When you operate an Internet based business, all the world is your customer. The problem for most web-based businesses is reaching out to the world and getting your offer seen in a raging sea of competition, crowd noise, and surfer confusion. It’s critical to your survival to provide the best product or service, but it’s equally important to get the message out to potential customers. The solution is to hire a professional like seo essex . This can solve many of your traffic problems.

No matter how good your lead generation, in-house marketing or list building efforts are, the key to adding zeros to bottom end of your bottom line comes from adding new buyers. New customers are the foundation of our entire future marketing effort. So it follows that the acquisition of new customers is the master key to your business success or failure.

It’s common for internet businesses to get stuck in a SEM or SEO sales channel and marketing strategy that leaves them in a narrowly focused competition pool. Here they fight it out with other trapped marketers vying for a share of a fixed volume of daily searches. Each competitor has their list of keywords and live or die over how many sales they can win from the daily available inbound search volume.

So how do we fish new buyers out of this stagnant pool of traffic? We reach outside of our fixed list of keywords. But not just any new keywords will do. We must find keywords that are returning traffic at levels we can pull fish, er potential customers out of.

Search Suggestion Tools

There are several ways to learn what people are searching for and to new build keyword silos to bring them into our network. We’ll go into content creation and keyword farming in later articles. Today we want to focus on a great way to find the missing link between what we think our market is about and what the public thinks it is about.

How do we do that? And what does it cost?

Search Engine Suggestion is the answer and it’s completely free

Here we go to the various online tools (overt and covert) to gain intelligence on what Search Intent Anticipation (SIA factor) suggestions engines are returning for your base keywords. The idea is to reach out beyond your own ideas of what your market is interested in and to see what real human traffic is looking for. Very often, this simple process will break you out of a marketing rut by opening new sales channels you can work on — to market them or even develop new products.

Please note that since most major search engines have refocus on monetized search, their main interest is in delivering quality search results. A big component of result quality is to anticipate and drill the surfer down to where they need to be when they started the search session. So the concept is to anticipate the surfer’s needs and deliver the best suggestions to fill in the blanks created by the surfer’s gap of imagination, laziness, or lack of keyword or typing skills, etc…

Also note that since the engines really want to monetize you they are always balancing Visitor Value (VV factor) with accurate anticipation. Even if they don’t admit it, there will always be heavy algorithmic gravitational pull towards commerce-specific results. You can be assured that commerce will play a factor because profitable search engines survive by driving traffic to monetized search.

A shocking but simple rule: If there is high search volume there will always be monetized search.

Why is that? Because anything that has a high volume of search will create a focus and concentration of human interest that will in turn lure Internet marketers into the game. Internet Marketers love the crowd because as P.T. Barnum claimed there is a sucker in every crowd.

So even on innocent subjects and strongly academic search terms, human interest generates the search volume and the search volume generates marketing interest, which in turns ignites search activity (remember that Internet marketers have to constantly study the subject to steal content to power their content-centric internet marketing information product marketing efforts).

But I digress… What we want to focus on is the margin created between human interest and marketing interest. Why? Because in that gap are seething pools of fish for you to drop a baited line into. And one of the best tools to discover the gap and create whole new channels you can exploit for free is search suggestion.

Google for example now has search suggestion based on absolute metrics. Just hit their main search site for real time search suggestions. Type in a few letters of your key phrase and the suggestions are instantly delivered to you. As a bonus they also throw in the number of indexed page results. Yahoo, has been providing these for a long time and they still work great. MSN Live and Ask.com are also helpful, but their anticipation-suggestion engine is very strongly weighted to commerce results. This makes sense considering their market positioning and struggle for share.

It’s easy and free to add new life to your web marketing by using the free tools provided by the search engines. So go for it! And happy fishing.

Kelly Asks:

Dwayne – You seem kind of like a guru on the online shopping stuff. My husband and I want to try and make some extra money by doing something online. We both have jobs but we figure we can spend about 3 hours on each weeknight and one weekend day to make a go of selling something on the net. We have a few hundred (maybe $500) to put into it. Can you suggest anything? We see the wholesale and dropship ads all over. Does that work?.

Answer:

Howdy Kelly;

Okay that is a great dream and a nice nest egg to start with. First you’re not going to replace your day job any time soon with a $500 investment, but with a little elbow grease and several weekends you can parlay that into something that will pay a car note and maybe create some mad money to boot.

First while I urge you to look into wholesale and dropship options, don’t just leap into anything just because of a sales pitch. Remember that landing page sales copy can be very persuasive and is designed to separate you from your money before you have time to carefully consider. So look into these options then come back and ask for any further advice once you find one you like.

Also consider novelty. Suppliers for novelty items like sexy panties and gag gifts are also an option.

Wholesale or Dropship products:

These are fun. There are aggregators like Doba and Simplix who you pay a fee to and they give you access to many ‘so-called’ wholesale products. Be careful because they are usually closer to 25% off retail so not really wholesale.You can also look into getting individual products and specializing once you find a good wholesale source. For example you can look are and select say, wholesale sunglasses to get started. Setting up a specialty stand at a flea market or the corner of a busy parking lot can make you more in a weekend than a year of eBaying the junk at Doba.

