First – Look for Fanatics

If you want your membership business to be profitable, you have to find a marketing with fanatics in it. What’s a fanatic? It’s someone who is so excited about a certain topic that they will spend their time and money on information about it. Here’s how to find fanatics:

• One simple idea that’s easily forgotten is to scan the magazine racks when you’re out and about. Because it’s becoming harder and harder to keep print periodicals profitable these days, if you see a magazine on the shelves, you know it’s making money. And that means there are lots of people interested in it. That doesn’t mean definitely that it will make a good membership business, but it’s a good starting point.
• Watch and listen for fanatics in your daily life. Pay attention to conversations, social events, TV, restaurants, public places to see what people are talking about. If people are talking about it, they are interested in it. Which means you can start a membership business providing information on it.
• Again, looking in the physical world for clues you can tell there are lots of people interested in something if there are clubs and organizations around the topic. By the same token, if enough people are interested to hold a convention on a certain topic, you can definitely find enough people to build a membership business around that same topic.
• What about your interests and hobbies? If you’re interested in something, it’s highly likely others are, too. And, as an added bonus, it’s much more fun to build a business around things you’re interested in.
• One simple and easy way to find out what’s hot is Google Trends. This service shows you the current most popular search terms. The reason people are searching Google for info on these topics is because they are interested. And the fact that it’s made it into Google Trends tells you LOTS of people are interested. Building a membership business around things people are actively searching for is a great way to ensure your success.

Second – Analyze the “commerciality”

After selecting a possible niche to build your membership site around, the next step is to find out if it’s a profitable niche to be in. One way to figure this out is to see if other are making money in it.

OK, how do we figure that out?

• Find out if there are blogs or forums related to it. Just search Google for “YourNiche blog” & “YourNiche forum” and see what comes up. This lets you know there is a market (a group of people actively interested in the niche.)
• Search Amazon, Google shopping and eBay to see if people are creating and selling products in the niche. It’s a good sign if there are because it tells you people are making money here.
• Monitor Google Adwords to determine if people are running the same ads for weeks in a row. If they are, this means they’re making money on these ads – otherwise, they’d stop running them. Which means there is money to be made in your niche.

Finally – Figure out your barrier to entry

Once you’ve found a niche and figured out that there is money to be made in, you need to determine if you can break into this niche. How do you gauge the ease of entry?

• Figure out what kinds of products people are interested in. If it’s mostly physical products, coaching and live seminars, then it will be harder to break into this niche. Membership websites based on information are the easiest to start and maintain.
• The last thing you want is a marketing filled with tons of competitors. A few means it’s a profitable niche, but too many means you won’t be able to take a piece of it.
• Unless the market is just so big that it doesn’t matter how many competitors there are, you want to limit the competition. So evaluate the size vs. the competition.
• How quickly do people in this market make buying decisions and are the ready to buy? Depending on the market it can be anywhere from a couple minutes to a many months between when someone starts the investigation process to when they actually make a purchase.

Putting it all together

OK, now that you’ve figured out what niche you’re going to go into. Determined there is money to be made and that the competition is not too strong to break into it. You’re ready to start your membership business. Now that you’ve prepared properly, you’re success is 99% guaranteed. How to actually run your membership website is the only thing left to talk about…

Here are a few lies and inaccuracies that SEO companies might tell you.

“Add keywords in meta tags”

Many SEO companies will provide you with a list of keywords that you will have to add into the meta tags for each page. It’s important to add a concise paragraph into your meta description, but adding meta tags won’t improve your website‘s ranking in Google one bit. Google stopped doing this many years ago, and other search engines followed soon after.

“Submit your website to search engines and directories”

Google looks at the amount of incoming links to your site and uses this as part of its algorithm to decide how high to rank your site. But the truth is that it only counts quality links. Often a SEO company might tell you that they’re going to “submit your site to 400 search engines and web directories”. This isn’t very effective because these links might be irrelevant. If they add links to websites called ‘link farms’ – which are designed to cheat Google’s rankings – you could actually be penalised by search engines, which heavily damages your chances of being ranked at all.

“A high amount of traffic is good for SEO“

Your SEO company might show you a Powerpoint presentation with a graph showing the traffic to your website sky rocketing. Great, you’re famous! But be sceptical. Where is all this traffic coming from and is it the right kind of traffic?

It’s possible to get high levels of traffic to your site by using directories (see above) or maybe even by tricking people to visit your site. The increased traffic might look good on a graph, but also remember to look at your bounce rate (the percentage of people who leave immediately because this isn’t the page they’re looking for). High amounts of traffic won’t improve your SEO at all.

