What’s All This Fuss About Google Plus?

Posted on August 13, 2011 by besters

There is a lot of buzz spin­ning around over Google’s release of the new social net­work plat­form, Google+ (or Google Plus). Right now you can only gain access to the site by invi­ta­tion from some­one else already con­nected, but mil­lions of peo­ple have already been con­nected in. The fast growth is prob­a­bly due at least par­tially to the sense of exclu­siv­ity that comes from the invitation-only deal. Yet, any­one involved with online mar­ket­ing or web­site pro­mo­tion has their ears perked up at this lat­est devel­op­ment as well.

You may be inter­ested in join­ing in the fun and grow­ing your cir­cles of friends, but you have an even deeper inter­est in learn­ing about Google Plus if you rely upon SEO to gain traf­fic to your web­sites. Right now, there might not be a direct impact and you are likely going about your busi­ness as usual, but your eyes and ears should be tuned to devel­op­ments with Google+.

Data Col­lec­tion in Social Media

Google isn’t jump­ing into the social net­work­ing mar­ket just because it is incred­i­bly pop­u­lar today. They don’t nec­es­sar­ily want to take down Face­book or MySpace. They are pri­mar­ily after data col­lec­tion. Users of social net­work­ing sites will­ingly hand over tons of infor­ma­tion about their life, their loca­tion, their fam­i­lies, and most impor­tantly, what they love and hate. This is valu­able infor­ma­tion that Google can use in the search engine business.

The goal of the Google search engine is to take what their cus­tomers (searchers) want to find or learn and deliver a list of rel­e­vant, high qual­ity web­sites, blogs, videos and images that will meet their needs. The more accu­rate they are in doing this and the bet­ter con­tent sug­ges­tions they offer, the more searchers will come to them rather than other search engines.

What could help them deliver the most rel­e­vant and use­ful sites bet­ter than cold hard fig­ures telling them which web­sites, blogs, images and videos real peo­ple find the most valu­able? This is data that can be col­lected through the cir­cles fea­ture on Google Plus and then directly applied to the rank­ing of web­sites in the Google search engine.

This has a direct impact on every­one using SEO to bring traf­fic to their sites. The sites that get the most “+1″ clicks could rise to the top of the SERPs even if they aren’t nec­es­sar­ily the ones using the best SEO strate­gies. This cre­ates a whole new game that peo­ple like you have to play if they want to remain highly ranked in the SERPs.

Some­thing to Watch Out For

Most peo­ple are now aware of Google Plus, but not every­one has fig­ured out how it could impact them. Some believe it is just another social net­work­ing tool and don’t yet see how it could impact the world of search engine opti­miza­tion and online mar­ket­ing in gen­eral. Those that take SEO seri­ously are watch­ing to see how fast Google Plus advances and what they decide to do with the data they have already started collecting.

What does this mean to you? Are you scram­bling to get your foot in the door with Google Plus? Are you try­ing to fig­ure out this new sys­tem so you are among the first to get advanced SERP rat­ings? Do you have some ideas of how Google+ could be used for mar­ket­ing and SEO?

If not, it’s okay, but you should at least have your eye on this lat­est Google development.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online mar­ket­ing agency pro­vid­ing Sin­ga­pore SEO ser­vices.

Find out more about OOm SEO ser­vices today.

Please feel free to repub­lish this arti­cle on your web­site, or dis­trib­ute it to your friends or clients, as long as you leave the resource box intact.

Arti­cle Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6487458

Share
Posted in Everything Google Related | 12 Comments

Keeping Your Subscribers Happy — 3 Expert Tips

Posted on August 9, 2011 by besters

In order to build a prof­itable email list, you need highly-targeted sub­scribers. You need sub­scribers that have a prob­lem that they des­per­ately need solved and they should see you, their list keeper, as their sav­ior. If you can build the author­ity, rel­e­vancy and trust that’s required to con­struct a highly-profitable email list, then you’ll go on to become a very wealthy per­son. Of course, that is if you can keep your list happy. The fol­low­ing tips will help you become the best list keeper ever so that your prof­itable list keeps prof­it­ing for years to come.

