Sunday, February 24, 2008

Preventing Google AdSense Account Termination

Google's earnings are directly tied to the confidence of its advertisers in the validity of advertisement click through statistics. So you can be sure that if Google suspects people of abusing their Google AdSense accounts Google will err on the side of Google AdSense account termination. You should also know that Google has advanced artificial intelligence software scanning for statistical irregularities that may indicate click fraud. Anyone suspected of abuse will be immediately flagged and possibly suspended or given a Google AdSense account termination. If the account is not terminated it likely that a Google AdSense investigator will be queued to investigate the possible infraction.

So there is more to maintaining profitable Google AdSense websites than generating revenue. You must also take measures to prevent Google AdSense account termination on account of suspected click fraud or Google AdSense account terms violations. Common violations, other than direct click fraud, include putting text to small for humans to read on your pages, text with colors too similar to the background of the page for human eyes to distinguish, and using CSS to hide or disguise text. A less common, but just as severely punished, violation include using scripts to dish out different versions of a website to search engine bots than to human website visitors. These violations will all result in Google AdSense account termination at Google's sole discretion.

Since Google also owns a search engine, abuses on the search engine are automatically cross-referenced to you Google AdSense account. So any other things you do that might be viewed as abuses on Google's search engine can result in a Google AdSense account termination. Things as simple, and possible to do accidentally, as submitting your site to the Google search engine too often could get you terminated. To avoid this, never submit your site to Google if it is already indexed by Google. Also, avoid submitting to Google through automatic and multiple submission sites or software. Having mirror websites, or more than one website with nearly identical content or structure, can also get you terminated. Avoid using the same content and/or site design in more than one page on the Web.

Another Google search engine violation that will result in a Google AdSense account termination is what is referred to as “link farms”. These are automated reciprocal link exchanges. Preventing Google AdSense account termination for link farms is a matter of not joining any automated link exchanges and not having too many links on any one of your pages. Consider less than 75 links per page to be a safe amount.

Closely related to link farms is selling or buying text link spaces on highly ranked sites to the highest bidder. This is one of the hardest forms of violation for Google to spot because they can't know the motives for your link being placed on a page. However, sometimes an evil competitor will tip them off. Or sometimes your stupidity or the stupidity of the other site will tip them off by actually posting a request to bid on the link placement for ranking purposes.

While one could argue that search engine doorways are in fact a reputable practice, depending on their structure, Google claims they're spam. So if you use doorway pages, your Google AdSense account may be terminated. They are especially sensitive to doorway pages with AdSense ads on them, so don't ever put AdSense on a doorway page.

One additional caveat to note is that Google AdSense account termination can be accompanied by a Google search engine domain ban. That is, if you attract the attention of a Google investigator that determines you're doing something that harms the Google search engine, that investigator can also see to it that your domains that have had AdSense on them are no longer listed in Google search results, either temporarily or permanently. This is probably the worst thing, short of a lawsuit, that can happen to a website owner who has spent years building up search engine traffic.

Preventing Google AdSense account termination may involve changing the way you do business to a small or large degree. But, if you're earning a lot of revenue from Google AdSense you just cannot afford to risk it. Play it safe and appease Google if you value your AdSense revenue stream.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Monitizing Your Website Traffic

It used to be that getting website traffic was not that difficult. In fact, some sites collapsed because they couldn't afford the bandwidth costs of all of the traffic they were accidentally getting. That is because it used to be more difficult to turn website traffic into profits. As customers have become more inclined to make purchases online and advertisers have become more inclined to pay for online advertising, monetization of website traffic has become a relatively simple matter.

The big reason why it has become more difficult to get website traffic is that there are more sites out there trying to grab as much website traffic as they can to make as many sales as they can. In other words, competition for website traffic is multiplying at a greater rate than the number of people browsing the Web is multiplying.

This is a very good thing for customers, but a difficult thing for small businesses just trying to earn enough money to survive. There is nothing wrong with trying to make a profit, as this is what makes a capitalist society function at its best. If you do not do everything you can for the monetization of website traffic you will cause an economic inefficiency: the loss of your income from society. Small business profits are the lifeblood of a strong economy and a strong nation. Never believe anyone who tells you that the monetization of website traffic is somehow an evil practice or a practice that hurts society. But, in order to continue providing your website and to pay for the time and related expenses you must have a stream of incoming cash flow.

