PaychecksDirect.com Work At Home Blog

So you think your site is fancy, huh? So might be… but how is that increasing your click through rates and sales? Never mind the experts, the teachers, competitors… They might want you to have a fancy website or your competitor may have a fancy website but  what is the real purpose of your web site? I guess it is making you money! In order to achieve that you need to focus on functionality rather than fancy graphics. Don’t get lost in layers of pretty design or unnecessary technology. It might look fancy but it might just as well ruin your sales!
BAD VS GOOD Website.
So… what defines a really good web site? If you have ever been on a web site trying to find something that you were supposed to be able to find on that specific site and couldn’t? Welcome to the club! In my opinion that would be the classic BAD website. It doesn’t matter how pretty it is, how good the colour scheme is, how brilliant JavaScript codes you manage to create or how fancy buttons and flash things you can create if I cannot find what I am looking for.

So now we know what a bad website is, in my opinion. Let’s find out what a good website is. Have you ever been on a site looking like it is was made by a 3rd. grader? Ugly fonts, crazy colours, plain links instead of pretty buttons and static banners instead of fancy flash animation? Many would call that a terrible website. And maybe I would too. However, let me ask you one thing: Did you find the information you were looking for? If you did, I would say it is a good web site. Ok. I don’t mean that you should design ugly website. Absolutely not. An especially if you are selling something your website need to have a professional look, but just don’t let the “fanciness” get in way of the real information - the actual reason why someone would visit your website in the first place.

In sum functionality is more important than looks. Ideally, your web site should be both functional and nice looking. All it takes is proper planning.

One easy way to avoid all the fancy stuff is by doing HTML coding by hand and not by using Dreamweaver, FrontPage etc. It will also make it a lot easier to clean the website sometime down the line and even make it easier to do SEO.
 
Conclusion:
Your goal should be to make clean and simple websites that is easy to use for the visitor and that deliver the content or service the website was intended to provide. 

Using graphics when constructing a website is something every webmaster like to do. However, images can make your website load slowly and actually turn people away. A website should load within 5 seconds, if not you will lose many visitors. You see, most people still connect to the internet via modems and regular phone lines so design your website for these people by avoid using large pictures.So how can you create a good looking website with nice images and aesthetic quality without making it load too slow?

Online advertising is exploding. With it has come new technology that turns blogs into the best platform to run an online business. The video stream has been described as a savvy use of a cheap toy for online marketing. In fact, some of the most profitable videos on the Internet today were made on webcams or digital cameras.

The two main purposes of a marketing video are to create awareness of a product or service, or to educate visitors.

The video ad is a virtual commercial that is viewed on a website, or sent through RSS feed to other websites through services like Adbrite and Google. These are short commercials. However, because they are made for a computer screen, a professional can make the video for less than $5,000.00. And, a determined do-it-yourself director can make one for under $400.00.

A web video is created to educate visitors and lead them through your web site’s presentation. It increases sales by educating visitors. This overcomes the main reason why visitors leave a website.

A visitor’s failure to understand instructions, or their refusal to read instructions, is the number one reason for lack of sales. Video forces visitors to pay attention to instructions and stops them from leaving the page.

There are dozens of video companies who will make expensive videos for a web site and then offer hosting. At first this appears to be an easy and effective way to introduce video to your website. Unfortunately, the cost is almost never justified. It is better to make a homemade video, and change it monthly. Once you see how easy it is, and how good the quality, you’ll be sold. If you doubt this, go to MySpace or YouTube and look at all the great quality videos made by amateurs.

YOUTUBE & GOOGLE VIDEO

Sticky websites are the main tool for today’s content site managers. They are finding it more difficult to build an opt-in list. It is difficult to keep visitors connected to the web site until they purchase. They need a real strong hook to keep visitors.

YouTube is a free service that lets webmasters embed their own video, or other video, onto a web site. Imbedding a video clip from a famous author, an industry guru, or even a news clip that relates to an article dramatically increases the impact, and sticky factor of the web page.

YouTube allows users to upload their own video and then embed it, with player, on their web site. This video can instruct, sell to, or build trust between the visitor and the product. In fact, it can become the product.

As for the marketing power of video, YouTub recently surpassed CNN’s hits per day, and MySpace video has surpassed AOL, according to Alexa. No wonder Google recently purchased YouTube for more money than many small countries are worth. This is a mute testament to the power of video.

Each of the three main video hosting sites have their advantages and disadvantages. MySpace is social based. Its ignorance of hard core porn leaves a bad taste in many Social Networking and SEO webmasters. There are very few intellectual videos on MySpace, and there is no way to easily embed them onto your web page. This means that people must leave the site to see them, or the webmaster must embed a video player.

Google video is too complicated. It can take more than twenty minutes to sign up. And then there is a complicated tutorial.

This leaves YouTube, as the leading service for most webmasters. YouTube allows a webmaster to sign up and embed video on their website in less than two minutes.

PODCASTING

Podcasting, or audio streaming, has been around for several years. It ranges from creating a radio station with syndication, or setting up a small web based audio sites, to uploading an audio stream onto your website.

Podcasting is the most cost-effective method of retaining customers, improving sales, and educating visitors. However, it is time consuming. It takes at least 30 hours of streaming, rotated in four hour blocks, to effectively create a 24 hour broadcast. The content should be continually updated. Even tutorials should change every few weeks.

Another setback for podcasting is the bandwidth and storage requirement. While there are cheap $5 a month services, you can find site that offer a complete service with royalty management, few webmasters are utilizing the services properly. Those web sites that are using these services are not scripting and editing, resulting in poor content.

The place where Podcasting excels is in short online tutorials. Many web sites utilize them with a PowerPoint presentation, creating a tutorial. While this is a ‘poor cousin’ to the Macromedia flash tutorials, Powerpoint has the benefit of saving each slide as a .gif, making it easy for amateurs to incorporate on their web sites.

It is easy to imbed an audio stream. Just upload the file, and then hyperlink it to a button on the web page. When the button is clicked, the user’s Media player will play the audio.

An audio file can even be linked to photos. A shopping cart with ten cameras on a page can include separate audio streams discussing the benefits of each. The visitor only needs to click a link and/or the image to start the audio stream.

