Browsing Category: "Blogging"
Make Your Website User Friendly
As an internet marketer one of the most important things you can do for your website or blog is to make it user friendly. Many people focus on the theme and design of their website or how SEO friendly it is, but they don’t think about whether or not it is actually user friendly. After the major components of the back end of the site are done and the SEO plan is worked out, it is important to have a user friendly site that people want to stay on and come back to.
I don’t know how many times I have been to websites or sales pages and wanted to find the back button as fast as I could in order to get away from it. Some website designs are just plain awful. If the website design isn’t good, the reader will often lose their place, get lost in the clutter, or have a hard time knowing where to go or what to do next.
The reason so many sales pages for products are only one page and have a fairly simple design is because it works. The simplicity of the design allows the user to know exactly what the product does, where they need to go next, how to order, and all of the other information the designer/company wants them to see.
In contrast, a highly cluttered sales site with multiple pages, pop-ups, flashing banners, movies playing automatically, and an unfriendly design will have a much harder time getting their point across in a way that allows the user to feel they benefited from their visit. Most visitors will want to get away from a site like that and the internet marketer will lose the potential sale.
There are so many reasons to keep your design simple, from a user’s standpoint, the ability to find the information they need without searching the entire site is a huge help. Keeping navigation straightforward and in the same area will allow users to always know they can go back there to find what they need next.
Using large enough fonts and adequate reading room is a must. You want your user to be able to easily scan your site for content to read. Most people don’t read an entire sales letter. So make it easy on them by using headings and bold when appropriate to highlight the main points of the copy as well as bullet points, numbered lists, etc…
Having a user friendly website will save you a lot of time and hassle dealing with issues later and will certainly help you to make more money with your internet marketing business. Keep advertisements organized and friendly, content in an easy to read column with minimum clutter, and always have a good navigation structure so it’s easy for users to get where they are going and benefit from your site. If the user enjoys their time on your site they will most likely become a subscriber, customer, loyal reader, or do whatever else it is that your site is trying to get them to do.
Sometimes internet marketing strategies can be applied before you actually go out and start promoting. Having a user friendly site is one such case.
Writing Good Content for Internet Marketing
One of the most important things you can do when it comes to internet marketing is to write good content for your website, blog, or sales page. This is probably the most basic internet marketing strategy of all but it is also essential, and far too many people don’t do it. If the content on your site is junk, then your entire website is going to be considered junk by anyone who visits it. On the other hand, if your content is really good then your site will be considered high quality even if it doesn’t have the best theme or look the greatest. High quality content matters a lot more than how “cool” your site looks.
It’s best to write the content yourself if you at least have some decent writing skills because good writers are hard to come by unless you want to pay a ton for every article/post you get. If you look at internet marketing forums or various webmaster forums, or even freelance writing sites, you will find many people with writing services claiming to be good writers. In reality, a lot of writers you hire online are not worth the money, even if their articles are cheap.
If you need someone else to write for you because you aren’t a good writer or you simply don’t have enough time to do it all yourself, then you really need to look around and check out many different options before you settle on someone. Don’t fill your website full of low quality content just because you found someone to write cheap articles for you and you don’t think you have any other options. Trust me, you do!
Now, here are a few notes for new internet marketers and bloggers, or anyone else needing a refresher on writing good content:
Don’t use fluff content – Make sure your words actually make sense and use short and specific sentences whenever possible. Do not ramble on about a subject for two paragraphs restating the same point over and over again just to fill space.
Include images in your posts – Always try to include related images in your blog posts and other website content if at all possible. Including images with proper formatting and SEO strategies will not only draw your reader’s attention to the post or article, but can also help you in ranking on search engines and can bring more traffic to your site. This is actually something I really need to work on myself. I have never gotten in the habit of using images but I do need to start.
Make it useful – There’s no point in writing just for the sake of updating your site. Make your content useful and informative for the reader. You want people to keep coming back and they aren’t going to do that if your content isn’t worth coming back to read again and again.
Use spell check and proof read – There’s nothing worse than an article/post full of spelling mistakes and other mistakes that could easily be avoided by simply using a spelling/grammar checker and proofreading your content before you publish it. It doesn’t need to be perfect, especially when writing online, but by minimizing your spelling and grammar errors, you will gain more respect for your work and more readers of your blog.
That’s about all there is to it. I’m sure you can handle that without any problems and if so you will be ahead of a large portion of your competition and on your way to a successful internet marketing career.
How to Find a Profitable Blog Topic in 3 Steps
There’s no arguing that blogging is definitely one of the best ways to start an internet marketing business and make money online. But you can’t think about blogging like you do when creating an information product where you plan to sell as many as possible as quickly as you can then move on to creating something else. Blogging online is a lot like publishing a magazine or newspaper offline. You’re creating an internet business and hopefully a loyal following that will visit your blog on a regular basis. These visitors will make money for you by purchasing products through your affiliate links, clicking on your ads, or doing whatever else is needed in order for you to make money from your blog.
