Two Steps To Build A List of Proven Buyers

It’s a very bad kept secret that the money is in the list. Yeah, I know, I know…You’ve heard it all before.

However, that doesn’t change the fact that the money really is in the list! You can’t get away from that fact, so if you’re really serious about making money online and building a business, you need to start your list TODAY.

And even though you may not have a list yet, you’ve probably heard the whole process on how to do it before. Create a product yourself or get someone to create it for you, set up a squeeze page/sales page and start to generate lots of traffic to that page, and then give away the product as an incentive for people to subscribe. That’s how the process is, in short.

But while building your list you should also start building relationships with your subscribers. “But how do you connect and build relationships with your list right away?”.

1. Deliver Massive Value

Oone way you can do it is to simply bring MASSIVE value to the table. If you over-deliver like crazy, people will start to notice you and get their eyes up for you. If you create a product and you think it’s well worth over $50 bucks, give it away for free. Yes, you read that right – FREE! That’s how you over-deliver…Getting people to subscribe to your list, won’t give you much money.

Then again…It’s called “The Money Is IN The List”.

Not in the process on getting people to subscribe TO your list. That’s the difference. Because what you should focus on is to build relationships before you even think about making some money. Take it slow, take your time and build your list day by day.

2. Don’t Be Afraid To Sell Things

That said, you CAN make some money and at the same time actually solidify your relationship. And if you ask me, this is the best way to build a list – not because of the money you’ll make, as it won’t be a lot, but because of the kind of subscribers you’ll remain with in the end.

Let me explain…

Instead of (or in addition to) creating a product you think will be well worth over $50 that you give away for free on your squeeze page, you can create a product you think will be well worth over $200 bucks and put it up on your sales page and sell it for $27 bucks, for example. Again, this will make your customers LOVE you, because they won’t believe the kind of value you’ve given them for the low price of $27 dollars!

So, again, you’ll immediately start to connect and build relationships with your list, and my guess is that they like you and want to stay on your list to see you provide them with more high-value content and products. And that’s a really good spot to be in when you’re an Internet Marketer!

Another thing most people don’t really think too much about is that by building your list this way you’ll remain with people who are willing to spend money and buy things that might help them. That is, you’ll get a list of proven buyers, and that is one of the most profitable assets you can have.

Good luck with your list!

4 Internet Marketing Strategies You Must Know

The post basically lists four Internet marketing strategies that few bloggers are aware of. In fact one of them was completely new to me as well, and I have been working in this industry for many years. The idea is simple but pretty clever: to put a customer testimonial on your Paypal checkout page. Here is a quotation from the article:

Strategy Three: The Paypal Checkout Testimonial

One thing I’ve noticed with product launches – especially the Cloud Blogging launch – is that a lot of people will click on our Buy Now button, but not actually purchase the item. There is a measure for this called the “Cart Abandonment Rate” and our CAR was as high as 90% on some occasions.

I spoke with a few people on this topic, and watched some relevant marketing material, and was told that I should add a step between the sale and the Add to Cart screen. The reason people are more likely to click on an Add to Cart button in the first place is because it doesn’t imply commitment compared to words like Buy Now!.

Therefore, if you’re sending that traffic to an instant payment page, they often back out of the deal. The step, they told me, was a good place to insert product testimonials so further convince people that your offering is good.

Instead of adding an entirely new page, I took advantage of a little known feature in Paypal. The ability to add your own header to the Paypal payment pages. In this header I used a testimonial from one of our customers. Thanks to this, our cart abandonment rate has decreased dramatically.

Search Engine Optimization SEO Checklist

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Checklist Google SEO Checklist Googe Ranking Factors

SEO Factor
Brief SEO Checklsit Information

Keyword in Domain Name/URL

MainKeyword(s) should always appear in the URL and if possible in thedomain name.

Keyword in Title

Main keyword should be as close to the beginning as possible. Don't stuff your title though! Don't use special characters.

Keyword in Meta Description Tag

Use1 to 2 reasonable sentences in your meta description and use yourkeywords at least once.

Keywords Meta Tag

Main keyword should be as close to the beginning as possible. Don'tuse more than about 10 keywords. Don't repeat any single word more thantwice!

Keyword Density in the body

There is no recommended or perfect keyword density, but don't use more than 15% to 20% per main keyword.

Keywords in header tags

Most important isH1, then follow H2, and H3. The others are proably not that important.

Keyword proximity

The closer the keywords are, the better they might rank.

Order of key phrases

Try to order your keywords so that they form key phrases that might be queried for more often in search engines.