The internet is tiring of web sites that sell ebook downloads. Instead of writing an ebook think ‘new trend.’ The emerging trend is online tutorials, either audio and PowerPoint, audio and photo, Macromedia flash, or video streaming.

HOW TO PROFIT

Each of these tools are used to create a sticky web site. They are used on blogs, web sites, and in forums. These tools ‘tease’ users. Then, when they are hooked, a full video course can be offered.

Bloggers do this. They offer ‘how to courses’ that span 500 blogs, or, the visitor can purchase the ebook, or download the entire course in an audio file.

Video has one main advantage over ebooks and podcasts. While an ebook may fetch $50 - $100.00, the exact same content packaged in a video course could fetch as much as $1,000.00.

Once you are prepared to profit, it is time to trash your homemade product and create a professional one.

Camtasia is an easy software system that allows video editing. It is moderately priced at $299.99. Camtasia Studio 4.0 makes it easy to publish videos and MP3 files for iPod, or other portable media players. Now your marketing message, screencast, lecture, or training video can reach anyone, anywhere, on the bus, in a coffee shop, or even while they’re jogging. Camtasia is easy to learn, easy to use, and affordably priced.

BRINGING IT TOGETHER

Today’s generation has been acclimatized to video. It is part of everything they do - their work, their education, and definitely their entertainment. They will not easily tire of video and audio streaming.

Webmasters do not need to worry about investing money into these mediums, only to have them go out of vogue like so many other Internet Marketing tools have. And, best of all, video is fun to create, easy to use, and very profitable.

Here are a few tips to help you tame search engines to get better results.

Ranking Algorithms

You may have heard of ranking algorithms when you were researching search engine trends and optimization techniques. These algorithms are mathematical formulas that search engines use to determine how Web pages are indexed in their databases. These algorithms also help to determine how Web pages are ranked in the results for specific keyword searches. Each of the search engines has its own specific ranking algorithm, but the actual formulas are kept confidential by each individual search engine company.

Because these algorithms have the power to change Web rankings and the way people do business, they are kept from other companies to protect the business interests of each search engine. Even though you don’t know exactly what these formulas are, there are guidelines for each search engine that you can follow to improve your rankings.

Ranking algorithms differ for each search engine, so you can use one search engine and then use a second search engine for the same keyword and get completely different results. This is why you need to have a wide range of search engine optimization techniques in place to optimize your Web site for the best results across all of the search engines.

If you heavily optimize your site for one search engine, you will lose traffic on other search engines. If you optimize your site for the top search engine, you may be able to get away with very little optimization for the other search engines.

All of this will depend on how the search engines are ranking sites when you are optimizing your site. You will also have to keep up with the major search engine trends after you initially optimize your site so you know what changes need to be made.

Off-page optimization has become increasingly more important because of the changes in search engine optimization. Many people involved in the SEO community have learned how to optimize their pages so the search engines started to place increasingly more importance on off-page optimization.

Off-page optimization means that you will have to work on optimizing your site without actually using the pages of your site for optimization purposes. One of the best tools for off-page optimization is link building. Link building means that you are building links from other Web sites to your own site. One-way links are the most valuable since they show that other Web site owners find the information on your site to be relevant or important.

Some of the bigger search engines determine the popularity of the Web sites that are ranked well in the results for specific keywords. If a well-ranked site is not getting much traffic from the search results, the search engines will decrease the rank of this site because Web users have shown it to be an irrelevant or useless site.

If a site that is not ranked as well in the search engines gets a lot of traffic, the search engines may elevate the rank of the site. Users who keep visiting the site despite its low rank are showing the search engines that the site’s information is very important and relevant to the keywords used in Web searches returning that particular site in the rankings.

The Importance of Google

If you have a small search engine optimization budget, you may be wondering if it’s really necessary to optimize your site for all of the search engines. While optimizing your site for all of the search engines will give you the best results, targeting the major search engines can help you to optimize your site for the smaller search engines at the same time.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN are known as the major search engines and they are in constant competition with each other to improve the way information is returned every time someone searches for a particular word or phrase. Google is the most important of these search engines, and the Google organization has changed the way users get information with their innovative search techniques and complementary services.

In addition to the search engine services it provides, Google also offers Google Scholar, Google Earth, Google Checkout, G-mail, and a number of other services for Web users. Google Scholar allows users to search for information in scholarly publications. This is an excellent tool for anyone writing a thesis, dissertation, or article for publication.

Google Earth is Google’s way of getting involved with satellite photographs. Users can search for photographs taken by satellites. Google Checkout is Google’s new payment processing system that is closely linked with major retailers, making it the online shopping experience for convenient. G-mail is Google’s e-mails service that has a very large storage capacity, making it the first choice for users who want to take advantage of the almost 3 GB inbox size.

Google PageRank

Google PageRank (PR) is a statistical tool that can be used by Web marketers to determine how their site is perceived in the online community. Google creates this statistic using a mathematical formula that takes the number of links to and from your Web site into consideration and comes up with the PR number.

When other Web site owners link to your site, Google interprets each link as a “vote” for your site. This allows Web users to contribute to the popularity of a site. The quality of the links to your site is just as important, if not more important, than the number of links to your site. If a Web site linking to you has a PR of 8 and 200 outgoing links, this may slightly help your PR.

If a site linking to you only has a PR of 6 but only has 10 links, this will be more helpful. Because the site has few outgoing links, Google assumes that your site is important because they used one of their few links to drive viewers to your site.

Checking your PageRank is easy using a tool called PR Checker. You simply enter your Web address and your PR will be displayed in a matter of seconds. If you find that your PR is low, you can attempt to increase it by building links and employing other SEO strategies.

The Sandbox Effect

Because Google is so important in the world of search engines, it has had a strong effect on how Web pages are indexed and ranked in the search engine results. This importance has resulted in an effect that is often called the Sandbox Effect. This effect refers to the period of time that Web site owners must wait before being ranked by the search engines. This period can be anywhere from 3 months to 6 months and this time is often used to see if each new Web site can survive without rankings.

If a Web site is not ranked but still has significant traffic, it means that the information and tools on the site must be worthwhile enough to attract visitors without using the search engines to generate traffic. If a Web site is able to stay afloat before it is ranked, Google assumes that the content is important enough to allow the Web site to be ranked for its specific keywords and phrases.

