Boost Your Business and Personal Success by Creating Your Own Luck!

Jason Zweig wrote a great little article in Money Magazine called “R+U Lucky? Some Guys Do Have All The Luck. Here’s How to Join Them” (Money, August 2003 pp85).

In it he describes the patterns that “lucky” people follow and how to increase your odds of success by basically placing yourself in the “right place at the right time.”

Can you always be in the right place at the right time? Not really, unless you broaden your definition of that phrase a bit, as I have.

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My Definition of The Right Place at The Right Time: “Putting yourself in every corner of your market niche in some fashion so as to be in front of customers and people who can further your business through partnerships, buyouts, joint ventures and many other opportunities that only come through the luck you *create* by being active and involved in your niche.”

Zweig talks about the fact that some people seem actually “skillful” at being lucky. A British psychologist, Richard Wiseman, even wrote a new book on the subject called “The Luck Factor.” (See www.luckfactor.co.uk)

Wiseman did a study on over 400 people who thought of themselves
as either very lucky or unlucky.

“He found that some are indeed luckier than others, that lucky people share similar attitudes and that many apparently random outcomes can be controlled” says Zweig.

Think of the first person that comes to mind who owns an online business and who you think of as “lucky.” Actually, think of about 5 people. Should be an easy list to make – they are your competition, or business owners you admire, most likely.

Now, what trait would you say your list of 5 lucky people share? I would venture to say they all share the same trait of being, at one point or another, “in the right place at the right time.”

How did they do it? Was it really blind luck? Are the odds dismal? The same as winning your state lottery jackpot?

Not even close! Although there are some people who really cannot explain their luck, and who truly were just “touched by an angel,” most successful people are successful because they are engaged to the hilt in their business. They are active promoters of their businesses in a radical way. They all have a fanatical involvement in networking themselves and their businesses.

The biggest mistake I see people make with their online businesses is that they separate their “self” from their business. They let the products speak for themselves, which is ok as one component of a marketing campaign, but that’s not enough. They also successfully market *themselves* as well as their business. They see themselves as important factors in the success and identity of their business.

“Lucky” people see no separation of the two in fact. Products and services are inanimate “things.” They are nothing really, without the people behind the scenes who put themselves in front of the scenes as much as possible and let others get to know THEM.

Why do you think so many people come back from conferences with stories of how they landed a great partner they never thought they’d even get to answer an email?

Conferences and seminars are the epitome of “creating luck.” The least important thing about them is the formal ceremonies. The good stuff happens at the bar in the hotel after the presentations are over. The “good stuff” is being in the right place at the right time. You are definitely creating luck whenever you network with peers and possible partners.

If you let yourself get lost in the day-to-day operations of your business and you don’t allow yourself time to think about the ways in which you can get your “self” in front of the people who can break you into a whole new league of success for your business, you will be less “lucky” in business.

There are lots of real rags-to-riches stories on the net. People are succeeding and profiting online like never before, but few do it in a vacuum. You will find more often than not that a story of success will begin with a line like “My business REALLY took off when I met…” or “I was talking on the phone one day with…and all the sudden an idea was born.”

Want to create some luck for yourself? Get involved in your business at a level in which you are always in the right place at the right time. Being active in online forums, calling people on the phone rather than using email, meeting people in person who can help you get your products in front of thousands of potential customers, all these practices are used by the ever-lucky, most successful people on the planet.

Put yourself into your business as part of the product. Develop relationships. Run far far away from people who want to sell you on the concept that you can succeed online without having to talk with or meet others. Success has never knocked on the door of people who aren’t open to human contact – that’s a ridiculous and self-defeating practice.

If you are passionate about making money with an online or offline business, good old fashioned networking will always win out over any other method of advertising.

So, now you have the formula for “creating luck.” If you can sit down this weekend and figure out all the ways you can put yourself in the right place at the right time to increase your business – including a powerful linking campaign for your website – you are going to start to see that there is a pattern indeed to creating luck and making things happen for your business.

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Pour la Creation site internet

Evaulating Web Site Performance

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don’t know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven’t been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.

However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website. To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100 (25 ÷ 2000 X 100).