Remember that a lot of other folks are out there trying to make a few extra bucks on the web. If you take a moment to think and talk about differential marketing (how you can be different from everyone else) it can pay off tons.

We want to hear how it goes so please write back.

Thanks again;

Dwayne

The National Finals Rodeo is an event that has been going on since 1959. This is an event that no other sporting event can hold a candle to. This championship last from December 2nd thru December 11th. It is held in the entertainment capital of the world, Las Vegas Nevada at the Thomas and Mack Center. There is no other event like it, not the Super Bowl, The Masters, or The World Series. This is the grand daddy of all sporting events and it pits man against some really bad beasts.
All the top cowboys and cowgirls are there. If they are one of the best this year then they will be there at the National Finals Rodeo. The champion in Bareback Riding, Steer Wrestling, Team Roping, Saddle Bronc Riding, Tie-Down Roping, Barrel Racing and Bull Riding will be awarded. There is also an award for the World All-Around Rodeo Champion Cowboy. This award goes to the highest-earning cowboy who has competed on a regular basis in more than one event.
There is not a bad seat in the house, but the best seats go first. The thing to do is go to NFR tickets 2010 and make your reservations today. This is one of those events that you really want to see before you die and you can take the entire family with you.

New unemployment numbers out today and somehow the administration has tortured the figures to show a 9.7% unemployment rate. So of course the argument starts and the complaining continues.  It’s hard to have a conversation with anyone lately without the subject turning to no work and lost jobs and what are we going to do? I feel your pain.

But like we talked about earlier, there are still some great ways to make money out there. You can do it on the Internet or you can do it in your home town. For example, one of the coolest ways you can self-employ yourself and work part time while job hunting (if you must) is to set up as a booth, kiosk, or roadside vendor. It’s cheap to get started and you can make some great money.

One very nice company to work with is Moda Sunglasses. They provide nice packs with assortments of high quality wholesale sunglasses you can order and resell for a great markup and still have room to give excellent prices. Check out their site and see the styles and prices and do some thinking about how you could set up to sell these locally or even at online auctions.

Anyway, the world is changing and unless we figure out how to employ ourselves instead of running around trying to fight for the latest crappy job available things are only gonna get worse.

There are few SEO strategies more effective than article marketing. In my ongoing webmaster resources series on article directories, I wanted to spend some quality time looking at A1articles article directory. For several months now the site has been an excellent source of Free content and expert articles I republish to help enhance the quality of the web properties I manage.

On the promotional side of things A1 really kicks because of the tools they provide to experts. Anyone who publishes content to the web knows the tool set is so important to making the most of your time. I also loved the speedy approval process and extra SEO support coded into the directory article and topic pages.

Looking at the content publishing side of the equation, the most important thing I noticed was the ease of use to repub their content. How about this for features?

• Killer RSS grouping
• One click print option
• One click Republish (including HTML and raw text versions!)
• Tag list and SEO freindly titles

So if you need a great source of top drawer free content click over to A1articles.

Getting your site noticed in all the clutter out there is critical. Most webmasters know article marketing is a powerful way to promote your website. With this in mind, I set out to review some of the top article directories and highlight the best ones on the web. No A-list of article directories would be complete without a close look at Article Alley.

Article Alley combines the best features of Article Marketing with the powerful synergy of easy syndication. Webmasters and experts can easily publish articles to their system to promote a site and drive traffic, while at the same time web publishers can syndicate quality content in a snap. We love Article Alley and use their articles on several web properties – both for business and personal sites.

So if you are an expert that wants to use this powerful technique to gain traffic and authority, or if your a busy web publisher who needs to beef up your content, Article Alley is the tool for you. Check em out: Article Alley

The thick and thin of affiliate marketing often comes down to a trade-off between work and worry.

Work: The work and time it takes to build good authority sites with high visitor value and long lasting serps positioning.

versus…

Worry: The stress over when those quickly ranked machine gun affiliate traps, slick redirects and frame pages will get nerfed or even flagged as spam.

Whether you’re designing an affiliate internet marketing plan from scratch, or if you already have affiliates sites deployed, you always need more testing and feedback to monitor your conversion-path effectiveness. The most common ways to adjust are spinning and split testing pre- and post-click components like ad copy, anchor phrases, and landing page copy. But if you operate networks of thin affiliate sites you are very limited in how effective your spin-post-test cycles can be since the goal is direct injection into the sale channel from the initial search click.

Thin affiliate sites have minimal original copy and limited visitor value. It’s tough to bring them up the serps and get these kinds of pages organically ranked. No kidding right? No not really. The cause-effect relationship between value and organic ranking is made more difficult by the constant adjustment required to address ever changing search algorithms and ever increasing human-assisted page ranking.

