By Lee Rowley

It’’s one of the buzzwords of today’’s internet world: Social marketing. If you”ve been selling on the internet for very long, or you”ve just been thinking about trying your hand at internet sales, you”ve probably read web page after web page about how social marketing is the future of ecommerce.

But some marketers think it’’s a colossal waste of time. Is it worth the time and energy it takes to launch a social marketing campaign?

Well, to evaluate whether social marketing is a worthwhile strategy, let’’s look at some of the ways that social marketing can build your business:

1) Viral marketing. Putting your company and your products on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Squidoo, and FriendsWin encourages people to tell their friends about you.

The more you interact with other internet users through these sites, the more people will become excited about your products. And when you”re excited about something, don”t you naturally want to tell other people about it?

There’’s a common myth that people only tell friends about negative experiences with companies and products. It’’s simply not true. Myspace didn”t acquire 330 million accounts without viral marketing. Likewise, FriendsWin didn”t add 25,000 subscribers in 3 months without word-of-mouth referrals.

Even products as simple as Beanie Babies (remember those?) were wildly successful because people told their friends about them, not because of aggressive ad campaigns.

2) Connecting with other business owners. Social marketing not only allows you to connect with potential buyers; it puts you in touch with other entrepreneurs who are marketing similar or complimentary products.

Gone are the days when every internet marketer acted like he or she was on an island, well-distanced from competing marketers. Today’’s internet business environment demands that marketers work together toward mutual success.

Internet users simply don”t have the time and patience for endless advertisements, so it’’s imperative that marketers work together to sell complimentary products to targeted, interested buyers.

For example, let’’s say you”re selling high quality pizza baking stones. You could develop your marketing plan from scratch, and rely on SEO and pay-per-click to find customers who want to buy your pizza stones.

But what if, through your social marketing efforts, you found Joe, who sells premium pizza cheeses, sauces, and other ingredients imported from Italy?

Through cross-selling, you and Joe could develop a “one stop shop” where pizza lovers could find everything they need to bake great pizza at home. His customers don”t have to scour the internet looking for the perfect pizza stone, and your customers don”t have to hunt for premium pizza ingredients.

Providing this kind of convenience could easily generate more sales than either you or Joe could generate on your own.

3) Quality backlinks to raise your search engine ranking. Social networking sites like Myspace, FriendsWin, Squidoo, and Facebook all have tremendous pull with Google and other search engines. Linking to your website or blog from these sites can substantially improve your own search engine position.

It’’s also an excellent way to get backlinks from people who like your products, and from other internet marketers. Remember viral marketing? Backlinks from customers and fellow marketers are simply an extension of this type of marketing. Even better, backlinks are not only highly effective, they”re free.

Sure, social marketing can be tedious and time consuming. There will always be entrepreneurs who tell you that social marketing takes up too much time to be effective. But if you have the patience and the vision to grow your business through social marketing, you”ll gain some pretty enviable advantages that will help you and your business succeed.

About The Author

To learn about a new social networking site that is blowing the doors off of Myspace, please visit my FriendsWin page. Right now, you can also make money recommending the site to others, no matter whether you currently have a business, or are just looking for a legitimate way to make money on the internet.

By Greg Shuey

With search engine optimization, there is only so much you can do to a website to make it search engine friendly. Most of the time, unless your website is in a specific niche and I mean very specific, you will need a large amount of back links pointing to your website to help it climb the ranks of Google for your target keywords. This is where link building becomes a necessity; it’’s not a luxury any more to have a few back links and be ok. Unfortunately, it will never be that way ever again.

For those of you new to the SEO game, you are probably wondering, what is a back link? A back link is a link that is “followed” by the search engines and pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have, the faster you will move up in the Google rankings. Simple as that!!

I am sure you are wondering how to go about getting back links to your website. There is the obvious way of contacting webmasters and asking them to link to your site. This is not a recommended practice because it is too time consuming and not effective in the least. I would recommend that you try article marketing to get a huge distribution of links in a very short amount of time.

Article marketing is something that is becoming more popular every day. Webmasters all over the world are realizing and understanding the power that is in it and are getting results very quickly. You first must begin by writing an article. You must be careful that your article is not a sales promotion, if it looks to salesy, your article will not be accepted by any website who publishes articles. You should pick a topic related to your website and write about it. This is your time to show the world who you are and why you are an expert in that particular field. The about author box is your time to shine when it comes to selling people on your product, service, or website. Make it good since you only have one shot to impress your target audience.

