SpackIndia Blog

The Purpose-Driven Website

2009-07-11T02:33:00.000-07:00

Assuming your website is successful, what will it have accomplished?
read the complete article at
http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2009/june/201650.html#ixzz0KwSI80ix&D

Website Maintenance Musts

2009-07-11T02:24:00.000-07:00

Keep your online business running smoothly with a monthly check-up of these crucial areas.To read the complete article,click on the following link.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/ebusinesscolumnist/article202322.html#ixzz0KwQ3jMGy&D

Skyrocket Your Traffic With Satellite Sites

2009-07-10T05:13:00.000-07:00

by Edwin Huertas (12/20/2008)

The more traffic your website gets, the greater your chances of making sales. It’s a simple precept of Internet marketing. Today, I’m going to show you how setting up “satellite sites” can skyrocket your traffic… and boost your sales in the process.

These additional traffic-building sites aren’t as complex as your primary website. In fact, they are often very simple - targeting one specific aspect of your business.

Think of your primary website as a storefront on the Net. If you have multiple storefronts (i.e., satellite sites) - each with unique content - you’re likely to get more “eyeballs” in front of your products or services. And, as you know, the more eyeballs that read through your sales copy, the more sales you’ll make.

One reason that satellite sites help draw more traffic is that you can submit them to the search engines separately. This means that more of your pages will show up on the search results pages when Web users type in your keywords. Just think - if one of your satellite sites AND your primary website rank highly for the same keyword, you could dominate that search engine results page!

I’ve been setting up satellite sites for ETR’s website. Right now, we have eight of them. Each of these sites is averaging about 30-40 new visitors per day. As time goes on, this traffic will increase. My goal is to have 100+ new satellite sites finished by the end of next year.
Imagine if you had 100 satellite sites, each bringing in highly targeted traffic. Even if each site brought in only 20 or 30 visits per day, that would be an extra 60,000 to 80,000 visits per month!

Now before you start throwing up satellite websites, you need to know that there’s a methodology to setting up good ones. In fact, doing it the wrong way can hurt you more than help.

Satellite Site Set-Up Guideline #1: Make sure each satellite site has unique content.
Search engines are smart. And they do not like sites that have identical content. They consider websites like these “cookie cutters.” If you have cookie-cutter satellite sites, the search engines may punish you by not giving those sites any priority. Even worse, you could be blacklisted and not show up in their results at all.
To avoid this, you have to make sure that each and every satellite site has unique, distinctive content.

At ETR, for instance, we sell a program that teaches people how to make money by importing goods from China. So I created one satellite that was optimized for “China importing secrets” - and I filled the site with content relating only to that aspect of the program.

When you do a Google search for “China importing secrets,” this satellite site will usually be within the top 10 positions. It is bringing in 20 to 30 new visits per day, and each visit comes in via a targeted keyword search performed on a major search engine.

Satellite Site Set-Up Guideline #2: Make sure your site is “big” enough for the search engines to find it.

It’s easy to toss up a single-page satellite site - but don’t expect it to attract any traffic. Search engines (especially Google) love sites that have plenty of pages - and content - for them to index. How many pages will depend on your business - but sites with 100+ pages tend to do better than those with fewer pages.

If you’re thinking, “Wow, that’s a lot of pages!” don’t worry. You will begin to see additional traffic with 10 or 20 pages (sometimes even less). And then, as you add more pages with new content, you will see more traffic.

To get that content, I like to hire freelance writers to create articles for me. I ask them to base those articles on information that has been posted by respected publications. For instance, if I need content relating to the medical industry, I might ask them to visit medical journals and government sites to find studies or news releases that they can comment on or summarize.

Satellite Site Set-Up Guideline #3: Each site should have a unique IP address.

A website’s IP address is a numerical identification (like a telephone number) that allows people (and search engines) to connect to it. Most hosting companies provide shared hosting accounts that use the same IP for all satellite sites. This is bad for your traffic-attracting efforts, because the search engines will recognize those sites as being related to one another.

If the content on each site is completely different, you won’t get flagged - but it’s much better to have unique IP addresses for them. That tells the search engines that they are separate websites. Contact your hosting provider to find out how you can do this.

Satellite Site Set-Up Guideline #4: Optimize each satellite site properly.

One of the best - and easiest - ways to optimize your satellite sites is to make each one focus on only one aspect of your business. Let’s say you have a primary website about pets. You could make a separate satellite site for each category of products that you offer: pet food, pet medication, grooming, training, etc. That way, each site stands a chance of getting more targeted traffic.

