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March 30, 2008
Website Builder
We live in a technologically-exciting world. Even brand new webmasters today can make use of easy to master web design tools that add functionality only a web programmer could have dreamed of just a couple of years ago.
And that is great, right? Wrong! Quite the opposite is true.
The accessibility of such web mastering tools has resulted in hundreds of "junk" websites that have so much going on at every page that the web surfer is completely overwhelmed.
Some of these web pages have as many as 7 or 8 distinct content areas contained on an 800 by 600 pixel screen... a flashing header graphic, several paragraphs of text, an opt in form, Google ads, Amazon ads, affiliate links, audio and/or video buttons to push, and sometimes even more.
Don't be tempted to make such glaring mistakes. It is unlikely that most web visitors will successfully navigate such a site. There are too many decisions to make, too many distractions. And the content is completely lost among all the technology and advertising.
So, what is the answer? Most successful webmasters today--that is webmasters who have visitors coming back over and over to their site and who are making money and/or getting some other desired response--will tell you that the answer is clean and simple web design. Usability is the key.
Great website designs focus on 3 basic values: simplicity, clarity, and speed. In other words, you need a site that is visually appealing, but at the same time downloads quickly and is easy to navigate.
To design a site that has visual appeal, you can make use of simple graphics, color, and graphical text. At all costs, stay away from flashing animations and busy backgrounds. In fact, a white, cream, or light yellow background with black or dark blue text is best, if you want the majority of visitors to be able to read your text easily.
It isn't necessary to be an accomplished graphic artist to design a visually pleasing content site. Grab a photo or two from a free stock photo site such as www.sxc.hu, add some colored text and a tagline using a graphics program like Windows Paint or Paint Shop Pro, and that's all that is needed for a header.
Navigation should be simple text links or buttons, either across the top, right under the header, or down the left or right side of the screen. Make sure the text labels clearly indicate what the user will find when he or she clicks on them.
An optin form and one or two simple ads can also be placed in the left or right panes, with your content in the main center panel. Your content pane should be the largest area on the screen, so that it draws the reader's focus.
Clean and simple web design extends to the layout of your content too. Text is most readable when it is in "chunks." This means short sentences and paragraphs of no more than 2 to 4 sentences each. Make liberal use of colored subheadings and bullets. Sprinkle a graphic or two per page to break up the text and add visual interest. Use margins (padding) around your text, so that it doesn't bump up against the edges of your navigation and ad panels. Lots of white space is crucial.
In summary, many beginning webmasters (and even some more experienced ones!) think that squeezing as much functionality into every page as possible is the right approach. It is not. What will keep people on your site and keep them coming back as well, is a clean, simple, easy to navigate design.
Want to learn how to get a terrific web site built?
Posted by billenross at 09:17 PM | Comments (0)
March 29, 2008
Internet Income Solution
If you want to achieve financial independence then the Internet is the best place to make it happen. You just need to know how the Internet can give you financial independence.
A lot of people are getting online every day looking for a home business that they can do because they want to achieve financial independence that they have heard others have accomplished. Anyone can use the Internet to make themselves financially independent. However there are some things that you will have to have if you want to be a success online no matter what Internet business you start.
When it comes to how the Internet can give you financial independence, too many people think that all they have to do is start their business and wait for the money to come to them. This is not how it works at all. You have to do certain things if the Internet is going to make you financially free.
One: It is very important that you have the motivation needed for your home business. If you don't work your business every day then you will not see results right away. You have to do a little something every day on your business because if you don't then you will never have financial independence.
Two: You have to want financial independence more than anything in the world. You are the only one that can make it happen; but how bad do you want it? It will not be easy to make your business a success. So you have to be prepared to do what ever it takes to make it a success. You also have to be willing to put in the time and effort to build your business because no matter what you have heard, it will take time and lots of patience. Adopt the attitude, I will not quit no matter what until I have achieved my financial goals.
Three: Multiple streams of income. You can sell only one or a couple products online but when you do you will have a very hard time achieving financial success. You will need to have over time, multiple streams of income every month. Everyone that is a success with their home business has multiple income streams.
