Is your business listed on Google Local?  What about when people search for you on Yahoo or Bing?  Get your business listed for FREE by visiting getlisted.org.. it’s easy and free.

Did you know instead of using wordpress as a blog on a subdirectory of your site you can use it to power the entire thing?  You can literally use wordpress as a content management system just like you would joomla or anything else.  Once you realize how much search engines love blogs you’ll definetely want to consider using wordpress on your site.  Maybe you’re already using wordpress but are looking for a new real estate wordpress theme to give it a boost in traffic or even looks.

If you’ve been using wordpress or blogging regularly you’ve no doubt felt the positive affects of traffic to your site.  If you are then congrats!  You know something that a lot of other agents don’t know.  And you’re probably doing better because of it.  If you don’t know how blogging with wordpress, or even why powering your site with wordpress can boost your traffic then please contact me.  I can tell you all the reasons why using wordpress is a good thing for your business.

Confirmed opt-in as defined by SpamHaus, who is one of the most respected anti spam organizations in the world:

Known as “COI” in the legitimate bulk email industry, also known as “Confirmed Opt-in”, “Verified Opt-in” or sometimes “Double Opt-in”.With Closed-Loop Opt-in the Recipient has verifiably confirmed permission for the address to be included on the specific mailing list, by confirming (responding to) the list subscription request verification. This is the standard practice for all responsible Internet mailing lists, it ensures users are properly subscribed, from a working address, and with the address owner’s consent.

In the event of “spam” accusation:

The Bulk Email Sender is fully and legally protected because the reply to the Subscription Confirmation Request received back from the recipient proves that the recipient did in fact opt-in and grant verifiable consent for the mailings.

Source:Spamhaus Website

Numerous myths have circulated regarding confirmed opt-in and its effects. There are many misconceptions out there, and we’d like to help clear those up.

Myth 1: My List Size Will Decrease Because Of Confirmed Opt-In.

Some addresses entered into your form will not confirm — that much is true. The percentage of addresses that don’t confirm depends on many factors, including the quality of your traffic and how effective your thank-you page, confirmation message and incentive for confirming are.

Percentages aside, there are compelling reasons that having fewer addresses on your list is a good thing.

Sometimes Less is Better

I know. You may be asking, “How can a decreased list size be a good thing?” Well, let’s consider:

5-20% of all web form submissions are undeliverable right off the bat.

This means that of your total list size you can cut that by 5-20% because these email addresses are simply dead. Remember these are not temporary undeliverable but permanent dead addresses.

Now, add on the bogus and malicious sign ups that undoubtedly will happen. For example, someone comes to your website and decides to put in bob@aol.com. Well, bob@aol.com was once a real email address and because you were not using confirmed opt-in you are now classified as an unintentional spammer.

A recent study by MarketingSherpa and KnowledgeStorm found that only 68% of users always enter a valid email address.So, nearly a third of respondents knowingly enter bogus email addresses.

- Source

ISPs do not differentiate between unintentional spammers or actual spammers. The potential for you to be blocked or even worse, blacklisted, remains the same.

Myth 2: My Mailing List Is Different! I Don’t Need Confirmed Opt-In.

Let’s be clear, confirmed opt-in is for all businesses, plain and simple. Anyone collecting subscribers and in turn sending email needs to confirm that those people intended to sign up to your mailing list and want to receive your email.

In this age of email regulations and massive volumes of spam email, deliverability can be an issue. Why increase your chances of not getting delivered by putting yourself at risk.

Myth 3: No One Else Uses Confirmed Opt-In. Why Should I?

This is simply not accurate. Our own campaigns here at AWeber use confirmed opt-in for all email marketing activities. When someone signs up for a Test Drive of AWeber, they must confirm.

After setting up an account, if they want to receive our customer training email course, they must confirm. The same goes for our affiliates and their email training. Even when someone subscribes to our blog, they must confirm.

Ok, but AWeber must practice what they preach, who else?

If you want to sign up for the mailing lists of these organizations you will need to first confirm:

CNN	Microsoft
Oprah, CNet	bellagio.com
IRS.gov	weather.com
ign.com	maxim.com
tgifridays.com	olivegarden.com
pbs.org	visitpa.com
Whitehouse.gov

The list goes on and on…

Myth 4: Subscribers In My Market Don’t Know How To Confirm.

