Local Search Engine Marketing: An Untapped Advertising Resource

By Tyler Houts

It is well known that internet search is changing the way people connect with businesses. If your website doesn’t show up within the first three results pages you’re being overlooked. However, there is another division of internet search that is widely untapped. Local Search. Everyday thousands of people in your local area search for products and services available in your area. You want to make sure that your business is the business that shows up in the local results pages when your products or services are searched for.

What Is Displayed Even if your company doesn’t have a website it can take advantage of local search. Local search will create a one page site with your businesses information. The address, phone number, and store hours will be displayed on your site for prospective clients to view. Also aiding customers is a map to your business. These maps are wonderful tools for customers to find your business. They feature street names, text directions, and zoom options. If your company does have a website, a link to it may also be included on the local search site.

More Benefits People utilizing local search are already interested in what you sell. This means less work for the business and more sales. Local search will strengthen local brand awareness and generate local leads because it is targeted to customers who search for products and services online but purchase locally. Think about how many times you search online locally for products or services. This is something that thousands of people do everyday. Now think about what a disadvantage your business is at if it is not listed when your products or services are searched for locally. You want to make sure that your business is listed, and that it is listed among the top results in a search. Local search is an inexpensive new way to ensure more business from people right in your neighborhood!

About the Author: Tyler Houts is the Public Relations and Online Marketing Director for Kinetica Media, an internet marketing company that works to harness the power of the internet for businesses of all sizes. Visit http://www.kineticamedia.com to see how their proven online marketing campaigns can enhance customer loyalty and attract new clients.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tyler_Houts

Search Engine Marketing Service: Absolutely Necessary Service Or Not!

By Stephen Pavis

If you think that you can increase your search engine ranking yourself, you,re probably right. However, if you think that you can bring your website up there to the top of search engine rankings by yourself, you,d better think again. Better yet, think about availing of a professional search engine marketing service.

The Value of a Search Engine Marketing Service

A search engine marketing service will not only increase your search engine rankings, it will enormously boost it. Website promotion through the search engine is not something that can be treated as lightly as child,s play. It requires the dedication and expertise that only a search engine marketing service can provide.

From reading various free sources in the internet, you have probably been misled into thinking that you can do your own search engine optimization yourself. In actuality, however, your amateurish efforts at S E O will not do your website much good when pitched against your competing websites that have had the advantage of professional S E O help.

S E O is a rigorous and a full-time job that requires the dedication of people who make a full-time career of it. More importantly, however, S E O requires technical expertise that is rarely available in free sources. S E O is a dynamic field; search engine ranking algorithms and parameters are always changing. If you,re not in the know, you,d likely be apprised of changes too late in the game for it to matter.

A search engine marketing service always knows when search engine ranking parameters are bound to change and they have unlimited technical expertise on how to take advantage of such changes. Moreover, it does not rely only on theories but practical experience. It knows exactly where the keywords should be to have a positive impact on search engine rankings. The search engine marketing service team you hire will know exactly what keyword density to aim for every search engine you want top rankings for.

In addition to a search engine marketing service team,s invaluable help in website keyword optimization, the members of such a team know how to build one-way links, quickly and effectively, so that your website will attain greater relevance to search engine queries. You may know in principle that you need to have as many quality links as possible, but you will probably not know how to go about obtaining these links.

On the contrary, S E O professionals will know how to procure these one-way links for your website. They usually have a varied network of inbound links sources which you,d have not known about in the normal course of your S E O study.

Suffice it to say that a search engine marketing service or company knows things about S E O that would mean the difference between moderately successful search engine optimization effort and an extremely successful one.

Search Engine Marketing Service Value Added Benefits

Aside from the obvious impact on search engine rank ratings, S E O professionals will give you valuable advice on your website layout, design, applications, hosting, and other pertinent aspects of your online business. Aside from theoretical advice though, they would be able to implement whatever changes are necessary so that you will not only have increased search engine exposure and greater web traffic but also increased conversion rate that comes from higher consumer satisfaction with your online business and service.

Written by Steve Pavis In the last year Steve’s companies have generated over 1.5 million dollars worth of business using different strategies one of them been internet marketing online at http://onlinemarketingelite.com Steve is a leading expert with 25 years experience in the business sector has offices in both the United States and the UK. The most solid advice you will ever hear is "find an easy market" with little competition and research your keywords correctly, research is the key

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Techniques in Affiliate Marketing Done By the Best

By Brandon L. Miller

The percentage behind affiliate marketing is that:

20 percent of affiliates produce 80 percent of all income; while

80 percent of affiliates generate 20 percent of all income.

