Whether you write them yourself or have it outsourced, it’s very important to have the best quality content you can get. After all, this is either going on your website or is pointing to it, so it is representative of you, whether you like it or not. Moreover, good quality content in the form of articles can drive lots of traffic to your site, simply either by virtue of being found on the article site or the search engines.

Make sure that you have employed all the keywords you wish to focus on in the articles. It’s very important to have them in the title, body of the article, as well as any tags you may be allowed to append. Of course, while you’re at it, make sure you make good use of keywords in any anchor text links you’re allowed to use in the author resource box. This is your chance to help your article get great search rankings, and your site to be found for exactly what you want it to be found for.

Make sure that when you post an article on any directory, the links are live, and are dofollow. This means that the search engines are allowed to count this as a backlink to your site. There are exceptions and times when it would be okay not to worry about this, for instance if you were posting an article somewhere where you were going to realize a huge spike in traffic anyway. It would be worth it in cases like that, and a few others.

Once you got some good content and want to get it out there, make sure you put it in all the right places. There are literally hundreds of article directories out there these days, and about 50 of those that matter. The rest use your content for adsense clicks, and deliver practically zero visitors and search engine juice. Some of the best ones to take advantage of are places like EzineArticles, GoArticles, Buzzle, ArtcilesBase, ArtcileAlley and a few others. There are also numerous Web 2.0 sites that you can place content on as well, and they are definitely worth the effort too. Sites like Squidoo, HubPages, Wetpaint, Blogger and Tripod come to mind.

Make sure if you take up article marketing as a strategy that you stick with it. Many put up seven or eight articles, and then tire of it before it can actually do much for them. Give it a fair shot and you’ll definitely see results!

With the advent of so many new applications, such as we see in the areas of social networking and microblogging, it would be easy to think that email marketing is dead, or at least relegated to the back alleys of internet marketing. Thinking like this could cost you a great deal of money.

While it’s true that these new ways of communicating are great and obviously skirt deliverability and spam issues that have been problematic with email marketing, there will come a time when a Tweet just won’t cut the mustard as far as delivering your marketing message. That’s when your email will come to the rescue, and save the sales.

Email marketing can and does make fortunes for people who know how to effectively build and maintain lists of customers and prospects. The options available with email are many, and they are very easy to use. You can send almost anything via email, and thus craft your marketing message accordingly. Videos, podcasts, html, and more can be transmitted to your lists, and the phrase “the money’s in the list!” has never been more true than it is today.

With a well thought-out email marketing campaign you can target certain prospects with distinct offers, crafted only for them. You can maintain many different lists, the advantage being that each prospect will get offers or mail pertinent only to their particular set of circumstances. Say someone is a customer who’s bought from you in the past. Nothing would be more annoying to them than to get offers for the same products they’ve already purchased from you. It could even lead them to unsubscribe from your list entirely.

Others may be at the beginning of your marketing funnel, and need a certain type of approach. Others who are further down the process a different one, and so on. In short, it’s very easy to create just the kind of emails you need, and keep the lists separate so you can better market them.

Make sure you use a good service to manage your lists. Trying to do it yourself is a nightmare, and you will certainly make mistakes. Two of the more widely known and extremely competent email marketing services would be Aweber and GetResponse. It’s hard to go wrong with either of these, and you’ll be able to manage as many lists as you like nearly effortlessly.

Make sure you use a double opt-in system to ensure that people do indeed wish to receive your emails. You really don’t want to be accused of spamming, as it will kill your efforts dead in their tracks.

Also very important is to track your results, and things like open rates do matter. It helps you decide whether you’ve done well enough with things like your headlines and content, and offer in general.

Email marketing is far from finished. Take the time to learn how to do it well, and your business will thank you for it!

Local search marketing can be a godsend, particularly for businesses in markets where there is a huge amount of competition for what they would consider their core keyword phrases. Making yourself visible to local search not only skirts the issue of having to compete for attention web-wide, but also targets your most likely customers in the first place. If you run a flower shop in Albany, NY it’s of no use to you to get web visitors form Garden Grove, CA. You need to capture the local business, particularly if your main business is a physical store or service. It just makes more sense. Let’s look at what’s involved with search engine local search.

