Dot Com Note

If you want a risk free, no cost solution to promote your business, you must consider online free classifieds. Advertising in free classified sites can be time consuming and frustrating if you do not know how to successfully profit from these sites. Knowing the right tricks and tips of online free classified ad will separate you from the hundreds who post thousands of ads without getting any results.

 Phote credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fernando/118800113/

All free classified sites are not created equal. You should focus on a few good sites and post your ads regularly in those sites only. Your starting point is Google search. Go to google.com and search for “free classifieds” and “free ads”. From the search result pages, visit 10 to 15 sites and register in those sites. If a site asks too many questions during the registration process, abandon the site and go to the next site. Why should you have to provide all your personal information for the site’s benefits? Good sites will only ask minimal questions to setup your account so that you can edit, delete and renew your ads. Also, look for sites that will allow you to post without any registration.

(more…)

Whatever the experts say, email is marketing is still one of the most effective marketing technique. It does not matter whether you are running a small online business or a local eatery, your budget is limited and your challenge is to keep getting new customers for growth and turn your existing customers into repeat buyers for business sustainability.

You can use a variety of advertising options depending on your budget. Email marketing is a low cost solution that you must use regardless of any other methods you pursue. However, if you don’t know how to start an email marketing campaign in a right way, you soon will be become the biggest spammer in the town and may lose everything you have due hate and litigation.

 Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/piccadillywilson/68766132/

Start with email addresses you have in your existing contact list. Explain them what you are up to and emphasis the benefits your business provides to ordinary folks. Don’t use any sales pitch. It should be informational with the emphasis on benefits. Keep it short because people don’t have time to read long emails. Also, encourage them to spread the news to their contacts.

(more…)

Writing quality articles for your blog and article marketing campaign is essential to establish yourself as an authority in your chosen niche. Every day, people post tens of thousands of articles in blogs and article directories. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to start producing authoritative and resourceful articles that others will read, bookmark, and promote using social media sites.

A quality article provides benefits to its readers. Neither it should be detailed and lengthy to put readers to sleep, nor it should be a laundry list of items for others to scan and forget. It should have enough information to put the written words into actions, but not more.

 Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebaird/1510017912/

Before you start writing an article, make a list of all the non-textual contents that you will include in the articles. Non-textual contents may be images, videos, sketches, links to other resources, etc. Collect all the non-textual resources in one place, preferably in a folder in your laptop.

So, where do you go to find all the resources you need before you start writing your article? People who churn out low quality articles rely on Google search engine and article directories. While Google search engine may be a source, you should never use an article directory as a resource for your article-writing project. Finding a good article in an article directory is like finding a needle in the haystack.

(more…)

Google search engine indexes images in your web pages. When someone uses Google Image Search to find images on the web, what chance does your website have to show up in the search results? If you know how to optimize images in your web pages, your images will have high rankings in the image search results. Using higly relevant and properly optimized images in your web pages will bring quality traffic from Google Image Search. Use the techniques described below for optimizing Google Image Search.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikonvscanon/1348462114/

1. Use the alt attribute in the html img tag. This is the most important one. Use a specific keyword or a key phrase that identifies what the image is all about. If the image is a red rose, use the key phrase ‘red rose’, instead of rose or flower, in the alt attribute.

2. Use the title attribute in the img tag. The title attribute is what people see when they hover the mouse over the image. You can use the same text for title that you use for the alt attribute.

(more…)

What is the most important thing for the success of a web site? It is the traffic. However, driving thousands of people to your website may not turn that traffic into money for you unless that traffic is targeted to the type of products or services you are selling. If you are selling apples and your visitors are on the lookout for oranges, they will not change their mind to purchase your shining apples.

How do you drive targeted traffic? Don’t jump into the link exchange. The link exchange is very archaic, unproductive and may be damaging for a search engine ranking. Follow the techniques describe below for better results.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/poagao/172973533/

Publish an ebook with full of information that is beneficial to the visitors of your website. If you are selling apples, write an ebook describing all the health benefits of apples. Put your web address in the ebook and give it for free. Even if your accidental visitor is not looking for apples, she will be glad to get the free information. If your book is compelling enough, she will visit your site in the future to buy apples. We have already entered the age of freeconomics where the selling lies in giving away free stuff for possible sales in the future.

