It doesn’t take much online experience to know that search engines are a valuable source of traffic for your website. Aside from the costs associated with optimizing your website, the traffic is pretty much free. It takes time more than money for those who don’t pay professional search engine optimization firms.

The basics of search engine optimization include using your keywords appropriately on your page, building quality links to your site and so forth. Overusing your keywords, hiding them on your page and trading links from any site, no matter the quality or relevance, are not so good for your site, although people have certainly had luck with those at various times.

One thing beginners often do is submit their sites to the search engines. Strictly speaking this is not necessary, although it generally does not do any harm. In the case of Google, if you want to submit your site to it you are better off creating an XML sitemap for them and submitting that. Yahoo also has a place for you to submit your sitemaps. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve probably read a great deal about blogging and what it can do for your business. Blogs bring traffic, they say. Blogs are a great way to build content. Blogs allow your readers to interact with you.

These can all be true. Of course, it all still depends on how you use your blog.

A blog on a topic no one but you cares about won’t bring in traffic. If you don’t post on your blog regularly, it certainly won’t magically build content. If you make it difficult for readers to comment on your posts, they are not terribly likely to interact with you.

There’s also more to it than just putting up a blog and posting to it. You probably heard about the “tag and ping” hype not that long ago. The principle is good, but your results will depend on the quality of your posts. Sites such as Technorati aren’t terribly tolerant of blog spam. It is my understanding that tag and ping is already less effective than it had been.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put tags on your posts or ping the blog directories. If you’re making quality posts, tag and ping away. But if it’s junk, don’t get your hopes up. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the truisms of online business is that “If you build it, they will come” just isn’t true online. You have to do a lot of work to get people to your online business.

One of the things you need is a good advertising strategy. You probably don’t have a big budget for advertising, especially if you’re just starting out, but you should budget something.

One thing you need to have in your advertising is a solid message. You want people to know why they are coming to your site. The ideal respondent to any advertising you do is strongly interested in what you have to offer. You want your message to attract them.

There are many places you can put your message to help. Business cards, forum signatures, email signatures, flyers, just to name a few.

The message needs to match the message of your website. If you promise blue widgets in your ads but really only sell red ones, you aren’t going to get many sales. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the benefits of working in direct sales is that many companies allow you to build a downline, and you get commissions off the sales of your downline. This gives you income even if you yourself are not selling at the moment.

Obviously, this means you really want to build a downline as well as your own business.

For many people, building a downline is even harder than finding customers. It’s one thing to buy a product, after all, quite another to start a business and actually work at it. Then you have many people who may sign up in your downline but simply make no or very few sales.

Just as in any other business, not everyone is going to succeed in direct sales, and you might be surprised by who succeeds. The more people in your downline, the more chances you have for people who really work the business to be in your downline, but it can also increase your workload.

Even before you start building your downline, you need to know what you have to offer them. I don’t just mean incentives for signing up under you. That may get signups, but if they never produce sales, what good is that? You need to provide support, and help your downline learn to make sales. Read the rest of this entry »

I just read about this on the 5 Star Affiliate Marketing blog. Commission Junction has backed down on requiring affiliates to use Javascript links. Looks like the outcry worked!

I am quite relieved. Commission Junction has some good programs that would be hard for me to replace, but I would have to if forced to make the switch to Javascript. There are just too many disadvantages.

One of the concerns many people have when they are new in home business is whether or not to trademark their company name or logo. It’s pricey and time consuming. However, it can also provide a benefit to your business.

The benefit is, of course, that your company name or logo has protection nationwide. It also makes it harder for someone else to claim that you are infringing on their trademark. It discourages people from claiming trademarks that are likely to be confused with yours, as you could accuse them of trademark infringement.

Trademark registration costs $335 for each class of goods or services - not cheap, but really not that expensive. It’s more than many other expenses you’ll incur with an online business, though. To do it right, however, you many need a trademark attorney to handle the search to confirm that you can indeed safely trademark your company name or logo, which can rapidly increase the cost. Read the rest of this entry »

The 301 redirect has a few uses. If you decide for some reason to change your domain name or the name of an individual directory or page, it allows you to redirect your traffic in a way that search engines prefer. It can also be used to forward other links.

Many hosts make the 301 direct easy to use. If you have cPanel, just look for “Redirects,” which should be under Site Management. Type in the location to be redirected and where you want it to be redirected to. Choose “Permanent” to make it a 301 redirect. Don’t use the “Temporary” selection in most cases, unless this truly is a temporary redirect.

If you don’t have cPanel, don’t give up hope. If you are able to change your .htaccess file, you can easily create a 301 redirect. Here’s the code, which should be all on one line, no matter how it appears on your screen:

Redirect 301 /example.htm http://www.site.com/page.html Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great things about going on vacation is the fresh outlook you get after.

I just got back from vacation a few days ago. It was a good vacation. No computers, no internet, so there was no temptation to check emails or anything else.

Of course, what that really means is that I had a TON of email waiting for me when I came home.

However, even this can be a plus. In the mailbox I use for newsletters and such, I had more than 300 messages. This box does have a spam filter. Some of the emails are from things I really should have unsubscribed from ages ago, and just kept the address to resusbscribe, such as the one to Freecycle. Nothing I need from that right now and nothing to give away at the moment, so those are just clutter. But from all those emails, there were very few worth even scanning. I deleted all but about 40 of them just offhand. I didn’t really need to read all those week-old “read this now” newsletters, after all. Read the rest of this entry »