How to Make Money Online as an Website Developer
December 12, 2009 by JoelC2009 · 5 Comments
Have you ever wanted to learn how to make money online as an internet marketer? This is an extremely difficult question to answer because there are so many complex factors involved. Specifically they techniques you employ in your Internet marketing campaign as well as the execution of these techniques can determine whether or not Internet marketing will work for your business. Additionally, the likelihood of your target audience using the Internet and responding to your marketing efforts should also be considered into the equation. This article will outline the potential for success in an Internet marketing campaign.
Content on your website can influence the size of the target audience you are able to reach by helping to improve your search engine rankings. With your content capable of doing so much, it is clear you should be hiring a professional content writer to assist you writing the copy for your website. This article will delve deeper into the importance of providing accurate, concise and informative content on your website when you are marketing online.
Conducting market research can do a great deal to help you determine whether or not you should invest in an Internet marketing campaign for your business. This step is very important because it will give you a good indication of whether or not you should even begin marketing your business on the Internet. Hiring a firm specializing in market research is recommended because they can conduct this research quickly and efficiently and will likely gain a great deal of valuable information as a result of their research efforts. If they determine your business can benefit from an Internet marketing campaign, it is time to start thinking about how you want to advertise your business online.
One of the most basic reasons why the quality of the content on your website is so important is because visitors to your website will likely form their initial opinions of your website based on the content on your website. If the copy is poorly written, does not hold the visitors attention and does not promote your products and services well visitors are likely to exit your website without making a purchase. Conversely, if the copy on your website is well written, engages the reader and promotes the products and services you offer the visitor is more likely to investigate the website further to learn more about the products and services and may make a purchase. The content of your website will be one of the aspects of the website which is first noticed by visitors so it is important for this content to be well written.
The sales copy should accurately describe the products or services offered stress the importance of these products and services and compel the visitor to make a purchase. All of this should be done without appearing to be blatantly advertising the products and services. Writing this type of copy can be quite complicated and typically requires hiring a sales copywriter who is experienced and skilled at writing this type of informative and persuasive content. Sales copy written by an amateur or an inexperienced writer will not likely be as effective as copy written by a professional with a great deal of experience in Internet marketing.
Get Traffic To Your Site With Article Advertising
December 3, 2009 by JoelC2009 · 7 Comments
When you write short content articles relating to your business, subject, or idea that are made available for distribution and publication on the internet it is called a type of article marketing.
Each article you write contains a bio box and a byline that include contact information and references for your site. These articles have the potential of increasing your business traffic as well as increasing new clients with this form of free article advertising.
An article directory is where you can post your articles without cost. The directory owner places advertising on each of your article pages and collects the revenue. As more articles by various authors on one or more subjects are posted the search engine popularity gradually increases.
This benefits both the authors and directory owner with increased visitors. Since it is free article advertising for you, drawing both possible customers and many more visitors than you could get on your own, both the article directory and your website benefit. Search engine optimization or SEO deals with how webpages are ranked.
For free web traffic advertising of this type it is desirable to be ranked near the top. Keywords or phrases are typed into a search engine and search engines display the information in order of importance or popularity.
Backlinks which are incoming links to a webpage or website are one indication to a search engine how relevant that site is. If both sites have content geared toward the keyword, the backlink is believed to have strong influence on the search engine rankings of the webpage.
This represents a favorable editorial vote for the receiving website from another granting website. Since the bio box contains a link to the authors website or webpage this should result in more links back to that website. This has led to more articles being written solely for SEO purposes, for example gogvo.
This process helps to increase the websites rank within the search engines. By helping to increase the article marketing directories ranking you are helping your own site to increased visitors and visibility.
The higher you are ranked on a page the possibility of your articles being read and drawing attention to your site. Most people don’t go past the first page when using a search engine.
Make sure your articles are well written and original to bring trust and credibility to your website. The free distribution of articles to online publishers has led to a large amount of duplicated content and poor quality articles being written solely for backlinks to increase the websites ranks.
This may help your business to be noticed but it probably will not get repeat readers of your articles coming to your site, such as qwara malta. “Word of mouth” is a valuable tool for free article advertising. There are many directory owners that will publish the articles you have created.
With a little help from the search engines you will be able to find many directories to publish your articles and get the free article advertising to get your business or idea out to the world wide web.
So You Want To Build A Website?
September 8, 2009 by JoelC2009 · 8 Comments
Introduction
When I decided I needed a website for my business I had no idea of the planning involved. Like most people, I thought web design meant deciding on the graphics and the look of the pages and then by some magic it would all happen.
I have a friend who is in the business of SEO web design and web content management systems so I approached him for a quote. As a complete novice who is computer literate up to a point, I was amazed at the depth of initial questioning required to find out exactly what my requirements were.
I had no idea about the various elements and the structure of the site and I found it mind blowing when I learnt about the amount of work involved. So I thought other people would be interested to know more about this complicated process particularly if you consider yourself a non computer person and have to get a website built. I have asked my SEO friend to supply the technical information for this article.
