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Tips for Getting Your Article Published

By admin on September 23, 2011 in ,

By asking another site to post your article you’re indirectly asking them to endorse you – so you need to offer their visitors something of value.

Remember, no matter how many competitors there are in any industry– there is always a shortage of high quality, easy to understand information.

  • Don’t go for the hard sell

When writing your content, don’t concentrate on ‘how great your products and services are’.

Before you can sell anything, you’ve got to establish trust and credibility with your audience.

The more quality information you provide, the less ‘selling’ you’ll have to do.

At the beginning or end of every article you’ll want to include a brief bio on yourself.

The purpose of your bio is to let readers know who you are and how you can help them.

It doesn’t have to be fancy or elaborate; it has to be clear and concise.

Avoid focusing too much on yourself and instead direct readers to the benefits your business provides to its customers.

For example, you don’t want:

‘John Smith has spent 15 years researching every factory widget under the sun.

As an accomplished engineer with a PHD in chaos theory, John likes to spend his afternoons sipping lemon tea on his veranda’.

You do want:
‘John Smith has spent 15 years helping small Australian manufacturers pick the right machinery to outfit their factories.

His website at www.factorypoint.com.au provides dozens of informative articles and offers a free downloadable checklist for business owners building a new factory’.

  • Proof-read everything you publish

Once you’ve written your copy, make sure you take the time to get a friend of colleague to proof-read it for you.

You’ll be surprised as how much an extra set of eyes helps.

Because it’s your own work, it’s often hard to see the forest for the trees.

A third person perspective will help detect any spelling or grammar mistakes, as well as providing you with invaluable feedback.

To avoid formatting issues it’s best to send your articles out in HTML format.

The easiest way to do this is to publish the article on your own website and then send publishers the direct hyperlink to your article.

Avoid sending your article as an Acrobat PDF or Microsoft Word document, as these file types can contain embedded formatting that can mess up the look of your article when converted into web pages.

Once you’ve created a great article, you then have to convince other people to publish your material.

The same rules as approaching a joint venture partner apply here.

Sell them on why your content is of benefit to their customers and how publishing your article makes them look good to their readers.

Not everyone will take you up on your offer, but the worst they can say is ‘no’.

If at first you don’t succeed, try a different angle.


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Final Thoughts on Free Content

By admin on September 23, 2011 in

Giving away free content is a great strategy to put your web design in the limelight.

If writing is a new process to you, don’t be intimidated – there’s no need to re-invent the wheel.

Your article might cover a new industry development or you can simply offer a different perspective on an existing topic.

Spend a bit of time reading the articles published within your industry and you’ll quickly get a sense as to what subjects are popular with readers.

Over time, you’ll establish a name for yourself and instead of having to constantly chase business – customers will come to you.

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Creating and Distributing Free Content

By admin on September 23, 2011 in

Creating and distributing free information is a great way to increase exposure of your online shopping cart whilst establishing yourself as an expert on a subject.

As a marketing strategy, distributing free content allows you to:

  • Establish your credibility with readers;
  • Target a highly qualified audience; and
  • Improve your search engine rankings.

1. Establish Your Credibility with Visitors- e-commerce host

When it comes to running an online business, one of your biggest challenges is establishing trust and credibility with your customers.

After all, visitors to your website don’t know you from a bar of soap.

To them – you’re just another nameless face in the crowd.

So before they’ll even consider buying anything from you – you’ll need to convince them that:

  • You’re a legitimate business;
  • You know your stuff; and
  • They can trust you.

One of the best ways to achieve all of the above is to write articles and have them published on other people’s websites.

By freely sharing your knowledge, you get to connect with your audience and establish your expertise.

2. Target a Highly Qualified Audience -

Another benefit of publishing articles to a specific industry is that your audience is extremely targeted.

Leads generated through industry based articles can to be better qualified than those achieved through paid marketing.

This in turn means your sales conversion ratio will improve.

3. Improve Your Search Engine Rankings – web design company sydney
One of the topics we discussed earlier was the importance in generating incoming links to your website and their effect on search engine rankings.

Publishing an article containing your website address kills two birds with one stone:

a) It gets the attention of readers and directs them to your site; and
b) It creates a valuable incoming link to your website.

