Internet Marketing Strategies, Tips and Tools

Internet marketers have various tools and methods at their disposal to promote and advertise their businesses to their target markets anywhere in the world. Search engine optimization (SEO) proves to be the most effective internet marketing strategies, as attested to by online marketers.

In a recent online survey conducted by TopRank Online Marketing, 36% of 400 business marketers polled said they will surely focus their Internet marketing campaigns on SEO over the next six months. Blogging emerged second with 33% of the votes while pay per click ranked third with 26%.

These results showed that online marketers are steadily learning the ropes in search engine optimization. As many SEO specialists would say, there is no sure or fixed formula to make sure that your website tops the search engine results page permanently. Keyword research, keyword insertion, the utilization of meta tags, and so on contribute to boosting your page ranking but SEO is as elusive to any beginner as with anyone who is doing it for years.

Perhaps the reason why business marketers put great value to SEO is because it offers a long-time potential for growth unlike with say, PPC ads, wherein your campaigns are given a definite start and end period. Search engines are the most widely used Internet tools around the world so it has the potential to drive bulk of the traffic to websites.

Online tools are readily available to determine which combinations work best and which do not. SEO must be used as part of a far larger social media optimization campaign because the combination of the two has proven to be very powerful.

Article marketing is one of the best forms of free advertising on or offline that is available for bringing new visitors to our websites.

Why is that you ask?

Writing articles can lead to increased visitors to your website. The main reasons you’re writing an article is for people to read and learn about your topic and you. After writing an article you want it published of course. Getting it publshed is how you’re going to drive traffic to your site.

If you know your target market then the hardest part of the work has been done for you - that of assembling a list several thousand individuals to read your article.

You’ll want to submit it to ezine publishers, article directories and create a webpage on your site to display it and to submit to the search engines.

There are several things to consider if you decide to write and submit articles to ezines. The format for writing the article itself, finding ezines to submit it to and figuring out the right way to submit it to publishers so that it gets an above average chance of being used by the publisher.

Writing is hard work. At least for me that is. I tend to generally keep up with how the internet is evolving and develop an article from changes that I see going on.

Writing articles for ezines takes on a basic format that you should become familiar with.

If you haven’t already subscribed to several good, quality ezines do so immediately. You want to review the articles in them so you can get a basic idea of the layout of an article that publishers expect when you submit an article to them.

You’ll notice it has:

- A Title
- The Authors Name
- The Body or Content of the Article
- An Authors Resource Box
- Sentences are under 65 characters per line

Those are the five main components of articles that are typically submitted to ezine publishers. Your best bet is not to vary from it in your initial writing efforts.

Let’s take a look at each one of those components.

** The Title **

Often times you may not even come up with a good attention grabbing title until after you have finished your article. If you have a general idea of what your article is going to cover it may be helpful later on if you jot down
some ideas right away.

**The Authors Name **

Hey you should be able to come up with this on your own. Include yours just under the title of your article.

** The Body or Content **

By far the most important aspect of your article. The best articles address some kind of problem or concern that readers may be experiencing and are looking for help, guidance or a solution for. If you have identified a bonafide problem take the time to do the research to find a solution for it.

The solution could be in the form of a unique solution you yourself have found, an existing one that few people know about or you could provide several solutions from which the reader can choose the one best suited to their needs.

Some good articles also address concerns of people in certain areas of their life or business for which there is no clear cut solution. If you can present the facts, known or obscure data that will keep a reader informed on the subject or help them come to a conclusion on their own, it will work just as well.

Within the article it is always a nice affect if you can provide some online resources or links that a reader can use to help solve their own problem or gather information from which they can draw their own conclusions.

Keep in mind that you are not writing your article(s) for the fun of it. At least I hope you’ve given some thought to what you want to accomplish using this method. Your main purpose is to get a few if not several hundred of those readers to visit your website so that you can present them with your own offers for subscribing to your ezine, joining your affiliate program, membership site or buying one of your products.

Your efforts should be in presenting a good quality article to the publisher. Take your time writing about the subject you’ve chosen. Clearly the best method of writing on the
internet is a personal, one-to-one approach to writing, write as though you’re talking to a friend or relative you know very well.

** Authors Resource Box **

This is your byline. This allows everyone who reads your article to learn more about you and your business. You’ll include it at the end of your article and it should contain a short description of your site, product or service you offer, along with your url.

It’s the second most important section of your article. Here you can put between 4 to 6 lines of text. This is the only acceptable format for advertising yourself, your website, ezine, product, etc. Describe it in as great a detail as you can get into these few lines.

