Things To Consider When Publishing A Newsletter

February 13, 2010 at 10:24 pm Filed in:Blog No Comments

Providing a newsletter for your opt-in list subscribers provides many benefits in terms of driving traffic into your site as well as boosting the sales and profits of your site and company. This is a marketing ploy that will not hugely dent your marketing budget and will not also require many man-hours in developing this project.

With a newsletter, you can inform the public about your company and products as well as services. You can keep them posted and updated about what’s going-on with your company as well as many of your promotions and offerings. With these, you keep on reminding your subscribers that you are still here and is willing to offer them good deals and services.

Newsletters also allow you to impress your subscribers. It can show your expertise and knowledge about the topic at hand and the many benefits you can offer them. When you impress people, they will become potential customers and another great thing is that they can recommend you to their friends, colleagues and family. All of them could very well be customers in the future.

If you do not have a newsletter or publishing one for your site, then you may have to consider about researching and be well informed on how to publish one. It is not as easy as it seems but if and when you get the right idea and process, it will be smooth sailing from there on. Try to take the time to learn what you need to learn and get that newsletter ready and good to attract subscribers to your newsletter as well as traffic to your site.

In the next few paragraphs, I will provide you with some things to reflect on when you decide to start your own newsletter for your site. Here are five things to consider when publishing a newsletter.

1) Make sure that the content of your newsletter pertains to and closely associated with your business or the theme of your site. Do not dwell too far on what could be regarded as your field of expertise. You have started a site and your theme for your site will always be something you are knowledgeable about. For example; if you have a site that sells auto car parts, your newsletter must contain articles or content like photos that pertain to cars, auto parts and such. You may also include content about your company and your staff.

Remember that visitors of a certain site are there because they are interested in what the site has to offer. If they sign up for an opt-in list or for a newsletter this means that they want to be updated for that certain theme or subject. Be sure that when you publish your newsletter you are providing for the need of the subscriber as well as their interests.

2) Ensure that you have well written, information riddled and content rich articles. You articles will be the body of your newsletter and that they should be able to excite your readers as well as provide information. Articles should be well written and checked for errors such as spelling and grammatical errors for it to look professional and believable. The trust of your client to you and newsletter is at stake here.

3) Fact-check your articles. Make sure that you provide true facts and figures so that your reputation as an expert and knowledgeable in that field is not questioned. If you lose the trust of your subscribers these may persuade them to unsubscribe to your newsletter. You will lose many potential sales this way.

4) Provide fresh and new articles that can provide new information to your subscribers. If you publish stale and old news in your newsletter, there is a tendency that people or your subscribers already have read and known about them. This will lose their interest in your newsletter and they wont get to read what is most important, your ads. They may not open or read any of your succeeding newsletters losing your intention in writing and publishing newsletters, to get them to visit your site and make a purchase.

5) Never use copyrighted materials such as photos and articles. This is outright plagiarism, you may get into a lot of trouble for this. You can lose your business and get sued over copyright infringement. If you do not have the time to write your own articles, there are many willing and able professional article writers that can do it for you for a reasonable fee. All your investment in writing and publishing articles will be well worth it when you see your list build up and your traffic increasing.

Building Search Engine Friendly Websites

February 13, 2010 at 10:22 pm Filed in:Blog No Comments

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

Top Tips To Improve Your Adsense Earnings

February 13, 2010 at 10:20 pm Filed in:Latest News | SEO No Comments

If webmasters want to monetize their websites, the great way to do it is through Adsense. There are lots of webmasters struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites. But then some of the geniuses of them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Adsense ads on their websites. What makes these webmasters different from the other kind is that they are different and they think out of the box.

The ones who have been there and done it have quite some useful tips to help those who would want to venture into this field. Some of these tips have boosted quite a lot of earnings in the past and is continuously doing so.

Here are some 5 proven ways on how best to improve your Adsense earnings.

1. Concentrating on one format of Adsense ad.

The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). This same format have the tendency to result in higher CTR, or the click-through rates. Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically because the ads will look like normal web links, and people, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links. They may or may not know they are clicking on your Adsense but as long as there are clicks, then it will all be for your advantage.

2. Create a custom palette for your ads.

Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, try to use white as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. Again, This will result to more clicks from people visiting your site.

3. Adsense Positioning

Remove the Adsense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your Adsense. Put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between Adsense locations can make when you see your earnings.

4. Maintain links to relevant websites.

If you think some sites are better off than the others, put your ads there and try to maintaining and managing them. If there is already lots of Adsense put into that certain site, put yours on top of all of them. That way visitor will see your ads first upon browsing into that site.

It is important to know that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. So focusing on a specific topic should be your primary purpose because the displays will be especially targeted on a topic that persons will be viewing already.

Note also that there are many other Adsense sharing the same topic as you. It is best to think of making a good ad that will be somewhat different and unique than the ones already done. Every clickthrough that visitors make is a point for you so make every click count by making your Adsense something that people will definitely click on.

Tips given by those who have boosted their earnings are just guidelines they want to share with others. If they have somehow worked wonders to some, maybe it can work wonders for you too. Try them out into your ads and see the result it will bring.

