create. You can do it for free or pay for domain registration and blog hosting. The free approach can actually take you less than an hour to have your blog up and running.

One of the first things you must do before you start your blog is to clearly define the reasons for setting up a blog. Are you looking at a recreational blog where you can discuss with friends, acquaintances and strangers almost anything under the sun or want to devote your blog to a specific subject? Also, is the purpose of the blog non-business or is it intended to be a source of revenue for you? These are important questions and you should answer them before you write a word on your new blog.

Think about what particular topics you wish to blog about? The breadth of topics you can write about is immense and this can make it easy for you to lose focus on your original intent for setting up a blog.

I always advise that one should go for a subject that fulfills two primary criteria: something that he/she is passionate about and something that he/she is knowledgeable on. If you settle on topics that meet these two criteria, you are more likely to always have something to say about your chosen topic and for that matter, a say that is interesting enough to elicit views and generate responses. That said, do not confine yourself to a straight jacket 100% of the time-a blog is always interesting when there is flexibility for members to once in a while talk about current affairs even when there may not be a direct link to the blogs central theme. But this has to be once in a while and as the blog owner, it is up to you to make sure that the blog does not lose its vision.

Now, if you choose to go for the free approach, there are two leading blogging platforms that you can go for: Wordpress and Blogger. There are hundreds of other Web 2.0 sites and blogging platforms available for free on the Internet but these two have the advantage of building a reputation over time and having been tweaked many times to meet the ever rising demands of their huge client base. Blogger is a fantastic platform for a beginner blogger and is easy to set up and use. The main problem with Blogger is its huge client base makes it difficult to access during times of peak user activity.

Wordpress.com is the other free alternative. You got your blog for free with more than 70 blog templates to choose from. Unfortunately, you cannot develop a customized template on Wordpress.com. However, it provides additional free services such as spam blocking, advanced security options through SSL, etc. The only thing you must remember when using Wordpress.com is that it is not suitable for you if your goal is to generate income through your blog since they are against advertising and affiliate marketing.

If you want to create a business-minded blog running on a Wordpress platform, then you have to download the Wordpress installation package from Wordpress.org, develop your blogging site and then pay for an independent webhosting service. Taking this approach gives a lot more leeway in customization and is the reason that Wordpress.org is popular with experienced bloggers and those with a business oriented objective.

As opposed to Blogger, where except for the part that precedes the suffix ‘blogspot.com’ you do not have too much leeway on how your blog address looks like, with Wordpress.org you can have a unique domain name of your own. Similar to setting up a normal website, your choice of the blog name is vital in achieving your intended goal.

The name and theme of the blog should resonate with exactly that which you want to discuss within your blog. A good name also works in an SEO sense in that it makes your website easier to find on the internet. When you register a unique domain name for your blog, go for the common top level domain extensions i.e. .COM, .NET and .ORG so that someone will not take advantage of your blog’s success in future to channel confused traffic to their own site or worse still hold you at white collar ransom.

The golden rule when customizing your blog is to always bear your target audience in mind. When choosing or customizing templates, the format and design of your blog should be in a way that makes reading easier and viewing friendlier. No one will want to visit a blog where they have to strain to read the text or be tempted to wear sunglasses to avoid the bright colors on your blog!

Once you are done with setting up, you are now ready to do what you have been itching to do all along-start blogging. Begin publishing content on your blog. Pay attention to the quality of content on your website especially if you are trying to sell a certain product. Poor content and grammar on a blog is one of the fastest ways of losing potential customers.

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The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords

The Definitive Guide to Google AdWordsThe Definitive Guide To Google Adwords is one of the most popular courses on using Google Adwords to get traffic. This course is written by Perry Marshall. If you haven’t heard of Perry, he is the leading authority on Google Adwords and has been teaching entrepreneurs how to use this medium to grow their business.

As an Internet marketer, I know how hard it is to get started with Google Adwords. There are so many features out there; the campaign management system is complicated, and it’s hard to get an idea of where to start. But if you’ve been looking into Google Adwords, then you know how profitable it can be. There are many success stories where business have used this advertising system to bring in thousands of dollars or more every month. Some businesses use Adwords alone as a traffic source and do huge figures.

Fortunately, Perry’s course teaches marketers how to get set up correctly and properly advertise on Adwords to get quality traffic to your site. If you’ve been online for a couple of years, you know how easy Google Adwords used to be. I remember when you could just bid on a keyword for 5 cents with a semi relevant ad, and turn out a decent profit.

The game has changed and if you want to reap the rewards from this medium, it’s time to adapt and learn how to advertise on Adwords the right way. The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords is a comprehensive course created to help marketers do exactly this. Here are some of the topics that Perry covers in his course:

1. Research. Before getting started with Adwords, Perry recommends that you really take a strong look at your business and find out who you are trying to sell to and what kind of value you are offering to this audience. Doing this will give you clarity on how to approach prospects and give you an idea what kind of ads to run in your campaigns.

Perry uses the term “message to market match” where the goal is to try to figure out what’s going on in the head of the prospect and use that information to write targeted ads in your Google ads. These kinds of ads usually have the highest CTR percentages and profitability.

2. Keywords. Perry discusses how to conduct keyword research and get the right keywords for your business. I like the fact that he stresses how important it is to get keywords that are related to your business and at the same time targeted buyers. Too many people waste their time and money using wrong keywords.

3. Organizing your campaigns. Before I read the course, I didn’t know how important organizing campaigns were to your success. Google has a quality score system that rewards relevancy. So by organizing related keywords in the same ad group, writing an ad that suits all your keywords, and by creating landing pages specifically designed for the ad groups, you can expect to pay less in clicks, get more click thrus, and also grab a higher ad ranking.

Being relevant will also make you stand apart from competitors that are trying to bait searchers to click on their ads. Searchers want to find what they’re looking for quickly so it’s better to be direct and give them what they’re looking for. That in turn will result in more profits.

4. Writing your ads. Google Adwords has a neat little system where you can split test different ads. Perry calls this the best direct response medium because unlike offline advertising methods, you can quickly get the results and test two different ads.

Perry teaches some cool tricks to improve CTR. For example, one way to try to increase CTR is by asking a question in the title portion of the ad. Another example is a formatting trick where you capitalize all the words in your ad. Perry shows some eye-opening test results that he’s found.

5. Testing and Tweaking. You will also learn how to test different elements of your campaign from the ad, bids, landing pages, and more. Perry gives efficient troubleshooting tips to turn losing campaigns into winners as well as information on what you can improve for bigger profits.

The course comes with a manual with over 200 pages, several reports, audio recordings, and a few bonuses. The deluxe version comes with additional modules to help affiliate marketers, information marketers, beginners, copywriters, and people who want to use the AdWords content network.

There is an immense amount of information in this course. Fortunately, everything is plotted out in different sections so you can move along step-by-step. There are even videos on Perry’s site to help you understand the strategies better.

There are also over 40 examples of real campaigns. I don’t know about you but I’ve yet to see another course on pay per click that showed me that many real examples I can model. The examples have before and after, screenshots, and statistics of how they performed. Perry also chimes in and tells you why certain campaigns worked and why they didn’t. This gives you the information you need to create your own campaigns with success.

In final, the Definitive Guide to Google Adwords is still the best course on the topic. Perry has 7 years of experience with Adwords and has worked with tons of clients across many different industries so he knows what he’s talking about. This is an essential course if you’re planning to use Google Adwords for traffic. I highly recommend it for both beginners and intermediates. Experts will also get a lot from the new version that was just released.

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