The Importance of A Good Design

April 30, 2008

by Kim and Charles Petty

Your website is the hub of your online business; it is the virtual representation of your company whether your company exists physically or not. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you physically like how they could if they were dealing with an offline company. Hence, people do judge you by your covers. This is where a good design comes in.

Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter.

Similarly, the same case is with your website. If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute “quick fix”, you are literally shouting to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.

On the opposite, if you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organised, focused and you really mean business.

On the other hand, you should also have anything related to your company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. Once again, think of the “salesperson dressed shabbily” anology, and you will get my point.

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5 Important Rules in Website Design

April 30, 2008

by Kim and Charles Petty

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

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Search Engine Friendly Pages

April 30, 2008

by Kim and Charles Petty

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

Stop using wrong HTML tags like to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

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Who Is Your Audience?

April 30, 2008

by Kim and Charles Petty

Understanding the type of people who visit your site is a very important task because you can use that information to enhance your site to suit them. As a result, you will gain more loyal returning visitors that come back again and again for more.

What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on gardening, but a professional botanist might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will leave a site filled with astronomy abstracts but a well educated university graduate will find that site interesting.

Take your audience’s emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that.

When you design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your audience. Are they old or young people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make sure your design suits your site’s general theme.

Try to sprinkle colloquial language in your sites sparingly where you see fit and you will create a sense that your audience is on common ground with you. This in turn builds a trusting relationship between you and your audience, which will come in useful should you want to market a product to your audience.

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Five Ways To Generate Traffic To Your Site

April 30, 2008

by Anson Hall

There is no doubt that you will want to make big money with affiliate marketing. And you will need to of course create your own website to this end.

Yet most webmasters will agree that it is not easy to drive quality traffic to your web site. In fact, it is a common challenge to all affiliate marketers. You can follow the following guidelines so that you can start working to drive traffic to your site.

The first way is by blogging. You will write some interesting things. And then you will ink back to your site from the blog. As matter of fact, it does not only attract visitors to click the links to your site. It also helps to build more back links to your site so as to boost your ranking in the searching engine. However, this method will not be effective if you do not write new post on a regular basis. Normally you will need to write a new post everyday.

Forums are another place you can promote your affiliate site. To this end you have to remember that you are not spamming this forums. And you are not trying to do any advertising in these forums either. You in fact join the discussion in the forums. You will try to answer the questions of the members and of course you may also sometimes ask question. You will put a link to your site in the signature of your post so that people can visit your site when they feel interested.

Viral marketing is another effective way of promotion. One of the easiest ways to do so is to give out free e-books on your site. In the e-book you will put links to your affiliate sites. Of course you should let your readers to give your e-book to the others.

You can also take advantages of social networks like MySpace. The Facebook is another site that you may take advantages of. You will be able to drive a lot of traffic from these sites.

You can also drive traffic by article submission. This is one of the most effective ways of driving traffic. The readers of the articles will follow your link in your resource box and visit your site.

In order to succeed in affiliate, you have to drive tons of traffic to your site. The key is to think out of the box and you will certainly be successful.

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Is Google AdWords the Only Pay Per Click Program on the Market?

April 30, 2008

by Kirt Christensen

Pay per click advertising has set the stage for a new evolution in internet marketing. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, the search engines finally mastered the art of making a profit off of internet marketing. What does that mean, exactly?

Let’s look at advertising from days gone by. No matter the medium for your advertising, TV, radio, newsprint, or web-page, you would be charged a fee. And for your fee you’d get you ads shown for a particular time period and they could be seen by any, and everybody.

Then a some person started thinking that this method wasn’t completely fair for internet usage. Not all types of advertising have the same benefit. They also started thinking that because a webpage was particularly busy, and the ads shown on it got more than average exposures to web surfers, why couldn’t the page owner also reap the benefits of the higher traffic rates.

But increasing the fees that they charge isn’t right either. The likelihood of traffic maintaining that rate is not good. The site might get to be known for charging too much for a small return.

