Are You Capturing People?

Have you ever done a search on the Internet, located a site, had a quick look around and then clicked away? It's not that you didn't like the site, or that you weren't interested in the topic, services, or products that were being offered. Perhaps you just weren't ready to take action at that precise point. What's the chances of you ever returning to that website again? You clicked away and you'll probably forget about it forever.

Now think about the likelihood of someone doing this when they visit your site? What are the chances of YOU loosing a great prospect forever? They were obviously interested in what you had to offer to have arrived at your site in the first place.

Studies reveal that as many as 99% of visitors to your website will NOT take action on their very first visit. That means you're loosing a whole lot of potential business.

So, what can you do to ensure that you have a method for bringing your prospects and clients back to your website over and over again? The answer? To ensure that you CAPTURE their contact details on their very first visit to your website. Now the problem with this is that people won't just give you their name and email address. You have to entice them by giving them something valuable in return.

So what can you offer them to get them interested? Well, the first point is to ensure that you offer informative content that is complementary to your area of expertise. Here are some ideas that are proven to work well.

1. A Free Ezine (Email Newsletter)

The most effective way for you to stay in touch with your prospects is to produce good content on a regular basis and package it in the form of an ezine. When your prospects sign up they are giving you express permission for you to contact them over and over again! It gives you multiple chances to build a relationship of trust, credibility and worth. The other benefit is that it will be YOU that your prospects think of at the point when they are ready to buy.

2. A Free Special Report or E-Book

One method for enticing people to sign up for your ezine is to offer them something that's free. This can be anything from a special report, an ebook or perhaps even a selection of articles on a topic relating to your area of expertise. The key here is to provide valuable 'how-to' advice and information. People are looking for useful content that will help them. So you might decide to produce a list of relevant resource or a top 10 list of do's and don'ts. Your aim here is to demonstrate the value and benefits of your service. At the end tell them how you're products or services will help them and what's the next step you would like them to take next.

3. A Free E-Course

Another option is to develop a course of how-to email tips that are delivered to your prospects over a period of days. The most effective is to have them delivered every day or every other day for about a week. The use of an autoresponder provides a very simple system for doing this. It allows your prospect to sign up at your website and the course of emails is sent out automatically thereafter. In the very last email introduce people to your products or service and explain how it can help them. And of course, always remember to provide a call to action. Make it clear what you would like them to do next.

4. Don't Forget to Follow Up!

Once you have begun to capture and grow your list of prospects you need to decide on a system for contacting them over and over again. The follow-up is essential and it's important that you do stay-in-touch with your prospects at least once a month. Of course if you're already publishing your own ezine on a regular basis you already have the ideal method for doing this. What easier way is there to build an ongoing relationship with your prospects and clients?

Why Valid Code May Be More Important Than You Think

Testing your web pages in browsers is an absolutely necessary process for building any web page. It allows you to see what others can see, and often you will notice mistakes in your HTML code because of the symptoms they cause in browsers. But what about when your testing browser(s) display the pages exactly as you intended. Are your pages error-free? Not necessarily.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets the standards for coding HTML and CSS for web pages. They also provide tools to validate your code for free. So do some third-parties. The question you might be asking is, "if my page looks fine in Internet Explorer, Netscape, Safari, Firefox, etc. why do I need to worry about validation?" If all you're looking is for proper display, you might not have to. However, if you're concerned at all with search engine optimization (SEO), and you probably should be, validating your source code is a necessity.

One reason for this is the difference between search engine spiders and browsers. Spiders "crawl" the web indexing web pages and their content. They are basically toned-down web browsers that aren't concerned with displaying for a user but with recognizing content. In other words, search engine spiders are looking at the same code your web browser is and parsing it in a very similar way. This difference in functionality, however, is vast.

There is a very real pressure on web browser developers to ensure that their browsers display pages correctly to the user. This often includes forgiving errors in the source code. Improperly nested elements, unclosed tags, unrecognized parameters - these are all errors in HTML code that might not affect your web page's display in your favorite browser. When it comes to search engine spiders, however, it can be an entirely different story.

That is not to say that small errors in your HTML code will spell death for your search engine rankings. Certainly they won't normally make your page invisible to spiders. They can, however, disrupt the vastly important process of a spider parsing your page for all relevant content or make some of that content invisible. And since so much of SEO is paying close attention to every little detail of your site and its content, why leave the possibility open of causing problems for search engines when they try to index your pages?

