Social Networking Communication - Using a Signature Tag For a Big Impact on Online Networks & Forums

by Felicia Slattery

Social networking at online forums for business is one of the hottest ways small business owners, home-based solopreneurs, and internet marketers are communicating with their target markets. But so many aren't taking full advantage of one aspect of this powerful medium.
Recently on a social network forum I frequent someone posed the following questions about your signature line or signature tag. The signature tag is the part of your message that gets placed below your name. Some forums automatically insert your tag that you write and save to your profile. In other forums, you have to manually type it each time you make a submission.
Here are the questions:
• Do you have any tips for someone looking to get into using a signature tag?
• Do you feel they are effective and worth your extra energy to attach to your posts & emails?
• How long is too long when it comes to a signature tag?
• Anything you see in regards to signature tags that you don't like seeing?
My Answer:
I don't see enough people using signature tags the way they should. Signature tags represent an opportunity for a powerful message. I personally do not have just one tag line. I select and add a signature every time I post.
My typical signature tag has one purpose: to build my subscriber list. But I also occasionally use it for other things, too. For example, on another thread I replied to someone who was asking about inexpensive ways to market her business. I gave her my answer and I talked about how to do something that I teach business owners how to do. Rather than making my post seem like an ad, I tried to give her some helpful hints, tips and advice, based on my professional experience. Then in my signature tag, I added the link to the product I sell that would help her (or others interested in the same topic) further.
• Your signature should have some sort of 1-2 sentence statement in it.
• You also need to include a live link to the place on your website where you want people to land. That may be your home page, but it could also be a special offer page.
The whole point of being active on social networking sites is to make connections with others so they get to know, like, and trust you. At some point they may want to do business with you... or they may never. But they will know who to refer friends and others to if they meet someone who needs your product or service. All they have to do is find any of your posts and visit the link. No link, no business.
Also, you have the opportunity to build your credibility with your signature tag. For example, I don't go around talking or writing about my credentials... it's a boring subject and looks like a person could be bragging. But by having my full name with those letters I earned after it, that's an understated message to the world that I know what I'm talking about.
Too long is when someone takes advantage of the space and launches a full-blown ad. It's like the only reason they're posting is to get that signature tag out there. Doing that is distasteful, transparent, and a bit "spammy."
Is it worth the extra energy? Since I get about 80% of my online business from social networking, I'd say a resounding YES!!!!!!
As you go forth and communicate on social networking forums for your business, keep in mind that your job in social networking is to build your credibility and attract business to you using pull marketing. That starts with a well-worded and powerful signature tag.
There are many ways to increase your credibility as a small or home-based business owner. I invite you to discover how to Increase Business by Communicating Your Credibility now. You'll get this FREE e-course designed to help you attract more business and get more cash flow. Pick it up here now: http://www.communicationtransformation.com/creating-credibility-ecourse.html

Social Bookmarks Increases Your Viral Marketing!

by Martin Lemieux

With this simple to use tool, webmasters and blog owners can easily create 2 different buttons to add to their site that helps visitors to bookmark the intended website, or blog. With just one button, visitors are taken to a page with a wide variety of social bookmarketing websites world wide.
There are 2 different types of buttons:
1. Browser BookMarks
2. RSS Feed BookMarks:
With a simple copy & paste code, these two buttons can be added to anywhere within your website.
AddThis.com has added enough social bookmarking websites to please everyone. No longer do you need to add multiple little images within the pages of your site which ultimately increases the loading time for your pages. Now you can simply add one button and never have to worry about using up valuable space.
This Service Is Similar AddToAny.com But, It Is Different:
Just like AddThis.com, you need to create your own AddToAny.com buttons. Unlike AddThis.com, AddToAny.com doesn't offer visitor stats for your buttons, they come "as is". With an account from AddThis.com, you can easily track how many times visitors have clicked on your buttons, where they were generated from, and whether or not people have actually added your site to their bookmark favorites.
In Conclusion:Keep blogging and writing your heart out. Always look for new and creative tools to help you get the word out about your blog, website, newsletter, or article postings. These tools are a great way to connect with visitors, I personally recommend AddThis.com hands down. If you have other recommendations, please feel free to post a comment below.
"Thanks Martin for the great review of AddThis. I'll be sure to check the comments for this post on a regular basis to see if your readers have suggestions, or enhancement requests for AddThis. We will be adding a lot of new cool features in the next month or so, including more stats for web publishers. Stay tuned." -Dom Vonarburg (AddThis http://blog.addthis.com/)
Martin Lemieux is the owner of a successful article directory network with over 80,000 author submitted articles, with over 30,000 active authors world wide.
http://www.Article99.com - Authors Club
http://www.MyFamilyLiving.com - Family Article Directory
http://www.MartinLemieux.ca - eBusiness Blog