The best kind of traffic is from people who actually want to see your site, and if they like what they see, they might even share your link on their blog, Twitter or website – this is more likely to increase SEO.

“We can guarantee number 1 result in Google”

Sometimes an SEO company will make a bold statement to get you to the #1 spot on Google. Definitely be suspicious if they can claim this before they even know what your keywords are! If your keyword is something really popular there’s no chance they can guarantee you’re going to be #1. What they really mean is they’ll get your website ranking #1 for some obscure keyword phrase, but if this isn’t the phrase that your prospective customers are using to search, then it’s useless.

And what does #1 in Google mean these days anyway? After all, everyone’s search results are different on Google now, depending on location, search history and social factors.

“It’s a complex technical process”

Okay I admit, getting your website ranking highly in search engines can be a complicated process, but don’t let them blind you with science and technical jargon.

True there are a lot of mathematical aspects to SEO, but getting people to your site requires a lot of good old fashioned marketing skills – considering who your audience is and where they spend their time online, knowing what content would benefit or interest them, speaking to potential customers using the language they would use not just an understanding of the latest technology.

“SEO is all about building links”

We know that incoming links are very important to your ranking success, but if your SEO company claims it can improve your rank in Google by link building alone, they’re only doing half a job.

Your website has to be optimised for your keywords, and built in a way that allows search engines to spider them easily. There are so many other factors that Google looks at other than links, including your website‘s location and page download speed. Don’t forget about these as they’re just as important!

“Higher pagerank will get you a better ranking”

Pagerank is a calculation based on the amount of websites that link to you, and the importance of each link, depending on how many sites link to them, and so on.

This is one of the many factors search engines look at when considering how to rank your site, but it’s certainly not the only factor. Also it’s important to note that the pagerank calculated by toolbars isn’t the real-time value used by Google. It’s only an approximation so take it with a pinch of salt.

“Great content will rank you highly”

It’s true that Google will reward fresh unique content with a high placement, but the depressing truth is that content alone won’t get you up to the top spot.

You could have the best content in the world but if the site is badly built and hard for search engines to spider your pages, you’ll find it difficult to get the attention from Google that your content deserves. It’s a bit like building a fantastic theme park in the middle of countryside and forgetting to build a road up to it. Unique content is essential, but you also need to optimise your site otherwise your great content will go unnoticed.

So remember to take the advice you’re given about SEO with a pinch of salt, or you might find you’re wasting your time making changes that have very little effect. There are many good things you can do to improve your site’s optimisation.

My advice would be to:

- Be clear on your audience, what they’re looking for and the keywords they use

- Ask companies to carefully measure the results of any SEO activity they do – ask to see bounce rates and conversion rates as well as the volume of traffic

- Don’t focus on one area of SEO, like linkbuilding, to the detriment of others – you need a good, all round SEO strategy to be successful, including on-site and off-site optimisation.

David Ball works for Silktide, a company that makes SiteBeam – a useful tool to test your website.

View the original article here

Traffic is useless . . . unless…

Before you begin trying to get traffic to your site, you need to do your keyword research first. Why? Because you have to target these keywords if you are to have any hope of actually generating traffic for them. This means it’s critical to select your keywords properly.

While doing your keyword research, keep the following in mind:

• Will you be able to rank for these keywords? You’ll have to analyze the competition and see what’s out there for this.
• What kinds of visitors do these keywords bring? Some keywords will bring lots of traffic, but none of them will buy. You want to generate visitors ready to buy.
• Another thing to think about is affiliates. If you want to build a huge business, you’re going to need affiliates to help you. This means that some of your traffic focus should be on getting affiliates to your site.

This is critical to your business, but it takes a lot of time and effort. Hiring someone else to do it costs a lot of money. The upside is that these two factors keep most everyone from even doing their keyword research. If you’re smart you will use website traffic software to help you with this process. Using tools like this speed up the process and improve your results, too!

Once you know your keywords…

Once you’ve done your properly keyword research, you’re now ready to start targeting these keywords to draw in visitors.

Here are a couple of clever ways to do this…

• Surveys
• “Answer” Sites
• Video Websites

Surveys

People love filling in surveys. And if you make it interesting, other people will post your survey on their website. It’s a win-win. They get a great perk on their site and you get a link back to yours. This allows you to get free website traffic from other people’s sites! Most people think surveys are just for collecting data, but in this case you don’t even care about the answers. So, get creative and make up a survey that’s wacky to get other people interested in putting it on their sites.