Keyword frequency

The most important main keyword should be repeated more than the others. However, don't spam the keyword in nonsensical points.

Keyword prominence

The earlier the main keyword appears on the page, the higher its relevance.

Keyword in ALT and TITLE tags

Describe the image and if possible with one of the main keywords, however, never spam the ALT tag, this is a common SEO mistake!

Keyword Anchor Text

Try to have keywords in your inbound anchor texts, that are links that direct to subpages of your site.

Keyword Stemming

Stem your keywords. Use singular, plural, past forms, etc.

Keyword Semantics

Make use of synonyms and don't spam your site with one and the same keyword.

No excessive deep linking

Check that all your pages can be reached with no more than 3 or 4 clicks!

Page to Page Linking

Try to link to appropriate subpages from a related subpage.

Domain Name Extension

.EDUand .ORG seem to be very important. For any .COM domain it is a littlemore difficult to prove trustworthiness and relevance due to the hugeamount of spamming sites.

File Sizes

Never exceed more than 100kb per page. Try to keep below 40kb per page.

Hyphenate file names

Do never use more than 4 words in the file name, as this indicates spam.

Fresh and new contents

Google loves new and regularly updated contents, so do your visitors!

Total length of URL

Keepit at a minimum. That does not mean that you should not use mor than 60characters.

How To Get Your Website On Google

Most Internet users rely on Google and other search engines to find information online. If you are building a website, therefore, it is very important to get your site listed on those search engines. But how do you achieve that? In this article will explain the two options you have.
Direct Submission – Not Effective Anymore

Virtually all search engines have a direct submission option. That is, they have a specific page where you can go and submit the URL of your website, to notify the search engine about its existence.

You can visit Google’s submission page to see an example.

When search engines first appeared, this method was the best one, because the search index was created almost manually. These days, however, search engines rely on automated web crawlers and algorithms to index the web almost in real time, so the direct submission is no longer an efficient option.

In fact here is what Google says on its submission page: “We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.”

Moreover, there is the fact that most low quality and spam websites resort to the direct submission, hoping it will help them to appear on Google. That is why search engines pick the websites that get submitted to them with a grain of salt.
Getting Backlinks – The Best Way

As we mentioned above, these days search engines have a very sophisticated technology to crawl and index the web. They are capable of discovering new links in a matter of hours, and if that link points to a website that is not in their index yet, they’ll add it on the fly.

That is why the best way to get your website listed on Google is to get other websites linking to your own site (when another site links to yours it is called a backlink). If you manage to get an authoritative site on your niche to link to your site, Google will probably index you within 24 hours. Even if you just get links from average sites, you should still be included in Google’s index within 48 to 72 hours.

Not sure how to get backlinks? Here are some simple methods you can use:
1. Ask Friends to Link to Your Website

If you have friends who have their own websites or blogs, ask them to link to your website. They could write a post recommending your website to their readers, for example, or simply include a link to your website on their sidebar.
2. Submit Your Website to Web Directories

Getting your website listed on web directories won’t send you much traffic, and it won’t give you fantastic search rankings either, but it should be enough to let Google discover and index your website. Here is a list with hundreds of web directories you can use.
3. Submit Content to Article Directories

When you submit an article to a directory, it will publish the article on its website, including an author byline. You are allowed to include a link to your website on that byline, and that is how you can get backlinks by submitting content to these directories. Here is a list with the top 50 article directories on the web.
4. Join Online Forums and Put A Link To Your Site on the Signature

Most online forums allow their members to create a signature, and you can also include a link to your website on that signature. After you create your member account and setup your signature, therefore, it will be a matter of writing posts in the forum, and each post will count as a backlink. You can use the Big-Boards.com site to find online forums in your niche.
Checking If Your Site Is Indexed

Once you get some backlinks to your website and wait a couple of days, how do you check to see if the site is already indexed or not?

The right way to do it is to use the “site:” parameter on Google. That is, search for “site:yourdomainname.com” on Google. If your website is already indexed, the first result should be your homepage, and the other results represent the internal pages that Google also indexed from your site. Here is a screenshot of this search query for our own website:

indexed-by-google
The Sandbox Effect

One common mistake webmasters make is to search on Google for the name of their website, expecting to find it there right away. When they don’t, they freak out and start thinking that something is wrong.

For example, let’s suppose that you just launched a website called SuperCars.com. You put some content there, get some backlinks, and then you use the “site:” parameter to see if it is indexed. It is. You then search on Google for “super cars,” hoping to find your site there, but it is nowhere to be found, even when you look on the second, third and fourth page of results.