Duplicate Web Content

There is a lot of information about the duplicate content penalty on the Internet, but there are just as many web sites that are devoted to proving the rumor to be false. Duplicate content is when you use content that is already on the Web to populate your web site with information.

Doing this is easy as it saves you time and money on writing your own articles, but if the search engines penalize you for duplicate content, you could be derailing your own SEO efforts. According to those who promote the existence of a duplicate content penalty, search engines have a filter that is used when duplicate content is detected. If your content is ignored by the search engines, you’re not going to improve your rankings and you may not even get anywhere near the top 10 of the results.

Having your own unique content is important for many reasons beyond the threat of a penalty for duplicate content. Writing your own content can position you as an expert in your field. Visitors will be much more impressed with your qualifications if you provide original content than they will be by visiting your web site and finding the same article they just read 10 minutes ago.

Having unique content on your web site can also help you improve your SEO efforts because other sites will want to link to your original information. Would you rather link to someone who has original ideas and a wealth of information on their web site, or to a web site that has the same content as 10 other sites? That’s how other people think and you’ll benefit from this thinking when they see that you have a ton of fresh content just waiting to be read by people all over the Web.

Another reason that adding unique content to your site on a regular basis is important is because it can help you to improve your search engine rankings. Search engines send crawlers out to look for information at designated intervals. If you update your web site, a crawler may visit it and gather the new information for indexing. This can help to improve your search engine ranking.

If you have a web site, newsletter, e-zine, tip sheet, or other information product, you’re going to want to have unique content. This can help to build your subscriber list to your newsletter and make your products more valuable in the online marketplace. Some of the same e-books and articles have spread all over the Internet and have the same tired information that is already out of date.

If you dedicate yourself to creating unique content, you can keep up with the latest trends and give your readers exciting and relevant information that they can use in their businesses. This will solidify your reputation as an expert in your field, and can also create goodwill with your web site visitors. One final reason to avoid using duplicate content is so that you can avoid any legal claims of plagiarism or copyright violation.

Just because something is on the internet doesn’t mean it’s free to reuse or distribute. If you inadvertently distribute or use something that is protected by copyright, you may find yourself in hot water with the copyright owner.

Keeping up with search engine trends and learning how to best optimize your web site for the search engines will not only bring you additional traffic, it will also bring you more chances for sales conversions and satisfied customers. Use these techniques wisely and you’ll be able to manage a steady business for many years to come.

Search engine optimization is the process of making your web site more accessible for the search engines. When you do this, you are making it easier for people to find you when they use search engines to search for information. Each individual search engine uses complicated mathematical formulas called algorithms to determine how web sites are ranked.

There are also differences in each search engine that you need to take into account when you are optimizing your web site. Search engine optimization is one of the most effective online marketing tools if done correctly and monitored frequently.

Search Engine Basics

When people use search engines, they usually believe that they are searching the web for information. This is not quite true. When you use a search engine to find information, you are actually searching the engine’s database of indexed content. Search engines can be human, where actual people index content. The most popular type of search engine is crawler-based. This means that those search engines use automated programs to crawl the web finding content and following links.

The information found by the crawlers is returned to the search engine and indexed according to the search engine’s guidelines. When you optimize your web site, you are making it easier for the search engines to find your site and index your content.

Keywords

Keywords are an important component of search engine optimization. When people use search engines, they use specific words and phrases to find information. Having the right keywords means you are improving your chances for having people find your site when they do a search. So how do you find out what the “right” keywords are?

You have to conduct keyword research. There are many tools available for keyword research that can help you to find keywords that have a lot of searches with relatively low competition. Once you conduct your research, you should have a list of keywords that are specific to your web site that will help people find your business through the search engines.

Page Titles

You can start your SEO efforts by optimizing your page titles for your web site. Instead of a generic “Welcome”, you should use your target keywords in your page titles. Because the page titles are very near the beginning of your web site’s HTML code, the search engines may be drawn to your site if you optimize the titles.

You should not place the same words next to each other or the search engines may not read all of your text. You should not repeat the same keyword more than twice for best results. Because search engines have different methods of indexing content, keep your page titles as short as possible.

Web Content

Web content is one of the most important search engine optimization tools. Sites that are rich in relevant and useful content tend to be visited more often by crawlers and show up closer to the top of the search engine rankings than sites that have little content. Your content can include articles, press releases, announcements, and other information.

The important thing is to use your keywords in a way that sounds natural. No one wants to read text that has a string of keywords jammed together. It makes it difficult to concentrate and can get frustrating for your web site visitors. It is better to use your keywords in places where they make sense.

Blogs

Blogs can also be used as a search engine optimization tool because of the amount of content and the number of links that can be used. Blogs can be filled with keyword-optimized postings that help make your site more accessible. You can also link to other pages in your web site, which is helpful for search engine optimization purposes.

Linking

Linking is an important component of search engine optimization. Two-way links can be useful, but one-way links are the best way to improve your search engine ranking and drive traffic to your site. For best results, use your keywords in your links so that you improve your search engine rankings even more.

Instead of displaying a link as www.exmaple.com, (Alexa) use keywords to make your link look like this: web site design. Both links take people to the same web site, but one of them utilizes keywords to add to your search engine optimization efforts.

You can also use links from other web sites to improve your rankings. One of the easiest ways to do this is by writing articles and submitting them to article directories. You can use the resource box after each of your articles to link to your web site. You can also promote your products and services with your articles, making your efforts well worth the time and energy you spend.

You can also drive traffic to your web site by using online discussion groups and forums to market your expertise and encourage people to visit your site. You can find many discussion groups related to your business topic if you search for your specific niche. When someone asks a question that you can answer, be sure to answer the question as completely as possible.

The SEO trick you’re going to use is the use of a signature line at the end of your postings. A signature line is a few lines that give your name, business name, and contact information.

If you include your web address in your signature, you’ll be creating one-way links to your web site that can promote more traffic and higher search engine rankings. This simple tool can add to your optimization efforts and has the added benefit of positioning you as an expert in your field

Online newsletters can also be a great way to improve the number of one-way links to your web site. You can create your own newsletter or submit one or two articles to newsletters produced by other people.

Make sure that you get a byline or an author bio when you submit articles to other newsletters, or you won’t be able to improve your search engine rankings by using this method. Include a link to your web site so that you can improve your web traffic and increase your search engine ranking.