If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it’s too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant and author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been marketing online since the early days and he knows what it takes to make money and succeed online. Stop by his Web site and subscribe to his Free monthly newsletter full strategies and techniques for successful web site promotions that can help YOU!

creation de site internet

Insight: Failure and Success In Online Business

Creativity and Determination are the KEY ingredients in all online success stories. So many times, as a moderator and participant  in the net’s most active and lauded online marketing forum, The Internet Marketing Warriors, I have heard the same questions repeated by hopeful marketer after hopeful marketer. And mostly they begin with “How do I…?”

Similar questions, in a dead-heat in frequency, vary around a theme such as “What tool should I use to…?”

Know-how and tools. Go to any forum on the net, on almost any subject, and you will find hundreds or even thousands of people exchanging information on know-how and tools. “What is the best way to write copy?” “Which autoresponder script is best for my business?” “What hosting is the best for me?”

Very infrequently will you come upon a marketing discussion that talks about creativity and determination. Even more rare is a successful product that shows people HOW to be creative and determined. This is because tools and know-how are so much easier to write about.

If this, then that. Such a small phrase, yet it is the bulk of what internet marketing training is all about if you have read even a small pile of ebooks geared toward making you a better sales producer.

And the formula sells – bigtime.

But then, why are there so many people failing at marketing their business online? What is IT that separates the masses from the relatively few truly successful online small businesses?

It is this: You cannot teach people creativity very easily. Some would say it’s impossible. Art classes are simply tools to weed out people that don’t have IT so they can get busy pursuing another line of work!

And it is this: Determination (including work ethic, stick-to-it-ivenss, seeing something through to the end) is even harder to simply instill in a person with the written word or teleseminar. You cannot reach through your ebook to slap someone everyday to recapture their focus for them and keep them on-task.

The problem is compounded when you have one of the above and not the other. Creative people very often have no business sense or the drive necessary to acquire it. Determined people fail gloriously in a gallon of sweat at five in the morning without creativity. Nothing is probably more disheartening than having one or the other. It must be like being able to see over the fence, but not have what it takes to climb to the other side.

Tools are tools. We must use them in any profession to the best of our ability. Henry Ford used tools to create Model Ts. But did you ever read a story proclaiming that Ford won the day with his tools? Of course not. The stories are about determination and creativity and that’s it.

You can go out right now and get the best software, the most expensive copywriter, the best programmer, and even the best product since sliced bread. And you can fail. It’s been done more times than success by a long margin throughout history.

This article is not about how to succeed at internet marketing. It is not about tools that will help get you over the fence where the grass is greener.

This article is an observation. An observation that is seeded with clues that only creative and determined people will pick up on. And, despite all the success manuals and training you may have spent hard earned money on, this article contains the answer to why many people fail and some succeed at not only internet marketing, but in anything in life.

Creativity in internet marketing is being able to think beyond what others have accomplished to date. It’s being able to take the pulse of the internet and the human condition and react by putting something together that is needed and desired.

Determination is being able to go out on a limb and work until you succeed despite obstacles and naysayers. It is fueled by belief in yourself and your creative ideas.

Do you have these two key ingredients? Can you see what is possible that thousands of other great minds have overlooked? If so, can you then take that vision and turn it into reality with dogged determination and perhaps the hardest work you have ever done in your life?

If you have “it,” then you can go learn about our trade from the technical (tools) standpoint and you can use them to succeed with your creativity and determination. The tools are worthless by themselves.

I hope one day to see a lot more questions about the creative process as it relates to business and success in forums in the future. I want to see questions (and honest answers!) about how much work it takes to create a profitable business online. Then I will know that a lot more people are on track and are asking the RIGHT questions. Most of all, I hope to see more training materials from experts that deal with not only what tools and systems to use, but with topics on how to think freely, on your own, about how you could make something better or make something new out of the situation at hand.

Finally, when you hear that this business is not for everyone, it means quite specifically that this business is not for people who cannot think outside the norm and work long hours. That’s why businesses that people try to sell you that “do all the work so you don’t even have to think” are so absurd.

No one has ever succeeded at anything without creativity and determination. Unless they have entered a couch potato contest. But even then the most successful people are going to be the ones who think creatively about how to sit on that couch longer than anyone else and watch more TV than was formerly thought humanly possible.