These are not all of the things that you will have to do in order to achieve financial independence. However, they are the most important ones and the ones that you don't hear about all on the Internet. There is a lot more involved when it comes to how to make money online but the above ones are imperative because without even one of those, you will never have the financial success that you desire.
Posted by billenross at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2008
Ways To Make Money Online
Social sites have become the latest craze on the Internet. Social Marketing can also be seen as the next wave of Internet marketing. Everyone has heard about social sites and benefits from such sites. Social sites provide a lot of freedom and interactivity to the user. Such sites are powered by the latest technologies like AJAX and allow users to personalize page backgrounds,style,post their music, post videos, store documents, share their favorites and connect with people. Users can also post their pictures, share them with friends and even invite or search for new friends.
But how exactly do these sites help your site and its rankings? By sending huge amounts of traffic and getting you a good ranking on search engines.
There are two types of social sites. One is social networking and the other type is social bookmarking. Social networking sites provide you an easy way to connect with people who share similar interests like you. Sites like MySpace, Orkut, Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster are popular among users. These sites have a huge user base and provide an excellent opportunity for advertising your site. There are also specialized social networking sites like 43Things, MomJunction, Mothersclick which cater to specific interests.
Some social networking sites group people with common interests, but some sites are "traditional networking sites" and allow you to search for friends based on your interests. In any case you will always have a larger audience for showcasing your site. Sites like Facebook and MySpace allow you to post your advertisements and promote your products, provided you are not spamming. If you have a really good site, you will surely find a large visitor base just by showcasing your site on your profile.
Social bookmarking sites provide you easy way to store, organize, manage your bookmarks as well as share them with your friends. You can bookmark any URL or page you liked and even mark them for public or private viewing. Social bookmarking sites also provide you with the option of tagging your bookmarks. Some of the bookmarking sites link directly to your URL’s thus helping your site in getting valuable back links and quick indexing. Sites like Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious are known to send huge traffic to your site. If you manage to get on the front page of these sites, you should be prepared to handle a huge number of visitors to your site.
Search engines spiders love social sites and usually follow links on these sites. This means if you have your site link on social networking and bookmarking sites, your site will be indexed quickly.
If you happen to be using Wordpress for your blog, you should use some good plugins like Socialmarker, Socializer and Addthis. These plugins provide your site visitors a quick option to bookmark your site. Getting bookmarked from different users and different bookmarking sites will definitely help your site rank better on search engines. Some plugins like Onlywire automatically bookmark your post to 20 different bookmarking sites as soon as you publish your post.
It is a known fact that the video and photo sharing sites like Youtube and Flickr are visited by millions of people everyday. If you think out of the box and use your creativity, your published video will get your site the traffic you've always wanted. Some video sharing sites like Metacafe also pay you a part of their revenue just for publishing your video.
Like it or not, social sites have become an integral part of the internet. You need to help you make money online.
Posted by billenross at 08:16 PM | Comments (0)
How To Make Money Online
If you want to achieve financial independence then the Internet is the best place to make it happen. You just need to know how the Internet can give you financial independence.
A lot of people are getting online every day looking for a home business that they can do because they want to achieve financial independence that they have heard others have accomplished. Anyone can use the internet to make themselves financially independent. However there are some things that you will have to have if you want to be a success online no matter what internet business you start.
When it comes to how making money online can give you financial independence, too many people think that all they have to do is start their business and wait for the money to come to them. This is not how it works at all. You have to do certain things if the Internet is going to make you financially free.
One: It is very important that you have the motivation needed for your home business. If you don't work your business every day then you will not see results right away. You have to do a little something every day on your business because if you don't then you will never have financial independence.
Two: You have to want financial independence more than anything in the world. You are the only one that can make it happen; but how bad do you want it? It will not be easy to make your business a success. So you have to be prepared to do what ever it takes to make it a success. You also have to be willing to put in the time and effort to build your business because no matter what you have heard, it will take time and lots of patience. Adopt the attitude, I will not quit no matter what until I have achieved my financial goals.
Three: Multiple streams of income. You can sell only one or a couple products online but when you do you will have a very hard time achieving financial success. You will need to have over time, multiple streams of income every month. Everyone that is a success with their home business has multiple income streams.
