Web Design - web development

Make more money with your product or business. If you have neither, there are abundant other resources you can use.

Yes, even if you don't have a product to sell, there are things you can sell in a matter of minutes, and make money with affiliate marketing.

Here is my list of ideal techniques to create or increase sales/customer requests...
1) Build websites or use your existing site with SEO and Pay Per Click ads.
2) Media Advertising (radio, newspaper) (for free)
3) Sponsored Links - flat monthly fee

If you like to learn and read, (and want to make some money) here are a few valuable pages for you. If you are in a hurry, do not read this material.

There are very many individuals who now call themselves "webmasters" who can do web design, construct and publish a web site. It is much easier today than a fewyears ago with the advent of Programs called "Editors" one may put together a site without much understanding of HTML (the source code behind all web sites), JavaScript, Frames, Flash etc. This being said, however,

1. You must have a good domain name with the right kind of host. You need a name that will let people find you, and you need certain technical set-ups with your web host that will allow you to have high placement in the search engines.

2. You need a well designed website without all the flare and excitement of Flash, or Shockwave or Java. (a little is OK) These pretty and flashy features will only deter from your desired end. If you already have a site with these features, we have alternative solutions that will still let you get a lot of traffic to your site.

3. Construct the source code to be search engine friendly (meta tags, link tags, keywords, title tags, image tags)

6. Write well written sales copy - very important to get people to read your message and buy your product. If you have boring copy, you will not close any sales.

7. Set up an automated ordering system that is user friendly. If it is not automated, you can lose a substantial portion of sales.

8. Create link-backs from other websites of same or similar content (Reciprocal Links)

9. Establish effective yet budget conscious “pay-per-click” campaign using Google and others.

A common misconception of search engine marketing by practicing webmasters is that all you have to do is submit your Web site and then you're done. Industry veterans know better. Search engine marketing, and more specifically, search engine optimization is an ongoing process. While it certainly offers many rewards, it is not a silver-bullet, single click solution to bringing more traffic to your Web site. Anyone that makes such lofty promises probably also sells a magic elixir that will cure cancer and re-grow hair.

Like most things worthwhile, search engine optimization requires at least a modest investment in time to be truly successful. Fortunately, it's an investment that rewards you handsomely when you know the steps to doing it right.

Search engine optimization offers a higher return on investment (ROI) than most, if not all other forms of online advertising. Countless studies have placed search engine marketing at the top of the "most effective forms of online marketing" list.

After all, what lead could be more targeted, and more ready to make a purchase than one that is specifically searching for what you have to offer? Most other types of advertising are passive, hoping to catch the curiosity of a potential buyer at just the right moment. Conversely, searching is active. The prospect is pro-actively looking for a product, service, or information.

With billions of searches being conducted daily, how does an online business tap into this incredible market potential? You must appear near the top of the results for search keywords that apply to your business. That means the search engine must find your Web site's content more relevant to a given search than the millions of other pages in its index.

Simply submitting your site and then hoping for the best is not an effective strategy. Instead, you must understand the process to achieving top rankings in the major search engines, and then do something about it. To industry insiders, this process is known as search engine optimization or SEO.

WEBMASTERS RULES: Generating free traffic for your Web site via search engine optimization requires the following five steps plus Site Maps and Blogs:

Just as bad, choose keywords that are too competitive and you'll soon throw your hands up in frustration trying to rise to the top.

Furthermore, if you choose keywords that are not closely related to the type of buyer you cater to, then visitors will arrive at your site but never make a purchase.

What is Web page optimization? Simply put, your goal is to give the search engine what it wants to see. The easiest way to determine what its looking for is to study pages already ranking in the top 10 and to emulate key aspects of those pages on your own site. No, this does not mean plagiarizing text from your competition. Instead, it means emulating the basic statistical elements of the page such as keyword counts, link popularity, word counts, and other criteria.

Most web pages are written in HTML. As for every language, HTML has its own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and every document written in HTML is supposed to follow these rules.

Like any language, HTML is constantly changing. As HTML has become a relative complex language, it's very easy to make mistakes. HTML code that is not following the official rules is called invalid HTML code.

