Vertical Measures Launches How-to Marketing Guide Series for Promoting Your Business in the Digital Space – YAHOO!
Internet Marketing Start to Finish: Drive measurable, repeatable online sales with search marketing, usability, CRM, and analytics, Rough Cuts – informIT
Traffic Exchanges
Traffic Exchanges are systems where you are asked to browse to other people’s websites and you earn credits or points that count towards other people who have signed up for the same traffic exchange to need to visit your website. Here is a short list of reasons that I believe you should avoid traffic exchanges:
- Some people use automated programs to earn extra credits, so your website won’t even get seen by a real person in those cases.
- The traffic you get is not targeted traffic. In fact it is worse than that, it’s traffic from people who are visiting your site mainly for the reason of getting people to visit their website. In other words, your visitors are not motivated to buy your product.
- Time is money and wasting time looking at other peoples websites, so that they will look at yours, could be better spent promoting your website in other ways.
- You can’t run Adsense on your site if you use a Traffic Exchange, because it is against Google’s Terms of Service for Adsense to use a Traffic Exchange program.
Link Farms
A link farm is a website whose purpose is for constructing links between member sites. For example, a link farm will create a link page that needs to be on all of it’s members pages. This can be spotted by Search Engines. Some link farms now have multiple link pages to make it harder for the Search Engines to spot. However, this technique is sure to be caught at some time. Link Farms should be avoided as they are a violation of most Search Engines’ policies, their use may hurt your site’s link popularity, and may result in a ranking penalty. I do not recommend using them.
Don’t confuse link farms with blogrolls. A blogroll is a list of other blogs that you link to from your blog. While many times blogrolls contain reciprocal links, blogrolls are in no way, shape, or form the same as a link farm.
At one point in time, many Search Engines were not fond of interlinking all your websites together. However, with the advent of blogs that has all changed. Several years ago when I was monitoring baby related search terms weblogsinc kept showing up in the results. When I looked at their blog network, I was just SURE that they were going to be banned by google for excessive interlinking of sites. But they never were banned! Realizing the power of being able to interlink all your blogs together (wheter related or unrelated) without a Search Engine penalty I decided to see if I liked blogging. It turned out that I did enjoy blogging and started building a blog network of my own.
To summarize:
link farms bad, blogrolls good
PPC (Pay per Click) vs. Buying Links
Now we are done talking about thing to avoid in SEO and web promotion. We are moving on to a new topic:
PPC vs. Link buying
Another way to get links is to buy them. It might make sense, but spending your money on Pay-Per-Click advertising like Yahoo® Search Marketing might make more sense. It just depends on your budget and goals. The big advantage of paying for links is that it not only increases your website visitors by getting traffic from visitors of the website you are advertising on, but it also could help your Search Engine Rankings.
The big advantage of Pay Per Click advertising, is that you are only paying for actual visitors to your website. In the case of buying links or banner space on other people’s sites, you don’t know how much traffic you will get from the links. Also, paying for links is harder to quantify in terms of ROI (Return on Investment). My recommendation is that if you choose to buy links, be sure to buy links that are likely to bring traffic to your website, and be sure to shop around for good deals.
If you want to buy links primarily to raise your Search Engine ranking then I recommend you purchase links from directories. Shop around for the best deals, but also be sure to buy links from the more prominent directories. In the case of directories, you aren’t really buying the links per say, you are spending money to get your site reviewed by an editor of the directory. If the editor believes that your site is acceptable they will include it.
I personally have never had a problem getting my sites listed in directories, but if you were to submit an evil web portal or spam site I would NOT expect it to get listed in many directories.
PS. If you want to learn more about Pay Per Click advertising then I highly recommend you download Aaron Wall’s free PPC ebook.
Finding Good Deals on Paid Links
The best deals for paid links are links that require a one time fee or a low annual fee. These links can often be obtained by:
1.Joining trade associations.
2.Sponsoring or supporting 501c organizations.
3.Sponsoring other websites.
4.Paid directory inclusion.
Trade Associations
Finding trade associations related to your business and joining them can help your business in many ways. Most trade associations have pages that list their members and include a link to their members websites. Getting involved in your community also helps you promote your site in other ways.
Sponsoring or Supporting Websites
Many 501c websites allow people to donate money to their organization to become a sponsor or supporter. On many of these sites you will get a link to your website. Sponsoring sites that will link back to your site for a small donation can be an excellent way to buy links that point to your website and in addition you are helping out the site you sponsor.
