And here’s to “new beginnings” with Resolutions!

Yours for a fantastic 2010!

Just short and sweet, Merry Christmas
one and all!

I hope your day is exactly what you want it to be.

Karen

Yesterday, I suggested a few tips to help you begin and manage a blog. So now, here are a few more thoughts about trying blogging…

One of the best ways that you can get money with a blog is to become an affiliate to a bigger Web site.

Making money using an Affiliate program with blogging would involve recommending products for a commission of the sale price. Sound simple?

In order for it to work, though, your content, of course, needs to be related in some way to the product you’re trying to sell or market.

For instance, if you’re an affiliate to a clothing store, perhaps your blog is a commentary on modern clothing styles and the like.

Affiliates will pay you for actual and objective ways that you’ve helped their business. They don’t just pay you one time to have their link there for a specific amount of time–they need concrete results to come to them.

Money is getting scarcer, which is why many people are turning towards alternative sources of profit to be had in these tough times.

The Internet is a great way to make money simply by talking about your interests. Of course, there are some regulations and requirements but that’s to be expected in any business that has the potential to change your life.

If you’re not sure what they are and if this business of blogging is for you, a quick trip to a search engine and a query on it will lead you to those regulations and requirements.

Why not give it a shot?

All you need is a little wit and decent writing skills to get into Web site blogging.

Yours in discovering blogging,

Perhaps you’ve heard…blogging is one of the most common forms of communication out there today.

It ranges from professionally done sites, which are run by many people, to personal, free journal-types that let people stay updated on how their friends are doing or what’s going on in their field of interests.

Making a blog is a snap; many Web sites offer free, and easy to understand, tutorials on how to make one, and they offer the webspace for free as well.

If you’re really new to the Internet, you might find it hard to believe just how easy it is to get into blogging.

Here are a some tips to help you understand the concept of blogging.

A blog is anything online that provides commentaries or expositions and the like on anything under the sun.

Blogging started as a form of online journal, and has since evolved into something much more powerful.

If you can think about it or dream it up, someone’s probably interested in it, so you can have an audience, somewhere out there on the Internet, and you can blog to them.

Web site blogging can begin from any number of sites.

You could just simply enter those words into a search engine and you’ll get results that offer free and easy ways to get started.

From there, you can create a blog based on just about anything.

Blogspot is a popular choice for the beginning blogger, as it is free and offers an interface that is smooth and easily customized. In fact, Web site blogging doesn’t get difficult until you see it as a business – then, of course, it gets complicated.

Come back here tomorrow about this time to read a few more tips on how to get started with blogging.

Yours in blogging,

It’s time to launch your email marketing campaign; what should you know prior to setting your plan into motion?

Well, before you do anything, you should first make certain you are prepared to make the transactions generated by your email marketing campaign.

Once you’re confident your business can handle a potential influx of sales, you should follow a few specific steps to ensure you’re making the most of your email marketing solutions.

The checklist below will help you to determine what to do and when to do it.

1. Determine what day of the week to send your messages.
The theories on this choice are numerous. Many experts suggest targeting individual customers over the weekend but business-to-business hopefuls on a Friday.

However, a recent study indicates the best day to issue B2B email marketing messages is Monday or Tuesday. The truth is, there is no hard and fast rule for this factor.

So do your own research to determine what day you think is best. Consider testing several days and determining which one gets the best response.

There are two times of day that are historically best for sending a marketing email: mid-morning and right after lunch. At these two times, people tend to be more receptive to what lands in their inbox.

After you’ve determined when and what time you’ll be sending your marketing email, you should prepare to monitor responses. Your monitoring efforts should cover everything from replies to unsubscribes.

Monitoring your responses early can help you to eliminate and even avoid certain link and spam problems.

2. Now it’s time to deliver that email and the final step should be creating an email that is attractive, but not too “spam-like” that customers will take time to read and find easy to navigate.

An effective interface will enable you to track the results of your email campaign and move ahead as a result of that tracking.

Below you will find a summarized “tip list” derived from various email marketing experts. Take some time to review these tips and then be on your way to email marketing success.

1. Offer something to your customers!
In exchange for their contact info, offer your customers something in return. (i.e. a free newsletter, or seminar, or more information)

2. Be economical about the info you gather!
When gathering customer contact information, only ask for the information you need.

3. Make it easy for them to unsubscribe!
Make absolutely certain you provide a way for customers to unsubscribe from your e-mail marketing solutions campaign.

Yours in finding solutions to email marketing,

Web sites become listed on search engine results if and only if the search engine spiders are indexing them.

If they pass right by your pages, and don’t even know they exist, then you’re simply not going to get listed. You are probably aware of the basic steps to get the search engine spiders to index your pages, however you might have missed a few key reasons the spiders are skipping right over your content.

Here are 10 reasons search engines might not index your webpage.

As it is, some pages are just not meant to be indexed by the spiders. This may not matter to your overall SEO strategy, however it’s important to understand what spiders do and don’t index.