There are many purveyors of local search, and more coming online every day. While local search still makes up for a small percentage of all searches, (less that 5%) it should be noted that this number will change, as research has shown that nearly half of all searches have some sort of local intent. This means that while they haven’t quite gotten the hang of searching locally yet, they’re about to!

The advantages of being found in local searches are many. While it’s possible that your competitors have caught onto this wave, it’s highly unlikely. Most probably you will beat them to the punch on this one, and we all know the edge first-movers have.

While there are many places to be found in local search marketing, you need to shoot for only a few of the best to start with. Google’s version, which used to be called Google Local, has now been made a part of Google Maps. This has been done to integrate your location as a service for searchers who want to find you. Yahoo is following suit, at least with the maps part of it.

Other good sources you’ll want to be found on locally include Yahoo Local, Live, AT&T Yellow Pages, CitySearch, Yelp, Ask.com and several others. These would be enough to give your business a distinct edge when it comes to being found in a local search almost anywhere.

One important thing to note about an online local search listing versus a printed Yellow page advertisement is that the online version can contain customer reviews, videos, and photos, as well as the expected information such as telephone numbers and addresses. And, it costs nothing compared to the print versions.

One thing to be aware of in local search is that with its interactive components, it’s quite easy to find yourself the victim of a bad review, whether warranted or not. Keeping an eye on your local listings is essential, because, for example, if you’re a restaurant and the first review on your listing tells about how they got food poisoning at your establishment, you may have a slow dinner rush. Conversely, good reviews can pump up the volume as well.

Local search marketing can be a boon to your business. Start taking advantage of it today!

If you’ve been around internet marketing for any length of time, you no doubt have heard of Google Adsense. You’ve perhaps heard some grandiose claims of extraordinary income, and equally lurid stories of just how hard it can be to create any sort of consistent income with Adsense. The truth, like in so many things, lies squarely in between.

Yes, people have made and continue to make great sums of money with Adsense, and yes, others have failed miserably. There are many reasons for this, but here I’ll just go into some of the best ways to create a stream of passive income from using Adsense on your sites.

First of all, those who succeed wildly and those who fail miserably have one thing in common: traffic. A wealth or a total lack of it. Those with abundant traffic, and can optimize their pages to achieve a CTR (click through rate) of somewhere between 10-25% will see a lot of clicks. As an example, take a site with 1000 visitors daily, who are clicking through at a rate of 15%. Say these clicks are worth $.37 each to the site owner. That’s a cool $55.50 per day in passive income to that site. Take another site with 65 visitors a day, and a CTR of 4.5%, and you get $1.08, not even coffee money anymore.

So clearly, if you want to make any consequential cash with Adsense, you need to be getting traffic, as well as having your site optimized to make the most of that traffic. There are numerous courses to help with this, and simply by hanging out in some of the more influential internet marketing forums, like DigitalPoint, Sitepoint, and the Warrior Forum, you can get a lot of good advice for free.

One thing you should know about Adsense. All clicks are not created equal. You might have a wonderful site all about parakeets, but the reality is that clicks for that keyword are selling at between $.19 – $.37 cents apiece, and you’ll get roughly half of that per Adsense click. Conversely a click on another keyword, such as “mortgage refinancing quotes” gets between $2.27 and $37.81 per click. Quite a difference! Of course, if parakeets are your thing…

Unless you are going to try and make Adsense your business, the best way to maximize your dollars from it is to make sure that it blends into your existing site very well, and that you don’t over indulge. By that I mean having many large, ostentatious Adsense ad blocks looming over your visitors. If your intent is to make a few extra bucks, make your site as pleasant as possible, and not a virtual billboard!

Google Adsense can be a nice source of income for those whose sites are built for another purpose other than showing Google ads, and possibly a great business model all by itself, which is the subject for another article!

