Good Design Practices

March 29th, 2007

Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion. Reduce the number of images on your website. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size. Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content. Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors. Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

Here’s Why Paying For Your Traffic Is A Smart Move

March 24th, 2007

There are so many success stories you will hear about businesses making it good in the internet. The troubling thing is, there are maybe a tenfold or even a hundredfold of stories contradictory to theirs. Many have unsuccessfully launched a business enterprise that is internet based but only a handful shall succeed.

Is this through luck? That is even more remote. It takes good business sense and a lot of help and team effort. Most importantly, it is the eagerness to succeed and the determination to learn and the willingness to invest in a lot of hard work and some money.

The Very Basic

Like Neo, traffic is “The One”. Without traffic, all your effort would just go to waste. Every business needs customers, without them you wouldn’t have anyone to sell your products to. In the internet world traffic is the walk in customer. The more traffic you have the more people would be able to sell your products to.

But like any business that’s in every corner building or in the mall, not everyone that goes in will buy, but the greater of number that do come in to browse your merchandise, the greater number of people that will buy your products. It is a simple and known fact.

But, how do you get traffic, traffic large enough that could make a small percentage of eventual buyers enough to make a good profit. Many big companies generate traffic of tens of thousands a day and a measly ten to fifteen percent actually buys, but that small percentage is enough to provide them with good business.

Many of these success stories get their traffic from paying others. Yes that’s right; you have to spend money to make money. Advertising is the key. The more people that knows that your site exists; the more people would of course go to your site, that’s common sense.

While there are many ways that can get you advertising for free, this do not generate the same high volume as those methods that are getting paid. These paid advertisements include advertising schemes by Google and Yahoo.

The Value of Searches

The search and will be the easiest and fastest medium in finding what a person needs in the internet. Search engines have been very popular because they provide a vital service to many people. They are free and easy to use. With this popularity, they get many visitors and clicks that they are the most common sites that people go to. It is easy to understand why so many companies would pay to advertise with these search engines.

Search engines provide information to the millions of users that they have each day. They provide links to many sites that a user may be looking for. If your sites link pop up in the high ranks of the search results page, you get a great chance that they will go to your site. While search engine optimization is a cheaper and low cost way to get your site a high rank, paying for advertisements will ensure that you will be on the top ranks.

When you pay for your advertisements, it is like paying for your traffic. This may sound like not such a good idea, but the payoffs would tell a different story. When you pay for your traffic, you are guaranteed of a consistent traffic flow to your site. You will never go with an empty sales day.

Paying for your Traffic

Usually, you will be charged with the number of hits a link gets when your ads is clicked, this is called pay per click. For some search engines, you will be charged with the number of times your ad shows up when a certain keyword or keyword phrase is searched. It is imperative that you have good keyword content in your ad. There are many tools that aid you in using the right keyword for the right moment.

All the money you spend in paying for your traffic will not be for naught. You will get an impressive boost in traffic which will also result to a great boost in your sales figures. Paying for your traffic would be a really good idea and you will get all the benefits it has to offer.

 Author: (Paul Hardy)
Please visit my website at: 007-webhosting
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Effectively Using Overture-Yahoo To Get Website Visitors

March 23rd, 2007

Overture or now known as Yahoo because of Yahoo’s takeover, was the original inventor of the use of the P4P or Pay for Performance. Overture saw that the internet was fast becoming the easiest and most convenient way to shop, and advertising was going to hit at an all time high because of the many businesses in the arena.

To get a person to go to a site than others, it needs to be very visible. Providing ads that could direct potential consumers and costumers to their site would allow them to have an increase in traffic as well as sales. Yahoo provides a service that can put a site or company’s ad in their sites that can be shown when certain keywords are inputted.

Yahoo offers a chance for any company to increase their traffic by using their services. With more people being aware of your site, there would be more traffic and visitors to your site given the chance to view your pages as well as your products. With even a small percentage of successful sales, with a high traffic volume this could still be a substantial figure for your company.

Getting a consistent substantial flow of website visitors is every company’s goal. Many methods are devised and utilized to ensure that there would be more people to boost the sales and to be aware of the existence of such a product or service. Website visitors are potentially the life blood of your internet based business.

Yahoo/Overture utilizes the same principle as Google’s Adwords. In fact, they are very similar to each other that they use keyword and keyword phrase searches and to determine which ads to show per search. When a person types in a keyword or keyword phrase to search for anything, the search engines gives out the results in a page. Then at the right side of the page, you will see selected ads that have paid for their ads to be viewed with certain keywords and keyword phrases searched.

For example, Lets say you run a car parts retail/wholesale site. You choose keywords that can prompt or trigger your ads to be shown in the page when a keyword is searched. When a search engine user types in Honda Accord, your ad may come up if you have designated that as one of your keywords. You don’t need to fully optimize your site with Search Engine Optimization methods and techniques.

While some labor so hard to make their site one of the high ranking sites per keyword search, you get the chance to be on the top of the list or at least in the first page of a search result increasing your chance to be clicked on. With that, you drive traffic and website visitors to your site a lot faster.