But thin sites have one huge advantage; deployment speed. While everyone else is hoeing away on their content, trust relationships, and logical link building, the thin affiliate farmer has already grown a huge 100 acre co-op and by shear scale has socially self-promoted their sites into the top 10 or 20.

Unfair? Unethical? Slimy? Maybe so, but that’s not the point of this post. Let’s get back to main idea: The choice that YOU as a web developer and marketer have to make when planning your deployment strategy for a certain niche or product line.

You may find my attitude callous but honestly I don’t waste much time thinking about which way to go. I want to do what works best for my clients. The real choice depends on the market. Let me explain.

When you approach a campaign that is affiliate based you are faced with strong competitive challenges from other affiliates and also from the product/service originator. Competing affiliates create market buzz but that buzz quickly turns into noise once everyone breaks into the game — or if you are late to the party and there is already strong brand and social exposure working against you.

Competition from the brand is also a serious challenge — especially these days, when SEO consultants are everywhere (ahem). It is no secret that many companies are collapsing their affiliate programs and putting the resources into brand and buzz building and dabbling in social link promotion.

So before you flex your affiliate site creative muscle, consider a balance of thick and thin affiliate properties. Sure, thin sites can help you achieve faster conversions, but high quality pages build real link equity and will help you survive in the long run…and isn’t this all about the long run?

Talk soon;

Dwayne

When you operate an Internet based business, all the world is your customer. The problem for most web-based businesses is reaching out to the world and getting your offer seen in a raging sea of competition, crowd noise, and surfer confusion. It’s critical to your survival to provide the best product or service, but it’s equally important to get the message out to potential customers.

No matter how good your lead generation, in-house marketing or list building efforts are, the key to adding zeros to bottom end of your bottom line comes from adding new buyers. New customers are the foundation of our entire future marketing effort. So it follows that the acquisition of new customers is the master key to your business success or failure.

It’s common for internet businesses to get stuck in a SEM or SEO sales channel and marketing strategy that leaves them in a narrowly focused competition pool. Here they fight it out with other trapped marketers vying for a share of a fixed volume of daily searches. Each competitor has their list of keywords and live or die over how many sales they can win from the daily available inbound search volume.

So how do we fish new buyers out of this stagnant pool of traffic? We reach outside of our fixed list of keywords. But not just any new keywords will do. We must find keywords that are returning traffic at levels we can pull fish, er potential customers out of.

Search Suggestion Tools

There are several ways to learn what people are searching for and to new build keyword silos to bring them into our network. We’ll go into content creation and keyword farming in later articles. Today we want to focus on a great way to find the missing link between what we think our market is about and what the public thinks it is about.

How do we do that? And what does it cost?

Search Engine Suggestion is the answer and it’s completely free

Here we go to the various online tools (overt and covert) to gain intelligence on what Search Intent Anticipation (SIA factor) suggestions engines are returning for your base keywords. The idea is to reach out beyond your own ideas of what your market is interested in and to see what real human traffic is looking for. Very often, this simple process will break you out of a marketing rut by opening new sales channels you can work on — to market them or even develop new products.

Please note that since most major search engines have refocus on monetized search, their main interest is in delivering quality search results. A big component of result quality is to anticipate and drill the surfer down to where they need to be when they started the search session. So the concept is to anticipate the surfer’s needs and deliver the best suggestions to fill in the blanks created by the surfer’s gap of imagination, laziness, or lack of keyword or typing skills, etc…

Also note that since the engines really want to monetize you they are always balancing Visitor Value (VV factor) with accurate anticipation. Even if they don’t admit it, there will always be heavy algorithmic gravitational pull towards commerce-specific results. You can be assured that commerce will play a factor because profitable search engines survive by driving traffic to monetized search.

A shocking but simple rule: If there is high search volume there will always  be monetized search.

Why is that? Because anything that has a high volume of search will create a focus and concentration of human interest that will in turn lure Internet marketers into the game. Internet Marketers love the crowd because as P.T. Barnum claimed there is a sucker in every crowd.

So even on innocent subjects and strongly academic search terms, human interest generates the search volume and the search volume generates marketing interest, which in turns ignites search activity (remember that Internet marketers have to constantly study the subject to steal content to power their content-centric internet marketing information product marketing efforts).

But I digress… What we want to focus on is the margin created between human interest and marketing interest. Why? Because in that gap are seething pools of fish for you to drop a baited line into. And one of the best tools to discover the gap and create whole new channels you can exploit for free is search suggestion.

Google for example now has search suggestion based on absolute metrics. Just hit their main search site for real time search suggestions. Type in a few letters of your key phrase and the suggestions are instantly delivered to you. As a bonus they also throw in the number of indexed page results. Yahoo, has been providing these for a long time and they still work great. MSN Live and Ask.com are also helpful, but their anticipation-suggestion engine is very strongly weighted to commerce results. This makes sense considering their market positioning and struggle for share.

It’s easy and free to add new life to your web marketing by using the free tools provided by the search engines. So go for it! And happy fishing.