If you work to get high search engine rankings and build a large readership, you can make money blogging — A lot of it! This is not going to take place over the next month or two. Building a successful blog is more like a six to twelve month strategy. But you’re building an asset that will continue to earn money for you well into the future, and the rewards are more than worth the effort.
The topic you choose for your blog is actually very important. It’s not just matter of throwing up a blog on anything and making money from it. You need a topic that has a good market of people on the internet interested in it and has profit potential. That means it has a market of buyers and there are affiliate products, CPA offers, Google ads, etc… That your visitors will take action on so that you can make money from all your hard work.
Here are a few steps that will help you in finding a profitable topic (niche) for your blog.
1) If you can find on a topic that you already know a lot about or at least that you are interested in learning more about, and it has profit potential, then you will be far ahead of most people. Knowing a fair amount about a topic helps in multiple ways. For one thing, you won’t have to do nearly as much research and it will be a lot easier to keep your blog updated. Also, you can usually tell by the way someone writes if they actually know what they are writing about or if they had to look it up. Their words have that ring of truth and experience that even the best researcher can’t fake.
Even more importantly is that a blog is not a short term thing. It’s a longer term deal that you will be writing on for a very long time. If you do it right, you are going to be “living” with your blog every day, and hopefully earning a living from it. Unless you are really interested in your topic and knowledgeable about it, you could easily get sick of your blog very quickly. That would cause you to slow down on your content writing or quit altogether, which will result in your blog going down the drain quickly
2) Make sure you do your homework before diving in. You can use Google’s external keyword tool to get a feel for how many times per month a certain keyword phrase is searched. Another thing you need to do is to check out who’s advertising in your niche. Having a number of advertisers is good. No advertisers or only a few advertisers doesn’t necessarily mean your niche is untapped. Most likely it means that your niche is not profitable for some reason. You don’t want an overabundance of competition to the point where it will be extremely hard for your blog to compete, but some competition is healthy because it typically means there’s money to be made.
3) Make a list of all the top to mid-range keywords in the niche you chose and build your blog to be optimized for them. You should also write your blog posts around these keywords. You can easily search engine optimize (SEO) a blog post by including the keyword phrase you want to rank for in your title, the first sentence of the post and sprinkled throughout the post content.
If you follow these three simple things, you will already be off to a great start and on the path to make money blogging. Skip them and you could be in for a lot of wasted time and no income from your blog. Now, get out there and start blogging!
How to Get More Traffic to Your Blog
Having a blog is a great way to build an business website or use it as one of your internet marketing strategies for your online business. Of course, your blog is pretty much worthless if nobody ever visits it. So you need to get as much traffic to your blog as you possibly can.
Here are several ways for how to get more traffic to your blog:
* Link Building – Using different SEO strategies such as building backlinks is extremely important for getting more traffic to your blog, and for internet marketing in general. There are many different ways to get backlinks. You should utilize as many of the ways as possible to get as many backlinks as possible. This is something you will continually do throughout the life of your blog but you won’t have to do it as much once you get high search engine rankings.
* Article Marketing – This is one way to get backlinks but it’s also a great way to get direct traffic to your blog. You write useful and informative articles on various topics in your niche and submit them to article directories. You’re hitting two birds with one stone when you utilize this internet marketing strategy.
* Comment on Other Blogs – As with article marketing this is a good way to get backlinks to help with search engine rankings and get direct traffic from the link you leave in your blog comments. To do this all you need to do is visit other people’s blogs in your niche and leave useful and relevant comments on posts that interest you.
* Guest Blogging – A great internet marketing strategy to get more traffic to your blog is to write guest posts for other blogs. Contact other bloggers in your niche and ask them if you can send them a guest post. Many will say yes. You’ll get a lot of visitors from their blog and at least one link back to your website to help with SEO. Just make sure you write very high quality and completely original guest posts or nobody will publish them.
* Social Sites – Social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter along with social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious, and Mixx can be good ways to get more traffic to your blog.
* Video Marketing – Creating marketing videos can be a great way to get more traffic to your blog. The videos don’t have to be anything extraordinary either. Just create basic videos, post them on YouTube or other video site, and include a link back to your blog.
* Pay Per Click (PPC) – This takes some money and it also takes a lot of knowledge so be careful with this one if you don’t know what you are doing. If you take the time to properly learn how to use PPC, such as Google Adwords, it can be extremely beneficial to your internet business. PPC can generate a lot of targeted traffic to your blog and can make you a lot of money.
Use all of the above marketing strategies and you will certainly get a lot of traffic to your internet business blog and make money from it.
