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3 Must have features for your website

1. Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.

The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the  information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

2. Understanding Your Target Customer

If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

3. Does your website give enough contact information?

When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

Building a Highly-targeted Opt in List: When Money Lies Beneath the Lists

I wonder how many online entrepreneurs are successful with their online businesses? If you would go out there and ask a couple of them this thing, I’m sure that some of them will elegantly avoid answering you. This happens because most of this entrepreneurs are not yet realizing the right way to use to be successful, in Internet Marketing, and they will still continue to believe that if they have an website, then this is enough to succeed.

And that is how they all going to by very upset, when they will realize that they do not know the secret which is behind the success, in Internet Marketing.

If you have just the website, when you want to make business online, it is not a solid guarantee that you will going to be successful in whatever you have decided to do. You really have to think seriously that people will not come to your website, if they don’t even know that it exists. The most important thing in online businesses, is to get noticed, and be successful in Internet Marketing.

To really get noticed, you need an opt in list. If you ask most of the experts in Internet Marketing, they all going to tell you that the most effective and important tool in Internet Marketing is an opt in list.

Again, it has to be mentioned what an opt in list is: it is a list of email addresses of people which voluntarily agreed to receive any type of information from your online business. “Opt In” means to have the permission to send them any information, newsletter or promotion you have, and in which they are interested.

It is very important that, before sending any of the above metioned promotions, you must have permission first. If you do not have your subscribers’ permission, then you will be accused of spamming them, which it is an illegal activity on the World Wide Web.

If you create an opt in list, then you will be able to mainatin contact with your previous buyers and in the same time, to boost the sales. And this because you will always have a targeted audience, which is ready to buy from you.

An opt in list is considered as the most important and valuable item which an Internet marketer can have, along with his business. This item will be the only thing that they would want to save, in case anything wrong happens, and they can’t save any other data.

You can see how such people really give a lot of attention to their opt in lists. If so, then this means that are very important, am I right?

If you are not yet aware of the importance of a highly targeted opt in list and you would want to find out how to build one, then you should read the tips below very carefully.

1. Decide which will be your niche or target market.

It is very important for you to know which niche you will going to try and cover. If you will simply start to build an opt in list, without thinking at a certain niche, then this can be time consuming and very confusing, also.

By having a niche market, will bring more and more focus on your marketing campaigns, and you will be able to drive much better results, because all your emails will be directed to people who are truly interested in what you have to offer.

2. You must be 100% sure that the niche you are trying to cover, is available on the Net.

It is not a guaranteed fact that if you have acquired a niche market, you will be able to start building your list right away. That is way it is important to have a niche market that is available online, so the opt in list to help you grow your business in the selected niche.

3. See if the targeted market you have selected can generate an income for you.

If your selected niche market won’t bring you any profits, then building a highly targeted opt in list will simply be a waste of time.

Try and see if the niche has income generating potential for you, by using search engines. If you will see that others are willing to pay to advertise on the search engine, in the same niche you have selected, then there is a possibility that you will make some profitsin it.

4. Use Internet forums, to find and solve the problems generated by your target market, if those will appear.

This way, you will be able to give answers to your target market’s questions, regarding your niche. You will be able to find out the problems met by your customers within the niche you are in, and to come up with some great solutions in solving it. This is also a handy thing, for when you are ready to start building an opt in list.

The success of an online business mostly depends on the opt in list that it has. Opt in lists are the place where online business are able to send their newsletters and to promote their products and also created the need of it. This will mean more sales and more money for those businesses.

As people say, ” the money is in the list “. This is why all businesses that have opt in lists, consider it as valuable as the gold is.

Time and time again we see all warps of life getting excited about the PR Update and there is always the lead up excitement about 2 weeks before it happens, weather some people are physic or just get the feeling its happening soon im not sure, i know its “suppose” to be scheduled thing but we all know Google have been mixing and matching when they do their updates for the past year or so. Well as of today (26th July 08) Google have pressed that button once again, this time around i think it reflects better on what PR should actually be after Googles over generous update last time.  Personally my main sites stayed the same with some good inner pr increases and some of the smaller sites took a drop in n PR which to be honest i couldnt give a rats arse about.

The Big hitters like DP still remain PR7 which i feel is deserved although there traffic in the last month has seriously taken a hit (not sure why)

Qdoos Webmaster Forum was a little bit of a surprise and stayed the same PR3 which i would have expected to get a PR5 at least.

Other sites of my interest was Joomla Xtreme that still remains a PR6 after the past 6 updates.

Leave a comment and let me know how you done in the updates, Successful or not ?

On the up side although PR has dropped SERPs have risen on my sites so over all im very happy.

Sometimes niches don’t rely on search engine traffic, but rather links from other sites. This is a great way to start a site, and make money right off the bat. Although these methods involve mostly “nofollow” links, and thus are looked down upon by most SEO marketers, they are a good way to get a constant flow of traffic to your site, and if your ads are right, a small flow of money.

For excellent targeted traffic, I suggest Yahoo Answer. These work especially well with blogs, but other sites can be effectively advertised as well. The key is to first answer the question, so that people don’t just skip over a spammy looking ad. After the answer, put your link either in the source or the answer. These answers can take less than 20 seconds each to read, write, and complete, and as long as you include a good phrase like “If you need any more help check out my site: …” or “blahblahblah.com can probably help you with that problem” people will see the comments as legitimate and most of the time click to investigate. The best types of ads are those that don’t look like ads, and this marketing proves that point.