If you plan on putting up multiple satellite websites, follow the rules. Make sure that each one has its own individual IP address and at least 10 pages of unique content… for starters.

You can also link to your primary site from each satellite site for extra “link juice,” but that’s an entirely different subject. For now, just get at least one satellite site up and running using the guidelines above… and watch the traffic begin to flow in.

(This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.)

Protecting Your Business Name Online

2009-06-27T11:40:00.000-07:00

Someone just registered a domain that's awfully similar to your business name. Are they cybersquatting?
To read the complete article,please visit the following link.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/startingabusiness/startupbasics/namingyourbusiness/article49040.html#ixzz0Jeoen7Ws&D

Choose the Right Domain Name

2009-06-27T11:32:00.000-07:00

It's going to be your identity in cyberspace, so make sure it's a name you can live with.
To read the complete article,click on the below link.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/websmarts/article199478.html#ixzz0Jemq6i7r&D.

SEO: Essential to Survival

2009-06-24T03:48:00.000-07:00

Companies that rely on the web for sales have two choices. Embrace SEO or don't embrace SEO. And one's not really a viable option.

To read the complete article,please visit the following link.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/marketing/onlinemarketing/article199906.html#ixzz0JLMG67Kv&D

Make 2009 Your Best Year Ever - Resolution #5: Become a Killer Link Builder

2009-06-24T00:08:00.000-07:00

by Alexis Siemon (12/26/2008)

A link is a shortcut to quickly get you from one website to another. If you can harness the power of the link, you can make your website a force to be reckoned with. That means higher search engine rankings, more traffic to your site, and, eventually, more customers and more money in your pocket.
That’s why one of your New Year’s resolutions should be to become a master link builder. Today, I’m going to show you just how to do it.
Link building is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization (SEO). When you attract links from other relevant websites, that tells the search engines that yours is a site to be trusted, and, therefore, displayed for relevant keyword searches.
The process of building those connections can be tedious. First you have to find sites in your niche, determine whether they’re relevant and of respectable quality, and then figure out the best way to contact the people behind them. It can be overwhelming. But I have three simple steps to get you started.
Link-Building Step #1: Link Research
The first step is to do a bit of research. What kinds of sites do you want to get links from? How do you go about finding them? There are several strategies, but one that will get you going in the right direction is to research your competitors’ links.
Let’s say you just launched a new site selling homebrew supplies. You would likely know that a popular competitive supply shop is NorthernBrewer.com. By finding the sites that link to the Northern Brewer website, you would instantly have a list of relevant sites that would potentially be willing to link to your site as well.
And you don’t need any fancy software. Both Google and Yahoo provide ways to perform this link research right from their websites:
• Link research on Google. To research the sites linking to your competitor, Northern Brewer, on Google, you would enter the following in Google’s search box:
link:http://www.northernbrewer.com
• Link research on Yahoo. To research the sites linking to your competitor, Northern Brewer, on Yahoo, you would go to a special section of Yahoo’s site called Site Explorer (https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/) and enter Northern Brewer’s URL in the field at the top. Make sure to click the “inlinks” tab to get the list you are looking for.
Now Google is a little stingy with their information. They will typically display only a portion of the links that they have in their database, which is why it’s a good idea to use Yahoo’s Site Explorer as well. In our example, you’d see that Google shows only 352 links for Northern Brewer while Yahoo shows 62,810.
Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of links. Now the hard work starts. You have to go through all those sites and determine which ones you want to have link to your site. Why not just pick them all? Well, just because a site is linking to Northern Brewer doesn’t mean they were asked to do it. Remember, any website can link to any other website for any reason at all… and without the site owner’s knowledge. There can be some link farms and other dubious low-quality sites in the mix, and you definitely don’t want to get links from them.
Link-Building Step #2: Link Quality
You want the good links - the high-quality, relevant, highly trafficked websites. So how do you weed them out? There are a few online tools that can help you make the distinction between a good link and a bad link.
• Alexa.com and Compete.com. These websites give you a general idea of the kind of traffic a particular site gets, and that can help you determine the quality of the site. High traffic typically means high quality.
• Google Toolbar PageRank (PR). Always controversial in SEO circles, many debate whether this particular little number means anything at all. Whenever I mention it, I always recommend taking it with a grain of salt. But a site with a higher Google PR is seen by Google as a higher quality site with a respectable number of links. In other words, a website you would want a link from.
These are good tools to have on your side, but not the only ways to determine the quality of a potential link. You can also use a kind of website common sense.
• Does the site have quality relevant content?
• If the site makes it possible for users to leave comments about its content, are they participating? This can be a sign of how active the site’s community is - a sign of quality.
• Does the site consist of nothing but links to other sites? If it’s not a known directory like Yahoo, etc. it’s likely a link farm - so stay away.
• Does the site have good design and navigation? Or does it look like it was patched together with FrontPage in 1998 and left to die?
Once you’ve identified the websites you definitely want to target for links, you have to determine the best way to approach each one.
Link-Building Step #3: Link Request
Gone are the days of the generic link request form letter. E-mails addressed “To Whom It May Concern” are usually deleted automatically by website owners
Link requests are now a request for a kind of partnership. That doesn’t necessarily mean reciprocal linking, but it does mean that site owners want to know that you have a genuine interest in their sites, not just in the “link juice” they can pass on to you.
Try to get familiar with the sites you want a link from. If you are targeting a blog, read it. Make some non-link-related comments. If you become part of the blog’s community, you’ll find the site owner much more receptive to a follow-up link request. You may also find that other commenters on that site have their own sites – and they may be willing to link to you.
If you find that you have no choice but to send a cold e-mail, try your best to find the e-mail address of a person to send it to. Not just a webmaster@ or info@ e-mail address. And when you write to that person, make it personal. Talk to them about why you like their site and why you think a link to you would be a fit for their readers/customers. Spouting off stats about your PageRank and traffic could be a turnoff for the site owner. If those things are really important to him, he knows how to do his own research (and will).
Link building may be a slow and tedious process - but it’s an absolutely necessary part of a successful SEO initiative. Knowing how to get started will make it much easier for you to build the links you need. And once you start acquiring some really solid quality links, you will no doubt begin to see improvement in your search engine rankings, your website traffic, and even your sales.