I”m sure you are now wondering how to get these articles distributed once you have written one. You can do this in two ways. First, you can do it manually by searching for ezines or article publishers on Google. Once you find a dozen or so, you can start submitting articles to them as frequently as you would like. There is an easier way and it is called article distribution services. These services take your article and submit it to hundreds, sometimes thousands of sites willing and ready to put your article online.

Either way you choose to go, you will begin building valuable back links to your website and begin setting yourself apart from your competition. Light the fire early and watch it grow into something that you would have never imagined. Work hard and you will see lasting results for years to come!

About The Author

Greg Shuey is an avid Article Marketer. Through article marketing and Link Building, he has been able to build a massive amount of back links to his and his clients websites helping them improve their search engine rankings. Visit Web Vizion to learn about link building and other Small Business Solutions.

By Sen Ze

Artists who work with oil paints, watercolors and canvases may seem rather old-fashioned with the increasing advancements of computer software designed specifically to draw and paint digitally.

Although there can be no replacement for the skill, purity and simplicity displayed in an oil-on-canvas painting, as compared to a digitally rendered one, the commercial value of artists has certainly declined with much of today’’s art work being created by their digital counterparts.

So how can ”old-school” artists start generating enough income to maintain their profession, without giving in to the pressure of turning to graphic software? It may seem somewhat ironical, but the Internet (in all its technological glory) could in fact prove a viable way for artists to boost their fortunes.

Artists who set up their own domains (using their own names, of course) and blogs will find that they have not only uncovered a great method of sharing their art with the world, but have opened themselves up to a myriad of wonderful opportunities. If you are an artist, here are 4 great reasons why you should immediately be investing in your own domain.

1. A World Wide Audience
Because artwork on canvas is significantly more difficult to pass around (as opposed to the ease of a JPEG file!), the people who get to view an artists work are often restricted to those who have visited the artists workshop or has had the artist send some copies of his work over.

With a website or a blog, however, an artist can easily take digital pictures of his work and put them on his blog, even commenting on the inspiration behind the painting and the techniques used. This would be akin to you - the artists - showing someone around a gallery your work!

But of course, the advantage of showing them around on a blog is that your viewers and fans of your work can access your website from all over the world, at any time, from any place with an Internet connection, leaving you to do what you do best - art.

2. Meet Other Artists And Build A Useful Network
It’’s always useful for artists to know other artists, as it invariably means that you create more opportunities for yourself and your career. For example, an artist you likes your art and has been invited to show his or her work in an exhibition may help to get your work displayed as well.

By having a presence on the Internet, you will meet a large number of other budding artists like yourself from all over the world, which may prove to be invaluable contacts in the future. You will also allow yourself to be found online by art gallery owners and managers, art collectors and other art aficionados, any of whom may play a role in advancing your career.

3. Sell Art Online
Of course, the most obvious commercial aspect of any website for an artist would be the selling of his or her artwork. Once you have set up your domain and blog, you can also arrange for an online merchant account, which will enable you to sell your art online to customers who will pay using their credit cards.

As an artist, this may not the most ideal way to sell your art work, but it can be an effective way for you to make money selling smaller art pieces, which you can then send to your customers anywhere in the world using a decent courier service. Just selling one piece of work a month can more than cover the cost of running and maintaining a blog!

4. Open To Commercial Opportunities
Aside from selling your work, a website or blog opens the artist up to other opportunities from which money can be made. For example, a frequent visitor to your website who enjoys your art may commission you to create an artwork for a decent fee. Or you may be invited to sell your art at an auction after an organizer of the event came across your website.

The opportunities are endless and mind-boggling, and with an open mind, any artist can take advantage of the vast untapped expanse of the Internet to give their career and finances a serious boost!

About The Author

Sen Ze and his 1-of-a-kind sites at http://www.SenZe.com (where else?) and http://www.SOLOBIS.com help you make money online in ways you”ve never known. Discover how to sell your services within days, starting with a dotcom version of your name!