One of the core concepts here is that people buy things because they need them or want them, not because they are forced to buy them. When you provide advertising links that a customer clicks on, you are not only making a profit but you are doing a service to the customer. However, if you misdirect or trick site visitors for the monetization of website traffic you are doing them a disservice and ultimately doing yourself a website traffic loyalty disservice.

So how can you make money from your website traffic? The methods for making money on the Web are as infinite as the financial imagination. But if you don't have a lot of time for imagination you can stick to some tried and proven methods for the monetization of website traffic. The two most mainstream forms providing for the monetization of website traffic are sales and advertising.

With the sales method, you make money from your website traffic by selling your visitors a product or service that is closely related to the visitors' reasons for visiting your website. For example, if you are getting heavy website traffic on a website you made dedicated to fixing hand saws, it would make a lot of sense to go about the monetization of website traffic by selling hand saws, hand saw parts, and hand saw repair tools.

With the advertising method, you also cater to the topic of your site except instead of selling anything yourself, you put paid advertisements from others on your pages. You can sell advertising space directly, sign up with an advertising brokerage to display their advertisers' ads in exchange for payments each time the advertisers links are clicked, or join affiliate programs that pay you a commission on sales generated from your pages. Website traffic is the most important component of profitability for most Web businesses, so people are willing to pay you a premium to redirect some of the traffic in their direction.

The more closely your site content matches the products you sell or the products your advertisers sell, the more profitable the monetization of website traffic will be for you. If you do not have a product to sell that closely matches your website content and you don't want to drive traffic to your competitors' websites through advertisements, you may find affiliate programs to be the most desirable monetization option for your website traffic. You can choose to be affiliated with a company that sells products or services very related to your site. Thus, your website traffic will be very likely to make a purchase. Affiliate programs usually pay very well, ranging from 2% to 70% of gross income, depending on the difficulty of finding customers that are interested in the product being sold. So the more unique the appeal of the content on your site, the greater the monetization value of your website traffic.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Free Methods to Generate Website Traffic

For almost any type of profitable company you have to spend money before the company becomes profitable. Chances are, you already have put money into a Web business and you have a lot more places in your business where you know you'll be spending money. So it is real good news when you find out that there are non-monetary methods of improving your business income. One of the best ways of generating greater income without spending more money is to make use of the numerous Web tools and knowledge sources available for generating free website traffic. All you need is an eagerness and determination to work hard and learn as much as you can about the resources available to you.

Just because you can generate free website traffic doesn't mean this is the only method you should use. But, it does mean you should take every available opportunity to generate free website traffic. Keep in mind that "free" is a monetary term, not an absolute term. You will have to put out consistent effort to generate free website traffic.

You can start the process of generating free website traffic by doing all you can to learn about the topic. Take advantage of all of the information available online. Excellent places to start your search are online forums and online communities dedicated to the topic. You will find there are many forums dedicated not only to the general topic of how to generate free website traffic, but forums dedicated to specialties within the topic that may suit your needs better. You can also use these forums to help others and establish a reputation for your online business. The more you help others the more others will share things with you that will help you generate free website traffic.

Take advantage of newsletters and e-zines as well. You can subscribe to newsletters about the topic. But you can also pay attention to how the newsletters are run so that you can run your own newsletter some day. Newsletters are both a great information source for you as a reader and a great free website traffic resource for you as a Web publisher. The more interesting and useful you make your newsletter, the more free website traffic you will receive.

While we're on the topic of newsletters, you may notice that the content in newsletters is often from third-parties and contains a short blurb at the bottom about the writer and the writer's website. You can find plenty of free articles like this to put in your newsletters, so you don't have to write your newsletters yourself.

But if you're a good writer, consider the possibility that you could be the one writing the articles others use in their newsletters. It could be your name and website mentioned at the bottom of numerous newsletters, introducing you to hundreds of thousands of people interested in the topic of your site and establishing your credibility to them as an expert in the field. To do this you simply write articles related to your site and then post them for free on sites that offer the content for free to newsletters and website publishers. The only requisite for people to use your articles is that they include the blurb, or resource box, about you below your article wherever they use your article.