Ironic but true.

You would almost certainly want to be one of those 20 percent that is earning the 80 percent of the total earnings wouldn't you? Of course you would!

Follow these basic steps and you will find yourself sharing the profits that the most fortunate ones are getting.

1. The best affiliate marketer cover their web site links. Cloaking affiliate links may not seem necessary, but it actually is. Apparently, visitors will not tend to click on your link when they see that it is leading to an affiliate program on your site once they point their mouse over them.

The usual tendency is for them to go directly to the affiliate domain. Thus ignoring your affiliate ID from the URL displayed. The best way to avoid this problem is by covering your URL. There are cloaking tools available over the Internet that you can take advantage of.

2. Successful affiliate marketers create and distribute their articles. Writing articles regarding your market niche is necessary to expand your reputation as a specialist in your field.

You can get the greatest benefits not just from writing these articles but also from getting those articles published and reprinted by other site owners and ezine publishers. Your articles will then give you both reputation and links from other web sites because of the resource box attached at the each of each article.

3. Affiliate marketers focus on a market niche. Loading your site with content that is focused on a certain product or service niche is one way of getting more web traffic in your target market. There are tools over the Internet that can help you point out market niches that is important for your website.

4. Top affiliate marketers uses autoresponders. Autoresponders are important tools that makes you capable of sending a timed series of email messages to those persons that signed up for them. Most of the time, these autoresponders are sent through by a third party provider. Look for the best provider that will cater to your autoresponder needs.

5. Smart affiliate marketers build web pages in order to pre-sell. Create either testimonial pages or review pages that talk about and pre-sell the product or service you are affiliated with. This is the best method of getting increased orders for your chosen affiliate programs.

Many programs truly offer an article or recommended text to sell their products for you and permits duplication of those articles with your links implanted.

6. An outstanding affiliate marketer collects email addresses. The best affiliates gather email addresses on their web site by presenting free reports thru autoresponders,giving out ebooks and newsletter signup forms.

This method is best used in building your own list of email addresses to contact. This also lets you contact potential customers that clicked away once they got into the affiliate program website.

7. Top affiliate marketers markets everywhere. You can advertise using PPC or ezine advertising depending on your market niche. Some categories of Pay-per-click can be expensive, but advertising somewhere is needed to get additional traffic to your site.

There are some good bargains in ezine advertising and some less popular PPC engines other than Yahoo's Overture and Google's Adwords you can check out.

8. Affiliate marketers optimize for the search engines. Search engine optimization is now getting more complex as new and more webmasters participate. But the basics put into your site can add to your visibility over time.

The most critical of the many SEO techniques is the use title tags that shows individual page content. Many webmasters write a master title tag and apply that site-wide. This is the worst thing you could do for search engine ranking.

9. Affiliate marketers have their own mailing lists. The best of affiliate marketers have their own newsletter or ezine and gather email addresses on their site to build their list of subscribers.

Having this list allows regular contact with potential customers interested in your site, your product and your market niche.

If you understand and make use of the above mentioned techniques, you can be one of the top people that are making it big in affiliate marketing. What are you waiting for?

Brandon Miller- Get a free gift just for visiting this site! Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brandon_L._Miller

Adwords Success On A $5 Budget

By Ochedikwu Anyebe

For Google Adwords campaigns on a limited budget, the difference between success and failure often lies in the initial cost. It is easy to get burnt trying out Adwords for the first time. My first attempts at launching an Adwords campaign would leave not only a gaping hole in my tiny pocket, but shatter my initial ambition of conquering the world wide web!

After a few failed campaigns, a bruised ego and a thin wallet, I retreated from the Adwords battleground to carefully analyse my campaign. After a bit of some hard work I came up with a formula for making money with Adwords even with a little start up capital. Infact, you can start a campaign with $5 and let it run itself successfully. But you must know these techniques and follow them guardedly. The following tips will help you run a successful and profitable adwords campaign on a tight budget.