By Michael Page

What does it take to succeed as an internet marketer? If you”ve been trying to make money online and enjoyed little success let me ask you this? Do you have an online money making system?

If you answered no then this article well be of enormous benefit. If you answered yes don”t stop reading just yet. Let me ask you is your online money making system doing just that - making you money?

The chances are if you”re still reading you want to make money online or you want to make more money online so what can guarantee your success?

Well the first ingredient is actually you. No one can do this for you but let me tell you if I can do it so can you. Internet Marketing is a business. You can”t just slap up a website promoting a product and expect people to buy. You have to pour your heart and soul into the business and make a decision that no matter what, you are going to do whatever it takes to succeed. Now that doesn”t mean you have to work at it for hours and hours every day but what it does mean is that you have to take at least one action a day to move your business forward.

Always bear in mind that the more hours you put in the quicker you will start making money. If you can only invest 2 hours per week then it could be year before you start to see any earnings. If you can do 2 hours per day it makes sense that things will happen 6 times faster i.e. after two months.

Now that assumes you are doing the right things and in my experience it is difficult to maintain focus and a belief that the right things are being done. There is a tendency to do too much analysis at the expense of taking action.

So what’’s the answer? Well that was in the title of this article - an online money making SYSTEM. You need a system or action plan. Not just any system but a system that has been put together by someone who has succeeded on a massive scale and is prepared to tell/show you how they did it.

A properly constructed system is easy to follow and is usually a series of specifically designed steps. For example: To make this system work for you open accounts with the following merchants; take these reports and promote them by doing x, y and z on a daily basis for the next 30 days; contact 20 businesses a day and ask them to help you do abc. Do you get the picture? You don”t have to worry about the what to do or how to do it. You just follow the instructions, maintain focus and discipline until eventually the accumulation of actions you have taken turn on the money tap. It really is that simple but so many of us make it hard.

There are a few pretty good systems out there and I hope you find one that’’s right for you. Make it easy on yourself and you”ll have an online money making system working for you in no time at all.

About The Author

Mike is a full time internet marketer who loves nothing more than helping others to succeed.

Did you find this article useful? You can learn a lot more about the mechanics of Online Money Making Systems at the Internet Marketing Support Center. You can also download an excellent free report revealing the secrets of “Automatic Money Machines”. This will teach you a proven strategy that all but guarantees your success.

By Boris Mikhailov

Every decent seller of genuine sunglasses is alarmed by the number of eBay members who sell fake sunglasses. There’’s more to that, many of these replica vendors have a feedback value of over 90%. There are a few well known techniques used by these vendors to raise their reputation, for example they can sell a few hundreds e-books for a cent or two each. It’’s being addressed by eBay at the moment. For now they just get away with ripping people off. So I thought to help you in avoiding bidding for replicas on eBay. If you follow my tips you will greatly minimize the chances of buying a fake.

1. Most official resellers who sell genuine sunglasses would let you know that what they are selling is authentic. So look for guaranteed authenticity.

2. Brand new sunglasses are always packed in a box and supplied with cleaning back and warranty card. Don”t trust any seller who doesn”t provide those items. The one and only case a seller can lack some of these items is when the sunglasses are not brand new and that cant be a good deal anyway. The vendor is highly unlikely to have a good explanation in any other situation.

3. Authentic sunglasses package usually has labels on every item supplied in it. For example Oakley has the “Genuine O Software” label sewn on the cleaning box.

4. Since many fraud sellers are aware of what a buyer is going to look at first, they try to either fake a box supplied or use a box from a different model. Check the barcode to match the sunglasses. I”ve seen many replicas packed in original boxes, which had barcode labels torn off.
5. Another good replica indicator is the price. It shouldn”t be far away from the average eBay value. For example, usually Oakley sunglasses are sold for over 50 USD. Anything below this price should be treated more carefully.

6. In the age of Internet every sunglasses company has its own website. You should take advantage of it. Browse the official website and make sure the model listed on eBay matches official one in color. It’’s amazing how many vendors sell wrong colored sunglasses.

7. Make sure that the vendor doesn”t use official photos. Well, in that case you should ask to email you a few real photos. When you get the pictures, look carefully for anything unusual. Avoid any stickers on the glasses or either of the lenses. Fraud vendors build fake authority by doing that. Don”t buy it!