Stages in the Process
Target Audience
Before building a website there are important questions to consider. I was asked who would be my potential audience. Who are my customers likely to be? Would they be children, businesses, home owners, sales people, parents or teenagers and so on? If you are not clear on your target audience then you are not going to be able to set the tone of the site correctly so this is a very important consideration.
The Objective of the Website
Then I was asked, what was the purpose of my website? Did I want to sell services on line or use it to market my business and get more leads for potential customers? Maybe I would want to use the site as an online brochure to showcase my services. Another possibility was to use the website to foster a community so that I was in contact with other like-minded people, with chat rooms, online discussions and being supported by advertising on the site.
I hadn’t quite realised the scope of a website but as I was asked these questions it became clear that a lot of careful thought went into the preparation before building a website.
Creating a Site Map
The importance of creating a site map is to get it clear in your mind of all the pages you will have on your website so you can prepare the content for each page and begin to design the flow through the website, such as when a user adds a product to their basket, then enters their delivery and billing address and makes the credit card payment in the correct order.
Before you can get involved in latter projects like copy writing or SEO you first of all must spend time on creating the sitemap. Even if it is just done on the back of an envelope, or scribbled on a pad, you need to have a clear idea of all the pages you are going to have on your website and which sections they are going to be in.
The aim is to make the site as simple to use as possible so that there are no barriers to getting into the website or making a purchase. For that reason often user name and passwords are set for the customer so that they are not put off making a purchase by having to register. How many times have you gone to buy something online and then been faced with having to choose a user name and password to create an account, and fill out all of your address details and decided not to bother in the end? Well they just lost a sale!
For a non e-commerce site things are simpler with a contact form which allows you to receive enquiries by email without publishing your email address on the website, thus avoiding spam.Web forms can also validate the information before you receive it, so ensuring that the phone number provided does not contain words, and that the email address is in the correct format, for example. These things may sound very technical to us lay-folk but I assure you everything has to be decided in advance before starting on the construction of the site.
Your Domain Name
Choosing a domain name is often quite a problem because every name you initially come up with will almost certainly have been taken. Domain names ending in .com are by far the most popular and internationally recognised; the snag is that it’s very popularity means that the majority of the shorter names have probably already been registered. Purchasing an existing .com domain name from its registered user can be fraught with problems and the best way to do this is through an escrow process monitored by a third party. However, you can usually think of some domain name that is available, which is much less time consuming than trying to purchase a previously registered domain name from its existing owner, most of the time just contacting them, and getting a reply is a challenge.
So looking at names with endings such as .net; .org .co.uk or .info may be able to provide you with the domain name you would like to have. When choosing your domain name it is very important to include one or more of your keywords if possible as this can apparently help with search engine rankings. So although the name of your business is the obvious choice for a domain name, it is not necessarily the only option.
Copy
The next stage is preparing the content. This is not the design of your website – just the words and visuals you want to have one each of the pages.
Having gathered all the previous information you will need to decide what imagery you want to use within the website content. As we all know, a picture speaks a thousand words and remains in people’s memory far longer than just words.
For each image you could also have a caption, as the caption of an image is the next ‘most read’ words on the page after the page title. Images and their captions need to be clickable. When you click on a picture it should take you to the next stage of the process such as the sale page or placing an enquiry if your website is for lead generation. All images should also have alternative text or alt tags. Alt tags will display the hover text when you position your mouse over the picture, but also they are used by screen readers to assist visually impaired users know what the image is about. See the section below on Accessibility and Compliance.
Website Design
Finally we come to the design of your website.
When we do website design we often prefer the client to work with an external design agency to get the site designs created, leaving us to focus on the more black and white site of installing the artworks on the new website and setting up the CMS.
There are a number of ways to approach web design but ultimately you need to create a design brief for the designer(s) to work from. Look at other websites and your competitor’s websites to find out what you like or dislike. The design brief should give reference to the logo, any existing brand guidelines or schemes and fonts and colour schemes, and should also detail which pages of the website that the designer is being tasked with creating visuals for. See the Sitemap section below.
The very best results will be achieved by using a graphic designer, and beware – not all graphic designers are the same. A graphic designer who designs specifically for print is working in a different discipline than a graphic designer who designs for screen and specifically the web. So choose your designer carefully, look at other work that person has done and determine whether or not you like their style.
If you are working in the big time and budget allows, use multiple graphic designers who have all been given the same design brief and request three concept designs from each designer. If the client themselves also do a graphic design, even if it’s a back of the envelope scribble, you will then have 10 concept designs. The next step is to get them all together and select the preferred elements from each design. Then give the work to the preferred graphic designer to work up as the final artwork.
The artwork should be finalised and agreed on by everybody before development of the site begins.
Navigation
Another important aspect when building a website is how you want your navigation to work. You can have links within the content of your website, in the text, so there are not just links from the menu. You will need to decide whether the links will open into a new window, retaining your original page open or just change the page to the one clicked on. Next time you go online, you will realise how much thought has gone into the way in which a website works.
