Forums are a useful platform for marketing a product or service and they have been gaining popularity amount the viral marketing crowd of late. Unfortunately because of this popularity, many marketers go to online forums with the sole intention of selling their products or getting recruits for their business, which can bring the quality of the forum down. So even if your main reason for joining a forum is to open up a new avenue for sales it is important to contribute something valuable to the forum community as well.

While you can successfully market a product on just about any type of discussion forum their main purpose is not to be an online marketplace. When viral marketers join a forum simply to market products, services or gain recruits the only thing that they really accomplish is making other members mad and ultimately getting themselves banned altogether. To be a successful in forum marketing you need to have the commitment to act respectfully and responsibly. You need to take a genuine interest in whatever the main topic of the forum in that you joined. This means you need to make regular visits to the forum in question and form a good relationship with other members of the forum. If you feel you have quality advice to offer then by all means offer it. Following the rules and regulations of an online forum is an absolute must. Do all of this and you are well on your way to building a solid reputation and a good reputation will take you a long way in the world of business. When trying to sell a product or service via an online forum you will find that buyers will assess your trustworthiness on your reputation gained from that forum, be it good or bad. Forums such as Continue reading ‘Selling via Forum Marketing’

If you offer any type of product or service on the Internet these days you need to have some type of company website or online ecommerce shop. It is truly the only way to present the professional image that you want to put forth in order to increase sales. As an extra addition to ecommerce websites many companies are adding blogs to help cultivate a returning customer base.
Blogging has recently entered the business world as a great way to keep your clients and potential clients up to date on the happenings of your business. Running a blog attached to your main business or ecommerce website is a very cost effective and efficient method in which to communicate with your customer base.

By maintaining a blog you can link your clients to all aspects and new developments in your business niche. In addition to informational updates, you can also add pictures of products as well as video and audio clips. This adds a very personal touch to the way your business is run which appeals to a large number of consumers. Another great benefit to maintaining a blog is that they are very easy to run so you do not need to worry about being tech savvy. Most blogging platforms such as Wordpress will allow you to assign members of staff user accounts with different levels of posting and admin access. You can also update a blog from just about anywhere and anytime you desire. Perfect for the business owner on the go right?
Here are a few suggestions to get your blog off to a great start.
Before you create your blog check out some blogs that are similar to what you plan to present to your target audience. Write down what you like about the blog and the features that you are not so fond of as it will give you a great idea of where you would like your blog to go.
Do not turn your blog into a simple product catalogue, save that for your main business website or ecommerce online shop. Customers enjoy visiting blogs to learn fun and interesting information related to your main website theme. Keep prices off of your blog unless you are announcing a sale or a special offer of some type.
Be sure to pick out a snappy URL for your blog or host your blog in a subdomain or directory on your main ecommerce website. You do not want to confuse your clients and potential clients with complicated urls, so you want to make sure that your blog url is easy to remember so people continue to visit your business blog.
If you are unable to learn all the in’s and out’s of blogging you could hire a freelance professional to maintain your blog or just to setup the code initially. It is well worth the web design fees in order to have a fun attention grabbing blog with a unique theme that suits your business niche.
Do not turn your blog into one huge ad for your business. You would be annoyed if you were looking at a blog and found loads of ads instead of interesting information about the subject matter you are interested in. Don’t subject your readers to the same annoyance by bombarding them with to many commercial plugs.
Keep these suggestions in mind and you will be running a quality blog that will help you build a fun and successful business with many return visitors.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Ecommerce, Business, Marketing

Case study results of an article submission through www.iSnare.com that was made in early 2007 with distribution results. The article directory iSnare.com offers article writers the option to submit their article for free to the directory or alternatively they offer a $2 paid distribution service.
For this article titled

Is Myspace the Hottest Social Network?

we elected to use the $2 paid article submission and distribution service through iSnare.com.
The paid service is supposed to distribute your article to over a thousand websites and send your article to over twenty thousand publishers via opt-in emails. Obviously a large proportion of those publishers will not be interested in your article or will not accept your article, so we were not expecting miracles. We have shown below the case study results for this article submission with screenshots from Google, Yahoo and MSN searches for the specific article title enclosed in quotes.

Search Results for Article Submission in Googles Index

Google shows 97 results for the specific article title searched for in quotes. Half the sites seem to look like other article directory sites. But as well as directories the article has been picked up and published by some Myspace Resource related sites (hopefully providing some related back-links and traffic).

Yahoo Search Results for Myspace Article Submission

Yahoo shows a higher instance of the specific article title than Google with 179 search results. Both Yahoo and Google are showing a similar mix of article directories, Myspace related sites, related Blogs and some obviously sp@mmy type sites and blogs that have picked up and republished the article.