Here is an example using the above: 99% of the people who set out to be the #1 Couch Potato will simply start out by sitting in front of the TV for as long as they can. They think, “I will just out-potato everyone else by doing it 24/7.”

And they will all fail. Because one person is going to think creatively and freely. They are going to buy 5 TVs and plug them all in in front of the couch. They are going to out-potato everyone else by being able to compound the amount of TV they can watch by 5 times the amount of everyone else while doing no more work than the other 99%. Through creativity and determination, the person who wins at anything is going to find ways to succeed that most people never would have thought of.

In the end, if you want to succeed online, you must ask yourself: Do I REALLY have the creativity and determination to turn my current situation into a better one through an online business? Don’t worry about tools and know-how. Those can be learned and used by anyone. But there is no need to commit yourself to a big learning curve if you don’t have what it really takes to succeed in the end.

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Pour la Referencement – optimisation de site (seo)

One Good Link Deserves Another

There is nothing on the web that compares to a good link when you are talking about building steady streams of traffic to your site. Did you know that one good link can bring you more daily traffic than a #1 position on a search engine? It’s true!

Did you also know that there are sites out there, thousands of them, who rely solely on the traffic they get from reciprocal links with other webmasters? There are! I call the webmasters of these sites Link Minded people!

No webmaster in their right mind would argue that links aren’t the lifeblood of the internet. A search engine is only a directory of links. A link directory on your domain is also a search engine when you use the proper technique of creating a “themed category listing.

I think the biggest problem on the net today is that so many webmasters are looking for a Magic Pill that will solve their traffic problems with The Click of a Button. How many times have you seen an ad with those exact words in it? 50? 100 times or more?

Well, I am sorry to tell you, there is no magic pill. That I can absolutely positively guarantee. There is no substitute for plain, old fashioned hard work and dedication to your website and the business you would like to succeed in. The internet offers tons of automation solutions, and even reciprocal linking has had a couple of valiant attempts and even successes at a certain degree of automation.

But exchanging meaningful, traffic-driving links with other webmasters is and always will be a personal, one-on-one thing. It is like a mini joint venture with other webmasters and you have to address them without bulk mail or spamming in order to even have a chance at getting the mother of all links someday!

When you look at reciprocal linking (the oldest original form of advertising since the web began) it is really surprising how few marketing experts deal with the topic. I wrote a book about the whole phenomenon simply because there were so few people looking into the science of link swapping!

And there is a science to it! There are pitfalls. There are plain NO-NOs. There are myriad ways to waste your time chasing after useless links, or worse, links that will get you banned from some search engines! Reciprocal linking is not link farming or posting to 400,000 Free-for-All links pages. (A most detestable practice used for awhile by all newbies, then abandoned after the damage is done.)

In short, you really have few choices on the net better than starting a link directory and asking webmasters with relevant content to your site for a link swap. Unless you have a huge budget and can afford to pay someone to get your site optimized and ranked in the top ten on all the big engines, there aren’t other alternatives.

Banner exchanges suck visitors from your site. Traffic exchanges bring you hits, but totally uninterested visitors. Ezine ads are an important linking strategy, but that is an ongoing process you do to get quick spurts of traffic, not ongoing, steady streams of it. Plus it is hard to know where to get the best ads and usually the best ads are pretty expensive on a small budget.

My recommendation for people who really want their site to be noticed to the tune of 1000 hits a day or more, who are on a budget and are just starting: start a link directory on your site and have clear instructions on how to swap links with you.

Then, search the net for your link partners (relevancy is SO key here, don’t swap links with Victoria’s Secret if you sell fishing line!) send them personalized emails asking for swaps, set up top listings for those willing to be “link partners and keep going until you have at least 100 links to your site! (Verifiable at altavista.com by typing in “Link:yourdomain.com)

Then, stop and take a break and start again. It’s work. Even with automation software. Nothing good comes on the net without work. Did you EVER in your life see a successful business owner who said “It really was easy, no real work at all to get where I am today!?

But the payoff here is guaranteed: Reciprocal links will bring you traffic and increase your site’s link popularity and ranking on the search engines. Any webmaster willing to do what it takes to succeed should be willing to work their fingers to the bone to get a huge amount of traffic through link swapping!