Another way to use other people's sites on the Web to generate free website traffic is to trade links with sites similar to your site. This benefits you and the person with which you trade links, as long as you are not direct competitors for the exact same products or services. The way this works is that customers who are already loyal to you benefit from your links to another site that may be useful to them. In return, customers loyal to another site or passing through another website will be sent to you to discover your website. So everyone in a link swap increases their customer base. This works especially well when you sell complementary products or one of the sites is an informational site and the other site is a sales site. Swapping links with similar websites also improves your website's credibility in your area of business with the major search engines.

Another way of improving your presence in search engines to generate free website traffic is by publishing the articles you've written or other people have written on the topic of your website. When search engines see these articles on your website they get a better understanding of your site purpose and are therefore more likely to show you in search results pages. This is a great way to generate free website traffic because the traffic coming to your site is looking for the exact things your site is about.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

How to Generate Website Traffic that Turns a Profit

The main difference between successful Web businesses and unsuccessful Web businesses is their ability to draw website traffic that they can convert into sales. Most of the businesses that fail on the Web fail because they don't generate website traffic at a profit. Either they generate too little traffic or they generate traffic from surfers who are not likely to purchase their products. It may seem like traffic is traffic no matter where it comes from, but this simply isn't true. It is just as important that your traffic be from people who are interested in your site content, products, or services as it is that you generate large amounts of traffic. The ideal is to get both. The surest way to get traffic that will convert to sales is by paying for website traffic from sites that have content and purposes complementary to your site or by paying for website traffic from people doing searches for keywords that describe your site.

It is true you can swap links with similar sites to get website traffic for free and that you can improve your search engine rankings to get free traffic from people searching for the keywords that describe your site. However, you're in business to maximize your profits and there are limitations on time and other resources that will limit how much traffic you can drive to your site by simply using these methods. And, everyone else is competing with you trying to do the same thing. You must complement all of your other marketing strategies by purchasing website traffic if you want to maximize your business profitability.

There is no measurable limit to the amount of quality website traffic you can purchase because there is no measurable limit to the number of website owners who would be willing to send you website traffic in exchange for additional revenue. It all goes back to the most fundamental concept of capitalism: you have to spend money to make money. There are many ways you can spend money to make money, but if you are advertising to people who are unlikely to buy your products, you are wasting your money.

So let us focus a minute more on purchasing website traffic at a profit from search engines. Website traffic from search engines converts into sales and repeat customers at a very high rate. The search engine not only sends you people looking for exactly what is on your site, but it also gives your site a certain credibility in the mind of the person doing the search. While there is a chance you can generate heavy search engine traffic through constant search engine optimization work, you need a sure thing when it comes to your business cash flow. Think of the traffic from search engine optimization as the icing on your business cake. Think of paid search traffic as the heart of your website traffic engine. You don't have to worry about whether or not you'll get paid search engine traffic because the search engine wants to make money and they only make money by sending you traffic. As long as you're willing to pay a high enough price, the search engine is willing to send you customers looking for your products.

As you may have figured out by now, the way purchasing website traffic from search engines works is you put in a bid of how much you're willing to pay to receive a potential customer searching for a certain term related to your site. Each time someone clicks on your advertisement, he is sent to your site and your search engine account has a charge placed on it for the amount you bid. It stands to reason then that the key to knowing how much you should bid for a keyword is having a good estimate of the likelihood that a person searching for that word will make a purchase on your site. You also need to know how much profit you will make from that purchase so you can estimate how much the average site visitor is worth. The final step is telling the search engine you are purchasing website traffic from the maximum amount you are willing to spend on traffic during that month. You can start small until you learn how to make good search engine advertisements and how much you can expect the average visitor to spend on your site. If you follow these guidelines, you stand a good chance of purchasing website traffic at a profit.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Improve your Adsense Earnings: 4 Easy Ways

Almost every business site owner and popular niche site owner knows by now that Google AdSense is an easy site add-on that can generate revenue. Most medium traffic sites make hundreds to thousands of dollars a month when they use AdSense. If you have anything unique enough, valuable enough, or entertaining enough to bring traffic to your site, you can make a lot of money with AdSense. If you are already making money with AdSense, that doesn't mean you can't make even more money with AdSense.

