How to Build a Complete Web Business on a Shoe String Budget with Article Marketing.

One of the greatest benefits of being a web business owner is that you don't need to have deep pockets to drive your businesses to success. I can show you how to build a complete web business from the ground up with a shoe string budget.


Step 1: Build a revenue generating website.

The first step to take is to build a website that will be able to generate sales for you. Do your market research in advance and find out the products that are selling well. Know everything to there is to know about the niche that you are targeting. What products are selling? What are the price points? Who are the target customers?

If you have the answers to the questions above, half the battle is won. In your mind's eye, you can already see success. Now, you need to put in time and effort to do the work and move yourself towards success.

I highly recommend that you register a keyword based domain name for SEO purposes. The bulk of your traffic will come from your articles. But organic search traffic is free, and it converts really well. So why not receive traffic from both sources?

A domain costs about $10 bucks to register. You may need to pay $120 for a year of web hosting. So far, total cost works out to be $130.


Step 2: Targeted traffic generation with article marketing.

Once your website is up and running, it's time to promote the site and drive targeted traffic to your website. There are many ways you can drive traffic - banner advertising, PPC, SEO, article marketing, etc.

When you consider these methods, you quickly realize that many of these methods are for experienced marketers only. In other words, they are paid advertising, and you get into those methods only if you are already making online, or if you have extra cash to spare. But what about the small business owner? What about the individual with a shoe string budget? How can they drive traffic?

One of the most cost effective ways to generate traffic is by article marketing. Article marketing has been around for ages. Traditionally, marketers publish content to newsletters and Ezines to market their websites.

Today, the focus is less on Ezines, and more on search engines. When you publish content publicly on the Internet, the articles get picked up quickly by the search engines. You then receive page views, which eventually lead to clicks and sales.

Always remember that your goal is to generate targeted traffic. You don't want to attract curious clicks or freebie seekers. These are not buyers and there is no point directing such traffic to your websites. So how to drive targeted traffic with articles?


Tip 1: Write a keyword rich article title.

Use specific keywords to weed out non-targeted visitors. For example, a title that says "Article Writing Guide - 3 Tips On Generating Targeted Traffic" is much better than a vague title like "Article Writing Tips".


Tip 2: Write a good teaser that draws in the reader in.

The summary of the title appears on the article directories, as well as in the search engines. Usually, the summary is made up of just 2 to 3 short sentences. It's not necessary to write a summary that is longer than 50 words because most of the texts will not be displayed. The summary appears right after the title, so we can try to use it as a teaser to draw the reader in. Don't reveal all the information in the summary, or there is no reason for the reader to click and visit the web page for the solution.


Tip 3: Write a brief but interesting article.

The article shouldn't be too lengthy. This is because you want the reader to finish reading the entire article. Why is that important? Well, your links are located at the bottom of each article. If the reader doesn't see your links, there is zero chance of getting clicks. The ideal length is between 300 to 500 words. Anything longer than 500 words should be separated and published as multiple articles.

   
Tip 4: Write a great author box.

Provide a strong incentive and invite the reader to click on your links. Note that you are competing for the reader's attention with other links on the same web page (e.g. ads, banners, other articles, etc). So your author box has to stand out. Don't try to abuse this tiny space by trying to squeeze in your resume. The author box is not for this purpose. It's supposed to help you get clicks. So focus on drawing attention to your links.

Total cost at this stage is still $130. I highly recommend that you invest a small sum of money on a good article writing course to boost your productivity. The more articles you can produce, the more traffic and sales you will receive.

More marketing tips.

1) Drive traffic to a squeeze page to build a list. A list is important if you are looking for long term success. Without a list, you have only 1 chance to make a sale. If the visitor doesn't buy, you have lost the visitor (perhaps forever). With a list, you can follow up and try to sell the prospect over and over again.

2) Always link to a website that you have full control over. Sure, you can always register for a free blog and save $10 on domain registration on hosting. But what if your site gets deleted (it has happened before). Also, affiliate offers sometimes get taken off market. So if you don't have control over your links, the links in your articles will be pointing to dead offers.

3) Focus on back end products. Traffic generation is important. But don't neglect back end sales.

4) Stop trying to chase the latest money making methods. Focus on the fundamentals of building a strong web business.

5) Productivity is important but it's not everything. Learning what works is just as important. Then just do more of what is currently working to boost your web businesses to the next level.