Hence: the birth of the concept of pay per click advertising.

Ads are written by the marketer, using keywords chosen for their productivity, for a product/service they would like to sell. Then the marketer gives these ads to the search engine.

Whenever a web surfer performs a search for the specific keyword the search engine displays the ad. Each time the ad is selected and the web surfer goes from ad to the web-page for that ad, the search engine receives a fee, mostly much less than a dollar, and the search engine and advertiser both profit from it.

The idea was taken a farther by the search engine. They make it possible for a marketer whose is willing to pay a little more per click on their advertisements (the one who has the highest bid on the particular keyword) to have their ads shown in the top slot of sponsored ads. In this way the advertiser can get greater visibility and create more traffic, and that means both he and the search engine will have greater profits.

If asked to give the name of some pay per click ‘PPC’ advertising tool many folks could come up with Google or Google AdWords; yet Google is only one of many search engines that offer pay-per-click services.

Yahoo!, ABC Search, Search Feed, 7 Search, MIVA, Findology, Microsoft AdCenter and Ask.com all allow marketers to advertise with them on a pay per click basis. The prosperous marketer will be the one that is willing to step out from the comfort zone of Google and AdWords and test their advertising skills in these uncharted waters.

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Mona Vie Complaints - I Didn’t Find Many But What About Value?

April 30, 2008

by Chris Gatenby

Live longer, be more energetic, get rid of muscle aches and pains and make money in your own home based Multi Level Marketing business. Sounds wonderful, right? Some of the Mona Vie distributors will agree.

Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, Mona Vie was started by Dallin Larsen. The firm is well respected and is considered to have a generous compensation program that can be lucrative if you produce. Like many MLM programs, Mona Vie pays a team bonus on a binary plan in addition to various other income streams including retail sales mark-up, bulk order bonus, first order bonus, star maker bonus, executive bonus and a leadership incentive.

Mona Vie is priced in the $30 to $40 range per 25 ounce bottle and has a retail mark-up of about 15 percent. Distributors who purchase in bulk can increase their margins and earn bonus points. The pricing structure is designed to reward the representatives who sell more product.

Mona Vie is not an economy product since someone taking the recommended one to two ounces twice daily will go through a 25 ounce bottle in about a week. The primary ingredient is said to be the acai berry from Brazil. The berry is rich in antioxidants and considered to be a super-food. Other fruit juices are included in the formulation. The flavor appeals to many but it is not universally loved.

As with many nutritional supplements, one hears claims that Mona Vie can increase your energy level, reduce joint pain and ward off serious medical conditions such as heart disease, hypertension and so on. Mona Vie does not make aggressive disease prevention claims in their literature so such claims are probably the work of over-zealous distributors. The company literature talks about delivering antioxidants, phytonutrients and glucosamine and esterified fatty acids in certain of their products.

Many people in the USA fail to consume the recommended servings of fruit and produce daily. It follows that nutritional supplements can be a benefit when diet does not deliver all the needed nutrients. Attention to detail is important in comparing nutritional products. I noticed that the Mona Vie literature lists relatively few nutrients compared to a multi-vitamin product.

Although the primary benefits of the Mona Vie product are said to stem from antioxidants, the ORAC score of a serving of Mona Vie was not stated in the material that I read. Clearly, acai berry has high ORAC value but it is still important to know the ORAC value per serving. As for vitamins and minerals, the Mona Vie literature indicated that one serving contains 20% of the recommended daily value of vitamin C, 1% of the sodium and 3% of total carbohydrates.

Based on what I had heard about Mona Vie, I expected it to be a complete nutritional product. However, based on the literature, it is primarily an antioxidant product and you have to go elsewhere to get your vitamins, minerals and so on. Considering the high price and narrow coverage, I am not impressed Mona Vie. A liquid supplement product that I use from an MLM company costs only $30 per month delivered and covers all the vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and antioxidants (2500 ORAC). That beats Mona Vie hands down for value.