The simple solution is to tell them. The first page after someone fills in an opt-in form, commonly called a “thank you page” should tell the visitor exactly what to do next. Often this is done most effectively with a picture showing visitors what the confirmation email will look like.

An excellent example is our test drive sign up video on the thank you page showing visitors what to do.

Honestly, if they can’t click a link then you probably should be marketing your business offline. If someone can find your website online I guarantee they can click a link.

Myth 5: My Sales Will Decrease Because Of Confirmed Opt-In.

Have you tested this assumption? The answer is always, “No, but I just assume” or “No, my colleague told me it would hurt sales”.

It’s best not to assume anything, but rather to seek out your own answers by testing and observing your own campaigns. We have found from our own testing that while the raw number of email addresses on our list declined when we switched to confirmed opt-in, sales did not.

This means that the people who did confirm were the ones that truly wanted the information that they had to offer and the ones that didn’t were not left to bloat the mailing list.

Grow Your Business Without Risk

Will your results be exactly the same as AWeber or even anyone else? This can only be determined by proper testing and measuring.

Use confirmed opt-in as an opportunity to make sure that your lists are 100% clean and that you know without a doubt that 100% of the people receiving your mail have specifically requested it themselves.

Spend your time and energy building your business with subscribers who want to hear from you rather than dealing with issues created by people who don’t want to hear from you.

Free Video from Our Confirmed Opt-in SeminarReady to optimize your Confirmed Opt-In process?

Join our Education Team for a recording of a recent live seminar for a demonstration of what you need to know to maximize the number of responsive subscribers on your list.

Watch the Confirmed Opt-in Seminar Video

This info is provided by Aweber, the email marketing service I use.

Think you know the best day and time to send your email newsletter?

Ever wonder if your fellow email marketers are all sending at the same time you do?

Convinced your open rate is too low (or amazingly high)?

Some recent statistics pulled from all AWeber users may help you answer these questions:

What Kind of Open Rates Are People Getting?

If you’re sending HTML emails, you probably use your open rate to help gauge your success.

Even though it’s not a perfect measure of whether people are actually opening and reading your emails, it’s useful as a relative measure:

If it goes up over a short period of time, more people are probably reading

If it falls over a short period of time, it’s almost certain fewer people are reading.

Plus, all other things being equal, it can give you some motivation (if your open rates are lower than other senders’) or satisfaction (if your rates are higher).

So, here goes…

When Is/Was The Best Day To Send?

You’ll often hear (at least, I often hear) that Tuesday is the optimal day to send, because on Monday people are catching up from the weekend, and that on Tuesday morning you’ll have their undivided attention before they jump into their work for the upcoming week.

Do the numbers back up that theory? Let’s see.

The breakdown of open rates by day of the week:

Last month, Tuesday was actually the second-worst day to send, at least if you’re measuring by open rates.

(While we’re breaking assumptions, I should point out this, too: the hour of the day that got the best open rate was not 8-9AM, or 9-10AM, but in fact 2-3PM Eastern Time — email newsletters sent during that hour last month enjoyed a 19.1% open rate.)

Does This Mean I Should Switch My Campaigns To Thursdays?

In a word: No.

In both March and February, Thursday newsletters got the 3rd-worst opens vs. the rest of the week.

I hesitated a little to publish these stats, because I’m concerned that people might flock to sending their newsletters at the day or time that happened to get the best results lately.

Please, don’t drastically change your sending times/days just because you see that the average last month, or any month, happened to be higher on a different day or time.

Yes, you might eventually be able to shift your sending schedule, or split test some broadcasts, but if you up and move everything, you may throw off subscribers who are used to hearing from you at the usual time.

“It’s So Busy, Nobody Goes There Anymore”

To get at the other reason for not shifting your sending based on these stats, let’s paraphrase Yogi Berra (see above).

If everyone switches their sending schedule to send on say, Thursday, then recipients will start getting a ton of email that day, and start paying less attention to each individual email.

One possible reason for Thursday’s success last month may be that it wasn’t as popular as say, Tuesday or Wednesday for sending email:

Those higher-volume days mean more emails in readers’ inboxes, which might contribute to reduced open rates. Following that reasoning, some people may look at the low weekend volume (more email newsletters were sent on Tuesdays than on Saturdays and Sundays combined) and see an opportunity to get their audiences’ undivided attention.

My main point in showing these is to point out that our assumptions about what works are often quite wrong, and that you ultimately have to test for yourself to see what best suits your audience.

