Website Marketing Skills For Small Businesses

Been thinking about adding a blog to your site?  It is time to take action.  The new features in WordPress now make installing nice themes and tweaks to your blog a snap that will only take a few minutes.

HOW TO INSTALL YOUR BLOG

If you do not have a blog yet, simply go to the control panel at your site – generally www.YourSite.com/cpanel – click the Fantastico icon, and then click the option to install WordPress in a directory of your choice.  Once the blog has been installed, you will want to go into your administrative panel, which is called a dashboard.  The dashboard allows you to update the blog software, add plugins, change the look of your blog and, of course, add content.

UPDATING THE BLOG SOFTWARE

Recent updates to the blogging software have allowed you to update the software with just a click within your dashboard, and also to search, review and install plugins directly from the administrative dashboard.  Plugins enhance your blog’s capabilities.

HOW TO WORK WITH BLOG THEMES

This plugin capability has been enhanced in the June 2009 WordPress update.  The new WordPress Version 2.8 offers an outstanding and super easy to use theme feature that is similar to the plugin feature.  You specify what you want by searching for and viewing themes directly from the dashboard – for instance, a 3 column, blue and white layout.  Click the theme that you want and WordPress will install it for you right from your dashboard.  The days of unzipping and then FTP’ing your theme to your site are over and you’ll save a heck of a lot of time.

After your theme has been installed, you can go to the edit page function and modify the php pages if you want.  The process is much easier with WordPress’ new color-coded theme editor.  When you review PHP and stylesheet pages in the theme editor, the code is now numbered and colored, making the job thousands of times easier.

There are some awesome free themes available, including the magazine style themes that look like a professional publication. If you use these types of themes, you will be working with a plugin called Timthumb that will display your images as thumbnails on the front page and display larger versions within the blog post.  It is easy to work with this, but sometimes the documentation that comes with the WordPress theme provider is not very good.  At Not Guru, you can find a step-by-step tutorial, replete with screen shots, which show you how to work with magazine style WordPress themes.

WORDPRESS IS NOW FASTER

As an added bonus, the new WordPress software has removed a bunch of bugs and it runs much faster.

REASONS TO BLOG

WordPress blogs, when updated frequently, are a fantastic search engine traffic magnet.  The key is that the blog should be updated consistently. When it is, new posts generally show up in the search engines on the same day and often within hours.  There’s a way to make this process even faster and it is free.  What you do is install what is called the SEO blog plugin.  WordPress’ plugin installation feature makes installing the blog traffic plugin a snap. In just a few minutes and a couple of mouse clicks, the zip file will be uploaded from your computer hard drive, unpacked, and fully installed.  Once installed, the plugin will tweak your blog, have you install other traffic-pulling plugins, and optimize the search engine capabilities of your blog.  As you tweak your blog using the SEO blog software, you can see your SEO grade, like 80% or 90% optimized.  You will see a huge difference in your blog’s performance once the SEO plugin is installed.

Because you will keep your web visitors happy with up-to-date content and the search engines constantly visiting your site, adding a blog is a powerful tool to add to your website.  With the new WordPress platform, it has never been easier to install and maintain a blog.  Blog installation tips, computer help and other practical guides are provided daily at the Not Guru blog.

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If you are considering Affiliate Marketing you should seriously consider Product Review Websites

The vast majority of people searching for product reviews are active buyers looking for reassurance that their decision is the right one. This offers the perfect opportunity for affiliates to make product recommendations & redirect the visitors via their links.

Some of the major benefits review websites offer affiliates are -

Pre-Written Content

Your website content is already 90% complete!

As you are promoting an advertised product, all the details, benefits, & specifications are already available on the vendors site. Simply use this information & add your own comments to build your own content.

Remember you are reassuring the reader about a decision they want to make so your reviews should emphasize the products benefits. You can list the specifications but they should not be the primary focus of any review.

Site Design

Web design & structure is already predetermined as a review site, so building your site is easy using pre-configured templates or Word press plugins.

On-site S.E.O

Wordpress Blogs are easy to SEO using freely available plugins
SEO optimization is also very straight forward, your keywords will be “product review or reviews” with the products benefits & details providing all the associated keywords. As your site becomes more popular visitor comments will keep the site updated with fresh content.

In conclusion Product Review Websites are easy to build, write & S.E.O, they are also perfect candidates for P.P.C. (Pay Per Click) promotion. Your site will have a very good quality score for its main keywords, keeping your cost per click down & your conversion rates will be high because you are targeting active buyers.

Whichever type of review blog you choose – Review Plugin, or a Review Template – Review sites are a great place to start

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If you follow search engine marketing then no doubt you’ve been hearing about Microsoft’s latest search engine release called Bing. Bing promises a new user experience for those surfing the web. This is a pretty necessary rework of Microsoft’s previous search in an effort to compete with both Google and Yahoo. There appears to be more press than ever covering this launch as Microsoft is seeking to make radical changes to their business model.

I seem to be getting a large number of blog readers asking about Bing and what they should be doing to get sites ranked well on this new search engine. This is a common question whenever new search engines hit the scene or major updates are announced to a search engine’s algorithm. The good news here is that Bing appears to follow many of the same protocols as Google, the world’s leading search engine.

One of the best ways to reverse engineer a given search engine is to do a study of the top ranked website for a specific term. Based on some research that I’ve done and the work of others in the SEO community, it’s pretty clear that this type of analysis provides clues of which criteria weigh most heavily in Bing’s search algorithm. No one will be all that surprised to learn that older domains perform better than newer websites and in bound linking plays a major role in results.