Publishers will exercise their own judgment and may shorten it to meet the standard criteria they have set for all submitted articles.

Here are some more Quick Tips to remember about writing your article:

- Keep your sentences and paragraphs short
- Use action words throughout your article
- Use examples from your own experience
- Write as though you’re talking to one person
- Personalize your message
- Use plenty of white space
- Use small understandable words
- Use subheadings
- Don’t hyphenate words at the end of sentences

Just one good article on a subject that is relevant to your target market and the target market of the ezine that you’re trying to get it published in, will produce some great publicity for you. Invite publishers of ezines with similar interests as yours to publish the article.

You really don’t want to slant it towards one of your products, an affiliate program or have your own links plastered throughout your article. Just about all publishers I know will recognize that kind of writing as a cheap effort to advertise a product at their expense.

Think about it - if a publisher wanted to see a product, etc promoted in his ezine he would put one of his own in it - not some stranger he has never met. Don’t try to disguise an advertisement for one of your products as an article. Most publishers will see right through this scheme.

The length of your article should probably be between 400 to 1000 words. Any less than 400 doesn’t give enough depth to a subject. Any more than 1000 can be too long for some ezine publishers who try to keep the content of there ezine to a maximum size for purposes of distribution and reader attention.

OK, so you’ve got your article written and it’s a gem and you know everyone will want to read it. Two things you now need to focus on - finding publishers and getting publishers to look at it.

The easiest place to start looking for publishers is in your own email program. Have you subscribed to any ezines? If so how many? If not - why not? If you haven’t
subscribed to a lot of them then you need to “go forth and subscribe” to as many as you can. The reason you want to do this is to build a database of ezines that are similar to your target market and at the same time become familiar with the ezines format.

You can also do a search on google or any of the other major search engines to look for ezines and article directories that your article would be appropriate for.

Here are a few article directories to get you started:

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.ezinearticles.com

http://www.articlecity.com

http://www.article-emporium.com

Well how do you get your article accepted in ezines?

Guess what? As long as you’re in the writing mood, you’re going to have to write a short email to each publisher and ask them to publish it. Or you can invest in member only sites or software that will automate this process for you.

I’m including a sample email template for you to look at. My experience is that you modify the text and personalize any template to your own style and writing. Using a template as is from a resource like this soon becomes recognizeable and automatically deleted by most publishers who receive it. Use your imagination when you draft your own letter.

——————————————————-
Sample E-Mail Letter To A Publisher
——————————————————-

Dear Publisher,

My name is (your name) and I subscribe to your ( ezine). I’ve found it to be informative and helpful in my endeavors on the net.

I have written an article that may be of interest and helpful to your subscribers. If you find it suitable to your readers I would appreciate your considering publishing it in the (ezine).

Thank you very much for your consideration,

Sincerely,

(Your Name)
(Your Email Address)

——————————–
End Of Sample Letter
——————————–

This information should get you well on the road to writing articles for publishing in ezines that meet the criteria for your target market.

I highly recommend it as a way to get more visitors to your website without spending any money on advertising.

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Learn more about writing articles and get internet marketing tools and resources to help you with your online business. Reprint this article as long as resource box remains intact. Copyright 2009 cashway.com

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Ever heard about canonicalization domain? It’s actually the method to choose the best url when there are some several choices that lead you to the same page. It’s not been seen by many user that when you go to http://domainname.com or http://www.domainname.com or http://www.domainname.com/index.php or http://domainname.com/, they go to the same page, but for search engine robots, they are actually seen as 4 different pages.

In that circumstances, search engine will calculate the value or the back links for this page as separate 4 pages, which actually go for the same page. It then of course will hurt the rank of the page since it’s divided to 4 different URLs.

So it is important to solve this canonical domain issue if you want to market your blog, or website, so you don’t risk duplicate content and so that your marketing efforts will be focused on one URL.

There is no need to be confused in choosing between using www or non www though, because from SEO point of view it really doesn’t matter whether you’d like to use www or non www for your homepage url. But please prefer one and stick to it, so you can get all potential backlinks to one of them.

How to get the search engine robots see your site as what you like?

1. Setting the parameter on Set Preferred Domain in Google Webmaster Tools.

Before doing it, of course you should submit your site using the chosen url. When it’s verified, just go to Dashboard - Tools - Set Preferred Domain, and define which version of URL that you choose for your homepage to be seen by the robot. This process will help the google robot to more accurately determine your site’s page rank. Though your site will be updated in the Google search results over a period of time, this information will be used for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. Keep in mind that this feature is only available for root sites and not support the subdomains or subdirectory sites.