Some Inspiration… And Some Help

Are you getting better open rates than this?

If so, GREAT! Give yourself a pat on the back…

…but don’t get complacent. Open rates aren’t the be-all, end-all of email metrics. They don’t guarantee that people are reading your emails, only that they have images turned on and that they probably saw your email for at least a moment.

Plus, there’s always room for improvement, right?

Some ideas that can help you raise your open rates:

Ask people to add you to their address books. Some email programs will display images from senders who are in the recipient’s contact list.

If you are putting pictures in your emails, use the ALT text for those images to pique readers’ interest in what the picture is, so that they enable images. Or, just directly ask readers to turn on images!

Add a picture of yourself to your emails, near/next to your signature. People like seeing your smiling face, and if they see it in one of your emails, they may be more likely to turn on images to see it again later.

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL:Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

Words/phrases:

Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images:

Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments:

With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

• http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
• http://www.bondedsender.com
• http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & Whitelisting

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

The email marketing service provider I recommend using is Aweber.  It’s what I use and is absolutely superb for beginners or even intermediate marketers.

I highly recommend HostGator as your web hosting provider. I run servers in the same datacenter as theirs and know firsthand that the quality is as high as it gets.

Their shared hosting plans are perfect for your new site and start at $6.95/mo. I personally recommend their “Hatchling” or “Baby” plans. These are both large enough to host your site and offer all the features you’ll probably ever need.

HostGator offers 24/7/365 phone support, 99.9% uptime, and have a 30 day money back guarantee. Your site will be on a top of the line Dual Xeon server that provides INSTANT backups of your site. Their control panel is one of the best in the industry, and has over 39 scripts that can be installed with a click of the mouse.

HostGator offers free site transfers and is one of the main reasons why I recommend them. If you don’t want to lose your site stats then it is crucial to choose them. During site transfer they can transfer all stats, email addresses etc.

The majority of newsletter subscribers opt to have their newsletter formatted in HTML so it’s good to send attractive emails filled with nice graphics and lots of pertinent info. Formatting newsletters in HTML doesn’t have to be a pain. If you are planning on offering a newsletter we recommend that you use a third party company to handle all of your email campaigns.

Aweber

Aweber Communications develops and manages online opt-in email newsletters, follow-up automation, and email deliverability services for small business customers around the world. You can access their website 24/7 to manage and send your newsletters to recipients who have specifically opted in on your website. Use can use their integrated Web Form Generator, with video tutorials, to create unblockable pop-ups or standard forms that are easily installed on your website without programming experience.

Configure unlimited follow up and newsletter messages with name personalization, click thru and open rate tracking, attachments, RSS, and split testing at no additional cost. Messages can include HTML using our 51+ pre-designed templates, or create your own with the integrated editor and images or plain text.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is the leading provider of web-based email marketing software for small to mid-sized businesses and organizations. With their easy-to-use wizard, over 100 eye-catching email templates, list management features, email tracking and reporting, and high deliverability, Constant Contact makes it easy for you to communicate with your customers and visitors – and keep them coming back!

TemplateZone

TemplateZone offers professional email templates so you can easily choose from hundreds of html email templates to customize and send out directly from your computer.

Need help with business and sales letters?

WriteExpress offers a suite of sales and business letter templates you can easily use if you are at a loss for words when writing an email sales letter. They offer 3,001 award-winning business, sales and personal letters, hundreds of additional sales and fundraising letters, plus free bonuses.

Newsletter Formatting Resources

• Aweber – Control all of your newsletter campaigns with Aweber. Also receive free HTML newsletter templates. Best Value
• Constant Contact – Do it yourself email marketing – customizable templates – reporting

Positioning is about creating unique products or services that stand out from the crowd. To win a customers business is to position your product or service in a way that it grabs them and makes them want to buy, even if they know another business offers the same thing.

Be Unique!

Being unique takes some creativity. Some ways you can help your product stand out are:

Pricing:

This is usually the first thing people think of when they want to offer an advantage. You can use price to create a difference. For instance you could undercut your competitors and offer the cheapest product of its kind in the market. Alternately, you can create an upmarket product and sell at a premium price. Check out this article on Pricing your product for more info.

Quality:

Quality is another way to distinguish what you sell from all the rest. You can give your customers assurance that your product is the best by listing features, testimonials, product comparisons, celebrity endorsements, warranties, refund policies etc. If you claim a certain quality standard then be willing to back that up. Packaging is another way you can show that your product is top notch.