Website optimization is a task that every unsuccessful website fails to undertake! Even if you perform it, there is no guarantee of success, but you stand a far greater chance of being found when searchers are looking for just what it is you do. Website optimization is not rocket science, and it can be learned and implemented by webmasters of average skills, and what you feel uncomfortable with you can easily and cheaply outsource to someone who can do it quickly and easily. Let’s look at some of the elements of skillful website optimization.

First, there are two basic forms of website optimization, On Page and Off Page. Some of the elements in On Page optimization are:

• Page title – Probably the single-most important item in whether or not your page is optimized well. This title should always include the primary keyword you want to be found for.
• Keywords – You need to know and employ exactly the keywords you are striving to be ranked for. This is best done before you launch the site, and needs to be done well. It is the key to success or failure.
• Meta description – Often used by search engines and directories to describe your page.
• Amount and quality of text – How much text and proper use of header tags.
• Internal link structure – How well you link up with the rest of your site, and does your navigation make it easy to get around
• Tags – If you’re a blog, do you make good use of relevant tags
• Web 2.0 – Do you make good use of Web 2.0 sharing options

Some of the Off Page items are:

• External links to your site – As many one-way, keyword rich links to your site as possible.
• Directory submissions – Not as useful as in days gone by, but still worth the effort.
• Social bookmarking – Can be a terrific way to get your site noticed, and possibly unleash an avalanche of traffic.
• Articles, Videos, Podcasts – Great ways to boost traffic and get authoritative links to your site.
• RSS Feeds – Another great way to share your content.
• Press Releases – If they are applicable to your market or service, then this is another wonderful way to get the word out.

Website optimization is best done when you are starting out a site, or if need be during a redesign. These tasks can be done by yourself or your staff, or you can quite easily outsource the work to a third party, either in North America or abroad. Currently, many are using outsourcers from the Philippines, as they have a good command of the language and are far cheaper than anyone stateside.

Whether you choose to do it yourself or have someone else do it, know that website optimization is one of the easiest, cheapest and quickest ways to boost your sites effectiveness. Make sure to make this a priority for your web business today!

You’ve no doubt heard the phrase social media marketing but may not actually know what it is or how it can be used to aid you in your marketing efforts. Let’s take a look at this, and see if we can’t clear up some confusion.

Social media marketing can be defined as using the various social media outlets, such as what are known as the Web 2.0 properties, to further our marketing programs and campaigns. The idea of a social web is very enticing, as the prospect of many hundreds or thousands of followers and friends following your moves and offers, can get any marketer salivating. It is a bit of a wild west show out there, as new Web 2.0 sites show up every day, and old ones fade away. What was hot two months ago is blasé now. It is a brave new world, indeed.

To get your mind around how this can work for you spend some time creating the goals you have for your social media marketing campaigns, and then make some hard choices, especially if you’re running this by yourself. You’ll want to be ruthless about time management, and the number of sites and services you take on. There are only so many hours in a day, and to be effective in a field as whimsical as social media marketing you really need to focus. You can always scale it up a bit more later, when you get a handle on it and can afford to outsource it.

Believe me, I know it’s much more fun to go and tinker and twitter all day with all the various Web 2.0 goodies out there, but if your goal is to make some progress with SMM, you need to be laser-targeted.

Decide early on if you will be trying to brand yourself. If you do want to do this, make sure to do it from the beginning, and also to take care in how you do things. Using social media outlets to spam people will get you branded as a “marketer” (of all things!), and unceremoniously shown the virtual door. Try as hard as you can to make your presence a helpful and congenial one, willing to help without expectation of anything in return. Once your reputation is established, you’ll have legions of loyal followers who will have put their trust in you, and then you’re home free. This is truly the nut you have to crack in using social media marketing to further your business aims.

Social media marketing encompasses so many areas that may have relevance for your business. You’re establishing brands, developing relationships, doing market research using the very audience you hope to sell to, creating and dropping back links, establishing your site as an authority, and so much more. Take the time to craft a wise social media marketing strategy and you’ll be richly rewarded!