“Traffic Traps”

These sites, like answers.yahoo.com are filled with people asking and answering questions for each other. However, you’re interest in these sites is not to ask and answer questions. You are going to generate traffic, leads and sales from them. Of course, the process of digging through these sites and pulling out the content info of leads for your business is very time consuming. But a much smarter method is to use website traffic software to do it for you. These tools put the whole thing on auto-pilot and just deliver the leads to you each day.

Video

No doubt you’re aware of YouTube and other video websites. In fact, YouTube has over 2 billion videos watched per day! If used properly, video sites can get you more website traffic than you know what to do with.

You don’t have to be able to make awesome videos for this to work. You can even take a webpage or article that you’ve written. And use free screen capture software to record yourself reading it. I’ve even seen software that will automatically convert an article to a video!

The Bottom Line…

Getting traffic is not that difficult. It just takes a little time and some ingenuity. Plus, there’s lots of great software out there to help you.

So, start right now and:

• Step 1 is researching your keywords
• Set up some viral surveys
• Take advantage of the “help” sites
• And don’t forget about video

Us, individuals, are so keen in making plans and decide on things ahead of time. Like what to wear for the next weekend, where to spend the summer vacation, a date the following evening, and precisely picturing out the details that should come with it. But unwanted circumstances occur, and prevent the things we want to materialize. These changes could cause a great big deal of stress and frustration. But the only way to get through it is accept the fact that it is as normal as our breathing, and simply be adaptive to it.

Take business for example. With the advancement of technology, and a drastic change in people’s lifestyle, the marketing strategies a few decades or at least a few years back is no longer applicable or efficient to keep up with competition. If you are to stick with an outdated business model, it is a surefire way of driving your business down the drain.

Nowadays, a lot of owners take their business online to reach and maintain their target market and increase opportunities by utilizing online marketing strategies like online advertising and Search Engine Optimisation. There are actually a lot of known methods and practices being implemented and continuously developed, to maximize business potentials in the online arena.

One of which as mentioned above is Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Simply put, SEO strategies will put your website on top of the list in search engines like Google, yahoo, among others. If a website is on the top and first pages of these search engines as a relevant result, chances are, the customer will click the link and be directed to the website. This gives businesses the edge of attracting more customers, thus a potential increase in sales or business promotion.

If you want your business to have staying power and be on top of the competition, take advantage of the internet. There are countless providers that can get the work done for you. A large pool of freelancers and companies all over the world offers their quality services at budget friendly and fair prices. Simply check out websites for entities or persons having expertise in Search Engine Optimisation as well as other internet marketing strategies, and see your business perform like it never did before.

Need help with your business web design? Call us today, we’re happy to help you with your questions.

Lloyd Roberts | 123 Web Design Bournemouth

123 SEO Bournemouth

http://www.123webdesignbournemouth.co.uk/

View the original article here

#1 – There are two kinds of keyword research applications offered to users. If you are a beginner then you may want to either opt for a trial version, basic tool or a free tool. Google offers a free tool that is considered to be the best free research application on the internet. Intermediate and advanced users usually prefer using a purchased version since these tools offer many advanced benefits. If you are using a free tool then you may want to consider double checking the data you have received by using another since many of these free tools do not provide accurate results. There are exceptions to this general rule, however to be on the safer side, users should use at least 2 free keyword research tools to ensure that the data they have received is accurate.

#2 – While using a keyword research application always select your target area and language carefully. By doing so you will ensure that you are reaching your target audience and that your website is getting maximum exposure. In addition, while choosing a target market you should research on what your target area is looking for. Although it may seem like a good idea at first to search in markets that your company doesn’t service to, doing so will only prove to be a waste of time and effort.

#3 – While learning the tricks of the trade and how to use the selected keyword research tool, you may want to focus your attention on broad searches because this allows you to get high numbers and more ideas however, once you have understood what you require you should focus your attention on making specific searches. Choosing the exact phrases and words will help you determine what you require and what needs to be done.

Remember, choosing the right keyword research tool can help you get a lot done in a short period of time and the benefits of using these tools often outweigh the cost of purchasing the application.

A well-researched keyword is important in your SEO campaign so a wise decision on an effective keyword research tool is vital. Find out more on these at our site http://www.seosoftwarereview.org/.

View the original article here

Here are the top ten reasons why link building is critical to your business:

1. It boosts your rankings in the search engines. The top search engines count the backlinks that point to your website and use these to determine how they are going to rank your website. Generally, your website has more chances of ranking high if it gets more backlinks. Backlinks are however not the same when it comes to quality. You have to see to it that the sites linking to you aren’t link farms or spam sites.

