Mantofa Articles Directory

Blogging is king!

I have emphasized time and time again that it is extremely beneficial to use a blog for your business. And considering the tons of revenue it has generated for tons of revenue companies worldwide, it’s going to be hard not to believe me.

Now, I’m going to tell you how you’re going to get more recognition for your blog and a rise in traffic.

1.Press Releases

Write a press release about your blog and submit it to press release directories online. What’s more, you can even submit the press release to your local newspaper. Give a personal note to the editor that you have a blog that he would be interested to publish into his newspaper. Editors love to receive something that has interest and is new in content to publish and gain the readers’ interest.

Write about something in your blog that the public would be interested in and what you can offer to them. Attach a link of your website to the press release so that your link would be printed out as well to make the readers get into action and go online to visit your blog.

If yours is a high ranking blog, all the more the better. Give statistics to the editor how many visitors you have to your blog every day and other achievements your blog has achieved in order to get into the editor’s good graces.

2.MySpace

MySpace is a social networking site with over 100 million people subscribed to it. Let me say this part of the sentence again,”…over 100 million people subscribed to it.”

With that being said, you to take advantage of this social networking site!

To promote your blog you have to start with writing an extremely good profile about yourself and the URL your blog and optimize it with targeted keywords so that search engines can find you. Although this has nothing much to do with content publishing, you can also join the MySpace groups that relates to your blog. For example if you’re selling clothes, you can join a group that discusses about fashion.

3.Contribute To Other Blogging Sites

You can do more of content publishing by posting comments at other bloggers’ sites that are similar to what you are doing. When people read your comments and sees you as an expert, they’ll head on to your site to learn more about you.

Another thing you can do is to ask other bloggers to link up to your article that might interest a lot of readers. They can either post the whole article as a post, together with your resource box of course, or give a review about it and provide a link.

You can also offer to write for them an article, but maintain copyright with your name and have a link to your blog.

On the whole, these three points on content publishing play a very important role in increasing and maintaining the traffic of your blog. And do you happen to see that most of these strategies are free and the rest are at extremely low cost?

Jo Han Mok is the author of the #1 international
business bestseller, The E-Code. Unlock the code for
unlimited online profits for yourself by visiting his
website today at: http://www.SuperFastProfit.com

Building customer trust online is a combination of good branding, good design, and good content. A website needs all three components to be successful in creating a climate of trust that encourages sales.

Branding is about finding a specific idea that you stand for, finding a way to own that idea in a credible way, and ultimately building a total trust that you will always deliver.

Branding for Success
Maybe you think only big businesses need to be branded, but I’d challenge that thought by telling you this – As soon as you open your doors for business (either physically or metaphorically) you become a brand in the eyes of everyone who sees you or buys from you. The only choice you have is to become either a negative brand, undifferentiated brand, or a powerful, motivating brand.

Good branding on a website immediately lets a visitor know what you can do for them. In other words, don’t brand your business by a generic term like “gardening.” Instead, brand your business by showing the uniqueness of what you offer with a benefit statement, “Container gardening for unhappy apartment dwellers who want to be surrounded by nature.”

With Internet branding, you want to present your brand so customers can interact with your message and interact with your site. On the Internet, your prospects have total control of what they see, read, and hear. That’s why traditional advertising doesn’t work on the Net.

Design Considerations
Visitors are interacting with your site when they are shopping. The Internet gives you total control over what your prospective customer sees. Their shopping experience needs to be positive or you lose the sale. According to a 2002 survey by the Stanford Credibility Project, 46% of respondents said that design plays a role in a websites creditability. Even a reputable brand with a poorly designed website would cause people to leave.

Just like in a crowded store, where you can’t find the section you are looking for, a crowded/cluttered website confuses a prospective buyer. Have the website set up with simple graphics and navigation. What you need to do is remove all the obstacles from the selling process. To increase the click-thru rate, your site must offer instant gratification in terms of comprehension and clarity.

Remember, customers are entering your site at different points, so it is important that your brand message is clear on every page of your website. Try to have a consistent look on the site that matches your offline branding. Keep the same colors on your website so that they match your offline marketing materials.