( This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com/. )

How to Get a Bunch of Useless Traffic to Your Website

2009-06-24T00:03:00.001-07:00

By Patrick Coffey

The Internet has been buzzing with praise for "social media" as the way to drive traffic to your website. By "social media," I’m talking about sites that (1) allow you to submit content and (2) allow other people to comment - and even vote - on it. The higher they rate your submission, the more exposure you get, with lots of people clicking on your link.
But today, I’m going to show you that this massive traffic isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
So far, some of the major players in the social media world are:
Digg - digg.com
Stumbleupon - stumbleupon.com
Sphinn - sphinn.com/
Reddit - reddit.com
Del.ico.us - del.icio.us/
Myspace - myspace.com
Facebook - facebook.com
These sites - and dozens and dozens of others that I’m sure I’m forgetting - have quickly become behemoths in the online world. In fact, many of them are getting even more traffic then the all-powerful Google.
At first, this might seem like an online marketer’s dream…
"If I could only get my article or blog post on the home page of Digg or Stumbleupon, my site will be flooded with traffic."
It’s easy to see why so many marketers are foaming at the mouth over the idea of tapping into all that traffic. But real online marketers understand that traffic does not mean anything without conversion. In other words, if you can’t turn your traffic into sales or e-mail sign-ups, it’s pretty much useless.
You may have heard of website traffic referred to as HITS. I’m sure you’ve been to websites that have a little counter at the bottom that tells you exactly how many HITS the site has received.
Well, this is my definition of HITS: How Idiots Track Success.
Just think about it. What should you really care about? How many people visit your site? Or how many people buy from your site?
Now you might be thinking, "Patrick, how do you know the traffic you get from social media is useless?"
This thing is, Alexis Siemon, ETR’s resident Search Engine Marketing Specialist, has been experimenting with trying to drive traffic via social media channels.
You can see how this is done by looking at the funny little logos at the bottom of each Early to Rise issue. These logos allow you to submit our content to various social media sites. And they have been helping us get "free" traffic. Through some trial and error, Alexis was able to help our natural health e-letter site get a boatload of traffic from Stumbleupon. In fact, in the last month, one page generated over 28,000 new visitors.
When I heard this, I thought it was great news. You see, when we get traffic from outside sources, we can generally convert at least 10 percent of it into e-mail sign-ups.
So how many of these 28,000 social media visitors do you think signed up for our natural health e-letter?
500? 1,000? 1,500? 2,800?
No! Try 80. That’s a conversion rate of just over 0.2 percent.
Compare that to the conversion rates we’re getting from search engine optimization (SEO), e-mail marketing, website advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and even direct mail. I’ve seen traffic from these sources convert to e-mail subscribers at rates of up to 50 percent.
That’s not the only reason I say social media traffic isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Recently, several of the top marketers here at Early to Rise and I went to the Webmasters World Conference in Las Vegas. We wanted to learn directly from many of the world’s top search engine marketers and see what they made of all the buzz surrounding this supposed traffic goldmine.
When I looked at the schedule, I was excited to see a panel discussion titled "Monetizing Social Media Traffic." After all, isn’t making money the point of getting website traffic? So we all attended this session with great anticipation…
The consensus of the panel was that it’s difficult to monetize social media traffic. For whatever reason, this traffic is resistant to advertising and tends not to stay on the site very long. In fact, it appeared to them that one of the only ways to monetize this traffic is by using a CPM (cost per thousand) advertising model. This is where you sell ad space on your site and charge the advertiser based on the number of people who see their ads. Certainly not a good model for those of us who run direct-response websites - because not only are these visitors not buying from us, they’re also not clicking on our advertisers’ links.
Even worse, this heavy influx of traffic can put a strain on your hosting servers and cause your site to crash. So you have a bunch of people visiting your site who don’t buy, don’t subscribe, and wind up crashing your server. Talk about turning your social media traffic dream into a nightmare.
But I don’t want you to think social media is all bad. Of course, we are delighted to allow our readers to share ETR articles that they think are good. And we are very grateful that, in one case, 80,000 people read our extremely valuable content as a result of this free traffic.
Many of the top stories on Digg and Stumbleupon get picked up by blogs and other websites. And when an article from your site is being bounced around the Internet this way, you’ll get inbound links from various sites. These new links help you get direct traffic from the linking sites. Plus, they help you with search engine optimization, which can, in turn, lead to more converting traffic and more subscribers.
At Early to Rise, we will continue to test social media and use it as a link-building tool. But if you’re looking to build your online business, it’s better to focus on the proven direct-response marketing methods we’ve been telling you about. Don’t be afraid to pay for traffic through e-mail list rental, text-link ads, and pay-per-click advertising. These methods might cost a little bit of money… but you’ll be attracting targeted visitors who will buy from you.