What is Script and Flash? This is language used inside of HTML that is considered unreadable by the search engines because it is not deemed as content. Hence, the more of this a webpage contains the more apt that the search engines will overlook the page.

Search engines have to parse the HTML code of your web site to find the relevant content. If your HTML code contains errors, search engines might not be able to find everything on the page.

Search engine crawler programs obey the HTML standard. They only can index your web site if it is compliant to the HTML standard. If there's a mistake in your web page code, they might stop crawling your web site and they might lose what they've collected so far because of the error.

Although most major search engines can deal with minor errors in HTML code, a single missing bracket in your HTML code can be the reason if your web page cannot be found in search engines.

If you don't close some tags properly, or if some important tags are missing, search engines might ignore the complete content of that page.

Many search engines today no longer crawl the Web to build their own unique index of Web sites. Instead, they will license an index from one of the major crawler-based engines like Google, Inktomi, or AllTheWeb. We will routinely send your site to the below named search engines.

The search engine industry is continually evolving. You need to know which of the major "players" is powering the smaller search engines if you want to know where you should focus your optimization efforts.

For the past couple of years, the major search engines have been preparing to square off against each other and battle it out for the industry's top spot. Google has been #1 for a while now, but Yahoo! and MSN have been making moves to steal the crown.

Google is still extremely powerful, with about a 55% market share. Yahoo! is the closest runner-up, with about 20% of users choosing it as their main search engine. And MSN is still a distant but threatening third, with about 10% of the global usage share.

Keep in mind, however, that Google and Yahoo! power many of the smaller search engines. For example, Google powers the free listings featured on AOL and Netscape, plus the paid listings
featured on AOL, Netscape, Ask Jeeves, HotBot, Teoma, and Lycos.

Yahoo! powers free listings featured on MSN, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and HotBot, plus the paid listings on MSN, AltaVista, and AllTheWeb.

However, MSN won't be powered by Yahoo! for much longer! MSN came out with a preview of their own long-anticipated search engine technology earlier this month. They're still working out the bugs, and the official MSN Search engine is still being powered by Yahoo!. But you can expect MSN to go solo
sometime over the next few months.

You need to be aware of these changes if you want to gear your optimization efforts toward the engines that will send you as much traffic as possible.

Of course, you also need to keep tabs on changes to the search engines themselves!

Search engines frequently change the algorithms they use to rank sites. They don't want unscrupulous site owners manipulating their indexing methods in order to get high rankings. By doing so, they damage the integrity of free search!

As soon as the search engines become aware of a trick being used by "search engine spammers" to boost their site ranking, they figure out a way to catch them.

So be careful! You don't want to catch yourself employing a "great strategy" promoted by a marketing "expert," only to find out it's a tactic the search engines hate! That could get you booted off their listings in no time flat.

In fact, that's exactly what happened at the end of last year, during what has come to be called the "Florida Google Dance."

Google made some major changes to their algorithms in November 2003 and started imposing an "over-optimization penalty" on any sites that appeared to be artificially boosting their site's relevancy for targeted keywords.

Many members of the business community were surprised to find their sites dropped from their high ranking in Google's listings. These people had to put a lot of work into revamping and resubmitting their sites in order to get listed again.

And many of the people who were penalized weren't "unscrupulous" site owners! They weren't trying to pull a "fast one" on search engines using frowned-upon techniques such as "keyword stuffing." They were simply trying to be smart marketers -- and some feel they were unfairly punished for it.

As you may know there are about a dozen decent PPC search engines. These are websites where you go on and bid whatever price you are willing to pay for a visitor to be sent to your website for a particular keyword. If you sell books, you may bid a maximum of 25 cents to have your ad display on these websites when someone searches for a book that you sell.

The rest of the best: Search123, enhance, SearchFeed, GoClick, 7Search, Findit-Quick, Looksmart, Kanoodle.