About the Author: Darren Chow is professional article marketer. He has just completed a brand new article writing guide. In the article writing guide, you get to learn the exact system to produce 400+ articles in a single month.

Traffic Exchange SWEEVA

This is a brand new concept in web site advertising where EVERYONE views the same site at the exact same time. We call it social browsing and we know you are going to love it! You will get live feedback, live comments about what others like and don't like about your site. And think of the potential you have when you get in contact with those viewers and address their concerns personally. The possibilities for network growth are endless... 






Want people to see your blog? How about a cool video you did? Or your favorite web site? Got a business? Promote it to hundreds and thousands of Sweeva members at the same time.

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This is social browsing. This is live feedback from other surfers, telling you what they like and what they don't like about your site. Encourage people to sign up, give them a free trial, let them ask you questions in real time, the possibilities are endless.

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9 Steps to Diagnosing Lost Search Engine Traffic

9 Steps to Diagnosing
Lost Search Engine Traffic

By Jill Whalen (c) 2010

For the past few weeks I've been tasked with reviewing a few different sites that have seen a loss in traffic - their owners hoped to find out why. I love these kinds of reviews because it's like solving a mystery or figuring out a puzzle. While it's not always possible to determine the exact cause for the traffic loss, I can usually make some educated guesses based on what I dig up in Google Analytics.

Here are 9 steps you can take to diagnose the cause of lost search engine traffic:

1. Determine what type of traffic loss you're dealing with. Many people look at Google's overview page, see a loss of overall traffic to their website, and assume that they must have lost their rankings in Google and the targetéd traffic that comes with it. This may or may not be the case. Be sure to check for search engine traffic, and even more specifically Google non-paid traffic.

2. Look at the extent of the traffic loss. Your research will be very different depending on whether there was a gradual decline in traffic or a sudden, drastic drop. I reviewed a site last week that lost all of their Google unpaid traffic overnight! This sort of loss is typically a technical issue such as a robots.txt file or a nofollow directive that keeps search engine spiders from indexing your pages. Sometimes it's not actually a loss of traffic at all - your analytics code could have been inadvertently removed from all or most of the pages, making it appear like a traffic loss. I have seen all of the above more times than I can count in just the last couple of months!

3. Compare apples to apples. Many businesses are cyclical or seasonal. A gift site may see huge spikes in traffic the months leading up to Christmas or the weeks before other holidays. This means that comparing any month to the previous month may not tell you the whole story. A drop in traffic in January is probably fairly normal for a gift site. If you've got more than a year's worth of data, you'll want to compare this month's traffic to the same month in previous years. Ideally, you'd of course want to see a growth in traffic. And if you don't, then you may very well have a problem on your hands. If you don't have data that goes back that far, you can compare month to month, but be sure to take the data with a grain of salt.

4. Review and filter out "brand" traffic. Most websites get a lot of Google traffic from people who've typed some version of the name of their company as their search query. You'll want to note whether those visitors have significantly increased or decreased. If you receive fewer visitors for your brand, this could be caused by a decrease in marketing and advertising. Once you make note of the brand traffic, you'll want to filter it out so you can study actual keyword traffic, which is what real SEO traffic consists of.

5. Analyze which keyword phrases have had a significant decrease in visitors. Now that you've filtered out the brand traffic, you should be able to see the keyword phrases that are bringing you the most traffic. If you have lots, you may want to view 100 phrases at a time rather than the default of just 10. Are there lots of keyword phrases that seem to bring far fewer visitors over the last few months as compared to last year at the same time? You may also notice some that are bringing significantly more visitors.

6. Do a quick Google search for the phrases. If you're not seeing any pages from your site on the first page in Google, it may or may not be a clue (given the fact that everybody sees different search results) but it is definitely a cause to investigate further. If a page from your site does show up fairly high in the líst, it could just be that fewer people are searching for that phrase now as compared to before. Or it could be that your listing isn't quite what the searcher is looking for based on your title and descriptive snippet. There might also be other results for the keyword phrase that have images or video embedded whereas yours doesn't. Or there might be local map results showing up that make your result less appealing.

7. Review the landing page for the keyword phrase that lost traffic. Is there any obvious reason why it's not bringing in as many visitors as it used to? Does it even exist anymore? Did it change substantially at some point during the year? Did it get buried deeper into the site architecture for some reason? Is the content duplicated from other pages within your site or contained on other websites? Were there links pointing to it at some point that no longer are? Does the copy read naturally, or are there a few extra instances of the keyword phrase than really makes sense to a person?