[Ed. Note: Patrick Coffey is ETR's Internet Marketing Director. He is also a contributor to ETR's Internet Money Club, which shows you how to build an online business within the next 12 months. The Club's membership was 100% filled last month - but we've just opened up a handful of slots for a very limited time. To check on availability, click here.]

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com/. )

8 Simple Steps to Making Your Website More User-Friendly

2009-06-23T23:57:00.000-07:00

by David Cross (01/22/2009)

I swerved for the third fallen tree on the road as torrential rain pelted the car windows. It was starting to look like a war zone as floodwater and rocks spewed out onto the road from the hillside that was rapidly becoming a series of slurried landslides. The first major storm of 2009 tore up the landscape and brought most rivers in the Pacific Northwest to flood stage. But I had to make the journey, and I was too far now to turn back.
Onward I pressed, and finally I was out of the woods. Ten miles of clear, open road lay ahead, and soon I was almost at my destination. Just a half-mile to go and… “ROAD CLOSED: HIGH WATER.” I had to double-back and make a 25-mile detour.
How many times has the lane you’ve been driving in come to a screeching halt when a sign suddenly appears that says “Right Lane Must Turn Right.” Why don’t these signs appear early enough for drivers to take action proactively, rather than having to slam on their brakes at the last minute?
This same basic problem exists on many websites, and it could be hurting your online sales. Fortunately, there’s something you can - and should - do about it.
Why This Problem Hurts Your Internet Sales
I’m sure this has happened to you…
You enter your credit card number to place your order. Then - AFTER you’ve entered your number - you get an error page that tells you “Credit Card Number must be entered in format xxxx-xxxx-xxxxx-xxxx.” Or that your phone number should be in a certain format. Or that your password needs a minimum of eight characters including numbers and must start with an uppercase letter.
All you want to do is spend money. But this website is preventing you from doing so.
If your website or shopping cart requires customers to enter information - such as an e-mail address, phone number, credit card number, etc. - a certain way, here are 8 steps you need to follow.
1. Try to limit the restrictions you place on people. They are customers, not computer programmers! It’s better to accept what the customer enters and leave the reformatting to your programmers.
2. Remember that it will be hard for some people (customers with dyslexia, for example), to enter data into your website. Make it simple for everyone to place their orders by listing your phone number on the website so they can just call you.
3. Place the request for information “in a certain format” at the point where people enter that data - underneath the field asking for the phone number, for example.
4. If you don’t wish to “clutter” your website with such instructions, have your programmer create a JavaScript or similar code that allows customers to input the data, but then warns them immediately that a certain format is required. This is less than ideal, but a good compromise.
5. It’s often possible to program your site to allow customers to enter their data any way they wish - and then have the program automatically remove dashes, dots, or superfluous characters and reformat the data into the required format.
6. If a customer is selecting a username, make it easy for them to determine whether that username has already been taken. Yahoo, MSN, and Gmail do a good job of this. There’s nothing more frustrating than having to submit a form three or four times while trying to come up with an available username.
7. If you don’t allow orders from certain countries, state that upfront on your website. Better still, use a software package that can identify the country a visitor is accessing your website from, and can lead them to a special page informing them that you do not currently service their location. (Such programs are made by MaxMind and IP2Location.)
I’ve personally experienced the frustration of browsing a site and shopping for half an hour, only to find out that the company didn’t deliver to the country I was in at the time.
8. When developing your website, allow plenty of time for testing with real customers. (Software developers and your staff do not constitute real customers.) The only way you’ll know, for example, how most of your customers will prefer to enter their credit card numbers - with dashes between digits, with slashes, or with no spacing at all - is to run tests. Invite a select few of your customers to test such things for you. As a gift for their help, do what my friends who run an aromatherapy business did: Give them the products they order during the test for free.
The most important function of your website is to allow your customers to place their orders and receive the products or services they’re interested in. So make it as easy and hassle-free as possible.
You know how frustrating it is when you have to make a U-turn or take a detour when you could have been given fair warning beforehand. Don’t make your customers jump through unnecessary hoops to complete their purchases.