Validation might mean some big headaches when you set out to fix every last error on your pages, but the benefits of valid code are clear - and running your pages through a validation service like that of the W3C can do a lot in the way of educating you about the mistakes you may be making.

MLM Home Based Business - 5 Tips to Succeed With a MLM Home Based Business

A home based business venture that many people look to is multi-level marketing (MLM). This opportunity often caters to those who have no experience in business and marketing because the products and training are usually provided for people who sign up. However the harsh reality is a lot of people fail with their MLM home based business. A few people might pan MLM because of the high failure rate. Even in spite of all the failure, it is still possible to succeed if you know what you are doing.

Many people fail to make money with a MLM home based business simply because of a lack of information. Some tips that can put you above the competition are:

1) Choose a multi-level marketing program very wisely. This may sound obvious but this is the first step towards success. Who do you think will be sending you commission checks anyway? There are many factors for you to consider, such as what product is the program based around, the compensation plan, and how easy it is for an average person to succeed. You also should see what other people say about a program you're interested in. Do your homework before you jump into a program, but once you jump in make sure you are ready to do as much work as it takes to succeed.

2) Part of being successful with your MLM home based business involves building your downline. That being said you should focus a significant amount of your efforts on recruiting people into your program. One way is to obtain business leads and try to convince them to join your opportunity. Another option is to advertise on the internet with methods such as classified ads, pay-per-click ads and ezine ads. You generally earn commissions for people you personally refer, and you may keep earning these for as long as the people under you are signed up (at least the programs I'm in). At the very least you want enough people under you so that your membership fee is covered and you have no out of pocket cost.

3) One important thing that I personally do not see enough of is helping the people in your downline. Some people may have no business experience whatsoever and not really have any clue what they are doing. Moreover they may be a bit shy when it comes to asking you, their sponsor, for help (I know I was). So it is up to you to help them out and make sure they succeed. Give them your advice, direct them to resources for more information, and share your marketing techniques with them. If they get too frustrated with their MLM home based business they might quit the program, which means a smaller downline and less referral earnings for you. They can't duplicate your efforts if you don't show them exactly how to do so.

4) It is a good idea to be fully informed of the products/services that your MLM home based business is centered around. Not everyone is interested in starting up a business, but they may be interested in the product or service you have to offer. What kind of problems does it solve for people? What are the types of people who already have an interest in what you are selling? These are things you should know and research.

5) One last tip for you is quite basic in nature, but it goes a long way. In order to truly succeed in the field of MLM home based business, you have to be creative. There are other people in the same program you are in, who are looking to recruit people and sell the company's products. You want to market and advertise in a way that makes you stand out from everyone else. You want to present the products in front of interested prospects before your competitors do. Why should someone join your downline instead of somebody else's?

Your MLM home based business will benefit greatly from these tips. Read and learn a lot so you stay knowledgeable.

Top 3 Search Engine Optimization Tips - Tips to Make SEO A Heck of A Lot Simpler

Search Engine Optimization is the art of performing a variety of techniques to your website to raise it up search engine rankings, specifically Google who basically dictates how much success your website will have based on its search position for primary keywords. It gives many people absolute hell, they try for months to get their site up there but they never quite do. Below are three tips that will help take your site to the next level.

Tip #1: Meta Tags


Make sure the meta tags on your website are set up properly. If your meta tags are not set up correctly your site will have trouble reaching the top of search engines because they read meta tags to aid in determining the topic of the site. Make sure you use around 10 keywords and no single word is repeated more than 3 times. Your primary keyword that you are targeting should be as specific as possible regarding your site or the keyword you want to be at the top of searches the most (as long as the competition for it isn't ridiculous). Include your primary keyword in your site title and description tag. Free meta tag generators are all over the web so look one up and get to work.

Tip #2: Backlinks


Write articles and submit your site to link directories that are relevant to your site's content. Make sure to include a link back to your website in the author bio for articles and make sure your primary keyword phrase is in the anchor text. A smart thing to do is to search for your primary keyword and see what sites are at the top, and then enter link:http://www.competitorwebsite.com to see what websites are linking to them. Seek to obtain links from the same sites that come up during that search query.

Tip #3: Unique Content


Make sure that the content on your site is unique and not duplicated from elsewhere. It is imperative that if your site's content is submitted to article directories that at least 40% of the article is rewritten so it is not a direct copy of the article from your site. Duplicate content leads to penalization from search engines, which hurts search position. Unique content paired with the first two tips should lead to position increases, but keep in mind that search engine optimization takes time and patience.