Service:

Service is not just for service providers, but for products as well. Do you offer customer service and support? Often you need to help the customer through the buying process. And what about after-sales support? Training? People want great service and when they find a company who has great service they are more willing to return and refer their friends.

Distribution:

How do customers obtain your product or service? Do you offer on-site service or instantly downloadable digital goods? Or do customers have to come to you? The easier your product is to distribute the more likely customers will be willing to buy. If you sell digital goods offer instant delivery via download to give your customers immediate satisfaction.

Packaging:

Packaging makes a strong statement. Appropriate design is the key issue here – it must deliver the message you intend. A cruise down a supermarket aisle will illustrate this. You can tell the biscuit section at a glance because there is consistency in how biscuits are packaged. A closer inspection, however, reveals a myriad of different colours and configurations. The trick is to be “the same but different!” You could try to pack your cookies in a coffee jar, but will that be too radical for the average biscuit-buyer to accept?

Likewise those offering their services must “package” themselves: this can come down to how your office is decorated, what uniforms your staff wear, even how your business stationery looks. All must reflect the unique image you are trying to portray.

Above all, make sure all the information you need to convey is contained in your packaging: ingredients, warnings, instructions, contact details, special promotions etc. etc. etc.

Identify your Strengths

Positioning is your competitive strategy. What’s the one thing you do best? What’s unique about your product or service? Identify your strongest strength and use it to position your product.

Ultimately, you want to use positioning to make sure it is your product or service – not your competitor’s – that springs to mind when a customer wants/needs something.

Being first in mind equals ownership. And market ownership allows you to be a big fish in a small pond. When you’re a big fish, you can always increase the size of the pond… or create even more ponds.

Market Research Resources

• About.com’s 4 part article on Market Research
• Dobney.com’s Basics of Market Research
• Pricing Your Product

One of the most important things to a businesses success is a successful marketing campaign. It is no different for online businesses. Online marketing is sometimes overlooked or not paid enough attention to. Below is some information we have put together to make sure you have a marketing plan in place to see to it that your business grows and prospers.

Think about marketing as “inbound” and “outbound” marketing.

Inbound marketing includes researching to find out:

1. What specific groups of potential customers (markets) might have which specific needs
2. How those needs might be met for each group (or target market), which suggests how your product might be designed to meet the need
3. How each of the target markets might choose to access the product, etc. (“packaging”)
4. How much customers might be willing to pay and how (pricing analysis)
5. Who your competitors are (competitor analysis)
6. How to design and describe the product so that customers buy from your organization, rather than from your competitors (its unique value proposition)
7. How the product should be identified – its personality – to be most identifiable (naming and branding)

Outbound marketing includes:

1. Advertising and promotions (focused on the product)
2. Sales
3. Public and media relations (focused on your organization)
4. Customer service
5. Customer satisfaction

Too often, people jump right to the outbound marketing. As a result, they often end up trying to push products onto people who really don’t want them. Effective inbound marketing research often results in much more effective outbound marketing and sales.

Gaining Traffic

Traffic is the most important thing for any website. It’s your visitors that generate revenue by clicking on your adsense ads, by following your affiliate links to make a purchase or purchasing products from your website. It is very important to build up traffic to your site if you want it to generate any amount of money.

There are a lot of services around that web that guarantee increased traffic. I however steer clear of any paid services that claim to generate traffic because with a little work you can generate unlimited amounts of traffic yourself for free. I’m talking about what is known as SEO (search engine optimization) or what I like to call website publicity. Generating free organic traffic to your site doesn’t cost money, it just takes time and effort.

I’m not going to go into lengthy details on SEO. I’m just going to give you quick tips on what you can do to start generating traffic to your site in your spare time. Of course the more effort you put into it the more traffic you can generate. Just remember more traffic equals more revenue.

So what is SEO? SEO is simply optimizing your website in a way that moves it towards the top of the search results when people search any major search engine. If your site is in the top 10 listings say on Google then you will be guaranteed traffic, depending of course on how many people are searching for your given keyword per month.

Your websites theme will dictate the keywords your site will be found under. If your site is about web hosting then that would be your main keyword. Other keywords related to web hosting would then follow and there are literally hundreds of keywords for any given topic. Keywords are just that. The Key Words that people will find your site under.