Trustworthy Content
Creating content that gives your customer a sense of safety and security is also a way of building trust with your customer. Fraud and identity theft are big concerns for online shoppers. Sadly, according to Forrester Research, 71% of online shoppers don’t believe the retailer can protect them from fraud. So, they are reluctant to give out financial information. Consumers also believe that only 49% of companies will protect their privacy.

Website visitors need to feel that the information they give to a website will be held in confidence. Before asking someone to give you their email address, be sure you have a privacy policy statement. Make sure the privacy statement is near the email sign-up.

To reassure your website visitors of a secure financial transaction, use the security certification seals of Verisign, Hackersafe, and Thawte. Make sure the seals are prominently displayed on the shopping cart and throughout the checkout process. Forrester research found that sites using these certification seals had a 14% increase in conversion rates.

Another technique is to use privacy seals from BBB online and TrustE. These third party logos communicate that your company can be trusted and have met a standard of measurement for reliability. These seals need to be placed throughout the website: near email signups, registration, cart, and checkout.

Communicate to Build Trust
Building trust online comes down to clearly communicating with your customer. Something as simple as failing to communicate the total purchase price upfront, will lead to shopping cart abandonment. Forrester research found that 57% of shoppers will abandon a shopping cart because the shipping charges were more than they expected.

The goal of an online business should be to create an environment of worry free shopping. Create a website that makes a visitor feel safe, clearly expresses the company’s brand through good design, and boosts website conversions through trustworthy content.

Michelle Howe, MBA, president of Internet Word Magic, specializes in writing irresistible copy for websites. Transform the way you do business. Visit her website at http://www.InternetWordMagic.com for a FR^EE chapter download of her new book “Turn Browsers into Buyers”.

You are at that point in life where you want to build your home based internet business. You’ve read countless ads about getting rich quick. You have heard terms such as “Article Submission” and “Linking”. This should get you started.

Link Popularity

The founders of Google believed in a term called “citation authority”. They found that the more that academic papers cited another person’s work, the more likely that the cited work represented an authority on the subject.

Similarly, when a lot of websites would link to a given site, it is very likely that the given site is an authority for the topic. The “topic” is whatever those links say it is. If 25 sites link to another site with the term “railroading” it’s likely that this page is an important page for train information.

Consequently, many schemes were born, such as mini-sites, site networks, link farms, and reciprocal linking. It didn’t take long for webmasters who wanted to rank well for certain terms to learn that they needed a lot of links with their chosen keyword phrases to improve their rankings in the search engines.

Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal links are links you trade with other sites (you add their link, they add yours) in order to build link popularity. In other words, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back in return. There are many online services, group exchanges, and software available to help you link up with webmasters that can enhance your product. As a result, many sites have grown sizeable directories on topics that have nothing to do with their area of expertise, simply because those other sites were willing to trade links with them.

Here is where you use the old noodle in selecting reciprocal linking partners. If your website talks about trains, you would not wish to link with a website that focuses on cats. Leave the cat fanciers to go meow elsewhere.

A lot of webmasters will still use this to link their sites containing nothing but garbage with your website, which you might want oriented to a given class of users. You ought to constantly monitor your reciprocal link requests for garbage. Accepting any or all link exchange requests could penalize you for the goal of obtaining good search engine ranking.

Does reciprocal linking work? The answer is doubtful. In the past, search engines have tended to count a link as a link, regardless of the subject matter of the originating site. Search engines are now tending to look for more ways to determine which sites are truly expert and which ones are simply manipulating their way to the top. Link relevance is sure to come into play. Some say it is already starting to affect rankings.

Mutual Linking

Mutual linking is a bit different from reciprocal linking. Mutual linking is where the content of each site actually benefits the content of a link partner’s site. If you sell automobiles, you may want to recommend other sites for tires, and still other sites for automobile financing. You may even maintain a directory of tire and battery service shops. This is useful information for your visitors, who are likely to need these services in the future. It makes sense for these sites to also recommend your automobile dealership and link to your site. While it’s technically still a reciprocal link, it has a mutual benefit for both sites.