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Pour la Creation sites internet

Business Tips To Help You Succeed

GENERAL IDEAS

Never let a day pass without engaging in at least one marketing activity.
Determine a percentage of gross income to spend annually on marketing.
Set specific marketing goals every year; review and adjust quarterly.
Maintain a tickler file of ideas for later use.
Carry business cards with you (all day, every day).
Create a personal nametag or pin with your company name and logo on it and wear it at high visibility meetings.TARGET MARKET

Stay alert to trends that might impact your target market, product or promotion strategy.
Read market research studies about your profession, industry, product, target market groups, etc.
Collect competitors’ ads and literature; study them for information about strategy, product features and benefits, etc.
Ask clients why they hired you and solicit suggestions for improvement.
Ask former clients why they left you.
Identify a new market.
Join a list-serve (email list) related to your profession.
Subscribe to an Internet usenet newsgroup or a list-serve that serves your target market.

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Create a new service, technique or product.
Offer a simpler/cheaper/smaller version of your (or another existing) product or service.
Offer a fancier/more expensive/faster/bigger version of your (or another existing) product or service.
Update your services.

EDUCATION, RESOURCES AND INFORMATION

Establish a marketing and public relations advisory and referral team composed of your colleagues and/or neighboring business owners to share ideas and referrals and to discuss community issues.
Meet quarterly for breakfast.
Create a suggestion box for employees.
Attend a marketing seminar.
Read a marketing book.
Subscribe to a marketing newsletter or other publication.
Subscribe to a marketing list-serve on the Internet.
Subscribe to a marketing usenet newsgroup on the Internet.
Train your staff, clients and colleagues to promote referrals.
Hold a monthly marketing meeting with employees or associates to discuss strategy, status and to solicit marketing ideas.
Join an association or organization related to your profession.
Get a marketing intern to take you on as a client; it will give the intern experience and you some free marketing help.
Maintain a consultant card file for finding designers, writers and other marketing professionals.
Hire a marketing consultant to brainstorm with.
Take a “creative journey” to another progressive city or country to observe and learn from marketing techniques used there. 
 
PRICING AND PAYMENT

Analyze your fee structure; look for areas requiring modifications or adjustments.
Establish a credit card payment option for clients.
Give regular clients a discount.
Learn to barter; offer discounts to members of certain clubs/professional groups/organizations in exchange for promotions in their publications.
Give “quick pay” or cash discounts.
Offer financing or installment plans. 

 MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

Publish a newsletter for customers and prospects. (It doesn’t have to be fancy or expensive.)
Develop a brochure of services.
Include a postage-paid survey card with your brochures and other company literature. Include check-off boxes or other items that will involve the reader and provide valuable feedback to you.
Remember, business cards aren’t working for you if they’re in the box. Pass them out! Give prospects two business cards and brochures — one to keep and one to pass along.
Produce separate business cards/sales literature for each of your target market segments (e.g. government and commercial, and/or business and consumer).
Create a poster or calendar to give away to customers and prospects.
Print a slogan and/or one-sentence description of your business on letterhead, fax cover sheets and invoices.
Develop a site on the World Wide Web.
Create a “signature file” to be used for all your e-mail messages. It should contain contact details including your Web site address and key information about your company that will make the reader want to contact you.
Include “testimonials” from customers in your literature.
Test a new mailing list. If it produces results, add it to your current direct mail lists or consider replacing a list that’s not performing up to expectations.
Use colored or oversized envelopes for your direct mailings. Or send direct mail in plain white envelopes to pique recipients’ curiosity.
Announce free or special offers in your direct response pieces. (Direct responses may be direct mail, broadcast fax, or e-mail messages.) Include the offer in the beginning of the message and also on the outside of the envelope for direct mail. 