Social Bookmarking - Why It Helps SEO

by Christine Abbate

Using Social Bookmarking sites are a really great way to promote your website or Blog. They are becoming one of the best marketing tools today, especially since they have very useful tools and features that users can utilize to improve their search engine optimization.
What is Social Bookmarking?
Social Bookmarking allows users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. This enables Internet users to access and add their favorite bookmarks from any computer. Personalized, informal tags are used to organize bookmarks instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders. These sites measure the popularity of a given website as compared to all other sites that have been submitted to its system. So you can see what bookmarks are favorites to a lot of people. Learning new things is easy and effortless with social bookmarking sites. Everything on these sites is someone's favorite -- they've already done the work of finding it, so all you have to do is look! Some common bookmarking websites are Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Technorati, Blinklist, Reddit, and Spurl.
Why would I want/need to be Socially Bookmarked?
There are lots of uses to social bookmarking- such as sharing your favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and anyone else. Groups can create a shared account to collect and organize bookmarks that are useful to the entire group. For example, if you're planning a group vacation, you all can collect bookmarks and review what everyone else finds. Creating wish lists on social bookmarking sites is also a great idea to get the word out to people you know. Make a birthday list by shopping online, saving your "wishes" as a bookmark and tell your friends/family to check it out from their computers!! Whatever the use for sharing information, social bookmarking can save a lot of your time. And today, time is so precious!
Why is Social Bookmarking good for SEO?
Due to the immense popularity of social bookmarking websites, being on their front-page, you are increasing your traffic to your website. In the long run, the numerous inbound links to your site will increase and regard you as a link reference, thus you have increased your link popularity and efficiently increased your rank. Between your high traffic and increased link popularity, social bookmarking websites use this method as their media platform with a viral marketing campaign to their advantage by doubling it with link baits. You win in more than one way!
Overall, social bookmarking is a great way to increase traffic and potential customers to your website. Just keep in mind, in order to be successful in social bookmarking, you must provide content that has value and worth bookmarking!
Christine handles SEO, SEM, usability and standards-compliance for NewSunGraphics (www.newsung.com) a New York firm offering Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, W3C-Compliant web design using full CSS layouts and all things web design/development. NewSunGraphics offers extensive services at affordable prices to a growing list of successful and happy clients. NSG is offering a Free SEO site analysis - an extensive examination of an existing site, valued at $195.00.

Small Budget Big Promotion!

by Daniel Millions

Your website will need visitors for you to earn money with your internet business. The biggest challenges for those starting a new internet business are limited resources and money to run marketing campaigns; and limited knowledge on how to cost effectively drive traffic to the website.
There are various ways of promoting your internet business, and some are more costly than others. If you have limited resources to spend on your advertising, then you will need to know about the most effective and yet not very costly methods of drawing traffic to your website.
1. Have an appropriate Domain name for your internet business. Although this seems very obvious, it is often underestimated in its importance. It is ideal for your domain name to have some of your internet business key words to make sure that you can be found when someone does a search for your keywords online.
2. Word of mouth in your circle of influence. Everyone has a circle of influence; being people that you interact with in your life. These people are your potential customers; and you must tell them about your internet business. This does not cost you anything. You just have to list all the people you make contact with in your daily routines and identify the best way of telling them about your internet business. Call them, email them, write them or give them your business card.
3. Email Marketing. If you have another internet business already, it is recommended that you email your existing customers or if you have a newsletter, your subscribers list; and tell them about your new online business. You can also email all your colleagues in your email address book. The more people you tell about your internet business, the more visitors you will get to your website.
4. Your Email Signature. Your email will need to look professional, and you must have in your signature the details about your internet business website: the URL, the business name, email address and other contact details. You can also set up different websites for various purposes. Having your website address in your signature in every email you send out is a cost effective way to promote your internet business.
5.Submit your website to search engines and directories. This is another cost effective way of driving traffic to your internet business. It is free if you can manually submit your website to search engines and directories. There are various companies that can submit your website for you at a cost. For your website to be picked up by search engines, you must have on your website high quality unique content and your content must be keyword-rich.
6.Write and distribute articles. Writing and distributing articles is one of the very effective ways of driving traffic to your website. There are several objectives that are to be accomplished with writing articles; namely to be picked up by ezine publishers, other websites, and also by offline publishers. By writing high quality articles on a regular basis, you come to be viewed as an authority or expert, which will further make your articles popular. In your articles, you put a resource box to build back-links, or to sell. By submitting articles, you have search engines pick up your website and eventually, send you some free traffic.
7. Link Exchanges. It is important to create some links with websites that are similar to yours so that you can get visitors coming to your site via the link on your partners websites. For your internet business to be successful, you need a lot of traffic. Creating links with partners can be time consuming. If you can afford it, you can use a software called The Link Machine which automates the process for you. Although two way links are important, one way links are even more effective and you can create these by other methods such as article submission, forum participation, directory submission etc.
8. Forum Participation. There are a lot of forums or groups for almost any interest or niche or business. Participating at these forums, with your email signature that has your website, can help you generate some targeted traffic for your site. You can get more visitors through this, which will support the growth of your internet business.
9. Offer Freebies. Giving away free gifts, tools or resources to your prospects is a very powerful way of growing your internet business. Because a visitor to your site benefits by getting some of your freebies, they will be encouraged to come back to your website again in the future, giving you some repeat business.
10. Publish an ezine or newsletter. Ezines are a targeted form of advertising, and they can be easy to prepare. Having an ezine helps you create a long term relationship with your potential customers. Over the long term, your subscribers will trust you and will do business with you.
If you consistently use these strategies to promote your internet business, you will see traffic to your website increasing.