Using search engine marketing to promote either your sites or products is one of the most essential skills you need to learn in order for your online endeavors to flourish. Without the search engines, you are relegated to secondary markets, and while some of these can be promising, such as email marketing, social media marketing, and social networking. While these offer great possibilities, you are still left with the fact that when someone  is searching for something in particular, whether it be information or products, it’s very likely they’re heading to Google or Yahoo, and not MySpace. This may change as time moves on, but for now, you need to understand how to use search engine marketing.

The primary methods used in search engine marketing include search engine optimization (SEO), paid inclusion, and contextual advertising. Each has its own vagaries, and each can take some time to master. A comprehensive strategy for promoting your interests can take advantage of all of these.

Search engine optimization is the practice of constructing your web pages so that they are “search engine friendly”, meaning that in the eyes of the engines, your pages are very relevant and easy to use for the web surfers who may happen upon it. There are a lot of elements that go into search engine optimization, and if these are followed closely, can help your pages rise in the search engine results pages (SERPS) and you will be more likely to be found in a search.

Paid inclusion refers to including a website for a fee paid to the search engine itself. The fees are usually for a year’s worth of inclusion, and your site will show up alongside pages found in organic search results. This is an older search engine marketing method, and the biggest problem with it is that Google doesn’t allow it, which right there knocks out 67% of possible web traffic!

Contextual advertising refers to programs such as Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher and MSN AdCenter. These programs allow contextual ads to be placed on websites and then serve up keyword relevant advertisements so that when a surfer comes to your page about radio controlled toys, Google or whoever you’re using will serve up ads that pertain to that market. If they are clicked on, both Google and the website owner make some cash. Recent improvements of the algorithms used in these programs have allowed the ads offered up to be ever more specific, thus aiding in the overall user experience on your web page.

Search engine marketing can be undertaken by yourself if you have the time and the patience to put into it. You can also outsource this task to any number of search engine marketing firms out there that have experienced and able staff to make this happen a lot faster and probably better than you can do on your own. Take the time to check them out, however, and when you’ve done so, give it some time to work. You’ll probably be glad you did!

Search engine optimization can seem like a big hairy beast that is known and practiced by a select few geeks who’ve been glued to their computer screens 24/7 for the last several years. This is far from the truth. Search engine optimization, or SEO, as it is commonly called, is the art of structuring your website in such as way as to maximize its value in the eyes of the search engines, these days Google in particular. It is neither difficult nor inaccessible. It can and does change regularly however, so there is a need to keep fairly abreast of goings-on in the SEO world, but with the availability of information at your fingertips these days that is not a hurdle that can’t be jumped.

The reason people want to make sure that their sites are optimized for the search engines is because a large part of where their sites are ranked comes from the value perceived on the page. When a web surfer is looking for a site on say, goldfish, and performs a search on Google or any of the other engines, they are presented with roughly 11 million results pages (at this writing) which they can comb through and find what they need. The most inveterate surfer may only get through 2-3 pages of this, before either finding what they need or giving up. This is why it is vital to get your pages to rank as highly as possible in the search engine, and search engine optimization is a great way to accomplish this.

Basic SEO involves making sure that certain elements on your page are serving your visitors as well as they can. Some basic tenets of SEO include steps like

• Page Relevance – Is your page consistent with what it says it is.
• Page Title – The most important part of your page, hopefully containing your primary keyword.
• Enough Content – Is your page full of ads, or does it offer real, relevant content to visitors.
• H1, H2, H3 – Using these header tags with keywords will help.
• Using Relevant Language – Make sure the language you’re speaking relates intimately with the topic of your page. There is a lingo for every niche, and this needs to be present.
• Incoming Links – Garner as many links to your page as you can, though only by using legitimate means. No link farms, etc. Use keyword anchor text for these, making certain to change it up a bit, and not using the same keyword all the time.
• Outgoing Links – Limit the number, and make them of great value to the visitor, ideally leading them to an authority site.

There is much more you can learn, but this will get you started. A good internet marketing forum, such as DigitalPoint or Sitepoint, will be good sources of information. While search engine optimization may seem like a tough nut to crack, it can be done, and faster than you might imagine.