To re-emphasize what we stated earlier, while you might make a case that visitors to your automobile dealership site might actually need stuff on gambling, forget about linking to such sites. They only make your site look unprofessional. You should avoid links such as these at all costs.

if you link to a site that the search engines consider a “bad neighborhood,” it could seriously damage your website. That innocent-looking pet accessories site may be cloaking (hiding links or text), or participating in other linking schemes and it just hasn’t been caught yet.

Should I Hide All My Outgoing Links?

We don’t recommend it. Many feel that Google’s Florida update (in Nov. 2003), adding relevant outgoing links seems to have a positive effect on rankings. Besides, if you hide or block their links, and they hide or block yours, what’s the point of participating in a reciprocal linking program at all?

So. What Will Happen if I Do Reciprocal Linking?

If you are looking to build long-term rankings (and real business links that can attract customers), it takes more work and creativity than just sending out automated emails or joining a linking program. Give your site an advantage by giving people a reason to link to it. Is it a helpful tool, a guide, an industry-specific directory, or some other useful content that people will feel good about recommending on their site? If your site is worth linking to, you won’t have to rely as much on swapping links as a promotion strategy.

Happy linking!

Bob Carper is a veteran consultant in information systems He holds a a MBA from Pitt. For additional information go to
http://www.secure-webconference.citymax.com. My blogsite is http://www.html-secrets.net/blog. You may also contact him at robertcarper06@comcast,net

Link exchanges have been somewhat maligned of late. There are those who think that anything that sends traffic away from your website is just not a good idea. It is true that link exchanges do create two-way traffic, but the idea here is to get more traffic coming than going… or at least an equal flow… and to let more people know about you, your website and your products or services.

The basic idea of a link exchange is that two companies who market to the same segment of the population but who market complimentary rather that competing products or services can help each other by exchanging links. The link exchange is free to both parties of an agreement. For example; a company that sells dog houses might exchange links with a company that sells dog health products. They are not competing with each other but they are both targeting the same buying segment of the population… dog owners.

There are complimentary but non-competing businesses in just about any niche market that you can think of and there are, without a doubt, companies that would make good link exchange partners for your website and for your products or services, as well.

There is link exchange partner software out there that will automatically submit your link exchange proposals for you without you lifting a finger. However, this software is mostly ineffective. Businesses that receive an automated proposal for a link exchange usually take a dim view of such proposals. You many even have received a few of these automated proposals yourself. They can be considered junk mail or even SPAM. Besides, you don’t have any money in your budget to waste on unhelpful software, anyway. You are going to have to do this the right way because you can’t afford to do it the wrong way.

You will also find link exchange sites on the Internet. Where, for a price, you can list your company as being interested in link exchanges and view lists of other website owners who are interested in link exchanges. The better of these sites can actually be very useful but you just can’t afford to register with them right now. They don’t have any information that you can’t find for yourself with just a little effort, anyway.

Here is how to locate potential link exchange partners. First go to your favorite search engine and type in words that would be related to your product or service. For example and staying with the dog theme; if you were selling dog houses, you might type in “dog health products”… or if you were selling an E-book about drawing up your own house plan, you might type in “home building products”. You get the idea. You want to find businesses that are targeting the same buying segment of the population but are selling products of services that are complimentary to what you are selling but not competing with what you are selling.

You will need to take the time to visit each website that you locate and consider to be potential link exchange partners. It would be great if you could find link exchange partners that have a PageRank of 7 or better in the search engines, but those that have a less desirable PageRank can still be useful. This isn’t costing you anything, remember?

When you visit each site, you can gather the information about who to contact. Look under their contact link. In some cases you will find a name and email address. For these you send a link exchange proposal. Simply be brief and get to the point. These other website owners are not interested in your personal information, nor your struggles to create an Internet business.

As you are visiting the websites and gathering contact information, you may well come across telephone contact numbers. If you do, use them and do so immediately. The website owners would not have posted telephone numbers unless they hoped they would be used. You might be able to work out a link exchange agreement on the telephone and do it sooner rather than later.