Finding the Correct Keywords for Your Content is the Only SEO Technique that You Really Need

A really great way to find a keyword that should be used on your blog or website, would be to first analyze the word that you are considering for it's overall popularity in a Google keyword search. If nobody uses that keyword or phrase that is in your head, it will serve you no purpose if you put it 20 times in your content article, because no one has bothered searching that specific keyword in Google or Yahoo!

And using a common keyword that is extremely popular with Google web users will only result in web hits from people who might not find the info they were looking for. That is because your keyword was not specific enough to describe what your content is really about. If there are a couple of million pages that contains those single keywords you were considering using before, it will not be easy to get a high search engine ranking for them. NO, the best plan is to use specific keyword phrases that describe exactly what value and content can be found on your own individual web site or blog.

USING KEYWORD PHRASES ARE THE PERFECT SOLUTION FOR A HIGH PAGE RANKING
I wrote an article about a month ago entitled "To acquire the wealth you dream of, you MUST take these steps today!" If you go to Google right now and put in the keyword phrase "acquire wealth", you will see that this article is on the front page of Google TWICE! That happened because I used two popular keywords, "Acquire and wealth", and put them into my article main title on two different article submission sites.

If you just put in "acquire" or "wealth", these articles will not be on Google's main pages because those words are much too common for any kind of high-ranking to be achieved without a lot more effort and a huge SEO campaign behind it. That's why it's always best if you can find a perfect combination of two popular keywords that make logical sense in the context of your web site content if somebody searched for them together.

TARGET YOUR POTENTIAL AUDIENCE WITH KEYWORD PHRASES
The more specific your keyword phrase is, the better chances are that you will be able to target the exact web visitor that you need to come to your web site and purchase your service or product. For example, if your service is promoting web sites that sell HD-DVD's to the general public, a great keyword phrase would be "free HD-DVD promotion service".

You might think to yourself "But my business charges people for my services." That does not really matter, because as long as you do actually give free advice to your potential clients by e-mail before they actually buy your service, you are being totally honest by saying you do not charge for every thing you actually do for your customers.

When you put the keyword "Free" at the beginning of your keyword phrase, you are opening up the potential of hitting at least a thousand more Google searches than if you excluded that great word that everybody loves so much. Just make sure you actually do offer a free service of some kind before adding "free" to the front part of your keyword phrase. If you don't you will make all of your future web visitors angry, and they will never again return to your site.

BEST WAYS TO FIND YOUR PERFECT KEYWORD PHRASE
You need to ask yourself how you would find your site if you had to look for it yourself on Google or Yahoo! What would be a perfect description of the product or service you sell? It should be a phrase that will appeal to the common man, not just the tech geeks out there who know every new term that has just been entered into the lexicon of the world wide web.

You also need to think globally, which means you have to consider what a person in England or Germany might enter to locate your service. You should write down every keyword affiliated with your website no matter how insignificant you think that word is. Then you can examine the words and figure out a two to three word combination that sounds very logical when you enter it into Google's search engine.

Targeting keyword phrases to a select audience is great because It's always better to get 500 visitors to your website that turns 10% into customers, than to get 5000 visitors who click away immediately. So before you decide too quickly what your keywords should be on your main title page of your site, go over these techniques that will for sure lead you to internet success.

Quick Hit SEO to Do List

Many potential Search Engine Optimization (SEO) clients come to me stating they don't have the financial resources to contract my firm for services yet they'd like to get started with the promotion of their site within the search engine sphere. Below I've attempted to outline the first steps I might take if I had a new website to promote from the ground up.

Submit Your Site to Directories


Directory submissions are an integral part of basic SEO, and directory listings help to form a foundation of links pointing to your site that generally won't go anywhere unless the directory disappears or is shutdown for some reason. Many directories such as DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory feed search engine results and carry a lot of "weight" with major search engines such as Google, MSN/Live, and Yahoo!

There are hundreds of free directories out there, and my recommendation is to subcontract this service out to an inexpensive submission service (do a search for "directory submission service"). For as little as $30, you can have your website submitted to hundreds of directories in little time. Manually doing this could take countless hours, and it's very tedious work. One note of caution: directories don't get indexed overnight. It will take some time for your site to get "credit" for being listed in a lot of the online directories.