For a really powerful antioxidant supplement, I like Xocai Healthy Chocolate, which is an MLM product. One Xocai Power Square contains 3582 ORAC and it tastes great. I think a limitation with a juice business is that you have to get people to change their habits and start drinking the juice whereas with healthy chocolate they want to eat it, especially when it is good for them.

In terms of the quality of the business opportunity, there is no denying the success of many Mona Vie distributors or the company as a whole. The concern I would have has to do with the cost of the product compared to other alternatives such as a value priced multi-formula supplement like GBG or a decadent antioxidant treat such as Xocai Healthy Chocolate.

I have noticed that the desirability of the product and the cost of the monthly autoship are important factors that people look at when deciding whether to join a network marketing company. Since Mona Vie would not replace my multi-vitamin supplement it would be an extra monthly cost and I suspect that prospsective customers would look at it the same way.

Experienced network marketers know that having a great product does not build a business; you need great marketing as well. But marketing is certainly a lot easier if you have a product that is well priced and offers a compelling value. Mona Vie is a well respected company but I think their products are overpriced.

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Search Engine Marketing: What SEO services do I need

April 30, 2008

by Terry Stanfield

Are you confused by all the talk about SEO services and how you need to make your website search engine optimized in order to increase the amount of web traffic that your web site gets? It can be confusing at first to know what SEO services are all about and what SEO services you need to implement some search engine marketing into your website and to increase your ranking on the search engine results pages. If you have never worked with a consultant before you’ll find that working with a qualified consultant is the best way to make sure your website is 100% search engine optimized.

SEO services are more than just writing search engine optimized content. An experienced consultant can change your website and increase your web site hits almost over night. SEO services range in price but how can you put a price on success? You should be willing to pay for experience when you’re hiring a consultant because the right services can make your business successful or take an already successful business to the next level. If you don’t know what SEO services you need the best thing to do is to have a consultation with an SEO expert. Show them your website and ask for a written proposal documenting all the services that you need to increase the traffic to your website and to make sure that your site ranks higher in the search engine results pages. Be willing to pay the SEO consultant for the consultation but many will offer new clients a free consultation so you might not need to pay anything. Once you have a better idea of what services you need you can plan a budget for the project of overhauling your website and making it more search engine optimized.

Not sure that you need any SEO services? Well search engine optimization and search engine marketing are more than just buzzwords. These days the Internet is overflowing with millions of websites and blogs. The only way to make sure that your site gets noticed and gets traffic is to use search engine optimization and search engine marketing. If the cost of SEO services or hiring an SEO consultant seems high think of the cost in terms of advertising. Every business needs to advertise. Would you rather spend your advertising budget on proven SEO methods that are almost sure to drive more traffic to your site and to reach your target market or would your rather spend your advertising budget on an a blanket internet ad campaign that might not bring in any web traffic at all? Spending the money to hire an experienced SEO consultant to provide SEO services is well worth the cost. Your website will only be successful if you are bringing in daily web traffic and getting an SEO overhaul for your web site is the best way to bring in that traffic. When you see your daily website traffic double or even triple after hiring an SEO consultant you’ll be glad you spent the extra money.

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The Trick Behind Successful Keywords

April 30, 2008

by Kirt Christensen

For all the marketers who are using Google AdWords to sell their products/services the idea of keywords is hallowed. They are the thing that can either make or break their business. It hinges on their ability to bring in business.

An unprofitable Adwords campaign can result in a great amount of money thrown away into advertising all because the ads did not attract serious traffic but attracted surfers that were “just looking” and whiling away the hours clicking on the ‘Sponsored Ads”

What these people often do not know is that it is not necessarily luck or careful research that determine whether a keyword will be successful.

Yes, a quick glance at a search engine’s database will show the keywords which generated the most business over an established period of time; however, these keywords are going to generate hundreds of pages of results due to their popularity and internet browsers are not going to look beyond the first five to ten. That means that anything on the remaining ninety pages is going to go unviewed.