Search Results in MSN for Article Submission

Out of the three search engines checked for the article submitted via iSnare MSN’s search index showed the lowest results. Only 33 instances of the specific article title searched for in quotes was found in the MSN search. Although the top result in MSN was for a Myspace related website (with Mypspace related domain name) rather than an article directory site, so MSN is showing results pages that are related to Myspace higher up.

Some direct traffic must have been created from this article as the iSnare publisher account shows that the article has been viewed over 150 times on iSnares website alone. So for the $2 iSnare fee it seems like this article submission should have gained at least 179 back links (according to Yahoo search for the article title). When writing this article we managed to include 3 url based links within the main body of text as well as a url link and anchor text link in the Author Resource box. Upon deeper investigation into where the articles have been republished it seems a small percentage of publishers have removed the Resource Box completely and quite a few strip anchor text based links from the Author box. So having managed to work url links into the main body of the article we still should gain at least a url based link (and maybe some traffic) from dodgy publishers that don’t republish the Author Resource box. Also the sites that have republished the article complete but stripped the anchor text links from the Bio will still have a live link from the url based link that was in the Author Bio box.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Content, Publishers, Articles, Marketing, Links

A new opportunity for UK webmasters to monetize their sites is available and they are paying per ad published rather than on a CPM, CPA or CPC basis. Unlike other advertising networks like Adsense or Chitika, Matched pays you £3 per advert published on your website page regardless of clicks or traffic statistics. Matched advertising network is only open to webmasters with UK bank accounts and they pay in GBP Pounds Sterling (unlike the majority of the ad networks that pay in US Dollars, which is a disadvantage for UK publishers due to the current exchange rate value of the Dollar to the Pound).

Matched.co.uk offers various advert sizes and configurations to suit your websites theme, and hopefully there are more ad sizes in the pipeline. You can choose from 180 x 150, 234 x 60 and 125 x 125 pixel sizes of ads currently to fit into your websites current template. Once registered you can add the website pages you wish to sell ad space on to your account for advertisers to search through. When an advertiser displays interest in advertising on your web page Matched.co.uk will email you and you may review the advert before accepting the ad and adding the ad code to your site. When adding your websites to your publishers account you must specify a category that best suits the particular web page. By categorizing your website pages correctly in your publisher account this gives the best chance of receiving offers for relevant advertisements that best match the content of your page.

Currently Matched publishers are allowed to add upto five different websites to their account for advertisers to view and choose from. Each site in your publishers account can have upto five different pages to offer advertising space on. Each advert placed on your site will earn £3 per month in advertising revenue, therefore earning a maximum of £75 per month for publishers (£3 multiplied by twenty-five different website pages ). Payment is made by bank transfer to publishers UK bank accounts on the 15th of the month after your adverts have been live on your website for a one month period.

This is a good opportunity to gain some extra revenue from your website that is paid in Pounds Sterling GBP for UK based webmasters. Sign up to this UK Advertising network to create some additional revenue from your websites at Matched.co.uk.

Opportunities for Advertisers are available on Matched in many different advertising categories and they offer packages for advertisers from £150 per month. An Affiliate program is also available earning publishers a £5 bonus for every new publisher they sign up to Matched.

Technorati Tags: Affiliates, Adsense

Using the WordPress plugin NoFollow Free we offer Do Follow comment links in NetStartUpBlog.com. As most WP users will know by default WordPress applies the rel=”nofollow” attribute to any comments left on your blogs posts by your users. Obviously this is done for the simple reason of preventing losing your link value to spammy sites that tend to spam blogs with thousands of rubbish links.
While this application of the rel=”nofollow” attribute is an excellent way of making sure the spammers don’t get your link juice it also prevents genuine commentors gaining anything from comment links on your blog. We feel blogging is a community orientated publishing platform, therefore links to other relevant blogs and websites should be allowed to pass some valuable link juice.
A keen eye will need to be kept on comments to make sure that spam doesn’t slip through the moderation net of Akismet but we feel it is worth the extra work to help the community. To help on the moderation front the Wordpress Plugin No Follow Free offers the option to set a blacklist of keywords that will trigger the rel=”nofollow” attribute to be reapplied to the commentors link. Another handy NoFollow Free function allows admin to require a certain number of comments are made by the commentor before the rel=”nofollow” tag is removed for that commentors links.
Other snazy NoFollow Free options include graphics to add to your blog that show you are a DoFollow blog (as we have used in the top right corner) available in various colours to match your WP theme. This link loving Wordpress Plugin is available in various language formats so why not give it a try and pass some of your blogs link juice to the rest of the community.