Write and Submit Articles about Your Business or Industry


Promoting your business via articles about your industry or the business itself are a great way to build awareness without being over the top or in someone's face. The more articles you write and submit to online e-zines or article directories, the more your name circulates. Think about it, when you read an informative article that helps you solve a problem, perform a task better, or recaps an event, your guard isn't as high as it is when you come across an all out advertisement is it?

Be sure to include a byline at the end containing a link to your site along with brief information about you and your company. This will not only generate awareness, it will also help your search engine optimization campaign by building "natural" links back to your website as the article circulates the online community.

Engage in a Free PR Campaign


While print media isn't as popular as it once was, people still read newspapers, trade journals, and magazines. Local newspapers are always looking for interesting stories on local people to write about in order to increase their readership. Magazines are a bit different in that your story needs to be very compelling and unique in some fashion, but your website and business can get a big jolt if you can land a story in a print publication of some sort. One word of caution: don't go shooting for the New York Times or Inc. Magazine right out of the chute unless you're truly prepared to handle a huge influx of site visits, e-mails, phone calls, and unrelated requests about your business.

Involve Yourself in the Blogosphere


Blogs are a great way to show a more human side to a company, and their popularity continues to increase. My advice is to start a blog about your company, industry, or niche that is a sub-domain off of your main website. A sub-domain may look like this: subdomain.domain.com to where your blog may utilize a scheme similar to blog.yourdomain.com. This is a great way to build unique content for your domain while also helping your customers or clients get to know the human side of your business. There are several free blog generators out there that will even host your blog for free, and two of the more popular ones can be found at blogger.com or wordpress.com.

If starting your own blog is too tall a task, visit others' blogs related to your industry and join in the conversation by posting comments and interacting with the blog owner. Many blog comments are indexed by the name you enter in the name field of the comment form so you can build links to your site this way. One note of caution: there is a lot of debate whether no-follow links such as the ones on most blogs provide any search optimization value, and I have found that they do provided the blog itself ranks well and has a large following.

Promote Your Site Everywhere


Offline optimization is just as important as it is online as you're simply trying to generate interest in your business or website, right? Consider promoting your website offline just as you would your business. Nobody will know about your site unless you tell them, but you don't want to be a hound about it either so be subtle. The traffic you generate may result in a huge sale that puts your business on the map.

Basic SEO isn't that difficult if you think about it in a common sense manner. Promoting your site online is very similar to how you'd promote your business offline—it's all about positive exposure. Being heavily involved online as well as off is a solid strategy to building awareness for your business and its website.

Make Money Online With Affiliate Marketing - Ultimate Wealth Package and Super Affiliate Handbook

To make money online depends highly upon your knowledge of the internet, marketing, and your ability to get targeted traffic to your website. If you can master these three things then you should be able to make money online. There is certain information that you should know when starting an internet business. Most of this information can be found inside of internet marketing products such as Ultimate Wealth Package and Super Affiliate Handbook.

It is sad to say that these two products have been labeled a scam far too many times. These products sell information about making money online. The sales pages for these products tell of how you can make money online by utilizing the information within the ebook that they are selling.

The problem with these products is not that they are a scam but the fact that if you are completely new to internet marketing then it may take some time before you figure out how to make money online. These products do not offer some magic website where you just add your name and all the sudden you start making $500 per day. What you have to do is take the information you learn within the ebook and use it online. Another important fact about these products is that about 99% of people who buy them will never even try to use the information they learned - they just put it off and put it off and eventually say it is a scam because they never made any money. Truth is they never tried.

Internet Marketing is like taking a class at college. You must buy the book, learn the material, and then apply it to the real world.

Another reason people may yell scam about these products is because some people are familiar with internet marketing and may already know the information that is within the ebook they just purchased. If this is the case then that still does not mean that the product is a scam, it just means that they already know that particular information.

Now what these products will give you information on is how to make websites centered around certain products. Then when people buy those products you will receive a percent of the sale. This is possible if you read and follow the directions in either the Ultimate Wealth Package or Super affiliate handbook.

Learning how to make money online takes time and effort. Please do not expect to read this information and be making $100 per day by next week. It is not going to happen that way. Everyone is different and learns in different ways and applies their own creativeness to current ideas. If you don't desperately want to make money online then don't even bother looking at this information. You have to be hungry to make money online - you have to want it so bad that you will work at it and work at it until it becomes a reality.