Here are some of the easiest and most overlooked ways to optimize AdSense sites:

1. Test out different AdSense ad display formats to see which ones get the best results. The most recommended is the “Large Rectangle”, which is 336 pixels by 280 pixels. Most people report their highest click through rates come from the Large Rectangle. But you may find you get different results based on how your pages are laid out and what type of content you have on your pages. The way you can tell of course which display formats work best for you is to try them all and compare click through statistics on the same days of the week, when nothing else on the page has been changed.

2. Make sure you create a color palette for your AdSense ads that integrates well into the design of your site. You may think that "sore-thumb" ads attract more attention, but in reality people have learned to distinguish and ignore ads that stick out after years of being exposed to banner advertisements. All bad looking ads really do is make bad, unprofessional looking websites. Contrary to wide speculation, site visitors are much more likely to read ads that fit in well and look like they belong as part of the page's content. But, if you don't believe me, try an AdSense palette that really fits your page for one week and then one that really clashes for one week and compare the click through rates of the two. If you get more clicks on the sore-thumb, stick with it.

3. If you have a large site with consistent design you should not waste time putting the AdSense script into each page by hand. You should instead use server side includes (SSI), PHP includes, or ASP includes, depending on which your host makes available to you. With includes you simply put the AdSense script into a single file and then a link to it in the template you use for creating your pages. Whenever a person visits the pages the host will automatically insert the code into each page. Many newer website owners have not yet discovered the power of includes to speed up the process of making and changing pages. If this includes you, taking the time to learn includes will save you hundreds or thousands of hours over the course of time.

4. Give serious consideration to making AdSense more prominent on your page. Many site owners try to hide their AdSense as if they're ashamed of it. Particularly, consider placing your AdSense at the top left where people will see it first upon visiting the page. If they came to your page looking for specific content and they see it first in the AdSense ad, there is a great chance they will click on the ad right away, making a deposit in your AdSense account.

Hopefully you have found at least one new thing you can do to optimize AdSense sites you own. Optimize AdSense sites can be a wonderful thing for you and your site visitors because they provide very relevant links to the content people are looking for on your sites. The better you fit your content into a tight niche category, the more value your AdSense will have for your visitors and the more click throughs you'll get. In the ultra-competitive Web business environment, you need every advantage you can get to maintain high click through rates.

Pay special attention to any tips you get on how to optimize AdSense sites. They may not all work for you, but each thing you try in an effort to optimize AdSense sites pushes you a little closer to optimizing profits. After all, profits are why you use AdSense in the first place. The more you learn by reading, trial, and error, the more quickly you'll be able to optimize AdSense sites you create in the future.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

4 Ways To Get Visitors to Trust Your Opt-in List

Finding people to subscribe to your website newsletters can be difficult but very rewarding. It provides you with a way to gain credibility for your website, brands, and products. It also gives you an audience with an interest in your niche. That of course makes it a lot easier to make sales. The problem is that with all of the annoyances people suffer from spam these days, they're hesitant to add more email to their inboxes.

In order to get people to subscribe to a newsletter, you must first convince them it will offer them something they want. It should not be too hard to figure out what they want because they are at your website. Obviously, the niche you serve has in some way attracted them to your site. So if you have a newsletter that provides further niche insight and information, many of your website visitors will want to take advantage of it by becoming subscribers.

Once you have subscribers, your work has not ended. You must continue to fulfill their desire for the niche your website serves. If you lose their interest by deviating to topics many of them won't enjoy, they may never read your newsletter again.

The good news is that the more you deliver content to them on the niche that is well-written and entertaining, the more you will gain credibility with your subscribers both for your newsletter and your website. Over time they will come to trust you as an expert and reliable source on the topic. They will come to know that you know what you're writing about. This is what most small business website owners dream of establishing, but find too elusive to grasp. Everyone knows the big businesses and that they are experts in their field. But to compete as a small business with these bigger businesses it really helps to gain credibility with your subscribers.

As you can see, the longer you provide a high-quality, well-targeted newsletter the more you will gain credibility with your subscribers. This becomes a big benefit whenever you send out an advertisement about a new product or service. Or, if you have a new feature on your site, you can add a little information about the feature and suddenly you'll have traffic to that feature. Because you've established yourself as being credible, you will achieve very high conversion rates from subscribers on any products or services you sell off of your site.