After doing just a small amount of investigation it’s clear that Bing is using criteria such as in bound linking to evaluate the appropriateness of a given site related to a search term. Consistent with other search enginemethodologies, in bound linking shows which sites are popular and worth of top rankings. Focus your SEO efforts on link building to do well in Google and other search engines like Bing.

Making improvement to your organic search results is vital to your online success. Many website owners or affiliate marketers believe they can buy their way to top rankings. In turn, these ranking produce significant traffic and a profitable revenue stream. However, organic results take time and hard work. If you know where to focus, you will get to your destination much quicker. Focus your efforts on building links and optimizing your pages for success.

Another area of importance is content. Search engines like Bing look for fresh, relevant content. You want to make sure that your content is valuable to browsers and web site visitors but that it is also relevant and up to date. Consider adding a revising content on a regular basis. This helps you succeed in generating inbound links and quality scores from search engine algorithms.

You might be wondering which search engine you should be optimizing your web site for. Based on what I’ve seen, I’m encouraged by preliminary Bing related findings. I believe that Bing is using many of the same factors that Google uses to evaluate a sites relevance to a search query. As always, focus on white hat methods to optimize your site and follow search engine optimization basics.

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All bloggers and website owners want more traffic, regardless of how much they currently receive. In recent years social media marketing has become a popular and effective practice for many bloggers. Still, even with some getting excellent results from social media marketing (SMM), many others have not adopted SMM as a promotional method of their own.

1. Enormous Traffic Potential

The main draw for most bloggers that use social media to promote their blogs is that it can send a very large amount of traffic in a short time. While there are countless different ways to promote a website, very few have the huge potential of social media. Any site, with the right content and promotion, can jump from literally nothing to thousands of visitors in a matter of hours.

2. Building Links

SMM works hand-in hand with SEO. Many social media marketers use SMM to build links to their sites so that their search engine rankings will increase as a result. In-bound links are extremely valuable for SEO, so the two naturally fit together.

Bloggers who are successful with social media marketing will get quality links from social media sites themselves, plus popular social media posts can potentially draw loads of links from other blogs. When compared to other link building techniques, SMM can be less costly and faster.

3. Viral Potential

The absolute cream of the crop content in social media will get passed around from users of various social media sites, and it will spread out of control. If this happens, your efforts will be multiplied and a flood of traffic will result.

The viral nature of social media marketing means that there is plenty of potential for leveraging your effort into incredible results. Of course, on the very best content will go viral, but for those who can achieve it, the results will be hard to top.

4. Large, Diverse Audience

The number of people that are using social media is growing all the time. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Digg are becoming increasingly mainstream, which means that the potential audience (for those who achieve success) can be very, very large.

Part of marketing a website or blog is getting it in front of a large number of targeted visitors. With social media that audience will not always be extremely targeted, but it can be very large.

5. No Cost Necessary

Social media marketing doesn’t have to cost a dime. Of course there are consultants and writers that you can hire if you choose, but that is not necessary. SMM includes a potent combination of huge potential and low cost.

If you do want to hire someone to help with SMM, chances are, you will still spend less than you will for other types of marketing, and you’ll get more bang for your buck.

6. Networking Potential

Social media marketing is social – I know that’s a big surprise. With all the attention on traffic and exposure it’s easy to overlook the potential to meet and connect with other bloggers and social media uses. You will likely find that the networking aspect will be equally as beneficial as the traffic that you receive directly from the social media sites.

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If you’ve happened to check your business’s balance sheets lately, it’s understandable if your heart starts fluttering. Supply costs, shipping expenses and employee healthcare climb through the roof, leaving you wonder how you can possibly continue in this market.

Adding further gasoline to the fire, markets quickly collapse as businesses everywhere cut back on everything that’s not absolutely essential. On top of escalating costs, there are fewer dollars being spent in this economy.

This can spell death to the small to mid-range business. Finance is a matter of survival for the little guy who tries not only to stop bleeding costs, but actually build and maintain a profit.

Yet it’s these very market conditions that make search engine optimization the most cost effective and productive marketing strategy available. As the costs to do business continue to escalate in a shrinking marketplace, making the most of everything advertising dollar is simply essential for survival. What advertises your company the best- an ad where a limited number of people will see it or a top search engine ranking where everyone in the world looking for that keyword can be reached? You’ll spend less, but reach more. In this changing world of finance and marketing makes perfect sense.

Search engine optimization, is the art of optimizing a site to consistently rank high in Google for keywords relevant to its market. This can be done through compelling market-driven content that’s not only conveys the purpose of the site, but essential and meaningful to the user who finds you.

It goes a further step by creating quality content on other sites that is then linked to your own, earning link prestige that increases your site’s importance in Google and other search engines. The better the links, the more importance your site will earn.

By spending relatively little on a consistent marketing campaign, your site can continually rank in the top of the rankings. At the top of the results, your site will be seen by a more relevant audience- people who are looking for you by using a particular phrase or keyword.

More traffic driven to your site means more potential clients. However, traffic alone doesn’t build a successful site. Traffic needs to result in substantial turn around, rather that means sales, educational supplements, or solid leads. That’s why it is more than just convincing the computer algorithms your site is more relevant than the competition. Real marketing sways the human element, driving people to react to your site in a substantial way that results in serious success in the market place.

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