(more…)

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fugitive247/989525384/

StumbleUpon is a second generation website that allows its users to discover interesting web pages and sites without doing a search in a search engine. You install a tool bar in your browser and channel surf the web by clicking a button on the tool bar.

You sign up at StumbleUpon website and list your interests. When you click on the surf button in your browser tool bar, you are randomly directed to a webpage that matches your interests. If you like the contents or the website offerings, you can tag the page and give it a thumbs-up. If you don’t like it, simply ignore the site or give it a negative vote, a thumbs-down, if you feel the site has employed some trickery to draw your attention.

You can also use the StumbleUpon tool bar for social bookmarking. When you find a new and interesting webpage, you can tag it and share it with others. Click the Send to button in the StumbleUpon tool bar to send the webpage you are on to a friend in your StumbleUpon network.

It is possible to get a massive amount of traffic from StumbleUpon. If you have an interesting or useful article, blog page, or an entire site, you can include it in StumbleUpon. If lots of StumbleUpon users thumbs up your page, you will get a large amount of traffic in a very short time period.

Besides a sizable number of thumbs-up by StumbleUpon users, there are other factors that help drive traffic to a site in StumbleUpon. The number of StumbleUpon friends, the type of friends and their profiles, the number of sites you have stumbled, and the number of reviews you have gotten in the past all determine traffic volume to your site. Another factor is the broad tagging of your article by other StumbleUpon users.

What are the other benefits of being stumbled besides a short-time traffic surge? Your website will get exposure and many visitors will comeback regularly. If your site is a blog, you will instantly increase your reader base. You will also get numerous backlinks from other StumbleUpon users who run websites.

To increase the repeat visits by StumbleUpon users, your site should have a professional design, in-depth contents, richly blended ads, and a memorable URL.

StumbleUpon users like video, humor, and web 2.0 sites. However, the monetization potential from StumbleUpon users using affiliate or contextual ads like Google Adsense is very low because these users are very fickle and want to click to the next site using the StumbleUpon button in their tool bar.

Like any social network, your goal should not be to use the system for driving traffic only to your site. Stumble other high quality and useful sites for others to benefit from information you posses. Develop a good online social network using StumbleUpon, share websites with others and have fun.

Image credit: PageRank

After punishing the text link advertisers with a reduction in their page ranks (PR), Google is going after the PayPerPost bloggers and dropping their PRs to zero from whatever PR they had before. An IZEA blog post by CEO Ted Murphy has this to say:

Once again Google has proved that PR has little to do with blog traffic, influence or relevance and everything to defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising.

Murphy also went after TechCrunch for their sponsored posts and suggested that Google did not punish them because they were silicon valley insiders. Duncan Riley at TechCrunch has posted a rebuttal to Murphy’s claims.

Every business wants to increase their market share to achieve monopolistic strongholds. No business person will say, “Gee, you know, I have too much market share. I will decrease my market share so others can compete.“

The question is, does Google misuses their monopolistic stronghold? And the answer is we don’t have any evidence so far.

PayPerPost (or any such service provider) should not charge the review rate based on a site’s PR. The review rate should be based on the actual traffic the site receives and PayPerPost should provide that information to their advertisers (people who are seeking reviews).

When Google reduces the PR of a site, another site gets a fair chance of ranking high in the SERP. So in a sense, Google is helping sites who don’t participate in PayPerPost. And what is wrong with that?

When a site reaches a higher PR and a higher ranking in the SERP, Google expects it to show some responsibilities. Just because the site has a higher PR, it does not mean that the site has a higher quality than hundreds of other sites that are slightly lower in PRs. And Google knows this fact.

Google’s actions will help sites, that don’t participate in PayPerPost, improve their rankings in the SERP.

Robert Fulgham’s timeless assertion “All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten” is applicable to every aspect of life, work, and business. Online marketing is no exception. This is how you can apply his ground rules to online marketing for achieving excellence.

Share everything.

Image Credit: Shared Slice

If you know a few tips, software tools, useful websites, etc. share it with others. Don’t be afraid of others taking your share of the pie. The pie is huge and you will never be able to eat it alone.

(more…)