This shows off the power of a newsletter, but more specifically the power of gaining credibility with your regular website visitors. Gaining the trust of website visitors is key both for converting sales from first-time purchasers and for converting sales from repeat customers. In many cases, gaining credibility after a sale through something such as a newsletter will reassure the customer that they got a good deal on a valuable or high-quality product. The more you reassure customers of the value they have received, the happier they'll be with their purchase. The happier customers are with their purchases, the more likely they'll be to remain loyal customers.

One aspect of credibility that is particularly important to certain types of website businesses is expertise. If you're selling specialized products or services, you must establish with your customers that you have specialized expertise. Providing the highest-quality content in your newsletters will help you gain credibility with your subscribers as an expert in your field, if not as the expert in the field.

Throw little hints into your newsletters about not only the quality of your products, but that you stand behind the quality of your products. This will gain you trust from people whether they've purchased from you before or not. It will also make them more likely to recognize the quality of your brand. This makes them more likely to purchase and more likely to recommend you to other people.

It may sound simple, but just having unsubscribe links readily available and working well can help you gain credibility with your subscribers. Even those who unsubscribe will remember their unsubscribe experience when they think of purchasing products in your niche area again. The last impression you leave with people is the most important impression the next time they think of dealing with you. Just because they don't want to read your newsletter doesn't mean they have lost faith in your credibility.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Google Adsense: Turn Your Website into a Cash Machine

AdSense is taking the Web by storm. Some would go as far as to say AdSense is changing the fundamental ways in which the Web operates. Whatever your take, it is apparent that the concepts behind AdSense are here to stay. AdSense is so simple that the smallest website owner can figure out how to put in on his or her page and generate some amount of cash from it. This cash is generated by an advertiser who pays Google each time the advertiser's link is clicked. Google in turn pays the AdSense member that provided the link placement on his or her website.

Since all of the financial arrangements are handled by Google, all you as the website owner have to do is provide the space for the AdSense advertisements. In fact, Google will not only handle the financial arrangements, but it also uses its advanced search engine content analysis tools to determine the advertisements most relevant to your site's visitors. This saves you the time most advertising and affiliate programs require in picking out your own advertiser's advertisements. Of course this service works better if you have a content site with plenty of words for Google to analyze.

The underlying reasons why AdSense is the essential component of a content site are that it provides income for the content site owners and it provides informational and referential value for site visitors looking for more resources on the current topics. If properly formatted into the layout and overall design of the site, AdSense will only add to the value of your site and increase your website traffic. Positioning the AdSense advertisements well can also improve the percentage of site visitors who view the advertisements, find the advertisements useful, and click on the advertisements.

Google AdSense also provides you with free statistics about the performance of your site that rival most of the expensive statistical analysis tools available for purchase. In analyzing your Google AdSense stats you will find out what your content site visitors are really interested in reading. You can read detailed reports about which of your pages are the most viewed and which pages link to AdSense content in which your readers are interested in viewing. You can then develop more content on those topics.

Since the AdSense statistics on your content site pages are always available in real-time, you can immediately view how changes made to your website effect site visitor behavior. You can even do groupings across pages on various sites to get additional statistics based on those groupings. This allows you to do a lot more testing of content and layouts to see how they effect your site visitors.

Advertisers will obviously benefit from your content site if you partake in AdSense. That is why they are willing to pay you for sending them traffic. In fact, the more valuable the traffic you send to advertisers, the more money they are willing to pay for that traffic. What makes traffic valuable is the uniqueness of your content site niche. The more unique your content site niche the more rare the types of site visitors you'll have are for your advertisers to find. AdSense helps you to really focus your content site to fill a niche for people and advertisers. Everyone involved benefits when you have a high quality content site serving AdSense advertisements.