8. You can safely skip any item with words like “-style” in the title. That word is just screaming that it’’s a fake item.

9. I”ve seen quite a few vendors who list models which don”t actually exist. So check the model against official websites.

10. If you”re not sure about authenticity of the sunglasses you”ve bought, get them checked by manufacturer. Most of them provide this service totally free if you mail your glasses to their head office. Also any official dealer would verify the sunglasses for you as well.

11. My last tip is to ask the seller if something is not clear for you in the listing. Official vendors won”t avoid providing authenticity proof. Don”t bid if the seller doesn”t reply to request like that.

About The Author

Boris Mikhailov shows people everything they should know about fake Oakley sunglasses.

By don smith

The New Era of Truly Having Access and Use of your Digital Assets in one centralized location has arrived by subscribing to a hosted digital content database that may be accessed through any web browser.

Digital Asset Management is the storage, cataloguing, search, retrieval, download, sharing and publishing of an individual’’s or company’’s rich digital media assets.

According to leading analyst firms, hosted digital asset management is a growing market trend. More than an IT infrastructure component, DAM is rapidly becoming an important application supporting marketing operations and other lines of business. Hosting offers a deployment alternative that eliminates infrastructure cost or the related in-house IT resources necessary to manage an installed system. And as the value of DAM extends beyond the creative team, high availability is needed to serve a global user community.

Companies will often choose a hosted solution for the bandwidth, network monitoring, redundancy, failover and managed services. These benefits are often costly to achieve if the desired alternative is to build an in house system.

Due to the overwhelming infrastructure requirements, timeframe, and costs, only high end advertising and media companies have been able to afford to use and effectively manage their digital assets.

Today, digital media is a growing concern for corporations. More than ever, company brand identity is contained in digital media, which spans a range of marketing content including images, photos, video, presentations, HTML web pages, and desktop publishing files. Digital media is used to drive sales, deliver information, create user communities, and establish brands in the marketplace.

Because it conveys a company’’s brand strategy, the value of digital media extends well beyond the expense of creating it. Recently, John Wornack, former CEO of Adobe Systems, Inc., was quoted as saying ” for every 1 minute spent creating a rich media asset, five minutes are spent finding it”.

In most companies, business units are demanding greater access causing executive teams to create better standards and establish better controls around these assets.

As digital media becomes an increasingly important asset, the lack of management, accessibility, and auditing make it difficult to fully exploit and protect its value. Most of it is spread across the enterprise, and is typically inaccessible and unshared. The problem is so pervasive that IDC estimates that software for the management of rich media will grow to be a $1.2 billion market by 2008, and the American Management Association sees rich media volume doubling each year.

Many companies have begun to explore digital asset management (DAM) systems to manage their digital media. These systems are designed to ingest and manage digital media, and transform the content into file formats for general business use outside the creative team.

Too often these DAM projects move slowly due to the high-cost of entry, IT infrastructure, network, and resource investments that are needed. This makes Web-Based DAM systems a viable alternative for companies looking for high availability, and the ability to extend the value of digital media beyond the creative organization.

There are a number of newly launched companies offering subscription based content management systems. MAVRIC Media, of Palo Alto, CA., and Clearstory Systems are emerging as the leaders in hosted, cost effective solutions. These services offer even the small free-lance professional access to powerful digital asset management tools. According to Don Smith, Co-Founder of Mavric Media, a subscription web based digital asset management system offers creative media professionals and corporations a phased in approach to using their digital assets more effectively. The cost to benefit ratio is immediately recognized in any collaborative use effort, says Smith.

The primary drivers to managing digital assets are more demanding consumers of digital media within the organization, then to the sub-contractors and outsourced marketing groups. Hosted service offers a subscription-based, pay as you go model for companies needing an immediate solution that can be used in a self serve environment. Both Clearstory and Mavric Media offer a growth path that can eventually result in an in-house solution for the enterprise user.

For some, using a hosted digital asset management service offers a cost-effective model for proof-of-concept. It allows businesses to refine requirements and prove the solution to justify the infrastructure and resource investments of an installed system.

Hosting also allows companies to a way to fast track the use of these assets to keep up with competition. In this case, companies can enjoy a more immediate return, keep pace in the marketplace, and determine the best long term plan for managing their assets in house.