An added benefit to this method is that articles from free newsletters are often used by other people on their web sites. Instead of having one one-way link to your web site, you can easily create 10, 50, or 100 or more quality one-way links. Be sure to submit newsletter articles only to sites that are relevant to your own web site.

If you have a graphic design business, you might submit articles to newsletters about advertising or marketing. You wouldn’t want to submit articles to a web site about carpet cleaning because that type of web site is not relevant to yours, and the links you receive won’t be as high in quality as links you have on web sites that compliment yours.

RSS stands for “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication”, and is another exciting internet marketing method that can help you boost web traffic and skyrocket your sales. When a web site owner wants to share content with other web sites, the content can be placed into an RSS document and registered with an RSS publisher. This content can include articles, press releases, blog postings, headlines, web content, and any other information that the web site owner wants to allow others to read.

Because of the ease of distribution and the potential for unique web traffic, you can use this technique to improve your online marketing efforts. The key to using RSS as a successful marketing tool is to have useful content that engages and informs your intended audience. No one will want to read boring or useless information, and they certainly won’t want to pass it on to others. Use the following tips to make your content sizzle so that your target market will keep coming back for more.

Articles for RSS

When you write articles for use in RSS feeds, put yourself in the shoes of your intended audience members. As a busy professional, do you want to read long articles with large blocks of text, or would you rather read short how-to articles and checklists? Write your articles to be long enough to provide at least one important piece of information, but short enough to capture the attention of even the busiest professional.

Consider breaking longer articles into one article series. Instead of writing one 2,000 word article, you can write ten 200-word articles that are more likely to be read. These shorter articles are also perfect for submission to online newsletters and e-zines. In addition to considering length, consider the topics you can write about.

Make sure that your articles are appropriate for your intended audience in terms of subject matter and depth. A beginner audience will get discouraged with overly technical articles and an advanced audience will not want to read simple tips and how-to articles.

RSS Press Releases

Press releases can easily be distributed with RSS, much like other types of content. Your press releases need to be targeted and contain information that presents your business in the best light. You can send press releases out for many reasons including changes in ownership, special events, charitable donations, the addition of new staff members, and an increase in the number of products and services you provide.

If you write just one press release a week, you can see a startling improvement in your web site traffic due to all the one-way links your submission efforts can generate. Using press releases is also a great way to encourage other people to post your information on their web sites.

RSS Blog Postings

Blogs are one of the most effective internet marketing tools currently available. They’re also relatively inexpensive and easy to maintain. Blogs allow you to post information about your company, optimize your web site for the search engines, and have customers leave comments so that your web site becomes interactive. When you write blog postings that will be used for RSS, keep the same principles of article writing in mind. Shorter posts are better because people can read them in between major projects or when they want to take a quick break from their work.

You should also be sure to write for your intended audience. Don’t overly promote your business in your postings. Instead, give people information and resources that they can use and they’ll be encouraged to keep visiting your web site. This can help you build solid customer relationships and improve your sales conversion rate.

RSS Content

There are many other types of content that can be used to promote your business through RSS. You can turn all of your knowledge into tip sheets, special reports, question and answer listings, and almost any other type of content that can be used with RSS. Keep in mind the rules for writing content for a target audience and you can successfully use your content to develop your web traffic and help to improve your sales conversion rate.

Setting Up an RSS Feed

Setting up an RSS feed requires a small investment of your time that can help you see a phenomenal return. If you want to set up your own RSS feed, you’ll need to have a server, a database with descriptions of your content, and the ability to use scripting. If you’re not able to use scripting or you don’t have a server or database set up, you can hire a freelancer to do the technical work for you so you can concentrate on finding ways to make your content available all over the Web.

Once you have everything ready to go, you can find an aggregate, or RSS publisher, to submit your content to for syndication. Many of these aggregates are available and allow you to submit your site under a specific category.

Categorizing Your Feed

When you submit your content to an aggregate, you need to make sure you submit it under the right category. This helps you to make sure your intended audience can access your information.

If you own a sporting goods business and accidentally categorize your content under a home furnishings category, people will wonder why your content is listed and will not be interested in visiting your web site. Review your content and make a list of categories that it might fit into. If you are a freelance writer, you can categorize your content under small business, home business, marketing, web content, search engine optimization, or publishing depending on the type of writing you do.

The important thing is not to pigeon-hole your content into one category. If your content can be used by many different audiences, submit to several aggregates under different categories to see the best return on your investment.

Resell rights is a simple concept to understand. If you buy a product with resell rights, you are allowed to sell the product or distribute it once you have made your purchase. You may want to use the product as a free giveaway for new customers or you may want to start selling the product in order to generate more income for yourself.

No matter how you use the product, it is yours to distribute once you have paid for it. Master resell rights are slightly different from normal resell rights. With normal resell rights, you are allowed to sell or distribute the product once you have made a purchase.

Master resell rights allow you to sell the products and then allow your customers to continue to sell the products to family members, friends, and business associates. Normal resell rights do not allow for your customers to continue selling the products once you have made sales.

Resell rights are commonly granted with several products including:

* Electronic books (e-books)
* Articles
* Web design templates

Products with resell rights have many benefits for those who take advantage of those rights once they have made a purchase. Buying information products with resell rights makes it easy for you to be able to make sales without having to write your own e-book or pay someone to ghost write hundreds of articles for you to sell.

Products with resell rights often also come with tools that you can use to make sales including a free web site and free sales letters that can be used to convince people to make a purchase. This will save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars on web design and copywriting costs.

Once you have purchased a product with resell rights or master resell rights, only your imagination can limit the possibilities for making sales and generating profits from these products.

E-Books with Resell Rights

You can purchase e-books on pretty much any topic for as low as 99 cents and still get resell rights for those e-books. Some of the more popular e-book topics include recipes, marketing, starting a business, weight loss and dating. Once you’ve purchased one or more e-books with resell rights, you can get down to the business of making sales.

One of the easiest ways to do this is by adding the e-book to a product that you already have for sale and making the two products into one package for only a few dollars more than the cost of the original product alone. This is a good way to start making e-book sales because you won’t have to spend time and money individually marketing your e-book.