2. Use 301 permanent redirect to facilitate the robot knows which URL you prefer to be canonical. For example, if you choose your defult URL to be http://www.domainname.com, then use 301 redirect to go to http://www.domainname.com whenever someone request http://domainname.com. You can do it by modify your .htaccess file. This 301 redirect will influence your results on all search engine (not only Google) and it also helps to fix all your permalinks, helps visitors link to your preferred domain name and is good for search engine optimization.

3. For wordpress user, you can go to wordpress admin panel, Settings - General. Then set your preferred URL in to the Wordpress Address field and Blog Address field.

That’s it. After you do this canonicalization method, you can focus to optimize the preferred URL that you’ve choose previously. And you will no longer have the canonical problem that will hurt your page rank later.

Read more about wordpress SEO tips from internet marketing Indonesia blog and Asian brain resources. Find out how to get traffic to website (blog or site built on any other platform) - visit the quoted site.

Social media optimization or SMO is another of many internet marketing strategies geared towards boosting the exposure of products and services on social media sites. Such sites cover network blogs, online communities, and other community sites, including Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, and so on.

SMO differs from search engine optimization (SEO) in such a way that SEO is focused on boosting search engine rankings. However, the two methods are related to each other because a solid SEO campaign is highly supportive of SMO strategies.

SMO Strategies

Social media optimization, though not as popular as other forms of Internet marketing, has proven to be effective by internet marketers who have been diligently pursuing the processes involved in SMO.

SMO is instrumental in online reputation management (ORM), also known as search engine reputation management. From the name itself, ORM is a general strategy that involves activities focused on boosting the online reputation of individuals and organizations.

SMO methods usually applied include adding RSS feeds at the end of articles and other content. A “Digg This” button could also be affixed. Iinternet marketers also use blogging, photo slides created via Flickr or Photobucket, YouTube videos, and other third-party community functionalities.

The power of SMO partly relies on the most part to the online concept of what is known as “word of mouth.” Through photo and video sharing and bookmarking among social media users, a product is promoted as the ad is spread along. The strength of the ripple effect is therefore dependent on how engaging a product, an ad, or an article is.

Profile
- Base Location: Zhejiang // China
- Registration Fee: None
- Minimum Order: None
- Payment Options: Paypal (Credit Card), Money Booker, Western Union, Moneygram, Bank Wire Transfer
- Shipping Options: EMS, TNT, China Post (*includes international)
- Return Policy: No — Credits for Exchange
- Validity: None

Products
- Quantity: 4000+
- Unit Pricing: $1.46 - $224.50
- Package Sizes: Individual Items
- Category: Apparel - Women, Apparel - Children

Ratings
- Overall Impression (7.8/10) * Good
- Product Prices (7/10)
- Product Quality (7/10)
- Product Quantity (8/10)
- Reliability of Service (9/10) (* offers live online/telephone help)
- Impression of Website (8/10)

Review

Wholesale-Dress.Net is both a wholesale and dropship source that offers apparel for women and children. The items are mostly for women, but the website also offers maternity and children’s provider. It seems, however, that the website handles wholesale better. Dropshipping is available, but it involves a somewhat unusual process of depositing $200 in advance into your account, manually e-mailing the dropship order, and then confirming the order after your e-mail has been received. Of course, there’s always the chance that you will not sell $200 worth of items, unless you are serious and determined to work with this company. Thus, I would suggest testing out this provider with the wholesale option first, in order to experiment with how quickly the items sell and how much profit you can gain.

The next thing to discuss, of course, is pricing. Some of the clothing is very low-priced, less than $2.00, and of good quality. Other clothing may be of good quality, but they are too high-priced to consider wholesale. Since there is such a large quantity of items, you will likely find products that are suitable for your store and goals, so you may want to take a look. The website makes the searching process easier by giving the option of arranging all items in a category by price, update, or time left in stock — either in ascending or descending order. However, the key thing to remember is that the shipping charges are likely to be rather high. Remember to keep that in your calculations as you consider what products to buy and what profit they may induce.

All in all, Wholesale-Dress.Net is a good wholesale source. Though, I would only suggest trying the dropship option if you are truly serious about working with this source. In general, this provider has good prices and quality of items, which is worth looking into. Just be careful about the shipping costs.

Reviews Internet Marketing Advice

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