Is there something wrong here? No. This is a perfectly normal pattern, and people call it “the sandbox effect.”

Google basically has a separate index, the sandbox, where it places all newly discovered websites. When websites are on the sandbox, they won’t appear in the search results for normal search queries, like “super cars. Why is that? Because Google still needs to evaluate whether the website is legitimate or not (i.e., that it has unique content, that it doesn’t have spam or malicious content and so on).

Once Google verifies that the website is legitimate, it will move it out of the sandbox and into the main index. That is when the site will start ranking for normal search queries, and that is when the owner of SuperCars.com would be able to find its website when searching for “super cars.”

How long does it take to get out of the sandbox? It varies from site to site. Sometimes it happens in one month, other times it takes three or four months.

The best way to make sure you’ll get out of the sandbox as soon as possible is to keep publishing unique content on your site to keep getting backlinks from quality and relevant websites.

5 Tips for Using Google Webmaster Tools

5 Tips for Using Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools is a free toolset that’s absolutely invaluable for SEO trouble shooting.

It’s pretty simple to set up, you just need to verify that you’re the site owner (there are a number of ways to do this, so just use the one that is best for you) and you’ll have instant access to an abundance of useful information that will help you to improve your website and your search engine optimisation (SEO).

Here are five tips that will get you started:
1. Crawl Stats

Crawl Stats give you information in Google’s crawling activity for the last 90 day period. When you click into this report which is located in Diagnostics, you’ll see three reports:

Pages crawled per day: Overall, it’s a good sign to see this graph going up. Whilst there are peaks and troughs, you’ll be able to see if there is a steady incline, decline or no change at all. Spikes in this report are often due to the introduction of new pages or an increase in inbound links.

Kilobytes crawled per day: This graph should bear some resemblance to the Pages crawled per day graph in terms of the peaks and troughs in the graph.

Time spent downloading a page: This graph will be different from the above two and is likely (hopefully) to not show as many peaks. Peaks on this graph could be a server problem as in the norm, Google should not take very long downloading your pages.

These stats are useful for diagnosing problems and gauging performance issues.
2. Not Found Errors

Not found crawl errors are very useful for usability & SEO. If customers are browsing around your site and finding that links are not taking them anywhere, they’re likely to get annoyed and go elsewhere. This tool (which is accessed on the top right of the dashboard) will identify all not found URLs in your site. Be aware, that this can sometimes be slightly outdated, and Google state:

    If you don’t recognize these URLs and/or don’t think they should be accessible, you can safely ignore these errors. If, however, you see URLs listed in the ‘Not found’ section that you recognize and would like crawled, we hope you find the ‘Details’ column helpful in identifying and fixing the errors.

So don’t dwell too much on getting this down to 0 errors in GWT, just use the information to improve site usability.

As well as links from within your site that are leading to a 404, this will also show you links from outside sites that are leading to a 404. This aspect is particularly valuable for SEO. Use this feature in GWT to do is identify the linked to pages within your site that no longer exist and redirect those pages to a real page within your site. This tactic will lead to increased link juice and increased visitors.
3. Meta Descriptions and Title Tags

Google Webmaster Tools will provide you with a list of URLs that have problems in their title tags or Meta descriptions, this list will include duplicates as well as incidences of titles or Meta descriptions that are too long or too short. Go into Diagnostics and HTML suggestions to find this information. Duplicate meta titles, especially can affect your rankings within Google and meta descriptions should be snappy and targeted to each specific page to help CTR of each page on your site.
4. Top Search Queries

Whilst you can get your top search queries out of Google Analytics or whatever analytics tool you use, I particularly like the Webmaster Tools version for the simple reason that it shows your average position within Google as part of the data. This enables you to look at your top search terms by position. The reason this is helpful is that when deciding which keywords to push, I particularly like to focus on the keywords that are currently in positions 2-4 as increases in positions at this level will have the most increased in traffic.
5. Site Links

If your site had a list of links below its Google listing, you can use the sitelink section within Site Configuration to control the links that are shown. You can’t actually tell Google which links to show, but you can block links that you don’t want shown.

These are just a few of the many tools available in Google Webmaster Tools and Google often add new features to this great tool. If you’re not a regular user of GWT, try these features out for size and look around to get used to other features on offer. If you are a regular user of GWT, let us know your favourite features and why

Tools and Resources for Keyword Research

Tools and Resources for Keyword Research
Researching keywords is an important activity for website owners and bloggers alike. Often times, however, people are not sure about what tools to use. Below you will find a list with my favorite resources for this purpose.

1. SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

This is tool uses the Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing engine) to produce estimations of monthly search volume.

seobookkeywordssuggestion.gif

Basically it gets the number of monthly searches reported by Yahoo! and divides it by two to find the MSN results and multiply it by two to find the Google results. It is a versatile tool because apart from the estimated search volume, it also brings links to several other tools and queries.

2. Google Trends

Google Trends allows you to compare the traffic levels of search queries along the time. You can insert up to five search queries, and the results can be filtered by region and time span.
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/wp-content/uploads/googletrends.png
googletrends.png

This tool is particularly useful when you are working with a limited number of keywords or terms, and when you need to see the evolution of the traffic related to each of these keywords.

3. Wordtracker.com

Wordtracker is a paid service ($300 yearly or $30 weekly), but it comes with a free trial tool which can be used after registering on their website.

wordtracker.png

The advantage of Wordtracker is that come with extra featured, including a keyword thesaurus and lateral search terms. You can use this tool, therefore, when you are not completely sure about the keywords you will be targeting

4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic

4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic
One of the most common complaints that I hear from bloggers is the fact that no matter how hard they try, they can’t grow their blogs past 100 or so daily page vies. Those early days are indeed the hardest, because you need to put hard work in without the certainty of achieving results.

If you are in that same situation, here is a simple strategy that will certainly increase your blog traffic and make you break the 1,000 daily page views mark. In fact, the strategy could be used even if your are already over that number but have reached a traffic plateau lately.

Just make sure to execute the 4 steps as planned and to spend the two hours and a half every day (obviously if you have more time available you can expand the time spent on each of the four steps proportionally).
First Step: Killer Articles (1 hour per day)

Spend one hour brainstorming, researching and writing killer articles (also called linkbaits, pillar articles and so on).

Notice that your goal is to release one killer article every week. If that is not possible aim for one every 15 days. So the one hour that you will spend every day will be dedicated to the same piece. In other words, expect killers articles to take from 5 up to 10 hours of work.

If you are not familiar with the term, a killer article is nothing more than a long and structured article that has the goal of delivering a huge amount of value to potential visitors. If you have a web design blog, for example, you could write an article with “100 Free Resources for Designers”. Here are some ideas for killer articles:

    * create a giant list of resources,
    * write a detailed tutorial teaching people how to do something,
    * find a solution for a common problem in your niche and write about it, or
    * write a deep analysis on a topic where people have only talked superficially

When visitors come across your killer article, you want them to have the following reaction: “Holy crap! This is awesome. I better bookmark it. Heck, I better even mention this on my site and on my Twitter account, to let my readers and friends know about it.”
Second Step: Networking (30 minutes per day)

Networking is essential, especially when you are just getting started. The 30 minutes that you will dedicate to it every day could be split among:

    * commenting on other blogs in your niche,
    * linking to the posts of bloggers in your niche, and
    * interacting with the bloggers in your niche via email, IM or Twitter.

Remember that your goal is to build genuine relationships, so don’t approach people just because you think they can help to promote your blog. Approach them because you respect their work and because you think the two of you could grow together.
Third Step: Promotion (30 minutes per day)

The first activity here is the promotion of your killer articles. Whenever you publish one of them, you should push it in any way you can. Examples include:

    * letting the people in your network know about it (don’t beg for a link though),
    * letting bloggers and webmasters in relevant niches know about it,
    * getting some friends to submit the article to social bookmarking sites,
    * getting some friends to Twitter the article, and
    * posting about the article in online forums and/or newsgroups.

If there is time left, spend it with search engine optimization, social media marketing and activities to promote your blog as whole. Those can range from keyword research to promoting your blog on Facebook and guest blogging.
Fourth Step: Normal Posts (30 minutes per day)

Just like a man does not live by bread alone, a blog does not live by killer articles alone. Normal posts are the ones that you will publish routinely in your blog, between the killer articles. For example, you could publish a killer article every Monday and normal posts from Tuesday through Friday. Here are some ideas for normal posts:

    * a post linking to an article on another blog and containing your opinion about it
    * a post informing your readers about a news in your niche
    * a post asking a question to your readers and aiming to initiate a discussion
    * a post highlighting a new resource or trick that you discovered and that would be useful to your readers

While killers articles are essential to promote your blog and bring new readers aboard, normal posts are the ones that will create diversity in your content and keep your readers engaged.