You simply package it with your existing products, use the marketing you already have in place, and use persuasive copy to entice consumers to make the package purchase. If your resell package came with a sample sales letter, customize it for your business and integrate it into your existing marketing materials.

If you want to market the e-book on its own without packaging it with other products, it will take a little more time and effort, but it can be done. E-book marketing is web-based due to the nature of information products and the convenience of being able to download an e-book in just a minute or two. Therefore, your e-book marketing should begin on your web site and spread out to the World Wide Web.

Feature your e-book on your home page, your order page, and on any product page that relates to the e-book in any way. You can branch out from your web site and start marketing your e-book on other web sites. Find affiliates who will receive a percentage of the sales for selling your e-book on their web sites.

Write and submit articles that reference your e-book and be sure to include a link to your e-book sales site. Use your monthly newsletter to introduce your e-book and point people to your e-book download page. With enough creativity and marketing savvy, you can market your e-book in a number of ways that cost you little and help you generate profits.

Articles with Resell Rights

Articles, particularly articles used as web content, are hot in internet marketing. Articles have many benefits for the marketers who purchase them and use them.

If you purchase articles with resell rights, you can use these articles in a number of ways to generate passive income even when you’re asleep! Keep reading for some great ideas that you can use for selling articles with resell rights.

If you purchase a set of articles that are closely related, you can package them together and sell them as a special report. This works well for articles on many topics - web design, marketing, starting a business, or improving sales.

Packaging articles together means your prospects will get a wide variety of information about their topic of interest. This is a great selling point and may help you make more sales.

Package a group of articles together and use them as a free gift with the purchase of a more expensive product or service. You don’t have to sell your articles to have them generate profits for your business. You can package several articles together and advertise the package as a free gift for subscribers to your membership web site or for people who purchase any of your products and services.

To make it profitable for you to offer the article package for free, offer it as a free gift with purchase over a certain dollar amount. If the package cost you $30 to purchase with the resell rights, consider giving it away to people who make purchases in the amount of $75 or more.

You’ll be making sales and your customers will be getting valuable information that can help them grow their businesses or enrich their personal lives.

Use the articles with resell rights as a way for your affiliates to make money. If you don’t want to directly sell the articles you have purchased, you can use your affiliates to make sales for you and take a cut of the profits. Offer your affiliates the ability to sell these articles on their web sites and come up with a way to compensate each affiliate for making sales.

One of the best compensation methods is using a tiered scale based on article sales. The more sales the affiliate makes, the more money he or she is able to keep from each sale. You’ll accomplish two goals with these articles. You’ll get to keep a percentage of the proceeds from each sale and you’ll have motivated people working to sell your products and create awareness for your brand.

Sell single articles for web content purposes. Articles are downloaded every day and used for information purposes. However, there is also a huge market for web content in the 21st Century. With the increasing importance of internet marketing and search engine optimization to businesses, many business owners are purchasing articles and using them for web content on their business web sites.

You can sell your articles through your own web site or through a web site that allows you to upload your articles and set a price for each article. Not only will you make money by selling articles individually, you’ll also be able to make others aware of your products and services.

Web Site Templates with Resell Rights

Web site templates allow people with little or no web design skills to build their own web sites without having to pay for professional design that may be too expensive for their budgets. Because web site templates make it so much easier for small businesses to get online, they are very popular in the Internet marketplace.

Web site templates with resell rights can be very lucrative if you can sell them to the right people at the right price. There are many ways for you to use web site templates to your advantage to make profits and build your business.

Sell packages of web site templates with resell rights. If you have purchased a group of web site templates with master resell rights, you can sell these templates and allow buyers to sell them to others.

Since you’re offering an opportunity for making extra income, people will be interested in purchasing your package of web site templates. Set the right price and market to the right people and you can make multiple sales to the same customers.

Offer a free web site template as a gift for purchasing web hosting or other web-related services. If you offer web hosting, make it worthwhile for customers to stick with you as a web host. If your customers don’t want to spend a lot of money on web design, make it easy for them to get online by giving them a free web site template with the purchase of one year of web hosting.

Offering a free template not only makes it very worthwhile for a customer to purchase hosting from you, but it also creates goodwill and improves your chances of getting repeat business from the same customer.

Sell single web site templates and offer to assist buyers with any issues they may have while using the templates. If you want to generate some consulting business for your web design company, you can sell single templates and offer to provide discounted consulting or maintenance services once the customer has used the web site to get online.

This will generate profits for your web design business and also create goodwill with customers since you are offering discounted services and valuable assistance once a purchase has been made.

Public domain (PD) content includes any documents that can be used by the public for any purpose. You can break down public domain material into four different categories. The first category is general information. This is information that is widely known such as U.S. state capitals or other facts and figures. The second category is for works such as films and books that were donated by their creators to the public domain. This means that the creators did not copyright the works and made them available for use by the public.

The third type of PD material is works by the government or representatives of the government. This can include manuals, brochures, special reports, and other related documents. The fourth and final type of PD material is works that were copyrighted at one time but have lost their copyright for some reason. This can include works that were created before 1923 or works created between 1923 and 1963 that have lapsed copyrights that were never renewed. So what does this mean for you? It means that you can take advantage of this PD material and use it to generate profits you never thought possible.

Finding Public Domain (PD) Materials

If you’re going to take advantage of PD material, you need to know where to find it without a lot of frustration. There are several great online resources where you can literally find millions of pages of free PD material. One of the best resources available is Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg is a compilation of over 19,000 free e-books, most of which are in the public domain.

These PD e-books can be used in many ways; in fact, Project Gutenberg encourages the use and distribution of the materials found in their database. The online catalog is easy to use and allows you to search for e-books by author’s name or by specific keywords. This makes it convenient and easy for you to find the e-book you are looking for.

Another great resource for PD works is Alibris. Alibris is an online bookstore featuring over 60 million books that are used, new, or out-of-print and can be found at Alibris. Not all of the books at this bookstore are in the PD, so be careful when you’re looking for public domain works. The easiest way to do this is to use the Advanced Search feature to search for works published before 1923.

To perform this type of search, click on “Advanced Search” and type “1923″ in the search box for “publication year.” You can also search for books published after 1922 and before 1964 to find books from 1923 to 1963 that may be in the PD. It is important to conduct more in-depth copyright research for these titles to make sure that these works are indeed in the PD.