Now, it’s important to note that Google has two advertising services – Adwords and Adsense. Adwords is for advertisers who want to have their ad display on Google and it’s partner sites (shown below) when a particular keyword is searched for. Adsense is for people who have a website that they want to let Google put relevant ads on, in which Google will pay the site owner a commission for each click an ad on their site receives. Google doesn’t disclose the actual percentage, but most experts estimate it’s around 50%. If I have a website about video games, Google will display ads on my website related to video games. If the top 3 or 4 Google Adwords advertisers have bid $1.00 per click on keyword “video games”, if someone on my website clicks their ad, I will receive approximately 50cents from Google for that click.

A few words about Google and Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Perry Marshall, well known Internet Guru, has said that never before in the history of advertising has it been possible to spend five bucks, write a couple of ads, and get instant access to over 100 million people in less than 10 minutes.

Google started in 1998, after the "big boys" in the search engine game like Yahoo and AltaVista were already well-established.

At the time, few people would have bet that Google would overtake them all - but in less than five years they did exactly that.

What's even more remarkable is they did so without a bunch of hype and loud marketing. They literally built a better mousetrap and the world beat a path to their door.

Google's mission in life was to build a search engine that would give people exactly what they were searching for, as fast as possible. If you were searching for "California butterflies" they wanted to give you the very best and most popular California butterfly websites on the very first page of results. They developed an amazing mathematical formula for figuring out who visited websites and why, and using that information in their search engine. So ... when they began to sell Pay Per Click advertising, they were extremely concerned that advertisers should also put out messages that were highly relevant.

Google rewards you for being relevant, and they let people who are searching vote for you. If your ad gets clicked on, it's relevant. If it doesn't, it's not. It's that simple. The higher your “clickthrough” rate - i.e., the more folks who see your ad and click on it - the less you have to pay for the position you want. But if you write lousy ads, Google will make you pay more to get your ads to show at all. So this creates a "Darwinian" effect, a deliberate natural selection that weeds out bad advertisers and rewards good ones. What's good for Google's customers is good for Google and good for you. When all the dust has settled, what really matters is that your ads and your content be relevant to the keywords you're bidding on. Your message must match what the person is thinking.

So ... what were they really thinking when they typed in "California butterflies?" That is the question! Figure that out and put it in front of them, and you'll win at Google. Write an ad that matches exactly what they're searching for and you'll beat your competitors by a country mile.

A Valuable Little Piece of Customer Psychology for You:

Here's a little mental trick to help you write Google ads. Imagine that you are not you. You are your customer.

Tricks about paying: The price you bid is almost never the price you actually pay. You almost always pay less.

First, it's a little bit like Ebay. You pay 1 cent above the position below you, not the maximum that you bid.

But there's an even more important secret that is the key to getting lower and lower prices, even while other bidders are jumping into the game:

Your Clickthrough Rate (CTR) is MORE important than how much you bid.

The Clickthrough Rate is the percentage of people searching who actually click. If 100 people search, your ad shows up 100 times, and one person clicks through, that's a 1% clickthrough rate.

So let's say I've got a 1% CTR and I'm paying $1.00 for position #2.

Let's say you've got a 2% CTR. If you play your cards right, you may only have to pay 51 cents to get position #2 and knock me down to position #3.

That means that you were 2 times as relevant, and you got to pay 1/2 as much!

The rules can be very simple, but the implications are huge.

When you achieve high click-thru rates, you can pull your bid prices down, down, down and yet stay at the same position on the page, while your traffic goes up.

The difference can be quite amazing. Here's an example of two ads - they are ALMOST IDENTICAL but one got nearly TWENTY TIMES the CTR as the other:

Popular Ethernet Terms 3 Page Guide - Free PDF Download Complex Words - Simple Definitions www.bb-elec.com		Popular Ethernet Terms Complex Words - Simple Definitions 3 Page Guide - Free PDF Download www.bb-elec.com
2 Clicks - CTR 0.1%		39 Clicks - CTR 3.6%

Notice what happened: All that happened was to reverse two lines - and the clickthrough rate jumped from 0.1% to 3.6%!

That means that the ad on the right gets more than TWENTY TIMES as much traffic - and I could pull down my bid prices and get that for the same amount of money as I was paying before. Just think how much money we'd be leaving on the table if we didn't discover this!

Google ranks your ad higher as your CTR goes up. Overture does not do this. On Overture, the highest bidder always wins.