You will have to pony up some cash when using this service though. There are different ways Yahoo/Overture will charge you. It may be in the number of Keywords or Keyword phrases your ad uses or in the many times your ad is clicked on. Others offer many other services like having your ad show up not only in the search engine pages but also with some third party sites.

Third party sites support ads that have the same theme or niche as them. With more areas your ad is shown, you increase the chances of people knowing about your site or product. With more website visitors you increase the sales of your site which makes your investment with your ads a wise one.

With so many competitions in the internet based businesses, it is necessary to take a huge leap forward from the pack by advertising. Yahoo/Overture will be a great place to start. Many have utilized their services and have reaped the rewards of this decision. It’s a marketing strategy that will increase your website visitors as well as increase your sales resulting to profit. 

It takes money to make money, while there are some methods that are basically low cost or free, using a marketing service such as what Yahoo/Overture offers will provide results faster and on a larger scale. Many businesses have learned this the hard way, don’t be counted with them.

Author: (Paul Hardy)
Please visit my website at: 007-webhosting
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How To Use A Tell A Friend Script To Drive Traffic Today

February 14th, 2007

More and more webmasters have the recurring dilemma on how to increase the flow of traffic in the websites. During the past few years many methods that been developed to solve this predicament. While most of them would work there are those that would not make even a small impact.

One of the methods that have spawned many success stories in driving traffic into websites is viral marketing. Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something to find informative, entertaining or amazing.

Many companies bank on this behavior to spread their products and increase the popularity of their company or their website. Viral marketing makes use of many mediums in enticing this behavior. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an addicting flash game, an amusing video and many others that may catch a person’s fancy.

This ingenious form of marketing is typically low cost and is a wonderful tool for any company to utilize. The benefit greatly overshadows the cost or efforts to initialize this marketing scheme. Any website would greatly benefit that viral marketing.

Tell A Friend Script

One of the easiest methods in viral marketing is using a tell a friend script. This is a simple programming script that you can attach to the programming of your website. Generally, tell a friends script are installed in pages where a media is placed so that a person can easily send the media to any of his friends or his family members.

The basic concept of  a tell a friend script is a script wherein a person may input his name, e-mail address, the recipient’s e-mail address and send the media to the intended recipient much like an e-mail with an attachment. As the recipient receives the e-mail he wouldn’t think of the mail a spam mail because he would see the sender’s name as someone he or she knows and trust.

Tell a friend script eliminates greatly the chances of being blocked because they use the information inputted by the sender. This allows for wider spreading of this marketing method. It can be quite sneaky but it is very effective.

With the e-mail sent and opened the sent media will either be read, viewed or played. Also along with the mail would be a brief description of the company or site that sponsors the media sent. This allows for the introduction of either the site, company name or its products. The along with it is another tell a friend script.

Then the process begins again. As more people use the tell a friend script, more and more people will know of the existence of the sponsoring company or site. People who read the ads inside the mail who liked what they see would go and click on the link and visit the site. This drives traffic into the site resulting to great number of potential customers.

Tell A Friend Script Availability

A tell a friend script is very simple and does not require a complicated method of programming. In fact, you can copy paste a script and simply put it on an intended page. Finding one is even simpler. All you have to do is go to a search engine and type in the search box “tell a friend script” then press enter or click go.

In the search results page you will see many links that will direct you to a site where you can get a tell a friend script. It would just be a simple matter of looking and searching for the script and copying it to your intended web page.

With a tell a friend script viral marketing strategy you can drive traffic into your site which could potentially spell profits. This is a simple harmless script that offers great benefits for low cost paired with great creativity and foresight.

Author: (Paul Hardy)
Please visit my website at: ebookarama
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and content must remain unchanged and the authors name
and contact information must be included.)

Top ten Scams To Avoid

February 8th, 2007

By Hamish Hayward

In 2005 the UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) launched a campaign in order to raise awareness of the most common ways in which people are conned. The OFT identified the top ten scams targeted at UK consumers.

These are listed below and, if you look through them, you will see some patterns emerging. It should help you avoid being scammed - online or offline.

WORK-AT-HOME SCAMS
Advertisements for paid work-from-home schemes and business opportunities are often scams. Would be home workers who apply are asked for money up-front to pay for materials. After payment no more is heard from the parent company.

Another variation on this is where the company does actually send out some materials for assembly. These materials are usually very inexpensive. When the assembled products are submitted they are invariably rejected as they “do not meet the necessary quality standards”. This method also gives the scammers a second bite at the cherry as they often sell a further kit with instructions for the necessar quality improvements to ensure acceptance in future. Regardless of how good the quality is, the assembled items will never be accepted.

TELEPHONE LOTTERY SCAMS
Scammers impersonate representatives from a genuine lottery, such as the Irish Lottery or the Canadian Lottery. They make unsolicited telephone calls to their victims and advise them that they are going to be entered in a draw.