Of course, whether your site is profit oriented or oriented towards some other purpose, the fact is that you have costs associated with running the site. You might as well be making at least enough money from it to cover the costs of the site and your time. One thing many content site owners have learned is that the more money they make from the site the more time they can devote to it. Many end up retiring from their day jobs to provide a high quality content site full-time. If this sounds like a possibility that is of interest to you, then you can understand why AdSense is the essential component of a content site. Content is a service you provide on your site to your site visitors. AdSense profits are a service you provide to yourself at no cost to your site visitors.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Build Wealth Through Affiliate Niche Marketing

The Web is continually growing. Information is becoming so available many of us don't know what to read next. Web businesses are springing up by the millions annually. What all of these Web businesses share is the need to generate revenue to pay their owners' bills. The Web is continually growing with no sign of shrinkage seen since its inception. Likewise, usage of the Web is continually growing as a ratio of the average person's life.

With this growth in Web users, the potential earnings of Web businesses are skyrocketing. Also with the growth in Web businesses, Web users immunity to many forms of advertising is growing. So to make profits Web business involved in sales through affiliate programs must find some form of advertising that will separate them from everyone else.

One way in which many Web businesses have managed to maintain or increase their wealth is by reaching out to very specific niche markets. The more specific the niche market, the less the competition in that area and the easier it is to build customer loyalty.

Another way in which many Web businesses have managed to increase wealth is by concentrating on only a niche market that has overwhelming growth. Since there is so much growth in the Web, you might want to consider trying to reach the Web hosting niche market by joining Web hosting affiliate programs or reseller programs.

Why not? All of these business websites need to have some sort of hosting. Many of those just casually surfing the Web want to have websites of their own to decorate up and make into a sort of home that expresses who they are. You could be the one to make a profit from their niche market needs through affiliate programs.

Find the web hosting affiliate programs that you think will work best for you. Analyze their terms and what they have to offer. Compare them to each other. Think about how you would go about selling their web hosting through your affiliate membership? Does the web host with the affiliate program you're considering have a style that matches your style?

If you already have websites yourself, you've probably already got experience with what to look for in a web host. Look for those same qualities before you join the web hosting niche market affiliate program. You certainly don't want to be affiliated with a web host you hated. What kind of person helps sale products to others that the person hates?

Don't forget to check if your Web host has an affiliate program in which you can begin participation. You've been paying them. Maybe it is time they start paying you. Since you're already using the service, you may not need to worry about how you are going to give credibility to your endorsement of the product the Web host sells. The fact you are using the product says all your website visitors will need to know about how strongly you believe in it. You can simply place affiliate links saying who your host is such as "powered by...", and suddenly be rolling in the additional revenue streams of your niche market affiliate program in web hosting.

In fact, you can do the same with any other products you use for or on your website. Athletes do it with what they wear. If the products you use on your website have affiliate programs, join them and put up links telling people that you use that product or service on your website. If they don't have an affiliate program, consider using rival products that do have affiliate programs. When you have a public forum or are in the public spotlight, everything you use or display has a potential for commercial profitability.

The Web is a continually growing opportunity for all who will use affiliate programs in niche markets to take advantage. Always consider in everything you post whether there is some related profit to be found.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

7 Ways To Increase Website Traffic!

It is no accident that the highest value businesses on the Web are not necessarily the ones with the highest annual profits but the ones with the most website traffic. This is because consistent website traffic presents unlimited opportunities for conversion into profits. Businesses that have the capital to do so concentrate for years on building website traffic before they even try to make a profit. However, those of us in the real world with small online businesses need to be more balanced. We need to increase website traffic and make a profit early on in our business pursuits. This article is an overview of the key methods the pros use to increase website traffic without breaking their budgets. After reading this, you should either have some new ideas about how to increase website traffic or have reinforced your drive to use these ideas to increase your website traffic.

If you are like most of the small businesses on the Web, you're scratching and clawing for every site visitor you can get. The Web is the most competitive environment in the world because everyone with an Internet connection can do business on the Web. However, the Web is also the greatest business opportunity in the world because there are about a billion people surfing around. What other marketplace can match that? Of course, none of those people do you any good unless you find a way to drive them to your website.

So, enough talk about the obvious importance of finding ways to increase website traffic. Below is a list of 7 important methods the pros use to increase website traffic without breaking their budgets:

1. Take part in online communities and forums. You can establish expertise, credibility, goodwill, and friendships with potential customers when you provide help to others in these communities and forums. You can also learn more about your customers and the needs people have that you can fill. You will increase website traffic for the long-term by being helpful in forums in many cases because these forum postings could be available on the Web for many years and help many people.