 MEDIA RELATIONS

Update your media list often so that press releases are sent to the right media outlet and person.
Write a column for the local newspaper, local business journal or trade publication.
Publish an article and circulate reprints.
Send timely and newsworthy press releases as often as needed.
Publicize your 500th client of the year (or other notable milestone).
Create an annual award and publicize it as an outstanding employee of the year.
Get public relations and media training or read up on it.
Appear on a radio or TV talk show.
Create your own TV program on your industry or your specialty. Market the show to your local cable station or public broadcasting station as a regular program. Or, see if you can air your show on an open access cable channel.
Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper or to a trade magazine editor.
Take an editor to lunch.
Get a publicity photo taken and enclose with press releases.
Consistently review newspapers and magazines for possible PR opportunities.
Submit “tip” articles to newsletters and newspapers.
Conduct industry research and develop a press release or article to announce an important discovery in your field.
Create a press kit and keep its contents current. 

 CUSTOMER SERVICE AND CUSTOMER RELATIONS

Ask your clients to come back again.
Return phone calls promptly.
Set up a fax-on-demand or email system to easily respond to customer inquiries.
Use an answering machine or voice mail system to catch after-hours phone calls. Include basic information in your outgoing message such a business hours, location, etc.
Record a memorable message or “tip of the day” on your outgoing answering machine or voice mail message.
Ask clients what you can do the help them.
Take clients out to a ball game, a show or another special event just send them two tickets with a note.
Hold a seminar at your office for clients and prospects.
Send hand-written thank-you notes.
Send birthday cards and appropriate seasonal greetings.
Photocopy interesting articles and send them to clients and prospects with a hand-written “FYI” note and your business card.
Send a book of interest or other appropriate business gift to a client with a handwritten note.
Create an area on your Web site specifically for your customers.
Redecorate your office or location where you meet with your clients. 

 NETWORKING AND WORD OF MOUTH

Join a Chamber of Commerce or other organization.
Join or organize a breakfast club with other professionals (not in your field) to discuss business and network referrals.
Mail a brochure to members of organizations to which you belong.
Serve on a city board or commission.
Host a holiday party.
Hold an open house.
Send letters to attendees after you attend a conference.
Join a community list-serve (email list) on the Internet. 

 ADVERTISING

Advertise during peak seasons for your business.
Get a memorable phone number, such as “1-800-WIDGETS.”
Obtain a memorable URL and email address and include them on all marketing materials.
Provide Rolodex® cards or phone stickers pre-printed with your business contact information.
Promote your business jointly with other professionals via cooperative direct mail.
Advertise in a specialty directory or in the Yellow Pages.
Write an ad in another language to reach a non-English-speaking market. Place the ad in a publication that market reads, such as a Hispanic newspaper.
Distribute advertising specialty products such as pens, mouse pads or mugs.
Mail “bumps,” photos, samples and other innovative items to your prospect list. (A bump is simply anything that makes the mailing envelope bulge and makes the recipient curious about what’s in the envelope!)
Create a direct mail list of “hot prospects.”
Consider non-traditional tactics such as bus backs, billboards and popular Web sites.
Project a message on the sidewalk in front of your place of business using a light directed through words etched in a glass window.
Consider placing ads in your newspaper’s classified section.
Consider a vanity automobile tag with your company name.
Create a friendly bumper sticker for your car.
Code your ads and keep records of results.
Improve your building signage and directional signs inside and out.
Invest in a neon sign to make your office or storefront window visible at night.
Create a new or improved company logo or “recolor” the traditional logo.
Sponsor and promote a contest or sweepstakes. 

 SPECIAL EVENTS AND OUTREACH

Get a booth at a fair/trade show attended by your target market.
Sponsor or host a special event or open house at your business location in cooperation with a local non-profit organization, such as a women’s business center. Describe how the organization helped you.
Give a speech or volunteer for a career day at a high school.
Teach a class or seminar at a local college or adult education center.
Sponsor an “Adopt-a-Road” area in your community to keep roads litter-free. People that pass by the area will see your name on the sign announcing your sponsorship.
Volunteer your time to a charity or non-profit organization.
Donate your product or service to a charity auction.
Appear on a panel at a professional seminar.
Write a “How To” pamphlet or article for publishing.
Produce and distribute an educational CD-ROM, audio or video tape.
Publish a book. 