For most companies, a hosted solution versus an installed system is not an either/or choice. Cost and time to create the system are primary drivers. There is often a logical progression as needs change and grow. With this in mind, many analysts recommend that companies consider a solution that can accommodate changing needs and business models. As user adoption of the DAM system increases the system must provide for growth whether hosted or installed in house.

A web based hosted digital asset management solution, supports users outside of the organization, marketing or sales teams in the field, or the general public.

This is accomplished thru security rights created by the administrator. When used effectively, anyone with a common browser and appropriate privileges can access the content they need around the clock.

Hosted solutions can be very valuable for companies looking to build a business case for enterprise implementation. Hosting offers a low-cost way to demonstrate if a solution increases productivity while managing costs. This prevents the delays that can occur while struggling to achieve buy-in, which can result in significant loss and missed opportunity. In other words, if the ROI model is defined, yet it takes you six months to implement an installed solution, what is the cost associated with the delay?

The main reason for choosing a hosted solution at first is that it’’s a risk free way to find the right solution. Often a key objection is that customers fear they will be trapped with the solution they select. Using a provider that offers a web based solution is the best choice for ultimate flexibility.

With hosted services, companies can focus their attention and resources on their core business activities, rather than managing and maintaining an installed application. Companies can save time and money on IT investments, and bring new products and services to market more quickly.

Be sure to choose a solution that it is completely self serve and used through a common web interface, and offers the user full administrative capability.

MAVRIC Media offers a hosted, web-based visual database for content management that is easy-to-use, can be customized and is ready to access in minutes.

About The Author

Don Smith and other founders of Mavric Media, Inc. have a long track record in Digital Media, having successfully formed, built and sold previous digital media companies that were funded by Intel, 3D software partners, and Wilson Sonsini. For more information visit http://www.mavricmedia.com

By Matthew Glenn

Making any decision can be hard. There is no harder decision to make than whether making money online is for you. Yes, we all surf from time to time and many of us buy merchandise online. But, when it comes to making a living online, not many of us will survive. The lack of survival rate is mainly due to the lack of facts when you start. Not having the proper information to go on when you start can lead you down a road of frustration and despair.

Knowing what to expect can give you the needed boost you need when times get rough or things don”t go according to plan. This allows you to recall that what you”re going through others have gone through as well. So it’’s not that bad. And more than likely you are making progress.

Being the Boss.

Probably the most rewarding of all the benefits of working from home is being the boss. Not having to beg for a raise or vacation is a luxury that few of us ever get to experience. Being the boss also gives you creative leverage; meaning you make the decision when it comes to the direction of your online business.

The other side of the coin of being the boss is there is no one to call to get a problem fixed. It’’s all on you. Especially online. You”re the only one that knows how you set up your business. Although you are the boss, in the beginning you must keep yourself motivated. This is where some of us fail. When we don”t see the results that we are looking for right away, we figure that it’’s the product or service and not the “BOSS” that’’s responsible.

Work When You Want.

Working when you want to work is another great perk of making money online. If you have a child’’s game to go to or an event in the middle of the day you just go. This flexibility is a great advantage of the work from home world.

Starting off, however, will be the biggest challenge. You”ll have to put in hours of work to get your website optimized properly, get your ad campaigns running, and make the proper connections to get your business running smoothly. The bright side is that when everything is running as a fine oiled engine the time needed to keep it running is much less, thus the appeal of making money online.

Free Stuff.

Traffic is always the order of the day. But did you know that there are many ways to promote your site that do not require you breaking the bank. You have blogs, ezines, and forums just to name a few.

Now the flip side is time. You must allow time for these methods to generate enough traffic to your site to make a difference. This is a pitfall of most would be marketers. Just before the big breakthrough they give up. Give yourself up to 6 months to see results. In actuality, it should not take this long but if you see great results before this then you really know you”re on your way.

Set up some markers for yourself to gauge exactly where you are and what you need to do to get more of what you want out of your efforts.

Success.

Nothing beats success. Once you have passed all of the hard start up things like getting your site up, your email campaigns, or your advertising rolling you can have a slight sigh of relief. Then the next part of the success formula is consistency. If you”re looking for sales set a goal with a time frame. When you reach this set a more loftier goal. The point here is to keep challenging yourself to do better.