If others have done it, there is nothing wrong trying it out for yourself.

11 Must Have WordPress Plugins

February 13, 2010 at 10:17 pm Filed in:Latest News | SEO No Comments

WordPress has become a massive platform for internet marketers and internet users alike. The large array of themes, plugins and possible customizations make it in my opinion one of the best website/blog platforms available right now. I am going to share with you some of the best plugins I have ever come across and how they can be used for your website or blog.

1) All in One SEO pack – Many of you will have already heard of this one but it is undeniably important and effective. It allows you to specify the title, description and keywords for each post and page. You will want to enter in keyword rich titles and descriptions.  This will be the information that will be displayed in the search engines. Here is a screenshot of the All in One SEO Pack plugin:

2) Pretty Link – This plugin is excellent for tracking the click-through of specific links. You are able to create unique links with you domain name. For example, I could create http://www.footprints-seo.com/prettylink. This URL currently does not go anywhere as I have not created it but if I used Pretty Link to create that URL I could redirect that URL to anywhere I wanted and track the amount of people that click on that unique URL I created. This is great for affiliate marketers or email marketers to track the click-through of each campaign or email. This is also great just to keep all your URLs appearing as your own.

3) Disqus Commenting System – The Disqus commenting system is in my opinion by far the best commenting system available. If you click the comments at the top of this post you will see what I am talking about. This commenting system is clean and neat and allows integration of Twitter and Facebook. You are able to either comment with you actual Disqus account, your Twitter account (which will also Tweet your comment), your Facebook account or as a guest. This integration is great for both you (the website owners) and your viewers. It helps to spread the word about your site as the comments are tweeted and facebooked everywhere. It integrates social networking tools that other people use so they can maintain their persona while commenting. There are also a lot of different skins for Disqus that you can use to customize the look to help it fit in with your website/blog.

4)  Contact Form 7 – This is a great simple plugin that can be used to create contact forms. You can customize them as much as you like to gather whatever information you are looking for. An example of the Contact Form 7 plugin in use is in my “Contact” page. You will see a contact form there created by this plugin. Creation of the forms is very straight forward and the implementation is as easy as copying one line and pasting it into your post or page.

5) Page Link Manager – This plugin is great as it allows you to choose which pages are displayed in your WordPress navigation. The plugin is very basic, it simply lists all your pages in the options and you can click radio buttons to select which pages are shown in your navigation. This is great for, thank you pages after a viewer has subscribed, free gifts pages or sales pages that don’t want to be visible in the navigation. It is a great little plugin that can be very useful.

6) Google XML Sitemaps Generator – This plugin is very important to help search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo to easily find your site. The plugin creates a Sitemap with all your pages and posts. It creates a separate page where you can link to in your footer.

7) WP-Email – This is another plugin that you can use to promote your blog and website. It creates a link after your post for people to send an email to their friends about your post. This is a great way to increase traffic as it is the online version of word-of-mouth.

8 ) Ultimate Google Analytics - This plugin integrates Google Analytics with your WordPress site. It displays statistics about your viewers and where they are coming from. This is very powerful and all website/blog owners must use Google Analytics. There are a lot features and options in Analytics so you should spend some time learning about it and how it can help you to track the effectiveness of your site.

9) WP E-Commerce - This plugin allows you to convert your wordpress site into a fully blown ecommerce website with a fully functional shopping cart. There are a few other plugins that are similar but this one is by far the best. This plugin also integrates web 2.0 with your shopping cart and allows you to for example import your products into Facebook. This plugin has a lot of different features so it is great for creating a shopping cart that works for you.

10) MobilePress – This is a great plugin that is becoming increasingly popular with the rise of 3G mobile phones. It allows you to optimize your site to be viewed on mobile phones such as the ever so popular iPhone. Allow your viewers to be able to access your site from anywhere on their mobile phone.

11) WordPress Automatic Upgrade – All WordPress website owners should get this plugin. It is a set and forget plugin. It will automatically update your WordPress installation for you to always ensure you are using the latest release of WordPress.

This is a list of 11 must-have WordPress Plugins. I hope you found this useful. I would love to hear your comments and thoughts on your favorite WordPress plugins.

10 Tips To Building Repeat Traffic

February 13, 2010 at 10:11 pm Filed in:Blog No Comments

1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.

2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.

3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons. This will definitely help you to get more targeted web traffic.

4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.

5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.

6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.

7. Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.

8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.

8. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark. Targeted web traffic will follow as you will be able to rank for the right keywords.

9. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.

10. Have a forum on your site. This will increase the stickiness of your website and also provide you page with more content, user generated traffic. A forum will help you to build a community based around your site and give you more expert status.

Monetize Your Traffic To Get The Most Out Of It – Footprints-SEO Masterclass

February 13, 2010 at 10:07 pm Filed in:Latest News No Comments

Establishing your own E-commerce site is not like what it used to be. There are thousands of competition that is all too willing to get a bigger share of the pie. Every scheme and method you can find to augment your sales would be very beneficial.