1. Choose a product with high demand and easy convertibility. This rule holds true not only for internet marketing as a whole but also Adwords. Nobody will click on a product or service that is not wanted no matter how nicely packaged. Consumer trends can always be gleaned from such sites as “Lycos 50”, Google’s Zeltergeist, 100hot.com, wordspot.com, or Wordtracker’s latest keywords search report. It is also quite possible to find high converting products from smaller niches.

2. Patiently study the guidelines of the pay per click search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Msn before launching an Adwords campaign. This is to save time and avoid making sometimes costly mistakes.

3. Bid on cheap keywords. Keywords are crucial to Adwords success for they determine not only the search parameter for finding a buyer but actually determine the cost. The cost of your campaign is the cost of your keyword. Time spent on researching keywords is therefore never time wasted. Compile a long list of keywords either manually or with the help of a Keyword Tool like that of Google or Overture. Check their cost per click using the Keyword Tool bid option and add only the keywords with a low cost per click to your campaign keyword list. I consider the minimum keyword bid price of $0.05 or $0.06 {$0.10 on Yahoo) the ideal price to bid on for an effective low cost campaign. Add keywords of no more than these. That is it. Don’t worry if the top keywords are few and expensive. We shall drive our own traffic from the cheap ones. Fortunately most adwords advertisers, some of them firms with big bucks, zero in on only these few expensive keywords {that is why they are so expensive}, leaving us poor folks to pick up the cheap keyword crumbs lying on the ground, much to our advantage of course!

4. Place the cost of your product or service on the ad. This is important as it serves to drive away the casual, oftentimes freebie-seeking browser from wasting your click. It in turn attracts the serious, prospective purchaser. The importance of this point cannot be overemphasized. These days I prefer launching adwords campaigns mainly only for products and services I can place the price of on the face of the ad.

5. Optimize your ad by placing keywords in the ad title and description. This tends to improve the quality of the ad according to Google policies by improving the click through rate (CTR). This in turn reduces the cost of the ad. To achieve this effect, it is advisable to compile different ads for different keyword adgroups.

6. Improve the quality of the keywords by using exact matching [ ], and phrase matching{“ “}. This is because broad keyword matching, the default in Google, tends to waste clicks and is better avoided altogether except in campaigns where you stand to gain commissions per click. In addition, create adgroups of misspellings of keywords.

7. Include negative keywords by adding the – sign before the word. This prevents anyone searching on such a word from seeing your ad. By adding the negative sign to the word free, for example, someone searching for a free version of your product is staved off, saving yourself from a potential wasted click. This optimization helps to create laser targeted clicks that have a high potential for converting to sales. In addition to negative keywords, you can also create an adgroup of keyword misspellings.

8. Don’t conduct Adwords campaigns for products or services with a payout of less than $30 per sale. Anything less than this and you stand the risk of getting burnt or running an expensive campaign.

9. Start your low budget adwords campaign by setting a low daily budget of around $5. This is to enable you test the waters and make necessary tweaks. Remove non-performing, inactive keywords. Keep adding new cheap ones if possible. Run one or two ads at a time to enable careful monitoring and to incur minimal costs. Increase your daily budget as your campaign begins to pick up.

10. Target your ads to a specific geographical location such as U.S and Canada. Ads in English should be targeted at English speaking countries, those in French to French speaking countries, and so on. Targeting your ad to the whole world can effectively reduce the campaign quality and click through rate.

11. Monitor sales from your website. An average performing product converts into a sale in 100 clicks. At 6 cents per click and a product with a $30 payout, 1000 clicks will result in sales commission of $300 at a cost of $60 or profit of $240. Pretty good business I dare say.

12. To run a Google Adwords campaign, follow the above mentioned tips. On a $5 initial deposit on Google or Yahoo, start a campaign by bidding on hundreds of keywords with a maximum cost per click of 5 or 6 cents or 10 cents as in Yahoo. Set a daily budget of $5. Promote a product that will pay you a minimum of $30 per sale. Place the price of the product on the ad. And target your specific consumer preference geographical area. Optimize your ad by placing keywords in the ad title and description. Optimize your keywords by using exact matching, phrase matching, negative keywords, and keyword misspellings. Write your keyword optimized attractive ad copy and launch it like a true general. By the time Google bills your Credit card, you would have made sufficient sales and profit to effectively cover the cost of the campaign. Thus you would have launched an effective adwords campaign with a budget as low as Google’s initial deposit of $5.