Technorati Tags: SEO, Marketing, Blogs, Nofollow, Dofollow

Blogging is an extremely exhausting task that requires many hours of intensive labor, accompanied with a dash of sarcastic humor. With such important things to worry about hosting shouldn’t even be a problem but unfortunately I’ve found that in this tremulous world locating a reliable web hosting company can be a daunting task, especially if you don’t have some experience in the matter.

It is with great pride that I present you Mckremie, an exceptional web hosting company that takes great pride in the excellence of its services. No stranger to stability and complete customer satisfaction, hosting a site has never been so affordable. With prices starting at $9.95mo, the irresistible Standard plan provides 1000 Mb Disk Space, 75 GB of transfer, cPanel Control Panel, FTP Accounts, file Manager, statistics programs, 24/7 support and a backup manager. For the more demanding individuals, the Professional plan with the 2000mb disk space and 250GB of transfer is the perfect solution which is available for the low price of $14.95mo.

Now there are no more excuses for suffering that dreaded down time. If you are searching for a solid web hosting solution give Mckremie a try, your site deserves only the best hosting provider.

Technorati Tags: Hosting

Banner ads suck, that’s a fact. This is so true that it isn’t even funny and if you take a few minutes to think about it I’m sure you’ll reach the same conclusion. This article is the next in the Understand the principals series which strives to teach you a thing or two about blogging.

I won’t make this a big discussing seeing as the title makes it perfectly clear. What I will do is explain why I think banner ads suck. You see most people, nearly all in my opinion, know pretty well that the big, flickering thing you have plastered on the sidebar of your blog is an advertisement. What they also know is that adsense, textlinkads and widgebucks are affiliate programs used to monetize a blog or site. In most cases these people are more than acquainted with these services and they do not need you to point them out. In other words, the change of a site making money with one of these banner ads is close to zero. I know some sites do manage to make money with this strategy but the odds are that your blog inst included in the list.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Adsense, Widgetbucks

Google is an impeccable, trustworthy company that would never use its overwhelming internet powers to harm competitors or monopolize the online advertising market. Sceptics and conspiracy theorist alike should throw their tin foil hats away and join the real world.

A few days ago I wrote an article The Google pay per post attack has commenced to commemorate the beginning of the latest attack aimed at hard working bloggers and what has become known as the Pay Per Post (PPP) advertising community.

You see, most bloggers have finally come to the conclusion that Adsense is in fact one of the worse affiliate programs currently available which in most cases uses blogs as a dumping ground for its undesired low quality ad inventory. But that is an entirely different story that we best discuss on a later date.

The good thing about Google is they stick to their word and always respect the interests of the wider internet community. This isn’t about money it’s about creating a better, safer internet for everyone, or at least that’s what they want us believing. Wouldn’t you at least expect Adsense to filter their network for all spammy services like PPP. The screenshot on the left top corner was taken yesterday after I created a new channel for a banner ad intended for one of my other blogs. Interesting, I guess thanks to me many unsuspecting bloggers will see their Page Rank removed for spamming.

Technorati Tags: Google, adsense, PPP, Pay per Post, screenshot, Page Rank, bloggers

This Christmas I’m looking to buy something extra sophisticated for my wife but the task hasn’t been an easy one at all. After looking at various possibilities and thinking about it for awhile, I believe the perfect gift has been finally found.

The only problem is that choosing the perfect diamond ring can be an extremely stressing endeavour, especially since every person has their own distinct taste. The rings are all beautifully encrusted with the world renowned Antwerp diamonds and benefit from an elegant individually handmade design. For all you romantic lovers out there that are thinking of popping that special question, you will also find some incredibly attractive Diamond engagement rings that will ensure only favourable results, or answers for that matter. The way I see it is, you can’t go wrong with a diamond of such outstanding quality. Just remember the one basic rule, the bigger the better.

To my true contentment this year everything has been organized and completely resolved ahead of time, leaving little room for error. With this surprise in hand who knows, maybe she will return the favor and offer me that Apple MacBook pro I’ve been coveting and dreaming about for so long.

Christmas is nearly here and we all know what that means, presents for everyone. Sometimes finding the perfect gift for that special someone is a challenging task, but this year I come prepared.

Woman love special gifts especially the expensive type that sparkle and come in the form of an elegant necklace or stunning ring. Also known to be a woman’s best friend, diamonds are guaranteed to make any young ladies’ heart sparkle with joy, at least that’s the whole intention.

Diamond jewellery is something I personally favor seeing as it is a gift that will last many years and most times can even be passed down the family tree. The more modern designs combined with what is commonly referred to as white gold, might in my opinion the best option and a likely candidate as this year’s winner.

At the moment the diamond rings have caught my eye but it is still early to make definite decision. Other interesting options include a more conservative gold necklace or maybe a thin bracelet. These things have to be extremely well thought out, it isn’t everyday that we are in the position to offer the person we love such a special gift.