This also helps to keep you motivated on those lonely nights or days at the computer. One final note would be to find a mentor. Someone who has been down the road before and can keep you focused on your goal. See you at the top!

About The Author

Matthew Glenn is a successful mentor that devotes his time, energy and, effort into making others and his team successful online. To learn what he is up to go to:Free YourSelf.

By Craig Summer

With more and more people accessing electronic information via electronic book readers, PC’’s and laptops, this is the age of the ebook. And the great thing about ebooks is that they are not just restricted to words. You an easily include images, videos, links to external websites, music, the possibilities are endless. And all of this increases the experience of the reader.

Of course, you do still need the writing, and it is important that its style and layout helps the reader get your message.

You must figure out how to keep your writing engaging. Often anecdotes, testimonials, little stories, photos, graphs, advice, and tips will keep the reader turning the pages.

Write with a casual, conversational tone rather than a formal tone such as textbook diction. Reader’’s respond to the feeling that you are having a
conversation with them. You don”t necessarily have to write from a third party point of you, you can refer to I and you. Break up the length and structure of your sentences so you do not send your readers to sleep.

In an ebook that is read on the screen, be aware that you must give your reader’’s eye a break. You can do this by using white space. Use plenty of white space. You can have wider margins than normal, double line spacing and larger spaces between paragraphs. Unlike a real book, you don”t need to worry about saving paper.

Make use of lists, both bulleted and numbered. This makes your information easy to absorb, and gives the reader a mental break from dissecting your paragraphs one after the other.

Finally, decide on an easy-to-read design. Find a font that’’s easy on the eyes, and stick to that font family. It is a big mistake to change fonts every paragraph as this subconsciously confuses the reader.

Of course, don”t forget to run a spell and grammar check, and ask someone, with a keen eye for detail to proof read it for you.

Last of all, create a contents page, index and bibliography. Make sure your page numbers on the contents page are correct. You could provide links to each chapter from the contents page. You do this by adding bookmarks at the start of each chapter and then using the select hyperlink option in your word processor, link to the relevant bookmark.

That’’s it! You”ve written a book!

Now all you have to do is publish your ebook online, and wait for download requests from your website visitors.

About The Author

Craig Summer is the compiler of
The Ebook Process
- How to Write Publish and Market an Ebook
which can be found at
www.e-bookcountry.com/ebookprocess

By Clive Calvin

Myspace is not just a trendy fad, nor is it just for those wanting to find long lost friends. It is a viable solution to a very real problem faced by many new bands and musicians struggling with a way to market and promote their sound. It is one of the best ways on the web to connect and interact with anyone from anywhere. Many musicians and people have found themselves on Myspace because of all these benefits.

The benefit of outweighs any prejudices about it being full of teenagers with nothing more to do than chat and exchange party pictures. Myspace represents the best way to advertise and market, using a mix of viral marketing and self promotion. It allows musicians to interact and contact not only peers but fans. A glance at some of the more successful musicians who use Myspace will reveal the benefits of this site.

One of the obvious and most sought after benefit is recognition. Knowing that your band is out there, that your band has talent, skill and a possibility of making a difference is one of the best benefits of using Myspace. It may seem a daunting task to gain this recognition but it can be easy, at least a lot easier than for those who do not have opportunity to get out there and promote their band.

More people will come to know your band if your band has a presence on the Myspace charts. Much like the Billboard Charts, these charts track popular musicians through each genre or through the overall site. Recognition starts here and the quickest way to reach the charts is by having a high play count for your songs.

While you could hope and pray that enough people will listen to your songs to earn your place among the top you can also take your fate into your own hands and use promotional tools. Use a service that is proven with the major labels and top recording artists today, one has been helping musicians increase their play count number which leads to more recognition, and has become a trusted resource for many musicians.

Keeping that recognition can be hard if you ignore your fans but musicians who are confident, friendly, and personable will not have to worry about that, with the aid of the Friend button, blogs, bulletins, and even with the ability to upload pictures to help them along.

Go out there and add anyone who you admire, anyone you know, and anyone who has expressed interest in your work. Communicate with your fans and friends and show them your band and any shows you”ve played through pictures.

This will help keep fans coming back for more and word of your hospitality and personality will spread quickly earning you more fans and more recognition. Advertise yours shows to get larger crowds and pretty soon you will find yourself playing larger events and venues.