Google is also a great resource for works in the public domain. Google has many features that allow you to search web sites, books, and other works for information. You can do a search for “public domain books” or “public domain information” and visit specific web sites that have PD information. You can also search Google for specific search terms and find information that is in the PD. Always perform copyright searches to ensure that you can use each work freely and without infringing upon anyone else’s copyrights.

Profiting with Public Domain Content

There are many ways for you to take free public domain content(PDC) and turn it into sizeable profits. The key is to find public domain materials that people are interested in and then market them to your prospects in a way that makes them very attractive to potential buyers. Your imagination is the only thing that can limit your profits when it comes to using PDC.

E-Courses with Public Domain Content

If you’ve ever wanted to develop an e-course, using PD content is one of the fastest and easiest ways to do so. There are many ways for you to use public domain works to develop an e-course. One is by using a public domain e-book and building lessons around the e-book. You may choose a literary e-book and develop lessons pertaining to that piece of literature. You can also split an e-book up into several sections and send your course subscribers one section per week with related course materials.

However you choose to package your e-course, using a work from the public domain speeds up the course development process and makes it easier for you to start distributing your course and making profits.

Special Reports with Public Domain Content

If you’ve been struggling to produce a special report that you can sell or include with the purchase of your products and services, public domain works may be the answer you’ve been looking for. Instead of struggling to write pages and pages of a special report, you can use a work from the public domain, tweak it to meet your needs, and distribute it as a special report. This works well for nonfiction works such as business, marketing, science, and technology e-books. If the public domain work is long enough, you can package it into several reports and increase your profits even more than you can with one report.

You don’t necessarily need to sell the report individually to see profit. You can use the special report as an incentive for customers to purchase your other (more expensive) products and services.

Newsletters with Public Domain Content

If you want to energize your weekly or monthly newsletters with informative and interesting content, you can use PDC to save time and writing costs. A few searches for your topic of interest may yield copyright-free e-books and articles that you can use in your newsletter.

Just because these PD works don’t exactly match what you’re looking for doesn’t mean you can’t use them to create an information-packed newsletter. Because they’re in the public domain, you can edit these works to meet the needs of your customers. You can add information, delete information, reword the text, add graphics and tables, and make any other changes necessary to ensure that your newsletter will wow your prospects and current customers and make them want to buy from you again and again.

E-Books with Public Domain Content

Have you always wanted to sell e-books but you’ve never had the time or the ability to sit down and write a great e-book that will be a valuable information product? With PDC, you can take works from the PD and turn them into profitable e-books that boost your sales and your profits.

You can sell the e-books as is or you can make changes and distribute the improved e-book through your web site. Using public domain works is an easy, inexpensive, and fast way to sell e-books or use them as incentives for your customers.

AdSense Campaigns with Public Domain Content

Using PDC is a quick and easy way to develop several AdSense campaigns without having to write your own content or pay a ghost writer to provide content for you. Google AdSense campaigns allow you to place advertisements on your web sites and earn a commission each time someone clicks on one of those advertisements. When you have a variety of public domain works at your disposal, you can easily set up AdSense campaigns for a number of different topics.

Once each site is set up with the advertisements related to your content, you can start earning commission immediately without doing any more work. This type of income is residual income - you set up the web pages and continue to reap the benefits even when the work is done.

SEO with Public Domain Content

Search engine optimization is made easier when you have a ton of relevant content on your web site. Using free PD works on your web site can help you go from no content to tons of content in just a few hours. You can post the content as-is or you can tweak the content so that it includes specific keywords that will drive even more traffic to your web site. Linking is also an important of SEO that can benefit from the use of PDC.

You can break PD works into short articles that you submit to online article directories. Include a resource box with a link to your web site with each article and you’ll end up with dozens if not hundreds of one-way links to your web site. These extra one-way links will boost your SEO efforts and can help you drive targeted visitors to your web site on a daily basis.

Becoming a Resource with Public Domain Content

If your web site offers interesting and relevant information for visitors, they’ll continue to visit your site whenever they are in need of information. You can use PD works to bulk up the information on your site and develop a reputation as a trusted resource in your industry by posting e-books and articles that can be downloaded for free and read by your visitors.

Private label rights content is one of the best things to come along on the Internet in a long time. This content is written by someone and then sold to other people who can use it as they wish. This is different than ghost writing because a ghost writer typically writes content for one person and one person only. This makes ghost writers an unaffordable option for some Internet marketers who are just starting out and haven’t built up a solid base of profits.

The beauty of PLR content is that it is written and distributed to many people. Instead of getting an article from another author and having to keep all of the information exactly the same, you can attach your own name to PLR content and use it however you wish.

Instead of having to link to another author’s Web site or spend hours writing your own articles, you can use PLR content to build up your Web site so that you can draw visitors and turn them into users or buyers. Instead of having a boring site with no content, you can have hundreds of articles added to your site in a day or two if you purchase large packs of PLR content.

There are many ways in which you can use PLR content. Two of the basic ways to make use of this trend are to buy PLR content and use it to build your business or to write PLR content and sell it to others. If you choose to purchase PLR content from another writer, be sure to check the quality of samples before committing to buying a large quantity of articles.

There are some writers who are trying to produce PLR content quickly and don’t proofread or edit the articles before distributing them. Other writers speak English as a second language and this is reflected in the way each article is written.

Even if you purchase some of these articles at a low price, it may still save you money to buy these affordable PLR articles and have an editor read through them and correct them instead of having a ghost writer write original content for you at an expensive price.

If you are a writer, you can make a good deal of money writing PLR articles and distributing them to Web site owners who want to build their sites full of relevant content. If you have high quality standards, you can even make a full-time living writing PLR articles.

PLR Content & Online Courses

If you’ve ever wanted to offer an online course, but didn’t have the money to pay a writer or the time to write all of the content, think about using PLR articles. If you want to offer a course on Internet marketing, all you need to do is buy a bundle of PLR content on the same topic and organize the most important articles in an online course format. You can edit the articles and include information from your own experience and research, or you can keep the articles intact and add other materials to each lesson.

Since the articles are usually in text format, it will be easy for you to organize these articles and send them one by one to your students. You can also create e-books and Web sites for people using your e-course to refer to when they need help or more information on a specific topic.