2. It drives more traffic. A single link to you from a high-traffic website can bring in hundreds if not thousands of instant traffic. This traffic will slow down in the following days but your business had already won new readers and customers.

3. It exposes your business in more platforms. Getting a link from, say Blogger or WordPress, exposes your website to users of these popular blogging platforms. This equates to more readers and customers as well.

4. It’s easy to do. Link building is not too difficult and it doesn’t take much time once you get used to it.

5. It’s free most of the time. Yes, you can resort to buying links but you can get the same links for free if you are creative enough. You should only buy links if you don’t have the time to build the links yourself.

6. The links you build will continue to benefit you in the months and even years to come. Unlike other strategies that bring you instant results but fade away in time, link building will benefit you as long as the links you built remain intact.

7. It drives targeted traffic. This is especially true if you target sites that have content which are related to yours.

8. It helps in building your business brand. The more you get your link out there, the more people will be able to identify with it. This makes your website easily recognizable and this usually leads to a boost in your brand.

9. Google loves links. As stated earlier, search engines like Google count the links pointing to your website. The more links they count, the more they’ll love and rank you.

10. It keeps you ahead of your competition. Link building helps you gain an edge over your competitors who don’t pay much attention to link building.

Link building is a must when it comes to growing an online business. It’s a strategy you should be constantly implementing.

View the original article here

Having affordable SEO services will bring more people to use one’s company instead of going somewhere else. The benefit to having affordable services as a SEO company is that by offering cheap rates one is to be able to gain more business and money. If a SEO company can only offer individual services it may not bring more clients as those companies that offer affordable packages, but both are great ways to get one’s business advertised. Writers for both SEO companies that offer individual or package services will bring results for the client.

Affordable SEO Contributions

For smaller businesses that want affordable SEO services, SEO firms contribute to them because if it weren’t for affordable prices they would never be able to promote their business. Many businesses used to use television to advertise and promote themselves before the Internet, but the Internet has revolutionized our world and has made it possible for small businesses to get noticed. By using the Internet small businesses are able to make their products known to the world, and an SEO company helps them in advertising articles on search engines. Having affordable services SEO companies have made it possible for the little guy to overcome costly advertisement endeavors.

Expectations

What one can expect from affordable SEO services is that anyone who wants to start a business of any kind can get advertising over the Internet for cheap prices. A person can look forward to getting a promotion for their company. Even if they have to start with using individual services at first until they are able to gain more business and pay for package deals. Someone who wants an affordable package can find the SEO companies online, and they will have their rates for packages on their website.

Your business needs SEO articles and content ASAP. Hire affordable SEO Writing experts today. Visit http://seowriting.net/ or call (323) 570-HIRE.

View the original article here

It is important to work with an SEO agency if you are developing your online presence. One of the main reasons for doing this is because spending money on search engine optimisation will increase the return on investment you gain from all other areas of your web marketing strategy. By contrast, if you choose not to invest in search engine optimisation, spending on other areas of online marketing will produce an inferior return.

However, an effective SEO campaign is comprised of much more than simply link building activities, although these often represent the most significant and consistent drain on an SEO agency’s resources. The other elements are important because without their inclusion in an SEO strategy, link building will have less of an impact on the ranking of a web site.

Step one in the SEO process is usually for the agency to discuss with the web site owner what their hopes and expectations for the campaign are. Although this is partly to do with budgeting the work, it is also to do with identifying the specific key terms that the web site owner wants to target. It is generally accepted that a certain web site cannot rank well for all key terms (Wikipedia seems to be the most prevalent exception to this rule), so the web site owner must be both selective and realistic when consulting with the agency to determine what key terms can be most effectively targeted.

Before even thinking about link building, a competent SEO agency should perform an evaluation of the web site in question. Broadly speaking, there are two different types of process involved in SEO: on-page and off-page. Just as you would not build a house without foundations, so you should not begin off-page search engine optimisation without first ensuring a good degree of on-page optimisation. When everything on the web site itself is optimised for the search engines, that site will experience the greatest possible benefits from the accompanying off-page promotion.

There are many different things on a web site that can affect its level of optimisation. These include (but are by no means limited to) the placement, tagging and content of headings, the use of keywords within bodies of text, the degree to which different pages on the site are interconnected by links, and the selection of a search engine-friendly domain name.

Once the broad goals of the strategy have been determined and the on-page optimisation is complete, it will be time for the agency concerned to begin thinking about link building.

Kingpin-SEO is a leading UK provider of SEO services. With years of experience and some of the brightest minds in the industry at its disposal, Kingpin-SEO is more than just a Link building company: it is a one-stop solution for all your search engine optimisation needs.

