Tired of SEO Theories and Algorithms: Try Blogging

Most of the local business owners, who I know, still don't have a web presence for a combination of reasons. Many business owners are from my age group and don't feel comfortable setting up a website. So, they pay somebody else to do it or it never gets done. There are a multitude of reasons to avoid launching your business on the web, and all of them are lame excuses.


During my tenure as a webmaster, I get to hear all the excuses. I'm too old, our business isn't the Internet type, and I don't know HTML. You can tell everybody else those excuses, but do you want to grow your business or not? The vast majority of small businesses fail, and the Internet is the cheapest form of advertising available.

If haven't launched a website or Blog, you are delaying business marketing progress for nothing. Take a computer class, learn from your kids, or learn from your grandchildren, but start as soon as possible. Perhaps, your grandchild can earn some money teaching you how to make even more money.

Blogs are easy to start with, since you don't need to have any HTML knowledge. You can also go to Blogger, and get a free Blog. It might take you 10 to 15 minutes to set up and start posting information right away.

Some website hosts work like that too, but let's assume you have a site of some kind. Did you know your website host might have a Blog feature built in, at no extra charge? If you have this feature, you can easily build a commercial Blog.

For a small business, with a website and commercial Blog, you should be able to establish your natural search engine rankings. Sometimes, these are called, organic rankings and you don't have to pay a penny for them. It may take a few months or more to establish yourself, and you should make regular posts.

For optimum results, your regular posts can be daily, a few times per week, or once a week. More postings are much better and will have significant impact on your rankings. Search engines love frequent posts, such as those found in Blogs.

Instead of worrying about Google algorithms, and SEO (search engine optimization) theories, go back to the basics and boost your rankings with content. Most of us have heard, Content is King, and it is totally true.

So what do you say about your business? Tell your established customers and prospects about your service and products. Explain what your unique selling proposition (USP) is. This is what makes you different from similar businesses in your town.

When you have new products, or are looking for feedback about new product development, a Blog is extremely useful. Your customers and prospects can leave you feedback, so marketing research is very easy.

Lastly, don't shy away from a gold mine. Free advertising is too valuable to ignore. Blogs are the advertising bargain of the decade and possibly, of the 21st century.

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Eugene Rivera is an internet marketing protégé. He is the webmaster of Secrets of Online Success. Learn about all the money making techniques to achieve success on the Internet. Click on our webpage at http://www.secretsofonlinesuccess.info

Work At Home Based Business Paradigm

Do you wish you could work at home, perhaps start a nice little home based business and be able to work it all from the comfort of your kitchen table or spare bedroom? If so, believe me, you're not alone. Millions of people would love to do the same thing.

Countless work at home schemes and home based business opportunities are available, but in this industry you have to be careful you aren't scammed out of money, or that you don't make a big mistake and end up regretting having quit your job.

So think hard before you decide what home work or home based business opportunities you want to take on. Having said that,you really can join the millions who already do successfully work from home. But before you make any life changing decisions, be sure what it is you'd be happy doing.

One of the drawback of working from home is you have to be self-motivated, and this is a very difficult thing to keep up if you don't enjoy the work you do. It's different in the employed work-place when you've got other people around you expecting a performance within the time schedule you're paid for. When you work for yourself the only person you're usually answerable to is yourself.

Although it is possible to find employers who hire people to work from home for them, they tend to be on a per-need basis, and the pay, benefits and work opportunities can be less than inspiring. However, if this is the root you want to take your best and safest option will be to approach professional organizations, not least your local job center or employment office, to see what work at home based opportunities are available in your area. Don't ever pay money out for work at home jobs, they should be paying you!

It is more usual however, for people who want to work from home to prefer the idea of working for themselves, and taking advantage of the unlimited possibilities and the big tax benefits that come from being self employed. It's the dream of millions to be their own boss, and the successful really can make fortunes. However, starting a home based business can be a scary and daunting task to take on. But the lure of the unlimited potentials, and the freedom a home based business venture can bring, spurs people to keep on dreaming and wishing they could find a way.

So what can we do and how do we go about it? Certainly, if you really do want to work at home, then starting a home business is a lot better option than working for someone else. But if you're not prepared to work hard for possibly little gain in the early stages, or if you're not prepared to make at least some investment (however small) then forget about most business opportunities.