If they search Google or Yahoo then your site should show up for those keywords. Getting your site to show up for those keywords is key in gaining traffic from the search engines. Once you get to the top spots all the traffic is free, highly targetted and is thee very best traffic any site could get.

When I’m optimizing my website for the search engines this is what I do.

First I do a little research. I try and find out keywords to use and figure out how many people are searching for them each month. With that information I do quick searches on Google to find out how much competition there is also known as keyword analysis. If a keyword only gets 100 searches a month but there are 100 million websites competing for that keyword then it’s not really going to pay off if your in the #1 spot on Google. So you have to figure out what you can achieve and where to spend your time. Longer keywords or what are known as “long tail keyphrases” are easier to optimize for and are just as lucrative because people searching for very specific things are usually in the mood to buy or take action if they find exactly what they are looking for. A long tail keyphrase is something like “cheap webhosting with cpanel control panel” or “affordable hotel rooms in las vegas”. The longer the keyword the less competition there usually is and the easier it is to get to the top spots on Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Here are some tools I use to do keyword research.

Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool – Search for any keyword and it will give you a number of searches performed in a previous month. Perfect for seeing what the most popular keywords are and also shows what the less popular keywords are.

Wordtracker – Wordtracker is a paid subscription keyword service that allows you to do much more extensive keyword research.

Keyword Discovery – another great keyword research service that offers a great set of keyword tools.

Overture’s free keyword tool is perfect if you are just getting started and want to get keyword ideas. Plus it’s free. I wouldn’t recommend paying for a keyword service unless you’re really serious about using keywords to generate niche traffic. Again it’s just about how much time, money and effort you want to invest. Try the Overture tool first and then move onto paid keyword research tools as you grow.

Since you purchased a website from me you are off to a great start as every site I build is already search engine friendly and most likely already has Pagerank and receives traffic. Now you just have to continue to build it up to get the most out of it.

How to use the keywords you’ve found for your website.

Once you have a good list of keywords to use in your website you have to figure out where and how you will use them in your content to drive traffic to those pages. If you have a blog you can easily create posts using those keywords in the title and body of your post. You should follow keyword density guidelines to some degree to make sure your keyword is spread throughout your content. You don’t always have to use the keywords you’ve found during research. Simply staying focused on the main topic of your website is sometimes enough. Write or have content written that relates to your main topic. The more content you have the better.

Gaining Inbound Links

Links to your website are crucial to where your site shows up on the search engines. The more high quality links you have the higher your site will be when people search for keywords you’ve used in your site. The search engines view links as votes. You might have heard of the term “link popularity”. This basically translates to: the more links you have the more popular your site is. Without links your site is dead. So you have to increase the amount of links pointing to your site to increase your traffic. There are several ways to do this.

You can either exchange links with other webmasters or you can get one-way links through various methods. One way links are by far superior to trading links because you are not bleeding Pagerank off your website onto someone else’s. One-way links to your site tell the search engines that another webmaster thought your site was so good that they linked to you by their own will. You didn’t have to coax them into linking to you by giving them a link back. You won’t always be able to get people to freely link to you so sometimes exchanging links is the only method. Feel free to do this but maintain a sense of precaution as exchanging too many links can get your website penalilzed.

Ok, so what can you do to gain one-way inbound links?

Gaining high quality one-way links isn’t as hard as some people might have you think. With a little research and work you can gain a lot of great one-way links to your site helping you gain more traffic, build up your Pagerank and essentially generate more revenue. Here’s where to start:

Online Forums: Do some research on any online forums that are related to your websites topic. Join those forums and simply place links to your site in your signature. Most forums today offer the ability to put links in your signature and you can freely advertise your site like this as well as get one-way links to your site. The more you post obviously the more times your links will show up but make sure you use diligence when posting on other people’s forums. You actually want to become a friendly and respected member of the community so don’t go posting useless info just to get your links up. You don’t want to get banned alltogether.

Blogs: Do some more research on any of the major search engines for blogs related to your website. You will most likely find many people with blogs related to yours. Read through the posts and comment on anything that you find interesting. Again use diligence and only leave relevant comments. During commenting you can leave your websites URL. Again the more you do this the more links you can gain back to your site.