 SALES IDEAS

Start every day with two cold calls.
Read newspapers, business journals and trade publications for new business openings and for personnel appointment and promotion announcements made by companies. Send your business literature to appropriate individuals and firms.
Give your sales literature to your lawyer, accountant, printer, banker, temp agency, office supply salesperson, advertising agency, etc. (Expand your sales force for free!)
Put your fax number on order forms for easy submission.
Set up a fax-on-demand or email system to easily distribute responses to company or product inquiries.
Follow up on your direct mailings, email messages and broadcast faxes with a friendly telephone call.
Try using the broadcast fax or email delivery methods instead of direct mail. (Broadcast fax and email allows you to send the same message to many locations at once.)
Using broadcast fax or email messages to notify your customers of product service updates.
Extend your hours of operation.
Reduce response/turnaround time. Make reordering easy reminders. Provide pre-addressed envelopes.
Display product and service samples at your office.
Remind clients of the products and services you provide that they aren’t currently buying.
Call and/or send mail to former clients to try to reactivate them.
Take sales orders over the Internet.

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Pour la Creation sites internet

How to get 1 Million Hits Without the Search Engines

I  love to show people how they can actually get up to 1 million hits per month using reciprocal links. People are doing it right now all over the web and have the live server log files to prove it. And you probably are thinking, “Yeah they are on top of the search engine lists! Actually, top listing on the search engines is not the cause of their hits! It’s a side-effect.

Reciprocal links alone put them in the Million-a-Month Club. Reciprocal links, good ones, can do much more for you than any search engine ever will.

Wow Jack, that’s a bold statement, got anything to back that up?

How about the server logs of people getting over a million hits per month who did nothing more than seek out link partners and ONLY submitted to each major search engine ONCE? Would that convince you?

Well check it out. Here are two sites that use reciprocal linking almost exclusively with all other forms of advertising bringing in a relatively negligible amount of traffic. When looking at their live server log files, pay attention to the following things:

1.) Qualified traffic from reciprocal links.

Look at the Refers Report and check the section labeled ‘/’. Underneath you will find which links and search engines are sending these websites traffic.) Search engine traffic to the sites’ Link Directory pages.

In the Refers Report, find the headings that start with /links/, with the name of the Link Directory pages directory after. Search engines send lots of traffic to these pages. These pages were never submitted to the search engines!

Example 1: CTEX CD Replication holds the number one keyword placement on Yahoo for “CD replication.” How did they get there? Link popularity! Check out their live server log files at: http://www.ctexinc.com/stats/index.html

Example 2: Toolady.com is a website that has been using reciprocal links for a long time and her web site traffic was generated completely reciprocal links! In four months it became one of the most heavily trafficked bird web sites on the internet. No other form of marketing was done. Check out her server log files here:

http://toolady.com/reports/log_bird.html

So you tell me, are search engines the almighty savior you thought they were a minute ago?

Relevance of Your Links

Relevance has a lot to do with how a search engine robot will treat you nowadays. That’s why I always talk about the importance of building a link list or “theme index” for your site (call it a reciprocal link exchange) that closely resembles the topics or products you deal with in your site. (But not those, of course, in direct competition to you.)

Now the FFA and Link Farm people are going to be mad at me, but this is the truth!

Here’s a test. If I fail it you may publicly scorn me!

Go to any FFA page on the web and look for Yahoo.com. Try Amazon.com, or CocaCola.com… There must be TONS of their links on FFA pages – EVERYBODY knows those guys! Go ahead and check it out, I’ll be here when you get back!

Glad you’re back – how many links did you find? None? Yikes!

Now go to Altavista.com and type link:yahoo.com in the search window. What happened? Well, I just did it and it said: We found 6,670,578 results. (By the way, don’t you love how the search engine will report millions of links just like it reports none? Doesn’t it seem like they would be like “WOW, six million links!!!”)

That’s 6,670,578 links pointing to Yahoo.com!!

And not a single one from a link farm. Now don’t go getting ideas in your head about getting 6 million links. You don’t need that many to flood your site with enough traffic to keep you selling widgets, or informing the public on the effects on the ozone layer from methane gas produced by cattle. (What? hey its late, that was the best example I could come up with! How do I know what you’re into?)

No, you need far fewer links than that to get 1,000,000 hits a month. And, with a million hits a month, how many methane gas-to-oxygen converters do you think you could sell to farmers to mount on the backs of their cows to protect the ozone layer? I’d say at least a whole heap!

