Link Building for Your Website

Link building is an extraordinary way of making your website or blog popular. This process of creating inbound links to your website utilizes: newsletters, directories, search engines, and anything else a crafty marketer can think of. Link building has several advantages. It helps in getting quality traffic from relative sights which increases sales. The higher the quality of incoming links the more valuable search engines will see your website. Link building is a valuable tool in creating awareness, visibility, and the credibility of your website. Through proper link building, your site will obtain wider search engine exposure and help to get your website indexed by search engines. The quickest and simplest way of building links to your website or blog is through the use of directories.

Web directories are collections of web pages that contain similar subjects and contents. Internet users see directories as a valuable source of information. The more directories that your website becomes listed in the better chance that your site will be added to the popular search engine listings: google, yahoo, msn.....etc.

What do you get out of directories?

There are 3 types of traffic that directory listings supply:

1. Click-through traffic-anyone who ends up on the directory page will be able to see your website and information.

2. Indexing your site-once directories find the links to your website, they will begin indexing the pages and bringing you traffic again and again.

3. By increasing your ranking on the search engines themselves when they find the volume of links and references to your website or blog.

Link building is one of the best ways to improve your traffic to your website or blog. The higher the quality of the links to your page the higher page rankings you will achieve in search engines. However complicated or time consuming it may be, building links to your website will help to improve your site traffic.

How Affiliate Marketing Works.

Affiliate marketing is a simple but effective way of exposing your products to a wide range of viewers. With this internet marketing practice a business pays affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's efforts. Basically it is a type of crowdsourcing. This form of marketing utilizes a very simple process:

1. First, the affiliate agrees to feature the merchants products on thier website.
2. A potential new customer views the affiliate's website.
3. Next, there is an action such as clicking the ad, the result of which the viewer is sent to the merchant's website, via your personal affiliant link.
4. If the customer goes on to make a purchase, it will be tracked back to you since they entered the merchant's site using your affiliate link.
5. Upon a successful transaction, the affiliate will be credited for the sale and given a commision.

Affiliate marketing has basically three main components:

1. The Merchant
2. The Publisher
3. The Consumer

The merchant is the seller. The merchant is the one that wants to advertise their products to as many potential buyers as possible. Next we have the publisher. This is the affiliate, the one that writes great sales copy to get thier viewers to click onto the merchant's site. Then we have the consumer. This of course is the person that completes the transaction and makes money for everyone.

So how do you know if your blog or website will be an excellent candidate for affiliate marketing?

You have to take a few things into consideration.

1. Having high traffic is a key component to your website or blog.
2. Next you have to find relevant products or services that relate to your website or blog.
3. You also want these products and services to be of good quality. (If you reccommend low quality products to your readers then they may begin to distrust your message.)
4. Your readers have to also be in a buying mood. You can have the best product or service for sale but if some one isn't in the mood to make a purchase then it just won't matter.
5. This is where the ability to write good sales copy comes into play. If you can write outstanding copy, then you may be able to influence the buyers mood and swing them to make a purchase.

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What is Email Marketing?

I remember a time when we had to make a trip to the store to buy envelops, paper, and pens. Then on our way back home or to the office we stopped at the local Post Office to buy book after expensive book of stamps. Then we we prepared our correspondence and had to make another trip to the post office and wait in long lines to send our marketing messages to our customers only to have them thrown in the trash without ever being opened. Thank the marketing gods that technology has advanced and cut our costs dramatically. Email marketing is simply defined as the email that you send to a customer or potential customer. Email marketing is usually broken down into three segments:

• Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again.
• Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship.
• Placing your marketing messages or advertisements in emails sent by other people.

What makes electronic email so popular?

1. Sending email is cheaper than most other forms of communication.
2. Email lets you deliver your message to the people.
3. Email marketing has proven successful for those who do it (Well, those that do it right).

Email marketing is a wonderful tool for the multi-channel marketer, however, it has its problems. First the designing and delivering of email messages to the right people can be a very complex task. This complexity can be minimized by using email services such as Constant Contact or iContact these email marketing services offer businesses solutions to their email and survey campaign management. A list of the 2009 top ten online email marketing services and reviews can be viewed at http://email-marketing-service-review.toptenreviews.com/. Next you have to get the recipients to read and respond to your message. Then finally you have to measure and analyze the results.

IMPORTANT: Don't be a Spammer!!!

If you send emails to people without the email owners permission then it is SPAM. If you are accused of sending spam, then you may have your email accounts

closed down, your website shut off, and your reputation tarnished. Some parts of the world it is against the law.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

So you have finally decide to make the investment and create a website to promote your business or service. Or maybe you just started a blog and you want to get the word out about it. After you have told all of your friends and family about your website and emailed your contacts and associates, its time to step up into the big leagues and get world wide promotion. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO is important tool because it helps in creating qualified customers. Instead of going out into the street and yelling to everyone that you are selling widgets, these are people that are actually looking for widgets (excuse me sir, do you have any widgets for sale). Now you can turn your campaign to people that really want what you have instead of wasting valuable marketing dollars on non-widget buyers. This alone should help to create an improvement on your marketing Return on Investment (ROI). SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Search captures an individual at the moment they view query results, creating immediate sales opportunities. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to indexing activities of search engines. Web crawlers (a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner) are one of these such indexing activities. Being one of the most cost effective methods of advertising, search engines are the primary way Internet users find websites. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) continues to deliver the highest pre-qualified audience online.

What is Brand Management and Why is It important?

Wilkepedia defines Brand Management as the application of marketing techniques to a specific product, product line, or brand. It seeks to increase the product's perceived value to the customer and thereby increase brand franchise and brand equity. Marketers see a brand as an implied promise that the level of quality people have come to expect from a brand will continue with future purchases of the same product.

How is brand measured, usually by comparing one brand to another. For example, Burger King vs. McDonald's. The whole point in a nutshell is what do people think of my product as compared to my competition. Are my products considered to be of higher quality or of lower quality or perhaps equal. The higher the perception of quality, usually the higher price that the brand is able to charge. The more value that your products provide to customers, the higher quality that your brand will be perceived to be. Business Week offers an annual guide of The World's Best Brands that list the 100 top companies in order of brand value. Next important question. Why do brands matter and to who? There are two groups of stakeholders, consumers and producers.

Consumers value brands because they offer:

• Identification of source product.
• Gives an assignment of responsibility to the product maker.
• Reduces dis-satisfaction risk.
• Search cost reducer.
• Establishes a bond with the product producer.
• Provides a sign of quality

Producers value brands because they offer:

• Offer a means of identification to simplify handling or tracking.
• Its a means of legally protecting unique features.
• Provides a quality level to satisfied customers.
• Source of competitive advantage.
• Source of financial returns.

Brands are considered tiny businesses within a company and the brand managers in charge of them have several duties to attend to:

• Monitoring the competitive landscape of the category in which your brand resides.
• Developing strategies to exploit market opportunities.
• Executing those strategies with the help of a cross-functional team.
• Delivering the sales volume, market share, and profit projections for the business.

Brand managers craft elegant business plans and submit them to senior management. They focus on the minutiae of a daily sales-volume report, and they dream big dreams when it’s time to update the vision for the brand.