Article Directories: You can submit articles to article directories for other webmasters to use on their websites. To use your articles they have to keep your author bio intact at the bottom of every article. You simply place a few of your website links in your bio section and when other webmasters publish them they will be linking directly back to your site. Don’t worry if you don’t know how or what to write. Simply post a job on any freelance website such as elance.com, guru.com, scriptlance.com etc with a job for a few articles. Give the freelancer your topic to write on and you can usually get nice 500+ word articles for pretty cheap. They are definetely worth the money as your article will most likely be published by multiple site owners sometimes hundreds. You can find people to write articles for as little as $5 a piece. Once you have your articles submit them to the article directories. Here is just a few:

http://www.articlecity.com

http://www.articlecentral.com

http://www.authorconnection.com

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.marketing-seek.com

http://www.netterweb.com/articles/articlesubmit.htm

http://www.boconline.com/sub-art.htm

http://www.dime-co.com/articlesub.html

http://www.freesticky.com/stickyweb/submit.asp

http://www.web-source.net/article_submissions.htm

http://ezinearticles.com/add_url.html

http://www.howtoadvice.com/Submit

http://www.ezinearticles.com

Social Bookmarking Sites: You can bookmark your own websites on every major social bookmarking site there is. You have to create a free account first then simply start bookmarking. You can bookmark several pages of your website if you want but again use diligence as you don’t want to be accused of link spamming. Here is a small list of social bookmarking sites you can use:

Furl - Del.ic.ous – Smarking – Simpy – Jots – BlogMarks – Scuttle – Blinklist – -Blogmemes – Bloglines – SocialBookmarking – Searchles – Reddit – Shadows – Co.mments

Testimonials: If you have ever used a product or service online that you love why not send a testimonial to the webmaster saying how much you loved their product. To make the testimonial look credible webmasters will usually include a link back to your site. This is yet another easy way to get more one-way links.

The Importance of Link Text

To make the most of these free methods of gaining one-way links you must use keywords in your link text. The text used in links tells the search engines what your site is about so use keywords that are related to your site. Also, don’t always link just to your homepage. Link deep into your site. Webmasters often link to subpages or subdomains of websites not just to the homepage. The more specific a link is often the better. If your site is about weddings and you have a page on your site named “unique wedding favors” get links to that page with that link text. The keyword “unique wedding favors” is a pretty popular keyword and to rank high on say Google for that keyword you need a lot of one-way links pointing to your site with that exact link text.

Building Pagerank

Once you work on gaining links to your site your Pagerank will naturally grow. The higher your Pagerank the higher Google will place your site amongst it’s results. Pagerank is achieved solely by links pointed to your site. The more links you have the higher your Pagerank will be. Pagerank is basically like electricity. It flows in the same fashion. Pagerank is passed from one site to another in varying amounts. The higher the Pagerank a website has the more juice or electricity it has to pass onto you. This is why webmasters are always looking for links from sites with a lot of pagerank. You can and will pass on Pagerank to other websites when you link out to people. The more you link out the more Pagerank you will pass and the less you will have. If you want to keep your PR high then link out less and gain more one-way links. Your websites structure is also important for passing PR through your website.

Increasing Revenue

Once your traffic continues to build you want to monetize it as much as possible. You can do this through displaying ads in a way that they get the highest visibility. Placing ads such as adsense above the sites fold is important for increasing your CTR (click through ratio). If you are relying on adsense for revenue then you want to display the maximum amount of ads as possible (currently 3 text ad blocks per page along with 1 link ad unit). You will also want to place the ads throughout your content so as to make it blend in. The less they look like ads the better. If you have a blog then you will want to place ads in every single post that is not displayed on the homepage. Remember not to go over the ad display limit. You will also want to make sure the links in adsense or even your affiliate ads are blue. Blue underlined links are the most recognized standard for links.

Using pictures next to adsense or affiliate links draws attention to them and increases click throughs. There is such a thing as banner blindness so using the standard 468×60 banner ads is not recommended. People have been so bombarded with this type of advert that they simply look past any ads in that size. Use text links whenever possible only displaying photos if they are relevant to your site and draw specific attention to an accompanying text link.

Only display relevant ads. Don’t try and push products that are not related to your websites main topic. You will have the most luck advertising products that are related to your sites content.

With the information above you should be able to generate more revenue from your website and I wish you the best of luck. There is a lot more information throughout this website that I encourage you to read. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask.

Other Related Topics

• Search Engine Optimization – More info on SEO.
• Online Marketing – Overview of online marketing.