There is automation software out there that people are using to drastically optimize their link lists and I highly recommend checking them out. The best and first of its kind can be found at webmastertraffictools.com.

This software has a fully functioning demo that will spider the web, set up your link directory, AND upload it to your server. It also does a mail-merge function to personalize all your link requests to other webmasters and mails for you. All in the DEMO version!

You CAN do all this manually, but it is highly recommended that you at least check out the automation software demo above to see what the best of the best webmasters are using to get those million hits per month.

(Author’s note: It has not yet been proven whether methane produced by cow emissions affects the ozone layer. Example above is fictional.)

————————–
Jack Humphrey is the Author of “Power linking 2: Evolution”
which hit the net this week to rave reviews. Grab your copy
before your competition does at http://power-linking-profits.com

Pour la Creation de sites internet

Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings

Your website’s ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for “spam” pages and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search engine’s index.

The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the “spam” net and tossed from a search engine’s index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do – and things you should be sure NOT to do – which will prevent this kind of misperception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links “bad neighborhoods.”

You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven’t linked to a bad neighborhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a “Pagerank” which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.

Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.

Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the keywords but made them the same color as the background color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye – but the eye of search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page’s link ranking.

Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text – splat! the page is penalized.

The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the gray text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background color of the page – ever!

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called “keyword stuffing.” It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called “Keyphrase Density” to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering – unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is “renters insurance,” be sure you don’t use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.

The final potential risk factor is known as “cloaking.” To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For the rest of you cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees is “cloaked” because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site’s search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page’s ranking to the top of the list.

It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as “pagejacking.” This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days due to the use of “off page” elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great risk.

Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.

Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant and author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been marketing online since the early days and he knows what it takes to make money and succeed online. Stop by his Web site and subscribe to his Free monthly newsletter full strategies and techniques for successful web site promotions that can help YOU!

Go to http://hop.clickbank.net/?kash095/revealed

Pour la Creation de sites internet

Increasing Link Popularity

Search engines are the gateway to the Internet; they are the first tool that potential customers use to find the products and services they need. This is why link popularity is so imperative. If the customers do not find your website, you have no possibilities of making any sales.

You’re probably wondering what the blazes is popular about a link! Well, in a word – plenty! Link popularity refers to the ranking assigned to your website by the search engines, and it determines the ranking your page gets when keywords are entered into a search engine. So, you’re probably wondering, how do I make my link popular?

Search engines are discretionary, giving status and ranking to sites that have links to their pages from related, quality sites. It’s a simple formula, but a very important one. Google created the system, and now virtually all the most popular search engines employ it to rank your web pages in their indexes.

The more commonly used your keyword is, the harder it will be to achieve link popularity, but without achieving this step, it is almost certain your site will never rank highly on any search engine. But don’t be discouraged; there are tried and true ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords.

There are a few things you should be aware of. The first is that just linking up with a large number of other websites will not achieve link popularity. In fact, it may have quite the opposite effect. This is particularly true when pertaining to websites that are nothing more than “link farms” – pages containing line after line of indiscriminate links. Search engines may aggressively discriminate against your website if you are associated with a link farm, so steer clear of them!

The next thing to bear in mind is the quality of the site you are linking to. Never link to a page you have reservations about your visitors seeing. The last thing you want your website to appear as is indiscriminate and cheap. Linking to sites of poor quality will only lessen your link popularity, if not completely destroy it.

So let’s get to what you need to do to achieve supreme link popularity and improve your rankings to stellar status on all the popular search engines.

The first step, and the fastest way to get your foot in the door, is to get a listing in a popular directory, such as Open Directory Project and Yahoo. If your site is business-related, you will want to be listed on Yahoo, and despite the fact that it will cost you around $300 a year, it will be money well spent. If your site is non-commercial, the listing will be free, but it will take time and follow-up to actually get it listed. Open Directory is gives you a free listing whether you are business-related or non-commercial, but be prepared to make a lot of follow-up inquiries before you see your site listed.