2. Offer a helpful or interesting newsletter related to the content of your business website. This is another way of gaining credibility with potential customers. If you make your newsletter very interesting, it will also provide a regular advertising medium to those with an interest in your products. So you will be increasing website traffic from those likely to buy from you.

3. Write articles related to the content of your business website that you can publish and/or make available for other sites and newsletters to publish. You will gain credibility as an expert for the contents of your articles and from the willingness of others to recognize your expertise by publishing your articles. You will also gain exposure, as your name and website will appear at the bottom everywhere your articles are used.

4. Swap links with websites related to your business website. This will help establish credibility for you because you are cited by other websites. More importantly, it will increase website traffic from people interested in your type of website. A further benefit will be that search engines will recognize links to your sites as an endorsement of your credibility on the topic and thus put you higher in search results.

5. Make sure the content on your website uses more nouns than pronouns. Search engines don't know what objects pronouns refer to when they see pronouns. And, the people doing searches use the noun objects themselves for their searches. So your websites should include the nouns for which they are searching. And you thought learning objects, nouns, and pronouns in school was useless?

6. Consider spending most of your advertising budget on search engine advertising. This advertising not only will increase website traffic, but you only have to pay for website traffic from people doing a search for words describing what you offer. This increases your chance of closing sales directly off your advertising budget.

7. Offer things to your customers for free that improve your brand image or contain advertisements that your customers will pass around to others, increasing your exposure. This is often referred to as viral marketing because the marketing spreads from one person to the next instead of from you to each customer. The best way to achieve this is to offer something unique that is either extremely useful or entertaining. It is a definite plus if what you offer appeals specifically to your target market so that you will increase website traffic from buying customers.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Building a Newsletter Subscriber List

While many Web businesses have seen drastic fluctuations in profits over the last ten years, those business who have successfully concentrated on building a newsletter subscriber list have seen continual profit growth. Fluctuations in profits are so rampant mostly because of fluctuations in the availability of new customers willing to make purchases online. However, having a good newsletter subscriber list helps you build customer loyalty and stay in contact with those who have purchased from your business in the past. The more they enjoy your newsletter over time, the greater the likelihood they'll take note of your advertisements in the newsletter and the greater your credibility will be in their eyes.

Even though newsletter subscriber lists are one of the oldest and most proven forms of Internet marketing, many small businesses are just now taking notice of its power. This is important because small business will benefit even more from building a newsletter subscriber list than large companies. Everybody remembers large companies and what they offer, but it takes a newsletter to keep your small business in people's minds for when the people are looking for what you offer.

Building a newsletter subscriber list requires opt-in marketing techniques. You have to find customers who want to receive your newsletters. The way you do that is by providing the same things in your newsletters for which people come to your website. That is to say, people are at your website because of the niche you serve. So if they are interested in your website because of that niche, they are likely to be interested in your newsletter because it services that same niche. So offer your newsletter to people when they come to your website as a means of getting more servicing of that niche.

This newsletter subscriber list in turn will provide you with a well-targeted customer because the person reading the newsletter is naturally interested in the niche your products or services fill. So whenever you are trying to sell something, you can put information about it in the newsletter and instantly reach your target customers who are already family with you and your credibility. So they will not be hesitant to buy your products that they want or need the way a new website visitor, unfamiliar with your business, would be.

How long it takes you to build your newsletter subscriber list is dependent on how much website traffic you get. If you do not get very much website traffic, then it may take you a while to build a newsletter subscriber list before you see big benefits. However, the less website traffic you get, all the more crucial it is for you to keep as much of it as possible as repeat business. If you get a lot of website traffic, you will find building a newsletter subscriber list is very easy and very financially rewarding over long periods of time. This is because new website visitors have very low sales conversion ratios and website visitors from your newsletter will have very high sales conversion ratios since they feel they know you and can count on you to deliver.

So about now you're probably wondering how to get started building a newsletter subscriber list. Well, to start you'll need a web form to place on the niche content rich portions of your website where people can enter their email addresses to receive your newsletter. You will want to accompany it with a brief description of what benefit they'll receive from this newsletter.