SEO Content and HTML Meta Tags

by Vasileios Tyrmakidis

The first technique of an effective search engine optimization (SEO) is that you should optimize all your pages before you make a search engine submission. A small important part of economical search engine optimization is keyword placement in html meta tags and on your web pages.
You need to find out the right keywords to optimize your website by using some special internet marketing software/tools. Good search engine placement, search engine ranking etc. is easier if you choose high-demand, low-supply keywords (for example free internet marketing software) and to create pages optimized for these keywords. You must take care that the chosen keywords are relevant to your website and optimize these for alternative yet similar versions. It is very important that you have in your web content marketing a high-value, relevant content, this keeps your online business moving.
Here are some rules for your web content publishing in terms of your online marketing, search engines (like Google and Yahoo) work using the following two rules. Their ultimate goal is simply to recognize relevance and quality. You can build traffic (visitors) by working with the search engines, and your business will improve.
1) Keep it real.
2) Provide what people want. (relevance and quality)
Do not forget to put your keywords in the title tag, meta description and keywords tag. Furthermore use H header tags. Some search engines use meta tags and some ignore html meta tags completely, preferring only to rely on page content, also remember that the search engines constantly change their ranking rules (algorithms). The meta description tag is still widely used and is definitely worth your time it is a good traffic generator. This tag is designed to let you include a written description of your website and is often used by search engines as the brief description that appears in search results pages.
Study these basic (SEO) search engine optimization guidelines and learn that many of the search engines behave differently when it comes to choosing the best pages they are constantly refining their algorithms that evaluate on-page and countless off-page criteria. One of these criteria is that a website which updates its content will be preferred. You should remember these simple rules while you are building your web pages refresh your content continuously and understand that these are only basic guidelines. However, they should help you for a better search engine rank in the search engines, over time.
I have worked together with some big online companies and have learned a lot about Internet Marketing and online business. Now I will tell you on my web site at http://www.internet-marketing-net.com the best way you can create a online business with less money and time.

Sell Beats Online - Promoting With Google AdWords

by Rich Sample

Google AdWords is an advertising program offered by Google which allows you to advertise your site when people search for certain keywords.
If you are confused don't worry. Go to Google and search for "rap beats". Now the results on the far right under "sponsored links" are the sites that paid to have their website displayed on that page.
Google Adwords is pay-per-click. Which means you will only have to pay every time someone clicks your link. Usually you won't have to pay more than 5-10 cents per click.
You must first sign up for Google AdWords by clicking "Advertise" under the search bar on google.com.
Follow the steps they provide you. If you are completely new to AdWords I suggest using the starter campaign. It will make it easier for you to get started.
After you have signed up for Google AdWords it's time to start advertising. First you need to think of a catchy headline that will attract artist to click your advertisement. You might try headlines such as "Download the hottest beats", or "Get the Best Beats Here".
Next you need a catchy description. Try something like "download the hottest beats in the industry". After you have your headline and description you need to set your target keywords. This is very critical. These are the keywords that when searched, you're advertisement will show up on the right. You don't want to target keywords that are not relevant to your website.
I have done extensive keyword research and have found the most effective keywords are below. I suggest using the ones below.
Rap Beats
Rap Instrumental Beats
Hip hop instrumentals
These keywords are searched for hundreds of times daily in Google. This will provide you with a good amount of hits per day. Remember to set your budget so you don't go over how much you want to spend.
This is one of the few industries that competitors are not hip to Google AdWords. In fact from my research there is practically no competition for keywords.
click here: http://www.liveoffbeats.com.