Another great way to advertise to gain traffic is in Facebook groups. Everyone has a Facebook these days and its really easy to just do a search for your niche, join a bunch of groups and post a comment on each group’s wall. Keep it short but not ad-like and people will click, because they are interested in the topic.

As was previously mentioned; these methods will not help you gain PR or count for anything search engine concerned. But they are an excellent way of getting people to your site, and keep them coming back if you have good content. Just remember you don’t get money for being the first on Google; you get money from people coming to your site, and this type of link building does just that.

When I started out attempting to make money online, after quitting my part time job, I thought I could do it with nothing but a site on a Virtual Private Server for $5 a month and a willingness to learn. This however is not the case. If you have any desire to make money online and you don’t yet you need to realize that you have to spend money to make money. At first it seems worthless: why should I spend $10-$20 to get submitted to directories or get links when I can do that stuff myself? And will I ever see $10-$20 worth of profit from traffic from those links? The reason SEO giants pay others to do those things is because they are smart, they know they will still make a profit, and doing menial tasks is a complete waste of their time. Therefore I implore you: please don’t make the same mistake I made and waste hours doing tasks for little in return.

Second you must diversify. No matter how great your idea is, you should always have a number of different sites to make you money. I made this mistake as well: I figured I could make a few dollars a day with Adsense on a simple blog to supplement my income for minimal effort. First off this didn’t happen: even with 8000 views the first month I only made about $9. After seeing such poor results I gave up and tried a new venture. Now the blog still makes me about $0.15 a day after not posting in months but the whole task was a waste, besides teaching me a lesson. If you have a really great idea, you can succeed with a single site, but you’re going to have to spend a lot to make it work. For the rest of you, build up a small network of sites on a private server, virtual hosting is too frustrating and costly. Income will be slow at first, but as your network of sites grows it will begin to pay for your server bill and some day make a profit. Making money online seems easy: it really isn’t. It takes hundreds of hours to learn and get started, but some day you will reap the benefits.

Posting on Blogs and submitting to directories are just some of the ways to build great links to your site. To get links that people may actually click on because they want to go to your site, a link exchange with another site is a great asset. Whether it’s from a site that you own, or someone else’s in a similar or the same niche, link exchange won’t get you a huge number of links usually, but they are often very good ones. Often times, blogs may exchange links in return for a guest post.

When these few links are not enough putting a link in your signature on a forum is an excellent way to build hundreds of new links. May web masters are on forums anyway for fun, or to give and receive information, so posting hundreds or even thousands of times usually isn’t really a chore and is an excellent way to get a large buildup of links, “dofollow” or not.

One final link building tip that I will suggest is to make people want to link to people. A site with no content or reason for existence has a very limited shelf life: people will go to it with good SEO techniques and it might make $1 a day which is fine if you have 100 or so sites, but to make real money with a single site you must have content. With good content your site will be marketed for you and link building won’t be as necessary; people will link to your site from all over the internet. So remember: if you have good content and some saviness you can be successful without spending a dime on paid links. It just takes time.

When trying to make money online, one of the best things you can do is rank well in the search engines, and at least for now, the best way to do that is to build links. The more links, the higher you rank for keywords, and the more visitors and money you get. While it is certainly easier to simply pay for links, there are a lot of different tools you can use to build links on your own without paying a penny.

One way is to comment and leave links on “dofollow” Blogs. These are blogs with “dofollow” links meaning that search engines count them in the number of links, and thus a site’s ranking (as opposed to “nofollow” links which do not count). With some research you can find hundreds of these blogs that you can make a short non spammy comment and leave your link. This short task will increase your link number slowly but surely and you will see your site rise up in the rankings for your keyword.

Another way to build links is to submit to free directories. These are databases of sites, categorized in topics, with a large number of “dofollow” links. Though you’re likely not going to get a lot of traffic from these, as they aren’t exactly a very good way to find sites, what they do provide is another free way to build your link number. Just remember; the traffic will come later once the sites rise in the search engine rankings. So don’t lose hope!

Entering into online marketing has become a fad in rich nations such as US, UK and Australia. An estimate says that people who are into online marketing are mostly in the age bracket of 20 - 30 who do not know but want to know the nuances of online marketing. Are there any good places for these amateur webmasters to become seasoned pros if not experts? Indeed yes. Sharing thoughts with virtual users spread across different geographic locations is possible through the birth of several webmasters forums. There are several established webmaster forums on the Internet that are regarded as webmasters marketplace. These webmasters forums offer knowledge enrichment in various fields including web development, web design and hosting, SEO and SEM tools and strategies so on and so forth.

While some of these online webmasters discussion forums offer registration at measly charges some of them offer membership for free. You may want to enter into some of these forums but at exorbitant membership costs. Some other webmasters marketplace community forums ask for a fee to post a listing. Whatever it is, these forums are all dynamic talking and discussion platforms wherein webmasters community share their day-to-day experiences and views, and even offer to sell thoughts and ideas on numerous topics including web programming, templates and scripting, software and hardware reviews search engine optimization and affiliate marketing tips.

A typical webmasters forum will be broadly categorized into webmasters marketing forums, blogging web development and even support forums. Each of the broad category will have sub forums. For instance, a webmasters marketplace and SEO SEM forum will have sub forums related to SEO and SEM tips, web hosting, domains and many more.
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