Obviously it is necessary that an advertisement be among these first few pages in order to guarantee its success, but what does that have to do with keywords? In order to ensure that an advertisement is among the top of the sponsored links (i.e. listed on those first five to ten pages) the advertiser is going to have to be among the top bidders for that keyword.

Of course that indicates that a higher price will be required for each click on the ads if we want to stay on the first pages and not end up on the other ninety nine.

Well who cares if you have to pay a little more per click? You should because every time that that ad is clicked on you have to pay that amount even if you aren’t getting any sales off of it and that could mean a very large deficit in the ad budget. That’s why each ad has to function at peak performance so that you can justify the expense.

If you want your ads to be successful than the keywords need to be successful also.

A good keyword will be one which will be specific enough that it narrows down the viewing pool (for example, “indoor swimming pools” rather than “swimming pools”) but still general enough that browsers will think to enter it into their search engine (honestly, unless they are professionals themselves they will not know to select a Culligan swimming pool).

If you are having trouble choosing your keywords for your ads, go and visit some of the terrific tools that Google makes available for the adwords customers. www.adwords.google.com.

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Better Search Engine Ranking

April 29, 2008

by John Neyman

If you are setting up a website, follow these simple rules to improve search engine rankings of your site. You can also follow these techniques if your website is not ranked high in search engines for certain keywords. Concentrate on the home page of your site and once you learn the techniques, you will be able to apply them to the other pages of your site that will have multiple high ranking pages.

1. Find keywords (or key phrases) relevant to your website. Go to the overture keyword selector tool (type key phrase overture inventory in Google) and check the popularity of the keywords you want to use. Avoid highly popular keywords. Highly popular keywords are very competitive and the least popular keywords are search engine traffic starved.

Select a dozen keywords and key phrases from the middle of the list. This is a very important exercise and you should spend at least a couple of hours, if not more, researching different keywords. While you are researching your keywords, check your competitors by doing a search in a couple of popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc., using those keywords. Keep a record of your competitors’ urls and other information because you don’t want to waste your time doing the same search again in the near future.

2. Use the keywords you selected into the meta tags of your home page. Meta tags are located in the head section of a web page. Go to one of your competitor’s website and select View and then Source from your web browser’s menu to view the html source of the web page. You will see the meta elements.

The two important meta tags are keywords and description meta tags. Don’t leave them blank. You can list your keywords, separated by comma, in the keywords meta tag. Construct a catchy description using your keywords for the description meta tag.

3. Use the keywords in your title tag. The text you use in the title tag appears in the title bar of the web browser. The title tag should be less than 64 characters long. Again, the key is to use a meaningful title using the keywords. Don’t just make a laundry list of your keywords for the title tag.

The title tag and your meta description may end up in many search engine listings. So, spend sometime to make these two elements interesting, meaningful, and relevant to your site.

4. Use the keywords in top heading (h1) tags of your page. Use one keyword (or a key phrase) for each h1 tag. Use these h1 tags for the headings of your contents.

5. In the home page content, use bold, using the strong html element, to highlight some of your keywords.

6. Italicize some of the keywords in your page.

7. Use the keywords in alt tags of images. You should always use the alt tag for all images.

8. Encourage others to use the keywords for text anchors when they link back to your site. Better yet, publish your own short link text with keyword anchors, bold and italicized key phrases and give it away for link exchanges.

9. If possible, use the keywords in your domain name. Try different arrangements of the keywords to come up with an available domain name that you can register.

10. If you are using php or asp or any other web programming language for your dynamic website, make your url search engine friendly using url rewrite techniques. Search the phrase url rewrite in Google to know more about url rewrite.

Keep in mind these simple rules every time you want to launch a website. Spending a few days upfront in the preparation of your site will pay off in the long run with better search engine rankings.

Our services at leader excel include any where from a personal website to an elite Premium business package website. Our premium package features include creating a personal header with your company’s logo that communicates your product and/or services.

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