Treat Your Sub­scribers With Respect

When you were grow­ing up, you were prob­a­bly taught the Golden Rule. Treat oth­ers as you would like to be treated. That’s the same way you should treat your tar­get audi­ence. Put your­self in their shoes. Would you like to be bom­barded with email after email pitch­ing the same prod­uct over and over again? Hell no! Behav­ior like that would get annoy­ing very quickly and you’d likely unsub­scribe from such a spammy list.

Instead, you should send out emails reg­u­larly, but spaced far enough apart so as not to annoy any­one on your list. And make sure you com­mu­ni­cate with your audi­ence that you’ll never share or trade their email addresses with any­one. And never sell your list unless you get permission.

Be Use­ful

There is noth­ing worse than being sold to again and again when you’re not inter­ested. And your sub­scribers are going to feel the same way if they keep get­ting bom­barded with the same tired offers. Instead, make sure your email com­mu­ni­ca­tions are rel­e­vant and, most of all, useful.

The best autore­spon­der email series are those that offer tips, tricks, hints and tech­niques for com­plet­ing var­i­ous goals within your sub­ject mat­ter. For instance, if your list is com­prised of diet­ing women over 40, you might send out an email that reads, “Top 10 Tricks for Women for Keep­ing Travel Pounds Off” or some­thing to that effect. The emails should con­tain con­tent that the sub­scriber will actu­ally look for­ward to receiv­ing. If you keep up the trend of only offer­ing use­ful con­tent, your list sub­scribers will remain happy and they cer­tainly won’t mind if you ‘occa­sion­ally’ throw in some prod­uct and ser­vice rec­om­men­da­tions that you feel they should check out.

Go Easy With Your Offers

When it comes to offer­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices to your list sub­scribers, remem­ber the first rule, “Treat your sub­scribers with respect.” Your sub­scribers will not appre­ci­ate it if you are force­ful with your offers. Instead, go easy and give your sub­scribers room and time to check the offers out for them­selves. This is called ‘Attrac­tion Mar­ket­ing’ and it works much bet­ter than force­ful sales techniques.

It works like this: When you have a prod­uct or ser­vice that you’d like to offer to your sub­scribers, you should han­dle it like this:

***

“Dear Sub­scribers,

I have a con­fes­sion to make. I have been hold­ing onto some vital infor­ma­tion and I can’t wait to tell you about it. I haven’t been hold­ing out on you out of nefar­i­ous rea­sons, quite the oppo­site. I wanted to wait until I was able to ver­ify this infor­ma­tion before I released it to you. See, I would never think of offer­ing you impor­tant infor­ma­tion that wasn’t ver­i­fied, just like I refuse to offer you prod­ucts and ser­vices that I haven’t actu­ally used myself. I respect you much more than that. And that’s why I couldn’t tell you what I’m about to tell you until now.

Thirty-days ago, I pur­chased a prod­uct. It’s designed to get rid of acne once and for all. I know, you’ve heard it all before. And so have I. But this prod­uct isn’t like any­thing I’ve ever seen before. In fact, if you’ve been keep­ing up with my emails so far, you know that I’m in the same boat as you. I’ve tried all the creams, lotions, pills and potions. And I’ve been to the doc­tor who only wants to pre­scribe expen­sive and dan­ger­ous med­ica­tions and oper­a­tions. But I knew the moment I saw this prod­uct that it was dif­fer­ent, and I also knew it was the real deal.

Are you ready to see it?”

***

Do you see how the email slowly builds up to the prod­uct? By the time you get to the actual link, the sub­scriber won’t be able to wait to click on it. If you can pro­duce emails like that and you only choose top-notch prod­ucts and ser­vices that are actu­ally worth the money, you’ll make more sales, more com­mis­sions and you’ll achieve your online mar­ket­ing goals.

And that’s all it takes to keep a list happy. If you can remain rel­e­vant and you can main­tain your author­ity over your niche, your sub­scribers will con­tinue to come to you for answers to their prob­lems. They’ll look for­ward to your emails and they’ll click on your links. They’ll com­pletely trust you and you’ll soon form a bond that can’t eas­ily be bro­ken. That’s the kind of list you want and if you fol­low these tips, that’s exactly the type of list you’ll end up with.