Article Marketing with PLR Content

Since PLR content is something you can use as you wish, you can change the articles to be specific to your business and your industry and then use them for article marketing. Article marketing is one of the most popular FREE marketing methods because this technique accomplishes two purposes. One, your credibility as an expert is increased because people will begin seeing your name attached to informative articles about your field.

Second, you can attach a resource box to your articles giving people the link to your Web site. This is an EXCELLENT way to create one-way links to your site without having to pay for them or offer a barter exchange for the one-way links. The more links to your site that people are exposed to, the more traffic you will have. Once you boost your traffic, then it’s your job to start converting all of your visitors to loyal customers.

Search Engine Optimization with PLR Content

Submitting PLR articles to online directories can also boost your search engine optimization efforts. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making your web site more accessible for the search engines so that people can find you when they perform searches for specific words and phrases.

One of the best SEO methods is to create one-way links to your web site. Creating these one-way links is often difficult because most web sites want to exchange their link for your link and do not want to link to your site without some sort of benefit for their business.

With the popularity of article directories, you no longer have to spend time seeking out other web sites that are willing to provide a one-way link to your site.

You can purchase a pack of PLR articles and use the resource box for each article to link to your own web site. Many newsletter writers, web site owners, and e-zine editors use these article directories to find articles for their online publications.

Not only will your link remain on the article directory page containing your article, it will also be displayed on any web site that uses your article. This means that if you submit only 20 articles to a directory, you can realistically generate 100 or more one-way links to your web site once other web sites start using each of your articles. Not only will these links help potential customers find your web site, they’ll also help the search engines find your site.

Article Directory Creation with PLR Content

You don’t have to use the article directories of other web sites to benefit from PLR content. You can create your own article directory and benefit from it in a number of ways. Simply purchase one or more packs of PLR content, develop a web site that archives each article by category or topic, and market your directory so that it begins generating traffic. Creating your own article directory will most likely benefit your SEO efforts as the search engines look favorably upon web sites with a lot of content.

There is an added benefit to creating your own article directory that can make you even more money. You can join Google AdSense or a similar program and place advertisements relating to the topic of each article on each individual page of your web site. When visitors click on these ads, you will receive a small commission from the program you have joined.

This is a simple way to make money without even doing any work. All you do is build the site, place the ads on each of your pages, and collect your commissions.

Maintaining Your Opt-In List with PLR Content

Your opt-in or subscriber list is one of the most valuable assets you have when you run an online business. When people opt in to your subscriber list, they are giving you permission to send them a newsletter, a weekly e-mail, or information on special offers from your company.

In order to keep them interested in your products and services, you have to keep them aware of your company, and interested in what you do. Using PLR content to keep people interested in your company is one of the best ways to maintain a loyal customer base. Imagine what would happen if you opted in to a subscriber list only to receive e-mails that did not have valuable information or if you didn’t receive any e-mails at all. What would happen? You’d either unsubscribe from the list or you’d stop opening list e-mails when they arrived in your inbox. This is exactly what you want to prevent your customers from doing.

Purchase one or more packs of PLR content about your customers’ topics of interest and send a weekly or monthly message that includes one or more of these articles. If you have more than one subscriber list, target each list with specific articles that relate to their needs. For example, an accountant might have three subscriber lists - one for small business owners, one for his or her corporate clients, and one for clients in the nonprofit industry.

PLR articles on topics of interest to each specific group can be purchased and sent to each subscriber. This will keep your company’s name in front of each prospect and provide valuable information that can create goodwill between you and your potential customers.

Newsletter Production with PLR Content

Having a newsletter not only provides information to your prospects and customers, it can also be a source of extra income for your business. You can purchase PLR articles and make them into one or more newsletters that can be sent to your subscriber base on a weekly or monthly basis. This will allow you to provide valuable information while promoting your products and services.

In addition to promoting your own products and services, you can also sell advertising space in your newsletter once the subscriber base has reached a significant number. If your newsletter reaches thousands of people each month, you can make it worthwhile for other companies to advertise with you. Be selective about other companies that you include in your newsletter.

Only advertise companies that provide products or services that your customers need. If you are producing a small business newsletter, include only advertisements for products and services needed by small businesses. You might advertise office supply providers, accountants, legal consultants, and marketing professionals. Advertisements for toys and home furnishings don’t have a place in your small business newsletter, so don’t accept advertisements from these businesses.

Becoming Known as an Expert with PLR Articles

Developing a reputation as an expert in your field is made easier with PLR articles. You can purchase packs of PLR articles with very specific information that is advanced in nature, and people on your subscriber list will start to look forward to reading your e-mails. Not only will you become a trusted source for quality information, you’ll also be able to give recommendations on web sites to visit and services to try.

With your subscribers’ confidence in you on the rise, you can recommend that they visit an affiliate’s web site or try one of your new services and it will sound like the advice of an expert rather than a thinly-veiled sales message. When your subscribers start visiting the sites you recommend, your income will increase in one of two ways. One is that subscribers will visit your own web sites and purchase your products and services.

The second is that your subscribers will visit other web sites that generate affiliate income for you and make purchases that will generate commissions. Either way, you win. You get the reputation of an expert and you boost your income at the same time.

Internet marketing is a long-time commitment between you and your online customer base. But, what is Internet marketing? At it’s most basic level, it’s the process of putting a product in front of a consumer, selling the product, and asking the consumer to return. But this is only the first part of a strong internet marketing strategy.

Internet marketing is also about making a website work its best for you, the business owner. That is why the successful formulas, secrets, and ‘My strategy for wealth’ schemes do not work. There are no ‘Ten Steps to Success’ for Internet marketing. What works for one business, will not work for another.

In the internet world, instead of two companies coming together in a merger, they form a joint venture.

The Commonwealth Alliance Program anticipates that strategic alliances (Joint Ventures) accounted for 25% of all revenues in 2005, a total of 40 trillion dollars. “This figure has been steadily growing over the past years as more solopreneurs and Work At Home Parents (WAHPs) decide to unite to augment their revenue in the highly competitive global environment.”

It all comes down to understanding all of the strategies and picking the right one for your business. In simple terms, internet marketing strategy is the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of online sales.