These are not all of the things that you will have to do in order to achieve financial independence. However, they are the most important ones and the ones that you don't hear about all on the Internet. There is a lot more involved when it comes to how the Internet can give you financial independence but the above ones are imperative because without even one of those, you will never have the financial success that you desire.
Posted by billenross at 07:58 AM | Comments (0)
March 19, 2008
Your Fight Against Spam
Spam e-mails are known to be the modern day version of junk mails. Usually e-mails from individuals or companies advertising their product or services, they are relatively harmless. However, the increasing use of networks have made spammers smarter. With losses of about $20 billion in productivity and expenses, several IT companies saw the increasing demand for spam solutions.
Here are some of the features that could be helpful in choosing the “ideal” spam filtering subscription.
There are two important things to look for in evaluating a particular spam filtering subscription. This would be - accuracy and false-positive rating. Accuracy refers to the percentage of legitimate e-mails that make it to the user’s inbox after being filtered. The accuracy of several spam filtering subscriptions are tested by “passing through” thousands of e-mails. Some of these e-mails are legitimate while some are spam. The satisfactory rating for accuracy is 80% though some subscriptions have ratings as high as 98%.
False-positive rating refers to the percentage of legitimate e-mails that have been wrongly identified as spam. The satisfactory rating for a false-positive is 1%.
Usually, spam filter providers use quarantine features in order to avoid important e-mails from being disposed. The user may then sort the important e-mails from the spam. Different computer publications such as PCWorld and PCMagazine offers reports on the accuracy and false-positive ratings of different spam filtering subscriptions.
Most internet service providers (ISP) and e-mail programs such as MSN Hotmail, Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo! Mail provide a certain type of spam solution. If looking for a separate spam filter, try to know first if it works with several e-mail programs. A particular spam filter may work with Microsoft Outlook but not with Mozilla’s Thunderbird.
The cost of spam-filtering subscriptions has to be guaged with the services it provides. A certain subscription may be expensive but may be worth paying for with its features, speed and control. Sometimes choosing a lower cost provider may mean paying more due to lost time and frustration from poor output performance.
A good spam filter should fit the specific needs of the subscriber. It should allow a great deal of control by offering a wide range of flexibility in configuration according to his/her policies. It would also be helpful if it provides automatic updates.
These are the main things to consider in fighting spam. Depending on the complexity of your situation more time could be spent in evaluating and comparing your options.
Posted by billenross at 10:11 PM | Comments (0)
March 13, 2008
Benefits of a Sitemap
How will your visitor know the contents of your website once he comes to it? Your homepage may set the topic, but what if your visitor wants to know what specific information will he find? This is where a SiteMap is useful. Acting like the table of contents of a book, your SiteMap will let your visitor know if you have the information he needs.
So, what is a SiteMap? Strictly speaking, it is a graphical representation of the structure of your website. It shows how the pages are linked to one another. But such a representation may be difficult to implement, and if there are so many pages, may be even difficult for a visitor to find useful. So, a SiteMap is created by listing all the links of all documents and files found in a website. These links are typically organized in a hierarchical manner, thus improving readability.
Sitemaps do not only serve your 'human' visitors, but search engines as well. These robots, or spiders, crawl the Internet, getting data on web pages for a specific keyword. They crawl by following links, giving importance to pages that are linked to. Hence, a good SiteMap is also used for search engine optimization.
Benefits of a SiteMap
Creating sitemaps may take time and effort, so why have one? The following lists some of the benefits for creating a SiteMap for your website.
1. You can use a SiteMap as a planing tool for web design.
Even if you have a website with few pages, it is good to have a structure of your website. This way, if you are to add more pages later on, you will know where to put them. Your site will not become a hodgepodge of pages without any relation to one another.
2. No page will be left unvisited.
The search engine spiders will be able to visit all the pages in your website if you have a SiteMap. Your pages will then be included in the search engines' databases, increasing your ranking.
3. Visitors will have an easier time to navigate your site.
One factor why visitors stay on a site is the ease to navigate through the site. With a SiteMap, visitors will have an idea on what the contents are in your site. They can also easily access those pages within your site. Without a SiteMap, your visitors may even leave your site, going back to the search engine pages, to look for information that may be in your website.