To learn more about how to build a highly-targeted email list that pro­duces again and again for years to come, visit The Fortune-Niche Ones ( http://thefortune-nicheones.com ), where we con­struct made-to-order Inter­net mar­ket­ing packages.

Arti­cle Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6463454
Share
Posted in List Building | 4 Comments

Hi, it’s Nick here just a quick note to say I’ve uploaded another video into the Video Vault for your perusal — No.16 — How to use TinyURL to cloak an affil­i­ate link. Great for all you affil­i­ate mar­keters out there!

Happy view­ing!

Share
Posted on August 7, 2011 by NickB | 9 Comments

Who Else Wants To Be An Entrepreneur?

Posted on August 3, 2011 by NickB

I believe that any­one is capa­ble of becom­ing an entre­pre­neur. In fact, if you have not con­sid­ered this avenue as an alter­na­tive to being an employee, then it’s time to take notice of what’s going on around you. Research indi­cates that at least 90% of employ­ees feel deeply unsat­is­fied and unful­filled in their cur­rent occu­pa­tion… can you remem­ber the last time you received a bonus?

Dis­cov­er­ing the Entre­pre­neur in You

The ben­e­fits of becom­ing an entre­pre­neur are crys­tal clear and very promis­ing. But how would you know that you are des­tined for this path? Do you have the char­ac­ter­is­tics of what it takes to become an entre­pre­neur? Take a look at the fol­low­ing attrib­utes of suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neurs. If you agree with each of these state­ments and believe that you have them in you, then you have the poten­tial of being the next suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur, poten­tially gen­er­at­ing mil­lions from your business.

  • Suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neurs con­sis­tently act on their goals and com­plete what they have started.
  • They have an open mind and are open to all pos­si­bil­i­ties and always look on the pos­i­tive side of every­thing. In other words, they can turn a neg­a­tive into a positive.
  • For the bud­ding entre­pre­neur, integrity is more impor­tant than haste and rep­u­ta­tion is far more valu­able than money.
  • They under­stand the mean­ing of respon­si­bil­ity and take full account­abil­ity over the deci­sions and sub­se­quent actions they make.
  • They see fail­ures as a nat­ural part of their growth cycle and any mis­takes as the fuel that keeps them going.
  • Finally, suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neurs did not do it all by them­selves; they had, con­tinue to have and recog­nise the value in hav­ing a mentor.

How to Become the Entre­pre­neur that is Wait­ing to Come Out

What sets you apart from the herd? Who are you and why would any­one care about your prod­ucts and ser­vices? You need to iden­tify what’s unique about you or what oth­ers refer to as your X-factor. This so-called X-factor should be well-founded and care­fully estab­lished. In other terms, this X-factor is your very own brand, your per­sonal brand or your USP. When defin­ing your brand, you have to seri­ously think about YOU — what sep­a­rates you from the rest and what exper­tise you are proud to offer your customers.

Once you have iden­ti­fied your brand, the next step is to build on it. Build­ing your brand involves keep­ing watch of your every action and tak­ing care of your tar­get audience.

Believ­ing Means Achieving

Just like any busi­ness, start­ing an online busi­ness needs your full atten­tion and total com­mit­ment from day one. Sim­ply believ­ing that you will suc­ceed is not enough; you have to act towards your goal of suc­cess. Adver­tise, make sales and pro­vide a top-notch ser­vice. Keep a vision book and have clear, medium-to-long term goals. For exam­ple, by 5 August 2016 I will have £1.2m in the bank, a BMW X5, a £500,000 house, a gar­dener and a house­keeper. Try to be as spe­cific as you can; the more detail the bet­ter. And when the day is over, think about this real­i­sa­tion: ‘How much I have kept from today is of more value than how much I made.’ One of the quick­est ways to boost the income of your busi­ness is through increas­ing your sav­ings. But this process is not easy and requires con­stant effort and learn­ing. You will need to be aware of how to estab­lish your busi­ness iden­tity in the mar­ket­place, how to max­i­mize your profit and how to plan your daily oper­a­tions. More­over, you will have to learn under­stand­ing the indus­try, the dif­fer­ent laws involved in attrac­tion mar­ket­ing and the over­all sta­tus of your busi­ness. I will be fol­low­ing up this arti­cle soon with oth­ers in a sim­i­lar vein. Watch this space.