Joint Venture

The term Joint Venture is a simplistic process in the Internet marketing realm. A Joint Venture means different things to different online businesses. You can use a Joint venture to build your opt-in list, earn income, increase hits, and increase exposure. A joint venture in the internet world operates differently than it would in the brick and mortar world.

An example of a joint venture in the brick and mortar world would be a gym coming together with a company that produces body building supplements. The gym needs equipment to operate, and they may sell some products on the side.

An example in the internet world would be a content rich, 1,000+ page niche web site that affiliates for a company selling products to that niche. The content rich site is well optimized and ranks well with all of the major search engines, and has its own large, loyal list of unique users. They need a product to sell.

A Joint Venture represents the easiest way to start an online business, and increase revenue. In fact, for many new entrepreneurs, it is the only 100% risk-free methods of marketing.

A joint venture is like a marriage. A good JV can create fortunes. It can bring together products and services, free media attention, and resources to cut down the amount of time needed to spend promoting and marketing. There are four players in the JV world, each works together to create a win-win situation for all.

The Product
It can take a long time to find a list owner who will take a new product. Most list owners want products with a proven value for their subscribers. There are thousands of list owners. Product owners uses these lists to leverage their sales and split profits with the list owner.

The trick for product owners is to find lists with an incredibly narrow niche. This can be hard. Many list owners try to be everything to everyone. A list with a target audience will produce more sales than a larger list that has a broader audience.
Remember that the brokers and customer list owners have something that you need - trust. You cannot buy trust, so when it comes to negotiating with them, do not try and nickel and dime them, especially if your product does not have a proven track record.

Mailing List Owner
Product owners aren’t the only ones who can profit nicely from joint ventures. Often a product owner will offer a much higher affiliate commission to the owner of a large, targeted list, for promoting the product. This is a win-win situation for both parties - the product owner’s sales will often explode right after the product is announced to a large, responsive list. And the list owner makes a nice commission on the product, all for taking an extra 5 minutes to mention the product in his or her newsletter.

Some of the best places to build opt-in lists are free and fall under the radar of most internet marketers. For example, did you know that Myspace now drives more hits to websites than MSN? Or, did you know that you can buy the top space on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Altvista for less than $50 a month? Yes, that’s right.

This is a great time to get building a list. The internet is still not awake to the idea that Web 2.0 doesn’t work the same way as the old websites. You no longer need to spend so much time optimizing your websites. In fact, MSN is the only major search engine that really cares about meta tags anymore. The rest of the search engines use keyword density to ban websites that pump more than 5% of a keyword.
It is easy to find brokers who will help you build a list. This is because few people work at building lists. The Brokers need these lists to survive.

Broker
The Broker’s job is to match the right product to the right list of customers. A good broker will charge a percent from both sides for as long as the joint venture remains, which could be years.
This is a great job for someone who is internet savvy, a real people person, and who can sell new concepts to people. The first step for a new broker is to join the forums, ezines, and communities that will put them in contact with products, and then do the same with content rich websites that under-utilize their marketing ability.

An easier way to do this is to contact hundreds of ezines, and get them to pay a fee for advertising on each other’s ezines. The ezine owners may pay you $100. In return, they get $1000 of advertising, build their opt-in list, and hike up the prices they charge their advertisers.

Providence Man
This is the most neglected Joint Venture method. It requires a lot of research, and there is failure. But, eventually, the providence man will earn 50% of all direct sales.

The providence man searches for great products that have poor exposure. They identify a product or service, review their web site, sales letter, order forms, web design and many other things, then recommend improvements. In this way, a providence man is sort of like the systems analyst of the brick and mortar world.

Then, the providence man will arrange a Joint Venturing agreement with the product owner. This is great for the person who is more at home on the internet than in the brick and mortar world. If you have already formed yahoo groups, have an ezine, host chats, sell ebooks, then you are a natural.

For example, you may know a lot of people who have created their own business software. You in turn build a contact list with dozens of ezines, websites, and forums where small businesses are looking for something easy, cheap, and reliable. Now, ask the programmers if they would be willing to pay you 10, 20, and even 50% of all sales through those ezines. In return, you pay the ezine owner 2 - 10% in sales.

Scams
The introduction to the Joint Venture world can be treacherous. Many of the new list-building communities are nothing more than old ’safe list’ programs cloaked as Joint Venture communities. They charge a fee to join, and offer nothing. Their products are rarely more than the ’secret to my success’ or ‘how to make a million overnight’ programs that used to be sold from websites and forums.

A certain amount of wading through scams is to be expected. However, once you find the real brokers and providence men venues, there is a fortune to be made.

Why It Works
One of the easiest to break into Joint Ventures I have seen is in the blogging sphere. The blogger builds 10 plus blogs and gets hundreds of hits. They ping daily, write free articles to build links, and build subscriber lists. The Internet Marketing companies pay them $5 - $10 per blog, to post a press release or ad from their clients. I know bloggers who write 200 blogs a week, post 50 ads in them, and make $500 - $1000. It is that simple.

This does not mean that a person who has a dynamite online course cannot hook up with one of the major players in their niche, and create a partnership with that one person, earning money hand-over-fist.
The reason why more people are not profiting from Joint Ventures is because they do not believe that the system works. That is because they lack vision. Yes, to many people it does sound impossible to make $1000’s a week, but that is because they are thinking like a laborer. Not like a solopreneur.

This is not a get rich quick scheme. Yes, it does take work to make $1000’s a week. I won’t kid you. But look at it this way. The internet transfers literally trillions of dollars in wealth every year. The measly $1000 you have been promised, in return for 100 - 500 hours of prep work, over a few weeks, or months, is totally in proportion to the hundreds of thousands of dollars that will trade hands in the time it takes you to read this report.

How Joint Venturing Works
Joint Venturing profits all parties, without any cash investment whatsoever. The parties rely upon two basic marketing rules. The first is that people buy from someone they trust and know. The second, there is more money in the list and backend sale, than there ever is in the initial sale.

A joint venture can be as simple as exchanging banners and text links. Most websites have engaged in a Joint Venture with Google’s Adsense program. Or, it could be a complex case where a content rich website with client lists finds products to sell in exchange for a percentage of those sales.

The beauty of a Joint Venture is that you do not need to sign away any of your business. This is not a merger. It is a symbiotic relationship where two entities will use each other’s strengths to ensure their survival in the vast world wide web.