Ochedikwu Anyebe is the owner and CEO of Webblazer1.com He is a work at home enterpreneur and consultant who has helped many to make money online. Visit his site at http://www.webblazer1.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ochedikwu_Anyebe

Top 5 Reasons Internet Marketers Should Use Firefox

By Rian Brooklyn

The ensuing Internet browser battle has become a full fledged war with latest enhancements to Mozilla's Firefox and the newest release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. A large percentage of users are still using Microsoft Internet Explorer due to the fact that it's embedded into every Windows operating system, but things are starting to change. The one time underdog, Mozilla Firefox, has all but leveled the browser playing field, and may soon be the victor in this War of the Web Browsers. From an Internet Marketing perspective, Firefox wins hands down (of course this is my humble, non bias opinion). If you haven't yet moved from IE or Netscape, you might want to stick around as I give you my top 5 reasons why I think Internet marketers should consider Firefox as a wise business move.

Reason #1: An SEO Friendly Web Browser As SEO (Search Engine Optimization) becomes part of your new Internet marketing vocabulary, it should also become part of your business. Firefox is no punk when it comes to SEO. Even if you have no intention of becoming an SEO expert, the SEO plugin support for Firefox is top notch. Integrated SEO allows for a quick glance at where your website ranks with Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Alexa, helping you to evaluate your own marketing strategy and that of your competition. This is a killer time saving feature for your Internet business. My SEO plugin of choice is called SEO for Firefox, which can easily be found by doing a Google search.

Reason #2: The Perfect Webmaster's Companion From the serious web developer or Internet marketer, to the part-time website hobbyist, Firefox is a feature rich browser that can help make your job much simpler. Firefox supports many W3C standards including XML, PHP, CSS, XHTML, etc.

Websites that often fall apart in other browsers due to lack of dynamic page support are preserved and functional in Firefox. For the Internet marketer looking to learn HTML or PHP coding, viewing source code and page info is made simple with a right-click of your mouse. Page info even provides a great way to find the destinations of all links on a page. What a great marketing research feature!

Also, Firefox is Open Source. What's Open Source? Well, it basically means that you can look under the hood and tinker with the engine. Not in a million years would you be able to "look inside" of Internet Explorer to see how it ticks. The Firefox source code is open to development by programmers worldwide, which means features and updates are constantly being added. Quick tech support is often available through the many Open Source web forums or from Mozilla's Support Page.

Reason #3: Security: The Fort Knox of Web Browsers Let's face it, as an Internet marketer, you're on the Internet a good percentage of your day. After all, the Internet is your lifeblood. Security and privacy should be on your list of "must haves", as identity theft is on the rise. If you're portal to the web is lost due to a virus, spyware, or a application crash, this could mean lost productivity, lost customers, or even lost profits. Not to mention increased frustration and the occasional broken keyboard that often results from anger directed at the computer. (Of course I'm not speaking from personal experience)

Overall, the security in Firefox is one of the main reasons more and more people are making the switch from Internet Explorer. In addition to enhanced stability, Firefox is far less prone to the many vulnerability exploits common in IE. Open Source code allows for teams of programmers from around the world to jump on the first news of a security exploit and to close the hole before it causes havoc. This is simply not the case with Internet Explorer. Trust me on this; I worked intimately with IE for many years as a network administrator. It wasn't fun. Firefox is a welcomed breath of fresh air!

Here are just a few of the security features available in the latest version of Firefox: (2.0 at the time of this writing)

• Phishing Protection - Enhanced identity theft protection and forged website safeguards

• Automatic Updates - Checks and notifies you of security updates to make sure you're always using the most stable and secure Firefox version available

• Integrated Spyware Protection - Will not allow a website to download or install programs unless you explicitly allow it, and provides notification of downloads and software installations

• Integrated Pop-Up Blocker - Eliminates pop-ups that could harm your computer, and simply annoy you from a pleasant browsing experience

• Privacy Protection - Allows for one-click clearing of private data, such as stored cache, cookies, authenticated sessions, and passwords.

• Strong Encryption - Support industry encryptions standards to protect and secure data transmissions.

Reason #4: A Lean Mean Web Browsing Machine If there were a luxury vehicle of the Internet browser, Firefox is it. When it comes to speed and functionality, Firefox has won many awards for its ability to shine in this area. It's fast, stable, and fully loaded with tons of cool features.