Peoples fears of losing their investment tend to cloud this issue, and rightly so. The home based business opportunity industry is wide open to scams - so do be very careful. However if you want to be truly SELF employed, then all your new home based business really needs is a good service or product(s) to sell, and the means of selling them. If you could do this cheaply and hassle free that would be ideal, don't you think? Well you can, and your “come to the rescue” solution is ...the INTERNET of course!

These days more and more people are finding the Internet to be a whole new world of home business opportunities. You'll find lots of home based business start-up help and advice within this website. We help you to get started in your search for ways to make a good living from the Internet. As the Internet offers direct access to the whole world, you have a very powerful medium right there in your own home...what better way to work from home.

Learn all you can before you make any final decisions which direction to go, but once you have decided - GO FOR IT.

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Eugene Rivera is an internet marketing protégé. He is the webmaster of Secrets of Online Success. Learn about all the money making techniques to achieve success on the Internet. Click on our webpage at http://www.secretsofonlinesuccess.info

How To Get Your Website Listed In The Search Engines

You've just spent several weeks working with your web designer building your company's websites. You spent a lot of time making revisions, writing and creating copy, making more revisions, but finally your project is complete and your website is live on the internet for the whole world to see.

A few weeks later you get a call from a business colleague, they say they went to look for your company in a search engine but your company was no where to be found, and they thought you ought to know about it. You open up your web browser, head over to Google and your company is nowhere to be found. You go to Yahoo and MSN but the results are the same, it's like your invisible to the online world.

Now clearly this isn't the goal you had in mind when you built your website. You wanted your company to be seen by the whole world, not to be so well hidden, that people looking for you can't find you. However this is a problem that affects many small to mid sized businesses that are just getting online or haven't done any online promotions. To help the search engines and ultimately your customers find you, you'll need to start working on promoting yourself online. Promoting yourself online is similar to promoting yourself in the real world you need to find ways to get your website noticed.

To help the search engines find your site you need a basic understanding of how they work. Search engines have programs that scan web pages; they read the contents of these pages and try to figure out what they think they are about. When they visit these pages they also look for links to other pages, note them down for future programs to visit and read. The early search engine developers had a bit of a sense of humor when they developed these programs to crawl across the web they named them “spiders”. The more often these spiders find links pointing to your pages the more frequently your website will be examined by the spiders, this process is known as “crawling”.

So to get the search engines to find your website you're going to need links. There are lots of different ways you can get links, some are easy, some are hard, and some will even cost you money. Examples of places you can get links are chambers of commerce, business trade organization, networking groups, directories, press releases, syndicated articles, blogs, and link exchanges. There are pluses and minuses associated with each of these types of links. In a nutshell what you are looking for is a prominently placed link on a reputable website.

Sometimes judging a websites reputation is a little tricky and is more of an art form than a science. As a rule of thumb don't ask or pay for a link from a website you don't want to be associated with. Sometimes you'll receive link requests via email asking you to exchange or trade links, however when you visit the website, you get the feeling something's not right. In some cases these people will have already put up a link to you. Don't worry about it just delete the email, there's usually no reason to worry about someone else linking to you.

Another thing to note about links is they aren't all valued equally. For example a link from your brother's hobby website isn't as “important” as link from The Washington Post, CNN, or Business Week Magazine. What you are really want is a link from another established, trusted, and quality website.
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Eugene Rivera is an internet marketing protégé. He is the webmaster of Secrets of Online Success. Learn about all the money making techniques to achieve success on the Internet. Click on our webpage at http://www.secretsofonlinesuccess.info

The Six Things You Need To Make Money Online

The Internet is probably the most amazing opportunity the small business person has ever been given. You don't need a bank loan, big office rent, expensive equipment, and pricey employees.

Even though these things have been necessary to run even the smallest firm in the past, the Internet lets you LOOK and operate like you have all those things for just a few dollars.

Twenty years ago I would have dismissed that statement with a sarcastic, "yeah right!" But today, the Internet, along with automated web sites and outsourced teams of sales people and pro writers, have made owning a BIG business a very simple thing.

Here are the six things you need to really succeed with your own online business:

1. You need a web site. It's quite possible to make money without a web site, but the number of people doing that are getting fewer by the day. An attractive, hot selling web site will grab visitors and turn them into paying customers. A well-done, well-targeted web site can easily earn several hundred thousand dollars a year, even for the home-based entrepreneur.