We have got to admit to ourselves. Most of us are into it for the money. We are not going to waste our time and effort just for the fun of it. Many sites would not wait until hell freezes over just to see their profits. While there are some who takes things lightly there are always those who would rather see profit any given day.

It is common knowledge that without traffic we have no business. Like any business, without any customers you donít get sales. Traffic represents all the people that gets a chance to see what you have to offer. The more people who see your products the more people there would be to buy them.

Nobody puts up an E-commerce site that doesn’t expect profit. We have a startup capital that needs to be regained. With a consistent traffic, we at least have a fighting chance to achieve that probability. Monetizing your traffic would optimize your chances of making the best out of it.

Making Money out of your Traffic

The best and most proven method of making a profit out of your traffic is using advertising. The internet generates hundreds of thousands upon hundred of thousands of traffic everyday. Most of them are searching for something. While some are just looking for information there is also a good percentage that is looking for something that they need.

The internet has proven to be a very reliable source in finding what was deemed to be a very unsearchable product. The internet has made the world a smaller place; you can advertise a product from the depths of Istanbul and still find a buyer from the center of Philadelphia.

Generating traffic is not an easy task. You have to contend with a great number of sites to generate a good number of traffic flow. But if done successfully this could open up a Pandoraís Box of possibilities. One of the benefits is monetizing your traffic flow.

So, to get to the core of it the more traffic you generate the more likely you are considered as a desirable, desirable, in a sense that a good traffic flowing site is easily convertible to profit. Basically traffic equals profit. Advertising is the name of the game; with the good advertising scheme you can use your traffic flow to your advantage.

When you have good traffic you have a good number of potential customers, customers that are willing to pour money into your coffers. Other than that these are also traffic that can be redirected to sponsored links that are willing to pay you for a sizeable portion of the traffic that you have generated.

This scheme is called pay-per-click. With every click a visitor of your site makes on an advertised link you will be paid. The more traffic you generate and the more clicks that happens would spell to more profits.

Affiliate Programs

Another method of monetizing your traffic are affiliate programs. You can link up with other tried and tested sites and online companies and monetize your traffic by having a percentage of sales generated by traffic coming from your site.

The basic idea is, traffic generated from your site will go to another site that can offer a product that you do not carry. Many programs can keep track and make records of transactions that was made possible because of site linkage.

When purchases are made by customers that was led by your site to their site you get a percentage of that sale. Affiliate programs would give you the benefit of monetizing your traffic without the actual need of carrying or promoting a certain product.

There are so many ways and methods to monetize your traffic. All it takes is a bit of hard work and the desire to successfully launch a profit-earning site. The internet is a veritable source of information, many tips and guides are offered everywhere in how to monetize your traffic and make your site a good profit earne

Keep an eye on changing pages in Google SEO

January 26, 2010 at 3:40 pm Filed in:Blog No Comments

Google just launched a nice feature on Google Reader: the ability to keep an eye on pages for changes. This works even if the page doesn’t have its own RSS feed. This sort of thing is very handy. You could use it to spot new things on a privacy policy page or watch for changes in the executives page at another search engine.

Check out the blog post, but it’s easy to use: just add any url to Google Reader.

Search Engine Opitmization | SEO Services

May 7, 2009 at 11:18 pm Filed in:SEO No Comments

Overview: Why research keywords?

The answer is quite easy:
Before you get to optimizing your website and promoting it on the Web, you should first select relevant search terms that will reach your target audience.

In other words, you are supposed to pinpoint your Keyword Niche. It should be large enough to draw good visitor traffic, yet ‘narrow’ and specific enough to let you overplay your competitors and get to the top on the SEs.

This task can be achieved with the help of the Keyword Suggestion tool that will help you:

1.

Spy on your competition to get suggestions on the keywords related to your business, and build a list of the keywords you might be using for optimization (Explore niche tab);
2.

Narrow the keyword list by removing the terms that are not searched often enough or turn to be too much competitive (Get suggestions tab);
3.

Get an idea of your potential keyword niche by studying your rivals that compete for your keywords at different SEs, both major SEs and local ones (View competitors tab);
4.

Analyze your competition thoroughly to weight your chances of being top-ranked for the chosen keywords/phrases (Analyze competition tab).

SEO Nottingham by FootPrints

April 11, 2009 at 11:11 am Filed in:SEO No Comments

FootPrints SEO are experts at search engine optimisation, building high quality relevant links and improving your online presence to drive targeted traffic to your website.  Our intimate understanding of major search engine algorithms allow us to provide the edge you need in todays competitive online environment.

Search Engine Results

Achieving search engine dominance is essential, a higher search engine position will result in more exposure to potential customers, and therefore more sales. FootPrints SEO provide services tailored to allow you to achieve and maintain that edge.
Successful SEO methodology is constantly in flux, with search engines using increasingly more complex algorithms.

FootPrints SEO have the knowledge, expertise, and skills to safely and effectively optimise your site. We use only white hat techniques.

FootPrints SEO is search engine marketing (SEO) and online marketing agency based in the UK.