You are not limited by numbers but by space here. You can work out as many link exchange agreements as you are able to and have space on your website for posting reciprocal links. The more times your advertisement appears on the Internet, the better it is for you.

It is a good idea to limit your link exchanges to one per product. That is, if you are selling dog houses, you should only have one exchange with a company that sells dog health products but you could also have one that sells dog toys or dog sweaters. You do not really want advertisements for companies that compete with each other even if they don’t compete with you.

A link exchange implies a recommendation. Having advertisements for companies that compete with one another makes you look like you could not make up your mind. It also makes the owners of the companies that you are exchanging links with more than a little unhappy.

When you choose link exchange partners, choose the ones that have the highest PageRank for their key words. These are the sites that will have the most traffic and more people will see your advertisements and have the opportunity to click on your link, visit your website and, perhaps, buy your product or service and sign into your opt-in list, as well.

Pj Germain

http://www.Affiliate-Success.Org

The Last Membership You’ll ever need!

Internet. Business. Profit. To fully integrate all of thesewords into a successful merging you will need another word. Traffic. Every article you will find about making your site orcompany successful would always include the importance ofgenerating traffic.

So, we all know that in the core of it all, traffic is the most essential thing to a successful internet based business company. Aside from ensuring that you have a great product to sell, and you have your companys internal organization well taken core
of, it would be time to get to the nitty gritty of things, generating traffic.

If you already have a site and you want think that you’re not getting the traffic that you’re supposed to be getting, then its time to reconsider. If you are contending in these very competitive business, you should always be a step ahead of your competition, increasing your traffic flow should have been done starting yesterday.

Timing is essential, thats an old adage known to everyone. But with generating traffic, you should always be on your toes and be a day ahead of everyone. Never think of today and tomorrow as a starting point for making your site traffic laden, it should always have been yesterday.

To help you out in generating more traffic for your site, here are some seven surefire ways to increase your traffic starting from yesterday.

1) Invest in good advertising with search engines
Googles Adwords and Yahoos Overture provide great
advertising schemes that are very truly popular and assures great traffic. Although with this surefire way to increase your traffic would cost some money.

While some would shy away from spending money to increase traffic, it is imperative in this case to do so because Adwords and Overture is the top surefire way to increase your traffic.

You could see for yourself the success this search engine advertising methods have reaped rewards for so many companies. Lots of site feature these advertising system and many have signed on to reap the benefits. Do not be left behind. Every penny is worth it with using Google and Yahoos advertising.

2) Exchange or Trade Links with other sites
With exchanging links with other sites, both of you will benefit from the efforts both of you do to enhance your sites traffic. When one site features another sites link, they could provide one another with the traffic one site generates. The efforts are doubly beneficial because it would seem like both of you are working to generate more traffic. The more links traded with more sites the more traffic could be expected.

3) Use Viral Marketing

Viral marketing allows you to spread the word about your company and product without any costs or if ever low costs only. This is a marketing method that can be quite sneaky; you can attach your companys name, product or link to a certain media such as a funny video, entertaining game, an interesting article or a gossip or buzz. With this method, people get infected with the creativity and entertainment of the medium that they will pass it on to many people.

4) Search and use proper keywords or keyword phrases for your sites content

Search engines look for certain keywords that they would show in their results page. In doing so, having the right keyword and keyword phrase is a high requirement in ranking in high in search engine results. You could write your own content or you could hire someone to do it for you.

5) Write Articles that can lead traffic to your site

Submit articles to sites that would contain the same subject that your site deals in. If you sell car parts write press releases and articles about cars and car parts. Attach your sites description and services at the end of the article as well as the link.

6) Join forums and form online communities

Capture a market and show your expertise and credibility. When you found a good foundation for your site, people will trust you and your site and will pass on to many people their trust. Traffic will certainly increase because they know that you can provide what they need.

7) Lastly, Offer newsletters.

If many people know what you are about and your existence is shared with many others, you will find a loyal traffic that can provide you with more traffic by recommendation. If you arouse the curiosity of your customers they would be pushed to help you with your traffic.

http://www.danielmillions.com
Daniel Millions