4. A SiteMap may encourage more traffic.
As your website grows, you must update your SiteMap. This way, visitors will know that content is being added to your website, encouraging them to return. This is also true if you are selling products or offering services. Potential buyers will immediately know your latest products or services by visiting your SiteMap.
5. There is potential advertising value when using a SiteMap.
With a SiteMap, potential advertisers will find it easy to best position themselves in the different pages of your website where they can advertise. This will mean additional income for you.
Benefits of sitemaps are worth the time and effort to create them. Not only will they help you in designing your website, they will also ease the navigation for your visitors, help your website in search engine rankings, increase traffic to your site, and provide you income from advertisements.
Posted by billenross at 09:08 PM | Comments (0)
March 09, 2008
Web Traffic Is Not Created Equal
Everyone who has a website wants more traffic. However, not all traffic is created equal. Many people get so caught up with driving traffic to their website they forget to check whether it is working towards the actual goal of the website.
Different websites have different goals. One may be to build a brand, another may be to sell a product while yet another may be to build a list from leads. No matter what the goal, tracking should be done to see whether the traffic generated from various sources is actually helping to achieve that goal.
In some cases, it is easy to see the difference between various traffic sources. For example, it is usually much cheaper to buy Pay Per Click (PPC) ads for a content network than for a search network. On a content network, ads appear on related web sites while on a search network they appear as the result of a user keying in specific search terms.
People who click on ads on the content network tend to be browsing the Internet for information. In most cases, they expect to get this information for free. On the other hand, those searching for key terms, especially product names, are more likely to be looking to buy. Because of this, conversion rates are typically much higher on the search network. This leads to more demand which, in turn, leads to higher prices for these ads.
Unfortunately, paying for advertising can eat into profits. In some cases campaigns that are generating a good volume of sales can be rendered unprofitable due to the costs of advertising. However, organic traffic, which comes from unpaid listing on search engines, is free and targeted. The difficulty arises in generating sufficient volumes of traffic. To do this requires being on the front pages of the major search engines for popular terms. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of trying to rank highly for competitive keywords. Unfortunately, many SEO techniques take considerable time to put into place and to affect search engine rankings.
One technique to overcome this problem is to aim for 'low-hanging fruit'. That is, keywords that have less competition. While these generate lower traffic, it is possible to build up considerable amounts of traffic by building up a portfolio of less popular keywords.
Other good forms of generating free targeted traffic include article marketing, email marketing and utilizing joint venture partnerships. The main thing is to avoid traffic generation strategies that cost money, but don't result in conversions.
Posted by billenross at 08:02 PM | Comments (0)
March 01, 2008
Dare to be Different Online
There are plenty of people offering their "secrets" to help you make more money online. The only problem is that as you trawl around the web searching out these secrets you soon discover they aren't secrets after all.
What you will learn is good, old-fashioned business common sense. These "secrets" will teach that some kind of a promotion is necessary to attract people to your web site. Once attracted, you need to entice people further with more offerings in exchange for their contact information (email address). As the saying goes, the money is in the list. You cannot run any kind of business online, or offline unless you have a list of potential customers.
So, the "secrets" that you are searching for online have been there ever since business began. Find something people want, entice them to connect with you, get their details and sell, sell, sell to them over a period of time to convert them from interested parties to confirmed customers.
But the one secret that is often missing from much of the information online has been around offline for centuries as well - be different. Don't try to be the same as your competitors. Stand out from the crowd. Do something different that gets you remembered.
For example, take the cab driver who gets the name and address of every passenger. Each Christmas they get a card from him. And guess what, people remember him and recommend him. He gets most of his fares from referral business, rather than having to wait around. Have you ever met a cab driver who sends all his passengers cards at Christmas?
Yet online, everyone seems to be the same. New online businesses follow the "rules" set by the experts and gurus. The result is that almost all web sites trying to sell something are starting to look the same. They all do the same thing - have a great offer and a box to fill in your details. Many of them even use the same templates. If you follow the "rules" that are part of the "secrets" you will end up following the pack and you won't be noticed. If you truly want to make it online, you have to be different.
So stand out from the crowd by being different - not just visually, but in the way you approach your readers. Do whacky things perhaps. You will be noticed and remembered - and online that's nine tenths of the battle.
Posted by billenross at 08:45 PM | Comments (0)