Firefox 2.0 weighs in at a small 5.7mb installation; where as IE7 is almost 15mb. The Firefox installation is quick and simple, and doesn't require a huge amount of bandwidth to download updates and addons. Firefox is responsive, loading quickly into memory, with page loads much faster than any other browser I've used. Long gone are the days of getting a cup of coffee while your web browser loads. Enhanced features such as an integrated search engine, download manager, tabbed browsing, built-in spell checking, web feeds, and smart keywords are just a few of the reasons why you many want to consider switching to Firefox.

Firefox is also a cross platform browser, meaning you don't need to be using Microsoft Windows to install it. In addition to Windows, Firefox is also available for many versions of both Macintosh and Linux. And if you need additional language support, Firefox is available in over 40 different languages. Some my favorite Firefox features:

• Tabbed Browsing - If you've been using the Internet without tabbed browsing, you're in for a treat. Instead of the cluttered windows of traditional web browsers, Firefox opens web pages in tabbed windows by default, which provides improved speed and accessibility. Microsoft has only recently implemented tabbed browsing in IE7, while this feature has long been a favorite for veteran Firefox users

• Integrated Search Engine Support - Quick searches can be done via the built-in search bar which offers instant searching via your search engine of choice. If you're serious about search, Firefox delivers the goods. Yet another huge time saver for the Internet Marketer.

• Bookmark Manager - With this feature, it is easy to import your IE favorites, manage and sort bookmarks into groups, and even sort bookmarks by keyword. Live bookmarks dynamically deliver updated content, such as news headlines, directly within your bookmarks list.

• Smart Keywords - Now this feature rocks! In addition to creating quick bookmarks, you can also create quick URL links using keywords. For example, let's use my site. First I create a bookmark for my site from the Bookmark menu. I then right-click my new bookmark to open it's properties. In the keyword field I enter "RB". Now instead of typing www.RianBrooklyn.com to open my site, I just hit Ctrl+L to go to the Location Bar, and then type "RB". Instantly I'm taken to my website. Now that's a cool feature!

• Web Syndication - RSS web feeds (Really Simple Syndication) makes it easy to stay up to date with your favorite websites from one location. Now the content comes to you without effort. I personally love this feature as an easy way to stay updated with my favorite Internet Marketing blogs.

Reason #5: Can You Say Customization? Custom addons, plugins, themes, and toolbars; Firefox has it all. If you love personalization, you'll have plenty of options too keep you busy with the 1000's of add-ons that are available for Firefox.

Using Firefox add-ons, you can add functionality with quick third party downloads. Integrated weather, news, music and video, or comparison shopping are all possible from your main Firefox interface. I personally like the tools that make web design and marketing much easier and fun, such as the SEO for Firefox plugin mentioned above. I've been hearing about a blogging plugin calling "Performancing" but have yet to try it.

With Firefox themes you can totally control the user interface and tweak it to your liking. Don't like the colors? Ugly fonts? Grab a new theme from the Firefox Themes page and within minutes you can have an interface that you like. You can even make it look like Internet Explorer, though I can't see any reason you'd want to?

Well, there you have it. My top 5 reasons I think every Internet marketer should use Firefox, as plain and direct as I can give it to you. If you made it this far, congrats! I have a tendency to get wordy. But I hope I've provided you with some new insight if you're unfamiliar with what other browsing options are available. Oh wait, I almost forgot, there's one more reason...it's free! Now you really have no excuse not to make the switch to Firefox. You may have grown up with Internet Explorer or been forced to use in at your workplace, but this is a business decision. There's simply not a better browser out there. Ok, enough reading. Head on over to www.Mozilla.com to get your free Firefox download, and start experiencing the Internet with the performance, speed, and security that you've been missing.

Rian Brooklyn is a network engineer, specializing in computer and network security. Recently though, Rian's computer knowledge has lead him to finding the world of Internet marketing, where he has become quite knowledgeable with affiliate marketing and Google Adwords. Rian, while a new Internet marketer, and has been documenting his successes and failures on his quest toward Internet freedom on his affiliate marketing blog. Visit Rian's site and signup to the newsletter if you'd like to have a blueprint to follow as Rian reveals how he joins the ranks of successful Internet marketers. http://www.RianBrooklyn.com

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