A few days later the victim receives another call to advise them that they have won a substantial amount of money. However, before they can receive their prize the victim must pay a fee for administration and taxes. The prize, of course, does not exist.

MATRIX SCHEMES
Often promoted online these schemes mainly involve websites which offering high cost electrical and electronic devices as free gifts in return for buying a relatively cheap product - for example a mobile phone charger. Consumers who buy the cheap product (take the bait) are then put onto a waiting list to receive their free gift.

The person at the top of the list receives their gift only after a predetermined number of new buyers sign up. The victims are usually encourage to hasten he process along by introducng their friends and family to the scheme. The large majority of people on the list never receive the prize.

PRIZE DRAW MAILINGS
The victim receives a notification by post that they have won a prize such as a holiday or a sweepstake draw. In order to receive the pize an administration fee or registration fee must be paid in advance. Once this is paid the prize will fail to materialise.

PROPERTY INVESTMENT SCHEMES
Potential investors attend a free presentation, the purpose of which is to persuade them to pay large amounts of money to enrol on a course which promises to make them a successful property dealer.

Some schemes involve the offer of buying as yet unbuilt properties at a discount. Others involve a buy-to-let scheme where the scammers offer to source, renovate and manage existing properties which they claim will provide good returns from rental income. The properties are often derelict and the tenants do not exist.

PREMIUM RATE TELEPHONE NUMBER SCAMS
The victim receives a notification in the post that they have won a prize - a holiday or a sweepstake. In order to claim the prize they need to call a premium rate number - usually beginning with 090 - which will incur high charges. Ofen there is a long recorded message and the prize simply does not exist.

INVESTMENT-RELATED SCAMS
The victim receives an unsolicited telephone call which offers the opportunity to invest in rare commodities such as diamonds, fine wines or shares. These investments are usually in areas which carry a high risk and where a high level of training, skill and experience is normally required.

The shares are not quoted on any conventional stock exchange. The diamonds, if they exist and are actually supplied, will be low grade and worth considerably less than the amount invested.

NIGERIAN ADVANCE FEE FRAUDS
This form of fraud has been around for many years. Many of the earlier scams originated from Nigeria, hence the name, but today similar variations can be seen from Iraq, Asia, Africa etc. The main requirement seems to be that the area should have recently had a war or some major political upheaval.

Today this type of fraud is mainly perpetrated via e-mail, but some traditionalist scammers may still use letters by post. The victim receives offer to share a large sum of money in return for using the recipient’s bank account to transfer of the money out of the country. If bank account details are rovided, the scammers may empty the victim’s account.

Alternatively, the scammers may ask for money up front - usually for bribing corrupt officials in order to get the money out of the country.

CREDIT SCAMS
Another advance fee fraud, which often originates in Canada. Adverts are placed in local newspapers offering quick loans, even if the applicant has poor credit history. Applicants are told thattheir loans have been approved but they must pay an insurance fee prior to release. After the fee is paid, the victim will never hear from the scammers again and the loan amount will never be advanced.

PYRAMID SCHEMES
Pyramid schemes, sometimes called Ponzi schemes, offer a return on a financial investment which is based upon the scheme continuing to grow as new members join the scheme. The money from new investors is used to pay earlier investors - robbing Peter to pay Paul.

After a while the pyramid will collapse as it reaches the point where there are not enough new victims entering to pay off the earlier investors.

These top ten “hall of shame” scams are outlined here in fairly broad brushstrokes. Nevertheless, hopefully you can see some common patterns which will help you to avoid being scammed in future.

About the Author Discover 6 simple steps to avoid being scammed online. Free e-books, tips and newsletter.
Website URL www.perfectsystem.co.uk

The Importance of a Sitemap

February 6th, 2007

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1) Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

 
2) Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

3) Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organized for everyone.

 Author: (Paul Hardy)
Please visit my website at: 007-webhosting
(You are granted the right to reprint this article but the title
and content must remain unchanged and the authors name
and contact information must be included.)

Good Design Practices

February 6th, 2007

Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

 Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

Generating Revenue with Good Planning

February 6th, 2007

For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. In fact, may websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace.

The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you might have a “food” section, an “accomodation” section and an “entertainment” section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information.

When you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page. You can also earn from programs like Google’s Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly.

As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away!

Author: (Paul Hardy)
Please visit my website at: 007-webhosting
(You are granted the right to reprint this article but the title
and content must remain unchanged and the authors name
and contact information must be included.)

Generating Revenue with Good Planning

February 2nd, 2007

For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. In fact, may websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace.

The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you might have a “food” section, an “accomodation” section and an “entertainment” section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information.

When you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page. You can also earn from programs like Google’s Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly.

As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away!

Author: (Paul Hardy)
Please visit my website at: 007-webhosting
(You are granted the right to reprint this article but the title
and content must remain unchanged and the authors name
and contact information must be included.)

Good Design Practices

February 2nd, 2007

Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarter of an offline company. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion. Reduce the number of images on your website. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size. Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content. Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors. Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.


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