The marketing phenomenon of Myspace should not be overlooked or ignored. The benefits of this site just might include launching your career. With enough recognition, you may just draw the attention of someone with connections that will be able to help bring your name and your music to an even larger crowd.

About The Author

TuneBoom Pro is now available beyond the major labels and artists and to the independent artist for the first time. Market your music like TODAYS MOST POPULAR ARTISTS! Everything needed to succeed is here. Use EXACTLY the same strategies used by Todays Mega Superstars!
Increase MySpace Plays

By Ingrid Cliff

Websites these days are an essential part of doing business. Every business should have one - they are as essential as a phone for business success.

But, when people look for you on the web, can they find you? When people are looking for your product or service, they generally don”t enter the name of your company or your name into a search engine. They type in what they are looking for.

So they won”t type in Mary Jones Premium Furniture, they will type in “leather lounge suites + Sydney”.

It is not much use having a website if you are buried on page 250 of Google. Most people will look at maybe the top 5 results from a search engine - that is ideally where you need to be for your search terms.
I use the term Google although there are lots of other search engines as it is the main search engine people use.

Where you appear in search engines like Google is the result of a complex combination of information - but it is one which you have control over.

Here are my top 10 simple website tips to increase your search engine rankings.

1. Delete your flash front page. Flash is a type of coding that creates animated pages. Flash front pages are pretty, but will totally stuff your rankings on the search engines. The reason is search engines look at the front page of your website as the most important page in the whole site. They expect to find information about what the site is about and what it contains. Without words, the search engine spiders can”t work out what the site is about. If you have a flash front page then delete it. You will see an almost instantaneous jump in your rankings.

2. Page titles are important. What you call each page is important. If you title your page “Home” you lose rank. Title your page with the most important words about your site. It doesn”t even have to be a full sentence Leather Lounges | Lounge Suites | Lounges Sydney is more effective.

3. Clear keywords count. Know what business you are in and work out the words people who are looking for your product or service key in to find you. There are loads of tools both free and paid to help you do this. Keywords are put into what is called “metatags” at the top of your page. You don”t see them unless you view the source code. Google is very secretive about whether they look at the keywords in the metatags - but some search engines still use them. Just make sure you use your words throughout your page and in your copy as well. Don”t overdo it though otherwise you could fall foul of keyword abuse penalties.

4. Different keywords on each page. Each page on your website is different. You need to use the keywords that are relevant to each pages contents. If you use the same words throughout the site, you are costing search positions.

5. Avoid duplicate content. If the search engine thinks you have the same thing on different pages it won”t index those duplicate pages. When it calculates whether or not you are duplicating content the spiders look at everything including your page template, pictures, format as well as words. Make sure each page is sufficiently different to avoid the duplicate content penalty.

6. Pictures have hidden messages. Each picture or graphic on your page needs to have an “alt” tag put in to help vision impaired people read your site (or to describe the content if someone has turned off all photos in their browser). You can use this to add in another keyword. So a photo on my site for example isn”t just a “man” it is a “business development consultant”.

7. Keep it fresh. Search engines like content that is fresh and updated regularly. Websites should never be set and forget - work out how you can add content in regularly. I have a blog and my newsletters. (I also constantly fiddle with bits of the site - sort of an occupational hazard!)

8. Inbound links. High quality inbound links are important. These can be links from higher ranking websites or blogs than you. The easiest way to do this is through articles and submitting them throughout online ezines. You can also comment on other’’s blogs and include a link back to your site or social bookmark your site.

9. Important stuff at the top. Google has a nasty habit of stopping at about 3 levels down which means your home page, the next page down and then the page below that. If you have good stuff buried down in your website it may not be found.

10. Keep your navigation clear. Google spiders want to see a logical flow of pages throughout your site. If it can”t follow the flow it can”t index your pages. Keep your navigation path clear and logical.

Improving your rankings can be as simple as following these 10 steps.

About The Author

Ingrid Cliff is a Freelance Copywriter, Business Development and Human Resources Consultant to Small Businesses with her business Heart Harmony. Ingrid writes a free weekly small business newsletter and Small Business Ideas blog for small businesses.www.heartharmony.com.au