A post over on GreyWolf’s blog asks how people are doing with their rankings on sites that they use article syndication sites to market. I’m rather fond of article marketing, and use Article Marketer to submit my articles.

So how am I doing?

I would say I get adequate but not spectacular results so far. This may change over time. I have a new site that I’m experimenting with pure article marketing on, and it does rank already at #5 for what I would consider to be a moderately competitive keyword. It’s about two months old, so it could just be the luck of being new and vanish utterly in a few weeks. We’ll just have to see.

I am giving that site content unique from the articles I submit for it. The idea is for the articles to encourage people to come to the site for more information. However, the articles are reasonably complete in and of themselves. I still want to give enough that site owners might possibly feel comfortable publishing the articles. Read the rest of this entry »

Some people do a lot of printing for their home business. Others, just a little.

I fall very much so into the second category. I rarely print anything for my business. But if I print it, I need it. And I hate how much inkjet cartidges cost.

Sites such as OfficeSupplyOutfitters say they have great prices. A Lexmark 10N0016 ink cartridge for as low as $16.90, for example. I couldn’t find cartidges for my Canon PIXMA iP6600, but that’s a problem I have everywhere. Only a few stores carry them, and always only a small stock. Call it something to check on the next time I need a new printer, may that day be many years away.

This made it a bit challenging to really review this site, as I was hoping to take a look with a product I know the regular price of quite well. But their prices on the BCI-6 cartridges, also for Canon printers and generally a bit lower in price (as I recall) to the ones I need were excellent, at around $3 each.

Everyone wants more people coming to their websites. It’s the entire point of building a site, after all.

One trick that can work well for some people is to make sure their images are easily indexed and search engine friendly. There are some risks to this, but overall it can be a decent tactic.

Optimizing images is not too hard. It’s a matter of naming the image well and of inserting it correctly into your site. The name of your image should be descriptive, and use hyphens to separate the words - pretty-picture.jpg, not prettypicture.jpg or pretty_picture.jpg.

When you put the image into your site, you should include it’s height and width as well as a descriptive alt tag. This is constructed as alt=”pretty picture” within the code for the image. Some people suggest doing the same with title=”pretty picture” but others feel that could be overdoing it.

Your code should look like:

img src=”pretty-picture.jpg” height=”100″ width=”100″ alt=”pretty picture”

enclosed in the usual brackets, of course. This means that Google and other search engines now know what your picture is about. You may start getting significant traffic from the images you optimize this way. Read the rest of this entry »

Bumper stickers are perhaps not as popular as they once were. But they can still be a fun way to promote your business.

An attention-getting bumper sticker takes some work to create. You want it to be something that people might actually think of putting on their car. That’s not an easy task. Humor can work - how many of the bumper stickers that you see are humorous - but it’s not always going to really help you bring attention to your home business.

CustomizedStickers.com makes it easy to make your own bumper sticker. They don’t limit the number of colors you use, and if you aren’t an artist, they include design services for free. They promise to use high quality materials and an excellent printing process.

I like the promises this site makes. If you want to print bumper stickers for your business they sound really promising. Their range of available sizes and shapes means you have a lot of flexibility. Prices don’t look too bad either.

And all you need is a good idea for a bumper sticker….

I read this over on the JenSense blog. This just sounds really great for better blending when a border makes sense.

You can now select the old squared corners, slightly rounded or very rounded corners. It looks great for being able to really coordinate your AdSense with the overall appearance of your website.

I can’t help but wish they’d come up with this sooner. Yes, it’s a minor change in a lot of ways, but it’s also a flat out really great change. Now you don’t have to just blend the entire unit when you use rounded corners on your site.

Technorati Tags: adsense rounded corners

Being a motivational speaker is one of those jobs you can either dream of for the income potential or dread because it would involve… speaking in front of a crowd. It’s most decidedly not for everyone.

But the pay can be excellent. I have an uncle who does professional motivational speaking, and he earns quite a decent living off that.

Here’s one of those things many people don’t think about. If you have a skill that is in demand, one of the ways is to take advantage and become a professional speaker on that topic. There are sports speakers, speakers who talk about current trends, all kinds of business topics, and so forth.

The trick, of course, is landing the jobs. It’s not easy. Even my uncle who has some pretty good experience goes through times where there just isn’t any work for him. But I would think that making the investment to join a professional site would help. However, excellent ratings are required by sites such as International Speakers Bureau. It’s really not for beginners. On the other hand, this means that once you’re good enough, you are represented by a company that is focused on working with other great speakers. That’s a good place to be.

The more I look at social bookmarking, the more interesting it gets. But it’s also challenging. For example, think about driving StumbleUpon traffic to your blog.

There is an easy way to do this. You can buy traffic from StumbleUpon as low as $0.05 per visitor. You set your budget, they send the traffic.

I suppose this could be viable, although I’ve never tried it. Instead, I prefer to try to get natural StumbleUpon traffic.

This, however, is not all that easy. You can Stumble your own sites to an extent, but take it too far and they won’t let you submit links from that domain anymore. As with any other sort of social bookmarking you need to participate, make friends, Stumble other sites that might be of interest.

StumbleUpon visitors can be interesting creatures. My husband likes to use it, and I have fun watching him, as he is not involved in any sort of online marketing. He’s just Stumbling for the fun of it. Read the rest of this entry »

I do a limited amount of work with datafeeds on a few of my sites. It’s not my main focus, but I’ve had some fair results from them. But I know a lot of people worry about them resulting in the much feared duplicate content penalty. After all, an unknown number of affiliates, plus possibly the merchant’s site may be using the exact same product information and descriptions.

But you really don’t have to worry that much about duplicate content. Especially if you are willing to put in a little extra work on your datafeed websites.

One of the quickest things to do is a find and replace for some of the descriptive terms. Get out your thesaurus and find different words to use. You will want to make sure that they will still make sense on your site.

If the merchant tends to use a particular phrase or sentence over and over again you can try to think of ways to replace it. Once again, simple find and replace. I sometimes flat out delete the sentence, other times replace it, or if I’m trying really hard, I come up with a couple of variations and switch them around. Read the rest of this entry »