View the original article here

OK guys, now listen up if you’re a novice to internet marketing and online information publishing you’ll probably have heard loads of weird and wonderful terms that confuse the hell out of the you and if your not careful you’ll end up trying to ‘overload’ your brain with so much techie information you’ll feel like your head is about to explode. So sit back and today I’ll cover just one of them that you’ll no doubt have come across -Search engine optimization, SEO for short.

You’ll certainly hear or read that SEO is a necessity for any Internet marketing success. Now although this is not strictly true, the reason for this is your search engine rankings are vital to get you exposure and traffic to your site.

Don’t Fail – SEO It!

When you fail to optimize your website, this can result in a loss of free potential page rank and therefore traffic you could have gained through enhanced search engine ranking positions called SERPS.

What this article intends to achieve is to give you a brief insight into what search engine optimization is all about and the need for every internet marketer to use it to a certain degrees to achieve their own internet marketing success.

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimization is a method by which a website is designed so certain key information is easily found when its crawled by the search engine spiders yes I know I did say spiders strange I know, you see its all about relevance so the search engines will rate a site dependant on them being able to establish the niche/subject it covers and therefore content of the site and its relevancy.

This can be achieved in a different number of ways. And it’s this combination of areas that need to be addressed that will make up a SEO campaign. There are the key factors which need to be considered when optimizing your website for the search engines & their identification process. These include keyword density, Keyword prominence, Meta tags, Title and inbound links, ok yes I know its sounds pretty daunting and many IM gurus would have you believe that but just read on and take every little bit at a time.

In basic terms you need to find the keywords and keyword terms often called long tail keywords that people interested in your niche are using to search for information., so as an example if you are in a niche, lets say ‘grooming & training long haired poodles’ then although that is generically in the dog grooming market – the keyword dog grooming is A very competitive and B very broad so you want to niche down to say ‘poodle grooming’, or ‘long haired poodle grooming’ or ‘how to groom your long haired poodle’ (good example of a long tailed keyword)- make sense?

Then once you have these keywords & phrases they need to be used strategically on your site and it pages. Therefore Google know what your site is about & when someone searches for ‘grooming long haired poodles’ Google can direct them to your site – job done.

Toby Russell, Internet Marketer, Publisher & Property Investor offers tried and tested methods to help you succeed on line.”Top Internet Marketer Reveals His Secrets” – FREE MP3 Download plus my popular FREE step-by-step 94 page Special Report. Available at => http://www.startinternetmarketingonline.com/

View the original article here

There are a lot of sites out there that get traffic simply because they are huge sites staffed by hundreds of workers. The bottom line though is that the content on the site is sporadic and does not necessarily have a positive impact on the site itself. Yes, Google does view sites will tons of contents and tons of back links as more reputable sites, but that is just one set of standards that leads to success.

The real way to success that is commonly left untouched is to actually keep each of the pages and content on their site relevant to a handful of specifically chosen keywords that match the intent of the website.

As mentioned above, you have to take the time to first lay down the proper foundation. This means that YOU HAVE TO DO KEYWORD RESEARCH! Don’t stop doing research until you have exhausted your options. Start to compile a large list of keywords that are all related to your site’s main topic. Break this big list down in to several separate lists that can serve as categories on your site. Each of these categories should be broken down into more specific sub-categories. You should continue this until you cannot go any deeper.

That being said, this will take an insane amount of time. Keyword research is pretty much impossible to do without SEO software unless you want to spend day and night for a few weeks looking at keywords and taking Excedrin. You should find a research tool such as SEO Keyword Builder and use it to do the data collection and number crunching. SEO software can give you the information you need such as how many people are interested in a particular keyword as well as how many website owners are already coming up in the search results for that keyword (competition). It becomes relatively easy to see which keywords are sure-fire successes and removes the errant guesswork. You should also be able to better manage your lists from within the software. This can help aid in breaking your main list down into categorical lists.

The next step, is to take those keywords and create pages that are dedicated to nothing more than a single keyword. The entire content (videos, pictures, text, etc.) found on that page should match the keyword as being the topic. This is a highly relevant page that has little competition and gets a reasonable amount of traffic.

Once you get the page out on the Internet, start promoting it by getting back links. If you did your research right and build the content well, you’ll be at the top of the search results in no time flat. The difference here is that you build more applicable content as opposed to building a ton of “hit or miss” content.

With all of the headaches that come with keyword research, you owe it to yourself to invest in SEO Software that can not only free up your valuable time, but give you better results. SEO Keyword Builder is a revolutionary keyword research tool that can and will give you what you need to succeed!

View the original article here