8. Review your long-tail traffic. Since the end of April and early May 2010 a few large sites lost a substantial amount of traffic for keyword phrases that brought small numbers of visitors individually, but in aggregate they made up a lot of website traffic. You'll want to filter your keywords to those that have only a few visitors (even just 1) and see if there are significantly fewer of those than previously. If this is the case, Google has gone on record stating that they're doing a better job at sending long-tail traffic to more meaningful and relevant pages than they used to. Which means you'll have to go above and beyond what you're currently doing if you want to get that long-tail traffic back.

9. Decide if you're dealing with a search engine penalty. For drastic drops, in the rare cases where it's not a technical issue, you're most likely dealing with a penalty. You can check your Google Webmaster Tools account to see if there is a notification of a penalty, but they don't usually bother to tell you. Still, search engine penalties are much rarer than people think. In fact, most website owners know what they've done wrong when they have a search engine penalty. There are some cases, however, where they may have been duped by a less than scrupulous "SEO" company. The penalties I've seen seem to occur on sites that have no redeeming value because they have the same products and content that can be found on many other sites (often ones owned by the same company), plus they are deeply entrenched in massive link farms. It's likely that they are also hosting part of the link farm on their own site in the form of a link directory. If this is what you find, you may be better off to start from scratch rather than trying to salvage the penalized domain.

I hope these steps help you diagnose your loss of traffic. I imagine they will keep you busy for quite some time! 

About The Author
Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has been performing SEO services since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum.

If you've lost search engine traffic and would like Jill to determine what the problem might be, fill out the contact form at www.highrankings.com/contact/ and mention it in the "Business Goals" section. She can review most sites that have Google Analytics installed for a one-time $600 fee.

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5 Tips for Marketing Through Content

5 Tips for Marketing Through Content Chris Crum | Staff Writer Delivering Content That's In Demand, Without Sacrificing Quality Gather.com is a site that started as a social networking site, but is now a demand-driven media company, attracting 7 million unique visitors per month (and growing), according to the company. Demand-driven media is certainly a competitive industry these days with companies like Demand Media, AOL, Yahoo and others all playing their roles. Tell us about your strategy for marketing through content. Content has always been "where it's at", and that holds true as much as ever these days. Gather CEO Tom Gerace, who is also founder of the Social Media Advertising Consortium (SMAC), a non-profit organization working on the creation of standards for social media engagement campaigns, offered some tips on marketing through content to share with WebProNews readers. These tips are: 1. Start with Search. There are 15.9 billion searches run every month and a small percentage are customers looking for you and your competitors. Figure out your market opportunity by understanding how many searches, keywords and keyword phrases are related to what you do. 2. Think holistically about your budget. What do you spend today per customer? What is your average SEM spend? Content-based programs can help lower cost/customer acquisition because fewer people are doing it and competition, so far, is less intense. Plan to shift some budget dollars from SEM and other acquisition marketing efforts to content marketing - it delivers results with an improved cost structure. Strategies for Making the Most of Your Data - Click Here Now 3. Target your content creation.  Content needs to be targeted to areas that align directly with your brand; where sufficient demand for your content will make content marketing worthwhile. 4. Make lots and lots and lots of content at a low cost.  Search engines weigh recency heavily when organizing content.  There is always fresh content at the top of search results pages, so 1,000 posts on a topic will capture more customers than a competitor with 5 - 10 posts. 5. Don't go it alone. Managing dozens of writers, achieving top search engine placement, and establishing content creation costs to make content marketing make sense requires specialized knowledge and training. Find a partner and make them put their money where their mouth is on the numbers they promise. Those are Gerace's tips, but I'll add that quality makes a difference. Not only does Google continually try to put more emphasis on quality with algorithm updates, but it also goes a long way when you're talking about reputation, and obviously you don't want to do something that will hurt your brand. As far as search, Google's Matt Cutts has said of the recent Mayday update, for example, that content farms are among the kinds of sites that are hit the hardest by the alrogithm change. That's another reason why churning out sub-par content is not going to be in your best interest. If you can walk the line of delivering content that people are searching for, and giving them content that stands out, there are lots of benefits to be had. Have your own tips for marketing through content? Share them here.

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