Search Engine Optimization Tools For The Do-It-Yourselfer

by Nathan Lewis

Having the right tool can make any job easier. The same can be said for search engine optimization. There are tools, many of them free, that will assist you in optimizing your site for the best possible ranking.
Page Optimization Software
Optimizing pages is one of the most important factors in achieving top rankings. Simply writing the content to make it visually attractive to your visitors is not enough to get you the high rankings you desire.
Optimizing pages is done one page at a time for best results. Yes, there are broad optimization techniques that are used on the entire site, but getting down to optimizing each of the top pages of your site is something you need to keep as a goal.
Creating the page in a manner that is easily read by search engines is more important than the vast majority of do-it-yourselfers know or understand. Fortunately, there are software packages available that can help make short work of a potentially long job.
The best I have seen is what I have been using for 4 years. Web CEO, found easily by performing a search your favorite search engine. Web CEO can be found at www.webceo.com The basic package comes with all of these features:
• Page/SEO Optimization
• Site Submission
• File Transferring (FTP)
• Site Ranking Check
• Keyword ranking and analysis
• Site quality checker
This package in its basic format has a tremendous amount of very usable features that will quickly become one of your primary tools for SEO and site submission.
Site Traffic Reporting
Having tried several different traffic reporting programs, the best I have found for the money is Google Analytics. By opening up a Google account you are able to take advantage of this extremely powerful reporting tool for free.
After setting up your website parameters, you are then able to copy a small amount of Java Script that is placed at the bottom of the page, just above the Body Tag. On HTML pages you must load this code onto every page you wish to track. Unless your page has a footer include file that will allow you to load the Java Script into this footer file instead. Our sites use a PHP based program that allows us to load the Java Script into such a footer file.
Once the Java Script is loaded, you can test the connection to confirm that the code is loaded properly. If so, wait 24 hours and you will see traffic data.
While I have not seen anything confirming this next statement, I can attest that shortly after installing Google Analytics on each of sites Google amazingly found our pages and began ranking them within weeks of us launching the sites. While this might not sound like a big deal to those new to SEO, those of us with any length of time in the Internet business know that it used to take up to a year to get any quality rankings with Google.
And, oh yes. You do get some very informative reports from Google Analytics.
Google Webmaster Tools
Once you have a Google account you can begin using their Webmaster Tools.
Go to www.google.com/webmasters/ to find an entire section of Google dedicated to the do-it-yourselfer who wants to obtain the highest possible rankings.
Add your site(s) to the dashboard and begin tracking some very key points of SEO. Not the least of which is the ability to submit a sitemap of your site to Google to make finding all of your pages easier for the Googlebot.
While Google does have some good information on how to create a sitemap, I found that there are 3rd party programs that are easier to manage and create the sitemap. Once the sitemap is created, I use Google Webmaster Tools to upload the new sitemap.
After as little as a week, you can start seeing information populating the pages of the Webmaster area. Site rankings, inbound and outbound links as well as any errors that occurred during the last crawl of your site are shown in the tool.
Google Base
If you are an e-Commerce site this could be the absolute, most important single tool that you will find for your site at any price.
Google Base allows e-Commerce sites to upload their entire database of items to Google for display at the top of search results. Interested?
If you have done Google searches, have you ever noticed that sometimes there are up to 3 items at the top of the search results with prices shown out to the right and links to sites below? These are items uploaded into Google Base by sites just like you.
How would you like your items to be ranked higher than you competitor and not cost you a dime? Upload your items to Google Base and watch the magic.
For our e-Commerce sites we use a shopping cart that has a Google Base export built into it. There are any number of shopping carts with this feature already included. Yours may be one of them. If not, Google will provide you with the format to create your own upload.
A bit of caution for dropshippers. Google does not like dropshippers and will not accept uploads from your site if they suspect that you dropship product.
The key here is to keep your items and upload current for the best possible results.
Google Toolbar
This is an add-on to your browser that shows the ranking Google assigns to all sites.
Page Rank is a somewhat mysterious number between 0 - 10. The higher the number, the better.
Using some algorithm, Google analyses a variety of factors to rank the significance of each site as it relates to the entire Internet. Confused? How about some examples:
• The New York Times has a PR of 9
• The Wall Street Journal has a PR of 7
• IBM has a PR of 9
• Selling Power Magazine has a PR of 5
• The Entertainment Section of my local paper has a PR of 0
• Google, of course has a PR of 10
While Page Rank will not by itself raise your rankings, it is a useful tool when linking to other sites. Google will give your site greater weight if it has inbound links from sites with a higher Page Rank. Think of the inbound link as a vote of confidence for your site. Having this vote of confidence from someone that Google thinks highly of certainly carries greater weight.
Do these tools work? Is the effort worth it?
Using just the tools outlined here we were able to increase our search engine website traffic by 3,900% in a year's time on one of our mature sites. We consistently have in excess of 80% of our traffic from referrals, including website traffic from all the major search engines.
We did this without spending a single dime on SEO and using the tools mentioned above.