You are aiming to get listed in the highest level of appropriate category, and this just takes some common sense. For example, if your company ships Alpaca wool from an Alpaca farm located in the middle of Nowhere, Tiny State, do NOT submit your listing to “Retailers from Nowhere, Tiny State.” BIG MISTAKE! All you have to do is look a little deeper – and submit your listing to the “Fine Alpaca Wool” category. You will not only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you will be listed in a national category.

The next step after you have attained directory listings is to locate other quality sites that will increase your link popularity. Try to find sites that are in some way related to yours, so not only will your link popularity increase, but your customer base may also be expanded. You want to avoid your competitors and look for sites that are useful to your site’s visitors. Let’s look at the Alpaca Wool site example. Linking up to a site that sells knitting supplies would be helpful to your visitors, and the chances of the knitting supply site wanting to link up to your site are also greater. By linking to a related site that will be relevant to your website’s traffic, you are increasing both of your site’s business prospects – and both of your sites’ link popularity.

Not all sites want to link to other sites, so you will have to do some research when you are looking for possible linking partners. Google is an excellent starting place for your search. Make sure you enter keywords that you think quality customers will also enter to find your own site. Remember, your criteria are quality, highly ranked, non-competing websites that have a links or resources page. Go to these sites and objectively assess them. Look at the quality of the product, the graphics, and the ease of use. Then check out the other sites they are linked to, and determine if your own site would fit in with the crowd.

When you decide you have found a good prospect, you must set out to woo them. The first thing to do is to add a link on your own links page to their site. This is an essential first step; it shows good faith, and ups your chances significantly of their reciprocity. After you have added their link, you must contact the webmaster of their site. Since this is almost always done by email, you want to make sure it is immediately clear that your message is not junk mail. This requires that you tell them right off the bat that you have added a link to their page on your site. A hook like this almost always insures the reader will read on.

Next, be sure to be flattering and let them know how much you appreciate their website. Make sure you emphasize that you have actually visited their site, and that their site is not just a random pick. Give them the address of your links page, and ask them to check out the link for themselves. It’s a good idea to mention that they will not only benefit from the increased traffic your website will direct their way, but you will also increase their link popularity. Briefly, explain why link popularity is so essential, but do this in a sentence or two so you don’t sound like a professor! Finally, tell them you would greatly appreciate if they would reciprocally add a link on their own links page to your website.

Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find, bearing in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. After you have emailed all relevant sites, be sure to check these website frequently to see if they have added a link to your page. Give it about a month, and if no link appears, try another charming email. Then give it another month, and if your site is still absent from their links page, it’s time to remove their link from your own links page. The only time you want to pursue a link further than this is if you believe a site is crucial to your link popularity and your business needs. Just remember to keep all your communications complimentary and cordial.

Then set up a schedule to check your ranking in search engines frequently to see if your link popularity has improved. This is not achievable in the blink of an eye. It will take some time and a good deal of work. There is no way around the labor-intensive quality of improving your link popularity, which is why search engines regard it with such importance.

By the way – make sure you have a beautiful, streamlined site or you will never persuade anyone to link up to you. Be prepared to keep plugging away at this process, as long as it takes, until you achieve link popularity stardom!

Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant and author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been marketing online since the early days and he knows what it takes to make money and succeed online. Stop by his Web site and subscribe to his Free monthly newsletter full strategies and techniques for successful web site promotions that can help YOU!

Go to search-engines-revealed.com

Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you – the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords – the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.

Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant and author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been marketing online since the early days and he knows what it takes to make money and succeed online. Stop by his Web site and subscribe to his Free monthly newsletter full strategies and techniques for successful web site promotions that can help YOU!

Learn More, Go to Search-Engines-Revealed.com

Analyzing Website Traffic

Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.

Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as “hits” and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.

Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.

If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page.

As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.

Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice a exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you must closely examine that particular page to discern what the problem is. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.

After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it’s time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor – meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase – the more valuable that keyword is.

However, if you find a large number of visitors are being directed – or should I say misdirected – to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment. Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor’s needs and motivations.

Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.

Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant and author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been marketing online since the early days and he knows what it takes to make money and succeed online. Stop by his Web site and subscribe to his Free monthly newsletter full strategies and techniques for successful web site promotions that can help YOU!

Go to search-engines-revealed.com