Production
Finally the preparation has been done and the site is ready to be built. Now for the more technical stuff! You will need to have decided which programming language to use to build the website. There are two main types for developing a website, one is Unix based, and the other is Windows based. Each one has pros and cons. If you are starting from scratch then it probably won’t matter, so you can go with the preference of your professional doing the work. My website is built on the Unix platform (apparently!) which is the same as many of the more well known websites such as Ebay, Facebook, Google and Amazon. Also your website hosting must be compatible with the development language with which your website is built.
Work In Progress
The best way to build a website and be able to monitor work in progress is on the web server where the site is ultimately going to live. This way, those involved in reviewing the work can see work in progress and provide comments throughout the development process.
Going live
The moment of excitement comes when your site finally goes live and you see the results of all the thought that has gone into the whole process.
When the demolition company site went live it was a relief but I was really pleased with it.
As soon as the site has gone live there is no substitute for real world testing though, so ask as many of your friends and colleagues to view the website from their own offices and give you their thoughts.
Accessibility and Compliance
The website has to meet the current standards for website coding and doing so insures that disabled users, such as the visually impaired, can still access the entire website if they are using a screen reader. It is also a good idea to also discuss conformance moving forward, particularly if you have a web content management system, because and accessible of compliant site may become un-accessible after six months of being edited by you if you do not add or edit the website content in an accessible manner.
Unforeseen Items
There are always things that arise in any project which you suddenly realise you have forgotten, so no matter how well the web designer prepares and asks the right questions, there is bound to be a last minute change of mind or addition to the site. The main aim is to minimise the number of glitches that might arise because they aren’t calculated in at the start and they could cause extra costs and delays on the date of the web site going live.As a general rule it is always a good idea to get he site live to the original plans and then look at an update after it has gone live, unless it is a very small deviation from the initial plans.
Reporting and Monitoring
Once your website is up and running, you might like to know how many people visit your website and from that number how many actually buy the products or place an enquiry. From these statistics you can work out the ratio of hits to sales and gradually make changes to improve the ratios. There are some reliable statistics packages such as Google Analytics or Web-Stat.com which allow you to collect and review website visitor data in near real time. All you need to do this is to have a small block of code inserted into each web page on your site.Using web stats programs is also invaluable for SEO keyword reviews after your site has been live for a while because it tells you what phrases have been typed into the search engines by users before they visited your website.
Another useful service that Web-stat.com provides is to monitor the website and warn you by email or text message if the site goes down.
Marketing
Once the website is live there are lots of things you can do to market your product or service. The first step is to submit it to the search engines and at the same time write articles, and press releases. Getting links to the site from forums, blogs and other social networking spaces are other options. For more on this subject ask your designer about SEO, remember that’s search engine optimisation.
How to be Found on the Web
One of the first questions I was asked was, ‘Do you want it to be found by Google the main search engine?’ If I did then there was a whole process of establishing Keywords. So finding the best keywords are vital if you want to be found in Google. He says there are two main types of keywords. The first is the trophy, or generic, keyword for the industry which in my industry is simply ‘demolition’. The second kind of keyword is the long tail keyword. These are not searched for as frequently but if you can get a match then they are much more likely to convert into customers. A good example of this in my industry is ‘factory demolition company Derby’. So it is very important to do a lot of research on keywords to find both those that are the most popular and the most specific. Generally most users only look at the top ten results so you will want to get your website promoted so as to get on this page for your chosen keywords. By using a keyword research tool such as the keyword lookup in the Google Web Master Tools kit you can find the single most popular keyword for your industry.
Conclusion
Wheww. What an amazing amount of work! I hadn’t realised when I started the process of getting a website up and running, how complicated it all is and how many factors you have to consider before even designing the website. The word web design is really a misnomer, as people often think it’s just about the graphic design on the home page, and the branding of the product. Unless you are a computer whizz, most people have no idea how much goes into designing and building a website and the systems that support the work you want it to do. I hope that this article gives you an understanding and insight into the whole process of website development from start to finish.
Article Writing Software Reviews – The Best Article Software
April 29, 2009 by JoelC2009 · 5 Comments
There is absolutely no doubt that article marketing is a powerful marketing technique to be reckoned with, not only does it give your site masses of free traffic, it returns a lot of oneway links targeting the keywords for your website which inturn obviously boosts your search engine rankings.
If you’re an affiliate marketer, then you can rapidly source an affiliate product, compose a few articles and send them to the top article directories linking back to your affiliate web page to gain those much deserved commissions.
Even so, there’s a problem if you are trying to bring about several of unique articles rapidly, particularly whenever you don’t have the funds to out source your work.
So what is the other options? You want a lot of unique articles quickly, or you might need to rewrite articles that are hidden on your disc drive, you need to get your hands on some useful article generating software, something that will save you a great deal of time and however produce articles that actually make good sense.
You’ll be able to also buy article software that will change one article into dozens, if not hundreds of similar articles at the press of a button, generally known as article spinning software.
But which article software will suit you? There are various very good programs and services out there, but there are a good deal of completely terrible ones that are just a pure waste of time and money.
Get yourself to our article writing software reviews for a indepth review of some of the best software and services available.