Improve your search engine rankings.
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Reciprocal Linking

By admin on September 23, 2011 in

Whilst surfing the web, you may have noticed that some shopping cart web templates have a ‘links’ or ‘recommended links’ page – this is reciprocal linking in action.

Participating in a legitimate reciprocal linking program (also called ‘link swapping’ or ‘link exchanging’) is one the most important steps you can take to improve your search engine rankings.

Some hosted ecommerce solutions will provide this service.

Exchanging reciprocal links is a simple three step process:

1. Research and create a list of potential partners;

2. Approach them with your offer to exchange links; and

3. Create a link to their site in exchange for a link to your site.

 

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Reciprocal Linking Frequently Asked Questions

By admin on September 23, 2011 in ,

How many links do I need?

The short answer is – as many as you can get.

If you are serious about obtaining a top search engine position for your shopping cart website, you’ll have to obtain more incoming links than your competitors have.

To view how many incoming links a competitor has, visit:
www.linkpopularity.com

You’ll probably find that the websites with the highest search engine rankings also have the most incoming links.

What should a link to my web design look like? – web design company melbourne

When practical, it’s best when your link partners use your keywords to link back to your website.

For example, if you have a website that sells birthday party supplies instead of writing:

‘click here to visit teds birthday supplies website’

…use your main keywords as the links – like this:

‘Ted’s offers the biggest range of children’s birthday supplies and dress up costumes.

We highly recommend his site’ Using your keywords as links lets search engines know what your website is about.

In this case ‘children’s birthday supples’ and ‘dress up costumes’.

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Viral Marketing Techniques

By admin on September 22, 2011 in , ,

Obviously not all of us have access to the funds required to hire a professional animation studio to build a dancing robot.

The good news is that there are many cost effective ways to take advantage of viral marketing.

1.  Web design Company Start a ‘Tell-a-friend’ Program

One simple way to encourage viral marketing is to add a ‘tell-a-friend’ link on your website.

If a reader finds something interesting – they simply click on the link and enter their friend’s email address to forward them the web page link.

For more information about tell-a-friend programs, visit:

http://www.webdummy.com.au/tellafriend.php

2. Shopping cart web design Encourage readers to forward your Newsletter

If you publish an email newsletter, the best way to build up your database is to encourage existing subscribers to forward your newsletter to friends, family and colleagues.

You can add something like this to the bottom of your newsletter:

‘Help your friends out!

Forward them this newsletter so they can stay up to date on the latest developments on Widget manufacturing’.

3. Offer a Free Service on Your  ecommerce templates

Offering a useful service for free on your website is great way to generate repeat visitors to your site.

For example, if you run a website on overseas shipping – offer your customers a free currency conversion tool from www.xe.com.

If you’re a business consultant, you can offer a free downloadable business plan and so on.

4. Web design company Melbourne – Create an Entertaining Game or Video

This option takes a little more work, but when implemented correctly it can generate a ton of traffic to your website.

Insurance giant Zurich recently created a little flash game called ‘Parking: Battle of the Sexes’.

The aim of the game is to answer the age old question ‘who’s better at parking – men or women’.

Players have to use their keyboard arrows to successfully manoeuvre their vehicle into the parking spot without hitting the other cars.

These types of games or funny video clips tend to circulate through the Internet very quickly.

If you do a search on Google, you can usually find a flash designer who can produce something for you starting at a fewhundred dollars.

 

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Viral Marketing

By admin on September 22, 2011 in ,

You’d be forgiven if the name ‘viral marketing’ conjures up all sorts of evil and sinister connotations.

The reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

Viral Marketing simply refers to a marketing message that spreads quickly from one person to another.

Similar in nature to a computer virus – but a good one!

Like the offline world, the idea is to get your message of your web design to reach as many people as possible.

Viral Marketing adds fuel to the fire by exploiting the speed and reach of the Internet.

In the music world, an artist can go from being an unknown to having his or her song played on radio stations all around the world within a week.

A good viral marketing campaign works in a similar fashion.

It can start with just one person and quickly spread to millions via email and a hosted ecommerce solution.

Started in 1996, Hotmail is considered the grandfather of viral marketing.

Although free web-mail is now commonplace, back in 1996 the idea of getting a free email account that could be accessed by anyone was a groundbreaking concept.