2. Get automation to work on your site. In the old days, we had to send an individual email to all our prospects. A simple task could take all day and half the evening. Now, advanced auto responder systems can instantly email customized responses to anyone that asks for more information, or buys, or has bought in the past. This one feature can be a HUGE money-maker for you.

3. Don't just settle for ONE way to make money. Your site should offer SEVERAL products and/or services. Often you can combine products and services into packages that sell far faster and command a higher price.

4. Learn the power of RESIDUAL INCOME in your activities -- then USE IT! Residual income is when people join your organization, and YOU get a commission for everything they sell. You can get tens, hundreds, even thousands of people working under you. The cash will flow in on a regular, continuing basis like you never organization is super easy. Most business opportunities have full-featured systems that help you EASILY do this.

5. Have online ordering on your site where people can use a credit card, send a check, or pay via PayPal. This will give you at least 80% more and bigger sales.

6. Sell an information product. Reports, books, ebooks, and CDs are what the Internet is all about. Information always has been and always will be KING on the Net. Get a great information product, sell it, sell republishing rights to others, and watch that cash flow in.

Keep these six simple points in mind when building your online business. They can give you a mighty head start on your path to profits.

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Eugene Rivera is an internet marketing protégé. He is the webmaster of Secrets of Online Success. Learn about all the money making techniques to achieve success on the Internet. Click on our webpage at http://www.secretsofonlinesuccess.info

How Business Blogging Can Cause An Increase In Sales

One of the reasons successful business blogging is working for small business is because of many of its direct and in-direct effects. In this series of articles, I'll be talking about some of these effects and how they occur, including increases in traffic, better search engine results, and the enhancement of online company brands.


One of the other side-effects of successful blogging can be, and often is, an increase in sales. This occurs for a myriad of reasons, four of which I've listed below.

First, as you begin to consistently give your prospects information they can use, they return for updates on a regular basis. As they begin to see you as an authority on your topic matter, in their minds it seems less of a risk to buy from you as they begin to trust you more, and rightfully so.

The logic is that if you know enough to be able to blog effectively about your subject, then you're knowledgeable in your field - which means that your product likely addresses a solution they'd be interested in purchasing.

Second, it illustrates that there is a human, approachable presence at your site. By blogging, you're showing that someone is in fact "at home", and that your web property is presently being maintained and updated, giving a prospective buyer more security as they weigh their options and approach a buying decision.

Third, the conversations that occur through blogging build a bridge of trust and loyalty. It's human nature to tend towards the familiar, and to trust it. When you blog frequently, your return visitors see you as the familiar.

Once they become buyers, this trust can elevate to loyalty. They'll begin to come to you repeatedly for information and when given the choice, will want to buy from you, the known, rather from someone else they don't know.

Fourth, if you take care to configure your blog in a way that takes advantage of its inherent search engine friendly architecture, your blog can help your site show up for searches for more terms, bringing you both readers who are generally interested in your topic matter, and those who are looking for a solution and are ready to buy.

Many blog systems have some of the necessary tools that can help you optimize your blog for better search engine placement by manually configuring settings in the template or modifying the code to make it more compatible. But if you're not a techie, or are a busy professional, you'll want to find a system that incorporates all the most needed tools for you already.

An increase in sales is just one of the reasons blogs are working for business online, from the small business to larger corporations. With Google embracing blogs with the Google Reader and Blog search, and Yahoo including blogs as sources in the Yahoo News section, business blogging is no longer seen as a theoretical test for increased exposure. They are an essential component to your online marketing strategy.

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Eugene Rivera is an internet marketing protégé. He is the webmaster of Secrets of Online Success. Learn about all the money making techniques to achieve success on the Internet. Click on our webpage at http://www.secretsofonlinesuccess.info

Work At Home Scams Thrive on the Internet

The ability to earn a living from home is one that millions of people would enjoy. No one likes being a slave to a time clock, and no one enjoys working for a difficult boss. The notion of working from home is appealing to everyone who has ever had an unpleasant job, and thousands of Americans try their hands at it every year with varying degrees of success.