That rewards people who have more money than brains.

Which means that for the smart marketer, Google is vastly superior!

While Google may tell you simply to bid more, the major reason that keywords get made 'inactive' is this: The message in the ad doesn't match what the person wanted when they typed in the keyword!

How do you fix this problem? By organizing your keywords into narrow themes and by testing different ads that match people's searches - like I described above.

The success of your campaigns depends on keywords you bid on, specifically:

1) Choosing the right ones

2) Choosing enough of them

3) Bidding wisely.

Mistake #1 that most people make is bidding on too few. If you're only bidding on a 10 or 20 keywords, you'll have a very hard time making it work. That's because the 10 or 20 that you're bidding on are the same ones everyone else is bidding on.

You need at least 100 or 200. As a matter of fact, a thoroughly designed campaign for most products or services will have as many as 1000.

Why would you possibly need to bid on 1000 words and phrases?

Because if you sell, say, Digital Cameras, there are probably 30 or 40 other bidders for "digital camera." But if you bid on "Sony Mavica MVCCD400" there will only be a handful of other bidders and you can get those coveted 5 Cent Clicks. The point is that all of this is not really about Google AdWords, or any particular way to get traffic. What matters more than all of that is the ability of your website to get people to take action - to opt in, to buy, or whatever you want them to do.

Google AdWords just happens to be the fastest, easiest, and sometimes the least expensive way to get the traffic there. But once again, it's not about Google - it's about your website.

What Google will help you do, more effectively than anything else, is send highly-targeted, predictable traffic to your website, day in and day out, so you can experiment, test, and perfect your sales process.

For most businesses, the FIRST thing you should do is properly set up a Google AdWords campaign and play with your website until the traffic converts to sales profitably. Frankly it doesn't matter how long it takes to make that work. Every step of the process teaches you very important things, even if it's through trial and error.

Why use Google for that? Here's why: It's just about the only way to get a steady, predictable stream of traffic day in and day out. Most other sources of traffic, like free search engine listings and PR, are things you have no real control of.

THEN... once it's working on AdWords, you take the same messages and sales process and roll out your product in this order:

1. Google AdWords

2. Search Engine Optimization

3. Other PPC's like Overture and Findwhat etc etc.

4. Email promotions

5. Affiliates

6. Press Releases

7. Direct Mail

8. Print Advertising

You see, items #2 through 8 are more expensive and less "controllable" than Google. Get it right with Google first, where you have total control. THEN do email. THEN get help from affiliates. Don't let any of these other things or people be your guinea pig - if it works on Google AdWords first, then you can invest in these other things and be fairly certain it will work.

I can't overemphasize how powerful this is. Usually pay per click traffic represents only a tiny percentage of the people who are potential customers for you. When you roll out to items 2 through 8, you can often make five to fifty times as much money as you were making with AdWords. And no longer is it necessary to risk more than a few hundred dollars on a marketing campaign!

Start your own Blog and be indexed by Google within 48 hours. Maintain high percentage of exporure with daily blogging to your site. Blogging is a good way to get good search engine traffic, but you must maintain it to be effective. That means blogging every day or close to that.

There are a number of features today that make a website attractive. There is a constant struggle between marketing and content. If you have too “stuff” in your html (frames, flash, javascript, loaded files, etc.) you will slow down the loading of the pages, and cause the SE spiders to bypass you. Those in the music business often want to have videos and audios of their work displayed on their site. Because these files are large – 4 megs to 150 megs – it is impractical to present them in a normal fashion as to listen to the songs or watch the video could take 30 minutes to download, even with DSL. The solution is to have a server and other devices that support Svideo or composite video that handles the load and allows instant reproduction. These services cost extra per month as they are over and above the normal web host capabilities. Companies do provide, by subscription, quick access through their servers where your material will reside, allowing your customer, promoter, advertiser, or whomever you want to see your material, will be able to listen or see it in a matter of seconds.

Quotations made on an individual, case by case basis depending on job. Minimums start at $500.

For standard maintentance – updates – web integrity, dealing with problems of any kind that may come up, $30 per hour is charged. In some cases the fee is more.