Your entre­pre­neur­ial jour­ney con­sists of con­sis­tent learn­ing as well as thor­ough imple­men­ta­tion. What you have just read here is only a taster of a much big­ger learn­ing oppor­tu­nity, an intro­duc­tion to the real world of online busi­ness and the start of an emo­tional roller-coaster that will lead you to a much-anticipated suc­cess­ful and reward­ing life.

Click here to know more about start­ing an online busi­ness in as lit­tle as 30 days.

Nick Best­wick is a part-time inter­net mar­keter, writer and edi­tor. He has writ­ten dozens of arti­cles that were pub­lished both online and offline. Writ­ing is his pas­sion and can write about pretty much any topic in minutes.

Share
Posted in Personal Development | 28 Comments

How To Rank Highly on Google

Posted on July 28, 2011 by NickB

Here are some tips that will help you get your web­site a high rank­ing on Google.

The most impor­tant part of select­ing key­words is doing the proper research. Use the free tools that are out there for you. Google AdWords key­word tool is prob­a­bly the best, but you may want to con­sider pay­ing for a more exten­sive pro­gram. Word­Tracker is my favorite but if you don’t have the funds that’s OK.

After you have picked your niche next is the domain name. Keep as many key­words in the name as pos­si­ble but keep the name short, prob­a­bly no more than 70 char­ac­ters. It’s ok to use hyphens but try not to use more than one. You want to make it easy to remember.

Use long tail key­words or key­word phrases of three words. The search engines love long tail key­words. Try and use them in the title and descrip­tion. Remem­ber, if you want your web­site to rank high, Google doesn’t like den­sity any longer so don’t try to cram a lot of key­words in. Let them flow nat­u­rally. Also what­ever the topic is use brand names in the con­tent that will attract the search engine. For exam­ple if you’re talk­ing about dog treats use the brand, Sargeants, Hartz,whatever. This makes the topic rel­e­vant and rec­og­niz­able and keeps it from look­ing like spam to the search engine.

As for the page names, use key­words in the title. You’re not going to rank high using the domain name as the header for each page. Make the name rel­e­vant with what’s on the page. This keeps you from using the same key­words over and over and makes the page rank higher.

Try to keep as much con­tent about the topic as pos­si­ble on the back pages. You don’t want it to look like sales copy. The rea­son peo­ple are search­ing on Google is infor­ma­tion not a prod­uct to buy. They will sniff out sales copy quickly and move on. It’s the rel­e­vant con­tent that attracts the search engine and the reader result­ing in higher Google rank­ing. Think of the prod­uct ad more as decoration.

A more sub­tle way to work the prod­uct in is a link in con­tent. For exam­ple my dog will jump flips for Hartz dog bis­cuits with Hatrz dog bis­cuits being a link.

Many web­sites don’t use inter­nal links to their full advan­tage. Always include some inter­nal links with the page key­words in it and also link to the other pages of the site when­ever pos­si­ble. This will make each indi­vid­ual page rank higher in turn caus­ing the web­site to go higher on Google.

You can always pay for a higher rank­ing but if the con­tent isn’t strong enough the searcher will move on and you’ve wasted money. If the key­words are researched well enough and these tips are used your site will rank there nat­u­rally and you’ll have much more success.

Always use an ALT tag for the images, which is a short descrip­tion of the image using tar­geted key words. The image may not always be vis­i­ble to the reader so they know what is there. Click­able images work great also it’s hard to resist click­ing on an image and it helps the site get a high ranking.

The Google search engine isn’t look­ing at meta tags any longer but meta title and descrip­tion is impor­tant. Using key­words and key­word phrases will raise the web­site rank­ing. Remem­ber to keep the descrip­tion short or it all won’t be seen on the Google page.

As for link build­ing; do not pay for exter­nal links. Poor links will not get your web­site high on Google. Qual­ity is bet­ter than quan­tity. Google will sniff out the poor links and pass you up. It’s bet­ter to have the qual­ity con­nec­tions any­way. It helps your rep­u­ta­tion and raises your brand worth as well as Google ranking.

Use these tips and you will get your web­site high on Google.

Arti­cle Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6436647

Share
Posted in Everything Google Related | 579 Comments