Search engine spiders don’t index:

1. Pages only accessible by using a search form
2. Pages that require a log in
3. Pages that require visitors to submit a form
4. Pages that redirect to a different URL before showing content

While some pages are not meant to be indexed, other pages are and might be missed. Pages that spiders often ignore include:

5. Pages with too many outgoing links
6. Pages with complex URLs – these often give spiders an error result
7. Pages which are more than three clicks from the home page, often described as “deep pages”

Other factors may also prevent your web pages from being indexed by search engines. These factors include:

8. Broken links from your site
9. A webpage that exceeds 105K
10. A slow loading time or a down server.

Finally, if your page is a flash page, search engine spiders just won’t be able to recognize it and will therefore not index it. Thus, as you’re optimizing your web site and specific web pages, pay attention to these factors. The goal, of course, is to be indexed and to achieve first page search engine results.

Yours in staying in front of search engines,

Aside from pre-selling your products and affiliated offers, the other purpose of your free viral report should be to build your mailing list.

This is because if you are unable to pre-sell, let alone sell, the products and services featured in your free report, the last ditch effort should be to collect leads.

In short, if you cannot convert the reader into a ready buyer, you should then attempt to convert him or her into your subscriber.

In that manner, you can still follow up with your reader on future offers and have a chance at converting him or her into your customer, preferably for a lifetime.

You can do this by offering a lifetime update to your report or a unique notification list your reader will be interested in subscribing to, which leads to having him or her subscribed to your mailing list.

One of the few success factors in viral marketing of your free report is quality.

If your readers find your information worth sharing, and you encourage them to do so by giving them the right to give your report away for free, you will be able to have your name, status and links within the report passed around without any effort on your part – simply because others are willing to do so for you!

Yours in creating free reports,

P.S. So, have you seen our free report: Inside Internet Marketing? Just enter your name in the box on the upper left of this page and it will be sent to you. You’ll also be on our mailing list to receive a complimentary issue of our ezine, On the Bright Side.

When you have a business blog, it’s important to focus on your target market because they are potential customers for your business. They are your bread and butter.

So how do you focus your business blog to your target market?

Begin with the name of your blog.

When you set up a business blog for the first time, the blogging platform will require a title for your blog. Carefully consider what this should be.

Should it be the name of your business (i.e. Sam’s Hardware Store Blog)? It depends on the type of business you own because you definitely don’t want your blog name to be too cheesy.

Neither do you want it to be so long that no one can remember the exact wording, so choose your blog name carefully. If you sell a specific product, say jewelry, you could use something catchy, like Gems from Julie, or whatever your name is.

A great way to come up with an appropriate name for your blog that your target market will easily find when they do a search, is to do a search yourself.

Do a keyword search to see how many hits certain words that pertain to your business receive. Then incorporate those words into the title of your blog.

Another way to focus your business blog to your target market is to stick with topics that pertain to your business.

When readers come to your blog, they are expecting to find information about the services you offer and product info. Don’t sell them short by posting about stuff that has nothing to do with your business.

They will leave and never come back.

In addition, be sure ads placed on your business blog are relevant to your business.

You won’t make any money if you have buttons advertising jewelry when you sell tools. Besides, your readers will get the sense you are just trying to make money instead of truly helping them, which really is the main goal of your business blog.

Yours in focusing on blogging to your target market,

When you’re promoting your business online, it’s important that you carefully pay attention to your Internet Marketing Statistics. While marketing statistics can often refer more to industry statistics than your own personal marketing results, you’re going to be most concerned with the statistics that apply only to you and your business for right now.

Your Internet Marketing Statistics include everything from the number of page views for each page of your Web site, to how many clicks a particular link in an email or advertisement bring you a new customer, to how many of those click-throughs actually purchase something or sign up for your mailing list so you can contact them later.

These statistics are vitally important, because they tell you whether or not your plan is working.

For instance, if your Internet Marketing Statistics show that an advertisement you placed in a newsletter drew very few people to your site, and few if any of those signed up for your mailing list or purchased anything, you’ll want to reconsider whether you’ll pay for advertising there again.

It could be that your ad was ineffective, and it could be that it’s just not a profitable place for you to advertise.

You could try an ad there similar to one you’ve used somewhere else with good results to see if the same thing happens. If it does, then the market is probably just not right for your product or service. If, though, the new ad gets a good response, you’ll know it’s the first ad itself that didn’t do well, not the market.

If you don’t keep a good eye on your Internet Marketing Statistics, everything becomes guesswork. Since you’re operating a business and not running a psychic phone line, the guesswork isn’t a wise way to run an Internet Marketing campaign.

Are you getting tons of Web site hits from a particular link, but few are following through and signing up for a list or buying? It’s still possible that it’s just simply not the market for you, or it could be you don’t have very interesting or eye-catching content on your page designed to make people want to sign up for your list.

You’ve probably had your Web site search engine optimized for certain keywords pertaining to your business. Type them in to a few different search engines and see if your site is in the top 10 or so listings.

If it’s not on the most searchers won’t see it at all because so few ever click as far as the second page of results, unless necessary.

Page rank is one of the more important Internet Marketing Statistics you can monitor, right along with link performance.

Another way to make your Statistics work for you is by looking at page views referred from within your site. The customer is there, and begins looking at different pages. Which ones get the most hits that way?

This is one of the Internet Marketing Statistics that can help you see what searchers like the most about your Web site.

Yours in figuring out your IM Statistics,