The higher quality the content on your website and the better your website serves the needs of the website visitor, the more likely the visitor will be to sign up for your newsletter. So it is really important that the articles on your website be every bit as impressive as the ones that will be in your newsletters. If you've got content on your site that is so search engine keyworded humans can hardly make sense of it, you have little chance of people signing up for your newsletter.

Just as your articles and other content on your site need to be high quality and useful to your site visitors, so too should your services and products be high quality and useful to visitors. Nobody wants a newsletter from a business that provides junk, because they would expect the newsletter to be junk too. If you make your site really creative and interesting in the process, you will make a better impression about the creativity and entertainment value that will be found in your newsletter.

Don't do anything dishonest on your sites that may make someone think they cannot trust you with their email address. Likewise, if you do things that appear dishonest in your newsletters, they'll want to unsubscribe from your newsletters too. It is very important when building a newsletter subscriber list to appear to be very forthright and noble. A good privacy policy on your website can help add a few subscribers. A note next to your form to subscribe to the newsletter reassuring them that email addresses will be shared with no one could double the conversion of site visitors into newsletter subscribers.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Increase Your Adsense Earnings

AdSense has quickly gained acclaim among webmasters as a great income opportunity. This has led to a shift in the way most websites are designed, putting an emphasis on unique keywords that will attract site traffic and attract unique AdSense advertisers' links to the websites. However, many webmasters also come away disillusioned when all of their keyworded content doesn't pay off as big as they had expected. What they are doing is a good idea, but the failures may be explained by other factors that need to progress with keyworded content.

Sometimes you have a great site getting good traffic, but not holding onto site visitors for many page views before they give up on your site. This can be a symptom that the style of your site navigation is flawed. Most people don't think of optimizing site navigation when they are develop an AdSense earning site, so it is not surprising many fail in this area.

Take some time to consider how your site visitors view and use your sites that utilize AdSense to earn revenue. When a site visitor is looking at your page, where will your site visitor likely go next? Is it where you want them to go next? Hopefully the answer to both of these questions is that you want them to find the content they're looking for next on either your page or one of your AdSense advertiser's pages. Giving visitors the ability to find whatever they're looking for either on your site or from your AdSense links is the key to converting site visitors into an increase in AdSense earnings.

Take some time also to consider the clarity of the wording of navigational links on your pages. Is it clear what content lies behind each link? It should be very clear. Do any of the links reach out and grab attention? If not, make some changes. Link terms such as "free" and "download" are always popular.

Also, consider the logic of your navigational hierarchy. Do all of the sub-links fit nicely into the main links so that you would always know which main link to click on to find the content of the sub-links? Do you put your best AdSense conversion ratio pages in a prominent area of the hierarchy? If not, make some changes. In particular, the more you shift your visitors to the high AdSense conversion ratio pages, the more you can increase AdSense earnings without making major changes to your site content.

Now that you have some ideas of things to tweak and test, you'll need to decide what parts of your site to make into guinea pigs. For the fastest feedback on how well your changes are working select a couple of your highest traffic pages. Make each change for one week and compare the stats to the previous week. If they increase AdSense earnings, you have found a good idea. If they get worse, go back to the old navigational style.

As you go through the process, always be thinking of how you can improve your site visitors' abilities to find your best converting AdSense page links. Do you need to change the link name? Do you need to change the link's location on your page? Does the link inspire curiosity? Each idea you have can be tested in the way noted above to see if you get an increase in AdSense earnings.

Nowadays most AdSense sites focus on using text links because search engines favor these types of links. But if you think using a graphic instead of a text link to take visitors to your highest converting page will get their attention better, it is worth putting to the test. Don't be afraid to be creative and don't be afraid to experiment. Experiments are your best chance to create something unique or novel that will attract attention and generate revenue.

While changing around navigation, don't forget to consider the physical location of your navigational links on the page. Try moving your navigational links around the page and see if visitors stay on your site for longer or shorter numbers of average page views per visitor.

See what other websites are doing to improve AdSense revenue and try those things out. Remember that it is a continual effort of the Web entrepreneur to find new ways to improve AdSense revenue and any other revenue streams that can be found. This should be a fun and adventurous pursuit.