Where there is opportunity for success, there is also opportunity for fraud, and the work at home sector is no exception to that rule. Offers to work from home are common subjects of spam e-mail, and there are thousands of Websites devoted to lavish descriptions of the riches one can acquire while working from home. Unfortunately, most of these offers are fraudulent, and the only thing that most people will get out of them is a lighter wallet. Offers to get rich at home while stuffing envelopes or processing medical claims for physicians earn far more for the people selling them than they do for the victims who buy them.

These are but two of the common work at home scams that can be commonly found in e-mail solicitations or in the classified advertising sections of business-related magazines. Anyone who is considering investing in a plan to work from home should first consider the following:

You can't get something for nothing. If a company promises that you can make thousands each week from doing little or no work, you should be suspicious.

Do not respond to solicitations that come via e-mail. These messages are literally sent out by the millions in hopes that a few people will believe the offer and send money. Don't do it.

Find out what it is you will do to get paid. Then do some research on your own. Is there a market for the work you will be doing? Look into it.

Research the company involved. Thanks to the Internet, it's as easy as looking them up in a search engine. See what others have to say about the company.

Do you have to invest money? How much? What do you receive? Can you get a refund if you change your mind? Find out.

While there are legitimate opportunities to work from home, most offers to hire people to do so are fraudulent. By doing a little homework before you invest your money or time, you can avoid being another victim of a work at home scam.
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Eugene Rivera is an internet marketing protégé. He is the webmaster of Secrets of Online Success. Learn about all the money making techniques to achieve success on the Internet. Click on our webpage at http://www.secretsofonlinesuccess.info

Can You Handle the Stress of an Online Business?

Are you looking to the Internet as a possible avenue of creating income and relieving you of your present burdens? You are not alone; many individuals see the potential for building their own business from wherever they are on this globe by means of the Internet. The Internet provides a level playing field and appeals to men and women of all ages as a prospective means of conducting business from the comfort of home.

However, despite the fact that running a business through the Internet can often be less expensive than a traditional business AND allows you access to a worldwide market at any time of the day, the truth behind starting a business online is that it can be as stressful as any other business. How can you prepare yourself for this obstacle?

PUT ON YOUR 'GAME FACE'

Yes, it IS a tough game to start a business. You are guaranteed to experience times when your self-confidence is shaken, you feel the task is beyond your abilities and you beat yourself up for making mistakes.

Know this - and move on. It is part of creating business and you will have to face these issues whether it's your first attempt or if you've been in business for years. Changes happen fast on the Internet and that includes changes to businesses. One day you will be amazing yourself and the next day you'll think you've been beat.

The best solution to this is to EXPECT it and plan to move on despite those feelings.

DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE

Are you bringing a small business to the Internet in order to expand your market? Good for you. Nearly every business can benefit from online exposure. Or are you inspired by the many programs that claim "instant wealth - easy to learn!"? Don't believe it. Regardless of if you've been in business for a long time or this is your first attempt - business done through the Internet has it's own methods and you'd better be ready to learn them if you want to make money.

The Internet is fast - people expect instant gratification when doing business online and can be incredibly fickle when all they need to do is click a button to check out the competition. If you are basing your Internet business on a traditional model that depends on walk-in traffic and personal referrals you will have to adapt your methods to an online business. If this is your first online business you will need to learn the nuances of obtaining customers and keeping them.

The learning curve can be steep and some individuals find it daunting. The good thing to remember is that it is possible for nearly anyone to operate a business online no matter what their previous experience - just be prepared to learn and have patience with your attempts.

DON'T BLOW ALL YOUR MONEY

It is easy to forget the need for a budget when you can spend money so easily online. Don't buy into every business opportunity or training program. Visit online forums to acquire a feel for the best systems available. Make friends on these forums that will support you when you are overwhelmed or needing advice.

The only thing worse than finding out you made a mistake is finding out that it cost you money. Remember that every experience is a learning experience. Try to stick to a budget but don't permit yourself to dwell on mistakes when they happen - learn and move on.

Taking steps to prepare yourself for the stress and rejection that all new business owners face will enable you to build on that knowledge and create a successful business. Thankfully for you there are many who won't make it that far which leaves the field wide open!

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Eugene Rivera is an internet marketing protégé. He is the webmaster of Secrets of Online Success. Learn about all the money making techniques to achieve success on the Internet. Click on our webpage at http://www.secretsofonlinesuccess.info