Paid Directory Inclusion
Many directories require payment to be included in their directory. Usually the payment is a one time editorial fee to determine if your site is appropriate for their directory. Directoriy links can be an excellent deal. Don’t just look for general directories, also look for industry specific directories. Many times industry specific directories will bring you more traffic, because people use them to find businesses in your area of expertise. At least I have found this to be the case for our sites. Also, some Search Engine’s (Google) might not look at a link from a directory as being nearly as important as a link from another site.
Links from Link Brokers
Text link brokers (sites that manage the buying and selling of text links) offer monthly payment programs, where you pay for a text link for one month on a particular related website. These programs will give you a variable degree of traffic. I can’t recommend one broker over another. However, I can say that some Search Engines (like Google) are trying to discount paid links for Search Engine ranking purposes.
My personal plan is to spend a very minimal amount of money on link building, mostly focused on a few related directory submissions. These days I prefer to spend my time and money on other methods of promotion. When you are first starting out and/or when you are running a strictly ecommerce site, spending money on links can help get you noticed.
Final Notes on Paid Links
The traffic you get from paid links will vary greatly. In some cases when you pay for links, you will get a lot of traffic in other cases you won’t. Paid links will help your search rankings in some Search Engines.
Some people are against buying links, but it’s not really different than spending money on PPC advertising. It’s just another method of promoting your website. It has it’s pros and cons. Be sure to research ahead of time how to make the best use of any budget you set aside for buying links. Every link you get has a price, whether it be the time you spent writing content that people linked to, or the time you spent finding reciprocal link partners, or the time you spent commenting on blogs, etc. Every link has a price, you have to decide what is the price you are willing to pay for the traffic you get and how to best make use of your advertising budget. It isn’t always easy and takes time to figure out.
Beyond Search Engine Optimization
There are many techniques to promote your site beyond SEO. Many of these techniques help your Search Engine traffic increase as well.
We will be discussing these methods in detail in future posts, starting with PPC ads.
PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising
PPC advertising is one of the best known ways to advertise a website or blog. I have used it succesfully on both Google and Yahoo. I highly recommend that you consider using PPC advertising to promote your online business (especially when you are first starting out).
Aaron Wall has written an excellent free ebook that covers all the details of PPC Advertising. I highly recommend you take a look at it. You can download it by clicking here.
5 Internet Marketing Strategies to Boost Efficiency
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by TJ Philpott
March 25, 2011
The internet marketing strategies you use should not only be effective but also help you increase efficiency as well. Operating an internet marketing business involves many functions and tasks so wherever and whenever you can increase efficiency you should strive to do so. The name of the game online is to first increase your web presence so that you have an audience to which you can promote. Gaining this exposure is very important, does take effort and can be time consuming, so you want to work as efficiently as possible
Here are 5 strategies you can use to expand your web presence in order to promote your internet marketing business to others in an efficient manner!
Blog
Blogs are great platforms off of which you can promote an internet marketing business as well as interact with visitors to get their feedback! A blog also offers you the opportunity to add fresh content, and easily, as much as you like. This is important since search engines love fresh content and you in turn will love both the exposure and traffic you will receive as a result!
Submit Articles
Submitting articles online is another great way to not only increase your web presence but also build valuable back links to your site. Most directories have high page ranks and when they publish your article they also are linking to your site. This happens because you have placed a link to your site in the resource box of the article you submitted! In addition you can use your articles as blog posts as well which helps you increase efficiently and that is what it is all about!
Free Giveaways
You can offer free giveaways on your blog or on a squeeze page you are using to build a list. You are building a list right? Of course the ‘gift’ you offer will once again be linked to your business site and you will also want to encourage others to share the gift with their friends. Remember the articles you are submitting? Well you can direct people to your squeeze page with the link in your resource box and here again you will be boosting your web presence and increase efficiency at the same time!
Signature File
As you navigate around online and get involved in social sites, forums, sending emails or even blog commenting always leave a signature file. This simply reflects your name, company name and of course your link. This is you calling card and you want to leave it everywhere when the opportunity presents itself!
RSS Feeds
Make available on your blog an RSS feed tab so that people can easily follow your updates. Be sure to place this tab prominently so that visitors do not have to go searching for it therefore it is recommended to position it at the top of the page! The easier it is for someone to subscribe to your feed the greater chance of their return and this will lead, hopefully, to loyalty which then leads to referrals. Now you have one simple tab that will help expand your web presence on a viral basis! Can you spell efficiency?
The internet marketing strategies reviewed above all target helping you to increase efficiency when working online without sacrificing effectiveness! To be successful an internet marketing business must establish a web presence in order to have an audience to which it can promote. Equally important is that when working online you must make the best use of your time since there will be many demands for it. Working as efficient as possible but in an effective manner is therefore the key. The strategies reviewed above serve as suggestions as to ways in which you can accomplish just that!