In its first 18 months of operation, Hotmail signed up over 12 million users giving it the fastest growing subscriber base in history.

The genius behind Hotmail was the viral marketing effect of the service.

When the two founders, Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia approached a venture capitalist firm to raise money – they also got some good advice.

The venture capitalists suggested attaching a small message at the bottom of every outgoing email to promote the service.

And that’s exactly what they did.

Attached to every outgoing email was a message that read:

‘Get your own free Hotmail email address’

This meant that just by using the service, every new user was in effect endorsing and promoting Hotmail.

Starting with a small amount of users, the ripple effect quickly grew Hotmail into the worlds largest email provider in the world.

The effectiveness of this idea is highlighted by the fact that Hotmail spent less than $500,000 on marketing, whilst a competitor (Juno Online Services) spent over $20 million on traditional marketing to gain a fraction of the users.

Amazon also implements viral marketing by encouraging their customers to send gifts to friends.

When the receiver gets the package, they also get a discount flyer promoting amazon.com and encouraging them to visit the shopping cart website.

French car maker Citroen recently released a viral marketing campaign with a video that features one of their cars transforming into a dancing robot.

The video clip is very entertaining and has spread throughout the world via email.

You can view the video clip here:

http://uk.download.yahoo.com/ne/fu/oa/eurcncs185030.mpg

Citroen Media Release

http://www.citroen.com.au/cms/default.asp?action=article&ID=8031

 

 

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Ingredients of a Successful Viral Marketing Strategy

By admin on September 22, 2011 in , , ,

When online payment processor Paypal launched their service – they offered you a free $25 credit when you referred a friend to sign up.

Offering an incentive answers that question we all have (‘what’s in it for me?’).

If you want your message to reach as many people as possible – it has to be catchy in some way. It has to get attention, make people laugh or generate controversy.

Search engine Lycos publishes a list of entertaining email campaigns
at: http://viral.lycos.co.uk/

Once you’ve done the hard yard of creating your viral marketing piece, you need to encourage users to forward it via email.

You need to include some form of call to action like ‘click here to email this to your friends’.

Don’t rely on your users to do it on their own accord – most people respond better when they are prompted to do something.

 

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Final Thoughts on Free Traffic

By admin on September 22, 2011 in ,

The marketing strategies outlined in this module work.

Countless web design, ecommerce hosting providers, online shopping carts, from every industry have successfully implemented them!

But keep in mind, that even though they don’t require any money to execute – they do require a time commitment by you.

Whichever strategies you decide to implement, make sure you set aside a small amount time to see them through.

If you find yourself overwhelmed at any point, it helps to take a step back and break everything into small chunks.

For example, we recently worked with an accountant who was overwhelmed at the thought of building a website with lots of information for his clients.

‘Where would he find the time?’ he asked us.

Although he found the strategy appealing, he was attempting to take on too much – too quickly.

After all, in addition to building his website – he still had the normal workload of attending to his clients.

Our solution was to have him set aside a small amount of time each week to write a few pages of content (no more than three pages at a time).

In just 12 months he’ll end up with a website with over 150 pages of high quality content.

For most people – that’s an easily achievable goal.

 

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The Difference between Permission Based Marketing and Spam

By admin on September 22, 2011 in ,

Email is now an essential communication tool for every shopping cart web design.

Compared to direct mail, one of the biggest advantages of email marketing is that it costs almost nothing to get started.

Unfortunately, the low cost factor introduces another problem – spam.

Spam, also known as Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), has become a huge problem on the Internet.

According to technology publisher ZDNet, Spam will soon represent 90% of all email traffic on the net.

It’s estimated that the average consumer receives 2,300 pieces of spam message a year.

By 2013, the number is projected to grow to 3,600 pieces.

Like many problems, it’s a small percentage of people who are affecting everybody else.

At one point, 150 individuals were said to account for 90% of the worlds spam.

We’ve all received those annoying messages attempting to sell us everything from generic Viagra and pornography to a cheap master’s degree or a reduction on our mortgage.

Aside from the annoyance factor, spam also puts a big strain on the resources required by Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) to deliver email from your hosted ecommerce solution.

Ultimately, the cost of spam is passed onto the consumer.

 

 

 

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