( This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com. )

One Website… or Many?

2009-06-23T23:45:00.000-07:00

By Bob Bly

One of my readers, DH, writes:
“When selling information products on the Internet, what are the pros and cons of having a home website with more than one product and having micro-sites only for the more expensive and lengthy products vs. having a micro-site for every product?”
I told DH that he would need a separate micro-site for every product.
A micro-site, also known as a landing page, is a long-copy sales letter posted on the Web. The copy on your landing page describes the product and its benefits, and links to a form where visitors can order it online.
The reason information marketers should have a separate micro-site for every product is that each one of those products is unique. The reader hasn’t heard of it before, so he has to be sold on buying it. To make that sale, you need a long-copy sales letter.
By comparison, if an Internet user goes to Amazon.com to order the new Harry Potter book, she already knows what she’s buying. That’s why Amazon.com sales pages for books are relatively brief vs. the long copy we use on our landing pages to sell information products.
Each of your product landing pages should have its own unique domain name rather than be an individual page on a central website. And you should choose domain names that are easy to remember. For instance, the landing page for my e-book on how to write and sell your first e-book is at myveryfirstebook.com.
The only thing the visitor should see on the landing page is the sales letter copy selling the product. Don’t add a menu bar with a lot of options. And there should be no navigation. The visitor can either order the product or leave the site. There should be no free content for him to read or download. You want him to focus on one thing only: the reasons he needs to buy that product right then and there.
However, as effective as single-product landing pages are for selling information online, there’s one thing they don’t do very well: They do not attract a lot of organic search traffic. The reason is that Google recognizes them as sales letters - and Google doesn’t rate sites with sales copy very high.
The solution? Create a “portal” site for your Internet information publishing business.
Have links to all your individual product landing pages on this portal site. And in several places on the site, encourage visitors to opt into your e-list by subscribing to your online newsletter or downloading a free report.
Then, add one or more sections to the portal site where visitors can find and download free content - articles… press releases… special reports… videos… audios… content-rich Web pages.
Why are you adding all this free content to your portal site? Because Google loves content, and will, therefore, rank the portal site much higher than it will rank your product landing pages. That way, you’ll benefit from organic search traffic and get lots of visitors.
A percentage of those visitors will click onto one of your landing pages and buy a product. Or they will click on a box or banner that lets them opt into your e-list. Result: You sell more products and build your list organically instead of having to buy traffic.
Another reason I like having a portal site is because when people ask me what products I sell, I can’t remember them all. But I can remember the URL for my portal site. I tell them that they can find every product I sell at ctcpublishing.net.
The portal site serves one additional function for the information marketer: It further solidifies your credentials as an expert in your niche.
There are lots of Internet marketers selling info products on every conceivable topic. The ones that sell info products on the same topics you write about are your competitors.
Often, the reader perceives little difference between all the available info products on a given topic. What helps differentiate them… and close the sale… is the reputation of the author/publisher as a guru in the field. Your content-rich portal site gives you an instant online presence that sets you apart - and gives readers enough trust in you to buy your products.

[Ed. Note: Bob Bly is a freelance copywriter and the author of more than 70 books. To subscribe to his free e-zine, The Direct Response Letter, and claim your free gift worth $116, click here now.

( This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com/. )